Philosophy and the Social Problem

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• Publisher: The Floating Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781776532032
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Will Durant was an influential American philosopher who sought to offer a unified perspective of the whole of Western thought, as well as to present philosophical issues and problems in accessible language that could appeal to a broad audience. In Philosophy and the Social Problem, Durant tackles his greatest concern: that of reducing human misery by changing our social and political institutions.

PART I - HISTORICAL APPROACH

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Introduction

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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

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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 subpoenaed 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 [Greek: enkrateia], who rules within, who is strong enough to stop and think, the man who has achieved [Greek: sôphrosunê],—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 ps...

Table of contents

• PHILOSOPHY AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM
• Contents
• PART I - HISTORICAL APPROACH
• Introduction
• Chapter I - The Present Significance of the Socratic Ethic
• Chapter II - Plato: Philosophy as Politics
• Chapter III - Francis Bacon and the Social Possibilities of Science
• Chapter V - Nietzsche
• PART II - SUGGESTIONS
• Chapter I - Solutions and Dissolutions
• Chapter II - The Reconstructive Function of Philosophy
• Chapter III - Organized Intelligence
• Chapter IV - The Reader Speaks
• Conclusion
• Endnotes