by Melvyn Bragg
Seneca published great treatises on mercy in which he was praising Nero, as if Nero really were a merciful emperor, as a devious way of getting him to become that merciful emperor. Seneca probably knew that Nero had already committed his first atrocity, which was the murder of his main rival for the principate. Picking up from that, Jonathan Rée called Seneca the greatest of the Stoics, because he recognised that, if you were in a state of sorrow, there was nothing you could do to control it; the point was not to trick yourself out of your misery, but to conquer the misery.
Melvyn mentioned Marcus Aurelius, who was emperor for about twenty years in the second century AD. He wrote things in his Meditations that were taken up in the nineteenth century in Britain, such as: ‘It is possible to live out your whole life in perfect contentment even though the whole world deafens you with its roar and wild beasts tear apart your body like a lump of clay, for nothing can shake a steady mind of its peaceful repose.’
For all that, in Jonathan Rée’s view, Marcus Aurelius was a tremendous step down intellectually.
JONATHAN RÉE: I find Marcus Aurelius rather prim, simple-minded and Pollyanna-ish. There is one very good sentence in it, which is where he says, ‘If anybody says to you “I will speak to you quite frankly,” then you know that they are a hypocrite, because if they have to say that they are being frank, their frankness can’t come to them naturally, so don’t believe it.’
MELVYN BRAGG: Noted by all broadcasters from now on! ‘To tell you the truth … ’ serves the same purpose, doesn’t it?
Whatever the status of Marcus Aurelius as a philosopher, Melvyn suggested, Stoicism had come a long way from people strolling around in Athens in 300 BC under the Colonnade and discussing how the universe was made, and how matter came into existence, for it to end up with the ruler writing his Meditations. Stoicism had become hugely important in the Roman Empire and, pace Jonathan Rée, Angie Hobbs had a sneaking affection for Marcus Aurelius.
ANGIE HOBBS: The intriguing thing about Stoicism is that it doesn’t just appeal to those in power, it can appeal to those in the very lowest ranks of society as well, and another of the most famous Stoics writing in the Roman imperial period was the freed slave Epictetus, and this was going to be crucial because it is going to lead onto one of the reasons Stoicism is going to appeal to Christianity.
The Stoics were defining virtue and happiness in such a way that it did not matter what your circumstances in life were, it was up to you and your reason to choose whether to accept to live in accordance with the divine plan. With that went the notion of Stoic cosmopolitanism, where all fellow humans were linked, which fitted in nicely with Roman imperial ambitions.
Stoic ideas were very widely read, and very widely known to the early Christian writers, David Sedley said, and those writers read a huge number of works that are now lost. St Augustine was absolutely steeped in Stoicism. Yet, soon after Marcus Aurelius, Stoicism was swallowed up into Platonism.
DAVID SEDLEY: Platonism was a great theoretical edifice that could compete with Christianity, and did for many centuries, and what the Platonists found they could learn from Stoicism was practical ethics. The best writers in antiquity on practical ethics were writing as Stoics, especially if you include Cicero when he was writing in a Stoic voice.
Stoicism was relaunched in Europe after the sixteenth century, Jonathan Rée added, when some people thought that Stoicism was exactly the same as Christianity, even if serious Christians themselves did not.
JONATHAN RÉE: Milton, for example, is absolutely appalled by the fashion for Stoicism. He talks about ‘Stoic pride’. The ideal of Stoicism is self-sufficiency, and Christianity (certainly the kind of Christianity that flourishes after the Reformation) says that there is no such thing as self-sufficiency, there is no such thing as salvation, except through Christ and through the gospels.
There was something deeply pagan about Stoicism, so that, when people started having doubts about Protestant Christianity in the nineteenth century, characters like Matthew Arnold talked of Marcus Aurelius as a great friend to him in times of adversity. Stoicism, Angie Hobbs noted, has been called the ‘religion of the nineteenth-century British public school’. When the Victorians thought the tide of divine providence had gone out, Stoicism left them with some kind of comfort; and, Jonathan Rée thought, all those ideas about empire and self-sacrifice, in the name of some greater good, came in to occupy the space vacated by Christianity.
COMMON SENSE PHILOSOPHY
In the first century BC, the Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero claimed, ‘There is no statement so absurd that no philosopher will make it.’ Indeed, in the history of western thought, philosophers have rarely been credited with having much common sense. In the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon made the point rather poetically, writing, ‘Philosophers make imaginary laws for imaginary commonwealths, and their discourses are as the stars, which give little light because they are so high.’ Samuel Johnson picked up the theme with some pugnacity in 1751, declaring, ‘The public would suffer less present inconvenience from the banishment of philosophers than from the extinction of any common trade.’ But, as Samuel Johnson scribbled his knockdown in The Rambler magazine, the greatest philosophers in Britain were locked in dispute about the very thing he denied them – common sense. It was a dispute about the nature of knowledge and the individuality of man, from which we derive the idea of common sense today. But what is common sense philosophy? Who are its proponents? And how did it emerge from the ties of scepticism, empiricism and rational enquiry running through eighteenth-century Europe?
Roman politician and lawyer Marcus Tullius Cicero.
With Melvyn to discuss common sense philosophy were: A. C. Grayling, master of the New College of the Humanities, London, and professor of philosophy; Melissa Lane, class of 1943 professor at Princeton University; and Alexander Broadie, emeritus professor of logic and rhetoric at the University of Glasgow.
Before moving to the main subject of the programme, A. C. Grayling mentioned an earlier, different connotation of common sense that went back to Aristotle, which was that there must be something in the mind that makes common the data that comes in from all the senses, so we get that unified experience. This ‘common sense in the mind’ makes common cause between all the different sense organs. And that was quite a different sense of common sense to the one we are used to today.
A. C. GRAYLING: What we mean today is: very fundamental, general, much-agreed views, beliefs, concepts about the world, which it would be absolute lunacy to deny or to reject. Common sense being, as it were, the touchstone of the ordinary person in the street.
MELVYN BRAGG: Can you give us some concrete examples, so we know how concrete we are being?
A. C. GRAYLING: Well, that there are physical objects, that we have spent most of our lives near the surface of the earth, that if you put your hand in a flame it will burn and so on.
The seventeenth-century Catholic theologian François Fénelon is often quoted for the way he expressed exactly, in the course of one of his dispositions, what common sense beliefs were.
A. C. GRAYLING: He said common sense notions are those that you cannot contradict or deny, or even, indeed, examine. They are just so basic to us that you can’t call them into question and try to examine them. And, yet, they are premised in all our thinking and doing otherwise. He said that if somebody (and this might be a lunatic or a philosopher, that collection of two types of people) were to call them into question, ‘all I could do is smile’.
In the seventeenth century, some of the great debates of philosophy in antiquity were revived, especially on the idea and nature of knowledge and the grounds of certainty in knowledge. People were looking for an answer to the question: how is it that we can have beliefs about an external world that seem to work, or about moral realities, or the existence of a deity?
A. C. GRAYLING: There were various attempts by well-known philosophers, it might be the empiricists Locke and Berkeley, and, later
on, Hume, to talk about how we acquire knowledge of the world through sensory experience alone, as if our minds were, as Locke began by saying, ‘blank slates on which experience writes’. And there were others who were saying we have got to know certain things at the moment of birth, because we wouldn’t be able do any kind of thinking or experiencing at all.
On innateness, the knowing from birth, Plato thought our immortal souls, when in their disembodied existence, were in immediate contact with all the great truths, and that, when we are embodied, we forget everything. The process of education was about being reminded, at least partially, of some of what we knew in our pre-birth existence.
Moving on to the Cambridge Platonists, Melissa Lane mentioned that there was a second great image in this debate, after the blank-slate idea from Locke.
MELISSA LANE: The Cambridge Platonists countered that with the notion of reason as the candle of the Lord, the image that God has put a candle of understanding into our minds, and we can use that in order to know the world with certainty.
They followed Plato’s idea that the mind already had certain knowledge, but took that more in a Stoic sense in which it was not so much that we were always born with the knowledge, but that our minds had a disposition to form certain judgements and concepts. For example, the Cambridge philosopher Ralph Cudworth took up this idea that the mind could only know what was native and domestic to it, and that enabled us to know God, to know morality.
MELISSA LANE: The main argument was to show the other side, the empiricist, materialist, sensationalist side, that their arguments were faulty. The [Cambridge Platonists’] arguments were to say, for example, how could you possibly ever form, just through sensations alone, how could you possibly form concepts like geometry, for example? You never encounter a perfect triangle in nature, so how would you be able to form the notion of a perfect triangle? That must be an innate idea.
The moral ideas were also seen as being among these innate ideas, so that we were not just machines for processing data coming in from the senses, but we actually had reason in our minds given by God and that included moral notions. Very often, for innatists, the way that we can have a guarantee that our innate ideas are true is because they come from God. If one tried to dispense with that premise, it was harder to make that argument.
In 1690, Locke launched a blistering attack on certain innate-ideas theorists, including the Cambridge Platonists. He asked: if you say that there are these universal ideas that are innate, well, which ideas are they?
MELISSA LANE: He went back to some of the ancient sceptical claims, saying that we look at the diversity of human kind, we look at the diversity of beliefs and senses, and we can’t say that there are these universals. He also thought and argued that believing in innate ideas makes us lazy. It is a cover for just accepting certain kinds of prejudices and accepting what we are told on authority.
Alexander Broadie turned to René Descartes, who wanted to found science upon an absolutely certain base for which he needed some propositions that nobody could deny. He found one that was affirming his own existence, and his philosophy developed from that. This was the ‘cogito ergo sum’ argument in which the crucial word was ‘sum’ – I exist. Descartes was starting in his own head.
ALEXANDER BROADIE: His problem is that this doesn’t seem a very suitable place for founding a basis for science, because the science he was talking about was all going on outside his head, it was about the real world. His big question, philosophically, was how to get outside his head. He managed this by constructing a series of arguments for the existence of a God who has all the perfections, including the moral perfections, and who is therefore not a deceiving God and therefore is a God who would not deceive Descartes into believing certain things when they are completely false.
To reach this, Descartes started with beliefs that, roughly speaking, were common sense beliefs in the form outlined earlier. He realised that such propositions as these were doubtable, as we know very well that sometimes our sensory receptors serve us ill, as well as serving us well, just as our memory can serve us ill, as well as serving us well.
ALEXANDER BROADIE: This means that those sources of information that tell us about the outside world now, and the outside world in the past, are not entirely reliable. He goes on doubting and doubting until he finds something that can no longer be doubted. Because to doubt the proposition in question, namely his own existence, and the fact that he is doubting, is, in effect, to affirm the proposition that he is trying to deny.
MELVYN BRAGG: So, when it comes to the doubt about his own existence, that’s proof that he exists?
ALEXANDER BROADIE: The very fact that he is doubting his own existence proves that there is himself, a thinking thing. Because doubting is a form of thinking, so there is thinking going on and so there must be a thinker who is at it.
Descartes got outside his head by noticing that there were, inside this head of his, a number of ideas. Among these was the idea of God and the question was, then, is it possible to argue, from the idea of God to the reality of God, the existence of God, not just an existence that depends upon an activity of Descartes’ mind but a God who has to exist for Descartes’ mind to exist?
In the case of Locke and Berkeley, who were empiricist philosophers, a different route had to be engineered from the experience inside the head to this external world.
A. C. GRAYLING: Locke tried to do it by saying that there were certain properties of things, what he called their primary qualities, the qualities of objects that you can measure (their position, their dimension, how big they are, how many they are and so on), that give us direct access to objects outside our heads. So there is a bridge, in experience, to the external world.
Scottish philosopher, historian, and economist David Hume.
This left Hume with the very interesting problem that, if you are really going to base everything on your experience, you are going to have to trace every one of your ideas or concepts to (what he called) an impression, either of sense or an internal impression, from which these ideas and concepts originated. His successors and his contemporaries, including Thomas Reid, thought that this landed him in a universal scepticism.
Hume was, on the one hand, committed to the notion that this is how all of our information had to come in. On the other hand, Melissa Lane continued, he was very aware of the ancient sceptical arguments, known as Pyrrhonism, that the senses do give us contradictory information all the time. The mind has to try to sort that out, and create a notion of an external world despite that.
Hume was based in Edinburgh, but there was a philosophy club in Aberdeen with a minister of the kirk there, Thomas Reid (mentioned earlier), and they discussed ideas, particularly Hume’s ideas. Hume’s ideas went down, in a sense, very well indeed in Aberdeen in the Wise Club, because Hume gave them something to argue over.
ALEXANDER BROADIE: There is a famous letter from Reid to Hume in which he tells Hume to keep publishing, ‘because otherwise I will run out of things to talk about’. We have the paradoxical situation that the Wise Club in Aberdeen was a fan club of Hume’s while, at the same time, being totally opposed to his ideas. The reason that they were opposed to his ideas is that the Aberdonians were not sceptics, and they reckoned that Hume was very much a sceptic.
It was not just that Hume could not find a proof of the external world, he was also locked into position by way of the ideas that he had adopted within his own system. In that case, if there was an external world, this had to be a world that was somehow constructed out of impressions and ideas.
ALEXANDER BROADIE: The position that Hume adopts is that what we are pleased to think of as reality is, in fact, almost entirely a construction of our own imagination going to work on the impressions and the ideas that we have. And that means that, in effect, each of us is a creator of the world, we are all of us world-makers, so that the world, the external world, stands to us roughly in the way in which a novel stands to an author.
; On several occasions in his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume spoke of the external world as a fiction, and he meant fiction in the modern sense as something that we have made and that, Alexander Broadie explained, was clearly scepticism in a very tough sense.
A. C. Grayling raised the point that philosophers were interested in whether this was indeed what Hume was trying to say. It may be that Hume was sceptical about the possibility of Rationalist (with a capital R) philosophy – philosophy as an enterprise of reason – to provide us with arguments.
A. C. GRAYLING: He also says in the Treatise that when he gets up from his study desk and goes off to play backgammon, which was his favourite occupation, he couldn’t help but believe that there is an external world; and so what he was implying there was that our human nature actually equips us with convictions about these very, very basic things.
It may then be that Hume was not at all a sceptic about the external world, but about the potentials of reason to prove it.
Reid was very important in this debate and he wrote an influential book in 1764, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense. Hume read a draft of this and then wrote in a letter that Reid was reviving innate ideas.
MELISSA LANE: But that wasn’t at all what Reid took himself to be doing, or not exactly that. Because Reid rejected this very notion of ideas that has been mentioned, the thought that the only thing that is real is the impression in our mind from the outside world. He wanted to restore a direct connection between ourselves and external reality, and he did that by these common sense principles.
For Reid, the common sense principles were principles like, ‘you exist and have a mind’, ‘this table is real’, ‘I exist’ or ‘I can have reason to trust my senses and testimony generally’. Reid picked up on Fénelon’s thought to say that people who denied these really were either lunatics or what he called ‘metaphysical lunatics’; they are mad philosophers. We could not ever reason or think without these premises; we had to accept that this was part of the constitution of our minds.
