What I find in Aristotle is mainly a quite dull collection of generalizations, many of which seem impossible to justify in the light of modern knowledge, whose organization appears extremely poor, and which seems primitive in the way old Greek pottery in the museums seems primitive.
Yeah, that.
Maybe my problem is that I don’t really understand the history of philosophy -- the long story of growth and progression of the philosophic art. I tend to pluck a philosopher out of the maelstrom of history without a true understanding of his place or position in what has to be an evolutionary tale. Sure, that philosopher looks like a fossil, but only because I’m looking at him with my modern eyes. If I better understood what was revolutionary about him in his time, I might have a better appreciation of his achievements.
It is with this spirit in mind that I picked up a copy of The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant in some dusty used bookstore somewhere. I was looking for a review course, and I more or less got one. Early on, it included a definition of our subject.
Specifically, philosophy means and includes five fields of study and discourse: logic, esthetics, ethics, politics, and metaphysics.
Logic is the study of ideal method in thought and research: observation and introspection, deduction and induction, hypothesis and experiment, analysis and synthesis -- such as the forms of human activity which logic tries to understand and guide; it is a dull study for most of us, and yet the great events in the history of thought are the improvements men have made in their methods of thinking and research.
Esthetics is the study of ideal form, or beauty; it is the philosophy of art.
Ethics is the study of ideal conduct; the highest knowledge, said Socrates, is the knowledge of good and evil, the knowledge of the wisdom of life.
Politics is the study of ideal social organization (it is not, as one might suppose, the art and science of capturing and keeping office); monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, socialism, anarchism, feminism -- these are the dramatis personae of political philosophy.
And lastly, metaphysics (which gets into so much trouble because it is not, like the other forms of philosophy, an attempt to coordinate the real in the light of the ideal) is the study of the “ultimate reality” of all things: of the real and final nature of “matter” (ontology), of “mind” (philosophical psychology), and of the interrelation of “mind” and “matter” in the process of perception and knowledge (epistemology).
This seems a handy reference to keep at your elbow whenever diving into a philosophic work. If true and complete, we should be able to trace trajectories of philosophic thought along these radial lines -- unless, of course, they wind up intersecting at some point beyond the central hub of their creation.
The rest of Durant’s book, subtitled “The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers” presents a more or less chronological review of some of the most famous philosophies. Beginning with Plato, then moving through Aristotle, Bacon, Spinoza, Voltaire, Kant, Schopenhauer, Spencer, and Nietzsche, and then wrapping up with a few “contemporary” philosophers of note: Bergson, Croce, Russell, Santayana, James and Dewey.
It is not my intention of summarize Durant’s take on every one of these figures, merely to capture the more compelling reactions I had to some of them. So, instead let me try to organize them around the five mentioned domains of philosophy.
Logic
Essential to the domain of logic is the issue of definitions.
“If you wish to converse with me,” said Voltaire, “define your terms.” How many a debate would have been deflated into a paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms! This is the alpha and omega of logic, the heart and soul of it, that every important term in serious discourse shall be subjected to strictest scrutiny and definition. It is difficult, and ruthlessly tests the mind; but once done it is half of any task.
I’ve made this remark many times myself -- usually in political conversations with friends and colleagues. If we can’t agree on our terms, that this collection of words has this specific meaning, then how can we hope to agree on anything else? And closely related to this concept is this insightful criticism from Francis Bacon:
“For men converse by means of language; but words are imposed according to the understanding of the crowd; and there arises from a bad and inapt formation of words, a wonderful obstruction to the mind.” Philosophers deal out infinites with the careless assurance of grammarians handling infinitives; and yet does any man know what this “infinite” is, or whether it has even taken the precaution of existing? Philosophers talk about “first cause uncaused,” or “first mover unmoved”; but are not these again fig-leaf phrases used to cover naked ignorance, and perhaps indicative of a guilty conscience in the user? Every clear and honest head knows that no cause can be causeless, nor any mover unmoved. Perhaps the greatest reconstruction in philosophy would be simply this -- that we should stop lying.
Amen. I think its was a contemporary philosopher not cited in Durant’s book that said “that which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” Many philosophers, in Durant’s book and out, fall victim to what I see as an essential logical construct. If something cannot be defined, you are not in a position to assert that it exists. To wit:
What is this underlying reality? Spinoza calls it substance, as literally that which stands beneath. Eight generations have fought voluminous battles over the meaning of this term; we must not be discouraged if we fail to resolve the matter in a paragraph. One error we should guard against: substance does not mean the constituent material of anything, as when we speak of wood as the substance of a chair. We approach Spinoza’s use of the word when we speak of “the substance of his remarks.” If we go back to the Scholastic philosophers from whom Spinoza took the term, we find that they used it as a translation of the Greek ousia, which is the present participle of einai, to be, and indicated the inner being or essence. Substance then is that which is (Spinoza had not forgotten the impressive “I am who I am” of Genesis); that which eternally and unchangeably is, and of which everything else must be a transient form or mode. If now we compare this division of the world into substance and modes with its division, in The Improvement of the Intellect, into the eternal order of laws and invariable relations on the one hand, and the temporal order of time-begotten and death-destined things on the other, we are impelled to the conclusion that Spinoza means by substance here very nearly what he meant by the eternal order there. Let us provisionally take it as one element in the term substance, then, that it betokens the very structure of existence, underlying all events and things, and constituting the essence of the world.
And wholly asserted, I suppose. Is there any evidence that Spinoza’s substance, fought voluminously for eight generations, even exists? When it comes to so many of the other domains of philosophy, this essential underpinning of basic logic seems so easily ignored.
I’m not the only philosopher who has noticed this. Here’s something amusing from Voltaire, which may more appropriately be positioned under metaphysics.
Metaphysics
“The further I go, the more I am confirmed in the idea that systems of metaphysics are for philosophers what novels are for women.” It is only charlatans who are certain. We know nothing of first principles. It is truly extravagant to define God, angels, and minds, and to know precisely why God formed the world, when we do not know why we move our arms at will. Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.” “I do not know how I was made, and how I was born. I did not know at all, during a quarter of my life, the causes of what I saw, or heard, or felt. … I have seen that which is called matter, both as the star Sirius, and as the smallest atom which can be perceived with the microscope; and I do not know what this matter is.”
He tells a story of “The Good Brahmin,” who says, “I wish I had never been born!”
“Why so?” said I.
“Because,” he replied, “I have been studying these forty years, and I find that it has been so much time lost. … I believe that I am composed of matter, but I have never been able to satisfy myself what it is that produces thought. I am even ignorant whether my understanding is a simple faculty like that of walking or digesting, or if I think with my head in the same manner as I take hold of a thing with my hands. … I talk a great deal, and when I have done speaking I remain confounded and ashamed of what I have said.”
The same day I had a conversation with an old woman, his neighbor. I asked her if she had ever been unhappy for not understanding how her soul was made? She did not even comprehend my question. She had not, for the briefest moment on her life, had a thought about these subjects with which the good Brahmin had so tormented himself. She believed in the bottom of her heart in the metamorphoses of Vishnu, and provided she could get some of the sacred water of the Ganges in which to make her ablutions, she thought herself the happiest of women. Struck with the happiness of this poor creature, I returned to my philosopher, whom I thus addressed:
“Are you not ashamed to be thus miserable when, not fifty yeards from you, there is an old automaton who thinks of nothing and lives contented?”
“You are right,” he replied. “I have said to myself a thousand times that I should be happy if I were but as ignorant as my old neighbor; and yet it is a happiness which I do not desire.”
This reply of the Brahmin made a greater impression on me than anything that had passed.
Even if Philosophy should end in the total doubt of Montaigne’s “Que sais-je?” it is man’s greatest adventure, and his noblest. Let us learn to be content with modest advances in knowledge, rather than be forever weaving new systems out of our mendacious imagination.
To me, this anecdote is amazing, and refreshing, after the so many attempts I have made to wade through the speculations of so many other philosophers.
Of course, when it comes to exploring metaphysics, one is bound to stumble into the various traps associated with free will. It may provide a helpful bridge to the domain of ethics, since the issue of whether or not we have free will either relates to the true underlying reality of our existence or to our ethical obligations to others or both. You should be free to pick you own poison.
Either way, Spinoza had a lot to say on the subject.
There is, consequently, no free will; the necessities of survival determine instinct, instinct determines desire, and desire determines thought and action. “The decisions of the mind are nothing save desires, which vary according to various dispositions.” “There is in the mind no absolute or free will; but the mind is determined in willing this or that by a cause which is determined in its turn by another cause, and this by another, and so on to infinity” “Men think themselves free because they are conscious of their volitions and desires, but are ignorant of the causes by which they are led to wish and desire.” Spinoza compares the feeling of free will to a stone’s thinking, as it travels through space, that it determines its own trajectory and selects the place and time of its fall.
This seems like such a key point to understanding ourselves and our place in the world around us. Our consciousness observes our behavior, it does not determine it. Disagree with me on that, and you and I are destined to disagree on almost everything else.
Ethics
And here comes the ethical side of that reality. More Spinoza, addressing the key ethical dilemma of determinism.
And let no one suppose that because he is no longer “free,” he is no longer morally responsible for his behavior and the structure of his life. Precisely because men’s actions are determined by their memories, society must for its protection form its citizens through their hopes and fears into some measure of social order and cooperation. All education presupposes determinism, and pours into the open mind of youth a store of prohibitions which are expected to participate in determining conduct. “The evil which ensues from evil deeds is not therefore less to be feared because it comes of necessity; whether our actions are free or not, our motives still are hope and fear. Therefore the assertion is false that I would leave no room for precepts and commands.” On the contrary, determinism makes for a better moral life: it teaches us not to despise or ridicule any one, or be angry with any one; men are “not guilty”; and though we punish miscreants, it will be without hate; we forgive them because they know not what they do.
Determined might mean free from will, but it does not mean free from moral responsibility. The evil which ensues from evil deeds is not less to be feared because it comes of necessity. The determined moral agents in the community around the evil doer still have the responsibility to prevent further evil.
But many philosophers have disagreed on this point. And those on the other side of the argument usually try to summon something more profound than simple human free will out of thin air. Here’s a snippet from Immanuel Kant.
And again, though we cannot prove, we feel, that we are deathless. We perceive that life is not like those dramas so beloved by the people -- in which every villain is punished, and every act of virtue meets with its reward; we learn anew every day that the wisdom of the serpent fares better here than the gentleness of the dove, and that any thief can triumph if he steals enough. If mere wordly utility and expediency were the justification of virtue, it would not be wise to be too good. And yet, knowing all this, having it flung into our faces with brutal repetition, we still feel the command to righteousness, we know that we ought to do the inexpedient good. How could this sense of right survive if it were not that in our hearts we feel this life to be only a part of life, this earthly dream only an embryonic prelude to a new birth, a new awakening; if we did not vaguely know that in that later and longer life the balance will be redressed, and not one cup of water given generously but shall be returned a hundred-fold?
Read that section again. “X” is true because I feel that it is. Does his reason go any deeper than that? If it does, I cannot see it. And I’m not the only one. As scientific naturalism began to get its feet under it in the years after Darwin, the very meaning of good began to change.
The nineteenth century dealt rather hardly with Kant’s ethics, his theory of an innate, a priori, absolute moral sense. The philosophy of evolution suggested irresistibly that the sense of duty is a social deposit in the individual, the content of conscience is acquired, though the vague disposition to social behavior is innate. The moral self, the social man, is no “special creation” coming mysteriously from the hand of God, but the late product of a leisurely evolution. Morals are not absolute; they are a code of conduct more or less haphazardly developed for group survival, and varying with the nature and circumstances of the group: a people hemmed in by enemies, for example, will consider as immoral that zestful and restless individualism which a nation youthful and secure in its wealth and isolation will condone as a necessary ingredient in the exploitation of natural resources and the formation of national character. No action is good in itself, as Kant supposes.
With respect to Kant, I far prefer the thoughts of Voltaire, who earned a special place in my heart when he offered the following as his rationale for writing his Essay on the Morals and the Spirit of the Nations from Charlemagne to Louis XIII.
What Voltaire sought was a unifying principle by which the whole history of civilization in Europe could be woven on one thread; and he was convinced that this thread was the history of culture. He was resolved that his history should deal not with kings but with movements, forces, and masses; not with nations but with the human race; not with wars but with the march of the human mind. “Battles and revolutions are the smallest part of the plan; squadrons and battalions conquering or being conquered, towns taken and retaken, are common to all history. … Take away the arts and the progress of the mind, and you will find nothing” in any age “remarkable enough to attract the attention of posterity.” “I wish to write a history not of wars, but of society; and to ascertain how men lived in the interior of their families, and what were the arts which they commonly cultivated. … My object is the history of the human mind, and not a mere detail of petty facts; nor am I concerned with the history of great lords…; but I want to know what were the steps by which men passed from barbarism to civilization.”
Speaking as someone currently slogging through a work of history too focused on kings and their struggles for dominance, Voltaire’s “moral history” sounds ideal.
Politics
And that leads us to politics. When it comes to many of the philosophers in this book, it is democracy that seems to win the day among our many political choices -- albeit a very rarefied kind of democracy.
Democracy is the most reasonable form of government; for in it “every one submits to the control of authority over his actions, but not over his judgment and reason; i.e., seeing that all cannot think alike, the voice of the majority has the force of law.” The military basis of this democracy should be universal military service, the citizens retaining their arms during peace; its fiscal basis should be the single tax. The defect of democracy is its tendency to put mediocrity into power; and there is no way of avoiding this except by limiting office to men of “trained skill.” Numbers by themselves cannot produce wisdom, and may give the best favors of office to the grossest flatterers. “The fickle disposition of the multitude almost reduced those who have experience of it to despair; for it is governed solely by emotions, and not by reason.” Thus, democratic government becomes a procession of brief-lived demagogues, and men of worth are loath to enter lists where they must be judged and rated by their inferiors. Sooner or later the more capable men rebel against such a system, though they be in a minority. “Hence I think it is that democracies change into aristocracies, and these at length into monarchies”; people at least prefer tyranny to chaos. Equality of power is an unstable condition; men are by nature unequal; and “he who seeks equality between unequals seeks an absurdity.” Democracy has still to solve the problem of enlisting the best energies of men while giving to all alike the choice of those, among the trained and fit, by whom they wish to be ruled.
Among the trained and fit. These are Spinoza’s words, but they echo similar passages written by Plato and Aristotle before him. Philosophers of many stripes seem to have landed on the idea of “checked” democracy as the ideal political system.
But on another level, it may not really matter which political system one is forced to live under. Force, and its use, after all, tends to blur all the distinctions.
The great evil of the state is its tendency to become an engine of war, a hostile fist shaken in the face of a supposedly inferior world. Santayana thinks that no people has ever won a war.
“Where parties and governments are bad, as they are in most ages and countries, it makes practically no difference to a community, apart from local ravages, whether its own army or the enemy’s is victorious in war. … The private citizen in any event continues in such countries to pay a maximum of taxes and to suffer, in all his private interests, a maximum of vexation and neglect. Nevertheless … the oppressed subject will glow like the rest with patriotic ardor, and will decry as dead to duty and honor anyone who points out how perverse is this helpless allegiance to a government representing no public interest.”
This is strong language for a philosopher; but let us have our Santayana unexpurgated. Often enough, he thinks, conquest and absorption by a larger state is a step forward toward the organization and pacification of mankind; it would be a boon to all the world if all the world were ruled by some great power or group of powers, as all the world was once ruled by Rome, first with the sword and then with the word.
It is an idea worth developing. As I heard a libertarian friend once say, what does it matter which group of criminals taxes us? And to extend that thought -- which is better, a bunch of small criminals, using their citizens in an eternal fight for dominance, or one large criminal, taking his due, but otherwise leaving all citizens in peace?
Santayana continues, again leading us back to where we started:
What form of society, then, shall we strive for? Perhaps for none; there is not much difference among them. But if for any one in particular, for “timocracy.” This would be government by men of merit and honor; it would be an aristocracy, but not hereditary; every man and woman would have an open road according to ability, to the highest offices in the state; but the road would be closed to incompetence, no matter how richly furnished it might be with plebiscites. “The only equality subsisting would be equality of opportunity.” Under such a government corruption would be at a minimum, and science and the arts would flourish through discriminating encouragement. It would be just that synthesis of democracy and aristocracy which the world pines for in the midst of its political chaos today: only the best would rule; but every man would have an equal chance to make himself worthy to be numbered among the best. -- It is, of course, Plato over again, the philosopher-kings of the Republic appearing inevitably on the horizon of every far-seeing political philosophy. The longer we think about these matters the more surely we return to Plato. We need no new philosophy; we need only the courage to live up to the oldest and the best.
Esthetics
The only piece of esthetics I found worth noting is this bit from Schopenhauer.
This deliverance of knowledge from servitude to the will, this forgetting of the individual self and its material interest, this elevation of the mind to the will-less contemplation of truth, is the function of art.
Very much the same Schopenhauer I stumbled across in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art.
Epilogue
I’ve occasionally stumbled across historical anecdotes that seem to beg me to write them up a short stories. To date, I’ve only acted on one of those entreaties -- when stumbling across the anecdote of Teddy Roosevelt’s fevered brush with death on his expedition up South America’s River of Doubt -- but others probably loom somewhere in my future. Here’s another to add to that list.
[Voltaire] was now eighty-three; and a longing came over him to see Paris before he died. The doctors advised him not to undertake so arduous a trip; but “if I want to commit a folly,” he answered, “nothing will prevent me”; he had lived so long, and worked so hard, that perhaps he felt he had a right to die in his own way, and in that electric Paris from which he had been so long exiled. And so he went, weary mile after weary mile, across France; and when his coach entered the capital his bones hardly held together. He went at once to the friend of his youth, d’Argental: “I have left off dying to come and see you,” he said. The next day his room was stormed by three hundred visitors, who welcomed him as a king; Louis XVI fretted with jealousy. Benjamin Franklin was among the callers, and brought his grandson for Voltaire’s blessing; the old man put his thin hands upon the youth’s head and bade him dedicate himself to “God and Liberty.”
Wow. Just imagine the scene. Poor Richard’s grandson, shaking hands with Voltaire, the bridge from European to American enlightenment encapsulated in this one small human gesture. That’s a story worth writing.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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