Tags
Alasdair MacIntyre, Aristotle, Augustine, Blaise Pascal, Canada, Epicurus, G.W.F. Hegel, Hebrew Bible, James Doull, Martha Nussbaum
In examining my previous question on internalism and externalism I’ve been trying to explore a powerful but complex and difficult answer: that this question is expressed in the very history of Western philosophy.
Lately I’ve slowly been making my way through Philosophy and Freedom, a collection of essays by and about the neglected Canadian Hegelian philosopher James Doull (rhymes with towel). Doull, like Socrates or George Herbert Mead, never published a book during his lifetime; his reputation derives almost entirely from being spread by his students and their students, mostly through the classics department at Dalhousie University and the great-books program at its affiliated University of King’s College. (I myself know Doull’s work only because a lifelong friend of mine is one of Doull’s “grand-pupils,” a devoted student of Doull’s students at Dalhousie and King’s.)
Doull’s work is difficult, both in the density of its prose and in the wide range of the texts it expects familiarity with – the chapter on ancient Greece covers not only philosophy but the full range of history, tragedy and comedy, viewing their scope all together through a Hegelian philosophical lens. Moreover, because Doull’s concerns are so wide-ranging, a study of his work does not immediately repay the reader with direct application to particular philosophical questions and problems. If ever there was a big-picture thinker it is this man, at least when it comes to Western philosophical traditions.
And yet studying Doull closely has ultimately paid off for me in thinking about the big question I’ve addressed above. I realize that this question of ethical motivation has, in its way, been central to Western philosophical tradition, not merely in the works of individual thinkers but through its history. Not all of what follows is said directly in Doull’s work, but it is inspired by it, and I think it is faithful to his spirit based on conversations with Doullian friends.
I’ve seen the point now particularly with reference to the book of Ecclesiastes, which Doull refers to and which I recently taught in my intro religion class at Stonehill. Ecclesiastes paints a picture of the world that differs greatly from more familiar books of the Hebrew Bible. The very message of the book of Exodus, for example, seems to be that God acts in history, that his presence in our lives is real and palpable, working his miracle everywhere one turns, bringing about cosmic justice for his chosen people if not others. Ecclesiastes, by contrast, gives us a remote and distant God, in a world where the wicked triumph and the unjust perish. There isn’t even an afterlife for the expectation of justice; all the dead go to sheol, “the grave” where they know nothing. It’s a moving text, and one which seems to fit the experience of our post-Darwinian age where God’s very existence seems questionable at best.
And yet. In the midst of this God-bereft world, where there is no justice and no reward for virtue, Ecclesiastes repeatedly tells us: “fear God and keep his commandments.” It seems, in its way, to be the paradigm of ethical externalism. One wants to ask: why? No reward awaits us for keeping God’s commandments, in this world or the next. And the approach to knowledge, if relatively untheorized, is similarly externalist: the truth is out there in God, whether we know it or not.
A couple centuries before this, Doull notes, the Sophists had innovated by presenting the opposite, internalist, position. Man is the measure of all things; everything, ethical and epistemological, is up to us. But this view runs into the problems I have addressed in recent posts about truth and contradiction. If we have no standards beyond our existing motivations, we have no grounds on which to change others’ behaviour, or our own.
For Doull, it is Aristotle who first resolves this problem, above all in the theory of eudaimonia – a human flourishing constituted by both virtue and happiness. But Doull agrees with the points Alasdair MacIntyre regularly makes about Aristotle – that this flourishing was embedded in the political context of the Greek polis, a community formed around shared ethical standards and practices. When the polis degenerated into a large and impersonal empire, virtue could no longer count on reward; so virtue and happiness became separated in the Stoics and Epicureans, who would define happiness entirely in terms of virtue (the Stoics) or vice versa (the Epicureans). But for both of them, as for Aristotle, internalism and externalism (in the sense of my previous post) remain united: our own motivations and the absolute ethical principle end up taking us to the same place. They could make this move because, unlike Aristotle, they dismissed the importance of external goods: our internal states were all that mattered. Sure, virtue doesn’t get you a public reward, but it gets you the internal state of undisturbed peace.
But the Stoics and Epicureans are in tension not only with each other – is virtue or happiness really the more important one? – but with the world itself. Our virtue is often lacking in spite of our best efforts of will, not enough to make us really happy; and some virtues (like friendship) seem constituted by external conditions that make them possible. This is part of the criticism that Martha Nussbaum has recently made of these Hellenistic thinkers, on quasi-Aristotelian grounds; but historically, the figure who made the point stick, on quite different grounds, was (Saint) Augustine – with help from the Jewish worldview that gave rise to Ecclesiastes.
Augustine accepts what seems like the commonsense view that virtue and happiness are not analytically equivalent. He notes that in this world, so full of suffering and misfortune, virtue is not rewarded with happiness; but further, neither real virtue nor real happiness can be adequately reached in this world, where humans are frail enough that they fall far short of the virtue and happiness they seek. Augustine’s solution is to put it all off into the next world, a world for which we can hope after death.
I haven’t yet been able to follow Doull’s story past this point. Which is something of a shame, for there’s an obvious problem with the resolution in Augustine’s time: we have no more evidence to believe in an afterlife of reward than we have to believe the virtuous are rewarded in this life. Wishful thinking is not an adequate basis on which to build a life. Neither is Pascal’s Wager, the argument that we should believe in God and follow his law just in case there is an afterlife; for it could just as easily be that the afterlife rewards vice. (MacIntyre in God, Philosophy, Universities goes so far as to say he doesn’t think Pascal himself believed the wager was a good argument.)
What appeals to me in all of this is a spirit that, in at least one respect, seems the opposite of analytic philosophy as normally practised. One could call Doull’s work synthetic philosophy: rather than cutting ideas up into ever smaller pieces, he puts them together. It’s an approach that I suspect leads ultimately to conclusions that are both truer and more satisfying. This isn’t to bash analytic philosophy or say there’s no place for it; but I do welcome a view that takes this larger scope.
Amod,
I might have guessed you’d know Doull. Does it come from being Canadian or just from having a nose for the neglected figures? I came upon him via George Grant, of course (who is himself, I think, much less well-known in the States).
I believe Kant based his proof of the soul’s immortality on precisely the same disappointment Augustine notes, on the grounds that Must implies Can: Since (i) in this life we inevitably fail to achieve perfect virtue (Kant calls it holiness of will, I think), and since (ii) we should perfect our will (see the entire Second Critique), therefore (iii) there is a posthumous existence.
I don’t say that this is an irrefutable (or even a very good) argument, but I’m with you in feeling that a philosophy that doesn’t wrestle with these questions isn’t of much interest.
Basically from being Canadian, I guess – my friend introduced me to Doull long before I started looking for neglected figures, and he got immersed in the Doull school because King’s is where you go in Canada if you want a Great Books curriculum. Though I’d place Doull very high on any list of most underrated recent thinkers.
I was going to mention Kant but thought the post was already long enough without him. :) One thing I think you miss: Kant doesn’t actually say there is an afterlife. Rather, it’s one of those things we absolutely cannot know one way or another. But – like free will and like God himself – we must assume its existence in the absence of knowledge. (Denying knowledge to make room for faith and all that.)
Amod and Skholiast,
There might be added to your lists: (a) Those with a poor prose style the strength of whose thought carries them into prominence (b) Those with a good prose style whose thought receives unmerited attention.
The little acquaintance I have with Doull’s work, from the book on Google leads me to think that his dull prose and area of specialisation may have militated against him. If he flourished in the cold war era the Hegelian connection to dialectical materialism and communism would have been neither profitable nor popular. The piece I’m reading is his lecture on Plato’s dialogue Parmenides. So far there is no flash of insight that you might expect from someone with classical learning and in depth knowledge of the background. Instead we are offered:
In category (b) how about David Hume and A.J. Ayer?
Dipping into Augustine’s City of GodI find that nothing not built on Christian principles can prosper. This is the only basis for a good life. In fact a society not built on principles of justice etc ceases to be a society as Augustine said was the case with Rome. There is some truth in that. Life under Fascism and Communism was not a time of human flourishing. The Greek polis was supported by slavery. Louis MacNeices’s poem Autumn Journalhas some great lines on this.
You are right about his prose style. In his defence, the work you picked to read may be his very hardest. The introduction to Charles Taylor’s Hegel has this wonderful quip about the two pitfalls in writing a commentarial work: in one direction one risks oversimplifying or even bowdlerizing the subject, in the other one writes a work so difficult that one turns in relief to the text in order to understand the commentary. Doull’s commentary on the Parmenides is the purest example I know of the latter kind of commentary. Right now I am trying to make it through that chapter while also reading the Parmenides with some friends; but I’m reading the Parmenides in order to understand Doull, even more than vice versa. The other chapters of his book are certainly easier and less dry – but I admit that’s not saying much.
I actually don’t think the connection to communism worked against Doull or any other Hegelian that much – at least outside the US. I think a great deal of 20th-century interest in Hegel was triggered precisely by his influence in Marx. If anything, the relative lack of interest in Doull by his Cold War contemporaries might have come from the fact that his reading of Hegel wasn’t Marxist enough for them.
From what I have read of Augustine, I don’t think he holds up a great hope for a Christian society on earth – certainly not in his lifetime, probably not ever. One should surely strive for such a thing, but not with the expectation of actually getting there. Human beings are too flawed and fallen for individual or social perfection to ever be realized on this side of the grave.
Just found this interesting post on the question of the desirability of consistency with regard to motivation and normative judgment:
http://gogrue.wordpress.com/2009/12/11/what-does-consistency-have-to-do-with-reasons/
Apologies if you’ve already seen this; it’s from late last year.
Hadn’t seen it. The thing is, the whole question being asked there seems to depend on an assumption – that there are no normative truths – which I would hold to be utterly false. If one denies that claim, then unless I’m missing something, the problem they investigate no longer seems to be a problem.