Kenny Anthony. Philosophy in the Modern World: A New History of Western Philosophy. Volume 4

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

wanting one of the principal ingredients of human happiness, and quite

the chief ingredient of individual and social progress’ (L 185).

Without individuality, human beings become mere machines, conform-

ing to a pattern imposed from without. But ‘human nature is not a

machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed

for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides’

(L 188). If eccentricity is proscribed, damage is done not only to the

individual constrained, but to society as a whole. We may all have some-

thing to learn from unconventional characters. ‘There is always need of

persons not only to discover new truths, and point out when what were

once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices, and

set the example of more enlightened conduct, and better taste and sense in

human life’ (L 193). Energetic and unorthodox characters are needed more

than ever in an age when public opinion rules the world, and individuals

are lost in the crowd. Genius must be allowed to unfold itself in practice as

well as in thought.

What exactly does Mill have in mind when he commends ‘experiments

in living’? Sadly, he expounds his thesis by a series of eloquent metaphors

rather than by offering examples of beneficial eccentricity. When he comes

to offer practical applications of his principles, he confines himself to

denouncing laws restricting humdrum activities of everyday people, not

statutes constraining the development of genius. As examples of bad

legislation, actual or hypothetical, he considers such things as prohibitions

on the eating of pork and the drinking of spirituous liquors, or laws against

travelling on the sabbath and restrictions on dancing and theatrical per-

formances.

No doubt when Mill was encouraging nonconformity one example at the

back of his mind was his own unconventional relationship with Harriet

Taylor during the long years before their marriage. But, oddly, the one

example he actually gives of an experiment in living is one of which he

heartily disapproved: the Mormon sanction of polygamy. This experiment,

he admitted, was in direct conflict with his libertarian principles, being ‘a mere

riveting of the chains of one half of the community, and emancipation of the

other from reciprocity of obligation towards them’ (L 224). However, since the

world taught women that marriage was the one thing needful, he thought it

understandable that many a woman should prefer being one of several wives

to not being a wife at all. Mill was not commending polygamy; merely urging

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

274

that Mormons should not be coerced into abandoning it. And it must be said

that he had almost as much distaste for current English monogamy as for the

institutions of Salt Lake City.

At the time of his own marriage in 1851 he wrote out a protest against

the laws that conferred upon one party to the contract complete control

over the person and property of the other. ‘Having no means of legally

divesting myself of these odious powers...I feel it my duty to put on

record a formal protest against the existing law of marriage, in so far as

conferring such powers, and a solemn promise never in any case or under

any circumstances to use them’ (CCM 396). He set out his objections to the

English law of marriage at length in the pamphlet On the Subjection of Women.

The legal subordination of one sex to the other was wrong in principle and

a chief obstacle to human progress. A wife was simply a bond-servant to

her husband; she was bound to give him lifelong obedience, and any

property she acquired instantly passed to him. In some ways she was

worse off than a slave. In a Christian country a slave had a right and

duty to reject sexual advances from her master; but a husband can enforce

upon his wife ‘the lowest degradation of a human being, that of being made

the instrument of an animal function contrary to her inclinations’ (L 504).

The subjection of women to men had no other origin than the greater

muscular strength of the male, and had been continued into a civilized age

only through male self-interest. No one could say that experience had

shown that the existing system of male superiority was preferable to any

alternative; for no other alternative had ever been tried. Women had, by

centuries of training from the earliest age, been brought to acquiesce in the

system.

When we put together three things—first, the natural attraction between opposite

sexes; secondly, the wife’s entire dependence on the husband, every privilege or

pleasure she has being either his gift, or depending entirely on his will; and lastly,

that the principal object of human pursuit, consideration, and all objects of social

ambition, can in general be sought or obtained by her only through him—it

would be a miracle if the object of being attractive to men had not become the

polar star of feminine education and formation of character. (L 487)

If women did wish to throw over their subjection, rebellion against their

masters is harder than any rebellion against despots has ever been. Hus-

bands have greater facilities than any monarch has ever had to prevent any

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

275

uprising against their power: their subjects live under their eyes and in

their very hands. It is no wonder that the tyranny of males has outlasted all

other forms of unjust authority.

Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer on Women

The significance of On the Subjection of Women in the climate of the time can be

brought out by comparing it with the treatment of marriage and woman-

hood in the works of two Continental philosophers, Kierkegaard and

Schopenhauer. In Kierkegaard’s Either/Or a ninety-page essay is devoted to

affirming ‘the aesthetic validity of marriage’—that is, to persuade the

reader that entering into matrimony need not diminish, indeed may

fortify, the raptures of first love. Romantic ballads and novels are quite

A Punch cartoon of 1867 satirises Mill’s crusade fo r equality between the sexes.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

276

wrong to portray love as a quest that surmounts obstacles and trials to

achieve its goal in marriage: a wedding is the beginning, not the end, of

truly romantic love. The essay takes the form of a letter to a romantic

correspondent who has fundamental objections to the whole idea of a

church marriage.

Kierkegaard imagines the objector saying:

The girl before whom I could fall down and worship, whose love I feel could

snatch me out of all confusion and give me new birth, it is she I am to lead to the

Lord’s altar, she who is to stand there like a sinner, of whom and to whom it shall

be said that it was Eve who seduced Adam. To her before whom my proud soul

bows down, the only one to whom it has bowed down, to her it shall be said that

I am to be her master and she subservient to her husband. The moment has come,

the Church is already reaching out its arms for her and before giving her back to

me it will first press a bridal kiss upon her lips, not that bridal kiss I gave the whole

world for; it is already reaching out its arms to embrace her, but this embrace will

cause all her beauty to fade, and then it will toss her over to me and say ‘Be fruitful

and multiply’. What kind of power is it that dares intrude between me and my

bride, the bride I myself have chosen and who has chosen me? And this power

would command her to be true to me; does she then need to be commanded? And

is she to be true to me only because a third party commands it, one whom she

therefore loves more than me? And it bids me be true to her; must I be bidden to

that, I who belong to her with my whole soul? And this power decides our relation

to each other; it says I am to ask and she is to obey; but suppose I do not want to

ask, suppose I feel myself too inferior for that? (E/O 408)

Judge Vilhelm, whom Kierkegaard sets up as the defender of traditional

marriage, urges his correspondent to accept that in marriage he cannot but

be master, that his wife is no more a sinner than any other woman, and

that accepting a third power means only thanking God for the love

between bride and groom. At marriage the husband comes to understand

that real love is daily possession throughout a lifetime, not the preternat-

ural power of a brief infatuation; and his taking her as a gift from God,

rather than as a conquest of his own, enables the wife ‘to put the loved one

at just enough distance for her to be able to draw breath’ (E/O 411).

Vilhelm is emphatic that the only worthy motive for entering on

marriage is love for the spouse. He lists, and rejects, other reasons why

people marry or are urged to marry: that marriage is a school for character,

that one has a duty to propagate the human race, that one needs a home.

None of these motives are adequate, from either an aesthetic or an ethical

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

277

point of view. ‘Were a woman to marry’, he tells us, ‘so as to bear a saviour

to the world, that marriage would be just as unaesthetic as immoral and

irreligious’ (E/O 417). Love is the one thing that will bring the sensual and

the spiritual together into unity.

It is true that marriage, unlike romantic love, brings with it duties. But

duty is not the enemy of love, but its friend. In marriage ‘duty here is just

one thing, truly to love, with the sincerity of the heart, and duty is as

protean as love itself, declaring everything holy and good when it is of love,

and denouncing everything, however pleasing and specious, when it is not

of love’ (E/O 470).

If On the Subjection of Women is a classic of feminism, and Judge Vilhelm’s

contribution to Either/Or was a classic defence of traditional marriage,

Schopenhauer’s Essay on Women of 1861 was a classic of male chauvinism.

The natural purpose of women, the essay began, was to give birth, to care

for children, and to be subject to a man, to whom she should be a patient

and cheering companion. Women were better than men at nurturing

children, because they were themselves childish: they lived in the present

and were mentally myopic. Nature had provided women with sufficient

beauty to allure a man into supporting them, but wisely took it away from

them once they had produced a child or two, so that they should not be

distracted from raising their families.

The fundamental defect of the female character, according to Schopen-

hauer, was lack of a sense of justice. As the weaker sex, they had to make

their way by cunning. ‘As nature has equipped the lion with claws and

teeth, the elephant with tusks, the wild boar with fangs, the bull with

horns and the cuttlefish with ink, so it has equipped woman with the

power of dissimulation as her means of attack and defence’ (EA 83).

Women feel they are justified in deceiving individual men because their

prime loyalty is not to the individual but to the species—to the propaga-

tion of the race that is their entire vocation.

Women are inferior to men not only in their powers of reason ing, but

also in artistic talent and appreciation. It is not just that they chatter in the

theatre at concerts (something that clearly annoyed Schopenhauer in-

tensely); they altogether lack creative ability.

. . . the most eminent heads of the entire sex have proved incapable of a single

truly great, genuine and original achievement in art, or indeed of creating

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

278

anything at all of lasting value: this strikes one most forcibly in regard to painting,

since they are just as capable of mastering the technique as we are, and indeed

paint very busily, yet cannot point to a single great painting. (EA 86)

The worst type of woman is the lady, the woman who is set on a pedestal,

treated with gallantry by men, and educated in arrogant haughtiness. A

European lady is an unnatural creature, the object of derision in the East;

and by her very existence she makes the great majority of her own sex

deeply unhappy.

The law made a great mistake, Schopenhauer tells us, when it gave

women equal rights with men without at the same time endowing them

with masculine reasoning powers. By ‘equal rights’ Schopenhauer does not

mean anything so outrageous as property rights or the suffrage; he simply

means the institution of monogamy, which allows members of each sex to

have one and only one marital partner. Polygamy, in fact, is a much more

satisfactory arrangement: it makes sure that every woman is taken care of,

whereas under monogamy many women are left untended as old maids or

forced into hard labour or prostitution. ‘There are 80,000 prostitutes in

London alone: and what are they if not sacrifices on the altar of mono-

gamy?’ Polygamy is a benefit to the female sex, considered as a whole, and it

regularizes the satisfaction of male desire. ‘For who is really a monogamist?

We all live in polygamy, at least for a time and usually for good.’ Since

every man needs many women, there could be nothing more just than

that he should be free, indeed obliged, to support many women.

We may be grateful that it was Mill, and not Schopenhauer, whom

future generations followed. Indeed, On the Subjection of Women has become

antiquated as a result of its own success. The battle of which it was an early

salvo has long been won, at least in the countries for whom Mill was

writing. The marriage laws that Mill denounced have long been repealed,

and in all matters of law women are now treated as in every respect the

equals of men. And it has to be said that the cruel imprisonment that

Victorian marriage law imposed on women is brought home with greater

impact by the narrative and dialogue of novelists like Eliot and Trollope

than by the ponderous earnestness of Mill’s periods.

The issues discussed in Mill’s On Liberty, by contrast, remain of the highest

importance, though contemporary liberals often differ from Mill when

they come to draw the line between warranted and unwarranted state

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

279

interference with personal liberty. Most liberals accept parcels of legislation

whose purpose is to promote an individual’s own well-being rather than to

protect others from harm: laws imposing compulsory insurance, or the

wearing of protective headgear, for instance. If a modern liberal justifies

this as design ed to prevent the individual from becoming a charge on

society, rather than as aiming at his own health and prosperity, it should be

pointed out that the possibility of the poor and sick placing a burden on

others assumes the existence of a network of social services provided at the

taxpayer’s expense—something for which Mill had a very limited enthu-

siasm.

On the other hand, Mill countenanced restrictions on liberty that most

modern liberals would reject. He thought, for instance, that a government

could legitimately limit the size of families, and he reconciled it with his

libertarian principle on the following grounds: ‘In a country either over-

peopled, or threatened with being so, to produce children, beyond a very

small number, with the effect of reducing the reward of labour by their

competition, is a serious offence against all who live by the remuneration of

their labour’ (L 242). Many liberals share Mill’s lifelong enthusiasm for

population control by contraception (a cause for which he was willing to

go, briefly, to prison). But when China introduced legislation to limit the

size of families to a single child, most Western liberals reacted with horror .

Marx on Capital and Labour

At the same time and in the same city as Mill was writing classical works of

liberal thought, Karl Marx was developing the theory of the communism that

was to be for more than a century one of liberalism’s greatest enemies. The

basis of the theory was historical materialism: the thesis that in every epoch

the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange determines the

political and intellectual history of society. ‘The mode of production of

material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life-process in

general. It is not the consciousness of human beings that determines their

being; on the contrary it is their social being that determines their con-

sciousness’ (CPE, p. x). There were two elements that determined the course

of history: the forces and the relations of production. By the forces of

production Marx meant the raw materials, the technology, and the labour

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

280

that are necessary to make a finished product; as wheat, a mill, and a

millworker are all needed to produce flour. The relations of production, on

the other hand, are the economic arrangements governing these forces,

such as the ownership of the mill and the hiring of the worker. Relations

of production are not static; they alter as technology develops. In the age of

the hand-mill, for instance, the worker is the serf of a feudal lord, tied to the

land; in the age of the steam-mill he is the mobile employee of the capitalist.

Relations of production are not matters of free choice; they are determined

by the interplay of the productive forces. If, at any time, they become

inappropriate to the productive forces, then a social revolution takes place.

Marx divided the past, present, and future history of the relations

of production into six phases, three past, one present, and two to come.

The past phases were primitive communism, slavery, and feudalism.

The present, critical phase was that of capitalism. After capitalism’s inevi-

table collapse, the future would bring first socialism and ultimately com-

munism once more.

Following Engels, Marx believed that in the earliest stages of history

human beings had been organized into primitive communist tribes, hold-

ing land in common, owning no private property, and ruled by a matri-

archy. In the Iron Age, however, society became patriarchal, it became

possible to accumulate private wealth, and slavery was introduced.

Slavery was the dominant economic feature of classical antiquity.

Society was to be divided into classes: patrician and plebeian, freemen

and slaves. Thus there began the story of class antagonism which was

henceforth to be the fundamental feature of human history. The splen-

dour of the classical culture of Greece and Rome was merely an

ideological superstructure built upon the relations of production be-

tween the classes.

The ancient world gave way to the feudal system, with its relationships

between lord and serf, and between guildsmen and journeymen. Once

again, the philosophy and religion of the Middle Ages were an ideological

superstructure sustained by the economic system of the age. From the

serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the char tered burghers of the earliest

towns: these were the first bourgeois, a middle class between the servile

labourers and the aristocratic landowners. Since the time of the French

Revolution the bourgeoisie had been gaining the upper hand over the

aristocrats.

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

281

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society

has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new

conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive

feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and

more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly

facing each other; Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. (CM 3)

Marx believed that the capitalist society in which he lived had reached a

state of crisis. The opposition between bourgeoisie and proletariat would

become steadily stronger and lead to a revolutionary change which would

usher in the final stages, first of socialism, in which all property would pass

to the state, and finally to communism, after the state had withered away.

The crisis which capitalism had reached, Marx maintained, was not a

contingent fact of history; it was something entailed by the nature of

capitalism itself. He based this conclusion on an analysis of the nature of

economic value.

How is the value of a commodity determined? As a first step, we can say

that a thing’s value is the rate at which it can be exchanged for ot her

commodities: a quarter of wheat may be worth so much iron, and so on.

But the real value of something must be different from the countless

different rates at which it can be exchanged with innumerable other

commodities. We need a method of expressing the value of commodities

that is common to, but distinct from, all the different particular exchanges

between them.

As the exchangeable values of commodities are only social functions of those things, and

have nothing at all to do with the natural qualities, we must first ask: What is the

common social substance of all commodities? It is labour. To produce a commodity a

certain amount of labour must be bestowed upon it, or worked up in it. And I say

not only labour, but social labour. A man who produces an article for his own

immediate use, to consume it himself, creates a product, but not a commodity. As

a self-sustaining producer he has nothing to do with society. But to produce a

commodity a man must not only produce an article satisfying some social want, but

his labour itself must form part and parcel of the total sum of labour expended by

society. It must be subordinate to the division of labour within society.(VPP 30)

To value a commodity, we should look on it as a piece of crystallized labour.

How is labour itself measured? By the length of time the labour lasts. A silken

handkerchief is worth more than a brick because it takes longer to make

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

282

than a brick does. Marx states his theory thus: ‘The value of one commodity

is to the value of another commodity as the quantity of labour fixed in the

one is to the quantity of labour fixed in the other’ (VPP 31).

Two qualifications must be made to this simple equation. A lazy or

unskilful worker will take longer to produce a commodity than an

energetic and skilful one: does this mean that his product is worth more?

Of course not: when we speak of the quantity of labour fixed in a

commodity we mean the time that is necessary for a worker of average

energy and skill to produce it. Moreover, we must add into the equation

the labour previously worked up into the raw material of the commodity,

and into the technology employed.

For example, the value of a certain amount of cotton yarn is the crystallisation of

the quantity of labour added to the cotton during the spinning process, the

quantity of labour previously realised in the cotton itself, the quantity of labour

realised in the coal, oil, and other auxiliary matter used, the quantity of labour

fixed in the steam engine, the spindles, the factory building and so forth. (VPP 32)

Naturally, only a proportion of the value of the spindle will be incorpo-

rated into the value of a particular quantity of yarn: the exact proportion

will depend on the average working life of a spindle.

The value of a product at any given time will depend upon the

productivity prevailing at that time. If an increase in population means

that less fertile soils must be cultivated, the value of agricultural products

will rise because greater labour is needed to produce them. On the other

hand, when the introduction of the power-loom made it twice as easy to

produce a given quantity of yarn, the value of yarn sank accordingly.

When value is expressed in monetary terms, it is called price. Since

labour itself has a price, it too must have a value. But how is this to be

defined? To answer this question we m ust note that what the labourer sells

to his employer is not his actual labour, but his labouring power. If he is

paid £10 for a sixty-hour week, he is selling for £10 his labouring power for

sixty hours. But how are we to reckon the value of labouring power itself ?

Like that of every other commodity, its value is determined by the quantity of

labour necessary to produce it. The labouring power of a man exists only in his

living individuality. A certain mass of necessaries must be consumed by a man to

grow up and maintain his life. But the man, like the machine, will wear out, and

must be replaced by another man. Beside the mass of necessaries required for his

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

283