Hegel occupied the thought space between the Modern and Contemporary Eras of philosophy, and many believe that it was his work that provided the impetus for the new focus of philosophy in the Contemporary Era. Hegel's work birthed the system of thesis and antithesis, which together create a synthesis. This synthesis then became a new thesis, which was met by another antithesis, and so on. This was a radical shift from the one-side absolutism of philosophical ages past. From here, the beginnings were in order for the shift to the Contemporary era. What followed in the Contemporary Era was in many ways, according to the philosophers of this age, the death of foundation or absolutism, and what followed, subsequently, was the instatement of relativism, pluralism, and perspectivalism. However, as I stated earlier, I worry that this new movement toward pluralism or perspectivalism is nothing more than an appearance. It is my contention that philosophers of the Contemporary Era are equally grounded in foundationalism or absolutism as the philosophers of ages previous, and that they base their systems on foundations, which are themselves fixed and absolute, often suggesting truth which lay beyond.

It is this occurrence that I wish to demonstrate, then, in the words to follow. I believe that the purported dissolution of absolutism in the Contemporary Era is an unnecessary and, indeed, unfounded claim. In the words to follow, then, it is precisely this that I wish to demonstrate.

In order to accomplish my aims, I will take a broad-strokes look at four philosophers of the Contemporary Era, and analyze the occurrence of foundations in their philosophy. I will look at the work of A.J. Ayer, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger. All of these philosophers, in varying ways, make claims toward pluralism or perspectivalism. It is my goal to deconstruct these claims and show how, at root, these philosophers construct their philosophies on indispensable foundations.

Philosopher One: A.J. Ayer

A.J. Ayer is one of the most important philosophers of the contemporary philosophical movement of Logical Positivism. In his most well-known work, “Language, Truth, and Logic,” Ayer works with several different agendas. First and foremost, in the first chapter of his work, Ayer seeks to undermine the claims of the metaphysician and dispense with the discipline of Metaphysics. He says, “Our charge against the metaphysician is not that he attempts to employ the understanding in a field where it cannot profitably venture, but that he produces sentences which fail to conform to the conditions under which alone a sentence can be literally significant.” In other words, as Ayer states, the metaphysician fails the meet the “principle of verification,” and accordingly speaks only nonsense. Defining the “principle of verification” Ayer says, “We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express--that is, if he knows what observations would lead him to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false.”

It is here that I wish to interject my first critique. It is true that in this part of his work Ayer has the aim of breaking down the claims of the metaphysician, but it is in his attempt to do this that I believe he brings in the first traces of absolutism or foundationalism. It other words, Ayer adopts standards for discerning truth and falsity, and these standards take the form of the “principle of verification” and logic. The “principle of verification,” in essence, holds that empirical verification is the means by which one determines the sensibility of a sentence. If a sentence is stated that cannot be evaluated by the “principle of verification,” it is discounted as “nonsense.” This, of course, is very absolutist and indeed is a foundational element of Ayer's philosophy. Without this absolute foundation, Ayer would unable to discern, outside the bounds of the a priori, the truth or falsity of any statement. The a priori, is related to the other and most significant absolute of Ayer's philosophy, and it is logic. Logic for Ayer is the sole epistemic means for discerning truth (the verification principle is, in essence, a child of reason). This is, of course, is true of all philosophers of the Contemporary Era who adhere to the movement of Logical Positivism. As its name implies, Logical Positivism holds that through the process of reason, and only by reason, one is able to arrive a positive or certain surety. It seems as though, thus far, Ayer falls relatively easily into the model of foundationalism, but what of a more subjective area of his philosophy?

Later in “Language, Truth, and Logic,” Ayer works with the problem of ethics or morality. Of “judgments of value” Ayer says, “they are not in the literal sense significant, but are simply expressions of emotion which can be neither true nor false.” Ayer here states his belief that all ethical statements are statements of emotion, and as such are not founded on any sort of standard or absolute truth. He gives an example of what he means by this. He says, “Thus if I say to someone, “You acted wrongly in stealing that money,” I am not stating anything more than if I had said, “You stole that money.”” In other words, Ayer is stating that morality, contrary to what many have traditionally asserted, is not based on any sort of absolutist foundation. Ayer says, “In admitting that normative ethical concepts are irreducible to empirical concepts, we seem to be leaving the way clear for the “absolutist” view of ethics--that is, the view that statements of value are not controlled by observation, as ordinary empirical propositions are, but only by a mysterious “intellectual intuition.” He continues, “A feature of this theory, which is seldom recognized by its advocates, is that it makes statements of value unverifiable.”

In the above selection, Ayer seems to be attempting to do away with absolutism in ethics, but it seems as though he also fails to realize that he is merely substituting his own absolute, the principle of verification, for the absolute of traditional morality, which he reduces to intuition. By doing this, of course, Ayer adopts a form absolutism or foundationalism. This absolute of empirical verification was derived from the process of Ayer's most significant form of foundationalism, reason. Reason, according to Aristotle, is founded on three main laws, (a) the law of contradiction (between two contradictory propositions, one must be true and the other false), (b) the law of excluded middle (every proposition is either true or false), and (c) the law of identity (a=a, or a thing is the same as itself). What is most important about the existence of logic are the implications is sets forth. Implied in the existence of such laws is the foundation of some sort of absolute, unchanging truth at the base of things. And, if reason springs from this sort of truth, so might an absolute justification for ethics. In other words, if one applies the logic of Pragmatism to the question of morality, it is rationally consistent to claim the superiority of one action over another, insofar as a given action yields more beneficial consequences. It is like what William James says in his book “Pragmatism” that what counts as moral is that which yields the greatest results of promotion harmony and goodness for all mankind. So, man can say you “ought” to do this or that, because every action yields a positive or negative consequence for mankind, and thereby becomes moral or immoral. OK, so this is a little off the subject, but you get the point; Ayer has, and must have, absolute foundations to his system.

Philosopher Two: Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein marks an interesting departure from the work of A.J. Ayer and others who follow the tradition of Logical Positivism. Particularly, Wittgenstein wished to address the Logical Positivist claim that they could reach certainty, “positivism.” His efforts to address this issue took form, most notably, in his work “On Certainty.” The title of the book reveals much about the subject content. In a rough parallel, Wittgenstein's philosophy bears resemblance in some ways to the earlier work of fellow German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. In his book “Critique of Pure Reason,” Kant reveals his model of reality. He believes that the world, or reality, is split into two realms. One realm he calls the “noumenal,” and of this realm, humans have no knowledge, and the other is the “phenomenal” realm, the realm in which all humans exist, it is the world of appearance, the world of perception, and experience. On Kant's model, we can never breach the reality of the “noumenal” realm, and are allotted knowledge of only the “phenomenal.” Wittgenstein's philosophy is in some ways very similar to Kant's (though not an exact parallel, which I will denote).

Wittgenstein believes that the condition of all men is to operate from a “frame of reference” or “language game.” What he means by this is that all human beings have had a different series of experiences, which all go into the defining of the way one perceives and/or understands the world. This unique perspective of perception, then, is what Wittgenstein labels as the “language game.” In this way, no human is free from a “language game,” insofar as they have had experiences that have shaped the construct or structure through which understand the world. In this way, also, man can have no knowledge of the real world as it exists outside his own language game.

It might seem, according to this revelation, that Wittgenstein's work does indeed eliminate absolutism. But, there are several ways in which I believe an absolute foundation creeps into Wittgenstein's work. First of all, he affirms the notion that there exists a real world, of absolute nature, but because humans are trapped within their language games, they will never have knowledge of it. This is similar to the thought he laid out in an earlier work, “Tractatus Logico Philosophicus.” In this work, he believes that there exists a real world, and man can have knowledge and understand this world, at the very least symbolically, if he can get his language to reflect that reality. In other words, he thinks language is like a map, it is not the real "land," but it reflects what it looks like, how it's shaped, and what is its general layout. He says, “Propositions can represent the whole reality, but they cannot represent what they must have in common with reality in order to able represent it--the logical form. To be able to represent the logical form, we should have to be able to put ourselves with the propositions outside logic, that is outside the world.”

This has view has a couple of very important implications. First of all, as stated before, Wittgenstein affirms the existence of a real world, which exists absolutely and immutably. Second, and much more importantly, Wittgenstein strongly affirms the existence and importance of logic. In “On Certainty” he says, “What counts as an adequate test of a statement belongs to logic. It belongs to the description of the language game.” This is, like with Ayer, is a powerful foundational element. The basis of understanding, for Wittgenstein, is reduced to reason, or logic. Of course, logic is very absolute, fixed, unchanging, and as stated before points to extant Truth lying behind the world as foundational. What is perhaps more interesting about this is the implication that it creates. First, if logic is the absolute of Wittgenstein's system, it must originate from somewhere other than the “language game,” for if it lay within the “language game,” it would only be of use to the one inhabiting that particular language game. So, the truth of logic must find its origin in the real world, of which Wittgenstein says we are supposed to have no certain knowledge. But, if logic becomes certainty within the “language game,” then we can be certain of one truth related to the real world, namely, it is the origin of logic, and as such is either logical or holds the truth, as elementary, truths which would support the laws of logic.

Philosopher Three: Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche's philosophy is well known for its projection of pluralistic, relativistic, or perspectival images. Of the contemporary philosophers, in fact, he is probably the most strongly affiliated with the point of view. Nietzsche's philosophy falls under that category of perspectivalism. Perspectivalism holds the assumption that all who do philosophy, in way somewhat similar to Wittgenstein's “language game,” that all philosophers operate from a distinct perspective, and no therefore, no particular philosopher has the monopoly on truth. Along these lines, Nietzsche said once of Plato, “If he (Plato) had said “this is a likely story,” he would have been the greatest philosopher who ever lived.” In other words, what really pestered Nietzsche about philosophical discourse was that so many philosophers throughout history have claimed to have captured truth, and he believed that this, in absolute sense, was ridiculous.

Nietzsche's perspectival philosophy is perhaps best demonstrated in his work, “Beyond Good and Evil.” In this work, Nietzsche makes the claim that the way philosophers have dealt with Truth, truth and falsity, has been very misguided and feeble. He says, “Supposing truth is a woman--what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women?” From here, Nietzsche embarks on his journey of deconstructing what philosophers of history had labored to produce. He believes that all of society is sick and in a mode of perpetual self-deception. He believes that one of the cardinal fallacies of philosophy, historically and in his present, is the centering on good and evil, right and wrong. Nietzsche wishes to dispense with the belief that true and false, good and evil, exist as such by means of some sort of “out there” objective standard. He asserts that these sorts of absolutist views are absurd. Nietzsche then makes his claim about the search from truth and where it originates. He believes search for truth is provoked by one thing, man's desire or will to power. Nietzsche believed that the origin of action for all men lies in their desire to put themselves in a position of superiority over those who would become the subordinates of the one in power. He claims that what lies at the root of all human existence and experience is man's desire for independence, autonomy, and power.

He says, “Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it even with the best right but without inner constraint proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring to the point of recklessness.” Nietzsche possessed the notion that only the few will live up to the true aim of man, the will to power, and that the disease of the masses is to deceive themselves and in so doing, eliminate real truth. In a later work, “The Gay Science,” Nietzsche describes what this disease has done, and it occurs in a story that he calls the Madman. He says, “Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!” He continues a bit further. Then he says (in the voice of the madman), “Wither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him--you and I. All of us are his murders.”” This, of course, reveals two important implications about Nietzsche's work. First, he believes that the disease of the masses has resulted in the death of God. The masses are dogmatic and calculative, having a deleterious effect on the understanding of God, which for Nietzsche must transcend the bounds of dogma. Second, and maybe not quite as evident, that Nietzsche, by saying that God is dead, is attempting to murder the concept that an “out there” standard of absolutism exists.

While Nietzsche's intent of instigating pluralism and perspecitivalism into philosophy seems to be quite clear through these examples, it is my belief that his philosophy, as stated exists in a state of dissonance or incongruency. Nietzsche argues the non-existence of an objective standard according to which things are rendered true and false. Further, he claims that this is what all philosophers throughout history have done. This presents Nietzsche's first locus of dissonance. In attempting to avoid absolutes as existing outside of man, Nietzsche has become absolutely negative. By negative I don't mean Eeyore-like. Rather, I mean that he has negated in an absolute sense; Nietzsche has negated thoroughly the works of philosophers of history as dogmatic. So perhaps this becomes the first of Nietzsche's foundations for further unraveling of his philosophical thought. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, I believe that Nietzsche himself explicitly illuminates his own foundation or absolute. Nietzsche believes that the absolute aim of man is to will oneself to power. He later would pen a book entitled “Will to Power.” In this way, it seems to me as though Nietzsche has really only shifted the placement of an absolute foundation from an objective morality to the absolute of power or not-power (weakness). This becomes his foundation. Nothing, as Nietzsche sees it, in the actions of men is free of the motive of will to power; it is simply that most men are too weak and/or inadequate to accomplish the task of grasping true power, freedom, and autonomy. Even with Nietzsche's highly apparent desire to do away with dogmatism, totally, it seems to me that in many ways, he has created new dogma. It is nominally this: all man's thought of ages previous has been in entirety dogmatic, and therefore must be done away with, because what is really going on is that at root, man has the will to power, and this is absolute. Of course this is a paraphrase, in my own words, of Nietzsche's thought, but I believe it captures well the essence of his philosophy, even though Nietzsche himself would loathe the observation.

Philosopher Four: Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger is a German philosopher and, along with Wittgenstein (a fellow German), is one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Heidegger inhabits a rather broad expanse of philosophical discourse, and has done work in several areas of philosophy, in addition to dabbling in poetry.

Heidegger's best known philosophy occurs perhaps within the realm of existential philosophy. Existential has been a powerful philosophical movement in the Contemporary Era. It has several basic tenets. First, as Jean Paul Sartre said, “existence precedes essence.” By this the existentialist means that man, at birth, has no essential self, rather man simply exists and the essence of one's “self” is created as one lives. This is the second tenet of existentialism, which states roughly that humans are the product of their choices, or in other words, the choices that a person makes decides what is his/her essence. Other philosophers in the existential movement discussed the concept of “bad faith,” which describes the greatest existential “no- no.” In this way, existentialism gives the appearance of being totally subjective. The only truth, for the existentialist, is the truth that you make. In this way, then, the existentialist is to take responsibility for what Heidegger calls one's “project.” This concept conveys the notion that life and the essence of the self and character is created by the choices one makes. Heidegger unfolds these thoughts more full in his work “Being and Time.” In this book, Heidegger discusses what he calls, from the German, Dasein. Dasein is a word that does not translate effectively into English, however, there are ways that it can be described. When talking about being, Heidegger is trying to get at the essence of what it means to be. He describes being as “being toward,” or “being toward death,” which for Heidegger is not-being. He uses very vague, cloudy language to discuss this topic, and this is because the concept he is trying to convey does not sculpt easily into language. Heidegger continues his treatment of the nature of being in his work, “Discourse on Thinking.”

“Discourse on Thinking” is divided into two parts. The first part is entitled Memorial Address. In this section, Heidegger speaks at a commemorative service for a German Composer named Conradin Kreutzer. In this address, Heidegger unfolds what he grasps to be two kinds of thinking: calculative and meditative. Calculative thinking is the sort in which most humans immerse themselves all of the time; it is thought of distinguishing one thing from another, and is the thought process of scientists, engineers, and all those who are “progress” minded. This, for Heidegger, is antagonistic to the second type of thinking, meditative thinking. Meditative thinking, for Heidegger, is thought that allows us to become open, unknowing, and in many ways, simply aware. He says, “I call the comportment which enables us to keep open to the meaning hidden in technology, openness to the mystery.” This meaning inside the mystery to which Heidegger refers is, in Heidegger's terms, called “autochthony” or “rootedness.” It is the center at which all things converge; it is like the foundation or the base for all that is. Heidegger describes it as “that which regions.” Heidegger goes on to state that with the increase of technology and “progress,” humans have been pulled progressively farther and farther away from their root. People tend to get lost in the maze of structures of thought, science, invention, etc. So, Heidegger urges, “Releasement toward things and openness to the mystery belong together. They grant us the possibility of being in the world in a totally different way. They promise us a new ground and foundation upon which we can stand and endure the world of technology without being imperiled by it.”

It is clearly evident here that Heidegger has built into all of his thought a concept of foundation. This concept of foundation, then, resides in the term “rootedness” or “autochthony.” In this way, Heidegger's foundation becomes one which is highly fixed, absolute in nature. Heidegger believes that what lies at the heart of all things is being itself, and, in this way, being comes the absolute foundation off of which is built the elaborates series' of technology and “convenience,” by which we understand the world. Heidegger says, “Meditative thinking demands of us not to cling one-sidedly to a single idea, nor to run down a one-track course of ideas. Meditative thinking demands of us that we engage ourselves with what at first sight does not go together at all.”

In this way, Heidegger is perhaps the most foundational or absolutist of all of the philosophers discussed in this essay. Heidegger's understanding of being or “autochthony,” is very much akin to the mystical understanding of God. It is also, in several ways, similar to what John Locke defined as the "substratum." The substratum is that in which all things inhere, and yet it is almost entirely unknown, save that it be. As theologian Paul Tillich once put it, “God does not exist.” What he means by this is that things exist, in a material sense, but God, as immaterial, does not exist. Rather, God is. In Jewish tradition, the name by which God revealed himself to mankind was Yahweh, or “I am,” “I will be who I will be.” It is this sort of concept that Heidegger conveys when he is attempting to get at the root of being, it is a sort of “isness.” This “isness,” then, is the absolute truth of the composition of being and existence, and in this way, is the very root or foundation of all that exists subsequently, like some theologians of history have viewed of the world or “creation” as having proceeded from God, that which is. Heidegger says, “That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery.” I find it interesting that at the center of Heidegger's philosophy one finds the concept of mystery or “root,” a concept which many of mystical religious tradition have declared to be their experience with God, the ultimate absolute.

Conclusion

All sorts of philosophical systems are built on a foundation. In some cases more than others, a system appears to be founded more or less on an absolute foundation. Often times these foundations are not explicitly expressed, and in the case of philosophy in the contemporary era, they are often outright denied. However, if one looks deeply into any philosophy, I believe that they will find, at root, a foundation off of which that philosophy springs. Some are more evident, and some are more complex, but quite simply, all philosophical foundations assume some sort of foundation, which points to the existence of an absolute or fixed truth. This can take the form of the "principle of verification," which is empiricism, logic, "will to power," and even, in Heidegger's terms, "rootedness" or "autochthony," a being that just be or is.

It is this root of "isness" or being itself out of which all things derive. It reminds me specifically, of the pre-Socratic philosopher, Anaxagoras, who claimed that at the root of all things lies "nous" or the divine mind. The existence of this "nous" is not existence as a thing, or materially, rather it is being itself. It is precisely from this level of being that I believe all other truth or foundations are derived. It is like Heidegger says, quoting Johann Peter Hebel, "We are plants which--whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not--must with our roots rise out of the earth in order to bloom the ether and bear fruit."