Image credit: Ivi Guyet, “Guillotine-v2”
part 11 of a series
More properly felt than judg’d of
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.– Shakespeare, Hamlet 1.5.167–68
Christians often scoff at Greek religion, so vastly inferior to their own as it lacks moralizing. They’re correct in the observation but wrong in the scoffing. By some accident of history, the Greeks escaped the cold claws of deities when it came to moral theorizing. Ethics (which is to say human behavior, which is to say morality) was a matter of philosophical debate, not some bellowing god’s commands—a discussion rather than dogma.
How nice is that! you remark.
The second you offering an important correction: How nice that would have been….
The third you—for reasons unimaginable—playing Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” on a loop. Oh, the landslide will bring you down….
And if you think about it, there’s something desultory about the history of philosophy—how that simple affinity for wisdom degenerated into turgid nitpicking that makes most normal people long for death as a better alternative to the required reading. Even an eternity of hot anger might be more easily endured than, say, actually reading Kant. Or Nietzsche!
It’s worth noting that things got off to a good start with philosophy, thanks to the pre-Socratics. Except … there are a couple of problems with that moniker, “pre-Socratic philosophers.” First, quite a few of them were contemporaries of the ugly stone mason (that would be Socrates). Second, they didn’t consider themselves philosophs. Early pre-Socratics generally described themselves as “inquirers into nature” (physikoi or physiologoi) and were identified by others as such; they stood apart from myth-makers (mythologoi) and theologians (theologoi).
And who might be responsible for such a misnaming? That would be one J.A. Eberhard, a German philosopher—which is something like two strikes already, Germans being famously bad at naming and philosophers being famously good at nitpicking. Eberhard, having nothing better to do, published a universal history of philosophy in 1788 that included a section titled, vorsokratische Philosophie. That embarrassment was corrected by two proper classicists in the mid-20th century, André Laks and Glenn W. Most, who adopted a more accurate moniker in their magisterial nine-volume Loeb series, Early Greek Philosophy.
What united the Inquirers, who otherwise had divergent points of view, was something so completely unimaginable as to hint at a divine origin. Nobody but nobody had thought the way they thought before—not Mesopotamians, not Persians, not Egyptians, not the Chosen People of Judea—and almost nobody (statistically) thinks the way they thought now. They came up with the crazy idea that the cosmos was ordered and to understand it, thought had to be similarly ordered. Out with the gods of Hesiod and Pythagoras’s theologizing, in with rational inquiry.
Which can lead to observations risking the gods’ hot anger, as in the case of Xenophanes (one of the most famous Inquirers). Noticing that different races imagined their deities much as themselves (“Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and dark, Thracians, that theirs are grey-eyed and red-haired”), he quipped:
But if cattle and horses or lions had hands, or were able to draw with their hands and do the works that men can do, horses would draw the forms of the gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each had themselves.
Which doubtless leads you to assume Xenophanes anticipated the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as a mouthy atheist. And as ever, you would be entirely incorrect. In fact, Xenophanes was on a spiritual journey toward monotheism, as he expressed in elegant dactylic hexameter:
One god greatest among gods and men,
Resembling mortals neither in body nor in thought.
… whole [he] sees, whole [he] thinks, and whole [he] hears,
but completely without toil he agitates all things
by the thought of his mind.
… always he remains in the same (state), agitated not at all,
nor is it fitting that he come and go
to different places at different times.
Socrates read the Inquirers in his youth but came to think they missed the forest for the trees. The study of nature (physis) is all well and good—what things are, how they come to be, the processes governing natural change—but material causes say nothing of ultimate goals; the Inquirers’ (or “disputants,” as Socrates called them) myopic focus on coming-to-be (genesis) misses what is (ousia). “They mix things up … they talk about the beginning and its consequences but care nothing for the reality itself.”
So it was that Socrates, like an angled mirror changing the direction of a light beam, deflected philosophy from things to words. What are the forms of things? What is their purpose or final cause? What is the good? And most important of all, What is the nature of the soul and how should it comport itself? Ethics was not just a part of Socrates’s philosophy, it was its essence.
Like the Old Testament prophets, Socrates believed he was on a divine mission, as he haughtily informed his Athenian accusers:
For know that the god commands me to do this, and I believe that no greater good ever came to pass in the city than my service to the god. For I go about doing nothing else than urging you, young and old, not to care for your persons or your property more than for the perfection of your souls.
Unlike the Old Testament prophets, Socrates was prophetic in vocation but not in epistemology; reason was a divine gift to be exercised. Perfecting the soul was not a matter of bowing herd-like to the threats of a divine narcissist, but one of rational self-examination. In that respect, the ugly mason remained firmly in the tradition of thinking in a way that no one else thought, earning him the hot anger not of the gods but of his fellow citizens.
In distinct contrast to Xenophanes’ placid one god, philosophers are ever agitated, especially when it comes to Socrates’s favorite topic. Thousands of years on, modern Disputants make a mockery of Enmerkar’s clever invention, abusing it to pen untold thousands of pages on that perennial gem of a topic, nice (aka morality). If stacked ziggurat style, the paper tower would reach highest heaven and attract the attention of the LORD. Which is never a good thing.
The endless disputation among the modern Disputants is but a subdiscipline of the larger field of ethics known in the trade as metaethics. Besides being unpronounceable in English as spelled (met-eye-thicks?), it makes little sense in describing what might be in dispute.
And who might have come up with such a mis-naming? Yet another German, who, not having been present in the Garden, never learned the art that YHWH taught Adam? No, that would be one G.E. Moore, an Englishman (so, sorta German—you know, Angles, Saxons, Jutes and the like) who, in his 1903 Principia Ethica, argued that earlier Disputants had failed to distinguish normative ethics from …
OH for the love of God! you scream in exasperation bordering on existential despair. Stop with the origin stories!
Whereupon the second you nods in solemn assent: Word.
The third you now playing the Eels’ “Novicaine for the soul” on an endless doom loop. You’d better give me something, so I don’t die….
Point(s) made and taken. Moving on.
Except, you might want to know what moving on entails. Which, take it however you like, might be construed as a loss or a gain. From the esteemed Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Metaethics is the attempt to understand the metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, and psychological, presuppositions and commitments of moral thought, talk, and practice. As such, it counts within its domain a broad range of questions and puzzles, including: Is morality more a matter of taste than truth? Are moral standards culturally relative? Are there moral facts? If there are moral facts, what are their origin and nature? How is it that they set an appropriate standard for our behavior? How might moral facts be related to other facts (about psychology, happiness, human conventions…)? And how do we learn about moral facts, if there are any?
Even you, all of the yous, dimwitted and preoccupied as you are with the busy-ness of your trivial existence, must admit those are fair questions (thus a loss). Or not (thus a gain). As you will.
Or, more likely, willy nilly.
Philosophy never did recover from Socrates’s great deflection; Plato magnified it. Or maybe it wasn’t Socrates after all. Hard to say, as the peevish mason didn’t write anything himself. All those endless Socratic dialogues being mostly Plato’s scribbling. Maybe Socrates is more Plato than Socrates? Nobody knows. Just as no one knows what Jesus might have actually said when he was being even more peevish, speaking in Aramaic to his illiterate fans, “reported” by Greek speakers decades later in manuscripts dating to hundreds of years later. Ever think about that?
And how might Plato have accomplished his optical feat? Oh, maybe by even more emphatically shunning the pre-Socratic Inquirers and their irritating empiricism, inventing instead such confections as Forms—some ideal reality making a mockery of observed reality just because he was able to think it in his big brain.
Which is pretty much what philosophers do (Aristotle, something of an empiricist, being something of an exception). To this very day, Disputants, more inclined to cogitate than investigate, concoct big ideas that someone pays them to disseminate—producing the endless scrivening referenced above.
If curious, which you likely aren’t, you might ask what all the fuss over metaethics is. In a nutshell, at issue is whether moral values are objective (like maths or gravity) or subjective (your whims or those of the culture you find yourself in).
For the objective tribe, the Realists, a sentence like “Dogs have four legs” is true independent of what you may think, “dogs” being no less real for being an abstraction, much like Plato’s Forms. That, they maintain (at length) is how moral values work: they are real without being physical; they are not reducible to any other kinds of properties or facts; they are ontologically unique.
The subjective tribe, the Relativists, seem to notice they have eyes attached to their big brains, allowing them to see a good deal of variation in the shadows dancing on the wall of Plato’s cave. They maintain (also at length) that moral values are fundamentally anthropocentric; they are not “out there” in the world but merely artefacts of human perspectives and needs that can vary from person to person or from culture to culture.
And there you have it.
Except, if you’re tempted to think that any of the foregoing is anything close to an adequate portrayal of metaethics generally or the concerns of that subfield’s earnest Disputants specifically, you’re in as sorry a state as Plato’s prisoners, chained neck and ankles to a wall in a murky cave. Which, you know?, credit to Plato: that’s not all that bad a metaphor for your sort, Homo, condemned to parse shadows on the rock in a compulsive nosce te ipsum quest.
In the long tradition of “It takes one to know one,” enter one David Hume. Except, young David was not born as a Hume. Related on his mother’s side to Sir David Falconer and on his father’s side to the Scottish Earl of Home, he was known until the age of 23 as David Home. The problem was that English types didn’t have the good sense to pronounce the Scottish Home as hyoom (IPA: hjuːm) as the Lord intended, but rather as the place where the heart is, “home” (IPA: həʊm). So in 1734, tired of endlessly correcting his cultural betters, David swapped his Scottish o for the English u producing Hume (IPA: hjuːm), to rhyme with tomb, doom, and assume. If that riot of vowels doesn’t make you wonder how on God’s green Earth English became the lingua Franca of the modern world, you’re just not paying attention.
David’s father abandoned the family in David’s infancy, not through any moral failing but by suffering La Condition humaine. His mother Katherine, still “young and handsome,” had options, but with the virtue of Penelope devoted herself to rearing and educating young David and his siblings instead. Of the three, David was something of an intellectual standout, so much so that when David’s older brother matriculated at Edinburgh University, Katherine sent the 10- or 11-year-old David along as well. To be fair, the typical age of matriculation at that time was 14, so Katherine doesn’t merit the aspersions for parental neglect that you might be inclined to cast, nor does David merit the laudets for uncommon precociousness that modern philosophs are inclined to heap upon him.
Born into a family of good social standing but meager of means, David would have to earn his own living. His family reckoned the practice of law as the best path to pursue, but David “found an insurmountable aversion to every thing but the pursuits of philosophy and general learning.” He determined to earn his living with his pen and in that endeavor found success of two sorts your sort seek most. Financially, he became not only “independent, but opulent.” Reputationally, he is now hailed as “one of the most important philosophers to write in English.” Nicely done.
Alexander the Great conquered the known world by the age of 33. At the age of 23, young David set out to conquer the intellectual world, perhaps in hopes of wearing the golden rams’ horns of Zeus Amon, as the Egyptian priests had conveyed to Alexander upon his conquest. Who knows? But it is worth noting how priests so casually accommodate themselves to the ways of those whom the Lord favors by virtue of conquest. In antiquity, as in modernity, “spear won” is a sign of divine sanction.
However that may be, young David cast a jaundiced eye on his chosen profession’s dismal history and sought to save it from itself. Which, pretty chesty. In a letter to his doctor (1734), David noted that the ancients “labor’d under the same Inconvenience that has been found in their natural Philosophy, of being entirely Hypothetical.… Everyone consulted his Fancy in erecting Schemes of Virtue & of Happiness, without regarding human Nature, upon which every moral Conclusion must depend.”
His more recent forebears were no better—in fact worse: “In later times, philosophy of all kinds, especially ethics, have been more closely united with theology than ever they were observed to be among the heathen.” His peers were “Philosophers, or rather divines under that disguise.”
And, oh!, the nitpicking—or “endless Disputes” as David named it:
Nothing is more usual than for philosophers to encroach upon the province of grammarians, and to engage in disputes of words, while they imagine that they are handling controversies of the deepest importance and concern.
Were truer words ever written?
In sum, David noticed what nearly everyone with some passing knowledge of the discipline—maybe that Philosophy 101 course that you suffered through long ago—quickly intuits: philosophers tend to be narcissists, picking the wrong nits: “I believe ’tis a certain Fact that most of the Philosophers who have gone before us, have been overthrown by the Greatness of their Genius.”
David’s cure for the disease was a strict, naturalistic empiricism; a resolute a posteriori to supersede the traditional a priori approach, a new covenant to replace the old. Out with the speculative metaphysics of the ancients and the gods of theologians wearing philosophical garb, in with empirical inquiry. David had Newtonian ambitions for philosophy: the laws governing human nature must be established through observation and experiment, not speculation. Thus was born his A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects (1739–40).
In the long and tedious history of human thought, there may be nothing more misrepresented than “Hume’s law”—or, as yet another philosoph, one Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre, named it, “Hume’s guillotine.” MacIntyre coined his grisly metaphor in an effort to tar Hume with the brush of moral emotivism (hurrah/boo theory) and argue for a return to Aristotelian virtue ethics—with a distinctly theological tint courtesy of St. Thomas. If ever there were a divine in philosophical disguise, Alasdair was that.
And what might be among the virtues that the esteemed Aristotle advocated? Were you to make the mistake of actually reading Nicomachean Ethics, you might find such feats of deduction as:
Now the proud man, since he deserves most, must be good in the highest degree; for the better man always deserves more, and the best man most. Therefore the truly proud man must be good.
Whereupon you, all the yous, are stunned into incredulous silence. Small mercies.
Whether a law in a Newtonian sense or a cultural decapitation much to be mourned, all of the fuss stemmed not from a deduction, but from an observation. In his Treatise, David wrote:
In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, it’s necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason.
And there you have it, yet again: the problem of nice, the famed is-ought problem which, simply put, goes like this: an ethical or judgmental conclusion cannot be inferred from purely descriptive factual statements. What you deem nice is not a statement of fact, but an expression of some sentiment you have, however you came by it.
Except, maybe it’s just a wee bit more complicated. In David’s telling, your moral sentiments are not arbitrary. You come by them like you come by everything else that makes you a Homo nosce te ipsum. They are observable psychological phenomena, based in sympathy, which is a universal trait. Which becomes generalized in a common point of view: you can imagine yourself in another’s situation, leading to all manner of social harmony. All that niceness comes, for David, with a caveat: moral sentiments are not facts in themselves, but observable psychological responses to facts. Oughts cannot be derived from is-es. That is Hume’s law.
And yet again, if you think that is an adequate exposition of Hume’s theory of morality, you would be entirely mistaken. But, as a thumbnail, it will have to do. Alternatively, you could maybe put down your ridiculous phone, shut off your divine AI psychopomp, and stick your nose in a book. Or not, as you will. After all, why think when something else can do the thinking for you?
It’s worth noting that David’s theorizing earned him the hot anger of his fellow citizens, much as was the case with Socrates long before. In 1745 David applied for the Chair of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, one of two candidates. The local clergy—ever aping their god’s worst characteristics—launched a coordinated campaign against David’s appointment. In a long and detailed apologia entitled A Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh, David summarized the charges laid against him. The final was the most damning: “I come now to the last Charge, which, according to the prevalent Opinion of Philosophers in this Age, will certainly be regarded as the severest, viz. the Author’s destroying all the Foundations of Morality.” Ouch!
David’s fate was decidedly nicer than Socrates’s; he lost only the chair.
Like Christians looking down long noses at Greek religion, Hume was right in his observations and wrong in his conclusion—though his sin was merely venial, the Christians’ mortal. Hume, arguing against theists (morality’s source is to be found in divine command) and rationalists (morality’s source is to be found in pure reason), penned a shocking statement: “Morality is more properly felt than judg’d of.”
Very true. Where he erred was in thinking the “judg’d of” was not a matter of fact, that sentiments were not a matter of matter.
As more has been learned, turns out that moral sentiments are facts about your sort, Homo nosce te ipsum, just as surely as you have two eyes, two ears and one nose. Lacking the material is of your sort, no ought exists.