Solomon Robert C. - The Big Questions: A Short Introduction to Philosophy

The Big Questions

A Short Introduction to Philosophy

Eighth Edition

ROBERT C. SOLOMON
University of Texas at Austin

KATHLEEN M. HIGGINS
University of Texas at Austin

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The Big Questions: A Short Introduction to Philosophy, Eighth Edition

Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins

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For our nieces and nephews,

Jem, Jesi, Danyal, Rachel, and Carrie Solomon,
Caitlin Higgins, Jeffrey and Matthew Cook,
Allison, Rachel, Daniel, Brett, and Marcus Felten,
Kevin and Emily Daily

It was the fall of 1806, in the college town of Jena, in what we now call Germany. It was about the time when most students and professors would have been getting ready for their classes, with mixed annoyance and anticipation. The professors would have been finishing up their summer research; the students would have been doing what students usually do at the end of the summer.

But this year school would not begin as usual.

Napoleons troops were already approaching the city, and you could hear the cannon from the steps of the university library. French scouts were already in the town, walking around the university, stopping for a glass of wine in the student bars, and chatting casually with the local residents, many of whom were in sympathy with the new French ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

As the battle was about to begin, a young philosophy instructor named Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was hastily finishing the book he was writinga very difficult philosophy book with the forbidding title The Phenomenology of Spirit. But spirited is what the book was, and it perfectly captured the tension, excitement, and anxiety of those perilous days. It was the end of an old way of life and the beginning of a new one. The book was a vision of consciousness caught in the midst of gigantic forces and looking for direction in a new and terrifyingly human world. It was an appeal for hope and thoughtful effort toward universal understanding and a belief in what was then innocently called the perfectibility of humanity.

Transfer the situation to our own timesit was as if life in America were about to change completely, with all our old habits and landmarks, our ideas about ourselves and the ways we live, replaced by something entirely new and largely unknown. We talk about future shock and megatrends but, in fact, most of what we consider drastic changes in American life are mere shifts of emphasis, sometimes inconvenient advantages that accompany new and improved technologies and techniques. If so many of us can get so melodramatic about computers, television, and the Internet, how would we react to a real change in our lives? Hegel and his students felt confident, even cheerful. Why? Because they had a philosophy. They had a vision of themselves and the future that allowed them to face the loss of their jobs, even the destruction of their society and the considerable chaos that would follow. Their ideas inspired them and made even the most threatening circumstances meaningful.

A class of our students, who had been reading Hegels philosophy were asked to characterize their own views of themselves and their times. The answers were not inspiring. For many of them, the word dull seemed to summarize the world; others spoke of crisis and despair. One said that life was absurd and another that it was meaningless. When asked why, they answered that gasoline was expensive, that most of them werent getting the job interviews they really wanted, and that television programs were bad. We agreed that these events were less than tragic, hardly absurd, and didnt make life meaningless. Everyone agreed that the specters of nuclear war and terrorism had put a damper on our optimism, but we also agreed that the likelihood of such catastrophes was debatable and that, in any case, we all had to live as best we could, even if under a shadow. But why, then, in these times of relative affluence and peace (compared to most of the world throughout most of history) were our answers so sour? What were we missing that Hegel and his students, confronting the most terrible battles ever known, seem to have hadsomething that made them so optimistic and fulfilled? Again, the answer is a philosophy.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770. While he was a college student, he was enthusiastic about the French Revolution (17891795) and an admirer of Napoleon. Hegel was teaching at the University of Jena in 1806 when Napoleon marched in and took over the town, ending the eight-hundred-year-old Holy Roman Empire and initiating widespread reforms throughout the German states. It was in this atmosphere of international war and liberal hopes that Hegel formulated his philosophy, which centered on the notion of Spirit, by which he meant the unity of the world through human consciousness. His method was