A History of Western Philosophy

by Bertrand Russell

  To say that the general will is always right is only to say that, since it represents what is in common among the self-interests of the various citizens, it must represent the largest collective satisfaction of self-interest possible to the community. This interpretation of Rousseau’s meaning seems to accord with his words better than any other that I have been able to think of.*

  In Rousseau’s opinion, what interferes in practice with the expression of the general will is the existence of subordinate associations within the State. Each of these will have its own general will, which may conflict with that of the community as a whole. “It may then be said that there are no longer as many votes as there are men, but only as many as there are associations.” This leads to an important consequence: “It is therefore essential, if the general will is to be able to express itself, that there should be no partial society within the State, and that each citizen should think only his own thoughts: which was indeed the sublime and unique system established by the great Lycurgus.” In a footnote, Rousseau supports his opinion with the authority of Machiavelli.

  Consider what such a system would involve in practice. The State would have to prohibit churches (except a State Church), political parties, trade-unions, and all other organizations of men with similar economic interests. The result is obviously the Corporate or Totalitarian State, in which the individual citizen is powerless. Rousseau seems to realize that it may be difficult to prohibit all associations, and adds, as an afterthought, that, if there must be subordinate associations, then the more there are the better, in order that they may neutralize each other.

  When, in a later part of the book, he comes to consider government, he realizes that the executive is inevitably an association having an interest and a general will of its own, which may easily conflict with that of the community. He says that while the government of a large State needs to be stronger than that of a small one, there is also more need of restraining the government by means of the Sovereign. A member of the government has three wills: his personal will, the will of the government, and the general will. These three should form a crescendo, but usually in fact form a diminuendo. Again: “Everything conspires to take away from a man who is set in authority over others the sense of justice and reason.”

  Thus in spite of the infallibility of the general will, which is “always constant, unalterable, and pure,” all the old problems of eluding tyranny remain. What Rousseau has to say on these problems is either a surreptitious repetition of Montesquieu, or an insistence on the supremacy of the legislature, which, if democratic, is identical with what he calls the Sovereign. The broad general principles with which he starts, and which he presents as if they solved political problems, disappear when he condescends to detailed considerations, towards the solution of which they contribute nothing.

  The condemnation of the book by contemporary reactionaries leads a modern reader to expect to find in it a much more sweeping revolutionary doctrine than it in fact contains. We may illustrate this by what is said about democracy. When Rousseau uses this word, he means, as we have already seen, the direct democracy of the ancient City State. This, he points out, can never be completely realized, because the people cannot be always assembled and always occupied with public affairs. “Were there a people of gods, their government would be democratic. So perfect a government is not for men.”

  What we call democracy he calls elective aristocracy; this, he says, is the best of all governments, but it is not suitable to all countries. The climate must be neither very hot nor very cold; the produce must not much exceed what is necessary, for, where it does, the evil of luxury is inevitable, and it is better that this evil should be confined to a monarch and his Court than diffused throughout the population. In virtue of these limitations, a large field is left for despotic government. Nevertheless his advocacy of democracy, in spite of its limitations, was no doubt one of the things that made the French government implacably hostile to the book; the other, presumably, was the rejection of the divine right of kings, which is implied in the doctrine of the Social Contract as the origin of government.

  The Social Contract became the Bible of most of the leaders in the French Revolution, but no doubt, as is the fate of Bibles, it was not carefully read and was still less understood by many of its disciples. It reintroduced the habit of metaphysical abstractions among the theorists of democracy, and by its doctrine of the general will it made possible the mystic identification of a leader with his people, which has no need of confirmation by so mundane an apparatus as the ballot-box. Much of its philosophy could be appropriated by Hegel* in his defence of the Prussian autocracy. Its first-fruits in practice was the reign of Robespierre; the dictatorships of Russia and Germany (especially the latter) are in part an outcome of Rousseau’s teaching. What further triumphs the future has to offer to his ghost I do not venture to predict.

  CHAPTER XX

  Kant

  A. GERMAN IDEALISM IN GENERAL

  PHILOSOPHY in the eighteenth century was dominated by the British empiricists, of whom Locke, Berkeley, and Hume may be taken as the representatives. In these men there was a conflict, of which they themselves appear to have been unaware, between their temper of mind and the tendency of their theoretical doctrines. In their temper of mind they were socially minded citizens, by no means self-assertive, not unduly anxious for power, and in favour of a tolerant world where, within the limits of the criminal law, every man could do as he pleased. They were good-natured, men of the world, urbane and kindly.

  But while their temper was social, their theoretical philosophy led to subjectivism. This was not a new tendency; it had existed in late antiquity, most emphatically in Saint Augustine; it was revived in modern times by Descartes’s cogito, and reached a momentary culmination in Leibniz’s windowless monads. Leibniz believed that everything in his experience would be unchanged if the rest of the world were annihilated; nevertheless he devoted himself to the reunion of the Catholic and Protestant Churches. A similar inconsistency appears in Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.

  In Locke, the inconsistency is still in the theory. We saw in an earlier chapter that Locke says, on the one hand: “Since the mind, in all its thoughts and reasonings, hath no other immediate object but its own ideas, which it alone does or can contemplate, it is evident that our knowledge is only conversant about them.” And: “Knowledge is the perception of the agreement or disagreement of two ideas.” Nevertheless, he maintains that we have three kinds of knowledge of real existence: intuitive, of our own; demonstrative, of God’s; and sensitive, of things present to sense. Simple ideas, he maintains, are “the product of things operating on the mind in a natural way.” How he knows this, he does not explain; it certainly goes beyond “the agreement or disagreement of two ideas.”

  Berkeley took an important step towards ending this inconsistency. For him, there are only minds and their ideas; the physical external world is abolished. But he still failed to grasp all the consequences of the epistemological principles that he took over from Locke. If he had been completely consistent, he would have denied knowledge of God and of all minds except his own. From such denial he was held back by his feelings as a clergyman and as a social being.

  Hume shrank from nothing in pursuit of theoretical consistency, but felt no impulse to make his practice conform to his theory. Hume denied the Self, and threw doubt on induction and causation. He accepted Berkeley’s abolition of matter, but not the substitute that Berkeley offered in the form of God’s ideas. It is true that, like Locke, he admitted no simple idea without an antecedent impression, and no doubt he imagined an “impression” as a state of mind directly caused by something external to the mind. But he could not admit this as a definition of “impression,” since he questioned the notion of “cause.” I doubt whether either he or his disciples were ever clearly aware of this problem as to impressions. Obviously, on his view, an “impression” would have to be defined by some intrinsic character distinguishing it fro
m an “idea,” since it could not be defined causally. He could not therefore argue that impressions give knowledge of things external to ourselves, as had been done by Locke, and, in a modified form, by Berkeley. He should, therefore, have believed himself shut up in a solipsistic world, and ignorant of everything except his own mental states and their relations.

  Hume, by his consistency, showed that empiricism, carried to its logical conclusion, led to results which few human beings could bring themselves to accept, and abolished, over the whole field of science, the distinction between rational belief and credulity. Locke had foreseen this danger. He puts into the mouth of a supposed critic the argument: “If knowledge consists in agreement of ideas, the enthusiast and the sober man are on a level.” Locke, living at a time when men had grown tired of “enthusiasm,” found no difficulty in persuading men of the validity of his reply to this criticism. Rousseau, coming at a moment when people were, in turn, getting tired of reason, revived “enthusiasm,” and, accepting the bankruptcy of reason, allowed the heart to decide questions which the head left doubtful. From 1750 to 1794, the heart spoke louder and louder; at last Thermidor put an end, for a time, to its ferocious pronouncements, so far at least as France was concerned. Under Napoleon, heart and head were alike silenced.

  In Germany, the reaction against Hume’s agnosticism took a form far more profound and subtle than that which Rousseau had given to it. Kant, Fichte, and Hegel developed a new kind of philosophy, intended to safeguard both knowledge and virtue from the subversive doctrines of the late eighteenth century. In Kant, and still more in Fichte, the subjectivist tendency that begins with Descartes was carried to new extremes; in this respect, there was at first no reaction against Hume. As regards subjectivism, the reaction began with Hegel, who sought, through his logic, to establish a new way of escape from the individual into the world.

  The whole of German idealism has affinities with the romantic movement. These are obvious in Fichte, and still more so in Schelling; they are least so in Hegel.

  Kant, the founder of German idealism, is not himself politically important, though he wrote some interesting essays on political subjects. Fichte and Hegel, on the other hand, both set forth political doctrines which had, and still have, a profound influence upon the course of history. Neither can be understood without a previous study of Kant, whom we shall consider in this chapter.

  There are certain common characteristics of the German idealists, which can be mentioned before embarking upon detail.

  The critique of knowledge, as a means of reaching philosophical conclusions, is emphasized by Kant and accepted by his followers. There is an emphasis upon mind as opposed to matter, which leads in the end to the assertion that only mind exists. There is a vehement rejection of utilitarian ethics in favour of systems which are held to be demonstrated by abstract philosophical arguments. There is a scholastic tone which is absent in the earlier French and English philosophers; Kant, Fichte, and Hegel were university professors, addressing learned audiences, not gentlemen of leisure addressing amateurs. Although their effects were in part revolutionary, they themselves were not intentionally subversive; Fichte and Hegel were very definitely concerned in the defence of the State. The lives of all of them were exemplary and academic; their views on moral questions were strictly orthodox. They made innovations in theology, but they did so in the interests of religion.

  With these preliminary remarks, let us turn to the study of Kant.

  B. OUTLINE OF KANT’S PHILOSOPHY

  Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is generally considered the greatest of modern philosophers. I cannot myself agree with this estimate, but it would be foolish not to recognize his great importance.

  Throughout his whole life, Kant lived in or near Königsberg, in East Prussia. His outer life was academic and wholly uneventful, although he lived through the Seven Years’ War (during part of which the Russians occupied East Prussia), the French Revolution, and the early part of Napoleon’s career. He was educated in the Wolfian version of Leibniz’s philosophy, but was led to abandon it by two influences: Rousseau and Hume. Hume, by his criticism of the concept of causality, awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers—so at least he says, but the awakening was only temporary, and he soon invented a soporific which enabled him to sleep again. Hume, for Kant, was an adversary to be refuted, but the influence of Rousseau was more profound. Kant was a man of such regular habits that people used to set their watches by him as he passed their doors on his constitutional, but on one occasion his time-table was disrupted for several days; this was when he was reading Emile. He said that he had to read Rousseau’s books several times, because, at a first reading, the beauty of the style prevented him from noticing the matter. Although he had been brought up as a pietist, he was a Liberal both in politics and in theology; he sympathized with the French Revolution until the Reign of Terror, and was a believer in democracy. His philosophy, as we shall see, allowed an appeal to the heart against the cold dictates of theoretical reason, which might, with a little exaggeration, be regarded as a pedantic version of the Savoyard Vicar. His principle that every man is to be regarded as an end in himself is a form of the doctrine of the Rights of Man; and his love of freedom is shown in his saying (about children as well as adults) that “there can be nothing more dreadful than that the actions of a man should be subject to the will of another.”

  Kant’s early works are more concerned with science than with philosophy. After the earthquake of Lisbon he wrote on the theory of earthquakes; he wrote a treatise on wind, and a short essay on the question whether the west wind in Europe is moist because it has crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Physical geography was a subject in which he took great interest.

  The most important of his scientific writings is his General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755), which anticipates Laplace’s nebular hypothesis, and sets forth a possible origin of the solar system. Parts of this work have a remarkable Miltonic sublimity. It has the merit of inventing what proved a fruitful hypothesis, but it does not, as Laplace did, advance serious arguments in its favour. In parts it is purely fanciful, for instance in the doctrine that all planets are inhabited, and that the most distant planets have the best inhabitants—a view to be praised for its terrestrial modesty, but not supported by any scientific grounds.

  At a time when he was more troubled by the arguments of sceptics than he was earlier or later, he wrote a curious work called Dreams of a Ghost-seer, Illustrated by the Dreams of Metaphysics (1766). The “ghost-seer” is Swedenborg, whose mystical system had been presented to the world in an enormous work, of which four copies were sold, three to unknown purchasers and one to Kant. Kant, half seriously and half in jest, suggests that Swedenborg’s system, which he calls “fantastic,” is perhaps no more so than orthodox metaphysics. He is not, however, wholly contemptuous of Swedenborg. His mystical side, which existed though it did not much appear in his writings, admired Swedenborg, whom he calls “very sublime.”

  Like everybody else at that time, he wrote a treatise on the sublime and the beautiful. Night is sublime, day is beautiful; the sea is sublime, the land is beautiful; man is sublime, woman is beautiful; and so on.

  The Encyclopedia Britannica remarks that “as he never married, he kept the habits of his studious youth to old age.” I wonder whether the author of this article was a bachelor or a married man.

  Kant’s most important book is The Critique of Pure Reason, (1st edition 1781 ; 2nd edition 1787.) The purpose of this work is to prove that, although none of our knowledge can transcend experience, it is nevertheless in part a priori and not inferred inductively from experience. The part of our knowledge which is a priori embraces, according to him, not only logic, but much that cannot be included in logic or deduced from it. He separates two distinctions which, in Leibniz, are confounded. On the one hand there is the distinction between “analytic” and “synthetic” propositions; on the other hand, the distinction between “a priori” and “empirical”
propositions. Something must be said about each of these distinctions.

  An “analytic” proposition is one in which the predicate is part of the subject; for instance, “a tall man is a man,” or “an equilateral triangle is a triangle.” Such propositions follow from the law of contradiction; to maintain that a tall man is not a man would be self-contradictory. A “synthetic” proposition is one that is not analytic. All the propositions that we know only through experience are synthetic. We cannot, by a mere analysis of concepts, discover such truths as “Tuesday was a wet day” or “Napoleon was a great general.” But Kant, unlike Leibniz and all other previous philosophers, will not admit the converse, that all synthetic propositions are only known through experience. This brings us to the second of the above distinctions.

  An “empirical” proposition is one which we cannot know except by the help of sense-perception, either our own or that of some one else whose testimony we accept. The facts of history and geography are of this sort; so are the laws of science, whenever our knowledge of their truth depends on observational data. An “a priori” proposition, on the other hand, is one which, though it may be elicited by experience, is seen, when known, to have a basis other than experience. A child learning arithmetic may be helped by experiencing two marbles and two other marbles, and observing that altogether he is experiencing four marbles. But when he has grasped the general proposition “two and two are four” he no longer requires confirmation by instances; the proposition has a certainty which induction can never give to a general law. All the propositions of pure mathematics are in this sense a priori.