A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein

by Roger Scruton

  Kierkegaard’s brilliance as a writer and critic more than makes amends for his magnificent philosophical failure. A study of a philosopher with whom he has often been compared suggests that this ethic of ‘subjectivity’ will always require literary gifts of a high order. These Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) certainly possessed. Far from using his gifts in the defence of Christianity, however, Nietzsche was guided in part by a hostility to that religion which some have considered to reflect the insanity which in later life overcame him. In retrospect, this hostility is likely to seem obsessive, if not tedious. But fortunately it is not the most significant aspect of Nietzsche’s thought.

  Nietzsche was a moralist, but one capable of considerable metaphysical ingenuity. He took as his starting-point the famous apophthegm, ‘God is dead’. This remark was first given philosophical significance by Max Stirner (1806-1856), in a striking book called The Ego and His Own (1845). Stirner belonged to that group of ‘Young Hegelians’ who reacted against the Hegelian thesis that the individual achieves freedom and self-realisation only in the institutional forms which ‘determine’ and therefore limit his activity (see p. 205). Stirner was the most extreme among them, rejecting all institutions, all values, all religion, and indeed all relations, except those which the individual ego could appropriate to itself. Stirner, a kind of atheistical Kierkegaard, found, like Kierkegaard, the capacity to generate many words out of the inexpressible state of isolation which he extolled. Nietzsche, by contrast, was more succinct and more subtle.

  Nietzsche’s philosophy begins, like Kierkegaard’s and Stirner’s, in the individual; but unlike his predecessors, Nietzsche remained profoundly sceptical that anything significant remained to the individual when the veil of appearance had been torn away. He accepted the doctrine that all description, being conceptual, abstracts from the individuality of what it describes. Moreover, he regarded the description and classification of the individual as peculiarly pernicious, in that it attributed to each individual only that ‘common nature’ which it was his duty to ‘overcome’. Nietzsche tried to avoid the paradoxes involved in this stance by adopting a scepticism towards all forms of objective knowledge. He repeated Hume’s arguments concerning causality, and Kant’s rejection of the thing-in-itself. (The thing-in-itself is a fabrication of that vulgar common sense with which every true philosopher must be at war.) Nietzsche sought for a ‘life-affirming scepticism’ which would transcend all the doctrines that stemmed from the ‘herd instinct’, and so allow the individual to emerge as master, and not as slave, of the experience to which he is condemned.

  Nietzsche affirmed, then, the ‘master’ morality against the ‘slave’ morality. This idea was directed both against the orthodox Christian and egalitarian outlook of his day, and against the conclusion of the ‘master and slave’ argument given by Hegel (see p. 170). In Beyond Good and Evil (1886) Nietzsche argued that there are no moral facts, only different ways of representing the world. Nevertheless one can represent the world in, ways that express and enhance one’s strength, just as one can represent it under the aspect of an inner weakness. Clearly it is appropriate for a person to engage in the first of these activities, rather than the second. Only then will he be in command of his experience and so fulfilled by it. This thought led Nietzsche to expound again the Aristotelian philosophy of virtue, or excellence, but in a peculiarly modern form. Like Aristotle, Nietzsche found the aim of life in ‘flourishing’; excellence resides in the qualities that contribute to that aim. Nietzsche’s style is of course very different from Aristotle’s, being poetic and exhortatory (as in the famous pastiche of Old Testament prophecy entitled Thus Spake Zarathustra (1892)). But there are arguments concealed within his rhetoric, and they are so Aristotelian as to demand restatement as such.

  First, Nietzsche rejects the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ as encapsulating a theological morality inappropriate to an age without religious belief. The word ‘good’ has a clear sense when contrasted with ‘bad’, where the good and the bad are the good and bad specimens of humanity. It lacks a clear sense, however, when contrasted with the term ‘evil’. The good specimen is the one whose power is maintained, and who therefore flourishes. The capacity to flourish resides not in the ‘good will’ of Kant (whom Nietzsche described as a ‘catastrophic spider’) nor in the universal aim of the utilitarians. (‘As for happiness, only the Englishman wants that.’) It is to be found in those dispositions of character which permit the exercise of will: dispositions like courage, pride and firmness. Such dispositions, which have their place, too, among the Aristotelian virtues, constitute self-mastery. They also permit the mastery of others, and prevent the great ‘badness’ of self-abasement. One does not arrive at these dispositions by killing the passions—on the contrary the passions enter into the virtuous character in a constitutive way. The Nietzschean man is able to ‘will his own desire as a law unto himself. (Aristotle had argued that virtue consists not in the absence of passions but in a right order among them.)

  Like Aristotle, Nietzsche did not draw back from the consequences of his anti-theological stance. Since the aim of the good life is excellence, the moral philosopher must lay before us the ideal of human excellence. Moral development requires the refining away of what is common, herdlike, ‘all too human’. Hence this ideal lies, of its nature, outside the reach of the common man. Moreover the ideal may be (Aristotle), or even ought to be (Nietzsche), repulsive to those whose weakness of spirit deprives them of sympathy for anything which is not more feeble than themselves. Aristotle called this ideal creature the ‘great-souled man’ (megalopsuchos); Nietzsche called it the ‘Übermensch’ (‘Superman’). In each case pride, self-confidence, disdain for the trivial and the ineffectual, together with a lofty cheerfulness of outlook and a desire always to dominate and never to be beholden were regarded as essential attributes of the self-fulfilled man. It is easy to scoff at this picture, but in each case strong arguments are presented for the view that there is no coherent view of human nature (other than a theological one) which does not have some such ideal of excellence as its corollary.

  The essence of the ‘new man’ whom Nietzsche thus announced to the world was ‘joyful wisdom’: the ability to make choices with the whole self, and so not to be at variance with the motives of one’s action. The aim is success, not just for this or that desire but for the will which underlies them. (In Nietzsche we find the Schopenhauerian will re-emerging as something positive and individual, with a specific aim: that of personal dominion over the world. Nietzsche’s early admiration for and subsequent passionate attack on Richard Wagner express the same ambivalent relationship to Schopenhauer.) This success is essentially the success of the individual. There is no place in Nietzsche’s picture of the ideal man for pity: pity is nothing more than a morbid fascination with failure. It is the great weakener of the will, and forms the bond between slaves which perpetuates their bondage. Nietzsche’s principal complaint against Christianity was that it had elevated this morbid feeling into a single criterion of virtue; thus it had prepared the way for the ‘slave’ morality which, being founded in pity, must inevitably reject the available possibilities of human flourishing.

  To some extent we can see all this as a restatement in modern language of the Aristotelian ideal of practical wisdom. When combined with Nietzsche’s theoretical scepticism, it led to the view which is sometimes called pragmatism, according to which the only test of truth is a ‘practical’ one. Since there are no facts, but only interpretations, the test of the truth of a belief must lie in its success. The true belief is the one that augments one’s power, the false belief the one that detracts from it. This made it easy for Nietzsche to recommend belief in a metaphysical theory which presents considerable obstacles to sober thought—the theory of eternal recurrence. For, however difficult it may be to justify the assertion that everything happens again and again eternally, this belief is certainly something of an encouragement to the ‘will to power’.
If you believe in eternal recurrence, it becomes easier ‘so to live that you desire to live again’. But why, in that case, stop short of that most heartening of all beliefs, the belief in an omnipotent deity of whom it is said, ‘Ask and thou shall be given’? One cannot help feeling that Nietzsche’s passionate extension of his egoism into the realm of metaphysics leads to more confusion than even his rhetorical gifts were able to hide. Moreover, a philosopher who says, ‘There are no truths, only interpretations,’ risks the retort: ‘Is that true, or only an interpretation?’

  In recent years, nevertheless, considerable interest has been expressed in Nietzsche’s metaphysics and epistemology, which have partially eclipsed the ethical theory for which he was earlier renowned. Nietzsche was acutely aware of the peculiar predicament of modernity. Hitherto, he argued, our beliefs and the concepts used to formulate them, have had the transcendental backing of religious faith. At no point in the conceptual scheme of civilisation has the void been fully apparent behind the thin paste of our conceptions. Now, however, everything is changing. People come into a world without certainties, and between the torn shreds of our inheritance the abyss is ‘always visible. In such a condition human life becomes problematic; without a radical re-construction of our world-view, which will permit the will to power on which our enterprises depend, we shall enter a peculiar spiritual desert, in which nothing has meaning or value—the world of ‘the last man’. Nietzsche has been accused of nihilism, but more recent commentators tend to the view that he is trying—perhaps against the odds, given his sceptical epistemology—to forestall nihilism and to provide us with the weapons against it. Moreover, his acute social criticism, and his ability to sniff the ‘will to believe’ behind all our ordinary beliefs and attitudes, have endeared him to radical critics of Western society, and caused him to be conscripted to secular causes—feminism, socialism, egalitarianism, ‘multiculturalism’—which he himself would have greeted with cavernous laughter. For such reasons Nietzsche, despite the brevity and impatience of his philosophical reasoning, is now as influential as any nineteenth-century philosopher.

  Part Four - The political transformation

  14 - POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY FROM HOBBES TO HEGEL

  Modern writers have tended to regard epistemology and metaphysics as the central areas of philosophy, and to treat political thought as an implied branch of the subject. Of the two greatest modern philosophers—Kant and Wittgenstein—the first wrote in a scattered and fragmentary way about politics, while the second ignored it altogether. Plato’s most famous work consists in a sustained account of political life, in which philosophical problems are shown to arise from the business of living together in a community; few modern philosophers would give so central a place to questions of politics, and of the exceptions the most prominent are often regarded, like Marx, as pseudo-scientists rather than philosophical thinkers in the strict sense of the word. There is, however, one modern philosopher who conceived the entire subject matter of politics in philosophical terms, and who saw political applications in almost every philosophical argument—Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), whose Leviathan and De Cive set the agenda for modern political philosophy.

  Published in Paris in 1651, two years after the execution of King Charles I, the Leviathan bears the mark of a civil war in which Hobbes and his contemporaries had been made aware of the terror and evil-doing which stem from anarchy. The book aims to justify the power and authority of the sovereign and to show that rebellion is seldom if ever justified, not only because of the chaos that it brings, but also because it involves a breach of a deep and self-contracted obligation. Many of Hobbes’s arguments are ad hoc, part of his own personal response to the tragic conflict which he had witnessed, rather than arguments from first principles. Nevertheless, his wide influence over his contemporaries is due at least in part to his attempt to provide a metaphysical foundation for political institutions, and to rise above the contingencies of history so as to view human community as it must be, in every age. He was a monarchist, but he inspired the republican Spinoza, whose Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) displays the same realistic view of human nature, and the same lofty disdain for political fashion, that are characteristic of Hobbes. The fact that Hobbes was an empiricist of a crudely formulated but uncompromising kind shows the extent to which empiricism lies at the basis of modern political philosophy, being the generating principle of major theories of the state, even when these issue from the pen of a philosopher like Spinoza, for whom reason is the ultimate court of appeal.

  Hobbes’s principal concern was with the concept of sovereignty, and with the rights and powers associated therewith. He conceived civil association as a ‘commonwealth’, arranged in rank and influence around the sovereign power, much as the parts of an organism are arranged around a single active principle of life. The organic analogy was very important to Hobbes, and enabled him both to describe the nature of the sovereign power, and also to separate it intellectually from any particular person, assembly or constitutional process that might be thought—in this or that political arrangement—to embody it. Hence his ideas about sovereignty were to prove acceptable to many who did not share his conviction that, unless the sovereign power finds concrete expression in a monarch, it neither commands the allegiance of the citizen nor supports the cohesion of the state. Hobbes’s extremely crude empiricism led him to a philosophy of mind that gave little persuasive power to that thought, or to the analogy between the life of a commonwealth and the life of an individual. But this analogy was later to be reinstated by Hegel, with all the philosophical benefits that Hobbes had been unable to provide for it. It then certainly did begin to seem persuasive.

  For the purposes of this chapter, the single most important thought to be found in Hobbes lies in his assertion that there can be ‘no obligation on any man which ariseth not from some act of his own’. The history of political philosophy in the eighteenth century is largely the history of that thought, and the rising conviction either that it is false, or that it serves to conceal something far more important. If the thought is right then it follows that no one is born into the world encumbered by obligations, and that no state has a right to allegiance unless it arises from some act of ‘consent’—however tacit, unreflecting or spontaneous— on the part of the citizen. (It has to be understood that when Hobbes speaks of an ‘act’ he means an intentional act of a kind that could be seen as bearing within itself the creation and acceptance of an obligation. Promising is a clear example of this; so too is the knowing engagement in business according to the common laws of contract and trade.)

  Hobbes finds his paradigm of obligation in contractual or quasi-contractual relations between ‘consenting adults’ (to use the modern term). This is naturally an odd starting point for the defence of monarchical government, in which the sovereign usually has rights over the citizen that transcend anything the citizen himself can either contract or even understand. Nevertheless, Hobbes believed that in acquiescing in the benefits of government the citizen does thereby accept, and so put himself under an obligation towards, the established order of the commonwealth. The sovereign, who is nothing but the embodied will of that order, therefore acts with the authority of all those who have overtly or covertly sought his protection.

  The philosophical basis of Hobbes’s quoted remark is important for what follows. Political philosophy has been preoccupied since its origins by an all-important distinction—that between rights (which are enforced only in the name of justice) and powers (which are enforced come what may). Plato’s Republic opens with an argument that purports to reduce the first to the second; Marx’s historical materialism regards the first as a mere institutional reflection of the second, and allows material reality to powers alone. Hobbes, preoccupied by legitimacy, saw how fragile are our human conceptions of justice when not supported by material power. What therefore makes the exercise of justice possible? It cannot exist in the ‘state of nature’, in which the life of man is ‘nasty, poor
, solitary, brutish and short’: it is therefore an artifact, made possible by the power of the state. So the sovereign power creates the possibility of a just order. At the same time, Hobbes recognised, we distinguish legitimate from illegitimate sovereign power. Is this merely—as the ‘vulgar’ Marxist would persuade us—an ideological illusion? Or does it have some independent basis in reality—independent, that is, of the evident motive that we all have, out of greed or cowardice, to believe that where might is, there right is also?

  Clearly rights exist only between persons, and a distinguishing mark of persons is that they can engage in voluntary transactions and thereby acquire at least a sense of obligation towards one another. It therefore seemed clear to Hobbes that we can make sense of ‘rights’ if we trace them back, through the complex history that surrounds them, to those acts in which the sense of obligation is first aroused. Rights can be seen as conferred by one person on another. They have their objective foundation in a habit of reflection that informs and is indispensable to the friendly commerce between rational beings. Their origin is wholly different from the origin of power, and hence they can stand in judgement on the exercise of power, even when power seeks to overthrow them. The happy commonwealth is clearly the one in which right and might are in consort, so that the sense of obligation confers its authority upon those de facto powers which seek its allegiance. Such thoughts raise enormous philosophical questions about the nature of rational agency, and about the relation between fact and value. But they serve in part to explain why so many moral and political philosophers have concentrated on the act of promising as a starting-point for their investigations. They also show the philosophical basis of a doctrine which was to develop through Locke and Rousseau to become one of the most influential of all political ideas, the doctrine of the social contract (or ‘compact’ as Locke called it).