Perhaps you have noticed a few yourself: those fascinating patterns, symmetries and recurrences you sometimes encounter when learning about history. Some examples: Caesar, Napoleon and Hitler at times seem like reincarnations, the rise of AI is arguably in the third iteration of the Industrial Revolution and the modern era could collapse like the Bronze Age and the Roman Empire before it.
And not too long ago I found one in the history of philosophy as well.
People always recommended to start the study of philosophy with ancient guys like Plato or Marcus Aurellius, then moving on to Descartes, and then working your way through history roughly chronologically. I tried that for some time, but soon noticed that (like many probably) the more recent philosophers piqued my interest more, especially those of the last century, and therefore I started focussing more on them.
Then at some point I noticed that somewhere in its history, philosophy adopted a fundamentally different view on humanity. A shift in an underlying paradigm on the relation between the subject and the object, if you will.
Here, the subject refers to a being with consciousness, agency and the capacity to experience the world. The object refers to that which the subject acts upon, which includes physical things, abstract concepts and thoughts.
To illustrate this shift, I will discuss two pairs of antipodes between which I saw the clearest contrast: Socrates versus Wittgenstein and the Enlightenment versus postmodernism.
I have to confess it’s a bit handwavy; history has never been one-sided and it is rare to find strong trends. Nonetheless, with our eyes squinted a little, we can in fact see an interesting turn.
Socrates, credited as the founder of Western philosophy, certainly had a great influence on Western philosophy.
Roughly 2400 years ago the simply dressed and particularly ugly man walked barefoot through the streets of Ancient Athens, asking his fellow Athenians deep questions. What is beauty? What is justice? What is goodness? (All this questioning even made him so infamous that it eventually got him sentenced to death for corrupting the youth.)
The philosophy of Socrates (and Plato after him), or rather the method of doing philosophy, characterizes itself by these sorts of questions that attempt to define certain concepts. Concepts such as beauty, justice and goodness. Central to this tendency for a deeper understanding lies the idea that for every concept, every noun, there exists an “essence”, something that all things that the concept encompasses have in common.
For example, in one of Plato’s earlier dialogues, Euthyphro, Socrates asks Euthyphro, who is waiting at court to prosecute his father, to tell him what the pious and the impious are. Euthyphro, like most of Socrates' interlocutors, starts by giving Socrates examples of pious actions. What he is doing now, prosecuting wrongdoers, for a start. Socrates is however never satisfied with examples and instead wants to understand the essence of the concept in question. “Bear in mind then that I did not bid you tell me one or two of the many pious actions but that form itself that makes all pious actions pious” he told Euthyphro. He wanted to probe deeper into what the word, in this case piety, entailed. To try to pinpoint its essence.
In opposition, the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein took a markedly different stance. I will not be the first to place Wittgenstein as the antithesis of Socrates, and indeed the fundamental difference between the two (the later Wittgenstein to be specific; Wittgenstein’s philosophy dramatically changed during his life) is unmistakable.
While the idea that behind every noun lies a deeper essence is the foundation of Socrates’ philosophy, Wittgenstein takes a fundamentally different stance. A word needn't stand for a particular thing, or correspond to some deeper essence, as Socrates thought. He thinks a word gets its meaning by its use, within a certain, what he calls, language game. All these questions Socrates, and in fact the majority of philosophers, were pondering about are nothing but confusions that arise from taking words out of their ordinary context. Outside of their context, words like reality, beauty etc. don’t have any meaning, so it’s nonsense to search for some kind of “essence”.
Take the word game for example, Socrates could have held an entire dialogue to attempt to find the deeper essence of the word game, looking at what all games have in common and characterises them. But there are so many, totally different sorts of games; board games, Olympic games, video games, ball games and so on, so it actually seems quite unlikely that they all have something in common. Even though one might be inclined to think they have something in common, because otherwise there seems to be no reason as for why they would all be called games.
But Wittgenstein instead wants us to think about it using the metaphor of family resemblance. Whereas Socrates would not be satisfied with any examples of games given by his interlocutors, Wittgenstein would have said you should precisely give these examples in order to understand concepts. All these different games might not have one particular thing in common, not one clear defining feature, but instead they all have some resemblances. A concept, such as games, is more like a family where one might have the hair of his father, the eyes of his grandmother and the voice of his grandfather, and where someone might be indistinguishable with one cousin, but have practically none in common with another.
Socrates and Wittgenstein clearly had fundamentally different stances on language, but apart from that we can also recognize a difference in view on the relation between subject (man) and the object (language).
Socrates wanted to fathom the essence of a word; to bring the confused subject closer to the truth of objects like words and concepts. Underneath, we see the notion of the subject as central, the agent that can pursue understanding about the object; the subject that tries to conquer the objects.
On the contrary, in Wittgenstein we see quite the opposite relation: it’s not man that confronts language and tries to grasp it, it is instead language that has us in its grip and confuses us. The subject was not the one in control, but has instead been misled by the object. As Wittgenstein put it: “philosophy is the battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language”.
The Age of Enlightenment, spanning the late 17th and 18th century, has profoundly changed the course of Western philosophy and laid the groundwork for modernity. With many of the values and systems fundamental to modern Western society that can be traced back to this movement, it has arguably had the greatest influence on the world today.
Beginning with the publication of René Descartes’ Discours de la Méthode, this era, sometimes also named The Age of Reason, characterizes itself by the focus on reason and the notion that this will allow society to progress.
Central are the belief that there is a rational structure of reality, an objective truth, and the idea that the human mind is able to uncover this through science and reason.
We find this notion for instance in Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy, where he famously takes it on him to discover absolutely certain knowledge by methodically doubting everything that could be doubted. Eventually, he arrived at the conclusion that there is one single thing he could not, with common sense, doubt; the existence of his mind. After all, there had to exist a mind to do the doubting. And thus, with the famous aphorism: “I think therefore I am”, Descartes placed the existence of the conscious, thinking mind, as the central foundation of knowledge.
But in addition, we generally also recognize an increased attention to epistemology, giving rise to two major schools of philosophy; rationalism, with Leibniz, Spinoza and Descartes as some central figures; and empiricism with Bacon and Locke. All until Immanuel Kant, another great name of the Enlightenment, eventually synthesized the two schools.
In contrast to the philosophy of the Enlightenment is that of postmodernism, which arose halfway the 20th century. The difference here is again not hard to notice; postmodernist philosophers have frequently and actively distanced themselves from the ideals and beliefs of the Age of Enlightenment. (French postmodernist philosopher Michel Foucault, for example, refused to use the biased name “Enlightenment” and used the term “classical period” instead). Though the differences are spread across many different areas, there are two I’d like to discuss.
We have seen that during the Enlightenment, the belief in an objective truth was fundamental to the philosophical thought in that period, but in postmodernism that idea has often been criticised heavily. Instead of there being a single, universal truth, truth is subjective, shaped by our culture, language and power structures. Objective truth, if there even is such a thing, would be unattainable since our knowledge about the world will always be influenced by biases, linguistic limitations or socially constructed and unconsciously accepted ideas.
Additionally, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (postmodernism was quite dominated by the French) spoke about “the triumph of the object”. As a result of (technological) progress (which in turn has its roots in Enlightenment principles), the power of the world of objects over the subject is, according to Baudrillard, growing continuously. From things like the global market and the media to everything we own, whether our phone, car or clothes, it’s now the realm of objects that holds us hostage and dictates our way of living. The subject, becoming increasingly defined by their relation to objects and their consumption, is now a victim.
Between the Age of Enlightenment and the movement of postmodernism we see, next to again a fundamental opposition, a shift in the perception of the relationship between the subject and object akin to that between Socrates and Wittgenstein.
During the Enlightenment, philosophers believed in an universal and objective truth, that they, as the thinking, conscious subjects, could make sense of through rational inquiry. Comparable to Socrates, the subject is placed in the centre, and has, with the aim to find certain knowledge, an objective realm of objects to be discovered.
In contrast, in postmodern philosophy, truth is seen as subjective. There is no universal truth to be uncovered by the subject, but it’s instead the subject’s perception of the truth that is influenced by things such as cultural beliefs or language. On top of that, we find in postmodernism the idea that progress, initiated by Enlightenment values and meant to help humanity as a tool, spinned out of control, and the object consequently paved its way to supremacy.
To me it is unclear where to exactly place this diachronic mirror, my knowledge of the history of philosophy and history in general is unfortunately not vast enough. But I would, at least, say it stands somewhere in the late 19th century, even though the real differences are not clearly visible until halfway the 20th century.
I also have no clear answer as for why Western philosophy took this 180 degree turn, so I can no more than give a theory, something that sounds like a logical explanation.
First of all, we should notice for the great part of Western civilization religion dominated people's form of life. Accompanying this was the focus on the immaterial, considered more divine, over the earthly material. Consequently, philosophy would have had a strong emphasis on metaphysics and transcendentality, seeing the material world as a shadow of a higher reality. The primacy of an immaterial and immortal mind (the subject) over the uncertain material objective world was therefore also clearly present.
(While it’s certainly true that philosophers heavily criticised religion during the Enlightenment, we have to note that the majority of them were still deists. Their criticism primarily concerned the dogmatic and social aspects of the church.)
However, exactly through the principles of the Enlightenment, the focus shifted to scientific and materialistic explanations. The success of empirical science weakened the tendency for immaterial explanations, and the central place for the divine and the immortal soul became less obvious. God died and the immaterial and material came to an equal footing, removing the advantage of the subject over the material object.
Secondly, overlapping in time and certainly closely related are the progression of technology and the growth of capitalism (both again strongly influenced by Enlightenment thought). Slowly, society transformed to one where everything, from basic needs to emotions and desires, has been commodified and where advanced technology is claiming an increasingly dominant place in our daily lives. Therefore, it seems not surprising that the subject became decentralized and the object took its place, and philosophical thought moved with it.
Beyond the fascinating contrast between the two pairs of antipodes and the broader shift in how the relation between the subject and object is understood, there is also a deeper lesson to be drawn.
Philosophy, even though it might attempt to find universal, timeless discoveries, is ultimately strongly shaped by underlying assumptions and prejudices, often unconsciously adopted from the philosopher’s culture and form of life. In other words, philosophy is highly dependent on the time in which it originated.
In fact, unlike science that continually progresses along a straight line by constantly improving on the already known, philosophy moves up and down, continuously reflecting and reacting to society at its time. The ones discussed in this text were merely specific examples, but it’s safe to assume that such phenomena have occurred more frequently and will continue to do so.