A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition

by Unknown Author

  Despite such difficulties, Mill’s theory of liberty has survived in essence to our own day. His influence passed through Sidgwick and Herbert Spencer to provide what has become liberal orthodoxy in jurisprudence. Mill himself was attached to it because of an ideal of self-development. This ideal was suited to the progressive and individualistic spirit of the age, but not obviously compatible with the classical principles of utilitarianism. However liberty is to be curtailed, it also has, for Mill, a positive content. This positive freedom consists in the ability to exercise and extend one’s desires, to conduct those ‘experiments in living’ without which human progress will be abridged or impeded, to fulfil one’s nature through gestures which reflect fundamental choices that are the responsibility of the individual alone. It should be noted that, neither in describing its containment, nor in gesturing towards its positive reward, is Mill referring to ‘freedom’ in any sense other than the political. His discussion proceeds, as it should proceed, independently of that metaphysical issue of free-will, which asks not about the nature of individual fulfilment and social constraint, but about the metaphysical status of those actions and omissions which we recognise as free.

  It is in this theory of positive freedom that Mill’s naivety about human nature is most apparent. Although at one point he makes a hesitant reference to the desires that a person ‘makes his own’, in distinction from those towards which his attitude is reserved, he has no theory which will distinguish the two, or justify our common belief that the one, but not the other, is worthy of satisfaction. When Hegelians and Marxists distinguished the true from the alienated desire, they meant to separate those desires in which a person’s self or personhood finds expression, from those which overwhelm him and constitute themselves as independent forces. Some desires force the self from its sovereign place as subject, and reduce it to the status of an object, victim of a passivity which could in certain circumstances destroy its fulfilment altogether. Mill lost sight of such ideas, having no philosophy of mind that would enable him to describe the human person as a mediator or arbitrator among his own desires. As a result his ‘free development of the individual’ sometimes seems little different from individual anarchy— that is, from the submergence of the personality in whatever impulse might be ready to assume command of it. Such an ideal is not merely repellent. It is not an ideal of freedom at all. Ibsen wrote to Mill’s Norwegian translator of the ‘sagelike philistinism’ of the utilitarian gospel, adding that ‘when I remember that there are authors who write philosophy without knowing Hegel...many things seem permissible’. Certainly, a sympathy for Hegel might have provided some corrective to Mill’s underlying conception of the human spirit.

  Those difficulties were apparent to the literati among Mill’s contemporaries, and Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) had already alerted Victorian readers to the preposterousness of utilitarianism and the theories of freedom which it had engendered. But the antiutilitarians lacked the rival philosophy with which to undermine the empiricist presuppositions of Mill’s thought. Mill possessed an atomistic picture of the human agent, according to which the mind is in some way constituted from individual desires, beliefs and sensations. As long as this picture was the received philosophy, the task of providing an anti-utilitarian account of the moral life seemed impossible. It was not until the late nineteenth century that there began to emerge in Britain the school of philosophical idealists who sought to undermine the outlook of utilitarianism, by replacing its wholly inadequate philosophy of mind.

  British idealism began, like the empiricist philosophy it sought to replace, from intuitions concerning the nature of mind, morality, and the political realm. The first advocate of this idealism was the Oxford philosopher T.H.Green (1836-1882), who reacted strongly against the failure of his contemporaries to take account of Kant’s attack on the metaphysical foundations of empiricism. There could, Green thought, be no serious moral or political philosophy that expressed itself in empiricist terms. He himself attempted to revive the Hegelian conception of the state. For Green the state was not means but end, the citizen’s allegiance being irreducible either to utility or to any fulfilment that could be described in individual terms. (It is interesting to note that Kant’s own ideas on politics read now much more like a premonition of Mill’s than of those views which were ostensibly Kantian in inspiration. Mill would certainly have found little to disagree with in this: ‘a constitution allowing the greatest possible human freedom in accordance with laws by which the freedom of each is made to be consistent with that of all others—I do not speak of the greatest happiness, for this will follow of itself—is...a necessary idea, which must be taken as fundamental not only in first projecting a constitution but in all its laws’ (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B.373).)

  In retrospect it is perhaps not unjust to treat T.H.Green as a gifted but wayward harbinger of his far greater successor among the Oxford idealists, F.H.Bradley (1846-1924). Bradley developed to the full a polemical scepticism and a metaphysical daring which he first exercised against the philosophy of man underlying the utilitarianism of Mill. He embodied his criticisms in a series of related essays published in 1876 as Ethical Studies. Written with vigour and passion, and in a style that T.S.Eliot later praised as a model of English prose, this short work was directed against the theories, the methods and, above all, the self-image of utilitarianism. Behind all utilitarian theory, and all the conceptions of liberty and ‘free development’ with which it had embellished itself, Bradley discerned the same, in his view pernicious, myth. According to this myth, the individual springs into existence fully armed with needs, desires and appetites; he encounters the world as though it were a neutral independent object from which to wrest the satisfactions which he already craves. The satisfaction of the community is simply the sum of the satisfactions of the individuals, while the satisfaction of the individual consists in the satisfaction of the sum of his desires. The whole philosophy, however, is founded on a mistake. This is the mistake of supposing that the individual exists antecedently to the social arrangements and social constraints which make his activity possible.

  For metaphysical reasons, Bradley was later to cast the whole concept of the ‘self’ in serious doubt. At this stage, he was content to point to the fact that, as he saw it, the self, and the moral choice through which it finds expression, is an artifact. Its freedom is not some absolute given, in terms of which the limits of social interference can be drawn; nor is its happiness to be understood atomistically, in terms of the satisfaction of this, that, or however many desires. The individual is as much created by the social arrangement as constrained by it, and the freedom of choice which is the condition of his values is the outcome of a process of elaborate social education. Moreover, the happiness of the individual is not to be understood in terms of his desires and needs, but rather in terms of his values—which is to say, in terms of those of his desires which he incorporates into his self, as representing what he really wants. Such desires are informed by a conception of what is desirable; they are the locus of rational choice, and the instrument of self-identification. All other desires are seen as alien to the self, extorted by external forces, or forced by the lingering influence of the undifferentiated consciousness that the true moral agent attempts to leave behind.

  The vision of self-realisation is given the structure, if not the phraseology, of the Hegelian ‘moment’. In the successive chapters of Ethical Studies Bradley describes, in terms which have all the ambiguity between history and logic, between time and the timeless, that Hegel manipulated so adeptly, the development of the soul towards its ideal of autonomy. One of the stages in this progress, and that which marks the emergence of the true moral consciousness from the anarchy which Mill calls freedom and which Bradley dismisses as a kind of tyranny of appetite, is described, in a famous phrase, as ‘my station and its duties’. This is the point of rest from which true individuality can be attempted, but without which there is neither freed
om nor the lack of it.

  Bradley saw the concepts of obligation and duty as inseparable from a sense of social station (by which he did not mean social class). He argued vehemently against the democratic, reformist view that the sense of obligation could be detached from allegiance to a given social order, or set up as an independent standard in the light of which all order and allegiance could be called in question. On the contrary, this detaching of the sense of obligation merely transplants it into the desert of relativism, where it withers and dies. What results is not the freedom which the reformer craved, but a kind of apathetic anarchy with no clear conception of the goals of life, or the value of attaining them.

  Bradley’s detailed criticisms of utilitarian individualism are persuasive and finely phrased. But it is fair to say that the positive philosophy of Ethical Studies is less clear than it ought to be, and becomes clear only when read in the light of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Bradley, however, often denied that he was a Hegelian, and in his later work attempted to derive an idealist metaphysics more compatible with his sceptical temperament than was the grandiose world-system of Hegel. This he attempted in two books, The Principles of Logic (1883) and Appearance and Reality (1893) and it is fitting to close with a brief discussion of these, since they will serve to introduce the topic of the chapter which follows.

  The Logic was written at a time when its subject matter was being transformed by the work of Frege. While it shares some of its theses with the new logic, its metaphysical intention allies it more with the logic of Hegel than with the scrupulous work that was soon to cast it into shadow. Bradley, arguing for what is known as the coherence theory of truth, wished to assert that no single judgement can express a complete fact. His reasons were not logical but metaphysical. He thought that everything exists in complete interdependence, and that no single fact exists that is not ‘internally related’ to some other fact. An internal relation is one that enters into the understanding of the very terms related. Thus when I say that ‘John is thinking about Rome’, I assert an internal relation between John’s thought and the idea of Rome. I cannot understand the nature of the thought without reference to this idea, which represents its content. Here the word ‘about’ denotes an internal relation. Bradley thought that all relations are internal. To isolate any fact from the whole which is the single true object of our understanding is to set it in an isolation which negates all that constitutes its reality. (This ‘logical’ thesis is the or metaphysical restatement of the social theory of Ethical Studies.)

  In his metaphysical treatise, Appearance and Reality, Bradley set out to demolish all received metaphysical ideas—what he called the metaphysics of common sense. Among these received ideas he singled out the following: that there is a distinction between primary qualities inherent in things, and secondary qualities which merely reflect our ways of knowing things; that there is a distinction in reality between thing, quality and relation; that objects exist in space and time; that there is a subject of experience—the self—who perceives and knows these things. His attack on those conceptions owed much to Hume, and yet was used to support a conclusion that is rightly seen as Hegelian (however much Bradley resented the label).

  Bradley argued that if a thing is to be distinct from its qualities, it cannot be defined in terms of any set of them. It must therefore constitute some peculiar kind of relatedness among qualities. But what is this relatedness that gives unity to the qualities of a thing? Surely it can only be a further quality—a quality of qualities. In our search for the bearer of qualities we find only another quality which they themselves are supposed to bear. Does this not suggest a contradiction at the very heart of the common sense distinction between thing and quality? Bradley went on to expose what he thought to be contradictions intrinsic to all the concepts of our unthinking metaphysics: thing, quality, space, time and self.

  What, then, is real? Not surprisingly, Bradley begins his answer to this question from the thought that ‘ultimate reality is such that it does not contradict itself. Moreover, it must be ‘harmonious’, which means individuated, but undivided, in the manner of an organism. In order to establish this second point Bradley relies on the datum of the moral life, as he had described it. ‘Feeling’—which provides our fundamental intuition of the nature of reality—has a content which is at once manifold and unitary. But in itself it is innocent: it does not divide and mutilate the world of knowledge but finds itself in undifferentiated harmony with it. Thought, by making judgements and seeking knowledge, must inevitably fragment what is innocently known. In order to overcome this destructive tendency, thought must be provided with system. It is only system that enables us to grasp the whole of things and so rediscover at the level of consciousness what we lost in becoming conscious, but knew intuitively before.

  System gives us knowledge of the absolute, which is ‘everything that is the case seen as constituting a single self-differentiating system’. Bradley is careful to argue that the absolute is not something transcendent: it names a way of seeing, and not a particular thing that is seen. Hence appearance is not unreal, it is only partial. What is needed to complete our partial knowledge is not the transcendence of appearance towards some Kantian thing-in-itself, but rather the summarising of experience within a systematic mode of knowledge which restores its totality.

  These ideas of Bradley’s—in particular those concerning the unreality of space and time—were soon to be attacked in the name of common sense by Russell and Moore. But what gave Russell and Moore their critical power was not some persuasive rival vision of metaphysical truth, but rather the new mode of philosophical analysis which rested, not so much on empiricist theory, as on logic, conceived as a formal science. In order to understand the consequent revolution in philosophy we must, therefore, first turn our attention to the new logic, and to its principal discoverer, Gottlob Frege.

  Part Five - Recent Philosophy

  17 - FREGE

  There is no greater proof of the fact that the history of philosophy needs constantly to be rewritten than the change in perspective that has followed the recent discovery of the importance of Gottlob Frege. Born in 1848 but bearing no marks of the political upheavals of that year, Frege lived and taught in Jena from 1874 to 1914, leading a secluded scholarly life, detached from worldly affairs. When he died in 1925 one modern logician wrote,1 ‘I was an undergraduate, already interested in logic, and I think that I should have taken notice if there had been any speeches or articles published that year in his honour. But I can recollect nothing of the kind.’

  Despite this neglect (he lived in the shadow of the new phenomenology) Frege secured the admiration of Russell, and of Wittgenstein, each of whose thought was formed and transformed by wrestling with problems and conceptions which he had bequeathed to them. In his own country his work went unnoticed, and only during the last twenty years has it become apparent that Frege was not merely the true founder of modern logic, but also one of the greatest philosophers of the late nineteenth century. He had not the range of Mill, Brentano or Husserl; but what he lacked in extensiveness he made up for in depth, and his occurrence at a time when philosophy stood in sore need of a mind that could focus on fundamental questions guaranteed both his eventual reputation and his contemporary neglect.

  Frege’s achievements were, first, to overthrow the Aristotelian logic that, in one form or another, had dominated Western philosophy since ancient times; secondly, to lay the foundations for the modern philosophy of language; thirdly, to show the deep continuity between logic and mathematics. Together these achievements provided the basis for modern analytical philosophy, and also for the philosophy of Wittgenstein, both in its earlier and in its later versions. In the hands of Russell and Wittgenstein, the Fregean conception of logic and mathematics was to provide a new epistemology, a new metaphysics and a new vision of the nature of philosophical argument. I shall perforce refer to Russell only rarely: as a character he is well enough known, and his copious powers of sel
f-advertisement might perhaps suffice to justify my perfunctory treatment of his philosophy. However, much of what I attribute to Frege might equally be attributed to Russell. They laid the foundations of modern logic together (though largely independently), and each used those foundations to explore the principles of mathematical thought. I choose to concentrate on Frege because while, in the long run, his influence has not proved more decisive, his thought was deeper and more exact.

  The ground was prepared for Frege’s logic by certain discoveries in the foundations of mathematics, and in the techniques of formalisation. But the new logic arose also from Frege’s sense of the deep connection between logic and metaphysics, and of the philosophical errors that had been per-petuated in the name of logic. In particular Frege believed that the Kantian theory of mathematics—that all mathematical truth is synthetic a priori—was mistaken, and could be shown to be mistaken by the adoption of a logic free from the Aristotelian preconceptions that had mesmerised Kant. Frege offered to demonstrate that arithmetical truth is not synthetic but analytic, in the sense of following from laws of logic so basic that they cannot be denied without self-contradiction. Frege was a kind of ‘Platonist’; he believed in a realm of mathematical truth independent of the human capacity to gain knowledge of it. Nevertheless, as a result of his ideas, the science of mathematics was soon to be construed, not as the exploration of a realm of timeless entities, nor as a prime example of synthetic a priori knowledge, but as the projection into logical space of our own propensities towards coherent argument. What appears as an independent realm of mathematical entities or mathematical truth, is simply a shadowy representation of our own intellectual powers. The number one is no more an entity than is the average man, and the laws of mathematics no more truths about an independent world than the assertion that ‘all bachelors are unmarried’.