THE FRUITS OF PHILOSOPHY

[Philosophia] animam format et fabricat, vitam disponit, actiones regit, agenda et omittenda demonstrate sedet ad gubernaculum et per ancipitia fluctuantium derigit cursum.

(‘Philosophy shapes and constructs the soul, arranges life, governs conduct, shows what is to be done and what omitted, sits at the helm and directs our course as we waver amidst uncertainties.’) Seneca

It is central to the ancient Greek conception of philosophy that it provides human beings with the way to lead a better life. A significant part of the philosophy of both Plato and Aristotle is concerned with laying out the framework for human fulfilment. For Plato (in some of his writings) the good life turns out actually to consist in philosophical theorizing, while Aristotle vacillates between this conception and a more down-to-earth vision of ordinary ‘practical wisdom’, in which, nonetheless, the achievement of the good life depends, at its deepest level, on the systematic exercise of reason.

THE PROJECT

Universae philosophiae finis est humana foelicitas (‘The goal of a complete philosophy is human happiness. ’) Eustachius a Sancto Paulo

This ambitious statement, from an early seventeenth-century textbook, the Composite System of Philosophy in Four Parts encapsulates a view of philosophy that was widespread at the time, and had a long ancestry. It has two aspects: the first, the notion of philosophy as a complete system of thought encompassing all aspects of human knowledge – metaphysical, physical and ethical – and, the second, the idea that the ultimate raison d'être of such a system is its ability to provide an authentic blueprint for human flourishing.

But can philosophy really show us how to live? The ancient Greek philosophers certainly thought it could; Descartes, the ‘father of modern philosophy’ strongly maintained as much. But in our own time, confused and conflicting answers have emerged, mostly on the negative side. It is often said that we live in the century of Freud; in the popular intellectual culture of our time, reflected in literature and drama and the media, it is psychoanalytical ideas, rather than philosophical theories, that seem to play an increasingly important role in how we try to understand ourselves and in our attempts to remove the obstacles to fulfilled and happy living.

THE CARTESIAN REVOLUTION: MATHEMATICAL TRANSPARENCY AND ARBITRARY LAW

Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie.

(‘The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.’) Blaise Pascal

It is a familiar fact that the seventeenth-century revolution in philosophy profoundly altered our conception not just of the physical universe but of the very nature of scientific understanding. But although that revolution is often presented by historiographers as a purely epistemological and scientific affair, it also subtly and irreversibly altered philosophy's relationship to its age-old task of providing an account of how humans can live fulfilled lives. In order to understand how that shift came about, it will be necessary first to lay out the principal respects in which the new seventeenth-century world-view differed from what had gone before.

The old picture, dominant in the Middle Ages, and broadly based on Platonic and Aristotelian elements incorporated within a Judaeo-Christian metaphysic, was of a benign and intelligible cosmos, with the earth at its centre – a universe made up of substances whose nature could be understood in terms of readily graspable forms and essences (what Aristotle had called ‘formal causes’), and whose behaviour could be understood teleologically, in terms of a progression towards a series of specifically ordered goals or end-states.

THE ECLIPSE OF REASON

L'homme se trouve devant l'irrationnel.

(‘Man stands face to face with the irrational.’) Albert Camus

The traditional project of synoptic ethics aims at the discovery of a rational life-plan for human happiness; its achievement is the jewel in the philosopher's crown, the ultimate accolade set on the activity of philosophizing. For the ancient Greek thinkers, what makes us essentially human is above all our rationality, and the models of well-being they offer are shaped by reason in the light of its best perceptions of what will realize our true nature. The resulting blueprint is either one where rational activity itself is viewed as the supreme good, or else one in which reason is seen as the essential coordinator and controller of the fulfilled life. Many centuries later, we find in Descartes a view of ethics as part of a philosophical system whose structure is illuminated by the ‘light of reason’; the end-point of philosophical knowledge is that we should reach a clear understanding both of the world around us and of our own human nature, and, armed with the power that understanding brings, be able to bring about the conditions for a worthwhile life.

From our contemporary standpoint, we cannot approach the optimistic ethics of the classical and early modern eras without being aware of a powerful challenge to the traditional doctrine of reason as the determiner and realizer of the conditions for the good life.

For non-human animals, life can be wretched or happy, but there is nothing much they can do about how it turns out. For human beings, by contrast, at least those who are fortunate enough to have the material resources to free them from the daily struggle for existence, there is the opportunity to reflect on how life should be lived. Among the educated citizens of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, many found it natural to turn to philosophy for guidance; as for the philosophers themselves, though few were prepared to offer instant solutions, most saw it as a main part of the purpose of philosophizing to reach a view on how to achieve fulfilment in life. In the centuries that followed, philosophical systems became steadily more complex and elaborate, but their authors held fast to the old aspiration of philosophy to help humans lead happy and worthwhile lives.

Nowadays, things are very different. A good many academic philosophers, for much of our own century, have strenuously resisted the idea that philosophy can help us with how to live. And while others, particularly in more recent times, have addressed questions about happiness and well-being, for the most part they have shrunk from offering direct guidance on these matters to their fellow citizens. This generalization, like most, is subject to notable exceptions; but it remains true that the bulk of philosophical work on ethics is now addressed to those within the specialist confines of the academy.

The fundamental question of Platonic ethics is ‘How should one live?’ (Republic 1.352d, Gorgias 500c). That question is not to be understood as ‘What is the morally best way to live?’, as is shown by the fact that in Rep. 1 an appropriate, though in Plato's view false, answer to it is that given by Thrasymachus, namely that one should live by emancipating oneself to the best of one's ability from the restraints of morality with a view to the furtherance of one's own interest. Rather it is to be understood as ‘How may one achieve the life which is, objectively, but from the point of view of one's own interest, the most worth living?’ (Rep. 1.344e). The Greek term for the achievement of such a life is eudaimonia (literally ‘having a favourable guardian spirit’ (daimōn)), conventionally translated ‘happiness’, but in view of its objective character better rendered ‘blessedness’ or ‘well-being’. According to Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics (EN) 1095318–20) it was universally acknowledged (a) that eudaimonia was the supreme good and (b) that the term meant ‘living well’ and ‘doing well’; nothing in the texts of Plato suggests that his use of the term conflicts with these claims. In the same passage Aristotle tells us that there were substantive disputes about what living well amounted to, some holding, for example, that it consists in acquiring wealth, others that it consists in a life of honour or of intellectual achievement; Plato depicts such substantive disputes in Socrates’ confrontations with Thrasymachus in Rep. 1 and Callicles in the Gorgias.

An outline of Epicurean ethics

Pleasure, according to Epicurus, is the single positive value, or ‘end’, towards whose attainment and maximisation all human and animal life is geared. An ideal Epicurean life gains its distinctive flavour from an orchestrated set of calculations aimed at that result, balancing in particular the relative contributions of bodily and mental pleasures, and, within those categories, of two distinct types, ‘kinetic’ and ‘katastematic’ pleasures. Bodily feeling is in a way focal, since mental pleasure and pain consist ultimately in satisfaction and dissatisfaction respectively about bodily feeling. For instance, the greatest mental pain, fear, is primarily the expectation of future bodily pain (which is the main ground, and a mistaken one, for the fear of death). And the greatest mental pleasure lies in confidence that bodily pain can continue indefinitely to be avoided or overcome. But although mental feelings ultimately depend on bodily ones, and not vice versa, mental feelings are a more powerful factor in the overall quality of a life. Someone in bodily pain – which may be unavoidable – can outweigh it by the mental act of reliving past pleasures and anticipating future ones. It is this ability to range over past and future that gives mental feeling its greater power. But misused, especially when people fear everlasting torture after death, it can equally well become a greater evil than its bodily counterpart.

Katastematic pleasure is the absence of pain.

Reactions to Stoic ethics

Stoic ethical doctrines provoke severe criticism from both ancient and modern readers. The criticism, however, expresses two sharply opposed views of the character and implications of Stoicism. These opposed views appear already in Cicero's comments on Stoicism, and they have affected interpretation and criticism of the Stoic position ever since.

Some critics attack the apparently extravagant, indeed outrageous, character of the Stoic conclusions. In the view of these critics, someone who actually accepted and practised Stoic doctrines would be so alien to us that he would be inhuman. Critics normally rest the charge of inhumanity on two features of Stoicism: (1) Since all reputed goods and evils except virtue and vice are indifferents, the sage sees no reason to be strongly concerned about anything other than virtue and vice. (2) The sage is free of all emotions, and so has no non-rational motive for being strongly concerned about anything.

When Cicero defends Lucius Murena in court, he seeks to undermine the effects of Cato's damaging and credible testimony against Murena, by ridiculing Cato's well-known Stoicism:

Although ‘ethics’ is a term that comes to us from the Greeks, Greek moral philosophy is notably different from typical modern discussions that fall under the same rubric. Some of our key moral concepts are absent or inconspicuous in Greek ethical debate. For example, much of modern ethics gravitates around the concepts of duty or moral obligation and rights, but neither of these concepts has any equivalent or close analogue in Greek speculation about how one ought to live. Similarly, the various oppositions between egoism and altruism or benevolence have no direct parallel in the ancient discussions. Since the Greeks have no counterpart to the Biblical injunction, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’, the question of altruism or benevolence is not a central moral issue. The ancient gods made relatively few moral demands upon their worshippers. There is no Greek parallel to the Ten Commandments, or more generally to the Biblical notion of God as moral lawgiver. As a consequence of this fact, there is also no Greek equivalent to the Kantian notion of the ‘moral law’, as the secular, internalised version of divine command.

So much for the absence in Greek thought of some of the concepts that structure modern discussions in moral philosophy. On the other hand, the Greek moral vocabulary is dominated by three pairs of opposite terms that have no direct equivalent in modern terminology. The basic terms of moral evaluation are good–bad (agathon–kakon), admirable–shameful or noble–base (kalon–aischron), and just–unjust (dikaion–adikon).