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Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction
‘This is a lively and interesting introduction to philosophy. Despite its
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Edward Craig
Philosophy A Very Short Introduction
1
3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford o x 2 6 d p
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Data available
ISBN 0–19–285421–6
5 7 9 10 8 6
Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain by
TJ International Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall
Contents
List of illustrations ix
1 Philosophy 1 A very short introduction
2 What should I do? 11 Plato’s Crito
3 How do we know? 24 Hume’s Of Miracles
4 What am I? 35 An unknown Buddhist on the self: King Milinda’s chariot
5 Some themes 45 6 Of ‘isms’ 61 7 Some more high spots 74
A personal selection
8 What’s in it for whom? 100 Bibliography 119
Where to go next
Index 127
List of illustrations
1 Boethius listens to the
words of the Lady
Philosophy 6 © Wallace Collection/Bridgeman
Art Library
2 Socrates was depicted
by Aristophanes as an
eccentric in a basket 13 © AKG London
3 Socrates takes the hemlock
from the gaoler 22 © Wolfe Collection, Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York;
photo Erich Lessing/AKG London
4 Hume was smarter
than he looked 25 © Mary Evans Picture Library
5 The Miracle of the Loaves
and Fishes 31 © Dagli Orti/the art archive
6 The image of the chariot:
Arjuna and Krishna 40 © H. Lute/Trip
7 The image of the chariot:
Hercules and Athena 40 © Ancient Art & Architecture
Collection
8 Marble head of
Epicurus 47 © British Museum/Bridgeman
Art Library
9 Beyond the family,
anything goes 53 © Punch
10 Every subject talks
its own talk 67 © www.CartoonStock.com
11 Descartes as
physiologist 80 © AKG London
12 Progress through
conflict 86 © Mary Evans Picture Library
13 Darwin’s message
wasn’t to be digested
quickly 90 © Down House/Bridgeman
Art Library
14 What to blow up next? 97 © AKG London
15 Epicureanism in
practice? 102 © J. King/Trip
16 Hobbes’s Leviathan rises
out of the English
countryside 106 © By permission of the
British Library
17 The Raja consults his
priests 108 © V&A Picture Library
18 The author and his
wares 117 Photograph: Simon Blackburn
19 Philosophy class 118 © Punch
Chapter 1
Philosophy
A very short introduction
Anyone reading this book is to some extent a philosopher already.
Nearly all of us are, because we have some kind of values by which we
live our lives (or like to think we do, or feel uncomfortable when we
don’t). And most of us favour some very general picture of what the
world is like. Perhaps we think there’s a god who made it all, including
us; or, on the contrary, we think it’s all a matter of chance and natural
selection. Perhaps we believe that people have immortal, non-material
parts called souls or spirits; or, quite the opposite, that we are just
complicated arrangements of matter that gradually fall to bits after we
die. So most of us, even those who don’t think about it at all, have
something like answers to the two basic philosophical questions,
namely: what should we do? and, what is there? And there’s a third
basic question, to which again most of us have some kind of an answer,
which kicks in the moment we get self-conscious about either of the
first two questions, namely: how do we know, or if we don’t know how
should we set about finding out – use our eyes, think, consult an oracle,
ask a scientist? Philosophy, thought of as a subject that you can study,
be ignorant of, get better at, even be an expert on, simply means being
rather more reflective about some of these questions and their
interrelations, learning what has already been said about them and why.
In fact philosophy is extremely hard to avoid, even with a conscious
effort. Consider someone who rejects it, telling us that ‘Philosophy is
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useless’. For a start, they are evidently measuring it against some
system of values. Secondly, the moment they are prepared to say,
however briefly and dogmatically, why it is useless, they will be talking
about the ineffectuality of certain types of thought, or of human beings’
incapacity to deal with certain types of question. And then instead of
rejecting philosophy they will have become another voice within it – a
sceptical voice, admittedly, but then philosophy has never been short
of sceptical voices, from the earliest times to the present day. We shall
meet some of them in Chapter 6.
If they take the second of those lines, they may also be implying that
making the discovery that human beings just can’t cope with certain
kinds of question, and making that discovery for yourself – and actually
making it, rather than just lazily assuming that you know it already –
isn’t a valuable experience, or is an experience without effects. Surely
that cannot be true? Imagine how different the world would have
been if we were all convinced that human beings just aren’t up to
answering any questions about the nature or even existence of a god,
in other words, if all human beings were religious agnostics. Imagine
how different it would have been if we were all convinced that there
was no answer to the question of what legitimates the political
authority that states habitually exercise over their members, in other
words, if none of us believed that there was any good answer to the
anarchist. It may well be controversial whether the differences would
have been for the good, or for the bad, or whether in fact they
wouldn’t have mattered as much as you might at first think; but that
there would have been differences, and very big ones, is surely beyond
question. That how people think alters things, and that how lots of
people think alters things for nearly everyone, is undeniable. A more
sensible objection to philosophy than that it is ineffectual is pretty
much the opposite: that it is too dangerous. (Nietzsche, see pp. 93–99,
called a philosopher ‘a terrible explosive from which nothing is
safe’ – though he didn’t mean that as an objection.) But what this
usually means is that any philosophy is dangerous except the speaker’s
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own, and what it amounts to is fear of what might happen if things
change.
It might occur to you that perhaps there are people who don’t even
think it worthwhile to enter into this discussion at all, however briefly,
not even to support the sceptical stance that I have just mentioned. And
you would be right, but that doesn’t mean to say that they don’t have a
philosophy. Far from it. It may mean that they are not prepared to
‘philosophize’ – to state their views and argue for them or discourse
upon them. But it doesn’t mean that they have no abiding values,
nothing which they systematically regard as worthwhile. They might
think, for instance, that real expertise at doing something is more
desirable than any amount of theoretical knowledge. Their ideal would
not so much be insight into the nature of reality as the capacity to
become one with it in the execution of some particular activity, to have
trained oneself to do something without conscious effort as if by a
perfectly honed natural instinct. I am not just making these people up: a
lot of Zen Buddhist thought, or perhaps I should say Zen Buddhist
practice, leans strongly in this direction. And this ideal, of aiming at a
certain kind of thoughtlessness, was the outcome of a great deal of
previous thinking.
If philosophy is so close to us, why do so many people think that it is
something very abstruse and rather weird? It isn’t that they are simply
wrong: some philosophy is abstruse and weird, and a lot of the best
philosophy is likely to seem abstruse or weird at first. That’s because the
best philosophy doesn’t just come up with a few new facts that we can
simply add to our stock of information, or a few new maxims to extend
our list of dos and don’ts, but embodies a picture of the world and/or a
set of values; and unless these happen to be yours already (remember
that in a vague and unreflective way we all have them) it is bound to
seem very peculiar – if it doesn’t seem peculiar you haven’t understood
it. Good philosophy expands your imagination. Some philosophy is
close to us, whoever we are. Then of course some is further away, and
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some is further still, and some is very alien indeed. It would be
disappointing if that were not so, because it would imply that human
beings are intellectually rather monotonous. But there’s no need to
start at the deep end; we start at the shallow end, where (as I’ve said)
we are all standing in the water already. Do remember, however (here
the analogy with the swimming-pool leaves me in the lurch, the way
analogies often do), that this doesn’t necessarily mean that we are all
standing in the same place: what is shallow and familiar, and what is
deep and weird, may depend on where you got in, and when.
We may be standing in the water, but why try to swim? In other words,
what is philosophy for? There is far too much philosophy, composed
under far too wide a range of conditions, for there to be a general
answer to that question. But it can certainly be said that a great deal of
philosophy has been intended as (understanding the words very
broadly) a means to salvation, though what we are to understand by
salvation, and salvation from what, has varied as widely as the
philosophies themselves. A Buddhist will tell you that the purpose of
philosophy is the relief of human suffering and the attainment of
‘enlightenment’; a Hindu will say something similar, if in slightly
different terminology; both will speak of escape from a supposed cycle
of death and rebirth in which one’s moral deserts determine one’s
future forms. An Epicurean (if you can find one nowadays) will pooh-
pooh all the stuff about rebirth, but offer you a recipe for maximizing
pleasure and minimizing suffering in this your one and only life.
Not all philosophy has sprung out of a need for a comprehensive way of
living and dying. But most of the philosophy that has lasted has arisen
from some pressing motivation or deeply felt belief – seeking truth and
wisdom purely for their own sakes may be a nice idea, but history
suggests that a nice idea is pretty much all it is. Thus classical Indian
philosophy represents the internal struggle between the schools of
Hinduism, and between them all and the Buddhists, for intellectual
supremacy; the battle for the preferred balance between human reason
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and scriptural revelation has been fought in many cultures, and in some
is still going on; Thomas Hobbes’s famous political theory (we shall be
seeing more of it later) tries to teach us the lessons he felt had to be
learnt in the aftermath of the English Civil War; Descartes and many of
his contemporaries wanted medieval views, rooted nearly two
thousand years back in the work of Aristotle, to move aside and make
room for a modern conception of science; Kant sought to advance the
autonomy of the individual in the face of illiberal and autocratic
regimes, Marx to liberate the working classes from poverty and
drudgery, feminists of all epochs to improve the status of women. None
of these people were just solving little puzzles (though they did
sometimes have to solve little puzzles on the way); they entered into
debate in order to change the course of civilization.
The reader will notice that I haven’t made any attempt to define
philosophy, but have just implied that it is an extremely broad term
covering a very wide range of intellectual activities. Some think that
nothing is to be gained from trying to define it. I can sympathize with
that thought, since most attempts strike me as much too restrictive,
and therefore harmful rather than helpful in so far as they have any
effect at all. But I will at least have a shot at saying what philosophy is;
whether what I have to offer counts as a definition or not is something
about which we needn’t, indeed positively shouldn’t, bother too much.
Once, a very long time ago, our ancestors were animals, and simply did
whatever came naturally without noticing that that was what they were
doing, or indeed without noticing that they were doing anything at all.
Then, somehow, they acquired the capacities to ask why things happen
(as opposed to just registering that they do), and to look at themselves
and their actions. That is not as big a jump as may at first sight appear.
Starting to ask why things happen is in the first place only a matter of
becoming a little more conscious of aspects of one’s own behaviour. A
hunting animal that follows a scent is acting as if aware that the scent is
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1. In this Renaissance painting Boethius (c.ad 480–525) listens to the words of the Lady Philosophy. The Consolation of Philosophy is his most famous book, and consolation was what he needed as he awaited execution. But philosophy has had many purposes besides this one.
there because its prey has recently passed that way – and it is because
that really is why the scent is there that it often succeeds in its hunt.
Knowledge of this sort of connection can be very useful: it tells us what
to expect. Furthermore, to know that A happens because B happened
may improve your control over things: in some cases B will be
something that you can bring about, or prevent – which will be very
useful if A is something you want, or want to avoid. Many of these
connections animals, humans included, follow naturally and
unconsciously. And the practice, once one is aware of it, can valuably be
extended by consciously raising such questions in cases where we do
not have conveniently built-in answers.
There could be no guarantee, however, that this generally valuable
tendency would always pay off, let alone always pay off quickly. Asking
why fruit falls off a branch pretty soon leads one to shake the tree.
Asking why it rains, or why it doesn’t rain, takes us into a different
league, especially when the real motive underlying the question is
whether we can influence whether it rains or not. Often we can
influence events, and it may well pay to develop the habit of asking,
when things (a hunting expedition, for example) have gone wrong,
whether that was because we failed in our part of the performance, as
opposed to being defeated by matters beyond our control. That same
useful habit might have generated the thought that a drought is to
some extent due to a failure of ours – and now what failure, what have
we done wrong? And then an idea might crop up which served us well in
our infancy: there are parents, who do things for us that we can’t do
ourselves, but only if we’ve been good and they aren’t cross with us.
Might there be beings that decide whether the rain falls, and shouldn’t
we be trying to get on the right side of them?
That is all it would take for human beings to be launched into the
investigation of nature and belief in the supernatural. So as their mental
capacities developed our ancestors found their power increasing; but
they also found themselves confronted by options and mysteries – life
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raised a host of questions, where previously it had simply been lived,
unquestioningly. It is just as well that all this happened gradually, but
even so it was the biggest shock the species has ever encountered.
Some people, thinking more in intellectual than biological terms, might
like to say that it was what made us human at all.
Think of philosophy as the sound of humanity trying to recover from
this crisis. Thinking of it like that will protect you from certain common
misapprehensions. One is that philosophy is a rather narrow operation
that only occurs in universities, or (less absurdly) only in particular
epochs or particular cultures; another, related to the first, is that it is
something of an intellectual game, answering to no very deep need. On
the positive side, it may lead you to expect that the history of
philosophy is likely to contain some fascinating episodes, as indeed it
does, and it certainly adds to the excitement if we bear in mind that
view of what is really going on. Can reeling homo sapiens think his way
back to the vertical? We have no good reason to answer that question
either way, Yes or No. Are we even sure that we know where the vertical
is? That’s the kind of open-ended adventure we are stuck with, like it
or not.
But isn’t that just too broad? Surely philosophy doesn’t include
everything that that account of it implies? Well, in the first place, it will
do us less harm to err on the broad side than the narrow. And in the
second place, the scope of the word ‘philosophy’ has itself varied
considerably through history, not to mention the fact that there has
probably never been a time at which it meant the same thing to
everyone. Recently something rather strange has happened to it. On the
one hand it has become so broad as to be close to meaningless, as when
almost every commercial organization speaks of itself as having a
philosophy – usually meaning a policy. On the other hand it has become
very narrow. A major factor here has been the development of the
natural sciences. It has often been remarked that when an area of
inquiry begins to find its feet as a discipline, with clearly agreed
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methods and a clearly agreed body of knowledge, fairly soon it
separates off from what has up to then been known as philosophy and
goes its own way, as for instance physics, chemistry, astronomy,
psychology. So the range of questions considered by people who think
of themselves as philosophers shrinks; and furthermore, philosophy
tends to be left in charge of those questions which we are not sure how
best to formulate, those inquiries we are not sure how best to set about.
This multiplication of thriving disciplines inevitably brings another
factor into play, namely specialization within universities, and creates
the opportunity to think of philosophy yet more narrowly. University
philosophy departments are mostly quite small. In consequence, so is
the range of their expertise, which tends to cluster around current
(sometimes also local) academic fashion – it must do, since it is
normally they who make it. Besides, undergraduate courses are, for
obvious reasons, quite short, and therefore have to be selective on pain
of gross superficiality. So the natural assumption that philosophy is
what university philosophy departments teach, though I certainly
wouldn’t call it false, is restrictive and misleading, and ought to be
avoided.
This book is called a very short introduction to philosophy. But, as I
hope is now becoming clear, I can’t exactly introduce you to philosophy,
because you are already there. Nor can I exactly introduce you to
philosophy, because there is far too much of it. No more could I ‘show
you London’. I could show you a few bits of it, perhaps mention a
handful of other main attractions, and leave you on your own with a
street map and some information about other guided tours. That’s
pretty much what I propose to do for philosophy.
At the beginning of this chapter I spoke of three philosophical
questions, though they might better have been called three types or
classes of question. Chapters 2–4 introduce, from a classic text, an
example of each type. By progressing from very familiar ways of
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thinking in the first to something most readers will find altogether
stranger in the third, they also illustrate (though not by any means in its
full extent) another theme of this introduction: the range of novelty to
be encountered in philosophy. I have also harped on somewhat about
the difficulty of avoiding being philosophical. If that is so, we should
expect to find some kind of philosophy more or less wherever we look.
As if to confirm that, our first example comes from Greece and the
fourth century bc, our second from eighteenth-century Scotland, and
our third from India, written by an unknown Buddhist at an unknown
date probably between 100 bc and ad 100.
All three of these texts should be fairly easy to obtain, especially the first
two (see Bibliography). This book can perfectly well be read without
them, but there are good reasons to read them yourself alongside it if
that is possible. One is to be able to enjoy the writing. Much philosophy
is well-written, and it is strongly recommended to enjoy the writing as
well as the views and the arguments. But the main reason is that it will
enable you to join in if you want to. Remember that this is not a
completely foreign country: you are to some extent already a
philosopher, and your ordinary native intelligence has a work permit
here – you don’t need to go through any esoteric training to get a
licence to think. So don’t be afraid, as you read, to start asking
questions and forming provisional conclusions. But notice, provisional.
Whatever you do, don’t get hooked up on that laziest, most complacent
of sayings, that ‘everyone has a right to their own opinion’. Acquiring
rights isn’t that simple. Rather, keep in mind the wry comment of
George Berkeley (1685–1753): ‘Few men think, yet all will have opinions.’
If true, that’s a pity; for one thing, the thinking is part of the fun.
Finally, please read slowly. This is a very short book about a very long
subject. I have tried to pack a lot in.
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Chapter 2
What should I do?
Plato’s Crito
Plato, who was born in or around 427 bc and died in 347, was not the
first important philosopher of ancient Greek civilization, but he is the
first from whom a substantial body of complete works has come down
to us. In the Indian tradition the Vedas, and many of the Upanishads are
earlier; but of their authors, and how they were composed, we know
next to nothing. The Buddha pre-dated Plato, though by just how much
is a matter of scholarly disagreement; but the earliest surviving
accounts of his life and thought were written down some hundreds of
years after his death. In China, Confucius also pre-dated Plato (he was
born in the middle of the previous century); again, we have nothing
known to have been written by him – the famous Analects are a later
compilation.
Plato’s works all take the form of dialogues. Mostly they are quick-fire
dialogues, conversational in style, though sometimes the protagonists
are allowed to make extended speeches. There are two dozen or so of
these known to be by Plato, and a handful more that may be. Of the
certainly authentic group two are much longer than the others, and
better thought of as books consisting of sequences of dialogues. (They
are Republic and Laws, both devoted to the search for the ideal political
constitution.) So there is plenty of Plato to read, and most of it is fairly
easy to obtain, in translation in relatively inexpensive editions. As
regards degree of difficulty, the range is wide. At one end we have a
11
number of dialogues comparable to the one we shall shortly be taking a
close look at. At the other are works like The Sophist, capable at times of
making the most experienced readers scratch their heads and look
blank.
A near constant feature of Plato’s dialogues is the presence of Socrates,
usually though not always as the leader of the discussion. Since the
dialogue called Crito is not only conducted by Socrates but also
concerns what he, personally, should do in a certain predicament in
which he finds himself, we need to know a little about him and how he
got into the situation he is in when the dialogue opens – namely in
prison in Athens awaiting imminent execution.
Socrates lived from 469 to 399 bc. He was clearly a charismatic figure,
with a somewhat eccentric lifestyle. Accepting the poverty it entailed,
he appears to have spent all his time in unpaid discussion with
whomever would join with him, which included many of the better-off,
hence more leisured, young men of Athens. These included Plato,
whose admiration for Socrates motivated the career and writings which
immortalized both of them.
Not all our evidence about Socrates’ thought comes to us through
Plato, but by far the greater part of it does, so it is no easy matter to
distinguish clearly between their views. Little doubt that Plato was
sometimes trying to portray the historical Socrates; little doubt that
he was sometimes using the figure of Socrates as a literary device to
convey his own philosophy. Where to draw the line isn’t always obvious,
but scholars seem now broadly agreed that the real Socrates
concentrated on ethical questions about justice and virtue (‘How should
I live?’ is sometimes called ‘the Socratic question’); and that he
constantly probed whether his fellow Athenians really understood what
was involved in these matters anything like as well as they claimed to.
Nor was he always sure that he understood it himself – but then he
didn’t claim to.
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2. Not everyone was as impressed by Socrates as Plato was. In The Clouds, by his contemporary Aristophanes, he appears as a self-important eccentric who spends his time dangling in a basket (so as to be in a better position for studying celestial phenomena).
That sounds like a pretty reliable way of making enemies, so this
account of Socrates’ activities fits in well enough with the next episode:
three citizens, surely acting as the public tip of a hostile iceberg,
brought a prosecution against him on a charge of corrupting the youth
of Athens. By a small majority he was found guilty, and condemned to
death. In The Apology of Socrates you can read Plato’s version of the
(totally unapologetic) speeches he made at his trial, one in his own
defence, one after the verdict, one after the sentence.
Socrates was not executed straight away. At the time of his trial a
ceremonial period was beginning, which would end only when an
official ship returned to Athens from the island of Delos. This had
religious significance, and no executions could take place while the ship
was away. So Socrates had to spend this time in prison – long enough
for his friends to set up a routine of visiting him, get to know the guards,
and form a plan of action. With time running out, it falls to Crito to put
this plan to Socrates: they propose to bribe the guards, Socrates can
escape from Athens and go somewhere else, maybe to Thessaly, where
Crito has friends who will offer hospitality and protection.
The dialogue Crito is Plato’s account of their discussion and Socrates’
response. Considering that this text is 2,400 years old, one of the most
surprising things about it is that it is not more surprising. You may not
agree with everything Socrates says – for instance, many readers will
feel that his view of the claims that the state can properly make on the
individual are exaggerated – but virtually all the points made will be
perfectly familiar to anyone who has ever had to think about a difficult
decision. When Plato writes about love we are aware that his
perspective differs from ours; when we read him on cosmology we are
back in a completely different age; but this discussion of a specific
ethical question, ‘What should I do in this case?’, could almost have
occurred yesterday. I said in Chapter 1 that we were all to some extent
philosophers, and that therefore some philosophy would feel very near
home. Here is an example – from ancient Greece.
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Just one word before we start. There is a standard method for referring
to passages in Plato’s texts, one that works whichever edition and
translation you are using. It actually goes back to the pagination of a
Renaissance edition published in 1578, and is known as Stephanus
numbering (from the Latin name of the editor, Henri Estienne). Any
modern edition of Plato will show it, either in the margin, or at the top
of the page. I shall be using it throughout this chapter.
The first page or so (43a–44b) sets the scene. Crito mentions that he is
well in with the warder. Socrates says that at his age you shouldn’t
complain too much about having to die. But then Crito opens his
campaign of persuasion. He starts – as one well might – by telling
Socrates how much his friends value him, and then implies that Socrates
might care to return the compliment: his friends’ reputation is at
stake – if he stays in prison and dies people will think that they weren’t
prepared to go to the expense of buying his escape.
Now a lot of very different points are raised very quickly (and left half
dealt with – Crito is not written like a well-constructed lecture, but
much more like a real conversation). Socrates responds by saying that
one shouldn’t bother about what ‘people’ think; the opinion that
should matter to us is that of reasonable people with a clear view of the
facts. ‘We can’t afford to take that line,’ says Crito, ‘majority opinion is
too powerful.’ ‘On the contrary,’ Socrates replies, ‘as regards what really
matters the majority don’t have much power at all.’ And what really
matters, apparently, is whether one is wise or foolish (44d).
I suspect that this idea will strike many readers as a rather strange one.
What does Socrates mean by wisdom, that it should be the only thing
that really matters? We should keep that question in mind, and keep an
eye open for anything later in the dialogue that might shed light on it.
Crito just lets it go, and goes back to the earlier issue of the
consequences for Socrates’ friends. Is Socrates thinking that his friends
will be in danger of reprisals if he escapes? Yes, it seems that he is (and
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he returns to emphasize the risk to them at 53a/b). This of course quite
neutralizes Crito’s argument: no point in appealing to the bad effects on
your friends if you don’t do something, when the effects on them if you
do are likely to be at least as bad.
Crito, understandably quite wound up, now makes a longer speech
(45a–46a) in which he fires off all his remaining ammunition in an
emotional and haphazard sort of way. Socrates shouldn’t think of the
risk to his friends, or the expense – anyway, the expense won’t be all
that great. Nor should he bother about the fact that escape into exile
would mean going back on things he said at his trial. (We shall soon see,
at 46b–46d and 52c, that this cuts no ice whatever with Socrates, for
whom being consistent, true to himself and his reasons for acting, is a
very important value.)
Next, Crito goes on, Socrates is acting wrongly in giving up his life
when he could save it, and so falling in with his enemies’ wishes. Crito
doesn’t tell us whether he thinks that for Socrates to give up his life
when he could save it would be wrong just because it means success for
his enemies, or whether it is an intrinsically wrong thing to do – as some
have thought suicide intrinsically wrong – or for some other reason
again. Which of these he has in mind actually makes quite a difference
to what he is saying, but he is in no state for precise thinking. Now
seriously overheating, he first accuses Socrates of showing no concern
for his children, then of showing a lack of courage (45d). (Considering
the courage required for what Socrates actually does intend to do, the
latter charge seems particularly absurd – the one about his children
Socrates will deal with later.) Running out of steam, Crito now returns to
his complaint about the damage to Socrates’ friends’ reputations, begs
Socrates to agree with him, and comes to a stop.
In his distress and anxiety Crito has become pretty offensive in his last
couple of paragraphs. But this Socrates overlooks, with a kind remark
about Crito’s warm feelings, and takes control of the dialogue. The
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thinking immediately becomes slower and calmer, and better
organized. He returns to the first point Crito made – the one about
reputation – and asks whose opinion we should respect, those of the
wise or the foolish, those of the many or those of the expert? Crito trots
along giving the obvious answers, the way his discussion-partners
usually do when Socrates gets into gear. So in this case we shouldn’t be
listening to the majority, but to someone who understands what it is to
be just, to act rightly, to live well or as one should. Otherwise we shall
damage our souls, as we would have damaged our bodies by listening to
the majority rather than the doctor in a matter of physical health. The
crucial question is whether it is right for Socrates to try to escape – all
this stuff about money, reputations, and bringing up children is of no
real consequence (48c).
Let’s just pause for a moment. One thing we should not do is read
philosophy uncritically. Isn’t there a whiff of moral fanaticism about
what Socrates is now saying? What damage to his soul exactly? And
why should it be so frightful? And if his friends’ reputations and his
children’s upbringing are on the line, mightn’t he be prepared to risk a
little damage to his soul? After all, he wouldn’t think much of anyone
who wasn’t prepared to risk physical injury for the sake of friends and
family. Admittedly, we have been told (back at 47e–48a) that the soul,
or more accurately ‘that part of us, whatever it is, which is concerned
with justice and injustice’, is much more valuable than the body. But we
haven’t been told why or how; and there has been no explanation of
why it should be so valuable that the prospect of damage to it instantly
overrides any little matters like friends’ reputations or the well-being of
one’s children. And besides, if children are not well cared for, might that
not damage ‘that part of them, whatever it is, which is concerned with
justice and injustice’? It looks as if Socrates needed a different
discussion-partner, someone who might have started calling for
answers to a few of these questions.
But let us hear Socrates out, and get a view of the full picture, as he
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argues that it would be wrong for him to escape into exile. First he asks
Crito to agree that doing someone a wrong is always wrong, even when
done in response to a wrong done to you (49a–49e). Revenge may be
sweet but it is not permissible. The strategic importance of this is easy
to see: if it is accepted, then whether anyone has wronged Socrates –
the State, the jurors, his accusers – becomes irrelevant; the only
question is whether he himself would be doing a wrong in following
Crito’s plan. Clearly Socrates does not expect there to be widespread
agreement on this point. He knows only too well that there are many
who hold that retaliation is permissible, even that it is positively right.
But it is Crito he is trying to convince, and the two of them have
evidently been here in discussion before – ‘our former opinion’ he calls
it. And Crito agrees: ‘I stand by it.’
Socrates now puts forward two much less controversial premisses:
doing harm to people is wrong (49c), and breaking a fair agreement is
wrong (49e). He is now about to argue that if he tries to escape he will
be doing both. The injured parties would be the State of Athens and its
laws; he imagines them coming forward, personified, to put their case.
In the first place, he would be doing them harm (50a–50b), indeed he
would be ‘intending their destruction’. That sounds odd – surely the
only thing Socrates would be intending is to escape execution? But the
next sentence tells us what is meant: if what he proposes to do were
taken as an example, the result would be the collapse of the law and
hence also of the State, neither of which can survive if private
individuals ignore the decisions of the courts. What we have here is an
appeal to a very familiar moral argument: ‘What would happen if
everybody behaved like that?’ When I do something, it is as if I were
giving everyone else my permission to do the same, and I have to
consider the consequences of that, not just of my individual action. The
German Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), some would say the most
influential philosopher of modern times, made this the basic principle of
morality (though he found a rather more complicated way of stating it).
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We have all heard of it, we have all had it thrown at us, and here it is
popping up in 400 bc.
In the second place, they suggest (50c), Socrates would be breaking an
agreement. But from here to 51d what the Laws and the State have to
say does not seem to be about an agreement at all, in any normal
sense – no voluntary consent to anything on the part of Socrates is in
question. It might be better described as being about obligations of
gratitude, or about the deference owed by a creature to its creator, or
both. The burden of this paragraph is that the Athenian State, which is
compared to a parent, made Socrates what he is; and he is not
dissatisfied with how it did it. So he is bound by its wishes, and it is
ridiculous to suppose that he might have a right of retaliation against it.
The last point really ought to be unnecessary, since Socrates has already
said that retaliation is wrong anyway. But he can be seen as covering
himself twice: even if retaliation were sometimes right, as many think it
is, it would still not be right in this case, where the parent-like State is
the other party. As to his being bound by the State’s wishes, this
totalitarian conception of the State’s powers and the corresponding
view of parental authority is more stipulated than justified in this
passage. That isn’t surprising, because it wouldn’t be at all easy to
justify the doctrine that the State, by virtue of its role in the lives of
human individuals, thereby acquires the right to dispose of them much
as if they were inanimate artefacts made for its own purposes. A State
may do a lot for its citizens, but can it conceivably do so much that they
can lay claim to no purposes of their own beyond those it allows them?
And once we grant that Socrates might be allowed some purposes of his
own independent of the will of Athens, then might not staying alive (if
that is what he wants) be one of them? Crito, were he not the perfect
Yes-man, could have had rather more to say at this stage.
However, at 51d Socrates’ imaginary antagonists introduce a point
which, if correct, makes a very big difference: Socrates has of his own
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free will entered into an agreement with them to respect and obey the
laws. Not that he ever signed a document or made an official statement;
but his behaviour was a sufficient indication of his agreement. For the
law allowed him, once an adult, to take his possessions and leave
Athens without any material penalty. He stayed. Nor has he ever in his
seventy years been away even temporarily, except on military service.
At his trial he made it clear that he had no interest in exile as a possible
alternative sentence. Taken together, this is clear voluntary consent to
the institutions of Athens. Does he now (contrary to what he avowed
at 49e) intend to break his agreement?
Much of Socrates’ argument has been conducted at a high level of
principle, sometimes dizzily high – as when he said that compared with
the importance of doing what is right, matters of reputation (his
friends’ as well as his own) and the upbringing of children were of no
account. But here in the closing pages of Crito, between 52c and the
end, there are signs of him covering his back. Whether he wants to be
sure of convincing those not convinced of his lofty principles, or
whether he isn’t himself altogether happy to let the entire issue rest on
them, the fact is that reputations, the risks to his friends, his prospects
in exile, and the education of his children now make a reappearance.
Not many pages back Socrates was telling Crito not to bother about the
opinion of the crowd. But ‘the Laws and the State’ think it is at least
worth mentioning that he is in danger of making himself a laughing
stock (53a), and of hearing many deprecatory things about himself
(53e), and of giving the jurors reason to think that they made the right
decision (53b/c). (More important to one holding Socrates’ principles is
that he himself would be ashamed if he were to go back on what he so
proudly said at his trial (52c) – his own integrity ought to mean more to
him than that.) He should think of the practical consequences: if he
escapes his friends will be in danger (53b), his life in exile will be
unrewarding and demeaning (53b–53e). And finally (54a), what will it
benefit his children? Is he to bring them up in Thessaly (Thessaly of all
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places!), exiles themselves? And if they are to grow up in Athens, what
difference to them whether he is dead or merely absent? His friends will
see to their education in either case.
The Laws have one last card to play, well known and much used by
moralists from earliest times right down to our own: the old fire-and-
brimstone manœuvre. Should Socrates offend against them, they say,
he can expect an uncomfortable reception in the afterlife. The laws of
the underworld are their brothers, and will avenge them.
Finally, Socrates speaks again in his own person (54d). His closing words
broach another perennial topic: the relationship between morals and
religion. Some have held (and many have disagreed with them) that
morality is impossible without belief in a god. There is no reason to
attribute that view to Socrates. But he does appear to be doing
something just as time-honoured as the fire-and-brimstone trick, and a
good deal more comforting: claiming divine moral inspiration. ‘These
things I seem to hear, Crito . . . and these words re-echo within me, so
that I can hear no others. . . . Let us then act in this way, since this is the
way the god is leading.’
The dialogue is over; I hope you have enjoyed reading it. Moral
problems are notoriously hard to settle, not just when several people
are trying to reach agreement, but even when they are trying to make
up their own minds as individuals. We have seen a little of why this
should be: so many factors, of so many different types, are involved.
Should you do A or not? Well, what will the consequences be if you do?
There may be consequences for your friends, your family, and others, as
well as those for you yourself. And what if you don’t? How do the
consequences compare? Alternatively, never mind the consequences for
a moment, just ask whether you can do A consistently with your own
view of yourself – would it involve betraying ideals that till then you had
valued and tried to live up to? How will you feel about having done it? Or
again, however pleasant the consequences may be, would it run
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3. Still debating with his friends, Socrates takes the hemlock from the gaoler. Jacques Louis David’s well-known painting The Death of Socrates (1787).
contrary to some duty, or some obligations you have incurred?
Obligations to whom? – and might you not be in breach of other
obligations if you don’t do it? Do obligations to friends and family take
precedence over duties towards the State, or vice versa? And if you have
a religion what does it say about the choice? All this complexity is only
latent in Crito, because Socrates manages to make all the relevant
factors come out either neutral (it won’t make much difference to his
children either way, nor to his friends) or all pointing in the same
direction. But it doesn’t take much imagination to see the potential for
agonizing moral dilemmas.
Some people expect philosophy to tell us the answers to moral
problems. But unless it can somehow impose simplicity on the
complexities we have been looking at, the prospects for that don’t look
good. For it would have to show us, convincingly, that there was just one
right way to balance out all the various considerations. Socrates was
going for simplification when (starting at 48c) he tried to make the
whole thing turn on just one issue. Kant, whom I mentioned earlier
(p. 18) went for simplification in basing morality on a single principle
closely related to the familiar ‘what would happen if everyone did that?’
Some try to simplify in another way, advising us not to think in terms of
duties and obligations but only of the consequences of our own
proposed actions for everyone whom they will affect. We shall see more
of this kind of view in Chapter 5.
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Chapter 3
How do we know?
Hume’s Of Miracles
Many – including your present guide – regard the Scotsman David
Hume (1711–76) as the greatest of all philosophers who have written in
English. He was of wide-ranging intellect: his multi-volume History of
England had the effect that in his lifetime he was equally well known as a
historian, and he also wrote essays on political (mainly constitutional)
questions and on economics. All of this he saw as contributing to a
single broad project, the study of human nature. His youthful
masterpiece, published in 1739/40, is called A Treatise of Human Nature;
in three books it deals with human beliefs, emotions, and moral
judgements. What are they, and what produces them?
Hume’s writings on these questions are shaped by a deeply held
conviction about what human beings are. Equally important to him was
a conviction about what we aren’t, a particular delusion which had to be
overcome before anything more positive would have a chance of taking
hold of our minds. Remember that most great philosophy doesn’t just
add/subtract one or two facts to/from our previous beliefs; it removes a
whole way of thinking and replaces it with another. There may be a lot
of minute detail within it, but just stand back a bit and you will see that
it is large-scale stuff.
The conception that Hume wanted to root out had its basis in religious
belief. Taking very seriously the saying that God created us in his own
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image, it saw us as hybrid beings, in this world but not entirely of it. Part
of us, our bodies, are natural objects, subject to natural laws and
processes; but we also have immortal souls, endowed with reason and
an understanding of morality – this is what makes us images of God.
Animals are quite different. They have no souls, but are just very subtle
and complex machines, nothing more. The really significant line comes
between us and them, not between us and God. Hume wanted to move
it: we are not inferior little gods but somewhat superior middle-sized
animals.
Don’t miss the added ‘?’, top-right. The left-hand column invites us to
overestimate human reason. Once we get it in proper perspective we
shall see both that we have drawn the line in the wrong place, and that
our attempts even to think about what might be above the line are
doomed to failure: we just aren’t up to it.
Hume therefore has a great deal to say about the role of reason in our
lives; he argues that it isn’t nearly as big, or of the same kind, as his
opponents thought. It then follows that much of what they took human
reason to do must in fact be done by something else: the mechanics of
human nature, about which he developed an extensive theory, a piece
of early cognitive science as we would call it nowadays. But when Hume
writes directly about religious belief (as he does quite a lot, see
Bibliography) he leaves the grand theory on the shelf and applies
God God (?)
Humans ———
⇒
——— Humans
Animals Animals
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common sense and everyday human observation. So in his essay Of
Miracles we have another classic piece of philosophical writing that
starts on your doorstep, if not actually in your living-room.
However, we mustn’t assume that everything here is completely
familiar. Hume is going to argue that if we believe that a miracle has
occurred, when our evidence consists in other people’s reports (as it
virtually always does), then we hold this belief contrary to reason, since
our reasons for believing that the alleged miracle did not occur must be
at least as strong as our reasons for supposing that it did; in fact, he
thinks, they are always stronger. This was a topic that he needed to
approach carefully, for two reasons. Not twenty years before he
published Of Miracles one Thomas Woolston had spent the last few years
of his life in prison for saying that the biblical reports of Christ’s
resurrection were not adequate evidence for belief in so unlikely an
event; what Hume was now about to say was by no means unrelated.
Second, Hume really wanted to change the way his contemporaries,
especially his compatriots, thought about religion. He couldn’t do that if
they didn’t read him, so he had to lead them in gently.
Hence the ‘Tillotson connection’ that Hume parades in the opening
paragraph. What could be better than to be able to say that your views
are just a development of an argument recently proposed by an
archbishop? Except perhaps, to be able to add that the archbishop’s
argument was a decisive refutation of a specifically Roman Catholic
doctrine? Hume’s public, most of them in varying degrees hostile to
Catholicism, would feel a comfortable warm glow . . . and read on.
Before we look at the argument itself, one more question: why does
Hume find it important to write about the evidence for miracles? It is
part of his plan for a systematic treatment of the grounds of religious
belief, and it was customary to think of these as being of two kinds. On
the one hand there were those which human beings, going on their own
experience and using their own reason, could work out for themselves.
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On the other, there were those that came from revelation, that is to say
from a sacred text or some other authority. But these present a further
problem, because you could have fraudulent texts and bogus
authorities; so how to tell the genuine ones? The answer was that
genuine revelations are connected with the occurrence of miracles:
hence their importance, as certificates of religious authority.
(Ultimately, they are issued by the highest possible authority; the widely
accepted view, which Hume here takes over, had it that miracles were
violations of laws of nature, and therefore could only be performed by
God or those God had entrusted with divine powers.) That we can never
have good reason to believe in a miracle was therefore a pretty
subversive claim; it amounted to saying that human reason cannot tell
the bona-fide revelation from the bogus.
So now to Hume’s argument. It starts at a point we all know well,
because we all frequently rely on things that other people have told us.
Mostly there has been no problem, but occasionally what we were told
turned out to be false. Occasionally we have heard contradictory things
from two people, so we knew that at least one of them was wrong even
if we never found out which. And we also know a little about what leads
to false reports: self-interest, protection of others, defence of a cause
dear to one’s heart, the wish to have a good story to tell, simple sincere
mistake, uncritical belief of earlier reports, mischief, and so on. Most of
us have sometime in our lives gone wrong in most of these ways
ourselves, so that it isn’t just from observation of others (as some of
Hume’s words might be taken to suggest) that we acquire this
knowledge. We all know that human testimony is sometimes to be
treated with caution, and under certain circumstances with a great deal
of caution.
Suppose I were to tell you that last week I drove, on a normal weekday
morning just before midday, right across London from north to south,
and didn’t see a single person or vehicle on the way – not a car, not a
bicycle, not a pedestrian; everyone just happened to be somewhere else
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as I was passing. You might wonder whether it was an absurdly
exaggerated way of saying that the roads were unusually quiet, or
whether I was testing your gullibility, or recounting a dream, or maybe
going mad, but one option you would not seriously entertain is that
what I had said was true. Almost anything, you would tell yourself,
however unlikely, is more likely than that.
That would be very reasonable of you. Even if what I said was in fact true
(which is just about conceivable, since nobody was under any
compulsion to be on my route at that time, so they might all have
decided to be somewhere else) it still wouldn’t be at all reasonable of
you to believe it, if your only reason for believing it was that I had said
so. Had you been with me and seen the empty streets yourself things
might be different; but we are talking about the case in which you are
reliant on my testimony.
Perhaps you can see the shape of Hume’s argument beginning to
appear. Given what its role is to be in underpinning religious belief, a
miraculous event must surely be one which our experience tells us is
highly improbable. For if it were the sort of thing that can quite easily
happen, then any old charlatan with a bit of luck or good timing could
seize the opportunity to qualify as having divine authority. But if it is
highly improbable, only the most reliable testimony will be strong
enough to establish it. Forced to choose between two improbabilities
the wise, who as Hume tells us proportion belief to evidence, will opt for
the alternative they find less improbable. So this will have to be the
testimony of such witnesses, that its falsehood would be more
improbable than the occurrence of the events it relates. And that is a tall
order, since, as we have seen, the events must be very improbable
indeed.
Now this leaves it perfectly possible that we might, in theory, have
testimonial evidence that was strong enough. But it is enough to create
serious doubt whether we do, in fact, have adequate evidence for any
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miracle. We know that eyewitnesses can be mistaken, or intentionally
deceived. Many of us have had the experience of finding ourselves in
disagreement with someone else who was also an eyewitness to the
events reported, often within a day or two of the events themselves.
Many reports of the miraculous come to us from people who were not
eyewitnesses, and were writing or speaking years after the events in
question. Most such reports come from adherents of the religion which
these alleged miracles are used to support. A court of law would take
the possibility that witnesses of this kind were unreliable very seriously
indeed – in some cases so seriously that it wouldn’t even be prepared to
hear them testify.
Are there any reports of miracles which escape such doubts? It sounds
as if we might have to trawl through the whole of recorded history to
answer that question. But that, Hume thinks, won’t be necessary. For it
isn’t just that a miracle has to be extremely improbable. It has to be in a
sense impossible – contrary to a law of nature (‘instead of being only
marvellous, . . . really miraculous’). That was Hume’s definition, and the
one he expected his audience to accept. And this enables us to state the
argument again in a slightly different, and more decisive, form – the
form Hume preferred.
We receive a report of something – for convenience call it The Event –
supposed to be miraculous. So we are asked to believe that The Event
occurred, and that this was contrary to a law of nature. For us to have
good reason to believe that an event of that kind would have been
contrary to a law of nature, it must be contrary to all our experience,
and to our best theories of how nature works. But if that is so then we
must have very strong reason to believe that The Event did not occur –
in fact the strongest reason we ever do have for believing anything of
that sort.
So what reason do we have on the other side – to believe that it did
occur? Answer: the report – in other words the fact that it is said to have
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occurred. Could that possibly be so strong as to overpower the contrary
reasons and win the day for The Event? No, says Hume, it could (in
theory) be of equal strength, but never of greater. There might be such
a thing as testimony, given by sufficiently well-placed witnesses, of the
right sort of character, under the right sort of circumstances, that as a
matter of natural (psychological) law it was bound to be true. But that
would only mean that we had our strongest kind of evidence both for
The Event and against it, and the rational response would be not belief
but bewilderment and indecision.
Note the bracketed words ‘in theory’. Hume doesn’t think that we ever
find this situation in practice, and gives a number of reasons why not.
Had he lived in our time he might have added that psychological
research has uncovered a number of surprising facts about the
unreliability of human memory and testimony, but shows no sign of
homing in on any set of conditions under which their reliability is
5. The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes, in a sixth-century representation. Food for 5,000? Or just food for thought?
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completely assured. Nor should we expect it to, given the range of
disruptive factors which Hume lists.
This, in essence, was Hume’s argument. Unsurprisingly, it has provoked
much discussion, and still does. Here are a couple of points, to give the
flavour. They also nicely illustrate two features frequent in philosophical
discussion and indeed in debate generally, so well worth being on the
look out for: there is the criticism which, whilst perfectly true in itself,
misses the point; and there is the objection that an argument ‘proves
too much’.
Hume, it may be said, based his argument on the thought that a miracle
must be (at least) extremely improbable. But won’t his opponents just
deny that? They, after all, are believers. So whereas they might regard a
report that – to take Hume’s own example – Queen Elizabeth I rose
from the dead as far beneath serious consideration, just as Hume
himself would, they may regard the alleged miracle of Christ’s
resurrection as not very improbable at all, given who they take Christ to
have been. Hasn’t Hume just begged the question against them – not
so much proved that they are wrong as simply assumed it?
But we should reply on his behalf that this mistakes what Hume was
doing. He was asking what reasons there may be for forming religious
beliefs in the first place. That the world may look very different, and
different arguments appear reasonable, when one has already formed
them, he would not for one moment dispute. Nor need he dispute it: it
has no bearing on the central issue, which is whether a miracle can be
proved, ‘so as to be the foundation of a system of religion’.
So that objection is simply off target. The second is not, and gives Hume
more trouble. Doesn’t his argument show that it could never be
reasonable for us to revise our views about the laws of nature? But that
is the main way in which science makes progress; so if that is irrational,
then any charge that belief in miracles is irrational begins to look rather
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less serious. ‘If I’m no worse than Newton and Einstein and company’,
the believer will say, ‘I’m not too bothered.’
Why might it be thought that Hume’s argument has gone over the top
in this way? Well, suppose we have very good reason to think that
something is a law of nature: all our experience to date fits in with it,
and our best current scientific theory supports it. Now suppose that
some scientists report an experimental result which conflicts with it.
Doesn’t Hume’s argument tell us that we ought just to dismiss their
report on the spot? Our evidence that what they report to have
happened cannot happen is as good as any evidence we ever have; on
the other side of the question we have just – their testimony. Isn’t that
exactly the situation he was talking about in regard to reports of
miracles?
Hume appears to be trying to pre-empt some such criticism when he
writes: ‘For I own that otherwise [i.e. when it is not a question of being
the foundation of a system of religion] there may possibly be miracles,
or violations of the usual course of nature, of such a kind as to admit
of proof from human testimony . . .’. And he goes on to describe an
imaginary case (philosophers often use imaginary cases to test the
force of an argument) in which there are found in all human societies
reports of an eight-day darkness, which agree with each other exactly
as to when the darkness began and when it lifted. Then, he says, it is
clear that we ought to accept the report, and start considering what the
cause of this extraordinary event might have been. But he does not tell
us precisely what it is about this example that makes the difference. And
that was what we needed to know.
I think Hume could have made a better, and certainly a clearer, response
to the threat. He might have said that in circumstances such as I have
just outlined (last paragraph but one) the scientific community
probably would not believe the report, and that they would be perfectly
rational not to, until several of them had repeated the experiment and got
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exactly the same result. Belief in it would then no longer be a matter of
testimony alone, but also of widespread observation. We can, and do,
demand that scientific results be replicable; we can’t demand a rerun of
a miracle. Where for any reason no rerun is possible those making the
improbable assertion have it too easy, and we ought to be as cautious in
science as we should be in matters religious.
It may be, though we cannot be certain, that this is what Hume was
trying to say. In the imaginary situation he describes, the report of the
eight-day darkness is found in all cultures. At a time when
communication was slow and cumbersome, and likely to be partial and
inaccurate, perhaps he took his story to be one in which it was beyond
doubt that all these different peoples had independently made precisely
the same observations, so that the situation was the equivalent of
running an experiment several times with exactly the same result. As I
say, we cannot be certain – not even Hume, one of the best
philosophical writers in this respect, is clear all the time. But we can be
fairly certain that that was not all he was trying to say. For at the end of
the paragraph from which the quotation above is taken, we find this:
‘The decay, corruption, and dissolution of nature, is an event rendered
probable by so many analogies, that any phenomenon, which seems to
have a tendency towards that catastrophe, comes within the reach of
human testimony, if that testimony be very extensive and uniform.’
Or in other words, the alleged eight-day darkness would indeed be very
unusual, but there is nothing especially unusual about nature behaving
out of the normal pattern from time to time. So we have no reason to
regard such a thing as impossible, and therefore there is no real
comparison with the case of a miracle at all. We could spend a long time
amongst the details of Hume’s essay Of Miracles. Many have. But our
tour must move on.
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Chapter 4
What am I?
An unknown Buddhist on the self: King Milinda’s chariot
It is generally true of Indian philosophy that we do not know much
about the people who wrote it. If we know their names, the region in
which they lived, and their dates within fifty years, that counts as
scholarly success. But in the case of the Milindapañha, the Questions of
King Milinda, no such ‘success’ has been achieved – we really know next
to nothing. Here a Buddhist monk, Nagasena, debates with a regional
king and answers his questions. Nagasena is probably a real figure,
grown legendary; King Milinda is generally thought to be Menander,
one of the Greek rulers in north-west India left over from the conquests
of Alexander the Great. Even that is speculative – so let us just go
straight to the text.
Only a few lines into it a shock awaits us. Plato’s Crito, we saw, is built of
elements nearly all of which most readers will have found quite familiar.
Hume’s argument in Of Miracles aimed to start from everyday common-
sense observations about testimony plus an unsurprising definition of a
miracle, and then arrive at a remarkable conclusion by showing that it is
an inevitable consequence. But sometimes authors will adopt different
tactics, pitching us straight in at the deep end with an assertion which
seems frankly preposterous. We should learn to ride out the shock and
read on, seeking to discover what the preposterous assertion really
amounts to (it may be what it seems, or it may just be an unusual way of
saying something rather less startling), and why they made it. Notice
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that ‘why they made it’ means two things, both important: their
reasons for thinking it true – and their motives for being interested in it,
what they are aiming at. All of these points are highly relevant to the
passage we are about to look at.
First, the shock. The party gathers; the king asks Nagasena’s name,
Nagasena tells him: ‘Sire, I am known as Nagasena’ – but then adds that
this word ‘Nagasena’ is only ‘a mere name, because there is no person
as such that is found’. What can he possibly mean? One would have
thought that Nagasena was a person, and he has just told Milinda his
name; but immediately it turns out that the name is not the name of a
person. So Nagasena isn’t a person after all, and this even though he has
just told the king how he is known and how his fellow monks address
him. What is going on here?
The king, who is evidently experienced in this kind of discussion (and
also has considerable prior knowledge of Buddhism), doesn’t despair
but sets out to get to the bottom of it. Realizing that Nagasena wasn’t
just speaking of himself, but intended the point he was making
(whatever it may have been) to apply equally to everyone, he starts
drawing what he takes to be absurd consequences from the monk’s
view. If it is true, then nobody ever does anything, right or wrong,
nobody ever achieves anything, suffers anything. There is no such thing
as a murder, for there is no person who dies. And then a little joke about
Nagasena’s status: there was no one who taught him, and no one who
ordained him. The tactic is common in debates of all kinds: here are a
number of things which we all unhesitatingly take to be true; is
Nagasena really saying that they are all false? Or is he going to tell us
that his view, if properly understood, doesn’t have that consequence?
Nagasena never takes that challenge up directly. By the end of the
chapter he has given a hint, from which we can reconstruct what he
might have said had he done so. But for the moment the king continues,
falling into question-and-answer style reminiscent of many of Plato’s
dialogues.
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Milinda’s questioning in this passage is structured by the Buddhist
doctrine of the ‘five aggregates’, according to which what we call a
human being is a complex of five elements. Milinda calls them
material form, feeling (by which they seem to have understood
pleasure, pain, and indifference), perception, mental formations
(i.e. our dispositions, our character), and consciousness. Exactly
what these are we need not bother about, so long as we have
some rough idea: the point is that the person is not to be identified
with any of them.
That is probably what most of us would say, on a little reflection. Are
we our feelings? No, we are what has the feelings, not the feelings
themselves. Are we our perceptions? No, for the same reason. Are we
our dispositions, our character? Well again, no – because dispositions,
characters are tendencies to behave in certain ways; and we aren’t the
tendencies but rather what has those tendencies. Likewise, we aren’t
the consciousness; we are whatever it is that is conscious. The fifth item
(the one that Milinda actually put first) might be more contentious,
however. Mightn’t the material element, i.e. the body, be the thing that
is conscious, has the dispositions, the perceptions, the feelings? When
asked, in effect, whether the body is Nagasena, why is Nagasena so
quick to say that it isn’t?
When someone presents a point as if it were pretty obvious when it
doesn’t seem obvious to you at all, it is good tactics to look for
something unspoken lying behind it. Perhaps they are assuming that a
self, a person, must be something rather pure and lofty – notice the
studiously repulsive description of the body with which the king
prefaces his question. Or that a self must be a permanent, unchanging
thing, quite unlike a body, perhaps even capable of surviving death.
Either of those assumptions might have come from earlier
philosophical/religious conceptions – back to that in a moment. Or
maybe from some such thought as this: matter doesn’t move itself (just
leave a lump of it lying around and see how much it moves), whereas an
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animal does – so there must be something non-material in it moving its
matter. Or: even if matter does move it doesn’t make coherent,
directed, intelligent movements – so a body needs something to
direct it.
These thoughts were commonplace long before Questions of King
Milinda was written. Remember the importance Socrates attaches to
the well-being of his soul in Crito; or go on to read Plato’s Phaedo – the
follow-up to Crito, about Socrates’ very last discussion and death. ‘Hold
it a moment’, you will say, ‘that’s Greece, whereas this is India’. True,
but very similar ideas are found (even earlier) in the Brahminical
writings sacred to Hinduism. Admittedly, Buddhism quite consciously
broke away from the Brahminical tradition. But the main points of
contention were animal sacrifice and the caste system (which Buddhism
abandoned along with all extreme forms of asceticism), so that a great
deal of that tradition remained and formed the background to
Buddhism as well. The idea of cyclical rebirth to further lives of
suffering, and the hope of escape from the cycle into a state of
liberation (the Buddhist nirvana and the Hindu moksha), are equally
part of both.
Knowing these things may help us a little in understanding the prompt
‘No, sire’ with which Nagasena answers this sequence of questions. But
it doesn’t help as much as we might wish, because it gives no hint as to
why he should make the same response to the king’s last question,
whether then Nagasena is something else, something different from the
five ‘aggregates’. If anything, it might lead us to expect that he would
say that Yes, it was something different, something that could leave the
body and later inhabit another, that could be having certain feelings and
perceptions now, and could have quite different ones in the future. But
again he says ‘No sire’ – it is not something else. So the puzzle remains.
And Milinda’s next remark is puzzling too: he accuses the monk of
having spoken a falsehood, for apparently ‘there is no Nagasena’. But
Nagasena never said there was – quite the contrary, it was his
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perplexing remark that there wasn’t a person ‘Nagasena’ which set the
discussion going.
You do meet traffic jams like this sometimes, and it would be a poor
guide who tried to cover it up. We need some creative reading at this
stage. For instance: are we to think of the king as just getting confused,
and losing track of what has been said? Or is it that he simply can’t
believe that there is no such person, and therefore thought that
Nagasena was bound to answer ‘Yes’ to at least one of his questions;
since he answered ‘No’ to all of them, at least one answer must have
been false, and that is the falsehood the king means when he says ‘You,
revered sir, . . . have spoken a falsehood’? Of those two (perhaps you
can think of another?) I prefer the second. It fits better with the feeling
one gets from the chapter as a whole that the king is supposed to have a
mistaken view of the nature of the self about which Nagasena puts
him right.
He does so (after briefly teasing Milinda about his pampered lifestyle)
by asking a parallel series of questions about the king’s chariot. This
tradition makes constant use of similes, parallels, and analogies;
listeners are brought to feel comfortable with something they find
problematic by coming to see it as similar to, or of the same kind as,
something else with which they are already familiar. Here the hope is
that once the king has answered ‘No’ to all the questions about the
chariot, he will see how Nagasena could return the same answer to all
his questions about the person.
And he does come to see it, by the end of the chapter. But first let me
mention something which no study of this text by itself could reveal,
but which would surely have had an effect on anyone of Milinda’s
obvious learning and intelligence. In using a chariot as a parallel to a
person, Nagasena is doing something both strongly reminiscent of, and
at the same time shockingly at odds with, a metaphor well-known
within their common philosophical culture.
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6. and 7. The image of the chariot. In a famous scene from the huge Indian epic, the Mahabharata, the warrior Arjuna has Krishna as his charioteer – and as his moral guide, not just his chauffeur! In the Greek example the hero Hercules takes the reins, watched over by the goddess Athena.
Plato famously compared the self to a chariot. A good deal earlier, in
the Indian tradition, the Katha Upanishad does the same (see
Bibliography). Is it now Nagasena’s turn? Well, not exactly. It is as if the
author were alluding to the tradition precisely to highlight his rejection
of it. In Plato we read of a charioteer trying to control one obedient
horse (reason) and one disobedient horse (the appetites); the Katha
Upanishad compares the self to someone riding in a chariot, the intellect
to the charioteer directing the senses, which are the horses. Nagasena
doesn’t mention any horses. More importantly, he doesn’t mention a
charioteer, let alone a rider distinct from the charioteer. That is the very
picture he is reacting against. There is no permanent presence, the self,
directing or overseeing. This author, in using the hallowed simile of the
chariot but using it differently, is simultaneously putting his own view
and signalling, to his cultural circle, just what he is rejecting.
So now the monk, following exactly the same pattern, questions the
king: ‘Is the axle the chariot? – are the wheels the chariot? . . .’. Milinda
repeatedly answers ‘No’. That isn’t surprising – but much as Nagasena’s
answers to his questions were fairly unsurprising except for the last, so
one of Milinda’s answers will raise nearly every reader’s eyebrows. This
time, however, it isn’t the last but the next to last. Nagasena asks
whether then the chariot is ‘the pole, the axle, the wheels, . . . the reins
and the goad all together’. Most of us would say ‘Yes; so long as we are
not talking about these parts lying around in a heap but rather in the
proper arrangement, that’s exactly what a chariot is.’ But Milinda just
says ‘No, revered sir’.
We shall shortly find out what lies behind this rather odd response.
For the moment let us just notice that the king, having answered
‘No’ to all the questions, has put himself in the same position as had
Nagasena, who immediately throws Milinda’s own earlier words back
at him: ‘Where then is the chariot you say you came in? You sire,
have spoken a falsehood . . .’ – and gets a round of applause even
from Milinda’s supporters. But the king is not for caving in. That
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was no falsehood, he says, for ‘it is because of the pole, the axle . . .
and the goad that “chariot” exists as a mere designation’. Just so,
replies Nagasena, and ‘Nagasena’ exists as a mere designation too,
because the five ‘aggregates’ are present. And he quotes the nun
Vajira:
Just as when the parts are rightly set
The word ‘chariot’ is spoken,
So when there are the aggregates
It is the convention to say ‘a being’.
The king is impressed, and the chapter ends happily. But just what (you
may well ask) have he and Nagasena agreed on? That ‘chariot’, ‘self’,
‘person’, ‘being’, and ‘Nagasena’ are conventional terms? But aren’t all
words conventional – in England ‘cow’, in France ‘vache’, in Poland
‘krowa’, whatever local convention dictates? Surely they are telling us
more than that?
Indeed they are. This is not about the conventionality of language; it is
about wholes and their parts, and the point is that wholes are in a sense
less real, less objective, and more a matter of convention, than are the
parts that compose them. To begin with, the parts are independent in a
way that the whole is not: the axle can exist without the chariot
existing, but not the chariot without the axle. (As the German
philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) said much later,
wholes have only a ‘borrowed’ reality – borrowed from the reality of
their parts.) Furthermore, what counts as a whole is not given by nature,
but depends to some extent on us and our purposes. If from a chariot
we remove the pole and one of the wheels, the collection of parts that
remains is not incomplete in itself, but only with regard to what we
want chariots for.
But why does all this matter? Why did Nagasena provoke this
conversation in the first place? Not just to pass the time, we may be
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sure. The point is important to him because he holds that what we
believe has an effect on our attitudes and through them on our
behaviour. That, surely, is perfectly reasonable: those, for instance,
who believe that the word ‘God’ stands for something real might be
expected to feel and perhaps also behave differently from those who
think it is just a socially constructed way of speaking. To use the
jargon: our metaphysics (what we think reality is fundamentally like)
can affect our ethics. Now on the Buddhist view the purpose of
philosophy (indeed the purpose of Buddhism) is to alleviate suffering;
there is no point in it if it doesn’t. And a major cause of suffering is
overestimation of the importance of the self, its needs, and its goals:
‘clinging to self’, as Buddhists say. So any change of belief which
downgrades the status of the self in our eyes is helpful. A Tibetan text
says: ‘Believing the ego to be permanent and separate, one becomes
attached to it; . . . this brings on defilements; the defilements breed
bad karma; the bad karma breeds miseries . . .’. That is why it
matters.
Can Nagasena be said to have proved his case in this chapter? Has he
really shown that there is no abiding self, just an unstable composite
which it is convenient to call a person? Surely not. Even if we accept
everything which he and Milinda say about the chariot, it would still
have to be argued that the chariot analogy is reliable when it comes to
thinking about a person, yet on that point Nagasena says nothing at all.
So like most analogies, this one is useful as an illustration or explanation
of what the doctrine about the self means, but not as evidence that it is
true. Nor do we learn why he gave the crucial answer (‘No, sire’) to the
king’s final and crucial question, the one to which a supporter of the
permanent self would have said Yes: ‘is Nagasena apart [distinct] from
material form, feeling, perception, mental formations and
consciousness?’
So our provisional verdict must be ‘unproven’. But we might ask
ourselves whether this question (‘Has Nagasena proved his case?’) is the
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right question to be asking. Perhaps it is, if we are trying to make up our
minds about the nature of the self; but if we are trying to understand
what is going on in the chapter we have been reading, perhaps not.
Remember that this is a branch of the tradition that gave us the guru,
the authoritative spiritual teacher. In Nagasena’s eyes the authority for
what he was saying would ultimately be the word of the Buddha; his
own business is to convey the right doctrine in lively and memorable
terms. The demand for compelling logic is best reserved for a writer like
Hume, to whom it is appropriate because he is genuinely trying to
meet it.
Some readers may feel a nagging worry. Buddhists, just as much as
Hindus, believe in rebirth – the present Dalai Lama is his predecessor,
reborn. But if there is no self beyond the five ‘aggregates’, what is there
to be reborn, what is it that migrates from one body to the next? How
did they reconcile these two doctrines? All I can say here is that they
were fully aware of the problem. It leads to a lot more Buddhist
metaphysics, which our all too brief tour can’t even make a start on. But
if you have in your hand the edition of Questions of King Milinda
recommended in the Bibliography, turn to pp. 58–9 and read the
section entitled ‘Transmigration and Rebirth’ – just to begin to get the
flavour.
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Chapter 5
Some themes
The three examples we have been looking at touch on a number of
general themes, ideas whose significance goes well beyond that of any
single text or for that matter any single school or period. Now I shall pick
half a dozen of them out for special attention. To what extent a
question can legitimately be considered in abstraction from the
particular historical contexts in which it was raised and (perhaps)
answered is itself a philosophical question, and no simple one; I shall
say something about it in the closing section of the chapter.
Ethical consequentialism
Don’t be frightened by the heading. It is just the trade name of the
doctrine that how good or bad something is has to be judged by
looking at its consequences. In Crito, as we saw, Socrates was
weighing the consequences of the actions open to him, the results for
his friends, his children, himself. But there were also considerations
about what had happened in the past, not what would result in the
future: his past behaviour meant that he now had a duty to the State,
which required him to accept its judgement and punishment. I
suggested at the end of that chapter that if philosophers were going
to solve our moral problems they were first going to have to convince
us that moral matters are really less complicated than they appear to
be. One such attempt is consequentialism: no moral reasons are
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backward-looking; proper moral reasons all look to the consequences
of our actions.
So the idea is that something is good if it has good consequences, bad if
it has bad ones. But, you will immediately notice, that doesn’t tell us
much; we still need to be told which consequences are good ones,
which are bad ones. Just repeating the formula (saying: consequences
are good when they themselves have good consequences) gets us no
further. A consequentialist must be willing to recommend certain
things, or states of affairs, as being good in themselves. In their case,
goodness does not consist in having good consequences – they just are
good. Other things are good only to the extent that they lead to them –
the things that are good in themselves.
That means that consequentialism isn’t any single ethical doctrine, but
a general type of doctrine which can take very different specific forms
depending on what is held to be good in itself. If you think that the only
thing good in itself is pleasure you will live very differently from
someone who thinks that the only thing good in itself is knowledge. So
even if we could all agree to be consequentialist in our ethical thinking,
very little would have been settled.
You might now wonder why we should be so exclusive: why can’t lots of
different things be good in themselves: pleasure, knowledge, beauty,
love – just for starters? That sounds very reasonable. But if what we
were hoping for was a moral theory that would make it fairly simple for
us to decide what we ought to do, then it is a big step in the wrong
direction. Once we agree to take more than one basic value into
account we will inevitably find that our values sometimes come into
conflict. I might quite often be in a position to promote one value (i.e.
do things which have that sort of consequence) or another, but not both.
Which should I choose? If Socrates had had to choose to between
risking his friends’ lives and damaging his children’s education, which
should he have chosen? How lucky for him that he didn’t! What an
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advantage if we could settle on just one basic value, and measure
everything else by the extent to which it leads to that one thing.
No surprise, then, that there have been ethical theories of just that kind.
An early one, well worth reading about, is that of Epicurus (341–271 bc).
For him and his followers, the one and only thing valuable in itself was
pleasure. But don’t expect him to recommend orgies and banquets
interspersed with periods of relaxation on the beach of your private
island. Because what Epicurus meant by pleasure was not that at all: it
was absence of pain, both physical and mental. This completely
untroubled state, he thought, was as great a pleasure as any. What we
immediately think of as pleasures are just different, not more pleasant.
This point, and his advice on how to achieve and maintain the ideal
state, he appears to have argued for with subtlety and wisdom. I say
‘appears’, because we have very little from his own hand; although he
wrote prolifically, our knowledge of him mostly comes from later
reports.
8. Marble head of Epicurus, in the British Museum.
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A modern and more accessible theory of this type was propounded by
John Stuart Mill (1806–73) in his famous essay Utilitarianism, where he
cited Epicurus as one of his philosophical ancestors. Mill declared the
one thing valuable in itself to be happiness – defining it as ‘pleasure and
the absence of pain’ (though without holding, as Epicurus had, that the
absence of all pain was itself the greatest pleasure). But there is a very
significant difference between Mill and Epicurus. For whereas Epicurus
seems to have been concerned to advise individuals how best to secure
their own pleasure/tranquillity, Mill was a social reformer whose ethical
principles aimed at the improvement of life (i.e. happiness) for
everybody. (A similar division is found in the history of Buddhism: is the
highest ideal the personal attainment of nirvana, or is it to bring all
beings to nirvana, oneself included?) ‘Let everyone seek to be free from
pain and anxiety’, says Epicureanism; though it may well add: ‘Helping
those around you to do so will probably help you achieve it too – and if
so, help them.’ For Mill, by contrast, the primary goal is, quite generally,
happiness; so anyone else’s happiness is just as much your goal as is
your own, and any person’s happiness is of equal value with anyone
else’s.
Mill’s aspirations went beyond his own society – he even writes of
improving the condition of the whole of mankind. This was Victorian
Britain, and the British Empire pretty much at its zenith (Mill himself
worked for the East India Company for over thirty years). But it would be
unfair to think of him as an interfering moral imperialist. He didn’t want
to tell anyone how to be happy; only that everyone should be provided
with the material goods, the education and the political and social
liberties to work out their own happiness in their own way. Many will
find this universality of Mill’s basic ethical principle admirable. Some
may also wonder whether it can be realistic to ask human beings to
spread their moral concern so widely and so impartially. Are we capable
of it? And what would life be like if we really tried?
These questions, especially the second, have led some philosophers to
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think that Mill’s doctrine conflicts with another value which nearly all of
us regard as very important to us. We have already seen it at work in the
Crito.
Integrity
One thing that weighed with Socrates, you remember, was the line
he had taken at his trial. How could he now choose exile, having
explicitly rejected that option when given the opportunity to propose
an alternative to the death-sentence? ‘I cannot, now that this fate has
befallen me, throw away my previous arguments.’ As a soldier, he
told the court, he had faced death rather than do what was wrong;
he will not now do what seems to him to be wrong just to prolong
his life.
These thoughts capture a central aspect of the virtue of integrity.
Integrity means wholeness, unity; the idea of integrity as a value is the
idea of a life lived as a whole rather than as a series of disconnected
episodes. So it includes steadfast adherence to principles, and to
opinions unless new reasons or evidence appear. Relatedly (and equally
applicable to Socrates’ case) it includes the value of consistent pursuit
of those chosen projects which give purpose and meaning to one’s life.
And it can also be taken to exclude self-deception and hypocrisy, states
in which people are in one way or another at odds with themselves.
So how comfortably does the ideal of integrity fit with Mill’s
utilitarianism? Not very comfortably at all, some think. For however
sincere your commitment to some principle in the past, that fact by
itself does not give you – if we take Mill’s position seriously and
literally – any reason to follow it again now. If in the past your
commitment to that principle has consistently led to good effects
(measured in terms of happiness), then that fact gives you at least some
reason to think that it will do so again – which is a reason to follow it
now. But your commitment to it, however sincere, however much it has
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become a part of your personality, is not. Critics of Utilitarianism
question whether we can really live with that way of thinking.
You might like to consider whether Utilitarians can defend themselves
against that charge. If they can’t, things look bad not just for them but
for most other types of consequentialist too. For in the last paragraph it
wasn’t important to think of effects being assessed in terms of
happiness; I might have written almost anything instead of ‘happiness’
without affecting the argument. So really this is an attack on
consequentialism – of which utilitarianism is only one variety. Anyone
who feels that the attack succeeds must accept that the consequences
of an action are (at most) only one aspect of its value, and that deciding
whether it was right or not may involve a subjective compromise
between factors of completely different types.
Political authority – the contract theory
States make demands of their members which would be deeply
objectionable if coming from a private person. Tax, for instance. Why
is it permissible for the State to appropriate a certain proportion of
my income when, if you were even to attempt it, you would be guilty
of extortion or ‘demanding money with menaces’? Or is it just that
the State gets away with it – by being easily the biggest menace
around?
Now most political theorists hold that the State does have some
legitimate authority, though there is less agreement about how much –
in other words, about how far this authority can extend whilst
remaining legitimate. Opinions range from totalitarian conceptions,
which assign to the State power over all aspects of individuals’ lives, to
minimalist conceptions, according to which it can do what is necessary
to keep the peace and enforce any contracts its members may make
with each other, and scarcely anything more. But except for the very few
who jump off the bottom end of this scale (‘States have no legitimate
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authority at all’), everyone faces the question how State authority over
individuals arises.
An answer with a long history – we have already seen a version of it in
Crito – is that it arises out of some kind of contract or agreement
between individuals and the state of which they are citizens. It is a very
natural answer. A person might agree to accept the authority of another
(in a certain area of activity) because he saw substantial benefit (for
himself) in doing so, and in return for that benefit. Most would accept
that such an arrangement legitimates the other’s authority over him as
far as their agreement reaches, provided that agreement was voluntary.
Though natural, it is not the only answer worth considering. Another
would be that the stronger has natural authority over the weaker, and
this authority is legitimate so long as it is used for the weaker’s benefit.
That might be a good way to think of parents’ authority over their infant
children, for instance. But if we allow the weaker to be the judges of
whether they are benefiting or not, then we are very close to saying that
the power is legitimate only so long as they accept it. Whereupon we
are back in the neighbourhood of a ‘tacit consent’ theory, like the one
that the Laws and State of Athens appealed to against Socrates (p. 20
above). Unless we allow that superior force makes authority legitimate
(‘might is right’), or that God has granted authority to certain persons
or institutions (the ‘divine right of kings’), it isn’t easy to avoid the
contract theory in some form or other.
There are several forms of it because of the wide variety of answers to
the question ‘Who makes what contract with whom?’ Since we were
speaking of every individual’s obligation to the State we might suppose
that everyone must individually be a party to the contract (that would
appear to be the drift of Socrates’ approach in Crito); but some theorists
write as if it were enough that one’s ancestors, or the founders of one’s
society, should have been party to it. And regardless of that question, is
the contract made with the whole of society (so that you contract to go
along with the decisions of the whole body, of which you are yourself a
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member)? Or with some distinct sovereign person or persons to whom
you then owe allegiance? You can see that the resulting difference in the
constitution may be enormous: anywhere from social democracy to
absolute monarchy.
And what is the contract? In what circumstances can the individual
properly regard the contract as having lapsed? The famous contract
theory of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), which we shall return to in
Chapter 8, has it that the sole benefit that the contracting individual can
rightfully demand is the preservation of their life: the sovereign puts up
a stop to the murderous, thieving lawlessness of the pre-contractual
situation, and organizes defence against attack from without. If that
fails, all bets are off; otherwise, complete obedience.
Epicurus had something pertinent to say: ‘He who knew best how to
meet the fear of external foes made into one family all the creatures he
could.’ Even Hobbes granted families a certain natural exemption from
the war of all against all. In troubled times families are the groups most
likely to hold together, and are the best model for co-operation and
allegiance. (Some readers may find that idea out of date – but perhaps
that is so because, and in places where, times are easier.) In Plato’s
prescription for an ideal state (The Republic) he in effect abolishes the
family – no doubt he had seen much family-centred intrigue and
corruption. A plurality of cohesive units within it must be dangerous to
the power of the State and its capacity to preserve peace. If there is to
be a family it is best that there should only be one – as Epicurus’ remark
implies – and that the State (recall Crito 50e ff.) be thought of as
everyone’s parent.
Evidence and rationality
Rationality is what you’ve got if you have some capacity to reason: to
work out, given certain truths, what else is likely to be true if they are;
perhaps also (though you need rather more rationality for this) how
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likely. It is the quality of mind Hume was talking about when he said, in
Of Miracles, that a wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.
Forming the right beliefs, with the appropriate degree of confidence,
isn’t the only manifestation of rationality however. A familiar situation is
that in which you want to know whether a certain thing is true or not
(‘Was it the butler who did it?’ ‘Have we any bread in the house?’), and
here your rationality will show at least as much in what evidence you
seek out, as in what you believe once you have got it. As well as powers
of investigation, we also have a capacity for rational choice: given
9. Beyond the family, anything goes. Hobbes’s state of nature?
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certain desires, to choose a course of action likely to lead to their
fulfilment. And our reason is sometimes, though controversially,
assigned a further function: not just to tell us what we ought to do,
given that we have certain goals, but in addition to tell us what goals we
ought to have. There is an influential heavyweight on either side of this
tricky question, with Kant affirming that reason does have such a power,
Hume denying it. (To my mind Hume and his followers have slightly the
better of it, though battle continues.) But here we stick with the issue of
belief and evidence.
Why should we be interested in having evidence, or being able to offer
reasons, for our beliefs? Because it makes it more likely that they will be
true; and it makes us more confident that they are true. Both are
important. We want our beliefs to be true, because we use them to
direct our actions, and actions directed by true beliefs are on the whole
far more successful. (Compare the actions, and the success rate, of two
people both wanting a beer: one believes – falsely – that the beer is in
the fridge, the other believes – truly – that it is still in the car.) And it
helps if we hold our true beliefs confidently, because then we go ahead
and act on them, rather than dithering about.
Those are practical considerations, influencing all of us all the time.
There may also be theoretical ones, having to do with our philosophical
self-image: we (some of us, at certain periods of history) may like to
think of ourselves as essentially rational beings in whose lives reason
plays an absolutely central role. For a long time philosophers took
rationality to be the crucial feature distinguishing humans from other
animals. (You can see Hume contesting this view in Of the Reason of
Animals, the section immediately before Of Miracles.)
The idea that reason is absolutely central to human life is a rather vague
one, so it isn’t the sort of view one could ever prove, or definitively
refute, and it would be a bad misjudgement to try. Nevertheless many
things can be said that are relevant to it.
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The first was well-known to the sceptics of ancient Greece. Suppose you
hold some belief (call it B), and you ask yourself what reason you have to
hold it. So then you think of some reason (call it R). This R cannot be
something you have just dreamt up. You must have a reason to think
that it is true, if it is to give you a reason for believing B. This further
reason can’t be B itself, or R again (that would be to give a belief as a
reason for itself, which seems like nothing more than reasserting the
belief, and is often called ‘begging the question’), so it must be
something else – whereupon the same argument repeats. This suggests
that the idea that we have reasons for our beliefs is just a local
appearance, which disappears as soon as we try to look at the wider
picture: ‘reasons’ turn out to be relative to certain other beliefs for
which we have no reasons. The search for a satisfactory response to this
argument has structured a whole area of philosophical inquiry known as
epistemology or the theory of knowledge.
Add that some of our most basic beliefs, beliefs without which we just
couldn’t get on with our lives, are very hard to find any decent reason
for. A much discussed example is our confidence that things will
continue much as they have in the past: your next breath of air won’t
suffocate you, the floor won’t collapse when you take your next step –
and hundreds of other things of that kind. With what reason do we
believe them? Don’t answer: that sort of belief has nearly always
worked. True, but that is just another example of what has happened in
the past, and what we wanted to know was why we expect the future to
go the same way.
So if the idea was that human belief can be made through and through
rationally transparent, or that human life could run on reason alone,
then it faces formidable obstacles. But it remains the case that human
powers of reasoning, acquiring beliefs by inferring them from previous
beliefs, are more than just important to us. Without them there would
be nothing recognizably human left except the shape of our bodies, and
the average chimp would run rings round us, literally and figuratively.
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The self
Chapter 4 introduced the Buddhist ‘no-self’ doctrine, according to
which a person is not a simple, independently enduring thing but a
composite, and an easily dissoluble composite at that, of the five
‘aggregates’, which are themselves complex things or states. But that is
not the only tradition in which we find the view that a self is really a
whole lot of separate things precariously holding together. It appears in
the modern West as the so-called ‘Bundle theory of the mind’, and is
almost invariably attributed to Hume. (In your guide’s personal opinion
it is very doubtful whether Hume actually held it, but I’ll skirt round that
controversy here.)
So suppose there is some simple, independently enduring thing –
you – which just continues the same so long as you exist. Where is it?
Look into your own mind and see if you can perceive it. What do you
find? In the first place, you notice that you are experiencing a motley of
perceptions: visual perceptions of the way your surroundings look,
auditory perceptions of the way they sound, perhaps also a few smells,
tactual sensations of pressure, roughness, warmth, and suchlike, from
touching nearby objects. Then sensations of tension in certain muscles,
awareness of bodily movements. All these are continually changing as
your position changes and surrounding objects themselves change. You
might also feel a slight ache in your foot, or in your forehead; and be
aware of a train of thought, perhaps as images or a silent sequence of
half-formed sentences. But there is no sign, in this shifting
kaleidoscopic complex, of that object ‘the self’, just steadfastly
persisting.
Why then suppose that there is such a thing? Well, someone will say, it’s
clear that all these experiences, my experiences, somehow belong
together; and there are other experiences, those that are not mine but
yours, which also belong together but don’t belong with this lot. So
there must be one thing, me, my self, which is having all my experiences
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but isn’t having any of yours, and another thing, your self, doing the
reverse.
Supporters of the bundle theory reply that nothing of the kind follows.
What makes all my experiences hang together doesn’t have to be a
relation they all stand in to something else; it might be some system of
relationships that they all stand in to each other (but don’t stand in to
any of yours). Think of a lot of shreds of paper which form one group by
virtue of all being pinned to the same pincushion (the model of the
central self) – and a collection of iron filings which form one bunch
because they are all magnetized and therefore cling together (the
model of the bundle).
You will have noticed the affinity between these thoughts (adapted
from Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, book 1, part 4, section 6 (1738) )
and those of the Buddhist author from our Chapter 4. But there are also
differences, one of the most significant being the status they give to the
body. The Buddhist didn’t hesitate to include the body (‘material form’)
as one of the five aggregates that compose the person, whereas the
eighteenth-century version doesn’t even bother to exclude it, but just
ignores it completely. Hume writes first ‘self’, then ‘self or person’, then
‘mind’, as if these were obviously the same, so that ‘What is the self (or
person)?’ and ‘What is the mind?’ are for him just two ways of asking
one question. Such was the change of climate brought about by
centuries of religious thought deeply influenced by Plato and
Neoplatonism, with their emphasis on the soul and the spiritual and
their denigration of the bodily.
There is also another, huge, difference. When presented with a
philosophical doctrine it is always a good idea to ask what happens
next – that is to say, what its proponents want to do with it. The
Buddhists, we saw, had an ethical purpose in mind. The ‘no-self’ theory
would help us to live better, keep clear of ‘defilements’, avoid suffering
more successfully. Hume’s next move was utterly different, having
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nothing at all to do with ethics but quite a lot to do with what we now
call cognitive science. If we do not perceive the enduring self, why then
do we believe that we are the same person from day to day? And he
proposed a psychological theory to account for it. (It was by today’s
standards a pretty naïve one, but that is only to be expected.)
We are not so much comparing two individuals as two epochs.
Nagasena’s was the age of survival, Hume’s the age of science. Where
there is such a difference in the plot, no wonder if a similar thought
turns up playing a very different role. Which leads straight into our next
topic.
Philosophy and historical context
Could Plato and Hobbes, 2,000 years apart, with their different
backgrounds and circumstances, really have been discussing the same
thing? Could a philosopher nowadays be asking the same questions
about the self as Hume did, let alone the early Buddhists? Doesn’t the
idea that we can talk about philosophical themes without reference to
whose and when make them sound like timeless objects that thinkers of
any epoch can plug into? That view would be quite the opposite of
popular nowadays. All thought, we repeatedly hear, is ‘situated’ – tied
to the particular historical, social, and cultural circumstances in which
thinkers find themselves.
I certainly don’t wish to recommend the belief that there are eternal
questions just hanging around waiting to be asked. But the view that no
question or answer has any existence beyond the specific circumstances
of whoever poses it is possibly even worse, and certainly no better. Part
of the attraction of such extremes is that they are very simple,
somewhat in the pantomime style of ‘Oh yes it is – Oh no it isn’t’. As so
often, the truth lies in between, and is much more complicated. One
can approach this topic in many ways, but I’ll choose this way: is it
legitimate to treat the thought of someone long since dead as a
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contribution to a present debate, as if it were being put to us, here and
now? I think it is, and that there are even reasons why we should. But it
needs to be done with care and – most importantly – with an eye to
what we may be missing.
There is nothing to stop us lifting a sentence from an old text and seeing
what it can do for us now. If we want to lift the thought, not just the
sentence, we may have to put some work into deciding what the
sentence meant. If we aren’t prepared to do that we shouldn’t expect
too much of it, and we certainly shouldn’t disparage its author if we
don’t get too much from it. But given that precaution we will often
find it relevant to our concerns, because much philosophy arises from
facts about human beings and human life which are pretty stable – at
any rate they haven’t changed much over the last 3,000 years.
Finding something relevant is one thing, finding it convincing is
another. Suppose we dismiss Plato’s and Hobbes’s arguments as
insufficient to establish the extent of the authority they ascribe to the
state. There is something right about this: no doubt their arguments are
insufficient. But if we then turn away, taking our business with them to
be finished, we risk making a number of mistakes.
One is that though we may have understood what they have written we
have not understood them – their concerns about what political
thought needed, the circumstances that gave rise to these concerns and
so made their conclusions attractive to them. So we may be missing the
humanity behind the text, and with it an important aspect of what
philosophy is for. Furthermore, whenever there is any uncertainty
about what they meant, understanding why they were saying it is
often a valuable means of resolving the ambiguity. In showing no
interest in their motivation we take a risk with our understanding of
their words.
A second point is that our appreciation of a philosopher’s achievement
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will be seriously blunted if we do not see the intellectual and emotional
circumstances out of which their work grew. I proposed earlier that we
think of philosophy as bewildered mankind’s attempt to think our way
back straight. That is not a story that can be appreciated without some
understanding of the circumstances in which thinkers have found
themselves.
So ‘Is this right?’ is certainly not the only question we should be
thinking about. Still, there is something wrong with refusing altogether
to ask whether our philosopher was right, or whether their arguments
are convincing, merely because they lived long ago. After all, Plato did
not take himself to be writing just for his own time and place. On the
contrary, he is constantly trying to direct our attention away from the
transient and towards what he believes to be permanent, and it seems
deeply condescending (or possibly self-protective?) to dismiss his
further ambitions without making any honest attempt to assess them.
‘There, there, designed his own ideal state, has he? – what a clever
little fellow.’
I hope that you are now beginning to notice something rather
encouraging. The literature of philosophy may be intimidatingly vast,
but the number of genuinely distinct philosophical themes is not. It is
somewhat too large for the compass of this very short book,
admittedly, but it is not enormous. We have already seen links across
2,000 years between Epicurus and Mill, Plato and Hobbes, Hume and
the author of Milinda. The problem lies not in becoming familiar with
the recurrent themes, but in being sensitive to the variations as
different thinkers play them again in their own way for their own
purposes. And what this means is that one’s understanding of
philosophy is cumulative, and accumulates rather quickly. Which must
be good news.
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Chapter 6
Of ‘isms’
From football to gardening and back via cookery, mountaineering, and
population genetics, every subject has its own terminology. Philosophy
certainly does, most of it fortunately not nearly as frightening as it
looks. In Chapter 4 we saw ‘metaphysics’, meaning the study of (or
opinions about) what reality is like in its most general features. In
Chapter 5 we encountered ‘consequentialism’, the blanket word for
theories that see the value of anything in its consequences rather than
in its own nature and its history; then ‘epistemology’, the branch of
philosophy concerned with knowledge, belief, and closely related
notions like reasons and justification. Now let’s look at some more
words, all of them ending in ‘ism’. This isn’t a matter of swotting up
vocabulary – rather of finding out more about philosophy as you learn
more of the jargon.
Most philosophical ‘ism’ words are (like ‘consequentialism’) quite broad
terms designating a certain general type of doctrine. Their breadth
makes them very flexible, and ensures that they are in constant use, but
it also brings dangers, principally that of taking them to say more than
they really do. Never think that you have got a philosopher sorted out
just because you can say what ‘ism’ he represents. The philosophy of
George Berkeley (1685–1752) is a form of Idealism, and so is that of
Hegel (1770–1831); but I have never heard it suggested that having read
either would be any help in understanding the other – their thought is
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miles apart. Karl Marx (1818–83), on the other hand, certainly wasn’t an
Idealist (which is actually a term of abuse in the Marxist vocabulary), but
he is in many respects extremely Hegelian, and that a student should
get to know something of Hegel before reading Marx seems the most
obvious advice imaginable.
With that warning uttered and illustrated, let us begin with dualism. It
can be used of any view which recognizes (exactly) two contrasting
forces or entities, so that a theology which posits two basic powers in
conflict, one good and one evil, is said to be dualistic. But by far its most
common meaning is a doctrine according to which reality consists of
two very different kinds of thing or stuff, namely mind and matter; a
human being consists of a bit of each. Perhaps the most famous
exponent of dualism in this sense is the Frenchman René Descartes
(some of whose work we shall be looking at in the next chapter). In fact,
some enemies of dualism, and there are plenty of them nowadays,
seem to want to blame it all on him. (That is historically dubious, to say
the least – Descartes was merely trying to give cogent proof of a
doctrine that is very much older.)
Dualism certainly has its problems, especially if it is to be combined with
modern scientific theory. One tricky question is: what does the dualist’s
mental stuff actually do? We naturally suppose that what we think,
what we feel, what we are aware of, affects our behaviour. If I think that
the train leaves in ten minutes, want to catch it, and see a signpost
saying ‘Railway Station’, I will go in the direction I believe the signpost
points. This means that my (physical) body goes somewhere it wouldn’t
otherwise have gone. But doesn’t scientific theory suggest that all
physical events have other physical events as their causes? In which case
how can there be room for something else, of a non-physical kind, to
cause my body to move? Dualists may just have to grit their teeth and
say that science is plain wrong about that. For if they agree that science
is right on that point, and if they agree (and it would be weird not to)
that what we think, feel, etc. affects what we do, then the consequence
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is that thinking, feeling, awareness, and so on must be physical
processes. In which case the question comes round again: what does
this non-physical stuff of theirs, this ‘mind’, actually do? But dualists
can’t just say that science is wrong about all physical events having
physical causes. That won’t convince anyone who wasn’t convinced to
start with. They will need some reason for saying that there is
something about us which cannot be physical. When we come to
Descartes we’ll see something of what a dualist might have to offer on
that score.
So, you may be thinking, if dualism is the view that there are two
ultimate sorts of stuff, mind and matter, probably we also find a
doctrine that says there is only matter, and another that holds that
there is nothing but mind. And you’re quite right. The first is called
materialism, the second idealism (not mentalism), and both have plenty
of history.
The earliest materialism of which we have clear record is that of the
Indian Lokāyatas, often known as Cārvākas after one of their most
eminent thinkers (incidentally, pronounce ‘c’ in these Sanskrit words as
‘ch’). Remember them if you find yourself slipping into the common
error of imagining that all Indian philosophy is mystical, religious, and
ascetic. Only perception confers knowledge, and what you can’t
perceive doesn’t exist, they reckoned. The eternal soul that, as the
Brahmins suppose, passes on from life to life, is a fiction. You have one
life and one only – try to enjoy it. The movement appears to have
survived for over a thousand years; unfortunately, just about all we now
know of it comes from reports written by its opponents.
In Greece Democritus – a fairly close contemporary of Socrates –
propounded a theory which, until twentieth-century physics changed
the picture, sounded very modern: the universe consists of myriads of
very small material particles moving in a vacuum or void. These little
things are called ‘atoms’ (from the Greek for uncuttable or indivisible);
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they and the void they move through are literally everything there is.
This rather good guess was taken over by Epicurus (we’ve seen him
already) and his school, but the easiest place to read about it is in a
famous work by Lucretius, a Roman admirer of Epicurus, called ‘Of the
Nature of Things’ (or ‘Of the Nature of the Universe’ – depending on
which translation you have got hold of).
You might expect materialism to be completely incompatible with any
sort of religious belief – as the case of the Lokāyatas appears to confirm.
But watch out for surprises! The Epicureans believed in gods, but then
held (as consistency demanded) that they had bodies made of a very
refined type of matter. (They live somewhere a very long way from here
in a state of divine bliss and untroubled happiness – paying not a wink
of attention to human life. Opponents said this was just a way of being
atheists without admitting it.)
The word ‘materialism’ as it occurs in everyday usage is rather different.
A ‘material girl’ isn’t a girl who consists of matter only – though if
philosophical materialists are right that is all she consists of, and so does
the material world she lives in. But the everyday ‘materialism’ which
some bemoan and others just enjoy isn’t wholly unrelated to the
philosophers’ sort. Madonna’s material girl derives her pleasures mostly
from material objects – their ownership and consumption – in
preference to the pleasures of the mind. Everyday materialism is the
attachment to what is – now in the philosophers’ sense – material, as
opposed to what is spiritual or intellectual. The philosophy of Marx
came to be called dialectical materialism, not so much because he held
that there is literally nothing but matter as because he held that the
most important underlying causes in human life are material: economic
facts about the way in which a society produces its material goods.
(What ‘dialectical’ meant we shall see in Chapter 7 when we encounter
Hegel, below, p. 81 ff.)
Idealism is also a word with an everyday as well as a technical meaning.
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At the technical end it is applied to views that deny the existence of
matter and hold that everything there is is mental or spiritual, like that
of the Irish bishop George Berkeley, whom we mentioned earlier.
Someone who tells us that had better explain, in the next breath, what
then are these things like chairs and mountains that we keep bumping
into and falling off. When he heard it said that Berkeley could not be
refuted, the celebrated man of letters Dr Johnson is reputed to have
answered: ‘I refute him thus’, and kicked a stone. But refuting Berkeley
isn’t that easy. (I use the word ‘refute’ to mean showing that something
is wrong, not just saying that it is wrong – which of course is very easy
indeed and can be done by anyone, especially someone like Dr Johnson,
who was rarely short either of an opinion or of a memorable way of
expressing it.)
Perhaps Berkeley can be refuted, but only if we can somehow
overcome the following well-worn line of thought. What I am really
aware of when I look at a table is not the table itself but how the table
looks to me. ‘How it looks to me’ describes not the table, but my
mind – it is the state of consciousness which the object, whatever it is,
produces in me when I look at it. And this goes on being true however
closely, or from however many angles, I look at the table; and it goes
on being true if I touch the table – except that then the object
(whatever it is) produces a different kind of state of consciousness in
me, tactual sensations as opposed to visual. If I kick the table (or
Dr Johnson’s stone) and it hurts, that is yet another state of my
consciousness. Admittedly, these states of consciousness fit together
very nicely; we quickly learn from a very few of them to predict quite
accurately what the rest are going to be like – one glance, and we
know pretty much what to expect. But the table itself, the physical
table, isn’t so much an established fact as a hypothesis that explains all
these states of perceptual consciousness. So it might be wrong – some
other hypothesis might be the truth. Berkeley himself thought
precisely that, though partly because he believed he had proved that
the very idea of a non-mental existent was incoherent. (I’m not going
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to trouble you with his supposed proof here.) Believing as he did in a
benevolent and all-powerful god, he made His will the direct cause of
our states of consciousness and declared matter redundant – as well as
incoherent.
Hume – again – made a nice comment. Berkeley’s arguments, he said
‘admit of no answer and produce no conviction’. However impossible
we may find it to believe Berkeley’s denial of matter, a convincing proof
that he just couldn’t be right has been extremely elusive. I myself don’t
believe that there is one – though neither, you won’t be surprised to
hear, do I believe Berkeley.
Some philosophical systems (like Hegel’s) qualify as idealism not
because they deny the very existence of matter but because they regard
it as subordinate to the mental or spiritual, which is what really
determines the nature of reality and gives it purpose. This use of
‘idealism’ parallels the use of ‘materialism’ we noticed above, in
its application to the philosophy of Karl Marx. But when we come
to the everyday notion of idealism the parallel with ‘materialism’
fails. A materialist’s attention is fixed on material goods as
opposed to mental, spiritual, or intellectual ones; whereas an idealist
is not someone always focused on the latter rather than the former,
but someone committed to ideals. And ideals are essentially things
of the mind, because they are the thoughts of circumstances not in
fact found in reality, but which we can strive to approach as nearly
as the conditions of life permit. The mental nature of ideals makes
the connection between the everyday usage of the word and the
technical one.
Two more ‘isms’ of which one hears a lot, and which tend to occur
together as a pair of supposed opposites, are ‘empiricism’ and
‘rationalism’. Whereas ‘dualism’, ‘materialism’, and ‘idealism’ belong to
metaphysics (what sorts of thing are there?), this pair belongs squarely
to epistemology (how do we know?).
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In a rough and ready way we all make a distinction between perceiving
and thinking. It is one thing to see the objects on your table, notice that
one is a pen and one a computer; it is another thing to think about
them, wonder if they still work, or what to do if they don’t. And we are
used to the idea that astronomers spend long hours looking at the sky,
whereas mathematicians just seem to sit there working things out,
feeling no need to look at anything at all except what they themselves
have written down. So here, on the face of it, are two quite different
ways of acquiring knowledge. Some philosophers have favoured one of
them at the expense of the other: ‘empiricism’ is a very general word for
doctrines that favour perceiving over thinking, ‘rationalism’ for
doctrines that favour thinking over perceiving.
There may have been philosophers who held that only what could be
perceived could be known, so allowing no cognitive powers at all to
thought, inference and reason. Something of much that kind is reported
of the Lokāyatas, whom we met above in connection with materialism.
10. Every subject talks its own talk.
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According to some reports of their thinking they went even further,
saying that only what can be perceived exists. If so (but remember that
all the reports we have were written by their opponents!), they surely
overreached themselves. Nobody who thinks that knowledge is only of
what you have perceived can claim to know that nothing imperceptible
exists, since that isn’t something you could possibly perceive. (It would
make as much sense as claiming to be able to hear that nothing
inaudible exists.)
An empiricist who holds that only perception yields knowledge need
not be saying that the process of perception itself involves no
thought whatever, so that we can have as it were pure perception
untainted by any thinking. Even to look at my table and see that
there is a pen on it requires more of me than just passively
registering the light patterns that enter my eyes. I need to know a
little about pens, at the very least about what they look like, and
then bring this knowledge to bear, otherwise I shall no more see a
pen than does the camera with which we photograph the pen.
Perception is interpretative, whereas cameras merely record patterns
of light. So a less crude empiricism will allow that classification,
thought, inference, and reason all have their legitimate role. But it
will take its stand on the point that they cannot generate a single
item of knowledge on their own. It may be true that there is no
thought-free perception; but it is also true that there is no
perception-free knowledge. All claims to knowledge answer, in the
end, to perception; it may be possible for them to go beyond
perception, but they must start from it.
The empiricist can offer a powerful argument for this view; any would-
be rationalist must have an answer ready. In perception we are in
some kind of contact with objects around us; they have an effect on
our senses. But if we try to think in complete independence of
perception, where is the link between us and the objects we are trying
to think about? For if there is no such link, then there is the world, and
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here are we thinking away to ourselves. That sounds like a recipe for
pure fantasy, perhaps interspersed with the very occasional lucky
guess. Let us take a quick look at how three philosophers of strongly
rationalist tendencies, Plato, Kant, and Hegel, responded to this
challenge.
What reason can tell us, according to Plato, is not directly about the
world of the senses at all, but about eternal, transcendent entities
called Ideas or Forms: the Good, the Just, the Equal, the Beautiful.
Things we perceive with the senses are good, equal, and so on just in
so far as they ‘participate’ in these Forms or approximate to the
standards set by them. But how does Reason get its knowledge of the
Forms? Plato (as you will know by now if you took my advice to read
his Phaedo as a follow-up to Crito) made use of a belief far from
unknown to ancient Greek thought. The soul has existed before it
entered its present body. In that existence it encountered – Plato hints
obscurely at something analogous to perception – the Forms, and in
rational thought it is now brought to remember what it then learnt
of them.
Kant, who was happy to concede far more to empiricism than Plato or
Hegel, met the challenge in a novel and radical way. Reason cannot tell
us anything about things imperceptible – it can only tell us what, in
general terms, our experience is bound to be like. And it can do this only
because our experience is shaped by our own minds. Reason, operating on
its own, is really only telling us how our minds work – which is why it
can do what it does without needing to draw on our perceptions of the
rest of the world.
Hegel’s response is not unlike Plato’s, in that he begins with a system of
thoughts or universals which he collectively calls ‘The Idea’. This is the
driving force which structures the whole of reality, which includes our
minds and the categories in which we think, as well as the rest of reality
which is what we are thinking about. That is why we can expect our
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reason, even when used on its own independently of perception, to be
in tune with the world. The reasoning subject and its object share a
structure, that of the Idea.
These three examples show us that the opposition between empiricism
and rationalism is not a minor skirmish. Those who begin by taking
opposite sides at this point can end up worlds apart, metaphysically
speaking. But I do not mean to suggest that only rationalism faces
difficulties and empiricism is problem-free. Not so, as we shall soon
find out.
Another much-used ‘ism’ is scepticism. One can be sceptical, of course,
about specific things like the probity of the Olympic Committee, the
existence of UFOs, or the value of a low-fat diet, but when ‘scepticism’
occurs in philosophical texts it usually refers to something much more
general: the rejection of a wide range of claims to knowledge, or doubts
about a large class of beliefs. It isn’t just their number, of course. Any
scepticism worthy of a place in the history books must be aimed at
beliefs that are actually held, and are held to be important – no medals
are awarded for shelling the desert.
This means that there can be plenty of thought which was sceptical in
its own time, but now reads differently. A good example would be Quod
Nihil Scitur (‘That Nothing is Known’), by the Portuguese philosopher/
medic Francisco Sanchez (1551–1623). A more sceptical-sounding title it
would be hard to find, but what follows seems to us not so much
scepticism as a vigorous attack on Aristotelianism, then prevalent but
now long since discredited. When sceptics succeed they cease to look
like sceptics; they look like critics who were right.
Other forms of scepticism have a longer shelf-life. These are the ones
whose targets are perennial human beliefs, or everyday beliefs, or what
is often called common sense. The most famous example of modern
times occurs at the beginning of Descartes’s Meditations, where we are
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threatened with the possibility that the senses cannot be relied upon to
tell us anything whatever about the world, not even that there is one.
But Descartes is on the programme for the next chapter, so let us here
look back instead to the school of Pyrrho (roughly: 365–275 bc), source
of the most developed sceptical philosophy we know. It can all be found
in a single book, Outlines of Pyrrhonism by Sextus Empiricus. Sextus, in
his prime around ad 200, here reports in loving detail the aims,
arguments, and conclusions of the system. Happy the movement that
finds a chronicler like him.
The early pyrrhonists had worked hard. They had catalogued ten
‘tropes’, or ways of arguing for their sceptical conclusion that we have
no sufficient grounds for any conviction as to what things are really
like, as opposed to how they appear to us. Faced with a ‘dogmatist’ –
one of the politer names they called people like Aristotelians and Stoics
who claimed to know such things – their favourite strategy was to find
some animal to which things would appear differently, or other human
beings to whom they appeared differently, or circumstances under
which they would appear differently to the claimants themselves, and
then to argue that there was no way of resolving the disagreement
without arbitrarily favouring one viewpoint over the rest. In one
passage Sextus argues that there is no reason to privilege the way
something seems to a dogmatist over the way it seems to a dog.
Readers will occasionally catch him arguing from premisses which a
sceptic might be expected to find untrustworthy. Perhaps he, and the
pyrrhonists, were not always speaking to eternity, but to their
contemporaries – and felt that what they accepted could legitimately
be used against them.
Nowadays one often hears it asked what the point of a comprehensive
scepticism could be – asked rhetorically, with the implication that it
can have no point whatever. But the pyrrhonists certainly thought
that their scepticism had a point: the achievement of tranquillity of
mind, untroubledness, ataraxia. They knew a thing or two about
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peace of mind. If you want to insist on the truth of your point of
view, remember that there is a cost: life is going to be a perpetual
intellectual brawl. And if the brawl stays intellectual, you’ll have
been lucky; especially in religion and politics, these things have
been known to end in bombs and burnings. I think they knew
something else as well: moving from how things immediately appear
to our senses to what they are really like is a much slower, more
hazardous and laborious enterprise than many of their contemporaries
realized.
The pyrrhonists’ favourite sceptical manœuvre was to remind us that
how a thing appears does not just depend on the thing: it depends on
the condition of the person to whom it appears, and the medium
through which it appears. Which ushers in our final ‘ism’: relativism.
Relativism is not a specific doctrine, but a type of doctrine – I might
add, a type much in vogue with intellectuals at the moment. The
general idea is easy to grasp. A moral relativist will hold that there is no
such thing as good (pure and simple), rather there is good-in-this-
society, good-in-that-society. An aesthetic relativist rejects the idea that
an object might simply be beautiful; we always have to ask ‘Beautiful for
whom, in whose eyes?’ A ‘gastronomic relativist’ won’t be interested in
the question whether pineapple tastes nice – it has to be ‘tastes nice to
whom, when, and in combination with what?’ A literary relativist
doesn’t believe that texts have meanings – except at best in the sense
that they have a variety of meanings for a variety of readers, and
probably even for one reader at different times. A relativist about
rationality will say that what is rational is relative to cultures, with the
consequence (for instance) that it is illegitimate to apply ‘western’
scientific standards to traditional African beliefs about witchcraft and
pronounce them irrational.
That bunch of examples illustrates a number of points about relativism.
One is that the initial plausibility of different cases of relativism varies
widely. Many people will find aesthetic relativism easily acceptable, and
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some will think that what I have called ‘gastronomic relativism’ is
obviously true. That rationality is culture-relative is a much more difficult
doctrine, as is relativism about moral values. These doctrines do not say,
remember, that different beliefs are accounted rational in different
societies, and different moral values avowed, for this nobody doubts.
They say that what these really are can differ from society to society, and
that is about as far from obvious as you can get. So if you hear someone
going on about relativism without saying relativism about what, give a
badly concealed yawn.
The examples illustrate another important point. It isn’t just what the
particular relativism is about, it is also what it relativizes to: the
individual, a society, a culture (there are plenty of multicultural
societies), a historical epoch, or what. Those forms of relativism, like the
‘gastronomic’, which can plausibly focus on the individual, have a big
advantage: unlike societies, cultures, and epochs, it is clear where an
individual begins and ends. If Europeans shouldn’t bring their scientific
standards to bear on African beliefs in witchcraft, may they properly
bring them to bear on European beliefs in witchcraft? Or only on
contemporary European beliefs in witchcraft? Imagine yourself living
intermingled with a people who, routinely and without moral qualms,
abandon unwanted babies and leave them to die. (Such societies have
existed.) Could you just say ‘Oh, fine. That’s what they think, that’s their
moral culture, ours is different’, as if it were like ‘They speak French and
we speak English’? Bitter experience suggests that many people are
unlikely to find it that easy.
I would be a bad guide if I left you with the impression that a short
paragraph can dispose of moral and intellectual relativism, just like
that. Be aware, though, that in several areas relativism is in for a rough
ride. The ride is rough theoretically, because of the difficulty of stating
clearly just what relativism does and doesn’t say; and it is rough
practically, because of the difficulty of standing by it when the crunch
comes.
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Chapter 7
Some more high spots
A personal selection
In Chapters 2, 3, and 4 we looked closely at three pieces of philosophical
writing. In this chapter I briefly introduce a few more of my favourites.
The selection is personal – another author would very likely have made
quite different choices. And it can only be a few. But be assured that
there are plenty more, indeed that however much you read, there will
still be plenty more.
Descartes: Discourse on the Method
In Chapter 2 I remarked that, whereas the ethical discussion presented
in Plato’s Crito could almost have taken place yesterday, Plato’s
cosmology takes us back to a completely different world. True – but we
needn’t go back that far; four centuries will be enough. In 1600 it was,
admittedly, over fifty years since Copernicus had offered his
replacement for the old Ptolemaic astronomy, moving the sun to the
centre of the solar system and letting the Earth, now just one of a
number of similar planets, circle round it. But few believed him. Galileo
(1564–1642) had not yet begun publicly to champion his cause, and
when he did so by no means everybody believed him.
It was not just that the Earth was displaced from its proud position in
the centre. In fact it wasn’t really that at all, since according to what we
would now call the physics of the day the centre was not a very
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desirable place to be: it was where the basest matter tended to
congregate, the cosmic rubbish tip one might almost say. Other factors
were far more important. Passages in the Bible appear to maintain that
the Earth is stationary; here was an individual prepared to reject or at
least reinterpret those passages on the basis of his own reasoning
without reference or deference to proper authority. Besides, the
claims made by Copernicus, let alone Galileo, were in conflict with the
(neo-Aristotelian) physics and cosmology that held sway in the
universities.
For an Aristotelian, the baser kinds of matter are earth and water. Unlike
the other two kinds, air and fire, they naturally strive towards the centre
of the universe. So a spherical mass of earth and water has formed
there, and this is the Earth. (However often you hear it said, it just isn’t
true that the medievals believed that the Earth was flat!) But the Moon,
the Sun, the planets and stars don’t consist of this sort of matter at all,
not even air and fire. They are made of the Quintessence – the fifth
element – incorruptible and unchanging, and all they do is go round in
circles, eternally, in godlike serenity. Now the new astronomy wants to
blow this distinction away: however things may look and feel from
where we are standing, the Earth is itself in the heavens; and the
heavenly bodies are not utterly set apart, but are as much proper
objects of scientific investigation as the Earth itself. On top of which the
new scientists want to replace explanations couched in terms of natures
and goals with talk of the particles of which things are composed, and
of mechanical causation governed by mathematical laws.
All this represented catastrophic intellectual change on several levels at
once. It is often called The Scientific Revolution, a name which captures
its magnitude, but wrongly suggests that it happened quickly. No
wonder that it was accompanied by a rise of scepticism. For if the best of
received wisdom, with 2,000 years of triumphant history, was now
seen to be failing, a natural reaction was to despair of human
knowledge altogether and call off the hunt.
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René Descartes (1596–1650) viewed Aristotelianism as a time-hallowed
system of errors. So did the sceptics, but unlike them he also took it to
be an obstacle – an obstacle to human knowledge of nature, like
scepticism itself. So he conceived an ambitious plan. (Had he known just
how ambitious he might have stopped in his tracks there and then – so
we should be grateful that he didn’t.) By going back to a point at which
no doubt was even possible and then rebuilding human knowledge by
unmistakable steps he would fight his way clear of scepticism, and
presumably of Aristotelianism as well, since he had no expectation that
his reconstruction would lead back in that old, worn, faltering direction.
Then he would illustrate the value of this heroic Great Escape of the
human intellect by demonstrable progress in the sciences: optics,
physics, physiology, and meteorology were all topics that he wrote
about.
The Discourse on the Method of rightly using one’s Reason (1637) is not
Descartes’s most famous work – that title surely goes to his Meditations
(1641). But it has the advantage of giving the reader, in very brief
compass, a taste of most of Descartes’s thought, including very
importantly an autobiographical account of the circumstances and
motivation from which his whole project arose.
So set aside a couple of hours – easily enough – and begin by
sympathizing with Descartes’s frustration when formal education left
him feeling that ‘I had gained nothing . . . but increasing recognition of
my ignorance’ and that there was ‘no such knowledge in the world as I
had previously been led to hope for’. Admittedly, there is value in some
of what he has been taught, and he gives a sentence each to the
advantages of languages, history, mathematics, oratory, and poetry –
though the latter two are ‘more gifts of the mind than fruits of study’.
As for philosophy, its chief ‘advantage’ is that it enables us to ‘speak
plausibly about any subject and win the admiration of the less
learned’ – so much for scholastic Aristotelianism. So the minute he is
old enough he chucks it all in and goes travelling, joining in the wars
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which were boiling away in Europe at this time. Perhaps men of action
will have more truth to offer than the scholars; after all, their
misjudgements really do rebound on them, whereas those of the
scholars have no practical consequences and can be false with impunity.
One thing he learns on his travels is how much customs differ from
place to place, people to people – as he pointedly says, there is as much
variety as in the opinions of the philosophers – so he had better not rely
on anything he has learnt only through ‘custom and example’. At this
stage many people (and nowadays even more than then) might slip into
a forlorn scepticism or a lazy relativism. But not this one. Descartes’s
reaction is that if he is to avoid living under the misguidance of false
opinions then once in his life he should dismantle his entire belief-
system and construct it anew. Which he intends to try – and on his own
what’s more.
One has to be amazed at the audacity of this unflinchingly positive
response to the crisis that Descartes, doubtless along with many less
articulate or less self-confident contemporaries, was experiencing. If,
that is, we believe that he really meant it – but I know no good reason to
think that he didn’t. In Part 2 of the Discourse we see him striving to
reassure any readers who may take him for a social, political, or
theological reformer: ‘No threat to any public institution, it’s only my
own beliefs that I’m going to overhaul.’ (Prudent, and a nice try, but not
altogether convincing, is it? As if he weren’t going to recommend his
renovated belief-system to anyone else!) Then in Part 3 he takes steps to
ensure that his life can keep ticking over while his beliefs are suspended,
for ‘before starting to rebuild your house you must provide yourself
with somewhere to live while building is in progress’. So he will simply
go along, non-committally, with the most sensible and moderate views
and behaviour he finds around him. It is a modified version of what he
would have found in Sextus Empiricus’ report of the recommendations
of the ancient sceptics – who faced the same problem permanently,
since they had no intention of rebuilding.
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How is demolition to proceed, and where will Descartes find his
foundations? At the start of Part 4 he suddenly feigns to go all shy:
perhaps he should bypass this bit, as being ‘too metaphysical and
uncommon for everyone’s taste’. But then he tells us anyway. What we
get in Part 4 is a high-speed résumé of his best-known work, the
Meditations on First Philosophy.
First, suspend any belief about which you can think of the slightest
grounds for doubt. (Don’t bother about whether these grounds actually
do make you feel doubtful – mostly they won’t, but that could just be a
fact about you.) Since your senses have sometimes deceived you,
consider the possibility that they might deceive you at any time, indeed
that they might deceive you all the time – that they have no more status
than a dream or an hallucination. But what about your belief that you
are now thinking? Here doubt really does run dry, because doubting
whether you are thinking is another case of thinking – the doubt defeats
itself. And if I am thinking, Descartes reflects, then I must exist – we
have reached the notorious Cogito ergo sum.
You may well wonder how Descartes is to rebuild anything on the basis
of what little has survived so fierce a test. But he isn’t cowed by the task.
He has found that his grasp of his own existence is absolutely secure.
But he can raise doubts about everything else, even his own body. So he
(his mind, soul, self) must be something else, distinct from his body,
and capable of existing without it. The body is one thing, the mind
another – this is the famous (or infamous) Cartesian dualism that we
saw in Chapter 6 (p. 62).
In the next step Descartes observes that he has the idea of a perfect
being, God, so the question arises: how did he get the ability to think
such a thought? As he points out elsewhere, if you had in mind the plan
of an extremely intricate machine we would think that either you were a
superb engineer yourself or had got the plan from someone who was.
And since Descartes knows that he is far from perfect himself he
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reckons his idea of a perfect being can’t come from him, but only from a
being that is actually perfect. That idea in his mind is the signature left
by his creator.
Many readers will feel that Descartes’s idea of a perfect being is far too
hazy, imprecise, and in a word imperfect to need anything more than
Descartes for its cause. But he held the existence of God to be proved,
and took a further step: what he believes when he has achieved the
utmost clarity of which he is capable must be true. For otherwise his
God-given faculties would be misleading in principle, which would make
God a deceiver, and hence imperfect. So if scepticism says that even our
very best efforts might lead us to falsehood, just dismiss it.
In Part 5 we are back with autobiography. Descartes turns to his
scientific work, things which he had earlier ‘endeavoured to explain in
a treatise which certain considerations prevent me from publishing’.
These ‘considerations’ were in fact the condemnation of Galileo’s
writings by the Church, as Descartes makes clearer (though without
mentioning names) in Part 6. There he offers reasons for his decision,
and for his further decision to present some of his results in the
Discourse after all. The reasons are fairly convoluted, and don’t
wholly dispel the suspicion that the case of Galileo had just
frightened him off.
At this stage one of those unfortunate little things happens. Descartes
was a notable mathematician, and no mean performer in physics. True,
the work of Isaac Newton (1642–1727) wiped his physics off the map
towards the end of the century, though not before Newton himself had
accepted it and attempted to work within it until his late thirties. But
the main example he selects for Part 5 is his theory about how the
human heart works, and this nowadays sounds just plain quaint and
fanciful – he believes it to be much hotter than any other part of the
body, and makes it sound like a distillery in action. (All it distils is blood,
some readers may be disappointed to learn.)
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In spite (or partly because) of this glitch the Discourse is a rich and
memorable work. An eminent founder of modern thought grapples
with himself, Aristotelianism, scepticism, academic reaction, public and
ecclesiastical opinion, physics, cosmology, and physiology, all in about
fifty pages. Now that I call a real feast.
11. Descartes as physiologist – a naked Cartesian understandably feeling a bit chilly.
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Hegel: Introduction to the Philosophy of History
We encountered Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) in Chapter
6, though only briefly. His influence has been massive; we shall see two
examples of it in the next and final chapter, but important as they are
they can give only the barest inkling of the extent of the Hegel-
phenomenon. And the opposition to him started two very significant
movements: existentialism, through the Danish thinker Søren
Kierkegaard, and in Britain the analytic school through Moore, Bertrand
Russell, and the young Ludwig Wittgenstein. It took heavyweights with
an alternative on offer to take people’s minds off Hegel, and then the
effect was only partial, local, and temporary.
But there is another reason for introducing a work by Hegel at this
point. Nearly all the philosophy we have looked at so far begins from
what are relatively ordinary, everyday considerations. (Socrates: what
will happen to my children if I do what my friends are suggesting?
Hume: you can’t always believe what other people tell you. Descartes:
when there’s so much disagreement between the authorities, what can
we do but go back to basics and start again?) Hegel’s thought in the
Philosophy of History, in contrast, arises out of a grand vision of reality
and the forces that move it – this is heavy-duty metaphysics.
Hegel is often said to be a very difficult philosopher. I won’t deny it – if
you select a page at random and read it from top to bottom you will
probably feel that you might just as well have read it from bottom to
top. But one of the most valuable experiences for someone coming new
to his philosophy is that of finding how much easier things are if you
approach the text with the grand metaphysical vision already in mind.
The big picture is the key, so we begin by trying to get some grasp of it.
Remember that I warned you back in Chapter 1 to expect to find some
philosophy weird. You will find Hegel’s less weird, even if you still don’t
believe a word of it, after you have read the Introduction to the
Philosophy of History. Here goes.
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We start with something called ‘The Idea’. Think of it as being rather
like the Ideas of Plato – a system of abstract universals from which
things and events in the world take their shapes and natures. But it
differs from Plato in two important ways. First, it is a highly structured
system, and its structure is in a certain sense developmental. I say ‘in a
certain sense’ because the Idea doesn’t happen in time, one bit after
another; Hegel’s doctrine is rather that it embodies a natural order of
thought, so that the thought of one element inexorably leads the mind
to another, and the thought of those two to a third, and so on until the
whole system is revealed.
The second big difference is that whereas Plato speaks as if his Ideas
exist independently of anything else, Hegel’s Idea can exist only if
something embodies it. So there has to be ‘Nature’ – the familiar
collection of concrete objects that surround us. And Nature, since it
exists in order to embody the Idea, reflects all the Idea’s properties. The
‘development’, which in the Idea was metaphorical, makes a literal
appearance in the changing patterns of Nature.
So the Idea and Nature are very closely related: each is a form of the
other. But at the same time they are so different that you might well
think of them as opposites. The Idea is abstract, and neither temporal
nor spatial, whereas Nature is spatio-temporal and concrete. The Idea is
composed of universals, general concepts, whereas Nature comprises
myriads of particular things. And it is material, which the Idea is
certainly not. Hegel now uses this situation – the existence of opposites
which are nevertheless in a sense the same thing – as the starting-point
for a deeply characteristic move.
Suppose that you want to know something about yourself, say, what
you really think about some question or other. Should you sit down
meditatively and try to introspect your own thoughts? No – you will just
think you see whatever you wanted to see. You should do something,
make something, write something, in general produce something that
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expresses you, your own work – and look at it. That is what will tell you
about yourself.
Good advice, and nothing especially new. (‘By our works shall we know
ourselves.’) But Hegel now makes a very surprising (and rather obscure)
use of it. He holds, remember, that Nature is the concrete expression of
the Idea. So the Idea is confronted by its own work, and the situation is
ripe for it to start to understand itself. Thus is born what Hegel calls
Geist, usually translated ‘spirit’ – consciousness, awareness. Human
minds are its vehicle, but what is really happening in them is that the
Idea is gradually moving towards full self-understanding. (OK, I told you
that this was my example of high-altitude metaphysics!) There’s more
to come: Hegel believes that the whole purpose of reality is precisely
this, that the Idea should come to full knowledge of its own nature. And
this is to happen in us, in the minds of the human race. No philosopher
has ever cast us in a more prestigious role. Indeed, could there be one?
This is the high-water mark of human self-assessment.
So what of history? History begins only when there are conscious beings
and something one might call a culture, that is to say when we have
reached Hegel’s Stage 3 – Spirit or Geist. History is driven by Reason, the
Idea: Hegel makes no bones of announcing this as established fact,
something which philosophy (his own philosophy) has shown. In
history, the Idea is working out its rational purposes.
If you find this thought rather alien, remember that to most of Hegel’s
audience it would have sounded quite familiar; it is a close relative of
something they had been brought up to accept. Providence is at work.
Behind all the mundane detail of life, God is realizing his aims. In spite of
everything, Good is gradually defeating Evil. All is for the best. That
thought is familiar to all of us, including those of us who snort at it.
What makes Hegel’s version of it feel unfamiliar is, first, his conception
of ‘the best’ – the Idea, the force that drives it all, comes to full
knowledge of its own nature – and second, his highly intellectualized
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account of what is doing the driving – not a personal God or deified
Superman, but the Idea, something like a system of Platonic forms. A
theology student in his youth, Hegel knows perfectly well how to
present this as a version of the orthodox Christian story (in fact he
thinks he is improving on it); and he can preach with the best of them,
as you’ll quickly discover as you read.
But history, surely, is driven by the actions of human beings? And they
have their own human schemes, interests, and motives – one thing they
aren’t trying to do is ensure that the Idea comes to perfect self-
knowledge. (How could they be? Most of them have never even heard of
it.) Now we meet a famous doctrine: the Cunning of Reason. Without
their knowledge, the Idea (or Reason) really is at work, influencing and
directing them towards its own ends.
So is there an external force, like the ancient Fates, looking down on us
and manipulating our lives? No, Hegel’s view is subtler and less
superstitious than that. Remember that our minds, in Hegel’s grand
plan, do embody the Idea, but not yet with any clear consciousness
of it. (Think of the way a gene – Hegel much approved of organic
metaphors – ‘contains’ the adult organism, but will only show it
gradually in the process of growth and development.) Because there is
this something within us, active though obscure, we can consciously
pursue our own limited and individual ends and purposes whilst really
serving the turn of Reason.
The Idea, now as Spirit or Geist, directs the course of history through the
will of ‘world-historical individuals’ (the famous people you read about
in history books). Their feeling for the requirements of Spirit is a little
more advanced than that of their contemporaries, their dissatisfaction
with the present state of things slightly sharper and better focused.
Hegel describes them (never let anyone tell you he couldn’t write!):
‘They do not find their aims and vocation in the calm and regular system
of the present . . . they draw their inspiration from another source, that
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hidden spirit whose hour is near but which still lies beneath the surface
and seeks to break out’. These are the leaders who change the world,
unite nations, create empires, found political institutions. And once the
new state of things exists, the society or nation comes face to face with
something it has itself produced – the situation that advances self-
understanding, remember – and finds out a little more about its own
real aspirations.
It also finds out more about the problems they bring with them. For a
start, these transitions from one state to another rarely happen
smoothly, without conflict and struggle. What Hegel calls ‘the calm and
regular system of the present’ always has its appeal, especially for those
in whom the subliminal awareness of Spirit’s next move is undeveloped.
These become the reactionaries who resist the world-historical
individual’s striving for change; they are opposed by those of a slightly
more advanced state of consciousness, who gather behind the leader,
sensing that the new direction is the right one.
Only right for now, however. Remember that the strange thing from
which we began, the Idea, involves development, in a figurative sense.
Everything that exists or happens reflects the Idea, and that of course
includes history, which exhibits the Idea’s ‘development’, but now in a
literal sense. The Idea, as you will find if you ever read Hegel’s Logic (but
be warned, it is desperately hard work), always develops through the
conflict of opposed concepts followed by their resolution, which itself
turns out to harbour another opposition, upon which a further
resolution follows, and so on until the entire system is complete. So it is,
therefore, in the political sphere. Conflict issues in a new order, but
before too long the new order itself is showing strains; the seeds of the
next conflict were already present in it, and once they mature it is swept
away in its turn. You may find the metaphysics with which Hegel
underpins all this extravagant, wild, and woolly, but when he applies it
to human history the result certainly isn’t stupid. It is this idea of
progress arising out of conflict which is known as ‘dialectic’. It pervades
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the thought of Hegel, but equally that of Marx, which is why Marx’s
philosophy is often called ‘dialectical materialism’ (see above p. 64,
and below p. 110).
Notice that there is very little comfort here for the individual. The Idea
is to come to self-knowledge, and this it must do in human minds,
which are the only vehicle around, but no particular human mind is of
any concern to it whatever. History throws individuals away once they
have served their turn. That is even, or especially, true of world-
historical individuals: ‘their end attained they fall aside like empty
husks’. Julius Caesar did his bit – and was assassinated. Napoleon
did his – then was defeated, captured, and sent to rot on Elba. An
individual is no more than a dispensable instrument. God, supposedly,
loves each one of us, but the Idea couldn’t care less, so long as there
are some of us, and they are doing its business. So it is hard to see
Hegelianism becoming a popular mass philosophy, for all its huge
influence.
12. Progress through conflict: the storming of the Bastille. Hegel was 19 when the French Revolution occurred – it made an impression.
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Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species
The first thing we can learn from this fascinating book is not to bother
too much about drawing a neat sharp line between philosophy and
science. The point is not that the line isn’t sharp, although I believe that
to be true. The point is that the line (if it exists) is not of much
importance for philosophy. On any reasonable way of drawing it
Darwin’s Origin is science, more specifically biology. But because of its
subject-matter, and the claims it makes, very few books have had
greater philosophical impact. For it implies a startling thesis about us
and how we have come to be as we are. It may not startle us today, but
it startled most of his contemporaries to the point of shock; and there
are still a number of people trying to perform the difficult balancing act
of rejecting it without appearing merely ignorant and prejudiced.
In one sense The Origin of Species does much more than ‘imply’ the
startling thesis: it builds a very carefully constructed case for it, backed
by a wealth of thoughtfully assessed evidence. Darwin was not the first
person to propose the theory of natural selection (he tells you a little of
the history of the idea in his own introduction to the book), but he was
the first to assemble so much evidence for it and so honestly to confront
the difficulties it faces. If prior to 1859 you wanted to reject the view
that species were mutable, and developed out of other species, and that
our own species was no exception, it was easy: just say ‘No’. It conflicted
with your other (deeply held) beliefs, many experts opposed it, and
there existed no serious and plausible statement of the case for it. After
1859 it wasn’t easy at all – though of course there were plenty of people
who didn’t notice.
In another sense, however, ‘imply’ is exactly the right word: Darwin
gave no prominence (in this book) to his opinion that just as much as
any other species humanity falls under the general theory. Readers who
reach the last chapter – or jump to it – will there find, discreetly placed
and well apart, two or three unmistakable sentences. Otherwise,
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silence. A common mistake is to call the book Origin of the Species,
presumably supposing that we are the species in question. Absolutely
not: There is almost nothing about us.
Plenty about pigeons, in fact half of chapter 1. They lend themselves
perfectly to Darwin’s strategy: start from a case in which it is totally
uncontroversial that a breed can be altered by selection – the breeder’s
selection of which birds to allow to mate with which. (Unsurprisingly,
there’s also a lot about cattle and sheep and racehorses; prize dahlias
get a mention too.) But that doesn’t take Darwin quite as far as he
wants to go, because it is perfectly possible to reply that human
breeders can only make quite slight changes, so that all the strikingly
different breeds of pigeon, though modified by human practice, must in
the first place have come each from birds of its own particular species –
they are just too different to have descended all of them from one type
of bird. Surely?
Now Darwin’s judgement is at its best. He doesn’t try to prove his
point, but just shows that anyone opposing it will have a lot more
talking to do. If there was an original fantail pigeon, where is it now
found in the wild? Well, perhaps it has become extinct, or lives
somewhere frightfully remote. And how about the other distinctive
breeds that pigeon-fanciers are interested in – where are their wild
relatives? And what of the fact that within these breeds one
occasionally finds individuals that closely match the complex colouring
of a type of pigeon that does exist in the wild nowadays? So is it that
all today’s distinctive breeds had ancestors of the same colouring
(although they were distinct species), and are now all either extinct in
the wild or at least have never been observed? Well, well, how very
surprising . . .
So if it is probable that artificial selection can produce such effects in a
relatively short time, is there any natural principle of selection that
might produce effects of similar magnitude, and perhaps of far greater
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magnitude, given an enormously longer time to work in? Yes, because
the ‘struggle for existence’ (about which Darwin writes a very
interesting chapter) eliminates many individuals before they are able to
reproduce. A fantail pigeon will probably mate only if it catches the eye
of the breeder; a wild pigeon will not mate unless it withstands the
struggle for existence long enough to reach maturity. What is being
selected for is in the two cases utterly different. In the second case it is
the capacity to withstand the local environmental/ecological
conditions, and if these should become harsh the selection process will
be brutally efficient.
Once thoughts like these have brought us to see that very substantial
change is possible, indeed positively likely, and when we recall (what
was only just becoming clear to geologists when Darwin was a young
man) that these processes may have been going on for an almost
unthinkable length of time, certain observations strike one differently,
like those Darwin offers in one of the very few sentences in which
human beings figure: ‘The framework of bones being the same in the
hand of a man, wing of a bat, fin of the porpoise, and leg of the horse –
the same number of vertebrae forming the neck of the giraffe and of
the elephant . . . at once explain themselves on the theory of descent
with slow and slight successive modifications.’
The nineteenth-century enthusiasm for progress, to which the
philosophy of Hegel gave such momentum, predisposed many to
understand Darwin as part of the same progressivist movement. His
younger contemporary Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), a man of a much
more metaphysical, even somewhat Hegelian turn of mind, really was
part of it. He was the inventor of the overworked phrase ‘the survival of
the fittest’, which can easily be understood as implying that those who
survive in the struggle for existence are superior to those who do not.
He himself seems to have taken it like that, for in the name of progress
he opposed anything that would lessen the intensity of the struggle,
like social welfare arrangements.
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13. Another variation on a theme much favoured by Victorian cartoonists. Darwin’s message wasn’t to be digested quickly.
This kind of thought soon turned into a movement known as Social
Darwinism. The name is inappropriate to the point of being slanderous.
Darwin never drew such conclusions, nor would he have done, for no
such thing follows. In his system the words ‘the fittest’ simply mean:
those best fitted to survive (and reproduce) under the conditions then
obtaining. They have nothing to do with moral, or intellectual, or
aesthetic superiority; and they mean nothing at all without the rider
‘under the conditions then obtaining’. If those conditions change,
yesterday’s ‘fittest’ may be tomorrow’s no-hopers. One of the many
problems about making social application of natural selection like
Spencer is that changes in human society can so easily produce changes
in the conditions under which they themselves arose. Is the internal
combustion engine ‘fitter’ than the horse and cart? In a sense, yes, but
only so long as it doesn’t run the world out of oil.
That doesn’t mean that Darwin shouldn’t be allowed to change
anyone’s attitudes to anything – far from it. Here is an example. The
literary critic and popularist Christian theologian C. S. Lewis once
(though I’m sure not only once) found himself lamenting our sexual
drives. Given the opportunity, he wrote, most of us would eat too
much, but not enormously too much; whereas if a young man
indulged his sexual appetite every time he felt like it, and each act led
to a baby, he would in a very short time populate an entire village.
Which shows, Lewis concluded, just how perverted our natural
sexuality has become.
But before you castigate yourself a sinner and start bewailing the lost
innocence of the human male, reflect on the lesson of Darwin: what we
see here is no perversion of nature; it is simply nature herself, who is not
concerned to construct the world in accordance with our moral code or
anyone else’s. Few factors will, on average, have as big an effect on the
numbers of a man’s children as the strength and frequency of his sexual
urges; so if this is itself something which many of his children inherit
from him, it is clearly a characteristic which natural selection will select
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and enhance. If most of today’s males possess it that is just what we
should expect, and certainly no call to start speaking of the Fall of Man,
perversion, and moral deterioration. Or perhaps what some call original
sin is really the fact that what evolution has produced – and was bound
to produce – is out of line with their own conception of an ideal human
character.
Incidentally: don’t worry about all those villages, each populated by
several hundred half-brothers and sisters. They will only spring up
where life provides our young Casanova with a veritable production-line
supply of females, willing, fertile, not already pregnant, and not
associated with any other males sufficiently aggressive to send him
packing. Nature can be relied upon to ensure that this does not happen
very often, to put it mildly. C. S. Lewis’s imagination was floating well
clear of the facts.
That example is specific and relatively trivial, but you can easily see how
Darwinism could subvert an entire philosophy, such as one of those we
have just seen. For Descartes human reason was a faculty given to us
and guaranteed by God, no less, and that was why he could rely on it to
tell us about the essential nature of mind and matter, and a good deal
else besides. What if instead he had thought of it as a natural
instrument which had developed because, and to the extent that, it gave
its possessors a competitive advantage over those without it? Would he
then have supposed that what it appeared to tell us on such matters
could with complete confidence be taken to be the truth? If so, how
would he have justified it? It is one thing to think that God could not be a
deceiver; but quite another to say that since the faculty of reason gives
us such advantage in practical matters it cannot possibly lead us
hopelessly astray when applied to a question like whether the mind is an
independent substance. Am I to believe that because reason is good at
helping us survive it must also be good at metaphysics? Why on earth
should that be true? If Descartes had lived after Darwin (please forgive
the historical absurdity) the foundations of his philosophy would have
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had to be very different, and if they were so different, could the
superstructure have been the same?
Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morals
‘A philosopher is a terrible explosive from which nothing is safe’ – that is
the only comment we have heard so far (p. 2) from the German
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). He had no intention of
offering his readers a comfortable experience, and his contemporaries
defended themselves by just not reading him. But soon after his death
the tide began to turn, and he became a major influence on twentieth-
century thought, especially on the European continent.
The Genealogy of Morals, first published in 1887, consists of a preface
and three essays, all conveniently divided into numbered sections.
Don’t skip the preface. And don’t miss the first sentence: ‘how much
we know nowadays, but how little we know about ourselves’. A huge
change in European thought is under way. The tendency had long been
to suppose that, however bewildering and opaque the rest of reality
may be to us, at least we could tell what was going on in our own minds;
but in the nineteenth century that tendency is fast losing momentum.
We have just seen a hint of it in Hegel’s understanding of history: the
forces of Geist are at work in us, though we know nothing or little of it
(p. 84 above). Less than a generation after Nietzsche came Sigmund
Freud (1856–1939), founder of psychoanalysis, with his doctrine of the
unconscious mind in which the most important causes of our mental
lives lie hidden from us. Acquiring self-knowledge is no longer a matter
of a quick introspective glance. It calls for hard and painful work, and
there is no guarantee that you will like what you find.
Don’t miss §3 of the preface either. Do you hear something familiar
about it? It reminds me of Part 1 of Descartes’s Discourse on the Method:
still a teenager, the future philosopher is struck by scepticism and
mistrust towards the intellectual diet that his seniors are feeding him
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(p. 76 above). For Descartes it had been the neo-Aristotelianism of the
universities. For Nietzsche it was the moral values of nineteenth-century
Christianity. Were they as self-evident as everyone around him seemed
to think? Descartes wanted to inquire into the truth of these ‘truths’
that he was being taught. Nietzsche reckoned it was time for some
questions about the value of these ‘values’. His method was to ask
about their history, their pedigree, what he called their ‘genealogy’.
Where had they come from, how had people come to hold them? Why
had they come to hold them, or in other words: what were these values
doing for the people whose values they became?
A frequent reaction at this point is to say that the value of something,
what it is worth, depends on what it is like now. How it came to be that
way is quite another matter. So Nietzsche is asking the wrong question.
However well he answers it, it won’t tell us anything about the value of
our values. To think that it will is to commit (some more philosophers’
jargon for your growing collection!) the ‘genealogical fallacy’.
But is that criticism altogether fair? I don’t think so. There are certainly
cases in which our view of what something is worth is very much bound
up with our beliefs about how it began, and if those beliefs change our
evaluation of the thing itself is threatened as well. Indeed we have just
seen a very important example, one which was important for Nietzsche
too: the effect of Darwinism on our conception of ourselves. For so
many of Darwin’s contemporaries the human race originated in a
decision by God to create us in His own image. The idea that we had in
fact developed from inferior things like monkeys by a distinctly chancy
process that might just as easily not have happened wasn’t just a new
fact to take on board, like the existence of one more previously
undiscovered planet; it was a slap in the face for human dignity and
their conception of their own worth – which was why it was doggedly
resisted then and is resisted by some to this day. No doubt about it:
under the right circumstances, genealogies can be just as explosive as
Nietzsche intended – so back to the question about moral values.
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Many believed, and some still do, that moral values were of similar
origin: handed down to human beings direct from God. Nietzsche,
who in spite of his clerical home background once described himself
as an atheist by instinct, had no interest whatever in that story; he
sought the origin of human values in human needs and human
psychology. (Human, all too Human is the pregnant title of one of his
earlier books.)
He wasn’t the first to do so, as becomes clear in preface §4. In fact,
there was already a tradition of it, and Nietzsche took its central thesis,
broadly stated, to be something along the following lines: when
humans found certain types of behaviour (on the part of individuals)
advantageous to them and the smooth running of their society, they
called them ‘good’, and strongly encouraged them; where they found
them disadvantageous, the reverse. That, simply, is how behaving for
the good of others rather than one’s own came to be regarded as
good – the others declared it to be good, because of the benefit they
received.
On the face of it that sounds quite plausible: a society reinforces what is
beneficial to it. But Nietzsche regarded it as sentimental, unhistorical
claptrap. Drawing on his expert knowledge of ancient languages (he
had had, and then abandoned, a meteoric academic career) he told a
very different tale. Far from its being those who received benefits from
the behaviour of others who then called those others (and their
behaviour) ‘good’, it was the upper classes, the aristocracy, the nobility,
the rulers of ancient societies who first called themselves (and their way
of life) good and the ordinary people, the slaves, the subject population,
bad. Early good/bad distinctions are perhaps better understood as
distinctions between ‘noble’ and base’, free and enslaved, leaders and
led, the washed and the unwashed. They were the words in which the
top dogs celebrated themselves, their strength, and their own way of
life, and expressed the extent of the gap that they felt between
themselves and the weak, impoverished, servile masses.
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That’s also pretty plausible – you can just imagine them thinking and
talking that way. (You can still hear it going on nowadays if you get into
the right company.) But it was the next step which, according to
Nietzsche, was the decisive one for the next 2,000 years and more of
European morality: the worm turned, the masses revolted. He isn’t
talking about violent revolution, armed struggle, for which the
underclasses were generally too weak, both materially and spiritually,
but about something much subtler and much more insidious. They
relieved their frustration and resentment in one of the very few ways
that were open to them, namely by developing their own system of
values in which everything about their oppressors was ‘bad’ and they
themselves, whose lives contrasted with theirs in so many ways,
were ‘good’.
So this value-system was not God-given, and it was not the outcome of
some intuitive perception of its truth, or intrinsic ‘rightness’. It was a
vengeful, retaliatory device, born of the weak’s resentment of the
strong. All that commitment to charity, compassion, and love was
actually fuelled by hate. This kind of thought is entirely typical of
Nietzsche, who loved to stand popular conceptions on their head. Just
when you thought your house was in good order, along comes a
Nietzschean ‘explosion’ and suddenly your roof has changed places with
your cellar. This is philosophy at its most challenging. Natural
iconoclasts will just love it, but anyone can admire the fireworks.
Just these facts (as he believed) about the origins of the morality of love
and compassion wouldn’t have made Nietzsche so profoundly
mistrustful of it as he actually was. After all, in adopting and promoting
it the masses were trying, in the only way open to them, to gain power
over the strong, and he has nothing against that – all life, in his view, is a
manifestation of the will to power, and no tiny little human moralist has
any business pronouncing on life in general. What he most dislikes
about ‘herd morality’ is that it arose not through affirmation of their
own way of life (like the codes of the higher classes) but through the
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negation of someone else’s: they looked at the vigorous, free, proud,
self-assured, self-assertive people who ruled them, resentfully declared
their qualities to be bad and hence the opposite qualities, such as
passivity, servitude, humility, unselfishness, to be good. Herd morality
is life-denying, in Nietzsche’s estimation.
Those who espoused this morality were now in a very strained position.
As living beings they embodied the same instinctive will to power as did
the ruling class, but unlike them they had no natural outlet for it. So
when their instincts led them to seek a different kind of power by
pronouncing their masters’ masterful instincts to be vices they were in
fact turning against their own instincts as well. So, to add to the fact
14. What to blow up next? Gazing fiercely at the world over the amazing moustache, Nietzsche always looks as if he is about to light some fuse or other.
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that they were needy and oppressed, these people were psychologically
sick, inwardly divided. And they felt pretty wretched.
But help – of a sort – is at hand, in the form of a figure known to every
culture and epoch and of intense interest to Nietzsche: the ascetic
priest, committed to poverty, humility, and chastity, and in some cases
practising quite extreme forms of self-torture. This figure, who
represents at its most explicit the wish to be rid of the bodily conditions
of life and to escape into something otherworldly and ‘beyond’, denies
life more emphatically than anyone else. So, like the herd, he is sick, but
much stronger than they are – a strength which manifests itself in his
ability to adopt and sustain his way of life.
This strength gives him power, the power to lead and direct the flock of
weaker souls. It arises partly from their perception of his inward
strength, partly from the air of mystery and esoteric knowledge with
which the ascetic surrounds himself. But it also arises in part from the
fact that he does them a service: he alleviates their suffering. Remember
that they suffer because they have set themselves against their own
vital instincts; so he can hardly be expected to cure their suffering,
because he too sets himself against his vital instincts, only more openly,
with greater determination and singleness of purpose.
An important fact about human suffering is that people will put up with
a great deal if only they understand the reason for it – even glory in it, if
they find the reason good enough. Another is that those who are
suffering want to find someone to blame for it – that acts as a kind of
anaesthetic, blocking the pain out with an overlay of anger.
The priest instinctively knows this, and gives his flock both a reason for
their suffering and an author of it. They are suffering to make their souls
fit for heaven, or for the victory of justice, or for the sake of truth, or so
that God’s kingdom should come on earth – all fine things to suffer for.
Who is to blame for the suffering? Answer: they themselves. With this
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stroke the seething resentment of the masses is directed away from the
rulers, its original objects, conflict with whom will most likely only lead
them into more suffering, perhaps partial annihilation. Redirected onto
themselves it may at least provide strength and motivation for a little
self-discipline and self-improvement – under priestly instruction. And
they are ready to accept it, for as we saw they have already turned
against their own instincts and so in one sense against themselves. They
know what has to be rooted out: any hint in themselves of the attitudes
and behaviour characteristic of the strong. They have been rendered
harmless.
Such is Nietzsche’s analysis. Whatever else we may think of it, it is
certainly unflinching. These are no more than a few of the main
thoughts, crudely compressed. Nietzsche’s style, its musicality, its
energy, its variety, its biting wit, is something one can only experience
for oneself. And the text is full of delightful detail, like the account of the
real philosopher in §7 of the third essay. Or take the first essay, §§7–9.
Do you find this anti-Semitic in tone? Then read it again, and you will
see that it is really aimed at anti-Semitism itself. What it says is that it
was only the moral history of the Jews which created the psychological
climate in which Christianity could arise – Nietzsche is firing an ironic
salvo at those Christian anti-Semites who grounded their anti-Semitism
on the premiss that it was Jews who were responsible for the crucifixion
of Christ. Once again he has turned a popular way of thinking upside
down: Christians should revere Jews, because they have the Jews to
thank for the success of Christianity. Delicious stuff!
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Chapter 8
What’s in it for whom?
Thinking about philosophy is hard work – you may have noticed, though
if you’ve got this far at least it hasn’t put you off. Writing the stuff is
even harder. (Take it from me.) So why have people done either? Well,
for one or more of a whole catalogue of reasons. In the hope of learning
to control nature, or of learning to control themselves, to get to heaven,
to avoid going to hell; to enable us to bear life as it is, to make life
bearable by changing it; to shore up institutions political, moral, or
intellectual, or to tear them down; to promote the writer’s interests, to
promote other people’s interests (yes, that happens too), even to
promote everybody’s interests; because they can’t stand certain other
philosophers; because their job demands it. Perhaps just occasionally
out of pure curiosity. There is a widespread idea that philosophers are
unworldly people, remote from reality. If that refers to their lifestyle, it
may frequently have been true, though not always. If it refers to their
work, then (I am speaking now of philosophy that endures) it is usually
false – at least in the sense that they are almost always addressing some
real concern and claiming to offer some real improvement.
Right back at the beginning (p. 1) I spoke of three big questions: what
should I do? what is there? (i.e. what is reality like?) and how do we
know? It might sound as if any philosophy offering human beings some
real improvement must be concerned primarily with the first of those.
But that wouldn’t be right. Beliefs about how things are can serve to
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give a meaning to life or bolster our feelings of self-worth, as for
example the belief that we are made in the image of God; they can give
a rationale to (or serve as an excuse for) certain types of behaviour, like
the belief that humans have rational souls and animals don’t. Answers
to the question ‘how do we know?’ can strengthen, or loosen, the hold
that various answers to the first two types of question have on us; and
very importantly, they can imply beliefs about who has knowledge, with
obvious consequences for the prestige and power of members of that
group.
Most philosophy attempts, then, to do something for somebody. To
finish, let’s look at some philosophy from this perspective. If it is to
endure, a philosophy needs a constituency, a group of interested
parties. Its chances are best if the constituency is a large one. First, a
couple of philosophies devoted to the individual. That’s a big
constituency – we’re all individuals.
The individual
The philosophy of Epicurus (see Chapter 5) is addressed to the
individual; it offers a recipe, backed by argument, for living a happy life.
Social and political arrangements are unjust if they interfere with
individuals’ attempts to apply the recipe; otherwise, his only political
recommendation is not to engage in politics. You can to some degree
help others to live the right sort of life, but only those close to you
(Epicureanism strongly advocates friendship); everyone must follow the
recipe for themselves. For success depends not on material conditions,
the sort of thing one person can arrange for another, but on your
attitude towards them. And that is precisely the point, since happiness
comes of knowing that your state of mind is largely independent of
whatever life may tip on you next.
It may then surprise you to hear that in Epicurus’ opinion the only good
is pleasure. Surely how much pleasure we can get depends heavily on
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our material conditions of life? But there’s a second surprise: he thinks
that the highest possible pleasure is freedom from physical pain and
mental anxiety. Simple, easily attainable pleasures are no less pleasant
than extravagant and exotic ones; and reliance on the latter induces
anxiety: the means to obtain them may be taken away from you. (The
idea that Epicureanism is a constant dinner party with musicians and
dancing-girls is completely misleading – it must have come down to us
from Epicurus’ opponents, who were numerous.)
A cause of much mental turmoil is superstitious fear. Banish it. Realize
that in their perfect bliss the gods have neither need nor wish to
interfere in human affairs. Learn enough about physics, astronomy, and
meteorology to feel confident that all phenomena have natural
explanations – they are not portents, omens, or signs of divine wrath.
15. Epicureanism in practice? Not according to Epicurus.
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And do not fear death, for death is simply non-existence, in which there
can be nothing to fear. That, on a thumbnail, is Epicurus’ advice to each
one of us. You could do a lot worse than follow it. Of course there
wouldn’t be any politicians if we all did; but perhaps we could put up
with that.
Epicurus taught the individual to be inwardly armed against whatever
may befall. Over 2,000 years later John Stuart Mill wrote a stirring
defence of every individual’s right to shape their own life. In his famous
essay On Liberty (1859) he argued for what has become known as the
Harm Principle: ‘the only purpose for which power can be rightfully
exercised over any member of a civilized community . . . is to prevent
harm to others’. As democratic systems of government became better
entrenched in Europe and America they also became better understood,
and Mill had spotted a latent danger: the tyranny of the majority over
the individual and over minority groups.
As befits the author of Utilitarianism (see Chapter 5) he makes no
appeal to human rights, but rather to the damage done, the value
lost, if his principle is not observed. To be master of one’s own life
is a good for human beings, a part of our happiness, so the individual
loses even if what the law forbids them to do is something they
wouldn’t have done anyway. But the whole society loses too. For the
people whom the Harm Principle protects are an extremely valuable
resource, precisely because they have unconventional opinions and
unusual lifestyles. If their opinions are in fact true the value to the
community is obvious. If they are false it is less obvious but equally
real: if truth is wholly unopposed it becomes a dead formula on the
tongue – opposition ensures that it remains live in the mind. As for
unconventional lifestyles, they provide living experimental data from
which everyone can learn. Constraining the individual damages
everybody.
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The State
Earlier (Chapter 2, and again briefly in Chapter 5, p. 50 ff.) we looked at
the so-called contract theory of political obligation. We saw it in action
in Plato’s Crito, and noticed that it can in principle take many forms,
arising from the variety of possible answers to the question: who
contracts with whom to do what on what conditions?
Of all contract theories that of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) is perhaps
the most famous – and if so then because of his marvellously
unflattering description of the ‘state of nature’, life before any social
arrangements had been made, in which nobody can own anything,
cultivate anything, or do anything constructive at all without continual
fear of being attacked and robbed, with a fair chance of being murdered
thrown in. As long as this ‘war . . . of every man against every man’ lasts,
life is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. So how to improve
matters? Form an association; agree to accept the authority of a
‘sovereign’ (person or body) with full powers to do anything they deem
needful to protect each of you from the others and from any external
threat. This sovereign body can do no injustice, since as their accepted
representative everything it does is done with the presumed consent of
all who are party to the contract that set it up. Only if the sovereign
directly threatens their lives may the citizens resist – for it was to
protect their lives that they entered into the contract in the first place.
The ‘Laws and Constitution of Athens’, you recall (Crito 50e–51c, p. 19
above), wouldn’t allow Socrates even that much, but gave little reason
to support such extreme claims.
Mightn’t Hobbes’s citizens reply that it wasn’t just to protect their lives
that they entered into the contract? It was to enjoy various liberties, all
of which were lacking in the state of nature. That would suggest that
the citizens’ right of resistance kicks in rather earlier than the point at
which their very lives are threatened. (Besides, having handed over all
the power, how are they to protect their lives?) Like Plato, Hobbes seems
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to have gone further than his arguments warrant. But really that isn’t
surprising. Plato’s youth coincided with Athens’ disastrous war against
Sparta. Hobbes was born as the Spanish Armada approached, towards
the end of a century torn by religious conflict that cost millions of lives,
and his maturity witnessed England’s descent into civil war. No wonder
that both men believed that the prime need of political life was
government strong enough to maintain peace and order, the values
without which no others could even begin. Their way of supporting the
individual was to hand over total sovereignty to the state. No surprise
that some have thought that they went too far. John Locke (1632–1704),
writing less than fifty years after Hobbes but in somewhat less
threatening political circumstances, waxed ironical:
As if when men quitting the state of nature entered into society, they
agreed that all of them but one, should be under the restraint of laws,
but that he should still retain all the liberty of the state of nature,
increased by power, and made licentious by impunity. This is to think that
men are so foolish, that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may be
done them by pole-cats, or foxes, but are content, nay think it safety, to
be devoured by lions.
The priesthood
Priests are not generally persons of either wealth or military strength.
So whatever gives them security, and not just security but often very
considerable power within their society or religious group, must be
something else. It arises from what their people think about them, what
they take them to be able to do for them, the value that they put upon
them. In other words, it arises from philosophy. The less tangible and
immediate the benefits and the dangers, the more powerful the
apparatus needed to maintain belief in them and faith in those who
confer (or avert) them.
This isn’t a matter of intentional deception – though it would be absurd
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16. Dwarfing everything, Hobbes’s Leviathan rises out of the billowing hills of the English countryside. Can this really be safety? No wonder Locke was worried.
to suggest that no such thing ever occurs. It isn’t even a question of
whether what the priestly class would have the laity believe about
them is true or false. The point is that it should be believed:
otherwise, no priests. So plenty of writing exists which promotes
their status.
Illustrations exist everywhere, so since we haven’t set foot outside
Western Europe for the last few chapters let’s return to India and look at
the opening chapter of one of the major Upanishads. By the time The
Questions of King Milinda was written, the Bŗhadāranyaka Upanishad (BU,
see Bibliography) may well have been as old as Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales today. It belongs to the world of the Hindu Vedas, a world of ritual,
sacrifices, and chants that are highly beneficial, though only if correctly
performed. To ensure correct performance, you need an expert learned
in Vedic matters; for a major ritual you even need a super-expert who
makes sure that the other experts are performing correctly. Such
expertise needs to be accorded due respect, and no doubt a due fee.
(‘I wish I had wealth so I could perform rites’ is said to be everyone’s
desire (1. 4. 17) ). This expertise – and the perks attaching to it – is the
(hereditary) privilege of a particular social class or caste, the Brahmins.
No mere social convention, this caste system, as 1. 4. 11 tells us –
apparently it arises out of the way the gods themselves were created.
Read 1. 4. 11 very carefully: notice how it ascribes a certain superiority to
the Kşatriya, the ruling aristocratic warrior class, whilst maintaining a
certain priority for the Brahmins. Their power is ‘the womb’ of the
power of the rulers – that from which it issues. So it’s a bad idea for a
warrior to injure a priest, for he harms the source of his own power.
This is philosophy and theology, but clearly it is good practical politics
as well.
A reader new to this tradition of thought will find much that is strikingly
alien. There is the doctrine of the correspondences between the parts of
the sacrificial horse (this was the most prestigious of the Vedic
sacrifices) and parts or aspects of the world: the year, the sky, the earth.
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17. The Raja consults his priests.
There is the faith in etymology, as when a longer word is shown to be
made up – approximately – of two shorter words, and this fact is taken
as indicating the genesis or inner nature of whatever it is that the longer
word describes. The knowledge of this strange lore, the text repeatedly
insists, is highly advantageous: ‘A man who knows this will stand firm
wherever he may go’; and ‘Whoever knows this, . . . death is unable to
seize him . . . and he becomes one of these deities’. So we should value
this knowledge, and therefore we should value the people who guard
it – the priests.
It isn’t necessarily what the priest can do for you – it may be what he can
do to you. Don’t go messing about with a Brahmin’s wife. As BU 6. 4. 12
makes abundantly clear, he will know just the ritual for getting back at
you. And ‘A man cursed by a Brahmin having this knowledge is sure to
depart from this world bereft of his virility and stripped of his good
works . . . . Never try to flirt with the wife of a learned Brahmin who
knows this, lest one make an enemy of a man with this knowledge.’ You
have been warned.
Of course it isn’t just priests who need to be needed. It’s also doctors
and dustbin men and game show presenters and advertising
consultants. And – I almost forgot – philosophy professors. They all
exist because of people’s beliefs and values, hopes and fears.
The working classes
The industrialization of Western Europe brought wealth to a few and the
most deplorable conditions of life to many. The many quickly found a
champion in Karl Marx (1818–83), whose work, it is no exaggeration to
say, changed the political face of all those parts of the globe where
there was such a thing as politics at all. Only in the last decade has its
influence begun to wane. It may have been a victim of its own success –
after all, there is no test of a theory like actually trying it out. (That’s the
principle which underlies the enormous power of the experimental
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method in the sciences.) And no political theory ever gets a proper trial
unless a lot of people are already convinced of it.
Here we have an opportunity to spot some of those connections which
are to be found all over the history of philosophy. Marx was no disciple
of Hegel – in some respects he was violently opposed to him. But
nobody of that time was untouched by Hegelianism. Like Hegel, Marx
held that history exhibits a necessary progression; unlike Hegel, he held
the driving force to be economic: the material conditions of life. Like
Hegel, he held that progress was essentially the resolution of conflict;
but the conflict was between the economic interests of different
sections of society – hence the famous ‘class struggle’ of the Marxists.
And he held a version of the doctrine we saw to be so important to
Hegel: the value of being in touch with your ‘Other’, something that
‘has something of yourself in it’, as we often say.
Marx made full use of this idea in his analysis of the contemporary
economic system, characterized by the conflict of interest between the
working classes and the capitalists, the owners of the ‘means of
production’ (i.e. the factories). His sympathies lay firmly with the
current underdogs, the workers. The crucial thing was that they,
needing to make a living and having nothing else to sell, were selling
their labour – working in return for a wage. Not much of a wage,
because those buying their labour had no interest in paying them any
more than was necessary to keep them working. This ensured for them
and their families a life of acute and degrading poverty.
But another, more spiritual, feature of the situation was pressing heavily
on them too – the fact that the work they were doing was not really
their work: ‘the work is external to the worker, it is not a part of his
nature . . . not the satisfaction of a need, merely a means to satisfying
other needs. . . . in work he does not belong to himself but to someone
else’. The unsatisfied need is the need to express oneself in what one
does.
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Diagnosis is one thing, a cure is another. It turns out to be just as
possible to experience alienation when the work one is doing is not
one’s own but the State’s as when it is not one’s own but the
company’s. That much identification with the interests of the
community, when the community is a large and complex one, is not
easily achieved or maintained. And even if it were, that would just help
to make work endurable. If what you do is stand by a conveyor belt
tightening the lids on jars of marmalade it may make things less
intolerable to be doing it for Mother Russia than for the Global
Marmalade Corporation. But that does nothing whatever to make it
something positive, an expression of your personality or skills or a
means to the development of your potential. Nowadays we speak of ‘job
satisfaction’. Not all of us get it – the problem hasn’t gone away.
Women
We have been bounding from topic to topic, person to person, across
the globe and three millennia like a package tour gone mad. But
nobody has been introduced to philosophy until they have seen, in at
least one case, a little more deeply into some one philosopher’s mind.
We have had a glimpse of two famous works by John Stuart Mill,
Utilitarianism and On Liberty. The first told us that the Good was
happiness, the second that happiness requires individual freedom. His
almost equally famous essay The Subjection of Women (1869) tells us
that that means everyone, not just adult males.
The practical politician in Mill takes aim at a quite specific and (in theory
at least) easily remedied abuse: ‘the legal subordination of one sex to
the other is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to
human improvement; . . . it ought to be replaced by a principle of
perfect equality’. Present family law, he argued, amounted to the
enslavement of wives. He meant the word quite literally, as his account
of the legal position in Chapter 2 shows. What he wants changed,
however, is the entire package of practices and opinions which deny
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women equal educational opportunities and then equal access, on
merit, to all occupations and positions of influence.
Any major philosophy needs potential beneficiaries, even in cases where
the benefit may be imaginary. In seeking to improve the lot of women
Mill has plenty of beneficiaries to appeal to. But he believes that the
constituency for his views is 100 per cent of mankind, not just 50. He
writes about the injustice to women and the damage done to their lives
by existing conditions, but he writes almost as much about the loss to
everybody. The suppression of women’s talents is ‘a tyranny to them
and a detriment to society’. History tells us a good deal about what
women can do, because women have done it. It tells us nothing about
what they can’t do, and it never will until they are routinely given the
opportunity. (As I write, 130-something years later, a young woman is in
the lead in the closing stages of a single-handed round-the-world sailing
race, an event that must make demands on mental and physical stamina
beyond anything I can imagine.)
Mill also believes that men are damaged as individuals, often in ways they
are not likely to notice (which is itself part of the damage). For it is not
good for anyone to be brought up to believe themselves superior to
others, especially when it happens, as it frequently does, to be others
whose faculties are in fact superior to theirs. On the other hand, harsh
though it may sound, living one’s life around a close relationship with
someone of inferior ‘ability and cultivation’ is detrimental to the superior
party. Yet many men find themselves in just this situation, married to
women whose limitations are no less real just because they are an
enforced artificial product of a thoroughly pernicious system. Those men
may think they are winning, but the truth is that everyone’s a loser.
Thank goodness things have improved since 1869. A bit. In some parts
of the world. For the time being.
Given our topic it would be strange to draw attention only to something
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written by a man. But there is an obvious, indeed almost obligatory,
place to turn. Simone de Beauvoir’s massive The Second Sex (1949) has
been the inspiration of so much feminist writing ever since. Were I
allowed a brief return to life in about 200 years’ time I would not be
surprised to find it rated one of the most influential books of the
twentieth century.
Like Mill, Beauvoir is concerned with the liberty of women; unlike Mill,
she is not particularly concerned with the connection between liberty
and happiness. She denies that there are any interesting general
statements about what women are like, for what they are like is a
response to their circumstances, some of which are social and therefore
highly variable. (Mill appeared to think that there might be some such
generalizations, but denied that any were known.) Besides, Beauvoir
stands in the existentialist tradition and holds that how we react to our
circumstances is a free decision for each of us – to pretend that we are
wholly determined by our circumstances is inauthenticity, abdication of
responsibility.
I have space enough only to touch one of the themes of this long and
constantly lively book. In Chapter 7 I spoke of the enormous influence of
Hegel, and mentioned his doctrine of self-knowledge: it arises when
one meets aspects of oneself in something else, or one’s ‘Other’. Seizing
on the psychological truth in this, whilst completely ignoring Hegel’s
grand metaphysics, Beauvoir develops her most characteristic doctrine:
woman is man’s Other, and the self-understanding of both depends on it.
When the Other is itself a subject, a person, the situation becomes more
complicated and potentially very damaging. I’m watching you watching
me watching you . . . How A sees B affects B, so it alters what A finds in
B. And this (recall the doctrine about self-knowledge) alters A’s
perception of A, which then affects A, both of which affect how A
sees B . . . Just once get something badly wrong, as when man enslaved
woman, thinking that that was good for him, and woman accepted
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enslavement, thinking that was the only choice for her, and all relations
between the sexes are going to get entangled in a net of error and
artificiality. Now ‘whatever he does . . . he feels tricked and she feels
wronged’. The reciprocity of the relationship means that neither party
alone can put it right: Beauvoir appeals simultaneously to men to
recognize the independence and equality of women, and to women to
become just that, by realizing that it is indeed the truth about
themselves.
So on the very last page comes a sentence which, whilst completely
characteristic of Beauvoir, could almost have been written by Mill:
‘when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the
whole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the “division” of
humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will
find its true form’. He, coming from the empiricist and utilitarianism
tradition, and she, against the totally different background of Hegel plus
existentialism, end up remarkably close together. It almost makes you
think they might be right . . .
Animals
Anyone promoting the interests of animals – non-human animals –
faces an initial problem: animals can’t read. So the writer will have to
convince an audience distinct from the group he seeks to benefit, which
calls for one or both of two strategies: either appeal to their better
nature, or argue that they will benefit too. We saw the second of those
at work in attempts to engage the support of the laity for the
priesthood; Mill and Beauvoir used both in trying to rally men to the
cause of women’s emancipation.
The situation is even less promising when most of those to whom you
are appealing benefit, or think they benefit, from the very practices you
are trying to have abolished. Lots of people like to eat meat, lots of
people believe that humans benefit enormously from medical research
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conducted by means of experiments on animals. Feminist writers had
something of the same problem when they tried to win men over to
their views, but at least they had a direct constituency in women;
‘animalists’ have no direct constituency at all.
Buddhism, without going to extremes, is naturally protective towards
animals. I say ‘naturally’, because Buddhism retains the Hindu belief
that souls return again and again to life, and that what is in one
incarnation a human may in another be an animal. The Buddha once
lived as a hare. Christianity had no such metaphysics, nor the attached
scruples – ask an Indian cow whether metaphysics matters! Adam was
created Lord over the animals, and they were created for the use of
mankind. We have rational souls, but they don’t, which leaves them
outside the moral sphere. (St Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) said so, among
others.) That one ran and ran. Hume took a pop at it (see p. 26 above),
but still it went on running.
As the founder of the utilitarianism that Mill espoused and developed,
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) took pain and pleasure to be the morally
decisive categories, and famously declared of animals: ‘The question is
not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?’ (They
can, of course, so they enter into the utilitarian equation and we have
moral responsibilities towards them.) But that was an incidental
passage from a book devoted to human welfare. It was only very
recently that we began to get whole books explicitly about the morality
of our treatment of animals (see Bibliography), a fact which may
reflect the tricky tactical situation which their authors have to address.
Their doctrines have made enormous progress over the last twenty or
thirty years – the tactical problem wasn’t insoluble. They were able to
appeal to the sentimentality of those who like to ascribe human
characteristics to animals. They were able to appeal to the much harder
facts of modern biology, which show, far more convincingly than Hume
could have done, that our relationship to animals is a lot closer than
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Aquinas ever imagined. They appealed powerfully to people’s
consciences, asking Bentham’s question whether the suffering of
animals could be justified by resulting good for humans, and if so, then
when? For you might feel a difference between the death of
experimental mice in return for a substantial advance in the treatment
of cancer, and the death of dogs and bears in a bear-pit for the sake of a
few minutes of sport.
Some aspects of animal welfare tie in with another pressing concern –
the whole business of damage to, and care for, the natural environment.
One such aspect, vegetarianism, is sometimes treated in that way.
Using vegetable materials to feed cattle, and then eating the meat, is
said to be a very inefficient way of using the Earth’s resources,
compared with eating the vegetables straight off and cutting out the
cow in between. So vegetarianism is presented as being, long-term, in
everyone’s self-interest. Good move – the more people are listening,
the more point in talking.
Professional philosophers
You will have noticed, perhaps with some surprise, that I have said
nothing about philosophy as it is being written now. That some of it is of
value, and will last, I have little doubt, and even less doubt that what
lasts will be a tiny fraction of what is now being published. I could guess
at one or two titles, but a guess is exactly what it would be; so I have
preferred to stick to work which we already know to have survived a
substantial test of time. Part of the reason why it has survived the test is
that it was written out of a real feeling that its message was needed for
the benefit of humanity, and we can recognize the passion in it as well
as the intelligence.
There is no reason why today’s philosophical writing shouldn’t be like
this, and some of it is. But one should be aware that most of it is written
by professionals, people whose livelihood and career prospects require
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them to write and publish on philosophy. Nothing follows from that –
after all, Kant and Hegel were professional philosophers too. And it
certainly doesn’t follow that their interest in philosophy isn’t genuine. But
it does mean that amongst the various reasons for them to be interested,
some are what I might call artificial. Back in Chapter 1 I spoke of
philosophers as entering debate to change the course of civilization,
not to solve little puzzles. But in today’s world of professionalized
philosophy the most brilliant solution of a puzzle can get its author a
very long way indeed; the temptations and pressures are there to write
on puzzles, for other professional philosophers, and let civilization
take its own course.
That is not – please! – to be read as a blanket condemnation of
everything now emerging from university philosophy departments. It is
meant as advice to someone making their first approach to philosophy
with the help of this Very Short Introduction. If you are leafing through
the latest philosophy book from some academic press, or a recent issue
18. A professional philosopher – be just a little wary of this man.
117
W h
a t’s in
it fo r w
h o
m ?
of a top professional journal, and find yourself unable to see what is going
on or what claim it could possibly have on your attention, don’t transfer
your reaction to the whole of philosophy en bloc. It may be that you are
looking at a detail from some much larger picture that you don’t yet have
the experience to recognize. Or the worst may be true, and you really are
reading the philosopher’s equivalent of a chess problem, something
highly ingenious but with no wider significance. Whilst developing your
own powers of discrimination, stick to the good old classics.
For no such doubts need arise about any of the philosophers I have tried
to introduce you to. We know that they were writing from the heart as
well as from the head. Alongside their enormous merits they may have
their faults, to be sure: unsuspected ignorance, prejudice, over-
confidence, obscurity – just to get the list started. But as I hope to have
indicated, philosophy is as wide as life, and in its huge literature are
exemplified most intellectual vices as well as most intellectual virtues.
Wishing it were otherwise would be close to wishing that human beings
didn’t have minds.
118
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Bibliography Where to go next?
My time is up. But I promised to leave you with the names and
addresses, so to speak, of some guides with whom you can begin to go
further and deeper. It is worth noticing that some very prominent
philosophers have devoted time and care to writing introductions. This
is no matter of churning out a standard textbook: every route into
philosophy is to some extent personal.
Introductions
T. Nagel, What Does it All Mean? (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987)
In this very short book Tom Nagel, eschewing all mention of history and
aiming straight for the problems, gives the reader a taste of nine
different areas: knowledge, other people’s minds, the mind–body
relation, language and meaning, freedom of the will, right and wrong,
justice, death, and the meaning of life. Just right for your first piece of
reading – see what grabs you.
S. W. Blackburn, Think (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)
The perfect thing to move on to after Nagel. Takes on several of the
same themes as Nagel’s book, plus God and Reasoning, now at greater
length and depth; frequent quotation of historical sources, so beginning
119
to communicate a sense of the (Western) philosophical tradition. Very
entertainingly written.
B. Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1912)
A classic introductory book, still going after nearly ninety years. Don’t
miss the last chapter – Russell’s claims for the value of philosophy –
even though some of it may nowadays seem just a little grandiose and
optimistic.
Histories of philosophy
B. Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: George Allen & Unwin,
1946)
A remarkable book synthesizing a mountain of material in a most
engaging way. Enjoy it, but don’t be surprised if you later hear the
opinion that Russell’s account of some particular thinker is limited, or
misses the main point, or is distorted by his intense dislike of
Christianity.
F. Copleston, A History of Philosophy (8 vols. London: Burns & Oates,
1946–66)
Nothing like so much fun as Russell, but comprehensive and reliable
and suitable for serious study. With a different publisher (Search
Press), Copleston later added a volume on French philosophy
from the Revolution onwards, and another on philosophy in
Russia.
S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy (2 vols. Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1996; 1st publ. 1929)
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, President of India 1962–7, earlier held
professorships in Calcutta and Oxford. The Indian philosophical
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tradition is deep and sophisticated; the Western reader will often
come across familiar thoughts and arguments, fascinatingly
transformed by the unfamiliar background. Don’t panic if you see
a few words of Sanskrit.
Reference works
There are now several good one-volume works of this kind: The Oxford
Dictionary of Philosophy, by Simon Blackburn; The Oxford Companion to
Philosophy, ed. Ted Honderich; The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy,
ed. Robert Audi (first two Oxford University Press, the last Cambridge
University Press).
The best multi–volume work in English is (though I say it myself – to
understand why I say that, take a close look at the photo on p. 117) The
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Not, in most cases, for the
individual pocket! This is one to read in a big public library or a
university library, or via some such institution which subscribes to the
internet version.
Works referred to in the text
Chapter 2
Plato, Crito. Handy and accessible is The Last Days of Socrates (Penguin
Books) which contains The Apology, Crito, and Phaedo in a translation
by Hugh Tredennick. My only complaint is that the Stephanus
numbering is indicated at the top of the page, instead of being given
fully in the margin. Should you feel yourself getting keen on Plato a
good buy is Plato: Complete Works, ed. J. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson
(Hackett Publishing Co.).
Chapter 3
David Hume, Of Miracles, section X of An Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding. Many editions. Try that by L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford
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University Press), which includes Hume’s Enquiry Concerning the
Principles of Morals. Other writings on religion by Hume, also easily
available, are his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural
History of Religion.
Chapter 4
Anon., The Questions of King Milinda is available in an inexpensive
abridged version edited by N. K. G. Mendis (Kandy, Sri Lanka: Buddhist
Publication Society, 1993).
Plato, Phaedrus 246a ff. and 253d ff. Plato compares the soul to a chariot.
Anon., Katha Upanishad, 3. 3–7, 9: the soul is compared to a chariot in
the early Indian tradition. An easily available edition of the main
Upanishads is in the Oxford University Press World Classics series in a
translation by Patrick Olivelle.
Chapter 5
Epicurus: The early historian of philosophy Diogenes Laertius wrote a
work called Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, published in the Loeb
Classical Library by Harvard University Press (2 vols.) The last section
of vol. 2 is devoted entirely to Epicurus, and reproduces some of his
writings. (Apart from these only a few fragments have come down to
us.)
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism. This short work, and Mill’s On Liberty (see
below under Ch. 8) can both be found in a volume in the Everyman’s
Library series published in London by J. M. Dent & Sons and in New
York by E. P. Dutton & Co.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. One good option is the edition by Richard
Tuck published by Cambridge University Press. The famous chapter
about the state of nature is part 1, chapter 13.
Plato, Republic 453–66. Plato’s abolition of the family – or should one
rather say his introduction of a new, non-biological concept of the
family? – and his reasons for it.
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Chapter 6
Lucretius, Of the Nature of Things, translated by R. E. Latham,
introduction by John Godwin, Penguin Books. Lucretius, a Roman of
the first century bc, put the doctrines of Epicurus into Latin verse with
the clear intention of converting his compatriots if he could. Godwin’s
introduction begins: ‘This book should carry a warning to the reader:
it is intended to change your life’. The original title is De Rerum Natura.
Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. Numerous
editions: a good bet is Roger Woolhouse’s edition, published by
Penguin Books, which also contains Berkeley’s Principles of Human
Knowledge.
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. Still the best translation is that by Norman
Kemp Smith, published by Macmillan. But beginners beware: this is
very hard reading.
Sanchez, Quod Nihil Scitur. This is highly specialized stuff, but since I
mentioned it in the text I give the details here: edited and translated
by Elaine Limbrick and Douglas Thomson, published by Cambridge
University Press.
Descartes, Meditations. Many editions available. But just in case you find
yourself getting interested in Descartes try (in its paperback version)
The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, translated by J. Cottingham,
R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch, published by Cambridge University
Press (2 vols.) The Meditations are in ii. 3–62.
Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Again, this is specialized
material. But it would be a pity never to have read at least the first
twelve sections of book 1, as far as the point where Sextus explains
what the Sceptical philosophy is for. R. G. Bury’s translation is
published in the Loeb Classical Library by Harvard University
Press.
Chapter 7
Descartes, Discourse on the Method. Numerous editions: see the
recommendation for Descartes’s Meditations just above. The Discourse
on the Method is in i. 111–51. Parts of Descartes’ Treatise on Man,
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from which the illustration on p. 80 of this book was taken, are on
pp. 99–108
Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History. An excellent translation is
that by H. B. Nisbet and published by Cambridge University Press
under the title Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History:
Introduction. Pp. 25–151 give you all you need.
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species. To be recommended is the edition
by J. W. Burrow published by Penguin Books. If you haven’t time for
the whole of it, at least read chapters 1–4 and 14 (the closing chapter).
Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals. Translating Nietzsche’s resonant and
inventive German is a tricky business; that may be why so many
English translations are presently available. The two I can recommend
are those by W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, published by Vintage
Books, and by Douglas Smith, published by Oxford University Press in
their World Classics series. (But if you can comfortably read Nietzsche
in German don’t even think about reading him in any other
language.) The central passage about the activities of the ‘ascetic
priest’ is 3. 10–22 – but don’t limit yourself to that.
Chapter 8
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty. This and Mill’s essay Utilitarianism (see
above under Chapter 5) are in a volume in the Everyman’s Library
series published in London by J. M. Dent & Sons and in New York by
E. P. Dutton & Co.
John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women. Available in a volume called
John Stuart Mill: Three Essays, introduction by Richard Wollheim,
published by Oxford University Press; or by itself in a very inexpensive
version from Dover Publications.
Anon., Bŗhadāranyaka Upanishad. As with the Katha Upanishad (see
above), an accessible edition is Patrick Olivelle’s translation of the
main Upanishads in the Oxford University Press World Classics series.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex. The translation by H. M. Parshley is
one of the most handsome volumes in the Everyman’s Library series,
published by David Campbell Publishers Ltd.
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Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. This is where the
quotation in the text comes from. Someone having their first go at
Marx should look to some anthology of his writings, perhaps The
Marx–Engels Reader, ed. R. Tucker, published by Norton and Co. But
beware: Marx, especially early Marx, often isn’t easy to read – a
consequence of habits of thought and style he got from Hegel.
Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, is a notable example of a book devoted
to the morality of human relationships with animals, published by
New York Review Books in 1975. Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal
Rights (University of California Press, 1983) is another.
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Index
A absolutism 52
aesthetic relativism 72
afterlife 21
agnosticism 2
agreement breaking 18, 19, 20
analytic philosophy 81
animals 26, 38, 54, 114–16
anthropomorphism 115
anti-Semitism 99
Aquinas, St Thomas 115
Aristophanes 13
Aristotelianism 70, 71, 76
Aristotle 5
Arjuna 40
artificial selection 88
ascetic priests 98–9
astronomy 74–5, 102
ataraxia (peace of mind) 71–2
Athena, goddess 40
atomism 63–4
B Beauvoir, Simone de 113–14
beer 54
beliefs 53–5, 94
religious 26–34, 64, 87
scepticism 70
Bentham, Jeremy 115, 116
Berkeley, George
idealism 61, 65–6
opinions 10
Bible 75
body, status of 57
Boethius 6
Brahmins 107
Buddhism 4, 11, 35–45
animals 115
body, status of 57
five aggregates of 37, 38, 42,
43, 44, 56, 57
nirvana 38, 48
self 35–45
bundle theory of the mind 56, 57
C capitalists 110
Cartesian, see Descartes, René
caste system 38
Catholicism 27
chariot analogy 39–42, 43
choice 53–4
Christianity 27, 94, 98–9, 115
citizens 50–2, 104
civic duty 18, 20, 45
class struggle 110
cognitive science 58
Cogito ergo sum (Descartes) 78
commonsense 70
compassion 96
Confucius 11
consciousness 37, 43, 65, 83–5
consequentialism 45–8, 49–50,
61
contract theory 50–2, 104–5
Copernicus 74, 75
corporate philosophy 8
cosmology 14, 74–5
127
Crito dialogue (Plato) 12, 14–21,
38, 45, 46, 51, 74, 104
cyclical rebirth 38, 44, 63, 115
D Darwin, Charles 87–93
Darwinism 94
death 102–3
democracy 103
Democritus 63–4
Descartes, René 5, 92–3, 93–4
Discourse on the Method
76–80
dualism 62, 78
scepticism 70–1, 76
dialectic 85–6
dialectical materialism 64, 86
dispositions 37
dualism 62, 66
Descartes 78
scientific theory and 62–3
E education 48, 76, 112
ego 43
empiricism 66–70
Epicureanism 4, 47–8, 64
atomism 64
individual and 101–3
social contract 52
epistemology 55, 61, 66–70
Estienne, Henri 15
ethical consequentialism 45–8
ethical questions 12, 14
existentialism 81, 113
experiences 56–7
experimental animals 116
eyewitness accounts 30–1
F falsehoods 28, 39, 41–2
families 52, 111
Fates 84
feelings 37, 43
feminism 5, 113–14, 115
five aggregates of Buddhist
doctrine 37, 38, 42, 43, 44,
56, 57
Forms (Plato) 69
Freud, Sigmund 93
friendship 15–18, 20, 101
G Galileo 74, 79
‘gastronomic’ relativism 72, 73
Geist (Spirit) 83–5
Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche)
93–9
God 26, 28, 43, 78–9, 83–4,
92
good/goodness
consequentialism 45–9
happiness 49, 103, 111
Nietzsche 95
relative 72
Greek philosophy 11–23, 55,
63–4, 71–2
H happiness 50
ataraxia 71–2
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Epicureanism 101
Mill 49, 103, 111
Harm Principle 103
hate 96
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
61–2, 66, 89
Marx and 110
Philosophy of History 81–6
reason 69–70
self-knowledge 82–3, 113
Hercules 40
‘herd morality,’ 96–7
Hinduism 4, 38, 115
history 83–5
History of England (Hume) 24
Hobbes, Thomas 5, 106
contract theory 52, 104–5
human beings 24, 26
human suffering 98
Hume, David 115, 116
on Berkeley’s arguments 66
bundle theory of the mind
56
miracles 24–34
rationality 53, 54
self 57, 58
I Idea
Hegel 82–5
reason and 69–70
idealism 61, 63, 64–6
Indian philosophy 4, 11, 63, 64,
67–8, 107
individual, the
Epicureanism and 101–3
Hegel on 86
relativism and 73
industrialization 109
integrity 49–50
J job satisfaction 111
Johnson, Dr 65
justice 12
K Kant, Immanuel 5
morality 18, 23
power of reason 54
reason and perception 69
karma 43
Katha Upanishad 41
Kierkegaard, Søren 81
knowledge, see epistemology
Krishna 40
L laws of nature 28, 30, 32–3
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 42
Lewis, C. S. 91, 92
Locke, John 105
Lokāyatas 63, 64, 67–8
love 14, 96
Lucretius 64
M Mahabharata 40
majority opinion 15, 17
Marx, Karl 5, 62, 64, 66, 86,
109
In d
e x
129
material goods 48
materialism 63–4, 66, 67
memory 31–2
mental formations 37, 43
metaphysics 43, 61, 66
dualism 62–3, 66
idealism 63, 64–6
materialism 63–4, 66, 67
meteorology 102
Mill, John Stuart 48, 103, 111–12,
115
miracles 27–34
moksha 38
Moore, G. E. 81
moral relativism 72
morality
Kant 18, 23
Nietzsche 94–7
religion and 21
N Nagasena (Buddhist monk)
35–45
natural sciences 8–9
natural selection 87–92
Nature 28, 30, 32–3, 82–3, 91, 105
Newton, Isaac 79
Nietzsche, Friedrich 2, 93–9
nirvana 38, 48
no-self doctrine, see five
aggregates of Buddhist
doctrine
O obligations 21, 23
opinions 10, 15, 17
Origin of Species, The (Darwin)
87–93
original sin 92
Other, the (Beauvoir) 113
P pain 115
absence of 47–8
parental authority 51
perception 37, 43, 56, 63, 67–8
philosophy
definition of 5–6
historical context of 58–60
history of 110
professionalized 116–19
terminology 61
physics 79, 102
physiology 79, 80
pigeons, and artificial selection
88, 89
Plato 60, 105
chariot analogy 41
Crito dialogue 12, 14–21, 38, 45,
46, 51, 74, 104
emphasis on the soul 57
on the family 52
Forms 69, 82
pleasure 46, 47, 101–2, 115
political authority 50–2
power
Harm Principle 103
of priests within their
community 105
will to 96–7
priesthood 98–9, 105–9
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Providence 83
psychoanalysis 93
pyrrhonism 71–2
Q Quintessence 75
R rationalism 66–70
rationality 52–5
reality 69–70, 81–3
Reason 83
Cunning of 84
Descartes 92–3
goals and 54
Hume 26
Ideas and 69–70
reincarnation 38, 44, 115
relativism 72–3
religion
belief 26–34, 64, 87, 94
morality and 21
Republic (Plato) 11, 52
reputations 15, 16, 17, 20
retaliation 18, 19
revelations 28
ruling class 95, 97, 99, 107
Russell, Bertrand 81
S salvation 4, 38
Sanchez, Francisco 70
scepticism 2, 3, 55, 70–1
Descartes 70–1, 76, 79
Nietzsche 93–4
scientific knowledge 32–4, 62–3,
102
Scientific Revolution 75
self 37–45, 56–8
self-knowledge 82–3, 93, 113
Sextus Empiricus 71
sexual drive 91
‘situated’ thought 58
social contracts 50–2
Social Darwinism 91
social reform 48
social value systems 95–7
Socrates 45, 46, 104
Crito dialogue 12, 14–21, 51
historical and literary
character 12
integrity of 49
soul 38
trial of 14
Sophist, The (Plato) 12
soul 57, 63, 69
sovereignty 104–5
specialization 9
Spencer, Herbert 89, 91
State, the 104–5
contract theory and 50–2
Stephanus numbering 15
Stoics 71
suffering
alleviation of 43
animal 115–16
human 98
suicide 16
supernatural 7
superstitious fear 102
survival of the fittest 89, 91
In d
e x
131
T taxation 50
testimonial evidence 28–9
totalitarianism 50
transmigration of souls 115
tropes 71
U undergraduate courses 9
university philosophy
departments 9, 118
Upanishads 11, 107
utilitarianism 48–50, 103, 115
V value-systems 95–7
Vedas 11, 107, 109
vegetarianism 116
virtue 12
W wholes 42
will to power concept
96–7
wisdom 15
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 81
women 111–14
Woolston, Thomas 27
working class 109–11
Z Zen Buddhism 3
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