E. The Way of Ideas

The narrative of rationality that extends through the European Enlightenment from Hobbes and Descartes through the Cartesian rationalists and then, via Locke, Berkeley, Hume, to Kant, is sometimes called “the way (dao?) of ideas.” This is because the whole tradition is focused on trying to make sense of how human beings with their peculiar faculty of thinking about the world in terms of ideas can know whether their though, their ideas, can provide them with knowledge of how the world is. This dao of ideas contributed to and developed alongside another dao that of science. Science seemed to be able to explain and, through this explanation, provide the means to manipulate and change the world. During the whole of this time, people we now call “scientists” called themselves “natural philosophers.” But, some of these philosophers also asked, how can I know whether these explanations match up with how the world actually is? The way of ideas is an attempt to answer this question.

The way of ideas gives us de, virtue or power by educating us in the uses and the limits of reasons and experience in informing one about the world. For the most part, non-philosophers are rather naive about the relation of mind to world. They take it for granted that the world is as it appears to us to be. They assume that events must be linked causally. If you touch a hot pan it will cause you skin to burn. They assume that even though things change they remain the same thing. You are the same person you were at the beginning of the semester … even though you have changed. The way of ideas should disillusion you of such assumptions. It is a dao of disillusionment. It is also a dao that should help you to refine your use of reason, And, so far in this particular philosophical story, it is dao that leaves you with some choices to make.

After considering these ideas will you scurry back to your naivete and see no philosophy, hear no philosophy, speak no philosophy?

Will you be a Cartesian rationalist and rely on the existence of a perfect being to ensure that your ideas correspond to a material world that is fundamentally different from the world of ideas? And that a disciplined reason will enable you to know the world?

Or will you choose to be an empiricist? And if you are an empiricist, will you resist the siren call of Berkeley’s idealism or Hume’s mitigated skepticism.

Or will you embrace Kant’s Copernican Revolution and become a phenomenologist, giving up knowledge of the noumena for a transcendental justification of your phenomenal knowledge.

Or are none of these alternatives palatable and you will continue the philosophical study of the question of mind and world to see whether there are alternatives to the possibilities presented to us by the way of ideas?

The choice is yours.

And, speaking of choice, the philosophers who thought their way through the way of ideas were also crucially important thinkers in another intellectual story, the story of the European Enlightenment. While Enlightenment thinkers were concerned with the problem of mind and the scientific decipherment of the ways the world works, they were also concerned with questions about the nature of human freedom, the constitution of a just state, the proper form of government, questions of the rights of women and non-Europeans and, for this class next, the question of whether life can have meaning in a scientific secularized world. Immanuel Kant was one of the most important thinkers of the European Enlightenment and he wrote a famous essay titled “What is Enlightenment?” It is to that question we will turn next, by looking briefly at Kant’s essay, and then at one Enlightenment tradition that developed in response to Kant’s essay.