Kenny Anthony. An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy
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the Absolute face to face with itself. Reader, I hope you realize what is happening
as you are reading!
If we take Hegel seriously, however, we should stop the book at this point. For
Hegel thought that with his own system, the history of philosophy comes to an
end. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy he displays earlier philosophies as
succumbing, one by one, to a dialectical advance marching steadily in the direc-
tion of German Idealism. A new epoch has now arisen, he tells us, in which finite
self-consciousness has ceased to be finite, and absolute self-consciousness has
achieved reality. The sole task of the history of philosophy is to narrate the strife
between finite and infinite self-consciousness; now that the battle is over, it has
reached its goal.
Marx and the Young Hegelians
Hegel’s importance in the history of philosophy derives not so much from the
content of his writing as from the enormous influence he exercised on thinkers
who followed him. Of all those whom he influenced, the one who in his turn was
most influential was Karl Marx, who described his own philosophical vocation as
‘turning Hegel upside-down’.
Marx was born in Trier, in 1818, to a liberal Protestant family of Jewish
descent. He attended university first at Bonn and then at Berlin, where he studied
the philosophy of Hegel under Bruno Bauer, the leader of a left-wing group
known as the Young Hegelians. From Hegel and Bauer Marx learned to view
history as a dialectical process. That is to say, history came in a succession of
stages which followed one another, like the steps in a geometrical proof, in an
order determined by fundamental logical or metaphysical principles. This was a
vision which he retained throughout his life.
The Young Hegelians attached great importance to Hegel’s concept of alien-
ation, that is to say, treating as alien something with which by rights one should
identify. Alienation is the state in which people view as exterior to themselves
something which is truly an intrinsic element of their own being. What Hegel
himself had in mind was that individuals, all of whom were manifestations of a
single Spirit, saw each other as hostile rivals rather than as elements of a single
unity. The Young Hegelians rejected the idea of the universal spirit, but retained
the notion of alienation, locating it elsewhere in the system.
Hegel had seen his philosophy as a sophisticated and self-conscious presenta-
tion of truths which had been given uncritical and mythical expression in religious
doctrines. For the Young Hegelians, religion was not to be translated, but elimin-
ated. For Bauer, and still more for Ludwig Feuerbach, religion was the supreme
form of alienation. Humans, who were the highest form of beings, projected their
own life and consciousness into an unreal heaven. The essence of man is the unity
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of reason, will, and love; unwilling to accept limits to these perfections, we form
the idea of a God of infinite knowledge, infinite will, and infinite love, and man
venerates Him as an independent Being distinct from man himself. ‘Religion is
the separation of man from himself: he sets God over against himself as an
opposed being.’
Marx was in sympathy with the Young Hegelian critique of religion, which
he was later to describe as ‘the opium of the people’, but from an early stage he
placed the focus of alienation elsewhere. He wrote:
Money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things. Hence it has robbed the
whole world, the human world as well as nature, of its proper value. Money is the
alienated essence of man’s labour and life, and this alien essence dominates him as
he worships it.
In 1841 he wrote a critique of Hegel’s philosophy of the State, in which he attacked
the theory that private property was the basis of civil society. In so far as a State
is based on private property it is itself an alienation of man’s true nature.
In 1842 Marx became the editor of a liberal journal, the Rheinische Zeitung.
The Prussian government regarded it as subversive, and closed it down. Marx,
out of a job, and newly married, migrated to Paris with his wife, Jenny. There he
found further work as a journalist, and made a number of radical friends includ-
ing the revolutionary socialist Friedrich Engels who became his right-hand-man.
He also made a study of the writings of British economists such as Adam Smith,
and began work on his own economic theory. His basic insight was that since
money is a form of alienation, all purely economic relationships – such as that
between worker and employer – are alienated forms of social intercourse, and
indeed a form of slavery which debases both slave and master. Only the abolition
of wage slavery and the replacement of private property by communism can put
an end to human alienation.
Soon he was forced to migrate again, this time to Brussels. There, with Engels,
Marx wrote The German Ideology, a work of philosophical criticism which was not
published until long after his death. In it he enunciates the principle that ‘life
determines consciousness, not consciousness life’. History is determined, not by
the mental history of a Hegelian Spirit, nor by the thoughts and theories of
human individuals, but by the processes of production of the necessities of life.
Marx had earlier reached the conclusion that human alienation would not be
ended by philosophical criticism alone. It was not simply that, as he famously put
it, ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it’.
The change that was necessary would have to be a violent one, and that called for
an alliance between the philosophers and the workers. ‘As philosophy finds its
material weapons in the proletariat, the proletariat finds its intellectual weapons in
philosophy.’ In 1847 a newly-formed Communist League met in London, and
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Marx and Engels were commissioned to write its manifesto, which was published
early in 1848, just before a series of revolutions rocked the major kingdoms of
the European continent.
‘The history of all hitherto existing society,’ states the Manifesto, ‘is the history
of class struggles.’ This is a consequence of the materialist theory of history.
Superficially, history may appear to be a record of conflicts between different
nations and different religions; but the underlying realities throughout the ages
are the forces of material production and the classes which are created by the
relationships between those involved in that production. The legal, political, and
religious institutions which loom so large in historical narrative are only a super-
structure concealing the fundamental levels of history: the forces and powers of
production, and the economic relations among the producers. The philosophy,
or ‘ideology’, which is used to justify the legal and political institutions of each
epoch are merely a smokescreen concealing the vested interests of the ruling
classes of the time.
Capitalism and its Discontents
Marx developed these ideas in many later writings, culminating in his great
Capital, written in London in the final period of his life, when he had been
forced to leave France in the aftermath of the revolution of 1848. In that work he
explained in detail how the course of history was dictated by the forces and
relations of production.
Productive forces, in Marx’s terms, include the raw materials, machinery, and
labour, which go to make a finished product: as wheat, a mill, and a mill-worker
are all needed to produce flour. The relations of production are economic rela-
tions which involve these forces, such as the ownership of the mill and the hiring
of the worker. Developments in technology lead to different relations of produc-
tion: in the age of the hand-mill, the worker is the serf of the feudal lord; in the
age of the steam-mill he is the employee of the capitalist. Changes in technology
can render existing relations of production obsolete: a steam-mill demands mobile
workers, not serfs tied to the land. When the relations of production no longer
match the productive forces, Marx believed, these relations ‘turn into fetters’ and
a social revolution takes place.
Marx divided the past, present, and future history of the relations of production
into six phases: primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism,
and ultimate communism. He believed that the capitalist society in which he lived
was in a state of crisis, and would shortly pass through a revolutionary change
which would usher in the final stages first of socialism and then of communism.
The crisis which capitalism had reached, he believed, was not a contingent his-
torical fact; it was something inherent in the nature of capitalism itself. He based
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this conclusion on two economic theories: the labour theory of value, and the
theory of surplus value.
Following a suggestion which goes back ultimately to Aristotle, Marx believed
that the true value of any product was in proportion to the amount of labour put
into it. That thesis enables us to decide what a product is worth only if we have
a way of measuring the value of labour. The way to do that is to work out the
cost of keeping the labourer alive and well for the time it takes to do the job.
Hence, if it takes a labourer a day to produce a quantity of flour, that flour is
worth the cost of one day’s subsistence.
Under capitalism, however, prices in the market are determined not by true
value, but by supply and demand. The capitalist, who owns the raw material and
the means of production, having paid the worker a wage equal to his day’s
subsistence, say £1, can often sell the product for many times that sum, say £10.
The difference between the subsistence wage and the market price is the surplus
value, in this case £9. Under capitalism, no part of this surplus value is returned
to the worker, it is all pocketed by the employer. The effect is that only one-tenth
of the labourer’s work is for his own benefit; nine-tenths of it is just to produce
profit for the capitalist (see Plate 15).
As technology develops, and the labourer’s productivity increases accordingly,
surplus value increases and the proportion of his work which is returned to him
becomes smaller and smaller. Finally this exploitation is bound to reach a point at
which the proletariat finds it intolerable, and rises in revolt. The capitalist system
will be replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat, which will abolish private
property and introduce a socialist state in which the means of production are
totally under central government control. But the socialist state will itself be only
temporary, and it will wither away to be replaced by a communist society in
which the interests of the individual and the community will be identical.
The theory of surplus value suffers from a fatal weakness. Marx offers no
convincing reason why the capitalist, no matter how great his profits, should pay
no more than a subsistence wage. But this thesis is an essential element in his
prediction that capitalism would inevitably lead to revolution, and do so soonest
in those states where technology, and therefore exploitation, was progressing
fastest. In fact, employers soon began, and have since continued, to pay wages
well above subsistence level in advanced industrialized countries. It was not in
them but in backward Russia that the first proletarian revolution occurred.
If we treat Marxism as a scientific hypothesis, to be judged by the success of its
predictions, it must be said that it has been totally discredited by the course of
history since Marx’s death. But whatever Marx himself may have thought, his
theories are essentially philosophical rather than scientific; and judged from that
standpoint, they can claim both successes and failures. On the one hand, though
few historians nowadays accept that events are determined totally by economic
factors, no historian, not even a historian of philosophy, would dare to deny the
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influence of those factors on politics and culture. On the other hand, even in
countries which underwent socialist revolutions of a Marxist type the power
wielded by individuals, such as Lenin, Stalin and Mao, has given the lie to the
theory that only impersonal forces determine the course of history. Finally, the
thesis that ideology is merely the smokescreen of the status quo is refuted by
the enormous influence which has been exerted, for good or ill, by Marx’s
own system of ideas, considered not as a scientific theory but as an inspiration
to political activism. If life determines consciousness, consciousness also deter-
mines life.
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XVIII
THE UTILITARIANS
Jeremy Bentham
Britain survived the Napoleonic era without invasion and without revolution.
Government remained in the hands of a privileged group, and in times of na-
tional crisis under Prime Ministers such as the younger Pitt and Lord Liverpool,
who were highly autocratic; there was a long way yet to go before the country
became a modern democracy. Reform was achieved, but in slow and constitu-
tional stages, rather than by violent upheaval or dramatic coup d’état.
One of those who did most to make British public opinion aware of the need
for reform was Jeremy Bentham, an Oxford-educated lawyer who in the year
of the French Revolution, at the age of forty-one, published an Introduction to
the Principles of Morals and Legislation. He had already, in 1776, published an
anonymous attack on the English legal system as recently presented in Sir William
Blackstone’s commentaries. He was much interested in penal reform, and on
a visit to Russia he had conceived the idea of a model prison, the Panopticon.
William Pitt’s government passed an Act of Parliament authorizing the scheme,
but it was defeated by ducal landowners who did not want a prison near their
London estates. In 1808 he became friends with James Mill and shared in the
education of his young son John Stuart. He wrote many papers on legal and
constitutional matters, most of which remained unpublished in his lifetime, and
spent years on the preparation of a constitutional code, which was unfinished
when he died. In 1817 he published a plan for parliamentary reform, followed
by a draft Radical Reform Bill. He died in 1832 a few weeks after the Great
Reform Bill had been passed, widely extending the parliamentary franchise. His
body is preserved in the library of University College, London, which he helped
to found.
Bentham’s Principles is the founding document of the school of moral and
political thought known as Utilitarianism, developed after him by John Stuart
Mill, and continuing to flourish up to the present day. The guiding idea of the
system is what Bentham calls ‘the principle of utility’, or ‘the greatest happiness
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Figure 37 Jeremy Bentham’s ‘auto-icon’ (i.e. his remains preserved in a waxwork).
(University College London)
principle’. The principle of utility evaluates every action according to the tend-
ency which it appears to have to augment or diminish happiness. The promotion
of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the only right and proper end
of human action, and laws and legal systems are to be tested by their conformity,
or lack of conformity, with this aim. The principle of utility enables us to distin-
guish good laws from bad, and it is the only source of political obligation. Belief
in natural law, or natural rights, or social contracts, Bentham maintained, is
nothing more than superstition.
‘The greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is one of those philosophical
slogans, like ‘the best of all possible worlds’ or ‘that than which nothing greater
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can be conceived’, which are impressive on first hearing, but which when probed
turn out to to have no clear meaning. It is not at all clear how we can measure
happiness and compare the quantity of happiness in different people, even if we
understand happiness in Bentham’s rather crude way as being pleasant sensation.
Again Bentham provides no consistent answer to the question ‘Greatest number
of what?’ Should we add ‘voters’ or ‘citizens’ or ‘human beings’ or ‘sentient
beings’? Again, should moralists and politicians attempt to control the number of
candidates for happiness, by taking steps to increase or diminish the population?
If so, in which direction? Most difficult of all, how do we balance the quantity
of happiness with the quantity of people? Suppose we have devised a scale from 0
to 100, on which 100 represents supreme happiness, and 0 represents supreme
misery. Should we prefer a state in which 51 per cent of the people score 51, and
49 per cent score 49, to a state in which 80 per cent of the people score 100 and
20 per cent score 0? If we try, in a simple way, to operate what Bentham calls ‘the
felicific calculus’, state A seems to score only 5002 points, and state B to score
8000 points. But anyone with a care for equality, or distributive justice, might
hesitate before casting a vote for state B.
Bentham was well aware of the difficulties in putting his slogan into practice,
and offers, for instance, recipes for the measurement of pleasures: they are to
be valued in accordance with their intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity,
fecundity, purity, and extension. He even offers a mnemonic rhyme to aid in
operating the calculus:
Intense, long, certain, speedy, fruitful, pure –
Such marks in pleasures and in pains endure.
Such pleasures seek if private be thy end;
If it be public, wide let them extend.
Such pains avoid, whichever be thy view
If pains must come, let them extend to few.
Later Utilitarians have devoted great ingenuity to dealing with the kinds of
problem outlined in the previous paragraph. But it remains true to this day that
the greatest happiness principle remains the title of a research programme rather
than an actual recipe for moral or political action.
Bentham’s influence on moral philosophy has been enormous. We may divide
moral philosophers into absolutists and consequentialists. Absolutists believe that
there are some kinds of actions which are intrinsically wrong and should never
be done no matter what the consequences are of refraining from doing them.
Consequentialists believe that the morality of actions should be judged by their
consequences, and that there is no category of act which may not, in special cir-
cumstances, be justified by its consequences. Prior to Bentham most philosophers
were absolutists, because they believed in a natural law or in natural rights. If
there are natural rights and a natural law, then some kinds of action, actions
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which violate those rights or conflict with that law, are wrong, no matter what
their consequences. Bentham’s attack on the notions of natural law and natural
rights has been more influential than his advocacy of the principle of utility: it has
had the effect of making consequentialism respectable in moral philosophy.
Consequentialists, like Bentham, judge actions by their consequences, and there
is no class of actions which is ruled out in advance. A believer in natural law, told
that some Herod or Nero has killed five thousand citizens guilty of no crime,
can say straightway ‘that was a wicked act’. The consequentialist, before making
such a judgement, must say ‘tell me more’. What were the consequences of the
massacre? What would have happened if the ruler had allowed the five thousand
to live?
The consequentialism which can trace its origin to Bentham is nowadays wide-
spread among professional philosophers. Thoroughgoing consequentialism is prob-
ably more popular in theory than in practice: outside philosophy seminars most
people probably believe that some actions are so outrageous that they should
morally be ruled out in advance, and reject the idea that one should literally stop
at nothing in the pursuit of desirable consequences. But in present-day discus-
sions of, for instance, topics in medical ethics, it is consequentialists who have the
greater say in the formation of policy, at least in English-speaking countries. This
is because they talk in the cost–benefit terms which technologists and policy-
makers instinctively understand. And among the general non-professional public,
many people share Bentham’s suspicion of the idea that some classes of action are
absolutely prohibited.
Where, people ask, do these absolute prohibitions come from? No doubt
religious believers see them as coming from God; but how can they convince
unbelievers of this? Can there be a prohibition without a prohibiter? Do not
those who subscribe to absolute prohibitions merely express the prejudices of
their upbringing?
The answer is to be found in the nature of morality itself. There are three
elements which are essential to morality: a moral community, a set of moral
values, and a moral code. All three are necessary. First, it is as impossible to have
a purely private morality as it is to have a purely private language, and for very
similar reasons. Secondly, the moral life of the community consists in the shared
pursuit of non-material values such as fairness, truth, comradeship, freedom: it is
this which distinguishes between morality and economics. Thirdly, this pursuit is
carried out within a framework which excludes certain prohibited types of beha-
viour: it is this which marks the distinction between morality and aesthetics. The
answer to the question ‘Who does the prohibiting?’ is that it is the members of
the moral community: membership of a common moral society involves subscrip-
tion to a common code. In attacking the notion that some things are absolutely
wrong, Bentham was attacking not just one form of morality, but something
constitutive of morality as such.
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Despite the baneful ethical system he originated, Bentham’s detailed discussions
of particular issues are often excellent. He writes briskly, and economically, mak-
ing acute and relevant distinctions, and packing a great weight of argument into
lucid and business-like paragraphs. Consider, as an instance, this discussion of the
purpose of the penal system:
The immediate principal end of punishment is to control action. This action is either
that of the offender, or of others: that of the offender it controls by its influence,
either on his will, in which case it is said to operate in the way of reformation; or on
his physical power, in which case it is said to operate by disablement; that of others
it can influence no otherwise than by its influence over their wills; in which case it is
said to operate in the way of example.
Bentham rejected the retributive theory of punishment, according to which just-
ice demands that he who has done harm shall suffer harm, whether or not his
suffering has any deterrent or remedial effect on himself or others. Such retribu-
tion, plain rendering of evil for evil, would simply increase the amount of evil in
the world rather than restoring any balance of justice. Since punishment involves
the infliction of pain, it can only be justified if it promises to exclude some greater
evil. The principal purpose of punishment, he believed, was deterrence; and
punishment should not be inflicted in cases where it would have no deterrent
effect, either on the offender or on others, nor should it be inflicted to any greater
extent than is necessary to deter. Bentham drew up a set of rules setting out the
proportion between punishments and offences, based not on the retributive prin-
ciple of ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ but on the effect which the prospect
of punishment will have on the calculation by a potential offender of the profit and
loss likely to follow on the offence. Any remedial effect of punishment, Bentham
believed, was always bound to be subsidiary to the deterrent effect, and in practice,
in the conditions of most actual prisons, was unlikely to be achieved.
Bentham also made valuable contributions in more general areas of moral
philosophy. For instance, he expounded the concept of intention more lucidly
than any previous writer. An act, he said, might be intentional without its con-
sequences being so: ‘thus, you may intend to touch a man without intending to
hurt him: and yet, as the consequences turn out, you may chance to hurt him’. A
consequence might be either directly intentional (‘when the prospect of produc-
ing it constituted one of the links in the chain of causes by which the person was
determined to act’) or obliquely intentional (when the consequence was foreseen
as likely, but the prospect of producing it formed no link in the determining
chain). Among directly intentional consequences he distinguishes between those
which are ultimately or immediately intentional; this corresponds to the traditional
distinction between ends and means.
Bentham distinguishes between intention and motive: a man’s intentions may
be good and his motives bad. A, for instance, may prosecute B, out of malice,
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