Kenny Anthony. An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy
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we may be apt to think the whole to be only a dream of fanciful men, who have
entangled themselves in cobwebs spun out of their own brain.
In fact, the recent history of philosophy shows how even the most intelligent
people can go wrong if they start from false first principles.
The initial problem with the theory of ideas is the ambiguity of the word ‘idea’.
In ordinary language, Reid maintains, it means an act of mind: to have an idea of
anything is to conceive it. But philosophers have given it a different meaning,
whereby it does not signify the act of conceiving, but some object of thought.
These ideas are first introduced into philosophy ‘in the humble character of
images or representatives of things’ but by degrees they have ‘supplanted their
constituents and undermined everything but themselves’.
In fact, Reid maintains, ideas in the philosophical sense are mere fictions. We
do indeed have conceptions of many things; but a conception is not an image,
and the postulation of ideas which are images is neither necessary nor sufficient to
explain how we acquire and use these concepts. Not only do philosophers like
Locke confuse concepts with images, but they start from the wrong end when
they consider concepts themselves. They talk as if knowledge begins with bare
conception, separate from belief, and that belief arises from the comparison of
simple ideas. The truth is the reverse: we begin with natural and original judge-
ments, and we later analyse them into indvidual concepts. Seeing a tree, for
instance, does not give us a mere idea of a tree, but involves the judgement that
it exists with a certain shape, size, and position.
The initial furniture of the mind is not a set of disconnected ideas, but a system
of original and natural judgements. ‘They are a part of our constitution, and all
the discoveries of our reason are grounded upon them. They make up what is
called the common sense of mankind; and what is manifestly contrary to any of
those first principles is what we call absurd.’ The common principles which are
the foundation of reasoning include some which have been called in question by
Hume: first, that sensible qualities must have a subject which we call body, and
conscious thoughts must have a subject which we call mind; secondly, that what-
ever begins to exist must have a cause which produced it. Reid’s blunt affirmation
of these principles in the face of Hume’s detailed criticism has a certain air of
dogmatism; but he would respond that principles so fundamental neither require
nor admit of proof.
Reid is willing to go along with Locke in distinguishing between primary and
secondary qualities. But unlike Locke, he thinks that a secondary quality such as
colour is a real quality of bodies: it is not identical with the sensation of colour
which we have, but it is its cause. No one, he says, thinks that the colour of a red
body has changed because we look at it through green glass. It is no objection to
the objectivity of a quality that we can only detect it by its effects: the same is true
of gravity and magnetism. ‘Red’ means what the common man means by it, and
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its meaning cannot be arbitrarily changed by philosophers. ‘The vulgar have
undoubted right to give names to things which they are daily conversant about;
and philosophers seem justly chargeable with an abuse of language, when they
change the meaning of a common word, without giving warning.’
But while Reid is firm that ordinary language sets the standard for the meaning
of words, he by no means implies that the beliefs of the vulgar are to be preferred
to the results of scientific investigation. On the contrary, Reid regarded himself as
an experimental scientist, and kept himself fully up to date with recent work
about the nature of vision. Indeed, in studying the geometry of visible objects, he
showed great scientific ingenuity, and anticipated the development of non-
Euclidean geometries. What Reid wanted to show was that the realism of the
common man was fully compatible with the pursuit of science, and with the
experimental study of the mind itself.
Reid was one of the ornaments of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlighten-
ment; he long continued to be influential in his own country, and his importance
has been rediscovered in our own time. But in the mainstream of European
thought his work was overshadowed by the more popular figures of the European
Enlightenment, and his brusque rebuttal of empiricism was superseded by the
more sophisticated critique of Kant.
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XV
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
The
Philosophes
In the eighteenth century, social and political philosophy in France, as in Britain,
was influenced by Locke. But whereas in England, under a constitutional mon-
archy, government was parliamentary if not democratic, and there was religious
toleration for all except Catholics, in France the monarchy was absolute, and once
Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685 only Catholicism was officially
tolerated. However, in the reign of his grandson, Louis XV, a degree of freedom
of thought was permitted, through indolence rather than policy, and a group of
thinkers, the philosophes of the French Enlightenment, created a climate of thought
hostile to the status quo in Church and State. Their manifesto was the Encyclopédie
edited in the 1750s by Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert.
Like Hume, the philosophers of the Enlightenment aimed to establish a science
of human affairs which would match the science which Newton had established
for the physical universe. They saw the power of the Church as an obstacle to the
development of such a science, and they saw it as their mission to replace super-
stition with reason. Already at the end of the seventeenth century Pierre Bayle
had argued in his Dictionnaire historique et critique that in view of the unending
conflicts within both natural and revealed theology, moral teaching should be
made totally independent of religion. A belief in immortality was not necessary
for morality, and there was no reason why there could not be a virtuous com-
munity of atheists.
Voltaire, the best known of the philosophes, agreed with Bayle on the first
point, but not with the second. He thought that the existence of a spiritual,
separable, soul was unprovable and probably false; but he thought that the world
as explained by Newton manifested the existence of God just as much as a watch
shows the existence of a watchmaker. If God did not exist, he said, it would be
necessary to invent him in order to back up the moral law. But Voltaire did not
believe that God had created the world by choice. If he had done so, we would
have to blame Him for such evils as the catastrophic earthquake which struck
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Lisbon in 1755. The world was not a free creation, but a necessary and eternal
consequence of God’s existence. Voltaire, to use the technical term, was not an
atheist but a deist.
In human affairs, too, Voltaire regarded freedom as an illusion, fostered by
historians’ habits of dwelling on the actions of great kings and generals. Voltaire
himself wrote voluminous works of history, emphasizing the importance of the
domestic, artistic, and industrial aspects of past ages. In politics, however, he was
neither a populist nor a democrat; his ideal was the rule of an enlightened despot,
such as his one-time patron, Frederick the Great of Prussia. The liberty he cared
most about was freedom of speech, even though it is not certain that he ever said
‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’
More significant as a political philosopher was the Baron de Montesquieu,
author of the Persian Letters, a risqué satire on French political and ecclesiastical
life, and The Spirit of the Laws, a vast treatise which seeks to base a theory of the
nature of the state on a mountain of sociological evidence. There are three main
kinds of government: republican, monarchical, and despotic. One cannot single
out one kind of government as everywhere preferable: the government should be
fitted to the climate, the wealth, and the national character of a country. Thus,
republics suit cold climates, and despotism hot climates; freedom is easier to
maintain on islands and in mountains than on level continents; a constitution
suitable for Sicilians would not suit Englishmen, and so on.
Montesquieu, who lived in England for a year, was a great admirer of the
British constitution, in particular because of its separation of powers, which he
saw as a necessary condition of liberty. The legislative, executive, and judicial
branches of government should not be combined in a single person or institu-
tion. If they are separated from each other, they act as checks and balances on
each other, and provide a bulwark against tyranny. Whether or not Montesquieu’s
understanding of the British parliamentary monarchy was accurate, his theory has
had a lasting influence, particularly through its embodiment in the American
constitution.
Rousseau
Of all French philosophers of the eighteenth century the most influential was
Jean Jacques Rousseau, though his influence was greater outside philosophical
circles than among professional philosophers. Like St Augustine, he wrote a book
of autobiographical Confessions; his confessions are more vivid and more detailed
than the Saint’s, and contain more sins, less philosophy, and no prayers. He was
born in Geneva, he tells us, and brought up as a Calvinist; at sixteen, a runaway
apprentice, he became a Catholic in Turin. In 1731 he was befriended by the
Baronne de Warens, with whom he lived for nine years. His first job was as
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secretary to the French ambassador in Venice in 1743; having quarrelled with
him he went to Paris and met Voltaire and Diderot. In 1745 he began a lifelong
relationship with a servant girl, and had by her five children whom he dumped,
one after the other, in a foundling hospital. He achieved fame in 1750 by pub-
lishing a prize-winning essay in which he argued, to the horror of the Encyclo-
paedists, that the arts and sciences had a baneful effect on mankind. This was
followed up, four years later, by a ‘Discourse on Inequality’, which argued that
man was naturally good, and corrupted by institutions. The two works held up
the ideal of the ‘noble savage’ whose simple goodness put civilized man to shame.
In 1754 Rousseau returned to Geneva and became Protestant once more.
After a bitter quarrel with Voltaire, he returned to France and wrote a novel,
La Nouvelle Héloïse, a treatise on education, Emile, and a major work of polit-
ical philosophy, The Social Contract. As a result of the inflammatory doctrines
of these works, he had to flee to Switzerland in 1762 but he was driven out of
Geneva also. In 1776 he was given sanctuary in England by David Hume, who
secured him a pension from King George III. But soon his paranoid ingratitude
became too much even for Hume’s patience, and he returned to France in spite
of the risk of arrest. In his last years he was poor and vilified, and when he died
in 1778 some thought that he had killed himself.
The Social Contract is very readable, as befits a work by a philosopher who was
also a best-selling novelist. Its first words are memorable, though misleading.
‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. Many a man believes himself to
be the master of others who is, no less than they, a slave.’ Readers of Rousseau’s
previous works assume that the chains are those of social institutions. Shall we
reject the social order then? No, we are told, it is a sacred right which is the basis
of all other rights. Social institutions, Rousseau now thinks, liberate rather than
enslave.
Like Hobbes, Rousseau believes that society originates when life in the original
state of nature becomes intolerable. A social contract is drawn up to ensure that
the whole strength of the community is enlisted for the protection of each
member’s person and property. Every member has to alienate all his rights to the
community and give up any claim against it. But how can this be done in such a
way that each man, united to his fellows, remains as free as he was before?
The solution is to be found in the theory of the general will. The social
contract creates a moral and collective body, the State or Sovereign People. Every
individual as a citizen shares in the sovereign’s authority, as a subject owes
obedience to the state’s laws. The sovereign people, having no existence outside
that of the individuals who compose it, can have no interest at variance with
theirs: hence it expresses the general will, and it cannot go wrong in its pursuit
of the public good. An individual’s will may go contrary to the general will, but
he can be constrained by the whole body of his fellow citizens to conform to it
– ‘which is no more than to say that it may be necessary to compel a man to be
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Figure 32 Allan Ramsay’s portrait of J. J. Rousseau.
(National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh)
free’. Under Rousseau’s social contract, men lose their natural liberty to lay hands
on whatever tempts them, but they gain civil liberty, which permits the stable
ownership of property. So men are, genuinely, more free than they were. But the
freedom which Rousseau attributes to the imprisoned malefactor is the rather
rarefied freedom to participate in the expression of the general will.
The sovereign people is an abstract entity: it is not to be identified with any
particular government, of whatever form. Hence, the theory of the general will
is not the doctrine that whatever the government does is right. How, then, is
the general will to be ascertained? By holding a referendum? No: for Rousseau
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‘the general will’ is not the same as ‘the will of all’. ‘There is often considerable
difference between the will of all and the general will. The latter is concerned
only with the common interest, the former with interests that are partial, being
itself but the sum of particular wills.’ The deliberations of a popular assembly,
even when it is unanimous, are by no means infallible. This is because each voter
may suffer from ignorance or be swayed by individual self-interest.
The general will, according to Rousseau, could be ascertained by plebiscite
on two conditions: first, that every voter was fully informed; second, that no two
voters held any communication with each other. The second condition is there to
prevent the formation of groups or parties less than the whole community. For
it is only within the context of the entire state that the differences between the
self-interest of individuals will cancel out and yield the self-interest of sovereign
people. ‘It is therefore essential, if the general will is to be able to express itself,
that there should be no partial society within the State, and that each citizen
should think only his own thoughts.’
The sovereignty of the people is indivisible: if you separate the powers of the
legislative and executive branches you make the sovereign a fantastic creature of
shreds and patches. But sovereignty is also limited: it must be concerned only
with matters of extreme generality. ‘Just as the will of the individual cannot
represent the general will, so, too, the general will changes its nature when called
upon to pronounce upon a particular object.’ Because of this the people, while
the supreme legislative power, has to exert its executive power, which is con-
cerned with particular acts, through an agent, namely the government.
A government is ‘an intermediate body set up to serve as a means of commun-
ication between subjects and sovereign, charged with the execution of the laws and
the maintenance of liberty’. Rulers are employees of the people: the government
receives from the sovereign the orders which it passes on to the people. Like
Montesquieu, Rousseau refuses to specify a single form of government as being
appropriate to all circumstances. But ideally, the form of government, as well
as the individual rulers, should be endorsed by periodic assemblies of the people.
At this point Rousseau’s affection for the procedures of a Swiss canton seem to
have overcome his principle that the sovereign should concern itself only with
general issues.
In spite of his concern with the general will of the people, Rousseau was not a
wholehearted supporter of democracy in practice. ‘Were there such a thing as a
nation of Gods, it would be a democracy. So perfect a form of government is not
suited to men.’ He was thinking, of course, of direct democracy, government
by popular assembly, and his worry was that in such a state the rulers would be
unprofessional and quarrelsome. His favoured form of government is an elective
aristocracy. ‘It is the best and most natural arrangement that can be made that
the wise should govern the masses.’ The great merit of this system is that it
demands fewer virtues than popular government; it does not call for a strict
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insistence on equality, all it requires is a spirit of moderation in the rich and of
contentment in the poor. Naturally, the rich will do most of the governing; they
have more time to spare. But from time to time, a poor man should be elected to
office, to cheer up the populace.
After the rousing rhetoric of ‘Man is born free and is everywhere in chains’ this
seems rather a tame and bourgeois conclusion. None the less, The Social Contract
was seen as a threat by those in power at the time, and was venerated as a Bible
by the revolutionaries who were shortly to take their place. It was not the social
contract of the book’s title which enraged or excited people: as we have seen,
such contract theories were by now two-a-penny. What inflamed readers was the
new notion of the general will.
Looked at soberly, the notion is theoretically incoherent and practically vacuous.
It is not true, as a matter of logic, that if A wills A’s good and B wills B’s good
then A and B jointly wish the good of A and B: to see this we need only consider
the case where A sees as his good the annihilation of B, and B sees as his good
the annihilation of A. What makes Rousseau’s notion useless in practice is the
difficulty of ascertaining what the general will prescribes. As we have seen, he laid
down as conditions for its expression that every citizen should be fully informed
and that no two citizens should be allowed to combine with each other. The
fulfilment of the second condition would demand a total tyranny of the state; the
first condition could never be fulfilled in a community of real human beings.
Revolution and Romanticism
It was, of course, the vacuousness of the notion of the general will which made it
so valuable for political purposes. Eleven years after Rousseau’s death the French
Revolution swept away the regime which had banned The Social Contract. After a
series of moderate and overdue reforms had been secured from King Louis XVI,
the Revolution gathered momentum, abolished the monarchy itself, and executed
the King. The Jacobin party came to power, under Robespierre, and in a reign of
terror guillotined not only the surviving aristocrats of the ancien régime but many
democrats of different colours. Robespierre could proclaim that the will of the
Jacobins was the general will, and that his despotic government was forcing citizens
to be free.
The Revolution could claim to be the offspring not only of Rousseau but also
of the enlightenment philosophes whom he opposed. The revolutionaries did their
best to destroy the Catholic Church not only because of the political and eco-
nomic power it had enjoyed in the ancien régime but also because of their belief
that it was an obstacle to scientific progress. In the Cathedral of Notre Dame an
actress was enthroned as a goddess of Reason. Ex-priests, retrained as deists, were
sent round to country parishes as ‘Apostles of Reason’ (see Plate 14).
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The Revolution that had taken from Rousseau its slogans of liberty and equal-
ity ended by handing over the expression of the general will to Napoleon Bona-
parte, who for a decade enjoyed more power in Europe than any single man since
Charlemagne. But long after the Revolution had blown itself out, Rousseau’s
influence was still to be felt throughout the continent in quite a different way,
through the romantic movement.
It was not the Rousseau of The Social Contract, but the Rousseau of the
Confessions and of the Discourses who shaped the romantic outlook. Rousseau’s
writings sought to revive, in eighteenth-century France, the contempt for the
artificial life of city and court and the cult of rustic crudity which had character-
ised the Cynics of ancient Greece. ‘Sensibility’ was already much in vogue in
France, and the ladies of the court played at being shepherdesses in manicured
gardens at Versailles. But the romantic movement was to turn what had been a
pastime for pampered idlers into the inspiration of a whole way of life.
Romantics did not necessarily take any real interest in the welfare of the rural
workers. They did, however, hold up the real or imagined virtues of peasants
as a mirror to society; and they sought out the forested or mountainous regions
in which the poorest of them lived. On the other hand, romantics scorned the
amenities which can be provided only in urban communities, such as libraries,
universities, and stock-exchanges. In a combination which was comprehensible, if
not inevitable, the preference for the country over the town was at the same time
an assertion of passion against intellect, and a craving for excitement rather than
security.
Romanticism in Britain received its most eloquent expression in the writings of
Wordsworth and Coleridge. In Frost at Midnight, Coleridge tells his baby son:
I was rear’d
In the great city, pent mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander, like a breeze,
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
The philosophy of the English romantics often, as in that passage, resembles
the pantheism of Spinoza, whom they admired. But Wordsworth explored also
Platonic themes: as in the Immortality Ode, which revives the doctrines of recol-
lection and pre-existence.
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Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
Elsewhere Wordsworth expresses his worship of Nature in ways which invoke
Neo-Platonic ideas.
I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused.
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
This takes us back to the World Soul of Plotinus and of Avicenna.
In the next generation of English poets, John Keats, addressing his Grecian
urn, voiced a sentiment that is sometimes taken as the quintessential credo of
romanticism
When old age shall this generation waste
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
But it would be unfair to characterize romanticism in general as the substitution
of beauty for truth as the supreme value. The romantics had a concern for truth
in their own fashion, insisting that it was more important for emotions to be
genuine than to be comme il faut. And pre-romantics too had placed a high value
on beauty; what the romantics did was to change men’s perceptions of what was
beautiful. In a reaction against the age of reason, order and enlightenment,
romantics felt the attraction of the Middle Ages – not of its philosophy, but of
its irregular architecture and its gloomy ruins. The Gothic revival, which was
to flower in the nineteenth century, began in England in the same decade as
Rousseau’s first Discourse. The last decades of the eighteenth century were the
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