Understanding the Times

Derek Thomas

H. L. Mencken once said, “There is no record in human history of a happy philosopher.” Even so, philosophy can still gather an audience. The BBC recently engaged in an admittedly unscientific nationwide poll to discover the answer to the question, who is the greatest philosopher of all time? Following months of radio programs where celebrities spoke briefly about their favorite philosopher, and interested listeners could vote via the Internet, a list of ten eventually emerged as candidates for “the greatest philosopher.”

Coming in at number ten—the Austrian-born, British philosopher, Sir Karl Popper (who died in 1994). As a philosopher of science, Popper was absolutely sure that something could be proved false but skeptical that anything could be proved true. He questioned traditional ideas that firm scientific laws could be established through observation and experiment and argued that absolute truth was alien to the scientific method.

In ninth place came Aristotle. Aristotle claimed that the perceived world, rather than a world beyond this one, is the real world thereby contradicting his teacher, Plato. Knowledge is built upon the careful grouping, naming, comparing and categorizing of all the varied things as they appear in the world. This sounds deadly boring even if true and is hugely unpopular today despite this ninth place in the poll. He had the dubious privilege of being the tutor to Alexander the Great (think Colin Farrell).  

In eighth place came Socrates. History has dubbed him the ugliest looking philosopher of all time and the man who popularized the term “philosopher.” Socrates influenced philosophy so much that all previous thinkers have come to be known as Pre-Socratic. Fortunately for us, he spent more time talking than writing which means that although history has been kind to him, we’re not quite sure what it is he believed, which is just as well, since he did apparently say, "All I know is that I know nothing". He felt the Greek gods were nothing more than projections of human vices, an idea that led him to drink a deadly draught of hemlock!  

Thomas Aquinas, dubbed the greatest scholar of the medieval period and the godfather of Catholic philosophy, came in seventh, no doubt signaling sectarian voting. If great minds are housed in large bodies, Aquinas, having an exceedingly large body had a very great mind. His so-called “Five Ways” (arguments for the existence of God) have proved very impressive indeed, except, that is, to Cornelius Van Til! When Aquinas announced to his family that he wanted to become a friar, his brothers locked him up in castle, sending him a beautiful prostitute. Aquinas chased her away, choosing instead to think of ways to marry Aristotelian logic to Christianity.  

In sixth place came Immanuel Kant who doubted that the transcendent was knowable. If the quality of being unreadable suggests great wisdom, his book, The Critique of Pure Reason, a piece which Kant himself described as “dry, obscure, contrary to all ordinary ideas, and on top of that prolix,” was very wise indeed. We will never know. Immanuel Kant is one good reason to avoid classes in philosophy.  

In fifth place came Plato, perhaps the wealthiest philosopher of all time. He is responsible for some of the most spellbinding philosophical ideas ever laid down; notably his theory of the forms—that all things on earth are imperfect copies of their perfect archetypes in another realm. Humans are like men sitting in a cave seeing shadows on the wall, he said. His view that life is the imprisonment of the soul in a body has got him into all sorts of trouble over the years and Christianity, adopting it in part, has suffered as a consequence. He wrote that in an ideal society, the philosopher would be king which is one good reason for rejoicing that we live in a less than ideal one!  

In fourth place was the existentialist, Friedrich Nietzsche-- a Machiavelli on steroids. Rene Descartes had sat in his “dutch oven“ unwilling to come out until he was certain of something. When he did come out all he was certain about was that he could think. Cogito ergo sum, he said: “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes had internalized reality. Along came Kant, who said that if we can’t perfectly empirically validate something, we can’t really know that it is. And finally we arrived at Nietzsche, who went beyond Kant and said that if you can’t validate something, it doesn’t exist. “God is dead” he boldly announced—in the presence, that is, of God. Nietzsche did not believe the masses could ever bring about true greatness, but now and again a race of superheroes, Übermenschen, might. The Nazis in the twentieth century liked this idea, as did Richard Strauss who wrote a cracking tone poem based on Nietzsche’s most famous writing, Also Sprach Zarathustra.  

Coming in third was Ludwig Wittgenstein. A proposition by Wittgenstein is designed to make you look very silly indeed. He believed that previous philosophers had tied themselves in knots by asking the wrong sorts of questions. They thought philosophical problems were to do with understanding the nature of the world but Wittgenstein thought they were all problems of language. Even if absolute truth exists, our language is so much a product of our environment and social convention that it is next to impossible to express it in words. Needless to say, a concept like inspiration is rendered impossible. 

In second place, they voted David Hume. Born and educated in Edinburgh (this was a poll conducted by the BBC after all), Hume did not believe there was sufficient evidence that God exists, a dangerous thought which has led to today’s deconstruction-ism doubting that Hume existed! Most biographers of Hume call him egocentric, out to make money and a name. He made little of the former but unfortunately a lot of the latter, partly through the publication of a 23 paged essay in which he discredited miracles, which he defined as a “violation of the laws of nature.” C. S. Lewis replied in his book Miracles, accusing Hume of begging the question.  

And number one? Not William of Ockham, not Hobbes (thankfully, whom I credit with a lot of what’s wrong with the world), not even Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Descartes, Bertrand Russell, Sartre, Schopenhauer, or Spinoza, but Karl Marx! Yes, Karl Marx! The same Karl Marx who wrote, “Man makes religion, it is not religion that makes man; religion is in reality man’s own consciousness and feeling which has not yet found itself or has lost itself again.” Thus religion is “the opiate of the masses, their self-created projections of hopes and longings.”  

Marxism reduced the human condition to issues of class struggle and economic exploitation. Earthly paradise would emerge through the creation of a class-less society. When the Russian Revolution attempted such a dream, it promised an end to exploitation by eradicating private property, liquidating religion, suppressing native cultures and abolishing individualism in the name of the collective. With the fall of the Berlin wall (the event which, according to Thomas Oden, marked the official beginnings of post-modernity) where, one might ask, is the mass appeal in for Marx? The answer seems to be that Marx still represents a powerful way to shape society. It is not so much old Marx but new Marx. The interest is not economic theory or class struggle but cultural change, and those who admire him are the bohemians who gravitate to culture-shaping institutions—education, the arts, and the media.  

What Marx discovered was the nature of idolatry, not the nature of Christian belief. It is true that much of that which we call “religion” is indeed the misleading projection of our own felt needs, inner longings, and sinful demands. Israel made a calf just as modern westerners make consumerism, sex, or popular entertainment a god before which they bow down and worship. 

Man’s mind, as Calvin said long ago, “is a perpetual factory of idols.”