A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein

by Roger Scruton

  Emotion

  As its title implies, the Ethics was not designed merely as a treatise on metaphysics with various moral asides. On the contrary it was designed to treat of the moral life in terms which, while they gained their validity from a sound metaphysical base and implied no confusion concerning Nature or God, were sufficiently definite to entail an account of the place of man in the natural world. This account would in its turn be adequate to found a true system of moral behaviour. Given his premises, Spinoza was more or less successful in this enterprise. The fact is the more surprising in that his moral views were by no means the received platitudes of the day, nor in any way predictable from the literature of the Christian and Jewish moralists who had been the overseers of his life and education. Not only did Spinoza argue that pity is ‘bad and useless’, and that ‘self-complacency is the greatest good that we can expect’; he also poured scorn on the resentment of the poor and ungifted, and recommended humility and repentance only to those unable to live according to the dictates of reason. The necessary bridge from the uncompromising determinism of the metaphysics towards this almost Nietzschean moral vision lies in the philosophy of the emotions.

  Although Descartes had written a treatise on the ‘passions’, it is fair to say that Spinoza was the first great philosopher since Aquinas to attempt to explore human passions systematically, in full consciousness that man’s place in nature could not otherwise be described. It is from his theory of the passions that Spinoza derived his idea of freedom. God is free in that he is self-determining. But human beings cannot be free in that sense (a sense which can, logically, apply only to substance). What, then, does the distinction between freedom and unfreedom amount to? Spinoza recognised that the distinction between the free and the unfree must be expressed in other terms than that of the distinction (imaginary for Spinoza) between the caused and the uncaused. In this he has been followed by many more recent philosophers. The first step in reconstructing the distinction between the free and the unfree lay in his theory of the passions.

  In some respects Spinoza’s theory of the emotions shows similarities to the far sketchier and less imaginative theory propounded by his empiricist predecessor Hobbes. In particular, he took after Hobbes in supposing the various human emotions to be definable in terms of a relatively simple number of mental states, together with a specification of the content of the thoughts and desires peculiar to each individual passion. Thus Hobbes had defined fear as ‘aversion, with opinion of hurt from its object’ (Leviathan, I, vi). Hobbes thought he could specify the range of the emotions in terms of the specific beliefs and desires characteristic of each of them, although he was very unclear as to how those beliefs and desires are united.

  In similar fashion Spinoza attempted to define emotions in terms of desire, pleasure and pain (for which he in turn offered definitions), and certain characteristic causes. These causes were so explained by Spinoza as to involve the concept of mentality. They involved particular conceptions of the world, and these define not just the causes but also the objects of the emotions. (The distinction here, between object and cause, is made clear by an example: I am afraid of what will happen at my meeting with the Chairman; what has caused my fear is thoughts about the Chairman’s past behaviour. The object here (my meeting with the Chairman) lies in the future and so cannot be the cause. This distinction between object and cause, vital to the theory of the emotions, was made with finesse by Aquinas, but not by Spinoza whose theory of the mind nevertheless brought it about that the oversight was cancelled out in the general account of the emotional life which followed from his premises.) It may seem odd that phenomena seemingly as arbitrary and fluctuating as the human passions could be treated by the geometrical method, so that conclusions concerning the nature of grief, remorse and jealousy could be seen to follow from the definitions and axioms of an incontrovertible metaphysics. But Spinoza, who in this, as in many respects, was close to medieval thought, was dissatisfied with conventional assumptions concerning the disorderliness of this material, and believed that many assertions about the emotional life which might appear to be the fruits of prolonged and fallible observation, were in fact demonstrably necessary. In thus reopening the field of the emotions to philosophical thought he became a principal guide to those later philosophers who have sought to understand them. There are many philosophers who would agree with Spinoza, for example, that we cannot hate a thing which we pity, or that no one envies the virtue of anyone save his equal; and who would agree with him, too, in seeing these propositions as necessary truths, to be established not by empirical investigation but by philosophical argument. In his definitions of the individual emotions and his drawing of such conclusions from them, Spinoza’s most lasting contribution to philosophy was made.

  Activity and passivity

  The essence of all emotion, for Spinoza, is passion. To the extent that he reacts to the world in an emotional way, a person is held to be passive towards it. Emotion is something suffered. The next step in Spinoza’s theory of freedom was to try to show an identity between suffering passion and being the victim of an external cause. A person is passive to the extent that his actions have their origin outside him. He is active to the extent that they have their origin within him. Now of course it follows from the metaphysics that, literally speaking, every action originates outside the agent, in God. But there is a matter of degree here. Just as the doctrine of conatus allows us to postulate indefinitely many quasi-individuals in a world which, literally speaking, contains only one individual, so does it enable us to speak of the greater or lesser degree to which the causes of an action are contained within the body of the agent and therefore within his mind. Passivity is therefore a matter of degree.

  The next step is to argue, from the premise that to every physical event in the body there is a mental event that constitutes its idea, to the conclusion that the more active a person is, the more his mind contains adequate ideas of the causes of his action. A person is more active in respect of his behaviour the more his consciousness contains an adequate idea of the behaviour and its cause. To have a completely adequate idea of the cause is to see it in relation to its own cause and so on, to the point of grasping the full necessity of the system of which the causes form a part. Spinoza further argues that this ever-increasing understanding of the causes of our action is the only legitimate concept of human freedom that we can postulate. Freedom is not freedom from necessity, but the consciousness of necessity.

  Now an emotion, since it already involves an obscure perception of reality, can be refined, as it were, from the passive to the active, as that perception is improved. To the extent that this refinement occurs—to the extent, as we might put it, that the object of a feeling is more clearly and completely understood—to that extent does the emotion pass from passion to action, from something suffered to something done. The free man is the man who thus gains mastery over his emotions, transforming them into accurate conceptions of the world which he thereby dominates. The change from passivity to activity is precisely what we mean by pleasure, and the reverse what we mean by pain.

  It is a small step from there to the conclusion that only the free man is truly happy, and that his freedom and his reason are one and the same. From these noble ideas Spinoza then unfolds his moral system, one aspect of which here deserves mention.

  The intellectual love of God

  Spinoza’s final moral vision has an Aristotelian and a Platonic aspect. Like the philosophers of the Platonic tradition, Spinoza wishes to locate the final wisdom and happiness of humans in the intellectual love of God (the love which informs the blessed souls of Dante’s Paradise). And he thinks he can make clear what this love consists in. To the extent that we understand something we obtain pleasure from it, and to the extent that such pleasure is pure—unmingled with confused ideas—to that extent does it constitute love. Now, understanding the universe in its totality cannot produce confused ideas, since the idea of the universe in its totali
ty is the idea of God, which, to the extent that we grasp it, is adequate in us. The attempt to understand reality through that idea necessarily leads us to the love of reality; in other words to the love of God. But this love is active and intellectual, not passive and emotional; in acquiring it we come to participate in the divine nature. We see the world in its fullness, under the idea of God, and not in partial, confused or passive form. Seeing things thus, we see them, as Spinoza puts it, ‘under the aspect of eternity’. Eternity means, not endless time, but timelessness. We see the world as an entity which endures because it has no duration, which is infinite because it has no parts, and in which we participate because in it we are dissolved. Seeing the world thus is to see God. Other ways of representing God—as the personal, anthropomorphic, passionate creature of established religion—might be useful in encouraging moral sentiments among the ignorant, bringing as they do the ideas of divine retribution and reward; but they are insignificant to the philosophical mind. Moreover the moral life of the enlightened has no need of anthropomorphic religion. Seeing things sub specie aeternitatis, they recognise that happiness, freedom and virtue are one and the same, and therefore that virtue is strictly its own reward.

  Conclusion

  Spinoza’s vision, as it emerges in the Ethics, is thus one of sublime impersonality. We are happy to the extent that we share in the objective vision which is God’s (the vision of the world sub specie aeternitatis). The first-person viewpoint of Descartes has been lost entirely. The ‘cogito’ appears only dimly reflected (in one of the incidental propositions of Part I); it plays no role in the validation of the system, and inevitably gives way to the third-personal vision towards which the Ethics tends. This loss of epistemological doubt, and consequent abandonment of first-personal privilege as the basis of philosophy, is characteristic of post-Cartesian metaphysics, and the origin of the more powerful of the critiques which were to destroy it. In Spinoza, we see the most adventurous development possible of the ideas of God and substance as the medievals had expounded them. With rare intellectual honesty, he worked out what he considered to be the inevitable logical consequences of those concepts, at the same time arguing for their indispensability. The result was a complete description of humanity, of nature, of the world and of God. The weak point of the philosophy lay not in its conclusions, but in its premises, and in particular in that fatal idea of substance which Spinoza had thought he both needed and could make intelligible.

  6 - LEIBNIZ

  Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716) shared with Newton the discovery of the calculus, and contributed the concept of kinetic energy to mechanics. He was accomplished in history, law, chemistry, geology and mechanics, made many incidental scientific discoveries of importance, was a tireless politician and courtier, founded the Academy of Berlin, wrote fluently in French, German and Latin, corresponded with every man of genius from whom he could learn, and produced a philosophical system of astonishing power and originality, which provided the basis of German academic philosophy throughout the century following his death. Embedded in this system are the foundations of a new logic, and, with the discoveries of modern logic, interest in the thought of Leibniz has been reawakened. But so fertile was his mind, and so prodigious his output, that even now many of his writings are unpublished, and few scholars can claim familiarity with every aspect of his thought.

  Leibniz published little during his lifetime, and his philosophical masterpiece—the Monadology—is such a triumph of succinct expression that, fully to interpret it, one must look to many other works and to his correspondence, in order to know the detailed arguments which underlie its conclusions. Among the most important of these works are the Discourse on Metaphysics, The New Essays on the Human Understanding (written partly in answer to certain theories of the empiricist Locke), The Theodicy1 and the correspondence with Arnauld, Clarke, de Volder and Des Bosses.

  Interpretation of Leibniz is made doubly difficult by the fact that he changed his mind about certain of his most influential ideas during the course of his lifetime, while remaining obstinately attached to them and unable overtly to reject them. Thus the picture to be obtained from reading the earlier works—such as the Discourse on Metaphysics—is different from that obtained from the mature Monadology, or the posthumous New Essays. In this brief summary, I shall tend more in the direction of the later Leibniz, while drawing on the earlier writings wherever these seem to be illuminating.

  Substances and individuals

  Spinoza’s thesis that all apparent individuals are merely ‘modes’ of the one substance is inherently paradoxical. For the distinction between substance and mode derives in part from the ancient attempt to distinguish individuals from their properties. Spinoza seems to have abolished individuals from his world-view, reducing them to properties of something that is neither individual nor universal but a strange metaphysical hybrid: a universal with a single instance. Leibniz’s philosophy arose from the attempt to provide a concept of the individual substance, and to use it to describe a plural universe—indeed, a universe in which there is not one substance but infinitely many.

  Spinoza argues for human immortality; but he concludes that we survive only in part, dispersed in the infinite mind of God. Leibniz also believed in immortality; but immortality would be worthless, he thought, if it did not involve the survival of the soul. And the soul is an individual, something which is numerically the same at one time as it was or will be at other times. But what exactly is an individual? What is the distinction between the individual and its properties, and what do we mean by saying that this individual is identical with the one I saw last week? These are the deep and difficult questions that Leibniz placed on the agenda of modern philosophy.

  Monads

  Every entity is either composite or simple, and simple entities do not contain parts. It is the simple entities that are the true substances, from which all other things are composed. These simple entities cannot be extended in space, since everything extended is also divisible. They are not to be confused, therefore, with the atoms of physical theory, and can best be understood in terms of their one accessible instance—the human soul, which is neither extended nor divisible, and which seems to be self-contained, simple and durable in exactly the way that a substance must be. Such basic individuals Leibniz called ‘monads’; and although the soul is our clearest example, there are and must be other kinds of monads, which do not share our distinguishing attributes of rationality and self-consciousness.

  Leibniz’s theory of monads (the ‘monadology’) contains three parts, being the theories of the monad, of the aggregates of monads and of the appearances of monads. These tend in three separate directions, and much ingenuity was needed in order to attempt a reconciliation. The theory of the monad can be briefly summarised in the following six propositions:

  Monads are not extended in space.

  Monads are distinguished from one another by their properties (their ‘predicates’).

  No monad can come into being or pass away in the natural course of things; a monad is created or annihilated only by a ‘miracle’.

  The predicates of a monad are ‘perceptions’—i.e. mental states— and the objects of these mental states are ideas. Inanimate entities are in fact the appearances of animated things: aggregates of monads, each endowed with perceptions.

  Not all perceptions are conscious. The conscious perceptions, or apperceptions, are characteristic of rational souls, but not of lesser beings. And even rational souls have perceptions of which they are not conscious.

  ‘Monads have no windows’—that is, nothing is passed to them from outside; each of their states is generated from their own inner nature. This does not mean that monads do not interact; but it does mean that certain theories as to how individual substances interact are untenable.

  Those propositions follow, Leibniz thinks, from the very idea of an individual substance, once the idea is taken seriously. But they can also be derived independently, fro
m certain metaphysical principles which it would be absurd to question.

  Principles

  Leibniz’s rationalism is displayed most vividly by his guiding principles, which he held to be at one and the same time laws of rational thinking and deep descriptions of reality. We need only follow these principles in order to arrive at a description of how things are—indeed, of how things must be. Naturally, this description of the world must be compatible with natural science. But science can be incorporated into metaphysics, Leibniz believed, once it is seen that scientific discoveries concern the ‘phenomena’ and not the underlying reality. Natural science is the representation of the world as it systematically appears, while the world as it really is can be known only from the self-evident principles of rational thinking.

  There are two supreme principles, which Leibniz treated as axiomatic to the end of his philosophical career:

  1. The Principle of Contradiction, ‘in virtue of which we judge that which involves a contradiction to be false, and that which is opposed or contradictory to the false to be true’;

  2. The Principle of Sufficient Reason, ‘by virtue of which we consider that we can find no true or existent fact, no true assertion, without there being a sufficient reason why it is thus and not otherwise, although most of the time these reasons cannot be known to us’.

  Corresponding to those two principles there are two kinds of truth: truths of reason, which depend upon the first principle, and truths of fact, which depend upon the second. Truths of reason are necessary, and their opposite impossible; truths of fact are contingent, and their opposite possible. Leibniz’s rationalism is reflected in his belief that for every truth of fact there is a sufficient reason, so that there is no bare contingency in the world, and the structure of reality conforms to the principles of rational argument.