The fourth Earl of Sandwich made two distinct contributions to American life. His incompetence as First Lord of the Admiralty during the Revolutionary War contributed to our independence. And his day spent gambling in 1762 led to a novel invention: he put meat between slices of bread and ate it, a form of food subsequently named for him. Why is the sandwich so popular? Because it's so fast.

recently reported that Wendy's is setting the pace for fast food restaurants, with an average of 150.3 seconds between the time you order your food and the time you receive it. McDonald's is 16.7 seconds slower, but promises to catch up. We Americans want everything, right now.

I aim to please. So this Friday and next, we'll survey 200 years of Western thought. Fasten your keyboards.

The first reaction to Kant's synthesis of reason and experience came from Thomas Reid (1710-1796), a Scottish philosopher. Remember that Kant maintained that you cannot know the "thing-in-itself," only your experience of it. Reid argued the opposite side: you can know the world directly, without the mediation of ideas. You are able to make self-evident moral judgments, based on principles which take precedence over experience. Because you have rational freedom, you are the cause of your experience, not just a reactor to it.

The school Reid founded, "Scottish 'Common-Sense' Realism," soon became the official philosophy of Princeton Seminary and of conservative Christianity in America. Through B. B. Warfield and others, it achieved great influence in this country and culture. The primary reason you've not heard of or wrestled with Kant's ideas is that your culture has not. Common sense dictates that you know reality, and that's good enough for most of us.

As a result, the Kantian denial of absolutes has met no real intellectual resistance in our culture. Relativism is appealing to a people who want independence from absolute ethics or truths. And because we've not interacted seriously with the Kantian sources of relativism and pluralism, we have no intellectual answer for this threat.

Common-sense realism defines the way most Americans think about how they think. That's both good and bad.

From reaction to Kant we turn to endorsement of his ideas. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) is considered both the father of modern philosophy and the father of liberalism. Let's see how both births took place.

Schleiermacher's On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799) and The Christian Faith (editions from 1821 to 1831) made him a universal reputation among the theologians and intellectuals of his day. He was the first theologian to approach systematically the Christian faith from the standpoint of personal experience. If Kant is right, we cannot know God "in himself," but only our impressions of him. And so theology is the analysis of our "God-consciousness."

What is this consciousness? We experience God in our sinfulness, our finiteness, our dependence on him. And so religion is a "feeling of absolute dependence."

Scheiermacher brought Kant into the philosophical mainstream, thus founding "modern" philosophy. And he applied his thought to theology, with the result that there is no absolute or objective truth in Christian faith. For this he is credited with "liberalism" as well.

We're still fighting these two sons today.

Another response to Kant's worldview has been as influential as Schleiermacher's, on a more political level. Georg Wilhelm Hegel (1770-1831) was born the son of a minor official in Stuttgart, in southern Germany. His family was poor, but he managed to obtain a university education. He became a private tutor, later a newspaper editor and school principle, finally a university professor.

Hegel was a prolific writer. His Phenomonology of Spirit contained over 750 pages, though its author considered it but a preface to his larger system. Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences is the outline of his entire system. His collected works in German comprise some twenty volumes. And they are exceedingly difficult to follow, given the intricate difficulty of his theories and his obfuscating writing style.

Nonetheless, his basic ideas are clear, and profoundly important. Hegel believed (against Kant) that the universe is rational. The mind creates form and shapes in the experiential world, and participates in them.

Here's how: thesis reacts with antithesis, resulting in synthesis. Hegel says this is how your mind processes its experiences, and shapes and forms them. Just as hydrogen and water make oxygen, so every experience you have suggests to your mind its opposite; your mind combines the best from both into a synthesis.

Hegel believed that this "dialectic" is the pattern for all of reality, in this progression (from bottom to top):

Spirit (God) / Idea-Nature

Notion / Being-Essence

Measure / Quantity-Quality

Being for Self / Being-Determinate Being

Becoming / Being-Nothing

This "triadic pattern" constitutes the way all experience and reality works, in Hegel's view. In just a moment, you'll see why such a complex worldview matters today.

Hegel's rather esoteric philosophical system has directly influenced millions upon millions of lives, believe it or not. The reason is named Karl Marx (1818-1883).

Marx's ideas developed through three distinct stages. In the German chapter of his life, he read and agreed with Hegel, adopting his "dialectical idealism." Marx was also influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach's argument that any projection of spirit is a result of our wishful thinking and dissatisfaction with life. (Sigmund Freud borrowed from Feuerbach as well his belief that "God" is a projection of our need for a father figure.)

And so Marx concluded (against Hegel) that the world is material only--all "spiritual" ideas are wish-fulfillment. But this material world operates according to the dialectical process. Marx published the Rhineland Journal, challenging some of Hegel's assertions, and soon found himself exiled from Germany.

Now in France, he studied with Saint-Simon the ideas of economic socialism. Here he published the Communist Manifesto with Engels. For it he was exiled again.

Finally he came to England, where he read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (the basis for capitalism). In reaction he published Capital, his most significant economic work.

Marx's worldview stands on two primary assertions. First, ultimate reality is material in nature, moving through various stages of dialectical history and finally to a Communist stage. The Asiatic and Primitive classes clashed, resulting in the Feudal; the Feudal and its antithesis led to Capitalism; the Capitalists and those they oppress (according to Marx) will clash, leading finally to the class-less world of Communism. Lenin's 1917 Bolshevik Revolution is the direct outworking of this philosophy.

Second, mankind is alienated from work and ourselves. We have a deep sense of dissatisfaction, leading to social revolutions. The solution to this alienation is to abolish capitalism, by armed revolution if necessary.

The major question asked for years of Marx's worldview is simple: why hasn't the inevitable revolution to Communism already occurred? With events of recent years we can now say that the class-less society did not result from Communism, and that revolutions are moving toward democracy and capitalism, not away from them.

Nonetheless, Marx's applications of Hegel's philosophy show the pervasive influence and significance of ideas. Millions have been enslaved to his.

The strongest reaction to both Kant and Hegel in the nineteenth century was made by the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Kierkegaard lived a tragic life--all his brothers and sisters died; he learned of an illegitimate relation between his parents and subsequently left the ministry; he felt that God had lodged a "veto" against his engagement to Regina Olson, and regretted her loss the rest of his life. His major controversy was his attack on the Lutheran Church of Denmark. Finding it cold, dead orthodoxy, he wrote viciously against it and was castigated by Danish society as a result. His was a life of deep alienation.

His central tenet was simple: truth is subjectivity. Theological speculations move us not one step closer to faith. Faith is not intellectual assent, but the total commitment of our lives to something. Such commitment is subjective, for its results are not known before they are experienced. Truth is chosen and acted upon.

Kierkegaard believed that we move through three stages in life. First, the aesthetic, an empty seeking after pleasure and beauty; second, the ethical, seeking to do our duty but experiencing the despair of failure; and third, the religious, when we choose to trust completely in God.

This passion for the individual's choice and life made Kierkegaard the "father of existentialism." The philosophy attributed to him stresses personal identity and choice as the basis for life. Tragically, there is no place for the community of faith in Kierkegaard's thought, or in the school he "founded." Existentialism will be dominant in Western thinking from Kierkgaard to the present.

Yet another reaction to Kant's synthesis was the bold philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). While his father and grandfather were both pastors in Prussian Saxony, Nietzsche became a committed opponent of the Christian faith. His principal contributions have been two: the "will to power" and "postmodernist relativism."

First the "will to power." Nietzsche believed that every drive we experience is but a variant of the one basic drive--the will to gain power. All goods, all values, all virtues are expressions of the power positions of various individuals and groups.

The best way to live is to embrace this will to power, according to Nietzsche. The "superman" is the person who takes for himself power from the world. The Christian, on the other hand, with his stress on humility, is weak and must be rejected. Happiness comes from power, and the more, the better.

Second, his contributions to what has become "postmodern relativism." In brief, Nietzsche argued that our language does not reflect reality as such, but only our experience of it (in agreement with Kant). There is no such thing as "leaves," only individual leafs which we experience and synthesize into the universal. Language is purely individual and subjective, absolutely the product of our own experiences. And so language cannot reflect a larger, objective reality or truth. This linguistic assertion will be crucial for the development of postmodernism we'll track in the last chapter.

Nietzsche is right: the "will to power" is the dominant drive in fallen human nature (cf. Genesis 3). But he is wrong: we must not embrace it but surrender it to God. Only then can his power (far greater than any we can claim) be ours, and his purpose fulfilled by our lives.

Are you tired of reading about responses to Kant? Come with me just a little further before we turn the corner. Yet another reaction to the German professor came from Auguste Comte (1798-1857), a teacher of mathematics and profound thinker. His contribution is called "positivism." Until this generation, it was the most dominant worldview in the intellectual community of Western culture.

Comte wanted to reform society and the sciences, according to the following model. He believes that all knowledge begins with the theological stage of childhood, when we regard things as the expression of supernatural beings. Next we evolve to the metaphysical stage of youth, where abstract powers are substituted for personal beings. Finally we arrive at the positive stage of adulthood, where we abandon all concern for ultimate knowledge and center only on the phenomena (with Kant) we can experience, as it is understood scientifically.

If Comte is right (and many in the West believed him for a century), the only "truth" worth knowing is that which you can verify scientifically or logically. We'll see more of this worldview shortly.

Finally we come to America's unique contribution to this history. It took a while, but here it is: American pragmatism. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) believed that differences in meaning are only significant if they lead to differences of practice. Truth is "opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate."

William James (1842-1910) took Peirce's ideas a step further. Building on the empiricism of John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), he argued that truth is that which works in experience. What we experience is reality (opposed to Kant). Applied to religion, faith is valid only if it works for the individual in experience. James coined "pragmatism" for this philosophy during an 1898 lecture at Harvard.

John Dewey (1859-1921) took things still farther: morality is that which works so that people function well together. The result: American pragmatism, the belief that truth is whatever works. Whether that truth is intellectual, linguistic, religious, or moral in nature, the test of practical experience is the only one we need. And Americans are still cheering today.

Now we step into the 20th century, and the major worldviews continue to pile up on the page. Process Theology was the application of Darwin's evolutionary thought to theories about God. Influenced by Alfred North Whitehead, process theologians thought (and still think today) that reality flows in a continuum of development (as frames of a motion picture). Every bit of reality is totally dependent on every other bit of reality. God is in evolution with his world. He is all the God there is today, but he will be even more God tomorrow.

In some of the mainline Protestant traditions, these contributions from Charles Hartshorne, John Cobb, Norman Pittinger and others have been extremely influential. In you're seeking a union between Darwinian scientific thought and faith, here's the wedding to attend.

We have surveyed the survey of 19th and early 20th century thought. Next week we'll do the same thing to rest of the 20th century. You may forget all the names which have whizzed past the screen, but see if these ideas still sound current. Your unexamined experience of reality is all the reality you need; religion is first a feeling, an experience; the "spiritual" is our projection of our wishes and needs; statements must be verifiable to be true; truth is what works for you; life and faith have evolved, and must keep on keeping on.

None of these ideas is stated in Scripture, but each is conventional wisdom today. Next week we'll learn why.

Copyright © 2006. GodIssues.org. All rights reserved.


Other segments of the "Why do we think the way we do" series:

"Why do we think the way we think?"

A stonecutter and the Savior

A broad thinker and the world he left us

The biological philosopher

So what?

Just the facts, ma'am

Olny srmat poelpe can raed tihs