Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction – Edward Craig (from p. 35)

March 4, 2011 dsiloha Leave a comment

Page 1, 2, 3, 4

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 commonsense 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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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 50eff.) 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

9. Beyond the family, anything goes. Hobbes’s state of nature?

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

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.

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.

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

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 andtheir 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 57 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

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

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.

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

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

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 Loka¯yatas, often known as Ca¯rva¯kas 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);

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 Loka¯yatas 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.

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

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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Categories: A Very Short Introduction, Philosophy - Edward Craig Tags: Edward Craig, Introduction, Oxford, Philosophy

Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction – Edward Craig (from p. 91)

March 4, 2011 dsiloha Leave a comment

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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 nosuch thing follows. In his system the words ‘the fittest’ simply mean:those best fitted to survive (and reproduce) under the conditions thenobtaining. They have nothing to do with moral, or intellectual, oraesthetic 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 changesin the conditions under which they themselves arose. Is the internalcombustion engine ‘fitter’ than the horse and cart? In a sense, yes, butonly so long as it doesn’t run the world out of oil.

That doesn’t mean that Darwin shouldn’t be allowed to changeanyone’s attitudes to anything – far from it. Here is an example. Theliterary critic and popularist Christian theologian C. S. Lewis once(though I’m sure not only once) found himself lamenting our sexualdrives. Given the opportunity, he wrote, most of us would eat toomuch, but not enormously too much; whereas if a young manindulged his sexual appetite every time he felt like it, and each act ledto a baby, he would in a very short time populate an entire village.Which shows, Lewis concluded, just how perverted our naturalsexuality has become.

But before you castigate yourself a sinner and start bewailing the lostinnocence of the human male, reflect on the lesson of Darwin: what wesee here is no perversion of nature; it is simply nature herself, who is notconcerned to construct the world in accordance with our moral code oranyone else’s. Few factors will, on average, have as big an effect on thenumbers of a man’s children as the strength and frequency of his sexualurges; so if this is itself something which many of his children inheritfrom him, it is clearly a characteristic which natural selection will select

and enhance. If most of today’s males possess it that is just what weshould expect, and certainly no call to start speaking of the Fall of Man,perversion, and moral deterioration. Or perhaps what some call originalsin is really the fact that what evolution has produced – and was boundto produce – is out of line with their own conception of an ideal humancharacter.

Incidentally: don’t worry about all those villages, each populated byseveral hundred half-brothers and sisters. They will only spring upwhere life provides our young Casanova with a veritable production-linesupply of females, willing, fertile, not already pregnant, and notassociated with any other males sufficiently aggressive to send himpacking. Nature can be relied upon to ensure that this does not happenvery often, to put it mildly. C. S. Lewis’s imagination was floating wellclear of the facts.

That example is specific and relatively trivial, but you can easily see howDarwinism could subvert an entire philosophy, such as one of those wehave just seen. For Descartes human reason was a faculty given to usand guaranteed by God, no less, and that was why he could rely on it totell us about the essential nature of mind and matter, and a good dealelse besides. What if instead he had thought of it as a naturalinstrument which had developed because, and to the extent that, it gaveits possessors a competitive advantage over those without it? Would hethen have supposed that what it appeared to tell us on such matterscould with complete confidence be taken to be the truth? If so, howwould he have justified it? It is one thing to think that God could not be adeceiver; but quite another to say that since the faculty of reason givesus such advantage in practical matters it cannot possibly lead ushopelessly astray when applied to a question like whether the mind is anindependent substance. Am I to believe that because reason is good athelping us survive it must also be good at metaphysics? Why on earthshould that be true? If Descartes had lived after Darwin (please forgivethe historical absurdity) the foundations of his philosophy would have

had to be very different, and if they were so different, could thesuperstructure have been the same?

Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Morals

‘A philosopher is a terrible explosive from which nothing is safe’ – that isthe only comment we have heard so far (p. 2) from the Germanphilosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). He had no intention ofoffering his readers a comfortable experience, and his contemporariesdefended themselves by just not reading him. But soon after his deaththe tide began to turn, and he became a major influence on twentiethcenturythought, especially on the European continent.

The Genealogy of Morals, first published in 1887, consists of a prefaceand three essays, all conveniently divided into numbered sections.Don’t skip the preface. And don’t miss the first sentence: ‘how muchwe know nowadays, but how little we know about ourselves’. A hugechange in European thought is under way. The tendency had long beento suppose that, however bewildering and opaque the rest of realitymay 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: theforces 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 SigmundFreud (1856–1939), founder of psychoanalysis, with his doctrine of theunconscious mind in which the most important causes of our mentallives lie hidden from us. Acquiring self-knowledge is no longer a matterof a quick introspective glance. It calls for hard and painful work, andthere is no guarantee that you will like what you find.

Don’t miss §3 of the preface either. Do you hear something familiarabout it? It reminds me of Part 1 of Descartes’s Discourse on the Method:still a teenager, the future philosopher is struck by scepticism andmistrust towards the intellectual diet that his seniors are feeding him

Some more high spots(p. 76 above). For Descartes it had been the neo-Aristotelianism of theuniversities. For Nietzsche it was the moral values of nineteenth-centuryChristianity. Were they as self-evident as everyone around him seemedto think? Descartes wanted to inquire into the truth of these ‘truths’that he was being taught. Nietzsche reckoned it was time for somequestions about the value of these ‘values’. His method was to askabout their history, their pedigree, what he called their ‘genealogy’.Where had they come from, how had people come to hold them? Whyhad they come to hold them, or in other words: what were these valuesdoing 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 thatway 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 ofour 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 certainlycases in which our view of what something is worth is very much boundup with our beliefs about how it began, and if those beliefs change ourevaluation of the thing itself is threatened as well. Indeed we have justseen a very important example, one which was important for Nietzschetoo: the effect of Darwinism on our conception of ourselves. For somany of Darwin’s contemporaries the human race originated in adecision by God to create us in His own image. The idea that we had infact developed from inferior things like monkeys by a distinctly chancyprocess that might just as easily not have happened wasn’t just a newfact to take on board, like the existence of one more previouslyundiscovered planet; it was a slap in the face for human dignity andtheir conception of their own worth – which was why it was doggedlyresisted then and is resisted by some to this day. No doubt about it:under the right circumstances, genealogies can be just as explosive asNietzsche intended – so back to the question about moral values.

Many believed, and some still do, that moral values were of similarorigin: handed down to human beings direct from God. Nietzsche,who in spite of his clerical home background once described himselfas an atheist by instinct, had no interest whatever in that story; hesought the origin of human values in human needs and humanpsychology. (Human, all too Human is the pregnant title of one of hisearlier 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: whenhumans found certain types of behaviour (on the part of individuals)advantageous to them and the smooth running of their society, theycalled them ‘good’, and strongly encouraged them; where they foundthem disadvantageous, the reverse. That, simply, is how behaving forthe good of others rather than one’s own came to be regarded asgood – the others declared it to be good, because of the benefit theyreceived.

On the face of it that sounds quite plausible: a society reinforces what isbeneficial to it. But Nietzsche regarded it as sentimental, unhistoricalclaptrap. Drawing on his expert knowledge of ancient languages (hehad had, and then abandoned, a meteoric academic career) he told avery different tale. Far from its being those who received benefits fromthe behaviour of others who then called those others (and theirbehaviour) ‘good’, it was the upper classes, the aristocracy, the nobility,the rulers of ancient societies who first called themselves (and their wayof life) good and the ordinary people, the slaves, the subject population,bad. Early good/bad distinctions are perhaps better understood asdistinctions between ‘noble’ and base’, free and enslaved, leaders andled, the washed and the unwashed. They were the words in which thetop dogs celebrated themselves, their strength, and their own way oflife, and expressed the extent of the gap that they felt betweenthemselves and the weak, impoverished, servile masses.

Some more high spotsThat’s also pretty plausible – you can just imagine them thinking andtalking that way. (You can still hear it going on nowadays if you get intothe right company.) But it was the next step which, according toNietzsche, was the decisive one for the next 2,000 years and more ofEuropean morality: the worm turned, the masses revolted. He isn’ttalking about violent revolution, armed struggle, for which theunderclasses were generally too weak, both materially and spiritually,but about something much subtler and much more insidious. Theyrelieved their frustration and resentment in one of the very few waysthat were open to them, namely by developing their own system ofvalues in which everything about their oppressors was ‘bad’ and theythemselves, 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 ofsome intuitive perception of its truth, or intrinsic ‘rightness’. It was avengeful, retaliatory device, born of the weak’s resentment of thestrong. All that commitment to charity, compassion, and love wasactually fuelled by hate. This kind of thought is entirely typical ofNietzsche, who loved to stand popular conceptions on their head. Justwhen you thought your house was in good order, along comes aNietzschean ‘explosion’ and suddenly your roof has changed places withyour cellar. This is philosophy at its most challenging. Naturaliconoclasts will just love it, but anyone can admire the fireworks.

Just these facts (as he believed) about the origins of the morality of loveand compassion wouldn’t have made Nietzsche so profoundlymistrustful of it as he actually was. After all, in adopting and promotingit the masses were trying, in the only way open to them, to gain powerover the strong, and he has nothing against that – all life, in his view, is amanifestation of the will to power, and no tiny little human moralist hasany business pronouncing on life in general. What he most dislikesabout ‘herd morality’ is that it arose not through affirmation of theirown way of life (like the codes of the higher classes) but through the

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.

negation of someone else’s: they looked at the vigorous, free, proud,self-assured, self-assertive people who ruled them, resentfully declaredtheir qualities to be bad and hence the opposite qualities, such aspassivity, servitude, humility, unselfishness, to be good. Herd moralityis 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 didthe ruling class, but unlike them they had no natural outlet for it. Sowhen their instincts led them to seek a different kind of power bypronouncing their masters’ masterful instincts to be vices they were infact turning against their own instincts as well. So, to add to the fact

that they were needy and oppressed, these people were psychologicallysick, inwardly divided. And they felt pretty wretched.

But help – of a sort – is at hand, in the form of a figure known to everyculture and epoch and of intense interest to Nietzsche: the asceticpriest, committed to poverty, humility, and chastity, and in some casespractising quite extreme forms of self-torture. This figure, whorepresents at its most explicit the wish to be rid of the bodily conditionsof life and to escape into something otherworldly and ‘beyond’, denieslife more emphatically than anyone else. So, like the herd, he is sick, butmuch stronger than they are – a strength which manifests itself in hisability to adopt and sustain his way of life.

This strength gives him power, the power to lead and direct the flock ofweaker souls. It arises partly from their perception of his inwardstrength, partly from the air of mystery and esoteric knowledge withwhich the ascetic surrounds himself. But it also arises in part from thefact that he does them a service: he alleviates their suffering. Rememberthat they suffer because they have set themselves against their ownvital 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 witha great deal if only they understand the reason for it – even glory in it, ifthey find the reason good enough. Another is that those who aresuffering want to find someone to blame for it – that acts as a kind ofanaesthetic, blocking the pain out with an overlay of anger.

The priest instinctively knows this, and gives his flock both a reason fortheir suffering and an author of it. They are suffering to make their soulsfit for heaven, or for the victory of justice, or for the sake of truth, or sothat 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

stroke the seething resentment of the masses is directed away from therulers, its original objects, conflict with whom will most likely only leadthem into more suffering, perhaps partial annihilation. Redirected ontothemselves it may at least provide strength and motivation for a littleself-discipline and self-improvement – under priestly instruction. Andthey are ready to accept it, for as we saw they have already turnedagainst their own instincts and so in one sense against themselves. Theyknow what has to be rooted out: any hint in themselves of the attitudesand behaviour characteristic of the strong. They have been renderedharmless.

Such is Nietzsche’s analysis. Whatever else we may think of it, it iscertainly unflinching. These are no more than a few of the mainthoughts, crudely compressed. Nietzsche’s style, its musicality, itsenergy, its variety, its biting wit, is something one can only experiencefor oneself. And the text is full of delightful detail, like the account of thereal 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 willsee that it is really aimed at anti-Semitism itself. What it says is that itwas only the moral history of the Jews which created the psychologicalclimate in which Christianity could arise – Nietzsche is firing an ironicsalvo at those Christian anti-Semites who grounded their anti-Semitismon the premiss that it was Jews who were responsible for the crucifixionof Christ. Once again he has turned a popular way of thinking upsidedown: Christians should revere Jews, because they have the Jews tothank for the success of Christianity. Delicious stuff!

Chapter 8 What’s in it for whom?

Thinking about philosophy is hard work – you may have noticed, thoughif you’ve got this far at least it hasn’t put you off. Writing the stuff iseven 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 learningto 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 lifebearable by changing it; to shore up institutions political, moral, orintellectual, or to tear them down; to promote the writer’s interests, topromote other people’s interests (yes, that happens too), even topromote everybody’s interests; because they can’t stand certain otherphilosophers; because their job demands it. Perhaps just occasionallyout of pure curiosity. There is a widespread idea that philosophers areunworldly people, remote from reality. If that refers to their lifestyle, itmay frequently have been true, though not always. If it refers to theirwork, then (I am speaking now of philosophy that endures) it is usuallyfalse – at least in the sense that they are almost always addressing somereal concern and claiming to offer some real improvement.

Right back at the beginning (p. 1) I spoke of three big questions: whatshould I do? what is there? (i.e. what is reality like?) and how do weknow? It might sound as if any philosophy offering human beings somereal 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 forexample the belief that we are made in the image of God; they can givea rationale to (or serve as an excuse for) certain types of behaviour, likethe belief that humans have rational souls and animals don’t. Answersto the question ‘how do we know?’ can strengthen, or loosen, the holdthat various answers to the first two types of question have on us; andvery importantly, they can imply beliefs about who has knowledge, withobvious consequences for the prestige and power of members of thatgroup.

Most philosophy attempts, then, to do something for somebody. Tofinish, let’s look at some philosophy from this perspective. If it is toendure, a philosophy needs a constituency, a group of interestedparties. Its chances are best if the constituency is a large one. First, acouple of philosophies devoted to the individual. That’s a bigconstituency – we’re all individuals.

The individual

The philosophy of Epicurus (see Chapter 5) is addressed to theindividual; it offers a recipe, backed by argument, for living a happy life.Social and political arrangements are unjust if they interfere withindividuals’ attempts to apply the recipe; otherwise, his only politicalrecommendation is not to engage in politics. You can to some degreehelp others to live the right sort of life, but only those close to you(Epicureanism strongly advocates friendship); everyone must follow therecipe for themselves. For success depends not on material conditions,the sort of thing one person can arrange for another, but on yourattitude 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 goodis pleasure. Surely how much pleasure we can get depends heavily on

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15. Epicureanism in practice? Not according to Epicurus.

our material conditions of life? But there’s a second surprise: he thinksthat the highest possible pleasure is freedom from physical pain andmental anxiety. Simple, easily attainable pleasures are no less pleasantthan extravagant and exotic ones; and reliance on the latter inducesanxiety: the means to obtain them may be taken away from you. (Theidea that Epicureanism is a constant dinner party with musicians anddancing-girls is completely misleading – it must have come down to usfrom Epicurus’ opponents, who were numerous.)

A cause of much mental turmoil is superstitious fear. Banish it. Realizethat in their perfect bliss the gods have neither need nor wish tointerfere in human affairs. Learn enough about physics, astronomy, andmeteorology to feel confident that all phenomena have naturalexplanations – they are not portents, omens, or signs of divine wrath.

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And do not fear death, for death is simply non-existence, in which therecan be nothing to fear. That, on a thumbnail, is Epicurus’ advice to eachone of us. You could do a lot worse than follow it. Of course therewouldn’t be any politicians if we all did; but perhaps we could put upwith that.

Epicurus taught the individual to be inwardly armed against whatevermay befall. Over 2,000 years later John Stuart Mill wrote a stirringdefence 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 theHarm Principle: ‘the only purpose for which power can be rightfullyexercised over any member of a civilized community . . . is to preventharm to others’. As democratic systems of government became betterentrenched in Europe and America they also became better understood,and Mill had spotted a latent danger: the tyranny of the majority overthe individual and over minority groups.

As befits the author of Utilitarianism (see Chapter 5) he makes noappeal to human rights, but rather to the damage done, the valuelost, if his principle is not observed. To be master of one’s own lifeis a good for human beings, a part of our happiness, so the individualloses even if what the law forbids them to do is something theywouldn’t have done anyway. But the whole society loses too. For thepeople whom the Harm Principle protects are an extremely valuableresource, precisely because they have unconventional opinions andunusual lifestyles. If their opinions are in fact true the value to thecommunity is obvious. If they are false it is less obvious but equallyreal: if truth is wholly unopposed it becomes a dead formula on thetongue – opposition ensures that it remains live in the mind. As forunconventional lifestyles, they provide living experimental data fromwhich everyone can learn. Constraining the individual damageseverybody.

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The State

Earlier (Chapter 2, and again briefly in Chapter 5, p. 50ff.) we looked atthe so-called contract theory of political obligation. We saw it in actionin Plato’s Crito, and noticed that it can in principle take many forms,arising from the variety of possible answers to the question: whocontracts with whom to do what on what conditions?

Of all contract theories that of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) is perhapsthe most famous – and if so then because of his marvellouslyunflattering description of the ‘state of nature’, life before any socialarrangements had been made, in which nobody can own anything,cultivate anything, or do anything constructive at all without continualfear of being attacked and robbed, with a fair chance of being murderedthrown in. As long as this ‘war . . . of every man against every man’ lasts,life is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. So how to improvematters? Form an association; agree to accept the authority of a‘sovereign’ (person or body) with full powers to do anything they deemneedful 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 ofall who are party to the contract that set it up. Only if the sovereigndirectly threatens their lives may the citizens resist – for it was toprotect their lives that they entered into the contract in the first place.The ‘Laws and Constitution of Athens’, you recall (Crito 50e–51c, p. 19above), wouldn’t allow Socrates even that much, but gave little reasonto support such extreme claims.

Mightn’t Hobbes’s citizens reply that it wasn’t just to protect their livesthat they entered into the contract? It was to enjoy various liberties, allof which were lacking in the state of nature. That would suggest thatthe citizens’ right of resistance kicks in rather earlier than the point atwhich their very lives are threatened. (Besides, having handed over allthe 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’tsurprising. Plato’s youth coincided with Athens’ disastrous war againstSparta. Hobbes was born as the Spanish Armada approached, towardsthe end of a century torn by religious conflict that cost millions of lives,and his maturity witnessed England’s descent into civil war. No wonderthat both men believed that the prime need of political life wasgovernment strong enough to maintain peace and order, the valueswithout which no others could even begin. Their way of supporting theindividual was to hand over total sovereignty to the state. No surprisethat some have thought that they went too far. John Locke (1632–1704),writing less than fifty years after Hobbes but in somewhat lessthreatening political circumstances, waxed ironical:

As if when men quitting the state of nature entered into society, theyagreed 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 thatmen are so foolish, that they take care to avoid what mischiefs may bedone them by pole-cats, or foxes, but are content, nay think it safety, tobe 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 veryconsiderable power within their society or religious group, must besomething else. It arises from what their people think about them, whatthey take them to be able to do for them, the value that they put uponthem. In other words, it arises from philosophy. The less tangible andimmediate the benefits and the dangers, the more powerful theapparatus needed to maintain belief in them and faith in those whoconfer (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 ofwhether what the priestly class would have the laity believe aboutthem is true or false. The point is that it should be believed:otherwise, no priests. So plenty of writing exists which promotestheir status.

Illustrations exist everywhere, so since we haven’t set foot outsideWestern Europe for the last few chapters let’s return to India and look atthe opening chapter of one of the major Upanishads. By the time TheQuestions of King Milinda was written, the Br ¸hada¯ranyaka Upanishad (BU,see Bibliography) may well have been as old as Chaucer’s CanterburyTales today. It belongs to the world of the Hindu Vedas, a world of ritual,sacrifices, and chants that are highly beneficial, though only if correctlyperformed. To ensure correct performance, you need an expert learnedin Vedic matters; for a major ritual you even need a super-expert whomakes sure that the other experts are performing correctly. Suchexpertise 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’sdesire (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 tothe Ks¸atriya, the ruling aristocratic warrior class, whilst maintaining acertain priority for the Brahmins. Their power is ‘the womb’ of thepower of the rulers – that from which it issues. So it’s a bad idea for awarrior to injure a priest, for he harms the source of his own power.This is philosophy and theology, but clearly it is good practical politicsas well.

A reader new to this tradition of thought will find much that is strikinglyalien. There is the doctrine of the correspondences between the parts ofthe sacrificial horse (this was the most prestigious of the Vedicsacrifices) 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 bemade up – approximately – of two shorter words, and this fact is takenas indicating the genesis or inner nature of whatever it is that the longerword describes. The knowledge of this strange lore, the text repeatedlyinsists, is highly advantageous: ‘A man who knows this will stand firmwherever he may go’; and ‘Whoever knows this, . . . death is unable toseize him . . . and he becomes one of these deities’. So we should valuethis knowledge, and therefore we should value the people who guardit – the priests.

It isn’t necessarily what the priest can do for you – it may be what he cando to you. Don’t go messing about with a Brahmin’s wife. As BU 6. 4. 12makes abundantly clear, he will know just the ritual for getting back atyou. And ‘A man cursed by a Brahmin having this knowledge is sure todepart from this world bereft of his virility and stripped of his goodworks . . . . 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.’ Youhave been warned.

Of course it isn’t just priests who need to be needed. It’s also doctorsand dustbin men and game show presenters and advertisingconsultants. And – I almost forgot – philosophy professors. They allexist because of people’s beliefs and values, hopes and fears.

The working classes

The industrialization of Western Europe brought wealth to a few and themost deplorable conditions of life to many. The many quickly found achampion in Karl Marx (1818–83), whose work, it is no exaggeration tosay, changed the political face of all those parts of the globe wherethere was such a thing as politics at all. Only in the last decade has itsinfluence 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 theprinciple which underlies the enormous power of the experimental

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method in the sciences.) And no political theory ever gets a proper trialunless a lot of people are already convinced of it.

Here we have an opportunity to spot some of those connections whichare to be found all over the history of philosophy. Marx was no discipleof Hegel – in some respects he was violently opposed to him. Butnobody of that time was untouched by Hegelianism. Like Hegel, Marxheld that history exhibits a necessary progression; unlike Hegel, he heldthe driving force to be economic: the material conditions of life. LikeHegel, he held that progress was essentially the resolution of conflict;but the conflict was between the economic interests of differentsections of society – hence the famous ‘class struggle’ of the Marxists.And he held a version of the doctrine we saw to be so important toHegel: 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 contemporaryeconomic system, characterized by the conflict of interest between theworking classes and the capitalists, the owners of the ‘means ofproduction’ (i.e. the factories). His sympathies lay firmly with thecurrent underdogs, the workers. The crucial thing was that they,needing to make a living and having nothing else to sell, were sellingtheir labour – working in return for a wage. Not much of a wage,because those buying their labour had no interest in paying them anymore than was necessary to keep them working. This ensured for themand their families a life of acute and degrading poverty.

But another, more spiritual, feature of the situation was pressing heavilyon them too – the fact that the work they were doing was not reallytheir work: ‘the work is external to the worker, it is not a part of hisnature . . . not the satisfaction of a need, merely a means to satisfyingother needs. . . . in work he does not belong to himself but to someoneelse’. The unsatisfied need is the need to express oneself in what onedoes.

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Diagnosis is one thing, a cure is another. It turns out to be just aspossible to experience alienation when the work one is doing is notone’s own but the State’s as when it is not one’s own but thecompany’s. That much identification with the interests of thecommunity, when the community is a large and complex one, is noteasily achieved or maintained. And even if it were, that would just helpto make work endurable. If what you do is stand by a conveyor belttightening the lids on jars of marmalade it may make things lessintolerable to be doing it for Mother Russia than for the GlobalMarmalade Corporation. But that does nothing whatever to make itsomething positive, an expression of your personality or skills or ameans to the development of your potential. Nowadays we speak of ‘jobsatisfaction’. Not all of us get it – the problem hasn’t gone away.

Women

We have been bounding from topic to topic, person to person, acrossthe globe and three millennia like a package tour gone mad. Butnobody has been introduced to philosophy until they have seen, in atleast 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 washappiness, the second that happiness requires individual freedom. Hisalmost equally famous essay The Subjection of Women (1869) tells usthat that means everyone, not just adult males.

The practical politician in Mill takes aim at a quite specific and (in theoryat least) easily remedied abuse: ‘the legal subordination of one sex tothe other is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances tohuman improvement; . . . it ought to be replaced by a principle ofperfect equality’. Present family law, he argued, amounted to theenslavement of wives. He meant the word quite literally, as his accountof 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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What’s in it for whom?women equal educational opportunities and then equal access, onmerit, to all occupations and positions of influence.

Any major philosophy needs potential beneficiaries, even in cases wherethe benefit may be imaginary. In seeking to improve the lot of womenMill has plenty of beneficiaries to appeal to. But he believes that theconstituency for his views is 100 per cent of mankind, not just 50. Hewrites about the injustice to women and the damage done to their livesby existing conditions, but he writes almost as much about the loss toeverybody. The suppression of women’s talents is ‘a tyranny to themand a detriment to society’. History tells us a good deal about whatwomen can do, because women have done it. It tells us nothing aboutwhat 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 inthe lead in the closing stages of a single-handed round-the-world sailingrace, an event that must make demands on mental and physical staminabeyond anything I can imagine.)

Mill also believes that men are damaged as individuals, often in ways theyare not likely to notice (which is itself part of the damage). For it is notgood for anyone to be brought up to believe themselves superior toothers, especially when it happens, as it frequently does, to be otherswhose faculties are in fact superior to theirs. On the other hand, harshthough it may sound, living one’s life around a close relationship withsomeone of inferior ‘ability and cultivation’ is detrimental to the superiorparty. Yet many men find themselves in just this situation, married towomen whose limitations are no less real just because they are anenforced artificial product of a thoroughly pernicious system. Those menmay think they are winning, but the truth is that everyone’s a loser.

Thank goodness things have improved since 1869. A bit. In some partsof 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) hasbeen the inspiration of so much feminist writing ever since. Were Iallowed a brief return to life in about 200 years’ time I would not besurprised to find it rated one of the most influential books of thetwentieth century.

Like Mill, Beauvoir is concerned with the liberty of women; unlike Mill,she is not particularly concerned with the connection between libertyand happiness. She denies that there are any interesting generalstatements about what women are like, for what they are like is aresponse to their circumstances, some of which are social and thereforehighly variable. (Mill appeared to think that there might be some suchgeneralizations, but denied that any were known.) Besides, Beauvoirstands in the existentialist tradition and holds that how we react to ourcircumstances is a free decision for each of us – to pretend that we arewholly determined by our circumstances is inauthenticity, abdication of responsibility.

I have space enough only to touch one of the themes of this long andconstantly lively book. In Chapter 7 I spoke of the enormous influence ofHegel, and mentioned his doctrine of self-knowledge: it arises whenone meets aspects of oneself in something else, or one’s ‘Other’. Seizingon the psychological truth in this, whilst completely ignoring Hegel’sgrand 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 morecomplicated and potentially very damaging. I’m watching you watchingme watching you . . . How A sees B affects B, so it alters what A finds inB. And this (recall the doctrine about self-knowledge) alters A’sperception of A, which then affects A, both of which affect how Asees B . . . Just once get something badly wrong, as when man enslavedwoman, thinking that that was good for him, and woman accepted

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What’s in it for whom?enslavement, thinking that was the only choice for her, and all relationsbetween the sexes are going to get entangled in a net of error andartificiality. Now ‘whatever he does . . . he feels tricked and she feelswronged’. The reciprocity of the relationship means that neither partyalone can put it right: Beauvoir appeals simultaneously to men torecognize the independence and equality of women, and to women tobecome just that, by realizing that it is indeed the truth aboutthemselves.

So on the very last page comes a sentence which, whilst completelycharacteristic of Beauvoir, could almost have been written by Mill:‘when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with thewhole system of hypocrisy that it implies, then the “division” ofhumanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple willfind its true form’. He, coming from the empiricist and utilitarianismtradition, and she, against the totally different background of Hegel plusexistentialism, end up remarkably close together. It almost makes youthink 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 toconvince an audience distinct from the group he seeks to benefit, whichcalls for one or both of two strategies: either appeal to their betternature, or argue that they will benefit too. We saw the second of thoseat work in attempts to engage the support of the laity for thepriesthood; Mill and Beauvoir used both in trying to rally men to thecause of women’s emancipation.

The situation is even less promising when most of those to whom youare appealing benefit, or think they benefit, from the very practices youare trying to have abolished. Lots of people like to eat meat, lots ofpeople believe that humans benefit enormously from medical research

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conducted by means of experiments on animals. Feminist writers hadsomething of the same problem when they tried to win men over totheir 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 towardsanimals. I say ‘naturally’, because Buddhism retains the Hindu beliefthat souls return again and again to life, and that what is in oneincarnation a human may in another be an animal. The Buddha oncelived as a hare. Christianity had no such metaphysics, nor the attachedscruples – ask an Indian cow whether metaphysics matters! Adam wascreated Lord over the animals, and they were created for the use ofmankind. We have rational souls, but they don’t, which leaves themoutside the moral sphere. (St Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) said so, amongothers.) 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 morallydecisive categories, and famously declared of animals: ‘The question isnot, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?’ (Theycan, of course, so they enter into the utilitarian equation and we havemoral responsibilities towards them.) But that was an incidentalpassage from a book devoted to human welfare. It was only veryrecently that we began to get whole books explicitly about the moralityof our treatment of animals (see Bibliography), a fact which mayreflect the tricky tactical situation which their authors have to address.

Their doctrines have made enormous progress over the last twenty orthirty years – the tactical problem wasn’t insoluble. They were able toappeal to the sentimentality of those who like to ascribe humancharacteristics to animals. They were able to appeal to the much harderfacts of modern biology, which show, far more convincingly than Humecould have done, that our relationship to animals is a lot closer than

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Aquinas ever imagined. They appealed powerfully to people’sconsciences, asking Bentham’s question whether the suffering ofanimals could be justified by resulting good for humans, and if so, thenwhen? For you might feel a difference between the death ofexperimental mice in return for a substantial advance in the treatmentof cancer, and the death of dogs and bears in a bear-pit for the sake of afew 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, issaid to be a very inefficient way of using the Earth’s resources,compared with eating the vegetables straight off and cutting out thecow in between. So vegetarianism is presented as being, long-term, ineveryone’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 saidnothing about philosophy as it is being written now. That some of it is ofvalue, and will last, I have little doubt, and even less doubt that whatlasts will be a tiny fraction of what is now being published. I could guessat one or two titles, but a guess is exactly what it would be; so I havepreferred to stick to work which we already know to have survived asubstantial test of time. Part of the reason why it has survived the test isthat it was written out of a real feeling that its message was needed forthe benefit of humanity, and we can recognize the passion in it as wellas the intelligence.

There is no reason why today’s philosophical writing shouldn’t be likethis, and some of it is. But one should be aware that most of it is writtenby professionals, people whose livelihood and career prospects require

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18. A professional philosopher – be just a little wary of this man.

them to write and publish on philosophy. Nothing follows from that –after all, Kant and Hegel were professional philosophers too. And itcertainly doesn’t follow that their interest in philosophy isn’t genuine. Butit 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 ofphilosophers as entering debate to change the course of civilization,not to solve little puzzles. But in today’s world of professionalizedphilosophy the most brilliant solution of a puzzle can get its author avery long way indeed; the temptations and pressures are there to writeon puzzles, for other professional philosophers, and let civilizationtake its own course.

That is not – please! – to be read as a blanket condemnation ofeverything now emerging from university philosophy departments. It ismeant as advice to someone making their first approach to philosophywith the help of this Very Short Introduction. If you are leafing throughthe latest philosophy book from some academic press, or a recent issue

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of a top professional journal, and find yourself unable to see what is goingon or what claim it could possibly have on your attention, don’t transferyour reaction to the whole of philosophy en bloc. It may be that you arelooking at a detail from some much larger picture that you don’t yet havethe experience to recognize. Or the worst may be true, and you really arereading the philosopher’s equivalent of a chess problem, somethinghighly ingenious but with no wider significance. Whilst developing yourown powers of discrimination, stick to the good old classics.

For no such doubts need arise about any of the philosophers I have triedto introduce you to. We know that they were writing from the heart aswell as from the head. Alongside their enormous merits they may havetheir faults, to be sure: unsuspected ignorance, prejudice, overconfidence,obscurity – just to get the list started. But as I hope to haveindicated, philosophy is as wide as life, and in its huge literature areexemplified most intellectual vices as well as most intellectual virtues.Wishing it were otherwise would be close to wishing that human beingsdidn’t have minds.

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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 gofurther and deeper. It is worth noticing that some very prominentphilosophers have devoted time and care to writing introductions. Thisis no matter of churning out a standard textbook: every route intophilosophy is to some extent personal.

Introductions

T. Nagel, What Does it All Mean? (New York and Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1987)

In this very short book Tom Nagel, eschewing all mention of history andaiming straight for the problems, gives the reader a taste of ninedifferent areas: knowledge, other people’s minds, the mind–bodyrelation, language and meaning, freedom of the will, right and wrong,justice, death, and the meaning of life. Just right for your first piece ofreading – 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 thesame themes as Nagel’s book, plus God and Reasoning, now at greaterlength and depth; frequent quotation of historical sources, so beginning

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to communicate a sense of the (Western) philosophical tradition. Veryentertainingly written.

B. Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1912)

A classic introductory book, still going after nearly ninety years. Don’tmiss the last chapter – Russell’s claims for the value of philosophy –even though some of it may nowadays seem just a little grandiose andoptimistic.

Histories of philosophy

B. Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: George Allen & Unwin,1946)

A remarkable book synthesizing a mountain of material in a mostengaging way. Enjoy it, but don’t be surprised if you later hear theopinion that Russell’s account of some particular thinker is limited, ormisses the main point, or is distorted by his intense dislike ofChristianity.

F. Copleston, A History of Philosophy (8 vols. London: Burns & Oates,1946–66)

Nothing like so much fun as Russell, but comprehensive and reliableand suitable for serious study. With a different publisher (SearchPress), Copleston later added a volume on French philosophyfrom the Revolution onwards, and another on philosophy inRussia.

S. Radhakrishnan, Indian Philosophy (2 vols. Delhi: Oxford UniversityPress, 1996; 1st publ. 1929)

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, President of India 1962–7, earlier heldprofessorships in Calcutta and Oxford. The Indian philosophicalPhilosophy

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tradition is deep and sophisticated; the Western reader will oftencome across familiar thoughts and arguments, fascinatinglytransformed by the unfamiliar background. Don’t panic if you seea 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 CambridgeUniversity Press).

The best multi–volume work in English is (though I say it myself – tounderstand why I say that, take a close look at the photo on p. 117) TheRoutledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Not, in most cases, for theindividual pocket! This is one to read in a big public library or auniversity library, or via some such institution which subscribes to theinternet version.

Works referred to in the text

Chapter 2

Plato, Crito. Handy and accessible is The Last Days of Socrates (PenguinBooks) which contains The Apology, Crito, and Phaedo in a translationby Hugh Tredennick. My only complaint is that the Stephanusnumbering is indicated at the top of the page, instead of being givenfully in the margin. Should you feel yourself getting keen on Plato agood 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 HumanUnderstanding. Many editions. Try that by L. A. Selby-Bigge (OxfordBibliography

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University Press), which includes Hume’s Enquiry Concerning thePrinciples of Morals. Other writings on religion by Hume, also easilyavailable, are his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The NaturalHistory of Religion.

Chapter 4

Anon., The Questions of King Milinda is available in an inexpensiveabridged version edited by N. K. G. Mendis (Kandy, Sri Lanka: BuddhistPublication 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 inthe early Indian tradition. An easily available edition of the mainUpanishads is in the Oxford University Press World Classics series in atranslation by Patrick Olivelle.

Chapter 5

Epicurus: The early historian of philosophy Diogenes Laertius wrote awork called Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, published in the LoebClassical Library by Harvard University Press (2 vols.) The last sectionof vol. 2 is devoted entirely to Epicurus, and reproduces some of hiswritings. (Apart from these only a few fragments have come down tous.)John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism. This short work, and Mill’s On Liberty (seebelow under Ch. 8) can both be found in a volume in the Everyman’sLibrary series published in London by J. M. Dent & Sons and in NewYork by E. P. Dutton & Co.Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. One good option is the edition by RichardTuck published by Cambridge University Press. The famous chapterabout the state of nature is part 1, chapter 13.Plato, Republic 453–66. Plato’s abolition of the family – or should onerather say his introduction of a new, non-biological concept of thefamily? – and his reasons for it.Philosophy

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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 ofthe first century bc, put the doctrines of Epicurus into Latin verse withthe clear intention of converting his compatriots if he could. Godwin’sintroduction 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. Numerouseditions: a good bet is Roger Woolhouse’s edition, published byPenguin Books, which also contains Berkeley’s Principles of HumanKnowledge.Kant, Critique of Pure Reason. Still the best translation is that by NormanKemp Smith, published by Macmillan. But beginners beware: this isvery hard reading.Sanchez, Quod Nihil Scitur. This is highly specialized stuff, but since Imentioned it in the text I give the details here: edited and translatedby Elaine Limbrick and Douglas Thomson, published by CambridgeUniversity Press.Descartes, Meditations. Many editions available. But just in case you findyourself 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 UniversityPress (2 vols.) The Meditations are in ii. 3–62.Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Again, this is specializedmaterial. But it would be a pity never to have read at least the firsttwelve sections of book 1, as far as the point where Sextus explainswhat the Sceptical philosophy is for. R. G. Bury’s translation ispublished in the Loeb Classical Library by Harvard UniversityPress.

Chapter 7

Descartes, Discourse on the Method. Numerous editions: see therecommendation for Descartes’s Meditations just above. The Discourseon the Method is in i. 111–51. Parts of Descartes’ Treatise on Man,Bibliography

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from which the illustration on p. 80 of this book was taken, are onpp. 99–108Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History. An excellent translation isthat by H. B. Nisbet and published by Cambridge University Pressunder 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 editionby J. W. Burrow published by Penguin Books. If you haven’t time forthe whole of it, at least read chapters 1–4 and 14 (the closing chapter).Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals. Translating Nietzsche’s resonant andinventive German is a tricky business; that may be why so manyEnglish translations are presently available. The two I can recommendare those by W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, published by VintageBooks, and by Douglas Smith, published by Oxford University Press intheir World Classics series. (But if you can comfortably read Nietzschein German don’t even think about reading him in any otherlanguage.) The central passage about the activities of the ‘asceticpriest’ is 3. 10–22 – but don’t limit yourself to that.

Chapter 8

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty. This and Mill’s essay Utilitarianism (seeabove under Chapter 5) are in a volume in the Everyman’s Libraryseries published in London by J. M. Dent & Sons and in New York byE. P. Dutton & Co.John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women. Available in a volume calledJohn Stuart Mill: Three Essays, introduction by Richard Wollheim,published by Oxford University Press; or by itself in a very inexpensiveversion from Dover Publications.Anon., Br ¸hada¯ranyaka Upanishad. As with the Katha Upanishad (seeabove), an accessible edition is Patrick Olivelle’s translation of themain Upanishads in the Oxford University Press World Classics series.Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex. The translation by H. M. Parshley isone of the most handsome volumes in the Everyman’s Library series,published by David Campbell Publishers Ltd.Philosophy

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Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. This is where thequotation in the text comes from. Someone having their first go atMarx should look to some anthology of his writings, perhaps TheMarx–Engels Reader, ed. R. Tucker, published by Norton and Co. Butbeware: Marx, especially early Marx, often isn’t easy to read – aconsequence of habits of thought and style he got from Hegel.Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, is a notable example of a book devotedto the morality of human relationships with animals, published byNew York Review Books in 1975. Tom Regan’s The Case for AnimalRights (University of California Press, 1983) is another.Bibliography

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Index

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

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

capitalists 110

Cartesian, see Descartes, Rene

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

Crito dialogue (Plato) 12, 14–21, 38, 45, 46, 51, 74, 104

cyclical rebirth 38, 44, 63, 115

Darwin, Charles 87–93

Darwinism 94

death 102–3

democracy 103

Democritus 63–4

Descartes, Rene 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

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

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

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

happiness 50

ataraxia 71–2

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

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

job satisfaction 111

Johnson, Dr 65

justice 12

Kant, Immanuel 5

morality 18, 23

power of reason 54

reason and perception 69

karma 43

Katha Upanishad 41

Kierkegaard, Soren 81

knowledge, see epistemology Krishna 40

laws of nature 28, 30, 32–3

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 42

Lewis, C. S. 91, 92

Locke, John 105

Loka￣yatas 63, 64, 67–8

love 14, 96

Lucretius 64

Mahabharata 40

majority opinion 15, 17

Marx, Karl 5, 62, 64, 66, 86, 109

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

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

obligations 21, 23

opinions 10, 15, 17

Origin of Species, The (Darwin)87–93

original sin 92

Other, the (Beauvoir) 113

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

Providence 83

psychoanalysis 93

pyrrhonism 71–2

Quintessence 75

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

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

taxation 50

testimonial evidence 28–9

totalitarianism 50

transmigration of souls 115

tropes 71

undergraduate courses 9

university philosophy

departments 9, 118

Upanishads 11, 107

utilitarianism 48–50, 103, 115

value-systems 95–7

Vedas 11, 107, 109

vegetarianism 116

virtue 12

wholes 42

will to power concept

96–7

wisdom 15

Wittgenstein, Ludwig 81

women 111–14

Woolston, Thomas 27

working class 109–11

Zen Buddhism 3

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Categories: Philosophy - Edward Craig Tags: Edward Craig, Introduction, Oxford, Philosophy

Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction – Edward Craig (from p 67)

March 4, 2011 dsiloha Leave a comment

Page 1, 2, 3, 4

10. Every subject talks its own talk.

In a rough and ready way we all make a distinction between perceivingand thinking. It is one thing to see the objects on your table, notice thatone is a pen and one a computer; it is another thing to think aboutthem, wonder if they still work, or what to do if they don’t. And we areused 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 themselveshave written down. So here, on the face of it, are two quite differentways of acquiring knowledge. Some philosophers have favoured one ofthem at the expense of the other: ‘empiricism’ is a very general word fordoctrines that favour perceiving over thinking, ‘rationalism’ fordoctrines that favour thinking over perceiving.

There may have been philosophers who held that only what could beperceived could be known, so allowing no cognitive powers at all tothought, inference and reason. Something of much that kind is reportedof the Loka¯yatas, whom we met above in connection with materialism.10. Every subject talks its own talk.

According to some reports of their thinking they went even further,saying that only what can be perceived exists. If so (but remember thatall the reports we have were written by their opponents!), they surelyoverreached themselves. Nobody who thinks that knowledge is only ofwhat you have perceived can claim to know that nothing imperceptibleexists, since that isn’t something you could possibly perceive. (It wouldmake as much sense as claiming to be able to hear that nothinginaudible exists.)

An empiricist who holds that only perception yields knowledge neednot be saying that the process of perception itself involves nothought whatever, so that we can have as it were pure perceptionuntainted by any thinking. Even to look at my table and see thatthere is a pen on it requires more of me than just passivelyregistering the light patterns that enter my eyes. I need to know alittle about pens, at the very least about what they look like, andthen bring this knowledge to bear, otherwise I shall no more see apen than does the camera with which we photograph the pen.Perception is interpretative, whereas cameras merely record patternsof light. So a less crude empiricism will allow that classification,thought, inference, and reason all have their legitimate role. But itwill take its stand on the point that they cannot generate a singleitem of knowledge on their own. It may be true that there is nothought-free perception; but it is also true that there is noperception-free knowledge. All claims to knowledge answer, in theend, to perception; it may be possible for them to go beyondperception, but they must start from it.

The empiricist can offer a powerful argument for this view; any wouldberationalist must have an answer ready. In perception we are insome kind of contact with objects around us; they have an effect onour senses. But if we try to think in complete independence ofperception, where is the link between us and the objects we are tryingto think about? For if there is no such link, then there is the world, and

here are we thinking away to ourselves. That sounds like a recipe forpure 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 theworld of the senses at all, but about eternal, transcendent entitiescalled Ideas or Forms: the Good, the Just, the Equal, the Beautiful.Things we perceive with the senses are good, equal, and so on just inso far as they ‘participate’ in these Forms or approximate to thestandards set by them. But how does Reason get its knowledge of theForms? Plato (as you will know by now if you took my advice to readhis Phaedo as a follow-up to Crito) made use of a belief far fromunknown to ancient Greek thought. The soul has existed before itentered its present body. In that existence it encountered – Plato hintsobscurely at something analogous to perception – the Forms, and inrational thought it is now brought to remember what it then learntof them.

Kant, who was happy to concede far more to empiricism than Plato orHegel, met the challenge in a novel and radical way. Reason cannot tellus anything about things imperceptible – it can only tell us what, ingeneral 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 onits own, is really only telling us how our minds work – which is why itcan do what it does without needing to draw on our perceptions of therest of the world.

Hegel’s response is not unlike Plato’s, in that he begins with a system ofthoughts or universals which he collectively calls ‘The Idea’. This is thedriving force which structures the whole of reality, which includes ourminds and the categories in which we think, as well as the rest of realitywhich is what we are thinking about. That is why we can expect our

reason, even when used on its own independently of perception, to bein tune with the world. The reasoning subject and its object share astructure, that of the Idea.

These three examples show us that the opposition between empiricismand rationalism is not a minor skirmish. Those who begin by takingopposite sides at this point can end up worlds apart, metaphysicallyspeaking. But I do not mean to suggest that only rationalism facesdifficulties and empiricism is problem-free. Not so, as we shall soonfind out.

Another much-used ‘ism’ is scepticism. One can be sceptical, of course,about specific things like the probity of the Olympic Committee, theexistence of UFOs, or the value of a low-fat diet, but when ‘scepticism’occurs in philosophical texts it usually refers to something much moregeneral: the rejection of a wide range of claims to knowledge, or doubtsabout a large class of beliefs. It isn’t just their number, of course. Anyscepticism worthy of a place in the history books must be aimed atbeliefs that are actually held, and are held to be important – no medalsare awarded for shelling the desert.

This means that there can be plenty of thought which was sceptical inits own time, but now reads differently. A good example would be QuodNihil Scitur (‘That Nothing is Known’), by the Portuguese philosopher/medic Francisco Sanchez (1551–1623). A more sceptical-sounding title itwould be hard to find, but what follows seems to us not so muchscepticism as a vigorous attack on Aristotelianism, then prevalent butnow long since discredited. When sceptics succeed they cease to looklike sceptics; they look like critics who were right.

Other forms of scepticism have a longer shelf-life. These are the oneswhose targets are perennial human beliefs, or everyday beliefs, or whatis often called common sense. The most famous example of moderntimes occurs at the beginning of Descartes’s Meditations, where we are

threatened with the possibility that the senses cannot be relied upon totell 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 herelook back instead to the school of Pyrrho (roughly: 365–275 bc), sourceof the most developed sceptical philosophy we know. It can all be foundin a single book, Outlines of Pyrrhonism by Sextus Empiricus. Sextus, inhis prime around ad 200, here reports in loving detail the aims,arguments, and conclusions of the system. Happy the movement thatfinds 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 haveno sufficient grounds for any conviction as to what things are reallylike, as opposed to how they appear to us. Faced with a ‘dogmatist’ –one of the politer names they called people like Aristotelians and Stoicswho claimed to know such things – their favourite strategy was to findsome animal to which things would appear differently, or other humanbeings to whom they appeared differently, or circumstances underwhich they would appear differently to the claimants themselves, andthen to argue that there was no way of resolving the disagreementwithout arbitrarily favouring one viewpoint over the rest. In onepassage Sextus argues that there is no reason to privilege the waysomething seems to a dogmatist over the way it seems to a dog.Readers will occasionally catch him arguing from premisses which asceptic might be expected to find untrustworthy. Perhaps he, and thepyrrhonists, were not always speaking to eternity, but to theircontemporaries – and felt that what they accepted could legitimatelybe used against them.

Nowadays one often hears it asked what the point of a comprehensivescepticism could be – asked rhetorically, with the implication that itcan have no point whatever. But the pyrrhonists certainly thoughtthat their scepticism had a point: the achievement of tranquillity ofmind, untroubledness, ataraxia. They knew a thing or two about

peace of mind. If you want to insist on the truth of your point ofview, remember that there is a cost: life is going to be a perpetualintellectual brawl. And if the brawl stays intellectual, you’ll havebeen lucky; especially in religion and politics, these things havebeen known to end in bombs and burnings. I think they knewsomething else as well: moving from how things immediately appearto our senses to what they are really like is a much slower, morehazardous and laborious enterprise than many of their contemporariesrealized.

The pyrrhonists’ favourite sceptical manoeuvre was to remind us thathow a thing appears does not just depend on the thing: it depends onthe condition of the person to whom it appears, and the mediumthrough which it appears. Which ushers in our final ‘ism’: relativism.Relativism is not a specific doctrine, but a type of doctrine – I mightadd, a type much in vogue with intellectuals at the moment. Thegeneral idea is easy to grasp. A moral relativist will hold that there is nosuch thing as good (pure and simple), rather there is good-in-thissociety,good-in-that-society. An aesthetic relativist rejects the idea thatan object might simply be beautiful; we always have to ask ‘Beautiful forwhom, in whose eyes?’ A ‘gastronomic relativist’ won’t be interested inthe question whether pineapple tastes nice – it has to be ‘tastes nice towhom, when, and in combination with what?’ A literary relativistdoesn’t believe that texts have meanings – except at best in the sensethat they have a variety of meanings for a variety of readers, andprobably even for one reader at different times. A relativist aboutrationality will say that what is rational is relative to cultures, with theconsequence (for instance) that it is illegitimate to apply ‘western’scientific standards to traditional African beliefs about witchcraft andpronounce them irrational.

That bunch of examples illustrates a number of points about relativism.One is that the initial plausibility of different cases of relativism varieswidely. Many people will find aesthetic relativism easily acceptable, and

some will think that what I have called ‘gastronomic relativism’ isobviously true. That rationality is culture-relative is a much more difficultdoctrine, as is relativism about moral values. These doctrines do not say,remember, that different beliefs are accounted rational in differentsocieties, and different moral values avowed, for this nobody doubts.They say that what these really are can differ from society to society, andthat is about as far from obvious as you can get. So if you hear someonegoing on about relativism without saying relativism about what, give abadly concealed yawn.

The examples illustrate another important point. It isn’t just what theparticular relativism is about, it is also what it relativizes to: theindividual, a society, a culture (there are plenty of multiculturalsocieties), a historical epoch, or what. Those forms of relativism, like the‘gastronomic’, which can plausibly focus on the individual, have a bigadvantage: unlike societies, cultures, and epochs, it is clear where anindividual begins and ends. If Europeans shouldn’t bring their scientificstandards to bear on African beliefs in witchcraft, may they properlybring them to bear on European beliefs in witchcraft? Or only oncontemporary European beliefs in witchcraft? Imagine yourself livingintermingled with a people who, routinely and without moral qualms,abandon unwanted babies and leave them to die. (Such societies haveexisted.) Could you just say ‘Oh, fine. That’s what they think, that’s theirmoral culture, ours is different’, as if it were like ‘They speak French andwe speak English’? Bitter experience suggests that many people areunlikely to find it that easy.

I would be a bad guide if I left you with the impression that a shortparagraph can dispose of moral and intellectual relativism, just likethat. Be aware, though, that in several areas relativism is in for a roughride. The ride is rough theoretically, because of the difficulty of statingclearly just what relativism does and doesn’t say; and it is roughpractically, because of the difficulty of standing by it when the crunchcomes.

Chapter 7 Some more high spots

A personal selection

In Chapters 2, 3, and 4 we looked closely at three pieces of philosophicalwriting. In this chapter I briefly introduce a few more of my favourites.The selection is personal – another author would very likely have madequite different choices. And it can only be a few. But be assured thatthere are plenty more, indeed that however much you read, there willstill be plenty more.

Descartes: Discourse on the Method

In Chapter 2 I remarked that, whereas the ethical discussion presentedin Plato’s Crito could almost have taken place yesterday, Plato’scosmology takes us back to a completely different world. True – but weneedn’t go back that far; four centuries will be enough. In 1600 it was,admittedly, over fifty years since Copernicus had offered hisreplacement for the old Ptolemaic astronomy, moving the sun to thecentre of the solar system and letting the Earth, now just one of anumber of similar planets, circle round it. But few believed him. Galileo(1564–1642) had not yet begun publicly to champion his cause, andwhen he did so by no means everybody believed him.

It was not just that the Earth was displaced from its proud position inthe centre. In fact it wasn’t really that at all, since according to what wewould now call the physics of the day the centre was not a very

desirable place to be: it was where the basest matter tended tocongregate, the cosmic rubbish tip one might almost say. Other factorswere far more important. Passages in the Bible appear to maintain thatthe Earth is stationary; here was an individual prepared to reject or atleast reinterpret those passages on the basis of his own reasoningwithout reference or deference to proper authority. Besides, theclaims made by Copernicus, let alone Galileo, were in conflict with the(neo-Aristotelian) physics and cosmology that held sway in theuniversities.

For an Aristotelian, the baser kinds of matter are earth and water. Unlikethe other two kinds, air and fire, they naturally strive towards the centreof the universe. So a spherical mass of earth and water has formedthere, and this is the Earth. (However often you hear it said, it just isn’ttrue 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 fifthelement – incorruptible and unchanging, and all they do is go round incircles, eternally, in godlike serenity. Now the new astronomy wants toblow this distinction away: however things may look and feel fromwhere we are standing, the Earth is itself in the heavens; and theheavenly bodies are not utterly set apart, but are as much properobjects of scientific investigation as the Earth itself. On top of which thenew scientists want to replace explanations couched in terms of naturesand goals with talk of the particles of which things are composed, andof mechanical causation governed by mathematical laws.

All this represented catastrophic intellectual change on several levels atonce. It is often called The Scientific Revolution, a name which capturesits magnitude, but wrongly suggests that it happened quickly. Nowonder that it was accompanied by a rise of scepticism. For if the best ofreceived wisdom, with 2,000 years of triumphant history, was nowseen to be failing, a natural reaction was to despair of humanknowledge altogether and call off the hunt.

René Descartes (1596–1650) viewed Aristotelianism as a time-hallowedsystem of errors. So did the sceptics, but unlike them he also took it tobe an obstacle – an obstacle to human knowledge of nature, likescepticism itself. So he conceived an ambitious plan. (Had he known justhow ambitious he might have stopped in his tracks there and then – sowe should be grateful that he didn’t.) By going back to a point at whichno doubt was even possible and then rebuilding human knowledge byunmistakable steps he would fight his way clear of scepticism, andpresumably of Aristotelianism as well, since he had no expectation thathis reconstruction would lead back in that old, worn, faltering direction.Then he would illustrate the value of this heroic Great Escape of thehuman intellect by demonstrable progress in the sciences: optics,physics, physiology, and meteorology were all topics that he wroteabout.

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 briefcompass, a taste of most of Descartes’s thought, including veryimportantly an autobiographical account of the circumstances andmotivation from which his whole project arose.

So set aside a couple of hours – easily enough – and begin bysympathizing with Descartes’s frustration when formal education lefthim feeling that ‘I had gained nothing . . . but increasing recognition ofmy ignorance’ and that there was ‘no such knowledge in the world as Ihad previously been led to hope for’. Admittedly, there is value in someof what he has been taught, and he gives a sentence each to theadvantages 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 ‘speakplausibly about any subject and win the admiration of the lesslearned’ – so much for scholastic Aristotelianism. So the minute he isold enough he chucks it all in and goes travelling, joining in the wars

which were boiling away in Europe at this time. Perhaps men of actionwill have more truth to offer than the scholars; after all, theirmisjudgements really do rebound on them, whereas those of thescholars have no practical consequences and can be false with impunity.

One thing he learns on his travels is how much customs differ fromplace to place, people to people – as he pointedly says, there is as muchvariety as in the opinions of the philosophers – so he had better not relyon anything he has learnt only through ‘custom and example’. At thisstage many people (and nowadays even more than then) might slip intoa forlorn scepticism or a lazy relativism. But not this one. Descartes’sreaction is that if he is to avoid living under the misguidance of falseopinions then once in his life he should dismantle his entire beliefsystemand construct it anew. Which he intends to try – and on his ownwhat’s more.

One has to be amazed at the audacity of this unflinchingly positiveresponse to the crisis that Descartes, doubtless along with many lessarticulate or less self-confident contemporaries, was experiencing. If,that is, we believe that he really meant it – but I know no good reason tothink that he didn’t. In Part 2 of the Discourse we see him striving toreassure any readers who may take him for a social, political, ortheological reformer: ‘No threat to any public institution, it’s only myown beliefs that I’m going to overhaul.’ (Prudent, and a nice try, but notaltogether convincing, is it? As if he weren’t going to recommend hisrenovated belief-system to anyone else!) Then in Part 3 he takes steps toensure that his life can keep ticking over while his beliefs are suspended,for ‘before starting to rebuild your house you must provide yourselfwith somewhere to live while building is in progress’. So he will simplygo along, non-committally, with the most sensible and moderate viewsand behaviour he finds around him. It is a modified version of what hewould have found in Sextus Empiricus’ report of the recommendationsof the ancient sceptics – who faced the same problem permanently,since they had no intention of rebuilding.

Some more high spotsHow is demolition to proceed, and where will Descartes find hisfoundations? At the start of Part 4 he suddenly feigns to go all shy:perhaps he should bypass this bit, as being ‘too metaphysical anduncommon for everyone’s taste’. But then he tells us anyway. What weget 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 slightestgrounds for doubt. (Don’t bother about whether these grounds actuallydo make you feel doubtful – mostly they won’t, but that could just be afact about you.) Since your senses have sometimes deceived you,consider the possibility that they might deceive you at any time, indeedthat they might deceive you all the time – that they have no more statusthan a dream or an hallucination. But what about your belief that youare now thinking? Here doubt really does run dry, because doubtingwhether you are thinking is another case of thinking – the doubt defeatsitself. And if I am thinking, Descartes reflects, then I must exist – wehave reached the notorious Cogito ergo sum.

You may well wonder how Descartes is to rebuild anything on the basisof 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 mindanother – this is the famous (or infamous) Cartesian dualism that wesaw in Chapter 6 (p. 62).

In the next step Descartes observes that he has the idea of a perfectbeing, God, so the question arises: how did he get the ability to thinksuch a thought? As he points out elsewhere, if you had in mind the planof an extremely intricate machine we would think that either you were asuperb engineer yourself or had got the plan from someone who was.And since Descartes knows that he is far from perfect himself he

reckons his idea of a perfect being can’t come from him, but only from abeing that is actually perfect. That idea in his mind is the signature leftby his creator.

Many readers will feel that Descartes’s idea of a perfect being is far toohazy, imprecise, and in a word imperfect to need anything more thanDescartes 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 theutmost clarity of which he is capable must be true. For otherwise hisGod-given faculties would be misleading in principle, which would makeGod a deceiver, and hence imperfect. So if scepticism says that even ourvery best efforts might lead us to falsehood, just dismiss it.

In Part 5 we are back with autobiography. Descartes turns to hisscientific work, things which he had earlier ‘endeavoured to explain ina treatise which certain considerations prevent me from publishing’.These ‘considerations’ were in fact the condemnation of Galileo’swritings by the Church, as Descartes makes clearer (though withoutmentioning names) in Part 6. There he offers reasons for his decision,and for his further decision to present some of his results in theDiscourse after all. The reasons are fairly convoluted, and don’twholly dispel the suspicion that the case of Galileo had justfrightened him off.

At this stage one of those unfortunate little things happens. Descarteswas a notable mathematician, and no mean performer in physics. True,the work of Isaac Newton (1642–1727) wiped his physics off the maptowards the end of the century, though not before Newton himself hadaccepted it and attempted to work within it until his late thirties. Butthe main example he selects for Part 5 is his theory about how thehuman heart works, and this nowadays sounds just plain quaint andfanciful – he believes it to be much hotter than any other part of thebody, and makes it sound like a distillery in action. (All it distils is blood,some readers may be disappointed to learn.)

11. Descartes as physiologist – a naked Cartesian understandably feeling a bit chilly.

In spite (or partly because) of this glitch the Discourse is a rich andmemorable work. An eminent founder of modern thought grappleswith himself, Aristotelianism, scepticism, academic reaction, public andecclesiastical opinion, physics, cosmology, and physiology, all in aboutfifty pages. Now that I call a real feast.

Hegel: Introduction to the Philosophy of History

We encountered Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) in Chapter6, though only briefly. His influence has been massive; we shall see twoexamples of it in the next and final chapter, but important as they arethey can give only the barest inkling of the extent of the Hegelphenomenon.And the opposition to him started two very significantmovements: existentialism, through the Danish thinker SørenKierkegaard, and in Britain the analytic school through Moore, BertrandRussell, and the young Ludwig Wittgenstein. It took heavyweights withan alternative on offer to take people’s minds off Hegel, and then theeffect was only partial, local, and temporary.

But there is another reason for introducing a work by Hegel at thispoint. Nearly all the philosophy we have looked at so far begins fromwhat are relatively ordinary, everyday considerations. (Socrates: whatwill 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 canwe do but go back to basics and start again?) Hegel’s thought in thePhilosophy of History, in contrast, arises out of a grand vision of realityand 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 – ifyou select a page at random and read it from top to bottom you willprobably feel that you might just as well have read it from bottom totop. But one of the most valuable experiences for someone coming newto his philosophy is that of finding how much easier things are if youapproach 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 somephilosophy weird. You will find Hegel’s less weird, even if you still don’tbelieve a word of it, after you have read the Introduction to thePhilosophy of History. Here goes.

We start with something called ‘The Idea’. Think of it as being ratherlike the Ideas of Plato – a system of abstract universals from whichthings and events in the world take their shapes and natures. But itdiffers from Plato in two important ways. First, it is a highly structuredsystem, and its structure is in a certain sense developmental. I say ‘in acertain sense’ because the Idea doesn’t happen in time, one bit afteranother; Hegel’s doctrine is rather that it embodies a natural order ofthought, so that the thought of one element inexorably leads the mindto another, and the thought of those two to a third, and so on until thewhole system is revealed.

The second big difference is that whereas Plato speaks as if his Ideasexist independently of anything else, Hegel’s Idea can exist only ifsomething embodies it. So there has to be ‘Nature’ – the familiarcollection of concrete objects that surround us. And Nature, since itexists in order to embody the Idea, reflects all the Idea’s properties. The‘development’, which in the Idea was metaphorical, makes a literalappearance in the changing patterns of Nature.

So the Idea and Nature are very closely related: each is a form of theother. But at the same time they are so different that you might wellthink of them as opposites. The Idea is abstract, and neither temporalnor spatial, whereas Nature is spatio-temporal and concrete. The Idea iscomposed of universals, general concepts, whereas Nature comprisesmyriads of particular things. And it is material, which the Idea iscertainly not. Hegel now uses this situation – the existence of oppositeswhich are nevertheless in a sense the same thing – as the starting-pointfor a deeply characteristic move.

Suppose that you want to know something about yourself, say, whatyou really think about some question or other. Should you sit downmeditatively and try to introspect your own thoughts? No – you will justthink you see whatever you wanted to see. You should do something,make something, write something, in general produce something that

expresses you, your own work – and look at it. That is what will tell youabout yourself.

Good advice, and nothing especially new. (‘By our works shall we knowourselves.’) But Hegel now makes a very surprising (and rather obscure)use of it. He holds, remember, that Nature is the concrete expression ofthe Idea. So the Idea is confronted by its own work, and the situation isripe for it to start to understand itself. Thus is born what Hegel callsGeist, usually translated ‘spirit’ – consciousness, awareness. Humanminds are its vehicle, but what is really happening in them is that theIdea is gradually moving towards full self-understanding. (OK, I told youthat this was my example of high-altitude metaphysics!) There’s moreto come: Hegel believes that the whole purpose of reality is preciselythis, that the Idea should come to full knowledge of its own nature. Andthis is to happen in us, in the minds of the human race. No philosopherhas 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 beingsand something one might call a culture, that is to say when we havereached Hegel’s Stage 3 – Spirit or Geist. History is driven by Reason, theIdea: Hegel makes no bones of announcing this as established fact,something which philosophy (his own philosophy) has shown. Inhistory, the Idea is working out its rational purposes.

If you find this thought rather alien, remember that to most of Hegel’saudience it would have sounded quite familiar; it is a close relative ofsomething 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 ofeverything, Good is gradually defeating Evil. All is for the best. Thatthought 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 conceptionof ‘the best’ – the Idea, the force that drives it all, comes to fullknowledge of its own nature – and second, his highly intellectualized

account of what is doing the driving – not a personal God or deifiedSuperman, but the Idea, something like a system of Platonic forms. Atheology student in his youth, Hegel knows perfectly well how topresent this as a version of the orthodox Christian story (in fact hethinks 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 theyhave their own human schemes, interests, and motives – one thing theyaren’t trying to do is ensure that the Idea comes to perfect selfknowledge.(How could they be? Most of them have never even heard ofit.) Now we meet a famous doctrine: the Cunning of Reason. Withouttheir knowledge, the Idea (or Reason) really is at work, influencing anddirecting them towards its own ends.

So is there an external force, like the ancient Fates, looking down on usand manipulating our lives? No, Hegel’s view is subtler and lesssuperstitious than that. Remember that our minds, in Hegel’s grandplan, do embody the Idea, but not yet with any clear consciousnessof it. (Think of the way a gene – Hegel much approved of organicmetaphors – ‘contains’ the adult organism, but will only show itgradually in the process of growth and development.) Because there isthis something within us, active though obscure, we can consciouslypursue our own limited and individual ends and purposes whilst reallyserving the turn of Reason.

The Idea, now as Spirit or Geist, directs the course of history through thewill of ‘world-historical individuals’ (the famous people you read aboutin history books). Their feeling for the requirements of Spirit is a littlemore advanced than that of their contemporaries, their dissatisfactionwith 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 systemof the present . . . they draw their inspiration from another source, that

hidden spirit whose hour is near but which still lies beneath the surfaceand seeks to break out’. These are the leaders who change the world,unite nations, create empires, found political institutions. And once thenew state of things exists, the society or nation comes face to face withsomething it has itself produced – the situation that advances selfunderstanding,remember – and finds out a little more about its ownreal aspirations.

It also finds out more about the problems they bring with them. For astart, these transitions from one state to another rarely happensmoothly, without conflict and struggle. What Hegel calls ‘the calm andregular system of the present’ always has its appeal, especially for thosein whom the subliminal awareness of Spirit’s next move is undeveloped.These become the reactionaries who resist the world-historicalindividual’s striving for change; they are opposed by those of a slightlymore 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 fromwhich we began, the Idea, involves development, in a figurative sense. Everything that exists or happens reflects the Idea, and that of courseincludes history, which exhibits the Idea’s ‘development’, but now in aliteral sense. The Idea, as you will find if you ever read Hegel’s Logic (butbe warned, it is desperately hard work), always develops through theconflict of opposed concepts followed by their resolution, which itselfturns out to harbour another opposition, upon which a furtherresolution follows, and so on until the entire system is complete. So it is,therefore, in the political sphere. Conflict issues in a new order, butbefore too long the new order itself is showing strains; the seeds of thenext conflict were already present in it, and once they mature it is sweptaway in its turn. You may find the metaphysics with which Hegelunderpins all this extravagant, wild, and woolly, but when he applies itto human history the result certainly isn’t stupid. It is this idea ofprogress arising out of conflict which is known as ‘dialectic’. It pervades

12. Progress through conflict: the storming of the Bastille. Hegel was 19 when the French Revolution occurred – it made an impression.

the thought of Hegel, but equally that of Marx, which is why Marx’sphilosophy 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 Ideais 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 ofany concern to it whatever. History throws individuals away once theyhave served their turn. That is even, or especially, true of worldhistoricalindividuals: ‘their end attained they fall aside like emptyhusks’. Julius Caesar did his bit – and was assassinated. Napoleondid his – then was defeated, captured, and sent to rot on Elba. Anindividual is no more than a dispensable instrument. God, supposedly,loves each one of us, but the Idea couldn’t care less, so long as thereare some of us, and they are doing its business. So it is hard to seeHegelianism becoming a popular mass philosophy, for all its hugeinfluence.

Charles Darwin: The Origin of Species

The first thing we can learn from this fascinating book is not to bothertoo much about drawing a neat sharp line between philosophy andscience. The point is not that the line isn’t sharp, although I believe thatto be true. The point is that the line (if it exists) is not of muchimportance for philosophy. On any reasonable way of drawing itDarwin’s Origin is science, more specifically biology. But because of itssubject-matter, and the claims it makes, very few books have hadgreater philosophical impact. For it implies a startling thesis about usand how we have come to be as we are. It may not startle us today, butit startled most of his contemporaries to the point of shock; and thereare still a number of people trying to perform the difficult balancing actof rejecting it without appearing merely ignorant and prejudiced.

In one sense The Origin of Species does much more than ‘imply’ thestartling thesis: it builds a very carefully constructed case for it, backedby a wealth of thoughtfully assessed evidence. Darwin was not the firstperson to propose the theory of natural selection (he tells you a little ofthe history of the idea in his own introduction to the book), but he wasthe first to assemble so much evidence for it and so honestly to confrontthe difficulties it faces. If prior to 1859 you wanted to reject the viewthat species were mutable, and developed out of other species, and thatour own species was no exception, it was easy: just say ‘No’. It conflictedwith your other (deeply held) beliefs, many experts opposed it, andthere existed no serious and plausible statement of the case for it. After1859 it wasn’t easy at all – though of course there were plenty of peoplewho didn’t notice.

In another sense, however, ‘imply’ is exactly the right word: Darwingave no prominence (in this book) to his opinion that just as much asany other species humanity falls under the general theory. Readers whoreach the last chapter – or jump to it – will there find, discreetly placedand well apart, two or three unmistakable sentences. Otherwise,

Some more high spotssilence. A common mistake is to call the book Origin of the Species,presumably supposing that we are the species in question. Absolutelynot: There is almost nothing about us.

Plenty about pigeons, in fact half of chapter 1. They lend themselvesperfectly to Darwin’s strategy: start from a case in which it is totallyuncontroversial that a breed can be altered by selection – the breeder’sselection of which birds to allow to mate with which. (Unsurprisingly,there’s also a lot about cattle and sheep and racehorses; prize dahliasget a mention too.) But that doesn’t take Darwin quite as far as hewants to go, because it is perfectly possible to reply that humanbreeders can only make quite slight changes, so that all the strikinglydifferent breeds of pigeon, though modified by human practice, must inthe 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 typeof bird. Surely?

Now Darwin’s judgement is at its best. He doesn’t try to prove hispoint, but just shows that anyone opposing it will have a lot moretalking to do. If there was an original fantail pigeon, where is it nowfound in the wild? Well, perhaps it has become extinct, or livessomewhere frightfully remote. And how about the other distinctivebreeds that pigeon-fanciers are interested in – where are their wildrelatives? And what of the fact that within these breeds oneoccasionally finds individuals that closely match the complex colouringof a type of pigeon that does exist in the wild nowadays? So is it thatall today’s distinctive breeds had ancestors of the same colouring(although they were distinct species), and are now all either extinct inthe wild or at least have never been observed? Well, well, how verysurprising . . .

So if it is probable that artificial selection can produce such effects in arelatively short time, is there any natural principle of selection thatmight produce effects of similar magnitude, and perhaps of far greater

magnitude, given an enormously longer time to work in? Yes, becausethe ‘struggle for existence’ (about which Darwin writes a veryinteresting chapter) eliminates many individuals before they are able toreproduce. A fantail pigeon will probably mate only if it catches the eyeof the breeder; a wild pigeon will not mate unless it withstands thestruggle for existence long enough to reach maturity. What is beingselected for is in the two cases utterly different. In the second case it isthe capacity to withstand the local environmental/ecologicalconditions, and if these should become harsh the selection process willbe brutally efficient.

Once thoughts like these have brought us to see that very substantialchange is possible, indeed positively likely, and when we recall (whatwas only just becoming clear to geologists when Darwin was a youngman) that these processes may have been going on for an almostunthinkable length of time, certain observations strike one differently,like those Darwin offers in one of the very few sentences in whichhuman beings figure: ‘The framework of bones being the same in thehand 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 ofthe elephant . . . at once explain themselves on the theory of descentwith slow and slight successive modifications.’

The nineteenth-century enthusiasm for progress, to which thephilosophy of Hegel gave such momentum, predisposed many tounderstand Darwin as part of the same progressivist movement. Hisyounger contemporary Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), a man of a muchmore metaphysical, even somewhat Hegelian turn of mind, really waspart of it. He was the inventor of the overworked phrase ‘the survival ofthe fittest’, which can easily be understood as implying that those whosurvive 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 progresshe opposed anything that would lessen the intensity of the struggle,like social welfare arrangements.

13. Another variation on a theme much favoured by Victorian cartoonists. Darwin’s message wasn’t to be digested quickly.

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