Sample Material of UPSC Mains Philosophy (Optional) Study Kit
Topic: Western Philosophy (Kant)
A. GERMAN IDEALISM IN GENERAL
PHILOSOPHY in the eighteenth century was dominated by the British empiricists, of whom Locke, Berkeley, and Hume may be taken as the representatives. In these men there was a conflict, of which they themselves appear to have been unaware, between their temper of mind and the tendency of their theoretical doctrines. In their temper of mind they were socially minded citizens, by no means self-assertive, not unduly anxious for power, and in favour of a tolerant world where, within the limits of the criminal law, every man could do as he pleased. They were good-natured, men of the world, urbane and kindly.
But while their temper was social, their theoretical philosophy led to subjectivism. This was not a new tendency; it had existed in late antiquity, most emphatically in Saint Augustine; it was revived in modern times by Descartes’s cogito, and reached a momentary culmination in Leibniz’s windowless monads. Leibniz believed that everything in his experience would be unchanged if the rest of the world were annihilated; nevertheless he devoted himself to the reunion of the Catholic and Protestant Churches. A similar inconsistency appears in Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.
In Locke, the inconsistency is still in the theory. We saw in an earlier chapter that Locke says, on the one hand: “Since the mind, in all its thoughts and reasonings, hath no other immediate object but its own ideas, which it alone does or can contemplate, it is evident that our knowledge is only conversant about them.” And: “Knowledge is the perception of the agreement or disagreement of two ideas.” Nevertheless, he maintains that we have three kinds of knowledge of real existence: intuitive, of our own; demonstrative, of God’s; and sensitive, of things present to sense. Simple ideas, he maintains, are “the product of things operating on the mind in a natural way.” How he knows this, he does not explain; it certainly goes beyond “the agreement or disagreement of two ideas.”