Thursday 28 November 2013

God and the Absolute (talk given to Kingston Philosophy Cafe 20/11/13)

Why The Good needs God

This started out a couple of years ago when one of Feliz’ students, Yvonne Plowright, gave us a talk on whether it was possible to ground ethics without the concept of God,  concluding that you could.    Feliz commented that it was a shame that since we are mostly atheists – and a survey showed that about 80% of academic philosophers these days profess atheism – there was a rather one sided discussion and we could do with someone to express the opposite view.    It’s been on my conscience for some time and finally I decided to have a go at it.   The title isn’t quite right though.    I’m not going to argue that the good needs to be grounded in some religious concept, like the ten commandments, because that implies that we don’t know right from wrong ourselves and need to be told or instructed, and I don’t believe that.   It’s more that the good, and God turn out to be aspects of the same thing, and that the concept of the good leads you to the concept of God.

I used to think that belief in God was a personal choice.   When I did, for the record, I sided with the majority, the atheists.    And I wouldn’t have tackled a topic like this in a philosophy gathering because if it is just a matter of personal choice then philosophy has little to contribute.    And most people who do express an opinion do seem to see it as a matter of choice.   On the side of God, those who believe often stress the importance of faith, in other words that there is no compelling reason for it, it’s a leap in the dark, and can only be explained as given by God’s grace.    On the atheist side, militant atheists like Richard Dawkins, who may be firmly convinced of his atheism, sure that he is right and that his opponents are in the grip of a delusion, nevertheless when you get down to it clearly express a belief in atheism, materialism and so on rather than a sure knowledge of it.    For example, Dawkins belief that evolution can explain everything is not based on the fact that it can, but that it is the only materialist explanation he can think of so it must be right, because only a materialist explanation (I use that word uneasily, because I don’t really know what it means) is acceptable.    In other words belief in materialism is what guides Dawkins, it is a presupposition and not a result.

What I want to argue, and what I have come to conclude simply through study of philosophy, is that you can come to a proper knowledge of the concept of God.     It’s not strictly a proof, as in the medieval proofs of the existence of God.    If you take these strictly as proofs, they contain a fatal flaw, which you can see for example in Descartes’ version of the ontological proof.   I can conceive of a perfect being, says Descartes, and for a perfect being not to exist would consist in an imperfection, therefore perfect being must exist.   In other words, existence is part of the notion of perfection, so this is a deduction, a kind of syllogism.    The problem with this is that it makes God (perfection) a result of reason, and if God is a result of reason then he is also dependent on it, not independent, or to put it another way, he’s a figment of your imagination, and you have proved exactly the opposite of what you wanted to prove.    The absolute in Descartes is the cogito and God is dependent on and subordinate to that.   But there’s another way of looking at it.   Take the phrase “nobody’s perfect”, something we have probably all said at some time so presumably it has meaning.   But where does that notion of perfection come from?   It can’t be from experience, because we just said nobody’s perfect, so you can’t point to an example of perfection and say the rest of us are imperfect in relation to that one perfect being.   But for the notion of imperfection to make sense there must nevertheless be an idea of perfection, even though we have never experienced it.     That more platonic procedure is the one I’m going to follow here, and I’ll show you a proof of the existence of God that is not based on deductive reasoning but which neverthelsss is necessarily true.


I’ll say more about that later but first I wanted look at the notion of truth, which is of course central to philosophy.   It’s fashionable nowadays to say that there is no such thing as absolute truth, and there are good reasons for saying that if you work within the paradigms of modern philosophy.   At the same time though, it is logically absurd.    If you say there is no absolute truth, then what is there?    Either there is no truth at all, in which case there is certainly no point on doing philosophy and arguably no point in any kind of communication at all, or there is some truth but it is somehow less than absolute.    So does the notion of relative truth make any sense?    If we take relative to mean partial, then something that is partially true is also partially untrue, and something that is untrue, even partially, cannot be a truth, so that doesn’t seem to make any sense.    Or if you say that something is relatively true meaning that it is true in relation to something else, but not necessarily in its own right, then you have to ask what is the truth of the thing is it relative to.   Is that absolute, or is its truth in turn relative to something else?    And is there then an infinite chain of relatives, or does the chain stop somewhere when we reach an absolute?    If the chain is unending they you are back with the notion that there is no truth, but if it does stop then you have found the absolute.    There doesn’t seem to be any other option so either the truth is absolute, or there is no truth.   If there is no truth we might as well all go home, so I’ll stick with the notion that there is truth, and that it is absolute, so we need to look for the absolute.

The absolute may be unfashionable, but there are plenty of examples of it in modern philosophy.     One of the great divisions in modern thought is that between fact and value, the is and the ought – and never the twain shall meet, because you can’t derive an ought from an is.   And of the ought, you can say that it is not, because there is no point saying something ought to be if it already is.   It makes sense then to say that philosophy should deal only with what is, because if it is interested in truth, how can you have a truth of something that doesn’t exist, that is not?    So philosophy becomes centred on what is, the empirical, or what is purely logical, but not on what ought to be.

Of course there is a big problem with this which is that if philosophy is restricted to the logical and the empirical it can’t say anything of any value, so it needs some connection to the “ought”.    It often does this through “premises” which are notions that are not logically necessary or observable facts, but which seem to be uncontroversial and serve as a starting point for philosophizing and enable it to make a connection with the real world.    There are many examples, happiness (Mill), life (Hobbes), Reasonableness (Kant), the self (Descartes).    These then function as the absolute, the premise of your philosophy which gives truth to the rest of it.   All the rest is true only in relation to the premise.


You can summarise it in a diagram, or rather a couple of lists:

Ought                                                                         Is
Value                                                                          Fact 
Good                                                                          Neutral
Non-being                                                                  Being
Metaphysics                                                               Facts and deductions

Absolutes:                                                                  Results:
Life (Hobbes)                                                             Social Contract
Happiness (Mill)                                                        Utilitarianism
Reason (Kant)                                                            Rationalism
Freedom (Sartre, Descartes)                                       Existentialism
DNA (Dawkins)                                                         Biological determinism

Now, there are four things I think worth noting about this picture.

Firstly, philosophy is done on the right hand side of the page, and the absolute lies outside of philosophy proper, on the left hand side, the side of non-being.   The absolute is just a premise, a starting point which doesn’t get examined, which is very odd because the absolute is the foundation of truth which surely ought to be the prime focus of philosophy.

Secondly, this absolute is very weak.   It’s just a premise or assumption and you can simply deny it.      For example, if you say to Hobbes, “I don’t care if I live or die” you take away his basic premise and his entire philosophy collapses.    All he can do is accuse you of lying, and maybe you are, but some people would make that claim in sincerity, and in the face of that Hobbes has no response and the whole edifice of his philosophy comes tumbling down.   It’s unsporting of course to do this and a good student accepts a philospher’s premises and focuses on the reasoning that follows, and attacking the premises is rightly seen as unproductive and negative;   but the fact remains that the philosophy cannot exist without them and they are the foundation of its claim to truth, the most important point in any philosophy worthy of the name (“love of truth") and if they are inadequate, then this is a very important and significant finding.

Thirdly, these versions are all abstractions, e.g life in general, happiness in general, and not any particular life or happiness.    Because of this it is axiomatic that they will end up in contradiction, and a Socrates would quickly show this.   Example?   Let's take Hobbes.    For Hobbes, life is the absolute and this means we all value life above all else.     This means we must want longer life and in order to achieve this we need security and rule of law to protect ourselves.   In order to have rule of law we have to have government and to have government there has to be a territory over which government can exert control, in other words the state.   In order to establish that you need men at arms who are willing to risk their lives to establish that rule of law.    But you said that life is the absolute, which means that nobody would risk it in defence of the state, so either the state couldn’t come into existence, or , because it does in fact exists, it proves that life is not the absolute.    QED.   I don’t say that because I want to pick a fight with Hobbes, but simply to illustrate with an example the notion that an abstract conception of the absolute will lead into contradiction

Fourthly, there are many absolutes, and of course that can’t be.     Because they all look as good or bad as each other it is tempting to conclude that there is no one absolute, which many and perhaps most students of modern philosophy do conclude, but as I have said that is problematic because it leaves you without any truth and with no basis for philosophy at all.


Now, let’s take a look at the right hand side of the page, and try to imagine a world where you have only what is, not what ought to be.    There is a strong element within analytical philosophy in particular that wants to do this.   Ayer for example says that only things that can be observed or things that can be deduced are capable of being true, and anything else that doesn’t come under either heading is “metaphysical” and meaningless.   He take this from Hume, of course, and Wittgenstein if I understand him rightly takes a similar view though instead of dismissing the left hand side as meaningless, he concedes that it does have meaning, but says that philosophy can’t say anything about it.    He’s a mystic in other words, rather than nihilistic like Ayer, but it’s really based on the same understanding.

The first question you can ask is what would a language that consisted only of expressions of matters of fact and relations of idea be like?    Don’t you think it would be rather dull?    If it can’t express anything of value, can it express anything at all?    Would there be any point in learning such a language?    I don’t think there would.  So, first point, without the notion of the good, of value, language itself would disappear, because there would be no point to it, nothing to express.

Second, a simple point, you can note that without the notion of the good, there could be no economy, because the things we trade are goods, things of value and without value there is no economy, so another key aspect of civilization would disappear.

Thirdly you can ask the empiricist who wants to ground truth in facts, how can you have facts without value?    Facts may look like neutral things, data, but they are much more than that, they are data that are interesting, or have value.    It may seem like a subtle distinction but it's not.    For example, if I say that 7% of the population of Scotland own 84% of the land, well, it looks like arithmetic, just numbers, objective data – but you immediately perceive that I have an agenda.   You don’t know what it is yet, probably some lefty notion to do with land reform (and in fact 7:84 was the name of a left wing theatre group in Scotland in the seventies), but you do know that I have marshaled the fact for a purpose.   Actually all facts are like this and the idea that you can study facts and proceed from the facts to conclusions is false.   You need to have some notion, something you want to investigate, some hypothesis, something of value, before any facts will exist for you and without that interest facts simply don’t exist.    Even science can't draw conclusions directly from data, it has first to propose a hypothesis and then look for facts that confirm or deny it.   So you can say to the hard-nosed empiricist that his beloved neutral objective facts themselves simply can’t exist without there first being some notion of value, without the good.    The notion that facts and deductions (Hume’s “matters of fact” and “relations of ideas”) are the only things that have meaning, and that anything else is metaphysical and meaningless is the exact opposite of the truth.   Actually deductions and data have no meaning of their own and any meaning they have is borrowed from the metaphysical:   only the metaphysical has meaning.    Deductions need premises if they are to lead to anything meaningful and the premises as we have seen lie on the side of metaphysics, and facts simply don’t exist unless someone shows an interest in them, thinks they are of value, and value also lies on the side of metaphysics.      

I don’t want to labour the point.   If you try to imagine a world without the notion of the good, you can discern what actually depends on the good and can only exist because of it, and the answer turns out to be everything, certainly everything to do with what we think of as civilization, and arguably literally everything.    Without the good, without value, nothing exists, not even a simple fact, let alone the trappings of civilization, language, art, government, a cup of tea….  Everything depends on the notion of the good.

So you may ask where does this notion of the good come from and in particular can if come from nature?    Can it somehow evolve?    Well, if it evolved from nature it would be the same kind of entity as nature.   If nature is being, what it gives rise to must also be being, but the good is really its opposite, because as we have seen value is non-being and sits on the metaphysical side of the page.    Civilization is the opposite of nature and the things that distinguish it can only exist because of the notion of the good.     The good is the cause of civilization, and if it is its cause, it can’t also be its result, and it can’t be a result of nature because it is its opposite.     It can no more evolve from nature than consciousness itself can be a product of matter – the neuroscientist’s dream – because as a subject it is the very opposite the object and is its ground, so it can’t also be its result.

If the good is not produced by nature, we must say then that it exists independently of it, and this means that it is real.    It is also absolute, as we have seen, because everything else results from it.    Hegel calls it the Absolute Idea, or simply The Concept, not any particular concept but conceptual thought in general.   Hegel’s use of terms like Idea, Concept, Notion and the like can be confusing – certainly confuses me – but one thing that he is clear about is that the key term The Concept is the same as the Greek notion of the Logos, which means something like reasoned thought in general but is usually translated simply as The Word, so when John writes “in the beginning was the Word…and the Word was God” this is the Logos, and is the same as the concept of the Absolute Idea, the Notion that allows our culture to exist.    The Logos is divine, it is God Himself, and it is God in this sense who makes civilization possible, who accounts for the remarkable fact that we all take for granted, because it comes so naturally to us, that we can actually communicate with each other at all.   The Logos is the power of discrimination in general, the basis of conceptual thought, the knowledge (if you want to speak allegorically) that Adam gained when he ate the apple, of good and evil.    And because atheists generally think of God as a being, or a concept, that you can choose to believe in or not as you prefer, it is worth stressing that the Divine Logos is not itself a being or a concept, but something much more,  the ground of all being, that which makes it possible for individual beings and concepts to exist, and is not an optional idea but a necessity.

Now, the good has a structure.    Because it exists, it must have four causes, because everything that exists must have a material, efficient, formal and final cause.     This is Aristotle’s theory of causality, which you are probably all familiar with but perhaps it’s worth just going over it again.    I like to think of the example of a building.    According to Aristotle, if the building exists all four causes must also exist.     The material cause is the building materials, bricks, mortar, wood, whatever, the stuff it is made of.    The efficient cause is the builders, because the materials don’t arrange themselves and there has to be an input of energy before they can come together to make the building.      The formal cause is the architect, because the builders can’t work without a plan, something that defines the shape of the building.    The final cause is the user, because you wouldn’t build a building without a purpose.     Each of these four is essential and if any one is missing, the building couldn’t exist.    If you have builders, materials and a plan, but no purpose, then no building, because there wouldn’t be any point… and so on for the others;  but if you have all four then nothing else is needed so they are both necessary and sufficient conditions.

In the case of the good, these causes are the cardinal virtues of wisdom, courage, temperance and justice in that order.    We can represent the good as a circle, and the virtues/causes as its quarters.    It’s critical to understand the relation of these parts to the whole, and two points in particular.   Firstly, the cardinal virtues are independent of each other and cannot be expressed in terms of each other, just because each is a different type of cause.     But, secondly, while they are independent of each other, each is entirely dependent on the whole.    It’s not as if you could collect say wisdom, courage, and temperance, and then say you only need justice and you will have the whole set and will have created the good.    It’s the other way around.    Each virtue or cause exists only as a moment (to coin a Hegelian term) of the absolute and has no existence independently of it.    As Aristotle said, a hand cut off from a body still looks like a hand, but without its relation to the body it used to be part of it no longer has meaning.    The cardinal virtues only have meaning as part of the good as a whole.   So for example, risking your life looks like courage, but it only has that meaning if it is done for the sake of the good and if it is done for some other reason – showing off for example – its really foolhardiness, and not a virtue.




                                                                   THE GOOD


 






Now there are a few features of this model that are worth pointing out.   Firstly, the notions of cause and necessity it contains are rather different from those you more commonly encounter in philosophy.    If a modern philosopher says something is necessarily the case, he is usually referring to deductive necessity, the kind of logic you find in mathematics, and if he talks of cause he means force, like a billiard ball forcing another to move in a certain way by imparting its momentum, a kind of bottom-up pressure, pushing from behind.   Here both cause and necessity have a different sense, although one quite in accord with normal language.     The four causes of the good are essential.    The good cannot exist without them and because it does exist the four causes must necessarily exist, but this is not a deduction in the mathematical or purely logical sense.    It has to do with the relationship of the parts to the whole, which is a necessary one and therefore causal, but the causes are not bottom-up forces working together to force the good into existence from below or behind, but elements that must be present.    Because the good can’t exist without them you can say that they are the necessary causes of the good, but it is a different and more subtle notion of causality than the modern one.

You can also say that if the truth is the whole, as this model implies, then you can only express the truth in a systematic way, because you have to show how the parts and the whole relate to each other.   That means philosophy must be systematic.   That's another unfashionable idea - so 19th century - but if the truth is the whole, it is unavoidable.

This simple picture is the beating heart of what I call real philosophy, to distinguish it from modern philosophy which is called philosophy but which doesn’t actually contain any truth, something you will surely have noticed at some level if you have studied it, and certainly doesn't love it.   Hegel has another name for real philosophy and calls it "speculative", a potentially misleading term which has nothing to do with speculation in the ordinary sense.    A better name perhaps would be Idealism, recognition of the logical primacy of ideas, because all true philosophy is idealism, and materialist philosophy is a contradiction in terms.

Now, that will do for now as a summary of the positive side of the absolute.   Let’s look at it from a negative point of view.    If you want to defend atheism you need to show why this picture is wrong.   Specifically you need to show
1   .     That the good is not real
2   .     That the cardinal virues are not independent but can be derived from eachother or from something else.
If you can do that you will have given atheism a philosophical grounding which it doesn’t have at the moment, so there’s a big opportunity, and I’ll follow you gladly if you can do it.   I don’t much want to be a believer and may aspects of religion (human sacrifice? cannibalism?) sit uneasily with me.    But it has never been done and I don’t think it ever will be.


Modern philosophy does in fact and quite consistently argue that the good is not real, and that the cardinal virtues can be derived from each other, but not because it has a thought-out critique of these ideas, but because it is unaware of them.   Like Descartes in his stove, it starts from scratch and with scant reference to the philosophy that came before it.

The basic idea of modern philosophy is that the good can be “explained” or “defined” (it amounts to the same thing).    After all if you can’t define something then it looks like you don’t know what it is, and that is anathema to a modern thinker.     We explain things by showing what causes them, so to explain or define the good is to show that it is caused by something else, for example happiness.   If the explanation succeeds then the notion of the good becomes redundant, because you can always replace it with what it really means, happiness.   The good is just an epiphenomenon, a shorthand, but the true reality is its deeper cause, whatever you think that is.     This is what is meant by “explaining something away”.   In explaining the good, you make it disappear.   It’s a kind of vanishing trick.     By implication, the good isn’t real, it’s more like an illusion, and this view is held implicitly by virtually all modern philosophy.

So modern philosophy is reductionist in terms of the good in general and you can further divide it in terms of which of the four causes the various practitioners reduce it to.     Take John Rawls for example.    The good is barely mentioned at all in his A Theory of Justice, and where it is it is immediately reduced to (meaning replaced with) the just, its final cause.   This is then immediately reduced to fairness, which replaces the concept of justice for the rest of the book.   Fairness is a category that belongs to reason (because of its appeal to universality, reason being the faculty of the universal) and reason with its virtue of temperance is formal cause.    This means that by implication Rawls is arguing that the notion of the cardinal virtues is wrong because he thinks that you can derive one, Justice, from another, Temperance.    But has he proved it?   Not at all, and in fact it is obvious that justice and fairness are by no means the same thing.    Justice is meted out by the state and involves vengeance and punishment, neither of which have anything to do with fairness.    You might as well say of a building that the people who use it (its final cause) are produced by the architect (its formal cause).    They aren’t and the architect can’t do anything without a client who wants a building for a purpose.    Both are essential to the process and play their separate part, and to say that only one matters is ridiculous and the simple response to Rawls’ identification of justice with fairness is that it is wrong.    You can’t derive justice from reason and if Rawls had paid attention to classical philosophy he would know that.   His entire "Theory of Justice" is in fact nothing of the sort, it's a theory of fairness, and justice is completely absent from the book, replaced everywhere by fairness.    Actually it’s not just justice which is reduced to reason by Rawls.   The other virtues also disappear and Reason becomes the only virtue, the only truth.   Rawls in other words, in common with most modern thinkers, is a rationalist, meaning that he thinks that the truth is to be found in reason, or that reason is the absolute.    It’s as if the architect said “you don’t need the client, you don’t need the builders and the materials – you just need me”.    I know some of them are a bit like that, but you can see the problem.

The majority of modern philosophers make the same mistake as Rawls.    They are rationalists, because they believe in Reason and think that everything else is derived from it.   Certainly Kant would fit into this (Rawls is really just Kant minus the interesting bits) as would Mill.     The problem with this view is not that reason is wrong, but that it is wrong to take it as the absolute, because that is to abstract from the three other causes of the good each of which is equally essential.

There’s another group though that goes further and reduces the good to efficient cause.   Thinkers like Sartre notice reasonably enough that reason can’t produce any particular virtue because it depends on generalisation, and also again reasonably enough react against the proscriptive, dry moralizing of the rationalist which is all about self denial and self control – because of course this is the virtue of reason – and says that actually the absolute is just the individual who is free by nature.     This comes from Descartes and the notion that self- consciousness is the one thing that is independent of the outside world and depends only on itself, but it is developed into the philosophy of existentialism by Sartre and others.    What matters for this way of thinking is not what I do but whether I do it freely or not and that is the only real virtue.     Rationalist morality is seen as a way of drawing comfort from the presence of rules and regularity, which means denying the essential and scary Angst-inducing fact of your existential freedom, and so you see a connection between this way of thinking and the cardinal virtue of courage.    The connection is also there at a deeper level because here we are delving into efficient cause, the question of what motivates us, and the existential answer is our freedom, and, subtext, our constant struggle for recognition.    The good in simple terms is reduced one more phase, from the rational to the free.    And this is wrong, not because we are not free, but because this freedom is only one of four moments of the good and because it is false to say that this freedom is itself the absolute.

And finally there is one more group of thinkers, not really philosophers but very popular, who go the final stage and reduce the good to the material cause, which they understand to be DNA.     All other virtues for such thinkers are results of impulses generated by our (selfish) genes.     This is the notion that the good is a result of nature, and that any virtuous behavior can be understood as a result of pressure on the organism to do that which favours the survival of the species.     This is like saying that the materials a building is made from cause its design.    Materialists really believe this and think that DNA causes us to have the shape we do, but this is impossible because DNA is the same in every cell in the body, so it can’t explain why one cell differs from another.    Biologists counter that genes within dna are switched on and off by other factors, which may be true, but if so then the other factors are not the DNA so you cannot say that it is the DNA that causes the shape and you need to understand how the other factors are operating independently of the DNA.   Of course, if you could demonstrate that DNA creates and accounts for not only our shape but our culture, wants, language, ethics and so on you would have done something that effectively demolished the classical model and would show that only material cause matters, but the truth is that this certainly has not been done, and it would seem for logical reasons that it never could be done.    It is still a belief powerfully held by many.

So the arguments of modern philosophy do rest on the notion that the good is not real, and that the cardinal virtues are not independent, but only as assumptions and not because they have been able to prove this is true, or even are aware of the implied criticism they are making of the classical model.    It’s worth reflecting a bit more on the notion of reality implied by this.   What is real?    The sense being used here is that what is real is self-subsistent.    Something that is real is not a result of something else, but stands on its own as an independent being.    If the good is real in this sense, we can ask what else is real?    The answer is profoundly counterintuitive:   nothing.    Why?    Because everything is a result of the absolute, everything owes its existence to the Logos, and without the Logos nothing would exist.   It seems strange;  after all, the objects we encounter every day seem to be self-subsistent, to have an independent reality.    I’m pretty sure this table in front of me will still be the same if I come back next week, so its self-subsistence seems OK.   But its being depends on someone understanding it as a table, and everything we know about it is conceptual, therefore without the Concept, it doesn’t exist.     This strange result was well understood by Plato, who famously argued that phenomena are not real and that the forms – the concepts by which we apprehend them – are the true reality.    One of Hegel’s more puzzling pronouncements in the Phenomenology, that  “reason is the certainty that it is all reality” also makes sense in this context, because not only is reason (in the sense of the Logos, rather than logic, the Kantian faculty of reason) the absolute, but also everything else is a result of it, is dependent on it, so has its reality only in relation to that absolute.   That is just what the notion of the absolute means:    everything else is relative to it.    The Logos actually is all reality, the only reality, and what goes for the Logos also goes for God, because they are the same thing.

Because this conclusion is so counterintuitive it is easy to brush it aside, and you can view modern philosophy as a kind of a conspiracy to ignore this inconvenient conclusion.   Prior to Descartes the notion that phenomena are not real was a defining feature of philosophy in general and it was understood that this mystery was at the centre of philosophical thought.     Since then there has been instead a dogged holding on to the common sense idea that appearance is reality, an idea which is hubristically called “enlightenment” when it is actually the opposite, a return to prephilosophical darkness.     It’s a kind of tyranny of the majority, a fingers-in-the-ears-singing-la-la-la group denial, a hope that by sheer force of numbers we can make the inconvenient truth that appearance is not the same as reality go away, if we only wish it so with enough conviction.   Instead we should face up to the fact that it is our common sense that it at fault and that actually without the metaphysical we are nothing, quite literally:  we don’t exist.    The metaphysical, the Logos, is not only real, it is the ground of all reality and anything else that exists does so only as a result of the Logos, or, if you like, by His Grace.





Sunday 28 April 2013

The Social Contract (talk given to Kingston Philosophy Cafe 2nd April 2013)



The Social Contract

The idea of the Social Contract is as old as philosophy itself.   It can be summarised as the idea that the state is the result of a contract between its citizens, who realise that though living under the rule of law may not be in their short term interest, as it restricts and controls them, it is very much in their long term interest and so they decide to sacrifice short term interest for long term gain and contrive to create rule of law, the state.    We can imagine a “state of nature” in which there is no rule of law, prior to the social contract, and the post-contract political society we actually live in.   Notice that this means that the state we all live in is an artificial one, against nature.

That’s all there is to it really.    The theory was considered and rejected in classical times and it is only in the sixteenth century with the beginning of the modern era that it comes back into fashion, and indeed becomes entirely dominant in political theory.    First Hobbes, then Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and then John Rawls, whose theory of Justice is considered by many the most important work of political theory of the twentieth century, all use the metaphor of the social contract in some way and it is hard to find any criticism of it.   Politicians and ordinary people who have never heard of the political theory also talk freely of our “contract with society” and in other ways that show that they too endorse the notion that we have an implied contract with each other that ought to govern or at least influence our behaviour.

The first problem with the theory is an empirical one.   There is not the slightest evidence that a state or proto-state has ever been founded by a contract between its citizens.    History teaches us that really without exception states are founded by acts of war, which seem to be the very opposite of contracts.     We can also ask ourselves at an individual level, how do we come by our nationality, our membership of and allegiance to a state?    The answer is by birth.    There is no act of consent and we have absolutely no choice in the matter.    We are citizens of a state just by being born, by simply existing, and choice, consent, or contract never, ever come in to play.

So I’m not going to talk about finer points of social contract theory, because there’s no point, it’s not true, and as philosophers we are only interested in truth .    The interesting question is how come the great minds of modern political theory, philosophers of the stature of Hobbes or Kant, come to believe almost universally and without question in a theory which is so evidently untrue?   Are they perhaps under the influence of some illusion, some ideology that prevents them from seeing the truth?    You bet they are.    It’s called the Enlightenment, and there are two aspects of it I want to look at tonight which are Individualism and Rationalism,  two sides of the same coin really which always go together, but which I think it will be useful to distinguish here.   They are views about the nature of the Absolute, the ground of truth, and they hold that the individual, and his reason, are the absolute standard against which everything must be assessed.

Individualism.

The Enlightenment holds that the “man is the measure of all things”, which is a statement about the nature of the Absolute.   Many modern philosophers will say that they no longer believe in “Absolutes” which they see as old-fashioned and archaic and inappropriate in our pluralistic age, but if they hold that man is the measure of all things, indisputably they do believe in an absolute.   In any case you can’t do philosophy if you reject the notion of absolute truth.   If truth is not absolute, but only relative, then as well as being relatively true it is also relatively untrue, and you can’t have a truth that is untrue, so rejection of the Absolute is rejection of philosophy itself.   Now, if man, the individual, is the absolute, then it follows that all cultural life is his creation and is relative to him, the result of his efforts.     From this it follows that if the state exists it too must be a result of something done by the individual, so individuals must at some time have realised the benefits of living in a political community and contrived to create it through some kind of contract.  In other words the idea of the contract is a result of the premise that man is the measure of all things, which is an aspiration of the enlightenment, and not a result of observation of reality at all.

So what about that aspiration?    It seems fine and unobjectionable really, doesn’t it?    But the thinking that gave rise to it grew out of the development of science, and it’s reasonable to apply scientific method to it.    We can say that the hypothesis of individualism (more strictly atomism, but I’m going to stick with the broader term individualism tonight) predicts that the state must be the result of agreement between its citizens, and we can see if the evidence supports it or not.   We have already seen that it doesn’t, so the hypothesis must be wrong.    But if this means that the individual is not the absolute what then is?     We are so used to thinking of ourselves as independent individuals, the building blocks of society, that it can be hard to imagine an alternative view, but one was given by Aristotle, who said for example that “man is by nature a political animal” and “it is clear the state is both natural and prior to the individual.

Aristotle would not say such things if he wasn’t aware of an opposite view (i.e. that the state is artificial and subsequent to the individual) , and we can take his comments to be criticism of some kind of social contract theory.   By saying that man is by nature a political animal,  he implies that there is no state of nature, in which we might exist as some kind of “noble savage”, and this means that the way we live is not artificial, as it is for the contractarians, but normal and natural, something that I personally feel more comfortable with.    And by saying that the state is prior to the individual he gives a clear alternative to individualism which says that actually the state comes first, the individual second.    This might seem counterintuitive, but it points to a fundamental problem with contract theory, which is this:    how can you make contracts, if you don’t first have rule of law?    Contracts are in general about exchange, and to have exchange you must first have private property, and if you have private property you must have a state which guarantees and protects it (that’s the difference between property and mere possession), so it makes no sense to say that you contract to create the state because it must have existed in the first place so that you could make a contract.   The very thing you are trying to explain by the social contract is presupposed.    And it is not just a circular argument, which would be defective but not necessarily false.   It’s worse than that, it's back to front.   It says that the individual is the cause of the state but actually the state is the cause of the individual.    The individual is not the same as the particular, the “specimen of humanity”, and properly understood the individual is both particular and universal united, and a very important aspect of individuality is the rights conferred (universally) on particular people by the state such as the right to own property, to be protected from assault, physical abuse and so on.

So individualism, the belief that the individual is the absolute or that man is the measure of all things, while it may seem natural to us, is problematic and there is an alternative expressed in classical philosophy which sees the individual as created by the state, not vice versa.    So here’s a question for discussion.     Is there such thing as society?    If you are an individualist the answer has to be yes, because the individual is absolute and anything else cultural that exists must be made up of relations between individuals, because there is nothing else, and these relations are what we mean when we speak of society.    But what is society actually?     Can you point to it?   Does it exist at all?    For my part I’d say no, it doesn’t,  it’s just an abstraction, and whenever I hear someone using the word society or social (as in “social contract” or “social relation”) or, worst of all,  “intersubjective”, it puts me on my guard because I know I am dealing with an individualist and that I am not going to  agree with them.    What do you think?

Rationalism

Now, moving on to rationalism, well, you can say that there is an obvious problem with individualism which is that there are seven billion or so of us on the planet, and we are all different, so that’s seven billion absolutes and clearly that is not much use.   But enlightenment gets round this by saying that it is one aspect only of the individual that is absolute which is his reason, which is the same for everyone and common to all (this is why strictly it is atomism rather than individualism).    So let’s have a quick look at this idea that it is Reason that is the Absolute.    After all this seems like something it would be unreasonable to disagree with, because if reason doesn’t ground knowledge, what is left?    It seems irrational to disagree with this, and like going back to more primitive, prescientific, superstitious times. 

There is actually a reasonable objection to the notion that reason is the absolute, the yardstick against which everything should be measured and assessed, and you can find it in ancient political theory in the concept of the four cardinal virtues (wisdom, courage, discipline, and justice).    Now, why are there four cardinal virtues?    Why not three or five, or twenty seven?    The reason is that everything that exists, at least according to Aristotle, must have four causes:   material, efficient, formal and final;   and these are essential to its existence, which means that if any one is missing the thing can’t exist, or, turning that round, if it does exist then it follows that each of the four causes must also exist.    The four causes are all-encompassing, nothing else is needed so they are also sufficient.   In the case of philosophy, the thing we want most to know is the nature of the good.    Now the good exists.    This is a proposition modern philosophy has trouble with, but intuitively we all know it to be true, so it follows that it must have material efficient formal and final causes.    These are the cardinal virtues.     Material cause is wisdom, because knowledge is the stuff of which the good is made, and if there were no knowledge clearly also there would be no good.      Efficient cause is courage, because that is the energy that makes the good happen and without that energy, that willingness to risk life for the sake of the good, it couldn’t exist.    Formal cause is reason and its virtue of control, discipline, temperance, whatever you want to call it, because the good isn’t just an abstract notion, it has shape, and the shape or form is given to it by restraint and control.    The final cause is Justice, which is the purpose, the telos or end of the good, and without this too the good couldn’t exist, because there wouldn’t be any point.    The virtues are cardinal because they stand on their own, they are quite different things and cannot be expressed in terms of each other.

Now let’s take a look at what Enlightenment does with this.    There is no direct Enlightenment criticism of the notion of the four cardinal virtues and it is hard to see how there could be because you can’t be an Enlightenment philosopher if you understand them, and in practice the Enlightement isn’t built on a criticism of classical philosophy, but on ignoring it and starting again from scratch;   but there is clear implied criticism of it in the notion of the social contract.

Let’s start with the notion of Justice, the concept political theory most wants to understand.     According to social contract theory, Justice is a result of reason.   This means that justice is no longer a cardinal virtue, because you can’t be a cardinal virtue if you are the result of something else, you are relative to and subordinate to that thing.     Justice becomes a part of reason, and you are now down to three cardinal virtues.    In some cases, Rawls being the best example, Justice isn’t just subordinated to reason.   It actually disappears.    Rawls’ book is based on the notion that “justice is fairness”.    If this is correct, then you no longer need the word justice at all because you can replace it in every instance with the word “fairness” and “justice” simply disappears.    It isn’t correct, because fairness and justice are quite different concepts.    Modern philosophers have a habit of using the term “justice” as a high-falutin’ term for moral rectitude, or just fairness, but actually that is not what it means.   If you doubt this, just pick up a tabloid newspaper.   They are always calling for justice, and when they do what they mean is that they want someone to suffer.   They are calling for blood, for vengeance, for something do be done by the state to someone they think has transgressed.   You can’t “do” fairness which is just a passive standard, and the fact of vengeance is enough to see that justice and fairness  or moral rectitude aren’t the same thing.    Rawls’ book is called “A Theory of Justice” but actually it is nothing of the sort, it is just a theory of fairness.   Rawls has done that classic thing which as Daniel Kahneman points out in Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow we all do when faced with a difficult question, which is to substitute an easier one.    "What is Justice?" is certainly a difficult question, so it comes naturally to us to substitute an easier one, "what is fairness" and this is just what Rawls has done.    His answer can be expressed in four words, a simple rule of the playground for fair division:   you half, I choose.    And we can ask, who knows more about justice, us, or John Rawls?    You might think the answer is John Rawls, who is after all considered the leading 20th century authority on the subject.   But actually, he is not aware of the substitution he has made, and if we are aware of the that and understand that justice is not the same as fairness, we can say we know more than him because we at least know one thing about justice, whereas Rawls knows precisely nothing, because all his thinking and writing on the matter is actually about another subject.

Now what about courage?    Courage is the efficient cause of the state, because before you can have any kind of government, you first have to control a territory in which you can enforce the rule of law, and this means you have to have armed forces, people who are willing to risk their lives in order to establish and maintain the rule of law.   Power is the essence of politics.   If you don’t have power, it’s not politics and politics cannot exist without power, without the instruments of repression and control, the armed forces, the penal system, the courts and so on.   Without courage, the state and the rule of law could not exist, that is how important it is.   In a word, it is essential, and you can’t get any more important than that.

So let’s have a look at how Social Contract theorists think about power.    At the modern and weakest extreme, thinkers like John Rawls ignore power altogether, and there is no mention of it at all in Rawls’  A Theory of Justice, which is another reason you can say it is not a work of political theory, because you can’t have a political theory that leaves out the most important aspect of the political, power.    Less wooly thinkers like Hobbes on the other hand do clearly understand the importance of political power, because for Hobbes “a covenant without the sword is of no force to bind a man”.    This is fairly typical of contractarian thinking.   In an ideal world where everyone was rational and negated their personal interests in favour of the general, so the thinking goes, you wouldn’t need power, or government at all really;  but that is a utopia we will never reach because people cannot be trusted to behave rationally all the time without some external encouragement, so power is an unfortunate necessity.    It’s there, but subordinate to reason and resulting from reason, and as to where it comes from, well this isn’t really addressed but the implication is that the people who put their lives on the line to create that power are just the hired help, and they do it because they are paid to.    This really isn’t good enough – would you risk your life in return for wages?    It doesn’t make sense.   And there is a logical fallacy here.   Just because you identify a “need” for something doesn’t mean that that thing exists or that that need is satisfied.    I need a helicopter and a yacht, but unfortunately that doesn’t mean that I have them.

Whatever way you look at it the virtue of courage has gone.   In Rawles it is totally absent, and in Hobbes, Rouseau and the rest, it is subordinate to reason, resulting from it, and therefore is no longer a cardinal virtue.   So in modern contractarian thinking both the efficient cause of the good, Courage, and it’s final cause, Justice, have either disappeared altogether, or have been so effectively subordinated to Reason that they no longer function as cardinal virtues.      So  can you see what has this means?    What is a philosophy like that has abandoned efficient and final cause?    Well the final cause is purpose, telos, so you can say that without this, philosophy has no purpose, and because purpose is also meaning you can say with some accuracy that this philosophy has become meaningless.   And efficient cause is power, so a philosophy that lacks efficient cause is impotent;  so modern contractarian thinking is pointless, meaningless, and impotent;   and that is in fact the general perception of modern philosophy, not just as seen from the outside but also the view of many of its practitioners most of whom have long abandoned the idea that philosophy has any purpose beyond academic exercise.  

So if you like the idea of philosophy that is pointless and impotent, modern philosophy with its contractarian views is for you.    If you think on the other hand that it ought to have a purpose, a meaning, and power, then you need to reject the notion that Reason is the absolute, that man is the measure of all things, and say instead that the Absolute is the Good, and that it has four pillars in the cardinal virtues which must be part of any political theory.    Reason is indeed one of them, but you need the rest as well.    And by the way there is a view these days that political theory is a kind of special interest in philosophy;   but if political theory is an account of justice, and justice is what gives meaning to the good, it’s pretty clear that it is essential and perhaps the most important  aspect of philosophy of all.     It’s a real problem then that the big hitters in modern philosophy all adopt the notion of the social contract, because it means their ideas are worthless and we really need to start all over again if we want to understand the political.   There is one philosopher in the modern era, and to my knowledge only one, who does try to build an account of the state that includes the cardinal virtues, and who rejects the notion of social contract out of hand, and that is Hegel in the Philosophy of Right.    There’s nothing else apart from the ancient classics, so I guess that is where you have to start.