In Our Time

by Melvyn Bragg

  GRAHAM FARMELO: I think Pauli [was], unquestionably, a great physicist. He did say later on, towards the end of his life, that he thought of himself, as a young man, as a revolutionary but, later on, he realised that he was a classicist rather than a revolutionary.

  In the studio afterwards, Melvyn wanted to know more about Pauli’s fixation with the number 137 to the point that, on his deathbed, he was reportedly excited to learn that he was in a room with number 137 on the door. Graham Farmelo told him that this is a number related to the strength of the electromagnetic forces, a pure number that appears, and many people were fixated by it. Melvyn asked for clarification.

  GRAHAM FARMELO: In quantum electrodynamics, there is a scale that has to be set somewhere, and this scale is encoded in a number that happens to have the value empirically of almost 137 – so near to it that people thought it was precisely 137 and that this somehow was significant. And, even today, people say that, if you’re trying to guess a theoretical physicist’s PIN, try 137.

  This prompted Graham Farmelo to tell a joke about Pauli, God and 137, which would be ruined if transcribed here, but can be heard at the end of the podcast. Michela Massimi recalled an odd book that Pauli and Jung wrote together, before, finally, Frank Close, confessing he had never fully understood Pauli’s fascination with the psychic phenomena, remembered one of Pauli’s comments.

  FRANK CLOSE: He’s made a prediction that perhaps we ought to enshrine in the In Our Time archive. He said that, in his view, the science of future reality will neither by psychic nor physical, but somehow both, and somehow neither.

  PHILOSOPHY

  Philosophy has always daunted me. The homespun philosophy of ‘Doc’ in John Steinbeck was a joy, the ruminations of Montaigne are immediately understandable, some Greeks could tell it comprehensively – indeed, Socrates, thought by some to be the originator (through the writing of his admirer, Plato), made it his life’s work to break through obfuscations and reveal the light of logic clearly. Zeno’s paradoxes are brilliant brainteasers. Nietzsche, in parts, is a heady romp to a teenage autodidact. Confucius can be as accessible as a ten times table and the great tradition of Arab philosophers in the Middle Ages speak directly to the reader – and all of these have been included in the philosophy programmes.

  So, when in a magazine interview with an English philosopher, I said, ‘I know damn-all about philosophy,’ a remark that condemned me out of my own mouth, what did I mean? Largely, contemporary philosophy, reaching back three centuries to Descartes’ ‘cogito ergo sum’ (I think therefore I am), gaining traction in the Enlightenment and becoming a specialism that is now, to outsiders like myself, as daunting as physics. Yet its practitioners whom we have had on the programme have been generous in trying to reach across the divide that has undoubtedly developed between philosophy and other thinking and given us a hand. But, to my loss, I find that they are burrowed so deeply in what has become an esoteric pursuit (to many of the rest of us), as mysterious as medieval alchemy and carrying out not dissimilar processes of turning dross into gold.

  I’m sure it all comes down to teaching. If you take up philosophy at or just before university and are well taught, the odds are you will be for ever after blessed with a set of intellectual tools of outstanding pleasure and utility. Even so, I’d guess that rather like, say, Sanskrit scholars, you will be aware that your expertise is not everywhere available and communicable. The Vienna School, so dazzlingly represented in this country by A. J. Ayer, became something of an imperial movement in thought but, I’d guess, only a few of its more memorable catchphrases were ever in general circulation. The work of Bertrand Russell could be said to have bridged the gap like no other. His History of Western Philosophy still reads like a meat-and-potatoes thriller. But his mathematical philosophy is caviar for the general.

  Philosophers themselves have not been kind about philosophers. Cicero wrote, ‘There is no statement so absurd that no philosopher will make it.’ He led the way.

  And then there were the more general thinkers, from Voltaire – with what he unashamedly called his Lettres Philosophiques (which would not pass muster as philosophy today) – to John Gray (his work and various other essays of ideas are equally accessible today and can claim the word ‘philosophy’). Though I doubt this would be allowed into the masonry of today’s hard-core professional philosophers who can make your eyes water.

  And yet, however intractable they seem, we/I have an appetite for ‘real’ philosophers. Like mathematicians and physicists, they are cleverer than the rest of us and, if they need their own language, so be it. One day in the future, we will catch up and all will be revealed.

  For me, there have been golden moments, as when I was discovering string theory in the company of scholars to whom it was as easy as pi, and, yes, I understood it! On that Thursday morning, I was a string theorist for a full twenty minutes. There have been similar epiphanies in discovering modern philosophy.

  I am here talking about philosophers who are leagues away from the thoughtful essayists and intellectual observers of our life and times. The word ‘philosophy’ in the tradition of Voltaire can be applied to the latter, I think. What is often impenetrable is the philosophy so closely taught in universities today, which, sadly, has cut it off from the commonwealth of general knowledge. Temporarily, I hope.

  KANT’S CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE

  Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was one of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, an age in which reason was the dominant force in philosophy as it was in science. Rather than relying on emotions or faith, Kant argued that the best way to distinguish right from wrong was to be rational. He argued that when someone was doing the right thing, that person was doing what was the universal law for everybody. This idea has been influential on moral philosophy ever since and is known as the ‘categorical imperative’. Taking this further, Kant argued that simply existing as a human being was valuable in itself, so that every human owed moral responsibilities to other humans and was owed responsibilities in return, a fundamental aspect of modern human rights.

  With Melvyn to discuss Kant’s categorical imperative were: Alison Hills, professor of philosophy at St John’s College, Oxford; David Oderberg, professor of philosophy at the University of Reading; and John Callanan, senior lecturer in philosophy at King’s College London.

  In his childhood in Königsberg in East Prussia, now Russian Kaliningrad, Kant’s family had fairly modest but reasonably comfortable means; his father was a harness maker, and Kant was devoted to his mother.

  DAVID ODERBERG: He had an education in a Pietist school, the Collegium Fridericianum, which emphasised evangelicalism, fundamentalism, rigorous morality, personal Christianity and so on. He rebelled against that; he found it quite stifling to his independence of mind.

  Kant went on to study at the University of Königsberg where he was to spend the rest of his life, starting off lecturing on science, mathematics, geography, geology, everything under the sun, but philosophy was his main interest and he became a philosopher, studying the branch of philosophy called ethics, or moral philosophy.

  DAVID ODERBERG: [Moral philosophers] are concerned with concepts of right and wrong in the moral sense not just as in ‘What’s the right wallpaper for my bedroom?’ but morally right. ‘What are the right actions that we should carry out? How should we act towards other people? How should we act towards ourselves? How should we develop our character? What is the concept of moral obligation? What are the grounds of right and wrong?’

  Kant was taught in a rationalist tradition at Königsberg, one in which philosophers were extremely optimistic about what human reason could tell us, where we could think for ourselves and could come up with knowledge of God, of our own souls, of our freedom and of what is morally right and wrong. He was also influenced by two philosophers who were much more sceptical about the powers of human reason.

  ALISON HILLS: Hume had ideas about theoretical reason, about these ideas about knowledge of God, thinking
that human reason is much more limited than the rationalist philosophers thought. We just cannot prove the existence of God, and much of what we think of as our knowledge of the world is actually instinct, or habit. We don’t know what the future will be like, there are lots of things that we just don’t know.

  Hume thought that human reason was not a powerful thing at all. Reason is pushed about by our desires. It can tell us how to get what we want, but it cannot tell us what we ought to do, and Kant talked of Hume ‘waking him up from his dogmatic slumber’. He also said that Rousseau was a huge influence on him, in his moral philosophy, in his ideas about equality of humans, and in reason being something that can be destructive or problematic.

  ALISON HILLS: Rousseau talks about how I can be happy with my life, and then I compare myself to other people and think, ‘It is fantastic that I am on the radio, I am so excited. But Melvyn’s on the radio every week. Actually, it is not so great after all!’ These sort of reasonings, giving me these comparisons … I turn out to be less happy than if I hadn’t had reason at all. And Kant says happiness cannot be the basis of our morality.

  Kant’s huge, monumental work of theoretical philosophy was The Critique of Pure Reason and, in that, he asked how we can have knowledge of the world, and among the pages of that really enormous, important, influential book are ideas that were really important later for moral philosophy.

  ALISON HILLS: Kant thinks that there are limits to what we can know about the existence of God, we cannot prove that God exists. He attacks all these arguments that the rational philosophers have put forward, people like Descartes, trying to prove the existence of God, we can’t know that. So we can’t base ethics in knowledge of God, that won’t work. Another very important limit is on human freedom; we cannot know that we are free; we also can’t know that we are not free; we also can’t know that God doesn’t exist.

  These are questions we cannot answer, with reason, and that is where Kant thought practical philosophy could come in.

  In 1785, Kant wrote The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, the focus of this programme. In this, he was trying to extend the Newtonian analysis into philosophy, to extend the use of reason to the questions of morality.

  JOHN CALLANAN: The central questions are: what is moral value? Is there such a thing, and what is it? How would we define it? Once we have defined it, is it possible that we might even realise it in our day-to-day actions? His core idea that begins The Groundwork is that you have to look to the subject, and to the subject’s will, as the source of moral value. The subject being the individual.

  Kant’s question is: what is moral goodness? Moral goodness, he said, has this character of being unconditional. An umbrella is good for keeping dry, if that is what you want, but we think that there is a different category of goodness, such as actions like refraining from torture, which is not just good in this or that circumstance but good in every circumstance for every person, always. He calls these ‘unconditional goods’.

  JOHN CALLANAN: If there is morality, it is something unconditional and he wants to know: what is that? His answer is the only thing that can be a source of unconditional value is a good will, that is the individual subject’s own capacity to form their intentions and plans, to perform actions.

  Will is your capacity to form intentions to perform an action and commit to them. They are your plans. They are the reasoning that you have engaged upon in forming those plans. Where that takes Kant is the idea that there is an inward turn.

  Kant was influenced by the work of Isaac Newton.

  JOHN CALLANAN: We are not looking for moral value now, out in the consequences of our actions. We are not looking for moral value in a divine lawgiver or something like that, or in conventional values. We are looking for moral value inwardly, which is akin to the Lutheran background. We are looking for that very personal, authentic, moral, sincere activity.

  The question then is: if we are now turning towards the subject’s reasoning processes as the source of moral value, how do we get to objectivity? It is for that reason that Kant wanted to appeal to the categorical imperative as a way in which a subject can realise objective truths. It is not enough to have a plan to do the right thing, you have got to do the right thing for the right reasons.

  JOHN CALLANAN: He uses an example of a shopkeeper who doesn’t rip off his customers, he keeps his prices the same for everybody, that’s the right thing to do. But what has been the shopkeeper’s motivation? His motivation is: if it got out that I was ripping people off, I would be ruined. So it is very prudential reasoning. However, another shopkeeper might keep his prices the same simply because it is the right thing to do, it is the fair policy.

  When looking at Kant, David Oderberg suggested, there is the exoteric and the esoteric, where the exoteric is really what John Callanan was talking about – doing things for the right reason.

  DAVID ODERBERG: The deeper motivation in Kant is this idea that morality has to be pure, it has to be purified of anything contingent, anything empirical, anything to do with personal happiness, personal desire, and even things that we normally regard as moral, such as love, sympathy, benevolence, desire for the welfare of others, things that we normally take as moral philosophers to be central to morality, are absolutely contaminating for him of morality.

  The only thing for Kant that is absolutely unconditionally good is a good will. That is not quite the same as intention; the good will is the subject as the personal legislator of morality.

  MELVYN BRAGG: So if the person thinks: if I do this, and everybody does this, we are okay.

  DAVID ODERBERG: He gives examples. The first formulation of the categorical imperative: ‘Act only on those maxims or principles that can be willed to be universal laws of nature for all rational beings.’ I have to ask myself, as a moral legislator, can the principle that I am considering – should I lie, should I do this, should I do that, should I treat people this way or that way, shall I treat myself this way or that way? – can I will that to be a universal law?

  Kant gave examples of what he held to be categorically true, and they were chosen carefully because he thought they were examples of every type of duty, which is his word for the reason to act morally, Alison Hills said. There are duties to other people, and there are duties to yourself. Among those, there is the duty not to make a promise you do not intend to keep; Kant says that we should think what it would be like if everybody acted on that. There is a duty to help others, since another feature of us, he thought, is that we depend on other people.

  ALISON HILLS: There are things that I will for myself that I can’t achieve unless other people help me. So I can’t, at the same time, will that no one ever helps any one. Similarly, I have a duty not to will the maxim of never helping anyone. I have a duty (he calls it an imperfect duty) to help other people sometimes.

  Before Kant, John Callanan continued, there was the Golden Rule of ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’, and there are some similarities here, but Kant is quite emphatic that what he is proposing here is not the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule would encourage him only to act on the desires where he will be happy if someone else were to act on those desires towards him, but that was not really the type of moral psychology Kant thought appropriate.

  JOHN CALLANAN: What if someone has, for example, masochistic desires, he doesn’t mind receiving pain every so often. Does the Golden Rule then sanction that they can inflict pain on others now and again? Or perhaps someone would reason: it is okay for me never to help someone, so long as I never receive any help. That satisfies the Golden Rule as we have just understood it. But Kant thinks it is just obvious that, if someone is in need, drowning in front of you, it is no excuse to say: ‘Well, I wouldn’t accept any help if I were drowning, so therefore I don’t have to offer you any help.’

  We have some basic moral responsibilities, obligations to others, which are issued by reason itself. What if everybody did this? If you believe in reason at all, then yo
u can see that you can use it for moral reasoning also.

  Where, Melvyn asked, was God in all this? For Kant, David Oderberg said, it was not clear. Biographers disagree over whether he was an atheist, an agnostic or a sincere theist, which goes to show how difficult it is to know exactly what Kant did think about God. From his statements in The Groundwork and other writings, we understand him to say we must believe in God.

  DAVID ODERBERG: Why must we believe in God? Well, The Critique of Pure Reason is that we can’t prove the existence of God through theoretical means, those proofs are folly. But we don’t want to give up on God, as it were. So where do we find a foundation for belief in God? We find it in morality, in duty, this wonderful duty that he rhapsodises about in The Critique of Practical Reason, particularly: ‘The starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.’

  How is it possible that this moral law has been given to us from somewhere? It is possible, Kant thought, as we are free, we are able to legislate for ourselves and we are immortal as well. Not that he could theoretically prove it, but we must hope for it and we must postulate the existence of God. Is God the supreme lawgiver? Kant never said.

  DAVID ODERBERG: He wants to extricate himself from the Enlightenment idea; you know, morality is not imposed on us by a divine lawgiver, but somehow God is the backing. Maybe one of the most helpful ways of looking at it – and it may be incorrect, it is just my take on it – I think he identifies God with the moral law.

  Alison Hills turned to the place of happiness in Kant’s moral philosophy. There are lots of moral theories that say happiness is the important thing, and utilitarianism is the key one there. Kant did not think that happiness played that important a role, partly because he thought it was a very elusive goal for us.