A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition (16 page)

Having resolved the problem of the nature of mind to his satisfaction, Berkeley felt able to lean on the Cartesian part of his argument. This proceeds, via the proof of the existence of God, to the not surprising conclusion that the world
is
in fact more than it merely seems to be: it
is
as it appears to God. While our knowledge of this divine appearance is imperfect we can be fairly sure that we are not deceived in those beliefs that arise cogently and naturally from the perceptions which God vouchsafes to us.

The most interesting part of Berkeley’s theology lies in a novel argument for the existence of God. This argument both clarifies and depends upon Berkeley’s notion of spiritual substance as the only source of activity. He rightly observes that, among ideas, we can distinguish those in respect of which we are active from those in respect of which we are passive. I can voluntarily call an image or thought to mind, and recognise it as the product of my mental activity. But other ideas—in particular those which go under the denomination of sensation and belief —are not similarly accessible to my will. I cannot command myself to believe that France is smaller than England, to see a man instead of a table before me, to feel a pain in my finger, and so on. Yet these involuntary ideas seem to be impressed on me with great vivacity. Whence came they? Not from me, for I can neither refuse nor amend them. From nowhere? Their vivacity and compellingness suggest otherwise: they bear the imprint of some other force. But force signifies the active principle—the will—which animates all spiritual substance. I conclude, therefore, that they are produced in me by some other being, some being far greater, and far wiser and far more powerful than I.

The conclusion falls short of what is theologically desirable. Embellished with other arguments, and set in the context of Berkeley’s radical scepticism about his own and his reader’s powers to transcend the knowledge provided by experience, it might seem persuasive enough. However, the argument involves many a weak step. Its assumption that, because I am passive in respect of an idea, some other being must be active in respect of it, stands, to say the least, in need of justification. It is from this point, however, that Berkeley, like Descartes, begins the laborious task of reconstructing the world of common sense. He considered himself to have effected no genuine change in that world; he had done no more than re-establish the priority of appearance, and so banish the metaphysical superstitions for which ‘material substance’ was the unholy name.

Conclusion

It is difficult to summarise the achievements or the beliefs of the early British empiricists. But certain threads seem to bind their philosophies together. In particular there is the disposition to put the theory of knowledge before metaphysics. In doing so, they rise to the vantage-point from which metaphysics can be criticised, and even dismissed as nonsense. But, bound up with this same disposition is another, which has been historically central to it. This is the tendency, present already in Descartes, to look for the
foundation
of knowledge, and hence to arrive at a satisfactory theory of what I can know and mean, on the basis of the evidence and understanding available to me. Thus we find, in all traditional empiricism, a radical allegiance to the first-person case, a belief that all philosophy must be resolved by appeal to my experience, and by studying the details of how things seem to me.

Out of this preoccupation many confusions arose, but so too did many clarities. It became clear, for example, that certain concepts, previously regarded as subsidiary to philosophical argument, in fact take a central place in all true metaphysics—these are the concepts of cause, of object, of existence and of the distinction between appearance and reality. At the same time the reliance of philosophical argument upon a theory of meaning, and upon a conception of the capacities of the human mind, became more apparent. When Hume was to draw out what he considered to be the true consequences of the empiricist assumptions, he was to put forward what Locke and Berkeley had merely hoped for: a philosophy dedicated to the destruction of metaphysics, and founded in a complete science of human nature.

The rise of modern science during the seventeenth century shook traditional beliefs in religion, politics and morality, at the same time instilling into those who renounced those beliefs an unforeseen conviction of the power and scope of the human intellect. But science brought with it a new and unfamiliar bridle to the ambitions of thought. It rested its authority at least in part on observation. This gave new impetus to the Cartesian doubt. If what I know of the world I know through observation, then what can I know beyond the fact that I seem to observe things? In other words, what can I know beyond the contents of my own mind? Without the overarching structure of
a priori
truth, philosophy seems to-lack the bridge that will take it from subject to object. It lies trapped in the first person, forced either to remain there, or to call, like Berkeley, in some new and less reasonable way, upon the God who had rescued Descartes from solipsism.

Before this radical scepticism could fully assert itself, the optimism of Newton held sway in the minds of less observant philosophers. Because their thought did much to create what has since become one of the fundamental branches of philosophy, we must treat of them here. The purpose of this chapter is to show how the empiricism of Locke gradually worked itself out through theories of ethics—the branch of philosophy which had in modern times been treated systematically only by the profoundly unempiricist Spinoza.

The philosophers that I shall discuss—Shaftesbury, Hutcheson and Butler—belong to the ‘Enlightenment’. In the first flush of scientific confidence, the thinkers of the Enlightenment tried to carry over into every human intellectual endeavour the search for first principles which, in Newton’s physics, had been attended with such success. This search brought with it a sceptical attitude towards authority, rejecting everything that had no secure foundation in experience. In history, morals, metaphysics and literature the Enlightenment attitude briefly prevailed, giving rise to the phenomenal ambitions of the French encyclopaedists, and to their materialist, almost clockwork, vision of the universe. It produced the political theories which motivated the French and American revolutions, and the systematic explorations in chemistry and biology that were to find fruition in nineteenth-century evolutionism. It also brought about the technical achievements which precipitated modern industrialism, and while thus preparing the way for the miseries of revolution and factory labour, it infected the minds of the educated classes with a serenity of outlook, and a trust in human capacities, that weathered the assaults of Hume’s scepticism, of Vice’s anti-rationalism, of the growing introversion and doom-laden mysticism of the romantics. This was the Augustan age of English poetry, the age of Johnson and Goldsmith, of Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau, of Lessing and Winckelmann. From the point of view of the historian it is perhaps the richest and most exciting of all intellectual eras, not because of the content, but because of the influence, of the ideas that were current in it.

The two major Enlightenment thinkers that I shall discuss—Hume and Kant—are among the greatest of philosophers. But I shall discuss them independently of the intellectual ferment from which they grew, both because they were superior to it, and also because their thought has a philosophical significance that is wholly misunderstood when they are seen merely as manifestations of a spirit which, being common to so many, retains the individual mark of no one in particular. I shall ignore the encyclopaedists, the French materialists and the great tradition of German academic philosophy which created the bridge between Leibniz and Kant. In all these cases philosophical ideas which were elsewhere given complete elaboration found more confused expression. The astonishing fact is not the depth of the thinking involved, but rather the remarkable character of an age that could generate the appearance of depth in so many.

But while it is possible to study the history of epistemology and metaphysics in such a way, concentrating only on the greatest thinkers, it is necessary to stray a little from the path of genius in order to discuss the history of philosophy’s subordinate branches. This is particularly true of ethics, aesthetics and political philosophy. I shall touch on the first of these in the present chapter, and the third in chapter 14. In both cases I shall be representing a characteristic aspect of Enlightenment thought.

With the advance of science came the hope for a ‘moral’ science. This hope achieved early expression in Descartes’
Treatise on the Passions
(1649), a work which profoundly influenced Spinoza. Spinoza’s own deductively conceived system of ethics, with its startling conclusions and its remote, noble vision of human things, served as a model for many later thinkers. Its appeal rested not merely in its reinstatement of a Platonic ideal of man as freed and fulfilled in thought, capable of rising above the vicissitudes of nature through understanding alone; but also in the fact that its conclusions seemed to depend on no appeal to revealed religion, or to any other moral authority that was not already contained in human reason. The vision of ‘each man his own moralist’ was to achieve its most profound and powerful statement in the philosophy of Kant. Before then, other thinkers were radically to change the subject of ethics, by recasting it in empiricist terms. They attempted to combine this outlook with the ideal of a science of human nature from which the precepts of ethics would follow, not as a matter of willing obedience, but as a matter of course. In other words, there arose the general impetus towards an ethical ‘naturalism’.
¹
Naturalism is the theory that the ideal of the good life is to be derived not from divine precept but from a description of human nature. Such a theory aims to show that evil is against nature, while good fulfils it.

Ethical naturalism found its most important expression in Britain, giving rise to the school of ‘British Moralists’, whose modesty of style and lack of metaphysical pretension to some extent conceal the seminal character of their philosophy. Their thoughts began to take shape under the influence of Locke, and in the writings of a man whose family had already enjoyed the intimacy and instruction of that philosopher. Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), published his
Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit
in 1699 and his
Characteristics
in 1711. The latter was one of the most popular philosophical works of the eighteenth century and saw eleven editions before 1790. Shaftesbury was the founder of the empiricist ‘moral science’ and of the modern study of aesthetics. His influence on the French and German Enlightenment was considerable. Even at the end of the eighteenth century Herder could write that ‘this virtuoso of humanity... has had a marked influence on the best minds of our century, on those who have striven with determination and sincerity for the true, the beautiful and the good’. However, the aspect of his thought which is now of greatest interest is not that which was most immediately influential. In his earlier work Shaftesbury attempted to combine the Lockean theory of the workings of the human mind with many of the arguments of Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics,
and it is this aspect of Shaftesbury’s philosophy which we need to consider.

In Aristotle the project of deriving an account of the good life from a description of human nature had found its finest ancient expression. At first sight it may seem that Shaftesbury was by no means original in his attempt to revive the outlook (if not all the conclusions) of Aristotle. The few philosophical achievements of Renaissance humanism had been in the field of ethics, and in almost every case the inspiration had been Aristotelian. Even Aquinas had advocated ethical ideas which stemmed directly from the conceptions of Aristotle, and when Count Baldassar Castiglione (1478-1529), in his
Book of the Courtier
(1528), gave to these ideas the humanistic bias which they naturally favour, he changed the morality of scholasticism only in two particulars. He neglected to mention God, and at the same time he shifted the aims of ethics away from a description of the good, towards a description of the noble.

Shaftesbury’s Aristotelianism was, however, new. It shared the sceptical temper, and the search for rigorous foundations, which characterise empiricism. It also sought to detach the conclusions of ethics from this or that particular style of life, this or that set of manners, these or those protective institutions. It was, in intention, ‘institution-free’, in a way that the ethics of the humanists was not. Hence Shaftesbury’s description of the good life was derived from qualities of human nature which he regarded as more or less common to all, and definitive of a human norm. Like Aristotle, he was concerned to found his moral system not so much in a conception of the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ of particular actions, as in a notion of the ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ of the characters which generate them. And, again like Aristotle, he regarded good character, or virtue, as the sole and sufficient cause of happiness. Happiness is the state in which our nature is in harmony with itself; the whole character is involved in this harmony, which is a form of proportion in the soul. Our love of beauty is therefore as much excited by the perception of happiness (or virtue) as is our natural sympathy, and it is as much given to human nature to admire virtue in others as to find fulfilment in pursuing it oneself.

But what does virtue consist in? Again Shaftesbury’s account is Aristotelian: virtue consists in a certain disposition of character, in which reason has governance over the passions (the ‘affections’). This governance is not the
suppression
of passion but the securing of its ‘right application’. The virtuous person is not the one who feels no hatred, love, anger or contempt. He is the one who is disposed to feel these passions only towards their appropriate objects—towards those things which are worthy of hatred, love, anger and contempt. Such a disposition requires a steady will and resolution, but it is not a form of unfeelingness, or blind obedience. The whole character is involved in virtue; hence any truly wicked act, since its wickedness displays the vice which was its motive, implicates the character of the agent.