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Introducing20Philosophy20-20A20Text20with20Integrated20Readings2011th20Edition.pdf
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Introducing Philosophy
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Introducing Philosophy
A T E X T W I T H I N T E G R AT E D R E A D I N G S
Eleventh Edition
Robert C. Solomon Late of University of Texas at Austin
Kathleen M. Higgins University of Texas at Austin
Clancy Martin University of Missouri–Kansas City
New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Solomon, Robert C. Introducing philosophy : a text with integrated readings/Robert C. Solomon, Late of University of Texas at Austin, Kathleen M. Higgins, University of Texas at Austin, Clancy Martin,
University of Missouri, Kansas City.—Eleventh Edition. pages cm ISBN 978-0-19-020945-2 1. Philosophy—Introductions. I. Higgins, Kathleen Marie. II. Martin, Clancy W. III. Title. BD21.S629 2015 100—dc23 2015021017 Printing number: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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For our parents Vita P. Solomon (1916–2005) and Charles M. Solomon (1914–1986)
Kathryn A. Higgins (1925–2003) and Eugene A. Higgins (1923–2013) Anna Victoria Moody and John William Martin (1941–1997)
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Contents in Brief Philosopher Biographies xvii Preface xix History of Philosophy xxvii
INTRODUCTION 1
Part One | The World and Beyond 41
1 | REALIT Y 43
2 | RELIGION 121
3 | KNOWLEDGE 191
4 | TRUTH AND RELATIVISM 253
Part Two | Know Thyself 321
5 | MIND AND BODY 323
6 | SELF 377
7 | FREEDOM 429
Part Three | The Good and the Right 495
8 | ETHICS 497
9 | JUSTICE 593
Glossary 657 Index 679
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C O N T E N T S | i x
Contents Philosopher Biographies xvii Preface xix History of Philosophy xxvii
INTRODUCTION 1
A. Socrates 1 Aristophanes, from Clouds 2 Plato, from Apology 2 Plato, from Crito 4 Plato, from Phaedo 8 Plato, from Republic 10
B. What Is Philosophy? 10 Plato, from Apology 13 Karl Jaspers, from “The ‘Axial Period’” 14 Laozi, from Dao De Jing 15
C. A Modern Approach to Philosophy 16 René Descartes, from Discourse on Method 21
D. A Brief Introduction to Logic 23
Key Terms 40 Bibliography and Further Reading 40
Part One | The World and Beyond 41
CHAPTER 1 | REALIT Y 43
A. “The Way the World Really Is” 43 Aristotle, from Metaphysics 44
B. The First Greek Philosophers 45 Parmenides, from Fragments 53
C. Ultimate Reality in the East: India, Persia, and China 55 From Upanishads 56 From Zend-Avesta 59
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From The Confucian Analects 60 Laozi, from Dao De Jing 62 Buddha, from “Fire-Sermon” 64
D. Two Kinds of Metaphysics: Plato and Aristotle 65 Plato, from Symposium 66 Plato, from Republic 67 Plato, from Meno 73 Aristotle, Metaphysics 80 Aristotle, from Physics 81 Aristotle, from Metaphysics 86
E. Modern Metaphysics 87 René Descartes, on Substance 90 René Descartes, from “Meditation VI” 92 Benedictus de Spinoza, from Ethics 94 Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, from Monadology 104 David Lewis, from Counterfactuals 113 Martin Heidegger, from “The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics” 114
Summary and Conclusion 116 Chapter Review Questions 117 Key Terms 118 Bibliography and Further Reading 118
CHAPTER 2 | RELIGION 121
A. What Is Religion? 121 John Wisdom, from “Gods” 122 Albert Einstein, On the Design of the Universe 124 Keiji Nishitani, from “What Is Religion?” 125
B. The Western Religions 127
C. Proving God: The Ontological Argument 130 St. Anselm, On the Ontological Argument 131 René Descartes, On the Ontological Argument 133 Immanuel Kant, Against the Ontological Argument 136
D. God as Creator: Intelligence and Design 138 St. Thomas Aquinas, Five Arguments for the Existence of God 139 William Paley, from “The Watch and the Watchmaker” 142 St. Thomas Aquinas, On the “Fifth Way” 145 David Hume, from Dialogues on Natural Religion 146 Cory Juhl, On the “Fine-Tuning” Argument 148
E. Religion, Morality, and Evil 150 Immanuel Kant, On God and Morality 150 William James, from “The Will to Believe” 152 St. Augustine, from Confessions 156 From the Bhagavadgı-ta- 163
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F. Beyond Reason: Faith and Irrationality 165 Mohammad al-Ghazali, from The Deliverance from Error 167 Søren Kierkegaard, On Subjective Truth 169 Paul Tillich, On the Ultimate Concern 172
G. Doubts about God and Religion 175 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from The Brothers Karamazov 175 Karl Marx, from Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right 178 Friedrich Nietzsche, from Beyond Good and Evil 179 Friedrich Nietzsche, from The Antichrist 180 Friedrich Nietzsche, from The Gay Science 181 Sigmund Freud, from The Future of an Illusion 182 Mary Daly, ”Wanted: ‘God’ or ‘the Goddess’?” 183 Victor A. Gunasekara, “The Buddhist Attitude to God” 185
Summary and Conclusion 187 Chapter Review Questions 188 Key Terms 189 Bibliography and Further Reading 189
CHAPTER 3 | KNOWLEDGE 191 Bertrand Russell, from The Problems of Philosophy 192 Plato, from Republic 195 Plato, from Theatetus 198
A. The Rationalist’s Confidence: Descartes 200 René Descartes, from “Meditation I” 201 René Descartes, from “Meditation II” 205 René Descartes, from “Meditation VI” 209
B. Innate Ideas Concerning Human Understanding: John Locke 210 John Locke, from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 211 Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, from New Essays on Human Understanding 213
C. Two Empiricist Theories of Knowledge 215 John Locke, from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 216 Bishop George Berkeley, from Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge 227
D. The Congenial Skeptic: David Hume 234 David Hume, from A Treatise of Human Nature 235 David Hume, from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 239
E. A Contemporary Conundrum: Knowledge as Justified True Belief 249
Summary and Conclusion 250 Chapter Review Questions 250 Key Terms 250 Bibliography and Further Reading 251
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CHAPTER 4 | TRUTH & RELATIVISM 253
A. What Is Truth? 255
B. Theories of Truth 258 Brand Blanshard, On The Coherence Theory 259 Charles Peirce, from “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” 262 William James, On the Pragmatic Theory 264 Alfred Tarski, from “The Semantic Theory of Truth” 266
C. Kant’s Revolution 268 Immanuel Kant, from The Critique of Pure Reason 272 Immanuel Kant, from Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics 272
D. The Battle in Europe After Kant: Relativism and Absolutism 277 G. W. F. Hegel, from The Phenomenology of Spirit 279 G. W. F. Hegel, from Reason in History 283 Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth 286
E. Phenomenology 288 Edmund Husserl, from “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” 288 Edmund Husserl, from The 1929 Paris Lectures 289
F. Hermeneutics and Pragmatism: Relativism Reconsidered 290 Richard Rorty, from “Solidarity or Objectivity?” 293 Isamu Nagami, from “Cultural Gaps: Why Do We Misunderstand?” 297
G. The Analytic Turn 302 Bertrand Russell, from The Problems of Philosophy 302 W. V. O. Quine, from “Epistemology Naturalized” 308
H. Feminist Epistemology 311 Elizabeth Grosz, On Feminist Knowledge 311 Uma Narayan, On Feminist Epistemology 314
Summary and Conclusion 317 Chapter Review Questions 318 Key Terms 318 Bibliography and Further Reading 318
Part Two | Know Thyself 321
CHAPTER 5 | MIND AND BODY 323
A. What Is Consciousness? 323 René Descartes, from “Meditation VI” 324 René Descartes, from “Meditation III” 328
B. The Problem of Dualism 328 René Descartes, from “The Passions of the Soul” 330
C. The Rejection of Dualism 332 Gilbert Ryle, from The Concept of Mind 334 J. J. C. Smart, from “Sensations and Brain Processes” 341 Jerome Shaffer, Against the Identity Theory 343
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Paul M. Churchland, On Eliminative Materialism 351 David Braddon-Mitchell and Frank Jackson, from Philosophy of Mind and Cognition 351 John R. Searle, from “The Myth of the Computer” 355 John R. Searle, from Minds, Brains, and Science 355
D. The Problem of Consciousness 357 Sigmund Freud, On the “Unconscious” 358 Thomas Nagel, from Mortal Questions 359
E. Changing Our Minds: Holism and Consciousness 362 Aristotle, from De Anima 362 Galen Strawson, On “Cognitive Experience” 364
F. The Politics of the Mind-Body Problem 359 Elizabeth V. Spelman, from “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views” 367
Summary and Conclusion 373 Chapter Review Questions 374 Key Terms 374 Bibliography and Further Reading 374
CHAPTER 6 | SELF 377
A. Consciousness and the Self: From Descartes to Kant 379 René Descartes, from “Meditation VI” 380 John Locke, On Personal Identity 381 David Hume, On the Idea of the Self 385 Immanuel Kant, Against the Soul as Substance 390 Meredith Michaels, On “Personal Identity” 392 Derek Parfit, from Reasons and Persons 395
B. Existentialism: Self-Identity and the Responsibility of Choice 396 Jean-Paul Sartre, On Existentialism 398 Jean-Paul Sartre, On Bad Faith 400 Jean-Paul Sartre, from No Exit 402
C. The Individual and the Community 404 Søren Kierkegaard, On “The Public” 405 Søren Kierkegaard, On Self and Passion 406 Martin Heidegger, On “Dasein” and the “They” 406 David Reisman, On Individualism 407 Malcolm X, On Being “African” 408 Malcolm X, from “At the Audubon” 409 Sherry Ortner, from “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” 409 Ann Ferguson, On Androgyny 412 Deirdre McCloskey, from Crossing 414
D. One Self? Any Self? Questioning the Concept of Personal “Essence” 417 Hermann Hesse, from Steppenwolf 418 Luce Irigaray, from This Sex Which Is Not One 419 Genevieve Lloyd, from “The Man of Reason” 421 From the Dhammapada 425 Laozi, from Dao De Jing 426
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Summary and Conclusion 427 Chapter Review Questions 427 Key Terms 428 Bibliography and Further Reading 428
CHAPTER 7 | FREEDOM 429
A. Fatalism and Karma 429 Sophocles, from Oedipus the King 431 Keiji Nishitani, On Fate 434
B. Predestination 435 St. Augustine, from On Free Choice of the Will 436 Muhammad Iqbal, from The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam 438 Jacqueline Trimier, On the Yoruba Ori 440 Jonathan Edwards, from “Freedom of the Will” 441
C. Determinism 444 Baron Paul Henri d’Holbach, from System of Nature 446 Daniel Dennett, from Elbow Room 448 Robert Kane, On Indeterminism 454 John Stuart Mill, On Causation and Necessity 457 David Hume, On Causation and Character 461 Robert Kane, On “Wiggle Room” 463 Harry Frankfurt, from “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person” 464
D. Compulsion and Ignorance 468 Aristotle, On Voluntary Action 469 Judith Orr, “Sex, Ignorance, and Freedom” 471 John Hospers, from “What Means This Freedom?” 473 B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom 476 B. F. Skinner, from Walden Two 479 Robert Kane, Beyond Skinner 479 Anthony Burgess, from A Clockwork Orange 481 Catharine MacKinnon, On Coercion of Women’s Sexuality 482
E. Freedom in Practice: Kant’s Solution 485
F. Radical Freedom: Existentialism 486 Jean-Paul Sartre, On “Absolute Freedom” 487 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from “The Most Advantageous Advantage” 490 Thich Nhat Hanh, from “Turning on the Television” 492
Summary and Conclusion 493 Chapter Review Questions 493 Key Terms 494 Bibliography and Further Reading 494
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Part Three | The Good and the Right 495
CHAPTER 8 | ETHICS 497
A. Morality 498
B. Is Morality Relative? 500 Gilbert Harman, from “Moral Relativism Defended” 501 St. Thomas Aquinas, from The Summa Theologica 505 John Corvino, from Same Sex: Debating the Ethics, Science, and Culture of Homosexuality 506
C. Egoism and Altruism 509 Plato, from Republic 510 Tara Smith, The Necessity of Egoism (Ayn Rand) 512
D. Are We Naturally Selfish? A Debate 515 Mencius, On Human Nature: Man Is Good 515 Xunzi, from “Human Nature Is Evil” 516 Joseph Butler, Against Egoism 519
E. Morality as Virtue: Aristotle 522 Aristotle, from The Nicomachean Ethics 522
F. Morality and Sentiment: Hume and Rousseau 535 David Hume, On “Reason as Slave of the Passions” 536 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from Émile 539
G. Morality and Practical Reason: Kant 542 Immanuel Kant, from Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals 543
H. Utilitarianism 556 Jeremy Bentham, from An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation 557 John Stuart Mill, from Utilitarianism 561
I. The Creation of Morality: Nietzsche and Existentialism 568 Friedrich Nietzsche, On “Morality as Herd-Instinct” 571 Friedrich Nietzsche, On “Master and Slave Morality” 571 Jean-Paul Sartre, from Existentialism Is a Humanism 575 Simone de Beauvoir, from The Ethics of Ambiguity 579
J. Ethics and Gender 584 Virginia Held, On Feminist Ethics 585
Summary and Conclusion 590 Chapter Review Questions 590 Key Terms 591 Bibliography and Further Reading 591
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CHAPTER 9 | JUSTICE 593
A. The Problem of Justice 595
B. Two Ancient Theories of Justice: Plato and Aristotle 596 Plato, from Republic 596 Aristotle, from The Nicomachean Ethics 598
C. Two Modern Theories of Justice: Hume and Mill on Utility and Rights 602 David Hume, On “Justice and Utility” 603 John Stuart Mill, from Utilitarianism 604
D. The Social Contract 608 Thomas Hobbes, from Leviathan 609 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from The Social Contract 615 Thomas Jefferson et al., from The Declaration of Independence 620
E. Fairness and Entitlement 621 John Rawls, from “Justice as Fairness” 621 Robert Nozick, from Anarchy, State, and Utopia 624
F. Justice or Care: A Feminist Perspective 628 Cheshire Calhoun, from “Justice, Care, Gender Bias” 628 María Lugones, from “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception” 629
G. Individual Rights and Freedom 635 John Locke, from The Second Treatise on Government 636 John Stuart Mill, from On Liberty 637 Malcolm X, On Civil and Human Rights 642 Amartya Sen, from “Property and Hunger” 643
H. Fighting for Rights and Justice: Civil Disobedience 646 Henry David Thoreau, from “Resistance to Civil Government” (“Civil Disobedience”) 647 Martin Luther King, Jr., from “Letter from Birmingham Jail” 649
Summary and Conclusion 654 Chapter Review Questions 654 Key Terms 654 Bibliography and Further Reading 655 Glossary 657 Index 679
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Philosopher Biographies INTRODUCTION
Socrates Plato Aristotle Laozi Isaac Newton René Descartes Bertrand Russell Mary Midgley Ralph Waldo Emerson
CHAPTER 1 Thales Anaximander Anaximenes Heraclitus Democritus Pythagoras Parmenides Zeno of Elea Zarathustra Confucius Buddha Benedictus de Spinoza Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz Martin Heidegger David Lewis
CHAPTER 2 John Wisdom Albert Einstein Keiji Nishitani Xenophanes St. Anselm Immanuel Kant
St. Thomas Aquinas William Paley David Hume William James Blaise Pascal St. Augustine Voltaire Mohammad al-Ghazali Søren Kierkegaard Paul Tillich Fyodor Dostoyevsky Karl Marx Friedrich Nietzsche Sigmund Freud Mary Daly Victor Gunasekara
CHAPTER 3 Euclid John Locke Noam Chomsky Bishop George Berkeley
CHAPTER 4 Charles Sanders Peirce Johann Gottlieb Fichte Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Edmund Husserl Hans-Georg Gadamer Richard Rorty Isamu Nagami William Van Orman Quine Elizabeth Grosz Uma Narayan
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CHAPTER 5 B. F. Skinner Gilbert Ryle J. J. C. Smart Jerome Shaffer Paul Churchland David Braddon-Mitchell Frank Jackson John Searle Thomas Nagel Ludwig Wittgenstein Maurice Merleau-Ponty Galen Strawson Elizabeth V. Spelman
CHAPTER 6 Meredith Michaels Derek Parfit R. D. Laing David Reisman Malcolm X Sherry Ortner Ann Ferguson Deirdre McCloskey Hermann Hesse Luce Irigaray Genevieve Lloyd
CHAPTER 7 Sophocles Muhammad Iqbal Jacqueline Trimier John Calvin Jonathan Edwards Baron Paul Henri d’Holbach Daniel Dennett
Werner Heisenberg Robert Kane John Stuart Mill Robert Owen Harry Frankfurt Albert Camus David Zimmerman Judith Orr Alfred Charles Kinsey John Hospers Ivan Pavlov John Burgess Wilson Catharine MacKinnon Thich Nhat Hanh
CHAPTER 8 Gilbert Harman John Corvino Mencius Xunzi Bishop Joseph Butler Jean-Jacques Rousseau Jeremy Bentham Simone de Beauvoir Virginia Held
CHAPTER 9 Thomas Hobbes John Rawls Robert Nozick Cheshire Calhoun María Lugones Amartya Sen Henry David Thoreau Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Preface Introducing Philosophy: A Text with Integrated Readings, Eleventh Edition, is a thorough in- troduction to the core problems of philosophy. Organized topically, the chapters present alternative perspectives—including analytic, continental, feminist, and non-Western viewpoints—alongside the historical works of major philosophers. The text provides the course materials that allow instructors and students to focus on a variety of philosophical problems and perspectives. The goal is to present students with alternative views on philo- sophical issues and let them arrive at their own conclusions, which should be based on argu- ments in class and with classmates, as well as on the discussions in this book. The book presupposes no background in the subject and no special abilities. The purpose of philoso- phy is to encourage each person to think for himself or herself; no single source of argu- ments or information can take the place of personal dialogues and discussions. A textbook is ultimately a sourcebook—everything in it is to be taken as a cause for further argument, not as a final statement of results.
New to the Eleventh Edition
• Chapters 1 and 2 have changed positions, making Chapter 1 on Reality and Chapter 2 on Religion.
• Chapter 3 from the Tenth Edition has been divided into Chapter 3 on Knowledge and Chapter 4 on Truth and Relativism
• Chapters 5 and 6 have changed positions, making Chapter 5 on Mind and Body and Chapter 6 on Self
• The reading from John Locke in the Reality chapter of the previous edition has been consolidated with the Locke reading on primary and secondary qualities in Chapter 3
• Additional discussion of recent trends in analytic metaphysics (Chapter 1) and philo- sophical zombies (Chapter 5)
The following readings have been added to the new edition:
• A brief excerpt from David Lewis, from Counterfactuals (Chapter 1)
• Cory Juhl, “On the ‘Fine-Tuning’ Argument” (Chapter 2)
• Mary Daly, “Wanted: ‘God’ or ‘the Goddess’?” (Chapter 2)
• Victor A. Gunasekara, “The Buddhist Attitude to God” (Chapter 2)
• The divided line from Plato, Republic (Chapter 3)
• Brand Blanshard, On the Coherence Theory (Chapter 4)
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• Charles Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (Chapter 4)
• William James, On the Pragmatic Theory (Chapter 4)
• Alfred Tarski, “The Semantic Theory of Truth” (Chapter 4)
• Elizabeth V. Spelman, from “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views” (Chapter 5)
• Derek Parfit, from Reasons and Persons (Chapter 6)
• A different reading from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness now replaces the previous edition’s reading on bad faith (Chapter 6)
• Deirdre McCloskey, from Crossing: A Memoir (Chapter 6)
• Tara Smith, On the Necessity of Egoism (Ayn Rand) (Chapter 8)
• Simone de Beauvoir, from The Ethics of Ambiguity (Chapter 8)
• María Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception” (Chapter 9)
The following readings have been omitted from the new edition:
• Arthur Schopenhauer, from The World as Will and Representation (Chapter 4)
• William James, from “Does Consciousness Exist?” (Chapter 5)
• Colin McGinn, On “The Mystery of Consciousness” (Chapter 5)
• Friedrich Nietzsche, On the “Genius of the Species” (Chapter 5)
• The previous edition’s reading from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (now replaced with a different reading from the same work) (Chapter 6)
• John Dewey, from The Quest for Certainty (Chapter 7)
Key Features
• A second color to visually enhance the text and further engage students and instructors
• More than 260 images that illustrate key concepts and encapsulate famous philosophi- cal figures
• More than 120 brief profiles of philosophers interspersed throughout the text
• Substantial readings from significant works in the history of philosophy, with helpful commentary from the authors
• Key terms bolded in the text and collected at the end of each chapter
• Marginal quotations from famous philosophers that keep the student engaged and focused
• Questions for further consideration at the end of every subsection and additional chapter review questions at the ends of chapters
• Bibliographies and Further Reading at the end of each chapter
• A Glossary of the most important and widely used philosophical terms at the end of the book
x x | P R E FA C E
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Ancillaries
Resources are available to instructors on the Oxford University Press Ancillary Resource Center (ARC) at www.oup-arc.com/solomon-introducing-philosophy, and a Companion Website at www.oup.com/us/solomon.
The ARC (www.oup-arc.com/solomon-introducing-philosophy) includes
• A Computerized Test Bank, with • 30 multiple-choice questions per chapter • 20 true/false questions per chapter • 10 fill-in-the-blank questions per chapter • 10 essay/discussion questions per chapter
• An Instructor’s Manual, with • A “pencil-and-paper” version of the Computerized Test Bank • Key terms and definitions for each chapter, taken from the text
• PowerPoint lecture outlines
The Companion Website (www.oup.com/us/solomon) includes
• Self-quizzes taken from the Test Bank, with • 15 multiple-choice questions and answers per chapter • 10 true/false questions and answers per chapter • 5 fill-in-the-blank questions per chapter
• Key terms and definitions for each chapter, taken from the text
P R E FA C E | x x i
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Acknowledgments
From Kathleen M. Higgins and Clancy Martin For this edition, we want to thank especially our editor, Robert Miller, and his assistant, Kaitlin Coats. We also want to thank Kayla Sosa, who helped tremendously with permissions, and the readers who advised us in the preparation of this edition: Marcos Arandia at North Lake College, Luisa Benton at Richland College, Jennifer Caseldine-Bracht at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, Edward J. Grippe at Norwalk Community College, M. Gregory Oakes at Winthrop University, Mark D. Sadler at Northeast Lakeview College, Nancy J. Shaffer at California University of Pennsylvania, Ellen B. Stansell at Austin Community College, Michele Svatos at Eastfield College, Khaldoun Sweis at Olive-Harvey College, and Paul Wilson at Texas State University.
From Robert C. Solomon This book and its previous editions have been made possible through the encouragement and help of many people, most important of whom are the several thousand introductory students I have had the pleasure of meeting and teaching. I want to give special thanks to my friend and colleague Clancy Martin. For the original edition, I thank Susan Zaleski for her very special insights and criticism of the manuscript in its early stages. I also thank Robert Fogelin, John McDermott, Janet McCracken, Stephen Phillips, Paul Woodruff, Stephanie Lewis, Michael Tye, George Cronk, Roland D. Zimany, Terry Boswell, Lisa Erlich, David Blumenfeld, Harry O’Hara, Barbara Barratt, Billy Joe Lucas, Cheshire Calhoun, Peter Hutcheson, Richard Palmer, Norman Thomas, Greta Reed, Edward Johnson, Don Branson, Hoke Robinson, Meredith Michaels, Bruce Paternoster, Maxine Morphis, Bruce Ballard, Jeffery Coombs, Timothy Owen Davis, Conrad Gromada, Gregory Landini, Dan Bonevac, Kathleen Higgins, Kristy Bartlett, Marilyn Frye, Jonathan Westphal, David J. Paul, Edward Johnson, Fred Tabor, Brian Kutin, Karen Mottola, John Rowell, Christopher Melley, John Carvalho, Michael Clifford, Timothy Davis, Ronald Glass, Isabel Luengo, Thomas Ryckman, William Smith, and Clancy Martin. At Harcourt College Publishers, my editors—Bill Pullin, Bill McLane, and David Tatom—were helpful and encouraging for many years and through many editions. Finally, I would like once again to thank my first philosophy teachers—Robert Hanson, Doris Yokum, Elizabeth Flower, James Ross, and C. G. Hempel—who provided me with the models and the materials for an ideal introductory philosophy course—and the many students who still continue to make the teaching of philosophy one of the more satisfying professions in a not easily satisfying world.
For the Student: Doing Philosophy Your attempt to develop your own thoughts—to “do” philosophy, as well as to read what others have done—is central to any study of philosophy. Philosophy, more than any other field, is not so much a subject as it is a way of thinking, one that can be appreciated fully only by joining in. While reading each section, therefore, do not hesitate to put down the book at any time and do your own thinking and writing. When reading about metaphysics, for ex- ample, think about how you would develop your own view of reality and how you would answer the questions raised by the first philosophers of ancient Greece or the Orient. When confronted by an argument, consider how you might argue for or against a given position. When facing an idea that seems foreign, try to put it in your own terms and understand the vision that lies behind it. And when facing a problem, always offer your own answer as well
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as the answers offered by earlier thinkers. In philosophy, unlike physics or biology, your own answer may be just as legitimate as those given by the philosophers of the past, and there may be equally interesting answers from different traditions. This is what makes philosophy so difficult to learn at first, but it is also what makes it so personally valuable and enjoyable.
Most of the sections and all the chapters are followed immediately by questions for you to answer, either out loud with other students in class or in writing, perhaps by way of a class journal or as an addition to your class notes. Most of the questions are intended simply to encourage you to articulate the point of what you have just read, putting it in (more or less) your own words. All too often when we are reading new or difficult material, we just allow it to “pass through” on the way to the next reading. We all have had the experience of reading a long passage, even spending a considerable amount of time on it, and then afterward find- ing that we are unable to say anything about it. The aim of the questions, therefore, is to force you to say or write something. Some of the questions are thought provoking, but most are aimed simply at providing immediate feedback for you. We ask, therefore, that you take the questions seriously and consider them an integral part of your reading assignment.
Writing Philosophy With the foregoing ideas in mind, it should be obvious why talking about philosophy with friends and classmates, raising important questions and objections in class, and writing down ideas are so important. Articulation reinforces comprehension, and arguing against objections broadens understanding. Writing papers in philosophy is a particularly important part of any philosophy course, and there are certain general guidelines to keep in mind:
1. Begin your essay with a leading question. “Thinking about” some philosophical issue can be fun, but too easily loses direction and purpose. For instance, thinking about “freedom” involves far too many different problems and perspectives. Asking such questions as “Is freedom of action compatible with scientific determinism?” or “Can there be freedom in a socialist state?” gives your thinking a specific orientation and way of proceeding.
2. Be clear about the difficulties you face in tackling the question. Are the terms of the question clear? It is not always necessary or possible to define terms at the start of your essay. Indeed, defining the key term may be the basic and most difficult conclu- sion you reach. Also, it is often a poor idea to depend on a dictionary (even a good one) for clarifying your question. Dictionaries are not written by philosophers and gen- erally reflect popular usage—which may include just such philosophical misunder- standings as you are attempting to correct.
3. Clarify the position you are arguing. Do not force the reader (your instructor) to guess where you are going. When you are clear about the question you ask, it will help you clarify the answer you intend to give, and vice versa. In fact, you may well change your mind—about both the question and the answer—several times while you are writing; this is the real danger of attempting a one-draft-the-night-before approach to essay writing.
4. Argue your case. Demonstrate why you hold the position you do. The most frequent criticism of student papers is “This is your assertion: Where is the argument?” When an exam question asks you to discuss an idea or a quotation “critically,” this does not mean that you must attack it or find fault with it but, rather, that you need to consider the merits and possible inadequacies, consider the reasons given, and give your own reasons for what you say.
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5. Anticipate objections to your position and to your arguments and take the offensive against rival positions. If you do not know what your position is opposed to, it is doubtful that you are clear about what your own position is. If you cannot imagine how anyone could possibly disagree with you, you probably have not thought through your position carefully.
6. Do not be afraid to be yourself, to be humorous, charming, sincere, or personal. The most powerful philosophical writings, those that have endured for centuries, often reflect the author’s deepest concerns and attitudes toward life. However, remember that no philosophical writing can be just humorous, charming, sincere, or personal. Make sure that everything you write—including a joke—is relevant to the topic at hand. What makes your writing philosophical is that it involves general concerns and careful arguments while attempting to prove an important point and answer one of the age-old questions.
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History of Philosophy Note: Over many centuries Western dates have traditionally been indicated in reference to the approximate year of the birth of Christ. “B.C.” stands for “Before Christ,” and “A.D.” stands for the Latin Anno Domine, meaning “in the year of the Lord.” Increasingly, these ab- breviations have been replaced with “B.C.E.,” meaning “Before the Common Era,” and “C.E.,” “Common Era.” We use the latter pair of abbreviations below.
3000 B.C.E.
The Epic of Gilgamesh (2700 B.C.E.)
2000 B.C.E.
Abraham (ca. 1900)
1500 B.C.E. Hindu Vedas (ca. 1500)
Moses (fl. 1220–1200)
Trojan War (1185 B.C.E.)
1000 B.C.E. Chinese develop gunpowder (1000 B.C.E.)
Homer (9th–8th century)
First Olympic Games 776 B.C.E.
Rome is founded 753 B.C.E.
Pythagoras ca. 581–507 B.C.E.
Laozi 570–510 B.C.E.
Buddha (Siddhārtha Gautama) 566–486 B.C.E.
500 B.C.E.
Aesop’s Fables ca. 550 B.C.E.
Confucius 551–479 B.C.E.
Heraclitus ca. 535–470 B.C.E.
Confucian Analects compiled ca. 475–221 B.C.E.
Socrates 470–399 B.C.E.
Parthenon is completed 433 B.C.E.
Plato 427–347 B.C.E.
400 B.C.E. Job ca. 400 B.C.E.
Pentateuch established ca. 400 B.C.E.
Plato’s Symposium ca. 385–380 B.C.E.
Aristotle 384–322 B.C.E.
Plato’s Republic ca. 380 B.C.E.
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Mencius 372–289 B.C.E.
Alexander the Great conquers Egypt 332 B.C.E.
300 B.C.E.
Julius Caesar assassinated 44 B.C.E.
Jesus Christ ca. 5 B.C.E.–30 C.E.
1 B.C.E.
St. Paul ca. 10–65 C.E.
St. Augustine 354–430
St. Augustine’s Confessions 397–398
C.E. 500
Muhammad ca. 570–632
1000 Beowulf ca. 1000
St. Anselm ca. 1033–1109
Al-Ghazali 1058–1111
The first crusade captures Jerusalem 1099
1100
Oxford University founded 1149
1200
The Magna Carta is signed 1215
St. Thomas Aquinas 1225–1274
Aquinas’ Summa Theologica 1265–1274
Marco Polo returns from China 1275
Farsighted eyeglasses are invented 1285
1300 Gunpowder used for the first time in Europe 1300
Dante’s Divine Comedy 1310
The Bubonic Plague 1348–1375
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales 1386
1400
First documented black slaves arrive in Europe 1441
Christian Constantinople falls to the Muslims 1453
Johannes Gutenberg invents the printing press 1455
Columbus and Spanish exploration and colonization of the Americas and Caribbean 1492–1520
1500 Northern European Renaissance begins 1500
High Renaissance in Italy 1500–1530
Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince 1513
Copernican Revolution 1514
Martin Luther’s 95 Theses 1517
Protestant Reformation 1517–1541
830,000 killed in massive earthquake in China 1556
Thomas Hobbes 1588–1679
René Descartes 1596–1650
1600
Shakespeare’s Hamlet 1601
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quixote 1605
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King James Bible 1611
Thirty Years War 1618–1648
Pilgrims arrive at Plymouth 1620
Blaise Pascal 1623–1662
Benedictus de Spinoza 1632–1677
John Locke 1632–1704
Descartes’s Discourse on Method 1637
Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy 1641
Isaac Newton 1642–1727
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz 1646–1716
1650
Hobbes’s Leviathan 1651
John Milton’s Paradise Lost 1667
Pascal’s Pensées 1670
Spinoza’s Ethics 1677
Bishop George Berkeley 1685–1753
Newton’s Principles of Mathematics 1687
Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 1690
1700
Berkeley’s A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge 1710
David Hume 1711–1776
Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712–1778
Leibniz’s The Monadology 1714
Immanuel Kant 1724–1804
Agricultural revolution in Western Europe 1730–1850
Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac 1732
Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature 1739
Jeremy Bentham 1748–1832
Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 1748
Voltaire’s Candide 1759
Rousseau’s Émile 1762
Rousseau’s The Social Contract 1762
Leibniz’s New Essays on Human Understanding 1765
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1770–1831
Boston Tea Party 1773
The American colonies declare independence 1776
Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations 1776
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason 1781
Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics 1783
Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason 1788
French Revolution begins 1789
Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women 1792
Reign of Terror in France 1793
Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals 1797
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1800
Napoleon crowned emperor of France 1804
John Stuart Mill 1806–1873
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit 1807
Charles Darwin 1809–1882
Søren Kierkegaard 1813–1855
The Battle of Waterloo 1815
Henry David Thoreau 1817–1862
Karl Marx 1818–1883
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 1818
Fyodor Dostoyevsky 1821–1881
England outlaws slavery 1833
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature” 1836
William James 1842–1910
Friedrich Nietzsche 1844–1900
The Potato Famine 1845–1848
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s The Communist Manifesto 1848
1850
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick 1851
Thoreau’s Walden 1854
Sigmund Freud 1856–1939
Edmund Husserl 1859–1938
John Dewey 1859–1952
Darwin’s Origin of Species 1859
Mill’s Utilitarianism 1863
Emancipation Proclamation 1863
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 1865
Telegraph cable connects the United States and Europe 1866
Mahatma Gandhi 1868–1948
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women 1868
Bertrand Russell 1872–1970
Global economic depression 1873–1877
Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina 1875
Albert Einstein 1879–1955
Dostoyevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov 1880
Karl Jaspers 1883–1969
Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889–1951
Martin Heidegger 1889–1976
1900 Gilbert Ryle 1900–1976
Keiji Nishitani 1900–1990
W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folks 1903
John Wisdom 1904–1993
Jean-Paul Sartre 1905–1980
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle 1906
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1908–1961
Simone de Beauvoir 1908–1986
NAACP established 1909
1910
Nationalist Revolution in China 1911
Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy 1912
Titanic sinks 1912
Albert Camus 1913–1960
World War I 1914–1918
Russian Revolution 1917
Influenza epidemic kills 20 million people 1918
1920
John Rawls 1921–2002
James Joyce’s Ulysses 1922
John Scopes indicted for teaching evolution 1925
Malcolm X 1925–1965
Kafka’s The Trial 1925
Michel Foucault 1926–1984
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse 1927
U.S. stock market crash 1929
William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury 1929
Worldwide economic depression 1929–1939
Martin Luther King, Jr. 1929–1968
1930 Rise of Nazis in Germany 1930
Jacques Derrida 1930–2004
Richard Rorty 1931–2007
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God 1937
John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath 1939
World War II 1939–1945
1940
The Japanese attack Pearl Harbor 1941
David Lewis 1941–2001
Merleau–Ponty’s The Structure of Behavior 1942
Camus’s The Stranger 1942
The Shoah (Holocaust) 1942–1945
Sartre’s Being and Nothingness 1943
Formation of the United Nations 1945
George Orwell’s Animal Farm 1945
The atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima 1945
India gains independence from Britain; Pakistan is created 1947
Israel is created 1948
Marshall Plan 1948
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman 1949
de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex 1949
Communist victory in China led by Mao Tse-tung 1949
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1950
J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye 1951
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot 1952
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man 1952
Brown v Board of Education 1954
The Vietnam War 1955–1975
1960 Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird 1960
Cuban Missile Crisis 1962
Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique 1963
John Fitzgerald Kennedy is assassinated 1963
The Civil Rights Act is passed in the United States 1964
Cultural Revolution in China 1965–1973
Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude 1967
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated 1968
Woodstock Music Festival 1969
1970
Rawls’s Theory of Justice 1971
Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia 1974
Lebanese Civil War 1975
Ronald Dworkin’s Taking Rights Seriously 1977
Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature 1979
Thomas Nagel’s Mortal Questions 1979
1980 Election of Ronald Reagan as president of the United States 1980
Apple’s Macintosh computers are released 1984
Glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) policies in Soviet Union 1985
Toni Morrison’s Beloved 1987
Berlin Wall falls 1989
1990 Internet introduced to the general public 1990
Soviet Union dissolved 1991
Hilary Putnam’s Renewing Philosophy 1992
First democratic elections in South Africa 1994
Charles Taylor’s Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition 1994
Genocide in Rwanda 1995
2000
September 11, 2001
Iraq War begins 2003
Barack Obama becomes president of the United States 2009
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1
Introduction The unexamined life is not worth living.
S O C R AT E S
A. Socrates He was not the first philosopher, but he was, and is still, the ideal of philosophers. Once assured by the oracle at Delphi that he was the wisest man in Athens, Socrates (470–399 b.c.e.) borrowed his view of life from the inscription at Delphi, “Know Thyself.” Mixing humility with arrogance, he boasted that his superiority lay in his awareness of his own igno- rance, and he spent the rest of his life making fools of the self-proclaimed “wise men” of Athens.
In the opinion of Socrates and other critics of the time, the government of Athens was corrupt and notoriously bumbling, in marked contrast to the “Golden Age” of Pericles a few years before. Philo- sophical arguments had become all cleverness and demagoguery, rhetorical tricks to win arguments and legal cases; political ambition replaced justice and the search for the good life. Socrates believed that the people of Athens held their principles glibly, like banners at a football game, but rarely lived up to them and even more rarely examined them. Against this, he developed a technique of asking seemingly innocent questions, trap- ping his audience in their own confusions and hypocrisies, exploding the pretensions of his times. And against their easy certainties, he taught that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” He referred to himself as a “gadfly” (an obnoxious insect with a painful bite), keeping his fellow citizens from ever becoming as smug and self-righteous as they would like to have been. Accordingly, he made many enemies and was satirized by Aristophanes in his play The Clouds.
Socrates (470–399 b.c.e.)
An Athenian philosopher with a gift for rhetoric and debating, who had a notoriously poor marriage, several children, and lived in pov- erty most of his life. Socrates was fascinated by human nature, mo- rality, and politics. He became famous debating with the many “sophists” who wandered about giving practical training in argu- ment and persuasion (the ancient equivalent of law school). Socrates found their general skepticism in- tolerable and urged a return to the absolute ideals of wisdom,
virtue, justice, and the good life. In his not always tactful search for truth, however, Socrates made many enemies, who eventually had him condemned to death, an unjust verdict that he accepted with dignity.
A traditional image of Socrates (© Shutterstock.com/Kamira)
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F RO M Clouds B Y Aristophanes1
STUDENT OF SOCRATES: Socrates asked Chaerephon how many of its own feet a flea could jump—one had bitten Chaerephon’s brow and then jumped to Socrates’ head.
STREPSIADES: And how did he measure the jump?
STUDENT: Most ingeniously. He melted wax, caught the flea, dipped its feet, and the hardened wax made Persian slippers. Unfastening these, he found their size.
STREPSIADES: Royal Zeus! What an acute intellect!
STUDENT: But yesterday a high thought was lost through a lizard.
STREPSIADES: How so? Tell me.
STUDENT: As he gaped up at the moon, investigating her paths and turnings, from off the roof a lizard befouled him.
In the play, Aristophanes made Socrates and his students look utterly ridiculous, and the Athenian public enjoyed Aristophanes’ sarcasm as a mild form of vengeance for Socrates’ con- stant criticisms. Aristophanes’ “clouds” refer to that confusion which we mean when we talk of someone “having his head in the clouds.” Aristophanes probably expressed the general public opinion when he described Socrates as “shiftless” and merely a master at verbal trickery.
Socrates’ students, however, virtually worshiped him. They described him as “the brav- est, most wise and most upright man of our times” and perceived him as a martyr for the truth in a corrupted society. The price of his criticism was not merely the satire of the play- wrights. Because he had been such a continual nuisance, the government arranged to have Socrates brought to trial for “corrupting the youth of Athens” and “not believing in the gods of the city.” And for these trumped-up “crimes,” Socrates was condemned to death. But at his trial, he once again became a gadfly to those who condemned him.
F RO M Apology B Y Plato2
He assesses the penalty at death. So be it. What counterassessment should I propose to you, gentlemen of the jury? Clearly it should be a penalty I deserve, and what do I deserve to suffer or to pay because I have deliberately not led a quiet life but have neglected what occupies most people: wealth, household affairs, the position of general or public orator or the other offices, the political clubs and factions that exist in the city? I thought myself too honest to survive if I occupied myself with those things. I did not follow that path that would have made me of no use either to you or to myself, but I went to each of you privately and conferred upon him what I say is the greatest benefit, by persuading him not to care for any of his be- longings before caring that he himself should be as good and as wise as possible, not
1 Excerpt from Clouds, in The Complete Plays of Aristophanes, ed. Moses Hadas. Copyright © 1962 by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. 2 Plato, Apology, in The Trial and Death of Socrates, 2nd ed., trans. G. M. A. Grube. Copyright © 1975 by Hackett Pub- lishing Company, Inc. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
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A . S O C R AT E S | 3
to care for the city’s possessions more than for the city itself, and to care for other things in the same way. What do I deserve for being such a man? Some good, gentlemen of the jury, if I must truly make an assessment according to my deserts, and something suitable.
Socrates here suggests that the state should give him a pension, rather than a punishment, for being a public benefactor and urging his students to be virtuous.
It is for the sake of a short time, gentlemen of the jury, that you will acquire the reputation and the guilt, in the eyes of those who want to denigrate the city, of having killed Socrates, a wise man, for they will say that I am wise even if I am not. If you had waited but a little while, this would have happened of its own accord. You see my age, that I am already advanced in years and close to death. I am saying this not to all of you but to those who condemned me to death, and to these same jurors I say: Perhaps you think that I was convicted for lack of such words as might have convinced you, if I thought I should say or do all I could to avoid my sentence. Far from it. I was convicted because I lacked not words but boldness and shameless- ness and the willingness to say to you what you would most gladly have heard from me, lamentations and tears and my saying and doing many things that I say are unworthy of me but that you are accustomed to hear from others. I did not think then that the danger I ran should make me do anything mean, nor do I now regret the nature of my defense. I would much rather die after this kind of defense than live after making the other kind. Neither I nor any other man should, on trial or in war, contrive to avoid death at any cost. Indeed it is often obvious in battle that one could escape death by throwing away one’s weapons and by turning to sup- plicate one’s pursuers, and there are many ways to avoid death in every kind of danger if one will venture to do or say anything to avoid it. It is not difficult to avoid death, gentlemen of the jury, it is much more difficult to avoid wickedness, for it runs faster than death. Slow and elderly as I am, I have been caught by the slower pursuer, whereas my accusers, being clever and sharp, have been caught by the quicker, wickedness. I leave you now, condemned to death by you, but they are condemned by truth to wickedness and injustice. So I maintain my assessment, and they maintain theirs. This perhaps had to happen, and I think it is as it should be.
Now I want to prophesy to those who convicted me, for I am at the point when men prophesy most, when they are about to die. I say gentlemen, to those who voted to kill me, that vengeance will come upon you immediately after my death, a vengeance much harder to bear than that which you took in killing me. You did this in the belief that you would avoid giving an account of your life, but I maintain that quite the opposite will happen to you. There will be more people to test you, whom I now held back, but you did not notice it. They will be more difficult to deal with as they will be younger and you will resent them more. You are wrong if you believe that by killing people you will prevent anyone from reproaching you for not living in the right way. To escape such tests is neither possible nor good, but it is best and easiest not to discredit others but to prepare oneself to be as good as possible. With this prophecy to you who convicted me, I part from you.
In prison, he was given the opportunity to escape. He refused it. He had always taught that “the really important thing is not to live, but to live well.” And to “live well” meant, along
“It is not difficult to avoid death, gentlemen of the jury, it is much more difficult to avoid wickedness, for it runs faster than death.” — P L ATO ’ S S O C R AT E S
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with the more enjoyable things in life, to live according to your principles. When his friend Crito tried to persuade him otherwise, Socrates countered his pleas and arguments with powerful arguments of his own. Look carefully at the structure of these arguments and judge for yourself their soundness.
F RO M Crito B Y Plato3
SOCRATES: My good Crito, why should we care so much for what the majority think? The most reasonable people, to whom one should pay more attention, will believe that things were done as they were done.
CRITO: You see, Socrates, that one must also pay attention to the opinion of the majority. Your present situation makes clear that the majority can inflict not the least but pretty well the greatest evils if one is slandered among them.
SOCRATES: Would that the majority could inflict the greatest evils, for they would then be capable of the greatest good, and that would be fine, but now they cannot do either. They cannot make a man either wise or foolish, but they inflict things haphazardly.
CRITO: That may be so. But tell me this, Socrates, are you anticipating that I and your other friends would have trouble with the informers if you escape from here, as having stolen you away, and that we should be compelled to lose all our property or pay heavy fines and suffer other punishment besides? If you have any such fear, forget it. We would be justified in running this risk to save you, and worse, if nec- essary. Do follow my advice, and do not act differently.
SOCRATES: I do have these things in mind, Crito, and also many others.
CRITO: Have no such fear. It is not much money that some people require to save you and get you out of here. . . .
Besides, Socrates, I do not think that what you are doing is right, to give up your life when you can save it, and to hasten your fate as your enemies would hasten it, and indeed have hastened it in their wish to destroy you.
SOCRATES: My dear Crito, your eagerness is worth much if it should have some right aim; if not, then the greater your keenness the more difficult it is to deal with. We must therefore examine whether we should act in this way or not, as not only now but at all times I am the kind of man who listens only to the argument that on reflection seems best to me. I cannot, now that this fate has come upon me, discard the arguments I used; they seem to me much the same. I value and respect the same principles as before, and if we have no better arguments to bring up at this moment, be sure that I shall not agree with you, not even if the power of the majority were to frighten us with more bogeys, as if we were children, with threats of incarcerations and executions and confiscation of property. How should we examine this matter more reasonably? Would it be by taking up first your argument about the opinions of men, whether it is sound in every case that one should pay attention to some opinions, but not to others? Or was that well-spoken before the necessity to die came upon me, but now it is clear that this was said in vain for the sake of argument, that it was in truth play and nonsense? I am eager to examine together with you, Crito, whether
3 Plato, Crito, in The Trial and Death of Socrates, 2nd ed., trans. G. M. A. Grube. Copyright © 1975 by Hackett Publishing Company. Reprinted with permission.
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this argument will appear in any way differ- ent to me in my present circumstances, or whether it remains the same, whether we are to abandon it or believe it. It was said on every occasion that one should greatly value some opinions, but not others. Does that seem to you a sound statement? . . . Examine the following statement in turn as to whether it stays the same or not, that the most impor- tant thing is not life, but the good life.
CRITO: It stays the same.
SOCRATES: And that the good life, the beautiful life, and the just life are the same; does that still hold, or not?
CRITO: It does hold.
SOCRATES: As we have agreed so far, we must examine next whether it is right for me to try to get out of here when the Athe- nians have not acquitted me. If it is seen to be right, we will try to do so; if it is not, we will abandon the idea. As for those ques- tions you raise about money, reputation, the upbringing of children, Crito, those consid- erations in truth belong to those people who easily put men to death and would bring them to life again if they could, without thinking; I mean the majority of men. For us, however, since our argument leads to this, the only valid consideration, as we were saying just now, is whether we should be acting rightly in giving money and gratitude to those who will lead me out of here, and ourselves helping with the escape, or whether in truth we shall do wrong in doing all this. If it appears that we shall be acting unjustly, then we have no need at all to take into account whether we shall have to die, if we stay here and keep quiet, or suffer in another way, rather than do wrong.
CRITO: I think you put that beautifully, Socrates, but see what we should do.
SOCRATES: Let us examine the question together, my dear friend, and if you can make any objection while I am speaking, make it and I will listen to you, but if you have no objection to make, my dear Crito, then stop now from saying the same thing so often, that I must leave here against the will of the Athenians. I think it important to persuade you before I act, and not to act against your wishes. . . .
SOCRATES: Then . . . I ask you: when one has come to an agreement that is just with someone, should one fulfill it or cheat on it?
CRITO: One should fulfill it.
SOCRATES: See what follows from this: If we leave here without the city’s per- mission, are we injuring people whom we should least injure? And are we sticking to a just agreement, or not?
Plato (427–347 b.c.e.)
Plato was born into a family of wealth and political power. But in Athens, he fell under the influence of Socrates and turned his talents to philosophy. He conceived of a “phi- losopher-king,” the ideal wise ruler, who certainly did not exist in Athens. He was disillusioned by Socrates’ execution and devoted his life to continuing Socrates’ work. Plato set up the Academy for this purpose and spent the rest of his life teaching there. He first set down his reminiscences of Socrates’ life and death, and, using the dia- logue form with Socrates as his mouthpiece, he extended Socrates’ thought into entirely new areas, no- tably, metaphysics and the theory of knowledge. Plato incorporated a
theory of morality into his metaphysics and politics, particularly in The Republic. Like all Greeks, he saw ethics as part of politics and the good life for the individual in terms of the strength and harmony of the society. In The Republic, accordingly, Socrates argues against the various views of selfishness and hedonism that would interfere with such a conception. Virtue, he argues, is the harmony of the in- dividual soul as well as the harmony of the individual within the soci- ety. It is still difficult to know, since we have nothing from Socrates himself, how much is original Plato and how much is transcribed Socrates.
The name “Plato” literally means “broad shoulders.” (© Shutterstock.com/
pseudolongino)
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CRITO: I cannot answer your question, Socrates, I do not know.
SOCRATES: Look at it this way. If, as we were planning to run away from here, or whatever one should call it, the laws and the state came and confronted us and asked: “Tell me, Socrates, what are you intending to do? Do you not by this action you are attempting intend to destroy us, the laws, and indeed the whole city, as far as you are concerned? Or do you think it possible for a city not to be destroyed if the verdicts of its courts have no force but are nullified and set at naught by private individuals?” What shall we answer to this and other such arguments? For many things could be said, especially by an orator on behalf of this law we are destroying, which orders that the judgments of the courts shall be carried out. Shall we say in answer, “The city wronged me, and its decision was not right.” Shall we say that, or what?
CRITO: Yes, by Zeus, Socrates, that is our answer.
SOCRATES: Then what if the laws said, “Was that the agreement between us, Socrates, or was it to respect the judgments that the city came to?” And if we won- dered at their words, they would perhaps add: “Socrates, do not wonder at what we say but answer, since you are accustomed to proceed by question and answer. Come now, what accusation do you bring against us and the city, that you should try to destroy us? Did we not, first, bring you to birth, and was it not through us that your father married your mother and begat you? Tell us, do you find anything to criti- cize in those of us who are concerned with marriage?” And I would say that I do not criticize them. “Or in those of us concerned with the nurture of babies and the education that you too received? Were those assigned to that subject not right to instruct your father to educate you in the arts and in physical culture?” And I would say that they were right. “Very well,” they would continue, “and after you were born and nurtured and educated, could you, in the first place, deny that you are our offspring and servant, both you and your forefathers? If that is so, do you think that we are on an equal footing as regards the right, and that whatever we do to you it is right for you to do to us? You were not on an equal footing with your father as regards the right, nor with your master if you had one, so as to retaliate for anything they did to you, to revile them if they reviled you, to beat them if they beat you, and so with many other things. Do you think you have this right to re- taliation against your country and its laws? That if we undertake to destroy you and think it right to do so, you can undertake to destroy us, as far as you can, in return? And will you say that you are right to do so, you who truly care for virtue? Is your wisdom such as not to realize that your country is to be honoured more than your mother, your father, and all your ancestors, that it is more to be revered and more sacred, and that it counts for more among the gods and sensible men, that you must worship it, yield to it and placate its anger more than your father’s? You must either persuade it or obey its orders, and endure in silence whatever it instructs you to endure, whether blows or bonds, and if it leads you into war to be wounded or killed, you must obey. To do so is right, and one must not give way or retreat or leave one’s post, but both in war and in courts and everywhere else, one must obey the commands of one’s city and country, or persuade it as to the nature of justice. It is impious to bring violence to bear against your mother or father, it is much more so to use it against your country.” What shall we say in reply, Crito, that the laws speak the truth, or not?
“Not only now but at all times I am the kind of man who listens only to the argument that on reflection seems best to me.” — P L ATO ’ S S O C R AT E S
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CRITO: I think they do.
SOCRATES: “Reflect now, Socrates,” the laws might say, “that if what we say is true, you are not treating us rightly by planning to do what you are planning. . . .
“So decisively did you choose us and agree to be a citizen under us. Also, you have had children in this city, thus showing that it was congenial to you. Then at your trial you could have assessed your penalty at exile if you wished, and you are now attempting to do against the city’s wishes what you could then have done with her consent. Then you prided yourself that you did not resent death, but you chose, as you said, death in preference to exile. Now, however, those words do not make you ashamed, and you pay no heed to us, the laws, as you plan to destroy us, and you act like the meanest type of slave by trying to run away, contrary to your un- dertakings and your agreement to live as a citizen under us. First then, answer us on this very point, whether we speak the truth when we say that you agreed, not only in words but by your deeds, to live in accordance with us.” What are we to say to that, Crito? Must we not agree?
CRITO: We must, Socrates.
SOCRATES: “Surely,” they might say, “you are breaking the undertakings and agree- ments that you made with us without com- pulsion or deceit, and under no pressure of time for deliberation. You have had seventy years during which you could have gone away if you did not like us, and if you thought our agreements unjust. You did not choose to go to Sparta or to Crete, which you are always saying are well governed, nor to any other city, Greek or foreign. You have been away from Athens less than the lame or the blind or other handicapped people. It is clear that the city has been outstandingly more congenial to you than to other Athenians, and so have we, the laws, for what city can please if its laws do not? Will you then not now stick to our agreements? You will, Socrates, if we can persuade you, and not make yourself a laughingstock by leaving the city.
“Be persuaded by us who have brought you up, Socrates. Do not value either your children or your life or anything else more than goodness, in order that you may have all this as your defense before rulers there. If you do this deed, you will not think it better or more just or more pious, nor will any one of your friends, nor will it be better for you when you arrive yonder. As it is, you depart,
Socrates in Prison (1785) by Johann Heinrich Tischbein the Elder (bpk, Berlin/Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel/Lutz Braun/Art Resource, NY)
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if you depart, after being wronged not by us, the laws, but by men; but if you depart after shamefully returning wrong for wrong and injury for injury, after breaking your agreement and contract with us, after injuring those you should injure least—yourself, your friends, your country and us—we shall be angry with you while you are still alive, and our brothers, the laws of the underworld, will not receive [you] kindly, knowing that you tried to destroy us as far as you could. Do not let Crito persuade you, rather than we, to do what he says.”
. . .
CRITO: I have nothing to say, Socrates.
SOCRATES: Let it be then, Crito, and let us act in this way, since this is the way the god is leading us.
• By choosing to go on living in the city, Socrates has agreed with Athens to obey its laws. Therefore, even if he is wrongly condemned by the same laws, he has the duty to stay and accept his punishment. Do you agree that he has made such a tacit agreement? Do you agree that he has the duty to stay and accept punishment even if he was wrongly condemned? Have you entered into such an agreement with your community? Your country? What would you do if you were Socrates?
4 Plato, Phaedo, in The Trial and Death of Socrates, 2nd ed., trans. G. M. A. Grube. Copyright © 1975 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Socrates believed that the good of his “soul” was far more important than the transient pleasures of life. Accordingly, he preferred to die for his ideas than live as a hypocrite. An idea worth living for may be an idea worth dying for as well.
F RO M Phaedo B Y Plato4
And while he was saying this, he was holding the cup, and then drained it calmly and easily. Most of us had been able to hold back our tears reasonably well up till then, but when we saw him drinking it and after he drank it, we could hold them back no longer; my own tears came in floods against my will. So I covered my face. I was weeping for myself—not for him, but for my misfortune in being deprived of such a comrade. Even before me, Crito was unable to restrain his tears and got up. Apollodorus had not ceased from weeping before, and at this moment his noisy tears and anger made everybody present break down, except Socrates, “What is this,” he said, “you strange fellows. It is mainly for this reason that I sent the women away, to avoid such unseemliness, for I am told one should die in good omened silence. So keep quiet and control yourselves. . . .”
Such was the end of our comrade, Echecrates, a man who, we would say, was of all those we have known the best, and also the wisest and the most upright.
Is there anything that you believe so passionately that you would die for it? Is there anything that you believe so passionately that it really makes your life worth living? For most people,
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now as always, life is rather a matter of “getting by.” One of the more popular phrases of self-praise these days is “I’m a survivor.” But, ironically, a person who is not willing to die for anything (e.g., his or her own freedom) is thereby more vulnerable to threats and corruption. To be willing to die—as Socrates was—is to have a considerable advantage over someone for whom “life is everything.”
If you look closely at your life, not only at your proclaimed ideals and principles but also your desires and ambitions, do the facts of your life add up to its best intentions? Or are you, too, just drifting with the times, dissatisfied with ultimately meaningless jobs and mindless joyless entertainments, concerned with the price of tuition and some recent stupidity of your government, the petty competitions of school and society, the hassles of chores and assign- ments, car troubles and occasional social embarrassments, interrupted only by all too rare and too quickly passing pleasures and distractions? What we learn from Socrates is how to rise above all of this. Not that we should give up worldly pleasures—good food and fun, sex, sports and entertainment—and put our heads in the “clouds”; but we should see them in perspective and examine for ourselves that jungle of confused reactions and conditioned responses that we have unthinkingly inherited from our parents and borrowed from our peers. The point is not to give up what we have learned or to turn against our culture. Rather, the lesson to be learned from Socrates is that thinking about our lives and clarifying our ideals can turn them from a dreary series of tasks and distractions into a self-conscious ad- venture, one even worth dying for and certainly worth living for. It is a special kind of abstract thinking, rising above petty concerns and transforming our existence into a bold experiment in living. This special kind of thinking is called philosophy.
Another fascinating aspect of Socrates’ approach to philosophy was his unquenchable thirst for knowledge. For Socrates, the willingness to passionately question what we know— to doubt—was as important as knowledge itself.
The Death of Socrates (1787) by Jacques Louis David (Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY)
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F RO M Republic B Y Plato5
SOCRATES: Do you agree, or not, that when we say that a man has a passion for something, we shall say that he desires that whole kind of thing, not just one part of it and not the other?
GLAUCON: Yes, the whole of it.
SOCRATES: The lover of wisdom, we shall say, has a passion for wisdom, not for this kind of wisdom and not that, but for every kind of wisdom?
GLAUCON: True.
SOCRATES: As for one who is choosy about what he learns, especially if he is young and cannot yet give a reasoned account of what is useful and what is not, we shall not call him a lover of learning or a philosopher, just as we shall not say that a man who is difficult about his food is hungry or has an appetite for food. We shall not call him a lover of food but a bad feeder.
GLAUCON: And we should be right.
SOCRATES: But we shall rightly call a philosopher the man who is easily willing to learn every kind of knowledge, gladly turns to learning things, and is unsatiable in this respect. Is that not so?
B. What Is Philosophy? Philosophy is not like any other academic subject; rather it is a critical approach to all sub- jects, the comprehensive vision within which all other subjects are contained. Philosophy is a style of life, a life of ideas or the life of reason, which a person like Socrates lives all of the time, yet which many of us live only a few hours a week. It is thinking, about everything and any- thing. But mainly, it is living thoughtfully. Aristotle, the student of Plato, who was the student of Socrates, called this “contemplative” or philosophical life the ideal life for humankind. He did not mean, however, that one should sit and think all of the time without doing anything. Aristotle, like the other Greek philosophers, was not one to abstain from pleasure or from political and social involvement for the sake of isolated thinking. Philosophy need not, as commonly believed, put our heads in the clouds, out of touch with everyday reality. Quite to the contrary, philosophy takes our heads out of the clouds, enlarging our view of ourselves and our knowledge of the world, allowing us to break out of prejudices and harmful habits that we have held since we were too young or too naive to know better. To say that philosophy is “critical” is not to say that it is negative or nihilistic; it is only to say that it is reflective. It looks at and thinks about ideas carefully, instead of unthinkingly accepting them.
Philosophy puts our lives and our beliefs in perspective by enabling us to see afresh the ways in which we view the world, to see what we assume, what we infer, and what we know for certain. It also allows us to appreciate other views of the world. It encourages us to see the consequences of our views and sometimes their hopeless inconsistencies. It allows us to see the justification (or lack of it) for our most treasured beliefs, and to separate what we will con- tinue to believe with confidence from what we should consider doubtful or reject. It allows us the option of considering alternatives. Philosophy gives us the intellectual strength to defend what we do and what we believe to others and to ourselves. It forces us to be clear about the
“We shall rightly call a philosopher the man who is easily willing to learn every kind of knowledge.” — P L ATO ’ S S O C R AT E S
5 Plato, Republic, Bk. V, trans. G. M. A. Grube, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1974.
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limits as well as the warrants for our acts and beliefs. Consequently, it gives us the intellectual strength to understand, tolerate, and even sympathize with or adopt views very different from our own.
Philosophy is first and foremost a discipline that teaches us how to articulate, hold, and defend be- liefs that, perhaps, we have always held, but without having spelled them out and argued for them. For example, suppose you have been brought up in a deeply religious home; you have been taught re- spect for God and church, but you have never had to learn to justify or argue for your beliefs. You know that, although there are people who would disagree with you, your belief is a righteous and necessary one, but you have never had to explain this to anyone, nor have you tried to explain it to yourself. But now you enter college and immediately you are con- fronted by fellow students, some of whom you con- sider close friends and admire in many ways, who are openly skeptical about religion. Others accept very different doctrines and beliefs, and vociferously defend these. Your first reactions may be almost physical; you feel weak, flushed, and anxious. You refuse to listen, and if you respond at all, it is with a tinge of hysteria. You may get into fights as well as arguments. You feel as if some foundation of your life, one of its main supports, is slipping away. But slowly you gain some confidence; you begin to listen. You give yourself enough distance so that you will consider arguments about religion in just the same way you would consider arguments about some scientific or political dispute. You ask yourself why your friends don’t believe what you believe. Are their arguments persuasive, their reasons good reasons? You begin asking yourself how you came to believe in your religion in the first place, and you may well come up with the answer (many freshmen do) that you were “condi- tioned” by your parents and by society in general. Consequently, you may, perhaps for a time, perhaps for a lifetime, question or reject the ideas you had once “naturally” accepted. Or you may reaffirm your faith with new commitment, determined that, whatever the source, your beliefs are right or, at least, right for you. But after further consideration and argument, per- haps with some new religious experience, you come to see both sides of the arguments. For the first time, you can weigh their merits and demerits against each other without defensively holding onto one and attacking the other. You may remain a believer; you may become an atheist or an agnostic (a person who admits not knowing whether there is a God or not). Some people convert to another faith. Or one can adopt a position in which he or she gives all reli- gions (and nonreligion) equal weight, continuing to believe but not insisting that one belief is the only correct one or that a person is necessarily superior because of it. But whatever you decide, your position will no longer be naive and unthinking. You know the arguments, both for and against. You know how to defend yourself. And, most importantly, you have confidence that your position is secure, that you have considered its objections, and that you have mas- tered its strengths. So it is with all philosophical problems and positions. Philosophy does not
Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.)
One of the greatest Western philoso- phers, Aristotle was born in northern Greece (Stagira). His father was the physician to Philip, king of Macedonia, and he himself was to become the tutor to Philip’s son, Alexander the Great. For eighteen years, Aristotle was a student in Plato’s Academy in Athens, where he learned and parted from Plato’s views. After Plato’s death, he turned to the study of biology, and many of his theories ruled Western science until the Renais- sance. Aristotle was with Alexander until 335 b.c.e., when he returned to Athens to set up his own school, the Lyceum. After Alexander’s death, the anti-Macedonian sentiment in Athens
forced Aristotle to flee (commenting that the Athenians would not sin twice against philosophy). In addition to his biological studies, Aristotle virtually created the sciences of logic and linguistics; developed extravagant theories in physics and astronomy; and made significant contributions to metaphysics, ethics, politics, and aesthetics. His Metaphysics is still a basic text on the subject, and his Nicomachean Ethics codified ancient Greek morality. This latter work stresses individual virtue and excellence for a small elite of Greek citizens. The best life of all, according to Aristotle, is the life of contemplation, that is, the life of a philosopher, for it is the most self-contained and the “closest to the gods.” But such contempla- tion must be together with the pleasures of life, honor, wealth, and virtuous action.
Aristotle is sometimes referred to as “The Philosopher.” (© Shutterstock.com/Dhoxax)
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pull us away from our lives; it clarifies them. It secures them on intellectual ground in place of the fragile supports provided by inherited prejudices, frag- ments of parental advice, and mindless slogans bor- rowed from television commercials.
“Philosophy” sounds like a new and mysterious discipline, unlike anything you have ever encoun- tered. But the basic ideas of philosophy are familiar to all of us, even if we have not yet formally con- fronted the problems. In this sense, we are all philos- ophers already. Watch yourself in a crisis, or listen to yourself in an argument with a friend. Notice how quickly abstract concepts like “freedom,” “man- kind,” “self-identity,” “nature” and “natural,” “rela-
tive,” “reality,” “illusion,” and “truth” enter our thoughts and our conversations. Notice how certain basic philosophical principles—whether conservative or radical, pragmatic or idealis- tic, confident or skeptical, pedestrian or heroic—enter into our arguments and our thinking as well as our actions. We all have some opinions about God, about morality and its principles, about the nature of man and the nature of the universe. But because we haven’t questioned them, they are merely the assumptions of our thinking. We believe many things without having thought about them, merely assuming them, sometimes without evidence or good reasons. What the study of philosophy does for us is to make our ideas explicit, to give us the means to defend our presuppositions, and to make alternative suppositions available to us as well. Where once we merely assumed a point of view, passively and for lack of alternatives, we now can argue for it with confidence, knowing that our acceptance is active and critical, systematic rather than merely a collection of borrowed beliefs (who knows from where). To be critical means to examine carefully and cautiously, being willing, if necessary, to change one’s own beliefs. It does not need to be nasty or destructive. There is “constructive criticism” as well. And to “argue” does not mean to “have a fight”; an argument is nothing less than an attempt to justify our beliefs, to back them up with good reasons.
So what is philosophy? Literally, from the Greek (philein, sophia), it is “the love of wisdom.”6 It is an attitude of critical and systematic thoughtfulness rather than a particular subject matter. This makes matters very difficult for the beginner, who would like a definition of philosophy of the same kind received when he or she began biology, as “the study of living organisms.” But the nature of philosophy is itself among the most bitter disputes in philosophy. Many philoso- phers say that it is a science, in fact, the “queen of the sciences,” the womb in which physics, chemistry, mathematics, astronomy, biology, and psychology began their development before being born into their own distinguished worlds and separate university departments. Histori- cally, this is certainly true. (Thus, in almost any scientific field, the highest degree is “doctor of philosophy” [“Ph.D.”].) Insofar as one says that philosophy is the road to reality and that the goal of philosophy is truth, that would seem to make it the ultimate science as well.
But it has also been argued, as far back as Socrates, that the main business of philosophy is a matter of definitions—finding clear meanings for such important ideas as truth, justice, wisdom, knowledge, and happiness. Accordingly, many philosophers have taken advantage of the increasingly sophisticated tools of logic and linguistics in their attempts to find such definitions. Other philosophers, however, would insist that philosophy is rather closer to
6 The word was invented by Pythagoras. When he was asked if he was already a wise man, he answered, “No, I am not wise, but I am a lover of wisdom.”
“Philosophy is to be studied, not for the sake of any definite an- swers to its questions, since no definite answers can, as a rule, be known to be true, but rather for the sake of the questions themselves; because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against specula- tion; but above all because through the greatness of the uni- verse which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.”
Bertrand Russell, from The Problems of Philosophy
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morality and religion, its purpose to give meaning to our lives and lead us down “the right path” to “the good life.” Still others insist that philosophy is an art, the art of criticism and argumentation as well as the art of conceptual system building or, perhaps, the art of creating comprehensive and edifying visions, dazzling metaphors, new ways of thinking. So consid- ered, philosophy may be akin to storytelling or mythology. Some philosophers place strong emphasis upon proof and argument; others place their trust in intuition and insight. Some philosophers reduce all philosophizing to the study of experience; other philosophers take it as a matter of principle not to trust experience. Also, some philosophers insist on being practical—in fact, insist that there are no other considerations but practicality—and then there are others who insist on the purity of the life of ideas, divorced from any practical con- siderations. But philosophy cannot, without distortion, be reduced to any one of these prefer- ences. All enter into that constantly redefined critical and creative life of ideas that Socrates was willing to die for. In fact, Socrates himself insisted that it is the seeking of wisdom that is the essence of philosophy and that anyone who is sure that he or she has wisdom already is undoubtedly wrong. In The Apology, for example, he makes this famous disclaimer:
F RO M Apology B Y Plato7
The effect of these investigations of mine, gentlemen, has been to arouse against me a great deal of hostility, and hostility of a particularly bitter and persistent kind, which has resulted in various malicious suggestions, including the description of me as a professor of wisdom. This is due to the fact that whenever I succeed in disproving another person’s claim to wisdom in a given subject, the bystanders assume that I know everything about that subject myself. But the truth of the matter, gentlemen, is pretty certainly this: that real wisdom is the property of God, and this oracle is his way of telling us that human wisdom has little or no value. It seems to me that he is not referring literally to Socrates, but has merely taken my name as an example, as if he would say to us “The wisest of you men is he who has realized, like Socrates, that in respect of wisdom he is really worthless.”
That is why I still go about seeking and searching in obedience to the divine command, if I think that anyone is wise, whether citizen or stranger; and when I think that any person is not wise, I try to help the cause of God by proving that he is not. This occupation has kept me too busy to do much either in politics or in my own affairs; in fact, my service to God has reduced me to extreme poverty.
In the West (that is, Europe, North America, and those parts of the world most influenced by them), Socrates remains a pivotal figure. But philosophy did not begin in Greece. It is a three-thousand-year-old conversation, or, rather, many conversations, that began in many different places, all around the globe.
The oldest philosophical texts we know are from South Asia, in what is now India, dating from more than a thousand years before Socrates—three thousand years ago. A remarkable series of texts, the Vedas, became a source for many of the great religions of the world, be- ginning with what came to be called Hinduism (which for many centuries referred only to a very loose collection of local religious beliefs and practices) and then providing the
7 Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredennick, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1954.
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philosophical foundations for Buddhism. Before Socrates, too, in China, a modest teacher named Kong Fuzi (“Confucius”) started a very different philosophical tradition, in parallel with another Chinese philosophy called Daoism (sometimes spelled “Taoism”). And in the Middle East, of course, there was a great deal of philosophical activity, in ancient Persia as well as in the religious cauldron of Jerusalem. Moreover, there had been philosophers in Greece for several centuries by the time Socrates came on the scene, so that the world was already steeped in philosophy. The twentieth-century philosopher Karl Jaspers describes this as “The Axial Period,” and says that it was the turning point of civilization.
F RO M “The ‘Axial Period’” B Y Karl Jaspers8
It would seem that this axis of history is to be found in the period around 500 b.c.e., in the spiritual process that occurred between 800 and 200 b.c.e. It is there that we meet with the most deep-cut dividing line in history. Man, as we know him today, came into being. For short we may style this the “Axial Period.”
The most extraordinary events are concentrated in this period. Confucius and Lao-Tzu were living in China, all the directions of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo-ti, Chuang-tse, Lieh-tsu, and a host of others; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha, and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to skepticism, to materialism, sophism and nihil- ism; in Iran Zarathustra taught the challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance, from Elijah, by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah, to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the ap- pearance of Homer, of the philosophers—Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Plato—of the tragedians, of Thucydides, and of Archimedes. Everything that is merely inti- mated by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India, and the Occident without any one of these knowing of the others.
What is new about this age, in all three of these worlds, is that man becomes aware of Being as a whole, of himself and his limitations. He experiences the terrible nature of the world and his own impotence. He asks radical questions. Face to face with the void he strives for liberation and redemption. By consciously recognizing his limits he sets himself the highest goals. He experiences uncondi- tionality in the depth of self hood and in the clarity of transcendence.
8 From Karl Jaspers, Basic Philosophical Writings—Selections, edited, translated, and with introductions by Edith Ehrlich, Leonard H. Ehrlich, and George B. Pepper, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1986, pp. 382–387.
• Why might it be a good thing to have one’s head in “the clouds”?
• Why does Socrates think it is more difficult to avoid wickedness than death? Why does he think that one shouldn’t avoid death at any cost?
• How does Socrates respond to Crito’s attempt to persuade him to escape? What are his reasons and arguments for staying in jail? What would you do?
• What makes reason a good reason?
• Is philosophy more like an art or a science?
• Which requires explanation: the fact that things change (like your body) or the fact that some things seem eternal (like 2 + 2 = 4)?
Karl Jaspers was one of the great psychiatrists, philosophers, and exis- tentialist theologians of the twentieth century. (© Bettmann/Corbis)
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Although this book is grounded in the Western tradition since Socrates, it is important to keep in mind the traditions from Asia as well. It would be utterly foolish to try to summarize the differences between “East and West,” as too many commentators try to do, especially since the Western tradition is thought to include both the reason-oriented legacy of the Greeks and the faith-oriented religions of the Hebrews and Christians, and eventually Islam, too. Furthermore, the diversity of ideas in Asia is colossal, between the “all is One” philoso- phy of the ancient Vedas to the world- and self-as-illusion philosophy of Buddhism and the alignment of the Chinese to the Dao (“the Way”). But it might be worth making a few rather simplified comments about similarities and differences. The first concerns the remarkable affinities between the philosophies that arose in Greece and the Middle East (“Asia Minor”) and the ancient Vedic philosophies, particularly in their mutual fascination with unified ex- planation. (Think of the “unity of science,” evident even in the earliest Greek philosophies, and monotheism, which pretty much defined the three great “Western” religions.)
Second, there is a dramatic contrast between the Greek notion of logos, suggesting “logic” and eternal truth (it also serves a central function in Christianity, as in “in the begin- ning was the logos”), and the Chinese conception of the Dao, which is more oriented toward change, movement, and process. Closely related to this is the Western affection for polari- ties and oppositions (good vs. evil, reality vs. appearance, the sacred vs. the secular) and the Chinese insistence on yin/yang, the interrelatedness of such seeming opposites. Of equal importance, Western thought over the past two thousand years has been pretty much de- fined by its attempts to come to grips with the idea of the One God. (Atheists, too, are caught up in the arguments concerning God’s nature and existence.) Much of Eastern thought, by contrast, has no such concern, or it is a very different kind of concern, although the notion of spirituality plays a central role in many Asian religions.
But while admitting that these very general characterizations brush over a wealth of inter- esting differences, it is worth insisting that the inclusion of Asian and other voices in the text that follows should not be treated as exotic spice added to the substance of philosophy, nor should it be thought of as mere echoes of Western ideas. Rather, it is an attempt to open windows to a number of very different perspectives, sometimes in contrast, sometimes as unexpected support. But philosophy has many faces and voices, and as one learns to appre- ciate the profundity of philosophical inquiries it is necessary to appreciate its diversity as well.
With diversity in mind, we can bring this section to a close with a very different descrip- tion of philosophy from the ancient Chinese Daoist philosopher Laozi in the texts of the Dao De Jing.9 Here Laozi sounds a bit like the ancient Greek Parmenides.
F RO M Dao De Jing B Y Laozi10
14 Look for it, and it can’t be seen. Listen for it, and it can’t be heard. Grasp for it, and it can’t be caught. These three cannot be further described, so we treat them as The One.
9 The philosopher and his text are sometimes referred to in the classic Wade-Giles transliteration as Lao-Tzu and the
Tao Te Ching. The modern pinyin style is now much preferred, and we use it throughout this edition to refer to all Chinese names. 10 From Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. J. H. McDonald, 1996 (for the public domain).
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The best leaders value their words, and use them sparingly. When she has accomplished her task, the people say, “Amazing: we did it, all by ourselves!”
C. A Modern Approach to Philosophy The orientation to philosophy in this book is, inevitably, essentially a modern Western ap- proach in which criticism plays a predominant role. Historically, modern European philoso- phy has its origins in the rise of science and technology. (As you shall see, philosophy and science both emerged in ancient Greece and Asia Minor and, about the same time, in South and East Asia.) We should understand science, however, not just as a particular discipline or subject matter, but rather as a state of mind, a way of looking at the world. In the European tradition, this means that the world is understandable and every event in the world is ex- plainable. It sees the universe as rational—operating according to universal laws. And it sees the human mind as rational, too—in the sense that it can grasp and formulate these laws for itself. European philosophy and science also put enormous emphasis on the mind of the individual and the ability of human beings to learn the truth about reality.
Although science is essentially a team effort, requiring the labor and thinking of thou- sands of men and women, the great breakthroughs in science have often been the insights of one man or woman alone. The most famous modern example of this individual genius is the British philosopher-scientist Isaac Newton. In the eyes of his contemporaries and
Laozi
Laozi likely flourished in the fourth century b.c.e., and is generally be- lieved to be the author of the Dao De Jing, the founding and most im- portant text for all Taoist thought. “Laozi” is an honorific title, which can be roughly translated as “the Old Master” or “the Old Child.” Laozi and Confucius are said to have met in the Imperial Library of the Zhou Dynasty court. The older Laozi likely had a great influence on the younger Confucius’ thought. Laozi believed in Dao or “the Way,”
which is the flowing reality that encompasses everything, with which we should try to attune our lives. Following the Dao means adopting the principle of wu-wei, or action through inaction. To follow the Dao is to be like a river: it is not that one does not move or engage in action, but that the action is a kind of effortlessness; it does not in- volve striving. The Dao De Jing covers many of the traditional areas of philosophy, but the text is more poetic than many philosophical texts and is difficult to read straightforwardly. It is often viewed as falling within the mystical tradition of philosophical writing.
Laozi is supposed to have de- livered the Dao De Jing to an official and then disappeared, riding an ox. (© iStockphoto.com/ HultonArchive)
Its highest is not bright. Its depths are not dark. Unending, unnameable, it returns to
nothingness. Formless forms, and imageless images, subtle, beyond all understanding.
Approach it and you will not see a beginning; follow it and there will be no end. When we grasp the Tao of the ancient ones, we can use it to direct our life today. To know the ancient origin of Tao: this is the beginning of wisdom.
17 The best leaders are those the people hardly
know exist. The next best is a leader who is loved and
praised. Next comes the one who is feared. The worst one is the leader that is despised. If you don’t trust the people, they will become untrustworthy.
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followers, he single-mindedly mastered the laws of the universe, while sitting (so the story goes) under an apple tree. The ideal of modern Western philos- ophy is, in a phrase, thinking for yourself. That is, philosophy is thinking for yourself about basic ques- tions—about life, knowledge, religion, and what to do with yourself. It is using the rationality built into your brain to comprehend the rationality (or lack of it) in the world around you. In some cultures, how- ever, the emphasis lies on the group or community, and thinking for yourself is not as important as maintaining group harmony and cohesiveness. In India and China, for example, it is the elusiveness of scientific knowledge that defines much of philoso- phy. In many of these traditions enlightenment rather than scientific knowledge is the main goal of philosophy. It is important to keep this difference in mind.
In much of Western tradition, the central demand of modern philosophy is the auton- omy of the individual person. This means that each of us must be credited with the ability to ascertain what is true and what is right, through our own thinking and experience, with- out just depending upon outside authority: parents, teachers, popes, kings, or a majority of peers. This does not mean that you should not listen to or, where appropriate, obey other people. Nor does it mean that whatever you think is true or right, even “for you.” What it means is that whether you believe in God or not, for example, must be decided by you, by appeal to your own reason and arguments that you can formulate and examine by yourself. Whether you accept a scientific theory, a doctor’s diagnosis, a television network’s version of the news, or the legitimacy of a new law are also matters to be decided by you on the basis of evidence, your evaluation of the testimony or authority of others, principles that you can accept, and arguments that you acknowledge as valid. Nevertheless, all of this—the evidence, your evaluation, testimony, and principles—must be subject to exami- nation by other people and other standards than just your own. The truth is not whatever you believe but that how you come to understand and justify the truth is nevertheless your responsibility. This stress on individual autonomy stands at the very foundation of contem- porary Western thought. We might say that it is our most basic assumption. (Accordingly, we shall have to examine it as well; but the obvious place to begin is to assume that we are—each of us—capable of carrying out the reflection and criticism that philosophy demands of us.)
Historically, the position of individual autonomy can be found most famously in Socrates, who went against the popular opinions of his day and, consequently, sacrificed his life for the “Laws” and principles he believed to be right. It also appears in many me- dieval philosophers, some of whom also faced grave danger in their partial rejection or questioning of the authority of the Church. It can also be found in those philosophers who, like the Buddha, struck out from established society to find a new way. The stress on indi- vidual autonomy comes to dominate Western thinking in that intellectually brilliant period of history called the Enlightenment (sometimes called “the Age of Reason”), which began in the late seventeenth century and continued through the French Revolution (1789). It ap- peared in different countries with varying speed and intensity, but ultimately it influenced
Isaac Newton (1642–1727)
One of the most formidable intel- lectual figures in history. Newton was an innovator in multiple areas. His contributions include the theory of universal gravitation and the basic laws of classical mechanics, the theory of the calculus (indepen- dently developed by Gottfried Leibniz), and the reflective tele- scope. Newton also wrote exten- sively on religious topics. He found the intricate organization of nature to be evidence of a divine Creator who had organized the world according to principles that human reason could apprehend.
A nineteenth-century engraving of Isaac Newton. (© iStockphoto.com/GeorgiosArt)
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the thinking of Europe, from England and France to Spain and Russia, and became the ideology of young America, which used Enlightenment doctrines in the formulation of a “Declaration of Independence,” a war for its own autonomy, and a new government es- tablished on Enlightenment principles. Those principles were, whatever the variations from one country or party to another, the autonomy of the individual and each person’s right to choose and to speak his11 own religious, political, moral, and philosophical beliefs, to “pursue happiness” in his own way, and to lead the life that he, as a reasonable person, sees as right.
If these principles have often been abused, creating confusion and sometimes anarchy and encouraging ruthlessness in politics and strife in a mixed society, they are principles that can be challenged only with great difficulty and a sense of imminent danger. Once the individual’s right or ability to decide such matters for himself or herself is denied, who shall decide? Society no longer agrees on any single unambiguous set of instructions from the Scriptures. Those in power are no longer trusted. We are rightfully suspicious of those who attack the individual, because it is not clear what else they have in mind. What- ever the abuses, and whatever political, social, or economic systems might be required to support them, philosophical autonomy is the starting point. Even in the most authority- minded societies, autonomy and the ability to think beyond prescribed limits remain essential.
The metaphor of enlightenment is common to many cultures. The comparison of clear thinking with illumination is to be found in ancient, Christian, and Eastern thought as well as in modern philosophy and comic-book symbolism (e.g., the cartoon lightbulb over a character’s head). The seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) was one of the founders of the Enlightenment, and he was particularly fond of
the “illumination” metaphor. He is generally recog- nized as the father of modern philosophy. Like Socrates two thousand years before him, Descartes believed that each person was capable of ascer- taining what beliefs were true and what actions were right. But whereas Socrates searched for the truth through dialogue and discussion, Descartes searched in the solitude of his own thinking. With considerable risk to his safety, he challenged the authority of the French government and the Catho- lic Church. He insisted that he would accept as true only those ideas that were demonstrably true to him. Against what he considered were obscure teachings of the Church and often opaque com- mands of his government, Descartes insisted upon “clear and distinct ideas” and arguments based upon “the light of reason.” The modern philosophy of individual autonomy began with Descartes. As a matter of fact, his results were quite conservative. He retained much of his medieval teachings: he continued to believe in God and the Church, and
René Descartes (1596–1650)
The French philosopher who is usually considered the “father of modern philosophy.” Descartes was raised in the French aristoc- racy and educated at the excellent Jesuit College of La Flèche. He became skilled in the classics, law, and medicine; however, he de- cided that they fell far short of proper knowledge, so he turned to modern science and mathematics. His first book was a defense of Copernicus, which he prudently did not publish. Descartes discov- ered, while still a young man, the connections between algebra and geometry (developing the field we now call “analytic geome- try”) and used this discovery as a model for the rest of his career. Basing the principles of philosophy and theology on a similar math- ematical basis, he was able to develop a method in philosophy that could be carried through according to individual reason and no longer depended upon an appeal to authorities whose insights and methods were questionable. In Discourse on Method (1637), he set out these basic principles, which he had already used in Meditations on First Philosophy (not published until 1641), to reex- amine the foundations of philosophy. Descartes sought a basic premise from which, as in a geometric proof, he could deduce all the principles that could be known with certainty.
11 Not, at that point in history, hers as well. The concept of a woman’s autonomy and right to choose is a late nineteenth-century idea that has only recently become accepted.
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he made it his first “moral maxim” to “obey the laws and customs of my country.” His chal- lenge to authority was rather his method, which signified one of the greatest revolutions in Western thought. From Descartes on, the ultimate authority was to be found in man’s own thinking and experience, nowhere else.
None of this is meant to deny authority as such, nor is it to deny the “objectivity” of truth. Appeals are still made to authority, but authorities are never to be taken as absolutes. For example, none of us would particularly like to go out and establish on our own the figures of the 2010 census of the U.S. population. But it is up to the individual whether or not to accept the official “authoritative” figures, to question, if necessary, the integrity or motiva- tion of the authorities, and to appeal, if necessary, to alternative sources of information. Nevertheless, the true figures do exist, whether we or anyone else ever discovers them. Intellectual autonomy and integrity do not demand that we give up the search for truth but rather that we should be continually critical—of both ourselves and others—in the pursuit of it.
For anyone beginning to study philosophy today, Descartes is a pivotal figure. His method is both easy to follow and very much in accord with our own independent temperaments. Descartes proceeded by means of logical arguments, giving his readers a long monologue of presentations and proofs of his philosophical doubts and beliefs. Like Socrates before him, Descartes used his philosophy to cut through the clouds of prejudice and unreliable opinions. He was concerned with their truth, no matter how many people already believed them—or, how few. Descartes’s arguments were his tools for finding this truth and distin- guishing it from falsehood and mere opinion.
Philosophy has always been concerned with truth and mankind’s knowledge of reality. Not coincidentally, Descartes’s new philosophy developed in the age of Galileo and the rise of modern science. In ancient Greece, the origins of philosophy and the birth of Greek science were one and the same. The truth, however, is not always what most people believe at any given time. (Most people once believed that the earth was flat and stationary, for ex- ample.) But, at the same time that they simply refuse to accept “common sense,” philoso- phers try not to say things that common sense finds absurd. For example, a philosopher who
This detail from Dreaming of Immortality in a Thatched Cottage by Tang Yin (1470–1524) reflects the Daoist ideal of free and easy mental wandering. (© Art Archive, The/Art Archive, The/SuperStock)
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in a public speech really denied that anyone existed besides himself would clearly be absurd. So too, the philosopher who argued that he knew that nobody ever knows anything. Never- theless, philosophers often take such claims very seriously, if only to refute them and show us why they are absurd.
Accordingly, two of the most important challenges in the philosopher’s search for truth are (1) skepticism and (2) paradox. In skepticism, the philosopher finds himself or herself unable to justify what every sane person knows to be the case; for example, that we are not merely dreaming all of the time. In Eastern as well as Western philosophy, skepticism has provided a valuable probe for our everyday presumptions of knowledge, and it some- times becomes a philosophy in its own right. In a paradox, an absurd conclusion seems to result from perfectly acceptable ways of thinking. For example, there is the familiar para- dox of Epimenides the Cretan, who claimed that “all Cretans are liars.” (That sounds rea- sonable enough.) But if what he said was true, then he was lying and what he said, accordingly, was false. But how can the same statement be both true and false? What Epimenides said was true only if it was false at the same time. That is a paradox, and when- ever a philosophical argument ends in paradox we can be sure that something has gone wrong. Again, in both East and West, philosophers have always been intrigued by para- doxes and have often been prompted by them to strike out in bold new directions in search of a resolution.
Skepticism begins with doubt. The philosopher considers the possibility that something that everyone believes is possibly mistaken. Some doubt is a healthy sign of intellectual au- tonomy, but excessive doubting becomes skepticism, which is no longer healthy. It has its obvious dangers: if you doubt whether you are ever awake or not, you might well do things that wouldn’t have serious consequences in a dream but would be fatal in real life (e.g., jumping out of a plane). Philosophers who have doubts about the most ordinary and seem- ingly unquestionable beliefs are called skeptics. For example, there was the Chinese phi- losopher who, when he once dreamed that he was a butterfly, started wondering whether he really were a butterfly—dreaming that he was a philosopher. But however challenging skep- tics may be as philosophers, in practice their skepticism is impossible. Accordingly, one of the main drives in philosophy has been to refute the skeptic and return philosophy to common sense (to prove, e.g., that we are not dreaming all of the time). Opposed to skepti- cism is an ancient philosophical ideal, the ideal of certainty, the ability to prove beyond a doubt that what we believe is true. Socrates and Descartes, in their very different ways, tried to provide precisely this certainty for the most important beliefs, and thus refute the skeptics of their own times.
In Western philosophy, the precision of mathematics has long served as an ideal of knowl- edge. In mathematics, we believe, we can be certain. For Descartes, certainty is the criterion, that is, the test according to which beliefs are to be evaluated. But do we ever find such certainty? It seems that we do, at least in one discipline Descartes suggested— mathematics. Who can doubt that two plus two equals four or that the interior angles of a triangle total 180 degrees? Using mathematics as his model, Descartes (and many genera- tions of philosophers following him) attempted to apply a similar method in philosophy. First, he had to find, as in Euclidean geometry, a small set of “first principles” or axioms that were obvious or self-evident. They had to be assumed without proof or be so fundamental that they seemed not to allow any proof. These would serve as premises or starting points for the arguments that would take a person from the self-evident axioms to other principles that might not be self-evident at all. But if they could be deduced from other principles that were already certain, like the theorems of geometry, then they would share the certainty of the principles from which they had been derived.
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Descartes was a scientist and a mathematician as well as a philosopher. With that in mind, we can understand his Discourse on Method. Descartes set out four basic rules that would define philosophy for many years:
F RO M Discourse on Method B Y René Descartes12
The first of these was to accept nothing as true which I did not clearly recognise to be so; that is to say, carefully to avoid precipitation and prejudice in judgments, and to accept in them nothing more than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly that I could have no occasion to doubt it.
The second was to divide up each of the difficulties which I examined into as many parts as possible, and as seemed requisite in order that it might be resolved in the best manner possible.
The third was to carry on my reflections in due order, commencing with objects that were the most simple and easy to understand, in order to rise little by little, or by degrees, to knowledge of the most complex, assuming an order, even if a fictitious one, among those which do not follow a natural sequence relatively to one another.
The last was in all cases to make enumerations so complete and reviews so gen- eral that I should be certain of having omitted nothing.
One might say that the essence of these rules is to be cautious and to think for oneself. The premises, upon which all else depends, must be utterly beyond doubt, “perfectly certain,” otherwise all else is futile. The test or criterion of such a prem- ise is that it be “a clear and distinct idea,” self-evident, and “springing from the light of reason alone.”
You will see much more of Descartes in the following chapters. Descartes’ technique for assuring the certainty of his premises will be what he called the method of doubt (or method- ological doubt). In order to make sure that he did not accept any principle too quickly (“too precipitously”) before being convinced of its “perfect certainty,” he resolved to doubt every belief until he could prove it true beyond question, and to show that the very act of doubting this belief led to an intolerable paradox. The point of this kind of argument is not to become a skeptic, but, quite the contrary, to find those premises that even the skeptic cannot doubt. From those premises, Descartes and many generations of philosophers who have followed him have attempted and will attempt to prove that we do indeed know what we think we know. Like Socrates, Descartes began by questioning what no one but a philosopher would doubt and ended up changing the way we think about ourselves and our knowledge for several centuries. In other cultures too, entire societies have been dramatically altered by philoso- phers who challenged what seemed to be obvious; sometimes they challenged reality itself.
Finally, two contemporary philosophers sum up their views of philosophy. The first is by the great English philosopher Bertrand Russell. The second one is by Mary Midgley:
But further, if we are not to fail in our endeavour to determine the value of philoso- phy, we must first free our minds from the prejudices of what are wrongly called “practical” men. The “practical” man, as this word is often used, is one who
“The first of [my rules] was to accept . . . nothing more than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly that I could have no occasion to doubt it.” — R E N É D E S C A R T E S
12 Excerpt from Discourse on Method by René Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, 1911. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
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recognises only material needs, who realises that men must have food for the body, but is oblivious of the necessity of providing food for the mind. If all men were well off, if poverty and disease had been reduced to their lowest possible point, there would still remain much to be done to produce a valuable society; and even in the existing world the goods of the mind are at least as important as the goods of the body. It is exclusively among the goods of the mind that the value of philosophy is to be found; and only those who are not indifferent to these goods can be persuaded that the study of philosophy is not a waste of time.13
Is philosophy like plumbing? Plumbing and philosophy are both activities
that arise because elaborate cultures like ours have, beneath their surface, a fairly complex system which is usually unnoticed, but which sometimes goes wrong. In both cases, this can have serious consequences. Each system sup- plies vital needs for those who live above it. Each is hard to repair when it does go wrong, because neither of them was ever consciously planned as
a whole. There have been many ambitious attempts to reshape both of them, but existing complications are usually too widespread to allow a completely new start.
Neither system ever had a single designer who knew exactly what needs it would have to meet. Instead, both have grown imperceptibly over the centuries, and are con- stantly being altered piecemeal to suit changing demands, as the ways of life above them have branched out. Both are therefore now very intricate. When trouble arises, specialized skill is needed if there is to be any hope of locating it and putting it right.
Here, however, we run into the first striking difference between the two cases. About plumbing, everybody accepts this need for specialists with painfully acquired technical knowledge. About philosophy, people—especially British people—not only doubt the need, they are often skeptical about whether the underlying system even exists at all. It is much more deeply hidden. When the concepts we are living by function badly, they do not usually drip audibly through the ceiling or swamp the kitchen floor. They just quietly distort and obstruct our thinking.14
Socrates lived, as we do, in a society that was highly articulate and self-conscious—indeed, strongly hooked on words. It may well be that other cultures, less committed to talking, find different routes to salvation, that they pursue a less word- bound form of wisdom. But wisdom itself matters everywhere, and everybody must start from where
13 Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, 1912. 14 Mary Midgley, from “Water and Thought” in Utopias, Dolphins, and Computers: Problems of Philosophical Plumb- ing. London: Routledge, 2006, pp. 1–2. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Books UK.
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970)
One of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century. As a young man, Russell wrote, with Alfred North Whitehead, a book called Principia Mathematica (1903), which set the stage for modern logic and foundations of mathematics and gave logic a central role as a philosophical tool. He wrote an enormous number of philosophical books on virtually every topic, including several noto- rious polemics in favor of atheism and what was branded “free love.” Russell was a persistent and harsh
critic of religion in general and Christianity in particular, as a source of what he called superstition and legitimized murder. He was a committed pacifist during World War I and wrote at least one of his most famous books while sitting in prison for his antiwar activities. Like his famous predecessor, David Hume (with whom he has much in common), Russell was too controversial for most universities, and a famous court case prevented him from teaching at the City College of New York. He won the Nobel prize for literature in 1950.
Philosopher Bertrand Russell (© Bettmann/Corbis)
Mary Midgley (1919–)
A moral philosopher and animal rights advocate. Midgley is a note- worthy critic of the view that science is a sufficient basis for under- standing ourselves and the world.
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they are. I think it might well pay us to be less impressed with what philosophy can do for our dignity, and more aware of the shocking malfunctions for which it is an essential remedy.
D. A Brief Introduction to Logic Descartes’ strategy, and the technique of many philosophers, is to present arguments for what they believe. In Plato’s Crito, Socrates and Crito offer arguments for their views, and Socrates wins because his arguments are better. An argument is a verbal attempt to get other people to accept a belief or opinion by providing reasons why they should accept it. We usually think of an argument as a confrontation between two people. When they try to convince each other, they usually resort to certain verbal means, and it is with these means that a philosopher is concerned. Of course, there are other ways of getting people to agree with you—tricks, bribes, brainwashing, and threats of physical force. But the use of arguments is the most du- rable and trustworthy, as well as the most respectable, way of getting others to agree. Free- dom of speech is the cornerstone of democracy (and the bane of totalitarianism) just because of our faith in the ability of arguments to determine the best among competing opinions. On the other hand, one should not think of an argument as a political weapon whose purpose is to shut down conversation or put other people and their opinions on the defensive. It is always reasonable to ask for arguments, but it may not be reasonable to push a person for arguments that he or she cannot provide. To fail to argue for a position is not necessarily to give up on it, and to refute the arguments for a position is not necessarily to reject the position.
You don’t have to be arguing with anyone in particular in order to construct an argument. Editorials in newspapers, for example, argue for a position, but not necessarily against anyone. But whether your argument is a letter to a magazine, in which you are trying to con- vince the entire American population of your views, or a personal letter, in which you are trying to convince a friend not to do something foolhardy, the main point of argument is to demonstrate or establish a point of view. A scientist describing an experiment tries to dem- onstrate to other scientists the truth of his or her theory. A politician tries to demonstrate to his or her constituency the need for higher taxes. A philosopher tries to demonstrate to us the value of a certain view of life, a certain view of reality, a certain view of ourselves. In each case, these people try to give as many reasons as possible why other people should accept their view of things; in short, they use arguments to persuade others.
Argument involves at least two components: logic and rhetoric. Logic concerns those reasons that should hold for anyone, anywhere, without appealing to personal feelings, sym- pathies, or prejudices. Rhetoric, on the other hand, does involve such personal appeals. Personal charm may be part of rhetoric, in a writer as well as in a public speaker. Jokes may
• Why is doubt important to philosophy?
• Why not simply rely on our senses for certainty?
• List a few differences between Eastern and Western philosophy.
• Do you have “a philosophy”? What is it?
• What does philosophy deal with?
• How does philosophy begin?
• What is the meaning of life? (Extra bonus points if you can answer this one.)
• Why does Socrates insist on the importance of good reasons?
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be part of rhetoric. Personal pleas are effective rhetorical tools; so is trying to be sympa- thetic to readers or playing off their fears. None of these personal tactics are part of logic, however. Logic is impersonal, and for this reason logic may be less flamboyant and person- ally exciting; but it has the advantage of being applicable to everyone. A logical argument goes beyond rhetorical appeal. But it is important to understand that logic and rhetoric virtually always function together. Although it is possible to be persuasive through pure rhetoric without being at all logical, such efforts often disappear as soon as readers have had a chance to think again about how they have been persuaded. One can also be logical without attention to rhetoric, but such arguments will be dry and unattractive, even if they do convince anyone who would take the time to read them. However, logic and rhetoric in combination can be very persuasive and are rarely separable in any great work of philoso- phy. In all of the readings of this book, you will notice the combination of impersonal logic and personal appeal, all aimed at getting the reader to agree with the author’s point of view.
There are good arguments and there are bad arguments. Just as the success of a logi- cally inadequate argument may depend upon the passing mood of a reader or the fact that he or she has not yet heard the other side, so a good argument must survive passing moods, reflection, and criticism. This requires good logic as well as effective rhetoric, and so it is important to master the basic rules of argument, as well as to be aware of the all too common pitfalls that lie in wait for those who ignore the rules. Knowing these rules and warnings will not only help you avoid what are called fallacies—it will allow you to criticize effectively other people’s arguments as well. Have you ever heard someone say, “Well, there’s some- thing wrong with that argument, but I’m not sure what it is”? Knowing a little logic may help you see clearly what is wrong with an argument.
Standard logic textbooks emphasize two primary forms of logical argument:
1. Deductive arguments reason from one statement to another by means of accepted logical rules; anyone who accepts the premises is bound logically to accept the conclusion.
2. Inductive arguments infer one statement from another, but it is possible for the con- clusion to be false even if all of the premises are true. The most familiar example of an inductive argument is a generalization from a set of particular observations to a gen- eral statement called a “hypothesis.”
1. Deductive Arguments A deductive argument is valid when it correctly conforms to the rules of deduction, when it is impossible for the premise(s) to be true and the conclusion false. In this sense, the premise(s) guarantee the truth of the conclusion. The following are some examples of the most familiar rules:
1. It was either Phyllis or Fred. (It was Phyllis or it was Fred.) It wasn’t Phyllis. Therefore it was Fred.
2. Both Tom and Jerry went to the circus last night. (Tom went to the circus last night and Jerry went to the circus last night.) Therefore Tom went to the circus last night.
3. If Carol did that all by herself, then she’s courageous. Carol did it all by herself. Therefore Carol is courageous.
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It is important to emphasize that whether or not an argument is valid depends only on the form of the argument. A valid argument—one in the correct form—can still have a conclu- sion that is false. Consider this:
4. If Carol did that all by herself, then elephants can fly. Carol did it all by herself. Therefore elephants can fly.
Notice that example 4 is identical in form to example 3. The conclusion is patently false, but the argument is still valid.
But what good is a deductive argument if its conclusion can be false? The answer is that if the initial statements are true, then the truth of the conclusion is guaranteed. The initial statements are called premises, and if the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true if the argu- ment form is valid. It is important to remember that a deductive argument cannot prove its own premises. To be effective, you must be sure of the premises before beginning the deductive argument. Thus the following argument, although it is valid, is an appallingly bad argument:
5. If someone argues for socialized medicine, then he or she is a communist. Communists want to kill people. Therefore if someone is for socialized medicine, he or she wants to kill people.
This argument has the valid form:
5.’ If p then q. If q then r. Therefore if p then r.
But although the argument is valid, its premises are not true, and therefore they provide no guarantee that the conclusion is true. A valid argument guarantees the truth of the conclu- sion only if the premises are true. Therefore, in using or evaluating any deductive argument, you must always ask yourself two things:
a. Are the premises true? b. Is the argument valid?
If the answer to both of these is yes, then the argument is said to be sound. An argument in an essay may not appear exactly in the form provided by the rules of
deduction. This does not mean that the argument is invalid. In example 5, the second premise, “Communists want to kill people,” must be restated in “If . . . then . . .” form. In fact, straight- forward copying of the rules of deduction in an essay makes boring reading, so arguments usually must be restated in order to fit these forms exactly. When you are writing an argument, it is nec- essary to pay attention both to the validity of the ar- gument and to the degree of interest with which it is stated. Sometimes it is permissible to leave out one of the premises, if it is so obvious to every reader that actually stating it would seem absurd. For example,
6. Men can’t give birth. Therefore Robert can’t give birth.
The missing premise, of course, is Robert is a man.
But it would be unnecessary in most contexts to say this. When using deductive arguments effectively, rhetorical considerations are important, too.
“If I say ‘Today’s Tuesday’ and it’s Tuesday, then what I said is true. On Wednesday or Sunday, it’s not. If I say ‘If today’s Tuesday, then I have a philosophy paper due’ and it’s true that today’s Tuesday, then I can soundly conclude that ‘I have a philosophy paper due.’ If I say ‘If today’s Tuesday, then I have a philosophy paper due’ and then I lie and say ‘It’s Tuesday’ when it’s not, then I can validly conclude that ‘I have a philosophy paper due,’ but this conclusion is unsound because I lied about ‘It’s Tuesday’.”
George Gale, Olson Professor of Philosophy, University of Missouri–Kansas City
TRUTH, VALIDIT Y, AND SOUNDNESS
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One of the best-known forms of deductive reasoning is called the syllogism. It refers to one kind in particular: deductive arguments, with two premises and a conclusion, usually involving membership in groups, and using the terms “all,” “some,” and “none.” The best known example is
7. All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal.
The first statement, “All men are mortal,” is called the major premise; the second statement, “Socrates is a man,” is called the minor premise. The final statement, following from the other two, is the conclusion and is generally preceded by the word “therefore.” In this example, the words “men” and “man” are called the middle term, the word “mortal” is called the predi- cate, and the name “Socrates” is called the subject. The middle term serves to link the subject and the predicate, both of which are joined in the conclusion. The form of this syllogism is
7.’ All A’s are B’s. C is an A. Therefore C is a B.
Any nouns can be substituted for the A, B, and C in this deductive form. For example,
8. All cows are pigeons. George Washington is a cow. Therefore George Washington is a pigeon.
Argument 8 is valid, although its conclusion is false. The reason, of course, is that the prem- ises are false. Again, a valid argument does not guarantee a true conclusion unless the prem- ises are true. So always be certain that you have adequately defended the premises before beginning your deduction.
Valid arguments sometimes proceed from negative premises as well as positive assertions. For example,
9. No woman has ever been president. Eleanor Roosevelt was a woman. Therefore Eleanor Roosevelt was not president.
The form is
9.’ No A’s are B’s. C is an A. Therefore C is not a B.
(© Shutterstock.com/Viorel Sima) (© iStockphoto.com/Savas Keskiner)(© Shutterstock.com/pandapaw)
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Another common argument is
10. Some elephants weigh more than two thousand pounds. Elephants are animals. Therefore some animals weigh more than two thousand pounds.
The form, with a little rephrasing, is
10.’ Some A’s are B’s. (Some elephants are more than two thousand pounds in weight.) All A’s are C’s. (All elephants are animals. The “all” is implicit.) Therefore, some C’s are B’s. (Some animals are more than two thousand pounds in weight.)
Not all deductive arguments are syllogisms in this traditional sense. For example, the following is a valid deductive argument, but not a syllogism:
11. Jones is an idiot, and he (Jones) is also the luckiest man alive. Therefore Jones is an idiot.
The form of this argument is
11.’ p and q. Therefore p.
In the discussion that follows, therefore, we will talk about deductive arguments in general and not worry whether they are properly to be called “syllogisms” or not.
It is impossible in this introduction to list all of the correct forms of deduction. We will, however, describe some of the most dangerous fallacies, mistakes in deductive form. The following example is one, for it looks dangerously like example 10':
12. Some elephants are domesticated. Some camels are domesticated. Therefore some elephants are camels.
This form
12.’ Some A’s are B’s. Some C’s are B’s. Therefore some A’s are C’s.
is invalid (not valid), and is thus a fallacy. This fallacy often appears in political arguments. For example,
13. We all know that some influential Republicans are corrupt. And we all know that at least some Communists are corrupt. Therefore we know that at least some Republicans are Communists.
When stated so simply, the fallacy is obvious. But when this argument is spread through a long-winded speech, such fallacies are often accepted as valid arguments. Using the logi- cian’s symbolic forms to analyze a complex speech or essay will often make clear the validity or invalidity of an argument.
Another common fallacy closely resembles the deductive form in example 3:
14. If this antidote works then the patient will live. The patient lived. Therefore the antidote works.
This looks valid at first glance, but it is not. The patient may have recovered on his or her own, proving nothing about the antidote. The form of this argument is
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14.’ If p then q. q. Therefore p.
The correct deductive form of example 3 was
If p then q. p.
Therefore q.
Be particularly careful of the difference between these two. “If . . . then . . .” statements are often used in another pair of arguments, one valid, one
invalid. The valid one is
15. If this antidote works then the patient will live. The patient didn’t live. Therefore the antidote did not work.
The form is
15.’ If p then q. Not q. Therefore not p.
This is valid, although one might insist on adding an explicit qualification to the first prem- ise. The qualification is, “for nothing else whatever can save the patient,” since one might argue that something else, perhaps a miracle, might save the patient rather than the antidote. Notice that this qualification doesn’t save the invalid argument in example 14, however, nor does it save the invalid argument in the following example:
16. If this antidote doesn’t work, then the patient will die. The antidote works. Therefore the patient won’t die.
Again, the patient might very well die of other causes, despite the antidote. The form
16.’ If p then q. Not p. Therefore not q.
is invalid. Most valid and invalid deductive argument forms are a matter of common sense. What
makes fallacies so common is not ignorance of logic so often as sloppy thinking or writing, or talking faster than one can organize thoughts in valid form. Most important, therefore, are careful thinking and writing. Yet even the greatest philosophers commit fallacies, and you will see some of them.
2. Inductive Arguments In deduction, the conclusion never states more than the premises. (It is often said that the conclusion is already “contained in” the premises.) In an inductive argument, the conclusion always states more than the premises. It is, therefore, a less certain form of argument, but that does not mean that it is any less important. Many of the premises in deductive argu- ments will come from inductive ones, and most of our knowledge and almost all of science depend upon induction. Induction takes various forms and defies rigid characterization. One general form of an inductive argument is
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Every A we have observed is a B. Therefore every A is a B.
The argument, in other words, is from an observed set of things to an entire class of things. For example
17. Every crow we have observed in the past twenty years is black. Therefore all crows are black.
But induction, unlike deduction, does not guarantee the truth of the conclusion, even if we know that the observations are all cor- rect. So the conclusion of example 17 should properly read:
It is probable that all crows are black.
This tentative conclusion is called a hypothesis. A hypothesis is an educated guess on the basis of the evidence collected thus far. It is always possible, when we are using induction, that a new piece of evidence will turn up that will refute the hypothesis. This new piece of evidence is called a counterexample. Inductive arguments must always be ready for such counterexamples because no induc- tive argument guarantees certainty. There is always the possibility that a counterexample will be found, or that a better hypothesis will be formulated. This is not to say, however, that we should not accept such arguments. Human beings have observed millions of rabbits, and never has a rabbit weighed more than two thou- sand pounds. This does not mean that it is impossible to find a two-thousand-pound rabbit, but neither does it mean that we should therefore hesitate to believe that no rabbits weigh more than two thousand pounds. Induction is never certain, but, on the basis of the evidence, we can nevertheless agree on the best hypothesis. It is worth noting, however, that some philosophers, following David Hume (see Chapter 2), have claimed that induction is without rational justification, no matter how undeniably useful it may be.
There are good (strong) and bad (weak) inductive arguments. The most familiar reason why an inductive argument may be called unsound is generalization on the basis of too few examples. For instance, the following is clearly weak:
18. Every U.S. president from the state of Pennsylvania has been a Democrat. Therefore we can suppose that every U.S. president from the state of Pennsylvania will be a Democrat.
There has only been one president from Pennsylvania, and the intricacies of politics are clearly such that the next president from Pennsylvania could as likely be a Republican as a Democrat. Similarly,
19. The driver of every Italian bus we rode had a beard. Therefore all Italian bus drivers have beards.
is weak. Although the sampling involves more than one example, this is still not sufficient to make a strong inductive generalization. How many examples are required? It varies with the case. If a chemist, conducting an experiment, adds chemical g to chemical h and gets j, that in itself will probably warrant a hypothesis that
g + h → j,
“Just then flew down a monstrous crow, as black as a tar- barrel!” (Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass) (Image © Anton Harder, 2011. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
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although this hypothesis, like all hypotheses, will have to be tested by further experiments and observations. (Deductions, on the contrary, do not have to be tested, assuming the truth of their premises.) A chemist can usually assume that one set of pure chemicals will react like any other set of the same chemicals. But when the hypothesis is about people, generalizations should be made with extreme caution, especially when writing about such a sensitive subject as “national character.” For example, “Italians are . . . ,” “Russians tend to be . . . ,” “Americans are too . . .” require extreme care. But caution does not mean that it is impossible to write about such subjects. It has often been done brilliantly, and you might even agree that a person who re- fuses to see the general differences between different peoples and societies is even more foolish than someone who generalizes too quickly and carelessly. But all generalizations (even this one) must be made with care for the context and the subject matter.
A different kind of inductive unsoundness comes from generalizing to a hypothesis that goes too far beyond what the evidence will sup- port. For example,
20. Every graduate we know of from Delmonico High School is an excellent athlete. Therefore we can suppose that the physical education teachers there must be very good.
The problem here is not too small a sampling; in fact, we might even look at every graduate of Delmonico High School. The problem is that this kind of evidence isn’t sufficient to prove anything about the teachers. The students might come from athletic homes. Or the food in the
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student cafeteria might be loaded with extra vitamins and protein. Or the students may enjoy playing sports outside of school, even though their gym classes are badly taught. It is important to be sure that the hypothesis you defend is supported by the right kind of evidence. In this case, we need evidence about the physical education teachers, not just about the students.
Not every inductive argument proceeds from evidence to a generalization. For example, detectives use inductive arguments in moving from the evidence to the indictment of a par- ticular individual. (What Sherlock Holmes refers to as his “powers of deduction” is in fact his remarkable ability with induction.) It is worth noting that not every philosopher thinks that induction is so important for knowledge. For example, the British philosopher Karl Popper believes that the logic of science (and police investigations) proceeds not by way of induc- tion but by way of the disconfirmation of proposed hypotheses with counterexamples. In other words, knowledge proceeds from hypothesis to hypothesis, not from evidence to hypothesis by way of induction. But whatever one thinks of the justifiability of induction and its importance, it is essential not to think of induction as occurring in a vacuum. Inductive reasoning always goes on against a background of other hypotheses, theories, and scientific viewpoints as well as an abundance of other evidence that is taken for granted, built into the hypothesis itself or, perhaps, ignored as irrelevant, undependable, or unimportant. Because of its formality, deduction can deal with isolated arguments. But induction, even when sub- jected to the formal rigors of probability theory, can never be so understood out of context. Background conditions and the state of knowledge at the moment are always in some sense presupposed. Because of this informal (if not chaotic) complexity, induction is just as much a matter of insight as logic.
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A very different kind of problem arises for induction when the hypothesis is self- confirming. A self-confirming hypothesis creates its own confirmation or, alternatively, blocks all possible counterexamples from the start. Two familiar examples: a policeman (in uniform) tries to evaluate the driving patterns of the cars that pass him, making sure that they all drive at the legal speed. Of course they do! But the same sort of self-confirmation often goes on in subtle ways in science, for example, where the equipment itself is designed to present precisely the evidence it is supposed to be looking for. The other example is the paranoid, who advances the hypothesis that “they’re all out to get me.” Given that way of looking at the world, indeed they are. Not only does the paranoid systematically interpret other peo- ple’s behavior in a hostile way, but he also behaves in such a way that people really do become wary of him, if not hostile to him. But again, this extreme case has thousands of more everyday instances; persons who feel friendless may easily work on a mild version of the paranoid hypothesis and confirm their own thesis. A person who entertains the hypoth- esis that “all people are basically selfish” will have little trouble finding what he or she is looking for, and, within that investigation, some selfish motive can always be found (for ex- ample, “in order not to feel guilty”) for even the most generous and unselfish behavior. (We might note that there are also self-defeating hypotheses; the policeman may hypothesize that everyone breaks the law and go out, in uniform, to catch them, thereby undermining his own hypothesis.)
3. Argument by Analogy A form of inductive argument that is sometimes controversial is argument by analogy. An argument by analogy defends the similarity between some aspect of two things on the basis of their similarity in other respects. For example, a politician defends the need for more efficient government and fewer unnecessary jobs on the basis of an argument by analogy between government and business. A government is like a business, the politician argues. It has a certain product to turn out, namely, services to the people, and receives a certain income from the sale of that product, namely, taxes. It employs a certain number of people, whose job it is to turn out that product and who are paid with that income. Their business is to produce the product as cheaply but as well as possible, to keep the cost down, and make a profit in order to be able to offer new and better services. Thus, the politician argues, the more efficiently it is run and the fewer unnecessary employees it must support, the better a government will be.
Such an argument is valuable in getting people to see similarities and in clarifying com- plex and confusing issues. The danger, and the reason why many logicians reject arguments by analogy altogether, is that no two things are similar in every respect. (Otherwise, they would be the same.) And just because two things are similar in certain respects, it doesn’t follow that they will be similar in others. But this objection is too strong. If two things are simi- lar in several respects, it is at least plausible to suggest that they will be similar in others. For example, running the government is like running a business. Both involve managing an or- ganization. Both require skill in handling money. The success of both depends on the quality of the products and services they produce. Therefore, the way to handle the city transporta- tion problem, for instance, is to ask which plan will give the most service for the least money.
Arguments by analogy may employ both deductive and inductive arguments; insofar as A (government) is like B (a business), deductions appropriate in discussing A will be appro- priate in discussing B as well. And if A and B are similar in so many ways, then it is inductively plausible that they will be similar in other ways as well. So arguments by analogy are at least a valuable form of reasoning, if not always a reliable form of proof. It is important, however,
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to pay careful attention to each particular analogy, to make sure that the two things com- pared are significantly similar and, most importantly, that the aspect that is argued about is significantly similar in both cases. Arguments by analogy are extremely valuable, but they must always be used with care. In traditional Western philosophy, analogies and metaphors play an enormous but often unappreciated role in the great philosophical classics. The as- sumption, or at least the expectation, is that these analogies and metaphors can be recast in terms of deductive and inductive arguments. But not all philosophical traditions make this assumption. In Chinese philosophy, for example, analogical reasoning is far more central to philosophical disputation than deductive arguments. What the philosopher does, in certain traditions, is to provide new ways of seeing things—a particular virtue of arguments by anal- ogy. So, too, in many folk philosophies around the world, the use of myth and metaphor has not yet been replaced—and probably cannot be replaced—by the standard logics of West- ern reasoning. The place of logic itself can be an important philosophical problem.
The three kinds of arguments discussed here—deductive, inductive, and argument by analogy—attempt to defend a view or an opinion. But part of almost every argument is an attack on alternative views and opinions. In general, someone else’s position can be ques- tioned by asking the following:
a. What is he or she arguing? Is the position clear?
b. What are the arguments? Are they deductive? Inductive? Or by analogy?
If deductive: What are the premises and are they all true? Are the deductive arguments valid?
If the answer to either of these questions is no, a good counterargument exists to show that the adversary has not given us a reason for accepting his or her view.
If inductive: Is there enough evidence to support the hypothesis? Does the evidence support the hypothesis? Is the hypothesis sufficiently clear? Is this the best hypothesis to explain the evidence?
How often do analogies compare apples and oranges? (© Shutterstock.com/Gunnar Pippel)
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If the answer to any of these is no, a good counterargument exists to show that the adversary has not defended his or her general claim.
If argument by analogy: Are the things compared similar? Are the things similar in the relevant respects in question?
If the answer to either of these is no, a good argument exists to show that the oppo- nent’s analogy is not a good one.
c. Does the conclusion mean what the opponent says it means?
4. Necessary and Sufficient Conditions, “Logical Possibility,” and Arguments by Counterexample Two concepts that will be of considerable importance in understanding the arguments of the great philosophers are the concepts of “necessary and sufficient conditions” and “logi- cal possibility.” A is a necessary condition for B when B can’t happen without A. So B re- quires A; if A doesn’t happen then B can’t happen; or necessarily if B then A. A is a sufficient condition for B when A is enough to guarantee B, so A implies B, or necessarily if A then B. Consequently A is necessary and sufficient for B when A is both required for B and enough to guarantee B (“A if and only if B”). When this happens, A and B necessarily go together— you can’t have one without the other.
A definition supposedly supplies necessary and sufficient conditions. Thus, a way of chal- lenging a philosophical definition or theory put forward—for example, a definition or theory of “justice” or “freedom”—is to show that it is logically possible to have an A without B, or a B without A. What you have supplied are counterexamples, not to an inductive argument or hypothesis, but to a philosophical claim. Since definitions or philosophical claims or theories give necessary and sufficient conditions, the person who has thus defined A in terms of B has to go back to the drawing board.
One need not actually find a counterexample in order to challenge a philosophical defini- tion. Insofar as definitions claim to provide logically necessary and sufficient conditions, it is enough that you can merely imagine a possible counterexample. That is to say, since a defini- tion proffers logically necessary and sufficient conditions that cover all possible cases, the mere logical possibility of a counterexample suffices to challenge the definition. Whenever a philoso- pher makes a general or a universal claim, it is possible to challenge it with a counterexample.
In Section 2, we mentioned counterexamples with respect to inductive generalizations. A counterexample that refutes a hypothesis, such as “here is an a that is not b,” will always give trouble to someone who argues that “all a’s are b’s.” For example, if a bigot says, “All people from Poland are naturally unintelligent,” the single counterexample of Copernicus, a Pole, is sufficient to undermine that claim. Counterexamples may also work in the face of deductively defended claims, however. Consider a common philosophical argument (which we shall discuss in Chapter 8):
21. All events in nature are determined by physical forces (gravity, chemistry, electromag- netic forces, and so on). All human actions are events in nature. Therefore all human actions are determined by physical forces.
This syllogism is a valid argument, of the form
21.’ All A’s are B’s. All C’s are A’s. Therefore all C’s are B’s.
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One way to attack this valid argument, even if you don’t see any reasons to reject the premises as such, is to use the method of counterexamples: “Look. I decided to come to this college of my own free will. I thought about it for a few days, and I re- member the exact moment when I made my decision—while eating pizza at Harry’s restaurant. Now I made that decision. It wasn’t caused in me by physical forces. Therefore, I reject your conclusion.”
What has happened here is this: On the one hand, if we accept the premises as true and the argument as valid, it would seem that we have to accept the conclusion. But what the counterexample does in this case is force the person who has argued the syllogism to clarify what is meant by “deter- mined by physical forces” in both the premise and the conclu- sion. Does this mean only that some forces must be present? If so, the argument is not nearly so interesting as we thought, for everyone will admit that when a person makes a decision there is an electrical charge or a chemical change in the brain. Does it mean rather that there are only physical causes present, in which case “free will” is indeed excluded? But what then of the counterexample (your college decision)? The burden of
proof is on the person who argued the syllogism; he or she is forced to explain how it seems that you made a decision of your own free will when in fact there is no such thing as free will. You can see how this philosophical argument could become very compli- cated, but we only want to make a simple point. A single, well-placed counterexample can open up a whole new discussion, even when it might seem as if the matter had al- ready been settled.
A general comment is necessary here. It might seem to you as if arguments are conclu- sive, one way or the other. In fact, this is almost never the case. An argument can be con- vincing and persuasive, but there is always room for further argument if someone is stubborn or persistent enough. A good counterexample can always be explained away, and even a large number of counterexamples might be explained away if one is willing to adjust other aspects of the theory, by refining definitions, for example. What ultimately sinks a bad hypothesis or general claim is the weight of the extra explanations it needs. For example, someone argues that there are Martians currently living on the Earth. You point out that no one has ever seen a Martian. Your opponent explains this away by suggesting that the Mar- tians are invisible to the human eye. You argue that the atmosphere on Earth would not support Martian life. Your opponent argues that they are a different form of life, different from any that we can understand. You ask your opponent what these Martians do and how we might come to test his or her view. He or she says that the Martians don’t want us to know that they are here, so they are careful not to do anything that would let us discover their presence. At this point, you will probably walk away in disgust. You have not silenced your opponent. In fact, he or she might go on inventing new ways out of your arguments forever. But, at a certain point, your opponent’s explanations will have become so obviously self-serving and defensive that you and everyone else will be completely justified in ignor- ing him or her. The point of argument, remember, is to persuade. Absolute proof is impos- sible. But this means, too, that persuading some people is also impossible. There are limits to argument—at least, practical limits.
What would it take to convince you that Martians actually exist? (© iStockphoto.com/Tomacco)
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5. Reductio ad Absurdum One last argument deserves mention. It is usually called by its Latin name, reductio ad absurdum, and is a form of deductive argument. It is, however, an “indirect” argument. It consists of taking your opponent’s view and showing that it has intolerable or contradictory consequences. For example, someone argues that one can never know whether minds exist other than one’s own. You counter by pointing out that the very act of arguing this with you contradicts his point. He replies, no doubt, that he can’t know that you exist. You show that he cannot even know that he exists. What you have done is reduce your opponent’s view to absurdity, showing that it leads to consequences that no one could accept, in this case, the idea that he cannot have self-knowledge at all. A reductio ad absurdum argument, like a good counterexample, is often an excellent way of forcing other people to clarify their posi- tions and explain more carefully exactly what they mean to argue.
6. The Most Insidious Kinds of Fallacies No brief survey of logic would be adequate without identifying other fallacies, more general and more tempting than those we discussed previously under deductive arguments. Whatever kinds of arguments you employ, be careful when you are tempted to use the following:
MERE ASSERTION The fact that you accept a position is not sufficient for anyone else to believe it. Stating your view is not an argument for it, and unless you are just answering a public opinion survey, every opinion always deserves a supporting argument. There are statements, of course, that everyone would accept at face value, and you need not argue those. But that does not mean that they cannot be argued, for even the most obvious facts of common sense must be argued when challenged—this is what much of philosophy is about.
BEGGING THE QUESTION Another fallacy is something that looks like an argument but simply accepts as a premise what is supposed to be argued for as a conclusion. For example, suppose you are arguing that one ought to be a Christian, and your reason is that the Bible tells you so. This may, in fact, be conclusive for you, but if you are trying to convince someone who doesn’t believe in Christ, he or she will probably not believe what the Bible says, either. As an argument for becoming a Christian, therefore, referring to the Bible begs the question. Question begging often consists of a reworded conclusion, as in “This book will improve your grades because it will help you to do better in your courses.” Although it is often used—improperly—to suggest that one is asking a question implicitly, begging the question does not mean to pose a question, nor does it mean that question is implicitly raised or demanded. It is simply a logical fallacy that uses the conclusion of an argument as one of its premises.
VICIOUS CIRCLE Begging the question is similar to another error, which is often called arguing in a “vicious circle.” Consider a more elaborate version of the above fallacy. A person claims to know God exists because she has had a religious vision. Asked how she knows that the vision was religious rather than just the effect of something she ate, she replies that such an elaborate and powerful experience could not have been caused by anyone or anything but God. Asked how she knows this, she replies that God Himself told her—in the
Begging the question involves assuming as a premise what you set out to prove. It is not a literal case of begging. (© Shutterstock.com/Luis Molinero)
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vision. Or, “he must be guilty because of the look on his face.” “How do you know that he looks guilty rather than frightened or sad?” “Because he’s the one who did it, that’s why!” If you argue A because of B, and B because of C, but then C because of A, you have argued in a vicious circle. It is vicious because, as in begging the question, you have assumed just what you want to prove. But the following is worth remembering: Ultimately, all positions may come full circle, depending upon certain beliefs that can be defended only if you accept the rest of a great many beliefs. Debates between religious people and atheists are often like this, or arguments between free marketeers and Marxists, where many hours of argument show quite clearly that each person accepts a large system of beliefs, all of which depend on the others. Some logicians call this a “virtuous circle,” but this does not mean that there are no vicious circles. A virtuous circle is the development of an entire world view, and it requires a great deal of thinking and organizing. Vicious circles, like begging the question, are usually shortcuts to nowhere that result from careless thinking.
IRRELEVANCIES You have seen people who argue a point by arguing everything else, throwing up charts of statistics and
complaining about the state of the universe and telling jokes—everything but getting to the point. This may be a technique of wearing out your opponent; it is not a way of persuading him or her to agree with you. No matter how brilliant an argument may be, it is no good to you unless it is relevant to the point you want to defend.
AD HOMINEM ARGUMENTS The most distasteful kind of irrelevancy is an attack on your opponent personally instead of arguing against his or her position. It may well be that the person you are arguing against is a liar, a sloppy dresser, bald and ugly, too young to vote or too old to work, but the only question is whether what he or she says is to be accepted. Harping on the appearance, reputation, manners, intelligence, friends, or possessions of your opponent may sometimes give your readers insight into why he or she holds a certain position, but it does not prove or disprove the position itself. As insight into an opponent’s motives, personal considerations may, in small doses, be appropriate. But more than a very small dose is usually offensive, and it will usually weigh more against you than against your opponent. Whenever possible, avoid this kind of argument completely. It usually indicates that you don’t have any good arguments yourself.
UNCLEAR OR SHIFTING CONCLUSIONS One of the most frustrating arguments to read is an argument that has a vague conclusion or that shifts conclusions with every paragraph. If something is worth defending at all, it is worth stating clearly and sticking with. If you argue that drug users should be punished, but aren’t clear whether you mean people who traffic in heroin or people who take aspirin, you are not worth listening to. If you say that you mean il- legal drug offenders, don’t argue that drugs are bad for your body, since this is equally true for both legal and illegal drugs. If you say that you mean amphetamine users, then don’t switch to talking about the illegality of drugs when someone explains to you the several medi- cal uses of amphetamines. Know what you are arguing, or your arguments will have no point.
CHANGING MEANINGS It is easy to miss a fallacy when the words seem to form a valid argument. For example, consider this:
People are free as long as they can think for themselves.
An example of an irrelevancy (© Shutterstock.com/ VisibleMind)
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Prisoners in jail are free to think for themselves. Therefore, prisoners in jail are free.
This paradoxical conclusion is due to the ambiguity of “free,” first used to refer to a kind of mental freedom, second to refer to physical freedom. An interesting example is the argu- ment often attributed to the famous British philosopher John Stuart Mill: “Whatever people desire, that is what is desirable.” But notice that this argument plays with an ambiguity in the English language. Not everything that is in fact desired should be desired (for example, al- cohol by alcoholics), so the argument is deductively invalid. (Mill makes the case, however, that the only evidence that x is desirable is that people in fact desire it.) Be careful that the key terms in your argument keep the same meaning throughout.
DISTRACTION Another familiar form of fallacy is the “red herring,” the sometimes long- winded pursuit of an argument leading away from the point at issue. For example, in the middle of an argument about the relation between the mind and the brain, a neu- rologist may well enjoy telling you, in impressive detail, any number of odd facts about neurology, about brain operations he or she has performed, about silly theories that neurology-ignorant philosophers have defended in the past. But if these do not bear on the issue at hand, they are only pleasant ways of spending the afternoon, not steps to settling a difference of opinion. Distraction is a fallacy that is especially advantageous when the time for argument is limited. (For this reason, it is particularly prevalent in the classroom.)
PSEUDO-QUESTIONS Sometimes fallacious reasoning begins with the very question being asked. For example, some philosophers have argued that asking such questions as “How is the mind related to the body?” or “Could God create a mountain so heavy that even He could not move it?” are pseudo-questions; that is, they look like real questions—even profound questions—but are ultimately unanswerable because they are based on some hidden piece of nonsense. (In these two cases, it has been suggested that there is no legiti- mate distinction between mind and body, and therefore any question about how they are “related” is pointless; the second question presumes that God is “omnipotent” in the sense that He can do the logically impossi- ble, which is absurd.) Pseudo-questions, like distractions, lead us down a lengthy path going nowhere, except that, with pseudo- questions, we start from nowhere as well.
DUBIOUS AUTHORIT Y We mentioned earlier that modern phi- losophy is based on the assumption that we have a right—and sometimes a duty—to question authority. Yet, most of our knowledge and opinions are based on appeals to authorities— whether scientists or “the people” are particularly wise or not. It would be extremely foolish, if not fatal, not to so appeal to au- thorities, especially in a world that has grown so technologically and socially complicated. We ask an economist what will happen if interest rates fall. We ask Miss Manners which fork to use for the salad. The fallacy of dubious authority arises when we ask the wrong person, when we appeal to an expert who is not in fact an expert in the area of concern. For example, when physi- cians are asked questions about nuclear policy or physicists are asked questions about high school education, their expertise in one field does not necessarily transfer to the other. Appealing to opinions in books and newspapers depends on the authority of
“Red herring” refers to something so surprising that it can distract people from making good arguments. (© Shutterstock.com/Tonis Pan)
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the authors and publications in question. What is in print is not necessarily authoritative.
SLIPPERY SLOPE Metaphors often pervade argu- ments. One of the more common metaphors is the “slippery slope,” the greased incline that, once trod, inevitably carries us to the bottom. (In politics, it is sometimes called “the chilling effect” or “the domino theory.”) For example, it is argued that any interference with free speech whatsoever, even for- bidding someone to scream “fire” in a crowded au- ditorium, will sooner or later lead to the eradication of free speech of every kind, including informed, responsible political discussion. But is it the case that, by attacking an extreme instance, we thereby endanger an entire institution? Sometimes, this may be so. But more often than not, the slippery slope metaphor leads us to think that there is such inevita- bility when in fact there is no such thing.
ATTACKING A STRAW MAN Real opponents with real arguments and objections are sometimes difficult to refute, and so the easy way out is to attack an unreal opponent with easily refutable arguments and objec- tions. This unreal fellow is called a “straw man,” and he provides us with the extra advantage of not fighting back. For example, a writer of religion attacks those
who have suggested that Muhammad never existed, when in fact his opponents have only questioned a particular interpretation of his being a prophet. A writer discussing the mind– body problem lampoons those who believe that there is no possible correlation between mental events and some (perhaps unknown) physical events—a position that has been argued by virtually no one.
PIT Y (AND OTHER EMOTIONAL APPEALS) Some forms of fallacy appeal to the better parts of us, even as they challenge our fragile logical abilities. The appeal to pity has always been such an argument. Photographs of suffering people may well be an incentive to social action, but the connection between our pity—which is an undeniable virtue—and the social action in question is not yet an argument. The appeal to pity—and all appeals to emotion— have a perfectly legitimate place in philosophical argument, but such appeals are not yet themselves arguments for any particular position. An orator may make us angry, but what we are to do about the problem must be the product of further argument.
APPEAL TO FORCE Physical might never makes philosophical right. Sometimes a person can be intimidated, but he or she is not thus refuted. Sometimes one has to back up a philo- sophical conviction with force, but it is never the force that justifies the conviction.
INAPPROPRIATE ARGUMENTS The last fallacy we will mention has to do with choice of methods. To insist on deductive arguments when there are powerful inductive arguments against you is a fallacy, too—not a fallacious argument, perhaps, but a mistake in logic all the same. For example, if you are arguing deductively that there cannot be any torture going on in a certain country, since Mr. Q rules the country and Mr. Q is a good man (where the implicit premise is that “good men don’t allow torture in their country”), you had better be willing to
When we attack a straw man, we’ve been taken in by a scarecrow. (© Shutterstock.com/Joao Virissimo)
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give up the argument when dozens of trustworthy eyewitnesses publicly describe the tor- tures they have seen or experienced. To continue with your deduction in the face of such information is foolish. This may not tell you where your argument has gone wrong: Perhaps Mr. Q is not such a good man. Or perhaps he has been overpowered. Or perhaps good men can’t prevent torture if they aren’t told about it. But in any case, the argument must now be given up.
The same may be true the other way around. Certain abstract questions seem to be an- swerable only by deduction. When arguing about religious questions, for example, looking for evidence upon which to build an inductive argument may be foolish. What is at stake are your basic concepts of religion and their implications. Evidence, in the sense of looking around for pertinent facts, may be irrelevant. Very abstract questions often require deduc- tive arguments only.
To be caught in one of these fallacies is almost always embarrassing and damaging to your overall argument. If you have a case to make, then make it in the most powerfully per- suasive way. An intelligent combination of deductive and inductive arguments, coupled with analogies and proper criticisms of alternative positions, is the most effective persuasion available. If you think your opinions are important, then they deserve nothing less than the best supporting arguments you can put together.
As you proceed with your course, you will have the opportunity to use many of these logi- cal forms, not only on the great philosophers of the past but on your own thinking as well. You will find that philosophical criticism is a powerful tool in the arguments you have with your friends and the debates you carry on, whatever the topic. Most importantly, philosophy is a valuable aid to getting together your own thoughts about things, about the problems of philosophy that you will encounter in this book, and about life in general.
But then again, why should we assume that the truth is all that coherent or logical? As Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote:
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.—“Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.”—Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythago- ras was misunderstood, and Socrates and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.15
Nevertheless, it would be prudent to advise: do not contradict yourself. Even if you are “great” it is unpleasant to be misunderstood, especially by your instructor. A prudent consistency is the salvation of most students.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
The founder of American tran- scendentalism, a philosophical movement that defended the idea of an intuitively accessible spiri- tual reality. This spiritual realm is more fundamental than the mate- rial world. Emerson wrote essays on such topics as self-reliance, fate, and the virtue of cultivating one’s individual character and avoiding conformity.
American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson (Art Resource, NY)
15 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self Reliance,” New York: Wise, 1929, pp. 143–44.
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KEY TERMS ad hominem argument argument assertion assumption autonomy axiom begging the question Buddha certainty coherent contradictory counterexample criterion critical Dao deductive argument doubt
Enlightenment fallacy first principles generalization hypothesis implication infer inductive argument invalid logic method (sometimes, methodology) method of doubt (or methodological doubt) paradox predicate premise
presupposition proof reason reasons reductio ad absurdum reflection rhetoric self-evident skepticism sound syllogism system valid vicious circle weak
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
The trial, imprisonment, and death of Socrates are recounted by Plato in the dialogues Apology, Crito, and Phaedo in The Trial and Death of Socrates, 3rd ed., trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001).
Excellent accounts of Socrates’ life are A. E. Taylor, Socrates (New York: Doubleday, 1959), and, with a more contemporary focus, Alexander Nehamas, “Socratic Reflections” in The Art of Living (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
The best single book on the Enlightenment is Peter Gay, The Enlightenment (New York: Norton, 1995); and a philosophical anthology of the period is Isaac Kramnick, The Porta- ble Enlightenment Reader (New York: Penguin, 1995).
A standard introduction to logic is Graham Priest, Logic: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
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The World and Beyond
PA RT I
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4 3
1 | Reality It must be that what can be spoken and thought is: for it is possible for it to be,
and it is not possible for what is nothing to be.
PA R M E N I D E S
Well over three thousand years ago, philosophers in India, in the Rg Veda (the oldest of those holy books called the Vedas), contemplated the nature and origins of the whole of reality, concluding, with considerable skepticism, that reality as such was not, or at least not normally, known by us, and perhaps it could not be known at all. Now, in the early twenty-first century, some philosophers and some of our best-known physicists have come to believe that ultimate reality (those evasive particles that seem to multiply as the experiments get more sophisticated) gets more and more (rather than less and less) mysterious, and some theorists even suggest that we create reality through our observation and that there is no independent reality at all.
The questions of the ultimate nature of reality and the origins of the universe have defined much of philosophy from most ancient times until today. The study of these questions, respectively, is called cosmology (the nature of the universe), and cosmogony (the origins of the universe). The way these questions are asked, of course, varies considerably with the growth of science and among various religious and cultural contexts, but they are perhaps the most fundamental of philosophical questions.
A. “The Way the World Really Is” What is the way the world really is? How do you answer that question? Very likely you will appeal to the authority of modern science, and that is probably a reasonable beginning. But you know that the “science” of one generation is seen as the superstitions of another. (Once people believed that the earth was flat.) You have probably, at least once in your school career, caught one of the “authorities”—perhaps a teacher, perhaps even a noted scientist— in a mistake. Can we simply accept what scientists tell us without question? Have you ever examined the evidence for the theory that the earth goes around the sun? If not, why should you believe it? Or, to take a very different example, scientists are generally agreed that some version of Darwin’s theory of evolution is true. Does that mean that you have to believe it? Many people do not, because it seems to contradict the story of creation in the Bible. You
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have to decide which account to believe. Even within science there are always disagree- ments and debates. There are different theories to answer the same questions, and you have to decide. Which are you to believe?
Your view of reality is influenced by modern science but it is also influenced by twenty-five hundred years of philosophy, even if you’ve never studied it before. We can say, with some confidence, that we know much more about the world than the ancient philosophers. But we must not be too confident. Not only are there still many scientific problems unsolved, there are and always will be conflicting views of how we are to see our world in more general terms. How much faith should we have in religion? How much should we see the world as a world of people and how much as a world of physical objects? How much should we accept “common sense” (which changes all the time) and how much should we indulge in scientific and philo- sophical speculation (which changes all the time also)?
Because a Greek coined the term philosophy and because philosophy was first recog- nized as a formal discipline in Greece, Western philosophers today often refer to the earliest Greek thinkers as the first “philosophers.” Philosophy in this sense is said to begin with a seemingly odd claim made by the Greek philosopher Thales on the coast of Turkey some- time around 580 b.c.e. He suggested that the source of everything was water. The earth floats upon water, and it and all things on it are made of water. Aristotle later called this theory “childish,” but he also acknowledged that this was the “oldest view that has been transmit- ted to us” (in his essay “On the Heavens”). In his Metaphysics, Aristotle went on to consider Thales’ view in some detail:
F RO M Metaphysics B Y Aristotle1
Most of the first philosophers thought that principles in the form of matter were the only principles of all things. For they say that the element and first principle of the things that exist is that from which they all are and from which they first come into being and into which they are finally destroyed, its substance remaining and its properties changing. . . . There must be some nature—either one or more than one—from which the other things come into being, it being preserved. But as to the number and form of this sort of principle, they do not all agree. Thales, the founder of this kind of philosophy, says that it is water (that is why he declares that the earth rests on water). He perhaps came to acquire this belief from seeing that the nourishment of everything is moist and that heat itself comes from this and lives by this (for that from which anything comes into being is its first principle)— he came to his belief both for this reason and because the seeds of everything have a moist nature, and water is the natural principle of moist things.
Similarly, the commentator Simplicius suggested that “Thales was the first to introduce the study of nature to the Greeks.” Thales’ seemingly simple claim, that the world rests on water, was in fact one of the most remarkable claims of the ancient world,
1 Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the loeb Classical library from Aristotle: Metaphysics, Volume XVII, trans. H. Tredennick, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933.
Thales (6th century b.c.e.)
The first known Greek philosopher, who taught that all things are ultimately composed of water.
“There must be some nature— either one or more than one—from which the other things come into being.” — A R I S TOT L E
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not because it is so implausible (as his own students pointed out to him) but because it was one of the first recorded attempts to describe “the way the world really is” without defer- ence to appearances and day-to-day opinions. Accordingly, Thales’ theory marks the begin- ning of Western science as well as philosophy. He was the first Greek thinker to break with common sense and religion and offer a general theory about the ultimate nature of reality. In place of mythological accounts of nature and human behavior in terms of divine agencies (gods, goddesses, and spirits), he and other thinkers of the period provided explanations in terms of laws and abstract generalizations. knowledge became an end in itself, one of the noblest pursuits of humanity.
Is it so implausible that water is the source of all things? (© Shutterstock.com/Constant)
• Do you consider Thales’ theory that the source of everything is water “childish”? How would you make his theory more plausible?
• In what ways are contemporary physicists’ theories that subatomic particles are the basis of the physical world anticipated by Thales?
B. The First Greek Philosophers We are all aware that the way the world really is may not correspond to our everyday views of it, the way it seems to be. For example, we casually talk of “sunrises” and “sunsets,” and surely it does seem as if the sun goes “up” and “down,” while we and our earth stay in place. It took several thousand years for people in general to recognize that, despite appearances, our earth actually moves around the sun. We now accept that without question, even if there is little in our everyday experience to support it. Similarly, consider the chair on which you are sitting: Does it seem to you that it is composed mostly of empty space and tiny
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electrically charged colorless particles whirling about at fantastic speeds? Of course not, but modern science has taught you that “solid” objects are indeed made up of just such spaces and particles. The world is not as it seems, and the beginnings of both philosophy and sci- ence were the first attempts to see beyond “common sense” views of things and try to find the reality behind them.
Although the pre-Socratic Greeks were the first thinkers to call themselves “philoso- phers,” we can look back from our modern vantage point to many ancient traditions we might want to call “philosophical,” in the sense that they looked beyond ordinary experi- ence for an understanding of “reality.” The ancient philosophers did not have the advantage of either our scientific sophistication or a long history of philosophical thinking to give them support. Yet, there were lots of new and profoundly thoughtful opinions offered by the ancients about reality. The first investigations into the ultimate nature of reality, among which we include Thales’ account, appeared in the middle of the first millennium b.c.e.
1. The Ionian Naturalists Thales’ approach was somewhat different from that of the thinkers of other early traditions; he is rightly credited with being the first in the line of philosophers of which Socrates was the culmination (called the “pre-Socratics”). Thales’ answer, that ultimate reality is water, should not surprise nearly so much as the fact that he attempted such a theory at all. Indeed, we should be impressed by the fact that he even asked “What is the world really like?” because as far as we know, no one had attempted to ask such a question in such a way before him.
Thales was not willing to accept the opinions and mythologies that had been handed down for generations. He insisted, instead, on observing the world for himself, on thinking out his own answer, and on discussing it with his friends and neighbors, many of whom, no doubt, thought that he was slightly peculiar. (It is also said, however, that his cosmic specula- tions helped him to make a fortune in the olive oil business. No doubt his neighbors respected that.)
Thales was the first of a group of philosophers—or rather, the first of several groups of philosophers—scattered around the various Greek islands and the coasts of Asia Minor, or Ionia, who lived in the sixth and fifth centuries b.c.e., before the time of Socrates. Accord- ingly, they are called Ionians, one group of the pre-Socratics. Their opinions varied greatly. Among them they developed a wide range of systematic views of the universe and the ulti- mate nature of reality. Unlike Socrates and most later philosophers, they were not very con- cerned with questions of method. They went straight to the heart of the question, to the nature of the universe itself. As we shall see, some of them came strikingly close to our modern scientific conceptions.
Thales made the first gigantic step, rejecting the “obvious” answers of common sense and trying to find out “the way the world really is.” But notice that Thales’ answer doesn’t depart from common sense entirely. Water is a substance with which everyone is familiar. His defense of his thesis also depended on some commonsensical evidence: for example, the idea that if you dig deep enough into the earth, you will eventually hit water.
Nevertheless, the idea that everything is water did not satisfy Thales’ friends and stu- dents. They appreciated his attempt to find the “One Reality,” but they thought that it must be something else. Thales’ first student, named Anaximander, argued against his teacher that some things, for example, the dry, dusty cliffs of Asia Minor, could not possibly be made of water, which was naturally wet and never dry. Anaximander was the first recorded student to talk back to his teacher (which in philosophy, unlike most other subjects, is considered a virtue rather than a discourtesy).
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Once Thales had made the break with common sense and said that the way the world really need not be at all like the way it seems to us, it was no longer necessary to suppose that reality was anything like our experiences. Anaximander, consequently, argued that ultimate reality could not be composed of any of the then-known elements—earth, air, fire, or water—since each was so different from the others. The elements might be mixed together, as when earth and water are mixed to make mud or clay, but it made no sense to suppose that any of them might really be made up of any of the others. So Anaximander suggested that the ultimate nature of reality was something else—let us simply call it “primordial stuff”—that is not like any- thing we could ever experience.
The word Anaximander actually used was the apeiron, which is sometimes translated as “the indefi- nite” or “the unlimited.” The apeiron, or “primordial stuff,” was a chaos or void, which yielded the variety of things in the world. This notion of “stuff” was a second major step in philosophy and science. Today, we feel comfortable with the idea that things are made of “stuff” (atoms and molecules) that we never experience in everyday life. But in the ancient world, this suggestion must have seemed extremely exciting.
Anaximander’s student, Anaximenes, thought his teacher’s notion of “stuff” was too mysterious, but he also rejected Thales’ theory and replaced it with the idea that air is the basic “stuff.” Just as our soul, which is air, integrates us, so breath and air surround the whole
Anaximander (611–547? b.c.e.)
A pre-Socratic philosopher who taught that reality is ultimately composed of an indeterminate something (the apeiron) that we can never know directly through experience.
The pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander demonstrates the use of a sundial on this clock by Antoine Beranger (1785–1867). (© RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY)
Where does the water end and the air begin? (© Shutterstock.com/Marko5)
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cosmos. Air makes up the other elements and the various things of the world by becoming thicker and thinner. (Think of steam condensing to form water and then ice.) Anaximenes thus introduced the idea that changes in the quantity of basic elements can produce changes in quality as well—a key principle of modern science.
• How is Anaximander’s theory that “primordial stuff” is the ultimate reality an im- provement on Thales’ theory? In what ways is it more problematic?
• To what extent must you reject “common sense” when trying to explain reality? What are the limitations to such speculation and theorizing?
2. Monism, Materialism, and Immaterial “Stuff” The attempt to reduce all of the varied things in the world to one kind of thing as Thales and his students did with water, air, and apeiron, is called monism. The search for ultimate reality, which might be very different from the appearance of everyday life, has motivated philoso- phy and science for twenty-five hundred years. Today, the debate continues: Is everything made up of matter, or energy, or matter-energy? Are there basic particles that cannot be reduced to anything else? Scientists once thought that atoms were such particles; then they discovered electrons, protons, and neutrons that made up atoms. Since then, they have discovered dozens of other subatomic particles, while today scientists debate whether fundamental reality is made up of tiny vibrating “strings” that operate in multiple spatial dimensions. Notice that all of these views are strictly physical. That is, they are concerned about basic questions of what we now call physics and chemistry, concerned about the ma- terial “stuff” of which all things are composed. This was true of Thales; and it is still true of
modern “quark” theorists. Accordingly, the philoso- phies of all of these thinkers can be called materialism, the view that reality is ultimately com- posed of some kind of material “stuff.” (In this con- text, “materialism” does not mean concern about the material things in life—money, cars, jewelry, or getting a new smartphone every year.)
If you think like a physical scientist, the idea that the universe is made up of some kind of material “stuff” sounds very plausible. In fact, you might wonder, what else could it be made of? Consider this: some things in the universe that could not plau- sibly be made of material “stuff.” What about your thoughts and feelings? Are they simply bits of matter, or are they composed of some entirely dif- ferent kind of “stuff,” perhaps some kind of mental or spiritual “stuff”? Certain early philosophers, some of them in Asia, offered accounts of reality based on nonmaterial notions. We should note that although the pre-Socratics emphasized the physical
The idea that the universe is made of atoms traces back to the pre- Socratics. (© Shutterstock.com/Alekksall)
Anaximenes (6th century b.c.e.)
A pre-Socratic philosopher who taught that the basic element of reality is air and that all things in the universe are different forms of air.
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components of reality, they considered the natural order divine. They were materialists, in thinking that all of reality is material, but they did not separate the spiritual from the material world. The pre- Socratic philosopher Heraclitus shared this concep- tion, but his account already gropes for a conception of an immaterial, nonphysical “stuff” of the sort that we will find in later Christian accounts of the soul. (“Immaterial,” in a philosophical context, does not mean “irrelevant,” as it does, for example, in law.)
3. Heraclitus Back in Greece, another pre-Socratic philosopher, named Heraclitus, quite independently defended the idea that fire was the fundamental “stuff” of reality. For Heraclitus, however, “fire” seemed to connote both the “natural element,” as the Ionians considered it, and a “spiritual power.” Heraclitus’ philosophy was cryptically expressed, and his contemporaries and commentators thought him hard to understand, calling him such things as “riddler.” Indeed, Heraclitus seems to have been a very cynical person, hardly interested in sharing his thoughts with others. Nonetheless, his profound and provocative claims have been an inspiration to many philosophers since, especially during the nineteenth century.
Heraclitus claimed that everything in the world was a manifestation of fire, but he did not understand fire as an eternal and unchanging origin. Quite the opposite: he claimed that everything that exists is fleeting and changeable. Fire was the element that best explained, or at least represented, the constant flux that underlay nature. “It is in changing that things find repose,” [23]2 Heraclitus stated, indicating that the only constant thing in the world is change. “You cannot step into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing on,” [21] he claimed. The fact that we refer to “the” river at all, however, shows that something is constant—but this is the very change and flow itself.
One fragment from Heraclitus reads, “This world that is the same for all . . . ever was and is and shall be ever-living fire that kindles in regular measures and goes out by regular mea- sures.” [B 30] Although the world never stops changing, this fire seems to have measure, a rhythm, underlying it, and the measure can be understood. So, Heraclitus claimed, our ever- changing reality has a form that remains the same, which he called the Logos. The Logos is the deeper “nature” behind natural, changing things, but you cannot see it, or hear it, or touch it. Thus, “nature loves to hide” [17] beneath the constant flux of the ordinary world we perceive.
Heraclitus’ doctrines were provocative, confusing, and sometimes maddening, as the following fragments indicate:
1. Man’s character is his fate.
2. Wisdom is one thing: to understand the logos by which all things are guided through all things.
2 This and the following fragments of Heraclitus were translated by John Burnet.
Heraclitus (5th century b.c.e.)
A pre-Socratic philosopher who taught that the basic ele- ment of reality is fire and that all things are in constant flux but yet are unified by an un- derlying logic or logos.
Heraclitus by Johann Heinrich Tischbein the Elder (bpk, Berlin/ Landesmuseum/ Hermann Buresch/
Art Resource, NY)
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3. The sun will not overstep his measures; if he does, the Erinyes [furies], the handmaids of justice, will find him out.
4. You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.
5. The sea is the purest and the impurest water. Fish can drink it, and it is good for them; to men it is undrinkable and destructive.
6. Good and ill are one.
7. To God all things are fair and good and right, but men hold some things wrong and some right.
8. We must know that war is common to all and strife is justice, and that all things come into being and pass away.
9. The way up and the way down is one and the same.
• Why does fire seem to be the appropriate element for Heraclitus?
• How can an ever-changing reality or “flux” have form (a Logos)?
• What does Heraclitus mean when he says that you can’t step into the same river twice?
4. Democritus, Atoms, and Pluralism Not all materialists thought that there was only one ultimate component of reality. A number of philosophers appeared in the ancient world who defended pluralism, that is, that more than one basic “stuff” made up the universe. The best known of the pluralists was Democritus, who suggested that the universe was made up of tiny bits of “stuff” that he called atoms that fall through the void. These combined to form the many different things and qualities of the world. (The soul, he suggested, consists of smooth, round, unusually mobile atoms, dis-
posed throughout the body.) Other pluralists stressed the idea that these different bits of “stuff” were very different in kind as well, so that the bits of “stuff” that composed water, for example, would be very different from those that composed fire. You can appreciate how modern these concepts are, given our current ideas in chemistry and physics. These ancient Greek issues and answers have not become obsolete; they have changed and become more refined. Some have been more in favor at one time and others at other times. But they are still very much with us.
5. Animism These ancient attempts to find out the way the world really is should not be thought of as clumsy attempts to find out the things that modern scien- tists now know. All the theories of “stuff” were indeed the precursors of modern physics and
Democritus (5th century b.c.e.)
A pre-Socratic philosopher who taught that reality is divis- ible into small “atoms” that combine to make up all things but which themselves are eternal and indivisible.
Democritus by Johann Heinrich Tischbein the Elder (bpk, Berlin/ Landesmuseum/Lutz Braun/Art
Resource, NY
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chemistry. But you can already see that these philosophers were also con- cerned with what we would call the mental and the spiritual aspects of the world. Even the most materialistic among them, for example, Thales, did not believe that the basic matter of the universe was cold and lifeless “stuff.” All of these philosophers believed that the universe itself, as well as everything in it, was alive in at least some limited way. That is, they all believed in animism, the doctrine that everything, volcanoes and stones as well as ele- phants and flowers, are living things and, as animate beings, have “souls” of some sort. Furthermore, animism has not disappeared because of the advances of science, though in certain periods (like our own) it has been treated less favorably than in others. As recently as the nineteenth century, when physics and chemistry were making some of their most spectacular advances, animism was an extremely popular doctrine, even among scien- tists. A great many people today still accept a modified version of it. The place of mind and spirit in a world of matter and energy is still among our basic problems.
Others besides animists may see hints of life in this rock formation (© Shutterstock.com/javarman)
• Is Democritus’ “atomic” view appealing just because it seems to anticipate modern physics? What are its merits in its own terms?
• What, if anything, is problematic about the claim that reality is made of individual “atoms”?
• Is animism compatible with contemporary scientific views of the world? Does science allow room for the idea of “souls” even though it explains the nature of reality without reference to them?
6. Pythagoras Another Greek pre-Socratic philosopher, Pythagoras, also attempted to defend a view of the world that did not depend upon the usual kinds of material “stuff.” He believed, how- ever, that numbers were the ultimate reality, and he taught his students to worship the mathe matical order of the universe. He was particularly inspired by new discoveries in music and harmony, and he saw the universe itself as a grand harmony. (Even the heavenly bodies produced sounds as they moved, and the distinc- tive sounds of the various bodies harmonized with each other in what came to be called “the music of the spheres.”) By contrast with the other pre- Socratic Greek philosophers we have met, Pythagoras was a religious figure. He was a mystic and the leader of a powerful underground cult that believed in reincarnation and the immortality of the soul, which he understood as that part of man which is capable of abstract thought, such as math- ematics. In accordance with his religion, he gave the mind and the soul a much more prominent place in his view of the world than did other pre- Socratic philosophers.
Pythagoras (6th–5th century b.c.e.)
A religious mystic who believed that numbers are the essence of all things. One of the pre-Socratics.
Pythagoras (© iStockphoto.com/ HultonArchive)
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Despite the sometimes mysterious views of Pythagoras and his cult, he is still recognized as one of the most important thinkers of the ancient world. With Heraclitus, he was one of the first Greeks to defend a view of reality that depended more on logic and thought than material “stuff.” The “ Pythagorean theorem” that students learn in high school is named after him. It was his discovery.
• How does modern science remain in the spirit of Pythagoras?
• Why is it necessary to know a lot of math to understand physics or engineering?
7. The Appearance/Reality Distinction All of the thinkers we have considered so far, whatever their differing views and outlooks, have espoused an underlying reality that differs from the world as it ordinarily appears. The discrepancy between the way the world seems and the way it really must be has come to be called, not surprisingly, the “appearance/reality distinction.”
For Thales, water was the eternal and unchanging element, although the forms it took might be very different and change constantly. For Democritus, atoms were unchanging and indestructible, although the things they combined to compose might change and be destroyed.
Heraclitus’ Logos and Pythagoras’ notion of the immortal “soul” were right on the edge of an investigation into how the world can be both one and many, both changing and stable. Because he believed that the reality was firelike, Heraclitus appreciated the importance of change, as in the flickering of a flame. But he insisted that the Logos, or logic, underlay the constant changes in the world. The presupposition that reality cannot change, despite the way things seem, will remain one of the most important beliefs in Western culture. (In Christianity, for example, the eternal and unchanging nature of God and the human soul are built upon the same philosophical foundation.)
None of the thinkers just considered, however, offered an explanation as to why the world should appear so different than their philosophical investigations led them to believe it really
was. Nor did they present any convincing argument that that this was in fact the case. This issue finally came to a head, and the argument was finally offered. The philosopher who brought it out most clearly was another pre-Socratic Greek, Parmenides.
8. Parmenides Parmenides was an accomplished mathematician who thought far more of the eternal certainties of arithmetic than he did the transient things of every- day experience. He, too, was a monist and believed in a single reality, “the One.” Because he shared the assumption that reality must be eternal and un- changing, he came to an astonishing conclusion: This world, the world of our experience, cannot be real! Our world is constantly changing: Objects are created and destroyed; organisms live and die; people grow old, change their appearance, and
Parmenides (5th century b.c.e.)
A pre-Socratic philosopher who taught that reality is eternal and unchanging and that we cannot know it as such.
Bust of Parmenides (Scala/Art Resource, NY)
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move from place to place. So this world, with all its changes, could not be the real world, nor could we ever know the real world, since we are as inconstant and changing as the other things of our experience. We are, at best, living in a kind of illusion, not in reality at all!
Parmenides gave us what is sometimes postulated to be the first full-scale philosophical argument.
F RO M Fragments B Y Parmenides3
(The goddess addresses the young philosopher) Come, I will tell you—and you, take the story when you have heard it—about the only routes there are for seeking to know: One says is and that there is no not being; this is the path of Persuasion (for she goes the way of Truth). The other says is not, and that not being is right. This I point out to you is an utterly ignorant footway. For you could not either get to know that which is not (for it is not attainable) or point to it.
. . . because the same thing is for knowing (or “thinking about”) that is for being.
It is right that what is for saying and knowing should be, for it can be; but noth- ing can not be.
. . . what is is unborn and imperishable, a whole of a single kind, unshakable and not incomplete. It neither was nor will be, because it is now, all of it together, one cohesive. For what birth will you seek for it? From what would it have grown? I will not let you say or think that it came from what is not. For “is not” cannot be said or thought.
The argument is: What really is cannot have come to be, for there is nothing outside of reality (what really is) that could have been its source. It is an ar- gument that is the source of much of Western meta- physics. Naturally, no two scholars agree about what it means. But all agree on the main point: that phi- losophers should be interested only in what is in the fullest sense, and not in what is not, or in what some- times is and sometimes is not. This means that phi- losophers should not be interested in anything that changes. The weather in Austin is cold one day, and not cold the next. Because it sometimes is not cold, it is not a proper subject for the pure philosopher. What is, according to Parmenides, is unchanging and eternal.
A simple way to understand the root of this argument is this: We cannot put nonexistent apples in a sack or nonexistent dollars in our wallet. By the same token, Parmenides assumes, we cannot put things that do not exist in our mind; we can only truly think about or know things that are. Moreover, only
3 Parmenides, Fragments (B2; B3; B6, 11 1–2; B8, 11 3–9), trans. Paul Woodruff.
Suppose the tortoise gets a head start of ten feet in a hundred- foot race. By the time the hare covers that same ten feet, the tor- toise will have walked another foot. But by the time the hare hops that foot, the tortoise will have traveled another inch or two. And by the time the hare travels that inch or two, the tortoise will have walked. . . . How can the hare ever catch the tortoise?
THE TORTOISE AND THE HARE
“It is right that what is for saying and knowing should be, for it can be; but nothing can not be.” — PA R M E N I D E S
Can the tortoise actually win the race? (© Shutterstock.com/James Steidl)
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9. The Sophists The following generation of philosophers, who called themselves sophists, went even fur- ther. The sophist Gorgias argued that there is no reality, and even if there were, we couldn’t know anything about it anyway. The teaching of Protagoras, another sophist, is still well known today; he said, “Man is the measure of all things,” to convey the idea that there is no reality except for what we take to be real. Because of their rhetorical debating tricks, the term “sophistry” has a bad name, but the sophists anticipated many of the most important philosophical concerns of the twentieth century. In particular, they stressed practical rather than abstract questions, and thus anticipated our own American pragmatists. (See Chapter 4.) In suggesting that truth is relative to people, they anticipated the much-disputed idea of relativism, the view that truth might be different at different times for different people. Wan- dering around the countryside, giving lessons in debating and rhetoric, the sophists used the accomplishments of their predecessors to ridicule philosophy and make fools of practi- cally everyone. That is, until they met Socrates, whose arguments against them changed the course of philosophy and Western thought in general.
one kind of thought really contains knowledge of the thing we are thinking about. Suppose we are thinking about milk. It is no use think- ing about all the things milk is not—like orange juice and iced tea. Really thinking about milk is thinking about what milk really is.
Since thinking about change involves thinking about things that are not always the same, it involves thinking, in a sense, about things that are not (as the weather is not cold today). But this, according to Parmenides’ as- sumption, is impossible: We can only think about what is.
Since Thales, the main achievement of philosophy had been to break away from common sense and ordinary experience in order to find out the way the world really is. But now we can see how far away from common sense and ordinary experience this breaking away can lead us. In Parmenides’ philosophy, if the results of his logic are incompatible with common sense and ordinary experience, so much the worse for common sense and ordinary experi- ence. The followers of Parmenides, particularly the mathematician Zeno of Elea, carried these bizarre conclusions even further. Zeno argued, by means of a series of famous para- doxes, that all motion and change, even the motion of an arrow in flight, is nothing but an illusion.
Zeno of Elea (5th century b.c.e.)
A pre-Socratic philosopher and student of Parmenides who taught that motion is unreal and developed a series of brilliant paradoxes to prove it.
• What does it mean to say that what is cannot have come to be?
• Can it be helpful when explaining what something is to explain what it is not? Is it ever necessary?
• What is the meaning of the claim that “man is the measure of all things”?
• How might you defend the position that man is the measure of all things? What arguments might lead someone to reject this view?
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10. Metaphysics These various theories about the way the world really is have a proper name. They are called metaphysical doctrines, and the attempt to develop such doctrines, in which we have been taking part for these past pages, is called metaphysics. The business of metaphysics is to ask and attempt to answer the most basic questions about the universe, the “stuff” of which it is composed, the role of man and mind, and the immaterial aspects of the universe as well as its physical nature. But now that we are about to discuss metaphysics in its maturity, with Plato and Aristotle, let us also give “stuff” its proper name. It is called (first by Aristotle) substance. Accordingly, metaphysics, the study of “the way the world really is,” begins with the answers to a series of questions about substance and how it is manifested in particular things (such as people and trees).
1. How many substances are there? (Monism claims one; pluralism claims more than one.)
2. What are they? (Water, air, fire, numbers, something unknown, minds, spirit, atoms?)
3. How are individual things composed? (And how do we tell them apart, identify them, and reidentify them?)
4. How do different things and (if there is more than one) different substances interact?
5. How did substance come into being? (Was it created by God? Has it always been there?)
6. Are substances “in” space and time? Are space and time themselves substances? (If not, what are they?)
Inquiry into the first four questions is usually referred to as ontology, the study of being as such. The last two questions are concerns of cosmology, the study of the universe. (For the pre-Socratics, these were the same.) Cosmological questions are necessarily shared among philosophers, physicists, and astronomers, and it is impossible for us to give them more than a cursory review within a strictly philosophical book. Ontology, on the other hand, is still considered by many philosophers to be the heart of metaphysics. Therefore, the rest of this chapter will be primarily concerned with ontology.
• How would a materialist understand thoughts and feelings, which seem immaterial? How would a materialist understand numbers (not numerals)?
• Why have philosophers and scientists tried so hard to find the basic “stuff” of the universe? Why not just say “everything is what it is and is not another thing”?
C. Ultimate Reality in the East: India, Persia, and China 1. Reality as One: The Upanishads While the Ionian naturalists were pursuing their protoscientific inquiries in Greece, sages in India were developing their own doctrines about the nature of reality. The earliest articula- tion of a single ultimate reality appears in the ancient Indian Vedic literature, especially in the appendages called Upanishads, “secret doctrines,” from which later Asian religious and spiritual traditions emerged. In addition to the innumerable sects and divisions of religious belief and practice traditionally termed Hindu or Buddhist, other Indic religions, such as Jainism and Sikhism, also owe a conceptual debt to the early Upanishads.
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A passage from one of the oldest Upanishads (ca. 800 b.c.e.) relates to the spiritual aspira- tion that sets the tone for much Upanishadic teaching:
F RO M Upanishads4
From non-being (asat) to true being (sat) lead me. From darkness to light lead me. From death to immortality lead me.
Whom or what is invoked in this passage is not clear, but the “seeking” expressed in the early Upanishads centers on “Brahman,” the ultimate reality both of ourselves and of the universe. Brahman is a Unity underlying all individual selves and things.
An ocean, a single seer without duality becomes he whose world [of vision] is brah- man. This is his supreme attainment. This is his highest fulfillment. This is his best world. This is his supreme bliss. Other creatures subsist on a small bit of this bliss.
This “Absolute” is considered to have a peculiar “nature” unlike that of everyday, finite, physical things. Brahman is the source of the universe and the inner reality within everything, yet it is transcendent of “names and forms.” In other words, it transcends everything finite, and thoughts and words cannot express its nature. All opposites coincide in Brahman. Although Brahman cannot be understood through thought, it can be discovered through mystical experience.
Not moving the One is swifter than the mind. The gods do not reach That run- ning [always] before. . . . That moves; That moves not. It is far, and It is near. It is within all this; It indeed is outside all this. He who experiences all things in the Self and the Self in all things thereupon does not fear.
Om. That is the Full. This is the Full. From the Full, the Full proceeds. Taking away the Full of the Full, it is just the Full that remains.
The Upanishadic conception of reality is sometimes interpreted as a form of “pantheism,” an identification of God and nature. Whether the following passage illustrates pantheism or not, it reveals a doctrine of divine immanence, of divine indwelling in all things. It also sug- gests an Inner Controller, the Self, who is thought to be “other” than the things, and particu- lar selves, in which it indwells.
Who standing in the earth is other than the earth, whom the earth knows not, whose body the earth is, who within controls the earth, that is this, the Self, the Inner Controller, the Immortal. Who standing in the waters is other than the waters, whom the waters know not, whose body the waters are, that is this, the Self, the Inner Controller. . . . Who standing in the wind is other than the wind, whom the wind knows not, whose body the wind is, who within controls the wind, that is this, the Self, the Inner Controller, the Immortal. . . . Who standing in all beings is other than all beings, whom all beings know not, whose body all beings are, that is this, the Self, the Inner Controller, the Immortal. . . . Who standing in the eye is other than the eye, whom the eye knows not, whose body
4 These five passages are taken from Br. hadāran. yaka 1.3.28, Br. hadāran. yaka 4.3.32, Iśā Upanis. ad 4– 6, Br. hadāran. yaka 5.1.1, Br. hadāran. yaka 3.7.3–3.7.23 passim. Chāndogya 6.11, and Katha 1.25–27, 2.11–12, and 2.20 –23. Unless noted otherwise, all passages were translated by Stephen Phillips.
“He who experiences all things in the Self and the Self in all things . . . does not fear.” — U PA N I S H A D S
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the eye is, who within controls the eye, that is this, the Self, the Inner Controller, the Immortal. Who standing in the ear is other than the ear, whom the ear knows not, whose body the ear is, that is this, the Self, the Inner Controller, the Immortal. . . . Who standing in the understanding is other than the understand- ing, whom the understanding knows not, whose body the understanding is, who within controls the understanding, that is this, the Self, the Inner Controller, the Immortal. . . . Who standing in the seed of generation is other than the seed of generation, whom the seed of generation knows not, whose body the seed of gen- eration is, that is this, the Self, the Inner Controller, the Immortal. Unseen, the seer, unheard, the hearer, unthought, the thinker, unknown, the knower; there is no other seer than this, no other hearer than this, no other thinker than this, no other knower than this. That is this, the Self, the Inner Controller, the Immortal; valueless is anything other.
The passage above—one that is quoted repeatedly over centuries of commentary and discussion—illustrates a “spiritually monist” view that has enjoyed substantial prominence in India, a view that finds the “self” (or ātman) as the key to life and reality. Clearly the “self” referred to here is not the individual, personal self. It is rather an all-encompassing spiritual reality that dwells within all of us. Moreover, this self is not other than Brahman, so as this self we are one with all reality.
Indian spirituality as articulated in the Upanishads recognizes the small worth of worldly desires and attachments in the light of inevitable death. The possibility of an extraordinary knowledge of the self through mystical experience, however, can carry us beyond the great fear of mortality.
“Were someone to hack the root of this large tree, dear child, it would bleed but live; were someone to hack its trunk, it would bleed but live; were someone to hack its tops, it would bleed but live. Pervaded by the living self (ātman), it stands continually drinking and exulting. If life were to leave one branch, then that branch would dry up; if a second, then that would dry up; a third, then that would dry up; if the whole, then the whole would dry up. Just in this way indeed, dear child,” he [Śvetaketu’s teacher] said, “understand: this endowed most surely with life dies; life does not die. That which is this, this is the most subtle, everything here has that as its soul (ātma). That is the real- ity; that is the self (ātman); you are that O Śvetaketu.” “Please, sir, instruct me even further.” “Alright, dear one,” he said. . . .
[Yama, “Death”:] “Whatever desires, (even) the most dif- ficult to win in the world of mortals, have them all at your demand. Delightful females with chariots, with music— none like these may be won by mortal men—be entertained by them, O Naciketas, given by me. Do not inquire into dying.” [Naciketas:] Existing only until tomorrow are such desires of a mortal, and, O Bringer-of-the-end, they wear away the splendor and vigor of every sense and power one
Yama and Nachiketas by Nandalal Bose illustrates an interaction depicted in the Chandogya Upanishad. (© Stapleton Collection/Corbis)
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has. Even all that is alive is of small worth indeed. Yours alone are the chariots; yours the dancing and the singing. A person is not to be satisfied with wealth. Are we to have wealth once we have seen you? But the boon that I wish to choose is this (answer this question): ‘Will we continue to exist while you rule?’ ” . . . [Death:] Having seen in your grasp, O Naciketas, the fulfillment of desire and the founda- tion of the world and an infinity of power, of self-will, and the safe shore of fearless- ness, and great fame sung far and wide, you wisely let it all go. A person who is wise and steadfast, discerning the God through spiritual discipline and study—the one that is difficult to experience, who has plunged deep into the hidden and is estab- lished in the secret place, standing in the cavern, the ancient—leaves joy and sorrow behind. . . . Subtler than the subtle, grander than the grand, the self is set in the secret heart of the creature. One who is without self-will experiences this (and be- comes) free of sorrow; through his clearness and purity towards material things [or, “through the grace of the Creator”5], one experiences the self ’s greatness and breadth. Seated he travels far; lying down he goes everywhere. Who other than I is fit to know this God, the one that has both maddening pleasure and freedom from maddening pleasure? The wise person, recognizing the bodiless in bodies, the set- tled in things unsettled, the great and pervasive self (ātman), does not grieve nor suffer. This the self is not to be won by eloquent instruction, nor by intelligence, nor by much study. Just that person whom this chooses, by such a person is this to be won; to such a person this the self reveals, uncovers its very own form and body.
2. Reality, Good, and Evil: Zarathustra In the sixth century b.c.e., a Persian reformer named Zarathustra broke away from the Indic peoples who were the progenitors of the Upanishads. He preached a version of monotheism over and against the early Indian polytheism. Zarathustra claimed that his god—called Ahura Mazda—was not just spiritual or divine nature, but a creator, the one origin of all that existed. Ahura Mazda was a personal and all-good god, who created all natural things. Thus, Zarathustra and the religion he began (called Zoroastrianism) were extremely influential on the monotheistic religions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
Zarathustra was the first to recognize and formulate a doctrine regarding the existence and origin of good and evil in the universe. Ahura Mazda, the One lord, created first among all things two twin spirits, lower sorts of divinities. The character of the first, called Spenta Mainyush, drew him and everything that followed him to goodness and good acts. The character of the other, called Angra Mainyush, led him and everything in his service to do evil. The twins are described in this passage from the Gathas (the original portion of the Zend-Avesta, the scripture of Zoroastrianism).
5 The Sanskrit text is ambiguous between these two meanings; the first suggests Buddhist doctrines, and the alterna- tive suggests Hindu theism.
• How do you understand the idea of a “Self” that is different from things, but none- theless inhabits all things and is unknown?
• Do you think the inevitability of death diminishes or augments the worth of worldly goods?
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F RO M Zend-Avesta6
Thus are the primeval spirits who as a pair (combining their opposite strivings), and (yet each) independent in his action, have been famed (of old). (They are) a better thing, they two, and a worse, as to thought, word, and as to deed. And between these two let the wisely acting choose right. (Yasna, XLV:2)
Although Angra Mainyush and Spenta Mainyush are born with natural tendencies toward evil and good, respectively, they choose quite freely to express it in action. Thus, while Ahura Mazda is responsible for the creation of everything, Angra Mainyush is responsible for unleashing evil, whose forms are deceit, destructiveness, and death. The natural world, according to Zoroastrianism, is set against itself like two armies, in an eternal battle between good and evil. Everything that exists freely chooses its alliance in accordance with its tendencies. Human beings, however, are free and conscious decision makers, and so have more choice about their moral alliances than do other creatures.
It followed from their choice to ally themselves with one of the twin spirits that all natural entities were things either to be worshiped or reviled. Fire, which represented the “Beneficent Immortal” spirit, Asha or “Righteousness,” was especially to be worshiped, as the best of the “good creation.” In fact, in their own time, Zoroastrians were referred to as “fire worshipers.”
In the following passage, also from the Gathas, Ahura Mazda despairs for his creation, should Asha find no good guardian for it.
Upon this the creator of the Kine (the holy herds) asked of Righteousness: How (was) thy guardian for the Kine (appointed) by thee when, as having power (over all her fate), ye made her? . . . Whom did ye select as her (life’s) master who might hurl back the fury of the wicked?
Asha: . . . (Great was our perplexity); a chieftain who was capable of smiting back (their fury), and who was himself without hate (was not to be obtained by us).
Zarathustra freely takes initiative on behalf of the herd. Recognizing his worthiness, God names Zarathustra its guardian. Zarathustra, then, takes a profoundly spiritual perspective on the question of the underlying nature of reality.
Although Zoroastrianism originally had no full-blown notion of “immaterial stuff,” or thought, as the essential nature of reality, Zarathustra’s Ahura Mazda is an immortal, con- scious entity that creates from thought, and it is the human’s ability to think, according to
6 All passages from the Yasna are taken from the Zend-Avesta, Part III, trans. l. H. Mills; part of the series, The Sacred Books of the East, ed. F. Max Muller, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972 (Oxford, 1887). All passages from the Yashts are taken from the Zend-Avesta, Part II, trans. James Darmesteter; part of the series, The Sacred Books of the East, ed. F. Max Muller, Motilal Banarsidass: Delhi, 1965 (Oxford, 1883).
Zarathustra (Zoroaster) (6th century b.c.e.)
An ancient Persian reformer and prophet of what is considered the first monotheistic religion, Zoroastrianism.
A Zoroastrian high priest engaged in a fire ceremony. (HIP/Art Resource, NY)
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3. Confucius In its earlier form in China, philosophy was not so concerned with the questions we have called “protoscientific,” but rather with human beings, their relationships, and their ac- tions. This focus is particularly evident in one Chinese thinker of the sixth century b.c.e., Confucius, who set the forms for Chinese society for millennia afterward. “Reality” for the Confucians, was primarily human reality. Confucius and his followers claimed that human beings were divided within themselves, and among themselves, because their passions, ambitions, and confused loyalties distracted them from their moral duty. Through conscious and attentive adherence to propriety, the Confucians claimed, human beings could over- come their selfish desires and develop into exemplary people. Confucius did not think that many people were sufficiently committed to this goal, as these passages from the Analects (a compendium of Confucius’ teachings) attest:
F RO M The Confucian Analects7
The Master [Confucius] said, [in response to the saying] “He who thinks but does not learn, is in grave danger.” (XI:5)
The Master said, I have never yet seen anyone whose desire to build up his moral power was as strong as sexual desire. (IX:17)
The Master said, I have never yet seen a man who was truly steadfast. Someone an- swered, “Shen Ch’eng.” The Master said, Ch’eng! He is at the mercy of his desires. How can he be called steadfast? (V:10)
Confucius encouraged society to return to ritual forms of behavior that had been abandoned during times of warfare and social turmoil. Whether in the context of grand ceremonies or everyday etiquette, ritual results in non-coercive social harmony that is the consequence of every- one’s cooperative efforts. By fulfilling his or her roles in relation to other people, each individual has an impact on the well-being of society. Hence, Confucius says that a father should be a father, a son a son, a ruler a ruler, and so on. The exemplary
7 Confucius, The Analects of Confucius, translated and annotated by Arthur Waley, New York: Vintage, 1938.
Zarathustra, that gives humankind its unique moral capacity. In addition, Zoroastrianism had a notion of eternity—of which our time here on earth is only a part. At the end of our time, so it was claimed, the evil creation would be eternally vanquished.
• What features of Zoroastrianism link it to the monotheistic religions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam? How does it differ from these religions?
Confucius (6th–5th century b.c.e.)
An ancient Chinese sage and founder of the Confucian reli- gion. His doctrine sought “gen- tlemanly conduct,” which was to be achieved through adherence to ritual.
kongfuzi (“the honorable Master kong”) became known as “ Confucius” in the West. (© Shutterstock.com/fotohunter)
“He who learns, but does not think, is lost.” — C O N F U C I U S
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person is one whose behavior is always appropriate, both to the role he or she is playing and to the situation. Confucius refers to this exemplary way of life as the “Way” (or Dao).
Wealth and rank are what every man desires; but if they can only be retained to the detriment of the Way he possesses, he must relinquish them. . . . The gentleman who ever parts company with goodness does not fulfill that name. Never for a moment does a gentleman quit the way of Goodness. (IV:5)
The goal for society, according to Confucius, was the achievement of interpersonal harmony at every level, beginning with the family. The family is particularly important in Confucian thought because it is the basis on which everyone learns to relate to other people. Confucius considers the harmony attained in music as a model for that which ideally prevails among family members and members of the community at large. To attain this, he encouraged his disciples to cultivate themselves through study and adherence to ritual.
[B]oth small matters and great depend upon it [harmony]. If things go amiss, he who knows the harmony will be able to attune them. But if harmony itself is not modulated by ritual, things will go amiss. (I:12)
• Do our passions and ambitions distract us from our moral duty? If so, is this always the case?
• Why is etiquette or acting in socially appropriate ways important?
4. Laozi, or the Poets of the Dao De Jing In China during Confucius’ own lifetime, or so the story goes, a religious mystic named laozi (a name meaning “Old Master”) espoused a doctrine that ran contrary to Confucian ideals. More likely, the poems attributed to laozi, called the poems of the Dao De Jing (literally, “Way Power Book”), were composed by several authors who shared Confucius’ inter- est in the best way for people to live, but drew radically different conclusions. These thinkers tended to be mystic recluses who saw the goal in life to be harmonizing with the Dao. Their interpretation of “Dao,” however, was different from Confucius’; for them it referred to the “Way” of the natural world, the flow of energy that comprises reality as a whole. Attending to these patterns, according to the Daoists, could help one to attune one’s own energies with the Dao and to live a healthy life.
Thus, these mystics were monists. They believed that the nature of reality is one, and that this One is, in a sense, alive. like Heraclitus, they believed that reality is continually changing, but that patterns within it could be discerned. But they did not go the way of the scientific doctrines of Greece, which sought explanations in terms of some fundamental substance. Instead, they focused on energy and conceived of reality in energetic terms.
Concerning themselves with the question of how best to live, the poets of the Dao De Jing shared Confucius’ primarily practical focus. They believed, however, that life in accordance with the Dao could be neither sought nor ex- pressed in any visible, speakable, observable way. Instead, the Dao was “ ineffable,” and any words used to describe it mislead us into thinking that reality is more fixed in character than it is. In general, the Daoists emphasize the limits of language. The Dao could not be taught or understood through
lao Tzu is honored on this Chinese postage stamp. (© iStockphoto.com/ hudiemm)
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discourse or rules, nor mimicked through the constancy of gentlemanly conduct. Rather, they claimed, the Dao could be known only through direct perception; accordingly, they encouraged a receptive stance toward the world and the avoidance of assertive action.
F RO M Dao De Jing B Y Laozi8
Existence is beyond the power of words To define: Terms may be used But are none of them absolute. When people lost sight of the way to live Came codes of love and harmony, Learning came, charity came, Hypocrisy took charge; . . .
The Daoists did not encourage aspiration to wealth and worldly influence, and they thought those in positions of prominence should take a hands-off approach to governing. The only power worthy of our attention was that of the Dao itself and of our own inner nature (the character of the Dao as it manifests in us as particular configurations of energy). They also shunned ritual, viewing prescribed forms as an obstacle to expressing one’s true nature. The best life was to refrain from attempts to force one’s will upon reality (efforts that always fail) and instead allow one’s own inner nature to act spontaneously. This spontaneous action is like that sometimes described by great musicians and ball players, in which one’s actions and responses are perfect, but without giving these matters any thought.
What we look for beyond seeing And call the unseen Listen for beyond hearing, And call the unheard, Grasp for beyond reaching And call the withheld, Merge beyond understanding In a oneness. . . .
Knowledge studies others, Wisdom is self-known; . . .
A realm is governed by ordinary acts, A battle is governed by extraordinary acts, The world is governed by no acts at all.
8 From lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. J. H. McDonald, 1996 (for the public domain).
• How can one attune oneself to the Dao if it is beyond description?
• What might be the reason that the Dao De Jing says that ethical codes came only when people had lost sight of the way to live?
• How can one act unassertively?
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5. Buddha Buddhism’s historical founder, Siddhārtha Gautama of the Śākya clan, was born a prince in India (or per- haps what is now southern Nepal) near the year 560 b.c.e. The Buddha (the Sanskrit term buddha means literally “the awakened one”) did not write anything himself. Records of his teachings and ser- mons were kept, apparently, by his disciples.
Through the centuries—first in India and then in almost every Asian country east of India—Buddhist doctrines and practices evolved; in each culture and epoch in which Buddhism prospered, local cus- toms and indigenous religious beliefs were assimi- lated, giving the religion everywhere a unique form and expression.
As a young prince, the Buddha-to-be led a life of pleasure and enjoyment. His father, fearing the prophecy that his son would become a religious mendicant, tried to protect him from the sight of anything unpleasant or evil. However, one day the young prince journeyed some distance from the royal enclave and encountered first a diseased person, then a wrinkled and decrepit old man, and then a corpse. Inquiring about each of these and being told that all persons are subject to such infirmities, the prince renounced his life of enjoyments and vowed to search tirelessly for the origin and cause of these evils—and for the power to root them up. Buddha’s experience of enlightenment did not occur immediately, however; he had to try various paths before arriving at the “Middle Way,” a way of life he later proclaimed to his disciples. Eventually, after a long spiritual ordeal during meditation under a Bodhi tree, Buddha achieved the summum bonum, “nibbana” (the Sanskrit “nirvāna”), an extinction of evil at its roots. Buddha spent the re- mainder of his life traveling and preaching— helping others to reach this supreme good and developing a picture of reality to support this conception.
Among the most important of Buddha’s teachings are the Four Noble Truths:
1. All is suffering (and transitory).
2. The root of suffering is selfish desire, attachment, and personal clinging.
3. There is a way to eliminate this root, and thereby eliminate suffering, namely nibbana.
4. The way to this supreme good is The Eightfold Noble Path: right thought, right re- solve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration or meditation.
The Buddhist vision of the universe was, in one sense, much like Parmenides,’ in that the world as we know it must be understood as illusion. But the underlying reality was One, as it was for the Hindus of the Upanishads, except that the Buddhists see this as “emptiness” or “nothingness.” Also like the Hindus, the Buddha proclaimed the “wheel of becoming,” the cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth. However, according to the Buddhists, the wheel of becoming shows the connectedness of all of these stages and the causal interdependence of all things. All things are insubstantial, or empty, as is the self or soul. There is no soul,
Buddha (6th century b.c.e.)
The “Awakened One,” a name for the founder of the Buddhist religion; the ancient Indian prince, Siddhārtha Gautama, after his enlightenment.
The Great Buddha, kamakura, Japan (© iStockphoto.com/joel-t)
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according to the Buddha.9 Although these doctrines of interdependence, the emptiness of all things, and the non-existence of the self or soul received much elaboration in later years, Buddhism is primarily practical, emphasizing meditation and compassion. What fol- lows is one of the most famous of the many hundreds of sermons and discourses attributed to the Buddha.
F RO M “Fire-Sermon” AT T R I B U T E D T O Buddha10
And there The Blessed One addressed the priests: “All things, O priests, are on fire. And what, O priests, are all these things
which are on fire? “The eye, O priests, is on fire; forms are on fire; eye-consciousness is on fire;
impressions received by the eye are on fire; and whatever sensation, pleasant, un- pleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the eye, that also is on fire.
“And with what are these on fire? “With the fire of passion, say I, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of infatua-
tion; with birth, old age, death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief, and despair are they on fire.
“The ear is on fire; sounds are on fire; . . . the nose is on fire; odors are on fire; . . . the tongue is on fire; tastes are on fire; . . . the body is on fire; things tan- gible are on fire; . . . the mind is on fire; ideas are on fire; . . . mind-consciousness is on fire; impressions received by the mind are on fire; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the mind, that also is on fire.
“And with what are these on fire? “With the fire of passion, say I, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of infatua-
tion; with birth, old age, death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief, and despair are they on fire.
“Perceiving this, O priests, the learned and noble disciple conceives an aversion for the eye, conceives an aversion for forms, conceives an aversion for eye- consciousness, conceives an aversion for the impressions received by the eye; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions received by the eye, for that also he conceives an aversion. Conceives an aversion for the ear, conceives an aversion for sounds, . . . conceives an aversion for the nose, conceives an aversion for odors, . . . conceives an aversion for the tongue, conceives an aversion for tastes, . . . conceives an aversion for the body, conceives an aversion for things tangible, . . . conceives an aversion for the mind, conceives an aversion for ideas, conceives an aversion for mind-consciousness, con- ceives an aversion for the impressions received by the mind; and whatever sensa- tion, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions
9 Some of these doctrines clearly have forerunners in the Upanishads; it is noteworthy that the Buddha upholds certain lines of continuity between his and previous spiritual perceptors’ teachings. Others are distinctively Buddhist, in par- ticular the “insubstantiality” doctrines. 10 “Fire-Sermon,” from Mahā-Vagga. Reprinted by permission of the publishers from Buddhism in Translation: Pas- sages Selected from the Buddhist Sacred Texts and Translated from the Original Pali into English by Henry Clark Warren, Student’s Edition, Harvard Oriental Series 3, pp. 351–353. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1896, 1922. Copyright © 1953 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
“The learned and noble disciple . . . becomes divested of passion, and by the absence of passion he becomes free.” —T H E B U D D H A
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D. Two Kinds of Metaphysics: Plato and Aristotle The term metaphysics is relatively new (from about 70 b.c.e. or so), but it is generally agreed that the first great systematic metaphysicians were Plato (427–347 b.c.e.) and Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.). Plato had been a student of Socrates and his most faithful recorder. (Almost all that we have of Socrates’ teachings comes to us through Plato.) Yet Socrates was a moral- ist, not a metaphysician, and most of the metaphysical doctrines that Plato discusses using Socrates as his mouthpiece are probably Plato’s own. Aristotle never tried to be a faithful disciple of Plato, although he was Plato’s student, and he became his teacher’s harshest and most famous critic. Whitehead famously said that the history of philosophy is nothing more than a series of footnotes to Plato. To be fair to Aristotle, many might claim that it is a series of footnotes to their debates.
Metaphysics is what Aristotle called “first philosophy,” the investigation of “Being as Being,” or ultimate reality. What does it mean for something to exist? What is it for some- thing to change? What makes one thing like another? Sometimes these questions, or at least the answers to these questions, are presupposed in our everyday thinking, whether we actu- ally think about them or not. For example, we “naturally” believe that a tree continues to exist when we aren’t looking at it. But why do we believe this? Even when such questions are the creations of philosophers, they outline views of the world that nonphilosophers share with them. The problem is, as we shall see, that people disagree violently about these issues, even from one generation to the next (e.g., from Plato to Aristotle). What seems to be clear and obvious to one philosopher will seem obscure, merely metaphorical, or downright para- doxical to another. But as we watch the warring history of metaphysics, we, too, should be humbled by it, for it cannot be that all of those geniuses got it wrong while we now have it right. We too, whether explicitly or not, have metaphysical views, and we too may have to be ready to give them up as we think more about them and face further arguments.
With Plato and Aristotle, metaphysics becomes a cautious consuming enterprise, produc- ing monumental systems of many volumes that require a lifetime of study to master. All we can do here is present a thumbnail sketch, with some brief selections of Plato’s metaphysical writ- ings and a very brief introduction to Aristotle’s philosophy, which seems, at first glance, to be primarily a refutation of Plato. But like so many philosophers who seem to be attacking each other from completely opposed viewpoints, Plato and Aristotle have much in common. Both
• Buddha claimed that selfish desire, or attachment, is the root of suffering. Is there a difference between attachment and desire? How might either cause us to suffer?
• Does one become free from suffering when one becomes devoid of passion?
• How can things be both empty and interdependent?
received by the mind, for this also he conceives an aversion. And in conceiving this aversion, he becomes divested of passion, and by the absence of passion he becomes free, and when he is free he becomes aware that he is free; and he knows that re- birth is exhausted, that he has lived the holy life, that he has done what it behooved him to do, and that he is no more for this world.”
Now while this exposition was being delivered, the minds of the thousand priests became free from attachment and delivered from the depravities.
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attempted to resolve the problems they inherited from the pre-Socratics: to find the ultimate substance of the universe, to understand what was eternal and unchanging, to understand change, and to show that the universe as a whole is intelligible to human understanding. Plato, following Parmenides and the other pre-Socratics who trusted their reason more than common sense, gave reason a grander position in human life and in the universe in general than it had ever received before. Aristotle, although he, too, defended reason, insisted that philosophy return to common sense and have a respect for ordinary opinion, which many of the Greek philosophers seemed to have lost. But whatever their differences, it is the shared grandeur of their enterprise that should impress us most about Plato and Aristotle. Between them, they established in the West what we today call “philosophy.” And between them, they also laid the intellectual foundations for Christian theology. St. Augustine, for example, was very much a Platonist, and St. Thomas Aquinas was thoroughly indebted to Aristotle.
1. Plato The most important single feature of Plato’s philosophy is his theory of Forms. (The Greek word is Eidos.) Plato’s Forms are sometimes referred to as Ideas, but Plato does not mean “ideas” in a person’s mind. Instead, he means ideal forms or perfect examples—the perfect circle or perfect beauty. To avoid confusion, we shall use, not the word “Ideas,” but “Forms.”
Forms are the ultimate reality. Things change, people grow old and die, but Forms are eternal and unchanging. Thus Plato could agree with Heraclitus that the world of our experi- ence is constantly changing; but he could also agree with Parmenides, who insisted that the real world, the eternal and unchanging world of Forms, was not the same as the world of our experience. There were, in other words, two worlds: (1) the world in which we live, a world of constant change or a world of Becoming, and (2) a world of Forms, an unchanging world, the real world or the world of Being. We can see here Plato’s close connection with Parmenides, holding that ultimate reality (the Forms) must be changeless and eternal. Furthermore, also in accordance with Parmenides, it is only such changeless and eternal things that truly can be known. Our only access to this latter world, the real world, is through our reason, our capacity for intellectual thought. Plato’s “two-worlds” view was to have a direct influence on Christian theology. It would also affect philosophers, mathematicians, mystics, poets, and romantics of all kinds until the present day. But in his own time it had a more immediate im- portance; it allowed him to reconcile Heraclitus and Parmenides, to resolve the problems of the pre-Socratics, and to finally give ideas their proper place in human thought.
Plato thought of the Forms as having the special features that according to Parmenides characterized what is. The most exciting Form for Plato was the Form of beauty. Plato thought a person could get to know beauty by falling in love in the right way and by realizing that the excitement of love is really aimed not at the personality of the person loved but at the link between that person and eternal beauty.
F RO M Symposium B Y Plato11
You see, the man who has been thus far guided in matters of Love, who has beheld beautiful things in the right order and correctly, is coming now to the goal of Loving: All of a sudden he will catch sight of something wonderfully beautiful in
11 Reprinted from Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Copyright © 1989 by A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff. Reprinted by permission of Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
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its nature; that, Socrates, is the reason for all his earlier labors: First, [Beauty] always is, and neither comes to be nor passes away, neither waxes nor wanes. Second, it is not beautiful this way and ugly that way, nor beautiful at one time and ugly at another; nor beautiful in relation to one thing and ugly in relation to an- other; nor is it beautiful here but ugly there, as it would be if it were beautiful for some people and ugly for others. Nor will the beautiful appear to him in the guise of a face or hands or anything else that belongs to the body. It will not appear to him as one idea or one kind of knowledge. It is not anywhere in another thing, as in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven, or in anything else, but itself by itself with itself, it is always one in form; and all the other beautiful things share in that, in such a way that when those others come to be or pass away, this does not become the least bit smaller or greater nor suffer any change.
For Plato, it is the world of Forms, the world of being, that is real. But this is not to say (as Parmenides had argued) that the world we live in, the world of becoming, is unreal. It is, however, less than real, not an illusion, but without those qualities of eternity and necessity that are the marks of true reality. This might seem like a verbal trick; it is not. The idea of a hierarchy of realities was already familiar in religions that antedated Plato’s philosophy by centuries. We still use such notions in our own thinking, comparing, for example, the world of film and novels to “the real world,” or the dreary humdrum of working-day life to “really living.” But the best illustration of Plato’s two-worlds view is his own, which he offers us in a parable called the Myth of the Cave.
It is a parable about bringing people from the less real to the really real. Indeed, one of the most striking features of Plato’s philosophy (and much of Greek philosophy in general) is its emphasis on the love of wisdom, the irresistibility of what is fundamentally real; and what is too easily lost in translation is the very erotic imagery Plato uses to describe our passion for the truth. The Myth of the Cave not only illustrates two kinds of knowledge, two kinds of worlds; it is also a parable about human timidity, the difficulties we have in facing the truth, and our resistance to the dazzling light of truth itself.
F RO M Republic B Y Plato12
S O C R AT E S: Imagine men to be living in an underground cavelike dwelling place, which has a way up to the light along its whole width, but the entrance is a long way up. The men have been there from childhood, with their neck and legs in fetters, so that they remain in the same place and can only see ahead of them, as their bonds prevent them turning their heads. Light is provided by a fire burning some way behind them, and on a higher ground, there is a path across the cave and along this a low wall has been built, like the screen at a puppet show in front of the performers who show their puppets above it.
G L AU C O N: I see it.
12 Plato, Republic, Bk. VII, trans. G. M. A. Grube. Copyright © 1974 by Hackett Publishing Company. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
Plato’s Myth of the Cave describes the shock of moving from darkness into light. (© Shutterstock.com/Marques)
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S O C R AT E S: See then also men carrying along that wall, so that they overtop it, all kinds of artifacts, statues of men, reproductions of other animals in stone or wood fashioned in all sorts of ways, and, as is likely, some of the carriers are talking while others are silent.
G L AU C O N: This is a strange picture, and strange prisoners.
S O C R AT E S: They are like us, I said. Do you think, in the first place, that such men could see anything of themselves and each other except the shadows which the fire casts upon the wall of the cave in front of them?
G L AU C O N: How could they, if they have to keep their heads still throughout life?
S O C R AT E S: And is not the same true of the objects carried along the wall?
G L AU C O N: Quite.
S O C R AT E S: If they could converse with one another, do you not think that they would consider these shadows to be the real things?
G L AU C O N: Necessarily.
S O C R AT E S: What if their prison had an echo which reached them from in front of them? Whenever one of the carriers passing behind the wall spoke, would they not think that it was the shadow passing in front of them which was talking? Do you agree?
G L AU C O N: By Zeus, I do.
S O C R AT E S: Altogether then, I said, such men would believe the truth to be nothing else than the shadows of the artifacts?
G L AU C O N: They must believe that.
S O C R AT E S: Consider then what deliverance from their bonds and the curing of their ignorance would be if something like this naturally happened to them. Whenever one of them was freed, had to stand up suddenly, turn his head, walk, and look up toward the light, doing all that would give him pain, the flash of the fire would make it impossible for him to see the objects of which he had earlier seen the shadows. What do you think he would say if he was told that what he saw was foolishness, that he was now somewhat closer to reality and turned to things that existed more fully, that he saw more correctly? If one then pointed to each of the objects passing by, asked him what each was, and forced him to answer, do you not think he would be at a loss and believe that the things which he saw earlier were truer than the things now pointed out to him?
G L AU C O N: Much truer.
S O C R AT E S: If one then compelled him to look at the fire itself, his eyes would hurt, he would turn round and flee toward those things which he could see, and think that they were in fact clearer than those now shown to him.
G L AU C O N: Quite so.
S O C R AT E S: And if one were to drag him thence by force up the rough and steep path, and did not let him go before he was dragged into the sunlight, would he not be in physical pain and angry as he was dragged along? When he came into the light, with the sunlight filling his eyes, he would not be able to see a single one of the things which are now said to be true.
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G L AU C O N: Not at once, certainly.
S O C R AT E S: I think he would need time to get adjusted before he could see things in the world above; at first he would see shadows most easily, then reflections of men and other things in water, then the things themselves. After this he would see objects in the sky and the sky itself more easily at night, the light of the stars and the moon more easily than the sun and the light of the sun during the day.
G L AU C O N: Of course.
S O C R AT E S: Then, at last, he would be able to see the sun, not images of it in water or in some alien place, but the sun itself in its own place, and be able to con- template it.
G L AU C O N: That must be so.
S O C R AT E S: After this he would reflect that it is the sun which provides the sea- sons and the years, which governs everything in the visible world, and is also in some way the cause of those other things which he used to see.
G L AU C O N: Clearly that would be the next stage.
S O C R AT E S: What then? As he reminds himself of his first dwelling place, of the wisdom there and of his fellow prisoners, would he not reckon himself happy for the change, and pity them?
G L AU C O N: Surely.
S O C R AT E S: And if the men below had praise and honours from each other, and prizes for the man who saw most clearly the shadows that passed before them, and who could best remember which usually came earlier and which later, and which came together and thus could most ably prophesy the future, do you think our man would desire those rewards and envy those who were honoured and held power among the prisoners, or would he feel, as Homer put it, that he certainly wished to be “serf to another man without possessions upon the earth”13 and go through any suffering, rather than share their opinions and live as they do?
G L AU C O N: Quite so, I think he would rather suffer anything.
S O C R AT E S: Reflect on this too. If this man went down into the cave again and sat down in the same seat, would his eyes not be filled with darkness, coming sud- denly out of the sunlight?
G L AU C O N: They certainly would.
S O C R AT E S: And if he had to contend again with those who had remained pris- oners in recognizing those shadows while his sight was affected and his eyes had not settled down—and the time for this adjustment would not be short—would he not be ridiculed? Would it not be said that he had returned from his upward jour- ney with his eyesight spoiled, and that it was not worthwhile even to attempt to travel upward? As for the man who tried to free them and lead them upward, if they would somehow lay their hands on him and kill him, they would do so.
G L AU C O N: They certainly would.
13 Odyssey 11, 489–490, where Achilles says to Odysseus, on the latter’s visit to the underworld, that he would rather be a servant to a poor man on earth than king among the dead [translator’s note].
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S O C R AT E S: This whole image, my dear Glaucon, must be related to what we said before. The realm of the visible should be compared to the prison dwelling, and the fire inside it to the power of the sun. If you interpret the upward journey and the contemplation of things above as the upward journey of the soul to the intelligible realm, you will grasp what I surmise since you were keen to hear it. Whether it is true or not only the god knows, but this is how I see it, namely that in the intelli- gible world the Form of the Good is the last to be seen, and with difficulty; when seen it must be reckoned to be for all the cause of all that is right and beautiful, to have produced in the visible world both the light and the fount of light, while in the intelligible world it is itself that which produces and controls truth and intelligence, and he who is to act intelligently in public or in private must see it.
G L AU C O N: I share your thought as far as I am able.
S O C R AT E S: Come then, share with me this thought also: do not be surprised that those who have reached this point are unwilling to occupy themselves with human affairs, and that their souls are always pressing upward to spend their time there, for this is natural if things are as our parable indicates.
G L AU C O N: That is very likely.
S O C R AT E S: Further, do you think it at all surprising that anyone coming to the evils of human life from the contemplation of the divine behaves awkwardly and appears very ridiculous while his eyes are still dazzled and before he is sufficiently adjusted to the darkness around him, if he is compelled to contend in court or some other place about the shadows of justice or the objects of which they are shadows, and to carry through the contest about these in the way these things are understood by those who have never seen Justice itself ?
G L AU C O N: That is not surprising at all.
S O C R AT E S: Anyone with intelligence would remember that the eyes may be confused in two ways and from two causes, coming from light into darkness as well as from darkness into light. Realizing that the same applies to the soul, whenever he sees a soul disturbed and unable to see something, he will not laugh mindlessly but will consider whether it has come from a brighter life and is dimmed because unad- justed, or has come from greater ignorance into greater light and is filled with a brighter dazzlement. The former he would declare happy in its life and experience, the latter he would pity, and if he should wish to laugh at it, his laughter would be less ridiculous than if he laughed at the soul that has come from the light above.
G L AU C O N: What you say is very reasonable.
S O C R AT E S: We must then, if these things are true, think something like this about them, namely that education is not what some declare it to be; they say that knowledge is not present in the soul and that they put it in, like putting sight into blind eyes.
G L AU C O N: They surely say that.
S O C R AT E S: Our present argument shows that the capacity to learn and the organ with which to do so are present in every person’s soul. It is as if it were not possible to turn the eye from darkness to light without turning the whole body; so one must turn one’s whole soul from the world of becoming until it can endure to contemplate reality, and the brightest of realities, which we say is the Good.
“One must turn one’s whole soul from the world of becoming until it can endure to contemplate reality, and the brightest of realities, which we say is the Good.” — P L ATO ’ S S O C R AT E S
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G L AU C O N: Yes.
S O C R AT E S: Education then is the art of doing this very thing, this turning around, the knowledge of how the soul can most easily and most effectively be turned around; it is not the art of putting the capacity of sight into the soul; the soul possesses that already but it is not turned the right way or looking where it should. This is what education has to deal with.
G L AU C O N: That seems likely.
Our world is like a set of shadows of the real world. That does not make it an illusion, but it does make it a mere imitation of the bright originals. Notice, too, the savior-like role of the philosopher that Plato is setting up here. (Drawing on this idea, he famously argues that philosophers should be kings, and kings philosophers.) like Pythagoras, Plato believed that knowledge of pure Forms, knowledge of the world of “Being,” is a person’s only hope for salvation and the “good life.”
• Do you see any similarities between Plato’s theory of the Forms and ideas in Asian philosophy that we have considered?
• In what sense is ignorance like being imprisoned in a cave? What in our experience is comparable to the shadows in Socrates’ story?
Socrates had taught his students, Plato among them, that the truth, if we can know it at all, must be in us. Plato (using his teacher as his literary spokesman) gives this revelation a new twist. It begins with a puzzle. How is it possible to learn anything? If we don’t already know it, how will we recognize it when we find it? And if we already do know it, it makes no sense to say that we “learn it.” This puzzle sounds like nonsense if we think only of examples such as “how many gyms are there in Omaha, Nebraska?” To answer such questions, obvi- ously we can’t simply “look into ourselves”; we have to go out into the world and get infor- mation. But Plato insists that he is after much bigger game than “information”; he wants knowledge (with a capital K ), knowledge of reality, to which we have access only through thinking. That world, unlike the world of change and “information” in which we live, is char- acterized by the fact that everything in it is eternal and necessary. In this eternal world, real- ity is not discoverable merely through observation and experience. For example, consider the simple truth, 2 + 2 = 4; it never changes—no experience is necessary to know it; it is one of those eternal truths that deserves its place in Plato’s world of Being.
Perhaps the best way to understand Plato’s exciting but somewhat mysterious notion of the Forms is to think of the Forms in terms of definitions. The Forms are what different things of the same kind have in common and what make them things of the same kind. For exam- ple, two horses have in common the Form horse, and you recognize a horse, Plato would say, because of its Form. Suppose that you’ve never seen a horse before. Is it possible for you to know what a horse is? The answer is, “of course.” It is enough that you have learned what a horse is (from pictures or descriptions), even if you’ve never seen one. But how is such learn- ing possible? According to Plato, it is possible because we know a definition and thus recog- nize the Form of a horse, like the ideal Form of a triangle, and with it we are able to know what a horse is, even if we have never seen one, and we recognize horses when we do see
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them. In Plato’s terms, we can recognize all horses, no matter what their age, shape, color, or peculiarities, just because they “participate” in the Form horse. For Plato, the Form horse has even more reality than particular, flesh-and-blood horses.
The concept of Form allows Plato to explain what it is that one comes to understand when one learns that two or more things are of the same kind. But for Plato the notion of Form serves another purpose as well. In addition to what we know about things from experience, we also know some things independent of experience, and we know these things with certainty (the same certainty Descartes sought, as we observed in our Introduction). For example, we know that every horse is an animal. We know that not simply because every horse that we have seen has turned out to be an animal, but because we know, apart from any particular experiences with horses, that the very Form horse involves the Form animal. (In our times, we would say that the meaning of the English word “horse” already includes the concept of “being an animal”; accordingly, philosophers refer to this kind of truth as conceptual truth. But this term was not available to Plato.)
Definitions are essential because without them it is difficult to know exactly what one is talking about. But this quest for definitions should not be confused with the high school debating technique of asking your opponent at the outset to “define [your] terms.” Rather, a definition is the conclusion of a philosophical argument—and it is very hard to come by. In his dialogue Meno, Plato has Socrates push for a definition of “virtue”; his arguments here are a good illustration of the Socratic pursuit of the Forms through definitions.
René Magritte’s Les Deux Mysteres (The Two Mysteries) draws attention to the way that a painting of a pipe is an image, not a real pipe. Plato would claim that a pipe that someone smokes is not ultimately real, either. (Banque d’Images, ADAGP/Art Resource, NY; © 2015 C. Herscovici/Artists Rights Society (ASR), New York)
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F RO M Meno B Y Plato14
M E N O : Can you tell me, Socrates, can virtue be taught? Or is it not teachable but the result of practice, or is it neither of these, but men possess it by nature or in some other way?
S O C R AT E S: Before now, Meno, Thessalians had a high reputation among the Greeks and were admired for their horsemanship and their wealth, but now, it seems to me, they are also admired for their wisdom, not least the fellow citizens of your friend Aristippus of Larissa. The responsibility for this reputation of yours lies with Gorgias, for when he came to your city he found that the leading Aleuadae, your lover Aristippus among them, loved him for his wisdom, and so did the other leading Thessalians. In particular, he accustomed you to give a bold and grand answer to any question you may be asked, as experts are likely to do. Indeed, he himself was ready to answer any Greek who wished to question him, and every question was answered. But here in Athens, my dear Meno, the opposite is the case, as if there were a dearth of wisdom, and wisdom seems to have departed hence to go to you. If then you want to ask one of us that sort of question, everyone will laugh and say: “Good stranger, you must think me happy indeed if you think I know whether virtue can be taught or how it comes to be; I am so far from knowing whether virtue can be taught or not that I do not even have any knowledge of what virtue itself is.”
14 Plato, Meno, trans. G. M. A. Grube. Copyright © 1976 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Reprinted with permis- sion. All rights reserved.
Ptolemy and Strabo in School of Athens by Raphael. Plato suggests that reason, which can solve complex mathematical puzzles, is innate in all human beings, even an illiterate slave boy. (© iStockphoto .com/estelle75)
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I myself, Meno, am as poor as my fellow citizens in this matter, and I blame myself for my complete ignorance about virtue. If I do not know what something is, how could I know what qualities it possesses? Or do you think that someone who does not know at all who Meno is could know whether he is good-looking or rich or well-born, or the opposite of these? Do you think that is possible?
M E N O : I do not; but, Socrates, do you really not know what virtue is? Are we to report this to the folk back home about you?
S O C R AT E S: Not only that, my friend, but also that, as I believe, I have never yet met anyone else who did know.
M E N O : How so? Did you not meet Gorgias when he was here?
S O C R AT E S: I did.
M E N O : Did you then not think that he knew?
S O C R AT E S: I do not altogether remember, Meno, so that I cannot tell you now what I thought then. Perhaps he does know; you know what he used to say, so you remind me of what he said. You tell me yourself, if you are willing, for surely you share his views.
M E N O : I do.
S O C R AT E S: Let us leave Gorgias out of it, since he is not here. But, Meno, by the gods, what do you yourself say that virtue is? Speak and do not begrudge us, so that I may have spoken a most unfortunate untruth when I said that I had never met anyone who knew, if you and Gorgias are shown to know.
M E N O : It is not hard to tell you, Socrates. First, if you want the virtue of a man, it is easy to say that a man’s virtue consists of being able to manage public affairs and in so doing to benefit his friends and harm his enemies and to be careful that no harm comes to himself; if you want the virtue of a woman, it is not difficult to describe: she must manage the home well, preserve its possessions, and be submissive to her husband; the virtue of a child, whether male or female, is dif- ferent again, and so is that of an elderly man, if you want that, or if you want that of a free man or a slave. And there are very many other virtues, so that one is not at a loss to say what virtue is. There is virtue for every action and every age, for every task of ours and every one of us—and Socrates, the same is true for wickedness.
S O C R AT E S: I seem to be in great luck, Meno; while I am looking for one virtue, I have found you to have a whole swarm of them. But, Meno, to follow up the image of swarms, if I were asking you what is the nature of bees, and you said that they are many and of all kinds, what would you answer if I asked you: “Do you mean that they are many and varied and different from one another in so far as they are bees? Or are they no different in that regard, but in some other respect, in their beauty, for example, or their size or in some other such way?” Tell me, what would you answer if thus questioned?
M E N O : I would say that they do not differ from one another in being bees.
S O C R AT E S: If I went on to say: “Tell me, what is this very thing, Meno, in which they are all the same and do not differ from one another?” Would you be able to tell me?
M E N O : I would.
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Meno continues to try to satisfy Socrates with a definition of virtue, but every time he either contradicts himself or argues in a circle. So how does one know a definition? The answer, according to Plato, is that we recognize the Forms. We know what a horse is because we recognize the Form of a horse. We recognize that 2 + 2 = 4 because we know the Forms. But how do we know the Forms? If we do not and cannot learn of them from experience (the changing world of Becoming in everyday life), then how do we know them at all? The answer, according to Plato, is that they already are “in us.”
The second principle of Plato’s metaphysics, our bridge between the two worlds, is the immortality and immateriality of the human soul. Our souls contain knowledge of the world of Being that is already in us at birth. Such knowledge and ideas are called innate. Experi- ence only triggers them off and allows us to “remember” them. Here is Plato’s extravagant answer to the puzzle, “How is it possible to learn a truth about the world of Being?” The answer is: We already “know” it; it’s just a matter of recalling it. Consider his famous illustra- tion of this second doctrine in Meno:
M E N O : How will you look for it, Socrates, when you do not know at all what it is? How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all? If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not know?
S O C R AT E S: I know what you want to say, Meno. Do you realize what a debater’s argument you are bringing up, that a man cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know? He cannot search for what he knows—since he knows it, there is no need to search—nor for what he does not know, for he does not know what to look for.
M E N O : Does that argument not seem sound to you, Socrates?
S O C R AT E S: Not to me.
The ancient Egyptians built architectural monuments to the belief in human immortality. (© iStockphoto.com/LUke1138)
“ . . . There is no teaching but recollection, in order to show me up at once as contradicting myself.” — P L ATO ’ S S O C R AT E S
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M E N O : Can you tell me why?
S O C R AT E S : I can. I have heard wise men and women talk about divine matters. . . .
M E N O : What did they say?
S O C R AT E S: What was, I thought, both true and beautiful.
M E N O : What was it, and who were they?
S O C R AT E S: The speakers were among the priests and priestesses whose care it is to be able to give an account of their practices. Pindar too says it, and many others of the divine among our poets. What they say is this; see whether you think they speak the truth: They say that the human soul is immortal; at times it comes to an end, which they call dying, at times it is reborn, but it is never destroyed, and one must therefore live one’s life as piously as possible:
Persephone will return to the sun above in the ninth year the souls of those from whom she will exact punishment for old miseries, and from these come noble kings, mighty in strength and greatest in wisdom, and for the rest of time men will call them sacred heroes.
As the soul is immortal, has been born often and has seen all things here and in the underworld, there is nothing which it has not learned; so it is in no way surprising that it can recollect the things it knew before, both about virtue and other things. As the whole of nature is akin, and the soul has learned everything, nothing prevents a man, after recalling one thing only—a process men call learning—discovering everything else for himself, if he is brave and does not tire of the search, for searching and learning are, as a whole, recollection. We must, therefore, not believe that de- bater’s argument, for it would make us idle, and fainthearted men like to hear it, whereas my argument makes them energetic and keen on the search. I trust that this is true, and I want to inquire along with you into the nature of virtue.
M E N O : Yes, Socrates, but how do you mean that we do not learn, but that what we call learning is recollection? Can you teach me that this is so?
S O C R AT E S: As I said just now, Meno, you are a rascal. You now ask me if I can teach you, when I say there is no teaching but recollection, in order to show me up at once as contradicting myself.
M E N O : No, by Zeus, Socrates, that was not my intention when I spoke, but just a habit. If you can somehow show me that things are as you say, please do so.
At this dramatic point in the dialogue, Socrates calls over an illiterate, uneducated slave boy and with minimal instructions leads him to discover an elementary geometrical proof. What is crucial is that Socrates does not tell the boy the answer but “draws it out of him.” But then the question becomes, where was this answer “in him,” and how did he recognize it? After the demonstration, Socrates draws his conclusions:
S O C R AT E S: What do you think, Meno? Has he, in his answers, expressed any opinion that was not his own?
M E N O : No, they were all his own.
S O C R AT E S: And yet, as we said, he did not know a short time ago?
M E N O : That is true.
S O C R AT E S: So these opinions were in him, were they not?
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M E N O : Yes.
S O C R AT E S: So the man who does not know has within himself true opinions about the things that he does not know?
M E N O : So it appears.
S O C R AT E S: These opinions have now just been stirred up like a dream, but if he were repeatedly asked these same questions in various ways, you know that in the end his knowledge about these things would be as accurate as anyone’s.
M E N O : It is likely.
S O C R AT E S: And he will know it without having been taught but only ques- tioned, and find the knowledge within himself ?
M E N O : Yes.
S O C R AT E S: And is not finding knowledge within oneself recollection?
M E N O : Certainly.
S O C R AT E S: Must he not either have at some time acquired the knowledge he now possesses, or else have always possessed it?
M E N O : Yes.
S O C R AT E S: If he always had it, he would always have known. If he acquired it, he cannot have done so in his present life. Or has someone taught him geometry? For he will perform in the same way about all geometry, and all other knowledge. Has someone taught him everything? You should know, especially as he has been born and brought up in your house.
M E N O : But I know that no one has taught him.
S O C R AT E S: Yet he has these opinions, or doesn’t he?
M E N O : That seems indisputable, Socrates.
S O C R AT E S: If he has not acquired them in his present life, is it not clear that he had them and had learned them at some other time?
M E N O : It seems so.
S O C R AT E S: Then that was the time when he was not a human being?
M E N O : Yes.
S O C R AT E S: If then, during the time he exists and is not a human being he will have true opinions which, when stirred by questioning, become knowledge, will not his soul have learned during all time? For it is clear that during all time he exists either as a man or not.
M E N O : So it seems.
S O C R AT E S: Then if the truth about reality is always in our soul, the soul would be immortal so that you should always confidently try to seek out and recollect what you do not know at present—that is, what you do not recollect?
M E N O : Somehow, Socrates, I think that what you say is right.
S O C R AT E S: I think so too, Meno.
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The doctrine of the immortality of the soul did not originate with Plato, of course. The ancient Egyptians believed in it many centuries before the first Greek philosophers, and Pythagoras had taught it to his students. But Plato’s doctrine had more than religious signifi- cance; it was his answer to the skeptics and our bridge to the eternal world of Being. Of course, as a student of Socrates, he also appreciated the advantages of believing in an afterlife. Socrates could face death so calmly, he told his students, just because he believed in life after death. But for Plato it signified something more; it provided us with knowledge in this life as well as continued existence in another.
Plato’s doctrines of the world of Being and the immortality of the soul introduce a clearly immaterialist conception of reality, as opposed to all of the more or less materialist concep- tions we have encountered so far (the world as “stuff”). Even Pythagoras’ numbers and Heraclitus’ logos had their materialistic foundations, for neither philosopher was willing to grant these things independent existence, independent, that is, of the material things of this world. The things of Plato’s world of Being can exist apart from them.
What is in this “other world,” this world of Being? We have already met one of its inhabit- ants: the simple truth, 2 + 2 = 4. Its inhabitants are Forms. Consider the following familiar example: Your geometry teacher asks you to prove that the internal angles of a triangle total 180°. Simple enough. You remember how: You extend the base of the triangle, draw a line parallel to the base through the apex, and then proceed with your proof. But now, how do you know that you have not only shown that the internal angles of this triangle total 180°? As a matter of fact, it is pretty obvious that what you have drawn isn’t even a triangle; the sides sag, one of the angles is broken, and the lines are fat (while a real line has no width at all). But yet you claim to have proved something about all triangles. It is clear that you needn’t do the proof even twice, much less an infinite number of times, to make your claim. How come? Because, you will answer, what you have been working with is not this particular poorly drawn triangle in your notebook but an ideal triangle, the form of all and any trian- gles. And there it is—Plato’s Form of a triangle. It is not identical to any particular triangle. (How could it be? It would have to be acute, isosceles, right, and nonright all at the same time!) It is the ideal Form, which each particular triangle approximates, that has its own exis- tence in the world of Being. Plato says that every triangle that we can draw participates in the ideal Form and that it is only through reason, not through observation of particular triangles, that we come into contact with these ideal Forms.
To know a Platonic Form is not just to “see” something. It is to fall in love with it; in fact, it is to fall madly in love. So Socrates, in nearly all of Plato’s dialogues, repeats the claim that a philosopher is a kind of lover. Indeed, he says that to know the Forms is to want to reproduce, to propagate, to teach everyone else to see them and to love them, too. The Myth of the Cave and the metaphor of the Sun and shadows have two sides. The first is that the changing world of our everyday experience is only a shadow, an imitation of reality. But the second side is that the world of our everyday experience is also an image of the divine and ultimate reality, and so in the things of everyday life we get at least a glimpse of perfection.
Among the Forms are those ideals of human perfection that we should not only recog- nize but try to realize here in the world of Becoming: Wisdom, Justice, Beauty, and Good- ness. To these ideals of perfection each of us aspires, and it is the definition of these ideals that is the task of every philosopher. His or her job (Socrates’ main task in all of Plato’s dialogues) is to sort out the common confusions about such vital matters. The business of the philosopher, in short, is to make others recognize eternal Forms and make it possible to achieve that wisdom to which Plato’s teacher, Socrates, had heroically devoted his life.
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We hope that you can appreciate, even from this brief sketch, the power of the metaphysi- cal doctrines Plato has developed. You may also be aware of some of their difficulties. Most importantly, the gap between our world and the real world makes us exceedingly uncomfort- able; none of us likes to think of ourselves living merely in the shadows. (As Plato himself warns, “wouldn’t the prisoners who had never been released . . . laugh at him and even . . . kill” the philosopher who thus instructs them?) The connection between the world of Being and our own world of Becoming is not at all clear. Plato does say that the things of this latter world “participate” in the Forms of the former, but one thing that we shall have to learn right away in philosophy (and in every other discipline) is that the words that pretend to be expla- nations are often only cosmetic cover-ups. It looks as if we have a theory when in fact we have only a word. This is particularly true of Plato’s word “participates” (methexis), and he himself raises serious doubts about it in his later dialogues. But the real attack comes, as it should come in philosophy, from his own students, and from one in particular, Aristotle.
• How does the slave boy in the Meno discover the proof without being told? Do you find Socrates’ explanation plausible?
• Is there any other plausible explanation for how the slave boy discovered a math- ematical truth?
2. Aristotle Aristotle claimed that he did not understand Plato’s concept of “participation.” (When a philosopher claims “not to understand” something, it means that he is pushing for a better account of it, that he is not satisfied so far. Aristotle probably understood Plato as well as anybody ever has.) Aristotle’s objection was, essentially, that Plato had failed to explain the relationship between the Forms and particular things, and that the word “participation” was no more than “a mere empty phrase and a poetic metaphor.”15 Furthermore, Plato’s empha- sis on the Forms made it impossible to appreciate the full reality of particular things, and the eternal permanence of the Forms made them useless for understanding how particular things could change. Indeed, the question “How do things change?” becomes the central theme of Aristotle’s philosophy.
Aristotle also wanted to determine the nature of reality. But Plato had argued that reality was something other than the world of our experience. Aristotle, a practical man of the earth, a great biologist, physicist, and worldly tutor to Alexander the Great, would have none of this. This world, our world, is reality. He agreed with Plato that knowledge must be univer- sal and concerned with what things have in common, but he rejected Plato’s idea that these common universal ingredients—the Forms of things—could be separated from particular things. But this meant that Aristotle also rejected Plato’s separation of the human soul from the body, and Aristotle, unlike Plato, saw human beings entirely as creatures of nature, “ra- tional animals”—but still animals. Metaphysics, for Aristotle, was not the study of another world, recollected in our eternal souls; metaphysics was simply the study of nature (physis) and, as importantly, the study of ourselves. Accordingly, he brought metaphysics “back home.” But it must not be thought that he made it any simpler. The beginning student of Aristotle—as well as the trained scholar—will attest to the fact that he is among the most difficult authors in philosophy.
15 Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. W. D. Ross, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924.
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F RO M Metaphysics B Y Aristotle16
There is a branch of knowledge that studies being qua being, and the attributes that belong to it in virtue of its own nature. Now this is not the same as any of the so-called special sciences, since none of these enquires universally about being qua being. They cut off some part of it and study the attributes of this part—that is what the mathematical sciences do, for instance. But since we are seeking the first principles, the highest causes, it is of being qua being that we must grasp the first causes.
The study of being qua being is metaphysics, which Aristotle was the first to isolate from other branches of philosophy. It is, first of all, the study of the different ways the word “being” can be used. This leads Aristotle to his famous theory of categories:
There are several senses in which a thing may be said to “be.” In one sense the “being” meant is “what a thing is” or a “this,” while in another sense it means a quality or a quantity or one of the other things that are predicated as these are. While “being” has all these senses, the primary type of being is obviously the “what,” which indicates the substance of the thing. For when we say of what qual- ity something is, we say that it is good or bad, not that it is six feet long or that it is a man; but when we say what it is, we do not say “white” or “hot” or “six feet long,” but “a man” or “a god.” All other things are said to be because they are quantities of that which is in this primary sense, or qualities of it, or in some other way characteristics of it.
The primary use of “be” is to tell us what something really is, what it is in an unqualified sense: Each of us is, in this sense, a certain individual human being. Each of us is also a cer- tain number of inches tall; but that fact is secondary, it is something about us, which could change without changing what we are, first and foremost, and belongs to the category of quantity. We may also be pale or dark; such a fact is also secondary and belongs to the cat- egory of quality. The primary category is that of substance. “Substance,” as Aristotle defines it, is “that which stands alone.” In other words, “substance” is independent being. You would exist, for instance, even if you didn’t have hair. But your hair could not exist without you, and so it is not a substance. Substances are the basic elements in Aristotle’s metaphys- ics. A horse, a tree, and a butterfly are substances.
Tables and chairs are not primary beings for Aristotle, because he thinks of primary beings as having their own natures. Something made by a human being, such as a table, can only exist if human beings exist. It cannot move or fulfill its nature—in this case, holding our foot—by itself. Our nature is what we will do if nothing stops us. A human being grows up and leads a human life, if nothing stops him; that’s his nature. A wooden table will inevitably rot if nothing stops it, since that is the nature of the wood it is made of. Wood has a nature; tables do not. For that reason, Aristotle treats artifacts (things we make) as having a lower level of being than we do ourselves.
16 Aristotle, Metaphysics, T.1.1003a21, Z.1.1028a10, trans. W. D. Ross, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924.
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F RO M Physics B Y Aristotle17
Some people think that the nature and real being of a natural object is the primary material in it (material in itself unformed)—in a bed it would be the wood, in a statue the bronze. It is an indication of this, according to Antiphon, that if you bury a bed, and the rotting wood becomes able to send up a shoot, what comes up will not be a bed, but wood—suggesting that the arrangement in accordance with the rules of the art belongs only incidentally, and that the reality—what the thing really is—is what actually persists through all those changes.
. . . But there is another way of speaking, according to which the nature of a thing
is its shape or form as given in its definition . . . and this rather than its matter is a thing’s nature. For (i) each thing is called whatever it is, when it is that thing actu- ally rather than just potentially [the wood or the seed, the matter, is not a table or a lettuce—though it may have the potentiality of being one—until it has actually been put together or has actually germinated and grown]. Further, (ii) men come to be from men, but not beds from beds. That is precisely why people say that the nature of a bed is not the shape but the wood; if it sprouts it is not a bed but wood that comes up. But if this shows that the wood is nature, form too is nature; for men come to be from men.
The doctrines of Aristotle’s metaphysics sound as simple as they could be. This world, the world of our experience, is reality; there is no other world. The ultimate things of reality, which Aristotle calls substances, are individual things—people, horses, trees, and butterflies. Change is real and much of reality is subject to change. Forms are real, but they cannot exist separately from the particular substances whose forms they are. This is not as radical a departure from Plato as it may seem. Aristotle did believe that the highest level of reality was not subject to change. Gods, the heavens, and even the forms of biological species were changeless in his system. Aristotle did not believe in any form of evolution.
Aristotle, like Plato, has a hierarchy of reality. But he turns Plato’s hierarchy upside down. Plato holds that the more abstract things are the more real; Aristotle argues that the more con- crete things, individuals, are the more real. For Aristotle, as in common sense, the more tangible things are consid- ered to be the most real things. For Aristotle, the primary substances are individual things; secondary sub- stances (less real than individuals) are what he called the “species” and the
17 Aristotle, Physics, II.1.193a9, II.1.193, I.8.191a24, trans. W. D. Ross, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936.
According to Aristotle, the form of the sofa is what makes it a sofa. (© Shutterstock.com/ bikeriderlondon)
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“genus” to which a thing belongs. To return to our equestrian example, this particular horse, for Aristotle, is the primary substance. The species, “horse,” and the even broader genus, “animal,” are less real than the horse itself.
What is a substance? Aristotle spends many pages giving a number of definitions, enough to keep the philosophers of the Middle Ages busy for a thousand years sorting them out. For our purposes, it will be enough to mention three different descriptions of substance, each of which is important for Aristotle and for later philosophy. The first charac- terization of substance is presented in terms of grammar. Aristotle says, “a substance is that which is neither predictable of a subject nor present in a subject; for instance, the individual man or horse.”18 More simply, a substance is the thing referred to by a noun, which is the subject of a sentence; for example, “the man is . . .” or “Socrates is . . .” or “the horse is. . . .” (This characterization would have been less confusing in Greek.) A more ontological way of putting this, but unfortunately very confusing, too, is to say (as we did above) that a sub- stance is independent of anything else. (We shall see how important this idea becomes in the modern metaphysics of Spinoza and leibniz.) Other things might depend upon a sub- stance, but a substance does not depend upon them. This is an awkward way of saying, for example, that the color of a horse could not exist without the horse; indeed, nothing could be true of a horse if it did not exist.
A second way of characterizing substance is to say that substance is what underlies all of the properties and changes in something. In this sense, you can say that you are the same person (that is, the same substance) that you were ten years ago, despite the fact that you are, quite obviously, very different in a great many ways. (Aristotle says, “Substance, while remaining the same, is capable of admitting contrary properties.”) Combining these two characterizations, we can say that a substance is whatever is most basic to reality, like the pre-Socratic philosophers’ notion of “stuff.” It is the concrete individual thing, which remains constant despite the fact that it changes and has different properties at different times. You are the same person before and after you’ve gotten a haircut, tried on a new suit of clothes, or had your appendix removed.
The third characterization of substance requires the introduction of another new term, which became a central concern of philosophers before this century. A substance can be defined in terms of what is essential. An essence is that aspect of an individual that identifies it as a particular individual. For example, it is part of the essence of being Socrates that he is a human being, that he lived in the fourth century b.c.e., and that he was wise. In other words, each of these characteristics is an essential property of Socrates. Anything that does not have these properties could not possibly be Socrates. There are other properties that Socrates has, of course; for example, the fact that he had a wart on his nose. But this is not an essential property. (Aristotle calls it an accident or an accidental property.) Socrates still would have been Socrates without it. But Socrates could not have been a centipede, for it is part of his essence to be human.
A substance is a combination of form and matter. Aristotle’s “form” is roughly the same as Plato’s Form, except that for Aristotle, it does not exist apart from the individual things that have it; it is always informing some matter. Matter is a discovery of Aristotle’s. It is, basi- cally, what things are made out of; it is what is given shape and structure by the form. The matter of a boat is wood; its form is the design that the boatbuilder realized in the wood. (Notice that “form” is written with a small f here, although Aristotle uses the same word as Plato, eidos. His word for the matter is hylē.)
18 Aristotle, Categories, trans. J. l. Ackrill, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963.
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These notions enabled Aristotle to explain change. Earlier philosophers, he thought, be- lieved only in matter that by itself would stay the same. Plato believed only in Forms that are eternally unchanging. But Aristotle believed in things that combined matter and form in a variety of ways. Substantial change, the “coming to be and passing away” of a substance, takes place when matter is given a new form.
With both concepts available, Aristotle thinks he can avoid the mistakes of his predeces- sors, especially the mistake of Parmenides, which he blames on inexperience:
The first people to philosophise about the nature and truth of things got side- tracked and driven off course by inexperience. They said that nothing comes to be or passes away, because whatever comes to be must do so either from what is, or from what is not—and neither of these is possible. For what is cannot come to be, since it is already; and nothing can come to be from what is not, since there must [in all change and coming into being] be something underlying.
The essence of a thing cannot change (or it would no longer be the same thing), and it is of little metaphysical importance if accidents change. So what does change?
Form and matter, Aristotle says, cannot exist separately, but they can be distinguished everywhere in nature. The best examples can be found in human craftsmanship. One can take a lump of clay, for example, and make it into a bowl of any number of shapes. Or one can take a piece of silver and make it into a fork, a spoon, a bracelet, or a couple of rings. The clay or the silver is the matter; the shape and the function define the form. Aristotle also says that the matter itself can be analyzed in terms of form and matter. The matter of the clay and the silver would be the basic elements—earth, air, fire, and water. The form would be the shape and proportion these elements assume to make clay or silver. Indeed, Aristotle even holds that the basic elements themselves can be analyzed in terms of more primitive matter—hotness, coldness, dryness, and wetness—which combine to give the form of the elements. It is the form of things that we can know and explain, according to Aristotle, never the matter. Thus, we can talk about form and matter separately, and so understand change. His predecessor, he thought, mistook the way we talk about reality for the way it is. The form, by itself, can never change, nor can the matter, but the way they combine can change. By changing their form, caterpillars turn into butterflies and seeds into fruits and flowers. Thus, Aristotle ex- plains both change and stability.
You may already anticipate certain troubles that will plague later philosophers. How much can we change a person, for example, and still have him or her be the same? Provide a haircut? A col- lege education? A ten-year jail sentence? Gender reassignment surgery? But before we worry about such problems, let us appreciate the importance of the notion of essence in Aristotle’s philosophy. With it, he can do everything that Plato wanted to do with his special notion of Forms, but without invoking anything otherworldly. According to Aristotle, we can know that Socrates is a man, for instance, just because the essence of Socrates includes the property of being a man. We can know that a horse is an animal because the
Are these pictures of the same man? (© Shutterstock.com/Rommel Canlas)
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essence of being a horse includes the property of being an animal. In Plato, a conceptual truth of this kind was a truth about eternal Forms; for Aristotle, such a conceptual truth is rather a statement about essences.
In both medieval and modern philosophy, the concepts of substance and essence will take on a particularly important role in debates about God and his relation to his creations as well as in the continuing controversies in ontology that accompanied the rise of modern science. But Aristotle’s ontology, much more than the philosophy of his predecessors, was linked up with an exciting prescientific cosmology, an account of the nature and pur- pose of the universe. In the Middle Ages, these theories profoundly inspired the great Christian theologian St. Thomas Aquinas, who would refer to Aristotle as simply “the Philosopher.”
• The three definitions of substance described above are all expressions of the same thing. Explain how they relate to each other.
• Give an example in which the form-matter combination explains change.
To understand Aristotle’s cosmology, we have to begin with a notion that is extremely foreign to people today: the idea that the universe as a whole and all things in it have a purpose, a goal. The Greek word for “purpose” or “goal” is telos, and Aristotle’s view is called teleology. Teleology can be directly contrasted with our modern scientific view of reality, which is primarily a causal view. Teleology explains something by looking for its purpose, goal, or end; causal explanations seek to understand how something came about, not why it came about. If you were asked why a frog has a heart, for example, the teleologi- cal answer would be “in order to keep it alive, by pumping the blood through its body.” The causal answer, on the other hand, would be an explanation of the genetics, the evolution- ary process, the development of the frog. If you were asked why a plant turns its leaves toward the sunlight, the teleological answer would be “in order to face the sun.” The causal explanation, instead, would refer you to the fact that the cells grow faster on one side of the stem and that certain light-sensitive chemicals do such-and-such, and so on. In modern science, a causal answer is always preferable, and if a teleological answer is allowed at all it is always with the qualification that either there is an underlying causal explanation or we do not yet have (but someday will have) an adequate causal explanation. In Aristotle’s metaphysics, on the other hand, one does not have an explanation unless one knows what purpose a thing or an event serves. “Nature does nothing in vain” is the motto of the teleologist.19
Aristotle believed that every substance, every natural thing whether human, animal, veg- etable, or mineral, had its own nature, its own internal principles, certain tendencies toward its natural end that were part of that thing’s essence. (Artifacts are directed toward ends, too, but these are “external” ends supplied by those who make them. They do not have in- ternal tendencies toward ends that are supplied by their very nature.) Aristotle’s contention that every natural thing has inherent tendencies was the basis, for example, of his famous theory of falling objects: Every object has its “place,” and if an object is moved, it will return
19 Aristotle rejected a theory of natural selection argued by Empedocles twenty-three hundred years before Darwin because it was not a teleological theory.
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to its rightful place on its own power. That means that any object of sufficient size, whose place is on (or under) the ground, will fall toward the earth immediately if it is lifted into the air. And larger objects, which are not slowed down by the air’s resistance, will fall faster than smaller ones—or so he claimed. Indeed, this seemed so inherently reasonable to Aristotle and everyone around him that it never occurred to them to test it under experimental condi- tions. But gravitation, which Newton would not discover for another two millennia, is essen- tially a causal concept. Aristotle’s explanation was a teleological one, which the Greeks found far more convincing. Moreover, even if they had had the equipment for a test, which they did not, the Greeks still might not have believed the answer. Aristotle could not under- stand how causation could possibly operate at a distance. Thus, Aristotle thought that the cause of an object falling had to be in the object and not in the earth.
A reader who begins reading Aristotle may be initially confused by his use of the word cause (in transliteration aition) to include not only what we have been calling causal expla- nation but teleological accounts as well. In fact, Aristotle lists four different kinds of cause, all of which together explain why a thing is as it is at any given time. The first of these is the matter that makes it up, the material cause, the silver in the spoon or the flesh and blood that make up our bodies. The second is the principle or law by which it is made, the formal cause, an architect's design or a craftsman's mental model. The third is what we would call
A blueprint illustrates Aristotle’s notion of a formal cause, a pattern or model that includes all the essential attributes of a thing in the right arrangement. (© iStockphoto.com/Dominik Pabis)
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“the cause,” which Aristotle calls the efficient cause, the person or event that actually makes something happen by doing something— pushing a button, causing an explo- sion, calling the person in charge. Fourth, there is the pur- pose of the thing, its final cause, its telos. Notice that Aristotle’s four causes are better suited for explaining human activities than giving what we would call scientific explanations about things that happen in nature. But this is indeed Aristotle’s paradigm, and he even says in Physics, “If purpose is present in art, it must also be present in nature.” It is the final cause that provides us with the most important explanation.
We can understand this without any difficulty when we are explaining human activities. We want to know, first of all, what purpose a person has in doing something. But when it comes to nature, we do not generally ask about purpose; we are more likely to ask about (efficient) causes. We might ask of an animal, what purpose is served by a long neck, or certain features in its feet, or some kind of fur,
but we are less likely to ask that of a plant and would find such a question unintelligible with reference to rocks, clouds, and stars. Aristotle and his fellow Greeks would not find this perplexing at all. Indeed, he believed (and until the seventeenth century thousands of sci- entists followed him) that everything that existed had to be accounted for in terms of its inner purposes and the overall purpose it served in nature. Thus a magnet literally “at- tracts” little pieces of metal, and the stars really do have a purpose in their heavenly wan- derings. Not only do all the things and creatures of the universe have their purposes, but the universe itself has its purpose, too. Indeed, it is this ultimate purpose of the universe that gives all the particular things their significance. Indeed, for Aristotle, the idea that the universe as a whole might not have a purpose would have been absurd. One of his most famous arguments is aimed at showing why there must be an ultimate purpose, a “first (Final) cause,” or what he calls, “the prime mover.”
F RO M Metaphysics B Y Aristotle20
Moreover, it is obvious that there is some first principle, and that the causes of things are not infinitely many either in a direct sequence or in kind. For the mate- rial generation of one thing from another cannot go on in an infinite progression (e.g., flesh from earth, earth from air, air from fire, and so on without a stop); nor can the source of motion (e.g., man be moved by air, air by the sun, the sun by Strife, with no limit to the series). In the same way neither can the Final Cause [that is, purposes] recede to infinity—walking having health for its object, and health happiness, and happiness something else: one thing always being done for the sake of another. And it is just the same with the Formal Cause [that is, the es- sence]. For in the case of all intermediate terms of a series which are contained between a first and last term, the prior term is necessarily the cause of those which
20 Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Tredennick, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933.
An infinite regress goes on forever. (© Shutterstock.com/Ykh)
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follow it; because if we had to say which of the three is the cause, we should say “the first.” At any rate it is not the last term, because what comes at the end is not the cause of anything. Neither, again, is the intermediate term, which is only the cause of one (and it makes no difference whether there is one intermediate term or several, nor whether they are infinite or limited in number). But of series which are infinite in this way, and in general of the infinite, all the parts are equally intermediate, down to the present moment. Thus if there is no first term, there is no cause at all.
The argument, simply stated, is that teleological explanations cannot go on forever, or what philosophers sometimes call an infinite regress. For Aristotle, if x exists for the pur- pose of y and y exists for the purpose of z, there must be some ultimate purpose that will explain them all. A similar argument can be made with regard to efficient causes, that if p makes q happen and r makes p happen and so on, there must be an end to the “and so on.” So too with the material cause and the formal cause. The most exciting aspect of this infinite regress argument is the idea that the universe itself must have a purpose, a Final cause, a “prime mover,” which Aristotle characterizes as “pure thought, thinking about itself.” It is an obscure but intriguing idea, which was taken up by Christian theology as an apt characterization of the Christian God (see Chapter 4). But Aristotle’s prime mover has few of the characteristics of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God; the prime mover did not create the universe and has no special concern for man. The prime mover is more of a meta- physical necessity than a proper object of worship. But it is not too far-fetched to say that Aristotle, like most of the Greeks, viewed the universe as something like a cosmic organism, with an ultimate goal, thinking itself.
We can appreciate how this cosmology would become a source of inspiration for a great many philosophers, poets, and religious people. In more recent centuries, for example, it was used as a welcome alternative to the nuts and bolts materialism of modern Newtonian science (as we shall see in leibniz). Tied to the technical details of Aristotle’s ontology is an extremely imaginative cosmology: the picture of a purposeful universe, developing accord- ing to its own goals and principles. It is a fascinating picture and still an attractive alternative to the lifeless picture of the physical universe that is so central to our modern scientific outlook.
• To what extent do we still rely on teleological explanations in science?
• Are there other areas besides science in which we utilize or look for teleological explanations?
E. Modern Metaphysics Throughout the Middle Ages, philosophers and theologians developed elaborate systems of metaphysics, many of them derived directly or indirectly from the thoughts and theories of Plato and Aristotle. Inherent in all such systems was the confidence that the world is ulti- mately intelligible, and that the truths that reason can discern about reality are not only true, but necessarily true. Throughout this rich millennium of philosophy (from the later days of the Roman Empire through the Renaissance and Reformation), philosophy and theology in
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Europe became pretty much a single subject, until the rise of the “new” science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The series of revolutions that took place at that time justify a discussion about the beginning of the “modern” era of philosophy. What distin- guished these revolutions was not a separation of philosophy from religion and theology (most of these philosophers were pious theists whose God played a central role in their thinking), but rather a new boldness of thought, often in contradiction with church authority and strikingly original in its form. The father of these revolutions was René Descartes (whom we met in the Introduction), whose philosophy represented a radically new turn in meta- physical thinking. (We should remind ourselves that no thinker, however bold or brilliant, carries off a revolution all alone. Generations paved the way for Descartes’s revolution.)
Descartes’s metaphysics drew from certain ancient ideas, in particular the Aristotelian notion of substance as it had developed through the intervening centuries of Judeo- Christian and Arabic-Islamic theology during the Middle Ages. It was also a product of modern science, which was rapidly developing under the guidance of such geniuses as Copernicus and Galileo, and soon, under Sir Isaac Newton. As with Aristotle, one of Descartes’s central concerns was teleology, the purposiveness of the world, but in the new religious climate the question of purposiveness was focused wholly on the Being through whom all purposes were to be ultimately explained, the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. But this sense of purpose (or final causality) started to run counter to the notions of efficient and material causality that had already come to rule modern science. With the birth of modern science and the modern world, the clash between the teleological visions of faith and the causal explanations of science became inevitable.
The most dramatic new ingredient in modern metaphysics, however, was a concept that played virtually no role in ancient metaphysics at all, and that was the notion of the subjec- tive mind, or consciousness. To be sure, the Greeks talked about their own psychological states. (Aristotle wrote long discussions of such emotions as anger, for example. Homer often described the psychology of his heroes, almost always in physiological terms.) But the idea of a mind as a self-contained inner realm or arena—what the contemporary philoso- pher Daniel Dennett has dubbed “the Cartesian theater”—is distinctively new. One can trace its development through the centuries by way of the ever-increasing Christian emphasis on the soul and inner personal experience, but it is only in modern metaphysics that we get the full-blown view that what the world is made of, the ultimate reality of things, is mind. This view, in general, is called idealism. For a few eccentric philosophers, this might be taken to mean that the reality of the world is a function of one’s individual mind, but most idealists had something much grander in mind, as we shall see. Deriving their views from medieval Christianity, for example, some philosophers suggested that there is ultimately only one mind, or one supreme mind, the mind of God. Others suggested that mind per- vades everything, both God and everything else. In one sense, this view is plausible: we realize that we know about the things of reality only by way of their effects (direct or indi- rect) on our minds. But the idea that they exist only because of our minds is a much more radical proposition, and whether our minds are “free” to conceive of things and determine our actions, in the light of modern science, will become one of the most pressing concerns of philosophy.
Descartes’s metaphysical system was an amalgam of the latest theories in science and mathematics (some of which he discovered), established theology, and the new science of psychology. His method itself (discussed briefly in the Introduction) was based on the model of mathematical proof, starting with premises that were self-evident and arguing deduc- tively to conclusions that were therefore equally certain. We consider Descartes’s contribu- tions to knowledge—and the famous arguments beginning with his Cogito (“I think,
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therefore I am”)—in Chapter 3. Here we consider Descartes’s equally famous metaphysical model of the world, one which has set the stage for much of philosophy ever since. (The basic idea that mind and body are distinct is still referred to as Cartesian dualism.) Next we look at Descartes’s two most famous and brilliant followers, who developed elaborate meta- physical systems quite different from—and in opposition to—his own. The first is a Jewish philosopher, expelled from the synagogue for his heresies, who lived his life in poverty on the outskirts of Amsterdam. He is Benedictus21 de Spinoza (1632–1677). The second is his slightly younger contemporary, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716), Germany’s first great modern philosopher. Together, they present us with the classics in modern Western metaphysics, three very different speculations on the nature of the world.
1. René Descartes Modern metaphysics begins with Descartes’s insistence upon perfect certainty and mathe- matical deduction as the legitimate methodology. But methodology aside, metaphysics is a continuous enterprise from the Greeks through medieval philosophy, with Descartes its direct heir. We should not be surprised, for example, to find that the central concept of Descartes’s metaphysics is substance, and that his definition of it (and the term itself) comes straight from Aristotle: “a thing existing in such a manner that it has need of no other thing in order to exist.” (Both Spinoza and leibniz follow Descartes in taking substance as their central concept, and they follow him also in their method. The three philosophers are usually grouped together as a single school of thought called Rationalism.)
Descartes’s metaphysics can be understood best in terms of a monumental historical conflict between the “new” science (developed by Galileo and others) and the established authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Descartes, like many of the most important philoso- phers to follow him, was both an enthusiast of the new science—in fact he was an important contributor to both science and its mathematical foundations—and a religious man. He could not tolerate the idea that science should replace the orderly, meaningful worldview of Christianity with a Godless, amoral universe of mere “matter in motion.” Neither could Descartes ever accept that science should reduce human existence—in particular, the think- ing self—to another mere machine. (It is often noted that Descartes did think that animals were mere machines, claiming that what we too generously attribute to them by way of learning and responding to the environment is in fact nothing but a mechanical adjustment.) Accordingly, his metaphysics divides the world into three sorts of “substances”: God; the mind, or self; and physical, material being. The latter two sorts of substances are, of course, created by and de- pendent on God. Indeed, Descartes begins his studies with a proof of the existence of the world (and one’s knowledge of it) that rests on the presumption of God’s goodness. Because God is rational and good, we can trust (within limits) our own limited knowledge of the world. (We examine some of these proofs and arguments in Chapter 3.) But because the world (of minds and matter) depends on God, there is no danger that science should leave us with a Godless, meaningless, mechanical universe. In Aristotelian terms, the ultimate causes in the universe are “final” (or purposive) causes, not “efficient” (or mechanical) causes. The physical world is God’s creation; and though it must be understood by science according to causal mechanisms, it is, nevertheless, within the domain of God’s providence.
Within the domain of nature there are two (sorts of) substances, mind and body. Because these are substances, they are utterly distinct and independent. One immediate advantage
21 Born Baruch, he changed his name after he was expelled from the Jewish synagogue.
René Descartes (© iStockphoto.com/
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of this “Cartesian dualism” is that the science of mind and the science of physical bodies do not and cannot contradict one another. There is a science of the self and a science of phys- ics, and there is no reason to suppose that science will deny the freedom of the self any more than there is reason to fear that science will ultimately conflict with theology. What is true of physical bodies is not what is true of minds, and vice versa. Bodies may be wholly con- strained by the laws of physics, but minds are free.
In what follows, Descartes delineates the three different kinds of substance:
On Substance B Y René Descartes22
P R I N C I P L E L I
What substance is, and that it is a name which we cannot attribute in the same sense to God and to His creatures.
As regards these matters which we consider as being things or modes of things, it is necessary that we should examine them here one by one. By substance, we can understand nothing else than a thing which so exists that it needs no other thing in order to exist. And in fact only one single substance can be understood which clearly needs nothing else, namely, God. We perceive that all other things can exist only by the help of the concourse of God. That is why the word substance does not pertain univoce to God and to other things, as they say in the Schools, that is, no common signification for this appellation which will apply equally to God and to them can be distinctly understood.
P R I N C I P L E L I I
That it may be attributed univocally to the soul and to body, and how we know substance.
Created substances, however, whether corporeal or thinking, may be conceived under this common concept; for they are things which need only the concurrence of God in order to exist. But yet substance cannot be first discovered merely from the fact that it is a thing that exists, for that fact alone is not observed by us. We may, however, easily discover it by means of any one of its attributes because it is a common notion that nothing is possessed of no attributes, properties, or qualities. For this reason, when we perceive any attribute, we therefore conclude that some existing thing or substance to which it may be attributed, is necessarily present.
P R I N C I P L E L I I I
That each substance has a principal attribute, and that the attribute of the mind is thought, while that of body is extension.
But although any one attribute is sufficient to give us a knowledge of substance, there is always one principal property of substance which constitutes its nature and essence, and on which all the others depend. Thus extension in length, breadth and depth, constitutes the nature of corporeal substance; and thought constitutes the nature of thinking substance. For all else that may be attributed to body presup- poses extension, and is but a mode of this extended thing; as everything that we find in mind is but so many diverse forms of thinking. Thus, for example, we
22 René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, ed. E. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, 1911. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
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cannot conceive figure but as an extended thing, nor movement but as in an extended space; so imagination, feeling, and will only exist in a thinking thing. But, on the other hand, we can conceive extension without figure or action, and thinking without imagination or sensation, and so on with the rest; as is quite clear to anyone who attends to the matter.
This is to say, following Aristotle, everything is either a substance or an attribute of sub- stance, and a substance (as opposed to an attribute) can be thought of independently and can exist independently. Strictly speaking, this is true only of God. But we can also so define physical and mental substances. What defines physical substance, Descartes tells us, is its extension in space. Mind, by contrast, is unextended; a thought does not have (in the sense that a wooden box has) a location in the physical dimensions of space.
P R I N C I P L E L I V
That the nature of body consists . . . in . . . extension alone.
The nature of matter or of body in its universal aspect, does not consist in its being hard, or heavy, or coloured, or one that affects our senses in some other way, but solely in the fact that it is a substance extended in length, breadth and depth. . . . If, whenever we moved our hands in some direction, all the bodies in that part retreated with the same velocity as our hands approached them, we should never feel hardness; and yet we have no reason to believe that the bodies which recede in this way would on this account lose what makes them bodies. It follows from this that the nature of body does not consist in hardness. The same reason shows us that weight, colour, and all the other qualities of the kind that is perceived in corporeal matter, may be taken from it, it remaining meanwhile entire: it thus follows that the nature of body depends on none of these.
P R I N C I P L E X I I I
What external place is . . .
The words place and space signify nothing different from the body which is said to be in a place, and merely designate its magnitude, figure, and situation as re- gards other bodies. . . . For example, if we consider a man seated at the stern of a vessel when it is carried out to sea, he may be said to be in one place if we regard the parts of the vessel . . . : and yet he will be found continually to change his position, if regard be paid to the neighbouring shores. . . . But if at length we are persuaded that there are no points in the uni- verse that are really immovable, as will presently be shown to be prob- able, we shall conclude that there is nothing that has a permanent place except in so far as it is fixed by our thought.
Although physical nature is ruled by mechanical, causal laws, mental sub- stance (the mind, the self) is defined by its freedom.
P R I N C I P L E X X X I X
That freedom of the will is self-evident.
Finally it is so evident that we are possessed of a free will that can give or withhold its assent, that this may be counted as one of the first and most ordinary notions that are found innately in us. We had before a very clear proof of this, for at the same time as we tried to doubt all things and even supposed that He who created us employed His
The body is extended in space, but the mind seems almost limitless. (© Shutterstock.com/Redshinestudio)
“Extension in length, breadth and depth, constitutes the nature of corporeal substance; and thought constitutes the nature of thinking substance.” — R E N É D E S C A R T E S
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unlimited powers in deceiving us in every way, we perceived in ourselves a liberty such that we were able to abstain from believing what was not perfectly certain and indubitable. But that of which we could not doubt at such a time is as self-evident and clear as anything we can ever know.
But the mind not only “wills”; it also understands. We perceive the world and come to know its objects. But since the physical world and the mind are two distinct substances, how can there be a link between the two? The answer is that we have ideas, which are states of mind but nevertheless represent objects in the world that are their causes. However, this raises a number of
ancient and more modern problems. Descartes, like Plato and Aristotle, has far more faith in reason and its favorite methods (e.g., mathematics) than he does in perception and the in- formation gleaned from the senses. The senses can fool us, and we tend to rush to judgment prematurely on the basis of sensory experience. For instance:
F RO M “Meditation VI” B Y René Descartes23
When I feel pain in my foot, my knowledge of physics teaches me that this sensa- tion is communicated by means of nerves dispersed through the foot, which, being extended like cords from there to the brain, when they are contracted in the foot, at the same time contract the inmost portions of the brain which is their extremity and place of origin, and then excite a certain movement which nature has estab- lished in order to cause the mind to be affected by a sensation of pain represented as existing in the foot. But because these nerves must pass through the tibia, the thigh, the loins, the back and the neck, in order to reach from the leg to the brain, it may happen that although their extremities which are in the foot are not affected, but only certain ones of their intervening parts, this action will excite the same movement in the brain that might have been excited there by a hurt received in the foot, in consequence of which the mind will necessarily feel in the foot the same pain as if it had received a hurt. And the same holds good of all the other percep- tions of our senses.
. . . From this it is quite clear that, notwithstanding the supreme goodness of God,
the nature of man, inasmuch as it is composed of mind and body, cannot be other- wise than sometimes a source of deception.
23 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, 1911. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
(© iStockphoto.com/Franky De Meyer)
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But there is another source of ideas in addition to those caused in us by perception. There are also innate ideas, implanted in us by God. Because of innate ideas we can know some propositions to be true for certain (e.g., the propositions of geometry, as Plato also had argued). It is because of innate ideas that we are able to reason and, in particular, to do phi- losophy, to know God, to know universal truths. But even here a dramatic difference must be noted between Descartes and his ancient predecessors. Plato and Aristotle would have claimed to know reality itself (whether this consisted of Forms or essences). But Descartes ultimately claims that we know only ideas. There is always that gap between the mind and the world that the ancients never allowed and never entertained. Thus the doctrine of innate ideas might be said to play an even more essential role in Descartes’s philosophy than in Plato’s. Nevertheless, in his time Descartes was accused by the Roman Catholic Church of overreaching our claim to knowledge. His claim that the human mind has access to the truth through innate ideas was still a challenge to the church’s claim to being the sole authority on all ultimate matters.
The most difficult problem facing Descartes’s philosophy, however, was the relation- ship between the various substances. How could God create a substance, which is defined as being able to exist independently, if that so-called substance were then dependent on God? And how could one substance interact with another, as physical objects must do if they are to cause perceptions in us? In general, how do the mind and the body interact, as surely they must, on Descartes’s account? By definition substances are distinct and in- dependent; interaction would seem to be interdependence and not logically possible. These are the questions that most bothered Spinoza and leibniz—the questions that would define much of philosophy for years to come. (We shall focus on Spinoza and leibniz in this chapter, but in Chapter 3 we shall see how other thinkers, too, took up these problems.)
With the rise of modern science, it became the generally accepted view that the universe was a giant machine, perhaps set up by God, but in any case a well-coordinated and predict- able mechanism. Isaac Newton’s discovery of the causal laws of motion and gravity only brought to a climax a scientific worldview that had been in the making for centuries. And though ancient animism was still alive and belief in God and an immaterial spiritual realm was still virtually universal, the modern mechanical view of reality was an absolutely unavoid- able consideration for any metaphysician.
Both Spinoza and leibniz fully appreciated this modern scientific view, although they in- terpreted it very differently. They were both religious men. (Spinoza, ironically, was branded an atheist and his philosophy banned from most of Europe.) They both accepted Descartes’s “rationalist,” deductive method and both developed their thinking along the lines of a geo- metrical system. They both began by considering the concept of substance. Yet Spinoza emerged as a monist, leibniz as a pluralist. In viewing their impressive systems of thought, it is important to keep in mind the long history we have quickly reviewed, the powerful influences of Christianity and science, and, most importantly, the various metaphysical prob- lems to which we will will turn in Chapter 2.
• What are the similarities between Cartesian dualism and Plato’s view of reality?
• Do we perceive substances, according to Descartes? If not, what do we perceive?
• Why does Descartes think that the body is a source of deception? Give evidence from your own experience that might be used to support this claim.
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2. Benedictus de Spinoza Spinoza’s Ethics is one of the few modern works that is accepted as an unqualified clas- sic by virtually everyone in philosophy. It is the author’s only major work. Spinoza was an avid political reformer, particularly on the issue of religious toleration, and even in liberal Amsterdam that made him a dangerous person to know. This work, which, as you will see, is much more than a study in ethics, was his most forceful contribution on the issue of tolerance. Spinoza introduced a shockingly radical reinterpretation of God and His relation to the universe. He also gave an equally shocking theory of our roles in the uni- verse. So while you are attempting to compre- hend his difficult statements and proofs about “substance,” keep your mind open for his sug- gestions that we dramatically change the way we look at our world and for his radical rethinking of the idea of God.
Spinoza begins with a set of definitions:
F RO M Ethics B Y Benedictus de Spinoza24
D E F I N I T IO N S I. By that which is self-caused, I mean that of which the essence involves existence, or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent.
II. A thing is called finite after its kind, when it can be limited by another thing of the same nature; for instance, a body is called finite because we always conceive another greater body. So, also, a thought is limited by another thought, but a body is not limited by thought, nor a thought by body.
III. By substance, I mean that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself: in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception.
IV. By attribute, I mean that which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance.
V. By mode, I mean the modifications of substance, or that which exists in, and is conceived through, something other than itself.
VI. By God, I mean a being absolutely infinite—that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes, in which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality.
VII. That thing is called free, which exists solely by the necessity of its own nature, and of which the action is determined by itself alone. On the other hand, that thing
24 Benedictus de Spinoza, from Ethics, in The Rationalists, trans. R. H. M. Elwes, New York: Doubleday, 1960.
Benedictus de Spinoza (1632–1677)
Spinoza was born Baruch ben Michael, the son of Jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquisition. He was born and grew up in Amsterdam, a relative haven of toleration in a world still dangerous because of religious hatreds. Spinoza studied to be a rabbi, making himself familiar with Christian theology as well. He was always a recluse, who wandered about the country making a living by grinding lenses, and he was later ostra- cized by his fellow Jews for his heretical beliefs. His best-known book is Ethics (1677); it is a radical reinterpretation of God as identical to the universe (pantheism) and a protracted argument concerning the uselessness of human struggle in the face of a thoroughly de- termined universe.
Baruch Spinoza (© Shutterstock .com/mtsyri)
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is necessary, or rather constrained, which is determined by something external to itself to a fixed and definite method of existence or action.
VIII. By eternity, I mean existence itself, in so far as it is conceived necessarily to follow solely from the definition of that which is eternal.
These definitions sound much more forbidding than they really are. Notice first how many of these terms and definitions are familiar to us from Aristotle: for example, the definition of substance as the basic “stuff” that has various properties but can be thought of without thinking of anything else. Attributes and modes, on the other hand, are properties: attri- butes consist of essential characteristics of a substance; modes are modifications of attri- butes. (For example, having a body is an attribute of substance; being blond and blue-eyed are merely modes.) The cause-of-itself is like Aristotle’s prime mover, but with some very important differences. Spinoza’s “mover” turns out to be identical to the universe, and Spinoza’s “God” is much more than “thought thinking itself,” as in Aristotle. But the basic starting point of the entire system, as summarized in these definitions and axioms, is the Aristotelian notion of substance. like the ancient metaphysicians, Spinoza insists that what- ever really exists, exists eternally (Definition VIII). But that also means—there can be no Creation and no Creator!
As in geometry, the definitions are followed by a set of axioms, that is, principles that are taken to be so obvious that they need no defense. In plane geometry, such an axiom would be “the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” Spinoza’s axioms may not seem quite so obvious at first glance, but this is partly because of the unfamiliarity of his metaphysical terminology.
A X I O M S I. Everything which exists, exists either in itself or in something else.
II. That which cannot be conceived through anything else must be conceived through itself.
III. From a given definite cause an effect necessarily follows, and, on the other hand, if no definite cause be granted, it is impossible that an effect can follow.
IV. The knowledge of an effect depends on and involves the knowledge of a cause.
V. Things which have nothing in common cannot be understood, the one by means of the other; the conception of one does not involve the conception of the other.
VI. A true idea must correspond with its ideate or object.
VII. If a thing can be conceived as non-existing, its essence does not involve existence.
You can see that the axioms follow approximately the same sequence as the defini- tions, and the axioms in most cases are based on the definitions, although they do not strictly follow from them. For example, Axiom I, like Definition I, concerns the idea that everything has an explanation. Definition I, although stated in terms of “cause” (“self- caused”), concerns that which must exist if it can even be thought of. Axiom I says that everything must either be explainable through itself (that is, “self-caused”) or through something else.
Similarly, Definition II uses a technical term (“finite after its kind”) to talk about things that can be explained only by reference to something greater, while Axiom II says that
“Everything which exists, exists either in itself or in something else.” — B E N E D I C T U S D E S P I N OZ A
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anything that cannot be so explained must be explained simply in terms of itself (“self-caused” again). Axioms III and IV outline the basic principles of cause and effect; that is, that a cause makes its effect happen necessarily, that without the cause, there would be no effect, and that the knowledge of the effect depends on knowing the cause. (These principles have had a long and important history in both metaphysics and theories of sci- ence and knowledge. They will play a key role in Spinoza’s theory of determinism [the idea that everything happens necessarily because of its causes] and in “deterministic” theories generally. These will be discussed in Chapter 7 in detail.) Axioms V–VII return to the central theme of explanation begun in Axioms I and II; Axiom V insists that one thing can be explained in terms of another only if the two have “something in common.” Thus you can explain one physical event in terms of another physical event (since they have in common certain physical properties). Axiom VI repeats the important assumption we made explicit at the end of the Introduction, namely, that our ideas are capable of grasping reality. (This axiom also states a seemingly innocent theory of truth, often called “the correspon- dence theory of truth,” which says that “a true idea corresponds with some actual fact [ideate or object] in the world.” This idea will be discussed further in Chapter 4.) Axiom VII returns to the idea of “essence involving existence,” a characterization of that which is self- caused, namely substance, or God. Axiom VII is stated negatively, however, and says that if we can think of something as not existing (for example, we can imagine what it would be like to live in a world without freeways, or without stars, or even without other people), then “its essence does not involve existence.” That is, existing is not one of its essential charac- teristics and it is not “self-caused.”
The general theme of the axioms is that for each thing there is an explanation for its ex- istence, either by reference to something else or by virtue of being “self-caused” or self- explanatory, that is, its “essence involves its existence” or it is entirely “in itself, and conceived through itself.” This last phrase is from the definition of “substance” (Def. III), so you can see how, even in his axioms and definitions, Spinoza is setting up his main thesis— that there can only be one substance.
Starting with these definitions and axioms, which he takes to be unobjectionable, Spinoza begins the “proofs” of his “propositions,” which follow like the theorems of Euclidean geom- etry from the definitions of terms such as “line,” “point,” and “parallel.” Again, these look forbidding, but their philosophical relevance should be clear.
P RO P O S I T IO N S PROP. I. Substance is by nature prior to its modifications. Proof.—This is clear from Def. iii. and v. PROP. II. Two substances, whose attributes are different, have nothing in common. Proof.—Also evident from Def. iii. For each must exist in itself, and be conceived
through itself; in other words, the conception of one does not imply the conception of the other.
PROP. III. Things which have nothing in common cannot be one the cause of the other. Proof.—If they have nothing in common, it follows that one cannot be appre-
hended by means of the other (Ax. v.), and, therefore, one cannot be the cause of the other (Ax. iv.). Q.E.D. [Latin, quod erat demonstrandum, a phrase used in tradi- tional logic meaning “thus it is proven.”]
PROP. IV. Two or more distinct things are distinguished one from the other either by the difference of the attributes of the substances, or by the difference of their modifications.
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Proof.—Everything which exists, exists either in itself or in something else (Ax. i.),—that is (by Def. iii. and v.), nothing is granted in addition to the under- standing, except substance and its modifications. Nothing is, therefore, given besides the understanding, by which several things may be distinguished one from the other, except the substances, or, in other words (see Ax. iv.), their attributes and modifications. Q.E.D.
PROP. V. There cannot exist in the universe two or more substances having the same nature or attribute.
Proof.—If several distinct substances be granted, they must be distinguished one from the other, either by the difference of their attributes, or by the difference of their modifications (Prop. iv.). If only by the difference of their attributes, it will be granted that there cannot be more than one with an identical attribute. If by the difference of their modifications—as substance is naturally prior to its modifica- tions (Prop. i.),—it follows that setting the modifications aside, and considering substance in itself, that is truly (Def. iii. and vi.), there cannot be conceived one substance different from another,—that is (by Prop. iv.), there cannot be granted several substances, but one substance only. Q.E.D.
PROP. VI. One substance cannot be produced by another substance. Proof.—It is impossible that there should be in the universe two substances with
an identical attribute, i.e., which have anything common to them both (Prop. ii.), and, therefore (Prop. iii.), one cannot be the cause of another, neither can one be produced by the other. Q.E.D.
So far, the main point is quite simple: if there is more than one substance, the substances could have no possible relation to each other. Therefore, by a kind of reductio ad absurdum argument, there can only be one substance. In the propositions that follow (and especially the note to Prop. VIII) this is demonstrated again:
PROP. VII. Existence belongs to the nature of substance. Proof.—Substance cannot be produced by anything external (Corollary, Prop.
vi.), it must, therefore, be its own cause—that is, its essence necessarily involves existence, or existence belongs to its nature.
PROP. VIII. Every substance is necessarily infinite. Proof.—There can only be one substance with an identical attribute, and exis-
tence follows from its nature (Prop. vii.); its nature, therefore, involves existence, either as finite or infinite. It does not exist as finite, for (by Def. ii.) it would then be limited by something else of the same kind, which would also necessarily exist (Prop. vii.); and there would be two substances with an identical attribute, which is absurd (Prop. v.). It therefore exists as infinite. Q.E.D.
Note.—No doubt it will be difficult for those who think about things loosely, and have not been accustomed to know them by their primary causes, to compre- hend the demonstration of Prop. vii.: for such persons make no distinction be- tween the modifications of substances and the substances themselves, and are ignorant of the manner in which things are produced; hence they attribute to substances the beginning which they observe in natural objects. Those who are ignorant of true causes, make complete confusion—think that trees might talk just as well as men—that men might be formed from stones as well as from seed; and
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imagine that any form might be changed into any other. So, also, those who con- fuse the two natures, divine and human, readily attribute human passions to the deity, especially so long as they do not know how passions originate in the mind. But, if people would consider the nature of substance, they would have no doubt about the truth of Prop. vii. In fact, this proposition would be a universal axiom, and accounted a truism. For, by substance, would be understood that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself—that is, something of which the conception requires not the conception of anything else; whereas modifications exist in some- thing external to themselves, and a conception of them is formed by means of a conception of the thing in which they exist. Therefore, we may have true ideas of non-existent modifications; for, although they may have no actual existence apart from the conceiving intellect, yet their essence is so involved in something exter- nal to themselves that they may through it be conceived. Whereas the only truth substances can have, external to the intellect, must consist in their existence, be- cause they are conceived through themselves. Therefore, for a person to say that he has a clear and distinct—that is, a true—idea of a substance, but that he is not sure whether such substance exists, would be the same as if he said that he had a true idea, but was not sure whether or not it was false (a little consideration will make this plain); or if anyone affirmed that substance is created, it would be the same as saying that a false idea was true—in short, the height of absurdity. It must, then, necessarily be admitted that the existence of substance as its essence is an eternal truth. And we can hence conclude by another process of reasoning—that there is but one such substance.
To think that trees can talk is to be ignorant of true causes. (© Shutterstock.com/Andrea Danti)
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This last phrase summarizes the key doctrine of the entire Ethics, that there can be but one substance. The argument in this note, which insists that the essence of substance in- cludes its existence, was a very popular argument throughout the Middle Ages. It means, quite simply, that if you can even imagine something whose essence includes existence, then you know that thing necessarily exists. In a further digression (the digressions often contain the most philosophy), Spinoza adopts Aristotle’s insistence (see pp. 85–87) that everything (or every event) must have its cause:
There is necessarily for each individual existent thing a cause why it should exist. This cause of existence must either be contained in the nature and definition of
the thing defined, or must be postulated apart from such definition.
Such an assertion gives Aristotle the basis for his “prime mover” argument. But Spinoza, unlike Aristotle, has no qualms about the idea of an “infinite regress”; in his view, the uni- verse extends back in time forever, has always existed, and at no time ever came into existence.
What then follows is the working-out of the notion that there is one substance:
PROP. IX. The more reality or being a thing has, the greater the number of its attributes (Def. iv.).
PROP. X. Each particular attribute of the one substance must be conceived through itself. Proof.—An attribute is that which the intellect perceives of substance, as consti-
tuting its essence (Def. iv.), and, therefore, must be conceived through itself (Def. iii.). Q.E.D.
Spinoza goes on to explain that, although we might think of different attributes separately (for example, think of minds and bodies as totally different from each other), we must not
Causality in action. (© Shutterstock.com/Anthony Hall)
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conclude that they are different substances. They are rather separate properties of one and the same substance. He then concludes:
Consequently it is abundantly clear, that an absolutely infinite being must necessar- ily be defined as consisting in infinite attributes, each of which expresses a certain eternal and infinite essence.
If anyone now ask, by what sign shall he be able to distinguish different sub- stances, let him read the following propositions, which show that there is but one substance in the universe, and that it is absolutely infinite, wherefore such a sign would be sought for in vain.
Now this looks quite complicated, but we can appreciate its straightforward significance by looking at it through our earlier questions in ontology and cosmology (p. 55): first, “How many substances does Spinoza say that there are (and must be)?” Only one—he is a monist, like the earliest pre-Socratics. Descartes, Spinoza’s immediate predecessor, had argued that there are three kinds of substance: bodies, minds, and God. Spinoza, however, argues that the very defi- nition of substance makes it necessary that there be only one substance and that bodies and minds are attributes of this one substance, not substances themselves.
So the answer to our second ontological question, “What kind of substances?” is “one infinite substance,” the full nature of which we cannot know. But at least we know two of its properties, namely body and mind. Now notice that this gets around a problem that will plague Descartes (see Chapter 5): How can different substances, which by definition are in- dependent, interact with one another (our fourth question)? If mind and body are separate substances, then how can they come together to form a person? For Spinoza, since there is only one substance, this problem does not arise.
With regard to our third question, “How do we distinguish different things (attributes, bodies, and minds)?” Spinoza’s answer is fantastic; there is ultimately only one body, namely the physical universe, and one mind, namely all of the thinking in the universe (both of which, in turn, are different attributes of the one substance). This means that distinctions between our bodies (“my” body and “your” body) and between our bodies and the rest of the physi- cal universe are ultimately unwarranted, a humanistic pretension that has no basis in reality. But even more surprising is the idea that there is but a single mind and that our individual minds are somehow only parts of it (that is, particular modes) but not individual minds at all! Your pride in your “individuality,” therefore, has no foundation in reality. You are only a part of that one cosmic substance, the universe.
But the universe is also God. Here is where the innocent-looking obscurity of Spinoza’s system becomes the heresy that was banned throughout Europe. By Proposition X, Spinoza has proved that God, substance, and the cause-of-itself are all identical. In the next few propositions, he proves that God necessarily exists (offering a version of the ontological proof we will consider in Chapter 2). Then comes Proposition XIV: “Besides God, no sub- stance can be granted or conceived.” This means that God and the universe are one and the same. This position, called pantheism (literally, “everything is God”), was considered sacri- lege, even in liberal Amsterdam. It means, against all traditional Judeo-Christian teachings, that God has no existence independent of the universe and that He therefore cannot be its Creator. look again at the explanation to Definition VIII and then at Proposition XV and those that follow:
PROP. XV. Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived. PROP. XVI. From the necessity of the divine nature must follow an infinite number of
things in infinite ways—that is, all things which can fall within the sphere of infinite intellect.
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PROP. XVII. God acts solely by the laws of his own nature, and is not constrained by anyone.
PROP. XVIII. God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things. PROP. XIX. God, and all the attributes of God, are eternal. PROP. XX. The existence of God and his essence are one and the same. PROP. XXI. All things which follow from the absolute nature of any attribute of God
must always exist and be infinite, or, in other words, are eternal and infinite through the said attribute.
PROP. XXII. Whatever follows from any attribute of God, in so far as it is modified by a modification, which exists necessarily and as infinite, through the said attribute, must also exist necessarily and as infinite.
PROP. XXIII. Every mode which exists both necessarily and as infinite must necessarily follow either from the absolute nature of some attribute of God, or from an attribute modified by a modification which exists necessarily and as infinite.
PROP. XXIV. The essence of things produced by God does not involve existence. PROP. XXV. God is the efficient cause not only of the existence of things, but also of
their essence.
Yes, Spinoza believes in God. But God is nothing other than the universe. He has few of the characteristics traditionally attributed to Him and worshiped in Him. For example, Spinoza goes on to argue, on the basis of what he has said already, that God has no will, that He doesn’t do anything, and, ultimately, He doesn’t care about anything either, including humanity. Here is a scientific worldview that is so unrelenting that Newton himself would be shocked by it. This does not mean that Spinoza is a materialist; quite to the contrary, the importance of his constant insistence upon “the infinite attributes of God,” of which we are capable of knowing only two (could you imagine what some of the others might be like?), is to say that God has not only physical existence but (at least) mental existence as well.
But where the scientific outlook becomes most dramatic is in Spinoza’s defense of the doctrine we shall call determinism, the thesis that every event in the universe necessarily occurs as the result of its cause. The ultimate cause is God, which is to say, the universe itself. Once again, the terms come from Aristotle, but it is important to insist that Spinoza does not believe—with either Aristotle or Christendom—that the universe has any purpose whatso- ever. Nor does he believe that the universe or God has any beginning or end, thus answering our two sets of cosmological questions with a single necessary truth, which he has, once again, derived directly from the definition of substance.
The ultimate meaning of Spinoza’s arguments for determinism is that no action, whether of man or God, is ever free. Everything in the universe, according to Spinoza, is exactly as it must be; the universe couldn’t be any other way. Nothing is as pointless as struggling against a universe in which everything, including our own natures and actions, is already determined.
PROP. XXVI. A thing which is conditioned to act in a particular manner has necessarily been thus conditioned by God; and that which has not been conditioned by God cannot condi- tion itself to act.
PROP. XXVII. A thing, which has been conditioned by God to act in a particular way, cannot render itself unconditioned.
PROP. XXVIII. Every individual thing, or everything which is finite and has a condi- tioned existence, cannot exist or be conditioned to act, unless it be conditioned for existence and action by a cause other than itself, which also is finite and has a conditioned existence; and likewise this cause cannot in its turn exist or be conditioned to act, unless it be conditioned for
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existence and action by another cause, which also is finite and has a conditioned existence, and so on to infinity.
PROP. XXIX. Nothing in the universe is contingent, but all things are conditioned to exist and operate in a particular manner by the necessity of the divine nature.25
PROP. XXX. Intellect, in function finite, or in function infinite, must comprehend the attributes of God and the modifications of God, and nothing else.
PROP. XXXI. The intellect in function, whether finite or infinite, as will, desire, love, &c., should be referred to passive nature and not to active nature.
PROP. XXXII. Will cannot be called a free cause, but only a necessary cause. PROP. XXXIII. Things could not have been brought into being by God in any manner
or in any order different from that which has in fact obtained. [Editors’ note: God is deter- mined too.]
PROP. XXXIV. God’s power is identical with his essence. PROP. XXXV. Whatsoever we conceive to be in the power of God, necessarily exists. PROP. XXXVI. There is no cause from whose nature some effect does not follow.
Part II of the Ethics discusses “the Nature and Origin of the Mind.” It begins with a further set of definitions and axioms, most importantly, the definition of body as “ extended thing,” that is, extended in space (which Spinoza got directly from Descartes and the me- dieval philosophers) and idea, “the mental conception which is formed by the mind as a thinking thing.” Mind, unlike body, is defined as unextended (that is, it has no spatial di- mensions). It is in this part that Spinoza argues those surprising doctrines that we have already summarized: Mind and body are each one of an infinite number of attributes of God, not substance themselves (as they were for Descartes), and our individual minds are really indistinguishable modifications of the one Great Mind of the One Substance. And Spinoza joins with all of his metaphysical colleagues in insisting that “the order and con- nection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things” (Prop. VII). Here again is Spinoza’s affirmation of his confidence in thought to grasp reality. (Remember Heraclitus: “thought is Being.”)
The upshot of Part II, and the subject that dominates the Ethics for the remaining three parts, is Spinoza’s determinism.
PROP. XLVIII. In the mind there is no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined to wish this or that by a cause, which has been determined by another cause, and this last by another cause, and so on to infinity.
Spinoza has none of Aristotle’s fears of an “infinite regress,” and if he believes in a “cause-of-itself” that is not the same as a “first cause,” for there is no such thing. We shall talk more about the “free will and determinism” problem in Chapter 7; but it is worth noting, as a way of summing up, Spinoza’s drastic answer to the problem. As an unyielding determinist, he rejects every attempt to save some space for freedom of human action. But he assures
25 [Editors' note:] We are all determined by the nature of God or the universe. But then, here is a problem: Are we not then compelled to struggle and unable to help doing so? If so, what is the point of Spinoza’s urging us not to?
Extended things have measurable size. Unextended things do not. (© Shutterstock.com/STILLFX)
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us that we can, with heroic effort (Prop. XlVII), understand the nature of this determinism, and accept it gracefully. The folly is in fighting it, he tells us. The remainder of the Ethics is given over to the attempt to draw out the logical consequences of this stoic conclusion.
Part III is a long argument against emotions and what we would call “emotional involve- ment” as the needless cause of suffering and vice. Against them, Spinoza argues the virtues of human reason, which penetrates the useless involvements of the emotions and allows us to understand the causes of our actions and feelings. To understand an emotion, Spinoza believes, is to change and eliminate it. For example, to understand why one is angry, accord- ing to Spinoza, is sufficient to let us get rid of our anger. To realize that we are unable to change ourselves or our circumstances, according to Spinoza, is the only freedom we can really be said to have.
What you have just seen is modern metaphysics at its most brilliant. (“Modern philoso- phy” refers in particular to philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.) The geometrical method, however, is no longer fashionable, and much of Spinoza’s language is, to us, antiquated and unnatural. But the intricacies of his system, the way he ties so many different ideas together, the answers he gave to ancient philosophical problems, and the boldness with which he sets out a new vision of the universe, have made Spinoza’s philosophy widely appreciated despite his difficult style.
What you are about to read, however, is no less astonishing, no less brilliant, and its author no less remarkable a genius. The work from which these excerpts come is a very short work (of about ninety paragraphs) written by leibniz, who begins with many of the same concepts and definitions as Spinoza but ends up with a wholly different metaphysi- cal system. (leibniz and Spinoza met several times and discussed these issues. But leibniz found Spinoza’s opinions shocking and acquaintanceship with him dangerous.)
• How does Spinoza “solve” the problem of how substances interact?
• What is the essence of God, according to Spinoza? Do you find this a persuasive con- ception of God?
3. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz leibniz begins with the same technical notion of substance as Spinoza does, but from it he draws an entirely different but equally fantastic picture of the universe. Where Spinoza’s universe was mechanical and wholly dependent upon causes, leibniz’s uni- verse is very much alive, and everything happens for a purpose (as in Aristotle’s ancient teleology). The guiding principle of leibniz’s philosophy is called the “Principle of Sufficient Reason,” which says, simply, that there must be a reason for everything. Even God, on this account, cannot act capriciously but must have a reason for whatever He has created. We shall see that this principle is among the most
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716)
Leibniz has been called “the last of the universal geniuses.” He was one of the inventors of the calculus; the father of modern formal linguistics; the inventor of a primitive com- puter; a military strategist (who may have influenced Napoleon); a physicist who, in his own time, was thought to be the rival of Newton; and, most of all, a great philoso- pher. He grew up in Leipzig but traveled considerably (to Paris and Amsterdam and all
over Germany). Leibniz spoke personally with most of the great philosophers of his time and debated with them constantly. His metaphysics is a curious combination of traditional theology and a radical alternative to the physical doctrines of Newton, to whose philosophy he had once been attracted but later gave up as “absurd.” His short Monadology (1714) is a summary of his mature metaphysical theories.
Gottfried Wilhelm von leibniz (© iStockphoto.com/GeorgiosArt)
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important tenets of leibniz’s philosophy. From it, he develops a radical alternative to Isaac Newton’s physics and a spectacularly optimistic view that, because God acts according to this principle, this world that He created must be “the best of all possible worlds.”
Where Spinoza argues that there can be at most one substance, leibniz argues that there are many. He calls these substances monads. Every monad is different from every other, and God (who is something of a supermonad and the only “uncreated monad”) has created them all. The work presented here, accordingly, is called the Monadology (“the study of monads”), written in 1714. It is a very condensed summary of leibniz’s metaphysics.
F RO M Monadology B Y Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz26
1. The Monad, of which we will speak here, is nothing else than a simple sub- stance, which goes to make up composites; by simple, we mean without parts.
2. There must be simple substances because there are composites; for a composite is nothing else than a collection or aggregatum of simple substances.
A simple substance is one that cannot be divided. The argument is curious: any “com- posite” is obviously divisible. That means that every composite must be “composed” of some simple substances that make it up. (There is a hidden infinite regress argument here: If there weren’t ultimately simple substances, then we could go on dividing things forever.) But if the simple substances were extended in space, then they, too, would be further divis- ible, for anything that has length, for example, no matter how small, can be cut in two (at least in theory). Therefore, leibniz concludes, these basic simple substances or monads must be immaterial and have no extension. They can have neither parts, nor extension, nor divisibility:
3. Now, where there are no constituent parts there is possible neither extension, nor form, nor divisibility. These Monads are the true Atoms of nature, and, in fact, the Elements of things.
Here, in leibniz’s first three propositions, are the answers to our first two ontological questions: “How many substances are there?” Many. This answer makes leibniz a pluralist. “What kind of substances are they?” Simple and immaterial substances, which makes him an immaterialist. (Don’t be misled by the term “atoms”: we are used to thinking of atoms as the smallest material substances, but leibniz’s atoms are immaterial.) Now, in three more propositions, leibniz answers our first cosmological question: “Are these substances eter- nal, or do they come into being at some time? How do they come into being? Are they destructible?”
4. This dissolution, therefore, is not to be feared and there is no way conceivable by which a simple substance can perish through natural means.
5. For the same reason there is no way conceivable by which a simple substance might, through natural means, come into existence, since it cannot be formed by composition.
26 Gottfried Wilhelm von leibniz, from Monadology, in The Rationalists, trans. George Montgomery, New York: Doubleday, 1968.
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6. We may say then, that the existence of Monads can begin or end only all at once, that is to say, the Monad can begin only through creation and end only through annihilation. Composites, however, begin or end gradually.
Spinoza had argued that the one substance could neither be created nor destroyed; it had neither beginning nor end. leibniz’s substances, or “monads,” can be created or de- stroyed, but not by any “natural” means. They can be created or destroyed only “all at once.” Anticipating later propositions, we can guess that leibniz will have God (who is something of a supermonad) create them. But notice that compounds of monads, for example, “mate- rial objects,” can be created and destroyed “naturally.”
Now our third question, “How do we distinguish different substances or monads?”
8. Still Monads must have some qualities, otherwise they would not even be exis- tences. And if simple substances did not differ at all in their qualities, there would be no means of perceiving any change in things. Whatever is in a composite can come into it only through its simple elements and the Monads, if they were with- out qualities, since they do not differ at all in quantity, would be indistinguishable one from another. For instance, if we imagine a plenum or completely filled space, where each part receives only the equivalent of its own previous motion, one state of things would not be distinguishable from another.
9. Each Monad, indeed, must be different from every other. For there are never in nature two beings which are exactly alike, and in which it is not possible to find a difference either internal or based on an intrinsic property.
Only God could actually know everything about every monad in order to compare and contrast them. But even God can distinguish different monads only because they in fact have differences between them. This leads leibniz to suggest one of his most controversial principles, the so-called “Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles”: no two monads can have exactly the same properties (Prop. 9). Why is this? According to the “Principle of Suffi- cient Reason” (Prop. 32) nothing can be without good reason. Even God, therefore, would have no good reason for duplicating any monad. If two monads were identical, leibniz argues, God could have no reason for putting one in one place and the other in another place, or for creating them both in the first place. Therefore, no two monads could be exactly alike. This is a strange kind of argument, but very much at the heart of leibniz’s philosophy, as we shall see later.
How does a monad, which is by definition “simple,” alter or combine with other monads to form the changing and familiar universe of our experience? (Here you should be reminded of the similar problems that faced the ancient pre-Socratics and Plato.) Here is our fourth ques- tion, and the most difficult leibniz has to answer: “How do substances interact?” By definition, monads cannot literally “interact.” So leibniz’s answer is extremely speculative and imaginative:
7. There is also no way of explaining how a Monad can be altered or changed in its inner being by any other created thing, since there is no possibility of transposition within it, nor can we conceive of any internal movement which can be produced, directed, increased or diminished there within the substance, such as can take place in the case of composites where a change can occur among the parts. The Monads have no windows through which anything may come in or go out.
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The problem is that different substances, by definition, are inde- pendent and cannot, therefore, have anything to do with one an- other. Descartes, as we shall see in Chapter 5, had a terrible time getting together his two substances of mind and body. Spinoza, as a monist, solved the problem in the simplest possible way; since there is only one substance, no question of “interaction” is appli- cable. But leibniz is a pluralist; there are many substances. They cannot interact as such. They cannot even perceive each other in the usual sense. They “have no windows,” in his peculiar but now famous expression; “nothing can come in or go out.” Unlike the ancient (and modern) materialist atomists, leibniz cannot have his monads simply combine and recombine to form new compounds in any usual sense. They cannot, in leibniz’s words, “be altered or changed in [their] inner being by any other created thing.” So, how do monads change? They must have all changes already created (by God) within themselves.
Remember the animism that was so prevalent in the ancient Greek philosophers. For them, the phenomenon of life was the model for metaphysics. The idea of Newtonian mechanics, which offers explanations in terms of the motion of lifeless bodies, would have been incomprehensible to them. leibniz, we may now say, was vehemently anti-Newton. He was, we may also say, one of the out- standing modern animists. A monad is as different as can be from a Newtonian material atom; a monad is alive, and its changes come from within, never from without. (Except, that is, for its initial cre- ation.) Think of a monad as a living being, “programmed” (to use a modern word) with all of the information and experiences it needs to develop in a certain way, like an acorn developing into an oak
tree. Thus the changes in the monad are all internal, programmed by God at the creation. Now keep in mind that a monad is immaterial, and so its “growth” cannot be thought of as a development in the physical world. The growth too, therefore, must be internal, and the apparent interaction between monads must really be changes in the perceptions of the monads themselves.
10. I assume it as admitted that every created being, and consequently the created Monad, is subject to change, and indeed that this change is continuous in each.
11. It follows from what has just been said, that the natural changes of the Monad come from an internal principle, because an external cause can have no influence upon its inner being.
12. Now besides this principle of change there must also be in the Monad a mani- foldness which changes. This manifoldness constitutes, so to speak, the specific nature and the variety of the simple substances.
13. This manifoldness must involve a multiplicity in the unity or in that which is simple. For since every natural change takes place by degrees, there must be some- thing which changes and something which remains unchanged, and consequently there must be in the simple substance a plurality of conditions and relations, even though it has no parts.
According to leibniz, identical twins are not identical. (© iStockphoto.com/Carasoyn)
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14. The passing condition which involves and represents a multiplicity in the unity, or in the simple substance, is nothing else than what is called Perception. This should be carefully distinguished from Consciousness.
leibniz argues that what we are really describing when we talk about a squirrel climbing a particular tree at a particular moment in time is ourselves. The perception of the squirrel is a permanent part of one unchanging monad—our perception as a whole. The apparent dif- ferences between parts of a monad are really changes in perception. leibniz is arguing that the sense in which material things seem to exist in space is as different perceptions or expe- riences of a perceiving monad. What is ultimately real, therefore, is the perceiving monad. Perceptions change, within each monad, to create the appearance of a moving and chang- ing material world. Notice that leibniz carefully distinguishes “Perception” from what he calls “Consciousness.” Perception is experience, in general, and is present, in some degree, in every monad. Consciousness, on the other hand, is a very special kind of experience, reflective and articulate, and is to be found only in a few monads. (It is worth noting that, in making this distinction, leibniz introduces the concept of “the unconscious” into German philosophy two hundred years before Freud.)
Here is the attack on Newton’s more materialist view of the universe. Such a view, leibniz complains, cannot account for experience (perception), in other words, the immaterial as- pects of the universe.
17. It must be confessed, however, that Perception, and that which depends upon it, are inexplicable by mechanical causes, that is to say, by figures and motions. Sup- posing that there were a machine whose structure produced thought, sensation, and perception, we could conceive of it as increased in size with the same propor- tions until one was able to enter into its interior, as he would into a mill. Now, on going into it he would find only pieces working upon one another, but never would he find anything to explain Perception.
It is accordingly in the simple substance, and not in the composite nor in a ma- chine that the Perception is to be sought. Furthermore, there is nothing besides perceptions and their changes to be found in the simple substance. And it is in these alone that all the internal activities of the simple substance can consist.
18. All simple substances or created Monads may be called Entelechies, because they have in themselves a certain perfection. There is in them a sufficiency which makes them the source of their internal activities, and renders them, so to speak, incorporeal Automations. [Editors’ note: In other words, every monad is alive, to a certain extent.]
19. If we wish to designate as soul everything which has perceptions and desires in the general sense that I have just explained, all simple substances or created Monads could be called souls. But since feeling is something more than a mere perception I think that the general name of Monad or Entelechy should suffice for simple sub- stances which have only perception, while we may reserve the term Soul for those whose perception is more distinct and is accompanied by memory. [Editors’ note: Again, Leibniz insists that “Perception” is most primitive and is common to all monads.]
20. We experience in ourselves a state where we remember nothing and where we have no distinct perception, as in periods of fainting, or when we are overcome by
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a profound, dreamless sleep. In such a state the soul does not sensibly differ at all from a simple Monad. As this state, however, is not permanent and the soul can recover from it, the soul is something more.
21. Nevertheless it does not follow at all that the simple substance is in such a state without perception. This is so because of the reasons given above; for it cannot perish, nor on the other hand would it exist without some affection and the affec- tion is nothing else than its perception. When, however, there are a great number of weak perceptions where nothing stands out distinctively, we are stunned; as when one turns around and around in the same direction, a dizziness comes on, which makes him swoon and makes him able to distinguish nothing. Among ani- mals, death can occasion this state for quite a period.
22. Every present state of a simple substance is a natural consequence of its preced- ing state, in such a way that its present is pregnant with its future. [Editors’ note: Here is Leibniz’s version of the thesis that one cause necessarily follows another.]
23. Therefore, since on awakening after a period of unconsciousness we become conscious of our perceptions, we must, without having been conscious of them, have had perceptions immediately before; for one perception can come in a natural way only from another perception, just as a motion can come in a natural way only from a motion.
. . . 29. It is the knowledge of eternal and necessary truths that distinguishes us from mere animals and gives us reason and the sciences, thus raising us to a knowledge of ourselves and of God. This is what is called in us the Rational Soul or the Mind.
30. It is also through the knowledge of necessary truths and through abstractions from them that we come to perform Reflective Acts, which cause us to think of what is called the I, and to decide that this or that is within us. It is thus, that in thinking upon ourselves we think of being, of substance, of the simple and composite, of a material thing and of God himself, conceiving that what is limited in us is in him without limits. These Reflective Acts furnish the principal objects of our reasonings.
As we have seen, the answer to our fourth question is, “Monads don’t interact.” Each is locked into itself and contains within itself its own view of the universe as a whole.
56. Now this interconnection, relationship, or this adaptation of all things to each particular one, and of each one to all the rest, brings it about that every simple substance has relations which express all the others and that it is consequently a perpetual living mirror of the universe.
57. And as the same city regarded from different sides appears entirely different, and is, as it were multiplied respectively, so, because of the infinite number of simple substances, there are a similar infinite number of universes which are, nev- ertheless, only the aspects of a single one as seen from the special point of view of each monad.
But, of course, the perspective of any one monad is extremely one-sided and confused.
60. Besides, in what has just been seen can be seen the a priori reasons why things cannot be otherwise than they are. It is because God, in ordering the whole, has had regard to every part and in particular to each monad; and since the Monad is by its very nature representative, nothing can limit it to represent merely a part of
“Every present state of a simple substance is a natural consequence of its preceding state, in such a way that its present is pregnant with its future.” — G OT T F R I E D W I L H E L M V O N L E I B N I Z
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things. It is nevertheless true that this representation is, as regards the details of the whole universe, only a confused representation, and is distinct only as regards a small part of them, that is to say, as regards those things which are nearest or great- est in relation to each Monad. If the representation were distinct as to the details of the entire universe, each Monad would be a Deity. It is not in the object repre- sented that the Monads are limited, but in the modifications of their knowledge of the object. In a confused way they reach out to infinity or to the whole, but are limited and differentiated in the degree of their distinct perceptions.
Now leibniz has an alternative to Newton: bodies (composite monads) only seem to interact; in fact, it all happens within each monad, programmed and created by God in “ preestablished harmony” with every other.
61. In this respect composites are like simple substances, for all space is filled up; therefore, all matter is connected. And in a plenum or filled space every movement has an effect upon bodies in proportion to this distance, so that not only is every body affected by those which are in contact with it and responds in some way to whatever happens to them, but also by means of them the body responds to those bodies adjoining them, and their intercommunication reaches to any distance whatsoever. Consequently every body responds to all that happens in the universe, so that he who saw all could read in each one what is happening everywhere, and even what has happened and what will happen.
62. Thus although each created Monad represents the whole universe, it represents more distinctly the body which specially pertains to it and of which it constitutes the entelechy. And as this body expresses all the universe through the interconnec- tion of all matter in the plenum, the soul also represents the whole universe in representing this body, which belongs to it in a particular way.
Every monad develops as a reflection of the development of all the other monads in the universe as well. If, for example, we are watching a squirrel climb around a tree, leibniz’s view is that the reality of the squirrel climbing around the tree is actually our perception of this. But you can see that this alone is not sufficient; we might simply dream or hallucinate this view, and it would then not be “real.” The difference between the dream and the reality is the changes in the other monads in the case of reality, for instance, the monads that constitute the squirrel and any other observers of the same scene, including God. Reality is composed of the totality of all monads, each perceiving from its own perspective (although God, leibniz insists, perceives from all perspectives at once). The “preestablished harmony” guarantees that all of these views from all of these perspectives are in agreement, so that our view of the squirrel, for example, is matched by the squirrel’s view of us.
This view of the preestablished harmony between monads allows leibniz to give a sur- prising answer to our fourth question, “How do different substances interact?” By definition, substances cannot interact as such. But they can seem to interact if their perceptions are coordinated. Thus, the collision of two billiard balls is in fact a harmony of perceptions about the collision of two billiard balls. Two people fighting is in fact a harmony of perceptions by each of the two people (and anyone else who is watching) about those two people fighting. This answer may seem to be extreme, but given leibniz’s conception of the universe as com- posed of a great number of immaterial substances, it is an answer that is necessary for his philosophy to be consistent. It is an answer that also enables him to reject Newton’s cosmol- ogy, which he and many of his contemporaries found even more extreme and difficult to understand than leibniz’s own strange view of interaction.
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The last of our initial set of questions about substance and our second cosmological question is, “Are space and time themselves substances?” According to leibniz, the answer to this question is an emphatic no. It is on this question that leibniz makes his sharpest break with Newton’s physics. Are monads “in” space? leibniz would have said no. But he also seems to give the surprising answer that not only are monads not “in” space (since they are immaterial), they are, strictly speaking, not “in” time either. The monad does not change in time, but rather, time is in the monad. That is, time is a relation between experiences of the monad. It is not something independent. These views of space and time are intimately tied to leibniz’s analysis of the merely apparent “interaction” between monads. Both are rejec- tions of Newton’s theory and an attempt to offer an alternative.
To our way of thinking, leibniz’s views seem bizarre, compared to the almost common- sense character of Newton’s theory. Newton had argued that the universe was the motion of (material) atoms in empty space, acting against each other according to the laws of motion, force, and gravity that he had so elegantly formulated. But Newton’s theories, which seem almost quaintly obvious to us now, contained what most people of his and leibniz’s time— including Newton himself—considered to be manifest absurdities. One, relating to our fourth ontological question, was the idea of action-at-a-distance, the idea that one object could affect another although the two were not even in contact. (For example, the idea that the moon and the earth have gravitational attraction for each other.) Thus leibniz’s concep- tion of windowless monads, each seeming to interact with others but in fact only developing within itself, and his idea of a “preestablished harmony” among monads would have seemed to his contemporaries no more absurd than Newton’s view of causality. Newton, meanwhile, had a great deal of trouble reconciling his mechanistic theories with the traditional ideas of God and Creation, which he continued to hold for the rest of his life.
The most famous disagreement between leibniz and Newton concerns the nature of space and time, a topic that is still being debated. Newton’s mechanical theory seemed to presuppose the existence of some permanent container, namely space, in which the mate- rial atoms of his theory could mutually attract and bounce against each other. This container, which could exist independently of its contents, is called absolute space. In itself, this sounds entirely reasonable; we talk about things “moving in space” and “taking up space.” But then, can we also talk about the entire universe being “in” space, the way a basketball
can be said to be “in” the basket? This idea has some absurd consequences that led leibniz and many of his contemporaries to reject it.
The idea that space could exist apart from all things in it, and perhaps even be entirely empty (or what many philosophers called “the void”), would mean that it makes sense to talk about movement or location in space even when there isn’t anything in space, not even points and rulers with which to measure distances or dimensions. Bertrand Russell, one of leibniz’s most famous followers, pointed out the absurdity of this idea by asking, “If space is absolute, then wouldn’t it make sense to suggest that the universe might have doubled in size last night?” But what would it mean to say that the universe has gotten larger? An elephant or a planet or even a galaxy can get larger, but only in comparison to some measuring
In our contemporary world, we often take action-at-a-distance for granted. (© iStockphoto.com/Stellajune3700)
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stick and a frame of reference. It is only by such comparisons that such “size” talk makes sense. But to say that the universe doubles in size is to say that our measuring stick, and we ourselves, double in size also. So all comparisons remain the same. Similarly, what would it mean to say that the universe in its entirety moved one foot to the left? All of the one-foot measurements are within the universe. There is no way to talk about the universe itself moving. On the basis of such considerations, leibniz rejected Newton’s idea of absolute space as absurd. In its place, he insisted that space is relative, that is, relative to measure- ments and things that are measured. There is no absolute space; there is only space relative to the various positions of the monads, that is, to observers.
The same is true of time. Newton believed in absolute time also, time as existing apart from anything happening “in” it. But the same consequences follow this initially reason- able idea. If time is absolute, it seems to make sense to ask, “When did the universe begin?” (In fact, astronomers are again asking this question.) But what could this “when” refer to? It can’t refer to any measurement in the universe (clocks, the age of rocks or stars) for it is the universe itself that is being measured, and there aren’t any measures of time outside of the universe. Consequently, leibniz rejected absolute time along with absolute space. Both are relative to the monads and have no possible existence of their own. This means, among other things, that there could be no void or empty space, nor could there be any sense of time in which literally nothing happened. Space and time, according to leibniz, are relative to our own perceptions.
Now we said many pages ago that such cosmological issues were never the domain of philosophy alone, and you are well aware that current physics and astronomy are still very much involved with these questions. Both alternatives, from Newton and from leibniz, are still very much alive. Scientists do indeed still talk about the beginning of the universe, with awesome sophistication; of course, they also talk in strictly relativistic terms, like leibniz, now à la Einstein. What is often relevant to these philosophical debates are the new and sometimes strange experimental findings that are always emerging from the sciences. For example, experiments with the speed of light have brought about startling changes in our views of space and time. One consequence of this changed view is the idea that we cannot talk intelligibly about two events happening “at the same time” if they are a sufficiently great distance apart, say several billion light years. The discovery of radiation from outer space and the expansion of galaxies has raised old issues about creation in a new way: whether the universe was created all at once and then started to expand and change (the “big-bang theory”) or whether there is continuous creation going on even now (the “steady-state theory”). Because of recent theories in science, philosophers are now willing to say things that would have seemed like utter nonsense to both Newton and leibniz—for example, that “space is curved.”
These are not issues to be settled by scientists alone, however; philosophical theories give structure and meaning to the scientific experiments. But neither can philosophers simply cut themselves off from science and pretend that they can solve these problems “just in their heads.” At the outer reaches of science, you will find philosophy, just as, at the begin- nings of philosophy, you will find the unanswered problems of science.
Earlier we stressed the importance of a basic assumption of all metaphysics, that the universe is intelligible. In leibniz’s philosophy, this assumption is presented as one of the basic presuppositions of all thinking; he calls it
32. . . . the Principle of Sufficient Reason, in virtue of which we believe that no fact can be real and no statement true unless it has a sufficient reason why it should be thus and not otherwise. Most frequently, however, these reasons cannot be known to us.
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They can, however, be known to God, who knows everything. It is on the basis of this prin- ciple, for example, that leibniz defends the claim he made in Proposition 9, that two monads can never be identical (“the identity of indiscernibles”). The reasoning is this: Since God is the supremely rational Being (monad), He must have a reason for all that He does. But leib- niz also argues (Prop. 58) that God must have created the universe “with the greatest pos- sible variety together with the greatest order that may be.” Here is the reason why God would not have created any two monads alike. But the Principle of Sufficient Reason has a further implication; it also serves as a principle of divine ethics. Among the various possible worlds (that is, among the infinitely many ways in which the world might have been), God chooses the most perfect, that is, “the best of all possible worlds.” Here is the doctrine of cosmic optimism that Voltaire so brilliantly lampooned in his novel Candide. But leibniz took this concept of “the best of all possible worlds” very seriously. In the next century, it was to provide a foundation for much of the optimism of the Enlightenment. And in leibniz’s own metaphysics, it provides the concluding propositions of Monadology, a joyous optimism that creates as close to a happy ending as one can expect to find in a serious philosophical treatise.
85. Whence it is easy to conclude that the totality of all spirits must compose the city of God, that is to say, the most perfect state that is possible under the most perfect monarch.
. . . 90. Finally, under this perfect government, there will be no good action unre- warded and no evil action unpunished; everything must turn out for the well- being of the good; that is to say, of those who are not disaffected in this great state, who, after having done their duty, trust in Providence and who love and imitate, as is meet, the Author of all Good, delighting in the contemplation of his perfec- tions according to the nature of that genuine, pure love which finds pleasure in the happiness of those who are loved. It is for this reason that wise and virtuous persons work in behalf of everything which seems conformable to presumptive or anteced- ent will of God, and are, nevertheless, content with what God actually brings to pass through his secret, consequent and determining will, recognizing that if we were able to understand sufficiently well the order of the universe, we should find that it surpasses all the desires of the wisest of us, and that it is impossible to render it better than it is, not only for all in general, but also for each one of us in particu- lar, provided that we have the proper attachment for the author of all, not only as the Architect and the efficient cause of our being [our Creator] but also as our Lord and the Final Cause [purpose of our existence] who ought to be the whole goal of our will, and who alone can make us happy.
This theological “happy ending” is not an afterthought for leibniz; it is the heart of his philosophy. like his older contemporary Spinoza, his involvement in metaphysics is ulti- mately a very personal concern for religion and for his own view of himself and his place in the world. From this perspective, it is revealing to see the vast differences between the two philosophers. Spinoza’s view of humanity is extremely anti-individualistic, and each indi- vidual is wholly submerged in the concept of the one substance. In leibniz, however, plural- ism reinforces the view that each individual is a world in himself or herself, and his idealism places an emphasis on mind and thought that is in sharp contrast with Spinoza’s balance between thought and body (although many critics have charged Spinoza with emphasizing
“It is easy to conclude that the totality of all spirits must compose the city of God, that is to say, the most perfect state that is possible under the most perfect monarch.” —G OT T F R I E D W I L H E L M V O N L E I B N I Z
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body to an alarming degree). Spinoza’s determinism and his view that ultimately we can do nothing but understand is surely a gloomy view compared to leibniz’s happy confidence that this is the “best of all possible worlds.” Of course, Spinoza’s heretical view of God as the one substance (sometimes called pantheism) is very different from leibniz’s more tra- ditional view.
But these considerations are far from being merely coincidental or curious implications of Descartes’s, Spinoza’s, and leibniz’s metaphysical views. These religious concerns lie at the heart of their philosophical accounts, and one might well say that each of their metaphysics is constructed as an ingenious form of support for their religious convictions. Indeed, for most of the past two thousand years, and until very recently, the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religious tradition has provided much of the motivation and the structure of Western philosophy.
More recently, however, questions about God have receded in Western metaphysics (although the philosophy of religion has become an important specialized topic in philoso- phy). The questions of metaphysics have moved away from speculative questions about the ultimate nature of reality and have turned more toward a descriptive analysis of reality as it appears to human beings. (This turn is largely due to the doubts about metaphysics that preoccupied philosophers in the mid-twentieth century, when an important group of phi- losophers called “logical positivists” rejected the very idea of metaphysical speculation in favor of the concreteness of science.) But this turn to descriptive analysis took two very dif- ferent directions in philosophy on the European continent and in Anglo-American philoso- phy, though in both it has been a rich source of philosophical engagement. In the Anglo-American world, attention has been given to abstract conceptual analysis of the relationship between whole entities and their component parts; the nature of time and space (including the question of whether time-travel is possible); and “modalities” such as possibility, probability, and necessity. A particularly influential type of analysis, developed by American philosopher David Lewis, considers the actual world to be one of many pos- sible worlds. In the following description, lewis considers what he means by this term.
F RO M Counterfactuals B Y David Lewis27
I believe that there are possible worlds other than the one we happen to inhabit. If an argument is wanted, it is this: it is uncontroversially true that things might have been otherwise than they are. I be- lieve, and so do you, that things could have been different in countless ways. But what does this mean? Ordinary language permits the paraphrase: there are many ways things could have been besides the way they actually are. On the face of it, this sentence is an existential quantifica- tion. It says that there exist many entities of a certain description, to wit ‘ways things could have been.’ I believe that things
27 From David lewis, Counterfactuals (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), p. 84.
David Lewis (1941–2001)
American philosopher who made major contributions in numerous areas of philosophy, including metaphysics logic, and philoso- phy of language, among others. He defended a theory of possible worlds, in which the actual world is only one of many alternative possible ones.
American philosopher David lewis. (Photo credit: Steffi Lewis)
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could have been different in countless ways; I believe permissible paraphrases of what I believe; taking the paraphrase at its face value, I therefore believe in the existence of certain entities that might be called ‘ways things could have been.’ I prefer to call them ‘possible worlds.’
On the European continent, the tendency toward descriptive analysis tended to follow a philosophical method called phenomenology (see Chapter 4, pp. 288–290), which explicitly appealed to the structures of human experience to describe the way the world must be. One of the most famous and most difficult authors in this tradition is a German named Martin Heidegger. His mammoth tome Being and Time set up a grand scheme for analyzing the nature of Being from the perspective of human experience. Each of us experiences our- selves, in every case, as already bound up with our world in a particular time and place. For this reason he describes each human individual as a Dasein, which literally means “being there.” The selection that follows makes use of this term. It is drawn from Heidegger’s essay “The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics,” and it defends the idea that philosophical questioning is basic to what makes us the kind of beings that we are.
F RO M “The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics” B Y Martin Heidegger28
Why are there essents [things that exist] rather than nothing? That is the question. Clearly it is no ordinary question. “Why are there essents, why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?”—obviously this is the first of all questions, though not in a chronological sense. Individuals and peoples ask a good many questions in the course of their historical passage through time. They examine, explore, and test a good many things before they run into the question “Why are there essents rather
than nothing?” Many men never encounter this question, if by encounter we mean not merely to hear and read about it as an inter- rogative formulation but to ask the ques- tion, that is, to bring it about, to raise it, to feel its inevitability.
And yet each of us is grazed at least once, perhaps more than once, by the hidden power of this question, even if he is not aware of what is happening to him. The question looms in moments of great despair, when things tend to lose all their weight and all meaning becomes obscured. Perhaps it will strike but once like a muffled bell that rings into our life and gradually dies away. It is present in moments of rejoicing, when all the things around us are transfigured and seem to be there for the first time, as if it
28 From An Introduction to Metaphysics by Martin Heidegger, translated by Ralph Manheim (1959) for Yale University Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press, Inc.
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)
A German phenomenologist and student of Edmund Husserl. Heidegger’s rebellion against his teacher began the “existential” movement in phenomenology. His best-known work is Being and Time (1927). Although focusing on metaphysics and phenome- nology, this work is also one of the first existentialist studies of “human nature.”
Twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger. (bpk, Berlin/Art Resource, NY)
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might be easier to think they are not than to understand that they are and are as they are. The question is upon us in boredom, when we are equally removed from despair and joy, and everything about us seems so hopelessly commonplace that we no longer care whether anything is or is not—and with this the question “Why are there essents rather than nothing?” is evoked in a particular form.
But this question may be asked expressly, or, unrecognized as a question, it may merely pass through our lives like a brief gust of wind; it may press hard upon us, or, under one pretext or another, we may thrust it away from us and silence it. In any case it is never the question that we ask first in point of time.
But it is the first question in another sense—in regard to rank. This may be clarified in three ways. The question “Why are there essents rather than nothing?” is first in rank for us first because it is the most far reaching, second because it is the deepest, and finally because it is the most fundamental of all questions.
Philosophy is one of the few autonomous creative possibilities and at times neces- sities of man’s historical being-there [Dasein]. The current misinterpretations of phi- losophy, all of which have some truth about them, are legion. Here we shall mention only two, which are important because of the light they throw on the present and future situation of philosophy. The first misinterpretation asks too much of philoso- phy. The second distorts its function.
Roughly speaking, philosophy always aims at the first and last grounds of the essent, with particular emphasis on man himself and on the meaning and goals of human being-there. This might suggest that philosophy can and must provide a foundation on which a nation will build its historical life and culture. But this is beyond the power of philosophy. As a rule such excessive demands take the form of a belittling of philosophy. It is said, for example: Because metaphysics did noth- ing to pave the way for the revolution it should be rejected. This is no cleverer than saying that because the carpenter’s bench is useless for flying it should be abolished. Philosophy can never directly supply the energies and create the oppor- tunities and methods that bring about a historical change; for one thing, because philosophy is always the concern of the few. Which few? The creators, those who initiate profound transformation. It spreads only indirectly, by devious paths that can never be laid out in advance, until at last, at some future date, it sinks to the level of a commonplace; but by then it has long been forgotten as original philosophy.
What philosophy essentially can and must be is this: a thinking that breaks the paths and opens the perspectives of the knowledge that sets the norms and hierar- chies, of the knowledge in which and by which a people fulfills itself historically and culturally, the knowledge that kindles and necessitates all inquiries and thereby threatens all values.
The second misinterpretation involves a distortion of the function of philoso- phy. Even if philosophy can provide no foundation for a culture, the argument goes, it is nevertheless a cultural force, whether because it gives us an overall, sys- tematic view of what is, supplying a useful chart by which we may find our way amid the various possible things and realms of things, or because it relieves the sciences of their work by reflecting on their premises, basic concepts, and princi- ples. Philosophy is expected to promote and even to accelerate—to make easier as it were—the practical and technical business of culture.
But—it is in the very nature of philosophy never to make things easier but only more difficult. And this not merely because its language strikes the everyday
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understanding as strange if not insane. Rather, it is the authentic function of phi- losophy to challenge historical being-there and hence, in the last analysis, being pure and simple. It restores to things, to the essents, their weight (being). How so? Because the challenge is one of the essential prerequisites for the birth of all great- ness, and in speaking of greatness we are referring primarily to the works and destinies of nations. We can speak of historical destiny only where an authentic knowledge of things dominates man’s being-there. And it is philosophy that opens up the paths and perspectives of such knowledge.
Even supposed observations assail you unawares. Such judgments are often dis- arming, precisely because they seem so natural. You hear remarks such as “Philoso- phy leads to nothing,” “You can’t do anything with philosophy,” and readily imagine that they confirm an expression of your own. There is no denying the soundness of these two phrases, particularly common among scientists and teachers of science. Any attempt to refute them by proving that after all it does “lead to something” merely strengthens the prevailing misinterpretation to the effect that the everyday standards by which we judge bicycles or sulphur baths are applicable to philosophy.
It is absolutely correct and proper to say that “You can’t do anything with phi- losophy.” It is only wrong to suppose that this is the last word on philosophy. For the rejoinder imposes itself; granted that we cannot do anything with philosophy, might not philosophy, if we concern ourselves with it, do something with us? So much for what philosophy is not.
“Granted that we cannot do anything with philosophy, might not philosophy . . . do something with us?” — M A R T I N H E I D E G G E R
• What does leibniz mean by preestablished harmony, and how does this notion solve the problem of interaction among substances?
• What is a monad, and how do we distinguish among monads, according to leibniz? What is the “Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles”? Do you think you could possibly doubt this principle? Why or why not?
• If even God must act for a reason, as leibniz claims, can God be said to be free?
• Is this the best of all possible worlds? What kind of evidence could be used to sup- port an answer to this question?
• Do you think other possible worlds besides this one are real? Why or why not?
• What is the difference, according to Heidegger, between things that exist and Being as such?
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
Metaphysics is the study of ultimate reality, the attempt to find out the way the world really is. The first recognized metaphysical theory in Western philosophy is Thales’ suggestion that everything is ultimately made of water. After Thales, a number of schools of metaphysics suggested alternative theories, all of them depending on the speculative powers of human reason and diverging in various and important ways from “common sense.” But these think- ers were not only the first significant Western philosophers; they were also the first
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theoretical scientists, anticipating in many ways some of the most sophisticated theories of contemporary physics, astronomy, and chemistry.
The first turning point in Western metaphysics came with Socrates, although Socrates himself was more interested in moral issues than in metaphysics as such. Socrates’ student Plato and Plato’s student Aristotle became the first great systematic metaphysicians, and philosophy ever since has been deeply indebted to them. Plato introduced an elaborate theory in which ultimate reality consisted of Forms, in contrast to the particular and chang- ing things of everyday life. To support this “two-worlds” theory of Forms versus individual things, he offered a “theory of recollection,” in which he argued that the human soul is immortal and that each of us already knows, in some sense, what we appear to learn in our lives. Aristotle argues instead that only individual things deserve the ultimate claim to reality, for these individual things are the primary substances. Since Aristotle, metaphysi- cians have typically used the term substance as the name of the basic entities that compose reality.
We have also summarized the thought of some of the greatest metaphysical thinkers of modern times. In Europe, they begin from the concept of “substance” and attempt to use deduction as a method for proving the ultimate nature of reality. Their answers are extremely different. Spinoza argues that there can only be one substance; leibniz argues that there are many. For Spinoza, God is identical to the universe, to the one substance; for leibniz, God is distinct from all other substances, which He created. For Spinoza, mind and body are but two of an infinite number of attributes of God, the only two that we can know; for leibniz, all substances are ultimately immaterial. But beneath these technical concerns is a struggle by both philosophers to answer the most important problems of human existence: the nature of God and proper religion, the place of human beings in the universe, and the role and foundations of science.
CHAPTER REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. What similarities (if any) do you find among the philosophies of Western modern philosophers (Descartes, leibniz, Spinoza), the pre-Socratics, and the ancient texts of Asian philosophy (Upanishads, Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism) with respect to their attempt to explain ultimate reality?
2. What pre-Socratic influences can you identify in Plato? (Be specific: e.g., “Plato, like Parmenides, believes that . . .”)
3. What traditional metaphysical issues seem important today?
4. Which modern theories about the nature of reality are materialist? Which are immaterialist?
5. How is Plato responding to the pre-Socratics with his theory of Forms? What is Aristo- tle’s response to this theory?
6. Explain the problem of substances interacting with each other. How do Descartes, leibniz, and Spinoza, respectively, go about solving this problem. Could any of these solutions help Plato solve the problem of participation? Are there any similarities be- tween participation and the interaction of substances? If so, what are they?
7. What is the value of talking about different “possible worlds,” as leibniz does? Are these literally different worlds?
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KEY TERMS
absolute space absolute time action-at-a-distance Ahura Mazda Analects, The Angra Mainyush animism apeiron Asha attribute Becoming (in Plato) Being (in Plato) best of all possible worlds Brahman Buddha cause cause-of-itself (causa sui) conceptual truth cosmogony cosmology Dao
determinism essence (or an essential
property) extended Forms (in Plato) Four Noble Truths Ideas idealism Identity of Indiscernibles immortality ineffable infinite regress innate (ideas) logical positivist materialism metaphysics modes (in Spinoza) monad (in leibniz) monism monotheism mystic
ontology pantheism participation pluralism polytheism preestablished harmony prime mover (in Aristotle) Principle of Sufficient Reason
(in leibniz) property reason sophists Spenta Mainyush substance substance (in Descartes) teleology (teleological) unextended Upanishads void Zend-Avesta Zoroastrianism
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
General surveys of ancient Greek philosophy can be found in Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, and New York: Penguin, 1987), and W. k. C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers: From Thales to Aristotle (New York: Harper & Row, 1960).
The most important texts from the pre-Socratics are in G. S. kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, eds., The Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1983).
Plato’s dialogues are collected in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John Cooper, with D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997). Helpful guides to his work include Julia Annas, Plato: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Richard kraut, How to Read Plato (london: Granta, 2008).
Aristotle’s works are collected in R. Mckeon, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941).
Two fine surveys of Aristotle’s works are W. D. Ross, Aristotle (New York: Meridian, 1959) and Christopher Shields, Aristotle (london: Routledge, 2007).
Brief surveys of the pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are available in D. J. O’Connor, ed., A Critical History of Western Philosophy (New York: Free Press, 1985) and Edward Craig, ed., The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1998), as well as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (URl: plato.stanford.edu).
Benedictus de Spinoza’s Ethics is in The Rationalists (New York: Doubleday, 1960). For guidance through the ethics, see Steven Nadler, Spinoza’s “Ethics”: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Olli koistinen, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza’s “Ethics” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
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A convenient collection of Gottfried W. von leibniz’s major works is Philip Wiener, ed., Leibniz, Selections (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951).
Two useful contemporary studies of leibniz are Hidé Ishiguro, Leibniz’s Philosophy of Logic and Language, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990) and Robert Merrihew Adams, Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). An important but biased study is Bertrand Russell, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (london: George Allen and Unwin, 1937).
To study twentieth- and twenty-first-century metaphysics, see A. lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936); Jacques Maritain, A Preface to Metaphysics (london: Sheed, 1948); Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T. E. Hulme (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1949); Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959); Richard Taylor, Metaphysics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963); D. F. Pears, ed., The Nature of Metaphysics (london: Macmillan, 1957); Simon Blackburn, Thinking (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Peter Van Inwagen, Metaphysics (Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 1993); Richard Gale, Blackwell Guide to Metaphysics (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2002); and E. J. lowe, A Survey of Metaphysics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); David lewis, Counterfactuals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973); David lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); Michael loux, Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (london and New York: Routledge, 2006); and Peter van Inwagen, Metaphysics, 3rd ed. (Boulder: Westview, 2009).
For a discussion of medieval philosophy, see Arthur Hyman and James J. Walsh, and William Thomas, eds., Philosophy in the Middle Ages: The Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Tradi- tions, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010); and A. S. McGrade, ed., The Cambridge Com- panion to Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
A broad selection of sources from non-Western cultures is found in Robert C. Solomon and kathleen M. Higgins, World Philosophy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995).
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2 | Religion Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
H E B R E W S I I : I
The age-old efforts of metaphysicians to know the way the world really is have rarely been motivated by curiosity or the scientific spirit alone. Most often, metaphysics and philosophy in general have been motivated by religious devotion. The search for truth and the concern with what we can know and how we ought to behave have often been tied to concern about the nature of the divine and its relationship to us. For many thoughtful people, there is no more powerful an experience than religious experience, and they have no more important beliefs than their religious beliefs. Religion defines their lives, and their religious views define reality. Although the issues of religion are philosophically within the domain of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, the importance of religion demands special attention. Religion involves experiences of a kind that are not common to other ontological and cosmological concerns. Religious beliefs involve emotions that are not relevant to the technical concerns with substance and science. It is this emotional involvement in religion that has inspired some of the greatest art, the bloodiest wars, the kindest actions, and the most brilliant phi- losophy in history.
A. What Is Religion? Religion has played an important role in the history of philosophy. Indeed, many scholars would claim that philosophy grew out of religion and only occasionally has turned against its religious heritage. But there have been many different religions. Some differ so drastically from one another that it is hard to say what they have in common. For instance, you may be inclined to cite “belief in God or gods” as a criterion for calling something a religion. But one of the biggest religious followings in the world—Buddhism—has no such concept. Or you may cite as a criterion some sort of social organization, a church, or a prayer gathering. But there are Christian Protestant sects who believe that religion is ultimately a private affair for which no congregation is necessary.
Although many philosophical schools share their beginnings with religions, we would not necessarily want to call a Methodist minister a philosopher. Nor would we want to call a
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college teacher who assigns the works of Maimonides (an impor- tant Jewish philosopher and theologian) a rabbi. Although reli- gion and philosophy are intimately linked, we hesitate to identify them. Central to both, however, is religious belief. A person who believes in a single, independent being, God, who is the creator of the universe, is a theist, a believer, whether Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, or Muslim. (To refuse to believe in God is to be an atheist. To admit one’s ignorance, and simply accept the fact that one does not know and perhaps has no way of knowing whether there is such a being or not, is to be an agnostic. We discuss some atheistic and agnostic claims, as well as several different religious traditions, later in this chapter.)
Before we investigate specific religious-philosophical debates, however, let us take a look at how some philosophers have answered a preliminary question: What is religion? Twentieth-century philosopher John Wisdom, a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein, claims that the essential feature of reli- gious belief is a certain “attitude” that the religious person has toward his or her surroundings and that the gap between the religious “attitude” and that of the philosopher or scientist who is interested in explanation is unbridgeable.
F RO M “Gods” B Y John Wisdom1
Two people return to their long neglected garden and find among the weeds a few of the old plants surprisingly vigorous. One says to the other “It must be that a gar- dener has been coming and doing something about these plants.” Upon inquiry they find that no neighbor has ever seen anyone at work in their garden. The first man says to the other “He must have worked while people slept.” The other says “No, someone would have heard him and besides, anybody who cared about the plants would have kept down these weeds.” The first man says “Look at the way these are arranged. There is purpose and a feeling for beauty here. I believe that someone comes, someone invisible to mortal eyes. I believe that the more carefully we look the more we shall find confirmation of this.” They examine the garden ever so carefully and sometimes they come on new things suggesting the contrary and even that a malicious person has been at work. Besides examining the garden carefully they also study what happens to gardens left without attention. Each learns all the other learns about this and about the garden. Consequently, when after all this, one says “I still believe a gardener comes” while the other says “I don’t” their
different words now reflect no difference as to what they have found in the garden, no dif- ference as to what they would find in the garden if they looked further, and no differ- ence about how fast untended gardens fall into disorder. At this stage, in this context, the gardener hypothesis has ceased to be
Symbols associated with (clockwise starting at left) the Jewish, Sikh, Islamic, Christian, Hindu, Daoist, Baha’i, Buddhist, Jain, Shinto, Confucian, and Native American religions. (© Shutterstock.com/casejustin)
John Wisdom (1904–1993)
Wisdom was part of the analytic movement in philosophy. He taught at Cambridge University and the University of Oregon and worked primarily in philosophy of mind and metaphysics.
1 John Wisdom, “Gods,” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, XlV, london: Harrison & Sons, 1944–1945.
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experimental; the difference between one who accepts and one who rejects it is now not a matter of the one expecting something the other does not expect. What is the difference between them? The one says: “A gardener comes unseen and unheard. He is manifested only in his works with which we are all familiar.” The other says “There is no gardener.” And with this difference in what they say about the gar- dener goes a difference in how they feel toward the garden, in spite of the fact that neither expects anything of it which the other does not expect.
But is this the whole difference between them—that the one calls the garden by one name and feels one way toward it, while the other calls it by another name and feels in another way toward it? And if this is what the difference has become, then is it any longer appropriate to ask “Which is right?” or “Which is reasonable?”
For Wisdom, religious belief is obviously different from the scientific quest for causal expla- nation. Since the scientific revolution of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, many philoso- phers have tried to define religion and science in contrast to one another, and many have tried to cast their lots with science. But there is plenty of resistance to such a move. Many scientists are deeply religious people, and many religious thinkers accept the authority of science without compromising their religious faith. No less a scientist than Albert Einstein, for example, argued that it is this religious awe and appreciation for the complex regularities of nature that has spawned the great efforts of science to understand it. Indeed, he says, science itself inspires a “cosmic religious feeling.”
“The one says: ‘A gardener comes unseen and unheard. He is manifested only in his works with which we are all familiar.’ The other says ‘There is no gardener.’” — J O H N W I S D O M
John Wisdom observes that people may agree completely in their descriptions of a garden without agreeing about whether there is a gardener. (Image © Tischenko Irina, 2011. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
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On the Design of the Universe B Y Albert Einstein2
It is easy to see why the churches have always fought science and persecuted its devo- tees. On the other hand, I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research. Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion without which pioneer work in theoretical science cannot be achieved are able to grasp the strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue. What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this world, Kepler and Newton must have had to enable them to spend years of solitary labor in disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics! Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a skeptical world, have shown the way to kindred spirits scattered
wide through the world and the centuries. Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man such strength. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.
Einstein’s statement of scientific faith is particu- larly important in times when science and religion seem once again at each other’s throats. Current controversies over “Creation” versus “evolution,” for example, have made it seem as if science and reli- gion are utterly irreconcilable, with completely opposed visions of the world. But consider this response from Keiji Nishitani, a Japanese philoso- pher conversant in both Christianity and Buddhism. Nishitani claims that the distinguishing feature of religion is the “personal/impersonal,” or, in other words, the deeply personal recognition that each of us must give to the amazing existence that we share with all other things in the universe. This recognition involves our stepping outside ourselves to consider the world and ourselves from an impersonal per- spective. Nishitani calls this perspective “personal nihility.” It is an intimate and unique activity, but also a necessary one. Everyone, whether consciously
“I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.” — A L B E R T E I N S T E I N
Albert Einstein (1879–1955)
A German physicist who made many groundbreaking contribu- tions to theoretical physics, most notably the theory of relativity. He sought to develop a unified field theory, a theory that would unify the basic concepts within physics. He received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921.
According to Einstein, a cosmic religious feeling has prompted scientific investigation into such matters as the design of the universe and the details of celestial mechanics. (© Shutterstock.com/Ventura)
2 Albert Einstein, “Religion and Science,” in Ideas and Opinions, trans. Sonia Bargmann, New York: Crown, 1954.
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or unconsciously, must engage in it at some point in his or her life, when our circumstances prompt the question of why we exist. For Nishitani, the question of “what is religion?” is the most important and personal question we can ask. It stands at the very heart of what it is to be human.
F RO M “What Is Religion?” B Y Keiji Nishitani3
“What is religion?” we ask ourselves, or, looking at it the other way around, “What is the purpose of religion for us? Why do we need it?” Though the question about the need for religion may be a familiar one, it already contains a problem. In one sense, for the person who poses the question, religion does not seem to be some- thing he needs. The fact that he asks the question at all amounts to an admission that religion has not yet become a necessity for him. In another sense, however, it is surely in the nature of religion to be necessary for just such a person. Wherever questioning individuals like this are to be found, the need for religion is there as well. In short, the relationship we have to religion is a contradictory one: those for whom religion is not a necessity are, for that reason, the very ones for whom reli- gion is a necessity. There is no other thing of which the same can be said.
When asked, “Why do we need learning and the arts?” we might try to explain in reply that such things are necessary for the advancement of mankind, for human happiness, for the cultivation of the individual, and so forth. Yet even if we can say why we need such things, this does not imply that we cannot get along without them. Somehow life would still go on. Learning and the arts may be indispensable to living well, but they are not indispensable to living. In that sense, they can be considered a kind of luxury.
Food, on the other hand, is essential to life. Nobody would turn to somebody else and ask him why he eats. Well, maybe an angel or some other celestial being who has no need to eat might ask such questions, but men do not. Religion, to judge from current conditions in which many people are in fact getting along without it, is clearly not the kind of necessity that food is. Yet this does not mean that it is merely something we need to live well. Religion has to do with life itself. Whether the life we are living will end up in extinction or in the attainment of eternal life is a matter of the utmost importance for life itself. In no sense is religion to be called a luxury. Indeed, this is why religion is an indispensable necessity for those very people who fail to see the need for it. Herein lies the distinctive feature of religion that sets it apart from the mere life of “nature” and from culture. There- fore, to say that we need religion for example, for the sake of social order, or human welfare, or public morals is a mistake, or at least a confusion of priorities. Religion must not be considered from the viewpoint of its utility, any more than life should. A religion concerned primarily with its own utility bears witness to its own degen- eration. One can ask about the utility of things like eating for the natural life, or of things like learning and the arts for culture. In fact, in such matters the question of utility should be of constant concern. Our ordinary mode of being is restricted to
Keiji Nishitani (1900–1990)
A Japanese philosopher, representative of the “Kyoto school,” founded by Kitaro Nishida (1870–1945). The work of this school was devoted to incorporating Western thought, especially existential- ism, into Buddhism.
3 Keiji Nishitani, “What Is Religion?” from Religion and Nothingness, ed. and trans. Jan Van Bragt. Copyright © 1982 by Keiji Nishitani. Published by University of California Press.
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these levels of natural or cultural life. But it is in breaking through that ordinary mode of being and overturning it from the ground up, in pressing us back to the elemental source of life where life itself is seen as useless, that religion becomes something we need—a must for human life.
Two points should be noted from what has just been said. First, religion is at all times the individual affair of each individual. This sets it apart from things like culture, which, while related to the individual, do not need to concern each indi- vidual. Accordingly, we cannot understand what religion is from the outside. The religious quest alone is the key to understanding it; there is no other way. This is the most important point to be made regarding the essence of religion.
Second, from the standpoint of the essence of religion, it is a mistake to ask “What is the purpose of religion for us?” and one that clearly betrays an attitude of trying to un- derstand religion apart from the religious quest. It is a question that must be broken through by another question coming from within the person who asks it. There is no other road that can lead to an understanding of what religion is and what purpose it serves. The counterquestion that achieves this breakthrough is one that asks, “For what purpose do I myself exist?” Of everything else we can ask its purpose for us, but not of religion. With regard to everything else we can make a telos of ourselves as individuals, as man, or as mankind, and evaluate those things in relation to our life and existence. We put ourselves as individuals/man/mankind at the center and weigh the significance of everything as the contents of our lives as individuals/man/mankind. But religion upsets the posture from which we think of ourselves as telos and center for all things. Instead, religion poses as a starting point the question: “For what purpose do I exist?”
We become aware of religion as a need, as a must for life, only at the level of life at which everything else loses its necessity and its utility. Why do we exist at all? Is not our very existence and human life ultimately meaningless? Or, if there is a meaning or significance to it all, where do we find it? When we come to doubt the meaning of our existence in this way, when we have become a question to our- selves, the religious quest awakens within us. These questions and the quest they give rise to show up when the mode of looking at and thinking about everything in terms of how it relates to us is broken through, where the mode of living that puts us at the center of everything is overturned. This is why the question of reli- gion in the form, “Why do we need religion?” obscures the way to its own answer from the very start. It blocks our becoming a question to ourselves.
The point at which the ordinarily necessary things of life, including learning and the arts, all lose their necessity and utility is found at those times when death, nihility, or sin—or any of those situations that entail a fundamental negation of our life, existence, and ideals, that undermine the roothold of our existence and bring the meaning of life into question—become pressing personal problems for us. This can occur through an illness that brings one face-to-face with death, or through some turn of events that robs one of what had made life worth living. . . .
Nihility refers to that which renders meaningless the meaning of life. When we become a question to ourselves and when the problem of why we exist arises, this means that nihility has emerged from the ground of our existence and that our very existence has turned into a question mark. The appearance of this nihility signals nothing less than that one’s awareness of self-existence has penetrated to an extraordinary depth.
Normally we proceed through life, on and on, with our eye fixed on something or other, always caught up with something within or without ourselves. It is these engagements that prevent the deepening of awareness. They block off the way to an
“Religion is at all times the individual affair of each individual.” — N I S H I TA N I K E I J I
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opening up of that horizon on which nihil- ity appears and self-being becomes a ques- tion. This is even the case with learning and the arts and the whole range of other cultural engagements. But when this hori- zon does open up at the bottom of those engagements that keep life moving contin- ually on and on, something seems to halt and linger before us. This something is the meaninglessness that lies in wait at the bottom of those very engagements that bring meaning to life. This is the point at which that sense of nihility, that sense that “everything is the same” we find in Nietzsche and Dostoevski, brings the rest- less, forward-advancing pace of life to a halt and makes it take a step back. In the Zen phrase, it “turns the light to what is directly underfoot.”
In the forward progress of everyday life, the ground beneath our feet always falls behind as we move steadily ahead; we overlook it. Taking a step back to shed light on what is underfoot of the self—“stepping back to come to the self,” as another an- cient Zen phrase has it—marks a conversion in life itself. This fundamental conver- sion in life is occasioned by the opening up of the horizon of nihility at the ground of life. It is nothing less than a conversion from the self-centered (or man-centered) mode of being, which always asks what use things have for us (or for man), to an at- titude that asks for what purpose we ourselves (or man) exist. Only when we stand at this turning point does the question “What is religion?” really become our own.
A Zen rock garden invites contemplation on the mysterious fact of existence, the “being real” that we share with rocks. (© iStockphoto.com/ Rolf_52)
• How would you decide whether there is a gardener or not?
• Do you think that belief is necessary for religion? If so, belief in what?
• Is the belief in God’s existence the same sort of belief as the belief that it is raining outside? Do you think that there is scientific evidence for God’s existence? Does there need to be?
• What does Nishitani mean when he says, “[T]hose for whom religion is not a neces- sity are, for that reason, the very ones for whom religion is a necessity”?
• What kind of answer might one give to the question, “For what do I exist?”
B. The Western Religions Among the world religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam bear a special relationship to each other and to philosophy. They may be called the “Abrahamic” religions because all three trace their roots to Abraham of the Old Testament. Thus, the God worshiped in all three of these religions is the “God of Abraham.” We may also call them the three “Western”
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religions, in that they all originated among peoples living west of the Indus River (one traditional dividing line between the East and the West).
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are closely associ- ated with each other and with the West for another reason as well. The early religious thinking of all three was heavily influenced by the Greek philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. Although some other religions make use of Greek philosophy, its influence in other faiths does not approach the status it holds in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thought.
Yet the God who appears in the Old Testament is not readily understood in either Platonic or Aristotelian terms. (You may look ahead at our discussions of Plato and Aristotle in earlier chapters and see if you can find anything akin to the Judeo-Christian God described
there.) Therefore, early thinkers, particularly in the Middle Ages, had their work cut out for them in offering defenses of their beliefs or in arriving at rational religious beliefs using the Greeks as their model. The medieval philosophers’ attempts to do so are among the most monumental efforts in the history of philosophy, with some of the most provocative and widely influential results.
In many cases, philosophy played a crucial role in the conversions of individuals and of whole countries to one of these religions. In others, philosophical disputes were the primary cause of sectarian secessions. In all cases, philosophical arguments were a vital ingredient in the development of the doctrines that have come down to us today.
1. The Traditional Conception of God The principal issues for all three of these great monotheisms, of course, are the existence and character of God. The God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam has many characteristics
that must be identified for our understanding. Most important, it is generally believed that God is an independent being, the Cre- ator of the universe, and distinct from the universe He created. It is generally agreed that God is the supremely rational and moral being with concern for human justice and human suffering. It is agreed that He is all-powerful (omnipotent) and all-knowing (omniscient) and that He is everywhere at once (omnipresent). In the Old Testament, it is made evident that God has emotions; for example, we read of God as “a jealous God,” and we hear of the “wrath of God.” It is the attempt to understand the being who has these characteristics that defines Western theology and a great deal of Western metaphysics.
To insist that God is an independent being, the creator of the universe but distinct from that universe, is of the utmost impor- tance for Western religion. When people try to reinterpret God so that He is nothing other than some universal quality, as in “God is love,” or “God is the ultimate force,” or “God is life,” or “God is the universe,” there is a real possibility that God’s exis- tence as an independent being is being denied. One can say “God is love” as shorthand for “God loves us and wants us to
(© Balage Balogh/Art Resource, NY)
Many artists have depicted God with human characteris- tics. Most philosophers would describe God (or the idea of God) in more abstract terms, such as omniscience and omnipotence, but these traits, too, are understood by comparison with our own capacities. (© iStockphoto.com/nicoolay)
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love each other” without this danger. But if one believes that God simply is identical to people loving one another, then it is evident that this belief is no different from that of a person who may not believe in God at all but just believes in love. Similarly, it is one thing to believe that God is a “force,” among other things, who created the universe, but if you be- lieve that God is nothing other than a force that created the universe, without consciousness or concern, then your belief does not differ from that of someone who also believes that some force created the universe but does not believe in God.
In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the independence of God from the universe He cre- ated is an all-important belief. Philosophers and theologians refer to this independence as the transcendence of God. We say that God “transcends” the universe and humankind. We also say that He “transcends” all human experience. It is this notion of transcendence that raises an immediate epistemological problem. If God transcends our experience, how can we know that He exists at all? If He is outside our every possible experience—if we cannot see, hear, or touch Him—what possible evidence can we have for His existence, and how can we have any way of knowing what He must be like?
In some ancient religions, gods and goddesses were very much like human beings. They were usually stronger and perhaps smarter. The Greek and Roman gods, for example, were like this. Although they were immortal, they often misbehaved and became jealous or furi- ous at one another. Philosophers use the word anthropomorphism when they refer to the perception of gods as being more or less human. It is natural, when people try to envision their deities, that they should endow them with those characteristics they understand best— human characteristics.
The Greek philosopher Xenophanes criticized popular Greek religion around 500 b.c.e. by noting that “if cows, horses, and lions had hands, or could draw and work like men with their hands, horses would draw gods in the shape of horses, etc.” He also noted that “Ethio- pians make their gods black and snub-nosed, Thracians give them red hair and gray eyes.” There is one God, he concluded, but he is “in no way like mortals in body and mind.”
The God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is much less anthropomorphic than the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome. But it would be a mistake to deny that God is conceived in certain anthropomorphic ways as well. The God of the Hebrews frequently took their side in battle in the Old Testament, helping them to fell the walls of Jericho, keeping the sun still for extra hours, and holding apart the waters of the Red Sea. The God of the Old Testament has many human emotions: He becomes jealous or angry when His commands are not carried out, having people swallowed by whales and sometimes destroying whole cities. Even the notion that God is a loving God carries with it anthropomorphism. It is often said that these are mere approximations, based on the idea that we can never really know or understand what God is like. (For example, it is said that we cannot understand divine love and that we use our all-too-human conception of love as the only example we can find.) But it must also be said that seeing our characterizations of God as anthro- pomorphic projections does not amount to an ob- jection to belief in God; it is only to be expected that people will try to understand religion in those terms that they know best.
Xenophanes (570–475 b.c.e.)
A precursor of the Eleatic school (a school of pre-Socratic philoso- phers in Elea, a Greek colony in southern Italy) and a severe critic of Greek popular religion.
Xenophanes (© Shutterstock .com/Renata Sedmakova)
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The scriptural emphasis on God’s sense of justice and His concern for humankind also demonstrates anthropomorphic characteristics, even if it is true, as we are so often told, that God’s conception of justice may be different from our own. These characteristics are so important that if a person does not believe that God is a merciful and concerned being with a strong sense of justice, then that person probably does not believe in God at all. (For example, Aristotle’s “prime mover,” despite the Western theologians’ marvelous ad- aptation of the concept to their religions, is not on the face of it very much like the Judeo-Christian God.) Prayer is meaningful only on the assumption that God listens to us and understands us; confidence in God is intelligible only on the assumption that God cares about us. Without these characteristics, God would probably not be a moral force in our lives.
Some sophisticated theists and theologians have tried to purge the idea of God of all anthropomorphic characteristics, speaking, for example, only of “Being Itself,” rather than the usual characterization of God as “Him.” Still, although we may not actually believe that God, like Zeus, resembles some superhuman immortal being, it is clear that our traditional conception of God is far more anthropocentric than some theologians would prefer.
The Western religions’ conception of God has been varied in so many ways that we cannot even begin to consider them. The differences between the God of the Old Testa- ment and the God of the New Testament have often been discussed. Then there are the obvious differences between the views of the various sects of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And the differences between the Abrahamic God and other gods (Zeus, Krishna, Isis) are so enormous that traditional Christians, Jews, and Muslims would hesitate to call these deities “God.”
• If God is transcendent and independent from creation, then how do we know that God has the qualities that we ascribe to him (e.g., omniscience, goodness, omnipotence)?
• Do you think anything would be lost or gained by trying to avoid anthropomor- phism in our thinking about God?
C. Proving God: The Ontological Argument It is one thing to be taught that there is a God; it is another to believe in God for good reason, rationally, and to know what one believes. Of course, many people have insisted that belief in God is not a matter of rationality or knowledge at all but only of faith. But the turn to faith logically comes after attempts to know. So before we examine other philosophical questions raised by religious belief, let us ask whether or not we can know that God exists.
The problem is a familiar one. Since God by definition transcends our experience, how can we have evidence for His existence? There are people who claim to have been direct witnesses to miracles or to have heard God’s own voice. But assuming that none of us is one of them, our problem remains: Should we believe their reports? Might they have been vic- tims of imagination or hallucination? Is there any evidence in our experience that would allow us to know of God’s existence? If not, what reasons can we give for a belief in God?
In the long history of Western theology, three major sets of “proofs” have emerged as attempts to demonstrate God’s existence. Each has received various formulations, and all are still being discussed today. They are called (1) the ontological argument, (2) the cosmological argument, and (3) the teleological argument.
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THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT This is the most difficult, for it is a purely logical proof; it attempts to argue from the idea of God to His necessary existence. Descartes used this argument in his Meditations to prove God’s existence. Similar arguments were to be found in both Spinoza and leibniz. But the man who is generally credited with the first clear formu- lation of the argument is an eleventh-century monk named St. Anselm. Because the argu- ment depends wholly on the idea of God’s existence, it is called ontological. Here is how Anselm presents it:
On the Ontological Argument B Y St. Anselm4
Some time ago, at the urgent request of some of my brethren, I published a brief work, as an example of meditation on the grounds of faith. I wrote it in the role of one who seeks, by silent reasoning with himself, to learn what he does not know. But when I reflected on this little book, and saw that it was put together as a long chain of arguments, I began to ask myself whether one argument might possibly be found, resting on no other argument for its proof, but sufficient in itself to prove that God truly exists, and that he is the supreme good, needing nothing outside himself, but needful for the being and well-being of all things. I often turned my earnest attention to this problem, and at times I believed that I could put my finger on what I was looking for, but at other times it completely escaped my mind’s eye, until finally, in despair, I decided to give up searching for something that seemed impossible to find. But when I tried to put the whole question out of my mind, so as to avoid crowding out other matters, with which I might make some progress, by this useless preoccu- pation, then, despite my unwillingness and resistance, it began to force itself on me more persistently than ever. Then, one day when I was worn out by my vigorous resistance to the obsession, the solution I had ceased to hope for presented itself to me, in the very turmoil of my thoughts, so that I enthusiastically embraced the idea which in my disquiet, I had spurned.
. . .
G O D T RU LY I S
And so, O Lord, since thou givest under- standing to faith, give me to understanding— as far as thou knowest it to be good for me—that thou dost exist, as we believe, and that thou art what we believe thee to be. Now we believe that thou art a being than which none greater can be thought. Or can it be that there is no such being, since “the fool hath said in his heart, ‘There is no God’”? But when this same fool hears what I am saying—“A being than which none greater can be thought”—he understands what he hears, and what he understands is in his understanding, even if he does not understand that it exists. For it is one thing
St. Anselm (1033–1109)
The archbishop of Canter- bury and a proponent of the ontological argument for God’s existence. He was one of the main de- fenders of the intellect and “understanding” against the then-current anti- intellectualism of the church. He is best known for his Monologion and Proslogion, in which the ontological argument is developed.
St. Anselm (1033–1109) is depicted in this nineteenth-century artist’s rendering as reluctantly accepting the position of Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093. (HIP/Art Resource, NY)
4 St. Anselm, Proslogion, in A Scholastic Miscellany, Vol. 10, The library of Christian Classics, ed. and trans. Eugene R. Fairweather, 1956. Used by permission of Westminster John Knox Press.
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for an object to be in the understanding, and another thing to understand that it exists. When a painter considers beforehand what he is going to paint, he has it in his understanding, but he does not suppose that what he has not yet painted already exists. But when he has painted it, he both has it in his understanding and understands that what he has now produced exists. Even the fool, then, must be convinced that a being than which none greater can be thought exists at least in his understanding, since when he hears this he understands it, and whatever is understood is in the un- derstanding. But clearly that than which a greater cannot be thought cannot exist in the understanding alone. For if it is actually in the understanding alone, it can be thought of as existing also in reality, and this is greater. Therefore, if that than which a greater cannot be thought is in the understanding alone, this same thing than which a greater cannot be thought is that than which a greater can be thought. But obvi- ously this is impossible. Without doubt, therefore, there exists, both in the under- standing and in reality, something than which a greater cannot be thought.
G O D C A N N O T B E T H O U G H T O F A S N O N E X I S T E N T
And certainly it exists so truly that it cannot be thought of as nonexistent. For some- thing can be thought of as existing, which cannot be thought of as not existing, and this is greater than that which can be thought of as not existing. Thus, if that than
which a greater cannot be thought can be thought of as not existing, this very thing than which a greater cannot be thought is not that than which a greater cannot be thought. But this is contradictory. So, then, there truly is a being than which a greater cannot be thought—so truly that it cannot even be thought of as not existing.
And thou art this being, O Lord our God. Thou so truly are, then, O Lord my God, that thou canst not even be thought of as not exist- ing. And this is right. For if some mind could think of something better than thou, the crea- ture would rise above the Creator and judge its Creator; but this is altogether absurd. And indeed, whatever is, except thyself alone, can be thought of as not existing. Thou alone, therefore, of all beings, has being in the truest and highest sense, since no other being so truly exists, and thus every other being has less being. Why, then, has “the fool said in his heart, ‘There is no God,’” when it is so obvi- ous to the rational mind that, of all beings, thou dost exist supremely? Why indeed, unless it is that he is a stupid fool?
HOW THE FOOL HAS SAID IN HIS HEART WHAT CANNOT BE THOUGHT
But how did he manage to say in his heart what he could not think? Or how is it that he was unable to think what he said in his heart?
“For God is that than which a greater cannot be thought, and whoever understands this rightly must understand that he exists in such a way that he cannot be nonexistent even in thought.” — S T. A N S E L M
St. Anselm argues that while it is in his power to imagine or not imagine a winged horse, such as the mythical Pegasus, it is not in his power to imag- ine God without existence. (© Shutterstock.com/Yuriy Kulik)
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After all, to say in one’s heart and to think are the same thing. Now if it is true—or, rather, since it is true—that he thought it, because he said it in his heart, but did not say it in his heart, since he could not think it, it is clear that something can be said in one’s heart or thought in more than one way. For we think of a thing, in one sense, when we think of the word that signifies it, and in another sense, when we understand the very thing itself. Thus, in the first sense God can be thought of as nonexistent, but in the second sense this is quite impossible. For no one who understands what God is can think that God does not exist, even though he says these words in his heart—perhaps without any meaning, perhaps with some quite extraneous meaning. For God is that than which a greater cannot be thought, and whoever understands this rightly must understand that he exists in such a way that he cannot be nonexistent even in thought. He, therefore, who understands that God thus exists cannot think of him as nonexistent.
Thanks be to thee, good Lord, thanks be to thee, because I now understand by thy light what I formerly believed thy gift, so that even if I were to refuse to believe in thy existence, I could not fail to understand its truth.
The logic of the argument is deceptively simple: The concept of “God” is defined, inno- cently enough, as “a being greater than which none can be thought.” Then, Anselm asks, “which would be greater, a being who is merely thought, or a being who actually exists?” The answer, of course, is a being who actually exists. But since God is, by definition, the greatest being who can be thought, He must therefore exist. “God cannot be nonexistent even in thought.” Anselm goes on to argue that the idea of an eternal being who either does not yet exist or no longer exists is self-contradictory, so that the very idea we have of such a being requires existence. It is worth noting that while formulating the ontological argument, Anselm was also putting into place some of the final ingredients in the Christian conception of God as not only a perfect or even the most perfect being but, rather, as the greatest (most perfect) conceivable being.
The argument has had a long, influential history, and logicians are still arguing about it. The argument was not seriously altered for five centuries, when Descartes took up Anselm’s argument and gave it its modern formulation. In the seventeenth century, Descartes (in his Meditations) made explicit the presupposition of the argument, that existence is a property that, like color, shape, weight, and charm, a thing may either have or not have. Some proper- ties, however, are essential to a thing: three angles are essential to a triangle, spots are essential to a Dalmatian. So, too, Descartes suggests, perfection is essential to the most perfect being, and existence is a perfection. One can no more conceive of a most perfect being without existence than one can conceive of a triangle without three angles or a Dalmatian without spots.
On the Ontological Argument B Y René Descartes5
But now, if just because I can draw the idea of something from my thought, it fol- lows that all which I know clearly and distinctly as pertaining to this object does really belong to it, may I not derive from this an argument demonstrating the
5 René Descartes, “Meditation IV,” in Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, 1911. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
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existence of God? It is certain that I no less find the idea of God, that is to say, the idea of a supremely perfect Being, in me, than that of any figure or number what- ever it is; and I do not know any less clearly and distinctly that an [actual and] eternal existence pertains to this nature than I know that all that which I am able to demonstrate of some figure or number truly pertains to the nature of this figure or number, and therefore, although all that I concluded in the preceding Medita- tions were found to be false, the existence of God would pass with me as at least as certain as I have ever held the truths of mathematics (which concern only numbers and figures) to be.
This indeed is not at first manifest, since it would seem to present some appear- ance of being a sophism. For being accustomed in all other things to make a dis- tinction between existence and essence, I easily persuade myself that the existence can be separated from the essence of God, and that we can thus conceive God as not actually existing. But, nevertheless, when I think of it with more attention, I clearly see that existence can no more be separated from the essence of God than can its having its three angles equal to two right angles be separated from the essence of a [rectilinear] triangle, or the idea of a mountain from the idea of a valley; and so there is not any less repugnance to our conceiving a God (that is, a Being supremely perfect) to whom existence is lacking (that is to say, to whom a certain perfection is lacking), than to conceive of a mountain which has no valley.
But although I cannot really conceive of a God without existence any more than a mountain without a valley, still from the fact that I conceive a mountain with a valley, it does not follow that there is such a mountain in the world; similarly although I conceive of God as possessing existence, it would seem that it does not follow that there is a God which exists; for my thought does not impose any necessity upon things, and just as I may imagine a winged horse, although no horse with wings exists, so I could perhaps attribute existence to God, although no God existed.
But a sophism is concealed in this objection; for from the fact that I cannot conceive a moun- tain without a valley, it does not follow that there is any mountain or any valley in existence, but only that the mountain and the valley, whether they exist or do not exist, cannot in any way be separated one from the other. While from the fact that I cannot conceive God without exis- tence, it follows that existence is inseparable from Him, and hence that He really exists; not that my thought can bring this to pass, or impose any ne- cessity on things, but, on the contrary, because the necessity which lies in the thing itself, i.e., the necessity of the existence of God determines me to think in this way. For it is not within my power to think of God without existence (that is of a supremely perfect Being devoid of a supreme perfection) though it is in my power to imagine a horse either with wings or without wings.
And we must not here object that it is in truth necessary for me to assert that God exists after having presupposed that He possesses every sort
“From the fact that I cannot conceive God without existence, it follows that existence is inseparable from Him, and hence that He really exists.” — R E N É D E S C A R T E S
(© iStockphoto.com/wynnter)
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of perfection, since existence is one of these, but that as a matter of fact my original supposition was not necessary, just as it is not necessary to consider that all quadrilat- eral figures can be inscribed in the circle; for supposing I thought of this, I should be constrained to admit that the rhombus might be inscribed in the circle since it is a quadrilateral figure, which, however, is manifestly false. Although it is not necessary that I should at any time entertain the notion of God, nevertheless whenever it hap- pens that I think of a first and a sovereign Being, and, so to speak, derive the idea of Him from the storehouse of my mind, it is necessary that I should attribute to Him every sort of perfection, although I do not get so far as to enumerate them all, or to apply my mind to each one in particular. And this necessity suffices to make me conclude (after having recognised that existence is a perfection) that this first and sovereign Being really exists; just as though it is not necessary for me ever to imagine any triangle, yet, whenever I wish to consider a rectilinear figure composed only of three angles, it is absolutely essential that I should attribute to it all those properties which serve to bring about the conclusion that its three angles are not greater than two right angles, even although I may not then be considering this point in particu- lar. But when I consider which figures are capable of being inscribed in the circle, it is in no way necessary that I should think that all quadrilateral figures are of this number; on the contrary, I cannot even pretend that this is the case, so long as I do not desire to accept anything which I cannot conceive clearly and distinctly. And in consequence there is a great difference between the false suppositions such as this, and the true ideas born within me, the first and principal of which is that of God. For really I discern in many ways that this idea is not something factitious, and depending solely on my thought, but that it is the image of a true and immutable nature; first of all, because I cannot conceive anything but God himself to whose essence existence [necessarily] pertains; in the second place because it is not possible for me to conceive two or more Gods in this same position; and, granted that there is one such God who now exists, I see clearly that it is necessary that He should have existed from all eter- nity and that He must exist eternally; and finally, because I know an infinitude of other properties in God, none of which I can either diminish or change.
Descartes’s version of the ontological argument is
I cannot conceive of a God without the property of existence. (“His existence cannot be separated from His essence.”) Therefore, God exists.
Then he adds,
My conception of God is such that He has every sort of perfection. Existence is a perfection. Therefore, God necessarily exists.
These arguments are valid as stated, but are they also sound? Consider the following argument, which has been proposed in the same form as the foregoing arguments. Define a “grenlin” as “the greenest imaginable creature.” Now, which is greener, a green creature that does exist or one that does not? Obviously the one that exists. Therefore, at least one grenlin exists.
It is worth noting that this objection had been raised against Anselm, too, by Gaunilo of Marmoutier, who suggested the existence of an island more perfect than any other, on the
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same grounds that it would be contradictory for the most perfect island not to exist. Anselm replied that the argument cannot be applied to islands (or gren- lins) or anything else whose nonexistence is con- ceivable. The question, then, is what it means for nonexistence to be conceivable or for existence to be a necessary property of a thing.
Descartes faced a similar challenge to his formu- lation when a critic attacked his analogy with trian- gles and insisted that, while it may be true that if a triangle exists, then it must have three angles, it does not follow that triangles must exist or that any in fact do exist. Descartes’s answer is similar to Anselm’s response to his critic: The essence of triangle does not include the perfection of exis- tence, as God’s surely does.
The ontological argument makes a special case for God because He is the only “greatest conceiv- able” or “most perfect” being. Nevertheless, the argument has made many believers uneasy and has been dismissed as a clever trick by nonbelievers. But whatever our unease, the argument is clearly valid.
The argument is a straightforward syllogism of the “All men are mortal/Socrates is a man/Socrates is mortal” type, the only real (but significant) differ- ence being that although there can be any number of men, there can be only one God, one “most per- fect” being. But what we have so far taken for granted in the foregoing presentations of the argu- ment is the presupposition that existence is a prop-
erty like a color or shape. One way of attacking the logic of the argument, even while accepting its validity, is to challenge this presupposition and thus the soundness of the ar- gument. Is “exists” really a predicate like “barks” and “is green”? Or is it rather a quantifier like “all” and “none” and “some” (and usable in formulations such as “there exists at least one . . .”)? The objection that “existence is not a predicate” was formulated against the on- tological argument by Immanuel Kant.
The great philosopher Kant suggested that the problem lies in the central idea, shared by the ontological argument and the unacceptable arguments that follow the same form, that existence is one of the essential properties, that is, part of the definition of a thing. But exis- tence, Kant argues, is not a property and cannot be part of a definition. In an often-quoted passage of his Critique of Pure Reason, he presents this argument:
Against the Ontological Argument B Y Immanuel Kant6
I answer:—Even in introducing into the concept of a thing, which you wish to think in its possibility only, the concept of its existence, under whatever disguise it
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)
A German philosopher, prob- ably the greatest Western phi- losopher since Plato and Aristotle, who lived his entire life in a small town in East Prussia (Königsburg). He was a professor at the university there for more than thirty years; he never married, and his neighbors said that his habits were so regular that they could set their clocks by him. (A later German poet said, “It is hard to write about Kant’s life, for he had no life.”) Yet, from a safe distance, he was one of the most persis- tent defenders of the French
Revolution and, in philosophy, created no less a revolution himself. His philosophical system, embodied in three huge volumes called Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Critique of Judgment (1790), changed the thinking of philoso- phers as much as the revolution changed France. His central thesis was the defense of what he called “synthetic a priori” judgments (and their moral and religious equivalents) by showing their neces- sity for all human experience. (Synthetic a priori judgments can be verified independently of experience.) In this way, he escaped from Hume’s skepticism and avoided the dead-end intuitionism of his rational predecessors.
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who made important contributions to virtually every area in philosophy, is commemorated by this German stamp. (© iStockphoto .com/ HuseyinHIDIR)
6 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, rev. 2nd ed., trans. Max Müller, london: Macmillan, 1927.
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may be, you have been guilty of a contradiction. If you were allowed to do this, you would apparently have carried your point; but in reality you have achieved nothing, but have only committed a tautology. I simply ask you, whether the proposition, that this or that thing (which, whatever it may be, I grant you as possi- ble) exists, is an analytical or a synthetical proposition? If the former, then by its existence you add nothing to your thought of the thing; but in that case, either the thought within you would be the thing itself, or you have presupposed existence, as belonging to possibility, and have according to your own showing deducted existence from internal possibility, which is nothing but a miserable tautology. The mere word reality, which in the concept of a thing sounds different from existence in the concept of the predicate, can make no difference. For if you call all accepting or positing (without determining what it is) reality, you have placed a thing, with all its predicates, within the concept of the subject, and accepted it as real, and you do nothing but repeat it in the predicate. If, on the contrary, you admit, as every sensible man must do, that every proposition involving existence is synthetical, how can you say that the predicate of existence does not admit of removal without contradiction, a distinguishing property which is peculiar to analytical proposi- tions only, the very character of which depends on it?
I might have hoped to put an end to this subtle argumentation, without many words, and simply by an accurate definition of the concept of existence, if I had not seen that the illusion, in mistaking a logical predicate for a real one (that is the predicate which determines a thing), resists all correction. Everything can become a logical predicate, even the subject itself may be predicated of itself, because logic makes no account of any contents of concepts. Determination, however, is a predi- cate, added to the concept of the subject, and enlarging it, and it must not therefore be contained in it.
Being is evidently not a real predicate, or a concept of something that can be added to the concept of a thing. It is merely the admission of a thing, and of certain determinations in it. Logically, it is merely the copula of a judgment. The proposi- tion, God is almighty, contains two concepts, each having its object, namely, God and almightiness. The small word is, is not an additional predicate, but only serves to put the predicate in relation to the subject. If, then, I take the subject (God) with all its predicates (including that of almightiness), and say, God is, or there is a God, I do not put a new predicate to the concept of God, but I only put the subject by itself, with all its predicates, in relation to my concept, as its object. Both must contain exactly the same kind of thing, and nothing can have been added to the concept, which expresses possibility only, by my thinking its object as simply given and saying it is. And thus the real does not contain more than the possible. A hun- dred real dollars do not contain a penny more than a hundred possible dollars. For as the latter signify the concept, the former the object and its position by itself, it is clear that, in case the former contained more than the latter, my concept would not express the whole object, and would not therefore be its adequate concept. In my financial position no doubt there exists more by one hundred real dollars, than by their concept only (that is their possibility), because in reality the object is not only contained analytically in my concept, but is added to my concept (which is a deter- mination of my state), synthetically; but the conceived hundred dollars are not in the least increased through the existence which is outside my concept.
“Being is evidently not a real predicate, or a concept of something that can be added to the concept of a thing.” — I M M A N U E L K A N T
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What Kant is arguing is that the existence of a thing can never be merely a matter of logic. (This is what he means when he says that the proposition that a thing exists cannot be ana- lytic.) “Existence” or “being,” he argues, isn’t a “real predicate” (although it is a grammatical predicate) because it does not tell us anything more about whatever is said to have exis- tence or being. In other words, there is something odd about the statement, “this apple is red, round, ripe, and exists.” What is odd is that “exists” does not give a characteristic of the apple but rather says that there is an apple with these characteristics. The proper character- ization of God, therefore, includes the various characteristics we discussed earlier in this chapter, but it should not include, according to Kant, any characteristic that implies God’s existence. It is one thing to say that God, if He exists, has such-and-such characteristics; it is something more to say that such a God exists. (This is what Kant means by his example about the one hundred real versus one hundred possible dollars; they both have exactly the same number of cents, but only the one hundred real dollars are worth anything.)
Whether or not the argument succeeds in anything like its classical form, it can be under- stood in another way, which clearly distinguishes it from all the absurd arguments that ap- parently have the same form. If you believe in God, then the argument may be taken in a different way, not as a “proof” but as an attempt to articulate your belief. The theologian Karl Barth argued that this is what Anselm’s argument really tries to do, and as you read over his argument a second or third time, it becomes clear that he is expressing his faith as much as he is offering a logical proof. In general, the “proofs” of God’s existence have been such articulations and expressions as well as proper logical arguments. Even if they fail as proofs, they often succeed in this other, and perhaps more important, function. Descartes’s and Anselm’s argument is, ultimately, that we cannot think about God and at the same time doubt His existence.
It is clear that considered simply as a logical argument, the ontological argument does not have the power to convert nonbelievers into believers. Or if you are a believer, it is clear that an objection to the “proof” is not going to shake your faith in any way whatsoever. So the significance of the proof is ambiguous: as a logical exercise, it is brilliant; as an expres- sion of faith, it may be edifying; but as an actual proof that God exists or as a means of con- verting atheists, it seems to have no power at all.
• Do any of our ideas about God (for example, the idea that nothing is greater than God) accurately reflect God’s nature? Are we in a position to know whether they do?
• What does it mean to say that a “proof” for God’s existence is not really a proof at all, but an articulation of belief?
D. God as Creator: Intelligence and Design The ontological argument is a fascinating exercise in logic and rationality, but critics often object that it does not seem to say anything about the all-important role of God as creator. Other arguments, however, take creation as their central focus, either by arguing the neces- sity of a creator or by paying attention to the detailed design of the world that was created. The “cosmological argument” is actually a series of arguments, all of which involve some- thing like Aristotle’s premise that there must be a first cause (“a prime mover”), some ultimate explanation for the existence and nature of the universe. If there were no such first cause or ultimate explanation, that would suggest an infinite regress (arguing backward forever), which Aristotle and most Western logicians until modern times considered unacceptable. In
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the next selection, St. Thomas Aquinas presents several of the best-known formulations of the cosmological argument in the first four of what he calls the “five ways” of proving God’s existence. He gives us the fifth way at the close of the section.
Five Arguments for the Existence of God B Y St. Thomas Aquinas7
The first and more manifest way is the argument from motion. It is certain, and evi- dent to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion. Now whatever is moved is moved by another, for nothing can be moved except it is in potentiality to that towards which it is moved whereas a thing moves inasmuch as it is in act. For motion is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality. But nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality. Thus that which is actually hot, as fire, makes wood, which is poten- tially hot, to be actually hot, and thereby moves and changes it. Now it is not possible that the same thing should be at once in actuality and potentiality in the same respect, but only in different respects. For what is actually hot cannot simultaneously be po- tentially hot; but it is simultaneously potentially cold. It is therefore impossible that in the same respect and in the same way a thing should be both mover and moved, i.e., that it should move itself. Therefore, whatever is moved must be moved by another. If that by which it is moved be itself moved, then this also must needs be moved by an- other, and that by another again. But this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and consequently, no other mover, seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are moved by the first mover, as the staff moves only because it is moved by the hand. There- fore, it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, moved by no other; and this everyone under- stands to be God.
The second way is from the nature of ef- ficient cause.8 In the world of sensible things we find there is an order of efficient causes. There is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself; for so it would be prior to itself, which is impossible. Now in efficient causes it is not possible to go on to infinity, because in all efficient causes fol- lowing in order, the first is the cause of the intermediate cause, and the intermediate is the cause of the ultimate cause, whether the intermediate cause be several, or one only. Now to take away the cause is to take away the effect. Therefore, if there be no first cause among efficient causes, there will be no ultimate, nor any intermediate cause.
“We cannot but admit the existence of some being having of itself its own necessity, and not receiving it from another, but rather causing in others their necessity.” — S T. T H O M A S AQ U I N A S
St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)
The architect of the most comprehensive theological structure of the Roman Cath- olic Church, the Summa Theologica, which has long been recognized as the “offi- cial” statement of orthodox Christian beliefs by many theologians. Aquinas drew many of his arguments from Aristotle, as can be seen in his “five ways” of demonstrating the existence of God.
The “five ways” of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) are the classical state- ment of the cosmological and te- leological arguments for the existence of God. (© RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY)
7 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, New York: Benziger, Bruce & Glencoe, 1948. 8 An efficient cause is an event (or an agent) that brings something about. The term comes from Aristotle. See “cause” in the glossary.
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But if in efficient causes it is possible to go on to infinity, there will be no first ef- ficient cause, neither will there be an ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient causes; all of which is plainly false. Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God.
The third way is taken from possibility and necessity, and runs thus. We find in nature things that are possible to be and not to be, since they are found to be gener- ated, and to be corrupted, and consequently, it is possible for them to be and not to be. But it is impossible for these always to exist, for that which can not-be at some time is not. Therefore, if everything can not-be, then at one time there was noth- ing in existence. Now if this were true, even now there would be nothing in exis- tence, because that which does not exist begins to exist only through something already existing. Therefore, if at one time nothing was in existence, it would have been impossible for anything to have begun to exist; and thus even now nothing would be in existence—which is absurd. Therefore, not all beings are merely pos- sible, but there must exist something the existence of which is necessary. But every necessary thing either has its necessity caused by another, or not. Now it is impos- sible to go on to infinity in necessary things which have their necessity caused by another, as has been already proved in regard to efficient causes. Therefore we cannot but admit the existence of some being having of itself its own necessity, and not receiving it from another, but rather causing in others their necessity. This all men speak of as God.
In his fourth way, Aquinas combines the form of cosmological argument with some of the ideas from the ontological argument:
The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble, and the like. But more and less are predicated of different things according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest; so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest, and, consequently, something which is most being, for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being, as it is written in [Aristotle’s] Metaphysics. . . . Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus, as fire, which is the maximum of heat, is the cause of all hot things, as is said in the same book. Therefore, there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfec- tion; and this we call God.
The cosmological argument, in all these versions, is also both an attempt at “proof” and an expression of one’s belief in God. Accordingly, it must be appreciated for its role in articu- lating the concept of God in traditional Christianity as well as being evaluated as a logical argument. As a logical argument, two modern objections seem to have considerable weight. First, even if the argument is formally valid, it proves only that there is some “first mover” or “first cause” or “necessary being.” It does not prove that this being has all the other attri- butes that allow us to recognize God. (Aquinas’ fourth “way,” however, includes moral attri- butes of perfection as well.) Taken at face value, the first three versions of the cosmological argument are similar to Aristotle’s argument for the “prime mover” (see Chapter 1) except
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that Aquinas takes the “first cause” to be an “efficient” as well as “final” cause, that is, as the creator as well as the meaning of the universe.
Furthermore, Aristotle (in his Physics) allows that there may be several unmoved movers, while Aquinas is clear that there can be only one. Nevertheless, one may accept the argu- ment and believe only in a “first cause” and deny the existence of God. Or if it is accepted that there must be a first cause, why could the universe itself not be its own cause? In current physics, scientists would argue that this idea is just as plausible as the idea that there must have been something else that caused our universe to exist. This argument leads us to the second objection, which would have been unthinkable to Aquinas (or Aristotle) but is gener- ally accepted today. The idea of an infinite regress, that the universe did not have a begin- ning but has always existed, seemed like an obvious absurdity to most Western thinkers until the nineteenth century. But now, even though scientists and mathematicians talk about the beginning of the universe and the relativity of time, they no longer consider an infinite re- gress as necessarily impossible. Without the idea that every infinite regress is an absurdity, the cosmological argument loses its main premise.
In fact, Aquinas admits that there is no valid argument against the claim that God and the universe existed for all eternity, but he has another argument to help him here. He says that the beginning of the universe required an act, which means that the universe could not have been the cause of itself. Furthermore, even if the universe existed eternally, it would still re- quire a prime mover to keep it in motion. Therefore, he concludes, God must exist even if the infinite regress argument by itself does not prove God’s existence.
The most familiar “proof” of God’s existence has been much in the news in the past sev- eral years. It is more of an empirical proof, an inference to the best explanation, not of the sheer existence of the world, but of its magnificent details, especially the miracle of life. It is
The cosmological and teleological arguments for God’s existence both emphasize God’s role as creator, a role that Michelangelo artistically presented in his fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)
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often called the argument from design, although lately it has taken on the more explicit title of “intel- ligent design.” Some proselytizers have even pre- sented it as a theory in science, that is, “creation science,” as opposed to the generally accepted sci- entific accounts of Darwinian evolution (the succes- sion of one species after another based on the principles of natural selection). It is quite controver- sial whether the argument from design can properly be understood as a scientific argument and whether there is any solid evidence that could count for or against it. But whether or not it is scientific, the strat- egy of the argument is clear enough: how could the world be as complex and intricate as it is (a question shared by Darwinians as well as by defenders of in- telligent design)? At this point, the Darwinians argue for random mutation and natural selection. The in- telligent design theorists insist that such mecha- nisms could not possibly explain the complexity of
the world. But we need not enter into the convoluted arguments against Darwin to appreci- ate the appeal of the argument, which evokes as much our emotional sense of wonder as our rationality and scientific curiosity.
Immanuel Kant called the argument from design the “teleological argument” because it attributes purpose to the creation of the world. We have already seen a version of the teleo- logical argument in John Wisdom’s discussion of the religious attitude. The argument was accessibly and charmingly presented by a Christian minister, William Paley, in the eighteenth century:
F RO M “The Watch and the Watchmaker” B Y William Paley9
S TAT E O F T H E A RG U M E N T In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer, that for any thing I knew to the contrary it had lain there for ever; nor would it, perhaps, be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for any thing I knew the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone; why is it not as admissible in the second case as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, namely, that when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive—what we could not discover in the stone—that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, or placed after any other manner or in any other order than that in which
The cosmological argument presupposes that an initial force must have caused the movement or energy that is present within the universe. (© iStockphoto.com/© RapidEye)
9 Paley, William, “The Teleological Argument” from Natural Theology and the Horae Pauline, New York: American Tract Society, 1852.
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they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it. To reckon up a few of the plainest of these parts and of their offices, all tending to one result: We see a cylindrical box containing a coiled elastic spring, which, by its endeavor to relax itself, turns round the box. We next observe a flexible chain—artificially wrought for the sake of flexure—communicating the action of the spring from the box to the fusee. We then find a series of wheels, the teeth of which catch in and apply to each other, conducting the motion from the fusee to the balance and from the balance to the pointer, and at the same time, by the size and shape of those wheels, so regulating that motion as to terminate in causing an index, by an equable and measured progression, to pass over a given space in a given time. We take notice that the wheels are made of brass, in order to keep them from rust; the springs of steel, no other metal being so elastic; that over the face of the watch there is placed a glass, a material employed in no other part of the work, but in the room of which, if there had been any other than a transparent substance, the hour could not be seen without opening the case. This mechanism being observed— it requires indeed an examination of the instrument, and perhaps some previous knowledge of the subject, to perceive and understand it; but being once, as we have said, observed and understood, the inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker—that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer, who comprehended its construction and designed its use.
I. Nor would it, I apprehend, weaken the conclusion, that we had never seen a watch made—that we had never known an artist capable of making one—that we were altogether incapable of executing such a piece of workmanship ourselves, or of understanding in what manner it was performed; all this being no more than what is true of some exquisite remains of ancient art, of some lost arts, and, to the general- ity of mankind, of the more curious pro- ductions of modern manufacture. Does one man in a million know how oval frames are turned? Ignorance of this kind exalts our opinion of the unseen and unknown, but raises no doubt in our minds of the exis- tence and agency of such an artist, at some former time and in some place or other. Nor can I perceive that it varies at all the inference, whether the question arise con- cerning a human agent or concerning an agent of a different species, or an agent pos- sessing in some respects a different nature.
II. Neither, secondly, would it invalidate our conclusion, that the watch sometimes went wrong, or that it seldom went exactly right. The purpose of the machinery, the design, and the designer might be evident,
William Paley (1743–1805)
A British Christian apologist, philosopher, and utilitarian. He is best known for his exposition of the teleological argument for the existence of God in his work Natural Theology.
William Paley compares the intricacy of the design of a watch we may find on a beach to the intricacy of the design we observe in nature. (© Shutterstock.com/viki2win)
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and in the case supposed, would be evident in whatever way we accounted for the irregularity of the movement, or whether we could account for it or not. It is not necessary that a machine be perfect, in order to show with what design it was made: still less necessary, where the only question is whether it were made with any design at all.
III. Nor, thirdly, would it bring any uncertainty into the argument, if there were a few parts of the watch, concerning which we could not discover or had not yet discovered in what manner they conduced to the general effect; or even some parts, concerning which we could not ascertain whether they conduced to that effect in any manner whatever. For, as to the first branch of the case if by the loss, or disor- der, or decay of the parts in question, the movement of the watch were found in fact to be stopped, or disturbed, or retarded, no doubt would remain in our minds as to the utility or intention of these parts, although we should be unable to inves- tigate the manner according to which, or the connection by which, the ultimate effect depended upon their action or assistance; and the more complex the ma- chine, the more likely is this obscurity to arise. Then, as to the second thing sup- posed, namely, that there were parts which might be spared without prejudice to the movement of the watch, and that we had proved this by experiment, these su- perfluous parts, even if we were completely assured that they were such, would not vacate the reasoning which we had instituted concerning other parts. The indica- tion of contrivance remained, with respect to them, nearly as it was before.
IV. Nor, fourthly, would any man in his senses think the existence of the watch with its various machinery accounted for, by being told that it was one out of pos- sible combinations of material forms; that whatever he had found in the place where he found the watch, must have contained some internal configuration or other; and that this configuration might be the structure now exhibited, namely, of the works of a watch, as well as a different structure.
V. Nor, fifthly, would it yield his inquiry more satisfaction, to be answered that there existed in things a principle of order, which had disposed the parts of the watch into their present form and situation. He never knew a watch made by the principle of order; nor can he even form to himself an idea of what is meant by a principle of order, distinct from the intelligence of the watchmaker.
VI. Sixthly, he would be surprised to hear that the mechanism of the watch was no proof of contrivance, only a motive to induce the mind to think so.
VII. And not less surprised to be informed, that the watch in his hand was nothing more than the result of the laws of metallic nature. It is a perversion of language to assign any law as the efficient, operative cause of any thing. A law presupposes an agent; for it is only the mode according to which an agent proceeds: it implies a power; for it is the order according to which that power acts. Without this agent, without this power, which are both distinct from itself, the law does nothing, is nothing. The expression, “the law of metallic nature,” may sound strange and harsh to a philosophic ear; but it seems quite as justifiable as some others which are more familiar to him such as “the law of vegetable nature,” “the law of animal nature,” or, indeed, as “the law of nature” in general, when assigned as the cause of phenomena, in exclusion of agency and power, or when it is substituted into the place of these.
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VIII. Neither, lastly, would our observer be driven out of his conclusion or from his confidence in its truth, by being told that he know nothing at all about the matter. He knows enough for his argument; he knows the utility of the end; he knows the subserviency and adaptation of the means to the end. These points being known, his ignorance of other points, affect not the certainty of his reasoning. The conscious- ness of knowing little need not beget a distrust of that which he does know. . . .
A P P L I C AT I O N O F T H E A RG U M E N T
Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature, with the difference on the side of nature of being greater and more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation. I mean, that the contrivances of nature surpass the contrivances of art, in the com- plexity, subtilty, and curiosity of the mechanism; and still more, if possible, do they go beyond them in number and variety; yet, in a multitude of cases, are not less evidently mechanical, not less evidently contrivances, not less evidently accom- modated to their end or suited to their office, than are the most perfect productions of human ingenuity. . . .
St. Thomas Aquinas’ fifth way is a classical statement of the argument from design (also called “the teleological argument”):
On the “Fifth Way” B Y St. Thomas Aquinas10
The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack knowledge, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that they achieve their end, not fortuitously, but designedly. Now whatever lacks knowledge cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is directed by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.
The argument is powerful psychologically, but it has its problems. like the earlier two ar- guments, it may prove much less about God than the theist needs to have proved. The God who has rationally designed the universe need not have the slightest concern for humankind, for example. He may well consider us just one of those little curiosities of evolution that, for a few thousand years, interfered with His other interests. But there are other problems pecu- liar to this argument. It is easily mocked, and Voltaire, who was around when the argument was most popular, parodied its logic in Candide (by suggesting that, among other things, it was marvelous that God gave us noses so that we can wear eyeglasses). A leibnizian philoso- pher, Dr. Pangloss, dismisses all the horrible tragedies that befall young Candide and his wife Cunegund on the grounds that this is, he keeps repeating, “the best of all possible worlds.”
10 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, New York: Benziger, Bruce & Glencoe, 1948.
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(A contemporary version of Candide, an opera by leonard Bernstein, uses the following re- frain: “Once one dismisses the rest of all possible worlds, one finds that this is the best of all possible worlds.”)
Perhaps the “design” in nature appears as such only to one who is already predisposed to believe in a designer. This is most powerfully presented by David Hume in his blasphe- mous (and therefore posthumous) Dialogues on Natural Religion:
F RO M Dialogues on Natural Religion B Y David Hume11
In a word, Cleanthes, a man who follows your hypothesis is able, perhaps, to assert or conjecture that the universe sometime arose from something like design; but beyond that position he cannot ascertain one single circumstance and is left after- wards to fix every point of his theology by the utmost license of fancy and hypoth- esis. This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect compared to a superior standard and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity who after- wards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance; it is the work only of some
dependent, inferior deity and is the object of derision to his superiors; it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannu- ated deity and, ever since his death, has run on at adventures from the first impulse and active force which it received from him.
Hume’s argument is, quite simply, that this is not a perfect world, which means that the God who supposedly designed it cannot be perfect, either. One can even wonder whether a universe that was so badly designed was designed at all. But Cleanthes replies that he rejects both the sup- positions and the tone of these sarcastic remarks and even insists that the argument that the uni- verse is badly designed presupposes a designer. There are more powerful replies, however: that the world is in fact designed as well as it could possibly be, or else that it is a design that has not yet been fully realized and has not yet come to see full perfection.
Hume goes on to argue that if the world is de- signed, its character suggests that God is either less powerful or less good than the traditional conception allows.
On the concurrence, then, of these four cir- cumstances does all or the greatest part of natural evil depend. Were all living crea- tures incapable of pain, or were the world administered by particular volitions, evil
“This world, for aught he knows, . . . was only the first rude essay of some infant deity who afterwards abandoned it.” — DAV I D H U M E
David Hume (1711–1776)
Often admired as the out- standing genius of British phi- losophy. Born in Scotland (Edinburgh), where he spent much of his life, Hume often traveled to London and Paris. After a vacation in France, he wrote the Treatise of Human Nature (1739). He achieved no- toriety as well as literary fame in his lifetime, was involved in scandals, and was often at odds with church authorities. Hume was refused professor- ships at the leading universities for his “heresies.” Yet he was, by all accounts, a delightful man who never lost his sense of humor. He was “the life of the party” in London, Edinburgh,
and Paris, and he has long set the standard of the ideal thinker for British philosophers. Hume’s Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) created as much of a stir in the intellectual world as his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). Like the latter book, the book on morality was a rewriting of his youthful Treatise, which never received the attention it deserved. Hume’s thesis in moral philosophy was as skeptical and shocking as his thesis in epis- temology: There is no knowledge of right and wrong and no ratio- nal defense of moral principles. Morality is based upon sentiment or feeling and, as such, cannot be defended by argument.
David Hume, shown in this engrav- ing of 1854, held views so contrary to religious orthodoxy that he al- lowed his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion to be published only posthumously. (© iStockphoto.com/duncan1890)
11 David Hume, Dialogues on Natural Religion, ed. Norman Kemp Smith, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935.
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never could have found access into the universe; and were animals endowed with a large stock of powers and faculties, beyond what strict necessity requires, or were the several springs and principles of the universe so accurately framed as to preserve always the just temperament and medium, there must have been very little ill in comparison of what we feel at present. What then shall we pronounce on this oc- casion? Shall we say that these circumstances are not necessary, and that they might easily have been altered in the contrivance of the universe? This decision seems too presumptuous for creatures so blind and ignorant. Let us be more modest in our conclusions. Let us allow that, if the goodness of the Deity (I mean a goodness like the human) could be established on any tolerable reasons a priori, these phenomena, however untoward, would not be sufficient to subvert that principle, but might easily, in some unknown manner, be reconcilable to it. But let us still assert that, as this goodness is not antecedently established but must be inferred from the phe- nomena, there can be no grounds for such an inference while there are so many ills in the universe, and while these ills might so easily have been remedied, as far as human understanding can be allowed to judge on such a subject.
The credibility of the argument from design has suffered enormously (but perhaps need- lessly) from the shock of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Accordingly, numerous Christian lead- ers have combatted the latter with all the resources at their command. But the battle has been largely unnecessary and, if anything, has falsely overemphasized the conflict between science and religion, weakening the credibility of the church. For evolution need not deny the argument from design. It only changes the argument from the traditional idea that God
Hume thought that the imperfections of our world are evidence against the idea of a perfect, benevolent designer. (© iStockphoto.com/Ian McDonnell)
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created the universe all at once (although even in Genesis, He spread it out over several days) to the idea that He cre- ated it over a long period, using natural selection as one of His tools.
But the logic of evolution does undermine the appeal of the argument from design in a more subtle way. The power of the argument is, boiled down to essentials, “Isn’t it mar- velous that things are as they are!” But our “marvel” de- pends on our putting some premium on “the way things are.” We place a high premium on “the way things are” be- cause, according to the laws of probability (or chance), the odds against this way are enormous. Now consider the fol- lowing analogy: You are playing cards, stud poker, and the dealer gives you excellent hands twice in a row. You would be suspicious. The odds are against it. And, particularly if you lose both times, you will be certain that some “design” (namely, the dealer’s) is behind it. But now, why would you not have the same suspicions, given any two consecutive hands, for the odds are exactly the same against any com- bination of cards? (The odds against receiving any hand of the same five cards twice consecutively are 2.6 million to 1.) The answer, of course, has nothing to do with the “likeli- hood” of getting one set of hands rather than another, but with the significance you place on the one combination rather than the other. So, too, with the argument from design.
Cory Juhl discusses the “fine-tuning” argument and how it relates to proofs of God’s existence:
On the “Fine-Tuning” Argument B Y Cory Juhl12
It seems that the fundamental constants of physics, such as the gravitational con- stant and dozens of others, seem “finely tuned” to allow for life as we know it. According to the fine-tuning argument, the surprising way in which the various constants “fit together” strongly suggests that an intelligent being was involved in the production of our universe. The reasoning is straightforward. Of all the com- binations of values that the constants might have taken, their values are distributed in just the right way to yield a universe that can produce life as we know it. If there is a God who wants life as we know it to arise, this is not surprising. If there is no God, the probability that such a combination would come into being spontane- ously, or accidentally, is infinitesimally small. Since these hypotheses exhaust the class of possible explanations, we should infer that God (or at least some extremely powerful intelligent being) “fine-tuned” the universe and its laws.
A number of responses have been given to this argument. One common re- sponse made by a number of physicists is that, granting the prior improbability of any single universe being “fine-tuned,” it may be that there are an enormous number of universes, whose fundamental constant values vary randomly across the
The detractors of Charles Darwin have often taken offense at his theory, which does not treat human beings as fundamen- tally different in nature from other animals. This stamp from Rwanda pokes fun at Darwin by depicting him as an ape. (© Shutterstock.com/Neftali)
12 Printed by permission of the author.
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collection. Given enough such universes, it is not surprising that some universe should be fine-tuned. Furthermore, intelligent observers will be around asking such questions only in fine-tuned universes, so it should not be surprising that we (intelligent observers) find ourselves in a universe of this sort. Fine-tuning advo- cates have responded that such a “many-universes” response seems ad hoc, since, they claim, there is no independent motivation (aside from theism-avoidance) for positing such worlds. Whether the “many-universes” hypothesis can be indepen- dently supported is an interesting open question.
Another response to the fine-tuning argument raises concerns about our assign- ments of prior probabilities to the various “universe production” scenarios. Unlike types of events that are produced regularly within our universe, we are only able to observe one universe. For example, it seems possible, for all we know, that there is a “law of universe production” that guarantees that only fine-tuned universes are ever produced. In the absence of further relevant data, which data seems impossible in principle to gather (that is, data about other universes), we simply have no justi- fication for thinking that universes like ours are probable or improbable.
A common reaction to the proposal of a “law of universe production” that nec- essarily yields fine-tuned universes like ours is that “this just pushes the question back,” as to why such an improbable law obtains. However, a tu quoque is possible here: why should a God of just the sort theists propose exist? The arguments are reminiscent of those pertaining to the cosmological argument discussed earlier. As to our ability to know prior probabilities, advocates of fine-tuning will insist that on any reasonable assignment of prior probabilities to various possible universes, fine-tuned universes will turn out to have an extremely low probability. Just as we make our best guesses on the basis of what we know in other more familiar cases, we should make our best guess in this case, which is without a doubt the conjecture that there is an Intelligent Designer.
Whether this is our best guess, though, remains questionable. In order to see why, we can consider any hypothesis as to the probability that God would produce a uni- verse of any given type. Given any hypothesis of this sort, there is an atheistic hy- pothesis (involving, say, a law of universe production) that yields universes of any given type with exactly the same probability. In a nutshell, given any theistic hypoth- esis about the probabilities of various types of universes, there is an “equivalent” atheistic hypothesis that assigns exactly the same probabilities to the creation of ex- actly the same types of universes. So the question becomes, is it obvious that in gen- eral we should prefer theistic hypotheses of that sort over atheistic hypotheses of the same sort? Opinions will differ, but it is far from clear that of any such pair of analo- gous pairs of hypotheses, the theistic hypotheses are intrinsically more plausible.
Evolution has given the world many different “ways that things are” and will give it many more. The reason for our marveling at this particular “way that things are” is that we suppose that the odds against it are uniquely high. But they are not. They are equally high against every other possible “way that things are,” so this “way” seems to deserve no special expla- nation. This does not deny “design,” of course; it only emphasizes the importance of a cer- tain way of seeing the world, a way shared by science and nature lovers as well as theists. Wittgenstein summed up this view toward the argument from design in a phrase: “What is remarkable is not how things are, but that they are at all.” (This statement turns us back to the cosmological argument.)
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13 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason, trans. lewis White Beck. Copyright © 1993, pp. 130 –132. Reprinted by permission of Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ.
• Is an infinite regress absurd? Do you find the idea of an uncaused cause any less absurd?
• Do you think that one can consistently believe both in God and in evolution?
• Do you think that any of the arguments for God’s existence establish the existence of the traditional God with all His qualities? Do you think that any argument could?
E. Religion, Morality, and Evil The three traditional forms of “proof” do not seem to be adequate as literal proofs. To accept any of them, it looks as if one has to begin by believing in God. Moreover, what each of them proves is not the existence of God, but at most the existence of something—something that is defined by its existence, something that is a first cause, or something that is an intelligent “designer.” But a very different view of God is defended, for example, by Immanuel Kant. According to this view, the most important attribute of the traditional Western God—the reason why men and women have worshiped Him, prayed to Him, feared Him, fought wars, and died for Him—is their belief in God’s divine justice. Thus the most important attributes of God in Western religion are His moral qualities. Without them, our belief in God would be very different than it is.
According to this view, the importance of God in Western thought is His role as the source of our moral laws, as the judge of our actions and feelings, and as the sanction that stands behind those laws and judgments. The preceding “proofs” of God’s existence are not wholly convincing, even if they are valid, just because they leave out this all-important moral aspect of belief in God. Accordingly, the question of God’s existence has a distinctly moral dimen- sion. The conception of the human good, for believers, depends on a conception of God.
Immanuel Kant, after attempting to refute all three of the traditional arguments of God’s existence, offered one of his own. He no longer tried to “prove” God’s existence as such and even said that, strictly speaking, we could have no knowledge of God at all, since God, as transcendent, cannot be the object of any possible experience. So Kant, following a long tradition in Christianity, said that belief in God is a matter of faith. But this does not mean, as people so often take it to mean, that it is an irrational belief. Quite to the contrary, Kant in- sisted that it is the most rational belief of all. For without it, we would not have the anchor for our morality, nor would we have any reason to suppose that our good deeds would eventu- ally be rewarded or our evil deeds would be punished. It was obvious to Kant, as it has been to every person with his or her eyes open since ancient times, that justice is not always deliv- ered in this life. Innocent children are butchered in wars; evil men live grand lives well into old age. Nevertheless, according to Kant, it was rational to believe in God, rational to have faith, even if faith was not, strictly speaking, a matter of knowledge. It is, he says, a “Postulate of Practical Reason.”
On God and Morality B Y Immanuel Kant13
The moral law led, in the foregoing analysis, to a practical problem which is assigned solely by pure reason and without any concurrence of sensuous incentives. It is the
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problem of the completeness of the first and principal part of the highest good, viz., morality; since this problem can be solved only in eternity, it led to the postulate of immortality. The same law must also lead us to affirm the possibility of the second element of the highest good, i.e., happiness proportional to that morality; it must do so just as disinterestedly as heretofore, by a purely impartial reason. This it can do on the supposition of the existence of a cause adequate to this effect, i.e., it must postu- late the existence of God as necessarily belonging to the possibility of the highest good (the object of our will which is necessarily connected with moral legislation of pure reason). We proceed to exhibit this connection in a convincing manner.
Happiness is the condition of a rational being in the world. In whose whole ex- istence everything goes according to wish and will. It thus rests on the harmony of nature with his entire end and with the essential determining ground of his will. But the moral law commands as a law of freedom through motives wholly indepen- dent of nature and of its harmony with our faculty of desire (as incentives). Still, the acting rational being in the world is not at the same time the cause of the world and of nature itself. Hence there is not the slightest ground in the moral law for a neces- sary connection between the morality and proportionate happiness of a being which belongs to the world as one of its parts and as thus dependent on it. Not being na- ture’s cause, his will cannot by its own strength bring nature, as it touches on his happiness, into complete harmony with his practical principles. Nevertheless, in the practical task of pure reason, i.e., in the necessary endeavor after the highest good, such a connection is postulated as necessary: we should seek to further the highest good (which therefore must be at least possible). Therefore also the existence is pos- tulated of a cause of the whole of nature, itself distinct from nature, which contains the ground of the exact coincidence of happiness with morality. This supreme cause, however, must contain the ground of the agreement of nature not merely with a law of the will of rational beings but with the idea of this law so far as they make it the supreme ground of determination of the will. Thus it contains the ground of the agreement of nature not merely with actions moral in their form but also with their morality as the motives to such actions, i.e., with their moral intention. Therefore, the highest good is possible in the world only on the supposition of a supreme cause of nature which has a causality corresponding to the moral intention. Now a being which is capable of actions by the idea of laws is an intelligence (a rational being), and the causality of such a being according to this idea of laws is his will. Therefore, the supreme cause of nature, in so far as it must be presupposed for the highest good, is a being which is the cause (and consequently the author) of nature through understanding and will, i.e., God. As a consequence, the postulate of the possibility of a highest derived good (the best world) is at the same time the postulate of the reality of a highest original good, namely, the existence of God. Now it was our duty to promote the highest good; and it is not merely our privilege but a necessity connected with duty as a requisite to presuppose the possibility of this highest good. This presupposition is made only under the condition of the existence of God, and this condition inseparably connects this supposition with duty. Therefore, it is mor- ally necessary to assume the existence of God.
The key to Kant’s argument is the obvious fact that good deeds are not always rewarded in this life and evil deeds are often not punished. Why then, he asks, should a person be moral
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and do what is right? If we are to decide rationally to be moral, we must also believe that happiness and morality will be in harmony (what Kant calls “the highest good”), that good people will be rewarded with happiness and evil people will be punished. But if this does not happen in this life, then we must believe that it happens in another life (“this problem can be solved only in eternity”). Furthermore, we must believe in some ultimate source of justice, a divine judge who will weigh good against evil and make certain that eternal happiness and punishment are meted out fairly. This argument is at one and the same time a defense of the Christian belief in the immortality of the human soul and in God. It is necessary to believe in both, according to Kant, to sustain our willingness to be moral. “Therefore, it is morally nec- essary to assume the existence of God.”
A similar position was argued more recently by the pragmatist William James. James’s position is a “pragmatic” one; that is, believing in God is “rational” insofar as it does not conflict with our other beliefs (for example, our belief in science, a matter that Kant also stressed) and if it tends to make us lead better lives. James’s idea is not that it is logically rational to believe in God, but that it might well be psychologically useful—and that is a rational reason for belief, on his account.
F RO M “The Will to Believe” B Y William James14
Science says things are; morality says some things are better than other things; and religion says essentially two things.
First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word. “Perfection is eternal”—this phrase of Charles Secrétan seems a good way of put- ting this first affirmation of religion, an af- firmation which obviously cannot yet be verified scientifically at all.
The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now if we believe her first affirmation to be true.
Now, let us consider what the logical ele- ments of this situation are in case the religious hypothesis in both its branches be really true. (Of course, we must admit that possibility at the onset. If we are to discuss the question at all, it must involve a living option. If for any of you religion be a hypothesis that cannot, by any living possibility be true, then you need go no farther. I speak to the “saving rem- nant” alone.) So proceeding, we see, first, that religion offers itself as a momentous option. We are supposed to gain, even now, by our belief, and to lose by our nonbelief, a
William James (1842–1910)
Perhaps the greatest American philosopher (and psychologist) to this day. He developed the particularly American philoso- phy of pragmatism from the brilliant but obscure formula- tions of his colleague at Harvard, Charles Sanders Peirce, into a popular and still- powerful intellectual force. James was born in New York City and graduated from Harvard, with a medical degree, but he decided to teach (at Har- vard), rather than to practice medicine. His best-known work in philosophy, besides his work called Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), is The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).
James also established himself as one of the fathers of modern psy- chology with his Principles of Psychology (1890).
Philosopher and psychologist William James defended mystical states as legitimate sources of knowledge, a knowledge deeper than what we gain through rational- ity. (© Bettmann/Corbis)
14 William James, “The Will to Believe,” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, New York: longmans, Green, 1896.
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certain vital good. Secondly, religion is a forced option, so far as that good goes. We cannot escape the issue by remaining sceptical and waiting for more light, because, although we do avoid error in that way if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve. It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not per- fectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married someone else? Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error—that is your faith-vetoer’s exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is back- ing the religious hypothesis against the field. To preach scepticism to us as a duty until “sufficient evidence” for religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true. It is not intel- lect against all passions, then; it is only intellect with one passion laying down its law. And by what, forsooth, is the supreme wisdom of this passion warranted? Dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear? I, for one, can see no proof; and I simply refuse obedi- ence to the scientist’s command to imitate his kind of option, in a case where my own stake is important enough to give me the right to choose my own form of risk. If religion be true and the evidence for it be still insufficient, I do not wish, by put- ting your extinguisher upon my nature (which feels to me as if it had after all some business in this matter), to forfeit my sole chance in life of getting upon the winning
The shrine at Chimayó, New Mexico, testifies to many believers’ confidence in God’s intervention in their lives. (© Kathleen M. Higgins)
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side—that chance depending, of course, on my willingness to run the risk of acting as if my passional need of taking the world religiously might be prophetic and right.
All this is on the supposition that it really may be prophetic and right, and that, even to us who are discussing the matter, religion is a live hypothesis which may be true. Now, to most of us religion comes in a still further way that makes a veto on our active faith even more illogical. The more perfect and more eternal aspect of the universe is represented in our religions as having personal form. The universe is no longer a mere It to us, but a Thou, if we are religious; and any relation that may be possible from person to person might be possible here. For instance, although in one sense we are passive portions of the universe, in another we show a curious autonomy, as if we were small active centres on our own account. We feel, too, as if the appeal of religion to us were made to our own active good-will, as if evidence might be forever withheld from us unless we met the hypothesis half-way. To take a trivial illustration: just as a man who in a company of gentlemen made no ad- vances, asked a warrant for every concession, and believed no one’s word without proof, would cut himself off by such churlishness from all the social rewards that a more trusting spirit would earn—so here, one who should shut himself up in snarl- ing logicality and try to make the gods extort his recognition willy-nilly, or not get it at all, might cut himself off forever from his only opportunity of making the gods’ acquaintance. This feeling, forced on us we know not whence, that by obsti- nately believing that there are gods (although not to do so would be so easy both for our logic and our life) we are doing the universe the deepest service we can, seems part of the living essence of the religious hypothesis. If the hypothesis were true in all its parts, including this one, then pure intellectualism, with its veto on our making willing advances, would be an absurdity; and some participation of our sympathetic nature would be logically required. I, therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules of truth-seeking, or willfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those
kinds of truth were really there, would be an irra- tional rule. That for me is the long and short of the formal logic of the situation, no matter what the kinds of truth might mate- rially be.
Another “practical” argument for belief in God comes from a short, brilliant proposal by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal. Pascal offered an argument that he called a wager, literally a bet about God. It is not a proof of God’s existence in any sense; in fact, one of its explicit terms is the fact that we cannot know whether God exists or not. But then, Pascal says, if God exists, and we believe in Him, we are entitled to an infinite reward. If He exists and we do not believe in Him, on the other hand, we are really in for it—eternal damnation. Even if God does not exist, we are
“The universe is no longer a mere It to us, but a Thou, if we are religious; and any relation that may be possible from person to person might be possible here.” — W I L L I A M J A M E S
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
A French scientist and philosopher with mildly mystical tendencies. He stressed confidence in the “heart,” rather than in reason, and many of his best-known writings are con- cerned with the problems of reli- gious faith. However, Pascal was also one of the inventors of the computer and a famous mathema- tician. His best-known work is Pensées (“Thoughts”) (1669).
A mathematical genius as well as a religious thinker, Pascal argued that in the face of uncertainty, religious faith is a better bet than atheism. (© iStockphoto.com/GeorgiosArt)
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still better off believing in Him because of the qualities faith brings to life in us. In support of the decision to believe, Pascal asks:
Now, what harm will befall you in taking this side? You will be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful. Certainly you will not have those poisonous pleasures, glory and luxury; but will you not have others? I will tell you that you will thereby gain in this life, and that, at each step you take on this road, you will see so great certainty of gain, so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will at last recognize that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing.15
So, if we treat this as a betting situation, in which our option is simply to believe or not be- lieve, our betting odds look like this:
“PASCAl’S WAGER”
AND GOD EXISTS AND GOD DOESN’T EXIST
IF WE BElIEVE Eternal reward. We’ve wasted a little piety but perhaps been better people.
IF WE DON’T BElIEVE Eternal damnation. No reward, no punishment.
looking at the odds as a betting person, it is obvious which option we ought to choose. The risk of eternal damnation overwhelms the promise of a few “poisonous” pleasures, and the prom- ise of eternal reward is well worth the risk that we may be wrong, considering what is gained even in this life. The conclusion, then, on strictly practical grounds, is that we ought to believe in God.
All three of these arguments by Kant, James, and Pascal are based on the same all-impor- tant assumption that God is just. On the basis of this assumption, they then argue that it is rational to believe in God, even if it is not possible to prove (or even know) that He exists. Accordingly, belief in God is a matter of faith, but this faith can be argued and justified as ra- tional belief. Just because it is faith and not knowledge, it does not follow that it is “blind faith” or irrational, beyond argument or arbitrary. To insist that belief in God is a matter of faith, therefore, is not to say that it is beyond the reach of philosophy or rational consideration.
15 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, no. 233, New York: Modern library, 1941.
• Can you will yourself to believe something? Is will sufficient to counter religious doubt?
• Do you think our need for justice is a good ground for believing in God?
• What does Pascal’s wager fail to capture about religious belief or devotion?
These “moral” arguments for believing in God are sound only as long as we accept the assumption that God is just. There have been few sophisticated theists who have actually denied this assumption, of course, but there have been a great many, particularly in modern times, who have worried about it considerably. The problem is called the problem of evil. It can be stated simply, but the solution, if you believe in God, is not simple at all. The problem is this: If God is all-powerful (omnipotent), all-knowing (omniscient), and just, then how is it possible that there is so much unearned suffering and unpunished wickedness in the world? Or simply, if God exists, how can the world be so full of evil? It cannot be that He does not know of these misfortunes, for He is all-knowing. Nor can it be that He is unable to do anything about them, for He is all-powerful. And if He is just and has concern for human beings, then
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He must care about protecting the innocent and punishing or preventing evil.
The problem of evil is a problem because few believers in any religion are willing to give up their faith in the power of nature or of its Creator, its innate goodness, or the belief that there is real justice. The clearest and most widely known characterization of the problem of evil for the reli- gious belief is probably still the one found in the biblical Book of Job, in which Job, deeply pious yet undeservedly suffering, struggles to keep his faith:
Then his wife said to him, “Are you still unshaken in your integrity? Curse God and die!” But he answered, “ . . . If we accept good from God, shall we not accept evil?” (2:9–10)
But eventually, Job asks God:
“Why should the sufferer be born to see the light? Why is life given to men who find it so bitter?” (3:20)
The most common solution to the problem of evil is offered to Job by his friend Eliphaz:
“Mischief does not grow out of the soil nor trouble spring from the earth; man is born to trouble, as surely as birds fly upwards.” (Job 5:6, New English Bible)
In other words, Eliphaz suggests that man has been cre- ated by God with the kind of nature that brings with it its own creation of troubles.
This has often been the solution offered by philosophers and theologians to the problem of evil. There are several ver-
sions even of this solution (that human beings have “free will”). The version most influential in Christianity was offered by St. Augustine. In his youth, Augustine had come under the influence of a religion called Manichaeism. Manichaeism was branded as heresy by all the great mono- theisms (including, at that time, the Persian religion, Zoroastrianism) precisely because of the explanation of evil that it espoused. The Manichaeans claimed that there were two equally powerful gods, one of which was good and one evil. The good god ruled the spirit and mind, and the evil god ruled the body. According to the Manichaeans, then, neither god was all- powerful, and human beings were not free, but rather at the mercy of one or the other of the gods. Only at death, claimed the Manichaeans, when the soul is separated forever from the body, could human beings achieve real moral goodness.
Augustine abandoned Manichaeism and embraced Christianity. As a Christian, he wrote eloquently about the freedom of the will and the ability of human beings to observe the moral obligations to which God has commanded them.
F RO M Confessions B Y St. Augustine16
But although I declared and firmly believed that you, our Lord God, the true God who made not only our souls but also our bodies and not only our souls and bodies
The story of Job (depicted in this engraving by Gustave Doré) suggests that suffering is not necessarily the result of previous wrongdoing. (© iStockphoto.com/duncan1890)
16 St. Augustine, Confessions, Bk. VII, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin. Copyright © 1961 by R. S. Pine-Coffin. Penguin Classics, 1961, pp. 136–149. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books, ltd.
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but all things, living and inanimate, as well, although I believed that you were free from corruption or mutation or any degree of change, I still could not find a clear explanation, without complications, of the cause of evil. Whatever the cause might be, I saw that it was not to be found in any theory that would oblige me to believe that the immutable God was mutable. If I believed this, I should myself become a cause of evil, the very thing which I was trying to discover. So I continued the search with some sense of relief, because I was quite sure that the theories of the Manichees were wrong. I repudiated these people with all my heart, because I could see that while they were inquiring into the origin of evil they were full of evil themselves, since they preferred to think that yours was a substance that could suffer evil rather than that theirs was capable of committing it.
I was told that we do evil because we choose to do so of our own free will, and suffer it because your justice rightly demands that we should. I did my best to un- derstand this, but I could not see it clearly. I tried to raise my mental perceptions out of the abyss which engulfed them, but I sank back into it once more. Again and again I tried, but always I sank back. One thing lifted me up into the light of your day. It was that I knew that I had a will, as surely as I knew that there was life in me. When I chose to do something or not to do it, I was quite certain that it was my own self, and not some other person, who made this act of will, so that I was on the point of understanding that herein lay the cause of my sin. If I did anything against my will, it seemed to me to be something which happened to me rather than something which I did, and I looked upon it not as a fault, but as a punish- ment. And because I thought of you as a just God, I admitted at once that your punishments were not unjust.
But then I would ask myself once more: “Who made me? Surely it was my God, who is not only good but Goodness itself. How, then, do I come to possess a will that can choose to do wrong and refuse to do good, thereby providing a just reason why I should be punished? Who put this will into me? Who sowed this seed of bitterness in me, when all that I am was made by my God, who is Sweetness itself ? If it was the devil who put it there, who made the devil? If he was a good angel who became a devil because of his own wicked will, how did he come to possess the wicked will which made him a devil, when the Creator, who is entirely good, made him a good angel and nothing else?”
These thoughts swept me back again into the gulf where I was being stifled. But I did not sink as far as that hell of error where no one confesses to you his own guilt, choosing to believe that you suffer evil rather than that man does it.
. . . “Where then is evil? What is its origin?
How did it steal into the world? What is the root or stem from which it grew? Can it be that there simply is no evil? If so, why do we fear and guard against something which is not there? If our fear is unfounded,
St. Augustine (354–430)
The main figure in the develop- ment of medieval Christian thought from its roots in classical Greece and Rome. Augustine was born in North Africa and lived during the decline of the Roman Empire. After exploring various pagan beliefs, he was converted to Christianity and became bishop of Hippo in North Africa. He is best known for his theological treatise The City of God and for his very personal Confessions.
St. Augustine, who once believed that the world was a battleground for the warring forces of good and evil, came to believe that evil is only the absence of good. (© Album/Prisma/Album/SuperStock)
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it is itself an evil, because it stabs and wrings our hearts for nothing. In fact the evil is all the greater if we are afraid when there is nothing to fear. Therefore, either there is evil and we fear it, or the fear itself is evil.
“Where then does evil come from, if God made all things and, because he is good, made them good too? It is true that he is the supreme Good, that he is him- self a greater Good than these lesser goods which he created. But the Creator and all his creation are both good. Where then does evil come from?
“Can it be that there was something evil in the matter from which he made the universe? When he shaped this matter and fitted it to his purpose, did he leave in it some part which he did not convert to good? But why should he have done this? Are we to believe that, although he is omnipotent, he had not the power to convert the whole of this matter to good and change it so that no evil remained in it? Why, indeed, did he will to make anything of it at all? Why did he not instead, by this same omnipotence, destroy it utterly and entirely? Could it have existed against his will? If it had existed from eternity, why did he allow it to exist in that state through the infinite ages of the past and then, after so long a time, decide to make something of it? If he suddenly determined to act, would it not be more likely that he would use his almighty power to abolish this evil matter, so that nothing should exist besides himself, the total, true, supreme, and infinite Good? Or, if it was not good that a God who was good should not also create and establish something good, could he not have removed and annihilated the evil matter and replaced it with good, of which he could create all things? For he would not be omnipotent if he could not create some- thing good without the help of matter which he had not created himself.”
These were the thoughts which I turned over and over in my unhappy mind, and my anxiety was all the more galling for the fear that death might come before I had found the truth. But my heart clung firmly to the faith in Christ your Son, our Lord and Saviour, which it had received in the Catholic Church. There were many questions on which my beliefs were still indefinite and wavered from the strict rule of doctrine, yet my mind never relinquished the faith but drank it in more deeply day by day.
. . .
12 It was made clear to me also that even those things which are subject to decay are good. If they were of the supreme order of goodness, they could not become cor- rupt; but neither could they become corrupt unless they were in some way good. For if they were supremely good, it would not be possible for them to be corrupted. On the other hand, if they were entirely without good, there would be nothing in them that could become corrupt. For corruption is harmful, but unless it dimin- ished what is good, it could do no harm. The conclusion then must be either that corruption does no harm—which is not possible; or that everything which is cor- rupted is deprived of good—which is beyond doubt. But if they are deprived of all good, they will not exist at all. For if they still exist but can no longer be corrupted, they will be better than they were before, because they now continue their exis- tence in an incorruptible state. But could anything be more preposterous than to say that things are made better by being deprived of all good?
So we must conclude that if things are deprived of all good, they cease alto- gether to be; and this means that as long as they are, they are good. Therefore, whatever is, is good; and evil, the origin of which I was trying to find, is not a
“Whatever is, is good; and evil . . . is not a substance, because if it were a substance, it would be good.” — S T. A U G U S T I N E
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substance, because if it were a substance, it would be good. For either it would be an incorruptible substance of the supreme order of goodness, or it would be a cor- ruptible substance which would not be corruptible unless it were good. So it became obvious to me that all that you have made is good, and that there are no substances whatsoever that were not made by you. And because you did not make them all equal, each single thing is good and collectively they are very good, for our God made his whole creation very good.
13 For you evil does not exist, and not only for you but for the whole of your creation as well, because there is nothing outside it which could invade it and break down the order which you have imposed on it. Yet in the separate parts of your creation there are some things which we think of as evil because they are at variance with other things. But there are other things again with which they are in accord, and then they are good. In themselves, too, they are good. And all these things which are at variance with one another are in accord with the lower part of creation which we call the earth. The sky, which is cloudy and windy, suits the earth to which it belongs. So it would be wrong for me to wish that these earthly things did not exist, for even if I saw nothing but them, I might wish for something better, but still I ought to praise you for them alone. For all things give praise to the Lord on earth, monsters of the sea and all its depths; fire and hail, snow and mist; and the storm-wind that executes his decree; all you mountains and hills, all you fruit trees and cedars; all you wild beasts and cattle, creeping things and birds that fly in air; all you kings and peoples of the world, all you that are princes and judges on earth; young men and maids, old men and boys together; let them all give praise to the Lord’s name. The heavens, too, ring with your praises, O God, for you are the god of us all. Give praise to the Lord in heaven; praise him, all that dwells on high. Praise him, all you angels of his, praise him, all his armies. Praise him, sun and moon; praise him, every star that shines. Praise him, you highest heavens, you waters beyond the heavens. Let all these praise the Lord. And since this is so, I no longer wished for a better world, because I was thinking of the whole creation, and in the light of this clearer discernment I had come to see that though the higher things are better than the lower, the sum of all creation is better than the higher things alone.
The problem arises once again, however, if we ask, How could God have given people free will, knowing—as He must have—that they would misuse it so badly? Would everyone be much better off if we had a bit less “free will,” or at least if we would have more desires to do good and fewer impulses to cause trouble and suffering?
There are several traditional responses to this question. One is that God has allowed us moral latitude to provide a test of our virtue, for if we were all “naturally” good, there would be little question of good versus evil or salvation versus damnation. But it is open to ques- tion whether these distinctions are themselves desirable; mightn’t it have been better for humanity to have stayed in the Garden of Eden? Why did God have to create temptation, and what would have been lost from the world if Adam and Eve had been created with a bit more fortitude and obedience?
Then there is the familiar defense, “but doesn’t the world need some evil so that we recognize the good?” But it isn’t at all obvious that we need anything like the amount of evil and suffering we have in the world to recognize what is good. And even if we were to
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agree on this “free will” defense of the traditional concep- tion of God as omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly just, laying the blame for suffering on people’s own choices, that would not solve the problem of evil. This is why we said that this line of free will defense is, at best, a partial solution. For not all human hardships and sufferings seem to be our own doing. Much of the evil in the world does not seem to depend on human action in any way.
Even if we accept the claim that we cause evil through free choice, we still need to explain how the effects of our choices can seem so unrelated to the actions that are sup- posedly their cause. The Western religions’ concept of “original sin” offers one such explanation, and it, too, finds its first expression in the Book of Job. When Job insists that he has done nothing to warrant his suffering, his friend Bildad suggests: “Inquire now of older generations and consider the experience of their fathers” (8:8), implying that the “sins of the fathers,” the original sin of the whole human race, justifies Job’s punishment. The punishment by God of any individual person, so goes the claim, is just, even though that particular individual did nothing to de- serve it. Thus, God remains both just and good.
But this solution, rejected by Job himself, undermines our hopes that right action will be rewarded, and so again it belies the moral force that God is supposed to play in our lives. For if we were destined to suffer anyway for sins com- mitted by others, then God would not appear to be just, and there would be little incentive for us to be faithful and follow God’s commandments.
Some philosophers answered the problem of evil in a different way, by denying one of the main tenets of traditional theistic thinking, namely, the idea that God is good. For example, Spinoza’s pantheism was one of these many attempts to save belief in God while maintain- ing a rational picture of nature. More radical versions of pantheism deny that God is just and that He has any moral characteristics at all. In Spinoza’s theory, however, which has often been compared to that of the Eastern religions, God is identical to the universe. He is not its creator. He is not a moral agent, so He has neither concern nor the ability to rectify the mis- fortunes and suffering of the world. If one defends an extreme determinism in which no one—not even God—has “free will,” questions of moral responsibility, reward, and punish- ment become irrelevant, a matter of human vanity, nothing more. It is not surprising that Spinoza, although devout, was long branded an atheist, and his books were proscribed.
The German philosophers Johann Fichte and G. W. F. Hegel also defended versions of pantheism in which God was immanent (instead of transcendent) and identical to the one universe as “Spirit” as well as Spinoza’s substance. They, too, fought off accusations of athe- ism in their careers (and Fichte was actually fired in a great scandal over this). In France, the anticlerical Enlightenment was trying to replace the increasingly dubious authority of the church with rationality, but this often meant gutting religion (Christianity, in particular) of much of its content, especially most of its rituals and its “superstitions.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his devoted followers in the French Revolution (for example, the Robespierre brothers) advo- cated belief in a “Supreme Being,” but jettisoned most other Christian beliefs. Foremost in
Augustine argued that much of the suffering in the world is a product of free human choices. (© iStockphoto.com/ivan-96)
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this fight was Voltaire, who also held onto his belief in God but sheared Him of all His moral attributes, thus avoiding the problem of evil by de- nying God His attribute of “justice.” “It makes no more sense to say that God is just or unjust than it does to say that he is blue or green.”
For Voltaire, God was just a “hypothesis,” the creator who turned on the giant Newtonian machine but then left it to go on its own. This pe- culiarly truncated version of theism is usually called deism. Deism in- cludes a belief in God, but this “God” is not much of one. It is essentially an appeal to the cosmological argument, and it is satisfied with a mini- mal deity, which stops far short of our traditional conception of God. (Most of the American Founding Fathers, by the way, were deists.) As we have seen, Voltaire also despised the “argument from design,” with all of its hidden moralizing. The world is full of evil, Voltaire insisted, and there is no denying it. And since there is evil, there cannot be an all- powerful, all-knowing God who is also just, and there can be no appeal to His “mysterious ways.” He has no “mysterious ways.” In fact, He has no “ways” at all. Thus Voltaire made his point against leibniz and his “best of all possible worlds” hypothesis in Candide, lampooning the leibnizian Dr. Pangloss. By saving rationality of faith in this way, the French philosophers lost a great deal of the religion. But the question for many believers would be the following: is the deist God God at all?
In the late eighteenth century, French intellectuals were abandoning most Christian doctrines beyond belief in a creator God and defending Enlighten- ment thought and the French Revolution. This famous work by Jacques louis David memorializes Jean Paul Marat, a physician, social theorist, and orator who was assassinated in his bathtub in 1793 for his role in defending the Revolution and inspir- ing violence against counterrevolutionaries. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY )
• Can you will yourself to believe something? Is will sufficient to counter religious doubt?
• Do you think our need for justice is a good ground for believ- ing in God?
• What does Pascal’s wager fail to capture about religious belief or devotion?
The difficulties stemming from the “free will” so- lution to the problem of evil may indicate to some that the Western religions’ conceptions of God and of human nature are just not adequate. The Western religions characterize human beings as so limited in our understanding of God’s justice that we can never predict the ultimate evil or good effects of our ac- tions. But if this is so, how can we have any meaning- ful moral theory at all? How do we know whether an action is evil or good? Similarly, these religions claim that the wrongdoings we engage in during our short lives here on Earth are punished eternally by God and that our occasional good actions are rewarded eternally. The view that each and every human life- time belongs to a unique eternal soul would seem to make all God’s rewards and punishments intrinsi- cally unjust—way out of proportion to the insignifi- cant actions that are supposedly their cause.
Voltaire (the pen name of François Marie Arouet) (1694–1778).
Voltaire was an adroit satirist, and his wit got him into trouble (both imprisonment and exile). An influential Enlightenment figure and prolific writer, he defended a reliance on reason, religious tolerance, and social reform.
Voltaire was a deist, who held that God initially caused the world, but no longer intervenes in it. (© iStockphoto.com/pictore)
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One interesting alternative to these conceptions of humans and God is offered by the Hindu religion, whose solution to the problem of evil is unique in its use of the notion of karma.
Hinduism is not actually a single religion. At best it is a family of religious beliefs and practices united, among other things, by a belief in the notion of social caste and a shared lineage from the Indic religions, such as Upanishadism, which we considered in Chapter 1. There are no identifiable “core” Hindu beliefs—beyond a reverence for the Veda, although it is rarely read, and a participation in a social organization. Nevertheless, one may speak of “scriptures” and of ideas that have, over the centuries, been more at the center of Hindu culture than others. In general, a theistic worldview has, more than any other, dominated Hindu belief and guided religious practices. However, the Hindu conception of God is radi- cally different from that shared by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Theistic Hinduism ac- knowledges a plurality of gods, even though many Hindus believe that they are all manifestations of the same divine reality (a view called “henotheism”). The Hindu notion of human nature also radically differs from the Western notion. Most Hindus believe that human beings have free will. However, the free exercise of that will changes the human being. This is the doctrine of karma, which claims that any course of action that one under- takes creates a psychological tendency to repeat it. One’s free will thus becomes limited by one’s own dispositions to action, or habits. These dispositions, according to much ancient Indian thought, continue even into a new birth. The inveterate smoker, for instance, may be drawn to the taste of tobacco at a young age in her next incarnation.
Of all the many, many “scriptures” and sacred texts that have moved the hearts of the faithful in India over the centuries, the Bhagavadgı̄ tā (or “Gı̄tā”), the “Song of God” (ca. 200 b.c.e.), clearly stands out as the most important. The Gı̄tā is a small portion of a long epic poem, the Mahābhārata. The central theme of the passages presented here is the unique Hindu response to the problem of evil. The warrior Krishna is the ruler of a
When Arjuna hesitates to give the order to begin a battle, Krishna tells him that it is his duty and assures him that death is not complete destruction, but only a transformation. (bpk, Berlin/Museum fuer Asiatische Kunst, Staatliche Museen/Iris Papadopoulos/Art Resource, NY)
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neighboring state. Throughout most of the long poem, Krishna is an ordinary person al- though an able, just, clever, and politically astute one. The key event of the entire epic is a battle over political succession. The political issues involved are complex; only one side of the warring family has a just claim. Five brothers are the principal representatives of the just family (although many noble and venerable sages and heroes fight against them). Krishna joins the battle line as charioteer for the third of the five brothers, a champion archer named Arjuna. The Gı̄tā is a dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna that occurs just minutes before the battle begins. In the dialogue, Krishna ceases to be a mere mortal and reveals Himself to Arjuna as God incarnate. So his advice to Arjuna, at least according to Hindu theists, is not simply the encouragement of a friend or the wise teachings of a guru; His words are the voice of God speaking to a human being in a time of personal moral crisis. Arjuna insists that it cannot be the morally right thing to do to fight and kill his kinsmen, teachers, friends, and loved ones who face him on the far side of the field of Kuruksetra. Krishna challenges this perspective.
F RO M The Bhagavadgı̄tā17
“No good do I see in killing my own family in battle. I desire not victory, nor rule, nor pleasures, Krishna; what is power to us, enjoyments, or life, Govinda? Those who make rulership desirable for us, and enjoyments and pleasures, it is they that are arrayed in battle (against us), abandoning life and wealth. Teachers, fathers, sons, grandfathers, uncles, inlaws—these I do not wish to kill even if it means that I must die, Krishna—not even to rule the three worlds, why then for the earth?”
Despite the passion and sincerity of moral feeling that Arjuna expresses, Krishna insists that the right thing to do in the circumstances is to fight, to kill the opposing warriors, and to win the battle.
There are several dimensions of Krishna’s explanation why fighting is the right course of action for Arjuna, and more commentary has probably been elicited by His response to Arjuna’s plea for guidance than by any other comparably brief text, except perhaps the Torah and the Gospels. In the verses that follow (part of Krishna’s reply), Krishna first explains the cosmic foundations of human action. Next He states His own motive as God for assuming mortal birth. Krishna goes on to talk again about human action and closes with a refrain recurring through- out the Gı̄tā—the injunction to practice yoga (i.e., spiritual “discipline”). Through the practices of self-discipline—whether karmayoga (the yoga of devoting one’s actions to God), jñāayoga (the yoga of knowledge and meditation), or bhaktiyoga, (the yoga of love and devotion)— Krishna lays out the three “paths” by which one may live a spiritually transformed life.
[Krishna:] Without personal attachment undertake action, Arjuna, for just one purpose, for the purpose of sacrifice. From work undertaken for purposes other than sacrifice, this world is bound to the law of karma. Having loosed forth crea- tures along with sacrifice, the Creator said of old, “With this may you bring forth fruit, let it be your horn-of-plenty.18 Make the gods flourish with this and may the gods make you flourish. Mutually fostering one another, you will attain the su- preme good. For made to flourish by sacrifice, the gods will give you the
17 The following texts are from Bhagavadgı̄tā 1.31b–35, 3.9–12, 3.15, 4.6–8, 4.11, 4.14–19, 4.22–24, 4.31–33, 4.36–37, and 4.42b. Trans. Steve Phillips. 18 literally, “wish-fulfilling cow.”
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enjoyments you desire. One who not giving to them enjoys their gifts is nothing but a thief.” . . . Know action to have its origin in the Absolute, Brahman, and Brahman to have its foundation in the Immutable. Therefore is the omnipresent Brahman established through all time in sacrifice. . . . Although I exist as the unborn, the imperishable self (ātman), and although I exist as the Lord of beings, resorting to and controlling my own nature I come into (phenomenal) being by my own magical power of self-delimitation. Whenever there is a crisis of dharma [righteousness, the good, the cosmic direction], Arjuna, and a rising up of adharma, then I loose myself forth. For the protection of good people and for the destruction of evil-doers, for the establishment of dharma, I take birth age after age. . . . Just in the ways in which I am approached, so do I receive to my love. People on all sides follow the path that is mine, Arjuna. . . . Actions do not stain me; nor do I have desire for the fruits of works. The person who recognizes me as this way is himself not bound by dispositions of action. So knowing, very ancient seekers of liberation and enlightenment carried out works. Therefore simply do actions as were done of old by the ancients. What action is (and all its implications), and what inaction, even the seer-sages are confused on this score. To you I will explain that kind of action which when understood you will be free from the untoward and evil. . . . For action must be understood, and wrong action as well; inaction must be under- stood—deep, dark, and dense is the nature of action. Were one to see inaction in action and action in inaction, that person among mortals would be the one with wisdom; he, spiritually disciplined, would be the agent of all works. One whose instigations and undertakings are all free from the motive of personal desire, the wise see that person as the truly learned, as one whose personal dispositions have been burned up in the fire of knowledge. . . . Satisfied with whatever gain comes by him, passed beyond oppositions and dualities, untouched by jealousy, equal- minded and balanced in the face of both success and failure, such a person though he acts is not bound (by karmic dispositions). All dispositions dissolve and wash away when a person is free from attachment, “liberated,” and has his mind firmly fixed in knowledge—acting in a spirit of sacrifice. . . . This world does not belong to one who fails to sacrifice, so how could the next, Arjuna? In this way, numerous diverse sacrifices are spread wide in the mouth of Brahman. Know them all as born in action. Thus knowing, you will be “liberated” and enlightened. The sacrifice that is knowledge, O you who are a great warrior, is superior to any sacrifice in- volving material things. All work and action in its entirety, Arjuna, culminates and is fulfilled in (spiritual) knowledge. . . . Even if of all sinners you are now the very worst evil-doer, once in the boat of knowledge you will safely cross over the crookedness of evil. As a fire kindled reduces its fuel to ashes, Arjuna, so the fire of knowledge makes ashes all karma. . . . In yoga, in “spiritual discipline,” take your stand; son of Bharata, stand up and fight.
Yet another approach to religion and the problem of evil is offered in Buddhism, whose Indian roots spread throughout Asia. In Buddhism, the theistic problem of evil is avoided entirely, since Buddhism abandons any conception of an anthropomorphic God. Yet Buddhism retains a belief in moral obligation. A Buddhist answer to “the problem of evil” is compassion, confronting the evil of suffering by helping those who suffer. This is the
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approach, in particular, of the northern, or Mahāyāna, school of Buddhism. Against the Theravada Buddhists, who encourage a course of spiritual discipline toward personal enlightenment, the Mahāyāna argue that this effort falls short of the highest end. Mahāyānists seek not only personal enlightenment, but the deliverance of all sentient beings from suffering and ignorance. A fol- lower of this path attempts to acquire the moral, intel- lectual, and spiritual perfections (parāmitā) possessed by Siddhārtha Gautama, who, in this conception, is less “the Buddha” than a bodhisattva. A bodhisattva has one foot, so to speak, in the bliss of nirvāna, but is moti- vated by compassion to further the welfare of all beings. Thus Mahāyāna is more world-affirming than Theravada Buddhism in that the goal is not an extinction of indi- viduality and personality in an other-worldly bliss. Instead, one does not aim at extinction of individual form; one needs individual form and body as a medium with which to help others.
The six personal perfections (pāramitā) sought by Mahāyānists are liberality or charity, good moral charac- ter, patience or peace in the face of anger or desires, energy (energy to strive for the good), the ability to main- tain deep meditation, and, most important, insight or wisdom (prajñā). The Mahāyānists do not view the natural world as an evil place to be abandoned, but as the “Body of the Buddha,” the dharmakāya. Even though nature comes to be viewed in such a positive way, however, Buddhist philosophy throughout the long history of Mahāyāna tends to be thoroughly “idealistic.” The answer to evil lies not in the world but in us.
Many Buddhists in East Asia believe that the bodhisattva Guanyin is so compassionate that she hears the prayers of Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike. (© Shutterstock.com/Hung Chung Chih)
• What is karma, and how is it related to free will?
• Do you think it is necessary to believe in reincarnation to accept some notion of karma? Why or why not?
• Do you think that spiritual liberation depends on an attitude of detachment?
• The Mahayana Buddhists advocate adopting the stance of the bodhisattva, who is committed to delivering all sentient beings from ignorance and suffering. Do you think the problem of evil can be resolved by taking this practical approach?
F. Beyond Reason: Faith and Irrationality Whenever you can defend your belief rationally, it is obviously desirable to do so. The move from rationality to irrationality in the defense of religion, therefore, is a serious step. Kant, who defended the belief in God as a matter of faith, nevertheless defended this belief as rational. But there have always been religious people who have defended faith against
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reason, emphasizing the impossibility of rational justification and the irrelevance of the usual forms of understanding and knowledge where religion is concerned. In some cases, particularly in modern times, this step away from rationality may be a convenient escape from argu- ments and doubts that have become too overpowering. But it is not always, or even usually, taken for this reason. As we have seen, there has always been an enthusiastic movement within the sometimes overly formal confines of all the organized religions and dogmas to emphasize the experience of religious belief, called “mysticism.” Such experiences may well be indescribable and incommunicable. (Philosophers would thereby say it is ineffable.) But it is precisely the fact that they defy description and contradict our everyday rational beliefs that makes such experiences so important to those who have had them.
Elsewhere in the text we will discuss the rationalist notion of intu- ition, a special kind of experience that allows us to know some things for certain without argument and without abstraction from experience in the usual sense. According to the rationalists, we know the basic principles of logic and arithmetic in this way, and perhaps the basic principles of metaphysics as well. Not everyone, however, believes that intuition is part of rationality. Some deny that rationality is essential for insight. There may also be, according to most religious mystics, extra- rational or even irrational insight. Their epistemology is often ambigu- ous at this point. On the one hand, mystics want to deny the rational nature of their intuitions. But at the same time, they want to insist that what they experience is true.
You can see how this can generate considerable confusion. When the mystic insists that his experience is true, he or she has made a claim that is on a par with the rationalist’s claim (whether they agree or disagree in their conclusions). If they disagree, that is, if the mystic insists that there is a God (perhaps he has even “seen” Him) and the rationalist denies it, it should be obvious that little room for constructive argument exists. The mystic considers the rationalist’s arguments irrelevant; the rationalist considers the mystic obstinate and un- willing to argue rationally. At this point, assuming the discussion does not degenerate into name-calling and fisticuffs, the rationalist will probably storm out of the room in frustration and the mystic, like a Zen master, may just shrug his or her shoulders. In such a case, that is probably the most rational response for both of them.
Mystics need not argue that what they have experienced is true, however. They may insist only that what they have “seen” is extremely important to them personally. In this case mys- tics need have no disagreement whatsoever with rationalists, either in conclusions or in methods. Their views are different, of course, but they are not at odds. Or the mystics could argue, as the Islamic mystics (or Sufis) from al-Ghazali on have done, that rationalist and mystical experience lead to the same truths by different “paths.” But whether the mystical experience is an intuition of the (more or less) traditional Judeo-Christian God, whether it is a vision of the Virgin Mary or simply a “feeling of oneness with the universe,” whether the experience is the result of twenty years of prayer and meditation or induced in an evening with peyote or mescaline, the philosophical question that follows is always one of interpreta- tion. Without denying the reality of the experience, the question is always whether one ought to interpret the experience as knowledge of reality. Is it just an experience—perhaps beautiful, worth repeating, even worth building your life around? Or—a very different to
The lyrical work of the great Persian poet Hafiz (1315–1390) is often appreciated for its mystical overtones. (© Shutterstock.com/nadi555)
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claim—is the experience true, a breakthrough beyond our normal perceptions (or, perhaps, our everyday illusions) to the reality behind them? None of this is to say that the mystic must be wrong. It is only to say that given the im- possibility of argument, there is no rational means for de- ciding the issue.
Following the Enlightenment, particularly in Germany, religion took a dramatic swing to the subjective. Attempts at rational defense were given up entirely. The German Ro- mantic philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher insisted that religion was simply a matter of intense feelings of depen- dence, nothing more. (His contemporary, Hegel, wryly re- torted that this would make a dog a better Christian than most of us.) Other philosophers turned to modernized mysticism, including contemporary experiments with drug- induced experiences, in an attempt to save their religion from rational criticism. The American philosopher William James, for example, writes about mysticism in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience and defended the idea that personal religious experience has a central place in re- ligion and that mysticism is the root of such experience. He, too, insists that mystical experiences are essentially “inef- fable,” that is, impossible to describe to anyone else, and he compares this experience with the experience of listen- ing to a symphony or being in love. But he also insists that mystical experiences provide us with knowledge, “states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.” James concludes that “the existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mysti- cal states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe.” “The mystic,” he writes, “is invulnerable, and must be left, whether we like it or not, in undisturbed enjoy- ment of his creed.”19 The Sufi philosopher Mohammad al-Ghazali, a medieval mystic, similarly insists that rational- ity cannot properly evaluate mysticism, which can be fath- omed only through direct experience:
F ROM The Deliverance from Error B Y Mohammad al-Ghazali20
When I had finished with [philosophy and theology], I next turned with set purpose to the method of mysticism (or Sufism). I knew that the complete mystic “way”
From the ninth century c.e., the Islamic tradition has fostered the development of science, philosophy, and scholarly inquiry gener- ally. The philosophical tradition of the West is greatly indebted to medieval Arabic thought. (Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, NY)
19 William James, “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” in The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott, New York: Random House, 1967. 20 Mohammad al-Ghazali, The Deliverance from Error, from The Faith and Practice of al-Ghazali, trans. William Montgomery Watt, london: Allen & Unwin, 1953.
Mohammad al-Ghazali (1058–1111)
An Islamic philosopher and theologian, known especially for his criticisms of Aristotelianism and Avicenna. His most famous work was called The Incoherence of the Philosophers.
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includes both intellectual belief and practical activity; the latter consists in getting rid of the obstacles in the self and in stripping off its base characteristics and vicious morals, so that the heart may attain to freedom from what is not God and to con- stant recollection of Him.
The intellectual belief was easier to me than the practical activity. I began to acquaint myself with their belief by reading their books. . . . I thus comprehended their fundamental teachings on the intellectual side, and progressed, as far as is possible by study and oral instruction, in the knowledge of mysticism. It became clear to me, however, that what is most distinctive of mysticism is something which cannot be apprehended by study, but only by immediate experience (dhawq— literally “tasting”), by ecstasy and by a moral change. What a difference there is between knowing the definition of health and satiety, together with their causes and presuppositions, and being healthy and satisfied! What a difference be- tween being acquainted with the definition of drunkenness—namely, that it des- ignates a state arising from the domination of the seat of the intellect by vapours arising from the stomach—and being drunk! Indeed, the drunken man while in that condition does not know the definition of drunkenness nor the scientific account of it; he has not the very least scientific knowledge of it. The sober man, on the other hand, knows the definition of drunkenness and its basis, yet he is not drunk in the very least. Again the doctor, when he is himself ill, knows the definition and causes of health and the remedies which restore it, and yet is lack- ing in health. Similarly there is a difference between knowing the true nature and causes and conditions of the ascetic life and actually leading such a life and forsak- ing the world.
I apprehended clearly that the mystics were men who had real experiences, not men of words, and that I had already progressed as far as was possible by way of intellectual apprehension. What remained for me was not to be attained by oral instruction and study but only by immediate experience and by walking in the mystic way.
An eccentric Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, is often claimed as the father of both the “new” Christianity and that nonreligious philosophy called existentialism. Kierkeg- aard was born into a society in which everyone was a Christian; they all believed the same dogmas, without thinking about them. They all went to the same (lutheran) churches for Sunday services and Friday afternoon bingo games and enjoyed these social gatherings immensely. They were all entitled to call themselves “Christians” just by virtue of the fact that they had been born of certain parents, brought as children to certain churches, and continued to mouth certain doctrines that they did not understand or care to understand in the slightest. What they all lacked was passion. Their religion and they themselves, accord- ing to Kierkegaard, were boring through and through. Whatever happened to the phrase “the fear of God in their hearts”? These people felt no “fear,” just the security of a comfort- able and self-righteous society and warm swill of beer in their bellies, he complained. Kierkegaard, who had been brought up in an unusually devout lutheran home, was dis- gusted with them. This is not Christianity, he insisted, and the sophisticated disputes over doctrine and dogma had nothing more to do with being religious than the calculations of an accountant at tax time.
“What is most distinctive of mysticism is something which cannot be apprehended by study, but only by immediate experience . . . by ecstasy and by a moral change.” — MOHAMMAD AL-GHAZALI
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Accordingly Kierkegaard offered his alternative—a new (in fact, very old) way of seeing oneself as a Christian. Rational argument was irrelevant. The doctrines of Christianity, he admitted, were absolutely absurd. But that did not matter. In fact, it was the very absurdity of these beliefs that made the passion of Christianity possible. After all, if it were simply a matter of accepting some proposition, why should we feel anything? And “proofs” of God’s existence, needless to say, were as irrelevant—in fact, offensive—as you could imagine. “Christianity is passion!” he insisted. “Religion is feeling and commitment.” No talk of “truth”—unless you mean simply subjective truth, truth for me alone. No talk of “proof” and no talk of “rationality.” There is simply, to use his most famous phrase, the leap of faith, across the borders of rationality and thinking to the passion-filled life of old-fashioned Christian fear and awe of God. “My only analogy is Socrates. My task is a Socratic task—to revise the conception of what it means to be a Christian.”
Kierkegaard’s move away from rationality is characterized as a rejection of “objectivity.” Being a Christian, he says, is not a matter of “objective faith” (consisting of reason, doc- trines, and “proofs”) but of subjectivity, passion, and “inwardness.”
On Subjective Truth B Y Søren Kierkegaard21
Objective faith: what does that mean? It means a sum of dogmas. But suppose Christianity is nothing of the kind; suppose, on the contrary, it is inwardness, and therefore also the paradox, so as to push away objectively; and thus to acquire significance for the existing individual in the inwardness of his existence, in order to place him more decisively than any judge can place the accused, between time and eternity in time, between heaven and hell in the time of salvation. Objective faith: it is as if Christianity had also been heralded as a kind of little system, although not quite so good as the Hegelian system; it is as if Christ—yes, no offense intended—it is as if Christ were a profes- sor, and as if the Apostles had formed a little professional society. Truly, if it was once no easy thing to become a Christian, I believe now it becomes more difficult every year, because by now it has become so easy to become one—one finds a little competition only in becoming a specula- tive philosopher. And yet the speculative philosopher is perhaps most removed from Christianity, and perhaps it is far preferable to be an offended individual who nonetheless continually relates him- self to Christianity, than to be a specula- tive philosopher who supposes he has understood it.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855)
A Danish philosopher and theolo- gian who is generally recognized as the father of existentialism and the founder of many varieties of con- temporary religious irrationalism. Kierkegaard dedicated himself to religious writing after a short and not altogether successful attempt at the wild life and a brief engage- ment, which he broke off to devote himself to his work. The basic tenet of Kierkegaard’s philosophy was the need for each individual to choose his own way of life. Christianity could not be considered anything
other than just such a choice, a passionate choice, which had noth- ing to do with doctrines, churches, social groups, and ceremonies.
Kierkegaard argued that reli- gion is a matter of personal passion, not proof. (Snark/ Art Resource, NY)
“Suppose Christianity is . . . inwardness, and . . . also the paradox, . . . for the existing individual in the inwardness of his existence.” — S Ø R E N K I E R K E G A A R D
21 The first and third readings are from Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and the second reading is from Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments. All three were translated from the Danish by Clancy Martin and reprinted with his permission.
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. . . Suppose, however, that subjectivity is truth, and that subjectivity is the existing
subjectivity, then, to put it this way, Christianity is an exact fit. Subjectivity cul- minates in passion, Christianity is paradox, paradox and passion fit one another exactly, and paradox exactly fits one whose situation is in the extremity of exis- tence. Yes, in the wide world there could not be found two lovers so well fitted for one another as paradox and passion, and their argument is like a lovers’ argument, when they argue whether he first aroused her passion, or she his. So it is here: by means of the paradox itself, the existing person has been situated in the extremity of existence. And what is more delightful for lovers than that they are allowed a long time together without any change in the relationship between them, except that it becomes more intensive in inwardness?
Religion is a confrontation with the unknown, not something knowable.
But what is this unknown thing, with which reason in its paradoxical passion is affronted, and which even upsets for man his self-knowledge? It is the Unknown. But it is certainly something human, insofar as we know what it is to be human, nor is it some other thing humans know. Let us call this unknown something: the God. That is merely the name we give to it. To want to prove that this unknown something (the God) exists could hardly occur to reason. For of course if God does not exist, it would be impossible to prove it, but if God does exist, it would be folly to try to prove it; for, in the very moment I began my proof, I would have presup- posed it, not as dubious but as certain (a presupposition is never dubious, just be- cause it is a presupposition); since otherwise I would never begin, understanding that the whole would be impossible if he did not exist. But if when I speak of prov- ing God’s existence I mean that I propose to prove that the Unknown, which exists, is God, then I express myself less fortunately; for then I prove nothing, least of all existence, but merely develop the content of a concept. In general, to try to prove that something exists is a difficult matter, and what is still worse for the bold who would attempt it, the difficulty is of a kind that will not bring fame to those who occupy themselves with it. The whole proof always turns into something en- tirely different, turns into an additional development of the consequences that come from my having assumed that the object in question exists. Thus I continu- ally deduce not toward existence, but I deduce from existence, whether I exert myself indeed in the world I can grasp with my hands or in thought. So I do not prove that a stone exists, but that something which exists is a stone; a court of jus- tice does not prove that a criminal exists, but that the accused, who certainly exists, is a criminal. Whether one calls existence an accessorium [a predicate] or the eternal prius [first given], it can never be proven. Let us take our time; for us there is no reason to hurry, as there is for those, who from concern for themselves or for God or for some other thing, must hurry to show they exist. When it is so, there is indeed excellent reason to hurry, especially if the prover sincerely tries to appreci- ate the danger that he himself or the thing in question may not exist until the proof is complete, and does not secretly entertain the thought that it exists whether he succeeds in proving it or not.
So if from Napoleon’s actions one tried to prove Napoleon’s existence, would it not be of the greatest peculiarity, since his existence very well explains his actions, but actions cannot prove his existence, unless I have already understood the word
“If God does not exist, it would be impossible to prove it, but if God does exist, it would be folly to try to prove it.” — S Ø R E N K I E R K E G A A R D
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“his” such that I assume that he exists. But Napoleon is only an individual, and insofar there is no absolute relationship between him and his actions; after all, an- other person may have performed the same actions. Perhaps this is why I cannot deduce from actions to existence. If I call these actions the actions of Napoleon, then the proof is superfluous, since I have already named him; if I ignore this, I can never prove from the actions that they are Napoleon’s, but (purely ideally) prove that such actions are the actions of a great general, etc. But between God and his works there is an absolute relationship, God is not a name, but a concept, and per- haps it follows from that, that his essentia involvit existentiam [essence entails exis- tence]. God’s works can only be done by God; quite right, but where then are the works of God? The works from which I would deduce his existence are not im- mediately given. Or does the wisdom in nature, the goodness, the wisdom in the governance of the world, reside on the very face of things? Are we not here con- fronted with the most terrible temptations to doubt, and is it not impossible finally to dispose of those doubts? But from such an order of things I will certainly not prove God’s existence, and even if I began I would never finish, and furthermore would live constantly in suspenso [in suspense], that something terrible should sud- denly happen that would demolish my little proof. So, from what works will I prove it? From the works as apprehended through an ideal interpretation, i.e., such as they do not immediately reveal themselves. But in that case it is not from the works that I prove it, but I develop only the ideality I have presupposed; because of my confidence in this I boldly defy all objections, even those that have not yet been made. As soon as I begin I have presupposed the ideal interpretation, and presuppose that I will be successful in carrying it through; but this is just to presup- pose that God exists, and that in confidence in him is how I am actually beginning.
You can see how little Kierkegaard thinks of the ingenious “proofs” of God’s existence, as well as all attempts to “know” Him. The point of religion, he says, is precisely not to know, but rather to feel, to genuinely experience the presence of God. It is the absurdity and the irrationality of Christian doctrines, he insists, that makes this rare intensity of feeling possible.
Precisely its objective repulsion, the absurd is the measure of the intensity of faith in inwardness. There is a man who wants to have faith, well, let the comedy begin. He wants to have faith, but he also wants to ensure himself with the help of an objective inquiry and its approximation-process. What happens? With the help of the approximation-process, the absurd becomes something else; it becomes prob- able, it becomes more probable, it becomes extremely and exceedingly probable. Now he is prepared to believe it, and he boldly supposes that he does not believe as shoemakers and tailors and simple folk do, but only after long consideration. Now he is prepared to believe it, but lo and behold, now it has become impossible to believe it. The almost probable, the very probable, the extremely and exceedingly probable: that he can almost know, or as good as know, to a greater degree and exceedingly almost know—but believe it, that is impossible, for the absurd is pre- cisely the object of faith, and only that can be believed.
Christianity, Kierkegaard concludes, involves suffering, the suffering that comes with the anticipation of our own death and our feeling of smallness and insignificance when we con- sider the eternal order of things. For those who try to minimize this suffering through
“This is just to presuppose that God exists, and that in confidence in him is how I am actually beginning.” — S Ø R E N K I E R K E G A A R D
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professional “understanding” and knowledge, Kierkegaard has little but sarcasm: “The two ways. One is to suffer; the other is to become a professor of the fact that another suffered.”
In his journals, Kierkegaard wrote the following:
What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except insofar as a kind of understanding must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God truly wishes me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea I can live and die for. What would be the use of discovering so-called objective truth, of mastering all the sys- tems of philosophy and of being able, if required, to discuss them all and reveal the inconsistencies within each; what good would it do me to be able to develop a theory of the state and synthesize all details into one whole, and so to create a world I did not live in, but only held up for others to see; what good would it do me to be able to explain the meaning of Christianity if it had no deeper significance for me and for my life; what good would it do me if truth herself stood before me, cold and naked, not caring whether I recognized her or not, and producing in me a shudder of terror rather than a trusting devotion? Indeed I do not deny that I yet acknowledge an imperative of understanding and that with it one can control men, but it must be taken up into my life, and that is what I now recognize as the most important thing.22
Following Kierkegaard, Christian “irrationalism” changed the complexion of Western reli- gion and gave faith a meaning that is not vulnerable to rational arguments. Paul Tillich proposed an extremely powerful form of Christianity that also gives up the traditional view of God and moves the focus of the religion to purely personal concerns and commitments. These are what our religion amounts to, and we do not need anything more.
On the Ultimate Concern B Y Paul Tillich23
We have discussed the meaning of symbols generally because, as we said, man’s ulti- mate concern must be expressed symboli- cally! One may ask: Why can it not be expressed directly and properly? If money, success, or the nation is someone’s ultimate concern, can this not be said in a direct way without symbolic language? Is it not only in those cases in which the content of the ulti- mate concern is called “God” that we are in the realm of symbols? The answer is that everything which is a matter of uncondi- tional concern is made into a god. If the nation is someone’s ultimate concern, the
22 Trans. Clancy Martin. 23 “Religious Symbols” from “Symbols of Faith,” pp. 50 –55 in The Dynamics of Faith by Paul Tillich. Copyright © 1957 by Paul Tillich, renewed 1985 by Hannah Tillich. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Paul Tillich (1886–1965)
A German-born philosopher who spent many of his later years teach- ing in the United States. Tillich is among the best known of those modern theologians who, like the Romantics of the nineteenth cen- tury, place the emphasis on emo- tion and “concern,” rather than on reason in religion. In his theology, God is no longer the transcendent judge of the scriptures, but simply the symbol of our “ultimate con- cern.” Tillich is the author of Systematic Theology (1953–63), The Dynamics of Faith (1957), and The Courage to Be (1952).
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name of the nation becomes a sacred name and the nation receives divine qualities which far surpass the reality of the being and functioning of the nation. The nation then stands for and symbolizes the true ultimate, but in an idolatrous way. Success as ultimate concern is not the natural desire of actualizing potentialities, but its readiness to sacrifice all other values of life for the sake of a position of power and social predominance. The anxiety about not being a success is an idolatrous form of the anxiety about divine condemnation. Success is grace; lack of success, ulti- mate judgment. In this way concepts designating ordinary realities become idola- trous symbols of ultimate concern.
The reason for this transformation of concepts into symbols is the character of ultimacy and the nature of faith. That which is the true ultimate transcends the realm of finite reality infinitely. Therefore, no finite reality can express it directly and properly. Religiously speaking, God transcends his own name. This is why the use of his name easily becomes an abuse or a blasphemy. Whatever we say about that which concerns us ultimately, whether or not we call it God, has a symbolic meaning. It points beyond itself while participating in that to which it points. In no other way can faith express itself adequately. The language of faith is the lan- guage of symbols. If faith were what we have shown that it is not, such an assertion could not be made. But faith, understood as the state of being ultimately con- cerned, has no language other than symbols. When saying this I always expect the question: Only a symbol? He who asks this question shows that he has not under- stood the difference between signs and symbols nor the power of symbolic lan- guage, which surpasses in quality and strength the power of any nonsymbolic language. One should never say “only a symbol,” but one should say “not less than a symbol.” With this in mind we can now describe the different kinds of symbols of faith.
The fundamental symbol of our ultimate concern is God. It is always present in any act of faith, even if the act of faith includes the denial of God. Where there is ultimate concern, God can be denied only in the name of God. One God can deny the other one. Ultimate concern cannot deny its own character as ultimate. There- fore, it affirms what is meant by the word “God.” Atheism, consequently, can only mean the attempt to remove any ultimate concern—to remain unconcerned about the meaning of one’s existence. Indifference toward the ultimate question is the only imaginable form of atheism. Whether it is possible is a problem which must remain unsolved at this point. In any case, he who denies God as matter of ultimate concern affirms God, because he affirms ultimacy in his concern. God is the fun- damental symbol for what concerns us ultimately. Again, it would be completely wrong to ask: So God is nothing but a symbol? Because the next question has to be: A symbol for what? And then the answer would be: For God! God is symbol for God. This means that in the person of God we must distinguish two elements: the element of ultimacy, which is a matter of immediate experience and not symbolic in itself, and the element of concreteness, which is taken from our ordinary experi- ence and symbolically applied to God. The man whose ultimate concern is a sacred tree has both the ultimacy of concern and the concreteness of the tree which sym- bolizes his relation to the ultimate. The man who adores Apollo is ultimately con- cerned, but not in an abstract way. His ultimate concern is symbolized in the divine figure of Apollo. The man who glorifies Jahweh, the God of the Old Testa- ment, has both an ultimate concern and a concrete image of what concerns him ultimately. This is the meaning of the seemingly cryptic statement that God is the
“God as the ultimate in man’s ultimate concern is more certain than any other certainty, even that of oneself.” — PA U L T I L L I C H
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symbol of God. In this qualified sense God is the fundamental and universal con- tent of faith.
It is obvious that such an understanding of the meaning of God makes the discussions about the existence or nonexistence of God meaningless. It is mean- ingless to question the ultimacy of an ultimate concern. This element in the idea of God is in itself certain. The symbolic expression of this element varies end- lessly through the whole history of mankind. Here again it would be meaningless to ask whether one or another of the figures in which an ultimate concern is symbolized does “exist.” If “existence” refers to something which can be found within the whole of reality, no divine being exists. The question is not this, but: Which of the innumerable symbols of faith is most adequate to the meaning of faith? In other words, which symbol of ultimacy expresses the ultimate without idolatrous elements? This is the problem, and not the so-called “existence of God”—which is in itself an impossible combination of words. God as the ulti- mate in man’s ultimate concern is more certain than any other certainty, even that of oneself. God as symbolized in a divine figure is a matter of daring faith, of courage and risk.
God is the basic symbol of faith, but not the only one. All the qualities we at- tribute to him, power, love, justice, are taken from finite experiences and applied symbolically to that which is beyond finitude and infinity. If faith calls God “almighty,” it uses the human experience of power in order to symbolize the content of its infinite concern, but it does not describe a highest being who can do as he pleases. So it is with all the other qualities and with all the actions, past, present, and future, which men attribute to God. They are symbols taken from our daily experience, and not information about what God did once upon a time or will do sometime in the future. Faith is not the belief in such stories, but it is the acceptance of symbols that express our ultimate concern in terms of divine actions.
Another group of symbols of faith are manifestations of the divine in things and events, in persons and communities, in words and documents. This whole realm of sacred objects is a treasure of symbols. Holy things are not holy in themselves, but they point beyond themselves to the source of all holiness, that which is of ultimate concern.
Notice how far Tillich has moved from the traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic conception of God, although he is still a theist and a Christian. Yet it is not clear that “God” means the same for Tillich as it does in the Old and New Testaments. God is a symbol of “ultimate con- cern.” Nevertheless, is this symbol God as Christians are supposed to think of Him? The belief in God is now expanded to represent the fact that one finds his or her life meaningful. Tillich says that this “makes the discussions about the existence or nonexistence of God meaningless.” It also undercuts the Western idea that God is a single kind of being with the characteristics we discussed earlier. This brings Tillich’s theism close to the general idea of religion, which Nishitani described in the passage presented earlier. God is whatever con- cerns us ultimately, whatever is most important in our lives. This is even true, Tillich says, when one denies the existence of God. “Where there is ultimate concern, God can be denied only in the name of God.”
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G. Doubts about God and Religion It is often said that religion is a matter of personal belief and faith, suggesting that the ob- jects of religious belief are beyond criticism and no one’s business but one’s own. But it is a questionable slide from this view—which is amiably suited to promoting tolerance among believers of different faiths—to the idea that true faith is immune to doubt, or, for that matter, to criticisms of a very different kind. On the one hand, religious belief may necessarily involve doubts; indeed, it may be argued that the dogmatic certainty sought by many believers is something less than real faith. Such a view is implied by Kierkegaard, for example, and his insistence on passionate commitment arises precisely to confront the “objective uncer- tainty” of faith. An even more profound doubt within the bonds of faith was expressed by the great Russian author, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Dos- toyevsky was a devout Christian whose faith was shaken many times, not least by the cruelty he often witnessed (and of which he was sometimes the victim) in feudal Tsarist Russia. In his novel The Brothers Karamazov, brother Alyosha is a devout but still naive religious novice, whereas his brother Ivan is entertaining serious doubts about the justification for belief in a good God. (The author clearly recognized himself in both brothers.) In a conversation between the two of them, Ivan presents us with a vivid and horrible picture of human evil challenging his faith.
F RO M The Brothers Karamazov B Y Fyodor Dostoyevsky24
“One picture, only one more, because it’s so curious, so characteristic, and I have only just read it in some collection of Rus- sian antiquities. I’ve forgotten the name. I must look it up. It was in the darkest days
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881)
A Russian novelist and essayist. His works are noteworthy for their psychological and philosophical depth. Dostoyevsky is often men- tioned as a precursor of the exis- tentialist movement because of his explorations of the darker sides of the human psyche in such works as Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov.
Vasilij Perov, Portrait of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1872). Dos- toyevsky displays the conflict between religious conviction and religious doubt in the in- teractions of two of the broth- ers in his literary masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov. (© Shutterstock.com/ppl)
24 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Barnett, New York: Modern library, 1929.
• How does subjectivism differ from mysticism?
• Do you think having an experience that is ineffable (i.e., it cannot be described or communicated to others) is a form of knowledge?
• Why does Kierkegaard claim that absurdity or paradox is the essence of faith?
• For Tillich, what is “an ultimate concern”? Why does it make the question of God’s existence “meaningless”?
• How is God a symbol of “the ultimate concern”? Can you have an ultimate concern and not believe in God?
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of serfdom at the beginning of the century, and long live the Liberator of the People! There was in those days a general of aristocratic connections, the owner of great estates, one of those men—somewhat exceptional, I believe, even then— who, retiring from the service into a life of leisure, are convinced that they’ve earned absolute power over the lives of their subjects. There were such men then.
So our general, settled on his property of two thousand souls, lives in pomp, and domineers over his poor neighbors as though they were dependents and buffoons. He has kennels of hundreds of hounds and nearly a hundred dog boys—all mounted and in uniform. One day a serf boy, a little child of eight, threw a stone in play and hurt the paw of the general’s favorite hound. ‘Why is my favorite dog lame?’ He is told that the boy threw a stone that hurt the dog’s paw. ‘So you did it.’ The general looked the child up and down. ‘Take him.’ He was taken—taken from his mother and kept shut up all night. Early that morning the general comes out on horseback, with the hounds, his dependents, dog boys, and huntsmen, all mounted around him in full hunting parade. The servants are summoned for their edification, and in front of them all stands the mother of the child. The child is brought from the lockup. It’s a gloomy, cold, foggy autumn day, a capital day for hunting. The gen- eral orders the child to be undressed; the child is stripped naked. He shivers, numb with terror, not daring to cry. . . . ‘Make him run,’ commands the general. ‘Run! run!’ shout the dog boys. The boy runs. . . . ‘At him!’ yells the general, and he sets the whole pack of hounds on the child. The hounds catch him, and tear him to pieces before his mother’s eyes! . . . I believe the general was afterwards declared incapable of administering his estates. Well—what did he deserve? To be shot? To be shot for the satisfaction of our moral feelings? Speak, Alyosha!”
“To be shot,” murmured Alyosha, lifting his eyes to Ivan with a pale, twisted smile. “Bravo!” cried Ivan delighted. “If even you say so . . . You’re a pretty monk! So
there is a little devil sitting in your heart, Alyosha Karamazov!” “What I said was absurd, but—” “That’s just the point, that ‘but’!” cried
Ivan. “Let me tell you, novice, that the absurd is only too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities, and perhaps nothing would have come to pass in it with- out them. We know what we know!”
“What do you know?” “I understand nothing,” Ivan went on, as
though in a delirium. “I don’t want to un- derstand anything now. I want to stick to the fact. I made up my mind long ago not to understand. If I try to understand anything, I shall be false to the fact, and I have deter- mined to stick to the fact.”
“Why are you trying me?” Alyosha cried, with sudden distress. “Will you say what you mean at last?”
“Of course, I will; that’s what I’ve been leading up to. You are dear to me. I don’t want to let you go, and I won’t give you up to your Zossima.”
Dostoevsky challenges belief in God’s justice, asking how a good and just God could have created a world in which human brutality (such as that shown in Francisco Goya’s The Third of May, 1808) is possible. (© iStockphoto.com/wynnter)
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Ivan for a minute was silent; his face became all at once very sad. “Listen! I took the case of children only to make my case clearer. Of the other
tears of humanity with which the earth is soaked from its crust to its center, I will say nothing. I have narrowed my subject on purpose. I am a bug, and I recognize in all humility that I cannot understand why the world is arranged as it is. Men are themselves to blame, I suppose; they were given paradise, they wanted freedom, and stole fire from heaven, though they knew they would become unhappy, so there is no need to pity them. With my pitiful, earthly, Euclidian understanding, all I know is that there is suffering and that there are none guilty; that effect follows cause, simply and directly; that everything flows and finds it level—but that’s only Euclid- ian nonsense, I know that, and I can’t consent to live by it! What comfort is it to me that there are none guilty and that effect follows cause simply and directly, and that I know it—I must have justice, or I will destroy myself. And not justice in some remote infinite time and space, but here on earth, and that I could see myself. I have believed in it. I want to see it, and if I am dead by then, let me rise again, for if it all happens without me, it will be too unfair. Surely I haven’t suffered, simply that I, my crimes and my sufferings, may manure the soil of the future harmony for somebody else. I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the lion and the victim rise up and embrace his murderer. I want to be there when everyone suddenly un- derstands what it has all been for. All the religions of the world are built on this longing, and I am a believer. But then there are the children, and what am I to do about them? That’s a question I can’t answer. For the hundredth time I repeat, there are numbers of questions, but I’ve only taken the children, because in their case what I mean is so unanswerably clear. Listen! If all must suffer to pay for the eternal harmony, what have children to do with it, tell me, please? It’s beyond all compre- hension why they should suffer, and why they should pay for the harmony. Why should they, too, furnish material to enrich the soil for the harmony of the future? I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too; but there can be no such solidarity with children. And if it is really true that they must share responsibility for all their fathers’ crimes, such a truth is not of this world and is beyond my comprehension. Some jester will say, perhaps, that the child would have grown up and have sinned, but you see he didn’t grow up, he was torn to pieces by the dogs, at eight years old. Oh, Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be, when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: ‘Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.’ When the mother em- braces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can’t accept that har- mony. And while I am on earth, I make haste to take my own measures. You see, Alyosha, perhaps it really may happen that if I live to that moment, or rise again to see it, I, too, perhaps, may cry aloud with the rest, looking at the mother embracing the child’s torturer, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ But I don’t want to cry aloud then. While there is still time, I hasten to protect myself, and so I renounce the higher harmony altogether. It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse, with its unexpi- ated tears to ‘dear, kind God’! It’s not worth it, because those tears are unatoned for. They must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them? Is it possible? By their being avenged? But what do I care for
“It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.” — I VA N K A R A M A ZO V
( I n F y o d o r D o s t o y e v s k y ’s T h e B r o t h e r s K a r a m a z o v )
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avenging them? What do I care for a hell for oppressors? What good can hell do, since those children have already been tortured? And what becomes of harmony, if there is hell? I want to forgive. I want to embrace. I don’t want more suffering. And if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. I don’t want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not for- give him! Let her forgive him for herself, if she will, let her forgive the torturer for the immeasurable suffering of her mother’s heart. But the sufferings of her tortured child she has no right to forgive; she dare not forgive the torturer, even if the child were to forgive him! And if that is so, if they dare not forgive, what becomes of harmony? Is there in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive? I don’t want harmony. From love for humanity I don’t want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong. Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.”
Doubt, however, is not limited to those of faith, and the more vicious attacks on the Judeo-Christian tradition challenge not only the theology of religion but its underlying motivation. It could be that religious faith is a perfectly understandable expression of hope for a better world or an appeal for some justice that transcends what we witness here in secular life. But it has been charged that religion is something more problematic than this, an escape from worldly responsibilities, an irresponsible reaction to a world we cannot cope with, or perhaps a childish unwillingness to give up an illusion of security that we ought to have outgrown in adolescence. These various views have been forcefully argued by Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud.
Karl Marx is often quoted for his incisive critique of religion. His point is simple, and he makes it powerfully. Humans invent religion to escape their intolerable social conditions. And once we see this, we should reject religion as an escape and turn instead to the correc- tion of those conditions that make such an escape necessary.
F RO M Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right B Y Karl Marx25
The basis of irreligious criticism is this: man makes religion; religion does not make man. Religion is indeed man’s self-consciousness and self-awareness so long as he has not found himself or has lost himself again. But man is not an abstract being, squatting outside the world. Man is the human world, a state, society. This state, this society, pro- duce religion which is an inverted world consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its general basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human being inasmuch as the human being possesses no
25 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right in Early Writings, trans. T. Bottomore. Copyright © 1964. Reprinted by permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies.
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true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly a struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.
Religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of men, is a demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illu- sions about their condition is a call to aban- don a condition which requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, the em- bryonic criticism of this vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not in order that man shall bear the chain without caprice or consolation but so that he shall cast off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man so that he will think, act and fashion his reality as a man who has lost his illusions and regained his reason; so that he will revolve about himself as his own true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun about which man revolves so long as he does not revolve about himself.
Fifty years later, Friedrich Nietzsche opened an even more blistering attack on religion in general and on Christianity in particular. Christianity is accused of being nothing other than rationalizations for impotence, an expression of everything that is most contemptible in human nature.
F RO M Beyond Good and Evil B Y Friedrich Nietzsche26
The Jewish “Old Testament,” the book of divine justice, has people, things, and speeches in such grand style that Greek and Indian literature have nothing to set beside it. One stands in awe and trembling before this monstrous vestige of what humanity once was, and has sorrowful thoughts about old Asia and its protruding little peninsula Europe, which would like to stand out over and against Asia as the “progress of humanity.” To be sure: there will be nothing in these ruins to astonish or distress anyone who is just a wretched tame house pet himself and understands only house pet needs (like our cultured people of today, including the Christians of “cultured” Christianity)—the taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone for the “great” and the “small”—perhaps he will find the New Testament, the book of
Karl Marx (1818–1883)
A German philosopher and social theorist who formulated the philo- sophical basis for one of the most cataclysmic political ideologies of the twentieth century. He received a doctorate in philosophy but could not teach in Germany be- cause of his radical views. He spent most of his life abroad, in Paris, Brussels, and London, developing his theories and writing for various journals and newspapers (includ- ing the New York Herald Tribune). His savage attacks on established
beliefs and advocacy of revolution were constant throughout his life and forced him into exile. As a young man, he wrote a devastat- ing critique of G. W. F. Hegel, whom he had studied and followed as a young student and whose concept of “dialectic” he used in developing a powerful social-political philosophy of class conflict and economic determination.
Marx thought that religion encouraged people to acqui- esce in injustice in this world by convincing them that jus- tice would be meted out in the next life. (© iStockphoto.com/ Bettabi)
26 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Clancy Martin.
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mercy, more to his taste (it is full of the true delicate musty odor of devotee and petty soul). To have glued this New Testament, a kind of rococo of taste in every respect, on to the Old Testament to make a single book, a “Bible,” a “book in itself ”: this is perhaps the greatest piece of temerity and “sin against the spirit” that literary Europe has on its conscience.
F RO M The Antichrist B Y Friedrich Nietzsche27
Christianity should not be prettified and or- namented: it has waged deadly war against the higher type of human being; it has raised an edict against all the basic instincts . . . and out of these instincts it has distilled evil and the Evil One: the strong as the characteristi- cally reprehensible, the “reprobate.” Christi- anity takes sides with everything weak and base, with every failure; it has made an ideal of what contradicts the instinct of strong life to maintain itself; it has corrupted the reason of even the strongest in spirit . . . in its fear of them it has bred the opposite sort:—the house pet, the herd animal, the sick human animal:—the Christian. As long as the priest is considered a higher type of human—this career refuter, slanderer, and poisoner of life— there is no answer to the question: what is truth? For truth has been stood on her head when the conscious proponent of nothingness and negation is welcomed as the representa- tive of “truth.” In Christianity, morality and religion do not have even a single point of contact with reality.
. . . This world of pure fiction is greatly inferior
to the world of dreams, so far as the latter mir- rors reality, and the former falsifies, devalues, and negates reality. . . . Who alone has good cause to lie his way out of reality? One who suffers from it!
. . .
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
A German philosopher who declared himself the archenemy of tradi- tional morality and Christianity and spent much of his life writing po- lemics against them. His most sustained and vicious attack (partly included in the text) is in one of his last books, Antichrist (1888). Al- though Nietzsche is generally known as an immoralist (a name he chose for himself), his moral philosophy is actually an attack on one conception of morality in order to replace it with another. The moral- ity he attacked was the morality of traditional Christianity as defined by Kant. The morality he sought to defend was the ancient morality of personal excellence, as defined by Aristotle. Nietzsche referred to the first as “slave morality,” suggesting that it was suitable only for the weak and servile, and to the latter as “master morality,” suggest- ing that it was the morality of the strong and independent few.
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer—Above a Sea of Fog (ca. 1817). Nietzsche believed that traditional Christianity has undermined believ- ers’ psychological well-being; consequently, he thought that a cultural turn toward atheism could represent a move toward greater spiritual health. (bpk, Berlin/Hamburger Kunsthalle/Elke Walford/Art Resource, NY)
27 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, trans. Clancy Martin.
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The Christian concept of God—God as god of the sick, God as a spider, God as spirit—is among the most corrupt concepts of the divine the world has ever ac- cepted. It may well represent the low-water mark in the descending development of divine kinds.
. . . This pitiful god of Christian monotono-theism! This hybrid creation of decay,
this mix of zero, concept and contradiction, in which every instinct of decadence, every timorousness and exhaustion of the soul, finds its justification!
F RO M The Gay Science B Y Friedrich Nietzsche28
The meaning of our cheerfulness.—The greatest recent event—that “God is dead,” that belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable—is even now beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. At least for the few, whose eyes—in whose eyes the suspicion is strong and fine enough for this spectacle, some sun seems to have set and some ancient deep trust has been transformed into doubt; to them our old world with every day looks more like evening: more mistrustful, stranger, “older.” But in general one may say: the event itself is much too great, too distant, too re- moved from the capacity of the many for understanding, for even its harbingers to be supposed as having arrived yet. One should suppose all the less that many people yet know what this event truly means—and how much must collapse now that this belief has been undermined, because it is built on the foundation of this belief, is supported by it, has developed on it: for example, our entire European morality. This long abundance and succession of collapse, destruction, ruin and disaster that is now upon us—who today could guess enough of it to feel the need to play the teacher and first prophet of this monstrous logic of horror, the proclaimer of a dark- ness and an eclipse of the sun the like of which has probably yet to occur on earth?
. . . The first consequences, the consequences for us, are just the opposite of what one
might expect: they are not at all sad and dark but rather like a new barely describable sort of light, happiness, relief, exhilaration, encouragement, daybreak. Indeed, we philosophers and “free spirits” feel, when we hear the news that “the old god is dead,” as if a new dawn shines on us; our hearts overflow with gratitude, astonishment, pre- sentiments, expectations. At long last the horizon looks free to us once more, even if it is not bright; at long last our ships may venture out once more, venture out to brave any risk; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is allowed once more; the sea, our sea, lies open once more; perhaps never yet has there been such an “open sea.”
In the twentieth century, the attack was given a psychoanalytic foundation by Sigmund Freud, who also reduces the grand aspirations of religion to mere illusions, but, even worse, the illusions of an insecure child who has never properly grown up.
28 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Clancy Martin.
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F RO M The Future of an Illusion B Y Sigmund Freud29
. . . the psychical origin of religious ideas. These, which are given out as teachings, are not precipitates of experience or end results of thinking: they are illusions, ful- filments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes. As we already know, the terrify- ing impression of helplessness in childhood aroused the need for protection—for protection through love—which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one. Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the dangers of life; the establishment of a moral world- order ensures the fulfilment of the demands of justice, which have so often remained unfulfilled in human civilization; and the prolongation of earthly existence in a future life provides the local and temporal framework in which these wish- fulfilments shall take place. Answers to the riddles that tempt the curiosity of man, such as how the universe began or what the relation is between body and mind, are developed in conformity with the underlying assumptions of this system. It is an enormous relief to the individual psyche if the conflicts of its childhood arising from the father-complex—conflicts which it has never wholly overcome—are re- moved from it and brought to a solution which is universally accepted.
When I say that these things are all illusions, I must define the meaning of the word. An illusion is not the same thing as an error; nor is it necessarily an error. Aristotle’s belief that vermin are developed out of dung (a belief to which ignorant
people still cling) was an error; so was the belief of a former generation of doctors that tabes dorsalis is the result of sexual excess. It would be incorrect to call these errors illu- sions. On the other hand, it was an illusion of Columbus’s that he had discovered a new searoute to the Indies. The part played by his wish in this error is very clear. One may de- scribe as an illusion the assertion made by cer- tain nationalists that the Indo- Germanic race is the only one capable of civilization; or the belief, which was only destroyed by psycho- analysis, that children are creatures without sexuality. What is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes. In this respect they come near to psychiatric delusions. But they differ from them, too, apart from the more complicated structure of delusions. In the case of delusions, we empha- size as essential their being in contradiction with reality. Illusions need not necessarily be false—that is to say, unrealizable or in
“Illusions need not necessarily be false—that is to say, unrealizable or in contradiction of reality.” — S I G M U N D F R E U D
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
An Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist and founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology.
Freud contended that religion offers illusory wish fulfillment that indulges immaturity. (Adoc-photos/ Art Resource, NY)
29 From The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey. Translation Copyright © 1961 by James Strachey, renewed 1989 by Alix Strachey. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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contradiction of reality. . . . Thus we call a belief an illusion when a wish-fulfilment is a prominent factor in its motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relations to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification.
Freud agrees with Marx and Nietzsche that the only proper concern of man is humanity. But is this necessarily an indictment of religion? Freud was fascinated by Jewish mysticism, and Nietzsche offered extravagant praise of Buddhism. For many people, religion is an emo- tional support without which they could not even function as human beings. Many Christians, Muslims, and Jews have used their religion as a metaphysical basis for concerted social activism and humanism—but also for “holy” wars. And therein lies a problem. No one can deny that there have been thousands of atrocities—to both spirit and body—in the name of religion. But is such cruelty essential to religion? Most believers would deny this. And no one has demonstrated that religion is as easily dispensable as some of its critics have suggested. (Even Nietzsche had his serious doubts.)
30 Mary Daly, “The Qualitative leap beyond Patriarchal Religion,” Quest 1, Spring 1975.
• The philosopher Karl Marx once remarked that religion was “the opium of the people.” Would Nietzsche and Freud have agreed? Do you? Explain.
• What are the human characteristics that religion emphasizes, and why does Nietzsche find them so contemptible?
• What does Freud mean when he says that the religious person is like a child?
Still further doubts about the concept of God are raised by the feminist philosopher Mary Daly and the Buddhist philosopher Victor A. Gunasekara.
Mary Daly (1928–2010) was an American philosopher and theologian. She taught for many years at Boston College and was one of the great feminists of the twentieth century.
F RO M”Wanted: ‘God’ or ‘The Goddess’“ B Y Mary Daly30
Feminist consciousness is experienced by a significant number of women as ontological becoming, that is, being. This process re- quires existential courage, courage to be and to see, which is both revolutionary and reve- latory, revealing our participation in ulti- mate reality as Verb, as intransitive Verb.
The question obviously arises of the need for anthropomorphic symbols for this reality. There is no inherent contra- diction between speaking of ultimate real- ity as Verb and speaking of this as personal. The Verb is more personal than a mere static noun. However, if we choose to image the Verb in anthropomorphic symbols,
Mary Daly (1928–2010)
American philosopher and feminist.
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we can run into a problematic phenomenon which sociologist Henri Desroche calls “crossing.” “Crossing” refers to a notable tendency among oppressed groups to attempt to change or adapt the ideological tools of the oppressor, so that they can be used against him and for the oppressed. The problem here is the fact that the functioning of “crossing” does not generally move far enough outside the ideologi- cal framework it seeks to undermine. . . .
Some women religious leaders within Western culture in modern times have performed something like a “crossing” operation, notably such figures as Mary Baker Eddy and Ann Lee, in stressing the “maternal” aspect of the divinity. The result has been mixed. Eddy’s “Father-Mother God” is, after all, the Christian God. Nor does Ann Lee really move completely outside the Christian framework. . . . But it is . . . necessary to note that their theologies lack explicit relevance to the concrete problems of the oppression of women. Intellection and spirituality remain cut off from creative political movement. In earlier periods also there were women within the Christian tradition who tried to “cross” the Christian all-male God and Christ to some degree. An outstanding example was Juliana of Norwich, an English recluse and mystic who lived in the last half of the fourteenth century. Juliana’s “God” and “Jesus” were—if language conveys anything—hermaphroditic con- structs, with the primary identity clearly male. While there are many levels on which I could analyze Juliana’s words about “our beloved Mother, Jesus (who) feeds us with himself,” suffice it to say here that this hermaphroditic image is somewhat less than attractive. The “androgynous” God and Jesus present problems analogous to and related to those problems which occur in connection with the use of the term “androgyny” to describe the direction of women’s becoming. There is something like a “liberation of the woman within” the (primarily male) God and Jesus. . . .
One fact that stands out here is that these were women whose imaginations were still partially controlled by Christian myth. My contention is that they were caught in a contradiction. . . . I am saying that there is a profound contradiction between the inherent logic of radical feminism and the inherent logic of the Christian symbol system. . . .
Both the reformers and those who leave Judaism and Christianity behind are contributing and will contribute in different ways to the process of the becoming of women. The point here is not to place value judgments upon individual persons and their efforts—and there are heroic efforts at all points of the feminist spectrum. Rather, it is to disclose an inherent logic in feminism. The courage which some women have in affirming this logic comes in part from having been on the feminist journey for quite awhile. Encouragement comes also from knowing increasing numbers of women who have chosen the route of the logical conclusion. Some of these women have “graduated” from Christianity or religious Judaism, and some have never even been associated closely with church or synagogue, but have discovered spiritual and mythic depths in the women’s movement itself. What we share is a sense of becoming in cosmic process, which I prefer to call the Verb, Be-ing, and which some would still call “God.”
For some feminists concerned with the spiritual depth of the movement, the word “God” is becoming increasingly problematic, however. This by no means indicates a movement in the direction of “atheism” or “agnosticism” or “secular- ism,” as these terms are usually understood. Rather, the problem arises precisely because of the spiritual and mythic quality perceived in feminist process itself. Some use expressions such as “power of being.” Some reluctantly still use the word
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“God” while earnestly trying to divest the term of its patriarchal associations, at- tempting to think perhaps of the “God of the philosophers” rather than the overtly masculist and oppressive “God of the theologians.” But the problem becomes in- creasingly troublesome, the more the “God” of the various Western philosophers is subjected to feminist analysis. “He”—“Jahweh” still often hovers behind the abstractions, stunting our own thought, giving us a sense of contrived doublethink. The word “God” just may be inherently oppressive.
Indeed, the word “Goddess” has also been problematic, but for different reasons. Some have been worried about the problem of “crossing.” However, that difficulty appears more and more as a pseudo-difficulty when it is recognized that “crossing” is likely to occur only when one is trying to work within a sexist tradition. For ex- ample, Christian women who in their “feminist liturgies” experiment with refer- ring to “God” as “she” and to the Trinity as “The Mother, the Daughter, and the Holy Spirit,” are still working within all the boundaries of the same symbolic framework and the same power structure. Significantly, their services are at the same place and time as “the usual,” and are regarded by most of the constituency of the churches as occasional variations of “business as usual.”
As women who are outside the Christian church inform ourselves of evidence sup- porting the existence of ancient matriarchy and of evidence indicating that the Gods of patriarchy are indeed contrived, pale derivatives and reversals of the Great God- dess of an earlier period, the fear of mere “crossing” appears less appropriate and per- haps even absurd. There is also less credibility allowable to the notion that “Goddess” would function like “God” in reverse, that is, to legitimate an oppressive “female- dominated” society, if one is inclined to look seriously at evidence that matriarchal society was not structured like patriarchy, that it was non-hierarchical. . . .
Clearly, it would be inappropriate and arrogant to try to “explain” or “inter- pret” this experience of another person. I can only comment that many women I know are finding power of being within the self, rather than in “internalized” father images. As a philosopher, my preference has been for abstractions. Indeed I have always been annoyed and rather embarrassed by “anthropomorphic” symbols, preferring terms such as “ground and power of being” (Paul Tillich), “beyond subjectivity and objectivity” (William James), “the Encompassing” (Karl Jaspers), or the commonly used “Ultimate Reality.” . . .
Here philosopher Victor Gunasekara discusses the Buddhist rejection of the concept of God. All Buddhists, he argues, are athiests. Victor Gunasekara has written a number of works on Buddhism, including Basic Buddhism: A Modern Introduction to the Buddha’s Teaching.
F RO M “The Buddhist Attitude to God” B Y Victor Gunasekara31
B U DD H I S M A S A N O N -T H E I S T I C R E L I G I O N
Buddhism is unique amongst the religions of the world because it does not have any place for God in its soteriology. Indeed most Asian religions (with the possible
31 From “The Buddhist Attitude to God” (seminar 1993) from Buddhist Society of Queensland website, www.uq.net .au/slsoc/budsoc.html. Reprinted with the permission of the Buddhist Society of Queensland.
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exception of some extremely devotional forms of Hinduism) are essentially non-theis- tic, in that God does not occupy the central place that is accorded to him in monotheistic religious traditions. But Buddhism goes beyond most of these other religions in that it
is positively anti-theistic because the very notion of God conflicts with some prin- ciples which are fundamental to the Buddhist view of the world and the role of humans in it. . . .
However Buddhism is not atheistic in the sense that modern secularism, ratio- nalism, humanism, etc. could be regarded to be atheistic (although it has much in common with them). Buddhism is not concerned primarily with refuting the notion of God (as some atheistic writers have done). It is principally concerned with developing a method of escape from the worldly ills. This involves undertak- ing a method of mental discipline and a code of conduct which is sufficient to sat- isfy the most demanding of spiritual requirements. Indeed only very little of the Buddha’s voluminous discourses deal directly with the question of God. He was more interested in expounding a way to personal salvation, and to improve the weal of mankind both in this world and in the worlds to come. It is this task that informs most of the discourses of the Buddha which later came to be compiled into the various Canons of Buddhism.
The Buddha did not take an ambiguous or agnostic position on the question of God as he is sometimes represented as having taken by theistically inclined writers. The Buddha has stated his position on God in clear and unequivocal terms.
T H E N O T I O N O F G O D It is first of all necessary to establish what is meant by the term “God.” This term is used to designate a Supreme Being endowed with the qualities of omnipotence and omniscience, who is the creator of the universe with all its contents, and the chief law-giver for humans. God is generally considered as being concerned with the welfare of his human creatures, and the ultimate salvation of those who follow his dictates. God is therefore a person of some kind, and the question whether such an entity exists or not is fundamental to all theistic systems.
In contrast to this notion of a personal God some modern theologians have in- terpreted the term “God” as representing some kind of abstract principle of good (or “ground of being”). This view was first developed in the ancient Indian Upanishads where God is equated with an abstract principle (Brahman). The an- cient Indian philosophers could entertain such a view because they also had a theory of karma which really does away with the need for a personal God. Bud- dhists too have a theory of karma, which is different from that of the Hindus, and which even more unequivocally dispenses with the need for a Deity. The use of the term “God” to denote an abstract reality by monotheistic theologians who have no theory of karma is difficult to justify; one suspects that this is merely a device to explain away the contradictions that arise from the notion of a personal God. In fact the actual practice of theistic religion proceeds as if God is a real person of some kind or other.
Just as Buddhism rejects the notion of a Supreme God it also rejects the notion of an abstract God-principle operating in the universe. . . . The Buddha argues that the three most commonly given attributes of God, viz. omnipotence, omniscience
Victor Gunasekara
An Australian philosopher and Buddhist.
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and benevolence towards humanity, cannot all be mutually compatible with the existential fact of dukkha [or suffering].
From the Buddhist standpoint the classic theistic statement that “God created man in his (i.e., God’s) image” has actually to be reversed. It is man who has created God in his (i.e., man’s) image! And as man’s own image changes so does that of his God. Thus in the present time with the rise of feminism there is an attempt to change the gender of God from a man to a woman (or perhaps even to a neuter). To liberate himself mankind has to shed his delusions, and one of these is the existence of God.
T H E G O D - C O N C E P T A N D B U DD H I S T P R I N C I P L E S Quite apart from explicit statements refuting the God-idea there is a fundamental incompatibility between the notion of God and basic Buddhist principles. . . .
A fundamental Buddhist belief is that all phenomena without exemption (includ- ing all animate beings) have three essential characteristics. These are dukkha, anicca (impermanence), and anatta (insubstantiality, “no-soul”). The attributes of God are not consistent with these universal marks of existence. Thus God must be free from dukkha; he must be eternal (and hence not subject to anicca); finally he must have a distinct unchanging identity (and therefore lack the characteristic of anatta).
Another concomitant of the God-idea that is fundamentally incompatible with Buddhism is the belief that God acts as the final judge and could determine if in- dividuals go the heaven or hell. According to Buddhism the destination of indi- viduals is determined by the karmic law which cannot be interfered [with] by any external process. Only individuals can effect their karmic destinies; even a Buddha cannot “pardon” or otherwise interfere with the karmic process. In Buddhism there is simply no place for a God even if one were to exist.
There is also no place for the notion of vicarious salvation, or atonement for human sins by a “suffering” God. The Buddha affirms that “by oneself is kamma done and by oneself is kamma undone.” According to Buddhism no one (and this includes gods or God) can save another. This is a cardinal principle of the Buddha which cannot be reconciled with the declared attributes and actions of God.
The Buddhist path to salvation is based on deeds (including mental culture through “meditation”) not prayer. God appears to Buddhists to be a vain being expecting all others to pray to him and worship him. Indeed such prayer seems to be the most decisive factor in a person’s salvation, not necessarily any good or bad deeds by him. But as mentioned above in Buddhism it is volitional action which determines the karma of an individual.
There are no doubt some similarities in the moral codes of Buddhism and some theistic religions. Things like compassion are inculcated in all religions. But in Buddhism this does not arise from a heavenly dictate and there is no limitation in the exercise of these virtues as occurs in some theistic religions.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
Religion is one of the most important, and therefore one of the most controversial and sensi- tive, parts of our lives. It is therefore also one of the most important, controversial, and sensi- tive areas of philosophy. Initially, religion seems to be part of metaphysics, an examination of the way the world really is. But we have seen that religion is much more than a search for
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knowledge; it is also a search for meaning, for morality, for ultimate justice, and for a type of experience that is like no other. Philosophy of religion begins as a metaphysical discipline, often attempting to define a supreme entity of a certain type (God) and to demonstrate His existence through rational arguments and proofs. But many philosophers and religious people deny that such a metaphysical approach is either possible or appropriate. Some phi- losophers deny that we can know God but insist that it is necessary to have faith. And while some philosophers interpret this faith as a form of rationality, others claim that it is strictly an emotional commitment beyond the domain of rational argument and understanding.
These various approaches to the philosophy of religion are all very much alive, and so, too, are the doubts that accompany each approach. Those who believe that we can know God are at odds with those who deny that we can know Him (or Her). Those who insist on faith disagree among themselves whether this faith can be or ought to be justified. There are those who want to believe in God but find that certain problems (for example, the problem of evil) make it difficult or impossible for them to do so. There are those who see belief in God as an outmoded belief, left over from the inadequate science and metaphysics of previ- ous centuries. And there are those who attack religion as not only outmoded, but as insidi- ous, as a symptom of decadence, weakness, or immaturity. But in the face of these various doubts and attacks, the world’s religious traditions continue to develop their responses and to raise new questions. Religion is humanity’s oldest philosophy, and it is still the most con- troversial area of philosophical concern. As we have seen, some philosophical religions, like Buddhism, argue that there is no God. In some ways we might say that all philosophical wor- ries begin with the religious impulse—and so as long as we have religion, we will philosophize.
CHAPTER REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. Give Anselm’s version of the ontological argument for the existence of God and Descartes’s revision of that argument. Then explain Kant’s attack on the argument. Do you agree with Kant that existence is not a predicate? Can you think of any other apparent predicates that are not actual predicates? If existence is a special case, why?
2. Hume argues that if God built the universe, he was not a very good architect. Some theists respond that the universe was built as well as it could be and that any changes would only make it worse. Do you find this response convincing? The poet Wallace Stevens once wrote a letter to his wife claiming that “with a wishing lamp and a bucket of sand I could make a world better than this one.” Do you agree with Stevens? Can you imagine a better world? What would you change?
3. Explain how Freud’s attack on Christianity developed from Marx’s and Nietzsche’s critiques. What does Freud mean by the word illusion? Are illusions always bad? Could Christianity and other forms of religion be good, helpful illusions? How would Nietzsche respond to your answer?
4. What are the differences between the rationalist and irrationalist views of faith? Which do you find convincing?
5. How would you characterize the pragmatic argument for God’s existence? What are its weaknesses, if any? Do you think that it undermines belief in God?
6. What is the problem of evil and what are the theists’ responses to it? Which of their arguments do you find convincing, if any?
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7. Is the idea of God fundamentally sexist?
8. How can you summarize the Buddhist view that religion does not need God?
KEY TERMS
Abrahamic religions agnostic anthropomorphism argument from design atheist Bhagavadgı̄tā (“Gı̄tā”) Brahma (“Brahman”) Buddha cosmological argument deism dharma
faith God illusion ineffable karma Krishna mysticism nihility omnipotent omnipresent omniscient
ontological argument pantheism patriarchy problem of evil subjective truth Sufism teleological argument theist transcendence
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
Some good general collections on religion and the philosophy of religion are Willard G. Oxtoby, World Religion, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Stephen Phil- lips, Philosophy of Religion: A Global Approach (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1995); Steven M. Cahn, ed., Ten Essential Texts in the Philosophy of Religion (New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 2004); louis S. Pojman and Michael Rea, eds., Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, 5th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2007); Charles Taliaferro and Paul J. Griffiths, eds., Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003); and William J. Wainwright, Philosophy of Religion, 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Press, 1998).
A general discussion of religious issues is J. Hick, Faith and Knowledge, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966).
A good series of lectures on the problem of evil is Peter Van Inwagen, The Problem of Evil (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
David Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1998) makes excellent and provocative reading.
A convenient collection of Søren Kierkegaard’s writings is W. H. Auden, The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard (New York: New York Review of Books Classics, 1999).
Two useful studies of Kierkegaard are John D. Caputo and Simon Critchley, How to Read Kierkegaard (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008); and louis Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972).
The selections from Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud are developed in Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. T. Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963); Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Antichrist” in The Viking Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1976); and Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. W. D. Robson-Scott, rev. ed. by James Strachey (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964).
On medieval religions, see A. Hyman and J. Walsh, Philosophy in the Middle Ages, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2010).
For more on Nishitani’s perspective, see Nishitani Keiji, Religion and Nothingness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). See also D. T. Suzuki, Zen Buddhism (New York: Doubleday, 1956).
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3 | Knowledge Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither
and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality
as a man. Suddenly, I waked, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly,
or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.
Z H UA N G Z I 1
After an evening of heated but fruitless metaphysical debate with a number of his friends, the British physician John Locke turned to them and asked, “Shouldn’t we first determine whether we are capable of answering such questions?” They agreed. Perhaps you are think- ing much the same thing. These great metaphysical systems are surely monuments to human intelligence. But do they achieve what they are intended to? Do they tell us “the way the world really is”? Since each of the contending systems claims that it does, how can it be that they disagree? Which is right? And how can we decide?
In 1690 Locke took philosophy around a sharp turn, one that had been suggested by Descartes a half century before. But Descartes had broached the question, “What can we know?” only as a preface to his metaphysics. Locke, on the other hand, decided to put ques- tions about reality on the shelf until he could develop an adequate theory of human knowl- edge. Accordingly, his great book is not primarily an inquiry into substance or reality or God or truth (although all of these enter in); it is An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. From metaphysics, the study of ultimate reality, we now turn to epistemology, the study of human knowledge—how we get it, what it is, whether we have it, or why we don’t.
Even before Plato, Parmenides had seen that between a false belief and knowledge of reality are many opinions and appearances of reality, which might be very different from the reality itself. Plato’s “Myth of the Cave” illustrates exactly this distinction. Descartes, al- though he distrusted his senses and wasn’t certain that they gave accurate representations of reality, at least could be certain of the appearances themselves—he could not be mis- taken about how things appeared. And here is the problem that has defined epistemology,
1 From Herbert A. Giles, trans., Chuang-Tzu: Taoist Philosopher and Chinese Mystic, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961 [1889], p. 47.
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the seeming abyss between reality and mere appearance. Perhaps we know the appearances of things, but how can we know that we know the reality “behind” them?
The problem was stated succinctly by the best-known British philosopher of the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell, in a little volume called The Problems of Philosophy, in which he says the following:
F RO M The Problems of Philosophy B Y Bertrand Russell2
In daily life, we assume as certain many things which, on a closer scrutiny, are found to be so full of apparent contradictions that only a great amount of thought en- ables us to know what it is that we really may believe. In the search for certainty, it is natural to begin with our present experiences, and in some sense, no doubt, knowledge is to be derived from them. But any state-
ment as to what it is that our immediate experiences make us know is very likely to be wrong. It seems to me that I am now sitting in a chair, at a table of a certain shape, on which I see sheets of paper with writing or print. By turning my head I see out of the window buildings and clouds and the sun. I believe that the sun is about ninety-three million miles from the earth; that it is a hot globe many times bigger than the earth; that, owing to the earth’s rotation, it rises every morning, and will continue to do so for an indefinite time in the future. I believe that, if any other normal person comes into my room, he will see the same chairs and tables and books and papers as I see, and that the table which I see is the same as the table which I feel pressing against my arm. All this seems to be so evident as to be hardly worth stating, except in answer to a man who doubts whether I know anything. Yet all this may be reasonably doubted, and all of it requires much careful discussion before we can be sure that we have stated it in a form that is wholly true.
To make our difficulties plain, let us concentrate atten- tion on the table. To the eye it is oblong, brown and shiny, to the touch it is smooth and cool and hard; when I tap it, it gives out a wooden sound. Any one else who sees and feels and hears the table will agree with this description, so that it might seem as if no difficulty would arise; but as soon as we try to be more precise our troubles begin. Al- though I believe that the table is “really” of the same colour all over, the parts that reflect the light look much brighter than the other parts, and some parts look white because of reflected light. I know that, if I move, the parts that reflect the light will be different, so that the apparent distribution of colours on the table will change. It follows that if several people are looking at the table at the same moment, no two of them will see exactly the same
What does a table really look like? (© Shutterstock.com/donatas1205)
How do we know whether we are dreaming? (© Shutterstock.com/Holger Wulschlaeger)
2 Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, oxford: oxford University Press, 1912.
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distribution of colours, because no two can see it from exactly the same point of view, and any change in the point of view makes some change in the way the light is reflected.
For most practical purposes the differences are unimportant, but to the painter they are all-important: the painter has to unlearn the habit of thinking that things seem to have the colour which common sense says they “really” have, and to learn the habit of seeing things as they appear. Here we have already the beginning of one of the distinctions that cause most trouble in philosophy—the distinction be- tween “appearance” and “reality,” between what things seem to be and what they are. The painter wants to know what things seem to be, the practical man and the philosopher want to know what they are; but the philosopher’s wish to know this is stronger than the practical man’s, and is more troubled by knowledge as to the difficulties of answering the question.
To return to the table. It is evident from what we have found, that there is no colour which preeminently appears to be the colour of the table, or even of any one particular part of the table—it appears to be of different colours from different points of view, and there is no reason for regarding some of these as more really its colour than others. And we know that even from a given point of view the colour will seem different by artificial light, or to a colour-blind man, or to a man wearing blue spectacles, while in the dark there will be no colour at all, though to touch and hearing the table will be unchanged. This colour is not something which is inherent in the table, but something depending upon the table and the spectator and the way the light falls on the table. When, in ordinary life, we speak of the colour of the table, we only mean the sort of colour which it will seem to have to a normal spectator from an ordinary point of view under usual conditions of light. But the other colours which appear under other conditions have just as good a right to be considered real; and therefore, to avoid favouritism, we are compelled to deny that, in itself, the table has any one particular colour.
The same thing applies to the texture. With the naked eye one can see the grain, but otherwise the table looks smooth and even. If we looked at it through a micro- scope, we should see roughnesses and hills and valleys, and all sorts of differences that are imperceptible to the naked eye. Which of these is the “real” table? We are naturally tempted to say that what we see through the microscope is more real, but that in turn would be changed by a still more powerful microscope. If, then, we cannot trust what we see with the naked eye, why should we trust what we see through a microscope? Thus, again, the confidence in our sense with which we began deserts us.
The shape of the table is not better. We are all in the habit of judging as to the “real” shapes of things, and we do this so unreflectingly that we come to think we actually see the real shapes. But, in fact, as we all have to learn if we try to draw, a given thing looks different in shape from every different point of view. If our table is “really” rectangular, it will look, from almost all points of view, as if it had two acute angles and two obtuse angles. If opposite sides are parallel, they will look as if they converged to a point away from the spectator; if they are of equal length, they will look as if the nearer side were longer. All these things are not commonly noticed in looking at a table, because experience has taught us to construct the “real” shape from the apparent shape, and the “real” shape is what interests us as practical men. But the “real” shape is not what we see; it is something inferred from what we see. And what we see is constantly changing in shape as we move
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about the room; so that here again the senses seem not to give us the truth about the table itself, but only about the appearance of the table.
Similar difficulties arise when we consider the sense of touch. It is true that the table always gives us a sensation of hardness, and we feel that it resists pressure. But the sensation we obtain depends upon how hard we press the table and also upon what part of the body we press with; thus the various sensations due to various pressures or various parts of the body cannot be supposed to reveal directly any definite property of the table, but at most to be signs of some property, which causes all the sensations, but is not actually apparent in any of them. And the same applies still more obviously to the sounds which can be elicited by rapping the table.
Thus it becomes evident that the real table, if there is one, is not the same as what we immediately experience by sight or touch or hearing. The real table, if there is one, is not immediately known to us at all, but must be an inference from what is immediately known. Hence, two very difficult questions at once arise; namely, (1) Is there a real table at all? (2) If so, what sort of object can it be?
In these few pages, Russell succeeds in summarizing the problems that have dominated British philosophy since Locke’s original epistemological studies. But why say “British phi- losophy”? Why should this problem have been more serious in Great Britain than on the continent of Europe, where most of the great metaphysicians were working? Why should it have had more impact on Locke and his followers than on Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and their latter-day followers? Because of a single profound difference, which has created a gen- eral gap in understanding between British-American philosophy and philosophy from the European continent. Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz retained their faith in human reason’s ability to give us knowledge of reality, despite the fact that reality was beyond our every possible experience. Because of their confidence in the powers of reason, they are usually called rationalists. Because it happens that all three were from the continent of Europe (Descartes was French; Spinoza, Dutch; and Leibniz, German), they are often called conti- nental rationalists. The movement developed by John Locke, on the other hand, is called empiricism, because of its insistence upon the data of experience (or empirical data) as the primary source of knowledge. (A datum [plural, data] is a bit of “given” information; modern empiricist philosophers sometimes talk of sense-data, that is, the information immediately given by the senses.) Also included in this group of empiricists are Bishop George Berkeley3 and David Hume, whom we shall also meet in this chapter. Because they were all from the British Isles they are sometimes called British empiricists. (Berkeley was Irish; Hume, Scottish; Russell is generally considered a more contemporary member of this same movement.)
“The real table, if there is one, is not immediately known to us at all, but must be an inference from what is immediately known.” — B E R T R A N D R U S S E L L
• What problem does the “appearance/reality distinction” pose for epistemology?
• Is there a “problem of knowledge”? If so, what is it?
Although epistemology received renewed attention and a new kind of treatment in the era after Descartes, the rift between the claims of rationalists and those of empiricists was not new. Plato stresses the distinction between knowledge we gain through the senses,
3 Bishop Berkeley traveled to the United States. Berkeley, California, is named after him.
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which he considers unreliable, and true knowledge, which is knowledge of the Forms. (For discussion of this distinction, see Chapter 1.) In the following passage from Republic, Plato’s Socrates compares the Form or Idea of the good to the sun, the supreme reality that gives light to the objects of the world and enables us to see. Reason enables us to gain knowledge of this reality, while our senses give us inferior, fallible images.
Socrates points out that what we often take to be “knowledge” falls short of a genuine grasp of reality, which he equates with insight into the Forms themselves. He categorizes our “knowledge” of things within the material world as ultimately matters of “opinion” and “belief,” since it is often untrustworthy. Socrates subdivides each of these categories (the invisible and the visible) into two further sections, one providing more shadowy versions of the other. In the case of the “invisible” realm (that of the Forms), the lesser subdivision is that of understanding that makes use of images instead of a direct grasp of reality itself. As ex- amples, he points to mathematicians attaining discoveries by beginning with certain as- sumptions (axioms) and deriving conclusions from them, making use of likenesses or images (e.g. drawings of triangles) to aid them. They come to a certain understanding in this way, but this amounts to a “lower” form of knowledge than that indicated in the other section of the “invisible” realm. This section involves utilizing reason to ascend from hypotheses to insight into “first principles,” the fundamental truth about ultimate reality, which amount to insight into the Forms themselves. The superior of the two subdivisions in the “visible” realm in- volves coming to “know” objects in our world through the senses, while the lower is the level of grasping shadows and reflections. While the former is more reliable than the latter, both fall short of real knowledge.
F RO M Republic B Y Plato4
This reality, then, that gives their truth to the objects of knowledge and the power of knowing to the knower, you must say is the idea of good, and you must conceive it as being the cause of knowledge, and of truth in so far as known. Yet fair as they both are, knowledge and truth, in supposing it to be something fairer still than these you will think rightly of it. But as for knowledge and truth, even as in our illustration it is right to deem light and vision sunlike, but never to think that they are the sun, so here it is right to consider these two their counterparts, as being like the good or boniform, but to think that either of them is the good is not right. Still higher honor belongs to the possession and habit of the good.
An inconceivable beauty you speak of, he said, if it is the source of knowledge and truth, and yet itself surpasses them in beauty. For you surely cannot mean that it is pleasure.
Hush, said I, but examine the similitude of it still further in this way. How? The sun, I presume you will say, not only furnishes to visibles the power of vis-
ibility but it also provides for their generation and growth and nurture though it is not itself generation.
Of course not. In like manner, then, you are to say that the objects of knowledge not only re-
ceive from the presence of the good their being known, but their very existence
4 Plato, from Republic, trans. Paul Shorey, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairnes, Bollingen Series, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980, pp. 745–747.
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and essence is derived to them from it, though the good itself is not essence but still transcends essence in dignity and surpassing power.
And Glaucon very ludicrously said, Heaven save us, hyperbole can no further go. The fault is yours, I said, for compelling me to utter my thoughts about it. And don’t desist, he said, but at least expound the similitude of the sun, if there
is anything that you are omitting. Why, certainly, I said, I am omitting a great deal. Well, don’t omit the least bit, he said. I fancy, I said, that I shall have to pass over much, but nevertheless so far as it is
at present practicable I shall not willingly leave anything out. Do not, he said. Conceive then, said I, as we were saying, that there are these two entities, and
that one of them is sovereign over the intelligible order and region and the other over the world of the eyeball, not to say the sky-ball, but let that pass. You surely apprehend the two types, the visible and the intelligible.
I do. Represent them then, as it were, by a line divided into two unequal sections and
cut each section again in the same ratio—the section, that is, of the visible and that of the intelligible order—and then as an expression of the ratio of their comparative clearness and obscurity you will have, as one of the sections of the visible world, images. By images I mean, first, shadows, and then reflections in water and on surfaces of dense, smooth, and bright texture, and everything of that kind, if you apprehend.
I do. As the second section assume that of which this is a likeness or an image, that is,
the animals about us and all plants and the whole class of objects made by man. I so assume it, he said. Would you be willing to say, said I, that the division in respect of reality and
truth or the opposite is expressed by the proportion—as is the opinable to the knowable so is the likeness to that of which it is a likeness?
I certainly would. Consider then again the way in which we are to make the division of the intel-
ligible section. In what way? By the distinction that there is one section of it which the soul is compelled to
investigate by treating as images the things imitated in the former division, and by means, of assumptions from which it proceeds not up to a first principle but down to a conclusion, while there is another section in which it advances from its as- sumption to a beginning or principle that transcends assumption, and in which it makes no use of the images employed by the other section, relying on ideas only and progressing systematically through ideas.
I don’t fully understand what you mean by this, he said. Well, I will try again, said I, for you will better understand after this preamble.
For I think you are aware that students of geometry and reckoning and such sub- jects first postulate the odd and the even and the various figures and three kinds of angles and other things akin to these in each branch of science, regard them as known, and, treating them as absolute assumptions, do not deign to render any further account of them to themselves or others, taking it for granted that they are obvious to everybody. They take their start from these, and pursuing the inquiry
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from this point on consistently, conclude with that for the investigation of which they set out.
Certainly, he said, I know that. And do you not also know that they further make use of the visible forms and
talk about them, though they are not thinking of them but of those things of which they are a likeness, pursuing their inquiry for the sake of the square as such and the diagonal as such, and not for the sake of the image of it which they draw? And so in all cases. The very things which they mold and draw, which have shadows and images of themselves in water, these things they treat in their turn as only images, but what they really seek is to get sight of those realities which can be seen only by the mind.
True, he said. This then is the class that I described as intelligible, it is true, but with the reser-
vation first that the soul is compelled to employ assumptions in the investigation of it, not proceeding to a first principle because of its inability to extricate itself from and rise above its assumptions, and second, that it uses as images or likenesses the very objects that are themselves copied and adumbrated by the class below them, and that in comparison with these latter are esteemed as clear and held in honor.
I understand, said he, that you are speaking of what falls under geometry and the kindred arts.
Understand then, said I, that by the other section of the intelligible I mean that which the reason itself lays hold of by the power of dialectic, treating its assump- tions not as absolute beginnings but literally as hypotheses, underpinnings, foot- ings, and springboards so to speak, to enable it to rise to that which requires no assumption and is the starting point of all, and after attaining to that again taking hold of the first dependencies from it, so to proceed downward to the conclusion, making no use whatever of any object of sense but only of pure ideas moving on through ideas to ideas and ending with ideas.
I understand, he said, not fully, for it is no slight task that you appear to have in mind, but I do understand that you mean to distinguish the aspect of reality and the intelligible, which is contemplated by the power of dialectic, as something truer and more exact than the object of the so-called arts and sciences whose as- sumptions are arbitrary starting points. And though it is true that those who con- template them are compelled to use their understanding and not their senses, yet because they do not go back to the beginning in the study of them but start from assumptions you do not think they possess true intelligence about them although the things themselves are intelligibles when apprehended in conjunction with a first principle. And I think you call the mental habit of geometers and their like mind or understanding and not reason because you regard understanding as some- thing intermediate between opinion and reason.
Your interpretation is quite sufficient, I said. And now, answering to these four sections, assume these four affections occurring in the soul—intellection or reason for the highest, understanding for the second, belief for the third, and for the last, picture thinking or conjecture—and arrange them in a proportion, considering that they participate in clearness and precision in the same degree as their objects partake of truth and reality.
I understand, he said. I concur and arrange them as you bid.
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The basics of the debate between the rationalists and empiricists is more directly laid out by Plato in his dialogue Theatetus:
F RO M Theatetus B Y Plato5
SOCRATES: But the question you were asked, Theatetus, was not, what are the objects of knowledge, nor yet how many sorts of knowledge there are. We did not want to count them, but to find out what the thing itself—knowledge—is. . . . Perception, you say, is knowledge?
THEATETUS: Yes.
SOCRATES: The account you give of the nature of knowledge is not, by any means, to be despised. It is the same that was given by Protagoras, though he stated it in a somewhat different way. He says, you will remember, that “man is the mea- sure of all things—alike of the being of things that are and of the not-being of things that are not.” No doubt you have read that.
THEATETUS: Yes, often.
SOCRATES: He puts it in this sort of way, doesn’t he, that any given thing “is to me such as it appears to me and is to you such as it appears to you,” you and I being men?
Plato Teaching in the Grove at Academia, by Joshua Cristall (1820) (National Galleries of Scotland, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY )
5 Plato, from Theatetus, trans. F. M. Cornford, reprinted in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairnes, Bollingen Series, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980, p. 61.
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THEATETUS: Yes, that is how he puts it.
SOCRATES: Well, what a wise man says is not likely to be nonsense. So let us follow his meaning. Sometimes, when the same wind is blowing, one of us feels chilly, the other does not, or one may feel slightly chilly, the other quite cold.
THEATETUS: Certainly.
SOCRATES: Well, in that case are we to say that the wind in itself is cold or not cold? Or shall we agree with Protagoras that it is cold to the one who feels chilly and not to the other? . . . [I]ndeed the doctrine is a remarkable one. It declares that nothing is one thing just by itself, nor can you rightly call it by one definite name, nor even say it is of any definite sort.
In this way, Socrates claims that the empiricist cannot have any knowledge at all. He defends the rationalist’s claim earlier in the dialogue:
SOCRATES: You do not suppose a man can understand the name of a thing when he does not know what the thing is?
THEATETUS: Certainly not.
SOCRATES: Then, if he has no idea of knowledge, “knowledge about shoes” conveys nothing to him?
THEATETUS: No.
SOCRATES: “Cobblery” in fact, or the name of any other art has no meaning for anyone who has no conception of knowledge.
Russell, like Theatetus, associated knowledge with perception, or “sense-data.” But if knowledge is perception, then presumably any notion of “substance” we might have must be derived from our perceptions. Socrates claimed that our varied perceptions can never give us a notion of substance. All we would be able to get out of a bunch of differing percep- tions is a bunch of differing perceptions. However, since we have a notion of a substance (in Russell’s example, for instance, of a “table”), we must have gotten it from something other than our perceptions. Knowledge, concludes Socrates, must be something other than per- ception. The continental rationalists, in a sense, agreed with Socrates on this point and claimed that the nonperceptual source of knowledge must be “reason” itself. The British empiricists went the other way, claiming that there simply wasn’t any source of ideas other than perception. (“Perception” actually can mean both “sense experience” and “under- standing.” We mean the first sense here.)
So, how are we to know reality? By retaining confidence in our own powers of abstract reason? or by appeal to experience, which carries with it the threat that we may never know reality beyond appearances? In the pages that follow, you will see one of the most vigorous and long-lasting debates in philosophy, not only between the rationalists and the empiri- cists but among various rationalists and among various empiricists as well.
Is the choice between reason and experience a “false dilemma” (a kind of pseudo- question in which one ignores all but two options)? Among the issues in dispute are not only the relative importance of reason and experience but what reason and experience, respec- tively, amount to. What is an idea that can be known to be true by reason alone—a “truth of reason”? How can we infer from the nature of our private experience what the world “out- side” is like? How do we even know that there is an “external” world? How is it possible to
Author Robert C. Solomon in the wind— can we tell if he is chilly? (© Kathleen M. Higgins)
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have “abstract” ideas, that is, ideas that are not simply based on the concrete particulars of experience, such as this dog, this table, that star over there to the left of the Big Dipper? How do we get the idea, for example, of “dog” in general, not this dog or that dog or big dog or little dog or Chihuahua or German shepherd but just “dog,” which includes all of them?
The question of substance comes up again and again: what is a substance? How do we know of substances? So does the notion of cause. Is an idea caused by an object of which it is the idea, or do we make the idea up, and so “cause” it ourselves? There is also a more specific set of questions: What aspects of a thing are in that thing? What aspects of a thing are rather in us, that is, in the way we perceive it, in the mental apparatus that we use in our knowledge? But beneath the welter of questions and debates, there is a singular shared concern. All of the rationalists and empiricists are men of science who appreciate the ad- vances of modern physics and its kindred disciplines, who think of knowledge as one of the highest human attributes, and who want to understand knowledge and its foundations as a way of justifying their faith in science. At the bottom of all of these disputes, in other words, is that basic admiration and concern for knowledge as such. The question “How is this knowledge possible?” is itself an extension of that same admiration and concern.
A. The Rationalist’s Confidence: Descartes Let’s return to the philosopher who began the modern emphasis on methodology, René Descartes. We have already mentioned his “method of doubt,” but the goal of this method is not to defend the doubts. Quite to the contrary, the goal is to move from doubt to knowl- edge and certainty. Descartes’s doubt is intended only to separate what is doubtful from what is not. He never doubted, nor did his followers, that he would be able to find beliefs about reality. These beliefs would be “clear and distinct” and “perfectly certain.” (Spinoza refers to such ideas as “adequate ideas”; Leibniz calls them “truths of reason.”) once Descartes had found even one such belief, he could use it as a premise from which he could deduce all of his other beliefs about reality. And none of this depends upon the data of ex- perience; it is entirely a process of reason, of examining the clarity of his beliefs and the logi- cal connections between them.
once again, it is important to remind ourselves that these problems and their sometimes radical complications and solutions do not appear in a vacuum. Descartes lived in the time of Galileo, and Galileo’s new science is always in the background of Descartes’s method of doubt. In undermining the traditional science of Aristotle and the Middle Ages, Galileo raised the suspicion that we might not see what we think we see. Colors, for example, seemed to be more in the minds of men and women than in the objects themselves. But if we could be mistaken about something so seemingly certain as the color of objects, Des- cartes reasons, could we not be mistaken about much else besides? Indeed, could we not be mistaken in our perceptions in general? For this reason Descartes appeals to reason rather than to experience (although, as we shall see, he dangerously calls reason into question as well). We might also add that, although he was a devout Catholic, Descartes could not help but be affected by Martin Luther’s challenge to church authority the century before. Thus the insistence of resolving these doubts for oneself, instead of appealing to established authority, was very much a part of the radical temper of the time.
In six famous “meditations,” Descartes begins with the resolve to doubt everything that he believes, that is, until he can find a first premise that is beyond doubt, from which he can then argue for the truth of other beliefs, which he can then use as premises to prove more beliefs, and so on. In the first meditation, he states his method of doubt and begins to elimi- nate all of those beliefs about which he could possibly be mistaken. He doubts his senses;
“I was convinced that I must . . . build anew from the foundation.” — R E N É D E S C A R T E S
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could they not mislead him, as they do in an optical illu- sion or a hallucination? He examines his belief in God; could it be that his Jesuit teachers had been fooling him? He even doubts the existence of the world; is it not conceivable that he is merely dreaming? Here is the first of his meditations.
F RO M “Meditation I” B Y René Descartes6
O F T H E T H I N G S W H I C H M AY B E B RO U G H T W I T H I N T H E S P H E R E O F T H E D O U B T F U L It is now some years since I detected how many were the false beliefs that I had from my earliest youth admitted as true, and how doubtful was ev- erything I had since constructed on this basis; and from that time I was convinced that I must once and for all seriously undertake to rid myself of all the opinions which I had formerly accepted, and commence to build anew from the foundation, if I wanted to establish any firm and permanent structure in the sciences.
In order to “build anew” his system of beliefs and eliminate his false beliefs, Descartes re- solves to doubt everything that he believes. But this does not mean that he has to list every belief he has; that might take forever. Instead, it is necessary only for him to examine those “first principles” upon which all of his other beliefs are based.
Now for this object it is not necessary that I should show that all of these are false— I shall perhaps never arrive at this end. But inasmuch as reason already persuades me that I ought no less carefully to withhold my assent from matters which are not entirely certain and indubitable than from those which appear to me manifestly to be false, if I am able to find in each one some reason to doubt, this will suffice to justify my rejecting the whole. And for that end it will not be requisite that I should examine each in particular, which would be an endless undertaking; for owing to the fact that the destruction of the foundations of necessity brings with it the downfall of the rest of the edifice, I shall only in the first place attack those prin- ciples upon which all my former opinions rested.
The first set of principles to be doubted is that “commonsense” set of beliefs that relies upon the senses: seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touching. Descartes argues that, despite our reliance on these, it is nevertheless possible that our senses could deceive us.
All that up to the present time I have accepted as most true and certain I have learned either from the senses or through the senses; but it is sometimes proved to me that these senses are deceptive, and it is wiser not to trust entirely to any thing by which we have once been deceived.
But it may be that although the senses sometimes deceive us concerning things which are hardly perceptible, or very far away, there are yet many others to be met
6 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, 1911. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
Descartes employs a method of radical doubt. (© iStockphoto.com/nao)
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with as to which we cannot reasonably have any doubt, although we recognise them by their means. For example, there is the fact that I am here, seated by the fire, attired in a dressing gown, having this paper in my hands and other similar matters. And how could I deny that these hands and this body are mine, were it not perhaps that I com- pare myself to certain persons, devoid of sense, whose cerebella are so troubled and clouded by the violent vapours of black bile, that they constantly assure us that they think they are kings when they are really quite poor, or that they are clothed in purple when they are really without covering, or who imagine that they have an earthenware head or are nothing but pumpkins or are made of glass. But they are mad, and I should not be any the less insane were I to follow examples so extravagant.
now Descartes makes one of his most famous philosophical moves: He wonders whether he could possibly be dreaming all of his experience; for in a dream, as we all know, it is possible that everything can still seem perfectly real, as if we were actually awake:
At the same time I must remember that I am a man, and that consequently I am in the habit of sleeping, and in my dreams representing to myself the same things or sometimes even less probable things, than do those who are insane in their waking moments. How often has it happened to me that in the night I dreamt that I found myself in this particular place, that I was dressed and seated near the fire, whilst in reality I was lying undressed in bed! At this moment it does indeed seem to me that it is with eyes awake that I am looking at this paper; that this head which I move is not asleep, that it is deliberately and of set purpose that I extend my hand and per- ceive it; what happens in sleep does not appear so clear nor so distinct as does all this. But in thinking over this I remind myself that on many occasions I have in sleep been deceived by similar illusions, and in dwelling carefully on this reflection I see so manifestly that there are no certain indications by which we may clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep that I am lost in astonishment. And my aston- ishment is such that it is almost capable of persuading me that I now dream.
Thus Descartes has brought himself to the point where he doubts the existence of the whole of nature, even the existence of his own body. After all, one can dream that one’s body has changed grotesquely, and on rare occasions it is even possible to dream that one leaves one’s body altogether. So isn’t it possible, according to this strict method of doubt, to wonder whether one does indeed have a body, just as it is possible to wonder how one knows of the existence of the “external world” in general?
But there is one sphere of knowledge that would seem to be immune even to Descartes’s radical doubting—the principles of arithmetic and geometry:
Arithmetic, Geometry and other sciences of that kind which only treat of things that are very simple and very general, without taking great trouble to ascertain whether they are actually existent or not, contain some measure of certainty and an element of the indubitable. For whether I am awake or asleep, two and three together always form five, and the square can never have more than four sides, and it does not seem possible that truths so clear and apparent can be sus- pected of any falsity [or uncertainty].
Euclid [300 b.c.e.]
A mathematician who founded a school in Alexandria. He is the author of Elements, a systematic compen- dium of mathematical knowl edge that was the standard text in geom- etry for more than two thousand years. In this text Euclid shows that the basic principles of geometry could be proved by assuming only a small set of axioms.Euclid (© Shutterstock.com/pavila)
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But these can be doubted, too. To do so, Descartes turns his attention to God, his Creator, and asks whether God might be deceiving him, even about these apparently certain principles:
Nevertheless I have long had fixed in my mind the belief that an all-powerful God existed by whom I have been created such as I am. But how do I know that He has not brought it to pass that there is no earth, no heaven, no extended body, no magnitude, no place, and that nevertheless [I possess the perceptions of all these things and that] they seem to me to exist just exactly as I now see them? And, besides, as I sometimes imagine that others deceive themselves in the things which they think they know best, how do I know that I am not deceived every time that I add two and three, or count the sides of a square, or judge of things yet simpler, if anything simpler can be imagined? But possibly God has not desired that I should be thus deceived, for He is said to be supremely good. If, however, it is contrary to His goodness to have made me such that I con- stantly deceive myself, it would also appear to be contrary to His goodness to permit me to be sometimes deceived, and nevertheless I cannot doubt that He does permit this.
Descartes’s argument, which he will use again later in his Meditations, is that God is good and would not deceive him. But suppose, just suppose, that God did not exist:
There may indeed be those who would prefer to deny the existence of a God so powerful, rather than believe that all other things are uncertain. But let us not oppose them for the present, and grant that all that is here said of a God is a fable; nevertheless in whatever way they suppose that I have arrived at the state of being that I have reached—whether they attribute it to fate or to accident, or make out that it is by a continual succession of antecedents, or by some other method— since to err and deceive oneself is a defect, it is clear that the greater will be the probability of my being so imperfect as to deceive myself ever, as is the Author to whom they assign my origin the less powerful. To these reasons I have cer- tainly nothing to reply, but at the end I feel constrained to confess that there is nothing in all that I formerly believed to be true, of which I cannot in some measure doubt, and that not merely through want of thought or through levity, but for reasons which are very powerful and maturely considered; so that hence- forth I ought not the less carefully to refrain from giving credence to these opin- ions than to that which is manifestly false, if I desire to arrive at any certainty [in the sciences].
To bring his method to its extreme conclusion, Descartes now introduces a drastic supposi- tion, namely, that not a good God but an evil genius, a malicious demon, is constantly de- ceiving him, even about those things of which he seems to be most certain:
I shall then suppose, not that God who is supremely good and the fountain of truth, but some evil genius not less powerful than deceitful, has employed his whole energies in deceiving me; I shall consider that the heavens, the earth, colours, figures, sound, and all other external things are nought but the illu- sions and dreams of which this genius has availed himself in order to lay traps for my credulity; I shall consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, nor any senses, yet falsely believing myself to possess all these things; I shall remain obstinately attached to this idea, and if by this means it is not in
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my power to arrive at the knowledge of any truth, I may at least do what is in my power [i.e., suspend my judg- ment], and with firm purpose avoid giving credence to any false thing, or being imposed upon by this arch de- ceiver, however powerful and deceptive he may be. But this task is a laborious one, and insensibly a certain las- situde leads me into the course of my ordinary life. And just as a captive who in sleep enjoys an imaginary lib- erty, when he begins to suspect that this liberty is but a dream, fears to awaken, and conspires with these agree- able illusions that the deception may be prolonged, so insensibly of my own accord I fall back into my former opinions, and I dread awakening from this slumber, lest the laborious wakefulness which would follow the tran- quility of this repose should have to be spent not in daylight, but in the excessive darkness of the difficulties which have just been discussed.
Descartes has taken his doubt as far as he can possibly go; he now doubts everything, until, that is, he finds the one principle that is beyond all doubt and perfectly certain. That principle is the fact of his own existence. That he cannot doubt, for if he doubts it, he still knows that he must exist to be able to doubt. Thus, he can be certain of one thing, at least, that he himself exists. From this first principle, Descartes proceeds, through the “Medita- tions” that follow, to reestablish his confidence in other things he believes as well—the exis- tence of God, the existence of the “external world,” and the existence of his own body.
Could an evil genius deceive us about absolutely every- thing? (© iStockphoto.com/Vizerskaya)
• Why does Descartes undertake his enterprise of “methodological doubt”? What does he hope to get out of it?
• What does Descartes’s dream argument demonstrate? Why does he introduce the idea of an evil genius? What does the possibility of the evil genius allow us to doubt?
• What, according to Descartes, is indubitable (beyond doubt)? How can we be cer- tain of anything if we assume that we are being deceived?
Many philosophers have challenged the extremity of Descartes’s method and have often objected that once you begin to doubt things so thoroughly, you will never again be able to argue your way back to certainty. one way of putting this objection is to ask, how can Des- cartes possibly get rid of an “evil genius” who is deceiving him about everything once he has introduced this possibility? Indeed, the supposition of an evil genius was so extreme that even Descartes, in the years that followed the publication and many disputes about his Meditations, insisted that no one should take his argument too seriously. But in the Medita- tions themselves he tried to show that we could indeed get rid of the evil genius. Having watched Descartes work his way into the depth of Plato’s cave, let us now watch him work his way out again.
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F RO M “Meditation II” B Y René Descartes7
O F T H E N AT U R E O F T H E H U M A N M I N D ; A N D T H AT I T I S M O R E E A S I LY K N OW N T H A N T H E B O DY The Meditation of yesterday filled my mind with so many doubts that it is no longer in my power to forget them. And yet I do not see in what manner I can resolve them; and, just as if I had all of a sudden fallen into very deep water, I am so disconcerted that I can neither make certain of setting my feet on the bottom, nor can I swim and so support myself on the surface. I shall nevertheless make an effort and follow anew the same path as that on which I yesterday entered, i.e. I shall proceed by setting aside all that in which the least doubt could be supposed to exist, just as if I had discovered that it was absolutely false; and I shall ever follow in this road until I have met with something which is certain, or at least, if I can do nothing else, until I have learned for certain that there is nothing in the world that is certain. Archimedes, in order that he might draw the terrestrial globe out of its place, and transport it elsewhere, demanded only that one point should be fixed and immovable; in the same way I shall have the right to conceive high hopes if I am happy enough to discover one thing only which is certain and indubitable.
I suppose, then, that all the things that I see are false; I persuade myself that nothing has ever existed of all that my fallacious memory represents to me. I con- sider that I possess no senses; I imagine that body, figure, extension, movement and place are but the fictions of my mind. What, then, can be esteemed as true? Perhaps nothing at all, unless that there is nothing in the world that is certain.
But how can I know there is not something different from those things that I have just considered, of which one cannot have the slightest doubt? Is there not some God, or some other being by whatever name we call it, who puts these reflections into my mind? That is not necessary, for is it not possible that I am ca- pable of producing them myself ? I myself, am I not at least something? But I have already denied that I had senses and body. Yet I hesitate, for what follows from that? Am I so dependent on body and senses that I cannot exist without these? But I was persuaded that there was nothing in all the world, that there was no heaven, no earth, that there were no minds, nor any bodies; was I not then likewise persuaded that I did not exist? Not at all; of a surety I myself did exist since I persuaded myself of something [or merely because I thought of something]. But there is some deceiver or other, very powerful and very cunning, who ever employs his ingenuity in de- ceiving me. Then without doubt I exist also if he deceives me, and let him deceive me as much as he will, he can never cause me to be nothing so long as I think that I am something. So that after having reflected well and carefully examined all things, we must come to the definite conclusion that this proposition: I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it.
Here it is, the one, certain truth that Descartes needs to start his argument. The more famous formulation of this truth, cogito, ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am,” occurs in his earlier Discourse on Method (1637). (A similar argument appears in St. Augustine, more than one thousand years earlier.)
“I am, I exist, is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it.” — R E N É D E S C A R T E S
7 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, 1911. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
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But now that Descartes knows that he exists, what is he? His answer: “a thing which thinks.”
But I do not yet know clearly enough what I am, I who am certain that I am; and hence I must be careful to see that I do not imprudently take some other object in place of myself, and thus that I do not go astray in respect of this knowledge that I hold to be the most certain and most evident of all that I have formerly learned. That is why I shall now consider anew what I believed myself to be before I embarked upon these last reflections; and of my former opinions I shall withdraw all that might even in a small degree be invalidated by the reasons which I have just brought forward, in order that there may be nothing at all left beyond what is absolutely certain and indubitable.
What then did I formerly believe myself to be? Un- doubtedly I believed myself to be a man. But what is a man? Shall I say a reasonable animal? Certainly not; for then I should have to inquire what an animal is, and what is reasonable; and thus from a single question I should insensibly fall into an infinitude of others more difficult; and I should not wish to waste the little time and leisure remaining to me in trying to unravel
subtleties like these. But I shall rather stop here to consider the thoughts which of themselves spring up in my mind, and which were not inspired by anything beyond my own nature alone when I applied myself to the consideration of my being. In the first place, then, I considered myself as having a face, hands, arms, and all that system of members composed of bones and flesh as seen in a corpse which I desig- nated by the name of body. In addition to this I considered that I was nourished, that I walked, that I felt, and that I thought, and I referred all these actions to the soul: but I did not stop to consider what the soul was, or if I did stop, I imagined that it was something extremely rare and subtle like a wind, a flame, or an ether, which was spread throughout my grosser parts. As to body I had no manner of doubt about its nature, but thought I had a very clear knowledge of it; and if I had desired to explain it according to the notions that I had then formed of it, I should have described it thus: By the body I understand all that which can be defined by a certain figure: something which can be confined in a certain place, and which can fill a given space in such a way that every other body will be excluded from it; which can be perceived either by touch, or by sight, or by hearing, or by taste, or by smell: which can be moved in many ways not, in truth, by itself, but by some- thing which is foreign to it, by which it is touched [and from which it receives impressions]: for to have the power of self-movement, as also of feeling or of think- ing, I did not consider to appertain to the nature of body: on the contrary, I was rather astonished to find that faculties similar to them existed in some bodies.
But what am I, now that I suppose that there is a certain genius which is ex- tremely powerful, and, if I may say so, malicious, who employs all his power in deceiving me? Can I affirm that I possess the least of all those things which I have just said pertain to the nature of body? I pause to consider, I revolve all these things
The mind, not the body, is a thing that thinks, according to Descartes. (© iStockphoto.com/herreid14)
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in my mind, and I find none of which I can say that it pertains to me. It would be tedious to stop to enumerate them. Let us pass to the attributes of soul and see if there is any one which is in me? What of nutrition or walking [the first men- tioned]? But if it is so that I have no body it is also true that I can neither walk nor take nourishment. Another attribute is sensation. But one cannot feel without body, and besides I have thought I perceived many things during sleep that I rec- ognized in my waking moments as not having been experienced at all. What of thinking? I find here that thought is an attribute that belongs to me; it alone cannot be separated from me. I am, I exist, that is certain. But how often? Just when I think; for it might possibly be the case if I ceased entirely to think, that I should likewise cease altogether to exist. I do not now admit anything which is not neces- sarily true: to speak accurately I am not more than a thing which thinks, that is to say a mind or a soul, or an understanding, or a reason, which are terms whose significance was formerly unknown to me. I am, however, a real thing and really exist; but what thing? I have answered: a thing which thinks. . . . What is a thing which thinks? It is a thing which doubts, understands, [conceives], affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels.
In other words, Descartes cannot know for certain that he has a body, much less a particular kind of body, since the evil genius could fool him about that. The only thing that the evil genius could not possibly fool him about is his own thinking, and therefore, the “I” that he knows to exist can only be a thinking “I,” not a person or a man in the more usual sense. Later on, this will cause Descartes to raise a gigantic problem, namely, how to explain the connection between this thinking self and the body with which it is associated. But for now, we are more interested in the way he will use his discovery of a single, certain truth. (His discussion of the “mind-body” connection occurs in “Meditation VI,” which we shall discuss in Chapter 5, pp. 324–327.)
Descartes has his premise, the fact of his own existence as a “thinking thing.” What must follow, then, is the use of this premise in an argument that will “prove” the beliefs he began by doubting: the existence of his own body, the existence of the “external” world, and the existence of God. Finally, he must somehow get rid of his tentative supposition of the evil demon. But first, he raises once again the old meta- physical question of substance. In a famous exam- ple from “Meditation II” he argues:
Let us begin by considering the commonest matters, those which we believe to be the most distinctly comprehended, to wit, the bodies which we touch and see; not indeed bodies in general, for these general ideas are usually a little more confused, but let us con- sider one body in particular. Let us take, for example, this piece of wax: it has been taken quite freshly from the hive, and it has not yet lost the sweetness of the odour of the honey which it contains; it still retains somewhat of the odour of the flowers from which it has been culled; its colour, its figure, its size are apparent; it is hard, cold, easily handled, and if you strike it with the finger, it will emit a sound. Finally all the things which are
The same substance can exhibit varying properties. (© iStockphoto.com/ James Brey)
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requisite to cause us distinctly to recognize a body, are met with in it. But notice that while I speak and approach the fire what remained of the taste is exhaled, the smell evaporates, the colour alters, the figure is destroyed, the size increases, it be- comes liquid, it heats, scarcely can one handle it, and when one strikes it, no sound is emitted. Does the same wax remain after this change? We must confess that it remains; none would judge otherwise. What then did I know so distinctly in this piece of wax? It could certainly be nothing of all that the senses brought to my notice, since all these things which fall under taste, smell, sight, touch and hearing, are found to be changed, and yet the same wax remains.
Perhaps it was what I now think, viz. that this wax was not that sweetness of honey, nor that agreeable scent of flowers, nor that particular whiteness, nor that figure, nor that sound, but simply a body which a little while before appeared to me as perceptible under these forms, and which is now perceptible under others. But what, precisely, is it that I imagine when I form such conceptions? Let us attentively consider this, and, abstracting from all that does not belong to the wax, let us see what remains. Cer- tainly nothing remains excepting a certain extended thing which is flexible and mov- able. But what is the meaning of flexible and movable? Is it not that I imagine that this piece of wax being round is capable of becoming square and of passing from a square to a triangular figure? No, certainly it is not that, since I imagine it admits of an infinitude of similar changes, and I nevertheless do not know how to compass the infinitude of my imagination, and consequently this conception which I have of the wax is not brought about by the faculty of imagination. What now is this extension? Is it not also unknown? For it becomes greater when the wax is melted, greater when it is boiled, and greater still when the heat increases; and I should not conceive [clearly] according to truth what wax is, if I did not think that even this piece that we are con- sidering is capable of receiving more variations in extension than I have ever imag- ined. We must then grant that I could not even understand through the imagination what this piece of wax is, and that it is my mind alone which perceives it. I say this piece of wax in particular, for as to wax in general it is yet clearer. But what is this piece of wax which cannot be understood excepting by the [understanding or] mind? It is certainly the same that I see, touch, imagine, and finally it is the same which I have always believed it to be from the beginning. But what must particularly be ob- served is that its perception is neither an act of vision, nor of touch, nor of imagina- tion, and has never been such although it may have appeared formerly to be so, but only an intuition of the mind, which may be imperfect and confused as it was for- merly, or clear and distinct as it is at present, according as my attention is more or less directed to the elements which are found in it, and of which it is composed.
This “intuition of mind” is the key to all rationalist thinking. Intuition is where the rational- ist obtains his premises, from which he argues to all other conclusions. The difference be- tween the rationalist and the empiricist, at least in what they say that they are doing, is the rationalist’s heavy reliance on nonempirical intuition. Both would agree on the legitimacy of the deductions that follow; it is the source of the premises that is in dispute. And intuition, according to the rationalists, has its source in reason alone. (notice that “reason” refers not only to the activity of reasoning but to unreasoned intuitions and insights as well.) Accord- ingly it is this source of intuition that will be the center of the dispute rather than the actual arguments that Descartes then uses to “prove” his other beliefs. The strategy of Descartes’s argument is as follows. First, there is the premise, which you have seen:
I exist (as a thinking thing).
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Then (in “Meditation III”), Descartes uses this premise to prove the existence of God. This is the second key move in the argument. (The first is the establishment of the premise, “I exist.”) The argument itself is a version of two arguments called “the cosmological argument” and “the ontological argument for God’s existence.” We discussed them in detail in Chapter 2 (“Religion”), but the basic form of both arguments is this: If a finite, dependent, and merely contingent being like myself can even think of an infinite, independent, and necessary being, then such a being must exist. The details of these arguments, however, are not so much the concern of epistemology or the theory of knowledge as they are of the special logical con- siderations necessary when talking about the Supreme Being. For now, therefore, let us simply grant Descartes his second step, with the promissory note that the proofs are ex- plained in the chapter on the philosophy of religion. So, we have
I exist (as a thinking thing). (premise) God exists (because I could not exist without Him).
now we can say that, by His very nature (another intuition), God is good, in fact, perfectly good. So, as Descartes says in “Meditation VI,”
F RO M “Meditation VI” B Y René Descartes8
Since He has given me a very strong inclination to believe that these ideas (of trees, houses, etc.) arise from corporeal objects, I do not see how he could be vindicated from the charge of deceit, if in truth they proceeded from any other source, or were produced by other causes than corporeal things? (For example, by the evil demon, or in dreams.)
Therefore,
We cannot be deceived [whether by the evil demon or whatever else]. . . . I cannot doubt but that there is in me a certain passive faculty of perception, that is, of re- ceiving and taking knowledge of the ideas of sensible things; but this would be useless to me, if there did not also exist in me, or in some other thing, another active faculty capable of forming and producing those ideas. But this active faculty cannot be in me [in as far as I am but a thinking thing], seeing that it does not presuppose thought, and also that those ideas are frequently produced in my mind without my contributing to it in any way, and even frequently contrary to my will. This faculty must therefore exist in some substance different from me, in which all the objective reality of the ideas that are produced by this faculty is contained for- mally or eminently, as I before remarked: and this substance is either a body, that is to say, a corporeal nature in which is contained formally [and in effect] all that is objectively [and by representation] in those ideas; or it is God himself, or some other creature, of a rank superior to body, in which the same is contained emi- nently. But as God is no deceiver, it is manifest that he does not of himself and immediately communicate those ideas to me, nor even by the intervention of any creature in which their objective reality is not formally, but only eminently, con- tained. For as he has given me no faculty whereby I can discover this to be the case, but, on the contrary, a very strong inclination to believe that those ideas arise from
8 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, 1911. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
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corporeal objects, I do not see how he could be vindicated from the charge of deceit, if in truth they proceeded from any other source, or were produced by other causes than corporeal things: and accordingly it must be concluded, that corporeal objects exist. Nevertheless they are not perhaps exactly such as we perceive by the senses, for their comprehension by the senses is, in many instances, very obscure and confused; but it is at least necessary to admit that all which I clearly and dis- tinctly conceive as in them, that is, generally speaking, all that is comprehended in the object of speculative geometry, really exists external to me.
The argument is not convincing, as Descartes’s critics were quick to point out. Where does Descartes get his confidence in reason to begin with, such that he feels confident in his own abilities to prove God’s existence? Descartes’s answer is that we get that confidence from God Himself. But with this answer he has begged the question; that is, he has pre- sumed the existence of God in order to get the confidence with which he then proves God’s existence. (This circularity of argument is often called “the Cartesian Circle.”) Another way of criticizing the same strategy is to say that, having once introduced the evil demon, Descartes has no way of getting rid of him, since that supposition undermines his confidence in his own reason just as thoroughly as his confidence in God bolsters it.
• Why is Descartes considered a “rationalist”? What does this designation mean?
• What is the “Cartesian Circle”? Why is it a problem?
our primary concern here, however, is with Descartes’s claim that certain beliefs are self-evident or “clear and distinct” on the basis of intuition and reason alone. These are
beliefs that we don’t have to learn—in fact, couldn’t learn—from experience. It is not just Descartes’s “I exist” premise that is such a belief; all of the rules of inference, which he uses in his arguments, are also beliefs of this kind. Ultimately, his confidence in reason itself is one, too. But how does one defend these beliefs? not every philosopher agrees with them. In particular, John Locke, in his disillusionment with metaphysics, begins his phi- losophy with an assault on the very idea of knowl- edge that is independent of experience. Thus he begins with an attack on the heart of the rationalist methodology.
B. Innate Ideas Concerning Human Understanding: John Locke Regarding metaphysics, John Locke is reported to have commented to a friend, “you and I have had enough of this kind of fiddling.” Against the some- times fantastic claims of the metaphysicians, Locke
John Locke (1632–1704)
Generally credited as not only the founder of British empiricism, but the father of modern political lib- eralism. Locke spent his early life in the English countryside, includ- ing many years at Oxford, where he taught philosophy and the clas- sics until he earned a medical degree and turned to medicine. Much of his mature life, however, was spent in politics, and Locke joined a more or less revolutionary group that was fighting for the overthrow of the government. He was forced to flee England in
1683 and lived in Holland until the Glorious Revolution of 1688. For his part in the struggle, Locke received a governmental position, although he spent most of his time writing his two Treatises on Government (1689) to justify the revolution and its political princi- ples and defending his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), which he had written while in exile.
John Locke (HIP/Art Resource, NY)
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sought a restoration of common sense.9 Just as Aristotle had acted as a critic of Plato’s extravagant two-worlds view, Locke provided a corrective to the metaphysical enthusiasm of the me- dieval and modern worlds. He accepted Descartes’s method of tentative skepticism, but he questioned his French predeces- sor’s urge to metaphysics as well as his confidence in the insights of pure reason. He rejected the unsupportable “intuitions” that provided Descartes with his rules and his premises, and he turned instead to the data of experience as the ultimate source of all knowledge. He therefore rejected Descartes’s exclusively deductive method and supplanted it with a method appropriate to generalizations from experience, or induction. In inductive reasoning, the conclusion always goes beyond the premises and therefore, unlike deductions, is always less certain than they are. (For example, from the observed fact that all the philosophy pro- fessors that you have met have been absent-minded [the prem- ise] you conclude by inductive generalization that all philosophy professors are probably absent-minded.) Accordingly, Locke also modified Descartes’s demand for “perfect certainty” and allowed for probability and “degrees of assent.” But it must not be thought that Locke therefore rejected reason as such. He still accepted the certainty of mathematical reasoning and the validity of deductive inferences; but he also expanded the concept of rationality to include inductive reasoning and probability as well as deduction and certainty.
Locke disagrees with Descartes over whether any of our ideas are innate. (© Shutterstock.com/Bruce Rolff)
• What is induction? (You can refer back to pages 28–31.) Give an example of induc- tive reasoning.
• How does induction differ from deduction?
Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) is built on a single premise, namely, that all our knowledge comes from experience. This means, in his view, that there cannot possibly be ideas that are prior to experience, ideas that are “born into us,” as sug- gested so vividly by Plato. In other words, Locke refuses to accept the notion of innate ideas, by which he means not only those ideas that are literally “born into us” but all ideas that are derived without appeal to experience. This includes, in his opinion, Descartes’s “clear and distinct ideas,” Spinoza’s “adequate ideas,” and Leibniz’s “truths of reason.”
F RO M An Essay Concerning Human Understanding B Y John Locke10
1. The way shown how we come by any knowledge, sufficient to prove it not innate.—It is an established opinion among some men, that there are in the understanding cer- tain innate principles; some primary notions, κοιναι′ε′ννοιαι, characters, as it were,
9 British empiricism traditionally has considered itself the defender of “common sense” against the excesses of meta- physics. This was even true of Berkeley and Hume, who reached conclusions more outrageous than those of any metaphysician. It is also true of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore in the twentieth century. 10 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. A. C. Fraser, oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894.
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stamped upon the mind of man which the soul receives in its very first being, and brings into the world with it. It would be sufficient to convince unprejudiced read- ers of the falseness of this supposition, if I should only show (as I hope I shall in the following parts of this discourse) how men, barely by the use of their natural facul- ties, may attain to all the knowledge they have, without the help of any innate impressions, and may arrive at certainty, without any such original notions or principles. . . .
2. General Assent the great Argument.—There is nothing more commonly taken for granted, than that there are certain principles, both speculative and practical (for they speak of both), universally agreed upon by all mankind, which therefore, they argue, must needs be constant impressions which the souls of men receive in their first beings, and which they bring into the world with them, as necessarily and really as they do any of their inherent faculties.
3. Universal Consent proves nothing innate.—This argument, drawn from universal consent, has this misfortune in it, that if it were true in matter of fact that there were certain truths wherein all mankind agreed, it would not prove them innate, if there can be any other way shown how men may come to that universal agree- ment in the things they do consent in, which I presume may be done.
4. “What is, is,” and “it is impossible for the same Thing to be and not to be,” not uni- versally assented to.—But, which is worse, this argument of universal consent, which is made use of to prove innate principles, seems to me a demonstration that there are none such; because there are none to which all mankind give an uni- versal assent. I shall begin with the speculative, and instance in those magnified principles of demonstration, “Whatsoever is, is” and “It is impossible for the same thing to be, and not to be”; which, of all others, I think, have the most allowed title to innate. These have so settled a reputation of maxims universally received that it will no doubt be thought strange if anyone should seem to question it. But yet I take liberty to say that these propositions are so far from having an universal assent that there are a great part of mankind to whom they are not so much as known.
5. Not on the Mind naturally imprinted, because not known to Children, Idiots, &c.— For, first, it is evident that all children and idiots have not the least apprehension or thought of them; and the want of that is enough to destroy that universal assent which must needs be the necessary concomitant of all innate truths: it seeming to me near a contradiction to say that there are truths imprinted on the soul which it perceives or understands not; imprinting, if it signify anything, being nothing else but the making certain truths to be perceived. For to imprint anything on the mind without the mind’s perceiving it, seems to me hardly intelligible. If there- fore children and idiots have souls, have minds, with those impressions upon them, they must unavoidably perceive them, and necessarily know and assent to these truths; which since they do not, it is evident that there are no such impres- sions. For if they are not notions naturally imprinted, how can they be innate, and if they are notions imprinted, how can they be unknown? To say a notion is imprinted on the mind, and yet at the same time to say that the mind is ignorant of it, and never yet took notice of it, is to make this impression nothing. No proposition can be said to be in the mind which it never yet knew, which it was never yet conscious of.
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The argument is straightforward; there is, in fact, no universal agreement regarding suppos- edly “innate” principles, and even if there were, that would not prove their “innateness.” Rather, Locke argues:
Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, a blank tablet (tabula rasa) of white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas; how comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer in one word, from experience: in that all our knowl- edge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself.
• What does Locke mean when he says that the mind is like a blank tablet (tabula rasa) of white paper? What position is he arguing against?
Locke is concerned to defend and use the premise that all knowledge derives from experi- ence, and his attack on innate ideas is by way of introduction. But Locke fails to prove that the human mind does not have inborn potentials and limitations, and more importantly, he fails to recognize that inference from experience might itself require principles that are not drawn from experience. In fact, Leibniz, one of the chief targets of Locke’s attack, was not long in providing what we might call “the rationalist’s reply.” Turning Locke against himself, Leibniz argued that, by his own principles, Locke could not attack the concept of innate ideas.
F RO M New Essays on Human Understanding B Y Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz11
The question at issue is whether the soul in itself is entirely empty, like the tablet upon which nothing has yet been written (tabula rasa), as is the view of Aristotle and the author of the Essay (Locke), and whether all that is traced on it comes solely from the senses and from experience; or whether the soul contains originally the principles of vari- ous notions and doctrines which external ob- jects merely awaken from time to time, as I believe, with Plato and even with the School- men, and with all those who take in this sense the passage of St. Paul (Romans, 2:15) where he remarks that the law of God is written in the heart. . . . From this there arises another question, whether all truths depend on expe- rience, that is to say, on induction and ex- amples, or whether there are some that have some other basis. For if some events can be foreseen before any trial has been made of them, it is clear that we must here contribute
“No proposition can be said to be in the mind which it never yet knew, which it was never yet conscious of.” — J O H N LO C K E
According to Locke, our minds are blank tablets until written on by experience. (© iStockphoto.com/blackred)
11 “Leibniz’s Rebuttal,” from New Essays on Human Understanding, by Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, trans. A. G. Lang- ley. Reprinted by permission of open Court Publishing Company, a division of Carus Publishing Company, Peru, IL. Copyright © 1949 by open Court Publishing.
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something of our own. The senses, although necessary for all our actual knowl- edge, are not sufficient to give us the whole of it, since the senses never give any- thing except examples, that is to say, particular or individual truths. All examples which confirm a general truth, however numerous they may be, are not enough to establish the universal necessity of this same truth; for it does not follow that what has happened will happen again in the same way.
. . . It would seem that necessary truths, such as are found in pure mathematics, and
especially in arithmetic and in geometry, must have principles the proof of which does not depend on examples, nor, consequently, on the testimony of the senses, although without the senses it would never have occurred to us to think of them. This ought to be well recognised; Euclid has so well understood it that he often demonstrates by reason what is obvious enough through experience and by sensible images. Logic also, together with metaphysics and ethics, one of which forms natu- ral theology and the other natural jurisprudence, are full of such truths; and conse- quently their proof can only come from internal principles, which are called innate. It is true that we must not imagine that these eternal laws of the reason can be read in the soul as in an open book, as the edict of the praetor can be read in his album without difficulty or research; but it is enough that they can be discovered in us by dint of attention, for which opportunities are given by the senses. The success of experiments serves also as confirmation of the reason, very much as proofs serve in arithmetic for better avoiding error of reckoning when the reasoning is long.
. . . It seems that our able author claims that there is nothing potential in us and noth-
ing even of which we are not at any time actually conscious; but he cannot mean this strictly, or his opinion would be too paradoxical; for acquired habits and the contents of our memory are not always consciously perceived and do not even always come to our aid at need, although we often easily bring them back to mind on some slight occasion which makes us remember them, just as we need only the beginning of a song to remember the song. Also he modifies his assertion in other places by saying that there is nothing in us of which we have not been at least formerly con- scious. But besides the fact that no one can be sure by reason alone how far our past apperceptions, which we may have forgotten, may have gone, especially in view of the Platonic doctrine of reminiscence, which, mythical as it is, is not, in part at least, incompatible with bare reason; in addition to this, I say, why is it necessary that everything should be acquired by us through the perceptions of external things, and that nothing can be unearthed in ourselves? Is our soul, then, such a blank that, besides the images borrowed from without, it is nothing? . . . [T]here are a thousand indications that lead us to think that there are at every moment numberless percep- tions in us, but without apperception and without reflections; that is to say, changes in the soul itself of which we are not conscious, because the impressions are either too slight and too numerous, or too even, so that they have nothing sufficient to distinguish them one from the other; but, joined to others, they do not fail to pro- duce their effect and to make themselves felt at least confusedly in the mass.
• How does Locke rebut the notion that “whatsoever is, is” and “It is impossible for the same thing to be, and not to be” are innate ideas? What kind of allegedly innate truths does Leibniz cite in response to Locke’s argument?
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Locke himself did not continue the debate; he was already convinced of his position and had more urgent problems to worry about (the political chaos in London following the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688). But the debate continued in different forms. The rise of anthropology in the nineteenth century, with the discoveries of societies whose basic ideas were radically different from our own, seemed to support Locke’s claim that no one will believe in innate universal principles if they “ever look beyond the smoke of their own chimneys.” But in the nine- teenth century a great many philosophers still argued for the existence of universal principles not learned through experience. (Immanuel Kant did so in a very powerful set of arguments that we will con- sider in the next several chapters.) In the early twen- tieth century, opinion was in general accord with Locke, but subsequently it took another swing back to Leibniz, this time, ironically, sup- ported by anthropology. A major movement in the social sciences, usually called structural- ism (whose main proponent was Claude Lévi-Strauss in France), argued that underneath the many superficial differences between very different societies there are certain basic “struc- tures” that are universal and innate. In America, the notion of innate ideas has appeared once again in the work of the well-known linguist noam Chomsky. According to Chomsky, certain capacities for language are built into us from birth, and this allows him to explain not only the similarities of human thinking but also children’s enormous capacity for learning different languages quickly. (The average three year old learns a language in six months.) The Locke-Leibniz debate remains very much alive.
C. Two Empiricist Theories of Knowledge Leaving aside those special concerns that involve only “the relations between ideas” (as in mathematics and logic, and in trivial conceptual truths such as “a horse is an animal”), according to Locke, all of our ideas are derived from experience. Epistemology (and philoso- phy in general) now became a kind of psychology (indeed, the two disciplines were not yet distinguished), a study of the history of our common experiences in order to discover where we get our ideas, particularly such ideas as substance, God, and our various concep- tions of reality. In his account of how our ideas come from the senses, Locke uses three familiar terms: sensation (or what more modern empiricists call sense- data), ideas (not in the Platonic sense but simply “the immediate object of perception, thought, or under- standing”), and quality (or what we have so far been calling property, for example, being red, being round, being heavy).
Noam Chomsky (1928–)
American philosopher and linguist who is also a prominent figure in the campaign for international rights.
Philosopher and linguist noam Chomsky (AP Photo/Moham- mad Abu Ghosh)
A snowball’s quality, e.g., coldness, is its power to produce an idea in us, for example, the idea of cold. (© Shutterstock.com/Eric Cote)
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F RO M An Essay Concerning Human Understanding B Y John Locke12
1. Concerning the simple ideas of Sensation, it is to be considered—that whatso- ever is so constituted in nature as to be able, by affecting our senses, to cause any perception in the mind, doth thereby produce in the understanding a simple idea; which, whatever be the external cause of it, when it comes to be taken notice of by our discerning faculty, it is by the mind looked on and considered there to be a real positive idea in the understanding, as much as any other whatsoever; though, per- haps, the cause of it be but a privation of the subject.
2. Thus the ideas of heat and cold, light and darkness, white and black, motion and rest, are equally clear and positive ideas in the mind; though perhaps, some of the causes which produce them are barely privations, in those subjects from whence our senses derive those ideas. These the understanding, in its view of them, consid- ers all as distinct positive ideas, without taking notice of the causes that produce them: which is an inquiry not belonging to the idea, as it is in the understanding, but to the nature of the things existing without us. These are two very different things, and carefully to be distinguished; it being one thing to perceive and know the idea of white or black, and quite another to examine what kind of par- ticles they must be, and how ranged in the superficies, to make any object appear white or black.
. . . 7. To discover the nature of our ideas the better, and to discourse of them intelligi- bly, it will be convenient to distinguish them as they are ideas or perceptions in our minds; and as they are modifications of matter in the bodies that cause such perceptions in us: that so we may not think (as perhaps usually is done) that they are exactly the images and resemblances of something inherent in the subject; most of those of sensation being in the mind no more the likeness of something existing without us, than the names that stand for them are the likeness of our ideas, which yet upon hearing they are apt to excite in us.
8. Whatsoever the mind perceives in itself, or is the immediate object of perception, thought, or understanding, that I call idea; and the power to produce any idea in our mind, I call quality of the subject wherein that power is. Thus a snowball having the power to produce in us the ideas of white, cold, and round—the power to produce those ideas in us, as they are in the snowball, I call qualities; and as they are sensations or perceptions in our understanding, I call them ideas; which ideas, if I speak of sometimes as in the things themselves, I should be understood to mean those qualities in the objects which produce them in us.
notice that the basis of Locke’s theory is the “commonsense” distinction between physi- cal objects in the world and sensations and ideas in our minds. Accordingly, we may talk of the qualities or properties inherent in the objects in the world, such as size and shape, and the qualities or properties they merely appear to have, such as color or texture, but they do not exist independently of the objects’ effects on our sense organs. Locke refers to those properties of the objects themselves as primary qualities; he calls those “properties” of the objects that we merely see them as having secondary qualities.
12 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. A. C. Fraser, oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894.
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P R I M A RY QUA L I T I E S: Qualities thus considered in bodies are, First, such as are utterly inseparable from the body, in what state soever it be; and such as in all the al- terations and changes it suffers, all the force can be used upon it, it constantly keeps; and such as sense constantly finds in every particle of matter which has bulk enough to be perceived; and the mind finds inseparable from every particle of matter, though less than to make itself singly be perceived by our senses: e.g. Take a grain of wheat, divide it into two parts; each part has still solidity, extension, figure, and mobility: divide it again, and it retains still the same qualities; and so divide it on, till the parts become insensible; they must retain still each of them all those qualities. For division (which is all that a mill, or pestle, or any other body, does upon another, in reducing it to insensible parts) can never take away either so- lidity, extension, figure, or mobility from any body, but only makes two or more distinct separate masses of matter, of that which was but one before; all which distinct masses, reckoned as so many distinct bodies; after division, make a certain number. These I call original or primary qualities of body, which I think we may observe to produce simple ideas in us, viz. solidity, extension, figure, motion or rest, and number.
. . .
S E C O N DA RY QUA L I T I E S: Secondly, such qualities which in truth are nothing in the objects themselves but powers to produce various sensations in us by their primary qualities, i.e., by the bulk, figure, texture, and motion of their insensible parts, as colours, sounds, tastes, &c. These I call secondary qualities. To these might be added a third sort, which are allowed to be barely powers; though they are as much real qualities in the subject as those which I, to comply with the common way of speaking, call qualities, but for distinction, secondary qualities. For the power in fire to produce a new colour, or consistency, in wax or clay—by its primary qualities, is as much a quality in fire, as the power it has to produce in me a new idea or sensation of warmth or burning, which I felt not before—by the same primary qualities, viz. the bulk, texture, and motion of its insensible parts.
The question, then, is how physical objects cause us to have sensations and ideas. Locke’s answer (which, like his theory as a whole, is very strongly influenced by the physical theories of his contemporary Isaac newton) is, by impulse. This might not seem illuminating until you try to think of the newtonian theory of force as a product of particles and masses in motion. It is on this model that Locke develops what is now called his “causal theory of perception.” First, for the primary qualities:
If then external objects be not united to our minds when they produce ideas therein; and yet we perceive these original qualities in such of them as singly fall under our senses, it is evident that some motion must be thence continued by our
We can keep dividing a grain of wheat, but its parts still take up space. (© Shutterstock.com/David Dohnal)
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nerves, or animal spirits, by some parts of our bodies, to the brains or the seat of sensation, there to produce in our minds the particular ideas we have of them. And since the extension, figure, number, and motion of bodies of an observable bigness, may be perceived at a distance by the sight, it is evident some singly imperceptible bodies must come from them to the eyes, and thereby convey to the brain some motion; which produces these ideas which we have of them in us.
Then, for secondary qualities:
After the same manner that the ideas of these original qualities are produced in us, we may conceive that the ideas of secondary qualities are also produced, viz. by the operation of insensible particles on our senses. For, it being manifest that there are bodies and good store of bodies, each whereof are so small, that we cannot by any of our senses discover either their bulk, figure, or motion—as is evident in those particles of the air and water, and others extremely smaller than those; perhaps as much smaller than the particles of air and water, as the particles of air and water are smaller than peas or hail-stones;—let us suppose at present that the different mo- tions and figures, bulk and number, of such particles, affecting the several organs of our senses, produce in us those different sensations which we have from the colours and smells of bodies; e.g. that a violet, by the impulse of such insensible particles of matter, of peculiar figures and bulks, and in different degrees and modifications of their motions, causes the ideas of the blue colour, and sweet scent of that flower to be produced in our minds. It being no more impossible to con- ceive that God should annex such ideas to such motions, with which they have no similitude, than that he should annex the idea of pain to the motion of a piece of steel dividing our flesh, with which that idea hath no resemblance.
What I have said concerning colours and smells may be understood also of tastes and sounds, and other the like sensible qualities; which, whatever reality we by mistake attribute to them, are in truth nothing in the objects themselves, but powers to produce various sensations in us; and depend on those primary qualities, viz. bulk, figure, texture, and motion of parts [as I have said].
Therefore,
I think it easy to draw this observation—that the ideas of primary qualities of bodies are resemblances of them, and their patterns do really exist in the bodies themselves, but the ideas produced in us by these secondary qualities have no re- semblance of them at all. There is nothing like our ideas, existing in the bodies themselves. They are, in the bodies we denominate from them, only a power to produce those sensations in us: and what is sweet, blue, or warm in idea, is but the certain bulk, figure, and motion of the insensible parts, in the bodies themselves, which we call so.
Flame is denominated hot and light; snow, white and cold; and manna, white and sweet, from the ideas they produce in us. Which qualities are commonly thought to be the same in those bodies that those ideas are in us, the one the perfect resemblance of the other, as they are in a mirror, and it would by most men be judged very extravagant if one should say otherwise. And yet he that will consider that the same fire that, at one distance produces in us the sensation of warmth, does, at a nearer approach, produce in us the far different sensation of pain, ought to bethink himself what reason he has to say—that this idea of warmth, which was produced in him by fire, is actually in the fire; and his idea of pain, which the same
“The ideas of primary qualities of bodies are resemblances of them, and their patterns do really exist in the bodies themselves, but the ideas produced in us by these secondary qualities have no resemblance of them at all.” — J O H N LO C K E
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fire produced in him the same way, is not in the fire. Why are whiteness and coldness in snow, and pain not, when it produces the one and the other idea in us; and can do neither, but by the bulk, figure, number, and motion of its solid parts?
The particular bulk, number, figure, and motion of the parts of fire or snow are really in them— whether any one’s senses perceive them or no: and therefore they may be called real qualities, because they really exist in those bodies. But light, heat, whiteness, or coldness, are no more really in them than sickness or pain is in manna. Take away the sensation of them; let not the eyes see light or colours, nor the ears hear sounds; let the palate not taste, nor the nose smell, and all colours, tastes, odours, and sounds, as they are such particular ideas, vanish and cease, and are reduced to their causes, i.e., bulk, figure, and motion of parts.
For Locke, heat is no more “in the fire” than pain is in the fire. (© iStockphoto.com/nikitje)
• What does Locke mean by “primary qualities”? Give an example.
• What does Locke mean by “secondary qualities”? Give an example.
This is the basic empiricist theory as Locke presented it. But how does the “causal theory of perception” allow Locke to approach the traditional questions of metaphysics? Significantly, the first two steps in the argument are identical with those we traced in Des- cartes—one’s own existence and the existence of God—and Locke even includes the prob- lematic notion of “intuition.”
1. The knowledge of our own being we have by intuition. The existence of God, reason clearly makes known to us.
But then, the strict empiricist reemerges and insists:
The knowledge of the existence of any other thing we can have only by sensation: for there being no necessary connexion of real existence with any idea a man hath in his memory; nor of any other existence but that of God with the existence of any particular man: no particular man can know the existence of any other being, but only when, by actual operating upon him, it makes itself perceived by him. For, the having the idea of anything in our mind, no more proves the existence of that thing, than the picture of a man evidences his being in the world, or the visions of a dream make thereby a true history. 2. It is therefore the actual receiving of ideas from without that gives us notice of the existence of other things, and makes us know, that something doth exist at that time without us, which causes that idea in us; though perhaps we neither know nor consider how it does it. For it takes not from the certainty of our senses, and the ideas we receive by them, that we know not the manner wherein they are pro- duced: e.g. whilst I write this, I have, by the paper affecting my eyes, that idea produced in my mind, which, whatever object causes, I call white; by which I know that that quality or accident (i.e. whose appearance before my eyes always causes
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that idea) doth really exist, and hath a being without me. And of this, the greatest assurance I can possibly have, and to which my faculties can attain, is the testimony of my eyes, which are the proper and sole judges of this thing; whose testimony I have reason to rely on as so certain, that I can no more doubt, whilst I write this, that I see white and black, and that something really exists that causes that sensation in me, than that I write or move my hand; which is a certainty as great as human nature is ca- pable of, concerning the existence of anything, but a man’s self alone, and of God.
Here Locke asserts his alternative to the strict Cartesian limitation of knowledge to matters of certainty and deduction:
3. The notice we have by our senses of the existing of things without us, though it be not altogether so certain as our intuitive knowledge, or the deductions of our reason employed about the clear abstract ideas of our own minds; yet it is an assurance that deserves the name of knowledge.
If we persuade ourselves that our faculties act and inform us right concerning the existence of those objects that affect them, it cannot pass for an ill-grounded confidence: for I think nobody can, in earnest, be so sceptical as to be uncertain of the existence of those things which he sees and feels. At least, he that can doubt so far, (whatever he may have with his own thoughts,) will never have any controversy with me; since he can never be sure I say anything contrary to his own opinion. As to myself, I think God has given me assurance enough of the existence of things without me: since, by their different application, I can produce in myself both plea- sure and pain, which is one great concernment of my present state. This is certain: the confidence that our faculties do not herein deceive us, is the greatest assurance we are capable of concerning the existence of material beings. For we cannot act anything but by our faculties; nor talk of knowledge itself, but by the help of those faculties which are fitted to apprehend even what knowledge is.
Locke then answers Descartes:
8. But yet, if after all this any one will be so sceptical as to distrust his senses, and to affirm all that we see and hear, feel and taste, think and do, during our whole being, is but the series and deluding appearance of a long dream, whereof there is no reality; and therefore will question the existence of all things, or our knowledge of any- thing: I must desire him to consider, that, if all be a dream, then he doth but dream that he makes the question, and so it is not much matter that a waking man should answer him. But yet, if he pleases, he may dream that I make him this answer, that the certainty of things existing in rerum natura when we have the testimony of our senses for it is not only as great as our frame can attain to, but as our condition needs. For, our faculties being suited not to the full extent of being, nor to a perfect, clear, comprehensive knowledge of things free from all doubt and scruple; but to the pres- ervation of us, in whom they are; and accommodated to the use of life: they serve to our purpose well enough, if they will but give us certain notice of those things, which are convenient or inconvenient to us. For he that sees a candle burning, and
While he writes, Locke cannot doubt that he is writing. As you read this, can you doubt that you are reading? (© iStock- photo.com/nicoolay)
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hath experimented the force of its flame by putting his finger in it, will little doubt that this is something existing without him, which does him harm, and puts him to great pain: which is as- surance enough, when no man requires greater certainty to govern his actions by than what is as certain as his actions themselves. And if our dreamer pleases to try whether the glowing heat of a glass furnace be barely a wandering imagina- tion in a drowsy man’s fancy, by putting his hand into it, he may perhaps be wakened into a certainty greater than he could wish, that it is something more than bare imagination. So that this evidence is as great as we can desire, being as certain to us as our pleasure or pain, i.e., happiness or misery; beyond which we have no concernment, either of knowing or being. Such an assurance of the existence of things without us is sufficient to direct us in the attaining the good and avoiding the evil which is caused by them, which is the important concernment we have of being made acquainted with them.
9. In summary, then, when our senses do actually convey into our understanding any idea, we cannot but be satisfied that there doth something at that time really exist without us, which doth affect our senses, and by them give notice of itself to our apprehensive faculties, and actually produce that idea which we then perceive.
We are now ready to return to the traditional metaphysical notion of substance—that which underlies both the primary and the secondary qualities of a thing. our ideas of par- ticular things, says Locke, are the results of our combining ideas we have of the various quali- ties we experience that we take to be united in a particular thing. We take the “thing” to which combinations of qualities attach to be a substance. Substance is the substratum that we envision as the basis to which these qualities attach (whether the particular thing in ques- tion is a body or a mind).
C H A P T E R X X I I I O F O U R C O M P L E X I D E A S O F S U B S TA N C E S 1. Ideas of particular Substances, how made. The mind being, as I have declared, fur- nished with a great number of the simple ideas, conveyed in by the senses as they are found in exterior things, or by reflection on its own operations, takes notice also that a certain number of these simple ideas go constantly together; which being presumed to belong to one thing, and words being suited to common ap- prehensions, and made use of for quick dispatch, are called, so united in one sub- ject, by one name; which, by inadvertency, we are apt afterward to talk of and consider as one simple idea, which indeed is a complication of many ideas together: because, as I have said, not imagining how these simple ideas can subsist by them- selves, we accustom ourselves to suppose some substratum wherein they do subsist, and from which they do result, which therefore we call substance.
2. Our obscure Idea of Substance is general. So that if any one will examine himself concerning his notion of pure substance in general, he will find he has no other idea of it at all, but only a supposition of he knows not what support of such qualities which are capable of producing simple ideas in us; which qualities are commonly called accidents. If any one should be asked, what is the subject wherein colour or
The senses provide impressions that we need for our survival. We cannot reasonably imagine that we just dream up the external world, Locke contends. (© iStockphoto.com/andDraw)
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weight inheres, he would have nothing to say, but the solid extended parts; and if he were demanded, what is it that solidity and extension adhere in, he would not be in a much better case than the Indian before mentioned who, saying that the world was supported by a great elephant, was asked what the elephant rested on; to which his answer was—a great tortoise: but being again pressed to know what gave support to the broad-backed tortoise, replied—something, he knew not what. And thus here, as in all other cases where we use words without having clear and dis- tinct ideas, we talk like children: who, being questioned what such a thing is, which they know not, readily give this satisfactory answer, that it is something: which in truth signifies no more, when so used, either by children or men, but that they know not what; and that the thing they pretend to know, and talk of, is what they have no distinct idea of at all, and so are perfectly ignorant of it, and in the dark. The idea then we have, to which we give the general name substance, being nothing but the supposed, but unknown, support of those qualities we find exist- ing, which we imagine cannot subsist sine re substante, without something to sup- port them, we call that support substantia; which, according to the true import of the word, is, in plain English, standing under or upholding.
3. Of the Sorts of Substances. An obscure and relative idea of substance in general being thus made we come to have the ideas of particular sorts of substances, by collecting such combinations of simple ideas as are, by experience and observation of men’s senses, taken notice of to exist together; and are therefore supposed to flow from the particu- lar internal constitution, or unknown essence of that substance. Thus we come to have the ideas of a man, horse, gold, water, &c.; of which substances, whether any one has any other clear idea, further than of certain simple ideas coexistent together, I appeal to every one’s own experience. It is the ordinary qualities observable in iron, or a diamond, put together, that make the true complex idea of those substances, which a smith or a jeweller commonly knows better than a philosopher; who, what- ever substantial forms he may talk of, has no other idea of those substances, than what
is framed by a collection of those simple ideas which are to be found in them: only we must take notice, that our complex ideas of substances, besides all those simple ideas they are made up of, have always the confused idea of something to which they belong, and in which they subsist: and therefore when we speak of any sort of substance, we say it is a thing having such or such qualities; as body is a thing that is extended, figured, and capable of motion; spirit, a thing capable of thinking; and so hardness, friability, and power to draw iron, we say, are qualities to be found in a loadstone. These, and the like fashions of speaking, intimate that the substance is supposed always something besides the extension, figure, solid- ity, motion, thinking, or other observable ideas, though we know not what it is.
4. No clear or distinct idea of Substance in general. Hence, when we talk or think of any particular sort of corporeal substances, as horse, stone, &c., though the idea we have of either of them be but the
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complication or collection of those several simple ideas of sensible qualities, which we used to find united in the thing called horse or stone; yet, because we cannot conceive how they should subsist alone, nor one in another, we suppose them existing in and supported by some common subject; which support we denote by the name substance, though it be certain we have no clear or distinct idea of that thing we suppose a support.
5. As clear an Idea of spiritual substance as of corporeal substance. The same thing happens concerning the operations of the mind, viz. thinking, reasoning, fearing, &c., which we concluding not to subsist of themselves, nor apprehending how they can belong to body, or be produced by it, we are apt to think these the actions of some other substance, which we call spirit; whereby yet it is evident that, having no other idea or notion of matter, but something wherein those many sensible qualities which affect our senses do subsist; by supposing a substance wherein thinking, knowing, doubt- ing, and a power of moving, &c., do subsist, we have as clear a notion of the sub- stance of spirit, as we have of body; the one being supposed to be (without knowing what it is) the substratum to those simple ideas we have from without; and the other supposed (with a like ignorance of what it is) to be the substratum to those operations we experiment in ourselves within. It is plain then, that the idea of corporeal substance in matter is as remote from our conceptions and apprehensions, as that of spiritual substance, or spirit: and therefore, from our not having any notion of the substance of spirit, we can no more conclude its non-existence, than we can, for the same reason, deny the existence of body; it being as rational to affirm there is no body, because we have no clear and distinct idea of the substance of matter, as to say there is no spirit, because we have no clear and distinct idea of the substance of a spirit.
6. Our ideas of particular Sorts of Substances. Whatever therefore be the secret abstract nature of substance in general, all the ideas we have of particular distinct sorts of substances are nothing but several combinations of simple ideas, co-existing in such, though unknown, cause of their union, as makes the whole subsist of itself. It is by such combinations of simple ideas, and nothing else, that we represent particular sorts of substances to ourselves; such are the ideas we have of their several species in our minds; and such only do we, by their specific names, signify to others, v.g. man, horse, sun, water, iron: upon hearing which words, every one who understands the language, frames in his mind a combination of those several simple ideas which he has usually observed, or fancied to exist together under that denomination; all which he supposes to rest in and be, as it were, adherent to that unknown common subject, which inheres not in anything else. Though, in the meantime, it be manifest, and every one, upon inquiry into his own thoughts, will find, that he has no other idea of any substance, v.g. let it be gold, horse, iron, man, vitriol, bread, but what he has barely of those sensible qualities, which he supposes to inhere; with a supposition of such a substratum as gives, as it were, a support to those qualities or simple ideas, which he has observed to exist united together. Thus, the idea of the sun,—what is it but an aggregate of those several simple ideas, bright, hot, roundish, having a constant regu- lar motion, at a certain distance from us, and perhaps some other: as he who thinks and discourses of the sun has been more or less accurate in observing those sensible qualities, ideas, or properties, which are in that thing which he calls the sun. . . .
9. Three sorts of Ideas make our complex ones of Corporeal Substances. The ideas that make our complex ones of corporeal substances, are of these three sorts. First, the ideas of the primary qualities of things, which are discovered by our senses, and are in them even when we perceive them not; such are the bulk, figure, number,
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situation, and motion of the parts of bodies; which are really in them, whether we take notice of them or not. Secondly, the sensible secondary qualities, which, de- pending on these, are nothing but the powers those substances have to produce several ideas in us by our senses; which ideas are not in the things themselves, oth- erwise than as anything in its cause. Thirdly, the aptness we consider in any sub- stance, to give or receive such alterations of primary qualities, as that the substance so altered should produce in us different ideas from what it did before; these are called active and passive powers: all which powers, as far as we have any notice or notion of them, terminate only in sensible simple ideas. For whatever alteration a loadstone has the power to make in the minute particles of iron, we should have no notion of any power it had at all to operate on iron, did not its sensible motion discover it: and I doubt not, but there are a thousand changes, that bodies we daily handle have a power to cause in one another, which we never suspect, because they never appear in sensible effects.
10. Powers thus make a great Part of our complex Ideas of particular Substances. Powers therefore justly make a great part of our complex ideas of substances. He that will examine his complex idea of gold, will find several of its ideas that make it up to be only powers; as the power of being melted, but of not spending itself in the fire; of being dissolved in aqua regia, are ideas as necessary to make up our complex idea of gold, as its colour and weight: which, if duly considered, are also nothing but different powers. For, to speak truly, yellowness is not actually in gold, but is a power in gold to produce that idea in us by our eyes, when placed in a due light: and the heat, which we cannot leave out of our ideas of the sun, is no more really in the sun, than the white colour it introduced into wax. These are both equally powers in the sun, operating, by the motion and figure of its sensible parts, so on a man, as to make him have the idea of heat; and so on wax, as to make it capable to produce in a man the idea of white.
11. The now secondary Qualities of Bodies would disappear, if we could discover the primary ones of their minute Parts. Had we senses acute enough to discern the minute particles of bodies, and the real constitution on which their sensible qualities depend, I doubt not but they would produce quite different ideas in us: and that which is now the yellow colour of gold, would then disappear, and instead of it we should see an admirable texture of parts, of a certain size and figure. This microscopes plainly discover to us; for what to our naked eyes produces a certain colour, is, by thus augmenting the acuteness of our senses, discovered to be quite a different thing; and the thus altering, as it were, the proportion of the bulk of the minute parts of a coloured object to our usual sight, produces different ideas from what it did before. Thus, sand or pounded glass, which is opaque, and white to the naked eye, is pellucid in a microscope; and a hair seen in this way, loses its former colour, and is, in a great measure, pellucid, with a mixture of some bright sparkling co- lours, such as appear from the refraction of diamonds, and other pellucid bodies. Blood, to the naked eye, appears all red; but by a good microscope, wherein its lesser parts appear, shows only some few globules of red, swimming in a pellucid liquor, and how these red globules would appear, if glasses could be found that could yet magnify them a thousand or ten thousand times more, is uncertain. . . .
14. Our specific Ideas of Substances. But to return to the matter in hand,—the ideas we have of substances, and the ways we come by them. I say, our specific ideas of substances are nothing else but a collection of a certain number of simple ideas, considered
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as united in one thing. These ideas of substances, though they are commonly simple apprehensions, and the names of them simple terms, yet in effect are complex and compounded. Thus the idea which an Englishman signifies by the name swan, is white colour, long neck, red beak, black legs, and whole feet, and all these of a certain size, with a power of swimming in the water, and making a certain kind of noise, and perhaps, to a man who has long observed this kind of birds, some other properties: which all terminate in sensible simple ideas, all united in one common subject.
15. Our Ideas of spiritual Substances, as clear as of bodily Substances. Besides the complex ideas we have of material sensible substances, of which I have last spoken,—by the simple ideas we have taken from those operations of our own minds, which we experiment daily in ourselves, as thinking, understanding, willing, knowing, and power of beginning motion, &c., co-existing in some substance, we are able to frame the complex idea of an immaterial spirit. And thus, by putting together the ideas of thinking, perceiving, liberty, and power of moving themselves and other things, we have as clear a perception and notion of immaterial substances as we have of material. For putting together the ideas of thinking and willing, or the power of moving or quieting corporeal motion, joined to substance, of which we have no distinct idea, we have the idea of an immaterial spirit; and by putting together the ideas of coherent solid parts, and a power of being moved, joined with substance, of which likewise we have no positive idea, we have the idea of matter. The one is as clear and distinct an idea as the other: the idea of thinking, and moving a body, being as clear and distinct ideas as the ideas of extension, solidity, and being moved. For our idea of substance is equally obscure, or none at all, in both: it is but a sup- posed I know not what, to support those ideas we call accidents. It is for want of reflection that we are apt to think that our senses show us nothing but material things. Every act of sensation, when duly considered, gives us an equal view of both parts of nature, the corporeal and spiritual. For whilst I know, by seeing or hearing, &c., that there is some corporeal being without me, the object of that sensation, I do more certainly know, that there is some spiritual being within me that sees and hears. This, I must be convinced, cannot be the action of bare insen- sible matter; nor ever could be, without an immaterial thinking being.
16. No Idea of abstract Substance either in Body or Spirit. By the complex idea of extended, figured, coloured, and all other sensible qualities, which is all that we know of it, we are as far from the idea of the substance of body, as if we knew nothing at all: nor after all the acquaintance and familiarity which we imagine we have with matter, and the many qualities men assure themselves they perceive and know in bodies, will it per- haps upon examination be found, that they have any more or clearer primary ideas belonging to body, than they have belonging to immaterial spirit.
17. Cohesion of solid parts and Impulse, the primary ideas peculiar to Body. The primary ideas we have peculiar to body, as contradistinguished to spirit, are the cohesion of solid, and consequently separable, parts, and a power of communicating motion by impulse. These, I think, are the original ideas proper and peculiar to body; for figure is but the consequence of finite extension.
18. Thinking and Motivity, the primary ideas peculiar to spirit. The ideas we have be- longing and peculiar to spirit, are thinking, and will, or a power of putting body into motion by thought, and, which is consequent to it, liberty. For, as body cannot but
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communicate its motion by impulse to another body, which it meets with at rest, so the mind can put bodies into motion, or forbear to do so, as it pleases. The ideas of existence, duration, and mobility, are common to them both. . . .
37. Recapitulation. And thus we have seen what kind of ideas we have of substances of all kinds, wherein they consist, and how we came by them. From whence, I think, it is very evident,
First, That all our ideas of the several sorts of substances are nothing but collec- tions of simple ideas: with a supposition of something to which they belong, and in which they subsist: though of this supposed something we have no clear distinct idea at all.
Secondly, That all the simple ideas, that thus united in one common substratum, make up our complex ideas of several sorts of substances, are no other but such as we have received from sensation or reflection. So that even in those which we think we are most intimately acquainted with, and that come nearest the compre- hension of our most enlarged conceptions, we cannot go beyond those simple ideas. And even in those which seem most remote from all we have to do with, and do infinitely surpass anything we can perceive in ourselves by reflection; or dis- cover by sensation in other things, we can attain to nothing but those simple ideas, which we originally received from sensation or reflection; as is evident in the com- plex ideas we have of angels, and particularly of God himself.
Thirdly, That most of the simple ideas that make up our complex ideas of sub- stances, when truly considered, are only powers, however we are apt to take them for positive qualities; v.g. the greatest part of the ideas that make our complex idea of gold are yellowness, great weight, ductility, fusibility, and solubility in aqua regia, &c., all united together in an unknown substratum: all which ideas are nothing else but so many relations to other substances; and are not really in the gold, considered barely in itself, though they depend on those real and primary qualities of its inter- nal constitution, whereby it has a fitness differently to operate, and be operated on by several other substances.
“Most of the simple ideas that make up our complex ideas of substances, when truly considered, are only powers . . . all united together in an unknown substratum.” — J O H N LO C K E
• Why does Locke claim that substance is “we know not what”? Is this conclusion reason to say that we don’t know what substance (a thing in itself) is?
our impressions of a thing are combined impressions of the thing’s particular qualities. These qualities hang together because they are attached, according to Locke, to a substratum, substance. But what is this substance? According to Locke it is “we know not what.” Yet he hesi- tates to reject the notion, for he cannot escape the suspicion that talk of “qualities” makes no sense unless the qualities are the qualities of something. But this suspicion is dispensable ac- cording to Locke’s own principles. So, it turns out, is his central distinction between primary and secondary qualities, as Bishop Berkeley is soon to point out. The consequence of a few simple, technical moves starting within Locke’s account will be shocking, to say the least.
Bishop George Berkeley
Beginning from John Locke’s “commonsense” philosophy, Bishop Berkeley developed the most provocative thesis in all philosophy. Berkeley’s thesis is called subjective idealism. It is the doctrine that there are no material substances, no physical objects, only minds and ideas in a mind. (His concept of “idea” comes directly from Locke.) This surprising position
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emerges directly from Locke’s thesis by three simple steps. First, it accepts the argument that we have no idea whatsoever what a substance might be, and it agrees that all that we can ever know of a thing are its sensible properties (or “qualities”). Second, it is shown that the distinction between primary and secondary qualities cannot be, as Locke had argued, a distinc- tion between properties inherent in the objects themselves as opposed to properties that the objects simply cause in us. Third, once one has agreed that all knowledge of the world (except for knowledge of one’s own existence and of God) must be based upon experience, the question becomes why we should ever think that there is anything other than our ex- periences. Locke had argued that our experiences were caused by the physical objects; but how could this claim be justified by experience? Since we have no experience of either the objects themselves or their causation, but only of their ef- fects (that is, the ideas they cause in us), a consistent empiricist must give up not only the causal theory of perception but the notion of physical objects as well.
Berkeley is an exceptionally clear writer, and the following excerpts from his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) should not be difficult to follow:
F RO M Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge B Y Bishop George Berkeley13
§ 1. It is evident to any one who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses, or else such as are perceiv’d by attending to the passions and operations of the mind, or lastly ideas formed by help of memory and imagination; either compound- ing, dividing, or barely representing those originally perceiv’d in the aforesaid ways. By sight I have the ideas of light and colours with their several degrees and variations. By touch I perceive hard and soft, heat and cold, motion and resistance, and of all these more and less either as to quantity or degree. Smell- ing furnishes me with odors; the palate with tastes, and hearing conveys sounds to the mind in all their variety of tone and composi- tion. And as several of these are observ’d to accompany each other, they come to be marked by one name, and so to be reputed as one thing. Thus, for example, a certain
According to Locke, microscopes can help us recognize which qualities of a thing are primary and which are second- ary. (© Shutterstock.com/wavebreakmedia)
Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753)
Wrote virtually all the work that made him famous before he turned twenty-eight. He was born, raised, and educated in Ireland, and as a student he immersed himself in the writings of the im- portant philosophers of the time, particularly Locke, Newton, and some of the French metaphysi- cians. In later life, Berkeley became an educational missionary, visiting America and Bermuda, and then a bishop, eventually moving to Oxford. Unlike Locke and Hume,
whose interests spread across the whole of philosophy, science, and human affairs. Berkeley restricted himself to a single problem— perception—and his entire philosophy is aptly summarized in his famous phrase “to be is to be perceived” (esse est percipi). His arguments for this position are most thoroughly outlined in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710).
George Berkeley (© Bettmann/ Corbis)
13 Bishop George Berkeley, Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, London: Brown & Sons, 1907.
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colour, taste, smell, figure and consistence having been observ’d to go together, are accounted one distinct thing, signified by the name apple. Other collections of ideas constitute a stone, a tree, a book and the like sensible things; which as they are pleasing or disagreeable excite the passions of love, hatred, joy, grief, etc.
§ 2. But besides all that endless variety of ideas or objects of knowledge, there is likewise something which knows or perceives them, and exercises divers opera- tions, as willing, imagining, remembering about them. This perceiving, active being is what I call mind, spirit, soul or my self. By which words I do not denote any one of my ideas, but a thing intirely distinct from them, wherein they exist, or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceiv’d, for the existence of an idea consists in being perceiv’d.
§ 3. That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow. And to me it is no less evi- dent that the various sensations or ideas imprinted on the sense, however blended or combin’d together (that is whatever objects they compose) cannot exist other- wise than in a mind perceiving them. I think an intuitive knowledge may be obtain’d of this, by any one that shall attend to what is meant by the term exist when apply’d to sensible things. The table I write on, I say, exists, i.e. I see and feel it, and if I were out of my study I should say it existed, meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it. There was an odor, i.e. it was smelt; there was a sound, i.e. it was heard; a colour or figure and it was perceiv’d by sight or touch. This is all that I can understand by these and the like expressions. For as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things without any relation to their being perceiv’d, that is to me perfectly unintel- ligible. Their esse is percipi, (to be is to be perceived) nor is it possible they shou’d have any existence, out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them.
§ 4. It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, moun- tains, rivers and in a word all sensible objects have an existence natural or real, distinct from their being perceiv’d by the understanding. But with how great an assurance and acquiescence soever, this principle may be entertained in the world: yet whoever shall find in his heart to call it in question may, if I mistake not, per- ceive it to involve a manifest contradiction. For what are the foremention’d objects but the things we perceive by sense, and what, do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations, and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these or any combination of them shou’d exist unperceiv’d.?
This is Berkeley’s central thesis—that “to be is to be perceived” (esse est percipi). In what follows, Berkeley argues that there is nothing other than these perceptions, or “ideas,” and it is nonsense to suppose that there are things outside of the mind that are “like” our ideas— for “nothing is like an idea but another idea.”
§ 6. Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man need only open his eyes to see ’em. Such I take this important one to be, viz. that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind, that their being is to be perceiv’d or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceiv’d by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some eternal spirit: it being perfectly unintelligible and involving all the absurdity of
“There was an odor, i.e. it was smelt; there was a sound, i.e. it was heard; a colour or figure and it was perceiv’d by sight or touch. . . . Their esse is percipi.” — G E O R G E B E R K E L E Y
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abstraction, to attribute to any single part of them an existence independent of a spirit. To make this appear with all the light and evidence of an axiom, it seems sufficient if I can but awaken the reflexion of the reader, that he may take an im- partial view of his own meaning, and turn his thoughts upon the subject itself, free and disengaged from all embarras of words and prepossession in favour of received mistakes.
§ 7. From what has been said, ’tis evident, there is not any other substance than spirit or that which perceives. But for the fuller demonstration of this point, let it be consider’d, the sensible qualities are colour, figure, motion, smell, taste, etc. the ideas perceiv’d by sense. Now for an idea to exist in an unperceiving thing is a manifest contradiction, for to have an idea is all one as to perceive, that therefore wherein colour, figure, etc. exist must perceive them; hence ’tis clear there can be no unthinking substance or substratum of those ideas.
§ 8. But say you, though the ideas themselves do not exist without the mind, yet there may be things like them whereof they are copies or resemblances, which things exist without the mind, in an unthinking substance. I answer an idea can be like nothing but an idea, a colour, or figure, can be like nothing but another colour or figure. If we look but never so little into our thoughts, we shall find it impossible for us to conceive a likeness except only between our ideas. Again, I ask whether those suppos’d originals or external things, of which our ideas are the pictures or representations, be themselves perceivable or no? If they are, then they are ideas and we have gain’d our point; but if you say they are not, I appeal to any one whether it be sense, to assert a colour is like something which is invisible; hard or soft, like something which is intangible, and so of the rest.
At this point Berkeley takes up Locke’s distinction between “primary and secondary quali- ties,” and maintains that the arguments Locke put forward regarding the latter also can be applied to the former. Primary qualities too are ideas only, and not properties of matter.
§ 9. Some there are who make a distinction betwixt primary and secondary qualities: by the former, they mean extension, figure, motion, rest, solidity or impenetrabil- ity and number: by the latter they denote all other sensible qualities as colours, sounds, tastes, etc. The ideas we have of these they acknowlege not to be the re- semblances, of any thing existing without the mind or unperceiv’d, but they will have our ideas of the primary qualities to be patterns or images of things which exist without the mind, in an unthinking substance which they call matter. By matter, therefore, we are to understand an inert, senseless substance, in which ex- tension, figure, motion, etc. do actually subsist, but it is evident from what we have already shewn, that extension, figure and motion are only ideas existing in the mind, and that an idea can be like nothing but another idea, and that consequently neither they nor their archetypes can exist in an unperceiving substance. Hence it is plain, that the very notion of what is called matter or corporeal substance, involves a contradiction in it.
. . . § 10. They who assert that figure, motion, and the rest of the primary or original qualities do exist without the mind, in unthinking substances, do at the same time acknowlege that colours, sounds, heat, cold, do not, which they tell us are sensa- tions existing in the mind alone, that depend on and are occasion’d by the different size, texture, motion, of the minute particles of matter. This they take for an
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undoubted truth, which they can demonstrate beyond all exception. Now if it be certain, that those original qualities are inseparably united with the other sensible qualities, and not, even in thought, capable of being abstracted from them, it plainly follows that they exist only in the mind. But I desire any one to reflect and try, whether he can by any abstraction of thought, conceive the extension and motion of a body, without all other sensible qualities. For my own part, I see evidently that it is not in my power to frame an idea of a body extended and moving, but I must withal give it some colour or other sensible quality which is acknowleg’d to exist only in the mind. (In short, extension, figure, and motion, abstracted from all other qualities, are inconceivable. Where therefore the other sensible qualities are, there must these be also, i.e. in the mind and no where else.)
. . . § 14. I shall farther add, that after the same manner, as modern philosophers prove colours, tastes, to have no existence in matter, or without the mind, the same thing may be likewise prov’d of all other sensible qualities whatsoever. Thus, for in- stance, it is said that heat and cold, are affections only of the mind, and not at all patterns of real beings, existing in the corporeal substances which excite them, for that the same body which appears cold to one hand, seems warm to another. Now why may we not as well argue that figure and extension, are not patterns or resem- blances of qualities existing in matter, because to the same eye at different stations, or eyes of a different texture at the same station, they appear various, and cannot therefore be the images of any thing settled and determinate without the mind? Again, ’tis prov’d that sweetness is not really in the sapid thing, because the thing remaining unalter’d the sweetness is changed into bitter, as in case of a fever or otherwise vitiated palate. Is it not as reasonable to say, that motion is not without the mind, since if the succession of ideas in the mind become swifter, the motion, it is acknowledg’d, shall appear slower without any external alteration.
§ 15. In short, let any one consider those arguments, which are thought manifestly to prove that colours, tastes, exist only in the mind, and he shall find they may with equal force, be brought to prove the same thing of extension, figure, and motion. Though it must be confess’d this method of arguing does not so much prove that there is no extension, colour, in an outward object, as that we do not know by sense which is the true extension or colour of the object. But the arguments fore- going plainly shew it to be impossible that any colour or extension at all, or other sensible quality whatsoever, shou’d exist in an unthinking subject without the mind, or in truth, that there shou’d be any such thing as an outward object.
Must there be substances apart from the mind? Berkeley asks. It is true that we are somehow “affected,” but it does not follow that there must be material objects. How would we know of any such objects?
§ 18. But though it were possible that solid, figur’d moveable substances may exist without the mind, corresponding to the ideas we have of bodies, yet how is it pos- sible for us to know this? Either we must know it by sense or by reason. As for our senses, by them we have the knowledge only of our sensations, ideas, or those things that are immediately perceiv’d by sense, call ’em what you will: but they do not inform us that things exist without the mind, or unperceiv’d, like to those which are perceiv’d. This the materialists themselves acknowlege. It remains there- fore that if we have any knowlege at all of external things, it must be by reason,
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inferring their existence from what is immediately perceiv’d by sense. But I do not see what reason can induce us to believe the existence of bodies without the mind, from what we perceive, since the very patrons of matter themselves do not pretend, there is any necessary connexion betwixt them and our ideas. I say it is granted on all hands (and what happens in dreams, frenzys and the like puts it beyond dispute) that it is possible we might be affected with all the ideas we have now, though there were no bodies existing without resembling them. Hence it is evident the supposi- tion of external bodies is not necessary for the producing our ideas: since it is granted they are produced sometimes, and might possibly be produced always in the same order, we see them in at present, without their concurrence.
§ 19. But, though we might possibly have all our sensations without them, yet perhaps it may be thought easier to conceive and explain the manner of their production, by supposing external bodies in their likeness rather than otherwise, and so it might be at least probable there are such things as bodies that excite their ideas in our minds. But neither can this be said, for though we give the materialists their external bodies, they by their own confession are never the nearer knowing how our ideas are pro- duced: since they own themselves unable to comprehend in what manner body can act upon spirit, or how it is possible it shou’d imprint any idea in the mind. Hence it is evident the production of ideas or sensations in our minds, can be no reason why we shou’d suppose matter or corporeal substances, since that is acknowleg’d to remain equally inexplicable with, or without this supposition. If therefore it were possible for bodies to exist without the mind, yet to hold they do so, must needs be a very precari- ous opinion; since it is to suppose, without any reason at all, that God has created innumerable beings that are intirely useless, and serve to no manner of purpose.
§ 20. In short, though there were external bodies, ’tis impossible we shou’d ever come to know it; and if there were not, we might have the very same reasons to think there were that we have now. Suppose, what no one can deny possible, an intelligence without the help of external bodies to be affected with the same train of sensations or ideas that you are, imprinted in the same order and with like vivid- ness in his mind. I ask whether that intelligence hath not all the reason to believe the existence of corporeal substances, represented by his ideas, and exciting them in his mind, that you can possibly have for believing the same thing? Of this there can be no question, which one consideration were enough to make any reasonable person, suspect the strength of whatever arguments he may think himself to have, for the existence of bodies without the mind.
§ 21. Were it necessary to add any farther proof against the existence of matter, after what has been said, I cou’d instance several of those errours and difficulties (not to mention impieties) which have sprung from that tenent. It has occasion’d numberless controversies and disputes in philosophy, and not a few of far greater moment in religion. But I shall not enter into the detail of them in this place, as well because I think, arguments a posteriori are unnecessary for confirming what has been, if I mistake not, sufficiently demonstrated a priori, as because I shall here- after find occasion to speak somewhat of them.
§ 22. I am affraid I have given cause to think, I am needlessly prolix in handling this subject. For to what purpose is it to dilate on that which may be demonstrated with the utmost evidence in a line or two, to any one that’s capable of the least reflexion? It is but looking into your own thoughts, and so trying whether you can
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conceive it possible for a sound, or figure, or motion, or colour to exist without the mind, or unperceiv’d. This easy trial may make you see, that what you contend for, is a downright contradiction. Insomuch that I am content to put the whole upon this issue; if you can but conceive it possible for one extended, moveable substance, or in general, for any one idea or any thing like an idea to exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving it, I shall readily give up the cause: and as for all that compages of external bodies you contend for, I shall grant you its existence, though you cannot either give me any reason why you believe it exists, or assign any use to it when it is supposed to exist. I say, the bare possibility of your opinions being true, shall pass for an argument that it is so.
§ 23. But say you, surely there’s nothing easier than to imagine trees, for instance, in a park, or books existing in a closet, and no body by to perceive them. I answer you may so, there is no difficulty in it: but what is all this, I beseech you, more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call books and trees, and at the same time omitting to frame the idea of any one that may perceive them? But do not you your self perceive or think of them all the while? This therefore is nothing to the purpose: it only shews you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind; but it does not shew that you can conceive it possible, the objects of your thought may exist without the mind; to make out this, it is necessary that you con- ceive them existing unconceiv’d or unthought of, which is a manifest repugnancy. When we do our utmost to conceive the existence of external bodies, we are all the while only contemplating our own ideas. But the mind taking no notice of it self, is deluded to think it can and does conceive bodies existing unthought of or with- out the mind; though at the same time they are apprehended by or exist in it self.
“But whatever power I may have over my own thoughts, I find the ideas actually perceiv’d by sense . . . are not creatures of my will. There is therefore some other will or spirit that produces them.” — G E O R G E B E R K E L E Y
• What is subjective idealism? How does Berkeley argue that Locke’s view leads to subjective idealism?
• What is Berkeley’s argument against the distinction between primary and second- ary qualities?
But what, then, can explain the fact that we cannot simply “think” things into existence by imagining them? And how can we say that a thing exists when no one is there to perceive it? (As this question has sometimes been put, “If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?”) It is here that God enters the picture as a matter of necessity.
§ 29. But whatever power I may have over my own thoughts, I find the ideas actually perceiv’d by sense have not a like dependence on my will. When in broad day-light I open my eyes, ’tis not in my power to chuse whether I shall see or no, or to determine what particu- lar objects shall present themselves to my view; and so likewise as to the hearing and other senses, the ideas imprinted on them are not creatures of my will. There is therefore some other will or spirit that produces them.
When we say there are books and trees, we are naming certain ideas in our minds, namely the ideas of books and trees. (© iStockphoto.com/Aldo Murillo)
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§ 30. The ideas of sense are more strong, lively and distinct than those of the imagi- nation, they have likewise a steddiness, order and coherence, and are not excited at random, as those which are the effects of human wills often are, but in a regular train or series, the admirable connexion whereof sufficiently testifies the wisdom and benevolence of its author. Now the set rules or establish’d methods, wherein the mind we depend on excites in us the ideas of sense, are called the laws of nature: and these we learn by experience, which teaches us that such and such ideas are attended with such and such other ideas, in the ordinary course of things.
§ 31. This gives us a sort of foresight, which enables us to regulate our actions for the benefit of life. And without this we shou’d be eternally at a loss, we cou’d not know how to act any thing that might procure us the least pleasure, or remove the least pain of sense. That food nourishes, sleep refreshes, and fire warms us; that to sow in the seed- time is the way to reap in the harvest, and, in general, that to obtain such or such ends, such or such means are conducive, all this we know, not by discovering any necessary connexion between our ideas, but only by the observation of the settled laws of nature, without which we shou’d be all in uncertainty and confusion, and a grown man no more know how to manage himself in the affairs of life, than an infant just born.
. . . § 33. The ideas imprinted on the senses by the Author of nature are called real things, and those excited in the imagination being less regular, vivid and constant, are more properly termed ideas, or images of things, which they copy and represent. But then our sensations, be they never so vivid and distinct, are nevertheless ideas, i.e. they exist in the mind, or are perceived by it, as truly as the ideas of its own framing. The ideas of sense are allow’d to have more reality in them, i.e. to be more strong, orderly and coherent than the creatures of the mind; but this is no argument that they exist without the mind. They are also less dependent on the spirit, or thinking substance which perceives them, in that they are excited by the will of another and more powerful spirit: yet still they are ideas, and certainly no idea, whether faint or strong, can exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving it.
This final formulation, that the things of the world are nothing other than ideas in the mind of God, is the subject of a limerick by Ronald Knox, quoted for us by Bertrand Russell:
There was a young man who said, “God Must think it exceedingly odd If he finds that this tree Continues to be When there’s no one about in the Quad.”
reply
Dear Sir: Your astonishment’s odd: I am always about in the Quad. And that’s why the tree Will continue to be, Since observed by Yours faithfully, god. 14
14 Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, new York: Simon and Schuster, 1945, p. 648.
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Finally, Berkeley argues against common sense with regard to ideas and objects:
§ 38. But after all, say you, it sounds very harsh to say we eat and drink ideas, and are clothed with ideas. I acknowledge it does so; the word “idea” not being used in common discourse to signify the several combinations of sensible qualities which are called “things”; and it is certain that any expression which varies from the fa- miliar use of language will seem harsh and ridiculous. But this doth not concern the truth of the proposition, which in other words is no more than to say, we are fed and clothed with those things which we perceive immediately by our senses.
§ 39. If it be demanded why I make use of the word “idea,” and do not rather in com- pliance with custom call them “thing”; I answer, I do it for two reasons—first, because the term “thing” in contradistinction to “idea,” is generally supposed to denote some- what existing without the mind; secondly, because “thing” hath a more comprehen- sive signification than “idea,” including spirit or thinking things as well as ideas. Since therefore the objects of sense exist only in the mind, and are withal thoughtless and inactive, I chose to mark them by the word “idea,” which implies those properties.
Is this where Locke was leading us? If so, it looks as if the “new metaphysics” is every bit as fantastic as the old ones. But the controversial development of Locke’s empiricism has still another step to go.
D. The Congenial Skeptic: David Hume It isn’t very far from Berkeley’s subjective idealism to David Hume’s outrageous, but seemingly irrefutable, skepticism. Russell, writing about Hume two hundred years later (1945), says,
To refute him has been, ever since he wrote, a favorite pastime among metaphysicians. For my part, I find none of their refutations convincing; nevertheless, I cannot but hope that something less skeptical than Hume’s system may be discoverable.
And
Hume’s skeptical conclusions . . . are equally difficult to refute and to accept. The result was a challenge to philosophers, which, in my opinion, has still not been ade- quately met.15
There have been philosophers who have said—or feared—that Hume’s skepticism is the last word in philosophy. In any case, it is one of those positions that no philosophy student can avoid taking seriously.
Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739) was written when he was in his early twenties; his ambition was no less than to be the Isaac newton of philosophy and psychology, following but outdoing John Locke. The book failed to attract much attention (he said “it fell stillborn
• Do the objects in your bedroom cease to exist when you are not there to perceive them, according to Berkeley?
• Why is God so important for Berkeley’s idealism?
15 Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, new York: Simon and Schuster, 1945.
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from the press”), and Hume turned his attention to other matters, making himself famous as a historian. Later, in 1748, he wrote a more popular version of his earlier Trea- tise, which he called An Enquiry Concerning Human Un- derstanding. It was extremely successful, and Hume became widely known as a “devil’s advocate” during his lifetime, a position he generally enjoyed. Both the Trea- tise and the Enquiry are firmly committed to Locke’s em- piricist methodology, but where Locke was generous with doubtful ideas with no clear experiential basis (no- tably, substance and God), Hume was ruthless. In a famous threatening passage, he bellowed,
When we run over libraries, persuaded of these [em- piricist] principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning con- cerning matter of fact and existence? No, Commit it to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.16
In this unveiled threat to traditional metaphysics we can see in a glance Hume’s formi- dable tactics—the insistence that every justifiable belief must be either a “relation of ideas,” for example, a statement of mathematics, logic, or a trivial conceptual truth, or a “matter of fact,” which can be confirmed by appeal to our experience. (This “either-or” is sometimes called “Hume’s fork.”) of course, most of the modern philosophers we have discussed shared this insistence upon justifiability either by reason (“relation of ideas”) or by experi- ence. But it is only Hume who realizes the severity of this demand and the embarrassing number of our fundamental beliefs that do not allow justification either by reason or experience.
Like his empiricist predecessor, Hume insists that all knowledge begins with basic units of sensory ex- perience. Hume’s “impressions” (Locke’s “sensa- tions”) are these basic units (what we would still call “sensations” or “sense-data”).
F RO M A Treatise of Human Nature B Y David Hume17
All the perceptions of the human mind re- solve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call impressions and ideas. The difference betwixt these consists in the
The term devil’s advocate comes from a role performed during can- onization hearings in the Catholic Church. The devil’s advocate advances reasons why a person should not be canonized.(© Shut- terstock.com/Igor Zakowski) (Image © Igor Zakowski, 2011. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
(© iStockphoto.com/dlewis33)
16 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 2nd ed., ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, oxford: oxford Univer- sity Press, 1902. 17 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, oxford: oxford University Press, 1888.
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degrees of force and liveliness with which they strike upon the mind, and make their way into our thought or consciousness. Those perceptions, which enter with most force and violence, we may name impressions; and under this name I compre- hend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul. By ideas I mean the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning; such as, for instance, are all the perceptions excited by the present discourse, ex- cepting only, those which arise from the sight and touch, and excepting the im- mediate pleasure or uneasiness it may occasion. I believe it will not be very necessary to employ many words in explaining this distinction. Every one of him- self will readily perceive the difference betwixt feeling and thinking. The common degrees of these are easily distinguished; tho’ it is not impossible but in particular instances they may very nearly approach to each other. Thus in sleep, in a fever, in madness, or in any very violent emotions of soul, our ideas may approach to our impressions: As on the other hand it sometimes happens, that our impressions are so faint and low, that we cannot distinguish them from our ideas. But notwith- standing this near resemblance in a few instances, they are in general so very dif- ferent, that no-one can make a scruple to rank them under distinct heads, and assign to each a peculiar name to mark the difference.
There is another division of our perceptions, which it will be convenient to observe, and which extends itself both to our impressions and ideas. This division is into simple and complex. Simple perceptions or impressions and ideas are such as admit of no distinction nor separation. The complex are the contrary to these, and may be distinguished into parts. Tho’ a particular colour, taste, and smell are quali- ties all united together in this apple, ’tis easy to perceive they are not the same, but are at least distinguishable from each other.
Having by these divisions given an order and arrangement to our objects, we may now apply ourselves to consider with the more accuracy their qualities and relations. The first circumstance, that strikes my eye, is the great resemblance be- twixt our impressions and ideas in every other particular, except their degree of force and vivacity. The one seems to be in a manner the reflexion of the other; so that all the perceptions of the mind are double, and appear both as impressions and ideas. When I shut my eyes and think of my chamber, the ideas I form are exact representations of the impressions I felt, nor is there any circumstance of the one, which is not to be found in the other. In running over my other perceptions, I find still the same resemblance and representation. Ideas and impressions appear always to correspond to each other. This circumstance seems to me remarkable, and en- gages my attention for a moment.
Upon a more accurate survey I find I have been carried away too far by the first appearance, and that I must make use of the distinction of perceptions into simple and complex, to limit this general decision, that all our ideas and impressions are resem- bling. I observe, that many of our complex ideas never had impressions, that cor- responded to them, and that many of our complex impressions never are exactly copied in ideas. I can imagine to myself such a city as the New Jerusalem, whose pavement is gold and walls are rubies, tho’ I never saw any such. I have seen Paris; but shall I affirm I can form such an idea of that city, as will perfectly represent all its streets and houses in their real and just proportions?
I perceive, therefore, that tho’ there is in general a great resemblance betwixt our complex impressions and ideas, yet the rule is not universally true, that they are exact copies of each other. We may next consider how the case stands with our
“That idea of red, which we form in the dark, and that impression, which strikes our eyes in sun-shine, differ only in degree, not in nature.” — DAV I D H U M E
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simple perceptions. After the most accurate exami- nation, of which I am capable, I venture to affirm, that the rule here holds without any exception, and that every simple idea has a simple impression, which resembles it; and every simple impression a correspondent idea. That idea of red, which we form in the dark, and that impression, which strikes our eyes in sun-shine, differ only in degree, not in nature. That the case is the same with all our simple impressions and ideas, ’tis impossible to prove by a particular enumeration of them. Every one may satisfy himself in this point by running over as many as he pleases. But if any one should deny this universal resemblance, I know of no way of con- vincing him, but by desiring him to show a simple impression that has not a correspondent idea, or a simple idea, that has not a correspondent impres- sion. If he does not answer this challenge, as ’tis certain he cannot, we may from his silence and our own observation establish our conclusion.
Thus we find, that all simple ideas and impres- sions resemble each other; and as the complex are formed from them, we may affirm in general, that these two species of perception are exactly correspondent. Having discover’d this relation, which requires no farther examination, I am curious to find some other of their qualities. Let us consider how they stand with regard to their existence, and which of the impressions and ideas are causes, and which effects.
The full examination of this question is the subject of the present treatise; and therefore we shall here content ourselves with establishing one general proposition. That all our simple ideas in their first appearance are deriv’d from simple impressions, which are correspondent to them, and which they exactly represent.
We can imagine many things that we have never seen. (© iStockphoto.com/Alex Belomlinsky)
• What is the difference between “impressions” and “ideas”?
According to Hume, simple ideas are derived from simple impressions. A simple idea would be something like a red, round image; the simple impression would be seeing a red, round image. More complex ideas, for example, the idea of an apple, are complex arrange- ments and associations of simple ideas. To justify a belief as knowledge, therefore, we must break up its complex ideas into simple ideas and then find the impressions upon which those ideas are based. If I claim to see an apple, for example, I analyze my experience; my idea that there is an apple out there depends upon my seeing several red, round images from differ- ent angles, feeling something smooth, tasting something fruity and tart, and so on. If I claim that there are objects of a certain kind (apples, for example), I must identify the simple ideas and impressions upon which my supposed knowledge is based. And if I make a metaphysi- cal claim, about the existence of God or substances, I must either be preapproved to iden- tify the ideas and impressions upon which such a claim is based, or I must show that it is nothing other than a “relation of ideas”; otherwise, the claim cannot be justified (“commit it to the flames”).
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But, to the embarrassment of most metaphysical doctrines, they cannot be defended by either of the methods allowed by Hume. They are, by their very nature, about things beyond everyday experience (God and substance being two examples) and so are not based upon “impression”; nor are they “relations of ideas” that can be demonstrated by a simple logi- cal or mathematical proof. Therefore, they cannot be justified. The problem, however, is that the same argument extends far beyond the debatable claims of metaphysics and under- mines some of the beliefs that are most essential to our everyday experiences as well.
In Hume’s philosophy, three such beliefs in particular are singled out for analysis. on the one hand, they are so fundamental to our daily experience and common knowledge that no sane man or woman could possibly doubt them; on the other hand, they are completely without justification. As Hume argues, the first of these is our idea of causation (or causality), of one event bringing about or causing another event.
From this idea, which provides what Hume calls “the strongest connections” of our expe- rience and, elsewhere, “the cement of the universe,” we derive a most important principle, the principle of universal causation, which states that every event has its cause (or causes). It is evident that we assume such a principle every time we explain anything. For example, the car won’t start. We search for the cause, but everything seems to check out—the carbu- retor, the electrical system, and so on. now we might search for hours without finding the cause, but there is one thing in which we have confidence and that is that there must be a cause somewhere—even if it is a very complex cause. What is not possible is that there be no cause. The principle that every event has its cause is presupposed in our everyday think- ing. (You may recognize this principle as a version of Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason,
but Hume substitutes the more newtonian notion of “cause” for the notion of “reason.”)
Let us turn to the second of the metaphysical be- liefs that Hume sees as without justification. Because of our presupposed belief in causation and its uni- versal applicability, we are able to think beyond our immediate “ideas” and predict the future and ex- plain the past. But to do so, we must also believe that our observations of the present will have some relevance in the future, that we can in fact draw valid inductive generalizations from our experience. of course, we do so all of the time; for example, when I wake up at 6:00 in the morning, I expect the sun to rise before too long if it hasn’t already risen. Why? Because it has always done so, and because it is February 26 and the almanac says it will rise within the hour. In making every such prediction, we pre- suppose the principle of induction, that is, that the laws of nature that have always held in the past will continue to hold in the future. The principle of in- duction is sometimes summarized as “the future will be like the past,” which is all right only so long as this statement is not taken too literally; for of course the future is never just like the past—just in the course of reading this paragraph you are fifteen seconds older than before, for example, you have just added a new expression to your knowledge, and (unless you are
Is it simply crazy to argue that the sun may not rise tomorrow? It is ex- traordinarily unlikely, yes, but are we absolutely certain? What is our de- fense of the claim that the sun will rise tomorrow? (© Shutterstock.com/ Johan Swanepoel)
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eating while you read) you have lost a tiny bit of weight as well. But the laws of nature, at least, do not change from moment to moment.
Third, there is our belief in the “external world,” that is, a physical or material world that exists independently of our impressions and ideas, which it presumably causes in us. Bishop Berkeley had already done Hume’s work for him here. Hume, following Berkeley, also rejects all notions of substance as unintelligible, including even that minimal “we know not what” of John Locke. But where Berkeley turned the rejection of matter and substance into a meta- physical theory (namely, his subjective idealism) and used it to defend the existence of God, Hume rejects this idealist metaphysics as well and remains wholly skeptical, refusing to accept the existence of God. He remains firm in his insistence that our belief in the existence of anything is actually just “the idea of what we conceive to be existent.”
We can see that these three basic beliefs are intimately tied together; the notion of cause supports the principle of induction,18 and the causal theory of perception supports our belief in the “external world.” Accordingly, Hume takes causation to be the central idea of all rea- soning,19 that is, all attempts to connect separate ideas together in a single belief. Hume’s arguments are both elegant and simple to follow. He contests both the principle of universal causation and the principle of induction by showing that neither can be defended either as a “relation of ideas” or as a “matter of fact.” He begins with a statement that all human knowledge must be one or the other, explains what he means by “relations of ideas” and “matters of fact,” shows how it is that “cause and effect” are the basis of all reasoning, and then proceeds to show that such reasoning can be neither a relation of ideas nor a simple matter of fact.
F RO M An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding B Y David Hume20
All the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of Fact. Of the first kind are the sciences of Geometry, Algebra, and Arithmetic; and in short, every affirmation which is either intuitively or demonstratively certain. That the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the square of the two sides, is a proposition which expresses a relation between these figures. That three times five is equal to the half of thirty, expresses a relation between these numbers. Propositions of this kind are discoverable by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is anywhere existent in the universe. Though there never were a circle or triangle in nature, the truths demonstrated by Euclid would for ever retain their certainty and evidence.
Matters of fact, which are the second objects of human reason, are not ascer- tained in the same manner; nor is our evidence of their truth, however great, of a like nature with the foregoing. The contrary of every matter of fact is still possible; because it can never imply a contradiction, and is conceived by the mind with the same facility and distinctness, as if ever so conformable to reality. That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradic- tion than the affirmation, that it will rise. We should in vain, therefore, attempt to
18 Modern philosophers have given a great deal of attention to inductive inferences that are not based upon any obvi- ous causes, for example, statistical probabilities (as in genetics or gambling). 19 It is important to remember that Hume, like Locke, models his philosophy-psychology after newton’s physics. So even if he rejects Locke’s “causal theory of perception,” the newtonian model, in which causality is central, remains at the heart of his theories. 20 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 2nd ed., ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, oxford: oxford Univer- sity Press, 1902.
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demonstrate its falsehood. Were it demonstratively false, it would imply a contra- diction, and could never be distinctly conceived by the mind.
It may, therefore, be a subject worthy of curiosity, to enquire what is the nature of that evidence which assures us of any real existence and matter of fact, beyond the present testimony of our senses, or the records of our memory. This part of philosophy, it is observable, has been little cultivated, either by the ancients or moderns; and therefore our doubts and errors, in the prosecution of so important an enquiry, may be the more excusable; while we march through such difficult paths without any guide or direction. They may even prove useful, by exciting curiosity, and destroying that implicit faith and security, which is the bane of all reasoning and free enquiry. The discovery of defects in the common philosophy, if any such there be, will not, I presume, be a discouragement, but rather an incite- ment, as is usual, to attempt something more full and satisfactory than has yet been proposed to the public.
All reasonings concerning matter of fact seem to be founded on the relations of Cause and Effect. By means of that relation alone we can go beyond the evidence of our memory and senses. If you were to ask a man, why he believes any matter of fact, which is absent; for instance, that his friend is in the country, or in France; he would give you a reason; and this reason would be some other fact; as a letter re- ceived from him, or the knowledge of his former resolutions and promises. A man finding a watch or any other machine in a desert island, would conclude that there had once been men in that island. All our reasonings concerning fact are of the same nature. And here it is constantly supposed that there is a connexion between the present fact and that which is inferred from it. Were there nothing to bind them together, the inference would be entirely precarious. The hearing of an articulate voice and rational discourse in the dark assures us of the presence of some person: Why? because these are the effects of the human make and fabric, and closely con- nected with it. If we anatomize all the other reasonings of this nature, we shall find that they are founded on the relation of cause and effect, and that this relation is either near or remote, direct or collateral. Heat and light are collateral effects of fire, and the one effect may justly be inferred from the other.
Hume’s argument, which we shall see again and again, is that we explain our experiences and events by appeal to other experiences and events. If I burn my finger and wonder how, I look down and see that I have just placed my hand too near the stove-top burner. I explain that the heat of the burner is the cause and the burn is the effect of the hot burner. Indeed, we are perplexed whenever we cannot find some causal explanation, and the suggestion that there might not be one (“there was no cause; you just burned yourself, that’s all”) is all but unintelligible to us. But now, Hume asks, where do we get this knowledge of causes and effects?
If we would satisfy ourselves, therefore, concerning the nature of that evidence, which assures us of matters of fact, we must enquire how we arrive at the knowl- edge of cause and effect.
I shall venture to affirm, as a general proposition, which admits of no exception, that the knowledge of this relation is not, in any instance, attained by reasonings a priori; but arises entirely from experience, when we find that any particular objects are constantly conjoined with each other. Let an object be presented to a man of ever so strong natural reason and abilities; if that object be entirely new to him, he will not be able, by the most accurate examination of its sensible qualities, to
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discover any of its causes or effects. Adam, though his rational faculties be sup- posed, at the very first, entirely perfect, could not have inferred from the fluidity and transparency of water that it would suffocate him, or from the light and warmth of fire that it would consume him. No object ever discovers, by the qualities which appear to the senses, either the causes which produced it, or the effects which will arise from it; nor can our reason, unassisted by experience, ever draw any inference concerning real existence and matter of fact.
This proposition, that causes and effects are discoverable, not by reason but by experi- ence, will readily be admitted with regard to such objects, as we remember to have once been altogether unknown to us; since we must be conscious of the utter in- ability, which we then lay under, of foretelling what would arise from them. Pres- ent two smooth pieces of marble to a man who has no tincture of natural philosophy; he will never discover that they will adhere together in such a manner as to require great force to separate them in a direct line, while they make so small a resistance to lateral pressure. Such events, as bear little analogy to the common course of nature, are also readily confessed to be known only by experience; nor does any man imagine that the explosion of gunpowder, or the attraction of a lodestone, could ever be discovered by arguments a priori. In like manner, when an effect is supposed to depend upon an intricate machinery or secret structure of parts, we make no difficulty in attributing all our knowledge of it to experience. Who will assert that he can give the ultimate reason, why milk or bread is proper nourish- ment for a man, not for a lion or a tiger?
But the same truth may not appear, at first sight, to have the same evidence with regard to events, which have become familiar to us from our first appearance in the world, which bear a close analogy to the whole course of nature, and which are supposed to depend on the simple qualities of objects, without any secret structure of parts. We are apt to imagine that we could discover these effects by the mere operation of our reason, without experience. We fancy, that were we brought on a sudden into this world, we could at first have inferred that one Billiard-ball would communicate motion to another upon impulse; and that we needed not to have waited for the event, in order to pronounce with certainty concerning it. Such is the influence of custom, that, where it is strongest, it not only covers our natural ignorance, but even conceals itself, and seems not to take place, merely because it is found in the highest degree.
But to convince us that all the laws of nature, and all the operations of bodies without exception, are known only by experience, the following reflections may, perhaps, suffice. Were any object presented to us, and were we required to pro- nounce concerning the effect, which will result from it, without consulting past observation; after what manner, I beseech you, must the mind proceed in this op- eration? It must invent or imagine some event, which it ascribes to the object as its effect; and it is plain that this invention must be entirely arbitrary. The mind can never possibly find the effect in the supposed cause, by the most accurate scrutiny and examination. For the effect is totally different from the cause, and conse- quently can never be discovered in it. Motion in the second Billiard-ball is a quite distinct event from motion in the first; nor is there anything in the one to suggest the smallest hint of the other. A stone or piece of metal raised into the air, and left without any support, immediately falls: but to consider the matter a priori, is there anything we discover in this situation which can beget the idea of a downward, rather than an upward, or any other motion in the stone or metal?
“The mind can never possibly find the effect in the supposed cause. . . . For the effect is totally different from the cause, and consequently can never be discovered in it.” — DAV I D H U M E
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And as the first imagination or invention of a particular effect, in all natural operations, is ar- bitrary, where we consult not experience; so must we also esteem the supposed tie or con- nexion between the cause and effect, which binds them together, and renders it impossible that any other effect could result from the op- eration of that cause. When I see, for instance, a Billiard-ball moving in a straight line towards another; even suppose motion in the second ball should by accident be suggested to me, as the result of their contact or impulse; may I not conceive, that a hundred different events might as well follow from that cause? May not both these balls remain at absolute rest? May not the first ball return in a straight line, or leap off from the second in any line or direction? All
these suppositions are consistent and conceivable. Why then should we give the preference to one, which is no more consistent or conceivable than the rest? All our reasonings a priori will never be able to show us any foundations for this preference.
Hume’s argument so far is that we do not know particular causes and effects through reason, but only through experience. Because you have seen it so many times, you know that a billiard ball moving toward and striking another billiard ball sets the second in motion on a predictable path. But if you had never seen anything like it before—perhaps if you were Adam or Eve (pool tables were not created until the eighth day of creation)—you would not have any idea of what to expect. Both balls might stop dead. Both might explode. The second might start a lawsuit. Prediction of cause and effect, in other words, depends upon prior experience, and no amount of mere reasoning will suffice by itself.
In a word, then, every effect is a distinct event from its cause. It could not, there- fore, be discovered in the cause, and the first invention or conception of it, a priori, must be entirely arbitrary. And even after it is suggested, the conjunction of it with the cause must appear equally arbitrary; since there are always many other effects, which, to reason, must seem fully as consistent and natural. In vain, therefore, should we pretend to determine any single event, or infer any cause or effect, with- out the assistance of observation and experience.
. . . When we reason a priori, and consider merely any object or cause, as it appears
to the mind, independent of all observation, it never could suggest to us the notion of any distinct object, such as its effect; much less, show us the inseparable and in- violable connexion between them. A man must be very sagacious who could dis- cover by reasoning that crystal is the effect of heat, and ice of cold, without being previously acquainted with the operations of these qualities.
In this argument, we see Hume applying the first half of his “fork” to the idea of causation. The idea of cause and effect cannot be a relation of ideas, because, for example, no matter how closely we examine the idea of fire, we will never discover the idea of its causing gunpow- der to explode. Reasoning alone cannot reveal the causes or effects of particular events.
(© iStockphoto.com/vuk8691)
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At the outset of this argument, Hume also suggests that the idea of causation is not discover- able through perception either: Although we perceive many different qualities of fire, we never perceive its power to cause gunpowder to explode. Hume concludes that the idea of cause and effect must be derived from our experience of the constant conjunction of two events. We observe, for example, that every time we set a match to gunpowder it explodes; and because we expect the future to be like the past, we infer that the application of fire is the cause of the gunpowder’s exploding. In short, our knowledge of causes is arrived at through induction from past experiences.
But Hume argues that induction itself is problematic. His argument against induction, and in particular against the inductive principle that the future will be like the past, takes exactly the same form. Again he begins with his “fork” between “relations of ideas” and “matters of fact,” and again he proves that one of the basic assumptions of all our thinking, the principle of induction, cannot be established either way:
But we have not yet attained any tolerable satisfaction with regard to the question first proposed. Each solution still gives rise to a new question as difficult as the foregoing, and leads us on to further enquiries. When it is asked, What is the nature of all our reasonings concerning matter of fact? the proper answer seems to be, that they are founded on the relation of cause and effect. When again it is asked, What is the foundation of all our reasonings and conclusions concerning that relation? it may be replied in one word, Experience. But if we still carry on our shifting humour, and ask, What is the foundation of all conclusions from experience? this implies a new question, which may be of more difficult solution and explication. Philosophers, that give themselves airs of superior wisdom and sufficiency, have a hard task when they encounter persons of inquisitive dispositions, who push them from every corner to which they retreat, and who are sure at last to bring them to some dangerous di- lemma. The best expedient to prevent this confusion, is to be modest in our pre- tensions; and even to discover the difficulty ourselves before it is objected to us. By this means, we may make a kind of merit of our very ignorance.
I shall content myself, in this section, with an easy task, and shall pretend only to give a negative answer to the question here proposed. I say then, that, even after we have experience of the operations of cause and effect, our conclusions from that experience are not founded on reasoning, or any process of the understanding. This answer we must endeavour both to explain and to defend.
It must certainly be allowed, that nature has kept us at a great distance from all her secrets, and has afforded us only the knowledge of a few superficial qualities of objects; while she conceals from us those powers and principles on which the influence of those objects entirely depends. Our senses inform us of the colour, weight, and consistence of bread; but neither sense nor reason can ever inform us of those qualities which fit it for the nourishment and support of a human body. Sight or feeling conveys an idea of the actual motion of bodies; but as to that won- derful force or power, which would carry on a moving body for ever in a contin- ued change of place, and which bodies never lose but by communicating it to others; of this we cannot form the most distant conception. But notwithstanding this ignorance of natural powers and principles, we always presume, when we see like sensible qualities, that they have like secret powers, and expect that effects, similar to those which we have experienced, will follow from them. If a body of like colour and consistence with that bread, which we have formerly eat, be pre- sented to us, we make no scruple of repeating the experiment, and foresee, with
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certainty, like nourishment and support. Now this is a process of the mind or thought, of which I would willingly know the foundation. It is allowed on all hands that there is no known connexion between the sensible qualities and the secret powers; and conse- quently, that the mind is not led to form such a con- clusion concerning their constant and regular conjunction, by anything which it knows of their nature. As to past Experience, it can be allowed to give direct and certain information of those precise objects only, and that precise period of time, which fell under its cognizance: but why this experience should be ex- tended to future times, and to other objects, which for aught we know, may be only in appearance similar; this is the main question on which I would insist. The bread, which I formerly eat, nourished me; that is, a body of such sensible qualities was, at that time, endued with such secret powers: but does it follow, that other bread must also nourish me at another time, and that like sensible qualities must always be attended with like secret powers? The consequence seems nowise necessary. At least, it must be acknowledged that there is here a consequence drawn by the mind; that there is a certain step taken; a process of thought, and an inference, which wants to be explained. These two propositions are far from being the same, I have found that such an object has always been attended with such an effect, and I foresee, that other objects, which are, in ap- pearance, similar, will be attended with similar effects.
The argument so far is just like the argument regarding cause and effect, namely, that it is only from experience that we know the properties and effects of things and events, that moving bodies cause others to move, for instance, or that eating bread gives me nourishment. But now Hume distinguishes two propositions: (1) I have recognized a certain cause-and-effect relationship in my past experience, and (2) I predict that a similar cause-and-effect relationship will hold in the future also. The inference is surely reasonable, Hume says, but again he insists that we cannot say why such an inference is reasonable, and he argues that we cannot do so.
I shall allow, if you please, that the one proposition may justly be inferred from the other: I know, in fact, that it always is inferred. But if you insist that the inference is made by a chain of reasoning, I desire you to produce the reasoning. The con- nexion between these propositions is not intuitive. There is required a medium, which may enable the mind to draw such an inference, if indeed it be drawn by reasoning and argument. What that medium is, I must confess, passes my compre- hension; and it is incumbent on those to produce it, who assert that it really exists, and is the origin of all our conclusions concerning matter of fact.
This negative argument must certainly, in process of time, become altogether convincing, if many penetrating and able philosophers shall turn their enquiries this way and no one be ever able to discover any connecting proposition or
We know it is bread because of how it smells, feels, and tastes. (© iStockphoto.com/Maica)
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intermediate step, which supports the under- standing in this conclusion. But as the ques- tion is yet new, every reader may not trust so far to his own penetration, as to conclude, because an argument escapes his enquiry, that therefore it does not really exist. For this reason it may be requisite to venture upon a more difficult task; and enumerating all the branches of human knowledge, endeavour to show that none of them can afford such an argument.
Here is the famous device we mentioned earlier: “Hume’s fork.” This is Hume’s division of all knowl- edge into reasoning about relations of ideas (which he here calls “demonstrative”) and reasoning about matters of fact (which he here calls “moral”). He says that it is clear from the above arguments that no de- monstrative reasoning is available to justify our pre- dictions of the future. But then he goes on to argue that no reasoning about matters of fact—no appeal to experience—can justify our propensity to make predictions either. For in order to justify our belief that the future will resemble the past on the basis of our experience, we would in effect be arguing that we know that the future will be like the past because in the past the future has always been like the past, and this is “begging the question,” a matter of a “vicious circle,” in which one defends a proposition by referring it back to itself. (It’s like asking a suspected liar, “Are you lying to me?”) Therefore our propensity for predict- ing can’t be justified by appealing to experience either, which leaves us without any justification.
Reasoning and argument are like a good detective. (© Shutterstock .com/Dm_Cherry)
• What is “Hume’s fork”? Which three beliefs does he claim are unjustified on this basis?
• How does Hume undermine our ability to make predictions?
All reasonings may be divided into two kinds, namely, demonstrative reasoning, or that concerning relations of ideas, and moral reasoning, or that concerning matters of fact and existence. That there are no demonstrative arguments in the case seems evident; since it implies no contradiction that the course of nature may change, and that an object, seemingly like those which we have experienced, may be attended with different or contrary effects. May I not clearly and distinctly conceive that a body, falling from the clouds, and which, in all other respects, resembles snow, has yet the taste of salt or feeling of fire? Is there any more intelligible proposition than to affirm, that all the trees will flourish in December and January, and decay in May and June? Now whatever is intelligible, and can be distinctly conceived, im- plies no contradiction, and can never be proved false by any demonstrative argu- ment or abstract reasoning a priori.
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If we be, therefore, engaged by arguments to put trust in past experience, and make it the standard of our future judgement, these arguments must be probable only, or such as regard matter of fact and real existence, according to the division above mentioned. But that there is no argument of this kind, must appear, if our explication of that species of reasoning be admitted as solid and satisfactory. We have said that all arguments concerning existence are founded on the relation of cause and effect; that our knowledge of that relation is derived entirely from expe- rience; and that all our experimental conclusions proceed upon the supposition that the future will be conformable to the past. To endeavour, therefore, the proof of this last supposition by probable arguments, or arguments regarding existence, must be evidently going in a circle, and taking that for granted, which is the very point in question.
. . . When a man says, I have found, in all past instances, such sensible qualities conjoined
with such secret powers: And when he says, Similar sensible qualities will always be con- joined with similar secret powers, he is not guilty of tautology, nor are these proposi- tions in any respect the same. You say that the one proposition is an inference from the other. But you must confess that the inference is not intuitive; neither is it de- monstrative: Of what nature is it, then? To say it is experimental, is begging the question. For all inferences from experience suppose, as their foundation, that the future will resemble the past, and that similar powers will be conjoined with simi- lar sensible qualities. If there be any suspicion that the course of nature may change, and that the past may be no rule for the future, all experience becomes useless, and can give rise to no inference or conclusion. It is impossible, therefore, that any ar- guments from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to the future; since all these arguments are founded on the supposition of that resemblance. Let the source of things be allowed hitherto ever so regular; that alone, without some new argument or inference, proves not that, for the future, it will continue so. In vain do you pretend to have learned the nature of bodies from your past experience. Their secret nature, and consequently all their effects and influence may change, without any change in their sensible qualities. This happens sometimes, and with regard to some objects: Why may it not happen always, and with regard to all ob- jects? What logic, what process of argument secures you against this position? My practice, you say, refutes my doubts. But you mistake the purport of my question. As an agent, I am quite satisfied in the point; but as a philosopher, who has some share of curiosity, I will not say scepticism, I want to learn the foundation of this inference. No reading, no enquiry has yet been able to remove my difficulty, or give me satisfaction in a matter of such importance. Can I do better than propose the difficulty to the public, even though, perhaps, I have small hopes of obtaining a solution? We shall at least, by this means, be sensible of our ignorance, if we do not augment our knowledge.
Hume’s arguments against the principle of universal causation and the principle of induction are also arguments against rationalism in general. What he is saying is that reasoning alone, without information from experience, cannot tell us anything whatever about the world. Rea- soning a priori, that is, without any appeal to experience, is incapable of proving any of those theorems so important to the rationalists, such as the existence of substances, a God, and causes, as well as the conformity of future events to past ones. Hume’s arguments are at the same time skeptical ones, since he reasons that even an appeal to experience cannot prove the reality of any of these things.
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What might dispel these skeptical doubts? If we seek a justification or defense, there is none, according to Hume. But in everyday life, such philosophical doubts need have no effect at all, for though there is no justification of our beliefs, we can yet remain confident that at least there is an explanation for them.
Suppose a person, though endowed with the strongest faculties of reason and reflection, to be brought on a sudden into this world; he would, indeed, immedi- ately observe a continual succession of objects and one event following another, but he would not be able to discover anything further. He would not at first, by any reasoning, be able to reach the idea of cause and effect, since the particular powers by which all natural operations are performed never appear to the senses; nor is it reasonable to conclude, merely because one event in one instance precedes another, that therefore the one is the cause, the other the effect. The conjunction may be arbitrary and casual. There may be no reason to infer the existence of one from the appearance of the other: and, in a word, such a person without more experience could never employ his conjecture or reasoning concerning any matter of fact or be assured of anything beyond what was immediately present to his memory or senses.
Suppose again that he has acquired more experience and has lived so long in the world as to have observed similar objects or events to be constantly conjoined together—what is the consequence of this experience? He immediately infers the existence of one object from the appearance of the other, yet he has not, by all his experience, acquired any idea or knowl- edge of the secret power by which the one object produces the other, nor is it by any process of reasoning he is engaged to draw this inference; but still he finds himself determined to draw it, and though he should be convinced that his un- derstanding has no part in the operation, he would neverthe- less continue in the same course of thinking. There is some other principle which determines him to form such a conclusion.
This principle is custom or habit. For wherever the repeti- tion of any particular act or operation produces a propensity to renew the same act or operation without being impelled by any reasoning or process of the understanding, we always say that this propensity is the effect of custom. By employing that word we pretend not to have given the ultimate reason of such a propensity. We only point out a principle of human nature which is universally acknowledged, and which is well known by its effects. Perhaps we can push our inquiries no further or pretend to give the cause of this cause, but must rest contented with it as the ultimate principle which we can assign of all our conclusions from experience. It is sufficient satisfaction that we can go so far without repining at the narrowness of our faculties, because they will carry us no further. And it is cer- tain we here advance a very intelligible proposition at least, if not a true one, when we assert that after the constant conjunc- tion of two objects, heat and flame, for instance, weight and solidity, we are determined by custom alone to expect the one from the appearance of the other. This hypothesis seems even
“All inferences from experience . . . are effects of custom, not of reasoning.” — DAV I D H U M E
Francisco de Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799). Can reason itself produce monsters, too? (© Burstein Collection/Corbis)
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the only one which explains the difficulty why we draw from a thousand instances an inference which we are not able to draw from one instance that is in no respect different from them. Reason is incapable of any such variation. The conclusions which it draws from considering one circle are the same which it would form upon surveying all the circles in the universe. But no man, having seen only one body move after being impelled by another, could infer that every other body will move after a like impulse. All inferences from experience, therefore, are effects of custom, not of reasoning.
In other words, there is no “solution to these skeptical doubts,” but, at most, what Hume calls “a skeptical solution.” It means an end, not only to philosophy, but to all rational inquiry and all claims that we can know anything (even that the sun will rise tomorrow, or that there is a textbook now in front of you). You might think that such conclusions would have driven Hume mad or caused him such confusion that he would have been incapable of coping with the most everyday chores. Yet we know that he was eminently practical and the jolliest sort of fellow. As a philosopher, he has been driven right up against the wall of Plato’s Cave. But he remains unperturbed. In a famous passage at the end of the Treatise, he simply remarks:
Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avoca- tion, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I wou’d return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.21
• Why does Hume think that rationality alone is unable to give us knowledge? Why does he think empiricism alone is unable to give us knowledge? What is Hume’s “solution” to this problem?
• Are Hume’s skeptical doubts convincing? Why or why not?
Perhaps you too find these speculations cold, strained and ridiculous. If so, however, this is not the time to run off to dinner and an evening of games and conversation. Something has gone very wrong. The empiricist attempt to restore common sense to philosophy has ended in the least commonsensical philosophy imaginable. A person who really believed that there might be no material world or that the future will not resemble the past (and therefore, having been hit by a truck last week, steps into the street con- vinced that it will not happen again) would be crazy! How can our intellects be so out of joint with our experience or our philosophy so far away from practical life? How serious is Hume’s skepticism?
21 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, oxford: oxford University Press, 1888.
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E. A CONTEMPORARY CONUNDRUM: KNOWLEDGE AS JUSTIFIED TRUE BELIEF Contemporary “analytic” epistemology has been understandably intrigued by a brief argu- ment put forward by Massachusetts philosopher Edmund Gettier illustrating as well as any moment in the history of philosophy both the philosophical obsession with necessary and sufficient conditions and the skillful employment of counter-examples (see p. 33). In the many arguments that make up the history of the philosophical study of knowledge, one basic definition or theory of knowledge has been almost universally accepted, and that is that knowledge is justified true belief. If a belief isn’t true, it can’t be known, and even if a belief is true, it isn’t part of knowledge unless it is also justified. Theories about the justifica- tion of belief abound, but most appeal to some sense of proof or evidence, and the idea is that if such justification for a true belief exists (even if that justification depends on the testi- mony or authority of others), the belief is an item of knowledge. Gettier offers counter- examples, cases in which a person is justified in a true belief, but does not really possess knowledge. In these cases the person has good reason to believe something that happens to be true, but on grounds that are in fact faulty. Gettier’s cases involve compound state- ments, one example being “Either Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Barcelona.” 22 In such a case, the truth of either “Jones owns a Ford” or “Brown is in Barcelona” would make the entire statement true (as would the truth of both of them). A person may believe this state- ment to be true because of seeing Jones consistently drive by in a Ford, but have no reason at all to think that Brown is in Barcelona. However, it could be that Jones has only rented the Ford and that Brown, coincidentally, is in Barcelona on vacation. The person would have reason to believe that this true compound statement is true, but on the basis of unreliable evidence. Although the person is justified in believing the statement, which is true, Gettier claims that the person does not know that the statement is true.
• Is justified true belief knowledge?
• How would you respond to the counter-example just described?
• What would be an example, besides the one given above, of a case in which a person is justified in believing something that is true, but nevertheless fails to know that it is true?
Gettier shows that the idea that knowledge is justified true belief isn’t so straightforward as it has seemed. His counter-examples have provided the models for a great deal of con- temporary philosophical criticism on a wide variety of topics. Whenever a philosophical theory presents us with a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, the reader is invited to invent a clever counter-example that forces the philosopher to reconsider and revise this theory.
What are we to make of this? one virtue of such “Gettier-type” examples is that they force us to be very careful in putting forward philosophical theories in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. But philosophers have also taken such counter-examples to sug- gest that philosophical theories as such are problematic and that the search for necessary and sufficient conditions is itself a mistake, as we shall see in the historical sketch from Kant to pragmatism and hermeneutics in the following chapter.
22 Edmund L. Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis 23 (1963), p. 123.
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SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
Epistemology is the study of human knowledge—what we can know, how we can know it, and what we cannot know. In this sense, epistemology and metaphysics are complementary disciplines. Epistemology becomes the method of approach to the knowledge of the way the world really is. For some philosophers, for example, Descartes, this approach places its primary trust in reason; accordingly, they are called rationalists. For other philosophers, for example, Locke, the preferred approach is to trust the senses and experience; they are called empiricists. The problem for both the rationalists and the empiricists is to get beyond the mere appearance of things to the reality behind them. The rationalist tries to do this by appealing to intuition and certain principles from which he or she can deduce the way the world really is. The empiricist, on the other hand, appeals to his or her experiences, trying to find evidence for the nature of reality. For both views, however, the danger is that their meth- ods do not always seem to achieve as much as they would like. Rationalists disagree about which principles to start with and which intuitions to trust. Empiricists find that their own method of experience makes it impossible to say anything about what lies beyond experi- ence. Thus Berkeley argues that only our ideas (including God) and the minds that have these ideas exist, and Hume concludes that we can never know anything about reality, but only about our own associations of ideas. Epistemologists are still working on more satis- factory answers to the questions of knowledge, and still trying to defeat or defend once and for all the skeptical conclusions so brilliantly argued by Hume. Finally, we considered a prev- alent view of knowledge as justified true belief and used that to reexamine the very idea of analysis in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions.
CHAPTER REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. Can you think of any way for Locke to defend his claim that substances exist, but we do not know what they are? How would Locke respond to Berkeley’s conclusion that we can only know ideas?
2. Descartes reestablishes his system of beliefs because of his famous statement “I am a thing that thinks.” Where is the place of the thing that thinks in Locke’s system?
3. Explain the difference between inductive and deductive reasoning and how it applies to the systems of Descartes and Locke.
4. How would you characterize skepticism? In what way have the various thinkers consid- ered in this chapter responded to the skeptics’ challenge? How might the skeptic reply in each case?
5. Explain the difficulties associated with rationalism and empiricism.
KEY TERMS
appearance a priori (knowledge) association of ideas causal theory of perception causation cause cogito, ergo sum
conceptual truth datum empiricism epistemology explanation generalization from experience (or induction)
Hume’s fork idea impression induction inductive generalization innate ideas intuition
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BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
Several studies of the various issues related to René Descartes’s epistemology can be found in Janet Broughton and John Carriero, eds., A Companion to Descartes (Malden, MA, and oxford: Blackwell, 2011).
Gottfried W. von Leibniz’s reply to John Locke is spelled out at length in Leibniz’s “New Essays on Human Understanding,” trans. and ed. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding is published by oxford University Press (1975).
Bishop Berkeley’s Treatise is printed in full in T. E. Jessop, ed., Berkeley, Philosophical Writ- ings (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1953).
of special interest is Berkeley’s Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (La Salle, IL: open Court, 1935), in which the arguments of his Treatise are worked out in entertaining dialogue form.
David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature is available, edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge (oxford: oxford University Press, 1888; 2nd ed., revised by P. H. nidditch, 1975), but most begin- ners will find Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, edited by L. A. Selby- Bigge (oxford: oxford University Press, 1902; 3rd ed., revised by P. H. nidditch, 1975) much easier reading.
Bertrand Russell, Problems of Philosophy (London: Williams and norgate, 1912) is an excel- lent introduction to the problems of epistemology and some of the problems of metaphysics.
Some more modern epistemological studies are Ralph Baergen, Contemporary Epistemol- ogy (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1995); Jonathan Dancy, Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology (oxford: Blackwell, 1985); John Greco and Ernest Sosa, The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology (oxford: Blackwell, 1998); Alfred Mele and Piers Rawling, The Oxford Handbook of Rationality (new York: oxford University Press, 2003); and Robert Audi, Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowl- edge (new York: Routledge, 2003).
A modern defense of skepticism is Peter Unger, Ignorance (London: oxford University Press, 1975).
justification matter of fact (in Hume) necessary (truth) necessary and sufficient conditions perception primary qualities principle of induction principle of universal causation
probable quality rational rationalism rationalist reason relations of ideas rules of inference secondary qualities sensation
sense-data skepticism subjective idealism substance tabula rasa truth of reason
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4 | Truth and Relativism Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live.
F R I E D R I C H N I E T Z S C H E 1
The problem of truth has always been central to philosophy. In asking “What is reality really like?” the ancient philosophers were trying to ascertain the truth behind the appearances of reality. Some of them, such as Parmenides and Plato, quite clearly distinguished between the True World—or simply, “the Truth”—and the world of our everyday experiences. Descartes and Locke were both looking for the truth, but in different ways, and the differ- ence in their approaches signified a difference in their sense of what the truth should be. But they both believed that there was such a thing as the Truth, that their preferred philosophical methods would get them the Truth. It is with the skeptics—and Hume in particular—that this assurance has broken down.
The multiplicity of cultures and philosophies—and different types of philosophy—also throws open the question of truth. If different cultures and philosophies only disagree in their perspective and style, then despite their differences it may nonetheless be true that there is a truth that all of them describe, but they orient themselves to that truth in different ways. It is like the old Persian story about the several blind men stroking an elephant, one of whom claims that the beast is as big as a barrel, another that the elephant is more like a snake, two others that it is like a rope or an ivory sword. But in this familiar story it is obvious that the blind men could, by moving around the animal, come to agree.
The real problem arises if it turns out that our various perspectives and the languages in which we describe them render us immobile, incapable of appreciating (except in the ab- stract) other orientations. It is as if we never experience reality itself—the thesis shared by various idealists and the skeptics alike—but know only our own interpretations. Or, to take a different metaphor, it is as if we were reading a book, a translation of an ancient text into English, which itself was translated from another ancient language, which was in turn
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 272.
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translated from another ancient language, which was copied from some ancient scrolls which now no longer exist and, just possibly, never existed in the first place. Do other cultures share our world but just see it differently, or do they live in some sense in a different world? If so, as Nietzsche writes, there may be many kinds of “truth,” and thus no truth at all.
The view of the Truth as out there in the world is the basis of both common sense and much of the history of philosophy. Even Bishop Berkeley, who argued that the world consists of ideas, in- sisted that these ideas were caused by God, who is the Truth. But skepticism challenges God as Truth just as it challenges our assumption that most of what we know is the Truth. The idea that the Truth is outside of us becomes no longer a matter of common sense but the source of seri- ous paradoxes. If it is outside of us, how will we ever know it? If it is not outside of us, is there anything at all to know?
What now comes into question are the very assumptions that have ruled metaphysics and common sense since the time of the first philoso- phers. First of all, there is Plato’s “two-worlds” view: “the world of Being,” which is the true world, and “the world of Becoming,” the world of our daily experience that, though perhaps not unreal, is less real than the world of Being. Now, the actual model Plato uses has not been accepted by all modern philosophers, and it is certainly out of line with common sense. But many philosophers, of both East and West, have accepted the distinction between appearance and reality. The empiricists, for example, held precisely the reverse of Plato’s view. According
to modern empiricism, it is the material world that becomes the real world, and our ideas— our mental “ideas” and experiences—become the less real “world.” The problem, whether in Descartes, Locke, Hume, or Russell, is always how to know that our “ideas” or experiences in fact match up to the real world. The fact that Descartes is confident that he can know that his experiences “match up,” while Hume believes that we can never even know there is such a world, must not hide from us the “two-worlds” model that both of them presuppose: real- ity (if there is one) on the one side, our experience on the other. How do we move from experience to reality?
We also mentioned two assumptions in Chapter 1, common not only to Plato and Aristotle but to most modern thinkers as well (Spinoza and Leibniz, for example). They were: (1) the world is intelligible to us and our language can capture the structures of reality, and (2) all knowledge of reality (that is, metaphysical knowledge) must consist of necessary truths. The first assumption seems to presuppose the “two-worlds” model in some sense, because
Truth is personified in this American wood engraving of approximately 1840. (Granger, NYC—All rights reserved.)
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something (our language) cannot be “faithful” unless it is faithful to something else, outside of itself (reality). But it also assumes that the language we (or the Greeks) use to express ourselves is also adequate to describe the world without distortion. Is that so obviously the case? For example, could the words we use to pick out individual objects in fact distort the truth for us, forcing certain things into categories that are unnatural to them and making impossible the identification of anything for which we do not have a word? Does our lan- guage delude us even by picking out objects at all? Are there really objects (substances)? Are we substances? And could it be that different languages (English and ancient Greek, for example) actually interpret the world in different ways?
This last very difficult question—which raises the problem that many philosophers call relativism—is also a problem that infects the assumption that knowledge of reality consists of necessary truths. Relativism is the thesis that truth varies from context to context: truth is rela- tive to a language, a culture, a way of looking at the world. (but what, then, is “the world,” if there are only so many ways of looking at it?) But to say that knowledge consists of necessary truths is to insist that knowledge could not be mistaken. But is this a fact about the world, or is it rather an inability on our part to see through the common assumptions that are, perhaps, built right into our language? How do we know that what we believe to be necessary—because of the structure of our language—is not just necessary for us, and not true of reality at all? So we have to ask, “Are we trapped inside our language? Is it impossible for us to know anything about reality itself, not merely what we ourselves have imposed through our language?”
Here the issue of multiculturalism crashes in on traditional Western philosophy with a ven- geance. Could it be that the structure Western philosophers and scientists posit in the world is in fact a projection of their language and methods? Could it be that the emphasis on ab- stract theory is an oversimplification or even a distortion of the truth? African folk traditions, for example, explain the ways of the world in what we would call metaphorical or mythological language. Is it correct or fair to insist, as Western philosophers and scientists have for nearly three thousand years, that those folk traditions are false or misleading, rather than an equally but extremely different way of trying to express one of several possible visions of the world?
The assumption that knowledge consists of necessary truths has already begun to bother us, since Locke and his empiricist followers insisted that all of our knowledge of the world must consist of truths based upon experience, and since, by the very nature of inductive ar- guments from experience, we could not actually be certain of anything. Descartes had in- sisted that any belief worth the honorific title “knowledge” had to be certain (“perfectly certain,” he said). But now, let us ask, wasn’t he demanding a bit too much? In fact, much too much! Surely I have the right to say that I know that I’m not dreaming right now, even if it’s true that I might be wrong. In other words, it is time to weaken our demands. Perhaps it will be enough if we believe what is rational to believe, even if it is not certain and even if it does not “match up” with some unexperienceable reality. You might even say, “Perhaps it is not necessary to believe what is true.” But notice that you would have already presupposed that what makes our belief true is some reality beyond our experience. It is just this notion of truth we must examine in this chapter.
A. What Is truth? What is truth? That familiar question was raised by Pontius Pilate as he dismissed Christ’s case from his court. Pilate was just a politician who did not take the question seriously. Philosophers, however, do. It is their business to find the truth, to expose fraudulent beliefs and superstitions, and to assure us that we can know, at least most of the time, what is true and what is false.
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What indeed is truth? Should we say, as we have so far, that our beliefs are true if and only if they “match up” with reality? Or, in accordance with our present sus- picions, should we not perhaps hold out for some different conception of “truth,” one that does not place such emphasis on “matching up” and the separation of reality on the one hand from our beliefs and experiences on the other?
The proper philosophical name for this notion of “matching up” our beliefs and experiences with reality is the correspondence theory of truth. On the one hand, it is an obvious truism: for example, when I tell you “there is a grapefruit in the refrigerator,” what I tell you is true if and only if there is in fact a grapefruit in the refrigerator. So obvious is this “correspondence” criterion of truth—that a belief or a statement is true if and only if it corresponds to the facts—that no one would have thought of calling it a “theory” at all until recently. In his Metaphysics Aristo- tle dismissed the whole “problem of truth” in a single sentence: “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true.” As long as philosophers (and everyone else) believed themselves unquestionably capable of knowing reality as such, this com- monsense platitude was as appropriate for the investigations of metaphysics as it was for the daily task of checking to see whether there was a grapefruit in the re- frigerator. But as empiricism and Hume’s skepticism grew in persuasiveness and the confidence that we could know reality was thrown into question, the platitude became a problem.
For Descartes, the correspondence between our ideas and reality had to be demonstrated. Locke expressed his doubts; Berkeley rejected the “external world” altogether, leaving only God (and other minds like Berkeley’s own); and
Hume left us with the seemingly irrefutable argument that we could never know reality out- side of us, or even if there was a reality to be known. But all of these philosophers presup- pose the correspondence theory of truth, the idea that knowledge is the correspondence of our ideas to reality and that the only knowledge worthy of the name is our being certain of this correspondence.
Now it will probably seem odd to you to even question something so obviously “true” as the correspondence theory of truth. Of course, we cannot deny that “there is a grapefruit in the refrigerator” is true if and only if there is a grapefruit in the refrigerator. But let us note immediately that the correspondence theory is not so obviously adequate for all true state- ments. What does “two plus two equals four” correspond to that makes it true? One might suggest that it corresponds to all combinations in the world of two things (walnuts, elephants, acres, or apples) and two other things of the same kind. “Two plus two equals four” would still be true even if there were no such combinations in the universe. A tautology such as “either it is snowing or it is not snowing” does not correspond to anything; it tells us nothing about the world. A conceptual truth such as “blue is a color” tells us only about the meanings of words in our language. A rule of inference tells us how to think. But none of these “corre- spond” to anything. So, at most, we shall have to say that the correspondence theory is good as an account of empirical knowledge only! (This is the conclusion of most empiricists.)
But there are more serious problems, even within the domain of empirical knowledge. Let’s look again at the truism, “‘There’s a grapefruit in the refrigerator’ is true if and only if there is a grapefruit in the refrigerator.” Let’s ask, first of all, in what sense the noises you utter (the sounds, “there’s a grapefruit in the refrigerator . . .”) correspond to the fact that there is a grapefruit in the refrigerator. If you think of one thing corresponding to another, you might think of a map corresponding to the terrain it is a map of: smaller scale with many omissions, but at least it is the same shape, same proportions, and has representations of things in that
Pilate asks “What is truth?” in this eponymously named 1890 painting, by Nikolai Nikolaevich Ge (What is Truth? (Christ and Pilate) 1890 (oil on
canvas), Ge (Gay), Nikolai Nikolaevich
(1831–94)/Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow,
Russia/Bridgeman Images)
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terrain that you can recognize. But how do those sounds coming out of your mouth (which, now that you listen to them, might sound strange indeed) “correspond” to that grapefruit in the kitchen? Now you will say that it is not merely “the sounds” that correspond but rather what you are saying or meaning. Of course, this is correct. But notice that what those words mean is not a matter of their use in this particular instance; they depend upon their role in a language (American English) which you happen to speak. (If you spoke only Swahili and pro- nounced the same sounds, it would be a remarkable coincidence, but your utterance wouldn’t mean anything.) And the “correspondence” between those words with their meanings and the fact that there is a grapefruit in the refrigerator depends not only on the whole American- English language and your knowledge of it but also on a set of conventions that both you and your friend must understand as referring to the grapefruit in the refrigerator.
In class, for example, your teacher says, “there is a grapefruit in the refrigerator” as an example of an English sentence. But you do not get up and look for a refrigerator. You know that although your teacher has said the same words that you say to your friend when offering a grapefruit, he or she is not directly referring to anything. The statement does not “corre- spond” to a fact that there is a grapefruit in the refrigerator. It is clear that what you’ve said (and the same is true of what you’ve thought) cannot correspond to anything by itself. In a sense, you might say that what corresponds to the fact that there is a grapefruit in the refrig- erator when you offer your friend a grapefruit is the whole of the English language, with all of its conventions and everything that you and your friend know that is relevant to the mean- ing of your statement in this particular case.
From the other side of this “correspondence,” matters are no less complicated. What is “the fact” that there is a grapefruit in the refrigerator? This sounds like an easy question. The answer is that there is a grapefruit in the refrigerator! But how do we pick out this fact, except by using our language to distinguish this fact from any number of others. Suppose that instead of saying anything, you were simply to point toward the refrigerator for your friend. Knowing you, your friend knows what you mean. In this case, the pointing is short- hand for the statement, and presupposes it. But suppose your friend is a time-traveler from thirteenth-century Siberia who had no idea what a refrigerator was, or a grapefruit for that matter? Would he pick out the right “fact”? How would he know whether you were pointing to the kitchen, to the door of the refrigerator, or to its contents? Is the “grapefruit” to be eaten or to be dropped on one’s feet? How do we even understand the pointing gesture? (If you point your finger toward a dish of cat food, a cat is more likely to smell your finger than understand your meaning.) So if it seems obvious to you that the “facts” are simply there, waiting to be corresponded to by our verbal or gestural pointing, think again. One isolates facts of the world only by picking them out by language. But if this is so, the language doesn’t strictly “correspond” to the world, for it is language that “carves up” our world into individually identifiable “facts” in the first place.
Now none of this is to deny that your statement, “there’s a grapefruit in the refrigerator” is true if and only if there is a grapefruit in the refrigerator. But it is to say that this simple “correspondence” is possible only because of the enormous number of systematic assump- tions we share within our language, about the world, and about the way we refer to particular “facts” in the world by use of certain statements. In everyday life we don’t have to think about such things. But in philosophy, they make us marvel at what complex and clever crea- tures we are. Bertrand Russell, certainly one of the smartest among us, spent forty years trying to make sense out of the “commonsense” correspondence theory. He never did. He never succeeded in formulating an adequate defense of the idea that some single unit of language could “correspond” to a discrete “fact.” Today most philosophers would agree, no matter what kind of method they follow, that the correspondence theory alone cannot
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make sense of the notion of truth. A statement means something only within a language, and a “fact” is “corresponded to” only after it has been picked out by language. That means that truth can’t be simple correspondence.
So the seemingly simple act of “saying what is true” turns out to be enormously compli- cated, and there are three telling arguments against the “correspondence theory of truth”:
1. It is, at best, limited. All cases of necessary truth, and perhaps some others, cannot be accounted for by it at all.
2. There is no such thing as a statement or a belief that by itself is capable of “ corresponding” to anything.
3. There is no such thing as a “fact” that can be picked out independently of the language used to describe it.
Next time you say or think that there is a grapefruit in the refrigerator, you might marvel at the complex relationship between fact and language that has just come into action. That won’t, unfortunately, guarantee that your statement or thought will be true. For de- spite all this sophisticated, intellectual apparatus we still occasionally forget to buy the grapefruit.
• What is the correspondence theory of truth? Is correspondence involved in all cases of truth? If not, what other bases might there be for claiming that a statement is true?
B. Theories of Truth Now what? We find ourselves with some ill-defined complex in which our language and real- ity are tied together and mutually depend on each other. But what we have been leading up to, finally, is that we need something more than the naive commonsense “correspondence theory of truth,” some theory that takes into account this complexity of interrelations. Three such theories have achieved prominence in the past century, although all three of them were anticipated by Immanuel Kant, whom we shall meet later in this chapter. The three theories are the following:
1. The coherence theory of truth, which says that a statement or a belief is true if and only if it “coheres” or ties in with other statements and beliefs.
2. The pragmatic theory of truth, which says that a statement or a belief is true if and only if “it works,” if it allows us to predict certain results, if it allows us to function effectively in everyday life, and if it encourages further inquiry or helps us lead better lives.
3. The semantic theory of truth, which says that a statement or a belief is true because the rules of our language set up a correspondence between certain statements and “the facts” that our language picks out in the world. Superficially this theory looks like the correspondence theory, but it is very different. The correspondence theory accepts facts as “already there,” independent of our language. The semantic theory explains this apparent correspondence by telling us that it is our language that sets it up in the first place.
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1. The Coherence Theory The coherence theory of truth does not necessarily oppose the commonsense idea that true statements “correspond” to facts in the world, but it does shift the focus of the discus- sion away from this correspondence—if there is one—to the interdependence of the state- ments themselves. In other words, it seizes on the observation made in our discussion of the correspondence theory, that a simple statement of fact (“there’s a grapefruit in the refrig- erator”) involves, in some sense, the whole English language. The words in that simple sentence would not mean much if they did not also have the same meaning in an unlimited number of other sentences, and their ability to refer to the world therefore depends on their role in a language.
Furthermore, when we try to ascertain the truth of a statement, how do we do it? By ascer- taining the truth of other statements and arguing, deductively or inductively, for the conse- quent truth of this one. Thus, the coherence theory places its emphasis on the ways in which we find out the truth, and it rightly points out that knowledge is not just a matter of establish- ing the truth of one statement after another; it is a matter of getting more and more state- ments to cohere in a unified body of knowledge. This coherence makes them true, whether or not there is some metaphysical sense in which they cohere because, in fact, they are true.
To represent the coherence theory, here is a selection from the American philosopher, Brand Blanshard.
On the Coherence Theory B Y Brand Blanshard2
To think is to seek understanding. And to seek understanding is an activity of mind that is marked off from all other activities by a highly distinctive aim. This aim . . . is to achieve systematic vision, so to apprehend what is now unknown to us as to relate it, and relate it necessarily, to what we know already.
But may it not be that what satisfies thought fails to conform to the real world? Where is the guarantee that when I have brought my ideas into the form my ideal requires, they should be true? . . . In our long struggle with the relation of thought to reality we saw that if thought and things are conceived as related only externally, then knowledge is luck; there is no necessity whatever that what satisfies intelli- gence should coincide with what really is. It may do so, or it may not; on the prin- ciple that there are many misses to one bull’s-eye, it more probably does not. But if we get rid of the misleading analogies through which this relation has been conceived, of copy and original, stimulus and organism, lantern and screen, and go to thought itself with the question what reference to an object means, we get a dif- ferent and more hopeful answer. To think of a thing is to get that thing itself in some degree within the mind. To think of a color or an emotion is to have that within us which if it were developed and completed, would identify itself with the object. In short, if we accept its own report, thought is related to reality as the partial to the perfect fulfillment of a purpose. The more adequate its grasp the more nearly does it approximate, the more fully does it realize in itself, the nature and relations of its objects.
2 Brand Blanshard, The Nature of Thought. New York: macmillan, 1941.
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. . . We may look at the growth of knowledge, individual or social, either as an attempt by our own minds to return to union with things as they are in their ordered wholeness, or the affirmation through our minds of the ordered whole itself. And if we take this view, our notion of truth is marked out for us. Truth is the approximation of thought to reality. It is thought on its way home. Its measure is the distance thought has travelled, under guidance of its inner compass, toward that intelligible system which unites its ultimate object with its ultimate end. Hence at any given time the degree of truth in our experience as a whole is the degree of system it has achieved. The degree of truth of a particular proposition is to be judged in the first instance by its coherence with experience as a whole, ulti- mately by its coherence with that further whole, all-comprehensive and fully articulated, in which thought can come to rest.
The coherence theory of truth, according to Blanshard, begins with the observation that we test the truth of a belief by seeing its implications and other logically connected beliefs. But the theory is not confined to this test. Truth itself, he insists, is nothing other than the inter- connectedness of our various beliefs. The truth of a particular belief is nothing other than how well it fits in with everything else we believe.
“Where is the guarantee that when I have brought my ideas into the form my ideal requires, they should be true?” — B R A N D B L A N S H A R D
• How does the coherence theory of truth overcome the problem of how thoughts can relate to or correspond to reality?
2. The Pragmatic Theory Pragmatism is the one major philosophical movement to originate and remain more or less completely in the united States. The three philosophers most easily identified with this movement are Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, all of them Americans (Peirce and James in massachusetts, Dewey in Chicago and New York). We shall see more of prag- matism later in this chapter, but for now, what is important to us is the pragmatists’ theory or theories of truth (for they did not entirely agree with one another). As one might expect, both from the name “pragmatism” and the characteristic American concern for what is “practi- cal,” a pragmatic theory of truths begins with a certain impatience for the abstractions and obscurities of traditional metaphysics and epistemology. In particular, the inadequacies of the correspondence theory of truth struck them not just as a philosophical dilemma, but a genuine source of scandal. How is it possible, they asked, that the traditional theories of truth ended up in skepticism?
Charles Peirce found the traditional discussions absurd just because they tried to con- ceive of truth without any concern or reference whatsoever to the practical circumstances in which we worry about the truth. Truth is not a relationship between sentences and the world, nor is it a complex relationship among sentences. Truth is the answer to questions that we ask, because we are uncertain, because we have doubts. The truth is what we all, eventually, agree upon. According to Peirce, “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately
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agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth.” The emphasis thus gets shifted from truth as a property of sentences and beliefs and their relationships to facts and each other to truth as a function of asking questions, carrying on investigations, and clearing up actual mysteries and disagreements. The test of truth is neither correspon- dence nor coherence but agreement, what in fact solves our problems and answers our inquiries.
Peirce was deeply concerned with the practices of scientific investigation, and his theory of truth was aimed primarily at questions of truth in science, where experimenta- tion and observation should lead, eventually, to agreement on one hypothesis or theory or another. William James, on the other hand, had much broader interests in philosophy. While he was interested in science (and, indeed, was one of America’s leading physicians and psychologists), he was also interested in the less scientific aspects of human life, in which truth was also a critical issue. For example, he wrote extensively on the topic of religious belief in which questions of experimentation and observation play virtually no role at all.
Accordingly, James places very little emphasis on agreement as the test of truth. How- ever appropriate this might be in science, it is surely not even plausible in the subject of re- ligion. Instead, he stressed the advantages of a certain belief in life. By “practical,” James meant the concrete, the effective, not that which leads to scientific agreement. Thus a reli- gious belief can be said to be true, for example, according to its effects on us. Believing in a good, just God makes us optimistic and happy; believing that life is meaningless makes us miserable. Thus truth refers to what significance a belief has in our lives, not correspon- dence, coherence or, we can add, the limited success of scientific hypotheses and theories. Scientific truth still has its place in James’s philosophy, of course. But that kind of truth is defined by the restricted context of an investigation; it should not be generalized as a con- cept of truth in all contexts. (It should be noted that Peirce so radically disagreed with James’s generalization of his theory that he actually changed the name of his philosophy from “pragmatism” to “pragmaticism,” which he noted was a word “sufficiently ugly” to avoid popularization.)
John Dewey returned the pragmatic theory to its narrower focus. He did not restrict truth to scientific truth, but he did restrict it to experiential truth. But whereas James would include, for example, religious experience, Dewey insists that the only meaningful notion of “experience” must be limited to empirically verifiable matters. That eliminates ques- tions of theology. Like Peirce, Dewey emphasizes the context of investigation, in particular, the intellectually painful experience of doubt. Like James and unlike Peirce, Dewey does not emphasize the notion of general agreement as the test of truth so much as he empha- sizes its efficacy in ending doubts and closing an investigation. A police case, for example, comes to an end when “all the pieces fall into place.” But that is not a matter of coherence so much as it is a matter of resolving doubts and “tying together loose ends,” satisfying all of our questions and quieting critics and skeptics. A scientific hypothesis is said to be true when all attempts to falsify it have failed and every attempt to confirm it comes out suc- cessfully. Again, it is an end to the inquiry, a solution to the problem. Where traditional philosophy gets into trouble is in trying to understand “truth” in a vacuum, without refer- ence to any inquiry or investigation, without any reference to the context in which truth makes a difference.
The following selections are from “How to make Our Ideas Clear,” by Peirce, and Prag- matism, by James.
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F RO M “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” B Y Charles Peirce3
Let us now approach the subject of logic, and consider a conception which particu- larly concerns it, that of reality. Taking clearness in the sense of familiarity, no idea could be clearer than this. Every child uses it with perfect confidence, never dream- ing that he does not understand it. As for clearness in its second grade, however, it would probably puzzle most men, even among those of a reflective turn of mind, to give an abstract definition of the real. Yet such a definition may perhaps be reached by considering the points of difference between reality and its opposite, fiction. A figment is a product of somebody’s imagination; it has such characters as his thought impresses upon it. That those characters are independent of how you or I think is an external reality. There are, however, phenomena within our own minds, dependent upon our thought, which are at the same time real in the sense that we really think them. But though their characters depend on how we think, they do not depend on what we think those characters to be. Thus, a dream has a real existence as a mental phenomenon. If somebody has really dreamt it; that he dreamt so and so, does not depend on what anybody thinks was dreamt, but is completely independent of all opinions on the subject. On the other hand, considering, not the fact of dreaming, but the thing dreamt, it retains its peculiarities by virtue of no other fact than that it was dreamt to possess them. Thus we may define the real as that whose characters are independent of what anybody may think them to be.
But, however satisfactory such a definition may be found, it would be a great mistake to suppose that it makes the idea of reality perfectly clear. Here, then, let us apply our rules. According to them, reality, like every other quality, consists in the peculiar, sensible effects which things partaking of it produce. The only effect which real things have is to cause belief, for all the sensations which they excite emerge into consciousness in the form of beliefs. The question, therefore, is, how is true belief (or belief in the real) distinguished from false belief (or belief in fiction). Now, as we have seen in the former paper, the ideas of truth and falsehood, in their full development, appertain exclusively to the scientific method of settling opinion. A
person who arbitrarily chooses the propositions which he will adopt can use the word truth only to emphasize the expression of his deter- mination to hold on to his choice. Of course, the method of tenacity never prevailed exclu- sively; reason is too natural to men for that. But in the literature of the Dark Ages we find some fine examples of it. . . . It is noticeable that where different faiths flourish side by side, ren- egades are looked upon with contempt even by the party whose belief they adopt; so completely has the idea of loyalty replaced that of truth- seeking. Since the time of Descartes, the defect in the conception of truth has been less appar- ent. Still, it will sometimes strike a scientific man that philosophers have been less intent on finding out what the facts are than on inquiring
3 Charles Peirce, “How to make Our Ideas Clear,” in Popular Science Monthly, January 1878.
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
American mathematician, philoso- pher, and scientist. Peirce was both an important logician and the founder of American pragmatism, premised on the notion that the truth is slowly discovered and con- firmed through experiment. Peirce argued that science provided a model for how philosophers should think of—and rethink—the notion of truth. His primary career was with the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, though he taught logic at Johns Hopkins for a number of years.
Charles Sanders Peirce (© Bettmann/Corbis)
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what belief is most in harmony with their system. It is hard to convince a follower of the a priori method by adducing facts; but show him that an opinion he is defend- ing is inconsistent with what he has laid down elsewhere, and he will be very apt to retract it. These minds do not seem to believe that disputation is ever to cease; they seem to think that the opinion which is natural for one man is not so for another, and that belief will, consequently, never be settled. In contenting themselves with fixing their own opinions by a method which would lead another man to a different result, they betray their feeble hold of the conception of what truth is.
On the other hand, all the followers of science are fully persuaded that the pro- cesses of investigation, if only pushed far enough, will give one certain solution to each question to which they can be applied. One man may investigate the velocity of light by studying the transits of Venus and the aberration of the stars; another by the oppositions of Mars and the eclipses of Jupiter’s satellites; a third by the method of Fizeau; a fourth by that of Foucault; a fifth by the motions of the curves of Lis- sajous; a sixth, a seventh, an eighth, and a ninth, may follow the different methods of comparing the measures of statical and dynamical electricity. They may at first obtain different results, but, as each perfects his method and his processes, the results will move steadily together toward a destined center. So with all scientific research. Different minds may set out with the most antagonistic views, but the progress of investigation carries them by a force outside of themselves to one and the same con- clusion. This activity of thought by which we are carried, not where we wish, but to a foreordained goal, is like the operation of destiny. No modification of the point of view taken, no selection of other facts for study, no natural bent of mind even, can enable a man to escape the predestinate opinion. This great law is embodied in the conception of truth and reality. The opinion which is fated4 to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is real. That is the way I would explain reality.
But it may be said that this view is directly opposed to the abstract definition which we have given of reality, inasmuch as it makes the characters of the real depend on what is ultimately thought about them. But the answer to this is that, on the one hand, reality is independent, not necessarily thought of in general, but only of what you or I or any finite number of men may think about it; and that, on the other hand, though the object of the final opinion depends on what that opinion is, yet what that opinion is does not depend on what you or I or any man thinks. Our perversity and that of others may indefinitely postpone the settlement of opinion; it might even conceivably cause an arbitrary proposition to be universally accepted as long as the human race should last. Yet even that would not change the nature of the belief, which alone could be the result of investigation carried sufficiently far; and if, after the extinction of our race, another should arise with faculties and disposition for investigation, that true opinion must be the one which they would ultimately come to. “Truth crushed to earth shall rise again,” and the opinion which would finally result from investigation does not depend on how anybody may actually think. But the reality of that which is real does depend on the real fact that investi- gation is destined to lead, at last, if continued long enough, to a belief in it.
4 Fate means merely that which is sure to come true and cannot be avoided. It is a superstition to suppose that a certain sort of events are ever fated, and it is another to suppose that the word fate can never be freed from its super- stitious taint. We are all fated to die.
“Different minds may set out with the most antago- nistic views, but the progress of investigation carries them by a force outside of themselves to one and the same conclusion.” — C H A R L E S P E I R C E
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On the Pragmatic Theory B Y William James5
I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the classic stages of a theories career. First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so im- portant that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it. Our doctrine of truth is at present in the first of these three stages, with symptoms of the second stage having begun in certain quarters. . . . Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their “agreement,” as fal- sity means their disagreement, with “reality.” Pragmatism and intellectualists both accept this definition as a matter of course. They begin to quarrel only after the question is raised as to what may precisely be meant by the term “agreement,” and what by the term “reality,” when reality is taken as something for our ideas to agree with.
In answering these questions the pragmatists are more analytic and painstak- ing, the intellectualists more off hand and irreflective. The popular notion is that a true idea must copy its reality. Like other popular views, this one follows the analogy of the most usual experience. Our true ideas of sensible things do indeed copy them. Shut your eyes and think of yonder clock on the wall, and you get just such a true picture or copy of its dial. But your ideas of its “works” (unless you are a clock-maker) is much less of a copy, yet it passes muster, for it in no way clashes with the reality. Even though it should shrink to the mere word “works,” that word still serves you truly; and when you speak of the “time-keeping func- tion” of a clock, or of its spring’s “elasticity,” it is hard to see exactly what your ideas can copy.
You perceive that there is a problem here. Where our ideas cannot copy defi- nitely their object, what does agreement with that object mean? Some idealists seem to say that they are true whenever they are what God means that we ought to think about that object. Others hold the copy-view all through, and speak as if our ideas possessed truth just in proportion as they approach to being copies of the Absolute’s eternal way of thinking.
These views, you see, invite pragmatistic discussion. But the great assumption of the intellectualists is that truth means essentially an inert static relation. When you’ve got your true idea of anything, there’s an end of the matter. You’re in possession: you know; you have fulfilled your thinking destiny. You are where you ought to be men- tally; you have obeyed your categorical imperative; and nothing more need follow on that climax of your rational destiny. Epistemologically you are in stable equilibrium.
Pragmatism, on the other hand, asks its usual question, “Grant an idea or belief to be true,” it says, “what concrete difference will its being true make in any one’s actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms?”
The moment pragmatism asks this question, it sees the answer: True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we can not. That is the practical difference it makes to us to have true ideas; that therefore, is the meaning of truth, for it is all that truth is known as.
5 William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. New York: Longmans, Green, 1907.
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This thesis is what I have to defend. The truth of an idea is not a stagnant prop- erty inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its validation.
But what do the words verification and validation themselves pragmatically mean? They again signify certain practical consequences of the verified and validated idea. It is hard to find any one phrase that characterizes these conse- quences better than the ordinary agreement-formula—just such consequences being what we have in mind whenever we say that our ideas “agree” with real- ity. They lead us, namely, through the acts and other ideas which they instigate, into or up to, or towards, other parts of experience with which we feel all the while—such feeling being among our potentialities—that the original ideas remain in agreement. The connexions and transitions come to us from point to point as being progressive, harmonious, satisfactory. This function of agreeable leading is what we mean by an idea’s verification. Such an account is vague and it sounds at first quite trivial, but it has results which it will take the rest of my hour to explain.
Let me begin by reminding you of the fact that the possession of true thoughts means everywhere the possession of invaluable instruments of action; and that our duty to gain truth, so far from being a blank command from out of the blue, or a “stunt” self-imposed by our intellect, can account for itself by excellent practical reasons.
The importance to human life of having true beliefs about matters of fact is a thing too notorious. We live in a world of realities that can be infinitely useful or infinitely harmful. Ideas that tell us which of them to expect count as the true ideas in all this primary sphere of verification, and the pursuit of such ideas is a primary human duty. The possession of truth, so far from being here an end in itself, is only a preliminary means towards other vital satisfactions. If I am lost in the woods and starved, and find what looks like a cow-path, it is of the utmost importance that I should think of a human habitation at the end of it, for if I do so and follow it, I save myself. The true thought is useful here because the house which is its object is useful. The practical value of true ideas is thus primarily derived from the practi- cal importance of their objects to us. Their objects are, indeed, not important at all times. I may on another occasion have no use for the house; and then my idea of it, however verifiable, will be practically irrelevant, and had better remain latent. Yet since almost any object may some day become temporarily important, the advan- tage of having a general stock of extra truths, of ideas that shall be true of merely possible situations, is obvious. We store such extra truths away in our memories, and with the overflow we fill our books of reference. Whenever such an extra truth becomes practically relevant to one of our emergencies, it passes from cold storage to do work in the world and our belief in it grows active. You can say of it then either that “it is useful because it is true” or that “it is true because it is useful.” Both these phrases mean exactly the same thing, namely that here is an idea that gets fulfilled and can be verified. True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification-process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience. True ideas would never have been singled out as such, would never have acquired a class-name, least of all a name suggesting value, unless they had been useful from the outset in this way.
. . .
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To “agree” in the widest sense with a reality can only mean to be guided either straight up to it or into its surroundings, or to be put into such working touch with it as to handle either it or something connected with it better than if we disagreed. . . .
“The true,” to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as “the right” is only the expedient way of our behaving.
“‘The true,’ to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient way of our behaving.” — W I L L I A M J A M E S
3. The Semantic Theory The semantic theory is the most difficult of the three kinds of alternatives to correspondence theory that we are considering. This is partly because of its misleading, superficial resem- blance to the correspondence theory, but mainly because it has been a purely formal theory. This theory, you’ll recall, claims that a statement is true if and only if it corresponds to certain “facts” that our language picks out. It is neutral regarding the other theories and ordinary, “natural” languages (for example, English or French, as opposed to an artificial “language” of symbols and formulas). In its formal “semantic” version it is generally credited to the American logician Alfred Tarski.
very simply explained, Tarski’s semantic theory picks out a “class” of “individuals” (objects, states of affairs, or “facts”) and specifies, for every sentence in the language, which individuals will or will not “satisfy” it, that is, make it “true” or not. On this theory, the logician must “set up” each pairing of a sentence and the individuals that will satisfy it. So it is obvi- ous that this formula will work only for a relatively small number of basic sentences with a manageable class of individuals. But for our purposes, the theory comes to this: We must set up the rules of satisfaction according to which our sentences become true or false. “ Correspondence” is not a relation for which we supply only the appropriate sentences. In developing a language, we must also specify the relation of the language to the world, and thus “set up” the world to correspond to our language.
F RO M “The Semantic Theory of Truth” B Y Alfred Tarski6
[W]e must always relate the notion of truth, like that of a sentence, to a specific language; for it is obvious that the same expression which is a true sentence in one language can be false or meaningless in another.
Let us start with a concrete example. Consider the sentence “snow is white.” We ask the question under what conditions this sentence is true or false. It seems clear that if we base ourselves on the classical conception of truth, we shall say that the sentence is true if snow is white, and that it is false if snow is not white. Thus, if the definition of truth is to conform to our conception, it must imply the following equivalence:
The sentence “snow is white” is true, if, and only if, snow is white.
We shall now generalize the procedure which we have applied above.
(T) X is true if, and only if, p.
6 Alfred Tarski, “The Semantic Theory of Truth,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4, no. 3 (march 1944). Reprinted by permission of Jan Tarski.
• How do Peirce and James differ on their conceptions of truth?
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We shall call any such equivalence (with “p” replaced by any sentence of the lan- guage to which the word “true” refers, and “X” replaced by a name of this sentence) an “equivalence of the form (T).”
Now at last we are able to put into a precise form the conditions under which we will consider the usage and the definition of the term “true” as adequate from the material point of view: we wish to use the term “true” in such a way that all equivalences of the form (T) can be asserted, and we shall call a definition of truth “adequate” if all these equivalences follow from it.
I should like to propose the name “the semantic conception of truth” for the concep- tion of truth which has just been discussed.
Semantics is a discipline which, speaking loosely, deals with certain relations between expressions of a language and the objects (or “states of affairs”) “referred to” by those ex- pressions. As typical examples of semantic concepts we may mention the concepts of designation, satisfaction, and definition as these occur in the following examples:
The expression “the father of his country” designates (denotes) George Washington;
Snow satisfies the sentential function (the condition) “x is white”;
The equation “2 · x = 1” defines (uniquely determines) the number ½
While the words “designates,” “satisfies,” and “defines” express relations (between certain expressions and the object “referred to” by these expressions), the word “true” is of a different logical nature: it expresses a property (or denotes a class) of certain expressions, viz., of sentences. However, it is easily seen that all the formu- lations which were given earlier and which aimed at the meaning of this word (“true”) referred not only to sentences themselves, but also to objects “talked about” by these sentences, or possibly to “states of affairs” described by them. . . . A definition of truth can be obtained in a very simple way from that of another semantic notion, namely, of the notion of satisfaction.
The semantic theory certainly resembles the correspondence theory. (Some philosophers, such as Karl Popper, have insisted that it is a version of the correspondence theory.) But in the development of the semantic theory of truth, Tarski and his followers have avoided traditional talk of “facts.” Instead, the emphasis is on the semantic conception of “satisfac- tion” (and the related notion of “reference”). Something outside of the language makes statements true—that is, satisfies them—but the semantic theory, unlike the traditional correspondence theory, does not insist or suggest that this “something” consists of al- ready discrete and complete units of reality. The “something,” too, is defined through language by its stipulative role in our statements. (It is an open question, for the semantic theory, whether the same references, the same somethings, are available in every lan- guage or whether reference and satisfaction are limited to particular languages; in other words, it is still being argued—vigorously—whether or not the semantic theory leads to relativism.)
Taken individually, each of the theories of truth just considered has its opponents. We have indicated attacks on the correspondence theory sufficiently. Against the coherence theory, some philosophers have objected that a system of statements and beliefs can be “coherent” but yet not be true. For example, take a simple system of true beliefs and deny them all. The denials will form a coherent system, but they will all be false. Similarly, we ob- served in the Introduction that an argument can be valid (which makes it coherent) yet have false premises and false conclusions.
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Two opposed systems of statements and beliefs can be equally “coherent,” but surely both cannot be true, for they claim opposite things about the world. (Think of the metaphysi- cal systems of Spinoza and Leibniz.) So truth must be more than mere coherence.
Against the pragmatic theory, some philosophers have objected that a belief might “work” but not be true. Scientists have often made great headway with false hypotheses. Political demagogues have often obtained great power and even achieved positive results with lies, and false beliefs often make us happier than the truth. (Think of the sayings “What you don’t know won’t hurt you” and “the truth hurts.”) The reason some beliefs “work” better than others, it has been argued (e.g., by Bertrand Russell), is that they are true. They are true, therefore, not because they “work,” but they work because they are true to the facts.
Against the semantic theory, philosophers have objected that ultimately, it is still a re- statement of the correspondence theory (“‘snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white”). Although the semantic theory is an improvement because it emphasizes the role of language in picking out the facts that make our statements true, it still leaves the nature of the “picking out” as obscure as ever. (Consider the following silly but profoundly philosophical joke: Eve says to Adam: “Let’s call that one a hippopotamus.” Adam: “Why ‘hippopotamus’?” Eve: “Because it looks more like a hippopotamus than anything else we’ve seen so far.”)
An adequate semantic theory of truth must be far more than merely formal. It must specify how such a theory would apply to natural (unformalized and open-ended) languages. Truth cannot be only formally defined. If the semantic theory is true, then translations between languages are impossible since the rules of satisfaction are unique to each language.
The dispute among these theories continues, but the likeliest outcome in philosophical debate is usually a combination of theories rather than the exclusive victory of any particular one. Each makes up for the deficiencies in the others. But one of the most important conse- quences of this debate, ironically, has been a loss of interest in the very concept of Truth (with a capital “T”). In everyday contexts, of course, philosophers, like everyone else, will talk about statements and beliefs being “true” and “false” on the basis of a primitive “corre- spondence” notion, that is, “correspondence to the facts.” But philosophically, the power of the word “Truth” has always derived from its strong metaphysical linkage to “the way the world really is.” many philosophers have given up on that grandiose conception of Truth, and some are inclined to give up the word “truth” altogether. They concern themselves only with what we ordinarily mean when we say that a statement is “true.”7 Other philosophers, however, refuse to give up the traditional search for truth, and new and improved versions of the traditional and newer theories are still appearing.
C. Kant’s Revolution Immanuel Kant is considered by a great many philosophers to be the greatest thinker since Plato and Aristotle. He stands at the beginning of almost every modern movement in philoso- phy in the united States and Europe, as an inspiration and as a kind of founder. Existentialism
7 J. L. Austin, for example, begins an essay on “Truth” by declaring, “in vino veritas (‘in wine, truth’), perhaps, but in a sober symposium, verum (‘true’).” J. L. Austin, “Truth,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplement 24 (1950): 111
• How is the semantic theory similar to the correspondence theory? How does it differ?
• What are some objections levied against the coherence theory of truth? What are objections against the pragmatic theory of truth?
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would not be possible without him; nor would phenome- nology, pragmatism, or many of the varieties of linguistic philosophy that dominated English and American philoso- phy for most of the twentieth century. He brings together the often opposed threads of rationalism and empiricism and weaves them into a single monumental philosophical system, which he published primarily in three “critiques” (The Critique of Pure Reason, The Critique of Practical Reason, and The Critique of Judgment) in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. His writing is notori- ously difficult, but it is possible for even a beginning phi- losophy student to appreciate the main theme of his self- proclaimed “revolution” in philosophy. It is, in one sense, a total reorientation of what we mean when we talk about reality and knowledge.
Ever since the ancient Greeks, almost all philosophers had accepted the idea that there is a reality “out there,” which we could come to know through reason, through experience, or perhaps which we could not come to know at all, according to a skeptic such as David Hume. The idea of an “external world” seemed innocent enough, until metaphysicians began to find that their contradictory views about this world could not be reconciled. This di- lemma prompted John Locke to turn away from metaphys- ics and pay more attention to the way we acquire knowledge. The shift of attention to knowledge led Hume to argue that we couldn’t even know that the sun would rise tomorrow, or that one billiard ball in fact causes the movement of another, or that there is indeed a world out- side of our own ideas.
This skeptical conclusion seemed utterly absurd to Kant, who was, in his own words, “awakened from his dog- matic slumbers” by Hume. Kant had been a metaphysician (a follower of Leibniz), but reading Hume convinced him that there was a serious problem, not only for metaphysics, but for all our claims to know the world. And Kant, who was also an enthusiastic supporter of Isaac Newton and the new physics, saw that he had to refute Hume if he was going to keep claiming that scientists (and everyone else) could know anything. But the problem, as he diagnosed it, turned out to be the unquestioned idea that there was a distinction to be made between our beliefs and experience of the world, on the one hand, and the world itself, Reality or Truth, on the other.
What Kant suspected, and what many philosophers believe today, is that our “ideas”— our concepts and our language—do not just correspond to reality but in some sense shape and “set up” the world, impose upon the world the structures we experience. We see material objects instead of just patterns of light and colors (as perhaps things appear to a newborn baby), and organizing what we take in from the senses is our contribution to experience. We experience events in a cause-and-effect relationship, instead of as mere sequences of events, and this is not solely because of events in the world, but because we make our experience conform to causal rules. We expect certain events in the future on the basis of what we have experienced in the past; and this, too, is not mere habit, but a
What, for Kant, is the hardware, and what is the software? (© iStockphoto.com/snapphoto)
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set of rules we necessarily impose on every experience. According to Kant, space and time do not exist “out there,” independent of our experience; we impose the forms of three- dimensional space and one-dimensional time on our experience, and come to know the world through these forms. So too, Kant argues, all of our knowledge of the world is in part a product of the various forms and rules that we impose upon, or use to “set up,” our experience. The word Kant uses for “set up” is “constitute.” A “constitution” sets up a government, provides it with its rules and structures. We constitute our own experience in the sense that we provide the rules and structures according to which we experience objects, as objects in space and time, as governed by the laws of nature and the relations of cause and effect. Kant writes, “the understanding does not derive its laws from, but prescribes them to, nature.”
According to Kant’s philosophy, we cannot understand reality except as we constitute it through our fundamental concepts. Kant took these concepts—or what he called “ categories”—to be the basic rules of the human mind as such, common to all peoples in all places at all times. Today, many philosophers would rather say that these concepts through which we constitute the world are part of a language, which raises the intriguing but contro- versial possibility that the world might be quite different for people who speak different languages. (Kant himself did not believe this.) But the upshot of Kant’s revolution is that truth and knowledge are a function of our concepts. Kant’s revolution rejects the very idea of encountering external Reality and instead looks to the concepts through which we “consti- tute” Reality. Thus there is no point to wondering whether our concepts match up to Reality, since we would not have access to any Reality without our concepts. Our concepts not only cohere with each other; they “set up” a corresponding reality as well. Of course those con- cepts “work”—it is as if someone were to wonder how it is that a ceramic mold exactly fits a piece of jewelry, when the mold gave shape to the jewelry in the first place.
Previous philosophers had asked, “How can we know that our ideas correspond with the way the world really is?” Kant rejected that question. Instead, he asked, “How do our ideas constitute the world? ” “What is the structure and what are the rules (the concepts or categories) of the human mind according to which we ‘set up’ our world, the world of our experience?”
• What does Kant mean when he claims that we “constitute” our world? Are there other ways to “constitute” the world according to Kant?
• How does Kant answer Hume’s skeptical challenge? Does his answer succeed?
The project of Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason is to analyze and prove the necessity of these concepts, which we can know a priori—independently of all experience and with cer- tainty, just because they are the rules within which all of our knowledge is possible. Think of it this way: You take a number of pieces of wood and a checkerboard and “set up” the game by making up rules about what can be moved where, how, and when. Then, within the game, you are free to make any number of moves, some brilliant, some stupid, but you are always bound by the rules that you yourself have “set up.” And since you yourself have established these rules, it would be absurd to wonder whether or not they are “true.”
Kant’s revolution changed our conception of reality, our conception of knowledge, and, most importantly, our conception of ourselves. Truth is no longer correspondence between our ideas and reality, but our own system of rules (concepts or categories) by which we con- stitute our reality. Knowledge, accordingly, is no longer the comprehending of a reality
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beyond our experience, but knowledge of our experience. But this does not mean knowl- edge of experience, distinct from knowledge of objects, for the objects of our experience are all there is to reality. moreover, in making this move, Kant gives the philosophers some- thing which they thought they had lost, a renewed ideal of certainty, for, he argued, we can be certain of the rules of our own experience. Kant defended the necessity of the truths of arithmetic and geometry as those rules that have to do with the a priori forms of our intu- itions of space and time. According to Kant’s philosophy in general, reality is the world of our experience, as we constitute it through the concepts of our understanding. Therefore, we can know it with certainty, for truth, in general, is our own construction.
You might at first think that there is some trick here, as if Kant is saying, “Well, if we can’t have knowledge in the hard sense, then I’ll simply redefine the words knowledge, reality, and truth.” But what he has done is to point to the difficulty of the picture that other philosophers had accepted; he has shown that what we normally mean by “truth,” “knowledge,” and “re- ality” is not an insatiable appeal to a world beyond our experience. underneath Kant’s spec- tacular pronouncements there is a return to common sense. This world, the one I stand in, touch, and see, is the real world. But what makes it real, according to Kant, is not just that I stand in, touch, and see it, but that I actively constitute it as the way it is, apply my own rules for understanding it, and structure it through my own experience.
Kant gives us a general way of giving an account of all those truths that metaphysicians have always argued about. using Kant’s terminology, we can say they are forms of synthetic a priori knowledge. Such knowledge is, briefly characterized, knowledge of our own rules with which we (necessarily) constitute reality. If a truth is not true because it conforms to what we experience, nor true because of the grammar or meanings of the sentences of our lan- guage, how else could it be defended? This was Hume’s dilemma, and with this two-test system of justification, he eliminated many of our most important beliefs as “unjustifiable,” as neither “matters of fact” nor “truths of reason.” But Kant shows us a third way: A belief can be true, necessarily true, if it is one of those rules that we impose to constitute our experi- ence. Thus we saw that Kant defended the truths of arithmetic and geometry by showing that they were the “(a priori) forms of intuition,” the ways in which we must experience our world. So, too, will he defend all of those truths that Hume had claimed to be unjustifiable.
The principle of universal causation, according to Kant, is neither a generalization from ex- perience nor an analytic truth (obviously true by virtue of the meanings of the words), but rather a rule for “setting up” our world. That rule is, “Always look for regular (or ‘lawlike’) connections between events, so that you can explain an event as an effect of previous events, and therefore predict future events as well.” Like a rule in chess, this is not a move within the game but one of those rules that defines the game. The same is the case for the principle of induction; it is nei- ther based upon experience nor a trivial truth but a rule with which we govern all of our experi- ence. So, too, for our belief in the “external” or material world, which Berkeley and Hume found so problematic. Our experience alone will not tell us whether we are dreaming or not, and the idea of the material (“external”) world is not a tautology or a conceptual truth. It is one of the rules that we use to constitute our experience, namely, that we shall always interpret our experi- ence of objects in space as external to us and as material or substantial. But notice that our metaphysical notion of substance is no longer that which is, by definition, outside of our experi- ence. It is now among the categories that we impose when we set up our experience.
• What does “a priori” mean? Why is “2 + 3 = 5” an a priori truth?
• What is an “analytic” truth? Give a couple of examples.
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F RO M The Critique of Pure Reason B Y Immanuel Kant8
T H E D I S T I N C T I O N B E T W E E N P U R E (A P R I O R I ) A N D E M P I R I C A L (A P O S T E R I O R I ) K N OW L E D G E That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how should the faculty of knowledge be called into activity, if not by objects which affect our senses, and which either produce representations by themselves, or rouse the activity of our understanding to compare, or connect, or to separate them, and thus to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which we call experience? In respect of time, therefore, no knowledge within us is antecedent to experience, but all knowledge begins with it.
But although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience. For it is quite possible that even our empirical experience is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and of that which our own faculty of knowledge (incited only by sensuous impressions), supplies from itself, a supplement which we do not distinguish from that raw material, until long practice has roused our attention and rendered us capable of separating one from the other.
It is therefore a question which deserves at least closer investigation, and cannot be disposed of at first sight, whether there exists a knowledge independent of expe- rience, and even of all impressions of the senses? Such knowledge is called a priori, and distinguished from empirical knowledge, which has its source a posteriori, that is, in experience.
F RO M Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics B Y Immanuel Kant9
My purpose is to persuade all those who think metaphysics worth studying that it is absolutely necessary to pause a moment and, regarding all that has been done as though undone, to propose first the preliminary question, “Whether such a thing as metaphysics can be even possible at all?”
If it be science, how is it that it cannot, like other sciences, obtain universal and lasting recognition? If no, how can it maintain its pretensions and keep the human mind in suspense with hopes never ceasing, yet never fulfilled? Whether then we demonstrate our knowledge or our ignorance in this field, we must come one and for all to a definite conclusion respecting the nature of this so-called science, which cannot possibly remain on its present footing. It seems almost ridiculous, while every other science is continually advancing, that in this, which pretends to be wisdom incarnate, for whose oracle everyone inquires, we should constantly move round the same spot, without gaining a single step. And so its votaries having melted away, we do not find men confident of their ability to shine in other
8 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, rev. 2nd ed., trans. max müller, London: macmillan, 1927. 9 Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. Lewis White Beck. Copyright © 1959. Reprinted by permission of Pearson Education, Inc., upper Saddle River, NJ.
“My purpose is to persuade all those who think metaphysics worth studying that it is absolutely necessary to . . . propose first the preliminary question, ‘Whether such a thing as meta- physics can be even possible at all?’” — I M M A N U E L K A N T
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sciences venturing their reputation here, where everybody, however ignorant in other matters, presumes to deliver a final verdict, because in this domain there is actually as yet no standard weight and measure to distinguish sound knowledge from shallow talk.
. . . Hume started chiefly from a single but important concept in metaphysics,
namely, that of the connection of cause and effect (including its derivatives force and action, and so on). He challenged reason, which pretends to have given birth to this concept of herself, to answer him by what right she thinks anything could be so constituted that if that thing be posited, something else also must necessarily be posited; for this is the meaning of the concept of cause. He demonstrated irre- futably that it was perfectly impossible for reason to think a priori and by means of concepts such a combination, for it implies necessity. We cannot at all see why, in consequence of the existence of one thing, another must necessarily exist or how the concept of such a combination can arise a priori. Hence he inferred that reason was altogether deluded with reference to this concept, which she erroneously con- sidered as one of her own children, whereas in reality it was nothing but a bastard of imagination, impregnated by experience, which subsumed certain representa- tions under the law of association and mistook a subjective necessity (habit) for an objective necessity arising from insight. Hence he inferred that reason had no power to think such combinations, even in general, because her concepts would then be purely fictitious and all her pretended a priori cognitions nothing but common experiences marked with a false stamp. In plain language, this means that there is not and cannot be any such thing as metaphysics at all.
. . .
For Kant, there is a wall beyond which reason cannot go. What is that wall? (© iStockphoto.com/ thornthunder)
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I openly confess my recollection of David Hume was the very thing which many years ago interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a quite new direction. I was far from following him in the conclusions at which he arrived by regarding, not the whole of his prob- lem, but a part, which by itself can give us no information. If we start from a well- founded, but undeveloped, thought which another has bequeathed to us, we may well hope by continued reflection to advance farther than the acute man to whom we owe the first spark of light.
I therefore first tried whether Hume’s objection could not be put into a general form, and soon found that the concept of the connection of cause and effect was by no means the only concept by which the understanding thinks the connection of things a priori, but rather that metaphysics consists altogether of such concepts. I sought to ascertain their number; and when I had satisfactorily succeeded in this by starting from a single principle, I proceeded to the deduction of these concepts, which I was now certain were not derived from experience, as Hume had at- tempted to derive them, but sprang from the pure understanding. This deduction (which seemed impossible to my acute predecessor, which had never even occurred to anyone else, though no one had hesitated to use the concepts without investigat- ing the basis of their objective validity) was the most difficult task which ever could have been undertaken in the service of metaphysics; and the worst was that meta- physics, such as it is, could not assist me in the least because this deduction alone can render metaphysics possible. But as soon as I had succeeded in solving Hume’s problem, not merely in a particular case, but with respect to the whole faculty of pure reason, I could proceed safely, though slowly, to determine the whole sphere of pure reason completely and from universal principles, in its boundaries as well as in its contents. This was required for metaphysics in order to construct its system according to a safe plan.
Kant gives us a way of resolving the age-old disputes of metaphysics—questions con- cerning reality as such. Since the claims of the metaphysicians are all synthetic a priori, Kant provides us with the following policy:
1. Those claims that are rules by which we must interpret our experience are true— necessarily true.
2. Those claims that contradict rules by which we must interpret our experience are false—necessarily false.
3. Those that are not rules by which we must interpret our experience are either analytic, contingently true, or contingently false.
4. Finally, those claims that cannot be decided by appeal to the rules of our experiences and make no difference to our experience one way or the other are to be rejected as possible topics of knowledge.
The logical positivists in the twentieth century took this last part of Kant’s policy as a program for a devastating attack on metaphysics in general. Although the logical positivists, as empiricists in the tradition of David Hume, did not accept much of Kant’s theory, they wholeheartedly endorsed his rejection of claims that made no difference whatever to our experience. They said that any claim that makes no difference to our experience—that cannot be tested in any way—is meaningless.
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Some of the metaphysicians’ claims will be upheld. For example, Kant saves Newton’s (and Spinoza’s) determinism in his rule of causality, thus rejecting Leibniz’s “pre-established harmony” view as necessarily false. With some revisions, he accepts a large part of Leibniz’s view of space and time as relative, that is, relative to our experience. He saves the notion of substance because he says that one of the most important rules of our experience is that we see objects as substantial (that is, as “real”). But he does not accept the view that substance is something independent of human experience, for such a view, by definition, would mean that substance is irrelevant to our experience. Nor does he accept the central dispute be- tween Spinoza and Leibniz, whether there is but one substance or many, for no rule of our experience is concerned one way or another. Either position on this question would make no difference to our experience. This debate is a metaphysician’s game and not a possible topic for knowledge.
Kant’s revolution is the elimination of “reality” and “truth” as external to ourselves. Since Kant, many philosophers no longer view human knowledge as the passive reception of sen- sations or intuitions. And, needless to say, the problems of philosophy have become radi- cally changed.
Kant destroyed the old problems, resolved the old disputes, and answered Hume’s skep- ticism, at least for a while. In rejecting the correspondence theory of truth and the idea of an “external” reality, he eliminated the basis of those problems, disputes, and doubts. But I expect that you can already see a new and even more virulent version of those problems, disputes, and doubts on the horizon. By denying us our anchor in reality, Kant launches phi- losophy in a bold new direction, and he creates the dilemma that still defines philosophy today: If we supply our own rules for experience, is there any uniquely correct way of describ- ing the way the world is?
The basis of Kant’s theory is that we supply the rules according to which we constitute our experience. Truth can be talked about only within our experience and according to those rules. But you can see what happens when we raise the following question: What about people (or creatures) who are very different from us? Will they use the same rules? Will they have the same experiences? And, if we do differ from them, who is “right”? Whose rules are “better”? Whose experience is “true”? You can see here the problems of the coherence theory of truth coming to haunt Kant’s philosophy. Suppose there are two (or more) sets of rules, equally coherent? Can they both be “true”? And the problems of the semantic theory are evident here, too: What if there are different languages with different basic concepts or categories, constituting different “facts”? Are they all “true”? You can appreciate how easily the German Romantic philosophers who immediately followed Kant replaced his notion of “constitution” with the more exciting notion of “creation.” We create our realities, they announced. We are all art- ists, building our worlds. Notice the words “reali- ties” and “worlds”; there is no longer confidence, much less a guarantee, that there is only one reality or one world.
Kant’s most immediate follower, a German named Johann Gottlieb Fichte, used the pragmatic theory of truth to come to the same conclusion; the truth is, according to him, that which is most practical, most conducive to the good life, and the evaluation of different realities depends wholly on the practical
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814)
A German philosopher, student of Immanuel Kant, who turned Kant’s “transcendental” philosophy into a practically oriented and relativis- tic “ethical idealism.” One of the first German nationalists.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (© Michael Nicholson/Corbis)
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consequences. (He said, in his most famous dictum: “The kind of philosophy a man chooses depends upon the kind of man he is.”) With Kant’s revolution, the Truth seems destined to be replaced by many truths, our knowledge with the possibility of different kinds of knowledge.
But before we go on to explore these intriguing complications, let us make it clear that Kant himself never accepted a word of all this. According to him, there was still but one pos- sible set of rules and therefore only one way of constituting our experience, whoever we are, wherever we’re from, and no matter what kind of conscious creature we happen to be. This means: one world, one science, one reality, and one truth. Kant tries to prove this in the central section of The Critique of Pure Reason in a formidable argument that he calls a “transcendental deduction.”
Like so much philosophical jargon, Kant’s term is easily explained and is used often enough to make it worth explaining. You already know that a deduction is an inference from one statement to another according to a set of rules of inference. In this case, Kant attempts to infer from various statements that we believe, the basic rules (concepts, cate- gories) of human experience. This is what “transcendental” means, the basic rules of human experience. But a transcendental deduction does not simply deduce some such rules; it also proves that they are the only rules that we are able to use to constitute our experience. That is why it is so important to Kant. It allows him his revolution without any anarchist consequences.
The argument itself is enormously complicated and scholars who have studied it for half their lives still do not agree on precisely what its steps are or whether it is a valid argument. Obviously, we won’t try to summarize it for you here. What can and must be said is this, how- ever: Kant believed that such a transcendental deduction would prove that, although it is we ourselves who supply the rules of our experience and determine what can be true for us, we don’t have a choice in the matter. There is still only one truth for all of us.
Philosophers are still arguing whether any such transcendental argument (Kant’s or not) might succeed. If one does, then people must, in their basic rules, all agree. (Of course, they will always disagree about particular matters; no two chess players make all the same moves.) But if there is no successful transcendental argument, then there need be no such universal agreement. It then makes sense to talk about different truths for different people. This, we may say, is the dominant battle of recent philosophy in the united States and in Europe. Those who believe that there is only one set of rules and one truth are often called absolutists (though many philosophers find that name repulsive because it sounds so dogmatic). Others, who believe that there are different rules for different people and therefore different “truths,” are called relativists. You have probably already figured out that Plato, and Descartes, for example, were absolutists and that Protagoras and the Sophists were relativists. Kant was an absolutist. most of his followers were relativists. (This is obscured by the confusing fact that many of them talked about “the Absolute.” But, they were still relativists, emphasizing the differences among the sets of basic rules people use in setting up their world.)
• What consequences do you see following from the difference between relativism and absolutism on questions of knowledge?
• Do you think that we all set up our experience in accordance with the same rules, as Kant argued? Why or why not?
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D. The Battle in Europe After Kant: Relativism and Absolutism The story of philosophy in Europe since Kant is largely the story of a war between relativism and absolutism, in which even the politics and arts of the times play a continuing role. The philosophers immediately following Kant, as we have already mentioned, pursued relativism with relish, develop- ing alternative systems of philosophy as fast as they could find publishers. The philosopher Friedrich Schelling, for example, produced about one system a year at the dawn of the nineteenth century. He became the best-known “Romantic” philosopher of a large group of “Romantic” intellectuals, poets, and critics throughout Europe who turned to the virtual worship of individual “genius” and com- peted for the most extravagant and creative views of the world. The virtually undisputed winner of this contest, however, was not Schelling but one of his schoolmates, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
1. Hegel Hegel was in college (Tübingen Lutheran seminary) when the French Revolution was raging just across the border. He was just starting to put together his mature philosophy when Na- poleon was attempting to take over all of Europe. This international turmoil helps us under- stand the global reach of Hegel’s philosophy and his bold effort to proclaim an “absolute” position with reference to knowledge. Like many young German intellectuals in that exciting period, he was trying to get outside his provincial perspective and to understand the world from a larger, even a “divine” point of view. Accordingly, Hegel’s theory of truth is part and parcel of his all-embracing system of thought.
Hegel begins by rejecting many key metaphors that have ruled modern philosophy, es- pecially all the “correspondence” metaphors in which the world in itself (or “the Absolute”) is on one side and our knowledge (beliefs, sentences, utterances) are on the other, sepa- rated by some distorting filter (our senses) or actively altered by the machinery of our under- standing. In place of such metaphors (and the skepticism they inevitably engender), Hegel suggests a holistic worldview in which consciousness and the world are not separate but inseparably integrated. In traditional terms, this means that there is no world, no reality- in-itself apart from consciousness.
It also means that we must give up our view of consciousness and the self as self- enclosed and, in some sense, “inside” us. Indeed, Hegel also suggests that we give up the view that the self is essentially a feature of the individual: the self—or “Spirit”—is shared by all of us; or rather, in more Platonic language, we all “participate” in Spirit. Not surprisingly, Hegel was familiar with some Asian thinkers and incorporated some Eastern views into his notion of truth. However, the truth, according to Hegel, “is the whole”—that is, the unity of all our consciousnesses and the world. This means that there is no saying (and no point in attempting to say) what the world might be apart from our conceptions of it. But neither is this to invite skepticism, for the world is nothing but the synthesis of all our possible conceptions of it.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
A German philosopher who, during the age of Napoleon, wrote his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), which was the single most powerful influence on European philosophy—after Kant’s works—for the next hun- dred years. Hegel argued that there were many different views of the world, that none of them should be thought to be wholly correct or incorrect in exclusion of the others, but that these various views could still be com- pared and evaluated according to a “dialectic,” in which some
views are shown to be more developed, more inclusive, and more adequate than others.
G. W. F. Hegel (bpk, Berlin/ Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen/
Klaus Goeken/Art Resource, NY)
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Hegel, like Kant, was an idealist. He calls himself an “absolute idealist” (in contrast to Kant’s “transcendental idealism”). This means, simply stated, that reality is the product of mind (not individual minds, of course)—the cosmic mind, “Spirit.” Yet this opens the way for the most radical departure from Kant, who argued at great length that there could be but one possible way of conceiving the world—that is, one a priori set of forms of intuition (space and time) and one set of categories (substance, causality, etc.). Hegel’s predecessor (Kant’s immediate successor) Fichte had already argued that there are at least two basically different ways of envisioning the world—the scientific, objective (“dogmatic”) way and the practical, moral, activist (“idealist”) way—and rather than being simply “right” or “wrong,” Fichte had declared famously that “The philosophy a man chooses depends upon the kind of man that he is.” Hegel goes a giant step further and provides a long series of possible conceptions of the world—or “forms of consciousness”—conceptions that are not divided into “practical” and “theoretical” but, he tells us, all of which have both their practical and their theoretical aspects. (Once again Hegel rejects an age-old dichotomy.) Such views are not simply alternative options, as if we could each simply choose one or another (as Kierkeg- aard would argue some years later). The way we view the world is already determined by our place in history, our language, and our society. Nor is the variety of forms of consciousness a demonstration of the now-popular view that there is no “correct” way of knowing. The vari- ous forms of consciousness emerge one from another by way of improvement or by way of opposition (as, for example, scientific theories tend to follow one another), and (again, as in science) there is always the necessary sense that they are all moving toward some final end— the correct view. So, too, Hegel insists that all these different conceptions and ways of view- ing the world are leading up to something—to a viewpoint that is not relative to any particular viewpoint or perspective. This is the standpoint he calls “absolute knowing.”
This idea that the various forms of consciousness emerge one from another and lead us eventually to the absolute is perhaps Hegel’s most exciting philosophical contribution to Western thinking. virtually every other philosopher we have discussed, whether metaphysi- cian or epistemologist, essentially offered us a static view of knowledge, a concept of the understanding that—except for education from childhood and the detailed knowledge gained by the sciences—did not change, did not grow, did not develop. Hegel provides philosophy (and humanity) with a historical perspective. Our knowledge is not, as many phi- losophers had insisted ever since ancient times, about what is apart from our knowledge of it. Truth develops, as the human mind develops. Truth is not being but becoming. Knowl- edge develops through conflict and confrontation, or what Hegel famously calls a dialectic (a term he borrowed from Kant but which goes back to the Greeks).
In an important sense, it is Hegel who discovers (or invents) the history of philosophy. Other philosophers had talked about their predecessors, of course. (Aristotle, for instance, provided us with much of what we know about the pre-Socratic philosophers.) But what Hegel suggests is that something more is to be gleaned than a mere sequence of refutations, addi- tions, and improvements to thought; it is reality itself that is being transformed. The history of philosophy, accordingly, is but one aspect of an incredible cosmic odyssey, a “phenomenol- ogy of spirit”—the development through time not only of consciousness but of reality too.
The selection that follows is from the Introduction of Hegel’s 1807 masterpiece, The Phenomenology of Spirit. In this book, Hegel presents a dialectic of various forms of con- sciousness, from the most primitive sensory perception to the most sophisticated views of the Enlightenment and “Revealed Religion” (Christianity), culminating in that final stage of “ Absolute Knowing.” In these paragraphs, Hegel rejects the traditional metaphors of epis- temology and argues that skepticism should not be taken at all seriously. He then suggests the holistic form of his overall system.
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F RO M The Phenomenology of Spirit B Y G. W. F. Hegel10
It is a natural assumption that in philosophy, before we start to deal with its proper subject-matter, viz. the actual cognition of what truly is, one must first of all come to an understanding about cognition, which is regarded either as the instrument to get hold of the Absolute, or as the medium through which one discovers it. A c ertain uneasiness seems justified, partly because there are different types of cognition, and one of them might be more appropriate than another for the attain- ment of this goal, so that we could make a bad choice of means; and partly because cognition is a faculty of a definite kind and scope, and thus, without a more precise definition of its nature and limits, we might grasp clouds of error instead of the heaven of truth. This feeling of uneasiness is surely bound to be transformed into the conviction that the whole project of securing for consciousness through cogni- tion what exists in itself is absurd, and that there is a boundary between cognition and the Absolute that completely separates form. For, if cognition is the instrument for getting hold of absolute being, it is obvious that the use of an instrument on a thing certainly does not let it be what it is for itself, but rather sets out to reshape and alter it. If, on the other hand, cognition is not an instrument of our activity but a more or less passive medium through which the light of truth reaches us, then again we do not receive the truth as it is in itself, but only as it exists through and in this medium. Either way we employ a means which immediately brings about the opposite of its own end; or rather, what is really absurd is that we should make use of a means at all.
It would seem, to be sure, that this evil could be remedied through an acquain- tance with the way in which the instrument works; for this would enable us to eliminate from the representation of the Absolute which we have gained through it whatever is due to the instrument, and thus get the truth in its purity. But this “improvement” would in fact only bring us back to where we were before. If we remove from a reshaped thing what the instrument has done to it, then the thing— here the Absolute—becomes for us exactly what it was before this (accordingly) superfluous effort. On the other hand, if the Absolute is supposed merely to be brought nearer to us through this instrument, without anything in it being altered, like a bird caught by a lime-twig, it would surely laugh our little ruse to scorn, if it were not with us, in and for itself, all along, and of its own volition. For a ruse is just what cognition would be in such a case, since it would, with its manifold exer- tions, be giving itself the air of doing something quite different from creating a merely immediate and therefore effortless relationship. Or, if by testing cognition, which we conceive of as a medium, we get to know the law of its refraction, it is again useless to subtract this from the end result. For it is not the refraction of the ray, but the ray itself whereby truth reaches us, that is cognition; and if this were removed, all that would be indicated would be a pure direction or a blank space.
Meanwhile, if the fear of falling into error sets up a mistrust of Science, which in the absence of such scruples gets on with the work itself, and actually cognizes something, it is hard to see why we should not turn round and mistrust this very mistrust. Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the
10 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. v. miller, New York: Oxford university Press, 1977.
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error itself ? Indeed, this fear takes something—a great deal in fact—for granted as truth, supporting its scruples and inferences on what is itself in need of prior scru- tiny to see if it is true. To be specific, it takes for granted certain ideas about cogni- tion as an instrument and as a medium, and assumes that there is a difference between ourselves and this cognition. Above all, it presupposes that the Absolute stands on one side and cognition on the other, independent and separated from it, and yet is something real; or in other words, it presupposes that cognition which, since it is excluded from the Absolute, is surely outside of the truth as well, is nevertheless true, an assumption whereby what calls itself fear of error reveals itself rather as fear of the truth.
This conclusion stems from the fact that the Absolute alone is true, or the truth alone is absolute.
. . . Now, because it has only phenomenal knowledge for its object, this exposition
seems not to be Science, free and self-moving in its own peculiar shape; yet from this standpoint it can be regarded as the path of the natural consciousness which presses forward to true knowledge; or as the way of the Soul which journeys through the series of its own configurations as though they were the stations ap- pointed for it by its own nature, so that it may purify itself for the life of the Spirit, and achieve finally, through a completed experience of life itself, the awareness of what it really is in itself.
Natural consciousness will show itself to be only the Notion of knowledge, or in other words, not to be real knowledge. But since it directly takes itself to be real knowledge, this path has a negative significance for it, and what is in fact the real- ization of the Notion, counts for it rather as the loss of its own self; for it does lose its truth on this path. The road can therefore be regarded as the pathway of doubt, or more precisely as the way of despair. For what happens on it is not what is ordi- narily understood when the word “doubt” is used: shilly-shallying about this or that presumed truth, followed by a return to that truth again, after the doubt has been appropriately dispelled—so that at the end of the process the matter is taken to be what it was in the first place. On the contrary, this path is the conscious in- sight into the untruth of phenomenal knowledge, for which the supreme reality is what is in truth only the unrealized Notion. Therefore this thoroughgoing scepti- cism is also not the scepticism with which an earnest zeal for truth and Science fancies it has prepared and equipped itself in their service: the resolve, in Science, not to give oneself over to the thoughts of others, upon mere authority, but to ex- amine everything for oneself and follow only one’s conviction, or better still, to produce everything oneself, and accept only one’s deed as what is true.
The series of configurations which consciousness goes through along this road is, in reality, the detailed history of the education of consciousness itself to the stand- point of Science. That zealous resolve represents this education simplistically as something directly over and done with in the making of the resolution; but the way of the Soul is the actual fulfillment of the resolution, in contrast to the untruth of that view. Now, following one’s own conviction is, of course, more than giving oneself over to authority; but changing an opinion accepted on authority into an opinion held out of personal conviction, does not necessarily alter the content of the opinion, or replace error with truth. The only difference between being caught up in a system of opinions and prejudices based on personal conviction, and being caught up in one based on the authority of others, lies in the added conceit that is
“The Absolute alone is true, or the truth alone is absolute.” — G . W. F. H E G E L
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innate in the former position. The scepticism that is directed against the whole range of phenomenal consciousness, on the other hand, renders the Spirit for the first time competent to examine what truth is. For it brings about a state of despair about all the so-called natural ideas, thoughts, and opinions, regardless of whether they are called one’s own or someone else’s, ideas with which the consciousness that sets about the examination (of truth) straight away is still filled and hampered, so that it is, in fact, incapable of carrying out what it wants to undertake.
The necessary progression and interconnection of the forms of the unreal con- sciousness will by itself bring to pass the completion of the series. To make this more intelligible, it may be remarked, in a preliminary and general way, that the exposi- tion of the untrue consciousness in its untruth is not a merely negative procedure. The natural consciousness itself normally takes this one-sided view of it; and a knowledge which makes the one-sidedness its very essence is itself one of the patterns of incomplete consciousness which occurs on the road itself, and will manifest itself in due course. This is just the scepticism which only ever sees pure nothingness in its result and abstracts from the fact that this nothingness is specifically the nothingness of that from which it results. For it is only when it is taken as the result of that from which it emerges, that it is, in fact, the true result; in that case it is itself a determinate nothingness, one which has a content. The scepticism that ends up with the bare abstraction of nothingness or emptiness cannot get any fur- ther from there, but must wait to see whether something new comes along and what it is, in order to throw it too into the same empty abyss. But when, on the other hand, the result is conceived as it is in truth, namely, as a determinate negation, a new form has thereby immediately arisen, and in the negation the transition is made through which the progress through the complete series of forms comes about of itself.
. . . This contradiction and its removal will become more definite if we call to mind
the abstract determinations of truth and knowledge as they occur in consciousness. Consciousness simultaneously distinguishes itself from something, and at the same time relates itself to it, or, as it is said, this something exists for consciousness; and the determinate aspect of the relating, or of the being of something for a conscious- ness, is knowing. But we distinguish the being-for-another from being-in-itself; whatever is related to knowledge or knowing is also distinguished from it, and posited as existing outside of this relationship; this being-in-itself is called truth. Just what might be involved in these determinations is of no further concern to us here. Since our object is phenomenal knowledge, its determinations too will at first be taken directly as they present themselves; and they do present themselves very much as we have already apprehended them.
Now, if we inquire into the truth of knowledge, it seems that we are asking what knowledge is in itself. Yet in this inquiry knowledge is our object, something that exists for us; and the in-itself that would supposedly result from it would rather be the being of knowledge for us. What we asserted to be its essence would be not so much its truth but rather just our knowledge of it. The essence or criterion would lie within ourselves, and that which was to be compared with it and about which a decision would be reached through this comparison would not necessarily have to recognize the validity of such a standard.
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Starting from a clearly Kantian perspective, Hegel taught that we have to stop talking about “true” and “false” philosophies, and “true” and “false” religions, political systems, societies, scientific theories, and values. There are only different “forms of consciousness,” some more sophisticated and perspicacious than others, but none wholly true (or false) to the exclusion of others. Hegel wholly endorsed the Kantian thesis that the world is nothing other than the way in which we constitute it.
Hegel’s dialectic was essentially a dialectic of ideas, a series of confrontations of various forms of consciousness so that we could see how they all form an interlocking view of reality. But although philosophy and human history improve through time—eventually reaching a form of absolute knowledge and (Hegel hoped) world peace and universal freedom—the movement itself is by no means a smooth progression. It was often violent, both in the intel- lectual realm and in the flesh-and-blood world of human politics, which Hegel grimly re- ferred to as “the slaughter-bench of history.”11
In what follows, Hegel presents an overview of his all-embracing notion of “spirit” (also called “the Idea”). Spirit, in one sense, is God, but the concept embraces all of humanity, all of history, and all of nature as well. The point of the argument is that the world itself develops and changes, and so the virtues and truths of one generation may well become inadequate to the next generation. Yet this is not relativism in the crude sense, such that a truth, for ex- ample, is only true for a particular person or people. First, truth is not, in this sense, subjec- tive; it is to be found in the world and not just in the minds of individuals or groups. Second, and even more important, to say that a truth is inadequate from a later, probably more
11 The familiar doctrine of Hegel’s dialectic is often known only in terms of “thesis-antithesis-synthesis.” In fact these categories are rarely used by Hegel.
• How does Hegel address the problem of skepticism in rejecting the “correspon- dence metaphors” of philosophy?
• Are you convinced by Hegel’s claim that over time humanity improves in its under- standing of reality? Why or why not?
Picasso’s Guernica (1937), an arresting image of “the slaughterhouse of history.” (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)
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expansive, point of view is not to say that it “was true but now is false”; rather, it shows that we are slowly approaching an ever more adequate conception of the truth and knowledge, which, in the following selection, Hegel calls “Freedom.” Freedom is God’s purpose developing through history and humanity.
F RO M Reason in History B Y G. W. F. Hegel12
The question of the means whereby Freedom develops itself into a world leads us directly to the phenomenon of history. Although Freedom as such is primarily an inter- nal idea, the means it uses are the external phenomena which in history present themselves directly before our eyes. The first glance at history convinces us that the actions of men spring from their needs, their passions, their interests, their characters, and their talents. Indeed, it appears as if in this drama of activities these needs, pas- sions, and interests are the sole springs of action and the main efficient cause. It is true that this drama involves also universal purposes, benevolence, or noble patrio- tism. But such virtues and aims are insignificant on the broad canvas of history. We may, perhaps, see the ideal of Reason actualized in those who adopt such aims and in the spheres of their influence; but their number is small in proportion to the mass of the human race and their influence accordingly limited. Passions, private aims, and the satisfaction of selfish desires are, on the contrary, tre- mendous springs of action. Their power lies in the fact that they respect none of the limitations which law and morality would impose on them; and that these natural impulses are closer to the core of human nature than the artificial and troublesome discipline that tends toward order, self-restraint, law, and morality.
When we contemplate this display of passions and the consequences of their vio- lence, the unreason which is associated not only with them, but even—rather we might say especially—with good designs and righteous aims; when we see arising therefrom the evil, the vice, the ruin that has befallen the most flourishing kingdoms which the mind of man ever created, we can hardly avoid being filled with sorrow at this universal taint of corruption. And since this decay is not the work of mere nature, but of human will, our reflections may well lead us to a moral sadness, a revolt of the good will (spirit)—if indeed it has a place within us. Without rhetorical exaggeration, a simple, truthful account of the miseries that have overwhelmed the noblest of nations and polities and the finest exemplars of private virtue forms a most fearful picture and excites emotions of the profoundest and most hopeless sadness, counter-balanced by no consoling result. We can endure it and strengthen ourselves against it only by thinking that this is the way it had to be—it is fate; nothing can be done. And at last, out of the boredom with which this sorrowful reflection threatens us, we draw back into the vitality of the present, into our aims and interests of the
12 G. W. F. Hegel, Reason in History, trans. Robert S. Hartman, pp. 25–29. Copyright © 1995. Reprinted by permission of Pearson Education, Inc., upper Saddle River, NJ.
Napoleon as self-styled emperor. (© iStockphoto.com/ivan-96)
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moment; we retreat, in short, into the selfishness that stands on the quiet shore and thence enjoys in safety the distant spectacle of wreckage and confusion.
But in contemplating history as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed, a question necessarily arises: To what principle, to what final purpose, have these monstrous sacrifices been offered?
From here one usually proceeds to the starting point of our investigation: the events which make up this picture of gloomy emotion and thoughtful reflection are only the means for realizing the essential destiny, the absolute and final purpose, or, what amounts to the same thing, the true result of world history. We have all along purposely eschewed that method of reflection which ascends from this scene of particulars to general principles. Besides, it is not in the interest of such sentimental reflections really to rise above these depressing emotions and to solve the mysteries of Providence presented in such contemplations. It is rather their nature to dwell melancholically on the empty and fruitless sublimities of their negative result. For this reason we return to our original point of view. What we shall have to say about it will also answer the questions put to us by this panorama of history.
The first thing we notice—something which has been stressed more than once before but which cannot be repeated too often, for it belongs to the central point of our inquiry—is the merely general and abstract nature of what we call principle, final purpose, destiny, or the nature and concept of Spirit. A principle, a law is something implicit, which as such, however true in itself, is not completely real (actual). Purposes, principles, and the like, are at first in our thoughts, our inner intention. They are not yet in reality. That which is in itself is a possibility, a faculty. It has not yet emerged out of its implicitness into existence. A second element must be added for it to become reality, namely, activity, actualization. The principle of this is the will, man’s activity in general. It is only through this activity that the concept and its implicit (“being-in-themselves”) determinations can be realized, actualized; for of themselves they have no immediate efficacy. The activity which puts them in operation and in existence is the need, the instinct, the inclination, and passion of man. When I have an idea I am greatly interested in transforming it into action, into actuality. In its realization through my participation I want to find my own satisfaction. A purpose for which I shall be active must in some way be my purpose; I must thereby satisfy my own desires, even though it may have ever so many aspects which do not concern me. This is the infinite right of the individual to find itself satisfied in its activity and labor. If men are to be interested in anything they must have “their heart” in it. Their feelings of self-importance must be satisfied. But here a misunderstanding must be avoided. To say that an individual “has an interest” in something is justly regarded as a reproach or blame; we imply that he seeks only his private advantage. Indeed, the blame implies not only his disregard of the common interest, but his taking advantage of it and even his sacrificing it to his own interest. Yet, he who is active for a cause is not simply “interested,” but “inter- ested in it.” Language faithfully expresses this distinction. Nothing therefore hap- pens, nothing is accomplished, unless those concerned with an issue find their own satisfaction in it. They are particular individuals; they have their special needs, instincts, and interests. They have their own particular desires and volitions, their own insight and conviction, or at least their own attitude and opinion, once the aspirations to reflect, understand, and reason have been awakened. Therefore people demand that a cause for which they should be active accord with their ideas.
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And they expect their opinion—concerning its goodness, justice, advantage, profit— to be taken into account. This is of particular importance today when people are moved to support a cause not by faith in other people’s authority, but rather on the basis of their own independent judgment and conviction.
We assert then that nothing has been accomplished without an interest on the part of those who brought it about. And if “interest” be called “passion”—because the whole individuality is concentrating all its desires and powers, with every fiber of volition, to the neglect of all other actual or possible interests and aims, on one object—we may then affirm without qualification that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.
. . . [O]ne may indeed question whether those manifestations of vitality on the part
of individuals and peoples in which they seek and satisfy their own purposes are, at the same time, the means and tools of a higher and broader purpose of which they know nothing, which they realize unconsciously. This purpose has been ques- tioned, and in every variety of form denied, decried, and denounced as mere dreaming and “philosophy.” On this point, however, I announced my view at the very outset, and asserted our hypothesis—which eventually will appear as the result of our investigation—namely, that Reason governs the world and has conse- quently governed its history. In relation to this Reason, which is universal and substantial, in and for itself, all else is subordinate, subservient, and the means for its actualization. Moreover, this Reason is immanent in historical existence and reaches its own perfection in and through this existence. The union of the abstract universal, existing in and for itself, with the particular or subjective, and the fact that this union alone constitutes truth are a matter of speculative philosophy which, in this general form, is treated in logic. But in its historical development (the subjec- tive side, consciousness, is not yet able to know what is) the abstract final aim of history, the idea of Spirit, for it is then itself in process and incomplete. The idea of Spirit is not yet its distant object of desire and interest. Thus desire is still unconscious of its purpose; yet it already exists in the particular purposes and realizes itself through them. The problem concerning the union of the general and the subjective may also be raised under the form of the union of freedom and necessity. We consider the immanent development of the Spirit, existing in and for itself, as necessary, while we refer to freedom the interests contained in men’s conscious volitions.
One of Hegel’s most enthusiastic followers, a young student in Berlin named Karl Marx, thought that Hegel had the dialectic of history turned upside down. It is not ideas that de- termine world history, marx argued, but rather the details of history—in particular the eco- nomic details—that determine the ideas, including the ideas of philosophers. From this notion of dialectic marx developed his powerful and influential view of history as class conflict, replacing Hegel’s abstract “forms of consciousness” with the day-to-day battles of wages, jobs, exploitation, and profits.
“Reason governs the world and has consequently governed its history.” — G . W. F. H E G E L
• What is Hegel’s dialectic, and how does it relate to truth and knowledge as he un- derstands it?
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2. Nietzsche After Hegel, relativism became ever more sophisticated. marx explained differences in philosophical worldviews in terms of dif- ferent economic and social circumstances. The question was no longer “which view of the world is true?” but rather, “what cir- cumstances would make a person believe that?” The eccentric but brilliant iconoclast Friedrich Nietzsche defended the radical idea that what we called reality was in fact an illusion. Nietzsche attacked the traditional notions of truth and knowledge with a vengeance and argued that there could be as many equally “true” (or equally “false”—it doesn’t matter) worldviews as there were creative people and societies. He also urged that every person adopt for himself or herself as many different worldviews as possible, at one time or another, as a matter of “experiment.”
Like marx, Nietzsche replaced the old question, “Which view of the world is true?” with a question about circumstances. But he was not interested in economic or social circumstances so much as psychological factors. So he asked, “What kind of personality would need to believe that?” Truth is no longer even an issue. In fact, even rationality is starting to feel the threat of relativism. For, with Nietzsche, not only is truth out the window, but coherence and pragmatism are forced to take second place as well. What comes first? Excitement, adventure, heroism, creativity, and what Nietzsche generally calls “the will to power.” Of course, one must still act ratio- nally if one is to achieve these things, but thinking, in Nietzsche’s view, plays at most a secondary role in our lives. Will comes first.
Nietzsche’s view of truth was, to put it mildly, startling. His basic claim was a paradox: “truth is error.” This can be interpreted in many different ways, and Nietzsche himself inter- prets and reinterprets it from many different perspectives—which is quite in line with his view of truth itself. “There are no facts,” he tells us, “only interpretations.” Elsewhere he tells us that there are only “perspectives,” various ways of viewing the world and no ultimately correct (or incorrect) way. The very idea of “Truth,” he writes, and the curious obsession with truth enjoyed by the scholars, is a kind of pathology, or at least a real curiosity, that requires exami- nation. He asks, why are we so enamored with the idea of “the Truth”? How and why did phi- losophers ever get the idea that there is another world, more real and “better” than this one?
On Truth B Y Friedrich Nietzsche13
Sense for Truth.—I welcome every skepticism to which I may answer: “Let us try it out!” But I no longer want to hear anything about things and questions that cannot be tested. This is the limit of my “sense for truth”: for courage has there lost its right.
Life no Argument.—We have organized for ourselves a world to live in—by postulating bodies, lines, surfaces, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content: without
13 All Nietzsche translations are by Clancy martin. These passages originally appear in Nietzsche’s works The Gay Science, sections 51, 121, 265; the compendium of Nietzsche’s notes entitled The Will to Power, sections 493, 534, 537, 540; Beyond Good and Evil 4; and Twilight of the Idols.
Nietzsche (bpk, Berlin/Gustav Adolf Schultze/Art Resource, NY)
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these instances of belief no one could manage to live today! But nevertheless they are yet unproven. Life is no argument; error might be among the conditions of life.
Ultimate Skepticism.—But in the end what are human truths?—They are our irrefut- able errors.
Truth is the sort of error without which a particular species of life could not live. In the end the value for life is what decides the matter.
The criterion of truth is in the enhancement of the feeling of power.
What is truth?—Inertia; that supposition that provides ease; the smallest cost in spiritual power; etc.
There are all kinds of eyes. Even the sphinx has eyes:—and thus there are all kinds of “truths,” and thus there is no truth.
For us the falseness of a judgment is not on that account an objection to a judgment . . . The question is how far is it life-promoting, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-propagating; and our fundamental inclination is to insist that the falsest judgments (such as synthetic a priori judgments) are for us the most indis- pensable, that without admitting as true the fictions of logic, without measuring real- ity against the entirely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without constant falsification of the world through numbers, human beings could not live— that to renounce false judgments would be to renounce life, would be to deny life.
H OW T H E “ T RU E WO R L D” AT L A S T B E C A M E A FA B L E : T H E H I S T O RY O F A N E R RO R 1. The true world:—attainable for the wise, the pious, the virtuous; he lives in it, he is it. (The oldest form of the idea, comparably sensible, simple, and compelling. . . . )
2. The true world:—unattainable for now, but promised for the wise, the pious, the virtuous (“for the sinner who repents”). (Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, sinister, incomprehensible: it becomes Christian.)
3. The true world:—unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very thought of it—a consolation, a duty, an imperative. (The old sun, really, but viewed through fog and skepticism. The idea has become elusive, pale, Nordic. Kantian.)
4. The true world:—unattainable? At least, unattained. And as unattained, also unknown. Thus no consolation, redemption, or obligation: how could something unknown obligate us? (Grey dawn. Reason’s first yawn. . . . )
5. The “true” world:—an idea that is no longer of any use, not even for obligating— an idea that has become worthless and superfluous—consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it! (Bright day; breakfast, return of bons sense and cheerfulness; . . . )
6. The true world:—we have abolished. What world is left? Perhaps the apparent? But no! With the true world we have abolished the apparent as well. (Noon; . . . end of the longest error; high point of humanity.)
Although Nietzsche wrote in the last half of the nineteenth century, his works were mostly ignored until the twentieth century, when they made an enormous impact (not all of it positive), first in Germany, then more widely. Nietzsche’s relativistic view of truth was still quite alien to the
“The falseness of a judgment is to us not necessarily an objection to a judgment . . .” — F R I E D R I C H N I E T Z S C H E
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ideas of the nineteenth century, when thinkers—following Hegel or Kant or natural science— were still trying to develop a unified and “true” picture of the world. However, one of Nietzsche’s German colleagues did have an impact, just at the end of the nineteenth century, and though his relativistic view of truth was not nearly so extreme as Nietzsche’s, he provoked extensive activity and comment. We speak of Wilhelm Dilthey. The doctrine he promoted, which is still tremendously influential in both Europe and the united States, is called historicism. Historicism is Hegel’s dialectic of forms of consciousness, pinned down to precise social and historical peri- ods. It is the thesis, simply, that truth and rationality are relative to particular peoples at particu- lar times in history and that overall comparison of them, with the intention of finding out which is “true,” is totally mistaken. It is, obviously, a very strong relativist doctrine, so strong and so influential that the absolutists in philosophy started looking around for a champion. They found him in the “phenomenologist” Edmund Husserl.
• What might Nietzsche mean when he claims that truths are “our irrefutable errors”?
• Is Nietzsche’s claim that “the enhancement of our feeling of power” is a criterion of truth convincing? Does his notion in any way resemble the pragmatic theory of truth? How does it differ from the pragmatic theory?
E. Phenomenology Phenomenology is a self-consciously “scientific” and “rigorous” discipline, modeled after mathematics (as it was for Descartes and the ancient Greeks). Phenomenology is the study of the essential structures of the human mind, and because these are essential, they can be known to be true, universally and necessarily. Husserl was a new kind of rationalist, who believed that the truths of arithmetic and geometry are known—and known with certainty—by appeal to a certain kind of intuition, which he called “essential” intuition. Believing that such intuitions are adequate for arithmetic and geometry, Husserl turned his theory elsewhere, to philosophy in general. Husserl, as much as any philosopher of his time (the early twentieth century), was horrified by what he saw as rampant relativism. He saw it, in fact, not only as a crisis in philoso- phy but as “a crisis in European civilization.” So he used his phenomenology to attack it. Turning against Dilthey, for example, he argued:
F RO M “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” B Y Edmund Husserl14
Historicism takes its position in the factual sphere of the empirical life of the spirit. To the extent that it posits this latter absolutely, without exactly naturalizing it (the specific sense of nature in particular lies far from historical thinking and in any event does not influence it by determining it in general), there arises a relativism that has a close affinity to naturalistic psychologism and runs into similar sceptical difficulties.
. . . In view of this constant change in scientific views we would actually have no right
to speak of sciences as objectively valid unities instead of merely as cultural forma- tions. It is easy to see that historicism, if consistently carried through, carries over
14 Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer, New York: Harper & Row, 1965.
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into extreme sceptical subjectivism. The ideas of truth, theory, and science would then, like all ideas, lose their absolute valid- ity. That an idea has validity would mean that it is a factual construction of spirit which is held as valid and which in its contingent validity determines thought. There would be no unqualified validity, or validity-in- itself, which is what it is even if no one has achieved it and though no historical human- ity will ever achieve it. Thus too there would then be no validity to the principle of con- tradiction nor to any logic, which latter is nevertheless still in full vigor in our time. The result, perhaps, will be that the logical principles of noncontradiction will be trans- formed into their opposites.
using both Kant’s terminology and his absolutist intentions, Husserl attacked all forms of relativism and attempted to develop a transcendental phenomenology, in other words, a phenomenology that discovers the basic rules of all experience (just as he had discovered them for arithmetic and geometry before). Because these rules (or “ideal laws”) were discov- ered to be essential, they were, Husserl concluded, the only rules possible. For Husserl as for Kant, the word transcendental means the basic and the only rules with which we “constitute” our world. (Husserl used the notion of “constitution” also, with much the same meaning that Kant did.) But what is phenomenology? It is the study of human consciousness. These es- sential rules of experience, in other words, were to be found in consciousness, not in a mys- terious Platonic “world of Being” nor simply in our language. Consciousness itself, with the objects of its own constitution, becomes our new anchor. Starting from Descartes, Husserl suggests that we go back to that “subjective” starting point—and that we look again.
F RO M The 1929 Paris Lectures B Y Edmund Husserl15
The splintering of contemporary philosophy and its aimless activity makes us pause. Must this situation not be traced back to the fact that the motivations from which Descartes’ meditations emanate have lost their original vitality? Is it not true that the only fruitful renaissance is one which reawakens these meditations, not in order to accept them, but to reveal the profound truth in the radicalism of a return to the ego cogito with the eternal values that reside therein?
. . . We thus begin, everyone for himself and in himself, with the decision to disregard
all our present knowledge. We do not give up Descartes’ guiding goal of an absolute foundation for knowledge. At the beginning, however, to presuppose even the
15 Edmund Husserl, The 1929 Paris Lectures, trans. Peter Koestenbaum, Hague: Nijhoff, 1975. Reprinted with kind per- mission from Springer Science and Business media.
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938)
A German-Czech philosopher and mathematician who was the founder of phenomenol- ogy, a modern form of rational intuitionism. With Gottlob Frege, Husserl fought against the empiricist view of necessary truth defended by John Stuart Mill and developed an alterna- tive view in which matters of necessity were not matters of ordinary experience but rather of a special kind of intuition. His best-known works are Ideas (Vol. 1) (1913) and Cartesian Meditations (1931).
Phenomenologist philosopher Edmund Husserl. (© Bettmann/Corbis)
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possibility of that goal would be prejudice. . . . Science demands proof by reference to the things and facts themselves, as these given in actual experience and intuition. Thus guided, we, the beginning philosophers, make it a rule to judge only by the evidence.
. . . Here, specifically following Descartes, we make the great shift which, when
properly carried out, leads to transcendental subjectivity. . . . Let us consider: as radi- cally meditating philosophers we now have neither knowledge that is valid for us nor a world that exists for us. . . . However, whatever be the veracity of the claim to being made by phenomena, whether they represent reality or appearance, phe- nomena in themselves cannot be disregarded as mere “nothing.” On the contrary, it is precisely the phenomena themselves which, without exception, render possible for me the very existence of both reality and appearance. This epistemological ab- stention is still what it is: it includes the whole stream of experienced life and all its particulars, the appearances of objects, other people, cultural situations, etc. Noth- ing changes, except that I no longer accept the world simply as real; I no longer judge regarding the distinction between reality and appearance. . . . This ubiqui- tous detachment from any point of view regarding the objective world we term the phenomenological epoché. It is the methodology through which I come to understand myself as that ego and life of consciousness in which and through which the entire objective world exists for me, and is for me precisely as it is. . . . Through the phe- nomenological epoché the natural human ego, specifically my own, is reduced to the transcendental ego. This is the meaning of the phenomenological reduction.
• Why does Husserl think that the method of phenomenology is a form of rationalism?
• What does Husserl mean by “transcendental subjectivity”? How is it related to Descartes’s project?
• How is phenomenology supposed to defeat relativism? How might it invite relativism?
Husserl’s battle, from beginning to end, was a battle against relativism, against all of those philosophies that held that there can be different equally true or equally rational worldviews. And it must be said that his phenomenology, for all of its internal struggles, was immensely successful; it still attracts the attention of a great many philosophers today. But phenomenology was not the solution to relativism. Husserl thought that phenomenology could be transcendental and prove that certain rules were basic and essential to all human thinking. But just as Kant opened the door to relativism with his view that we constitute our world, Husserl opened it wider with his view that a study of consciousness was the way to do philosophy. For were there not, his followers asked, many different forms of consciousness? (Thus they returned to Hegel rather than Kant.) And phenomenology as it developed in France, rather than Germany, became the source of a new relativism.
F. Hermeneutics and Pragmatism: Relativism Reconsidered Absolutist views seem to deny the obvious fact that people are different and disagree, not only in superficial ways but in terms of their most basic beliefs. Relativism, on the other hand, seems to deny the obvious similarities among people and imply that we will never be able to
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understand one another—or find the truth—at all. One attempt to bridge the gap between dogmatic absolutism and solipsistic relativism is hermeneutics.
“Hermeneutics” is an old name for “interpretation,” with an eye to getting at the Truth. For many centuries, this formidable word was applied exclusively to the interpretation of the Bible, with the aim of understanding the Word of God. Today, however, the term has a much broader meaning. It is often used in literary criticism to talk about the interpretation of texts—not only the Bible, but any text. But it is now used in philosophy, too, to refer to the discipline of interpreting and understanding the world, which becomes, in effect, our text, and different cultures’ views of the world, which may seem initially to be mutually incommensurable.
The modern father of hermeneutics is the German “historicist” Wilhelm Dilthey, whom we encountered in the previous section. Dilthey came to realize that the methods of the physical sciences were not very successful when applied to the “human sciences,” in part because history played such enormous importance in human life. He also realized that there was a very real danger in the Kantian attempt to overcome traditional philosophical distinc- tions between appearance and reality, subjectivity, and objective truth. While his historicism lent itself to relativism, Dilthey himself was vehemently antirelativist. The problem, he argued, was to develop a method for understanding human differences. But he believed that all of these were ultimately superficial and thus not incommensurable.
Contemporary hermeneutics is just this attempt to provide a way of understanding view- points other than our own. It is simply dogmatic to insist—as Kant and many other philoso- phers have insisted—that the structures of the human mind are everywhere the same and, consequently, that we all share a common basis of knowledge. But is it simple-minded, on the other hand, to insist that we are all different and have different truths, since there is at least enough overlap for us to understand that we do disagree. For example, the medievals saw God and the earth as the spiritual and spatial centers of the universe. How can a mod- ern-day scientist understand them? Well, not just by dismissing their views as nonsense, nor can we sensibly say, “Well, they have their opinions and we have ours.” Hermeneutics is just this attempt to step into someone else’s shoes (but without taking off our own shoes first).
In the twentieth century, hermeneutics was turned into a powerful style of philosophizing by the German metaphysician Martin Heidegger. It was Heidegger, in his monumental book Being and Time (1928), who suggested that life is like a text, and the purpose of our lives is to understand that text. Heidegger was a student of Husserl and was thus a phenomenologist. But in his hermeneutical phenomenology he tries to “un- cover” the hidden meanings in our experience. He rejects the scientific tone of Husserl’s phenomenol- ogy and prefers to talk about the structures of life itself, including our profound sense of history, which defines human life.
The most important proponent of hermeneutics, however, is a student of Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer. In fact, Gadamer is so wary of the fact that method—and not only the scientific method— may distort our understanding that he insists that hermeneutics must resist the temptation to become another method. It is rather the attempt to over- come methods, to dispense with the overemphasis
Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002)
German philosopher specializing in philosophical hermeneutics. Re- jecting approaches that take tex- tual interpretation to be aimed at determining an author’s original intention, Gadamer emphasized the extent to which an interpreter’s own background and historical po- sition impacts the interpretation of a text. Although the “pre-judg- ments” we bring with us to texts limit what we get out of them, they also enable us to recognize the way that the text has relevance to our own era’s concerns.
Hans-Georg Gadamer (AP Photo/Heribert Proepper)
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on proofs and arguments and the quest for certainty and emphasize instead the shared un- derstandings that we already have with one another. The substance of philosophy then be- comes dialogue rather than individual phenomenology or abstract proofs. Interpretation thus becomes not an abstract function of the intellect but a process that permeates our every activity.
Gadamer’s hermeneutics does not reject the notion of truth, but it does give up entirely the idea that there is a Truth wholly outside of us which we need a method (rationalism, em- piricism, scientific psychology) to discover. Like the coherence theorist and the pragmatist, he gives up the idea of secure foundations for our knowledge—such as the raw experiences or “sense data” discussed by some empiricists, or the a priori principles defended by Kant. But where both the coherence theorist and the pragmatist tend to interpret truth as a func- tion of the present—coherence of beliefs and workability, respectively—the hermeneuticist insists that truth must be understood historically, in terms of a tradition. Thus the philosophi- cal tradition, ironically, has tended to ignore the importance of its own tradition and look for strictly eternal truths. Gadamer’s hermeneutics hold rather that it is only within a tradition, and by looking at our tradition, that philosophical truth is possible at all. Does this mean that we must accept whatever our tradition may be, even if it is wrong? But what would it be, Gadamer asks, for a tradition to be wrong? We can criticize ourselves, of course, and that is just the point of hermeneutics. But does it mean that we must also justify ourselves and what we have always believed? “Do we need to justify,” he asks rhetorically, “that which has always supported us?”
Does relativism mean that there can be no truth? Does relativism apply only to philo- sophical views, not to real theories? Could there be really different views of the world—and different worlds? But does it even make sense to talk about relative truth, that is, a truth that is only “true for” one person or group and not another?
If such a phrase even makes sense, it must mean that a statement is true for a person or group by virtue of the scheme or conceptual framework they employ; thus it is true for a certain society that the witch doctor embodies the power of the devil, but true for another society that the powers of the so-called witch doctor are nothing but the combination of natural pharmaceuticals plus the power of suggestion. But we must not fall into the radical trap of Protagoras and claim that “man is the measure of all things”—if we are to continue using the word truth at all. A statement or a belief cannot be true just by virtue of its being believed, in other words, if there is no possibility that a person or a group can believe what is false (or, not believe some statement that is nevertheless true). Furthermore, as in herme- neutics, it is essential that we do not close off the possibility that one truth might be under- standable—perhaps in different terms—by those who believe another, apparently contradictory truth. This would be to deny the possibility of cross-cultural communication— to cut people of different cultures off from each other completely.
• What is hermeneutics? What role does history play in hermeneutical understanding of truth?
Hermeneutics has had a recent resurgence in American philosophy, particularly in discus- sions of relativism and multiculturalism. In the following essay, the contemporary American philosopher, Richard Rorty, who claimed a profound debt to hermeneutics, defends a vision of “solidarity”—which he contrasts with the traditional notion of “objectivity” and also associ- ates with “pragmatism.” His claim is that the pragmatic theory of truth, which we outlined
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previously, is essentially the theory that truth has a moral standard—the solidarity of a community— rather than a metaphysical one—objectivity. In other words, he claims that pragmatism defines “truth” as “what it is morally best for our community to be- lieve,” and using this definition, he can claim that it is morally best for us to believe in pragmatism.
F RO M “Solidarity or Objectivity?” B Y Richard Rorty16
There are two principal ways in which reflective human beings try, by placing their lives in a larger context, to give sense to those lives. The first is by telling the story of their contribution to a community. This community may be the actual historical one in which they live, or another actual one, distant in time and place, or a quite imaginary one, consisting perhaps of a dozen heroes and heroines selected from history or fiction or both. The second way is to describe themselves as standing in immediate relation to a nonhuman reality. This relation is immediate in the sense that it does not derive from a relation between such a reality and their tribe, or their nation, or their imagined band of comrades. I shall say that stories of the former kind exemplify the desire for solidarity, and that stories of the latter kind exemplify the desire for objectivity. Insofar as a person is seeking solidarity, he or she does not ask about the relation between the practices of the chosen community and some- thing outside that community. Insofar as he seeks objectivity, he distances himself from the actual persons around him not by thinking of himself as a member of some other real or imaginary group, but rather by attaching himself to something which can be described without reference to any particular human beings.
. . . Those who wish to ground solidarity in
objectivity—call them “realists”—have to construe truth as correspondence to reality. So they must construct a metaphysics which has room for a special relation between be- liefs and objects which will differentiate true from false beliefs. They also must argue that there are procedures of justification of belief which are natural and not merely local. So they must construct an epistemol- ogy which has room for a kind of justification which is not merely social but natural, springing from human nature itself, and made possible by a link between that part of nature and the rest of nature. On their view, the various procedures which are thought of
Pragmatism—the notion that the truth is slowly discovered and confirmed through experiment—was first advocated in the work of C. S. Peirce. In the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Peirce argued that science provided a model for how philosophers should think of—and rethink—the notion of truth.
Richard Rorty (1931–2007)
American philosopher. Rorty was one of the most dynamic and diverse thinkers in twentieth- century American philosophy, defending his own brand of pragmatism. Rorty challenged the idea of the mind as the “mirror of nature,” defending the idea that knowledge is situ- ated in social practice and that we are in no position to know for sure that our beliefs are really true. At best we can ascertain that they meet our society’s cur- rent standards for acceptance. As a consequence, philosophy amounts to an ongoing, never- ending conversation.
American pragmatist philosopher and literary theorist Richard Rorty. (© Kathleen M. Higgins)
16 Richard Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity?” from Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1: Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge university Press.
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as providing rational justification by one or another culture may or may not really be rational. For to be truly rational, procedures of justification must lead to the truth, to correspondence to reality, to the intrinsic nature of things.
By contrast, those who wish to reduce objectivity to solidarity—call them “pragmatists”—do not require either a metaphysics or an epistemology. They view truth as, in William James’ phrase, what it is good for us to believe. So they do not need an account of a relation between beliefs and objects called “correspondence,” nor an account of human cognitive abilities which ensures that our species is capable of entering into that relation. They see the gap between truth and justification not as something to be bridged by isolating a natural and transcultural sort of rationality which can be used to criticize certain cultures and praise others, but simply as the gap between the actual good and the possible better. From a prag- matist point of view, to say that what is rational for us now to believe may not be true, is simply to say that somebody may have come up with a better idea. It is to say that there is always room for improved belief, since new evidence, or new hy- potheses, or a whole new vocabulary, may come along. For pragmatists, the desire for objectivity is not the desire to escape the limitations of one’s community, but simply the desire for as much intersubjective agreement as possible, the desire to extend the reference of “us” as far as we can. Insofar as pragmatists make a distinc- tion between topics on which such agreement is relatively easy to get and topics on which agreement is relatively hard to get.
“Relativism” is the traditional epithet applied to pragmatism by realists. Three different views are commonly referred to by this name. The first is the view that every belief is as good as every other. The second is the view that “true” is an equivocal term, having as many meanings as there are procedures of justification. The third is the view that there is nothing to be said about either truth or rational- ity apart from descriptions of the familiar procedures of justification which a given society—ours—uses in one or another area of inquiry. The pragmatist holds the ethnocentric third view. But he does not hold the self-refuting first view, nor the eccentric second view. He thinks that his views are better than the realists, but he does not think that his views correspond to the nature of things. He thinks that the very flexibility of the word “true”—the fact that it is merely an expression of commendation—insures its univocity. The term “true,” on his account, means the same in all cultures, just as equally flexible terms like “here,” “there,” “good,” “bad,” “you,” and “me” mean the same in all cultures. But the identity of meaning is, of course, compatible with diversity of reference, and with diversity of proce- dures for assigning the terms. So he feels free to use the term “true” as a general term of commendation in the same way as his realist opponent does—and in particular to use it to commend his own view.
However, it is not clear why “relativist” should be thought an appropriate term for the ethnocentric third view, the one which the pragmatist does hold. For the pragmatist is not holding a positive theory which says that something is relative to something else. He is, instead, making the purely negative point that we should drop the traditional distinction between knowledge and opinion, construed as the dis- tinction between truth as correspondence to reality and truth as a commendatory term for well-justified beliefs. The reason that the realist calls this negative claim “relativistic” is that he cannot believe that anybody would seriously deny that truth has an intrinsic nature. So when the pragmatist says that there is nothing to be said about truth save that each of us will commend as true those beliefs which he or she
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finds good to believe, the realist is inclined to interpret this as one more positive theory about the nature of truth: a theory according to which truth is simply the contemporary opinion of a chosen individual or group. Such a theory would, of course, be self-refuting. But the pragmatist does not have a theory of truth, much less a relativistic one. As a partisan of solidarity, his account of the value of coopera- tive human inquiry has only an ethical base, not an epistemological or metaphysi- cal one. Not having any epistemology, a fortiori he does not have a relativistic one.
. . . [T]he question is not about how to define words like “truth” or “rationality” or
“knowledge” or “philosophy,” but about what self-image our society should have of itself. The ritual invocation of the “need to avoid relativism” is most comprehensible as an expression of the need to preserve certain habits of contemporary European life. These are the habits nurtured by the Enlightenment, and justified by it in terms of an appeal of Reason, conceived as a transcultural human ability to correspond to reality, a faculty whose possession and use is demonstrated by obedience to explicit criteria. So the real question about relativism is whether these same habits of intel- lectual, social, and political life can be justified by a conception of rationality as criterionless muddling through, and by a pragmatist conception of truth.
I think that the answer to this question is that the pragmatist cannot justify these habits without circularity, but then neither can the realist. The pragmatists’ justification of toleration, free inquiry, and the quest for undistorted communica- tion can only take the form of a comparison between societies which exemplify these habits and those which do not, leading up to the suggestion that nobody who has experienced both would prefer the latter. It is exemplified by Winston Churchill’s defense of democracy as the worst form of government imaginable, except for all the others which have been tried so far.
. . . My suggestion that the desire for objectivity is in part a disguised form of the fear
of the death of our community echoes Nietzsche’s charge that the philosophical tradition which stems from Plato is an attempt to avoid facing up to contingency, to escape from time and chance. Nietzsche thought that realism was to be condemned not only by arguments from its theoretical incoherence, the sort of argument we find in Putnam and Davidson, but also on practical, pragmatic grounds. Nietzsche thought that the test of human character was the ability to live with the thought that there was no convergence. He wanted us to be able to think of truth as:
a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthromorphisms—in short a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people.
Nietzsche hoped that eventually there might be human beings who could and did think of truth in this way, but who still liked themselves, who saw themselves as good people for whom solidarity was enough.
I think that pragmatism’s attack on the various structure-content distinctions which buttress the realist’s notion of objectivity can best be seen as an attempt to let us think of truth in this Nietzschean way, as entirely a matter of solidarity. That is why I think we need to say, despite Putnam, that “there is only the dialogue,” only us, and to throw out the last residues of the notion of “transcultural rational- ity.” But this should not lead us to repudiate, as Nietzsche sometimes did, the ele- ments in our movable host which embody the ideas of Socratic conversation,
“The question is not about how to define words like ‘truth’ or ‘rationality’ or ‘knowledge’ or ‘philosophy,’ but about what self-image our society should have of itself.” — R I C H A R D R O R T Y
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Christian fellowship, and Enlightenment science. Nietzsche ran together his diag- nosis of philosophical realism as an expression of fear and resentment with his own resentful idiosyncratic idealizations of silence, solitude, and violence. Post- Nietzschean thinkers like Adorno and Heidegger and Foucault have run together Nietzsche’s criticisms of the metaphysical tradition on the one hand with his criti- cisms of bourgeois civility, of Christian love, and of the nineteenth century’s hope that science would make the world a better place to live, on the other. I do not think that there is any interesting connection between these two sets of criticisms. Pragmatism seems to me, as I have said, a philosophy of solidarity rather than of despair. From this point of view, Socrates’ turn away from the gods, Christianity’s turn from an Omnipotent Creator to the man who suffered on the Cross, and the Baconian turn from science as contemplation of eternal truth to science as instru- ment of social progress, can be seen as so many preparations for the act of social faith which is suggested by a Nietzschean view of truth.
The best argument we partisans of solidarity have against the realistic partisans of objectivity is Nietzsche’s argument that the traditional Western metaphysico- epistemological way of firming up our habits simply isn’t working anymore. It isn’t doing its job. It has become as transparent a device as the postulation of deities who turn out, by a happy coincidence, to have chosen us as their people. So the prag- matist suggestion that we substitute a “merely” ethical foundation for our sense of community—or, better, that we think of our sense of community as having no foundation except shared hope and the trust created by such sharing—is put for- ward on practical grounds. It is not put forward as a corollary of a metaphysical claim that the objects in the world contain no intrinsically action-guiding proper- ties, nor of an epistemological claim that we lack a faculty of moral sense, nor of a semantical claim that truth is reducible to justification.
Rorty makes the point that our metaphysical theory of “truth” has political overtones. The belief that there is one, single, truth can lead to condescension and disrespect toward people who believe differently from oneself. Only, however, if the absolutist believes, in addition to his or her absolutism, that he or she or his or her culture is closer to that one truth than are others. Need the absolutist always think that the objective truth is his or her sole dominion? This seems to cut off the possibility of communication and learning between cultures.
• What is the difference between “objectivity” and “solidarity” according to Rorty? Why does Rorty favor “solidarity”?
Is solidarity “enough”? In the following reading, Japanese philosopher Isamu Nagami considers the communication between individuals and cultures, which he calls intersubjectivity, and suggests that neither “solidarity” nor “objectivity” is politically “enough.” He employs hermeneutics to appreciate the complexities of not only cross-cultural but also intracultural understanding.
Isamu Nagami (1941–)
A philosopher of religion. He has served as president of Nagoya Ryujo College in Aichi, Japan.
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F RO M “Cultural Gaps: Why Do We Misunderstand?” B Y Isamu Nagami17
A well-known Japanese psychologist, Takeo Doi, expressed his frustration and puzzlement with American ways of life in his book, The Anatomy of Dependence:
From time to time I began to feel an awkwardness arising from the difference between my ways of thinking and feeling and those of my hosts (that is, Americans). For example, not long after my arrival in America I visited the house of someone to whom I had been introduced by a Japanese acquaintance, and was talking to him when he asked me, “Are you hungry? We have some ice cream if you’d like it.” As I remember, I was rather hungry, but finding myself asked point-blank if I was hungry by someone whom I was visiting for the first time, I could not bring myself to admit it, and ended by denying the suggestion. I probably cherished a mild hope that he would press me again; but my host, disappointingly, said “I see” with no further ado, leaving me regretting that I had not replied more honestly. And I found myself thinking that a Japanese would almost never ask a stranger unceremoniously if he was hungry, but would produce something to give him without asking.
Those who have lived in foreign countries have experienced more or less the sort of cultural shock Doi expressed so well. These kinds of intercultural experi- ences have led many thinkers to probe into the core elements of culture for com- parative study. In Japan, for example, we find many popular writers who explain the difference between Japanese culture and that of the Western nations including the U.S.A. in terms of group orientation and individual identity. The thesis for this type of argument is that while Japanese behavior in general can be explained by orientation within the group, Americans behave on the basis of individual free- dom. There is no doubt that this reveals a meaningful comparison between the two
A tree is both a living thing and the source of wood. The Japanese word conveys this fact; in English, we have different words for wood and tree. Does this tell us something about differences in how we think? (© The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY)
17 Isamu Nagami, “Cultural Gaps: Why Do We misunderstand?” from Liberation Ethics: Essays in Religious and Social Ethics in Honor of Gibson Winter, ed. Charles Amjad-Ali and W. Alvin Pitcher. Copyright © 1985. Reprinted by permis- sion of the Center for the Scientific Study of Religion.
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cultures to those who have journalistic interests. But if we start by inquiring into various modalities of the experiential world of daily life in culture, we find we cannot follow the above approach primarily for three reasons. (1) Those who accept the group versus individual thesis tend to explain every cultural phenomenon in terms of this and as a result they conceal many other rich possibilities which every culture may contain. (2) Certain features are common to all social worlds. In this respect every culture can share a kind of symbolic common denominator through which we can compare differences. Yet, this approach of contrast ignores the uni- versality in human existence. (3) The very fact that people understand and describe different cultures reveals a kind of cultural ethos in which their thinking is embed- ded. That is to say, their ways of thinking are inescapably and necessarily cultural. This thought process is not self-critically oriented in the sense that it is not able to show its historico-cultural character and, therefore, tends to be ideological.
The most striking characteristic of these approaches is based on their inability to provide any critical perspective and at the same time on a sort of false legitimacy in our actual human life. Thus it is crucial for us to find another way to understand culture in its most sensible manners. In this respect, we would propose a method of phenomenological reflection, for phenomenology can reveal the various dimen- sions of human life which, I believe, symbolize culture and thereby can help us to overcome the aforementioned difficulties.
. . .
I N T E R S U BJ E C T I V I T Y, L A N G UAG E A N D TA K E N - F O R- G R A N T E D N E S S When, for instance a boy and his mother see a cedar, she is most likely to call it a tree rather than a cedar. After a while if he happens to see an oak tree and asks her “What’s that?” she will call it a tree. At that time he might be very confused with that term simply because there is a difference between a cedar and an oak and yet they partake of the same name, tree. But gradually he realizes that the word or sound “tree” implies a certain group of characteristics which belong to the same category. It is clear that a word “tree” signifies an abstract expression in the sense that it represents certain characteristics and ignores others such as those that belong to the category “flower.” In this respect, concreteness in common sense is not con- crete in reality, but rather abstract. The reason why people mistake abstract expres- sions for concrete reality is due to the fact that they unconsciously accept the expressions as taken-for-granted, rooted in a specific-temporal world. Hence some concrete meanings in one culture are not concrete but very enigmatic, non- concrete expressions in another. In English, people distinguish tree from parts of tree which are used for architectural and other purposes, that is “wood.” But in Japanese we don’t do so. We express the idea of tree and wood both with one term, Ki. Yet, the dictionary usually describes Ki as having the same meaning as tree. Lan- guages also differ in their built-in grammatical signals, that is in semantics, syntax and phonetics. In English people are very conscious of specifying the number of people involved in what they are discussing. But in Japanese the contrary is often true. Here we can see that the very nature of language through which we compre- hend the world and understand ourselves inevitably involves us in the cultural con- text of language. Hence languages differ immensely from one another not only in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar, but also in the way they recognize certain things and ignore others, thereby reflecting the society and culture they serve.
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Experience and language are reciprocal in the sense that human beings can experi- ence outside reality only in terms of the meanings disclosed by language. Human beings are thrown into language worlds in which they learn to identify things as well as to understand reality. In this sense it is obvious that our ways of understand- ing and interpreting reality are already conditioned by the socially given knowledge.
If we accept that our knowledge is socially given, it seems that we are caught in the relativistic position of suggesting that there is no such thing as objectivity. Hence, we may ask a further question: How can we affirm something as an objec- tive entity on which everybody can agree? In this question we again need to reflect on what I will call the intersubjective world which language as well as our every- day life thinking always presupposes. Situationally we unconsciously put ourselves as the center of spatio-temporal coordinates in the world. This means that I usually see the position I occupy as “here,” distinguished from “there” taken by a fellow human being. Yet we can interchange our positions freely, as if we can place our- selves in the other’s situation. A saying such as “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” implies this interchangeability. This interchangeability is pos- sible because there is an intersubjectively acknowledged spatio-temporal world in which both s/he and I are embedded and therefore can exchange, as well as share, our positions in essentially the same fashion with essentially the same possibilities and consequences. The concept of intersubjectivity signifies this intersubjectively acknowledged spatio-temporal world. Each socio-cultural environment presup- poses an intersubjective world which historically develops various conceptions of the world as symbolized in language. Those who have been living in American society share various typicalities as a horizon of familiarity and of unquestioned pre-experience. Through the use of these we can converse with one another and understand the objects of the world as the reality of the taken-for-granted. The meanings of words such as tree or flower are simply taken for granted and therefore are self-evident. In other words, we are speaking, acting and understanding within an intersubjective world in which we share our perspectives through knowledge gained by previous experience. The fact that I am able to express my thinking to a fellow human being already presupposes an intersubjective world in which both s/he and I are embedded and, therefore, s/he can share my thinking and I hers/his. This sharing is the very basis with which we can affirm objective reality for we are able to identify an entity within the same perspective. Understanding, hence, always presupposes a common social heritage of an intersubjective world with the participation of Mystery. It is in this intersubjectivity that we can understand our ways of perceiving outside reality as the objective one.
T H E P RO B L E M O F I N T E R S U BJ E C T I V I T Y Up till this point in our discussion, intersubjectivity has not seemed to present a crucial problem to our cultural concerns. However, when we consider cases in which there are two distinctive groups responding differently according to their own intersubjective worlds, the problem of intersubjectivity can be seen. In order to reveal this problem, let me follow Alfred Schutz’s notion of “in-group” and “out-group.” The in-group, as defined by Schutz, are those who accept the ready- made standardized scheme of a socio-cultural environment, that is, an intersubjec- tive world as an unquestioned and unquestionable system of knowledge. For them the system of knowledge in everyday life situations as manifested in language,
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tradition, habits and various social systems appears to have sufficient coherence, clarity and consistency. In contrast those who stand outside of that world are defined as the out-group. Members of the out-group sometimes feel that what is taken-for-granted by the in-group is actually an ambiguous and enigmatic reality since the out-group have not had any sharing experience with the in-group’s his- torical traditions. Suppose, for instance, that an American who has never lived in any foreign country has to live in Japan, without first learning about the culture or studying the language, and to work at a Japanese factory in a Japanese style. Being astonished by the Japanese employee’s daily singing of the company’s song or quot- ing the company’s slogan in a militaristic manner, s/he would as a result have con- siderable difficulty in understanding the Japanese way of life simply because s/he does not share his/her intersubjective world with that of the Japanese. The self- evidence of everyday life for the members of an in-group may not be self-evident for those of the out-group. It is this gap that creates misunderstandings.
I explained a sharing world of an in-group in distinction to that of out-groups. Actually this characterization does not really indicate the true meaning of sharing because the sharing world of an in-group eventually destroys the sharing world in the global sense. A sharing world of an in-group becomes a kind of confinement in which we tend to glorify ourselves as a sharing people, as exemplified in Germany and Japan during the Second World War. As long as we understand “sharing a world” in terms of in-group and out-group, we in a sense validate a dualism of the human condition in which in-group stands apart from out-group. This does not really signify the true meaning of sharing. To share various human concerns in the world means not to dif- ferentiate in-group from out-group, but to take part in every possible activity in the world. This participation can create a sort of “fusion of horizons” in which the differ- ences between in-group and out-group eventually disappear, creating a new horizon of understanding which involves a broadening of the present horizon.
F U S I O N O F H O R I Z O N: O P E N N E S S A N D L I S T E N I N G The encounter between in-group and out-group usually creates tension. How can we overcome this tension and at the same time attain a respectful understanding of each other, allowing every individual and every culture to their own dignity? Indeed this is an important question. Let us recall Gadamer’s attempt to explain the encounter between text and interpreter in his magnum opus, Truth and Method, for his analysis is helpful in understanding the question of the encounter between in- group and out-group. He states:
The concept of the ‘horizon’ suggests itself because it expresses the wide, superior vision that the person who is seeking to understand must have. To acquire a horizon means that one learns to look beyond what is close at hand—not in order to look away from it, but to see it better within a larger whole and in truer proportion.
“To acquire a horizon means that one learns to look beyond what is close at hand.” What does that mean? It means that we need to learn to understand the out- group’s own dignity enabling them to disclose their true nature. This requires from us an openness towards out-groups, a willingness to listen to what the members of out-groups would say. Earlier I discussed the example of the notions of tree and Ki; so long as we are caught up within the taken-for-grantedness of our notions in lan- guage, we will never be able to understand the real meanings of out-groups’ expres- sions. But if we are able to admit that our understanding is historically conditioned
“Openness and listening are keys to understanding other cultures as well as other human beings.” — I S A M U N A G A M I
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and therefore to allow ourselves to be open to what an out-group says, then a new horizon between us may come into being in the sense that everybody will become able to realize the limitedness of both tree and Ki in a larger context. Openness and listening are keys to understanding other cultures as well as other human beings. It is true that an understanding of other cultures involves issues more complex than the difference between tree and Ki. Yet, if we lose a sense of listening and openness, there is no possibility for us to understand different cultures and people.
At present we are confronted by the nuclear crisis. This came about because we lost the attitude of listening to others, because we forgot that human beings are rooted in the common destiny of the world, because we manipulated others at our disposal, and because we lost the original meaning of the Biblical story about human beings on earth: human beings were created to bring to light and to protect the world in the context of relationships within which different people and things belong together with mutual dependency.
In the question of fusion of horizons between different cultures and people, language reveals very mysterious powers. Since every language is tied up to a par- ticular historical setting, various languages differ from one another. Language is also the medium through which human beings are able to identify various his- torico-cultural phenomena in their settings. Hence, historico-cultural differences can be understood as differences among languages. In this regard, language always discloses particular characteristics of its own historico-cultural setting.
But how can we mediate these differences of language? Clearly it is also through language that differences can be fused or compared. In this respect, language dis- closes the universal dimension through which differences can be overcome. It is true that the English language is different from Japanese. But if English discloses totally different characteristics from Japanese, is it possible for any Japanese to un- derstand the various meanings of English? The very fact that I can translate differ- ent English expressions into Japanese already presupposes that there are universally shared meanings between the two languages. Thus language discloses not only particular modes of being, but also the universal dimensions of our existence.
Language, furthermore, has the immanently transcending power by which I mean that language is able to overcome its own limited meaning in its historical condition. Here, paradoxically speaking, our fateful situation is not fateful when we reflect on, and open ourselves to, the fatefulness of our existence. When I say that the tree of the English language is different from the Ki of Japanese, I note that the meanings of tree and Ki are limited. Yet, in so pointing out, language can open much larger possibilities than those of tree and Ki. Because any society signifies linguistically its historical heritage in which human relationality dwells, human relationships, too, disclose particular modes of being as well as universality. Human relationality contains something common to all humanity. Everywhere we find language, cultural objects, playthings for children, family life through which human beings live and celebrate such great events of life as birth, initiation, mar- riage and death. These are given universally. Human beings are different and yet we share various dimensions of human existence as universally shared meanings. It is in this human sharing that we can appreciate and understand different people.
We cannot escape the “taken-for-grantedness” of our world. We are fatefully thrown into that world where we must find meanings for our existence. It is impos- sible for us to have meaningful dialogue with others if we do not take our language for granted. For example, it is impossible for us to bring our sick baby to a doctor if
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we do not take some medical knowledge for granted. In this regard “taken-for- grantedness” discloses appreciative human meanings in addition to its ideological dimensions. One of the fundamental mistakes utopian theorists often make is to assume that they themselves are the vanguard as they claim a-priori powers to tran- scend the ideological power of culture. But, in so doing, they themselves become ideological in the sense that they negate the ultimate human condition: human beings are historical beings who disclose a fateful as well as a transformative mode of life and thought. It seems to me that every human being at certain points has to share in the ideological power of existence. We are, in a sense, living within origi- nal sin. However, this does not mean that we cannot transcend various modes of ideological power in our respective cultures. We are living in a constant transfor- mative process within the horizon of encounters between different people. If we are open and responsive to other people in dialogue, then Mystery can lead humans to learn to trust and find a way of reconciling the differences of culture and exis- tence. This awareness opens up much richer possibilities of shaping various modes of our existence in more meaningful ways. The genuine work of education, it seems to me, is to provide and teach this dialogical-critical ability to human beings so that we can create and develop meaningful societies in a global sense.
G. The Analytic Turn At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, especially in England, philosophers began to suspect that many philosophical problems were the consequence of
confusions and imperfections in our language. A “purely logical language” was sought (although not found) in mathematics. A new emphasis emerged, focusing on conceptual analysis: the so-called analytic turn. Increasingly philosophers in the twentieth cen- tury, especially within the English-speaking world, sought to make their language and arguments as clear and logically transparent as possible. One of the great founders of this movement was the British phi- losopher Bertrand Russell, who here argues for the “commonsense” correspondence theory of truth.
F RO M The Problems of Philosophy B Y Bertrand Russell18
Our knowledge of truths, unlike our knowl- edge of things, has an opposite, namely error. So far as things are concerned, we may know them or not know them, but there is no posi- tive state of mind which can be described as erroneous knowledge of things, so long, at any rate, as we confine ourselves to
Othello and Desdemona in a 2011 performance of Othello by the Dnepropetrovsk State Opera and Ballet Theatre in ukraine. Othello’s false belief that Desdemona is unfaithful illustrates the point that beliefs are often complicated. (© Shutterstock.com/Igor Bulgarin)
18 From Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 1912). Reprinted by permission of Oxford university Press.
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knowledge by acquaintance. Whatever we are acquainted with must be something: we may draw wrong inference from our acquaintance, but the acquaintance itself cannot be deceptive. Thus there is no dualism as regards acquaintance. But as re- gards knowledge of truths, there is a dualism. We may believe what is false as well as what is true. We know that on very many subjects different people hold different and incompatible opinions: hence some beliefs must be erroneous. Since erroneous beliefs are often held just as strongly as true beliefs, it becomes a difficult question how they are to be distinguished from true beliefs. How are we to know, in a given case, that our belief is not erroneous? That is a question of the very greatest diffi- culty, to which no completely satisfactory answer is possible. There is, however, a preliminary question which is rather less difficult, and that is: What do we mean by truth and falsehood? It is this preliminary question which is to be considered in this chapter. . . .
. . . We are not asking how we can know whether a belief is true or false: we are asking what is meant by the question whether a belief is true or false. It is to be hoped that a clear answer to this question may help us to obtain an answer to the question what beliefs are true, but for the present we ask only “What is truth?” and “What is falsehood?” not “What beliefs are true?” and “What beliefs are false?” It is very important to keep these different questions entirely separate, since any con- fusion between them is sure to produce an answer which is not really applicable to either.
There are three points to observe in the attempt to discover the nature of truth, three requisites which any theory must fulfill.
(1) Our theory of truth must be such as to admit of its opposite, falsehood. A good many philosophers have failed adequately to satisfy this condition: they have con- structed theories according to which all our thinking ought to have been true, and have then had the greatest difficulty in finding a place for falsehood. In this respect our theory of belief must differ from our theory of acquaintance, since in the case of acquaintance it was not necessary to take account of any opposite.
(2) It seems fairly evident that if there were no beliefs there could be no falsehood, and no truth either, in the sense in which truth is correlative to falsehood. If we imagine a world of mere matter, there would be no room for falsehood in such a world, and although it would contain what may be called “facts,” it would not contain any truths, in the sense in which truths are things of the same kind as false- hoods. In fact, truth and falsehood are properties of beliefs and statements: hence a world of mere matter, since it would contain no beliefs or statements, would also contain no truth or falsehood.
(3) But, as against what we have just said, it is to be observed that the truth or false- hood of a belief always depends upon something which lies outside the belief itself. If I believe that Charles I died on the scaffold, I believe truly, not because of any intrinsic quality of my belief, which could be discovered by merely examining the belief, but because of an historical event which happened two and a half centuries ago. If I believe that Charles I died in his bed, I believe falsely: no degree of vivid- ness in my belief, or of care in arriving at it, prevents it from being false, again because of what happened long ago, and not because of any intrinsic property of my belief. Hence, although truth and falsehood are properties of beliefs, they are properties dependent upon the relations of the beliefs to other things, not upon any internal quality of the beliefs.
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The third of the above requisites leads us to adopt the view—which has on the whole been commonest among philosophers—that truth consists in some form of correspondence between belief and fact. It is, however, by no means an easy matter to discover a form of correspondence to which there are no irrefutable objections. By this partly—and partly by the feeling that, if truth consists in a correspondence of thought with something outside thought, thought can never know when truth has been attained—many philosophers have been led to try to find some definition of truth which shall not consist in relation to something wholly outside belief. The most important attempt at a definition of this sort is the theory that truth consists in coherence. It is said that the mark of falsehood is failure to cohere in the body of our beliefs, and that it is the essence of a truth to form part of the completely rounded system which is The Truth.
There is, however, a great difficulty in this view, or rather two great difficul- ties. The first is that there is no reason to suppose that only one coherent body of beliefs is possible. It may be that, with sufficient imagination, a novelist might invent a past for the world that would perfectly fit on to what we know, and yet be quite different from the real past. In more scientific matters, it is certain that there are often two or more hypotheses which account for all the known facts on some subject, and although, in such cases, men of science endeavor to find facts which will rule out all the hypotheses except one, there is no reason why they should always succeed.
In philosophy, again, it seems not uncommon for two rival hypotheses to be both able to account for all the facts. Thus, for example, it is possible that life is one long dream, and that the outer world has only that degree of reality that the objects of dreams have; but although such a view does not seem inconsistent with known facts, there is no reason to prefer it to the common-sense view, according to which other people and things do really exist. Thus coherence as the definition of truth fails because there is no proof that there can be only one coherent system.
The other objection to this definition of truth is that it assumes the meaning of “coherence” known, whereas, in fact, “coherence” presupposes the truth of the laws of logic. Two propositions are coherent when both may be true, and are incoherent when one at least must be false. Now in order to know whether two propositions can both be true, we must know such truths as the law of contradic- tion. For example, the two propositions “this tree is a beech” and “this tree is not a beech,” are not coherent, because of the law of contradiction. But if the law of contradiction itself were subjected to the test of coherence, we should find that, if we choose to suppose it false, nothing will any longer be incoherent with anything else. Thus the laws of logic supply the skeleton or framework within which the test of coherence applies, and they themselves cannot be established by this test.
For the above two reasons, coherence cannot be accepted as giving the meaning of truth, though it is often a most important test of truth after a certain amount of truth has become known.
Hence we are driven back to correspondence with fact as constituting the nature of truth. It remains to define precisely what we mean by “fact,” and what is the nature of the correspondence which must subsist between belief and fact, in order that belief may be true.
In accordance with our three requisites, we have to seek a theory of truth which (1) allows truth to have an opposite, namely falsehood, (2) makes truth a property
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of beliefs, but (3) makes it a property wholly dependent upon the relation of the beliefs to outside things.
The necessity of allowing for falsehood makes it impossible to regard belief as a relation of the mind to a single object, which could be said to be what is believed. If belief were so regarded, we should find that, like acquaintance, it would not admit of the opposition of truth and falsehood, but would have to be always true. This may be made clear by examples. Othello believes falsely that Desdemona loves Cassio. We cannot say that this belief consists in a relation to a single object, “Desdemona’s love for Cassio,” for if there were such an object, the belief would be true. There is in fact no such object, and therefore Othello cannot have any rela- tion to such an object. Hence his belief cannot possibly consist in a relation to this object.
It might be said that his belief is a relation to a different object, namely “that Desdemona loves Cassio”; but it is almost as difficult to suppose that there is such an object as this, when Desdemona does not love Cassio, as it was to suppose that there is “Desdemona’s love for Cassio.” Hence it will be better to seek for a theory of belief which does not make it consist in a relation of the mind to a single object.
It is common to think of relations as though they always held between two terms, but in fact this is not always the case. Some relations demand three terms, some four, and so on. Take, for instance, the relation “between.” So long as only two terms come in, the relation “between” is impossible: three terms are the small- est number that render it possible. York is between London and Edinburgh; but if London and Edinburgh were the only places in the world, there could be nothing which was between one place and another. Similarly jealousy requires three people: there can be no such relation that does not involve three at least. Such a position as “A wishes B to promote C’s marriage with D” involves a relation of four terms; that is to say, A and B and C and D all come in, and the relation involved cannot be expressed otherwise than in a form involving all four. Instances might be multi- plied indefinitely, but enough has been said to show that there are relations which require more than two terms before they can occur.
The relation involved in judging or believing must, if falsehood is to be duly al- lowed for, be taken to be a relation between several terms, not between two. When Othello believes that Desdemona loves Cassio, he must not have before his mind a single object, “Desdemona’s love for Cassio,” or “that Desdemona loves Cassio,” for that would require that there should be objective falsehoods, which subsist in- dependently of any minds; and this, though not logically refutable, is a theory to be avoided if possible. Thus it is easier to account for falsehood if we take judgment to be a relation in which the mind and the various objects concerned all occur severally; that is to say, Desdemona and loving and Cassio must all be terms in the relation which subsists when Othello believes that Desdemona loves Cassio. This relation, therefore, is a relation of four terms, since Othello also is one of the terms of the relation. When we say that it is a relation of four terms, we do not mean that Othello has a certain relation to Desdemona, and has the same relation to loving and also to Cassio. This may be true of some other relation than believing; but believing, plainly, is not a relation which Othello has to each of the three terms concerned, but to all of them together: there is only one example of the relation of believing involved, but this one example knits together four terms. Thus the actual occurrence, at the moment when Othello is entertaining his belief, is that the
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relation called “believing” is knitting together into one complex whole the four terms Othello, Desdemona, loving, and Cassio. What is called belief or judgment is nothing but this relation of believing or judging, which relates a mind to several things other than itself. An act of belief or of judgment is the occurrence between certain terms at some particular time, of the relation of believing or judging.
We are now in a position to understand what it is that distinguishes a true judgment from a false one. For this purpose we will adopt certain definitions. In every act of judgment there is a mind which judges, and there are terms concern- ing which it judges. We will call the mind the subject in the judgment, and the remaining terms the objects. Thus, when Othello judges that Desdemona loves Cassio, Othello is the subject, while the objects are Desdemona and loving and Cassio. The subject and the objects together are called the constituents of the judgment. It will be observed that the relation of judging has what is called a “sense” or “direction.” We may say, metaphorically, that it puts its objects in a certain order, which we may indicate by means of the order of the words in the sentence. (In an inflected language, the same thing will be indicated by inflec- tions, e.g., by the difference between nominative and accusative.) Othello’s judg- ment that Cassio loves Desdemona differs from his judgment that Desdemona loves Cassio, in spite of the fact that it consists of the same constituents, because the relation of judging places the constituents in a different order in the two cases. Similarly, if Cassio judges that Desdemona loves Othello, the constituents of the judgment are still the same, but their order is different. This property of having a “sense” or “direction” is one which the relation of judging shares with all other relations. The “sense” of relations is the ultimate source of order and series and a host of mathematical concepts; but we need not concern ourselves further with this aspect.
We spoke of the relation called “ judging” or “believing” as knitting together into one complex whole the subject and the objects. In this respect, judging is ex- actly like every other relation. Whenever a relation holds between two or more terms, it unites the terms into a complex whole. If Othello loves Desdemona, there is such a complex whole as “Othello’s love for Desdemona.” The terms united by the relation may be themselves complex, or may be simple, but the whole which results from their being united must be complex. Wherever there is a relation which relates certain terms, there is a complex object formed of the union of those terms; and conversely, wherever there is a complex object, there is a relation which relates its constituents. When an act of believing occurs, there is a complex, in which “believing” is the uniting relation, and subject and objects are arranged in a certain order by the “sense” of the relation of believing. Among the objects, as we saw in considering “Othello believes that Desdemona loves Cassio,” one must be a relation—in this instance, the relation “loving.” But this relation, as it occurs in the act of believing, is not the relation which creates the unity of the complex whole consisting of the subject and the objects. The relation “loving,” as it occurs in the act of believing, is one of the objects—it is a brick in the structure, not the cement. The cement is the relation “believing.” When the belief is true, there is another complex unity, in which the relation which was one of the objects of the belief relates the other objects. Thus, e.g., if Othello believes truly that Desdemona loves Cassio, then there is a complex unity, “Desdemona’s love for Cassio,” which is composed exclusively of the objects of the belief, in the same order as they had in the belief, with the relation which was one of the objects occurring now as the cement
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that binds together the other objects of the belief. On the other hand, when a belief is false, there is no such complex unity composed only of the objects of the belief. If Othello believes falsely that Desdemona loves Cassio, then there is no such com- plex unity as “Desdemona’s love for Cassio.”
Thus a belief is true when it corresponds to a certain associated complex, and false when it does not. Assuming, for the sake of definiteness, that the objects of the belief are two terms and a relation, the terms being put in a certain order by the “sense” of the believing, then if the two terms in that order are united by the rela- tion into a complex, the belief is true; if not, it is false. This constitutes the defini- tion of truth and falsehood that we were in search of. Judging or believing is a certain complex unity of which a mind is a constituent; if the remaining constitu- ents, taken in the order which they have in the belief, form a complex unity, then the belief is true; if not, it is false.
Thus although truth and falsehood are properties of beliefs, yet they are in a sense extrinsic properties, for the condition of the truth of a belief is something not involv- ing beliefs, or (in general) any mind at all, but only the objects of the belief. A mind, which believes, believes truly when there is a corresponding complex not involving the mind, but only its objects. This correspondence ensures truth, and its absence entails falsehood. Hence we account simultaneously for the two facts that beliefs (a) depend on mind for their existence, (b) do not depend on minds for their truth.
We may restate our theory as follows: If we take such a belief as “Othello be- lieves that Desdemona loves Cassio,” we will call Desdemona and Cassio the object- terms, and loving the object-relation. If there is a complex unity “Desdemona’s love for Cassio,” consisting of the object-terms related by the object-relation in the same order as they have in the belief, then this complex unity is called the fact cor- responding to the belief. Thus a belief is true when there is a corresponding fact, and is false when there is no corresponding fact. . . .
. . . Minds do not create truth or false- hood. They create beliefs, but when once the beliefs are created, the mind cannot make them true or false, except in the spe- cial case where they concern future things which are within the power of the person believing, such as catching trains. What makes a belief true is a fact, and this fact does not (except in exceptional cases) in any way involve the mind of the person who has the belief.
W. v. O. Quine, one of the most influential American analytic philosophers, thought, like C. S. Peirce, that knowledge and the project of knowing were inti- mately tied to the sciences. Accordingly, he argued that our study of knowledge—our epistemology— should be recognized to be as “natural” as our study of the world around us. “Let us be more scientific in our epistemology!” Quine advises.
Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000)
American pragmatist whose early attacks on logical positivism and its basic tenets have been respon- sible for several of the dominant concerns of recent American phi- losophy. His attack on Immanuel Kant’s distinction between “ana- lytic” and “synthetic” sentences, for example, along with the more tradi- tional distinction between neces- sity and contingency, resulted in considerable turmoil for the whole contemporary philosophical enter- prise. According to Quine, there are no indubitably “necessary” state-
ments or beliefs, just those that happen, at a particular point in our knowledge and interests, to hold a relatively protected place in the overall system of our beliefs for ostensibly practical reasons. He is the author of Word and Object (1960) and many other works in logic and the philosophy of language.
American philosopher W. v. O. Quine. (AP Photo/Julie Malakie)
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F RO M “Epistemology Naturalized” B Y W. V. O. Quine19
Epistemology, or something like it, simply falls into place as a chapter of psychol- ogy and hence of natural science. It studies a natural phenomenon, viz., a physical human subject. This human subject is accorded a certain experimentally controlled input—certain patterns of irradiation in assorted frequencies, for instance—and in the fullness of time the subject delivers as output a description of the three- dimensional external world and its history. The relation between the meager input and the torrential output is a relation that we are prompted to study for somewhat the same reasons that always prompted epistemology; namely, in order to see how evidence relates to theory, and in what ways one’s theory of nature transcends any available evidence.
Such a study could still include, even, something like the old rational recon- struction, to whatever degree such reconstruction is practicable; for imaginative constructions can afford hints of actual psychological processes, in much the way that mechanical simulations can. But a conspicuous difference between old episte- mology and the epistemological enterprise in this new psychological setting is that we can now make free use of empirical psychology.
The old epistemology aspired to contain, in a sense, natural science; it would construct it somehow from sense data. Epistemology in its new setting, conversely, is contained in natural science, as a chapter of psychology. But the old containment remains valid too, in its way. We are studying how the human subject of our study posits bodies and projects his physics from his data, and we appreciate that our posi- tion in the world is just like his. Our very epistemological enterprise, therefore, and the psychology wherein it is a component chapter, and the whole of natural science wherein psychology is a component book—all this is our own construction or projection from stimulations like those we were meting out to our epistemological subject. There is thus reciprocal containment, though containment in different senses: epistemology in natural science and natural science in epistemology.
This interplay is reminiscent again of the old threat of circularity, but it is all right now that we have stopped dreaming of deducing science from sense data. We are after an understanding of science as an institution or process in the world, and we do not intend that understanding to be any better than the science which is its object. . . .
One effect of seeing epistemology in a psychological setting is that it resolves a stubborn old enigma of epistemological priority. Our retinas are irradiated in two dimensions, yet we see things as three-dimensional without conscious inference. Which is to count as observation—the unconscious two-dimensional reception or the conscious three-dimensional apprehension? In the old epistemological context the conscious form had priority, for we were out to justify our knowledge of the external world by rational reconstruction, and that demands awareness. Awareness ceased to be demanded when we gave up trying to justify our knowledge of the external world by rational reconstruction. What to count as observation now can be settled in terms of the stimulation of sensory receptors, let consciousness fall where it may. . . .
19 Republished with permission of Columbia university Press, 562 W. 113th St, New York, NY 10025. Ontological Rela- tivity and Other Essays, W. v. O. Quine, 1969. Reproduced by permission of the publisher via Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.
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Vaguely speaking, what we want of observation sentences is that they be the ones in closest causal proximity to the sensory receptors. But how is such proxim- ity to be gauged? The idea may be rephrased this way: observation sentences are sentences which, as we learn language, are most strongly conditioned to concur- rent sensory stimulation rather than to stored collateral information. Thus let us imagine a sentence queried for our verdict as to whether it is true or false, queried for our assent or dissent. Then the sentence is an observation sentence if our verdict depends only on the sensory stimulation present at the time.
But a verdict cannot depend on present stimulation to the exclusion of stored information. The very fact of our having learned the language evinces much stor- ing of information, and of information without which we should be in no position to give verdicts on sentences however observational. Evidently then we must relax our definition of observation sentence to read thus: a sentence is an observation sentence if all verdicts on it depend on present sensory stimulation and on no stored information beyond what goes into understanding the sentence.
This formulation raises another problem: how are we to distinguish between information that goes into understanding a sentence and information that goes beyond? This is the problem of distinguishing between analytic truth, which issues from the mere meanings of words, and synthetic truth, which depends on more than meanings. Now I have long maintained that this distinction is illusory. There is one step toward such a distinction, however, which does make sense: a sentence that is true by mere meanings of words should be expected, at least if it is simple, to be subscribed to by all fluent speakers in the community. Perhaps the controversial notion of analyticity can be dispensed with, in our definition of observation sen- tence, in favor of this straight forward attribute of community-wide acceptance.
This attribute is of course no explication of analyticity. The community would agree that there have been black dogs, yet none who talk of analyticity would call this analytic. My rejection of the analyticity notion just means drawing no line between what goes into the mere understanding of the sentences of a language and what else the community sees eye-to-eye on. I doubt that an objective dis- tinction can be made between meaning and such collateral information as is community-wide.
Turning back then to our task of defining observation sentences, we get this: an observation sentence is one on which all speakers of the language give the same verdict when given the same concurrent stimulation. To put the point negatively, an observation sentence is one that is not sensitive to differences in past experience within the speech community.
This formulation accords perfectly with the traditional role of the observation sentence as the court of appeal of scientific theories. For by our definition the ob- servation sentences are the sentences on which all members of the community will agree under uniform stimulation. And what is the criterion of membership in the same community? Simply, general fluency of dialogue. This criterion admits of degrees, and indeed we may usefully take the community more narrowly for some studies than for others. What count as observation sentences for a community of specialists would not always so count for a larger community.
There is generally no subjectivity in the phrasing of observation sentences, as we are now conceiving them; they will usually be about bodies. Since the distinguish- ing trait of an observation sentence is intersubjective agreement under agreeing stimulation, a corporeal subject matter is likelier than not. . . .
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The veteran physicist looks at some apparatus and sees an x-ray tube. The neo- phyte, looking at the same place, observes rather “a glass and metal instrument replete with wires, reflectors, screws, lamps, and pushbuttons.” One man’s obser- vation is another man’s closed book or flight of fancy. The notion of observation as the impartial and objective source of evidence for science is bankrupt. Now my answer to the x-ray example was already hinted a little while back: what counts as an observation sentence varies with the width of community considered. But we can also always get an absolute standard by taking in all speakers of the lan- guage, or most. It is ironical that philosophers, finding the old epistemology un- tenable as a whole, should react by repudiating a part which has only now moved into clear focus.
Clarification of the notion of observation sentence is a good thing, for the notion is fundamental in two connections. These two correspond to the duality that I remarked upon early in this essay: the duality between concept and doc- trine, between knowing what a sentence means and knowing whether it is true. The observation sentence is basic to both enterprises. Its relation to doctrine, to our knowledge of what is true, is very much the traditional one: observation sentences are the repository of evidence for scientific hypotheses. Its relation to meaning is fundamental too, since observation sentences are the ones we are in a position to learn to understand first, both as children and as field linguists. For observation sentences are precisely the ones that we can correlate with observ- able circumstances of the occasion of utterance or assent, independently of varia- tions in the past histories of individual informants. They afford the only entry to a language.
The observation sentence is the cornerstone of semantics. For it is, as we just saw, fundamental to the learning of meaning. Also, it is where meaning is firmest. Sentences higher up in theories have no empirical consequences they can call their own; they confront the tribunal of sensory evidence only in more or less inclusive aggregates. The observation sentence, situated at the sensory periphery of the body scientific, is the minimal verifiable aggregate; it has an empirical content all its own and wears it on its sleeve.
The predicament of the indeterminacy of translation has little bearing on obser- vation sentences. The equating of an observation sentence of our language to an observation sentence of another language is mostly a matter of empirical general- ization; it is a matter of identity between the range of stimulations that would prompt assent to the one sentence and the range of stimulations that would prompt assent to the other.
. . . Epistemology now becomes semantics. For epistemology remains centered as always on evidence, and meaning remains centered as always on verification; and evidence is verification. What is likelier to shock preconceptions is that meaning, once we get beyond observation sentences, ceases in general to have any clear ap- plicability to single sentences; also that epistemology merges with psychology, as well as with linguistics.
This rubbing out of boundaries could contribute to progress, it seems to me, in philosophically interesting inquiries of a scientific nature. One possible area is per- ceptual norms. Consider, to begin with, the linguistic phenomenon of phonemes. We form the habit, in hearing the myriad variations of spoken sounds, of treating each as an approximation to one or another to a limited number of norms—around thirty altogether—constituting so to speak a spoken alphabet. All speech in our
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language can be treated in practice as sequences of just those thirty elements, thus rectifying small deviations. Now outside the realm of language also there is prob- ably only a rather limited alphabet of perceptual norms altogether, toward which we tend unconsciously to rectify all perceptions. These, if experimentally identi- fied, could be taken as epistemological building blocks, the working elements of experience. They might prove in part to be culturally variable, as phonemes are, and in part universal. . . .
H. Feminist Epistemology Over the past century, feminism has expanded from a worldwide social protest movement to a profound philosophical challenge to traditional theories of knowledge. Feminist episte- mology is premised on the claims that the perspective of women differs from that of men and that the pursuit of knowledge, accordingly, is quite different for the two genders, The argument is that epistemology and knowledge, while they are presented as gender-neutral, are in fact largely male defined, that is, “patriarchal,” in the now-established language of feminist discourse. In the two following selections, the idea of a feminist epistemology is presented by Australian feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz and by Indian feminist philosopher Uma Narayan, who adds the twist of cultural diversity to the already controver- sial topic of gender differences.
On Feminist Knowledge B Y Elizabeth Grosz20
There is considerable disagreement among feminists about which approach to take in questioning philosophy’s sexist, patriarchal and phallocentric assumptions. They are divided over whether to accept philosophy on its own terms, to undertake a revision of it in the light of feminist knowledges, to abandon it or actively to un- dermine it. Radical feminists challenge philosophy’s orientation around oneness, unity, or identity—one truth, one method, one reality, one logic, and so on. Many have insisted that there are a plurality of perspectives and a multiplicity of models on which philosophy could base itself.
In their endorsement of plurality and multiplicity, feminists such as Le Doeuff, Irigaray, and Lloyd are not, however, committed to relativism. Relativism is the belief that there are no absolute positions of judgment or knowledge. There are many positions, each of which is equally valid. Relativism or pluralism implies the existence of frameworks and positions which each have their own validity and standards; and the belief that none of these positions is comprehensive or all-inclusive.
Pluralism and relativism imply aban- doning the right to criticize actively other positions, even those we find offensive and disturbing—phallocentric or racist
Elizabeth Grosz (1952–)
Australian philosopher and professor of women’s studies and phi- losophy at Rutgers University, Grosz has published a number of books in feminist philosophy.
20 Elizabeth Grosz, “Philosophy” in Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct, ed. Sneja Gunew, London: Routledge, 1990.
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statements, for example—and to accept them as having equal validity to our own positions. Radical feminists instead aim to expand and multiply the criteria for what is considered true, rational, or valid and to reject or condemn those they perceive to be discriminatory. They insist on retaining the right to judge other positions, to criticize them, and also to supersede them. Radical feminists are not absolutists nor objectivists nor relativists nor subjectivists. They advocate a perspectivism which acknowledges other points of view but denies them equal value.
It is at this time impossible to specify what a philosophy compatible with femi- nism would be like; given that it does not exist as a definite body of texts, any definition or description would be overly prescriptive. Nevertheless, some general tendencies can be briefly outlined.
Among the features a feminist philosophy may develop are the following.
(a) Instead of a commitment to truth and objectivity, it can openly accept its own status (and that of all discourses) as context-specific. It accepts its perspectivism, that fact that all discourses represent a point of view, have specific aims and objectives, often not coinciding with those of their authors. Rather than seeing itself as disin- terested knowledge, it can openly avow its own political position: all texts speak from or represent particular positions within power relations.
(b) Instead of regarding philosophy as the unfolding of reason, a sure path of prog- ress towards truth, a feminist philosophy can accept itself as the product of a specific socio-economic and textual-discursive history. Neither relativist nor subjectivist, it aims to render these and other binary oppositions problematic. A feminist philoso- phy defies modes of conventional evaluation. This is not, however, to claim that it cannot be evaluated in any terms; simply that the criteria used must be different. A theory’s validity is not judged simply according to its adoption of a fixed or pre- given form, but it may be judged according to its intersubjective effects, that is, its capacity to be shared, understood, and communicated by those occupying similar positions; and also by its intertextual effects, that is, its capacity to affirm or under- mine various prevailing or subordinated discursive systems, and the effects it has on other discourses.
(c) Instead of separating the subject and object of knowledge, a feminist philosophy may instead assert a continuity or contiguity between them. The gulf necessary for objectivity is an attempt to guarantee a knowing subject free of personal, social, political, and moral interests (a Cartesian subject), unimplicated in a social context, and uninfluenced by prior ideas and knowledges. A feminist philosophy would need to reconceptualize their interrelations so that reason and knowledge include history, context, and specificity. A feminist philosophy could accept, as patriarchal discourses cannot, that subjects occupying different positions may develop different types of theory and have different investments in their relation to the object. Above all, it can accept that all knowledge is sexualized, that it occupies a sexually coded and structured position. However, the sexual position of the text cannot be readily identified with the sexual identity of its author; a female author, for example, does not in any way guarantee a feminine text.
(d) Instead of the dichotomous, oppositional structure, which separates subject and object, teacher and pupil, truth and falsity, etc., a feminist philosophy may regard these terms as continuities or differences. Distinctions or oppositions imply that two
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binary terms are mutually exclusive and exhaustive of the field; that one term defines the other as its negative; that this other can have a place in the binary struc- ture; however, when terms are conceived as two among many others, they are neither contradictory nor all-inclusive. If anything, the relation of difference is based on contrariety not contradiction.
(e) Instead of aspiring to the status of truth, a feminist philosophy prefers to see itself as a form of strategy. Strategies are not abstractions, blueprints, or battle- plans for future action. Rather, they involve a provisional commitment to goals and ideals; a recognition of the prevailing situation, in opposition to which these ideals are erected; and an expedient relation to terms, arguments, and techniques which help transform the prevailing order into the ideal. To deny that a feminist philosophy aspires to truth is not to claim it is content with being regarded as false; rather, the opposition between truth and falsity is largely irrelevant for a strategic model.
(f ) Instead of dividing theory from practice—so that practice is located chrono- logically before and after theory (construed as either a plan or a post facto reflection, respectively)—a feminist philosophy may regard theory as a form of practice, a textual, conceptual, and educational practice, one involved in strug- gles for theoretical ascendancy, where dominant and subordinated discourses battle with each other. Theory is not privileged by its isolation from practice and its relegation to a pure conceptual level. When it is seen as a material pro- cess, theory can be seen as a practice like any other, neither more nor less privi- leged in its ability to survey and assess other practices. As a material labour or practice, theory relies on concepts, words, and discursive “raw materials,” pro- cesses of theoretical production (e.g. the form of argument, narrative, or lin- guistic structure needed to make coherent discourses) and a determined product (a text or theory). It is not hierarchically privileged over other practices, reserv- ing the right of judgement; rather it is itself capable of being assessed by other practices.
(g) Instead of opposing reason to its others, a feminist philosophy expands the concept of reason. It has analyzed how reason as we know it is allied with mas- culinity and relegates feminine attributes to a repressed or subordinated status. A feminist philosophy would not reverse the relation between reason and its others, but would expand reason so that its expelled others are now included. In beginning with women’s lived experiences in the production of knowledge it seeks a reason that is not separated from experience but based upon it, that is not opposed to the body but accepts it, not distinct from everyday life but cognisant of it.
(h) Instead of accepting dominant models of knowledge (with their logic, binary structure, desire for precision and clarity) a feminist philosophy can accept its status as material, textual, and institutional. As such, it can accept the provi- sional, not eternal, status of its postulates. It aims for the production of new methods of knowing, new forms of analysis, new modes of writing, new kinds of textual objects, new texts. No one method, point of view, position for subjects and objects is the norm or model for all philosophy.
“No one method, point of view, position for subjects and objects is the norm or model for all philosophy.” — E L I Z A B E T H G R O S Z
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On Feminist Epistemology B Y Uma Narayan21
A fundamental thesis of feminist epistemology is that our location in the world as women makes it possible for us to perceive and understand different aspects of both the world and human activities in ways that challenge the male bias of existing perspectives. Feminist epistemology is a particular manifestation of the general insight that the nature of women’s experiences as individuals and as social beings, our contributions to work, culture, knowledge, and our history and political inter- ests have been systematically ignored or misrepresented by mainstream discourses in different areas.
Women have been often excluded from prestigious areas of human activity (for example, politics or science) and this has often made these activities seem clearly “male.” In areas where women were not excluded (for example, subsistence work), their contribution has been misrepresented as secondary and inferior to that of men. Feminist epistemology sees mainstream theories about various human enterprises, including mainstream theories about human knowledge, as one- dimensional and deeply flawed because of the exclusion and misrepresentation of women’s contributions.
Feminist epistemology suggests that integrating women’s contribution into the domain of science and knowledge will not constitute a mere adding of details; it will not merely widen the canvas but result in a shift of perspective enabling us to see a very different picture. The inclusion of women’s perspective will not merely amount to women participating in greater numbers in the existing practice of sci- ence and knowledge, but it will change the very nature of these activities and their self-understanding.
It would be misleading to suggest that feminist epistemology is a homogenous and cohesive enterprise. Its practitioners differ both philosophically and politically in a number of significant ways (Harding 1986). But an important theme on its agenda has been to undermine the abstract, rationalistic, and universal image of the scientific enterprise by using several different strategies. It has studied, for instance, how contingent historical factors have colored both scientific theories and practices and provided the (often sexist) metaphors in which scientists have conceptualized their activity (Bordo 1986; Keller 1985; Harding and O’Barr 1987). It has tried to reintegrate values and emotions into our account of our cognitive activities, arguing for both the inevitability of their presence and the importance of the contributions they are capable of making to our knowledge. . . . It has also attacked various sets
of dualisms characteristic of western philosoph- ical thinking—reason versus emotion, culture versus nature, universal versus particular—in which the first of each set is identified with sci- ence, rationality, and the masculine and the second is relegated to the nonscientific, the nonrational, and the feminine.
. . .
21 uma Narayan, “The Project of Feminist Epistemology: Perspectives from a Non-Western Feminist,” in Gender/ Body/Knowledge, ed. Alison m. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo. Copyright © 1989 by Rutgers, The State university. Reprinted by permission of Rutgers university Press.
Uma Narayan (1958–)
A feminist philosopher and professor at Vassar College. In addi- tion to feminism, Narayan’s work deals with post-colonial theory and the challenge it poses to assumptions in traditional Western philosophy.
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At the most general level, feminist epistemology resembles the efforts of many oppressed groups to reclaim for themselves the value of their own experience. The writing of novels that focused on working-class life in England or the lives of black people in the United States shares a motivation similar to that of feminist episte- mology—to depict an experience different from the norm and to assert the value of this difference.
In a similar manner, feminist epistemology also resembles attempts by third- world writers and historians to document the wealth and complexity of local eco- nomic and social structures that existed prior to colonialism. These attempts are useful for their ability to restore to colonized peoples a sense of the richness of their own history and culture. These projects also mitigate the tendency of intellectuals in former colonies who are westernized through their education to think that any- thing western is necessarily better and more “progressive.” In some cases, such studies help to preserve the knowledge of many local arts, crafts, lore, and tech- niques that were part of the former way of life before they are lost not only to practice but even to memory.
These enterprises are analogous to feminist epistemology’s project of restoring to women a sense of the richness of their history, to mitigate our tendency to see the stereotypically “masculine” as better or more progressive, and to preserve for posterity the contents of “feminine” areas of knowledge and expertise—medical lore, knowledge associated with the practices of childbirth and child rearing, tra- ditionally feminine crafts, and so on. Feminist epistemology, like these other en- terprises, must attempt to balance the assertion of the value of a different culture or experience against the dangers of romanticizing it to the extent that the limitations and oppressions it confers on its subjects are ignored.
. . . I think that one of the most interesting insights of feminist epistemology is the view
that oppressed groups, whether women, the poor, or racial minorities, may derive an “epistemic advantage” from having knowledge of the practices of both their own contexts and those of their oppressors. The practices of the dominant groups (for instance, men) govern a society; the dominated group (for instance, women) must acquire some fluency with these practices in order to survive in that society.
There is no similar pressure on members of the dominant group to acquire knowledge of the practices of the dominated groups. For instance, colonized people had to learn the language and culture of their colonizers. The colonizers seldom found it necessary to have more than a sketchy acquaintance with the language and culture of the “natives.” Thus, the oppressed are seen as having an “epistemic ad- vantage” because they can operate with two sets of practices and in two different contexts. This advantage is thought to lead to critical insights because each frame- work provides a critical perspective on the other.
I would like to balance this account with a few comments about the “dark side,” the disadvantages, of being able to or of having to inhabit two mutually incompat- ible frameworks that provide differing perspectives on social reality. I suspect that nonwestern feminists, given the often complex and troublesome interrelationships between the contexts they must inhabit, are less likely to express unqualified en- thusiasm about the benefits of straddling a multiplicity of contexts. Mere access to two different and incompatible contexts is not a guarantee that a critical stance on the part of an individual will result. There are many ways in which she may deal with the situation.
“The oppressed are seen as having an ‘epistemic advantage’ because they can operate with two sets of practices and in two different contexts.” — U M A N A R AYA N
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First, the person may be tempted to dichotomize her life and reserve the frame- work of a different context for each part. The middle class of nonwestern countries supplies numerous examples of people who are very westernized in public life but who return to a very traditional lifestyle in the realm of the family. Women may choose to live their public lives in a “male” mode, displaying characteristics of aggres- siveness, competition, and so on, while continuing to play dependent and compliant roles in their private lives. The pressures of jumping between two different lifestyles may be mitigated by justifications of how each pattern of behavior is appropriate to its particular context and of how it enables them to “get the best of both worlds.”
Second, the individual may try to reject the practices of her own context and try to be as much as possible like members of the dominant group. Westernized intel- lectuals in the nonwestern world often may almost lose knowledge of their own cultures and practices and be ashamed of the little that they do still know. Women may try both to acquire stereotypically male characteristics, like aggressiveness, and to expunge stereotypically female characteristics, like emotionality. Or the individual could try to reject entirely the framework of the dominant group and assert the virtues of her own despite the risks of being marginalized from the power structures of the society; consider, for example, women who seek a certain sort of security in traditionally defined roles.
The choice to inhabit two contexts critically is an alternative to these choices and, I would argue, a more useful one. But the presence of alternative contexts does not by itself guarantee that one of the other choices will not be made. More- over, the decision to inhabit two contexts critically, although it may lead to an “epistemic advantage,” is likely to exact a certain price. It may lead to a sense of totally lacking roots or any space where one is at home in a relaxed manner.
This sense of alienation may be minimized if the critical straddling of two con- texts is part of an ongoing critical politics, due to the support of others and a deeper understanding of what is going on. When it is not so rooted, it may generate am- bivalence, uncertainty, despair, and even madness, rather than more positive criti- cal emotions and attitudes. However such a person determines her locus, there may be a sense of being an outsider in both contexts and a sense of clumsiness or lack of fluency in both sets of practices. Consider this simple linguistic example: most people who learn two different languages that are associated with two very differ- ent cultures seldom acquire both with equal fluency; they may find themselves devoid of vocabulary in one language for certain contexts of life or be unable to match real objects with terms they have acquired in their vocabulary. For instance, people from my sort of background would know words in Indian languages for some spices, fruits, and vegetables that they do not know in English. Similarly, they might be unable to discuss “technical” subjects like economics or biology in their own languages because they learned about these subjects and acquired their techni- cal vocabularies only in English.
The relation between the two contexts the individual inhabits may not be simple or straightforward. The individual subject is seldom in a position to carry out a perfect “dialectical synthesis” that preserves all the advantages of both contexts and transcends all their problems. There may be a number of different “syntheses,” each of which avoids a different subset of the problems and preserves a different subset of the benefits.
No solution may be perfect or even palatable to the agent confronted with a choice. For example, some Indian feminists may find some western modes of dress
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(say trousers) either more comfortable or more their “style” than some local modes of dress. However, they may find that wearing the local mode of dress is less so- cially troublesome, alienates them less from more traditional people they want to work with, and so on. Either choice is bound to leave them partly frustrated in their desires.
Feminist theory must be temperate in the use it makes of this doctrine of “double vision”—the claim that oppressed groups have an epistemic advantage and access to greater critical conceptual space. Certain types and contexts of oppression cer- tainly may bear out the truth of this claim. Others certainly do not seem to do so; and even if they do provide space for critical insights, they may also rule out the possibility of actions subversive of the oppressive state of affairs.
Certain kinds of oppressive contexts, such as the contexts in which women of my grandmother’s background lived, rendered their subjects entirely devoid of skills required to function as independent entities in the culture. Girls were married off barely past puberty, trained for nothing beyond household tasks and the rearing of children, and passed from economic dependency on their fathers to economic de- pendency on their husbands to economic dependency on their sons in old age. Their criticisms of their lot were articulated, if at all, in terms that precluded a desire for any radical change. They saw themselves sometimes as personally unfortunate, but they did not locate the causes of their misery in larger social arrangements.
I conclude by stressing that the important insight incorporated in the doctrine of “double vision” should not be reified into a metaphysics that serves as a substitute for concrete social analysis. Furthermore, the alternative to “buying” into an op- pressive social system need not be a celebration of exclusion and the mechanisms of marginalization. The thesis that oppression may bestow an epistemic advantage should not tempt us in the direction of idealizing or romanticizing oppression and blind us to its real material and psychic deprivations.
• How does gender supposedly make a difference in our ability to know?
• In what ways is epistemology “one-sided and deeply flawed”?
• Feminist philosophy claims to advocate “perspectivism,” which acknowledges other points of view, but denies that they have equal value. Is there anything about this view that you find problematic? How is feminist theory (as outlined by Grosz) supposed to achieve the balance between recognizing that truth is perspectival and denying all perspectives equal value?
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION Since the writings of Immanuel Kant, the questions about knowledge have shifted from the question of how we know what the world is like to questions that presume that reality is not independent of consciousness, that we somehow “constitute” the world through our con- cepts. The German Idealists, including Fichte and Hegel, developed very different concep- tions of knowledge based on the new Kantian philosophy, and Nietzsche employed it as well. Contemporary phenomenology, hermeneutics, and pragmatism put even more em- phasis on culture and practicality, and, finally, attention to the differences between the sexes
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has further added to the complexity of our questions about truth and knowledge. Do men and women know the world differently? How personal is knowledge—how relative to the individual and his or her cultural context and biology?
CHAPTER REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. What are the key differences between necessary and contingent truths? Why not just say “what is true is true”?
2. What are the three traditional theories of truth (correspondence, coherence, pragmatic)?
3. How does the semantic theory of truth differ from the correspondence theory?
4. What does Kant mean when he says that we “constitute” our world? Are there other ways to “constitute” the world according to Kant?
5. How does Kant answer Hume’s skeptical challenge? Does he succeed?
6. Discuss the difference between “absolutism” and “relativism” and the various prob- lems associated with each. How do you see this debate being played out in the popu- lar press and in the views of the public toward science, ethics, and religion?
7. What do you see as the role of language in the theories discussed in this chapter? Why would a concern with language be so central to questions about truth?
KEY TERMS
absolutism absolutists analytic (of a sentence or truth) categories coherence theory of truth conceptual truth constitute correspondence theory of truth
dialectic hermeneutics historicism induction intersubjectivity necessity phenomenology pragmatic theory of truth pragmatism rational
relativism relativists semantic theory of truth synthetic a priori knowledge tautology transcendental transcendental deduction
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
Two useful surveys of theories of truth are Richard L. Kirkham’s Theories of Truth: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, mA: mIT, 1992), and Timothy m. mosteller, Theories of Truth: An Introduction (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).
William James develops his pragmatic theory in his Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York: Longmans Green, 1907), currently available through Hackett Publishing Company, 1981.
Three brief but helpful introductions to Immanuel Kant’s philosophy are J. Kemp, The Phi- losophy of Kant (London: St. Augustine Press, 1968); G. J. Warnock, “Kant,” in A Critical History of Western Philosophy, ed. D. J. O’Connor (New York: Free Press, 1964), and Roger Scruton, Kant: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 2001).
Two useful introductions to German idealism are Robert C. Solomon, Introducing the German Idealists (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1981), and Frederick C. Beiser, German
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Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, mA: Harvard univer- sity Press, 2002).
The best basic discussion of hermeneutics is David Hoy, The Critical Circle (Berkeley: univer- sity of California Press, 1978).
Two compendiums of writings by Gadamer are Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. D. Linge (Berkeley: university of California Press, 1976), and The Gadamer Reader, ed. Jean Grondin, trans. Richard Palmer (Chicago: Northwestern university Press, 2007).
On feminist theories of knowledge, see Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, eds., Feminist Epistemologies (New York: Routledge, 1993).
Simon Blackburn’s Truth: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 2005), is a delightful guide to the philosophical debates about absolute truth and relativism.
Richard Rorty critiques traditional epistemological views in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton university Press, 1997), as well as Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 1989).
A good guide to European (“continental”) philosophy is Robert Solomon and David Sherman, Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).
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Know Thyself PA RT I I
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5 | Mind and Body It is certain that I (that is, my mind, by which I am what I am) is entirely
and truly distinct from my body, and may exist without it.
R E N É D E S C A RT E S
Whatever our attempts to answer the problems of self-identity, they begin with a single “fact,” our own consciousness. This was the logical beginning for Descartes, who used the fact of his own consciousness as the starting point for his whole philosophy. It was true for Locke, who argued that our identity is to be found in the continuity of our consciousness rather than in the continuity of our bodies. It was even used by Hume, who used his own consciousness as the basis of his denial that there was any such thing as the self. It was the starting point of Kant’s philosophy; his transcendental ego, like Descartes’s “I think,” gave him the basis for the rest of his philosophy. Even those philosophers who have not been interested in these arguments—Buddhists, Marxists, and existentialists—have begun with at least one of a variety of considerations of consciousness; the fact of our own self- consciousness, the facts of consciousness, or just the fact that only people seem capable of or interested in asking the question “Who am I?” But now what is this “consciousness”? As soon as we ask the question, we find ourselves once again up to our eyeballs in the labyrinth of traditional metaphysics.
A. What Is Consciousness? We can begin to appreciate the problems of consciousness by returning to the attempts of the eighteenth-century rationalist metaphysicians to be clear about their notion of “sub- stance.” Descartes said that there were two different kinds of substances; mind, or mental substance, and body, or physical substance. Accordingly, he is usually called a dualist and the position, in general, that mind and body are different substances is called Cartesian dualism.1 As you may remember Descartes insisted that he was as a “thinking thing,” in other words, a mental substance. But now, what of his body? We have seen that he believed that he could intelligibly doubt the existence of his body but not of his mind. But what is so
1 Named after Descartes. As a matter of fact, Descartes believed that there were three kinds of substances, the third being God. But we need not worry about that third substance at this point. For our purposes, Descartes is simply a dualist.
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special about this body that, unlike other bodies (the chair in front of him, the body of the king), was so intimately connected to his mind? It moved when he willed it to move, it walked when he decided to walk, it wrote what he wanted to write. In the last of his six Meditations, he returns to this problem.
F RO M “Meditation VI” B Y René Descartes2
Firstly, then, I perceived that I had a head, hands, feet, and other members compos- ing that body which I considered as part, or perhaps even as the whole, of myself. I perceived further, that that body was placed among many others, by which it was capable of being affected in diverse ways, both beneficial and hurtful; and what was beneficial I remarked by a certain sensation of pleasure, and what was hurtful by a sensation of pain. And, besides this pleasure and pain, I was likewise conscious of hunger, thirst, and other appetites, as well as certain corporeal inclinations towards joy, sadness, anger, and similar passions.
Nor was I altogether wrong in likewise believing that that body which, by a special right, I called my own, per- tained to me more properly and strictly than any of the others; for in truth, I could never be separated from it as from other bodies: I felt in it and on account of it all my appetites and affections, and in fine I was affected in its parts by pain and the titillation of pleasure, and not in the parts of the other bodies that were separated from it. But when I inquired into the reason why, from this I know not what sensation of pain, sadness of mind should follow, and why from the sensation of pleasure joy should arise, or why this indescribable twitching of the stomach, which I call hunger, should put me in mind of taking food, and the parchedness of the throat of drink, and so in other cases, I was unable to give any explanation, unless that I was so taught by nature; for there is assuredly no affinity, at least none that I am able to comprehend, between this irritation of the stomach and the desire of food, any more than between the perception of an object that causes pain and the consciousness of sadness which springs from the perception. And in the same way it seems to me that all the other judgments I had formed regarding the objects of sense, were dictates of nature; because I remarked that those judgments were formed in me, before I had leisure to weigh and consider the reasons that might constrain me to form them.
But, afterwards, a wide experience by degrees sapped the faith I had reposed in my senses; for I frequently ob- served that towers, which at a distance seemed round, ap- peared square when more closely viewed, and that colossal
How is the mind joined to the body? Do they often feel at odds with one another? (© iStockphoto.com/vuk8691)
2 René Descartes, “Meditation VI,” in Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, 1911. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
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figures, raised on the summits of these towers, looked like small statues, when viewed from the bottom of them; and, in other instances without number, I also discovered error in judgments founded on the external senses; and not only in those founded on the external, but even in those that rested on the internal senses; for is there aught more internal than pain? and yet I have sometimes been informed by parties whose arm or leg had been amputated, that they still occasionally seemed to feel pain in that part of the body which they had lost,—a circumstance that led me to think that I could not be quite certain even that any one of my members were affected when I felt pain in it. And to these grounds of doubt I shortly after- wards also added two others of very wide generality: the first of them was that I believed I never perceived anything when awake which I could not occasionally think I also perceived when asleep, and as I do not believe that the ideas I seem to perceive in my sleep proceed from objects external to me, I did not any more ob- serve any ground for believing this of such as I seem to perceive when awake; the second was that since I was as yet ignorant of the author of my being, or at least supposed myself to be so, I saw nothing to prevent my having been so constituted by nature as that I should be deceived even in matters that appeared to me to pos- sess the greatest truth.
. . .
But now that I begin to know myself better, and to discover more clearly the author of my being, I do not, indeed, think that I ought rashly to admit all which the senses seem to teach, nor, on the other hand, is it my conviction that I ought to doubt in general of their teachings.
And, firstly, because I know that all which I clearly and distinctly conceive can be produced by God exactly as I conceive it, it is sufficient that I am able clearly and distinctly to conceive one thing apart from another, in order to be certain that the one is different from the other, seeing they may at least be made to exist separately, by the omnipotence of God; and it matters not by what power this separation is made, in order to be compelled to judge them different; and, therefore, merely because I know with certitude that I exist, and because, in the meantime, I do not observe that aught necessarily belongs to my nature or essence beyond my being a thinking thing, I rightly conclude that my essence consists only in my being a thinking thing [or a substance whose whole essence or nature is merely thinking]. And although I may, or rather, as I will shortly say, although I certainly do possess a body with which I am very closely conjoined; nevertheless, because, on the one hand, I have a clear and distinct idea of myself, in as far as I am only a thinking and unextended thing, and as, on the other hand, I possess a distinct idea of body, in as far as it is only an extended and unthinking thing, it is certain that I [that is, my mind, by which I am what I am] am entirely and truly distinct from my body, and may exist without it.
Then comes Descartes’s proof that, in general, he could not be fooled about the existence of bodies “outside” of him.
But there is nothing which that nature teaches me more expressly [or more sen- sibly] than that I have a body which is ill affected when I feel pain, and stands in need of food and drink when I experience the sensations of hunger and thirst, etc. And therefore I ought not to doubt but that there is some truth in these informations.
“Because, on the one hand, I have a clear and distinct idea of myself . . . as . . . only a thinking and unextended thing, and as, on the other hand, I possess a distinct idea of body . . . only an extended and unthinking thing, it is certain that I am entirely and truly distinct from my body, and may exist without it.” — R E N É D E S C A R T E S
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Nature likewise teaches me by these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst, etc., that I am not only lodged in my body as a pilot in a vessel, but that I am besides so intimately conjoined, and as it were intermixed with it, that my mind and body compose a certain unity. For if this were not the case, I should not feel pain when my body is hurt, seeing I am merely a thinking thing, but should perceive the wound by the understanding alone, just as a pilot perceives by sight when any part of his vessel is damaged; and when my body has need of food or drink, I should have a clear knowledge of this, and not be made aware of it by the confused sensations of hunger and thirst: for, in truth, all these sensations of hunger, thirst, pain, etc., are nothing more than certain confused modes of thinking, arising from the union and apparent fusion of mind and body.
Besides this, nature teaches me that my own body is surrounded by many other bodies . . . some are agree-
able, and others disagreeable, there can be no doubt that my body, or rather my entire self, in as far as I am composed of body and mind, may be variously affected, both beneficially and hurtfully, by surrounding bodies.
But how can two different substances, particularly two such different kinds of substances as body and mind, interact? We know what it is for two bodies to interact, but how can a body make contact with a mind, which seems so intangible and “ghostly”? Descartes never answers this problem to his or to his critics’ satisfaction. Spinoza, seeing Descartes’s trou- bles, insists that there is only one substance and that body and mind are but different “at- tributes” of that one substance. That avoids the metaphysical question, for there is no trouble about interaction within a substance. But it still leaves a sizable problem, namely, how these two attributes are coordinated. That is a question Spinoza never answers; and Leibniz, attacking the same problem, finds it preferable to deny the reality of physical sub- stance altogether. There are only mental substances, monads, each locked into its own ex- perience. The extravagance of these two solutions should give you some idea of the difficulty of the problem.
We can get a more specific clue to the mysterious quality of “consciousness” if we con- sider the following. Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, you recall, define mind as “unex- tended,” that is, unextended in space. (Bodies, on the other hand, are defined as extended in space.) In other words, it is essential that minds, unlike bodies, cannot be said to be “this large” or to be located in such and such a place. But despite this definition, notice how much of our talk about consciousness consists of metaphors of spatial form; we talk about some- thing being “in” our minds. We talk about something “slipping (out of) our minds.” Philoso- phers often talk about the “contents” of consciousness, and a popular phrase from William James is the “stream of consciousness.” Now we might say, “those are just metaphors”; but why are such metaphors necessary?
How would you answer the question “What is it to be conscious?” you might say some- thing about “awareness” or “feelings,” but that only restates the problem with different
Descartes claims that mind and body are more intimately conjoined than are a pilot and a vessel. (© Shutterstock.com/ skifserg)
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words. When we try to describe an image we do so in terms appropriate to physical things (namely, what it is an image of ). We try to describe a pain and come out with metaphors (“it’s as if a vice were closing on my head”) or comparisons (“it feels the same as when . . .”). The retreat to spatial metaphors reflects this difficulty. We talk about our experiences as if we were describing other things but then qualify our descriptions by saying that they are “in” consciousness rather than in the world.
How can we describe consciousness itself? There is a further difficulty: If I can talk about my mind only with difficulty, how can I talk about your mind? I can experience only what is “in” my mind, I can’t feel your pain. Even if I feel “sympathy pains” with you, it is my pain I feel. So I can’t describe your mind, and evidently I have difficulty describing my mind as well. Therefore, how can we talk about “mind” at all? Not surprisingly, many psychologists and philosophers have rejected the idea of “mind” altogether, preferring to talk only about what is mutually observable and “extended” in physical space (for example, neurology and overt behavior).
We shall later consider some of these attempts to reject the very idea of “mind.” But what should seem fairly obvious to you is that this idea can be rejected only with reference to other people, not with reference to ourselves. Why? Because of Descartes’s first premise, to put it bluntly. The same logic that allows him to assert with certainty “I am thinking” and “I exist as a thinking thing” now forces us to admit that “I am not thinking” and “I am not a thinking thing” are utterly absurd and unintelligible statements. They are self-refuting in exactly the same sense that “I am thinking” is self-confirming. (This isn’t to say that you are thinking clearly, or well, or enjoying it; only that, in some minimal sense, you are thinking.) Therefore, you must have a mind. In one’s own case, the fact of being conscious is the last thing one could ever deny.
• What does Descartes mean when he says that the mind’s awareness of bodily sensations and interactions demonstrates a connection between mind and body? Can you think of counterexamples to this claim (i.e., a time when your mind was unaware of something occurring within the body or something occur- ring within the mind with no bodily manifestations)? Do these counterexamples prove Descartes wrong? or are they impossible in some way? What might be another explanation for the perceived intimacy between physical and mental states?
• Is the existence of your consciousness irrefutable? What about the existence of particular conscious states (moods, ideas, sensations, emotions)? How can you be certain of your knowledge of them?
It is important to appreciate the fact that Descartes did not defend the idea of a radical difference between mind and body only as a metaphysical or scientific thesis. There is much in “common sense” that supports it, and the separation of mind or soul from physical body obviously serves a long-standing religious concern as well. It makes sense of the thesis that the soul might survive the body after death, and it safely separates the realms of religion and science. It even provides an argument for the necessity of God’s existence. Descartes points out (in “Meditation III”) that his various fleeting thoughts could not be unified into a coher- ent, enduring self without the intervention of a higher power.
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F RO M “Meditation III” B Y René Descartes3
But though I assume that perhaps I have always existed just as I am at present, nei- ther can I escape the force of this reasoning, and imagine that the conclusion to be drawn from this is, that I need not seek for any author of my existence. For all the course of my life may be divided into an infinite number of parts, none of which is in any way dependent on the other; and thus from the fact that I was in existence a short time ago it does not follow that I must be in existence now, unless some cause at this instant, so to speak, produces me anew, that is to say, conserves me. It is as a matter of fact perfectly clear and evident to all those who consider with at- tention the nature of time, that, in order to be conserved in each moment in which it endures, a substance has need of the same power and action as would be necessary to produce and create it anew, supposing it did not yet exist, so that the light of nature shows us clearly that the distinction between creation and conservation is solely a distinction of the reason.
And in the dedication of the same work, he writes,
And as regards the soul, although many have considered that it is not easy to know its nature, and some have even dared to say that human reasons have convinced us that it would perish with the body, and that faith alone could believe the contrary, nevertheless, inasmuch as the Lateran Council held under Leo X (in the eighth ses- sion) condemns these tenets, and as Leo expressly ordains Christian philosophers to refute their arguments and to employ all their powers in making known the truth, I have ventured in this treatise to undertake the same task.
B. The Problem of Dualism How is consciousness connected to your body? you decide to raise your hand, and your hand goes up. you formulate an answer to your friend’s question, and it comes out of your mouth. How does what takes place “in your mind” determine what happens with your body? A familiar image, borrowed from untold numbers of cartoons, is the little man (or woman) in your head, operating your body as a con- struction worker operates a giant steam shovel. But this is no answer. First, there is no little man. But even if there were, the same problem would then focus on him (or her). How does he or she move a body by making certain mental decisions? The same problem arises in the other direction, from body to
The close connection of mind and body is evident in the discipline of yoga. (© iStockphoto.com/dolgachov)
3 René Descartes, “Meditation III,” and “Letter of Dedication to the Dean and Doctors of the Faculty of Sacred Theol- ogy of Paris,” in Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, 1911. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
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mind. A friend steps on your toe—your physiology teacher can explain to you what happens: nerves are pinched and signals are sent through your central nervous system into that huge complex of fat cells called your brain. But then, at some point, there is something else, the feeling, the pain. How does this happen? How does a feeling emerge from that complex network of neurological reactions going on in your body?
you can see that this problem of mind-body interaction is no longer just a technical meta- physical problem having to do with the special notion of substance. The problem of “inter- action” is the same for Spinoza and his one substance as it is for Descartes and his dualism. Even if you don’t want to talk of substances, there is still the problem of explaining how your mind affects your body and how your body affects your mind. For whether or not you accept the special problems of the eighteenth-century metaphysicians, you have to admit that your mind is very different from your body, and that is the source of the trickiest of all modern philosophy problems—the mind-body problem. How are mind and body related?
The human body, like any other physical body, can be described in terms of its size, weight, chemical composition, and movements in space. The workings of the human ner- vous system, although very complex and not yet adequately understood, can be described just like any other biological reaction, in terms of the changes in cell membranes and chemi- cal reactions, the procession of chemoelectric nerve “impulses,” and the computer-like net- work of different nerve components that are stimulated at any given time. The human brain can be seen as a complex machine, like a gooey computer. The human mind, however, is not to be characterized in any such spatial or chemical terms. The mind is not the same as the brain. It has no shape, no weight, and has the awkward property of being observable—in any particular case—by one and only one person. (Anyone can see my brain if they can get inside my skull.) We can understand how a body might interact with another body, even when the “forces” involved are hard to picture (for example, the gravitational attraction between two distant planets). But how does a body interact with something that has none of the crucial characteristics of a body? you might think of “energy” here, for energy would seem to have at least some of the intangible and “unextended” features of mind. It too, in a very limited sense, “has no size or weight.” But energy is a function of physical bodies, force is a function of mass and acceleration. They are not, like our experiences, “private”: a lightning bolt is observ- able to anyone who looks. And no one has ever claimed that descriptions of energy states, like descriptions of our ideas, are incorrigible. While it has been demon- strated (by Einstein) that energy and mass are intercon- vertible, any such “interconvertibility” of mind and matter is still at the highly speculative stage, limited to freak performances by a few isolated and not wholly de- pendable “psychics” and such. We may well talk about “mental energy,” but it is far from clear what we mean.
How can something so different as ideas and sensa- tions interact with nervous systems and brain cells? Phi- losophers have proposed a number of solutions, all of them controversial and none of them yet satisfactory. But even before we look at some of them, it is important to stress the following point: The “mind-body problem” is not simply a matter of how little we still know about the human nervous system. No matter how much our knowledge develops, we will still be faced with that
Descartes believed that the pineal gland was the seat of the soul in the body. (© Shutterstock.com/Alila Medical Media)
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mysterious gap between the last known neurological occurrence and the experience. Right now we can trace our neural impulses only so far, and the “last known neurological occur- rence” is not very far along. But even when we have complete “brain maps” and can say for every mental occurrence what is going on in the brain at the same time, the problem will still remain: How are the two related?4
The classic attempt to resolve the problem of dualism is by Descartes. The following se- lection is from his essay “The Passions of the Soul.”
F RO M “The Passions of the Soul” B Y René Descartes5
But in order to understand all these things more perfectly, we must know that the soul is really joined to the whole body, and that we cannot, properly speaking, say that it exists in any one of its parts to the exclusion of the others, because it is one and in some manner indivisible, owing to the disposition of its organs, which are so related to one another that when any one of them is removed, that renders the whole body defective; and because it is of a nature which has no relation to exten- sion, nor dimensions, nor other properties of the matter of which the body is com- posed, but only to the whole conglomerate of its organs, as appears from the fact that we could not in any way conceive of the half or the third of a soul, nor of the space it occupies, and because it does not become smaller owing to the cutting off of some portion of the body, but separates itself from it entirely when the union of its assembled organs is dissolved.
It is likewise necessary to know that although the soul is joined to the whole body, there is yet in that a certain part in which it exercises its functions more par- ticularly than in all the others; and it is usually believed that this part is the brain, or possibly the heart: the brain, because it is with it that the organs of sense are connected, and the heart because it is apparently in it that we experience the pas- sions. But, in examining the matter with care, it seems as though I had clearly as- certained that the part of the body in which the soul exercises its functions immediately is in nowise the heart, nor the whole of the brain, but merely the most inward of all its parts, to wit, a certain very small gland which is situated in the middle of its substance and so suspended above the duct whereby the animal spirits in its anterior cavities have communication with those in the posterior, that the slightest movements which take place in it may alter very greatly the course of these spirits; and reciprocally that the smallest changes which occur in the course of the spirits may do much to change the movements of this gland.6
. . . Let us then conceive here that the soul has its principal seat in the little gland
that exists in the middle of the brain, from whence it radiates forth through all the
“The soul is really joined to the whole body, and . . . we cannot, properly speaking, say that it exists in any one of its parts to the exclusion of the others.” — R E N É D E S C A R T E S
4 It is logically possible, although it is extremely unlikely, that scientific research could show that the brain and our mind have very little to do with each other, that the presumed coordination between the two does not exist. It once was thought, for example, that the heart had to do with emotions. Aristotle and Descartes both subscribed to this idea. Science has proved them wrong. But science cannot do more than lay the groundwork for the problem. 5 René Descartes, “The Passions of the Soul,” in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, 1911. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. 6 The gland Descartes is referring to is what is now called the pineal gland, a small endocrine gland at the base of the brain. It had only recently been discovered in Descartes’s time, and its functions are still not adequately understood. It is currently hypothesized that it controls mating cycles in higher animals and possibly any number of other activity cycles.
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remainder of the body by means of the animal spirits, nerves, and even the blood, which, participating in the impressions of the spirits, can carry them by the arteries into all the members. Recollecting what has been said above about the machine of our body, that is, that the little filaments of our nerves are so distributed in all its parts, that on the occasion of the diverse movements which are there excited by sensible objects, they open in diverse ways the pores of the brain, which causes the animal spirits contained in these cavities to enter in diverse ways into the muscles, by which means they are capable of being moved; and also that all the other causes which are capable of moving the spirits in diverse ways suffice to conduct them into diverse muscles; let us here add that the small gland which is the main seat of the soul is so suspended between the cavities which contain the spirits that it can be moved by them in as many different ways as there are sensible diversities in the object, but that it may also be moved in diverse ways by the soul, whose nature is such that it receives in itself as many diverse impressions, that is to say, that it pos- sesses as many diverse perceptions as there are diverse moments in this gland. Re- ciprocally, likewise, the machine of the body is so formed that from the simple fact that this gland is diversely moved by the soul, or by such other cause, whatever it is, it thrusts the spirits which surround it towards the pores of the brain, which conduct them by the nerves into the muscles, by which means it causes them to move the limbs.
The technical name given to this theory is causal interactionism, in other words, the posi- tion that mental changes cause bodily changes, and vice versa. Unlike his followers, Descartes did not take seriously the problem of how separate substances or radically dif- ferent changes can causally affect one another. He apparently felt satisfied, if not exactly comfortable, with such a causal account. He was vigorously attacked in this by most of his immediate followers, including Spinoza, Leibniz, and many of the empiricists. “Different substances cannot interact,” they insisted. or, in more modern dress, they argued that only physical bodies can causally interact, not anything so different as physical bodies and minds. yet one thing remains obvious, and that is that the familiar coordination of our mental activities and the movements of our bodies must be accounted for. To do so, with- out bringing in causal interaction, required considerable ingenuity on the part of Descartes’s critics.
We have already seen the two metaphysical alternatives that immediately followed Descartes. The first was formulated by Leibniz as part of his overall theory of monads. He insisted that there could be no causal interaction between monads, and specifically, that no sense could be made of the claim that mental substances interacted with anything that we call “physical bodies.” So what could he suggest as an alternative? His answer to the prob- lem was that God, who had created monads in the first place, had also “programmed” them in such a way that our mental activities and what we call our bodily activities are exactly co- ordinated. Leaving aside the rest of Leibniz’s theory and looking just at the mind-body prob- lem, we can restate his solution as a form of what is called parallelism, the view that minds and bodies operate in coordination, but without interacting. His “preestablished harmony” between monads can now be viewed as the somewhat strange theory that our mental lives and the movements of our bodies are exactly coordinated (so that I feel pain when you step on my toe and so that my hand goes up just when I “decide” that it should). yet there is no causal interaction. It is like the sound and visual tracks of a movie film, moving along exactly
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in parallel but without affecting each other. (That is, the character who appears to be talking in the movie does not cause the sounds that you hear as if he or she were producing them. The sounds are actually produced separately and would continue even if the projector bulb burned out and the figure on the screen disappeared altogether.) of course, to accept this theory you must also accept the considerable metaphysical and theological supports that it requires. If you don’t believe in a God who could set up this complex system, there is abso- lutely no way of explaining the remarkable coordination of mind and body. Even if you do believe in God, you may well think that the mind-body problem requires some plausible secular solution.
The theory that Spinoza defends need not be formulated in the “one substance” meta- physics that he used to present it. In fact, Bertrand Russell argued for basically the same view much more recently, without reference to the metaphysical notion of substance. Russell said, as Spinoza had said centuries before, that mind and body, mental events and physical changes, were different aspects of one and the same “something.” For Spinoza, the “some- thing” was “the one substance” and the aspects were what he called “attributes.” Russell claimed only that our experiences and ideas were one aspect of certain events or activities, of which the various chemical reactions of the brain were another aspect. Accordingly, the theory has often been called the dual aspect theory, whether or not it is specifically ad- dressed to the problem of substances and their attributes. Since we are now talking about two “aspects” of the same thing rather than two different things, the problem of interaction doesn’t arise. But as we complained before, this only hides the problem rather than solves it. What is this mysterious “something” of which mind and body are merely “aspects”? It is neither brain nor mind, so what could it be? By the nature of the case, we can’t find out, which leaves us with the equally embarrassing question, “How could one and the same thing have such different aspects?” you might say, “Well, a hot coal has both ‘aspects’ of being heavy and being hot.” However, we can explain that. What are we to say of a “something” that is neither brain nor mind, but both?
• outline the various solutions to the mind-body problem (e.g., causal interactionism, parallelism, dual aspect theory).
C. The Rejection of Dualism If the problem is dualism, then perhaps the answer is the rejection of dualism. of course, we still have to account for the obvious facts of the case: that we feel something when certain things happen to our bodies, that we do something when we mentally decide to. But in recent times most philosophers—and nearly all psychologists—have taken a dim view of dualism in all the foregoing forms.
A first, still timid step toward eliminating dualism consists of minimizing, though not re- jecting, the mental side of dualism. This theory is usually called epiphenomenalism, and William James was one of its best-known proponents. Epiphenomenalism allows for causal interaction, but only in one direction. Bodies and changes in bodies cause mental events. you might think of a boiler system or automobile engine equipped with various gauges to tell us how the machine is functioning at any given time. The machine works on, registering certain results on the attached gauges. But notice that the gauge is relatively unimportant to the working of the machine. In fact, the gauge can break while the machine continues to function for years. What is the significance of such a theory? Many philosophers and psy- chologists are interested in the continuity of physical and physiological laws and concerned
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to avoid the problematic disruption of mysterious “mental causes.” For them, such a theory allows them to concentrate wholly on the physical side of the matter and ignore “the mind” completely. If an objection is raised, one can always insist: “oh, I’m not denying that you feel something, too.” But this is an unimportant detail, a side-product, an epiphenomenon, that need not be taken all that seriously.
• Does epiphenomenalism solve the problem of dualism? Why or why not?
1. Radical Behaviorism Epiphenomenalism is a timid rejection of dualism. It doesn’t actually reject dualism, but it minimizes one half the duality. other forms of attack are not so timid. In psychology, many authors have long accepted that talk of “the mental” is a hopeless tangle of confusions that, by the nature of the case, cannot be resolved through any experiment whatsoever. (That is, only one person could observe the results of the experiment in any given case, and the very nature of a scientific experiment is that it must be observable by anyone.) Accordingly, many psychologists practice what they call behaviorism.
The best-known behaviorist is the late psychologist B. F. Skinner.7 Behaviorism, as a form of science, refuses to even consider any events that cannot be publicly witnessed. That immediately and logically excludes mental events. Behaviorism is primarily a scientific method and need not deny the existence of mental events. Most behaviorists, however, have gone beyond the method—which only says that they will not scientifically study such events—and have done a bit of metaphysics as well; they also deny that there can be any mental events. John B. Watson, for example, goes so far as to suggest that belief in con- sciousness goes back to the ancient days of superstition and magic. He insists that any good behaviorist can catch the average under- graduate student in a mess of tongue-tied contra- dictions regarding consciousness but concludes from this not that our concept of consciousness is complicated and confused but rather that there could not possibly be any such thing. His argument is self-consciously “scientific,” the alternative to which is being a mere “savage and still believing in magic.” His test is simply whether the soul (philoso- phers and psychologists often shift too easily between “soul” and “consciousness”) can be ex- perienced; “no one has ever touched a soul, or seen one in a test tube, or has in any other way come into relationship with it as he has with the other objects of his daily experience.”8 Thus Watson shifts from his view as a scientist, able to write about only what he can measure and observe, to a view as a metaphysician, insisting that there cannot be any such thing as consciousness and that no rational person should believe that there is.
B. F. Skinner (1904–1990)
An American psychologist and author who taught at Harvard University. He is famous for his radical behav- iorism, which rejects refer- ence to any mental concepts in psychological analysis.
The psychologist and philosopher B. F. Skinner was the founder of behaviorism. (© Bettmann/Corbis)
7 Selections by B. F. Skinner can be found in Chapter 7 on pages 476–479. 8 John Watson, Behaviorism, New york: Norton, 1930.
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2. Logical Behaviorism Philosophers have also turned to behaviorism as a way of escaping the problems of Carte- sian dualism. oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle, following some suggestions by Ludwig Wittgenstein, established a new form of behaviorism—logical behaviorism—in his book The Concept of Mind (1949). Its first chapter is appropriately called “Descartes’s Myth.” First, Ryle describes what he calls “the official doctrine”:
F RO M The Concept of Mind B Y Gilbert Ryle9
There is a doctrine about the nature and place of minds which is so prevalent among theorists and even among laymen that it deserves to be described as the official theory. Most philosophers, psychologists and religious teachers subscribe, with minor reservations, to its main articles and, although they admit certain theo- retical difficulties in it, they tend to assume that these can be overcome without serious modifications being made to the architecture of the theory. It will be argued
here that the central principles of the doctrine are unsound and conflict with the whole body of what we know about minds when we are not speculating about them.
The official doctrine, which hails chiefly from Descartes, is something like this. With the doubtful exceptions of idiots and infants in arms every human being has both a body and a mind. Some would prefer to say that every human being has both a body and a mind. His body and his mind are ordinarily harnessed to- gether, but after the death of the body his mind may continue to exist and function.
Human bodies are in space and are subject to the mechanical laws which govern all other bodies in space. Bodily processes and states can be inspected by external observers. So a man’s bodily life is as much a public affair as are the lives of animals and reptiles and even as the careers of trees, crystals and plants.
But minds are not in space, nor are their op- erations subject to mechanical laws. The work- ings of one mind are not witnessable by other
• In denying the legitimacy of anything that cannot be “publicly witnessed,” how does behaviorism reject dualism?
• Do you think behaviorism is a sensible scientific program?
Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976)
The Oxford “ordinary-language” philosopher whose book The Concept of Mind (1949) set the stage for several decades of debate over his quasi- behavioristic resolution of the mind-body problem. His main thesis is that the distinction between mind and body rests on what he calls a “category mistake,” that is, wrongly be- lieving something to be one kind of thing when it is really another. In particular, it has been thought that mental events were events on a par with, but wholly different from, bodily events. Instead, Ryle argues, to talk about mind is to
talk about behavioral dispositions and abilities. (To say that a person wants to do something is to say that he would do it if given the opportunity.)
Philosopher Gilbert Ryle (© Hulton- Deutsch Collection/Corbis)
9 Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson, 1949. Reprinted with permission of Taylor and Francis Books UK, with the permission of the Principal, Fellows, and Scholars of Hertford College in the University of oxford.
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observers; its career is private. Only I can take direct cognisance of the states and processes of my own mind. A person therefore lives through two collateral histo- ries, one consisting of what happens in and to his body, the other consisting of what happens in and to his mind. The first is public, the second private. The events in the first history are events in the physical world, those in the second are events in the mental world.
It has been disputed whether a person does or can directly monitor all or only some of the episodes of his own private history; but, according to the official doc- trine, of at least some of these episodes he has direct and unchallengeable cogni- sance. In consciousness, self-consciousness and introspection he is directly and authentically apprised of the present states and operations of his mind. He may have great or small uncertainties about concurrent and adjacent episodes in the physical world, but he can have none about at least part of what is momentarily occupying his mind.
It is customary to express this bifurcation of his two lives and of his two worlds by saying that the things and events which belong to the physical world, including his own body, are external, while the workings of his own mind are internal. This antithesis of outer and inner is of course meant to be construed as a metaphor, since minds, not being in space, could not be described as being spatially inside anything else, or as having things going on spatially inside themselves. But relapses from this good intention are common and theorists are found speculating how stimuli, the physical sources of which are yards or miles outside a person’s skin, can generate mental responses inside his skull, or how decisions framed inside his cranium can set going movements of his extremities.
Even when “inner” and “outer” are construed as metaphors, the problem of how a person’s mind and body influence one another is notoriously charged with theo- retical difficulties. What the mind wills, the legs, arms and the tongue execute; what affects the ear and the eye has something to do with what the mind perceives; gri- maces and smiles betray the mind’s moods and bodily castigations lead, it is hoped, to moral improvement. But the actual transactions between the episodes of the pri- vate history and those of the public history remain mysterious, since by definition they can belong to neither series. They could not be reported among the happenings described in a person’s autobiography of his inner life, but nor could they be reported among those described in someone else’s biography of that person’s overt career. They can be inspected neither by introspection nor by laboratory experiment. They are theoretical shuttlecocks which are forever being bandied from the physiologist back to the psychologist and from the psychologist back to the physiologist.
Underlying this partly metaphorical representation of the bifurcation of a per- son’s two lives there is a seemingly more profound and philosophical assumption. It is assumed that there are two different kinds of existence or status. What exists or happens may have the status of physical existence, or it may have the status of mental existence. Somewhat as the faces of coins are either heads or tails, or somewhat as living creatures are either male or female, so, it is supposed, some existing is physical existing, other existing is mental existing. It is a necessary fea- ture of what has physical existence that it is in space and time; it is a necessary feature of what has mental existence that it is in time but not in space. What has physical existence is composed of matter, or else is a function of matter; what has mental existence consists of consciousness, or else is a function of consciousness.
. . .
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What sort of knowledge can be secured of the workings of a mind? On the one side, according to the official theory, a person has direct knowl- edge of the best imaginable kind of the workings of his own mind. Mental states and processes are (or are normally) conscious states and processes, and the consciousness which irradiates them can engender no illusions and leaves the door open for no doubts. A person’s present thinkings, feel- ings and willings, his perceivings, rememberings and imaginings are intrinsically “phosphores- cent”; their existence and their nature are inevi- tably betrayed to their owner. The inner life is a stream of consciousness of such a sort that it would be absurd to suggest that the mind whose life is that stream might be unaware of what is passing down it.
. . . On the other side, one person has no direct
access of any sort to the events of the inner life of another. He cannot do better than make problematic inferences from the observed behaviour of the other person’s body to the states of mind which, by analogy from his own conduct, he supposes to be signalized by that behaviour. Direct access to the workings of a mind is the privilege of that mind itself; in default of such privi- leged access, the workings of one mind are inevitably occult to everyone else. For the supposed arguments from bodily movements similar to their own to mental workings similar to their own would lack any possibility of observational corrobo- ration. Not unnaturally, therefore, an adherent of the official theory finds it difficult to resist this consequence of his premises, that he has no good reason to believe that there do exist minds other than his own. Even if he prefers to believe that to other human bodies there are harnessed minds not unlike his own, he cannot claim to be able to discover their individual characteristics, or the particular things that they undergo and do. Absolute solitude is on this showing the ineluctable destiny of the soul. Only our bodies can meet.
Then, in section 2, Ryle argues that the “official doctrine” is “absurd” and is based upon what he calls “a category mistake”:
Such in outline is the official theory. I shall often speak of it with deliberate abu- siveness, as “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine.” I hope to prove that it is entirely false, and false not in detail but in principle. It is not merely an assemblage of particular mistakes. It is one big mistake and a mistake of a special kind. It is, namely, a category-mistake. It represents the facts of mental life as if they belonged to one logical type of category (or range of types or categories), when they actually belong to another. The dogma is therefore a philosopher’s myth. In attempting to explode the myth I shall probably be taken to be denying well-known facts about the mental life of human beings, and my plea that I aim to do nothing more than rectify the logic of mental-conduct concepts will probably be disallowed as mere subterfuge.
I see the batter and the bowler, but who’s in charge of team spirit? If no one is the “team spirit” player, how could it exist? (© Shutterstock.com/ Lance Bellers)
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I must first indicate what is meant by the phrase “Category-mistake.” This I do in a series of illustrations.
A foreigner visiting Oxford or Cambridge for the first time is shown a number of colleges, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific departments and administrative offices. He then asks “But where is the university? I have seen where the members of the Colleges live, where the Registrar works, where the scientists experiment and the rest. But I have not yet seen the University in which reside and work the members of your University.” It has then to be ex- plained to him that the University is not another collateral institution, some ulterior counterpart to the colleges, laboratories and offices which he has seen. The University is just the way in which all that he has already seen is organized. When they are seen and when their coordination is understood, the University has been seen. His mistake lay in his innocent assumption that it was correct to speak of Christ Church, the Bodleian Library, the Ashmolean Museum and the University, to speak, that is, as if “the University” stood for an extra member of the class of which these other units are members. He was mistakenly allocating the University to the same category as that to which the other insti- tutions belong.
. . . One more illustration. A foreigner watching his first game of cricket learns what
are the functions of the bowlers, the batsmen, the fielders, the umpires and the scorers. He then says “But there is no one left on the field to contribute the famous element of team-spirit. I see who does the bowling, the batting and the wicket- keeping; but I do not see whose role it is to exercise esprit de corps.” Once more, it would have to be explained that he was looking for the wrong type of thing. Team-spirit is not another cricketing-operation supplementary to all of the other special tasks. It is, roughly, the keenness with which each of the special tasks is performed, and performing a task keenly is not performing two tasks. Certainly exhibiting team-spirit is not the same thing as bowling or catching, but nor is it a third thing such that we can say that the bowler first bowls and then exhibits team-spirit or that a fielder is at a given moment either catching or displaying esprit de corps.
These illustrations of category-mistakes have a common feature which must be noticed. The mistakes were made by people who did not know how to wield the concepts University . . . and team-spirit. Their puzzles arose from inability to use certain items in the English vocabulary.
A category mistake, in general, is mistaking one type of thing for another. For example, it would be a category mistake to ask, “what color is the number 3?” The philosophically inter- esting mistakes, of course, are neither so obvious nor so silly as that example. They are mistakes made when we try to think abstractly. Most important are the category mistakes that philosophers make when they talk about “the mind”:
My destructive purpose is to show that a family of radical category-mistakes is the source of the double-life theory. The representation of a person as a ghost mysteri- ously ensconced in a machine derives from this argument. Because, as is true, a person’s thinking, feeling and purposive doing cannot be described solely in the idioms of physics, chemistry and physiology, therefore they must be described in counterpart idioms. As the human body is a complex organised unit, so the human
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mind must be another complex organized unit, though one made of a different sort of stuff and with a different sort of structure. Or, again, as the human body, like any other parcel of matter, is a field of causes and effects, so the mind must be an- other field of causes and effects, though not (Heaven be praised) mechanical causes and effects.
This unfortunate category mistake, which Ryle attributes primarily to Descartes, is thinking that “the mind” and its events are some strange and mysteriously private sort of thing behind our behavior, when, in fac t, mind is the pattern of our behavior, not some- thing “behind” it.
When two terms belong to the same category, it is proper to construct conjunc- tive propositions embodying them. Thus a purchaser may say that he bought a left-hand glove and a right-hand glove, but not that he bought a left-hand glove, a right-hand glove and a pair of gloves. “She came home in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair” is a well-known joke based on the absurdity of conjoining terms of different types. It would have been equally ridiculous to construct the dis- junction “She came home either in a flood of tears or else in a sedan-chair.” Now the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine does just this. It maintains that there exist both bodies and minds; that there occur physical processes and mental pro- cesses; that there are mechanical causes of corporeal movements and mental causes of corporeal movements. I shall argue that these and other analogous conjunctions are absurd; but, it must be noticed, the argument will not show that either of the illegitimately conjoined propositions is absurd in itself. I am not, for example, denying that there occur mental processes. Doing long division is a mental process and so is making a joke. But I am saying that the phrase “there occur mental processes” does not mean the same sort of thing as “there occur physical processes,” and, therefore, that it makes no sense to conjoin or disjoin the two.
The key to Ryle’s analysis is what he calls a disposition. A disposition is a tendency for something to happen given certain conditions. Ryle explains this in the following way:
There are at least two quite different senses in which an occurrence is said to be “explained”; and there are correspondingly at least two quite different senses in which we ask “why” it occurred and two quite different senses in which we say that it happened “because” so and so was the case. The first sense is the causal sense. To ask why the glass broke is to ask what caused it to break, and we explain, in this sense, the fracture of the glass when we report that a stone hit it. The “because” clause in the explanation reports an event, namely the event which stood to the fracture of the glass as cause to effect.
But very frequently we look for and get explanations of occurrences in another sense of “explanation.” We ask why the glass shivered when struck by the stone and we get the answer that it was because the glass was brittle. Now “brittle” is a dispositional adjective; that is to say, to describe the glass as brittle is to assert a general hypothetical proposition about the glass. So when we say that the glass broke when struck because it was brittle, the “because” clause does not report a happening or a cause; it states a law-like proposition. People commonly say of explanations of this second kind that they give the “reason” for the glass breaking when struck.
“The phrase ‘there occur mental processes’ does not mean the same sort of thing as ‘there occur physical processes,’ and, therefore . . . it makes no sense to conjoin or disjoin the two.” — G I L B E R T R Y L E
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How does the law-like general hypothetical proposition work? It says, roughly, that the glass, if sharply struck or twisted, etc. would not dissolve or stretch or evaporate but fly into fragments. The matter of fact that the glass did at a particular moment fly into fragments, when struck by a particular stone, is explained, in this sense of “explain,” when the first happening, namely the impact of the stone, satisfies the protasis of the general hypothetical proposition, and when the second happening, namely the fragmentation of the glass, satisfies its apodosis.
He then applies this concept of disposition to his analysis of “mind.” (This occupies him for most of his book.) The main idea is this: Everything “mental” is really a disposition to behave in certain ways. Consider, for example, his brief analysis of acting from vanity:
The statement “he boasted from vanity” ought, on one view, to be construed as saying that “he boasted and the cause of his boasting was the occurrence in him of a particular feeling or impulse of vanity.” On the other view, it is to be construed as saying “he boasted on meeting the stranger and his doing so satisfies the law-like proposition that whenever he finds a chance of securing the admiration and envy of others, he does whatever he thinks will produce this admiration and envy.”
Then Ryle states the general argument:
To say that a person knows something, or aspires to be something, is not to say that he is at a particular moment in process of doing or undergoing anything, but that he is able to do certain things, when the need arises, or that he is prone to do and feel certain things in situations of certain sorts. . . .
Abandonment of the two-worlds legend involves the abandonment of the idea that there is a locked door and a still to be discovered key. Those human actions and reactions, those spoken and unspoken utterances, those tones of voice, facial expressions and gestures, which have always been the data of all the other students of men, have, after all, been the right and the only manifestations to study. They and they alone have merited, but fortunately not received, the grandiose title “mental phenomena.”
Ryle’s (and Wittgenstein’s) logical behaviorism differs from the radical behaviorism of the psychologists in that it is not so much a theory about behavior and its causes as it is a theory about the language of mind, about the meaning of “mentalistic” terms such as “wants,” “be- lieves,” “hurts,” “loves,” “feels,” and “thinks.” Ryle’s basic thesis, stripped of his polemic against “the ghost in the machine,” is that applying a mental term—attributing a mental property to a person—is logically equivalent to saying that the person will act in a certain way.
The advantage of this is that it eliminates all mysterious things mental by translating the mental terminology into statements about behavior, not “inner events.” Instead of thinking of love as “a feeling deep inside,” for example, the logical behaviorist would say, unromanti- cally perhaps, that “John loves Mary” means that John will be with Mary every chance he gets, he will buy her flowers if flowers are available, he will take her to the movies if she utters the stimulating words, “Let’s go to the movies!” As you can see from this example, the number of acts and possible acts involved in the translation of a mentalistic term can be indefinitely large, since, in various circumstances and with various opportunities, a person in
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love might do almost anything. (The case is not so complicated, usually, with such mental predicates as “is thirsty” and “has an itch.”) But however compli- cated the translation from mental language to behavioral disposition, the prob- lem of dualism does not arise. The causal interaction between mind and body has been reformulated as the causal connection between a physical state—a disposition to behave in certain ways—and the actual consequent behavior. Saying “he will marry her because he loves her” is therefore no more meta- physically problematic than saying “the glass will break because it is brittle.”
There is a problem with all forms of behaviorism—both radical and logical. However tempting such a theory might be when we are studying other people at a distance, it seems utterly absurd when we try to think behavioristically while talking to a friend or listening to someone talk to us. And behaviorism becomes pure nonsense in one’s own case, when we are trying to understand and talk about our own mental states. My pain is not the same as my behavior, and no matter how easy it may be for you to infer from my behavior that I am in pain, that is certainly not how I know that I am in pain, and it is not what I mean by my report, “I am in pain.” Indeed, when I tell you “I am in pain,” I am not predicting my behavior. I am telling you what I feel, quite apart from anything I might do. Whatever the logic of mental language, that undeniable feeling seems to remind us that behaviorism, however therapeutic in psychology and however powerful as an antidote to Cartesianism, cannot be the whole story.
Watson’s behaviorism helped correct an absurd amount of mentalistic theorizing about the behavior of animals (“the rat is trying to figure out how to get the door open”). So too, Ryle’s behaviorism is a vital challenge to the too-easy supposition that our “minds” are ghostly containers filled with equally ghostly entities and processes. But as an alternative account of the mind, behaviorism inevitably bangs up against that ultimate mark of the mental, Descartes’s “I think.” There is no way you can consistently think that you never think or think that your thinking is nothing but your tendency to behave. As one of Watson’s early critics commented, “What behaviorism shows is that psychologists do not always think very well, not that they don’t think at all.”
The rejection of dualism need not be a rejection of the mental side of the duality, al- though that is the obvious preference of most scientists. We have seen at least one philoso- pher, however, who escapes the problems of Cartesian dualism by rejecting the physical side of the problem. That is Bishop Berkeley, who quite clearly, in attacking Locke and de- fending his own “subjective idealism,” provides a radical solution to the mind-body problem as well. His theory is that there are only minds and their ideas, no physical bodies. Therefore, there is no problem of interaction. Like Leibniz, however, he needs God to hold his system together. Idealism has not been as rare an answer to the mind-body problem as you might think, although we see little of it nowadays. The religious idealists of the nineteenth century, in the United States as well as in England and Europe, were so powerful that they virtually ruled Western philosophy for a number of decades.
Could a robot perfectly imitate a human being? Suppose one could: what would that mean for behaviorism? (© iStock- photo.com/alex-mit)
• How has dualism committed a “category mistake,” according to Ryle? Do you think our use of “mind” is akin to our use of “university”?
• Can the mind be described in dispositional terms? How would doing so avoid inter- preting the mind as a substance?
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3. The Identity Theory The most powerful and most plausible rejection of dualism, however, consists neither of denying consciousness nor of denying physical bodies. To deny dualism by denying mind or body strikes us as a bit simple-minded. There is a better way. Why not say that there are not two things, as there appear to be, but only one. In other words, mind and body, or more ac- curately, mental events and certain bodily events (presumably brain events) are identical. This theory, accordingly, is called the identity theory, and its plausibility was once one of the hottest controversies in American philosophy. you can see that it was anticipated, in a sense, by Spinoza and Russell with their dual aspect theory. But the identity theory, unlike the others, tries to tie itself as closely as possible with current scientific research, and al- though it is not a scientific theory itself, it will allow no such mysterious “something” as we found in Spinoza and Russell. Accordingly, it is usually considered a form of materialism (al- though it does not deny the existence—only the ontological independence—of mental events).
The identity theory says that there are mental events, but they are identical to—the same thing as—certain physical events, that is, processes in the brain. Unlike behaviorism (radical or logical), the identity theory does not deny that mentalistic terms refer to something. The identity theory rather denies dualism by insisting that what mentalistic terms such as “wants,” “believes,” and “loves” refer to is not just some further unspecifiable mental state; it is also a neurological process that scientists, someday, will be able to specify precisely. Dualism is eliminated because there are no longer two things to interact; there is just a single event, a mental-neurological event, which can be described in either of two ways, in either of two quite different languages. one can (truthfully) say, “I have a headache” or, if one knows an extensive amount of neurology, one could just as well say “such and such process is going on in my brain.”
The following essay is one of the classic statements of the identity theory by Australian philosopher J. J. C. Smart.
F RO M “Sensations and Brain Processes” B Y J. J. C. Smart10
It seems to me that science is increasingly giving us a viewpoint whereby organ- isms are able to be seen as physico-chemical mechanisms: it seems that even the behavior of man himself will one day be explicable in mechanistic terms. There does seem to be, so far as science is concerned, nothing in the world but increas- ingly complex arrangements of physical constituents. All except for one place: in consciousness. That is, for a full description of what is going on in a man you would have to mention not only the physical processes in his tissue, glands, ner- vous system, and so forth, but also his states of consciousness: his visual, auditory, and tactual sensations, his aches and pains. That these should be correlated with brain processes does not help, for to say that they are correlated is to say that they are something “over and above.” You cannot correlate something with itself. You correlate footprints with burglars, but not Bill Sikes the burglar with Bill Sikes the burglar. So sensations, states of consciousness, do seem to be the one sort of thing left outside the physicalist picture, and for various reasons I just cannot
10 J. J. C. Smart, “Sensations and Brain Processes,” in Philosophical Review 68 (1959): 141–156. Copyright © 1959 by Cornell University. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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believe that this can be so. That everything should be explicable in terms of physics (to- gether of course with descriptions of the ways in which the parts are put together—roughly, biology is to physics as radio-engineering is to electromagnetism) except the occurrence of sensations seems to me to be frankly unbeliev- able. Such sensations would be “nomological
danglers,” to use Feigl’s expression. It is not often realized how odd would be the laws whereby these nomological danglers would dangle. It is sometimes asked, “Why can’t there be psycho-physical laws which are of a novel sort, just as the laws of electricity and magnetism were novelties from the standpoint of Newtonian mechanics?” Certainly we are pretty sure in the future to come across new ulti- mate laws of a novel type, but I expect them to relate simple constituents: for example, whatever ultimate particles are then in vogue. I cannot believe that ul- timate laws of nature could relate simple constituents to configurations consisting of perhaps billions of neurons (and goodness knows how many billion billions of ultimate particles) all put together for all the world as though their main purpose in life was to be a negative feedback mechanism of a complicated sort. Such ulti- mate laws would be like nothing so far known in science. They have a queer “smell” to them. I am just unable to believe in the nomological danglers them- selves, or in the laws whereby they would dangle. If any philosophical arguments seemed to compel us to believe in such things, I would suspect a catch in the argu- ment. In any case it is the object of this paper to show that there are no philo- sophical arguments which compel us to be dualists.
. . . Why should sensations just be brain processes of a certain sort? There are, of
course, well-known (as well as lesser-known) philosophical objections to the view that reports of sensations are reports of brain-processes, but I shall try to argue that these arguments are by no means as cogent as is commonly thought to be the case.
Let me first try to state more accurately the thesis that sensations are brain pro- cesses. It is not the thesis that, for example, “after-image” or “ache” means the same as “brain process of sort X” (where “X” is replaced by a description of a cer- tain sort of brain process). It is that, in so far as “after-image” or “ache” is a report of a process, it is a report of a process that happens to be a brain process. It follows that the thesis does not claim that sensation statements can be translated into state- ments about brain processes. Nor does it claim that the logic of a sensation state- ment is the same as that of a brain-process statement. All it claims is that in so far as a sensation statement is a report of something, that something is in fact a brain process. Sensations are nothing over and above brain processes. Nations are noth- ing “over and above” citizens, but this does not prevent the logic of nation state- ments being very different from the logic of citizen statements, nor does it insure the translatability of nation statements into citizen statements. (I do not, however, wish to assert that the relation of sensation statements to brain-process statements is very like that of nation statements to citizen statements. Nations do not just happen to be nothing over and above citizens, for example. I bring in the “nations” example merely to make a negative point: that the fact that the logic of A- statements is different from that of B-statements does not insure that A’s are anything over and above B’s.)
J. J. C. Smart (1920–2012)
An Australian philosopher was professor emeritus at Monash University in Melbourne after retiring from the Australian National University. He was a staunch defender of the mind-body “identity theory.”
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Remarks on identity (When I say that a sensation is a brain process or that light- ning is an electric discharge, I am using “is” in the sense of strict identity. Just as in the—in this case necessary—proposition “7 is identical with the smallest prime number greater than 5.”) When I say that a sensation is a brain process or that light- ning is an electric discharge I do not mean just that the sensation is somehow spa- tially or temporally continuous with the brain process or that the lightning is just spatially or temporally continuous with the discharge. When on the other hand I say that the successful general is the same person as the small boy who stole the apples I mean only that the successful general I see before me is a time slice of the same four-dimensional object of which the small boy stealing apples is an earlier time slice. How- ever, the four-dimensional object which has the general-I-see-before-me for its late time slice is identical in the strict sense with the four- dimensional object which has the small-boy- stealing- apples for an early time slice. I distinguish these two senses of “is identical with” because I wish to make it clear that the brain-process doc- trine asserts identity in the strict sense.
As compatible as the identity theory may seem with contemporary science and as plausible as it may seem as a way of rejecting dualism without rejecting the obvious facts about feelings and thinking, the identity theory too runs up against its share of paradoxes. The idea that one thing (a brain event = a mental event) can be referred to and described in two different languages sounds plausi- ble and impressive. But, in this case, the two languages are so very different that there is very good reason to sup- pose that the thing(s) they refer to is/are very different as well. To pursue this line of criticism, here is a reevaluation of the identity theory by the American philosopher Jerome Shaffer.
Against the Identity Theory B Y Jerome Shaffer11
The sense of “identity” relevant here is that in which we say, for example, that the morning star is “identical” with the evening star. It is not that the expression “morning star” means the same as the expression “evening star”; on the contrary, these expressions mean something different. But the
“Sensations are nothing over and above brain processes.” — J . J . C . S M A R T
Alexander Archipenko, In the Boudoir (Before the Mirror) (1915). Imagine the many dimensions of identity. (The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY)
11 Jerome Shaffer, Philosophy of Mind. Copyright © 1994. Reprinted with permission of the author.
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object referred to by the two expressions is one and the same; there is just one heavenly body, namely, Venus, which when seen in the morn- ing is called the morning star and when seen in the evening is called the evening star. The morning star is identical with the evening star; they are one and the same object.12
Of course, the identity of the mental with the physical is not exactly of this sort, since it is held to be simultaneous identity rather than the identity of a thing at one time with the same thing at a later time. To take a closer example, one can say that lightning is a particularly massive electrical discharge from one cloud to another or to the earth. Not that the word “lightning” means “a particularly massive electrical discharge . . .”; when Benjamin Franklin discovered that light- ning was electrical, he did not make a discovery about the meaning of words. Nor when it was discovered that water was H
2 O was a discovery made about the
meanings of words; yet water is identical with H 2 O.
In a similar fashion, the identity theorist can hold that thoughts, feelings, wishes, and the like are identical with physical states. Not “identical” in the sense that mentalistic terms are synonymous in meaning with physicalistic terms but “identi- cal” in the sense that the actual events picked out by mentalistic terms are one and the same events as those picked out by physicalistic terms.
. . . What are the advantages of the identity theory? As a form of materialism, it does
not have to cope with a world which has in it both mental phenomena and physical phenomena, and it does not have to ponder how they might be related. There exist only the physical phenomena, although there do exist two different ways of talking about such phenomena: physicalistic terminology and, in at least some situations, mentalistic terminology. We have here a dualism of language, but not a dualism of entities, events or properties.
But do we have merely a dualism of languages and no other sort of dualism? In the case of Venus, we do indeed have only one object, but the expression “morning star” picks out one phase of that object’s history, where it is in the mornings, and the expression “evening star” picks out another phase of the object’s history, where it is in the evenings. If that object did not have these two distinct aspects, it would not have been a discovery that the morning star and the evening star were indeed one and the same body, and, further, there would be no point to the different ways of referring to it.
Now it would be admitted by identity theorists that physicalistic and mentalistic terms do not refer to different phases in the history of one and the same object. What sort of identity is intended? Let us turn to an allegedly closer analogy, that of the identity of lightning and a particular sort of electrical phenomenon. Yet here again we have two distinguishable aspects, the appearance to the naked eye on the one hand and the physical composition on the other. And this is also not the kind of identity which is plausible for mental and physical events. The appearance
Jerome Shaffer (1929–)
An American philosopher and professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut. He is one of the best-known critics of the “identity theory” of mind and body.
12 Both refer to the planet Venus, one as seen in the morning, the other as seen at night. But it took many years for this identity to be discovered.
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to the naked eye of a neurological event is utterly differ- ent from the experience of having a thought or a pain.
It is sometimes suggested that the physical aspect results from looking at a particular event “from the outside,” whereas the mental results from looking at the same event “from the inside.” When the brain surgeon observes my brain he is looking at it from the outside, whereas when I experience a mental event I am “looking” at my brain “from the inside.”
Such an account gives us only a misleading anal- ogy, rather than an accurate characterization of the relationship between the mental and the physical. The analogy suggests the difference between a man who knows his own house from the inside, in that he is free to move about within, seeing objects from different perspectives, touching them, etc., but can never get outside to see how it looks from there, and a man who cannot get inside and therefore knows only the outside appearance of the house, and perhaps what he can glimpse through the win- dows. But what does this have to do with the brain? Am I free to roam about inside my brain, observing what the brain surgeon may never see? Is not the “inner” aspect of my brain far more accessible to the brain surgeon than to me? He has the X rays, probes, electrodes, scalpels, and scissors for getting at the inside of my brain. If it is replied that this is only an anal- ogy, not to be taken literally, then the question still remains how the mental and the physical are related.
One of the leading identity theorists, J. J. C. Smart, holds that mentalistic dis- course is simply a vaguer, more indefinite way of talking about what could be talked about more precisely by using physiological terms. If I report a red afterim- age, I mean (roughly) that something is going on which is like what goes on when I really see a red patch. I do not actually mean that a particular sort of brain process is occurring, but when I say something is going on I refer (very vaguely, to be sure) to just that brain process. Thus the thing referred to in my report of an afterimage is a brain process. Hence there is no need to bring in any nonphysical features. Thus even the taint of dualism is avoided.
Does this ingenious attempt to evade dualistic implications stand up under phil- osophical scrutiny? I am inclined to think it will not. Let us return to the man reporting the red afterimage. He was aware of the occurrence of something or other, of some feature or other. Now it seems to me obvious that he was not neces- sarily aware of the state of his brain at that time (I doubt that most of us are ever aware of the state of our brain) nor, in general, necessarily aware of any physical features of his body at that time. He might, of course, have been incidentally aware of some physical feature but not insofar as he was aware of the red afterimage as such. Yet he was definitely aware of something, or else how could he have made that report? So he must have been aware of some non-physical feature. That is the only way of explaining how he was aware of anything at all.
What is the relationship between your thoughts and your brain? Is thought in any way independent of the brain? (© Shutterstock .com/jumpingsack)
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Of course, the thing that our reporter of the afterimage was aware of might well have had further features which he was not aware of, particularly, in this connec- tion, physical features. I may be aware of certain features of an object without being aware of others. So it is not ruled out that the event our reporter is aware of might be an event with predominantly physical features—he just does not notice those. But he must be aware of some of its features, or else it would not be proper to say he was aware of that event. And if he is not aware of any physical features, he must be aware of something else. And that shows that we cannot get rid of those nonphysical features in the way that Smart suggests.
. . . If by X-rays or some other means we were able to see every event which
occurred in the brain, we would never get a glimpse of a thought. If, to resort to fantasy, we could so enlarge a brain or so shrink ourselves that we could wander freely through the brain, we would still never observe a thought. All we could ever observe in the brain would be the physical events which occur in it. If mental events had location in the brain, there should be some means of detecting them there. But of course there is none. The very idea of it is senseless.
In defending the identity theory, it is most important to stress that the identity of brain processes and thoughts is an empirical identity, that is, an identity that must be discovered through experiment and experience. It is not a logical identity, as if the two terms “brain process” and “thought” are synonymous. The latter suggestion is obviously false, and modern defenders of the identity theory are always emphasizing that future neurophysio- logical research will prove them right. Shaffer’s criticism, however, is based on a principle that must be distinguished from the all-too-easy attack on the logical identity suggestion. The principle is that if two things are identical, then they must have all the same properties. But, Shaffer argues, no amount of research could possibly show that brain processes and thought have the same properties. Most importantly, brain processes take place in the brain and can be traced like any other physical processes; thoughts, on the other hand, have no spatial location, and there is nothing that research can “discover” that will show that they do. of course, research can and has shown that certain thoughts are correlated with certain brain processes, but correlation is not yet identity.
• Is the identity theory of mind a form of materialism? If not, how do the two differ? How does it differ from epiphenomenalism?
• How could psychophysics describe your experience of pain or of seeing red? Do you think that psychophysics could fully capture what it is like to have these experi- ences? Does the identity theorist claim to capture your experience of pain when he describes it in terms of physical laws?
• What does Smart mean when he claims, “sensations are nothing over and above brain processes”? What does he mean by “strict identity”?
• How are mental properties different from physical properties? Does this show that they cannot be identical?
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4. Eliminative Materialism To most materialists, the identity theory seemed promising, even if its arguments proved inade- quate. The real question was whether there might be some other version of the thesis—that mental states were “nothing but” brain states—that did not claim the kind of “one-to-one match” required by the identity theory. one suggestion is the thesis called eliminative materialism, which proposes to defend materialism without claiming an identity between what we call “mental states” and the workings of the brain. Rather, the argument goes, our increasing knowledge of the workings of the brain will make outmoded our “folk-psychology” talk about the mind and we will all learn to talk the language of neurology instead.
In the following excerpt, Paul M. Churchland defends the opposition (rather than the complementarity) of neurological explanations of human behavior and the familiar mental- istic accounts used in everyday speech. With increased knowledge of neurology, our ordi- nary language will be replaced or, at least, seriously revised.
On Eliminative Materialism B Y Paul M. Churchland13
The identity theory was called into doubt not because the prospects for a materialist account of our mental capacities were thought to be poor, but because it seemed un- likely that the arrival of an adequate materialist theory would bring with it the nice one-to-one match-ups, between the concepts of folk psychology and the concepts of theoretical neuroscience, that intertheoretic reduction requires. The reason for that doubt was the great variety of quite different physical systems that could instantiate the required functional organization. Eliminative materialism also doubts that the cor- rect neuroscientific account of human capacities will produce a neat reduction of our common-sense framework, but here the doubts arise from a quite different source.
As the eliminative materialists see it, the one-to-one match-ups will not be found, and our common-sense psychological framework will not enjoy an inter- theoretic reduction, because our commonsense psychological framework is a false and radically misleading conception of the causes of human behavior and the nature of cognitive activity. On this view, folk psychology is not just an incomplete representation of our inner na- tures; it is an outright mis-representation of our internal states and activities. Conse- quently, we cannot expect a truly adequate neuroscientific account of our inner lives to provide theoretical categories that match up nicely with the categories of our common-sense framework. Accordingly, we must expect that the older framework will simply be eliminated, rather than be reduced, by a matured neuroscience.
H I S T O R I C A L PA R A L L E L S As the identity theorist can point to historical cases of successful intertheoretic reduction, so the eliminative materialist can point to historical cases of the outright elimination of the ontology of an older theory in favor of the ontology of a new and superior theory.
. . .
Paul Churchland (1942–)
A Canadian philosopher and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He is a specialist in cognitive science and the interplay among philosophy, computer science, and neurology.
13 Paul M. Churchland, Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988, pp. 43–49.
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It used to be thought that when a piece of wood burns, or a piece of metal rusts, a spiritlike substance called “phlogis- ton” was being released: briskly, in the former case, slowly in the latter. Once gone, that “noble” substance left only a base pile of ash or rust. It later came to be appreciated that both processes involve, not the loss of something, but the gaining of a substance taken from the atmosphere: oxygen. Phlogiston emerged, not as an incomplete description of what was going on, but as a radical misdescription. Phlogis- ton was therefore not suitable for reduction to or identification with some notion from within the new oxygen chemistry, and it was simply eliminated from science.
. . . The concepts of folk psychology—belief, desire, fear, sen-
sation, pain, joy, and so on—await a similar fate, according to the view at issue. And when neuroscience has matured to the point where the poverty of our current conceptions is apparent to everyone, the superiority of the new framework is established, we shall then be able to set about reconceiving our internal states and activities, within a truly adequate conceptual framework at last. Our explanations of one another’s behavior will appeal to such things as our neuro- pharmacological states, the neural activity in specialized anatomical areas, and whatever other states are deemed rel- evant by the new theory. Our private introspection will also be transformed, and may be profoundly enhanced by reason of the more accurate and penetrating framework it will have to work with—just as the astronomer’s perception of the night sky is much enhanced by the detailed knowledge of modern astronomical theory that he or she possesses.
The magnitude of the conceptual revolution here suggested should not be mini- mized: it would be enormous. And the benefits to humanity might be equally great. If each of us possessed an accurate neuroscientific understanding of (what we now conceive dimly as) the varieties and causes of mental illness, the factors in- volved in learning, the neural basis of emotions, intelligence, and socialization, then the sum total of human misery might be much reduced. The simple increase in mutual understanding that the new framework made possible could contribute substantially toward a more peaceful and humane society. Of course, there would be dangers as well: increased knowledge means increased power, and power can always be misused.
A RG U M E N T S F O R E L I M I N AT I V E M AT E R I A L I S M The arguments for eliminative materialism are diffuse and less than decisive, but they are stronger than is widely supposed. The distinguishing feature of this position is its denial that a smooth intertheoretic reduction is to be expected—even a species- specific reduction—of the framework of folk psychology to the framework of a ma- tured neuroscience. The reason for this denial is the eliminative materialist’s conviction that folk psychology is a hopelessly primitive and deeply confused conception of our internal activities. But why this low opinion of our common-sense conceptions?
(© iStockphoto.com/higyou)
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There are at least three reasons. First, the eliminative materialist will point to the widespread explanatory, predictive, and manipulative failures of folk psychol- ogy. So much of what is central and familiar to us remains a complete mystery from within folk psychology. We do not know what sleep is, or why we have to have it, despite spending a full third of our lives in that condition. (The answer, “For rest,” is mistaken. Even if people are allowed to rest continuously, their need for sleep is undiminished. Apparently, sleep serves some deeper functions, but we do not yet know what they are.) We do not understand how learning transforms each of us from a gaping infant to a cunning adult, or how differences in intelligence are grounded. We have not the slightest idea how memory works, or how we manage to retrieve relevant bits of information instantly from the awesome mass we have stored. We do not know what mental illness is, nor how to cure it.
In sum, the most central things about us remain almost entirely mysterious from within folk psychology.
. . . This argument from explanatory poverty has a further aspect. So long as one
sticks to normal brains, the poverty of folk psychology is perhaps not strikingly evident. But as soon as one examines the many perplexing behavioral and cogni- tive deficits suffered by people with damaged brains, one’s descriptive and explana- tory resources start to claw the air. . . . As with other humble theories asked to operate successfully in unexplored extensions of their old domain (for example, Newtonian mechanics in the domain of velocities close to the velocity of light, and the classical gas law in the domain of high pressures or temperatures), the descrip- tive and explanatory inadequacies of folk psychology become starkly evident.
The second argument tries to draw an inductive lesson from our conceptual his- tory. Our early folk theories of motion were profoundly confused, and were even- tually displaced entirely by more sophisticated theories. Our early folk theories of the structure and activity of the heavens were wildly off the mark, and survive only as historical lessons in how wrong we can be. Our folk theories of the nature of fire, and the nature of life, were similarly cockeyed. And one could go on, since the vast majority of our past folk conceptions have been similarly exploded. All except folk psychology, which survives to this day and has only recently begun to feel pressure. But the phenomenon of conscious intelligence is surely a more complex and difficult phenomenon than any of those just listed. So far as accurate under- standing is concerned, it would be a miracle if we had got that one right the very first time, when we fell down so badly on all the others. Folk psychology has survived for so very long, presumably, not because it is basically correct in its representa- tions, but because the phenomena addressed are so surpassingly difficult that any useful handle on them, no matter how feeble, is unlikely to be displaced in a hurry.
. . .
A RG U M E N T S AG A I N S T E L I M I N AT I V E M AT E R I A L I S M The initial plausibility of this rather radical view is low for almost everyone, since it denies deeply entrenched assumptions. That is at best a question-begging com- plaint, of course, since those assumptions are precisely what is at issue. But the fol- lowing line of thought does attempt to mount a real argument.
Eliminative materialism is false, runs the argument, because one’s introspection reveals directly the existence of pains, beliefs, desires, fears, and so forth. Their existence is as obvious as anything could be.
“The most central things about us remain almost entirely mysterious from within folk psychology.” — PA U L M . C H U R C H L A N D
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The eliminative materialist will reply that this argument makes the same mis- take that an ancient or medieval person would be making if he insisted that he could just see with his own eyes that the heavens form a turning sphere, or that witches exist. The fact is, all observation occurs within some system of concepts, and our observation judgments are only as good as the conceptual framework in which they are expressed. In all three cases—the starry sphere, witches, and the familiar mental states—precisely what is challenged is the integrity of the back- ground conceptual frameworks in which the observation judgments are expressed. To insist on the validity of one’s experiences, traditionally interpreted, is therefore to beg the very question at issue. For in all three cases, the question is whether we should reconceive the nature of some familiar observational domain.
. . . A final criticism draws a much weaker conclusion, but makes a rather stronger
case. Eliminative materialism, it has been said, is making mountains out of mole- hills. It exaggerates the defects in folk psychology, and underplays its real successes. Perhaps the arrival of a matured neuroscience will require the elimination of the occasional folk-psychological concept, continues the criticism, and a minor adjust- ment in certain folk-psychological principles may have to be endured. But the large-scale elimination forecast by the eliminative materialist is just an alarmist worry or a romantic enthusiasm.
Perhaps this complaint is correct. And perhaps it is merely complacent. Which- ever, it does bring out the important point that we do not confront two simple and mutually exclusive possibilities here: pure reduction versus pure elimination. Rather, these are the end points of a smooth spectrum of possible outcomes, between which there are mixed cases of partial elimination and partial reduction. Only empirical research . . . can tell us where on that spectrum our own case will fall. Perhaps we should speak here, more liberally, of “revisionary materialism,” instead of concen- trating on the more radical possibility of an across-the-board elimination.
Churchland’s primary aim in this final section of argument is to present as at least intelli- gible his position that “our collective conceptual destiny lies substantially toward the revo- lutionary end of the spectrum.” In other words, he contends that society as a whole will move toward more scientific terminology and away from vague talk about mental states.
• In what sense do the eliminative materialists (such as Churchland) agree with those who reject the identity theory (such as Shaffer)? In what important ways do they differ?
• What is “folk psychology”? Can you give an example of a folk psychological expla- nation for falling in love, being sad, embarrassment followed by anger, hunger dis- sipating after a few days of fasting, and the need for sleep?
5. Functionalism: The Mind and the Computer Despite the claims of Cartesians that “minds are nonphysical,” at least in the obvious sense, Churchland and other materialists based their notion of the “self” on what they felt to be scientific fact, the physical basis of minds—the brain and the central nervous system. It is the brain that makes minds possible. This was a rather remarkable discovery in the history of biology. It is by no means obvious, looking at the gooey cauliflower-shaped stuff inside
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the skull, that in that space is packed billions of tiny neural networks that control our every experience, our every action, including the inner actions of our bodies of which we may not even be aware (control of metabolism and blood flow, for example).
However, since the introduction of computers, scientific criticisms of dualism have taken another line. Is it so obvious that minds could only be the product of brains? Could mental processes be based on physical processes that are not brain processes? Could, for example, mental processes be based upon a network of electronic signals in a properly designed complex of transistors and circuit boards? In other words, could mental processes be the product of a computer? Could the brain be nothing but an organic computer? Could com- puters—the kind that we make out of metal and minerals—have minds?
It is no coincidence that the recent decades of computer breakthroughs has produced a revolution in the way some philosophers think about selves and minds. The philosophical position is called functionalism, and its basic insight is that minds are produced not so much by particular kinds of materials (for example, brains) but rather by the relations between parts. In another few decades, it may in fact be possible, according to the most optimistic functionalists, to build a human mind out of computer parts. But whether or not computer scientists achieve such a (frightening) miracle, less optimistic functionalists hold that the mind is, in effect, a function of the patterns of neurological activity in the brain.
In computer technology (now at least in part included in our everyday language), there is a crucial distinction between “hardware” and “software.” Hardware is the actual computer with its circuits. In the case of human minds, the hardware would be the brain and its neuro- logical circuits. Software is the program that gives the computer specific instructions. (Sometimes, specific instructions can be “hardwired,” as in the case of instinct, but these are not the exciting cases that inspire most functionalists and computer scientists.) The view of the functionalists is that the mind is nothing other than an elaborate program of sorts, which is the product of a spectacularly complicated pattern embodied in the physical workings of the brain.
In the following selection, David Braddon-Mitchell and Frank Jackson give a brief defense of functionalism.
F RO M Philosophy of Mind and Cognition B Y David Braddon-Mitchell and Frank Jackson14
The world is full of states, devices, stations in life, objects, processes, properties and events that are defined wholly or partly by their functional roles. Thermostats are defined by how they control temperature by switching machines on and off; burglar alarms are defined by how they function to produce loud noises on being disturbed in various ways (only sometimes by burglars, unfortunately); the office of vice-chancellor is defined by its function in a university; filtration is defined as a process that takes as input solids in liquid suspension and delivers as separate outputs the solid and the liquid; a graduation cere- mony is an event in part defined by its role of producing graduates; a dangerous corner is the kind that tends to take approaching cars and deliver accidents; and so on and so forth.
David Braddon-Mitchell (1959–)
A professor of philosophy at the University of Sydney in Australia. He works primarily on issues in philosophy of mind and metaphysics.
14 David Braddon-Mitchell and Frank Jackson, Philosophy of Mind and Cognition, London: Blackwell, 1996.
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In all these cases there is a distinction to be drawn between the functional role and what occupies or fills it. Some thermostats are bime- tallic strips; some are more complex electronic devices. Either way, they count as thermostats provided they do the required regulating of temperature. Many different people might be vice-chancellor of the university. Burglar
alarms come in many shapes and sizes. There are many ways a corner can be dangerous.
In the same way functionalists about the mind distinguish the functional roles specified by the input, output and internal role clauses from what occupies them, and insist that what matters for being in one or another mental state are the roles that are occupied, not what occupies them. Provided the right roles are occupied, it does not matter what occupies them. Sometimes it is claimed that as a matter of empirical fact what occupies the relevant roles most likely varies. It is claimed that what plays the belief-that-there-is-food-nearby role in dogs is most likely different from what plays that role in cats; or perhaps the occupant of the role varies from one kind of dog to another; or perhaps it is different in left-handed people as opposed to right-handed people. Sometimes the claim is simply that it is abstractly possible that what plays or realizes the role associated with a given mental state varies. What is agreed though is that what matters for being in a given mental state are the roles occupied, not what occupies them. This is the famous multiple realiz- ability thesis distinctive of functionalist theories of mind. Multiple realizability is appealing for a number of reasons:
Frank Jackson (1943–)
An Australian philosopher and professor at Australian National University. Although he formulated a famous argument against physicalism, he no longer considers it (or many other arguments) decisive objections to physicalism.
Is the brain like a computer’s central processing unit? (If a computer had a brain, wouldn’t it be the CPU?) (© iStockphoto.com/pixelbrat)
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1. We ascribe mental states on the basis of behaviour in circumstances and without much regard to what realizes the various functional roles. Indeed, we do not know in any detail what realizes the roles, and until relatively recently we did not know even in broad outline.
2. We have all read science fiction stories about creatures—traditionally called “Martians” in philosophical discussions—whose chemistry is, say, silicon-based, instead of carbon-based like ours, and who interact with the environment much as we do, plan our defeat, fall in love with some of us, admire characteristics that we abhor, shame us with their compassion and understanding, are vastly more intelli- gent than we are, or whatever. These stories strike us as perfectly coherent, despite the fact that it is part of the story that the states that realize the relevant functional roles in them are quite different from those that realize the roles in us. As the con- clusion from these science fiction considerations is often put, we should not be chauvinists about the mind.
3. There is considerable evidence that our brains start out in a relatively plastic state, and that as we grow and the environment impacts on us, states come to occupy new functional roles, those subserving language, for instance. The usual explanation as to why language cannot be learnt past a certain age appeals to this point. Past a certain age it is too late for the right changes in brain function to occur. This opens up the possibility that the way your brain changed to subserve the functional roles needed for language was different from the way my brain did. But, provided the job gets done, it does not seem to matter.
4. An important part of making a good recovery from a stroke is getting an un- damaged part of the brain to do something previously done by the part damaged by the stroke. Stroke victims do not worry about whether the new part of the brain counts as a different realizer of the old role. What they worry about is whether the job will be well done, and that seems exactly the right attitude to take.
5. Prosthetic surgery for the brain seems no more problematic in principle than does prosthetic surgery in general. We can imagine that, as they degenerate, parts of someone’s brain are progressively replaced by silicon implants. Provided the im- plants fill the same functional roles, surely the surgery would count as successful. But then it must be the case that mental life is preserved despite the radical change in what realizes the various functional roles.
Multiple realizability, then, in addition to being common ground among func- tionalists, is a point in favour of their theory. It is widely accepted that any theory of mind should accommodate multiple realizability, and it is very much a point in functionalism’s favour that it does this so naturally. What is not common ground is the question of which functional roles are essential to which mental states and the more general question of where functionalism should stand on how we might answer this question.
One response is to leave the question to someone else. Some functionalists hold that the question of which functional roles mental states occupy should be left to empirical psychology and neuroscience. We can distinguish very many functional roles played by mental states, and the study of the mind is the study of these many functional roles. But it is no part of functionalism, on this view, to argue for one or another answer to conceptual issues concerning how to analyse what it is to be in pain, believe that it will rain soon, or whatever. But if the key to the mind lies in
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functional roles, it seems fair to ask for some sort of guide as to which functional roles matter. A burglar alarm may play many functional roles. Perhaps it plays the role of being a drain on your bank balance, being a conversation piece at dinner parties, and making a loud noise when burglars are near. We know which role mat- ters for its being a burglar alarm. The last role is the one that matters. That is why if it stops breaking down—and so stops being a drain on your bank balance—and if it stops being unusual in the neighbourhood—and so stops being a conversation piece—it will still be a burglar alarm. Among the various functional roles it has, we discriminate between those that matter for its counting as a burglar alarm and those that do not matter. The same is true for all the examples we gave earlier. Any par- ticular vice-chancellor, thermostat or dangerous corner will play many roles, but only some will matter for being a vice-chancellor, a thermostat or a dangerous corner. Why, then, should it be impossible to make the same kind of discrimination in the case of mental states? We know that not all the roles which various mental states fill matter equally for its being the mental state that it is—for instance, pain’s
playing the role of being the example most often chosen for discussion by philosophers is irrelevant to its being pain; it wouldn’t hurt any less if philosophers instead began to discuss itching—so surely it is fair to ask the functionalist for some guide as to which func- tional roles of a mental state matter for its being the mental state that it is.
The best answer, in our view, to the question of which functional roles matter is the answer given by common-sense functionalism. Common-sense func- tionalism aims to give an analysis of what it is to be in one or another mental state in broadly functional terms, in the same general way that we can give an analysis of being a burglar alarm in broadly func- tional terms.
The idea that the computer will someday provide a single model of mental states and information processes has been called into question recently. It is not at all clear that the mind works like a computer, or whether instead it works on different parallel levels in a manner substan- tially more complicated and considerably faster than any known computer.
Nevertheless, like any bold new hypothesis, the functionalist-analogy analysis of the mind as a computer has crashed head-on into some of the most entrenched ideas and experiences of common sense. In defense of common sense, John R. Searle—one of the leading ana- lysts of ordinary human language and the special fea- tures of human communication—attacks the notion that computers are sufficiently intelligent to threaten or to challenge human intelligence any time soon.
What does it mean for human “thought” when a computer can play chess more nimbly (more intelligently?) than we can? (© iStockphoto.com/Inok)
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F RO M “The Myth of the Computer” B Y John R. Searle15
The details of how the brain works are immensely complicated and largely un- known, but some of the general principles of the relations between brain func- tioning and computer programs can be stated quite simply. First, we know that brain processes cause mental phenomena. Mental states are caused by and realized in the structure of the brain. From this it follows that any system that produced mental states would have to have powers equivalent to those of the brain. Such a system might use a different chemistry, but whatever its chemistry it would have to be able to cause what the brain causes. We know from the [previous] argument digital computer programs by themselves are never sufficient to produce mental states. Now since brains do produce minds, and since programs by themselves can’t produce minds, it follows that the way the brain does it can’t be by simply instantiating a computer program. (Everything, by the way, instantiates some program or other, and brains are no exception. So in that trivial sense brains, like everything else, are digital computers.) And it also follows that if you wanted to build a machine to produce mental states, a thinking machine, you couldn’t do it solely in virtue of the fact that your machine ran a certain kind of computer program. The thinking machine couldn’t work solely in virtue of being a digital computer but would have to duplicate the specific causal powers of the brain.
A lot of the nonsense talked about com- puters nowadays stems from their relative rarity and hence mystery. As computers and robots become more common, as common as telephones, washing machines, and forklift trucks, it seems likely that this aura will disappear and people will take computers for what they are, namely useful machines.
Pursuing his attack on functionalism, Searle suggests a powerful counterexample to the widespread claim that “the conclusive proof of the presence of mental states and capacities [in a computer system or elsewhere] is the ability to convince a competent expert, for example, if a machine could converse with a native Chinese speaker in such a way as to convince the speaker that it understood Chinese.”16
F RO M Minds, Brains, and Science B Y John R. Searle17
Imagine that a bunch of computer programmers have written a program that will enable a computer to simulate the understanding of Chinese. So, for
“Since brains do produce minds, and since programs by themselves can’t produce minds, it follows that the way the brain does it can’t be by simply instantiating a computer program.” — J O H N R . S E A R L E
John Searle (1932–)
An American philosopher emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley; the best-known living proponent of “speech–act theory” in the philosophy of language and the author of many controversial books and articles, including a series of attacks on the ambitions of cognitive science and computer models of the mind.
15 John R. Searle, “The Myth of the Computer,” in the New York Review of Books. Reprinted with permission from The New York Review of Books. Copyright © 1982 by NyREV, Inc. 16 This is an instance of the so-called Turing test, named after logician/computer scientist Alan Turing (1912–1954). 17 John R. Searle, Minds, Brains, and Science, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.
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example, if the computer is given a question in Chinese, it will match the question against its memory, or data base, and produce appropriate an- swers to the questions in Chinese. . . . Does the computer, on the basis of this, understand Chinese, does it literally understand Chinese, in the way that Chinese speakers understand Chinese? Well, imag- ine that you are locked in a room, and in this room are several baskets full of Chinese symbols. Imagine that you (like me) do not understand a word of Chinese, but that you are given a rule book in English for manipulating these Chinese symbols. The rules specify the manipulations of the symbols purely formally, in terms of their syntax, not their semantics. So the rule might say: “Take a squiggle- squiggle sign out of basket number one and put it next to a squoggle-squoggle sign from basket number two.” Now suppose that some other Chinese sym- bols are passed into the room, and that you are given further rules for passing back Chinese symbols out of the room. Suppose that unknown to you the sym- bols passed into the room are called “questions” by the people outside the room, and the symbols you pass back out of the room are called “answers to the questions.” Suppose, furthermore, that the program- mers are so good at designing the programs and that you are so good at manipulating the symbols, that very soon your answers are indistinguishable from those of a native Chinese speaker. There you are locked in your room shuffling your Chinese symbols and passing out Chinese symbols in response to in- coming Chinese symbols. On the basis of the situa-
tion as I have described it, there is no way you could learn any Chinese simply by manipulating these formal symbols.
Now the point of the story is simply this: by virtue of implementing a formal computer program from the point of view of an outside observer, you behave exactly as if you understood Chinese, but all the same you don’t understand a word of Chinese. But if going through the appropriate computer program for under- standing Chinese is not enough to give you an understanding of Chinese, then it is not enough to give any other digital computer an understanding of Chinese. . . . All that the computer has, as you have, is a formal program for manipulating uninter- preted Chinese symbols.
(© iStockphoto.com/btrenkel)
• How is the mind similar to a computer? In what ways does it differ? In what respects does a functionalist view of mind argue that they are the same?
• How might a functionalist reply to Searle and his “Chinese room” thought experi- ment? Does it prove what he wants it to prove?
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6. Connectionism Not all criticisms of functionalism are nonmaterialist. Recently, objections have been raised against functionalism from neurophysiologists who claim that functionalism is just too sim- plistic in its vision of the brain and of computers. Connectionists complain that functionalism is a “top-down,” “software” approach, which is not accurate in its representation of the “hardware” of either the brain or the computer. In other words, say the connectionists, a functionalist starts with behavior—either human behavior or computer behavior—and claims that understanding human consciousness is just a matter of finding the “program” for that behavior. The functionalist claims that to understand the “program” is to understand the behavior, regardless of the mechanical and physical interactions that make the program run. The connectionist, on the other hand, claims that the mechanical and physical interac- tions that occur in the brain determine the kinds of behavior we are able to perform, just as the hardware and its operations determine which kinds of software computers are capable of processing. Connectionists therefore advocate a “bottom-up” approach to understand- ing the mind. Connectionists are still materialists, but not in the simple, reductionist way of their predecessors. They believe that consciousness—in its full color and quality—is a result of the complicated “connections” that really do go on in the brain. There is no one-to-one correspondence between neurons and thoughts or perceptions; rather, they claim, the “hardware” of the brain is an immensely complex mechanism to which the functionalists do not do justice.
• What are the similarities and differences between functionalists and connectionists?
D. The Problem of Consciousness Descartes claimed he knew what was going on in his mind with an immediate certainty that he could never have about what was going on in the world “outside” him. In his first “Medita- tion,” he talks about his seeming to be sitting in front of the fire and the fact that he might be wrong (if he were in bed asleep at the time). But what he could not be wrong about is his seeming to be sitting in front of the fire. Similarly, you think you see a friend walking across the street. you are wrong, for your friend is in fact in Alaska this week. But you can still be certain that you thought that you saw him, even if you didn’t.
Philosophers often refer to this special kind of “immediate” certainty in the case of our own conscious experiences as incorrigibility. you might make a mistake in any factual claim about the world, for you might be hallucinating, or dreaming, or simply fooled by circum- stances. But nothing could lead you to suspect that you might be mistaken about your own experiences. Given enough evidence against you, you might be willing to change from “but I know that I saw it” to “well, I thought I saw it.” But nothing could convince you that you were wrong in thinking that you saw whatever it was. That claim, the claim about your experi- ence, is incorrigible. your claim about what you saw, however, is always open to further questioning.
For many years, this notion of incorrigibility served as part of the definition of “mind” and, as Churchland implies, also a defense against materialism. Whatever was mental could be described incorrigibly, and this is very different than is the case with physical things. But doubts have begun to creep in. Part of the problem was Sigmund Freud’s introduction of the notion of the unconscious. According to Freud’s famous “psychoanalytic” theory, not
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everything mental is knowable, and therefore surely not everything “in the mind” can be described incorrigibly. In a famous passage from his “Introductory Lectures,” Freud says the following:
On the “Unconscious” B Y Sigmund Freud18
There is no need to discuss what is to be called conscious: it is removed from all doubt. The oldest and best meaning of the word “unconscious” is the descriptive one; we call a psychical process unconscious whose existence we are obliged to assume—for some such reason as that we infer it from its effects—, but of which we know nothing. In that case we have the same relation to it as we have to a physi- cal process in another person, except that it is in fact one of our own. If we want to be still more correct, we shall modify our assertion by saying that we call a process unconscious if we are obliged to assume that it is being activated at the moment though at the moment we know nothing about it.
Notice that Freud starts from a Cartesian position, the idea that “conscious is removed from all doubt.” But then he suggests what no Cartesian can tolerate, the idea that there are ideas (experiences, intentions) in our minds that we do not and sometimes cannot know, much less know with certainty. And if we accept this notion of “the unconscious” (or even the weaker notion of the “preconscious” mind), the traditional notion of the “incorrigibility” of the mental is seriously challenged.
The argument, however, cuts both ways. Many philosophers have rejected Freud’s ac- count just because his notion of “the unconscious” goes against the notion of incorrigibility. “If it isn’t knowable incorrigibly,” these philosophers have said, “then it can’t be mental at all.” Even Freud himself was forced to admit that his theory flew in the face of our normal “manner of speaking.” The debate continues. Can you be wrong about what is going on in your own mind? For a long time, it was generally agreed that you could not be. Now we aren’t so sure. you are certain that you are over an old love affair, but, without too much difficulty, a friend or a psychologist convinces you that you have been thinking about it con- stantly. you are certain that you are angry, but on closer examination, and in retrospect, you decide that you really felt guilty. you thought that you were thinking about your professor, when suddenly you realize that in fact it was the face of your father!
Is there anything about which we could not be mistaken? What of those basic bits of data that the empiricists talked about—sensations or impressions? Could we possibly be wrong in our confidence that “right now, I am experiencing a cold feeling in my hand”? The empiri- cists assumed that one could not be wrong about this, for it was on the basis of such certain- ties that we were able to construct, through inductive reasoning, our theories about the world. But could we be wrong even about our own sensations? Consider this example (it comes from Bishop Berkeley): A mischievous friend tells you that he is going to touch your hand with a very hot spoon. When you aren’t looking, he touches you with a piece of ice. you scream and claim, with seeming certainty, that he has given you an uncomfortable sensation of heat. But you’re wrong. What you felt was cold. What you seemed to feel was heat. But in this case you were mistaken even about this “seeming.”
18 Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. James Strachey, New york: Norton, 1964.
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19 Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions. Copyright ©1979. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
Philosophers have also pointed out that what is unique to mind as opposed to body is the fact that one and only one person can (and must) experience what is going on. I can (and must) feel only my own pains; I can’t experience your pains. Philosophers have referred to this as privileged access, sometimes as the privacy of mental events. The “privilege” is the fact that, whatever is going on in your mind, you are not only the first but the only one to know of it directly. The “privacy” refers to the fact that if you decide not to tell anyone or betray yourself (through your facial expressions or your behavior), no one else need ever know. If you have a wart on your thigh, you can keep it contingently “private” by choosing suitable clothing. But if you have a “dirty little secret” in your mind, you have a logical guar- antee of its privacy—it is private necessarily.
“Incorrigible” means “beyond correction”; “privileged access” implies “known in a spe- cial way.” (These concepts must be kept separate.) Because of privileged access and the “privacy” of consciousness, our states of mind have the very peculiar status of being always knowable to ourselves (though whether or not we want to say “knowable with certainty” depends on our views about incorrigibility) and yet possibly unknowable to anyone else. That is why, as you learned in grade school, you could always fake a headache to stay home for the day but you couldn’t fake a fever or a sore. As long as it was purely mental, it was also purely private. your success depended wholly upon how good (or bad) an actor you were. But when it comes to your body, you were in no privileged position. It was the thermometer, not your opinions, that told whether you had a fever or not. And it was the doctor, not you, who decided how serious your sore really was. When it came to your own consciousness, on the other hand, you were in a truly privileged and irrefutable position.
• What does it mean to say that your own mental experiences are “incorrigible”? How does this notion resist materialism? How does Freud undermine the claim to incorrigibility?
opponents of materialistic and eliminative ac- counts of the mind-body relation continue to point to the peculiarity of the first-person position, of our relationship to our own consciousness in their argu- ments. Against all forms of reductionism and mate- rialism, philosopher Thomas Nagel has argued in an ingenious fashion that it is consciousness, or what he calls “subjectivity,” that makes the problem so “intractable.” Characterizing “subjectivity” loosely as “what it’s like” to be something, he introduces his concern about the mind-body problem with the in- triguing question: “What is it like to be a bat?”
F RO M Mortal Questions B Y Thomas Nagel19
Conscious experience is a widespread phe- nomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life, though we cannot be sure of its presence
Thomas Nagel (1937–)
An American philosopher at New York University and a broad-ranging thinker who has written on a spectrum of topics from sex and death to political philosophy and racism in South Africa. He is the author of Mortal Questions and The View from Nowhere.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel teaches at New york University. (© DARIO PIGNATELLI/Reuters/ Corbis)
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in the simpler organisms, and it is very difficult to say in general what provides evi- dence of it. (Some extremists have been prepared to deny it even of mammals other than man.) No doubt it occurs in countless forms totally unimaginable to us, on other planets in other solar systems throughout the universe. But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basi- cally, that there is something it is like to be that organism. There may be further implications about the form of the experience; there may even (though I doubt it) be implications about the behavior of the organism. But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.
We may call this the subjective character of experience. It is not captured by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental, for all of them are logi- cally compatible with its absence. It is not analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people though they experienced nothing. It is not ana- lyzable in terms of the causal role of experiences in relation to typical human behav- ior—for similar reasons. I do not deny that conscious mental states and events cause behavior, nor that they may be given functional characterizations. I deny only that this kind of thing exhausts their analysis. Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed. It is useless to base the defense of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character.
. . . I assume we all believe that bats have experience. After all, they are mammals,
and there is no more doubt that they have experience than that mice or pigeons or whales have experience. I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all. Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philo- sophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an
excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fun- damentally alien form of life.
I have said that the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation, detecting the reflections, from objects within range, of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks. Their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables bats to make precise dis- criminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision. But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any
“Fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism— something it is like for the organism.” —T H O M A S N A G E L
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sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat. We must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate to the inner life of the bat from our own case, and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion.
Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one’s feet in an attic. Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat be- haves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imag- ining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications.
To the extent that I could look and behave like a wasp or a bat without changing my fundamental structure, my experiences would not be anything like the experi- ences of those animals. On the other hand, it is doubtful that any meaning can be attached to the supposition that I should possess the internal neurophysiological constitution of a bat. Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like. The best evidence would come from the experiences of bats, if we only knew what they were like.
• Explain “privileged access.” How is it distinct from incorrigibility? How does “privi- leged access” pose the problem of knowing what it is like to be a bat? (What would it be like to be a bat?)
Nagel is not the only contemporary thinker to approach the nature of the mind-body rela- tion through thought experiment. Australian philosopher David Chalmers, among others, has made use of the notion of zombies to challenge physicalist views of the mind (views that take the mind to be reducible to or a function of physical processes). As Chalmers defines the idea, a “philosophical zombie” (as opposed to a movie zombie or a zombie produced by voodoo) is a being that is physically just like us, behaving as we do, but completely lacking in conscious experience. “Zombies look and behave like the conscious beings that we know and love, but ‘all is dark inside.’ There is nothing it is like to be a zombie.”20 Chalmers is not arguing that such beings exist, but he raises the question of whether such beings are logi- cally and metaphysically possible. If they are (though this is a big if ), this implies that having the kinds of bodies we have does not automatically result in our having conscious minds. This possibility strikes some as reason to question mind-body identity theory and perhaps as grounds for endorsing some form of dualism, since minds and bodies appear to be (in the abstract) separable kinds of things.
20 David Chalmers, “Zombies on the Web,” URL: http://consc.net/zombies.html.
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E. Changing Our Minds: Holism and Consciousness When Aristotle wrote about “the soul,” he meant nothing other than “the form of the body”:
F RO M De Anima B Y Aristotle21
One can no more ask if the body and the soul are one than if the wax and the impression it receives are one, or speak- ing generally the matter of each thing and the form of which it is the matter; for admitting that the terms unity and existence are used in many senses, the paramount sense is that of actuality. We have, then, given a general definition of what the soul is: it is substance expressed as form. It is this which makes a body what it is.
This is not behaviorism. Aristotle is not denying the exis- tence of anything that we normally believe in. yet it is clearly not a dualism of the Cartesian variety, and this raises the fol- lowing question: Are there ways of conceiving of ourselves without falling into dualistic talk about minds and bodies?
We can only suggest a few possibilities here. The first, per- haps, was advanced by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosoph- ical Investigations. Although he has often been considered an unconfessed behaviorist, a more recent and perhaps more plausible interpretation is that Wittgenstein wanted to deny
the very idea that human beings are a curious combination of two very different substances or kinds of entities or events. Rather, there are just people, not minds plus bodies.
A very different kind of answer comes to us from Husserl’s phenomenology. Although Husserl was not particularly concerned with the mind-body problem as such, he was obvi- ously very interested in the nature of consciousness, the topic that provides the subject matter of his entire life’s work. What Husserl argued began with a violent attack on the spa- tial metaphors we use in talking about consciousness. At the beginning of the chapter, we mentioned these, suggesting that they were “just metaphors,” symptoms of a problem but not a problem themselves. Husserl, however, contends that they are a problem, that philoso- phers have not used them merely as metaphors, and that it is because of their taking these metaphors literally that our problems about consciousness arise in the first place.
What Husserl attacks is the very idea of consciousness as a mysterious container, “in” which one finds ideas, thoughts, feelings, desires, and so on. The same objection holds of such metaphors as “the stream of consciousness,” with emotions, thoughts, and feelings floating by like so much flotsam and jetsam. Consciousness must rather be viewed in two parts (though Husserl insists these must not be thought of as a separate “dualism”): There are acts of consciousness, and there are the objects of those acts.
(© iStockphoto.com/Anton Brand)
21 Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Loeb Classical Library from Aristotle: Minor Works, Volume XIV, trans. W. S. Hett, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936.
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Simply stated, a phenomenologist would analyze my seeing a tree into (1) my act of seeing and (2) the tree as seen. So far, this looks innocent enough. But its consequences are not so innocent. First, just in passing, notice what this does to Berke- ley’s idealism. Berkeley’s whole argument rested on his thesis that all we can experience are ideas. But this is a confusion, Husserl insists, of our act of expe- riencing with the objects experienced. The object experienced (the tree) is not merely my idea. Accordingly, Husserl concludes that Berkeley’s ide- alism is “absurd.” And in general, Husserl’s phenom- enological theory insists that philosophers have been neglectful of this crucial distinction. Many at- tributes of the act of experiencing do not hold of the object; for example, the object, unlike the act, is not “private.” one and only one person, namely, myself, can perform my act of seeing. But any number of people can see the object of my seeing, the tree. Moreover, there can be no such thing, Husserl argues, as a conscious act without an object. If I am conscious, I am conscious of something. you can see how this might provide a powerful argument against many traditional forms of skepticism.
our concern here is Husserl’s conception of consciousness, which depends on intentionality. Intentionality, as a philosophical notion, is the “about- ness” of consciousness, its relation to the world. (The act and object as Husserl describes them are often called the “intentional act,” and the “intentional object.”) To say that consciousness is intentional means (among other things) that our conscious acts are always directed toward objects. We should not, therefore, talk about conscious acts as self-contained “contents” that are mysteriously coordi- nated with the movements of our bodies. Rather, we can simply say that among our various acts as persons are intentional conscious acts as well as physical ac- tions. We can look at a tree and we can kick a tree. But there is no problem of “coordination” or interaction.
This theory was never actually developed by Hus- serl himself, but it was worked out in great detail by one of his “existential” followers in France, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (for a time a close friend and inter- locutor of Sartre). Coming from a very different start- ing point, Merleau-Ponty arrives at a position surprisingly close to that of Wittgenstein. It must not be called “behaviorist,” but like Wittgenstein, Mer- leau-Ponty does reject the traditional way of dividing up mind and body. He thereby suggests a very dif- ferent conception of persons in which such problem- atic distinctions are not allowed to arise.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
An Austrian-born philosopher who became the single most powerful influence on twentieth-century “analytic” philosophy. He entered philosophy as an engineer, stud- ied with Bertrand Russell, and wrote the book Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus (1922), which in- spired logical positivism. Giving up philosophy for a number of years and changing his mind about his arguments in the Tractatus, he returned to philoso- phy at Cambridge and developed that “therapeutic” brand of phi- losophy that became known as
“ordinary-language” philosophy. In his later works, culminating in his Philosophical Investigations (1953, published posthumously), Wittgenstein initiated a devastating attack on Cartesian dualism and the problems it carried with it. His so-called private language argument, culled from a series of aphorisms, argues that even if there were such “private” occurrences as mental events, we should have no way of talking about them and no way of knowing about them, even in our own case. But although he is often described as a “behaviorist,” Wittgenstein is better described as one of those philosophers who was groping for an entirely new conception of a “person” or, at least, attempting to reject all the old ones.
Ludwig Wittgenstein is hon- ored on this Austrian stamp. (© iStockphoto.com/ traveler1116)
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961)
A French “existentialist,” Merleau- Ponty theorizes the body as our means of knowing and engaging with our world. His most important work is his Phenomenology of Perception (1945). He is also well known for his political writings and his art criticism. In his early Struc- ture of Behavior (1942), he argued that the human body cannot be considered merely another “frag- ment of matter,” in other words, merely a body, but must be viewed as the center of our experience.Maurice Merleau-Ponty
(© Bettmann/Corbis)
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Merleau-Ponty attacks dualism from the side that has so far seemed least controversial— the idea that the human body is just another “bit of matter.” He introduces the notion of a “dialectic” between mind and body, by which he means that there is no ultimate distinction between them. From one point of view, he argues, it is possible to see the body as “the cause of the structure of consciousness,” for example, as a physiologist interested in the workings of the brain and the sense organs. From another point of view, it is possible to see the body as a mere “object of knowledge,” for example, when a medical student dissects a body in his anatomy class. But it is a mistake, Merleau-Ponty argues, to confuse either of these viewpoints with the “correct” view of the body, either as a cause of consciousness or as something wholly distinct from it. only the living body can count as my body, except in a very special and not everyday sense, namely, the sense in which I can talk about what will happen to my body after I die.
“The body is not a self-enclosed mechanism” he argues, nor does it makes sense to treat “the soul” or consciousness as a distinct entity with some mysterious relationship with the body. “There is not a duality of substances,” he writes, but only “the dialectic of living being in its biological milieu.” Merleau-Ponty sometimes says that consciousness is nothing but “the meaning of one’s body,” all of which is to say, in extremely complicated prose, that mind and body are nothing other than a single entity, and the distinctions we make between them are always special cases. “I live my body,” he says; there is no enigma of “my body” to be explained.22
In his difficult “dialectical” language, Merleau-Ponty defends a thesis that is strikingly similar to that proposed by Wittgenstein: one cannot treat a person as an uneasy conglom- erate of mental parts and body parts; instead, we must begin with the whole person. But while Wittgenstein proceeds by attacking the mental side of Cartesian dualism, Merleau- Ponty attacks anyone who would treat the human as “just another body.” The body itself is not only alive but, in an important sense, conscious. This does not mean, as in Descartes, that it is connected with a consciousness. It is itself aware, as we often notice when we talk of “bodily awareness” or “feeling our way.” The difference between the body of a living person and a corpse is not just a difference in physiology, nor is it the difference between an “inhabited” body and an “uninhabited” body. My body and myself are essentially one, and to try to separate them, as Descartes had done, is to make the relationship between “me and my body” into an unnecessary mystery.
A similar view has been defended by analytic philosopher Galen Strawson, following Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Strawson objects to a standard analysis of consciousness by analytic philosophy. According to that analysis, consciousness consists of two elements, sensations and intentionality (Hume’s “impressions and ideas”). Strawson contends that there is a more holistic concept that is essential, what he calls “cognitive experience.”
On “Cognitive Experience” B Y Galen Strawson23
Consider (experience) the difference, for you, between my saying: “I’m reading War and Peace” and my saying “barath abalori trafalon.” In both cases you experi- ence sounds, but in the first case you experience something more: you have understanding-experience, cognitive experience.
22 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher, Boston: Beacon Press, 1963. 23 From Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Mind, eds. David Woodruff Smith and Amie L. Thomasson. New york: oxford University Press, 2005.
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Why isn’t this point universally acknowl- edged? Have you had only sensory experience for the last two minutes? One problem is that there has been a terminological lock-in. When an- alytic philosophers talk generally about what I call “EQ content”—when they talk gener- ally of the “subjective character” of experi- ence, or “what-it’s-likeness,” or “qualitative character,” or “phenomenology” in the cur- rent deviant use of the term (It is incorrect first because “phenomenology” is the study of experience, not experience itself, second because when it is used to mean experience itself it is used too narrowly to mean only sensory content.)—they standardly have only sensory EQ content, in mind, and the mistake has already been made. For this terminological habit simply forbids expression of the idea that there may be non-sensory or cognitive EQ content.
One doesn’t have to be Husserl to be astounded by this terminological folly, and the metaphysical folly that it entrains—the denial of the existence of cognitive experience—as one negotiates the unceasing richness of everyday experience. It beggars belief. It amounts to an outright denial of the existence of almost all our actual experience, or rather of fundamental features of almost all (perhaps all) our experience. And yet it is terminological orthodoxy in present-day analytic philoso- phy of mind.
How did this happen? It was, perhaps, an unfortunate by-blow of the correct but excessively violent rejection, in the twentieth century, of the “image theory of thinking” or “picture theory of thinking” seemingly favoured, in various degrees, by the British empiricists and others. But rejecting the picture theory of thinking didn’t require denying the existence of cognitive experience. On the contrary. Liberation from the picture-theory idea that cognitive experience centrally and constitutively involves sensory experience, and is indeed (somehow or other) a kind of internal sensory experience, is a necessary first step towards a decent account of what cognitive experience is. Schopenhauer certainly didn’t reject the existence of cognitive experience when he refuted the picture theory of thinking in 1819 in terms that no one has improved on:
While another person is speaking, do we at once translate his speech into pictures of the imagination that instantaneously flash upon us and are arranged, linked, formed, and coloured according to the words that stream forth, and to their grammatical inflex- ions? What a tumult there would be in our heads while we listened to a speech or read a book! This is not what happens at all. The meaning of the speech is immediately grasped, accurately and clearly apprehended, without as a rule any conceptions of fancy being mixed up with it.
When it comes to EQ content, then, when it comes to the strictly qualitative charac- ter of experience, which is wholly what it is considered entirely independently of its causes there is cognitive EQ content as well as sensory or non-cognitive EQ content. There is cognitive experience. Its existence is obvious to unprejudiced reflection, but some philosophers have denied it fiercely and, it must be said, rather scornfully.
Galen Strawson (1952–)
A contemporary British philoso- pher who currently teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. He has numerous interests, including the mind-body problem, the phi- losophy of mind, and the nature of the self.
Galen Strawson (Photo credit: Babette Babich. Used with permission of Galen Strawson.)
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It can seem difficult to get a decent theoretical grip on it. It is, for one thing, hard to pin down the contribution to the character of your current experience that is being made now by the content of this very sentence in such a way as to be able to take it as the object of reflective thought. (It is far easier to do this in the case of the phenomenological character of an experience of yellow, let the “transparentists” say what they will.) In fact, when it comes to the attempt to figure to oneself the phenomenological character of understanding a sentence like “Consider your hear- ing and understanding of this very sentence and the next” it seems that all one can really do is rethink the sentence as a whole, comprehendingly; and the trouble with doing this is that it seems to leave one with no mental room to stand back in such a way as to be able to take the phenomenological character of one’s understanding of the sentence, redelivered to one by this rethinking, as the principal object of one’s attention: one’s mind is taken up with the sense of the thought in such a way that it is very hard to think about the experience of having the thought.
This is, as it were, a merely practical difficulty. It is I think a further point that there is in any case something fundamentally insubstantial, intangible, unpin- downable, about the character of much cognitive experience, and that this is so even though cognitive experience can also and simultaneously have a character of great determinacy. Consider, for example, your experience of understanding this very sentence, uneventful as it is. Or the sentence “This sentence has five words.” Determinate but insubstantial.
I use quiet sentences to make the point, rather than sentences like “A thousand bonobos hurtled past on bright green bicycles,” simply because it helps to still the imagistic or emotional accompaniments of thought or understanding as far as pos- sible. It is then easier to see that what is left is something completely different, something that is equally real and definite and rich although it can seem trouble-
somely intangible when one tries to reflect on it: the experience that is standardly involved in the mere comprehending of words, read, thought, or heard— right now—, where this comprehending is (once again) considered quite independently of any imagis- tic or emotional accompaniments. Cognitive experi- ence, we may say, is a matter of whatever EQ content is involved in such episodes after one has subtracted any non-cognitive EQ content trappings or accompa- niments that such episodes may have.
I think we have no choice but to grant that our capacity for cognitive experience is a distinct naturally evolved experiential modality that is, whatever its origins, fundamentally different from all the sensory experiential modalities (at least as we currently under- stand them). This is a radical claim in the current con- text of discussion of experience or consciousness, especially given all the input from psychology and neuropsychology, which very strongly constrains people to think that all experience must be somehow sensory.
We also have to think through very clearly the initially difficult fact that cognitive EQ content is, in
It is hard not to see emotional intelligence in this baby’s expres- sion. (© Shutterstock.com/dpaint)
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itself, purely a matter of experiential qualitative character, wholly what it is considered entirely independently of its causes. We may have to dwell on the point, work on it, especially if we have been trained up as analytic philosophers at any time in the last fifty years. Try now to imagine life without cognitive ex- perience being part of the (experiential) qualitative character of experience. Consider yourself reading this now and try to convince yourself that all that is going on is sensory experience (accompanied by non-experiential changes in your dispositional set).
F. The Politics of the Mind-Body Problem We have been considering alternative theories offered to explain the relationship between mind and body. While the question of how the two are related has been of philosophical interest in itself, Elizabeth V. Spelman suggests that the way philosophers have understood this relationship often has an impact on their understandings of other matters as well. To illustrate this point, she considers Plato’s hierarchical account of this relationship as inte- grally related to his political views. Plato’s negative view of the body in relation to the soul, she claims, is reflected in his assessments of groups of people within society. He judges those whose way of life is largely involved with bodily matters (women and slaves, for ex- ample) as inferior to those whose lives are focused primarily on more “mental” matters, a status restricted to free men.
F RO M “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views” B Y Elizabeth V. Spelman24
P L AT O ’ S L E S S O N S A B O U T T H E S O U L A N D T H E B O DY Plato’s dialogues are filled with lessons about knowledge, reality, and goodness, and most of the lessons carry with them strong praise for the soul and strong indict- ments against the body. According to Plato, the body, with its deceptive senses, keeps us from real knowledge; it rivets us in a world of material things which is far removed from the world of reality; and it tempts us away from the virtuous life. It is in and through the soul, if at all, that we shall have knowledge, be in touch with reality, and lead a life of virtue. Only the soul can truly know, for only the soul can ascend to the real world, the world of the Forms or Ideas. That world is the per- fect model to which imperfect, particular things, we find in matter merely approxi- mate. It is a world which, like the soul, is in- visible, unchanging, not subject to decay, eternal. To be good, one’s soul must know the Good, that is, the Form of Goodness, and this is impossible while one is dragged down by the demands and temptations of bodily life. Hence, bodily death is nothing to be feared: immortality of the soul not only is possible, but greatly to be desired, because
Elizabeth V. Spelman
An American philosopher and pro- fessor of philosophy and humani- ties at Smith College. Her research focuses in particular on intersec- tions between gender and racial identity and on emotion’s role in political relationships.
Elizabeth V. Spelman (Photo credit: Deborah Campert. Used with permission by Elizabeth V. Spelman.)
“Plato seems to want to make very firm his insistence on the destructiveness of the body to the soul. In doing so, he holds up for our ridicule and scorn those lives devoted to bodily pursuits.” — E L I Z A B E T H V. S P E L M A N
24 Elizabeth V. Spelman, “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views,” Feminist Studies 8:1 (Spring 1982): 109–131.
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when one is released from the body one finally can get down to the real business of life, for this real business of life is the business of the soul. Indeed, Socrates de- scribes his own commitment, while still on earth, to encouraging his fellow Athe- nians to pay attention to the real business of life:
[I have spent] all my time going about trying to persuade you, young and old, to make your first and chief concern not for your bodies nor for your possessions, but for the highest welfare of your souls. [Apology 30a–b]
Plato also tells us about the nature of beauty. Beauty has nothing essentially to do with the body or with the world of material things. Real beauty cannot “take the form of a face, or of hands, or of anything that is of the flesh” (Symposium 221a). Yes, there are beautiful things, but they only are entitled to be described that way because they “partake in” the form of Beauty, which itself is not found in the mate- rial world. Real beauty has characteristics which merely beautiful things cannot have; real beauty
is an everlasting loveliness which neither comes nor goes, which neither flowers nor fades, for such beauty is the same on every hand, the same then as now, here as there, this way as that way, the same to every worshipper as it is to every other. [Symposium 221a]
Because it is only the soul that can know the Forms, those eternal and unchang- ing denizens of Reality, only the soul can know real Beauty; our changing, decay- ing bodies only can put us in touch with changing, decaying pieces of the material world.
Plato also examines love. His famous discussion of love in the Symposium ends up being a celebration of the soul over the body. Attraction to and appreciation for the beauty of another’s body is but a vulgar fixation unless one can use such ap- preciation as a stepping stone to understanding Beauty itself. One can begin to learn about Beauty, while one is still embodied, when one notices that this body is beautiful, that that body is beautiful, and so on, and then one begins to realize that Beauty itself is something beyond any particular beautiful body or thing. The kind of love between people that is to be valued is not the attraction of one body for another, but the attraction of one soul for another. There is procreation of the spirit as well as of the flesh (Symposium 209a). All that bodies in unison can create are more bodies—the children women bear—which are mortal, subject to change and decay. But souls in unison can create “something lovelier and less mortal than human seed,” for spiritual lovers “conceive and bear the things of the spirit,” that is, “wisdom and all her sister virtues” (Symposium 209c). Hence, spiritual love be- tween men is preferable to physical love between men and women. At the same time, physical love between men is ruled out, on the grounds that “enjoyment of flesh by flesh” is “wanton shame,” while desire of soul for soul is at the heart of a relationship that “reverences, aye and worships, chastity and manhood, greatness and wisdom” (Laws 837c–d). The potential for harm in sexual relations is very great—harm not so much to one’s body or physique, but to one’s soul. Young men especially shouldn’t get caught up with older men in affairs that threaten their “spiritual development,” for such development is “assuredly and ever will be of supreme value in the sight of gods and men alike” (Phaedrus 241c).
So, then, one has no hope of understanding the nature of knowledge, reality, goodness, love, or beauty unless one recognizes the distinction between soul and
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body; and one has no hope of attaining any of these unless one works hard on free- ing the soul from the lazy, vulgar, beguiling body. A philosopher is someone who is committed to doing just that, and that is why philosophers go willingly unto death; it is, after all, only the death of their bodies, and finally, once their souls are released from their bodies, these philosophical desiderata are within reach.
The offices and attributes of the body vis-à-vis the soul are on the whole inter- changeable, in Plato’s work, with the offices and attributes of one part of the soul vis-à-vis another part. The tug-of-war between soul and body has the same dy- namics, and the same stakes, as the tug-of-war between “higher” and “lower” parts of the soul. For example, sometimes Plato speaks as if the soul should resist the desires not of the body, but of part of its very self (Gorgias 505b). Sometimes he describes internal conflict as the struggle between soul and body, and sometimes as the battle among the rational, the spirited, and the appetitive parts of the soul. The spirited part of the soul is supposed to help out the rational part in its constant at- tempt to “preside over the appetitive part which is the mass of the soul in each of us and the most insatiate by nature of wealth”; unless it is watched, the appetitive part can get “filled and infected with the so-called pleasures associated with the body” (Republic 442a–b).
The division among parts of the soul is intimately tied to one other central and famous aspect of Plato’s philosophy that hasn’t been mentioned so far: Plato’s politi- cal views. His discussion of the parts of the soul and their proper relation to one another is integral to his view about the best way to set up a state. The rational part of the soul ought to rule the soul and ought to be attended by the spirited part in keeping watch over the unruly appetitive part; just so, there ought to be rulers of the state (the small minority in whom reason is dominant), who, with the aid of high-spirited guardians of order, watch over the multitudes (whose appetites need to be kept under control).
What we learn from Plato, then, about knowledge, reality, goodness, beauty, love, and statehood, is phrased in terms of a distinction between soul and body, or alternatively and roughly equivalently, in terms of a distinction between the ratio- nal and irrational. And the body, or the irrational part of the soul, is seen as an enormous and annoying obstacle to the possession of these desiderata. If the body gets the upper hand (!) over the soul, or if the irrational part of the soul overpowers the rational part, one can’t have knowledge, one can’t see beauty, one will be far from the highest form of love, and the state will be in utter chaos. So the soul/body distinction, or the distinction between the rational and irrational parts of the soul, is a highly charged distinction. An inquiry into the distinction is no mild meta- physical musing. It is quite clear that the distinction is heavily value-laden. Even if Plato hadn’t told us outright that the soul is more valuable than the body, and the rational part of the soul is more important than the irrational part, that message rings out in page after page of his dialogues. The soul/body distinction, then, is integral to the rest of Plato’s views, and the higher worth of the soul is integral to that distinction.
P L AT O ’ S V I E W O F T H E S O U L A N D B O DY, A N D H I S AT T I T U D E T OWA R D WO M E N Plato, and anyone else who conceives of the soul as something unobservable, cannot of course speak as if we could point to the soul, or hold it up for direct observation.
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At one point, Plato says no mere mortal can really understand the nature of the soul, but one perhaps could tell what it resembles (Phaedrus 246a). So it is not sur- prising to find Plato using many metaphors and analogies to describe what the soul is like, in order to describe relations between the soul and the body or relations between parts of the soul. For example, thinking, a function of the soul, is de- scribed by analogy to talking (Theaetetus 190a; Sophist 263e). The parts of the soul are likened to a team of harnessed, winged horses and their charioteer (Phaedrus 246a). The body’s relation to the soul is such that we are to think of the body vis-à-vis the soul as a tomb (Gorgias 493a), a grave or prison (Cratylus 400c), or as barnacles or rocks holding down the soul (Republic 611e–612a). Plato compares the lowest or bodylike part of the soul to a brood of beasts (Republic 590c).
But Plato’s task is not only to tell us what the soul is like, not only to provide us with ways of getting a fix on the differences between souls and bodies, or differ- ences between parts of the soul. As we’ve seen, he also wants to convince us that the soul is much more important than the body, and that it is to our peril that we let ourselves be beckoned by the rumblings of the body at the expense of harkening to the call of the soul. And he means to convince us of this by holding up for our inspection the silly and sordid lives of those who pay too much attention to their bodies and do not care enough for their souls; he wants to remind us of how unruly, how without direction, are the lives of those in whom the lower part of the soul holds sway over the higher part. Because he can’t point to an adulterated soul, he points instead to those embodied beings whose lives are in such bad shape that we can be sure that their souls are adulterated. And whose lives exemplify the proper soul/body relationship gone haywire? The lives of women (or sometimes the lives of children, slaves, and brutes).
For example, how are we to know when the body has the upper hand over the soul, or when the lower part of the soul has managed to smother the higher part? We presumably can’t see such conflict, so what do such conflicts translate into, in terms of actual human lives? Well, says Plato, look at the lives of women. It is women who get hysterical at the thought of death (Phaedo 60a, 112d; Apology 35b); obviously, their emotions have overpowered their reason, and they can’t control themselves. The worst possible model for young men could be “a woman, young or old or wrangling with her husband, defying heaven, loudly boasting, fortunate in her own conceit, or involved in misfortune or possessed by grief and lamentation—still less a woman that is sick, in love, or in labor” (Republic 395d–e). He continues:
When in our own lives some affliction comes to us you are aware that we plume ourselves . . . on our ability to remain calm and endure, in the belief that this is the conduct of a man, and [giving in to grief] that of a woman. [Republic 605c–d]
To have more concern for your body than your soul is to act just like a woman; hence, the most proper penalty for a soldier who surrenders to save his body, when he should be willing to die out of the courage of his soul, is for the soldier to be turned into a woman (Laws 944e). Plato believed that souls can go through many different embodied life-times. There will be certain indications, in one’s life, of the kind of life one is leading now; and unless a man lives righteously now, he will as his next incarnation “pass into a woman” and if he doesn’t behave then, he’ll become a brute! (Timaeus 42b–c, 76e, 91a).
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Moreover, Plato on many occasions points to women to illustrate the improper way to pursue the things for which philosophers are constantly to be searching. For example, Plato wants to explain how important and also how difficult the attain- ment of real knowledge is. He wants us to realize that not just anyone can have knowledge, there is a vital distinction between those who really have knowledge and those who merely think they do. Think, for example, about the question of health. If we don’t make a distinction between those who know what health is, and those who merely have unfounded and confused opinions about what health is, then “in the matter of good or bad health . . . any woman or child—or animal, for that matter—knows what is wholesome for it and is capable of curing itself ” (Theaetetus 171c). The implication is clear: if any old opinion were to count as real knowledge, then we’d have to say that women, children, and maybe even animals have knowledge. But surely they don’t have knowledge! And why not? For one thing, because they don’t recognize the difference between the material, changing world of appearance, and the invisible, eternal world of Reality. In matters of beauty, for example, they are so taken by the physical aspects of things that they assume that they can see and touch what is beautiful; they don’t realize that what one knows when one has knowledge of real Beauty cannot be something that is seen or touched. Plato offers us, then, as an example of the failure to distinguish between Beauty itself, on the one hand, and beautiful things, on the other, “boys and women when they see bright-colored things” (Republic 557c). They don’t real- ize that it is not through one’s senses that one knows about beauty or anything else, for real beauty is eternal and invisible and unchangeable and can only be known through the soul.
So the message is that in matters of knowledge, reality, and beauty, don’t follow the example of women. They are mistaken about those things. In matters of love, women’s lives serve as negative examples also. Those men who are drawn by “vulgar” love, that is, love of body for body, “turn to women as the object of their love, and raise a family” (Symposium 208e); those men drawn by a more “heavenly” kind of love, that is, love of soul for soul, turn to other men. But there are strong sanctions against physical love between men: such physical unions, especially be- tween older and younger men, are “unmanly.” The older man isn’t strong enough to resist his lust (as in woman, the irrational part of the soul has overtaken the ra- tional part), and the younger man, “the impersonator of the female,” is reproached for this “likeness to the model” (Laws 836e). The problem with physical love be- tween men, then, is that men are acting like women.
To summarize the argument so far: the soul/body distinction is integral to the rest of Plato’s views; integral to the soul/body distinction is the higher worth and importance of the soul in comparison to the body; finally, Plato tries to persuade his readers that it is to one’s peril that one does not pay proper attention to one’s soul—for if one doesn’t, one will end up acting and living as if one were a woman. We know, Plato says, about lives dictated by the demands and needs and induce- ments of the body instead of the soul. Such lives surely are not good models for those who want to understand and undertake a life devoted to the nurturance of the best part of us: our souls.
To anyone at all familiar with Plato’s official and oft-reported views about women, the above recitation of misogynistic remarks may be quite surprising. Ac- counts of Plato’s views about women usually are based on what he says in book 5
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of the Republic. In that dialogue, Plato startled his contemporaries, when as part of his proposal for the constitution of an ideal state, he suggested that
there is no pursuit of the administrators of a state that belongs to woman because she is a woman or to a man because he is a man. But the natural capacities are distributed alike among both creatures, and women naturally share in all pursuits and men in all. [Republic 455d–e]
The only difference between men and women, Plato says at this point, is that women have weaker bodies than men, but this is no sign that something is amiss with their souls.
Plato also says, in a dialogue called the Meno, that it doesn’t make sense to talk about “women’s virtues” or “men’s virtues,” because virtue as virtue is the same, whether it happens to appear in the life of a woman, a man, or a child. This view is part of Plato’s doctrine of the Forms, referred to earlier. Virtue, like any other Form, is eternal and unchanging; so it can’t be one thing here, another thing there; it is always one and the same thing. Virtue as virtue does not “differ, in its character as virtue, whether it be in a child or an old man, a woman or a man” (Meno 73a).
Well now, what are we to make of this apparent double message in Plato about women? What are we to do with the fact that on the one hand, when Plato explic- itly confronts the question of women’s nature, in the Republic, he seems to affirm the equality of men and women; while on the other hand, the dialogues are riddled with misogynistic remarks? I think that understanding the centrality and impor- tance of the soul/body distinction in Plato’s work helps us to understand this con- tradiction in his views about women. As we’ve seen, Plato insists, over and over again in a variety of ways, that our souls are the most important part of us. Not only is it through our souls that we shall have access to knowledge, reality, good- ness, beauty; but also, in effect we are our souls; when our bodies die and decay, we, that is our souls, shall live on. Our bodies are not essential to our identity; in their most benign aspect, our bodies are incidental appendages; in their most malignant aspect, they are obstacles to the smooth functioning of our souls. If we are our souls, and our bodies are not essential to who we are, then it doesn’t make any dif- ference, ultimately, whether we have a woman’s body or a man’s body. When one thinks about this emphasis in Plato’s thought, his views about the equality of women and men seem integral to the rest of his views. If the only difference be- tween women and men is that they have different bodies, and if bodies are merely incidental attachments to what constitutes one’s real identity, then there is no im- portant difference between men and women.
But as we have also seen, Plato seems to want to make very firm his insistence on the destructiveness of the body to the soul. In doing so, he holds up for our ridi- cule and scorn those lives devoted to bodily pursuits. Over and over again, women’s lives are depicted as being such lives. His misogyny, then, is part of his somatopho- bia: the body is seen as the source of all the undesirable traits a human being could have, and women’s lives are spent manifesting those traits.
So the contradictory sides of Plato’s views about women are tied to the distinc- tion he makes between soul and body and the lessons he hopes to teach his readers about their relative value. When preaching about the overwhelming importance of the soul, he can’t but regard the kind of body one has as of no final significance, so there is no way for him to assess differentially the lives of women and men; but when making gloomy pronouncements about the worth of the body, he points an
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accusing finger at a class of people with a certain kind of body—women—because he regards them, as a class, as embodying (!) the very traits he wishes no one to have. In this way, women constitute a deviant class in Plato’s philosophy, in the sense that he points to their lives as the kinds of lives that are not acceptable philo- sophically: they are just the kinds of lives no one, especially philosophers, ought to live. It is true that Plato chastises certain kinds of men: sophists, tyrants, and cow- ards, for example. But he frequently puts them in their place by comparing them to women! We’ve already seen some examples of that, such as male homosexuals being ridiculed for their likeness to women. Another example comes from the same dialogue in which Plato’s argument about equality occurs. At the one point in the Republic (579c), Plato tries to convince us that tyranny does not pay, by saying that a tyrant is someone who “must live for the most part cowering in the recesses of his house like a woman, envying among the other citizens anyone who goes abroad and sees any good thing.”
Plato had what I have described elsewhere as a case of psychophilic somatopho- bia. As a psychophile who sometimes spoke as if the souls of women were not in any important way different from the souls of men, he had some remarkably non- sexist things to say about women. As a somatophobe who often referred to women as exemplifying states of being and forms of living most removed from the philo- sophical ideal, he left the dialogues awash with misogynistic remarks. Of course, one can be a dualist without being a misogynist, and one can be a misogynist without being a dualist. However, Plato was both a dualist and a misogynist, and his negative views about women were connected to his negative views about the body, insofar as he depicted women’s lives as quintessentially body-directed.
In summary, Plato does not merely embrace a distinction between soul and body; for all the good and hopeful and desirable possibilities for human life (now and in an afterlife) are aligned with the soul, while the rather seedy and undesirable liabilities of human life are aligned with the body (alternatively, the alignment is with the higher or lower parts of the soul). There is a highly polished moral gloss to the soul/body distinction in Plato. One of his favorite devices for bringing this moral gloss to a high luster is holding up, for our contempt and ridicule, the lives of women. This is one of the ways he tries to make clear that it makes no small difference whether you lead a soul-directed or a bodily directed life.
Spelman’s argument about the pernicious influence of the mind/body distinction in Plato’s thought does not, of course, mean that dualism is false. It does, however, suggest reasons why we should be very careful, if we do accept dualism, not to slide from distinguishing be- tween mind and body to formulating dubious views about the inferiority of some groups of people relative to others.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
Since Descartes’s discussion of mind and body as two separate and different substances, philosophers have struggled with a number of theories to explain how mind and body works together to constitute a complete human being. Certain properties of mind—its lack of “extension” and seeming “privileged access,” and the “incorrigibility” of mental claims— made the connection between mind and body extremely problematic. Therefore, philoso- phers suggested that mental events and bodily events are different aspects of some other
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event (dual aspect theory), or that they occur in parallel, like the sound and visual tracks on a film (parallelism or pre-established harmony), or that bodily events cause mental events but not the other way around (epiphenomenalism), or that mental events and bodily events are in fact identical (identity theory). Many philosophers and psychologists embraced be- haviorism, arguing that “mental event” is in fact only shorthand for a complex description of patterns of behavior. More recently, many philosophers have come to reject the distinction between mind and body altogether, insisting on the primacy and indivisibility of the concept of a person. The political legacy of mind-body dualism has also prompted some to be wary of it. other philosophers have come to embrace functionalism, which holds that the brain is in fact an extremely sophisticated computer, and the mind is causally but not logically de- pendent on the brain. Still other philosophers dismiss all such theories as essentially hope- less, insisting on the intractability of the mind-body problem.
CHAPTER REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. What is the identity theory? What problem is it called on to answer? In what ways is the dual aspect theory a version of the identity theory? In what ways is it similar to Mer- leau-Ponty’s notion of a unified body? What are the differences and similarities in these views?
2. The argument for functionalism is ultimately concerned with the relations between elements of the brain. Mental acts occur as a “function” of elements. Logical behav- iorism claims that mind is only the “pattern” of our behavior. What are the differences between these two accounts? What is similar about them? In what ways are they using the same ideas to provide different accounts of the mind?
3. Recall that Ryle rejects dualism because, according to him, Descartes committed a category mistake. In what sense do phenomenologists, like Husserl and Merleau- Ponty, agree with Ryle? How do their accounts differ from his?
4. Discuss how Nagel’s question, “What is it like to be a bat?” confronts the challenge of the eliminative materialists. Can you think of how an eliminative materialist might re- spond? How might some of the other theorists who reject dualism respond to the claim that “subjectivity” is essential to our concept of ourselves?
KEY TERMS
behaviorism functionalism philosophical zombie causal interactionism identity theory preestablished harmony dual aspect theory immediate privacy dualism incorrigibility private language argument eliminative materialism intentionality privileged access epiphenomenalism parallelism unconscious
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
Many excellent collections and studies of the mind-body problem fall under the rubric of “cognitive science” or the “philosophy of mind” these days. Some that are particularly recommended include: Stephen P. Stich and Ted A. Warfield, eds., Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind (oxford: Blackwell, 2003); John Heil, Philosophy of Mind: A Contem- porary Introduction, 3rd ed. (London and New york: Routledge, 2012); David Chalmers, Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings (New york: oxford University
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Press, 2002); David Braddon-Mitchell and Frank Jackson, Philosophy of Mind and Cogni- tion: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007); and David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (New york: oxford University Press, 1996).
Issues regarding the mind-body problem and the nature of consciousness are also dis- cussed in the first two parts of The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind, ed. Brian McLaughlin, with Ansgar Beckermann and Sven Walter (oxford: oxford University Press, 2009).
Gilbert Ryle’s famous statement of logical behaviorism, Concept of Mind, is available from University of Chicago Press, with an introduction by Daniel Dennett (2002).
Descartes’s Passions of the Soul, translated by Stephen H. Voss, is available from Hackett Publishing Company (1989).
For further information about zombies of philosophical and other species, see “Zombies on the Web,” compiled by David Chalmers, URL: http://consc.net/zombies.html.
Two delightful presentations of the functionalist position are the collection of essays by Daniel Dennett, Brainstorms (Newton Center, MA: Bradford Books, 1979) and his Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little Brown, 1991).
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6 | Self “I’m not myself today, you see,” Alice said to the caterpillar.
“I don’t see,” said the caterpillar.
L E W I S C A R RO L L
“Just be yourself!” How often have you heard that? What is it to be a “self”? And what does it mean to be a particular self? In the abstract, these questions seem obscure. But in every- thing that we do, we adopt some conception of our identity, both as a person and as an in- dividual, whether we are called upon to articulate it or not. As a student, you walk into a classroom with certain conceptions of your own abilities and intelligence, your status among other students, your role vis-à-vis the professor, some haunting memories, perhaps some embarrassment or a certain vanity about your looks, your clothes, your grades, or just your new pair of shoes.
If you had to identify yourself as an individual, describe what makes you you, how would you do it? What features are essential to being a person? What are essential to being the person you are and what features distinguish you from other persons? Think for a moment of yourself in an office, applying for a job or a scholarship for professional school or just filling out one of those dozens of forms that bombard you during the year. You dutifully fill in your birthdate, where you were born, your grades in school, your service in the military if any, awards you have received, arrests and other troubles, whether you’re married or not, male or female, perhaps your race and religion. This list of facts about yourself would be one way of identifying “you.” But at some point, I am sure you have felt that sense of absurdity and re- bellion, “this isn’t me!” or “this is all irrelevant!” What may seem more relevant to your self- identity are your political views, your tastes in art and music, your favorite books and movies, your loves and hates, habits and beliefs, or just the fact, perhaps, that you think your own thoughts. These more personal, or “internal,” features as well as the “cold facts,” or “exter- nal” features, about yourself are important for identifying you as an individual different from other individuals.
In one sense, your self-identity is the way you characterize yourself as an individual. The philosophical problem of self-identity is thus concerned in part with what these character- izing qualities are. Are they just concerned with status and roles among other people? Or is there something that can truly be called “your self,” your “essence,” or maybe even your soul, without reference to anyone else? Should we think of ourselves as individuals?
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Or should we instead view ourselves as mere components of a larger organism—society, mankind, or perhaps the world as a whole? How should we identify ourselves?
There is another sense in which we might talk about a person’s self-identity. You may know someone who has ex- perienced a religious conversion, or who has just under- gone treatment for alcoholism; or perhaps you can think of someone you see again after a long time who says, “I’m not the same person.” What does this mean, and how is it possible to say you are not the same person? When some- one says, “I’m not the same person I was,” he or she is pointing to the fact that some significant aspects of him- self or herself have changed; this person has a new self- identity. Yet, in another sense, this is still the same person; the old identity and the new identity are both identities of the same person.
So we have a second sense of “self-identity.” Here your self-identity is what makes you the same person over time. Thus, the second philosophical problem, which is the one that has most concerned philosophers, is how to identify an individual as the same individual over time. What is it about you without which you wouldn’t be you? Presumably you would still be you if you changed your religious beliefs or tastes in music. But what if you had gender reassign- ment surgery? Or what if you completely lost your memory, all recollection of your family and friends? Or what if you physically disappeared altogether, remaining only a wispy consciousness, a spirit, or a ghost without a body? Would it then make sense to say that you are still you?
There is yet a third sense in which we talk about self- identity. What individuates us, or in other words, what is it that distinguishes each of us from everyone else? Interest-
ingly, the fact of consciousness—of having thoughts and feelings—seems the most private and individual thing a person possesses, and yet is the very thing that we tend to believe all people possess. Whatever our attempts to answer the problems of self-identity, they begin with a single “fact”—our own consciousness. This was, after all, the logical beginning for Descartes, who used the fact of his own consciousness as the starting point for his whole philosophy. locke took consciousness to be basic as well. He argued that our identity is to be found in the continuity of our consciousness rather than in the continuity of our bodies. Even Hume used consciousness as a starting point, using it as the basis for questioning whether there is any such thing as the self!
Of course, these questions assume some metaphysical claims that can and have been questioned. later in this chapter, we will look at some of these assumptions and criticisms of them. Is self-identity a matter of nature? Are we born with an identity? Or is it a matter of per- sonal choice or of environmental factors such as our upbringing or education? Must a person have only one “self,” or might he or she in fact have several or many selves? Is there a “self” at all? Or is the self, as many Eastern philosophers have argued, an illusion? Should self-lessness be our ideal self-identity? Ought we even to conceive of ourselves as individuals? Or ought we instead think of ourselves as organic components of a larger community or society?
John Tenniel (1820–1914), Alice Meets the Blue Caterpillar, 1890. Does Alice’s sense of self turn upside-down when she falls through the rabbit hole? (British Library/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY)
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In this chapter, we explore a number of different questions and conceptions about self- identity. We consider the question of what makes you you, both in the sense of what makes you a person, and in the sense of what makes you the particular person you are. The great psychologist freud once said that every man is in some ways like all other men, in some ways like some other men, and in some ways like no other man. Philosophers who investigate the problem of self-identity attempt to figure out exactly how and why this might be so. We begin with an important tradition in philosophy, from Descartes and locke to Hume and Kant, which focuses on self-consciousness as the sole key to personal identity.
A. Consciousness and the Self: From Descartes to Kant Sometimes we act out our identities without being aware of it at all. At other times, particu- larly when we talk about ourselves or are placed in a situation where we are forced to “look at ourselves as others see us,” we are very much aware—even painfully aware—of our identi- ties. At such times we say we are self-conscious. In general, most modern philosophers and psychologists would argue that you can’t have a concept of who you are unless you are also sometimes (not necessarily always) self-conscious. Conversely, you can’t even be self- conscious unless you have some sense of identity, no matter how crude. The two concepts, in other words, go hand in hand and cannot be separated from each other.
Descartes is an example of a thinker who takes identity to be a matter of consciousness. Remember how he characterized himself:
But what then am I? A thing which thinks. What is a thing which thinks? It is a thing which doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, refuses, which also imagines and feels.
He goes on to say, I am a thing with desires, who perceives light and noise and feels heat. Clearly, Descartes’s concept of “self” is of thought, or consciousness—a human essence— which each person has and with which each person identifies himself or herself. He also claims to show by his method of doubt that all of this might be so even if he were not to have a body at all. Perhaps, he argues, I am fooled about my “having” a body just as I might be fooled about all sorts of other things. Therefore, he concludes, it is not my body that pro- vides me with an identity or with the self from which I begin my philosophy. It follows from this that particular aspects of my self—whether I am male or female, black or white, tall or short, handsome or ugly, strong or weak—are associated with my body only and cannot be essential to my identity. My self-identity is in my mind, in my thinking, doubting, feeling, perceiving, imagining, and desiring. I am, essentially, “a thing which thinks.”
• How would you describe your “self”—that which makes you “you” and different from other people?
• How much of your self-identity is shaped by your interaction with other people, either family, friends, or strangers? To what extent do you think that your identity is self-determined?
• Do you think that there is anything that necessarily “underlies” the changes each of us undergoes as a person through the course of a lifetime?
• Are there different senses of self-identity, in your view? Or are all of them reducible to a single all-embracing sense?
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F RO M “Meditation VI” B Y René Descartes1
Therefore, just because I know certainly that I exist, and that meanwhile I do not remark that any other thing necessarily pertains to my nature or essence, excepting that I am a thinking thing, I rightly conclude that my essence consists solely in the fact that I am a thinking thing [or a substance whose whole essence or nature is to think]. And although possibly (or rather certainly, as I shall say in a moment) I pos- sess a body with which I am very intimately conjoined, yet because, on the one side, I have a clear and distinct idea of myself inasmuch as I am only a thinking and unextended thing, and as, on the other, I possess a distinct idea of body, inasmuch as it is only an extended and unthinking thing, it is certain that this I [that is to say, my soul by which I am what I am], is entirely and absolutely distinct from my body, and can exist without it.
It is important to appreciate the kind of step Descartes has taken here. What he is saying is that self-identity depends on consciousness. Our identity does not depend in any way on our body remaining the same, and so human identity is different from the identity of any- thing else in the world.
• What is the connection between self-consciousness and self-identity? Do you think (some) animals are self-conscious? If so, do you think that they might have a self-identity?
• What does Descartes identify as the “self”? Is this “self” anything unique to individuals? In what sense (if any) does it individuate you as distinct from someone else?
Many philosophers have argued that not only is self-consciousness crucial to having a concept of one’s own individuality, but it is also crucial for establishing that one is an enduring self, that is, the same person over time. John locke, like Descartes, sees self-consciousness as the key to self-identity. But unlike Descartes, he argues that this identity does not depend on our remaining the same thinking substance, that is, on our having the same soul. Indeed, in the course of our life our soul might be replaced with new souls just as in the course of a tree’s growth its cells are replaced with new cells. What makes the tree the same tree is the fact that the same life is present in spite of changes in its physical structure; and what makes a person the same person is that the same consciousness and memories are present. Thus locke differs from Descartes in distinguishing between the soul (a substance) and con- sciousness. It is our consciousness that we call our “self.” In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, locke argues:
1 René Descartes, “Meditation VI,” in Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, 1911. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge university Press.
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On Personal Identity B Y John Locke2
To find wherein personal identity consists, we must consider what person stands for;—which, I think, is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from think- ing, and as it seems to me, essential to it: it being impossible for any one to perceive without perceiving that he does perceive. When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, medi- tate, or will anything, we know that we do so. Thus it is always as to our present sensations and perceptions: and by this every one is to himself that which he calls self:—it not being considered, in this case, whether the same self be continued in the same or divers substances. For, since consciousness always accompanies think- ing, and it is that which makes every one to be what he calls self, and thereby dis- tinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational being: and as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person; it is the same self now it was then; and it is by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that action was done.
Consciousness makes personal Identity.—But it is further inquired, whether it be the same identical substance. This few3 would think they had reason to doubt of, if these perceptions, with their consciousness, always remained present in the mind, whereby the same thinking thing would be always consciously present, and, as would be thought, evidently the same to itself. But that which seems to make the difficulty is this, that this consciousness being interrupted always by forgetfulness, there being no moment of our lives wherein we have the whole train of all our past actions before our eyes in one view, but even the best memories losing the sight of one part whilst they are viewing another; and we sometimes, and that the greatest part of our lives, not reflecting on our past selves, being intent on our present thoughts, and in sound sleep having no thoughts at all, or at least none with that consciousness which remarks our waking thoughts,—I say, in all these cases, our consciousness being interrupted, and we losing the sight of our past selves, doubts are raised whether we are the same thinking thing, i.e. the same substance or no. Which, however reason- able or unreasonable, concerns not personal identity. The question being what makes the same person; and not whether it be the same identical substance, which always thinks in the same person, which, in this case, matters not at all: different substances, by the same consciousness (where they do partake in it) being united into one person, as well as different bodies by the same life are united into one animal, whose identity is preserved in that change of substances by the unity of one continued life. For, it being the same consciousness that makes a man be himself to himself, per- sonal identity depends on that only, whether it be annexed solely to one individual substance, or can be continued in a succession of several substances. For as far as any intelligent being can repeat the idea of any past action with the same consciousness it had of it at first, and with the same consciousness it has of any present action; so far it is the same personal self. For it is by the consciousness it has of its present thoughts and actions, that it is self to itself now, and so will be the same self, as far as
2 John locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. A. C. fraser, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894. 3 locke refers here to Descartes.
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the same consciousness can extend to actions past or to come; and would be by dis- tance of time, or change of substance, no more two persons, than a man be two men by wearing other clothes to-day than he did yesterday, with a long or a short sleep between: the same consciousness uniting those distant actions into the same person, whatever substances contributed to their production.
Personal Identity in Change of Substance.—That this is so, we have some kind of evi- dence in our very bodies, all whose particles, whilst vitally united to this same thinking conscious self, so that we feel when they are touched, and are affected by, and conscious of good or harm that happens to them, are a part of ourselves; i.e. of our thinking conscious self. Thus, the limbs of his body are to every one a part of himself; he sympathizes and is concerned for them. Cut off a hand, and thereby sepa- rate it from that consciousness he had of its heat, cold, and other affections, and it is then no longer a part of that which is himself, any more than the remotest part of matter. Thus, we see the substance whereof personal self consisted at one time may be varied at another, without the change of personal identity; there being no question about the same person, though the limbs which but now were a part of it, be cut off.
. . . If the same consciousness (which, as has been shown, is quite a different thing
from the same numerical figure or motion in body) can be transferred from one thinking substance to another, it will be possible that two thinking substances may make but one person. For the same consciousness being preserved, whether in the same or different substances, the personal identity is preserved. Whether the same immaterial being, being conscious of the action of its past duration, may be wholly stripped of all the consciousness of its past existence, and lose it beyond the power of ever retrieving it again: and so as it were beginning a new account from a new period, have a consciousness that cannot reach beyond this new state. All those who
hold pre-existence are evidently of this mind; since they allow the soul to have no remaining conscious- ness of what it did in the pre-existing state, either wholly separate from body, or informing any other body; and if they should not, it is plain experience would be against them. So that personal identity, reaching no further than consciousness reaches, a pre-existent spirit not having continued so many ages in a state of silence, must needs make different persons. Suppose a Christian Platonist or a Pythago- rean should, upon God’s having ended all his works of creation the seventh day, think his soul hath ex- isted ever since; and should imagine it has revolved in several human bodies; as I once met with one, who was persuaded his had been the soul of Socrates (how reasonably I will not dispute; this I know, that in the post he filled, which was no inconsiderable one, he passed for a very rational man, and the press has shown that he wanted not parts of learning;)— would any one say, that he, being not conscious of any of Socrates’ actions or thoughts, could be the same person with Socrates? Let any one reflect upon himself, and conclude that he has in himself an
frida Kahlo, The Two Fridas (1939). Would the real frida Kahlo please stand up? (Schalkwijk/Art Resource, NY)
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immaterial spirit, which is that which thinks in him, and, in the constant change of his body keeps him the same: and is that which he calls himself.
The body, as well as the soul, goes to the making of a Man.—And thus may we be able, without any difficulty, to conceive the same person at the resurrection, though in a body not exactly in make or parts the same which he had here,—the same consciousness going along with the soul that inhabits it. But yet the soul alone, in the change of bodies, would scarce to any one but to him that makes the soul the man, be enough to make the same man. For should the soul of a prince, carrying with it the consciousness of the prince’s past life, enter and inform the body of a cobbler, as soon as deserted by his own soul, every one sees he would be the same person with the prince, accountable only for the prince’s actions: but who would say it was the same man? The body too goes to the making the man, and would, I guess, to everybody determine the man in this case, wherein the soul, with all its princely thoughts about it, would not make another man: but he would be the same cobbler to every one besides himself. I know that, in the ordinary way of speaking, the same person, and the same man, stand for one and the same thing.
Consciousness alone unites actions into the same Person.—But though the same immate- rial substance or soul does not alone, wherever it be, and in whatsoever state, make the same man; yet it is plain, consciousness, as far as ever it can be extended—should it be to ages past—unites existences and actions very remote in time into the same person, as well as it does the existences and actions of the immediately preceding moment: so that whatever has the consciousness of present and past actions, is the same person to whom they both belong. Had I the same consciousness that I saw the ark and Noah’s flood, as that I saw an overflowing of the Thames last winter, or as that I write now, I could no more doubt that I who write this now, that saw the Thames overflowed last winter, and that viewed the flood at the general deluge, was the same self,—place that self in what substance you please—than that I who write this am the same myself now whilst I write (whether I consist of all the same substance, material or immaterial, or no) that I was yesterday. For as to this point of being the same self, it matters not whether this present self be made up of the same or other substances—I being as much concerned, and as justly accountable for any action that was done a thousand years since, appropri- ated to me now by this self-consciousness, as I am for what I did the last moment.
Self depends on Consciousness, not on Substance.—Self is that conscious thinking thing,—whatever substance made up of, (whether spiritual or material, simple or compounded, it matters not)—which is sensible or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that conscious- ness extends. Thus every one finds that, whilst comprehended under that conscious- ness, the little finger is as much a part of himself as what is most so. Upon separation of this little finger, should this consciousness go along with the little finger, and leave the rest of the body, it is evident the little finger would be the person, the same person; and self then would have nothing to do with the rest of the body. As in this case it is the consciousness that goes along with the substance, when one part is sepa- rate from another, which makes the same person, and constitutes this inseparable self: so it is in reference to the substances remote in time. That with which the con- sciousness of this present thinking thing can join itself, makes the same person, and is one self with it, and with nothing else; and so attributes to itself, and owns all the actions of that thing, as its own, as far as that consciousness reaches, and no further.
“Self is that conscious thinking thing . . . which is sensible or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends.” — J O H N LO C K E
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The main thesis of locke’s argument is this: Personal self-identity is based upon self- consciousness, in particular, upon memories about one’s former experiences. In this, he argues, man is different from animals, whose identity (that is, “the same dog” or “the same horse”) is based on the continuity of the body, just as you would say that you have had “the same car” for ten years even if almost every part except the chassis has been replaced during that time. The identity of a “person,” that is, “personal” identity, depends on self-consciousness.
locke’s idea that memory is what constitutes a self-identity is inspired by the distinctly Cartesian notion that a person’s relationship to his or her own thoughts is unique. You cannot think my thoughts and I cannot think yours. Since memory is a species of thought, it follows that you cannot remember my experiences, nor I yours. for example, you may remember your first day of school. Because you are remembering that experience as one that hap- pened to you, you are self-identical to the person who had the earlier experience. According to locke, then, memory provides an infallible link between what we might call different “stages” of a person. Memory seems to guarantee the identity of the person who is now remembering with the person who was then having the experience.
While locke’s theory has the advantage over Descartes’s of allowing us to understand self-identity in terms of consciousness without requiring that we posit the existence of a persisting immaterial soul, it is not without its own difficulties. first, much of what we experi- ence, we later forget. Do you remember everything that has ever happened to you? un- doubtedly, the answer is no. Even a person who has a very good memory does not remember being born, learning to walk, or what he had for breakfast on June 3, 2008. Probably you
have completely forgotten some fairly long stretches of your past. What are we to make of these forgotten peri- ods, with regard to our personal identity? How mistaken can we be in our memories and beliefs about ourselves? At what point of remembering would we want to say that “those memories cannot be our memories at all?”
Second, our memories are not always accurate. Some- times we remember things that never happened. for ex- ample, you might remember very clearly lending your copy of Introducing Philosophy to a friend, only to find later that you had, in fact, been using it as a doorstop. Even more disturbing, though fortunately less frequent, cases of inaccurate memory occur when a person sincerely remembers experiences which, in fact, happened, but didn’t happen to him. What are we to say of the memories of the deluded and the deranged? They are not genuine memories, but are only apparent memories. Clearly, locke did not intend merely apparent memories to count among those which guarantee identity. We must, then, find a way to distinguish between those cases in which a memory is genuine and those in which it is not. But to do this, it seems that we would have to say that the memories are in fact the correct memories of that person. If this is so, it would appear that locke’s Memory Theory is circular (that is, it depends on a claim that it sets out to prove).
A genuine memory, as opposed to a merely apparent one, is, of course, a memory of an experience the
The author, Robert C. Solomon, age five. (Photo credit: Charles Solomon.
Used by permission of H.
Andrew Solomon, Jon Solo-
mon, and Kathleen M.
Higgins.)
Which is the “true” Robert C. Solomon: the five-year-old boy or the fifty-seven-year-old man? They are so different: how can they be the same person? (© Kathleen M. Higgins)
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rememberer actually had. The person who is having the memory must be the one who had the experience. now you can see that in distinguishing genuine from apparent memories, we have presupposed the existence of a persisting, self-identical person. That would be all very well were it not for the fact that the concept of self-identity is precisely what we are trying to explain. We cannot use the concept of memory to explain self-identity and then use the con- cept of self-identity to explain memory. Moreover, once we reflect on the nature of genuine memory, we can see that locke was, indeed, putting the cart before the horse. When a person says, “I remember when I learned to ride my bike,” the truth of his statement presup- poses, rather than establishes, that he is self-identical to the little boy with the scabby knees.
nevertheless, modern theories of personal identity have by and large appealed to some notion of memory, self-consciousness, or psychological continuity. It is worth mentioning that ancient philosophers, Aristotle for example, did not believe this and probably would not even have understood much of what Descartes and locke were arguing about. for Aristotle, self-identity was essentially bodily identity, without any particular reference to self- consciousness. But neither must it be thought that the modern thesis has been without its critics—in fact, its devastating critics.
• How does the role of consciousness differ in locke and Descartes’s respective accounts of self-identity?
• Can you think of a time when you were “unaware” of your self, i.e., contrary to locke, you were not aware of your awareness and you did not perceive that you were perceiving? If so, describe this situation.
• What is the difference between individual substance and personal identity for locke? What constitutes individual substance? What constitutes personal identity?
• Does locke think that the preexistence of the soul entails the preexistence of one’s self?
• What is the difference between “the person” and “the man” for locke? What is required for each?
Hume completely undercuts Descartes’s and locke’s view of self-identity. Relying on his belief that any idea must be derived from an impression, Hume argues that when we are self-conscious we are only aware of fleeting thoughts, feelings, and perceptions; we do not have an impression of the self or a thinking substance. He concludes that the idea of the self is simply a fiction. Moreover, since we are never aware of any enduring self, we are never justified in claiming we are the same person we were a year or a minute ago.
On the Idea of the Self B Y David Hume4
There are some philosophers, who imagine we are every moment intimately con- scious of what we call our Self, that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its per- fect identity and simplicity. The strongest sensation, the most violent passion, say they, instead of distracting us from this view, only fix it the more intensely, and make us consider their influence on self either by their pain or pleasure. To attempt
4David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. l. A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford: Oxford university Press, 1888.
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a farther proof of this were to weaken its evidence; since no proof can be deriv’d from any fact, of which we are so intimately conscious; nor is there any thing of which we can be certain, if we doubt of this.
Unluckily all these positive assertions are contrary to that very experience, which is pleaded for them, nor have we any idea of self, after the manner it is here explain’d. For from what impression cou’d this idea be deriv’d? This question ’tis impossible to answer without a manifest contradiction, and absurdity; and yet ’tis a question, which must necessarily be answer’d, if we wou’d have the idea of self pass for clear and intelligible. It must be some one impression, that gives rise to every real idea. But self or person is not any one impression, but that to which our several impressions and ideas are suppos’d to have a reference. If any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that impression must continue invariably the same, thro’ the whole course of our lives; since self is suppos’d to exist after that manner. But there is no impression constant and invariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time. It cannot, therefore, be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is deriv’d; and consequently there is no such idea.
But farther, what must become of all our particular perceptions upon this hy- pothesis? All these are different, and distinguishable, and separable from each other and may be separately consider’d, and may exist separately, and have no need of any thing to support their existence. After what manner, therefore, do they belong to self and how are they connected with it? For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the percep- tion. When my perceptions are remov’d for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my percep- tions remov’d by death, and cou’d I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I shou’d be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is further requisite to make me a perfect nonentity. If any one upon serious and unprejudiced reflexion, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu’d, which he calls himself; tho’ I am certain there is no such principle in me.
But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different per- ceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement. Our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without vary- ing our perceptions. Our thought is still more variable than our sight; and all our other senses and faculties contribute to this change; nor is there any single power of the soul, which remains unalterably the same, perhaps for one moment. The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The com- parison of the theatre must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind: nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is compos’d.
“I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” — DAV I D H U M E
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What then gives us so great a propension to ascribe an identity to these succes- sive perceptions, and to suppose ourselves possest of any invariable and uninter- rupted existence thro’ the whole course of our lives?
To answer this question, Hume draws an analogy between the fictitious identity we as- cribe to persons and the equally fictitious identity we ascribe to things. Just as we can never find an impression of the self that will explain human identity, so we can never find an impres- sion of an object or substance to explain the identity of plants, animals, and things. Accord- ing to Hume, then, we are never justified in claiming that, for example, a tree we see now is the same tree we saw five years ago or even five minutes ago. The cells and parts of the tree are continuously being replaced so that at no time is it ever literally the same tree. But Hume’s argument goes further than this; even if that were not so, we would still have no way of justifying our belief that this tree is the same one we saw some time ago, rather than an- other, reasonably similar to it, but yet different. How do we know, for example, that someone has not come along and replaced it with another?
The temptation to ascribe identity to things and persons, Hume thinks, arises in part from the spatiotemporal continuity of the thing; the tree is in the same place at different times. People, however, have the troublesome habit of moving around, going to Europe for the summer or to college for the semester. We still see the continuity of the person’s movement, receive postcards from the appropriate places at the appropriate times, and so we conclude that we have encountered the same person. In addition to spatiotemporal continuity, we ordinarily rely on resemblance as a criterion of identity. We tolerate small changes, a haircut or a new scar, perhaps even a lost leg or a bit of plastic surgery. As long as there is a strong resemblance between two individuals, for example before and after a haircut, we think of them as the same. Only when there is a great change, as from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde, do we question the identity of the two individuals.
Hume, however, argues that spatiotemporal continuity and resemblance do not in fact guarantee identity:
The identity, which we ascribe to the mind of man, is only a fictitious one, and of a like kind with that which we ascribe to vegetables and animal bodies. It cannot, therefore, have a different origin, but must proceed from a like operation of the imagination upon his objects.
(© iStockphoto.com/Rawpixel Ltd)
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We have a distinct idea of an object, that remains invariable and uninterrupted thro’ a suppos’d variation of time; and this idea we call that of identity or sameness. We have also a distinct idea of several different objects existing in succession, and connected together by a close relation; and this to an accurate view affords as per- fect a notion of diversity, as if there was no manner of relation among the objects. But tho’ these two ideas of identity, and a succession of related objects be in them- selves perfectly distinct, and even contrary, yet ’tis certain, that in our common way of thinking they are generally confounded with each other. That action of the imagination, by which we consider the uninterrupted and invariable object, and that by which we reflect on the succession of related objects, are almost the same to the feeling, nor is there much more effort to thought requir’d in the latter case than in the former. The relation facilitates the transition of the mind from one object to another, and renders its passage as smooth as if it contemplated one continu’d object. This resemblance is the cause of the confusion and mistake, and makes us substitute the notion of identity, instead of that of related objects.
Our last resource is to . . . boldly assert that these different related objects are in effect the same, however interrupted and variable. In order to justify to ourselves this absurdity, we often feign some new and unintelligible principle, that connects the objects together, and prevents their interruption or variation. Thus we feign the continu’d existence of the perceptions of our senses, to remove the interruption; and run into the notion of a soul, and self, and substance, to disguise the variation. But we may farther observe, that where we do not give rise to such a fiction, our propension to confound identity with relation is so great, that we are apt to imagine something unknown and mysterious connecting the parts, beside their relation; and this I take to be the case with regard to the identity we ascribe to plants and vegetables. And even when this does not take place, we still feel a propensity to confound these ideas, tho’ we are not able fully to satisfy ourselves in that particular, nor find any thing invariable and uninterrupted to justify our notion of identity.
. . . Suppose any mass of matter, of which the parts are contiguous and connected, to be
plac’d before us; ’tis plain we must attribute a perfect identity to this mass, provided all the parts continue uninterruptedly and invariably the same, whatever motion or change of place we may observe either in the whole or in any of the parts. But supposing some very small or inconsiderable part to be added to the mass, or subtracted from it; tho’ this absolutely destroys the identity of the whole, strictly speaking; yet as we seldom think so accurately, we scruple not to pronounce a mass of matter the same, where we find so trivial an alteration. The passage of the thought from the object before the change to the object after it, is so smooth and easy, that we scarce perceive the transition, and are apt to imagine, that ’tis nothing but a continu’d survey, of the same object.
• How do you understand Hume’s claim that the self is nothing but a bundle of per- ceptions? Where, then, do we get our idea of identity, according to Hume?
Hume’s argument is familiar to us from our discussion of empiricism in Chapter 3. All we perceive, he says, is a sequence of impressions, and nowhere do we encounter an impres- sion either of a substance (an enduring object) or of the self. What right do we have, there- fore, to identify the object of this impression with the object of another? What right do we have to identify the person we are now with someone in the past?
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But Hume’s argument that “I never can catch myself” suffers from a peculiar but obvious form of self-contradiction. He can’t even deny that there is a self without in some sense pointing to himself in order to do it. This point was not missed by Kant. Kant agrees with Hume that the enduring self is not to be found in self-consciousness. The enduring self is not an object of experience—Hume was right on this point, and both Descartes and locke were mistaken. In Kant’s words, the enduring self is not empirical. It is transcendental.
By “transcendental” Kant means what is a necessary condition for the possibility of any experience. Kant saw that if there were a different self at each moment of consciousness, we would not be able to perceive anything. In order to experience an object, we must be able to combine our various impressions of it in a unified consciousness. Thus, if we do in fact experience objects, we must assume that we have a unified consciousness that combines these impressions into the perception of an object. Or, to take a different example, Hume talks of different sorts of relations of impressions, for example, succession. In order for an individual to perceive two impressions as successive, these impressions must have been perceived by the same consciousness.
The self of “I” for Kant, then, is the necessary logical subject of any thought, perception, feeling, and so on. It is not an object of experience but transcends and is presupposed by all experience.
Kant argues that Hume’s error, as in other matters, was in confusing the supposed experi- ence of self-consciousness with the transcendental rules with which we tie these various experiences together. Accordingly, Descartes and locke are both correct in equating self- identity and self-consciousness, but it must not be thought that the self is therefore a “thing” (as Descartes said) that we find in experience.
According to Kant, the self is the activity of consciousness, in particular the activity of organizing our various experiences. Kant borrows Hume’s argument, but he turns it toward the opposite conclusion: True, I never find a self “in” my experiences, but I can always find myself in that “I” that has the experience. Kant’s “self,” in other words, is the act of having experiences rather than anything that we experience itself. But for Kant this self is not merely the passive recipient of experiences, and here is where the notion of self as activity becomes all-important. The self is the activity of applying the rules by which we organize our experi- ence. Moreover, Kant argues that one of the most basic rules of this activity is that the self organizes its experience as its own experience. The rule is that we must always “synthesize” our various experiences into a unity, for we could not come to have any knowledge whatever of a scattering of various impressions and sensations without this synthesis. (Think, for example, of the slightly painful and generally meaningless sensations you have when someone sets off a camera flashbulb in your eyes.) This basic rule of synthesis allows Kant to say that not only is the self the activity that applies the various rules to experience, but its existence as a unified self with a unified synthesis of experiences is itself a rule.
Kant gives this curious idea of the self as a rule a formidable name, “the transcendental unity of apperception.” What is im- portant in this concept is that the self for Kant is indeed essential to self-consciousness, but it is not “in” self-consciousness. Met- aphorically, it is often said that it is “behind” self-consciousness, that is, it is the activity of bringing our various experiences to- gether in accordance with the basic rules of our experience.
The incoherent sensations we have when a flashbulb goes off remind us of how organized our experience normally is (© Shutterstock.com/Yeko Photo Studio)
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Accordingly, Kant refers to this self as the transcendental ego, “transcendental” because it is basic and necessary for all possible human experience. The difference between Hume and Kant is sometimes illustrated in this way: Hume looks for the self among our experiences and doesn’t find it; Kant agrees with Hume but argues that he looked in the wrong place. The self, Kant says, is the thread that ties together our various experiences. Accordingly, the self is not in the bundle of our experiences; it is rather the “transcendental” thread that holds them all together and is as real as any experience.
Kant returns to Descartes and challenges his main theses, even while agreeing with parts of them. first, while Descartes thought that we had to be self-conscious all the time, Kant insists that it is only necessary for “the ‘I think’” to be able to accompany all experiences. It is not necessary to be always conscious of our selves but only to be, at any point in our experience, capable of becoming self-conscious; we can turn our attention when we want to from whatever we are doing and watch ourselves doing what we are doing. This is an important point: Our concern with self-consciousness is given impetus just because we are often not self-conscious. In fact, certain philosophers (and many mystics) have argued that self-consciousness is bad, a useless thing, and should be avoided as much as possible. According to Descartes, this is not possible, for to exist as a human being is to exist self-consciously. According to Kant, on the other hand, to exist as a human being is “to be able” to be self-conscious.
Second, Kant objects to Descartes’s belief that the thinking self is a thinking thing. He objects to this, first of all, because of his insistence (as a result of Hume’s argument) that the self (or “transcendental ego”) is not in our experience but rather “behind” it and responsible for it. More literally, he says that the self must be thought of as an activity. You can see what a radical move this is when you recall the traditional doctrine of the soul in Plato, in Christian- ity, and in much of modern thought. The soul, quite simply, is the self conceived of as a thing, an enduring thing that can survive the death of the body. By saying that the self is an activity, Kant undermines (as Hume had intended to undermine) the traditional concept of soul.5
Against the Soul as Substance B Y Immanuel Kant6
Pure reason requires us to seek for every predicate of a thing its own subject, and for this subject, which is itself necessarily nothing but a predicate, its subject, and so on indefinitely (or as far as we can reach). But hence it follows that we must not hold anything at which we can arrive to be an ultimate subject.
Now we appear to have this substance in the consciousness of ourselves (in the thinking subject), and indeed in an immediate intuition; for all the predicates of an internal sense refer to the ego, as a subject, and I cannot conceive myself as the predicate of any other subject. Hence completeness in the reference of the given concepts as predicates to a subject—not merely an Idea, but an object—that is, the absolute subject itself, seems to be given in experience. But this expectation is dis- appointed. For the ego is not a concept, but only the indication of the object of the inner sense, so far as we know it by no further predicate. Consequently it cannot indeed be itself a predicate of any other thing; but just as little can it be a definite concept of an absolute subject, but is, as in all other cases, only the reference of the
5 It is worth mentioning that Kant held onto the Christian concept of soul; to do so, he defended it as a “postulate of practical reason,” in other words, as a strictly moral claim, much as he had defended his belief in God. later philoso- phers borrowed Kant’s arguments against the substantial soul to get rid of the concept of the soul altogether. 6 Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. lewis White Beck. Copyright © 1959. Reprinted by permission of Pearson Education, Inc., upper Saddle River, nJ.
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inner phenomena to their unknown subject. Yet this idea (which serves very well as a regulative principle totally to destroy all materialistic explanations of the inter- nal phenomena of the soul) occasions by a very natural misunderstanding a very specious argument, which infers its nature from this supposed knowledge of the substance of our thinking being. This is specious so far as the knowledge of it falls quite without the complex of experience.
But though we may call this thinking self (the soul) “substance,” as being the ultimate subject of thinking which cannot be further represented as the predicate of another thing, it remains quite empty and without significance if permanence— the quality which renders the concept of substances in experience fruitful—cannot be proved of it.
But permanence can never be proved of the concept of a substance as a thing in itself, but for the purposes of experience only.
If, therefore, from the concept of the soul as a substance we would infer its perma- nence, this can hold good as regards possible experience only, not of the soul as a thing in itself and beyond all possible experience. Life is the subjective condition of all our possible experience; consequently we can only infer the permanence of the soul in life, for the death of a man is the end of all experience which concerns the soul as an object of experience, except the contrary be proved—which is the very ques- tion in hand. The permanence of the soul can therefore only be proved (and no one cares to do that) during the life of man, but not, as we desire to do, after death. The reason for this is that the concept of substance, so far as it is to be considered neces- sarily with the concept of permanence, can be so combined only according to the principles of possible experience, and therefore for the purposes of experience only.
Third, Kant argued that we need two very different conceptions of self. He saw that this conception of self as self-consciousness was not sufficient to do the whole job that philoso- phers had wanted it to do. One part of Descartes’s enterprise was to find out what was essen- tial to his existence, what could not be doubted and so could serve as a first premise for his Meditations. So, too, locke and Hume had tried to find (though locke did and Hume didn’t) that self that defined us through our various changes, that identified Jekyll and Hyde and identifies us from year to year, day to day, and mood to mood. But the function of the self was also to serve as a way of identifying ourselves in distinction from other people and other things. Thus Descartes’s concept of the self as a thinking thing was not sufficient to tell us what made one person different from another, and he found it necessary to supplement his concept of self with an account of how a person was composed of a self and a body in some special way.
Similarly, locke distinguishes between personal identity and identity as a man (that is, as a biological example of the species Homo sapiens) and tells us that both are necessary for us to understand how one particular person is different from another particular person. We can now clearly see that the question of self-identity divides into two questions: (1) What is essential to being a self? and (2) What is essential to being a particular self? Kant’s concep- tion of self as that which has experiences, the transcendental self, only answers the first question. nothing in the notion of transcendental self allows us to distinguish between dif- ferent people and tell them apart. Accordingly, he identifies another “self” that he calls the empirical ego, which includes all of those particular things about us that make us different people. Differences in our bodies, our looks, our size, our strength would be such differ- ences. So, too, would our different personalities, our different thoughts and memories. It is
“Life is the subjective condition of all our possible experience; consequently we can only infer the permanence of the soul in life, for the death of a man is the end of all experience.” — I M M A N U E L K A N T
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These have been the traditional answers to the philosophical problem of self-identity. What is it that makes one “the same person” from moment to moment and year to year? The spatiotemporal continuity of the body would seem to be a part of the answer. But philoso- phers since (and before) Descartes have seen quite clearly that this is never enough, that it is also self-consciousness that provides the key to self-identity. But even this has not solved the problem. To see this, consider these bizarre but illuminating cases:
Jones has an emergency brain operation. His own brain is removed and replaced by the brain of Brown (who is recently deceased). “Jones” still looks like Jones, still carries the same driver’s license and lives in the same house, but all of his memories and personality traits are those of Brown. Is he still Jones? Or is he Brown in Jones’s body? Suppose you had been (or are) Brown; could you claim to be still alive in Jones’s body?
Or, suppose Smith undergoes a personality split of the most radical kind imaginable. like the one-celled animal, the amoeba, Smith splits, head to toe, each half of him forming an exact duplicate of the original—same memories and personality, same habits, knowledge, likes and dislikes, skills, and so on. Which of the two is Smith? Does it make any sense to say that both are? Suppose that you are one of the two resultant Smiths. Would you—could you—intelligibly say that the other Smith is also you? But, given your common origins and exact similarities, could you say that the other Smith was merely someone else?
Or consider this case, presented here by Massachusetts philosopher Meredith Michaels, who has written extensively on the problem of personal identity:
On “Personal Identity” B Y Meredith Michaels8
While they are illuminating, particularly in relation to one another, these tradi- tional answers to the philosophical problem of self-identity raise as many questions as they answer. To see this, let us travel to a not very distant make-believe world.
One night, after a serious bout with the library, you and your best friend Wanda Bagg (or Walter, if you prefer) decide to indulge yourselves at the College Haven. Before you can stop her, Wanda steps out in front of a steamroller that happens to
7 ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, used a Kantian thesis to deny the existence of the subject altogether. In his Trac- tatus Logico-Philosophicus, he tells us: “The thinking, presenting subject—there is no such thing. . . . In an important sense there is no subject. . . . The subject does not belong to the world, but is a limit of the world. . . . There is therefore really a sense in which in philosophy we can talk of a nonpsychological I. The I occurs in philosophy through the fact that the ‘world is my world.’ The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body, or the human soul of which psy- chology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit—not a part of the world.” ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (london: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922), 5.631–5.632, 5.641, pp. 151–153. 8 Meredith Michaels, “Personal Identity,” in Robert C. Solomon, Introducing Philosophy: A Text with Readings, 3rd ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977). Reprinted with permission.
the empirical self that identifies us as individual persons. The transcendental self makes pos- sible human consciousness.7
• How does Kant answer Hume’s challenge that there is no enduring self of which we are aware?
• Why is the transcendental self lacking as an explanation for self-identity? What does Kant introduce into his theory to account for the differences we observe among persons?
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be moving down Main Street. Wanda is crushed. Witnessing the horror of the accident, you have a stroke. Fortunately, Dr. Hagendaas, the famous neurosurgeon who has been visiting the campus, is also on the way to the College Haven. Taking charge, he rushes you and Wanda to the Health Center, where he performs a “body transplant.” He takes Wanda’s brain, which miraculously escaped the impact of the steamroller, and puts it in the place of yours, which was, of course, severely damaged by the stroke. After several days, the following battle ensues: Wanda’s parents claim that they are under no obligation to continue paying tuition. After all, Wanda was killed by a steamroller. Your parents claim that they are under no obligation to continue paying tuition. After all, you died of a stroke. It is clear, then, that a basic question is in need of an answer: who is the person lying in bed in the Health Center? Is it Wanda? Is it you? Is it someone else altogether? For the sake of discussion, let us call the person lying in the bed Schwanda. What reasons do we have for believing that Schwanda is Wanda? Given that one’s self-consciousness, one’s thoughts, beliefs and feelings are all mental phe- nomena, we might naturally conclude that a person goes wherever her brain goes (on the assumption that our mental characteristics are more likely “located” in the brain than in, say, our smallest left toe). Schwanda will remember having set off for the College Haven with you; she will remember receiving the college acceptance letter addressed: “Dear Wanda, We are happy to inform you that . . .”; she’ll re- member being hugged by Wanda’s mother on the afternoon of her first day of school. That is, Schwanda will believe that she’s Wanda.
Nevertheless, the fact that Schwanda believes herself to be Wanda does not in itself guarantee that she is. Do we have any basis for insisting that Schwanda is Wanda and not someone who is deluded into thinking that she’s Wanda? How can we determine whether Schwanda’s Wanda memories are genuine and not merely apparent? As we came to realize in our discussion of Locke’s Memory Theory, it is not legitimate at this point to appeal to the self-identity of Schwanda and Wanda, since that is precisely what we’re trying to determine. In other words, in attempt- ing to establish that Schwanda’s Wanda memories are genuine memories, we cannot argue that they are genuine on the grounds that Schwanda is Wanda.
Perhaps it is possible to stop short of circularity. Why couldn’t we say that Schwanda’s Wanda memories are genuine because the brain that is remembering is the same as the brain that had the original experiences. Thus, the experiences are preserved in the very organ that underwent them. Though there is an initial plausi- bility to this response, it fails to solve our problem. Suppose that Schwanda is Wanda—remembering the experience of learning to ride a bicycle. Though the brain in question is indeed the same, it is nonetheless clear to all of us that brains alone do not learn to ride bicycles. Nor, indeed, do brains alone remember having done so. People learn to ride bicycles and people remember having done so. And the question we are trying to answer is whether Schwanda (who is remembering) is the same
Meredith Michaels
American philosopher who works primarily on issues in feminism and the ethics and epistemology of reproduction.
American philosopher Meredith Michaels (Photo credit: Lee Bowie. Used with permission
by Meredith Michaels.)
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person as Wanda (who did the bicycling). The appeal to the fact that the same brain is involved in each event does not provide us with a way out of the Lockean circle.
It is at this point that philosophers begin to reconsider the Aristotelian position, mentioned earlier, that self-identity is essentially bodily identity. If the Body Theory of Personal Identity is true, then the person lying in bed at the Health Center is you, deluded into believing that you are Wanda. That is, Schwanda is self-identical to you.
You might wonder, at this point, whether there are any positive reasons for en- dorsing the Body Theory, or whether it is simply a place to which one retreats only in defeat? The following case is designed to persuade you that there is at least some plausibility to the Body Theory. Suppose that an evil scientist, Dr. Nefarious, has selected you as his prime subject for a horrible experiment. You are dragged into his office. He says, “Tomorrow at 5:00, you will be subjected to the most terrible tor- tures. Your nails will be pulled out one by one. Rats will be caged around your head. Burning oil will drip slowly on your back. The remainder I leave as a surprise.”
Are you worried about what will happen to you at 5:00 tomorrow? If you have any sense, you are. You think of the excruciating pain and suffering you will un- dergo and would surely do just about anything to avoid it.
But now, Dr. Nefarious says, “Tomorrow at 4:55, I will use my Dememorizer to erase your memory of this conversation.” Are you still anxious about what is going to happen to you tomorrow at 5:00? Surely you are. After all the fact that you won’t, between 4:55 and 5:00, be anticipating your torture doesn’t entail that the torture itself will be any less painful. When you forget that your Calculus professor told the class there would be a test on Friday, you aren’t thereby spared the experi- ence of taking the test (in fact, in that case the experience is made worse by your not having had the opportunity to anticipate it).
Now, Dr. Nefarious says, “Tomorrow at 4:57, I will use my Dememorizer to erase all of your memories.” Are you still anxious about what will happen tomor- row at 5:00? Isn’t it natural to describe the situation as one in which you will un- dergo horrible torture, though you won’t know who you are or why this is happening to you? You will still experience your fingernails being pulled out, your back being burned, your face being eaten up by rats. Surely, those experiences are ones you would like to avoid.
Finally, Dr. Nefarious says to you, “Tomorrow at 4:58, I am going to use my Rememorizer to implant in your brain all of Ronald Reagan’s memories.” Though this may not please you for personal or political reasons, the relevant question remains this: are you still worried about what is going to happen tomor- row at 5:00? Isn’t it again perfectly natural to describe the situation as one in which you will undergo horrible torture, all the while believing that you are Ronald Reagan. Do you not now remain concerned that you are Ronald Reagan? Do you not now remain concerned that you will experience excruciating pain and intolerable suffering? Look at your fingernails while you consider your answer to this question.
What this story demonstrates is not the conclusive superiority of the Body Theory over the Memory (or Brain) Theory, but rather the importance of our bodies to our self-identity. This is something that tends to get lost in the traditional conceptions of personal identity. Furthermore, returning to the case of Schwanda, we can now see that it is not altogether preposterous to argue that Schwanda is indeed you, deluded into believing that she is Wanda. In other words, anyone who wishes to dismiss the possibility must also dismiss the possibility that the person
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who undergoes the torture is indeed you, deluded into believing that you are Ronald Reagan.
While it is true that we tend to identify ourselves with and by our thoughts, beliefs, inclinations and feelings, our discussion of the Body Theory should remind us that there are reasons for believing that our bodies are, at the very least, impor- tant to who we are. Some philosophers would argue that our bodies are who we are, that self-identity is bodily identity.
In considering these admittedly fanciful problem cases, we have seen that we lack a concept of self-identity that allows us to predict when we would or wouldn’t persist through time. This might suggest to us that our concept of self-identity is not an all-or-nothing one, that, in fact, our concept is one which admits of degrees. If so, we are no longer talking about identity per se, which is an all-or-nothing concept, but rather about some other relation of psychological and physical con- nectedness. Nevertheless, we can now see first, that the answer to the question “Who ought to pay Schwanda’s tuition?” will depend upon which theory of per- sonal identity we are inclined to endorse and second, that the answer may not be as clear and unequivocal as we would like it to be.
British philosopher Derek Parfit proposes another type of science fictional thought experi- ment to probe the idea that spatiotemporal continuity is essential to being a particular person.
F RO M Reasons and Persons B Y Derek Parfit9
W H AT W E B E L I E V E O U R S E LV E S T O B E I enter the Teletransporter. I have been to Mars before, but only by the old method, a space-ship journey taking several weeks. This machine will send me at the speed of light. I merely have to press the green button. Like others, I am nervous. Will it work? I remind myself what I have been told to expect. When I press the button, I shall lose consciousness, and then wake up at what seems a moment later. In fact I shall have been unconscious for about an hour. The Scanner here on Earth will destroy my brain and body, while recording the exact states of all of my cells. It will then transmit this information by radio. Travelling at the speed of light, the message will take three minutes to reach the Replicator on Mars. This will then create, out of new matter, a brain and body exactly like mine. It will be in this body that I shall wake up.
Though I believe that this is what will happen, I still hesitate. But then I remember seeing my wife grin when, at breakfast today, I revealed my nervousness. As she re- minded me, she has been often teletrans- ported, and there is nothing wrong with her. I press the button. As predicted, I lose and seem at once to regain consciousness, but in
“We lack a concept of self-identity that allows us to predict when we would or wouldn’t persist through time.” — M E R E D I T H M I C H A E L S
Is the brain the self? (© iStockphoto.com/mevans)
Derek Parfit (1942–)
British philosopher and emeritus senior research fellow in All Souls College, Oxford. In addition to personal identity, he works on issues concerning rationality and ethics.
9 Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 1986), pp. 199–200.
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a different cubicle. Examining my new body, I find no change at all. Even the cut on my upper lip, from this morning’s shave, is still there.
Several years pass, during which I am often Teletransported. I am now back in the cubicle, ready for another trip to Mars. But this time, when I press the green button, I do not lose consciousness. There is a whirring sound, then silence. I leave the cubicle, and say to the attendant: ‘It’s not working. What did I do wrong?’
‘It’s working’, he replies, handing me a printed card. This reads: ‘The New Scanner records your blueprint without destroying your brain and body. We hope that you will welcome the opportunities which this technical advance offers.’
The attendant tells me that I am one of the first people to use the New Scanner. He adds that, if I stay for an hour, I can use the In- tercom to see and talk to myself on Mars.
‘Wait a minute’, I reply, ‘If I’m here I can’t also be on Mars’. Someone politely coughs, a white-coated man who asks to speak
to me in private. We go to his office, where he tells me to sit down, and pauses. Then he says: ‘I’m afraid that we’re having problems
with the New Scanner. It records your blueprint just as accurately, as you will see when you talk to yourself on Mars. But it seems to be damaging the cardiac systems which it scans. Judging from the results so far, though you will be quite healthy on Mars, here on Earth you must expect cardiac failure within the next few days.’
The attendant later calls me to the Intercom. On the screen I see myself just as I do in the mirror every morning. But there are two differences. On the screen I am not left-right reversed. And, while I stand here speechless, I can see and hear myself, in the studio on Mars, starting to speak.
Parfit’s own views are akin to Hume’s. The fictional case of teletransportation is not unlike our actual situation, he claims. A person’s self at one point in time shares many features, in- cluding memories, with his or her self at another, but nothing establishes that these selves are the same self. ultimately, Parfit concludes, the survival of personal identity doesn’t really matter. We should concern ourselves instead with recognizing the psychological continuity of our characters and memories and the connectedness of one person with another.
B. Existentialism: Self-Identity and the Responsibility of Choice The ideas of multiple selves and of no self introduced very important alternatives to Western, essentially Judeo-Christian conceptions. In addition to concern for survival in heaven or hell, this Western conception has typically been linked to the concerns of striving and ambition, status and planning for the future, and “making something of yourself.” Existentialism, as we shall shortly see, involves this conception. The American dream and Protestant and capi- talist ethics in general do as well. By contrast, from the conception of no self (or a series of selves) comes a very different picture—of unqualified acceptance of things as they
Would you survive a trip in Parfit’s teletrans- porter? (© Shutterstock.com/dimitris_k)
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are rather than struggling to change them, which involves a rejection of such notions as status and “accomplishing things.”
Once again we must not confuse this rejection of traditional Western conceptions of the self with a rejection of the philosophical question of self-identity. “Who am I?” is as impor- tant a question for the mystic as it is for the Western philosopher. It is just that the mystic’s answer to the question is radically different. Does it make sense to say that the one is more “correct” than the other? Must there be a single “correct” answer for everyone? There is nothing necessary about this, or even desirable. The problem of self-identity, both in each individual case and as a general problem, is the problem of deciding which of the many pos- sible characteristics (not necessarily one) should be chosen as our own standards for self- identity, and that choice is not just one that philosophers make, but one which each person makes at some point or points during his or her life.
A self-identity isn’t simply a label you throw on yourself in the casual discussion of a phi- losophy class. It is a mask and a role that you wear in every social encounter (though per- haps you don slightly different masks and roles for significantly different encounters). It is the way you think of yourself and the standards by which you judge yourself in every moment of reflection and self-evaluation. It is the self-image you follow in every action, when you decide that one thing more than another is “worth doing” or when you decide how to act in a given circumstance. Because of it, you feel proud, guilty, ashamed, or delighted after you have done something. The problem of self-identity is not just a problem for philoso- phers; it is a problem we all face, either explicitly or implicitly, every self-conscious minute of our lives.
But, you might say, why make it sound as if there is any single notion or goal of a correct self-identity? The way in which a contemporary Chinese farmer thinks of himself and judges himself is very different from that of a contemporary American college student. And a very handsome but stupendously dumb bully will surely have a very different con- ception of self-identity than an extremely intelligent and talented college mathematics major. But most of us, despite the glib relativism we usually defend, would insist on a cat- egory that transcends all such individual considerations; we call it “being a good person.” ultimately we would judge the dumb bully and the budding young artist according to the same criterion. Even where cultural differences would seem to demand entirely different conceptions of self-identity, we might still insist that the same criterion applies. for ex- ample, a South Sea Islander might well think of himself or herself in terms that would be wholly unacceptable to us, but we can always reduce any variance from our norms to mere “accidental differences,” insisting that we are essentially the same. Of course people are different and think differently of themselves; but it does not follow that those differences are essential, nor does it follow that relativism is true. ultimately when you say that all people are “essentially the same,” then you believe that there are, indeed, universal crite- ria for self-identity and that the differences between people, though we need not deny them, are merely superficial.
One of the most powerful schools of twentieth-century thought, however, was dedicated to a contrasting view, the idea that self-identity, in every case, is a matter of individual choice. This school, which we have briefly met before, is existentialism. Its most powerful advocate was the french philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. According to Sartre, there are no set stan- dards for self-identity, either for individuals or for people in general. “Human nature” does not exist, he contends, and what we are—and what it means to be a human being—are always matters of decision. There is no correct choice; there are only choices, he claims. In a well-known essay from the late 1940s, he argues:
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On Existentialism B Y Jean-Paul Sartre10
What existentialists have in common is simply the fact that they believe that existence comes before essence—or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjec- tive. What exactly do we mean by that?
If one considers an article of manufacture—as, for example, a book or paper- knife—one sees that it has been made by an artisan who had a conception of it; and he has paid attention, equally, to the conception of a paper-knife and to the pre- existent technique of production which is a part of that conception and is, at bottom, a formula. Thus the paper-knife is at the same time an article producible in a certain manner and one which, on the other hand, serves a definite purpose, for one cannot suppose that a man would produce a paper-knife without knowing what it was for. Let us say, then, of the paper-knife that its essence—that is to say the sum of the formulae and the qualities which made its production and its definition possible— precedes its existence. The presence of such-and-such a paper-knife or book is thus determined before my eyes. Here, then, we are viewing the world from a technical standpoint, and we say that production precedes existence.
When we think of God as the creator, we are thinking of him, most of the time, as a supernal artisan. Whatever doctrine we may be considering, whether it be a doctrine like that of Descartes, or of Leibniz himself, we always imply that the will follows, more or less, from the understanding or at least accompanies it, so that when God creates he knows precisely what he is creating. Thus, the conception of man in the mind of God is comparable to that of the paper-knife in the mind of the artisan: God makes man according to a procedure and a conception, exactly as the artisan manufactures a paper-knife, following a definition and a formula. Thus each individual man is the realisation of a certain conception which dwells in the divine understanding. In the philosophic atheism of the eighteenth century, the notion of God is suppressed, but not, for all that, the idea that essence is prior to
existence; something of that idea we still find everywhere, in Diderot, in Voltaire and even in Kant. Man possesses a human nature; that “human nature,” which is the concep- tion of human being, is found in every man; which means that each man is a particular example of an universal con- ception, the conception of Man. In Kant, this universality goes so far that the wild man of the woods, man in the state of nature and the bourgeois are all contained in the same definition and have the same fundamental qualities. Here again, the essence of man precedes that historic existence which we confront in experience.
. . . What do we mean by saying that existence precedes es-
sence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself after- wards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be
10 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Phillip Mairet, new York: Philosophical library of new York, 1949.
The essence of letter-opener determines what kind of thing this letter-opener is. But what human beings are is not determined in advance by an essence. (© iStockphoto .com/Jasther)
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anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing—as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism. And this is what people call its “subjectivity,” using the word as a reproach against us. But what do we mean to say by this, but that man is of a greater dignity than a stone or a table? For we mean to say that man primarily exists—that man is, before all else, something which propels itself to- wards a future and is aware that it is doing so. Man is, indeed, a project which pos- sesses a subjective life, instead of being a kind of moss, or a fungus or a cauliflower. Before that projection of the self nothing exists; not even in the heaven of intelli- gence: man will only attain existence when he is what he purposes to be. Not, however, what he may wish to be. For what we usually understand by wishing or willing is a conscious decision taken—much more often than not—after we have made ourselves what we are. I may wish to join a party, to write a book or to marry—but in such a case what is usually called my will is probably a manifestation of a prior and more spontaneous decision. If, however, it is true that existence is prior to essence, man is responsible for what he is. Thus, the first effect of existen- tialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders. And, when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men.
When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men. For in effect, of all the actions a man may take in order to create him- self as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, at the same time, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be.
“When we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men.” — J E A N - PA U L S A R T R E
Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. (AP Photo/stf/Laurent)
• To what extent is self-identity a matter of choice?
• In what way do we choose for everyone when we choose for ourselves, as Sartre sees it?
This existentialist doctrine of choice doesn’t make the problem of self-identity any easier. In fact, it complicates it enormously. Earlier in this section, we began by asking whether the facts about a person are sufficient to determine his or her identity. We said surely not all of them are necessary; some are more essential than others. But this isn’t yet an answer to the question, for it may be that all the essential facts are still not sufficient to determine a person’s identity.
According to the existentialist, this is made even more complex by the fact that a person chooses which facts are to be considered as essential. Are the facts alone ever sufficient to determine our identity? Sartre’s answer, which he adapted from German philosopher Martin Heidegger, is “never!” The facts that are true of a person are always, at least so long as a person is alive, only indicative of what a person has been and done so far. In judging a per- son’s identity, we must always consider more than the facts that are true of him or her (which Sartre and Heidegger collectively name, somewhat technically, a person’s facticity); we must also consider their projections into the future, their ambitions, plans, intentions, hopes, and fantasies. (Sartre calls these considerations a person’s transcendence. notice that this
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is the third different way in which we have used the term “transcendence,” so be careful.) This way of viewing the person makes the question of self-identity impossibly complex, in fact, irresolvable. for example, consider Sartre’s example of what he calls “bad faith” in one of his most important works, Being and Nothingness (1943).
On Bad Faith B Y Jean-Paul Sartre11
Take the example of a woman who has consented to go out with a particular man for the first time. She knows very well the intentions which the man who is speaking to her cherishes regarding her. She knows also that it will be necessary sooner or later for her to make a decision. But she does not want to realize the ur- gency; she concerns herself only with what is respectful and discreet in the attitude of her companion. She does not apprehend this conduct as an attempt to achieve what we call “the first approach;” that is, she does not want to see possibilities of temporal development which his conduct presents. She restricts this behavior to what is in the present; she does not wish to read in the phrases which he addresses to her anything other than their explicit meaning. If he says to her, “I find you so attractive!” she disarms this phrase of its sexual background; she attaches to the conversation and to the behavior of the speaker, the immediate meanings, which she imagines as objective qualities. The man who is speaking to her appears to her sincere and respectful as the table is round or square, as the wall coloring is blue or gray. The qualities thus attached to the person she is listening to are in this way fixed in a permanence like that of things, which is no other than the projection of the strict present of the qualities into the temporal flux. This is because she does not quite know what she wants. She is profoundly aware of the desire which she in- spires, but the desire cruel and naked would humiliate and horrify her. Yet she would find no charm in a respect which would be only respect. In order to satisfy her, there must be a feeling which is addressed wholly to her personality—i.e., to her full freedom—and which would be a recognition of her freedom. But at the same time this feeling must be wholly desire; that is, it must address itself to her body as object. This time then she refuses to apprehend the desire for what it is; she does not even give it a name; she recognizes it only to the extent that it transcends itself toward admiration, esteem, respect and that it is wholly absorbed in the more re- fined forms which it produces, to the extent of no longer figuring anymore as a sort of warmth and density. But then suppose he takes her hand. This act of her com- panion risks changing the situation by calling for an immediate decision. To leave the hand there is to consent in herself to flirt, to engage herself. To withdraw it is to break the troubled and unstable harmony which gives the hour its charm. The aim is to postpone the moment of decision as long as possible. We know what hap- pens next; the young woman leaves her hand there, but she does not notice that she is leaving it. She does not notice because it happens by chance that she is at this moment all intellect. She draws her companion up to the most lofty regions of sen- timental speculation; she speaks of Life, of her life, she shows herself in her essential aspect—a personality, a consciousness. And during this time the divorce of the body from the soul is accomplished; the hand rests inert between the warm hands of her companion—neither consenting nor resisting—a thing.
11 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, new York: Philosophical library of new York, 1956.
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We shall say that this woman is in bad faith. But we see imme- diately that she uses various procedures in order to maintain herself in this bad faith. She has disarmed the actions of her companion by reducing them to being only what they are; that is, to existing in the mode of the in-itself. But she permits herself to enjoy his desire, to the extent that she will apprehend it as not being what it is, will recognize its transcendence. Finally while sensing profoundly the presence of her own body—to the degree of being disturbed perhaps—she realizes herself as not being her own body, and she contemplates it as though from above as a passive object to which events can happen but which can neither provoke them nor avoid them because all its possibilities are outside of it. What unity do we find in these various aspects of bad faith? It is a certain art of form- ing contradictory concepts which unite in themselves both an idea and the negation of that idea. The basic concept which is thus en- gendered, utilizes the double property of the human being, who is at once a facticity and a transcendence. These two aspects of human reality are and ought to be capable of a valid coordination. But bad faith does not wish either to coordinate them nor to surmount them in a synthesis. Bad faith seeks to affirm their identity while preserving their differences. It must affirm facticity as being transcendence and transcendence as being facticity, in such a way that at the instant when a person apprehends the one, he can find himself abruptly faced with the other.
Bad faith, quite simply, is refusing to accept yourself.12 This can happen in two different ways. Either you can refuse to accept the facts and actions as relevant to your self-identity (for example, denying that your repeated cowardly behavior establishes your identity as a coward). Or you can go too far in the opposite direction, believing that your actions conclu- sively and unalterably establish your self-identity (for example, denying that you could ever alter your cowardly self-identity through an act of heroism).
Of course, one can imagine that the woman Sartre observes is well aware of what she is doing— keeping the man’s interest while she decides what she wants. Sartre’s point is not about any particular person’s external behavior, but about how we define ourselves and how we “own” or “own up to” our self-characterizations.
for Sartre, bad faith points to the most important single fact about personal self-identity—there isn’t any. In somewhat paradoxical terminology, Sartre tells us, “one is what one is not, and one is not what one is.” In other words, whatever the facts about you, you are always something more than those facts.
(© iStockphoto.com/TheresaTibbetts)
Garcin bolted . . . but like a lion? (© Shutterstock.com/Ollyy)
12 Bad faith, however, is the main concept of Being and Nothingness and takes well over seven hundred pages to ana- lyze thoroughly.
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Whatever the pattern of one’s previous behavior, we can always choose to act differently in the future. A cowardly person is a coward to the extent that his or her past actions and desires are those of a coward. He falls into bad faith by refusing to acknowledge this. Yet at the same time, there is a genuine sense in which he is not a coward: In the future, he may radically alter his course. It would, then, also be bad faith were he to totally accept his self-identity as a coward, denying that he could be anything else. As long as a person is alive, he or she is identified by intentions, plans, dreams, and hopes as much as by what is already true by virtue of the facts. Given this complexity, the problem of deciding “who I am” takes on dramatic and extravagant complications. Consider the following scene from Sartre’s famous play, No Exit, in which one of the characters (now dead and “living” in hell) tries to justify his image of him- self as a hero, despite the facts of his life, which would indicate that he was a coward.
F RO M No Exit B Y Jean-Paul Sartre13
GARCIN: They shot me.
ESTELLE: I know. Because you refused to fight. Well, why shouldn’t you?
GARCIN: I—I didn’t exactly refuse. [In a far-away voice] I must say he talks well, he makes out a good case against me, but he never says what I should have done instead. Should I have gone to the general and said: “General I decline to fight”? A mug’s game; they’d have promptly locked me up. But I wanted to show my colors, my true colors, do you understand? I wasn’t going to be silenced. [To estelle] So I—I took the train. . . . They caught me at the frontier.
ESTELLE: Where were you trying to go?
GARCIN: To Mexico. I meant to launch a pacifist newspaper down there. [A short silence.] Well, why don’t you speak?
ESTELLE: What could I say? You acted quite rightly, as you didn’t want to fight. [garcin makes a fretful gesture.] But, darling, how on earth can I guess what you want me to answer?
INEZ: Can’t you guess? Well, I can. He wants you to tell him that he bolted like a lion. For “bolt” he did, and that’s what’s biting him.
GARCIN: “Bolted,” “went away”—we won’t quarrel over words.
ESTELLE: But you had to run away. If you’d stayed they’d have sent you to jail, wouldn’t they?
GARCIN: Of course. [A pause.] Well, Estelle, am I a coward?
ESTELLE: How can I say? Don’t be so unreasonable, darling. I can’t put myself in your skin. You must decide that for yourself.
GARCIN: [wearily]: I can’t decide.
ESTELLE: Anyhow, you must remember. You must have had reasons for acting as you did.
GARCIN: I had.
13 from No Exit and The Flies by Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Stuart Gilbert. Copyright © 1946 by Stuart Gilbert, renewed 1974, 1975 by Maris Agnes Mathilde Gilbert. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a Division of Random House, Inc., and Éditions Gallimard, Paris.
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ESTELLE: Well?
GARCIN: But were they the real reasons?
ESTELLE: You’ve a twisted mind, that’s your trouble. Plaguing yourself over such trifles!
GARCIN: I’d thought it all out, and I wanted to make a stand. But was that my real motive?
INEZ: Exactly. That’s the question. Was that your real motive? No doubt you argued it out with yourself, you weighed the pros and cons, you found good rea- sons for what you did. But fear and hatred and all the dirty little instincts one keeps dark—they’re motives too. So carry on, Mr. Garcin, and try to be honest with yourself—for once.
GARCIN: Do I need you to tell me that? Day and night I paced my cell, from the window to the door, from the door to the window. I pried into my heart, I sleuthed myself like a detective. By the end of it I felt as if I’d given my whole life to intro- spection. But always I harked back to the one thing certain—that I had acted as I did, I’d taken that train to the frontier. But why? Why? Finally I thought: My death will settle it. If I face death courageously, I’ll prove I am no coward.
INEZ: And how did you face death?
GARCIN: Miserably. Rottenly. [inez laughs.] Oh, it was only a physical lapse— that might happen to anyone; I’m not ashamed of it. Only everything’s been left in suspense, forever. [To estelle] Come here, Estelle. Look at me. I want to feel some- one looking at me while they’re talking about me on earth. . . . I like green eyes.
INEZ: Green eyes! Just hark to him! And you, Estelle, do you like cowards?
ESTELLE: If you knew how little I care! Coward or hero, it’s all one—provided he kisses well.
GARCIN: There they are, slumped in their chairs, sucking at their cigars. Bored they look. Half-asleep. They’re thinking: “Garcin’s a coward.” But only vaguely, dreamily. One’s got to think of something. “That chap Garcin was a coward.” That’s what they’ve decided, those dear friends of mine. In six months’ time they’ll be saying: “Cowardly as that skunk Garcin.” You’re lucky, you two; no one on earth is giving you another thought. But I—I’m long in dying.
GARCIN: [putting his hands on (inez’s) shoulders]: Listen! Each man has an aim in life, a leading motive; that’s so, isn’t it? Well, I didn’t give a damn for wealth, or for love. I aimed at being a real man. A tough, as they say. I staked everything on the same horse. . . . Can one possibly be a coward when one’s deliberately courted danger at every turn? And can one judge a life by a single action?
INEZ: Why not? For thirty years you dreamt you were a hero, and condoned a thousand petty lapses—because a hero, of course, can do no wrong. An easy method obviously. Then a day came when you were up against it, the red light of real danger—and you took the train to Mexico.
GARCIN: I “dreamt,” you say. It was no dream. When I chose that hardest path, I made my choice deliberately. A man is what he wills himself to be.
INEZ: Prove it. Prove it was no dream. It’s what one does, and nothing else, that shows the stuff one’s made of.
“It’s what one does, and nothing else, that shows the stuff one’s made of.” — J E A N - PA U L S A R T R E
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C. The Individual and the Community So far, both our defenses and criticisms of the Cartesian model have focused on the indi- vidual. We have considered the individual and individual consciousness, asking whether or not it conforms to the Cartesian picture of the self. There is a wholly different alternative, however, which we haven’t discussed yet (although Sartre’s No Exit does touch upon it).
Even within discussions of the individual self, it becomes evident that the individual self is largely, if not entirely, a social product and a self defined by society. We have all had the experi- ence of finding ourselves in company in which we “could not be ourselves” or, even worse, in which we acted according to an identity that was wholly imposed upon us by other people. When going to school, for example, we played the role of “student,” ingratiating and op- pressed, long before we started to recognize that it is a role, and not a very pleasant one at that. now we see it as a role that has been formulated solely for the advantage of other people— teachers, administrators, parents—so that we could be forced to “behave.” Have you started to wonder how many other aspects of your identity have been similarly imposed upon you, not chosen at all, much less created by you? How much of your behavior has been “programmed” or “conditioned” by parents, society, television, movies, friends, and schoolmates? The suspi- cion deepens, and soon you start to see a split developing in your thinking about yourself: first, there is your conception of your own identity; second, there is the identity that has been im- posed upon you. The two drift apart like boat and dock, and you find yourself falling between.
no wonder, then, that one of the leading psychiatrists of the last century, R. D. laing, looked at this problem not only as the basis of much of our everyday unhappiness but as the cause of some of our most serious psychological breakdowns as well. laing describes what
he calls “ontological insecurity” as just this split be- tween your awareness of yourself by yourself and the awareness that is imposed upon yourself as an object of other people’s attention. Guilt is an ex- ample of this split; in excess (as freud often argued) such emotions tend to be pathological. One definition of guilt is that it is a kind of self-consciousness that is caught between the need for approval and recog- nition by others and the feeling that you must be “yourself.” Thus we tend to get the idea of a “true self” that lies concealed behind the masks that we present in public, even to our closest friends. We get the sense that our real selves are known only to ourselves, but at the same time we do not really exist except with other people.
• What is the difference between “facticity” and “transcendence”? How does Sartre employ these concepts to claim that there is no self-identity?
• What is “bad faith”? Describe a time when you acted in bad faith.
GARCIN: I died too soon. I wasn’t allowed time to—to do my deeds.
INEZ: One always dies too soon—or too late. And yet one’s whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are—your life, and nothing else.
R. D. Laing (1927–1989)
A Scottish psychiatrist and philoso- pher who wrote extensively about selfhood and personality.
Philosopher and psychiatrist R. D. laing, photographed here by the poet Allen Gins- berg. (© Allen Ginsberg/Corbis)
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But this is an extremely negative view of a ten- sion that is in fact central to our whole Western notion of self, the tension between individuality and social self-identity. In most societies, Plato and Aristotle’s Greece, for example, a person would always see his or her own identity in terms of the society of which one was a member. The idea of a self that was antagonistic to society would have been completely foreign to them (Consider, for in- stance, Socrates’ speech in Crito, in our Introduc- tion, in which he says, in effect, that he cannot serve his own interests against the state without betray- ing himself.) Yet our own idea of self-identity has become so individualistic that the very idea that self-identity is really social-identity flies in the face of that whole Cartesian tradition—and much of Western thinking—that begins with the autonomy of the self and self-consciousness.
An attempt at individual rebellion was launched by nineteenth-century Christian philoso- pher Søren Kierkegaard, who has often been claimed as the father (or forefather) of existen- tialism. He deplores what he sarcastically calls “the public” and urges an end to collective identity and social roles in favor of renewed respect for the individual.
On “The Public” B Y Søren Kierkegaard14
Despite all his work, the subjective thinker obtains only a modest return. The more the collective idea comes to dominate even the ordinary perspective, the more forbidding seems the transition to becoming an individual existing human being instead of losing oneself in the race and saying “we,” “our age,” “the nineteenth century.” That it is a very little thing [to be an existing human being] is not to be denied; thus it takes a great deal of resignation not to disparage it. For what is an individual existing human being? Our age knows all too well how little it is, but just here is the particular immorality of our age. Every age has its own particular immorality: the immorality of our age is perhaps not lust, pleasure and sensuality, but rather a degenerate and pantheistic contempt for the individual. In the midst of all our elation over our age and the nineteenth century there sounds a note of hidden contempt for the individual; in the midst of the self-importance of the gen- eration there is a despair over being human. Everything must be joined to every- thing else; people strive to deceive themselves in the totality of things, in world history; no one wants to be an individual human being.
In fact, so adamant is Kierkegaard on this issue that he argues that a person who “follows the crowd” and does not choose his or her own identity and live passionately as an individual cannot really even be said to exist.
Kierkegaard thinks that some of us “exist” in the way a sleeping passenger takes a drive. (© iStockphoto.com/Linda Steward)
14 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Clancy Martin.
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On Self and Passion B Y Søren Kierkegaard15
It is impossible to exist without passion, unless existing means just any sort of so- called existence. For this reason every Greek thinker was essentially a passionate thinker. I have often wondered how one might bring a man to passion. So I have thought I might seat him on a horse and frighten the horse into a wild gallop, or still better, in order to bring out the passion properly, I might take a man who wants to go somewhere as quickly as possible (and so was already in a sort of pas- sion) and seat him on a horse that can barely walk. But this is just how existence is, if one becomes conscious of it. Or if someone hitched a carriage with Pegasus and an old nag, and told the driver, who was not usually inclined to passion, “Now, drive”: I think that would succeed. And this is just how existence is, if one becomes conscious of it. Eternity is the winged horse, infinitely quick, and time is the old nag, and the existing individual is the driver; that is to say, he is the driver when his existence is not merely a so-called existence, for then he is no driver, but a drunken peasant who sleeps in the wagon and lets the horses fend for themselves. True, he also drives, he is a driver, and so there are perhaps many who—also exist.
Borrowing from both Kierkegaard and nietzsche, Heidegger argued against collective social identity in terms of what he (also ironically) calls das Man, an extremely useful German expression that roughly translates as “they” as in “they say that garlic cures colds.” Who are “they”? no one at all, Heidegger says, just an anonymous no one. Making use of his notion of Dasein (his term for the individual, as one who is literally “being there” in the world),16 he presents the following argument:
On “Dasein” and the “They” B Y Martin Heidegger17
Dasein, as everyday Being-with-one-another, stands in subjection to Others. It itself is not; its Being has been taken away by the Others. Dasein’s everyday possibilities of Being are for the Others to dispose of as they please. These Others, moreover, are not definite Others. On the contrary, any Other can represent them. What is decisive is just that inconspicuous domination by Others which has already been taken over unawares from Dasein as Being-with. One belongs to the Others one- self and enhances their power. “The Others” whom one thus designates in order to cover up the fact of one’s belonging to them essentially oneself, are those who proximally and for the most part “are there” in everyday Being-with-one-another. The “who” is not this one, not that one, not oneself, not some people, and not the sum of them all. The “who” is the neuter, the “they” [das Man].
Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The “they,” which supplies the answer to the question of the “who” of everyday Dasein, is the “nobody” to whom every Dasein has already surrendered itself in Being-among-one-another.
“Everyone is the other, and no one is himself.” — M A R T I N H E I D E G G E R
15 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Clancy Martin. 16 for “Dasein,” read “individual human being”; for “Being-with,” read “being around other people.” 17 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. MacQuarrie and E. Robinson, new York: Harper & Row, 1962.
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Against this “surrender,” Heidegger urges us to “take hold of ourselves” as individuals and find our “authentic” selves.
The Self of everyday Dasein is the they-self, which we distinguish from the authentic Self—that is, from the Self which has been taken hold of in its own way.
This individualist tendency is not unique to existentialism; it is in the mainstream of Western thinking, from ancient Socrates through Reformation Christianity to contemporary capitalism. Socrates’ rebellion was, in a very important way, an existential rebellion. He stood up for his principles against the opinions of the age. luther’s Reformation was, among other things, very much a reassertion of the individual (individual conscience, indi- vidual actions) against the all-embracing spirit of the Catholic Church. Today, virtually every American would agree that every individual deserves at least some individual rights and respect.
Individualism has always had its doubters, however. Individu- alism arises largely as a reaction against the awareness of how socially conditioned we really are. As an instrument of personal growth and as a defense against excessive socialization, individ- ualism is extremely valuable. But when individualism becomes so powerful that personal interests eclipse the interests of everyone else and individual values begin to destroy the community, then it may be time to bring the limits of individualism into question as well. furthermore, an excessive emphasis on individuality may lead us to forget that there are other human ways of living that are not individualistic. There are, of course, limits to the degree to which we can challenge the values and customs of our up- bringing. Some rebellion is required for growth and change of the society as well as of the individual. But too much rebellion can be self-destructive as well as destructive to the community. for our self-identities, no matter how hard we try to think of ourselves as completely indi- vidual, are inextricably tied to the communities and values in which we were raised.
The American sociologist David Reisman looks again at individualism in the light of these considerations and defends it as follows:
On Individualism B Y David Reisman18
Social science has helped us become more aware of the extent to which individuals, great and little, are the creatures of their cultural conditioning; and so we neither blame the little nor exalt the great. But the same wisdom has sometimes led us to the fallacy that, since all men have their being in culture and as the result of the culture, they owe a debt to that culture which even a lifetime of altruism could not repay. (One might as well argue, and in fact many societies in effect do, that since
das Man, or, “the They.” (© Shutterstock.com/John Rawsterne)
18 David Reisman, Individualism Reconsidered, new York: Doubleday, 1954.
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we are born of parents, we must feel guilt whenever we transcend their limitations!) Sometimes the point is pushed to the virtual denial of individuality: since we arise in soci- ety, it is assumed with a ferocious determinism that we can never transcend it. All such con- cepts are useful correctives of an earlier solip- sism. But if they are extended to hold that
conformity with society is not only a necessity but also a duty, they destroy that margin of freedom which gives life its savor and its endless possibility for advance.
David Reisman (1909–2002)
A Harvard sociologist who focused on the American middle class, life in the modern urban environment, higher education, and American foreign relations, especially in connection with the nu- clear arms race.
• In what ways is your self-identity socially constituted? Do you think that who you are is entirely determined by your social relations? What is left after you subtract the entirety of those relations that seem to define you?
In contemporary times, the question of how individuals are defined by or in society is a deeply political issue. It is tied to questions of how we categorize our society ethnically, sexually, and racially. In our pluralist American society, we tend to believe that individual freedoms play more of a role in defining us within society than do, say, our family lineage or professional organiza- tions. We are particularly sensitive, then, to racial or sexual stereotyping and to strict enforce- ment of social roles, because we feel that our identities are thereby taken out of our own control and our individuality is overlooked. This concern is similar to the concern that dualists have about materialism. We worry that if we “are” just our bodies—or similarly if we “are” just what our society makes us—then we are not the free, rational creatures we would like to be.
In the passage that follows, the Black nationalist leader Malcolm X argues that African- Americans’ self-identities are defined for them to a large extent by American society in which whites are a majority.
On Being “African” B Y Malcolm X19
Right now, in this country, if you and I, 22 million African-Americans—that’s what we are—Africans who are in America. You’re nothing but Africans. Nothing but Africans. In fact, you’d get farther calling yourself African instead of Negro. Africans don’t catch hell. You’re the only one catching hell. They don’t have to pass civil-rights bills for Africans. An African can go anywhere he wants right now. All you’ve got to do is tie your head up. That’s right, go anywhere you want. Just stop being a Negro. Change your name to Hoogagagooba. That’ll show you how silly the white man is. You’re dealing with a silly man. A friend of
Malcolm X (1925–1965)
An outspoken leader of the black nationalist movement in this coun- try. He was assassinated in 1965, upon his return from a trip to the Middle East.
Civil rights leader Malcolm x (© Shutterstock.com/Neftali)
19 Malcolm x, “The Ballot or the Bullet” from Malcolm X Speaks. Copyright © 1965, 1989 by Betty Shabazz and Path- finder Press.
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mine who’s very dark put a turban on his head and went into a restaurant in Atlanta before they called themselves desegregated. He went into a white restaurant, he sat down, they served him, and he said, “What would happen if a Negro came in here?” And there he’s sitting, black as night, but because he had his head wrapped up the waitress looked back at him and says, “Why, there wouldn’t no nigger dare come in here.”
Malcolm x explains the moral of the story in another famous speech:
F RO M “At the Audubon” B Y Malcolm X20
One of the best ways to safeguard yourself from being deceived is always to form the habit of looking at things for yourself, listening to things for yourself, thinking for yourself, before you try and come to any judgment. Never base your impression of someone on what someone else has said. Or upon what someone else has writ- ten. Or upon what you read about someone that somebody else wrote. Never base your judgment on things like that. Especially in this kind of country and in this kind of society which has mastered the art of very deceitfully painting people whom they don’t like in an image that they know you won’t like. So you end up hating your friends and loving their enemies.
• Have you ever felt a conflict between your conception of yourself and the ways in which others view you? Describe such a situation and how it made you feel.
• Do you think that it is possible for us to “rebel” against our socialized selves and create ourselves as unique, independent, “authentic” individuals? What problems or limitations do you foresee in such an enterprise?
Obviously, social roles have limited the “free individuality” of other groups, too, includ- ing women. Many contemporary feminists have analyzed how sex roles falsely define us and undermine our individuality. In a now-famous article, Sherry Ortner considers the way soci- ety identifies women.
F RO M “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” B Y Sherry Ortner 21
Much of the creativity of anthropology derives from the tension between two sets of demands: that we explain human universals, and that we explain cultural par- ticulars. By this canon, woman provides us with one of the more challenging problems to be dealt with. The secondary status of woman in society is one of the true universals, a pan-cultural fact. Yet within that universal fact, the specific
20 Malcolm x, “At the Audubon” from Malcolm X Speaks. Copyright © 1965, 1989 by Betty Shabazz and Pathfinder Press. 21 from Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and louise lamphere. All rights reserved. used with the permission of Stanford university Press, www.sup.org. Copyright © 1974 by the Board of Trustees of the leland Stanford Junior university.
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cultural conceptions and symbolizations of woman are extraordinarily diverse and even mutually contradictory. Further, the actual treatment of women and their relative power and contribution vary enormously from cul- ture to culture, and over different periods in the history of particular cultural traditions. Both of these points—the universal fact and the cultural variation—constitute problems to be explained.
My interest in the problem is of course more than academic: I wish to see genuine change come about, the emergence of a social and cul- tural order in which as much of the range of human potential is open to women as is open to men. The universality of female subordina- tion, the fact that it exists within every type of social and economic arrangement and in soci- eties of every degree of complexity, indicates
to me that we are up against something very profound, very stubborn, something we cannot rout out simply by rearranging a few tasks and roles in the social system, or even by reordering the whole economic structure. In this paper I try to expose the underlying logic of cultural thinking that assumes the inferiority of women; I try to show the highly persuasive nature of the logic, for if it were not so persua- sive, people would not keep subscribing to it. But I also try to show the social and cultural sources of that logic, to indicate wherein lies the potential for change.
T H E U N I V E R S A L I T Y O F F E M A L E S U B O R D I N AT I O N What do I mean when I say that everywhere, in every known culture, women are considered in some degree inferior to men? First of all, I must stress that I am talk- ing about cultural evaluations; I am saying that each culture, in its own way and on its own terms, makes this evaluation. But what would constitute evidence that a particular culture considers women inferior?
Three types of data would suffice: (1) elements of cultural ideology and infor- mants’ statements that explicitly devalue women, according them their roles, their tasks, their products, and their social milieux less prestige than are accorded men and the male correlates; (2) symbolic devices, such as the attribution of defilement, which may be interpreted as implicitly making a statement of inferior valuation; and (3) social-structural arrangements that exclude women from participation in or contact with some realm in which the highest powers of the society are felt to reside. These three types of data may all of course be interrelated in any particular system, though they need not necessarily be. Further, any one of them will usually be sufficient to make the point of female inferiority in a given culture. Certainly, female exclusion from the most sacred rite or the highest political council is sufficient evidence. Certainly, explicit cultural ideology devaluing women (and their tasks, roles, products, etc.) is sufficient evidence. Symbolic indicators such as defilement are usually sufficient, although in a few cases in which, say, men and women are equally polluting to one another, a further indicator is required—and is, as far as my investigations have ascertained, always available.
Sherry Ortner (1941–)
An American anthropologist, best known for her work in cross-cul- tural gender distinctions.
Anthropologist Sherry Ortner. (Used with permission by Sherry
Ortner)
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On any or all of these counts, then, I would flatly assert that we find women subordinated to men in every known society.
. . .
N AT U R E A N D C U LT U R E How are we to explain the universal devaluation of women? We could of course rest the case on biological determinism. There is something genetically inherent in the male of the species, so the biological determinists would argue, that makes them the naturally dominant sex; that “something” is lacking in females, and as a result women are not only naturally subordinate but in general quite satisfied with their position, since it affords them protection and the opportunity to maximize maternal pleasures, which to them are the most satisfying experiences of life. With- out going into a detailed refutation of this position, I think it fair to say that it has failed to be established to the satisfaction of almost anyone in academic anthropol- ogy. This is to say, not that biological facts are irrelevant, or that men and women are not different, but that these facts and differences only take on significance of superior/inferior within the framework of culturally defined value systems.
If we are unwilling to rest the case on genetic determinism, it seems to me that we have only one way to proceed. We must attempt to interpret female subordina- tion in light of other universals, factors built into the structure of the most general- ized situation in which all human beings, in whatever culture, find themselves. For example, every human being has a physical body and a sense of nonphysical mind, is part of a society of other individuals and an inheritor of a cultural tradition, and must engage in some relationship, however mediated, with “nature,” or the non- human realm, in order to survive. Every human being is born (to a mother) and ultimately dies, all are assumed to have an interest in personal survival, and society/ culture has its own interest in (or at least momentum toward) continuity and sur- vival, which transcends the lives and deaths of particular individuals. And so forth. It is in the realm of such universals of the human condition that we must seek an explanation for the universal fact of female devaluation.
I translate the problem, in other words, into the following simple question. What could there be in the generalized structure and conditions of existence, common to every culture, that would lead every culture to place a lower value upon women? Specifically, my thesis is that woman is being identified with—or, if you will, seems to be a symbol of—something that every culture devalues, some- thing that every culture defines as being of a lower order of existence than itself. Now it seems that there is only one thing that would fit that description, and that is “nature” in the most generalized sense. Every culture, or, generically, “culture,” is engaged in the process of generating and sustaining systems of meaningful forms (symbols, artifacts, etc.) by means of which humanity transcends the givens of natural existence, bends them to its purposes, controls them in its interest. We may thus broadly equate culture with the notion of human consciousness, or with the products of human consciousness (i.e., systems of thought and technology), by means of which humanity attempts to assert control over nature.
. . . Returning now to the issue of women, their pan-cultural second-class status
could be accounted for, quite simply, by postulating that women are being identified or symbolically associated with nature, as opposed to men, who are identified with culture. Since it is always culture’s project to subsume and transcend nature, if
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women were considered part of nature, then culture would find it “natural” to subordinate, not to say oppress, them. Yet although this argument can be shown to have considerable force, it seems to oversimplify the case. The formulation I would like to defend and elaborate on in the following section, then, is that women are seen “merely” as being closer to nature than men. That is, culture (still equated rela- tively unambiguously with men) recognizes that women are active participants in its special processes, but at the same time sees them as being more rooted in, or having more direct affinity with, nature.
The revision may seem minor or even trivial, but I think it is a more accurate rendering of cultural assumptions. Further, the argument cast in these terms has several analytic advantages over the simpler formulation; I shall discuss these later. It might simply be stressed here that the revised argument would still account for the pan-cultural devaluation of women, for even if women are not equated with nature, they are nonetheless seen as representing a lower order of being, as being less transcendental of nature than men are.
. . . In short, the postulate that woman is viewed as closer to nature than man has
several implications for further analysis, and can be interpreted in several different ways. If it is viewed simply as a middle position on a scale from culture down to nature, then it is still seen as lower than culture and thus accounts for the pan- cultural assumption that woman is lower than man in the order of things. If it is read as a mediating element in the culture-nature relationship, then it may account in part for the cultural tendency not merely to devalue woman but to circumscribe and restrict her functions, since culture must maintain control over its (pragmatic and symbolic) mechanisms for the conversion of nature into culture. And if it is read as an ambiguous status between culture and nature, it may help account for the fact that, in specific cultural ideologies and symbolizations, woman can occasion- ally be aligned with culture, and in any event is often assigned polarized and con- tradictory meanings within a single symbolic system. Middle status, mediating functions, ambiguous meaning—all are different readings, for different contextual purposes, of woman’s being seen as intermediate between nature and culture.
“Even if women are not equated with nature, they are nonetheless seen as representing a lower order of being, as being less transcendental of nature than men are.” — S H E R R Y O R T N E R
• Does your own culture define women as inferior to men? If so, how? How do you explain this? Do you find Ortner’s argument convincing? Are there ways you would argue that women are superior to men? Or do you think that very idea of a “supe- rior” sex/gender is somehow absurd?
How would a society without clear social and sexual roles function? Is it even possible that we could interact with each other as entirely free individuals? Some feminists, like Ann fer- guson, believe so. She believes, however, that in order to achieve such an ideal, we must all embrace an “androgynous” sexuality.
On Androgyny B Y Ann Ferguson22
There is good evidence that human babies are bisexual, and only learn a specific male or female identity by imitating and identifying with adult models. This
22 Ann ferguson, “Androgyny as a Progressive Ideal for Human Development,” in Feminism and Philosophy, ed. Mary Vetterling-Braggin, frederick A. Elliston, and Jane English, lanham, MD: littlefield, Adams, 1977.
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evidence comes from the discovery that all human beings possess both male and female hormones (androgen and estrogen respec- tively), and also from concepts first devel- oped at length by Freud. Freud argued that heterosexual identity is not achieved until the third stage of the child’s sexual develop- ment. Sex identity is developed through the resolution of the Oedipus complex, in which the child has to give up a primary at- tachment to the mother and learn either to identify with, or love, the father. But Sh- ulamith Firestone suggests that this process is not an inevitable one, as Freud presents it to be. Rather, it is due to the power dynam- ics of the patriarchal nuclear family. Note that, on this analysis, if the sexual division of labor were destroyed, the mechanism that trains boys and girls to develop heterosexual sexual identities would also be de- stroyed. If fathers and mothers played equal nurturant roles in child-rearing and had equal social, economic, and political power outside the home, there would be no reason for the boy to have to reject his emotional side in order to gain the power associated with the male role. Neither would the girl have to assume a female role in rejecting her assertive, independent side in order to attain power indirectly through manipulation of males. As a sexual identity, bisexuality would then be the norm rather than the exception.
At the time ferguson wrote this article, feminists commonly claimed that a distinction should be made between sex, the biological facts about a per- son’s reproductive potential, and gender, the social roles that get assigned to people on the basis of their sexual classification. She emphasizes that gender roles are malleable, and she suggests that if the division of labor along sexual lines were dis- rupted, our sense of sexual identities would change as well. Since then many feminist thinkers have fol- lowed American philosopher Judith Butler in criti- cizing the sex-gender distinction. Butler argues that these notions cannot be as clearly distinguished as feminists had earlier thought. We don’t have access to what the sexed body would be “prior” to being assigned gender categories, and our very catego- ries of male and female are as much products of social construction as are our ideas of social roles.
While the relationship between sex and gender is debated, many (perhaps most) of us consider
Ann Ferguson (1938–)
An emerita professor of philoso- phy and women’s studies at the University of Massachusetts.
American philosopher Ann ferguson. (Photo credit: Lena Gunnarssön. Used with permission
of Ann Ferguson.)
This temple sculpture from Elephanta Island, off Mumbai, India, depicts the androgynous deity Ardhanari, who conjoins the male and female energies of Shiva and his consort Shakti. (HIP/Art Resource, NY)
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these aspects of ourselves to be important to making us who we are. In light of this, it is in- teresting that Descartes’s classical notion of the self as a “thinking thing” has no place for sex or gender as determinant of our identity. On his account, these notions would refer to what Aristotle considers “accidental” characteristics, inessential to making us the kind of thing we are. If we are to consider sex and/or gender essential to our self-identities, however, the malleability of either would suggest that our identities could change rather drastically if we embraced androgyny or underwent gender reassignment surgery (a term that itself sug- gests a particular take on the connection between sex and gender).
In her memoir Crossing, American economist Deirdre McCloskey describes the kind of transformation she experienced in the process of having her gender reassigned. Though she wants to avoid any notion of gender essentialism (the idea that a gender is defined by a fixed set of characteristics), she considers her motivation to be a matter of recognizing her identity. Her experiences suggest that, at least where gender is concerned, self-identity and social identity may be related in complicated ways and that psychological and physical con- tinuity may be matters of degrees.
F RO M Crossing: A Memoir B Y Deirdre McCloskey23
I want to tell you the story of a crossing from fifty-two-year-old man to fifty-five- year-old woman, Donald to Deirdre.
“A strange story,” you say. Yes, it’s strange, statistically. All the instruments agree that what’s usually called
“transsexuality,” permanently crossing the gender boundary, is rare. (The Latin in “transsexuality” makes it sound sexual, which is mistaken; or medical, which is misleading; or scientific, which is silly. I’ll use plain English “crossing.”) Only three in ten thousand want to cross the boundary of gender, a few of them in your own city neighborhood or small town. Gender crossing is no threat to male/female sex ratios or the role of women or the stability of the dollar. Most people are con- tent with their birth gender.
But people do after all cross various boundaries. I’ve been a foreigner a little, in England and Holland and on shorter visits elsewhere. If you’ve been a foreigner you can understand somewhat, because gender crossing is a good deal like foreign travel. Most people would like to go to Venice on vacation. Most people, if they could magically do it, would like to try out the other gender for a day or a week or a month. The Venice visitors as a group can be thought of as all the “crossgen- dered,” from stone butch dykes to postoperative male-to-female gender crossers, all the traversers, permanent or temporary, monk or from civilian to soldier or from man to woman. Crossing boundaries is a minority interest, but human.
My crossing—change, migration, growing up, self-discovery—took place from 1994 to 1997, beginning in my home in Iowa, then a year in Holland, then back in Iowa, with travels in be- tween. As Donald and then as Deirdre I was and am a professor of economics and of history at the University of Iowa. From age eleven
Deirdre McCloskey (1942–)
American professor of economics, history, English and communi- cation at the University of Illinois at Chicago and professor of eco- nomic history at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. She is also a civil rights advocate for those in the LGBT community.
23 Deirdre n. McCloskey, Crossing: A Memoir, Chicago: university of Chicago Press, 1999.
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I had been a secret crossdresser, a few times a week. Otherwise I was normal, just a guy. My wife had known about the crossdressing since the first year of our mar- riage, when we were twenty-two. No big deal, we decided. Lots of men have this or that sexual peculiarity. Relax, we said. By 1994, age fifty-two, I had been mar- ried those three decades, had two grown children, and thought I might crossdress a little more. Visit Venice more too.
I visited womanhood and stayed. It was not for the pleasures, though I dis- covered many I had not imagined, and many pains too. But calculating plea- sures and pains was not the point. The point was who I am. Here the analogy with migration breaks down. One moves permanently from Sicily to New York because one imagines the streets of New York are paved with gold, or at least better paved than the streets at home, not mainly because back in Catania since age eleven one had dreamed of being an American. Migration can be modeled as a matter of cost and benefit, and it has been by economic historians. But I did not change gender because I liked colorful clothing (Donald did not) or womanly grace (Donald viewed it as sentimentality). The “decision” was not utilitarian. In our culture the rhetoric of the very word “decision” suggests cost and benefit. My gender crossing was motivated by identity, not by a balance sheet of utility.
Of course you can ask what psychological reasons explain my desire to cross and reply with, say, a version of Freud. Some researchers think there is a biological explanation for gender crossing, because parts of the brains of formerly male gender crossers in postmortems are notably female. But a demand for an answer to why carries with it in our medicalized culture an agenda of treatment. If a gender crosser is “ just” a guy who gets pleasure from it, that’s one thing (laugh at him, jail him, murder him). If it’s brain chemistry, that’s another (commit him to a mad- house and try to “cure” him).
I say in response to your question Why? “Can’t I just be?” You, dear reader, are. No one gets indignant if you have no answer to why you are an optimist or why you like peach ice cream. These days most people will grant you an exemption from the why question if you are gay: in 1960 they would not and were therefore eager to do things to you, many of them nasty. I want the courtesy and the safety of a whyless treatment extended to gender crossers. I want the medical models of gender crossing (and of twenty other things) to fall. That’s the politics. I am ashamed that from the 1960s to the 1990s, in the political movements for black civil rights, women’s liberation, gay rights, and opposition to the war in Vietnam, I had sound opinions but never really took a chance on them. Telling you my story is my last chance to be counted.
And incidentally, Why do you think you are the gender you were officially as- signed to at birth? Prove it. How odd.
Ah. I think you need some treatment.
After a year of hesitation, and two years from well beginning, I found to my delight that I had crossed. Look by look, smile by smile, I was accepted. That doesn’t make me a 100 percent, essential woman—I’ll never have XX chromosomes, never have had the life of a girl and woman up to age fifty-two. But the world does not demand 100 percents and essences, thank God. An agnostic since adolescence, in my second year of crossing I came tentatively to religion and then could thank God in person, who made me inside in my comfort a woman.
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I get weepy sometimes as I walk to the office, pick up my dry cleaning, shop at Prairie Lights bookstore, so pleased to Be. It’s like someone who thought herself more French than American and one day was able to be French; or someone who always hoped to be a professional athlete and finally became one; or someone who felt herself a businesswoman and at last was seen as one. My game of solitaire came out.
I apologize for romanticizing sometimes the goodness of women and criticizing sometimes the badness of men. It’s how I felt at the time. Forgive me, new to this place and starry-eyed. Perhaps my stories of Donald and then Dee and then Deirdre show enough bad women and good men to offset my romantic theories. In con- trasting how men and women “are” I do not mean to recruit stereotypes or essen- tialisms that have been used to the disadvantage of other women. Women are not always more loving, or less interested in career. And certainly they are what in detail they “are” not on account of some eternal Platonic ideal or the imperatives of genetics. I am reporting how the difference in social practice seemed to me, admitting always that the difference might be, as the professors say, “socially con- structed.” Gender is not in every way “natural.” “Feminine” gestures, for example, are not God’s own creation. This of course I know. The social construction of gender is, after all, something a gender crosser comes to know with unusual vivid- ness. She does it for a living.
. . . After the crossing I was eating lunch in Iowa City with a woman friend, another aca- demic, and we spoke about how talk normalizes. She said, “This is the age of the candid memoir.” So it seems. It’s a good thing, we agreed, because talking to each other about who we are can make us mutually all human. Demonizing Others is the first stop on the railway to the gas chambers. Nowadays there are many books about the crossgendered. Movies and television have stopped portraying them as dangerous lunatics in the mold of Anthony Perkins in Psycho. Since the 1960s, detested by those who value order above freedom, many kinds of people have spoken up: the raped women who kept their secrets, the unmarried mothers who kept theirs. In the 1950s a lot of people were keeping secrets, personal and state: the obedient wives, the hidden handicapped, the closeted homosexuals, the silenced socialists, the blacks under Jim Crow. After the liberation and the talk that followed they are no longer disgraceful Others or pathetic victims, or merely invisibles—“We don’t have any homosexuals in Oklahoma”—but people whose stories are heard and talked about and might even be imagined as one’s own. It’s the difference between shame and life. . . .
As the car pulled out of the parking lot Donald thought, I am a fifty-three-year-old heterosexual crossdresser, married thirty years, two grown chil-
dren, a professor of economics and history. I don’t want to be a woman. Of course not. Just a hobby. Relax. Let’s see: East-West Tollway. He thought he knew the road well. . . . Just try it on, he said, as the car carried him west toward the Mississippi. How
would it feel to actually be a woman? A mental exercise. I’m in male drag now, of course, no women’s clothes. Appropriate:
heterosexual crossdresser. Not a transsexual! Not me. . . .
Just a guy who gets off dressing occasionally as a woman. No one knows in Iowa City. No problem.
Maybe one guy in a hundred does crossdressing, otherwise straight and married. Or gay. Women, too—though they can crossdress without anyone caring, like that wife of a colleague
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who wears men’s shoes. None of them want to be in the other gender for real. Out of a hundred crossdressers maybe three do want to change. Three in a hundred out of one in a hundred. Hey, a different thing, very rare. Not me. It makes crossdressing look conventional.
I’m not transsexual. I don’t want to cross permanently, be a woman. I don’t want to become a Venetian. In the past eight months I’ve spoken to lots of transsexuals, though. Just out of interest.
Wife, grown kids. Me still Tarzan, not Jane. We can work it out. If my wife will be rea- sonable. Just reasonable.
But let’s see. Try it on. A mental experiment. Just thinking. Near De Kalb, the only town between the outskirts of Chicago and the Missis-
sippi, after twenty miles of just thinking, he said, Wait: Good Lord. I can become a woman. I have always wanted to. I have learned by accident that I can. I am not a heterosexual crossdresser. All this time. I am a transsexual. I can be a woman, he said. And he wept in relief, as the car drove itself. I am a
woman, he said. Yes! She said again, I am a woman, and wept.
That’s what the crossdressing since age eleven had been about, closeted over four decades, confined within marriage. And the open dressing in clubs and at home during the eight months past, more and more. The womanhood was there beneath the surface and yearned to take form.
Later in an interview with the student newspaper he described the feeling on the toll road as an “epiphany,” which was a dangerous choice of words. It is a religious word, evoking Saul on the road to Damascus. “And suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven, and he fell to the earth, and heard a voice.” Donald was not then religious, Deirdre later was noncharismatically so, and the experience was not spiritual. No light, no presence of God, no voice. The danger is that newspapers and psychiatrists treat religious experiences as madness. Donald’s epiphany was merely a moment of personal insight, a realization on the toll road near De Kalb. This “epiphany”: people have moments like that, Deirdre would say, moments when self-knowledge becomes more than a swirl of facts. A singular truth of character stands in front of you, as clear as a crucifix. Watch it: more religious talk in an irreligious world. Secularly speaking, understand, it is knowing yourself instead of knowing about yourself. He knew the dam. On the twentieth day of August 1995 a little after noon the dam broke and the water of his life swirled out onto the plain. He knew himself. Herself.
That’s it, she said: I am a woman.
D. One Self? Any Self? Questioning the Concept of Personal “Essence” So far, we have talked as if self-identity is something singular, a unified set of ideals and char- acteristics according to which one identifies himself or herself. But need we think of the “self” in this way?
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In his novel Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse pres- ents a character whose “self” is something quite different. Hesse’s Harry Haller is a multiple or plural- istic self, a collection of “selves,” with no one of them “real” or “essential.” like many of us, he lives with the myth of “two selves,” one human, rational, and well behaved, the other beastly, wild, and wolflike. He is torn between the two. But, Hesse tells us, Harry’s unhappiness is not, as he thinks, a result of his “war between the selves” but rather the result of an oversimplified notion of self. “The Steppen- wolf is a fiction,” writes Hesse, a “mythological simplification.” The idea of two selves, one wolf, one man, is as old as the mind-body distinction, as
the Christian division between the body and the soul—even older, in fact, dating back to Pythagoras and Plato. Hesse’s argument is that this simple self is a strictly “bourgeois con- vention,” a middle-class argument for the simplicity and unity of the self. Indeed, Harry is unhappy because of the tension and complexity of only two selves: the “human” who has culture and cultivated thoughts and feelings and the “wolf” who is savage and cruel, im- mersed in the dark world of freud’s unconscious instincts and raw, untamed nature. Hesse argues the following:
F RO M Steppenwolf B Y Hermann Hesse24
Suppose that Harry tried to ascertain in any single moment of his life, any single act, what part the man had in it and what part the wolf, he would find himself at once in a dilemma, and his whole beautiful wolf theory would go to pieces. For there is not a single human being . . . not even the idiot, who is so conveniently simple that his being can be explained as the sum of two or three principal elements; and to explain so complex a man as Harry by the artless division into wolf and man is a hopelessly childish attempt. Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone’s does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousands.
Why is it, Hesse asks, that we all seem to have this need to think of ourselves in such de- ceptive terms and regard the self as a single unit? Because, he suggests, we are deluded by an analogy; since each of us has but one body, it is assumed that each of us has a single soul, too. from this analogy we assume that there must be one self within each body. But it is here that Hesse contrasts our view with the views of ancient India and notes with admiration that there is no trace of such a notion in the poems of the ancient Asian traditions. He then offers us his own analogy:
Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made up of many threads. The ancient Asiatics knew this well enough, and in the Buddhist Yoga an exact technique was devised for unmasking the illusion of the personality. The human merry-go-round sees many changes: The illusion that cost India the efforts
Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
Novelist and poet. Although born in Germany, he was opposed to German nationalism, and he became a Swiss citizen in 1923. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946.
Hermann Hesse. (© Estate of Fred Stein/Art Resource, NY)
(© Shutterstock.com/Memo
Angeles) 24 Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf, trans. Basil Creighton and Rev. Joseph Mileck, new York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1929.
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Hesse refers to Buddhist concepts of the self with praise. Although he remains en- trenched in Western ideas as well, Hesse is already moving more than halfway toward one of the ancient Eastern conceptions of self, which is essentially a denial of the self as we think of it. As we’ve seen in Chapter 1, the Buddhist says, “give up your self-identity.” This is a familiar refrain among many Eastern mystics. It may also be an ideal secular aspiration, however. for instance, the contemporary french philosopher and feminist Luce Irigaray claims that the unified, “essential” self is a limiting and oppressive notion, particularly when applied to women. In her book This Sex Which Is Not One she claims that the genuine and free identity of a woman is a multiplicity or plurality of characters. note the deliberate play on words in her title: “this sex which is not one.” With it, she implies a multiplicity of meanings: The female sex is not singular and unified; women are not unified together; the female is not a sex at all. With this reading, we see that Irigaray is not only claiming that a woman has mul- tiple selves instead of a single body and a single soul, but also that all human beings, men included, may have multiple sexualities, multiple identities—that there may not be any natu- ral masculinity or femininity at all in the plural “self” from which we sort them out. Thus, Iriga- ray is making a feminist criticism of all our social and sexual roles at the same time as she offers a theory of self-identity.
F RO M This Sex Which Is Not One B Y Luce Irigaray25
. . . not knowing what she wants, ready for anything, even asking for more, so long as he will “take” her as his “object” when he seeks his own pleasure. Thus she will not say what she herself wants; moreover, she does not know, or no longer knows, what she wants. As Freud admits, the beginnings of the sexual life of a girl child are so “obscure,” so “faded with time,” that one would have to dig down very deep indeed to discover beneath the traces of this civilization, of this history, the vestiges of a more archaic civilization that might give some clue to woman’s sexuality. That extremely ancient civilization would undoubtedly have a different alphabet, a different language. . . . Woman’s desire would not be expected to speak the same language as man’s; woman’s desire has doubtless been submerged by the logic that has dominated the West since the time of the Greeks.
. . . “She” is indefinitely other in herself. This
is doubtless why she is said to be whimsical, incomprehensible, agitated, capricious . . . not to mention her language, in which “she” sets off in all directions leaving “him” unable to discern the coherence of any meaning.
• What would it mean to have a pluralistic self or selves? Do you find this view plau- sible? Have you ever felt as though you were somehow a multiplicity of selves or identities? (We’re not talking craziness here.) Describe such an experience.
Luce Irigaray (1930–)
A French feminist philosopher. Her work incorporates literary criticism, feminism, and philosophy. Her best-known works are Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which Is Not One.
of thousands of years to unmask is the same illusion that the West has labored just as hard to maintain and strengthen.
25 Reprinted from luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. Copyright © 1985 by Cornell university. used by permission of the publisher, Cornell university Press.
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Hers are contradictory words, somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason, inau- dible for whoever listens to them with ready-made grids, with a fully elaborated code in hand. For in what she says, too, at least when she dares, woman is constantly touching herself. She steps ever so slightly aside from herself with a murmur, an exclamation, a whisper, a sentence left unfinished. . . . When she returns, it is to set off again from elsewhere. From another point of pleasure, or of pain. One would have to listen with another ear, as if hearing an “other meaning” always in the process of weaving itself, of embracing itself with words, but also of getting rid of words in order not to become fixed, congealed in them. For if “she” says something, it is not, it is already no longer, identical with what she means. What she says is never identical with any- thing, moreover; rather, it is contiguous. It touches (upon). And when it strays too far from that proximity, she breaks off and starts over at “zero,” her body-sex.
It is useless, then, to trap women in the exact definition of what they mean, to make them repeat (themselves) so that it will be clear; they are already elsewhere in that discursive machinery where you expected to surprise them. They have re- turned within themselves. Which must not be understood in the same way as within yourself. They do not have the interiority that you have, the one you per- haps suppose they have. Within themselves means within the intimacy of that silent, multiple, diffuse touch. And if you ask them insistently what they are thinking about, they can only reply: Nothing. Everything.
Thus what they desire is precisely nothing, and at the same time everything. Always something more and something else besides that one—sexual organ, for example—that you give them, attribute to them. Their desire is often interpreted, and feared, as a sort of insatiable hunger, a voracity that will swallow you whole. Whereas it really involves a different economy more than anything else, one that upsets the linearity of a project, undermines the goal-object of a desire, diffuses the polarization toward a single pleasure, disconcerts fidelity to a single discourse.
. . . Must this multiplicity of female desire and female language be understood as
shards, scattered remnants of a violated sexuality? A sexuality denied? The question has no simple answer. The rejection, the exclusion of a female imaginary certainly puts woman in the position of experiencing herself only fragmentarily, in the lit- tle-structured margins of a dominant ideology, as waste, or excess, what is left of a mirror invested by the (masculine) “subject” to reflect himself, to copy himself. Moreover, the role of “femininity” is prescribed by this masculine specularization and corresponds scarcely at all to woman’s desire, which may be recovered only in secret, in hiding, with anxiety and guilt.
But if the female imaginary were to deploy itself, if it could bring itself into play otherwise than as scraps, uncollected debris, would it represent itself, even so, in the form of one universe? Would it even be volume instead of surface? No.
. . . (Re-)discovering herself, for a woman, thus could only signify the possibility of
sacrificing no one of her pleasures to another, of identifying herself with none of them in particular, of never being simply one. A sort of expanding universe to which no limits could be fixed and which would not be incoherence . . . nonetheless—nor that polymorphous perversion of the child in which the erogenous zones would lie waiting to be regrouped under the primacy of the phallus.
Woman always remains several, but she is kept from dispersion because the other is already within her and is autoerotically familiar to her. Which is not to say
“The role of ‘femininity’ is prescribed by this masculine specularization and corresponds scarcely at all to woman’s desire, which may be recovered only in secret, in hiding, with anxiety and guilt.” — L U C E I R I G A R AY
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that she appropriates the other for herself, that she reduces it to her own property. Ownership and property are doubtless quite foreign to the feminine. At least sexu- ally. But not nearness. Nearness so pronounced that it makes all discrimination of identity, and thus all forms of property, impossible.
Irigaray is not the only feminist philosopher to criticize the notion of “self” that was as- sumed by Descartes and adopted by many of his successors. Many feminists are critical of the Cartesian notion “self” particularly because of the way the mind-body distinction is re- lated to stereotypes of gender. (for a focus on the mind-body distinction in relation to ste- reotypes, see Spelman’s article in Chapter 5.) Because our society has come to accept the “masculinity” of the mind and the “femininity” of the body, these feminists claim, the philo- sophical notion of the “self” as consciousness or mind incorporates sexism right into our notions of human nature.
In the following passage, Genevieve Lloyd, a contemporary feminist and philosopher, criticizes Cartesian philosophy for emphasizing an ideal of the rational self that, as character- ized, once applied exclusively to men.
F RO M “The Man of Reason” B Y Genevieve Lloyd26
By the Man of Reason I mean the ideal of rationality associated with the rationalist philosophies of the seventeenth century. And, secondly, something more nebulous— the residue of that ideal in our contemporary consciousness, our inheritance from seventeenth century rationalism. This is, I think, a substantial component in what reason has come to be. But it is not, of course, the only component. In focusing on it to the exclusion of any other developments in the notion of reason since the sev- enteenth century, this paper inevitably presents an incomplete picture of reason, but one that does highlight, I think, some aspects of reason that are of considerable relevance to philosophical aspects of feminism.
The main feature of the Man of Reason that I am concerned to bring into focus is his maleness. This in itself, I think, is a matter of philosophical interest. More is involved here than the supposedly “neutral” sense of “man” to include women. We are all familiar with the fact that linguistic usage commonly fails to recognize that humanity comprises two sexes. But there is something deeper to the maleness of the Man of Reason; something more deeply engrained in consciousness. He is after all a creation of reflective consciousness. When the Man of Reason is extolled, philosophers are not talking about idealizations of human beings. They are talking about ideals of manhood.
What I want to do in this paper is to bring this undoubted maleness of the Man of Reason into clearer focus. There are, I think, reasons that belong in the history of philosophy for the association between reason and masculinity. Some parts of the
Genevieve Lloyd (1941–)
Australian feminist philosopher. She is professor emerita at the University of New South Wales in Australia.
26Genevieve lloyd, “The Man of Reason,” first published in Metaphilosophy 10, 1 (January 1979): 18–37; reprinted in Women, Knowledge, and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy, ed. Ann Garry and Marilyn Pearsall, Boston: unwin, Hyman. Reprinted with permission.
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history of philosophy can throw light here on a very con- fused and tension-ridden area of human experience. Past philosophical reflection has after all helped form our present thought structures. And the creature I am calling the Man of Reason embodies some of the fundamental ideals of our culture. Let us try then to bring him into sharper focus.
T H E A S S O C I AT I O N O F “M A L E ” W I T H “ R AT IO N A L” The associations between “male” and “rational” and be- tween “female” and “non-rational” have, of course, a very long history. The idea that the rational is somehow spe- cially associated with masculinity goes back to the Greek founding fathers of rationality as we know it. Aristotle thought that woman was “as it were an impotent male, for it is through a certain incapacity that the female is female.” This intrinsic female incapacity was a lack in the “principle of soul” and hence associated with an incapacity in respect of rationality. The claim is not of course that women do not have rationality, but they have it in an inferior, fainter way. They have rationality; they are distinguished from the animals by being rational. Yet they are not equal to men. They are somehow lesser men, lesser in respect of the all-important thing; rationality.
. . .
R E A S O N I N T H E S E V E N T E E N T H C E N T U RY One of the most striking things that happens to reason in the seventeenth century is the attempt to encapsulate it in
a systematic method for attaining certainty. The paradigm of this approach to reason is Descartes’ Regulae, the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, written in 1628. Here there emerges a new conception of what is involved in knowledge. The ac- quisition of knowledge is a matter of the systematic pursuit of an orderly method. The essence of the method is to break down all the complex operations involved in reasoning into their most basic constituents and to render the mind adept in per- forming these simple operations—intuition and deduction. Intuition is the un- doubting conception of an unclouded and attentive mind which comes from the light of reason alone. This is the basis for Descartes’ later influential doctrine of clear and distinct ideas. Deduction is the process by which we extend knowledge beyond intuitions by connecting them in series. These are the only mental opera- tions Descartes will admit into his method; but the proper understanding and use of them will, he thinks, yield all that lies within the province of knowledge. Any- thing else is in fact an impediment to knowledge:
nothing can be added to the pure light of reason which does not in some way obscure it.
The method is universally applicable, regardless of any difference in subject matter:
we must not fancy that one kind of knowledge is more obscure than another, since all knowledge is of the same nature throughout, and consists solely in combining what is self evident.
Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), The Thinker (1902). The man of reason? (© iStockphoto.com/Vladimir1965)
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This universality of Cartesian method is emphasized in the Discourse on Method, published in 1637:
provided only that we abstain from receiving anything as true which is not so, and always retain the order which is necessary in order to deduce the one conclusion from the other, there can be nothing so remote that we cannot reach to it, nor so recondite that we cannot discover it.
For Descartes, then, all knowledge consists in self-evident intuition and neces- sary deduction. We are to break down the complex and obscure into what is simple and self-evident, then combine the resultant units in an orderly manner. In order to know we must isolate the “simple natures,” the objects of intuition, and “scrutinise them separately with steadfast mental gaze.” We then combine them in chains of deductions. The whole of human knowledge consists in a distinct perception of the way in which these simple natures combine in order to build up other objects.
There is a deeper, metaphysical, dimension to the Cartesian treatment of reason. In the course of elaborating a method for attaining certain knowledge Descartes thinks he is uncovering the unity of all the sciences, the unity of knowledge. For him this is identical with the order of thought itself, with the very structure of the knowing mind. And this order of thought is taken as transparently reflecting the order of things. In the Regulae there is no gap between intuitions and the simple natures that are their objective correlates. In the later Meditations (1641) the possi- bility of radical doubt opens a gap between ideas and the material world, between the structure of the mind and the structure of the reality it attempts to know. But this gap is then closed by the existence of a veracious God. Introspection of the nature of thought in an individual mind ultimately yields access to universal reason, God given and God guaranteed, and hence to the structure of reality itself, con- ceived by Cartesian rationalism to be identical with that of the mind.
This isomorphism, between reason and reality, founded on a veracious God, gives reason a quasi-divine character. Reason is God imbued, the divine spark in man. This is the seventeenth century version of the treatment of man’s ratio- nal faculty as reflecting the godhead, as that in virtue of which man is made in God’s image.
Another feature of Descartes’ treatment of reason that is crucial here is its con- nection with his antithesis between mind and matter. The basic units of Cartesian method are discrete, sharp edged and self-contained mental items. This becomes even more pronounced in his later works. The vehicles of knowledge are clear, precisely bordered mental states, sharply separated from one another:
The distinct is that which is so precise and different from all other objects that it con- tains within itself nothing but what is clear.
And this discrete, delineated character of the units of knowledge is grounded in Descartes’ distinction between mind and matter. The absolute certainty that ac- companies clear and distinct ideas derives from their purely mental character. In- tuition, as Descartes puts it, is free of the “fluctuating testimony of the senses” and the “blundering constructions of imagination.” Cartesian method is essentially a matter of forming the “habit of distinguishing intellectual from corporeal mat- ters.” It is a matter of shedding the sensuous from thought.
The search for the “clear and distinct,” the separating out of the emotional, the sensuous, the imaginative, now makes possible polarizations of previously ex- isting contrasts—intellect versus the emotions; reason versus imagination; mind
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versus matter. We have seen that the claim that women are somehow lacking in respect of rationality, that they are more impulsive, more emotional, than men is by no means a seventeenth century innovation. But these contrasts were previously contrasts within the rational. What ought to be dominated by reason had not previously been so sharply delineated from the intellectual. The conjunction of Cartesian down-grading of the sensuous with the use of the mind-matter distinc- tion to establish the discrete character of Cartesian ideas introduces possibilities of polarization that were not there before.
Another relevant factor here is that shedding the non-intellectual from our mental states is something that demands training. In earlier centuries too, of course, it was thought appropriate to give the education of women a different character from that of men. And it was possible to present this as justified by their being different in respect of rationality. But with the seventeenth century there is a new dimension. Women can now be excluded from training in reason, that is, from the acquisition of method. And since this training is explicitly a matter of learning to leave one’s emotions, imagination, etc., out of account, there now emerges a new dimension to the idea that women are more emotional or more impulsive, etc., than men. If they are excluded from training in rationality, women are perforce left emotional, impul- sive, fancy ridden. They are not trained out of the “blundering constructions of the imagination” to enter the rarified air of reason. So thought styles, that are in the seventeenth century sense pre-rational, can survive in women. This makes it true, in a way it need not have been before, that women are less rational than men.
Also, it now becomes possible, as it was not before, to have a reasoned basis for assigning the emotions, the imagination, the sensuous in general, to women as their special area of responsibility. The training of a Man of Reason does after all involve getting him to shed many of his normal characteristics. It can now be seen as woman’s role to preserve for him the areas of warmth and sensuousness that training in reason demands that he himself transcend. A great deal happens of course between the time of Descartes and that of Rousseau. But we can see this theme, elaborated almost to the point of parody, in Rousseau’s views on the educa- tion of women in Emile, which so outraged Mary Wollstonecraft in the Vindication of the Rights of Women:
To be pleasing in his sight, to win his respect and love, to train him in childhood, to tend him in manhood, to counsel and console, to make his life pleasant and happy, these are the duties of woman for all time, and this is what she should be taught while she is young.
The contrast involved in the idea that man was made in God’s image and woman was made to be a companion for man thus takes on a new dimension in the seven- teenth century. We now have a separation of functions backed by a theory of mind. Given an already existing situation of sexual inequality, reason—the godlike, the spark of the divine in man—is assigned to the male. The emotions, the imagina- tion, the sensuous are assigned to women. They are to provide comfort, relief, entertainment and solace for the austerity that being a Man of Reason demands. Something like this had of course been the case before. Different training was given to men and women to fit them for different life styles. But now the tran- scending of the sensuous can be seen as an end in itself. It is not in order to fit him for the heroic that the Man of Reason is to be trained out of his soft emotions and his sensuousness, but because that is precisely what it is to be rational. The division
“Given an already existing situation of sexual inequality, reason—the godlike, the spark of the divine in man—is assigned to the male. The emotions, the imagination, the sensuous are assigned to women.” — G E N E V I E V E L LOY D
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Although these feminist criticisms are contemporary, there has long been criticism of the notion of the unified “self” in the Eastern religions, as Hesse noted. Around the world, in fact, mystic sects of all faiths have tended toward a different conception of self-identity from that which has been dominant in Western philosophy. Of course, even these mystics admit that people have “personalities” and “egos” in some sense; most people most of the time have some notion of “themselves.” Some Eastern religions claim, however, that this vision of “ourselves” is a false image. It is just an illusion that one accepts out of ignorance. In Bud- dhism, for example, awareness of the non-existence of the self is an ideal, which can be fully achieved only with enlightenment.
An early Buddhist work, for instance, the Dhammapada (ca. 250 b.c.e.), contains several passages about this ideal.
F RO M The Dhammapada27
C H A P T E R X I I S E L F Let each man first direct himself to what is proper, then let him teach others; thus a wise man will not suffer.
If a man make himself as he teaches others to be, then, being himself well- subdued, he may subdue others; for one’s own self is difficult to subdue.
Self is the lord of self, who else could be the lord? With self well-subdued, a man finds a lord such as few can find.
The evil done by one’s self, born of one’s self, begot- ten by one’s self, crushes the foolish, as a diamond breaks even a precious stone.
. . . The foolish man who scorns the instruction of the
saintly, of the elect [ariya], of the virtuous, and follows a false doctrine—he bears fruit to his own destruction, like the fruits of the Katthaka reed.
By one’s self the evil is done, by one’s self one suffers; by one’s self evil is left undone; by one’s self one is purified. The pure and the impure stand and fall by themselves; no one can purify another.
Let no one forget his own duty for the sake of an- other’s, however great; let a man after he has discerned his own duty, be faithful to his duty.
• Do you agree that the “Man of Reason” is necessarily male? In what ways (if any) is rationality or reflective consciousness distinctly masculine?
between reason and the non-rational can now be seen as reflexing and as being reenacted in the division between the sexes—in a way it was not before.
The stage is now set for the emergence of the Man of Reason as a male character ideal.
The Buddha. (© Shutterstock.com/Deborah Kolb)
27 from The Dhammapada, parts reprinted in The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha: Early Discourses, the Dhammapada, and Later Basic Writings, ed. E. A. Burtt, new York: new American library, 1955. Reprinted by permis- sion of W. B. Brinster.
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All forms are unreal—he who knows and sees this is at peace though in a world of pain; this is the way that leads to purity.
. . . Through zeal knowledge is gained, through lack of zeal knowledge is lost; let a
man who knows this two-fold path of gain and loss thus place himself that knowl- edge may grow.
Cut down the whole forest of desires, not a tree only! Danger comes out of the forest of desires. When you have cut down both the forest of desires and its under- growth, then, bhikshus, you will be rid of the forest and of desires!
. . . Cut out the love of self, like an autumn lotus with your hand! Cherish the road
to peace. Nirvana has been shown by the Blessed One.
The thirteenth poem of the Dao De Jing touches on the same theme:
F RO M Dao De Jing B Y Laozi28
13 Success is as dangerous as failure, and we are often our own worst enemy.
What does it mean that success is as dangerous as failure? He who is superior is also someone’s subordinate. Receiving favor and losing it both cause alarm. That is what is meant by success is as dangerous as failure. What does it mean that we are often our own worst enemy? The reason I have an enemy is because I have “self.”
If I no longer had a “self,” I would no longer have an enemy. Love the whole world as if it were your self; then you will truly care for all things.
2 2 If you want to become whole, first let yourself become broken. If you want to become straight, first let yourself become twisted. If you want to become full, first let yourself become empty. If you want to become new, first let yourself become old.
For this reason the Master embraces the Tao, as an example for the world to follow. Because she isn’t self centered, people can see the light in her. Because she does not boast of herself,
“The reason I have an enemy is because I have ‘self.’ If I no longer had a ‘self,’ I would no longer have an enemy.” — L A OZ I
A Chinese Daoist scroll painting of laozi. (Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY)
28 from lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. J. H. McDonald, 1996 (for the public domain).
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she becomes a shining example. Because she does not glorify herself, she becomes a person of merit. Because she wants nothing from the world, the world can not overcome her.
When the ancient Masters said, “If you want to become whole, then first let yourself be broken,” they weren’t using empty words. All who do this will be made complete.
These Eastern examples are certainly not the only alternatives to the early modern Euro- pean notion of the self accepted by Descartes. There have also been challenges to the notion of a unified self, by Islamic, Christian, and Jewish mystics in the West, among others.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
Self-identity is a question of essential properties: What is it about you that makes you a par- ticular person and the same person over time? In this chapter we have reviewed a series of different answers to this question. The tradition from Descartes and locke to Kant stresses the importance of consciousness in our conception of ourselves, that is, the importance of our minds over our bodies. (Even Hume, who denies that there is a self, is part of this tradi- tion.) Then there is the general question, how much is the self something that we can choose, and how much is it something that is determined for us? Does each person have just one self, one set of essential properties, or might a single “person” be several people, with several selves? Or might there really be no self at all? And how much should we conceive of ourselves as individuals, and how much as organic components of a larger community? none of these questions has any firmly agreed-upon answers, but all of us adopt one view or another, even if just for a short time, every time we attempt to define ourselves or just “be ourselves.”
CHAPTER REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. In Kant’s view of the self, what is the difference between the transcendental ego and the empirical ego? Why does Kant need both notions?
2. How does Sartre’s conception of the self complicate the idea of an individual self? How does he explain the paradox that he creates between the self “being what it is and being what it is not”? Why does he believe this?
3. nietzsche and Kierkegaard both believe that the “enemy” is social identity and con- formity to “the herd.” Explain why. Are there ways in which you find yourself identify- ing socially and “going along” in ways that seem untrue to yourself? What does this feel like? What are the negative consequences that can arise from too much confor- mity? from too much individuality?
4. What role, if any, does the body play in self-identity or identity of personhood? Or do you agree that consciousness, memory, or some mental aspect is sufficient to estab- lish personal identity? Could you conceive of your consciousness and memory states inhabiting some other body? What would make that person you?
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KEY TERMS
bad faith essence self-identity continuity existentialism transcendence criterion facticity transcendental ego dualism resemblance unconscious empirical ego self-conscious
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
Two anthologies on the question of self-identity are John Perry, ed., Personal Identity (Berke- ley and los Angeles: university of California Press, 1975) and Owen J. flanagan and Amélie O. Rorty, eds., Identity, Character, and Morality: Essays in Moral Psychology (Cam- bridge: MIT Press, 1993).
Derek Parfit’s conclusions about the upshot of his teletransporter thought experiments can be found in Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 1986).
Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist view of the self is developed in his essay Transcendence of the Ego (new York: noonday, 1957).
Hermann Hesse’s complex theory of the self is best developed in Steppenwolf, rev. ed., trans. Basil Creighton (new York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), but it is most simply portrayed in Siddhartha, trans. Hilda Rosner (new York: new Directions, 1951).
for further reading on Asian conceptions of the self see Roger T. Ames, et al. eds., Self as Person in Asian Theory and Practice (Albany: State university of new York Press, 1994).
A good introduction of G. W. f. Hegel’s very difficult philosophy is the introduction to his lectures on the philosophy of history in his Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. leo Rauch (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988).
An exceptionally rich but difficult study of the history of self is Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard university Press, 1994).
Two other studies worth recommending are Quassim Cassam, Self-Knowledge (new York: Oxford university Press, 1994), and Richard Ashmore and lee Jussim, Self and Identity (new York: Oxford university Press, 1997).
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7 | Freedom “Two plus two equals four”—as if freedom means that!
F YO D O R D O S T OY E V S K Y
“The murderer had been raised in a slum. His father abandoned him when he was seven months old; he was beaten by his older siblings and constantly abused by his mother. He never had the chance to attend school; he never could get or hold a job. By the time he robbed the store, he was near starvation, addicted to hard drugs, without friends, and without help of any kind. His sister said, ‘I’ve known since he was a child that he would do this some day.’ His mother complained, ‘I don’t understand!’ The prosecutor called it a ‘cold-blooded, premeditated act.’ The defense accused the whole of society, claiming that it had, through its neglect as well as its negative conditioning, made this man an in- evitable killer.” We know the rest of the arguments; what we do not know is their resolu- tion. Should a man be held responsible for an act for which he has been conditioned his whole life? Or must we not hold out that no matter what the circumstances, he could have resisted; that he could have decided not to commit the crime; and therefore that he must be held responsible?
Of all the abstract problems of philosophy, the problem of freedom has the most obvi- ous practical consequences. If we believe that a person is free to choose his or her actions and destiny, we tend to load the person with moral responsibility, praise or blame; if we believe a person is simply a victim of the fates, a cog in a mechanical universe, or a pawn in the abstract hands of society, then our attitude toward his or her actions can be no different than our attitudes toward the movement of glaciers and the growth of flowers. “It happens that way,” that’s all.
A. Fatalism and Karma Are we cogs in the universe? Are we pawns of the fates? People have often thought so. In the West, our tendency to believe in fate goes back to the ancient Greeks. Most of the ancient Greeks believed that our destinies were already decided for us; no matter what our actions, the outcome was settled. Today, many people believe that our actions and character are the causal result of our genes and our upbringing, and perhaps also the result of unconscious fears and desires that we may never even recognize. Then, too, astrology and other theories
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of external determination have always been popular. (For instance, “Virgo: It’s going to be a bad day: don’t get out of bed and don’t talk to anyone.”) And we can see why they would be. The more our actions are the results of other forces and not our own doing, the less we need feel responsible for them, and the less we need worry about deciding what to do. It is al- ready decided, and not by us.
Consider for example, the following news article, a modified version of one that appeared throughout the United States in April 1980:
The way lawyer John Badger1 saw it, he was giving the judge a chance to “follow the flow into the brotherhood of man” by entertaining the notion that his client’s life of crime was ordained by the stars.
But Circuit Judge Ruben Costa, who said he was “inclined to believe there is a certain verity” to astrology, threw out the proposed defense at a pretrial hearing Monday for 23-year-old John Matthew Gopel, who is charged with rape, robbery and assault.
Badger had planned to argue Gopel was insane by virtue of his astrological destiny.
Badger said his client, born at 8:14 p.m. on Aug. 8, 1956, was literally “a born loser.”
Eugene delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830) personifies political freedom as a woman who is leading people from various social classes. (© RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY)
1 All names in this article have been invented to protect the individuals involved.
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“There is a force in the life of this young man that forced him to go on transmission fluid, sniff gasoline, cocaine, anything he could get his hands on,” he said.
Badger said he intended to present testimony from astrologers, scientists and mental health experts, as well as a bartender who would describe the effects of the full moon on human behavior.
The list of defense evidence included the song “When You Wish Upon A Star,” Spiderman comic books and the plays King Lear and Hamlet.
The ancient Greek tragedies, like Oedipus the King, presuppose fatalism, the view that whatever a person’s actions and circumstances, however free they may seem, his or her pre- determined end is inevitable. The story of Oedipus most famously recounted in the tragedy by Sophocles is perhaps the most stirring picture of Greek determinism. Oedipus and his wife, Iocasta, both scoffed at the prophets and made efforts to avoid their prophesied destinies.
F RO M Oedipus the King B Y Sophocles2
OEDIPUS: I went to Delphi. Phoebus . . . declared A thing most horrible: he foretold that I Should mate with my own mother, and beget A brood that men would shudder to behold, And that I was to be the murderer Of my own father. Therefore, back to Corinth I never went—the stars alone have told me Where Corinth lies—that I might never see Cruel fulfillment of that oracle.
IOCASTA: Listen to me And you will hear the prophetic art Touches our human fortunes not at all. I soon can give you proof.—An oracle Once came to [my husband] . . . His fate it was, that he should have a son By me, that son would take his father’s life. But he was killed—or so they said—by Strangers. By brigands, at a place where three ways meet. As for the child, it was not three days old When [my husband] fastened both its feet together And had it cast off a precipice. Therefore Apollo failed . . . So much for what prophetic voices have uttered.
A nineteenth-century engraving depicting Sophocles, who wrote Oedipus the King. (© iStockphoto.com/
GeorgiosArt)
2 Sophocles, Three Tragedies: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Electra, trans. H. d. F. Kitto, Oxford University Press, 1962. Reprinted with permission.
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Unbeknown to either of them, of course, the “brigand” who killed Iocasta’s husband was Oedipus himself, Iocasta’s son, saved as a baby from the precipice and adopted by the man he had thought was his father, from whom he had fled. Thus, both their destinies had been fulfilled. neither had any control over—nor even knowledge of—what hap- pened to them, and so neither acted freely at all. Thus, the Chorus of observers declares:
I pray that I might pass my life in reverent holiness of word and deed For there are laws enthroned above, Heaven created them, Olympus was their father, And mortal men had no part in their birth.
How should we deal with our fate? Should we try to know our fate? Iocasta advocates that “ignorance is bliss” and tries hard throughout the play not to acknowledge her growing suspicions. If we cannot do anything about our fate, she reasons, then we should not even think about it. But Oedipus insists on finding out the truth, and, as a whole, the play seems to advocate facing the fact of our destinies.
IOCASTA: Why should we fear, seeing that man is ruled By chance, and there is room for no clear forethought? No: live at random, live as best one can. . . .
Sophocles (c. 496 b.c.e.–406 b.c.e.)
One of the great tragic playwrights of ancient Athens. Among the seven of his plays that survive are Oedipus the King and Antigone, enduring masterpieces that have been influential in Western phi- losophy and culture in general.
Oedipus (© iStockphoto.com/ZU_09)
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Whoever thinks The least of this, he lives most comfortably.
OEDIPUS: Alas! you generations of men! Even while you live you are next to nothing! Has any man won for himself More than the shadow of happiness? . . . Time sees all, and Time, in your despite Disclosed and punished your unnatural marriage
CREON [OEDIPUS’ UNCLE/BROTHER-IN-LAW]: Seek not to have your way in all things. Where you had your way before, Your mastery broke before the end.
The anthropomorphic Greek gods were integral to the ancient Greek notion of fate. Human choices were considered impotent to change one’s fate because human beings were thought to be at the mercy of the gods’ whims. But another conception of fate, the Buddhist conception, sees human choices as tremen- dously important—not because they are free, but precisely the opposite. In Buddhism, all human choices are gestures of attachment to the physical world, each one binding its maker more and more to a difficult fate. The effects of one’s choices, as we have seen in Chapter 2, are called his or her karma, which one can only escape by living out the consequences that one’s actions have set in motion. Buddhism does have a con- cept of freedom, a state called nirvana, but it is not a freedom of the self or the individual. In fact, it is a freedom from the self and the individual, achieved only when there is no longer a self at all. It is our foolish attachment to this world, the Buddhist claims, that fosters the illusion that we are individuals at all. In a sense, then, our fate is entirely determined; yet ironically, if we submit ourselves to fate and accept its authority, if we can stop making choices that further delude us into believing we are free, then and only then, can we ultimately become really free.
Consider the following excerpt from a con- temporary Japanese philosopher, Keiji nishitani, who has written extensively on the Buddhist concept of “nothingness” and the Western con- cept of “nihilism,” which he says has now in- fected Japan.
Fate was personified by the ancient Greeks as three sewing women, the Fates, who measured and cut the thread that determined the length of each person’s life. (V&A Images, London/Art Resource, NY)
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On Fate B Y Keiji Nishitani3
From that viewpoint [the standpoint of nothingness] the world of karma is a world where each individual is determined by its ties and causal kinship within an endless world nexus, and yet each instance of individual existence and behavior, as well as each moment of their time, arises as something totally new, possessed of freedom and creativity.
Although the ebb and flow of the total nexus “since time past without begin- ning” is conceived as an infinite chain of causal necessity, its having no beginning implies, conversely, a before previous to any and all conceivable pasts. For such time to have no end means that it has an after that is future even to the most remote of possible futures. Any such before and after (beyond any definite before and after) lies in the present of every man and makes the present into free and creative activity.
. . .
The karmic deeds that make manifest this restless, incessant becoming always return thereby at the same time to the home-ground of karma, to the home- ground of the present. In other words, doing opens itself up on each occasion to the openness of nihility and thus preserves the dimension of ecstatic transcendence.
This means that the self is at all times itself. Even as in my karma I constantly constitute my existence as a becoming qua being, in the home-ground of that karma I am ever in my own homeground: I am always myself. This is why restless, incessant becoming within time is at all times my existence. Karma is at all times my karma. And this means that it is free karma, that it implies an ecstatic transcen- dence to nihility.
Of course, although we call it freedom or creativity, it is not at this point true freedom or creativity. Freedom here is one with an inner necessity compelling us constantly to be doing something. It is in unison with that infinite drive and that infinite drive in turn is in unison with freedom. To be within the limitless world- nexus ceaselessly relating to something or other, and to be conditioned and deter- mined in these relations by the world-nexus, is, seen from the other side, a self-determination. While the present karma is here the free work of the self, it appears at the same time to be possessed of the character of fate. Fate arises to awareness in unison with that freedom. Here the present karma reaches awareness under its form of infinity as infinite drive, in its “willful” essence.
The self ’s relation with something, seen as a self-determination, is the self ’s ex- ercise of free will. Of its own accord, the self accepts a thing as good or rejects it as bad. But insofar as it is determined through causal kinship within the total nexus, this free will is a fate, a causal necessity, without thereby ceasing to be free will. To accept or reject something implies a simultaneous “attachment” to it. The karma that relates to something by lusting after it is at once voluntary and compulsory. The being of the self that comes about in that karma is at once a freedom and a burden. Here spontaneity becomes a burden and a debt.
. . .
3 Keiji nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, ed. and trans. Jan Van Bragt. Copyright © 1982 by Keiji nishitani. Published by the University of California Press.
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All of this indicates how deeply rooted self-centeredness is. So deeply under- ground do the roots of the self extend that no karmic activity can ever reach them. The karma of the self at all times returns to its own home-ground, namely, to the self itself, but it cannot get back to the home-ground of the self as such. Karma can do no more than go back to its own home-ground in the self and there reinstate its debt-laden existence. In karma, the self is constantly oriented inward to the home- ground of the self; and yet the only thing it achieves by this is the constant recon- stitution of being qua becoming in a time without beginning or end. To transit endlessly through time in search of the home-ground of the self is the true form of our karma, that is, of our being in time, our life.
The karma of “time past without beginning” is the true form of our life. It im- plies a sense of essential “despair.” Karma is what Kierkegaard calls the “sickness unto death.” Its despair rises to awareness from directly underfoot of the work of our present deed, word, and thought, from the fountainhead of time without be- ginning or end, and of being within that time, in short from our self-centeredness. We can see an awareness of that despair also underlying the confession of the Buddhist Verse of Repentance, which suggests that every sort of karma stemming from the body, mouth, and mind of the self is grounded in a greed, anger, and folly without beginning.
. . .
Karma here comes to bear the marks of guilt and sin. In a certain sense, it takes on the character of original sin, namely, sin that is as equally elemental as the free work and existence of man. Karma is freedom determined by causal necessity within the whole infinite nexus, a freedom of spontaneity in “attachment” and, therefore, a freedom totally bound by fate. At the same time, having reduced the whole causal nexus to its own center, it is a freedom altogether unbound. In karma these two aspects of freedom and causal necessity become one. Consequently, as a freedom that derives entirely from the determining force of causal necessity, as a freedom chased out and driven away from necessity, karma binds itself in attach- ment to the other, while at the same time it remains an altogether unbound free- dom, gathering every other into the center of the self. This freedom is in the mode of an original sin.
“Karma is freedom determined by causal necessity within the whole infinite nexus, a freedom of spontaneity in ‘attachment’ and, therefore, a freedom totally bound by fate.” — K E I J I N I S H I TA N I
• do you agree with nishitani that the doctrine of karma is compatible with freedom? Why or why not?
• What are the similarities and differences between the notion of fate and the notion of karma? How is the notion of luck different from both of them?
• do you believe that fate dictates the basic plot of one’s life and death?
B. Predestination Fatalism, in its Greek or Buddhist sense, is the claim that our future is determined by a play of forces beyond our understanding. But what if these forces are understood and, in fact, created by one superhuman, being? Predestination has been the view of many theologians,
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who hold that our every action (and every event in the universe) is known, if not also caused in advance, by God. Predestination, like fatalism, does not depend upon any particular an- tecedent conditions unless we want to say that God is an antecedent condition.
All the Western theologians have had to ponder the problem of predestination and free- dom, since all the Western religions’ scriptures claim that God created, or caused, everything. As we saw in Chapter 2, this is of particular concern when considering evil. In that chapter, the “problem of evil” was described as the question of how evil could be caused by a good God. We now can see that the crux of the “problem of evil” is the question of freedom. It would be easy to explain much of the world’s evil if human beings were free. In that case, we, not an all- good God, would be the cause of evil. But if, as is stated in scripture, God created and caused everything, then surely, God creates our human actions, too. Humans sin—so it seems that we are back to the drawing board. How can an all-good God cause us or let us be free to sin?
The following lines from St. Augustine summarize the problem of freedom and one Chris- tian solution to it. God made human beings free because He is all good, and free actions are better than unfree ones. However, since freedom allows us to sin, we are responsible for bringing evil into the world.
F RO M On Free Choice of the Will B Y St. Augustine4
1. W H Y D I D G O D G I V E F R E E D O M O F T H E W I L L T O M E N , S I N C E I T I S BY T H I S T H AT M E N S I N ?
EVODIUS: Now, if possible, explain to me why God gave man free choice of the will since if he had not received it he would not be able to sin.
AUGUSTINE: Are you perfectly sure that God gave to man what you think ought not to have been given?
EVODIUS: As far as I seem to understand the discussion in the first book, we have freedom of will, and could not sin if we were without it.
AUGUSTINE: I, too, remember that this was made clear to us. But I just asked you whether you know that it was God who gave us that which we possess, through which it is clear that we commit sin.
EVODIUS: No one else. For we are from Him, and whether we sin or whether we do right, we earn reward or punishment from Him.
AUGUSTINE: I want to ask, as well: do you know this clearly, or do you believe it willingly without really knowing it, because you are prompted by authority?
EVODIUS: I admit that at first I trusted authority on this point. But what can be more true than that all good proceeds from God, that everything just is good, and that it is just to punish sinners and to reward those who do right? From this it fol- lows that through God sinners are afflicted with unhappiness, and those who do right endowed with happiness.
AUGUSTINE: I do not object, but let me ask another question: how do you know that we are from God? You did not answer that; instead, you explained that we merit punishment and reward from God.
4 St. Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, trans. Anna S. Benjamin and l. H. Hackstaff. Copyright © 1964. Reprinted by permission of Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, nJ.
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EVODIUS: The answer to that question, too, is clear, if for no other reason than the fact that, as we have already agreed, God punished sins. All justice is from God, and it is not the role of justice to punish foreigners, although it is the role of good- ness to bestow benefits on them. Thus it is clear that we belong to God, since He is not only most generous in bestowing benefits upon us, but also most just in pun- ishing us. Also, we can understand that man is from God through the fact, which I proposed and you conceded, that every good is from God. For man himself, insofar as he is a man, is a good, because he can live rightly when he so wills.
AUGUSTINE: If this is so, the question that you proposed is clearly answered. If man is a good, and cannot act rightly unless he wills to do so, then he must have free will, without which he cannot act rightly. We must not believe that God gave us free will so that we might sin, just because sin is committed through free will. It is sufficient for our question, why free will should have been given to man, to know that without it man cannot live rightly. That it was given for this reason can be understood from the fol- lowing: if anyone uses free will for sinning, he incurs divine punishment. This would be unjust if free will had been given not only that man might live rightly, but also that he might sin. For how could a man justly incur punishment who used free will to do the thing for which it was given? When God punishes a sinner, does He not seem to say, “Why have you not used free will for the purpose for which I gave it to you, to act rightly?” Then too, if man did not have free choice of will, how could there exist the good according to which it is just to condemn evildoers and reward those who act rightly? What was not done by will would be neither evildoing nor right action. But punishment and reward would be unjust if man did not have free will. Moreover, there must needs be justice both in punishment and in reward, since justice is one of the goods that are from God. Therefore, God must needs have given free will to man.
One’s opinion on the question of freedom was a crucial determinant of one’s sectarian alliance in early Islam. Islam is sometimes understood in the West as a “fatalist” religion; in other words, it is thought that all Muslims believe that human beings are not free. However, the Mu’tazilites, one of the first Islamic sects, claimed that the human will is free, despite passages in scripture that would lead one to believe the contrary, such as the following:
No misfortune befalls except by Allah’s [God’s] will. He guides the hearts of those who believe in him. Allah has knowledge of all things. (64:11)
. . .
Every misfortune that befalls the earth or your own persons, is ordained before we bring it into being. (57:22–23)
Thus, Islam provides an interesting breadth of argument on the question of freedom. The Mu’tazilites claimed that human freedom is consistent with God’s power by distinguishing between two types of action, or causality. God’s actions are “necessary,” or lawlike. They must happen. Human actions, however, are “intentional”; they are contingent upon God’s actions, which are their necessary conditions and consequences. Thus, a person is free, for instance, to hit a billiard ball with his or her pool cue. But he or she is not free to hit the ball and have it stay still or to hit it in one direction and have it go in another. Only God is “free” to make necessary physical laws. For the Mu’tazilites, human freedom amounts to directing God’s actions along various possible paths. We are responsible for how we direct God’s creations, and so we are rightly rewarded or punished by God for our choices.
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Another important Islamic school, the Ash’arites, reacted against the Mu’tazilites in favor of a more liberal interpretation of scriptural passages like the ones just quoted. The Ash’arites, however, wound up making a distinction with regard to the question of freedom that was similar to that of the Mu’tazilites. The Ash’arites claimed that only God is free and that all human actions are determined by God. God’s “predestination” here, however, is more like an offer of a gift. God offers us various actions, which we can accept, or “acquire.” Only God, therefore, can create an action, according to the Ash’arites. Human beings merely acquire them, “secondhand” so to speak. When we acquire good actions, we deserve our reward. When we acquire bad ones, we deserve our punishment.
Although one may conclude that overall, then, Islamic tradition does seem to believe more in God’s predestination than does Christianity, the Islamic stance on the question of freedom is really a complex one. The debate within Islam about freedom continues to this day. Here is an example from an important twentieth-century Islamic theologian, Sir Muhammad Iqbal.
F RO M The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam B Y Muhammad Iqbal5
Does the ego then determine its own activity? If so, how is the self-determination of the ego related to the determination of the spatio-temporal order? Is personal
Islamic scholars have defended various interpretations of human freedom as being compatible with the Qur’an. (© iStockphoto.com/Ahmed Refaat)
5 Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, london: Oxford University Press, 1934.
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causality a special kind of causality, or only a disguised form of the mechanism of Nature? It is claimed that the two kinds of determinism are not mutually exclusive and that the scientific method is equally ap- plicable to human action. The human act of deliberation is understood to be a con- flict of motives which are conceived, not as the ego’s own present or inherited tenden- cies of action or inaction, but as so many external forces fighting one another, gladiator-like, on the arena of the mind. Yet the final choice is regarded as a fact determined by the strongest force, and not by the resultant of contending motives, like a purely physical effect. I am, however, firmly of the opinion that the controversy between the advocates of Mechanism and Freedom arises from a wrong view of intelligent action which modern psy- chology, unmindful of its own independence as a science, possessing a special set of facts to observe, was bound to take on account of its slavish imitation of physi- cal sciences.
. . .
Thus the element of guidance and directive control in the ego’s activity clearly shows that the ego is a free personal causality. He shares in the life and freedom of the Ultimate Ego who, by permitting the emergence of a f inite ego, capable of private initiative, has limited this freedom of His own free will. This freedom of conscious behaviour follows from the view of ego- activity which the Quran takes. There are verses which are unmistakably clear on this point:
“And say: The truth is from your Lord: Let him, then, who will, believe: and let him who will, be an unbeliever.” (18:28)
“If ye do well to your own behoof will ye do well: and if ye do evil against yourselves will ye do it.” (17:7)
Indeed Islam recognizes a ver y important fact of human psychology, i.e., the rise and fall of the power to act freely, and is anxious to retain the power to act freely as a constant and undiminished factor in the life of the ego. The timing of the daily prayer, which according to the Quran restores “self- possession” to the ego by bringing it into closer touch with the ultimate source of life and freedom, is intended to save the ego from the mechanizing effects of sleep and business. Prayer in Islam is the ego’s escape from mecha- nism to freedom.
The fatalism implied in this attitude is not negation of the ego . . . it is life and boundless power which recognizes no obstruction, and can make a man calmly offer his prayers when bullets are showering around him.
A different example of determinism comes from the African Yoruba nation. In the Yoruba version, there is a place for human freedom within a larger determinist context. Here it is described by philosopher Jacqueline Trimier:
Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938)
An Indian philosopher, politician, and poet. A leader in the All India Muslim League, Iqbal encouraged an Islamic spiritual revival and called for the development of cooperative ties among Muslims re- gardless of nationality. He was among the first to propose a sepa- rate Muslim state in British-controlled India, a vision that was realized after his death with the creation of Pakistan.
“[Fatalism] is life and boundless power which recognizes no obstruction, and can make a man calmly offer his prayers when bullets are showering around him.” — M U H A M M A D I Q B A L
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On the Yoruba Ori B Y Jacqueline Trimier6
In Yoruba philosophy, the ori [or “inner head”] determines one’s fate, and, contrary to most al- ternative cultural accounts of the soul, the Yoruba actually chooses his ori. In the creation myth Ajala, the “potter of heads,” provides each body with a head. But before a person arrives on earth, he or she must go to the house of Ajala to choose a head. To make matters more com- plicated, Ajala has a reputation for being irre- sponsible and careless. As a result, Ajala molds many bad heads; he sometimes forgets to fire some, misshapes others, and overburns still others. Because it is said that he owes money to many people, Ajala commonly hides in the ceil-
ing to avoid creditors and neglects some of the heads he put on the fire, leaving them to burn. But beneath this earthy and all-too-human depiction of the deity, certain classic concepts of fate and freedom are evident. People choose their destinies, but it is a choice that is fraught with dangers and uncertainties. Ajala molds many bad heads and only a few good ones. When a person gets to Ajala’s storehouse of heads, he or she does not know which heads are bad or good—all people choose heads in ignorance. If a person picks a bad head, he or she is doomed to failure in life. More- over, before a person reaches earth with a body, head, and soul, rain can erode an imperfectly made head. On earth, hard work would be useless to affect one’s fortune because all of one’s energy would have been used for repairing the damaged, useless head. Yet, if a person picks a really good head, the person is destined to have a good, prosperous life. With hard work, he or she will surely be successful, since little or no energy need be expended in costly head repairs.
The concept of the ori or inner head carries with it a profound belief in predes- tination. The life one leads depends upon the head one chooses. One myth from Ifa literary corpus tells about three friends Oriseeku, Orileemere, and Afuwape who needed heads to travel from heaven to earth. They went to find the house of Ajala to choose their heads. Before leaving heaven, they were told not to stop at any place along the way. However, Afuwape did not listen; he visited his father, and his two friends left him behind. When the latter reached Ajala’s house, they did not find him because, as usual, he was hiding in the rafters from creditors. Instead of wait- ing for Ajala to appear, the two friends picked their heads without knowing which ones were properly made; and as they descended to earth, rain wore out their heads. Consequently, they lived unsuccessful lives on earth.
Afuwape got to the home of his father, Orunmila (god of wisdom), who was con- sulting his Ifa (divination texts). When Afuwape told his father of his plan to see Ajala, the Ifa priests consulted for Afuwape and said Orunmila should offer money and salt as a sacrifice and that Afuwape should carry part of these offerings on his
Jacqueline Trimier (1968–)
A philosopher at the College of Lake County, Grayslake, Illinois.
Jacqueline Trimier (Used by permission of Jacqueline Trimier)
6 Jacqueline Trimier, “African Philosophy,” from World Philosophy, ed. R. C. Solomon and K. Higgins, new York: McGraw-Hill, 1994. Reprinted by permission of the author.
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journey. Afuwape left his father’s home and, along the way, asked a gatekeeper for the way to Ajala’s house. The gatekeeper had never used salt before and was cooking his soup over a flame and salting it with ashes. Afuwape offered the gatekeeper some salt which he liked. To return the kindness, the gatekeeper took Afuwape to the house of Ajala.
When Afuwape found Ajala’s house, Ajala was not at home but one of the creditors was waiting for him. The gatekeeper had advised Afuwape to help Ajala pay part of his debt so that Ajala would help him choose the best head possible. Afuwape paid the debt, and the creditor left. When Ajala came home, he was so grateful that he took Afuwape to his storehouse and helped him choose the best head. Consequently, Afuwape’s head with- stood the hazards of a journey to earth, and he had a good life on earth.
To Americans, the most familiar version of belief in predestination comes from that school of Protestant Chris- tianity called Calvinism. In the following passage, the famous American Calvinist theologian, Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), gives a defense of his belief in predestination.
F RO M “Freedom of the Will” B Y Jonathan Edwards7
Wherein it is considered whether there is or can be any such sort of freedom of will, as that wherein Arminians8 place the essence of the liberty of all moral agents; and whether any such thing ever was or can be conceived of.
. . .
First, I am to prove, that God has an absolute and certain foreknowledge of the free actions of moral agents.
One would think, it should be wholly needless to enter on such an argument with any that profess themselves Christians: but so it is; God’s certain foreknowl- edge of the free acts of moral agents, is denied by some that pretend to believe the Scriptures to be the word of God; and especially of late. I therefore shall consider the evidence of such a prescience in the Most High, as fully as the designed limits of this essay will admit of; supposing myself herein to have to do with such as own the truth of the Bible.
Yoruba diviners store palm nuts in this bowl, which is shaped in the form of a woman with a child who is kneeling to show respect for the god of divination, Ifa. (SSPL/Science Museum/Art Resource, NY)
7 Jonathan Edwards, “Freedom of the Will,” from The Works of President Edwards, in Four Volumes, Vol. 2, new York: leavitt and Allen, 1856. 8 Jacobus Arminius (1560 –1609) was a dutch theologian who claimed that although God has foreknowledge of our actions, human beings nonetheless act freely. Edwards aims his arguments against Arminius’ followers throughout.
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Arg I. My first argument shall be taken from God’s prediction of such events. Here I would, in the first place, lay down these two things as axioms.
(1) If God does not foreknow, he cannot fore- tell such events; that is, he cannot peremptorily and certainly foretell them. If God has no more than an uncertain guess concerning events of this kind, then he can declare no more than an uncertain guess. Positively to foretell, is to profess to foreknow, or to declare positive foreknowledge.
(2) If God does not certainly foreknow the future volitions of moral agents, then neither can he certainly foreknow those events which are consequent and dependent on these voli- tions. The existence of the one depending on the existence of the other; the knowledge of
the existence of the one depends on the knowledge of the existence of the other; and the one cannot be more certain than the other.
Therefore, how many, how great and how extensive soever the consequences of the volitions of moral agents may be; though they should extend to an altera- tion of the slate of things through the universe, and should be continued in a series of successive events to all eternity, and should in the progress of things branch forth into an infinite number of series, each of them going on in an end- less line or chain of events; God must be as ignorant of all these consequences, as he is of the volitions whence they take their rise: all these events, and the whole slate of things depending on them, how important, extensive and vast soever, must be hid from him.
S E C T I O N X I I .
God’s certain Foreknowledge of the future Volitions of moral Agents, inconsistent with such a Contingence of those Volitions
as is without all Necessity.
Having proved that God has a certain and infallible prescience of the act of the Will of moral agents, I come now, in the second place, to show the consequence; to show how it follows from hence, that these events are necessary, with a Necessity of connection or consequence.
The chief Arminian divines, so far as I have opportunity to observe, deny this consequence; and affirm, that if such Foreknowledge be allowed, it is no evi- dence of any Necessity of the event foreknown. Now I desire, that this matter may be particularly and thoroughly inquired into. I cannot but think that, on particular and full consideration, it may be perfectly determined, whether it be indeed so or not.
In order to a proper consideration of this matter, I would observe the following things.
John Calvin (1509–1564)
A French theologian and a major leader in the Protestant Refor- mation. He was the author of a magnum opus on theology, the Institutes of the Christian Religion. In that work, he defends the doc- trine of predestination, which holds that God has predeter- mined who will be eternally saved and who will not be.
John Calvin preached that God had predestined certain people, the Elect, to be saved from eternal damnation. (© iStockphoto.com/GeorgiosArt)
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I. It is very evident, with regard to a thing whose existence is infallibly and indis- solubly connected with something which already hath or has had existence, the existence of that thing is necessary. Here may be noted:
1. I observed before, in explaining the nature of Necessity, that in things which are past, their existence is now necessary: having already made sure of exis- tence, it is too late for any possibility of alteration in that respect: it is now impossible that it should be otherwise than true, that that thing has existed.
2. If there be any such thing as a divine Foreknowledge of the volitions of free agents, that Foreknowledge, by the supposition, is a thing which already has, and long ago had, existence; and so, now its existence is necessary; it is now utterly impossible to be otherwise than that this Foreknowledge should be, or should have been.
3. It is also very manifest, that those things which are indissolubly connected with other things that are necessary, are themselves necessary. As that propo- sition whose truth is necessarily connected with another proposition, which is necessarily true, is itself necessarily true. To say otherwise, would be a contradiction: it would be in effect to say, that the connection was indissol- uble, and yet was not so, but might be broken. If that, whose existence is indissolubly connected with something whose existence is now necessary, is itself not necessary, then it may possibly not exist, notwithstanding that indissoluble connection of its existence.—Whether that absurdity be not glaring, let the reader judge.
4. It is no less evident, that if there be a full, certain, and infallible Foreknowledge of the future existence of the volitions of moral agents, then there is a certain infallible and indissoluble connection between those events and that Fore- knowledge; and that therefore, by the preceding observations, those events are necessary events; being infallibly and indissolubly connected with that whose existence already is, and so is now necessary, and cannot but have been.
To say the Foreknowledge is certain and infallible, and yet the connection of the event with that Foreknowledge is not indissoluble, but dissoluble and fallible, is very absurd. To affirm it, would be the same thing as to affirm that there is no necessary connection between a proposition’s being infallibly known to be true, and its being true indeed. So that it is perfectly demonstrable, that if there be any infallible knowledge of future volitions, the event is necessary; or, in other words, that it is impossible but the event should come to pass. For if it be not impossible but that it may be otherwise, then it is not impossible but true. But how absurd is that, on the supposition that there is now an infallible knowledge (i.e. knowledge which it is impossible should fail) that it is true. There is this absurdity in it, that it is not impossible but that there now should be no truth in that proposition which is now infallibly known to be true.
II. That no future event can be certainly foreknown, whose existence is contin- gent, and without all necessity, may be proved thus; it is impossible for a thing to be certainly known to any intellect without evidence. To suppose otherwise, im- plies a contradiction: because, for a thing to be certainly known to any understand- ing, is for it to be evident to that understanding: and for a thing to be evident to any understanding, is the same thing as for that understanding to see evidence of it: but no understanding, created or uncreated, can see evidence where there is
“If there be any such thing as a divine Foreknowledge of the volitions of free agents, that Foreknowledge . . . is a thing which already has, and long ago had, existence; and so, now its existence is necessary; it is now utterly impossible to be otherwise than that this Foreknowledge should be, or should have been.” — J O N AT H A N E D WA R D S
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none: for is the same thing as to see that to be which is not. And therefore, if there be any truth which is absolutely without evidence, that truth is absolutely unknowable, insomuch that it implies a contradiction to suppose that it is known. . . .
III. To suppose the future volitions of moral agents not to be necessary events; or, which is the same thing, events which it is not impos- sible but that they may not come to pass; and yet to suppose that God certainly foreknows them, and knows all things, is to suppose God’s knowledge to be inconsistent with itself. For to say, that God certainly, and without all conjecture, knows that a thing will infallibly be, which at the same time he knows to be so contingent that it may possibly not be, is to suppose his knowledge inconsis-
tent with itself; or that one thing that he knows, is utterly inconsistent with an- other thing that he knows.
Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758)
American philosopher and Calvinist theologian. At the time of his death, he was president of what is now Princeton University.
Jonathan Edwards, a Calvinist, defended predestination on the ground that God has foreknowledge of everything we do. (© Corbis)
• How do predestination and fatalism differ? In what respects are they similar? Is pre- destination a version of fatalism?
• How is predestination related to the problem of evil? What account does St. Augustine offer to tie them together? How, then, does his account allow room for free will?
• What are the differences between the Mu’tazilites’ and Ash’arites’ conceptions of human freedom and predestination?
• How do the Yoruba and the Calvinist views of predestination compare?
C. Determinism As we have seen, the problem of freedom occurs in different contexts, from pagan fatalism to Christian predestination. The problem occurs in connection with the most abstract thesis that the universe as a whole is a single great machine or “substance” (as in newton or Spinoza) and in localized theories about the psychology of the human personality. At all levels, however, the problem has usually been identified with a single claim, defended as the position called determinism. We briefly introduced determinism in Chapter 1: Spinoza de- fended it in his metaphysical system; newton gave it a convincing scientific interpretation with his physical theories. In a phrase, determinism can be characterized by a principle that is already familiar to you from Chapter 3, the “principle of universal causation.” “Every event has its cause(s).” determinism is the thesis that everything that happens in the universe is determined according to the laws of nature. The problem is that human actions, whatever else they may be, are also events in the physical universe. But if human action is just another
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law-determined natural occurrence, can it also be free? It is as if we were to start praising people (or blaming them) for obeying the law of gravity. What else could they possibly do?
determinism, as we have defined it, is related to, but different from, fatalism and predes- tination. According to fatalism, despite what happens, the end is inevitable. In predestina- tion, God’s will has power over both human choices and natural law. According to determinism, however, an event will necessarily happen if its antecedent conditions are fulfilled. determin- ism need not say that any event is inevitable; it insists only that if certain conditions exist, then a certain kind of event will take place. (For example, if a pot of water is heated sufficiently, then it will boil, or if a person is forced to choose between losing his or her life and killing an insect, then the person will take the life of the insect.) This “if . . . then” structure is essential to determinism. (There need be no such “ifs” or “thens” in fatalism or predestination.)
determinism is the theory that every event in the universe, including every human action, has its natural causes; given certain antecedent conditions, an event will take place neces- sarily, according to the laws of nature. But we must fill out the determinist’s premise by at least one more step. It is not enough to say “every event has its natural cause(s),” since this would leave open the possibility that although every event requires certain antecedent con- ditions to take place, the event may still be a matter of chance, at least to some extent, or a matter of human choice. We must say that “every event has its sufficient natural cause(s).” A sufficient cause is capable of bringing the event about by itself. Then there is no room for chance and no room for choice. This view, which we call “hard” determinism (“hard” as in “hardhearted,” as well as a “hard” conclusion to accept), clearly leaves no room for human freedom. Without choice, there can be no freedom, and without freedom, there is no reason to hold a person responsible for his or her action, no matter how virtuous or how vicious it may be. According to the hard determinist thesis, we can barely be said to be “acting” at all, for our “actions” are nothing but the result of antecedent conditions and laws of nature that leave no room for our “doing something” at all.
1. Hard Determinism The hard determinist premise received its greatest impetus from Isaac newton’s physics and his picture of the universe as “matter in motion,” determined according to the laws of motion and gravitation that he so elegantly formulated. But his followers applied these laws not only to the movements of the planets and the stars or to the ball rolling down an inclined plane. Ac- cording to them, we, too, are “matter in motion,” physical bodies that are subject to all the laws of nature. What we “do” is just as determined by these laws as any other event in nature.
This “hardheaded” determinism has maintained a powerful hold on philosophers ever since newton published his theories in the seventeenth century. The philosopher Pierre Simon laplace had such confidence in the newtonian system that he claimed that if he knew the location and motion of every object in the universe, he could predict the location and motion of every object in the universe at any time in the future. (He could also retrodict, or look back to, every past state of the universe.) laplace’s statement means that if he had a proper map of the universe, including the material parts of our own bodies, he could predict everything that would ever happen and everything that we would ever do. If he could do so, what possible sense could we make of our vain claims to have choices of actions, to decide what to do, or to hold ourselves and others responsible for what we have done?
laplace’s confidence in the hard determinist thesis was common among the immediate successors and enthusiasts of newton. For example, one of the philosophers of the French Enlightenment, Baron Paul Henri d’Holbach, defended the hard determinist viewpoint so uncompromisingly that he shocked even his colleagues as well as many traditionalists.
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F RO M System of Nature B Y Baron Paul Henri d’Holbach9
In whatever manner man is considered, he is connected to universal nature, and submitted to the necessary and immutable laws that she interposes on all beings she contains, according to their peculiar essences or to the respective properties with which, without consulting them, she endows each particular species. Man’s life is a line that nature commands him to describe upon the surface of the earth, without his ever being able to swerve from it, even for an instant. He is born with- out his own consent; his organization does in nowise depend upon himself; his ideas come to him involuntarily; his habits are in the power of those who cause him to contract them; he is unceasingly modified by causes, whether visible or concealed, over which he has no control, which necessarily regulate his mode or existence, give the hue to his way of thinking, and determine his manner of acting. He is good or bad, happy or miserable, wise or foolish, reasonable or ir- rational, without his will being for anything in these various states. Nevertheless, in spite of the shackles by which he is bound, it is pretended he is a free agent, or that independent of the causes by which he is moved, he determines his own will, and regulates his own condition.
However slender the foundation of his opinion, of which everything ought to point out to him the error, it is current at this day and passes for an incontestable truth with a great number of people, otherwise extremely enlightened; it is the basis of religion, which supposing relations between man and the unknown being she has placed above nature, has been incapable of imagining how man could merit reward or deserve punishment from this being, if he was not a free agent. Society
has been believed interested in his system; be- cause an idea has gone abroad, that if all the actions of man were to be contemplated as nec- essary, the right of punishing those who injure their associates would no longer exist. At length human vanity accommodated itself to a hypothesis which, unquestionably, appears to distinguish man from all other physical beings, by assigning to him the special privilege of a total independence of all other causes, but of which a very little reflection would have shown him the impossibility.
The will, as we have elsewhere said, is a modification of the brain, by which it is dis- posed to action, or prepared to give play to the organs. This will be necessarily determined by the qualities, good or bad, agreeable or painful, of the object or the motive that acts upon his sense, or of which the idea remains with him, and is resuscitated by his memory. In consequence, he acts necessarily, his action
9 Baron Paul Henri d’Holbach, System of Nature, london: Kearsley, 1797.
Baron Paul Henri d’Holbach (1723–1789)
A French philosopher and one of the leaders of the Enlightenment. An ardent materialist and atheist, he represented the most radical fringe of the brilliant freethinkers of prerevolutionary France.
Baron Paul Henri d’Holbach, depicted by luis Carrogis Carmontelle, denied human freedom, claiming that our actions are as much the outcome of necessary causal laws as any physical event. (© RMN-Grand Palais/Art
Resource, NY)
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is the result of the impulse he receives either from the motive, from the object, or from the idea which has modified his brain, or disposed his will. When he does not act according to his impulse, it is because there comes some new cause, some new motive, some new idea, which modified his brain in a different manner, gives him a new impulse, determines his will in another way, by which the action of the former impulse is suspended: thus, the sight of an agreeable object, or its idea, determines his will to set him in action to procure it; but if a new object or a new idea more powerfully attracts him, it gives a new direction to his will, an- nihilates the effect of the former, and prevents the action by which it was to be procured. This is the mode in which reflection, experience, reason, necessarily arrests or suspends the action of man’s will: without this he would of necessity have followed the anterior impulse which carried him toward a then desirable object. In all this he always acts according to necessary laws from which he has no means of emancipating himself.
. . .
In short, the actions of man are never free; they are always the necessary con- sequence of his temperament, of the received ideas, and of the notions, either true or false, which he has formed to himself of happiness; of his opinions, strengthened by example, by education, and by daily experience. So many crimes are witnessed on the earth only because every thing conspires to render man vi- cious and criminal; the religion he has adopted, his government, his education, the examples set before him, irresistibly drive him on to evil: under these cir- cumstances, morality preaches virtue to him in vain. In those societies where vice is esteemed, where crime is crowned, where venality is constantly recom- pensed, where the most dreadful disorders are punished only in those who are too weak to enjoy the privilege of committing them with impunity, the practice of virtue is considered nothing more than a painful sacrifice of happiness. Such societies chastise, in the lower orders, those excesses which they respect in the higher ranks; and frequently have the injustice to condemn those in the penalty of death, whom public prejudices, maintained by constant example, have ren- dered criminal.
Man, then, is not a free agent in any one instant of life; he is necessarily guided in each step by those advantages, whether real or fictitious, that he attaches to the objects by which his passions are roused: these passions themselves are necessary in a being who unceasingly tends towards his own happiness; their energy is nec- essary, since that depends on his temperament; his temperament is necessary, because it depends on the physical elements which enter into his composition; the modification of his temperament is necessary, as it is the infallible and inevitable consequence of the impulse he receives from the incessant action of moral and physical beings.
Given the scientific paradigm that is still widespread in philosophy, determinism is still an influential thesis, despite the shifts in science that make d’Holbach’s conception of nature quite outdated. But not everyone today finds determinism a convincing thesis. Daniel Dennett, argues that determinism is dismissed, in part, because of popular images that as- sociate it with particular “bogeyman” images that he thinks are absurd.
“In short, the actions of man are never free; they are always the necessary consequence of his temperament, of the received ideas, and of the notions, either true or false, which he has formed to himself of happiness; of his opinions, strengthened by example, by education, and by daily experience.” — B A R O N PA U L H E N R I D ’ H O L B A C H
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F RO M Elbow Room B Y Daniel Dennett10
1. T H E P E R E N N I A L G R I P P I N G P RO B L E M The idea of Fate is older than philosophy itself, and since the dawn of the discipline philosophers have been trying to show what is wrong with the idea that our fates are sealed before we are born. It has seemed very important to demonstrate that we are not just acting out our destinies but somehow choosing our own courses, making decisions—not just having “decisions” occur in us.
Ideas about causation were at the focus of attention in the early days of Greek philosophy, and it occurred to some to wonder whether all physical events are caused or determined by the sum total of all prior events. If they are—if, as we say, determinism is true—then our actions, as physical events, must themselves be deter- mined. If determinism is true, then our every deed and decision is the inexorable outcome, it seems, of the sum of physical forces acting at the moment, which in turn is the inexorable outcome of the forces acting an instant before, and so on, to the beginning of time.
. . .
Why do people find the free will problem gripping? In part, surely, because it touches deep and central questions about our situation in the universe, about “the human condition,” as one portentously says. But also, I will argue, because phi- losophers have conjured up a host of truly frightening bugbears and then sublimi- nally suggested, quite illicitly, that the question of free will is whether any of these bugbears actually exist.
. . .
[T]here are a host of analogies to be found in the literature: not having free will would be somewhat like being in prison, or being hypnotized, or being paralyzed, or being a puppet, or . . . (the list continues).
I do not think these analogies are merely useful illustrations, merely graphic expository devices. I think they are at the very foundation of the problem. Without them to anchor the philosophical discussions, the free will problem would float away, at best a curious issue to bemuse metaphysicians and puzzlemongers.
2 . T H E B O G E Y M E N The first of the bugbears are quite literally bogeymen—bogeypersons if you insist— for they are all conceived as agents who vie with us for control of our bodies, who compete against us, who have interests antithetical to or at least independent of our own. These fearsome fellows are often used by philosophers as reverse cheerleaders (gloomleaders, you might call them) ushered onto the stage whenever anxiety flags, whenever the urgency of the topic under discussion becomes doubtful. As intricacy piles on intricacy, the reader begins to yawn and fidget, but is quickly regalvanized by a nudging analogy: “But that would be like finding yourself in the clutches of . . .”
10 daniel dennett, Elbow Room, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984.
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The Invisible Jailer: Prisons are dreadful. Prisons are to be shunned. Anyone who fails to understand this is not one of us. Well, if prison is bad, what does it contrast with? If one is not in prison, one is free (in one important sense), and each of us can reflect gratefully on how glad we are not to be in prison. “Aha!” says the fearmonger. “What makes you so sure you’re not in prison?” Sometimes it’s obvious when one is in prison, but sometimes it isn’t. A sly jailer may conceal the steel bars in the window mullions, and install dummy doors in the walls (if you opened one, you would see a brick wall behind it). It might be some time before a prisoner realized he was in prison.
Are you sure you’re not in some sort of prison? Here one is invited to consider a chain of transformations, taking us from obvious prisons to unobvious (but still dreadful) prisons, to utterly invisible and undetectable (but still dreadful?) prisons. Consider a deer in Magdalen College park. Is it imprisoned? Yes, but not much. The enclosure is quite large. Suppose we moved the deer to a larger enclosure—the New Forest with a fence around it. Would the deer still be imprisoned? In the State of Maine, I am told, deer almost never travel more than five miles from their birth- place during their lives. If an enclosure were located outside the normal unim- peded limits of a deer’s lifetime wanderings would the deer enclosed be imprisoned? Perhaps, but note that it makes a difference to our intuitions whether someone in- stalls the enclosure. Do you feel imprisoned on Planet Earth—the way Napoleon was stuck on Elba? It is one thing to be born and live on Elba, and another to be put and kept on Elba by someone. A jail without a jailer is not a jail. Whether or not it is an undesirable abode depends on other features; it depends on just how (if at all) it cramps the style of its inhabitants.
The Nefarious Neurosurgeon: How would you like to have someone strap you down and insert electrodes in your brain, and then control your every thought and deed by pushing buttons on the “master” console? Consider, for instance, the entirely typical invocation of this chap by Fischer:11 the ominous Dr. Black, who arranges things in poor Jones’ brain so that Black can “control Jones’ activities. Jones, meanwhile, knows nothing of this.” First, we may ask—as we always should—why is this other, rival agent introduced? Why bring Dr. Black into it? Couldn’t the example get off the ground just as well, for instance, if Jones had a brain tumor that produced odd results? What makes Fischer’s version more dread- ful is that Jones’ control of his own activities has been usurped by another controller, Dr. Black. A tumor might cause this or that in someone’s brain, and it would be terrible indeed to have a debilitating brain tumor, but it would take an a wfully smart tumor to control someone’s brain.
Variations on the Nefarious Neurosur- geon are the Hideous Hypnotist and the Peremptory Puppeteer. We all know about stage hypnotists (we think we do, in any case) and what is particularly chilling about them is that unlike the Nefarious Neurosur- geons, they may leave no physical trace of their influence.
. . .
Daniel Dennett (1942–)
An American philosopher and cog- nitive scientist who teaches at Tufts University.
Philosopher daniel dennett (Agencia Estado via AP Images)
11 J. Fischer, Journal of Philosophy 79, January 1982, pp. 24–40.
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The Malevolent Mindreader: This agent is es- sentially an opponent, but he does not cause or control your moves; he just foresees them and stymies them. Playing “rock, paper, or scis- sors” against this fellow is hopeless, for since he knows exactly what rut you’re in, what policy you’re following, he can see in advance which move you intend to make and always counters successfully.12 If only you could shield your mind from him! If only you could find a strategy of unpredictability that would be proof against his calculations! Then you wouldn’t be so impotent, so vulnerable in the game of Life. Predictions matter in a special way when one has a stake in them, when they are not merely future tense statements but rather wagers which one might want to make come true and an opponent might want to make come false. In real life one often comes into competition with other people, and even
with other organisms (outwitting the rat or mosquito, for instance), but in the cosmic game of Life against whom is one wagering?
I cannot prove that none of the bogeymen in this rogues’ gallery really exist, any more than I can prove that the Devil, or Santa Claus, doesn’t exist. But I am pre- pared to put on a sober face and assure anyone who needs assuring that there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that any of these horrible agents exists. But of course if any of them did, woe on us! A closet with a ghost in it is a terrible thing, but a closet that is just like a closet with a ghost in it (except for lacking the ghost) is nothing to fear, so we arrive at what may turn out to be a useful rule of thumb: whenever you spy a bogey man in a philosophical example, check to see if this scary agent, who is surely fictitious, is really doing all the work.
dennett urges us to reconsider determinism after dissociating it from these far-fetched fig- ments of imagination. He presents an account of the instinctive behavior of wasps and asks whether our behavior could be analogous. Might we, too, be at the mercy of “brute causation”?
3. S P H E X I S H N E S S A N D O T H E R WO R R I E S There are other fears fueling the free will problem that do not have personified objects. It often seems to people that if determinism were true, there would have to be something “mechanical” about our processes of deliberation that we would regret. We could not be free agents, but only automata, insectlike in our behavior. Consider the digger wasp, Sphex ichneumoneus:
When the time comes for egg laying, the wasp Sphex builds a burrow for the purpose and seeks out a cricket which she stings in such a way as to paralyze but not kill it. She drags the cricket into the burrow, lays her eggs alongside, closes the burrow, then flies away, never to return. In due course, the eggs hatch and the wasp grubs feed off
daniel dennett thinks that resistance to determinism is encouraged by various bogeymen in the popular imagination, such as the “nefarious neurosurgeon,” who would use brain science to control another per- son’s actions. (© iStockphoto.com/annedde)
12 d. Hofstadter, Scientific American 247, August 1982, pp. 16–24.
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the paralyzed cricket, which has not decayed, having been kept in the wasp equivalent of deep freeze. To the human mind, such an elaborately organized and seemingly purposeful routine conveys a convincing flavor of logic and thoughtfulness—until more details are examined. For example, the Wasp’s routine is to bring the paralyzed cricket to the burrow, leave it on the threshold, go inside to see that all is well, emerge, and then drag the cricket in. If the cricket is moved a few inches away while the wasp is inside making her preliminary inspection, the wasp, on emerging from the burrow, will bring the cricket back to the threshold, but not inside, and will then repeat the prepara- tory procedure of entering the burrow to see that everything is all right. If again the cricket is removed a few inches while the wasp is inside, once again she will move the cricket up to the threshold and re-enter the burrow for a final check. The wasp never thinks of pulling the cricket straight in. On one occasion this procedure was repeated forty times, always with the same result.13
13 d. Wooldridge, The Machinery of the Brain, new York: McGraw-Hill, 1963, p. 82.
• What does “hard determinism” mean, as opposed to “determinism” without this modifier? Why is hard determinism incompatible with the possibility of human freedom?
• What are the implications of giving up the determinists’ premise that every event has a sufficient natural cause? Would abandoning this claim solve the problem of freedom?
• does the determinist thesis necessarily entail that our actions are compelled? How might we say that our acts are still free, even if they are determined?
• Can you think of an instance in which one of dennett’s “bogeymen” is involved in an argument about human freedom (in the popular press, on television, in politics)?
2. Determinism versus Indeterminism Should we accept the determinist’s premise? Without it, determinism cannot get to first base. Well, we have already seen the arguments traditionally advanced in earlier chapters, even by philosophers who are not themselves hard determinists. The most general argu- ment in favor of determinism is that only by assuming from the outset that every event has its (sufficient natural) cause(s) can we ever understand anything. Otherwise, we should have auto mechanics always giving us back our cars (with their bills) and making the unhelpful statement that “there’s no cause for your troubles.” We could expect the same from doctors whenever a diagnosis gave them the least bit of trouble, and we would use it ourselves every time a problem began to get difficult.
A much stronger argument was made by Kant, who said that the basic rule of determin- ism, the principle of universal causation, is one of the rules by which we must interpret every experience. Even Hume, who denied that this principle can be justified either through reason or through experience, insisted that it is a “natural habit” or custom that is indispensable to us and that we could not give up even if we wanted to. The consensus, then, has been that the principle itself is inescapable. And leibniz, who rejected the idea of causation
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altogether, insisted on his “Principle of Sufficient Reason,” which came to the similar conclu- sion that “every event has its sufficient reason.”
The agreement of so many philosophers indicates the strength of the hard determinist position. Without the assumption that “every event has its sufficient natural cause(s),” human knowledge would seem to be without one of its most vital presuppositions. not only scien- tific research, but even our most ordinary, everyday beliefs would be forced to an intolerable skeptical standstill. Our every experience would be unintelligible, and our universe would appear to be nothing but a disconnected stream of incoherent happenings from which noth- ing could be predicted and nothing understood. So the answer to the question, “Why should we accept the determinist’s premise?” seems to be, “We cannot give it up; how could we possibly do without it?” For no matter how it is rephrased or philosophically altered (for example, by leibniz, who eliminated the concept of “cause” from it), the assumption that every event in the universe, including our own actions, can be explained and understood if only one knows enough about it and its antecedent conditions is a presupposition of all human thinking that we cannot imagine doing without.
Even if the hard determinist’s premise seems undeniable, it is not yet clear how we are to understand that premise. The older determinists of the newtonian period (laplace, d’Holbach) understood the idea of a cause as a literal push or compulsion, as if one were given a shove down the stairs. On this model, our actions are no different, except in com- plexity, from the “actions” of billiard balls on a felt-covered table, the motion of each wholly determining the motion of the next. The exact movements of every ball, of course, are not always evident. In the opening break, for example, even the most expert player cannot pre- dict with accuracy where each ball will go. But we can be sure that each one is absolutely determined by the movements of the other balls that make contact with it, just as with the simple predictable case of a single ball hitting another straight on.
If we view human beings as nothing more than physical bodies—bones, muscles, nerve cells, and the like—then this mechanical billiard ball model may make some sense. But a much weaker interpretation of the hard determinist premise does not require us so radically to reduce people to mere bodies. Instead of talking about actual physical pushes and com- pulsions, we can interpret the determinist premise in the following way: To say that every event has its cause(s) is to say that if certain antecedent conditions are satisfied, then we can predict that such and such will occur. On the stronger mechanistic determinist interpreta- tion, causes are actual pushes and, with such an interpretation, the notion of freedom is clearly impossible. But the weaker interpretation of determinism as predictability may yet offer room for us to talk about freedom of action. For example, we may be able to predict our friend’s decision, but that does not seem to mean that he was forced to make it. We may be able to predict his action, but only because, knowing him, we know what he will probably do. On the second interpretation, perhaps we can have determinism and freedom.
Many philosophers defend determinism only as predictability on the basis of probability. We may easily be wrong. To say that every event is determined, in this view, means only that it is predictable if we know enough about antecedent conditions. But it has been objected, against the determinist, that the fact of such predictability is not sufficient to defend deter- minism in anything like the “hard” sense. It is one thing to say that all events, including human actions, are actually caused or compelled by physical forces. It is something quite different to say that all events, including human actions, are predictable. Events may be predictable, for example, only on the basis of certain statistical probabilities. “Most people in this circumstance would do that.” “The odds are for it,” in other words. Or, in the case of human actions, the predictability may still be due to human choices; we can predict each other’s actions because we know how we would probably choose in the same circumstances.
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But there is no need here to talk about “causes” or compulsions. nor, it has been argued, should we even talk any longer about “determinism,” if this is all that we mean.
In contrast, the antideterminist thesis, called i ndeterminism, rejects both versions of determin- ism. Indeterminism claims that not every event has its sufficient natural cause(s). This theory at least ap- pears to leave room for free will, for as soon as we allow that there are some events that are uncaused, human actions may be among them. Thus it would seem that we can be held properly responsible for our actions. But is the indeterminist thesis plausible?
The indeterminist argument has recently re- ceived a boost from physics, the very science that gave rise to the determinist threat in the first place. It was newtonian physics that gave determinism its strongest claims. Remember laplace boasting that if he knew the location and motion of every particle in the universe, he could predict every future state of the universe at any time. But it has been shown in recent physics that such knowledge is impossible. One of the most important discoveries of modern physics is the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (named after its discoverer, Werner Heisenberg), which says that we cannot know both the location and the momentum of a subatomic particle. In coming to know the one, we make it impossible for us to know the other at the same time.
From this principle, the British physicist-philosopher Sir Arthur Eddington advanced the indeterminist argument that determinism is false on physical grounds. not every event in the universe is predictable. Furthermore, many scientists now agree, on the basis of such con- siderations, that the concept of “cause” does not apply to certain subatomic particles either. The determinist premise that “every event in the universe has its sufficient natural cause” is false. Some events, namely, those involving some subatomic particles, are not caused, not predictable, and therefore not determined, on any interpretation. But if not all events are determined, then perhaps human actions are not determined but free; if they are predict- able, it is not because they are caused.
The object of indeterminism is to deny the determinist position in order to make room for human freedom. But there are, unfortunately, two serious objections to this indeterminist argument. First, even if we suppose that the conclusions of modern physical (“quantum”) theory are correct (a matter still in dispute among physicists), it is clear that determinism is of importance to us primarily as a theory of macroscopic bodies (that is, objects of visible size—people, trees, cars), not subatomic particles. no one has ever concluded that quan- tum theory and modern physics actually refute newton’s theories. Rather, quantum theory supplements them, puts them in their place, and qualifies them in ways that would have been unthinkable in the eighteenth century. But as for the determinism of the gravitation of the planets or the rolling of a ball down an inclined plane, the spectacular discoveries of modern particle physics do not affect them in the least. Physical determinism with regard to our own bodies, also remains as before. It may be true that it is impossible to predict what a subatomic particle in our bodies may do. But it does not follow that it is impossible to
Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976)
A German physicist who revolution- ized the field of quantum mechanics.
German physicist Werner Heisenberg provided support for the opponents of deter- minism by establishing that we cannot know both the mo- mentum and the position of a subatomic particle and that therefore we cannot make accurate predictions of its behavior. (© Estate of Fred Stein/ Art Resource, NY)
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predict what our bodies will do. Falling out of a plane, we still fall at exactly the same speed as a sack of potatoes, which is all that determinists need to continue their attack on our con- cept of freedom.
Second, even if there should be subatomic indeterminism, indeterminism is not the same as freedom. Suppose there should be a “gap” in the causal determination of our decisions by the various neurological processes of our brains; that would mean, at most, that what we do is not determined at all—or is determined only randomly. Suppose all of a sudden your legs started moving and you found yourself kicking a fire hydrant; surely, this is not what we mean by a “free action.” Freedom means, at least, that we are free to choose what we shall do and that our decisions are effective. Indeterminism robs us of our freedom, therefore, just as much as determinism. And the argument against determinism, in any case, is not yet suf- ficiently persuasive to allow the indeterminists their conclusions. Here, presenting this argu- ment, is philosopher Robert Kane.
On Indeterminism B Y Robert Kane14
Yet such thoughts only lead to a further problem that has haunted free will debates for centuries: if this deeper freedom is not compatible with determinism, it does not seem to be compatible with indeterminism either. An event which is undermined might occur or might not occur, given the entire past. (A determined event must occur, given the entire past.) Thus, whether or not an undetermined event actually occurs, given its past, is a matter of chance. But chance events occur spontaneously and are not under the control of anything, hence not under the control of agents. How then could they be free actions? If, for example, a choice occurred by virtue of a quantum jump or other undetermined event in one’s brain, it would seem a fluke or accident rather than a responsible choice. Undetermined events in the brain or body it seems would inhibit or interfere with our freedom, occurring spontaneously and not under our control. They would turn out to be a nuisance—
or perhaps a curse, like epilepsy—rather than an enhancement of our freedom.
Or look at the problem in another way that goes a little deeper. If my choice is really unde- termined, that means I could have made a dif- ferent choice given exactly the same past right up to the moment when I did choose. That is what indeterminism and the denial of determinism mean: exactly the same past, different out- comes. Imagine, for example, that I had been deliberating about where to spend my vaca- tion, in Hawaii or Colorado, and after much thought and deliberation had decided I pre- ferred Hawaii and chose it. If the choice was undetermined, then exactly the same delibera- tion, the same thought processes, the same be- liefs, desires and other motives—not a sliver of
Robert Kane (1938–)
An emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Through the Moral Maze, The Importance of Free Will, and other books and many articles.
Philosopher Robert Kane (Used by permission of Robert Kane)
14 Courtesy of Robert Kane.
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difference—that led up to my favoring and choosing Hawaii over Colorado, might by chance have issued in my choosing Colorado instead. That is very strange. If such a thing happened it would seem a fluke or accident, like that quantum jump in the brain just mentioned, not a rational choice. Since I had come to favor Hawaii and was about to choose it, when by chance I chose Colorado, I would wonder what went wrong and perhaps consult a neurologist. For reasons such as these, people have argued that undetermined free choices would be “arbitrary,” “capri- cious,” “random,” “irrational,” “uncontrolled,” and “inexplicable,” not really free and responsible choices at all. If free will is not compatible with determinism, it does not seem to be compatible with indeterminism either.
• What implications do recent developments in physics (the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, quantum mechanics) have for the determinist thesis?
• What are the objections to indeterminism? Is indeterminism compatible with freedom?
3. The Role of Consciousness Hard determinism is true of us as physical bodies. But, you may insist, we are not just physical bodies, we are also conscious. We can make decisions. We have wills of our own. The problem of freedom is often called “the free will problem.” But we shall not use this terminology here.
The question of whether we are free or not is intimately joined to the question of who “we” are, as was discussed in Chapter 5. Are we the meeting place of a body and a mind, or is our consciousness “just” brain processes? Whatever we are besides physical bodies, our physical bodies are still subject to all the laws of newtonian physics. You can see the prob- lem. If our bodies are just cogs in the universe, what does it matter whether we are conscious or not? If you fall out of an airplane, you fall and accelerate at exactly the same rate as a sack of potatoes. The fact that you, unlike the potatoes, are aware of your falling, scared out of your mind, and wishing or praying like crazy that some miracle will save you makes not a bit of difference. But perhaps this is so with all our actions as well. Our bodies are composed of bits of matter, various molecules undergoing chemical interactions and acted upon by the various laws of physics. no one can deny that they are subject to all the laws of physical nature. But once all the parts are determined in their various movements and activities, what is left for consciousness to do?
Suppose one insists that consciousness, unlike our physical bodies, is not part of the scheme of determinism. Consciousness, unlike our bodies, is free—free to make decisions, free to choose what to do. But if our bodies are determined in their movements, then what can consciousness do even if it is “free”? Whatever consciousness decides, it cannot have any possible effect on the movements of our bodies; in other words, it cannot affect our ac- tions. Our “decisions,” then, would be mere vanities, like fancy switches on a machine that do not do anything at all. Consciousness, in this view, is nothing but a sideshow, for whatever it “decides,” what we will do and what will happen are already determined by other anteced- ent conditions that have nothing to do with the “decision.” In crude form, this was Spinoza’s ethical position, as well as that of some of the early Stoic philosophers. Everything is deter- mined by the laws of nature; it is absurd to fight against nature. All we can do is to accept the necessity of whatever happens and recognize our consciousness and our apparent freedom
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as a luxurious vanity. Every human action has its sufficient natural causes apart from con- sciousness, so consciousness can make no difference whatsoever.
Most hard determinists, however, would probably not agree with the idea that any event, even a nonphysical event such as an act of consciousness, could be “outside” the determin- ism of nature. Most hard determinists would argue that our thoughts and feelings, even our decisions, are caused by the states of our brains and nervous systems. Our “decisions” are nothing but the conscious effects of complex causal antecedents—most of which we still do not understand—but are definitely part of the deterministic scheme of things. How con- sciousness enters this deterministic scheme is open to all the questions that we asked in the previous chapter—whether, for example, there can be causal connections between con- sciousness and our bodies, whether consciousness is merely an “epiphenomenon” of our brain states or identical to them, or whether we should no longer speak of “consciousness” at all. But, however these disputes are resolved, the hard determinist will insist that con- sciousness cannot be an exception to determinism.
If consciousness is part of the deterministic scheme of things, could we not say that what happens in consciousness, particularly our decisions, thereby causes movements of our bodies, and therefore controls our actions? This attractive compromise faces an overwhelm- ing problem, however. If one accepts the determinist’s premise, then our decisions cannot cause our actions unless it is also true that our decisions, as part of the deterministic scheme, are caused in turn. Our decisions, therefore, are also determined, and no matter that it may seem as if we have a choice of actions, what we decide has already been determined by those antecedent conditions that determine our decision.
Suppose, for example, you are deciding whether or not to go to the movies. Whether or not you go depends upon your decision. But your decision, in turn, depends upon its causal ante- cedents. now suppose that we knew enough about your upbringing and tastes, your character, and the workings of your brain that we could see that your decision—let’s say to go to the movies—is nothing more than the result of all these conditions. What sense would it make, then, to say that you decided to go? Of course, it is true that you went through all the motions of “making a decision.” But the outcome of that decision, even if it was the causal result of the deci- sion, was nevertheless nothing more than the result of conditions that preceded and had noth- ing to do with the decision. It is as if I gave you a choice of two alternatives, only one of which was possible anyway. That is hardly a choice. Therefore, if a decision enters into our actions, it may be a decision whose outcome is already determined in advance. The hard determinist thus wins in either case. If consciousness is not part of the deterministic scheme, it can have no possible effects on our actions. If it is part of the deterministic scheme of things, then it cannot be free. In either case, hard determinism is undeniable, and freedom turns out to be an illusion.
• How does the problem of mind-body dualism affect or complicate the issue of freedom and determinism?
• do you think that consciousness is part of the deterministic scheme of things? Can you think of any alternative possibilities?
4. Soft Determinism The philosophers of the newtonian tradition, those hard determinists who believe that de- terminism precludes the possibility of freedom of choice and action, have always had a pow- erful and simple argument on their side. But because of the urgency of our demand that we
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hold ourselves and each other responsible for our actions, most philosophers have not accepted hard determinism, even though they have accepted the determinist argument. Accordingly, many philosophers have espoused what has been called soft determinism. (The name was coined by William James.) Soft determinists, unlike the uncompromising hard determinists, believe that human freedom and determinism are compatible positions. On the one hand, they accept the determinist’s argument, but, on the other, they refuse to give up the all-important demand for human freedom and responsibility. (Accordingly, they are often called compatibilists, and their position, compatibilism.)
The key to the soft determinist position is that an action or a decision, although fully determined, is free if it “flows from the agent’s character.” John Stuart Mill, for example, defends such a position in the following way:
On Causation and Necessity B Y John Stuart Mill15
The question, whether the law of causality appears in the same strict sense to human actions as to other phenomena, is the celebrated controversy concerning the freedom of the will; which, from at least as far back as the time of Pelagius, has divided both the philosophical and the religious world. The affirmative opinion is commonly called the doctrine of Necessity, as asserting human volitions and actions to be necessary and inevitable. The negative maintains that the will is not deter- mined, like other phenomena, by anteced- ents, but determines itself; that our volitions are not, properly speaking, the effects of causes, or at least no causes which they uni- formly and implicitly obey.
I have already made it sufficiently appar- ent that the former of these opinions is that which I consider the true one; but the mis- leading terms in which it is often expressed, and in the indistinct manner in which it is usually apprehended, have both obstructed its reception, and perverted its influence when received. The metaphysical theory of free-will, as held by philosophers (for the practical feeling of it, common in a great or less degree to all mankind, is in no way in- consistent with the contrary theory), was invented because the supposed alternative of admitting human actions to be necessary was deemed inconsistent with every one’s instinctive consciousness, as well as humili- ating to the pride and even degrading to the moral nature of man. Nor do I deny that the doctrine, as sometimes held, is open to these
15 John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, 8th ed., new York: Harper & Row, 1874.
John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)
Son of James Mill, also a philosopher, and one of the documented ge- niuses of modern history. His intellectual feats by the age of ten would have been to the credit of most scholars at the age of sixty. Mill pushed himself so hard, however, that he suffered a ner- vous breakdown in 1826, at the age of twenty, and turned his attention from the “hard” sciences to poetry and political reform. He is best known for his moral and political writings, particularly On
Liberty (1859) and Utilitarianism (1861). His logic and epistemology are the best to be found in the British empiricist tradition of the nine- teenth century. His views on mathematics, for example, became one of those positions that every writer on the subject had either to accept or to fight forcefully.
Other people’s ability to predict our be- havior correctly does not, according to John Stuart Mill, establish that our behav- ior is not free. Mill was also a prominent advocate of practical freedom for women, for which he is lampooned in this cartoon. (HIP/Art Resource, NY)
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imputations; for the misapprehension in which I shall be able to show that they originate, unfortunately is not confined to the opponents of the doctrine, but is participated in by many, perhaps we might say by most, of its supporters.
Correctly conceived, the doctrine called Philosophical Necessity is simply this: that, given the motives which are present to an individual’s mind, and given like- wise the character and disposition of the individual, the manner in which he will act might be unerringly inferred; that if we knew the person thoroughly, and knew all the inducements which are acting upon him, we could foretell his conduct with as much certainty as we can predict any physical event. This proposition I take to be a mere interpretation of universal experience, a statement in words of what every one is internally convinced of. No one who believed that he knew thor- oughly the circumstances of any case, and the characters of the different persons concerned, would hesitate to foretell how all of them would act. Whatever degree of doubt he may in fact feel, arises from the uncertainty whether he really knows the circumstances, or the character of some one or other of the persons, with the degree of accuracy required; but by no means from thinking that if he did know these things, there could be any uncertainty what the conduct would be. Nor does this full assurance conflict in the smallest degree with what is called our feeling of freedom. We do not feel ourselves the less free, because those to whom we are in- timately known are well assured how we shall will to act in a particular case. We often, on the contrary, regard the doubt what our conduct will be, as a mark of ignorance of our character, and sometimes even resent it as an imputation. The religious metaphysicians who have asserted the freedom of the will, have always maintained it to be consistent with divine foreknowledge of our actions: and if with divine, then with any other foreknowledge. We may be free, and yet another may have reason to be perfectly certain what use we shall make of our freedom. It is not, therefore, the doctrine that our volitions and actions are invariable conse- quents of our antecedent states of mind, that is either contradicted by our con- sciousness, or felt to be degrading.
But the doctrine of causation, when considered as obtaining between our voli- tions and their antecedents, is almost universally conceived as involving more than this. Many do not believe, and very few practically feel, that there is nothing in causation but invariable, certain, and unconditional sequence. There are few to whom mere constancy of succession appears a sufficient stringent bond of union for so peculiar a relation as that of cause and effect. Even if the reason repudiates, the imagination retains, the feeling of some more intimate connection, of some pecu- liar tie, or mysterious constraint exercised by the antecedent over the consequent. Now this it is which, considered as applying to the human will, conflicts with our consciousness, and revolts our feelings. We are certain that, in the case of our voli- tions, there is not this mysterious constraint. We know that we are not compelled, as by a magical spell, to obey any particular motive. We feel, that if we wished to prove that we have the power of resisting the motive, we could do so (that wish being, it needs scarcely be observed, a new antecedent); and it would be humiliating to our pride, and (what is of more importance) paralyzing to our desire of excel- lence, if we thought otherwise. But neither is any such mysterious compulsion now supposed, by the best philosophical authorities, to be exercised by any other cause over its effect. Those who think that causes draw their effects after them by a mys- tical tie, are right in believing that the relation between volitions and their ante- cedents is of another nature. But they should go farther, and admit that this is also
“Given the motives which are present to an individual’s mind, and given likewise the character and disposition of the individual, the manner in which he will act might be unerringly inferred.” — J O H N S T U A R T M I L L
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true of all other effects and their antecedents. If such a tie is considered to be in- volved in the word Necessity, the doctrine is not true of human actions; but neither is it then true of inanimate objects. It would be more correct to say that matter is not bound by necessity, than that mind is so.
. . .
A fatalist believes, or half believes (for nobody is a consistent fatalist), not only that whatever is about to happen will be the infallible result of the causes which produce it (which is the true necessitarian doctrine), but moreover that there is no use in struggling against it; that it will happen however we may strive to prevent it. Now, a necessitarian, believing that our actions follow from our characters, and that our characters follow from our organization, our education, and our circum- stances, is apt to be, with more or less of consciousness on his part, a fatalist as to his own actions, and to believe that his nature is such, or that his education and circumstances have so moulded his character, that nothing can now prevent him from feeling and acting in a particular way, or at least that no effort of his own can hinder it. In the words of the sect which in our own day has most perseveringly inculcated and most perversely misunderstood this great doctrine, his character is formed for him, and not by him; therefore his wishing that it had been formed dif- ferently is of no use; he has no power to alter it. But this is a grand error. He has, to a certain extent, a power to alter his character. Its being, in the ultimate resort, formed for him, is not inconsistent with its being, in part formed by him as one of the intermediate agents. His character is formed by his circumstances (including among these his particular organization); but his own desire to mould it in a par- ticular way, is one of those circumstances, and by no means one of the least influ- ential. We can not, indeed, directly will to be different from what we are. But neither did those who are supposed to have formed our characters directly will that we should be what we are. Their will had no direct power except over their own actions. They made us what they did make us, by willing, not the end, but the requisite means; and we, when our habits are not too inveterate, can, by similarly willing the requisite means, make ourselves different. If they could place us under the influence of certain circumstances, we, in like manner, can place ourselves under the influence of other circumstances. We are exactly as capable of making our own character, if we will, as others are of making it for us.
Yes (answers the Owenite16), but these words, “if we will,” surrender the whole point: since the will to alter our own character is given us, not by any efforts of ours, but by circumstances which we can not help, it comes to us either from ex- ternal causes, or not at all. Most true: if the Owenite stops here, he is in a position from which nothing can expel him. Our character is formed by us as well as for us; but the wish which induces us to attempt to form it is formed for us; and how? Not, in general, by our organization, nor wholly by our education, but by our experi- ence; experience of the painful consequences of the character we previously had; or by some strong feeling of admiration or aspiration, accidentally aroused. But to think that we have no power of altering our character, and to think that we shall not use our power unless we desire to use it, are very different things, and have a very different effect on the mind. A person who does not wish to alter his charac- ter, can not be the person who is supposed to feel discouraged or paralyzed by
16 From Robert Owen (1771–1858), a political reformer.
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thinking himself unable to do it. The depress- ing effect of the fatalist doctrine can only be felt where there is a wish to do what that doc- trine represents as impossible. It is of no conse- quence what we think forms our character, when we have no desire of our own about forming it; but it is of great consequence that we should not be prevented from forming such a desire by thinking the attainment impracti- cable, and that if we have the desire, we should know that the work is not so irrevocably done as to be incapable of being altered.
And indeed, if we examine closely, we shall find that this feeling, of our being able to modify our own character if we wish, is itself the feeling of moral freedom which we are conscious of. A person feels morally free who feels that his habits or his temptations are not his masters, but he theirs; who, even in yield-
ing to them, knows that he could resist; that were he desirous of altogether throw- ing them off, there would not be required for the purpose a stronger desire than he knows himself to be capable of feeling. It is of course necessary, to render our consciousness of freedom complete, that we should have succeeded in making our character all we have hitherto attempted to make it; for if we have wished and not attained, we have, to that extent, not power over our own character; we are not free. Or at least, we must feel that our wish, if not strong enough to alter our char- acter, is strong enough to conquer our character when the two are brought into conflict in any particular case of conduct. And hence it is said with truth, that none but a person of confirmed virtue is completely free.
In this section, Mill glides between the harsh alternatives of hard determinism and inde- terminism. He begins by accepting determinism and the idea that all human actions are “necessary and inevitable,” given their causes. But he then goes on to say that these causes are themselves within human control, that we can alter the causes of events and even, by taking certain steps, alter our own characters. But this is not in the least to deny determin- ism; nor does it deny that we are in control and have “free will” in an important sense. Human actions, following from their various causes (including “character” or personality), are as predictable as any other events. But predictability is not incompatible with freedom, for freedom means, according to Mill, nothing other than acting in accordance with one’s own character, desires, and wishes. Since these are the causes of our actions, that means that Mill can defend both determinism and freedom at the same time.
david Hume is also a soft determinist, and he, too, argues that the reconciliation of “lib- erty and necessity” is to be found in the fact that a person’s actions “flow from one’s charac- ter or disposition.” In defending soft determinism, Hume contends that we cannot mean by a free action one that is uncaused, a matter of chance, for this flies in the face of our common assumption that every event must have a cause. Such a view of freedom is also incoherent: The free-will advocate wants to ensure that we can hold people responsible for their actions;
Robert Owen (1771–1858)
A Welsh social reformer and a leader in the socialist movement that was budding in his era. He denied free will, contending that people are not responsible for their actions. Rather, Owen con- tended, actions are guided by people’s characters, which exter- nal influences had shaped. Owen defended educational and labor reform, hoping to improve the environment that played such an important role in shaping peo- ple’s lives.
Robert Owen believed that education led people to have the characters they do, so they are not ultimately responsible for actions that flow from their characters. (HIP/Art Resource, NY)
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but if people’s actions were merely a matter of chance, over which they have no control, we surely would not hold them responsible. On the contrary, actions that we praise or blame are precisely those determined by the person’s character.
Although Hume defends a soft determinist position, there is a sense in which he is not a determinist at all. Recall from Chapter 3 that Hume thinks that causality is a fiction and our penchant for seeking out causes merely a habit. Thus he can argue that just as we are never rationally justified in claiming that a particular event has a cause, so we are never fully justi- fied in claiming that human actions have causes.
On Causation and Character B Y David Hume17
But to proceed in this reconciling project with regard to the question of liberty and necessity; the most contentious question of metaphysics, the most contentious sci- ence; it will not require many words to prove, that all mankind have ever agreed in the doctrine of liberty as well as in that of necessity, and that the whole dispute, in this respect also, has been hitherto merely verbal. For what is meant by liberty, when applied to voluntary actions? We cannot surely mean that actions have so little connexion with motives, inclinations, and cir- cumstances, that one does not follow with a certain degree of uniformity from the other, and that one af- fords no inference by which we can conclude the exis- tence of the other. For these are plain and acknowledged matters of fact. By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting according to the determinations of the will; that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may. Now this hypotheti- cal liberty is universally allowed to belong to everyone who is not a prisoner and in chains. Here then is no subject of dispute.
Whatever definition we may give of liberty, we should be careful to observe two requisite circum- stances: first, that it be consistent with plain matter of fact; secondly, that it be consistent with itself. If we ob- serve these circumstances and render our definition in- telligible, I am persuaded that all mankind will be found of one opinion with regard to it.
It is universally allowed that nothing exists without a cause of its existence, and that chance, when strictly ex- amined, is a mere negative word and means not any real power which has anywhere a being in nature. But it is pretended that some causes are necessary, some not nec- essary. Here then is the advantage of definitions. Let anyone define a cause without comprehending it, as part of the definition, a necessary connexion with its effect, and let him show distinctly the origin of the idea expressed
17 david Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 2nd ed., ed. l. A. Selby-Bigge, Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1902.
Rembrandt, Self-Portrait (1664). Much of the debate over determinism focuses on whether we are responsible for our own characters and the acts that flow from them. (Scala/Art Resource, NY)
“By liberty, . . . we can only mean a power of acting or not acting according to the determinations of the will.” — DAV I D H U M E
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by the definition, and I shall readily give up the whole controversy. But if the fore- going explication of the matter be received, this must be absolutely impracticable. Had not objects a regular conjunction with each other, we should never have en- tertained any notion of cause and effect; and this regular conjunction produces that inference of the understanding which is the only connexion that we can have any comprehension of. Whoever attempts a definition of cause exclusive of these cir- cumstances will be obliged either to employ unintelligible terms or such as are synonymous to the term which he endeavours to define. And if the definition above mentioned be admitted, liberty, when opposed to necessity, not to con- straint, is the same thing with chance, which is universally allowed to have no existence. . . . All laws being founded on rewards and punishments, it is supposed as a fundamental principle, that these motives have a regular and uniform influence on the mind, and both produce the good and prevent the evil actions. We may give to this influence what name we please; but, as it is usually conjoined with the action, it must be esteemed a cause, and be looked upon as an instance of that neces- sity, which we would here establish.
The only proper object of hatred or vengeance is a person or creature, en- dowed with thought and consciousness; and when any criminal or injurious ac- tions excite that passion, it is only by their relation to the person, or connexion with him. Actions are, by their very nature, temporary and perishing; and where they proceed not from some cause in the character and disposition of the person who performed them, they can neither redound to his honour, if good; nor infamy, if evil. The actions themselves may be blameable; they may be contrary to all the rules of morality and religion: But the person is not answerable for them; and as they proceeded from nothing in him that is durable and constant, and leave nothing of that nature behind them, it is impossible he can, upon their account, become the object of punishment or vengeance. According to the prin- ciple, therefore, which denies necessity, and consequently causes, a man is as pure and untainted, after having committed the most horrid crime, as at the first moment of his birth, nor is his character anywise concerned in his actions, since they are not derived from it, and the wickedness of the one can never be used as a proof of the depravity of the other.
Men are not blamed for such actions as they perform ignorantly and casually, whatever may be the consequences. Why? but because the principles of these ac- tions are only momentary, and terminate in them alone. Men are less blamed for such actions as they perform hastily and unpremeditatedly than for such as proceed from deliberation. For what reason? but because a hasty temper, though a constant cause or principle in the mind, operates only by intervals, and infects not the whole character. Again, repentance wipes off every crime, if attended with a reformation of life and manners. How is this to be accounted for? but by asserting that actions render a person criminal merely as they are proofs of criminal principles in the mind; and when, by an alteration of these principles, they cease to be just proofs, they likewise cease to be criminal. But, except upon the doctrine of necessity, they never were just proofs, and consequently never were criminal.
It will be equally easy to prove, and from the same arguments, that liberty, ac- cording to that definition above mentioned, in which all men agree, is also essen- tial to morality, and that no human actions, where it is wanting, are susceptible of any moral qualities, or can be the objects either of approbation or dislike. For as actions are objects of our moral sentiment, so far only as they are indications of the
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internal character, passions, and affections; it is impossible that they can give rise either to praise or blame, where they proceed not from these principles, but are derived altogether from external violence.
In other words, Hume too suggests that not only is freedom of choice and action possible within the framework of determinism, but determinism is even necessary if we are to make sense out of the notion of freedom of choice and responsibility. His language is convoluted, but his point is plain: We can make sense of the notion of voluntary action only because there is a uniform (“necessary”) connection between our motives, inclinations, circum- stances, and characters and what we do. But “soft determinism” raises the same old ques- tions yet again. Can we be said to be responsible even for those acts that are caused by our character? Can we choose our character, as Mill suggests? Could we have done other than what we did, even if we had wanted to? Consider the following argument from Robert Kane.
On “Wiggle Room” B Y Robert Kane18
Frequently in everyday life we act from our existing motives without having to think or deliberate about what to do. At such times, we may very well be deter- mined by our existing characters and motives. Yet we may also be acting “of our own free wills” to the extent that we formed our present characters and motives (our wills) by earlier choices or actions that were not themselves determined. Let us call these earlier choices or actions “self-forming” choices or actions.
Now I believe that such undetermined self-forming choices or actions occur at those difficult times of life when we are torn between competing visions of what we should do or become; and they are more frequent than we think. Perhaps we are torn between doing the moral thing or acting from ambition, or between powerful present desires and long term goals, or we are faced with difficult tasks for which we have aversions. In all such cases, we are faced with competing motivations and have to make an effort to overcome temptation to do something else we also strongly want. There is tension and uncertainty in our minds about what to do at such times that, I suggest, is reflected in appropriate regions of our brains by move- ment away from thermodynamic equilibrium—in short, a kind of stirring up of chaos in the brain that makes it sensitive to micro-indeterminacies at the neuronal level. The uncertainty and inner tension we feel at such soul-searching moments of self-formation would thus be reflected in the indeterminacy of our neural processes themselves. What is experienced personally as uncertainty would correspond phys- ically to the opening of a window of opportunity that temporarily screens off com- plete determination by influences of the past. (By contrast, when we act from predominant motives or settled dispositions, the uncertainty or indeterminacy is muted. If it did play a role in such cases, it would be a mere nuisance or fluke.)
When we do decide under such conditions of uncertainty, the outcome is not determined because of the preceding indeterminacy—and yet it can be willed (and hence rational and voluntary) either way owing to the fact that in such self- formation, the agents’ prior wills are divided by conflicting motives. Consider a
18 Courtesy of Robert Kane.
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businesswoman who faces a conflict of this kind. She is on the way to a business meeting important to her career when she observes an assault taking place in an alley. An inner struggle ensues between her moral conscience, to stop and call for help, and her career ambitions which tell her she cannot miss this meeting. She has to make an effort of will to overcome the temptation to go on to her meeting. If she overcomes this temptation, it will be the result of her effort, but if she fails, it will be because she did not allow her effort to succeed. And this is due to the fact that, while she wanted to overcome temptation, she also wanted to fail, for quite different and incommensurable reasons. When we, like the businesswoman, decide in such circumstances, and the indeterminate efforts we are making become deter- minate choices, we make one set of competing reasons or motives prevail over the others at that moment by deciding.
How do we “make” a set of competing reasons or motives prevail? One classic response to this question was introduced by Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt about forty years ago, when he redefined the concept of free will in his essay “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person.”
F RO M “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person” B Y Harry Frankfurt19
It is my view that one essential difference between persons and other creatures is to be found in the structure of a person’s will. Human beings are not alone in having desires and motives, or in making choices. They share these things with the mem- bers of certain other species, some of whom even appear to engage in deliberation and to make decisions based upon prior thought. It seems to be peculiarly charac- teristic of humans, however, that they are able to form what I shall call “second- order desires” or “desires of the second order.”
Besides wanting and choosing and being moved to do this or that, men may also want to have (or not to have) certain desires and motives. They are capable of want- ing to be different, in their preferences and purposes, from what they are. Many animals appear to have the capacity for what I shall call “first-order desires” or “desires of the first order,” which are simply desires to do or not to do one thing or another. No animal other than man, however, appears to have the capacity for re- flective self-evaluation that is manifested in the formation of second-order desires.
. . .
Someone has a desire of the second order either when he wants simply to have a certain desire or when he wants a certain desire to be his will. In situations of the latter kind, I shall call his second-order desires “second-order volitions” or “voli- tions of the second order.” Now it is having second-order volitions, and not having second-order desires generally, that I regard as essential to being a person. It is logi- cally possible, however unlikely, that there should be an agent with second-order desires but with no volitions of the second order. Such a creature, in my view,
19 Harry Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” in Journal of Philosophy 68, no. 1 (January 14, 1971): 5–20.
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would not be a person. I shall use the term “wanton” to refer to agents who have first- order desires but who are not persons be- cause, whether or not they have desires of the second order, they have no second-order volitions.
The essential characteristic of a wanton is that he does not care about his will. His desires move him to do certain things, without its being true of him either that he wants to be moved by those desires or that he prefers to be moved by other de- sires. The class of wantons includes all nonhuman animals that have desires and all very young children. Perhaps it also includes some adult human beings as well. In any case, adult humans may be more or less wanton; they may act wantonly, in response to first-order desires concerning which they have no volitions of the second order, more or less frequently.
The fact that a wanton has no second-order volitions does not mean that each of his first-order desires is translated heedlessly and at once into action. He may have no opportunity to act in accordance with some of his desires. Moreover, the trans- lation of his desires into action may be delayed or precluded either by conflicting desires of the first order or by the intervention of deliberation. For a wanton may possess and employ rational faculties of a high order. Nothing in the concept of a wanton implies that he cannot reason or that he cannot deliberate concerning how to do what he wants to do. What distinguishes the rational wanton from other rational agents is that he is not concerned with the desirability of his desires them- selves. He ignores the question of what his will is to be. Not only does he pursue whatever course of action he is most strongly inclined to pursue, but he does not care which of his inclinations is the strongest.
Thus a rational creature, who reflects upon the suitability to his desires of one course of action or another, may nonetheless be a wanton. In maintaining that the essence of being a person lies not in reason but in will, I am far from suggesting that a creature without reason may be a person. For it is only in virtue of his rational capacities that a person is capable of becoming critically aware of his own will and of forming volitions of the second order. The structure of a person’s will presup- poses, accordingly, that he is a rational being.
The distinction between a person and a wanton may be illustrated by the differ- ence between two narcotics addicts. Let us suppose that the physiological condition accounting for the addiction is the same in both men, and that both succumb inevi- tably to their periodic desires for the drug to which they are addicted. One of the addicts hates his addiction and always struggles desperately, although to no avail, against its thrust. He tries everything that he thinks might enable him to overcome his desires for the drug. But these desires are too powerful for him to withstand, and invariably, in the end, they conquer him. He is an unwilling addict, helplessly violated by his own desires.
The unwilling addict has conflicting first-order desires: he wants to take the drug, and he also wants to refrain from taking it. In addition to these first-order desires, however, he has a volition of the second order. He is not a neutral with regard to the conflict between his desire to take the drug and his desire to refrain from taking it. It is the latter desire, and not the former, that he wants to constitute his will; it is the latter desire, rather than the former, that he wants to be effective and to provide the purpose that he will seek to realize in what he actually does.
Harry Frankfurt (1929–)
An American moral philosopher, currently an emeritus professor of philosophy at Princeton University.
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The other addict is a wanton. His actions reflect the economy of his first-order desires, without his being concerned whether the desires that move him to act are desires by which he wants to be moved to act. If he encounters problems in obtaining the drug or in administering it to himself, his responses to his urges to take it may involve deliberation. But it never occurs to him to consider whether he wants the relations among his desires to result in his having the will he has. The wanton addict may be an animal, and thus incapable of being concerned about his will. In any event he is, in respect of his wanton lack of concern, no different from an animal.
The second of these addicts may suffer a first-order conflict similar to the first- order conflict suffered by the first. Whether he is human or not, the wanton may (perhaps due to conditioning) both want to take the drug and want to refrain from taking it. Unlike the unwilling addict, however, he does not prefer that one of his conflicting desires should be paramount over the other; he does not prefer that one first-order desire rather than the other should constitute his will. It would be mis- leading to say that he is neutral as to the conflict between his desires, since this would suggest that he regards them as equally acceptable. Since he has no identity apart from his first-order desires, it is true neither that he prefers one to the other nor that he prefers not to take sides.
It makes a difference to the unwilling addict, who is a person, which of his con- flicting first-order desires wins out. Both desires are his, to be sure; and whether he finally takes the drug or finally succeeds in refraining from taking it, he acts to satisfy what is in a literal sense his own desire. In either case he does something he himself wants to do, and he does it not because of some external influence whose aim happens to coincide with his own but because of his desire to do it. The un- willing addict identifies himself, however, through the formation of a second- order volition, with one rather than with the other of his conflicting first-order desires. He makes one of them more truly his own and, in so doing, he withdraws himself from the other. It is in virtue of this identification and withdrawal, accom- plished through the formation of a second-order volition, that the unwilling addict may meaningfully make the analytically puzzling statements that the force moving him to take the drug is a force other than his own, and that it is not of his own free will but rather against his will that this force moves him to take it.
. . .
There is a very close relationship between the capacity for forming second-order volitions and another capacity that is essential to persons—one that has often been considered a distinguishing mark of the human condition. It is only because a person has volitions of the second order that he is capable both of enjoying and of lacking freedom of the will. The concept of a person is not only, then, the concept of a type of entity that has both first-order desires and volitions of the second order. It can also be construed as the concept of a type of entity for whom the freedom of its will may be a problem. This concept excludes all wantons, both infrahuman and human, since they fail to satisfy an essential condition for the enjoyment of free- dom of the will. And it excludes those suprahuman beings, if any, whose wills are necessarily free.
Just what kind of freedom is the freedom of the will? . . .
According to one familiar philosophical tradition, being free is fundamentally a matter of doing what one wants to do. Now the notion of an agent who does what
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he wants to do is by no means an altogether clear one: both the doing and the wanting, and the appropriate relation between them as well, require elucidation. But although its focus needs to be sharpened and its formula- tion refined, I believe that this notion does capture at least part of what is implicit in the idea of an agent who acts freely. It misses entirely, however, the peculiar content of the quite different idea of an agent whose will is free.
A particularly interesting example of first- versus second-order desires is presented in Alber t Camus’s widely read novel The Stranger. The cen- tral character (“antihero”) Meursault displays a “strange” disconnect between first-order desires and the second-order desires through which most of us regulate (or try to regulate) our lives. It is not as if, as it is so often argued, Meursault is a man without feelings. What makes Meursault so strange is the absence of second-order desires, despite his having quite strong impulses and first- order desires throughout the book. But it is not as if he is some sort of automaton and devoid of self-awareness. The contemporary philosopher David Zimmerman spells out the oddity this way:
It is a different story with Camus’s Meursault. Wantons need not be (virtually) blank slates. In fact, one of the truly unnerving things about Meursault is that he is at one-and-the-same-time extraordinarily observant about his environment (he is, after all, the first-person narrator of the novel), but also completely indifferent to anything but the purely sensuous and very occasionally sensual aspects of it. He is not a pure spectator, because he does have many first-order desires: to swim in the warm sea, to drink wine to the point of muzziness, to kiss Marie. Meursault is also much affected by his physical surroundings: the waxing of the sun frequently makes him drowsy; he is finely attuned to the shifts and changes of light playing across the Algerian landscape. (The sun is, in fact, a major character in the novel, arguably more responsible for the pivotal murder than Meursault himself. But more of that later.)
Meursault also manages to register things that go on in the social environ- ment. It would be too much to say that he is actually sensitive to what people say and think and feel. However, he does take note of these things, sometimes even to the point of avowing that he can see some- one else’s point of view. But seeing never triggers real sympathy. He closely observes the people around him—the mourners at his mother’s funeral, the old man and his scrofu- lous dog, the pimp Raymond, Marie—but they do not touch his feelings, not in the way
Albert Camus (1913–1960)
A philosopher, novelist, playwright, and journalist. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957. Perhaps his most famous work was his first novel, The Stranger.
Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger features a character who is deficient in the ability to make judgments about his first-order desires. He is, in Harry Frankfurt’s term, a wanton. (Adoc-photos/ Art Resource, NY)
David Zimmerman (1942–)
An American philosopher who is a professor of philosophy at Simon Fraser University. He has written extensively on ethics and the free will/determinism issue.
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the sun, the sea, the air touch his sensations. Meursault may well be a kind of psychopath or sociopath, but he lacks one crucial characteristic of this pathol- ogy, viz. any urge for self-interested calculation, a lack which in the end is his undoing.
A baffling case, then, a man with acute cognitive faculties of awareness and even self-awareness, with a range of first-order desires, with the capacity to en- tertain higher-order beliefs about his own first-order beliefs and desires, as well as about other people’s beliefs, desires, emotions, with the capacity to feel even the occasional self-referential emotion like embarrassment, but with no other- directed emotions and certainly no higher-order desires much less volitions. If not an existentialist hero, then a cognitively and conceptually sophisticated wanton.20
• “Compatibilists” hold that freedom and determinism are compatible. do you think that they are? (Just because you are unwilling to give up either one of them does not mean that they are compatible.)
• Have you ever been a “wanton,” in Frankfurt’s terms? If so, describe your experience.
• What is an example of a second-order desire regarding a first-order desire?
• One “commonsense” objection to determinism is that it conflicts with our experi- ence of freedom. How does Mill address this objection? How does he distinguish between different ideas of causation?
• Hume suggests that determinism is necessary for us to make sense of action and responsibility. Is acting from character sufficient for freedom?
D. Compulsion and Ignorance The basis of compatibilism or soft determinism is that we somehow carve a space within determinism for those actions that we insist on calling “free” and for which we hold our- selves and other people responsible. But this means that “free actions” must also be actions that are determined by antecedent conditions and causes. Free as well as unfree acts (like falling down the stairs) are caused, according to the determinist argument. The distinction, therefore, as we saw in both Mill and Hume, depends upon whether the determining factors are within or “outside” the agent. If they are outside the person, we say that the act was not free but compelled or “done under compulsion.” This distinction, of course, has important moral implications. We often say of a person who is not morally responsible for an action that he or she is not free not to do it. This distinction is not a new one. Aristotle, for example, many centuries ago defined a voluntary action as one that was (1) not done under compul- sion and (2) not done from ignorance.
20 david Zimmerman, Doing and Time: Autonomous Agency in the Natural Order. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
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On Voluntary Action B Y Aristotle21
It is only voluntary feelings and actions for which praise and blame are given; those that are involuntary are condoned, and sometimes even pitied. Hence it seems to be necessary for the student of ethics to define the difference between the Voluntary and the Involuntary; and this will also be of service to the legislator in assigning rewards and punishments.
It is then generally held that actions are involuntary when done (a) under com- pulsion or (b) through ignorance, and that (a) an act is compulsory when its origin is from without, being of such a nature that the agent, or person compelled, con- tributes nothing to it: for example, when a ship’s captain is carried somewhere by stress of weather, or by people who have him in their power. But there is some doubt about actions done through fear of a worse alternative, or for some noble object—as for instance if a tyrant having a man’s parents and children in his power commands him to do something base, when if he complies their lives will be spared but if he refuses they will be put to death. It is open to question whether such actions are voluntar y or involuntar y. A somewhat similar case is when cargo is jet- tisoned in a storm; apart from circumstances, no one voluntarily throws away his prop- erty, but to save his own life and that of his shipmates any sane man would do so. Acts of this kind, then, are “mixed” or composite; but they approximate rather to the voluntary class. For at the actual time when they are done they are chosen or willed; and the end or motive of an act varies with the occasion, so that the terms “voluntary” and “involun- tary” should be used with reference to the time of action; now the actual deed in the cases in question is done voluntarily, for the origin of the movement of the parts of the body instrumental to the act lies in the agent; and when the origin of an action is in oneself, it is in one’s own power to do it or not. Such acts therefore are voluntary, though perhaps involuntary apart from cir- cumstances—for no one would choose to do any such action in and for itself.
. . .
What kind of actions then are to be called “compulsory”? Used without qualification,
21 Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of the loeb Classical library from Aristotle: Minor Works, Volume XIX, Vol. 73, trans. H. Rackham, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1926 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. The loeb Classical library® is a registered trademark of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Aristotle considered the life of contemplation the best life for human beings, in part because a contemplative life is a quintessentially free life. Rembrandt portrayed Aristotle himself as engaging in contemplation while observing a bust of Homer. (Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY)
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perhaps this term applies to any case where the cause of the action lies in things outside the agent, and when the agent contributes nothing. But when actions in- trinsically involuntary are yet in given circumstances deliberately chosen in prefer- ence to a given alternative, and when their origin lies in the agent, these actions are to be pronounced intrinsically involuntary but voluntary in the circumstances, and in preference to the alternative. They approximate however rather to the voluntary class, since conduct consists of particular things done, and the particular things done in the cases in question are voluntary. But it is not easy to lay down rules for deciding which of two alternatives is to be chosen, for particular cases differ widely.
To apply the term “compulsory” to acts done for the sake of pleasure or for noble objects, on the plea that these exercise constraint on us from without, is to make every action compulsory. For (1) pleasure and nobility between them supply the motives of all actions whatsoever. Also (2) to act under compulsion and invol- untarily is painful, but actions aiming at something pleasant or noble are pleasant. And (3) it is absurd to blame external things, instead of blaming ourselves for fall- ing an easy prey to their attractions; or to take the credit of our noble deeds to ourselves, while putting the blame for our disgraceful ones upon the temptations of pleasure. It appears therefore that an act is compulsory when its origin is from outside, the person compelled contributing nothing to it.
Everything that is done by reason of ignorance is not voluntary; it is only what produces pain and repentance that is involuntary. For the man who has done some- thing owing to ignorance, and feels not the least vexation at his action, has not acted voluntarily, since he did not know what he was doing, nor yet involuntarily, since he is not pained. Of people, then, who act by reason of ignorance he who repents is thought an involuntary agent, and the man who does not repent may, since he is different, be called a not voluntary agent; for, since he differs from the other, it is better that he should have a name of his own.
Acting by reason of ignorance seems also to be different from acting in igno- rance; for the man who is drunk or in a rage is thought to act as a result not of ig- norance but of one of the causes mentioned, yet not knowingly but in ignorance.
Now every wicked man is ignorant of what he ought to do and what he ought to abstain from, and it is by reason of error of this kind that men become unjust and in general bad; but the term “involuntary” tends to be used not if a man is ignorant of what is to his advantage—for it is not mistaken purpose that causes involuntary action (it leads rather to wickedness), nor ignorance of the universal (for that men are blamed), but ignorance of particulars, i.e., of the circumstances of the action and the objects with which it is concerned. For it is on these that both pity and pardon depend, since the person who is ignorant of any of these acts involuntarily.
What is compulsion? According to Aristotle, an act is compulsory “when its origin is with- out” such that the person who acts “contributes nothing to it.” Thus a person who is literally pushed into doing something is compelled rather than free. But what are we to say, for ex- ample, of the person who is neurotic, who acts compulsively or “irrationally” because of mental illness? It might once have been said that such a person was “possessed,” as if some- thing “external” (a demon or an evil spirit) had “taken over” and compelled certain actions.
This, in a sense, is what Aristotle means by “ignorance.” Factors unknown to the agent influence his or her choice. But, also, what you do not know seriously does restrict
“Now every wicked man is ignorant of what he ought to do and what he ought to abstain from, and it is by reason of error of this kind that men become unjust and in general bad.” — A R I S TOT L E
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your freedom. Think of college students back in 1950, whose knowledge of sex, even the most rudimentary information about pregnancy and sexual well-being, was all but nonexistent. To say that such ignorance limited their freedom would have been an understatement, to put it mildly. (At the same time, of course, those who were leery of teenage sexual activity were more than happy to restrict freedom through such ignorance.) What follows is a 2005 review of the movie, Kinsey, about the life of the sex researcher who lifted the veil on much of that ignorance.
“Sex, Ignorance, and Freedom” B Y Judith Orr 22
Alfred Kinsey got into the study of human sexual behavior (after years of research into the evolution of gall wasps) when he experienced the impact of ignorance about sex first hand—both he and his wife were virgins when they married. He started a “marriage course” at Indiana University. It was a sensation. The movie shows that as word spread that his lectures were frank, informative and open, young people crammed into the lecture theatre, some pretending to be engaged, desperate for the most basic information about sex. One student tells him she thought that women gave birth through their belly button, so when Kinsey spelt out the biology of women’s sexual pleasure it was a revelation to the 18 year olds in the room!
His wider research flowed from these lectures as he realized so little was known about people’s sexual habits. He is portrayed as a man with a mission, embarking on a mass study with his unique method of interviewing with codes to keep the histories confidential. His staff were trained to draw people out, to use words they were comfortable with, to control their reactions to people’s intimate revelations so that they were seen as non-judgmental and unshockable. These interviews filmed full face to camera are powerful and give a feel of just how much Kinsey and his team were breaking new ground.
The results of the studies—they did 18,000 in the end—were explosive. Kinsey published the instantly famous statistic that 10 percent of the population were gay. He also announced that “37 percent of all men had had a homosexual experience, nearly 50 percent of women were engaged in premarital sex, 62 percent of women masturbated, 49 percent of men had had oral sex within marriage,” and so it went on. In fact Kinsey wouldn’t put people in “boxes” according to their sexuality. Instead his approach was revolutionary for its time—he described sexuality as a con- tinuum with someone who was totally gay or straight on either end, with many people, including himself, falling somewhere in between.
Titian’s Tarquinius and Lucrecia. Coercion interferes with freedom to the point that a person is compelled to per- form a specific action. (Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)
22 Judith Orr, “Intimate Truths.” The Socialist Review, March 2005. Reprinted by permission.
Judith Orr
A leader in the British Socialist Workers Party and editor of Socialist Review.
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It is hard to overestimate the impact of an analysis which denied there was such a thing as “normal” sexual behavior. Kinsey said there was only “common” or “rare” behavior. The liberating effect of the whole experience is re- flected in the look and color of the movie as the black and white and gloom of the early days is gradually lightened and colored. But although many say that Kinsey laid the foundations for the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and indeed Kinsey and his team practiced a form of “free love” and sexual experimentation in their own relationships, the 1950s were still characterized by sexual repression and taboo. The establish- ment saw his writing as a challenge to their authority and Kinsey is shown being hauled in front of the Un-American Activities Commit- tee, accused of Communist-inspired plots to weaken American values (but only after he re- fused Hoover’s request to “root out homosexu- als” in the State Department).
The movie gives you a real sense of the per- sonal anguish caused by enforced ignorance about sex. The revival of campaigns encouraging abstinence in teenagers in the U.S. today is an attempt to put the clock back to such days and is being funded by the Bush administration, which has pledged $170 million this year. Today only 14 out of 50 states require that the issue of contraception be covered in schools at all, and abstinence educators can only discuss contraception in order to emphasize its limitations.
Today we talk about “compulsions” and “denial” of the facts as conditions within the person, not as “external” influences. In fact, psychologists would say that the neurotic always contributes to the neurosis as well as suffers from it, and thus, according to Aristotle’s crite- rion, such acts are not really compelled at all, but voluntary, like the acts of a drunkard.
To take a much more difficult kind of case, what are we to say of those celebrated cases of “brain-washing” (as the Chinese did to Un prisoners of war during the Korean War) in which a person seemingly performs an action voluntarily, but only after he or she has been “conditioned” in a dramatic and sometimes brutal way? Sometimes even the person’s “char- acter” itself is changed. Should we hold a person responsible for such actions? (This ques- tion has been an issue in some war-crimes cases, for example.) Similarly, should we go against Aristotle and hold a person responsible for actions performed under great stress or as the result of a violent emotion (rage or infatuation, for example)? Should we hold a person responsible for actions performed under the influence of drugs or alcohol (assuming that we may well hold them responsible for taking the drugs or drinking in the first place)? You can see that the distinction between “free” actions and acts that are “compelled” is not nearly as clear as it first seemed. We can easily distinguish between a person who breaks into a store and a person who is pushed through the front window. But in many cases in which freedom is most in question, in cases of neurosis, brainwashing, great passion, and chemical
Alfred Charles Kinsey (1894–1956)
An American biologist whose pioneering work on human sex- uality had a great impact on soci- ology, philosophy, and many other disciplines.
Alfred Kinsey’s mission was to make people more aware of— and thus freer with respect to—the facts of sexuality through his studies of human sexual behavior. (© Corbis)
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“influences,” the distinction between what is “external” to the person and what is within his or her character is not clear at all.
There are more serious problems with the notion of compulsion, however. Even if we admit that some problematic examples of actions are not clearly either “free” or “compelled” (neurosis and brainwashing, great passion and drugs), we would want to insist that at least some actions are clearly free and not compelled. For example, you write a check to the American Cancer Society just because you believe that it is an important organization and you want to make a contribution. no one solicited you, no one encouraged you to do it, and no one need know that you did it. Can even this act, so seemingly performed “of your own free will,” be counted as a “free action”? The soft determinist would say that this action is “free” because it flows from your generous character. But what has gone into making your character? Your education and upbringing? Your social class? What about your national origin or your gender? Perhaps even your height and weight affect your choices.
Even in our “freest” acts, it can be argued that the desires and decisions, in short, our “personality” is wholly determined by forces outside us and beyond our control. Consider the following argument, for example, by Professor John Hospers, who uses Freud and psychoanalysis as the basis for his claim that all our acts are compelled and not free, inso- far as all our acts are brought about by a set of psychological determinants over which we have no control.
F RO M “What Means This Freedom?” B Y John Hospers23
[Are we] in the final analysis, responsible for any of our actions at all[?] The issue may be put this way: How can anyone be responsible for his actions, since they grow out of his character, which is shaped and molded and made what it is by influences—some hereditary, but most of them stemming from early parental environment—that were not of his own making or choosing? This question, I believe, still troubles many people who would agree to all the distinctions we have just made but still have the feeling that “this isn’t all.” They have the uneasy suspicion that there is a more ulti- mate sense, a “deeper” sense, in which we are not responsible for our actions, since we are not responsible for the character out of which those actions spring.
. . .
Let us take as an example a criminal who, let us say, strangled several persons and is himself now condemned to die in the electric chair. Jury and public alike hold him fully responsible (at least they utter the words “he is responsible”), for the murders were planned down to the minutest detail, and the defendant tells the jury exactly how he planned them. But now we find out how it all came about; we learn of parents who rejected him from baby- hood, of the childhood spent in one foster home after another, where it was always plain to him that he was not wanted; of the constantly frustrated early desire for affec- tion, the hard shell of nonchalance and bit- terness that he assumed to cover the painful
23 John Hospers, “What Means This Freedom?” in Determinism and Freedom in the Age of Modern Science, ed. Sidney Hook, new York: new York University Press, 1958. Reprinted by permission of Ernest B. Hook, M.d.
John Hospers (1918–2003)
A former professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California, an articulate follower of Ayn Rand, and a onetime Liber- tarian candidate for president of the United States.
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and humiliating fact of being unwanted, and his subsequent attempts to heal those wounds to his shattered ego through defensive aggression. . . . The poor victim is not conscious of the inner forces that exact from him this ghastly toll; he battles, he schemes, he revels in pseudo-aggression, he is miserable, but he does not know what works within him to produce these catastrophic acts of crime. His aggressive actions are the wriggling of a worm on a fisherman’s hook. And if this is so, it seems difficult to say any longer, “He is responsible.” Rather, we shall put him behind bars for the protection of society, but we shall no longer flatter our feeling of moral superiority by calling him personally responsible for what he did.
Let us suppose it were established that a man commits murder only if sometime during the previous week, he has eaten a certain combination of foods—say, tuna fish salad at a meal also including peas, mushroom soup, and blueberry pie. What if we were to track down the factors common to all murders committed in this country during the last twenty years and found this factor present in all of them, and only in them? The example is of course empirically absurd; but may it not be that there is some combination of factors that regularly leads to homicide, factors such as are described in general terms in the above quotation? (Indeed the situa- tion in the quotation is less fortunate than in our hypothetical example, for it is easy to avoid certain foods once we have been warned about them, but the situa- tion of the infant is thrust on him; something has already happened to him once and for all, before he knows it has happened.) When such specific factors are dis- covered, won’t they make it clear that it is foolish and pointless, as well as im- moral, to hold human beings responsible for crimes? Or, if one prefers biological to psychological factors, suppose a neurologist is called in to testify at a murder trial and produces X-ray pictures of the brain of the criminal; anyone can see, he argues, that the sella turcica was already calcified at the age of nineteen; it should be a flexible bone, growing, enabling the gland to grow. All the defendant’s dis- orders might have resulted from this early calcification. Now, this particular ex-
planation may be empirically false; but who can say that no such factors, far more com- plex, to be sure, exist?
When we know such things as these, we no longer feel as much tempted to say that the criminal is responsible for his crime; and we tend also (do we not?) to excuse him—not le- gally (we still confine him to prison) but morally; we no longer call him a monster or hold him personally responsible for what he did. Moreover, we do this in general, not merely in the case of crime: “You must excuse Grandmother for being irritable; she’s really quite ill and is suffering some pain all the time.” Or: “The dog always bites children after she’s had a litter of pups; you can’t blame her for it: she’s not feeling well, and besides she naturally wants to defend them.” Or: “She’s nervous and jumpy, but do excuse her: she has a severe glandular disturbance.”
. . .
The death penalty presupposes that people are responsible for their actions, but John Hospers challenged this idea. (© The Gallery Collection/ Corbis)
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But one may still object that so far we have talked only about neurotic behavior. Isn’t nonneurotic or normal or not unconsciously motivated (or whatever you want to call it) behavior still within the area of responsibility? There are reasons for an- swering “No” even here, for the normal person no more than neurotic one has caused his own character, which makes him what he is. Granted that neurotics are not responsible for their behavior (that part of it which we call neurotic) because it stems from undigested infantile conflicts that they had no part in bringing about, and that are external to them just as surely as if their behavior had been forced on them by a malevolent deity (which is indeed one theory on the subject); but the so-called normal person is equally the product of causes in which his volition took no part. And if, unlike the neurotic’s, his behavior is changeable by rational con- siderations, and if he has the will power to overcome the effects of an unfortunate early environment, this again is no credit to him; he is just lucky. If energy is avail- able to him in a form in which it can be mobilized for constructive purposes, this is no credit to him, for this too is part of his psychic legacy. Those of us who can discipline ourselves and develop habits of concentration of purpose tend to blame those who cannot, and call them lazy and weak-willed; but what we fail to see is that they literally cannot do what we expect; if their psyches were structured like ours, they could, but as they are burdened with a tyrannical super-ego (to use psy- choanalytic jargon for the moment), and a weak defenseless ego whose energies are constantly consumed in fighting endless charges of the super-ego, they simply cannot do it, and it is irrational to expect it of them. We cannot with justification blame them for their inability, any more than we can congratulate ourselves for our ability. This lesson is hard to learn, for we constantly and naïvely assume that other people are constructed as we ourselves are.
. . .
The position, then, is this: if we can overcome the effects of early environment, the ability to do so is itself a product of the early environment. We did not give ourselves this ability; and if we lack it we cannot be blamed for not having it. Sometimes, to be sure, moral exhortation brings out an ability that is there but not being used, and in this lies its occasional utility; but very often its use is pointless, because the ability is not there. The only thing that can overcome a desire, as Spinoza said, is a stronger con- trary desire; and many times there simply is no wherewithal for producing a stronger contrary desire. Those of us who do have the wherewithal are lucky.
While Hospers’s example of eating a tuna sandwich as a kind of physiological compulsion may seem exaggerated, we may more easily accept many physical factors as having a deci- sive influence on our character. Many have argued, for instance, that a person’s sex or race is an inescapable physical factor that compels him or her to make certain decisions. determin- ist arguments of this sort have been made even among members of oppressed groups who are seeking tolerance. In a well-publicized example, a lawyer defended her client against charges of assault by claiming that her client’s actions were determined by her overwhelm- ing case of premenstrual syndrome!24
“If we can overcome the effects of early environment, the ability to do so is itself a product of the early environment.” — J O H N H O S P E R S
24 david Bird, “defense linked to Menstruation dropped in Case,” New York Times, november 4, 1982. Copyright © 1982 by new York Times, Inc.
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If we believe that most of our actions are physiologically compelled, then no matter how we try to wriggle free of total determinism, it seems as if we keep finding ourselves en- meshed back in hard determinism. We suggested that perhaps an act is free if one of its causes is a decision, but if the decision itself is caused in turn, ours is not really a decision at all. We suggested that an action is free if it “flows from a person’s character,” but then we saw that it can be argued that an act that “flows from a person’s character” is no more within his or her control and no more his or her responsibility than any other act. We may want to say that a person’s act is free if, in this case, he or she could have done otherwise, but what does this mean, given the previous arguments, except that the act would have been different if the circumstances had been different or if the person had been, in effect, another person?
For example, it is true that you could have changed the course of World War II—but if what? If you had been born Winston Churchill, perhaps. But that is a nonsensical “if.” does it make any more sense, however, to say that “you could have been a professional football player?” If what? If circumstances had been different? If you had been born with a different body or raised in a different environment? But isn’t this to say, for each of these “ifs,” that you would be (slightly but significantly) a different person than you are? It looks as if we are trapped by the tautology that each of us is whoever he or she is. It is true of the geranium that if it had been planted in better soil, it would be larger; if a ball had been dropped from a greater height, it would have landed harder; and if you were raised differently, placed in different circumstances, then you might have acted other than you did. But does this have anything to do with “freedom”? Are your actions any more free than the growth of the plant or the falling of the ball? Of course, there is a difference: You think that you have made some decision. But why should what you think change the way things are determined? You may pretend to be flying after you have fallen out of the plane. But you are still falling, and what- ever you think or do does not slow you down at all.
not everyone views determinism with horror. The eminent American psychologist B. F. Skinner, for example, applauds the determinist’s argument as a means of controlling human behavior and changing it for the better. In his best-seller Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Skinner argues that we have made a fetish of freedom and that we should replace it with an acceptance of determinism. Behavioral scientists, he contends, can and should be given the power to “engineer” human behavior in accordance with an agreed-upon set of ideals (social harmony, individual happiness, and productivity).
Beyond Freedom B Y B. F. Skinner25
Perhaps the most crucial part of our democratic philosophy to be reconsidered is our attitude toward freedom—or its reciprocal, the control of human behavior. We do not oppose all forms of control because it is “human nature” to do so. The reac- tion is not characteristic of all men under all conditions of life. It is an attitude which has been carefully engineered, in large part by what we call the “literature” of democracy. With respect to some methods of control (for example, the threat of force), very little engineering is needed, for the techniques or their immediate consequences are objectionable. Society has suppressed these methods by branding them “wrong,” “illegal,” or “sinful.” But to encourage these attitudes toward ob- jectionable forms of control, it has been necessary to disguise the real nature of
25 B. F. Skinner, “Freedom and the Control of Men,” in The American Scholar, 1955–56. Courtesy of the B. F. Skinner Foundation.
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certain indispensable techniques, the com- monest examples of which are education, moral discourse, and persuasion. The actual procedures appear harmless enough. They consist of supplying information, presenting opportunities for action, pointing out logi- cal relationships, appealing to reason or “enlightened understanding,” and so on. Through a masterful piece of misrepresen- tation, the illusion is fostered that these procedures do not involve the control of be- havior; at most, they are simply ways of “getting someone to change his mind.” But analysis not only reveals the presence of well-defined behavioral processes, it dem- onstrates a kind of control no less inexora- ble, though in some ways more acceptable, than the bully’s threat of force.
Let us suppose that someone in whom we are interested is acting unwisely—he is care- less in the way he deals with his friends, he drives too fast, or he holds his golf club the wrong way. We could probably help him by issuing a series of commands: don’t nag, don’t drive over sixty, don’t hold your club that way. Much less objectionable would be “an appeal to reason.” We could show him how people are affected by his treat- ment of them, how accident rates rise sharply at higher speeds, how a particular grip on the club alters the way the ball is struck and corrects a slice. In doing so we resort to verbal mediating devices which emphasize and support certain “contingencies of reinforcement”—that is, certain relations between behavior and its consequences— which strengthen the behavior we wish to set up. The same consequences would possibly set up the behavior without our help, and they eventually take control no matter which form of help we give. The appeal to reason has certain advantages over the authoritative command. A threat of punishment, no matter how subtle, generates emotional reactions and tendencies to escape or revolt. Perhaps the controllee merely “feels resentment” at being made to act in a given way, but even that is to be avoided. When we “appeal to reason,” he “feels freer to do as he pleases.” The fact is that we have exerted less control than in using a threat; since other conditions may contribute to the result, the effect may be delayed or, possibly in a given instance, lacking. But if we have worked a change in his behavior at all, it is because we have altered relevant environmental conditions, and the processes we have set in motion are just as real and just as inexorable, if not as comprehensive, as in the most authoritative coercion.
“Arranging an opportunity for action” is another example of disguised control. The power of the negative form has already been exposed in the analysis of censor- ship. Restriction of opportunity is recognized as far from harmless. As Ralph Barton Perry said in an article which appeared in the Spring, 1953, Pacific Spectator, “Whoever determines what alternatives shall be made known to man controls what that man shall choose from. He is deprived of freedom in proportion as he is denied access to any ideas, or is confined to any range of ideas short of totality of relevant possibilities.” But there is a positive side as well. When we present a relevant state of affairs, we increase the likelihood that a given form of behavior will be emitted. To the extent that the
Ivan Pavlov (1848–1936)
A Russian physician, physiologist, and psychologist whose work on conditioning behavior had an enor- mous impact on psychology and philosophy. He won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1904.
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849–1936) did famous ex- periments on dogs, demon- strating that they could be conditioned to salivate on cue. (© Shutterstock.com/rook76)
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probability of action has changed, we have made a definite contribution. The teacher of history controls a student’s behavior (or, if the reader prefers, “deprives him of free- dom”) just as much in presenting historical facts as in suppressing them. Other condi- tions will no doubt affect the student, but the contribution made to his behavior by the presentation of material is fixed and, within its range, irresistible.
The methods of education, moral discourse, and persuasion are acceptable not because they recognize the freedom of the individual or his right to dissent, but because they make only partial contributions to the control of his behavior. The freedom they recognize is freedom from a more coercive form of control. The dis- sent which they tolerate is the possible effect of other determiners of action. Since these sanctioned methods are frequently ineffective, we have been able to convince ourselves that they do not represent control at all. When they show too much strength to permit disguise, we give them other names and suppress them as ener- getically as we suppress the use of force. Education grown too powerful is rejected as propaganda or “brain-washing,” while really effective persuasion is decried as “undue influence,” “demagoguery,” “seduction,” and so on.
If we are not to rely solely upon accident for the innovations which give rise to cultural evolution, we must accept the fact that some kind of control of human behavior is inevitable. We cannot use good sense in human affairs unless someone engages in the design and construction of environmental conditions which affect the behavior of men. Environmental changes have always been the condition for the improvement of cultural patterns, and we can hardly use the more effective methods of science without making changes on a grander scale. We are all con- trolled by the world in which we live, and part of the world has been and will be constructed by men. The question is this: Are we to be controlled by accident, by tyrants, or by ourselves in effective cultural design?
The danger of the misuse of power is possibly greater than ever. It is not allayed by disguising the facts. We cannot make wise decisions if we continue to pretend that human behavior is not controlled, or if we refuse to engage in control when valuable results might be forthcoming. Such measures weaken only ourselves, leaving the strength of science to others. The first step in a defense against tyranny is the fullest possible exposure of controlling techniques. A second step has already been taken successfully in restricting the use of physical force. Slowly, and as yet imperfectly, we have worked out an ethical and governmental design in which the strong man is not allowed to use the power deriving from his strength to control his fellow men. He is restrained by a superior force created for that purpose—the ethical pressure of the group, or more explicit religious and governmental measures. We tend to distrust superior forces, as we currently hesitate to relinquish sovereignty in order to set up an international police force. But it is only through such countercontrol that we have achieved what we call peace—a condition in which men are not permitted to control each other through force. In other words, control itself must be controlled.
Science has turned up dangerous processes and materials before. To use the facts and techniques of a science of man to the fullest extent without making some monstrous mistake will be difficult and obviously perilous. It is no time for self- deception, emotional indulgence, or the assumption of attitudes which are no longer useful. Man is facing a difficult test. He must keep his head now, or he must start again—a long way back.
“We are all controlled by the world in which we live, and part of the world has been and will be constructed by men. The question is this: Are we to be controlled by accident, by tyrants, or by ourselves in effective cultural design?” — B . F. S K I N N E R
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In his novel Walden Two, Skinner gives us a prototype for his deterministic utopia.
F RO M Walden Two B Y B. F. Skinner26
“When a particular emotion is no longer a useful part of a behavioral repertoire, we proceed to eliminate it.”
“Yes, but how?” “It’s simply a matter of behavioral engineering,” said Frazier. “Behavioral engineering?” “Each of us,” Frazier began, “is engaged in a pitched battle with the rest of
mankind.” “A curious premise for a Utopia,” said Castle. “Even a pessimist like myself takes
a more hopeful view than that.” “You do, you do,” said Frazier. “But let’s be realistic. Each of us has interests
which conflict with the interests of everybody else. That’s our original sin, and it can’t be helped. Now, ‘everybody else’ we call ‘society.’ It’s a powerful opponent, and it always wins. Oh, here and there an individual prevails for a while and gets what he wants. Sometimes he storms the culture of a society and changes it slightly to his own advantage. But society wins in the long run, for it has the advantage of numbers and of age. Many prevail against one, and men against a baby. Society attacks early, when the individual is helpless. It enslaves him almost before he has tasted freedom. The ‘ologies’ will tell you how it’s done. Theology calls it building a conscience or developing a spirit of selflessness. Psychology calls it the growth of the super-ego.
“Considering how long society has been at it, you’d expect a better job. But the campaigns have been badly planned and the victory has never been secure. The behavior of the individual has been shaped according to revelations of ‘good con- duct,’ never as the result of experimental study. But why not experiment? The questions are simple enough. What’s the best behavior for the individual so far as the group is concerned? And how can the individual be induced to behave in that way? Why not explore these questions in a scientific spirit?”
Philosopher Robert Kane thinks about Skinner this way:
Beyond Skinner B Y Robert Kane27
The problem is brought out in a striking way by twentieth-century utopian novels, like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two. In the fic- tional societies described in these famous works, people can have and do what they will or choose, but only to the extent that they have been conditioned by behav- ioral engineers or neuro-chemists to will or choose what they can have and do. In Brave New World, the lower-echelon workers are under the influence of powerful
26 B. F. Skinner, Walden Two. Copyright © 1976. Reprinted by permission of Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, nJ. 27 Courtesy of Robert Kane.
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drugs so that they do not dream of things they cannot have. They are quite content to play miniature golf all weekend. They can do what they want, though their wants are meager and controlled by drugs.
The citizens of Walden Two have a richer existence than the workers of Brave New World. Yet their desires and purposes are also covertly controlled, in this case by behavioral engineers. Walden Two-ers live collectively in a kind of rural commune; and because they share duties of farming and raising children, they have plenty of leisure. They pursue arts, sciences, crafts, engage in musical performances and enjoy what appears to be a pleasant existence. The fictional founder of Walden Two, a fellow named Frazier, forthrightly says that their pleasant existence is brought about by the fact that, in his community, persons can do whatever they want or choose because they have been behaviorally conditioned since childhood to want and choose only what they can have and do. In other words, they have maximal surface freedom of action and choice (they can choose or do anything they want), but they lack a deeper freedom of the will because their desires and purposes are created by their behavioral conditioners or controllers. Their wills are not of “their own” making. Indeed, what hap- pens in Walden Two is their surface freedom to act and choose as they will is maximized by minimizing the deeper freedom to have the ultimate say in what they will.
Thus Frazier can say that Walden Two “is the freest place on earth,” since he has surface freedoms in mind. For there is no coercion in Walden Two and no pun- ishment because no one has to be forced to do anything against his or her will. The citizens can have anything they want because they have been conditioned not to want anything they cannot have. As for the deeper freedom, or free will, it does not exist in Walden Two, as Frazier himself admits. But this is no loss, according to Frazier. Echoing Walden Two’s author, B. F. Skinner (a foremost defender of behaviorism in psychology), Frazier thinks the deeper freedom of the will is an illusion in the first place. We do not have it anyway, inside or outside Walden Two. In our ordinary lives, he argues, we are just as much the products of up- bringing and social conditioning as the citizens of Walden Two, though we may delude ourselves into thinking otherwise. In our case, the conditioners are par- ents, teachers, coaches, schoolmates, peers, makers of TV programs, films, videos and other creators of the cultures and societies in which we live. The difference is that, unlike Walden Two, such everyday conditioning is often haphazard, incom- petent and harmful.
Why then, Skinner asks, reject the maximal surface freedom and happiness of Walden Two for a deeper freedom of the will that is something we do not and cannot have anyway? Along with many other scientists, he thinks the idea that we could be ultimate determiners of our own ends or purposes (which is what the deeper freedom of the will would require) is an impossible ideal that cannot fit into the modern scientific picture of the world. To have such freedom, we would have to have been the original creators of our own wills—of ourselves. But if we trace the psychological springs of action back further and further to childhood, we find that we were less free back then, not more, and more subject to condition- ing. We thus delude ourselves into thinking that we have sacrificed some real (deeper) freedom for the happiness of Walden Two. Rather we have gained a maxi- mum amount of the only kind of freedom we really can have (surface freedom), while giving up an illusion (free will).
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Seductive as these arguments may be, there are many people who continue to believe that something important is missing in Walden Two and that the deeper freedom is not a mere illusion. Such persons want to be the ultimate designers of their own lives as Frazier was for the lives of Walden Two. They want to be the creators, as he was, not the pawns—at least for their own lives. What they long for is what was traditionally meant by “free will.”
not every visionary has looked upon determinism with delight. More often determinism has appeared in novels as a nightmare, as the philosophical basis of societies that are more oppressive and authoritarian than any we have ever seen. The most famous examples are George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In both novels, psychology and drugs are used to manipulate the inhabitants of entire societies and force them to con- form to a single set of behavioral standards, concerning which they have no choice whatso- ever. In a somewhat more recent novel, A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess presents a nightmarish fantasy in which a young hoodlum named Alex is “reconditioned” to be “good” through a series of experiments in which his viewing of violent movies is accompanied by a drug that makes him violently ill. It works (after a fashion), but the prison chaplain summa- rizes the philosophical difficulties this treatment raises:
F RO M A Clockwork Orange B Y Anthony Burgess28
“You are to be made into a good boy, 6655321. Never again will you have the desire to commit acts of violence or to offend in any way whatsoever against the State’s Peace. I hope you take all that in. I hope you are absolutely clear in your own mind about that.” I said:
“Oh, it will be nice to be good, sir.” But I had a real horrorshow smeck at that inside, brothers. He said:
“It may not be nice to be good, little 6655321. It may be horrible to be good. And when I say that to you I realize how self-contradictory that sounds. I know I shall have many sleepless nights about this. What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him? Deep and hard questions, little 6655321. But all I want to say to you now is this: if at any time in the future you look back to these times and remember me, the lowest and humblest of all God’s servitors, do not, I pray, think evil of me in your heart, thinking me in any way involved in what is now about to happen to you. And now, talking of praying, I realize sadly that there will be little point in praying for you. You are passing now to a region where you will be beyond the reach of the power of prayer. A terrible terrible thing to consider. And yet, in a sense, in choosing to be deprived of the ability to make an ethical choice, you have in a sense really
28 From A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. Copyright © 1962, 1989, renewed 1990 by Anthony Burgess. W. W. norton Company, Inc. and William Heinemann.
John Burgess Wilson (1917–1993)
An English novelist, playwright, linguist, composer, and critic. He published under the pen name Anthony Burgess.
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chosen the good. So I shall like to think. So, God help us all, 6655321, I shall like to think.” And he began to cry.
The claims of behavioral scientists like Skinner have provoked among contemporary ethi- cists similar responses to those that have provoked religious determinists. The repercus- sions are frightening. What if, for instance, instead of associating violent movies with illness and repulsion, the scientists in A Clockwork Orange were to associate them with pleasure? Well, that is exactly what our society does, claims Catharine MacKinnon, an American femi- nist philosopher. MacKinnon claims that advertisers, moviemakers, pornographers, and others in the media in our society make men’s treatment of women fundamentally violent.
On Coercion of Women’s Sexuality B Y Catharine MacKinnon29
“Representation of the world,” de Beauvoir writes, “like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.” The parallel between representation and construction should be sustained: men create the world from their own point of view, which then becomes the truth to be described. This is a closed system, not anyone’s confusion. Power to create the world from one’s point of view is power in its male form. The male epis- temological stance, which corresponds to the world it creates, is objectivity: the
Alex, the main character in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (based on the novel by Anthony Burgess), is conditioned to have an aversion to classical music that he had formerly loved. (© Bettmann/Corbis)
29 Catharine MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory,” from The Signs Reader, ed. Elizabeth Abel and Emily K. Abel. Copyright © 1982 by The University of Chicago Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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ostensibly noninvolved stance, the view from a distance and from no particular perspec- tive, apparently transparent to its reality. It does not comprehend its own perspectivity, does not recognize what it sees as subject like itself, or that the way it apprehends its world is a form of its subjugation and pre- supposes it. The objectively knowable is object. Woman through male eyes is sex object, that by which man knows himself at once as man and as subject. What is objectively known corresponds to the world and can be verified by pointing to it (as science does) because the world itself is controlled from the same point of view. Combining, like any form of power, legitimation with force, male power extends beneath the representation of reality to its construction: it makes women (as it were) and so verifies (makes true) who women “are” in its view, simultaneously confirm- ing its way of being and its vision of truth. The eroticism that corresponds to this is “the use of things to experience self.” As a coerced pornography model put it, “You do it, you do it, and you do it; then you become it.” The fetish speaks feminism.
Objectification makes sexuality a material reality of women’s lives, not just a psy- chological, attitudinal, or ideological one. It obliterates the mind/matter distinction that such a division is premised upon. Like the value of a commodity, women’s sexual desirability is fetishized: it is made to appear a quality of the object itself, spontaneous and inherent, independent of the social relation which creates it, uncon- trolled by the force that requires it. It helps if the object cooperates: hence, the vagi- nal orgasm; hence, faked orgasms altogether. Women’s sexualness, like male prowess,
Catharine MacKinnon (1946–)
An American professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, known particularly for her writings on philosophy of law and feminism.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). Catharine MacKinnon argued that the media promotes violence against women by subjecting women to sexual objectification. (© Paramount Pictures/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis)
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is no less real for being mythic. It is embodied. Commodities do have value, but only because value is a social property arising from the totality of the same social relations which, unconscious of their determination, fetishize it. Women’s bodies possess no less real desirability—or, probably, desire. Sartre exemplifies the problem on the epistemological level: “But if I desire a house, or a glass of water, or a woman’s body, how could this body, this glass, this piece of property reside in my desire and how can my desire be anything but the consciousness of these objects as desirable?” Indeed. Objectivity is the methodological stance of which objectification is the social process. Sexual objectification is the primary process of the subjection of women. It unites act with word, construction with expression, perception with en- forcement, myth with reality. Man [expletive deleted] woman; subject verb object.
note that MacKinnon’s argument, despite its opposition to the media conditioning of sexual oppression, is thoroughly determinist. She believes that our traditions and media cause violence and oppression. This seems like a slippery slope: If any of our actions can really be compelled through psychological conditioning, then why not all our actions? And if our actions, good or bad, are compelled, then it does not seem to make sense to hold anyone responsible for his or her actions (even the people doing the conditioning). If Skinner is right, then moral education and political activity can be reduced to the results of multiple conditions and reinforcements. If MacKinnon is right, we are all the victims of our pervasive social-sexual conditioning.
“Sexual objectification is the primary process of the subjection of women.” — C AT H A R I N E M A C K I N N O N
• Assess Aristotle’s criteria for an involuntary action. Can you think of any modifica- tions that should be added? How would you characterize those actions that Aristotle considers hard to classify as involuntary or voluntary (such as actions motivated by fear or extortion)?
• do you agree with Hospers that we are no more justified in holding a “normal” person responsible for her actions than in holding a “neurotic” person responsible, given that neither is the “cause” of her character? If not, what considerations would justify discriminating between the two cases?
• do you think that there is any moral distinction between acts that are “compelled” from “outside” the agent and those acts that are “compelled” from within the agent (when the agent’s actions are determined by antecedent psychological or neurological conditions)?
• Ironically, Skinner suggests that we are enslaved by our notion of freedom and that we should engage in a form of behavior control. do you find his proposal at all plausible?
• Are those who are dissatisfied with Skinner’s vision and resist the idea that we do not possess “deeper freedom” or free will (as Kane suggests) engaging in any- thing more than wishful thinking, or do you think that there is something to this objection?
• do you agree with MacKinnon that images that objectify result in violence toward women? do you think that such images amount to a form of conditioning that limits freedom?
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E. Freedom in Practice: Kant’s Solution As many of the foregoing arguments have shown, it is not enough just to answer the meta- physical question about the causes of human action. The demand for freedom and respon- sibility is not going to be satisfied by different variations of determinism, no matter how “soft” they pretend to be. If we are to understand the role of freedom in our daily lives, what we need is a breach in determinism, a conception of our actions, or at least our decisions, as truly free and not determined in any of the ways discussed previously.
The classic statement of this claim to freedom and responsibility is to be found in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. (no doubt, you now appreciate how truly monumental Kant’s philosophy is. We present more of him in the next chapter as well.) We have already noted that Kant gave an unqualified endorsement of determinism, arguing that the principle (of universal causation) upon which it is based is nothing less than a necessary rule of all human experience, including human actions:
Actions of men are determined in conformity with the order of Nature, by their empirical character and other causes; if we could exhaust all the appearances, there would not be found a single human action which would not be predicted with certainty.30
This is surely a statement of the hardest of “hard” determinism. But Kant also appreci- ated, as much as any philosopher ever has, the importance of unqualified freedom for human responsibility. (He called freedom, as he had called God, a “postulate” [or presupposition] of practical reason.) But how could he defend both universal determinism and human free- dom? determinism is true of every possible event and object of human knowledge, Kant says, but it does not follow that it is also applicable to human acts of will or decisions to act. Action is a wholly different matter than knowledge. The metaphysics with which Kant de- fends this view is far too complicated even to summarize here. But the basic principle is simple enough: Kant says that we adopt two different standpoints toward the world, one theoretical, one practical. Insofar as we want to know something, we adopt the standpoint of science and determinism. Within that standpoint, every event, including human actions, is determined, brought about by sufficient natural causes (including the states of our brains and various psychological factors). But when we are ready to do something, we switch to the practical standpoint. The main point is this: Insofar as we are acting or deciding to act, we must consider our own acts of will and decisions as the sufficient causes of our actions, and we cannot continue the causal chain backward to consider whether those acts of will are themselves caused. When we act, in other words, we cannot think of ourselves except as acting freely.
Suppose that you are about to make a decision: You are finally going to give up smoking. A friend offers you a cigarette on the second day. Yes or no? do you smoke it? now it may very well be that given your personality, your weakness for past habits, and any number of other psychological factors, you are clearly determined to accept and thus break your reso- lution. Your friend, who knows you quite well, may even know this. But you cannot think of yourself in this deterministic way, for insofar as you have to make a decision, you cannot simply “find out” what you will do. In other words, you cannot simply predict your own be- havior, no matter how much you know about the various causes and factors that allow your friend to predict your behavior. If you were to predict, “I’m going to start smoking again anyway,” you would not be simply predicting; you would be, in that very act, breaking your
30 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. norman Kemp Smith, new York: St. Martin’s Press, 1933.
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F. Radical Freedom: Existentialism Kant’s suggestion has been taken up in a different way in European philosophy, particularly by the existentialists. like Kant, the existentialists accept (or at least do not bother to reject) determinism in science. But they insist that even if determinism is true, one must always view himself or herself as agent as necessarily free. When you have to decide what to do, all the knowledge of the possible factors determining your decision is not sufficient to cause you to decide. For you cannot predict your own decision without at the same time making it.
Jean-Paul Sartre, the French existentialist, took the Kantian claim for human freedom as far as it could possibly be defended. In his mammoth book Being and Nothingness, he
argues that we are, always, absolutely free. By this Sartre means, as Kant had insisted, that insofar as we act (and Sartre says that we are always acting), our decisions and actions cannot be viewed as having any causes whatsoever. As beings who pos- sess consciousness (who are “for-itself,” in Sartre’s terminology), we must make decisions, and no amount of information and no number of causal cir- cumstances can ever replace our need to make them. We can, of course, refuse to make decisions, acting as if they were made for us, as if circum- stances already determined them, as if the fates had already established the outcome. But even in these cases, we are making decisions, “choosing not to choose,” as Sartre classically puts it. We are “con- demned to be free,” Sartre says, in a phrase that has since become famous. Again, desires may enter into consideration, but only as “considerations.” We can always act against a desire, any desire, no matter how strong, if only we have sufficiently decided that we shall do so. A starving man may refuse food if, for example, he is taking part in a hunger strike for a
resolution, that is, deciding to break it. So, when your own acts and decisions are concerned, you have to act as if you were totally free. This, in a way, denies determinism. It says that since you are the one who has to make the decision, determinism is not relevant. (Kant says, “and to have to think yourself free is to be free.”)
Kant defends both freedom and determinism, and so he undermines the distinction that philosophers had drawn between them. Kant implies that a careful reconsideration of human action from the point of view of practice may put the metaphysicians’ insistence on freedom as a type of causation in a new light and may allow us to think of freedom in a new way. For Kant, freedom is a certain type of experience, not an “internal cause.”
Although Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that we are radically free, he acknowledged that we are limited by the facts of our situation, including the constraints of physical laws. (Banque d’Images, ADAGP/Art Resource, NY)
• do you really have to think yourself free, as Kant claims? Is thinking yourself free the same as being free?
• Would being a determinist resolve all the difficulties you face when you have to make a decision? Why or why not?
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political cause to which he is dedicated. A mother may refuse to save her own life if it would be at the expense of her children. A student may miss his favorite television show if he has resolved to study for tomorrow’s test. Whether trivial or grandiose, our every act is a deci- sion, and our every decision is free. Even if we fail to live up to our decisions or find that we “cannot” make them, we are responsible nevertheless. There is no escape from freedom or responsibility.
On “Absolute Freedom” B Y Jean-Paul Sartre31
Although the considerations which are about to follow are of interest primarily to the ethicist, it may nevertheless be worthwhile after these descriptions and argu- ments to return to the freedom of the for-itself and try to understand what the fact of this freedom represents for human destiny.
The essential consequence of our earlier remarks is that man being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being. We are taking the word “responsi- bility” in its ordinary sense as “consciousness (of ) being the incontestable author of an event or of an object.” In this sense the responsibility of the for-itself is over- whelming since he is the one by whom it happens that there is a world; since he is also the one who makes himself be, then whatever may be the situation in which he finds himself, the for-itself must wholly assume this situation with its peculiar coefficient of adversity, even though it be insupportable. He must assume the situ- ation with the proud consciousness of being the author of it, for the very worst disadvantages or the worst threats which can endanger my person have meaning only in and through my project; and it is on the ground of the engagement which I am that they appear. It is therefore senseless to think of complaining since nothing for- eign has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.
Furthermore this absolute responsibility is not resignation; it is simply the logical re- quirement of the consequences of our free- dom. What happens to me happens through me, and I can neither affect myself with it nor revolt against it nor resign myself to it. Moreover everything which happens to me is mine. By this we must understand first of all that I am always equal to what happens to me qua man, for what happens to a man through other men and through himself can be only human. The most terrible situations of war, the worst tortures do not create a non-human state of things; there is no non- human situation. It is only through fear,
Although few of us are in a position to declare war, Sartre claimed that we each have the war we deserve. (© Shutterstock.com/Tom Antos)
31 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes. Copyright © 1956. Reprinted by permission of the Philosophical library of new York.
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flight, and recourse to magical types of conduct that I shall decide on the non- human, but this decision is human, and I shall carry the entire responsibility for it. But in addition the situation is mine because it is the image of my free choice of myself, and everything which it presents to me is mine in that this represents me and symbolizes me. Is it not I who decide the coefficient of adversity in things and even their unpredictability by deciding myself ?
Thus there are no accidents in life; a community event which suddenly burst forth and involves me in it does not come from the outside. If I am mobilized in a war, this war is my war; it is in my image and I deserve it. I deserve it first because I could always get out of it by suicide or by desertion; these ultimate possibles are those which must always be present for us when there is a question of envisaging a situation. For lack of getting out of it, I have chosen it. This can be due to inertia, to cowardice in the face of public opinion, or because I prefer certain other values to the value of the refusal to join in the war (the good opinion of my relatives, the honor of my family, etc.). Any way you look at it, it is a matter of choice. This choice will be repeated later on again and again without a break until the end of the war. Therefore we must agree with the statement by J. Romains, “In war there are no innocent victims.” If therefore I have preferred war to death or to dishonor, everything takes place as if I bore the entire responsibility for this war. Of course others have declared it, and one might be tempted perhaps to consider me as a simple accomplice. But this notion of complicity has only a juridical sense, and it does not hold here. For it depended on me that for me and by me this war should not exist, and I have decided that it does exist. There was no compulsion here, for the compulsion could have got no hold on a freedom. I did not have any excuse; . . . the peculiar character of human-reality is that it is without excuse. Therefore it remains for me only to lay claim to this war.
But in addition the war is mine because by the sole fact that it arises in a situation which I cause to be and that I can discover it there only by engaging myself for or against it, I can no longer distinguish at present the choice which I make of myself from the choice which I make of the war. To live this war is to choose myself through it and to choose it through my choice of myself. There can be no question of considering it as “four years of vacation” or as “reprieve,” as a “recess,” the es- sential part of my responsibilities being elsewhere in my married, family, or profes- sional life. In this war which I have chosen I choose myself from day to day, and I make it mine by making myself. If it is going to be four empty years, then it is I who bear the responsibility for this.
Finally, . . . each person is an absolute choice of self from the standpoint of a world of knowledges and of techniques which this choice both assumes and il- lumines; each person is an absolute upsurge at an absolute date and is perfectly unthinkable at another date. It is therefore a waste of time to ask what I should have been if this war had not broken out, for I have chosen myself as one of the possible meanings of the epoch which imperceptibly led to war. I am not distinct from this same epoch; I could not be transported to another epoch without con- tradiction. Thus I am this war which restricts and limits and makes comprehen- sible the period which preceded it. In this sense we may define more precisely, the responsibility of the for-itself if to the earlier quoted statement, “There are no innocent victims,” we added the words, “We have the war we deserve.” Thus, totally free, undistinguishable from the period for which I have chosen to
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be the meaning, as profoundly responsible for the war as if I had myself declared it, unable to live without integrating it in my situation, engaging myself in it wholly and stamping it with my seal, I must be without remorse or regrets as I am without excuse; for from the instant of my upsurge into being, I carry the weight of the world by myself alone without anything or any person being able to lighten it.
Yet this responsibility is of a very particular type. Someone will say, “I did not ask to be born.” This is a naïve way of throwing greater emphasis on our facticity. I am responsible for everything, in fact, except for my very responsibility, for I am not the foundation of my being. Therefore everything takes place as if I were compelled to be responsible. I am abandoned in the world, not in the sense that I might remain abandoned and passive in a hostile universe like a board floating on the water, but rather in the sense that I find myself suddenly alone and without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant. For I am responsible for my very desire of fleeing responsibilities. To make myself passive in the world, to refuse to act upon things and upon Others is still to choose myself, and suicide is one mode among others of being-in-the-world. Yet I find an absolute responsibility for the fact that my facticity (here the fact of my birth) is directly inapprehensible and even inconceivable, for this fact of my birth never appears as a brute fact but always across a projective reconstruction of my for- itself. I am ashamed of being born or I am astonished at it or I rejoice over it, or in attempting to get rid of my life I affirm that I live and I assume this life as bad. Thus in a certain sense I choose being born. This choice itself is integrally af- fected with facticity since I am not able not to choose, but this facticity in turn will appear only in so far as I surpass it toward my ends. Thus facticity is every- where but inapprehensible; I never encounter anything except my responsibility. That is why I can not ask, “Why was I born?” or curse the day of my birth or declare that I did not ask to be born, for these various attitudes toward my birth— i.e., toward the fact that I realize a presence in the world—are absolutely nothing else but ways of assuming this birth in full responsibility and of making it mine. Here again I encounter only myself and my projects so that finally my abandonment—i.e., my facticity— consists simply in the fact that I am condemned to be wholly responsible for myself. I am the being which is in such a way that in its being its being is in question. And this “is” of my being is as present and inapprehensible.
Under these conditions since every event in the world can be revealed to me only as an opportunity (an opportunity made use of, lacked, neglected, etc.) or better yet since everything which happens to us can be considered as a chance (i.e., can appear to us only as a way of realizing this being which is in question in our being) and since others as transcendences-transcended are themselves only opportunities and chances, the responsibility of the for-itself extends to the entire world as a peopled-world. It is precisely thus that the for-itself apprehends itself in anguish; that is, as a being which is neither the foundation of its own being nor of the Other’s being nor of the in-itselfs which form the world, but a being which is compelled to decide the meaning of being—within it and everywhere outside of it. The one who realizes in anguish his condition as being thrown into a responsibility which extends to his very abandonment has no longer either remorse or regret or excuse;
“From the instant of my upsurge into being, I carry the weight of the world by myself alone without anything or any person being able to lighten it.” — J E A N - PA U L S A R T R E
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he is no longer anything but a freedom which perfectly reveals itself and whose being resides in this very revelation. But as we pointed out . . . , most of the time we flee anguish in bad faith.
Sartre’s position is the culmination of a full century of existentialist thought, beginning with Søren Kierkegaard in the 1840s. Kierkegaard, too, argued that one is responsible for whatever one is and that self-conscious choice and commitment are the factors that make a person most human. Sartre’s strong sense of responsibility goes even so far as to ascribe an act of choice to those situations in which we seem clearly to be only victims, for example, in war. “There are no accidents in life,” he argues. Each of us always chooses a way to act in and deal with a situation. One can always complain, “I didn’t ask to be born,” Sartre says, but this is only one of many ways we have of trying to avoid responsibility. Given the fact that we have been born, raised in certain conditions, and so forth, it is now entirely up to us as to what we shall make of all this. Instead of looking at the events of the world as problems and intru- sions, Sartre ultimately says, we should learn to look at everything as an opportunity. Here is the optimistic note to his strong defense of human freedom.
What all these arguments demand is the following: In one’s own case, in making your decision, there can be no appeal to determinism even if determinism is true. Whatever may be theoretically determined, in practice, you must choose. Since freedom is the key to our self-esteem and our pride in ourselves, some people will demand it at any cost.
The most brilliant, if bizarre, example of this existentialist demand is formulated by the strange character in dostoyevsky’s short novel Notes from the Underground. The argu- ment is simple. Any prediction can be thwarted as long as you know about it. If they say, “you’ll do x,” do y. now, suppose that determinism is true. In particular, suppose that psy- chological determinism is true and that its basic law is this: “people always act to their own advantage.” now, what does this have to do with the predictability of a person’s actions? Absolutely nothing if you are sufficiently determined not to be predictable. Accordingly, the character in this novel is, more than anything else, spiteful. His main concern is not being predictable, in proving his freedom even if it means making himself miserable. now you might say that his spite itself is the determinant of his behavior, and, of course, it is. But the very point of the argument is that causes and explanations of any kind are simply beside the point. let the underground man know what you expect him to do, and he will do pre- cisely the opposite. If you predict that he will act spiteful, he will be as agreeable as can be—just out of spite!
F RO M “The Most Advantageous Advantage” B Y Fyodor Dostoyevsky32
I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased. However, I don’t know beans about my disease, and I am not sure what is bothering me. I don’t treat it and never have, though I respect medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, let’s say sufficiently so to
32 Fyodor dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground, in Notes from the Underground and The Grand Inquisitor, trans. Ralph Matlaw, new York: E. P. dutton, 1960.
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respect medicine. (I am educated enough not to be su- perstitious, but I am.) No, I refuse to treat it out of spite. You probably will not understand that. Well, but I understand it.
. . .
Why, in the first place, when in all these thousands of years has there ever been a time when man has acted only for his own advantage? What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that men, knowingly, that is, fully understanding their real ad- vantages, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to risk, to chance, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were, precisely because they did not want the beaten track, and stubbornly, wilfully, went off on an- other difficult, absurd way seeking it almost in the darkness. After all, it means that this stubbornness and wilfulness were more pleasant to them than any ad- vantage. Advantage! What is advantage? And will you take it upon yourself to define with perfect accuracy in exactly what the advantage of man consists of ? And what if it so happens that a man’s advantage sometimes not only may, but even must, consist exactly in his desiring under certain conditions what is harmful to himself and not what is advantageous. And if so, if there can be such a condition then the whole principle becomes worthless.
. . .
The fact is, gentlemen, it seems that something that is dearer to almost every man than his greatest advantages must really exist, or (not to be illogical) there is one most advantageous advantage (the very one omitted of which we spoke just now) which is more important and more advantageous than all other advantages, for which, if necessary, a man is ready to act in opposition to all laws, that is, in opposition to reason, honor, peace, prosperity—in short, in opposition to all those wonderful and useful things if only he can attain that fundamental, most advanta- geous advantage which is dearer to him than all.
What is that “advantageous advantage?” nothing other than
One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own fancy, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy. That is the “most advantageous advantage,” which is always overlooked.
Freedom, in other words, is itself what we most demand, whatever the cost, whatever the difficulties, and whatever the arguments against it. Whatever else may be true, we will refuse to see ourselves as anything but free. For it is freedom that makes us human.
dostoyevsky’s narrator in Notes from the Underground uses his freedom spitefully to defy others’ expectations. (© iStockphoto.com/Lise Gagne)
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dostoyevsky’s picture of this radical, desperate freedom is perhaps not an uplifting one. A similar sentiment, however, can give a joyous image of freedom. Here is a sample from Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk. It is a prayer to say when turning on the television:
F RO M “Turning on the Television” B Y Thich Nhat Hanh33
The mind is a television with thousands of channels.
I choose a world that is tranquil and calm so that my joy will always be fresh.
Mind is consciousness. Consciousness includes the subject which knows and the object which is known. The two aspects, subject and object, depend on each other in order to exist. As the Vietnamese meditation master, Huong Hai, said, “In seeing matter, you are at the same time seeing mind. Without the arising of the object, the subject does not arise.” When our mind is conscious of something, we are that thing. When we contemplate a snow-covered mountain, we are that moun- tain. When we watch a noisy film, we are that noisy film.
Our mind is like a television set with thousands of channels, and the channel we switch on is the channel we are at that moment. When we turn on anger, we are anger. When we turn on peace and joy, we are peace and joy. We have the ability to select the channel. We are what we choose to be. We can select any channel of the mind. Buddha is a channel, Mara is a channel, remembering is a channel, forget-
ting is a channel, calm is a channel, agitation is a channel. Changing from one state of being to another is as simple as the change from a chan- nel showing a film to a channel playing music.
There are people who cannot tolerate peace and quiet, who are afraid of facing themselves, so they turn on the television in order to be preoccupied with it for a whole evening. In contemporary culture, people rarely like to be with themselves, and they frequently seek forgetfulness—downtown at the theater or other places of amusement. People rarely like to look deeply and compassionately at them- selves. Young people in America watch televi- sion more than five hours per day, and they also have all sorts of electronic games to occupy them. Where will a culture in which people do not have the chance to face themselves or form real relationships with others lead us?
There are many interesting, instructive programs on television, and we can use the
Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–)
A Vietnamese Buddhist monk, peace activist, and writer. He cur- rently lives in France and occasion- ally teaches in the United States.
Thich nhat Hanh argues that we should beware of becoming victims of our televisions. (© Philippe Lissac/Godong/Corbis)
“Our mind is like a television set with thousands of channels, and the channel we switch on is the channel we are at that moment.” —T H I C H N H AT H A N H
33 Thich nhat Hanh, “Turning on the Television,” from Present Moment, Wonderful Moment. Copyright © 1990 by Parallax Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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TV guide to select programs which encourage mindfulness. We should decide to watch only the programs we have selected and avoid becoming a victim of the television.
• How is Sartre’s view of freedom similar to Kant’s? Is thinking that you are free proof that in some important sense you are free?
• Explain what Sartre means by in “choosing not to choose, we are condemned to be free.”
• do you agree with Sartre that we are always responsible insofar as everything in our life is, in effect, a free choice (including war—in war, “there are no innocent victims”)?
• To what extent is it possible to choose otherwise or “to negate” certain facts about yourself? Could you choose to be taller, better looking, or more intelligent? How would Sartre or dostoyevsky reply?
• To what extent are we free to choose our states of consciousness?
• What would Thich nhat Hanh have to say about Facebook and other social media? How do distraction and freedom relate to each other?
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION To say that a person’s act is free is to be able to ascribe responsibility. The defense of free- dom therefore becomes extremely important to us. Our confidence in the universality of scientific explanations, however, seems to imply the thesis of determinism, which holds that every event has its sufficient natural cause. Human actions, as events, thus seem to be deter- mined and thus not free. In this chapter, we have explored the various ways in which philoso- phers have attempted to reconcile these two vital beliefs—that at least some human acts are free and that science can ultimately (at least in principle) explain everything.
Some philosophers have defended determinism (“hard determinism”) to the exclusion of freedom. Others (“indeterminists”) have defended freedom to the exclusion of determin- ism. Most philosophers, however, have tried to defend both theses (and so are often called “compatibilists”). They (“soft determinists”) have argued that determinism does not pre- clude freedom if an act flows from a person’s decision or character; that we can be more and less susceptible to determinists; or that even if determinism is true, we cannot help but think of ourselves as free.
CHAPTER REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. Compare and contrast hard determinism, soft determinism, and indeterminism. Ex- plain why indeterminism is just as problematic as hard determinism.
2. Compare and contrast the ideas of a universe ruled by chance, divine predestination, fatalism, and karma. Which view do you find most appealing?
3. What is the Islamic conception of predestination? How does it compare with other reli- gious views you have studied?
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4. defenders of free will argue that there is a notion of freedom that is undetermined. do you find this view problematic? How would you defend this view against the determin- ists’ objections?
5. discuss the relationship between moral responsibility and freedom. What similarities and differences can you discern among Aristotle, Skinner, and Sartre? What would the others say to Sartre’s claim that in war there are no innocent victims?
KEY TERMS
antecedent conditions freedom prediction cause free will responsibility compatibilism Heisenberg uncertainty retrodict compulsion principle soft determinism determinism indeterminism sufficient cause fatalism predestination
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
Three good collections of essays on the free will problem are Gary Watson, ed., Free Will (new York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Robert Kane, ed., Free Will (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 2002); and Robert Kane, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (new York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Also recommended are Alfred Mele, ed., The Philosophy of Action (new York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Robert Kane, The Significance of Free Will (new York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and daniel C. dennett, Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984).
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The Good and the Right
PA RT I I I
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8 | Ethics “From now on I’m thinking only of me.”
Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile, “But Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way?”
“Then I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?”
J O S E P H H E L L E R , C AT C H -2 2
What should we do, and what should we not do? Which acts should we praise? Which acts should we condemn and blame? These are questions of ethics, the concern for which Socrates was willing to give up his life. A core concern of ethics is morality. Morality is a set of fundamental rules that guide our actions; for example, they may forbid us to kill each other, encourage us to help each other, tell us not to lie, and command us to keep our promises.
Most of the moral rules we accept and follow are ones that we have learned and adopted from our parents, friends, teachers, and society. At times, though, others may challenge our moral rules, demanding that we defend them. Why should we help each other? Why shouldn’t we ever cheat? What reasons can we give to defend one sexual ethic rather than another? New social and technological developments may also force us to reevaluate our morality. Since minorities and women have participated more and more in public debates on moral issues, we have become more aware of the injustices of discrimination on the basis of race or sex. The development of sophisticated life-sustaining devices has forced both physi- cians and philosophers to question whether it is always a moral duty to preserve life when- ever possible.
Whenever we try to defend or criticize a moral belief we enter the realm of ethics. Ethics is not restricted to specifying moral rules, but instead is concerned with the foundation of morality and with providing general principles that will both help us evaluate the validity of a moral rule and choose among different moralities (different sets of moral rules). For ex- ample, some ethical theorists, called utilitarians, hold that any good moral rule should pro- mote the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Other theorists, for example, Aristotle and Kant, have argued that a good moral rule helps us act in the most rational way possible.
Ethics is also concerned with whether or not to take into account others’ or our own inter- ests and desires when deciding what we ought to do. For some ethicists, morality is tied to
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self-interest at least in an abstract way, and they argue that morality is the best way of satisfy- ing everyone’s interests. Other philosophers retain the rigid distinction between morality and self-interest and insist that obedience to morality is good for its own sake, equivalent to being rational, or simply required in order to make us human. Finally some authors have argued that morality is only one among many sets of principles, which we may but need not choose to obey.
in this chapter, we begin by raising some of the perennial problems of ethics, including the nature of morality and the problem of moral relativism. Then, we address the familiar claim that the basis of all human behavior—moral behavior included—is selfishness, or egoism. Finally we examine several different ethical theories, different ways of conceiving of morals and (or) justifying moral beliefs:
• The ethics of Aristotle, who based his view of morality on the concept of “virtue” and his idea that man is by nature a social and rational animal. Aristotle argues that being virtu- ous—controlling our feelings and acting rationally—enables us to become fully human. in this discussion, we have the opportunity to examine a moral system that is significantly different from our own, but still sufficiently similar for us to understand it.
• The view that morality is essentially a matter of feeling; David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are its representatives.
• The monumental ethical theory of immanuel Kant, who insisted that morality is strictly a matter of practical reason, divorced from our personal interests and desires and based solely on universal principles or laws. Thus, according to Kant, we cannot justify the morality of our actions simply by appealing to the good consequences of our actions for others or ourselves. We also consider subsequent efforts to support or criticize Kant’s view.
• The ethical theories of the utilitarians, who argued (in contrast to Kant) that moral rules are merely rules of thumb for achieving the greatest good for the greatest number of people, and who thereby tried to reconcile the interests of each individual with the inter- ests of everyone else.
• The radical theories of Nietzsche and the existentialists, who insist that, in an important sense, we choose our moralities and that this choice cannot be justified in any of the ways argued by other modern philosophers. For Nietzsche, at least, this view also in- cluded a retrospective appreciation of the morality of the ancient Greeks, and he argued that we should inject some of their conceptions into our own. We also look at subse- quent efforts to support the idea that morality is conventional—a matter of custom within specific societies.
• Recent feminist theories, which argue that the moral tradition has overemphasized principles and procedures and neglected the moral importance of interpersonal roles and relationships.
A. Morality Morality gives us the rules by which we live with other people. it sets limits to our desires and our actions. it tells us what is permitted and what is not. it gives us guiding principles for making decisions. it tells us what we ought and ought not to do. But what is this “morality” that sounds so impersonal and “above” us? it is important to begin with an appreciation for the metaphor, which so well characterizes moral rules. Nietzsche describes it this way: “A tablet of virtues hangs over every people.”
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The “tablet of virtues” is morality. The prototype of morality, in this view, is those ancient codes, carved in stone, with commands that are eternal and absolute, such as the two tablets inscribed by God in front of Moses that we call the Ten Commandments. And they are indeed commandments. They all say “Thou shalt” or “Thou shalt not.” This is the essence of moral- ity. it consists of commands. These commands do not appeal to individual pleasures or de- sires. They do not make different demands on different individuals or societies. Quite to the contrary, they are absolute rules that tell us what we must or must not do, no matter who we are, no matter what we want, and regardless of whether or not our interests will be served by the command. “Thou shalt not kill” means that even if you want to, even if you have the power to, and even if you can escape all punishment, you are absolutely forbidden to kill.
The image of morality as coming “from above” is appropriate. First, because moral laws are often said, and not only in our society, to come from God. Second, because we learn these laws from our parents, who literally “stand over us” and indoctrinate us with them through their shouts, commands, examples, threats, and gestures. Finally, and most impor- tant, morality itself is “above” any given individual or individuals, whether it is canonized in the laws of society or not. Morality is not just another aid in getting us what we want; it is entirely concerned with right and wrong. And these considerations are “above” tampering by any individual, no matter how powerful, as if they have a life of their own.
This characteristic of morality as independent of individual desires and ambitions has led many people to characterize morality simply in terms of some absolute and independent agency. Most often, this absolute and independent agency is God. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, refers to God as the source of moral law: “Therefore by divine law precepts had to be given, so that each man would give his neighbor his due and would abstain from doing injuries to him.”1 And in the Bible we read, “When thou shalt harken—to the voice of the lord thy God, to keep all his commandments, which i command thee this day, to do that which is right in the eyes of the lord thy God.”2
But whether or not one believes in God, it is clear that something further is needed to help us define morality. Even assuming that there is a God, we need a way of determining what His moral commands must be. One may say that He has given these commands to vari- ous individuals, but the fact is that different people seem to have very different ideas about the morality that God has given them. Some, for example, would say that it explicitly rules out abortion and infanticide. Others would argue that God does not rule these out but makes it clear that they are, like other forms of killing (a “holy war,” for example), justifiable only in certain circumstances. in view of such disagreements, we cannot simply appeal to God but must, for reasons that we can formulate and defend, define our morality for our- selves. There is the further question, which has often been debated, but was raised originally by Plato, in his dialogue, Euthyphro. Should we follow God’s laws just because they are His or rather, because His laws are good? if the latter, then we have to decide what is good in order to know that God is good. if the former, then one has to decide whether or not to be- lieve in God precisely on the basis of whether we can accept those laws. Either way, we have to decide for ourselves what laws of morality we are willing to accept.
Similar considerations hold true for that familiar appeal to conscience in determining what we ought or ought not do. Even if one believes that conscience is God-given, the same problems emerge again. Should we follow our consciences just because our “conscience tells us to”? Or do we follow our conscience just because we know that what our conscience commands is good? How does one decide whether a nagging thought is or is not the
1 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk. iii (New york: Doubleday, 1955). 2 Deuteronomy 13:18.
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prompting of God? Probably on the basis of whether what it demands is good or not. (Thus one readily attributes to conscience the nagging reminder that one should not have cheated an unsuspecting child, but one does not attribute to conscience the nagging thought that one could have gotten away with shoplifting if only one had had the daring to do it.) if one believes that conscience is simply the internalization of the moral teachings of one’s parents and society, then the question takes an extra dimension: Should we accept or reject what we have been taught? Since our consciences often disagree, we must still decide whose con- science and which rules of conscience we ought to obey. identifying morality with the promptings of one’s conscience is both plausible and valuable, but philosophically it only moves the question one step back: How do we know what is, and what is not, the prompting of conscience? And is it always right to follow one’s conscience? But these two questions are, in fact, just another way of asking what is moral. What should i do?
Morality is not just obedience—whether obedience to a king, a pope, the law, or one’s conscience. Morality is doing what is right, whether or not it is commanded by any person or law and whether or not one “feels” it in one’s conscience. One way of putting it—defended later by immanuel Kant—is to say that morality involves autonomy, that is, the ability to think for oneself and decide, for oneself, what is right and what is wrong, whom to obey and whom to ignore, what to do and what not to do. The danger is that this conception of morality as autonomy seems to leave us without a place to learn morality in the first place. How do we learn to judge right and wrong but from our parents, our friends, our teachers, and our soci- ety and its models? But if we try to tie morality too closely to our upbringing and our society, then it looks as if there is no room for autonomy, no way in which we could disagree with our family or society, no way to criticize the way in which we have been raised. Furthermore, tying morality to particular societies raises an additional question: whether morality (or moralities) may not be relative to particular societies and cultures.
• in your opinion, which is the more appropriate interpretation of the view that moral- ity coincides with what God commands: (1) the moral law is right because God commands it? or (2) God commands the moral law because it is right? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each view?
• Why does it make you uncomfortable when you ignore your conscience? Does it help if others tell you that ignoring it is right?
B. Is Morality Relative? Moralities, like lifestyles, vary from culture to culture and even from person to person. But while there is nothing surprising about the fact that lifestyles vary, there is a problem in the variation of moralities. Morality, by its very nature, is supposed to be a set of universal principles—principles that do not distinguish between cultures or peoples or lifestyles. if it is morally reprehensible to kill for fun, then it is morally reprehensible in every society, in every culture, for every lifestyle, and for every person, no matter who he or she is. it will be true even if the society or person in question does not agree with that moral principle.
Aristotle, for example, discusses at length what he calls “the wicked man,” who does evil because he believes in immoral principles and therefore acts without regret, unlike the person who acts badly from momentary weakness, force of circumstances, desperation, or misinformation. But on what grounds can one society or person claim that another society’s or person’s principles are immoral? How could European Christians, for example, be justified in criticizing the sexual morality of Polynesians in the South Pacific? The Polynesians they
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encountered were a separate society, with their own mores and principles that worked quite well for them, possibly even better in certain ways than the European customs worked in Europe. yet European missionaries felt no hesitation in condemning their sexual practices as “immoral.” Similarly but more seriously, what gives us the right to criticize a culture across the world that believes in genocide as a legitimate aim of war or in torture as a way of keep- ing civil order? We surely feel that we have the right to speak up in such cases, but then we are asserting the universality of our morality, extending it even to people who may explicitly reject our principles. How can we do so? What justifies such an extension?
The problem of relativism has been extremely controversial since the nineteenth cen- tury, when anthropologists began telling us in the West of exotic societies with moralities that were quite different from ours. in a sense, relativism has always been a threat to estab- lished morality, for even the Greeks came into contact with societies that were much differ- ent from theirs. (They tended immediately to label anything non-Greek “barbarian,” so they did not have to consider the possibility of relativism.) Kant was the most vigorous opponent of relativism, for his conception of morality was such that if a human being was to count as rational at all, he or she had to agree to at least the basic principles of a universal morality. There were people and societies that did not, but that, according to Kant, only proved that they were less than rational (and implicitly less than human as well). Today we tend to be more liberal in our acceptance of different styles of life, but few people would deny that at least some moral principles hold for every society. The principle that unnecessary cruelty is wrong, for example, would be such a principle, although people may well disagree about what is “cruel” and what is “unnecessary.”
Philosophers generally distinguish two theses. First, there is the factual claim that differ- ent societies have different moralities. This thesis is called cultural relativism. The difficult question is whether these different moralities are only different superficially or whether they are fundamentally different. For example, in earlier times, certain indigenous Arctic tribes sometimes thinned their numbers in response to famine by letting elderly members die of exposure. We consider that act grossly immoral (we send most of our elders to frigid “old- age homes” instead). But the question of cultural relativity is whether this difference is merely the reflection of different interpretations of some basic moral principle (such as, do not kill anyone unless it is absolutely necessary for the survival of the rest) or whether it really is a wholly different morality. This is among the most controversial anthropological ques- tions of our time. But philosophers are interested in a somewhat different question: Assum- ing that two moralities really are fundamentally different, is it possible that each is as correct as the other? The philosopher who says yes is an ethical relativist, and ethical relativism is what occupies us here.
in the following selection, Gilbert Harman presents a contemporary defense of the rela- tivist position.
F RO M “Moral Relativism Defended” B Y Gilbert Harman3
My thesis is that morality arises when a group of people reach an implicit agree- ment or come to a tacit understanding about their relations with one another. Part of what I mean by this is that moral judgments—or, rather, an important class of them—make sense only in relation to and with reference to one or another such agreement or understanding. This is vague, and I shall try to make it more precise
3 Gilbert Harman, “Moral Relativism Defended,” in Philosophical Review 75 (1975): 3–22.
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in what follows. But it should be clear that I intend to argue for a version of what has been called moral relativism.
In doing so, I am taking sides in an ancient controversy. Many people have supposed that the sort of view which I am going to defend is obviously correct—indeed, that it is the only sort of account that could make sense of the phenomenon of morality. At the same time there have also been many who have supposed that moral relativism is confused, incoherent, and even immoral, at the very least obviously wrong.
Most arguments against relativism make use of a strategy of dissuasive definition; they
define moral relativism as an inconsistent thesis. For example, they define it as the assertion that (a) there are no universal moral principles and (b) one ought to act in accordance with the principles of one’s own group, where this latter principle, (b), is supposed to be a universal moral principle. It is easy enough to show that this version of moral relativism will not do, but that is no reason to think that a de- fender of moral relativism cannot find a better definition.
My moral relativism is a soberly logical thesis—a thesis about logical form, if you like. Just as the judgment that something is large makes sense only in relation to one or another comparison class, so too, I will argue, the judgment that it is wrong of someone to do something makes sense only in relation to an agreement or understanding. A dog may be large in relation to chihuahuas but not large in relation to dogs in general. Similarly, I will argue, an action may be wrong in rela- tion to one agreement but not in relation to another. Just as it makes no sense to ask whether a dog is large, period, apart from any relation to a comparison class, so too, I will argue, it makes no sense to ask whether an action is wrong, period, apart from any relation to an agreement.
There is an agreement, in the relevant sense, if each of a number of people in- tends to adhere to some schedule, plan, or set of principles, intending to do this on the understanding that the others similarly intend. The agreement or understand- ing need not be conscious or explicit; and I will not here try to say what distin- guishes moral agreements from, for example, conventions of the road or conventions of etiquette, since these distinctions will not be important as regards the purely logical thesis that I will be defending.
Although I want to say that certain moral judgments are made in relation to an agreement, I do not want to say this about all moral judgments. Perhaps it is true that all moral judgments are made in relation to an agreement; nevertheless, that is not what I will be arguing. For I want to say that there is a way in which certain moral judgments are relative to an agreement but other moral judgments are not. My relativism is a thesis only about what I will call “inner judgments,” such as the judgment that someone ought or ought not to have acted in a certain way or the judgment that it was right or wrong of him to have done so. My relativism is not meant to apply, for example, to the judgment that someone is evil or the judgment that a given institution is unjust.
Gilbert Harman (1938–)
An American philosopher who specializes in ethics, epistemology, and cognition science. He teaches at Princeton University.
Professor Gilbert Harman argues that morality is a matter of group agreement and that groups can legiti- mately have different morali- ties. (Used by permission of Gilbert Harman)
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In particular, I am not denying (nor am I asserting) that some moralities are “objectively” better than others or that there are objective standards for assessing moralities. My thesis is a soberly logical thesis about logical form.
I . I N N E R J U D G M E N T S We make inner judgments about a person only if we suppose that he is capable of being motivated by the relevant moral considerations. We make other sorts of judgment about those who we suppose are not susceptible of such motivation. Inner judgments include judgments in which we say that someone should or ought to have done something or that someone was right or wrong to have done something. Inner judgments do not include judgments in which we call someone (literally) a savage or say that someone is (literally) inhuman, evil, a betrayer, a trai- tor, or an enemy.
Consider this example. Intelligent beings from outer space land on Earth, beings without the slightest concern for human life and happiness. That a certain course of action on their part might injure one of us means nothing to them; that fact by itself gives them no reason to avoid the action. In such a case it would be odd to say that nevertheless the beings ought to avoid injuring us or that it would be wrong for them to attack us. Of course we will want to resist them if they do such things and we will make negative judgments about them; but we will judge that they are dreadful en- emies to be repelled and even destroyed, not that they should not act as they do.
Similarly, if we learn that a band of cannibals has captured and eaten the sole survivor of a shipwreck, we will speak of the primitive morality of the cannibals and may call them savages, but we will not say that they ought not to have eaten their captive.
Again, suppose that a contented employee of Murder, Incorporated was raised as a child to honor and respect members of the “family” but to have nothing but con- tempt for the rest of society. His current assignment, let us suppose, is to kill a certain bank manager, Bernard J. Ortcutt. Since Ortcutt is not a member of the “family,” the employee in question has no compunction about carrying out his assignment. In particular, if we were to try to convince him that he should not kill Ortcutt, our argument would merely amuse him. We would not provide him with the slightest reason to desist unless we were to point to practical difficulties, such as the likelihood of his getting caught. Now, in this case it would be a misuse of language to say of him that he ought not to kill Ortcutt or that it would be wrong of him to do so, since that would imply that our own moral considerations carry some weight with him, which they do not. Instead we can only judge that he is a criminal, someone to be hunted down by the police, an enemy of peace-loving citizens, and so forth.
. . . Of course, I do not want to deny that for various reasons a speaker might pre-
tend that an agent is or is not susceptible to certain moral considerations. For ex- ample, a speaker may for rhetorical or political reasons wish to suggest that someone is beyond the pale, that he should not be listened to, that he can be treated as an enemy. On the other hand, a speaker may pretend that someone is susceptible to certain moral considerations in an effort to make that person or others susceptible to those considerations. Inner judgments about one’s children sometimes have this function. So do inner judgments made in political speeches that aim at restoring a lapsed sense of morality in government.
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I I . T H E L O G I C A L F O R M O F I N N E R J U D G M E N T S Inner judgments have two important characteristics. First, they imply that the agent has reasons to do something. Second, the speaker in some sense endorses these reasons and supposes that the audience also endorses them. Other moral judg- ments about an agent, on the other hand, do not have such implications; they do not imply that the agent has reasons for acting that are endorsed by the speaker.
. . . Now we need not suppose that the agreement or understanding in question is
explicit. It is enough if various members of society knowingly reach an agreement in intentions—each intending to act in certain ways on the understanding that the others have similar intentions. Such an implicit agreement is reached through a process of mutual adjustment and implicit bargaining.
Indeed, it is essential to the proposed explanation of this aspect of our moral views to suppose that the relevant moral understanding is thus the result of bar- gaining. It is necessary to suppose that, in order to further our interests, we form certain conditional intentions, hoping that others will do the same. The others, who have different interests, will form somewhat different conditional intentions. After implicit bargaining, some sort of compromise is reached.
Seeing morality in this way as a compromise based on implicit bargaining helps to explain why our morality takes it to be worse to harm someone than to refuse to help someone. The explanation requires that we view our morality as an implicit agreement about what to do. This sort of explanation could not be given if we were to suppose, say, that our morality represented an agreement only about the facts (naturalism). Nor is it enough simply to suppose that our morality represents an agreement in attitude, if we forget that such agreement can be reached, not only by way of such principles as are mentioned, . . . but also through bargaining.
Although contemporary awareness of what is happening around the globe makes us mindful of the diversity of cultural views, the issue of ethical relativism has been around for centuries. in the thirteenth century, St. Thomas Aquinas took up the question of ethical rela- tivism and concluded that it was false. He answered the question that Plato raised in the Euthyphro by claiming that it is right to follow God’s laws because they are good. They are good, in fact, because they conform to nature, and most often they will result in what is best for us. Natural law is the term for the moral law as it inheres in nature. Aquinas noted, “it is apparent that things prescribed by divine law are right, not only because they are put forth by law, but also because they are in accord with nature.”4 God gave each thing in creation a nature that directs it toward what is good for it. in the case of human beings, this nature in- volves free will, the pursuit of what is good for us is subject to our free choice. But we are given guidance by using our reason and objectively attending to our nature as human beings to ascertain what actions are consistent with providing for our various needs in a harmonious way. Every human being is in a position to know the general prescriptions of moral law.
When asked how natural law can be universal if cultures vary in their moral views, Aquinas distinguishes between the fundamental principles of natural law and the practices that apply these principles. Knowledge of the former is present in every society. However, as circumstances vary, so do the applications of these principles. in other words, Aquinas
4 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk. iii (New york Doubleday, 1955).
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acknowledges the factual claim of cultural relativism but concludes that it offers no evidence for the truth of ethical relativism. One can recognize the diversity of moral practices and still hold that in essence, the same moral law holds for everyone.
F RO M The Summa Theologica B Y St. Thomas Aquinas5
T H E N AT U R A L L AW . . . to the natural law belongs those things to which a man is inclined naturally: and among these it is proper to man to be inclined to act according to reason. Now the process of reason is from the common to the proper, as stated in Phys. i. The speculative reason, however, is differently situated in this matter, from the practical reason. For, since the speculative reason is busied chiefly with necessary things, which cannot be otherwise than they are, its proper conclusions, like the universal principles, contain the truth without fail. The practical reason, on the other hand, is busied with contingent matters, about which human actions are concerned: and consequently, although there is necessity in the general principles, the more we descend to matters of detail, the more frequently we encounter defects. Accord- ingly then in speculative matters truth is the same in all men, both as to principles and as to conclusions: although the truth is not known to all as regards the conclu- sions, but only as regards the principles which are called common notions. But in matters of action, truth or practical rectitude is not the same for all, as to matters of detail, but only as to the general principles: and where there is the same rectitude in matters of detail, it is not equally known to all.
It is therefore evident that, as regards the general principles whether of specula- tive or of practical reason, truth or rectitude is the same for all, and is equally known by all. As to the proper conclusions of the speculative reason, the truth is the same for all, but is not equally known to all: thus it is true for all that the three angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles, although it is not known to all. But as to the proper conclusions of the practical reason, neither is the truth or rectitude the same for all, nor, where it is the same, is it equally known by all. Thus it is right and true for all to act according to reason: and from this principle it follows as a proper conclusion, that goods entrusted to another should be restored to their owner. Now this is true for the majority of cases: but it may happen in a particular case that it would be injurious, and therefore unreasonable, to restore goods held in trust; for instance if they are claimed for the purpose of fighting against one’s country. And this principle will be found to fail the more, according as we descend further into detail, e.g., if one were to say that goods held in trust should be restored with such and such a guarantee, or in such and such a way; because the greater the number of conditions added, the greater the number of ways in which the principle may fail, so that it be not right to restore or not to restore.
Consequently we must say that the natural law, as to general principles, is the same for all, both as to rectitude and as to knowledge. But as to certain matters of detail, which are conclusions, as it were, of those general principles, it is the same for all in the majority of cases, both as to rectitude and as to knowledge; and yet in some few cases it may fail, both as to rectitude, by reason of certain obstacles
5 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk. iii (New york Doubleday, 1955).
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( just as natures subject to generation and corruption fail in some few cases on ac- count of some obstacle), and as to knowledge, since in some the reason is perverted by passion, or evil habit, or an evil disposition of nature . . .
Aquinas’s argument that every human being has access to the basic precepts of moral law depends on the idea that we can recognize actions as being consistent with or contrary to nature. The same assumption is at work in contemporary arguments that certain behaviors (often sexual practices) are unnatural and should therefore be condemned. Sexual practices, in particular, have been the focus of such assertions. Philosopher John Corvino challenges this line of reasoning when applied to homosexuality. He argues that unnatural is a vague term with various meanings, but that on any construal the charge that homosexuality is un- natural would not establish that it is immoral.
F RO M Same Sex: Debating the Ethics, Science, and Culture of Homosexuality B Y John Corvino6
H O M O S E X UA L S E X I S “ U N N AT U R A L” Many contend that homosexual sex is “unnatural.” But what does that mean? Many things that people value—clothing, houses, medicine, and government, for example—are unnatural in some sense. On the other hand, many things that people detest—disease, suffering, and death, for example—are “natural” in the sense that they occur “in nature.” If the unnaturalness charge is to be more than empty rhetorical flourish, those who levy it must specify what they mean. Borrow-
ing from Burton Leiser, I will examine several possible meanings of “unnatural.”
W H AT I S U N U S UA L O R A B N O R M A L I S U N N AT U R A L One meaning of “unnatural” refers to that which deviates from the norm, that is, from what most people do. Obviously, most people engage in heterosexual relationships. But does it follow that it is wrong to engage in homosexual rela- tionships? Relatively few people read Sanskrit, pilot ships, play the mandolin, breed goats, or write with both hands, yet none of these activi- ties is immoral simply because it is unusual. As the Ramsey Colloquium, a group of Jewish and Christian scholars who oppose homosexuality, writes, “The statistical frequency of an act does not determine its moral status.” So while homo- sexuality might be unnatural in the sense of being unusual, that fact is morally irrelevant.
John Corvino (1969–)
Professor of philosophy at Wayne State University and the author of many articles and several books in philosophy, including Same Sex.
Philosopher John Corvino (© Cybelle Codish. Used by
permission of John Corvino)
6 John Corvino, Same Sex: Debating the Ethics, Science, and Culture of Homosexuality (lanham, MA: Rowman & little- field, 1997), pp. 4–7. Reprinted with permission.
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W H AT I S N O T P R AC T I C E D BY O T H E R A N I M A L S I S U N N AT U R A L Some people argue, “Even animals know better than to behave homosexually; homosexuality must be wrong.” This argument is doubly flawed. First, it rests on a false premise. Numerous studies—including Anne Perkins’s study of “gay” sheep and George and Molly Hunt’s study of “lesbian” seagulls—have shown that some animals do form homosexual pair-bonds. Second, even if animals did not behave homosexually, that fact would not prove that homosexuality is immoral. After all, animals don’t cook their food, brush their teeth, participate in religious worship, or attend college; human beings do all of these without moral censure. Indeed, the idea that animals could provide us with our standards—especially our sexual standards—is simply amusing.
W H AT D O E S N O T P RO C E E D F RO M I N N AT E D E S I R E S I S U N N AT U R A L Recent studies suggesting a biological basis for homosexuality have resulted in two popular positions. One side proposes that homosexual people are “born that way” and that it is therefore natural (and thus good) for them to form homosexual rela- tionships. The other side maintains that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice, which is therefore unnatural (and thus wrong). Both sides assume a connection between the origin of homosexual orientation, on the one hand, and the moral value of homosexual activity, on the other. And insofar as they share that assumption, both sides are wrong.
Consider first the pro-homosexual side: “They are born that way; therefore it’s natural and good.” This inference assumes that all innate desires are good ones (i.e., that they should be acted upon). But that assumption is clearly false. Research sug- gests that some people are born with a predisposition toward violence, but such people have no more right to strangle their neighbors than anyone else. So while people like Tommy and Jim may be born with homosexual tendencies, it doesn’t follow that they ought to act on them. Nor does it follow that they ought not to act on them, even if the tendencies are not innate. I probably do not have any innate tendency to write with my left hand (since I, like everyone else in my family, have always been right-handed), but it doesn’t follow that it would be immoral for me to do so. So simply asserting that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice will not show that it is an immoral lifestyle choice.
Do people “choose” to be homosexual? People certainly don’t seem to choose their sexual feelings, at least not in any direct or obvious way. (Do you? Think about it.) Rather, they find certain people attractive and certain activities arousing, whether they “decide” to or not. Indeed, most people at some point in their lives wish that they could control their feelings more—for example, in situations of unrequited love—and find it frustrating that they cannot. What they can control to a considerable degree is how and when they act upon those feelings. In that sense, both homosexual- ity and heterosexuality involve lifestyle choices. But in either case, determining the origin of the feelings will not determine whether it is moral to act on them.
W H AT V I O L AT E S A N O RG A N ’ S P R I N C I PA L P U R P O S E I S U N N AT U R A L Perhaps when people claim that homosexual sex is unnatural they mean that it cannot result in procreation. The idea behind the argument is that human organs have various natural purposes: eyes are for seeing, ears are for hearing, genitals are
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for procreating. According to this argument, it is immoral to use an organ in a way that vio- lates its particular purpose.
Many of our organs, however, have multiple purposes. Tommy can use his mouth for talk- ing, eating, breathing, licking stamps, chewing gum, kissing women, or kissing Jim; and it seems rather arbitrary to claim that all but the last use are “natural.” (And if we say that some of the other uses are “unnatural, but not im- moral,” we have failed to specify a morally rel- evant sense of the term “natural.”)
Just because people can and do use their sexual organs to procreate, it does not follow that they should not use them for other pur- poses. Sexual organs seem very well suited for expressing love, for giving and receiving pleasure, and for celebrating, replenishing, and enhancing a relationship—even when pro- creation is not a factor. Unless opponents of homosexuality are prepared to condemn het-
erosexual couples who use contraception or individuals who masturbate, they must abandon this version of the unnaturalness argument. Indeed, even the Roman Catholic Church, which forbids contraception and masturbation, approves of sex for sterile couples and of sex during pregnancy, neither of which can lead to pro- creation. The Church concedes here that intimacy and pleasure are morally legiti- mate purposes for sex, even in cases where procreation is impossible. But since homosexual sex can achieve these purposes as well, it is inconsistent for the Church to condemn it on the grounds that it is not procreative.
One might object that sterile heterosexual couples do not intentionally turn away from procreation, whereas homosexual couples do. But this distinction doesn’t hold. It is no more possible for Tommy to procreate with a woman whose uterus has been removed than it is for him to procreate with Jim. By having sex with either one, he is intentionally engaging in a nonprocreative sexual act.
Yet one might press the objection further and insist that Tommy and the woman could produce children if the woman were fertile: whereas homosexual relationships are essentially infertile, heterosexual relationships are only incidentally so. But what does that prove? Granted, it might require less of a miracle for a woman without a uterus to become pregnant than for Jim to become pregnant, but it would require a miracle nonetheless. Thus it seems that the real difference here is not that one couple is fertile and the other not, nor that one couple “could” be fertile (with the help of a miracle) and the other not, but rather that one couple is male-female and the other male-male. In other words, sex between Tommy and Jim is wrong because it’s male- male—i.e., because it’s homosexual. But that, of course, is no argument at all.
W H AT I S D I S G U S T I N G O R O F F E N S I V E I S U N N AT U R A L It often seems that when people call homosexuality “unnatural” they really just mean that it’s disgusting. But plenty of morally neutral activities—handling snakes, eating snails, performing autopsies, cleaning toilets, and so on—disgust people.
One person’s view of what is natural need not be another’s. (© iStockphoto.com/Westergren)
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Indeed, for centuries, most people found interracial relationships disgusting, yet that feeling—which has by no means disappeared—hardly proves that such rela- tionships are wrong. In sum, the charge that homosexuality is unnatural, at least in its most common forms, is longer on rhetorical flourish than on philosophical cogency. At best it expresses an aesthetic judgment, not a moral judgment.
One need not rely on natural law to challenge moral relativism. However, the idea that nature is a guide to morality is a theme that appears in various theories that we will consider. it is most noticeable in Aristotle’s moral theory, but implicit in some of Kant’s arguments as well. We will also return to the issue of moral relativism when we consider recent critics of the Western moral tradition in the last few sections of this chapter.
“It often seems that when people call homosexuality ‘unnatural’ they really just mean that it’s disgusting. But plenty of morally neutral activities—handling snakes, eating snails, performing autopsies, cleaning toilets, and so on—disgust people.” — J O H N C O R V I N O
• What is ethical relativism? Does it undermine morality’s claim to authority?
• Can you think of a way in which one might account for the variety of moral princi- ples (cultural relativism) without adopting ethical relativism? Do you think Aquinas succeeds in demonstrating that this is possible?
• What is ethical absolutism? Does it capture how you think of morality? What prob- lems do you see with it?
• Why does Harman insist that he is giving “only the logical form” of relativism? What does this mean? What is he not claiming?
• Harman supposes that the foundation for morality is an implicit social agreement? Do you agree?
• Are you convinced by Aquinas’s argument that cultures all recognize the same basic moral principles and that their disagreements have to do with applications of these basic principles?
• Do you agree with Corvino that we cannot base what is moral on what is natural and what is immoral on what is unnatural? How might Aquinas reply?
C. Egoism and Altruism Most moral rules enjoin us to take into account the interests, feelings, or welfare of other people. The commands not to lie, not to kill, and not to steal, as well as the commands to keep our promises, treat others fairly, and be generous, are all commands that concern our relationships to other persons. (There can, of course, be moral rules that require us to take into account our own interests; for example, the prohibition of suicide or, as Kant thought, the obligation to develop our talents.)
One of the important assumptions of any morality, then, is that it is possible for us to act in the interests of other people. in addition, morality assumes that it is possible for us to do so because we are concerned about others’ welfare or because we recognize that we ought to be. Someone who refrains from cheating, for example, simply because he or she is afraid of being caught acts purely self-interestedly; we would not think this person is morally praiseworthy. Again, a person who visits a dying relative in the hospital because he or she wants to ensure a substantial inheritance is not acting morally. Only if actions are motivated by a concern for others’ interests do we call them truly moral actions.
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One important theory, though, denies that we can be motivated simply by a concern for others. This is psychological egoism. Psychological egoism is the thesis that everyone, in fact, acts for his or her own advantage, and the only reason why people act respectfully or kindly toward each other is that for one reason or another, that too is to their advantage. it might be fear of punishment that makes them act “correctly.” Some have “ulterior motives”; that is, they expect other things later on, perhaps a favor in return or a reward in heaven after they die, or they are trying to avoid guilt or want a feeling of self-satisfaction. in popular language, the egoist position is often called selfishness.
One should be careful, though, to distinguish psychological egoism from ethical egoism. Psychological egoism asserts that our psychology is such that we cannot help but act in our own interests. in contrast, ethical egoism claims that even though we can act in others’ in- terests because we are concerned for others, we ought always to act in our own interest. One of the most widely read contemporary ethical egoists was the late Ayn Rand, who wrote of “the virtue of selfishness.”
it is psychological, not ethical, egoism that challenges the very possibility of any morality. One of Socrates’ opponents in The Republic states the psychological egoist’s view with brutal clarity:
F RO M Republic B Y Plato7
They say that to do wrong is naturally good, to be wronged is bad, but the suffering of injury so far exceeds in badness the good of inflicting it that when men have done wrong to each other and suffered it, and have had a taste of both, those who are unable to avoid the latter and practise the former decide that it is profitable to come to an agreement with each other neither to inflict injury nor to suffer it. As a result they begin to make laws and covenants, and the law’s command they call lawful and just. This, they say, is the origin and essence of justice; it stands between the best and the worst, the best being to do wrong without paying the penalty and the worst to be wronged without the power of revenge. The just then is a mean between two extremes; it is welcomed and honoured because of men’s lack of the power to do wrong. The man who has that power, the real man, would not make a compact with anyone not to inflict injury or suffer it. For him that would be madness. This then, Socrates, is, according to their argument, the nature and origin of justice.
Even those who practise justice do so against their will because they lack the power to do wrong. This we could realize very clearly if we imagined ourselves granting to both the just and the unjust the freedom to do whatever they liked. We could then follow both of them and observe where their desires led them, and we would catch the just man redhanded travelling the same road as the unjust. The reason is the desire for undue gain which every organism by nature pursues as a good, but the law forcibly sidetracks him to honour equality. The freedom I just mentioned would most easily occur if these men had the power which they say the ancestor of the Lydian Gyges possessed. The story is that he was a shepherd in the service of the ruler of Lydia. There was a violent rainstorm and an earthquake which broke open the ground and created a chasm at the place where he was tending sheep. Seeing this and marvelling, he went down into it. He saw, besides many other wonders of which we are told, a hollow
7 Plato, Republic, Bk. ii, trans. G. M. A. Grube. Copyright © 1974 by Hackett Publishing Company, inc. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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bronze horse. There were window-like openings in it; he climbed through them and caught sight of a corpse which seemed of more than human stature, wearing nothing but a ring of gold on its finger. This ring the shepherd put on and came out. He arrived at the usual monthly meeting which reported to the king on the state of the flocks, wearing the ring. As he was sitting among the others he happened to twist the hoop of the ring towards himself, to the inside of his hand, and as he did this he became in- visible to those sitting near him and they went on talking as if he had gone. He marvelled at this and, fingering the ring, he turned the hoop outward again and became visible. Perceiving this he tested whether the ring had this power and so it happened: if he turned the hoop inwards he became invisible, but was visible when he turned it outwards. When he realized this, he at once arranged to become one of the messengers to the king. He went, committed adultery with the king’s wife, attacked the king with her help, killed him, and took over the kingdom.
Now if there were two such rings, one worn by the just man, the other by the unjust, no one, as these people think, would be so incorruptible that he would stay on the path of justice or bring him- self to keep away from other people’s property and not touch it, when he could with impunity take whatever he wanted from the market, go into houses and have sexual relations with anyone he wanted, kill anyone, free all those he wished from prison, and do the other things which would make him like a god among men. His actions would be in no way different from those of the other and they would both follow the same path. This, some would say, is a great proof that no one is just willingly but under compulsion, so that justice is not one’s private good, since wherever either thought he could do wrong with impunity he would do so. Every man believes that injustice is much more profitable to himself than justice, and any exponent of this argument will say that he is right. The man who did not wish to do wrong with that oppor- tunity, and did not touch other people’s property, would be thought by those who knew it to be very foolish and miserable. They would praise him in public, thus deceiving one another, for fear of being wronged. So much for my second topic.
A Contemporary Egoist: Ayn Rand Ayn Rand won over a huge audience over the past forty years with such best- selling novels as The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Born in Communist Russia, throughout her long career she was a ferocious defender of what she took to be the essential capitalist values, including “the virtue of selfishness.” in the reading that follows, contemporary ethicist Tara Smith, one of Ayn Rand’s most respected contemporary defenders, explains one of her most basic ideas.
Plato’s character Glaucon suggests that we would all behave immorally if we were confident that we would not get caught. (© iStockphoto.com/parema)
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The Necessity of Egoism (Ayn Rand) B Y Tara Smith8
Ethical egoism is the thesis that a person should act to promote his own self- interest. Rand holds that selfishness means “concern with one’s own interest,” and she advocates “rational selfishness”—the pursuit of “the values required for man’s survival qua man.”
. . . just as life is an end in itself, so every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others . . . man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself.” (Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness)
The propriety of egoism is a direct outgrowth of the need for values. What emerges from value’s origin in life is a code of moral prescriptions designed to promote the agent’s own flourishing, Life makes values possible and necessary. Distinctions between things as good or bad (and derivatively, between actions as right or wrong) are intelligible only in relation to the quest for life. No purported value that does not benefit an organism’s life would be a genuine value. The con- ditional nature of value—the fact that a person must seek his life in order to be subject to morality’s authority—underscores that the point of living morally is to benefit oneself. The life that is pivotal is not life per se, the life of mankind or of all flora and fauna. Rather, value is contingent on the aim of serving one’s own life. The fact that life makes values necessary means that the person who seeks his life must act morally in order to achieve values to sustain his life. That is the foundation for moral obligation.
As such, morality is egoistic through and through. Egoism concerns not merely one corner of a broader moral code that addresses many independent questions. Egoism is infused in morality from the outset, in the very nature of value and the logic of its pursuit. There is not one argument for morality and another argument for egoism. Rather, the selfish purpose of securing one’s life establishes the answers to all of morality’s more particular questions concerning what constitute virtues and vices and how a person should act. What are the stakes of living morally? A person’s own life. The reason to follow any specific moral principle is that doing so is in one’s interest.
At root, the case for egoism is the case for morality. It rests in the fact that if a person does not nourish his existence, he will die. Human beings survive by acting for their own benefit. Egoism simply is the policy of living—of wanting to live and acting to live, of having that purpose and deliberately pursuing it.
The necessity of egoism is corroborated by several pockets of egoism in popular practices. For all the attacks on selfishness and lip service to serving others that we routinely encounter, we also find ample areas in which people consider it perfectly appropriate to seek one’s own prosperity. “Charity begins at home” is a familiar justification for refusing to deny oneself for the benefit of others. “Don’t be a door- mat,” friends counsel one another; “don’t allow yourself to be taken advantage of ”; “stand up for yourself.” Few parents have qualms about doing all they can for the good of their children; a woman who devotes more energy to other people’s
8 From Tara Smith, Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality (lanham, MA: Roman & littlefield, 2000). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Tara Smith (Photo credit: Godfrey Joseph.)
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children is condemned as a neglectful mother far more than she is praised as a moral ideal. Yet the devotion to one’s children is selfish insofar as it is based on one’s love for them. One cares for these children as opposed to countless others because of their value to the parent; they are among the values that significantly contribute to the parent’s flourishing.
For that matter, consider a child’s own actions. When an infant thirstily sucks its mother’s milk or begins to crawl or walk and we react with encouraging exclama- tions of “good boy!” what are we celebrating but the fact that these activities are good for him? That he is acquiring the ability to do things that will help him become strong and self-sufficient—in short, the sorts of things necessary for him to flourish?
We could extend this list at length. Self-defense is hardly considered a sin; no one complains that a victim who defends herself from a rapist is being selfish. While profit is widely vilified, most people consider it perfectly reasonable to seek a raise or lucrative employment benefits. Similarly, most people think it reasonable to “vote their pocketbooks,” supporting political policies and candidates that serve their interests. Indeed, people most often object to self-interested politics when they suspect that others’ pursuit of their interests will prove costly to them.
Business is the realm most often treated as an enclave from altruistic demands, governed by rules of its own that permit self-interest. This stands to reason. As the realm of production and trade, business places people’s survival most directly at stake. If a person does not make a living—enabling him to eat, pay the rent, and so on—he will die. In business, the failure to be egoistic carries obvious and dramatic consequences.
My point in observing these instances of egoism is not that people are all truly egoists, at heart. People’s practices and attitudes toward egoism tend to be confused and inconsistent. I wish simply to indicate the considerable regions in which people do, unapologetically, endorse and engage in self-interested action. The reason for this is the fact that we must practice egoism. We “tolerate” egoism because we depend on egoism. Living requires that a person act to promote his own interest. A consistently practiced renunciation of self-interest would be utterly impossible. No one could survive on such a policy.
Assessments of egoism have usually been skewed by assumptions that egoism’s structure is parallel to altruism’s. Altruism is the view that moral goodness “consists in always denying oneself for the sake of others” (E. J. Bond, “Theories of the Good,” Encyclopedia of Ethics, ed. Lawrence Becker). The contention that a person should sacrifice himself for others places primary significance on the identity of the beneficiary of a person’s actions. The fact that altruism poses a “me or you” choice leads people to presume that egoism must also center around this choice. Thus, egoism is typically portrayed as an answer to the question: who should a person place first, himself or others?
The history of moral philosophy testifies to the influence of altruism on our image of egoism. For the classical Greeks, “self-concern was not only considered acceptable, but the foundation of the moral life” (Kelly Rogers, ed., Self-Interest: An Anthology of Philosophical Perspectives). Yet many scholars resist interpreting the Greeks as egoists—in large part, I suspect, because their egoism was not elaborated in terms of a contest with altruism. Aristotle’s egoism, for example, did not consist in an ex- plicit renunciation of altruism so much as in counseling the achievement of personal excellence by developing qualities most conducive to the agent’s eudaimonia. Indeed,
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egoism was not a keen issue in moral philosophy until the widespread preaching of service to others. According to Alasdair Maclntyre, the debate between egoism and altruism did not appear in full-fledged form until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Maclntyre, “Egoism and Altruism,” Enyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards). It is also noteworthy that the Greeks’ conception of a good life as an inte- grated whole is antithetical to the compartmentalized conception of ethics that al- truism both relies on and encourages. Altruism is more tenable when confined to narrow corners of life, demanded only in select realms. Such limited arenas for al- truism allow the egoism in other arenas that a person’s life requires. If ethics is con- ceived as all-encompassing, however, with the same basic principles governing all areas of activity, the consequences of the policies of altruism and egoism are more nakedly exposed. Altruism must be contained to limited spheres, in other words, because if it were conscientiously practiced across the board, it would result in self- destruction. (Another part of the reason for reluctance to consider Aristotle an egoist may simply be the assumption that “good guys” can’t be egoists.)
However entrenched it may be, the “me or you” alternative is a misleading framework for understanding egoism. The mandate for egoism emerges from con- sidering the basis of all moral instruction, not merely the question of how to treat others. Egoism is the course prescribed in order for anyone to live. Everyone is an end in himself; no one is born under an obligation to place others’ lives above his own. Each person should pursue his own flourishing, and no alternatives to self- interested action can achieve this end. While the injunction to pursue one’s own interest carries the implication that one should not treat others’ interests as weight- ier than one’s own, one’s relationship to others is not what egoism is about. Egoism would be equally imperative if a person were alone on a deserted island, for the fact that necessitates egoism is not other people, but one’s own nature. Whether a person is situated all by himself or in a city of millions, his life depends on life- promoting (i.e., self-interested) action.
Egoist positions are contrasted with what is usually called altruism, that is, acting for the sake of other people’s interests. There are degrees of altruism. One may be altruistic be- cause one acts morally because one recognizes an obligation to other people. Or one may be altruistic in actually taking another person’s interests (such as those of one’s lover or brother or sister) as important or even more important than one’s own. Altruism can also be divided into two distinct theses, although these are not so often distinguished. Psychologi- cal altruism says that people “naturally” act for each other’s sakes. (This thesis is defended by several important philosophers in later sections.) it has rarely been argued, however, that people are compelled to act altruistically. Thus psychological egoism is usually defended for all cases; psychological altruism, in contrast, is defended only for some cases. Ethical altruism, on the other hand, says that people ought to act with each other’s interests in mind. This is, of course, a basic statement of morality, best summarized in the so-called Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” (We shall see a modern version of this ancient teaching in the philosophy of Kant.)
The most familiar and most difficult question is about psychological egoism: is it true that people act only for their own self-interest? A famous story about Abraham lincoln is an apt illustration of the thesis. As lincoln was arguing the psychological egoist position with a friend, his coach was passing a mud slide where a mother pig was squealing as her piglets
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were drowning. lincoln stopped the coach, saved the piglets, then moved on. His friend asked him whether that wasn’t a clear case of altruism. lincoln replied: “Why that was the very essence of selfishness. i should have had no peace of mind all day had i gone on and left that suffering old sow worrying over those piglets. i did it to get peace of mind, don’t you see?”9
Many actions are based upon self-interest and are “selfish” without any question. The question is, are there any actions that are not based on self-interest? lincoln’s response is an excellent example because it would seem as if his action is not for selfish reasons at all. yet, according to him, there was a selfish reason behind his actions—his own sense of satisfac- tion and “peace of mind.” Could this be true of all our actions?
Consider the following debate between two famous ancient Chinese philosophers.
D. Are We Naturally Selfish? A Debate At the bottom of the ongoing debates about justice, gov- ernment, and the role of society in constituting and en- forcing justice, a deeper debate about human nature can always be found. in the Western tradition, we know this debate by way of two thousand years of arguments about so-called original sin—that is, the idea that people are es- sentially flawed just by virtue of the fact that they are human. if this is so—if people are, for instance, naturally selfish—then that fact would seem to dictate corrective governmental or cultural sanctions. Thomas Hobbes’s view of man in the state of nature makes this point quite clear. On the other hand, if one has a more benign view of human nature, as, for example, in the philosophy of Jean- Jacques Rousseau, then the sanctions of the state should be more modest, perhaps even minimal. (These views of Hobbes and Rousseau will be considered later in this chapter.) But here we look at a different version of that debate in the philosophies of ancient China. On the one hand, there is the philosophy of Mencius, a disciple of the great Chinese philosopher Confucius. Mencius argues that humanity is basically benevolent, that every person has within him or her a sense of compassion for others. Against this view, the later Confucian philosopher Xunzi argues that people are naturally selfish and that cultivation is necessary to correct their evil dispositions.
On Human Nature: Man Is Good B Y Mencius10
6. Mencius said, “No man is devoid of a heart sen- sitive to the suffering of others. Such a sensitive heart was possessed by the Former Kings and this manifested itself in compassionate government.
9 Quoted in F. Sharp, Ethics (New york: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1928). 10 Mencius, Human Nature, trans. D. C. lau, (New york: Penguin Classics, 1970), pp. 82–83. Copyright © 1970 by D. C. lau. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books, ltd.
Mencius believed that we would all feel compelled to stop a young child from harming himself or herself. (© iStockphoto.com/Anyka)
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With such a sensitive heart behind compas- sionate government, it was as easy to rule the Empire as rolling it on your palm.
“My reason for saying that no man is devoid of a heart sensitive to the suffering of others is this. Suppose a man were, all of a sudden, to
see a young child on the verge of falling into a well. He would certainly be moved to compassion, not because he wanted to get in the good graces of the parents, nor because he wished to win the praise of his fellow villagers or friends, nor yet be- cause he disliked the cry of the child. From this it can be seen that whoever is devoid of the heart of compassion is not human, whoever is devoid of the heart of shame is not human, whoever is devoid of the heart of courtesy and modesty is not human, and whoever is devoid of the heart of right and wrong is not human. The heart of compassion is the germ of benevolence; the heart of shame, of dutifulness; the heart of courtesy and modesty, of observance of the rites; the heart of right and wrong, of wisdom. Man has these four germs just as he has four limbs. For a man possessing these four germs to deny his own potentialities is for him to cripple himself; for him to deny the potentialities of his prince is for him to cripple his prince. If a man is able to develop all these four germs that he possesses, it will be like a fire starting up or a spring coming through. When these are fully developed, he can take under his protection the whole realm within the Four Seas, but if he fails to develop them, he will not be able to serve his parents.”
7. Mencius said, “Is the maker of arrows really more unfeeling than the maker of armour? He is afraid lest he should fail to harm people, whereas the maker of armour is afraid lest he should fail to protect them. The case is similar with the sorcerer-doctor and the coffin-maker. For this reason one cannot be too careful in the choice of one’s calling.
“Confucius said, ‘The best neighbourhood is where benevolence is to be found. Not to live in such a neighbourhood when one has the choice cannot by any means be con- sidered wise.’ Benevolence is the high honour bestowed by Heaven and the peaceful abode of man. Not to be benevolent when nothing stands in the way is to show a lack of wisdom. A man neither benevolent nor wise, devoid of courtesy and dutifulness, is a slave. A slave ashamed of serving is like a maker of bows ashamed of making bows, or a maker of arrows ashamed of making arrows. If one is ashamed, there is no better remedy than to practise benevolence. Benevolence is like archery: an archer makes sure his stance is correct before letting fly the arrow, and if he fails to hit the mark, he does not hold it against his victor. He simply seeks the cause within himself.”
F RO M “Human Nature Is Evil” B Y Xunzi11
The nature of man is evil; his goodness is acquired. His nature being what it is, man is born, first, with a desire for gain. If this desire
is followed, strife will result and courtesy will disappear. Second, man is born with
Mencius (372–289 b.c.e.)
A Confucian philosopher who emphasized our natural compassion and virtue.
11 Wing-Tsit Chan, Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy. Copyright © 1963, renewed 1991 by Princeton university Press. Reprinted by permission.
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envy and hate. If these tendencies are followed, injury and cruelty will abound and loyalty and faithfulness will disappear. Third, man is born with passions of the ear and eye as well as the love of sound and beauty. If these passions are followed, ex- cesses and disorderliness will spring up and decorum and righteousness will disap- pear. Hence to give rein to man’s original nature and to yield to man’s emotions will assuredly lead to strife and disorderliness, and he will revert to a state of barbarism. Therefore it is only under the influence of teachers and laws and the guidance of the rules of decorum and righteousness that courtesy will be observed, etiquette respected, and order restored. From all this it is evident that the nature of man is evil and that his goodness is acquired.
Crooked wood needs to undergo steaming and bending by the carpenter’s tools; then only is it straight. Blunt metal needs to undergo grinding and whetting; then only is it sharp. Now the original nature of man is evil, so he must submit himself to teachers and laws before he can be just; he must submit himself to the rules of decorum and righteousness before he can be orderly. On the other hand, without teachers and laws, men are biased and unjust; without decorum and righteousness, men are rebellious and disorderly. In ancient times the sage-kings knew that man’s nature was evil and therefore biased and unjust, rebellious and disorderly. There- upon they created the codes of decorum and righteousness and established laws and ordinances in order to bend the nature of man and set it right, and in order to trans- form his nature and guide it. All men are thus made to conduct themselves in a manner that is orderly and in accordance with the Way. At present, those men who are influenced by teachers and laws, who have accumulated culture and learning, and who are following the paths of decorum and righteousness, are the gentlemen. On the other hand those who give rein to their nature, who indulge in their will- fulness, and who disregard decorum and righteousness, are the inferior men. From all this it is evident that the nature of man is evil and that his goodness is acquired.
Mencius says: “The reason man is ready to learn is that his nature is originally good.” I reply: This is not so. This is due to a lack of knowledge about the original nature of man and of understanding of the distinction between what is natural and what is acquired. Original nature is a heavenly endowment; it cannot be learned, and it cannot be striven after. As to rules of decorum and righteousness, they have been brought forth by the sages, they can be attained by learning, and they can be achieved by striving. That which cannot be learned and cannot be striven after and rests with Heaven is what I call original nature. That which can be attained by learning and achieved by striving and rests with man is what I call acquired char- acter. This is the distinction between original nature and acquired character. Now by the nature of man, the eye has the faculty of seeing and the ear has the faculty of hearing. But the keenness of the faculty of sight is inseparable from the eye, and the keenness of the faculty of hearing is inseparable from the ear. It is evident that keenness of sight and keenness of hearing cannot be learned.
Mencius says: “The original nature of man is good; but because men all ruin it and lose it, it becomes evil.” I reply: In this he is gravely mistaken. Regarding the nature of man, as soon as he is born, he tends to depart from its original state and depart from its natural disposition, and he is bent on ruining it and losing it. From all this, it is evident that the nature of man is evil and that his goodness is acquired.
“Crooked wood needs to undergo steaming and bending by the carpenter’s tools; then only is it straight. Blunt metal needs to undergo grinding and whetting; then only is it sharp. Now the original nature of man is evil, so he must submit himself to teachers and laws before he can be just.” — X U N Z I
Xunzi (298–230 b.c.e.)
A Confucian philosopher who emphasized the importance of cul- ture in replacing man’s natural selfishness with virtue.
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To say that man’s original nature is good means that it can become beautiful without leaving its original state and it can become beneficial without leaving its natural disposition. This is to maintain that beauty pertains to the original state and disposition and goodness pertains to the heart and mind in the same way as the keenness of the faculty of sight is inseparable from the eye and the keenness of the faculty of hearing is inseparable from the ear, just as we say that the eye is keen in seeing or the ear is keen in hearing. Now as to the nature of man, when he is hungry he desires to be filled, when he is cold he desires warmth, when he is tired he desires rest. This is man’s natural disposition. But now a man may be hungry and yet in the presence of elders he dare not be the first to eat. This is because he has to yield precedence to someone. He may be tired and yet he dare not take a rest. This is because he has to labor in the place of someone. For a son to yield to his father and a younger brother to yield to his older brother, for a son to labor in the place of his father and a younger brother to labor in the place of his older brother— both of these kinds of actions are opposed to man’s original nature and contrary to man’s feeling. Yet they are the way of the filial son and in accordance with the rules of decorum and righteousness. It appears if a person follows his natural disposition he will show no courtesy, and if he shows courtesy he is acting contrary to his natural disposition. From all this it is evident that the nature of man is evil and that his goodness is acquired.
It may be asked: “If man’s original nature is evil, whence do the rules of deco- rum and righteousness arise?” I reply: All rules of decorum and righteousness are
William Blake’s The body of Abel found by Adam and Eve. The story of Cain and Abel suggests that evil behavior has been part of the human world (virtually) since the beginning. (Tate, London/Art Resource, NY)
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the products of the acquired virtue of the sage and not the products of the nature of man. Thus, the potter presses the clay and makes the vessel—but the vessel is the product of the potter’s acquired skill and not the product of his original nature. Or again, the craftsman hews pieces of wood and makes utensils—but utensils are the product of the carpenter’s acquired skills and not the product of his original nature. The sage gathers many ideas and thoughts and becomes well versed in human affairs, in order to bring forth the rules of deco- rum and righteousness and establish laws and in- stitutions. So then the rules of decorum and righteousness and laws and institutions are simi- larly the products of the acquired virtue of the sage and not the products of his original nature.
. . . Man wishes to be good because his nature is
evil. If a person is unimportant he wishes to be important, if he is ugly he wishes to be beautiful, if he is confined he wishes to be at large, if he is poor he wishes to be rich, if he is lowly he wishes to be honored—whatever a person does not have within himself, he seeks from without. But the rich do not wish for wealth and the honorable do not wish for position, for whatever a person has within himself he does not seek from without. From this it may be seen that man wishes to be good because his nature is evil. Now the original nature of man is really without decorum and righ- teousness, hence he strives to learn and seeks to obtain them.
The arguments that are still considered to be the most powerful and definitive against psychological egoism were formulated as sermons by an English bishop, Joseph Butler. Bishop Butler argues that such reasoning as lincoln’s turns on a number of fallacies. Butler begins by accepting the distinction between “private good and a person’s own preservation and happiness” and “respect to society and the promotion of public good and the happi- ness of society.” But then he insists that these are not, as the egoists argue, always in conflict and fighting against each other. To the contrary, they are almost always in perfect harmony.
Against Egoism B Y Joseph Butler12
From this review and comparison of the nature of man as respecting self and as respecting society, it will plainly appear that there are as real and the same kind of indications in human nature that we were made for society and to do good to our fellow creatures, as that we were intended to take care of our own life and health and private good; and that the same objections lie against one of these assertions as against the other.
Are we naturally selfish? (© iStockphoto.com/den0909)
12 Joseph Butler, Sermons (Boston: Hillard, Gray, little, and Wilkins, 1827).
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First, there is a natural principle of benevolence in man, which is in some degree to society what self-love is to the individual. And if there be in mankind any disposition to friendship; if there be any such thing as compassion, for compassion is momentary love; if there be any such thing as the paternal or filial affections; if there be any
affection in human nature the object and end of which is the good of another—this is itself benevolence or the love of another. Be it ever so short, be it in ever so low a degree, or ever so unhappily confined, it proves the assertion and points out what we were designed for, as really as though it were in a higher degree and more extensive. I must however remind you that though benevolence and self-love are different, though the former tends most directly to public good, and the latter to private, yet they are so perfectly coincident that the greatest satisfactions to ourselves depend upon our having benevolence in a due degree, and that self-love is one chief security of our right behavior toward society. It may be added that their mutual coinciding, so that we can scarce promote one without the other, is equally a proof that we were made for both.
Secondly, this will further appear, from observing that the several passions and affections, which are distinct both from benevolence and self-love, do in general con- tribute and lead us to public good as really as to private. It might be thought too minute and particular, and would carry us too great a length, to distinguish between and compare together the several passions or appetites distinct from benevolence, whose primary use and intention is the security and good of society; and the passions distinct from self-love, whose primary intention and design is the security and good of the individual. It is enough to the present argument that desire of esteem from others, contempt and esteem of them, love of society as distinct from affection to the good of it, indignation against successful vice—that these are public affections or passions, have an immediate respect to others, naturally lead us to regulate our be- havior in such a manner as will be of service to our fellow creatures. If any or all of these may be considered likewise as private affections, as tending to private good,
this does not hinder them from being public af- fections, too, or destroy the good influence of them upon society, and their tendency to public good. It may be added that as persons without any conviction from reason of the desirableness of life would yet of course preserve it merely from the appetite of hunger, so by acting merely from regard (suppose) to reputation, without any consideration of the good of others, men often contribute to public good. In both these instances they are plainly instruments in the hands of another, in the hands of Providence, to carry on ends, the preservation of the individual and good of society, which they themselves have not in their view or intention. The sum is, men have various appetites, passions, and particular affections, quite distinct both from self-love and from benevolence—all of these have a tendency to promote both public and private good, and
Bishop Joseph Butler (1692–1752)
A powerful English clergyman who formulated what are still recog- nized as the standard arguments against psychological egoism in his Fifteen Sermons (1726).
Butler argues that we have a natural tendency toward benevolence toward others, and that we can hardly promote our own well-being without promoting that of others (and vice versa). (© iStockphoto.com/ Elena Elisseeva)
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may be considered as respecting others and ourselves equally and in common; but some of them seem most immediately to respect others, or tend to public good, others of them most immediately to respect self, or tend to private good; as the former are not benevolence, so the latter are not self-love; neither sort are instances of our love either to ourselves or others, but only instances of our Maker’s care and love both of the individual and the species, and proofs that He intended we should be instruments of good to each other, as well as that we should be so to ourselves.
Thirdly, there is a principle of reflection in men by which they distinguish be- tween, approve and disapprove, their own actions. We are plainly constituted such sort of creatures as to reflect upon our own nature. The mind can take a view of what passes within itself, its propensions, aversions, passions, affections, as respect- ing such objects and in such degrees, and of the several actions consequent there- upon. In this survey it approves of one, disapproves of another, and toward a third is affected in neither of these ways, but is quite indifferent. This principle in man by which he approves or disapproves his heart, temper, and actions, is conscience. . . . That this faculty tends to restrain men from doing mischief to each other, and leads them to do good, is too manifest to need being insisted upon. Thus a parent has the affection of love to his children; this leads him to take care of, to educate, to make due provision for them; the natural affection leads to this, but the reflec- tion that it is his proper business, what belongs to him, that it is right and com- mendable so to do—this added to the affection becomes a much more settled principle and carries him on through more labor and difficulties for the sake of his children than he would undergo from that affection alone, if he thought it, and the course of action it led to, either indifferent or criminal. This indeed is impossible, to do that which is good and not to approve of it; for which reason they are fre- quently not considered as distinct, though they really are, for men often approve of the actions of others which they will not imitate, and likewise do that which they approve not. It cannot possibly be denied that there is this principle of reflection or conscience in human nature. Suppose a man to relieve an innocent person in great distress, suppose the same man afterwards, in the fury of anger, to do the greatest mischief to a person who had given no just cause of offense; to aggravate the injury, add the circumstances of former friendship and obligation from the injured person, let the man who is supposed to have done these two different actions coolly reflect upon them afterwards, without regard to their consequences to himself; to assert that any common man would be affected in the same way toward these different actions, that he would make no distinction between them, but approve or disap- prove them equally, is too glaring a falsity to need being confuted. There is there- fore this principle of reflection or conscience in mankind.
. . .
If it be said that there are persons in the world who are in great measure without the natural affections toward their fellow creatures, there are likewise instances of persons without the common natural affections to themselves; but the nature of man is not to be judged of by either of these, but by what appears in the common world, in the bulk of mankind.
in short, Butler argues that merely acting on one’s own desires does not make an action self- ish, for all actions are, in some sense, based on our desires, but at least some of those desires
“If it be said that there are persons in the world who are in great measure without the natural affections toward their fellow creatures, there are likewise instances of persons without the common natural affections to themselves; but the nature of man is not to be judged of by either of these, but by what appears in the common world, in the bulk of mankind.” — J O S E P H B U T L E R
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are desires to serve someone else’s interests. Thus the “object” of desire is what makes an act selfish or unselfish, not merely the fact that one’s own desire is acted upon. Nor can simply acting with some benefit to oneself make an action selfish, for even if we agreed that an act gives us some benefit (for example, peace of mind), it may still be the case that most of the ben- efit is for someone else. Even if peace of mind typically follows virtuous actions, that does not show that our motivation is selfish. The satisfaction that accompanies good acts is itself not the motivation of the act. Here is the answer to lincoln. His act was, despite his philosophical claims, an altruistic one; his satisfaction was not the motive of the act but only its consequence.
• How are psychological egoism and ethical egoism distinguished? Do you agree with either? Are you convinced by the story of the magical ring of Gyges, a story that suggests that a person who could do wrong with impunity would do so?
• Mencius argues that human beings “by nature” have sympathy for one another. Why do you think, then, that some people display utter callousness toward others, and we all find it difficult to sympathize with some people?
• What do you think Mencius means when he quotes Confucius as saying, “A man neither benevolent nor wise, devoid of courtesy and dutifulness, is a slave”?
• Xunzi argues that people are by nature evil and unjust and that they require teach- ers and laws to become good and just. if so, then how can we be sure that our teachings and laws are just and good, since they are made and taught by human beings whose nature is evil? Wouldn’t good teachings and laws require some kernel of natural goodness? Does Xunzi offer a solution to this problem?
• Are ethical altruism and psychological egoism compatible? How does Bishop Butler reconcile the two?
• How is it that our private good is so bound up with the public good?
E. Morality as Virtue: Aristotle Aristotle’s Ethics (properly called The Nicomachean Ethics) is the best systematic guide to ancient Greek moral and ethical thinking. The significant feature of Greek ethics is its stress on being virtuous as opposed to merely following moral rules. Aristotle’s concept of virtue is based on a very special conception of man as a rational being. Virtue, accordingly, is ra- tional activity, activity in accordance with a rational principle. Having defined virtue in this way, Aristotle can then defend, for example, courage as a virtue by showing that the coura- geous man is more rational than the coward.
Aristotle arrives at his conception of man as an essentially rational being by asking what “the natural good for man” is. This, he argues, will be discovered by finding what all men desire “for its own sake” and not “for the sake of anything else.”
F RO M The Nicomachean Ethics B Y Aristotle13
Every art and every kind of inquiry, and likewise every act and purpose, seems to aim at some good; and so it has been well said that the good is that at which
13 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, 8th ed., trans. by F. H. Peters (london: K. Paul, Trench, Tubner & Co., ltd., 1888).
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everything aims. But a difference is observable among these aims or ends. What is aimed at is sometimes the exercise of a faculty, sometimes a certain result beyond that exercise. And where there is an end beyond that act, there the result is better than the exercise of the faculty. Now since there are many kinds of actions and many arts and sciences, it follows that there are many ends also; e.g. health is the end of medicine, ships of ship- building, victory of the art of war, and wealth of economy. But when several of these are subordi- nated to some one art or science,—as the making of bridles and other trappings to the art of horse- manship, and this in turn, along with all else that the soldier does, to the art of war, and so on,— then the end of the master art is always more de- sired than the end of the subordinate arts, since these are pursued for its sake. And this is equally true whether the end in view be the mere exercise of a faculty or something beyond that, as in the above instances.
If then in what we do there be some end which we wish for on its own account, choosing all the others as means to this, but not every end without exception as a means to something else (for so we should go on ad infinitum, and desire would be left void and objectless),—this evidently will be the good or the best of all things.
We see here one of Aristotle’s favorite logical strategies—the idea that every act is for the sake of something else (we want to earn a dollar to buy ourselves some food, and we want that food to satisfy our hunger). But since there can be no “infinite regress,” there must be some ultimate end. Aristotle examines two popular conceptions of this ultimate end that is the natural good for man: pleasure and success. He rejects both because neither pleasure nor success is desired for its own sake. Rather, happiness is what all men desire for its own sake, and it is therefore the natural good for man.
It seems that men not unreasonably take their notions of the good or happiness from the lives actually led, and that the masses who are the least refined suppose it to be pleasure, which is the reason why they aim at nothing higher than the life of enjoyment. For the most conspicuous kinds of life are three: this life of enjoyment, the life of the statesman, and, thirdly, the contemplative life. The mass of men show themselves utterly slavish in their preference for the life of brute beasts, but their views receive consideration because many of those in high places have the tastes of Sardanapalus. Men of refinement with a practical turn prefer honour; for I suppose we may say that honour is the aim of the statesman’s life. But this seems too superficial to be the good we are seeking: for it appears to depend upon those who give rather than upon those who receive it; while we have a presentiment that the good is something that is peculiarly a man’s own and can scarce be taken away from him. Moreover, these men seem to pursue honour in order that they may be
Raphael contrasts Aristotle’s down-to-earth approach with Plato’s theory of transcendent Forms. (Scala/Art Resource, NY)
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assured of their own excellence,—at least, they wish to be honoured by men of sense, and by those who know them, and on the ground of their virtue or excel- lence. It is plain, then, that in their view, at any rate, virtue or excellence is better than honour; and perhaps we should take this to be the end of the statesman’s life, rather than honour. But virtue or excellence also appears too incomplete to be what we want; for it seems that a man might have virtue and yet be asleep or be inactive all his life, and, moreover, might meet with the greatest disasters and mis- fortunes; and no one would maintain that such a man is happy, except for argu- ment’s sake. But we will not dwell on these matters now, for they are sufficiently discussed in the popular treatises. The third kind of life is the life of contemplation: we will treat of it further on. As for the money-making life, it is something quite contrary to nature; and wealth evidently is not the good of which we are in search, for it is merely useful as a means to something else. So we might rather take plea- sure and virtue or excellence to be ends than wealth; for they are chosen on their own account. But it seems that not even they are the end, though much breath has been wasted in attempts to show that they are.
. . . Let us return once more to the question, what this good can be of which we are
in search. It seems to be different in different kinds of action and in different arts,— one thing in medicine and another in war, and so on. What then is the good in each of these cases? Surely that for the sake of which all else is done. And that in medicine is health, in war is victory, in building is a house,—a different thing in each different case, but always, in whatever we do and in whatever we choose, the end. For it is always for the sake of the end that all else is done. If then there be one end of all that man does, this end will be the realizable good,—or these ends, if there be more than one.
By this generalization our argument is brought to the same point as before. This point we must try to explain more clearly. We see that there are many ends. But some of these are chosen only as means, as wealth, flutes, and the whole class of instruments. And so it is plain that not all ends are final. But the best of all things must, we conceive, be something final. If then there be only one final end, this will be what we are seeking—or if there be more than one, then the most final of them. Now that which is pursued as an end in itself is more final than that which is pur- sued as means to something else, and that which is never chosen as means than that which is chosen both as an end in itself and as means, and that is strictly final which is always chosen as an end in itself and never as means.
Happiness seems more than anything else to answer to this description: for we always choose it for itself, and never for the sake of something else; while honour and pleasure and reason, and all virtue or excellence, we choose partly indeed for themselves (for, apart from any result, we should choose each of them), but partly also for the sake of happiness, supposing that they will help to make us happy. But no one chooses happiness for the sake of these things, or as a means to anything else at all. We seem to be led to the same conclusion when we start from the notion of self-sufficiency. The final good is thought to be self-sufficing [or all-sufficing]. In applying this term we do not regard a man as an individual leading a solitary life, but we also take account of parents, children, wife, and, in short, friends and fel- low-citizens generally, since man is naturally a social being. Some limit must indeed be set to this; for if you go on to parents and descendants and friends of friends, you will never come to a stop. But this we will consider further on: for the
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present we will take self-sufficing to mean what by itself makes life desirable and in want of noth- ing. And happiness is believed to answer to this description. And further, happiness is believed to be the most desirable thing in the world, and that not merely as one among other good things: if it were merely one among other good things [so that other things could be added to it], it is plain that the addition of the least of other goods must make it more desirable; for the addition becomes a sur- plus of good, and of two goods the greater is always more desirable. Thus it seems that happi- ness is something final and self-sufficing, and is the end of all that man does.
We need some idea of what happiness is, and Aristo- tle here gives us his idea: Happiness is living according to rationality, thereby exercising our most vital human faculty.
But perhaps the reader thinks that though no one will dispute the statement that happiness is the best thing in the world, yet a still more precise definition of it is needed. This will best be gained, I think, by asking, What is the function of man? For as the goodness and the excellence of a piper or a sculptor, or the practiser of any art, and gen- erally of those who have any function or business to do, lies in that function, so man’s good would seem to lie in his function, if he has one. But can we suppose that, while a carpenter [or] a cobbler has a function and a business of his own, man has no business and no function assigned him by nature? Nay, surely as his several members, eye and hand and foot, plainly have each his own function, so we must suppose that man also has some function over and above all these.
What then is it? Life evidently he has in common even with the plants, but we want that which is peculiar to him. We must exclude, therefore, the life of mere nutrition and growth. Next to this comes the life of sense; but this too he plainly shares with horses and cattle and all kinds of animals. There remains then the life whereby he acts—the life of his rational nature, with its two sides or divisions, one rational as obeying reason, the other rational as having and exercising reason. But as this ex- pression is ambiguous, we must be understood to mean thereby the life that consists in the exercise [not the mere possession] of the faculties; for this seems to be more properly entitled to the name.
The function of man, then, is exercise of his vital faculties [or soul] on one side in obedience to reason, and on the other side with reason. But what is called the function of a man of any profession and the function of a man who is good in that
The Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, rewarded those who showed excellence in battle. A virtue, according to Aristotle, is a particular excellence that has become habitual. (© Shutterstock .com/Slimewoo)
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profession are, generically the same, e.g., of a harper and of a good harper; and this holds in all cases without exception, only that in the case of the latter his su- perior excellence at his work is added; for we say a harper’s function is to harp, and a good harper’s to harp well. Man’s function then being, as we say, a kind of life—that is to say, exercise of his faculties and action of various kinds with reason—the good man’s function is to do this well and beautifully [or nobly]. But the function of anything is done well when it is done in accordance with the proper excellence of that thing. If this be so the result is that the good of man is exercise of his faculties in accordance with excellence or virtue, or, if there be more than one, in accordance with the best and most complete virtue. But there must also be a full term of years for this exercise; for one swallow or one fine day does not make a spring, nor does one day or any small space of time make a blessed or happy man.
it is important to notice the structure of Aristotle’s argument here, for you will see it emerge often in philosophy as well as in your own thoughts. The argument is an argument on the basis of what is “natural” to man. The good for man is that which is “natural” to him, and that means, according to Aristotle, what is special or unique to him as well. Thus mere “nutrition and growth,” that is, eating and keeping physically healthy, cannot in themselves be happiness (although they are necessary for happiness) because even plants, Aristotle says, have this “goal.” Nor can happiness lie in simple experience, even exciting experi- ences, since even a cow has this as the “end” of its life. What is unique to man, Aristotle concludes, is his rationality, his ability to act on rational principles. But action according to rational principles, is, as we shall see, precisely what Aristotle thinks virtue is. Thus happiness turns out to be an “activity of the soul in accordance with perfect virtue.” (This is the key phrase of his work.) This “perfect virtue” is also called “excellence,” and Aristotle’s ethics is often called an ethics of self-realization, the goal of which is to make each individual as per- fect as possible in all ways:
Indeed, in addition to what we have said, a man is not good at all unless he takes pleasure in noble deeds. No one would call a man just who did not take pleasure in doing justice, nor generous who took no pleasure in acts of generosity, and so on. If this be so, the manifestations of excellence will be pleasant in themselves. But they are also both good and noble, and that in the highest degree—at least, if the good man’s judgment about them is right, for this is his judgment. Happiness, then, is at once the best and noblest and pleasantest thing in the world.
So far, however, it seems as if virtue and happiness are strictly individual matters. But this is not the case. Aristotle’s well-known belief that man is a social animal is as important as these other principles. Thus, the principles of reason and rationality that enter into his Ethics will have the interests of society as well as the individual built into them. (Aristotle even says that there is no real distinction between ethics and politics and that the proper end of ethics is politics.) virtue, accordingly, is also a social conception, and most of the virtues that Aristotle discusses have much to do with one’s role in society. (Courage, for example, is particularly applicable to soldiers.) Happiness in general, therefore, has its social dimen- sions. For example, Aristotle argues that both respect and honor are ingredients in the good life. For Aristotle, the happy person, the virtuous person, is mainly a good citizen. it is necessary to add, however, that the only people who could qualify for Aristotle’s good life were Greek citizens, which meant that women, children, slaves, and anyone who did not
“The good of man is exercise of his faculties in accordance with excellence or virtue, or, if there be more than one, in accordance with the best and most complete virtue.” — A R I S TOT L E
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have the good fortune to be born Greek did not even have a chance at being happy, in Aristotle’s sense.14
Not only does happiness have a social dimension and not only are the virtues socially defined, but the good life, according to Aristotle, must be taught us by society. Accordingly, Aristotle talks a great deal about the need for a “good education,” and he goes so far as to say that if a person has not been brought up “properly,” then no amount of philosophy will be able to make him either virtuous or happy. He also says that young people, because they are “inexperienced in the actions of life” and are “so ruled by their passions,” should not try to learn moral philosophy, which depends upon maturity and rationality. On this point, how- ever, we will ignore Aristotle’s warnings. For growing older and more “mature” is certainly no guarantee of wisdom, and the passions of youth are sometimes more geared toward virtue than the “rationality” of established maturity.
We have already seen Aristotle’s starting point: Every act has its goal (or “good”), and ultimately there is a goal (or “chief good”) toward which all human acts aim, and it is gener- ally called happiness (eudaimonia). But, Aristotle adds, this is not much help, for people give very different accounts of what they take to be the ingredients in happiness. Some say that it is pleasure, others say it is wealth or honor. We have seen Aristotle’s arguments against these views and his conclusion that happiness must be “activity in accordance with rational principle,” which means, virtuous activity. The key to Aristotle’s ethics, then, lies in his con- cept of virtue. virtue leads us to the “telos” or goal (or end) of good activity. That telos is happiness or eudaimonia.
Aristotle distinguishes two kinds of virtues, the practical or moral virtues (courage, gener- osity, and so on) and the intellectual virtues (skill in mathematics and philosophy). Although Aristotle thinks the highest virtue is the intellectual virtue of philosophical contemplation, most of his discussion of virtue centers on the moral virtues. We now take a closer look at how moral virtues are acquired, what Aristotle means by a moral virtue, and what the moral virtues are. Again, bear in mind that the moral virtues have an end or telos; for this reason (as you might recall from Chapter 1) we call Aristotle’s moral theory a teleological theory.
Excellence, then, being of these two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual excellence owes its birth and growth mainly to instruction, and so requires time and experience, while moral excellence is the result of habit or custom and has ac- cordingly in our language received a name formed by a slight change from the word for custom. From this it is plain that none of the moral excellences or virtues is implanted in us by nature; for that which is by nature cannot be altered by train- ing. For instance, a stone naturally tends to fall downwards, and you could not train it to rise upwards, though you tried to do so by throwing it up ten thousand times, nor could you train fire to move downwards, nor accustom anything which naturally behaves in one way to behave in any other way. The virtues, then, come neither by nature nor against nature, but nature gives the capacity for acquiring them, and this is developed by training.
Again, where we do things by nature we get the power first, and put this power forth in act afterwards: as we plainly see in the case of the senses; for it is not by
14 it is necessary to say something about Aristotle’s special notion of happiness, which is not at all like our conception of “feeling happy.” Aristotle’s term (eudaimonia) means more like “living well,” and it includes such matters as one’s status in society and virtuous acts as well as good feelings. No matter how good you feel about yourself—even if you are in a state of ecstasy all the time—you would not be happy in Aristotle’s sense unless you had these other advan- tages and acted virtuously as well.
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constantly seeing and hearing that we acquire those faculties, but, on the contrary, we had the power first and then used it, instead of acquiring the power by the use. But the virtues we acquire by doing the acts, as is the case with the arts too. We learn an art by doing that which we wish to do when we have learned it; we become builders by building, and harpers by harping. And so by doing just acts we become just, and by doing acts of temperance and courage we become temperate and courageous.
. . . Again, both the moral virtues and the correspond-
ing vices result from and are formed by the same acts; and this is the case with the arts also. It is by harping that good harpers and bad harpers alike are produced: and so with builders and the rest; by building well they will become good builders, and bad builders by building badly. Indeed, if it were not so, they would not want anybody to teach them, but would all be born either good or bad at their trades. And it is just the same with the virtues also. It is by our conduct in our intercourse with other men that we become just or unjust, and by acting in circumstances of danger, and training ourselves to feel fear or confidence, that we become courageous or cowardly. So, too, with our animal appetites and the passion of anger; for by behaving in this way or in that on the occasions with which these passions are concerned, some become temperate and gentle, and others profligate and ill-
tempered. In a word, acts of any kind produce habits or characters of the same kind. Hence we ought to make sure that our acts be of a certain kind; for the re- sulting character varies as they vary. It makes no small difference, therefore, whether a man be trained from his youth up in this way or in that, but a great dif- ference, or rather all the difference.
Aristotle’s point here is not just that the virtues are acquired by practice; he is also argu- ing that virtue is a state of character. The virtuous person wants to do virtuous acts, and he does them “naturally.” We sometimes think that we are moral just because we believe in moral principles. But believing is not enough—virtuous action is required. But not even vir- tuous action by itself is enough to make us virtuous. We sometimes think a person is virtuous because he “forces himself” to do what he is supposed to. Not according to Aristotle. The virtuous person is one who does what he is supposed to do because he wants to because it is built into his very character. it is even essential, according to Aristotle, that the virtuous man enjoys being virtuous:
And, further, the life of these men is in itself pleasant. For pleasure is an affection of the soul, and each man takes pleasure in that which he is said to love,—he who loves horses in horses, he who loves sight-seeing in sight-seeing, and in the same way he who loves justice in acts of justice, and generally the lover of excellence or virtue in virtuous acts or the manifestation of excellence. And while with most
The sculpture of Thomas Jefferson in the Jefferson Monument portrays him as a man of contemplation in Aristotle’s sense. He appears full of life and vitality and interested in the world around him. (© Shutterstock.com/Kevin D. Oliver)
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men there is a perpetual conflict between the several things in which they find pleasure, since these are not naturally pleasant, those who love what is noble take pleasure in that which is naturally pleasant. For the manifesta- tions of excellence are naturally pleasant, so that they are both pleasant to them and pleasant in themselves. Their life, then, does not need pleasure to be added to it as an appendage, but contains pleasure in itself.
Here Aristotle gives us perhaps his most famous doctrine, the idea that virtues are “means between the extremes.” This phrase is often misinterpreted, however, to read, “everything in moderation.” What Aristotle teaches is quite different; he tells us that we cannot do too much of a good thing, that is, if it is a virtue. One cannot be too courageous (as opposed to being rash or cowardly) or too just. What he intends by “the means between the extremes” is this:
By the absolute mean, or mean relatively to the thing itself, I understand that which is equidistant from both extremes, and this is one and the same for all. By the mean relatively to us I understand that which is neither too much nor too little for us; and this is not one and the same for all. For in- stance, if ten be too large and two too small, six is the mean relatively to the thing itself: for it exceeds one extreme by the same amount by which it is exceeded by the other extreme: and this is the mean in arithmetical propor- tion. But the mean relatively to us cannot be found in this way. If ten pounds of food is too much for a given man to eat, and two pounds too little, it does not follow that the trainer will order him six pounds: for that also may perhaps be too much for the man in question, or too little; too little for Milo, too much for the beginner. The same holds true in running and wrestling. And so we may say generally that a master in any art avoids what is too much and what is too little, and seeks for the mean and chooses it—not the absolute but the relative mean.
If, then, every art or science perfects its work in this way, looking to the mean and bringing its work up to this standard (so that people are wont to say of a good work that nothing could be taken from it or added to it, implying that excellence is destroyed by excess or deficiency, but secured by observing the mean; and good artists, as we say, do in fact keep their eyes fixed on this in all that they do), and if virtue, like nature, is more exact and better than any art, it follows that virtue also must aim at the mean—virtue of course meaning moral virtue or excellence; for it has to do with passions and actions, and it is these that admit of excess and de- ficiency and the mean. For instance, it is possible to feel fear, confidence, desire, anger, pity, and generally to be affected pleasantly and painfully, either too much or too little, in either case wrongly; but to be thus affected at the right times, and on the right occasions, and towards the right persons, and with the right object, and in the right fashion, is the mean course and the best course, and these are characteristics of virtue. And in the same way our outward acts also admit of excess and deficiency, and the mean or due amount. Virtue, then, has to deal with feelings or passions and with outward acts, in which excess is wrong and defi- ciency also is blamed, but the mean amount is praised, and is right—both of which are characteristics of virtue. Virtue, then, is a kind of moderation inasmuch as it aims at the mean.
Again, there are many ways of going wrong (for evil is infinite in nature, to use a Pythagorean figure, while good is finite), but only one way of going right; so that the one is easy and the other hard—easy to miss the mark and hard to hit. On this
Practice is typically necessary to develop skill in choosing the mean between extremes. (© iStockphoto .com/Anna Bryukhanova)
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account also, then, excess and deficiency are characteristic of vice, hitting the mean is characteristic of virtue.
. . . Virtue, then, is a habit or trained faculty of choice, the characteristic of which
lies in moderation or observance of the mean relatively to the persons concerned, as determined by reason, i.e. by the reason by which the prudent man would de- termine it. And it is a moderation, firstly, inasmuch as it comes in the middle or mean between two vices, one on the side of excess, the other on the side of defect; and, secondly, inasmuch as, while these vices fall short of or exceed the due mea- sure in feeling and in action, it finds and chooses the mean, middling, or moderate amount. Regarded in its essence, therefore, or according to the definition of its nature, virtue is a moderation or middle state, but viewed in its relation to what is best and right it is the extreme of perfection.
But it is not all actions nor all passions that admit of moderation; there are some whose very names imply badness, or malevolence, shamelessness, envy, and, among acts, adultery, theft, murder. These and all other like things are blamed as being bad in themselves, and not merely in their excess or deficiency. It is impossible therefore to go right in them; they are always wrong: rightness and wrongness in such things (e.g. in adultery) does not depend upon whether it is the right person and occasion and manner, but the mere doing of any one of them is wrong. It would be equally absurd to look for moderation or excess or deficiency in unjust cowardly or profligate conduct; for then there would be moderation in excess or deficiency, and excess in excess, and deficiency in deficiency. The fact is that just as there can be no excess or deficiency in temperance or courage because the mean or moderate amount is, in a sense, an extreme, so in these kinds of conduct also there can be no moderation or excess or deficiency, but the acts are wrong however they be done. For, to put it generally, there cannot be moderation in excess or defi- ciency, nor excess or deficiency in moderation.
We see that Aristotle defines “moral virtue” as a mean both in feeling and action. Thus courage is a virtue because the courageous man feels neither too little nor too much fear. His fear is appropriate to the dangerousness of his situation. Because the courageous person feels the right amount of fear, he acts in the right way, neither plunging rashly into danger nor fleeing from it in terror. Now, finally, Aristotle gives us his examples of virtue:
Moderation in the feelings of fear and confidence is courage: of those that exceed, he that exceeds in fearlessness has no name (as often happens), but he that exceeds in confidence is foolhardy, while he that exceeds in fear, but is deficient in confi- dence, is cowardly. Moderation in respect of certain pleasures and also (though to a less extent) certain pains is temperance, while excess is profligacy. But defective- ness in the matter of these pleasures is hardly ever found, and so this sort of people also have as yet received no name: let us put them down as “void of sensibility.” In the matter of giving and taking money, moderation is liberality, excess and defi- ciency are prodigality and illiberality. But both vices exceed and fall short in giving and taking in contrary ways: the prodigal exceeds in spending, but falls short in taking; while the illiberal man exceeds in taking, but falls short in spending. . . . But, besides these, there are other dispositions in the matter of money: there is a moderation which is called magnificence (for the magnificent is not the same as the liberal man: the former deals with large sums, the latter with small), and an excess which is called bad taste or vulgarity, and a deficiency which is called meanness.
“Virtue, then, has to deal with feelings or passions and with outward acts, in which excess is wrong and deficiency also is blamed, but the mean amount is praised, and is right—both of which are characteristics of virtue. Virtue, then, is a kind of moderation inasmuch as it aims at the mean.” — A R I S TOT L E
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. . . With respect to honour and disgrace, there is a moderation which is pride, an excess which may be called vanity, and a de- ficiency which is humility.
But just as we said that liberality is re- lated to magnificence, differing only in that it deals with small sums, so here there is a virtue related to high-mindedness, and differing only in that it is concerned with small instead of great honours. A man may have a due desire for honour, and also more or less than a due desire: he that carries this desire to excess is called ambitious, he that has not enough of it is called unambitious, but he that has the due amount has no name. . . . In the matter of anger also we find excess and deficiency and moderation. The characters themselves hardly have rec- ognized names, but as the moderate man is here called gentle, we will call his charac- ter gentleness; of those who go into ex- tremes, we may take the term wrathful for him who exceeds, with wrathfulness for the vice, and wrathless for him who is deficient, with wrathlessness for his character.
. . . In the matter of truth, then, let us call him who observes the mean a true [or
truthful] person, and observance of the mean truth [or truthfulness]: pretence, when it exaggerates, may be called boasting, and the person a boaster; when it un- derstates, let the names be irony and ironical. With regard to pleasantness in amuse- ment, he who observes the mean may be called witty, and his character wittiness; excess may be called buffoonery, and the man a buffoon; while boorish may stand for the person who is deficient, and boorishness for his character. With regard to pleasantness in the other affairs of life, he who makes himself properly pleasant may be called friendly, and his moderation friendliness; he that exceeds may be called obsequious if he have no ulterior motive, but a flatterer if he has an eye to his own advantage; he that is deficient in this respect, and always makes himself disagree- able, may be called a quarrelsome or peevish fellow.
Moreover, in mere emotions and in our conduct with regard to them, there are ways of observing the mean; for instance, shame is not a virtue, but yet the modest man is praised. For in these matters also we speak of this man as observing the mean, of that man as going beyond it (as the shamefaced man whom the least thing makes shy), while he who is deficient in the feeling, or lacks it altogether, is called shameless; but the term modest is applied to him who observes the mean. Righ- teous indignation, again, hits the mean between envy and malevolence. These have to do with feelings of pleasure and pain at what happens to our neighbours. A man is called righteously indignant when he feels pain at the sight of undeserved prosperity, but your envious man goes beyond him and is pained by the sight of any one in prosperity, while the malevolent man is so far from being pained that he actually exults in the misfortunes of his neighbours.
Jan Steen’s paintings (such as this one, The Merry Company) frequently depict lives of immoderation, precisely the opposite of what Aristotle extols as the good life. (Scala/Art Resource, NY)
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it is worth making a short list of Aristotle’s moral virtues. Many of them we would cite as virtues also, but some of them are far more appropriate to an aristocratic, warrior society than they are to our own. To illustrate Aristotle’s idea that virtues are the means between the extremes, we have included “the extremes” in parentheses for contrast:
COURAGE, particularly courage in battle (extremes: cowardice, rashness). What moti- vates courage, Aristotle tells us, is a sense of honor, not fear of punishment nor desire for reward, nor merely a sense of duty. The courageous man is afraid, he adds, because with- out fear there would be no courage. The man who feels no fear in the face of danger is rather rash.
TEMPERANCE, particularly concerning bodily pleasures, such as sex, food, and drinking (extremes: self-indulgence or piggishness, insensitivity). Notice that Aristotle does not say, along with many modern moralists, that pleasures are either “bad” or unimportant; in fact, he attacks the man who does not enjoy sex, food, and drinking as much as he attacks the man who overindulges himself. He considers such people “not even human.”
LIBERALITY, we would say, charity (extremes: prodigality or waste, meanness or stingi- ness). it is worth noting that Aristotle would ridicule the man who gives more than he can afford to charity as much as he would chastize the man who did not give at all.
MAGNIFICENCE, in other words, how extravagantly you live (extremes: vulgarity, miserli- ness). Aristotle says that one ought to live “like an artist” and spend lavishly. (There is little of the ascetic in Aristotle.)
PRIDE (extremes: humility, vanity). it is worth noting that pride is one of the seven deadly sins in Christian morality while humility is a virtue. in Aristotle’s ethics, this is reversed.
GOOD TEMPER (extremes: irascibility or bad temper, being too easygoing). it is impor- tant to get angry, according to Aristotle, about the right things, but not too much (which “makes a person impossible to live with”).
FRIENDLINESS (extremes: obsequiousness, churlishness). Friendship, for Aristotle, is one of the most important ingredients in the good life, and being friendly, therefore, is an ex- tremely important virtue. But Aristotle does not say that we should be friendly to every- one; the person who is indiscriminately friendly toward everyone is not worth being a friend with at all.
TRUTHFULNESS (extremes: lying, boasting), especially telling the truth about oneself.
WITTINESS (extremes: buffoonery, boorishness). We think of wittiness as a personal asset, but rarely as a virtue. Aristotle thinks that people who are incapable of telling a joke or who tell bad jokes are actually inferior. Fun is an important ingredient in Greek virtuousness.
SHAME. Aristotle calls this a “quasi-virtue” (extreme: shamelessness). We all make mistakes, and it is a sign of virtue, according to Aristotle, that the good man feels shame when he makes them. Shamelessness is a sign of wickedness. Aristotle does not even talk of the other extreme, which he did not consider a problem. (We certainly would. We call it excessive guilt.)
JUSTICE, the cardinal virtue of the Greeks. The need for lawful and fair (which does not mean equal) treatment of other men. (The sense in which justice is a mean between ex- tremes is too complex to discuss here. Aristotle spends a full chapter explaining it. We consider his view of justice in the following chapter.)
Finally, Aristotle gives us his view of the good life for humankind; it is the life of activity in accordance with virtue, but it is also, ideally, a life of intellectual activity, or what he calls “the life of contemplation.” in other words, the happiest person is the philosopher:
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We said that happiness is not a habit or trained faculty. If it were, it would be within the reach of a man who slept all his days and lived the life of a vegetable, or of a man who met with the greatest misfortunes. As we cannot accept this conclusion, we must place happiness in some exercise of faculty, as we said before. But as the exercises of faculty are sometimes necessary (i.e. desirable for the sake of something else), sometimes desirable in themselves, it is evident that happiness must be placed among those that are desirable in themselves, and not among those that are desirable for the sake of something else: for happiness lacks nothing; it is sufficient in itself.
Now, the exercise of faculty is desirable in itself when nothing is expected from it beyond itself. Of this nature are held to be (1) the manifestations of excellence; for to do what is noble and excellent must be counted desirable for itself: and (2) those amusements which please are more apt to be injured than to be benefited by them, through neglect of their health and fortunes. Now, most of those whom men call happy have recourse to pastimes of this sort. And on this account those who show a ready wit in such pastimes find favour with tyrants; for they make themselves pleasant in that which the tyrant wants, and what he wants is pastime. These amusements, then, are generally thought to be elements of happiness, be- cause princes employ their leisure in them. But such persons, we may venture to say, are no criterion. For princely rank does not imply the possession of virtue or of reason, which are the sources of all excellent exercise of faculty. And if these men, never having tasted pure and refined pleasure, have recourse to the pleasures of the body, we should not on that account think these more desirable; for children also fancy that the things which they value are better than anything else. It is only natural, then, that as children differ from men in their estimate of what is valuable, so bad men should differ from good.
As we have often said, therefore, that is truly valuable and pleasant which is so to the perfect man. Now, the exercise of those trained faculties which are proper to him is what each man finds most desirable; what the perfect man finds most desirable, therefore, is the exercise of virtue. Happiness, therefore, does not con- sist in amusement; and indeed it is absurd to suppose that the end is amusement, and that we toil and moil all our life long for the sake of amusing ourselves. We may say that we choose everything for the sake of something else, excepting only happiness; for it is the end. But to be serious and to labour for the sake of amuse- ment seems silly and utterly childish; while to amuse ourselves in order that we may be serious, as Anacharsis says, seems to be right; for amusement is a sort of recreation, and we need recreation because we are unable to work continuously. Recreation then, cannot be the end; for it is taken as a means to the exercise of our faculties.
Again, the happy life is thought to be that which exhibits virtue; and such a life must be serious and cannot consist in amusement. Again, it is held that things of serious importance are better than laughable and amusing things, and that the better the organ or the man, the most important is the function; but we have al- ready said that the function or exercise of that which is better is higher and more conducive to happiness. Again, the enjoyment of bodily pleasures is within the reach of anybody, of a slave no less than the best of men; but no one supposes that a slave can participate in happiness, seeing that he cannot participate in the proper life of man. For indeed happiness does not consist in pastimes of this sort, but in the exercise of virtue, as we have already said.
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But if happiness be the exercise of virtue, it is reasonable to suppose that it will be the exercise of the highest virtue; and that will be the virtue or excellence of the best part of us. Now, that part or faculty—call it reason or what you will—which seems naturally to rule and take the lead, and to apprehend things noble and divine—whether it be itself divine, or only the divinest part of us—is the faculty the exercise of which, in its proper excellence, will be perfect happiness. . . . this consists in speculation or theorizing.
This conclusion would seem to agree both with what we have said above, and with known truths. This exercise of faculty must be the highest possible; for the reason is the highest of our faculties and of all knowable things those that reason deals with are the highest. Again, it is the most continuous; for speculation can be carried on more continuously than any kind of action whatsoever. We think too that pleasure ought to be one of the ingredients of happiness; but of all virtu- ous exercises it is allowed that the pleasantest is the exercise of wisdom. At least philosophy is thought to have pleasures that are admirable in purity and steadfast- ness; and it is reasonable to suppose that the time passes more pleasantly with those who possess, than with those who are seeking knowledge. Again, what is called self-sufficiency will be most of all found in the speculative life. The neces- saries of life, indeed, are needed by the wise man as well as by the just man and the rest; but, when these have been provided in due quantity, the just man further needs persons towards whom, and along with whom, he may act justly; and so does the temperate and the courageous man and the rest; while the wise man is able to speculate even by himself, and the wiser he is the more is he able to do this. He could speculate better, we may confess, if he had others to help him, but nevertheless he is more self-sufficient than anybody else. Again, it would seem that this life alone is desired solely for its own sake; for it yields no result beyond the contemplation, but from the practical activities we get something more or less besides action.
. . . [It] follows that the exercise of reason will be the complete happiness of man, i.e.
when a complete term of days is added; for nothing incomplete can be admitted into our idea of happiness. But a life which realized this idea would be something more than human; for it would not be the expression of man’s nature, but of some divine element in that nature—the exercise of which is as far superior to the exer- cise of the other kind of virtue, as this divine element is superior to our compound human nature. If then reason be divine as compared with man, the life which consists in the exercise of reason will also be divine in comparison with human life. Nevertheless, instead of listening to those who advise us as men and mortals not to lift our thoughts above what is human and mortal, we ought rather, as far as pos- sible, to put off our mortality and make every effort to live in the exercise of the highest of our faculties; for though it be but a small part of us, yet in power and value it far surpasses all the rest. And indeed this part would even seem to consti- tute our true self, since it is the sovereign and the better part. It would be strange, then, if a man were to prefer the life of something else to the life of his true self. Again, we may apply here what we said above—for every being that is best and pleasantest which is naturally proper to it. Since, then, it is the reason that in the truest sense is the man, the life that consists in the exercise of the reason is the best and pleasantest for man—and therefore the happiest.
“Since . . . it is the reason that in the truest sense is the man, the life that consists in the exercise of the reason is the best and pleasantest for man—and therefore the happiest.” — A R I S TOT L E
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Still, it must not be thought that Aristotle’s ideal philosopher does nothing but contemplate. He may also enjoy pleasure, wealth, honor, success, and power. As a man among men, he is also virtuous and chooses to act virtuously like all good men. But in addition, he has an understand- ing and an appreciation of reason that makes him “dearest to the Gods and presumably the happiest among men.” This is surely a flattering portrait of the place of the philosopher! if we ignore this final self-congratulation, however, we can see in Aristotle a powerful conception of morality, with its emphasis on virtue, excellence, and a kind of heroism (whether intellectual or moral), that is in some ways very different from our own conception of morality and the good life.
• What does Aristotle mean by happiness? How does this conception differ from the way in which we usually think of happiness?
• What role does society or the community play in Aristotle’s ethics?
• How does Aristotle define virtue? What does he mean by the mean between ex- tremes? What are some examples of the virtues? in what sense are they the mean between the extremes? Can you identify any virtues that do not seem to have a corresponding extreme (whether excess or deficiency)?
• How does Aristotle characterize human excellence? How does this characterization differ from your own conception of the good life?
F. Morality and Sentiment: Hume and Rousseau Morality for Aristotle depended upon rules embedded and learned in a particular society, an elite society of the privileged males of the Greek aristocracy. Modern conceptions of morality, on the other hand, are usually thought to be universal, that is, not restricted to a particular society or a particular elite. They apply to women, men, poor people, rich people, adults, and children, even if they are only a few years old. At the same time, however, most modern conceptions of morality minimize Aristotle’s emphasis on society and upbringing, preferring to place morals on some individual basis. in Kant’s moral philosophy, the key to morality is individual autonomy, the idea that every person can find for himself or herself, just through the use of reason, what acts are moral and what acts are not. Before Kant, the ruling conception of morality was based upon a conception of personal feelings of a special moral kind, a “natural desire” to help one’s fellow man. (As in Aristotle, this philosophy insisted that morality had to be viewed as a part of nature.)
it should be clear how this conception of morality has a distinct advantage in reconciling personal interests and moral principles. Since strong moral feelings are a kind of personal interest, one can satisfy one’s personal feelings and the demands of morality at the same time. (Again, this notion lies at the heart of Bishop Butler’s arguments.) Of course, other personal feelings—jealousy, greed, and envy—can act against these moral feelings. But at least some of our feelings are satisfied by moral action. And according to philosophers who argue this position, such moral feelings can be found in virtually all of us.
The two most famous of these philosophers are David Hume and the French-Swiss phi- losopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The key to both of their philosophies is the notion of sentiment (“feeling”) and the notion of sympathy (“fellow feeling” or feeling pity for other people and taking their interests into account as well as our own). Hume says:
The hypothesis which we embrace is plain. It maintains that morality is determined by sentiment. It defines virtue to be whatever mental action or quality gives to a spectator the pleasing sentiment of approbation; and vice the contrary.15
15 David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (la Salle, il: Open Court Press, 1912).
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The central concern in Hume’s moral philosophy distin- guishes those who defend morality as a function of reason from those who say that it is rather a matter of sentiment and passion. Elsewhere Hume gives us his strong opinion that “reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions.” Here is his argument:
On “Reason as Slave of the Passions” B Y David Hume16
There has been a controversy started of late, much better worth examination, concerning the general foundation of morals; whether they be derived from reason or from sentiment; whether we attain the knowledge of them by a chain of argument and in- duction or by an immediate feeling and finer inter- nal sense; whether, like all sound judgment of truth
and falsehood, they should be the same to every rational, intelligent being, or whether, like the perception of beauty and deformity, they be founded entirely on the particular fabric and constitution of the human species.
The ancient philosophers, though they often affirm that virtue is nothing but conformity to reason, yet, in general, seem to consider morals as deriving their existence from taste and sentiment. On the other hand, our modern inquirers, though they also talk much of the beauty of virtue and deformity of vice, yet have commonly endeavored to account for these distinctions by metaphysical reasonings and by deductions from the most abstract principles of the understanding. Such confusion reigned in these subjects that an opposition of the greatest consequence could prevail between one system and another, and even in the parts of almost each individual system, and yet nobody, till very lately, was ever sensible of it.
. . . It must be acknowledged that both sides of the question are susceptible of spe-
cious arguments. Moral distinctions, it may be said, are discernible by pure reason; else, whence the many disputes that reign in common life, as well as in philosophy with regard to this subject, the long chain of proofs often produced on both sides, the examples cited, the authorities appealed to, the analogies employed, the falla- cies detected, the inferences drawn, and the several conclusions adjusted to their proper principles? Truth is disputable, not taste: what exists in the nature of things is the standard of our judgment: what each man feels within himself is the standard of sentiment. Propositions in geometry may be proved, systems in physics may be controverted, but the harmony of verse, the tenderness of passion, the brilliancy of wit must give immediate pleasure. No man reasons concerning another’s beauty, but frequently concerning the justice or injustice of his actions. In every criminal trial, the first object of the prisoner is to disprove the facts alleged and deny the actions imputed to him; the second, to prove that, even if these actions were real, they might be justified as innocent and lawful. It is confessedly by deductions of
16 David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (la Salle, il: Open Court Press, 1912).
Many philosophers argue that the feeling of sympathy is fundamental to morality. (© iStockphoto.com/monkeybusinessimages)
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the understanding that the first point is ascertained; how can we suppose a different faculty of the mind is employed in fixing the other?
On the other hand, those who would resolve all moral determinations into senti- ments may endeavor to show that it is impossible for reason ever to draw conclusions of this nature. To virtue, say they, it belongs to be amiable and vice odious. This forms their very nature or essence. But can reason or argumentation distribute these different epithets to any subjects and pronounce beforehand that this must produce love and that hatred? Or what other reason can we ever assign for these affections but the original fabric and formation of the human mind, which is natu- rally adapted to receive them?
The end of all moral speculations is to teach us our duty, and, by proper repre- sentations of the deformity of vice and beauty of virtue, beget correspondent habits and engage us to avoid the one and embrace the other. But is this ever to be expected from inferences and conclusions of the understanding, which of themselves have no hold of the affections or set in motion the active powers of men? They discover truths. But where the truths which they discover are indifferent and beget no desire or aversion, they can have no influence on conduct and behavior. What is honorable, what is fair, what is becoming, what is noble, what is generous takes possession of the heart and animates us to embrace and maintain it. What is intelligible, what is evident, what is probable, what is true procures only the cool assent of the under- standing and, gratifying a speculative curiosity, puts an end to our researches.
. . . Extinguish all the warm feelings and prepossessions in favor of virtue, and all
disgust or aversion to vice; render men totally indifferent toward these distinctions, and morality is no longer a practical study nor has any tendency to regulate our lives and actions.
These arguments on each side (and many more might be produced) are so plau- sible that I am apt to suspect they may, the one as well as the other, be solid and satisfactory and that reason and sentiment concur in almost all moral determinations and conclusions. The final sentence, it is probable, which pronounces characters and actions amiable or odious, praiseworthy or blamable; that which stamps on them the mark of honor or infamy, approbation or censure; that which renders morality an active principle and constitutes virtue our happiness, and vice our misery—it is probable, I say, that this final sentence depends on some internal sense of feeling which nature has made universal in the whole species.
it is worth noting here that Hume’s moral philosophy, like his philosophy of knowledge, is strictly empiricist:
Men are now cured of their passion for hypotheses and systems in natural philoso- phy and will hearken to no arguments but those which are derived from experi- ence. It is full time they should attempt a like reformation in all moral disquisitions and reject every system of ethics, however subtle or ingenious, which is not founded on fact and observation.
Reason, Hume argues, may be of use in deciding how we can get what we want, but it is in- capable of ever telling us what we ultimately want. Notice the familiar argument against an infinite regress; notice also Hume’s sharp distinction between reason (which is concerned with knowledge, truth, and falsehood) and taste or sentiment (which judges values, which, in turn, ultimately depend upon pleasure and pain):
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It appears evident that the ultimate ends of human actions can never, in any case, be accounted for by reason, but recommend themselves entirely to the sentiments and affections of mankind without any dependence on the intellectual faculties. Ask a man why he uses exercise; he will answer, because he desires to keep his health. If you then inquire why he desires health, he will readily reply, because sickness is painful. If you push your inquiries further and desire a reason why he hates pain, it is impos- sible he can ever give any. This is an ultimate end and is never referred to any other object.
Perhaps to your second question, why he desires health, he may also reply that it is necessary for the exercise of his calling. If you ask why he is anxious on that head, he will answer, because he desires to get money. If you demand, why? It is the instrument of plea- sure, says he. And beyond this, it is an absurdity to ask for a reason. It is impossible there can be a progress in infinitum and that one thing can always be a reason why another is desired. Something must be desirable on its own account and because of its immediate accord or agreement with human sentiment and affection.
Now, as virtue is an end and is desirable on its own account, without fee or reward, merely for the immediate satisfaction which it conveys, it is requisite that there should be some sentiment which it touches—some internal taste or feeling, or whatever you please to call it, which distinguishes moral good and evil and which embraces the one and rejects the other.
Thus, the distinct boundaries and offices of reason and of taste are easily ascer- tained. The former conveys the knowledge of truth and falsehood; the latter gives the sentiment of beauty and deformity, vice and virtue. The one discovers objects as they really stand in nature, without addition or diminution; the other has a productive
faculty; and gliding or straining all natural objects with the colors borrowed from internal sentiment, raises, in a manner, a new creation. Reason, being cool and disengaged, is no motive to action and directs only the impulse received from appetite or inclination by showing us the means of attaining happiness or avoiding misery. Taste, as it gives pleasure or pain, and thereby constitutes happiness or misery, becomes a motive to action and is the first spring or impulse to desire and volition. From circumstances and relations, known or supposed, the former leads us to the discovery of the con- cealed and unknown. After all circumstances and relations are laid before us, the latter makes us feel from the whole a new sentiment of blame or approbation.
Elsewhere Hume argues a razor-sharp distinction between facts and values. He argues with characteristic conciseness that “it is impossible to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is,’” that is, any notions of value or what we ought to do cannot be derived from any statements of fact. One can know, as a matter of fact, that pushing this button will kill a thousand innocent children, but from this fact alone, it does not follow that i ought not push the button. What i ought to do—or ought not to do—depends on something that is not a matter of fact or reason at all, my moral
“[T]he distinct boundaries and offices of reason and of taste are easily ascertained. The former conveys the knowledge of truth and falsehood; the latter gives the sentiment of beauty and deformity, vice and virtue.” — DAV I D H U M E
Hume argues that moral discrimination, like artistic taste, is a matter of sentiment. (Snark/Art Resource, NY)
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feelings or sentiments. Without these sentiments, no action is either moral or immoral, praiseworthy or blameworthy, or of any value whatever. Accordingly, in one of his most shocking statements, Hume says that it would not be irrational for him to prefer the death of half the world to the pricking of his little finger. This is not to say that he would prefer it, but there is nothing in reason to forbid it. values are a matter of sentiment, not of reason.
A similar theory of sentiment is defended by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Although Rous- seau is often characterized as the first great “Romantic,” it is worth noting that he is not nearly so antagonistic to reason as his reputation suggests. Sentiment, according to his theory, is tied to a kind of “natural reason.” The key to his theory, therefore, is the concept of conscience, a powerful type of moral feeling that has its own kind of divine reason. like Hume, Rousseau argues that detached reason offers us no guidance. Notice that he too reconciles “self-love” and “moral goodness” as ultimately having the same goals:
F RO M Émile B Y Jean-Jacques Rousseau17
Let us lay it down as an incontrovertible rule that the first impulses of nature are always right; there is no original sin in the human heart, the how and why of the entrance of every vice can be traced. The only natural passion is self-love or selfish- ness taken in a wider sense. This selfishness is good in itself and in relation to our- selves; and as the child has no necessary relations to other people he is naturally indifferent to them; his self-love only becomes good or bad by the use made of it and the relations established by its means. Until the time is ripe for the appearance of reason, that guide of selfishness, the main thing is that the child shall do nothing because you are watching him or listening to him; in a word, nothing because of other people, but only what nature asks of him; then he will never do wrong.
I do not mean to say that he will never do any mischief, never hurt himself, never break a costly ornament if you leave it within his reach. He might do much damage without doing wrong, since wrong-doing depends on the harmful intention which will never be his. If once he meant to do harm, his whole education would be ruined; he would be almost hopelessly bad.
. . . The morality of our actions consists en-
tirely in the judgments we ourselves form with regard to them. If good is good, it must be good in the depth of our heart as well as in our actions; and the first reward of justice is the consciousness that we are acting justly. If moral goodness is in accordance with our nature, man can only be healthy in mind and body when he is good. If it is not so, and
17 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, trans. Barbara Foxley (New york: E. P. Dutton, 1968). Reprinted by permission of Everyman’s library, an imprint of Alfred A. Knopf.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778)
A stormy Enlightenment philoso- pher who fought with most of his peers (including David Hume) and developed a dramatic conception of “natural morality,” which he contrasted to what he saw as the fraud and hypocrisy of contempo- rary civilized man. Rousseau for- mulated a picture of man in “the state of nature,” before civiliza- tion, in which man’s “natural good- ness” was not yet “corrupted” by society. The key to this idea was his conception of moral sentiment,
which was innate in all people and not learned from society. His writings were condemned, and he spent much of his life running from the police. Rousseau died in poverty, but only a few years after his death, his political ideas became the central ideology of the French Revolution.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (© iStockphoto.com/GeorgiosArt)
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if man is by nature evil, he cannot cease to be evil without corrupting his nature, and goodness in him is a crime against nature. If he is made to do harm to his fellow-creatures, as the wolf is made to devour his prey, a humane man would be as depraved a creature as a pitiful wolf; and virtue alone would cause remorse.
My young friend, let us look within, let us set aside all personal prejudices and see whither our inclinations lead us. Do we take more pleasure in the sight of the sufferings of others or their joys? Is it pleasanter to do a kind action or an unkind action, and which leaves the more delightful memory behind it? Why do you enjoy the theatre? Do you delight in the crimes you behold? Do you weep over the pun- ishment which overtakes the criminal? They say we are indifferent to everything but self-interest; yet we find our consolation in our sufferings in the charms of friendship and humanity, and even in our pleasures we should be too lonely and miserable if we had no one to share them with us. If there is no such thing as mo- rality in man’s heart, what is the source of his rapturous admiration of noble deeds, his passionate devotion to great men? What connection is there between self- interest and this enthusiasm for virtue?
. . . Take from our hearts this love of what is noble and you rob us of the joy of life.
The mean-spirited man in whom these delicious feelings have been stifled among vile passions, who by thinking of no one but himself comes at last to love no one but himself, this man feels no raptures, his cold heart no longer throbs with joy, and his eyes no longer fill with the sweet tears of sympathy, he delights in nothing; the wretch has neither life nor feeling, he is already dead.
There are many bad men in this world, but there are few of these dead souls, alive only to self-interest, and insensible to all that is right and good. We only de- light in injustice so long as it is to our own advantage; in every other case we wish the innocent to be protected. If we see some act of violence or injustice in town or country, our hearts are at once stirred to their depths by an instinctive anger and wrath, which bids us go to the help of the oppressed; but we are restrained by a stronger duty, and the law deprives us of our right to protect the innocent. On the other hand, if some deed of mercy or generosity meets our eye, what reverence and love does it inspire! Do we not say to ourselves, “I should like to have done that myself ”? What does it matter to us that two thousand years ago a man was just or unjust? and yet we take the same interest in ancient history as if it happened yester- day. What are the crimes of Cataline to me? I shall not be his victim. Why then have I the same horror of his crimes as if he were living now? We do not hate the wicked merely because of the harm they do to ourselves, but because they are wicked. Not only do we wish to be happy ourselves, we wish others to be happy too, and if this happiness does not interfere with our own happiness, it increases it. In conclusion, whether we will or not, we pity the unfortunate; when we see their suffering we suffer too. Even the most depraved are not wholly without this instinct, and it often leads them to self-contradiction. The highwayman who robs the travel- ler, clothes the nakedness of the poor; the fiercest murderer supports a fainting man.
Men speak of the voice of remorse, the secret punishment of hidden crimes, by which such are often brought to light. Alas! who does not know its unwelcome voice? We speak from experience and we would gladly stifle this imperious feeling which causes us such agony. Let us obey the call of nature; we shall see that her yoke is easy and that when we give heed to her voice we find a joy in the answer of a good conscience. The wicked fears and flees from her; he delights to escape
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from himself; his anxious eyes look around him for some object of diversion; with- out bitter satire and rude mockery he would always be sorrowful; the scornful laugh is his one pleasure. Not so the just man, who finds his peace within himself; there is joy not malice in his laughter, a joy which springs from his own heart; he is as cheerful alone as in company, his satisfaction does not depend on those who approach him; it includes them.
. . . It is no part of my scheme to enter at present into metaphysical discussions which
neither you nor I can understand, discussions which really lead nowhere. I have told you already that I do not wish to philosophise with you, but to help you to consult your own heart. If all the philosophers in the world should prove that I am wrong, and you feel that I am right, that is all I ask.
For this purpose it is enough to lead you to distinguish between our acquired ideas and our natural feelings; for feeling precedes knowledge; and since we do not learn to seek what is good for us and avoid what is bad for us, but get this desire from nature, in the same way the love of good and the hatred of evil are as natural to us as our self-love. The decrees of conscience are not judgments but feelings. Although all our ideas come from without, the feelings by which they are weighed are within us, and it is by these feelings alone that we perceive fitness or unfitness of things in relation to ourselves, which leads us to seek or shun these things.
To exist is to feel; our feeling is undoubtedly earlier than our intelligence, and we had feelings before we had ideas. Whatever may be the cause of our being, it has provided for our preservation by giving us feelings suited to our nature; and no one can deny that these at least are innate. These feelings, so far as the individual is concerned, are self-love, fear, pain, the dread of death, the desire for comfort. Again, if, as it is impos- sible to doubt, man is by nature sociable, or at least fitted to become sociable, he can only be so by means of other innate feelings, relative to his kind; for if only physical well-being were considered, men would cer- tainly be scattered rather than brought together. But the motive power of conscience is derived from the moral system formed through this twofold relation to himself and to his fellow-men. To know good is not to love it; this knowledge is not innate in man; but as soon as his reason leads him to perceive it, his conscience impels him to love it; it is this feeling which is innate.
So I do not think, my young friend, that it is impos- sible to explain the immediate force of conscience as a result of our own nature, independent of reason itself. And even should it be impossible, it is necessary; for those who deny this principle, admitted and received by everybody else in the world, do not prove that there is no such thing; they are content to affirm, and when we affirm its existence we have quite as good grounds as they, while we have moreover the witness within us, the voice of conscience, which speaks on its own behalf. If the first beams of judgment dazzle us and confuse the
“To know good is not to love it; this knowledge is not innate in man; but as soon as his reason leads him to perceive it, his conscience impels him to love it; it is this feeling which is innate.” — J E A N - J A C Q U E S R O U S S E A U
Rousseau argues that conscience conjoins the demands of emotion and reason. (© iStockphoto.com/aukeherrema)
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objects we behold, let us wait till our feeble sight grows clear and strong, and in the light of reason we shall soon behold these very objects as nature has already showed them to us. Or rather let us be simpler and less pretentious; let us be content with the first feelings we experience in ourselves, since science always brings us back to these, unless it has led us astray.
Conscience! Conscience! Divine instinct, immortal voice from heaven; sure guide for a creature ignorant and finite indeed; yet intelligent and free; infallible judge of good and evil, making man like to God! In these consists the excellence of man’s nature and the morality of his actions; apart from thee, I find nothing in myself to raise me above the beasts—nothing but the sad privilege of wandering from one error to another, by the help of an unbridled understanding and a reason which knows no principle.
As we pointed out before, there is a problem with this notion of conscience and with all appeals of morality to personal feeling. What if different people disagree? Whose con- science or whose feelings should we accept? And even if we find ourselves in agreement, how do we know that our consciences or feelings are right? it is with these questions in mind that we turn to the moral philosophy of Kant.
• Can morality be based on natural, human sentiment? Does this view seem too “subjective”? How might it be made less so?
• Why is morality usually thought to be based on reason, according to Hume? What argument does Hume give to support the claim that morality is based on senti- ment? How does Hume envision the relationship between reason and the passions, or sentiments? Do you agree?
• What does Rousseau mean when he claims that a child will never do wrong if left to act according to his nature? How could this bold claim be defended?
• Why is Rousseau convinced that our capacity for morality is a natural response?
G. Morality and Practical Reason: Kant Aristotle, Hume, and Rousseau all give feeling an important place in their conceptions of morality. For Aristotle, the virtuous man wants to act virtuously and enjoys doing so. For Hume and Rousseau, sentiment defines morality. On all such accounts, our concept of duty—what we ought to do—is derivative, at least in part, from such feelings and from our upbringing. But what if feelings disagree? What if people are brought up to value different things? What are we to say of a person who is brought up by criminals to value what is wicked and to enjoy cruelty? And what are we to say, most important of all, in those familiar cases in which a person’s feelings all draw him or her toward personal interests but duty calls in the opposite direction? This is the problem that Kant considered, and because of it, he rejected all attempts to base morality on feelings of any kind. Morality, he argued, must be based solely on reason and reason alone. its central concept is the concept of duty, and so morality is a matter of deontology (from the Greek word dein, or “duty”).
Hume restricted the notion of reason to concern with knowledge, truth, and falsity. Kant replies that reason also has a practical side, one that is capable of telling us what to do as
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well as how to do it. Rousseau said that morality must be universal, common to all men, even in a presocietal “state of nature.” Kant (who very much admired Rousseau) agrees but says that the nature of this universality cannot lie in peo- ple’s feelings, which may vary from person to person and society to society, but only in reason, which, by its very nature, must be universal. Aristotle insisted that morality must be taught within society and that morals are very much a matter of public opinion and practices. Kant, however, insisted on the inde- pendence of morality from society. What is most important, he argues, is that morality should be autonomous, a function of individual reason, such that every rational person is capable of finding out what is right and what is wrong for himself or herself. Where Hume and Rousseau had looked for morality in individual feeling, Kant again insists that it must be found through an examina- tion of reason, nothing else. This is the key to Kant’s moral philosophy: Morality consists solely of rational principles.
Since morality is based on reason, according to Kant, it does not depend on particular societies or particular circumstances. Nor does it depend on indi- vidual feelings or desires. (Kant categorizes all such personal feelings, desires, ambitions, impulses, and emotions as inclinations.) The purpose of moral phi- losophy is to examine our ability to reason practically and to determine from this examination the fundamental principles that lie at the basis of every moral- ity, for every person, and in every society. in direct contrast to Aristotle, Kant begins by saying that the benefits and virtues that make up happiness are not ultimately good. instead, the only thing in this world that is intrinsically good is a good will. A good will, in turn, is the will that exercises pure practical reason.
F RO M Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals B Y Immanuel Kant18
Nothing can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, which can be called good without qualification, except a good will. Intelligence, wit, judgment, and other talents of the mind, however they may be named, or courage, resolution, perseverance, as qualities of temperament, are undoubtedly good and desirable in many respects; but these gifts of nature may also become extremely bad and mis- chievous if the will which is to make use of them, and which, therefore, constitutes what is called character, is not good. It is the same with the gifts of fortune. Power, riches, honor, even health, and the general well being and contentment with one’s condition which is called happiness, inspire pride and often presumption, if there is not a good will to correct the influence of these on the mind, and with this also to rectify the whole principle of acting, and adapt it to its end. The sight of a being who is not adorned with a single feature of a pure and good will, enjoying unbro- ken prosperity, can never give pleasure to an impartial rational spectator. Thus a good will appears to constitute the indispensable condition even of being worthy of happiness.
The argument behind this opening move is this: it makes no sense to blame or praise a person for his or her character or abilities or the consequences of his or her actions. Many factors contribute to a person’s circumstances. Whether or not a person is wealthy,
According to immanuel Kant, a good will is good in itself. (© iStockphoto.com/wynnter)
18 immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. T. K. Abbott (New york: longmans, Green, 1898).
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intelligent, courageous, witty, and so on—whether the person possesses Aristotle’s virtues—is often due to his or her upbringing and heredity, rather than to any personal choice. But what we will, that is, what we try to do, is wholly within our control. Therefore it is the only thing that is ultimately worth moral consideration. Notice that Kant is concerned with questions of morality, not questions of the good life in general. What makes us happy is not particularly his concern. He is concerned only with what makes a person morally worthy of being happy.
A good will is good not because of what it performs or effects, not by its aptness for the attainment of some proposed end, but simply by virtue of the volition—that is, it is good in itself, and considered by itself is to be esteemed much higher than all that can be brought about by it in favor of any inclination, nay, even of the sum- total of all inclinations. Even if it should happen that, owing to special disfavor of fortune, or the niggardly provision of a step-motherly nature, this will should wholly lack power to accomplish its purpose, if with its greatest efforts it should yet achieve nothing, and there should remain only the good will (not, to be sure, a mere wish, but the summoning of all means in our power), then, like a jewel, it would still shine by its own light, as a thing which has its whole value in itself. Its usefulness or fruitlessness can neither add to nor take away anything from this value. It would be, as it were, only the setting to enable us to handle it the more conveniently in common commerce, or to attract it to the attention of those who are not yet connoisseurs, but not to recommend it to true connoisseurs, or to de- termine its value.
There is, however, something so strange in this idea of the absolute value of the mere will, in which no account is taken of its utility, that notwithstanding the thorough assent of even common reason to the idea, yet a suspicion must arise that it may perhaps really be the product of mere high-flown fancy, and that we may have misunderstood the purpose of nature in assigning reason as the governor of our will. Therefore we will examine this idea from this point of view.
Kant’s argument here is surprisingly similar to Aristotle’s argument in his Ethics. There Aristotle argues that the good for man must be found in man’s nature, in that which is unique to him. The assumption is that since man is singularly endowed with reason, reason must have a special significance in human life. Kant’s argument also begins with the observation that man, unlike other creatures, is capable of reasoning. But why should he have such a capacity? Not in order to make him happy, Kant argues, because any number of instincts would have served that end more effectively. (Remember that Kant is presupposing God as Creator here, so he believes, like leibniz, that everything exists for some sufficient reason.)
[Our] existence has a different and far nobler end, for which and not for happiness, reason is properly intended, and which must, therefore, be regarded as the supreme condition to which the private ends of man must, for the most part, be postponed.
This “far nobler end” and “supreme condition” is what Kant calls duty. “The notion of duty,” he tells us, “includes that of a good will,” but a good will that subjects itself to rational prin- ciples. These rational principles are moral laws, and it is action in accordance with such laws that alone makes a man good.
it is important, however, to make a distinction that Aristotle also makes: it is one thing to do what duty requires for some personal interest, and it is something else to do one’s duty just because it is one’s duty. For example, a grocer may refuse to cheat his customers (which is his duty) because it would be bad for business; then he is not acting for the sake of duty, but
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for personal interests. But he may refuse to cheat his customers just because he knows that he ought not to. This does count as doing his duty and thereby makes him morally worthy.
I omit here all actions which are already recognized as inconsistent with duty, al- though they may be useful for this or that purpose, for with these the question whether they are done from duty cannot arise at all, since they even conflict with it. I also set aside those actions which really conform to duty, but to which men have no direct inclination, performing them because they are impelled thereto by some other inclination. For in this case we can readily distinguish whether the action which agrees with duty is done from duty or from a selfish view. It is much harder to make this distinction when the action accords with duty, and the subject has besides a direct inclination to it. For example, it is always a matter of duty that a dealer should not overcharge an inexperienced purchaser; and wherever there is much commerce the prudent tradesman does not overcharge, but keeps a fixed price for everyone, so that a child buys of him as well as any other. Men are thus honestly served; but this is not enough to make us believe that the tradesman has so acted from duty and from principles of honesty; his own advantage required it; it is out of the question in this case to suppose that he might besides have a direct inclination in favor of the buyers, so that, as it were, from love he should give no advantage to one over another. Accordingly the action was done neither from duty nor from direct inclination, but merely with a selfish view.
On the other hand, it is a duty to maintain one’s life; and, in addition, everyone has also a direct inclination to do so. But on this account the often anxious care which most men take for it has no intrinsic worth, and their maximum has no moral import. They preserve their life as duty requires, no doubt, but not because duty requires. On the other hand, if adversity and hopeless sorrow have completely taken away the relish for life, if the unfortunate one, strong in mind, indignant at his fate rather than desponding or dejected, wishes for death, and yet preserves his life without loving it—not from inclination or fear, but from duty—then his maxim has a moral worth.
To be beneficent when we can is a duty; and besides this, there are many minds so sympathetically constituted that, without any other motive of vanity or self-in- terest, they find a pleasure in spreading joy around them, and can take delight in the satisfaction of others so far as it is their own work. But I maintain that in such a case an action of this kind, however proper, however amiable it may be, has nev- ertheless no true moral worth, but is on a level with other inclinations, for exam- ple, the inclination to honor, which, if it is happily directed to that which is in fact of public utility and accordant with duty, and consequently honorable, deserves praise and encouragement, but not esteem. For the maxim lacks the moral import, namely, that such actions be done from duty, not from inclination. Put the case that the mind of that philanthropist was clouded by sorrow of his own extinguishing all sympathy with the lot of others, and that while he still has the power to benefit others in distress he is not touched by their trouble because he is absorbed with his own; and now suppose that he tears himself out of this dread insensibility and per- forms the action without any inclination to it, but simply from duty, then first has his action its genuine moral worth. Further still, if nature has put little sympathy in the heart of this or that man, if he, supposed to be an upright man, is by tem- perament cold and indifferent to the sufferings of others, perhaps because in respect of his own he is provided with the special gift of patience and fortitude and
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supposes, or even requires, that others should have the same—and such a man would certainly not be the meanest product of nature—but if nature had not spe- cially framed him for a philanthropist, would he not still find in himself a source from whence to give himself a far higher worth than that of a good-natured tem- perament could be? Unquestionably. It is just in this that the moral worth of the character is brought out which is incomparably the highest of all, namely, that he is beneficent, not from inclination, but from duty.
in a curious two short paragraphs, Kant tells us that we have a duty to make ourselves happy, not because we want to be happy (wants are never duties), but because it is neces- sary for us to do our other duties. Then, with reference to the Bible, Kant makes a famous (or infamous) distinction between two kinds of love: practical love, which is commanded as a duty, and pathological love, in other words, what we would call the emotion of love.
To secure one’s own happiness is a duty, at least indirectly; for discontent with one’s condition, under a pressure of many anxieties and amidst unsatisfied wants, might easily become a great temptation to transgression of duty. But here again, without look- ing to duty, all men have already the strongest and most intimate inclination to happiness, because it is just in this idea that all inclinations are combined in one total. But the precept of happiness is often of such a sort that it greatly interferes with some inclinations, and yet a man cannot form any definite and certain con- ception of the sum of satisfaction of all of them which is called happiness. It is not then to be wondered at that a single inclination, definite both as to what it promises and as to the time within which it can be gratified, is often able to overcome such a fluctuating idea, and that a gouty patient, for instance, can choose to enjoy what he likes, and to suffer what he may, since, according to his calculation, on this oc- casion at least, he has [only] not sacrificed the enjoyment of the present moment to a possibly mistaken expectation of a happiness which is supposed to be found in health. But even in this case, if the general desire for happiness did not influence his will, and supposing that in his particular case health was not a necessary ele- ment in this calculation, there yet remains in this, as in all other cases, this law— namely, that he should promote his happiness not from inclination but from duty, and by this would his conduct first acquire true moral worth.
It is in this manner, undoubtedly, that we are to understand those passages of Scripture also in which we are commanded to love our neighbor, even our enemy. For love, as an affection, cannot be commanded, but beneficence for duty’s sake may, even though we are not impelled to it by any inclination—nay, are even repelled by a natural and unconquerable aversion. This is practical love, and not pathological—a love which is seated in the will, and not in the propensions of sense—in principles of action and not of tender sympathy; and it is this love alone which can be commanded.
Having thus defended his primary proposition—that what is ultimately good is a good will acting in accordance with practical reason, in other words, from duty—Kant moves on to two corollary propositions:
The second proposition is: That an action done from duty derives its moral worth, not from the purpose which is to be attained by it, but from the maxim by which it is determined, and therefore does not depend on the realization of the object of the action, but merely on the principle of volition by which the action has taken place, without regard to any object of desire. It is clear from what precedes that the
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purposes which we may have in view in our actions, or their effects regarded as ends and springs of the will cannot give to actions any unconditional or moral worth. In what, then, can their worth lie if it is not to consist in the will and in reference to its expected effect? It cannot lie anywhere but in the principle of the will without regard to the ends which can be attained by the action. For the will stands between its a priori principle, which is formal, and its a posteriori spring which is material, as between two roads, and as it must be determined by something, it follows that it must be determined by the formal principle of volition when an action is done from duty, in which case every material principle has been withdrawn from it.
The third proposition, which is a consequence of the two preceding, I would express thus: Duty is the necessity of acting from respect for the law. I may have inclination for an object as the effect of my proposed action, but I cannot have respect for it just for this reason that it is an effect and not an energy of will. Similarly, I cannot have respect for inclination, whether my own or another’s; I can at most, if my own, ap- prove it; if another’s, sometimes even love it, that is, look on it as favorable to my own interest. It is only what is connected with my will as a principle, by no means as an effect—what does not subserve my inclination, but overpowers it, or at least in case of choice excludes it from its calculation—in other words, simply the law of itself, which can be an object of respect, and hence a command. Now an action done from duty must wholly exclude the influence of inclination, and with it every object of the will, so that nothing remains which can determine the will except objectively the law, and subjectively pure respect for this practical law, and consequently the maxim that I should follow this law even to the thwarting of all my inclinations.
Thus the moral worth of an action does not lie in the effect expected from it, nor in any principle of action which requires to borrow its motive from this ex- pected effect. For all these effects—agreeableness of one’s condition, and even the promotion of the happiness of others—could have been also brought about by other causes, so that for this there would have been no need of the will of a rational being; whereas it is in this alone that the supreme and unconditional good can be found. The pre-eminent good which we call moral can therefore consist in noth- ing else than the conception of law in itself, which certainly is only possible in a rational being, in so far as this concep- tion, and not the expected effect, determines the will. This is a good which is already preset in the person who acts accordingly, and we have not to wait for it to appear first in the result.
By what sort of law can that be the conception of which must determine the will, even without paying any regard to the effect expected from it, in order that this will may be called good absolutely and without qualification? As I have deprived the will of every im- pulse which could arise to it from obedience to any law, there remains nothing but the universal conformity of its actions to law in general, which alone is to serve the will as a principle.
The conception of “universal conformity to law” is Kant’s central notion of duty. He defines it, as we shall see, as a
“[A]n action done from duty must wholly exclude the influence of inclination, and with it every object of the will.” — I M M A N U E L K A N T
Morality has nothing to do with our satisfaction, according to Kant; it is concerned solely with doing our duty. (© iStockphoto.com/Magdalena Tworkowska)
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generalized version of the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The point is, decide what you ought to do by asking yourself the question, “What if everyone were to do that?” The rule, as he states it, is as follows:
I am never to act otherwise than so, that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law. Here, now, it is the simple conformity to law in general, without assuming any particular law applicable to certain actions, that serves the will as its principle, and must so serve it if duty is not to be a vain delusion and a chimerical notion. The common reason of men in its practical judgments perfectly coincides with this, and always has in view the principle here suggested. Let the question be, for example: May I when in distress make a promise with the intention not to keep it? I readily distinguish here between the two significations which the question may have: whether it is prudent or whether it is right to make a false promise? The former may undoubtedly often be the case. I see clearly indeed that it is not enough to extricate myself from a present difficulty by means of this subterfuge, but it must be well considered whether there may not hereafter spring from this lie much greater inconvenience than that from which I now free myself, and as, with all my supposed cunning, the consequences cannot be so easily foreseen but that credit once lost may be much more injurious to me than any mischief which I seek to avoid at present, it should be considered whether it would not be more prudent to act herein according to a universal maxim, and to make it a habit to promise nothing except with the intention of keeping it. But it is soon clear to me that such a maxim will still only be based on the fear of consequences. Now it is a wholly different thing to be truthful from duty, and to be so from apprehension of injurious consequences. In the first case, the very notion of the action implies a law for me; in the second case, I must first look about elsewhere to see what results may be combined with it which would affect myself. For to deviate from the principle of duty is beyond all doubt wicked; but to be unfaithful to my maxim of prudence may often be very advanta- geous to me, although to abide by it is certainly safer. The shortest way, however, and an unerring one, to discover the answer to this question whether a lying prom- ise is consistent with duty, is to ask myself, Should I be content that my maxim (to extricate myself from difficulty by a false promise) should hold good as a universal law, for myself as well as for others; and should I be able to say to myself, “Every one may make a deceitful promise when he finds himself in a difficulty from which he cannot otherwise extricate himself ”? Then I presently become aware that, while I can will the lie, I can by no means will that lying should be a universal law. For with such a law there would be no promises at all, since it would be in vain to allege my intention in regard to my future actions to those who would not believe this allega- tion, or if they over-hastily did so, would pay me back in my own coin. Hence my maxim, as soon as it should be made a universal law, would necessarily destroy itself.
The impressive name Kant gives to this general formulation of his notion of duty is the categorical imperative. An imperative is just what we called a command in our preliminary discussion of morality. it is of the form “do this!” or “don’t do this!” Some imperatives tell us to “do this!” but only to get or do something else. Kant calls these “hypothetical imperatives.” For example, “go to law school” (if you want to be a lawyer) or “don’t eat very hot curry” (unless you don’t mind risking an ulcer). But imperatives with a moral ought in them are not tied to any such “if” or “in order to” conditions. They are simply “do this” or “don’t do this,” whatever the circumstances, whatever you would like or enjoy personally— for example, “don’t lie” (no matter what). This is what Kant means by “categorical.”
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Now all imperatives command either hypothetically or categorically. The former repre- sent the practical necessity of a possible action as means to something else that is willed (or at least which one might possibly will). The categorical imperative would be that which represented an action as necessary of itself without reference to an- other end, that is, as objectively necessary.
Since every practical law represents a possible action as good, and on this ac- count, for a subject who is practically determinable by reason as necessary, all im- peratives are formulae determining an action which is necessary according to the principle of a will good in some respects. If now the action is good only as a means to something else, then the imperative is hypothetical; if it is conceived as good in itself and consequently as being necessarily the principle of a will which of itself con- forms to reason, then it is categorical.
With hypothetical imperatives, what is commanded depends upon particular circum- stances. With moral or categorical imperatives, there are universal laws that tell us what to do in every circumstance. (A maxim, according to Kant, is a “subjective principle of action,” or what we would call an intention, formulated as a general principle. it is distinguished from an “objective principle,” that is, a universal law of reason.)
There is therefore but one categorical imperative, namely, this: Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a uni- versal law.
Now if all imperatives of duty can be deduced from this one imperative as from their principle, then, although it should remain undecided whether what is called duty is not merely a vain notion, yet at least we shall be able to show what we under- stand by it and what this notion means.
Since the universality of the law according to which effects are produced constitutes what is properly called nature in the most general sense (as to form)—that is, the existence of things so far as it is determined by general laws—the imperative of duty may be expressed thus: Act as if the maxim of thy action were to become by thy will a universal law of nature.
We will now enumerate a few duties, adopting the usual division of them into duties to ourselves and to others, and into perfect and imperfect duties.
1. A man reduced to despair by a series of misfor- tunes feels wearied of life, but is still so far in pos- session of his reason that he can ask himself whether it would not be contrary to his duty to himself to take his own life. Now he inquires whether the maxim of his action could become a universal law of nature. His maxim is: From self- love I adopt it as a principle to shorten my life when its longer duration is likely to bring more
Kant’s categorical imperative applies to all human beings every- where at all times. (© iStockphoto.com/hidesy)
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evil than satisfaction. It is asked then simply whether this principle founded on self- love can become a universal law of nature. Now we see at once that a system of nature of which it should be law to destroy life by means of the very feeling whose special nature it is to impel to the improvement of life would contradict itself, and therefore could not exist as a system of nature; hence that maxim cannot possibly exist as a universal law of nature, and consequently would be wholly inconsistent with the supreme principle of all duty.
2. Another finds himself forced by necessity to borrow money. He knows that he will not be able to repay it, but sees also that nothing will be lent to him unless he promises stoutly to repay it in a definite time. He desires to make this promise, but he has still so much conscience as to ask himself: Is it not unlawful and inconsistent with duty to get out of a difficulty in this way? Suppose, however, that he resolves to do so, then the maxim of his action would be expressed thus: When I think myself in want of money, I will borrow money and promise to repay it, although I know that I never can do so. Now this principle of self-love or of one’s own ad- vantage may perhaps be consistent with my whole future welfare; but the question now is, Is it right? I change then the suggestion of self-love into a universal law, and state the question thus: How would it be if my maxim were a universal law? Then I see at once that it could never hold as a universal law of nature, but would neces- sarily contradict itself. For supposing it to be a universal law that everyone when he thinks himself in a difficulty should be able to promise whatever he pleases, with the purpose of not keeping his promise, the promise itself would become impos- sible, as well as the end that one might have in view in it, since no one would consider that anything was promised to him, but would ridicule all such statements as vain pretenses.
3. A third finds in himself a talent which with the help of some culture might make him a useful man in many respects. But he finds himself in comfortable circum- stances and prefers to indulge in pleasure rather than to take pains in enlarging and improving his happy natural capacities. He asks, however, whether his maxim of neglect of his natural gifts, besides agreeing with his inclination to indulgence, agrees also with what is called duty. He sees then that a system of nature could indeed subsist with such a universal law, although men (like the South Sea island- ers) should let their talents rest and resolve to devote their lives merely to idleness, amusement, and propagation of their species—in a word, to enjoyment; but he cannot possibly will that this should be a universal law of nature, or be implanted in us as such by a natural instinct. For, as a rational being, he necessarily wills that his faculties be developed, since they serve him, and have been given him, for all sorts of possible purposes.
4. A fourth, who is in prosperity, while he sees that others have to contend with great wretchedness and that he could help them, thinks: What concern is it of mine? Let everyone be as happy as Heaven pleases, or as he can make himself; I will take nothing from him nor even envy him, only I do not wish to contribute any- thing to his welfare or to his assistance in distress! Now no doubt, if such a mode of thinking were a universal law, the human race might very well subsist, and doubtless even better than in a state in which everyone talks of sympathy and good-will, or even takes care occasionally to put it into practice, but, on the other side, also cheats when he can, betrays the rights of men, or otherwise violates them. But although it is possible that a universal law of nature might exist in accordance
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with that maxim, it is impossible to will that such a principle should have the uni- versal validity of a law of nature. For a will which resolved this would contradict itself, inasmuch as many cases might occur in which one would have need of the love and sympathy of others, and in which, by such a law of nature, sprung from his own will, he would deprive himself of all hope of the aid he desires.
These are a few of the many actual duties, or at least what we regard as such, which obviously fall into two classes on the one principle that we have laid down. We must be able to will that a maxim of our action should be a universal law. This is the canon of the moral appreciation of the action generally. Some actions are of such a character that their maxim cannot without contradiction be even conceived as a universal law of nature, far from it being possible that we should will that it should be so. In others, this intrinsic impossibility is not found, but still it is impossible to will that their maxim should be raised to the universality of a law of nature, since such a will would contradict itself. It is easily seen that the former violate strict or rigorous (inflexible) duty; the latter only laxer (meritorious) duty. Thus it has been completely shown by these examples how all duties depend as regards the nature of the obligation (not the object of the action) on the same principle.
Another way of describing the categorical imperative, using a term from Kant that we have already encountered, is to say that it is an a priori principle, independent of any par- ticular circumstances. Moral principles are necessary for the same reason that certain prin- ciples of knowledge are necessary, according to Kant: they are essential to our nature. it is important, therefore, for Kant to insist that moral principles, as a priori principles of reason, hold for every human being. in fact, Kant claims that they hold “for every rational creature.” (There is an extremely important point hidden in this phrase. Traditionally, morality has been defended on the basis of God’s will. That is, the traditional view has been that we ought to be moral because God gave us the moral laws. According to Kant, however, God does not give the laws, but as a rational creature, He is bound by them just as we are. Thus, in answer to the question, Are the laws of morality good because God is good, or is God good be- cause he obeys the laws of morality? Kant would claim the latter.)
Kant’s discussion of the categorical imperative is made confusing because after he has told us that “there is but one categorical imperative,” he then goes on to give us others. He calls these “alternative formulations of the categorical imperative,” but their effect on most readers is to confuse them unnecessarily. in actuality, for Kant there are a great many cate- gorical imperatives. The first one Kant gave us is merely the most general. More specific examples are “don’t lie!” and “keep your promises!” Another general categorical impera- tive is “never use people!” We should recognize that there is a sense in which “using people” may be perfectly innocent. For example, you “use” another person in order to play tennis, since you could not play alone. in such a case, the other person derives as much benefit from your “using” him or her as you do, and we could say that the person is “using you” as well. But there are cases in which we are tempted to “use” people for our own benefit without any regard to their interests. This is what this categorical imperative forbids.
Now I say: man and generally any rational being exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will, but in all his actions, whether they concern himself or other rational beings, must be always regarded at the same time as an end. All objects of the inclinations have only a conditional worth; for if the inclinations and the wants founded on them did not exist, then their object would be without value. But the inclinations themselves, being sources of want, are so far from having an absolute worth for which they should be desired
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that, on the contrary, it must be the universal wish of every rational being to be wholly free from them. Thus the worth of any object which is to be acquired by our action is always conditional. Beings whose existence depends not on our will but on nature’s, have nevertheless, if they are not rational beings, only a relative value as means, and are therefore called things; rational beings, on the contrary, are called persons, because their very nature points them out as ends in themselves, that is, as something which must not be used merely as means, and so far therefore restricts freedom of action (and is an object of respect). These, therefore, are not merely subjective ends whose existence has a worth for us as an effect of our action, but objective ends, that is, things whose existence is an end in itself—an end, moreover, for which no other can be substituted, which they should subserve merely as means, for otherwise nothing whatever would possess absolute worth; but if all worth were conditioned and therefore contingent, then there would be no supreme practical principle of reason whatever.
If then there is a supreme practical principle or, in respect of the human will, a categorical imperative, it must be one which, being drawn from the conception of that which is necessarily an end for everyone because it is an end in itself, constitutes an objective principle of will, and can therefore serve as a universal practical law. The foundation of this principle is: rational nature exists as an end in itself. Man necessarily conceives his own existence as being so; so far then this is a subjective principle of human actions. But every other rational being regards its existence similarly, just on the same rational principle that holds for me; so that it is at the same time an objective principle from which as a supreme practical law all laws of the will must be capable of being deduced. Accordingly the practical imperative will be as fol- lows: So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other in every case as an end withal, never as means only. We will now inquire whether this can be practically carried out.
To abide by the previous examples: First, under the head of necessary duty to oneself: He who contemplates suicide
should ask himself whether his action can be consistent with the idea of humanity as an end in itself. If he destroys himself in order to escape from painful circumstances, he uses a person merely as a mean to maintain a tolerable condition up to the end of life. But a man is not a thing, that is to say, something which can be used merely as means, but must in all his actions be always considered as an end in himself. I cannot, therefore, dispose in any way of a man in my own person so as to mutilate him, to damage or kill him. (It belongs to ethics proper to define this principle more precisely, so as to avoid all misun- derstanding, for example, as to the amputation of the limbs in order to preserve myself; as to expos- ing my life to danger with a view to preserve it, etc. This question is therefore omitted here.)
Secondly, as regards necessary duties, or those of strict obligation, towards others: He who is think- ing of making a lying promise to others will see at once that he would be using another man merely as
“[R]ational beings, on the contrary, are called persons, because their very nature points them out as ends in themselves, that is, as something which must not be used merely as means.” — I M M A N U E L K A N T
Hypothetical imperatives, which apply only to some, depending on their goals, are familiar in everyday life. (© Shutterstock.com/Radu Razvan)
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a mean, without the latter containing at the same time the end in himself. For he whom I propose by such a promise to use for my own purpose cannot possibly assent to my mode of acting towards him, and therefore cannot himself contain the end of this action. This violation of the principle of humanity in other men is more obvious if we take in examples of attacks on the freedom and property of others. For then it is clear that he who transgresses the rights of men intends to use the person of others merely as means, without considering that as rational beings they ought always to be esteemed also as ends, that is, as beings who must be capable of containing in themselves the end of the very same action.
Thirdly, as regards contingent (meritorious) duties to oneself: It is not enough that the action does not violate humanity in our own person as an end in itself, it must also harmonize with it. Now there are in humanity capacities of greater perfection which belong to the end that nature has in view in regard to human- ity in ourselves as the subject; to neglect these might perhaps be consistent with the maintenance of humanity as an end in itself, but not with the advancement of this end.
Fourthly, as regards meritorious duties towards others: The natural end which all men have is their own happiness. Now humanity might indeed subsist although no one should contribute anything to the happiness of others, provided he did not intentionally withdraw anything from it; but after all, this would only harmonize negatively, not positively, with humanity as an end in itself, if everyone does not also endeavor, as far as in him lies, to forward the ends of others. For the ends of any subject which is an end in himself ought as far as possible to be my ends also, if that conception is to have its full effect with me.
This principle that humanity and generally every rational nature is an end in itself (which is the supreme limiting condition of every man’s freedom of action), is not borrowed from experience, first, because it is universal, applying as it does to all rational beings whatever, and experience is not capable of determining anything about them; secondly, because it does not present humanity as an end to men (sub- jectively), that is, as an object which men do of themselves actually adopt as an end; but as an objective end which must as a law constitute the supreme limiting condi- tion of all our subjective ends, let them be what we will; it must therefore spring from pure reason.
in Kant’s own terms, every human will is a will that is capable of acting according to universal laws of morality, not based upon any personal inclinations or interests but simply in obedience to rational principles that are categorical. using this as a definition of morality, Kant then looks back at his predecessors:
Looking back now on all previous attempts to discover the principle of morality, we need not wonder why they all failed. It was seen that man was bound to laws by duty, but it was not observed that the laws to which he is subject are only those of his own giving, though at the same time they are universal, and that he is only bound to act in conformity with his own will—a will, however, which is designed by nature to give universal laws. For when one has conceived man only as sub- ject to a law (no matter what), then this law required some interest, either by way of attraction or constraint, since it did
Helping others in distress is a duty that can never be completely fulfilled. it is an ongoing obligation. (© Shutterstock.com/Kittikorn Phongok)
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not originate as a law from his own will, but this will was according to a law obliged by something else to act in a certain manner. Now by this necessary consequence all the labor spent in finding a supreme principle of duty was irrevocably lost. For men never elicited duty, but only a necessity of acting from a certain interest.
Any morality worthy of the name, in other words, must be a product of a person’s own autonomous reason yet universal at the same time, as a product of rational will and indepen- dent of personal feeling or interest. All previous philosophies, however, have insisted upon appealing to such personal feelings and interests. They thus ended up with principles that were in every case hypothetical and not, according to Kant, categorical or morally obliga- tory. For example, morality for Aristotle depended upon a person’s being a male Greek citi- zen. For Kant, morality and duty are completely set apart from such personal circumstances and concerns. Morality and duty have no qualifications, and, ultimately, they need have nothing to do with the good life or with happiness. in a perfect world, perhaps, doing our duty may also bring us happiness. But this is not such a world, Kant observes. Happiness and morality are two separate concerns, with the second always to be considered the most im- portant. (it is at this point, however, that Kant introduces his “Postulates of Practical Reason,” and God in particular, to give us some assurance that, at least in the [very] long run, doing our duty will bring us some reward.)
Kant’s conception of morality is so strict that it is hard for most people to accept. What is most difficult to accept is the idea that morality and duty have nothing to do with our personal desires, ambitions, and feelings, which Kant called our inclinations. We can agree that at least sometimes our duties and our inclinations are in conflict. But many philosophers have thought that Kant went much too far the other way in separating them entirely.
Furthermore, Kant’s emphasis on the categorical imperative systematically rules out all reference to particular situations and circumstances. in response to Kant, one may ask: isn’t the right thing to do often determined only within the particular context or situation? (A rela- tively recent moral philosophy called “situation ethics” has insisted upon this idea.) Don’t we have to know the particular problems and persons involved? What is right in one situation may very well be wrong in another, just because of different personalities, for example. Some people may be extremely hurt if we tell them the “truth” about themselves. On the other hand, a little “white” lie will make them feel much better. Other people are offended by any lie, however, and prefer even hurtful truths to the “ignorant bliss” of not knowing. Must not all moral rules be tempered to the particular situation?
The Kantian response to this objection would be that there are many ways to avoid hurt- ing people other than telling lies. One can say, “no comment.” One can cough conveniently or drop the platter in one’s hand. The fact that certain deceptions are institutionalized in our society (such as “regrets” for not attending a dinner party) does not mean that a Kantian should defend them. The question, then, becomes how one formulates an accurate descrip- tion of the options in such cases. is it ever the case that one has only two alternatives—hurt someone or tell a lie?
in a more general way, some have objected that Kant’s unqualified concept of morality is much too general to help us decide what to do in any particular situation. As an example, take the categorical imperative “do not steal!” Although the imperative itself, as a categori- cal one, must be unqualified, in order to apply it at all, we have to understand the kinds of
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circumstances to which it applies. Can’t we have a right to steal in certain circumstances? Or, to put the same point differently, aren’t there some circumstances in which “stealing” isn’t really stealing at all? What, then, of the situation in which a starving man steals a loaf of bread from an extremely wealthy baker. Surely he is stealing, but wouldn’t we say that under the circumstances he is justified in doing so? The Kantian reply here is to distinguish between the question of whether that person is wrong in stealing and the question of whether (or how) he should be punished. in this case, we can presume, Kant would insist that the man did wrong, but nevertheless agree that he should not be punished.
How do we decide “under which circumstances” a moral law is to be applied? Kant’s formulation of the categorical imperative tells us only that we must act in such a way that anyone in similar circumstances would act the same way. What defines these “similar” cir- cumstances? Suppose a person were to tailor a maxim so that it is unlikely to apply to anyone else—for example, “anyone in these circumstances, namely, being five-foot-seven and born in Detroit in 1942, having blond hair and blue eyes, and being a graduate of C. High School, may steal.” How can we avoid such trickery? Not by any considerations within the categorical imperative itself, for by its very nature (being designed to apply across the board), it is inca- pable of telling us under what circumstances a moral law applies.
Another way of making the same objection is to complain that there is no way of decid- ing how detailed the imperative must be. For example, should we simply say, “do not steal!” or rather “do not steal unless you are starving and the other person is not!” or else, “do not steal unless you are blond and blue-eyed!” and so on? Kant’s reply, to prevent such abuses, is quite clearly to leave out all mention of particular circumstances in the formula- tion of principles. Nevertheless we have to decide in what circumstances to apply what principles, for example, in what cases it is relevant to consider the principle, “Do not steal.” And here the question comes up once again. Which circumstances are relevant to the for- mulation of a categorical imperative? Surely it would not be right to say that none is rele- vant. At least we must know enough to know whether or not a particular act is an instance of stealing.
There have been other objections to Kant’s severe philosophy. For example, if moral principles are categorical, then what do we do when two different moral principles con- flict? The rule that tells us “do not lie!” is categorical; so is the rule that tells us “keep your promises!” Suppose that i promise not to tell anyone where you will be this weekend. Then some people who want to kill you force me to tell them where you are. i have to say some- thing. Either i break the promise or i lie. Kant gives us no adequate way of choosing be- tween the promise and the lie. He has ruled out any appeal to the consequences of our actions. in Kant’s argument, even if your enemies are trying to kill you, this is not morally relevant. Most important, Kant has ruled out any appeal to what will make people happy, and this applies not only to the person who must either lie or break a promise but to every- one else who is involved as well. Kant would reply, presumably, that such cases of apparent conflict are due to a misrepresentation of the case. For example, one could respond to the intruders by playing dumb, or refusing to say anything, or trying to make them go away with force.
The question of moral conflict thus becomes critical for Kant’s moral philosophy. if moral principles conflict, we need a way of choosing between them. if Kant is right that they do not conflict, then we need a way of accounting for apparent conflicts and resolving them. it is not clear that the Kantian theory gives us either a satisfactory criterion for getting out of moral quandaries or for explaining away some of the very painful moral conflicts in which we oc- casionally find ourselves.
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H. Utilitarianism Partially in response to the austere Kantian view of morality, with its neglect of happiness and the good life, a number of British philosophers, chiefly Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, and his son John Stuart Mill, developed a conception of morality that is called utilitarianism. utilitarianism was an attempt to bring back personal inclinations and interests into moral considerations. utilitarians wanted to reconsider the consequences as well as the intentions of an action and to consider particular circumstances in an attempt to determine what is morally right. Most important, utilitarianism was an attempt to return morality to the search for the personally satisfying life, which Kant had neglected.
The basis of utilitarianism is a form of hedonism, a conception of the good life that says that the ultimate good is pleasure and that we want and ought to want pleasure. But whereas traditional hedonism is concerned only with one’s personal pleasure, utilitarianism is con- cerned with pleasure in general—both one’s own pleasure and the pleasure of other people.
in many utilitarian writings, the notions of pleasure and happiness are used interchangeably. From our earlier discussions (especially our discussion of Aristotle), you know that we must be cautious of such an exchange. Many short-lived pleasures do not make us happy, and happiness is much more than mere pleasure. The utilitarians are concerned with acknowledging this point, however. Their whole theory revolves around a single aim, to make the most people as happy as possible, sometimes sacri- ficing short-term pleasures for enduring ones. Their central principle is often summarized as “the great- est good for the greatest number.”
Jeremy Bentham was motivated to formulate his utilitarian theories not so much by the strict moralism of Kant’s philosophy as by the absurd
• What role does reason play in Kant’s morality? Kant claims to be indebted to Rousseau—how is he like Rousseau? How does he differ from Rousseau?
• What does Kant mean by a “good will”? What makes a will good, according to Kant?
• What makes an act “morally worthy,” according to Kant?
• What is a categorical imperative? How does it differ from a hypothetical impera- tive? What is a maxim? How does Kant first formulate the categorical imperative in terms of maxims? How does he use this formulation to show that lying is wrong?
• What does it mean to say that we are “ends”? How do you treat someone as an end? What does Kant mean when he tells us not to treat others as a means only? What would be an example of treating another person as a means only? Are there any circumstances under which it may be permissible to do so?
• Do you find Kant’s view that moral worth has nothing to do with our own personal inclinations, passions, and feelings convincing? Why is he so concerned with sepa- rating morality from inclinations?
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832)
A leader in the legal reform move- ment in England and the founding father of that ethical position called utilitarianism. His principle of utility, which says that one should act to produce the greatest good for the greatest number of people, was the central theme of utilitarianism and slowly worked its way into the con- fusion of rules and statutes that con- stituted the English legal system of his day. Bentham’s best-known work is his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789).
Jeremy Bentham (© Bettmann/ Corbis)
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complexity of the British legal system. Just as Kant sought a single principle that would sim- plify all morality, Bentham looked for a single principle that would simplify the law. Bentham began with the fact that people seek pleasure and avoid pain and developed the “principle of utility,” to be applied to policy decisions as well as to personal ones.
F RO M An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation B Y Jeremy Bentham19
I. Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think; every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire; but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes the subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to tear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law. Systems which attempt to question it, deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, the darkness instead of light.
But enough of metaphor and declamation: it is not by such means that moral science is to be improved.
II. The principle of utility is the foundation of the present work; it will be proper therefore at the outset to give an explicit and determinate account of what is meant by it. By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disap- proves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question; or, what is the same thing in other words, to promote or to oppose that happiness. I say of every action whatsoever; and therefore not only of every action of a private individual, but of every measure of government.
III. By utility is meant that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness, (all this in the present case comes to the same thing) or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happen- ing of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered: if that party be the community in general, then the happiness of the community: if a particular individual, then the happiness of that individual.
IV. The interest of the community is one of the most general expressions that can occur in the phraseology of morals: no wonder that the meaning of it is often lost. When it has a meaning, it is this. The community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were its members. The interest of the community then is, what?—the sum of the interests of the sev- eral members who compose it.
V. It is in vain to talk of the interest of the community, without understanding what is the interest of the individual. A thing is said to promote the interest, or to be for the interest, of an individual, when it tends to add to the sum total of his pleasures: or, what comes to the same thing, to diminish the sum total of his pains.
19 Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Oxford, u.K.: Clarendon Press, 1879).
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VI. An action then may be said to be conformable to the principle of utility, or, for shortness’ sake, to utility, (meaning with respect to the community at large) when the tendency it has to augment the happiness of the community is greater than any it has to diminish it.
VII. A measure of government (which is but a particular kind of action, per- formed by a particular person or persons) may be said to be conformable to or dictated by the principle of utility, when in like manner the tendency which it has to augment the happiness of the community is greater than any which it has to diminish it.
Morality, according to Bentham’s principle of utility, demands nothing other than action that tends to increase the amount of pleasure rather than diminish it.
X. Of an action that is conformable to the principle of utility, one may always say either that it is one that ought to be done, or at least that it is not one that ought not to be done. One may say also, that it is right it should be done; at least that it is not wrong it should be done: that it is a right action; at least that it is not a wrong action. When thus interpreted, the words ought, and right and wrong, and others of that stamp, have a meaning: when otherwise, they have none.
How does one defend this principle of utility? One cannot, Bentham tells us. To try to prove the principle is “as impossible as it is needless.” People quite “naturally,” whether they admit to it or not, act on the basis of it. This is not to say that they always act on it, but when they do not, it is only because they do not always know what is best for them. The reason for ar- ticulating the principle is to enable them to figure it out.
The heart of Bentham’s theory is the formulation of a procedure for deciding, in every possible case, the value of alternative courses of action. The procedure simply involves the determination of alternative amounts of pleasures and pain, according to what has appropri- ately been called the happiness calculus.
I. Pleasures then, and the avoidance of pains, are the ends which the legislator has in view; it behoves him therefore to understand their value. Pleasures and pains are the instruments he has to work with: it behoves him therefore to understand their force, which is gain, in other words, their value.
II. To a person considered by himself, the value of a pleasure or pain considered by itself, will be greater or less, according to the four following circumstances.
1. Its intensity. 2. Its duration. 3. Its certainty or uncertainty. 4. Its propinquity or remoteness.
III. These are the circumstances which are to be considered in estimating a plea- sure or a pain considered each of them by itself. But when the value of any pleasure or pain is considered for the purpose of estimating the tendency of any act by which it is produced, there are two other circumstances to be taken into the account; these are,
5. Its fecundity, or the chance it has of being followed by sensations of the same kind: that is, pleasures, if it be a pleasure: pains, if it be a pain.
6. Its purity, or the chance it has of not being followed by sensations of the opposite kind: that is, pains, if it be a pleasure: pleasures, if it be a pain.
“An action . . . may be said to be conformable . . . to utility . . . when the tendency it has to augment the happiness of the community is greater than any it has to diminish it.” — J E R E M Y B E N T H A M
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Bentham proceeds to the test itself:
V. To take an exact account then of the general tendency of any act by which the interests of a community are affected, proceed as follows. Begin with any one person of those whose interests seem most immediately to be affected by it; and take an account,
1. Of the value of each distinguishable pleasure which appears to be produced by it in the first instance.
2. Of the value of each pain which appears to be produced by it in the first instance.
3. Of the value of each pleasure which appears to be produced by it after the first. This constitutes the fecundity of the first pleasure and the impurity of the first pain.
4. Of the value of each pain which appears to be produced by it after the first. This constitutes the fecundity of the first pain, and the impurity of the first pleasure.
5. Sum up all the values of all the pleasures on the one side, and those of all the pains on the other. The balance, if it be on the side of pleasure, will give the good tendency of the act upon the whole, with respect to the interests of that individual person; if on the side of pain, the bad tendency of it upon the whole.
6. Take an account of the number of persons whose interests appear to be con- cerned; and repeat the above process with respect to each. Sum up the num- bers expressive of the degrees of good tendency, which the act has, with respect to each individual, in regard to whom the tendency of it is good upon the whole: do this again with respect to each individual, in regard to whom the tendency of it is bad upon the whole. Take the balance; which, if on the side of pleasure, will give the general good tendency of the act, with respect to the total number of community of individuals concerned; if on the side of pain the general evil tendency, with respect to the same community.
let us provide an example. Bentham discusses the problem of lust (Prop. XXX), which he says is always bad. Why? “Because if the effects of the motive are not bad, then we do not call it lust.” lust, in other words, is sexual desire that is so excessive that it brings about more pain than pleasure. Suppose you are sexually attracted to another person. How do you decide (assuming that there is already mutual agreement) whether to follow through or not?
Here is Bentham’s proposal: First, you estimate the amount of pleasure each person will gain. An important question is whether the pleasure of only these two people should be estimated or the pleasure of others besides. if it is a question of adultery, then the interests of at least a third person should be considered. Even assuming that no such direct complica- tions are involved, the indirect interests of the rest of society must be considered. (if you and your potential lover are sufficiently young, should the happiness of your parents enter into your decision?)
Then, after you have considered the initial pleasure that will result, estimate the initial pain. (in this case, we may presume it will be slight.) Then ask about the longer-term plea- sures and pains for each person involved. if a sexual relationship will leave you feeling happy about yourself and the other person, then the subsequent pleasure will be considerable. if either person will feel regrets, or degraded, or embarrassed; if sex will spoil a good friend- ship; or if a sexual relationship will set up expectations that one or both of you is unwilling to fulfill, the amount of subsequent pain may be overwhelming.
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After pursuing all these considerations, add up the pleasures and pains for each person (and for others who may be affected); match the total amount of pleasure against the total pain; and if the balance is positive, go ahead. if the balance is negative, don’t do it. Suppose, for example, that you each expect a great deal of initial pleasure, and one of you expects nothing but good feelings afterward while the other expects only mild regrets. No one else need even know, so the balance is clearly very positive. But suppose neither of you expects to enjoy it all that much, and the subsequent hassles will be a prolonged and troublesome bother, then, very likely the balance will be negative.
We do not often make this kind of decision in this way. We simply do what we want to do at the time. And this is precisely what Bentham says we should not do. Bentham argues that it is because we so often act on the basis of impulses without rational calculations that we end up unhappy. in other words, the fact that we are usually irrational is not an argument against Bentham’s principles. Their purpose is precisely to make us rational, to help us get what we really want.
There are problems with Bentham’s theory. All that is considered, according to his “hap- piness calculus,” is the amount of pleasure and pain. But some of you, in response to our preceding example, may well say, “it doesn’t matter how much pleasure and how little pain two people will gain if they get into a sexual relationship. under certain circumstances (if it is adultery or simply if they are not married) such behavior is wrong! Mere pleasure is not enough!” Here we see the beginning of a swing back toward Kant. Regardless of your reac- tion to the previous example, such a move is necessary. To see why, let us examine the fol- lowing objection to Bentham.
Suppose a great many people would get a great deal of pleasure out of seeing some in- nocent person tortured and slaughtered like a beast. Of course, the victim would suffer a great deal of pain, but by increasing the size of the crowd, we could eventually obtain an amount of pleasure for everyone else that more than balanced the suffering of the victim. Bentham’s calculus has no way of rejecting such a gruesome outcome. A less horrible ex- ample is this: if a person gets great pleasure from some activity and no pain, there are no other considerations that apply to him or her (assuming that his or her actions do not affect others). Are we then to say that a life of sloth and self-indulgence, if it satisfies everyone and gives them a lot of pleasure and no pain, is to be preferred to any other life of any kind? Does Bentham give us any reason to try for anything “better” than being happy pigs? This was the problem that bothered Bentham’s godson, John Stuart Mill.
Mill’s version of utilitarianism added an important qualification to Bentham’s purely quan- titative calculus. Mill said that it is not only the quantity of pleasure that counts, but the qual- ity as well. Needless to say, this makes the calculations much more complicated. in fact, it makes them impossible, for there cannot be precise calculations of quality, even though there can be precise calculations of quantity. Mill’s now-famous example is the following: if a pig can live a completely satisfied life, while a morally concerned and thoughtful individual like Socrates cannot ever be so satisfied, is the life of the pig therefore preferable? Mill’s answer is this:
It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.
On what grounds can he say this? Aren’t the pig and the fool happier?
If the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party [Socrates] knows both sides.20
20 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (london: J. M. Dent, 1910).
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Some problems emerge from this theory. How are we to evaluate different “qualities” of pleasure, even if we have tried them all? First let us look to Mill’s revision of utilitarianism, as summarized in his popular pamphlet, appropriately called Utili- tarianism. (it was Mill, not Bentham, who invented this term.) it begins with a general consideration of morality and of Kant’s moral philosophy in particular.
F RO M Utilitarianism B Y John Stuart Mill21
Our moral faculty, according to all those of its inter- preters who are entitled to the name of thinkers, sup- plies us only with the general principles of moral judgments; it is a branch of our reason, not of our sensi- tive faculty; and must be looked to for the abstract doc- trines of morality, not for perception of it in the concrete. The intuitive, no less than what may be termed the in- ductive, school of ethics, insists on the necessity of general laws. They both agree that the morality of an individual action is not a question of direct perception, but of the application of a law to an individual case. They recognise also, to a great extent, the same moral laws; but differ as to their evidence, and the source from which they derive their authority. According to the one opinion, the principles of morals are evident a priori, requiring nothing to com- mand assent, except that the meaning of the terms be understood. According to the other doctrine, right and wrong, as well as truth and falsehood, are questions of observation and experience. But both hold equally that morality must be deduced from principles; and the intuitive school affirm as strongly as the inductive, that there is a science of morals. Yet they seldom attempt to make out a list of the a priori principles which are to serve as the premises of the science; still more rarely do they make any effort to reduce those various principles to one first principle, or common ground of obligation. They either assume the ordinary precepts of morals as of a priori authority, or they lay down as the common groundwork of those maxims, some generality much less obviously authoritative than the maxims themselves, and which has never succeeded in gaining popular acceptance. Yet to support their pretensions there ought either to be some one fundamental principle or law, at the root of all morality, or if there be several, there should be a determinate order of precedence among them; and the one principle, or the rule for deciding between the various principles when they conflict, ought to be self-evident.
To inquire how far the bad effects of this deficiency have been mitigated in practice, or to what extent the moral beliefs of mankind have been vitiated or made uncertain by the absence of any distinct recognition of an ultimate standard, would imply a complete survey and criticism of past and present ethical doctrine. It would, however, be easy to show that whatever steadiness or consistency these moral be- liefs have attained, has been mainly due to the tacit influence of a standard not
A nineteenth-century engraving of John Stuart Mill (The New York Public Library/Art Resource, NY)
21 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (london: J. M. Dent, 1910).
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recognised. Although the non-existence of an acknowledged first principle has made ethics not so much a guide as a consecration of men’s actual sentiments, still, as men’s sentiments, both of favour and of aversion, are greatly influenced by what they suppose to be the effects of things upon their happiness, the principle of util- ity, or as Bentham latterly called it, the greatest happiness principle, has had a large share in forming the moral doctrines even of those who most scornfully reject its authority. Nor is there any school of thought which refuses to admit that the influ- ence of actions on happiness is a most material and even predominant consideration in many of the details of morals, however unwilling to acknowledge it as the fundamental principle of morality, and the source of moral obligation. I might go much further, and say that to all those a priori moralists who deem it necessary to argue at all, utilitarian arguments are indispensable. It is not my present purpose to criticise these thinkers; but I cannot help referring, for illustration, to a systematic treatise by one of the most illustrious of them, the Metaphysics of Ethics, by Kant. This remarkable man, whose system of thought will long remain one of the land- marks in the history of philosophical speculation, does, in the treatise in question, lay down a universal first principle as the origin and ground of moral obligation; it is this:—“So act, that the rule on which thou actest would admit of being adopted as a law by all rational beings.” But when he begins to deduce from this precept any of the actual duties of morality, he fails, almost grotesquely, to show that there would be any contradiction, any logical (not to say physical) impossibility, in the adoption by all rational beings of the most outrageously immoral rules of conduct. All he shows is that the consequences of their universal adoption would be such as no one would choose to incur.
Mill next gets down to the business of redefining utilitarianism. like Bentham, he insists that the principle of utility cannot be proved as such, for it is the ultimate end in terms of which everything else is justified. But there is, Mill tells us, a “larger sense of the word ‘proof’”:
On the present occasion, I shall, without further discussion of the other theories, attempt to contribute something towards the understanding and appreciation of the Utilitarian or Happiness theory, and towards such proof as it is susceptible of. It is evident that this cannot be proof in the ordinary and popular meaning of the term. Questions of ultimate ends are not amenable to direct proof. Whatever can be proved to be good must be so by being shown to be a means to something ad- mitted to be good without proof. The medical art is proved to be good by its con- ducing to health; but how is it possible to prove that health is good? The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good? If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselves good, and that whatever else is good, is not so as an end, but as a mean, the formula may be accepted or rejected, but is not a subject of what is commonly understood by proof. We are not, however, to infer that its acceptance or rejection must depend on blind impulse, or arbitrary choice. There is a larger meaning of the word proof, in which this question is as amenable to it as any other of the disputed questions of philoso- phy. The subject is within the cognisance of the rational faculty; and neither does that faculty deal with it solely in the way of intuition. Considerations may be pre- sented capable of determining the intellect either to give or withhold its assent to the doctrine; and this is equivalent to proof.
“Questions of ultimate ends are not amenable to direct proof. Whatever can be proved to be good must be so by being shown to be a means to something admitted to be good without proof.” — J O H N S T U A R T M I L L
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Mill concerns himself with dispelling a popular misconception, which views the principle of utility as advocating “usefulness” in opposition to pleasure. Here he points out that, by utility, proponents of the theory have always meant “not something to be contradistin- guished from pleasure, but pleasure itself, together with exemption from pain.” The great- est happiness principle, in turn, holds that actions are right to the extent that they promote happiness and are wrong to the extent that they diminish happiness. By “happiness,” of course, Mill means pleasure and the absence of pain. Pleasure or happiness, according to Mill, is the only thing desirable as an end (it is therefore an intrinsic good), and all other desir- able things are desired for the pleasure that they produce. These other goods are simply means toward pleasure (and are therefore instrumental goods).
A passing remark is all that needs be given to the ignorant blunder of supposing that those who stand up for utility as the test of right and wrong, use the term in that restricted and merely colloquial sense in which utility is opposed to pleasure. An apology is due to the philosophical opponents of utilitarianism, for even the momen- tary appearance of confounding them with any one capable of so absurd a miscon- ception; which is the more extraordinary, inasmuch as the contrary accusation, of referring everything to pleasure, and that too in its grossest form, is another of the common charges against utilitarianism: and, as has been pointedly remarked by an able writer, the same sort of persons, and often the very same persons, denounce the theory “as impracticably dry when the word utility precedes the word pleasure, and as too practicably voluptuous when the word pleasure precedes the word utility.” Those who know anything about the matter are aware that every writer, from Epi- curus to Bentham, who maintained the theory of utility, meant by it, not something to be contradistinguished from pleasure, but pleasure itself, together with exemption from pain; and instead of opposing the useful to the agreeable or the ornamental, have always declared that the useful means these, among other things. Yet the common herd, including the herd of writers, not only in newspapers and periodicals, but in books of weight and pretension, are perpetually falling, into this shallow mis- take. Having caught up the word utilitarian, while knowing nothing whatever about it but its sound, they habitually express by it the rejection, or the neglect, of pleasure in some of its forms; of beauty, of ornament, or of amusement. Nor is the term thus ignorantly misapplied solely in disparagement, but occasionally in compliment; as though it implied superiority to frivolity and the mere pleasures of the moment. And this perverted use is the only one in which the word is popularly known, and the one from which the new generation are acquiring their sole notion of its meaning. Those who introduced the word, but who had for many years discontinued it as a distinctive appellation, may well feel themselves called upon to resume it, if by doing so they can hope to contribute anything towards rescuing it from this utter degradation.
The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to pro- mote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happi- ness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. To give a clear view of the moral standard set up by the theory, much more requires to be said; in particular, what things it includes in the ideas of pain and pleasure; and to what extent this is left an open question. But these supplementary explanations do not affect the theory of life on which this theory of morality is grounded—namely, that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which are as
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numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.
After defining the principle of utility, Mill turns his attention to the objection (one often levied against the Epicureans) that to claim that plea- sure is the highest good for human beings is to degrade human life to the level of pigs. Mill re- sponds that it is not the advocates of pleasure who degrade human life, but their critics, since they assume that humans are capable only of the same types of pleasures as swine. Mill dis- tinguishes between higher and lower pleasures and says that humans, unlike pigs, are capable of both because we possess higher cognitive faculties. Hence, when Mill says that the highest good is pleasure, he is referring primarily to the higher types of pleasures.
How do we know which pleasures are higher or what makes one pleasure higher than another? Mill’s answer is simple: if we are considering two pleasures, then the higher plea- sure will be the one that is preferred by those who have experienced both. Human beings will prefer to satisfy their higher faculties over satisfying their lower ones, even though the higher faculties are much more difficult to satisfy. Few among us would consent to exchange our life with the life of a satisfied pig, even if we seem to be less satisfied than a pig. We hardly think that the life of a satisfied pig is a dignified one. Thus, Mill reaches his conclusion: “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dis- satisfied than a fool satisfied.”
Now, such a theory of life excites in many minds, and among them in some of the most estimable in feeling and purpose, inveterate dislike. To suppose that life has (as they express it) no higher end than pleasure—no better and nobler object of desire and pursuit—they designate as utterly mean and grovelling; as a doctrine worthy only of swine, to whom the followers of Epicurus were, at a very early period, contemptuously likened; and modern holders of the doctrine are occasion- ally made the subject of equally polite comparisons by its German, French, and English assailants.
When thus attacked, the Epicureans have always answered, that it is not they, but their accusers, who represent human nature in a degrading light; since the ac- cusation supposes human beings to be capable of no pleasures except those of which swine are capable. If this supposition were true, the charge could not be gainsaid, but would then be no longer an imputation; for if the sources of pleasure were precisely the same to human beings and to swine, the rule of life which is good enough for the one would be good enough for the other. The comparison of the Epicurean life to that of beasts is felt as degrading, precisely because a beast’s pleasures do not satisfy a human being’s conceptions of happiness. Human beings have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, and when once made con- scious of them, do not regard anything as happiness which does not include their
Mill claims that no human being, no matter how miserable, would willingly exchange places with a satisfied pig. (© Shutterstock.com/jadimages)
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gratification. I do not, indeed, consider the Epicureans to have been by any means faultless in drawing out their scheme of consequences from the utilitarian princi- ple. To do this in any sufficient manner, many Stoic, as well as Christian elements require to be included. But there is no known Epicurean theory of life which does not assign to the pleasures of the intellect, of the feelings and imagination, and of the moral sentiments, a much higher value as pleasures than to those of mere sensa- tion. It must be admitted, however, that utilitarian writers in general have placed the superiority of mental over bodily pleasures chiefly in the greater permanency, safety, uncostliness, etc., of the former—that is, in their circumstantial advantages rather than in their intrinsic nature. And on all these points utilitarians have fully proved their case; but they might have taken the other, and, as it may be called, higher ground, with entire consistency. It is quite compatible with the principle of utility to recognise the fact, that some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others. It would be absurd that while, in estimating all other things, quality is considered as well as quantity, the estimation of pleasures should be sup- posed to depend on quantity alone.
If I am asked, what I mean by difference of quality in pleasures, or what makes one pleasure more valuable than another, merely as a pleasure, except its being greater in amount, there is but one possible answer. Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided prefer- ence, irrespective of a feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desir- able pleasure. If one of the two is, by those who are competently acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that they prefer it, even though knowing it to be attended with a greater amount of discontent, and would not resign it for any quantity of the other pleasure which their nature is capable of, we are justified in ascribing to the preferred enjoyment a superiority in quality, so far outweighing quantity as to render it, in comparison, of small account.
Now it is an unquestionable fact that those who are equally acquainted with, and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying, both, do give a most marked preference to the manner of existence which employs their higher faculties. Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals, for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast’s pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no instructed person would be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would be selfish and base, even though they should be persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better satisfied with his lot than they are with theirs. They would not resign what they possess more than he for the most complete satisfaction of all the desires which they have in common with him. If they ever fancy they would, it is only in cases of unhappiness so extreme, that to escape from it they would exchange their lot for almost any other, however unde- sirable in their own eyes. A being of higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is capable probably of more acute suffering, and certainly accessible to it at more points, than one of an inferior type; but in spite of these liabilities, he can never really wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence. We may give what explanation we please of this unwillingness; we may attribute it to pride, a name which is given indiscriminately to some of the most and to some of the least estimable feelings of which mankind are capable: we may refer it to the love of liberty and personal independence, an appeal to which was with the Stoics one of the most effective means for the inculcation of it; to the love of power, or to the love of excitement, both of which do really enter into and contribute to it: but
“Of two pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of a feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure.” — J O H N S T U A R T M I L L
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its most appropriate appellation is a sense of dignity, which all human beings pos- sess in one form or other, and in some, though by no means in exact, proportion to their higher faculties, and which is so essential a part of the happiness of those in whom it is strong, that nothing which conflicts with it could be, otherwise than momentarily, an object of desire to them. Whoever supposes that this preference takes place at a sacrifice of happiness—that the superior being, in anything like equal circumstances, is not happier than the inferior—confounds the two very dif- ferent ideas, of happiness, and content. It is indisputable that the being whose ca- pacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfec- tions, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify. It is better to be a human being dissatis- fied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.
Mill does recognize that cultivating the higher faculties is a difficult thing to do. We know many among us who do not pursue the higher pleasures, but seem constantly to seek bodily satisfaction. Mill explains the behavior of these types of people in a number of ways. They may be lazy, they may have had little opportunity to cultivate their higher faculties in the past and are now incapable of them, they may be ignorant, or they may have what is referred to as “weakness of will.” Weakness of will is that familiar experience of knowing what is the right thing to do, yet choosing, giving into temptation and failing to do it.
Mill thinks that the cultivation of noble character is necessary for the utilitarian. Not only will noble or virtuous people be more receptive to cultivating their higher faculties and therefore more apt to pursue higher pleasures, they tend to make others happy. Since the goal of utilitarianism is to increase not just the agent’s happiness, but the greatest total amount of happiness of everyone, the utilitarian is obligated to cultivate the virtues in him- self and others.
It may be objected, that many who are capable of the higher pleasures, occasionally, under the influence of temptation, postpone them to the lower. But this is quite compatible with a full appreciation of the intrinsic superiority of the higher. Men often, from infirmity of character, make their election for the nearer good, though they know it to be the less valuable; and this no less when the choice is between two bodily pleasures, than when it is between bodily and mental. They pursue sensual indulgences to the injury of health, though perfectly aware that health is the greater good. It may be further objected, that many who begin with youthful enthusiasm for everything noble, as they advance in years sink into indolence and selfishness. But I do not believe that those who undergo this very common change, voluntarily choose the lower description of pleasures in preference to the higher. I believe that before they devote themselves exclusively to the one, they have already become incapable of the other. Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the oc- cupations to which their position in life has devoted them, and the society into which it has thrown them, are not favourable to keeping that higher capacity in exercise. Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes,
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because they have not time or opportunity for in- dulging them; and they addict themselves to infe- rior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only ones to which they have access, or the only ones which they are any longer capable of enjoying. It may be questioned whether any one who has remained equally susceptible to both classes of pleasures, ever knowingly and calmly preferred the lower; though many, in all ages, have broken down in an ineffectual attempt to combine both.
From this verdict of the only competent judges, I apprehend there can be no appeal. On a question which is the best worth having of two pleasures, or which of two modes of existence is the most grateful to the feelings, apart from its moral attri- butes and from its consequences, the judgment of those who are qualified by knowledge of both, or, if they differ, that of the majority among them, must be admitted as final. And there needs be the less hesitation to accept this judgment respecting the quality of pleasures, since there is no other tri- bunal to be referred to even on the question of quantity. What means are there of determining which is the acutest of two pains, or the intensest of two pleasurable sensations, except the general suffrage of those who are familiar with both? Nei- ther pains nor pleasures are homogeneous, and pain is always heterogeneous with pleasure. What is there to decide whether a particular pleasure is worth purchasing at the cost of a particular pain, except the feelings and judgment of the experienced? When, therefore, those feel- ings and judgment declare the pleasures derived from the higher faculties to be preferable in kind, apart from the question of intensity, to those of which the animal nature, disjoined from the higher faculties, is susceptible, they are entitled on this subject to the same regard.
I have dwelt on this point, as being a necessary part of a perfectly just conception of Utility or Happiness, considered as the directive rule of human conduct. But it is by no means an indispensable condition to the acceptance of the utilitarian standard; for that standard is not the agent’s own greatest happiness, but the greatest amount of happiness altogether; and if it may possibly be doubted whether a noble character is always the happier for its nobleness, there can be no doubt that it makes other people happier, and that the world in general is immensely a gainer by it. Utilitarianism, therefore, could only attain its end by the general cultivation of nobleness of charac- ter, even if each individual were only benefited by the nobleness of others, and his own, so far as happiness is concerned, were a sheer deduction from the benefit. But the bare enunciation of such an absurdity as this last, renders refutation superfluous.
According to the Greatest Happiness Principle, as above explained, the ultimate end, with reference to and for the sake of which all other things are desirable
Shakespearean plays, such as King John, are among the higher pleasures that Mill considers qualitatively superior to bodily grati- fication. (© iStockphoto.com/azndc)
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(whether we are considering our own good or that of other people), is an existence exempt as far as possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments, both in point of quantity and quality; the test of quality, and the rule for measuring it against quantity, being the preference felt by those who in their opportunities of experience, to which must be added their habits of self-consciousness and self- observation, are best furnished with the means of comparison. This, being, accord- ing to the utilitarian opinion, the end of human action, is necessarily also the standard of morality; which may accordingly be defined, the rules and precepts for human conduct, by the observance of which an existence such as has been described might be, to the greatest extent possible, secured to all mankind; and not to them only, but, so far as the nature of things admits, to the whole sentient creation.
• What is the principle of utility? is pleasure quantifiable? How does Bentham sug- gest that we calculate utility? Consider two courses of action and compare them according to the Benthamite calculus.
• Why is Mill’s modification of Bentham’s view so significant? Can you provide ex- amples of higher pleasures? (lower pleasures are pretty obvious.) Mill recognizes that humans do not always seek higher pleasures. Do you find his explanations for this convincing?
• What is hedonism? is Mill a hedonist? How does hedonism differ from Aristotle’s view of the good life? in what ways does Mill’s notion of higher pleasure seem closer to Aristotle’s conception of eudaimonia than Bentham’s idea of pleasure?
• Do you see any problems with trying to base a morality on considerations of pain and pleasure?
I. The Creation of Morality: Nietzsche and Existentialism The single term morality must not mislead us. We have been discussing not simply different theories of the nature of morality, but different conceptions of morality—different morali- ties, in other words, even if they should have many principles in common. The problem of relativism is not confined to the comparison of exotically different cultures. it faces us in a far more urgent form in our own conceptions of morality. We may agree that killing without extreme provocation is wrong. But why do we believe that it is wrong? One person claims that it is wrong because the Ten Commandments (orders from God) forbid it. Another says it is wrong because it is a mark of insensitivity that demonstrates a flaw in character. Another says it is wrong because it violates people’s rights, while still another says it increases the amount of pain in the world without equally adding to happiness. They all agree that killing is wrong, but the different reasons point to different circumstances in which each would kill: the first, if God commanded him or her to; the second, if the killing could be seen as a sign of strength and heroism; the third, if he or she found another right that overrode the right to live; the fourth, if the death of one person was more than balanced by the increased welfare of the others (as in a criminal execution).
From the three great moral philosophies we have presented, four such conceptions emerge. They all agree on many principles, but the reasons differ widely, and some of the principles do as well. Most dramatic is the difference between Aristotle’s ancient Greek morality and Kant’s modern morality of duty. Kant’s morality may be taken as a fair represen- tation of the modern Judeo-Christian morality in its strictest form: the emphasis on moral
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principle and laws, the emphasis on reason and individual autonomy, and the emphasis on good intentions (“a good will”) and on doing one’s duty. There are small differences that we have already pointed out: the Greek emphasis on pride as a virtue in contrast to the Chris- tian condemnation of pride as a “deadly sin” (or, at least, a personality flaw) and its emphasis on humility. One of Aristotle’s first virtues was courage in battle, while most modern morali- ties consider courage as a special case, not as a matter of being an everyday “good person” at all. This difference may well be attributed to the different political climates of the two societies. But that is not enough. As we shall see, the differences are much deeper than that.
There are crucial differences between ancient and modern moral perspectives. The most striking is the difference in the scope of their applicability. in Aristotle’s moral philosophy, only a small elite is thought to be capable of true happiness (eudaimonia) through virtuous action and contemplation. Other people (women, slaves, and noncitizens) may live comfort- ably enough and do their duties and chores efficiently, but they cannot be called “happy.” The elite, however, are characterized by their excellence; by their individual achievements, including wealth, power, honor, intelligence, and wit; and by all those rewards that come with an aristocratic upbringing—the best education and a life in which basic comforts are guar- anteed from birth.
in Kant’s conception of morality, by contrast, all people who are rational (that is, everyone except the severely retarded, young children, and popular musicians) are to be judged by the same moral standards—the standards of duty. There are no elites. And since the judg- ments of moral worth are made solely on the basis of good intentions, no “external” advan- tages are relevant to a person’s goodness or badness. in fact, it is possible that a perfectly “good” person would, with only the best intentions, cause chaos and unhappiness around him wherever he goes. And the harder he tries to make amends, the more he fouls them up. Dostoyevsky wrote one of his greatest novels, The Idiot, about just this—a perfectly good man, with all the right intentions, causes suffering and even death every time he tries to do good. yet (and this is Dostoyevsky’s point) he is, by this modern conception, still the per- fectly good man. Aristotle would find this laughable. How could we call a man virtuous just because of his intentions? How can a perfect failure be an example of ideal goodness?
in Aristotle’s morality, the only people who operate on the basis of duty are those who are incapable of being truly good and truly happy. Duty is a morality for women and servants. For the elite, it is rather a question of personal excellence—in battle, in games, in business, in love, in debate, and in all things, especially philosophy. And where Kant’s morality consists mostly (like the Ten Commandments) of “thou shalt not . . .” Aristotle’s morality appropri- ately emphasizes personal desires and ambitions, not commands to achieve, and certainly not negative commands. The key element of Kant’s philosophy, duty, is treated minimally in Aristotle, where the emphasis is on personal growth and achievement. On the other side, the image of the well-rounded, successful man, excellent in all things and the envy of his fellow men, plays only a secondary role in Kant’s philosophy (for example, in his Doctrine of Virtue, the second part of the Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals). For Kant, what is important is the person who does what he or she is supposed to do. For Aris- totle, the ideal is to strive for personal excellence, and doing what a person is supposed to do is simply taken for granted along the way.
Now notice that both moralities have many of the same results. Aristotle’s morality praises many and condemns most of the same acts as Kant’s morality: Killing needlessly and steal- ing are wrong; telling the truth and keeping promises are right. But their conceptions of morality and, consequently, their conceptions of people are distinctively different. if we ap- preciate the nature of this difference, we will be in a position to understand one of the most dramatic moral revolutions of modern times, initiated by Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche
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called himself an immoralist, and he attacked morality as viciously as he attacked Christianity. But though he has often been interpreted as saying that we should give up morality and feel free to kill, steal, and commit crimes of all kinds, his moral philosophy does not in fact say any such thing. What Nietzsche did was to attack modern morality, as summarized by Kant and Christianity, and to urge us to return to ancient Greek morality, as summarized by Aristotle. Nietzsche also attacked utilitarianism, which he considered “vulgar.”
like a great many philosophers of the nineteenth century (particularly German philoso- phers: Fichte, Hegel, and Marx), Nietzsche saw in the ancient Greeks a sense of personal harmony and a sense of excellence that had been lost in the modern world. Nietzsche, like Aristotle, viewed the concept of duty as fit for servants and slaves, but thought that such a morality was wholly inadequate to motivate us to personal excellence and achievement. And Nietzsche, like Aristotle, was an unabashed elitist. Only a few people were capable of this “higher” morality. For the rest, the “slave morality” of duty would have to suffice. But for the elite, nothing was more important than to give up the “thou shalt not . . .” of Judeo- Christian morality and to seek one’s own virtues and abilities. This does not mean that such a person need ever violate the laws of morality, although it must be said that Nietzsche’s belligerent style and often warlike terminology certainly suggests that his master morality would include a good amount of cruelty and immorality. But it is clear that Nietzsche does not consider obedience to laws as the most important thing in life. Nor does this mean that Nietzsche is (as he is often thought to be) an ethical egoist. To say that a person should de- velop his or her own virtues and become excellent in as many ways as possible is not to say that one must act only in one’s own interests. As in Aristotle, the excellence of the individual is part of and contributes to the excellence of mankind as a whole.
Nietzsche takes his central project as a philosopher to be what he calls “the creation of values.” in this he is rightly listed among the existentialist philosophers or, at least, as one of their most important predecessors. The phrase creation of values is perhaps misleading, however. What Nietzsche is doing is not inventing new values so much as reasserting an- cient ones. Furthermore, Nietzsche, like Aristotle, takes ethics to be based solely upon human nature, so it is not a question of “creating values” as much as finding them in one- self. But where such a philosophy for Aristotle was in agreement with most of the thinking of his times, Nietzsche’s thought was a radical disruption of the usual Kantian style of think- ing of the modern period, and so it takes on the tone of violent destructiveness rather than—as in Aristotle—the self-satisfied tones of a gentleman. Since Nietzsche, unlike Aristotle, did not believe that every human “nature” was the same, moreover, he taught that different individuals would most assuredly find and follow different values, different conceptions of excellence, and thus have different moralities. For this reason, students who read Nietzsche looking for concrete moral advice, a set of principles to act on, are always disappointed. Nietzsche’s central teaching is rather “follow yourself, don’t follow me.” Consequently, Nietzsche can’t—and won’t—try to tell you how to live. But he does tell you to live fully and to give up the servile views of ourselves that we in the West have held for many centuries.
Nietzsche’s moral philosophy is largely critical, and most of his efforts have gone into the rejection of the Kantian approach to morality in order to make room for individual self- achieving as found in Aristotle. His argument, however, is not a refutation in the usual sense. instead, he undermines morality by showing that the motivation behind it is decrepit and weak. The categories in his philosophy are strength and weakness, and Nietzsche considers the Greek tradition of personal excellence a source of strength and the modern conception of morality a facade for weakness. Accordingly, he calls the first a “master morality” and the second, a “slave morality” or, with reference to modern mass movements, a “herd instinct.”
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The excerpts that follow illustrate Nietzsche’s general attack on morality. But never forget that his purpose is not merely destructive but, in his eyes, creative. The point is to get us to look to ourselves for values and to excel, each in our own ways. (The phrase “will to power” refers to just this effort to excel as individuals.)
On “Morality as Herd-Instinct” B Y Friedrich Nietzsche22
Wherever we meet with a morality we find a valuation and order of rank of the human impulses and activities. These valuations and orders of rank are always the expression of the needs of a community or herd: that which is in the first place to its advantage—and in the second place and third place—is also the authoritative standard for the worth of every individual. By morality the individual is taught to become a function of the herd, and to ascribe to himself value only as a function. As the conditions for the maintenance of one community have been very different from those of another community, there have been very different moralities; and in respect to the future essential transformations of herd and communities, states and societies, one can prophesy that there will still be very divergent moralities. Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.
On “Master and Slave Morality” B Y Friedrich Nietzsche23
Apart from the value of claims like “there is a categorical imperative in us,” the question remains: what does this sort of claim tell us about the ones who make it? There are moralities that are meant to justify their creator in the eyes of others, and other moralities that are meant to calm him and help him to be content with himself; still others allow him to crucify and hu- miliate himself. With others he wants to take revenge, with others to hide, with others to transfigure himself and remove himself to the heights. There are moralities that help their creators to forget, and others that allow him— or something about him—to be forgotten. Many moralists want to exercise their power and creative whims on humanity, some others, perhaps even Kant himself, suggest with their morality: “What deserves respect in me is that I can obey—and you ought not to be different than me!”—in short, morality is merely a sign language of the passions!
. . . On a journey through the many finer and coarser moralities that have so
far ruled or still rule on earth I found that certain properties recurred regu- larly together and were closely related: until at last I found two fundamental types and one fundamental difference. There are master morality and slave morality—I add immediately that in all the higher and mixed cultures there also appear attempts at a blending of both moralities, and still more often the interpenetration and mutual misunderstanding of both, indeed at times
“By morality the individual is taught to become a function of the herd, and to ascribe to himself value only as a function.” — F R I E D R I C H N I E T Z S C H E
22 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New york: Random House, 1974). 23 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Clancy Martin.
According to Nietzsche, morality for most people is like the behav- ior of herd animals, a matter of conformity in which one person follows another. (© iStockphoto.com/ Nikada)
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they are hard against one another—even in the same human being, within a single soul. The moral discrimination of values has originated either in a ruling group whose understanding of its difference from the ruled was felt with well-being—or among the ruled, the slaves and dependents of every grade. In the first case, when it is the rulers who determine what is “good,” the lofty proud states of soul are expe- rienced as conferring distinction and deter- mining the order of rank. The noble human distances from himself those in whom the con- trary of such lofty proud states finds expression: he despises them. One should immediately note that in this first kind of morality the op- position of “good” and “bad” means about the same as “noble” and “contemptible.” The op-
position of “good” and “evil” has a different origin. Despised are the cowardly, the anxious, the petty, those who think about narrow utility; even so the suspicious with their constrained glances, those who humble themselves, the dog-kind of humans who allow themselves to be maltreated, the fawning flatterers, above all the liars. It is a fundamental belief of all aristocrats that the common people lie. “We truthful ones” thus the nobility of ancient Greece named itself. It is obvious that moral designations were everywhere first applied to humans and only deriva- tively and late to actions: which is why it is a serious error when historians of mo- rality begin with questions like “why was the pitying act praised?” The noble kind of human feels itself as establishing values, it has no need for approval, it judges “what is harmful to me is harmful in itself,” it knows itself to be that which first grants things their honor, it is value-creating. It honors everything that it knows as part of itself: such a morality is self-glorification.
It is different with the second type of morality, slave morality. Suppose the raped, oppressed, suffering, bound, timorous and exhausted moralize: what will their moral valuations have in common? Probably a pessimistic suspicion about the whole human condition will make itself known, perhaps a condemnation of humankind along with its condition. The glance of the slave is adverse to the virtues of the powerful: he has skepticism and mistrust, he has subtle mistrust of all the “good” that is honored there, he would like to persuade himself that even their happiness is not real. Conversely, those qualities are brought forth and brightly illuminated that serve to lighten existence for the suffering: here pity, the obliging helpful hand, the warm heart, patience, industry, humility, and friendliness come to be honored, for here these are the most useful qualities and nearly the sole means for enduring the stress of existence. Slave morality is es- sentially a morality of utility. Here is the place for the source of that famous op- position between good and “evil”: into evil were projected power and dangerousness, a certain fearfulness, subtlety and strength, that does not permit contempt to arise. For slave morality the “evil” therefore inspire fear; for master morality it is precisely the “good” that inspire and want to inspire fear, while the “bad” are felt to be contemptible. The opposition comes to a peak when, as a direct consequence of slave morality, a touch of scorn comes along with the
Differences in relative rank and power result in different moral outlooks, according to Nietzsche (Nietzsche, it should be added, did not endorse slavery). (Album/Art Resource, NY)
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“good” of this morality. This may be slight and benevolent because the good must be harmless in the slave’s way of thinking: he is good-natured, easy to de- ceive, a bit stupid perhaps, un bonhomme [“a nice person”]. In general, where slave morality becomes predominant, language tends to bring the words “good” and “stupid” closer together.
Nietzsche’s ethics is not all criticism, however. Nietzsche also vigorously argues for an alternative morality, a heroic morality, not unlike that of the ancient Greeks. in his book, a long quasi-biblical epic called Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he introduces his famous idea of the Übermensch, the superman who is more than human and superior in his virtues. Our virtues, in turn, should be aimed at making such a supervirtuous person possible (for example, by defending our own idealism and by educating future generations to be better than we are).
Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Übermensch, a rope over an abyss.
A dangerous crossing, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling and halting.
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and a going under.
I love those that do not know how to live except by going under, for they are those who go over.
I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers and arrows of longing for the other shore.
I love those who do not first seek a reason beyond the stars for going under and being sacrifices, but sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth may some day belong to the Übermensch.
I love him who lives in order to know, and seeks to know in order that the Über- mensch may live some day. And thus he wants to go under.
I love him who loves his virtue: for virtue is the will to going under, and an arrow of longing.
I love him who reserves not one drop of spirit for himself, but wants to be wholly the spirit of his virtue: thus he strides as spirit over the bridge.
I love him who makes his virtue his addiction and his catastrophe: thus, for the sake of his virtue, he wants to live on and to live no more . . .
I love him whose soul is so overfull that he forgets himself, and all things are in him: thus all things become his going under.
I love him who has a free spirit and a free heart: thus his head is only the guts of his heart; his heart, however, causes his going under.
Behold, I am a herald of the lightning, and a heavy drop out of the cloud: the lightning, however, is the Übermensch.24
And
True philosophers . . . are commanders and legislators: they say, “thus it shall be!” First they determine the “where to” and the “what for” of humankind, and thus they have at hand the preliminary work of all philosophical laborers, of everyone who has overcome the past. With a creative hand they reach for the future, and
24 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Clancy Martin (New york: Barnes & Noble, 2005).
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all that is and has been becomes a means for them, a tool, a hammer. Their “knowing” is creating, their creating is a legislating, their will to truth is—will to power.—Are there such phi- losophers today? Have there been such phi- losophers yet? Must there not be such philosophers?25
Nietzsche is often viewed as the most extreme of the antimoralists, those who attack the traditional duty-bound Kantian-Christian conception of moral- ity. in fact, he is but one among many philosophers who have rejected that morality in exchange for a more personal and individual set of principles. Given his emphasis on human “nature,” we can say that even Nietzsche is much more traditional than is usually supposed (although the tradition he holds to is the Aristotelian, not the Kantian one). in the past several decades, however, morality has become far more personalized than even Nietzsche suggested. For some Anglo-American philosophers, largely in the wake of logical positivism, ethics has been re- duced to a matter of emotions, prescriptions, and attitudes, rather than of principles and rational laws. (ironically, Nietzsche has always been in extreme disfavor among such philosophers, while Kant has been considered with extreme favor.)
The attack on the idea of absolute moral principles of reason, which are the same for ev- eryone, has been one of the most vigorous philosophical movements of the twentieth cen- tury, so much so that many philosophers, religious leaders, and moralists have become alarmed at the destruction of uniform moral codes and have attempted to reassert the old moral laws in new ways. The problem is relativism. is there a single moral code? Or are there possibly as many moralities as there are people? There are intermediary suggestions, such as relativizing morals to particular groups or societies, but the question remains the same: “is there ultimately any way of defending one moral code against any other?”
The most extreme relativist position has emerged from Nietzsche’s existentialist succes- sors, particularly Jean-Paul Sartre. in Sartre’s philosophy, not only the idea of a uniform mo- rality but the idea of a human nature upon which this morality may be based is completely rejected. it is rejected not because different people may have different “natures,” as in Ni- etzsche, but because for Sartre our values are literally a question of creation, of personal commitment. in answer to any question about morality, the only ultimate answer is “be- cause i choose to accept these values.” What is most fascinating about Sartre’s conception of morality as choice is that he does not therefore abandon general principles as Nietzsche does. Quite the contrary, he makes the almost Kantian assertion that each of us needs to choose principles for all mankind, not just for oneself. The difference is that Sartre, unlike Kant, makes no claims about the singular correctness of these principles. All he can say is “this is what i choose mankind to be.” Thus Sartre’s moral philosophy is a curious mixture of the most radical relativism and the most traditional moralizing.
Nietzsche claims that human beings and animals are motivated by the same basic drive: the will to power. (© Shutterstock.com/Ludmila Yilmaz)
25 Friedrich Nietzsche, from Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Clancy Martin.
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F RO M Existentialism Is a Humanism B Y Jean-Paul Sartre26
Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism. And this is what people call its “subjectivity,” using the word as a reproach against us. But what do we mean to say by this, but that man is of a greater dignity than a stone or a table? For we mean to say that man primarily exists—that man is, before all else, something which propels itself towards a future and is aware that it is doing so. Man is, indeed, a project which possesses a subjective life, instead of being a kind of moss, or a fungus or a cauliflower. Before that projection of the self nothing exists; not even in the heaven of intelligence; man will only attain ex- istence when he is what he purposes to be. Not, however, what he may wish to be. For what we usually understand by wishing or willing is a conscious decision taken—much more often than not—after we have made ourselves what we are. I may wish to join a party, to write a book or to marry—but in such a case what is usually called my will is probably a manifestation of a prior and more spontaneous decision. If, however, it is true that existence is prior to essence, man is responsible for what he is. Thus, the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in pos- session of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders. And, when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men. The word “subjectivism” is to be understood in two senses, and our adversaries play upon only one of them. Subjectivism means, on the one hand, the freedom of the individual subject and, on the other, that man cannot pass beyond human subjectivity. It is the latter which is the deeper meaning of existentialism. When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men. For in effect, of all the actions a man may take in order to create himself as he wills to be, there is not one which is not creative, at the same time, of an image of man such as he believes he ought to be. To choose between this or that is at the same time to affirm the value of that which is chosen; for we are unable ever to choose the worse. What we choose is always the better and nothing can be better for us unless it is better for all. If, moreover, existence precedes essence and we will to exist at the same time as we fashion our image, that image is valid for all and for the entire epoch in which we find ourselves. Our responsibility is thus much greater than we had supposed, for it concerns mankind as a whole. If I am a worker, for instance, I may choose to join a Christian rather than a Communist trade union. And if, by that membership, I choose to signify that resignation is, after all, the attitude that best becomes a man, that man’s kingdom is not upon this earth, I do not commit myself alone to that view. Resignation is my will for everyone, and my action is, in consequence, a commitment on behalf of all mankind. Or if, to take a more personal case, I decide to marry and to have children, even though this deci- sion proceeds simply from my situation, from my passion or my desire, I am thereby committing not only myself, but humanity as a whole, to the practice of monog- amy. I am thus responsible for myself and for all men, and I am creating a certain image of man as I would have him to be. In fashioning myself I fashion man.
. . .
“When we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men.” — J E A N - PA U L S A R T R E
26 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet (New york: Philosophical library of New york, 1949). Reprinted by permission.
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Who can prove that I am the proper person to impose, by my own choice, my conception of man upon mankind? I shall never find any proof whatever; there will be no sign to convince me of it.
. . . If I regard a certain course of action as good, it is only I who choose to say that
it is good and not bad. . . . nevertheless I also am obliged at every instant to perform actions which are examples. Everything happens to every man as though the whole human race had its eyes fixed upon what he is doing and regulated its conduct accordingly.
. . . As an example by which you may the better understand this state of abandon-
ment, I will refer to the case of a pupil of mine, who sought me out in the following circumstances. His father was quarrelling with his mother and was also inclined to be a “collaborator”; his elder brother had been killed in the German offensive of 1940 and this young man, with a sentiment somewhat primitive but generous, burned to avenge him. His mother was living alone with him, deeply afflicted by the semi-treason of his father and by the death of her eldest son, and her only con- solation was in this young man. But he, at this moment, had the choice between going to England to join the Free French Forces or of staying near his mother, and helping her to live. He fully realized that this woman lived only for him and that his disappearance—or perhaps his death—would plunge her into despair. He also realized that, concretely and in fact, every action he performed on his mother’s behalf would be sure of effect in the sense of aiding her to live, whereas anything he did in order to go and fight would be an ambiguous action which might vanish like water into sand and serve no purpose. For instance, to set out for England he would have to wait indefinitely in a Spanish camp on the way through Spain; or,
“To choose between this or that is at the same time to affirm the value of that which is chosen.” — Jean-Paul Sartre (© Shutterstock.com/Greg Epperson)
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on arriving in England or in Algiers he might be put into an office to fill up forms. Consequently, he found himself confronted by two very different modes of action; the one concrete, immediate, but directed to- wards only one individual; and the other an action addressed to an end infinitely greater, a national collectivity, but for that very reason ambiguous—and it might be frus- trated on the way. At the same time, he was hesitating between two kinds of morality; on the one side the morality of sympathy, of personal devotion and, on the other side, a morality of wider scope but of more debat- able validity. He had to choose between those two. What could help him to choose? Could the Christian doctrine? No. Christian doctrine says: Act with charity, love your neighbour, deny yourself for others, choose the way which is hardest, and so forth. But which is the harder road? To whom does one owe the more brotherly love, the patriot or the mother? Which is the more useful aim, the general one of fighting in and for the whole community, or the precise aim of helping one particular person to live? Who can give an answer to that a priori? No one. Nor is it given in any ethical scripture. The Kantian ethic says, Never regard another as a means, but always as an end. Very well; if I remain with my mother, I shall be regarding her as the end and not as a means: but by the same token I am in danger of treating as means those who are fighting on my behalf; and the converse is also true, that if I go to the aid of the combatants I shall be treating them as the end at the risk of treating my mother as a means.
If values are uncertain, if they are still too abstract to determine the particular, concrete case under consideration, nothing remains but to trust in our instincts. That is what this young man tried to do; and when I saw him he said, “In the end, it is feeling that counts; the direction in which it is really pushing me is the one I ought to choose. If I feel that I love my mother enough to sacrifice everything else for her—my will to be avenged, all my longings for action and adventure— then I stay with her. If, on the contrary, I feel that my love for her is not enough, I go.” But how does one estimate the strength of a feeling? The value of his feeling for his mother was determined precisely by the fact that he was standing by her. I may say that I love a certain friend enough to sacrifice such or such a sum of money for him, but I cannot prove that unless I have done it. I may say, “I love my mother enough to remain with her,” if actually I have remained with her. I can only estimate the strength of this affection if I have performed an action by which it is defined and ratified. But if I then appeal to this affection to justify my action, I find myself drawn into a vicious circle.
. . . In other words, feeling is formed by the deeds that one does; therefore I cannot
consult it as a guide to action. And that is to say that I can neither seek within myself for an authentic impulse to action, nor can I expect, from some ethic, for- mulae that will enable me to act. You may say that the youth did, at least, go to a
When we make a decision, we show what our values really are. (© iStockphoto.com/Kemter)
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professor to ask for advice. But if you seek counsel—from a priest, for example— you have selected that priest; and at bottom you already knew, more or less, what he would advise. In other words, to choose an adviser is nevertheless to commit oneself by that choice. If you are a Christian, you will say, Consult a priest; but there are collaborationists, priests who are resisters and priests who wait for the tide to turn: which will you choose? Had this young man chosen a priest of the resis- tance, or one of the collaboration, he would have decided beforehand the kind of advice he was to receive. Similarly, in coming to me, he knew what advice I should give him, and I had but one reply to make. You are free, therefore choose—that is to say, invent. No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do.
To say that it does not matter what you choose is not correct. In one sense choice is possible, but what is not possible is not to choose. I can always choose but I must know that if I do not choose, that is still a choice. This although it may appear merely formal, is of great importance as a limit to fantasy and caprice. For, when I confront a real situation—for example, that I am a sexual being, able to have rela- tions with a being of the other sex and able to have children—I am obliged to choose my attitude to it, and in every respect I bear the responsibility of the choice which, in committing myself, also commits the whole of humanity. . . . Man finds himself in an organized situation in which he is himself involved: his choice involves mankind in its entirety, and he cannot avoid choosing. Either he must remain single, or he must marry without having children, or he must marry and have children. In any case, and whichever he may choose, it is impossible for him, in respect of this situation, not to take complete responsibility. Doubtless he chooses without refer- ence to any pre-established values, but it is unjust to tax him with caprice. Rather let us say that the moral choice is comparable to the construction of a work of art.
. . . No one can tell what the painting of tomorrow will be like; one cannot judge a
painting until it is done. What has that to do with morality: We are in the same creative situation. We never speak of a work of art as irresponsible; when we are discussing a canvas by Picasso, we understand very well that the composition became what it is at the time when he was painting it, and that his works are part and parcel of his entire life.
It is the same upon the plane of morality. There is this in common between art and morality, that in both we have to do with creation and invention. We cannot decide a priori what it is that should be done. I think it was made sufficiently clear to you in the case of that student who came to see me, that to whatever ethical system he might appeal, the Kantian or any other, he could find no sort of guidance whatever; he was obliged to invent the law for himself. Certainly we cannot say that this man, in choosing to remain with his mother—that is, in taking sentiment, personal devotion and concrete charity as his moral foundations—would be making an irresponsible choice, nor could we do so if he preferred the sacrifice of going away to England. Man makes himself; he is not found ready-made; he makes him- self by the choice of his morality, and he cannot but choose a morality, such is the pressure of circumstances upon him.
Sartre says that “man makes himself.” He believes this to be true both individually and collectively. it is through my actions that i commit myself to values, not through principles
“There is this in common between art and morality, that in both we have to do with creation and invention. We cannot decide a priori what it is that should be done.” — J E A N - PA U L S A R T R E
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i accept a priori or rules that are imposed upon me by God or society. if you accept the voice of some authority, you have chosen to accept that authority rather than some other. if you appeal for advice or help, you have chosen to seek that kind of advice rather than some other kind. if you refuse to choose between alternatives, then you are responsible for neglecting both or all the alternatives, for “copping- out.” in any case, you must do something, even if what you do is “doing nothing” (that is, not choos- ing one of the important alternatives before you).
Here is Sartre’s reply to his predecessors: We are no longer in the position of Aristotle, in which moral- ity appears to us as a given, as “natural,” and with- out alternatives of the most irresolvable kind. We can no longer trust our “sentiments,” as Hume did, for we now find ourselves torn with conflicting sentiments of every kind. We can no longer accept the a priori moralizing of Kant, for we now see that the circumstances in which we must act are never so simple that a simple “categorical” imperative will resolve our quandaries. And even “the greatest good for the greatest number” no longer provides a guide for our actions, for we no longer pretend that we can calculate the consequences of our actions with any such accuracy. Besides, who is to say what “the greatest good” or, for that matter, “the greatest number” is today? Against all this, Sartre argues that there is simply our choice of actions and values, together with their consequences, whatever they are. There is no justification for these choices and no “right” or “wrong.” This does not mean that we need not choose or that it is all “arbitrary.” To the contrary, the upshot of Sartre’s thesis is precisely that we are always choosing and that morality is nothing other than our commit- ments, at least for the present, to the values that we choose to follow through our actions.
The great French philosopher and feminist Simone de Beauvoir took the difficulties of creating and existential ethics head-on in her classic The Ethics of Ambiguity.
F RO M The Ethics of Ambiguity B Y Simone de Beauvoir 27
Man’s unhappiness, says Descartes, is due to his having first been a child. And indeed the unfortunate choices which most men make can only be explained by the fact that they have taken place on the basis of childhood. The child’s situation is characterized by his finding himself cast into a universe which he has not helped to establish, which has been fashioned without him, and which appears to him as an absolute to which he can only submit. In his eyes, human inventions, words, customs, and values are given facts, as inevitable as the sky and the trees. This means that the world in which he lives is a serious world, since the characteristic of the spirit of seriousness is to consider values as ready-made things. That does not mean that the child himself is serious. On the contrary, he is allowed to play, to expend his existence freely. In his child’s circle he feels that he can passionately pursue and joyfully attain goals which he has set up for himself. But if he fulfills this experience in all tranquillity, it is precisely because the domain open to his subjectivity seems insignificant and puerile in his own eyes. He feels himself
Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986)
A French existentialist, social critic, and reformer. The author of a great many influential books on feminism as well as the central topics of exis- tentialist philosophy, she is widely considered to be the greatest fem- inist of the twentieth century.
Simone de Beauvoir (© Hulton- Desutsch Collection/Corbis)
27 Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New york: Citadel Press, 1948).
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happily irresponsible. The real world is that of adults where he is allowed only to respect and obey.
. . .
Rewards, punishments, prizes, words of praise or blame instill in him the con- viction that there exist a good and an evil which like a sun and a moon exist as ends in themselves. In his universe of definite and substantial things, beneath the sover- eign eyes of grown-up persons, he thinks that he too has being in a definite and substantial way. He is a good little boy or a scamp; he enjoys being it. If something deep inside him belies his conviction, he conceals this imperfection. He consoles himself for an inconsistency which he attributes to his young age by pinning his hopes on the future. Later on he too will become a big imposing statue. While waiting, he plays at being, at being a saint, a hero, a guttersnipe. He feels himself like those models whose images are sketched out in his books in broad, unequivo- cal strokes: explorer, brigand, sister of charity. This game of being serious can take on such an importance in the child’s life that he himself actually becomes serious. We know such children who are caricatures of adults. Even when the joy of exist- ing is strongest, when the child abandons himself to it, he feels himself protected against the risk of existence by the ceiling which human generations have built over his head. And it is by virtue of this that the child’s condition (although it can be unhappy in other respects) is metaphysically privileged. Normally the child es- capes the anguish of freedom. He can, if he likes, be recalcitrant, lazy; his whims and his faults concern only him. They do not weigh upon the earth. They can not make a dent in the serene order of a world which existed before him, without him, where he is in a state of security by virtue of his very insignificance. He can do with impunity whatever he likes. He knows that nothing can ever happen through him; everything is already given; his acts engage nothing, not even himself.
. . .
The fact is that it is very rare for the infantile world to maintain itself beyond adolescence. From childhood on, flaws begin to be revealed in it. With astonish- ment, revolt and disrespect the child little by little asks himself, “Why must I act that way? What good is it? And what will happen if I act in another way?” He dis- covers his subjectivity; he discovers that of others. And when he arrives at the age of adolescence he begins to vacillate because he notices the contradictions among adults as well as their hesitations and weakness. Men stop appearing as if they were gods, and at the same time the adolescent discovers the human character of the real- ity about him. Language, customs, ethics, and values have their source in these uncertain creatures. The moment has come when he too is going to be called upon to participate in their operation; his acts weigh upon the earth as much as those of other men. He will have to choose and decide. It is comprehensible that it is hard for him to live this moment of his history, and this is doubtless the deepest reason for the crisis of adolescence; the individual must at last assume his subjectivity.
From one point of view the collapsing of the serious world is a deliverance. Although he was irresponsible, the child also felt himself defenseless before obscure powers which directed the course of things. But whatever the joy of this liberation may be, it is not without great confusion that the adolescent finds himself cast into a world which is no longer ready-made, which has to be made; he is abandoned, unjustified, the prey of a freedom that is no longer chained up by anything. What will he do in the face of this new situation? This is the moment when he decides. If
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what might be called the natural history of an individual, his affective complexes, etcetera depend above all upon his childhood, it is adolescence which appears as the moment of moral choice. Freedom is then revealed and he must decide upon his attitude in the face of it. Doubtless, this decision can always be reconsidered, but the fact is that conversions are difficult because the world reflects back upon us a choice which is confirmed through this world which it has fashioned. Thus, a more and more rigorous circle is formed from which one is more and more unlikely to escape. Therefore, the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know its exigencies.
This misfortune has still another aspect. Moral choice is free, and therefore unfore- seeable. The child does not contain the man he will become. Yet, it is always on the basis of what he has been that a man decides upon what he wants to be. He draws the motivations of his moral attitude from within the character which he has given him- self and from within the universe which is its correlative. Now, the child set up this character and this universe little by little, without foreseeing its development. He was ignorant of the disturbing aspect of this freedom which he was heedlessly exercising. He tranquilly abandoned himself to whims, laughter, tears, and anger which seemed to him to have no morrow and no danger, and yet which left ineffaceable imprints about him. The drama of original choice is that it goes on moment by moment for an entire lifetime, that it occurs without reason, before any reason, that freedom is there as if it were present only in the form of contingency. This contingency recalls, in a way, the arbitrariness of the grace distributed by God in Calvinistic doctrine. Here too there is a sort of predestination issuing not from an external tyranny but from the operation of the subject itself. Only, we think that man has always a possible recourse to himself. There is no choice so unfortunate that he cannot be saved.
. . . To exist is to make oneself a lack of being; it is to cast oneself into the world. Those
who occupy themselves in restraining this original movement can be considered as sub-men. They have eyes and ears, but from their childhood on they make them- selves blind and deaf, without love and without desire. This apathy manifests a fundamental fear in the face of existence, in the face of the risks and tensions which it implies. The sub-man rejects this “passion” which is his human condition, the laceration and the failure of that drive toward being which always misses its goal, but which thereby is the very existence which he rejects.
Such a choice immediately confirms itself. Just as a bad painter, by a single move- ment, paints bad paintings and is satisfied with them, whereas in a work of value the artist immediately recognizes the demand of a higher sort of work, in like fashion the original poverty of his project exempts the sub-man from seeking to legitimize it. He discovers around him only an insignificant and dull world. How could this naked world arouse within him any desire to feel, to understand, to live? The less he exists, the less is there reason for him to exist, since these reasons are created only by existing.
Yet, he exists. By the fact of transcending himself he indicates certain goals, he circumscribes certain values. But he at once effaces these uncertain shadows. His whole behavior tends toward an elimination of their ends. By the incoherence of his plans, by his haphazard whims, or by his indifference, he reduces to nothing- ness the meaning of his surpassing. His acts are never positive choices, only flights. He can not prevent himself from being a presence in the world, but he maintains this presence on the plane of bare facticity.
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However, if a man were permitted to be a brute fact, he would merge with the trees and pebbles which are not aware that they exist; we would consider these opaque lives with indifference. But the sub-man arouses contempt, that is, one recognizes him to be responsible for himself at the moment that one accuses him of not willing himself. The fact is that no man is a datum which is passively suf- fered; the rejection of existence is still another way of existing; nobody can know the peace of the tomb while he is alive. There we have the defeat of the sub-man. He would like to forget himself, to be ignorant of himself, but the nothingness which is at the heart of man is also the consciousness that he has of himself. His negativity is revealed positively as anguish, desire, appeal, laceration, but as for the genuine return to the positive, the sub-man eludes it. He is afraid of engaging himself in a project as he is afraid of being disengaged and thereby of being in a state of danger before the future, in the midst of its possibilities. He is thereby led to take refuge in the ready-made values of the serious world. He will proclaim certain opinions; he will take shelter behind a label; and to hide his indifference he will readily abandon himself to verbal outbursts or even physical violence. One day, a monarchist, the next day, an anarchist, he is more readily anti-semitic, anti- clerical, or anti-republican. Thus, though we have defined him as a denial and a flight, the sub-man is not a harmless creature. He realizes himself in the world as a blind uncontrolled force which anybody can get control of. In lynchings, in po- groms, in all the great bloody movements organized by the fanaticism of serious- ness and passion, movements where there is no risk, those who do the actual dirty work are recruited from among the sub-men. That is why every man who wills himself free within a human world fashioned by free men will be so disgusted by the sub-men. Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity, and the sub-man feels only the facticity of his existence. Instead of aggrandizing the reign of the human, he opposes his inert resistance to the projects of other men. No project has mean- ing in the world disclosed by such an existence. Man is defined as a wild flight. The world about him is bare and incoherent. Nothing ever happens; nothing merits desire or effort. The sub-man makes his way across a world deprived of meaning toward a death which merely confirms his long negation of himself. The only thing revealed in this experience is the absurd facticity of an existence which re- mains forever unjustified if it has not known how to justify itself.
The sub-man experiences the desert of the world in his boredom. And the strange character of a universe with which he has created no bond also arouses fear in him. Weighted down by present events, he is bewildered before the dark- ness of the future which is haunted by frightful specters, war, sickness, revolution, fascism, bolshevism. The more indistinct these dangers are, the more fearful they become. The sub-man is not very clear about what he has to lose, since he has nothing, but this very uncertainty re-enforces his terror. Indeed, what he fears is that the shock of the unforeseen may remind him of the agonizing consciousness of himself.
Thus, fundamental as a man’s fear in the face of existence may be, though he has chosen from his earliest years to deny his presence in the world, he can not keep himself from existing, he can not efface the agonizing evidence of his freedom. That is why, as we have just seen, in order to get rid of his freedom, he is led to engage it positively. The attitude of the sub-man passes logically over into that of the serious man; he forces himself to submerge his freedom in the content which the latter accepts from society. He loses himself in the object in order to annihilate
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his subjectivity. This certitude has been described so frequently that it will not be necessary to consider it at length.
. . .
The serious man gets rid of his freedom by claiming to subordinate it to values which would be unconditioned. He imagines that the accession to these values likewise permanently confers value upon himself. Shielded with “rights,” he fulfills himself as a being who is escaping from the stress of existence. The serious is not defined by the nature of the ends pursued. A frivolous lady of fashion can have this mentality of the serious as well as an engineer. There is the serious from the moment that freedom denies itself to the advantage of ends which one claims are absolute.
. . .
[E]very man was first a child. After having lived under the eyes of the gods, having been given the promise of divinity, one does not readily accept becoming simply a man with all his anxiety and doubt. What is to be done? What is to be believed? Often the young man, who has not . . . first rejected existence, so that these questions are not even raised, is nevertheless frightened at having to answer them. After a more or less long crisis, either he turns back toward the world of his parents and teachers or he adheres to the values which are new but seem to him just as sure. Instead of assuming an affectivity which would throw him dangerously beyond himself, he represses it. Liquidation, in its classic form of transference and sublimation, is the passage from the affective to the serious in the propitious shadow of dishonesty. The thing that matters to the serious man is not so much the nature of the object which he prefers to himself, but rather the fact of being able to lose himself in it. So much so, that the movement toward the object is, in fact, through his arbitrary act the most radical assertion of subjectivity: to believe for belief ’s sake, to will for will’s sake is, detaching transcendence from its end, to realize one’s freedom in its empty and absurd form of freedom of indifference.
The serious man’s dishonesty issues from his being obliged ceaselessly to renew the denial of this freedom. He chooses to live in an infantile world, but to the child the values are really given. The serious man must mask the movement by which he gives them to himself, like the mythomaniac who while reading a love-letter pretends to forget that she has sent it to herself. . . . [C]ertain adults can live in the universe of the serious in all honesty, for example, those who are denied all instruments of escape, those who are enslaved or who are mystified. The less economic and social circum- stances allow an individual to act upon the world, the more this world appears to him as given. . . . On the contrary, the man who has the necessary instruments to escape this lie and who does not want to use them consumes his freedom in denying them. He makes himself serious. He dissimulates his subjectivity under the shield of rights which emanate from the ethical universe recognized by him; he is no longer a man, but a father, a boss, a member of the Christian Church or the Communist Party.
If one denies the subjective tension of freedom one is evidently forbidding him- self universally to will freedom in an indefinite movement. By virtue of the fact that he refuses to recognize that he is freely establishing the value of the end he sets up, the serious man makes himself the slave of that end. He forgets that every goal is at the same time a point of departure and that human freedom is the ultimate, the unique end to which man should destine himself. He accords an absolute meaning to the epithet useful, which, in truth, has no more meaning if taken by itself than the words high, low, right, and left. It simply designates a relationship and requires a
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complement: useful for this or that. The complement itself must be put into ques- tion, and, as we shall see later on, the whole problem of action is then raised.
But the serious man puts nothing into question. For the military man, the army is useful; for the colonial administrator, the highway; for the serious revolutionary, the revolution—army, highway, revolution, productions becoming inhuman idols to which one will not hesitate to sacrifice man himself. Therefore, the serious man is dangerous. It is natural that he makes himself a tyrant. Dishonestly ignoring the subjectivity of his choice, he pretends that the unconditioned value of the object is being asserted through him; and by the same token he also ignores the value of the subjectivity and the freedom of others, to such an extent that, sacrificing them to the thing, he persuades himself that what he sacrifices is nothing.
• Do you see affinities between Nietzsche and Aristotle on ethics?
• What are “master morality” and “slave morality”? What do these two ethical per- spectives suggest about the nature of morality?
• Does anything make an act good for Sartre? in what way is Sartre’s view still in the Kantian tradition? (Hint: “in choosing for himself he chooses for all men.”) How is it very different?
• Do you see any problems with Sartre’s ideas that morality amounts to the commit- ments that we make and that each of us, by making choices, is constructing an indi- vidual morality?
• What does Simone de Beauvoir mean by the “ethics of ambiguity”?
J. Ethics and Gender One of the most obvious features of much of the moral philosophy we have been examining is its focus on (or occasionally the denial of) the centrality of abstract principles of reason. Kant, most obviously, celebrates the a priori dictates of practical reason as the core of moral- ity. Mill, although the nature of his utilitarian principles may be quite different, nevertheless emphasizes the importance of a calculative impersonal principle in the determination of right and wrong. More recent decades, however, have seen the appearance of an enormous amount of literature that has challenged this view that morality is something essentially ratio- nal, principled, and impersonal. in 1982 Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan argued at some length that women tend to think about moral issues differently from men, attending more to the impact that particular actions have on relationships than to the conformity of these actions to abstract rules. Ever since, there has been a booming business in trying to elaborate and sort out the relative merits of these diverging perspectives. Theories of feminist ethics often draw upon this work, arguing that traditional moral theory has paid too little attention to rela- tionships. This is not to deny that many of the features that are emphasized in feminist ethics, for instance, a healthy attention to personal feelings as well as (or rather than) impersonal reason, were anticipated by earlier male philosophers, such as Hume and Rousseau. But femi- nist ethicists have defended the centrality of relational considerations to ethics in an unprec- edented way. Some have emphasized the moral relevance of experiences that are distinctively female, such as the experience of motherhood. in the following essay, Virginia Held, philoso- pher and feminist, attempts to spell out some grounds for a feminist critique of traditional ethical theories and suggests new directions for moral thinking on women’s experience.
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On Feminist Ethics B Y Virginia Held28
The history of philosophy, including the history of ethics, has been constructed from male points of view, and has been built on assumptions and concepts that are by no means gender-neutral. Feminists characteristically begin with different con- cerns and give different emphases to the issues we consider than do non-feminist approaches. And, as Lorraine Code expresses it, “starting points and focal points shape the impact of theoretical discussion.” Within philosophy, feminists often start with, and focus on, quite different issues than those found in standard philoso- phy and ethics, however “standard” is understood. Far from providing mere addi- tional insights which can be incorporated into traditional theory, feminist explorations often require radical transformations of existing fields of inquiry and theory. From a feminist point of view, moral theory along with almost all theory will have to be transformed to take adequate account of the experience of women.
. . .
T H E H I S T O RY O F E T H I C S Consider the ideals embodied in the phrase “the man of reason.” As Genevieve Lloyd has told the story, what has been taken to characterize the man of reason may have changed from historical period to historical period, but in each, the character ideal of the man of reason has been constructed in conjunction with a rejection of whatever has been taken to be characteristic of the feminine. “Rationality,” Lloyd writes, “has been conceived as transcendence of the ‘feminine,’ and the ‘feminine’ itself has been partly constituted by its occurrence within this structure.”
This has of course fundamentally affected the history of philosophy and of ethics. The split between reason and emotion is one of the most familiar of philo- sophical conceptions. And the advocacy of reason “controlling” unruly emotion, of rationality guiding responsible human action against the blindness of passion, has a long and highly influential history, almost as familiar to non-philosophers as to philosophers. We should certainly now be alert to the ways in which reason has been associated with male endeavor, emotion with female weakness, and the ways in which this is of course not an accidental association. As Lloyd writes, “From the beginnings of philosophical thought, femaleness was symbolically associated with what Reason supposedly left behind—the dark powers of the earth goddesses, im- mersion in unknown forces associated with mysterious female powers. The early Greeks saw women’s capacity to conceive as connecting them with the fertility of Nature. As Plato later expressed the thought, women ‘imitate the earth.’”
. . . The associations, between Reason, form,
knowledge, and maleness, have persisted in various guises, and have permeated what has been thought to be moral knowledge as well as what has been thought to be scientific knowledge, and what has been thought to be the practice of morality. The associations
Virginia Held (1929–)
An American philosopher, specializing in feminist epistemology. She is Professor Emerita at Hunter College of the City University of New York.
28 virginia Held, “Feminist Transformations of Moral Theory,” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. l, Supplement (Fall 1990). Reprinted by permission of Blackwell Publishing ltd.
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between the philosophical concepts and gender cannot be merely dropped, and the concepts retained regardless of gender, because gender has been built into them in such a way that without it, they will have to be different concepts. As feminists repeatedly show, if the concept of “human” were built on what we think about “woman” rather than what we think about “man,” it would be a very different concept. Ethics, thus, has not been a search for universal, or truly human guidance, but a gender-biased enterprise.
Other distinctions and associations have supplemented and reinforced the iden- tification of reason with maleness, and of the irrational with the female; on this and other grounds “man” has been associated with the human, “woman” with the natural. Prominent among distinctions reinforcing the latter view has been that between the public and the private, because of the way they have been interpreted. Again, these provide as familiar and entrenched a framework as do reason and emotion, and they have been as influential for non-philosophers as for philoso- phers. It has been supposed that in the public realm, man transcends his animal nature and creates human history. As citizen, he creates government and law; as warrior, he protects society by his willingness to risk death; and as artist or philoso- pher, he overcomes his human mortality. Here, in the public realm, morality should guide human decision. In the household, in contrast, it has been supposed that women merely “reproduce” life as natural, biological matter. Within the household, the “natural” needs of man for food and shelter are served, and new instances of the biological creature that man is are brought into being. But what is distinctively human, and what transcends any given level of development to create human progress, are thought to occur elsewhere.
This contrast was made highly explicit in Aristotle’s conceptions of polis and household; it has continued to affect the basic assumptions of a remarkably broad swath of thought ever since. In ancient Athens, women were confined to the household; the public sphere was literally a male domain. In more recent history, though women have been permitted to venture into public space, the associations of the public, historically male sphere with the distinctively human, and of the household, historically a female sphere, with the merely natural and repetitious, have persisted. These associations have deeply affected moral theory, which has often supposed the transcendent, public domain to be relevant to the foundations of morality in ways that the natural behavior of women in the household could not be. To take some recent and representative examples, David Heyd, in his discussion of supererogation, dismisses a mother’s sacrifice for her child as an example of the supererogatory because it belongs, in his view, to “the sphere of natural relation- ships and instinctive feelings (which lie outside morality).” J. O. Urmson had ear- lier taken a similar position. In his discussion of supererogation, Urmson said, “Let us be clear that we are not now considering cases of natural affection, such as the sacrifice made by a mother for her child; such cases may be said with some justice not to fall under the concept of morality. . . .” And in a recent article called “Dis- trusting Economics,” Alan Ryan argues persuasively about the questionableness of economics and other branches of the social sciences built on the assumption that human beings are rational, self-interested calculators; he discusses various examples of non self-interested behavior, such as of men in wartime, which show the as- sumption to be false, but nowhere in the article is there any mention of the activity of mothering, which would seem to be a fertile locus for doubts about the usual picture of rational man. Although Ryan does not provide the kind of explicit
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reason offered by Heyd and Urmson for omitting the context of mothering from consideration as relevant to his discussion, it is difficult to understand the omission without a comparable assumption being implicit here, as it so often is elsewhere. Without feminist insistence on the relevance for morality of the experience in mothering, this context is largely ignored by moral theorists. And yet, from a gender-neutral point of view, how can this vast and fundamental domain of human experience possibly be imagined to lie “outside morality”?
The result of the public/private distinction, as usually formulated, has been to privilege the points of view of men in the public domains of state and law, and later in the marketplace, and to discount the experience of women. Mothering has been conceptualized as a primarily biological activity, even when performed by humans, and virtually no moral theory in the history of ethics has taken mothering, as ex- perienced by women, seriously as a source of moral insight, until feminists in recent years have begun to. Women have been seen as emotional rather than as rational beings, and thus as incapable of full moral personhood. Women’s behavior has been interpreted as either “natural” and driven by instinct, and thus as irrele- vant to morality and to the construction of moral principles, or it has been inter- preted as, at best, in need of instruction and supervision by males better able to know what morality requires and better able to live up to its demands.
The Hobbesian conception of reason is very different from the Platonic or Aristotelian conceptions before it, and from the conceptions of Rousseau or Kant or Hegel later; all have in common that they ignore and disparage the experience and reality of women. Consider Hobbes’ account of man in the state of nature contract- ing with other men to establish society. These men hypothetically come into exis- tence fully formed and independent of one another, and decide on entering or staying outside of civil society. As Christine Di Stefano writes, “What we find in Hobbes’s account of human nature and political order is a vital concern with the survival of a self conceived in masculine terms . . . This masculine dimension of Hobbes’s atomistic egoism is powerfully underscored in his state of nature, which is effectively built on the foundation of denied maternity.” In Citizen, where Hobbes gave his first systematic exposition of the state of nature, he asks us to “consider men as if but even now sprung out of the earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity, without all kinds of engagement with each other.” As Di Stefano says, it is a most incredible and problematic feature of Hobbes’s state of nature that the men in it “are not born of, much less nurtured by, women, or anyone else.” To abstract from the complex web of human reality an ab- stract man for rational perusal, Hobbes has, Di Stefano continues, “expunged human re- production and early nurturance, two of the most basic and typically female-identified features of distinctively human life, from his account of basic human nature. Such a strat- egy ensures that he can present a thoroughly atomistic subject. . . .” From the point of view of women’s experience, such a subject
“Mothering has been conceptualized as a primarily biological activity, even when performed by humans, and virtually no moral theory in the history of ethics has taken mothering, as experienced by women, seriously as a source of moral insight.” — V I R G I N I A H E L D
According to virginia Held, the moral importance of mothering has been unappreciated by the ethical tradition. (© Shutterstock.com/Calek)
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or self is unbelievable and misleading, even as a theoretical construct. The Levia- than, Di Stefano writes, “is effectively comprised of a body politic of orphans who have reared themselves, whose desires are situated within and reflect nothing but independently generated movement. . . . These essential elements are natural human beings conceived along masculine lines.”
Rousseau, and Kant, and Hegel, paid homage to the emotional power, the aes- thetic sensibility, and the familial concerns, respectively, of women. But since in their views morality must be based on rational principle, and women were inca- pable of full rationality, or a degree or kind of rationality comparable to that of men, women were deemed, in the view of these moralists, to be inherently want- ing in morality. For Rousseau, women must be trained from childhood to submit to the will of men lest their sexual power lead both men and women to disaster. For Kant, women were thought incapable of achieving full moral personhood, and women lose all charm if they try to behave like men by engaging in rational pur- suits. For Hegel, women’s moral concern for their families could be admirable in its proper place, but is a threat to the more universal aims to which men, as mem- bers of the state, should aspire.
These images, of the feminine as what must be overcome if knowledge and morality are to be achieved, of female experience as naturally irrelevant to moral- ity, and of women as inherently deficient moral creatures, are built into the his- tory of ethics. Feminists examine these images, and see that they are not the incidental or merely idiosyncratic suppositions of a few philosophers whose views on many topics depart far from the ordinary anyway. Such views are the nearly uniform reflection in philosophical and ethical theory of patriarchal attitudes per- vasive throughout human history. Or they are exaggerations even of ordinary male experience, which exaggerations then reinforce rather than temper other patriarchal conceptions and institutions. They distort the actual experience and aspirations of many men as well as of women. Annette Baier recently speculated about why it is that moral philosophy has so seriously overlooked the trust be- tween human beings that in her view is an utterly central aspect of moral life. She noted that “the great moral theorists in our tradition not only are all men, they are mostly men who had minimal adult dealings with (and so were then mini- mally influenced by) women.” They were for the most part “clerics, misogynists, and puritan bachelors,” and thus it is not surprising that they focus their philo- sophical attention “so single-mindedly on cool, distanced relations between more or less free and equal adult strangers. . . .”
As feminists, we deplore the patriarchal attitudes that so much of philosophy and moral theory reflect. But we recognize that the problem is more serious even than changing those attitudes. For moral theory as so far developed is incapable of cor- recting itself without an almost total transformation. It cannot simply absorb the gender that has been “left behind,” even if both genders would want it to. To con- tinue to build morality on rational principles opposed to the emotions and to in- clude women among the rational will leave no one to reflect the promptings of the heart, which promptings can be moral rather than merely instinctive. To simply bring women into the public and male domain of the polis will leave no one to speak for the household. Its values have been hitherto unrecognized, but they are often moral values. Or to continue to seek contractual restraints on the pursuits of self-interest by atomistic individuals, and to have women join men in devotion to these pursuits, will leave no one involved in the nurturance of children and
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cultivation of social relations, which nurturance and cultivation can be of greatest moral import.
There are very good reasons for women not to want simply to be accorded entry as equals into the enterprise of morality as so far developed. In a recent survey of types of feminist moral theory, Kathryn Morgan notes that “many women who engage in philo- sophical reflection are acutely aware of the masculine nature of the profession and tradition, and feel their own moral concerns as women silenced or trivialized in virtually all the official settings that define the practice.” Women should clearly not agree, as the price of admission to the masculine realm of traditional morality, to abandon our own moral concerns as women.
And so we are groping to shape new moral theory. Understand- ably, we do not yet have fully worked out feminist moral theories to offer. But we can suggest some directions our project of devel- oping such theories is taking. As Kathryn Morgan points out, there is not likely to be a “star” feminist moral theorist on the order of a Rawls or Nozick: “There will be no individual singled out for two reasons. One reason is that vital moral and theoretical conversa- tions are taking place on a large dialectical scale as the feminist community struggles to develop a feminist ethic. The second reason is that this community of feminist theoreticians is calling into question the very model of the individualized autonomous self presupposed by a star-centered male-dominated tradition. . . . We experience it as a common labour, a common task.”
The dialogues that are enabling feminist approaches to moral theory to develop are proceeding. As Alison Jaggar makes clear in her useful overview of them, there is no unitary view of ethics that can be identified as “feminist ethics.” Feminist approaches to ethics share a commitment to “rethinking ethics with a view to correcting what- ever forms of male bias it may contain.” While those who develop these approaches are “united by a shared project, they diverge widely in their views as to how this project is to be accomplished.”
Not all feminists, by any means, agree that there are distinctive feminist virtues or values. Some are especially skeptical of the attempt to give positive value to such traditional “feminine virtues” as a willingness to nurture, or an affinity with caring, or reluctance to seek independence. They see this approach as playing into the hands of those who would confine women to traditional roles. Other feminists are skeptical of all claims about women as such, emphasizing that women are di- vided by class and race and sexual orientation in ways that make any conclusions drawn from “women’s experience” dubious.
Still, it is possible, I think, to discern various important focal points evident in current feminist attempts to transform ethics into a theoretical and practical activ- ity that could be acceptable from a feminist point of view. In the glimpse I have presented of bias in the history of ethics, I focused on what, from a feminist point of view, are three of its most questionable aspects: (1) the split between reason and emotion and the devaluation of emotion; (2) the public/private distinction and the relegation of the private to the natural; and (3) the concept of the self as constructed from a male point of view.
A modern woman contending with the de- mands of both the public and private spheres. (© iStockphoto.com/runzelkorn)
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SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
in this chapter, we have reviewed a variety of theories of morality. (1) Aristotle takes the key to morality to be the concept of “virtue,” which he argues to be activity in accordance with rational principles. He bases this argument on a concept of what is “natural” for man, but his discussion is clearly limited to a small class of Greek male citizens, whom he views as the ideal specimens of humanity. (2) Hume and Rousseau both argue that morality must be based on certain kinds of feelings or “sentiments.” “Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions,” Hume argues, and Rousseau similarly argues that man is “naturally” good. (3) Kant insists that morality is strictly a matter of rational principle divorced from all per- sonal interests and desires (“inclinations”). His moral theory includes a rejection of the views of Hume and Rousseau, who base morality on feelings (which are inclinations in Kant’s sense). it also rejects Aristotle’s position. Although both philosophers use the notion of a “rational principle,” Kant intends his notion to apply to every human being, and therefore every person has the same duties and obligations. (4) The utilitarians, Bentham and Mill, reject Kant’s divorce between morality and personal interest and argue that morality is our guide to the satisfaction of the greatest number of interests of the greatest number of people. (5) Nietzsche rejects both Kant and the utilitarians, preferring a return to the elitism and “virtue” orientation of Aristotle’s ethics. He argues that we create our values and live with them according to our personal needs. Following him, the existentialists, particularly Jean-Paul Sartre, argue that all values are chosen by us; there is no “true” morality, only those values to which we have voluntarily committed ourselves. (6) Finally, recent feminists have challenged the “male bias” of these traditional theories and have suggested the pos- sibility of a different kind of moral view.
CHAPTER REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. Compare Rousseau’s notion of conscience to Hume’s notion of sentiment. Does one theory seem to be stronger than the other, based on the differences and similarities between the notions of sentiment and conscience?
2. Does Aristotle’s model of virtue ethics depend only upon social expectations, or does it also leave room for individual autonomy?
3. Aristotle claims that “actions are called just or temperate when they are the sort that a just or temperate person would do.” Does this account seem circular to you? How would Aristotle deny the charge that it is circular?
4. Hobbes (and Xunzi) insist that humankind is naturally evil. Rousseau (and Mencius), on the other hand, believe in the natural goodness of humanity. What do you think? if humankind is naturally good, how does evil enter the picture?
• Do you think that men and women tend to have different approaches to moral rea- soning? What might count as evidence for your view?
• What are some major differences between traditional morality and feminist moral- ity? is Held committed to a form of ethical relativism? Why or why not?
• Can you think of ways in which the role and experience of mothers may offer in- sights of use to moral theory?
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5. Consider how one might reconcile the rule-based system of Kant with the conse- quence-based system of utilitarianism. Do the two ethical systems complement one another, or are they at odds?
6. Think of a moral dilemma that cannot be satisfactorily solved by either Kant or Mill. Does Nietzsche provide a solution? How would Simone de Beauvoir approach the problem?
7. What are the moral dangers of suggesting, as Nietzsche and Sartre do, that individuals create their own value systems? Could a prison guard in a Nazi concentration camp have described himself as a “good person” on existentialist grounds? How would the same prison guard deal with his moral responsibilities on Simone de Beauvoir’s account?
8. How plausible is the idea that men and women make their moral choices using differ- ent criteria?
9. Given the choice between saving your own child’s life and the lives of someone else’s two children, what would you do and why? What do you think Aristotle would say? Kant? Mill? What do you think virginia Held would say?
KEY TERMS
altruism existentialism morality a priori Golden Rule natural law autonomy happiness obligation categorical imperative happiness calculus principle of utility commitment (or felicity calculus) psychological egoism conscience hedonism rationality contemplation (the life of) hypothetical imperative relativism cultural relativism immoralist selfishness deontology imperative sentiment duty inclination slave morality egoism law sympathy ethical egoism master morality utilitarians ethical relativism maxim virtue ethics mean (between will to power eudaimonia the extremes)
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
A comprehensive but brief history of ethics is A. Macintyre, A Short History of Ethics, 2nd ed. (New york: Macmillan, 1998).
A general schematic discussion of the problems of ethics is W. Fankena, Ethics, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1973).
A lively summary of ethical issues is S. Blackburn, Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics (New york: Oxford university Press, 2001).
A much more detailed survey of the problems and history of ethics is R. R. Brandt, Ethical Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1959).
The classic arguments against egoism are in Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel (Gloucestershire, u.K.: Dodo Press, 2009).
A more modern and technical set of arguments is in T. Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford, u.K.: Clarendon Press, 1970).
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Textbooks that include various discussions of ethical options are Ethics: History, Theory, and Contemporary Issues, ed. S. Cahn and P. Markie, 4th ed. (New york: Oxford university Press, 2008), and l. M. Hinman. Ethics: A Pluralistic Approach to Ethical Theory, 4th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2007).
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics was translated by W. D. Ross (Oxford, u.K.: Oxford university Press, 1925). Ross also has a good summary of the arguments in his Aristotle, rev. ed. (New york: Barnes & Noble, 1964).
Some excellent articles on Aristotle’s ethics are collected in J. J. Walsh and H. l. Shapiro, eds., Aristotle’s Ethics (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1967), and J. Moravscik, ed., Aristotle (New york: Doubleday Anchor, 1967).
David Hume’s moral philosophy is most accessible in his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (la Salle, il: Open Court Press, 1966).
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s moral theories are to be found in his second discourse “On the Origins of inequality” in The Social Contract, trans. E. D. H. Cole (New york: Dutton, 1950) and in Émile, trans. B. Foxley (New york: Dutton, 1972).
The best summary of immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy is his own Foundations of the Meta- physics of Morals, available in various translations. One recent one is Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. M. Gregor (New york: Cambridge university Press, 1998). See also immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. P. Heath (New york: Cambridge uni- versity Press, 2001).
John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism is well summarized in his pamphlet Utilitarianism (New york: Dutton, 1910).
An account of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ethics can be found in W. Kaufmann, Nietzsche, 4th ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton university Press, 1974).
A good summary of existentialist ethics is M. Warnock, Existentialist Ethics (New york: St. Martin’s Press, 1967).
For a survey of feminist ethics, see H. lindemann, An Invitation to Feminist Ethics (New york: McGraw-Hill, 2005).
A good collection of essays on feminism and values is M. Pearsall, Women and Values, 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1993).
An excellent historical overview is J. McCracken, Thinking about Gender: A Historical Anthology (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace, 1997).
Two all-purpose collections are P. Singer, ed., A Companion to Ethics (Oxford, u.K.: Blackwell, 1991), and P. Singer, ed., Ethics (New york: Oxford university Press, 1994).
Also recommended are H. laFollette, The Blackwell Guide to Ethical Theory (Oxford, u.K.: Blackwell, 2000), and J. Rachels, Ethical Theory, 2 vols. (New york: Oxford university Press, 1998).
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9 | Justice We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that
they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
T H O M A S J E F F E R S O N E T A L .
“Man is a social animal,” wrote Aristotle. Therefore, he is a political animal as well. We live with other people, not just our friends and families, but thousands and millions of others, most of whom we will never meet and many of whom we come across in only the most casual way—passing them as we cross the street or buying a ticket at the movie theater. Yet we have to be concerned about them, and they about us, for there is a sense in which we are all clearly dependent on each other. For example, we depend on them not to attack us without reason or to steal our possessions. Of course, our confidence varies from person to person and from city to city. But it is clear that, in general, we have duties toward people we will never know, such as the duty not to contaminate their water or air supplies or to place their lives in danger. And they have similar duties to us. We also claim certain rights for ourselves, such as the right not to be attacked as we walk down the street, the right to speak our mind about politically controversial issues without being thrown in jail, and the right to believe in this or that religion or no religion at all, without having our jobs, our homes, or our freedom taken from us.
Political and social philosophy is the study of people in societies. It pays particular atten- tion to the abstract claims that people have on each other in the form of “rights,” “duties,” and “privileges” and their demands for “justice,” “equality,” and “freedom.” (It is important to distinguish this sense of political freedom from the causal or metaphysical freedom that we discussed earlier. These types of freedom can be discussed independently of each other.) At least ideally, politics is continuous with morality. Our political duties and obliga- tions, for example, are often the same as our moral duties and obligations. Our claims to certain “moral rights” are often claims to political rights as well. And political rights— particularly those very general and absolute rights that we call human rights (for example, the right not to be tortured or degraded or the right not to be exploited by powerful institu- tions or persons)—are typically defended on the basis of moral principles. The virtues of government are ideally the same as the virtues of individuals: government should be just, temperate, courageous, honest, humane, considerate, and reasonable. Plato and Aristotle
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portrayed their visions of the ideal state in precisely these terms. (Both Plato and Aristotle, unlike most modern phi- losophers, actually had the opportunity to set up such governments; both failed, but for reasons that were not their fault.)
We do not mean to say that all politics or all politicians are moral. We all know better than that. But it is to say that our politics are constrained and determined by our sense of morality. Morality is more concerned with relations be- tween particular people, while politics is more concerned with large and impersonal groups. But the difference is one of degree. In ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle lived in relatively small “city-states” (each called a polis), with fewer citizens than even most u.s. towns. It was not a stretch for them to treat morality and politics together. But even today, we still speak hopefully of “the human family” and “international brotherhood,” which is to reas- sert our enduring belief that politics—even at the interna- tional level—ought to be based on interpersonal moral principles.
The key to a successful society is cooperation. If people do not cooperate, the success of society requires that some authority have the power to bring individual inter- ests into line with the public interest. This authority is gen- erally called the state. The state passes laws and enforces them; its purpose is to protect the public interest. But is it only this? We would probably say no. Its purpose is also to protect individual rights, for example, against powerful
corporations and against strongly mobilized pressure groups that try to interfere with indi- vidual lives. In general, we may say that the function of the state is to protect justice. But there has been disagreement ever since ancient times about what protecting justice means and how much the primary emphasis should be placed on the public interest and how much on individual rights and interests.
Our concept of the state and the extent of its power and authority depends very much on our conception of human nature and of people’s willingness to cooperate without being forced to do so. At one extreme are those who place such strong emphasis on the smooth workings of society that they are willing to sacrifice most individual rights and interests. They are generally called “authoritarians,” and their confidence in willing individual cooperation is slight compared to their confidence in a strong authoritarian state. (“He makes the trains run on time” was often said of the fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.) At the other ex- treme are people with so much confidence in individual cooperation and so little confidence in the state that they argue that the state should be eliminated altogether. They are called anarchists. Between these extremes are more moderate positions. For example, many people have some confidence both in individual cooperation and in the possibility of a rea- sonably just state, but do not have complete confidence in either. Democrats and Republi- cans, for example, both believe in a government that is at least partially run by the people themselves but with sufficient power to enforce its laws over individual interests when nec- essary. All these people believe in different solutions to the same central problem: the prob- lem of a balance between the public interest and the need for cooperation, on the one hand,
A blindfolded woman holding scales is a traditional representation of justice. (© iStockphoto.com/Andrey Burmakin)
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and individual rights and interests, on the other. They are concerned, in other words, with the problem of justice.
A. The Problem of Justice When we think of justice, we tend first to think of criminal cases and of punishment. Justice, in this sense, is catching the criminal and “making him pay for his crime.” The oldest sense of the word justice, therefore, is what philosophers call retributive justice, or simply, “getting even.” Retribution for a crime is making the criminal suffer or pay an amount appropriate to the severity of the crime. In ancient traditions, the key phrase was “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” If a criminal caused a person to be blind, he was, in turn, blinded. We now view this form of justice as brutal and less than civilized. But is it so clear that we have in fact given up this retributive sense of justice? Do we demand retribution from our criminals by punish- ing them, or do we sincerely attempt to reform them? Or is the purpose of prison simply to keep them off the street? should we ever punish people for crimes, or should we simply protect ourselves against their doing the same thing again? If a man commits an atrocious murder, is it enough that we guarantee that he will not commit another one? Or does he deserve punishment even if we know that he will not do it again?
Retributive justice and the problems of punishment, however, are really only a small piece of a much larger concern. Justice is not just “getting even” for crimes and offenses. It con- cerns the running of society as a whole in day-to-day civil matters, as well as in the more dramatic criminal cases. Given the relative scarcity of wealth and goods, how should they be distributed? should everyone receive exactly the same amount? should the person who works hard at an unpleasant job receive no more than the person who refuses to work at all and prefers to spend the day watching television and engaging in other amusements? should the person who uses his or her wealth to the benefit of others receive no more than the person who “throws away” his or her money on gambling, drinking, and debauchery? If a class of people has historically been deprived of its adequate share because of the color of their skins, their religious beliefs, or their sex or age, should that class now be given more than its share in compensation? Or is this, too, an injustice against other people?
Not only wealth and goods are at issue here. Distribution of privileges and power are equally important. Who will be allowed to vote? Will everyone’s vote count equally? should the opinions of an illiterate who does not even know the name of his political leaders have as much say in the gov- ernment as the political scientist or economist who has studied these matters for years? should everyone be al- lowed to drive? Or to drink? should everyone receive ex- actly the same treatment before the law? Or are there concerns that would indicate that some people (for exam- ple, members of Congress or foreign diplomats) should receive special privileges?
Enjoyment of society’s cultural gifts is also at issue. should everyone receive the same education? What if doing so turns out to be “impractical” (since job training is much more efficient than “liberal arts”)? If only some are educated in more than occupational skills, doesn’t that mean that some—the workers and career persons who are trained to do a job—are deprived of the education neces- sary to enjoy great books, music, poetry, philosophy,
Is getting even the essence of justice? (© iStockphoto.com/bruce7)
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intellectual debate, or proficiency in foreign languages, all of which give considerable enjoy- ment to those who have been taught to appreciate them?
There are also questions of status. should there be social classes? What if it could be proved that such divisions make a society run more smoothly? How minimal should distinctions in status be? This question, in turn, leads to the more general question: shouldn’t all members of society be able to expect equal treatment and respect not only by the law but in every conceivable social situation? All these are the concerns of justice. But what is just? Who decides? And how?
B. Two Ancient Theories of Justice: Plato and Aristotle Theories of justice, in one sense, are as old as human society. The ancient codes of the Hebrews, the Persians, and the Babylonians were theories of justice in the sense that they were efforts to develop rules to cover fair dealing and distribution of goods, the punishment of criminals, and the settling of disputes. A fully developed theory of justice, however, should go beyond making rules and try to analyze the nature of justice itself. The first great western theories of justice were those of Plato and Aristotle. In the Republic, Plato argues that justice in the state is precisely the same as justice in the individual. Justice in both cases is a har- mony among the various parts for the good of the whole. In other words, cooperation among all for the sake of a successful society is the key to justice. But this means that the interests of the individual take a clearly secondary role to the interests of society. In ancient Greece, individual interests may have been an occasional concern of the wealthy and powerful, but for the majority of people—especially the slaves—this secondary role was the norm. Because their docile submission was seen as necessary to the overall success of society, their indi- vidual interests and rights were extremely minimal. They expected to be rewarded and satis- fied only insofar as their efforts benefited their betters, and they expected their betters to reap far more reward from their labor than they themselves. In Plato’s universe, everyone has his or her “place,” and justice means that they act and are treated accordingly:
F RO M Republic B Y Plato1
I think that justice is the very thing, or some form of the thing which, when we were beginning to found our city, we said had to be established throughout. We stated, and often repeated, if you remember, that everyone must pursue one o ccupation of those in the city, that for which his nature best fitted him.
Yes, we kept saying that. Further, we have heard many people say, and have often said ourselves, that
justice is to perform one’s own task, and not to meddle with that of others. We have said that. This then, my friend, I said, when it happens, is in some way justice, to do one’s
own job. And do you know what I take to be a proof of this? No, tell me. I think what is left over of those things we have been investigating, after mod-
eration and courage and wisdom have been found, was that which made it possible for those three qualities to appear in the city and to continue as long as it was pres- ent. We also said that what remained after we found the other three was justice.
It had to be.
1 Plato, Republic, Bk. VI, trans. G. M. A. Grube. Copyright © 1974 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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And surely, I said, if we had to decide which of the four will make the city good by its presence, it would be hard to judge whether it is a common belief among the rulers and the ruled, or the preservation among the soldiers of a law-inspired belief as to the nature of what is, and what is not, to be feared, or the knowledge and guardianship of the rulers, or whether it is, above all, the presence of this fourth in child and woman, slave and free, artisan, ruler and subject, namely that each man, a unity in himself, performed his own task and was not meddling with that of others.
How could this not be hard to judge? It seems then that the capacity for each in the city to perform his own task rivals
wisdom, moderation, and courage as a source of excellence for the city. It certainly does. You would then describe justice as a rival to them for excellence in the city? Most certainly. Look at it this way and see whether you agree: you will order your rulers to act
as judges in the courts of the city? Surely. And will their exclusive aim in delivering judgment not be that no citizen
should have what belongs to another or be deprived of what is his own? That would be their aim. That being just? Yes. In some way then possession of one’s own and the performance of one’s own
task could be agreed to be justice. That is so. Consider then whether you agree with me in this: if a carpenter attempts to do
the work of a cobbler, or a cobbler that of a carpenter, and they exchange their tools and the esteem that goes with the job, or the same man tries to do both, and all the other exchanges are made, do you think that this does any great harm to the city?
No. But I think that when one who is by nature a worker or some other kind of
moneymaker is puffed up by wealth, or by the mob, or by his own strength, or some other such thing, and attempts to enter the warrior class, or one of the soldiers tries to enter the group of counselors or guardians, though he is unworthy of it, and these exchange their tools and the public esteem, or when the same man tries to perform all these jobs together, then I think you will agree that these exchanges and this meddling bring the city to ruin.
They certainly do. The meddling and exchange between the three established orders does very
great harm to the city and would most correctly be called wickedness. Very definitely. And you would call the greatest wickedness worked against one’s own city
injustice? Of course. That then is injustice. And let us repeat that the doing of one’s own job by the
moneymaking, auxiliary, and guardian groups, when each group is performing its own task in the city, is the opposite, it is justice and makes the city just.
I agree with you that this is so.
“[T]he doing of one’s own job by the moneymaking, auxiliary, and guardian groups, when each group is performing its own task in the city . . . is justice and makes the city just.” — P L ATO ’ S C H A R A C T E R S O C R AT E S
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Plato’s rigid hierarchy of social classes and insistence on the inequality of people offends our sense of universal equality. The same is true of Aristotle’s theory of justice. But it is im- portant to see that equality (or, more properly, egalitarianism, the view that all men and women are equal just by virtue of their being human) is a position that must be argued. It is not a “natural” state of affairs or a belief that has always been accepted by everyone.
In his Politics, Aristotle gives an unabashed defense of slavery, not only on the grounds that slaves are efficient and good for society as a whole, but because those who are slaves are “naturally” meant to be slaves. They would be unhappy, he claims, and unable to cope if they were granted freedom and made citizens. (This is not just an ancient argument. You may have heard similar arguments about other groups of people in your own lifetime.) According to Plato and Aristotle, different people have different roles, and to treat unequals equally is as unjust as it is to treat equals unequally. Plato and Aristotle would consider the view that the retarded and children and foreigners deserve the same respect and treatment as citizens to be ridiculous. so, too, would they find the contemporary argument that we should treat men and women as equals.2
Despite these opinions, however, Plato and Aristotle laid the foundations for much of our own conception of justice. The idea that equals must be treated as equals is the foundation of our sense of justice just as much as it was theirs—the difference is that we are taught to believe that everybody is an equal. similarly, the theory of what is called distributive justice, the fair distribution of wealth and goods among the members of society, is a current interna- tional as well as national concern that owes much to Aristotle’s original formulations. The idea that individuals are due certain rewards for their labor is also Aristotle’s idea. And despite his aristocratic opinions and his harsh elitism, Aristotle saw quite clearly that the members of society who depended most upon an adequate theory of justice were the poorer and less powerful members. It was for them that the just society was most vital (since the powerful and wealthy had a much better chance of taking care of themselves). It was also Aristotle who made the vital distinction, with which we began this section, between justice in the restricted sense of righting certain wrongs (in crimes, in bad business deals, and in public misfortunes) and justice as the more general concern for a well-balanced and reasonable society.
F RO M The Nicomachean Ethics B Y Aristotle3
Let us take as a starting-point, then, the various meanings of “an unjust man.” Both the lawless man and the greedy and unfair man are thought to be unjust, so that evidently both the law-abiding and the fair man will be just. The just, then, is the lawful and the fair, the unjust the unlawful and the unfair.
Since the lawless man was seen to be unjust and the law-abiding man just, evi- dently all lawful acts are in a sense just acts; for the acts laid down by the legislative art are lawful, and each of these, we say, is just. Now the laws in their enactments on all subjects aim at the common advantage either of all or of the best of those who hold power, or something of the sort; so that in one sense we call those acts just that tend to produce and preserve happiness and its components for the political society. And the law bids us do both the acts of a brave man (e.g. not to desert our post nor take to flight nor throw away our arms), and those of a temperate man (e.g. not to commit adultery nor to gratify one’s lust), and those of a good-tempered
2 Plato did venture that women as well as men ought to be rulers. 3 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford, u.K.: Oxford university Press, 1925).
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man (e.g. not to strike another nor to speak evil), and similarly with regard to the other virtues and forms of wickedness, commanding some acts and forbidding others; and the rightly-framed law does this rightly, and the hastily conceived one less well.
This form of justice, then, is complete virtue, but not absolutely, but in relation to our neighbour. And there- fore justice is often thought to be the greatest of virtues, and “neither evening nor morning star” is so wonderful; and proverbially “in justice is every virtue compre- hended.” And it is complete virtue in its fullest sense, because it is the actual exercise of complete virtue. It is complete because he who possesses it can exercise his virtue not only in himself but towards his neighbour also; for many men can exercise virtue in their own af- fairs, but not in their relations to their neighbour.
. . .
But at all events what we are investigating is the jus- tice which is a part of virtue; for there is a justice of this kind, as we maintain. Similarly it is with injustice in the particular sense that we are concerned.
That there is such a thing is indicated by the fact that while the man who exhib- its in action the other forms of wickedness acts wrongly indeed, but not graspingly (e.g. the man who throws away his shield through cowardice or speaks harshly through bad temper or fails to help a friend with money through meanness), when a man acts graspingly he often exhibits none of these vices—no, nor all together, but certainly wickedness of some kind (for we blame him) and injustice. There is, then, another kind of injustice which is a part of injustice in the wide sense, and a use of the word “unjust” which answers to a part of what is unjust in the wide sense of “contrary to the law.” Again, if one man commits adultery for the sake of gain and makes money by it, while another does so at the bidding of appetite though he loses money and is penalized for it, the latter would be held to be self-indulgent rather than grasping, but the former is unjust, but not self-indulgent; evidently, therefore, he is unjust by reason of his making gain by his act. Again, all other unjust acts are ascribed invariably to some particular kind of wickedness, for ex- ample adultery to self-indulgence, the desertion of a comrade in battle to coward- ice, physical violence to anger; but if a man makes gain, his action is ascribed to no form of wickedness but injustice. Evidently, therefore, there is apart from injustice in the wide sense another, “particular,” injustice which shares the name and nature of the first, because its definition falls within the same genus; for the significance of both consists in a relation to one’s neighbour, but the one is concerned with honour or money or safety—or that which includes all these, if we had a single name for it—and its motive is the pleasure that arises from gain; while the other is concerned with all the objects with which the good man is concerned.
It is clear, then, that there is more than one kind of justice, and that there is one which is distinct from virtue entire; we must try to grasp its genus and differentia.
. . .
Distributive justice is fairness in the allocation of goods. (© iStockphoto.com/koun)
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Of particular justice and that which is just in the corresponding sense, (A) one kind is that which is manifested in distributions of honour or money or the other things that fall to be divided among those who have a share in the constitution (for in these it is possible for one man to have a share either unequal or equal to that of another), and (B) one is that which plays a rectifying part in transactions between man and man. Of this there are two divisions; of transactions (1) some are volun- tary, and (2) others involuntary—voluntary such transactions as sale, purchase, loan for consumption, pledging, loan for use, depositing, letting (they are called volun- tary because the origin of these transactions is voluntary), while of the involuntary (a) some are clandestine, such as theft, adultery, poisoning, procuring, enticement of slaves, assassination, false witness, and (b) others are violent, such as assault, im- prisonment, murder, robbery with violence, mutilation, abuse, insult.
. . . (A) We have shown that both the unjust man and the unjust act are unfair or un-
equal; now it is clear that there is also an intermediate between the two unequals involved in either case. And this is the equal; for in any kind of action in which there is a more and a less there is also what is equal. If, then, the unjust is unequal, the just is equal, as all men suppose it to be, even apart from argument. And since the equal is intermediate, the just will be an intermediate. Now equality implies at least two things. The just, then, must be both intermediate and equal and relative (i.e. for cer- tain persons). And qua intermediate it must be between certain things (which are respectively greater and less); qua equal, it involves two things; qua just, it is for certain people. The just, therefore, involves at least four terms; for the persons for whom it is in fact just are two, and the things in which it is manifested, the objects distributed, are two. And the same equality will exist between the persons and between the things concerned; for as the latter—the things concerned—are related, so are the former; if they are not equal, they will not have what is equal, but this is the origin of quarrels and complaints—when either equals have and are awarded unequal shares, or unequals equal shares. Further, this is plain from the fact that awards should be “according to merit”; for all men agree that what is just in distribution must be ac- cording to merit in some sense, though they do not all specify the same sort of merit, but democrats identify it with the status of freeman, supporters of oligarchy with wealth (or with noble birth), and supporters of aristocracy with excellence.
This, then, is what the just is—the proportional; the unjust is what violates the proportion. Hence one term becomes too great, the other too small, as indeed hap- pens in practice, for the man who acts unjustly has too much, and the man who is unjustly treated too little, of what is good. In the case of evil the reverse is true; for the lesser evil is reckoned a good in comparison with the greater, and what is worthy of choice is good, and what is worthier of choice a greater good.
This, then, is one species of the just. . . .
(B) The remaining one is the rectificatory, which arises in connexion with transactions both voluntary and involuntary. This form of the just has a different specific character from the former. For the justice which distributes common pos- sessions is always in accordance with the kind of proportion mentioned above (for in the case also in which the distribution is made from the common funds of a partnership it will be according to the same ratio which the funds put into the busi- ness by the partners bear to one another); and the injustice opposed to this kind of
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justice is that which violates the proportion. But the justice in transactions between man and man is a sort of equality indeed, and the injustice a sort of inequality; not according to that kind of proportion, however, but according to arithmetical pro- portion. For it makes no difference whether a good man has defrauded a bad man or a bad man a good one, nor whether it is a good or a bad man that has committed adultery; the law looks only to the distinctive character of the injury, and treats the parties as equal, if one is in the wrong and the other is being wronged, and if one inflicted injury and the other has received it. Therefore, this kind of injustice being an inequality, the judge tries to equalize it; for in the case also in which one has received and the other has inflicted a wound, or one has slain and the other has been slain, the suffering and the action have been unequally distributed; but the judge tries to equalize things by means of the penalty, taking away from the gain of the assailant. For the term “gain” is applied generally to such cases, even if it be not a term appropriate to certain cases, for example to the person who inflicts a wound—and “loss” to the sufferer; at all events when the suffering has been esti- mated, the one is called loss and the other gain. Therefore the equal is intermediate between the greater and less in contrary ways; more of the good and less of the evil are gain, and the contrary is loss; intermediate between them is, as we saw, the equal, which we say is just; therefore corrective justice will be the intermediate between loss and gain. This is why, when people dispute, they take refuge in the judge; and to go to the judge is to go to justice; for the nature of the judge is to be a sort of animate justice; and they seek the judge as an intermediate; and in some
Peter Van lint’s painting The Judgment of Solomon illustrates some of the grave difficulties in deter- mining what is just. (© RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY)
“[T]o go to the judge is to go to justice; for the nature of the judge is to be a sort of animate justice.” — A R I S TOT L E
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states they call judges mediators, on the assumption that if they get what is inter- mediate they will get what is just. The just, then, is an intermediate, since the judge is so. The judge restores equality.
• What is retributive justice? What is distributive justice? Provide an example of each. Do you think that one concept (theory) fits them both, or are they very different?
• Why must individuals submit themselves to the authority of the state for the sake of justice?
• Plato’s conception of justice is antiegalitarian. In what respects does our society remain antiegalitarian (or inegalitarian) today?
• Aristotle gives one definition of justice that requires that each be given his due ac- cording to merit. Is this notion of justice compatible with equality?
• Why should we treat others equally? Can you think of circumstances in which it is unjust to treat people equally?
• What does Aristotle mean when he claims that “the just is the proportional”?
C. Two Modern Theories of Justice: Hume and Mill on Utility and Rights In contrast to the Greeks, the premise of most modern theories of justice has been the equality of everyone with everyone else. No one is “better” than anyone else, whatever his or her talents, achievements, wealth, family, or intelligence. This view rules out slavery on principle, whatever the benefits to society as a whole and whatever the alleged benefits to the slaves. slavery is an extreme form of inequality and is thus to be condemned.
But our egalitarian principle has its problems, too. It is obvious that, as a matter of fact, all people are not equally endowed with intelligence or talent, good looks or abilities. Is it therefore to the good of all that everyone should be treated equally? One person is a doctor, capable of saving many lives; another is a chronic profligate and drunkard. If they were to commit exactly the same crime, would it be to the public interest to give them equal jail terms? Obviously not. But would it be just to give them different terms? It doesn’t appear so. One problem that recent theorists have tried to answer is connected with cases in which the public interest seems at odds with the demands for equal treatment.
A similar problem, which we mentioned before, gives rise to one of the “paradoxes of democracy.” Does it make sense to treat the opinions of an ignorant person whose only knowledge of current events comes from fifteen minutes (at best) of television news a day in the way that we treat the opinions of a skilled political veteran? But the ballots these indi- viduals cast make no such distinction. At the same time, it is obvious that our society, despite its egalitarian principles, treats people who are cleverer at business or power-brokering much better than everyone else. Is this an example of systematic injustice? Or are there cases, even for us, in which inequality can still be defended as compatible with justice?
The theory of justice has been one of the central concerns of British philosophy for sev- eral centuries. Thomas Hobbes developed a theory that began with the idea that equality is a “natural fact” and justice is that which “assured peace and security to all” when enforced by the government. There is no justice in “the state of nature,” Hobbes argued. Justice, like
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law, comes into existence only with society, through a “social compact” in which everyone agrees to abide by certain rules and to cooperate rather than compete—all for their mutual benefit. subse- quently, John locke and later David Hume argued a similar theory of justice. Again, their premises were equality and mutual agreement as the basis of gov- ernment authority. For both philosophers, the ulti- mate criterion of justice was utility, the public interest, and therefore the satisfaction of the inter- ests of at least most citizens. This criterion would have been rejected by Plato and Aristotle.
Hume exemplifies the modern view—that justice is to be characterized not just in terms of the struc- ture of the overall society and everyone’s “place” in it, but by the interests and well-being of each and every individual. But what about an instance, Hume asks, in which a particular act of justice is clearly contrary to the public interests, such as the case in which an obviously guilty criminal is released for technical reasons or a disgusting pornographer is allowed to publish and sell his or her wares under the protection of “free speech”? Hume replies that there is a need to distin- guish between the utility of a single act and the utility of an overall system; that although a specific act of justice may go against the public interest, the system of justice necessarily will be in the public interest. According to Hume, a single unjust act is to be challenged not as an isolated occurrence, but as an example of a general set of rules and practices.
On “Justice and Utility” B Y David Hume4
To make this more evident, consider, that though the rules of justice are established merely by interest, their connection with interest is somewhat singular, and is dif- ferent from what may be observed on other occasions. A single act of justice is frequently contrary to public interest; and were it to stand alone, without being fol- lowed by other acts, may, in itself, be very prejudicial to society. When a man of merit, of a beneficent disposition, restores a great fortune to a miser, or a seditious bigot, he has acted justly and laudably, but the public is a real sufferer. Nor is every single act of justice, considered apart, more conducive to private interest, than to public; and it is easily conceived how a man may impoverish himself by a single instance of integrity, and have reason to wish that with regard to that single act, the laws of justice were for a moment suspended in the universe. But however single acts of justice may be contrary, either to public or private interest, it is certain, that the whole plan or scheme is highly conducive, or indeed absolutely requisite, both to the support of society, and the well-being of every individual.
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)
The author of Leviathan (1651) and one of England’s first great modern philosophers. He is generally cred- ited with the formulation of the theory of the “social contract” for the establishment of governments and society, and he was one of the first philosophers to base his theory of government on a con- ception of man prior to his “civiliza- tion,” in what he called “the state of nature.” This life was, according to Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Therefore, people were motivated to become
part of society for their mutual protection. Hobbes also defended a materialist conception of the universe. Even the human mind, he argued, was nothing more than “matter in motion.”
Thomas Hobbes (New York Public Library / Art Resource, NY)
4 David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (la salle, Il: Open Court Press, 1912).
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The most explicitly “utilitarian” statement of justice as utility is found in John stuart Mill’s influential pamphlet, Utilitarianism.
F RO M Utilitarianism B Y John Stuart Mill5
In the case of this, as of our other moral sentiments, there is no necessary connec- tion between the question of its origin and that of its binding force. That a feeling is bestowed on us by nature does not necessarily legitimate all its promptings. The feeling of justice might be a peculiar instinct, and might yet require, like our other instincts, to be controlled and enlightened by a higher reason. If we have intellec- tual instincts leading us to judge in a particular way, as well as animal instincts that prompt us to act in a particular way, there is no necessity that the former should be more infallible in their sphere than the latter in theirs: it may as well happen that wrong judgments are occasionally suggested by those, as wrong actions by these.
. . .
In the first place, it is mostly considered unjust to deprive any one of his personal liberty, his property, or any other thing which belongs to him by law. Here, there- fore, is one instance of the application of the terms Just and Unjust in a perfectly definite sense; namely, that it is just to respect, unjust to violate, the legal rights of any one. But this judgment admits of several exceptions, arising from the other forms in which the notions of justice and injustice present themselves. For example: the person who suffers the deprivation may (as the phrase is) have forfeited the rights which he is so deprived of; a case to which we shall return presently.
. . .
Secondly, The legal rights of which he is deprived may be rights which ought not to have belonged to him: in other words, the law which confers on him these rights may be a bad law. When it is so, or when (which is the same thing for our purpose) it is supposed to be so, opinions will differ as to the justice or injustice of infringing it. Some maintain that no law, however bad, ought to be disobeyed by an indi- vidual citizen; that his opposition to it, if shown at all, should only be shown in endeavoring to get it altered by competent authority. This opinion (which con- demns many of the most illustrious benefactors of mankind, and would often pro- tect pernicious institutions against the only weapons, which, in the state of things existing at the time, have any chance of succeeding against them) is defended, by those who hold it, on grounds of expediency; principally on that of the impor- tance, to the common interest of mankind, of maintaining inviolate the sentiment of submission to law. Other persons, again, hold the directly contrary opinion, that any law, judged to be bad, may blamelessly be disobeyed, even though it be not judged to be unjust, but only inexpedient; while others would confine the license of disobedience to the case of unjust laws. But, again, some say that all laws which are inexpedient are unjust, since every law imposes some restriction on the natural liberty of mankind; which restriction is an injustice, unless legitimated by tending to their good. Among these diversities of opinion, it seems to be universally admit- ted that there may be unjust laws, and that law, consequently, is not the ultimate criterion of justice, but may give to one person a benefit, or impose on another an
5 John stuart Mill, Utilitarianism (london: J. M. Dent, 1910).
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evil, which justice condemns. When, however, a law is thought to be unjust, it seems always to be regarded as being so in the same way in which a breach of law is unjust—namely, by infringing somebody’s right; which, as it cannot in this case be a legal right, receives a different appellation, and is called a moral right. We may say, therefore, that a second case of injustice consists in taking or withholding from any person that to which he has a moral right.
Thirdly, It is universally considered just, that each person should obtain that (whether good or evil) which he deserves; and unjust, that he should obtain a good, or be made to undergo an evil, which he does not deserve. This is, perhaps, the clearest and most emphatic form in which the idea of justice is conceived by the general mind. As it involves the notion of desert, the question arises, What consti- tutes desert? Speaking in a general way, a person is understood to deserve good if he does right; evil, if he does wrong: and, in a more particular sense, to deserve good from those to whom he does or has done good, and evil from those to whom he does or has done evil. The precept of returning good for evil has never been regarded as a case of the fulfilment of justice, but as one in which the claims of justice are waived, in obedience to other considerations.
Fourthly, It is confessedly unjust to break faith with any one; to violate an en- gagement, either express or implied; or disappoint expectations raised by our own conduct, at least if we have raised those expectations knowingly and voluntarily. Like the other obligations of justice already spoken of, this one is not regarded as absolute, but as capable of being overruled by a stronger obligation of justice on the other side, or by such conduct on the part of the person concerned as is deemed to absolve us from our obligation to him, and to constitute a forfeiture of the benefit which he has been led to expect.
Fifthly, It is, by universal admission, inconsistent with justice to be partial; to show favor or preference to one person over another in matters to which favor and preference do not properly apply. Impartiality, however, does not seem to be re- garded as a duty in itself, but rather as instrumental to some other duty; for it is admitted that favor and preference are not always censurable, and indeed the cases in which they are condemned are rather the exception than the rule. A person would be more likely to be blamed than applauded for giving his family or friends no superiority in good offices over strangers, when he could do so without violating any other duty; and no one thinks it unjust to seek one person in preference to an- other as a friend, connection, or companion. Impartiality, where rights are con- cerned, is of course obligatory; but this is involved in the more general obligation of giving to every one his right. A tribunal, for example, must be impartial, because it is bound to award, without regard to any other consideration, a disputed object to the one of two parties who has the right to it. There are other cases in which im- partiality means, being solely influenced by desert; as with those who, in the capac- ity of judges, preceptors, or parents, administer reward and punishment as such. There are cases, again, in which it means being solely influenced by consideration for the public interest; as in making a selection among candidates for a government employment. Impartiality, in short, as an obligation of justice, may be said to mean being exclusively influenced by the considerations which it is supposed ought to influence the particular case in hand, and resisting the solicitation of any motives which prompt to conduct different from what those considerations would dictate.
Nearly allied to the idea of impartiality is that of equality; which often enters as a component part both into the conception of justice and into the practice of it, and,
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in the eyes of many persons, constitutes its essence. But, in this still more than in any other case, the notion of justice varies in different persons, and always conforms in its variations to their notion of utility. Each person maintains that equality is the dictate of justice, except where he thinks that expediency requires inequality. The justice of giving equal protection to the rights of all is maintained by those who sup- port the most outrageous inequality in the rights themselves. Even in slave countries, it is theoretically admitted that the rights of the slave, such as they are, ought to be as sacred as those of the master, and that a tribunal which fails to enforce them with equal strictness is wanting in justice; while, at the same time, institutions which leave to the slave scarcely any rights to enforce are not deemed unjust, because they are not deemed inexpedient. Those who think that utility requires distinctions of rank do not consider it unjust that riches and social privileges should be unequally dispensed; but those who think this inequality inexpedient think it unjust also. Whoever thinks that government is necessary sees no injustice in as much inequality as is constituted by giving to the magistrate powers not granted to other people. Even among those who hold levelling doctrines, there are as many questions of justice as there are dif- ferences of opinion about expediency. Some Communists consider it unjust that the produce of the labor of the community should be shared on any other principle than that of exact equality; others think it just that those should receive most whose wants are greatest; while others hold that those who work harder, or who produce more, or whose services are more valuable to the community, may justly claim a larger quota in the division of the produce. And the sense of natural justice may be plausibly appealed to in behalf of every one of these opinions.
Mill then goes on to define a right:
When we call any thing a person’s right, we mean that he has a valid claim on so- ciety to protect him in the possession of it, either by the force of law, or by that of education and opinion. If he has what we consider a sufficient claim, on whatever account, to have something guaranteed to him by society, we say that he has a right to it. If we desire to prove that any thing does not belong to him by right, we think this done as soon as it is admitted that society ought not to take measures for secur- ing it to him, but should leave him to chance, or to his own exertions. Thus a person is said to have a right to what he can earn in fair professional competition, because society ought not to allow any other person to hinder him from endeavor- ing to earn in that manner as much as he can. But he has not a right to three hun- dred a year, though he may happen to be earning it, because society is not called on to provide that he shall earn that sum. On the contrary, if he owns ten thousand pounds three-per-cent stock, he has a right to three hundred a year, because society has come under an obligation to provide him with an income of that amount.
To have a right, then, is, I conceive, to have something which society ought to defend me in the possession of. If the objector goes on to ask why it ought, I can give him no other reason than general utility. If that expression does not seem to convey a sufficient feeling of the strength of the obligation, nor to account for the peculiar energy of the feeling, it is because there goes to the composition of the sentiment, not a rational only, but also an animal element—the thirst for retalia- tion; and this thirst derives its intensity, as well as its moral justification, from the extraordinarily important and impressive kind of utility which is concerned. The interest involved is that of security; to every one’s feelings, the most vital of all interests. All other earthly benefits are needed by one person, not needed by
“When we call any thing a person’s right, we mean that he has a valid claim on society to protect him in the possession of it, either by the force of law, or by that of education and opinion.” — J O H N S T U A R T M I L L
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another; and many of them can, if necessary, be cheerfully foregone, or replaced by something else. But security no human being can possibly do without: on it we depend for all our immunity from evil, and for the whole value of all and every good, beyond the passing moment; since nothing but the gratification of the instant could be of any worth to us if we could be deprived of everything the next instant by whoever was momentarily stronger than ourselves. Now, this most indispens- able of all necessaries, after physical nutriment, cannot be had, unless the machin- ery for providing it is kept unintermittedly in active play. Our notion, therefore, of the claim we have on our fellow-creatures to join in making safe for us the very groundwork of our existence, gathers feelings around it so much more intense than those concerned in any of the more common cases of utility, that the difference in degree (as is often the case in psychology) becomes a real difference in kind. The claim assumes that character of absoluteness, that apparent infinity, and incom- mensurability with all other considerations, which constitute the distinction be- tween the feeling of right and wrong and that of ordinary expediency and inexpediency. The feelings concerned are so powerful, and we count so positively on finding a responsive feeling in others (all being alike interested), that ought and should grow into must, and recognized indispensability becomes a moral necessity, analogous to physical, and often not inferior to it in binding force.
Mill’s utilitarian theory of justice is a logical extension of his ethical theories: What is good and desirable is what is best for the greatest number of people. But although it may at first seem as if the greatest happiness of the greatest number leaves no room for such abstract concerns as justice, Mill argues that, to the contrary, only the principle of utility can give that abstract sense of justice some concrete basis in human life.
The problem with the utilitarian theory of justice is identical to the problem that we saw with the utilitarian theory of morals. Could there not be a case in which the public interest and general utility would be served only at the clearly unjust expense of a single unfortunate individual? suppose we lived in a society that ran extremely well, such that we had few, if any, com- plaints about our government and the way it was run, when a single muckraking journalist started turning the peace upside down with his insistence that something was very wrong in the government. We might easily suppose that, at least in the short run, the public confusion and trauma would be much more harmful to the public interest than the slight correction the muckraker might accomplish by publically exposing corrupt politicians. should the government forcefully silence the journalist? We would say no. He has a right to his inquiries and a right to speak his mind. Or suppose that the most efficient way to solve a series of ongoing crimes was to torture a recently captured suspect and hold him without evidence? Here, again, public interest and justice are at odds. Or more generally, should the government have the authority to throw people in
Justice, according to Mill, is of fundamental importance to utilitarians because it deals with our security, one of our most basic needs. (© iStockphoto.com/swilmor)
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jail just because it has reason (even good reason) to believe that they will create a public disturbance or commit certain crimes? Public interest says yes; justice says no.
This is the problem with utilitarian theories of justice in general: although we may well agree that justice ought to serve the public interest and every individual’s interests as well, the utilitarian view is always in an awkward position when serving the public interest would come at the intolerable expense of injustice toward a small number of individuals or even a single individual. Consider the extreme example of an entire city that would prosper if it would sacrifice the life of one innocent child. Arguably, utilitarianism would seem to defend the sacrifice; justice, however, says that such a sacrifice is inexcusable.
• In what important respect do modern conceptions of justice differ from those of the ancients?
• How are interests and rights important considerations for justice?
• Can justice demand that we break a law? How does Mill argue this point? Can you think of an example in which breaking the law would be the just thing to do? How so?
• How does Mill define a right? Does his definition agree with our general under- standing of rights? Is utilitarianism compatible with rights? (Bentham did not think so.) Why might they be incompatible?
D. The Social Contract The single most influential conception of justice in modern times has been called the “social contract theory.” The social contract is an agreement among people to share certain inter- ests and make certain compromises for the good of them all. It is a “consent of the gov- erned” theory. In one form or another, it existed even in ancient times. For example, read socrates’ argument in the Crito, in which he says that by staying in Athens, he had implicitly agreed to abide by its laws, even when those laws unfairly condemned him to death.
What is most important in understanding the nature of this social contract is that, as socrates’ argument makes clear, there need not have been any actual, physical contract or even oral agreement. We are bound by a social contract, even if we never signed or saw such a contract. Moreover, it may not be the case that there was ever such a contract, even in past history. It happens that Americans are among the few people in the world whose state was actually formed explicitly by such a contract, namely, our Constitution. But the actual exis- tence of such a piece of paper is not necessary for the existence of a social contract. simply to live in a society, according to these philosophers, is to have accepted, at least implicitly, the terms of such an agreement. (Thus, living in a society, you are expected to obey its laws. “Ignorance is no excuse,” and you cannot get out of an arrest by saying “I don’t really live here,” much less “I don’t recognize your right to arrest me.”)
Two different pictures of the original social contract are presented by the English philoso- pher Thomas Hobbes and the French-swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Both begin by considering man in “the state of nature,” without laws and without society, before men and women came together to accept the social contract. Hobbes bases his conception of the social contract on an extremely unfavorable conception of human nature. He attacks the idealistic political philosophies of Plato and Aristotle for being unrealistic and assuming wrongly that people are naturally capable of virtue and wisdom. Hobbes considers himself a “realist,” and like most self-avowed realists, he focuses on the nasty side of things.
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According to his theory of human nature, natural man is a selfish beast, fighting for his own interests against everyone else. In the natural state human life is a “war of all against all,” and a person’s life, consequently, is “nasty, brutish and short.” Hobbes dismisses the view that people are fundamentally rational, and his sense of human nature emphasizes the passions, particularly the passion for self-preservation. The social contract, accordingly, is mainly an agreement among equally selfish and self-seeking persons not to commit mutual murder.
F RO M Leviathan B Y Thomas Hobbes6
O F T H E N AT U R A L C O N D I T I O N O F M A N K I N D A S C O N C E R N I N G T H E I R F E L I C I T Y, A N D M I S E RY Men by nature equal. Nature hath made men so equal, in the faculties of the body, and mind; as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another; yet when all is reckoned to- gether, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pre- tend, as well as he. For as to the strength of the body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himself.
. . .
For such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves; for they see their own wit at hand, and other men’s at a distance. But this proveth rather that men are in that point equal, than unequal. For there is not ordinarily a greater sign of the equal distribution of any thing, than that every man is contented with his share.
From equality proceeds diffidence. From this equality of ability, ariseth equality of hope in the attaining of our ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their end, which is principally their own conservation, and some- times their delectation only, endeavour to destroy, or subdue one another. And from hence it comes to pass, that where an invader hath no more to fear, than an- other man’s single power; if one plant, sow, build, or possess a convenient seat, others may probably be expected to come prepared with forces united, to dispos- sess, and deprive him, not only of the fruit of his labour, but also of his life, or liberty. And the invader again is in the like danger of another.
From diffidence war. And from this diffidence of one another, there is no way for any man to secure himself, so reasonable, as anticipation; that is, by force, or wiles, to master the persons of all men he can, so long, till he see no other power great enough to endanger him: and this is no more than his own conservation re- quireth, and is generally allowed. Also because there be some, that taking pleasure in contemplating their own power in the acts of conquest, which they pursue far- ther than their security requires; if others, that otherwise would be glad to be at ease within modest bounds, should not by invasion increase their power, they
6 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Hafner, 1926).
“If any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their end, which is principally their own conservation, and sometimes their delectation only, endeavour to destroy, or subdue one another.” —T H O M A S H O B B E S
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would not be able, long time, by standing only on their defence, to subsist. And by consequence, such augmentation of dominion over men being necessary to a man’s conservation, it ought to be allowed him.
Again, men have no pleasure, but on the contrary a great deal of grief, in keeping company, where there is no power able to over-awe them all. For every man looketh that his companion should value him, at the same rate he sets upon himself: and upon all signs of contempt, or undervaluing, naturally en- deavors, as far as he dares (which amongst them that have no common power to keep them in quiet, is far enough to make them destroy each other), to extort a greater value from his contemners, by damage; and from others, by the example.
So that in the nature of man, we find three prin- cipal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.
The first, maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation. The first use violence, to make themselves masters of other men’s persons, wives, children, and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile,
a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons, or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name.
Out of civil states, there is always war of every one against every one. Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man. For war, consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is suf- ficiently known.
. . .
The incommodities of such a war. Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
It may seem strange to some man, that has not well weighed these things; that nature should thus dissociate, and render men apt to invade, and destroy one an- other: and he may therefore, not trusting to this inference, made from the passions, desire perhaps to have the same confirmed by experience. Let him therefore con- sider with himself, when taking a journey, he arms himself, and seeks to go well
Without organized society, says Hobbes, human life would be a war of all against all. (© iStockphoto.com/alashi)
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accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his doors; when even in his house he locks his chests; and this when he knows there be laws, and public officers, armed to revenge all injuries shall be done him; what opinion he has of his fellow-sub- jects, when he rides armed; of his fellow citizens, when he locks his doors; and of his children, and servants, when he locks his chests. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words? But neither of us accuse men’s nature in it. The desires, and other passions of man, are in themselves no sin. No more are the actions, that proceed from those passions, till they know a law that forbids them: which till laws be made they cannot know: nor can any law be made, till they have agreed upon the person that shall make it.
It may peradventure be thought, there was never such a time, nor condition of war as this; and I believe it was never generally so, over all the world: but there are many places, where they live so now. For the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small families, the concord whereof dependeth on natural lust, have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before. Howsoever, it may be perceived what manner of life there would be, where there were no common power to fear, by the manner of life, which men that have formerly lived under a peaceful government, use to degener- ate into, in a civil war.
O F T H E F I R S T A N D S E C O N D N AT U R A L L AW S , A N D O F C O N T R AC T S Right of nature what. The right of nature, which writers commonly call jus naturale, is the liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life; and consequently, of doing any thing, which in his own judgment, and reason, he shall conceive to be the aptest means thereunto.
Liberty what. By liberty, is understood, according to the proper signification of the word, the absence of external impediments: which impediments, may oft take away part of a man’s power to do what he would; but cannot hinder him from using the power left him, according as his judgment, and reason shall dictate to him.
A law of nature what. A law of nature, lex naturalis, is a precept or general rule, found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that, which is destruc- tive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same; and to omit that, by which he thinketh it may be best preserved.
Difference of right and law. For though they that speak of this subject, use to confound jus, and lex, right and law: yet they ought to be distinguished; because right, consisteth in liberty to do, or to forbear: whereas law, determineth, and bin- deth to one of them: so that law, and right, differ as much, as obligation, and lib- erty; which in one and the same matter are inconsistent.
Naturally every man has right to every thing. And because the condition of man, as hath been declared in the precedent chapter, is a condition of war of every one against every one; in which case every one is governed by his own reason; and there is nothing he can make use of, that may not be of help unto him, in preserving his life against his enemies; it followeth, that in such a condition, every man has a right to every thing; even to one another’s body. And therefore, as long as this natural right of every man to every thing endureth, there can be no security to any man, how strong or wise soever he be, of living out the time, which nature ordinarily alloweth men to live.
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The fundamental law of nature. And consequently it is a precept, or general rule of reason, that every man, ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek, and use, all helps, and advantages of war.
. . .
The second law of nature. From this fundamental law of nature, by which men are commanded to endeavour peace, is derived this second law; that a man be willing, when others are so too, as far-forth, as for peace, and defence of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself. For as long as every man holdeth this right, of doing any thing he liketh; so long are all men in the condition of war. But if other men will not lay down their right, as well as he; then there is no reason for any one, to divest himself of his: for that were to expose himself to prey, which no man is bound to, rather than to dispose himself to peace. This is that law of the Gospel; whatsoever you require that others should do to you, that do ye to them.
. . .
What it is to lay down a right. To lay down man’s right to any thing, is to divest himself of the liberty, of hindering another of the benefit of his own right to the
same. For he that renounceth, or passeth away his right, giveth not to any other man a right which he had not before; because there is noth- ing to which every man had not right by nature: but only standeth out of his way, that he may enjoy his own original right, without hin- drance from him; not without hindrance from another. So that the effect which redoundeth to one man, by another man’s defect of right, is but so much diminution of impediments to the use of his own right original.
. . .
Not all rights are alienable. Whensoever a man transferreth his right, or renounceth it; it is either in consideration of some right recipro- cally transferred to himself; or for some other good he hopeth for thereby. For it is a volun- tary act: and of the voluntary acts of every man, the object is some good to himself. And therefore there be some rights, which no man can be un- derstood by any words, or other signs, to have abandoned, or transferred. As first a man cannot lay down the right of resisting them, that as- sault him by force, to take away his life; because he cannot be understood to aim thereby, at any good to himself. The same may be said of wounds, and chains, and imprisonment; both because there is no benefit consequent to such patience; as there is to the patience of suffering another to be wounded, or imprisoned: as also because a man cannot tell, when he seeth men
William Blake’s engraving of Behemoth and leviathan. (Tate, London / Art Resource, NY)
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proceed against him by violence, whether they intend his death or not. And lastly the motive, and end for which this renouncing, and transferring of right is intro- duced, is nothing else but the security of man’s person, in his life, and in the means of so preserving life, as not to be weary of it. And therefore if a man by words, or other signs, seem to despoil himself of the end, for which those signs were in- tended; he is not to be understood as if he meant it, or that it was his will; but that he was ignorant of how such words and actions were to be interpreted.
Contract what. The mutual transferring of right, as that which men call CONTRACT.
. . .
Covenants of mutual trust, when invalid. If a covenant be made, wherein neither of the parties perform presently, but trust one another; in the condition of mere nature, which is a condition of war of every man against every man, upon any reasonable suspicion, it is void: but if there be a common power set over them both, with right and force sufficient to compel performance, it is not void. For he that per- formeth first, has no assurance the other will perform after; because the bonds of words are too weak to bridle men’s ambition, avarice, anger, and other passions, with- out the fear of some coercive power; which in the condition of mere nature, where all men are equal, and judges of the justness of their own fears, cannot possibly be sup- posed. And therefore he which performeth first, does but betray himself to his enemy; contrary to the right, he can never abandon, of defending his life, and means of living.
But in a civil estate, where there is a power set up to constrain those that would otherwise violate their faith, that fear is no more reasonable; and for that cause, he which by the covenant is to perform first, is obliged so to do.
The cause of fear, which maketh such a covenant invalid, must be always some- thing arising after the covenant made; as some new fact, or other sign of the will not to perform: else it cannot make the covenant void. For that which could not hinder a man from promising, ought not to be admitted as a hindrance of performing.
Right to the end, containeth right to the means. He that transferreth any right, transferreth the means of enjoying it, as far as lieth in his power. As he that selleth land, is understood to transfer the herbage, and whatsoever grows upon it: nor can he that sells a mill turn away the stream that drives it. And they that give to a man the right of government in sovereignty, are understood to give him the right of levying money to maintain soldiers; and of appointing magistrates for the administration of justice.
Hobbes begins his argument with the perhaps surprising observation that people are basically equal in nature. He is not talking here about legal equality or equal rights (for there are no laws and no legal rights), but rather equality in abilities, talents, and power. This ob- servation seems strange because in considering the issue of equality, we usually pay atten- tion to the great differences between people. Instead Hobbes points out our similarities. In particular, he points out that almost everyone is strong and smart enough to kill or inflict grievous injury on others. Even a puny, intellectually challenged individual can, with a knife or a handgun, kill the strongest and smartest person on earth. Accordingly, the basis of the social contract (or “covenant”), according to Hobbes, is our mutual protection. Everyone agrees not to kill other people and in return is guaranteed that he or she will not be killed. Although Hobbes has a cynical view of human nature, his analysis continues to be one of the
“If a covenant be made, wherein neither of the parties perform presently, but trust one another; in the condition of mere nature, which is a condition of war of every man against every man, upon any reasonable suspicion, it is void: but if there be a common power set over them both, with right and force sufficient to compel performance, it is not void.” —T H O M A S H O B B E S
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most powerful arguments for strong governments. (Hobbes himself was a conservative monarchist.)
Rousseau, quite to the contrary, had an extremely optimistic view of human nature, as we showed in the preceding chapter. He believed that people are “naturally good,” and it is only the corruptions of society that makes them selfish and destructive. Rousseau does not take the social contract, therefore, to be simply a doctrine of protection between mutually brutish individuals. The function of the political state is rather to allow people to develop the “natural goodness” that they had in the absence of any state at all. This is not to say (although he is often interpreted this way) that Rousseau was nostalgic and wanted to “go back to the state of nature.” (It is not even clear that Rousseau believed that there ever was a “state of nature” as such. His example, like Hobbes’s, is a way of conveying a picture of “human nature,” whether or not it is historically accurate.) We are already in society; that is a given fact. Rousseau’s aim is to develop a conception of the state that will allow us to live as morally as possible. This is important, for Rousseau, unlike most social contract theorists, is not a utilitar- ian. It is not happiness that is most important, but goodness. (Hobbes, by way of contrast,
took utility, pleasure and well-being, in addition to self- preservation, to be the purpose of the social contract.)
Rousseau’s ambition, therefore, is not to “get us back to nature” but rather to revise our conception of the state. His blueprint for this “revision,” however, is one of the most radical documents in modern history and has rightly been cited as one of the causes of both the American and French revolutions. Rousseau’s main thesis is inherited from locke: The state has legitimate power only as long as it serves the people it governs. The revolutionary corollary is that when a state ceases to serve its citizens, the citizens have a right to overthrow that government. This was a radi- cal claim. Even Rousseau was not comfortable with it. (locke had made his statement to this effect after the Eng- lish Revolution.) Rousseau called revolution “the most hor- rible alternative,” to be avoided wherever possible. But subsequent French history took his theories quite literally. It also demonstrated the “horror” that may follow too radi- cal and abrupt a change in the authority that citizens accept as legitimate.
In earlier works, Rousseau argued his famous thesis that “natural man” is “naturally good” and that contemporary society has corrupted him (and her). He went on to say that competition and the artificiality of our lust for private prop- erty are responsible for this corruption. He even included marriage and romantic love as forms of this “lust for private property.” In the state of nature, he suggested, people mated when they felt like it, with whomever they felt like, and duels fought between rivals were unheard of. Rousseau does not suggest that we return to prehistoric customs, but he does use his account of them as a wedge to pry open even the most sacred of our modern civil institutions. All these institutions, he argues, must be reexamined, and the tool for that reexamination is the social contract.
The title page from Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan depicted the sovereign as ruling over all. (© British Library Board/Robana/Art Resource, NY)
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The key, as Rousseau argues in his most famous book, appropriately called The Social Contract, is that man must regain his freedom within society. This does not mean, however, that a person can do whatever he or she would like to do. Quite the contrary—to be a citi- zen, according to Rousseau, is to want and do what is good for the society as well. Being free, in fact, means wanting to do what is good for society. In one of the most problematic statements of the social contract, Rousseau says that a person who does not act for the good of the society may have to “be forced to be free.” Here we see a strange paradox. On the one hand, Rousseau has properly been regarded as the father of the most liberal and revolutionary political theories of our time. (Marx, for example, claims a great debt to Rousseau.) Rousseau’s political philosophy stresses individual freedom and rights above all, even above the state itself. But another side to Rousseau emerges in his paradoxical phrase about forcing freedom. His stress on the subservience of the individual to the state, which is an entity in itself (“the sovereign,” presumably the king, but essentially any government), has also caused him to be labeled as an authoritarian and the forerunner of totalitarian and fascist governments.
This paradox is not easily resolved, but we can at least explain how it comes about. Rousseau believes that the state is subject to and receives its legitimacy from the people it governs. But this does not mean that the individual person necessarily has any real power in determining the form or functions of government. Rousseau is not a democrat. What he says instead is that the state is subject to what he calls the general will, and this is not simply a collection of individuals but something more. We talk about “the spirit of the revolution” or “the discontent of the working class,” but these are not simply the sum of every individual person’s spirit or discontent. The revolution may have spirit even though some participants do not; indeed, some may even dislike the whole idea.
Here is the source of the paradox: legitimacy is given to the state by the general will, not by every individual person. The person who does not agree with the general will, therefore, may very well find himself or herself coerced into compliance with the state (“forced to be free”). How much force should be used, however, is a matter about which Rousseau is not very clear; nor have his many followers agreed on that crucial point. On one extreme, Rousseau’s authoritarian followers have insisted that all dissent from the general will must be stifled. On the other extreme, Rousseau’s most libertarian and anarchist followers have insisted that the individual’s rights to be free from government intervention and to live according to his or her own “natural goodness” outweigh any claims that the state may have. What follows are a few selections from The Social Contract, beginning with one of Rousseau’s best-known slogans.
F RO M The Social Contract B Y Jean-Jacques Rousseau7
Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I can answer.
If I took into account only force, and the effects derived from it, I should say: “As long as a people is compelled to obey, and obeys, it does well; as soon as it can shake off the yoke, and shakes it off, it does still better; for, regaining its liberty by the same right as took it away, either it is justified in resuming it, or there was no justification for those who took it away.” But the social order is a sacred right which
7 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole, J. M. Dent, ltd., 1947. Reprinted by permission of Everyman’s library, an imprint of Alfred A. Knopf.
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is the basis of all other rights. Nevertheless, this right does not come from nature, and must therefore be founded on conventions. Before coming to that, I have to prove what I have just asserted.
T H E F I R S T S O C I E T I E S The most ancient of all societies, and the only one that is natural, is the family: and even so the children remain attached to the father only so long as they need him for their preservation. As soon as this need ceases, the natural bond is dissolved. The children, released from the obedience they owed to the father, and the father, released from the care he owed his children, return equally to independence. If they remain united, they continue so no longer naturally, but voluntarily; and the family itself is then maintained only by convention.
This common liberty results from the nature of man. His first law is to provide for his own preservation, his first cares are those which he owes to himself; and, as soon as he reaches years of discretion, he is the sole judge of the proper means of preserving himself, and conse- quently becomes his own master.
The family then may be called the first model of political societies; the ruler corresponds to the father, and the people to the children; and all, being born free and equal, alienate their liberty only for their own advantage. The whole difference is that, in the family, the love of the father for his children repays him for the care he takes of them, while,
in the State, the pleasure of commanding takes the place of the love which the chief cannot have for the peoples under him.
. . .
T H E S O C I A L C O N T R AC T I suppose men to have reached the point at which the obstacles in the way of their preservation in the state of nature show their power of resistance to be greater than the resources at the disposal of each individual for his maintenance in that state. That primitive condition can then subsist no longer; and the human race would perish unless it changed its manner of existence.
But, as men cannot engender new forces, but only unite and direct existing ones, they have no other means of preserving themselves than the formation, by aggrega- tion, of a sum of forces great enough to overcome the resistance. These they have to bring into play by means of a single motive power, and cause to act in concert.
This sum of forces can arise only where several persons come together: but, as the force and liberty of each man are the chief instruments of his self-preservation, how can he pledge them without harming his own interests, and neglecting the care he owes to himself ? This difficulty, in its bearing on my present subject, may be stated in the following terms:
“The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.” This is the fundamental problem of which the Social Contract pro- vides the solution.
The clauses of this contract are so determined by the nature of the act that the slightest modification would make them vain and ineffective; so that, although they
(© iStockphoto.com/Royce DeGrie)
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have perhaps never been formally set forth, they are everywhere the same and everywhere tacitly admit- ted and recognized, until, on the violation of the social compact, each regains his original rights and resumes his natural liberty, while losing the conven- tional liberty in favour of which he renounced it.
These clauses, properly understood, may be reduced to one—the total alienation of each as- sociate, together with all his rights, to the whole community; for, in the first place, as each gives himself absolutely, the conditions are the same for all; and, this being so, no one has any interest in making them burdensome to others.
Moreover, the alienation being without re- serve, the union is as perfect as it can be, and no associate has anything more to demand: for, if the individuals retained certain rights, as there would be no common superior to decide between them and the public, each, being on one point his own judge, would ask to be so on all; the state of nature would thus continue, and the association would necessarily become inoperative or tyrannical.
Finally, each man, in giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody; and as there is no associate over which he does not acquire the same right as he yields others over himself, he gains an equivalent for everything he loses, and an increase of force for the preservation of what he has.
If then we discard from the social contract what is not of its essence, we shall find that it reduces itself to the following terms:
“Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.”
At once, in place of the individual personality of each contracting party, this act of association creates a moral and collective body, composed of as many members as the assembly contains voters, and receiving from this act its unity, its common identity, its life, and its will. This public person, so formed by the union of all other persons, formerly took the name of city, and now takes that of Republic or body poli- tic; it is called by its members State when passive, Sovereign when active, and Power when compared with others like itself. Those who are associated in it take collec- tively the name of people, and severally are called citizens, as sharing in the sovereign power, and subjects, as being under the laws of the State. But these terms are often confused and take one for another: it is enough to know how to distinguish them when they are being used with precision.
T H E S OV E R E I G N This formula shows us that the act of association comprises a mutual understanding between the public and the individuals, and that each individual, in making a con- tract, as we may say, with himself, is bound in a double capacity; as a member of the Sovereign he is bound to the individuals, and as a member of the State to the Sovereign. But the maxim of civil right, that no one is bound by undertakings
The first social contract in Great Britain was the Magna Carta, which extended rights to citizens and set limits on the rights of the king. (© iStockphoto.com/Roel Smart)
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made to himself, does not apply in this case; for there is a great difference between incurring an obligation to yourself and incurring one to a whole of which you form a part.
Attention must further be called to the fact that public deliberation, while com- petent to bind all the subjects to the Sovereign, because of the two different capaci- ties in which each of them may be regarded, cannot, for the opposite reason, bind that Sovereign to itself; and that it is consequently against the nature of the body politic for the Sovereign to impose on itself a law which it cannot infringe. Being able to regard itself in only one capacity, it is in the position of an individual who makes a contract with himself; and this makes it clear that there neither is nor can be any kind of fundamental law binding on the body of the people—not even the social contract itself. This does not mean that the body politic cannot enter into undertakings with others, provided the contract is not infringed by them; for in relation to what is external to it, it becomes a simple being, an individual.
But the body politic or the Sovereign, drawing its being wholly from the sanc- tity of the contract, can never bind itself, even to an outsider, to do anything de- rogatory to the original act, for instance, to alienate any part of itself, or to submit to another Sovereign. Violation of the act by which it exists would be self-annihi- lation; and that which is itself nothing can create nothing.
As soon as this multitude is so united in one body, it is impossible to offend against one of the members without attacking the body, and still more to offend
against the body without the members resenting it. Duty and inter- est therefore equally oblige the two contracting parties to give each other help; and the same men should seek to combine, in their double capacity, all the advantages dependent upon that capacity.
Again, the Sovereign, being formed wholly of the individuals who compose it, neither has nor can have any interest contrary to theirs; and consequently the sovereign power need give no guaran- tee to its subjects, because it is impossible for the body to wish to hurt all its members.
. . .
In fact, each individual, as a man, may have a particular will contrary or dissimilar to the general will which he has as a citizen. His particular interest may speak to him quite differently from the common interest: his absolute and naturally independent existence may make him look upon what he owes to the common cause as a gratuitous contribution, the loss of which will do less harm to others than the payment of it is burdensome to himself; and, regarding the moral person which constitutes the State as a persona ficta, because not a man, he may wish to enjoy the rights of citizenship without being ready to fulfil the duties of a subject. The continuance of such an injustice could not but prove the undoing of the body politic.
In order then that the social compact may not be an empty for- mula, it tacitly includes the undertaking, which alone can give force to the rest, that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free; for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to his country, secures him against all personal
The signing of the Magna Carta (© iStockphoto .com/duncan1890)
“[E]ach individual, in making a contract, as we may say, with himself, is bound in a double capacity; as a member of the Sovereign he is bound to the individuals, and as a member of the State to the Sovereign.” — J E A N - J A C Q U E S R O U S S E A U
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dependence. In this lies the key to the work- ing of the political machine; this alone le- gitimizes civil undertakings, which, without it, would be absurd, tyrannical, and liable to the most frightful abuses.
T H E C I V I L S TAT E The passage from the state of nature to the civil state produces a very remarkable change in man, by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and giving his ac- tions the morality they had formerly lacked. Then only, when the voice of duty takes the place of physical impulses and right of appetite, does man, who so far had consid- ered only himself, find that he is forced to act on different principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclina- tions. Although, in this state, he deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted, that, did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left, he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it for ever, and, instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal, made him an intelligent being and a man.
Let us draw up the whole account in terms easily commensurable. What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to every- thing he tries to get and succeeds in getting; what he gains is civil liberty and the proprietorship of all he possesses. If we are to avoid mistake in weighing one against the other, we must clearly distinguish natural liberty, which is bounded only by the strength of the individual, from civil liberty, which is limited by the general will; and possession, which is merely the effect of force or the right of the first occupier, from property, which can be founded only on a positive title.
We might, over and above all this, add, to what man acquires in the civil state, moral liberty, which alone makes him truly master of himself; for the mere im- pulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law which we prescribe to our- selves is liberty.
Although Rousseau shares with Hobbes a belief in the social contract theory, the differ- ences between them could not be more striking. Where Hobbes begins with a brutal view of human nature forced into agreement by fear of mutual violence, Rousseau begins by saying that “man is born free.” For Rousseau, the social contract is not an instrument of mutual protection but a means of improving people and bringing out what is best in them. His cen- tral theme is not our mutual antagonism, but humanity’s “natural goodness.” With unmistak- able clarity, Rousseau rejects all might-makes-right theories and insists that legitimacy must
Rousseau’s ideas and other social contract theories inspired the French Revolution and the overturning of monarchies throughout Europe. (© iStockphoto.com/HultonArchive)
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always be a matter of the consent of the governed. “The general will” is not a general com- promise but the creation of a new power, the power of the people, which for Rousseau is the ultimate voice of authority.
The most famous example of social contract theory at work is our own Declaration of In- dependence. In that document, social contract theory combined with a theory of “natural” (“unalienable”) rights to provide an epoch-making announcement of the right of a people to overthrow an established government:
F RO M The Declaration of Independence B Y Thomas Jefferson et al.
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these rights, Gov- ernments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will indicate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.
• What is a social contract? Does it matter whether there is an actual meeting or agreement? To what extent is our own society or government based on a social contract?
• What is meant by the “state of nature”? Given that the state of nature does not de- scribe an actual historical state of affairs, what purpose does referring to the state of nature serve?
• What does Hobbes mean when he claims that equality is a “natural fact”? How are we naturally equal?
• How does Hobbes describe human nature? How does his view differ from Plato’s, Aristotle’s, and Rousseau’s views of human nature?
• Does the social contract function differently in Hobbes’s view as compared with Rousseau’s?
• What does it mean to be free, according to Rousseau? What is the difference be- tween natural liberty and civil liberty? What kind of freedom does civil liberty involve?
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E. Fairness and Entitlement Because of increased sensitivity to the unacceptability of scenarios in which the good of indi- viduals is sacrificed to the general will, a very different conception of justice has once again begun to dominate. This conception is articulated in a set of views that recognizes the desir- ability of serving every individual’s interests and interprets the primary concern for justice not in terms of utility, but in terms of rights. On this account, public interest is important, but re- spect for every individual’s rights is even more important. This view dates back (at least) to Kant, who defended the notions of “duty” and “obligation” as morally basic to any concern for utility. In its modern conception, its most able defense has been Harvard philosopher John Rawls’s profound work entitled A Theory of Justice. For nearly six hundred pages, Rawls essentially defends two principles in order of priority. The first (and more fundamental) prin- ciple asserts that we all have basic and equal rights, in particular with reference to our per- sonal freedom. The second principle (which assumes the first) asserts that although we cannot expect everyone in society to enjoy equal wealth, equal health, and equal opportunities, we can and should insist that the way in which inequalities are arranged is to every individual’s advantage. For example, it should not be such that society allows that “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” Rawls’s actual statement from Theory of Justice is as follows:
First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.
Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to posi- tions and offices open to all.8
Rawls’s justification for establishing the rationality and necessity of these “liberal” principles derives from his view that we should consider what we would deem fair if all of us (or our ances- tors) were in “the original position”—prior to organized society, like Hobbes’s “state of nature,” but without any knowledge of our particular traits or interests. In such a situation, what would be rational for us to choose by way of the principles according to which society would be run? Be- cause we do not know, in the essential sense, who we will be in that society, it does us no good to adopt principles that benefit the persons we are now. For example, in a society composed entirely of purple people and green people (remembering that in the original position we do not know which we will be), it would only be rational, Rawls argues, to enact a law that would treat all people equally, whether purple or green. It is much like (but much more complicated and uncer- tain than) the childhood example involving one of us being asked to cut a pie into sections, giving everyone else first choice. The only rational decision—even if you suspect that the other children are dullards—is to divide the pie equally. similarly, the aim of Rawls’s dual principles is to cut for all of us—if not equal pieces of the social pie, at least pieces that are as equal as possible.
The following selection from one of Rawls’s early essays elaborates on his principles of justice:
F RO M “Justice as Fairness” B Y John Rawls9
Throughout I consider justice only as a virtue of social institutions, or what I shall
John Rawls (1921–2002)
The author of A Theory of Justice (1971) and for many years a profes- sor of philosophy at Harvard University, John Rawls was one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century in politics and ethics.
8 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard university Press, 1971), p. 60. 9 John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness,” in The Philosophical Review 67 (April 1958). Copyright © 1958 by Cornell university. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
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call practices.10 The principles of justice are regarded as formulating restrictions as to how practices may define positions and offices, and assign thereto powers and liabilities, rights and duties. Justice as a virtue of particular actions or of persons I do not take up at all. It is important to distinguish these various subjects of justice, since the meaning of the concept varies according to whether it is applied to prac- tices, particular actions, or persons. These meanings are, indeed, connected, but they are not identical. I shall confine my discussion to the sense of justice as applied to practices, since this sense is the basic one. Once it is understood, the other senses should go quite easily.
The conception of justice which I want to develop may be stated in the form of two principles as follows: first, each person participating in a practice, or affected by it, has an equal right to the most extensive liberty compatible with a like liberty for all; and second, inequalities are arbitrary unless it is reasonable to expect that they will work out for everyone’s advantage, and provided the positions and offices to which they attach, or from which they may be gained, are open to all. These principles express justice as a complex of three ideas: liberty, equality, and reward for services contributing to the common good.
The term “person” is to be construed variously depending on the circumstances. On some occasions it will mean human individuals, but in others it may refer to nations, provinces, business firms, churches, teams, and so on. The principles of justice apply in all these instances, although there is a certain logical priority to the case of human individuals. As I shall use the term “person,” it will be ambiguous in the manner indicated.
The first principle holds, of course, only if other things are equal: that is, while there must always be a justification for departing from the initial position of equal liberty (which is defined by the pattern of rights and duties, powers and liabilities,
established by a practice), and the burden of proof is placed on him who would depart from it, nevertheless, there can be, and often there is, a justification for doing so. Now, that simi- lar particular cases, as defined by a practice, should be treated similarly as they arise, is part of the very concept of a practice; it is involved in the notion of an activity in accordance with rules. The first principle expresses an analo- gous conception, but as applied to the struc- ture of practices themselves. It holds, for example, that there is a presumption against the distinctions and classifications made by legal systems and other practices to the extent that they infringe on the original and equal liberty of the persons participating in them. The second principle defines how this pre- sumption may be rebutted.
“Inequalities are arbitrary unless it is reasonable to expect that they will work out for everyone’s advantage.” — J O H N R AW L S
What social arrangements, asks Rawls, would be acceptable to all parties concerned? (© Shutterstock.com/Nolte Lourens)
10 We use the word practice throughout as a sort of technical term meaning any form of activity specified by a system of rules which defines offices, roles, moves, penalties, defences, and so on, and which gives the activity its structure. As examples one may think of games and rituals, trials and parliaments, markets and systems or property. A partial analysis of the notion of a practice appears in R. C. solomon’s, “Two Concepts of Rules,” Philosophical Review 64 (1955), pp. 3–32 [Rawls’s note].
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It might be argued at this point that justice requires only an equal liberty. If, however, a greater liberty were possible for all without loss or conflict, then it would be irrational to settle on a lesser liberty. There is no reason for circumscribing rights unless their exercise would be incompatible, or would render the practice defining them less effective. Therefore no serious distortion of the concept of justice is likely to follow from including within it the concept of the greatest equal liberty.
The second principle defines what sorts of inequalities are permissible; it speci- fies how the presumption laid down by the first principle may be put aside. Now by inequalities it is best to understand not any differences between offices and posi- tions, but differences in the benefits and burdens attached to them either directly or indirectly, such as prestige and wealth, or liability to taxation and compulsory services. Players in a game do not protest against there being different positions, such as batter, pitcher, catcher, and the like, nor to there being various privileges and powers as specified by the rules; nor do the citizens of a country object to there being the different offices of government such as president, senator, governor, judge, and so on, each with their special rights and duties. It is not differences in the resulting distribution established by a practice, or made possible by it, of the things men strive to attain or avoid. Thus they may complain about the pattern of honors and rewards set up by a practice (e.g., the privileges and salaries of govern- ment officials) or they may object to the distribution of power and wealth which results from the various ways in which men avail themselves of the opportunities allowed by it (e.g., the concentration of wealth which may develop in a free price system allowing large entrepreneurial or speculative gains).
It should be noted that the second principle holds that an inequality is allowed only if there is reason to believe that the practice with the inequality, or resulting from it, will work for the advantage of every party engaging in it. Here it is important to stress that every party must gain from the inequality. Since the principle applies to practices, it implies that the representative man in every office or position defined by a practice, when he views it as a going concern, must find it reasonable to prefer his condition and prospects with the inequality to what they would be under the practice without it. The principle excludes, therefore, the justification of inequalities on the grounds that the disadvantages of those in one position are outweighed by the greater advantages of those in another position. This rather simple restriction is the main modification I wish to make in the utilitarian principle as usually understood.
Rawls, like Hume in particular, ties the concept of “justice” to the concept of “equality.” The main theme of his work is an attempt to develop this connection and to state precisely the kind of “equality” that is most important for justice. Against the conservative suggestion that people should be considered equal in legal rights and “opportunities” alone, without any right to material goods and social services, Rawls argues that a just society will consider the welfare of the worst-off members of society as an obligation. Here he differs with Mill and the utilitarians, who would say that providing such help must be justified as a matter of utility; for Rawls, it is more like a Kantian duty. Moreover, Rawls clearly distinguishes himself from socialists as well, who would argue that all property should be shared. He says only that it is obligatory to help out the worst-off members of society. Nowhere does he suggest that all people ought therefore to have equal wealth and property. Justice, for Rawls, does not equate fair distribution with equal distribution. Equality becomes a far more complex notion than simple egalitarianism often takes it to be.
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Is equality the primary concern of justice? Even Rawls admits that a society in which ev- eryone had exactly equal shares of social goods is impossible. But why is it impossible? We can all imagine a situation—and some radical thinkers even propose it—in which all material goods (at least) would be collected and cataloged by the state, then redistributed to every citizen in precisely equal shares. Most of us, including Rawls, find this suggestion intolerable. Yet why, if it realizes the equality that justice demands? something stops us, and it is not simply the idea that we might lose our own goods, for many of us would in fact benefit from such a redistribution scheme.
What bothers us initially is the very idea of anyone, including (perhaps especially) the gov- ernment, intruding into our lives and exerting such power. However, we also sense that such a scheme for redistributing the wealth violates something that is very basic to justice—namely, the rights we have to our possessions. Rawls, of course, gives rights top priority in his theory, but the rights he is concerned with have to do with liberty in general, not with having posses- sions as such. We all feel, with whatever reservations, that we have a right to what we earn and that we have a right to keep what we already possess. Many of us resent that the government takes from us a substantial percentage of our earnings to use in ways that are not directly (or perhaps even indirectly) under our control. And we believe we have the right, for instance, to the modest sum that grandfather left us in his will (presumably the residue of earlier taxation), even though we did not earn it in any sense. In response to such considerations, many phi- losophers have become increasingly aware of another kind of right that is not treated ade- quately by such liberal theories of Rawls’s—in fact, a right that goes against the modest scheme of redistribution (for example, through taxation) encouraged by his principles. This other kind of right, known as entitlement, gives rise to a very different theory of justice.
The popular name for this alternative theory is libertarianism, and it has recently become a powerful force in American politics. libertarianism is an “entitlement theory” that puts the right to private property first and foremost and couples this idea with a deep skepticism as to the wisdom or fairness of government. The original entitlement theory was developed by John locke. locke argued that the right to private property was so basic that it preceded any social conventions or laws, and existed quite independent of any government or state. What gave a person the right to a piece of property, locke argued, was that he had “mixed his labor with it,” in other words, the person worked with it and improved it and so had the right to it. By “property,” locke was thinking mainly of land. In today’s society—where what is at stake consists mainly of salaries and what we can buy with them—we would say that a person has the basic right to keep what he or she earns. In the 1970s, locke’s theory was updated considerably and argued forcefully by John Rawls’s younger Harvard colleague, Robert Nozick. In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Nozick argues for the entitlement theory and against any attempt to set “patterns” of fair distribution. The enforcement of any such pat- tern, he contends, must result in the violation of people’s rights.
F RO M Anarchy, State, and Utopia B Y Robert Nozick11
Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights). So strong and far-reaching are these rights that they raise the question of what, if anything, the state and its officials may do. How much room do individual rights leave for the state? . . . Our main conclusions about the
“A minimal state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified.” — R O B E R T N OZ I C K
11 From Anarchy, State, and Utopia by Robert Nozick. Copyright © 1974 by Basic Books, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a member of Perseus Books, l.l.C.
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state are that a minimal state, limited to the narrow functions of protection against force, theft, fraud, enforcement of contracts, and so on, is justified; that any more exten- sive state will violate persons’ rights to not be forced to do certain things, and is unjus- tified; and that the minimal state is inspiring as well as right. Two noteworthy implications are that the state may not use its coercive apparatus for the purpose of getting some citizens to aid others, or in order to prohibit activities to people for their own good or protection.
. . .
T H E E N T I T L E M E N T T H E O RY The subject of justice in holdings consists of three major topics. The first is the origi- nal acquisition of holdings, the appropriation of unheld things. This includes the issues of how unheld things may come to be held, the process, or processes, by which unheld things may come to be held, the things that may come to be held by these processes, the extent of what comes to be held by a particular process, and so on. We shall refer to the complicated truth about this topic, which we shall not formu- late here, as the principle of justice in acquisition. The second topic concerns the transfer of holdings from one person to another. By what processes may a person transfer holdings to another? How may a person acquire a holding from another who holds it? Under this topic come general descriptions of voluntary exchange, and gift and (on the other hand) fraud, as well as reference to particular conven- tional details fixed upon in a given society. The complicated truth about this sub- ject (with placeholders for conventional details) we shall call the principle of justice in transfer. (And we shall suppose it also includes principles governing how a person may divest himself of a holding, passing it into an unheld state.)
If the world were wholly just, the following inductive definition would exhaus- tively cover the subject of justice in holdings.
1. A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in acquisition is entitled to that holding.
2. A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in transfer, from someone else entitled to the holding, is entitled to the holding.
3. No one is entitled to a holding except by (repeated) applications of 1 and 2.
The complete principle of distributive justice would say simply that a distribution is just if everyone is entitled to the holdings they possess under the distribution.
A distribution is just if it arises from another just distribution by legitimate means. The legitimate means of moving from one distribution to another are spec- ified by the principle of justice in transfer. The legitimate first “moves” are speci- fied by the principle of justice in acquisition. Whatever arises from a just situation by just steps is itself just.
. . .
Not all actual situations are generated in accordance with the two principles of justice in holdings: the principle of justice in acquisition and the principle of justice in transfer. Some people steal from others, or defraud them, or enslave them,
Robert Nozick (1938–2002)
An American philosopher who taught at Harvard University and was the author of an influential book on political philosophy, Anar- chy, State, and Utopia, and of Philosophical Explanations.
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seizing their product and preventing them from living as they choose, or forcibly exclude others from competing in exchanges. None of these are permissible modes of transition from one situation to another. And some persons acquire holdings by means not sanctioned by the prin- ciple of justice in acquisition. The existence of past injustice (previous violations of the first two principles of justice in holdings) raises the third major topic under justice in holdings: the rectification of injustice in holdings. If past in- justice has shaped present holdings in various ways, some identifiable and some not, what now, if anything, ought to be done to rectify these injustices? What obligations do the per- formers of injustice have toward those whose position is worse than it would have been had the injustice not been done? Or, than it would have had compensation been paid promptly? How, if at all, do things change if the beneficia- ries and those made worse off are not the direct parties in the act of injustice, but, for example, their descendants? Is an injustice done to some- one whose holding was itself based upon an un- rectified injustice? How far back must one go in wiping clean the historical slate of injustices? What may victims of injustice permissibly do in order to rectify the injustices being done to them, including the many injustices done by persons acting through their government? I do not know of a thorough or theoretically sophis- ticated treatment of such issues. Idealizing greatly, let us suppose theoretical investigations will produce a principle of rectification. This principle uses historical information about pre-
vious situations and injustices done in them (as defined by the first two principles of justice and rights against interference), and information about the actual course of events that flowed from these injustices, until the present, and it yields a descrip- tion (or descriptions) of holdings in the society.
. . .
H I S T O R I C A L P R I N C I P L E S A N D E N D - R E S U LT P R I N C I P L E S The general outlines of the entitlement theory illuminate the nature and defects of other conceptions of distributive justice. The entitlement theory of justice in dis- tribution is historical; whether a distribution is just depends upon how it came about. In contrast, current time-slice principles of justice hold that the justice of a distribution is determined by how things are distributed (who has what) as judged by some structural principle(s) of just distribution. A utilitarian who judges between any two distributions by seeing which has the greater sum of utility and, if the sums tie,
An illustration of Thomas More’s island of “utopia” (bpk, Berlin/ Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen/Dietmar Katz/Art Resource, NY)
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applies some fixed equality criterion to choose the more equal distribution, would hold a current time-slice principle of justice. As would someone who had a fixed schedule of trade-offs between the sum of happiness and equality. According to a current time-slice principle, all that needs to be looked at, in judging the justice of a distribution, is who ends up with what; in comparing any two distributions one need look only at the matrix presenting the distributions. No further information need be fed into a principle of justice. It is a consequence of such principles of justice that any two structurally identical distributions are equally just. (Two dis- tributions are structurally identical if they present the same profile, but perhaps have different persons occupying the particular slots. My having ten and your having five, and my having five and your having ten are structurally identical dis- tributions.) Welfare economics is the theory of current time-slice principles of justice. The subject is conceived as operating on matrices representing only current information about distribution. This, as well as some of the usual conditions (for example, the choice of distribution is invariant under relabeling of columns), guar- antees that welfare economics will be a current time-slice theory, with all of its inadequacies.
Most persons do not accept current time-slice principles as constituting the whole story about distributive shares. They think it relevant in assessing the jus- tice of a situation to consider not only the distribution it embodies, but also how that distribution came about. If some persons are in prison for murder or war crimes, we do not say that to assess the justice of the distribution in the society we must look only at what this person has, and that person has, and that person has, . . . at the current time. We think it relevant to ask whether someone did something so that he deserved to be punished, deserved to have a lower share. Most will agree to the relevance of further information with regard to punish- ments and penalties. Consider also desired things. One traditional socialist view is that workers are entitled to the product and full fruits of their labor; they have earned it; a distribution is unjust if it does not give the workers what they are entitled to. Such entitlements are based upon some past history. No socialist holding this view would find it comforting to be told that because the actual distribution A happens to coincide structurally with the one he desires D, there- fore is no less just than D; . . . This socialist rightly, in my view, holds onto the notions of earning, producing, entitlement, desert, and so forth, and he rejects current time-slice principles that look only to the structure of the resulting set of holdings. . . . His mistake lies in his view of what entitlements arise out of what sorts of productive processes.
• What does Rawls mean by “justice as fairness”? When are inequalities tolerable?
• Do you think that envisioning what people in “the original position” would find ac- ceptable if they were designing the ground rules of society is an effective means for determining what is fair? Why or why not?
• How does the entitlement theory differ from Rawls’s conception of justice as fair- ness? Which view is more similar to Aristotle’s conception of justice?
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F. Justice or Care: A Feminist Perspective The debate about justice has gone on for almost 2,500 years. But it may be noted that most of the voices in the debate have been male voices. This fact raises the question of whether there is some male bias to the perspective in which justice has been debated or, indeed, some male bias in the very notion of justice itself. Cheshire Calhoun has argued that this is the case. Here is an excerpt from her argument.
F RO M “Justice, Care, Gender Bias” B Y Cheshire Calhoun12
Carol Gilligan poses two separable, though in her work not separate, challenges to moral theory. The first is a challenge to the adequacy of current moral theory that is dominated by the ethics of justice. The ethics of justice, on her view, excludes some dimensions of moral experience, such as contextual decision making, special obligations, the moral motives of compassion and sympathy, and the relevance of considering one’s own integrity in making moral decisions. The second is a chal- lenge to moral theory’s presumed gender neutrality. The ethics of justice is not gender neutral, she argues, because it advocates ideals of agency, moral motivation, and correct moral reasoning which women are less likely than men to achieve; and because the moral dimensions excluded from the ethics of justice are just the ones figuring more prominently in women’s than men’s moral experience.
The adequacy and gender bias charges are, for Gilligan, linked. She claims that the ethics of justice and the ethics of care are two different moral orientations. Whereas individuals may use both orientations, the shift from one to the other requires a Gestalt shift, since “the terms of one perspective do not contain the terms of the other.” The exclusion of the care perspective from the ethics of justice simultaneously undermines the adequacy of the ethics of justice (it cannot give a
complete account of moral life) and renders it gender-biased.
Some critics have responded by arguing that there is no logical incompatibility between the two moral orientations. Because the ethics of justice does not in principle exclude the ethics of care (even if theorists within the justice tra- dition have had little to say about care issues), it is neither inadequate nor gender-biased. Cor- rectly applying moral rules and principles, for instance, requires, rather than excludes, knowl- edge of contextual details. Both orientations are crucial to correct moral reasoning and an adequate understanding of moral life. Thus, the ethics of justice and the ethics of care are not in fact rivaling, alternative moral theories. The so-called ethics of care merely makes focal issues that are already implicitly contained in the ethics of justice.
“The exclusion of the care perspective from the ethics of justice simultaneously undermines the adequacy of the ethics of justice . . . and renders it gender-biased.” — C H E S H I R E C A L H O U N
12 Cheshire Calhoun, “Justice, Care, Gender Bias,” in Journal of Philosophy 85 (1988). Reprinted by permission.
Cheshire Calhoun (1954–)
A professor of philosophy at Ari- zona State University, Tempe.
Feminist philosopher Cheshire Calhoun (Used with permission of Cheshire Calhoun)
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Suppose the two are logically compatible. Would the charge of gender bias evap- orate? Yes, so long as gender neutrality only requires that the ethics of justice could, consistently, make room for the central moral concerns of the ethics of care. But perhaps gender neutrality requires more than this. Since the spectre of gender bias in theoretical knowledge is itself a moral issue, we would be well advised to consider the question of gender bias more carefully before concluding that our moral theory speaks in an androgynous voice. Although we can and should test the ethics of jus- tice by asking whether it could consistently include the central moral issues in the ethics of care, we might also ask what ideologies of the moral life are likely to result from the repeated inclusion or exclusion of particular topics in moral theorizing.
Theorizing that crystallizes into a tradition has nonlogical as well as logical im- plications. In order to explain why a tradition has the contours it does, one may need to suppose general acceptance of particular beliefs that are not logically en- tailed by any particular theory and might be denied by individual theorists were those beliefs articulated. When behavioral researchers, for example, focus almost exclusively on aggression and its role in human life, neglecting other behavioral motives, their doing so has the nonlogical implication that aggression is, indeed, the most important behavioral motive. This is because only a belief like this would explain the rationality of this pattern of research. Such nonlogical implications become ideologies when politically loaded (as the importance of aggression is when coupled with observations about women’s lower level of aggression).
When understood as directed at moral theory’s nonlogical implications, the gender-bias charge takes a different form. Even if the ethics of justice could consis- tently accommodate the ethics of care, the critical point is that theorists in the justice tradition have not said much, except in passing, about the ethics of care, and are unlikely to say much in the future without a radical shift in theoretical priori- ties; and concentrating almost exclusively on rights of noninterference, impartial- ity, rationality, autonomy, and principles creates an ideology of the moral domain which has undesirable political implications for women. This formulation shifts the justice-care debate from one about logical compatibility to a debate about which theoretical priorities would improve the lot of women.
”Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception” B Y Maria Lugones13
As outsiders to the mainstream, women of color in the U.S. practice “world”- travelling, mostly out of necessity. I affirm this practice as a skillful, creative, rich, enriching and, given certain circumstances, as a loving way of being and living. I recognize that much of our travelling is done unwillfully to hostile White/Anglo “worlds.” The hostility of these “worlds” and the compulsory nature of the “ travelling” have obscured for us the enormous value of this aspect of our living and its connection to loving. Racism has a vested interest in obscuring and devalu- ing the complex skills involved in it. I recommend that we affirm this travelling across “worlds” as partly constitutive of cross-cultural and cross-racial loving. Thus
13 María lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and loving Perception,” Hypatia 2, no. 2 (summer 1987). © by María lugones.
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I recommend to women of color in the U.S. that we learn to love each other by learning to travel to each other’s “worlds.” . . .
As a child, I was taught to perceive arrogantly. I have also been the object of arrogant percep-
tion. Though I am not a White/Anglo woman, it is clear to me that I can under- stand both my childhood training as an arrogant perceiver and my having been the object of arrogant perception without any reference to White/Anglo men, which is some indication that the concept of arrogant perception can be used cross- culturally and that White/Anglo men are not the only arrogant perceivers. I was brought up in Argentina watching men and women of moderate and of considerable means graft the substance of their servants to themselves. I also learned to graft my moth- er’s substance to my own. It was clear to me that both men and women were the victims of arrogant perception and that arrogant perception was systematically or- ganized to break the spirit of all women and of most men. I valued my rural ‘gaucho’ ancestry because its ethos has always been one of independence in poverty through enormous loneliness, courage and self-reliance. I found inspiration in this ethos and committed myself never to be broken by arrogant perception. . . .
I want to explore two failures of love: my failure to love my mother and White/ Anglo women’s failure to love women across racial and cultural boundaries in the U.S. As a consequence of exploring these failures I will offer a loving solution to them. . . . what I call playful “world”-travel.
It is clear to me that at least in the U.S. and Argentina women are taught to perceive many other women arrogantly. Being taught to perceive arrogantly is part of being taught to be a woman of a certain class in both the U.S. and Argentina, it is part of being taught to be a White/Anglo woman in the U.S. and it is part of being taught to be a woman in both places: to be both the agent and the object of arrogant perception. My love for my mother seemed to me thoroughly imperfect as I was growing up because I was unwilling to become what I had been taught to see my mother as being. I thought that to love her was consistent with my abusing her (using, taking for granted, and demanding her services in a far reaching way that, since four other people engaged in the same grafting of her substance onto themselves, left her little of herself to herself ) and was to be in part constituted by my identifying with her, my seeing myself in her: to love her was supposed to be of a piece with both my abusing her and with my being open to being abused. It is clear to me that I was not supposed to love servants: I could abuse them without identifying with them, without seeing myself in them. When I came to the U.S. I learned that part of racism is the internalization of the propriety of abuse without identification: I learned that I could be seen as a being to be used by White/Anglo men and women without the possibility of identification, i.e. without their act of attempting to graft my substance onto theirs, rubbing off on them at all. They could remain untouched, without any sense of loss.
So, women who are perceived arrogantly can perceive other women arrogantly in their turn. To what extent those women are responsible for their arrogant per- ceptions of other women is certainly open to question, but I do not have any doubt that many women have been taught to abuse women in this particular way. I am not interested in assigning responsibility. I am interested in understanding the phe- nomenon so as to understand a loving way out of it.
María Lugones
A professor of philosophy and literature at Binghamton University in New York.
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There is something obviously wrong with the love that I was taught and some- thing right with my failure to love my mother in this way. But I do not think that what is wrong is my profound desire to identify with her, to see myself in her; what is wrong is that I was taught to identify with a victim of enslavement. What is wrong is that I was taught to practice enslavement of my mother and to learn to become a slave through this practice. There is something obviously wrong with my having been taught that love is consistent with abuse, consistent with arrogant perception. . . . Even though I could both abuse and love my mother, I was not supposed to love servants. This is because in the case of servants one is and is sup- posed to be clear about their servitude and the “equation of servitude with love” is never to be thought clearly in those terms. So, I was not supposed to love and could not love servants. But I could love my mother because deception (in particular, self-deception) is part of this “loving.” . . .
. . . When I say that there is something obviously wrong with the loving that I was taught, I do not mean to say that the connection between this loving and abuse is obvious. Rather I mean that once the connection between this loving and abuse has been unveiled, there is something obviously wrong with the loving given that it is obvious that it is wrong to abuse others.
I am glad that I did not learn my lessons well, but it is clear that part of the mechanism that permitted my not learning well involved a separation from my mother: I saw us as beings of quite a different sort. It involved an abandoning of my mother while I longed not to abandon her. I wanted to love my mother, though, given what I was taught, “love” could not be the right word for what I longed for.
I was disturbed by my not wanting to be what she was. I had a sense of not being quite integrated, my self was missing because I could not identify with her, I could not see myself in her, I could not welcome her world. I saw myself as separate from her, a different sort of being, not quite of the same species. This separation, this lack of love, I saw, and I think that I saw correctly as a lack in myself (not a fault, but a lack). I also see that if this was a lack of love, love cannot be what I was taught. Love has to be rethought, made anew.
There is something in common between the relation between myself and my mother as someone I did not use to be able to love and the relation between myself or other women of color in the U.S. and White/Anglo women: there is a failure of love. . . . But I also think that there is a complex failure of love in the failure to identify with another woman, the failure to see oneself in other women who are quite different from oneself. . . .
Many times White/Anglo women want us out of their field of vision. Their lack of concern is a harmful failure of love that leaves me independent from them in a way similar to the way in which, once I ceased to be my mother’s parasite, she became, though not independent from all others, certainly independent from me. But of course, because my mother and I wanted to love each other well, we were not whole in this independence. White/Anglo women are independent from me, I am independent from them, I am independent from my mother, she is independent from me, and none of us loves each other in this independence.
I am incomplete and unreal without other women. I am profoundly dependent on others without having to be their subordinate, their slave, their servant. . . .
To love my mother was not possible for me while I retained a sense that it was fine for me and others to see her arrogantly. Loving my mother also required that I see with her eyes, that I go into my mother’s world, that I see both of us as we are
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constructed in her world, that I witness her own sense of herself from within her world. Only through this travelling to her “world” could I identify with her be- cause only then could I cease to ignore her and to be excluded and separate from her. Only then could I see her as a subject even if one subjected and only then could I see at all how meaning could arise fully between us. We are fully dependent on each other for the possibility of being understood and without this understanding we are not intelligible, we do not make sense, we are not solid, visible, integrated; we are lacking. So travelling to each other’s “worlds” would enable us to be through loving each other. . . .
Some time ago I came to be in a state of profound confusion as I experienced myself as both having and not having a particular attribute. I was sure I had the at- tribute in question and, on the other hand, I was sure that I did not have it. I remain convinced that I both have and do not have this attribute. The attribute is playful- ness. I am sure that I am a playful person. On the other hand, I can say, painfully, that I am not a playful person. I am not a playful person in certain worlds. One of the things I did as I became confused was to call my friends, far away people who knew me well, to see whether or not I was playful. Maybe they could help me out of my confusion. They said to me, “Of course you are playful” and they said it with the same conviction that I had about it. Of course I am playful. Those people who were around me said to me, “No, you are not playful. You are a serious woman. You just take everything seriously.” They were just as sure about what they said to me and could offer me every bit of evidence that one could need to conclude that they were right. So I said to myself: “Okay, maybe what’s happening here is that there is an attribute that I do have but there are certain worlds in which I am not at ease and it is because I’m not at ease in those worlds that I don’t have that attribute in those worlds. But what does that mean?” I was worried both about what I meant by “worlds” when I said “in some worlds I do not have the attribute” and what I meant by saying that lack of ease was what led me not to be playful in those worlds. Because you see, if it was just a matter of lack of ease, I could work on it. . . .
For something to be a “world” in my sense it has to be inhabited at present by some flesh and blood people. That is why it cannot be a utopia. It may also be in- habited by some imaginary people. It may be inhabited by people who are dead or people that the inhabitants of this “world” met in some other “world” and now have in this “world” in imagination.
A “world” in my sense may be an actual society given its dominant culture’s description and construction of life, including a construction of the relationships of production, of gender, race, etc. But a “world” can also be such a society given a non-dominant construction, or it can be such a society or a society given an idio- syncratic construction. As we will see it is problematic to say that these are all constructions of the same society. But they are different “worlds.”
A “world” need not be a construction of a whole society. It may be a construc- tion of a tiny portion of a particular society. It may be inhabited by just a few people. Some “worlds” are bigger than others.
A “world” may be incomplete in that things in it may not be altogether con- structed or some things may be constructed negatively (they are not what ‘they’ are in some other “world.”) Or the “world” may be incomplete because it may have references to things that do not quite exist in it, references to things like Brazil, where Brazil is not quite part of that “world.” Given lesbian feminism, the con- struction of ‘lesbian’ is purposefully and healthily still up in the air, in the process
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of becoming. What it is to be a Hispanic in this country is, in a dominant Anglo construction purposefully incomplete. Thus one cannot really answer questions of the sort “What is a Hispanic?”, “Who counts as a Hispanic?”, “Are Latinos, Chicanos, Hispanos, black dominicans, white cubans, korean-colombians, italian- argentinians hispanic?” What it is to be a ‘hispanic’ in the varied so-called hispanic communities in the U.S. is also yet up in the air. We have not yet decided whether there is something like a ‘hispanic’ in our varied “worlds.” . . .
One can “travel” between these “worlds” and one can inhabit more than one of these “worlds” at the very same time. I think that most of us who are outside the mainstream of, for example, the U.S. dominant construction or organization of life are “world travellers” as a matter of necessity and of survival. It seems to me that inhabiting more than one “world” at the same time and “travelling” between “worlds” is part and parcel of our experience and our situation. . . .
Those of us who are “world”-travellers have the distinct experience of being different in different “worlds” and of having the capacity to remember other “worlds” and ourselves in them. We can say “That is me there, and I am happy in that “world.” So, the experience is of being a different person in different “worlds” and yet of having memory of oneself as different without quite having the sense of there being any underlying “I.” So I can say “that is me there and I am so playful in that “world.” . . .
The shift from being one person to being a different person is what I call “travel.” This shift may not be willful or even conscious, and one may be completely un- aware of being different than one is in a different “world,” and may not recognize that one is in a different “world.” Even though the shift can be done willfully, it is not a matter of acting. One does not pose as someone else, one does not pretend to be, for example, someone of a different personality or character or someone who uses space or language differently than the other person. Rather one is someone who has that personality or character or uses space and language in that particular way. The “one” here does not refer to some underlying “I.” One does not experience any underlying “I”. . . .
The first way of being at ease in a particular “world” is by being a fluent speaker in that “world.” I know all the norms that there are to be followed, I know all the words that there are to be spoken. I know all the moves. I am confident.
Another way of being at ease is by being normatively happy. I agree with all the norms, I could not love any norms better. I am asked to do just what I want to do or what I think I should do. At ease.
Another way of being at ease in a “world” is by being humanly bonded. I am with those I love and they love me too. It should be noticed that I may be with those I love and be at ease because of them in a “world” that is otherwise as hostile to me as “worlds” get.
Finally one may be at ease because one has a history with others that is shared . . . We are not passive. Playfulness is, in part, an openness to being a fool, which is a combination of not
worrying about competence, not being self-important, not taking norms as sacred and finding ambiguity and double edges a source of wisdom and delight.
So, positively, the playful attitude involves openness to surprise, openness to being a fool, openness to self-construction or reconstruction and to construction or reconstruction of the “worlds” we inhabit playfully. Negatively, playfulness is characterized by uncertainty, lack of self-importance, absence of rules or a not
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taking rules as sacred, a not worrying about competence and a lack of abandon- ment to a particular construction of oneself, others and one’s relation to them. In attempting to take a hold of oneself and of one’s relation to others in a particular “world,” one may study, examine and come to understand oneself. One may then see what the possibilities for play are for the being one is in that “world.” One may even decide to inhabit that self fully in order to understand it better and find its creative possibilities. All of this is just self-reflection and it is quite different from resigning or abandoning oneself to the particular construction of oneself that one is attempting to take a hold of.
There are “worlds” we enter at our own risk, “worlds” that have agon, conquest, and arrogance as the main ingredients in their ethos. These are “worlds” that we enter out of necessity and which would be foolish to enter playfully in either the agonistic sense or in my sense. In such “worlds” we are not playful.
But there are “worlds” that we can travel to lovingly and travelling to them is part of loving at least some of their inhabitants. The reason why I think that travel- ling to someone’s “world” is a way of identifying with them is because by travelling to their “world” we can understand what it is to be them and what it is to be ourselves in their eyes. Only when we have travelled to each other’s “worlds” are we fully subjects to each other. . . .
Knowing other women’s “worlds” is part of knowing them and knowing them is part of loving them. Notice that the knowing can be done in greater or lesser depth, as can the loving. Also notice that travelling to another’s “world” is not the same as becoming intimate with them. Intimacy is constituted in part by a very deep knowledge of the other self and “world” travelling is only part of having this knowledge. Also notice that some people, in particular those who are outsiders to the mainstream, can be known only to the extent that they are known in several “worlds” and as “world”-travellers.
Without knowing the other’s “world,” one does not know the other, and with- out knowing the other one is really alone in the other’s presence because the other is only dimly present to one.
Through travelling to other people’s “worlds” we discover that there are “worlds” in which those who are the victims of arrogant perception are really subjects, lively beings, resistors, constructors of visions even though in the mainstream construc- tion they are animated only by the arrogant perceiver and are pliable, foldable, file- awayable, classifiable. I always imagine the Aristotelian slave as pliable and foldable at night or after he or she cannot work anymore (when he or she dies as a tool). Aristotle tells us nothing about the slave apart from the master. We know the slave only through the master. The slave is a tool of the master. After working hours he or she is folded and placed in a drawer till the next morning. My mother was appar- ent to me mostly as a victim of arrogant perception. I was loyal to the arrogant perceiver’s construction of her and thus disloyal to her in assuming that she was exhausted by that construction. I was unwilling to be like her and thought that identifying with her, seeing myself in her necessitated that I become like her. I was wrong both in assuming that she was exhausted by the arrogant perceiver’s con- struction of her and in my understanding of identification, though I was not wrong in thinking that identification was part of loving and that it involved in part my seeing myself in her. I came to realize through travelling to her “world” that she is not foldable and pliable, that she is not exhausted by the mainstream argentinian patriarchal construction of her. I came to realize that there are “worlds” in which
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she shines as a creative being. Seeing myself in her through travelling to her “world” has meant seeing how different from her I am in her “world.”
So, in recommending “world”-travelling and identification through “world”- travelling as part of loving other women, I am suggesting disloyalty to arrogant perceivers, including the arrogant perceiver in ourselves, and to their constructions of women. In revealing agonistic playfulness as incompatible with “world”- travelling, I am revealing both its affinity with imperialism and arrogant percep- tion and its incompatibility with loving and loving perception.
• In what sense are notions of justice “masculine”? What contribution or revisions can a feminist perspective offer?
• Do you think an ethics of justice and an ethics of care are compatible? If so, how?
• How might the principles of love and playfulness change our conceptions of justice and the ethics of justice?
• How might lugones’ notion of “world-traveling” expand our conception of justice? Can you think of ways that the Internet and other contemporary technologies might serve the cause of justice through “world-traveling”?
G. Individual Rights and Freedom If our concern were only the smooth workings of society, almost any government would do—the stronger the better, the more authoritarian, the more efficient. But efficiency is only one of several concerns and probably not the most important. You may argue that the public interest could be served by an efficient, authoritarian government, but it is clear that justice and individual rights could not. The most important feature of social contract theory (and consent-of-the-gov- erned theories in general) is the clear emphasis on justice and rights. How- ever, the social contract theory by itself is not entirely clear about the status of individual rights, as Nozick makes clear in his criticism of Rawls. Those rights concerning freedom are of particular concern here. How much per- sonal freedom does the social contract guarantee us?
Any discussion of justice and the state must include some special concern for the status of basic freedoms and unalienable rights (that is, rights that no one and no government may take away). Among these are the freedom to speak one’s political opinions without harassment, freedom to worship (or not worship) without being penalized or punished, freedom to defend one- self against attack (“the right to bear arms” is a controversial case), and the freedom to pursue one’s own interests (when these interests do not interfere with the rights of others). In addition, we can add the right not to be impris- oned without reason, accused without a fair trial, or punished unduly for a crime committed. Our best-known list of such freedoms and rights is the American Bill of Rights, appended to the main body of the u.s. Constitution as a kind of contractual guarantee of personal rights.
But even if the importance of such rights is indisputable, the precise formulation and extent of those rights are highly debatable. We speak of
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“unalienable rights,” but should such rights be left unrestricted, for example, even in wartime? It is clear, to mention the most common example, that freedom of speech does not extend so far as the right to falsely yell “fire” in a crowded theater. Freedom of speech, therefore, like other rights, is limited by considerations of public welfare and utility. But how limited? Is mere annoyance to the government sufficient reason to limit it, or the populace becoming sick of some message? similarly, we can go back to the difficult examples we raised in earlier sec- tions. Is the right not to be subjected to harsh punishment always legitimate, even against overwhelming public interest? For example, is it valid in the case of a person who has commit- ted violent crimes repeatedly? Or, to take a difficult example, is “free enterprise” an “unalien- able” right in our society? Or is free enterprise rather a theory (and a debatable one) that suggests that public interest and justice will best be served by open competition and a free market? That theory evolved before modern monopolies developed and before it was obvi- ous that “free” markets could be manipulated so as not to be either free or in the public inter- est at all. Is that “freedom” still a right? Or should it also be tempered by other concerns?
One of the most important basic rights is the presumed right to own private property. John locke, writing just after the English (“Glorious”) Revolution of 1688, listed three basic rights that would become the main ingredients of both the American Declaration of Inde- pendence and a still-prominent political philosophy called liberalism. Foremost among them were “life, liberty, and the right to own private property.” (The original draft of the American Declaration included just these three, but Jefferson replaced the last with the less committal “pursuit of happiness.”) For locke, private property is the bulwark of freedom and the basis of other human rights. One’s own body is private property in the most basic sense; no one else has the authority to violate or use it without permission. Most contemporary societies recognize this right to one’s own body as fundamental. But then locke adds that the right to own property that one has helped cultivate with his or her body (that one “hath mixed his labour with”) is also basic to freedom and human dignity. The Protestant work ethic is powerfully evident in this view, in which work and rights are treated together, the first being our way of earning the second:
F RO M The Second Treatise on Government B Y John Locke14
Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatso- ever, then, he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For his labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.
He that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under an oak, or the apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriated them to himself. Nobody can deny but the nourishment is his. I ask, then, when did they begin to be his? when he digested? or when he ate? or when he boiled? or when he brought
“For his labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.” — J O H N LO C K E
14 John locke, The Second Treatise on Government (Oxford, u.K.: Clarendon, 1690), pp. 26–27, 51.
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them home? or when he picked them up? And ’tis plain, if the first gathering made them not his, nothing else could. That labour put a distinction between them and common. That added something to them more than Nature, the common mother of all, had done, and so they became his private right. And will any one say he had not right to those acorns or apples he thus appropriated because he had not the consent of all mankind to make them his? Was it a robbery thus to assume to him- self what belonged to all in common? If such a consent as that was necessary, man had starved, notwithstanding the plenty God had given him. We see in commons, which remain so by compact, that ’tis the taking any part of what is common, and removing it out of the state Nature leaves it in, which begins the property, without which the common is of no use. And the taking of this or that part does not depend on the express consent of all the commoners. Thus, the grass my horse has bit, the turfs my servant has cut, and the ore I have digged in any place, where I have a right to them in common with others, become my property without the assigna- tion or consent of any body. The labour that was mine, removing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed my property in them.
. . .
And thus, I think, it is very easy to conceive, without any difficulty, how labour could at first begin a title of property in the common things of nature, and how the spending it upon our uses bounded it; so that there could then be no reason of quar- relling about title, nor any doubt about the largeness of possession it gave. Right and conveniency went together. For as a man had a right to all he could employ his labour upon, so he had no temptation to labour for more than he could make use of. This left no room for controversy about the title, nor for encroachment on the right of others. What portion a man carved to himself was easily seen; and it was useless as well as dishonest to carve himself too much, or take more than he needed.
A right is a kind of demand, the demand that one is owed something by society and the state, usually a certain sort of consideration or treatment. But most of the rights we have been discussing are in fact rights to freedom or to liberty, that is, the right to be left alone and not interfered with. A belief in individual freedom forms the basis of the liberal political philosophy, which is defined most of all by a commitment to the right of each individual to be free to do whatever he or she wishes as long as it does not interfere with similar rights of others. The classic statement of this position is another pamphlet by John stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859). In it, Mill defends the rights of individuals and minorities against the tyranny of democratic majorities, for he sees that liberty can be as endangered in a democracy as it can in an authoritarian state. Mill goes on to offer a “very simple principle,” that individual liberty is to be considered inviolable except when other people are threatened with harm.
F RO M On Liberty B Y John Stuart Mill15
The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and
15 John stuart Mill, On Liberty, (london: longmans, 1859).
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control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized commu- nity, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting with any evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to some one else. The only part of the con- duct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.
It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that this doctrine is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. We are not speaking of children, or of young persons below the age which the law may fix as that of manhood or womanhood. Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others, must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury. For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage. The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress are so great, that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming them; and a ruler full of the spirit of improvement is war- ranted in the use of any expedients that will attain an end, perhaps otherwise unat- tainable. Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement,16 and the means justified by actually af- fecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.
It is proper to state that I forego any advantage which could be derived to my argument from the idea of abstract right, as a thing independent of utility. I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of a man as a progressive being. Those interests, I contend, authorise the subjection of individual spontaneity to external control, only in respect to those actions of each, which concern the inter- est of other people. If any one does an act hurtful to others, there is a prima facie case for punishing him, by law, or, where legal penalties are not safely applicable, by general disapprobation. There are also many positive acts for the benefit of others, which he may rightfully be compelled to perform; such as to give evidence in a court of justice; to bear his fair share in the common defence, or in any other joint work necessary to the interest of the society of which he enjoys the protec- tion; and to perform certain acts of individual beneficence, such as saving a fellow creature’s life, or interposing to protect the defenceless against ill-usage, things
16 Notice the political implications for this qualification, however, in “underdeveloped” countries and colonies. The principle of paternalism—that one ought to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves—is easily abused and therefore dangerous.
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which whenever it is obviously a man’s duty to do, he may rightfully be made responsible to society for not doing. A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case is justly ac- countable to them for the injury. The latter case, it is true, requires a much more cau- tious exercise of compulsion than the former. To make any one answerable for doing evil to others is the rule; to make him answerable for not preventing evil is, comparatively speaking, the exception. Yet there are many cases clear enough and grave enough to jus- tify that exception. In all things which regard the external relations of the individ- ual, he is de jure amenable to those whose interests are concerned, and, if need be, to society as their protector. There are often good reasons for not holding him to the responsibility; but these reasons must arise from the special expediencies of the case: either because it is a kind of case in which he is on the whole likely to act better, when left to his own discretion, than when controlled in any way in which society have it in their power to control him; or because the attempt to exercise control would produce other evils, greater than those which it would prevent. When such reasons as these preclude the enforce- ment of responsibility, the conscience of the agent himself should step into the vacant judgment seat, and protect those interests of others which have no external protection; judging himself all the more rigidly, because the case does not admit of his being made accountable to the judgment of his fellow creatures.
But there is a sphere of action in which society, as distinguished from the indi- vidual, has, if any, only an indirect interest; comprehending all that portion of a person’s life and conduct which affects only himself, or if it also affects others, only with their free, voluntary, and undeceived consent and participation. When I say only himself, I mean directly, and in the first instance; for whatever affects himself, may affect others through himself; and the objection which may be grounded on this contingency, will receive consideration in the sequel. This, then, is the appro- priate region of human liberty. It comprises, first, the inward domain of conscious- ness; demanding liberty of conscience in the most comprehensive sense; liberty of thought and feeling; absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological. The liberty of expressing and publishing opinions may seem to fall under a different principle, since it be- longs to that part of the conduct of an individual which concerns other people; but, being almost of as much importance as the liberty of thought itself, and resting in great part on the same reasons, is practically inseparable from it. Secondly, the principle requires liberty of tastes and pursuits; of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character; of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow: without impediment from our fellow creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong. Thirdly, from this liberty of each individual, follows the liberty, within the same limits, of combination among individuals; freedom to unite, for any purpose
John stuart Mill thought that censorship is rarely justified. (© iStockphoto. com/paparazzit)
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not involving harm to others: the persons combining being supposed to be of full age, and not forced or deceived.
No society in which these liberties are not, on the whole, respected, is free, whatever may be its form of government and unqualified. The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental and spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to them- selves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.
Mill’s main concern in his essay is the extent to which the government and public interest have authority over individuals and individual actions. If an action harms other people or presents a public menace, then the government does have the authority to prevent it or punish a person for doing it. But if an action is not harmful to others, the government has no such authority. In the question of freedom of speech, for example, this means that govern- ments have no authority to censor some comment or publication unless it clearly harms other people, not merely annoys or personally offends them. Mill is particularly concerned with protecting individuals against “the tyranny of the majority.” The public interest is au- thoritative to “a limit,” but it does not justify interference with personal affairs or opinions.
We have been discussing the right to behave as one likes, so long as one does not harm others. But it is important to point out that discussions of rights should never be set apart from discussions of political duties and obligations. As the several versions of the social contract make clear, these are always part of one and the same agreement—certain rights in return for certain obligations. To discuss freedom of speech, for example, without also discussing the obligation to be well informed and logically coherent, is to provide a danger- ously one-sided view of the problem. The theme that all rights and “freedoms from” must be coupled with duties and obligations and the freedom to perform them has recurred since the ancient Greeks. Recall Rousseau’s idea, for example, that the citizen’s obligations to the state are just as important as the state’s obligations to its citizens.
One way of developing this idea of an exchange of rights and obligations has been to distinguish two different senses of “freedom”: a negative freedom from interference and a positive freedom to realize one’s own potential and find one’s place in society. Freedom from interference may be necessary for a person to enjoy life and contribute to the welfare of those around him or her, but a person also needs positive goods—health and education, for example. Thus freedom takes on a double meaning, freedom from interference but free- dom to participate in society, too. since positive freedom also includes a person’s being able to take on responsibilities, some philosophers have pointed out the paradox that one can be “free to perform obligations.”
The idea that one is “free to perform obligations” may sound odd to us because we are so used to talking exclusively about freedom from constraints and the demands made by authority. But many philosophers are concerned that simple freedom from constraint leaves people without moral direction and can easily degenerate into chaos and anarchy. Thus these philosophers stress the necessity of certain supports and guidelines as an essential part of freedom. They call it “positive” freedom, since it necessarily includes “positive” goods (health and education) as well as a set of roles, duties, obligations, and constraints. This notion can be abused easily, for “positive freedom” can be made compatible with the most authoritarian state. (The soviet union, for example, often used the term freedom in this
“The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.” — J O H N S T U A R T M I L L
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“positive” sense.) But despite possible abuses, it is important to see that there is more to freedom than simple freedom from in- terference. Whenever someone demands freedom, it is impor- tant to ask not only “from what?” but “for what?”
It is also worth distinguishing several different kinds of rights. We can distinguish between “negative” and “positive” rights as well as freedoms; one has a right not to be interfered with, and one has rights to certain goods that society can provide. We have mostly been discussing negative rights (the right to be left alone, the right not to be arrested without good reason). But there are positive rights that are equally important for a good human life, although they are often controversial in this society. They include, for example, the right to a minimal income regard- less of the type of work one performs and the right to adequate health care regardless of one’s ability to pay for it. Many rights are clearly localized within a particular state or community, as, for example, the right of university regents to free tickets to foot- ball games and lunches at taxpayers’ expense. These rights exist by convention only and cannot be generalized from one com- munity to another.
More generally, however, there are civil rights, rights that are guaranteed in a particular state or nation. One example is the right to equal treatment despite differences in skin color, sex, or religion, as required by various state and federal laws. These civil rights are obviously much more important than conventional rights, and they have a clearly moral basis. For this reason, even though they are defined by reference to a particular state and society, they are often generalized to apply to other societies as well. Rights that are justifi- ably generalized in this way should be recognized as moral rights or human rights, extend- able to all people, in any society, regardless of the laws and customs of the society in which they live. some apparent human rights have been hotly debated: for example, whether the u.s. government has the moral authority to interfere with the harsh abuses of human rights in, say, China or Castro’s Cuba. If the right in question is harsh punishment for a seemingly minor crime, it could be argued that their system of punishment is simply more severe than ours, and we should not apply our values. If the right in question is the ability of citizens to speak out against the government without threat of imprisonment or worse, strong argu- ments have been made that the u.s. government does indeed have the moral authority to interfere. (Whether or not it wishes to risk the consequences is another matter.) If the right in question is one of the basic human rights—such as the right not to be tortured or debased or pointlessly murdered—then it can be argued that everyone has a moral obligation to defend such rights. Human rights are those that transcend all social and national boundar- ies. They demand that people deserve certain treatment just because they are human, re- gardless of all else.
Human rights, according to Malcolm X, were at stake in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Malcolm X was one of the leaders of the “Black Nationalist” movement of that era, and he pursued not just justice, but an independent and separate state for black people of all nations. In the following passage, he argues that the rights being denied to African Amer- icans were fundamental human rights, and they should be recognized as such at the interna- tional level.
Why is freedom of expression a “negative right”? (© iStockphoto.com/claudelle)
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On Civil and Human Rights B Y Malcolm X17
Civil rights actually keeps the struggle within the domestic confines of America. It keeps it under the jurisdiction of the American government, which means that as long as our struggle for what we’re seeking is labeled civil rights, we can only go to Washington, D.C., and then we rely upon either the Supreme Court, the President or the Congress or the senators. These senators—many of them are rac- ists. Many of the congressmen are racists. Many of the judges are racists and of- tentimes the president himself is a very shrewdly camouflaged racist. And so we really can’t get meaningful redress for our grievances when we are depending upon these grievances being redressed just within the jurisdiction of the United States government.
On the other hand, human rights go beyond the jurisdiction of this govern- ment. Human rights are international. Human rights are something that a man has by dint of his having been born. The labeling of our struggle in this country under the title civil rights of the past 12 years has actually made it impossible for us to get outside help. Many foreign nations, many of our brothers and sisters on the African continent who have gotten their independence, have restrained themselves, have refrained from becoming vocally or actively involved in our struggle for fear that they would be violating U.S. protocol, that they would be accused of getting in- volved in America’s domestic affairs.
On the other hand, when we label it human rights, it internationalizes the prob- lem and puts it at a level that makes it possible for any nation or any people any- where on this earth to speak out in behalf of our human rights struggle.
So we feel that by calling it civil rights for the past 12 years, we’ve actually been barking up the wrong tree, that ours is a problem of human rights.
Plus, if we have our human rights, our civil rights are automatic. If we’re re- spected as a human being, we’ll be respected as a citizen; and in this country the black man not only is not respected as a citizen, he is not even respected as a human being.
And the proof is that you find in many instances people can come to this coun- try from other countries—they can come to this country from behind the Iron Curtain—and despite the fact that they come here from these other places, they don’t have to have civil-rights legislation passed in order for their rights to be safeguarded.
No new legislation is necessary for foreigners who come here to have their rights safeguarded. The Constitution is sufficient, but when it comes to the black men who were born here—whenever we are asking for our rights, they tell us that new legislation is necessary.
Well, we don’t believe that. The Organization of Afro-American Unity feels that as long as our people in this country confine their struggle within the limita- tions and under the jurisdiction of the United States government, we remain within the confines of the vicious system that has done nothing but exploit and
17 From Two Speeches by Malcolm X. Copyright © 1990 by Betty shabazz and Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
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oppress us ever since we’ve been here. So we feel that our only real hope is to make known that our problem is not a Negro problem or an American problem but rather, it has become a human problem, a world problem, and it has to be at- tacked at the world level, at a level at which all segments of humanity can inter- vene in our behalf.
In the heated discussion of rights that has defined a great deal of the debate about justice in the advanced industrialized countries—whether there should be limitations on freedom of speech and whether or not a government has the right to tax the income of its citizens—what is often neglected is the crisis that threatens so much of the developing world (and to a shocking extent the developed world as well). Many people lack the most essential necessities of human life: clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and enough food to eat. The lack of food is not so much a problem of supply—there is plenty of food in the world—but a problem of justice. some political thinkers have begun to address this issue of justice in terms of rights, claiming that people have fundamental human rights to the basic necessities for living. All too often, they argue, the rights to property are de- fended even when the consequence is that thousands or millions of people will starve. Here, Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya sen defends the idea that hunger deserves much more dedicated attention than it has been getting from economists and philosophers.
F RO M “Property and Hunger” B Y Amartya Sen18
Moral claims based on intrinsically valuable rights are often used in political and social arguments. Rights related to ownership have been invoked for ages. But there are also other types of rights which have been seen as “inherent and inalien- able,” and the American Declaration of Independence refers to “certain unalien- able rights,” among which are “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The Indian constitution talks even of “the right to an adequate means of livelihood.” The “right not to be hungry” has often been invoked in recent discussions on the obligation to help the famished.
P RO P E RT Y A N D D E P R I VAT I O N The right to hold, use and bequeath property that one has legitimately acquired is often taken to be inherently valuable. In fact, however, many of its defenses seem to be actually of the instrumental type, e.g., arguing that property rights make people more free to choose one kind of a life rather than another. Even the tradi- tional attempt at founding “natural property rights” on the principles of “natural liberty” (with or without John Locke’s proviso) has some instrumental features. But even if we do accept that property rights may have some intrinsic value, this does not in any way amount to an overall justification of property rights, since property rights may have consequences which themselves will require assessment.
18 Amartya sen, “Property and Hunger,” from Economics and Philosophy, vol. 4 (1988), pp. 57– 68. Copyright © Cambridge university Press. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge university Press and the author.
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Indeed, the causation of hunger as well as its prevention may materially depend on how property rights are structured. If a set of prop- erty rights leads, say, to starvation, as it well might, then the moral approval of these rights would certainly be compromised severely. In general, the need for consequential analysis of property rights is inescapable whether or not such rights are seen as having any intrinsic value. . . .
If starvation and hunger are seen in terms of failures of entitlements, then it becomes immediately clear that the total availability of food in a country is only one of several vari- ables that are relevant. Many famines occur without any decline in the availability of food. For example, in the Great Bengal famine of 1943, the total food availability in
Bengal was not particularly bad (considerably higher than two years earlier when there was no famine), and yet three million people died, in a famine mainly af- fecting the rural areas, through rather violent shifts in the relative purchasing powers of different groups, hitting the rural laborers the hardest. The Ethiopian famine of 1973 took place in a year of average per capita food availability, but the cultivators and other occupation groups in the province of Wollo had lost their means of subsistence (through loss of crops and a decline of economic activity, related to a local drought) and had no means of commanding food from else- where in the country. Indeed, some food moved out of Wollo to more prosperous people in other parts of Ethiopia, repeating a pattern of contrary movement of food that was widely observed during the Irish famine of the 1840s (with food moving out of famine-stricken Ireland to prosperous England which had greater power in the battle of entitlements). The Bangladesh famine of 1974 took place in a year of peak food availability, but several occupation groups had lost their entitlement to food through loss of employment and other economic changes (including inflationary pressures causing prices to outrun wages). Other exam- ples of famines without significant (or any) decline in food availability can be found, and there is nothing particularly surprising about this fact once it is rec- ognized that the availability of food is only one influence among many on the entitlement of each occupation group. Even when a famine is associated with a decline of food availability, the entitlement changes have to be studied to under- stand the particular nature of the famine, e.g., why one occupation group is hit but not another. The causation of starvation can be sensibly sought in failures of entitlements of the respective groups.
The causal analysis of famines in terms of entitlements also points to possible public policies of prevention. The main economic strategy would have to take the form of increasing the entitlements of the deprived groups, and in general, of guaranteeing minimum entitlements for everyone, paying particular attention to the vulnerable groups. This can, in the long run, be done in many different ways, involving both economic growth (including growth of food output) and distri- butional adjustments. Some of these policies may, however, require that the
Amartya Sen (1933—)
An Indian economist and philoso- pher. He won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1998. He teaches at Harvard University.
Nobel laureate, economist, and philosopher Amartya sen (© STR/epa/Corbis)
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property rights and the corresponding entitlements of the more prosperous groups be violated.
There is, however, no great moral dilemma in this if property rights are treated as purely instrumental. If the goals of relief of hunger and poverty are sufficiently powerful, then it would be just right to violate whatever property rights come in the way, since—in this view—property rights have no intrinsic status. On the other hand, if property rights are taken to be morally inviolable irrespective of their consequences, then it will follow that these policies cannot be morally accept- able even though they might save thousands, or even millions, from dying. The inflexible moral “constraint” of respecting people’s legitimately acquired entitle- ments would rule out such policies.
The issue here is not the valuing of property rights, but their alleged inviola- bility. There is no dilemma here either for the purely instrumental view of prop- erty rights or for treating the fulfillment of property rights as one goal among many, but specifically for consequence-independent assertions of property rights and for the corresponding constraint-based approaches to moral entitlement of ownership.
That property and hunger are closely related cannot possibly come as a great surprise. Hunger is primarily associated with not owning enough food and thus property rights over food are immediately and directly involved. Fights over that property right can be a major part of the reality of a poor country, and any system of moral assessment has to take note of that phenomenon. The tendency to see hunger in purely technocratic terms of food output and availability may help to hide the crucial role of entitlements in the genesis of hunger, but a fuller economic analysis cannot overlook that crucial role. Since property rights over food are de- rived from property rights over other goods and resources (through production and trade), the entire system of rights of acquisition and transfer is implicated in the emergence and survival of hunger and starvation.
T H E R I G H T N O T T O B E H U N G RY Property rights have been championed for a long time. In contrast, the assertion of “the right not to be hungry” is a comparatively recent phenomenon. While this right is much invoked in political debates, there is a good deal of skepticism about treating this as truly a right in any substantial way. It is often asserted that this con- cept of “right not to be hungry” stands essentially for nothing at all (“simple non- sense,” as Bentham called “natural rights” in general). That piece of sophisticated cynicism reveals not so much a penetrating insight into the practical affairs of the world, but a refusal to investigate what people mean when they assert the existence of rights that for the bulk of humanity, are not in fact guaranteed by the existing institutional arrangements.
The right not to be hungry is not asserted as a recognition of an institutional right that already exists, as the right to property typically is. The assertion is pri- marily a moral claim as to what should be valued, and what institutional structure we should aim for, and try to guarantee if feasible. It can also be seen in terms of Ronald Dworkin’s category of “background rights”—rights that provide a justifi- cation for political decisions by society in abstract. This interpretation serves as the basis for a reason to change the existing institutional structure and state policy.
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H. Fighting for Rights and Justice: Civil Disobedience If one accepts Mill’s argument for limited government, one may also be tempted to favor a still more radical step—to no government at all. The idea that people can get along and work together without a government requires a robust confidence in the capacity and will- ingness of both the average person and the most powerful members of society to cooper- ate without the need of force from above, the opposite of Thomas Hobbes’s view of men as selfish and requiring a sovereign in order to get along. Another extreme alternative would be to question the need for living in society at all. Henry David Thoreau is well known for his grand experiment of living in the Massachusetts woods at Walden pond, minimizing his needs and, for the most part, living virtually alone. Of course one may object that he was able to do so only with the support of other people (not the least because the land itself was owned by his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson). But the point, repeated by many defenders of
“the simple life” over the centuries, is that we can all get along with much less than we who live in a “civi- lized” society typically think we can. This point is being widely promoted in the united states and other “advanced” societies today, in the name of the environment and the ultimate viability of life on earth. Thoreau’s experiment spoke to something quite different, however, and that was the indepen- dence and self-reliance of the individual.
Despite his experiment with isolation, Thoreau lived in society like the rest of us and could thus be argued to be beholden to its laws. But should one obey the laws of the land? socrates (in the Crito) certainly thought so, even in the case when those laws were unfairly turned against him. But not every- one agrees. One of the founding principles of the united states, expressed so clearly in the
• What is a right? What does it mean to say that rights are unalienable? Are rights ever actually absolute or unalienable?
• What is the only justification for the exercise of power, according to Mill? Is despo- tism ever a legitimate form of government?
• How is liberty related to a notion of rights? Which of the rights guaranteed under the u.s. Constitution can you identify in Mill’s article?
• What is the relationship between rights and obligations? Provide an example. Do the concepts of negative freedom and positive freedom help to clarify the distinc- tion between rights and obligations? How are these two notions of freedom related to positive and negative rights?
• What is the difference between a civil right and a human right? Does Hobbes think that there are any human rights?
• How might our political institutions respond if the right not to be hungry were taken seriously?
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
An American essayist, naturalist, and philosopher; a champion of in- dividualism. His most famous work was Walden.
Henry David Thoreau (© iStockphoto.com/wynnter)
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Declaration of Independence, is that a people has the right to rebel against unjust laws and an oppressive government. This principle is directly entailed by the very idea of a social contract. But what about individuals? What are their obligations?
Thoreau turned his ferocious sense of independence to defend the individual’s right to disobey unjust laws in his essay “Resistance to Civil Government” (later published as “Civil Disobedience”), in which he defends his decision not to pay his taxes. Indeed, he claims that for a person to obey the laws of a government that behaves unjustly would be the same as his behaving unjustly himself. While “lesser men”—degraded, immoral, and unthinking pawns of government—may go along year after year, obeying the laws, no man of moral character would do so, Thoreau claimed. But being a man of moral character himself, he absolved himself of any obligations to his country other than to “do what he believed right.”
F RO M “Resistance to Civil Government” (“Civil Disobedience”) B Y Henry David Thoreau19
I heartily accept the motto,—“That government is best which governs least;” and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—“That government is best which governs not at all;” and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of gov- ernment which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at least be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the mode which the people have chosen to exe- cute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure.
This American government,—what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man can bend it to his will. It is a sort of wooden gun to the people themselves; and, if ever they should use it in earnest as a real one against each other, it will surely split. But it is not the less necessary for this; for the people must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy that idea of government which they have. Governments show thus how successfully men can be imposed on, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage. It is excellent, we must allow; yet this government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alac- rity with which it got out of its way. It does not keep the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not educate. The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way. For government is an expedi- ent by which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone; and, as has been said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most let alone by it. Trade and commerce, if they were not made of India rubber, would never manage to bound
19 Henry David Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government,” 1849.
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over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way; and, if one were to judge these men wholly by the effects of their actions, and not partly by their intentions, they would deserve to be classed and punished with those mis- chievous persons who put obstructions on the railroads.
But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no- government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better govern- ment. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.
After all, the practical reason why, when the power is once in the hands of the people, a majority are permitted, and for a long period continue, to rule, is not because they are most likely to be in the right, nor because this seems fairest to the minority, but because they are physically the strongest. But a government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice, even as far as men under- stand it. Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?—in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly enough said, that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, pow- der-monkeys and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, aye, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small moveable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?
. . .
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place to-day, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them; on that separate, but more free and honorable ground, where the State places those who are not with her but against her,—the only house in a slave-state in which a free man can abide with honor. If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat injustice who has experienced a little in his own person. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war
“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then?” — H E N R Y DAV I D T H O R E A U
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and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed inno- cent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, “But what shall I do?” my answer is, “If you really wish to do any thing, resign your office.” When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished. But even suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an ever- lasting death. I see this blood flowing now.
. . .
Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a government which says to me, “Your money or your life,” why should I be in haste to give it my money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot help that. It must help itself; do as I do. It is not worth the while to snivel about it. I am not responsible for the suc- cessful working of the machinery of society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and de- stroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.
Thoreau did not reject the idea of living in society, despite his insistence on indepen- dence and self-reliance, nor did he reject the idea of government as such. He rather insisted on a just government and just laws as the precondition of his cooperation. A little more than a hundred years later, in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., used similar reasoning in his decision to participate in the civil rights protests in Birmingham, Alabama. King was famous for his advocacy of nonviolent protest; nonetheless, King did believe in protest. In fact, he claims that disobeying the law was his moral—and Christian—obligation. We close this chapter with his famous “letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which he makes this argument.
F RO M “Letter from Birmingham Jail” B Y Martin Luther King, Jr.20
I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been in- fluenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in.” I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an
20 Martin luther King, Jr., “letter from Birmingham Jail.” Reprinted by arrangement with The Heirs to the Estate of Martin luther King, Jr., c/o Writers House, Inc. as agent for the proprietor. Copyright © 1967 by Martin luther King, Jr., copyright renewed 1995 by the Estate of Martin luther King, Jr.
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organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty-five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct-action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily con- sented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am here because I have organizational ties here.
But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the proph- ets of the eighth century b.c. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco- Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.
Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Bir- mingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.
You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your state- ment, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstration. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.
In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts.
There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good-faith negotiation.
Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham’s economic community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants— for example, to remove the stores’ humiliating racial signs. On the basis of these promises, the
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968)
An American Baptist minister, civil rights leader, and Nobel Prize Lau- reate. He was assassinated in 1968.
A 1968 photograph of Dr. Martin luther King, Jr., in Memphis, Tennessee. (© Jacques Haillot/Apis/Sygma/
Corbis)
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” — M A R T I N L U T H E R K I N G , J R .
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Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained.
As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self-purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: “Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?” “Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?” We decided to schedule our direct-action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic-withdrawal program would be the by- product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change.
Then it occurred to us that Birmingham’s mayoralty election was coming up in March, and we speedily decided to postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that the Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, had piled up enough votes to be in the run-off, we decided again to postpone action until the day after the run-off so that the demonstrations could not be used to cloud the issues. Like many others, we waited to see Mr. Connor defeated, and to this end we endured postponement after postponement. Having aided in this community need, we felt that our direct-action program could be delayed no longer.
You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of cre- ative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.
The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.
. . .
We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This
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“Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “ justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Su- preme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral respon- sibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”
Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferior- ity. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I-it” relationship for an “I-thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economi- cally and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.
Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.
Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devis- ing the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up that state’s segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama all sorts of de- vious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured?
Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is noth- ing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.
. . .
Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro.
Martin Buber (© Hulton-Deutsch
Collection/Corbis)
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Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro com- munity, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must re- lease them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides—and try to understand why he must do so. If his re- pressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: “Get rid of your discontent.” Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist.
But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despite- fully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do oth- erwise, so help me God.” And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. . . .” So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime—the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth, and goodness, and therefore rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.
• On what basis is civil disobedience justified, according to Thoreau? In what re- spects is Thoreau’s view similar to Rousseau’s or locke’s?
• Can you think of a current law that you believe to be unjust? Do you think that you are acting unjustly in obeying such laws? How would you respond to Thoreau?
• Are pacifists justified in not paying their federal income tax because they believe war (and by extension, military expenditures) to be immoral?
• Is disobedience by violent means ever justified? How might one draw a moral distinc- tion between the Fathers of the American Revolution and political terrorist groups?
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SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
In some areas of philosophy, the question arises, What does this have to do with everyday life? In political philosophy, as in moral philosophy, the connection between philosophy and “every- day life” is obvious. It is no coincidence that the major revolutions of the eighteenth and nine- teenth centuries came soon after a flurry of philosophical radicalism. And we know that much of the world is divided and ruled according to rival political philosophies at the present time.
What is always at issue is the concept of justice. The ideas that people are equal and should be treated equally, that people have natural or human rights that no one and no government can take away from them, that people should equally share the material goods of society—these have all been the subject of constant debate, and sometimes wars and revolutions, for most of modern times. The nature of the state itself has been part of that debate as well, with the state serving as the stage on which the debate has been carried out. How much should the state serve the people, and how much should the people serve the state? What constitutes a good state? And when, if ever, do people have the right to over- throw the state, or a particular regime, or a particular law? We cannot even begin to give adequate answers to these complex questions in the context of a general introduction to philosophy. But neither can we avoid asking them in the world as it is today.
CHAPTER REVIEW QUESTIONS
1. Does a utilitarian description of the state necessarily compromise the rights of the in- dividual? Mill doesn’t think so. How can rights be used to protect the individual from the “tyranny of the majority”? How could a utilitarian defend a robust conception of individual rights?
2. Recall John Rawls’s two principles of justice. Give a short argument detailing how those two principles can be derived from his “original position.” Rawls insists that for this derivation to work, individuals must be self-interested and rational. Explain why this is so. Are individuals self-interested and rational in your view?
3. Can you envision situations in which “positive” and “negative” rights may conflict? If so, how should such conflicts be resolved?
4. What rights would you include in a list of unalienable human rights? What kind of coer- cive measures may be justified in order to satisfy these rights?
5. We have seen a number of different conceptions of justice: as an orderly society in which members perform their well-defined social function, as giving each his due, as defend- ing some notion of equality, as fairness, as entitlement, and even as a kind of playful- ness. Can you think of how these different definitions could be unified under a single concept of justice? What key ideas do all conceptions of justice share in common?
KEY TERMS
anarchists equality rights authority government social contract civil rights human rights society democracy justice sovereign distributive justice legitimacy state egalitarianism retributive justice unalienable rights entitlement
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BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
Plato, The Republic, trans. F. M. Cornford (Oxford, u.K.: Oxford university Press, 1941), is still standard reading for the basics and some thought-provoking alternatives in political philosophy.
see also Aristotle, Politics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. R. McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941).
Our own national documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, are always important reading.
John stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. E. Rapaport (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), has long been the classic defense of liberalism.
M. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1962), is an important challenge to liberal philosophy. so is M. sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge university Press, 1998). see also Robert Nisbet, Conservatism: Dream and Reality (Minneapolis: university of Minnesota Press, 1986).
Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, trans. s. Moore (Chicago: Regnery, 1969), and his Early Writings, trans. T. Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), are essential reading for beginning students in political philosophy.
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. D. Wootton (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), and Jean- Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. E. D. H. Cole (New York: Dutton, 1950), are both important and rewarding reading.
For more general discussions of the philosophy of politics, see A Companion to Contempo- rary Political Philosophy, ed. R. E. Goodin, P. Pettit, and T. Pogge (New York: Wiley- Blackwell, 1995), and R. E. Goodin and P. Pettit, eds., Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, 2nd ed. (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006).
More of Amartya sen’s ideas about justice and the limitations of traditional theories of rights can be found in his book The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard university Press, 2009).
For a discussion of justice issues in relation to women, see M. C. Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (New York: Oxford university Press, 1999).
For further consideration of the feminist discussion of justice in relation to an ethics of care, see Annette Baier, “The Need for More than Justice,” in her book Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard university Press, 1995), pp. 18–32.
For further discussions of justice in relation to civil rights and the civil rights movement of the 1960s, see The Autobiography of Malcolm X, coauthored with Alex Haley (New York: Ballantine, 1992), and Martin luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope, ed. J. M. Washington (san Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991).
Two good collections are R. simon, Blackwell Guide to Social and Political Philosophy (Oxford, u.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), and R. solomon and M. Murphy, What Is Justice? 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford university Press, 2003).
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Glossary Abrahamic religions The Western monotheisms: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (which all trace
their roots from the prophet Abraham).
absolute space and absolute time The view that space and time exist independently of objects and events “in” them, a view defended by Newton. In general, absolute, as used in philoso- phy, means independent and nonrelative, unqualified and all-inclusive.
absolutism The thesis that there is but one correct view of reality. Opposed to relativism.
abstract Overly general, not concrete, independent of particular concerns or objects. For ex- ample, a philosopher may attempt to ascertain the nature of justice without particular refer- ence to any concrete practical case.
action-at-a-distance The idea that one object can have a causal effect on another from a dis- tance, as in Newton’s laws of gravitational attraction. Leibniz’s rejection of this idea as “absurd” led him to develop a noncausal interpretation of the same phenomena.
ad hominem argument An argument against the person instead of the position; for example, attacking a philosopher’s living habits instead of asking whether or not his theories are true.
agnosticism The refusal to believe either that God exists or that He does not exist, usually on the grounds that there can be no sufficient evidence for either belief.
Ahura Mazda The supreme God of Zoroastrianism.
alienation In Marx, the unnatural separation of a person from the products he or she makes, from other people, or from oneself.
altruism The thesis that one ought to act for the sake of the interests of others.
Analects, The One of the major works of Confucianism.
analytic (of a sentence or truth) Demonstrably true (and necessarily true) by virtue of the logical form or the meanings of the component words. The concept was introduced by Kant, who defined it in terms of a sentence (he called it a “judgment”) in which the “predicate was contained in the subject” and “added nothing to it.” For example, in “a horse is an animal,” he would say that the concept of “horse” already includes the concept of being an animal; we would say that “horse” means “an animal that . . .” and thus “is an animal” adds nothing to what we already know just from “horse.” Kant also says that the criterion or test for analytic sentences is the principle of contradiction; an analytic sentence is one for which denial yields a self-contradiction.
analytic philosophy The movement in twentieth-century philosophy, particularly in the United States and Britain, that focuses its primary attention on language and linguistic analysis.
anarchism The view that no government has the legitimate authority to coerce people and that the public interest and individual rights can be served only without a state of any kind.
Angra Mainyush The evil spirit in Zoroastrianism.
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animism The view that things (or, at the extreme, all things) are alive. It may also be the view that the universe as a whole is one gigantic organism.
antecedent conditions Those circumstances, states of affairs, or events that regularly precede and can be said to cause an event. The antecedent conditions of boiling water, for example, are the application of heat to water under normal atmospheric pressure, and so on. A deter- minist would say that the antecedent conditions of a human action would be the state of the agent’s nervous system, a developed character (with personality traits), certain desires and beliefs, and the circumstances (or “stimulus”) in which the action takes place.
anthropomorphic Humanlike. An anthropomorphic conception of God ascribes human attri- butes to Him.
apeiron In Anaximander, “the unlimited,” the basic stuff of the universe.
aphorism A short, striking general observation, usually just a sentence or two.
a posteriori (knowledge) “After experience” or empirical. (See empirical.)
appearance The way something seems to us through our senses. Usually philosophers worry about something’s being a mere appearance, such that it bears no faithful resemblance to the reality of which it is the appearance.
a priori (knowledge) “Before experience” or, more accurately, independent of all experience. A priori knowledge is always necessary, for there can be no imaginable instances that would refute it and no intelligible doubting of it. One may come to know something a priori through experience (for example, you may find out that no parallel lines ever touch each other by drawing tens of thousands of parallel lines), but what is essential to a priori knowledge is that no such experience is needed. Knowledge is a priori if it can be proved independently of experience. The most obvious examples of a priori knowledge are analytic sentences, such as “a horse is an animal” and “if all men are mammals and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is a mammal.”
argument The process of reasoning from one claim to another. An argument may, but need not, be directed against an explicit alternative. A philosophical argument does not require an opponent or a disagreement.
argument from design See teleological argument.
asceticism A life of self-denial and material simplicity, often to further philosophical or religious goals.
Asha Immortal spirit or “righteousness” in Zoroastrianism.
assertion A statement or declaration, taking a position. Mere assertion, when presented as an argument, is a fallacy; arguments consist not only of assertions but of reasons for them as well.
association of ideas A central idea of empiricist philosophy, according to which all knowledge is composed of separate ideas that are connected by their resemblance to one another (e.g., “this one looks exactly like that one”), by their contiguity in space and time (e.g., “every time I see this, I see that as well”), and by their causality (e.g., “every time a thing of that sort happens, it is followed by something of this sort”). (The three different “associations” here are Hume’s.)
assumption A principle taken for granted without argument or proof.
atheism The belief that there is no God. A person who believes that there is no God is an atheist.
attribute In Spinoza, an essential property of God; for example, having a physical nature, having thoughts. In general, an attribute is a property (as in Aristotle).
authority That which controls; usually, that which has the right to control. (For example, the gov- ernment has the authority to tax your income.)
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autonomy Intellectual independence and freedom from authority. Moral autonomy is the abil- ity of every rational person to reach his or her own moral conclusions about what is right and what is wrong. (This does not mean that they will therefore come to different conclusions.)
axiom A principle that is generally accepted from the beginning and so may be used without further debate as a starting point of an argument.
bad faith Sartre’s characterization of a person’s refusal to acknowledge the degree to which he or she is free and responsible for his or her choices. This sometimes means not accepting the facts that are true about you. More often it means accepting the facts about you as conclu- sive about your identity, as in the statement “Oh, I couldn’t do that, I’m too shy.”
Becoming (in Plato) The “world of Becoming” is the changing world of our daily experience, in which things and people come into being and pass away.
begging the question Merely restating as the conclusion of an argument one of its premises. For example, “Why do oysters give me indigestion? Because they upset my stomach.”
behaviorism In psychology, the radical methodological thesis that insists that only what is pub- licly observable can be used as subject matter or as evidence in scientific research regarding human beings. In particular, all talk of “minds” and “mental events,” “desires,” “purposes,” “ideas,” “perceptions,” and “experiences” is to be given up in favor of terms that refer only to the experimental situation or the behavior of the creature (or person) in question (for ex- ample, “stimulus,” “response,” “reinforcements”). In philosophy and metaphysics, behavior- ism is the logical thesis that there are no “covert” or “private” mental events, only patterns of behavior and psychological ways of talking about behavior as “intelligent,” “deceitful,” “calculating,” or “inattentive.” All these patterns of behavior must be understood not in terms of some process (“intelligence,” “deceitful thinking,” “calculating,” or “lack of attend- ing”) going on “in the mind” but, rather, as ways of interpreting, predicting, and otherwise describing and evaluating behavior.
Being (in Plato) The “world of Being” is the realm of eternal Forms, in which nothing ever changes. It is, for Plato, reality, and, in general, Being is used by philosophers to refer to whatever they consider ultimately real (substance, God).
best of all possible worlds This world, according to Leibniz’s view that God demands a perfect universe and makes it “the best possible,” all things considered.
Bhagavadgı̄tā (“Gı̄tā”) The “Song of God” of ancient Hinduism; a segment of the epic poem the Mahabhavata in which the character Krishna reveals himself to be God incarnate.
Brahman The Hindu idea of the One, the unity underlying all things.
Buddha “The awakened one”; the historical founder of Buddhism.
Cartesian Concerning Descartes. In particular, concerning his philosophical method. (Des- cartes’s followers are generally called “Cartesians” and their method “Cartesianism.”) The Cartesian method is essentially a deductive method, as in geometry, starting with self- evident axioms and deducing the rest.
categorical imperative In Kant’s philosophy, a moral law, a command that is unqualified and not dependent on any conditions or qualifications. In particular, that rule that tells us to act in such a way that we would rationally will that everyone else act the same way.
categories Kant’s word (borrowed from Aristotle) for those most basic and a priori concepts of human knowledge, for example, causality and substance.
causal interactionism The theory that mind and body causally interact, that mental events (for example, an “act of will”) can cause a bodily consequence (for instance, raising one’s arm), and that a bodily change (such as a puncture of the skin) can cause a mental consequence (for example, a pain).
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causal theory of perception The view that our experience (our sensations and ideas) are the effects of physical objects acting upon our sense organs.
causation or causality The relation of cause and effect, one event bringing about another ac- cording to natural law. In Hume, (1) one event following another necessarily (or so it seems to us) or (2) one type of event regularly following another (See association of ideas.)
cause That which brings something about. On the hard determinist interpretation, a cause is an antecedent condition that, together with other antecedent conditions, is sufficient to make the occurrence of some event necessary, according to the laws of nature. On a weaker inter- pretation, a cause may simply be an event (or condition) that regularly precedes another event and thus can be used to predict when the latter will occur. (For example, if we say “a cause of forest fires is lightning,” we mean “whenever lightning strikes a sufficiently dry forest, fire will occur.”) In Aristotle, “cause” means something like “reason,” and he distin- guishes four different kinds of “causes” of a change: (1) the formal cause, the principle or essential idea according to which a change comes about (think of a blueprint for a building or the plans for a project); (2) the material cause, the matter that undergoes the change (think of the raw materials for building a house—lumber, bricks, cement); (3) the efficient cause, that which initiates the change (the construction workers and their tools); and (4) the final cause, or the purpose of the change (to build a place where Socrates and his family can live, for example).
cause-of-itself (causa sui) That which brings about its own existence or whose essence involves existence, often said of God.
certainty Beyond doubt. But it is important to insist that certainty in the philosophical sense is more than the common psychological use of certain (“feeling certain”). One can feel certain and yet be wrong or foolish. One can be certain, in this philosophical sense, only if one can prove that the matter is beyond doubt, that no reasons for doubt could be raised.
civil rights Those rights that are determined by a particular state and its laws; constitutional rights, for example, are civil rights in this sense, guaranteed by the law of the land.
cogito, ergo sum Or “I think, therefore I am” is Descartes’s only principle that he finds “beyond doubt” and “perfectly certain.” (Think here refers to any kind of idea or experience in the mind, not just what we would call thinking.) It is the premise of his entire philosophy.
coherence Logical connection. A statement by a witness in a courtroom coheres with other tes- timony and evidence when it fits in and is consistent with that other testimony and evidence. To say that a philosophy must be coherent is to say that its various principles must fit together in an orderly and logically agreeable fashion.
coherence theory of truth A statement or a belief is true if and only if it “coheres” with a system of statements or beliefs. A truth of mathematics is “true” because it forms part of the nexus in the complex of mathematical truths. A geometrical theorem is “true” because it can be proved from other theorems (axioms, definitions) of the geometrical system. A “factual” statement is “true” insofar as other “factual” statements, including general statements about experience that are logically relevant to the original statement, support it. Since we can never get “outside” our experience, the only sense in saying that a belief is true (accord- ing to this theory) is that it “coheres” with the rest of our experience.
commitment To form a binding obligation voluntarily. In Sartre’s moral philosophy, a commit- ment is the freely chosen adoption of a moral principle or project that one thereby vows to defend and practice, even in the absence of any other reasons for doing so. Since, according to Sartre, there are never conclusive reasons for adopting any particular moral position, one must always defend his or her position through commitment and nothing else.
compatibilism The thesis that both determinism (on some interpretations) and free action can be true. According to compatibilists, determinism does not rule out free action and the
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possibility of free action does not require that determinism be false. They are compatible positions.
compulsion “Being forced to do something.” One acts from compulsion (or is compelled to act) when he or she could not have done otherwise. Some philosophers distinguish between external compulsions (for example, being pushed) and internal compulsions (for instance, a neurotic obsession).
conceptual truth A statement that is true and that we can see to be true by virtue of the meanings of the words (or we should say, the “concepts”) that compose it. For example, “a horse is an animal” is a conceptual truth because anyone who speaks English and knows the meaning of the words horse and animal knows that such a statement must be true; part of the definition of the word horse is “an animal.” In Plato, a conceptual truth is a truth about Forms. In Aristo- tle, a conceptual truth is a matter of describing the essence of a thing. (See essence, Form.)
conscience A sense or feeling about what is right and wrong, usually without argument. (It is like intuition in matters of knowledge.) In Christian moral theory, it is a moral sense instilled in us by God. In Freudian psychology, it is the internalization of the moral lessons taught us as children by our parents and teachers.
consistent Fitting together in an orderly logical way. Two principles are consistent if they do not contradict each other. A philosophy is consistent if none of its principles contradict each other.
constitute To put together, “set up,” or synthesize experience through categories or concepts. First used by Kant, later by Husserl.
contemplation (the life of) According to Aristotle (and other philosophers), the happiest life, the life of thought and philosophy.
contingent (truth) Dependent on the facts; neither logically necessary nor logically impossible. A contingent state of affairs could have been otherwise. One test to see if a state of affairs is contingent is to see if it is conceivable that it could be other than it is. It is contingent, for example, that heavy objects fall toward the earth, since it is easily imaginable what it would be like if they did not. This is so even though, in another sense, we say that it is (physically) necessary that heavy objects fall. The philosophical terms contingent and necessary refer to logical possibility, not to the factual question of whether a statement is true or not.
continuity (spatiotemporal continuity) The uninterrupted identifiability of an object over time in the same location or in a sequence of tangent locations.
contradiction The logical relation of two principles in which the truth of one requires the falsity of the other. A witness’s statement in court contradicts other testimony if both statements cannot be true.
correspondence theory of truth A statement or belief is true if and only if it “corresponds” to “the facts.” Even when restricting our attention to statements of fact, however, this common- sense “theory” gets into trouble as soon as it tries to pick out what corresponds to what. How can we identify a “fact,” for example, apart from the language we use to identify it? And what does it mean to say that a statement “corresponds” to a fact?
cosmogony The study of the origins of the universe in its entirety.
cosmological argument An argument (or set of arguments) that undertakes to “prove” that God exists on the basis of the idea that there must have been a first cause or an ultimate reason for the existence of the universe (the cosmos).
cosmology The study of the universe in its entirety (from the Greek word for “universe”—cosmos).
counterexample An example that contradicts a generalization, such as “all elephants have
tusks.” A counterexample would be an elephant without tusks.
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criterion The test or standard according to which a judgment or an evaluation can be made. For example, a test for a substance being an acid is whether or not it turns litmus paper red. Or a sure mark or standard. In ancient skepticism, a sufficient guarantee of truth.
critical Thinking so as to be mindful of mistakes in reasoning; to be critical is not necessarily to be unpleasant.
cultural relativism The descriptive anthropological thesis that different societies have different moralities. It is important to stress that these moralities must be fundamentally different, not only different in details. Some societies consider an act as stealing while others do not, but a society that does not have a conception of private property may be fundamentally differ- ent from one that does.
Dao The “Way”; in Confucianism, the “way” to be a gentleman, for example, following the rituals; in Daoism, the underlying and ineffable “way” of nature or reality.
datum Latin, literally, “what is given.” (plural, data)
declarative sentence A sentence in which one takes a position, states a fact, asserts a proposition.
deconstruction Initiated by Jacques Derrida, a school of philosophical thought that encourages critical reading “against the grain,” exposing and resisting the text’s binary assumptions (the text’s hierarchy of what is valuable and what is not) and displacing the analytical structure that is based on them.
deduction (deductive argument) A process of reasoning from one principle to another by means of accepted rules of inference. In a deductive argument, a conclusion follows neces- sarily from the premises, so if you are certain of the premises, you can be certain of the conclusion, too.
deism A variation of the Judeo-Christian religion that was extremely popular in the science- minded eighteenth century. Deism holds that God must have existed to create the universe with all its laws (and thereby usually accepts some form of the cosmological argument) but also holds that there is no justification for our belief that God has any special concern for man, any concern for justice, or any of those anthropomorphic attributes assumed when we worship Him, pray to Him, and believe in biblical stories about Him.
democracy That form of government in which policies or, at least, the makers of policy are chosen by popular mandate.
deontology Ethics based on duty (Gk: dein). Kant’s ethic is deontological in that it stresses obe- dience to principle, rather than attention to consequences (including happiness).
determinism The view that every event in the universe is dependent upon other events, which are its causes. On this view, all human actions and decisions, even those that we would nor- mally describe as “free” and “undetermined,” are totally dependent on prior events that cause them.
dharma In Hinduism, righteousness, the way of the good; one’s duties and obligations, based on the role one occupies.
dialectic Argument through dialogue, disagreement, and successive revisions, out of which comes agreement. Alternately, a “logic” developed by Hegel in which different forms or philosophies are arranged according to increasing sophistication and scope. The “logic” is a development from one form, whose inadequacies are demonstrated, to an- other, which correc ts these inadequacies, and so on. Marx borrows this “dialec tic” and gives it a social interpretation. (The “logic” need not be any thing like the form “thesis-antithesis-synthesis.”)
distributive justice The ideal of everyone receiving his or her fair share. For example, concerns over ownership of land, just wages, and fair prices are all matters of distributive justice.
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divine preordination God’s knowledge of and power over all that will happen, including our own future actions.
doubt Lack of certainty; lack of reasons to believe and perhaps having reasons not to believe. It is important to distinguish doubt in this philosophical sense from doubt in the ordinary psy- chological sense. Mere personal uncertainty or distrust is not sufficient; there must be a demonstrable reason for doubt, that is, a reason for not accepting the belief in question.
dual aspect theory The theory (for example, in Spinoza) that mind and body are simply different aspects (or “attributes”) of one and the same substance, thus avoiding the problem of inter- action between substances.
dualism In general, the distinction between mind and body as separate substances, or very dif- ferent kinds of states and events with radically different properties.
duty What one is morally bound to do.
egalitarianism The view that all people are equal in rights and equally deserving of respect.
egoism The thesis that people act for their own interests. Psychological egoism is merely the thesis that people act in their own interests; ethical egoism is the thesis that people ought to act in their own interests.
eliminative materialism The thesis that increasing knowledge of neurology eventually will allow us to give up our “folk psychological” terminology of mental states.
empirical (knowledge) Derived from and to be defended by appeal to experience. Empirical knowledge can only be so derived and so defended (as opposed to a priori knowledge, which need not be).
empirical ego All the characteristics of a person that can be discovered through experience and that distinguish each of us from other persons qualitatively; that which makes each of us a particular man or woman and gives us a particular “character.” Compare transcendental ego.
empiricism The philosophy that demands that all knowledge, except for certain logical truths and principles of mathematics, comes from experience. British empiricism is often used to refer specifically to the three philosophers Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Empiricism is still very much alive, however, and includes Bertrand Russell and a great many philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century who called themselves “logical empiricists” (better known as logical positivists).
emptiness In Buddhism, in Nāgārjuna, being without substance: the proper understanding of being as without substance.
Enlightenment A cultural and philosophical movement in the eighteenth century in Europe de- fined by a new confidence in human reason and individual autonomy. Some of the major figures of this movement were Descartes, the metaphysician d’Holbach, the political phi- losopher Rousseau, and the political reformer-writer Voltaire in France. In Great Britain, En- lightenment philosophers were Locke and Hume; in Germany, Kant.
entitlement A right; for instance, a right to own property.
epiphenomenalism The thesis that mental events are epiphenomena, that is, side effects of vari- ous physical processes in the brain and nervous system but of little importance themselves. The model is a one-way causal model: body states cause changes in the mind, but mental states have no effect in themselves on the body.
epistemology The study of human knowledge, its nature, its sources, and its justification.
equality In political philosophy, the nondiscriminatory treatment of every person, regardless of sex, race, religion, physical or mental abilities, wealth, social status, and so forth.
essence (or an essential property) The necessary or defining characteristics or properties of a thing. The essence of a person is that without which we would not say one is that particular
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person (Fred rather than Mary, for example). In Husserl’s writings, “essence” or “essential intuition” refers to those ideal objects and laws that constitute necessary truths. The term essence is borrowed from Aristotle (and the medieval philosophers) and used in much the same way, except that Husserl’s notion of essence is always tied to “intuition” and consciousness.
ethical absolutism The thesis that there is one and only one correct morality.
ethical egoism The thesis that people ought to act in their own interests.
ethical relativism The thesis that different moralities should be considered equally correct even if they directly contradict each other. A morality is “correct,” according to this thesis, merely if it is correct according to the particular society that accepts it.
ethics A system of general moral principles and a conception of morality and its foundation. Or, the study of moral principles.
eudaimonia Aristotle’s word for “happiness,” or, more literally, “living well.”
existentialism A modern movement in philosophy that puts great emphasis on individual choice and the voluntary acceptance (or creation) of one’s values. In Sartre’s terms, existentialism is the philosophy that teaches that “man’s existence precedes his essence.” That is, people have no given self-identity; they have to choose their identities and work for them through their actions. (Neglect and omission, however, are also actions. One can be a certain type of person just by not bothering to perform particular actions.)
explanation An account—usually a causal account—of something; it is opposed to justification, which also defends. One can, for example, explain one’s action (say, by claiming that one was drunk) without thereby justifying it, that is, showing it to be right. Hume ultimately explains our knowledge but does not justify it.
extended Having spatial dimensions. Philosophers (for example, Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza) often define bodies as “extended” and minds and ideas as “unextended.”
extended (substance) Physical matter in space and time, material objects.
facticity Sartre’s term (borrowed from Heidegger) for the totality of facts that are true of a person at any given time.
faith In the popular sense, believing in something for which you have inadequate evidence or little good reason. In theology, faith usually refers to the trust that a believer should have in God’s ultimate grace and fairness. Sometimes, faith is defended as a rational belief in God (for example, in Kant). More often, faith is defended against rationality (as in Kierkegaard).
fallacy An apparently persuasive argument that is really an error in reasoning; an unsound or in- valid argument.
fascism The view that the best government is the strongest and that the government has the right—and perhaps the duty—to control the lives of every citizen for the sake of the most efficient society.
fatalism The thesis that certain events (or perhaps all events) are going to happen inevitably, regardless of what efforts we take to prevent them.
first principles Those axioms and assumptions from which a philosophy begins. They must be solid and indisputable principles; they need not be those principles that one happens to believe first.
Form (in Plato) An independently existing entity in the world of Being, which determines the nature of the particular things of this world that “participate” in it. In Aristotle, forms have no independent existence.
formal logic A branch of logic that is concerned with the principles of reasoning as such, in which the relationships between symbols are studied, not their interpretation.
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Four Noble Truths Among the most important teachings of the Buddha: “All is suffering (and transitory),” the need to eliminate desire, the way to eliminate desire, and the right path to the good.
freedom The idea that a human decision or action is a person’s own responsibility and that praise and blame may be appropriately ascribed. The most extreme interpretation of freedom is the absence of any causes or determinations. Thus an indeterminist would say that an event was free if it had no causes; a libertarian would say that a human act was free if it was only self-caused, but not determined by anything else (including a person’s character). Certain determinists, however (“soft determinists”), would say that an act is free if only it is “in character” and based upon a person’s desire and personality. Most generally, we say that a person’s act was free if we would say that he or she could have done otherwise, whether or not it was the result of a conscious decision and whether or not certain causes may have been involved. (See also liberty.)
freedom of the will The condition in which actions are undetermined by external causes, includ- ing the power of God (although how God can leave us this “indeterminacy” in spite of God’s power and knowledge over us is and must be incomprehensible to us).
free will Among philosophers, a somewhat antiquated expression (as in “he did it of his own free will”), which means that a person is capable of making decisions that are not determined by antecedent conditions. Of course, there may be antecedent considerations, such as what a person wants or what a person believes, but free will means that such considerations never determine a person’s decision. At most they “enter into the decision.”
functionalism The view that the mind is the product of a pattern in the brain, as in a computer, rather than a product of the matter of the brain as such.
generalization Usually, a proposition about all of a group or set of things on the basis of a limited acquaintance with some of its members. In logic, however, a generalization may be universal (“all x’s are y’s”) or existential (“there are some x’s that are y’s”).
generalization from experience (or inductive generalization) Inference from observation, ex- perience, and experiment to a generalization about all members of a certain class. For ex- ample, in a laboratory, a researcher finds that certain experiments on tobacco plants always have the same result. He or she generalizes, through induction, from experimental observa- tions to a claim (or hypothesis) about all tobacco plants. But notice that this generalization is never certain (like the generalization in geometry from a proof of a theorem about this tri- angle to a theorem about all triangles). It may always turn out that there was a fluke in the experiment or that the experimenter chose a peculiar sample of plants.
God In traditional Judeo-Christian theology, the being who created the universe and exists inde- pendently of it, who is all-powerful, all-knowing, everywhere at once, and concerned with justice and the ultimate welfare of humankind. When spelled with a small “g,” the word refers to any supernatural being worthy of worship or, at least, extraordinary respect.
Golden Rule “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
government The instrument of authority; the body that rules, passes and enforces laws, and so forth.
happiness The achievement of the good life. In Aristotle, the name we all agree to give to the good life, whatever it is. Happiness, in this sense, must not be confused with pleasure, which is but one (among many) concerns and conceptions of the good life.
happiness calculus (also felicity calculus) Bentham’s technique for quantifying and adding up pleasures and pains as a way of deciding what to do.
hedonism The conception of the good life that takes pleasure to be the ultimate good. Hedo- nism is the premise of most forms of utilitarianism. It is often the premise—although some- times a consequence—of ethical egoism. (These two are not the same: hedonism refers to the end; egoism refers to whose ends.)
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Heisenberg uncertainty principle An important principle of recent physics that demonstrates that we cannot know both the position and the momentum of certain subatomic particles, for in our attempts to know one, we make it impossible to know the other. This principle has been used to attack the very idea of “determinism” in its classical formulations, for determin- ism requires the “certainty” of possible prediction that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle rejects.
hermeneutics The discipline of interpretation of texts. Broadly conceived (as by Heidegger and Gadamer), it is the “uncovering” of meanings in everyday life, the attempt to understand the signs and symbols of one’s culture and tradition in juxtaposition with other cultures and traditions.
historicism A philosophy that localizes truth and different views of reality to particular times, places, and peoples in history. It is generally linked to a very strong relativist thesis as well, that there is no truth apart from these various historical commitments.
human rights Those rights that are considered to be universal, “unalienable,” and common to every person regardless of where or when he or she lives. For example, freedom from torture and degradation would be a human right.
Hume’s fork Hume’s insistence that every belief be justified either as a “relation between ideas” or as a “matter of fact.”
hypothesis A provisional conclusion, accepted as most probable in the light of the known facts or tentatively adopted as a basis for analysis.
hypothetical imperative In Kant, a command that is conditional, depending upon particular aims or inclinations. For example, “if you want to be a doctor, then go to medical school.” According to Kant, all other philosophers (Aristotle, Hume, Rousseau) took morality to be a hypothetical imperative. He does not.
idea In epistemology, almost any mental phenomenon (not typically, as in Plato, with existence independent of individual minds). The terminology varies slightly; Locke uses idea to refer to virtually any “mental content”; Hume reserves idea for those mental atoms that are derived by the mind from impressions. In Plato, a Form.
idealism The metaphysical view that only minds and their ideas exist.
Identity of Indiscernibles A principle of Leibniz’s philosophy according to which no two things can possibly have all the same properties or be absolutely identical in all respects.
identity theory The thesis that the mind and brain are ontologically one and the same or, more accurately, that mental states and events are in fact certain brain and nervous system pro- cesses. The theory is usually presented as a form of materialism, but it is important to em- phasize that unlike many materialistic theories, it does not deny the existence of mental events. It denies only that they have independent existence. Mental events are nothing other than certain bodily events.
illusion A false belief motivated by intense wishes. According to Marx, religion is an illusion that is intended to compensate for an intolerable social situation. According to Freud, religion is an illusion that attempts to hold onto our childhood desires for fatherly protection and security.
immaterialism The metaphysical view that accepts the existence of nonspatial, nonsensory enti- ties, such as numbers, minds, and ideas. The weak version asserts merely that there are such entities. The strong version asserts that there are only such entities (that is, there are no physical objects).
immediate For certain and without need for argument.
immoralist A person who rejects the ultimate claims of morality. An immoralist need not actually break the rules of morality; he or she does not consider them absolute rules and claims that other considerations (even personal considerations) may override them.
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immortality The idea that the soul survives death (and, in some belief systems, precedes birth).
imperative A command.
implication One statement logically follows from another. Statements imply one another: We infer one from the other.
impression Hume’s word for sensations or sense-data, that which is given to the mind through the senses.
inclination Kant’s term for all personal considerations: desires, feelings, emotions, attitudes, moods, and so on.
incoherent Not fitting together in an orderly or logically agreeable fashion. Using fancy jargon that has no precise meaning may be a source of incoherence. So is a mere list of random beliefs, without any order or logic to hold them together. (They may even contradict each other.) An incoherent philosophy may be insightful and true in parts, but because it never coheres into a single system, it may well appear to be nonsense or simply a jumble of words and phrases. In other cases, an incoherent philosophy may be one that makes no sense, whose terms are utter gibberish or whose principles are mere ramblings without intelligible connection or interpretation. (Opposite of coherent.)
inconsistent Not compatible; contradictory. One may also say that a person’s actions are incon- sistent with his or her principles. People as well as other principles can be inconsistent with a principle.
incorrigibility Impossible to correct; cannot be mistaken. It has long been argued that our claims about our own mental states are incorrigible—we cannot be mistaken about them.
indeterminism The thesis that at least some events in the universe are not determined, are not caused by antecedent conditions, and may not be predictable.
induction; inductive reasoning; inductive generalization Induction is the process of inferring general conclusions (for example, “all swans are white”) from a sufficiently large sample of particular observations (“this swan is white, that swan is white, and that one, and that one, and that one. . . .”). It is usually contrasted with deduction, in that, while deductive reasoning guarantees that the conclusion shall be as certain as the premises, induction never gives us a conclusion as certain as the premises. Its conclusions are, at most, merely probable. (“There may always be some black swan somewhere,” and there are, in Western Australia.) (See A Brief Introduction to Logic, pp. 28–31.)
inductive argument A process of reasoning in which the characteristics of an entire class or set of things is inferred on the basis of an acquaintance with some of its members. In an induc- tive argument, although the conclusion is supported by the premises, it does not follow necessarily from the premises, and its truth is not guaranteed by them.
ineffable Indescribable.
inference Reasoning from one set of principles to another, as in an argument. Deductive infer- ence is but a single kind of inference.
inference-ticket Ryle’s term for referring to the proper function of a mental state: talk, as a de- scription of a pattern of behavior and, therefore, as an “inference-ticket” that allows us to infer what a person will do in the future. (To say “George wants an olive” is to give us an in- ference-ticket regarding his future behavior around olives.)
infinite regress A sequence going back endlessly. For example, “A is caused by B, and B by C, and C by D . . . and so on to infinity.” Aristotle believed such a regress to be an intellectual absurdity.
innate ideas Literally, ideas that are “born into the mind”; knowledge that is “programmed” into us from birth and need not be learned. Experience may be necessary to “trigger off“ such ideas, but they are already “in” all of us. In Plato, the theory of innate ideas is part of a
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general theory of the immortality of the soul. Locke’s famous attack on such ideas took them to be literally ideas that all men share from birth. The rationalist philosophers he was suppos- edly attacking, however, held a much more sophisticated notion; they did not believe that ideas are literally “born into us,” but they did believe that we are born with certain “innate” capacities and dispositions, which will develop with proper education (and mental health). And, most important, these ideas can be defended or justified without appeal to any par- ticular experiences or experiments. This is the claim that Locke ultimately rejected.
intentionality The “aboutness” of mental states (and other intentional states). A belief is always about something. A desire is always for something. An emotion is directed at someone or some situation. The importance of this concept in phenomenology is that it undercuts the metaphor of mental “contents” (as in a theater, an image explicitly used by Hume, for ex- ample). The concept was used by Husserl’s teacher, Franz Brentano, who borrowed it from some medieval philosophers before Husserl used it and made it famous. McGinn, on the other hand, treats intentionality as the content of consciousness.
intuition Immediate knowledge of the truth without the aid of any reasoning and without appeal to experience. Intuition, as rational intuition (there are other kinds), is a central concern of the rationalist philosophers, who consider intuition one of the main functions of reason. But be- cause of its very nature, intuition cannot be argued for, nor can it be defended by experi- ence. Accordingly, many philosophers, especially empiricists, reject the notion of intuition and accept it only when absolutely unavoidable. In the twentieth century, Edmund Husserl defended the appeal to intuition in his phenomenology.
invalid Not correctly following agreed-upon rules of inference in an argument. Always applied to arguments, not to statements. (Opposite of valid.)
justice In the general sense, the virtues of an ideal society. In the more particular sense, the bal- ance of public interest and individual rights, the fair sharing of the available goods of society, the proper punishment of criminals, and the fair restitution to victims of crime and misfor- tune within society.
justification An attempt to defend a position or an act, to show that it is correct (or at least rea- sonable). (Compare with explanation.)
karma In Hinduism, the tendency of any course of action to be repeated; the limitation of one’s free will by one’s own habits and dispositions (even into the next life).
Krishna In Hinduism, an avatar, God incarnate.
law An objective rule that is binding on individuals whether they personally accept it or not. Con- trasted with maxim.
law of contradiction That basic rule of logic that demands that a sentence and its denial cannot both be true. “Not (P and not P).” This law is used by many philosophers (Kant, Leibniz, and Hume, for example) as a criterion for analyticity or analytic truth.
law of the excluded middle That rule of logic that says that either a sentence or its denial must be true: “Either P or not P.” In formal logic, this law, together with the law of contradiction, forms the basis of a great many arguments (for example, that form of argument called reductio ad absurdum, in which the consequences of one premise are shown to be absurd, and therefore its denial is accepted). Many logicians are now reconsidering this law, for it is becoming evident that not all sentences are either true or false. For example, consider Rus- sell’s famous example, “the King of France is bald” (when there is no king of France); is that true or false? It surely is not true, but neither can it be false, for there is no king of France who is not bald. Or what of, “green ideas sleep furiously”? Many philosophers would say that these are neither true nor false, thus rejecting the law of the excluded middle.
legitimacy The right to have authority; sanctioned power (for example, through the grace of God, by means of legal succession, by appeal to justice, or to the general consent of the people governed).
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liberty (political freedom) The ability to act without restraint or threat of punishment. For ex- ample, the ability to travel between states without a passport, the ability to speak one’s opinions without prosecution, or the ability to work for or choose one’s profession or career. This ability, however, is not mere physical or mental ability; one may have the liberty to travel or to try to become a doctor without having the means to do so. It is also important to distin- guish this political sense of liberty or freedom from the metaphysical or causal sense dis- cussed previously. Whether our acts are really free in that sense must be distinguished from the question of whether we are constrained or free to act in this political sense. The first refers to the causes of human behavior; the second refers only to the existence of legislation and political forces constraining our behavior.
logic The study of the rules of valid inference and “rational argument.” In general, a sense of order.
logical truth A sentence that can be shown to be true by virtue of its logical form alone (by virtue of the connectives, “and,” “or,” and so forth).
masculinist From the point of view of men’s interests and advantage, as opposed to those of women.
master morality In Nietzsche, a morality that takes personal self-realization as primary, so-called because it was the morality of the “masters” in the slave states of the ancient world (includ- ing Greece).
materialism The metaphysical view that only physical matter and its properties exist. Such intan- gible entities as numbers, minds, and ideas are really properties of physical bodies. To talk about energy, for example, is, in a way, to talk about physical potential; to talk about minds is, as a kind of shorthand, to talk about behavior; to talk about ideas is, in a misleading way, to talk about the various structures and interrelationships between objects. Numbers have no exis- tence of their own but only represent sets of sets of objects (the set of all sets of eight things is the number eight, for example). Materialism has always been a powerful worldview in modern scientific culture. It is also the most common view among the pre-Socratic philosophers.
matter of fact (in Hume) An empirical claim, to be confirmed or falsified through experience.
maxim In Kant, a personal rule or intention. Contrasted with law.
mean (between the extremes) In Aristotle, the middle course, not too much, not too little. Courage, for example, is a mean because a person with courage is neither too timid to fight nor so lacking in fear that he or she is rash or reckless in the face of danger.
metaphysics Most simply, the study of the most basic (or “first”) principles. Traditionally, the study of ultimate reality, or “Being as such.” Popularly, any kind of very abstract or obscure thinking. Most philosophers today would define metaphysics as the study of the most general concepts of science and human life, for example, reality, existence, freedom, God, soul, action, mind. In general, we can divide metaphysics among ontology, cosmology, and an ill-defined set of problems concerning God and the immortality of the human soul. (See ontology, cosmology.)
method (sometimes, methodology) An approach and strategy for resolving philosophical problems. For example, the appeal to experience, the appeal to divine revelation, the insis- tence upon mathematical logic, confidence in reason, or trust in authority—all these are as- pects of philosophical methodology.
method of doubt (or methodological doubt) Descartes’s technique for discovering those prin- ciples of which we can be “perfectly certain,” namely, doubt everything, until you discover those principles that cannot be doubted.
modes (in Spinoza) Inessential properties or modifications of attributes.
monad (in Leibniz) The simple immaterial substances that are the ultimate constituents of all reality. God, the one uncreated monad, created all the others as self-enclosed (“window- less”), predetermined entities.
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monism The metaphysical view that there is ultimately only one substance, that all reality is one. Less strictly, it may be applied to philosophers who believe in only one kind of substance.
monotheism Belief in one God.
morality In general, the rules for right action and prohibitions against wrong acts. Sometimes morality is the single set of absolute rules and prohibitions that are valid for all men at all times and all societies. More loosely, a morality can be any set of ultimate principles, and there may be any number of moralities in different societies.
mysticism The belief that one can come to grasp certain fundamental religious truths (the exis- tence of God, the oneness of the universe) through direct experience, but of a very special kind, different from ordinary understanding and often at odds with reason.
natural law The moral law as it is revealed through the way that nature (particularly our human nature) has been constructed. St. Thomas Aquinas, among others, defends this idea, arguing that God has prescribed rules for our conduct in the very way he designed us.
naturalism The belief that ultimate reality is a natural property.
necessary (truth) Cannot be otherwise and cannot be imagined to be otherwise. In philosophy, it is not enough that something be “necessary” according to physical laws (for example, the law of gravity) or “necessary” according to custom or habit (for example, the “necessity” of laws against rape or the felt necessity of having a cigarette after dinner). Necessary allows for not even imaginary counterexamples; hence it is a necessary truth that two plus two equals four. Not only do we believe thus with certainty and find ourselves incapable of intelligibly doubting it, but we cannot even suggest what it would be for it to be false, no matter how wild our imaginations.
necessary and sufficient conditions A is necessary and sufficient for B when A is both logically required and enough to guarantee B (“A if and only if B”).
necessity In accordance with a necessary truth.
nihility “The Nothing,” “nothingness.”
obligation Bound by duty. For example, “you have an obligation to keep your promises.”
omnipotent All powerful, usually said of God.
omnipresent Everywhere at once, usually said of God.
omniscient All knowing, usually said of God.
ontological argument An argument (or set of arguments) that tries to “prove” the existence of God from the very concept of “God.” For example, “God,” by definition, is that being with all possible perfection; existence is a perfection; therefore, God exists.
ontology The study of being. That is, that part of metaphysics that asks such questions as, What is there? What is it for something to exist? What is an individual thing? How do things inter- act? Traditionally, these questions were formulated as questions about substance. Today, much of ontology is part of logic and linguistics and is the study of the concepts we use to discuss such matters. Sometimes ontology is used as a synonym for metaphysics, but usually the latter is the broader discipline.
ought The term most often used to express moral duty or obligation. Sometimes should is used, but this word is ambiguously between ought and merely preferable. Sometimes must or have to is used, but this word is ambiguously between ought to and forced to. In Hume’s ethics (and in many others as well), ought is contrasted with is as the hallmark of value (especially moral) judgment.
pantheism The belief that God is identical to the universe as a whole, everything is divine, or that God is in everything. Spinoza, for example, was a pantheist. Hinduism is a form of pantheism in that it includes a conception of the divine in all things, rather than as a separate Creator.
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paradox A self-contradictory conclusion drawn from seemingly acceptable premises. For ex- ample, suppose you try to help all and only those people who do not help themselves. That sounds reasonable enough. But then, do you help yourself? If you do help everyone, then you would also help yourself. But if you do not help yourself, then you are not helping all who do not help themselves. This is a paradox.
parallelism The thesis that mental events and bodily events parallel each other and occur in perfect coordination but do not interact.
participation Plato’s obscure and unexplained relationship between the things of this world and the Forms of which they are manifestations. He tells us that individual things “participate” in their Forms.
perception A kind of knowledge, sense experience.
phenomenology A contemporary European philosophy, founded by the German-Czech philos- opher Edmund Husserl, that begins with a “pure description of consciousness.” Originally developed as an answer to certain questions of necessary truth in the foundations of arith- metic, it was later expanded to answer more general philosophical questions and, in the hands of its later practitioners, it became a “philosophy of man” as well as a theory of knowledge.
philosophical zombie A being that is physically and behaviorally just like us, but lacking in
consciousness.
pluralism The metaphysical view that there are many distinct substances in the universe and, perhaps, many different kinds of substances as well.
polytheism Belief in many gods.
pragmatic theory of truth A statement or belief that is true if and only if it “works,” that is, if it allows us to predict certain results and function effectively in everyday life, and if it encour- ages further inquiry and helps us lead better lives.
pragmatism A distinctly American philosophical movement founded by Charles Sanders Peirce at the turn of the twentieth century and popularized by William James and John Dewey. Its central thesis is obvious in its name, that truth and value are always to be determined by reference to practical (pragmatic) considerations. Only those metaphysical distinctions that make some difference in practice are worth considering, and the only ultimate defense of any belief is that “it works.”
predestination The thesis (usually in a theological context) that every event is destined to happen (as in fatalism) whatever efforts we make to prevent it. The usual version is that God knows and perhaps causes all things to happen, and therefore everything must happen pre- cisely as He knows (and possibly causes) it to happen.
predicate That which is asserted or denied of a thing, which refers to a property of things. Some familiar predicates would be “is red,” “is an animal.”
prediction To say that some event will happen before it happens. Determinism normally includes the thesis that if we know enough about the antecedent conditions of an event, we can always predict that it will occur. But prediction does not require determinism. One may predict the outcome of some state of affairs on the basis of statistical probabilities without knowing any antecedent conditions and perhaps even without assuming that there are any such conditions (in quantum physics, for example). It is also possible that a person may predict the future on the basis of lucky guesses or ESP, again without necessarily accepting determinism.
preestablished harmony The belief that the order of the universe is prearranged by God. In Leibniz, this view allows him an alternative to Newton’s theory of causal relationships, namely, that the coordination between our ideas and the physical events of the world and our bodies was set up by God in perfect order.
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premise The principle or one of the principles upon which an argument is based. The starting point of an argument.
presupposition A principle that is assumed as a precondition for whatever else one believes, which itself may remain unexamined and uncriticized throughout the argument. For exam- ple, a lawyer presupposes that the court aims at justice and has some idea what is just. It is the philosopher, not the lawyer, who challenges such claims.
primary qualities In Locke, those properties (“qualities”) that inhere in the object.
prime mover (in Aristotle) The “cause-of-itself,” the first cause, which (Who) initiates all changes but is not itself (Himself) affected by anything prior. Aristotle believes there must be a prime mover if we are to avoid an infinite regress, which he considers an absurdity. Aristotle also refers to the prime mover as “God,” and medieval philosophers (for example, St. Thomas Aquinas) developed these views into Christian theology.
principle of induction The belief that the laws of nature will continue to hold in the future as they have in the past. (Crudely, “the future will be like the past.”)
Principle of Sufficient Reason (in Leibniz) The insistence that all events must have a justification and that ultimately all events must be justified by God’s reasons. The principle is sometimes invoked to assert that everything must have some explanation, whether or not God is in- volved. (For example, scientists use such a principle in their work, as was shown in Chapter 1.)
principle of universal causation The belief that every event has its cause (or causes). In scientific circles, it is usually added, “its sufficient natural cause,” in order to eliminate the possibility of miracles and divine intervention (which are allowed in Leibniz’s similar but broader Prin- ciple of Sufficient Reason).
principle of utility In Bentham, the principle that one ought to do what gives the greatest plea- sure to the greatest number of people.
privacy The seeming inaccessibility of mental states and events to anyone other than the person who “has” them.
private language argument Wittgenstein’s argument that even if there were such “private ob- jects” as mental states and events, it would be impossible for us to talk about them and im- possible for us to identify them, even in our own case.
privileged access The technical term used by philosophers to refer to the curious fact that a person usually (if not always) can immediately know, simply by paying attention, what is going on in his own mind, while other people can find out what is going on—if they can at all—only by watching the person’s behavior, listening to what he or she says, or asking (and hoping they get a truthful answer). It is important to distinguish privileged access from incorrigibility. The first means that a person knows directly what is “in his mind” without having to observe his behavior; the second means that he knows for certain and beyond the possibility of error.
probable Likely or supported by the evidence (but not conclusively). The empiricist’s middle step between the extremities of certainty and doubt. (Probability is the measure of how probable something is.)
problem of evil The dilemma that emerges from trying to reconcile the belief that God is om- nipotent, omniscient, and just with the suffering and evil in the world.
proof In a deductive argument, a proof is a sequence of steps, each according to an acceptable rule of inference, to the conclusion to be proved.
property Properties are generally distinguished from the substances in which they “inhere” by pointing to the fact that a property cannot exist without being a property of something; for example, there can be any number of red things but no redness that exists independently. (Many philosophers have challenged this idea, but this problem, which is called the “prob- lem of universals,” is not discussed in this introductory volume.)
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proposition An assertion that is either true or false.
psychological egoism The thesis that people always act for their own self-interest, even when it seems as if they are acting for other people’s benefit (for example, in giving to charity, the egoist would say, a person is simply making himself or herself feel self-righteous).
purposiveness without a purpose (Kant) The idea that the elements of a beautiful object seem to cohere as if toward a purpose, but we can find no definite purpose. For example, a sunset seems to us a unified aesthetic phenomenon, but there obviously is no “purpose” to a sunset.
quality In Locke (and other authors), a property.
rational In accordance with the rules of effective thought: coherence, consistency, practicability, simplicity, comprehensiveness, looking at the evidence and weighing it carefully, not jump- ing to conclusions, and so forth. Rationality may not guarantee truth; all the evidence and everything we believe may point to one conclusion, while later generations, who know things that we do not, may see that our conclusion was incorrect. Yet it would still be, for us, the rational conclusion. Rationality points to the manner of thinking, rather than its ultimate con- clusions. Philosophically, the stress on rationality takes the emphasis off reality and places it on our manner of philosophizing.
rationalism The philosophy that is characterized by its confidence in reason, and intuition in particular, to know reality independently of experience. (See reason and intuition.) Continen- tal rationalism is usually reserved for three European philosophers: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz.
rationality Acting in the best possible way; according to reason. Sometimes, rationality means simply doing what is best under the circumstances, without insisting that there is only one rational way of acting. In other words, rationality is considered relative to particular interests and circumstances. In Kant’s philosophy, however, rationality refers to the faculty that allows us to act in the correct way, without reference to particular interests and circumstances.
realism The thesis that reality exists in itself and is independent of our consciousness of it.
reason The ability to think abstractly, to form arguments and make inferences. Sometimes re- ferred to as a “faculty” of the human mind (a leftover from eighteenth-century philosophy). In rationalism, the term describes the faculty that allows us to know reality, through intuition. In empiricism, simply the ability to recognize certain principles that are “relations of ideas,” for example, trivial truths (“a cat is an animal”) and, more complicated, principles of arithme- tic and geometry. Empiricists deny that reason allows us special insight into reality, however; it tells us only relationships between ideas. In metaphysics, however, reason often has a more controversial meaning, namely, the human ability to go beyond experience to determine, through thought alone, what reality is really like.
reasons Explanations, justifications, evidence, or some other basis for accepting a proposition.
reductio ad absurdum A form of argument in which one refutes a statement by showing that it leads to self-contradiction or an otherwise intolerable conclusion.
reflection To think about something, to “put it in perspective.” We often do so with our beliefs and emotions. For example, “This morning I was furious at you, but after reflecting on it at lunch, I decided that it was nothing to be angry about.” One may say that philosophy is re- flection about life and knowledge in general.
relations of ideas In empiricism, knowledge that is restricted to the logical and conceptual con- nections between ideas, not to the correspondence of those ideas to experience or to reality. Such knowledge can therefore be demonstrated without appeal to experience. Arith- metic and geometry were taken to be paradigmatic examples of relations of ideas.
relativism The thesis that there is no single correct view of reality, no single truth. Relativists often talk about the possibility of “different conceptual frameworks,” “alternative lifestyles,”
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and various “forms of consciousness.” They are opposed, often violently, to realists and ab- solutists. Also, the thesis that morals are relative to particular societies, particular interests, particular circumstances, or particular individuals. (See cultural relativism, ethical relativism.)
resemblance Having the same features. All people resemble each other (or, at least, most do) in having one and only one head; you resemble yourself five years ago in (perhaps) having the same hair texture, the same color eyes, the same fear of spiders, and the same skill at chess.
responsibility Answerability or accountability for some act or event presumed to be within a person’s control.
retributive justice “Getting even” or “an eye for an eye.”
retrodiction To say, on the basis of certain present evidence, what must have happened in the past. For example, the astronomer who looks at the present course of a comet can retrodict certain facts about its history. For the determinist, retrodiction is as important to his or her thesis as prediction.
rhetoric The persuasive use of language to convince other people to accept your beliefs.
rights Demands that a member of society is entitled to make upon his or her society. Everyone, for example, has a right to police protection. Some people, by virtue of their position, have special rights; for example, members of Congress have the right to send mail to their con- stituents without paying postage.
rule of inference A generally accepted principle according to which one may infer one state- ment from another; those rules of logic according to which validity is defined. All such rules are analytic, but there is considerable disagreement about whether all are so by virtue of their own logical form or whether some are so because they are derived from other, more basic rules. There is also the following question: Given that these rules define correct logical form, how is it possible to say that they have correct logical form?
secondary qualities In Locke, those properties (“qualities”) that are caused in us by objects, but do not inhere in the objects themselves (for example, color).
self-consciousness Being aware of oneself, whether “as others see you” (looking in a mirror or “watching yourself play a role” at a party) or just “looking into yourself “ (as when you reflect on your goals in life or wonder, in a moment of philosophical perversity, whether you really exist or not.) Self-consciousness requires having some concept of your “self.” Accordingly, it is logically tied to questions of self-identity.
self-contradictory A contradiction within one and the same statement or set of statements. What I say may contradict what you say; but what I say may also contradict something else that I said, in which case I am being self-contradictory. Moreover, in a few strange cases, my own statement may be self-contradictory; for example, “I do not exist.”
self-evident Obvious without proof or argument; for Descartes, a “clear and distinct idea,” about which there could be no doubt, and it is obvious that there could be no doubt.
self-identity The way you characterize yourself, either in general (as a human being, as a man or as a woman, as a creature before God, or as one among many animals) or in particular (as the person who can run the fastest mile, as an all-“C” student, or as the worst-dressed slob in your class). Self-identity, on this characterization, requires self-consciousness. The self- identity of a person, in other words, is not merely the same as the identity of a “thing,” for example, the identity of a human body.
selfishness Acting in one’s own interest to the exclusion of others’ interests. The word has a nasty connotation and so should be separated from the more neutral claims of the psychological egoist. To say that a person is acting selfishly is to condemn him or her and say that the action is blameworthy. It is possible to act for one’s own interests, however, and not be selfish, for one may also act for the benefit of others. A selfish act is to the exclusion of other people’s interests; an act may be both in one’s own interests and in the interests of others, however.
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semantics The meanings of a sentence and its various components. Also, the study of those meanings. (So, we can talk about the semantics of a sentence, and we can talk about doing semantics.) “Merely semantic” is a nasty way of referring to conceptual truths, analytic sen- tences that are true just by virtue of meanings.
semantic theory of truth A formal theory, best known from the work of Alfred Tarski, that de- fines “true” in terms of a technical notion of satisfaction. According to the theory, every sentence in the language is either satisfied or not by a distinct class of individuals. This theory is adequate, however, only for artificially constructed languages. Generalizing the theory to natural language (for example, American English), we can say that the theory suggests that we (but not each of us personally) set up the rules according to which our sentences do or do not “correspond with the facts” of the world.
sensation The experimental result of the stimulation of a sense organ, for example, seeing red, hearing a ringing noise, smelling something burning. The simplest of mental phenomena.
sense-data That which is given to the senses, prior to any reasoning or organization on our part.
sentiment Feeling, emotion, particularly moral feelings (as in Hume, Rousseau).
skepticism A philosophical belief that knowledge is not possible, that doubt will not be over- come by any valid arguments. A philosopher who holds this belief is called a skeptic. Again, skepticism is not mere personal doubt; it requires systematic doubt with reasons for that doubt.
slave morality In Nietzsche’s moral philosophy, a morality that takes duties and obligations as primary, so called because it was the morality of the slaves who were not allowed to aspire any higher than mere efficiency and personal comfort.
social contract An agreement, tacit or explicit, that all members of society shall abide by the laws of the state in order to maximize the public interest and ensure cooperation among themselves. Such a contract need never have actually been signed in history; what is impor- tant is that every member of a society, by choosing to remain in that society, implicitly makes such an agreement.
society A group of people with common historical and cultural ties, usually but not always, mem- bers of the same state and ruled by the same government.
soft determinism A thesis that accepts determinism but claims that certain kinds of causes, namely, a person’s character, still allow us to call his or her actions “free.” Soft determinists are therefore compatibilists, for they believe in both freedom and determinism.
sophists Ancient Greek philosophers and teachers who believed that no reality exists except for what we take to be reality.
sound Refers to an argument whose premises are true and that is valid.
sovereign Independent. A sovereign state is one that is subject to the laws of no other state. A sovereign is a person (for example, a king) who is not subject or answerable to the com- mands of anyone else. A people are sovereign when their wishes are ultimate in the same way and not subject to commands by anyone else or any government. (To say that a people is sovereign is not to say that the will of any individual or group is sovereign within it.)
Spenta Mainyush The good spirit of Zoroastrianism.
state The center of authority in a society, for example, the largest political unit in a society. Usu- ally a state is a nation, for example, the United States or Germany. Usually, but not always, coextensive with a society and usually, but not always, distinguished by a single form of government and a single government (for example, the U.S. federal government).
subjective idealism The view that only ideas and mind exist and that there are no substances, matter, or material objects. In particular, the philosophy of Bishop Berkeley.
subjective truth In Kierkegaard, the “truth” of strong feelings and commitment.
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substance A “unit” of existence, a being; something that “stands by itself”; the essential reality of a thing or things that underlies the various properties and changes of properties. Its most common definitions: “that which is independent and can exist by itself” and “the essence of a thing which does not and cannot change.” In traditional metaphysics, substance is the same as “ultimate reality,” and the study of substance is that branch of metaphysics that studies reality, namely, ontology. In Descartes, a thing that so exists that it needs no other thing in order to exist (God). Created substances need only the occurrence of God to exist. (See essence, ontology.)
sufficient cause Capable of bringing something about by itself (for example, four healthy people are sufficient to push a Volkswagen up a hill).
Sufism Islamic mysticism.
syllogism A three-line deductive argument; the best-known examples are those arguments of this form:
All P’s are Q’s. (Major premise)
S is a P. (Minor premise)
Therefore S is a Q. (Conclusion)
The major premise asserts something about the predicate of the conclusion (in this case, Q). The minor premise asserts something about the subject of the conclusion (in this case, S).
sympathy Fellow feeling; a felt concern for other people’s welfare. In the ethics of Hume and Rousseau, the necessary and universal sentiment without which morals—and society— would be impossible.
synonym “Meaning the same.” Two words are synonymous if they are interchangeable in a sen- tence without losing the meaning of the sentence. For example, the words criminal and felon are synonyms in most contexts. The test of a supposedly conceptual truth is to replace cer- tain words with synonyms and then see if its denial yields a self-contradiction. In other words, substituting synonyms turns a conceptual truth into an analytic truth. For example, “ferns are plants”; substituting for fern its synonym (or, in this case, also its definition) “a primitive plant that bears spores, etc.” we have “a plant is a plant,” whose denial is a contradiction (“a plant is not a plant”) and thus is analytic.
synthetic (statement) A noncontradictory proposition in which the predicate is not entailed by the subject, for example, “horses are generally obstinate.” (Synthetic is opposed, in this sense, to analytic.) A synthetic sentence cannot be shown to be true by appeal to the logical form or the meanings of the component words. Kant defined a synthetic sentence as one that “adds an idea to the subject which is not already contained in it.” For example, “a horse is the source of a large income for some people” is a strictly synthetic sentence. No appeal to the meaning of horse will help you find out whether it is true or not, and its denial surely does not result in self-contradiction. But, according to Kant, it must not be concluded that all synthetic sentences can be shown to be true solely by appeal to experience. Some, he claimed, are known a priori.
synthetic a priori knowledge Knowledge that is necessary and known independently of experi- ence (and thus a priori), but that does not derive its truth from the logic or meaning of sen- tences (thus synthetic). This is the focal concept of Kant’s philosophy.
system An orderly formulation of principles (together with reasons, implications, evidence, methods, and presuppositions) that is comprehensive, consistent, and coherent and in which the various principles are interconnected as tightly as possible by logical implications.
tabula rasa In Locke’s philosophy, the “blank tablet” metaphor of the mind, in opposition to the doctrine that there are innate ideas. In other words, the mind is a “blank” at birth, and every- thing we know must be “stamped in” through experience.
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tautology A trivial truth that is true by virtue of logical form alone and tells us nothing about the world. (Popularly, a bit of repetitive nonsense, for example, “a rose is a rose is a rose.” Techni- cally (in logic), a sentence that can be shown to be true no matter what the truth or falsity of its component parts.)
teleological argument An argument that attempts to “prove” that God exists because of the intricacy and “design” of nature. It is sometimes called the “argument from design,” since the basis of the argument is that since the universe is evidently designed, it must have a de- signer. The analogy most often used is our inference from finding a complex mechanism on the beach (for example, a watch) that some intelligent being must have created it.
teleology (teleological) The belief that every phenomenon has a purpose, end, or goal (from the Greek telos, meaning “purpose”). Aristotle’s metaphysics is a teleology, which means that he believes that the universe itself—and consequently everything in it—operates for purposes and can be explained according to goals.
theism Belief in God.
transcendence Sartre’s term for a person’s plan, ambitions, intentions, and hopes for the future. (Do not confuse this use of the word with those introduced in Chapters 1, 2, and 4. In Chap- ters 1 and 2 we used the term in reference to what is beyond all things finite. In Chapter 4 we considered Kant’s use of the term “transcendental” to refer to the basic rules, or conditions, that make human experience possible.)
transcendent Independent of. In the philosophy of religion, a transcendent God is one who is distinct and separate from the universe he created. This is contrasted with the concept of an immanent God, for example, in pantheism, where God is identical with his creation or, to take a different example, in certain forms of humanism, in which God is identical with humankind. (Hegel argued such a thesis.)
transcendental Referring to the basic rules of human knowledge, usually with an absolutist sug- gestion that there can be but a single set of such basic rules. Thus Kant’s “transcendental deduction” attempted to deduce the one possible set of basic rules for human understand- ing, and Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology attempted to lay bare the one set of basic (“essential”) laws of human consciousness. Contemporary philosophers sometimes talk about “the transcendental turn” in philosophy, in other words, the attempt to move beyond claims that may apply only to ourselves and our way of viewing things to the way that things must be viewed.
transcendental deduction Kant’s elaborate attempt to prove that there is but one set of catego- ries (basic rules or a priori concepts) that all rational creatures must use in constituting their experience.
transcendental ego The bare, logical fact of one’s own self-consciousness: Descartes’s “I think”; the self “behind” all our experiences; the mental activity that unifies our various thoughts and sensations. (The term comes from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.)
trivial Obvious and not worth saying.
truth of reason In traditional rationalism, a belief that can be justified solely by appeal to intu- ition or deduction from premises based upon intuition. Arithmetic and geometry were, for the rationalists as for the empiricists, paradigmatic cases of such truths. The rationalists and empiricists disagreed mainly on the scope of such truths and the restrictions to be placed on the problematic appeal to intuition.
unalienable rights The rights that no one and no government can take away, for example, the right of a person to protect his or her own life. In other words, human rights.
unconscious Freud’s famous way of referring to the fact that there are ideas, desires, memories, and experiences in our minds to which we do not have privileged access, that we may be wrong about (and, therefore, about which our claims are not incorrigible), and that may be
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more evident to other people than to us. Freud also distinguishes a preconscious (“the ante- chamber of consciousness”). Preconscious ideas can be made conscious simply by being attended to. (For example, you do know what the capital of California is, but you were not conscious of it before I mentioned it; it was preconscious.) Truly unconscious ideas, however, cannot be made conscious, even when one tries to do so.
unextended Not having spatial dimensions. Philosophers (for example, Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza) often define mind and ideas as unextended.
unsound Refers to an argument whose premises are false or that is invalid.
Upanishads The text containing the “secret doctrines” that form the basis of Hinduism and Buddhism.
utilitarianism The moral philosophy that says we should act in such ways as to make the greatest number of people as happy as possible.
valid Refers to an argument that correctly follows agreed-upon rules of inference. Always applies to arguments, not statements.
vicious circle The use of two propositions or arguments to support one another with no other support. For example, “He must be guilty because he’s got such a guilty look on his face. . . . Well, I can tell it’s a guilty look because he’s the one who is guilty.”
virtue Moral excellence. In Aristotle’s philosophy, a state of character according to which we enjoy doing what is right. In Kant, willing what is right (whether or not we enjoy it, in fact, especially if we don’t enjoy it).
void Empty space.
will The power of mind that allows us to choose our own actions or, at least, what we shall try to do. In Kant, a good will is the only thing that is good “without qualification,” in other words, acting for the right reasons and good intentions.
will to power In Nietzsche’s philosophy, the thesis that every act is ultimately aimed at greater capability or control, sometimes over other people, but, more important, superiority accord- ing to one’s own standards. In other words, it is what Aristotle meant by excellence. (Nietzsche has often been interpreted, however, to mean political power.)
Zend-Avesta The scripture of Zoroastrianism.
Zoroastrianism The religion founded by Zarathustra (“Zoroaster”) in ancient Persia.
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Index Page numbers in bold indicate illustrations.
Abrahamic religions, 127–30, 436, 499 absolute space, 110 absolute time, 111 absolutism, 277, 279, 290–91 absolutists, 276 abstinence education, 472 abstract thinking, 9 Academy of Plato, 5, 11 accidental property, 82 action-at-a-distance, 110 ad hominem arguments, 36 African Americans, 408–9, 641, 649–53 “African Philosophy,” 440–41 afterlife, 78 “Against Egoism” (Butler), 519–22 “Against the Identity Theory” (Shaffer), 343–46 “Against the Soul as Substance” (Kant), 390–91 Age of Reason. See Enlightenment aggregatum, 104 agnosticism, 11, 122 Ahura Mazda, 58–59 air, 47–48, 85 aition (cause), 85 Alexander the Great, 11, 79 al-Ghazali, Mohammad, 167–68 Alice Meets the Blue Caterpillar (painting), 378 altruism, 509–15 ambiguity, 37 America, 18 American Revolution, 161, 614 Analects (Confucius), 60–61 analogy (argument), 31–33 analytic (of a sentence or truth), 271 analytic epistemology, 249 analytic geometry, 18 analytic philosophy, 122, 363, 365 analytic turn, 302–11 anarchists, 594, 615 anarchy, 18
Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Nozick), 624–27 anatta (no-soul), 187 Anaximander, 46–47 Anaximenes, 47–48 androgyny, 184 Androgyny as a Progressive Ideal for Human
Development (Ferguson), 412–13 Angra Mainyush, 58–59 animism, 50–51, 93, 106 Anselm, Saint, 130–33, 138 antecedent conditions, 445, 452, 468 anthropology, 215, 409–12 anthropomorphism, 129–30 The Antichrist (Nietzsche), 180–81 antideterminism, 453 Antiphon, 81 apeiron, 47–48 Apology (Plato), 2–4, 13 a posteriori (knowledge/principles), 231, 272–73 appeals to authority, 37 appeals to emotion, 38 appeal to force, 38 appearance/reality distinction, 52, 191–92, 254 a priori (knowledge/principles), 231, 240–42,
245–46, 273–74, 278, 551, 584 Aquinas, St. Thomas
and Aristotle, 84, 139–40 biography of, 139 ethical relativism, 504 King on, 652 on moral law, 499 on natural law, 504–6 “On the Fifth Way,” 145 and Plato, 66 Summa Contra Gentiles, 499, 504–6 Summa Theologica, 139
Archimedes, 14 argument/arguments
by analogy, 31–33 appeal to force, 38 assertions (argument), 26
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argument/arguments (continued ) components of, 23–24 conditions, necessary and sufficient, 33–34 cosmological arguments, 130, 139–40 counterexample, 33–34 definition of, 12, 23 Descartes and, 19 design, argument from, 142–49, 161 emotion, appeals to, 38 evidence for, 17 fallacies in, 35–39 fine-tuning argument, 148–50 inappropriate, 38–39 limits to, 34 ontological argument, 130–38 a posteriori, 231 a priori, 231, 240–42 reasons and, 11, 240–42, 245–46 reductio ad absurdum, 35 Socrates and, 1 teleological argument, 130, 142
Aristophanes, 1–2 Aristotle
aition (cause), 85 biography of, 11 on change, 79, 81–84 on common sense, 81 on compulsion, 469–70 on contemplation (the life of), 527, 532–33, 569 on cosmology, 84–85 De Anima, 362 Descartes and, 89 on emotions, 88 on ethics, 522–35 on evil, 500, 529–31 on first principles, 85–86 on gender, 526–27 on God, 81 government and, 594 on happiness, 526–28, 527n14, 533–35, 569 Held on, 586 Hobbes on, 608 on identity, 405 on ignorance, 469–71 infinite regress, 102 influence on Abrahamic religion, 128 influence on Aquinas, 139–40 on justice, 596 Kant and, 568 Leibniz and, 103 linguistics and, 11 logic and, 11 and the Lyceum, 11 on man and society, 594–95 matter and, 82 means (between the extremes), 529
Metaphysics, 44, 86–87, 256 metaphysics and, 11, 65–66, 79–80, 117 on morality, 497, 500, 543, 569, 590 The Nicomachean Ethics, 11, 522–35, 598–602 Nietzsche and, 180, 590 “On the Heavens,” 44 ontology, 82, 84 on philosophy, 10 Physics, 81, 141 Plato and, 65–66, 211 Politics, 598 prime mover concept, 86, 99, 130, 138, 140 on reality, 79–87, 93, 256 on reason, 66 Sartre on, 579 on self-identity, 385, 414 on slavery, 598 on the soul, 362 on substance, 80–84 on teleology, 84–85 on truth, 84, 256 on virtue, 526–28, 530–32, 542–43 voluntary action, 468–70
Arjuna (legendary hero), 163–65 Arminius, Jacobus, 441n8, 442 Arouet, François Marie. See Voltaire Asha (spirit), 59 Ash’arites, 438 Asia, 16 assertions (argument), 26 association of ideas, 250 assumptions, 12 astrology, 429–31 atheism, 11, 15, 22, 36, 93, 122, 154–55, 186,
398, 446 Athens, 1 ātman, 57 atoms, 48, 50, 104 attachment, 435 “At the Audubon” (Malcolm X), 409 attributes, 94–95, 332 Augustine, Saint, 66, 156–60, 205, 436–37 authoritarians, 594, 635, 637, 640–41 authority, 594 autonomy, 17–18, 20, 500, 535, 554, 568–69 The Axial Period (Jaspers), 14 axioms, 20, 95–96, 102, 195, 202
background rights, 645 bad faith, 400–402 The Ballot or the Bullet (Malcolm X), 408–9 Barth, Karl, 138 beauty, 66–67, 195, 368, 371 Becoming (in Plato), 66, 78–79 begging the question, 35–37, 210, 245 behaviorism, 334–40, 374, 482, 484
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Being (in Aristotle), 80 Being (in Plato), 66, 75, 78–79 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 400–401, 487–90 Being and Time (Heidegger), 114, 291, 406–7 Being Itself, 130 being qua being, 80 being there, 114–16 beliefs, 8, 10–11, 36, 121, 166–67, 195, 237, 249,
260–61, 302–7 benevolence, 520 Bentham, Jeremy, 556, 557–60, 590 Berkeley, Bishop George
biography of, 227 causal theory of perception, 217–19, 227 on common sense, 234 empiricism and, 194 on existence, 227–30, 250 on God, 232–33, 250, 340 idealism and, 363 and Locke, 227, 340 on mind, 228, 230, 250 a posteriori, 231 on primary quality, 229–30 a priori, 231 on reality, 256 on sensation, 230–31, 358 subjective idealism of, 226–34, 340 on truth, 228, 254
Bernstein, Leonard, 146 best of all possible worlds, 104, 112–13,
145–46, 161 “Beyond Freedom” (Skinner), 476–78 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 179–81, 571–73 “Beyond Skinner” (Kane), 479–81 Bhagavadgı̄tā (Gı̄tā), 162–65 Bible, 43–44, 156, 160, 291, 499 big-bang theory, 111 Bill of Rights, 635 biological determinism, 411 bisexuality, 412 Black Nationalism, 641 Blanshard, Brand, 259–60 bodhisattva, 165 body
continuity of, 378 Descartes on, 89–92, 100, 202, 206–7,
324–27, 380 determinism and, 452–54 feminine nature of, 421 Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An
Agenda for Theory (MacKinnon), 484 Hesse on, 418–19 Hobbes on, 609, 611 Lloyd on, 421 Locke on, 383, 636–37 Merleau-Ponty on, 363, 364
Michaels on, 394–95 Plato on, 369–70 primary quality, 217–19 as private property, 636 self-identity and, 385, 394–95 spatiotemporal continuity, 392 Spinoza on, 99–100, 102 Structure of Behavior (Merleau-Ponty), 363 See also mind-body problem
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 170–71 Book of Job, 156, 160 Braddon-Mitchell, David, 351–54 Brahma (Brahman), 56–57, 164 brain, 351, 353, 355–56, 374, 446–47, 463–64 brain-washing, 472–73, 478 Brave New World (Huxley), 479–80 British philosophy, 194, 210, 211n9, 453, 457, 602 The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyevsky), 175–78 Buber, Martin, 652 Buddha, 17, 63–65, 165, 186 Buddhism
The Buddhist Attitude to God (Gunasekara), 185–87
The Dhammapada, 425–26 doctrines of, 63–64, 433 existentialism and, 125 fate and, 433–34 God in, 121 Hesse on, 419 Hinduism and, 14 on identity, 419 on individuality, 165 influence on, 14 problem of evil, 164–65 schools of, 165 self-identity and, 425–26 Verse of Repentance, 435 world-and self-as-illusion, 15
Burgess, Anthony, 481–82 Butler, Joseph, 519–22, 535 Butler, Judith, 413
calculus, 17, 103 Calhoun, Cheshire, 628, 629 Calvin, John, 442 Calvinism, 441–44, 581 Camus, Albert, 467 Candide (Voltaire), 112, 145, 161 capitalism, 511 Carroll, Lewis, 377 Cartesian Circle, 210, 220 Cartesian dualism, 88–90, 323–30, 334, 340,
350–51, 363, 364, 404, 423–24 categorical imperative, 548–49, 551, 554–55, 579 categories, 270 category mistake, 334, 336–38
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Catholic Church. See Roman Catholic Church causal antecedents, 456 causal interactionism, 331 causal theory of perception, 217–19, 227 causation/causality, 238–39, 242–43, 457–63 cause
aition (cause), 85 cause of itself, 94–99, 102 in determinism, 444–45 efficient cause, 139–40 final cause, 141 first cause, 140–41 Principle of Sufficient Reason (in Leibniz), 451–52 principle of universal causation, 238, 485 the problem of evil and, 436 science and, 88, 452 substance and, 200 sufficient cause, 445 types of, 85–87 universal causation, 246
censorship, 639–40 certainty, 20, 29, 72 Chalmers, David, 361 change, 49, 51–54, 66, 79, 81–84, 104–7 changing meanings, 36–37 chaos, 47 character, 457–67, 472–73, 476, 485, 493, 528, 566 China, 14–15, 32, 60–62, 426–27, 472, 515–16 Chomsky, Noam, 215 Christianity
Abrahamic religion, 127 Aristotle on, 87 Augustine as convert, 156–57 Calvinism and, 441–44 change and, 52 in the Enlightenment, 160–61 evolution and, 147 Freud on, 181 God and, 88 Hegel on, 278 idealism and, 88 irrationality and, 172 Kierkegaard on, 168–72 logos, 15 Luther and, 649 morality and, 500–501 Nietzsche on, 179–80, 570 Plato and, 66 predestination and, 438 pride as deadly sin, 569 reality and, 52 Reformation, 407 Russell as critic, 22 science and, 93 on the soul, 328, 390, 390n5 two-world view, 66
Chuang-tse, 191n1 Churchill, Winston, 295, 476 Churchland, Paul, 347–50 citizenship, 617–18, 640 The City of God (Augustine), 157 civil disobedience, 646–54 civil rights, 641–43, 650 class conflict, 285 class society, 598 A Clockwork Orange (Burgess), 481–82 Clouds (Aristophanes), 1–2 cogito, ergo sum, 205 cognition, 279, 364–67 coherence, 39 coherence theory of truth, 258–60, 275, 304 commitment, 574 common sense
Aristotle on, 81 Berkeley on, 234 changing nature of, 44 deductive argument, 28 Descartes on, 201 empiricism and, 211n9 Kant on, 271 Locke on, 211, 216 mere assertion, 35 philosophy and, 19–20, 45, 54 pre-Socratics, 66 science and, 45–46 Thales on, 47, 54
Communism, 472 compassion, 165, 520 compatibilism, 457, 468 compatibilists, 468 compulsion, 468–84 computers, 347, 350–51, 354–56, 355n16, 374 The Concept of Mind (Ryle), 334–40 conceptual truth, 72, 215, 256 Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Kierkegaard),
169–72, 405–6 conclusions, 20, 24–26, 28–29, 33–34, 36 conditions, necessary and sufficient, 33–34 Confessions (Augustine), 156–59 conformity, 571 Confucius, 14, 16, 60–61, 515–16 connectionism, 357 Connor, Eugene “Bull,” 651 conscience, 499–500, 539–42, 639–40, 648 consciousness
behaviorism and, 333 connectionism and, 357 Descartes on, 323–24, 357, 378–80, 427 dualism and, 328–32 emotions and, 362 hard determinism and, 455–56 Hegel on, 277–83
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historicism and, 288 Hume on, 236, 323, 378 Husserl on, 362–63 identity and, 378 individuality and, 404 James on, 326 Kant on, 389–90, 427 Leibniz on, 108 Locke on, 378, 381–84, 427 “The Man of Reason” (Lloyd), 421 Merleau-Ponty on, 364 Mortal Questions (Nagel), 359–61 phenomenology and, 289–90, 362–63 philosophical zombies, 361 reality and, 317 Sartre on, 486 “Sensations and Brain Processes” (Smart),
341–43 Strawson on, 364–67 subjective mind, 88 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein),
392n7 transcendental self, 392 “Turning on the Television” (Nhat Hanh), 492–93 unconsciousness, 107–8, 418, 429 Watson on, 333 Wittgenstein on, 392n7 See also mind; self-consciousness
consistency, 39 constitute, 270, 289 constructive criticism, 12 contemplation (the life of), 527, 532–33, 569 continental rationalists, 194–95, 199 continuity, 380, 387, 392 contradiction (argument), 35, 39 cooperation, 594 Copernicus, 18, 88 correspondence theory of truth. See truth Corvino, John, 506, 507–9 cosmogony, 43 cosmological arguments, 130, 138–40, 209 cosmology, 43, 55, 84–85, 87, 101 counterexample, 29–30, 32–35 Counterfactuals (Lewis), 113–14 courage, 526, 530, 569 The Courage to Be (Tillich), 172 creation story, 43–44, 58, 111, 124, 129, 148 criterion, 20, 387 critical, philosophy as, 10, 12 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Marx),
178–79 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 136 Critique of Practical Reason (Kant), 136 Crito (Plato). See Plato crossing, 184–85 Crossing: A Memoir (McCloskey), 414–17
culture “Cultural Gaps: Why Do We Misunderstand?”
(Nagami), 297–302 cultural relativism, 501 ethical relativism, 504 freedom and, 477–78 gender and, 413 hermeneutics and, 291, 317 “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?”
(Ortner), 409–12 knowledge and, 317–18 morality and, 500–509 vs. nature, 411–12 phenomenology and, 317 pragmatism and, 317 self-identity and, 397 truth and, 253–55 Xunzi on, 517
custom, 247
Dao/Daoism, 14–16, 19, 61, 183–85 Dao De Jing (Laozi), 15–16, 61–62, 426–27 Darwinian evolution, 147–48 Dasein (being there), 114–16, 406–7 data/datum, 194 De Anima (Aristotle), 362 The Death of Socrates (painting), 9 death penalty, 473–75 de Beauvoir, Simone, 579, 580–84, 590 Declaration of Independence (Jefferson et al.), 18,
593, 620, 636, 647 deductive argument, 24–28, 30–32, 35,
38–39, 93, 117 deism, 161 The Deliverance from Error (al-Ghazali), 167–68 Delphi oracle, 1 democracy, 23, 602, 637–40 Democritus, 50 demonstrative reasoning, 245 Dennett, Daniel, 88–89, 447–51, 449 deontology, 542 Descartes, René
as absolutist, 276 analytic geometry, 18 appearance/reality distinction, 191–92 Aristotle and, 89 biography of, 18 on body, 89–92, 100, 202, 206–7, 380 Cartesian Circle, 210 on certainty, 72 on consciousness, 323–24, 357, 378–80, 427 de Beauvoir on, 579 deductive argument, 93 Discourse on Method, 18, 21 dualism and, 329 and the Enlightenment, 18
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Descartes, René (continued ) on existence, 133–36, 205–9 on experiences, 202, 254 feminist philosophy and, 421 on first principles, 20–21 on free will, 91–92 on God, 89, 100–101, 133–36, 203–4, 209–10,
327, 423 Husserl and, 289–90 on ideas, 93 on knowledge, 423 Lloyd on, 422–23 Locke and, 220–21 “Meditations III,” 328 Meditations on First Philosophy, 18, 92, 133–36,
138, 201–9 “Meditations VI,” 324–27, 380 metaphysics and, 88–89 on mind, 89–92, 100, 205–9, 323, 326–28, 357 mind-body problem, 373 “The Passion of the Soul,” 330–31 perfect certainty, 211 pictured, 89 Principles of Philosophy, 90–92 rationalism and, 200–210 on reality, 256 on reason, 92–93, 250 Regulae, 422–23 Rules for the Direction of the Mind, 422–23 Ryle on, 338–39 on self-consciousness, 389–90 on self-identity, 380, 414 on sense-data, 200–201 skepticism and, 211 and Socrates, 18 on the soul, 327–28 on substances, 89, 93, 100, 106, 207–8, 323–24,
326–28, 331, 380 on truth, 253 See also Cartesian dualism
design, argument from, 142–49, 161 desire, 475, 486–87, 497, 507, 516–17, 521 Desroche, Henri, 184–85 determinism
antecedent conditions, 445, 452 biological determinism, 411 body and, 452–54 causal antecedents, 456 compatibilists and, 468 compulsion and, 475–76 consciousness and, 455–56 Dennett on, 447, 450–51 epiphenomenalism and, 456 existentialism and, 486 experience and, 452 fatalism and, 445
freedom and, 444–45, 485, 493 Greek philosophy, 431 hard determinism, 445–51, 455–56, 476, 485 Hume on, 451, 460–63 vs. indeterminism, 451–55, 460, 493 Kane on, 463–64 Kant on, 451, 485 Laplace on, 445, 452 laws of nature, 444–45 MacKinnon and, 484 principle of universal causation, 444 probability and, 452 Sartre and, 490 science and, 485–86 soft determinism, 456–60, 463, 468, 493 Spinoza and, 96, 100–103, 113, 444, 455 Stoic philosophers, 455 sufficient cause, 445 Yoruba philosophy, 439–41
devil’s advocate, 235 Dewey, John, 260–61 The Dhammapada, 425–26 dharma, 164 dhawq (tasting), 168 d’Holbach, Paul Henri, 445, 446, 447 dialectic (Hegel), 277, 278, 282 dialectic (Marx), 179 dialectic (Merleau-Ponty), 364 Dialogues on Natural Religion (Hume), 146–48 Diderot, Denis, 398 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 288, 291 Discourse on Method (Descartes), 18, 21, 423 disposition, 338–39 Di Stefano, Christine, 587–88 distraction, 37 distributive justice, 598 Doctrine of Virtue (Kant), 569 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 175–78, 429, 490–92, 569 double vision, 317 doubt, 20–21, 175, 261, 280 Dreaming of Immortality in a Thatched
Cottage (painting), 19 drug use, 166–67 dual aspect theory, 332, 374 dualism, 323, 328–46, 361–64, 374. See also
Cartesian dualism dubious authority, 37–38 dukkha (suffering), 187 duty, 542, 544–47, 554, 568–69, 570, 593,
605, 618–19 Dworkin, Ronald, 645 The Dynamics of Faith (Tillich), 172–74
Eddington, Arthur, 453 Eddy, Mary Baker, 184 education, 460, 472, 477–78, 527
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Edwards, Jonathan, 441–43, 441n8, 444 efficient cause, 86, 139–40 egalitarianism, 598, 602, 623 ego, 389–90, 438–39 egoism, 498, 509–15, 519–22 Egyptians, 78 Eightfold Noble Path, 63 Einstein, Albert, 123–24, 329 Elbow Room (Dennett), 448–51 Eleatic school, 129 Elements (Euclid), 202 Elijah, 14 eliminative materialism, 347–50 elitism, 570 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 39, 646 Émile (Rousseau), 424, 539–42 emotions
appeals to emotion, 38 Aristotle on, 88 consciousness and, 362 gender and, 424 God and, 128 Hume on, 236 Kant on, 543 means (between the extremes), 531 religion and, 121 Spelman on, 367 Spinoza on, 103 Tillich on, 172 Walden Two (Skinner), 479
empirical (knowledge), 215–21 empirical ego, 391–92 empiricism
appearance/reality distinction, 254 Berkeley on, 194 British philosophy, 211n9 Hume on, 248, 256, 388, 537–38 Locke and, 194, 210 Mill and, 457 vs. rationalism, 194, 208 sensations and, 358 sense-data and, 215 skepticism and, 256 Strawson on, 365
empiricists, 250, 254 end-result principles, 626–27 English Revolution, 614 Enlightenment, 17–18, 63, 112, 160–61, 278,
295–96, 445, 446, 539 An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
(Hume), 146, 235, 239–48, 461–63, 536–38, 603–4
Entelechies, 107, 109 entitlement, 624 entitlement theory, 621, 624–27, 644–45 Epicureanism, 564–65
epiphenomenalism, 332–33, 374, 456 epistemic advantage, 315–17 epistemology, 191, 249–50, 293, 308–17, 585 Epistemology Naturalized (Quine), 308–11 equality, 598, 605–6, 623–24 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(Locke), 191, 210–13, 216–19, 380–84 esse est percipi, 227–28 essence/essential property, 82–84, 86, 377, 398,
417–27 essential intuition, 288 eternity, 60, 95 ethical egoism, 510, 570 ethical idealism, 275–76 ethical relativism, 501, 504 ethics
Aristotle on, 11, 522–35, 598–602 behaviorism and, 482 of care, 628–29 de Beauvoir on, 582 desire and, 497 The Ethics of Ambiguity (de Beauvoir), 579–84 feminist analysis, 584–90 logical positivism and, 574 Mill on, 584 morality and, 497 moral relativism and, 498 Nietzsche on, 570 Principle of Sufficient Reason, 112 reason and, 584 situational, 554 Socrates on, 497 Spinoza on, 94–103 utilitarianism and, 497–98
Euclid, 202, 214, 239 eudaimonia, 527, 527n14, 569 Euthyprho (Plato), 499, 504 evidence, 17, 30, 32, 39, 249 evil
Aristotle on, 500, 529–31 Augustine on, 157–59 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 179–81, 571–73 Buddhism on, 425–26 d’Holbach on, 447 Dialogues on Natural Religion (Hume), 146–47 evil demon, 210 evil genius, 204, 206–7 genocide, 501 God and, 204, 206–7 Hinduism on, 162–65 “Human Nature Is Evil” (Xunzi), 516–19 Manichaeism and, 156–57 predestination and, 436 Rousseau on, 540 Zoroastrianism and, 58–59 See also problem of evil
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evolution, 43, 124, 142, 148–49 existence
Augustine on, 205 Berkeley on, 227–30, 250 cogito, ergo sum, 205 de Beauvoir on, 581–82 Descartes on, 133–36, 205–9 essence and, 398 Existentialism Is a Humanism (Sartre), 398–99 God and, 132, 139, 150, 209–10 Heidegger on, 114–16 Locke on, 219–20 substance (Spinoza), 96–97, 99
existentialism, 9, 125, 268–69, 363, 396–404, 407, 486–93, 575–84. See also Nietzsche, Friedrich
experience Berkeley on, 227 “Cognitive Experience” (Strawson), 366–67 Descartes on, 202, 254 determinism and, 452 false dilemma and, 199 generalizations from experience, 211 Heidegger on, 291 Hume on, 235, 240–48 incorrigibility of, 357–59, 373 intuition and, 166 James on, 152, 167 Kant on, 270–71, 274, 276, 389–90 knowledge and, 211–13 Locke on, 211–13, 227, 250 phenomenology and, 289, 365 religious, 152, 167, 188 Russell on, 332 Structure of Behavior (Merleau-Ponty), 363
experiential truth, 261 explanation, 240 extended (body), 102, 373
facticity, 399–401, 489, 581–82 fairness, 621–23 faith, 121, 123, 165–75, 188 fallacies, 24, 27–28, 35–39 false dilemma, 199 family, 61 fascism, 615 fatalism, 429–36, 439, 445, 459–60 fate, 263n4, 429, 431–34, 440, 448 feminism, 409–12 Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An
Agenda for Theory (MacKinnon), 482–84 feminist analysis, 183–85, 421, 482–84, 498, 628–35 feminist philosophy, 419 femininity, 421 Ferguson, Ann, 412, 413 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 160, 275, 276, 278, 317 final cause, 86, 141
fine-tuning argument, 148–50 fire, 49, 59 “Fire-Sermon” (Buddha), 64–65 first cause, 140–41 first-order desires, 467 first principles, 20, 85–86, 195, 201–4 “Five Arguments for the Existence of God”
(Aquinas), 139 folk psychology, 347–50 formal cause, 85–86 Forms (Plato), 66–67, 75, 93, 195. See also Plato Four Noble Truths, 63 Fragments (Parmenides), 53 Frankfurt, Harry, 464–67 freedom
attachment and, 435 authoritarians and, 640–41 “Beyond Freedom” (Skinner), 476–78 character and, 493 de Beauvoir on, 582–83 in democracy, 637–40 determinism and, 444–45, 485, 493 Dostoyevsky on, 429 existentialism and, 486–93 “Freedom and the Control of Men” (Skinner),
476–78 “Freedom of the Will and the Concept
of a Person” (Frankfurt), 464–67 Hume on, 460 indeterminism and, 493 Islam and, 438–39 justice and, 593 Kant on, 485–86 King on, 651–53 Liberty Leading the People (painting), 430 Mill on, 640 mind-body problem, 456 positive/negative types of, 640–41 predictability and, 460 private property and, 636 and the problem of evil, 436 responsibility and, 429, 485, 493 rights and, 635–46 Rousseau on, 615 Sartre on, 486–90 self-esteem and, 490 and the social contract, 618–19 surface freedom, 480 Walden Two (Skinner), 479 “What Means This Freedom” (Hospers), 473–75 Yoruba philosophy, 439–41
free speech, 23, 38 free will
antecedent conditions and, 468 antideterminism and, 453 Book of Job, 160
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brain-washing and, 472–73 character and, 476 compulsion and, 468, 472 consciousness and, 455 Dennett on, 448 Descartes on, 91–92 Edwards on, 441–44 On Free Choice of the Will (Saint Augustine),
436–37 “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a
Person” (Frankfurt), 464–67 God and, 160 in Hinduism, 162 Hospers on, 473–75 Hume on, 460–63 Islam and, 437–39 Manichaeism on, 156 mental illness and, 470 Mill on, 457–60 Nishitani on, 434 Owen on, 460 and the problem of evil, 160–61 Spinoza and, 101–2 surface freedom and, 480 System of Nature (d’Holbach), 446–47 Through the Moral Maze: The Importance of
Free Will (Kane), 454–55 virtue and, 159
Frege, Gottlob, 289 French Revolution, 17, 136, 160–61, 210, 277,
539, 614 Freud, Sigmund, 178, 182, 183, 357–58, 379,
404, 418 functionalism, 350–54, 374 Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of
Morals (Kant), 543–56, 569 “The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics”
(Heidegger), 114–16 fusion of horizons, 300–302 The Future of an Illusion (Freud), 182–83
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 291, 292 Galileo, 19, 88, 200 Gathas (Zoroastrianism), 58–59 Gaunilo of Marmoutier, 135–36 Gautama, Siddhartha, 165 The Gay Science (Nietzsche), 181, 571 gender
Aristotle on, 526–27 Butler on, 413 creation story and, 424 Crossing: A Memoir (McCloskey), 414–17 emotions and, 424 feminist analysis and, 584–90 feminist philosophy and, 421 God and, 424
Held on, 586 “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?”
(Ortner), 410–12 “Justice, Car, Gender Bias” (Calhoun), 628, 629 Plato on women, 598n2 reassignment of, 378 self-identity and, 414 sex roles and, 413 Spelman on, 367 This Sex Which Is Not One (Irigaray), 419–21 women and reason, 424
generalizations, 24, 29–30, 33 generalizations from experience, 211 Genesis, 148 genetics, 429 genocide, 501 Gettier, Edmund, 249 Ghost in the Machine, 336, 338 Gilligan, Carol, 584, 628 Ginsberg, Allen, 404 Glaucon, 68–71, 196 Glorious Revolution, 215 God
Abrahamic religion, 127–30 agnosticism, 11, 122 Ahura Mazda, 58–59 Aquinas on, 139–42 Aristotle on, 81 Arminius on, 441n8 Asian traditions, 15 Being Itself, 130 Berkeley on, 232–33, 250, 340 in Buddhism, 121, 165, 185–87 Christianity and, 88 The City of God (Augustine), 157 cosmological arguments for, 209 as creator, 138–50 deism on, 161 Descartes on, 89, 100–101, 133–36, 203–4,
209–10, 327, 423 as divine judge, 152 doubt about, 175 emotions and, 128 as evil genius, 204, 206–7 existence of, 132, 139, 150, 209–10 feminism and, 184–85 Fichte on, 160 gender and, 424 “Gods” (Wisdom), 122–23 Hegel on, 160, 282–83 in Hinduism, 162 innate ideas, 93 in Islam, 437–38 James on, 261 justice from, 129–30, 150 Kant on, 165–66, 485, 544, 554
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God (continued ) Kierkegaard on, 170, 175 Leibniz on, 105, 112, 117 limerick, 233 Locke on, 219–20, 226 and the mind-body problem, 332 monads and, 106 morality and, 499–500, 551 Newton and, 110 Nietzsche on, 181 “On the Ultimate Concern” (Tillich), 172–74 ontological argument for, 130–38, 209 pantheism and, 56, 160 Pascal’s wager, 154–55 prayer and, 130 in predestination, 436 as prime mover, 130, 138–50 and the problem of evil, 155–56, 188 pseudo-questions about, 37 Sartre on, 398–99, 579 skepticism and, 254 Spinoza on, 94 teleological argument for, 143 transcendence of, 129, 150 as truth, 254 Voltaire on, 145, 161 in Western philosophy, 15 “What Is Religion?” (Nishitani), 125–27
god(s), 583 Golden Rule, 514, 548 good, 58–59 good will, 543–44, 569 Gorgias, 54, 73–74 government
Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Nozick), 624–27 Aristotle on, 594 authoritarian, 594 civil rights and, 641 Hobbes on, 614 human rights and, 641 individual rights and, 635–46 justice and, 603, 654 Mill on, 640 Plato on, 594 property and, 624 “Resistance to Civil Government” (“Civil
Disobedience”) (Thoreau), 647–49 Rousseau on, 615 The Second Treatise on Government
(Locke), 636–37 tyranny of the majority, 640 virtues of, 593–94
gravity, 93, 110 Greatest Happiness Principle, 567–68 Greece, 16, 19 Greek philosophers, 128, 429
Grosz, Elizabeth, 311–13 guilt, 404, 435 Gunasekara, Victor, 185–87
hallucinations, 201 happiness
Aristotle on, 523–28, 527n14, 533–35, 569 Bentham on, 556 Declaration of Independence
(Jefferson et al.), 636 eudaimonia, 527 happiness calculus, 558–60 Happiness theory, 562–63 Kant on, 151–52, 543, 546, 554 Mill on, 567–68, 607 reason and, 534 utilitarianism and, 497–98, 562–63 Walden Two (Skinner), 480
hard determinism. See determinism Harman, Gilbert, 501, 502, 503–4 harmony, 51, 61, 109–10 hedonism, 556 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
as absolute idealist, 278 biography of, 277 on consciousness, 277–78, 280–82 dialectic of, 278, 282 on doubt, 280 on God, 160, 282–83 Held on, 588 Idealism, 317 on knowledge, 278, 282, 317 Marx on, 178–79, 285 on pantheism, 160 The Phenomenology of Spirit, 277,
278–83 on reality, 277–78, 280, 282 Reason in History, 283–85 on Schleiermacher, 167 on science, 279–80 on skepticism, 278, 280–82 on the soul, 280 on spirit, 282, 284 on truth, 277, 279–80
Heidegger, Martin, 114–16, 291, 399, 406–7 Heisenberg, Werner, 453 Held, Virginia, 584–89 Heller, Joseph, 497 henotheism, 162 Heraclitus, 14, 49, 49–50, 52, 78, 102 herd instinct, 570–71 hermeneutics, 290–302 Hesse, Hermann, 418, 419 Heyd, David, 586–87 Hinduism, 13, 63, 162, 164 historicism, 288–89, 291
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Hobbes, Thomas, 515, 587–88, 602, 603, 608–14, 619, 646
Homer, 14, 88 homosexuality, 368, 371, 373, 506–9 Hospers, John, 473–75 “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (Peirce),
261–63 human nature, 397, 515–22, 539, 570, 574–79,
594, 608, 613–14, 646 human rights, 641–43 Hume, David
association of ideas, 250 biography of, 146 causation/causality, 238–39 on consciousness, 236, 323, 378 on determinism, 451, 460–63 as devil’s advocate, 235 empiricism and, 194, 248, 256, 388, 537–38 An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,
235, 239–48, 461–63, 536–38 on experiences, 235, 240–48 on free will, 460–63 Hume’s fork, 235, 242–43, 245 on inductive argument, 29, 243, 246 on justice, 602–4, 623 Kant and, 273–75, 390 on knowledge, 237, 271 on liberty, 461–63 Locke and, 234–35 on metaphysics, 235, 238 on morality, 146, 535–38, 542, 590 and Parfit, 396 on perception, 243 pictured, 146 principle of induction, 238–39 a priori (knowledge/principles), 240–42, 245 on rationalism, 246 on reality, 250, 256, 269 on reason, 242–43, 248, 542 relation of ideas, 235, 237–39, 245 and Rousseau, 539 and Russell, 22 Sartre on, 579 on self-identity, 385, 427 on sentiment, 537–39 as skeptic, 146, 234–35, 248, 250 soft determinism, 460 A Treatise of Human Nature, 234–39, 385–88 on the two-world view, 254–55
hunger, 643–46 Hunt, George and Molly, 507 Huong, Hai, 492 Husserl, Edmund, 288, 289, 290–91, 362–63, 365 Huxley, Aldous, 479–80 hypothetical imperatives, 548–49 hypothesis, 29–31, 195
idealism, 88, 165, 226–34, 275–76, 278, 340, 363 Idealism, 317 ideas
abstract ideas, 200 adequate ideas, 200 association of ideas, 250 Berkeley on, 228 Chomsky on, 215 Descartes on, 92, 93 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(Locke), 210–13 “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (Peirce), 261–63 Ideas (Forms), 66–67 innate, 93, 211–15 personal identity, 391 relation of ideas, 235, 237–39, 245 sense-data and, 215 Spinoza on, 102, 200 A Treatise of Human Nature (Hume), 235–39
Ideas (Forms), 66–67 identity, 379, 391, 396–405, 408–9, 419.
See also self-identity identity of indiscernibles, 105 identity theory, 341–50, 374 The Idiot (Dostoyevsky), 569 ignorance, 468–84 illusion, 63, 167, 286 immanent (God), 160 immaterialist, 104 immediate (certainty), 357 immoralist, 180, 570 immortality, 51–52, 75–78 imperative, 548–49 implications (argument), 39 impression/impressions, 235–39, 386, 388 inappropriate (argument), 38–39 inclinations, 543, 546–47, 590 incorrigibility (experience), 357–59, 373 indeterminism, 451–55, 460, 493 India, 14 individualism, 646 Individualism Reconsidered (Reisman), 407–8 individuality, 14, 100, 112, 165, 377, 404–17,
571, 607–8 individuals, autonomy of, 17 induction, 211 inductive argument
by analogy, 31 conclusions in, 28–29 definition of, 24 evidence and, 32 generalizations from experience, 30, 211 Hume on, 29, 243, 246 inappropriate, 38–39 Popper on, 30 premises, 24, 28
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inductive argument (continued ) principle of induction, 238–39, 271 self-confirming (argument), 31 truth and, 29 unsound generalizations, 29–30
ineffable, 61, 166–67 inequality, 623 inference, 10 infinite regress, 87, 99, 102, 104, 141 infinity, 97 innate (knowledge), 75 innate ideas, 93, 210–15 Inner Controller, 56–57 inner judgments, 503–4 Institutes of the Christian Religion (Calvin), 442 intellectual virtue, 527 “intelligent design,” 142 intentionality (consciousness), 363 interaction, 329 intersubjectivity, 296–302 In the Boudoir (painting), 343 “Intimate Truths” (Orr), 471–72 Introduction to the Principles of Morals and
Legislation (Bentham), 556, 557–59 intuition, 166, 208, 211, 219, 250, 288 invalid (argument), 27–28 Ionian Naturalists, 46–48 Iqbal, Muhammad, 438–39 Irigaray, Luce, 419–21 irrationality, 165–75 irrelevancies, 36 “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?”
(Ortner), 409–12 Islam, 127, 437–39
Jackson, Frank, 351–54 Jaggar, Alison, 589 Jainism, 55 James, William, 152, 167, 260–61, 264–66, 294,
326, 332–33, 457 Jaspers, Karl, 14 Jefferson, Thomas, 593, 636 Judaism, 14, 89, 121–22, 127, 183 Judeo-Christian morality, 568–69 The Judgment of Solomon (painting), 601 Juhl, Cory, 148–50 Juliana of Norwich, 184 justice
Aristotle on, 596 authority and, 594 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 179 civil disobedience and, 646–54 Declaration of Independence
(Jefferson et al.), 593 distributive justice, 598 egalitarianism and, 598, 602, 623
entitlement theory and, 621 equality and, 598, 623–24 feminist analysis and, 628–35 freedom and, 593 Gilligan on, 628 from God, 129, 130, 150 government and, 603, 654 Hobbes on, 602–3 Hume on, 602–4, 623 individual rights and, 635–46 The Judgment of Solomon (painting), 601 “Justice, Car, Gender Bias” (Calhoun), 628–29 “Justice as Fairness” (Rawls), 621–23 law and, 596 Locke on, 603 Mill on, 602, 623 The Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 598–602 philosophy and, 654 problem of, 595–96 Republic (Plato), 510–11 retributive, 595 rights and, 593–95, 621 slavery and, 602 and the social contract, 619 A Theory of Justice (Rawls), 621 The Third of May (painting), 176 utilitarianism and, 604–8 wealth and, 595
justification, 235 justified true beliefs, 249
Kane, Robert, 454, 455, 463–64, 479–81 Kant, Immanuel
as absolutist, 276 “Against the Ontological Argument,” 136–38 argument from design, 142 and Aristotle, 568 on autonomy, 500 Bentham and, 556–57 biography of, 136 categorical imperative, 548–49, 551, 554–55 on categories, 270 on character, 485 coherence theory of truth, 275 on consciousness, 389–90, 427 correspondence theory of truth, 275 Critique of Practical Reason, 150–52 The Critique of Pure Reason, 270, 272 on determinism, 451, 485 on duty, 544–47, 554, 568–69 Existentialism and, 268–69 on experiences, 270–71, 274, 276, 389–90 Fichte and, 275 on freedom, 485–86 Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of
Morals, 543–56, 569
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on God, 165–66, 485, 544, 554 Golden Rule, 548 on good will, 543–44 on happiness, 151–52, 543, 546, 554 Held on, 588 Hume and, 273–75, 389–90 Husserl and, 289 inclinations, 543, 546–47 on knowledge, 270–71, 485 Leibniz and, 269 on mathematics, 271 on maxims, 549–51 on morality, 497–98, 590 Newton and, 269, 275 Nietzsche on, 180 on obligation, 509 “Postulates of Practical Reason,” 554 principle of volition, 546 a priori (knowledge/principles), 278, 584 Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics,
272–74 Quine and, 307 on rationality, 543, 569 on reality, 269–70, 275 on reason, 542–43, 546 relativism and, 290 on rights, 621 Sartre on, 398, 579 on self, 389, 391–92 on the soul, 390, 390n5 on substances, 271, 275 on suicide, 549–50, 552–53 synthetic a priori knowledge, 136, 271 transcendental deduction, 276 universal causation, 271 universal conformity to law, 547–48 universal principles, 215
karma, 162, 187, 429–35 Kierkegaard, Søren, 168–72, 175, 405–6, 435, 490 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 649, 650 Kinsey, Alfred, 472 knowledge
Chuang-tse and, 191n1 culture and, 317–18 Descartes on, 423 empiricism and, 215–21 epistemology and, 191, 250 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(Locke), 191 experience and, 211–13 feminist analysis of, 311 Fichte on, 317 Forms, 195 Gadamer on, 292 hard determinism and, 452 Hegel on, 278, 282, 317
Hume on, 237, 245, 271 innate knowledge, 75, 211–13 as justified true belief, 249 Kant on, 270–71, 485 Locke on, 220, 269 method of doubt/methodological
doubt, 200 Nagami on, 299 necessary truth, 254–55 Nietzsche on, 317 “On Feminist Knowledge” (Grosz), 311–13 opinion and, 195 Plato on, 71, 191, 194–95, 198–99, 371 The Problems of Philosophy (Russell), 303 Quine on, 307 reason and, 194, 199 Rorty on, 293 Ryle on, 336 sense-data and, 194–95 Socrates on, 195, 198–99 Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human
Knowledge (Berkeley), 227–34 See also a priori (knowledge/principles);
perception; truth Knox, Ronald, 233 Kong, Fuzi. See Confucius Korean War, 472 Krishna, 162–65 Kubrick, Stanley, 482 Kyoto school, 125
Laing, R. D., 404 language
analytic turn, 302–11 and the brain, 353 Chomsky on, 215 Epistemology Naturalized (Quine), 308–11 intersubjectivity and, 298–300 private language argument, 363 reality and, 258 Searle on, 354–56 semantic theory of truth, 266–68, 275 speech-act theory, 355 truth and, 253–55 Word and Object (Quine), 307
Lao-Tzu, 14 Laozi, 15–16, 61–62, 426–27 Laplace, Simon, 445, 452 law
justice and, 596 just vs. unjust, 652 Kant on, 498, 547–48 King on, 652 laws of nature, 444–45, 455 moral law, 499 natural law, 611–12
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law (continued ) “Resistance to Civil Government”
(Civil Disobedience”) (Thoreau), 647–49 Socrates on, 646 utilitarianism and, 604–5
Lee, Ann, 184 legitimacy, 615, 619–20 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von
absolute space, 110 action-at-a-distance, 110 best of all possible worlds, 104, 112–13 biography of, 103 calculus and, 17, 103 Candide (Voltaire), 145 on causation, 451–52 on consciousness, 108 on God, 105, 112, 117 identity of indiscernibles, 105 Kant and, 269, 275 on mathematics, 103, 214 Monadology, 103–10 monads, 331 New Essays on Human Understanding, 213–14 Newton and, 106, 111 on perception, 107–8 pluralism and, 93, 104–6, 112 preestablished harmony, 109–10, 331–32 Principle of Sufficient Reason, 103–5, 111–12,
238, 452 on reality, 107, 109 Russell and, 110–11 on the soul, 107–8, 213–14 on space/time, 110–11 on substances, 89, 103, 117, 326, 331 on truth, 108 on truth of reason, 200 on the universe, 111–12, 117 Voltaire on, 161 Western metaphysics and, 89
Les Deux Mysteres (painting), 72 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (King), 649–53 Leviathan (Hobbes), 609–13 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 215 Lewis, David, 113–14 liberalism, 210, 636 liberality, 531 libertarianism, 473, 624 liberty, 461–63, 611, 619, 622–24, 637–40 Liberty Leading the People (painting), 430 limerick, 233 Lincoln, Abraham, 514–15 linguistics, 11, 12 Lloyd, Genevieve, 421–25, 585 Locke, John
Berkeley and, 227, 340 biography of, 210
causal theory of perception, 217–19 on consciousness, 378, 381–84, 427 Descartes and, 220–21 empiricism and, 194, 210 entitlement theory and, 624 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
191, 210–13, 216–21, 380–84 on existence, 219–20 on experiences, 227, 250 generalizations from experience, 211–13 on God, 219–20, 226 Hume and, 234–35 on identity, 391 inductive method and, 211 innate ideas and, 214–15 on intuition, 211 on justice, 603 on knowledge, 220, 269 on memory, 384–85, 393 metaphysics and, 191, 210–11, 219 Michaels on, 393 on mind, 212–13, 222–23 Newton and, 217 philosophy and, 191 on property, 636 on qualities, 223–24, 226, 229 on rationalism, 211 on reality, 256 Rousseau and, 614 The Second Treatise on Government, 636–37 on self-consciousness, 380, 389 on self-identity, 323, 381–84 on sensation, 235 on sense-data, 250 on the soul, 380, 382–84 on substances, 191, 221–26, 381–84 Treatises on Government, 210 on truth, 253
logic, 12, 15, 22–24, 30, 35, 38–39, 52, 130–38, 184, 457–60
logical behaviorism, 334–40 logical positivism, 113, 274, 307, 363, 574 logical possibility, 33 logical predicate, 137 logos, 15, 49, 52, 78 love, 368 Lugones, Maria, 629–35 lust, 559–60, 598–99, 614 Luther, Martin, 200, 407 Lyceum, 11
MacKinnon, Catharine, 482–84 Magna Carta, 617 Mahāyānists, 162, 165 Maimonides, 122 Malcolm X, 408–9, 641–43
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Manichaeism, 156 “The Man of Reason” (Lloyd), 421–25 Marx, Karl, 178–79, 183, 285–86, 615 masculinity (mind), 421–22 master morality, 180, 570–73 material cause, 85, 87 materialism, 48–49, 78, 87–88, 107, 341, 344–50,
360, 446 mathematics
analytic turn, 302 axioms, 195 Descartes on, 20–21, 88–89, 202 Euclid and, 202 Husserl and, 289 as intellectual virtue, 527 Kant on, 271 Leibniz on, 103, 214 Locke and, 211 Mill and, 457 Parmenides and, 52 Pascal and, 154 phenomenology and, 288 Principia Mathematica (Russell and Whitehead), 22 Pythagoras and, 51 relation of ideas, 235 truth and, 239
matter, 82 matter of fact (in Hume), 235, 239–45 maxims, 549–51 McCloskey, Deirdre, 414–17 means (between the extremes), 529 “Meditations III” (Descartes), 328 Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes), 18,
133–36, 138, 201–9 “Meditation VI” (Descartes), 92, 324–27, 380 memory, 378, 384–85, 393, 396 Mencius, 515–17 Meno (Plato), 72–77 mental causes, 333 mental energy, 329 mental events, 341, 359, 363, 374 mental illness, 470 mental states, 353–55, 360 mental substance, 323, 326 mere assertion, 35 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 363 metaphors, 32, 38 metaphysics
Aristotle and, 11, 65–66, 79–80, 117 definition of, 55 Descartes and, 88–89 epistemology and, 250 Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of
Morals (Kant), 543–56 “The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics”
(Heidegger), 114–16
Hume on, 235, 238 Leibniz on, 89 Lewis on, 113–14 Locke on, 191, 210–11, 219 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 44, 86–87, 256 modern, 87–88 Plato on, 5, 65–66, 75, 117 Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Kant),
272–74 reality and, 55, 116, 191–92 religion and, 187 Socrates on, 117 truth and, 87–88
methexis (participation), 79 method, 19 method of doubt/methodological doubt, 21, 200,
201–4 Michaels, Meredith, 393, 394–95 Middle Ages, 128 Middle Way, 63 Midgley, Mary, 22 Mill, John Stuart
Bentham and, 560 biography of, 457 on character, 566 on desires, 37 on ethics, 584 on fatalism, 459–60 Greatest Happiness Principle, 567–68 on happiness, 567–68, 607 on justice, 602, 623 On Liberty, 637–40 on morality, 590 necessary truth, 289 pictured, 561 on rights, 606–7 A System of Logic, 457–60 Utilitarianism, 561–68, 604–7 utilitarianism and, 556, 560, 584
mind Berkeley on, 228, 230, 250 brain and, 351 category mistake, 337 as computer, 354 Descartes on, 89–92, 100, 205–9, 323,
326–28, 357 Hobbes on, 609 Hume on, 241 identity theory, 344 incorrigibility (experience), 357–58 Locke on, 212–13, 222–23 Manichaeism on, 156 masculinization of, 421–22 “Minds, Brains and Science” (Searle), 355–56 “Nature and Origin of the Mind”
(Spinoza), 102
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mind (continued ) Philosophy of Mind and Cognition (Braddon-
Mitchell and Jackson), 351–54 privileged access to, 359, 373 Russell on, 307 Ryle on, 340 Spinoza on, 102 subjective idealism and, 226 subjective mind and, 88 “Turning on the Television” (Nhat Hanh), 492–93 unconsciousness and, 357–58 unextended (mind), 326 See also consciousness; mind-body problem
mind-body problem behaviorism and, 374 causal interactionism, 331 Chalmers on, 361 Descartes on, 373 dualism and, 323, 329–30 epiphenomenalism and, 374 feminist philosophy and, 421 freedom and, 456 functionalism and, 350–51, 374 God and, 332 idealism and, 340 identity theory, 344 identity theory and, 374 mental energy and, 329 mental events and, 341, 374 Merleau-Ponty on, 363–64 Nagel on, 359–60 parallelism and, 331–32, 374 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein),
362–63 Philosophy of Mind and Cognition
(Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson), 351–55 preestablished harmony, 374 Rules for the Direction of the Mind
(Descartes), 422–23 Strawson on, 365 subjective idealism and, 340 Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary
Views (Spelman), 367–73 misogyny, 371–72 moderation, 529–31 modes (in Spinoza), 94–95 Monadology (Leibniz), 103–10 monads, 104–10, 326, 331–32 monism, 48, 52, 55, 57, 93, 100 Monologion (Anselm), 131 monotheism, 15, 58–59, 128, 156 morality
Abrahamic religion, 499 altruism and, 509–15 Aristotle on, 11, 497, 500, 543, 569, 590 autonomy and, 535, 554
Bentham on, 557–59, 590 Buddhism and, 165 Butler on, 535 Christianity and, 500–501 conscience and, 499–500 culture and, 500–509 de Beauvoir on, 590 definition of, 498 ethics and, 497 Euthyprho (Plato), 499 feminist analysis and, 498, 590 Gilligan on, 584 God and, 499–500, 551 Hume on, 146, 536–38, 542, 590 The Idiot (Dostoyevsky), 569 inclinations, 590 Judeo-Christian, 568–69 Kant on, 497, 569, 590 Lloyd on, 585 logical positivism and, 574 master morality, 180, 570–73 Mill on, 590 modern concepts, 535 “Moral Relativism Defended” (Harman), 501–4 Nietzsche on, 498–99, 569–70, 590 philosophy and, 13 politics and, 593–94 reason and, 543, 569, 584, 590 relationships and, 584 relativism and, 500–509, 568, 574 Rousseau on, 535–36, 542–43, 590 Sartre on, 579, 590 science and, 152 self-interest and, 498 sentiment and, 535–42, 590 situational ethics and, 554 slave morality and, 180, 570–73 and the social contract, 619 suicide and, 509 sympathy and, 536 utilitarianism and, 556–68, 590 Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root
and Reward of Morality (Smith), 513–14 as virtue, 498, 522–35, 590
moral reasoning, 245 moral relativism, 498 “Moral Relativism Defended” (Harman), 501–4 moral virtue, 527, 530–32 Morgan, Kathryn, 589 Mortal Questions (Nagel), 359–61 motherhood, 584–90, 630–32 multiculturalism, 292 multiple realizability, 352–53 Mussolini, Benito, 594 Mu’tazilites, 437–39 mystic, 51
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mysticism, 51, 61, 166–67, 183 myth, 32 Myth of the Cave (Plato), 67–71, 78, 191, 204 “The Myth of the Computer” (Searle), 355
Nagami, Isamu, 78, 296–302 Nagel, Thomas, 359 Napoleon, 277, 283 Narayan, Uma, 314–17 natural law, 504–6, 611–12 natural selection, 142, 148 Natural Theology and the Horse Pauline
(Paley), 143 nature, 411–12 “Nature and Origin of the Mind” (Spinoza), 102 necessary and sufficient conditions, 249 necessary truth, 254–55, 289 necessity, 270 necessity doctrine, 457–60 neurology, 347–50 neuroscience, 348–50 neurosis, 472 New Essays on Human Understanding
(Leibniz), 213–14 Newton, Isaac
absolute time, 111 biography of, 17 engraving, 17 God and, 110 gravity and, 85, 93, 110 hard determinism and, 456 Heisenberg and, 453 Kant and, 269, 275 Leibniz on, 107, 111 Locke and, 217 mechanics, 106 as philosopher, 16 science and, 88 on substances, 444
Nhat Hanh, Thich, 492–93 The Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 11, 522–35,
598–602 Nietzsche, Friedrich
The Antichrist, 180–81 as antimoralist, 574 on Aristotle, 180, 590 Beyond Good and Evil, 179–80, 571–73 biography of, 180, 286 on Christianity, 179–80, 570 on duty, 570 ethical egoism and, 570 existentialism and, 570 and Freud, 183 The Gay Science, 181, 571 on human nature, 570, 574 as immoralist, 570
on individuality, 571 master morality and, 570–73 on morality, 498–99, 569–70, 590 “On Truth,” 286–88 on pragmatism, 286 reality and, 286, 295–96 relativism and, 287–88 on religion, 178 slave morality and, 570–73 on social identity, 406 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 573 on truth, 253–54 Übermensch, 573 on utilitarianism, 570 the will to power, 286, 571
nihilism, 433–34 nihility, 124–26 The 1929 Paris Lectures (Husserl), 289–90 1984 (Orwell), 481 nirvana, 165, 433 Nishitani, Keiji, 124–26, 174, 433–35 No Exit and The Flies (Sartre), 402–4 nomological danglers, 342 nonviolent protest, 649 Notes from the Underground (Dostoyevsky), 175 Nozick, Robert, 624–27, 635 numbers, 51, 78
objectification, 483–84 objective faith, 169 objectivity, 294, 299 obligation, 509, 640 observation sentence, 309–10 Oedipus the King (Sophocles), 431–33 Old Testament, 128 omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient God, 128 “On Design of the Universe” (Einstein), 124 “On Eliminative Materialism” (Churchland), 347–50 “On Feminist Epistemology” (Narayan), 314–17 “On Feminist Knowledge” (Grosz), 311–13 On Free Choice of the Will (Saint Augustine),
436–37 On Liberty (Mill), 637–40, 638n16 “On the Fine-Tuning Argument” (Juhl), 148–50 “On the Pragmatic Theory” (James), 264–66 “On the Ultimate Concern” (Tillich), 172–74 “On the Unconscious” (Freud), 358 ontological argument, 130–38, 209 ontological insecurity, 404 ontology, 55, 82, 84, 130–33 “On Truth” (Nietzsche), 286–88 opinion, 195 ordinary-language philosophy, 363 Ori (“inner head”), 440–41 original sin, 160, 435, 539 Orr, Judith, 471–72
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Ortner, Sherry, 409, 410, 411–12 ought, 607 Owen, Robert, 459n16, 460
pacifist, 22 Paley, William, 142–45 pantheism, 56, 100–101, 113, 160 paradox, 20–21, 37, 54 parallelism, 331–32, 374 paranoid, 31 Parfit, Derek, 395–96 Parmenides, 3, 14, 43, 51, 54, 63, 66–67, 83,
191, 253 participates (methexis), 79 participation, 79 Pascal, Blaise, 154–55 passion, 175, 406 “The Passion of the Soul” (Descartes), 330–31 paternalism, 638n16 patriarchy, 185, 311, 588 Pavlov, Ivan, 477 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 152, 260–61, 262, 263,
263n4, 293 Pensées (Pascal), 154 perception, 107–8, 199–200, 215, 217–19, 227–28,
235–39, 243, 363, 386–87, 629–35 perfect certainty, 211 perfection, 165 Pericles, 1 Perry, Ralph Barton, 477 “Personal Identity” (Michaels), 391–92 personal pleas, 24 perspectivism, 312, 317 Phaedo (Plato), 8 phenomenology, 114, 269, 277, 278–83, 288–90,
362–63, 365 philosophers, 20, 71 Philosophical Explanations (Nozick), 625 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), 362–63 Philosophical Necessity, 458–59 philosophical zombies, 361 philosophy
abstract thinking, 9 analytic, 122, 307, 363 Asian traditions, 15 beginnings of, 13 common sense and, 19–20, 45, 54 cosmology and, 87 Descartes as modern father, 18 description of, 10–13 enlightenment as main goal, 17 European, 277–88, 290 feminist, 311–17, 421–25 Fichte on, 278 Greek origins, 12, 19, 44 hard determinism and, 457
Hegel and, 278 Heidegger on, 115–16 hermeneutics and, 291 identity theory and, 341 as intellectual virtue, 527 justice and, 654 justified true beliefs, 249 Kyoto school, 125 Locke’s impact, 191 “On Feminist Epistemology” (Narayan), 314 ordinary-language philosophy, 363 Philosophy of Mind and Cognition
(Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson), 351–54 The Problems of Philosophy (Russell), 12, 302–7 rationalist vs. empiricist, 199–200 religion and, 13, 121–22, 188 Romantic philosophy, 277 theology and, 87–88 truth and, 19 universal principles, 215 Western approach, 15–23 women and, 589
phlogiston, 348 physical force, 38 physics, 445, 453 Physics (Aristotle), 81, 141 Pindar, 76 pineal gland, 329, 330n6 pity (argument), 38 Plato
as absolutist, 276 Academy of Plato, 5, 11 Apology, 2–4, 13 Aquinas and, 66 Aristotle and, 65–66, 211 on beauty, 368, 371 Becoming (in Plato), 66, 78–79 biography of, 5 on the body, 369–70 Crito (Plato), 4–8, 23, 405, 608, 646 on egoism, 510–11 Euthyprho, 499, 504 Forms, 66–67, 71–72, 78–79, 84, 93, 117 government and, 594 Hobbes on, 608 on homosexuality, 368, 371, 373 on identity, 405 on immortality, 75–78 influence on Abrahamic religion, 128 innate ideas, 93 on justice, 596 on knowledge, 71, 191, 194–95, 198–99, 371 on love, 368 Meno, 72–77 metaphysics and, 5, 65–66, 75, 117 as misogynist, 371–72
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Myth of the Cave, 67–71, 191 1984 (Orwell), 481 participation, 79 Phaedo, 8 philosopher-king, 5 philosophy and, 14 Plato Teaching in the Grove at Academia
(painting), 198 on reality, 81, 195–98, 371 on reason, 66 Republic, 5, 10, 67–71, 195–98, 510–11, 596–97 sculpture of, 5 somatophobia, 372–73 on the soul, 78–79, 117, 196–97, 367–73, 390 Spelman on, 367–73 Symposium, 66–67 Theatetus, 198–99 theory of recollection, 117 on truth, 195, 253 two-world view, 117, 211, 254–55 on virtue, 372 on women, 598n2
“Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception” (Lugones), 629–35
pluralism, 50, 93, 104–6, 112, 311–12 politics, 593–94 Politics (Aristotle), 598 polytheism, 58 Pontius Pilate, 255–56 Popper, Karl, 30, 267 “Postulates of Practical Reason” (Kant), 554 power of being, 184–85 practice (justice), 621–23, 622n10 pragmatic theory, 152, 258, 260–66, 275–76 pragmatism, 260–61, 264–66, 269, 286,
290–302, 307 Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways
of Thinking (James), 152 pragmatists, 54 prayer, 130, 187 predestination, 435–36, 438, 440–43, 444, 581 predicate (argument), 26, 390–91 predictability, 490–92 predicted (determinism), 452, 460 preestablished harmony, 109–10, 331–32, 374 premises, 24–26, 28, 30, 32, 34–35 pre-Socratics, 46–48, 129 presuppositions, 12 pride, 569 primary quality, 216–19, 223, 229–30 prime mover concept (in Aristotle), 86, 99, 130,
138–50 primordial stuff, 47–49, 52, 116 Principia Mathematica (Russell and Whitehead), 22 principle attribute, 90 principle of induction, 238–39
principle of universal causation, 238, 444, 485 principle of utility, 556, 557, 607 principle of volition, 546 principles, 90–92 Principles of Philosophy (Descartes), 90–92 Principles of Psychology (James), 152 privacy (mind), 359 private language argument, 363 privileged access (mind), 359, 373 probability, 211, 452 problem of evil, 155–56, 160–62, 165,
188, 436 The Problems of Philosophy (Russell), 12,
192–95, 302–7 Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
(Kant), 272–74 proof, 13, 20, 31, 34 property, 82, 216, 624, 636–37 “Property and Hunger” (Sen), 643–46 Proslogion (Anselm), 131 Protagoras, 54, 276 Protestantism, 407, 442 pseudo-questions, 37 psychoanalytic theory, 357–58 psychological altruism, 514 psychological egoism, 510, 519–22 psychology, 333, 477 Pythagoras, 51, 52, 71, 78
quality, 215, 223–24, 226–27, 229 quantum mechanics, 453 Quine, W. V. O., 307
race, 408–9 racism, 629 radical behaviorism, 333 radicalism (philosophical), 654 Rand, Ayn, 473, 510 rational, 255 rational (inquiry), 248 rationalism, 89, 194, 200–211, 246, 288, 423–24 rationalists, 194–95, 250 rational/rationality, 16–17, 166, 188, 421–25,
497–98, 525–27, 543, 560, 569 rational soul, 108 Rawls, John, 621–24, 635 reality
in animism, 51 appearance/reality distinction, 52, 191n1 Aristotle on, 79–87, 93, 256 Asian traditions, 55 Berkeley on, 256 Blanshard on, 259 Buddhism on, 63 Christianity and, 52 Confucius on, 60–61
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reality (continued ) consciousness and, 317 Daoists on, 61 deductive argument, 117 Democritus on, 50 Descartes on, 256 empiricists and, 250, 254 Forms and, 93 Hegel on, 277–78, 280, 282 Heraclitus on, 49–50, 52, 102 Hinduism on, 63 Hume on, 250, 256, 269 Husserl on, 290 illusion and, 286 Kant on, 269–70, 275 knowledge of, 71 language and, 258 Leibniz on, 107, 109 Locke on, 256 materialism and, 48–49, 78 metaphysics and, 55, 116, 191–92 monism and, 48 Myth of the Cave (Plato), 67–71, 78 Nietzsche on, 286, 295–96 as One, 55 Parmenides on, 43, 52–53, 66–67, 191 Peirce on, 262–63 philosophy and, 12 Plato on, 81, 195–98, 371 rationalists and, 250 reason and, 194–95 religion and, 121 Rorty on, 293 science and, 43–44 Simplicius on, 44 sophists on, 54 Spinoza on, 102 substance as basic element of, 117 ultimate, 46, 55, 195 Upanishads and, 55–58, 63 Vedas/Vedic philosophy, 55 Zarathustra and, 58 Zoroastrianism on, 59–60 See also truth
Rear Window (film), 483 reason
Aristotle on, 66 begging the question, 210 Berkeley on, 230–31 The Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 136, 150–52,
270, 272, 276 demonstrative reasoning, 245 Descartes on, 92–93, 250 ethics and, 584 feminist philosophy and, 313 happiness and, 534
Held on, 585–86 Hobbes on, 587 Hume on, 239–45, 248, 542 intuition and, 208 irrationality and, 166 Kant on, 542–44, 546 knowledge and, 199 life of, 10 “The Man of Reason” (Lloyd), 421 morality and, 543, 569, 584, 590 Parmenides on, 66 Plato and, 66 “Postulates of Practical Reason” (Kant), 554 Principle of Sufficient Reason (in Leibniz),
103–5, 111–12, 238, 452 a priori, 240–42, 245–46 reality and, 194–95 “Reason as Slave of the Passions” (Hume),
536–38 Reason in History (Hegel), 283–85 Reasons and Persons (Michaels), 395–96 relation of ideas, 235, 245 Rousseau on, 539, 541 The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
(painting), 247 truth of reason, 199–200 Voltaire on, 161 women and gender, 424
reasoning, 31 reasons (argument), 11 The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam
(Iqbal), 438–39 red herring, 37 reductio ad absurdum, 35, 97 reflection, on ideas, 10, 17 Reformation, 407 Regulae (Descartes), 422–23 reincarnation, 63 Reisman, David, 407–8 relation of ideas, 235, 237–39, 245 relationships, 584 relativism
absolutism and, 290–91 cultural relativism, 501 definition of, 255 ethical, 504 feminism and, 311 Harman on, 501–4 historicism and, 291 Husserl and, 288–89 Kant and, 290 Marx and, 286 moral, 498 morality and, 500–509, 568, 574 multiculturalism and, 292 Nietzsche and, 287–88
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philosophy and, 277 pluralism and, 311–12 Rorty on, 294–95 Sartre on, 574 self-identity and, 397 sophists and, 54 truth and, 255
relativists, 276 relativity, 124 religion
Asian traditions, 55 beliefs and, 121, 166–67 Daly on, 184–85 Dialogues on Natural Religion (Hume), 146–48 drug use in, 166–67 Einstein on, 123–24 emotions and, 121 faith and, 188 Freud on, 178, 182–83 Greek, 129 irrationality and, 165 Kierkegaard on, 169, 171–72 Marx on, 178–79 metaphysics and, 187 mysticism and, 166–67 philosophy and, 13, 121–22, 188 reality and, 121 Religion and Nothingness (Nishitani), 434 Schleiermacher on, 167 symbolism in, 122 truth and, 121 Wisdom on, 122–23 Xenophanes on, 129 See also God; individual denominations
Republic (Plato). See Plato resemblance (identity), 387 “Resistance to Civil Government” (Civil
Disobedience”) (Thoreau), 647–49 responsibility, 429, 457, 463, 473–75, 484–85,
487–90, 493, 575 retributive justice, 595 retrodiction, 445 revolution, 647, 649 Rg Veda, 43 rhetoric, 23, 25, 54 righteousness, 59 rights, 424, 593–95, 606–7, 612–13, 620–21,
624–27, 635–54 Robespierre brothers, 160 Roman Catholic Church, 18, 89, 93, 139, 200,
407, 508 Romantic philosophy, 277 Rorty, Richard, 292, 293, 294–96 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
biography of, 539 on citizenship, 640
on consciousness, 539–42 in the Enlightenment, 160, 539 on government, 615 Held on, 588 on human nature, 515, 614 on legitimacy, 619–20 on liberty, 619 Lloyd on, 424 on Locke, 614 on lust (property), 614 on morality, 535–36, 542–43, 590 on reason, 539, 541 on revolution, 614 on the social contract, 608, 614–19
Rules for the Direction of the Mind (Descartes), 422–23
rules of inference, 210 Russell, Bertrand
analytic turn, 302 on the appearance/reality distinction, 192–95 atheism and, 22 biography of, 22 correspondence theory of truth, 257 dual aspect theory, 332, 341 on Hume, 234n15 knowledge and perception, 199 and Leibniz, 110–11 and the mind-body problem, 332 Nobel Prize, 22 on philosophy, 21–23 Principia Mathematica, 22 The Problems of Philosophy, 12, 192–95, 302–7 and Wittgenstein, 363
Ryan, Alan, 586–87 Ryle, Gilbert, 334, 336–40
salvation, 187 Same Sex (Corvino), 506–9 sampling, 29–30 Sartre, Jean-Paul
on Aristotle, 579 bad faith, 400–401 Being and Nothingness, 400–401, 486–90 existentialism and, 397 Existentialism Is a Humanism, 398–99 on God, 398–99, 579 on human nature, 397, 574 on Hume, 579 on Kant, 579 and Merleau-Ponty, 363 on morality, 579, 590 No Exit and The Flies, 402–4 pictured, 399 relativism and, 574 on responsibility, 487–90, 575 on sentiment, 579
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Sartre, Jean-Paul (continued ) on utilitarianism, 579 on values, 578–79
Schilling, Friedrich, 277 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 167 School of Athens (painting), 73 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 365 science
animism and, 93 atoms, 48 behaviorism and, 333 causation and, 88, 452 Christianity and, 93 common sense and, 45–46 determinism and, 485–86 faith and, 123 Hegel on, 279–80 identity theory and, 341, 343 inductive argument and, 28 James and, 261 materialism and, 87–88 method of doubt/methodological doubt, 200 “Minds, Brains and Science” (Searle), 355–56 morality and, 152 neuroscience and, 348–50 origins of, 116–17 Peirce on, 262, 263, 293 phenomenology and, 288–90 philosophy and, 16–17, 19 pragmatism and, 261 Quine and, 307 reality and, 43–44 self-confirming (argument), 31 Thales as first scientist, 45 theology and, 90 truth and, 261
Searle, John R., 354–56 secondary quality, 216–19, 223 second-order desires, 464–67 The Second Treatise on Government (Locke),
636–37 Secrétan, Charles, 152 security, 607 self
Being and Time (Heidegger), 406–7 Buddhist doctrine, 433 Churchland on, 350 continuity of, 380 essence and, 377, 417–27 Hegel on, 277 Hesse on, 418–19 Inner Controller, 56–57 Irigaray on, 419–21 Kant on, 389, 391–92 Kierkegaard on, 406 materialism and, 350
Nishitani on, 124–25, 434–35 Sartre on, 575 social identity and, 405 transcendental self, 392 See also self-identity
self-confirming (argument), 31 self-consciousness, 335, 379–80, 389–90, 404 self-defeating hypothesis, 31 self-esteem, 490 self-evident, 20 self-identity
Aristotle on, 385, 414 bad faith and, 401–2 body and, 385, 394–95 Buddhism and, 425–26 consciousness and, 323 culture and, 397 Dao De Jing (Laozi), 426–27 Descartes on, 380, 414 empirical ego, 391–92 essence/essential property, 377, 427 gender and, 414 Hume on, 385–88, 427 individuality and, 377 Locke on, 381–84 memory and, 378, 396 “Personal Identity” (Michaels), 392–95 relativism and, 397 Sartre on, 400 self and, 397 self-consciousness and, 380 social identity and, 408
self-interest, 498, 540 selfishness, 510, 515, 521, 539 self-love, 510, 520 self-preservation, 616–17 semantics, 267, 275, 310 “Semantic Theory of Truth” (Tarski), 266–68 Sen, Amartya, 643, 644, 645–46 sensation, 215–21, 235, 341–43, 358 “Sensations and Brain Processes” (Smart), 341–43 sense-data, 194, 199, 200–201, 214–15, 235,
250, 292 sentiment, 535–42, 579, 590 “Sex, Ignorance, and Freedom” (Orr), 471–72 sex roles, 409, 413 sexuality, 471, 472, 482–84, 506–9, 559–60 Shabazz, Betty, 642–43 Shaffer, Jerome, 343–46 shifting conclusions, 36 Shuttlesworth, Fred, 651 Sikhism, 55 Simplicius, 44 situational ethics, 554 skepticism
challenge of, 20
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Descartes on, 21, 211 doubt and, 21 empiricism and, 256 God and, 254 Hegel on, 278, 280–82 Hume and, 146, 234, 248, 250 Locke and, 211 Nietzsche and, 286–87 sophists and, 1 truth and, 260
Skinner, B. F., 333, 476–81 slave morality, 180, 570–73 slavery, 598, 602 The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
(painting), 247 slippery slope, 38 Smart, J. J. C., 341–43, 345 Smith, Tara, 511, 512, 513–14 social compact, 603 social contract, 608, 614–20, 617, 635–36, 640 social identity, 405–7 socialism, 460, 627 society, 594–95 sociopath, 468 Socrates
afterlife, 78 in Apology (Plato), 2–4, 13 biography of, 1 in Clouds (Aristophanes), 1–2 in Crito (Plato), 4–8, 23, 405, 608, 646 The Death of Socrates (painting), 9 on ethics, 497 existential rebellion and, 407 individual autonomy and, 17 on knowledge, 195, 198–99 in Meno (Plato), 72–77 metaphysics and, 117 on perception, 199 in Phaedo (Plato), 8 and Plato, 71 in Republic, 10, 67–71 Socrates in Prison (painting), 7 and the sophists, 54 on the soul, 8, 368 in Theatetus (Plato), 198–99 in Western philosophy, 13
soft determinism. See determinism “Solidarity or Objectivity” (Rorty), 293–96 Solomon, Robert C., 198, 384 somatophobia, 372–73 sophists, 1, 54, 276 Sophocles, 431–33 soul
as air, 47 anatta (no-soul), 187 Aristotle on, 362
behaviorism and, 333 in Buddhism, 63–64, 187 Christianity on, 328, 390, 390n5 Descartes on, 207, 327–28, 330–31 Egyptian religion, 78 as essence, 377–78 Forms and, 78 Hegel on, 280 immortality of, 51–52, 75–78 and a just God, 161 Kant on, 390–91, 390n5 Leibniz on, 107–8, 213–14 Locke on, 380, 382–84 Manichaeism on, 156 Merleau-Ponty on, 364 Plato on, 78–79, 117, 196–97, 367–73, 390 rational soul, 108 Socrates on, 8, 368 as substance, 391
sound (argument), 25 sovereign, 615, 617–18 space/time, 110 spatiotemporal continuity, 387, 395–96 Speculum of the Other Woman (Irigaray), 419 Spelman, Elizabeth V., 367 Spenta Mainyush, 58–59 Spinoza, Benedictus de
adequate ideas, 200 atheism and, 93 on attributes, 94–95 axioms of, 95–96 biography of, 94 on body, 99–100, 102 on cause of itself, 94–99, 102 on desires, 475 determinism and, 96, 100–103, 113, 455 dual aspect theory of, 341 on emotions, 103 on eternity, 95 on free will, 101–2 on God, 94 on individuality, 100, 112 on infinite regress, 99, 102 Judaism and, 89 Kant and, 275 on mind, 99–100, 102 on the mind-body problem, 329 monism and, 93–95, 100 as pantheist, 100–101, 113, 160 propositions of, 100–102 on substances, 89, 94–100, 117, 326, 331–32, 444 on the universe, 100–101
spirit, 223, 225, 229, 282, 284 spirituality, 57 state, 594 state of nature, 603
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Steppenwolf (Hesse), 418–19 Stoic philosophers, 455 The Stranger (Camus), 467 straw man, 38 Strawson, Galen, 364–67, 365 structuralism, 215 Structure of Behavior (Merleau-Ponty), 363 subject, 390–91, 392n7 subjective idealism, 226–34, 340 subjective mind, 88 subjective truth, 169–72 subjectivism, 289 subjectivity, 359–60, 399, 583 sub-men, 581–83 substance
Aristotle on, 80–84, 362, 390–91 Augustine on, 157–59 cause and, 200 definition of, 55 Descartes on, 89, 93, 100, 106, 207–8,
323–24, 326–28, 331, 380 Kant on, 271, 275 Leibniz on, 89, 103, 117, 326, 331 Locke on, 191, 221–26, 381–84 monads as, 55, 104–10, 326 Newton on, 444 perception and, 199–200 phlogiston, 348 reality and, 117 soul as, 391 Spinoza on, 89, 94–100, 117, 326, 331–32, 444 subjective idealism and, 226–27 and the universe, 444
suffering, 187 sufficient cause, 445 Sufism, 166–67 suicide, 489, 509, 549–50, 552–53 Summa Contra Gentiles (Aquinas), 499, 504–6 Summa Theologica (Aquinas), 139, 145 supererogation, 586 supposition, 12 surface freedom, 480 syllogism, 26–27, 33–34, 136 symbolism, 122, 172 sympathy, 536 Symposium (Plato), 66–67 synthetic a priori knowledge, 136, 271, 273–74 system, 13 Systematic Theology (Tillich), 172 A System of Logic (Mill), 457–60 System of Nature (d’Holbach), 446–47
tabula rasa, 213–14 Taoism. See Dao/Daoism Tarski, Alfred, 266–68 tautology, 137, 271
teleological argument, 130, 142 teleology, 84–85, 87 teletransportation scenario, 395–96 Ten Commandments, 499, 568 Thales, 44–45, 47, 51–52, 54, 116 Theatetus (Plato), 198–99 theist, 122, 174 theology, 87–88, 90 A Theory of Justice (Rawls), 621 theory of recollection, 117 Theravada Buddhists, 165 The Third of May (painting), 176 This Sex Which Is Not One (Irigaray), 419–21 Thoreau, Henry David, 646, 647–49 Through the Moral Maze: The Importance of Free
Will (Kane), 454–55 Thucydides, 14 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 573 Tillich, Paul, 172, 173–74, 652 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein),
363, 392n7 transcendence (God), 129, 150 transcendence (Sartre), 399–401 transcendental, 276 transcendental deduction, 276 transcendental ego, 389–90 transcendentalism, 39 transcendental self, 392 transcendental subjectivity, 290 transgender, 414–17 Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human
Knowledge (Berkeley), 227–34 A Treatise of Human Nature (Hume), 146, 234–39,
385–88 Treatises on Government (Locke), 210 Trimier, Jacqueline, 439, 440, 441 truth
absolutists and, 276 analytic (truth), 271 Aristotle on, 84, 256 Berkeley on, 228, 254 coherence of, 39 coherence theory of, 258–60 coherence theory of truth, 275 conceptual truth, 72, 215, 256 correspondence theory of, 96, 256–58,
267–68, 275 culture and, 253–55 Descartes on, 19, 253 experiential truth, 261 feminist philosophy and, 312–13 Four Noble Truths, 63 Gadamer on, 292 God as, 254 Hegel on, 277, 279–80 hermeneutics and, 291
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historicism and, 288 inductive argument, 29 innate ideas and, 214–15 “Intimate Truths” (Orr), 471–72 James on, 264–66, 294 justified true beliefs, 249 language and, 253–55 Leibniz on, 108 Locke on, 253 mathematics and, 239 means (between the extremes), 531 metaphysics and, 87–88 nature of, 255–58 necessary truth, 254–55, 289 Nietzsche on, 253–54, 286–88 paradox and, 20–21 Parmenides on, 253 Plato on, 195, 253 pragmatic theory of, 258, 260–66, 275–76 The Problems of Philosophy (Russell), 302–7 relativism and, 255 relativists and, 276 religion and, 121 Rorty on, 293, 296 science and, 261 search for, 20 semantic theory of, 258, 266–68 skepticism and, 260 subjective truth, 169–72 theories of, 258–68 truth of reason, 199–200 ultimate reality and, 195 in valid argument, 25 What is Truth? (painting), 256 See also reality
Turing test, 355n16 “Turning on the Television” (Nhat Hanh), 492–93 The Two Fridas (painting), 382 Two Speeches by Malcolm X (Shabazz), 642–43 two-world view, 66, 117, 211, 254–55 tyranny of the majority, 640
Übermensch, 573 ultimate concern, 172–74 ultimate reality, 46, 48, 56–57, 195 unalienable rights, 635–36 uncertainty principle, 453 unclear conclusion, 36 unconsciousness. See consciousness unextended (mind), 102 universal causation, 246, 271 universal consent, 212 universal principles, 215 universe, 51, 55, 63, 87, 93, 100–101, 111–12, 117,
141, 148–50, 160 “unnatural” behaviors, 507–9
unsound (argument), 25 unsound generalizations, 29–30 Upanishads, 14, 55–58, 63, 162 Urmson, J.O., 586–87 U.S. Constitution, 608, 635 utilitarianism
Epicureanism and, 564–65 ethics and, 497–98 Happiness theory, 497–98, 562–63 hedonism and, 556 individuality and, 607–8 justice and, 604–8 law and, 604–5 Mill on, 556, 560–68, 584, 604–8 morality and, 556–68, 590 Nietzsche on, 570 Nozick on, 626–27 Paley on, 143 Sartre on, 579 weakness of will, 566
valid (argument), 24–27, 36–37 validity, 289 values, 578–79 The Varieties of Religious Experience
(James), 152, 167 Vedas, 43 Vedas/Vedic philosophy, 13, 15, 55, 162 Verse of Repentance, 435 Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and
Reward of Morality (Smith), 511–14 vicious circle, 35–36 Vindication of the Rights of Women
(Wollstonecraft), 424 virtue
Aristotle on, 526–27, 530–32, 542–43, 569, 590 free will and, 159 of government, 593–94 Hume on, 538 in Meno (Plato), 73–75 morality and, 498, 522–35, 590 The Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 522 Plato on, 372
void, 110–11 Voltaire, 112, 145, 161, 398 voluntary action, 468–70
wager, 154–55 Walden (Thoreau), 646 Walden Two (Skinner), 479–81 “Wanted: ‘God’ or ‘the Goddess’?” (Daly), 183–85 wantonness, 465–67 war, 487–89, 609–11, 636 “The Watch and the Watchmaker” (Paley), 142–45 water, 44–45, 52, 116 Watson, John, 333, 340
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weak (argument), 29 weakness of will, 566 wealth, 62, 523–24, 527, 595, 623–24 welfare economics, 627 Western religions, 127–30 “What Is Religion?” (Nishitani), 125–27 What is Truth? (painting), 256 “What Means This Freedom?,” 473–75 Whitehead, Alfred North, 22, 65–66 “Wiggle Room” (Kane), 463–64 will to power, 286, 571 Wisdom, John, 122–23, 142 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 122, 149, 339, 362, 363,
364, 392n7 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 424 Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary
Views (Spelman), 367–73 Word and Object (Quine), 307
World War I, 22 World War II, 476
Xenophanes, 129 Xunzi, 515
Yama and Nachiketas (painting), 57 yin/yang, 15 yoga, 163, 165 Yoruba philosophy, 439–41
Zarathustra, 14, 58–59 Zend-Avesta, 58–59 Zeno of Elea, 54 Zhuangzi, 191 Zimmerman, David, 467–68 zombies (philosophical), 361 Zoroastrianism, 58, 156
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- Cover
- Half Title Page
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents in Brief
- Contents
- Philosopher Biographies
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- History of Philosophy
- Introduction
- A. Socrates
- Aristophanes, from Clouds
- Plato, from Apology
- Plato, from Crito
- Plato, from Phaedo
- Plato, from Republic
- B. What Is Philosophy?
- Plato, from Apology
- Karl Jaspers, from “The ‘Axial Period’”
- Laozi, from Dao De Jing
- C. A Modern Approach to Philosophy
- René Descartes, from Discourse on Method
- D. A Brief Introduction to Logic
- KEY TERMS
- BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
- Chapter 1: Reality
- A. “The Way the World Really Is”
- Aristotle, FROM Metaphysics
- B. The First Greek Philosophers
- Parmenides, FROM Fragments
- C. Ultimate Reality in the East: India, Persia, and China
- FROM Upanishads
- FROM Zend-Avesta
- FROM The Confucian Analects
- Laozi, FROM Dao De Jing
- Buddha, FROM “Fire-Sermon”
- D. Two Kinds of Metaphysics: Plato and Aristotle
- Plato, FROM Symposium
- Plato, FROM Republic
- Plato, FROM Meno
- Aristotle, Metaphysics
- Aristotle, FROM Physics
- Aristotle, FROM Metaphysics
- E. Modern Metaphysics
- René Descartes, on Substance
- René Descartes, FROM “Meditation VI”
- Benedictus de Spinoza, FROM Ethics
- Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, FROM Monadology
- David Lewis, FROM Counterfactuals
- Martin Heidegger, FROM “The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics”
- SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
- CHAPTER REVIEW QUESTIONS
- KEY TERMS
- BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
- Chapter 2: Religion
- A. What Is Religion?
- John Wisdom, FROM “Gods”
- Albert Einstein, On the Design of the Universe
- Keiji Nishitani, FROM “What Is Religion?”
- B. The Western Religions
- C. Proving God: The Ontological Argument
- St. Anselm, On the Ontological Argument
- René Descartes, On the Ontological Argument
- Immanuel Kant, Against the Ontological Argument
- D. God as Creator: Intelligence and Design
- St. Thomas Aquinas, Five Arguments for the Existence of God
- William Paley, FROM “The Watch and the Watchmaker”
- St. Thomas Aquinas, On the “Fifth Way”
- David Hume, FROM Dialogues on Natural Religion
- Cory Juhl, On the “Fine-Tuning” Argument
- E. Religion, Morality, and Evil
- Immanuel Kant, On God and Morality
- William James, FROM “The Will to Believe”
- St. Augustine, FROM Confessions
- From the Bhagavadgi-ta
- F. Beyond Reason: Faith and Irrationality
- Mohammad al-Ghazali, FROM The Deliverance from Error
- Søren Kierkegaard, On Subjective Truth
- Paul Tillich, On the Ultimate Concern
- G. Doubts about God and Religion
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, FROM The Brothers Karamazov
- Karl Marx, FROM Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
- Friedrich Nietzsche, FROM Beyond Good and Evil
- Friedrich Nietzsche, FROM The Antichrist
- Friedrich Nietzsche, FROM The Gay Science
- Sigmund Freud, FROM The Future of an Illusion
- Mary Daly, ”Wanted: ‘God’ or ‘the Goddess’?”
- Victor A. Gunasekara, “The Buddhist Attitude to God”
- SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
- CHAPTER REVIEW QUESTIONS
- KEY TERMS
- BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
- Chapter 3: Knowledge
- Bertrand Russell, FROM The Problems of Philosophy
- Plato, FROM Republic
- Plato, FROM Theatetus
- A. The Rationalist’s Confidence: Descartes
- René Descartes, FROM “Meditation I”
- René Descartes, FROM “Meditation II”
- René Descartes, FROM “Meditation VI”
- B. Innate Ideas Concerning Human Understanding: John Locke
- John Locke, FROM An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
- Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, FROM New Essays on Human
- C. Two Empiricist Theories of Knowledge
- John Locke,FROM An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
- Bishop George Berkeley, FROM Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
- D. The Congenial Skeptic: David Hume
- David Hume, FROM A Treatise of Human Nature
- David Hume, FROM An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
- E. A Contemporary Conundrum: Knowledge as Justified True Belief
- SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
- CHAPTER REVIEW QUESTIONS
- KEY TERMS
- Bibliography and Further Reading
- CHAPTER 4: Truth and Relativism
- A. What Is Truth?
- B. Theories of Truth
- Brand Blanshard, On The Coherence Theory
- Charles Peirce, FROM “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”
- William James, On the Pragmatic Theory
- Alfred Tarski, FROM “The Semantic Theory of Truth”
- C. Kant’s Revolution
- Immanuel Kant, FROM The Critique of Pure Reason
- Immanuel Kant, FROM Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
- D. The Battle in Europe After Kant: Relativism and Absolutism
- G. W. F. Hegel, FROM The Phenomenology of Spirit
- G. W. F. Hegel, FROM Reason in History
- Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth
- E. Phenomenology
- Edmund Husserl, FROM “Philosophy as Rigorous Science”
- Edmund Husserl, FROM The 1929 Paris Lectures
- F. Hermeneutics and Pragmatism: Relativism Reconsidered
- Richard Rorty, FROM “Solidarity or Objectivity?”
- Isamu Nagami, FROM “Cultural Gaps: Why Do We Misunderstand?”
- G. The Analytic Turn
- Bertrand Russell, FROM The Problems of Philosophy
- W. V. O. Quine, FROM “Epistemology Naturalized”
- H. Feminist Epistemology
- Elizabeth Grosz, On Feminist Knowledge
- Uma Narayan, On Feminist Epistemology
- SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
- CHAPTER REVIEW QUESTIONS
- KEY TERMS
- BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
- Chapter 5: Mind and Body
- A. What Is Consciousness?
- René Descartes, FROM “Meditation VI”
- René Descartes, FROM “Meditation III”
- B. The Problem of Dualism
- René Descartes, FROM “The Passions of the Soul”
- C. The Rejection of Dualism
- Gilbert Ryle, FROM The Concept of Mind
- J. J. C. Smart, FROM “Sensations and Brain Processes”
- Jerome Shaffer, Against the Identity Theory
- Paul M. Churchland, On Eliminative Materialism
- David Braddon-Mitchell and Frank Jackson, FROM Philosophy of Mind and Cognition
- John R. Searle, FROM “The Myth of the Computer”
- John R. Searle, FROM Minds, Brains, and Science
- D. The Problem of Consciousness
- Sigmund Freud, On the “Unconscious”
- Thomas Nagel, FROM Mortal Questions
- E. Changing Our Minds: Holism and Consciousness
- Aristotle, FROM De Anima
- Galen Strawson, On “Cognitive Experience”
- F. The Politics of the Mind-Body Problem
- Elizabeth V. Spelman, FROM “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views”
- SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
- CHAPTER REVIEW QUESTIONS
- KEY TERMS
- BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
- Chapter 6: Self
- A. Consciousness and the Self: From Descartes to Kant
- René Descartes, FROM “Meditation VI”
- John Locke, On Personal Identity
- David Hume, On the Idea of the Self
- Immanuel Kant, Against the Soul as Substance
- Meredith Michaels, On “Personal Identity”
- Derek Parfit, FROM Reasons and Persons
- B. Existentialism: Self-Identity and the Responsibility of Choice
- Jean-Paul Sartre, On Existentialism
- Jean-Paul Sartre, On Bad Faith
- Jean-Paul Sartre, FROM No Exit
- C. The Individual and the Community
- Søren Kierkegaard, On “The Public”
- Søren Kierkegaard, On Self and Passion
- Martin Heidegger, On “Dasein” and the “They”
- David Reisman, On Individualism
- Malcolm X, On Being “African”
- Malcolm X, FROM “At the Audubon”
- Sherry Ortner, FROM “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?”
- Ann Ferguson, On Androgyny
- Deirdre McCloskey, FROM Crossing
- D. One Self? Any Self? Questioning the Concept of Personal “Essence”
- Hermann Hesse, FROM Steppenwolf
- Luce Irigaray, FROM This Sex Which Is Not One
- Genevieve Lloyd, FROM “The Man of Reason”
- From the Dhammapada
- Laozi, FROM Dao De Jing
- SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
- CHAPTER REVIEW QUESTIONS
- KEY TERMS
- BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
- Chapter 7: Freedom
- A. Fatalism and Karma
- Sophocles, FROM Oedipus the King
- Keiji Nishitani, On Fate
- B. Predestination
- St. Augustine, FROM On Free Choice of the Will
- Muhammad Iqbal, FROM The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam
- Jacqueline Trimier, On the Yoruba Ori
- Jonathan Edwards, FROM “Freedom of the Will”
- C. Determinism
- Baron Paul Henri d’Holbach, FROM System of Nature
- Daniel Dennett, FROM Elbow Room
- Robert Kane, On Indeterminism
- John Stuart Mill, On Causation and Necessity
- David Hume, On Causation and Character
- Robert Kane, On “Wiggle Room”
- Harry Frankfurt, FROM “Freedom of the Will and the Concept
- D. Compulsion and Ignorance
- Aristotle, On Voluntary Action
- Judith Orr, “Sex, Ignorance, and Freedom”
- John Hospers, from “What Means This Freedom?”
- B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom
- B. F. Skinner, from Walden Two
- Robert Kane, Beyond Skinner
- Anthony Burgess, FROM A Clockwork Orange
- Catharine MacKinnon, On Coercion of Women’s Sexuality
- E. Freedom in Practice: Kant’s Solution
- F. Radical Freedom: Existentialism
- Jean-Paul Sartre, On “Absolute Freedom”
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, FROM “The Most Advantageous Advantage”
- Thich Nhat Hanh, FROM “Turning on the Television”
- SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
- CHAPTER REVIEW QUESTIONS
- KEY TERMS
- BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
- Chapter 8: Ethics
- A. Morality
- B. Is Morality Relative?
- Gilbert Harman, FROM “Moral Relativism Defended”
- St. Thomas Aquinas, FROM The Summa Theologica
- John Corvino, FROM Same Sex: Debating the Ethics, Science, and Culture of Homosexuality
- C. Egoism and Altruism
- Plato, FROM Republic
- Tara Smith, The Necessity of Egoism (Ayn Rand)
- D. Are We Naturally Selfish? A Debate
- Mencius, On Human Nature: Man Is Good
- Xunzi, FROM “Human Nature Is Evil”
- Joseph Butler, Against Egoism
- E. Morality as Virtue: Aristotle
- Aristotle, FROM The Nicomachean Ethics
- F. Morality and Sentiment: Hume and Rousseau
- David Hume, On “Reason as Slave of the Passions”
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, FROM Émile
- G. Morality and Practical Reason: Kant
- Immanuel Kant, FROM Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals
- H. Utilitarianism
- Jeremy Bentham, FROM An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
- John Stuart Mill, FROM Utilitarianism
- I. The Creation of Morality: Nietzsche and Existentialism
- Friedrich Nietzsche, On “Morality as Herd-Instinct”
- Friedrich Nietzsche, On “Master and Slave Morality”
- Jean-Paul Sartre, FROM Existentialism Is a Humanism
- Simone de Beauvoir, FROM The Ethics of Ambiguity
- J. Ethics and Gender
- Virginia Held, On Feminist Ethics
- SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
- CHAPTER REVIEW QUESTIONS
- KEY TERMS
- BIBLIOGRAPHY AND FURTHER READING
- Chapter 9: Justice
- A. The Problem of Justice
- B. Two Ancient Theories of Justice: Plato and Aristotle
- Plato, FROM Republic
- Aristotle, FROM The Nicomachean Ethics
- C. Two Modern Theories of Justice: Hume and Mill on Utility and Rights
- David Hume, On “Justice and Utility”
- John Stuart Mill, FROM Utilitarianism
- D. The Social Contract
- Thomas Hobbes, FROM Leviathan
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, FROM The Social Contract
- Thomas Jefferson et al., FROM The Declaration of Independence
- E. Fairness and Entitlement
- John Rawls, FROM “Justice as Fairness”
- Robert Nozick, FROM Anarchy, State, and Utopia
- F. Justice or Care: A Feminist Perspective
- Cheshire Calhoun, FROM “Justice, Care, Gender Bias”
- María Lugones, FROM “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception”
- G. Individual Rights and Freedom
- John Locke, FROM The Second Treatise on Government
- John Stuart Mill, FROM On Liberty
- Malcolm X, On Civil and Human Rights
- Amartya Sen, FROM “Property and Hunger”
- H. Fighting for Rights and Justice: Civil Disobedience
- Henry David Thoreau, FROM “Resistance to Civil Government” (“Civil Disobedience”)
- Martin Luther King, Jr., FROM “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
- Summary and Conclusion
- Chapter Review Questions
- Key Terms
- Bibliography and Further Reading
- Glossary
- Index
