In the positioning series I talked about the turn in language — from representing an absolute reality to something relational (Wittgenstein, Rorty). Merleau-Ponty anchors the body as the 'frontline' participant in this relational activity. However, these were not isolated events but happened after a long evolution in thinking. In fact, this started at the beginning of modern philosophy and science about 500 years ago.
Although the turn is associated with Kant, it was in fact Descartes that fired the first shot: he shifted the focus from a God who reveals truth to humans who through doubt enquire what can be known of reality. However, his approach ended up using the inevitable existence of God as the main means of justification, not very satisfactory since it implicitly gives the last word back to God. But the transition was made: enquiry into the nature of reality had become 'personal' — even if it was still about holding up a mirror to a reality 'out there.' That mirror would persist for centuries.
There is another side to Descartes: he split the individual into mind and body, a clean separation. The mind is where enquiry takes place. The body forms part of the 'mechanistic' world of life and non-life, no thinking there. At the time this was very liberating — it opened the door to the birth of modern science. Describing a pure mechanistic world poses no threat to theologians and religion.
Triggered by Hume's empiricism in response to Descartes' rationalism, Kant responded with the question that defines the turn: How do objects conform to the mind? instead of How does the mind conform to objects?. It is the mind that structures experience. No God's-eye view. We see from somewhere, not from everywhere. However, the landscape under observation remained static — a reality to be observed and described, with a language that is referential.
And that is where Hegel's historicity makes its biggest contribution. We are in a totality that evolves: thought and reality aren't two separate domains requiring a bridge. Understanding develops historically, through contradiction and resolution. It has become a process.
After Hegel, Western philosophy gradually split into three distinct traditions: pragmatism, the continental tradition, and the analytical tradition. All three were strongly influenced by mathematics at their inception, though that influence only survived long term in the analytical tradition. Pragmatism — Peirce, James, Dewey — is straightforward: what works, goes, no strings attached. The analytical tradition — Frege, Russell, the early Wittgenstein — shifted the structuring from the mind to language, aiming to capture the logical structure of reality through the logical structure of language.
Husserl, in what will become the continental tradition, made a deceptively simple move: stop asking whether your experience matches some independent reality. Instead, examine the structures of experience as they are — a phenomenological treatment of Kant's question, but now described from the inside, through careful attention to what consciousness actually does.
Meanwhile, in linguistics, a development of equal importance was taking place. Saussure broke with the assumption that words are actual names for things. The linguistic sign is arbitrary and differential — neither the sound nor the concept has content in itself. Both are defined entirely by their differences from other elements in the system. Meaning is differential, not referential. Relational all the way down.
Whitehead, a mathematician, belonged to none of these traditions. His complaint: philosophy since Descartes had been mistaking abstractions for concrete realities. What's truly concrete are events, not things. Reality is process. Each occasion takes in other occasions. No substance underneath. Relations are primary — without them, no entities. He dissolves the mind-body split at the root: every occasion is both physical and experiential.
Heidegger, Husserl's student, embedded the observer deeper into reality. We don't begin as detached minds contemplating objects. We're already in a world, practically engaged. The hammer isn't an object you observe — it's something you use. Understanding is activity, not contemplation. Where Husserl had described consciousness with unprecedented precision, Heidegger went well beyond — the observer isn't examining reality from a distance, the observer is part of reality.
By this time the ground was prepared for Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty and Rorty — all chipping away at the same thing: the refutation that we can stand outside reality and describe it as it is. The outside view, giving way to the relational.
And philosophy was not alone. Physics was making the same move, independently. Next to be covered in the positioning series.
Photo: Popovkin / Unsplash
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