Lectures on the History of Moral and Political Philosophy

Jonathan Wolff, G. A. Cohen, Gerald A. Cohen

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781400848713
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Previously unpublished writings from one of the most important political philosophers of recent times G. A. Cohen was one of the leading political philosophers of recent times. He first came to wide attention in 1978 with the prize-winning book Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence. In subsequent decades his published writings largely turned away from the history of philosophy, focusing instead on equality, freedom, and justice. However, throughout his career he regularly lectured on a wide range of moral and political philosophers of the past. This volume collects these previously unpublished lectures.Starting with a chapter centered on Plato, but also discussing the pre-Socratics as well as Aristotle, the book moves to social contract theory as discussed by Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, and then continues with chapters on Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. The book also contains some previously published but uncollected papers on Marx, Hobbes, and Kant, among other figures. The collection concludes with a memoir of Cohen written by the volume editor, Jonathan Wolff, who was a student of Cohen's.A hallmark of the lectures is Cohen's engagement with the thinkers he discusses. Rather than simply trying to render their thought accessible to the modern reader, he tests whether their arguments and positions are clear, sound, and free from contradiction. Throughout, he homes in on central issues and provides fresh approaches to the philosophers he examines. Ultimately, these lectures teach us not only about some of the great thinkers in the history of moral and political philosophy, but also about one of the great thinkers of our time: Cohen himself.

PART ONE

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Lectures

Chapter 1

PLATO AND HIS PREDECESSORS

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0. I believe that the philosophically most fundamental motivation of Plato’s Republic is to reply to a staple proposition of fifth-century Greek thought, a proposition propounded by many of Plato’s Sophistic predecessors, and that is the proposition that there is a distinction between nature and convention, phusis and nomos, and that nomos, convention, human law, cannot be derived from nature, and, according to some, though not all, of those who believe all that, even contradicts nature. I think Plato was an extreme social conservative who found the line of thought that contrasted nature and convention threatening, and that it is profitable to read the Republic as a reply to that threat.

It is true that the threat is not put expressly like that in the Republic. But the subversive distinction between nature and convention is alive in the challenge that Glaucon lays down to Socrates. Plato’s manifest aim, among other things, is to respond to Glaucon, and thereby to refute a contractarian account of justice which debases it by tracing it to individual self-interest. Here’s what Glaucon says:

Well, I promised I’d talk first about the nature and origin of morality, so here goes. The idea is that although it’s a fact of nature that doing wrong is good and having wrong done to one is bad, nevertheless the disadvantages of having it done to one outweigh the benefits of doing it. Consequently, once people have experienced both committing wrong and being at the receiving end of it, they see that the disadvantages are unavoidable and the benefits are unattainable; so they decide that the most profitable course is for them to enter into a contract with one another, guaranteeing that no wrong will be committed or received. They then set about making laws and decrees, and from then on they use the terms “legal” and “right” to describe anything which is enjoined by their code. So that’s the origin and nature of morality, on this [that is, the Sophist] view: it is a compromise between the ideal of doing wrong without having to pay for it, and the worst situation, which is having wrong done to one while lacking the means of exacting compensation. Since morality is a compromise, it is endorsed because, while it may not be good, it does gain value by preventing people from doing wrong. The point is that any real man with the ability to do wrong [and get away with it] would never enter into a contract to avoid both wronging and being wronged: he wouldn’t be so crazy. Anyway, Socrates, that is what this view has to say about the nature and origin of morality and so on.¹

Glaucon is saying that morality is not natural to us, like affection or anger, and he is putting a particular individualist spin on that.² But in replying to Glaucon Plato goes beyond the contractarian argument to dispute the Sophistic terms in which it is framed.³ “Glaucon’s account resonates with the fifth-century distinction (associated particularly with the sophistic movement) between nature and convention, and the preference for the competitive values of natural law rather than the co-operative values of conventional law.”⁴

Accordingly, and in order to expound the doctrine of the Republic from the explained angle of vision, that is, within the perspective of the nature/convention contrast, I shall first discuss the contribution of Sophists.

1. In the history of European civilization, the fifth-century traveling teachers known as the Sophists were the first to treat social and political affairs as an independent object of study. Now the phrase “independent object” invites the question “independent of” what? And the answer is that they studied society and politics, indeed, humankind itself, as something independent of, or separate from, the world of nonhuman nature: that is the deepest meaning of their famous distinction between nature and convention, between what comes naturally and what comes by human and social contrivance. We may conjecture that, before the Sophists, or at any rate before the Athenian fifth century, there is not a developed conception such as we take for granted of the human being as operating differently from beings of nonhuman nature, nor of the individual human being as a being endowed both with freedom of choice, and notably with the capacity and the right to govern his or her own life; nor of a human community as having an unambiguous right to make and remake laws which reflect its optional ideals and interests. I do not mean that, before the Sophists, no one has any inkling of these truths, some of which may indeed be truisms, but that, as I put it, there is no integrated developed conception answering to them. (It would be as absurd to suppose that, pre-Sophistically, nomos and phusis were entirely confounded as it would be to suppose that there was no assimilation that their emphatic distinguishing rejected. Only bores say with special emphasis what everybody knows to be true. When the Sophists contrasted nature and convention, many were shocked as no one could be if anyone happened to say with special emphasis: there’s a difference between the dry and the wet.)

The nomos/phusis distinction generates a possibility of radical criticism and radical transformation: the space society occupies, when society is conceived in separation from the natural world, is a space of possibility and choice (at least relative to natural constraint). Much conservative thought is an attempt to shrink that space, and it is not surprising that there exists a perennial conservative rhetoric in which certain existing institutions are said to be natural, which means that they have arisen with some necessity, like a flower from its seed, or that they are natural in that they can be suppressed only at great cost, at the cost, and here again we can use the flower analogy, of distortion, of destruction of natural growth. The Sophist distinction between nature and convention, phusis and nomos, between what comes of itself and what comes by deliberate contrivance contradicts that particular conservative outlook.

Now, as I said, the Sophist emphasis on the nature/convention distinction proves that in pre-Sophistic thought it was not made, or not with the appropriate and required emphasis: nobody makes a great to-do about a distinction that is entirely familiar. Taking that as a clue, I hypothesize that we encounter in pre-Sophistic thought a conception of humanity in which it is engulfed, or sunk, in nature.⁵ In this conception humanity is not conceived to be as separate from the rest of nature as humanity later came to be conceived to be. And on that hypothesis, it follows that we find in pre-Sophistic thought a conceptual predisposition to if not the full doctrinal structure of a conservative social philosophy. (A fully articulated conservative doctrinal structure is, in any case, impossible, until its doctrinal opposite is also possible. You cannot deny that there is a distinction between nature and convention until that distinction is on the table. We can certainly say that the conservative post-Sophists, Plato and Aristotle, rejected the distinction that the Sophists made: but the Sophists’ predecessors simply failed to make it—it was not yet there to be rejected.)

In the lectures that follow, I shall do five things. First, I shall set forth a partly conjectured pre-Sophistic thought pattern, in which humanity is, to a degree, engulfed in nature. Next, I shall describe the Sophistic revolution, or, better, the fifth-century revolution in conception that found a particularly sharp expression in the teaching of some Sophists. (It is not so important for my purposes to credit the Sophists in particular with originality in this respect, by comparison, say, with the Athenian playwrights, of whom I know very little. What matters is that the Sophists were militant public or semipublic deniers of a traditional thinking that Plato sought to retrieve.) Third, I shall present the political thought of the political reactionary Plato as an attempt to recoup and refashion the subordination of humanity to nature which characterized the pre-Sophistic tradition. Fourth, I shall also say some things about Plato’s Republic in particular which amplify my principal theme, and then, fifth, some further things that have almost nothing to do with it.

2. I now pursue my hypothesis about pre-Sophistic thought. I cite three indications that it failed thoroughly to distinguish humanity from nature, and, with respect to each indication, the contrast with the Sophists is plain. In summary description, the three are: (1) that in explanatory theory humanity is regarded as continuous with nature, as are the Gods and nature, and the Gods, of course, are more or less naive projections of human beings; that human beings are not viewed as free and responsible; or as determining their own history; (2) that they are thought of as dividing naturally into (a) Greeks and barbarians, (b) free persons and slaves, and (c) natural aristocrats and natural hoi polloi; and (3) that there was much reflection at a high intellectual level about cosmology and physics, and, one could say, physical chemistry, but not systematic reflection, just occasional asides, about human society. I must now elaborate and connect these points.

3. (i) As far as fundamental explanations of them are concerned, humanity and nature are in a relatively undifferentiated continuum. Indeed, divinity, humanity, and nature are all three assimilated to one another—natural occurrences are explained in the language of justice, a language that later comes to be restricted to the human realm; human beings are understood on the model of other parts of nature; and nature is understood as manifesting divine forces where the divine is itself understood in human terms.

We think of nature as mindless and of ourselves as possessed of consciousness and acting out of deliberation. We think of natural things as lacking in spontaneity and operating according to law, and we think of ourselves as, by contrast, spontaneously adopting designs, being guided by laws (as atoms are not), and even as devising the laws by which we are guided. To be sure, there are materialists among us who are skeptical about the robustness of the distinction that I just drew. They will say that the special powers of humankind are ultimately grounded in or reducible to nothing but a complex arrangement of nature, that part of nature which comprises the human cerebrum and nervous system. But, when they are not addressing ultimate questions, which is to say, most of the time, the materialists think the way everybody else does, using contrasts which we all take for granted, whether or not in a philosophical hour we labor to stress the contrast or to reduce its force or even to explain it away.

Since it is obvious for us to make the foregoing distinction between the structures of human and natural agency, we readily distinguish, as I indeed did a moment ago, between the laws that human beings make and the laws to which nature conforms, so much so that one might claim that the word “law” is now ambiguous across those two contexts.⁶ But that distinction between social and natural law was not at all obvious to the early Greeks, one indication of which is the manifest fact that when the Sophists contrasted nomos and phusis what they said was treated as novel and subversive.⁷

The nomos/phusis distinction is absent or slurred in early Greek thought since, for the early Greeks, the human estate is understood in terms of nature and the realm of nature is explained by principles that we have learned to restrict to the human realm. When Anaximander of Miletus (610–ca. 547 BC) says, “Things come into existence and perish as it is ordained; for they pay the just penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice, in accordance with the order of time,”⁸ and when Heraclitus (of Ephesus ca. 540–ca. 480) echoes, “The sun will not overstep its limits, because if it does the Erinyes [the Furies, handmaidens of justice] will find him out,”⁹ they are not, so I thi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part One: Lectures
• Part Two: Papers
• Part Three Memoir
• Works Cited
• Index