PHILOSOPHY AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM
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PHILOSOPHY
AND
THE SOCIAL PROBLEM
BY
WILL DURANT, PH.D.
INSTRUCTOR IN PHILOSOPHY, EXTENSION TEACHING
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
τὁν μἑν βἱον
ἡ φὑσις ἑδωκε, το δἑ καλὡς ζἡν ἡ τἑχνη.
--UNKNOWN DRAMATIC POET.
NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1917
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1917,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1917.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
TO
ALDEN FREEMAN
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 1
PART I
HISTORICAL APPROACH
CHAPTER I
THE PRESENT SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SOCRATIC ETHIC
I. History as rebarbarization 5
II. Philosophy as disintegrator 6
III. Individualism in Athens 7
IV. The Sophists 9
V. Intelligence as virtue 12
VI. The meaning of virtue 15
VII. “Instinct” and “reason” 23
VIII. The secularization of morals 27
IX. “Happiness” and “virtue” 31
X. The Socratic challenge 33
CHAPTER II
PLATO: PHILOSOPHY AS POLITICS
I. The man and the artist 36
II. How to solve the social problem 40
III. On making philosopher-kings 44
IV. Dishonest democracy 52
V. Culture and slavery 55
VI. Plasticity and order 60
VII. The meaning of justice 62
VIII. The future of Plato 64
CHAPTER III
FRANCIS BACON AND THE SOCIAL POSSIBILITIES OF SCIENCE
I. From Plato to Bacon 67
II. Character 69
III. The expurgation of the intellect 70
IV. Knowledge is power 74
V. The socialization of science 76
VI. Science and Utopia 79
VII. Scholasticism in science 81
VIII. The Asiatics of Europe 85
CHAPTER IV
SPINOZA ON THE SOCIAL PROBLEM
I. Hobbes 90
II. The spirit of Spinoza 91
III. Political ethics 93
IV. Is man a political animal? 95
V. What the social problem is 98
VI. Free speech 101
VII. Virtue as power 105
VIII. Freedom and order 108
IX. Democracy and intelligence 112
X. The legacy of Spinoza 115
CHAPTER V
NIETZSCHE
I. From Spinoza to Nietzsche 117
II. Biographical 120
III. Exposition 126
1. Morality as impotence 126
2. Democracy 128
3. Feminism 131
4. Socialism and anarchism 133
5. Degeneration 138
6. Nihilism 141
7. The will to power 143
8. The superman 150
9. How to make supermen 155
10. On the necessity of exploitation 159
11. Aristocracy 162
12. Signs of ascent 165
IV. Criticism 172
V. Nietzsche replies 177
VI. Conclusion 178
PART II
SUGGESTIONS
CHAPTER I
SOLUTIONS AND DISSOLUTIONS
I. The problem 185
II. “Solutions” 190
1. Feminism 190
2. Socialism 194
3. Eugenics 198
4. Anarchism 200
5. Individualism 202
6. Individualism again 202
III. Dissolutions 205
CHAPTER II
THE RECONSTRUCTIVE FUNCTION OF PHILOSOPHY
I. Epistemologs 214
II. Philosophy as control 218
III. Philosophy as mediator between science and statesmanship 222
CHAPTER III
ORGANIZED INTELLIGENCE
I. The need 227
II. The organization of intelligence 230
III. Information as panacea 234
IV. Sex, art, and play in social reconstruction 240
V. Education 246
CHAPTER IV
THE READER SPEAKS
I. The democratization of aristocracy 251
II. The professor as Buridan’s ass 255
III. Is information wanted? 257
IV. Finding Mæcenas 261
V. The chance of philosophy 264
CONCLUSION 268
PART I
HISTORICAL APPROACH
PHILOSOPHY AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this essay is to show: first, that the social problem has
been the basic concern of many of the greater philosophers; second, that
an approach to the social problem through philosophy is the first
condition of even a moderately successful treatment of this problem; and
third, that an approach to philosophy through the social problem is
indispensable to the revitalization of philosophy.
By “philosophy” we shall understand a study of experience as a whole, or
of a portion of experience in relation to the whole.
By the “social problem” we shall understand, simply and very broadly,
the problem of reducing human misery by modifying social institutions.
It is a problem that, ever reshaping itself, eludes sharper definition;
for misery is related to desire, and desire is personal and in perpetual
flux: each of us sees the problem unsteadily in terms of his own
changing aspirations. It is an uncomfortably complicated problem, of
course; and we must bear in mind that the limit of our intention here is
to consider philosophy as an approach to the problem, and the problem
itself as an approach to philosophy. We are proposing no solutions.
Let us, as a wholesome measure of orientation, touch some of the
mountain-peaks in philosophical history, with an eye for the social
interest that lurks in every metaphysical maze. “Aristotle,” says
Professor Woodbridge, “set treatise-writers the fashion of beginning
each treatise by reviewing previous opinions on their subject, and
proving them all wrong.”[1] The purpose of the next five chapters will
be rather the opposite: we shall see if some supposedly dead
philosophies do not admit of considerable resuscitation. Instead of
trying to show that Socrates, Plato, Bacon, Spinoza, and Nietzsche were
quite mistaken in their views on the social problem, we shall try to see
what there is in these views that can help us to understand our own
situation to-day. We shall not make a collection of systems of social
philosophy; we shall not lose ourselves in the past in a scholarly
effort to relate each philosophy to its social and political
environment; we shall try to relate these philosophies rather to our own
environment, to look at our own problems successively through the eyes
of these philosophers. Other interpretations of these men we shall not
so much contradict as seek to supplement.
Each of our historical chapters, then, will be not so much a review as a
preface and a progression. The aim will be neither history nor
criticism, but a kind of construction by proxy. It is a method that has
its defects: it will, for example, sacrifice thoroughness of scholarship
to present applicability, and will necessitate some repetitious
gathering of the threads when we come later to our more personal
purpose. But as part requital for this, we shall save ourselves from
considering the past except as it is really present, except as it is
alive and nourishingly significant to-day. And from each study we shall
perhaps make some advance towards our final endeavor,--the mutual
elucidation of the social problem and philosophy.
CHAPTER I
THE PRESENT SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SOCRATIC ETHIC
I
History as Rebarbarization
History is a process of rebarbarization. A people made vigorous by
arduous physical conditions of life, and driven by the increasing
exigencies of survival, leaves its native habitat, moves down upon a
less vigorous people, conquers, displaces, or absorbs it. Habits of
resolution and activity developed in a less merciful environment now
rapidly produce an economic surplus; and part of the resources so
accumulated serve as capital in a campaign of imperialist conquest. The
growing surplus generates a leisure class, scornful of physical activity
and adept in the arts of luxury. Leisure begets speculation; speculation
dissolves dogma and corrodes custom, develops sensitivity of perception
and destroys decision of action. Thought, adventuring in a labyrinth of
analysis, discovers behind society the individual; divested of its
normal social function it turns inward and discovers the self. The
sense of common interest, of commonwealth, wanes; there are no citizens
now, there are only individuals.
From afar another people, struggling against the forces of an obdurate
environment, sees here the cleared forests, the liberating roads, the
harvest of plenty, the luxury of leisure. It dreams, aspires, dares,
unites, invades. The rest is as before.
Rebarbarization is rejuvenation. The great problem of any civilization
is how to rejuvenate itself without rebarbarization.
II
Philosophy as Disintegrator
The rise of philosophy, then, often heralds the decay of a civilization.
Speculation begins with nature and begets naturalism; it passes to
man--first as a psychological mystery and then as a member of
society--and begets individualism. Philosophers do not always desire
these results; but they achieve them. They feel themselves the unwilling
enemies of the state: they think of men in terms of personality while
the state thinks of men in terms of social mechanism. Some philosophers
would gladly hold their peace, but there is that in them which will out;
and when philosophers speak, gods and dynasties fall. Most states have
had their roots in heaven, and have paid the penalty for it: the
twilight of the gods is the afternoon of states.
Every civilization comes at last to the point where the individual, made
by speculation conscious of himself as an end _per se_, demands of the
state, as the price of its continuance, that it shall henceforth enhance
rather than exploit his capacities. Philosophers sympathize with this
demand, the state almost always rejects it: therefore civilizations come
and civilizations go. The history of philosophy is essentially an
account of the efforts great men have made to avert social
disintegration by building up natural moral sanctions to take the place
of the supernatural sanctions which they themselves have destroyed. To
find--without resorting to celestial machinery--some way of winning for
their people social coherence and permanence without sacrificing
plasticity and individual uniqueness to regimentation,--that has been
the task of philosophers, that is the task of philosophers.
We should be thankful that it is. Who knows but that within our own time
may come at last the forging of an effective _natural_ ethic?--an
achievement which might be the most momentous event in the history of
our world.
III
Individualism in Athens
The great ages in the history of European thought have been for the most
part periods of individualistic effervescence: the age of Socrates, the
age of Cæsar and Augustus, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment;--and
shall we add the age which is now coming to a close? These ages have
usually been preceded by periods of imperialist expansion: imperialism
requires a tightening of the bonds whereby individual allegiance to the
state is made secure; and this tightening, given a satiety of
imperialism, involves an individualistic reaction. And again, the
dissolution of the political or economic frontier by conquest or
commerce breaks down cultural barriers between peoples, develops a sense
of the relativity of customs, and issues in the opposition of individual
“reason” to social tradition.
A political treatise attributed to the fourth-century B.C. reflects the
attitude that had developed in Athens in the later fifth century. “If
all men were to gather in a heap the customs which they hold to be good
and noble, and if they were next to select from it the customs which
they hold to be base and vile, nothing would be left over.”[2] Once such
a view has found capable defenders, the custom-basis of social
organization begins to give way, and institutions venerable with age are
ruthlessly subpœnaed to appear before the bar of reason. Men begin to
contrast “Nature” with custom, somewhat to the disadvantage of the
latter. Even the most basic of Greek institutions is questioned: “The
Deity,” says a fourth-century Athenian Rousseau, “made all men free;
Nature has enslaved no man.”[3] Botsford speaks of “the powerful
influence of fourth-century socialism on the intellectual class.”[4]
Euripides and Aristophanes are full of talk about a movement for the
emancipation of women.[5] Law and government are examined: Anarcharsis’
comparison of the law to a spider’s web, which catches small flies and
lets the big ones escape, now finds sympathetic comprehension; and men
arise, like Callicles and Thrasymachus, who frankly consider government
as a convenient instrument of mass-exploitation.
IV
The Sophists
The cultural representatives of this individualistic development were
the Sophists. These men were university professors without a university
and without the professorial title. They appeared in response to a
demand for higher instruction on the part of the young men of the
leisure class; and within a generation they became the most powerful
intellectual force in Greece. There had been philosophers, questioners,
before them; but these early philosophers had questioned nature rather
than man or the state. The Sophists were the first group of men in
Greece to overcome the natural tendency to acquiesce in the given order
of things. They were proud men,--humility is a vice that never found
root in Greece,--and they had a buoyant confidence in the newly
discovered power of human intelligence. They assumed, in harmony with
the spirit of all Greek achievement, that in the development and
extension of knowledge lay the road to a sane and significant life,
individual and communal; and in the quest for knowledge they were
resolved to scrutinize unawed all institutions, prejudices, customs,
morals. Protagoras professed to respect conventions,[6] and pronounced
conventions and institutions the source of man’s superiority to the
beast; but his famous principle, that “man is the measure of all
things,” was a quiet hint that morals are a matter of taste, that we
call a man “good” when his conduct is advantageous to us, and “bad” when
his conduct threatens to make for our own loss. To the Sophists virtue
consisted, not in obedience to unjudged rules and customs, but in the
efficient performance of whatever one set out to do. They would have
condemned the bungler and let the “sinner” go. That they were flippant
sceptics, putting no distinction of worth between any belief and its
opposite, and willing to prove anything for a price, is an old
accusation which later students of Greek philosophy are almost unanimous
in rejecting.[7]
The great discovery of the Sophists was the individual; it was an
achievement for which Plato and his oligarchical friends could not
forgive them, and because of which they incurred the contumely which it
is now so hard to dissociate from their name. The purpose of laws, said
the Sophists, was to widen the possibilities of individual development;
if laws did not do that, they had better be forgotten. There was a
higher law than the laws of men,--a natural law, engraved in every
heart, and judge of every other law. The conscience of the individual
was above the dictates of any state. All radicalisms lay compact in that
pronouncement. Plato, prolific of innovations though he was, yet shrank
from such a leap into the new. But the Sophists pressed their point, men
listened to them, and the Greek world changed. When Socrates appeared,
he found that world all out of joint, a war of all against all, a
stridency of uncoördinated personalities rushing into chaos. And when he
was asked, What should men do to be saved, he answered, simply, Let us
think.
V
Intelligence as Virtue
Intelligence as virtue: it was not a new doctrine; it was merely a new
emphasis placed on an already important element in the Greek--or rather
the Athenian--view of life. But it was a needed emphasis. The Sophists
(not Socrates, _pace_ Cicero) had brought philosophy down from heaven to
earth, but they had left it grovelling at the feet of business
efficiency and success, a sort of _ancilla pecuniæ_, a broker knowing
where one’s soul could be invested at ten per cent. Socrates agreed with
the Sophists in condemning any but a very temporary devotion to
metaphysical abstractions,--the one and the many, motion and rest, the
indivisibility of space, the puzzles of predication, and so forth; he
joined them in ridiculing the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, and
in demanding that all thinking should be focussed finally on the real
concerns of life; but his spirit was as different from theirs as the
spirit of Spinoza was different from that of a mediæval money-lender.
With the Sophists philosophy was a profession; they were “lovers of
wisdom”--for a consideration. With Socrates philosophy was a quest of
the permanently good, of the lastingly satisfying attitude to life. To
find out just what are justice, temperance, courage, piety,--“that is an
inquiry which I shall never be weary of pursuing so far as in me lies.”
It was not an easy quest; and the results were not startlingly
definite: “I wander to and fro when I attempt these problems, and do not
remain consistent with myself.” His interlocutors went from him
apparently empty; but he had left in them seed which developed in the
after-calm of thought. He could clarify men’s notions, he could reveal
to them their assumptions and prejudices; but he could not and would not
manufacture opinions for them. He left no written philosophy because he
had only the most general advice to give, and knew that no other advice
is ever taken. He trusted his friends to pass on the good word.
Now what was the good word? It was, first of all, the identity of virtue
and wisdom, morals and intelligence; but more than that, it was the
basic identity, in the light of intelligence, of communal and individual
interests. Here at the Sophist’s feet lay the débris of the old
morality. What was to replace it? The young Athenians of a generation
denuded of supernatural belief would not listen to counsels of “virtue,”
of self-sacrifice to the community. What was to be done? Should social
and political pressure be brought to bear upon the Sophists to compel
them to modify the individualistic tenor of their teachings? Analysis
destroys morals. What is the moral--destroy analysis?
The moral, answered Socrates, is to get better morals, to find an
ethic immune to the attack of the most ruthless sceptic. The Sophists
were right, said Socrates; morality means more than social obedience.
But the Sophists were wrong in opposing the good of the individual to
that of the community; Socrates proposed to prove that if a man were
intelligent, he would see that those same qualities which make a man a
good citizen--justice, wisdom, temperance, courage--are also the best
means to individual advantage and development. All these “virtues”
are simply the supreme and only virtue--wisdom--differentiated by
the context of circumstance. No action is virtuous unless it is an
intelligent adaptation of means to a criticised end. “Sin” is failure
to use energy to the best account; it is an unintelligent waste of
strength. A man does not knowingly pursue anything but the Good; let him
but see his advantage, and he will be attracted towards it irresistibly;
let him pursue it, and he will be happy, and the state safe. The trouble
is that men lack perspective, and cannot see their true Good; they need
not “virtue” but intelligence, not sermons but training in perspective.
The man who has ἑνκρἁτεια, _who rules within_, who is strong enough to
stop and think, the man who has achieved σωφροσὑνη,--the self-knowledge
that brings self-command,--such a man will not be deceived by the
tragedy of distance, by the apparent smallness of the future good
alongside of the more easily appreciable good that lies invitingly at
hand. Hence the moral importance of dialectic, of cross-examination, of
concept and definition: we must learn “how to make our ideas clear”;
we must ask ourselves just what it is that we want, just how real
this seeming good is. Dialectic is the handmaiden of virtue; and all
clarification is morality.
VI
The Meaning of Virtue
This is frank intellectualism, of course; and the best-refuted doctrine
in philosophy. It is amusing to observe the ease with which critics and
historians despatch the Socratic ethic. It is “an extravagant paradox,”
says Sidgwick,[8] “incompatible with moral freedom.” “Nothing is
easier,” says Gomperz,[9] “than to detect the one-sidedness of this
point of view.” “This doctrine,” says Grote,[10] “omits to notice, what
is not less essential, the proper conditions of the emotions, desires,
etc.” “It tended to make all conduct a matter of the intellect and not
of the character, and so in a sense to destroy moral responsibility,”
says Hobhouse.[11] “Himself blessed with a will so powerful that it
moved almost without friction,” says Henry Jackson,[12] “Socrates fell
into the error of ignoring its operations, and was thus led to regard
knowledge as the sole condition of well-doing.” “Socrates was a
misunderstanding,” says Nietzsche;[13] “reason at any price, life made
clear, cold, cautious, conscious, without instincts, opposed to the
instincts, was in itself only a disease, ... and by no means a return to
‘virtue,’ to ‘health,’ and to happiness.” And the worn-out dictum about
seeing the better and approving it, yet following the worse, is quoted
as the deliverance of a profound psychologist, whose verdict should be
accepted as a final solution of the problem.
Before refuting a doctrine it is useful to try to understand it. What
could Socrates have meant by saying that all real virtue is
intelligence? What is virtue?
A civilization may be characterized in terms of its conception of
virtue. There is hardly anything more distinctive of the Greek attitude,
as compared with our own, than the Greek notion of virtue as
intelligence. Consider the present connotations of the word _virtue_:
men shrink at having the term applied to them; and “nothing makes one so
vain,” says Oscar Wilde, “as being told that one is a sinner.” During
the Middle Ages the official conception of virtue was couched in terms
of womanly excellence; and the sternly masculine God of the Hebrews
suffered considerably from the inroads of Mariolatry. Protestantism was
in part a rebellion of the ethically subjugated male; in Luther the man
emerges riotously from the monk. But as people cling to the ethical
implications of a creed long after the creed itself has been abandoned,
so our modern notion of virtue is still essentially mediæval and
feminine. Virginity, chastity, conjugal fidelity, gentility, obedience,
loyalty, kindness, self-sacrifice, are the stock-in-trade of all
respectable moralists; to be “good” is to be harmless, to be not “bad,”
to be a sort of sterilized citizen, guaranteed not to injure. This
sheepish innocuousness comes easily to the natively uninitiative, to
those who are readily amenable to fear and prohibitions. It is a static
virtue; it contracts rather than expands the soul; it offers no handle
for development, no incentive to social stimulation and productivity. It
is time we stopped calling this insipidly negative attitude by the once
mighty name of virtue. Virtue must be defined in terms of that which is
vitally significant in our lives.
And therefore, too, virtue cannot be defined in terms of individual
subordination to the group. The vitally significant thing in a man’s
life is not the community, but himself. To ask him to consider the
interests of the community above his own is again to put up for his
worship an external, transcendent god; and the trouble with a
transcendent god is that he is sure to be dethroned. To call “immoral”
the refusal of the individual to meet such demands is the depth of
indecency; it is itself immoral,--that is, it is nonsense. The notion of
“duty” as involving self-sacrifice, as essentially duty to others, is a
soul-cramping, funereal notion, and deserves all that Ibsen and his
progeny have said of it.[14] Ask the individual to sacrifice himself to
the community, and it will not be long before he sacrifices the
community to himself. Granted that, in the language of Heraclitus, there
is always a majority of fools, and that self-sacrifice can be procured
by the simple hypnotic suggestion of _post-mortem_ remuneration: sooner
or later come doubt and disillusionment, and the society whose
permanence was so easily secured becomes driftwood on the tides of time.
History means that if it means anything.
No; the intelligent individual will give allegiance to the group of
which he happens to find himself a member, only so far as the policies
of the group accord with his own criticised desires. Whatever
allegiance he offers will be to those forces, wherever they may be,
which in his judgment move in the line of these desires. Even for such
forces he will not sacrifice himself,--though there may be times when
martyrdom is a luxury for which life itself is not too great a price.
Since these forces have been defined in terms of his own judgment and
desire, conflict between them and himself can come only when his
behavior diverges from the purposes defined and resumed in times of
conscious thought,--_i.e._, only when he ceases to adapt means to his
ends, ceases, that is, to be intelligent. The prime moral conflict is
not between the individual and his group, but between the partial self
of fragmentary impulse and the coördinated self of conscious purpose.
There is a group within each man as well as without: a group of partial
selves is the reality behind the figment of the unitary self. Every
individual is a society, every person is a crowd. And the tragedies of
the moral life lie not in the war of each against all, but in the
restless interplay of these partial selves behind the stage of action.
As a man’s intelligence grows this conflict diminishes, for both means
and ends, both behavior and purposes, are being continually revised and
redirected in accordance with intelligence, and therefore in convergence
towards it. Progressively the individual achieves unity, and through
unity, personality. Faith in himself has made him whole. The ethical
problem, so far as it is the purely individual problem of attaining to
coördinated personality, is solved.
Moral responsibility, then,--whatever social responsibility may be,--is
the responsibility of the individual to himself. The social is not
necessarily the moral--let the sociological fact be what it will. The
unthinking conformity of the “normal social life” is, just because it is
unthinking, below the level of morality: let us call it sociality, and
make morality the prerogative of the really thinking animal. In any
society so constituted as to give to the individual an increase in
powers as recompense for the pruning of his liberties, the unsocial will
be immoral,--that is, self-destructively unreasonable and unintelligent;
but even in such a society the moral would overflow the margins of the
social, and would take definition ultimately from the congruity of the
action with the criticised purposes of the individual self. This does
not mean that all ethics lies compact in the shibboleth, “Be yourself.”
Those who make the least sparing use of this phrase are too apt to
consider it an excuse for lives that reek with the heat of passion and
smack of insufficient evolution. These people need to be reminded--all
the more forcibly since the most palatable and up-to-date philosophies
exalt instinct and deride thought--that one cannot be thoroughly one’s
self except by deliberation and intelligence. To act indeliberately is
not to be, but in great part to cancel, one’s self. For example, the
vast play of direct emotional expression is almost entirely
indeliberate: if you are greatly surprised, your lips part, your eyes
open a trifle wider, your pulse quickens, your respiration is affected;
and if I am surprised, though you be as different from me as Hyperion
from a satyr, my respiration will be affected, my pulse will quicken, my
eyes will open a trifle wider, and my lips will part;--my direct
reaction will be essentially the same as yours. The direct expression of
surprise is practically the same in all the higher animals. Darwin’s
classical description of the expression of fear is another example; it
holds for every normal human being; not to speak of lower species. So
with egotism, jealousy, anger, and a thousand other instinctive
reaction-complexes; they are common to the species, and when we so
react, we are expressing not our individual selves so much as the
species to which we happen to belong. When you hit a man because he has
“insulted” you, when you swagger a little after delivering a successful
speech, when you push aside women and children in order to take their
place in the rescue boat, when you do any one of a million indeliberate
things like these, it is not you that act, it is your species, it is
your ancestors, acting through you; your acquired individual difference
is lost in the whirlwind of inherited impulse. Your act, as the
Scholastics phrased it, is not a “human” act; you yourself are not
really acting in any full measure of yourself, you are but playing
slave and mouth-piece to the dead. But subject the inherited tendencies
to the scrutiny of your individual experience, _think_, and your action
will then express yourself, not in any abbreviated sense, but up to the
hilt. There is no merit, no “virtue,” no development in playing the game
of fragmentary impulses, in living up to the past; to be moral, to grow,
is to be not part but all of one’s self, to call into operation the
acquired as well as the inherited elements of one’s character, to be
_whole_. So many of us invite ruin by actions which do not really
express us, but are the voice of the merest fragment of ourselves,--the
remainder of us being meanwhile asleep.[15] To be whole, to be your
deliberate self, to do what you please but only after considering what
you really please, to follow your own ideals (but to follow them!), to
choose your own means and not to have them forced upon you by your
ancestors, to act consciously, to see the part _sub specie totius_, to
see the present act in its relation to your vital purposes, to think, to
be intelligent,--all these are definitions of virtue and morality.
There is, then, in the old sense of the word, no such thing as morality,
there is only intelligence or stupidity. Yes, virtue is calculus,
horrible as that may sound to long and timid ears: to calculate
properly just what you must do to attain your real ends, to see just
what and where your good is, and to make for it,--that is all that can
without indecency be asked of any man, that is all that is ever
vouchsafed by any man who is intelligent.
Perhaps you think it is an easy virtue,--this cleaving to
intelligence,--easier than being harmless. Try it.
VII
“Instinct” and “Reason”
And now to go back to the refutations.
The strongest objection to the Socratic doctrine is that intelligence is
not a creator, but only a servant, of ends. What we shall consider to be
our good appears to be determined not by reason, but by desire. Reason
itself seems but the valet of desire, ready to do for it every manner of
menial service. Desire is an adept at marshalling before intelligence
such facts as favor the wish, and turns the mind’s eye resolutely away
from other truth, as a magician distracts the attention of his audience
while his hands perform their wonders. If morality is entirely a matter
of intelligence, it is entirely a question of means, it is excluded
irrevocably from the realm of ends.
The conclusion may be allowed in substance, though it passes beyond the
warrant of the facts. It is true that basic ends are never suggested by
intelligence, reason, knowledge; but it is also true that many ends
suggested by desire are vetoed by intelligence. Why are the desires of a
man more modest than those of a boy or a child, if not because the blows
of repeated failure have dulled the edge of desire? Desires lapse, or
lose in stature, as knowledge grows and man takes lessons from reality.
There is an adaptation of ends to means as well as of means to ends; and
desire comes at last to take counsel of its slave.
Be it granted, none the less, that ends are dictated by desire, and that
if morality is intelligence, there can be no question of the morality of
any end _per se_. That, strangely, is not a refutation of the Socratic
ethic so much as an essential element of it and its starting-point.
Every desire has its own initial right; morality means not the
suppression of desires, but their coördination. What that implies for
society we shall see presently; for the individual it implies that he is
immoral, not when he seeks his own advantage, but when he does not
really behave for his own advantage, when some narrow temporary purpose
upsets perspective and overrides a larger end.[16] What we call
“self-control” is the permanent predominance of the larger end; what we
call weakness of will is instability of perspective. Self-control means
an intelligent judgment of values, an intelligent coördination of
motives, an intelligent forecasting of effects. It is far-sight,
far-hearing, an enlargement of the sense; it hears the weakened voice of
the admonishing past, it sees results far down the vista of the future;
it annihilates space and time for the sake of light. Self-control is
coördinated energy,--which is the first and last word in ethics and
politics, and perhaps in logic and metaphysics too. Weak will means that
desires fall out of focus, and taking advantage of the dark steal into
action: it is a derangement of the light, a failure of intelligence. In
this sense a “good will” means coördination of desires by the ultimate
desire, end, ideal; it means health and wholeness of will; it means,
literally, integrity. In the old sense “good will” meant, too often,
mere fear either of the prohibitions of present law or of the
prohibitions stored up in conscience. Such conscience, we all know, is a
purely negative and static thing, a convenient substitute for policemen,
a degenerate descendant of that _conscientia_, or _knowing-together_,
which meant to the Romans a discriminating awareness in
action,--discriminating awareness of the whole that lurks round the
corner of every part. This is one instance of a sort of pathology of
words,--words coming to function in a sense alien to their normal
intent. _Right_ and _wrong_, for example, once carried no ethical
connotation, but merely denoted a direct or tortuous route to a goal;
and significantly the Hebrew word for sin meant, in the days of its
health, an arrow that had missed its mark.
But, it is urged, there is no such thing as intelligence in the sense of
a control of passion by reason, desire by thought. Granted; it is so
much easier to admit objections than to refute them! Let intelligence be
interpreted as you will, so be it you recognize in it a delayed
response, a moment of reprieve before execution, giving time for the
appearance of new impulses, motives, tendencies, and allowing each
element in the situation to fall into its place in a coördinated whole.
Let intelligence be a struggle of impulses, a survival of the fittest
desire; let us contrast not reason with passion, but response delayed by
the rich interplay of motive forces, with response immediately following
upon the first-appearing impulse. Let impulse mean for us fruit that
falls unripe from the tree, because too weak to hang till it is mature.
Let us understand intelligence as not a faculty superadded to impulse,
but rather that coördination of impulses which is wrought out by the
blows of hard experience. The Socratic ethic fits quite comfortably into
this scheme; intelligence is delayed response and morality means, Take
your time.
It is charged that the Socratic view involves determinism; and this
charge, too, is best met with open-armed admission. We need not raise
the question of the pragmatic value of the problem. But to suppose that
determinism destroys moral responsibility is to betray the mid-Victorian
origin of one’s philosophy. Men of insight like Socrates, Plato, and
Spinoza, saw without the necessity of argument that moral responsibility
is not a matter of freedom of will, but a relation of means to ends, a
responsibility of the agent to himself, an intelligent coördination of
impulses by one’s ultimate purposes. Any other morality, whatever pretty
name it may display, is the emasculated morality of slaves.
VIII
The Secularization of Morals
The great problem involved in the Socratic ethic lies, apparently, in
the bearings of the doctrine on social unity and stability. Apparently;
for it is wholesome to remember that social organization, like the
Sabbath, was made for man, and not the other way about. If social
organization demands of the individual more sacrifices than its
advantages are worth to him, then the stability of that organization is
not a problem, it is a misfortune. But if the state does not demand such
sacrifices, the advantage of the individual will be in social behavior;
and the question whether he will behave socially becomes a question of
how much intelligence he has, how clear-eyed he is in ferreting out his
own advantage. In a state that does not ask more from its members than
it gives, morality and intelligence and social behavior will not
quarrel. The social problem appears here as the twofold problem of,
first, making men intelligent, and, second, making social organization
so great an advantage to the individual as to insure social behavior in
all intelligent men.
Which has the better chance of survival:--a society of “good” men or a
society of intelligent men? So far as a man is “good” he merely obeys,
he does not initiate. A society of “good” men is necessarily stagnant;
for in such a society the virtue most in demand, as Emerson puts it, is
conformity. If great men emerge through the icy crust of this
conformity, they are called criminals and sinners; the lives of great
men all remind us that we cannot make our lives sublime and yet be
“good.” But intelligence as an ethical ideal is a progressive norm; for
it implies the progressive coördination of one’s life in reference to
one’s ultimate ideals. The god of the “good” man is the _status quo_;
the intelligent man obeys rather the call of the _status ad quem_.
Observe how the problem of man _versus_ the group is clarified by thus
relating the individual to a larger whole determined not by geographical
frontiers, but by purposes born of his own needs and moulded by his own
intelligence. For as the individual’s intelligence grows, his purposes
are brought more and more within the limits of personal capacity and
social possibility: he is ever less inclined to make unreasonable
demands upon himself, or men in general, or the group in which he lives.
His ever broadening vision makes apparent the inherent self-destructiveness
of anti-social aims; and though he chooses his ends without reference
to any external moral code, those ends are increasingly social.
Enlightenment saves his social dispositions from grovelling conformity,
and his “self-regarding sentiments” from suicidal narrowness. And now
the conflict between himself and his group continues for the most part
only in so far as the group makes unreasonable demands upon him. But
this, too, diminishes as the individuals constituting or dominating
the group become themselves more intelligent, more keenly cognizant
of the limits within which the demands of the group upon its members
must be restricted if individual allegiance is to be retained. Since
the reduction of the conflict between the individual and the community
without detriment to the interests of either is the central problem of
political ethics, it is obvious that the practical task of ethics is
not to formulate a specific moral code, but to bring about a spread
of intelligence. And since the reduction of this conflict brings with
it a better coördination of the members of the group, through their
greater ability to perceive the advantages of communal action in an
intelligently administered group, the problem of social coherence and
permanence itself falls into the same larger problem of intellectual
development.
“How to make our ideas clear”;--what if that be the social problem? What
a wealth of import in that little phrase of Socrates,--τὁ τἱ--“what
is it?” What is my good, my interest? What do I really want?--To find
the answer to that, said Robert Louis Stevenson, is to achieve wisdom
and old age. What is my country? What is patriotism? “If you wish to
converse with me,” said Voltaire, “you must define your terms.” If you
wish to be moral, you must define your terms. If our civilization is to
keep its head above the flux of time, we must define our terms.
For these are the critical days of the secularization of moral
sanctions; the theological navel-string binding men to “good behavior”
has snapped. What are the leaders of men going to do about it? Will they
try again the old gospel of self-sacrifice? But a world fed on
self-sacrifice is a world of lies, a world choking with the stench of
hypocrisy. To preach self-sacrifice is not to solve, it is precisely to
shirk, the problem of ethics,--the problem of eliminating individual
self-sacrifice while preserving social stability: the problem of
reconciling the individual as such with the individual as citizen. Or
will our leaders try to replace superstition with an extended physical
compulsion, making the policeman and the prison do all the work of
social coördination? But surely compulsion is a last resort; not because
it is “wrong,” but because it is inexpedient, because it rather cuts
than unties the knot, because it produces too much friction to allow of
movement. Compulsion is warranted when there is question of preventing
the interference of one individual or group with another; but it is a
poor instrument for the establishment or maintenance of ideals. Suppose
we stop moralizing, suppose we reduce regimentation, suppose we begin to
define our terms. Suppose we let people know quite simply (and not in
Academese) that moral codes are born not in heaven but in social needs;
and suppose we set about finding a way of spreading intelligence so that
individual treachery to real communal interest, and communal
exploitation of individual allegiance, may both appear on the surface,
as they are at bottom, unintelligently suicidal. Is that too much to
hope for? Perhaps. But then again, it may be, the worth and meaning of
life lie precisely in this, that there is still a possibility of
organizing that experiment.
IX
“Happiness” and “Virtue”
A word now about the last part of the Socratic formula: intelligence =
virtue = happiness. And this a word of warning: remember that the
“virtue” here spoken of is not the mediæval virtue taught in Sunday
schools. Surely our children must wonder are we fools or liars when we
tell them, “Be good and you will be happy.” Better forget “virtue” and
read simply: intelligence=happiness. That appears more closely akin to
the rough realities of life: intelligence means ability to adapt means
to ends, and happiness means success in adapting means to ends;
happiness, then, varies with ability. Happiness is intelligence on the
move; a pervasive physiological tonus accompanying the forward movement
of achievement. It is not the consciousness of virtue: that is not
happiness, but snobbery. And similarly, remorse is, in the intelligent
man, not the consciousness of “sin,” but the consciousness of a past
stupidity. So far as you fail to win your real ends you are
unhappy,--and have proved unintelligent. But the Preacher says, “He that
increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” True enough if the increment of
knowledge is the correction of a past error; the sorrow is a penalty
paid for the error, not for the increase of knowledge. True, too, that
intelligence does not consistently lessen conflicts, and that it
discloses a new want for every want it helps to meet. But the joy of
life lies not so much in the disappearance of difficulties as in the
overcoming of them; not so much in the diminution of conflict as in the
growth of achievement. Surely it is time we had an ethic that stressed
achievement rather than quiescence. And further, intelligence must not
be thought of as the resignation of disillusionment, the consciousness
of impotence; intelligence is to be conceived of in terms of adaptive
activity, of movement towards an end, of coördinated self-expression
and behavior. Finally, it is but fair to interpret the formula as making
happiness and intelligence coincide only so far as the individual’s
happiness depends on his own conduct. The causes of unhappiness may be
an inherited deformity, or an accident not admitting of provision; such
cases do not so much contradict as lie outside the formula. So far as
your happiness depends on your activities, it will vary with the degree
of intelligence you show. Act intelligently, and you will not know
regret; feel that you are moving on toward your larger ends, and you
will be happy.
X
The Socratic Challenge
But if individual and social health and happiness depend on intelligence
rather than on “virtue,” and if the exaltation of intelligence was a
cardinal element in the Athenian view of life, why did the Socratic
ethic fail to save Athens from decay? And why did the supposedly
intelligent Athenians hail this generous old Dr. Johnson of philosophy
into court and sentence him to death?
The answer is, Because the Athenians refused to make the Socratic
experiment. They were intelligent, but not intelligent enough. They
could diagnose the social malady, could trace it to the decay of
supernatural moral norms; but they could not find a cure, they had not
the vision to see that salvation lay not in the compulsory retention of
old norms, but in the forging of new and better ones, capable of
withstanding the shock of questioning and trial. What they saw was
chaos; and like most statesmen they longed above all things for order.
They were not impressed by Socrates’ allegiance to law, his cordial
admission of the individual’s obligations to the community for the
advantages of social organization. They listened to the disciples: to
Antisthenes, who laughed at patriotism; to Aristippus, who denounced all
government; to Plato, scorner of democracy; and they attacked the master
because (not to speak of pettier political reasons) it was he, they
thought, who was the root of the evil. They could not see that this man
was their ally and not their foe; that rescue for Athens lay in helping
him rather than in sentencing him to die. And how well they could have
helped him! For to preach intelligence is not enough; there remains to
provide for every one the instrumentalities of intelligence. What men
needed, what Athenian statesmanship might have provided, was an
organization of intelligence for intelligence, an organization of all
the forces of intelligence in the state in a persistent intellectual
campaign. If that could not save Athens, Athens could not be saved. But
the myopic leaders of the Athenian state could not see salvation in
intelligence, they could only see it in hemlock. And Socrates had to
die.
It will take a wise courage to accept the Socratic challenge,--such
courage as battle-fields and senate-chambers are not wont to show. But
unless that wise courage comes to us our civilization will go as other
civilizations have come and gone, “kindled and put out like a flame in
the night.”
NOTE.--From a book whose interesting defence of the Socratic ethic
from the standpoint of psychoanalysis was brought to the writer’s
attention after the completion of the foregoing essay: “The
Freudian ethics is a literal and concrete justification of the
Socratic teaching. Truth is the sole moral sanction, and
discrimination of hitherto unrealized facts is the one way out of
every moral dilemma.... Virtue is wisdom.” Practical morality is
“the establishment, through discrimination, of consistent, and not
contradictory (mutually suppressive), courses of action toward
phenomena. The moral sanction lies always in facts presented by the
phenomena; morality in the discrimination of those facts.” Moral
development is “the progressive, lifelong integration of
experience.”--_The Freudian Wish and Its Place in Ethics_, by Edwin
B. Holt, New York, 1915, pp. 141, 145, 148.