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Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction – Edward Craig
Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction
“This is a lively and interesting introduction to philosophy. Despite its
brevity Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction addresses many of the
central philosophical questions in an engaging and thought-provoking
style. At the same time it gives readers a flavour of some of the greatest
works of philosophy and provides expert guidance for those who want
to read the original works themselves. Edward Craig is already famous
as the editor of the best long work on philosophy (the Routledge
Encyclopedia); now he deserves to become even better known
as the author of one of the best short ones.”
Nigel Warburton, The Open University
Very Short Introductions are for anyone wanting a stimulating
and accessible way in to a new subject. They are written by experts, and have
been published in more than 25 languages worldwide.
The series began in 1995, and now represents a wide variety of topics
in history, philosophy, religion, science, and the humanities. Over the next
few years it will grow to a library of around 200 volumes – a Very Short
Introduction to everything from ancient Egypt and Indian philosophy to
conceptual art and cosmology.
Edward Craig
Philosophy
A Very Short Introduction
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Contents
1 Philosophy : A very short introduction 1
2 What should I do? Plato’s Crito 11
3 How do we know? Hume’s Of Miracles 24
4 What am I? An unknown Buddhist on the self: King Milinda’s chariot 35
7 Some more high spots: A personal selection 74
| 1. Boethius listens to the words of the Lady Philosophy6©Wallace Collection/Bridgeman Art Library2. 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/BridgemanArt Library 9. Beyond the family, anything goes 53 ©Punch
|
10. Every subject talks its own talk 67 © http://www.CartoonStock.com11. Descartes as physiologist 80©AKG London
12. Progre ss 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 poohpooh 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
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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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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
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-andbrimstone manoeuvre. 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
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. 23
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 24
the ingenuity of his mind, especially of his delicacy and vivacity’ wrote one visitor.
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.
| God | ⇒ | God (?) |
| Humans | ⇒ | ——— |
| ——— | ⇒ | Humans |
| Animals | ⇒ | 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 26 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.
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
Food for 5,000? Or just food for thought?
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?
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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DSILOHA 