Three Philosophical Attitudes

James Heffernan

Philosophy is a discipline that studies ‘philosophies’. Some insight into what ‘philosophies’ are

may be garnered from the following passage in John Le Carré’s novel The Spy Who Came in from the

Cold:

They went for walk that afternoon, following the gravel road down into the valley, then branching into the
forest along a broad, pitted track lined with felled timber. All the time, Fiedler probed, giving nothing. About the
building in Cambridge Circus, and the people who worked there. What social class did they come from, what parts
of London did they inhabit, did husbands and wives work in the same departments? He asked about the pay, the leave,
the morale, the canteen; he asked about their love-life, their gossip, their philosophy. Most of all he asked about their
philosophy.
To Leamas that was the most difficult question of all.
“What do you mean, a philosophy?” he replied. “We’re not Marxists, we’re nothing. Just people.”
“Are you not Christians then?”
“Not many, I shouldn’t think. I don’t know many.”
“What makes them do it, then?” Fiedler persisted: “They must have a philosophy.”
Why must they? Perhaps they don’t know; don’t even care. Not everyone has a philosophy,” Leamas
answered, a little helplessly.
“Then tell me what is your philosophy?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Leamas snapped, and they walked on in silence for a while. But Fiedler was not to
be put off.
“If they do not know what they want, how can they be so certain they are right?”
“Who the hell said they were?” Leamas replied irritably.
“But what is the justification then? What is it? For us it is easy, as I said to you last night. The Abteilung and
organizations like it are the natural extension of the Party’s arm. They are in the vanguard of the fight for Peace and
Progress. They are to the Party what the Party is to socialism: they are the vanguard. Stalin said so—“ he smiled drily,
“it is not fashionable to quote Stalin—but he said once ‘Half a million liquidated is a national tragedy.’ He was
laughing, you see, at the bourgeois sensitivities of the mass. He was a great cynic. But what he meant is still true: a
movement which protects itself against counterrevolution can hardly stop at the exploitation—or the elimination,
Leamas—of a few individuals. It is all one, we have never pretended to be wholly just in the process of rationalizing
society. Some Roman said it, didn’t he, in the Christian Bible—it is expedient that one man should die for the benefit
of many?”
“I expect so,” Leamas replied wearily.

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 “Then what do you think? What is your philosophy?”
“I just think the whole lot of you are bastards,” said Leamas savagely.
Fiedler nodded. “That is a viewpoint I understand. It is primitive, negative, and very stupid—but it is a
viewpoint, it exists. But what about the rest of the Circus?”
“I don’t know. How should I know?”
“Have you ever discussed philosophy with them?”
“No. We’re not Germans.” He hesitated, then added vaguely: “I suppose they don’t like Communism.”
“And that justifies, for instance, the taking of human life? That justifies the bomb in the crowded restaurant;
that justifies your write-off rate of agents—all that?”
Leamas shrugged. “I suppose so.”
“You see, for us it does,” Fiedler continued. “I myself would have put a bomb in a restaurant if it brought
us farther along the road. Afterwards I would draw the balance—so many women, so many children; and so far along
the road. But Christians—and yours is a Christian society—Christians may not draw the balance.”
“Why not? They’ve got to defend themselves, haven’t they?”
“But they believe in the sanctity of human life. They believe every man has a soul which can be saved. They
believe in sacrifice.”
“I don’t know. I don’t much care,” Leamas added. “Stalin didn’t either, did he?”1

In accord with Fiedler I suggest that ‘philosophies’ are the views or outlooks that govern and

justify or make sense of the things we do, the lives we lead. They are the bedrock principles and beliefs

we have about such things as Truth, Goodness, and Meaning. They express our convictions regarding

what we can know and what we cannot, our convictions regarding what is real and what is not, our

convictions regarding how we should live, and our convictions regarding what it is all for.

In the sense of having such an outlook on life we are all—or almost all—already philosophers.

Fiedler has a philosophy and, to the extent that he is able to articulate it, he is doing philosophy.

Leamas, I would argue, also has a philosophy, one that disagrees strongly, with Fiedler’s. However, he

is very impatient with Fiedler’s intellectualizing, even to the extent of denying that he has a philosophy.

However, because all of us have some concept of what constitutes living or failing to live his

or her own life as well as what constitutes living it well or badly, it would seem even Leamas has a

1
John Le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (New York: Dell Publishing, 1963), pp. 121-123.

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philosophy. When he angrily rebukes Fielder, by saying “the whole lot of you are bastards,” he shows

he has convictions as to what Good is and he betrays a conviction that there is a moral standard that

condemns Fiedler’s behavior.

However, if it is true that we all have philosophies, it is probably also true that we do not all do

philosophy. What then is “doing philosophy”? First, as we saw above, it involves simply articulating

or expressing one’s overall outlook, as Fiedler does. Most people can do this to some extent when they

express their deepest convictions. The difference between lay people and “experts” here is probably

the care and discipline with which it is done. However there is another, and perhaps more important,

part of doing philosophy that one encounters in studying the history of philosophy: the critical

assessment of philosophies—testing and questioning philosophies to see if they are true. Most of us

simply absorb the outlook we have from our family and culture without ever doubting or wondering

whether it is the right one. Thus we evade critical assessment with respect to our own philosophies.

Moreover, some religious outlooks actively discourage the critical assessment of views by claiming that

the question of which philosophy is correct can be definitively answered by consulting sacred books

whose truth is guaranteed by divine authority.

The outcome of the critical assessment of a philosophy could be a change of mind because one

becomes convinced one’s philosophy is groundless. But the outcome could also be a deepening of

conviction because one acquires a deeper grasp of the grounds of one’s philosophy.

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates said that "the unexamined life—a life of having an

outlook without testing it—is not worth living." Why is that? One reason is that when a philosophy is

imbibed and not thoughtfully chosen, it is not held authentically. It is not my own. This means that I

am not the source of conviction. The source is outside of me. I simply accept what others have accepted

or thought through for themselves. The French existentialist Sartre might say I live in ‘bad faith’

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because I think my philosophy is necessary or to be the only possibility without investigating the

strengths and weaknesses of that philosophy or its alternatives.

Another reason that critical assessment is important is that the effect of a philosophy on our

lives can be constricting or impoverishing. This possibility is suggested by the allegory of the cave as

presented in Plato’s dialogue The Republic, Book VII:

Imagine men living in a cave with a long passageway stretching between them and the cave's mouth,

where it opens wide to the light. Imagine further that since childhood the cave dwellers have had their

legs and necks shackled so as to be confined to the same spot. They are further constrained by blinders

that prevent them from turning their heads; they can see only directly in front of them. Next, imagine

a light from a fire some distance behind them and burning at a higher elevation. Between the prisoners

and the fire is a raised path along whose edge there is a low wall like the partition at the front of a

puppet stage. The wall conceals the puppeteers while they manipulate their puppets above it.

Imagine, further, men behind the wall carrying all sorts of objects along its length and holding

them above it. The objects include human and animal images made of stone and wood and all other

material. Presumably, those who carry them sometimes speak and are sometimes silent.

Like ourselves. Tell me, do you not think those men would see only the shadows cast by the

fire on the wall of the cave!

***

By every measure, then, reality for the prisoners would be nothing but shadows cast by

artifacts.

The dwellers in the cave are trapped by a limited view regarding what they can know, what is

real, and how they should live; and it is impoverishing their lives. A similar idea is explored in the

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recent film Matrix. A troubled young man named Neo meets a strange figure named Morpheus.

Morpheus suggests that Neo is already aware that there is something wrong with his present

‘philosophy,’ his present convictions about the way things are.

You’ve felt it your entire life. That there is something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it

is. But it’s there like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.

Neo doesn’t like the idea that his outlook has been imposed on him, that it is fate. So Morpheus offers

Neo a choice between the red pill, which will reveal that his present view of the way things are does

not reflect the way things really are, and the blue pill which will allow him to ignore his doubts and

retain his current view. Neo chooses the red pill.

The study of philosophy can be something like taking the red pill. It can awaken us to the

possibility that things may not be as they seem to us or that they are not as they should be. Like the red

pill of The Matrix philosophy seeks to provide a vision of the way things really are and the way they

ought to be. But what is the correct view? Is there such a view?

Although the history of philosophy presents us with almost as many answers as there are

philosophers, it helps to see that these answers can be viewed as stemming from three fundamental

philosophical attitudes: Nihilism, Transcendentalism, and Naturalism.

Nihilism is a response of despair to a deep disappointment with things. If this attitude expresses

itself as a philosophy, it could be summed up in Puck’s brief reflection in Shakespeare’s Midsummer

Night Dream: “What fools these mortals be.” The Nihilist is someone who thinks humans are mostly

fools because they form strong convictions about things but they do not have knowledge in these

matters. Hence, they are stabbing in the dark when they claim that they know how things really are.

They are deluding themselves when they follow a religious view, or take a moral stand, or think that

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life has meaning. MacBeth’s soliloquy of despair seems to capture this view quite well: “Life is a tale

told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

But Nihilism incorporates a paradox. If the Nihilist expresses a view that he thinks justifies his

despair, then in expressing his hopelessness over finding the correct view he adopts a view he considers

to be correct. This is paradoxical.

In the film Big Lebowski Jeff Bridges flirts with a young woman as her unconscious boyfriend

floats in the nearby swimming pool. Bridges asks if she thinks her boyfriend will mind what they are

doing; and she replies that her boyfriend “doesn’t care about anything. He’s a nihilist.” Bridges quips

back “Oh, that must be exhausting.” There is something paradoxical—and exhausting—about not

caring about anything because at least you seem to care about not caring. But this means that the

thoughtful person must reject Nihilism for another view. But what view should we accept?

Plato’s dialogue The Sophist (266a-c) provides an interesting suggestion. One of the

interlocutors (called “the Stranger”) suggests that there is a fundamental struggle between two views

about the way things are which he calls a “battle of gods and giants”:

STRANGER: What we shall see is something like a battle of gods and giants (ãéãáíôïìá÷ßá) going on

between them over their quarrel about reality.

THEAETETUS: Howso?

STRANGER: One party is trying to drag everything down to earth out of heaven and the unseen, literally

grasping rocks and trees in their hands, for they lay hold upon every stock and stone and strenuously affirm that real

existence belongs only to that which can be handled and offers resistance to the touch. They define reality as the same

thing as body, and as soon as one of the opposite party asserts that anything without a body is real, they are utterly

contemptuous and will not listen to another word.

THEAETEUS: The people you describe are certainly a formidable crew. I have met quite a number of them

before now.

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 STRANGER: Yes, and accordingly their adversaries are very wary in defending their position somewhere

in the heights of the unseen, maintaining with all their force that true reality consists in certain intelligible and bodiless

forms. In the clash of argument they shatter and pulverize those bodies which their opponents wield, and what those

others allege to be true reality they call, not real being, but a sort of moving process of becoming. On this issue an

interminable battle is always going on between the two camps.

This “interminable battle” can be seen to at work throughout the history of philosophy. It is a

battle between the two philosophical attitudes: Transcendentalism—the view of “gods”—and

Naturalism—the view of “giants.” These two attitudes are at odds over the central issue of what reality

is and much else besides. They have a common enemy in Nihilism. Indeed, each of the other attitudes

attempts to characterize the other as leading to Nihilism in order to achieve final victory. In other

words, if Naturalism leads to Nihilism, and Nihilism is untenable, then Transcendentalism is the only

possible attitude. Whereas, if Transcendentalism leads to Nihilism, and Nihilism is untenable, then

Naturalism is the only possible attitude. But since each attitude rejects its identification with Nihilism,

neither seems capable of final victory and the battle seems interminable. Hence, we face a choice that

William James termed a “genuine option.” Such choices are between alternatives that are “live”—both

alternatives are real possibilities2 —“forced”—a person must adopt one or the other—and

“momentous”—whichever alternative is chosen makes a pervasive difference to one’s life.

The mistake that many people make is to think that the only alternative to the view they have

chosen is Nihilism.: My view or nothingness. In this way they try to escape responsibility for the choice

they make. They choose inauthentically. But if the choice we make is to be authentic, we must be aware

2
A person in the modern world cannot choose between being a knight or a squire because the world in which those

alternatives were available no longer exists.

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that although we choose a view that we think is right, we may have no irrefutable guarantee that it is

right.3

As a start on the search for an authentic choice of views let us see how the three attitudes differ

in their responses to four over-arching questions: Can we know anything? Is there a way things really

are? Is there a right way to live? Does life have meaning?

V iew /Q uestion C an w e know anything? Is there a w ay things really Is there a right w ay to live? D oes life have meaning?

are?

N ihilism No No No No

Transcendentalism Y es Y es Y es Y es

N aturalism Y es Y es Y es Y es

This table shows a strong contrast between Nihilism and the two views that reject it:

Transcendentalism and Naturalism. At this level the latter two views are in accord. They both oppose

Nihilism.

If Nihilism were a credible outlook, it would hold that we can know nothing, that there is no

way things really are, that there is no right way to live, and that life has no meaning. But as we saw

above this outlook is filled with paradox. If a person actually tries to adopt this view, she will be

implicitly claiming she has knowledge and that there is a way things are. It is also quite demanding to

live a life in which nothing matters because anything a person does seems to assume doing something

is right or worth doing, even if only to share the thought that “nothing matters.”

3
Cf. William James writes “[T]he faith that truth exists, and that our minds can find it, may be held in two ways.

We may talk of the empiricist way and of the absolutist way of believing in truth. The absolutists in this matter say that we

not only can attain to knowing truth, but we can know when we have attained to knowing it; while empiricists think that

although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know when.” William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in

Popular Philosophy (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 12.

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 At one time or another we may feel the Nihilist’s despair about finding satisfactory answers to

the questions philosophy raises. We often try to escape this despair by simply refusing to think about

it. People with a philosophical cast of mind, however, are not satisfied with just ignoring Nihilism.

They want to understand, as best they can, why the Nihilist attitude is incorrect or wrong. They want

to think about it. Although virtually all philosophers reject Nihilism, it is important to realize that there

are two different ways to do so: the Transcendentalist way and the Naturalist way.

The Transcendentalist—taking the side of the gods—tends to reject Nihilism on the basis of

something that is beyond or transcends human experience. Transcendentalism maintains we can have

knowledge not only from our experience, but also in other ways: from reason, faith, or mystical

intuition. It maintains there is more to the universe than what we can experience through the use of our

five senses, the natural or physical world. There is a world beyond (or transcending) the world that we

grasp by sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Transcendentalists differ in their views of what the world

beyond the natural world contains. For Plato the transcendent world was the world of Forms, the eternal

unchanging world of Ideas such as Beauty and Justice. For St. Thomas Aquinas and other Christian

philosophers the transcendent world is the dwelling place of God, angels, and human souls.

It is characteristic of Transcendentalist views that the transcendent world is more significant

than the natural world in part because the former is unchanging and eternal, while the latter changes

and passes away. This being so our lives should be lived in accord with the dictates of the transcendent.

This, in turn, is because the most important aspect of human beings is the soul, which participates in

the transcendent world. Life is meaningful because our lives do not end with death, but share in the

eternity of the transcendent world.

The Naturalist—taking the side of the giants—tends to reject Nihilism on the basis of things within

human experience. Naturalism maintains that we can only know what we can experience or infer from

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experience. Hence, the natural world—the world we experience—is all there is. There is no

transcendent world, no God, no spirits or souls. Humans are creatures of nature, more complicated than

other creatures of nature, but no less natural. It may be that we will live our lives differently from other

creatures, but that is because our nature is different from theirs. In any case, how we live is to some

extent fixed by our nature: we are creatures who grow and develop, seek friendship and love, live and

die. Our lives can be fulfilling and meaningful insofar as we live the lives our nature seeks and makes

possible.

But although there are two ways to reject nihilism, each approach tends to reject the other as

though it were tantamount to nihilism. Transcendentalist philosophers reject naturalism as nihilistic

because it places its confidence within this fleeting, mortal life; while naturalist philosophers condemn

transcendentalism as nihilistic because it places its confidence in something outside this life that may

not exist.

In the chapters that follow we will compare and contrast Transcendentalism and Naturalism by

examining the answers given by each to eight "big" questions:

1. Can we know what is real only on the basis of sense experience, i.e. sight, hearing, smell, taste, or touch?

2. Is there a God—an all-good, all-powerful creator and ruler of the universe?

3. Do we have spiritual souls and, hence, life after death?

4. Do we have free will and, hence, moral responsibility for what we do?

5. Are we capable of doing things for the sake of others and, hence, acting morally?

6. Is morality completely relative, i.e., are there no moral standards binding on all peoples and cultures?

7. Do our lives have meaning without God and life beyond death?

8. Is a government based on Transcendentalism better than a government based on Naturalism?

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 The answers to these eight questions constitute a philosophical outlook that consists of our

convictions regarding what we can know (question 1), what things exist (questions 2, 3, 4, 5) how we

should live (question 6 ), and what meaning there is to life (questions 7 and 8).

The table below shows in more detail how Transcendentalism differs from Naturalism and how

they both differ from Nihilism in the answers they give:

QUESTIONS/VIEWS TRANSCENDENTALISM NATURALISM NIHILISM

1. Can we only know what is real on the No Yes Yes

basis of sense experience, i.e. sight, hearing,

smell, taste, or touch?

2. Is there a God—an all-good, all-powerful Yes No No

creator and ruler of the universe?

3. Do we have spiritual souls and, hence, life Yes No No

after death?

4. Do we have free will and, hence, moral Yes Yes No

responsibility for what we do?

5. Are we capable of doing things for the Yes Yes No

sake of others and, hence, acting morally?

6. Is morality completely relative—are there No No Yes

no moral standards binding on all peoples

and cultures?

7. Do our lives have meaning without God No Yes No

and life beyond death?

8. Is a government based on on Yes No No

Transc enede nt a l i s m b e t ter than a

government based on Naturalism?

In the following chapters three interlocutors—the Nihilist, the Transcendentalist, and the

Naturalist—will discuss their answers to the above questions. Each will present the strengths of her or

his own view and the weaknesses of the two views she or he disagrees with. Although Nihilism seems

to be an impossible viewpoint to adopt, there will be no overall attempt to advocate either

Transcendentalism or Naturalism as the way to escape nihilism. Each reader must decide on the

position whose strengths outweigh the weaknesses. I believe this is the best we can do. To attain

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authentic belief means to believe that one’s philosophy is true, but also to realize that it is a choice one

makes of a way to escape Nihilism not the way, that in such matters there seems to be no final

resolution, as reflection on the history of philosophy and the cultural clashes of the present-day world

might suggest. But perhaps, this could arise from the reflection that I live in a world in which there are

a multiplicity of possible views and that my view is just the view I happen to have because of the time

and culture in which I was born.

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