Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men. In Victor Gourevich, editor and translator: Rousseau: The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

 

In his First and Second Discourses, Rousseau praises one ‘ancient’ thinker, Socrates, while condemning one set of them, the pre-Socratics. He praises one Christian, Jesus, while condemning one set of Christians, the Scholastics. Among the ‘moderns’ he praises Bacon, Descartes, and Newton while condemning Voltaire, the man Voltaire praises as le sage Locke, and Locke’s predecessor, Hobbes. Among the ancient regimes, he singles out Sparta for praise among the ‘ancients,’ Switzerland among the ‘moderns.’ He proceeds to navigate his argument among these lighthouses, and although he, like Locke, raises self-contradiction to the level of a literary technique, his argument sails carefully through dangerous waters. He wants to confuse some who would track his vessel but always knows where he wants to go, and how to get there.

The First Discourse responds to a question proposed by the Academy of Dijon in a contest it sponsored in 1750: “Has the reestablishment of the sciences and the arts contributed to the purification of moeurs?” No, just the opposite, Rousseau famously replies. Enlightenment leads to “the fatal inequality introduced among men by the distinction of talents and the disparagement of virtues.” In defending this claim he alludes to and quotes Socrates. He takes a Socratic pose, calling himself “an honest man who knows nothing” and quotes Socrates’ criticism of people who believe they know something but really know nothing, whereas he, Socrates, knows he knows nothing—and that is his wisdom. Glancing not only at Socratic self-knowledge but at Cartesian self-examination, he calls the effort “to return into [oneself], there to study man and to know his nature, his duties, and his end” a grander project that the modern Enlightenment. Hence his criticism of the arch-Enlightener, Voltaire. In the essay’s central paragraph he cites Socrates’ opposition to unnamed pre-Socratics, proponents of the Sophistic Enlightenment, “those artful and subtle Greeks who seduced virtue and enervated the courage of his fellow citizens.” Initially, he suggests that among us ‘moderns,’ Socrates would not have drunk hemlock but he would have drunk scorn. In a later footnote he revises this judgment, suspecting that even in ‘enlightened’ times and regimes Socrates would be killed.

What goes for philosophy goes for religion, too. Virtue is “the sublime science of simple souls,” “engraved in all hearts” and therefore conducive to equality. Jesus teaches pure morals; the Scholastics obscure the simplicity of His teachings with their elaborate argumentation. The problem comes back to the misuse of philosophy. Genuine philosophers, thinkers of the stature of Bacon, Descartes, and Newton, need no guides; they teach themselves. Once philosophers or would-be philosophers attempt to flatter the people by giving them reason to suppose they have become ‘enlightened,’ then the esteem for talent begins to replace the esteem for virtues. The people begin to imagine that they are sophisticated. And they are, in the literal sense: transformed into sophists. “It is good that there be Philosophers provided the People do not pretend to be Philosophers.” There is a place for egalitarianism, but the life of the mind isn’t it. Enlightenment amounts to a sort of drug, whereby talented men boost themselves into positions of authority by pretending that they have assisted the people in becoming wise. In fact they have satisfied and stupefied them, the better to rule them.

Hence his praise of Geneva in the Epistle Dedicatory of the Second Discourse. Geneva, he tells the Genevans, has rightly combined natural, moral equality with institutional inequality of talents “in the means most clearly approximating natural law” and “most favorable to society, to the preservation of public order, and the happiness of individuals” by instituting representative government. Representative government ensures that the people themselves don’t administer the (long-established) laws—a task for the talented—while keeping the administrators on the short leash of annual elections. Thus simple souls, wise in the sublime science, monitor the virtue of magistrates, wise in the ways of the world. As for Geneva’s “amiable and virtuous Citizen-women,” they rightly confine themselves to their household, where their “chaste power” is “exercised in conjugal union alone,” and not in the public square. Since “it will always be the lot” of women to rule men, such women as the Genevans will rule in modernity as Spartan women ruled in antiquity, “despis[ing] vain luxury,” loving the laws, and “correct[ing] the misconceptions which our young Men acquire in other countries” that run counter to the “august freedom” Genevans enjoy at home.

In his preface, Rousseau recurs to the ‘Socratic turn’ away from the direct study of nature and from sophistry, the preeminent features of Enlightenment ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’: “The most useful and the least advanced of all human knowledge seems to be that of man” and, like Socrates, he will heed “the inscription on the Temple at Delphi,” which adjured its readers, “Know thyself.” The question proposed by the Academy at Dijon is: “What is the origin of inequality among men, and whether it is authorized by the natural law.” This seems to point essayists to a historical account, but Rousseau asks a preliminary question: “How can the source of inequality among men be known without first knowing men themselves?” To answer this question, not history but introspection is necessary because the human soul has been “altered” in “the lap of society,” altered so much as to have become “almost unrecognizable,” altered so much that “man’s constitution” has changed. Modern souls are no longer simple; progress makes us ignorant of ourselves. Such progress in artful knowledge is by no means necessary; Rousseau rejects teleology, natural or historical, because he sees that some human populations have ‘progressed’ in the sciences and the arts whereas some have not. Only the Socratic way of self-knowledge and the Cartesian ‘method’ of introspection can clear away the crust of conventions and habits but more, show us how the constitution of man itself has changed. Only self-knowledge can ‘recover’ the sense of human nature as it is by nature, which for Rousseau means at its origin and not at its end.

Rousseau emphasizes the non-historical character of his inquiry. “It is no light undertaking to disentangle what is original from what is artificial in man’s present Nature, and to know accurately a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never did exist, which probably never will exist, and about which it is nevertheless necessary to have exact Notions in order accurately to judge of our present state.” Unlike Hobbes and Locke, for whom the state of nature has existed, sometimes still exists, and always will exist (at times), Rousseau rules out empirical evidence from the core of his thinking; in this he anticipates Kant. At the same time, he will not abandon scientific method, the method of Bacon, insofar as it disciplines thought by experiment. Rousseau asks, “What experiments would be needed in order to come to know natural man; and by what means can these experiments be performed within society?” He cedes nothing to the Enlightenment, in that. In the central paragraphs of his preface he charges, as he had in the First Discourse, that some ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns’ have erred in making knowledge of natural law too abstruse; “for it to be natural, it must speak immediately with the voice of Nature.” “Hence, disregarding all the scientific books that only teach us to see men as they have made themselves, and meditating on the first and simplest operations of the human Soul”—as did Descartes and indeed Locke, before him—I believe I perceive in it two principles prior to reason.” One “interests us intensely in our well-being and our self-preservation,” the other “inspires in us a natural repugnance at seeing any sentient Being, and especially any being like ourselves, perish or suffer.” The first principle is identical to that asserted by Hobbes and Locke; the second, pity, amounts to a ‘secularized’ (actually naturalized) version of Christian agape or charity. He endorses the teaching of Hobbes and rejects that of Locke in calling sociability unnatural to man, but unlike Hobbes he tempers this with the sentiment of pity.

“This way one is not obliged to make a Philosopher of man before making a man of him.” Making a man out of man makes man a beast insofar as he shares sentience with other beasts; further, being sentient, both beasts and man partake in natural right. One “must at least give the beast the right not to be uselessly maltreated by man.” The ‘animal rights movement’ begins with Rousseau. Natural law and natural right are simple and comprehensive. “As long as [man] does not resist the internal impulsion of commiseration, he will never harm another man or even any sentient being, except in the legitimate case when, his preservation being involved, he is obliged to give himself preference.” We fail to see this only because arts and sciences have over-complicated our way of life, denaturing man, and especially modern man.

Rousseau addresses the question of the origin of inequality more squarely in his Exordium. Here, he posits a dualism, if not the mind/body dualism of Descartes—that is, Descartes as he is usually taken to claim. There are “two sorts of inequality in the human Species”: natural or physical inequality (“differences of age, health, strengths of Body, and qualities of Mind or of Soul”); and “moral or political inequality,” which depends on “a sort of convention and is established, or at least authorized by Men’s consent.” Rousseau, then, is no less a materialist than Hobbes or Locke and, like them, does not regard human beings as political animals by nature. The precise issue, on these terms, is when Right replaced violence, when Nature was subjected to Law, when the strong resolved to serve the weak, when the people purchased “the idea of repose at the price of real felicity.” No philosopher has yet reached “the state of Nature” because none has begun as Rousseau does, “by setting aside all the facts”; facts “do not affect the question.” Rousseau begins not with facts but with a hypothesis in what we now would call a ‘thought experiment.’ This experiment will have no recourse to revelation, either, but rather to “what Mankind might have become if it had been abandoned to itself,” with no Serpent and no God (at least, no God after Creation). Rousseau insists on this because nature “never lies,” inasmuch as it never speaks, as gods, men, and serpents do.

Part I of the Second Discourse initiates the experiment consideration on the body of man. Rousseau won’t try to trace man’s physical development, which would entangle him in facticity. “Stripping” man of his supernatural, God-made aspects, and of his artificial, man-made aspects, Rousseau finds “an animal,” “the most advantageously organized of all animals.” This animal “perhaps” has no instincts, and so will feed on anything. It ate the fruits and vegetables supplied by an earth that was much more fertile than it is now, and “since prey is almost the only object about which Carnivores fight, and Frugivores live in constant peace with one another, it is clear that if the human species were of the latter kind, tit would have subsisted more easily in the state of Nature, and would have had much less need and fewer occasions to leave it.” The state of nature was neither Hobbes’s war of all against all nor Locke’s condition of scarcity. It was peaceful and abundant.

The state of nature had a ‘regime.’ Nature dealt with early men “exactly as the Law of Sparta did with the Children of Citizens; it makes those who have a good constitution strong and robust, and causes all the others to perish; differing, in this, from our societies, where the State kills children indiscriminately before their birth by making them a burden to their Fathers.” There was no abortion in the state of nature; the right to self-preservation began before birth. Without tools other than his own body, natural man had no weapons other than that. Accordingly, he was stronger and more agile than men today, “ever ready for every eventuality” and largely self-sufficient, carrying “all of [him]self along with [him].” Indeed, he soon finds that he surpasses all the other animals “in skill more than they do him in strength”; he does not live in terror, as Hobbesian natural man does. Without any formidable natural enemies and therefore no fear of violent death, he has no fear of a peaceful death, either. Natural men “eventually die without anyone’s noticing that they cease to be, and almost without noticing themselves.” Their life is solitary, but not nasty, poor, brutish—except in a good way—or short.

This is “the simple, uniform and solitary way of life,” the regime, “prescribed to us by Nature.” It is noteworthy that Rousseau’s claim about man to some extent follows from his method; philosophic introspection focuses the mind on the individual and, sure enough, it finds natural man living alone. Moving away from the body, Rousseau argues that this method is nonetheless necessary now to understand man as he existed then. True, “the state of reflection is a state against nature,” and “the man who meditates” is “a depraved animal”—no longer a machine-like being whose life consists of feeding, attacking, and defending, of simple willing and not willing, desiring and fearing. “Man in the state of Nature” is healthy, simple. But to rediscover him, philosophers—the most meditative, the most depraved of civilized men—can only as it were ‘double down’ on their depravity, use it to get beyond it, at least in their theorizing.

Like all animals, men “lose half” of their “vigor, strength, and courage” when domesticated; as man becomes “sociable and a Slave, he becomes weak, timorous, groveling, and his soft and effeminate way of life completes the enervation of both his strength and his courage.” Worse, because man has it in him to put other domesticated animal species into his own service, and to invent “conveniences” that sap his strength even more than mere domestication alone would do, civilized man has degenerated even more than other animals. Hobbes and Locke are dead wrong; civil society doesn’t secure natural rights, it compromises them. Machiavelli is right to say that Christian religiosity effeminates man, but so do all the trappings of civilized life. The human senses themselves have become denatured. Living in conditions of hardiness, natural man’s “touch and taste will be extremely crude”—these senses “are perfected only by softness and sensuality,” neither of which prevail in nature—but “his sight, hearing and smell” are “most subtle,” as seen in primitive peoples today. Machiavelli’s ‘epistemology’ of touch is therefore an excrescence of civilization, a realism only in unnatural, civil, society.

Moving from physical man to “the Metaphysical and Moral side,” Rousseau sees “in any animal nothing but an ingenious machine to which nature has given senses in order to wind itself up and to a point, protect itself against everything that tends to destroy or to disturb it.” So too with natural man, “with this difference”: “man contributes to his operations in his capacity as a free agent,” a being that “chooses or rejects” freely, not by instinct alone. “As a result the Beast cannot deviate from the Rule prescribed to it even when it would be to its advantage to do so, while man often deviates from it to his detriment.” In man, “the Mind depraves the senses, and the will continues to speak when Nature is silent.” It isn’t the capacity to reason that differentiates human beings from other animals; reasoning is unnatural. “It is his property of being a free agent” that differentiates him, “and it is mainly in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of his soul exhibits itself.” That is, in examining himself, Rousseau finds not only man’s original physical attributes but also consciousness of his own freedom. The emphasis on “consciousness” seen in subsequent thinkers starts here. It can be seen even today in the valorizing slang term, ‘woke,’ and it has been esteemed by thinkers from Hegel and Marx to contemporary feminists and libertarians, who make ‘choice’ a ‘value’ in itself. Here is a more nearly Cartesian kind of dualism. Rousseau needs something along these lines because nature is not teleological, in his theory; finding un-mechanical dimensions in himself, he explains them in terms of the power of choosing, “and in the sentiment of this power”—”purely spiritual acts about which nothing is explained by the Laws of Mechanics.”

Even more teleological, without being a natural teleology in (for example) Aristotle’s sense is a related natural power of human being, its “faculty of perfecting itself.” This power typically leads man not to the flowering of his best potential; quite on the contrary. “It would be sad for us to be forced to agree that this distinctive and almost unlimited faculty is the source of all of man’s miseries; that it is the faculty which, by dint of time, draws him out of that original condition in which he would spend calm and innocent days; that it is the faculty which, over the centuries, causes his enlightenment, and his errors, his vice and his virtues to arise, and eventually makes him his own and Nature’s tyrant.” Sad, but true. His labor and sciences only “feed his insane pride and I know not what vast self-admiration.” While man— by nature solitary, peaceful, vigorous, and content—”is naturally good,” men—living under civil-social conditions but retaining their essentially solitary, ‘individual’ characteristic (if nothing else)—”are wicked.” Such creatures, living socially, bump up against each other, moving themselves “to hate one another in proportion as their interests cross.” Society consists of a collection of such individuals, whose natural traits, harmless when living in natural isolation, become lethal in close quarters. They see “how one man’s loss almost always makes for another’s prosperity,” and “more dangerous still,” how “public calamities” offer opportunities for private gain and are therefore “waited and hoped for by a host of private individuals,” who never let a ‘good crisis’ go to waste. In civil society, Machiavelli is more nearly right than Hobbes or Locke, inasmuch as “men are forced to flatter and destroy one another” there.

“Savage man, once he has supped, is at peace with all of Nature and a friend to all of his kind.” Asocial, and therefore with no sacred honor to defend, and indeed no sense of either the sacred or of pride to inspire such a sentiment, his fights over food will be brief, “end[ing] with a few fisticuffs”; “the victor eats, the vanquished goes off to seek his fortune.” Not so with “man in Society,” where the passions for luxury, distinction, and mastery feed on one another, and “my Hero will end up by cutting every throat until he is the sole master of the Universe”in his quest to satisfy “the secret aspirations of the heart of every Civilized man.” In effect, civilized man dreams of returning to his original, natural solitude, but now spurred by libido dominandi at the service of supreme vanity. International and civil war, piracy, crime, abortion, infanticide, join with such lesser evils as miserable marriages, unhealthy occupations, and luxury to make civil society anything but civil. “As industry and the arts spread and flourish, the scorned farmer, weighed down by taxes needed to support Luxury, and condemned to spend his life between labor and hunger, abandons his fields to go look in the Cities for the bread which he should be bringing there,” resulting in the modern state which “on one side grows rich, grows weak and is depopulated on the other,” soon “the prey of the poor Nations that succumb to the fatal temptation to invade them,” growing “rich and weak in their turn, until they are themselves invaded and destroyed by others.” To complete the horrors, civilized man cannot return to nature; only religion is left to him. Alone among the civilized, a philosopher might rediscover a natural way of life, as Rousseau himself did, becoming the solitary walker, in but not of modern society. The solitary walker communes not with God; he is the restless desert saint of the self.

How can such rare souls establish such a way of life for themselves? In Rousseau there is no philo-sophia, no intellectual eros striving for noetic satisfaction. “Human understanding owes much to the Passions”; “it is by their activity that our reason perfects itself,” as “we seek to know only because we desire to enjoy.” “The Passions, in turn, owe their origin to our needs and their progress to our knowledge.” The only goods Savage man knows are “food, a female, and rest; the only evils he fears are pain, and hunger”—not death, as Hobbes supposes, “for an animal will never know what it is to die.” As savages interact with circumstances, they will respond with different ways of satisfying these modest goods and avoiding or ameliorating these evils. The arts—and therefore civilization—first arose in Egypt because the cyclical flooding of the Nile River forced savages to invent in order to survive. Egypt turned out to be the exception to a general rule: “the peoples of the North are more industrious than those of the south because they can less afford not to be so, as if Nature wanted in this way to equalize things, by endowing Minds with the fertility it denies the Soil.”

If so, and if the path to civilization widens and lengthens in the manner Rousseau sketches, only a few men will resist the decadence. They will do so by means of Rousseau’s version of Cartesian introspection, beginning by taking measure of “the distance between pure sensations and the simplest knowledge.” They will then be in the intellectual position to ask themselves, “How many centuries perhaps elapsed before men were in a position to see any other fire than that of Heaven? How many different chance occurrences must they have needed before they learned the most common uses of this element?” Such men will ask themselves how a non-rational animal could develop the language that was necessary before the principle of non-contradiction could be discovered. How long did it take before the random sexual reproduction seen in nature led to the institution of the family? In nature, mothers initially nursed their infants only to relieve their own discomfort, and then out of habit-induced love of their own. Even as Hobbes is wrong about the state of nature as the state of war, Locke is wrong about conjugal society. Why would a man stick around to assist in providing for his mate or his children? (Rousseau well knows that many don’t want to do that, even now.) “There is, therefore, no reason for the man to seek out the same woman, nor for the woman to seek out the same man. Locke’s argument collapses.”

As for language, the centerpiece of the classical philosophic understanding of man as the being of logos, of speech and reason, and equally the centerpiece of Biblical creationism, Rousseau addresses it in the Discourse‘s central paragraph. “Man’s first language, the most universal, the most energetic and the only language he needed before it was necessary to persuade assembled men, is the cry of Nature,” a cry “wrested from him only by a sort of instinct on urgent occasions,” never in the ordinary course of his life. Accordingly, savage man had no ideas. Contra the Book of Genesis, “Each object was at first given a particular name without regard to kinds and species”—one oak was called Ed, another Ralph. Or something like that. Locke’s “general ideas can enter the Mind only with the help of words,” and the only natural language consisted of cries of passion in extremis and, eventually, names assigned to particular objects. A simple thought experiment will relieve you of any other notion: “Only the definition of a Triangle gives you its genuine idea; as soon as you [frame the] figure [of] one in your mind, it is some one given Triangle and not another.” Ideas and the abstract or generalized word arose “by means which I cannot conceive.” Philosophic inquiry stops here.

But philosophic inquiry does give the rare soul a glimpse of what the natural life for man was. Asocial natural man was “a free being whose heart is at peace and body in health,” not the miserable being imagined by Hobbes and Locke. Savage man never commits suicide; he was not so much beyond good and evil as prior to those conditions, “neither good nor wicked.” In this, the Bible is right, if for the wrong reasons. (Here, one should notice, Rousseau revises his previous claim that natural man was good.)  “In instinct alone he had all he needed to live in the state of Nature,” whereas—and here he speaks to the rare souls—”in cultivated reason he was only what he needs to live in society.” What savage man knew by natural instinct, the philosopher can re-learn by the right use of reason—beginning with introspection.

Introspecting further, Rousseau finds another sentiment in savage man. Human self-love, amour de soi, aims at self-preservation. So much Hobbes and Locke saw. But further, “self-preservation prior to the birth of vanity”—amour-propre—”tempers his ardor for well-being”—that is, a life beyond the satisfaction of physical necessity—”with an innate repugnance to see his kind suffer.” This is “the force of natural pity,” a pure movement of Nature prior to all reflection,” a sentiment that causes savage man to “identify” with suffering fellow-humans. Pity predates the Golden Rule and is “perhaps more useful”; “the first sentiment of humanity,” it is the source of all “social virtues” today, leading us to the maxim, “Do your good with the least possible harm to others.”

This raises a serious problem. How could savage man feel repugnance at the sufferings of his kind if he couldn’t recognize species, if he had no power of abstraction? If George sees that Oglethorpe in pain, what is it to George? Rousseau does not ask himself that question, here.

Instead, he considers reason and the philosophy it underpins. These isolate man within civil society. Reason “turns man back upon himself,” as it does for Descartes and for Rousseau. In this it reestablishes certain men in something close to man’s natural condition. But “although Socrates and Minds of his stamp may be capable of acquiring virtue through reason, Mankind would long ago have ceased to be if its preservation depended solely on the reasonings of those who make it up.” If reason originates under social conditions, if deployed socially in projects for the general ‘enlightenment’ of whole societies, it merely serves vanity, amour-propre. If used introspectively, however, it can turn away from the vanities of civil society, back toward the rediscovery of human nature, abandoning the sorrows that will soon torment Young Werther, the soul-agonies of civilized man. Sexual passion, for example, will redirect itself. Natural, physical love is fleeting and harmless, serving to preserve the species without knowing it does so. “Any woman suits” savage man; there were no epic wars over a Helen in the state of nature. Moral love, however, “gives this desire its distinctive character and focuses it exclusively on a single object,” a “factitious sentiment” leading young men to submit to the tyranny of women, who extol moral love “in order to establish their rule and to make dominant the sex that should obey.” When man was always free to move on from his current mate, there could be no conflicts over women, a condition which “renders vain the Law of the stronger.” Even under the conditions of decadence prevailing in civil life, the philosopher will discover this, and begin to live according to the natural standard insofar as prudence enables him to negotiate his way through the artificial reefs and shoals of society.

“It remains for me to consider and bring together the various contingencies that can have perfected human reason while deteriorating the species, make a being wicked by making it sociable, and from so remote a beginning finally bring man and the world to the point where we now find them.” This is his task in Part II. There he turns to the ‘historical’ account he had eschewed earlier, but this can now be a story decisively inflected by his experiment in philosophic introspection. Rousseau offers the sort of history of inequality’s origins that the essay topic implies, but it is a philosophic history.

Whatever beginnings language and other social relations may have had prior to the event, “the first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred to say this is mine and found people sufficiently simple to believe him, was the true founder of civil society” and therefore the origin of inequality among men. What had happened between the state of nature and the idea of property, bringing human beings to this point?

“Man’s first sentiment was that of his existence, his first care that of his preservation.” (This is the experience the philosopher seeks to recreate, as it were, in the Reveries.) “The earth’s products provided him with all the assistance he needed, instinct moved him to use them”—a “blind inclination, devoid of any sentiment of the heart,” led to reproduction, after which “the two sexes no longer recognized one another, and even the child no longer meant anything to the Mother as soon as it could do without her.” In defending himself against his few natural enemies, savage man used “natural weapons” (stones, branches), “learn[ing] to overcome the obstacles of Nature.” As the human population grew, “difficulties multiplied” along with it. Necessity being the mother of invention, “they invented line and hook,” becoming “fishermen and Fish-eaters.” “Lightning, a Volcano, or some happy accident acquainted them with fire a new resource against the rigors of winter”; once they learned to conserve and to reproduce fire, savage man began “to prepare the meats they had previously devoured raw.” Crucially, “this repeated interaction of the various beings with himself as well as with one another must naturally have engendered in man’s mind perceptions of certain relationships,” such as those “we express by the words, great, small, strong, weak, fast, slow, fearful, bold, and other such ideas, compared as need required and almost without thinking about it, finally produced in him some sort of reflection, or rather a mechanical prudence that suggested to him the precautions most necessary for his safety.” This was the first “enlightenment,” as man “became the master of those [animals] that could be useful, and the scourge of those that could be harmful to him.” At the same time, he must have begun to recognize his similarity to some of those animals, enabling him to take the next step of association with them.

“Taught by experience that love of well-being is the sole spring of human actions, he was in a position to distinguish between the rare occasions when common interest should make him count on the help of his kind, and the even rarer occasions when competition should make him suspicious of them.” He “united with them in a herd, or at most in some kind of free association that obligated no one and lasted only as long as the transitory need that had formed it”; at other times, “everyone sought to seize his own advantage” by force or by fraud, depending upon whether he had an advantage of physical or mental strength. For this level of cooperation he needed no more language than the cries, gestures, and imitative noises we see in other ‘social’ animals, such as crows and monkeys.

Such free associations, if transient, eventually led to “a first revolution”: “the establishment and differentiation of families” along with some sort of property, “from which perhaps a good many quarrels and Fights already arose.” Conjugal and paternal love—amour de soi under changed circumstances—could now exist, but with it, and property, came leisure and the degeneration of man’s natural hardiness. From families came nations, “united in morals and character, not by Rules or Laws.” Familial and ultimately family rivalries, including jealousy, flowed from this newly-complex version of self-love. Cain and Abel, yes, but they were competing for the favor of some woman, not God. “The moment men needed the help of another” to satisfy their newly-real but artificial needs “equality disappeared, property oppressed, work became necessary”—Rousseau’s understanding of the curse of Adam resulted not in death, which had existed all along, but “slavery and misery.”

“Everyone began to look at everyone else and to wish to be looked at himself, and public esteem acquired a value.” Who sings or dances best? Who is “the handsomest, the strongest, the most skillful, or the most eloquent”? Hence vanity and contempt, shame and envy, inequality and vice—in a word, civil society, the earliest versions of which Hobbes and Locke mistook for the state of nature. “All subsequent progress has been so many steps in appearance toward the perfection of the individual”—deluded by amour-propre —”and in effect toward the decrepitude of the species.” No wonder that the few remaining savages today resist our “civilizing missions.” “Metallurgy and agriculture were the two arts the invention of which brought about this great revolution. For the Poet it is gold and silver; but for the Philosopher it is iron and wheat that civilized men, and ruined Mankind.” This explains Europe’s advantage over other parts of the world, as it “is both the most abundant in iron and the most fertile in wheat.”

Once some men began to melt and forge iron, others were needed to feed them. The invention of the plow brought metallurgy and agriculture together; division of land followed, itself followed by the need for “the first rules of justice” designed to stabilize property ownership. With this, conventional right supplanted the natural law. More, the primitive capacities to hunt and to gather take little ability, but farming and metallurgy do. This made certain natural capacities the basis for ever-increasing civil-social inequality. Under these conditions, if you don’t have much natural ability, you fake it until you make it. “To be and to appear became two entirely different things, and from this distinction arose ostentatious display, deceitful cunning, and all the ices that follow in their train,” including “consuming ambition, the ardent desire to raise one’s relative fortune less out of genuine need than in order to place oneself above others.” “All these evils are the first effect of property, and the inseparable train of nascent inequality.”

The war of all against all that resulted induced men for form social contracts to “protect and defend all the members of the association, repulse common enemies, and keep us in eternal concord.” Or so the first ‘founder’ told his dupes, who then “ran toward their chains in the belief that they were securing their freedom,” chains with which “gave the weak new fetters and the rich new forces, irreversibly destroy[ing] natural freedom, forever.”

Forever: there will be no return. Philosopher can come the closest; civil societies, for their part, may at least redesign their chains in a manner that loosens them, making them citizens instead of slaves of some master. At best, the vast majority of men can only craft “a true Contract between the People and the Chiefs it chooses for itself.” Hence Du Contrat Social. From the first Discourse to the Reveries, each book in Rousseau’s oeuvre has its exact place in the outline provided here, in this book.

These vast changes in human life suggest to Rousseau one of his most influential and (as it proved) dangerous notions. “The Mankind of one age is not the Mankind of another age.” By this, Rousseau doesn’t mean simply that different regimes or ways of life reward some human types and punish others. Human nature itself changes as “original man gradually vanishes.” Whereas “the Savage lives in himself,” man in civil society, “sociable man,” lives “always outside himself, is capable of living only in the opinion of others and, so to speak, derives the sentiment of his existence solely from their judgment.” Sociable men “have nothing more than a deceiving and frivolous exterior, honor without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without wisdom.”

With human nature deemed malleable, subsequent philosophers, especially under the very different but complementary influence of Hume, would seek the source of right elsewhere, eventually in ‘History’ now reconceived not as the story of the course of events but as the course of events itself. The optimism of the Enlightenment, which Rousseau intended to bridle, would not only return but overwhelm the political sense of limits, of moderation and balance in ways that would magnify the vices of civilization Rousseau deplored.

 

 

 

 

Stephen Schwartz: A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: From Russell to Rawls. West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons, 2012.

 

“Personally and passionately involved in the enlightening and edifying enterprise of analytic philosophy,” Professor Schwartz calls it “the dominant Anglo-Saxon philosophical movement of the twentieth century” and also of this century, so far. He is unquestionably correct, especially with respect to academic philosophizing. With the compartmentalization of academic research, and with the division of labor institutional departmentalization reflects, academics ‘doing philosophy’ have needed a way to distinguish their enterprise from mathematics and science ‘hard’ and ‘soft.’ At the same time, they could not ignore the intellectual authority of mathematics and science in the modern world, seen in the thought of Bacon and Descartes, two of modernity’s philosophic progenitors. This authority has increased in the centuries subsequent to their work, and it includes the application or attempted application of scientific method to the work of governments in the form of the ‘administrative state.’ Even its recent philosophic, often ideological rival, ‘post-modernism,’ which rejects rationalism in the name of a democratized Nietscheism, nonetheless eagerly uses the apparatus of the administrative state as its preferred instrument of ruling.

“I am personally and passionately involved in the enlightening and edifying enterprise of analytic philosophy,” Schwartz writes. This engagement seldom injures his account of its history. Quite the contrary, for the most part: History written by a lover almost always outranks history written by despiser, as a lover will attend to the features of his beloved, always wanting to know more about her.

Modern philosophers have tended to group themselves into two major encampments, empiricists (‘Baconians’) and rationalists (‘Cartesians’). Although analytic philosophers began by distancing themselves sharply from Hegelianism, with its grand thesis-antithesis-synthesis historical dialectic, it’s hard to deny that they began by attempting to ‘synthesize’ modern empiricism and rationalism. Empiricists hold that all knowledge is based on experience; ‘experimental’ science tests ideas, initially demoted to the status of hypotheses, testing them by concrete results under the rationally controlled conditions of the laboratory—that is, a place of labor, of action, not of contemplation. Modern scientists, including Einstein himself, were quite relieved that the mathematical formula E=mc² found confirmation in the lab. Modern rationalists concentrate their attention on ideas thought to be innate in the human mind, ideas based on ‘pure’—that is to say, non-empirical, non-factual—reason. Can these two opposite approaches to philosophizing be combined? How?

Bertrand Russell took the first, and very deep, stab at accomplishing this in his Principia Mathematica, co-written with Alfred North Whitehead and published in 1903. Russell sought nothing less than to break with both Aristotelian and Hegelian logic. Taking over a project begun by the German mathematician Gottlob Frege, Russell treated logic like the calculus. As Jacob Klein has shown, the calculus itself was invented to register the interest of modern philosophers, beginning with Machiavelli in kinetics. [1] Moderns are less interested in the stable figures of Pythagorean geometry as in a geometry of motion—of plotting points along a curve. Aristotelian, syllogistic logic seeks to understand things in accordance with their forms and ‘essences.’ Hence such standard syllogistic locutions as “All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal.” “Socrates” is the subject, “man” the predicate. To say “All zebras are animals” is logically the same as to say “Socrates is a man,” despite the fact that a zebra is a species, Socrates a person. Additionally, in syllogistic logic, “Socrates is married to Xanthippe” is logically identical to these other propositions because “married to Xanthippe” is the predicate—this, despite the fact that “married to” is a relation, whereas “is a man” is a statement about the intrinsic nature of Socrates.

In mathematical logic, “predicates represent functions from objects to truth-values,” “functions” being a term from calculus. To say “Socrates is a man” is to say “Socrates satisfies the function ‘man.'” “‘All zebras are animals’ says that if any object satisfies the function ‘x is a zebra,’ then it satisfies the function ‘x is an animal.'” And to say that “Socrates is married to Xanthippe” is to say that the pair Socrates/Xanthippe satisfies the function “is married to.” Such sentences are structured like equations in calculus. They say nothing about the substance of the things equated. They do not posit essences, only the verbal equivalents of points on a line.

Russell’s logic differs from Hegel because it is analytic. It does not aim at producing a synthesis. When X meets not-X there is no necessary Y that comes out of the meeting. The logical principle of non-contradiction enables us to analyze but tells us nothing about synthesis. Analytic philosophy is as kinetic as Hegelianism, but it doesn’t try to tell us where we are going. No wonder Lenin hated it. [2]

Because it is analytic and kinetic, not ‘essentialist’ or substantive and not synthetic, either, “The name ‘analytic philosophy refers more to the methods of analytic philosophy than to any particular doctrine that analytic philosophers have all shared.” For such philosophers, “insight comes from seeing how things are put together and how they can be prized apart; how they are constructed and how they can be reconstructed.” Schwartz notes the similarity between analytic philosophy and the more recent philosophies of ‘deconstructionism.’ The difference, it might be added, stems from the influence of Nietzsche on deconstructionists, which is entirely absent from the minds of the ‘analysts.’ Like the deconstructionists, and like Nietzsche, “analytic philosophers rejected the pretensions of the Enlightenment philosophers,” their grand schemes of rationally-controlled progress. Unlike the deconstructionists and Nietzsche, they did not question the Enlightenment philosophers’ “commitment to reason.” At any rate, analytic philosophy “is not a unified movement or school,” and indeed Russell himself changed his opinions on all manner of things throughout his long career.

“The basic aspects of modernism—rejection of past traditions, experimentation with new methods and forms; fascination with and anxiety about technology and use of new technical methods; focusing on method, surface, expression, and language—all characterize analytic philosophy.” This method also comports with the ambition of modernism to master nature; by basing logic on a particular form of modern mathematics, the calculus, it intends to overcome reality even as it seeks to understand it. As Schwartz puts it, the analytic philosophers “saw their work as freeing philosophy and even society, from its past forms and obsessions.”

“Mathematics is a priori and universal, so how can it be empirical?” Following Frege, Russell initially “treat[ed] logic mathematically, and then treat[ed] mathematics as a form of logic.” By abstracting from experience, mathematical equations give us certainty; for example, we can’t know empirically that there are infinitely many prime numbers because we can’t know if the one we’ve just mentioned is the last one. This appears to lead to a strict form of rationalism. Frege replies that “mathematical propositions are not based on experience or observation, but they are not the results of pure rational insight into the ultimate nature of reality, either.” They may not be ‘about’ anything other than themselves. Russell replies to Frege by counter-example: The famous Liar’s Paradox (a Cretan says, “All Cretans are liars”) doesn’t only yield an ’empty set,’ as mathematicians say; it isn’t a set at all. Originally a Fregian, Russell now could “no longer plausibly claim that mathematics was reducible to pure logic—that it was all analytic.” What he did claim (and here is where empiricism comes in) was that language can be analyzed. The Epicureans’ atomism can return because sentences can be rationally reduced to what Russell called “ultimate simples” or “logical atoms.” They are the objects perceived through the empeiria of this new empiricism; for logical purposes they have the same status as the natural atoms for Lucretius, the sense-data for Locke. And these empirical facts can be analyzed by means of symbolic logic, a logic that takes on the form of mathematical equations but without the need to need to translate the things analyzed into numbers. (In this, Russell sharply diverges from such system as the Gematria in Judaism, which does indeed translate words into numbers. Russell would deny that such a move makes sense.)

It was Russell’s sometime colleague, G. E. Moore, who attacked the then-dominant school of German Idealism, especially as seen in the thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic of Hegel. Hegel and his followers claimed that the dialectic had ontological content, that it registered the logical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit. Moore (with Russell) denied this. The negation of a ‘thesis’ by an ‘antithesis’ yields nothing more than a contradiction; there is no ‘synthesis’ at all. The logical atomists or, as they also called themselves, logical positivists (contrasted with Hegelian ‘negationists’) was nothing but airy “metaphysics.” Logical positivists insisted on limiting reason to matters of common sense, that is, sense data, with which we are all “directly acquainted,” as Schwartz puts it. But we are only acquainted with the sense data we perceive; such notions as whiteness, diversity, and brotherhood are not immediate perceptions. It is through a mental process that we become aware of them. I perceive the appearance of a table sensually, but I know it only indirectly, through words, “by description.” And, in Russell’s words, “Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.” These are logical atoms because any attempt at forming a conception that is exposed as illogical, as self-contradictory, thereby falls apart in our mind, becomes inconceivable. In mathematical terms one might call it a failed function, a pseudo- or dys-functional function.

“Analytic philosophers proudly contrast the clarity, technical proficiency, and respect for natural science of analytic philosophy versus the ultra-sophistication, contrived jargon, and mystification of Continental philosophy.” They are working very broadly within the British philosophic framework of empiricism, seen in Hobbes and Locke, but they add a linguistic layer to perception that the earlier empiricists did not emphasize. To the logical positivists, we truly know only what we make, and what we make first and foremost is concepts, out of sense perceptions mixed with words.

Schwartz adds that there was a political-historical element to all of this. At the time, “Hegelianism was something like the official philosophy of Germany, and especially Prussia.” Germany generally and Prussia particularly had taken on a bad odor for Englishmen as it rose to challenge the British regime at the beginning of the twentieth century. This may or may not have had philosophic relevance (the positivists denied that there can be such a thing as political philosophy), but it aided in obtaining a respectful hearing for a philosophic method distinct from and indeed contradictory to that of the Germans.

Russell and Moore were logicians who called themselves positivists, but ‘logical positivism’ as the term for a philosophic school came to be deployed in Vienna in the 1920s. Its most important proponent was Ludwig Wittgenstein. “Like Russell and Moore, the members of the Vienna Circle reacted against Hegelian German idealism,” very much including its political dimension; “many blamed the Prussian aristocratic traditions for starting the war and for not being able to pursue it successfully”—quite the failure of historicist dialectic, that. “If Frege is the pioneer and Bertrand Russell the father of analytic philosophy, then Wittgenstein’s writings provide the backbone.” Wittgenstein had read the Principia Mathematica before the war, studied with Russell at Cambridge, and then became a decorated artillery officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army. Presumably, his stint in an Italian P.O.W. camp provided the leisure to contemplate the defects of the German-Austrian misalliance, along with the philosophic reasons for doubting Hegelianism and for refining positivism. He published his Tractatus in 1924.

Wittgenstein sees that language attempts not only to represent the world—what analytic philosophers would come to call the “actual” world we perceive with our senses—but also to represent “non-actual states of affairs,” the stuff of plans and fantasies. “In order for us to be able to think about the world and talk about it, there must be a fundamental similarity of structure or isomorphism between thought and language, and between language and the world. This structure is represented by formal logic.” He breaks with Russell, however, in denying that logic describes “very abstract or fundamental facts or truths about the world or thought or even language”; language provides only “the framework or scaffolding that makes statements of facts possible.” The limits of the linguistic framework are tautologies on the one hand, self-contradictions on the other; this is what keeps Wittgenstein within the realm of logic. “Russell was still yearning for some sort of intellectually satisfying certainty, whereas according to Wittgenstein the only certainty available is empty and formal.”

An analytic proposition is self-evident only because it is a tautology. In this it is identical to a mathematical proposition, whether an axiom, postulate, or theorem. This returns mathematics to the apodictic certainty of pure abstraction, and it denies that any certainty can result from empirical investigation. As another member of the Vienna Circle put it, there are statements about facts and statements which “merely express the way in which the rules which govern the application of words to facts depend upon each other.” The latter “say nothing about objects and are for this very reason certain, universally valid, irrefutable by observation.” Therefore, as Wittgenstein writes, “Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences”; it aims only “at the logical clarification of thoughts” and not at “a body of doctrine.” It “does not result in ‘philosophical propositions,’ but rather in the clarification of propositions.” A decade later, A. J. Ayer concurred, asserting that “The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.” Philosophers have been the dupes of language, goofed by grammar. Such a conception as ‘God’ is neither provable nor disprovable. ‘Moral philosophy’ is equally a contradiction in terms, as moral claims have no cognitive content but express nothing but attitudes and emotions. At best, logic will tell us if a moral judgment coheres logically with the moral standard asserted by the one making the judgment.

Logical positivism, popularized (well, at least among academics) by Ayer’s 1936 book, Language, Truth, and Logic, held sway among philosophy professors well into the 1950s. “Much of the development of philosophy and methodology in the sciences since the 1950s has been driven by the criticisms of the doctrines of the logical positivists.” One of the critics would be Wittgenstein himself. These criticisms, however, were undertaken in “the spirit of the logical positivists’ motivation,” deploying many of the same “methods, standards, and attitudes.”

Wittgenstein, for example, came to reject “the use of symbolic logic to dissolve philosophical problems.” He now took “the meaning of a statement” to be not “a picture of reality or a fact” but a tool, a matter of how the statement was used in “practical life.” This begins to move toward a reconception of language as rhetoric: “Language is used to elicit a response in listeners, to coordinate our activities, and so on.” This is the theme of Wittgenstein’s philosophic notebooks, published posthumously (he died in 1951) as The Philosophical Investigations. This shift distinguishes what scholars have come to call the “early Wittgenstein” of the Tractatus from the “later Wittgenstein.”

After Wittgenstein, W. V. Quine took up the mantle. To understand meaning as use is to recall the American pragmatist school, led by John Dewey and William James. Radicalized, the tendency of pragmatism is to reject all attempts to ‘verify’ the truth of a statement; indeed, ‘truth’ itself comes to be guarded by inverted commas, too. Accordingly, Quine rejects even Karl Popper’s more modest principle of falsification, which asks us not to verify anything in accordance with some standard but more modestly to eliminate those claims which contradict that standard. Quine regards all claims, whether they are assertions of the existence of the Homeric gods or of the existence of physical objects, as “cultural posits.” ‘We moderns’ believe in the existence of physical objects only because that belief (as Quine puts it) “has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.” That is, meaning is Machiavellian in intent; it seeks to master Fortuna. “There is no first or fundamental philosophy that discovers truth or rather TRUTH underlying or separate from science”—which is a matter of ‘grasping,’ of touch, not of seeing (noesis) or of hearing (revelation).

If an ‘analytic’ statement has a meaning independent of facts and a ‘synthetic’ meaning is grounded in facts, can we really distinguish between the two? Quine doubts it. What is a ‘cigarette’? Tobacco rolled in cylindrically-shaped paper? What about marijuana rolled in paper? And does a ‘cigarette’ need to be rolled in paper at all? Why not a tobacco leaf? “We begin to see the difficulty of distinguishing pure elements of the linguistic meaning of ‘cigarette’ from empirical facts or generalizations about cigarettes. The notion that the term ‘cigarette’ has a pure linguistic meaning begins to dissolve,” and with it its logical ‘analyticity.’ Quine says that the only way to assign meaning to ‘cigarette’ is to consider it within “the whole of science,” “the totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs,” which he deems “a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges,” a (rather disorderly) “web of belief.” What “positivists and other modern empiricists failed to recognize” was this “holistic character of knowledge.” Human knowledge or science is never comprehensive (as it is in such a great systematizer as Hegel); when a given experience contradicts it, we can and should adjust it accordingly. “Even the laws of logic and mathematics are not immune to revision.” But there is no standard ‘above’ the myth or story of science; we are simply adjusting the “paradigm” (as the historian of ideas Thomas Kuhn calls it). More, we rarely discard an old paradigm for a new one. Kuhn writes, “Typically the adherents of the old scientific paradigm are not defeated by the results of experiments or observations. They are defeated by the grim reaper,” as “older scientists are replaced in positions of scientific power by younger colleagues with fewer intellectual commitments.” (Notice that this last point strengthens the intellectual hands not only of analytic philosophers but of post-modernists, ever alert to ‘will to power’ Nietzsche so vehemently asserted to be the pervasive principle of all life.)

Why, then, do Quine and Kuhn persist in favoring scientific paradigms over others? It can’t simply be a matter of “cultural predilections.” Rather, scientific paradigms have proven more accurate than, say, astrology as tools “for making predictions.” We judge science the same way “we judge any tool. How useful is it? How well does it work? Does it do the job for which it is designed?” Philosophy and philosophizing thus can assist the modern scientific enterprise, so long as philosophers abandon their pretension to see nature and stick to the task of sharpening the tools by which we grasp and shape it.

All of this is quite reminiscent of Dewey, as Quine’s successor, Richard Rorty, insists in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). Rorty, along with his contemporary Hilary Putnam, “labored to dismantle the traditional view of science as an attempt, by rigid and formal methods, to get an ever more accurate picture or mirror of a fixed lawlike world.” This led them to question whether science has a monopoly on knowledge. Why can’t painting, sculpture, music, literature, moral codes, “and perhaps even religion” “contribute to the web of knowledge”? These areas of thought, too, may offer “cognitive content with pragmatic value,” even if modern science remains “the Queen” of the knowledges.

Respecting moral codes, for example, Putnam rejects the fact/value distinction, “which was almost as dear to the positivists as the analytic/synthetic distinction.” Not only such words as ‘cruel’ and ‘kind’ are “value-laden,” but so are “such factual sounding terms as ‘rational,’ ‘logical,’ ‘irrational'”. Putnam considers “his rescuing values from positivist exclusion to be his most important contribution to philosophy.”

Putnam especially insists that this opening-up of knowledge, even combined with the rejection of a standard of truth ‘above the cave’ of our current myth, doesn’t entail relativism. “Denying that it makes sense to ask whether our concepts ‘match’ something totally uncontaminated by conceptualization is one thing; but to hold that every conceptual system is therefore just as good as every other would be something else. If anyone really believed that, and if they were foolish enough to pick a conceptual system that told them they could fly and to act upon it by jumping out of a window, they would if they were lucky enough to survive, see the weakness of the latter view at once.” While “the very inputs upon which our knowledge is based are conceptually contaminated,” such contaminated inputs “are better than none.” And if “contaminated inputs are all we have, still all we have has proved to be quite a bit,” given the success of modern science in doing what its philosophic forebears promised, the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate.

Meanwhile, in England, philosophy shifted its base of operations from Russell’s Cambridge to Oxford, where C. E. M. Anscombe, R. M. Hare, H. L. A. Hart, Charles Stevenson, and Gilbert Ryle worked. They too rejected Cambridge and Vienna Circle formalism, “tend[ing] to view symbolic logic as an attractive snare for the philosophical intellect.” They retained linguistic philosophy’s emphasis on language but turned (Socrates-like, it might be said) to the consideration of “ordinary language” and common sense. Again like their analytic-philosophy predecessors, they sought to elucidate the meaning of concepts, but focused their attention not so much on mathematics and science as on the more concrete realms of literature, the arts, and politics. Ryle held that “philosophy is messy and the messy problems it confronts cannot be resolved by mathematical formulas.” Even as Aristotle had observed that a cultivated man should not expect more precision in a field of knowledge than its subject-matter allows one to have, the “ordinary language philosophers” sought “precision and accuracy of thought and argument, not the precision of the physicist, chemist, or medical doctor.”

Whether analytic philosophers have maintained that symbolic logic mirrors nature, or whether they have maintained that we find meaning only in uses, in pragmatic refinement of paradigms, they have committed what Ryle regards as the fallacy of dualism, what he called (following Arthur Koestler) “the ghost in the machine,” the Geist or spirit/mind as distinguished from the body. Our minds are not separate from our bodies; they are only “organizations of behavior”. Ryle replaces logical atomism and logical positivism with logical behaviorism. We know what people are thinking and feeling primarily by their actions, which include their vocalizations, linguistic and otherwise. Although Ryle eventually questioned behaviorism, finding it insufficient to account for the experience of introspection, behaviorism has enjoyed a long if often pernicious life in the writings of social scientists seeking, as they do, observable and measurable phenomena to describe.

Resistance to dualism entails a rejection of the superiority of mind over matter. This “reflected changes in society,” Schwartz remarks, and indeed it does look like a continuation of the trend toward what Tocqueville calls democracy, social egalitarianism—the pushing-down of aristocratic claims to rule in all endeavors of mind and heart. Would ‘aristocracy’ make a comeback,? Would philosophers begin to call ordinary language philosophy ordinary-all-too-ordinary?

Not entirely. “Since the decline of ordinary language philosophy in the 1960s, no single movement or school has dominated analytic philosophy.” In Schwartz’s estimation, the “most striking and impressive advances” by analytic philosophers came in the investigation of language. And this marked a return to nature, thanks to the work on the linguist Noam Chomsky, whose research into human beings’ innate propensity to language spurred a rethinking of that large portion of philosophic thought which took its cue from John Locke and his (now clearly mistaken) notion of the mind as a tabula rasa. Before Chomsky, the mathematician Kurt Gödel gave “the final deathblow” to the earliest, pre-Principia Mathematica form of analytic philosophy by showing that arithmetic “cannot be reduced to logic and set theory” because some axioms are un-analyzable, unprovable and therefore “beyond the reach of human knowledge.” To put it in verbal terms (as the philosopher Alfred Tarski did), to say that snow is white is true if and only if snow is white. That doesn’t get you very far. More importantly, it can’t, so don’t waste any effort in trying. It is well worth noticing, as Stanley Rosen does, that analytic philosophy tends to deny cognitive status to intellectual intuition or noesis, and that this one of the “limits to analysis.” [3]

To deal with such a conundrum, Tarski distinguished between “object-language”—the sentences in which we talk about objects—and “meta-language”—the sentences in which we talk about the object-language, in which (as Tarski writes) we “construct the definition of truth for the first language.” Donald Davidson elaborated on Tarski’s proposal, linking meta-language to Quine’s anti-positivist holism or Kuhn’s paradigm theory. Or, reaching back still further, Davidson writes, “Frege said that only in the context of a sentence does a word have meaning; in the same vein he might have added that only in the context of the language does a sentence (and therefore a word) have meaning.” Therefore, “an argument must always be interpreted in the way that makes the most sense given the context and other information we have”; “if we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behavior of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational, as having beliefs, or as saying anything.” Taken by itself, this would amount to a highly sophisticated form of classical conventionalism; it took Chomsky to bring nature back in, after it had been driven out by philosophic pitchforks.

Chomsky rejected behaviorism, which “cannot explain our ability to learn a language” because languages are too complex to be learned by an organism starting at zero. “All normal humans are born with a universal grammar already hard-wired in their brains.” This strikes a blow against Quine, a friend of B. F. Skinner, the Harvard psychologist who became the most prominent behaviorist of the postwar decades. [4] Schwartz comments, “Logical behaviorism never had any plausibility. No definitions in terms of behavior and dispositions to behave were ever formulated nor could they be,” inasmuch as “thoughts and day dreams are interior and private and need never be manifested in anything exterior.” They are unverifiable by outside observers.

Further, the natural languages that derive from the universal grammar natural to human beings resemble “a formal logical system.” Whereas Wittgenstein, and Quine following him, denied that the purpose of language “was to express our thoughts,” Chomsky “embraces exactly this view.” Despite his esteem for the Quine insofar as he authored the metaphor of the “web of belief,” Davidson limited such conventionalism by endorsing Chomsky rationalist naturalism: “The dependence of speaking on thinking is evident,” he wrote, “for to speak is to express thoughts.” Schwartz sees that “the next step is not far: [T]he structure of language is isomorphic to the structure of thought, and the world.” The deeper philosophers dove into language, the more they moved toward the classical claim that man is by nature animated by logos, by speech and reason.

From the philosophy of language, then, to the philosophy of mind. Here, philosophers noticed that “the behaviorist cannot forgo appeal to mental states,” which are “functional states of an organism,” that is, states that cause it to behave. External stimuli may ‘push’ the organism to do something, but only as mediated through that mental state (e.g., pain, pleasure, revulsion, attraction). The “functionalist” “views a mental state as a function that takes an input stimulus, plus other mental states, and generates an output that depends on both the input and the other mental states,” indeed, “the entire mental state of the organism.” A computer, which is an artifact imitating the human mind, performing some of the same functions (albeit more efficiently) does much the same thing: its “output depends on the input plus the program the machine is running.”

This is as good as far as it goes, but it “leaves out of the account the subjective nature of our mental lives.” Computers have no consciousness, “as far as we know.” An organism that had no consciousness would feel no pain, even if it were subjected to abuse—a point well known to all of us who have experienced the benefits of anesthesia. Although Davidson and many other philosophers are reluctant to abandon materialism, the idea of consciousness obviously causes a problem for them, even if their web-of-belief organicism disposes of behaviorist simplisme. Schwartz notes, “The problem of mental causation and the problem of consciousness are today the central problems in the philosophy of mind.”

And with all this, even much-denigrated metaphysics, the bugbear of analytic philosophers, has reappeared in the thought of today’s analytic philosophers. This “remarkable development” occurred thanks to “developments in formal modal logic in the 1960s.” Formulated by C. I. Lewis, “modal” logic “is the logic of necessity and possibility,” duly translated into symbolic-logic figures (a box symbolizing necessity, a diamond symbolizing possibility). As Quine immediately saw, and abominated, this suggests that symbolic logic might be made into a means of understanding things in nature, reviving the hated ‘essentialism’ of previous schools of philosophy, and with it metaphysics itself. Schwartz counts himself among those who find Aristotelian essential “intuitive and commonsensical,” very far from impossible to think about logically. “In embracing metaphysics,” he hastens to add, “we did not give up commitment to clarity, care, and careful sequential reasoning, nor to honoring science and mathematics.” That part of the analytic-philosophy mindset remains, well, conscious of itself.

The centerpiece of contemporary metaphysical thought is the idea of “possible worlds,” that is, worlds that “could have been” but are not the “actual” world. The notion of possible worlds was originated by G. W. F. Leibniz, the renowned seventeenth-century metaphysician and indeed theologian. The down-to-earth example of such thinking begins with a “counterfactual”: a world in which, for example, Ralph Nader didn’t run in the 2000 presidential election, resulting in victory for Senator Gore over Governor Bush. Such a possible, but not actual turn of events likely would have led to turns in subsequent events (would President Gore have prosecuted Gulf War II?). In this line of thought, a necessary proposition is true in every possible world, whereas a possible proposition is true in at least one possible world; an impossible proposition is possible in none, and a contingent proposition is true in some worlds, false in others. “This is not about language. Even though we speak of possible world semantics, it is metaphysics.” And it reopens philosophic minds to essentialism: “I have the property of being a human being in every world in which I exist,” Schwartz writes. “I have the property of living in Ithaca in some but not others. I am essentially a human but contingently an Ithacan.” “An essence is a property or conjunction of properties that is necessary and sufficient for being a particular individual.” As Alvin Plantinga puts it, “If Socrates”—not to be confused with Schwartz, but the principle is the same—”had not existed, his essence would have been unexemplified, but not nonexistent. In world where Socrates exists, Socrateity is his essence; exemplifying Socrateity is essential to him.” Or, as Schwartz puts it, “In some worlds, some essences are exemplified, and others are not.” Mathematicians have dealt with such an idea for years in the form of probability theory in statistics. As the political writer George F. Will noticed, a Chicago Cubs hitter whose batting average is .203, isn’t necessary ‘overdue for a base hit,’ whatever some cheerleading baseball announcer may say. In the actual world, he may strike out, even if there are possible worlds in which he saves the day with an RBI triple.

On a loftier level, modal logic revives the ontological argument for the existence of God. In Descartes’ version, since God has all perfections and existence is a perfection, God exists. The modal version of the ontological argument is: “If it is possible that God exists, then God exists”—that is, in essence if not in actuality; “if it is possible that a necessary being who is omnipotent” and possesses the other attributes of the Biblical God exists, “then such a being exists.” This doesn’t prove the existence of God, but, as Plantinga argues, “it establishes the rational acceptability of belief in God—the rational acceptability of theism,” because even if one disbelieves that there can be a possible world in which “maximal greatness is instantiated,” believing that there is, “is not irrational.” Therefore, “theism is not irrational” but rather a logical stance taken on the basis of a premise that cannot be proven or disproven, rather as we understand that snow is white only if snow is white. “To my knowledge,” Schwartz writes, “no one has yet succeeded in demonstrating that the concept of God is impossible, self-contradictory, or nonsensical.”

If nature has returned to philosophy, precisely through the thinking-through of analytic philosophy, what is nature? Putnam defines natural kinds as “classes of things that we regard as of explanatory importance… held together [by] deep-lying mechanisms.” According to the theory of “reference”—what we mean to say that our words refer to something—meaning has “intension” and “extension.” “Intension” is what we mean to say by using a given term; the word ‘lemon’ means a certain “conjunction of properties.” “Extension” is a reference to the things to which that meaning applies. The term ‘lemon’ refers to an object currently sitting in the fruit and vegetable section of Market House, among other objects, many of them not lemons. In logical terms, the concept corresponding to the term is its “intension,” and it “must always provide a necessary and sufficient condition for falling into the extension of the term.” “Analytic” truths “are based on the meanings of terms.” From Hume onwards, “all necessity was construed as analyticity or somehow based on linguistic conventions.” This is what’s behind Hume’s questioning of the theory of causality; there is no sort of “extra-linguistic necessity.” That’s what Wittgenstein has in mind when he claims that essence is expressed by grammar, by a linguistic convention, and need not apply to the physical world.

Keith Donellan argues otherwise. To describe something, he remarks, you may make an “attributive” description or a “referential” one. An attributive description is one in which I infer a characteristic of, say, a person without knowing who the person is. If someone explains E=mc² to me, I might think that the person who first formulated that must have been smarter than I am, but I might not know it was Albert Einstein. If I met Einstein and had a conversation with him, and then described him as being smarter than I am, I would be defining him referentially, now having a definite person in mind. Bringing in ‘possible worlds’ theory, Saul Kripke adds that when I say “Albert Einstein” I mean “the same person whether or not he… satisfies some list of commonly associated descriptions.” Those who knew Einstein as a child attributed no genius to him but nonetheless meant the same dude as those who later described him quite differently. Kripke distinguishes between necessity—a category in metaphysics—a prioricity—a category in epistemology—and analyticity—a category in linguistics.

The same goes not only for persons but for natural kinds. Under the older theory, “the concept associated with a term functions like the set of identifying descriptions supposedly associated with an ordinary name”; “gold” is yellow, shiny, metallic, and so forth. It can be analyzed linguistically, broken down into these other words. Kripke observes, however, that such a description doesn’t truly define gold. Only “its atomic structure defines whether some stuff is gold.” Gold is gold metaphysically, that is, it is gold in all possible worlds. Anything that does not have that atomic structure isn’t gold, “even if it satisfies some list of superficial features that we think” characterize it. Our certainty in this classification derives not from “knowledge of a definition” but from “a well-established empirical theory.” It is not analytic, in the analytic-philosophy sense, but “if it is true, it is necessary” metaphysically.

Schwartz provides another way into the question, distinguishing physical possibility and necessity from metaphysical possibility and necessity, and both from logical possibility and necessity. An alternate world that is physically possible must have the same natural laws as our world. An alternative world that is metaphysically possible might be physically impossible in our, actual, world. An alternative world that is logically possible must only meet the criterion of “logical consistency.” So, for example, it is physically possible for Schwartz to have lived in San Francisco, as this would violate “no natural laws”; what is more, this is also metaphysically and logically possible. It is physically impossible for Schwartz to swim across the Atlantic Ocean; it isn’t metaphysically or logically impossible, however. It is not physically possible for Schwartz to be an alligator, nor is it metaphysically possible “(assuming that I am essentially human)”; it is nonetheless logically possible, for example if I (not doubt unwarrantedly) use the term ‘alligator’ as a metaphor to describe Schwartz’s personality.

Speaking of character, analytic philosophers have also begun to admit ethics into their purview, along with metaphysics and nature. G. E. Moore’s moral-philosophic equivalent of the Principia Mathematica was his Principia Ethica, published in the same year as the Russell/Whitehead opus. Moore denied that there can be any such things as moral philosophy; his book centers on what he calls “metaethics,” the “logical and analytical study of ethics” by means of epistemological, logical, and metaphysical categories. Such categories tell one nothing substantive about right and wrong, good and bad because (according to Moore) such ethical topics have no cognitive content if one considers them epistemologically, logically, and metaphysically. Moore argues that ‘good’ is an indefinable term, rather like ‘white’ or ‘yellow.’ Like those terms, it cannot be analyzed. But unlike shades and colors, it can’t be “perceived by the senses,” either; it is “apprehended by moral intuition.” Because it can’t be perceived by the senses it can’t be natural; in claiming this, Moore affirms Hume’s denial that we can derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’. Philosophers who try to derive ethics from nature commit the “naturalistic fallacy.” The moral intuition amounts to “personal affection” and “appreciation”—to ‘values’ as distinct from ‘facts.’ A later writer in Moore’s line, C. L. Stevenson subsumed ethical discourse under rhetoric: “The point of ethical discourse is to influence not describe.” A. J. Ayer agreed.

Analytic philosophers began to change their minds after World War II, which conflict must have imposed a fairly severe challenge to moral subjectivism. R. M. Hare hoped to stay within the Moore-Stevenson-Ayer orbit, but in the process put an end to their ethical emotivism by remarking (in an unwittingly Aristotelian way) that ‘good’ in morality means essentially the same thing as it means in other areas. We mean ‘good person’ in more or less the same way we mean ‘good dog,’ ‘good car,’ ‘good movie.’ We don’t mean only that we like that person, dog, car, or movie; we also mean that it has some intrinsic quality that fulfills the definition of the noun we use to classify it. And so, to use Schwartz’s example, if Conan the Barbarian understands the good life as the victorious life cannot be right, as victory in itself contributes nothing “to human flourishing,” does not fulfill the meaning of the noun ‘human.’ “It is mere self-interest.” But more, one might argue. Insofar as mere victory in battle might deform the person who achieves it, making him more inhuman than before, it is not even self-interest, rightly understood.

This is the kind of thing C. E. M. Anscombe and Philippa Foot have in mind when they assert that moral terms have factual content, that a ‘value’ can partake of facticity. They founded “a school of ethics, based on Aristotle’s ethics, called virtue ethics,” which emphasizes “moral character rather than moral oughts and goodness” in the utilitarian and also in the Kantian sense. Schwartz somewhat puzzlingly goes on to laud John Rawls, a neo-Kantian, as a veritable “Philosopher King,” although this does at least bring political philosophy back into the ethical universe, as Aristotle had seen it to be.

Looking at the trajectory of analytic philosophy as described by Schwartz, one finds it a remarkable enterprise indeed. What started out as a philosophic method that eschewed metaphysics and morality as sub-philosophical realms devoid of rational content has slowly uncovered doctrines with affinities to Aristotelianism. That is, ultra-‘modern’ analytic philosophy has begun to turn modernity away from itself and back toward the ‘ancients.’ Will postmodernists take a similar turn? As the old saying goes, ‘From your mouth to God’s ears’—God having now been reintroduced to polite philosophic conversation.

 

Notes

1. Jacob Klein: Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origins of Algebra. Eva Brann translation. New York: Dover Publications, 1992.
2. V. I. Lenin: Collected Works. Volume 14, pp. 17-362. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972.
3. Stanley Rosen: The Limits of Analysis. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000.
4. An acquaintance of mine once lived next door to a famous behavioral psychologist. The great man had gone so far as to place his infant son for in what was called a ‘Skinner box’ for substantial periods of time. A Skinner box was a controlled environment in which an animal (very often a rat or a pigeon) would be rewarded for performing a certain action, not rewarded or even punished for failing to perform it. The last time my acquaintance saw him, the lad was chasing the family cat around the back yard, a syringe in hand. This suggests that errors in epistemological theory may have startling actual-world consequences, although admittedly it doesn’t rigorously prove that they do, or must do.

 

Henry Veatch: Realism and Nominalism. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1954.

Henry Veatch: Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1980 [1962].

 

David Hume disrupted philosophy by arguing that ‘is’ implies no demonstrable ‘ought.’ The mere fact that a thing is by nature or by convention does not tell me whether it is good. Natural laws may describe gravity, the growth of a tree, the traits of horses and humans, but they cannot tell me what I should do or become. Nature tells me what pleasures and pains me, not what is right. Similarly, no civil custom or law justifies itself; political society may reward me or punish me, but it cannot prove that it is right to do so. When writing about matters of good and bad, right and wrong, Hume could offer nothing other than experience as the criterion to which I should attend, claiming there is no other. When considering politics, he interested himself primarily in ruling institutions, which shape the experience of citizens and subjects, and history, which recounts the experiences of previous generations for the instruction of subsequent generations.

Evidently, Hume must understand nature to be devoid of purpose. Like Hobbes, he recognizes material, formal, and efficient causes in nature, but not final causes. To put it in historical terms, he shares Hobbes’s rejection of Aristotelian philosophy. That is the fundamental reason for his denial of any connection between ‘is’ and ‘ought.’ Nature, what is, can generate no such thing as an ‘ought.’ Those who claim otherwise therefore fall into both logical contradiction and groundless ethics.

Henry Veatch has his eye on that claim, both as a logician and as a moral philosopher. But he begins well before Hume, considering the major philosophic controversy of the generation before Thomas Aquinas: ‘realism’ vs. ‘nominalism.’ He does so for no antiquarian reason. “Realism and nominalism may well be perennial issues in philosophy” (RNR 1); “today, no less than in the 12th century, there is a realist-nominalist controversy raging” (RNR 2). And this makes sense, inasmuch as the philosophic atmosphere, as it were, of that century resembles that of the mid-1950s: In the twelfth century, philosophers “knew little else in philosophy save logic”; for their part, today’s philosophers are “all pretty much agreed that the only really serious discipline in philosophy is logic” (RNR 2). Then as now, philosophers bind themselves with “logicism” (RNR 2).

Veatch contends that “the current issue of realism vs. nominalism may be in large measure understood in terms of, and perhaps may even be said to have been caused by the rather uncritical use by modern logicians of a certain basic scheme, or ordering pattern, that quite literally dominates the entire vast corpus of modern mathematical logic” (RNR 3). This pattern begins with Gottlob Frege’s understanding of logic in the mathematical terms of function and argument. In any mathematical equation, there is a constant and a variable—for example, in ‘2x’ two is the constant, x the variable. Frege “proposed to generalize these notions so as to make them applicable far beyond the confines of mathematics in the narrower sense, extending them to the analysis of concepts and propositions in logic” (RNR 5). He translates these terms into logic by calling the logical equivalent of the constant the “function,” the x-factor the “argument.” To analyze the sentence, “Caesar conquered Gaul,” he treats “Gaul” as the function or constant, Caesar as the argument or x-factor.

This sets up “the vast and elaborate quantification theory of modern logic, a theory, which it is claimed, almost infinitely surpasses the old subject-predicate theory of traditional logic in range and power” (RNR 8). In subject-predicate theory, “Caesar conquered Gaul” means just that. It registers “a simple one-place function.” But in quantification theory, anything could replace the function, “Gaul,” just as any number could replace the two in “2x.” “The propositions envisaged in quantification theory will involve besides one-place functions, two-place, three-place, four place and so on up to n-place functions!” (RNR 8-9).

Bertrand Russell, for one, became so enamored of quantitative logic that he dismissed subject-predicate logic altogether, holding it “unable to admit the reality of relations” (RNR 10) Why so? Because subject-predicate logic limits itself to only one thing in relation to one other thing; it is cramped by concreteness. Quantitative logic, like numbers, ‘abstracts from’ the particulars: “The true function of logic as applied to matters of experience,” Russell writes, is to “show the possibility of hitherto unsuspected alternatives,” to “liberate the imagination as to what the world may be” (RNR 11). As Veatch puts it, in Russell’s view quantitative logic “provides an inventory of possibilities, a repertory of abstractly tenable hypotheses” (RNR 11). Veatch may be a bit too much of the gentleman to remark that this sort of thing fit rather well with Russell’s socialism, an imaginary construct of what the world may be, abstractly considered. With quantitative logic in hand, a philosopher might do seriously what Plato’s Socrates did ironically: make a city in speech plausible.

In considering realism and nominalism in his thirteenth century, Aquinas distinguished ens rationis and ens naturae, while connecting this distinction to a distinction in logic. Reason, he argued, finds what he calls “intentions” in natural things “insofar as they are considered by reason” (RNR 12). By “intention” he means such attributes as genus and species. One doesn’t find such ideas as genus and species by means of one’s senses’ perception of things; the ideas “rather are consequent upon reason’s consideration of the things of nature” (12). Logic, thought guided by the principle of non-contradiction, does discover the genus and species of things by comparing one thing to another, observing that (for example) a diamond is not a ruby, a sheep is not a goat, because their attributes in some respect contradict one another, whereas a diamond and a ruby are both minerals, a sheep and a goat both animals, because their attributes in some respects are identical to one another, do not contradict at all. Veatch observes, “if the subject matter of logic is the sort of thing which St. Thomas here suggests that it is, then it is quite obviously not the sort of thing that Lord Russell says it is” (RNR 12). They are things of different species. “Liberating the imagination, or drawing up inventories of possibilities, or contemplating unsuspected alternatives as to what in the eyes of God or the devil or Lord Russell the world may be—all this is all very well, but it simply isn’t the business of logic,” since what Russell wants logic to “disclose and reveal are real possibilities; they are not mere intentions in the sense of beings of reason” (RNR 13).

Thomas’s distinction between the natural things and logical “intentions” addresses the realism-vs.-nominalism question he inherited from his immediate philosophic predecessors by connecting reality to names in a logical, and indeed Aristotelian way. Logical intentions have nothing to do with things in the natural world, real or possible, as immediately perceived by the senses. “It is only as things come to be known, or better, it is only insofar as in coming to be known they acquire a status as objects of thought or reason… which otherwise and just in themselves they would not have at all” (RNR 14). If the “subject” we consider is hydrogen, and by measuring it we determine its atomic weight as 1.008, “we make ‘hydrogen’ the subject of a proposition and we predicate ‘having an atomic weight of 1.008’ of it” (RNR 14). Reason “may be said to find in hydrogen, insofar as hydrogen comes to be known and is made an object before the mind,” its atomic weight, the predicate of the sentence ‘Hydrogen has an atomic weight of 1.008’ (RNR 15).

Moreover, “logical intentions, in addition to being consequent upon reason’s consideration of nature, are also instrumental to reason’s consideration of things” (RNR 15). That is, they are “the tools and means of human knowledge,” not only their products; “or better, they are produced in the process of knowledge, precisely in order that through them such knowledge may be made possible” (RNR 16). In nature, “hydrogen is neither a species nor a subject, but in its condition of being known and as an object before the mind, it takes on these purely logical features or ‘intentions,’ as they are called” (RNR 16). The mind classifies hydrogen with respect to it being “a species of a genus or a subject of a predicate” so that “we may thereby come to know that hydrogen really is an element or that it does in fact have an atomic weight of 1.008” (RNR 116-17). “The main instruments of traditional logic—concepts, propositions, and arguments—are, in form and structure, simply relations of identity” (RNR 17). As “tools,” they ‘dig out’ the characteristics of natural objects not perceived by the senses alone, characteristics nonetheless real, albeit real in a different way than sensually-perceived reality. “It is only intellectually or in the mind that what-a-thing-is is abstracted from the thing itself and then reidentified with it in a logical proposition,” such as ‘a sheep is a mammal'” (RNR 17). Through the tool, instrument, device of logic, the mind relates “a thing to its own ‘what,'” causing the thinker “to recognize what that thing is in fact and in reality” (RNR 18). “The relation of identity that the mind sets up between subject and predicate in a proposition is an intentional relation precisely in the sense that through it the mind or reason is able to intend things as they are in themselves and in reality”; when I say what a thing is I am ‘identifying’ it through language (RNR 19). That’s why I might be mistaken and, if my proposition is illogical, why I must be mistaken; I can’t show you how a thing can be or do opposites at the same time, with respect to the same part, in relation to the same thing. A subatomic particle may manifest itself as a wave or as a particle, but not at the same time, by means of the same observation.

Not so with Frege’s quantitative logic. It isn’t “intentional” in the Thomistic sense, for two reasons. First, “the relation of a function to its argument or arguments is not a relation of identity”; therefore, “the function can in no sense be regarded as representing what the argument or arguments are’ (RNR 19). ‘2x’ tells me nothing about what ‘2’ is. The person who speaks or writes ‘2x’ has formed no such (Thomistic) intention. As Veatch puts it, the sentence “Milwaukee is north of Chicago,” in which “Chicago” and “Milwaukee” are the arguments and “north of” is the function, tells me nothing of “what Milwaukee and Chicago conjointly are” (RNR 19-20). Second, “unlike the relation of identity between subject and predicate, the relation between argument and function is not one whose nature is simply to be of or about something else” (RNR 20). The relation of Milwaukee to Chicago in the sentence refers not to the ‘whatness’ of either city, but to “the order of parts in a whole.” It does not tell me what that whole is—if, for example, Milwaukee and Chicago form part of a ‘metroplex.’

Returning to the question of realism and nominalism as they reappear in modern philosophic thought, Veatch observes that for Russell the word or symbol that is the “argument” in the proposition (say, Milwaukee, Chicago, Socrates) stands for an irreducible “particular”; the function sign (say, north of, or Plato) stands for a universal or a relation. In the sentence “Socrates was older than Plato,” “Socrates” and “Plato” are the particulars, the “arguments,” and “being older than” is the relation or universal (RNR 23-24). What does such a sentence, so understood, signify? It means nothing about ‘what’ the particulars are, but rather states (one aspect of) their relation to one another. Veatch calls this “logical atomism,” meaning that both the particulars and the universal/relational exist “outside of and along side” of one another (RNR 27). Russell himself soon saw that this means a word in a logical proposition, and therefore the logical proposition itself, need not have any relation to reality at all. A word of course “contributes to the meaning of the sentence in which it occurs,” Russell writes, but that is a feature of language, not necessarily of any reality beyond language (RNR 31).

Russell thus went from the quasi-Platonic realism of Frege, in which numbers “peopled the timeless realm of Being,” toward nominalism. W. V. Quine takes that final step, denying that there are any abstract entities at all. The word “appendicitis” “is a noun,” he writes, “only because of a regrettable strain of realism which pervades our own particular language” (RNR 35-36). As Veatch puts it, Quine regards “all supposedly ‘descriptive’ words as if they are ultimately and in principle no different from ‘logical’ words” (RNR 36). “This certainly sounds like nominalism”; “the function-argument scheme has indeed given rise to an extreme nominalist type of semantics” (RNR 37). Quine can deny that the ‘function’ side of the proposition, the ‘universal’ side, refers to any objective reality, arguing that “in any proposition involving a function-argument structure, while both parts of the proposition may be presumed to be meaningful and significant, still in asserting the proposition as a whole, what one asserts to exist are only the arguments and not the function” (RNR 40). One cannot, by means of logical propositions, understand anything that is ‘out there.

Thus “modern logicians and semanticists have found themselves forced into one or the other of two very embarrassing alternatives” (RNR 45): either Quine is right, and logic is only a language game which tells one nothing about any reality beyond itself, or one must admit that ‘Milwaukee’ means a particular city, ‘Socrates’ a particular person, ‘north of’ a real direction, ‘older than’ seniority in years—an alternative that re-presents quantitative logic as a realism depending upon a leap of faith (which doesn’t sound entirely logical).

But (Veatch argues) this only indicates that philosophers have entangled themselves in a pseudo-problem. “The entire trouble would seem to stem from the use in modern logic of a schema like that of function and argument, which turns out to be radically non-intentional, and hence not adapted to the proper purposes of logic at all” (RNR 46). Subject-predicate logic avoids this problem altogether because to use logic as a tool, instrument, device “certainly does not imply that one means or signifies by it a real universal entity existing extra-mentally, as the realists would seem to hold; nor is the only alternative to this the nominalistic one of supposing that in using a universal concept, one does not thereby mean or signify anything real at all” (RNR 47). If I assert that “many Wisconsin barns are red” I don’t mean that many Wisconsin barns are redness. I’m not saying that any particular barn or set of barns is the idea of redness, or indeed that it is the idea of barn-ness. Nor does such an assertion commit me to the idea of the Ideas in the supposedly Platonic sense of an ‘extra-mental’ set of realities above and beyond the particulars. In using language to form sentences I intend to bring out, some aspect of the particulars I am talking about; using language logically signifies an intention to correct errors in my perception of those particulars, to re-cognize them. As Thomas puts it in the Summa contra Gentiles, “although it is necessary for the truth of a cognition that the cognition answer to the thing known, still it is not necessary that the mode of the thing known be the same as the mode of its cognition” (RNR 51). In this, Thomas follows Aristotle, that logician who does not need ‘Platonic’ ideas in order to reason about things.

“Somehow,” Veatch concludes (with a hint of exasperation) “one wonders whether, if only this simple and rather obvious principle of intentionality had been observed by modern logicians, there would ever have been the current and seemingly futile dispute between realists and nominalists among modern semanticists” (RNR 51). But what about modern ethicists? To use a recently-invented, Greek-sounding word Veatch avoids, has this ‘epistemological’ debacle twisted them in the wrong direction, too?

Can Ethics Be Logical?

Lord Russell famously answered with a resounding ‘No,’ having taken the ways of mathematical logic for those of logic as such and concluded that in ethics all we have are emotions (as in the fear behind his Cold-War slogan “Better Red than dead”) and that in politics all we have is imagination powered by emotion (as in The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism). In Rational Man, Veatch demurs, deploying Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to refute not so much Russell as the existentialist ethics of William Barrett in his then-recent book, Irrational Man and also the language-philosophy stance of Charles L. Stevenson, who, in his 1944 book Ethics and Language, consigned substantive ethical questions to the realm of less-than-philosophic souls. Veatch intends not to explicate Aristotle but “to use him in a modern effort to set forth and justify a rational system of ethics,” an application of Aristotelian ethics to modern circumstances (RM xiii). “This book will have to do with just such normative questions as the currently regnant intelligentsia has come to regard as not philosophically respectable” (RM xxvi).

Unlike Aristotle, whose ethical philosophy leads directly to political philosophy (a term he may have invented), Veatch promises to duck social and political questions, as in current circumstances so many ‘realists’ skip ethics entirely, jumping immediately to matters of society and politics, conceived simply as field of ‘power relations.’ Such Realpolitik thinkers, ‘Left’ or ‘Right,’ find unintended allies among linguistic philosophers. But what if philosophy has more to offer than language games, however rigorously played? “To most people it must seem that ethics has to do with more than just the meanings of words and the uses of language” (RM 2). What if they are right? Even if to think well about ethics one will need to clarify terms, among other acts of hygiene?

Everyone wants to live well. And, after any number of blunders, most people see that living well requires “an art or technique that one must master, a skill that one must acquire before one can do [the act of living] well, or perhaps even do it at all” (RM 3). In an effort to help in this, optimistic parents send their children to college. But, “Let’s face it: modern learning does not have anything to do with living, or being learned with being human” (RM 4). In considering the lives of philosophers, Kierkegaard “trembles to think of what it means to be a man” (RM 5); Socrates replies that to philosophize one must know oneself and learn how to live. One must find a good way of life—a thought Socrates shares with the founders of major religions, such as the God of the Bible, who very much insists on His way, demanding that His people abjure the ways of Canaanites, Egyptians, Persians, and indeed all others but His own.

In adjuring men to master Fortuna, to conquer nature, modern philosophy, the science it has produced, and the technology that science has produced offer “a truly amazing example of the relevance of knowledge to life” (RM 10). When modern science attends to human nature, it goes so far as to claim to control the lives of non-scientists, reducing human life to a set of “functions” (RM 10)—exactly what one would expect of a project animated by quantitative logic. But who is doing the animation? What is their character? “What is needed for ethics is knowledge not of how to control nature, but of how to control oneself” (RM 10), not only others. In this sense, ethics must precede politics, self-government preceding political rule. What can quantitative logic teach about self-government?

Not much. “Isn’t it a truism nowadays that morals and ethics are relative matters, that is to say, matters of opinion, not of knowledge?” (RM 13) “Ethical relativism has become almost a sine qua non of the educated man, a sort of badge of the modern intellectual,” who maintains that one’s opinions are always ‘relative’ to, even determined by, one civilization, culture class, physical environment, biology, psychological drives. As proof, the intellectual points to the diversity, the contradictory multitude, of moral principles. But this is no proof of anything but the manifoldness of human ways, a fact as well known to Moses and Aristotle as it is to Lord Russell and Professor Stevenson. “The mere diversity in human moral standards does not in principle preclude the possibility of at least some of these standards being correct and others incorrect” (RM 14). Indeed, “the whole world might be wrong and a single individual right” (RM 15), as any number of philosophers (and not only prophets) have started out by thinking.

Ethical relativism follows from Hume’s is-ought dichotomy. The denial of this dichotomy leads relativists “to label their opponents ‘absolutists'” (RM 19n.). Linguistically considered, ‘absolute’ does oppose ‘relative.’ No one calls the knowledge of modern scientists “a purely relative matter”; yet no one calls it “an absolute knowledge,” either. “And if scientists can enjoy an immunity from the dilemma of relativism or absolutism, why may not moral philosophers as well?” (RM 19n)

Some ethical relativists hope that relativism will bring forth greater toleration of differing opinions, and of those who hold them. The anthropologist Ruth Benedict believed so. But, then, so did Benito Mussolini, whose ghost-writer (probably the philosophy professor Giovanni Gentile) wrote for him, “Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition…. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable” (RM 20). Toleration, meet intolerance, each of you standing on the same leg (as do so many of the ‘post-modern’ Leftists whom Veatch, Benedict, Mussolini, and Gentile never lived to see).

All of these would-be relativists face the same dilemma, as well as one another. “No human being can stop with just having convictions, he also has to live and to act. But to act is to choose and to choose is to manifest some sort of preference for one course of action over another. However, to manifest any such human preference means that, consciously or unconsciously, implicitly or explicitly, one has made a judgment of value as to which course of action is the better or the wiser or the more suitable or preferable.” (RM 22)  Benedict holds on high the banner of toleration; Mussolini self-assertion; “liberated youth” their “impulses and inclinations”; skeptics (Hume) “the standards of the community of which [he] is a member” (RM 23). All of these standards rest on “a glaring non sequitar: “Since no course of action is really better or superior to any other, I conclude that the better course of action for me to follow would be thus and so'” (RM 23). Obviously, there is “no possible way in which the denial of all standards of better and worse can itself be transformed into a kind of standard of better or worse” (RM 23). To get out of this impasse, one will need not self-assertion, whether spirited or dispirited, but self-examination.

“Back to Socrates and Aristotle,” then (RM 27). Back, as it happens, to the facts, and to a consideration of facts prior to asserting the ethical equivalent of realism-vs.-nominalism, namely facts-vs.-values. Aristotle observes that every art and every investigation aims at some good (else why undertake it?). Is there a supreme good at which all our actions, taken together, aim? Since all beings have a nature, a set of characteristics defining what they are, the good for each kind of being must be the perfection of its nature. This means that ‘values,’ as they are called, “are simply facts of nature” (RM 29). It can’t be good for water, as water, to evaporate, although sometimes its evaporation may be good for other beings, or for nature as a whole. The distinctively human good, the one fulfilling the definition of what a human being is, “will involve what might loosely be called the maturity or healthy condition of the whole man, or of man in his total being” (RM 29). Further, “since man is a being capable of intelligence and understanding, and consequently of planned and deliberate behavior on the basis of such understanding, it may also be presumed that the way in which a human being attains his appropriate good or natural perfection will be rather different from that of a plant or an animal,” by “a conscious recognition of what the human end is and by deliberately aiming at this proper end” (RM 29). Such recognition, according to Aristotle’s subject-predicate logic, comes from using the “tool” of logic, by reasoning.

Veatch illustrates this by a hypothetical which seems as if it were inspired by the late Franklin Roosevelt. Suppose that a person comes along who begins by “remind[ing] us of how precarious our existence is,” and then offers us a deal: From now on, he will see to it that we will enjoy “freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom from worry,” on condition that “we shan’t know what is going on” (RM 32). In short, life under the soft despotism of administrative statism, ideally conceived. Would we take the deal? We might, “in moods of defeatism, of misery, and of utter hopelessness,” such as many experienced during the Great Depression and the Second World War. But in less dire circumstances “by and large no man in his senses would prefer the existence of a contented cow, however well fed and well cared for, to the existence of a human being with at least some understanding of what is going on” (RM 33). And as a matter of fact, modern rulers usually do not make their offer explicit, shrewdly assuring that the ruled are clever, informed, wise—the very opposite of those deplorable ignoramuses over there—”while in fact depriving them of the reality of all genuine knowledge and understanding,” or at least trying to (RM 33).

Some, following Hegel, will say that human beings don’t want to know so much as they want to be ‘recognized,’ esteemed by their fellows. In running for Congress, the young Abraham Lincoln admitted that such was his ambition. But was that what Lincoln really wanted? “Why do we seek recognition so avidly?” “Because such praise and respect from our fellows somehow serve as reassurance to ourselves that maybe we have accomplished something or amounted to something after all” (RM 35). If so, then recognition or reputation, honor, is only a proximate end; we seek a sense of “our own worth, our own real achievement and perfection” (RM 35). Following Aristotle, Veatch conducts his readers toward self-examination, toward self-knowledge, by his very argument for self-knowledge as a constituent of human perfection. To perfect something or someone, one first must know what it or he is.

What the English would call a ‘horrible’ lurks here. “It would appear that the good life for man, as Socrates and Aristotle envisage it, would turn out to be none other than the academic life, the life of the professor!”—”the pathetic reality of present-day academic life” (and mind you, Veatch is writing in 1962, years before the inmates took over the academic asylums) (RM 36). Perish the thought, preferably by refusing to allow thought to perish, even in academic groves. “Socrates is always careful to stress that the kind of knowledge and wisdom in which human perfection consists is the knowledge of ‘Know thyself’ and the wisdom that makes for the improvement of the soul,” whereas “there is something about nearly all modern science and scholarship that seems to make it not merely impertinent, but actually antithetic to anything on the order of Socratic wisdom” (RM 37). As Veatch’s readers have already seen, the misapprehension of the distinctively human characteristic, reason, and particularly of its tool, logic, has helped to make this so.

Here Veatch ventures a rare departure from Aristotle. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle proposes two kinds of human perfection or excellence: “the practical life of man as possessing reason” that aims at discovering and at walking along the right way of life; and then, in Book X, the theoretical life, the life of the philosopher (RM 38). But although discovering the right way of life does require (finally if not initially) theoretical reasoning about what a human being is, such knowledge aims at living the right life, not merely thinking about it. “Knowledge for its own sake can never be the be-all and the end-all of human existence, nor can the chief good of man ever consist in the mere possession or even the exercise of knowledge”; it must rather consist “in its use in the practical living of our lives under the guidance of such knowledge and understanding as we possess” (RM 40-41). That is human perfection or excellence, full humanity. “The intelligent man, in this sense, is the good man or the man of character, and, vice-versa, the good man, in the sense of the man who has attained his full perfection or natural end as a human being, is the intelligent man,” who has achieved eudaimonia or happiness understood not as a ‘feeling’ but as a condition (RM 41). Happiness is “not a matter of subjective feeling on the part of the individual, but something objectively determinable,” just as the health of an individual isn’t a matter of feeling healthy (RM 42). If one feels contented by some condition that is “anything less than what as a human being he is capable of and what… he is naturally ordered and oriented toward, then we should certainly say that such a person had settled for less than he should have, or that he didn’t know what was good for him” (RM 43). We would say, as Socrates says of some interlocutors, he has a wrongly-ordered soul.

A modern scientist might reply to Veatch by saying that disease is no less natural than health, that nature has no end or purpose, that life and death are indifferent to nature, equally part of nature. Veatch answers, as he does to logical positivists, that modern science excludes consideration of natural end a priori. The ‘method’ of modern science, dovetailing with the method of mathematical logic, excludes considerations of ‘what-ness’ and ‘who-ness.’ But such considerations are exactly what ethical thought requires. This does not make ethical thought irrational; it only makes it unscientific. I once asked an atheist, who found the notion of God unscientific and therefore rationally inadmissible, if his little daughter knew him. If so, she could not know him scientifically, having no knowledge whatever of his chemical composition, his DNA, or nearly anything other things modern scientists can measure beyond his size, shape, and (to some extent) behavior. “The possibility of explanation in scientific terms must involve the exclusion a priori of all such data as do not lend themselves to the particular procedures of scientific testing and verification” (RM 46), as the possibility of explanation in mathematical terms must involve such exclusion of all things do not lend themselves to the particular procedures of mathematical measurement and proof. But these exclusions do not preclude reasoning in other ways, ways which (as Aristotle says) fit the things being considered.

One might reply to Veatch by remarking that all of this depends upon the nature of nature, as it were. What or who are you knowing? Is it or he (or He?) good to know? Veatch, with Aristotle, answers that human being not only has a good but is itself good ‘for itself.’ God might reply, ‘Not so fast, sinner.’ But God will then offer the grace which makes nature better than it now is. And even a mere philosopher might justify his own way of life, in reasonable terms, by explaining that he too requires self-knowledge, and in knowing himself he knows that, qua philosopher, qua lover of theoretical and not only practical wisdom, his perfection consists in attempting to know the whole of nature, including its First Cause. The philosopher’s good is not exactly the same as the good of the practical man. It comprehends, or at least seek to comprehend, more than a good life in the social and political world. The scientific and mathematical ‘universes’ are not necessarily “the only reality there is” (RM 47). But does this leave “in the utterly unsatisfactory situation philosophically of having to acknowledge that truth is not one, but many”? (RM 48).

Whether by natural reasoning or divine revelation, knowledge of the human good requires that human beings think ‘pre-scientifically,’ pre-mathematically. In the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Everything I know of the world, even through science, I know from a point of view which is mine or through an experience of the world without which the symbols of science would be meaningless” (RM 48). “We must first re-awaken this experience of the world,” Merleau-Ponty continues, “for science is its second expression. Science does not have and never will have the same kind of being that the perceived world has, for the simple reason that science is a determination or explanation of the world” (RM 48). This latter claim could (and did, in Merleau-Ponty’s case) lead not to Aristotelianism but to a historicist apology for tyranny, to a claim that morality consists in going with the ever-changing, Heraclitean flow issuing in a universal despotism. With Aristotle, Veatch rather doubts that, and would concur instead with Leo Strauss (who equally called for a return to ‘naive’ or pre-scientific understanding as the foundation of all knowing, including scientific and mathematical knowing) in recognizing that historicism is only another ‘ism,’ philosophically interesting but mistaken, and sometimes calamitously so. Accordingly, Veatch valorizes not Stalinism or Maoism but the less grandiose task of “try[ing] to return, in some sense at least, to the things themselves,” to “a return to this world as it is before scientific knowledge,” to “the concrete world of ordinary human experience” (RM 48-49).

What happens if we do? “Living intelligently involves seeing things as they are and seeing oneself as one is, amid all the confusions and misrepresentations due to one’s own passions and predilections and prejudices” (RM 56). In so living, one finds the passions to be double-edged—often clouding the mind but also providing a useful mental shorthand, as the pain of a bee sting causes wariness of bees, around which one exercises caution ‘without thinking,’ from then on. “Without emotions and passions, a human being would not be human, but a mere clod, lacking the dynamic quality that is requisite for the attainment of human perfection” (RM 59); if passions run too high, they overpower thought altogether. “The virtuous man is the man who knows how to utilize and control his own emotions and desires,” the one who governs himself (RM 59). Fundamentally expressions of desire or aversion, emotions imply judgments of good and bad; this is why Aristotle puts such emphasis on the definition of virtues as means between extremes, and on the particular virtue of moderation. To understand courage (for example) as the mean or the middle between rashness and cowardice implies that the courageous soul leaves itself room for making a reasoned judgment of how to conduct itself in each circumstance which arises. Moderation, which ‘hits the middle’ regarding physical desires, is the virtue needed most often, addressing the ordinary challenges of our daily lives. Virtue understood and exercised as “the mean” also enables us to avoid judging simply according to habit derived from “mere social convention” (RM 61). It enables even a non-philosophic soul to ‘ascend from the Cave’ of social opinion. And it should not go unnoticed that “the mean” isn’t quantifiable; there is no mathematical formula we can devise to get us to hit it, except with respect to bodily goods, care for which requires us first to intend to hit the mean in the first place.

Aristotle identifies magnanimity or greatness of soul as the crown of the moral virtues. Veatch ‘democratizes’ it somewhat, calling it “self-respect” (RM 62). “The man who manages to live well will be the man who has a just estimate of himself, being neither overly complacent about his capacities and achievements, not, at the other extreme, overly lacking in a sense of his own dignity and responsibilities” (RM 62). Veatch criticizes the tendency of many Americans toward “indifference or even… disgust for the purposes and responsibilities of life,” men who preen themselves on such evasion (RM 62). In academia, this attitude results in “your man of learning secretly delight[ing] in picturing himself as a sort of composite Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre, and perhaps Pablo Picasso,” while in reality is “only a Sir Walter Elliot” (RM 66), that model of vanity readers meet on the first page of Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

Ethics consists in the art of living well, but it is more than an art. Aristotle warns that in the arts an intended mistake is not so bad as an unintended one, but in ethics, which involves practical wisdom as well as art, an unintended mistake is worse. That is because in ethics you need more than know-how; “in addition, you have to do” what you know (RM 71). If you know what to do but fail to do it you “would certainly not be a good man” (RM 72), unless unfavorable circumstances prevented a good course of action. What is more, “there just can’t be any knowledge of this sort of thing without doing” (RM 72), developing a desire to do the right thing, cultivating good “habits of choice” (73), having “learned how to let his choices and preferences be determined by such knowledge and understanding as he may have, rather than to proceed simply from chance feelings and impulses of the moment or from long established but mechanical habits of response” (RM 74).

Is the “examined life” possible? Is it the good life for human beings, or are human purposes irretrievably irrational? Yes, it is possible and good because the good life is “the natural end toward which a human being is oriented by virtue of being human,” a “fact of nature” discoverable by reasoning although not created by reasoning (RM 79). That human nature requires deliberation and choice for its fulfillment becomes obvious in considering the many examples of persons lacking in self-knowledge, unable “intellectually to see or know the truth about [themselves], as in not being willing or disposed to see this truth” (RM 83). Such persons may be no less, and even more, intelligent than we are, but what a mess they have made of their lives. This underscores Aristotle’s remark that “in a science such as ethics the end is not knowledge but action” (RM 84). Choosing to do what’s right is harder than knowing what’s right; deliberate habituation in right action—”the repeated performance of just and temperate actions”—is more moral than moralizing. Generally speaking, “in the final analysis our human failures are ultimately due not to the fact that we don’t know what we ought to do, but rather to the fact that we don’t choose to act on our knowledge” (RM 97). Virtue “is more a matter of abiding by one’s knowledge or remaining constant to it, instead of letting it be forever displaced by numberless counter-opinions and judgments that are determined by our passions and whims of the moment” (RM 102). The fact that we may not do this, that we may indeed choose inconsistently, drifting from one opinion to another, one impulse to another, one course of action to another, indicates the human capacity for freedom of judgment. “It is not because of ignorance that we fail, ultiomately, it is because we don’t choose when we could choose” (RM 108).

As for the force of circumstances, “for most of us, most of the time, our adversities and ill fortune are not such as to leave us completely without resources” (RM 115). Rather, “the important thing is how we take our good fortune, or our ill fortune. That is what determines whether we are well off or not, not the good or ill fortune itself” (RM 116). Circumstances seldom allow us to choose the best; they often prevent us from choosing what is especially good, but they always allow us to choose the better or the worse, until incapacity or death wrest choice from us.

Behind the flaccid relativism of thinkers like Russell and Barrett stands Nietzsche, mocking the Last Man whom they comfort with their egalitarian niaiseries and proclaiming grandly, “God is dead”—”God” meaning not only the God of the Bible, and the gods of all books deemed holy, but any “objectively grounded moral order anywhere in the universe” (RM 129). “The purpose of [Rational Man] is to suggest that in Nietzsche’s terms, God is not dead after all, that nature itself, or at least human nature, does involve a moral order, which it should be the concern of human beings to recognize and act upon” (RM 129). Less stirring thinkers than Nietzsche have also supposed that nature offers no real moral support to human beings. Utilitarians, for example, make reason instrumental to the desires. Utilitarians commit what might call the fallacy of misplaced sociality. Their concern for the greatest ‘good’ for the greatest number—good being defined as pleasure—rests on the assumption that “morals or ethics involves only their relations with others and never their relations with themselves” (RM 130). They typically ignore the question of whether pleasure is good for oneself or, if so, what pleasures are good. Further, they “have always had some difficulty in showing why anyone has any obligation to think about others” if hedonism should rule us all. John Stuart Mill argues that we take pleasure in altruism, an argument Veatch finds “dubious, to say the least” (RM 132). It might be more accurate and kinder to say that it is idiosyncratic; what Veatch has in mind, however, is that pleasure is no guarantee of self-knowledge, that one might, on hedonic grounds, take oneself to be happy if permanently deluded with drugs or some other illusion-producing device.

Mill also argues, it should be noted, that some pleasures are better than others, that it is better to be Socrates satisfied than a pig satisfied—assuming of course that one is a man, not a pig. But it also should be noted that in this claim he begins to move a bit closer to Aristotle, and away from Jeremy Bentham. The twentieth-century philosopher and contemporary of Russell G. E. Moore condemns Aristotle for committing what he calls the “naturalistic fallacy.”

Moore wonders why “a natural tendency” should “necessarily be a tendency toward the good” (RM 137). As Paul the Apostle observed long before him, Moore that some men aim at evil, adding that some aim at things morally indifferent. He concurs with Hume: One cannot logically derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is.’ “Aristotle’s definition of the good is held to be mistaken, not because it does not fit the facts, but because it violates the logical canons of good definition: it attempts to define something not in terms of what it is”—a thing—”but in terms of what it is not”—a value (RM 139). That is, to define a fact as a value is to fail to define it at all, to fail to construct a proper definition in the first place. Veatch rejoins that this refutation ranges too widely. “On the same principles just about any definition of anything must also commit a fallacy,” since if you define A as A you’ve produced a tautology, but if you define A as B or C then you’re defining it “in terms of what is other than A, and this violates the principle that everything is what it is and not another thing” (RM 140). “This is far more than Moore himself ever bargained for” (RM 140), limiting the definition of ‘fish,’ for example, to ‘fish.’ If Moore means simply that it is contradictory to say ‘A is not-A,’ or ‘a fish is a not-fish,’ then the question remains, is a so-called ‘value’ a not-is?

The fact/value distinction, progeny of Hume’s is/ought distinction, depends upon “an excessively static and atomistic conception of facts” (RM 145). But is there (in fact, one is tempted to say) “any fact at all that does not suggest all sorts of possibilities of how it might become other and different?” (RM 145). On the contrary, “the whole of reality is shot through with the distinction between potentiality and actuality, between what is still only able to be and what actually is,” between the imperfect and the perfect, the incomplete and the complete, the empty to the full” (RM 145). When Aristotle says ‘the good’ he means “the actual as related to the potential” (RM 145). A mangled hand cannot fully serve the purpose of a hand; a mangled soul cannot fully serve the purpose of a soul. The fact that mangled souls aim at evil or at least defective ends illustrates the point. It is only if he remain within the limits of quantitative logic and/or nonteleological modern science that we must deny that this is so. But the denial may be the product of the limitations of our way of thinking, which restricts rational thought too much.

The existentialism of William Barrett, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other Nietzsche epigoni attacks not only Aristotelian ethics but any rationalist ethics. According to existentialists, “reason cannot tell man anything about how to live or what to live for” not because reason cannot be used for such a purpose but because there is no “ethical truth” to be discovered in the first place (RM 150). Faced with a universe devoid of meaning, human beings can only give meaning to their otherwise meaningless lives by freely choosing the way of life they happen to prefer. This argument replicates the is/ought distinction in its own way, holding up “disinterested, impersonal objectivity on the one hand and a committed subjectivity on the other” (RM 155). Veatch rejoins, choice alone can’t make the choice right. “The issue is whether one can ever choose rightly without knowledge” (RM 155). To deploy the term ‘commitment,’ as such thinkers do, sounds impressive, but why should Sartre prefer his commitment to communism over Hitler’s commitment to fascism? Merely because it is his commitment? This would elevate love of one’s own to unsuspected moral heights. Is ‘my own’ worth of a human being, given the nature of human beings? Is it worthy of my own potential? How, on the basis of existentialism, can I know?

Sartre satirizes what Aristotle esteems as the spoudaios, the serious man. Such a man “tries to hide from himself that it is human freedom which decides on moral values,” that “if man is not the creator of being, he is at least the inventor of moral values”; such a man “takes refuge in the spirit of seriousness” in an attempt “to evade moral responsibility” (RM 155), which requires us not to follow our true nature or to obey divine law but to invent values ‘against’ an indifferent, amoral nature and to admit that divine law is human, all-too-human. But if there is no God—in the broad sense of no personal god or gods and no nature with moral content—then to act as if there were is nothing more than what Sartre calls “bad faith.” Veatch rejoins, to claim that God is dead is to claim “a certain understanding, a knowledge of what the score is” (RM 157). This must be “a morally relevant knowledge, a knowledge that indicates what we should do and what our responsibilities are in light of the facts” (RM 157). “Must not the very dialectic of their own position catch the existentialists up into the logic of ‘Know thyself’ and of the examined life, and ultimately into the ethics of rational man?” (RM 157) And to do that is at least tacitly to acknowledge one’s humanness, one’s givenness, one’s nature, to try to understand what it is, rather than escaping into imagining oneself as a Nietzschean superman, beyond good and evil, or into imagining a socialist utopia as a real future regime.

“While in their capacity as scientists,” Veatch concludes, “men can attain a knowledge of nature that is literally limitless in its own dimension, yet in respects to other dimensions such a scientific knowledge of nature is both narrowly defined and rigorously restricted, not merely in fact, but in principle” (RM 158). Much the same is true for quantitative logic. Meanwhile, however, “men merely as human beings,” not as scientists or mathematicians, “can, by exercising their intelligence, achieve a kind of commonsense understanding of their own nature and of the nature of the world they live in which is different from scientific knowledge, and for which scientific knowledge is no substitute” (RM 158).