An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy

by Scruton, Roger

  Something like that must surely be true, if the argument of previous chapters has any cogency. The stance of the subject to other subjects is interrogatory; and this interrogatory attitude spreads over objects too, conceptualizing them not as they are, but as they appear in the light of our human interests. In the case of objects, on which we can perform experiments, and which are open to our uses in every way, the concepts of our ordinary intentional understanding soon give way to other and deeper classifications, founded in scientific method. In the case of other subjects, this transition can occur only with difficulty, and only at the risk of losing sight of the matter that we are trying to understand. The ‘human sciences’ are really attempts to reorder the appearance of the human world, not so as to explore its underlying causes, but so as to enter into dialogue with it, and discover its meaning as an object of human interest.

  The term ‘human sciences’ is the best translation we have of the German Geisteswissenschaften; but just as ‘human’ is a very bad equivalent to Geist, which means spirit, so is ‘science’ a poor equivalent for Wissenschaft, which also means knowledge, expertise and wisdom, as did scientia in Latin. These semantic points are not quibbles, since they go to the heart of Dilthey’s project. The attempt to make the humanities into sciences risks the very real understanding which they contain. It sacrifices the human appearance to the non-human reality, and presents as a system of objects that which we relate to as a community of subjects.

  Here, then, is the clue to the study of history. Historical categories and classifications order the past in terms of its meaning, as an object of rational dialogue. A valid historical category helps us to understand the ‘why?’ of a past action, of a past way of thinking, or of a past sequence of events, so as to see how human subjects might have acted or thought in that way. For example, the concept of the Renaissance classifies together a collection of ambitions, projects and artefacts, in terms of a common stance towards the world. By grouping the writings of Alberti, the buildings of Bramante. the political projects of the Medici and the new polyphony as ‘Renaissance’, we seem to increase our understanding of all of them: we are better able to interrogate them, to ask ‘Why?’, and to find a reason which makes sense to us. If we think of them in this way, we begin to look for parallels, to find the ways in which Brunelleschi was doing ‘the same kind of thing’ as Josquin, or Cosimo Medici the ‘same kind of thing’ as Piero della Francesca. It is not absurd to think of this kind of explanation in the terms suggested by Hegel: we are looking for the common ‘spirit’ of an epoch, in the hope that one action will make sense in the light of another, just as one gesture in a ceremony begins to make sense, when related to the other gestures by which it is surrounded, even though each is unintelligible alone.

  There are dangers in this, of course. We might begin to mix hermeneutics with a kind of a priori determinism, believing that contemporaneous actions must express the same spirit, that, existing in Renaissance Italy, you simply had to be a humanist, a classicist, a believer in antiquity, a lover of pagan mythology and of polyphony built in thirds. Hegel encourages this kind of determinism, as do the academic subjects which sprang up in the wake of his ideas - notably the history of art, which did so much to create the currently accepted periodization of our culture. Such determinism is precisely what the hermeneutical approach should avoid. A hermeneutics of history aims to understand historical events as the free actions of individual subjects, which nevertheless, conceived as a whole, have a common appearance or Gestalt. If we say that this or that event in the pattern must be as it is, or that, in the context of the Gestalt, it is inevitable, we are not really speaking in causal terms. The concept of inevitability that we are using is that which occurs also in aesthetic judgement: as when I say that this chord is inevitable, or that the character of Caliban is required by the play. The necessity here is a felt necessity, deriving from our sense of artistic form. Such artistic necessity is the highest kind of freedom, and in no way determined by the context.

  The most damaging form of historical determinism arises when we try to understand present times. Historical categories, provided that they deal with times sufficiently remote, and people sufficiently mysterious, can bring us into dialogue with the matters they describe, and so advance our understanding. We see past periods and movements in dramatic terms, singling out the leading motives, the shared conceptions, and the principal points of conflict, in order to elicit the kind of order that we understand from the unity of human character. A period is like a collective person, speaking to us down the ages, in a way which permits a coherent response. This is how we should understand the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Enlightenment. These periods or movements do not have clear temporal boundaries, and the aspect they present to us is often ambiguous, like the aspect of a painting. Yet we can understand them as we understand persons in a drama: they embody a pattern of human motivation, in terms of which to grasp the how and why of emotions, beliefs and desires.

  When we try to see our own epoch or society in such terms, however, we at once fall out of relation with it. Historical categories are designed to apply to the past: they reassemble the fragments of recorded time as a coherent drama, in order that we can profitably relate to it. But this is reasonable only because we have no other way of relating to it, no way of interrogating the past directly, no way of changing it according to our own conceptions and ideals. We are forced to look upon it from an impassable distance, as we look upon the characters in a play. If we take the same approach to our own time, then we remove ourselves from a true engagement with it; we depersonalize the world in which we live, precisely by seeing it as a collective person. And dire results may follow from this, as they followed from Lenin’s reading of Marx, and Goebbels’ reading of Spengler. An aesthetic of history becomes a science of the present, and a prophecy of future things.

  It is in the light of this that we should understand the fashionable concept of postmodernity. I am reluctant to add to the many definitions of‘modernity’, still less to encourage the belief that the ‘modern’ world is all of a piece. Nevertheless, a change came into the world when people began to define themselves as modern — as in some way ‘apart from’ their predecessors, standing to them in some new and self-conscious relationship. And this could serve as a definition of modernity: as the condition in which people provide definitions of modernity. For there is a great difference between living in history — which, for self-conscious beings, is unavoidable — and living according to an idea of history, and of one’s own place within it.

  You might put the point in another, and more provocative way. Modern people do not live in the present. They live the pastness of the present - confronting each moment as it will be from the vantage-point of future time. Modern people live as though they stepped into the present from the future; and even as they seize the present moment, it is misted over by its pastness, and falls from their hands into the boundless sea of remembrance and forgetting. When people argue that the modern world is finished, that we are now entering the postmodern period of our culture, they are in a sense expressing their adherence to modernity in its latest form, inventing another historical category through which to summarize and pre-empt the past of the present moment, and to look on the world as a perpetually disappearing thing. But they are also expressing their sense that this very practice, of seeing oneself as ‘one step further on’, has lost its former appeal.

  Looked at from the point of view of intellectual history, the ‘modern’ world arose from the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, from the ideal of secular and democratic government, from the industrial revolution, and from the pressure of education and emancipation which led to the collapse of old ideas of sovereignty, and to the belief that the individual could never be bound by an obligation which had not been chosen by himself. Those great events belong together, as cause or effect of the rise of science; and the term ‘Enlightenment’
is now frequently used to refer to them, having been introduced by Kant in one of the first of many attempts to write ‘the history of the present moment’. Together they exalt the idea of ‘progress’ into a ruling principle in every sphere of human endeavour, whether scientific, cultural or political. And it may very well be that this idea has lost its sovereign place in our thinking - and with good reason, when you consider the damage it has caused.

  The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard puts the point somewhat differently. In The Postmodern Condition (1979) he argues that modernity should be characterized in terms of certain ‘narratives’ (he actually calls them, for no good reason, ‘metanarratives’) of ‘legitimation’: by which he means doctrines, stories, theories and ideas which tend to the conclusion that institutions and practices are well-founded and legitimate, that all’s well with the world, whether or not God is in his Heaven. Traditional societies derive their legitimacy from backward-looking narratives - the myths, archetypes and religions which embed the tribe in history. The narratives which characterize the modern era are forward-looking, pointing to a future state of emancipation and higher knowledge; present privations and injustices are rendered tolerable when they are shown to be stages on the way to that higher state, or intolerable when discovered to be obstructions. And the future state - the Idea to be realized (freedom, enlightenment, socialism, prosperity, equality, and so on) - has ‘legitimating value’ because it is universal. The narratives of modernity are ‘cosmopolitan’, to use another of Kant’s expressions: they are promises made to all mankind.

  The postmodern condition comes about when such narratives have ceased to be believable. The last gasp of hope has been breathed, and we stand amid the ruin of our dear illusions, looking on a world the legitimacy of which can be ceaselessly questioned, but never confirmed. The fund of affirmation has at last run dry, and nothing remains to us save the choice between despair and irony.

  No such thing could possibly be true. If it seems true, it is because the writer has been tempted by the ‘history of the present moment’ into a posture of determinism. If we think that historical categories show us how things must be, and that the era in which we live is intelligible only as the era of postmodernity, then we may find ourselves having to choose between postmodernist irony, and postmodern despair. The correct response to the diagnosis, however, is to forget about both the modern and the postmodern condition, and look seriously at the human world. If there is no legitimacy to be found in the idea of progress, then let us renounce those forward-looking attitudes which make such use of it, and study things as they were and are. A small dose of philosophy will persuade us that people have always been wrong to look to the future for the test of legitimacy, rather than to the past. For the future, unlike the past, is unknown and untried. A host of respectable modern thinkers were aware of this fact and tried (against the pressure of half-educated enthusiasm) to remind their contemporaries of it: Burke, for example, Coleridge, Tocqueville, even Hegel. The modernist adulation of the future should be seen as an expression of despair, not of hope; and the postmodernist irony is merely an attempt to recapture an ingredient in all true philosophy - in all philosophy that recognizes that we are both subject and object, and that between these two lies an impassable barrier through which at every moment we must nevertheless pass.

  In those last few paragraphs I have been considering a question in the history of ideas. If you take philosophy seriously, you will soon recognize that the history of philosophy is a very different subject from the history of ideas. The history of philosophy is a branch of philosophy. It consists in the exposition and criticism of arguments, lifted from their historical context and assessed for their validity. Ideas are studied for the light that they cast on questions that still concern us, like the questions that have occupied the discussions in this book. The history of ideas, by contrast, is a branch of historiography. An historian of ideas is interested in the origin and influence of an idea; but he may be indifferent to its truth or validity. A philosopher ought not to be interested in those ‘narratives of legitimation’ which fascinate Lyotard: for they never were believable, not even at the time when first they were uttered. Most people cannot think clearly or consistently; hence absurd conceptions tend to have more historical impact than serious arguments, and minor thinkers occupy the foreground in the history of ideas. The history of ideas is not a history of the believable, but of the will to believe.

  If we step back from the history of ideas into the realm of pure philosophy, we find that neither the modern nor the postmodern are concepts which are helpful to us. Philosophical answers may not be eternal; but the questions recur. And that is what we must expect. Our condition, properly seen, is neither temporal nor timeless. As Nietzsche saw, self-consciousness requires ‘eternal recurrence’, in which everything we think and do is both now and always. The effort to say what this means is the perennial task of philosophy; and it is a task that is fulfilled only by relinquishing it — by taking the reader to the point where the music of the spheres can at last be heard, and he attains that ‘condition of complete simplicity’, costing, Eliot adds in parenthesis, not less than everything.

  FURTHER READING

  I have tried to give an overview of the subject in Modern Philosophy, London 1994. This contains a Study Guide, which takes the reader through the contemporary literature, and tries to impose some order upon it. I have also written an introduction to the history of modern philosophy: A Short History of Modern Philosophy, 2nd edn., London 1995. Whatever the faults of those books, they have, for me, the singular merit of presenting the subject as I think it to be. Others would not agree with my approach. Among reputable alternatives, the following are noteworthy:

  Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, London 1912.

  A.J. Ayer, The Central Questions of Philosophy, London 1973.

  A.C. Grayling, ed., Philosophy: a Guide through the Subject, Oxford 1995.

  Simon Blackburn, ed., A Dictionary of Philosophy, Oxford 1995.

  For a scrupulous, if occasionally somewhat dated, account of the history of philosophy, the reader should consult the magisterial work by Frederick Copleston, in 12 vols: History of Philosophy, London 1950 onwards.

  INDEX

  Alberti, Leone Battista

  Anselm, St

  Aquinas, St Thomas

  Arendt, Hannah

  Aristotle

  Augustine, St

  Ayer, Sir Alfred

  Bach, J.S.

  Bacon, Sir Francis Baird-Smith, Robin

  Barth, Karl

  Beethoven, Ludwig van

  Berg, Alban

  Bergson, Henri

  Blake, William

  Boethius

  Boole, George

  Brahms, Johannes

  Bruckner, Anton

  Brunelleschi, Filippo

  Burke, Edmund

  Cicero

  Coleridge, S.T.

  Descartes, René

  Dilthey, Wilhelm Donne, John

  Durkheim, Emile

  Eliot, T.S.

  Ellis, Fiona

  Ellis, Havelock

  Feuerbach, L.A.

  Fichte, J.G.

  Foucault, Michel Frege, Gottlob

  Freud, Sigmund

  Goebbels, J.

  Goethe, J.W. von

  Gresham, Sir Thomas

  Haydn, Josef

  Hegel, G.W.F.

  Heraclitus

  Hesiod

  Hume, David

  Huxley, Aldous

  Jeffreys, Sophie

  John the Evangelist, St

  Josquin des Pres

  Kant, Immanuel , BO-1

  Kierkegaard, S.

  Kinsey, Alfred

  Koestler, Arthur

  Krafft-Ebing, R. von

  Leibniz, G.W.

  Lenin, V.I.

  Locke, John

  Lyotard, J.-F.

  McTaggart, J.M.

  Mahler, Gustav

  Mann, Thomas


  Masaryk, T.G.

  Marx, Karl

  Medici, Cosimo di

  Mill, John Stuart

  Milton, John

  Mozart, W.A.

  Nietzsche, F.W.

  Ovid

  Orwell, George

  Parfit, Derek

  Piero della Francesca Plato

  Plotinus

  Posner, Richard Proust, Marcel

  Quine, W.V.

  Rachmaninov, Sergei Ravel, Maurice J.

  Rawls, John

  Rilke, R.M.

  Russell, Bertrand

  Sartre, J.-P.

  Schelling, F.W.J. von

  Schleiermacher, F.D.E.

  Schopenhauer, Arthur

  Shakespeare, W.

  Socrates

  Spengler, Oswald

  Spinoza, Benedict de

  Stirner, Max

  Stravinsky, Igor

  Strawson, Sir Peter