A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein

by Roger Scruton

  The two major Enlightenment thinkers that I shall discuss—Hume and Kant—are among the greatest of philosophers. But I shall discuss them independently of the intellectual ferment from which they grew, both because they were superior to it, and also because their thought has a philosophical significance that is wholly misunderstood when they are seen merely as manifestations of a spirit which, being common to so many, retains the individual mark of no one in particular. I shall ignore the encyclopaedists, the French materialists and the great tradition of German academic philosophy which created the bridge between Leibniz and Kant. In all these cases philosophical ideas which were elsewhere given complete elaboration found more confused expression. The astonishing fact is not the depth of the thinking involved, but rather the remarkable character of an age that could generate the appearance of depth in so many.

  But while it is possible to study the history of epistemology and metaphysics in such a way, concentrating only on the greatest thinkers, it is necessary to stray a little from the path of genius in order to discuss the history of philosophy’s subordinate branches. This is particularly true of ethics, aesthetics and political philosophy. I shall touch on the first of these in the present chapter, and the third in chapter 14. In both cases I shall be representing a characteristic aspect of Enlightenment thought.

  With the advance of science came the hope for a ‘moral’ science. This hope achieved early expression in Descartes’ Treatise on the Passions (1649), a work which profoundly influenced Spinoza. Spinoza’s own deductively conceived system of ethics, with its startling conclusions and its remote, noble vision of human things, served as a model for many later thinkers. Its appeal rested not merely in its reinstatement of a Platonic ideal of man as freed and fulfilled in thought, capable of rising above the vicissitudes of nature through understanding alone; but also in the fact that its conclusions seemed to depend on no appeal to revealed religion, or to any other moral authority that was not already contained in human reason. The vision of ‘each man his own moralist’ was to achieve its most profound and powerful statement in the philosophy of Kant. Before then, other thinkers were radically to change the subject of ethics, by recasting it in empiricist terms. They attempted to combine this outlook with the ideal of a science of human nature from which the precepts of ethics would follow, not as a matter of willing obedience, but as a matter of course. In other words, there arose the general impetus towards an ethical ‘naturalism’.1 Naturalism is the theory that the ideal of the good life is to be derived not from divine precept but from a description of human nature. Such a theory aims to show that evil is against nature, while good fulfils it.

  Ethical naturalism found its most important expression in Britain, giving rise to the school of ‘British Moralists’, whose modesty of style and lack of metaphysical pretension to some extent conceal the seminal character of their philosophy. Their thoughts began to take shape under the influence of Locke, and in the writings of a man whose family had already enjoyed the intimacy and instruction of that philosopher. Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713), published his Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit in 1699 and his Characteristics in 1711. The latter was one of the most popular philosophical works of the eighteenth century and saw eleven editions before 1790. Shaftesbury was the founder of the empiricist ‘moral science’ and of the modern study of aesthetics. His influence on the French and German Enlightenment was considerable. Even at the end of the eighteenth century Herder could write that ‘this virtuoso of humanity... has had a marked influence on the best minds of our century, on those who have striven with determination and sincerity for the true, the beautiful and the good’. However, the aspect of his thought which is now of greatest interest is not that which was most immediately influential. In his earlier work Shaftesbury attempted to combine the Lockean theory of the workings of the human mind with many of the arguments of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and it is this aspect of Shaftesbury’s philosophy which we need to consider.

  In Aristotle the project of deriving an account of the good life from a description of human nature had found its finest ancient expression. At first sight it may seem that Shaftesbury was by no means original in his attempt to revive the outlook (if not all the conclusions) of Aristotle. The few philosophical achievements of Renaissance humanism had been in the field of ethics, and in almost every case the inspiration had been Aristotelian. Even Aquinas had advocated ethical ideas which stemmed directly from the conceptions of Aristotle, and when Count Baldassar Castiglione (1478-1529), in his Book of the Courtier (1528), gave to these ideas the humanistic bias which they naturally favour, he changed the morality of scholasticism only in two particulars. He neglected to mention God, and at the same time he shifted the aims of ethics away from a description of the good, towards a description of the noble.

  Shaftesbury’s Aristotelianism was, however, new. It shared the sceptical temper, and the search for rigorous foundations, which characterise empiricism. It also sought to detach the conclusions of ethics from this or that particular style of life, this or that set of manners, these or those protective institutions. It was, in intention, ‘institution-free’, in a way that the ethics of the humanists was not. Hence Shaftesbury’s description of the good life was derived from qualities of human nature which he regarded as more or less common to all, and definitive of a human norm. Like Aristotle, he was concerned to found his moral system not so much in a conception of the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ of particular actions, as in a notion of the ‘goodness’ or ‘badness’ of the characters which generate them. And, again like Aristotle, he regarded good character, or virtue, as the sole and sufficient cause of happiness. Happiness is the state in which our nature is in harmony with itself; the whole character is involved in this harmony, which is a form of proportion in the soul. Our love of beauty is therefore as much excited by the perception of happiness (or virtue) as is our natural sympathy, and it is as much given to human nature to admire virtue in others as to find fulfilment in pursuing it oneself.

  But what does virtue consist in? Again Shaftesbury’s account is Aristotelian: virtue consists in a certain disposition of character, in which reason has governance over the passions (the ‘affections’). This governance is not the suppression of passion but the securing of its ‘right application’. The virtuous person is not the one who feels no hatred, love, anger or contempt. He is the one who is disposed to feel these passions only towards their appropriate objects—towards those things which are worthy of hatred, love, anger and contempt. Such a disposition requires a steady will and resolution, but it is not a form of unfeelingness, or blind obedience. The whole character is involved in virtue; hence any truly wicked act, since its wickedness displays the vice which was its motive, implicates the character of the agent.

  What is this ‘reason’ that has or should have governance over the affections? Shaftesbury’s answer to this question is not clear, but his awareness of the need for an answer, and the terms in which he posed the question, were to provide the structure of moral philosophy as it developed to its culmination in Kant. The principal operation of reason in this respect is connected with ‘conscience’. Shaftesbury argued that no morality could be founded in religious obedience, or piety. On the contrary, a person is motivated to such obedience only because conscience tells him that the divine being is worthy of it. Shaftesbury wavered between seeing the origin of conscience in reason, and seeing it in a specific moral feeling. This feeling he also regarded as natural, being a kind of internal reflection of our social sense. It is because we are social beings that we acquire the sense of right and wrong. Conscience therefore reflects the nature not of this or that particular human agent, but rather of our common humanity. The dispositions of the virtuous are the fulfilment of this common nature, and must therefore form themselves in harmony with it. The principle of harmony is sympathy, which is the ability to feel the sufferings and joys of each individual as a part of some greater whole.
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  This shift in emphasis from reason to sympathy as the ruling principle in moral thought was characteristic. It shows Shaftesbury’s reluctance to carry his arguments through, or fully to define his terms. It also shows his awareness of the complexity of the moral and emotional life of human beings. This awareness was to gain strength and vitality in subsequent thinkers. Shaftesbury had perceived two important truths: first, morality is both peculiar to rational beings and also integral to their entire nature; secondly, morality has an intimate relation to the emotions, at the heart of which lies man’s perception of his nature as a social being. To which sphere, then, should morality be assigned: the rational or the emotional? Shaftesbury’s hesitation is in part an expression of a tardy perception that the distinction between these is as unclear as the definition of either, and that no advance in the ‘moral sciences’ will be possible without a clearer account of how reason and emotion interact.

  As Kant was later to perceive, Shaftesbury’s problems arose in the course of an attempt to recapture and delimit the conception of ‘practical reason’ which had troubled Aristotle. But it was not until Kant that this notion was once again fully to come into the foreground of moral thought. The intervening period, which led from Shaftesbury to Hume, was characterised by further attempts to explore the structure of the ‘human nature’ from which morality derives. The most interesting of these attempts were those of Hutcheson (1694-1746), Butler (16921752) and Adam Smith (1723-1790), to the first two of which I shall devote the remainder of this chapter.

  Francis Hutcheson’s Inquiry Concerning Moral Good and Evil was published in 1725. It shows everywhere the influence of Shaftesbury, adopting a neo-Aristotelian view of human virtue, and directing many of its individual arguments against the seventeenth-century moral sceptics (such as Hobbes and Mandeville) whose writings had equally called forth the opprobrium of Shaftesbury. Nevertheless it is marked by certain important original features. Hutcheson saw in ethics the basis of a new epistemological problem. Putting the point in terms of Lockean empiricism, he notes that, since our language contains terms like ‘moral good’ and ‘moral evil’, we ought to be able to locate the ideas which such words stand for, and the qualities in objects which those ideas represent. We must ask ourselves what foundation there is in nature for this distinction of words. As he recognised, such a question generates a problem of epistemology which for the empiricist is particularly acute. What is the experience, or set of experiences, from which our moral ideas derive? If we can say nothing about those experiences, then we have a problem not just about the truth or falsehood of moral judgements, but about their very meaningfulness.

  Hutcheson began from the distinction between self-interest and morality. He argued that Shaftesbury’s view—that self-interest alone suffices to persuade the reasonable person to virtue—is fallacious. Shaftesbury had ignored the completely different character of the motives of morality and self-interest, and the different manner in which we are affected when we perceive the moral and the non-moral reality of things. Hutcheson now faced a question: how do we know that some action, or character, is morally good, if this is not revealed to us by the calculations of self-interest? He felt that he could not derive an answer by referring merely to ordinary capacities of sense-perception: goodness is not, as one might say, a ‘perceivable property’ of the world, in the way that redness is. For one thing, as Shaftesbury had also observed, only rational beings have moral views. Yet there is nothing absurd in supposing that a non-rational being should have all the sensory capacities—sight, touch, hearing, etc.—which characterise us. On the other hand, Hutcheson was reluctant to allow that reason alone could determine what is good or bad. He anticipated Hume’s view that reason can deliver to us no more than the relations among ideas. Hence it provides no insight into the ends of our conduct, however useful it might be in calculating the means to them. Moreover, Hutcheson was thoroughly persuaded not only of the falsehood of rationalist metaphysics, but also of the falsehood of an implication contained in it. This implication is almost explicit in the ethics of Spinoza (whose ‘systematic’ approach to ethics Hutcheson nevertheless sought to emulate). It seems that, on the rationalist view, the ordinary unthinking person could only have confused and indefinite moral convictions, and that it is an unlikely accident if the opinions of the normal active majority happen to coincide. This consequence of rationalism was rejected by all the British moralists as palpably absurd.

  Hutcheson, despite his empiricist bias and the consequent emphasis on the question ‘How do I know?’, shared with other eighteenth-century naturalists the view that there is a common body of moral knowledge, and that it is available to everyone whatever the state of their education. It is part of human nature to acquire and exercise this body of moral knowledge. How then is it acquired? Hutcheson’s answer is that we each possess a moral sense, which compellingly delivers to us, through experience, the moral ideas that prompt our actions. Hence these ideas are intelligible in the manner of all ideas—by virtue of an intrinsic connection with the experience from which they derive. This postulation of a moral ‘sense’ explains various facts which would otherwise be mysterious. First, it explains why moral opinions are common to people of all periods and cultures, local variations being explicable not as fundamental differences of outlook but as reflections of the varying circumstances with which the common moral outlook is combined. Secondly, it explains why these opinions are aroused in us spontaneously upon the perception of good or evil acts. They are aroused, as it were, against our will: faced with an outrageous act I am stirred to indignation. This is not something I do but something that happens to me. (‘Passivity’ is a feature of sensory perception made prominent by Berkeley and later by Hume.) Moreover it seems that the moral sense cannot be overcome by self-interest or passion: it always tells me what is right or wrong, much as my eyes always tell me what is there, whatever my individual desires, projects or emotions.

  It is clear that the moral-sense theory is able to reconcile the objectivity of moral judgement with empiricist conceptions of meaning. Nevertheless it leaves many questions unanswered. For example, it seems odd to speak of a ‘sense’, when there is no particular organ involved in the perception. Moreover, the problem remains of explaining why only rational beings—beings with certain non-sensory powers—are capable of exercising moral judgement. What is it about a dog that makes it impossible for it to perceive these apparently evident properties of the actions which we call right and wrong? Moreover, how is it that we can engage in and be persuaded by moral argument? We do not argue someone into perceiving the colour of a thing, nor would we try to do so. What is the force, then, of referring to a ‘sense’ when the rational capacities seem so integral to its exercise?

  Hutcheson did not address himself to all those problems: nevertheless, he rightly felt that the moral sense could not be taken as a brute capacity—like the capacity to hear, for example—which we might have lacked while being in every other respect rational. He recognised that the moral sense has a further basis in rational nature, and its fundamental working can be understood only in terms of that basis. Hence Hutcheson, like Shaftesbury, had recourse to a general theory of benevolence. He argued that the disposition of human beings to feel pained at each other’s sufferings and to rejoice at each other’s delights is, in so far as it exists, the motivating force behind both the perception of moral qualities and the actions which are precipitated by it. The disposition to sympathise in these and all the many other ways with which we are familiar is part of what later philosophers were to call the ‘social’ nature of humankind. The British empiricists deserve credit for this, if for no other thing, that they so described the moral life as to make it clear that there could be no moral theory, whether sceptical or otherwise, that treated the individual as an isolated unit, in only accidental relation to his fellows. The concepts of ‘sympathy’ and benevolence became basic to moral theory, until Kant suddenly swept them aside in a theory of ethics t
hat made not only these, but every other variety of emotion, utterly irrelevant.

  It is at this point that the moral-sense theory becomes unsatisfactory, however. Benevolence may be a natural disposition, but it is not clear how it can provide the foundation of a sense. There are no objects, states of affairs or whatever which it is proper to benevolence to perceive, even though it may be proper to benevolence to act on them. At least, if we do say that there is a perception of right and wrong and it is benevolence which leads us to it, we also need to meet Hume’s later charge that this, which we interpret as a ‘perception’, is but another example of the mind’s capacity to ‘spread itself upon objects’. There is neither right nor wrong in the world, but only a collective hallucination born of good will. It does not really alter this fact that by nature we all agree on what is right or wrong. That only shows that our sympathies are naturally in tune. It does nothing to persuade those who are out of tune with the spirit of benevolence that there is a respect in which they perceive the world wrongly.

  The moral-sense theory waned, was revived, waned again, and still continues its spasmodic life, under the guise of ethical ‘intuitionism’. But the immediate contemporary of Hutcheson, and the philosopher who did most to gather together the insights of Lockean moral philosophy into a system, was not persuaded by it. Bishop Butler, whose Sermons first appeared in 1726, kept closer to Shaftesbury’s strategy. That is to say, he put aside questions of moral epistemology and of the meaning of moral terms in favour of a description of human nature which would show, in Aristotelian fashion, not that the evil perceive things wrongly, but rather that they act and feel against nature. Hence, however we answer such questions as ‘To what idea does the word “right” refer?’ or ‘Is there an objective property of things which constitutes their moral value?’, we shall be in a position to argue that there is as much reason to act in accordance with the precepts of morality as there is to act in accordance with any other part of ourselves which is essential to the harmonious functioning of our nature. It was from reflections inspired by this thought— and in particular from those delivered by Butler—that much of the modern philosophy of mind was born. If Butler is admired now it is as much because of his acute understanding of the peculiar philosophical problems posed by the nature of appetite, will and emotion, as on account of his answers to the questions of morality.