Bergson was born in the Rue Lamartine in Paris, not far from the Palais Garnier (the old Paris opera house). He was descended from a Polish Jewish family (originally Berekson) on his father's side, while his mother was from an English and Irish Jewish background. His family lived in London for a few years after his birth, and he obtained an early familiarity with the English language from his mother. Before he was nine, his parents crossed the English Channel and settled in France, Henri becoming a naturalized citizen of the Republic. His sister, Mina Bergson (also known as Moina Mathers), married the English occult author Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, a leader of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the couple later relocated to Paris as well.
Bergson's lived the quiet and uneventful life of a French professor. Its chief landmarks were the publication of his four principal works: first, in 1889, the Time and Free Will (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience), then Matter and Memory (Matière et mémoire) in 1896, Creative Evolution (L'Evolution créatrice) in 1907 and finally The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion) in 1932.
Bergson attended the Lycée Fontaine (now known as the Lycée Condorcet) in Paris from 1868 to 1878. While there he won a prize for his scientific work and another, in 1877 when he was eighteen, for the solution of a mathematical problem. His solution was published the following year in Annales de Mathématiques. It was his first published work. After some hesitation as to whether his career should lie in the sphere of the sciences or that of the humanities, he decided in favour of the latter, and when nineteen years of age, he entered the famous École Normale Supérieure. He obtained there the degree of Licence-ès-Lettres, and this was followed by that of Agrégation de philosophie in 1881.
The same year he received a teaching appointment at the Lycée in Angers, the ancient capital of Anjou. Two years later he settled at the Lycée Blaise-Pascal in Clermont-Ferrand, capital of the Puy-de-Dôme département, a town whose name is usually more of interest for motorists than for philosophers, being the home of Michelin tyres and the Charade Circuit racing track.
The year after his arrival at Clermont-Ferrand Bergson displayed his ability in the humanities by the publication of an excellent edition of extracts from Lucretius, with a critical study of the text and the philosophy of the poet (1884), a work whose repeated editions are sufficient evidence of its useful place in the promotion of classical study among the youth of France. While teaching and lecturing in this part of his country (the Auvergne region), Bergson found time for private study and original work. He was working on his essay Time and Free Will, which was submitted, along with a short Latin thesis on Aristotle, for the degree of Docteur-ès-Lettres, which was awarded by the University of Paris in 1889. The work was published in the same year by Felix Alcan, the Paris publisher.
Bergson dedicated Time and Free Will to Jules Lachelier, then public education minister, who was a disciple of Felix Ravaisson and the author of a rather important philosophical work On the Founding of Induction (Du fondement de l'induction, 1871). Lachelier endeavoured "to substitute everywhere force for inertia, life for death, and liberty for fatalism." (Lachelier was born in 1832, Ravaisson in 1813. Bergson owed much to both of these teachers of the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Cf. his memorial address on Ravaisson, who died in 1900.)
Bergson settled again in Paris, and after teaching for some months at the Municipal College, known as the College Rollin, he received an appointment at the Lycée Henri-Quatre, where he remained for eight years. In 1896 he published his second large work, entitled Matter and Memory. This rather difficult, but brilliant, work investigates the function of the brain, undertakes an analysis of perception and memory, leading up to a careful consideration of the problems of the relation of body and mind. Bergson had spent years of research in preparation for each of his three large works. This is especially obvious in Matter and Memory, where he showed a thorough acquaintance with the extensive pathological investigations which had been carried out during the period.
In 1898 Bergson became Maître de conférences at his Alma Mater, L'Ecole Normale Supérieure, and was later promoted to a Professorship. The year 1900 saw him installed as Professor at the Collège de France, where he accepted the Chair of Greek Philosophy in succession to Charles L'Eveque.
At the First International Congress of Philosophy, held in Paris during the first five days of August, 1900, Bergson read a short, but important, paper, "Psychological Origins of the Belief in the Law of Causality" (Sur les origines psychologiques de notre croyance à la loi de causalité). In 1901 Felix Alcan published a work which had previously appeared in the Revue de Paris, entitled Laughter (Le rire), one of the most important of Bergson's minor productions. This essay on the meaning of comedy was based on a lecture which he had given in his early days in the Auvergne. The study of it is essential to an understanding of Bergson's views of life, and its passages dealing with the place of the artistic in life are valuable. The main thesis of the work is that laughter is a corrective evolved to make social life possible for human beings. We laugh at people who fail to adapt to the demands of society, if it seems their failure is akin to an inflexible mechanism. Comic authors have exploited this human tendency to laugh in various ways, and what is common to them is the idea that the comic consists in there being "something mechanical in something living".
In 1901 Bergson was elected to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, and became a member of the Institute. In 1903 he contributed to the Revue de metaphysique et de morale a very important essay entitled Introduction to Metaphysics (Introduction à la metaphysique), which is useful as a preface to the study of his three large books.
On the death of Gabriel Tarde, the eminent sociologist, in 1904, Bergson succeeded him in the Chair of Modern Philosophy. From the 4th to the 8th of September of that year he was at Geneva attending the Second International Congress of Philosophy, when he lectured on The Mind and Thought: A Philosophical Illusion (Le cerveau et la pensée: une illusion philosophique). An illness prevented his visiting Germany to attend the Third Congress held at Heidelberg.
His third major work, Creative Evolution, appeared in 1907, and is undoubtedly the most widely known and most discussed. It constitutes one of the most profound and original contributions to the philosophical consideration of the theory of evolution. Imbart de la Tour remarked that Creative Evolution was a milestone of new direction in thought. By 1918, Alcan, the publisher, had issued twenty-one editions, making an average of two editions per annum for ten years. Following the appearance of this book, Bergson's popularity increased enormously, not only in academic circles, but among the general reading public.
Bergson came to London in 1908 and visited William James, the Harvard philosopher who was Bergson's senior by seventeen years, and who was instrumental in calling the attention of the Anglo-American public to the work of the French professor. James's impression of Bergson is given in his Letters under date of October 4, 1908. "So modest and unpretending a man but such a genius intellectually! I have the strongest suspicions that the tendency which he has brought to a focus, will end by prevailing, and that the present epoch will be a sort of turning point in the history of philosophy."
As early as 1880 James had contributed an article in French to the periodical La Critique philosophique, of Renouvier and Pillon, entitled Le Sentiment de l'Effort. Four years later a couple of articles by him appeared in "Mind: What is an Emotion?" and "On some Omissions of Introspective Psychology." Of these articles the first two were quoted by Bergson in his 1889 work, Time and Free Will. In the following years 1890-91 appeared the two volumes of James's monumental work, The Principles of Psychology, in which he refers to a pathological phenomenon observed by Bergson. Some writers, taking merely these dates into consideration and overlooking the fact that James's investigations had been proceeding since 1870 (registered from time to time by various articles which culminated in "The Principles"), have mistakenly dated Bergson's ideas as earlier than James's.
It has been suggested that Bergson owes the root ideas of his first book to the 1884 article by James, "On Some Omissions of Introspective Psychology," which he neither refers to nor quotes. This article deals with the conception of thought as a stream of consciousness, which intellect distorts by framing into concepts. Bergson replied to this insinuation by denying that he had any knowledge of the article by James when he wrote Les données immédiates de la conscience. The two thinkers appear to have developed independently until almost the close of the century. They are further apart in their intellectual position than is frequently supposed. Both have succeeded in appealing to audiences far beyond the purely academic sphere, but only in their mutual rejection of "intellectualism" as final is there real unanimity. Although James was slightly ahead in the development and enunciation of his ideas, he confessed that he was baffled by many of Bergson's notions. James certainly neglected many of the deeper metaphysical aspects of Bergson's thought, which did not harmonize with his own, and are even in direct contradiction. In addition to this, Bergson can hardly be considered a pragmatist. For him, "utility," far from being a test of truth, was in fact the reverse: a synonym for error.
Nevertheless, William James hailed Bergson as an ally. Early in the century (1903) he wrote: "I have been re-reading Bergson's books, and nothing that I have read since years has so excited and stimulated my thoughts. I am sure that that philosophy has a great future, it breaks through old cadres and brings things into a solution from which new crystals can be got." The most noteworthy tributes paid by him to Bergson were those made in the Hibbert Lectures (A Pluralistic Universe), which James gave at Manchester College, Oxford, shortly after meeting Bergson in London. He remarks on the encouragement he has received from Bergson's thought, and refers to the confidence he has in being "able to lean on Bergson's authority."
The influence of Bergson had led him "to renounce the intellectualist method and the current notion that logic is an adequate measure of what can or cannot be." It had induced him, he continued, "to give up logic, squarely and irrevocably" as a method, for he found that "reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy, use what word you will, exceeds our logic, overflows, and surrounds it."
These remarks, which appeared in James' book A Pluralistic Universe in 1909, impelled many English and American readers to an investigation of Bergson's philosophy for themselves. A certain handicap existed in that his greatest work had not then been translated into English. James, however, encouraged and assisted Dr. Arthur Mitchell in his preparation of the English translation of Creative Evolution. In August of 1910 James died. It was his intention, had he lived to see the completion of the translation, to introduce it to the English reading public by a prefatory note of appreciation. In the following year the translation was completed and still greater interest in Bergson and his work was the result. By a coincidence, in that same year (1911), Bergson penned a preface of sixteen pages entitled Truth and Reality for the French translation of James's book, "Pragmatism". In it he expressed sympathetic appreciation of James's work, coupled with certain important reservations.
In April (5th to 11th) Bergson attended the Fourth International Congress of Philosophy held at Bologna, in Italy, where he gave an address on "Philosophical Intuition". In response to invitations he visited England in May of that year, and on several subsequent occaisions. These visits were well received. His speeches offered new perspectives and elucidated many passages in his three major works: Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, and Creative Evolution. Although necessarily brief statements, they developed and enriched the ideas in his books and clarified for English audiences the fundamental principles of his philosophy.
Bergson visited the University of Oxford, where he delivered two lectures entitled The Perception of Change (La perception du changement), which were published in French in the same year by the Clarendon Press. As he had a delightful gift of lucid and brief exposition, when the occasion demands such treatment, these lectures on Change formed a most valuable synopsis or brief survey of the fundamental principles of his thought, and served the student or general reader alike as an excellent introduction to the study of the larger volumes. Oxford honoured its distinguished visitor by conferring upon him the degree of Doctor of Science.
Two days later he delivered the Huxley Lecture at the University of Birmingham, taking for his subject Life and Consciousness. This subsequently appeared in The Hibbert Journal (October, 1911), and since revised, forms the first essay in the collected volume Mind-Energy (L'Energie spirituelle). In October he was again in England, where he had an enthusiastic reception, and delivered at University College London four lectures on La Nature de l'Ame.
In 1913 he visited the United States of America, at the invitation of Columbia University, New York, and lectured in several American cities, where he was welcomed by very large audiences. In February, at Columbia University, he lectured both in French and English, taking as his subjects: Spirituality and Freedom and The Method of Philosophy. Being again in England in May of the same year, he accepted the Presidency of the British Society for Psychical Research, and delivered to the Society an impressive address: Phantoms of Life and Psychic Research (Fantômes des vivants et recherche psychique).
Meanwhile, his popularity increased, and translations of his works began to appear in a number of languages: English, German, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Hungarian, Polish and Russian. In 1914 he was honoured by his fellow-countrymen in being elected as a member of the Académie française. He was also made President of the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques, and in addition he became Officier de la Légion d'honneur, and Officier de l'Instruction publique.
Bergson found disciples of many varied types, and in France movements such as Neo-Catholicism or Modernism on the one hand and Syndicalism on the other, endeavoured to absorb and to appropriate for their own immediate use and propaganda some of the central ideas of his teaching. That important continental organ of socialist and syndicalist theory, Le Mouvement socialiste, suggested that the realism of Karl Marx and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is hostile to all forms of intellectualism, and that, therefore, supporters of Marxian socialism should welcome a philosophy such as that of Bergson. Other writers, in their eagerness, asserted the collaboration of the Chair of Philosophy at the College de France with the aims of the Confédération Générale du Travail and the Industrial Workers of the World. It was claimed that there is harmony between the flute of personal philosophical meditation and the trumpet of social revolution.
While social revolutionaries were endeavouring to make the most out of Bergson, many leaders of religious thought, particularly the more liberal-minded theologians of all creeds, e.g., the Modernists and Neo-Catholic Party in his own country, showed a keen interest in his writings, and many of them endeavoured to find encouragement and stimulus in his work. The Roman Catholic Church, however, which still believed that finality was reached in philosophy with the work of Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, and consequently had made that mediaeval philosophy her official, orthodox, and dogmatic view, took the step of banning Bergson's three books by placing them upon the Index of prohibited books (Decree of June 1, 1914).
In 1914, the Scottish Universities arranged for Bergson to deliver the famous Gifford Lectures, and one course was planned for the spring and another for the autumn. The first course, consisting of eleven lectures, under the title of The Problem of Personality, was delivered at the University of Edinburgh in the Spring of that year. The course of lectures planned for the autumn months had to be abandoned because of the outbreak of war. Bergson was not, however, silent during the conflict, and he gave some inspiring addresses. As early as November 4, 1914, he wrote an article entitled Wearing and Nonwearing forces (La force qui s'use et celle qui ne s'use pas), which appeared in that unique and interesting periodical of the poilus, Le Bulletin des Armées de la République Française. A presidential address, The Meaning of the War, was delivered in December, 1914, to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques.
Bergson contributed also to the publication arranged by The Daily Telegraph in honour of the King of the Belgians, King Albert's Book (Christmas, 1914). In 1915 he was succeeded in the office of President of the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques by M. Alexandre Ribot, and then delivered a discourse on The Evolution of German Imperialism. Meanwhile he found time to issue at the request of the Minister of Public Instruction a delightful little summary of French Philosophy. Bergson did a large amount of travelling and lecturing in America during the war. He was there when the French Mission under M. Viviani paid a visit in April and May of 1917, following upon America's entry into the conflict. M. Viviani's book La Mission française en Amérique (1917), contains a preface by Bergson.
Early in 1918 he was officially received by the Académie française, taking his seat among "The Select Forty" as successor to Emile Ollivier, the author of the large and notable historical work L'Empire libéral. A session was held in January in his honour at which he delivered an address on Ollivier. In the war, Bergson saw the conflict of Mind and Matter, or rather of Life and Mechanism; and thus he shows us the central idea of his own philosophy in action. To no other philosopher has it fallen, during his lifetime, to have his philosophical principles so vividly and so terribly tested.
As many of Bergson's contributions to French periodicals were not readily accessible, he agreed to the request of his friends that these should be collected and published in two volumes. The first of these was being planned when war broke out. The conclusion of strife was marked by the appearance of a delayed volume in 1919. It bears the title Spiritual Energy: Essays and Lectures (L'Energie spirituelle: essais et conférences). The advocate of Bergson's philosophy in England, Dr. Wildon Carr, prepared an English translation under the title Mind-Energy. The volume opens with the Huxley Memorial Lecture of 1911, "Life and Consciousness", in a revised and developed form under the title "Consciousness and Life". Signs of Bergson's growing interest in social ethics and in the idea of a future life of personal survival are manifested. The lecture before the Society for Psychical Research is included, as is also the one given in France, L'Ame et le Corps, which contains the substance of the four London lectures on the Soul. The seventh and last article is a reprint of Bergson's famous lecture to the Congress of Philosophy at Geneva in 1904, The Psycho-Physiolgical Paralogism (Le paralogisme psycho-physiologique), which now appears as Le cerveau et la pensée: une illusion philosophique. Other articles are on the False Recognition, on Dreams, and Intellectual Effort. The volume is a most welcome production and serves to bring together what Bergson wrote on the concept of mental force, and on his view of "tension" and "detension" as applied to the relation of matter and mind.
In June, 1920, the University of Cambridge honoured him with the degree of Doctor of Letters (D.Litt). In order that he may be able to devote his full time to the great new work he was preparing on ethics, religion, and sociology, Bergson was relieved of the duties attached to the Chair of Modern Philosophy at the Collège de France. He retained the chair, but no longer delivered lectures, his place being taken by his noted pupil Edouard Le Roy. Living with his wife and daughter in a modest house in a quiet street near the Porte d'Auteuil in Paris, Bergson won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927.
After his retirement from the Collège, Bergson faded into obscurity, because he was suffering from a degenerative illness. He completed his new work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, which extended his philosophical theories to the realms of morality, religion and art, in 1935. It was respectfully received by the public and the philosophical community, but all by that time realized that Bergson's days as a philosophical luminary were past. He was, however, able to reiterate his core beliefs near the end of his life, by renouncing all of the posts and honours previously awarded him, rather than accept exemption from the antisemitic laws imposed by the Vichy government. Though wanting to convert to Catholicism, he held off instead and showed solidarity with his fellow Jews by signing the registry books.
A Roman Catholic priest said prayers at his funeral per his request.
Henri Bergson is buried in the Cimetière de Garches, Hauts-de-Seine.
Sartre was born in Paris to parents Jean-Baptiste Sartre, an officer of the French Navy, and Anne-Marie Schweitzer. His mother was of German-Alsacian origin, and was a cousin of German Nobel prize laureate Albert Schweitzer. When he was 15 months old, his father died of a fever and Anne-Marie raised him with help from her father, Charles Schweitzer, a high school professor for German, who taught Sartre mathematics and introduced him to classical literature at an early age.
As a teenager in the 1920s, Sartre became attracted to philosophy upon reading Henri Bergson's Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. He studied in Paris at the elite École Normale Supérieure, an institution of higher education which has served as the alma mater for multiple prominent French thinkers and intellectuals. Sartre was influenced by many aspects of Western philosophy, absorbing ideas from Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Martin Heidegger.
In 1929 at the École Normale, he met Simone de Beauvoir, who studied at the Sorbonne and later went on to become a noted thinker, writer, and feminist. The two, it is documented, became inseparable and lifelong companions, initiating a romantic relationship, though one that was not monogamous.
Together, Sartre and Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyle and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually-destructive conformity (mauvaise foi, literally, "bad faith") and an "authentic" state of "being" became the dominant theme of Sartre's work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work L'Être et le Néant (Being and Nothingness) (1943).
Sartre's best-known introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism is a Humanism (1946), originally presented as a lecture. In this work, he defends existentialism against its detractors, which ultimately results in a somewhat incomplete description of his ideas. The work has been considered a popular, if over-simplifying, point of entry for those seeking to learn more about Sartre's ideas but lacking the background in philosophy necessary to fully absorb his longer work Being and Nothingness. One should not take the expression of his ideas contained here as authoritative; in 1965, Sartre told Francis Jeanson that its publication had been "une 'erreur.'"
He graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in 1929 with a doctorate in philosophy and served as a conscript in the French Army from 1929 to 1931.
In 1935 Sartre tried the psychedelic drug mescaline, which is found naturally in the peyote cactus of North America. By all accounts he had a bad experience. It is widely reported that the chapter 'Six o'clock in the evening' from 'The Nausea' is essentially a description of a bad mescaline trip. The sudden revelation of the independent existence of objects (rather than merely the formulation of ideas in the observer's mind), the loss or irrelevance of names for those objects, and the indwelling horror of 'naked existence', are all very common elements of a negative visionary experience (see 'Heaven and Hell' by Aldous Huxley for an instructive comparison).
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As a junior lecturer at the Lycée du Havre in 1938, Sartre wrote the novel La Nausée (Nausea) which serves in some ways as a manifesto of existentialism and remains one of his most famous books. Taking a page from the German phenomenological movement, he believed that our ideas are the product of experiences of real-life situations, and that novels and plays describing such fundamental experiences have as much value as do discursive essays for the elaboration of philosophical theories. With this mandate, the novel concerns a dejected researcher (Roquentin) in a town similar to Le Havre who becomes starkly conscious of the fact that inanimate objects and situations remain absolutely indifferent to his existence. As such, they show themselves to be resistant to whatever significance human consciousness might perceive in them. This indifference of "things in themselves" (closely linked with the later notion of "being-in-itself" in his Being and Nothingness) has the effect of highlighting all the more the freedom Roquentin has to perceive and act in the world; everywhere he looks, he finds situations imbued with meanings which bear the stamp of his existence. Hence the "nausea" referred to in the title of the book; all that he encounters in his everyday life is suffused with a pervasive, even horrible, taste -- specifically, his freedom. No matter how much he longs for something other or something different, he cannot get away from this harrowing evidence of his engagement with the world. The novel also acts as a terrifying realization of some of Kant's fundamental ideas; Sartre uses the idea of the autonomy of the will (that human freedom and morality are derived from our ability to choose in reality) as a way to show the world's indifference to the individual. The freedom that Kant exposed is here a strong burden, for the freedom to act towards objects is ultimately useless, and the practical application of Kant's ideas prove to be bitterly rejected.
The stories in Le Mur (The Wall) emphasize the arbitrary aspects of the situations people find themselves in and the absurdity of their attempts to deal rationally with them. A whole school of absurd literature subsequently developed.
In 1939 Sartre was drafted into the French army, where he served as a meteorologist. German troops captured him in 1940 in Padoux, and he spent nine months in prison — later in Nancy and finally in Stalag 12D, Treves, where he wrote his first theater piece: Barionà, fils du tonnerre, a drama concerning Christmas. Due to poor health (he claimed that his poor eyesight affected his balance) Sartre was released in April 1941. Given civilian status, he recovered his position as a teacher of Lycée Pasteur near Paris, settled at the Hotel Mistral near Montparnasse at Paris and was given a new position at Lycée Condorcet, replacing a Jewish teacher, forbidden to teach by Vichy law. After coming back to Paris in May 1941, he participated in the founding of the underground group Socialisme et Liberté with other writers Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Toussaint and Dominique Desanti, Jean Kanapa, and École Normale students. In August, Sartre and Beauvoir went to the French Riviera seeking the support of André Gide and André Malraux. However, both Gide and Malraux were undecided, and this might be the cause of Sartre's disappointment and discouragement.
Socialisme et liberté disappeared soon and Sartre decided to write instead of being involved in active resistance. He then wrote Being and Nothingness, The Flies and No Exit, none of which were censored by the Germans. He also contributed to both legal and illegal literary magazines. After August 1944 and the Paris Liberation, he was a very active contributor of Combat, a newspaper created during the period of clandestinity by Albert Camus, a philosopher and author who held similar beliefs. Sartre and Beauvoir remained friends with him until Camus turned away from communism, a schism that eventually divided them in 1951, after the publication of Camus' book entitled The Rebel.
Later, while Sartre was labelled by some authors as a resistant, the French philosopher and resistant Vladimir Jankelevitch criticized Sartre's lack of political commitment during the German Occupation, and interpreted his further struggles for liberty as an attempt to redeem himself.
When the war ended Sartre established Les Temps Modernes (Modern Times), a monthly literary and political review, and started writing full-time as well as continuing his political activism. He would draw on his war experiences for his great trilogy of novels, Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom) (1945–1949).
Jean-Paul Sartre was the head of the Organization to Defend Iranian Political Prisoners from 1964 till the victory of the Islamic Revolution.[1]
The first period of Sartre's career, defined by Being and Nothingness (1943), gave way to a second period as a politically engaged activist and intellectual. His 1948 work Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands) in particular explored the problem of being both an intellectual at the same time as becoming "engaged" politically. He embraced communism, though he never officially joined the Communist party, and took a prominent role in the struggle against French colonialism in Algeria. He became perhaps the most eminent supporter of the Algerian war of liberation. He had an Algerian mistress, Arlette Elkaïm, who became his adopted daughter in 1965. He opposed the Vietnam War and, along with Bertrand Russell and other luminaries, he organized a tribunal intended to expose U.S. war crimes, which became known as the Russell Tribunal in 1967.
As a fellow-traveller, Sartre spent much of the rest of his life attempting to reconcile his existentialist ideas about self-determination with communist principles, which taught that socio-economic forces beyond our immediate, individual control play a critical role in shaping our lives. His major defining work of this period, the Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason) appeared in 1960.
Sartre's emphasis on the humanist values in the early works of Marx led to a dispute with the leading Communist intellectual in France in the 1960s, Louis Althusser, who claimed that the ideas of the young Marx were decisively superseded by the "scientific" system of the later Marx.
During the 1940s and 1950s Sartre's ideas remained ambiguous, and existentialism became a favoured philosophy of the beatnik generation. Sartre's views were counterposed to those of Albert Camus in the popular imagination. In 1948, the Catholic Church placed his complete works on the Index of prohibited books. Most of his plays are richly symbolic and serve as a means of conveying his philosophy. The best-known, Huis-clos (No Exit), contains the famous line: "L'enfer, c'est les autres", usually translated as "Hell is other people".
Besides the obvious impact of Nausea, Sartre's major contribution to literature was the Roads to Freedom trilogy which charts the progression of how World War II affected Sartre's ideas. In this way, Roads to Freedom presents a less theoretical and more practical approach to existentialism. The first book in the trilogy, L'âge de raison (The Age of Reason) (1945), could easily be said to be the Sartre work with the broadest appeal.
In 1964, Sartre renounced literature in a witty and sardonic account of the first six years of his life, Les mots (Words). The book is an ironic counterblast to Marcel Proust, whose reputation had unexpectedly eclipsed that of André Gide (who had provided the model of litterature engagée for Sartre's generation). Literature, Sartre concluded, functioned as a bourgeois substitute for real commitment in the world. In the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he resoundingly declined it, stating that he had always refused official honors and didn't wish to align himself with institutions.
Though he was now world-famous and a household word (as was "existentialism" during the tumultuous 1960s), Sartre remained a simple man with few possessions, actively committed to causes until the end of his life, such as the student revolution strikes in Paris during the summer of 1968.
In 1975, when asked how he would like to be remembered, Sartre replied: "I would like [people] to remember Nausea, [my plays] No Exit and The Devil and the Good Lord, and then my two philosophical works, more particularly the second one, Critique of Dialectical Reason. Then my essay on Genet, Saint Genet...If these are remembered, that would be quite an achievement, and I don't ask for more. As a man, if a certain Jean-Paul Sartre is remembered, I would like people to remember the milieu or historical situation in which I lived,...how I lived in it, in terms of all the aspirations which I tried to gather up within myself."
Sartre's physical condition deteriorated, partially due to the merciless pace of work (and using drugs for this reason, e.g amphetamine) he put himself through during the writing of the Critique and the last project of his life, a massive analytical biography of Gustave Flaubert (The Family Idiot), both of which remain unfinished. He died April 15, 1980 in Paris from an edema of the lung.
Sartre lies buried in Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris. His funeral was attended by some 50,000 people.
Sartre's atheism was foundational for his style of existentialist philosophy. In March 1980, about a month before Sartre's death, he was interviewed by an assistant of his, Benny Lévy, and within these interviews he expressed interest in Messianic Judaism. Some people apparently took this to indicate a religious conversion, however the text of the interviews makes it clear that he did not consider himself a Jew, and was interested in the ethical and "metaphysical character" of the Jewish religion, while continuing to reject the idea of an existing God. In a separate 1974 interview with Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre said that he often saw himself "as a being that could, it seems, only come from a creator." However he immediately adds that "this is not a clear, exact idea..." and in preceding and following passages he makes it clear that he remains an atheist and finds in atheism a source of personal and ethical power.
Nevertheless, perhaps due in part to the fact that Sartre's interest in Jewish messianism was precisely a rejection of Marxist ideas which has previous played such a huge role in his thought, the validity of the Beny Levy interviews was disputed. Sartre's supporters were understandably reluctant to believe that he had so abruptly renounced a crucial part of his philosophy. However, shortly before his death, Sartre confirmed that the interviews were authentic.[citation needed]
When eleven Israeli Olympians were killed by the Palestinian organization Black September in Munich 1972, Sartre referred to terrorism as a "terrible weapon but the oppressed poor have no others." He also found it "perfectly scandalous that the Munich attack should be judged by the French press and a section of public opinion as an intolerable scandal." (Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century, Bernard-Henri Lévy, p.343).
Kant defined the Enlightenment, in the essay "Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?", as an age shaped by the motto, "Dare to know" (latin: Sapere aude). This involved thinking autonomously, free of the dictates of external authority. Kant's work served as a bridge between the Rationalist and Empiricist traditions of the 18th century. He had a decisive impact on the Romantic and German Idealist philosophies of the 19th century. His work has also been a starting point for many 20th century philosophers.
The two interconnected foundations of what Kant called his "critical philosophy" of the "Copernican revolution" which he claimed to have wrought in philosophy were his epistemology (or theory of knowledge) of Transcendental Idealism and his moral philosophy of the autonomy of practical reason. These placed the active, rational human subject at the center of the cognitive and moral worlds. With regard to knowledge, Kant argued that the rational order of the world as known by science could never be accounted for merely by the fortuitous accumulation of sense perceptions. It was instead the product of the rule-based activity of "synthesis". This consisted of conceptual unification and integration carried out by the mind through concepts or the "categories of the understanding" operating on the perceptual manifold within space and time, which are not concepts, but forms of sensibility that are a priori necessary conditions for any possible experience. Thus the objective order of nature and the causal necessity that operates within it are dependent upon the mind. There is wide disagreement among Kant scholars on the correct interpretation of this train of thought. The common '2-world' interpretation regards Kant's position as a statement of epistemological limitation, that we are never able to transcend the bounds of our own mind, meaning that we cannot access the "thing-in-itself". Kant however also speaks of the thing in itself or transcendental object as a product of the (human) understanding as it attempts to conceive of objects in abstraction from the conditions of sensibility. Following this thought, interpreters have argued that the thing in itself does not represent a separate ontological domain but simply a way of considering objects by means of the understanding alone. Much of current Kant-research revolves around this dispute. With regard to morality, Kant argued that the source of the good lies not in anything outside the human subject, either in nature or given by God, but rather only the good will itself. A good will is one that acts from duty in accordance with the universal moral law that the autonomous human being freely gives itself. This law obliges one to treat humanity - understood as rational agency, and represented through oneself as well as others, as an end in itself rather than (merely) as means.
These Kantian ideas have largely framed or influenced all subsequent philosophical discussion and analysis. The specifics of Kant's account generated immediate and lasting controversy. Nevertheless, his theses that the mind itself necessarily makes a constitutive contribution to its knowledge, that this contribution is transcendental rather than psychological, that morality is rooted in human freedom and acting autonomously is to act according to rational moral principles, and that philosophy involves self-critical activity, have had a lasting effect on subsequent philosophy.
Immanuel Kant - who was baptized as "Emanuel" but later changed his name to "Immanuel"—was born in 1724 in Königsberg, Kingdom of Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He spent his entire life in and around his hometown, the capital of East Prussia at that time. His father was a German craftsman from Memel, Germany's northeasternmost city (now Klaipėda, Lithuania). In his youth, Kant was a solid, albeit unspectacular, student. He was raised in a Pietist household, a then popular Lutheran reform movement that stressed intense religious devotion, personal humility and a literal reading of The Bible. Consequently, Kant received a stern education—strict, punitive, and disciplinary—that favored Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science. Kant later described this period as a time of unhappiness.
Kant enrolled in the University of Königsberg in 1740, at the age of 16. He studied the philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff under Martin Knutsen, a rationalist who was also familiar with the developments of British philosophy and science and who introduced Kant to the new mathematical physics of Newton. His father's stroke and subsequent death in 1746 interrupted his studies. Kant became a private tutor in the smaller towns surrounding Königsberg, but continued his scholarly research. 1749 saw the publication of his first philosophical work, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces. Kant published several more works on scientific topics and became a university lecturer in 1755. From this point on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he would continue to write on the sciences throughout his life. In the early 1760s, Kant produced a series of important works in philosophy. The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures, a work in logic, was published in 1762. Two more works appeared the following year: Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy and The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. In 1764, Kant wrote Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and then was second to Moses Mendelssohn in a Berlin Academy prize competition with his Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (often referred to as "the Prize Essay"). In 1770, at the age of 45, Kant was finally appointed Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Königsberg. Kant wrote his Inaugural Dissertation in defense of this appointment. This work saw the emergence of several central themes of his mature work, including the distinction between the faculties of intellectual thought and sensible receptivity.
At the age of 46, Kant was an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher. Much was expected of him. In response to a letter from his student, Markus Herz, Kant came to recognize that in the Inaugural Dissertation, he had failed to account for the relation and connection between our sensible and intellectual faculties. He also credited David Hume with awakening him from "dogmatic slumber" (circa 1770). Kant would not publish another work in philosophy for the next eleven years.
Kant spent his silent decade working on a solution to the problems posed. When he emerged from his silence in 1781, the result was the Critique of Pure Reason. Although now uniformly recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, this Critique was largely ignored upon its initial publication. The book was long, over 800 pages in the original German edition, and written in a dry, scholastic style. It received few reviews, and these failed to recognize the Critique's revolutionary nature. Kant was disappointed with the work's reception. Recognizing the obscurity of the original treatise, he wrote the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783 as a summary of its main views and he encouraged his friend, Johann Schultz, to publish a brief commentary of the Critique of Pure Reason.
Kant's reputation gradually rose through the 1780s, sparked by a series of important works: the 1784 essay, "Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?"; 1785's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (his first work on moral philosophy); and, from 1786, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. But Kant's fame ultimately arrived from an unexpected source. In 1786, Karl Reinhold began to publish a series of public letters on the Kantian philosophy. In these letters, Reinhold framed Kant's philosophy as a response to the central intellectual controversy of the era: the Pantheism Dispute. Friedrich Jacobi had accused the recently deceased Lessing (a distinguished philosopher of the period) of Spinozism. Such a charge, tantamount to atheism, was vigorously denied by Lessing's friend Moses Mendelssohn, and a bitter public dispute arose between them. The controversy gradually escalated into a general debate over the values of the Enlightenment and of reason itself. Reinhold maintained in his letters that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason could settle this dispute by defending the authority and bounds of reason. Reinhold's letters were widely read and made Kant the most famous philosopher of his era.
Kant published a second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1787, heavily revising the first parts of the book. Most of his subsequent work focused on other areas of philosophy. He continued to develop his moral philosophy, notably in 1788's Critique of Practical Reason (known as the second Critique) and 1797's Metaphysics of Morals. The 1790 Critique of Judgment (the third Critique) applied the Kantian system to aesthetics and teleology. He also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, religion, politics and other topics. These works were well received by Kant's contemporaries and confirmed his preeminent status in eighteenth century philosophy. There were several journals devoted solely to defending and criticizing the Kantian philosophy. But despite his success, philosophical trends were moving in another direction. Many of Kant's most important disciples (including Reinhold, Beck and Fichte) transformed the Kantian position into increasingly radical forms of idealism. This marked the emergence of German Idealism. Kant was against these developments and publicly denounced Fichte in an open letter[1] in 1799. It was one of his final philosophical acts. Kant's health, long poor, turned for the worse and he died in 1804. His unfinished final work, the fragmentary Opus Postumum, was (as its title suggests) published posthumously.
A variety of popular beliefs have arisen concerning Kant's biography and legend. It is often held, for instance, that Kant was a late bloomer, that he only became an important philosopher in his mid-50s after rejecting his earlier views. While it is true that Kant wrote his greatest works relatively late in life, there is a tendency to underestimate the value of his earlier works. Recent Kant scholarship has devoted more attention to these "pre-critical" writings and has recognized a degree of continuity with his mature work.
Another common myth concerns Kant's personal mannerisms. It is often held that Kant lived a very strict and predictable life, leading to the oft-repeated story that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. Again, this is only partly true. While still young, Kant was very gregarious and, though he never married, he remained fond of dinner parties through most of his life. Only later in his life, under the influence of his friend, the English merchant Joseph Green, did Kant adopt a more regulated lifestyle.[2]
Kant developed his moral philosophy in three works: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals [1] (1785), Critique of Practical Reason [2] (1788), and Metaphysics of Morals [3] (1798).
The three works proceed by a method of taking the "rational [, obvious, and everyday] knowledge of the moral to the philosophical [knowledge of the moral]" in the Groundwork - and also making necessary the moral works that followed; and then, in those latter works, following a method of using "practical reason", based only upon things about which reason can tell us, and not deriving any principles from experience, to reach conclusions which are able to be applied to the world of experience (in the second part of The Metaphysic of Morals). The German Philosopher Schopenhauer's criticism of Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals is a careful analysis of Kant's book.
Kant is known for his theory that there is a single moral obligation, which he called the Categorical Imperative, which is derived from the concept of duty. It is from the Categorical Imperative that all other moral obligations are generated, and by which all moral obligations can be tested. He believed that the moral law is a principle of reason itself, and is not based on contingent facts about the world, such as what would make us happy. Accordingly, he believed that moral obligation applies to all and only rational agents.
A categorical imperative is an unconditional obligation; that is, it has the force of an obligation regardless of our will or desires. (Contrast this with hypothetical imperative.) Kant's categorical imperative was formulated in three ways, which he believed to be roughly equivalent (although many commentators do not):
The most popular interpretation of the first formulation is called the "universalizability test." An agent's maxim, according to Kant, is his "subjective principle of volition" — that is, what the agent believes is his reason to act. The universalizability test has five steps:
(For a modern parallel, see John Rawls' hypothetical situation, the original position.)
Although he did not attend regular Church services, Kant stated the practical necessity for a belief in God in his Critique of Pure Reason and made a moral argument for the existence of God. See Argument from morality for more details. A few Kant biographers have noted that the details of his beliefs may have been muted by the sensitive religious atmosphere of his time, and even those who knew him expressed different views on Kant's religiosity.[citation needed]
In Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795) Kant listed several conditions that he thought necessary for ending wars and creating a lasting peace. They included a world of constitutional republics. This was the first version of the democratic peace theory.
He opposed "democracy", which at his time meant direct democracy, believing that majority rule posed a threat to individual liberty. He says, "Democracy is necessarily despotism, as it establishes an executive power contrary to the general will; all being able to decide against one whose opinion may differ, the will of all is therefore not that of all: which is contradictory and opposite to liberty."
Kant discusses the subjective nature of aesthetic qualities and experiences in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, (1764). Kant's contribution to aesthetic theory is developed in the Critique of Judgment (1790) where he investigates the possibility and logical status of "judgments of taste". In the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment", the first major division of the Critique of Judgment, Kant used the term "aesthetic" in a manner that is, according to Kant scholar W.H. Walsh, its modern sense. Prior to this, in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had, in order to note the essential differences between judgments of taste, moral judgments , and scientific judgments, abandoned use of the term "aesthetic" as "designating the critique of taste", noting that judgments of taste could never be "directed" by "laws a priori". He was one of the first philosophers to develop and integrate aesthetic theory into a unified and comprehensive philosophical system, utilizing ideas that played an integral role throughout his philosophy.
In the chapter "Analytic of the Beautiful" of the Critique of Judgment , Kant states that beauty is not a property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but instead a mental state - the pleasure derived from having made a judgement of taste. Even though it appears that we are using reason to decide what we find beautiful, feelings for the beautiful belong to the faculty of the understanding and we feel that we can convince others to share our passions. A judgement of taste is in fact purely subjective and is based on nothing but esteem for an object itself: it is a disinterested pleasure. Kant also believed that a judgement of taste shares characteristics engaged in a moral judgement: both are disinterested, and we hold them to be universal. In the chapter "Analytic of the Sublime" Kant identifies the sublime as an aesthetic quality which, like beauty, is subjective, but unlike beauty shares the character of moral judgments as belonging to the faculty of reason. The feeling of the sublime is derived from one's estimation of natural objects and the realization that they are not equal to the expectations of one's moral ideas. This appreciation of moral feeling through exposure to the sublime helps to develop moral character.
Kant had developed the distinction between an object of art as a material value subject to the conventions of society and the transcendental condition of the judgment of taste as a "refined" value in the propositions of his Idea of A Universal History (1784). In the Fourth and Fifth Theses of that work he identified all art as the "fruits of unsociableness" due to men's "antagonism in society", and in the Seventh Thesis asserted that while such material property is indicative of a civilized state, only the ideal of morality and the universalization of refined value through the improvement of the mind of man "belongs to culture." (L.W. Beck translation)
Kant's most powerful and revolutionary effect on philosophy, which changed forever its meaning, modes of thinking, and language(s), was not "positive" in the sense of producing specific assertions about the world that have become accepted truths, as in the positive sciences. Rather it was "negative" in the sense of restricting the areas about which such knowledge was possible — by making philosophy "critical" and self-critical. Kant's idea of "critique" was to examine the legitimate scope of the mind or of knowledge. In this regard the "critique of pure reason", which was also the title of his most important work (see below and Critique of Pure Reason), meant examining what certain and legitimate knowledge human beings could arrive at simply by thinking about things independently of experience and perception, with his conclusion being: not very much. Prior to Kant, the entire mode of functioning of most philosophy was drawing conclusions about the nature of the universe, of God, or of the soul simply by logical thinking about them, by what seemed to make sense through "a priori" thinking, i.e. thinking on purely logical grounds. For this sort of thinking it must be the case that God or the universe is this way or that way, because it makes sense logically. But, in the history of philosophy, for every philosophical theory that God or the universe or the mind must be one way, some philosopher arrived at another theory stating that it must be precisely the opposite way. Kant called this unproductive, unresolvable, back-and-forth, dogmatic thinking the "dialectic of pure reason". That is, it was an inevitable consequence of trying to arrive at knowledge on purely logical grounds independently of experience or of scientific knowledge based on the evidence of the senses. For Kant, this entire style of pursuing knowledge was bankrupt and must be abandoned. According to Kant, philosophy must henceforth operate within the narrow "limits of pure reason" and recognize that most positive knowledge could come only through the sciences based on sense perception and not through metaphysics, which was about things of which we could never have direct sense perception.
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was strongly influenced by Kant's transcendental idealism. Schopenhauer accepted the distinction between two kinds of knowledge: the world perceived as phenomenon and the world thought of as non-phenomenon (thing-in-itself). For Kant, the thing-in-itself cannot be an object of perceived experience. But, for Schopenhauer, the thing-in-itself can be directly and immediately experienced as the basis of that which, in animal life, is known as will, desire, striving, craving, or urging. Schopenhauer claimed that the will as such, as thing-in-itself, is the inner, essential nature of the whole experienced world.
Some important philosophers and schools of thought, such as German Idealists, neo-Thomists and other theologically oriented philosophers, and Heidegger's "fundamental ontology" have refused to accept the limitations that Kant imposed upon philosophy and attempted to come up with new metaphysical systems about "the Absolute", "God", or "Being" , although even these philosophers have generally tried doing so by taking Kant into account. Over-all, however, post-Kantian philosophy has never been able to return to the style of thinking, arguing, and asserting conclusions that characterized philosophy before him. In this way, Kant was correct in asserting that he had brought about a "Copernican revolution" in philosophy. According to Kant, Copernicus's revolution in the understanding of the cosmos lay in taking the position of the observer into account. This explained why it looks as though the sun revolves around the earth even though in reality the earth revolves around the sun. Taking the observer's position into account prevents the unaware projection of the observer's perception or point of view onto the picture of the universe. Kant saw his own Copernican revolution in philosophy, analogously, as consisting in taking the position of the knower into account and thereby preventing the unaware projection of the knower's way of thinking ("pure reason") onto the philosophical map of reality. According to Kant, it was philosophers unawarely doing this that had created the illusions of metaphysics that dominated the prior history of philosophy. Kant saw this revolution, in turn, as being part of "Enlightenment" (as conceived of in the Age of Enlightenment) and the creation of an enlightened citizenry and society freed from dogmatism and irrational authority.
Kant's wider influence not only in philosophy but in the humanities and social sciences generally lies in the central concept of the Critique of Pure Reason, namely that it is the synthesizing, unifying, constitutive activity of the subject of knowledge that is at the basis of our having an ordered world of experience and of the objects of knowledge themselves. This idea has spread out through many intellectual disciplines in which it has manifested itself in different forms, for example:
In this way Kant's conception of synthesizing, ordering mental activity has become central to modern intellectual culture.
Kant is today considered to be the creator of the democratic peace theory, one of the main controversies in political science.
From 1873 to 1881, money was raised to build a monument chapel. His tomb and its pillared enclosure outside the Königsberg Cathedral in Kaliningrad, on the Pregolya (Pregel) River, are some of the few artifacts of German times preserved by the Soviets after they conquered the city in 1945. Kant's original tomb was demolished by Russian bombs early in that year. A replica of a statue of Kant that stood in front of the university was donated by a German entity in 1991 and placed on the original pediment. Newlyweds bring flowers to the chapel, as they formerly did for Lenin's monument. Near his tomb is the following inscription in German and Russian, taken from the "Conclusion" of his Critique of Practical Reason: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."
The democratic peace theory is a relatively new development. No early author seems to have considered it true. One explanation is that democratic governments were scarce before the late 19th century.
It was Immanuel Kant who first foreshadowed the theory in his essay Perpetual Peace written in 1795, although he thought that liberal democracy was only one of several necessary conditions for a perpetual peace.
Dean Babst, a criminologist, was the first to do statistical research and write an academic paper supporting the theory, in 1964, in Wisconsin Sociologist; he published a slightly more popularized version, eight years later, in the trade journal Industrial Research. Both versions initially received little attention.
J. David Singer and Melvin Small (1976) eventually responded and denied that democracies were in general less war-like than other nations; but they found only two marginal cases of democracies fighting each other. This paper was published in a political science journal, the Jerusalem Journal of International Relations, and this finally brought more widespread attention to the theory — also partly through Michael Doyle's (1983) lengthy discussion of the topic.
Rudolph J. Rummel cited Babst's work in the fourth book of his five-volume work, Understanding Conflict and War (1975-1981). He has since written extensively on the democratic peace, and has also drawn considerable lay attention to the subject.
There have been numerous studies in the field since.[1] Most studies have found some form of democratic peace exists; although neither methodological disputes nor doubtful cases are entirely resolved (Kinsella 2005).
The democratic peace theory has been extremely divisive among political scientists. It is rooted in the idealism in international relations and classical liberalism traditions; and is opposed to the previously dominant theory, realism in international relations. However, democratic peace theory has come to be more widely accepted and has in some democracies affected policy.
Presidents of both the major American parties have expressed support for the theory. Former President Bill Clinton of the Democratic Party: "Ultimately, the best strategy to ensure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere. Democracies don't attack each other." [2] Current President George W. Bush of the Republican Party: "And the reason why I'm so strong on democracy is democracies don't go to war with each other. And the reason why is the people of most societies don't like war, and they understand what war means.... I've got great faith in democracies to promote peace. And that's why I'm such a strong believer that the way forward in the Middle East, the broader Middle East, is to promote democracy." [3]
Some fear that the democratic peace theory may be used to justify wars against nondemocracies in order to bring lasting peace, in a democratic crusade (Chan 1997, p. 59). Woodrow Wilson in 1917 asked Congress to declare war against Imperial Germany, citing Germany's sinking of American ships due to unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmerman telegram, but also stating that "A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations" and "The world must be made safe for democracy."[4] Some point out that the democratic peace theory has been used to justify the 2003 Iraq War, others argue that this justification was used only after the War had already started. However, research shows that attempts to create democracies by using external force has often failed eventually. Those attempts that have succeeded, like creating a stable democracy in occupied Japan after WWII, have involved a drastic change of the whole political culture. Supporting internal democratic movements and using diplomacy may be far more successful and less costly. Thus, the theory and related research, if they were correctly understood, may actually be an argument against a democratic crusade (Weart 1998), (Owen 2005), (Russett 2005).
A democratic peace theory has to define what it means by "democracy" and what it means by "peace" (or, more often, "war").
Democracies have been defined differently by different theorists and researchers; this accounts for some of the variations in their findings. Some examples:
Kant (1795) opposed direct democracy since it is "necessarily despotism, as it establishes an executive power contrary to the general will; all being able to decide against one whose opinion may differ, the will of all is therefore not that of all: which is contradictory and opposite to liberty." Instead, Kant favors a constitutional republic where individual liberty is protected from the will of the majority.
Singer (1976) define democracy as a nation that (1) holds periodic elections in which the opposition parties are as free to run as government parties, (2) allows at least 10% of the adult population to vote, and (3) has a parliament that either controls or enjoys parity with the executive branch of the government.
Doyle (1983) requires (1) that "liberal régimes" have market or private property economics, (2) they have polities that are externally sovereign, (3) they have citizens with juridical rights, and (4) they have representative governments. Either 30% of the adult males were able to vote or it was possible for every man to acquire voting rights as by attaining enough property. He allows greater power to hereditary monarchs than other researchers; for example, he counts the rule of Louis-Philippe of France as a liberal régime.
Ray (1995) requires that at least 50% of the adult population is allowed to vote and that there has been at least one peaceful, constitutional transfer of executive power from one independent political party to another by means of an election.
Rummel (1997) states that "By democracy is meant liberal democracy, where those who hold power are elected in competitive elections with a secret ballot and wide franchise (loosely understood as including at least 2/3rds of adult males); where there is freedom of speech, religion, and organization; and a constitutional framework of law to which the government is subordinate and that guarantees equal rights."
Weart (1998). See Never at War.
The above definitions are binary, classifying nations into either democracies or nondemocracies. Many researchers have instead used more finely grained scales. One example is the Polity data series which scores each state on two scales, one for democracy and one for autocracy, for each year since 1800; as well as several others.[5] The use of the Polity Data has varied. Some researchers have done correlations between the democracy scale and belligerence; others have treated it as a binary classification by (as its maker does) calling all states with a high democracy score and a low autocracy score democracies; yet others have used the difference of the two scores, sometimes again making this into a binary classification (Gleditsch 1992).
Several researchers have observed that many of the possible exceptions to the democratic peace have occurred when at least one of the involved democracies was very young. They have therefore added a qualifier, typically stating that the peacefulness apply to democracies older than 3 years (Doyle 1983), (Russett 1993), (Rummel 1997), (Weart 1998). Rummel (1997) argues that this is enough time for "democratic procedures to be accepted, and democratic culture to settle in." Additionally, this may allow for other states to actually come to the recognition of the state as a democracy.
Quantitative research on international wars usually define war as a military conflict with more than 1000 killed in battle. This is the definition used in the Correlates of War Project which has also supplied the data for many studies on war. It turns out that most of the military conflicts in question fall clearly above or below this threshold (Ray 1995, p. 103).
Some researchers have used different definitions. For example, Weart (1998) defines war as more than 200 battle deaths. Russett (1993, p. 50), when looking at Ancient Greece, only requires some real battle engagement, involving on both sides forces under state authorization.
Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs), in the Correlates of War Project classification, are lesser conflicts than wars. Such a conflict may be no more than military display of force with no battle deaths. MIDs and wars together are "militarized interstate conflicts" or MICs. MIDs include the conflicts that precede a war; so the difference between MIDs and MICs may be less than it appears.
Statistical analysis and concerns about degrees of freedom are the primary reasons for using MID's instead of actual wars. Wars are relatively rare. An average ratio of 30 MID's to one war provides a richer statistical environment for analysis. [6]
The straightforward argument for the democratic peace is: given the number of wars over the past two centuries, if democracies fought each other as often as any other pair of states, there should have been many wars between democracies. Instead, depending on the study, we find zero or very few, and the possible exceptions generally involve doubtful democracies. A review (Ray 1998) lists many studies finding that this peacefulness is statistically significant.
Several researchers find no wars between well-established liberal democracies.[7] Jack Levy (1988) made an oft-quoted assertion that the theory is "as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations".
Others see one or two exceptions. Some wars commonly suggested as exceptions are the Spanish-American War and the Continuation War. Even some of those who see exceptions regard them as marginal cases.[8]
Other authors simply describe war between democracies as "rare", "very rare", "rare or non-existent".[9]
The question of no or few wars may be unimportant. Bremer (1992, 1993), who strongly supports the democratic peace, argues that it is impossible to prove a probability of exactly zero wars between democracies; thus is "fruitless to debate the question of whether democracies never or only very rarely fight one another". It is only possible to show a decrease in the probability of war.
However, at least one researcher (Rummel 1983) have argued that the
inter-democratic peace is an absolute law. One exception will disprove
the theory. Most researchers disagree (Gleditsch 1992).
The democratic peace theory is a relatively new development. No early author seems to have considered it true. One explanation is that democratic governments were scarce before the late 19th century.
It was Immanuel Kant who first foreshadowed the theory in his essay Perpetual Peace written in 1795, although he thought that liberal democracy was only one of several necessary conditions for a perpetual peace.
Dean Babst, a criminologist, was the first to do statistical research and write an academic paper supporting the theory, in 1964, in Wisconsin Sociologist; he published a slightly more popularized version, eight years later, in the trade journal Industrial Research. Both versions initially received little attention.
J. David Singer and Melvin Small (1976) eventually responded and denied that democracies were in general less war-like than other nations; but they found only two marginal cases of democracies fighting each other. This paper was published in a political science journal, the Jerusalem Journal of International Relations, and this finally brought more widespread attention to the theory — also partly through Michael Doyle's (1983) lengthy discussion of the topic.
Rudolph J. Rummel cited Babst's work in the fourth book of his five-volume work, Understanding Conflict and War (1975-1981). He has since written extensively on the democratic peace, and has also drawn considerable lay attention to the subject.
There have been numerous studies in the field since.[1] Most studies have found some form of democratic peace exists; although neither methodological disputes nor doubtful cases are entirely resolved (Kinsella 2005).
The democratic peace theory has been extremely divisive among political scientists. It is rooted in the idealism in international relations and classical liberalism traditions; and is opposed to the previously dominant theory, realism in international relations. However, democratic peace theory has come to be more widely accepted and has in some democracies affected policy.
Presidents of both the major American parties have expressed support for the theory. Former President Bill Clinton of the Democratic Party: "Ultimately, the best strategy to ensure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere. Democracies don't attack each other." [2] Current President George W. Bush of the Republican Party: "And the reason why I'm so strong on democracy is democracies don't go to war with each other. And the reason why is the people of most societies don't like war, and they understand what war means.... I've got great faith in democracies to promote peace. And that's why I'm such a strong believer that the way forward in the Middle East, the broader Middle East, is to promote democracy." [3]
Some fear that the democratic peace theory may be used to justify wars against nondemocracies in order to bring lasting peace, in a democratic crusade (Chan 1997, p. 59). Woodrow Wilson in 1917 asked Congress to declare war against Imperial Germany, citing Germany's sinking of American ships due to unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmerman telegram, but also stating that "A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations" and "The world must be made safe for democracy."[4] Some point out that the democratic peace theory has been used to justify the 2003 Iraq War, others argue that this justification was used only after the War had already started. However, research shows that attempts to create democracies by using external force has often failed eventually. Those attempts that have succeeded, like creating a stable democracy in occupied Japan after WWII, have involved a drastic change of the whole political culture. Supporting internal democratic movements and using diplomacy may be far more successful and less costly. Thus, the theory and related research, if they were correctly understood, may actually be an argument against a democratic crusade (Weart 1998), (Owen 2005), (Russett 2005).
A democratic peace theory has to define what it means by "democracy" and what it means by "peace" (or, more often, "war").
Democracies have been defined differently by different theorists and researchers; this accounts for some of the variations in their findings. Some examples:
Kant (1795) opposed direct democracy since it is "necessarily despotism, as it establishes an executive power contrary to the general will; all being able to decide against one whose opinion may differ, the will of all is therefore not that of all: which is contradictory and opposite to liberty." Instead, Kant favors a constitutional republic where individual liberty is protected from the will of the majority.
Singer (1976) define democracy as a nation that (1) holds periodic elections in which the opposition parties are as free to run as government parties, (2) allows at least 10% of the adult population to vote, and (3) has a parliament that either controls or enjoys parity with the executive branch of the government.
Doyle (1983) requires (1) that "liberal régimes" have market or private property economics, (2) they have polities that are externally sovereign, (3) they have citizens with juridical rights, and (4) they have representative governments. Either 30% of the adult males were able to vote or it was possible for every man to acquire voting rights as by attaining enough property. He allows greater power to hereditary monarchs than other researchers; for example, he counts the rule of Louis-Philippe of France as a liberal régime.
Ray (1995) requires that at least 50% of the adult population is allowed to vote and that there has been at least one peaceful, constitutional transfer of executive power from one independent political party to another by means of an election.
Rummel (1997) states that "By democracy is meant liberal democracy, where those who hold power are elected in competitive elections with a secret ballot and wide franchise (loosely understood as including at least 2/3rds of adult males); where there is freedom of speech, religion, and organization; and a constitutional framework of law to which the government is subordinate and that guarantees equal rights."
Weart (1998). See Never at War.
The above definitions are binary, classifying nations into either democracies or nondemocracies. Many researchers have instead used more finely grained scales. One example is the Polity data series which scores each state on two scales, one for democracy and one for autocracy, for each year since 1800; as well as several others.[5] The use of the Polity Data has varied. Some researchers have done correlations between the democracy scale and belligerence; others have treated it as a binary classification by (as its maker does) calling all states with a high democracy score and a low autocracy score democracies; yet others have used the difference of the two scores, sometimes again making this into a binary classification (Gleditsch 1992).
Several researchers have observed that many of the possible exceptions to the democratic peace have occurred when at least one of the involved democracies was very young. They have therefore added a qualifier, typically stating that the peacefulness apply to democracies older than 3 years (Doyle 1983), (Russett 1993), (Rummel 1997), (Weart 1998). Rummel (1997) argues that this is enough time for "democratic procedures to be accepted, and democratic culture to settle in." Additionally, this may allow for other states to actually come to the recognition of the state as a democracy.
Quantitative research on international wars usually define war as a military conflict with more than 1000 killed in battle. This is the definition used in the Correlates of War Project which has also supplied the data for many studies on war. It turns out that most of the military conflicts in question fall clearly above or below this threshold (Ray 1995, p. 103).
Some researchers have used different definitions. For example, Weart (1998) defines war as more than 200 battle deaths. Russett (1993, p. 50), when looking at Ancient Greece, only requires some real battle engagement, involving on both sides forces under state authorization.
Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs), in the Correlates of War Project classification, are lesser conflicts than wars. Such a conflict may be no more than military display of force with no battle deaths. MIDs and wars together are "militarized interstate conflicts" or MICs. MIDs include the conflicts that precede a war; so the difference between MIDs and MICs may be less than it appears.
Statistical analysis and concerns about degrees of freedom are the primary reasons for using MID's instead of actual wars. Wars are relatively rare. An average ratio of 30 MID's to one war provides a richer statistical environment for analysis. [6]
The straightforward argument for the democratic peace is: given the number of wars over the past two centuries, if democracies fought each other as often as any other pair of states, there should have been many wars between democracies. Instead, depending on the study, we find zero or very few, and the possible exceptions generally involve doubtful democracies. A review (Ray 1998) lists many studies finding that this peacefulness is statistically significant.
Several researchers find no wars between well-established liberal democracies.[7] Jack Levy (1988) made an oft-quoted assertion that the theory is "as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations".
Others see one or two exceptions. Some wars commonly suggested as exceptions are the Spanish-American War and the Continuation War. Even some of those who see exceptions regard them as marginal cases.[8]
Other authors simply describe war between democracies as "rare", "very rare", "rare or non-existent".[9]
The question of no or few wars may be unimportant. Bremer (1992, 1993), who strongly supports the democratic peace, argues that it is impossible to prove a probability of exactly zero wars between democracies; thus is "fruitless to debate the question of whether democracies never or only very rarely fight one another". It is only possible to show a decrease in the probability of war.
However, at least one researcher (Rummel 1983) have argued that the
inter-democratic peace is an absolute law. One exception will disprove
the theory. Most researchers disagree (Gleditsch 1992).
The term realism or political realism collects a wide variety of theories and modes of thought about International Relations
that have in common that the motivation of states is in the first place
the strive for (mostly) military and economic power or security, rather
than ideals or ethics. This term is mostly used as a synonym for power politics. Sometimes realism is also used to refer to classical realism, the oldest form of realism.
The term realism or political realism collects a wide variety of theories and modes of thought about International Relations
that have in common that the motivation of states is in the first place
the strive for (mostly) military and economic power or security, rather
than ideals or ethics. This term is mostly used as a synonym for power politics. Sometimes realism is also used to refer to classical realism, the oldest form of realism.
Social constructionism is a sociological theory of knowledge developed by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann with their 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality. The focus of social constructionism is to uncover the ways in which individuals and groups participate in the creation of their perceived reality. It involves looking at the ways social phenomena are created, institutionalized, and made into tradition by humans. Socially constructed reality is seen as an ongoing, dynamic process; reality is re-produced by people acting on their interpretations and their knowledge of it. Berger and Luckmann argue that all knowledge, including the most basic, taken-for-granted common sense knowledge of everyday reality, is derived from and maintained by social interactions. When people interact, they do so with the understanding that their respective perceptions of reality are related, and as they act upon this understanding their common knowledge of reality becomes reinforced. Since this common sense knowledge is negotiated by people, human typifications, significations and institutions come to be presented as part of an objective reality. It is in this sense that it can be said that reality is socially constructed.
Within social constructionist thought, a social construction (social construct) is an idea which may appear to be natural and obvious to those who accept it, but in reality is an invention or artifact of a particular culture or society. The implication is that social constructs are in some sense human choices rather than laws resulting from divine will or nature. This is not usually taken to imply a radical anti-determinism, however. [citation needed]
Social constructionism is dialectically opposed to essentialism, the belief that there are defining transhistorical
essences independent of conscious beings that determine the categorical
structure of reality. The specific mechanisms underlying Berger and
Luckmann's notion of social construction are discussed further in social construction.
In the tradition of sociology of knowledge, what seems real to members of a social class arises from the situation of the class, such as the capitalist or working classes, especially with respect to the economic fundamentals which affect the class. According to the theories advanced by Karl Mannheim, who formulated the classic theories of sociology of knowledge, intellectuals occupy a special position which is to some extent free of the intellectual blinders imposed by the social position of other classes. [citation needed]Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony both prefigures and enriches current social constructionist discourse. As a Marxist, Gramsci was interested in the way inequitable class relations are maintained, and the role of knowledge in this process. Marx himself recognized the important role of knowledge in the maintenance of class supremacy, observing that the prevailing ideology in society tends to be the ideology of the ruling class, and proposing that the proletariat are suppressed by the implementation of a ‘false consciousness’. Whilst previous Marxist thinkers saw hegemony in terms of political and ideological leadership, Gramsci took the idea of hegemony as ideological dominance and expanded it to the common sense knowledge of the everyday. In Gramsci’s view, the interests of the ruling class are not only reflected in politics and ideologies, but also in the taken-for-granted, assumed-as-natural knowledge that appears as common sense. By accepting a version of common sense that protects the interests of the bourgeoisie as natural and inevitable, the proletariat ‘consent’ to domination: revolution is prevented and the social order is maintained. [1]
Sociologist Talcott Parsons used the concept of gloss to discuss the idea that 'reality' is constructed, that we are all actors on a stage. [citation needed]
Berger and Luckman's work has been influential in the sociology of knowledge, including the sociology of science, where Karin Knorr-Cetina, Bruno Latour, Barry Barnes, Steve Woolgar and others use the ideas of social constructionism to relate what science has typically characterized as objective facts to the processes of social construction, with the goal of showing that human subjectivity imposes itself on those facts we take to be objective, not solely the other way around. [citation needed] A particularly provocative title in this line of thought is Andrew Pickering's Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics.
Social Constructionism has also left its mark on the Social Shaping of Technology field, especially on the Social construction of technology, or SCOT, and authors as Wiebe Bijker, Trevor Pinch, Maarten van Wesel etc. [citation needed]
An illustrative example of social constructionist thought at work is, following the work of Sigmund Freud and Émile Durkheim, religion. According to this line of thought, the basis for religion is rooted in our psyche, in a need to see some purpose in life. A given religion, then, does not show us some hidden aspect of objective reality, but has rather been constructed according to social and historical processes according to human needs. Peter L. Berger wrote an entire book exploring the social construction of religion, The Sacred Canopy.
Social constructionism can be seen as a source of the postmodern movement, and has been influential in the field of cultural studies. Some have gone so far as to attribute the rise of cultural studies (the cultural turn) to social constructionism.
Within the social constructionist strand of postmodernism, the concept of socially constructed reality stresses the on-going mass-building of worldviews by individuals in dialectical interaction with society at any time. The numerous realities so formed comprise, according to this view, the imagined worlds of human social existence and activity, gradually crystallised by habit into institutions propped up by language conventions, given ongoing legitimacy by mythology, religion and philosophy, maintained by therapies and socialisation, and subjectively internalised by upbringing and education to become part of the identity of social citizens.
Though social constructionism contains a diverse array of theories and beliefs, it can generally be divided into two camps: Weak social constructionism and strong social constructionism. The two differ mainly in degree, where weak social constructionists tend to see some underlying objective factual elements to reality, and strong social constructionists see everything as, in some way, a social construction. This is not to say that strong social constructionists see the world as ontologically unreal. Rather, they propose that the notions of "real" and "unreal" are themselves social constructs, so that the question of whether anything is "real" is just a matter of social convention. [citation needed]
Linguist Steven Pinker[2] writes that "some categories really are social constructions: they exist only because people tacitly agree to act as if they exist. Examples include money, tenure, citizenship, decorations for bravery, and the presidency of the United States."
In a similar vein, Stanley Fish[3] has suggested that baseball's "balls and strikes" are social constructions.[4]
Both Fish and Pinker agree that the sorts of objects indicated here can be described as part of what John Searle calls "social reality". [citation needed] In particular, they are, in Searle's terms, ontologically subjective but epistemologically objective. Informally, they require human practices to sustain their existence, but they have an effect that is (basically) universally agreed upon. The disagreement lies in whether this category should be called "socially constructed". Ian Hacking [5] argues that it should not. Furthermore, it is not clear that authors who write "social construction" analyses ever mean "social construction" in Pinker's sense. If they never do, then Pinker (probably among others) has misunderstood the point of a social constructionist argument.
"Science is a highly elaborated set of conventions brought forth by one particular culture (our own) in the circumstances of one particular historical period; thus it is not, as the standard view would have it, a body of knowledge and testable conjecture concerning the real world. It is a discourse, devised by and for one specialized interpretive community, under terms created by the complex net of social circumstance, political opinion, economic incentive and ideological climate that constitutes the ineluctable human environment of the scientist. Thus, orthodox science is but one discursive community among the many that now exist and that have existed historically. Consequently its truth claims are irreducibly self-referential, in that they can be upheld only by appeal to the standards that define the scientific community and distinguish it from other social formations."[6]
Radical constructionism is concerned with showing how social processes influence the very content of technology, for example, what it means for a technology to be deemed working. It draws heavily upon the sociology of science and claims that the meaning of the technology, including facts about its working, are themselves social constructs. This latter view is opposed to any conception of technological determinism. [citation needed]Ernst von Glasersfeld is the most prominent proponent of radical constructionism. [citation needed] He attempts to show that knowledge is the self-organized cognitive process of the human brain. That is, the process of constructing knowledge regulates itself, and since knowledge is a construct rather than a compilation of empirical data, it is not possible to know the degree to which knowledge reflects upon an ontological reality. [citation needed]
"Social construction" may mean many things to many people. Ian Hacking, having examined a wide range of books and articles with titles of the form "The social construction of X" or "Constructing X", argues that when something is said to be "socially constructed", this is shorthand for at least the following two claims:
Hacking adds that the following claims are also often, though not always, implied by the use of the phrase "social construction":
Thus a claim that gender is socially constructed probably means that gender, as currently understood, is not an inevitable result of biology, but highly contingent on social and historical processes. In addition, depending on who is making the claim, it may mean that our current understanding of gender is harmful, and should be modified or eliminated, to the extent possible.
According to Hacking, "social construction" claims are not always clear about exactly what isn't "inevitable", or exactly what "should be done away with." Consider a hypothetical claim that quarks are "socially constructed". On one reading, this means that quarks themselves are not "inevitable" or "determined by the nature of things." On another reading, this means that our idea (or conceptualization, or understanding) of quarks is not "inevitable" or "determined by the nature of things".[10]
Hacking is much more sympathetic to the second reading than the first.[11] Furthermore, he argues that, if the second reading is taken, there need not always be a conflict between saying that quarks are "socially constructed" and saying that they are "real".[12]
The stronger first position, however, is more-or-less an inevitable correlary of Willard Van Orman Quine's concept of ontological relativity, and particularly of the Duhem-Quine thesis. That is, according to Quine and like-minded thinkers (who are not usually characterized as social contructionists) there is no single privileged explanatory framework that is closest to "the things themselves"—every theory has merit only in proportion to its explanatory power. [citation needed]
As we step from the physical word to the world of human beings, "social construction" analyses can become more complex. Hacking briefly examines Helène Moussa’s analysis of the social construction of "women refugees".[13] According to him, Moussa's argument has several pieces, some of which may be implicit:
Hacking suggests that this third part of the analysis, the "interaction" between a socially constructed category and the individuals that are actually or potentially included in that category, is present in many "social construction" analyses involving types of human beings.
The pleasure principle and the reality principle are two psychoanalytical terms coined by Sigmund Freud.
Respectively, the desire for immediate gratification versus the deferral of that gratification. Quite simply, the pleasure principle
drives one to seek pleasure and to avoid pain. However, as one matures,
one begins to learn the need sometimes to endure pain and to defer
gratification because of the exigencies and obstacles of reality: "An
ego thus educated has become reasonable; it no longer lets
itself be governed by the pleasure principle, but obeys the reality
principle, which also at bottom seeks to obtain pleasure, but pleasure
which is assured through taking account of reality, even though it is
pleasure postponed and diminished" (Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures 16.357).
