sensualism

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The sensationalism is an influential especially in England in the 17th century intellectual movement of the Enlightenment . Proceeding from this, however, it is also a philosophical direction native to France, which relates experience to individual sensory impressions (i.e. from neurophysiological stimuli) or perceptions. Sensualism is thus a specific form of empiricism .

The term "sensualism" was first used in 1804 by the French Joseph Marie Degérando in his history of philosophy. He used it to describe modern epistemology that understood physical sensation as the origin of all thought and action. As a result, the term “sensualism” was used as a philosophy-historical category and also applied to comparable points of view of ancient philosophers.

Ancient sensualism

Representatives of the Cyrenaics , Cynics , Sophists , Skeptics and Stoics are counted among the Sensualists. Antisthenes , Protagoras , Gorgias , Epicurus , Zenon , Pyrrhon , Sextus Empiricus were among the best known. Their sensualistic views were very different.

Essentially, these philosophers meant that people only perceive sensual sensations . Sensation was therefore equated with perception. What was revealed when perceiving was called “ phenomena ” (old Greek: “phainomena”). Before, this word was only used to designate the rising and setting stars, according to whose constellations the seafaring Greeks took their course. Philosophically, this now means: Everyone starts from what is shown to him and based his decisions on it. "Things are for me as they appear to me and for you as they appear to you," said Protagoras. In this sense, according to Protagoras , every person became the “measure of all things”. This also resulted in: what everyone thinks is true or everything is false, said the sophist Gorgias. The most consistent among them opted for restraint: Man has no measure or criterion for truth and therefore one should not even talk about truth .

Knowledge was the result of personal experience and was therefore viewed as changeable and individually determined. It had to prove itself over and over again. Sensualists concluded from this: a knowledge that is always and equally valid for everyone, i. H. is universally valid does not exist. The catchphrase: “I know that I don't know anything!” Followed on from this insight.

Two other common features of their conceptions were the rejection of mythical conceptions and the acceptance of the limits of human perception. Ancient sensualists denied the possibility of obtaining knowledge about gods. Beyond that, you can believe what you want. However, for fear of persecution, they rarely explicitly questioned the existence of the gods. Recognizing the limits of human knowledge and reluctance to judge therefore characterize sensualistic philosophers. This earned them the name " skeptikoi ". A “skeptikos” was considered by the Greeks to be someone who did interested and thorough research.

Sensual perception was not only the basis of human knowledge, but also the basis of action and behavior. They believed that the central task of philosophers was to provide guidance. They advised that in everything human be based on natural processes and circumstances, instead of traditional mythical conceptions. Everyone should behave in such a way that, after careful consideration, it served their joy in life. This pragmatic approach has been called hedonism by modern philosophers and has been rejected from a Christian perspective. In principle, sensualists respected Hellenic morality and religious customs. In place of an absolute good they put that which all have in common benefits .

For the successful communal organization of life in the Greek city-states , it was also important to exchange knowledge with one another. In the popular assemblies, individuals campaigned for their views for the good of the city. It was therefore important to be able to express yourself clearly and emotionally. Sensualistic philosophers studied language . They made their knowledge available to young and adult citizens and taught them to give speeches that could convince others. Politically ambitious Athenians were happy to use these services. Since sensualistic philosophers earned money with it, they were criticized in a moralizing way by philosophers of the Platonic Academy. The latter considered such social services to be a dutiful and free service.

Sensualism in the Middle Ages

The view that sensory perception is the origin of knowledge remained in the Middle Ages . In the Middle Ages, the rule of the Christian worldview meant that sensualistic views were only acceptable if they were compatible with Christian belief and the biblical statements.

In the ancient worldview, gods determined the lives of people in an arbitrary or fateful way. Philosophical conceptions such as the sensualistic one provided orientation for action that would make one's own life only likely to succeed. At the center of the Christian worldview of the Middle Ages, on the other hand, was an image of God and a theology that could provide a true Christian with a framework in which his own life and the world ran on safe paths. A knowledge of action and the world developed that was valid and reliable for everyone. Individual, Protagorean views that diverged from this were branded as heretical and from now on skeptics became doubters who refused the salvation of the truth and disrupted the community of believers.

The Augustinian epistemology was predominant until the High Middle Ages . She guaranteed the reliability of sensory experience through the belief that the spirit-soul of every person is directly connected to God. The only function of perception is to stimulate the spirit-soul to inner knowledge. The human activity of knowing is guided by divine movement which Augustine called reason. The individual belief in God's guidance that embraces one's own life was the guarantee that one could recognize the true order and the true essence of things and events in the “light of inner truth”, ie with the help of “God's reason”. This epistemology was called "Illumination Doctrine". It is still used today by Christian philosophers to solve epistemological problems. Knowledge, as taught by church authorities, thus became objective knowledge for philosophers too.

With the spread of the Aristotelian writings by Arab-Muslim scholars, sensualistic aspects of perception came back to the attention of medieval philosophers. Thomas Aquinas assumed that nothing would be recognized by people, that they had not sensed: “Nothing is in the spirit that was not in the senses before!” He restricted Augustine's all-encompassing teaching on illumination to statements of faith. He denied direct enlightenment for statements about the world, about things and events that could be scientifically researched. Thomas guaranteed the reliability of knowledge with his variant of the Aristotelian theory of abstraction , which he combined with the framework of the Christian-divine world order. He assumed that natural laws and what actually defines each thing, ie its essence , can only be known through the senses. The human spirit is in a position to filter out (literally: “subtract”) from the concrete individual the generally valid, real connections and characteristics in order to recognize them.

In the 11th and 12th centuries, the philosophizing Franciscan clergy Roscelin of Compiègne and Petrus Abelardus questioned this possibility of certainty. You did not dispute the theory of abstraction. But they did not consider the abstract to be more real than the concrete individual that people perceive. They even claimed that the individual was the only reality to which knowledge could relate. This sensualistic difference marked the problem of the differences of opinion that ran through the entire Middle Ages in the universal dispute , which had already begun in the Platonic Academy in a far more radical manner .

With Roscelin and Abälard, a philosophical development had begun that ushered in the empiricism of the modern age and a resumption of sensualistic conceptions. Roger Bacon was inspired by this development to use empirical methods in the natural sciences in the 13th century.

Modern sensualism

The theoretical sensationalism was - after preparatory work of Thomas Hobbes - founded by John Locke , of his approach with a set of Thomas Aquinas justified: "Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu" (Nothing is in the understanding, which is not [previously ] was in the sense). Leibniz already contradicted this with the addition "nisi intellectus ipse" (with the exception of the mind itself). Locke derived all simple terms from external impressions, while the compound ( substances , states, relationships) from “inner experience”, equal to reflection . This theory was supported by Pierre Gassendi , albeit with the modification that the deductive method makes sense in mathematics . Locke's reflections were continued by David Hume , who derived all ideas from sensory impressions: for him consciousness was nothing more than a bundle of sensory perceptions. The supersensible cannot be an object of knowledge; Causality is not a natural principle, but just our subjective impression of the sequence of different phenomena . George Berkeley not only negated the objective basis of ideas, but also the material universe as a whole, and postulated that a thing only exists because it is perceived ("esse rei est percipi"). This strict empiricism is the answer to the rationalism of Descartes , Leibniz and Spinoza , who considered all sensory impressions to be dubious and therefore unreliable; In return, strict sensualism regards everything that goes beyond sensory perception as a deception.

From an ethical point of view, sensualism is understood to mean the view held in antiquity by the Epicurean school ( Aristippus of Cyrene ), in more recent times by Thomas Hobbes and the French naturalists, according to which there is no other standard than sensual pleasure for the concepts of good and bad and should give displeasure. This variety builds a bridge to utilitarianism . The Scottish philosophers Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith, on the other hand, made the innate sense of morality ( moral sense or common sense ) the standard in moral matters instead of sensual pleasure . This moral sensualism was in turn continued in Germany by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi .

Sensualism is reproached for being hostile to spirit and opening the door to materialism . In the Traité des sensations (1754), for example, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac traced all functions of the soul back to the underlying sensations in a purely mechanical manner, thus denying the personality of the human being. On the other hand, the sensualist Berkeley placed great emphasis on the meaning of the spirit (through which God mediates the sensations), and the core of Jacobi's moral philosophy is "the beautiful soul".

The French encyclopaedist and enlightener Denis Diderot turns out to be a sensualist in the context of his language theory, in the sense of a successor or in conflict with de Condillac.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Johannes Hirschberger. History of philosophy. Cologne (Komet) 2007, p. 9 ff.
  2. ↑ Schischkoff, Georgi (ed.): Philosophical dictionary. Alfred-Kröner, Stuttgart 14 1982, ISBN 3-520-01321-5 , to Lexikon-Stw. “Sensualism”, page 632
  3. ↑ Wolfgang Röd (1995): The way of philosophy. Munich (Beck) 2nd edition, 2009.
  4. ↑ See also on the whole section: Fredo Ricken: Antike Skeptiker. Munich 1994.
  5. ↑ Johannes Hirschberger: History of Philosophy. Freiburg (Herder) 13./14. Edition, 1991. pp. 345-374; 464-529.
  6. ^ Christoph Horn (1995): Augustine. Munich (Beck) p. 61 ff.
  7. ↑ Maximilian Forschner (2006): Thomas von Aquin Munich (Beck), p. 36ff.
  8. ↑ Alain de Libera (2005): The Universal Dispute: from Plato to the end of the Middle Ages . Munich (Wilhelm Fink).
  9. ↑ Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de veritate , q. 2, a. 3, arg. 19 .
  10. ^ Karl Vorländer: History of Philosophy. Hamburg (rowohlt tb) 1990.
  11. ↑ Cordula Neis: Anthropology in language thinking in the 18th century: the Berlin price question about the origin of language (1771). Vol. 67 Studia linguistica Germanica, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-11-017518-5 , p. 63.