A LITTLE HISTORY of PHILOSOPHY

Contents

1 The Man Who Asked Questions 1Socrates and Plato

2 True Happiness 9Aristotle

3 We Know Nothing 15Pyrrho

4 The Garden Path 22Epicurus

5 Learning Not to Care 28Epictetus, Cicero, Seneca

6 Who Is Pulling Our Strings? 34Augustine

7 The Consolation of Philosophy 40Boethius

8 The Perfect Island 46Anselm and Aquinas

9 The Fox and the Lion 51Niccolò Machiavelli

10 Nasty, Brutish, and Short 57Thomas Hobbes

11 Could You Be Dreaming? 62René Descartes

12 Place Your Bets 69Blaise Pascal

13 The Lens Grinder 76Baruch Spinoza

14 The Prince and the Cobbler 81John Locke and Thomas Reid

15 The Elephant in the Room 87George Berkeley (and John Locke)

16 The Best of All Possible Worlds? 93Voltaire and Gottfried Leibniz

17 The Imaginary Watchmaker 99David Hume

18 Born Free 105Jean-Jacques Rousseau

19 Rose-Tinted Reality 110Immanuel Kant (1)

20 What if Everyone Did That? 115Immanuel Kant (2)

21 Practical Bliss 121Jeremy Bentham

22 The Owl of Minerva 126Georg W.F. Hegel

23 Glimpses of Reality 132Arthur Schopenhauer

24 Space to Grow 138John Stuart Mill

25 Unintelligent Design 145Charles Darwin

26 Life’s Sacrifices 152Søren Kierkegaard

27 Workers of the World Unite 158Karl Marx

28 So What? 164C.S. Peirce and William James

29 The Death of God 171Friedrich Nietzsche

30 Thoughts in Disguise 176Sigmund Freud

31 Is the Present King of France Bald? 183Bertrand Russell

32 Boo!/Hooray! 190A.J. Ayer

33 The Anguish of Freedom 196Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir andAlbert Camus

34 Bewitched by Language 202Ludwig Wittgenstein

35 The Man Who Didn’t Ask Questions 208Hannah Arendt

36 Learning from Mistakes 214Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn

37 The Runaway Train and the Unwanted Violinist 222Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson

38 Fairness Through Ignorance 228John Rawls

39 Can Computers Think? 234Alan Turing and John Searle

40 A Modern Gadfly 239Peter Singer

Index 246

chapter 1

The Man Who Asked Questions

Socrates and Plato

About 2,400 years ago in Athens a man was put to death for asking too many questions. There were philosophers before him, but it was with Socrates that the subject really took off. If philosophy has a patron saint, it is Socrates.

Snub-nosed, podgy, shabby and a bit strange, Socrates didnot fit in. Although physically ugly and often unwashed, he hadgreat charisma and a brilliant mind. Everyone in Athens agreed that there had never been anyone quite like him and probably wouldn’t be again. He was unique. But he was also extremely annoying. He saw himself as one of those horseflies that have anasty bite – a gadfly. They’re irritating, but don’t do seriousharm. Not everyone in Athens agreed, though. Some loved him;others thought him a dangerous influence.

As a young man he had been a brave soldier fighting inthe Peloponnesian wars against the Spartans and their allies.In middle age he shuffled around the marketplace, stopping

people from time to time and asking them awkward questions.That was more or less all he did. But the questions he askedwere razor-sharp. They seemed straightforward; but theyweren’t.

An example of this was his conversation with Euthydemus.Socrates asked him whether being deceitful counted as beingimmoral. Of course it does, Euthydemus replied. He thoughtthat was obvious. But what, Socrates asked, if your friend isfeeling very low and might kill himself, and you steal his knife?Isn’t that a deceitful act? Of course it is. But isn’t it moral ratherthan immoral to do that? It’s a good thing, not a bad one –despite being a deceitful act. Yes, says Euthydemus, who by nowis tied in knots. Socrates by using a clever counter-example hasshown that Euthydemus’ general comment that being deceitfulis immoral doesn’t apply in every situation. Euthydemus hadn’trealized this before.

Over and over again Socrates demonstrated that the peoplehe met in the marketplace didn’t really know what they thoughtthey knew. A military commander would begin a conversationtotally confident that he knew what ‘courage’ meant, but aftertwenty minutes in Socrates’ company would leave completelyconfused. The experience must have been disconcerting.Socrates loved to reveal the limits of what people genuinelyunderstood, and to question the assumptions on which theybuilt their lives. A conversation that ended in everyone realizinghow little they knew was for him a success. Far better that thanto carry on believing that you understood something whenyou didn’t.

At that time in Athens the sons of rich men would be sent tostudy with Sophists. The Sophists were clever teachers whowould coach their students in the art of speech-making. Theycharged very high fees for this. Socrates in contrast didn’t

charge for his services. In fact he claimed he didn’t knowanything, so how could he teach at all? This didn’t stop studentscoming to him and listening in on his conversations. It didn’tmake him popular with the Sophists either.

One day his friend Chaerophon went to the oracle ofApollo at Delphi. The oracle was a wise old woman, a sibyl, whowould answer questions that visitors asked. Her answers wereusually in the form of a riddle. ‘Is anyone wiser than Socrates?’Chaerophon asked. ‘No,’ came the answer. ‘No one is wiser thanSocrates.’

When Chaerophon told Socrates about this he didn’t believeit at first. It really puzzled him. ‘How can I be the wisest man inAthens when I know so little?’ he wondered. He devoted yearsto questioning people to see if anyone was wiser than he was.Finally he realized what the oracle had meant and that she hadbeen right. Lots of people were good at the various things theydid – carpenters were good at carpentry, and soldiers knewabout fighting. But none of them were truly wise. They didn’treally know what they were talking about.

The word ‘philosopher’ comes from the Greek words meaning‘love of wisdom’. The Western tradition in philosophy, the onethat this book follows, spread from Ancient Greece across largeparts of the world, at time cross-fertilized by ideas from theEast. The kind of wisdom that it values is based on argument,reasoning and asking questions, not on believing things simplybecause someone important has told you they are true. Wisdomfor Socrates was not knowing lots of facts, or knowing how todo something. It meant understanding the true nature of ourexistence, including the limits of what we can know. Philosopherstoday are doing more or less what Socrates was doing: askingtough questions, looking at reasons and evidence, struggling toanswer some of the most important questions we can ask

ourselves about the nature of reality and how we should live.Unlike Socrates, though, modern philosophers have the benefitof nearly two and a half thousand years of philosophicalthinking to build on. This book examines ideas of some of thekey thinkers writing in this tradition of Western thought, atradition that Socrates started.

What made Socrates so wise was that he kept asking ques-tions and he was always willing to debate his ideas. Life, hedeclared, is only worth living if you think about what you aredoing. An unexamined existence is all right for cattle, but notfor human beings.

Unusually for a philosopher, Socrates refused to write anythingdown. For him talking was far better than writing. Writtenwords can’t answer back; they can’t explain anything to youwhen you don’t understand them. Face-to-face conversation wasmuch better, he maintained. In conversation we can take intoaccount the kind of person we are talking to; we can adapt whatwe say so that the message gets across. Because he refused towrite, it’s mainly through the work of Socrates’ star pupil Platothat we have much idea of what this great man believed andargued about. Plato wrote down a series of conversations betweenSocrates and the people he questioned. These are known as thePlatonic Dialogues and are great works of literature as well as ofphilosophy – in some ways Plato was the Shakespeare of his day.Reading these dialogues, we get a sense of what Socrates waslike, how clever he was and how infuriating.

Actually it isn’t even as straightforward as that, as we can’talways tell whether Plato was writing down what Socrates reallysaid, or whether he was putting ideas into the mouth of thecharacter he calls ‘Socrates’, ideas which are Plato’s own.

One of the ideas that most people believe is Plato’s ratherthan Socrates’ is that the world is not at all as it seems. There is

a significant difference between appearance and reality. Most ofus mistake appearances for reality. We think we understand, butwe don’t. Plato believed that only philosophers understand whatthe world is truly like. They discover the nature of reality bythinking rather than relying on their senses.

To make this point, Plato described a cave. In that imaginarycave there are people chained facing a wall. In front of themthey can see flickering shadows that they believe are real things.They aren’t. What they see are shadows made by objects held upin front of a fire behind them. These people spend their wholelives thinking that the shadows projected on the wall are the realworld. Then one of them breaks free from his chains and turnstowards the fire. His eyes are blurry at first, but then he starts tosee where he is. He stumbles out of the cave and eventually isable to look at the sun. When he comes back to the cave, no onebelieves what he has to tell them about the world outside. Theman who breaks free is like a philosopher. He sees beyondappearances. Ordinary people have little idea about realitybecause they are content with looking at what’s in front of themrather than thinking deeply about it. But the appearances aredeceptive. What they see are shadows, not reality.

This story of the cave is connected with what’s come to beknown as Plato’s Theory of Forms. The easiest way to under-stand this is through an example. Think of all the circles thatyou have seen in your life. Was any one of them a perfect circle?No. Not one of them was absolutely perfect. In a perfect circleevery point on its circumference is exactly the same distancefrom the centre point. Real circles never quite achieve this. Butyou understood what I meant when I used the words ‘perfectcircle’. So what is that perfect circle? Plato would say that theidea of a perfect circle is the Form of a circle. If you want tounderstand what a circle is, you should focus on the Form of the

circle, not actual circles that you can draw and experiencethrough your visual sense, all of which are imperfect in someway. Similarly, Plato thought, if you want to understand whatgoodness is, then you need to concentrate on the Form of good-ness, not on particular examples of it that you witness.Philosophers are the people who are best suited to thinkingabout the Forms in this abstract way; ordinary people get ledastray by the world as they grasp it through their senses.

Because philosophers are good at thinking about reality,Plato believed they should be in charge and have all the politicalpower. In The Republic, his most famous work, he described animaginary perfect society. Philosophers would be at the top andwould get a special education; but they would sacrifice theirown pleasures for the sake of the citizens they ruled. Beneaththem would be soldiers who were trained to defend the country,and beneath them would be the workers. These three groups ofpeople would be in a perfect balance, Plato thought, a balancethat was like a well-balanced mind with the reasonable partkeeping the emotions and desires in control. Unfortunately hismodel of society was profoundly anti-democratic, and wouldkeep the people under control by a combination of lies andforce. He would have banned most art, on the grounds that hethought it gave false representations of reality. Painters paintappearances, but appearances are deceptive about the Forms.Every aspect of life in Plato’s ideal republic would be strictlycontrolled from above. It’s what we would now call a totalitarianstate. Plato thought that letting the people vote was like lettingthe passengers steer a ship – far better to let people who knewwhat they were doing take charge.

Fifth-century Athens was quite different from the society thatPlato imagined in The Republic. It was a democracy of sorts,though only about 10 per cent of the population could vote.

Women and slaves, for example, were automatically excluded.But citizens were equal before the law, and there was an elabo-rate lottery system to make sure that everyone had a fair chanceof influencing political decisions.

Athens as a whole didn’t value Socrates as highly as Platovalued him. Far from it. Many Athenians felt that Socrates wasdangerous and was deliberately undermining the government. In399 bc, when Socrates was 70 years old, one of them, Meletus,took him to court. He claimed that Socrates was neglecting theAthenian gods, introducing new gods of his own. He alsosuggested that Socrates was teaching the young men of Athens tobehave badly, encouraging them to turn against the authorities.These were both very serious accusations. It is difficult to knownow how accurate they were. Perhaps Socrates really diddiscourage his students from following the state religion, andthere is some evidence that he enjoyed mocking Athenian democ-racy. That would have been consistent with his character. What iscertainly true is that many Athenians believed the charges.

They voted on whether or not he was guilty. Just over halfof the 501 citizens who made up the huge jury thought hewas, and sentenced him to death. If he’d wanted to, he couldprobably have talked his way out of being executed. Butinstead, true to his reputation as a gadfly, he annoyed theAthenians even more by arguing that he had done nothingwrong and that they should, in fact, be rewarding him by givinghim free meals for life instead of punishing him. That didn’tgo down well.

He was put to death by being forced to drink poison madefrom hemlock, a plant that gradually paralyses the body. Socratessaid goodbye to his wife and three sons, and then gathered hisstudents around him. If he had the choice to carry on livingquietly, not asking any more difficult questions, he would not

take it. He’d rather die than that. He had an inner voice that toldhim to keep questioning everything, and he could not betray it.Then he drank the cup of poison. Very soon he was dead.

In Plato’s dialogues, though, Socrates lives on. This difficultman, who kept asking questions and would rather die than stopthinking about how things really are, has been an inspiration forphilosophers ever since.

Socrates’ immediate impact was on those around him. Plato carried on teaching in the spirit of Socrates after his teacher’s death. By far his most impressive pupil was Aristotle, a very different sort of thinker from either of them.

chapter 2

True Happiness

Aristotle

‘One swallow doesn’t make a summer.’ You might think this phrase comes from William Shakespeare or another great poet. It sounds as if it should. In fact it’s from Aristotle’s book The Nicomachean Ethics, so called because he dedicated it to his son Nicomachus. The point he was making was that just as it takes more than the arrival of one swallow to prove that summer has come, and more than a single warm day, so a few moments of pleasure don’t add up to true happiness.

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Happiness for Aristotle wasn’t a matter of short-term joy. Surprisingly, he thought that children couldn’t be happy. This sounds absurd. If children can’t be happy, who can? But it reveals how different his view of happiness was from ours. Children are just beginning their lives, and so haven’t had a full life in any sense. True happiness, he argued, required a longer life.

Aristotle was Plato’s student, and Plato had been Socrates’. Sothese three great thinkers form a chain: Socrates–Plato–Aristotle.

This is often the way. Geniuses don’t usually emerge fromnowhere. Most of them have had an inspirational teacher. But theideas of these three are very different from each other. They didn’tsimply parrot what they had been taught. Each had an originalapproach. Put simply, Socrates was a great talker, Plato was asuperb writer, and Aristotle was interested in everything. Socratesand Plato thought of the world we see as a pale reflection of truereality that could only be reached by abstract philosophicalthought; Aristotle, in contrast, was fascinated by the details ofeverything around him.

Unfortunately, almost all the writing by Aristotle that survivesis in the form of lecture notes. But these records of his thinkinghave still made a huge impact on Western philosophy, even ifthe writing style is often dry. But he wasn’t just a philosopher:he was also fascinated by zoology, astronomy, history, politicsand drama.

Born in Macedonia in 384 bc, after studying with Plato, trav-elling, and working as a tutor to Alexander the Great, Aristotleset up his own school in Athens called the Lyceum. This wasone of the most famous centres of learning of the AncientWorld, a bit like a modern university. From there he sent outresearchers who returned with new information about every-thing from political society to biology. He also started animportant library. In a famous Renaissance painting by Raphael,The School of Athens, Plato points upwards to the world of theForms; in contrast, Aristotle is reaching out towards the worldin front of him.

Plato would have been content to philosophize from anarmchair; but Aristotle wanted to explore the reality we experi-ence through the senses. He rejected his teacher’s Theory ofForms, believing instead that the way to understand any generalcategory was to examine particular examples of it. So to

understand what a cat is he thought you needed to look at realcats, not think abstractly about the Form of cat.

One question that Aristotle mulled over was ‘How should welive?’ Socrates and Plato had both asked it before him. The needto answer it is part of what draws people to philosophy in thefirst place. Aristotle had his own answer. The simple version ofit is this: seek happiness.

But what does that phrase ‘seek happiness’ mean? Today mostpeople told to seek happiness would think of ways they couldenjoy themselves. Perhaps happiness for you would involveexotic holidays, going to music festivals or parties, or spendingtime with friends. It might also mean curling up with yourfavourite book, or going to an art gallery. But although thesemight be ingredients in a good life for Aristotle, he certainlydidn’t believe that the best way to live was to go out and seekpleasure in these ways. That on its own wouldn’t be a good life,in his view. The Greek word Aristotle used was eudaimonia(pronounced ‘you-die-moania’, but meaning the opposite). Thisis sometimes translated as ‘flourishing’ or ‘success’ rather than‘happiness’. It is more than the sort of pleasant sensations youcan get from eating mango-flavoured ice cream or watchingyour favourite sports team win. Eudaimonia isn’t about fleetingmoments of bliss or how you feel. It’s more objective than that.This is quite hard to grasp as we are so used to thinking thathappiness is about how we feel and nothing more.

Think of a flower. If you water it, give it enough light, maybefeed it a little, then it will grow and bloom. If you neglect it, keepit in the dark, let insects nibble its leaves, allow it to dry out, itwill wilt and die, or at best end up as a very unattractive plant.Human beings can flourish like plants too, though unlike plantswe make choices for ourselves: we decide what we want to doand be.

Aristotle was convinced that there is such a thing as humannature, that human beings, as he put it, have a function. Thereis a way of living that suits us best. What sets us apart fromother animals and everything else is that we can think andreason about what we ought to do. From this he concluded thatthe best kind of life for a human being was one that used ourpowers of reason.

Surprisingly, Aristotle believed that things you don’t knowabout – and even events after your death – could contribute toyour eudaimonia. This sounds odd. Assuming there is no after-life, how could anything that happens when you are no longeraround affect your happiness? Well, imagine that you are a parentand your happiness in part rests on the hopes for your child’sfuture. If, sadly, that child falls seriously ill after your own death,then your eudaimonia will have been affected by this. In Aristotle’sview your life will have got worse, even though you won’t actuallyknow about your child’s sickness and you are no longer alive. Thisbrings out well his idea that happiness is not just a matter of howyou feel. Happiness in this sense is your overall achievement inlife, something that can be affected by what happens to others youcare about. Events outside your control and knowledge affectthat. Whether you are happy or not depends partly on good luck.

The central question is: ‘What can we do to increase ourchance of eudaimonia?’ Aristotle’s answer was: ‘Develop theright kind of character.’ You need to feel the right kind ofemotions at the right time and these will lead you to behavewell. In part this will be a matter of how you’ve been brought up,since the best way to develop good habits is to practise themfrom an early age. So luck comes in there too. Good patterns ofbehaviour are virtues; bad ones are vices.

Think of the virtue of bravery in wartime. Perhaps a soldierneeds to put his own life at risk in order to save some civilians

from an attacking army. A foolhardy person has no concernwhatsoever for his own safety. He might rush into a dangeroussituation too, perhaps even when he does not need to, but that’snot true bravery, only reckless risk-taking. At the other extreme,a cowardly soldier can’t overcome his fear enough to act in anappropriate way at all, and will be paralysed with terror at thevery moment when he is most needed. A brave or courageousperson in this situation, however, still feels fear, but is able toconquer it and take action. Aristotle thought that every virtuelies in between two extremes like this. Here bravery is halfwaybetween foolhardiness and cowardice. This is sometimes knownas Aristotle’s doctrine of the Golden Mean.

Aristotle’s approach to ethics isn’t just of historical interest.Many modern philosophers believe that he was right about theimportance of developing the virtues, and that his view of whathappiness is was accurate and inspiring. Instead of looking toincrease our pleasure in life, they think, we should try tobecome better people and do the right thing. That is whatmakes a life go well.

All this makes it sound as if Aristotle was just interested inindividual personal development. But he wasn’t. Human beingsare political animals, he argued. We need to be able to live withother people and we need a system of justice to cope with thedarker side of our nature. Eudaimonia can only be achieved inrelation to life in a society. We live together, and need to findour happiness by interacting well with those around us in awell-ordered political state.

There was one unfortunate side effect of Aristotle’s brilliance,though. He was so intelligent, and his research was so thorough,that many who read his work believed he was right about every-thing. This was bad for progress, and bad for philosophy in thetradition that Socrates had started. For hundreds of years after

his death most scholars accepted his views of the world asunquestionably true. If they could prove that Aristotle had saidsomething, that was enough for them. This is what is sometimescalled ‘truth by authority’ – believing something must be truebecause an important ‘authority’ figure has said it is.

What do you think would happen if you dropped a piece ofwood and a piece of heavy metal that was the same size from ahigh place? Which would hit the ground first? Aristotle thoughtthat the heavier one, the one made of metal, would fall faster. Infact, this isn’t what happens. They fall at the same speed. Butbecause Aristotle declared it to be true, throughout the medi-eval period just about everyone believed that it must be true. Nomore proof was needed. In the sixteenth century Galileo Galileisupposedly dropped a wooden ball and a cannonball from theleaning tower of Pisa to test this out. Both reached the groundat the same time. So Aristotle was wrong. But it would havebeen quite easy to show this much earlier.

Relying on someone else’s authority was completely againstthe spirit of Aristotle’s research. It’s against the spirit of philos-ophy too. Authority doesn’t prove anything by itself. Aristotle’sown methods were investigation, research and clear reasoning.Philosophy thrives on debate, on the possibility of being wrong,on challenging views, and exploring alternatives. Fortunately, inmost ages there have been philosophers ready to think criticallyabout what other people tell them must be so. One philosopherwho tried to think critically about absolutely everything was thesceptic Pyrrho.

chap ter 3

We Know Nothing

Pyrrho

No one knows anything – and even that’s not certain. Youshouldn’t rely on what you believe to be true. You might bemistaken. Everything can be questioned, everything doubted.The best option, then, is to keep an open mind. Don’t commit,and you won’t be disappointed. That was the main teaching ofScepticism, a philosophy that was popular for several hundredyears in Ancient Greece and later in Rome. Unlike Plato andAristotle, the most extreme sceptics avoided holding firm opin-ions on anything whatsoever. The Ancient Greek Pyrrho (c.365–c. 270 bc) was the most famous and probably the mostextreme sceptic of all time. His life was decidedly odd.

You may believe that you know all kinds of things. You knowthat you are reading this now, for example. But sceptics wouldchallenge this. Think about why you believe that you are actu-ally reading this and not just imagining that you are. Can you besure that you are right? You appear to be reading – that’s the way

it seems to you. But perhaps you are hallucinating or dreaming(this is an idea that René Descartes would develop someeighteen hundred years later: see Chapter 11). Socrates’ insist-ence that all that he knew was how little he knew was a scepticalposition too. But Pyrrho took it much much further. He prob-ably took it a little too far.

If reports of his life are to be believed (and perhaps we shouldbe sceptical about them too), Pyrrho made a career from nottaking anything for granted. Like Socrates, he never wroteanything down. So what we know about him comes from whatother people recorded, mostly several centuries after his death.One of those, Diogenes Laertius, tells us that Pyrrho became acelebrity and was made a high priest of Elis where he lived andthat in his honour philosophers didn’t have to pay any taxes. Wehave no way of checking the truth of this, though it does soundlike a good idea.

As far as we can tell, though, Pyrrho lived out his scepticismin some quite extraordinary ways. His time on earth would havebeen very short if he hadn’t had friends to protect him. Anyextreme sceptic needs the support of less sceptical people, orvery good luck, to survive for long.

Here’s how he approached life. We can’t completely trust thesenses. Sometimes they mislead us. It’s easy to make a mistakeabout what you can see in the dark, for example. What lookslike a fox may only be a cat. Or you might think you heardsomeone calling you when it was only the wind in the trees.Because our senses quite often mislead us, Pyrrho decided neverto trust them. He didn’t rule out the possibility that they mightbe giving him accurate information, but he kept an open mindon the issue.

So, whereas most people would take the sight of a cliff edgewith a sheer drop as strong evidence that it would be very

foolish to keep walking forward, Pyrrho didn’t. His sensesmight be deceiving him, so he didn’t trust them. Even thefeeling of his toes curling over the cliff edge, or the sensation oftipping forward, wouldn’t have convinced him he was about tofall to the rocks below. It wasn’t even obvious to him that fallingon to rocks would be so bad for his health. How could he beabsolutely sure of that? His friends, who presumably weren’t allSceptics themselves, stopped him having accidents, but if theyhadn’t, he would have been in trouble every few minutes.

Why be afraid of savage dogs if you can’t be sure they want tohurt you? Just because they’re barking and baring their teethand running towards you doesn’t mean they’ll definitely bite.And even if they do, it won’t necessarily hurt. Why care aboutoncoming traffic when you cross the road? Those carts mightnot hit you. Who really knows? And what difference does itmake if you are alive or dead anyway? Somehow Pyrrhomanaged to live out this philosophy of total indifference andconquer all the usual and natural human emotions and patternsof behaviour.

That’s the legend anyway. Some of these stories about himwere probably invented to make fun of his philosophy. But it’sunlikely that they’re all fictional. For example, he famously keptcompletely calm while sailing through one of the worst stormsanyone had ever witnessed. The wind was tearing the sails topieces and huge waves were breaking over the ship. Everyonearound him was terrified. But it didn’t bother Pyrrho in theleast. Since appearances are so often deceptive, he couldn’t beabsolutely sure that any harm would come from it. He managedto remain peaceful while even the most experienced sailorswere panicking. He demonstrated that it’s possible to stay indif-ferent even under these conditions. That story has a ring oftruth about it.

As a young man, Pyrrho visited India. Perhaps that was whatinspired him in his unusual lifestyle. India has a great traditionof spiritual teachers or gurus putting themselves throughextreme and almost unbelievable physical deprivation: beingburied alive, hanging weights from sensitive parts of theirbodies, or living for weeks without food, to achieve inner still-ness. Pyrrho’s approach to philosophy was certainly close to thatof a mystic. Whatever techniques he used to achieve this, hecertainly practised what he preached. His calm state of mindmade a deep impression on those around him. The reason hedidn’t get worked up about anything was that, in his opinion,absolutely everything was simply a matter of opinion. If there’sno chance of discovering the truth, then there’s no need to fret.We can then distance ourselves from all firm beliefs, becausefirm beliefs always involve delusion.

If you’d met Pyrrho, you’d probably have thought he was mad.And perhaps he was in a way. But his views and his behaviourwere consistent. He would think that your various certaintieswere simply unreasonable and stood in the way of your peace ofmind. You are taking too much for granted. It’s as if you havebuilt a house on sand. The foundations of your thought aren’tanything like as firm as you’d like to believe and are unlikely tomake you happy.

Pyrrho neatly summarized his philosophy in the form ofthree questions anyone who wants to be happy should ask:

What are things really like?

What attitude should we adopt to them?

What will happen to someone who does adopt that attitude?

His answers were simple and to the point. First, we can’t everknow what the world is really like – that’s beyond us. No one will

ever know about the ultimate nature of reality. Such knowledgesimply isn’t possible for human beings. So forget about that.This view is completely at odds with Plato’s Theory of Formsand the possibility that philosophers could gain knowledge ofthem through abstract thought (see Chapter 1). Secondly, and asa result of this, we shouldn’t commit to any view. Because wecan’t know anything for sure, we should suspend all judgementand live our lives in an uncommitted way. Every desire that youhave suggests that you believe that one thing is better thananother. Unhappiness arises from not getting what you want.But you can’t know that anything is better than anything else. So,he thought, to be happy you should free yourself from desiresand not care about how things turn out. That is the right way tolive. Recognize that nothing matters. That way nothing willaffect your state of mind, which will be one of inner tranquillity.Thirdly, if you follow this teaching this is what will happen toyou. You will start off by being speechless, presumably becauseyou won’t know what to say about anything. Eventually, you willbe free from all worry. That’s the best you or anyone can hopefor in life. It’s almost like a religious experience.

That’s the theory. It seemed to work for Pyrrho, though it ishard to see it giving the same results for most of humanity. Fewof us will ever achieve the kind of indifference that he recom-mended. And not everyone will be lucky enough to have a teamof friends to save them from their worst mistakes. In fact, ifeveryone followed his advice, there wouldn’t be anyone left toprotect the Pyrrhonic Sceptics from themselves and the wholeschool of philosophy would very quickly die out as they toppledover cliff edges, stepped in front of moving vehicles, or weresavaged by vicious dogs.

The basic weakness of Pyrrho’s approach is that he movedfrom ‘You can’t know anything’ to the conclusion ‘Therefore

you should ignore your instincts and feelings about what isdangerous’. But our instincts do save us from many possibledangers. They may not be totally reliable, but that doesn’t meanwe should just ignore them. Even Pyrrho is supposed to havemoved away when a dog snapped at him: he couldn’t completelyovercome his automatic reactions however much he wanted to.So to try and live out Pyrrhonic Scepticism seems perverse. Noris it obvious that living this way produces the peace of mind thatPyrrho thought it would. It is possible to be sceptical aboutPyrrho’s Scepticism. You might want to question whether tran-quillity really will come from taking the sorts of risks thathe took. It might have worked for Pyrrho, but what is theevidence that it will work for you? You might not be 100 percent sure that a ferocious dog will bite you, but it makes sensenot to take the chance if it is 99 per cent certain.

Not all sceptics in the history of philosophy have been asextreme as Pyrrho. There is a great tradition of moderate scepti-cism, of questioning assumptions and looking closely at theevidence for what we believe, without attempting to live asif everything was in doubt all of the time. Sceptical questioningof this sort is at the heart of philosophy. All the great philoso-phers have been sceptics in this sense. It is the opposite ofdogmatism. Someone who is dogmatic is very confident thatthey know the truth. Philosophers challenge dogma. Theyask why people believe what they do, what sorts of evidencethey have to support their conclusions. That was what Socratesand Aristotle did and it is what present-day philosophers dotoo. But they don’t do this just for the sake of being difficult.The point of moderate philosophical scepticism is to get closerto the truth, or at least to reveal how little we know or can know.You don’t need to risk falling off a cliff edge to be this kindof sceptic. But you do need to be prepared to ask awkward

questions and to think critically about the answers that peoplegive you.

Although Pyrrho preached freedom from all cares, most of usdon’t achieve that. One common worry is the fact that each ofus will die. Another Greek philosopher, Epicurus, had someclever suggestions about how we can come to terms with this.

The Garden Path

Epicurus

Imagine your funeral. What will it be like? Who’ll be there?What will they say? What you are imagining must be from yourown perspective. It’s as if you are still there watching eventsfrom a particular place, perhaps from above, or from a seatamong the mourners. Now, some people do believe that that isa serious possibility, that after death we can survive outside aphysical body as a kind of spirit that might even be able to seewhat’s going on in this world. But for those of us who believedeath is final, there is a real problem. Every time we try andimagine not being there we have to do it by imagining that weare there, watching what is happening when we’re not there.

Whether or not you can imagine your own death, it seemsquite natural to be at least a bit afraid of not existing. Whowouldn’t fear their own death? If there’s anything we should beanxious about, it’s surely that. It seems perfectly reasonable toworry about not existing even if that will happen many years

from now. It’s instinctive. Very few people alive have neverthought deeply about this.

The Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 bc) arguedthat fear of death was a waste of time and based on bad logic.It was a state of mind to be overcome. If you think clearly aboutit, death shouldn’t be frightening at all. Once you get yourthinking straight you’ll enjoy your time here much more – whichfor Epicurus was extremely important. The point of philosophy,he believed, was to make your life go better, to help you findhappiness. Some people believe that it is morbid to dwell on yourown death, but for Epicurus it was a way of making living moreintense.

Epicurus was born on the Greek island of Samos in theAegean. He spent most of his life in Athens where he becamesomething of a cult figure, attracting a group of students wholived with him in a commune. The group included women andslaves – a rare situation in Ancient Athens. This didn’t makehim popular, except with his followers who almost worshippedhim. He ran this philosophy school in a house with a garden –and so it came to be known as The Garden.

Like many Ancient philosophers (and some modern ones,such as Peter Singer: see Chapter 40), Epicurus believed thatphilosophy should be practical. It should change how you live.So it was important that those who joined him in The Gardenput the philosophy into practice rather than just learnt about it.

For Epicurus the key to life was recognizing that we all seekpleasure. More importantly, we avoid pain whenever we can.That’s what drives us. Eliminating suffering from your life andincreasing happiness will make it go better. The best way to live,then, was this: have a very simple lifestyle, be kind to thosearound you, and surround yourself with friends. That way you’llbe able to satisfy most of your desires. You won’t be left wanting

something you can’t get. It’s no good having a desperate urge toown a mansion if you won’t ever have the money to buy one.Don’t spend your whole life working in order to get somethingthat is probably beyond your reach anyway. It’s far better to livein a simple way. If your desires are simple they are easy to satisfyand you will have the time and energy to enjoy the thingsthat matter. That was his recipe for happiness, and it makes a lotof sense.

This teaching was a form of therapy. Epicurus’ aim was tocure his students of mental pain, and to suggest how physicalpain could be made bearable by remembering past pleasures.He pointed out that pleasures are enjoyable at the time, but theyare also enjoyable when we remember them afterwards, so theycan have long-lasting benefits for us. When he was dying and insome discomfort, he wrote to a friend about how he managed todistract himself from his illness by recalling his enjoyment oftheir past conversations.

This is all quite different from what the word ‘epicurean’means today. It’s almost the opposite. An ‘epicure’ is someonewho loves eating fine foods, someone who indulges in luxuryand sensual pleasure. Epicurus had much simpler tastes thanthat suggests. He taught the need to be moderate – giving in togreedy appetites would just create more and more desires andso in the end produce the mental anguish of unfulfilled craving.That sort of life of wanting more and more should be avoided.He and his followers ate bread and water rather than exoticfood. If you start drinking expensive wine, then you’ll very soonend up wanting to drink even more expensive wine, and getcaught in the trap of longing for things that you can’t have.Despite this, his enemies claimed that in The Garden communeEpicureans spent most of their time eating, drinking and havingsex with each other in a non-stop orgy. That’s how the modern

meaning of ‘epicurean’ got going. If Epicurus’ followers reallydid do this, it was completely at odds with their leader’steaching. It’s more likely, though, that this was just a maliciousrumour.

One thing Epicurus certainly did spend a lot of time doingwas writing. He was prolific. Records suggest that he wrote asmany as three hundred books on rolls of papyrus, though noneof these has survived. What we know about him comes mostlyfrom notes followers wrote. They learnt his books by heart, butthey also passed on his teaching in written form. Some of theirscrolls survived in fragments, preserved in the volcanic ash thatfell on Herculaneum near Pompeii when Mount Vesuviuserupted. Another important source of information aboutEpicurus’ teaching is the long poem On the Nature of Thingsby the Roman philosopher-poet, Lucretius. Composed overtwo hundred years after Epicurus’ death, this poem summa-rized the key teachings of his school.

So, to return to the question that Epicurus asked, whyshouldn’t you fear death? One reason is that you won’t experi-ence it. Your death won’t be something that happens to you.When it happens you won’t be there. The twentieth-centuryphilosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein echoed this view when hewrote in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ‘Death is not anevent in life’. The idea here is that events are things that weexperience, but our own death is the removal of the possibilityof experience, not something further that we could be consciousof and somehow live through.

When we imagine our own death, Epicurus suggested, mostof us make the mistake of thinking there will be something ofus left to feel whatever happens to the dead body. But this is amisunderstanding about what we are. We are tied to our partic-ular bodies, our particular flesh and bone. Epicurus’ view was

that we consist of atoms (though what he meant by this termwas a bit different from what modern scientists mean by it).Once these atoms come apart at death we no longer exist asindividuals capable of consciousness. Even if someone couldcarefully put all the bits back together again later, and breathelife back into this reconstructed body, it wouldn’t be anything todo with me. The new living body wouldn’t be me, despitelooking like me. I wouldn’t feel its pains, because once the bodyceases to function nothing can bring it back to life. The chain ofidentity would have been broken.

Another way Epicurus thought he could cure his followers oftheir fear of death was by pointing out the difference betweenwhat we feel about the future and what we feel about the past.We care about one but not the other. Think about the timebefore your birth. There was all that time that you didn’t exist.Not just the weeks when you were in your mother’s womb whenyou might have been born early, or even the point before youwere conceived but were just a possibility for your parents, butrather the trillions of years before you came along. We don’tusually worry about not existing for all those millennia beforeour birth. Why should anyone care about all that time that theydidn’t exist? But then, if that’s true, why should we care so muchabout all those aeons of non-existence after death? Our thoughtis asymmetrical. We’re very biased towards worrying about thetime after our death rather than the time before our birth. ButEpicurus thought this was a mistake. Once you see this, youshould start thinking of the time after your death in the samesort of way that you do the time before it. Then it won’t be a bigconcern.

Some people get very worried that they might end up beingpunished in an afterlife. Epicurus dismissed that worry too. Thegods aren’t really interested in their creation, he confidently told

his followers. They exist apart from us, and don’t get involvedwith the world. So you should be all right. That’s the cure – thecombination of these arguments. If it works, you should feelmuch more relaxed about your future non-existence now.Epicurus summed up his whole philosophy in his epitaph:

‘I was not; I have been; I am not; I do not mind’

If you believe that we are simply physical beings, composed ofmatter, and that there is no serious risk of punishment afterdeath, then Epicurus’ reasoning may well persuade you thatyour death is nothing to be afraid of. You might still worryabout the process of dying as that is often painful and definitelyexperienced. That’s true even if it is unreasonable to fret aboutdeath itself. Remember, though, that Epicurus believed thatgood memories could ease pain, so he had an answer even forthat. But if you think that you are a soul in a body, and that soulcan survive bodily death, Epicurus’ cure is unlikely to work foryou: you will be able to imagine carrying on existing even afteryour heart has stopped beating.

The Epicureans weren’t alone in thinking of philosophy as atype of therapy: most Greek and Roman philosophers did. TheStoics, in particular, were renowned for their lessons in how tobe psychologically tough in the face of unfortunate events.

chap ter 5

Learning Not to Care

Epictetus, Cicero, Seneca

If it starts to rain just as you have to leave your house, that isunfortunate. But if you have to go out, apart from putting on araincoat or getting your umbrella, or cancelling your appoint-ment, there isn’t much you can do about it. You can’t stop therain no matter how much you want to. Should you be upsetabout this? Or should you just be philosophical? ‘Being philo-sophical’ simply means accepting what you can’t change. Whatabout the inevitable process of growing older and the shortnessof life? How should you feel about these features of the humancondition? Same again?

When people say they are ‘philosophical’ about what happensto them, they are using the word as the Stoics would have done.The name ‘Stoic’ came from the Stoa, which was a paintedporch in Athens where these philosophers used to meet. One ofthe first was Zeno of Citium (334–262 bc). Early Greek Stoicshad views on a wide range of philosophical problems about

reality, logic and ethics. But they were most famous for theirviews on mental control. Their basic idea was that we shouldonly worry about things we can change. We shouldn’t getworked up about anything else. Like the Sceptics, they aimedfor a calm state of mind. Even when facing tragic events, suchas the death of a loved one, the Stoic should remain unmoved.Our attitude to what happens is within our control even thoughwhat happens often isn’t.

At the heart of Stoicism was the idea that we are responsiblefor what we feel and think. We can choose our response to goodand bad luck. Some people think of their emotions as like theweather. The Stoics, in contrast, thought that what we feel abouta situation or event is a matter of choice. Emotions don’t simplyhappen to us. We don’t have to feel sad when we fail to get whatwe want; we don’t have to feel angry when someone tricks us.They believed emotions clouded reasoning and damaged judge-ment. We should not just control them, but wherever possibleremove them altogether.

Epictetus (ad 55–135), one of the best-known later Stoics,started out as a slave. He had endured many hardships andknew about pain and hunger – he walked with a limp as aresult of a bad beating. When he declared that the mind canremain free even when the body is enslaved he was drawingon his own experience. This wasn’t just an abstract theory.His teaching included practical advice about how to deal withpain and suffering. It boiled down to this: ‘Our thoughts areup to us.’ This philosophy inspired a US fighter pilot JamesB. Stockdale who was shot down over North Vietnam duringthe Vietnam war. Stockdale was tortured many times andkept in a cell in solitary confinement for four years. He managedto survive by applying what he remembered of Epictetus’teaching from a course he had taken in college. As he drifted

down towards enemy territory on his parachute he resolved tostay unmoved by what others did to him, no matter how harshhis treatment. If he couldn’t change it, he wouldn’t let it affecthim. Stoicism gave him the strength to survive the pain andloneliness that would have destroyed most people.

This tough philosophy began in Ancient Greece, but it was inthe Roman Empire that it flourished. Two important writerswho helped to spread the Stoic teaching were Marcus TulliusCicero (106–43 bc) and Lucius Annaeus Seneca (1 bc–ad 65).The brevity of life and the inevitably of ageing were topics thatparticularly interested them. They recognized that ageing is anatural process, and didn’t try to change what couldn’t bechanged. At the same time, though, they believed in making thebest of our short time here.

Cicero seemed to pack more than most into a day: hewas a lawyer and politician as well as a philosopher. In his bookOn Old Age he identified four main problems with growingolder: it gets harder to work, the body becomes weaker, joy inphysical pleasures goes, and death is close. Ageing is inevitablebut, as Cicero argued, we can choose how we react to thatprocess. We should recognize that decline in old age need notmake life unbearable. First, old people can often get by doingless because of their experience, so any work they do can bemore effective. Their bodies and minds won’t necessarilydecline dramatically if they exercise them. And even if physicalpleasures become less enjoyable, old people can spend more timeon friendship and conversation which are themselves veryrewarding. Finally, he believed that the soul lived for ever, so thatold people shouldn’t worry about dying. Cicero’s attitude was thatwe should both accept the natural process of growing older andrecognize that the attitude we take to that process need not bepessimistic.

Seneca, another great popularizer of Stoic views, took asimilar line when he wrote about the brevity of life. You don’toften hear people complaining that life is too long. Most say it’sfar too short. There’s so much to do and so little time in whichto do it. In the words of the Ancient Greek Hippocrates, ‘Life isshort, art is long.’ Old people who can see their death approachingoften wish for just a few more years so that they can achievewhat they really wanted to in life. But often it’s too late andthey’re left feeling sad about what might have been. Natureis cruel in this respect. Just as we are getting on top of things,we die.

Seneca didn’t agree with this view. An all-rounder like Cicero,he found time to be a playwright, a politician and a successfulbusinessman as well as a philosopher. The problem as he sawit was not how short our lives are, but rather how badly mostof us use what time we have. Once again, it was our attitudeto unavoidable aspects of the human condition that matteredmost for him. We should not feel angry that life is short, butinstead should make the most of it. He pointed out that somepeople would waste a thousand years as easily as they do thelife that they have. And even then they’d probably still complainthat life was too short. In fact life is usually long enough toget plenty done if we make the right choices: if we don’t fritterit away on useless tasks. Some chase after money with suchenergy that they don’t have time to do much else; others fallinto the trap of giving over all their free time to drinkingand sex.

If you wait till you are old to discover this, it will be too late,Seneca thought. Having white hair and wrinkles doesn’t guar-antee that an old person has spent much time doing anythingworthwhile, even though some people mistakenly act as if it does.Someone who sets sail in a ship and is carried this way and that

by stormy winds hasn’t been on a voyage. He’s just been tossedabout a lot. So it is with life. Being out of control, drifting throughevents without finding time for the experiences that are mostvaluable and meaningful, is very different from truly living.

One benefit of living your life well is that you won’t have tobe afraid of your memories when you are old. If you waste yourtime, when you look back you may not want to think about howyou spent your life, as it will probably be too painful to contem-plate all the opportunities you missed. That’s why so manypeople become preoccupied with trivial work, Seneca thought– it’s a way of avoiding the truth about what they’ve failed to do.He urged his readers to remove themselves from the crowd andto avoid hiding from themselves by being busy.

How, then, according to Seneca, should we spend our time?The Stoic ideal was to live like a recluse, away from otherpeople. The most fruitful way to exist, he declared – percep-tively – was studying philosophy. This was a way of being trulyalive.

Seneca’s life gave him plenty of chances to practise what hepreached. In ad 41, for example, he was accused of having anaffair with the Emperor Gaius’ sister. It’s not clear whether hehad or not, but the result was that he was sent into exile inCorsica for the next eight years. Then his luck turned again andhe was called back to Rome to become tutor to the 12-year-old emperor-to-be, Nero. Later Seneca acted as his speech-writer and political advisor. This relationship ended very badly,though: another twist of fate. Nero accused Seneca of being partof a plot to murder him. There was no escape for Seneca thistime. Nero told him to commit suicide. Refusal was out of thequestion and would have led to execution anyway. To resistwould have been pointless. He took his own life, and, true to hisStoicism, was peaceful and calm to the end.

One way of looking at the main teaching of the Stoics is tothink of it as a kind of psychotherapy, a series of psychologicaltechniques that will make our lives calmer. Get rid of thosetroublesome emotions that cloud your thinking and everythingwill be much more straightforward. Unfortunately, though,even if you manage to calm your emotions, you may find thatyou have lost something important. The state of indifferencechampioned by the Stoics may reduce unhappiness in the faceof events we can’t control. But the cost might be that we becomecold, heartless, and perhaps even less human. If that is the priceof achieving calm, it may be too high.

Although influenced by Ancient Greek philosophy, Augustine,an early Christian whose ideas we’ll turn to next, was far from aStoic. He was a man of strong passions with a deep concern aboutthe evil he saw in the world and a desperate desire to understandGod and his plans for humanity.

chapter 6

Who Is Pulling Our Strings?

Augustine

Augustine (354–430) desperately wanted to know the truth. Asa Christian, he believed in God. But his belief left many ques-tions unanswered. What did God want him to do? How shouldhe live? What should he believe? He spent most of his wakinglife thinking and writing about these questions. The stakes werevery high. For people who believe in the possibility of spendingeternity in hell, making a philosophical mistake can seem tohave terrible consequences. As Augustine saw it, he might endup burning in sulphur for ever if he was wrong. One problem heagonized over was why God allowed evil in the world. Theanswer he gave is still a popular one with many believers.

In the medieval period, roughly from the fifth to the fifteenthcentury, philosophy and religion were very tightly interlinked.Medieval philosophers learnt from Ancient Greek philosopherssuch as Plato and Aristotle. But they adapted their ideas, applyingthem to their own religions. Many of these philosophers were

Christians, but there were important Jewish and Arabic philoso-phers such as Maimonides and Avicenna too. Augustine, whowas much later made a saint, stands out as one of the greatest.

Augustine was born in Tagaste in what is now Algeria inNorth Africa but was then still part of the Roman Empire. Hisreal name was Aurelius Augustinus, though he is now almostalways known as either St Augustine or Augustine of Hippo(after the city where he later lived).

Augustine’s mother was a Christian, but his father followed alocal religion. After a wild youth and early adulthood duringwhich he had a child by a mistress, Augustine converted toChristianity in his thirties, eventually becoming Bishop of Hippo.He famously asked God to make him stop having sexual desires‘but not yet’, because he was enjoying worldly pleasures too much.In later life he wrote many books including his Confessions, TheCity of God and almost a hundred others, drawing heavily on thewisdom of Plato but giving it a Christian twist.

Most Christians think that God has special powers: he orshe is supremely good, knows everything and can do anything.That is all part of the definition of ‘God’. God wouldn’t be Godwithout having these qualities. In many other religions God isdescribed in similar ways, but Augustine was only interested ina Christian perspective.

Anyone who believes in this God will still have to admit thereis a great deal of suffering in the world. That would be very hardto deny. Some is the result of natural evil such as earthquakesand diseases. Some of this suffering is due to moral evil: evilcaused by human beings. Murder and torture are two obviousexamples of moral evil. Long before Augustine was writing, theGreek philosopher Epicurus (see Chapter 4) had recognizedthat this presents a problem. How could a good, all-powerfulGod tolerate evil? If God can’t stop it happening, then he can’t

be truly all-powerful. There are limits to what he can do. But ifGod is all-powerful and doesn’t seem inclined to stop it, howcan he be all-good? That didn’t seem to make sense. It puzzlesmany people today too. Augustine focused on moral evil. Herealized that the idea of a good God who knows that this kindof evil happens and does nothing to prevent it is difficult tounderstand. He wasn’t satisfied with the idea that God moves inmysterious ways that are beyond human comprehension.Augustine wanted answers.

Imagine a murderer about to kill his victim. He is poised overhim with a sharp knife. A truly evil act is about to take place. Yetwe know that God is powerful enough to stop it happening. Itwould just take a few minor alterations to the neurons in thewould-be murderer’s brain. Or God could makes knives turnsoft and rubbery every time someone tried to use them as adeadly weapon. That way they would just bounce off the victim,and no one would get hurt. God must know what’s going on ashe knows absolutely everything. Nothing can escape him. Andhe must want the evil not to happen, because that is part of whatit means to be supremely good. Yet the murderer kills his victimall the same. Steel knives don’t turn to rubber. There is no flashof lightning, no thunderbolt, the weapon doesn’t miraculouslyfall from the murderer’s hand. Nor does the murderer changehis mind at the last minute. So what is going on? This is theclassic Problem of Evil, the problem of explaining why Godallows such things. presumably if everything comes from God,then the evil must come from God too. In some sense God musthave wanted this to happen.

In his younger days Augustine had a way of avoiding believingthat God wanted evil to happen. He was a Manichaean.Manichaeism was a religion that originally came from Persia(present-day Iran). The Manichaeans believed that God wasn’t

supremely powerful. Instead there was a never-ending strugglegoing on between equal forces of good and evil. So on this view,God and Satan were locked in an ongoing battle for control.Both were immensely strong, but neither was powerful enoughto defeat the other. In particular places at particular times, evilgot the upper hand. But never for long. Goodness would returnand triumph over evil again. This explained why such terriblethings happened. Evil came from dark forces and goodnessfrom the forces of light.

Within a person, the Manichaeans believed, goodness camefrom the soul. Evil came from the body, with all its weaknessesand desires and its tendency to lead us astray. This explainedwhy people were sometimes drawn towards wrongdoing. Theproblem of evil wasn’t such a problem for them because theManichaeans didn’t accept the idea that God was so powerfulthat he controlled every aspect of reality. If God didn’t havepower over everything, then he wasn’t responsible for the exist-ence of evil, nor could anyone blame God for failing to preventevil. Manichaeans would have explained the murderer’s actionsas due to the powers of darkness within him leading himtowards evil. These powers were so strong in an individual thatthe forces of light could not defeat them.

In later life Augustine came to reject the Manichaeanapproach. He couldn’t see why the struggle between good andevil would be never-ending. Why didn’t God win the battle?Surely the forces of good were stronger than those of evil?Although Christians accept that there can be powers of evil,these powers are never as strong as God’s power. Yet if God wastruly all-powerful, as Augustine came to believe, the problem ofevil remained. Why did God allow evil? Why was there so muchof it? There was no easy solution. Augustine thought long andhard about these problems. His main solution was based on the

existence of free will: the human ability to choose what we willdo next. It’s often known as the Free Will Defence. This istheodicy – the attempt to explain and defend how a good Godcould allow suffering.

God has given us free will. You can, for example choosewhether or not to read the next sentence. That’s your choice. Ifno one is forcing you to read on, then you are free to stop.Augustine thought having free will is good. It allows us to actmorally. We can decide to be good, which for him meantfollowing God’s commands, particularly the Ten Commandments,as well as Jesus’ command to ‘Love thy neighbour’. But a conse-quence of having free will is that we can decide to do evil. We canbe led astray and do bad things, like lying, stealing, harming oreven killing people. This often happens when our emotionsoverpower our reason. We develop strong desires for objects andfor money. We give in to our physical lusts and are led away fromGod and what God commands. Augustine believed that therational side of us should keep our passions under control, aview he shared with Plato. Human beings, unlike animals, havethe power of reason and should use it. If God had programmedus always to choose good over evil we wouldn’t do any harm, butwe wouldn’t really be free, and we couldn’t use our reason todecide what to do. God could have made us like that. Augustineargued that it was much better that he gave us choice. Otherwisewe’d have been like puppets with God pulling all our strings sothat we always behaved ourselves. There would be no point inthinking about how to behave since we would always automati-cally choose the good option.

So God is powerful enough to prevent all evil. But the factthat evil exists is still not directly due to God. Moral evil is aresult of our choices. Augustine believed that it was also partlya result of Adam and Eve’s choices. Like many Christians of his

time, he was convinced that things went terribly wrong in theGarden of Eden as described in the first book of the Bible,Genesis. When Eve and then Adam ate from the Tree ofKnowledge and so betrayed God, they brought sin into theworld. This sin, called Original Sin, was not just something thataffected their lives. Absolutely every human being pays theprice. Augustine believed that Original Sin gets passed on toeach new generation by the act of sexual reproduction. Even achild from its earliest moments bears traces of this sin. OriginalSin makes us more likely to sin ourselves.

For many present-day readers, this idea that we are somehowto blame and are being punished for actions that someone elsecommitted is very hard to accept. It seems unfair. But the ideathat evil is the result of our having free will and not directly dueto God still convinces many believers – it allows them to believein an all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good God.

Boethius, one of the most popular writers of the Middle Ages,believed in such a God, but he wrestled with a different issueabout free will: the question of how we could choose to doanything if God already knows what we’ll choose.

The Consolation of PhilosophyBoethius

If you were in prison awaiting execution would you spend yourlast days writing a philosophy book? Boethius did. It turned outto be the most popular book that he wrote.

Ancius Manlius Severinus Boethius (475–525), to give himhis full name, was one of the last Roman philosophers. He diedjust twenty years before Rome fell to the barbarians. But in hislifetime Rome was already going downhill. Like his fellowRomans Cicero and Seneca, he thought of philosophy as a kindof self-help, a practical way of making your life go better as wellas a discipline of abstract thought. He also provided a link backto the Ancient Greeks Plato and Aristotle whose work he trans-lated into Latin, keeping their ideas alive at a time when therewas a risk that they might be lost for ever. As a Christian, hiswriting appealed to the devoutly religious philosophers whoread his books in the Middle Ages. His philosophy, then, madea bridge from Greek and Roman thinkers forward to the

Christian philosophy that would dominate the West for centu-ries after his death.

Boethius’ life was a mixture of good and bad luck. KingTheodoric, a Goth who ruled Rome at the time, gave him thehigh office of Consul. He made Boethius’ sons consuls too as aspecial honour, even though they were too young to have gotthere by their own merit. Everything seemed to be going rightfor him. He was rich, from a good family, and showered withpraise. Somehow he managed to find time for his philosophicalstudies alongside his work for the government, and he was aprolific writer and translator. He was having a great time. Butthen his luck changed. Accused of plotting against Theodoric,he was sent away from Rome to Ravenna where he was held inprison, tortured and then executed by a combination of stran-gulation and being beaten to death. He always maintained thathe was innocent, but his accusers didn’t believe him.

While in prison, knowing that he was soon to die, Boethiuswrote a book that, after his death, became a medieval bestseller,The Consolation of Philosophy. It opens with Boethius inhis prison cell feeling sorry for himself. Suddenly he realizesthat there is a woman looking down at him. Her height seemsto change from average to higher than the sky. She is wearinga torn dress embroidered with a ladder that rises from theGreek letter pi at the hem up to the letter theta. In one handshe holds a sceptre, in the other books. This woman turnsout to be Philosophy. When she speaks, she tells Boethius whathe should believe. She is angry with him for forgetting abouther, and has come to remind him how he should be reacting towhat has happened to him. The rest of the book is their conver-sation, which is all about luck and God. It is written partlyin prose and partly in poetry. The woman, Philosophy, giveshim advice.

She tells Boethius that luck always changes, and that heshouldn’t be surprised by this. That’s the nature of luck. It isfickle. The wheel of Fortune turns. Sometimes you are at thetop; sometimes you are at the bottom. A wealthy king can findhimself in poverty in a day. Boethius should realize that’s justthe way it is. Luck is random. There is no guarantee that becauseyou are lucky today you will be lucky tomorrow.

Mortals, Philosophy explains, are foolish to let their happinessdepend on something so changeable. True happiness can onlycome from inside, from the things that human beings cancontrol, not from anything that bad luck can destroy. This is theStoic position that we looked at in Chapter 5. When peopledescribe themselves as ‘philosophical’ about bad things happeningto them today, this is what they mean; they try not to be affectedby things outside their control, like the weather or who theirparents are. Nothing, Philosophy tells Boethius, is terrible in itself– it all depends on how you think about it. Happiness is a state ofmind, not of the world, an idea Epictetus would have recognizedas his own.

Philosophy wants Boethius to turn once again to her. She tellshim he can be truly happy despite being in prison waiting to bekilled. She is going to cure him of his distress. The message isthat riches, power and honour are worthless since they cancome and go. No one should base their happiness on suchfragile foundations. Happiness has to come from somethingthat is more solid, something that can’t be taken away. AsBoethius believed that he would continue to live after death,seeking happiness in trivial worldly things was a mistake. Hewould lose them all at death anyway.

But where can Boethius find true happiness? Philosophy’sanswer is that he will find it in God or goodness (these turn outto be the same thing). Boethius was an early Christian, but

doesn’t mention this in The Consolation of Philosophy. The Godthat Philosophy describes could be Plato’s God, the pure Formof goodness. But later readers would recognize Christianteaching about the worthlessness of honour and riches, and theimportance of focusing on pleasing God.

Throughout the book Philosophy reminds Boethius of whathe already knows. That is again something that comes fromPlato, since Plato believed that all learning is really a kind ofrecollection of ideas we already have. We never really learnanything new, just have our memories jogged. Life is a struggleto recall what we knew earlier. What Boethius already knows atsome level is that he was wrong to worry about his loss offreedom and public respect. Those are largely outside hiscontrol. What matters is his attitude to his situation, and that issomething he can choose.

But Boethius is puzzled by a genuine problem that hasworried many people who believe in God. God, being perfect,must know everything that has happened, but also everythingthat will happen. That is what we mean when we describe Godas ‘all-knowing’. So if God exists, he must know who will winthe next World Cup, and what I’m going to write next. He musthave foreknowledge of everything that will ever happen. Whathe foresees must necessarily happen. So at this moment Godknows how everything will turn out.

It follows from all this that God must know what I’m going todo next, even if I’m not yet sure what that will be. At the timewhen I make a decision about what to do, different possiblefutures seem to lie open to me. If I come to a fork in the road, Ican go left or right, or perhaps just sit down. I could at thismoment stop writing and go and make myself some coffee. Orelse I can choose to carry on typing on my laptop. That feels likemy decision, something I can choose to do or not do. No one is

forcing me one way or the other. Similarly, you could choose toclose your eyes now if you wanted to. How can that be whenGod knows what we’ll end up doing?

If God already knows what we are both going to do, how caneither of us have a genuine choice about what we are going todo? Is choice just an illusion? It seems that I can’t have free willif God knows everything. Ten minutes ago God could havewritten on a piece of paper, ‘Nigel will carry on writing.’ It wastrue then, and so I necessarily would carry on writing, whetheror not I realized this at the time. But if he could have done that,then surely I didn’t have a choice about what I did, even thoughit felt as if I did. My life was already mapped out for me in everytiniest detail. And if we don’t have any choice about our actions,how is it fair to punish or reward us for what we do? If we can’tchoose what to do, then how can God decide whether or not weshall go to heaven?

This is very perplexing. It is what philosophers call a paradox.It does not seem possible that someone could know what I amgoing to do and that I would still have free choice about what Ido. These two ideas seem to contradict each other. Yet both areplausible if you believe that God is all-knowing.

But Philosophy, the woman in Boethius’ cell, has someanswers. We do have free will, she tells him. That isn’t an illu-sion. Although God knows what we will do, our lives aren’tpredestined. Or to put it another way, God’s knowledge of whatwe will do is different from predestination (the idea that wehave no choice about what we will do). We do still have a choiceabout what to do next. The mistake is to think of God as if hewere a human being seeing things unfolding in time. Philosophytells Boethius that God is timeless, outside time altogether.

What this means is that God grasps everything in an instant.God sees past, present and future as one. We mortals are stuck

with one thing happening after another, but that is not how Godsees it. The reason why God can know the future withoutdestroying our free will and turning us into some kind of pre-programmed machines with no choice at all is that God observesus at no particular time at all. He sees everything in one go in atimeless sort of way. And, Philosophy tells Boethius, he shouldnot forget that God judges human beings on how they behave,the choices they make, even though he knows in advance whatthey will do.

If Philosophy is right about this, and if God exists, he knowsexactly when I’m going to end this sentence; but it is still my freechoice to end with a full stop right here.

You, meanwhile, are still free to decide whether or not to readthe next chapter, which looks at two arguments for believing inGod’s existence.

chapter 8

The Perfect Island

Anselm and Aquinas

We all have an idea of God. We understand what ‘God’ means,whether or not we believe that God actually exists. No doubtyou are thinking about your idea of God now. That seemsvery different from saying that God actually exists. Anselm(c.1033–1109), an Italian priest who later became Archbishop ofCanterbury, was unusual in that with his Ontological Argumenthe claimed to show that, as a matter of logic, the fact that wehave an idea of God proves that God actually exists.

Anselm’s argument, which he included in his book Proslogion,starts from the uncontroversial claim that God is that being‘than which nothing greater can be conceived’. This is justanother way of saying God is the greatest being imaginable:greatest in power, in goodness and in knowledge. Nothinggreater can be imagined – or that thing would be God. God isthe supreme being. This definition of God doesn’t seem contro-versial: Boethius (see Chapter 7) defined God in a similar way,

for example. In our minds, we can clearly have an idea of God.That too is uncontroversial. But then Anselm points out that aGod that only existed in our minds but not in reality wouldn’tbe the greatest being conceivable. One that actually existedwould certainly be greater. This God could conceivably exist –even atheists usually accept that. But an imagined God cannotbe greater than an existing one. So, Anselm concluded, Godmust exist. It follows logically from the definition of God. IfAnselm is right, we can be certain that God exists simply fromthe fact that we have an idea of God. This is an a priori argu-ment, one that doesn’t rely on any observation about the worldto reach its conclusions. It is a logical argument that, from anuncontroversial starting point, seems to prove that God exists.

Anselm used the example of a painter. The painter imaginesa scene before painting it. At some stage the painter paints whathe imagines. Then the painting exists both in the imaginationand in reality. God is different from this sort of case. Anselmbelieved that it was logically impossible to have an idea of Godwithout God actually existing, whereas we can quite easilyimagine the painter who never actually painted the picture hehad imagined, so that the painting only existed in his mind, butnot in the world. God is the only being like this: we can imagineanything else not existing without contradicting ourselves. If wetruly understand what God is we will recognize that it would beimpossible for God not to exist.

Most people who have grasped Anselm’s ‘proof ’ of God’sexistence suspect there is something fishy about how he arrivesat the conclusion. It just doesn’t feel right. Not many peoplehave come to believe in God purely on the basis of it. Anselm,in contrast, quoted from the Psalms that only a fool would denyGod’s existence. In his own lifetime another monk, Gauniloof Marmoutiers, however, criticized Anselm’s reasoning. He

came up with a thought experiment that supported the fool’sposition.

Imagine that somewhere in the ocean there is an island whichno one can reach. This island has incredible wealth, and is filledwith all the fruit, exotic trees and plants and animals that areimaginable. It isn’t inhabited either, which makes it an evenmore perfect place. In fact it is the most perfect island anyonecan think of. If someone says that this island doesn’t exist,there’s no difficulty understanding what they mean by this. Thatmakes sense. But suppose they then went on to tell you that thisisland must really exist because it is more perfect than any otherisland. You have an idea of the island. But it wouldn’t be themost perfect island if it only existed in your mind. So it mustexist in reality.

Gaunilo pointed out that if anybody used this argument totry and persuade you that this most perfect island actuallyexisted, you’d probably think it was some kind of joke. You can’tconjure a perfect island into real existence in the world just byimagining what it would be like. That would be absurd. Gaunilo’spoint is that Anselm’s argument for the existence of God has thesame form as the argument for the existence of the most perfectisland. If you don’t believe that the most perfect island imagi-nable must exist, why believe that about the most perfect beingimaginable? The same type of argument could be used toimagine all kinds of things into existence: not just the mostperfect island, but the most perfect mountain, the most perfectbuilding, the most perfect forest. Gaunilo believed in God,but he thought that Anselm’s reasoning about God in thiscase was weak. Anselm replied, making the point that his argu-ment only worked in the case of God and not with islands, sinceother things are only the most perfect of their kind, whereasGod is the most perfect of everything. That’s why God is

the only being that necessarily exists: the only one that couldn’tnot exist.

Two hundred years later in a short section in a very longbook called Summa Theologica, another Italian saint, ThomasAquinas (1225–74), outlined five arguments, the Five Ways thatwere meant to demonstrate that God exists. These Five Waysare now much better known than any other part of the book.The second of these was the First Cause Argument, an argu-ment which, like much of Aquinas’ philosophy, was based onone that Aristotle had used much earlier. Like Anselm, Aquinaswanted to use reason to provide proof for God’s existence. TheFirst Cause Argument takes as its starting point the existence ofthe cosmos – everything that there is. Look around you. Wheredid everything come from? The simple answer is that each thingthat exists has a cause of some kind that brought it into beingand made it as it is. Take a football. That is the product of manycauses – of people designing and making it, of the causes thatproduced the raw materials, and so on. But what caused the rawmaterials to exist? And what caused those causes? You can goback and trace that. And back and back. But does that chain ofcauses and effects go on back for ever?

Aquinas was convinced that there couldn’t be a never-endingseries of effects and their earlier causes going back endlessly intime – an infinite regress. If there had been an infinite regressthat would have meant that there would never have been a firstcause: something would have caused whatever you think wasthe first cause of everything, and something must have causedthat too, and so on to infinity. But Aquinas thinks that logicallythere must at some point have been something that set every-thing going in this chain of causes and effects. If he’s right aboutthat, there must have been something that wasn’t itself causedthat began the series of cause and effect which has brought us to

where we are now: an uncaused cause. This first cause, hedeclared, must have been God. God is the uncaused cause ofeverything that is.

Later philosophers had plenty of responses to this argument.Some pointed out that even if you agree with Aquinas that theremust have been some uncaused cause that began everything,there is no particular reason to believe that that uncaused causewas God. An uncaused first cause would have to be extremelypowerful, but there is nothing in this argument to suggest thatit need have any of the properties religions usually assumeGod has. For instance, such an uncaused cause wouldn’t need tobe supremely good; nor would it have to be all-knowing. Itcould have been some kind of surge of energy rather than apersonal God.

Another possible objection to Aquinas’ reasoning is that wedon’t have to accept his assumption that there couldn’t be aninfinite regress of effects and their causes. How do we know?For every suggested first cause of the cosmos we can always ask‘And what caused that?’ Aquinas simply assumed that if we keptasking that question we would come to a point where theanswer would be ‘Nothing. This is an uncaused cause.’ But it isnot obvious that this is a better answer than that there is aninfinite regress of effects and causes.

The saints Anselm and Aquinas, with their focus on belief inGod and their commitment to a religious way of life, provide astark contrast to Niccolò Machiavelli, a worldly thinker whomsome have compared with the devil.

chap ter 9

The Fox and the Lion

Niccolò Machiavelli

Imagine you are a prince ruling a city-state such as Florence orNaples in sixteenth-century Italy. You have absolute power. Youcan issue an order and it will be obeyed. If you want to throwsomeone into jail because he has spoken out against you, orbecause you suspect him of plotting to kill you, you can do that.You have troops ready to do whatever you tell them. But you aresurrounded by other city-states run by ambitious rulers whowould love to conquer your territory. How should you behave?Should you be honest, keep your promises, always act withkindness, think the best of people?

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) thought that would prob-ably be a bad idea, though you might want to seem honest andseem good in that sense. According to him, sometimes it isbetter to tell lies, break your promises and even murder yourenemies. A prince needn’t worry about keeping his word. As heput it, an effective prince has to ‘learn how not to be good’. The

most important thing was to stay in power, and just about anyway of doing that was acceptable. Not surprisingly, The Prince,the book in which he spells all this out, has been notorious eversince it was published in 1532. Some people have described it asevil or at best a handbook for gangsters; others think it the mostaccurate account ever written of what actually happens in poli-tics. Many politicians today read it, though only some willadmit this, perhaps revealing that they are putting its principlesinto practice.

The Prince wasn’t meant to be a guidebook for everyone, onlyfor those who had recently come to power. Machiavelli wrote itwhile living on a farm about seven miles south of Florence.Sixteenth-century Italy was a dangerous place. Machiavelli hadbeen born and brought up in Florence. As a young man he wasappointed as a diplomat, and he had met several kings, anemperor and the Pope in his travels across Europe. He didn’tthink much of them. The only leader who really impressed himwas Cesare Borgia, a ruthless man, the illegitimate son of PopeAlexander VI, who thought nothing of tricking his enemies andmurdering them as he took control over a large part of Italy. Asfar as Machiavelli was concerned, Borgia did everything right,but was defeated by bad luck. He fell ill just at the point whenhe was attacked. Bad luck played a large part in Machiavelli’s lifetoo and it was a topic he thought hard about.

When the immensely rich Medici family, who had previouslyruled Florence, returned to power, they threw Machiavelli intoprison, claiming that he had been part of a plot to overthrowthem. Machiavelli survived torture and was released. Some ofhis colleagues were executed. But his punishment, because hehadn’t confessed to anything, was to be banished. He couldn’treturn to the city he loved. He was cut off from the world ofpolitics. There, in the country, he would spend his evenings

imagining conversations with the great thinkers of the past. Inhis imagination they discussed with him the best way to keeppower as a leader. He probably wrote The Prince to impressthose in power and as an attempt to get a job as a politicaladvisor. That would have allowed him to return to Florence andthe excitement and dangers of real politics. But the plan didn’twork. Machiavelli ended up being a writer. As well as ThePrince, he wrote several other books about politics and was asuccessful playwright – his play Mandragola is still sometimesperformed.

So what exactly did Machiavelli advise and why has this soshocked most of his readers? His key idea was that a princeneeded to have what he called virtù. This is the Italian word for‘manliness’ or valour. What does that mean? Machiavellibelieved that success depends quite a lot on good luck. Half ofwhat happens to us is down to chance and half is a result of ourchoices, he thought. But he also believed that you can improveyour odds of success by acting bravely and swiftly. Just becauseluck plays such a large part in our lives, it doesn’t mean that wehave to behave like victims. A river might flood, and that’ssomething we can’t prevent, but if we have built dams and flooddefences we stand a better chance of surviving. In other words,a leader who prepares well and seizes the moment when itcomes is more likely to do well than one who doesn’t.

Machiavelli was determined that his philosophy should berooted in what really happens. He showed his readers what hemeant through a series of examples from recent history, mostlyinvolving people he’d met. When, for example, Cesare Borgiadiscovered that the Orsini family were planning to overthrowhim, Borgia managed to make them feel confident that he knewnothing. He tricked their leaders into coming to talk with himin a place called Sinigaglia. When they arrived, he had them all

murdered. Machiavelli approved of this trick. It seemed to hima good example of virtù.

Again, when Borgia took control of the region called Romagnahe put a particularly cruel commander Remirro de Orco incharge. De Orco terrified the people of Romagna into obeyinghim. But once Romagna had calmed down, Borgia wanted todistance himself from de Orco’s cruelty. So he had him murdered,and left his body cut into two pieces in the city square foreveryone to see. Machiavelli approved of this gruesome treat-ment. It achieved what Borgia wanted, which was to keep thepeople of Romagna on his side. They were glad that de Orcowas dead, but at the same time they realized that Borgia musthave ordered his murder and this would have scared them. IfBorgia was capable of that sort of violence against his owncommander, none of them was safe. So Borgia’s action wasmanly, in Machiavelli’s eyes: it displayed virtù and was just thesort of thing a sensible prince should do.

This sounds as if Machiavelli approved of murder. He obvi-ously did in some circumstances if the results justified it. But thatwasn’t the point of the examples. What he was trying to show wasthat Borgia’s behaviour in killing his enemies, and in making anexample of his own commander de Orco, worked. It producedthe desired effects and prevented further bloodshed. Through hisswift, cruel action, Borgia stayed in power and prevented thepeople of Romagna rising against him. For Machiavelli, this endresult was more important than how it was achieved: Borgia wasa good prince because he wasn’t squeamish about doing what wasnecessary to keep in power. Machiavelli wouldn’t have approvedof pointless murder, killing just for the sake of it; but the murdershe described weren’t like that. Acting with compassion in thosecircumstances, Machiavelli believed, would have been disastrous:bad both for Borgia, and for the state.

Machiavelli stresses that it’s better as a leader to be fearedthan to be loved. Ideally you would be both loved and feared,but that’s hard to achieve. If you rely on your people loving you,then you risk them abandoning you when times get tough. Ifthey fear you, they will be too scared to betray you. This is partof his cynicism, his low view of human nature. He thought thathuman beings were unreliable, greedy and dishonest. If you areto be a successful ruler, then you need to know this. It’sdangerous to trust anyone to keep their promises unless theyare terrified of the consequences of not keeping them.

If you can achieve what you are aiming for by showing kind-ness, keeping your promises, and being loved, then you shoulddo this (or at least appear to do it). But if you can’t, then youneed to combine these human qualities with animal ones. Otherphilosophers emphasized that leaders should rely on theirhumane qualities, but Machiavelli thought that at times theeffective leader would have to act like a beast. The animals tolearn from were the fox and the lion. The fox is cunning and canspot traps, but the lion is immensely strong and terrifying. It isno good being like the lion all the time, acting simply by bruteforce, as that will leave you at risk of falling into a trap. Nor canyou just be a wily fox: you need the strength of the lion occa-sionally to keep you safe. But if you rely on your own kindnessand sense of justice, you won’t last long. Fortunately, people aregullible. They are taken in by appearances. So, as a leader, youmay be able to get away with seeming to be honest and kindwhile breaking your promises and acting cruelly.

Now you’ve read this, you are probably thinking that Machiavelliwas simply an evil man. Many people do believe that, and theadjective ‘machiavellian’ is widely used as an insult to refer tosomeone who is prepared to scheme and use people to get theirown way. But other philosophers believe Machiavelli expressed

something important. Perhaps ordinary good behaviour doesn’twork for leaders. It is one thing to be kind in everyday life and totrust people who make promises to you, but if you have to lead astate or a country, trusting other countries to behave well towardsyou may be a very dangerous policy. In 1938 the British PrimeMinister Neville Chamberlain believed Adolf Hitler when hegave his word that he would not try and expand German territoryfurther. That now looks naïve and foolish. Machiavelli wouldhave pointed out to Chamberlain that Hitler had every reason tolie to him and that he shouldn’t trust him.

On the other hand, we shouldn’t forget that Machiavellisupported acts of extreme brutality against potential enemies.Even in the bloody world of sixteenth-century Italy, his openapproval of Cesare Borgia’s behaviour seemed shocking. Manyof us think there should be strict limits to what a leader can doto his or her worst enemies, and that these limits should be setby law. If limits aren’t set, we end up with savage tyrants. AdolfHitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein and Robert Mugabeall used the same sorts of techniques as Cesare Borgia to stay inpower. Not exactly a good advertisement for Machiavelli’sphilosophy.

Machiavelli saw himself as a realist, someone who recognizedthat people are fundamentally selfish. Thomas Hobbes sharedthat view: it underpins his whole account of how he thoughtsociety ought to be structured.

Nasty, Brutish, and ShortThomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was one of England’s greatestpolitical thinkers. What’s less well known is that he was also anearly fitness fanatic. He would go out for a long walk everymorning, striding quickly up hills so as to get out of breath. Incase he had any good ideas while out he had a special stickmade with an inkwell in the handle. This tall, red-faced,cheerful man with a moustache and a little wispy beard hadbeen a sickly child. But as an adult he was extremely healthy andplayed real tennis into old age. He ate lots of fish, drank verylittle wine, and used to sing – behind closed doors, and out ofearshot – to exercise his lungs. And, of course, like most philos-ophers, he had a highly active mind. The result was that he livedto 91, an exceptional age for the seventeenth century whenaverage life expectancy was 35.

Despite his genial character, Hobbes, like Machiavelli, had alow view of human beings. We are all basically selfish, driven by

fear of death and the hope of personal gain, he believed. All ofus seek power over others, whether we realize this or not. If youdon’t accept Hobbes’ picture of humanity, why do you lock thedoor when you leave your house? Surely it’s because you knowthat there are many people out there who would happily stealeverything you own? But, you might argue, only some peopleare that selfish. Hobbes disagreed. He thought that at heart weall are, and that it is only the rule of law and the threat ofpunishment that keep us in check.

The consequence of this, he argued, was that if society brokedown and you had to live in what he called ‘a state of nature’,without laws or anyone with the power to back them up, you,like everyone else, would steal and murder when necessary. Atleast, you’d have to do that if you wanted to carry on living. In aworld of scarce resources, particularly if you were struggling tofind food and water to survive, it could actually be rational tokill other people before they killed you. In Hobbes’ memorabledescription, life outside society would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty,brutish, and short’.

Take away the power of the state to prevent people fromhelping themselves to each other’s land and killing whoeverthey want to, and the result is a never-ending war in whicheveryone is against everyone else. It is hard to imagine a worsesituation. In this lawless world even the strongest wouldn’t besafe for long. We all have to sleep; and when we are asleep weare vulnerable to attack. Even the weakest, if cunning enough,would be able to destroy the strongest.

You might imagine that the way to avoid being killed would beto team up with friends. The trouble is you couldn’t be sure thatanyone was trustworthy. If other people promised to help you,then it might sometimes be in their interest to break their prom-ises. Any activity that required co-operation, like growing food

on a large scale, or building, would be impossible without a basiclevel of trust. You wouldn’t know that you’d been tricked until itwas too late, and perhaps by that time you’d literally have beenstabbed in the back. There would be no one to punish your back-stabber. Your enemies could be everywhere. You’d live your wholelife on your own in fear of attack: not an attractive prospect.

The solution, Hobbes argued, was to put some powerful indi-vidual or parliament in charge. The individuals in the state ofnature would have to enter into a ‘social contract’, an agreementto give up some of their dangerous freedoms for the sake ofsafety. Without what he called a ‘sovereign’, life would be a kindof hell. This sovereign would be given the right to inflict severepunishment on anyone who stepped out of line. He believedthat there were certain natural laws that we would recognize asimportant, such as that we should treat others as we’d expect tobe treated ourselves. Laws are no good if there isn’t someone orsomething strong enough to make everyone follow them.Without laws, and without a powerful sovereign, people in thestate of nature could expect a violent death. The only consola-tion was that such a life would be very brief.

Leviathan (1651), Hobbes’ most important book, explains indetail the steps needed to move from the nightmarish situationof the state of nature to a secure society in which life is bearable.‘Leviathan’ was a gigantic sea monster described in the Bible.For Hobbes it was a reference to the great power of the state.Leviathan opens with a picture of a giant towering over a hill-side, holding a sword and a sceptre. This figure is made up oflots of smaller people, who are recognizably still individuals.The giant represents the powerful state with a sovereign as itshead. Without a sovereign, Hobbes believed, everything wouldfall apart and society would decompose into separate peopleready to tear each other to pieces in order to survive.

Individuals in the state of nature, then, had very good reasonsfor wanting to work together and seek peace. It was the only waythey could be protected. Without that their lives would beterrible. Safety was far more important than freedom. Fear ofdeath would drive people towards forming a society. He thoughtthat they would agree to give up quite a lot of freedom in orderto make a social contract with each other, a promise to let asovereign impose laws on them. They’d be better off with apowerful authority in charge than all fighting each other.

Hobbes had lived through dangerous times, even in thewomb. He was born early because his mother had gone intolabour when she heard that the Spanish Armada was sailing toEngland and would probably invade the country. Fortunately itdidn’t. Later he escaped the dangers of the English Civil War bymoving to Paris, but the real fear that England could easilydescend into anarchy haunted his later writing. It was in Paristhat he wrote Leviathan, returning to England soon after it waspublished in 1651.

Like many thinkers of his day, Hobbes wasn’t just a philoso-pher – he was what we would now call a Renaissance man. Hehad serious interests in geometry and science, and in ancienthistory too. As a young man he loved literature and had writtenand translated it. In philosophy, which he only took up inmiddle age, he was a materialist, believing that humans weresimply physical beings. There is no such thing as the soul: weare simply bodies, which are ultimately complex machines.

Clockwork mechanisms were the most advanced technologyin the seventeenth century. Hobbes believed that muscles andorgans in the body were the equivalent of these: he frequentlywrote about the ‘springs’ of action and the ‘wheels’ that move us.He was convinced that all aspects of human existence, includingthinking, were physical activities. There was no space for the

soul in his philosophy. This is a modern idea that many scien-tists hold now, but it was radical for his time. He even claimedthat God must be a large physical object, though some peopletook this to be a disguised way of declaring that he was anatheist.

Critics of Hobbes think he went too far in allowing the sover-eign, whether it was a king or queen or parliament, to have suchpower over the individual in society. The state he describes iswhat we would now call an authoritarian one: one in which thesovereign has almost unlimited power over citizens. Peace maybe desirable, and fear of violent death a strong incentive tosubmit to peace-keeping powers. But to put so much in thehands of an individual or group of individuals can be dangerous.He didn’t believe in democracy; he didn’t believe in the abilityof the people to make decisions for themselves. But if he’dknown about the horrors committed by tyrants in the twentiethcentury, he might have changed his mind.

Hobbes was notorious for refusing to believe in the existenceof the soul. René Descartes, his contemporary, in contrast,believed that mind and body were completely distinct fromeach other. This was probably why Hobbes thought Descarteswas much better at geometry than philosophy and should havestuck to that.

Could You Be Dreaming?

René Descartes

You hear the alarm, turn it off, crawl out of bed, get dressed,have breakfast, get ready for the day. But then something unex-pected happens: you wake up and realize that it was all just adream. In your dream you were awake and getting on with life,but in reality you were still curled up under the duvet snoringaway. If you’ve had one of these experiences you’ll know what Imean. They’re usually called ‘false awakenings’ and they can bevery convincing. The French philosopher René Descartes(1596–1650) had one and it set him thinking. How could he besure that he wasn’t dreaming?

For Descartes philosophy was one among many intellectualinterests. He was an outstanding mathematician, perhaps bestknown now for inventing ‘Cartesian co-ordinates’ – allegedlyafter watching a fly walking across the ceiling and wonderinghow he could describe its position at various points. Sciencefascinated him too, and he was both an astronomer and a

biologist. His reputation as a philosopher rests largely on hisMeditations and his Discourse on Method: books in which heexplored the limits of what he could possibly know.

Like most philosophers, Descartes didn’t like to believeanything without examining why he believed it; he also likedasking awkward questions, questions which other people didn’tget round to asking. Of course Descartes recognized youcouldn’t go through life constantly questioning everything. Itwould be extremely difficult to live if you didn’t take somethings on trust most of the time, as Pyrrho no doubt discovered(see Chapter 3). But Descartes thought it would be worth tryingonce in his life to work out what – if anything – he could knowfor certain. To do this he developed a method. This is known asthe Method of Cartesian Doubt.

The method is quite straightforward: don’t accept anything astrue if there is the slightest possibility that it isn’t. Think of a bigsack of apples. In the sack you know there are some mouldyapples, but you’re not sure which ones they are. What you wantto end up with is a sack containing just good apples and nomouldy ones. How would you go about achieving that result?One way would be to tip all the apples on to the floor and thenlook at them one at a time, only putting the ones that you wereabsolutely sure were good back into the bag. You might throwout a few good apples in the process because they looked as ifthey might possibly be a bit mouldy inside. But the consequencewould be that only good apples would make it into your sack.That’s more or less what Descartes’ Method of Doubt is. Youtake a belief, such as ‘I am awake reading this now’, examine it,and only accept it if you are certain it can’t be wrong ormisleading. If there is the tiniest room for doubt, reject it.Descartes went through a number of things he believed, andquestioned whether or not he was absolutely certain that they

were as they seemed to be. Was the world really the way itlooked to him? Was he sure he wasn’t dreaming?

What Descartes wanted to find was one thing that he couldbe sure about. That would be enough to give him a foothold onreality. But there was a risk that he might sink into a whirlpoolof doubt and end up realizing that nothing at all was certain. Heused a kind of sceptical move here, but it differed from the scep-ticism of Pyrrho and his followers. They were intent on showingthat nothing could be known for certain; whereas Descarteswanted to show that some beliefs are immune from even thestrongest forms of scepticism.

Descartes sets out in his quest for certainty by thinkingfirst about the evidence that comes through the senses: seeing,touching, smelling, tasting and hearing. Can we trust our senses?Not really, he concluded. The senses sometimes trick us. Wemake mistakes. Think about what you see. Is your sight reliableabout everything? Should you always believe your eyes?

A straight stick put in water seems bent if you look at it fromthe side. A square tower in the distance might look round. Weall occasionally make mistakes about what we see. And,Descartes points out, it would be unwise to trust something thathas tricked you in the past. So he rejects the senses as a possiblesource of certainty. He can never be sure that his senses aren’ttricking him. They probably aren’t most of the time, but thefaint possibility that they might be means he can’t completelyrely on them. But where does that leave him?

The belief ‘I am awake reading this now’ probably seemsfairly certain to you. You are awake, I hope, and you are reading.How could you possibly doubt it? But we’ve already mentionedthat you can think you are awake in dreams. How do you knowyou aren’t dreaming now? Perhaps you think the experiencesyou are having are too realistic, too detailed to be dreams; but

plenty of people have very realistic dreams. Are you sure youaren’t having one now? How do you know that? Perhaps you’vejust pinched yourself to see if you are asleep. If you haven’t, tryit. What did that prove? Nothing. You could have dreamt thatyou pinched yourself. So you might be dreaming. I know itdoesn’t feel like it, and it is very unlikely, but there must be roomfor a small doubt about whether you are awake or not. So,applying Descartes’ Method of Doubt, you have to reject thethought ‘I am awake reading this now’ as not completelycertain.

This shows us that we can’t wholly trust our senses. We can’tbe absolutely sure we’re not dreaming. But surely, Descartessays, even in dreams, $2+3=5$ . This is where Descartes uses athought experiment, an imaginary story to make his point. Hepushes doubt as far as it will go and comes up with an eventougher test for any belief than the ‘Could I be dreaming?’ test.He says, imagine there is a demon who is incredibly powerfuland clever, but also fiendish. This demon, if it existed, couldmake it seem that $2+3=5$ every time you did the sum eventhough it really equals six. You wouldn’t know the demon wasdoing this to you. You’d just be adding numbers up innocently.Everything would seem normal.

There is no easy way of proving that this isn’t happening now.Perhaps this fiendishly clever demon is giving me the illusion ofsitting at home typing at my laptop, when in fact I’m lying on abeach in the south of France. Or perhaps I’m just a brain in a jarof liquid on a shelf in the evil demon’s laboratory. He might haveput wires into my brain and be sending electronic messages tome that give me the impression that I’m doing one thing, whileI am really doing something completely different. Perhaps thedemon is making me think that I’m typing words that makesense, when in fact I am just typing the same letter over and

over again. There’s no way of knowing. You couldn’t prove thatthat isn’t happening, however crazy it might sound.

This evil demon thought experiment is Descartes’ way ofpushing doubt to its limits. If there was one thing that we couldbe sure the evil demon couldn’t trick us about, that would beamazing. It would also provide a way of answering those peoplewho claim that we can’t know anything at all for certain.

The next move he made led to one of the best-known lines inphilosophy, though many more people know the quotation thanunderstand what it means. Descartes saw that even if the demonexisted and was tricking him, there must be something that thedemon was tricking. As long as he was having a thought at all,he, Descartes, must exist. The demon couldn’t make him believethat he existed if he didn’t. That’s because something thatdoesn’t exist can’t have thoughts. ‘I think, therefore I am’ (cogitoergo sum in Latin) was Descartes’ conclusion. I’m thinking, so Imust exist. Try it for yourself. As long as you have some thoughtor sensation, it is impossible to doubt that you exist. What youare is another question – you can doubt whether you have abody, or the body that you can see and touch. But you can’tdoubt that you exist as some kind of thinking thing. Thatthought would be self-refuting. As soon as you start to doubtyour own existence, the act of doubting proves that you exist asa thinking thing.

This may not sound like much, but the certainty of his ownexistence was very important for Descartes. It showed him thatthose who doubted everything – the Pyrrhonic Sceptics – werewrong. It was also the start of what is known as CartesianDualism. This is the idea that your mind is separate from thebody and interacts with it. It is a dualism because there are twotypes of thing: the mind and the body. A twentieth-centuryphilosopher, Gilbert Ryle, mocked this view as the myth of the

ghost in the machine: the body was the machine, and the soulthe ghost inhabiting it. Descartes believed that the mind wasable to produce effects in the body and vice versa because thetwo interacted at a certain point in the brain – the pineal gland.But his dualism left him with real problems about how toexplain a non-physical thing, the soul or mind, producingchanges in a physical one, the body.

Descartes was more certain about the existence of his mindthan his body. He could imagine not having a body, but hecouldn’t imagine not having a mind. If he imagined not havinga mind, he’d still be thinking, and so that would prove that hehad a mind because he couldn’t have thoughts at all if he didn’thave a mind. This idea that body and mind can be separated,and that the mind or the spirit is non-physical, not made ofblood, flesh and bones, is very common amongst religiouspeople. Many believers hope the mind or spirit will live on afterthe death of the body.

Proving his own existence, just so long as he was thinking,would not have been enough to refute scepticism, though.Descartes needed further certainties to escape from the whirl-pool of doubt that he had conjured up with his philosophicalmeditations. He argued that a good God must exist. Using aversion of St Anselm’s Ontological Argument (see Chapter 8),he convinced himself that the idea of God proves God’s exist-ence – God wouldn’t be perfect unless he was good and existed,just as a triangle wouldn’t be a triangle without interior anglesadding up to 180 degrees. Another of his arguments, theTrademark Argument, suggested that we know God existsbecause he has left an idea implanted in our minds – wewouldn’t have an idea of God if God didn’t exist. Once he wascertain that God existed, the constructive phase of Descartes’thought became much easier. A good God wouldn’t deceive

humanity about the most basic matters. So, Descartes concluded,the world must be more or less as we experience it. When wehave clear and distinct perceptions these are reliable. His conclu-sion: the world exists, and is more or less as it appears, eventhough we sometimes make mistakes about what we perceive.Some philosophers, however, believe this was wishful thinking,and that his evil demon might just as easily have deceived himabout God’s existence as about the thought that $2+3=5$ .Without the certainty of a good God’s existence, Descarteswould not have been able to move beyond his knowledge thathe was a thinking thing. Descartes believed that he had showna way out of complete scepticism; but his critics are still scep-tical about this.

Descartes, as we’ve seen, used the Ontological and Trademarkarguments to prove to his satisfaction that God exists. His fellowcountryman Blaise Pascal had a very different approach to thequestion of what we should believe.

Place Your Bets

Blaise Pascal

If you toss a coin it can come up heads or tails. There is a 50/50chance of either, unless the coin has a bias. So it doesn’t reallymatter which side you bet on as it is just as likely each time youtoss the coin that heads will come up as tails. If you aren’t surewhether or not God exists, what should you do? Is it like tossinga coin? Should you gamble on God not existing, and live yourlife as you please? Or would it be more rational to act as if Goddoes exist, even if the odds on this being true are very long?Blaise Pascal (1623–62), who did believe in God, thought hardabout this question.

Pascal was a devout Catholic. But unlike many Christianstoday, he had an extremely bleak view of humanity. He was apessimist. Everywhere he saw evidence of the Fall, the imper-fections we have which he thought were due to Adam and Evebetraying God’s trust by eating the apple from the Tree ofKnowledge. Like Augustine (see Chapter 6), he believed that

human beings are driven by sexual desire, are unreliable andeasily bored. Everyone is wretched. Everyone is torn betweenanxiety and despair. We should realize how insignificant we allare. The short time that we are on earth is, in relation to theeternity both before and after our lives, almost meaningless. Weeach occupy a tiny space in the infinite space of the universe.Yet, at the same time, Pascal believed that humanity has somepotential if we don’t lose sight of God. We are somewherebetween beasts and angels, but probably quite a lot closer to thebeasts in most cases and for most of the time.

Pascal’s best-known book, his Pensées (‘Thoughts’), waspieced together from fragments of his writing and published in1670 after his early death at the age of 39. It is written in a seriesof beautifully crafted short paragraphs. No one is completelysure how he intended the parts to fit together, but the mainpoint of the book is clear: it is a defence of his version ofChristianity. Pascal hadn’t finished the book when he died. Theorder of the parts is based on how he had arranged pieces ofpaper into bundles tied with string. Each bundle forms a sectionin the published book.

Pascal was a sickly child, and not physically strong at anytime in his life. In painted portraits, he doesn’t ever look well.His watery eyes gaze out sadly at you. But he achieved a greatdeal in a short time. As a young man, encouraged by his father,he became a scientist, working on ideas about vacuums anddesigning barometers. In 1642 he invented a mechanical calcu-lating machine that could add and subtract by using a stylus toturn dials attached to complicated gears. He made it to help hisfather with his business calculations. About the size of a shoebox,it was known as the Pascaline and although a bit clunky, itworked. The main problem was that it was very expensive toproduce.

As well as being a scientist and inventor, Pascal was a superbmathematician. His most original mathematical ideas wereabout probability. But it is as a religious philosopher and writerthat he will be remembered. Not that he would have likedto have been called a philosopher: his writings include manycomments about how little philosophers know, and howunimportant their ideas are. He thought of himself as atheologian.

Pascal switched from work in mathematics and science towriting about religion as a young man after he had beenconverted to a controversial religious sect known as Jansenism.The Jansenists believed in predestination, the idea that we don’thave free will, and that only a few people had already been pre-selected by God to go to heaven. They also believed in a verystrict way of life. Pascal once scolded his sister when he saw hercuddling her child because he disapproved of displays ofemotion. His last years were spent living like a monk, andalthough in great pain from the illness that eventually killedhim, he managed to carry on writing.

René Descartes (the subject of Chapter 11) – like Pascal, adevout Christian, a scientist and a mathematician – believedthat you could prove God’s existence by logic. Pascal thoughtotherwise. For him, belief in God was about the heart andfaith. He wasn’t persuaded by the sorts of reasoning about God’sexistence that philosophers generally use. He wasn’t, forexample, convinced that you could see evidence of God’s handin nature. For him, the heart, not the brain, was the organ thatleads us to God.

Despite this, in his Pensées he came up with a clever argu-ment to persuade those who are unsure whether or not Godexists that they should believe in God, an argument that hascome to be known as Pascal’s Wager. It draws on his interest in

probability. If you are a rational gambler, rather than just anaddict, you’ll want to have the best chance of winning a bigprize, but you’ll also want to minimize your losses whereverpossible. Gamblers calculate odds and, in principle, bet accord-ingly. So what does that mean when it comes to betting on God’sexistence?

Assuming you aren’t sure whether or not God exists, there area number of options. You can choose to live your life as if Goddefinitely doesn’t exist. If you are right, then you will have livedwithout any illusion about a possible afterlife, and so you willhave avoided agonizing about the possibility that you are toomuch of a sinner to end up in heaven. You also won’t havewasted time in church praying to a non-existent being. But thatapproach, though it has some obvious benefits, carries with it ahuge risk. If you don’t believe in God, but God does actuallyturn out to exist, not only might you lose your chance of bliss inheaven, but you might end up in hell where you will be torturedfor the whole of eternity. That is the worst imaginable outcomefor anybody.

Alternatively, Pascal suggests, you can choose to live your lifeas if God does exist. You can say prayers, attend church, read theBible. If it turns out that God does indeed exist, you win the bestpossible prize: the serious chance of eternal bliss. If you chooseto believe in God, but it turns out that you are wrong, you won’thave made a substantial sacrifice (and presumably, you won’t bearound after your death to learn that you were wrong and feelbad about all that wasted time and effort). As Pascal put it, ‘Ifyou win you win everything; if you lose you lose nothing.’ Herecognized that you might miss out on ‘those poisonous pleas-ures’: glory and luxury. But instead you’ll be faithful, honest,humble, grateful, generous, a good friend, and will always tellthe truth. Not everyone would see it quite in these terms. Pascal

was probably so immersed in a religious way of life thathe didn’t realize that it would be a sacrifice for many non-religious people to devote their lives to religion and live a lifeof illusion, as they would see it. Nevertheless, as Pascal pointsout, on one side you have the chance of eternal bliss if you areright, and relatively minor inconveniences and a few illusionsif you are wrong. On the other side, you risk the chance ofhell, but your possible gains don’t compare with an eternity inheaven.

You can’t really sit on the fence on the issue of whether or notGod exists, either. From Pascal’s point of view, if you try to dothis it could produce the same outcome for you as believing thatGod definitely doesn’t exist: you could end up in hell, or at leastwon’t get access to heaven. You have to make a decision one wayor the other. You really don’t know if God exists. What shouldyou do?

Pascal thought it was obvious. If you are a rational gamblerand look at the odds with a cool gaze you will see that youshould bet on God existing even if, as with tossing the coin,there is only a small chance of being correct. The potential prizeis infinite, and the potential loss not great. No rational personwould do anything else but gamble on God existing with thoseodds, he thought. Obviously there is a risk that you bet on Godand lose: that God turns out not to exist. But that’s a risk youshould take.

But what if you see the logic of this, but still don’t feel in yourheart that God exists? It’s really difficult (and perhaps impos-sible) to talk yourself into believing something which yoususpect just isn’t true. Try believing there are fairies in yourwardrobe. You might be able to imagine that, but that’s verydifferent from really thinking there are fairies in there. Webelieve things that we think are true. That’s just the nature

of belief. So how does the non-believer who doubts God’sexistence get to have faith in God?

Pascal had an answer to this problem. Once you’ve workedout that it is in your best interests to believe in God, then youneed to find a way of convincing yourself that God does existand to have faith. What you should do is imitate people whoalready believe in God. Spend time in church doing the thingsthat they do there. Take the holy water, have masses said and soon. Very soon you’ll end up not just imitating their actions, butactually having the beliefs and feelings they do, he thought.That’s your best chance of winning eternal life and avoiding therisk of eternal torture.

Not everyone finds Pascal’s argument at all convincing. Oneof the most obvious problems with it is that God, if he exists,might not look very favourably on people who only believedin him because it was the safest bet. It seems like the wrong sortof reason to believe in God. It’s just too self-interested becauseit is based entirely on you selfishly wanting to save your ownsoul at all costs. One risk might be that God would makesure that no one who used this gambler’s argument ever gotinto heaven.

Another serious problem with Pascal’s Wager is that it doesn’ttake into account the possibility that in following it you mighthave opted for the wrong religion, the wrong God. Pascalpresents the option as between faith in a Christian God orbelieving that there is no God. But there are many other reli-gions that promise everlasting bliss to believers. If one of thosereligions proves to be true, then by opting for followingChristianity the individual who follows Pascal’s Wager mightcut him or herself off from infinite happiness in heaven assurely as the person who rejects all belief in God would havedone. Had Pascal thought about this possibility, he might,

perhaps, have been even more pessimistic about the humancondition than he was.

Pascal believed in the God described in the Bible; BaruchSpinoza had a very different view of the deity, one that led someto suspect he was an atheist in disguise.

chap ter 13

The Lens Grinder

Baruch Spinoza

Most religions teach that God exists somewhere outsidethe world, perhaps in heaven. Baruch Spinoza (1632–77)was unusual in thinking that God is the world. He wroteabout ‘God or Nature’, to make this point – meaning that thetwo words refer to the same thing. God and nature are twoways of describing a single thing. God is nature and nature isGod. This is a form of pantheism – the belief that God is every-thing. It was a radical idea that got him into quite a lot oftrouble.

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam, the son of Portuguese Jews.Amsterdam was then popular with people fleeing persecution.But even here there were limits to the views you could express.Although brought up in the Jewish religion, Spinoza was excom-municated and cursed by the rabbis in his synagogue in 1656when he was 24 years old, probably because his views aboutGod were so unorthodox. He left Amsterdam, later settling in

The Hague. From this point he was known as Benedict deSpinoza rather than Baruch, his Jewish name.

Many philosophers have been impressed by geometry. TheAncient Greek Euclid’s famous proofs of various geometricalhypotheses moved from a few simple axioms or starting assump-tions to conclusions such as that the sum of the interior anglesof a triangle are equal to two right angles. What philosophersusually admire in geometry is the way it moves by carefullogical steps from agreed starting points to surprising conclu-sions. If the axioms are true, then the conclusions must be true.This sort of geometrical reasoning inspired both René Descartesand Thomas Hobbes.

Spinoza did not just admire geometry; he wrote philosophyas if it were geometry. The ‘proofs’ in his book Ethics look likegeometrical proofs and include axioms and definitions. Theyare supposed to have the same relentless logic as geometry. Butinstead of dealing with topics like the angles of triangles and thecircumferences of circles, they are about God, nature, freedomand emotion. He felt that these subjects could be analysed andreasoned about in just the same way that we can reason abouttriangles, circles and squares. He even ends sections with ‘QED’which is short for quod erat demonstrandum, a Latin phrasemeaning ‘which was to be proved’ that appears in geometrytextbooks. There is, he believed, an underlying structural logicto the world and our place in it that reason can reveal. Nothingis as it is by chance, there is a purpose and principle to it all.Everything fits together in one huge system and the best way tounderstand this is by the power of thought. This approach tophilosophy, emphasizing reason rather than experiment andobservation, is often labelled Rationalism.

Spinoza enjoyed being on his own. It was in solitude that hehad the time and peace of mind to follow his studies. It was

probably also safer not to be part of a more public institution,given his views about God. For this reason too his most famousbook, Ethics, was only published after his death. Although hisreputation as a highly original thinker spread during his life-time, he turned down an offer to take up a teaching post atHeidelberg University. He was, though, happy to discuss hisideas with some of the thinkers who came to visit him.The philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz was oneof these.

Spinoza lived very simply, staying in lodgings rather thanbuying his own house. He didn’t need much money and wasable to get by on what he earned as a lens grinder together withsome small payments from people who admired his philosoph-ical work. The lenses he made were used in scientific instru-ments such as telescopes and microscopes. This allowed him toremain independent and work from his lodgings. Unfortunatelyit also probably contributed to his early death from a chestinfection at only 44. He would have breathed in the fine glassdust from grinding the lenses and this almost certainly damagedhis lungs.

If God is infinite, Spinoza reasoned, it must follow that therecannot be anything that is not God. If you discover somethingin the universe that is not God, then God can’t be infinite,because God could have in principle been that thing as well aseverything else. We are all parts of God, but so are stones, ants,blades of grass, and windows. All of it. It all fits together into anincredibly complex whole, but ultimately everything that existsis part of this one thing: God.

Traditional religious believers preached that God lovedhumanity and responded to personal prayers. This is a form ofanthropomorphism – projecting human qualities, such ascompassion, on to a non-human being, God. The most extreme

form of this is to imagine God as a kindly man with a big beardand a gentle smile. Spinoza’s God was nothing like this. He – orperhaps more accurately ‘it’ – was completely impersonal anddid not care about anything or anyone. According to Spinoza,you can and should love God, but don’t expect any love back inreturn. That would be like a nature lover expecting nature tolove him back. In fact, the God he describes is so completelyindifferent to human beings and what they do that manythought Spinoza didn’t believe in God at all and that hispantheism was a cover. They took him to be an atheist andagainst religion altogether. How could someone who believedthat God didn’t care about humanity be anything else? FromSpinoza’s perspective, though, he had an intellectual love ofGod, a love based on deep understanding achieved by reason.But this was hardly conventional religion. The synagogue hadprobably been right to excommunicate him.

Spinoza’s views on free will were controversial too. He was adeterminist. This meant he believed that every human actionwas the result of earlier causes. A stone thrown into the air, if itcould become conscious like a human being, would imaginethat it was moving by its own willpower even though it wasn’t.What was really moving it along was the force of the throw andthe effects of gravity. The stone just felt that it rather thangravity, was controlling where it went. Human beings are thesame: we imagine that we are choosing freely what we do andhave control over our lives. But that’s because we don’t usuallyunderstand the ways in which our choices and actions havebeen brought about. In fact free will is an illusion. There is nospontaneous free action at all.

But although he was a determinist, Spinoza did believe thatsome kind of very limited human freedom was possible anddesirable. The worst way to exist was to be in what he called

bondage: at the complete mercy of your emotions. When some-thing bad happens, someone is rude to you, for example, andyou lose your temper and are filled with hatred, this is a verypassive way to exist. You simply react to events. Externalhappenings cause your anger. You are not in control at all. Theway to escape this is to gain a better understanding of the causesthat shape behaviour – the things that lead you to be angry. ForSpinoza, the best that we can achieve is for our emotions toemerge from our own choices rather than external events. Eventhough these choices can never be fully free, it is better to beactive than passive.

Spinoza is typical of a philosopher. He was prepared to becontroversial, to put forward ideas that not everyone was readyto hear, and to defend his views with argument. Through hiswriting he continues to influence those who read his work, evenwhen they disagree strongly with what he wrote. His belief thatGod is nature didn’t catch on at the time, but since his death hehas had some very eminent admirers, including the Victoriannovelist George Eliot, who made a translation of his Ethics, andthe twentieth-century physicist Albert Einstein who, though hecouldn’t bring himself to believe in a personal God, revealed ina letter that he did believe in Spinoza’s God.

Spinoza’s God, as we have seen, was impersonal and had nohuman characteristics, so would not punish anyone for theirsins. John Locke, born in the same year as Spinoza, took a verydifferent line. His discussion of the nature of the self was partlyinspired by his concern about what might happen on the Day ofJudgment.

The Prince and the Cobbler

John Locke and Thomas Reid

What were you like as a baby? If you have one, look at a photo-graph taken at the time. What do you see? Was that really you?You probably look quite different now. Can you remember whatit was like being a baby? Most of us can’t. We all change overtime. We grow, develop, mature, decline, forget things. Most ofus get wrinklier, eventually our hair turns white or falls out, wechange our views, our friends, our dress sense, our priorities. Inwhat sense, then, will you be the same person as that baby whenyou are old? This question of what makes someone the sameperson over time is one that vexed the English philosopher JohnLocke (1632–1704).

Locke, like many philosophers, had wide interests. He wasenthusiastic about the scientific discoveries of his friends RobertBoyle and Isaac Newton, was involved in the politics of his dayand also wrote about education. In the aftermath of the EnglishCivil War, he fled to the Netherlands when accused of plotting

to murder the newly restored king, Charles II. From there hechampioned religious toleration, arguing that it was absurd totry to force people to change their religious beliefs throughtorture. His view that we have a God-given right to life, freedom,happiness and property influenced the founding fathers whowrote the United States Constitution.

We don’t have any photographs or drawings of Locke as ababy. But he probably changed quite a lot as he grew older. Inmidlife he was a gaunt, intense-looking figure with long stragglyhair. As a baby, though, he would have been quite different. Oneof Locke’s beliefs was that the mind of a newborn is like a blankslate. We don’t know anything when we are born, and all ourknowledge comes from our experience in life. As the babyLocke grew into the young philosopher, he acquired all kinds ofbeliefs and became the person we think of now as John Locke.But in what sense was he the same person as the baby, and inwhat sense was the middle-aged Locke the same person as theyoung man?

This sort of problem doesn’t just arise for human beingswondering about their relationship to their past. As Lockenoticed, it can even be an issue when thinking about socks. Ifyou have a sock with a hole in it and you patch that hole up, andthen patch up another hole, eventually you might end up with asock that consists just of the patches, with none of the originalmaterial there at all. Would that still be the same sock? In onesense it is, because there is a continuity of parts from the orig-inal to the completely patched up sock. But in another sense itisn’t the same sock, because none of the original material isthere. Or think of an oak tree. An oak tree grows from an acorn,loses its leaves each year, gets bigger, branches fall off, but stillremains the same oak tree. Is the acorn the same plant as thesapling, and the sapling the same plant as the huge oak?

One way of approaching the question about what makes ahuman being the same person over time would be to pointout that we are living things. You are the same individual animalthat you were as a baby. Locke used the word ‘man’ (meaning bythat ‘man or woman’) to refer to the ‘human animal’. He thoughtit was true to say that over a life each of us remains the same‘man’ in that sense. There is a continuity of the living humanbeing that develops in the course of its life. But for Lockebeing the same ‘man’ was very different from being the sameperson.

According to Locke, I could be the same ‘man’, but not thesame person I was previously. How could that be? What makesus the same person over time, Locke claimed, is our conscious-ness, our awareness of our own selves. What you can’t rememberisn’t part of you as a person. To illustrate this he imagined aprince waking up with a cobbler’s memories; and a cobbler witha prince’s memories. The prince wakes up as usual in his palace,and to outside appearances is the same person he was when hewent to sleep. But because he has the cobbler’s memories insteadof his own, he feels that he is the cobbler. Locke’s point was thatthe prince is right to feel that he is the cobbler. Bodily continuitydoesn’t decide the issue. What matters in questions aboutpersonal identity is psychological continuity. If you have theprince’s memories, then you are the prince. If you havethe cobbler’s memories, you are the cobbler, even if you have thebody of a prince. If the cobbler had committed a crime, it wouldbe the one with the prince’s body that we should hold respon-sible for it.

Of course in ordinary cases memories don’t switch like that.Locke was using this thought experiment to make a point. Butsome people do claim that it is possible that more than oneperson can inhabit a single body. That is a condition known as

multiple personality disorder, where it appears that differentpersonalities are present within a single individual. Locke antic-ipated this possibility and imagined two completely inde-pendent persons living in one body – one present by day, theother only at night. If these two minds have no access to eachother, then they are two persons, on Locke’s account.

For Locke, questions of personal identity were closelyconnected with moral responsibility. He believed that God wouldonly punish people for crimes they remembered committing.Someone who no longer remembered doing evil wouldn’t be thesame person who committed the crime. In everyday life, ofcourse, people lie about what they remember. So if someoneclaims to have forgotten what they’ve done, judges are reluctantto let them off. But because God knows everything, he will beable to tell who deserves punishment and who doesn’t. A conse-quence of Locke’s view would be that if Nazi-hunters track downan old man who in his youth had been a concentration campguard, the old man should only be held responsible for what hecan remember, and not for any other crimes. God wouldn’tpunish him for the actions he’d forgotten about, even if ordinarycourts wouldn’t give him the benefit of the doubt.

Locke’s approach to personal identity also gave an answer toa question that vexed some of his contemporaries. They worriedabout whether you needed the same body to be brought back tolife in order to go to heaven. If you did, what would happen ifyour body had been eaten by a cannibal or a wild animal? Howwould you get all the body parts back together to be raised fromthe dead? If the cannibal had eaten you, then bits of you wouldhave become part of him or her. So how could both the cannibaland the cannibal’s meal (i.e. you) both be restored as bodies?Locke made clear that what mattered was that you were thesame person in the afterlife rather than the same body. On his

view you could be the same person if you had the same memo-ries, even if these were attached to a different body.

One consequence of Locke’s view is that you probably aren’tthe same person as the baby in the photograph. You are thesame individual, but unless you can remember being a baby,you can’t be the same person. Your personal identity onlyextends as far back as your memory. As your memories fade inold age, too, the extent of what you are as a person will alsoshrink.

Some philosophers feel that Locke went a bit far with hisemphasis on self-conscious memory as the basis of personalidentity. In the eighteenth century, the Scottish philosopherThomas Reid came up with an example showing a weakness inLocke’s way of thinking about what it is to be a person. An oldsoldier can remember his bravery in a battle when he was ayoung officer; and when he was a young officer he couldremember that he had been hit when as a boy he’d stolen applesfrom an orchard. But in his old age, the soldier can no longerremember this event from his childhood. Surely this pattern ofoverlapping memories would mean that the old soldier was stillthe same person as the boy? Thomas Reid thought it wasobvious that the old soldier was still the same person as theyoung boy.

But according to Locke’s theory the old soldier was the sameperson as the young brave officer, but wasn’t the same person asthe young child who was hit (because the old soldier hadforgotten about that). Yet, also according to Locke’s theory, theyoung brave officer was the same person as the child (becausehe could remember his orchard escapade). This gives the absurdresult that the old soldier is the same person as the young braveofficer, and the young brave officer is the same person as thechild; but at the same time the old soldier and the child are not

the same person. As a matter of logic that doesn’t work at all. Itis like saying $\mathrm{A}=\mathrm{B}$ and $\mathrm{B}=\mathrm{C};$ , but A doesn’t equal C. Personalidentity, it seems, relies on overlapping memories, not on totalrecall as Locke had thought.

Locke’s impact as a philosopher rests on far more than hisdiscussion of personal identity. In his great work An EssayConcerning Human Understanding (1690), he put forward theview that our ideas represent the world to us, but that only someaspects of that world are as they seem. This stimulated GeorgeBerkeley to come up with his own imaginative account ofreality.

The Elephant in the RoomGeorge Berkeley (and John Locke)

Have you ever wondered if the light really does go off when youshut the fridge door and no one can see it? How could you tell?Perhaps you could rig up a remote camera. But then whathappens when you turn the camera off? What about a treefalling in a forest where no one can hear it? Does it really makea noise? How do you know your bedroom continues to existunobserved when you aren’t in it? Perhaps it vanishes everytime you go out. You could ask someone else to check for you.The difficult question is: does it carry on existing when nobodyis observing it? It’s not clear how you could answer these ques-tions. Most of us think that objects do continue to exist unob-served because that is the simplest explanation. Most of us toobelieve that the world we observe is out there somewhere: itdoesn’t just exist in our minds.

Though according to George Berkeley (1685–1753), an Irishphilosopher who became Bishop of Cloyne, anything that stops

being observed ceases to exist. If no mind is directly aware ofthe book you are reading, it won’t exist any more. When you arelooking at the book you can see and touch the pages, but all thatmeans for Berkeley is that you have experiences. It doesn’t meanthat there is something out there in the world causing theseexperiences. The book is just a collection of ideas in your mindand in other people’s minds (and perhaps in God’s mind), notsomething beyond your mind. For Berkeley, the whole notionof an outside world made no sense at all. All of this seems to goagainst common sense. Surely we are surrounded by objectsthat continue to exist whether or not anyone is aware of them,aren’t we? Berkeley thought not.

Understandably, many people believed he had gone madwhen he first started spelling out this theory. In fact it was onlyafter his death that philosophers started taking him seriouslyand recognized what he was trying to do. When he heard aboutBerkeley’s theory, his contemporary Samuel Johnson kicked astone hard in the street and declared, ‘I refute it thus’. Johnson’spoint was that he was certain that material things do exist andaren’t just composed of ideas – he could feel that stone hardagainst his toe when he kicked it, so Berkeley must be wrong.But Berkeley was more intelligent than Johnson believed him tobe. Feeling the hardness of a stone against your foot wouldn’tprove the existence of material objects, only the existence of theidea of a hard stone. It’s just that for Berkeley what we call astone is nothing more than the sensations it gives rise to. Thereis no ‘real’ physical stone behind it causing the pain in the foot.In fact there is no reality at all beyond the ideas that we have.

Berkeley is sometimes described as an idealist and sometimesas an immaterialist. He was an idealist because he believed thatall that exist are ideas; he was an immaterialist because hedenied that material things – physical objects – exist. Like many

of the philosophers discussed in this book, he was fascinated bythe relationship between appearance and reality. Most philoso-phers, he believed, were mistaken about what that relationshipwas. In particular, he argued that John Locke was wrong abouthow our thoughts relate to the world. It’s easiest to understandBerkeley’s approach by comparing it with Locke’s.

If you look at an elephant, Locke thought, you don’t see theelephant itself. What you take to be an elephant is actually arepresentation; what he called an idea in your mind, somethinglike a picture of an elephant. Locke used the word ‘idea’ to coveranything we could possibly think about or perceive. If you see agrey elephant, the greyness can’t simply be something in theelephant, because it would look a different colour under adifferent light. The greyness is what Locke called a ‘secondaryquality’. It is produced by a combination of features of theelephant and features of our sensory apparatus, in this case theeye. The elephant’s skin colour, its texture and the smell of itsdung are all secondary qualities.

Primary qualities, such as size and shape, according to Locke,are real features of things in the world. Ideas of primary quali-ties resemble those things. If you see a square object the realobject that gives rise to your idea of that object is also square.But if you see a red square, the real object in the world thatcauses your perception isn’t red. Real objects are colourless.Sensations of colour, Locke believed, come from the interactionbetween the microscopic textures of objects and our visualsystem.

There’s a serious problem here, though. Locke believed thatthere is a world out there, the world that scientists try todescribe, but that we only get at it indirectly. He was a realist inthat he believed in the existence of a real world. This real worldcontinues to exist even when no one is aware of it. The difficulty

for Locke is knowing what that world is like. He thinks that ourideas of primary qualities such as shape and size are goodpictures of that reality. But how could he possibly tell? As anempiricist, someone who believes that experience is the sourceof all our knowledge, he should have had good evidence for theclaim that ideas of primary qualities resemble the real world.But his theory doesn’t explain how he could ever know what thereal world is like since we can’t go and check this. How could hebe so sure that ideas of primary qualities, such as shape and size,resemble the qualities of the real world out there?

Berkeley claimed to be more consistent. Unlike Locke hethought that we do perceive the world directly. That is becausethe world consists of nothing but ideas. The whole of experi-ence is all that there is. In other words, the world and everythingin it only exist in people’s minds.

Everything you experience and think about – a chair or atable, the number 3, and so on – for Berkeley only exists in themind. An object is just a collection of ideas that you and otherpeople have of it. It doesn’t have any existence beyond that.Without someone to see or hear them, objects simply stopexisting, because objects aren’t anything over and above theideas that people (and God) have of them. Berkeley summed upthis strange view in Latin as ‘Esse est percipi’ – to be (or exist) isto be perceived.

So the fridge light can’t be on, and the tree can’t make a noisewhen there is no mind there to experience them. That mightseem the obvious conclusion to draw from Berkeley’s immateri-alism. But Berkeley didn’t think that objects were continuallycoming into and out of existence. Even he recognized that thatwould be weird. He believed that God guaranteed the contin-uing existence of our ideas. God was constantly perceivingthings in the world, so they continued to exist.

This was captured in a pair of limericks written in the earlytwentieth century. Here’s the first one, which highlights thestrangeness of the idea that a tree would stop existing if no oneobserved it:

There once was a man who said ‘God

Must think it exceedingly odd

If he finds that this tree

Continues to be

When there’s no one about in the Quad.’

(A ‘quad’ is the name given to the squares of grass in courtyardsin Oxford colleges.) This is surely right. The hardest thing toaccept about Berkeley’s theory is that a tree wouldn’t be there ifno one was experiencing it. And here is the solution, a messagefrom God:

Dear Sir, Your astonishment’s odd:

I am always about in the Quad.

And that’s why the tree

Will continue to be,

Since observed by Yours faithfully, God.

An obvious difficulty for Berkeley, however, is explaining howwe can ever be mistaken about anything. If all that we have areideas, and there is no further world behind them, how do we tellthe difference between real objects and optical illusions? Hisanswer was that the difference between experience of what wecall reality and experience of an illusion is that when we experi-ence ‘reality’ our ideas don’t contradict each other. For example,if you see an oar in water, it may look bent at the point where itbreaks the surface. For a realist such as Locke, the truth is that

the oar is really straight – it just looks bent. For Berkeley, wehave an idea of a bent oar, but this contradicts the ideas we willhave if we reach into the water and touch it. We’ll then feel thatit is straight.

Berkeley didn’t spend every hour of his day defending hisimmaterialism. There was much more to his life than that. Hewas a sociable and likeable man, and his friends included theauthor of Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift. In later life Berkeleyhatched an ambitious plan to set up a college on the island ofBermuda and managed to raise quite a lot of money to do this.Unfortunately the plan failed, partly because he hadn’t realizedhow far from the mainland Bermuda was and how difficultit was to get supplies there. He did, however, after his death,have a West Coast university named after him – Berkeley inCalifornia. That came from a poem he wrote about Americawhich included the line ‘Westward the course of empire takes itsway’, a line that appealed to one of the university’s founders.

Perhaps even stranger than Berkeley’s immaterialism was hispassion in later life for promoting tar water, an American folkmedicine made from pine tar and water. This was supposed tocure just about every illness. He even went so far as to write along poem about how amazing it was. Although tar water waspopular for a time, and may even have worked as a cure forminor ailments since it does have mild antiseptic properties, itis, rightly, not a popular cure now. Berkeley’s idealism hasn’tcaught on either.

Berkeley is an example of a philosopher who was prepared tofollow an argument wherever it went, even when it seemed tolead to conclusions that defied common sense. Voltaire, incontrast, had little time for this kind of thinker, or, indeed, formost philosophers.

The Best of All Possible Worlds?

Voltaire and Gottfried Leibniz

If you were designing the world would you have done it thisway? Probably not. But in the eighteenth century some peopleargued that theirs was the best of all possible worlds. ‘Whateveris, is right,’ declared the English poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744). Everything in the world is the way it is for a reason:it’s all God’s work and God is good and all-powerful. So even ifthings seem to be going badly, they’re not. Disease, floods,earthquakes, forest fires, drought – they’re all just part of God’splan. Our mistake is to focus close up on individual detailsrather than the larger picture. If we could stand back and see theuniverse from where God sits we would recognize the perfec-tion of it, how each piece fits together and everything that seemsevil is really part of a much larger plan.

Pope was not alone in his optimism. The German philoso-pher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) used his Principleof Sufficient Reason to come to the same conclusion.

He assumed that there must be a logical explanation for every-thing. Since God is perfect in every respect – that is part ofthe standard definition of God – it followed from this that Godmust have had excellent reasons for making the universein precisely the form that he did. Nothing could have beenleft to chance. God did not create an absolutely perfect worldin every respect – that would have made the world into God,since God is the most perfect thing that there is or can be. Buthe must have made the best of all possible worlds, the one withthe least amount of evil needed to achieve that result. Therecouldn’t have been a better way of putting the bits togetherthan this: no design would have produced more goodness usingless evil.

François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), better known as Voltaire,didn’t see it this way. He took no comfort at all from this ‘proof ’that everything is going well. He was deeply suspicious of philo-sophical systems and the kind of thinkers who believe theyhave all the answers. This French playwright, satirist, fictionwriter and thinker was well known throughout Europe for hisoutspoken views. The most famous sculpture of him, by Jean-Antoine Houdon, captures the tight-lipped smile and laughterlines of this witty, brave man. A champion of free speech andreligious toleration, he was a controversial figure. He is, forinstance, supposed to have declared, ‘I hate what you say,but will defend to the death your right to say it’, a powerfuldefence of the idea that even views that you despise deserveto be heard. In eighteenth-century Europe, however, the CatholicChurch strictly controlled what could be published. Many ofVoltaire’s plays and books were censored and burned in publicand he was even imprisoned in the Bastille in Paris becausehe had insulted a powerful aristocrat. But none of this stoppedhim challenging the prejudices and pretensions of those around

him. He is best known today, though, as the author of Candide(1759).

In this short philosophical novel he completely underminedthe kind of optimism about humanity and the universe thatPope and Leibniz had expressed, and he did it in such an enter-taining way that the book became an instant bestseller. WiselyVoltaire left his name off the title page, otherwise its publicationwould have landed him in prison again for making fun ofreligious beliefs.

Candide is the central character. His name suggests inno-cence and purity. At the start of the book, he is a young servantwho falls hopelessly in love with his master’s daughter,Cunégonde, but is chased out of her father’s castle when he iscaught in a compromising position with her. From then on, ina fast-moving and often fantastical tale, he travels through realand imaginary countries with his philosophy tutor Dr Pangloss,until he finally meets up with his lost love Cunégonde again,though by now she is old and ugly. In a series of comicalepisodes Candide and Pangloss witness terrible events andencounter a range of characters along the way, all of whom havethemselves suffered terrible misfortunes.

Voltaire uses the philosophy tutor, Pangloss, to spout a cari-catured version of Leibniz’s philosophy, which the writer thenpokes fun at. Whatever happens, whether it is a natural disaster,torture, war, rape, religious persecution or slavery, Panglosstreats it as further confirmation that they live in the best of allpossible worlds. Rather than causing him to rethink his beliefs,each disaster just increases his confidence that everything is forthe best and this is how things had to be to produce the mostperfect situation. Voltaire takes great delight in revealingPangloss’ refusal to see what is in front of him, and this is meantto mock Leibniz’s optimism. But to be fair to Leibniz, his point

wasn’t that evil doesn’t occur, but rather that the evil that doesexist was needed to bring about the best possible world. It does,however, suggest that there is so much evil in the world thatit is hardly likely that Leibniz was right – this can’t be theminimum needed to achieve a good result. There is just toomuch pain and suffering in the world for that to be true.

In 1755 one of the worst natural disasters of the eighteenthcentury occurred: the Lisbon earthquake that killed more than20,000 people. This Portuguese city was devastated not just bythe earthquake, but also by the tsunami that followed, and thenby fires that raged for days. The suffering and loss of life shookVoltaire’s belief in God. He couldn’t understand how an eventlike this could be part of a larger plan. The scale of sufferingdidn’t make any sense to him. Why would a good God allow thisto happen? Nor could he see why Lisbon was the target. Whythere and not somewhere else?

In a key episode in Candide, Voltaire used this real tragedy tohelp make his case against the optimists. The travellers are ship-wrecked near Lisbon in a storm that kills almost everyone elseon board their ship. The only one of the crew to survive was asailor who had apparently deliberately drowned one of theirfriends. But despite the obvious lack of justice in this, Panglossstill sees everything that happens through the filter of his philo-sophical optimism. Arriving in Lisbon just after the earthquakehas devastated the city and left tens of thousands dead or dyingaround him, Pangloss continues, absurdly, to maintain thatall is well. In the rest of the book things get even worse forPangloss – he is hanged, dissected alive, beaten and made to rowa galley. But he still clings to his faith that Leibniz was right tobelieve in a pre-established harmony of everything that is.There is no experience that will budge the stubborn philosophyteacher from his beliefs.

Unlike Pangloss, Candide is gradually changed by what hewitnesses. Although at the start of their journey he shares histeacher’s views, by the end of the book his experiences havemade him sceptical about all philosophy and he opts for a morepractical solution to life’s problems.

Candide and Cunégonde have been reunited, and they areliving together with Pangloss and several of the other characterson a small farm. One character, Martin, suggests that the onlyway to make life bearable is to stop philosophizing and getdown to work. For the first time they start to co-operate andeach gets on with what he or she is best at. When Pangloss startsto argue that everything bad that has happened in their liveswas a necessary evil that led to this happy conclusion, Candidetells him that’s all very well, but ‘we must cultivate our garden’.These are the final words of the story, and are intended toconvey a strong message to the reader. The phrase is the moralof the book, the punchline of this extended joke. At one level,within the story, Candide is simply saying that they need to geton with the work of farming, they need to keep themselvesoccupied. At a deeper level, though, cultivating our garden, forVoltaire, is a metaphor for doing something useful for humanityrather than just talking about abstract philosophical questions.That’s what the characters in the book need to do to flourishand be happy. But, Voltaire hints strongly, this isn’t just whatCandide and his friends should do. It’s what we all ought to do.

Voltaire was unusual amongst philosophers in being rich. Asa young man he had been part of a syndicate that had found aflaw in the state lottery and had bought thousands of winningtickets. He invested wisely and became even richer. This gavehim the financial freedom to champion the causes he believedin. Rooting out injustice was his passion. One of his mostimpressive acts was to defend the reputation of Jean Calas, who

had been tortured and executed for supposedly murdering hisown son. Calas was clearly innocent: his son had committedsuicide, but the court had ignored the evidence. Voltairemanaged to get the judgment overturned. There was no chanceof consolation for poor Jean Calas, who had protested his inno-cence to his last breath; but at least his ‘accomplices’ were freed.This is what ‘cultivating our garden’ meant in practice forVoltaire.

From the way Voltaire mocks Pangloss’ ‘proof ’ that God hasproduced the best of all possible worlds, you might assume thatCandide’s author was an atheist. In fact, although he had notime for organized religion, he was a deist, someone whobelieves that there is visible evidence of God’s existence anddesign to be found in nature. For him, looking up at the nightsky was all it took to prove that a Creator exists. David Humewas highly sceptical of this idea. His criticisms of this style ofreasoning are devastating.

chap ter 17

The Imaginary Watchmaker

David Hume

Take a look in the mirror at one of your eyes. It has a lens thatfocuses the image, an iris that adapts to changing light, andeyelids and eyelashes to protect it. If you look to one side, theeyeball swivels in its socket. It’s also quite beautiful. How didthat happen? It’s an amazing bit of engineering. How could aneye have turned out this way just by chance?

Imagine stumbling through a jungle on a deserted island, andcoming to a clearing. You clamber over the tumbled remains ofa palace with walls, stairs, pathways and courtyards. You knowit couldn’t have got there by chance. Someone must havedesigned it, some kind of architect. If you find a watch whenyou are out for a walk it is quite reasonable to assume that it hasbeen made by a watchmaker, and that it was designed for apurpose: to tell the time. Those tiny cogwheels didn’t just fallinto place by themselves. Someone must have thought it allthrough. All these examples seem to point to the same thing:

objects that look as if they have been designed almost certainlyhave been.

Well then, think of nature: trees, flowers, mammals, birds,reptiles, insects, even amoebae. These things also look as if theyhave been designed. Living organisms are much more compli-cated than any watch. Mammals have complex nerve systems,blood pumping round their body, and are usually very wellsuited to the places they inhabit. So surely an incredibly powerfuland intelligent Creator must have made them. That Creator – aDivine Watchmaker or Divine Architect – must have been God.Or that’s what many people thought in the eighteenth centurywhen David Hume was writing – and some still do today.

This argument for the existence of God is often known as theDesign Argument. New discoveries in science in the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries seemed to support it. Microscopesrevealed the complexity of tiny pond animals; telescopes showedthe beauty and regularity of the solar system and the MilkyWay. These too seemed to have been put together with greatprecision.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76) wasn’tconvinced. Influenced by Locke, he set out to explain the natureof humanity and our place in the universe by considering howwe acquire knowledge and the limits of what we can learn byusing reason. Like Locke, he believed that our knowledge comesfrom observation and experience, so he was particularly inter-ested in an argument for God’s existence that began with obser-vation of some aspects of the world.

He believed the Design Argument was based on bad logic.His Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) includeda chapter attacking the idea that we can prove God’s existence inthis way. That chapter and one arguing that it was never reason-able to believe eyewitness reports of miracles were extremely

controversial. At the time in Britain it was difficult to be openlyagainst religious beliefs. This meant Hume never got a job at auniversity despite being one of the great thinkers of his time.His friends gave him good advice when they told him not toallow publication of his most powerful attack on the usual argu-ments for God’s existence, his Dialogues Concerning NaturalReligion (1779), until after his death.

Does the Design Argument prove the existence of God?Hume thought it didn’t. The argument does not provide enoughevidence to conclude that an all-powerful, all-knowing andall-good being must exist. Most of Hume’s philosophy concen-trated on the kind of evidence we can give in support ofour beliefs. The Design Argument is based on the fact that theworld appears to be designed. But, Hume argued, just because itlooks designed, it doesn’t follow that it really was designed; nordoes it follow that God was the designer. How did he arrive atthat conclusion?

Imagine an old-fashioned set of weighing scales partly behinda screen. You can only see one of the two pans of the scales. Ifyou see that pan going up, all you can know is that whatever isin the other pan is heavier than the one you can see. You can’ttell what colour it is, whether it is cube-shaped or spherical,whether it has words written on it, or is covered in fur, oranything else.

In this example we’re thinking about causes and effects. Inanswer to the question ‘What caused the pan to move upwards?’all you can answer is, ‘The cause was something heavier in theother pan.’ You see the effect – the pan going up – and try towork out the cause from that. But without further evidencethere’s not a lot more you can say. Anything you do say is pureguesswork and we have no way of telling whether it is true ornot if we can’t look behind the screen. Hume thought we are in

a similar situation with the world around us. We see the effectsof various causes, and try to work out the most likely explana-tion of these effects. We see a human eye, a tree, a mountain,and they might well appear to be designed. But what can wesay about their probable designer? The eye looks as if aneye-maker has thought about how best to make it work. Itdoesn’t follow from this, though, that the eye-maker was God.Why not?

God is usually thought of as having the three special powersalready mentioned: he is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good. Even if you reach the conclusion that something verypowerful made the human eye, you don’t have evidence to saythat it was all-powerful. The eye has some flaws. Things gowrong: many people need spectacles to see properly, for example.Would an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good God havedesigned the eye just this way? Possibly. But the evidence we getfrom looking at the eye doesn’t show this. At best it shows thatsomething highly intelligent and very powerful and skilfulmade it.

But does it even show that? There are other possible explana-tions. How do we know the eye wasn’t designed by a team oflesser gods all working together? Most complex machinery isput together by a team of people; why doesn’t the same hold foreyes and other natural objects, assuming they are put togetherat all? Most buildings are built by a team of builders; why shouldan eye be different? Or perhaps the eye was made by a very oldgod who has since died. Or a very young god who was stilllearning how to design perfect eyes. Because we don’t haveevidence to decide between these different stories, we can’t besure just from looking at the eye – an apparently designedobject – that it was definitely made by a single living God withthe traditional powers. If you start thinking clearly in this area,

Hume believed, you will be very limited in the conclusions youcan draw.

Another argument that Hume attacked was the Argumentfrom Miracles. Most religions claim that miracles havehappened. People are raised from the dead, walk on water, ormake unexpected recoveries from illness; statues talk or cry, thelist goes on. But should we believe that miracles have happenedjust because other people tell us they have? Hume thought not.He was deeply sceptical about that idea. If someone tells youthat a man has miraculously recovered from an illness, whatdoes that mean? For something to be a miracle, Hume thought,it had to defy a law of nature. A law of nature was somethinglike ‘No one dies and comes back to life again’ or ‘Statues nevertalk’ or ‘No one can walk on water’. There is a huge amountof evidence that these laws of nature hold. But if someonewitnesses a miracle, why shouldn’t we believe them? Thinkabout what you would say if your friend came running into theroom now and told you that she had seen someone walkingon water.

Hume’s view was that there were always more plausible expla-nations of what was going on. If your friend tells you that shesaw someone walking on water, it is always more likely that sheis either deceiving you, or has been mistaken herself, than thatshe has witnessed a genuine miracle. We know that some peopledelight in being the centre of attention and are prepared to lie toget there. So that’s one possible explanation. But we also knowthat all of us can get things wrong. We make mistakes all thetime about what we see and hear. Often we want to believethat we have seen something unusual and so avoid the moreobvious explanation. Even today there are many people whojump to the conclusion that every unexplained sound late atnight is the result of supernatural activity – ghosts moving

about – rather than being due to more ordinary causes such asmice or the wind.

Although he regularly criticized the arguments used by reli-gious believers, Hume never openly declared that he was anatheist. He may not have been. His published views could beread as claiming that there is a divine intelligence behind every-thing in the universe, it’s just that we can never say much aboutthe qualities of that divine intelligence. Our powers of reason,when used logically, don’t tell us much at all about what quali-ties this ‘God’ must have. On the basis of this, some philoso-phers think he was an agnostic. But he probably was an atheistby the end of his life, even if he stopped short of that beforethen. When his friends came to visit him in Edinburgh in thesummer of 1776 as he was dying he made clear that he wasn’tabout to have a deathbed conversion. Far from it. James Boswell,a Christian, asked him whether he was worried about whatwould happen after he died. Hume told him he had absolutelyno hope that he would survive death. He gave the answer thatEpicurus might have given (see Chapter 4): he was, he said, nomore worried about the time after his death than he was aboutthe time he had not existed before his birth.

Hume had many brilliant contemporaries, many of whom heknew personally. One of them, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, made asignificant impact on political philosophy.

Born Free

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

In 1766 a small dark-eyed man in a long fur coat went to see aplay at the Drury Lane theatre in London. Most of the peoplethere, including the king, George III, were more interested inthis foreign visitor than in the play being performed on stage.He seemed uncomfortable and was worried about his Alsatiandog, which he’d had to leave locked in his room. This man didn’tenjoy the sort of attention he got in the theatre and would havebeen far happier out in the country somewhere on his ownlooking for wild flowers. But who was he? And why dideveryone find him so fascinating? The answer is that this wasthe great Swiss thinker and writer, Jean-Jacques Rousseau(1712–78). A literary and philosophical sensation, Rousseau’sarrival in London, at David Hume’s invitation, caused the sortof commotion and crowds that a famous pop star would today.

By this time the Catholic Church had banned several of hisbooks because they contained unconventional religious ideas.

Rousseau believed that true religion came from the heart anddidn’t need religious ceremonies. But it was his political ideasthat caused the most trouble.

‘Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains,’ hedeclared at the beginning of his book, The Social Contract. It’sno surprise that revolutionaries learnt these words by heart.Maximilien Robespierre, like many of the leaders of the FrenchRevolution, found them inspirational. The revolutionarieswanted to break the chains that the rich had placed on so manyof the poor. Some of them were starving while their rich mastersenjoyed a high life. Like Rousseau, the revolutionaries wereangry about how the wealthy behaved while the poor couldbarely find enough to eat. They wanted true freedom togetherwith equality and brotherhood. It’s unlikely, though, thatRousseau, who had died a decade before, would have approvedof Robespierre sending his enemies to the guillotine in a ‘reignof terror’. Cutting off your opponents’ heads was closer in spiritto Machiavelli’s thinking than to his.

According to Rousseau, human beings are naturally good. Leftto our own devices, living in a forest, we wouldn’t cause manyproblems. But take us out of this state of nature and put us incities and things start to go wrong. We become obsessed withtrying to dominate other people, and with getting other people’sattention. This competitive approach to life has terrible psycho-logical effects and the invention of money just makes it all farworse. Envy and greed were the result of living together in cities.In the wild, individual ‘noble savages’ would be healthy, strongand, above all, free, but civilization seemed to be corruptinghuman beings, Rousseau felt. Nevertheless, he was optimisticabout finding a better way of organizing society, one that wouldallow individuals to flourish and be fulfilled, yet which would beharmonious with everyone working towards a common good.

The problem he set himself in The Social Contract (1762) wasto find a way for people to live together that would alloweveryone to be as free as they were outside society while stillobeying the laws of the state. This sounds impossible to achieve.And perhaps it is. If the cost of becoming part of society was akind of enslavement, that would be too high a price to pay.Freedom and strict rules imposed by society don’t go together,since the rules can be like chains preventing some sorts ofaction. But Rousseau believed that there was a way out. Hissolution was based on his idea of the General Will.

The General Will is whatever is best for the whole community,the whole state. When people choose to group together forprotection, it seems that they have to give up many of theirfreedoms. That’s what Hobbes and Locke both thought. It’s hardto see how you can remain genuinely free and yet live in a largegroup of people – there have to be laws to keep everyone in checkand some restrictions on behaviour. But Rousseau believed thatas an individual living within a state you can both be freeand obey the laws of the state, and that rather than being inopposition, these ideas of freedom and obedience can combine.

It’s easy to misunderstand what Rousseau meant by theGeneral Will. Here’s a modern example. If you asked mostpeople, they’d prefer not to have to pay high taxes. In fact that isa common way for governments to get elected: they simplypromise to lower the rate of taxation. Given the choice betweenpaying 20 per cent of their earnings as tax and 5 per cent of theirearnings as tax, most people would prefer to pay the loweramount. But that is not the General Will. What everyone saysthey want if you ask them is what Rousseau would call the Willof All. In contrast, the General Will is what they ought to want,what would be good for the whole community, not just for eachperson within it thinking selfishly. When working out what the

General Will is we have to ignore self-interest and focus on thegood of the whole society, the common good. If we accept thatmany services, such as the upkeep of roads, need to be paidfor from taxation then it is good for the whole communitythat taxes are high enough to make this possible. If they are toolow, then the whole society will suffer. That then is the GeneralWill: that taxes should be high enough to provide a good levelof services.

When people get together and form a society, they become akind of person. Each individual is then part of a greater whole.The way Rousseau felt that they could stay truly free in societywas to obey laws that were in line with the General Will. Theselaws were created by a clever legislator. This person’s job was tocreate a legal system that helped individuals keep in line withthe General Will, rather than pursuing selfish interests at others’expense. True freedom, for Rousseau, is being part of a group ofpeople doing what is in the interest of that community. Yourwishes should coincide with what is best for all, and laws shouldhelp you to avoid acting selfishly.

But what if you oppose what would be best for your city-state? You, as an individual, may not want to conform with theGeneral Will. Rousseau had an answer here. But it’s not one thatmost people would like to hear. He famously, and rather worry-ingly, declared that if someone failed to recognize that obeyinga law was in the interest of the community, then that personshould be ‘forced to be free’. His point was that anyone whoopposed something that was really in the interest of theirsociety, while they might feel they were choosing freely, wouldn’tgenuinely be free unless they fell into line and conformedwith the General Will. How could you force someone to be free?If I forced you to read the rest of this book, then that wouldn’tbe a free choice you had made, would it? Surely forcing someone

to do something is the opposite of letting them make a freechoice.

For Rousseau, however, this wasn’t a contradiction. Theperson who couldn’t identify the right thing to do wouldbecome freer by being forced to conform. Since everyone in asociety is part of this larger group, we need to recognize thatwhat we should do is follow the General Will, not our selfishindividual choices. On this view, only when we follow theGeneral Will are we truly free, even if we are forced to do so.That is Rousseau’s belief, but many later thinkers, includingJohn Stuart Mill (see Chapter 24), have argued that politicalfreedom should be freedom for the individual to make his orher own choices as far as possible. Indeed, there is somethingslightly sinister about the idea of Rousseau, who had complainedabout humanity being in chains, suggesting that forcingsomeone to do something is another kind of freedom.

Rousseau spent much of his life travelling from country tocountry to escape persecution. Immanuel Kant in contrastbarely left his home town, though the impact of his thought wasfelt throughout Europe.

Rose-Tinted Reality

Immanuel Kant (1)

If you are wearing rose-tinted spectacles they will colourevery aspect of your visual experience. You may forget that youare wearing them, but they will still affect what you see.Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) believed that we are all walkingaround understanding the world through a filter like this. Thefilter is the human mind. It determines how we experienceeverything and imposes a certain shape on that experience.Everything we perceive takes place in time and space, and everychange has a cause. But according to Kant, that is not because ofthe way reality ultimately is: it is a contribution of our minds.We don’t have direct access to the way the world is. Nor can weever take the glasses off and see things as they truly are. We’restuck with this filter and without it we would be completelyunable to experience anything. All we can do is recognize thatit is there and understand how it affects and colours what weexperience.

Kant’s own mind was very ordered and logical. So was his life.He never married and he imposed a strict pattern to each day.In order not to waste any time, he had his servant wake him at5 a.m. He would then drink some tea, smoke a pipe, and beginwork. He was extremely productive, writing numerous booksand essays. Then he would lecture at the university. In the after-noon, he would go for a walk at 4.30 – exactly the same timeeach day – up and down his street precisely eight times. In factpeople who lived in his home town of Königsberg (nowKaliningrad) used to set their watches by his walk.

Like most philosophers, he spent his time trying to under-stand our relation to reality. That, in essence, is what meta-physics is about, and Kant was one of the greatest metaphysiciansto have lived. His particular interest was in the limits of thought,the limits of what we can know and understand. This was anobsession for him. In his most famous book The critique ofPure Reason (1781), he explored these limits, pushing right tothe boundaries of what makes sense. This book is far from aneasy read: Kant himself described it as both dry and obscure –and he was right. Very few people would claim to understand itall, and much of the reasoning is complex and jargon-heavy.Reading it can feel like struggling through a dense thicket ofwords with little sense of where you are going, and few glimpsesof daylight. But the core argument is clear enough.

What is reality like? Kant thought that we can’t ever have acomplete picture of the way things are. We’ll never learnanything directly about what he calls the noumenal world,whatever it is that lies behind appearances. Although he some-times uses the word ‘noumenon’ (singular) and sometimes‘noumena’ (plural) he shouldn’t have done (a point Hegel madetoo, see Chapter 22): we can’t know whether reality is one thingor many. Strictly speaking, we can’t know anything at all about

this noumenal world; at least we can’t get information about itdirectly. We can know about the phenomenal world, though, theworld around us, the world we experience through our senses.Look out of the window. What you can see is the phenomenalworld – grass, cars, sky, buildings, or whatever. You can’t see thenoumenal world, only the phenomenal one, but the noumenalworld is lurking behind all our experience. It is what exists at adeeper level.

Some aspects of what exists, then, will always be beyond ourgrasp. Yet we can, by rigorous thought, get a greater under-standing than we could get from a purely scientific approach.The main question Kant set himself to answer in The critique ofPure Reason was this: ‘How is synthetic a priori knowledgepossible?’ That question probably doesn’t make any sense toyou. It will take a little explaining. But the main idea is not asdifficult as it first seems. The first word to explain is ‘synthetic’.In Kant’s philosophical language ‘synthetic’ is the opposite of‘analytic’. ‘Analytic’ means true by definition. So, for example,‘all men are male’ is true by definition. What this means is thatyou can know that this sentence is true without making anyobservations of actual men. You don’t need to check that theyare all male, as they wouldn’t be men if they weren’t male. Nofieldwork is required to come to this conclusion: you could sitin an armchair and work it out. The word ‘men’ has the idea ofmale built into it. It’s like the sentence ‘All mammals suckle theiryoung.’ Again, you don’t need to examine any mammals at all toknow that they all suckle their young, as that is part of the defi-nition of a mammal. If you found something that seemed to bea mammal, but which didn’t suckle its young, you’d know that itcouldn’t be a mammal. Analytic statements are really just aboutdefinitions, so they don’t give us any new knowledge. They spellout what we’ve assumed in the way we’ve defined a word.

Synthetic knowledge, in contrast, requires experience orobservation and it gives us new information, something thatisn’t simply contained in the meaning of the words or symbolswe use. We know, for example, that lemons taste bitter but onlythrough having tasted them (or because someone else tells usabout their experience of tasting lemons). It isn’t true by defini-tion that lemons taste bitter – that is something that is learntthrough experience. Another synthetic statement would be ‘Allcats have tails.’ This is something that you would need to inves-tigate to find out whether or not it was true. You can’t tell untilyou look and see. In fact some cats, Manx cats, don’t have tails.And some cats have lost their tails, but are still cats. The ques-tion of whether all cats have tails is, then, a matter of fact aboutthe world, not about the definition of ‘cat’. It’s very differentfrom the statement ‘All cats are mammals’, which is just a matterof definition and so is an analytic statement.

So where does that leave synthetic a priori knowledge? Apriori knowledge, as we have seen, is knowledge that is inde-pendent of experience. We know it prior to experience, that is,before we’ve had experience of it. In the seventeenth and eight-eenth centuries there was a debate about whether or not weknow anything at all a priori. Roughly speaking, empiricists(such as Locke) thought we didn’t; rationalists (such asDescartes) thought we did. When Locke declared that therewere no innate ideas and that a child’s mind was a blank slate,he was claiming that there was no a priori knowledge. Thismakes it sound as if ‘a priori’ just means the same as ‘analytic’(and for some philosophers the terms are interchangeable). Butfor Kant it doesn’t. He thought that knowledge that reveals truthabout the world, yet is arrived at independently of experience,is possible. That’s why he introduced the special category ofsynthetic a priori knowledge to describe this. An example of

synthetic a priori knowledge, one that Kant himself used, wasthe mathematical equation $7+5=12$ . Although many philoso-phers have thought that such truths are analytic, a matter of thedefinition of mathematical symbols, Kant believed that we areable to know a priori that $7+5$ is equal to 12 (we don’t need tocheck this against objects or observations in the world). Yet atthe same time this gives us new knowledge: it is a syntheticstatement.

If Kant is right, this is a breakthrough. Before him philoso-phers investigating the nature of reality treated it simply assomething beyond us that causes our experience. Then thedifficulty was how we could ever get access to that reality to sayanything meaningful about it that was more than just guess-work. His great insight was that we could, by the power ofreason, discover features of our own minds that tint all ourexperience. Sitting in an armchair thinking hard, we couldmake discoveries about reality that had to be true, yet weren’tjust true by definition: they could be informative. He believedthat by logical argument he had done the equivalent of provingthat the world must necessarily appear pink to us. He’d not onlyproved that we are wearing rose-tinted spectacles, but had alsomade new discoveries about the various shades of pink thatthese glasses contribute to all experience.

Having answered to his satisfaction the fundamental issuesabout our relation to reality, Kant turned his attention to moralphilosophy.

What if Everyone Did That?

Immanuel Kant (2)

There’s a knock at your door. Standing in front of you is a youngman who obviously needs help. He’s injured and is bleeding.You take him in and help him, make him feel comfortable andsafe and phone for an ambulance. This is obviously the rightthing to do. But if you help him just because you feel sorry forhim, according to Immanuel Kant, that wouldn’t be a moralaction at all. Your sympathy is irrelevant to the morality of youraction. That’s part of your character, but nothing to do withright and wrong. Morality for Kant wasn’t just about what youdo, but about why you do it. Those who do the right thing don’tdo it simply because of how they feel: the decision has to bebased on reason, reason that tells you what your duty is, regard-less of how you happen to feel.

Kant thought that emotions shouldn’t come into morality.Whether we have them or not is largely a matter of luck. Somepeople feel compassion and empathy, others don’t. Some are

mean and find it difficult to feel generous; others get greatenjoyment from giving away their money and possessions tohelp other people. But being good should be something that anyreasonable person should be able to achieve through their ownchoices. For Kant, if you help the young man because you knowit is your duty, then that is a moral action. It’s the right thing todo because it is what everyone in the same situation should do.

This may sound strange to you. You probably think thatsomeone who felt sorry for the young man and helped himbecause of that would have acted morally and was perhaps abetter person for feeling that emotion. That’s what Aristotlewould have thought too (see Chapter 2). But Kant was certain.If you do something just because of how you feel that is not agood action at all. Imagine someone who felt disgust when theysaw the young man, but still went ahead and helped him out ofduty. That person would be more obviously moral in Kant’s eyesthan someone who acted from compassion. That’s because thedisgusted person would clearly be acting from a sense of dutybecause their emotions would be pushing in the completelyopposite direction, encouraging them not to help.

Think of the parable of the Good Samaritan. The GoodSamaritan helps a man in need he sees lying by the side of theroad. Everyone else just passes by. What made the GoodSamaritan good? If the Samaritan helped the man in needbecause he thought it would get him into heaven, in Kant’s viewthat wouldn’t have been a moral action at all. It would betreating the man as a way of getting something – a means to anend. If he helped him simply from compassion, as we’ve seenalready, that would be no good in Kant’s eyes. But if he helpedhim because he recognized that it was his duty, and the rightthing for anyone in those circumstances to do, then Kant wouldagree that the Good Samaritan was morally good.

Kant’s view of intentions is easier to accept than his view of theemotions. Most of us do judge each other by what each of us istrying to do, rather than just by what we succeed in doing. Thinkof how you would feel about being accidentally knocked over bya parent rushing to stop his young child from running into theroad. Compare that with how you would feel if someone else haddeliberately knocked you over for fun. The parent didn’t intend tohurt you. The thug did. But, as the next example shows, havinggood intentions isn’t enough to make your action moral.

There’s another knock at the door. You answer. It’s your bestfriend who looks pale, worried and out of breath. She tells yousomeone is chasing her, someone who wants to kill her. He’s gota knife. You let her in, and she runs upstairs to hide. Momentslater there is yet another knock on the door. This time it is thewould-be killer and he has a crazy look in his eyes. He wants toknow where your friend is. Is she in the house? Is she hiding ina cupboard? Where is she? In fact she is upstairs. But you tell alie. You say she has gone to the park. Surely you’ve done theright thing by sending the would-be killer out to look for her inthe wrong place. You’ve probably saved your friend’s life. Thatmust be a moral act, mustn’t it?

Not according to Kant. Kant thought that you should neverlie – not in any circumstances. Not even to protect your friendfrom a would-be murderer. It’s always morally wrong. Noexceptions. No excuses. That’s because you couldn’t make ageneral principle that everyone should always lie when it suitedthem. In this case if you lied and, without you knowing it, yourfriend had gone out to the park, you would have been guilty ofhelping the murderer. It would have been to some extent yourfault that your friend died.

This example is one Kant himself used. It shows how extremehis view was. There were no exceptions to truth-telling or to any

moral duty. We all have an absolute duty to tell the truth or, ashe put it, a Categorical Imperative to do so. An imperative is anorder. Categorical imperatives contrast with hypotheticalimperatives. Hypothetical imperatives take the form ‘If youwant $x_i$ , do $y^{\mathrm{i}}$ ’. ‘If you want to avoid prison, don’t steal’ is anexample of a hypothetical imperative. Categorical imperativesare different. They instruct you. In this case the CategoricalImperative would simply be ‘Don’t steal!’ It is an order tellingyou what your duty is. Kant thought that morality was a systemof categorical imperatives. Your moral duty is your moral dutywhatever the consequences and whatever the circumstances.

Kant believed that what makes us human is that, unlike otheranimals, we can think reflectively about our choices. We would belike machines if we couldn’t do things on purpose. It almostalways makes sense to ask a human being, ‘Why did you do that?’We don’t just act out of instinct, but on the basis of reasons. Kant’sway of putting this is in terms of the ‘maxims’ we act from. Themaxim is just the underlying principle, the answer to the ques-tion, ‘Why did you do that?’ Kant believed that the maxim under-lying your action was what really mattered. He argued that youshould only act on maxims that were universalizable. For some-thing to be universalizable it has to apply to everyone. This justmeans that you should only do things that would make sense foranyone in the same situation as you to do. Always ask the ques-tion: ‘What if everyone did that?’ Don’t make a special case foryourself. Kant thought what this meant in practice was that youshouldn’t use other people but should treat them with respect,recognizing other people’s autonomy, their capacity as individualsto make reasoned decisions for themselves. This reverence for thedignity and worth of individual human beings is at the core ofmodern human rights theory. It is Kant’s great contribution tomoral philosophy.

This is easier to understand through an example. Imagine youown a shop and you sell fruit. When people buy fruit from you,you are always polite and give them the correct change. Perhapsyou do this because you think it is good for business and will makepeople more likely to come back to spend their money in yourshop. If that’s the only reason you give them the right change, thenthat is a way of using them to get what you want. Kant believedthat because you couldn’t reasonably suggest that everyone treatedeveryone else in this way, it wasn’t a moral form of behaviour. Butif you give them the correct change because you recognize that itis your duty not to deceive others, then that is a moral action.That’s because it is based on the maxim ‘Don’t deceive others’, amaxim he thinks we can apply to every case. Deceiving people isa way of using them to get what you want. It can’t be a moral prin-ciple. If everyone deceived everyone else all trust would breakdown. No one would believe anything anyone ever said.

Take another example Kant used: imagine that you arecompletely broke. The banks won’t lend you money, you don’thave anything that you can sell, and if you don’t pay your rentyou will be out on the street. You come up with a solution. Yougo to a friend and ask to borrow some money. You promise topay him back even though you know that you won’t be able todo so. This is your last resort, you can’t think of any other wayof paying your rent. Would that be acceptable? Kant argues thatborrowing from a friend without intending to return the moneymust be immoral. Reason can show us this. It would be absurdfor everyone to borrow money and promise to pay it back eventhough they knew they couldn’t. That, again, isn’t a universaliz-able maxim. Ask the question, ‘What if everyone did that?’ Ifeveryone made false promises like this, promises would becomecompletely worthless. If it isn’t right for everyone, it can’t beright for you. So you shouldn’t do it. It would be wrong.

This way of thinking about right and wrong based on coolreasoning rather than emotion is very different from Aristotle’s(see Chapter 2). For Aristotle, a truly virtuous person alwayshas the appropriate feelings and does the right thing as a resultof that. For Kant, feelings simply cloud the issue, making itmore difficult to see that someone is genuinely doing the rightthing, rather than just seeming to. Or to put a more positivespin on this: Kant made morality available to every rationalperson, whether or not they were fortunate enough to have feel-ings that motivated them to act well.

Kant’s moral philosophy stands in stark contrast to that ofJeremy Bentham, the topic of the next chapter. Where Kantargued that some actions are wrong whatever consequencesfollow from them, Bentham claimed that it was consequences,and only consequences, that mattered.

Practical Bliss

Jeremy Bentham

If you visit University College London you may be surprised tofind Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), or rather what’s left of hisbody, in a glass case. He is sitting looking out at you, with hisfavourite walking cane that he nicknamed ‘Dapple’ restingacross his knees. His head is made of wax. The real one ismummified and kept in a wooden box, though it used to beon display. Bentham thought that his actual body – he calledit an auto-icon – would make a better memorial than a statue.So when he died in 1832 he left instructions about how to dealwith his remains. The idea has never really caught on, thoughLenin’s body was embalmed and put on display in a specialmausoleum.

Some of Bentham’s other ideas were more practical. Take hisdesign for a circular prison, the Panopticon. He described it as‘a machine for grinding rogues honest’. A watchtower in themiddle allows a few guards to keep an eye on a large number of

prisoners without them knowing whether or not they’re beingwatched. This design principle is used in some modern prisonsand even several libraries. It was one of his many projects forsocial reform.

But far more important and influential than this wasBentham’s theory about how we should live. Known as utilitari-anism or the Greatest Happiness Principle, this is the idea thatthe right thing to do is whatever will produce the most happi-ness. Although not the first person to suggest this approach tomorality (Francis Hutcheson, for instance, had already doneso), Bentham was the first to explain in detail how it might beput into practice. He wanted to reform the laws of England sothat they were more likely to bring about greater happiness.

But what is happiness? Different people seem to use the wordin different ways. Bentham had a straightforward answer to thequestion. It’s all about how you feel. Happiness is pleasure andthe absence of pain. More pleasure, or a greater quantity ofpleasure than pain, means more happiness. For him, humanbeings were very simple. Pain and pleasure are the great guidesto living that nature has given us. We seek pleasurable experi-ences and avoid painful ones. Pleasure is the only thing that isgood in itself. Everything else we want because we believe it willgive us pleasure or help us avoid pain. So if you want an icecream, that isn’t a good thing to have just for its own sake. Thepoint of the ice cream is that it is likely to give you pleasurewhen you eat it. Similarly you try to avoid burning yourselfbecause that would be painful.

How do you go about measuring happiness? Think about atime when you were really happy. What did it feel like? Couldyou put a number on your happiness? For instance, was it at alevel of seven or eight out of ten? I can remember a trip on awater taxi leaving Venice that felt like a nine-and-a-half or

maybe even a ten when the driver accelerated away with the sunsetting over the beautiful view, the spray from the lagoon in myface, and my wife and children laughing with excitement. Itdoesn’t seem absurd to be able to give a mark for experienceslike this. Bentham certainly believed that pleasure could bequantified and different pleasures compared on the same scale,in the same units.

The Felicific Calculus was the name he gave to his methodfor calculating happiness. First, work out how much pleasure aparticular action will bring about. Take into account how longthe pleasure will last, how intense it is, how likely it is that it willgive rise to further pleasures. Then subtract any units of painthat might be caused by your action. What you are left with isthe happiness value of the action. Bentham called this its‘utility’, meaning usefulness, because the more pleasure anaction brings about the more useful it is to society. That’s whythe theory is known as utilitarianism. Compare the utility of anaction with the scores for other possible actions and choose theone that brings about most happiness. Simple.

What about the sources of pleasure, though? Surely it’s betterto get pleasure from something uplifting like reading poetrythan from playing a childish game or eating ice cream, isn’t it?Not according to Bentham. How the pleasure is produceddoesn’t matter at all. For him, daydreaming would be as good asseeing a Shakespeare play if they made you equally happy. Heused the example of pushpin – a mindless game popular in hisday – and poetry. All that counts is the amount of pleasureproduced. If the pleasure is the same, the value of the activity isthe same: from a utilitarian view, pushpin can be as morallygood as reading poetry.

Immanuel Kant, as we saw in Chapter 20, argued that we haveduties, such as ‘never lie’ that apply in all situations. Bentham,

however, believed that the rightness or wrongness of what we docomes down to the likely results. These can differ according tocircumstances. Lying isn’t necessarily always wrong. There mightbe times when telling a lie is the right thing to do. If, on balance,greater happiness results from telling a lie than not, then that isthe morally right action in those circumstances. If a friend asksyou whether a new pair of jeans is flattering or not, someonewho followed Kant would have to tell the truth even if it wasn’twhat their friend wanted to hear; a utilitarian would work outwhether greater happiness would result from telling a mild lie. Ifit would, then the lie is the right response.

Utilitarianism was a radical theory to put forward at the endof the eighteenth century. One reason was that in calculatinghappiness everyone’s happiness was equal; in Bentham’s words,‘Everybody to count for one, nobody to count for more thanone’. No one gets special treatment. The pleasure of an aristocratcounted no more than the pleasure of a poor worker. That wasnot how society was ordered then. aristocrats had a very greatinfluence over how land was used, and many even had a heredi-tary right to sit in the House of Lords and decide on the laws ofEngland. Not surprisingly, some felt uncomfortable withBentham’s stress on equality. Perhaps even more radical for thetime was his belief that animals’ happiness was relevant. Becausethey are capable of pleasure and pain, animals were part of hishappiness equation. It didn’t matter that animals couldn’t reasonor speak (though it would have done to Kant); those weren’t therelevant features for moral inclusion in Bentham’s view. Whatmattered was their capacity for pain and pleasure. This is thebasis of many present-day campaigns for animal welfare, suchas Peter Singer’s (see Chapter 40).

Unfortunately for Bentham, there’s a devastating criticism ofhis general approach with its emphasis on all possible causes of

pleasure being treated equally. Robert Nozick (1938–2002)invented this thought experiment. Imagine a virtual realitymachine that gives you the illusion of living your life, butremoves all the risk of pain and suffering. Once you have beenplugged into this machine for a short while, you will forget thatyou are no longer experiencing reality directly and will becompletely taken in by the illusion. This machine generates awhole range of pleasurable experiences for you. It is like adream generator – it can make you imagine that, for example,you are scoring the winning goal in the World Cup, or havingthe vacation of your dreams. Whatever will give you the greatestpleasure can be simulated. Now, since this machine wouldclearly maximize your blissful mental states, you should, onBentham’s analysis, plug into it for the whole of your life. Thatwould be the best way to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.Yet many people, though they might enjoy experimenting withsuch a machine from time to time, would refuse to plug in forlife because there are other things they value more highly thana series of blissful mental states. What this seems to show is thatBentham was wrong to argue that all ways of bringing about thesame amount of pleasure are equally valuable, and that noteveryone is guided solely by a desire to maximize their pleasureand minimize their pain. This is a theme that was taken up byhis exceptional pupil and later critic, John Stuart Mill.

Bentham was immersed in his own age, keen to find solu-tions to the social problems that surrounded him. GeorgWilhelm Friedrich Hegel claimed to be able to stand back andget an overview of the entire course of human history, a historythat was unfolding according to a pattern that only the mostimpressive intellects could grasp.

The Owl of Minerva

Georg W.F. Hegel

‘The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.’ This was the view ofGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). But what does itmean? Actually, that question ‘What does it mean?’ is one thatreaders of Hegel’s works ask themselves a lot. His writing isfiendishly difficult, partly because, like Kant’s, it is mostlyexpressed in very abstract language and often uses terms that hehas himself invented. No one, perhaps not even Hegel, hasunderstood all of it. The statement about the owl is one of theeasier parts to decipher. This is his way of telling us that wisdomand understanding in the course of human history will onlycome fully at a late stage, when we’re looking back on what hasalready happened, like someone looking back on the events of aday as night falls.

Minerva was the Roman goddess of wisdom, and she wasusually associated with the wise owl. Whether Hegel was wiseor foolish is much debated, but he was certainly influential. His

view that history would unfold in a particular way inspired KarlMarx (see Chapter 27) and so certainly changed what happened,since Marx’s ideas stirred revolutions in Europe in the earlytwentieth century. But Hegel also irritated many philosophers.Some philosophers even treated his work as an example of therisk of using terms imprecisely. Bertrand Russell (see Chapter31) came to despise it, and A.J. Ayer (see Chapter 32) declaredthat most of Hegel’s sentences expressed nothing at all. For Ayer,Hegel’s writing was no more informative than nonsense verseand considerably less appealing. Others, including Peter Singer(see Chapter 40), have found great depth in his thought, andargue that his writing is difficult because the ideas he is strug-gling with are so original and hard to grasp.

Hegel was born in Stuttgart, in what is now Germany, in 1770and grew up in the era of the French Revolution when themonarchy there was overthrown and a new republic estab-lished. He called it ‘a glorious dawn’ and with his fellow studentsplanted a tree to commemorate the events. This time of politicalinstability and radical transformation influenced him for therest of his life. There was a real sense that fundamental assump-tions could be overturned, that what seemed to be fixed for alltime needn’t be. One insight this led to was the way in which theideas that we have are directly related to the time we live inand can’t be fully understood outside their historical context.Hegel believed that in his own lifetime a crucial stage in historyhad been reached. On a personal level he progressed fromobscurity to fame. He began his working life as a private tutorto a wealthy family before moving on to be a headmaster ofa school. Eventually he was made a professor at the universityin Berlin. Some of his books were originally lecture noteswritten up to help his students understand his philosophy. Bythe time of his death he was the best-known and most admired

philosopher of his time. This is quite amazing, given how diffi-cult his writing can be. But a group of enthusiastic studentsdedicated themselves to understanding and discussing what hetaught and bringing out both the political and metaphysicalimplications.

Heavily influenced by Immanuel Kant’s metaphysics (seeChapter 19), Hegel came to reject Kant’s view that noumenalreality lies beyond the phenomenal world. Rather than acceptingthat noumena lie beyond perception causing our experience, heconcluded that the mind shaping reality just is reality. There isnothing beyond it. But this did not mean that reality remainedin a fixed state. For Hegel, everything is in a process of change,and that change takes the form of a gradual increase in self-awareness, our state of self-awareness being fixed by the periodin which we live.

Think of the whole of history as a long bit of paper folded upon itself. We can’t really understand what is there until it has allbeen unfolded. Nor can we know what is written on the very lastbit of paper until it is opened out. There is an underlying struc-ture to the way it unfolds. For Hegel, reality is constantlymoving towards its goal of understanding itself. History isn’t inany sense random. It’s going somewhere. When we look backover it we will see that it had to unfold like this. This is a strangeidea when you first hear it. I suspect most people reading thiswon’t share Hegel’s view. History for most of us is closer to howHenry Ford described it: ‘just one damned thing after another’.It is a series of things that happen without any overall plan. Wecan study history and discover the probable causes of eventsand predict something of what might happen in the future. Butthat doesn’t mean it has an inevitable pattern in the way Hegelthought it did. It doesn’t mean it’s going somewhere. And itcertainly doesn’t mean it is gradually becoming aware of itself.

Hegel’s study of history wasn’t a separate activity from hisphilosophy, it was part of it: the main part of it. History andphilosophy were entwined for him. And everything was drivingtowards something better. This wasn’t an original idea. Religionsusually explain history as leading to some end point, such asChrist’s Second Coming. Hegel was a Christian, but his accountwas far from orthodox. For him, the final result wasn’t theSecond Coming. For Hegel, history has an end target, one thatno one had really appreciated before. It’s the gradual and inevi-table coming to self-awareness of Spirit through the march ofreason.

But what is Spirit? And what does it mean for it to becomeself-aware? The word for Spirit in German is Geist. Scholarsdisagree about its precise meaning; some prefer to translate it as‘Mind’. Hegel seems to mean by it something like the singlemind of all humanity. Hegel was an idealist – he thought thatthis Spirit or Mind was fundamental and finds its expression inthe physical world (in contrast, materialists believe that physicalmatter is basic). Hegel retold the history of the world in termsof gradual increases in individual freedom. We are moving fromindividual freedom, via freedom for some people but notothers, towards a world in which everyone is free in a politicalstate that allows them to contribute to that society.

One way he thought that we make progress in thought is bya clash between an idea and its opposite. Hegel believed that wecan move closer to truth by following his dialectical method.First someone puts forward an idea – a thesis. This is then metwith its contradiction, a view that challenges the first idea – itsantithesis. From this clash of two positions, a more complexthird position emerges, which takes account of both – a synthesisof the two. And then, more often than not, this starts theprocess again. The new synthesis becomes a thesis, and an

antithesis is put against it. All this keeps going until full self-understanding by Spirit occurs.

The main thrust of history turns out to be Spirit under-standing its own freedom. Hegel traced this progress from thosewho lived under tyrannical rulers in Ancient China and India,who did not know that they were free, through to his own time.For these ‘Orientals’, only the supremely powerful ruler experi-enced freedom. In Hegel’s view, the ordinary people had noawareness at all of freedom. The Ancient Persians were littlemore sophisticated in their appreciation of freedom. They weredefeated by the Greeks, and this brought progress. The Greeksand later the Romans were more aware of freedom than thosewho went before them. Yet they still kept slaves. This showedthat they didn’t fully appreciate that humanity as a whole shouldbe free, not just the wealthy or the powerful. In a famouspassage in his book The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), hediscussed the struggle between a master and a slave. The masterwants to be recognized as a self-conscious individual and needsthe slave in order to achieve this: but without acknowledgingthat the slave merits recognition too. This unequal relationshipleads to a struggle, with one dying. But this is self-defeating.Eventually master and slave come to recognize their need foreach other, and the need to respect each other’s freedom.

But, Hegel claimed, it was only with Christianity, which trig-gered an awareness of spiritual value, that genuine freedombecame possible. In his own time history realized its goal. Spiritbecame aware of its own freedom and society was as a resultordered by principles of reason. This was very important to him:true freedom only arose from a properly organized society. Whatworries many readers of Hegel is that in the sort of ideal societyimagined by Hegel those who don’t fit in with the powerfulorganizers’ view of society will, in the name of freedom, be forced

to accept this ‘rational’ way of living. They will, in Rousseau’sparadoxical phrase, be ‘forced to be free’ (see Chapter 18).

The end result of all history turned out to be Hegel himselfcoming to an awareness of the structure of reality. He seemed tothink he had achieved that in the final pages of one of his books.That was the point at which Spirit first understood itself. Like Plato(see Chapter 1), then, Hegel gave a special position to philoso Âphers. Plato, you’ll remember, believed that philosopher-kingsshould rule his ideal republic. Hegel, in contrast, thought philoso-phers could achieve a particular kind of self-understanding thatwas also an understanding of reality and of all history, another wayof enacting the words engraved at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi:‘Know Thyself’. It is philosophers, he believed, who come to realizethe ultimate unfolding pattern of human events. They appreciatethe way that the dialectic has produced a gradual awakening.Suddenly everything becomes clear to them and the point of thewhole of human history becomes obvious. Spirit enters a newphase of self-understanding. That’s the theory anyway.

Hegel had many admirers, but Arthur Schopenhauer was notone of them. He thought Hegel wasn’t really a philosopher at allbecause he lacked seriousness and honesty in the way heapproached the subject. As far as Schopenhauer was concerned,Hegel’s philosophy was nonsense. Hegel, for his part, describedSchopenhauer as ‘loathsome and ignorant’.

Glimpses of Reality

Arthur Schopenhauer

Life is painful and it would be better not to have been born.Few people have such a pessimistic outlook, but ArthurSchopenhauer (1788–1860) did. According to him, we are allcaught up in a hopeless cycle of wanting things, getting them,and then wanting more things. It doesn’t stop until we die.Whenever we seem to get what we want, we start wanting some-thing else. You might think you would be content if you were amillionaire, but you wouldn’t be for long. You’d want somethingyou hadn’t got. Human beings are like that. We’re never satisfied,never stop craving for more than we have. It’s all very depressing.

But Schopenhauer’s philosophy isn’t quite as dark as thissounds. He thought that if we could only recognize the truenature of reality, we would behave very differently and mightavoid some of the bleaker features of the human condition. Hismessage was very close to the Buddha’s. The Buddha taught thatall life involves suffering but that at a deep level there is no such

thing as ‘the self ’: if we recognize that, we can achieve enlight-enment. This similarity was no coincidence. Unlike mostWestern philosophers, Schopenhauer had read widely in Easternphilosophy. He even had a statue of the Buddha on his desk,next to one of his other great influences, Immanuel Kant.

Unlike the Buddha and Kant, Schopenhauer was a gloomy,difficult, vain man. When he got a job as a lecturer in Berlin, hewas so convinced of his own genius that he insisted that hislectures should take place at exactly the same time as Hegel’s.This wasn’t his greatest idea, as Hegel was very popular withstudents. Hardly anyone showed up to Schopenhauer’s lectures;Hegel’s, meanwhile, were packed. Schopenhauer later left theuniversity and lived for the rest of his life on inherited money.

His most important book, The World as Will and Representation,was first published in 1818, but he kept working on it for years,producing a much longer version in 1844. The main idea atthe heart of it is quite simple. Reality has two aspects. It existsboth as Will and as Representation. Will is the blind drivingforce that is found in absolutely everything that exists. It is theenergy that makes plants and animals grow, but it is also the forcethat causes magnets to point north, and crystals to grow inchemical compounds. It is present in every part of nature. Theother aspect, the World as Representation, is the world as weexperience it.

The World as Representation is our construction of reality inour minds. It is what Kant called the phenomenal world. Lookaround you now. Perhaps you can see trees, people or carsthrough a window, or this book in front of you; perhaps you canhear birds or traffic or noises in another room. What you areexperiencing through your senses is the World as Representation.That is your way of making sense of everything and it requiresyour consciousness. Your mind organizes your experience to

make sense of it all. This World as Representation is the worldwe live in. But, like Kant, Schopenhauer believed that there wasa deeper reality that exists beyond your experiences too, beyondthe world of appearances. Kant called that the noumenal world,and he thought we had no direct access to it. For Schopenhauer,the World as Will was a bit like Kant’s noumenal world, thoughthere were important differences.

Kant wrote about noumena, the plural of noumenon. Hethought that reality could have more than one part. It is not clearhow Kant knew this, given that he had declared that the noumenalworld was inaccessible to us. Schopenhauer in contrast held thatwe couldn’t assume that the noumenal reality was divided at all,since that kind of division requires space and time, which Kantbelieved were contributed by the individual mind rather thanexisting in reality itself. Instead Schopenhauer described theWorld as Will as a single, unified, directionless force behindeverything that is. We can glimpse this World as Will through ourown actions and also through our experience of art.

Stop reading this and put your hand on your head. Whathappened? Someone watching you would just see your handgoing up and resting on your head. You can see that too if youlook in the mirror. This is a description of the phenomenalworld, the World as Representation. According to Schopenhauer,though, there is an inner aspect to our experience of movingour body, something that we can feel in a different way from ourexperience of the phenomenal world in general. We don’t expe-rience the World as Will directly, but we do come very close tothat when we perform deliberate actions, when we will bodilyactions, make them happen. That’s why he chose the word ‘Will’to describe reality, even though it is only in the human situationthat this energy has any connection whatsoever with doingsomething deliberately – plants don’t grow deliberately, nor do

chemical reactions happen deliberately. So it’s important torealize that the word ‘Will’ is different from ordinary uses of theterm.

When someone ‘wills’ something they have an aim in mind:they’re trying to do something. But that is not at all whatSchopenhauer means when he describes reality at the level ofthe World as Will. The Will (with a capital W) is aimless, or, ashe sometimes puts it, ‘blind’. It isn’t attempting to bring aboutany particular result. It doesn’t have any point or goal. It isjust this great surge of energy that is in every natural phenom-enon as well as in our conscious acts of willing things. ForSchopenhauer there is no God to give it direction. Nor is theWill itself God. The human situation is that we, like all reality,are part of this meaningless force.

Yet there are some experiences that can make life bearable.These come mostly from art. Art provides a still point so that,for a short time, we can escape the endless cycle of striving anddesire. Music is the best art form for this. According toSchopenhauer that’s because music is a copy of the Will itself.This, he felt, explained music’s power to move us so profoundly.If you listen to a Beethoven symphony in the right frame ofmind you aren’t just being stimulated emotionally: you areglimpsing reality as it truly is.

No other philosopher has given such a central place to the arts,so it is not surprising that Schopenhauer is popular with creativepeople of various kinds. Composers and musicians love himbecause he believed that music was the most important of all thearts. His ideas have also appealed to novelists including LeoTolstoy, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann and Thomas Hardy. DylanThomas even wrote a poem ‘The force that through the greenfuse drives the flower’ which was inspired by Schopenhauer’sdescription of the World as Will.

Schopenhauer didn’t just describe reality and our relation toit. He also had views about how we should live. Once you realizethat we are all part of one energy force, and that individualpeople exist only at the level of the World as Representation,this should change what you do. For Schopenhauer, harmingother people is a kind of self-injury. This is the foundation of allmorality. If I kill you, I destroy a part of the life force that joinsus all together. When someone harms another person it is like asnake biting its tail without knowing that it is sinking its fangsinto its own flesh. So the basic morality that Schopenhauertaught was one of compassion. Properly understood, otherpeople aren’t external to me. I care what happens to you becausein a way you are part of what we are all part of: the Worldas Will.

That’s Schopenhauer’s official moral position. It is question-able, though, whether he achieved anything like this degree ofconcern for other people himself. On one occasion, an oldwoman chatting outside his door made him so angry that hepushed her down the stairs. She was injured, and a courtordered Schopenhauer to pay compensation to her for the restof her life. When she died some years later, Schopenhauershowed no compassion: instead he scribbled the joke-rhyme‘obit anus, abit onus’ (Latin for ‘the old woman dies, the burdengoes’) on her death certificate.

There is another, more extreme method for coming to termswith the cycle of desire. To avoid getting caught up in all this,simply turn away from the world altogether and become anascetic: live a life of sexual chastity and poverty. This, he felt,would be the ideal way to cope with existence. It is the solutionmany Eastern religions opt for. Schopenhauer, however, neverbecame an ascetic, despite withdrawing from social life as hegrew older. For most of his life he enjoyed company, had affairs,

ate well. It is tempting to say that he was a hypocrite. Indeed, thevein of pessimism that runs through his writing is so deep inplaces that some readers thought that if he had been sincere hewould have killed himself.

The great Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill, in contrast,was an optimist. He argued that rigorous thought and discus-sion could spur social change and bring about a better world, aworld in which more people could lead happy and fulfilled lives.

Space to Grow

John Stuart Mill

Imagine that you had been kept away from other children formost of your childhood. Instead of spending time playing, youwould have been learning Greek and algebra, taught by a privatetutor, or you’d be in conversation with highly intelligent adults.How would you have turned out?

This is more or less what happened to John Stuart Mill(1806–73). He was an educational experiment. His father, JamesMill, a friend of Jeremy Bentham, shared John Locke’s view thata young child’s mind was empty, like a blank slate. James Millwas convinced that if you brought a child up in the right way,there was a good chance that he or she would develop into agenius. So James taught his son John at home, making sure thathe didn’t waste any time playing with children his own age orlearning bad habits from them. But this wasn’t simply cram-ming, forced memorization, or anything like that. James taughtusing Socrates’ method of cross-questioning, encouraging his

son to explore the ideas he was learning rather than just parrotthem.

The stunning result was that by the age of three John wasstudying Ancient Greek. By six he had written a history ofRome, and aged seven he could understand Plato’s dialogues inthe original language. At eight he started to learn Latin. By 12he had a thorough appreciation of history, economics and poli-tics, could solve complex mathematical equations and had apassionate and sophisticated interest in science. He was aprodigy. In his twenties he was already one of the most brilliantthinkers of his age, though he never really got over his strangechildhood and remained lonely and a bit distant throughouthis life.

Nevertheless, he had turned into a kind of genius. So hisfather’s experiment had worked. He became a campaigneragainst injustice, an early feminist (he was arrested for promotingbirth control), a politician, a journalist, and a great philosopher,perhaps the greatest philosopher of the nineteenth century.

Mill had been brought up as a utilitarian, and Bentham’sinfluence was immense. The Mills would stay at Bentham’shouse in the Surrey countryside each summer. But, althoughMill agreed with Bentham that the right action is always the onethat produces the most happiness, he came to believe that histeacher’s account of happiness as pleasure was too crude. So theyounger man developed his own version of the theory, one thatdistinguished between higher and lower pleasures.

Given the choice, would it be better to be a contented pigrolling about in a muddy sty and chomping through the food inits trough, or a sad human being? Mill thought it was obviousthat we would choose to be a sad human rather than a happypig. But that goes against what Bentham thought. Bentham,you will remember, says that all that counts are pleasurable

experiences, no matter how they are produced. Mill disagreed.He thought that you could have different kinds of pleasure andthat some were much better than others, so much better that noquantity of the lower pleasure could ever match the smallestquantity of the higher one. Lower pleasures, such as those ananimal can experience, would never challenge the higher, intel-lectual pleasures, like the pleasure of reading a book or listeningto a concert. Mill went further, and said that it would be betterto be a dissatisfied Socrates than a satisfied fool. That’s becausethe philosopher Socrates was capable of gaining so much moresubtle pleasures from his thinking than the fool could everachieve.

Why believe Mill? His answer was that anyone who has expe-rienced both higher and lower pleasures prefers the higherones. The pig can’t read or listen to classical music, so itsopinion on this wouldn’t count. If a pig could read it wouldprefer reading to rolling in mud.

That’s what Mill thought. But some people have pointed outthat he assumed that everyone was like him in preferringreading to rolling in the mud. Worse still, as soon as Mill intro-duces different qualities of happiness (higher and lower) as wellas different quantities, it becomes much harder to see how youcould ever calculate what to do. One of the great virtues ofBentham’s approach was its simplicity, with every kind ofpleasure and pain measured in the same currency. Mill gives noway of working out an exchange rate between the differentcurrencies of higher and lower pleasures.

Mill applied his utilitarian thinking to all aspects of life. Hethought that human beings are a bit like trees. If you don’t givea tree enough space to develop, it will be twisted and weak. Butin the right position it can fulfil its potential and reach a greatheight and spread. Similarly, in the right circumstances, human

beings flourish, and that produces good consequences not justfor the individual concerned, but for the whole of society –it maximizes happiness. In 1859 he published a short butinspiring book defending his view that giving each personspace to develop as they saw fit was the best way to organizesociety. That book is called On Liberty and it is still widely readtoday.

Paternalism, from the Latin pater meaning father, is forcingsomeone to do something for their own good (though it couldequally have been maternalism from mater, the Latin formother). If as a child you were made to eat your greens then youwill understand this concept very well. Eating green vegetablesdoesn’t do anyone else any good, but your parents still make youdo it for your own good. Mill thought paternalism was finewhen it was directed at children: children need to be protectedfrom themselves and have their behaviour controlled in variousways. But paternalism towards adults in a civilized society wasunacceptable. The only justification for it was when an adultrisked harming someone else by their actions or if they hadsevere psychiatric problems.

Mill’s message was simple. It is known as the Harm Principle.Every adult should be free to live as he or she pleases as long asno one else is harmed in the process. This was a challengingidea in Victorian England when many people assumed that partof the role of government was to impose good moral values onthe people. Mill disagreed. He thought that greater happinesswould come from individuals having greater freedom in howthey behaved. And it was not just government telling peoplewhat to do that worried Mill. He hated what he called ‘thetyranny of the majority’, the way that social pressures worked toprevent many people from doing what they wanted to do orbecome.

Others may think they know what will make you happy. Butthey are usually wrong. You know much better than they dowhat you really want to do with your life. And even if you don’t,Mill argued, it is better to let each of us make our own mistakesthan to force us to conform with one way of living. This isconsistent with his utilitarianism since he believed thatincreasing individual freedom produces more happiness overallthan restricting it does.

According to Mill (who was one himself), geniuses, evenmore than the rest of us, need freedom in order to develop.They rarely fit into society’s expectations about how they shouldbehave and often seem eccentric. If you cramp their develop-ment, then we all lose out because they probably won’t make thecontributions to society that they might otherwise have done.So, if you want to achieve the greatest possible amount of happi-ness, let people get on with their lives without interfering withthem; unless, of course, they risk harming other people by theiractions. If you find what they are doing offensive that is nota good reason for preventing them from living this way. Millwas very clear on this point: offence should not be confusedwith harm.

Mill’s approach has some quite disturbing consequences.Imagine a man with no family who decides that he will drinktwo bottles of vodka every night. It is very easy to see that he isdrinking himself to death. Should the law intervene to stophim? No, says Mill, not unless he risks harming someone else.You can argue with him, tell him he is destroying himself. Butno one should force him to change his ways; nor should govern-ment prevent him drinking his life away. That’s his free choice.It wouldn’t be his free choice if he was looking after a youngchild, but as he has no one depending on him, he can do whathe likes.

As well as freedom in how to live, Mill thought it was vitalthat everyone was given freedom to think and speak as theyliked. Open discussion was of great benefit to society, he felt,because it forced people to think hard about what they believed.If you don’t have your views challenged by people with opposingviews, then you will probably end up holding them as ‘deaddogmas’, prejudices that you can’t really defend. He argued forfree speech up to the point at which it incited violence. A jour-nalist, he believed, should be free to write an editorial in whichhe declared that ‘corn-dealers are starvers of the poor’, but if hewaved a placard with the same words on it while standing onthe steps of a corn-dealer’s house in front of an angry mob, thatwould be an incitement to violence and so forbidden by Mill’sHarm Principle.

Many people disagreed with Mill. Some thought his approachto freedom was too centred on the idea that what matters is howindividuals feel about their lives (it is much more individual-istic, for example, than Rousseau’s concept of freedom, seeChapter 18). Others saw him as opening the doors to a permis-sive society that would wreck morality for ever. James FitzjamesStephen, one of his contemporaries, argued that most peopleshould be forced down a narrow channel and not given toomany choices about how they live, because so many, given freerein, would end up making bad and self-destructive decisionsfor themselves.

One area in which Mill was particularly radical at the time hewrote was in his feminism. In England in the nineteenthcentury married women were not allowed to own property, andhad little legal protection against violence and rape by theirhusbands. Mill argued in The Subjection of Women (1869) thatthe sexes should be treated equally both in law and in societymore generally. Some around him claimed that women were

naturally inferior to men. He asked how they could possiblyknow this when women had so often been prevented fromreaching their full potential: they were kept away from highereducation and many professions. Above all, he wanted greaterequality of the sexes. Marriage should be a friendship betweenequals, he argued. His own marriage to the widow HarrietTaylor, which came very late in their lives, was like this and itbrought both great happiness. They had been intimate friends(and perhaps even lovers) while her first husband was alive, butMill had had to wait until 1851 to become her second. Shehelped him write both On Liberty and The Subjection of Women,though, sadly, she died before either was published.

On Liberty was first published in 1859. In the same yearanother even more important book appeared: Charles Darwin’sOn the Origin of Species.

chap ter 25

Unintelligent Design

Charles Darwin

‘Are you related to monkeys on your grandmother’s or yourgrandfather’s side?’ This was Bishop Samuel Wilberforce’s cheekyquestion in a famous debate with Thomas Henry Huxley inOxford’s Museum of Natural History in 1860. Huxley wasdefending the views of Charles Darwin (1809–82). Wilberforce’squestion was meant to be both an insult and a joke. But it back-fired. Huxley muttered under his breath, ‘Thank you God fordelivering him into my hands’, and replied that he would ratherbe related to an ape than to a human being who held back debateby making fun of scientific ideas. He might just as well haveexplained that he was descended from monkey-like ancestors onboth sides – not very recently, but some time in the past. That’swhat Darwin claimed. Everyone has them in their family tree.

This view caused a great stir almost from the moment hisbook On the Origin of Species was published in 1859. After thatit was no longer possible to think of human beings as completely

different from the rest of the animal kingdom. Human beingsweren’t special any more: they were just part of nature like anyother animal. This might not come as a surprise to you, but itdid to most Victorians.

You might think that all it would take to recognize our close-ness to apes would be a few minutes spent in the company ofa chimpanzee or gorilla or perhaps even a hard look in themirror. But in Darwin’s day more or less everyone assumed thathuman beings were very different from any other animal andthe idea that we shared distant relatives with them was ridicu-lous. There were plenty of people who thought that Darwin’sideas were crazy and the work of the devil. Some Christiansclung to their belief that the Book of Genesis gave the truestory of how God created all the animals and plants in sixbusy days. God had designed the world and everything in it,each with its proper place for all time. These Christians believedthat every species of animal and plant had remained the samesince the Creation. Even today some people still refuse tobelieve that evolution is the process by which we came to bewhat we are.

Darwin was a biologist and a geologist, not a philosopher. Soyou might wonder why there is a chapter about him in thisbook. The reason it’s here is that his theory of evolution bynatural selection and its modern versions have had a profoundimpact on how philosophers – as well as scientists – think abouthumanity. It is the most influential scientific theory of all time.The contemporary philosopher Daniel Dennett has called it ‘thesingle best idea anyone has ever had’. The theory explains howhuman beings and the plants and animals around them havecome to be as they are and how they are all still changing.

One result of this scientific theory was that it became easierthan ever before to believe that there is no God. The zoologist

Richard Dawkins has written, ‘I can’t imagine being an atheistat any time before 1859, when Darwin’s On the Origin of Specieswas published.’ There were atheists, of course, before 1859 –David Hume, the subject of Chapter 17, was probably one – butthere were many more afterwards. You don’t have to be anatheist to believe that evolution is true: many religious believersare Darwinists. But they can’t be Darwinists and believe thatGod created all species exactly as they are today.

As a young man, Darwin went on a five-year voyage on HMSBeagle, visiting South America, Africa and Australia. This wasthe adventure of his lifetime – as it would be for anyone. Beforethat he hadn’t been a particularly promising student, and no onewould have expected him to make such an impressive contribu-tion to human thought. He was no genius at school. His fatherwas convinced that he was going to be a waster, and a disgraceto his family because he spent so much of his time hunting andshooting rats. As a young man he’d started training as a doctorin Edinburgh, but when that didn’t work out, he switched tostudying divinity at Cambridge University, intending to becomea vicar. In his spare time he was an enthusiastic naturalist,collecting plants and insects, but there were no signs that he wasgoing to be the greatest biologist in history. In many ways heseemed a bit lost. He didn’t really know what he wanted to do.But the voyage of the Beagle transformed him.

The trip was a scientific expedition around the world, partlyto map the coastlines of the places the ship visited. Despite hislack of qualifications, Darwin took on the role of official bota-nist, but he also made detailed observations of rocks, fossils andanimals wherever they landed. The small ship quickly filled upwith the samples he collected. Luckily he was able to send mostof this collection back to England where it was stored ready forinvestigation.

By far the most valuable part of the voyage turned out to be thevisit to the Galapagos Islands, a group of volcanic islands in thePacific Ocean roughly 500 miles from South America. The Beaglereached the Galapagos Islands in 1835. There were plenty ofinteresting animals to examine there, including giant tortoisesand sea-loving iguanas. Though it wasn’t obvious to him at thetime, the most important for Darwin’s theory of evolution were arange of rather drab-looking finches. He shot a number of thesesmall birds and sent them home for further examination. Closestudy later revealed that there were thirteen distinct species. Thesmall differences between them were mostly in their beaks.

After his return, Darwin abandoned his plans of becoming avicar. While he’d been travelling the fossils, plants and deadanimals he’d sent back had made him quite famous in the scien-tific world. He became a full-time naturalist and spent manyyears working on his theory of evolution as well as becoming aworld expert on barnacles, those small limpet-like animals thatcling to rocks and the hulls of ships. The more he thought aboutit, the more he was convinced that species evolved through anatural process and were constantly changing rather than fixedfor all time. Eventually he came up with the suggestion thatplants and animals that were well suited to their environmentwere more likely to survive long enough to pass on some oftheir characteristics to their young. Over long periods thispattern produced plants and animals that seemed to have beendesigned to live in the environments in which they were found.The Galapagos Islands provided some of the best evidence ofevolution in action. For example, at some point in history, hethought, finches had found their way there from the mainland,perhaps carried by strong winds. Through many thousands ofgenerations, the birds on each island had then gradually adaptedto where they were living.

Not all birds of the same species are identical. There’s usuallyquite a lot of variety. One bird might have a slightly morepointed beak than another, for instance. If having this kind ofbeak helped the bird survive longer, it would be more likely tobreed. For example, a bird that has a beak that is good for eatingseeds would do well on an island where there were many seedsaround, but probably not so well on an island where the mainsource of food is from nuts that needed to be cracked. A birdthat had a harder time finding food because of its beak shapewould find it difficult to survive long enough to mate andproduce offspring. That made it less likely that that type of beakwould be passed on. Birds with beaks that suited the availablefood supplies would be more likely to pass that feature on totheir offspring. So on a seed-rich island, the birds with goodbeaks for eating seeds came to dominate. Over many thousandsof years this led to a new species evolving, one that was verydifferent from the original type that landed on the island. Birdswith the wrong types of beak would have gradually died out. Onan island with different conditions a slightly different sort offinch would evolve. Over long periods of time the birds’ beaksbecame better and better adapted to their environment. Thevarying environments on different islands meant that the birdsthat thrived were the ones best suited to that place.

Other people before Darwin, including his grandfatherErasmus Darwin, had suggested that animals and plants hadevolved. What Charles Darwin added was the theory of adapta-tion by natural selection, the process that leads the best-adaptedto survive to pass on their characteristics.

This struggle for survival explains everything. It isn’t just astruggle between members of different species; members of thesame species struggle against each other too. They are all incompetition to pass on their own characteristics to the next

generation. This is how features of animals and plants that lookas if they have been invented by an intelligent mind have comeabout.

Evolution is a mindless process. It has no consciousness orGod behind it – or at least it doesn’t need to have anything likethis behind it. It is impersonal: like a machine that keepsworking automatically. It is blind in the sense that it doesn’tknow where it is going and it doesn’t think about the animalsand plants that it produces. Nor does it care about them. Whenwe see its products – plants and animals – it’s difficult not tothink of them as cleverly designed by someone. But that wouldbe a mistake. Darwin’s theory provides a much simpler andmore elegant explanation. It also explains why there are somany types of life, with different species adapting to the parts ofthe environment they live in.

In 1858 Darwin still hadn’t got round to publishing his find-ings. He was working on his book – he wanted to get it justright. Another naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913),wrote to him sketching his own, very similar theory of evolu-tion. This coincidence nudged Darwin into going public withhis ideas, first with a presentation to the Linnean Society inLondon, and then the next year, 1859, with his book On theOrigin of Species. After devoting a large part of his life toworking out his theory, Darwin didn’t want Wallace to get therebefore him. The book instantly made him famous.

Some people who read it were unconvinced. The captain ofthe Beagle, Robert FitzRoy, for example, a scientist himself andinventor of a system of weather forecasting, was a devoutbeliever in the biblical story of Creation. He was dismayed thathe had played a part in undermining religious belief, andwished he’d never taken Darwin on board his ship. Even today,there are creationists who believe that the story told in Genesis

is true and a literal description of the origin of life. But amongscientists there is overwhelming confidence that Darwin’stheory explains the basic process of evolution. This is partlybecause since Darwin’s time there has been a mass of newobservations in support of the theory and of later versions of it.Genetics, for example, has given a detailed explanation of howinheritance works. We know about genes and chromosomesand about the chemical processes involved in passing on partic-ular qualities. The fossil evidence today is also far moreconvincing than it was in Darwin’s day. For all these reasons thetheory of evolution by natural selection is much more than ‘justa hypothesis’: it is a hypothesis that has a very substantial weightof evidence in its support.

Darwinism may have more or less destroyed the traditionalDesign Argument and shaken many people’s religious faith. ButDarwin himself seems to have kept an open mind on the ques-tion of whether or not God exists. In a letter to a fellow scientisthe declared that we aren’t really up to coming to a conclusion onthe issue: ‘the whole subject is too profound for human intellect,’he explained: ‘A dog might as well speculate on the mind ofNewton.’

A thinker who was prepared to speculate about religiousfaith, and, unlike Darwin, made it central to his life’s work, wasSøren Kierkegaard.

Life’s SacrificesSøren Kierkegaard

Abraham has a message from God. It is a truly awful one: hemust sacrifice his only son, Isaac. Abraham is in emotionaltorment. He loves his son, but he is also a devout manand knows he has to obey God. In this story from Genesis inthe Old Testament, Abraham takes his son up to the top of amountain, Mount Moriah, ties him to a stone altar and is aboutto kill him with a knife, as God has instructed. At the very lastsecond, though, God sends an angel who stops the slaughter.Instead, Abraham sacrifices a ram that is caught in some bushesnearby. God rewards Abraham’s loyalty by allowing his sonto live.

This is a story with a message. The moral is usually thoughtto be, ‘Have faith, do what God tells you to do and everythingwill turn out for the best.’ The point is not to doubt God’s word.But for the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), itwasn’t quite so simple. In his book Fear and Trembling (1842) he

tried to imagine what must have gone through Abraham’s mind,the questions, fears and anguish as he made the three-dayjourney from his home to the mountain where he believed hewould have to kill Isaac.

Kierkegaard was quite odd and didn’t fit in easily inCopenhagen where he lived. During the day this small thin manwas often seen walking around the city deep in conversationwith a companion and liked to think of himself as the DanishSocrates. He wrote in the evening – standing up in front of hisdesk surrounded by candles. One of his quirks was to show upat the interval of a play so that everyone thought he’d been outenjoying himself when he’d really not watched the play at all buthad been busy at home writing for most of it. He worked veryhard as a writer, but he had an agonizing choice to make in hispersonal life.

He had fallen in love with a young woman, Regine Olsen, andhad asked her to marry him. She had agreed. But he worriedthat he was too gloomy and too religious to marry anyone.Perhaps he would live up to his family name ‘Kierkegaard’,which means ‘graveyard’ in Danish. He wrote to Regine tellingher he couldn’t marry her and returned his engagement ring.He felt terrible about his decision and spent many nights cryingin bed after that. She, understandably, was devastated andbegged him to come back. Kierkegaard refused. It is no coinci-dence that after that most of his writing was about choosinghow to live and the difficulty of knowing that your decision isthe right one.

Decision-making is built into the title of his most famouswork: Either/Or. This book gives the reader a choice betweeneither a life of pleasure and chasing after beauty or one based onconventional moral rules, a choice between the aesthetic andthe ethical. But a theme he kept returning to throughout his

writing was faith in God. The story of Abraham is at the heartof that. For Kierkegaard, it is not a simple decision to believe inGod, but one that requires a kind of leap into the dark, a deci-sion taken in faith that may even go against conventional ideasof what you should do.

If Abraham had gone ahead and killed his son he would havedone something morally wrong. A father has a basic duty tolook after his son, and certainly shouldn’t tie him to an altar andcut his throat in a religious ritual. What God asked Abrahamto do was to ignore morality and make a leap of faith. Inthe Bible Abraham is presented as admirable for ignoring thisnormal sense of right and wrong and being ready to sacrificeIsaac. But couldn’t he have made a terrible mistake? What ifthe message wasn’t really from God? Perhaps it was a hallucina-tion; perhaps Abraham was insane and hearing voices. Howcould he know for sure? If he had known in advance that Godwouldn’t follow through on his command, it would have beeneasy for Abraham. But as he raised that knife ready to shed hisson’s blood, he really believed that he was going to kill him.That, as the Bible describes the scene, is the point. His faith is soimpressive because he put his trust in God rather than inconventional ethical considerations. It wouldn’t have been faithotherwise. Faith involves risk. But it is also irrational: not basedon reason.

Kierkegaard believed that sometimes ordinary social duties,such as that a father should always protect his son, are not thehighest values there can be. The duty to obey God trumps theduty to be a good father, and indeed any other duty. From ahuman perspective, Abraham might seem hard-hearted andimmoral for even considering sacrificing his son. But it is as ifGod’s command is an ace of trumps that wins the game, what-ever it is that God commands. There is no higher card in the

pack, and so human ethics are no longer relevant. Yet theperson who abandons ethics in favour of faith makes anagonizing decision, risking everything, not knowing whatbenefit there could possibly be from doing so, or what willhappen; not knowing for sure that the message is truly fromGod. Those who choose this path are totally alone.

Kierkegaard was a Christian, though he hated the DanishChurch and couldn’t accept the way complacent Christiansaround him behaved. For him, religion was a heart-wrenchingoption, not a cosy excuse for a song in church. In his opinionthe Danish Church distorted Christianity and wasn’t trulyChristian. Not surprisingly, this didn’t make him popular. LikeSocrates, he ruffled the feathers of those around him who didn’tlike his criticisms and pointed remarks.

So far in this chapter I’ve written confidently about whatKierkegaard believed. But interpreting what he really meant inany of his books isn’t easy. This was no accident. He is a writerwho invites you to think for yourself. He rarely wrote underhis own name, but instead used pseudonyms. For example,he wrote Fear and Trembling under the name Johannes deSilentio – John of Silence. This wasn’t just a disguise to preventpeople discovering that Kierkegaard had written the books –many people guessed who the author was straight away, whichis probably what he wanted. The invented authors of his booksare, rather, characters with their own way of looking at theworld. This is one of Kierkegaard’s techniques for getting you tounderstand the positions he is discussing and encouraging youto be engaged as you read. You see the world through that char-acter’s eyes and are left to make up your own mind about thevalue of their different approaches to life.

Reading Kierkegaard’s writing is almost like reading anovel and he often uses fictional narrative to develop ideas.

In, Either/Or (1843), the imaginary editor of the book, VictorEremita, describes finding a manuscript in a secret drawer in asecond-hand desk. The manuscript is the main text of the book.It has supposedly been written by two different people – hedescribes them as A and B. The first is a pleasure-seeker whoselife revolves around his avoidance of boredom by seeking newthrills. He tells the story of the seduction of a young womanin the form of a diary that reads like a short story and mirrorsin some ways Kierkegaard’s relationship with Regine. Thepleasure-seeker, though, unlike Kierkegaard, is only interestedin his own feelings. The second part of Either/Or is written as ifby a judge who makes the case for a moral way of life. The styleof the first part reflects A’s interests: it consists of short piecesabout art, opera and seduction. It’s as if the author can’t keep hismind on any one topic for long. The second half is written in amore sober and long-winded style that reflects the judge’soutlook on life.

In case you are feeling sorry for poor jilted Regine Olsen, bythe way, after her difficult on–off relationship with Kierkegaardshe married a civil servant and seems to have been happyenough for the rest of her life. Kierkegaard, however, nevermarried, never even had a girlfriend after their break-up. Shereally was his true love and their failed relationship was thesource of almost everything that he wrote in his short andtormented life.

Like many philosophers, Kierkegaard wasn’t fully appreciatedduring his brief lifetime – he died aged only 42. In thetwentieth century, however, his books became popular withexistentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre (see Chapter 33)who were particularly taken with his ideas about the anguishof choosing what to do in the absence of pre-existingguidelines.

For Kierkegaard, the subjective point of view, the experienceof the individual making choices, was all-important. Karl Marxtook a broader view. Like Hegel, he had a grand vision of howhistory was unfolding and of the forces driving it. UnlikeKierkegaard, he saw no hope whatsoever of salvation throughreligion.

Workers of the World UniteKarl Marx

In the nineteenth century there were thousands of cotton millsin the north of England. Dark smoke poured from their tallchimneys, polluting the streets and covering everything in soot.Inside men, women and children worked very long hours –often 14-hour days – to keep the spinning machines going.They weren’t quite slaves, but their wages were very low, and theconditions were tough and often dangerous. If they lost concen-tration they could get caught up in the machinery and loselimbs or even be killed. Medical treatment in these circum-stances was basic. They had little choice, though: if they didn’twork they would starve. If they walked away, they might notfind another job. People who worked in these conditions didn’tlive long, and there were very few moments in their lives theycould call their own.

Meanwhile the owners of the mills grew rich. Their mainconcern was making a profit. They owned capital (money they

could put to use to make more money); they owned the build-ings and the machinery; and they more or less owned theworkers. The workers had next to nothing. All they could dowas sell their ability to work and help the mill owners grow rich.By their labour they added value to the raw materials that themill owners bought. When the cotton came into the factory itwas worth much less than it was when it left. But that addedvalue mostly went to the owners when they sold the product. Asfor the workers, the factory owners paid them as little aspossible – often just what would keep them alive. The workershad no job security. If demand for whatever they were makingdeclined, they were sacked and left to die if they couldn’tfind more work. When the German philosopher Karl Marx(1818–83) began writing in the 1830s these were the grimconditions that the Industrial Revolution had produced not justin England, but all over Europe. It made him angry.

Marx was an egalitarian: he thought human beings should betreated equally. But in the capitalist system those who hadmoney – often from inherited wealth – got richer and richer.Meanwhile those who had nothing but their labour to sell livedwretched lives and were exploited. For Marx, the whole ofhuman history could be explained as a class struggle: thestruggle between the rich capitalist class (the bourgeoisie) andthe working class or proletariat. This relationship stoppedhuman beings achieving their potential and turned work intosomething painful rather than a fulfilling kind of activity.

Marx, a man of immense energy and with a reputation forcausing trouble, spent most of his life in poverty, moving fromGermany to Paris, then Brussels to avoid persecution. Eventuallyhe made his home in London. There he lived with his sevenchildren, his wife Jenny, and a housekeeper Helene Demuthwith whom he had an illegitimate child. His friend Friedrich

Engels helped him find work writing for newspapers and evenadopted Marx’s illegitimate son to help him save face. But theMarx family rarely had enough money. They were often sick,hungry and cold. Tragically, three of his children died beforereaching adulthood.

In later life, most days Marx would walk to the ReadingRoom at the British Museum in London and study and write, orelse stay at home in his crowded Soho flat and dictate to his wifebecause his own handwriting was so bad that sometimes evenhe couldn’t read it. In these difficult conditions he produced ahuge number of books and articles – they fill more than fiftythick volumes. His ideas have changed the lives of millions ofpeople, some for the better, and many, undoubtedly, for theworse. At the time, though, he must have seemed an eccentricfigure, perhaps a little crazy. Few people could have foreseenhow influential he would be.

Marx identified with the workers. The whole structure ofsociety ground them down. They couldn’t live fully as humanbeings. Factory owners very soon realized that they could makemore goods if they broke the production process down intosmall tasks. Each worker could then specialize in a particularjob on the production line. But this made the workers’ lives evenmore tedious as they were forced to perform boring, repetitiveactions over and over again. They didn’t see the whole processof production and they barely earned enough to feed them-selves. Instead of being creative, they were worn down andturned into cogs in a huge piece of machinery that was therejust to make the factory owners richer. It was as if they weren’treally human beings at all – just stomachs that needed to be fedto keep the production line going and the capitalists extractingmore profit: what Marx called the surplus value created by theworkers’ labour.

The effect on the workers of all this was what Marx labelledalienation. He meant several things by this word. The workerswere alienated or distanced from what they truly were as humanbeings. The things they made alienated them too. The harderthe workers worked and the more they produced, the moreprofit they made for the capitalists. The objects themselvesseemed to take revenge on the workers.

But there was some hope for these people even though theirlives were miserable and completely mapped out by economiccircumstances. Marx believed that capitalism would in the enddestroy itself. The proletariat was destined to take over in aviolent revolution. Eventually from all this bloodshed a betterworld would emerge, one in which people were no longerexploited, but could be creative and co-operate with each other.Each person would contribute whatever they could to society,and society in turn would provide for them: ‘from each accordingto his ability, to each according to his need’ was Marx’s vision.By taking control of factories, the workers would make sure thatthere was enough for everyone to have what they needed. Noone need go hungry or without suitable clothing or shelter. Thisfuture was communism, a world based on sharing the benefitsof co-operation.

Marx believed that his study of the way society developsrevealed that this future was inevitable. It was built into thestructure of history. But it could be helped along a bit, and in theCommunist Manifesto of 1848, which he wrote with Engels, hecalled upon workers of the world to unite and overthrow capi-talism. Echoing the opening lines of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’sSocial Contract (see Chapter 18), they declared that the workershad nothing to lose but their chains.

Marx’s ideas about history were influenced by Hegel (thesubject of Chapter 22). Hegel, as we have seen, declared that

there is an underlying structure to everything, and that we aregradually progressing to a world that will somehow be consciousof itself. Marx took from Hegel the sense that progress is inevi-table, and that history has a pattern and is not just one thingafter another. But in Marx’s version, progress occurs because ofthe underlying economic forces.

In place of the class struggle Marx and Engels promised aworld in which no one would own land, where there was noinheritance, where education was free, and where public facto-ries provided for everyone. There would be no need for religionor morality either. Religion, he famously declared, was ‘theopium of the people’: it was like a drug keeping them in a sleepystate so they didn’t realize their true oppressed condition. In thenew world after the revolution human beings would achievetheir humanity. Their work would be meaningful and theywould co-operate in ways that benefited everyone. Revolutionwas the way to achieve all this – and this meant violence, sincethe rich were unlikely to give up their wealth without a struggle.

Marx felt that philosophers of the past had only described theworld, whereas he wanted to change it. This was a little unfairto earlier philosophers, many of whom had brought aboutmoral and political reform. But his ideas had more effect thanmost. They were contagious, inspiring real revolutions in Russiain 1917 and elsewhere. Unfortunately the Soviet Union – thehuge state that emerged, embracing Russia and some of itsneighbours – together with most other communist states createdin the twentieth century on Marxist lines, proved oppressive,inefficient and corrupt. Organizing the processes of productionon a national scale was far harder than might be imagined.Marxists claim that this doesn’t damage Marxist ideas them-selves – some still believe that Marx was basically right aboutsociety, it’s just that those who ran the communist states didn’t

run them on truly communist lines. Others point out thathuman nature makes us more competitive and greedy forourselves than he allowed: there is no possibility in their view ofhuman beings co-operating fully in a communist state – we’rejust not like that.

When he died of tuberculosis in 1883, few people could haveforeseen Marx’s impact on later history. It looked as if his ideaswould be buried with him in London’s Highgate Cemetery.Engels’ declaration at the graveside that ‘His name will endurethrough the ages, and so also will his work!’ seemed like wishfulthinking.

Marx’s main interest was in economic relationships since inhis view they shape everything that we are and can become.William James, a pragmatist philosopher, meant something quitedifferent when he wrote about the ‘cash value’ of an idea – forhim, that was simply what action the idea led to, what differenceit made in the world.

So What?

C.S. Peirce and William James

A squirrel is clinging tightly to the trunk of a large tree. On theother side of the tree, close up against the trunk is a hunter.Every time the hunter moves to his left, the squirrel movesquickly to its left too, scurrying further round the trunk,hanging on with its claws. The hunter keeps trying to find thesquirrel, but it manages to keep just out of his sight. This goeson for hours, and the hunter never gets a glimpse of the squirrel.Would it be true to say that the hunter is circling the squirrel?Think about it. Does the hunter actually circle his prey?

It’s possible that your answer will be ‘Why do you want toknow?’ The American philosopher and psychologist WilliamJames (1842–1910) came across a group of friends arguingabout this same example. He would have had some sympathywith your response. His friends couldn’t agree on the answerbut were discussing the question as if there were an absolutetruth to the matter that they could uncover. Some said yes, the

hunter was circling the squirrel; others said no, he certainlywasn’t. They thought James might be able to help them answerthe question one way or the other. His response was based onhis pragmatist philosophy.

This is what he said. If you mean by circling that the man isfirst north, then east, then south, then west of the squirrel, whichis one meaning of ‘circling’, then the answer is that it is true thatthe hunter circles the squirrel. He does go round the squirrel inthis sense. But if you mean that the hunter is first of all in frontof the squirrel, then to the squirrel’s right, then behind thesquirrel and then to its left, another meaning of ‘circling’, thenthe answer is no. Because the squirrel’s belly is always facing thehunter, the hunter doesn’t go round the squirrel in that sense.They are always face to face with each other with the tree inbetween them as they dance round out of each other’s sight.

The point of this example is to show that pragmatism isconcerned with practical consequences – the ‘cash value’ ofthought. If nothing hangs on the answer, it doesn’t really matterwhat you decide. It all depends why you want to know and whatdifference it will actually make. Here, there is no truth beyondparticular human concerns with the question, and the preciseways we use the verb ‘to circle’ in different contexts. If there isno practical difference, then there is no truth of the matter. It’snot that truth is somehow ‘out there’ waiting for us to find it.Truth for James was simply what works, what has a beneficialimpact on our lives.

Pragmatism is a philosophical approach that became popularin the United States in the late nineteenth century. It started withthe American philosopher and scientist C.S. Peirce (pronounced‘purse’), who wanted to make philosophy more scientific than ithad been. Peirce (1839–1914) believed that for a statement to betrue there had to be some possible experiment or observation to

support it. If you say ‘Glass is brittle’ what this means is thatif you hit it with a hammer it will break into tiny fragments.That’s what makes the statement ‘Glass is brittle’ true. Thereisn’t some invisible property of ‘brittleness’ the glass has apartfrom this fact about what happens if you hit it. ‘Glass is brittle’is a true statement because of these practical consequences.‘Glass is transparent’ is true because you can see through glass,not because of some mysterious property in the glass. Peircehated abstract theories that didn’t make any difference in prac-tice. He thought they were nonsense. Truth for him is whatwe would end up with if we could run all the experimentsand investigations we would ideally like to. This is very closeto A.J. Ayer’s logical positivism which is the subject ofChapter 32.

Peirce’s work was not widely read. But William James’ was.He was an excellent writer – as good as or better than hisfamous brother, the novelist and short story writer HenryJames. William had spent many hours discussing pragmatismwith Peirce when they had both been lecturers at HarvardUniversity. James developed his own version of it that he popu-larized in essays and lectures. For him, pragmatism boils downto this: truth is what works. He was, though, a bit vague aboutwhat ‘what works’ meant. Although he was an early psycholo-gist, he wasn’t interested just in science, but also in questionsabout right and wrong, and religion too. In fact his most contro-versial writing was about religion.

James’ approach is very different from the traditional view oftruth. On that view truth means correspondence to the facts.What makes a sentence true on the correspondence theoryof truth is that it accurately describes how the world is. ‘Thecat is on the mat’ is true when the cat is actually sitting onthe mat, and false when it isn’t; when, for example, it is out in

the garden looking for mice. According to James’ pragmatictheory of truth, what makes the sentence ‘The cat is on the mat’true is that believing it produces useful practical results for us.It works for us. So, for example, believing ‘the cat is on the mat’gives the result that we know not to play with our pet hamsteron that mat until the cat has gone somewhere else.

Now, when using an example like ‘The cat is on the mat’, theresults of this pragmatic theory of truth don’t seem particularlydisconcerting or important. But try it with the sentence ‘Godexists.’ What would you expect James to say about that?

Is it true that God exists? What do you think? The mainanswers are ‘Yes, it’s true that God exists’, ‘No it’s not true thatGod exists’, and ‘I don’t know.’ presumably you gave one of thoseanswers if you bothered to answer my question before readingthis. These positions have names: theism, atheism and agnosti-cism. Those who say ‘Yes, it’s true that God exists’ usually meanthat there is a Supreme Being somewhere and that the statement‘God exists’ would be true even if there were no human beingsalive and even if no human beings had ever existed. ‘Godexists’ and ‘God doesn’t exist’ are statements that are eithertrue or false. But it’s not what we think about them that makesthem true or false. They are true or false whatever we thinkabout them. We just hope we get it right when we thinkabout them.

James gave a rather different analysis of ‘God exists.’ Hethought that the statement was true. What made it true was thatit was in his opinion a useful belief to have. In coming to thatconclusion he focused on the benefits of believing that Godexists. This was an important issue for him and he wrote a book,The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), which examined awide range of effects that religious belief can have. For James, tosay that ‘God exists’ is a true statement is simply to say that it is

somehow good for the believer to believe it. This is quite asurprising position to take. It’s a bit like Pascal’s argument thatwe looked at in Chapter 12: that agnostics stood to benefit frombelieving that God existed. Pascal, though, believed that ‘Godexists’ was made true by the real existence of God, not byhuman beings feeling better when they believe in God, orbecoming better people because they have this belief. His Wagerwas just a way of getting agnostics to believe what he thoughtwas true. For James, it is the supposed fact that belief in God‘works satisfactorily’ that makes ‘God exists’ true.

To get clear about this, take the sentence ‘Santa Claus exists.’Is that true? Does a large, jolly red-faced man come down yourchimney every Christmas Eve with a sack of presents? Don’tread the rest of this paragraph if you believe that this does actu-ally happen. I’m guessing, though, that you don’t think SantaClaus exists even if you think that it would be nice if he did. TheBritish philosopher Bertrand Russell (see Chapter 31) made funof William James’ pragmatic theory of truth by saying it meantthat James had to believe ‘Santa Claus exists’ is true. His reasonfor saying this was that James thinks that all that makes asentence true is the effect on the believer of believing it. And formost children, at least, believing in Santa Claus is great. Itmakes Christmas a very special day for them; it makes thembehave well; it gives them a focus in the days coming up toChristmas. It works for them. So because believing it works insome sense, that seems to make it true according to James’theory. The trouble is there is a difference between what wouldbe nice if it were true and what is actually true. James could havepointed out that while believing in Santa Claus works for youngchildren, it doesn’t work for everyone. If parents believed thatSanta was going to deliver presents on Christmas Eve then theywouldn’t go out and buy presents for their children. It would

only take until Christmas morning to realize that somethingwasn’t working with the belief ‘Santa Claus exists’. But does thatmean it’s true for small children that Santa Claus exists, but falsefor most adults? And doesn’t that make truth subjective, amatter of how we feel about things rather than the way theworld is?

Take another example. How do I know that other people haveminds at all? I know from my own experience that I’m not justsome kind of a zombie with no internal life. I have my ownthoughts, intentions and so forth. But how can I tell whetherpeople around me have thoughts at all? Perhaps they aren’tconscious. Couldn’t they just be zombies acting automaticallywith no minds of their own? This is the Problem of OtherMinds that philosophers have worried about for a long time. Itis a difficult puzzle to solve. James’ answer was that it must betrue that other people have minds, otherwise we wouldn’tbe able to satisfy our desire to be recognized and admired byother people. This is an odd sort of argument. It makes hispragmatism sound very much like wishful thinking – believingwhat you’d like to be true whether or not it is actually true.But just because it feels good to believe that when someonepraises you they are a conscious being and not a robotdoesn’t make them a conscious being. They could still lack anyinternal life.

In the twentieth century the American philosopher RichardRorty (1931–2007) carried on this style of pragmatic thinking.Like James, he thought of words as tools that we do things with,rather than symbols that somehow mirror the way the world is.Words allow us to cope with the world, not copy it. He declaredthat ‘truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with’and that no period of history gets reality more nearly right thanany other. When people describe the world, Rorty believed, they

are like literary critics giving an interpretation of a Shakespeareplay: there’s no single ‘correct’ way of reading it that we shouldall agree on. Different people at different times interpret the textdifferently. Rorty simply rejected the idea that any one view iscorrect for all time. Or at least that’s my interpretation of hiswork. Rorty presumably believed that there was no correctinterpretation of it in the same way that there’s no ‘right’ answerabout whether the hunter was circling the squirrel as it scram-bled round the tree.

Whether or not there is a correct interpretation of the writ-ings of Friedrich Nietzsche is also an interesting question.

The Death of God

Friedrich Nietzsche

‘God is dead’. These are the most famous words that the Germanphilosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) wrote. But howcould God die? God is supposed to be immortal. Immortalbeings don’t die. They live for ever. In a way, though, that’s thepoint. That’s why God’s death sounds so odd: it’s meant to.Nietzsche was deliberately playing on the idea that God couldn’tdie. He wasn’t literally saying that God had been alive at onetime and now wasn’t; rather that belief in God had stoppedbeing reasonable. In his book Joyful Wisdom (1882) Nietzscheput the line ‘God is dead’ in the mouth of a character who holdsa lantern and looks everywhere for God, but can’t find him. Thevillagers think he is crazy.

Nietzsche was a remarkable man. Appointed as a professor atthe University of Basel at the very young age of 24, he looked setfor a distinguished academic career. But this eccentric andoriginal thinker didn’t fit in or conform, and seemed to enjoy

making life hard for himself. He eventually left the university in1879, partly because of ill health, and travelled in Italy, Franceand Switzerland, writing books that hardly anyone read at thetime, but which are now famous as works of both philosophyand literature. His psychological health declined and he spentmuch of his later life in an asylum.

In complete contrast to Immanuel Kant’s orderly presenta-tion of ideas, Nietzsche’s come at you from all angles. Much ofthe writing is in the form of short, fragmentary paragraphs andpithy one-sentence comments, some of them ironic, somesincere, many of them arrogant and provocative. Sometimes itfeels as if Nietzsche is shouting at you, sometimes that he iswhispering something profound in your ear. Often he wants thereader to collude with him, as if he is saying that you and I knowhow things are, but those foolish people over there are allsuffering from delusions. One theme he keeps returning to isthe future of morality.

If God is dead, what comes next? That’s the question Nietzscheasked himself. His answer was that it left us without a basis formorality. Our ideas of right and wrong and good and evil makesense in a world where there is a God. They don’t in a godlessone. Take away God and you take away the possibility of clearguidelines about how we should live, which things to value.That’s a tough message, and not one most of his contemporarieswanted to hear. He described himself as an ‘immoralist’, notsomeone who deliberately does evil, but someone who believesthat we need to get beyond all morality: in the words of the titleof one of his books, ‘beyond good and evil’.

For Nietzsche, the death of God opened up new possibilitiesfor humanity. These were both terrifying and exhilarating. Thedownside was that there was no safety net, no rules about howpeople had to live or be. Where once religion had provided

meaning and a limit on moral action, the absence of God madeeverything possible and removed all limits. The upside, at leastfrom Nietzsche’s perspective, was that individuals could nowcreate their own values for themselves. They could turn theirlives into the equivalent of works of art by developing their ownstyle of living.

Nietzsche saw that once you accept there is no God, you can’tjust cling to a Christian view of right and wrong. That would beself-deception. The values that his culture had inherited, valuessuch as compassion, kindness, and consideration of otherpeople’s interests, could all be challenged. His way of doing thiswas to speculate about where these values originally came from.

According to Nietzsche, the Christian virtues of looking afterthe weak and helpless had surprising origins. You might thinkthat compassion and kindness are obviously good. You’ve prob-ably been brought up to praise kindness and despise selfishness.What Nietzsche claimed is that the patterns of thought andfeeling that we happen to possess have a history. Once you knowthe history or ‘genealogy’ of how we come to have the conceptsthat we do, it is hard to think of them as fixed for all time andas somehow objective facts about how we ought to behave.

In his book The Genealogy of Morality he described the situ-ation in Ancient Greece when powerful aristocratic heroes builttheir lives around ideas of honour, shame and heroism in battlerather than kindness, generosity and guilt at wrongdoing. Thisis the world described by the Greek poet Homer in the Odysseyand the Iliad. In this world of heroes, those who were powerless,the slaves and the weak, were envious of the powerful. Theslaves channelled their envy and resentment towards thepowerful. Out of these negative feelings they created a new setof values. They turned the heroic values of the aristocrats ontheir head. Instead of celebrating strength and power like the

aristocrats, the slaves made generosity and care for the weakinto virtues. This slave morality, as Nietzsche calls it, treatedthe acts of the powerful as evil and their own fellow feelingsas good.

The idea that a morality of kindness had its beginnings infeelings of envy was a challenging one. Nietzsche showed astrong preference for the values of the aristocrats, the celebra-tion of strong warlike heroes, over the Christian morality ofcompassion for the weak. Christianity and the morality derivedfrom it treats every individual as having the same worth;Nietzsche thought that was a serious mistake. His artistic heroeslike Beethoven and Shakespeare were far superior to the herd.The message seems to be that Christian values, which emergedfrom envy in the first place, were holding humanity back. Thecost might be that the weak get trampled on, but that was a priceworth paying for the glory and achievement that this opened upfor the powerful.

In Thus Spake Zaruthustra (1883–92) he wrote about theÜbermensch or ‘Super-Man’. This describes an imagined personof the future who is not held back by conventional moral codes,but goes beyond them, creating new values. Perhaps influencedby his understanding of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution,he saw the Übermensch as the next step in humanity’s develop-ment. This is a bit worrying, partly because it seems to supportthose who see themselves as heroic and want to have their waywithout consideration of other people’s interests. Worse still, itwas an idea that the Nazis took from Nietzsche’s work and usedto support their warped views about a master race, though mostscholars argue that they distorted what Nietzsche actuallywrote.

Nietzsche was unfortunate in that his sister Elisabeth controlÂled what happened to his work after he lost his sanity and for

thirty-five years after his death. She was a German nationalist ofthe very worst kind and an anti-Semite. She went through herbrother’s notebooks, picking out the lines she agreed with andleaving out anything that criticized Germany or didn’t supporther racist viewpoint. Her cut-and-paste version of Nietzsche’sideas, published as The Will to Power, turned his writing intopropaganda for Nazism, and Nietzsche became an approvedauthor in the Third Reich. It is highly unlikely that, had he livedlonger, he would have had anything to do with it. Yet it is undeni-able that there are plenty of lines in his work that defend the rightof the strong to destroy the weak. It is no surprise, he tells us, thatlambs hate birds of prey. But that doesn’t mean we should despisethe birds of prey for carrying off and devouring the lambs.

Unlike Immanuel Kant, who celebrated reason, Nietzschealways emphasized how emotions and irrational forces playtheir part in shaping human values. His views almost certainlyinfluenced Sigmund Freud, whose work explored the natureand power of unconscious desires.

chap ter 30

Thoughts in Disguise

Sigmund Freud

Can you really know yourself? The Ancient philosophersbelieved that you could. But what if they were wrong? What ifthere are parts of your mind that you can never reach directly,like rooms that are permanently locked so that you can neverenter them?

Appearances can be deceptive. When you watch the sun inthe early morning it seems to come up from beyond thehorizon. During the day it moves across the sky and then finallysets. It is tempting to think that it travels around the earth. Formany centuries people were convinced it did. But it doesn’t. Inthe sixteenth century the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus real-ized this, though other astronomers had their suspicions beforethat. The Copernican revolution, the idea that our planet wasnot at the heart of the solar system, came as a shock.

The mid-nineteenth century brought another surprise, aswe have seen (Chapter 25). Until then it had seemed likely

that human beings were completely different from animalsand had been designed by God. But Charles Darwin’s theoryof evolution by natural selection showed that human beingsshare common ancestors with apes and that there was noneed to suppose that God had designed us. An impersonalprocess was responsible. Darwin’s theory explained how wehad descended from ape-like creatures and how close we wereto them. The effects of the Darwinian revolution are stillbeing felt.

According to Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the third greatrevolution in human thought was brought about by hisown discovery: the unconscious. He realized that much ofwhat we do is driven by wishes that are hidden from us. Wecan’t get at them directly. But that doesn’t stop them affectingwhat we do. There are things that we want to do that we don’trealize we want to do. These unconscious desires have a deepinfluence on all our lives and on the way we organize society.They are the source of the best and worst aspects of humancivilization. Freud was responsible for this discovery, though asimilar idea can be found in some of Friedrich Nietzsche’swriting.

Freud, a psychiatrist who had begun his career as a neurolo-gist, lived in Vienna when Austria was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The son of a middle-class Jewish father, hewas typical of many well-educated and established young menin this cosmopolitan city at the end of the nineteenth century.His work with several young patients, however, drew his atten-tion increasingly to the parts of the psyche that he believed weregoverning their behaviour, creating their problems throughmechanisms of which they were unaware. He was fascinatedby hysteria and other types of neurosis. These hystericalpatients, who were mostly women, often walked in their sleep,

hallucinated, and even developed paralysis. Yet it wasn’t knownwhat was causing all this. Doctors couldn’t find a physical causefor these symptoms. Through careful attention to the patients’descriptions of their problems and knowledge of their personalhistories, Freud came up with the idea that the real source ofthese people’s problems was some kind of disturbing memoryor desire. This memory or desire was unconscious and they hadno idea that they had it.

Freud would get his patients to lie on a couch and talk aboutwhatever came into their head, and often this made them feelmuch better as it let their ideas escape. This ‘free association’,allowing the ideas to flow, produced surprising results, makingwhat was previously unconscious conscious. He also askedpatients to recount their dreams. Somehow this ‘talking cure’unlocked their troublesome thoughts and removed some of thesymptoms. It was as if the act of talking released pressure causedby the ideas they did not want to confront. This was the birth ofpsychoanalysis.

But it isn’t just neurotic and hysterical patients who haveunconscious wishes and memories. According to Freud, we alldo. That is how life in society is possible. We hide from ourselveswhat we really feel and want to do. Some of these thoughts areviolent and many are sexual. They are too dangerous to let out.The mind represses them, keeps them down in the unconscious.Many are formed when we are small children. Very early eventsin a child’s life can re-emerge in adulthood. For example, Freudbelieved that men all have an unconscious wish to kill theirfather and have sex with their mother. This is the famousOedipus complex, named after Oedipus who in Greek mythologyfulfilled the prophecy that he would murder his father andmarry his mother (without being aware in either case that hewas doing so). For some people, this early awkward desire

completely shapes their life without them even realizing it.Something in the mind stops these darker thoughts gettingthrough in a recognizable form. But whatever it is in us thatstops this, and other unconscious desires, from becomingconscious isn’t completely successful. The thoughts still manageto escape, but in disguise. They emerge in dreams, for example.

For Freud, dreams were ‘the royal road to the unconscious’,one of the best ways of finding out about hidden thoughts. Thethings we see and experience in dreams aren’t what they seem.There is the surface content, what appears to be going on. Butthe latent content is the real meaning of the dream. That is whatthe psychoanalyst tries to understand. The things we encounterin dreams are symbols. They stand for the wishes that lurk inour unconscious minds. So, for example, a dream that involvesa snake or an umbrella or a sword is usually a disguised sexualdream. The snake, umbrella and sword are classic ‘Freudiansymbols’ – they stand for a penis. Similarly in a dream the imageof a purse or a cave represents a vagina. If you find this ideashocking and absurd, Freud would probably tell you that that isbecause your mind is protecting you from recognizing suchsexual thoughts within yourself.

Another way in which we get glimpses of unconscious wishesis in slips of the tongue, so-called Freudian slips, where we acci-dentally reveal wishes that we don’t realize we have. Manytelevision newsreaders have stumbled over a name or phrase,accidentally speaking an obscenity. A Freudian would say thishappens too often for it simply to be a matter of chance.

Not all unconscious wishes are sexual or violent. Some reveala fundamental conflict. On a conscious level we may want onething that on an unconscious level we do not want. Imagine youhave an important examination that you have to pass in orderto go to university. Consciously you do everything in your

power to prepare for it. You go through the relevant past exami-nation papers, prepare the answers to the questions in outlineform and make sure you set your alarm clock earlyto get to the examination room on time. Everything seems tobe going well. You wake up on time, eat breakfast, catch thebus, and realize you will arrive with time to spare. At thispoint you doze off contentedly on the bus. But when you awakeyou find, to your horror, that you have misread the numberon the bus and are now in completely the wrong part of townwith no chance of getting to the right part in time to sit theexamination. Your fear of the consequences of passing theexamination seem to have overruled your conscious efforts. Ata deep level you didn’t want to succeed. It would be too fright-ening to admit this to yourself, but your unconscious revealedit to you.

Freud applied his theory not just to individuals acting neurot-ically, but also to common cultural beliefs. In particular hegave a psychoanalytic account of why people are so drawn toreligion. You might believe in God. Perhaps you feel God’spresence in your life. But Freud had an explanation for whereyour belief in God comes from. You might think you believein God because God exists, but Freud thought that you believein God because you still feel the need for protection that youfelt as a very small child. In Freud’s view whole civilizationshave been based on this illusion – the illusion that there is astrong father-figure out there somewhere who will meet yourunmet needs for protection. This is wishful thinking – believingthat such a God really exists because you have a great desire inyour heart that he should. It all stems from the unconsciousdesire to be protected and cared for that arises in early child-hood. The idea of God is comforting for adults who still havethese feelings left over from childhood, even though they don’t

usually realize where the feelings came from and activelyrepress the idea that their religion comes entirely from a deeplyfelt and unmet psychological need rather than from the exist-ence of God.

From a philosophical point of view, Freud’s work broughtinto question many assumptions that thinkers such as RenéDescartes had made about the mind. Descartes believed that themind was transparent to itself. He believed that if you have athought you must be able to be aware of that thought. AfterFreud the possibility of unconscious mental activity had to beacknowledged.

But the basis of Freud’s ideas aren’t accepted by all philoso-phers, though many accept that he was right about the possibilityof unconscious thought. Some have claimed that Freud’s theoriesare unscientific. Most famously, Karl Popper (whose ideas aremore fully discussed in Chapter 36) described many of the ideasof psychoanalysis as ‘unfalsifiable’. This wasn’t a compliment, buta criticism. For Popper, the essence of scientific research was thatit could be tested; that is, there could be some possible observa-tion that would show that it was false. In Popper’s example, theactions of a man who pushed a child into a river, and a man whodived in to save a drowning child were, like all human behaviour,equally open to Freudian explanation. Whether someone tried todrown or save a child, Freud’s theory could explain it. He wouldprobably say that the first man was repressing some aspect of hisOedipal conflict, and that led to his violent behaviour, whereasthe second man had ‘sublimated’ his unconscious desires, that is,managed to steer them into socially useful actions. If everypossible observation is taken as further evidence that the theoryis true, whatever that observation is, and no imaginable evidencecould show that it was false, Popper believed, the theory couldn’tbe scientific at all. Freud, on the other hand, might have argued

that Popper had some kind of repressed desire that made him soaggressive towards psychoanalysis.

Bertrand Russell, a very different style of thinker from Freud,shared his distaste for religion, believing that it was a majorsource of human unhappiness.

Is the Present King of France Bald?

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell’s main interests as a teenager were sex, religionand mathematics – all at a theoretical level. In his very long life(he died in 1970, aged 97) he ended up being controversialabout the first, attacking the second, and making importantcontributions to the third.

Russell’s views on sex got him into trouble. In 1929 hepublished Marriage and Morals. In that book he questionedChristian views about the importance of being faithful to yourpartner. He didn’t think you had to be. This raised a feweyebrows at the time. Not that that bothered Russell much. He’dalready spent six months in Brixton prison for speaking outagainst the First World War in 1916. In later life he helpedfound the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), whichis an international movement opposed to all weapons of massdestruction. This sprightly old man would be at the front ofpublic rallies in the 1960s, still as opposed to war as he had been

as a young man some fifty years earlier. As he put it, ‘Either manwill abolish war, or war will abolish man.’ So far neither outcomehas been realized.

On religion he was just as outspoken and just as provocative.For Russell there was no chance of God stepping in to savehumanity: our only chance lay in using our powers of reason.People were drawn to religion, he believed, because they wereafraid of dying. Religion comforted them. It was very reassuringto believe that a God exists who will punish evil people, evenif they get away with murder and worse on earth. But it wasn’ttrue. God doesn’t exist. And religion nearly always producedmore misery than happiness. He did allow that Buddhismmight be different from most other religions, but Christianity,Islam, Judaism and Hinduism all had a lot to answer for. Thesereligions throughout their histories had been the cause of war,individual suffering and hatred. Millions had died as a resultof them.

It should be clear from all this that, despite being a pacifist,Russell was prepared to stand up and fight (at least with ideas)for what he believed to be right and just. Even as a pacifist hestill thought that in rare cases, such as the Second World War,fighting might be the best option available.

By birth he was an English aristocrat. He came from avery distinguished family: his official title was the 3rd EarlRussell. You could probably tell that he was an aristocrat justby looking at him. He had a distinguished haughty sort oflook, an impish grin and twinkly eyes. His voice gave himaway as a member of the upper classes. On recordings hesounds like something from another century – which he was:he was born in 1872, so was truly a Victorian. His grand Âfather  on his father’s side, Lord John Russell, had been PrimeMinister.

Bertrand’s non-religious ‘godfather’ was the philosopherJohn Stuart Mill (the subject of Chapter 24). Sadly, he nevergot to know him as Mill died when Russell was still a toddler.But he was still a huge influence on Russell’s development.Reading Mill’s Autobiography (1873) was what led Russell toreject God. He had previously believed the First CauseArgument. This is the argument, used by Thomas Aquinasamongst others, that everything must have a cause; and thecause of everything, the very first cause in the chain of causeand effect, must be God. But Mill asked the question ‘Whatcaused God?’ and Russell saw the logical problem for the FirstCause Argument. If there is one thing that doesn’t have a causethen it can’t be true that ‘Everything has a cause’. It made moresense to Russell to think that even God had a cause rather thanbelieve that something could just exist without being caused byanything else.

Like Mill, Russell had an unusual and not particularly happychildhood. Both his parents died when he was very young, andhis grandmother, who looked after him, was strict and a bitdistant. Taught at home by private tutors, he threw himself intohis studies and became a brilliant mathematician, going on tolecture at Cambridge University. But what really fascinated himwas what made mathematics true. Why is $2+2=4$ true? Weknow it is true. But why is it true? This led him quite quickly tophilosophy.

As a philosopher, his real love was logic: a subject on theborder between philosophy and mathematics. Logicians studythe structure of reasoning, usually using symbols to expresstheir ideas. He became fascinated by the branch of mathematicsand logic called set theory. Set theory seemed to promise a wayof explaining the structure of all our reasoning, but Russellcame up with a big problem for that idea: it led to contradiction.

The way he showed this was in a famous paradox that wasnamed after him.

Here’s an example of Russell’s Paradox. Imagine a village inwhich there is a barber whose job it is to shave all (and only) thepeople who don’t shave themselves. If I lived there, I’d probablyshave myself – I don’t think I’d be organized enough to get to thebarber every day and I can shave myself perfectly well. And itwould probably work out too expensive for me. But if I decidedI didn’t want to, then the barber would be the one to shave me.But where does that leave the barber? He’s allowed to shaveonly people who don’t shave themselves. By this rule, he can’tever shave himself because he can only shave people who don’tshave themselves. This is going to get difficult for him. Usuallyif someone can’t shave himself in this village it is the barberwho does it for him. But the rule won’t allow the barber to dothat, because that would turn him into someone who shavedhimself – but the barber only shaves the ones who don’t shavethemselves.

This is a situation that seems to lead to a direct contradiction– saying something is both true and false. That’s what a paradoxis. It’s very puzzling. What Russell discovered was that when aset refers to itself this sort of paradox emerges. Take anotherfamous example of the same sort of thing: ‘This sentence isfalse.’ This is a paradox too. If the words ‘This sentence is false’mean what they seem to mean (and are true) then the sentenceis false – which then means that what it states is true! Thisseems to suggest that the sentence is both true and false. But asentence can’t be true and false at the same time. That’s a basicpart of logic. So there’s the paradox.

These are interesting puzzles in themselves. There’s no easysolution to them, and that seems strange. But they were farmore important than that for Russell. What they did was reveal

that some of the basic assumptions that logicians all over theworld had been making about set theory were wrong. Theyneeded to begin again.

Another of Russell’s main interests was how what we sayrelates to the world. If he could work out what made a statementtrue or false it would be a significant contribution to humanknowledge, he felt. Again, he was interested in the very abstractquestions that lie behind all our thinking. Much of his work wasdevoted to explaining the logical structure underlying the state-ments we make. He felt that our language was far less precisethan logic. Ordinary language needed to be analysed – takenapart – to bring out its underlying logical shape. He wasconvinced that the key to making advances in all areas ofphilosophy was this sort of logical analysis of language, whichinvolved translating it into more precise terms.

For example, take the sentence, ‘The golden mountain doesnot exist.’ Everyone is likely to agree that this sentence is true.That’s because there is no mountain made of gold anywhere inthe world. The sentence seems to be saying something about athing that does not exist. The phrase ‘the golden mountain’seems to refer to something real, but we know it doesn’t. This isa puzzle for logicians. How can we talk meaningfully aboutnon-existent things? Why isn’t the sentence completely mean-ingless? One answer, given by the Austrian logician AlexiusMeinong, was that everything that we can think about andtalk about meaningfully does exist. On his view, the goldenmountain must exist, but in a special way he labelled ‘subsist-ence’. He also thought unicorns and the number 27 ‘subsist’ inthis way.

Meinong’s way of thinking about logic didn’t seem right toRussell. It does seem very strange. It meant that the world wasfull of things that exist in one sense but not in another. Russell

devised a simpler way of explaining how what we say relates towhat exists. This is known as his Theory of Descriptions. Takethe rather odd sentence (one of Russell’s favourites) ‘The presentking of France is bald.’ Even in the early twentieth century whenRussell was writing there was no king of France. France got ridof all her kings and queens during the French Revolution. Sohow could he make sense of that sentence? Russell’s answer wasthat, like most sentences in ordinary language, it wasn’t quitewhat it seemed.

Here’s the problem. If we want to say that the sentence ‘Thepresent king of France is bald’ is false, this seems to be commit-ting us to saying that there is a present king of France who isn’tbald. But that surely isn’t what we mean at all. We don’t believethere is a present king of France. Russell’s analysis was this.A statement like ‘The present king of France is bald’ isactually a kind of hidden description. When we speak about ‘thepresent king of France’ the underlying logical shape of our ideais this:

(a) There exists something that is the present king of France.

(b) There is only one thing that is the present king of France.

(c) Anything that is the present king of France is bald.

This complicated way of spelling things out allowed Russell toshow that ‘The present king of France is bald’ can make somesense even though there is no present king of France. It makessense, but is false. Unlike Meinong, he didn’t need to imaginethat the present king of France had to exist somehow (orsubsist) in order to speak and think about him. For Russell thesentence ‘The present king of France is bald’ is false becausethe present king of France doesn’t exist. The sentence suggeststhat he does; so the sentence is false rather than true. The

sentence ‘The present king of France is not bald’ is also false forthe same reason.

Russell started what is sometimes called the ‘linguistic turn’in philosophy, a movement in which philosophers began tothink very hard about language and its underlying logical form.A.J. Ayer was part of that movement.

Boo!/Hooray!

Alfred Jules Ayer

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you had a way of knowing whensomeone was talking nonsense? You’d never need to be fooledagain. You could divide everything that you heard or read intostatements which made sense and statements which were justnonsense and not worth your time. A.J. Ayer (1910–89) believedhe’d discovered one. He called it the Verification Principle.

After spending some months in Austria in the early 1930sattending meetings of a group of brilliant scientists and philoso-phers known as the Vienna Circle, Ayer returned to Oxfordwhere he was working as a lecturer. At the young age of 24 hewrote a book that declared that most of the history of philos-ophy was filled with gibberish – it was complete nonsense andmore or less worthless. That book, published in 1936, was calledLanguage, Truth and Logic. It was part of a movement known aslogical positivism, a movement that celebrated science as thegreatest human achievement.

‘Metaphysics’ is a word used to describe the study of anyreality that lies beyond our senses, the kind of thing that Kant,Schopenhauer and Hegel believed in. For Ayer, though, ‘meta-physics’ was a dirty word. It was what he was against. Ayer wasonly interested in what could be known through logic or thesenses. But metaphysics often went far beyond either anddescribed realities which couldn’t be investigated scientificallyor conceptually. As far as Ayer was concerned, that meant it wasof no use at all and should be ditched.

Not surprisingly, Language, Truth and Logic ruffled feathers.Many of the older philosophers in Oxford hated it, which madeit difficult for Ayer to get a job. But ruffling feathers is some-thing philosophers have been doing for thousands of years, inthe tradition that began with Socrates. Still, to write a book thatso openly attacked the work of some of the great philosophersof the past was a brave thing to do.

Ayer’s way of telling meaningful from meaningless sentenceswas this. Take any sentence, and ask these two questions:

(1) Is it true by definition?

(2) Is it empirically verifiable?

If it was neither of these then it was meaningless. That was histwo-pronged test for meaningfulness. Only statements thatwere true by definition or empirically verifiable were of any useto philosophers. This needs some explanation. Examples ofstatements that are true by definition are ‘All ostriches are birds’or ‘All brothers are male’. These are analytic statements, inImmanuel Kant’s terminology (see Chapter 19). You don’t needto go and investigate ostriches to know they are birds – that’spart of the definition of an ostrich. And obviously you couldn’thave a female brother – no one will ever discover one of those,

you can be sure of that; not without a sex change at some pointanyway. Statements that are true by definition bring out what isimplicit in the terms that we use.

Empirically verifiable statements (‘synthetic’ statements, inKant’s jargon), in contrast, can give us genuine knowledge. Fora statement to be empirically verifiable there has to be some testor observation that will show whether it is true or false. Forexample if someone says ‘All dolphins eat fish’ we could getsome dolphins and offer them fish and see if they eat some. Ifwe discovered a dolphin that never ate fish, then we’d know thatthe statement was false. That would still be a verifiable state-ment for Ayer because he used the word ‘verifiable’ to coverboth ‘verifiable’ and ‘falsifiable’. Empirically verifiable state-ments were all factual statements: they are about the way theworld is. There must be some observation that will support orundermine them. Science is our best way of examining them.

If the sentence was neither true by definition nor empiricallyverifiable (or falsifiable), then it was, Ayer declared, meaning-less. As simple as that. This bit of Ayer’s philosophy wasborrowed straight from David Hume’s work. Hume had halfseriously suggested that we should burn works of philosophythat failed this test because they contained nothing but ‘soph-istry and illusion’. Ayer reworked Hume’s ideas for the twentiethcentury.

So, if we take the sentence ‘Some philosophers have beards’then it is fairly obvious that this isn’t true by definition, since itisn’t part of the definition of a philosopher that some of themmust have facial hair. But it is empirically verifiable because it issomething we could go out and get evidence about. All we needto do is look at a range of philosophers. If we find some withbeards, as we are very likely to do, then we can conclude that thesentence is true. Or, if after looking at many hundreds of

philosophers we can’t find a single one with a beard, we mayconclude that the sentence ‘Some philosophers have beards’ isprobably false, though we can’t be sure without examining everyphilosopher there is. Either way – true or false – the sentence ismeaningful.

Compare that with the sentence ‘My room is full of invisibleangels that leave no trace.’ That isn’t true by definition either.But is it empirically verifiable? It seems not. There’s no imagi-nable way of detecting these invisible angels if they really leaveno trace. You can’t touch them or smell them. They don’t leavefootprints, and they don’t make a noise. So the sentence is justnonsense, even though it looks as if it might make sense. It is agrammatically correct sentence, but as a statement about theworld, it is neither true nor false. It is meaningless.

This can be quite hard to grasp. The sentence ‘My room is fullof invisible angels that leave no trace’ seems to mean something.But Ayer’s point is that it contributes nothing whatsoever tohuman knowledge, though it might sound poetic or couldpossibly contribute to a work of fiction.

Ayer didn’t just attack metaphysics: ethics and religion wereboth targets for him too. For example, one of his most chal-lenging conclusions was that moral judgements were literallynonsense. This seemed an outrageous thing to say. But it waswhat followed if you used his two-pronged test on moral state-ments. If you say ‘Torture is wrong’ all you are doing, hethought, was the equivalent of saying ‘Torture, boo!’ You arerevealing your personal emotions about the issue rather thanmaking a statement that could be true or false. That’s because‘Torture is wrong’ isn’t true by definition. Nor is it somethingthat we could ever prove or disprove as a fact. There’s no testthat you could do that would decide the issue, he believed –something that utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham and John

Stuart Mill would have disputed, since they would have meas-ured the resulting happiness.

It is therefore, on Ayer’s analysis, completely meaningless tosay ‘Torture is wrong’ since it is the type of sentence that couldnever be either true or false. When you say ‘Compassion isgood’ all you are doing is showing how you feel: it’s just likesaying ‘Compassion, Hooray!’ Not surprisingly, Ayer’s theory ofethics, known as emotivism, is often described as the Boo!/Hooray! Theory. Some people took Ayer to be saying thatmorality doesn’t matter, that you can choose to do whatever youlike. But that wasn’t his point. He meant that we couldn’t havemeaningful discussion of these issues in terms of values, but hedid believe that in most debates about what we should do factswere discussed, and these were empirically verifiable.

In another chapter of Language, Truth and Logic Ayer attackedthe idea that we could talk meaningfully about God. He arguedthat the statement ‘God exists’ was neither true nor false; again,it was, he felt, literally meaningless. That’s because it wasn’t trueby definition (though some people, following St Anselm, usingthe Ontological Argument have said God must necessarilyexist). And there wasn’t a test you could do to prove God’s exist-ence or non-existence – since he rejected the Design Argument.So Ayer was neither a theist (who believes God exists) nor anatheist (who believes that God doesn’t exist). Rather he thoughtthat ‘God exists’ was just another of those meaningless state-ments – some people give this position the name ‘igtheism’.So Ayer was an igtheist, that special category of people whothink that all talk of God existing or not existing is completenonsense.

Despite this, Ayer did get a shock very late in life when he hada near-death experience after choking on a bit of salmon boneand falling unconscious. His heart stopped for four minutes.

During that time he had a clear vision of a red light and two‘Masters of the Universe’ talking to each other. This vision didn’tmake him believe in God, far from it, but it did make him ques-tion his certainty about whether the mind could continueexisting after death.

Unfortunately for Ayer’s logical positivism, it provided thetools for its own destruction. The theory itself didn’t seem topass its own test. First, it’s not obvious that the theory is true bydefinition. Secondly, there is no observation that would proveor disprove it. So by its own standards it is meaningless.

For those who turned to philosophy to help them answerquestions about how to live, Ayer’s philosophy was of very littleuse. More promising in many ways was existentialism, themovement that emerged from Europe during and immediatelyafter the Second World War.

The Anguish of FreedomJean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir andAlbert Camus

If you could travel back in time to 1945 and to a café in Pariscalled Les Deux Magots (‘The Two Wise Men’), you would findyourself sitting near a small man with goggly eyes. He issmoking a pipe and writing in a notebook. This man is Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), the most famous existentialist philoso-pher. He was also a novelist, playwright and biographer. Helived most of his life in hotels and did most of his writing incafés. He didn’t look like a cult figure, but within a few yearsthat’s what he would become.

Quite often Sartre would be joined by a beautiful and highlyintelligent woman, Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86). They’dknown each other since they met at college. She was his long-term companion, though they never married and never livedtogether. They had other lovers too, but theirs was a long-lastingrelationship – they described it as ‘essential’ and all their otherrelationships as ‘contingent’ (meaning ‘not necessary’). Like

Sartre, she was a philosopher and a novelist. She wrote animportant early feminist book called The Second Sex (1949).

During much of the Second World War that had just endedParis had been occupied by the Nazi forces. Life had been verydifficult for the French. Some had managed to join the Resistancefighters and had fought the Germans. Others had collaboratedwith the Nazis and betrayed their friends to save themselves.Food had been in short supply. There had been gun battles inthe streets. People disappeared and were never seen again. TheJews of Paris had been sent to concentration camps, where mostwere murdered.

Now that the Allies had defeated Germany it was time to startlife afresh. There was both relief that the war was over and alsoa sense that the past had to be left behind. It was time to thinkthrough what sort of society there should be. After the terriblethings that had happened in the war, all kinds of people wereasking themselves the sorts of questions philosophers ask, like‘What is the point of living?’, ‘Is there a God?’, ‘Must I always dowhat others expect me to do?’

Sartre had already written a long and difficult book calledBeing and Nothingness (1943) which was published during thewar. The central theme of the book was freedom. Human beingsare free. This was an odd message in occupied France whenmost French people felt like – or really were – prisoners in theirown country. What he meant, though, was that, unlike, say, apenknife, a human being wasn’t designed to do anything inparticular. Sartre didn’t believe there was a God who could havedesigned us, so he rejected the idea that God had a purpose forus. The penknife was designed to cut. That was its essence, whatmade it what it is. But what was a human being designed to do?Human beings don’t have an essence. We aren’t here for areason, he thought. There is no particular way we have to be to

be human. A human being can choose what to do, what tobecome. We are all free. No one but you can decide what youmake of your life. If you let other people decide how you live,that is, again, a choice. It would be a choice to be the kind ofperson other people expect you to be.

Obviously if you make a choice to do something, you mightnot always succeed in doing it. And the reasons why you don’tsucceed may be completely outside your control. But you areresponsible for wanting to do that thing, for trying to do it, andfor how you respond to your failure to be able to do it.

Freedom is hard to handle and many of us run away from it.One of the ways to hide is to pretend that you aren’t really freeat all. If Sartre is right, we can’t make excuses: we are completelyresponsible for what we do every day and how we feel aboutwhat we do. Right down to the emotions we have. If you’re sadright now, that’s your choice, according to Sartre. You don’t haveto be sad. If you are sad, you are responsible for it. That is fright-ening and some people would rather not face up to it because itis so painful. He talks about us being ‘condemned to be free’.We’re stuck with this freedom whether we like it or not.

Sartre described a waiter in a café. This café waiter moves ina very stylized way, acting as if he is a kind of puppet. Everythingabout him suggests that he thinks of himself as completelydefined by his role as a waiter, as if he has no choice aboutanything. The way he holds the tray, the way he moves betweenthe tables, are all part of a kind of dance – a dance that is chore-ographed by his job as a waiter, not by the human beingperforming it. Sartre says this man is in ‘bad faith’. Bad faith isrunning away from freedom. It is a kind of lie you tell yourselfand almost believe: the lie that you aren’t really free to choosewhat to do with your life, when, according to Sartre, whetheryou like it or not, you are.

In a lecture he gave just after the war, ‘Existentialism is aHumanism’, Sartre described human life as full of anguish. Theanguish comes from understanding that we can’t make anyexcuses but are responsible for everything we do. But theanguish is worse because, according to Sartre, whatever I dowith my life is a kind of template for what anyone else should dowith their life. If I decide to marry, I’m suggesting that everyoneshould marry; if I decide to be lazy, that’s what everyone shoulddo in my vision of human existence. Through the choicesI make in my life I paint a picture of what I think a humanbeing ought to be like. If I do this sincerely it is a greatresponsibility.

Sartre explained what he meant by the anguish of choicethrough the true story of a student who had come to ask hisadvice during the war. This young man had to make a verydifficult decision. He could either stay at home to look after hismother; or he could run off and try to join the French Resistanceand fight to save his country from the Germans. This was themost difficult decision of his life and he wasn’t sure what to do.If he left his mother, she would be vulnerable without him. Hemight not succeed in getting to the Resistance fighters beforebeing caught by the Germans, and then the whole attempt to dosomething noble would be a waste of energy and of a life. But ifhe stayed at home with his mother, he’d be letting others do thefighting for him. What should he do? What would you do?What advice would you give him?

Sartre’s advice was a bit frustrating. He told the student thathe was free and that he should choose for himself. If Sartre hadgiven the student any practical advice about what to do, thestudent would still have had to decide whether or not to followit. There is no way to escape the weight of responsibility thatcomes with being human.

‘Existentialism’ was the name that other people gave toSartre’s philosophy. The name came from the idea that we findourselves first of all existing in the world, and then have todecide what we will make of our lives. It could have been theother way round: we could have been like a penknife, designedfor a particular purpose. But, Sartre believed, we aren’t. In hisway of putting it, our existence comes before our essence,whereas for designed objects their essence comes before theirexistence.

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir gave this existen-tialism a different twist by claiming that women are not bornwomen; they become women. What she meant was that womentend to accept men’s view of what a woman is. To be what menexpect you to be is a choice. But women, being free, can decidefor themselves what they want to be. They have no essence, noway given by nature that they have to be.

Another important theme of existentialism was the absurdityof our existence. Life doesn’t have any meaning at all until wegive it meaning by making choices, and then before too longdeath comes and removes all the meaning that we can give it.Sartre’s version of this was to describe a human being as ‘auseless passion’: there is no point to our existence at all. Thereis only the meaning each of us creates through our choices.Albert Camus (1913–60), a novelist and philosopher also linkedwith existentialism, used the Greek myth of Sisyphus to explainhuman absurdity. Sisyphus’ punishment for tricking the gods isthat he has to roll a huge rock to the top of a mountain. Whenhe reaches the top, the rock rolls down and he has to begin fromthe bottom once more. Sisyphus has to do this again and againfor ever. Human life is like Sisyphus’ task in that it is completelymeaningless. There is no point to it: no answers that will explaineverything. It’s absurd. But Camus didn’t think we should

despair. We shouldn’t commit suicide. Instead we have to recog-nize that Sisyphus is happy. Why is he happy? Because there issomething about the pointless struggle of rolling that huge rockup the mountain that makes his life worth living. It is still pref-erable to death.

Existentialism became a cult. Thousands of young peoplewere drawn to it and would discuss the absurdity of humanexistence late into the night. It inspired novels, plays and films.It was a philosophy that people could live by and apply to theirown decisions. Sartre himself became more politically involvedand more left wing as he got older, and he tried to combine theinsights of Marxism with his earlier ideas – a difficult task. Hisexistentialism of the 1940s focused on individuals makingchoices for themselves; but in his later work he tried to makesense of how we are part of a larger group of people and howsocial and economic factors play a role in our lives. Unfortunatelyhis writing got more and more difficult to understand, perhapsin part because much of it was written while he was high onamphetamines.

Sartre was probably the best-known philosopher of the twen-tieth century. But if you ask philosophers who was the mostimportant thinker of the last century, many of them will tell youthat it was Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Bewitched by Language

Ludwig Wittgenstein

If you found yourself at one of the seminars Ludwig Wittgenstein(1889–1951) held in Cambridge in 1940 you would very quicklyrealize that you were in the presence of someone very unusual.Most people who met him thought he was a genius. BertrandRussell described him as ‘passionate, profound, intense and domi-nating’. This small Viennese man with bright blue eyes and a deepseriousness about him would pace up and down, asking studentsquestions, or pause lost in thought for minutes at a time. No onedared interrupt. He didn’t lecture from prepared notes, but thoughtthrough the issues in front of his audience, using a series of exam-ples to tease out what was at stake. He told his students not towaste their time reading philosophy books; if they took suchbooks seriously, he said, they should throw them across the roomand get on with thinking hard about the puzzles they raised.

His own first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922),was written in numbered short sections, many of which read

more like poetry than philosophy. Its main message was that themost important questions about ethics and religion lie beyondthe limits of our understanding and that if we can’t talk mean-ingfully about them, we should stay silent.

A central theme in this later work was ‘bewitchment bylanguage’. Language leads philosophers into all sorts of confu-sion, he believed. They fall under its spell. Wittgenstein saw hisrole as that of a therapist who would make much of this confu-sion go away. The idea was that you would follow the logic of hisvarious carefully chosen examples and that as you did this yourphilosophical problems would vanish. What had seemed terriblyimportant would no longer be a problem.

One cause of philosophical confusion was, he suggested, theassumption that all language works in the same way – the ideathat words simply name things. He wanted to demonstrate tohis readers that there are many ‘language games’, differentactivities that we perform using words. There is no ‘essence’ oflanguage, no single common feature that explains the wholerange of its uses.

If you see a group of people who are related to each other, ata wedding for example, you may be able to recognize membersof the family from physical resemblances between them. That iswhat Wittgenstein meant by a ‘family resemblance’. So you maylook a bit like your mother in some ways – perhaps you bothhave the same hair and eye colour – and a bit like your grandfa-ther in that you are both tall and slim. You might also have thesame hair colour and eye shape as your sister, but she mighthave different-coloured eyes from you and your mother. Thereis not one single feature that every member of the family sharesthat makes it straightforward to see that you are all part of thesame genetically related family. Instead, there is a pattern ofoverlapping resemblances, with some of you sharing some

features, and others sharing different features. That pattern ofoverlapping resemblances is what interested Wittgenstein. Heused this metaphor of family resemblance to explain somethingimportant about how language works.

Think about the word ‘game’. There are lots of different thingsthat we call games: board games like chess, card games likebridge and patience, sports like football, and so on. There arealso other things that we call games, such as games of hide-and-seek or games of make-believe. Most people just assume thatbecause we use the same word – ‘game’ – to cover all these, theremust be a single feature that they all have in common, the‘essence’ of the concept ‘game’. But rather than just assumingthat there is such a common denominator, Wittgenstein urgeshis readers to ‘Look and see’. You might think that games allhave a winner and a loser, but what about solitaire, or theactivity of throwing a ball at a wall and catching it? Both of theseare games, but obviously there isn’t a loser. Or what about theidea that what they have in common is a set of rules? But somegames of make-believe don’t seem to have rules. For everycandidate for a common feature of all games, Wittgensteincomes up with a counter-example, a case of something that is agame but that doesn’t seem to share the suggested ‘essence’ of allgames. Instead of assuming that all games have a single thing incommon, he thinks we should see words like ‘game’ as ‘familyresemblance terms’.

When Wittgenstein described language as a series of ‘languagegames’ he was drawing attention to the fact that there are manydifferent things that we use language for, and that philosophershave become confused because they mostly think that all languageis doing the same sort of thing. In one of his famous descriptionsof his aim as a philosopher, he said that what he wanted to do wasshow the fly the way out of the fly bottle. A typical philosopher

will buzz around like a fly trapped in a bottle, banging against thesides. The way to ‘solve’ a philosophical problem was to removethe cork and let the fly out. What this meant was that he wantedto show the philosopher that he or she had been asking the wrongquestions or had been misled by language.

Take St Augustine’s description of how he had learnt to speak.In his Confessions, he suggested that the older people aroundhim would point to objects and name them. He sees an apple,someone points to it and says ‘apple’. Gradually Augustineunderstood what the words meant and was able to use them totell other people what he wanted. Wittgenstein took this accountto be a case of someone assuming that all language had anessence, a single function. The single function was to nameobjects. For Augustine, every word has a meaning that it standsfor. In place of this picture of language, Wittgenstein encouragesus to see language use as a series of activities that are tied upwith the practical lives of speakers. We should think of languageas more like a tool bag containing many different sorts of tools,rather than as, for example, always serving the function that ascrewdriver does.

It may seem obvious to you that when you are in pain andyou speak about it what you are doing is using words whichname the particular sensation you have. But Wittgenstein triesto disrupt that view of the language of sensation. It’s not thatyou don’t have a sensation. It’s just that, logically, your wordscan’t be the names of sensations. If everybody had a box with abeetle in that they never showed to anyone, it wouldn’t reallymatter what was in the box when they talked to one anotherabout their ‘beetle’. Language is public, and it requires publiclyavailable ways of checking that we are making sense. When achild learns to ‘describe’ her pain, Wittgenstein says, whathappens is that the parent encourages the child to do various

things, such as say ‘It hurts’ – the equivalent in many ways to thequite natural expression ‘Aaargh!’ Part of his message here isthat we should not think of the words ‘I am in pain’ as a way ofnaming a private sensation. If pains and other sensations reallywere private we would need a special private language todescribe them. But Wittgenstein thought that idea didn’t makesense. Another of his examples may help explain why hethought this.

A man decides that he will keep a record of every time he hasa particular kind of sensation for which there is no name –perhaps a specific kind of tingle. He writes ‘S’ in his diary when-ever he feels that special tingling sensation. ‘S’ is a word in hisprivate language – no one else knows what he means by it. Thissounds as if it is possible. It isn’t difficult to imagine a mandoing exactly this. But then, think a bit harder. How does heknow when he gets a tingle that it really is a further example ofthe type ${\bar{\mathbf{S}}}_{}^{\prime }$ he’s decided to record and not another kind oftingle? He can’t go back and check it against anything except hismemory of having an earlier ${}^{\mathfrak{c}}\mathrm{s}$ tingling experience. That’s notreally good enough, though, because he could be completelymistaken about it. It isn’t a reliable way of telling that you areusing the word in the same way.

The point he was trying to make with his example of thediary was that the way we use words to describe our experiencescan’t be based on a private linking of the experience with theword. There must be something public about it. We can’t haveour own private language. And if that is true, the idea that themind is like a locked theatre that no one else can get into ismisleading. For Wittgenstein, then, the idea of a private languageof sensations doesn’t make sense at all. This is important – anddifficult to grasp too – because many philosophers before himthought that each individual’s mind was completely private.

Although Christian by religion, the Wittgenstein family wasconsidered Jewish under Nazi laws. Ludwig spent part of theSecond World War working as an orderly in a London hospital,but his extended family were lucky to escape from Vienna. Hadthey not, Adolf Eichmann might have overseen their deporta-tion to the death camps. Eichmann’s involvement in theHolocaust and his later trial for crimes against humanity werethe focus of Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the nature of evil.

The Man Who Didn’t Ask QuestionsHannah Arendt

The Nazi Adolf Eichmann was a hard-working administrator.From 1942 he was in charge of transporting the Jews of Europeto concentration camps in Poland, including Auschwitz. Thiswas part of Adolf Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’: his plan to kill all Jewsliving in land occupied by the German forces. Eichmann wasn’tresponsible for the policy of systematic killing – it was not hisidea. But he was heavily involved in organizing the railwaysystem that made it possible.

Since the 1930s the Nazis had been introducing laws thattook away the rights of Jewish people. Hitler blamed almosteverything that was wrong with Germany on the Jews and hada mad wish to get revenge on them. These laws prevented Jewsfrom going to state-run schools, forced them to hand overmoney and property, and made them wear a yellow star. Jewswere rounded up and forced to live in ghettos – overcrowdedsections of cities that became prisons for them. Food was scarce,

and life was difficult. But the Final Solution introduced a newlevel of evil. Hitler’s decision to murder millions of peoplesimply because of their race meant that the Nazis needed a wayof getting the Jews out of the cities to places where they couldbe killed in large numbers. Existing concentration camps wereturned into factories for gassing and cremating hundreds ofpeople a day. As many of these camps were in Poland, someonehad to organize the trains that transported the Jews to theirdeaths.

While Eichmann sat shuffling bits of paper in an office andmaking important telephone calls, millions died as a result ofwhat he did. Some perished from typhoid or starvation, otherswere made to work until they died, but most were killed withgas. In Nazi Germany the trains ran on time – Eichmann andpeople like him made sure of that. Their efficiency kept thecattle trucks full. Inside were men, women and children, all ona long and painful journey to their death, usually without foodor water, sometimes in intense heat or cold. Many died on thejourney, particularly the old and sick.

The survivors arrived weak and terrified, only to be forcedinto chambers disguised as shower rooms where they weremade to strip naked. The doors were locked. It was here that theNazis murdered them with Zyklon gas. Their bodies wereburned and their possessions plundered. If they weren’t selectedfor immediate death in this way, the stronger ones among themmight be forced to work in atrocious conditions with little food.The Nazi guards would beat or even shoot them for fun.

Eichmann played a significant role in these crimes. Yet afterthe Second World War ended he managed to escape fromthe Allies, eventually arriving in Argentina, where he lived forsome years in secret. In 1960, though, members of the Israelisecret police, Mossad, tracked him down to Buenos Aires and

captured him. They drugged him and flew him back to Israel tostand trial.

Was Eichmann some kind of evil beast, a sadist who enjoyedother people’s suffering? That was what most people believedbefore the trial began. How else could he have played this partin the Holocaust? For several years his job was to find efficientways to send people to their death. Surely only a monster wouldbe capable of sleeping at night after that kind of work.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–75), a German Jewwho had emigrated to the United States, reported on Eichmann’strial for the New Yorker magazine. She was interested in comingface to face with a product of the Nazi totalitarian state, asociety in which there was little room to think for yourself. Shewanted to understand this man, get a sense of what he was like;and see how he could have done such terrible things.

Eichmann was very far from the first Nazi that Arendt hadmet. She fled the Nazis herself, leaving Germany for France, buteventually becoming a US citizen. As a young woman at theUniversity of Marburg her teacher had been the philosopherMartin Heidegger. For a short while they were lovers eventhough she was only 18 and he was married. Heidegger wasbusy writing Being and Time (1962), an incredibly difficultbook that some people think is a major contribution to philos-ophy and others a deliberately obscure piece of writing. Laterhe would become a committed member of the Nazi Party,supporting its anti-Jewish policies. He even removed thename of his former friend, the philosopher Edmund Husserl,from the dedication page of Being and Time because he wasJewish.

But now in Jerusalem, Arendt was to meet a very differentsort of Nazi. Here was a rather ordinary man who chose not tothink too hard about what he was doing. His failure to think had

disastrous consequences. But he wasn’t the evil sadist that shemight have expected to find. He was something far morecommon but equally dangerous: an unthinking man. In aGermany where the worst forms of racism had been writteninto the law, it was easy for him to persuade himself that whathe was doing was right. Circumstances gave him the opportu-nity for a successful career, and he took it. Hitler’s Final Solutionwas an opportunity for Eichmann to do well, to show that hecould do a good job. This is difficult to imagine, and manycritics of Arendt don’t think she was right, but she felt that hewas sincere when he claimed to be doing his duty.

Unlike some Nazis, Eichmann didn’t seem to be driven by astrong hatred of Jews. He had none of Hitler’s venom. Therewere plenty of Nazis who would have happily beaten a Jew todeath in the street for failing to give the ‘Heil Hitler!’ greeting,but he wasn’t one of them. Yet he had taken on the official Naziline and had accepted it, but far, far worse than that, he hadhelped send millions to their death. Even as he listened to theevidence against him he seemed to see little wrong with what hehad done. As far as he was concerned, since he had not brokenany laws, and had never directly killed anyone himself or askedanyone else to do that for him, he had behaved reasonably. Hehad been brought up to obey the law and trained to followorders, and all around him people were doing the same as hewas. By taking commands from other people he avoided feelingresponsible for the results of his daily work.

There was no need for Eichmann to see people bundled intocattle trucks or to visit the death camps, so he didn’t. This was aman who told the court he couldn’t have become a doctorbecause he was afraid of the sight of blood. Yet the blood wasstill on his hands. He was a product of a system that hadsomehow prevented him thinking critically about his own

actions and the results they produced for real people. It was asif he couldn’t imagine other people’s feelings at all. He carriedon with his deluded belief in his innocence all through his trial.Either that, or he had decided that his best line of defence wasto say he was only obeying the law; if so, he took Arendt in.

Arendt used the words ‘the banality of evil’ to describe whatshe saw in Eichmann. If something is ‘banal’, it is common,boring and unoriginal. Eichmann’s evil was, she claimed, banalin the sense that it was the evil of a bureaucrat, of an officemanager, rather than a devil. Here was this very ordinarysort of man who had allowed Nazi views to affect everythinghe did.

Arendt’s philosophy was inspired by events around her. Shewasn’t the kind of philosopher to spend her life in an armchairthinking about purely abstract ideas or debating endlessly aboutthe precise meaning of a word. Her philosophy was linked torecent history and lived experience. What she wrote in her bookEichmann in Jerusalem was based on her observations of oneman and the sorts of language and justifications he gave. Fromwhat she saw she developed more general explanations of evil ina totalitarian state and its effects on those who did not resist itsthought patterns.

Eichmann, like many Nazis during that era, failed to seethings from someone else’s perspective. He wasn’t brave enoughto question the rules that he was given: he simply looked for thebest way to follow them. He lacked imagination. Arendtdescribed him as shallow and brainless – though that too couldhave been an act. Had he been a monster he would have beenterrifying. But at least monsters are rare and usually quite easyto spot. What was perhaps more terrifying still was the fact thathe appeared so normal. He was an ordinary man who, by failingto question what he was doing, took part in some of the most

evil acts known to humanity. If he had not lived in NaziGermany it is unlikely that he would have been an evil man.Circumstances were against him. But that doesn’t remove hisguilt. He was obedient to immoral orders. And obeying Naziorders was, as far as Arendt was concerned, the same assupporting the Final Solution. By failing to question what hewas told to do, and by carrying out those orders, he took part inmass murder even though from his point of view he was justcreating train timetables. At one point in his trial he evenclaimed to be acting according to Immanuel Kant’s theory ofmoral duty – as if he had done the right thing by followingorders. He completely failed to understand that Kant believedthat treating human beings with respect and dignity was funda-mental to morality.

Karl Popper was a Viennese intellectual fortunate enough toescape the Holocaust and Eichmann’s well-timetabled trains.

Learning from Mistakes

Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn

In 1666 a young scientist was sitting in a garden when an applefell to the ground. This made him wonder why apples fallstraight down, rather than going off to the side or upwards. Thescientist was Isaac Newton, and the incident inspired him tocome up with his theory of gravity, a theory that explained themovements of planets as well as apples. But what happenednext? Do you think that Newton then gathered evidence thatproved beyond all doubt that his theory was true? Not accordingto Karl Popper (1902–94).

Scientists, like all of us, learn from their mistakes. Scienceprogresses when we realize that a particular way of thinkingabout reality is false. That, in two sentences, was Karl Popper’sview of how humanity’s best hope for knowledge about theworld functions. Before he developed his ideas most peoplebelieved that scientists begin with a hunch about how the worldis, and then gather evidence that shows their hunch was correct.

What scientists do, according to Popper, is try to prove theirtheories are false. Testing a theory involves seeing if it can berefuted (shown to be false). A typical scientist starts with a boldguess or Conjecture that he or she then tries to undermine in aseries of experiments or observations. Science is a creative andexciting enterprise, but it doesn’t prove anything is true – all itdoes is get rid of false views and – hopefully – edge towardstruth in the process.

Popper was born in Vienna in 1902. Although his family hadconverted to Christianity, he was descended from Jews andwhen Hitler came to power in the 1930s Popper wisely left thecountry, moving first to New Zealand, and later to Englandwhere he settled, and took up a post at the London Schoolof Economics. As a young man he had wide-ranging interestsin science, psychology, politics and music, but philosophy washis real love. By the end of his life he had made importantcontributions both to the philosophy of science and to politicalphilosophy.

Until Popper started writing about scientific method, manyscientists and philosophers believed that the way to do sciencewas to seek out evidence that supported your hypothesis. If youwanted to prove that all swans are white you’d make a lot ofobservations of white swans. If all the swans you looked at werewhite, it seemed reasonable to assume that your hypothesis ‘Allswans are white’ was true. This style of reasoning goes from ‘Allthe swans I’ve seen are white’ to the conclusion ‘All swans arewhite.’ But clearly a swan that you haven’t observed could turnout to be black. There are black swans in Australia, for example,and in many zoos around the world. So the statement ‘All swansare white’ doesn’t follow logically from the evidence. Even if youhave looked at thousands of swans and they were all white, itcould still be false. The only way to prove conclusively that they

are all white is to look at every single swan. If just one blackswan exists, your conclusion ‘All swans are white’ will have beenfalsified.

This is a version of the Problem of Induction, a problem thatDavid Hume wrote about in the eighteenth century. Inductionis very different from deduction. That is the source of theproblem. Deduction is a type of logical argument where if thepremises (the starting assumptions) are true the conclusionmust be true. So, to take a famous example, ‘All men are mortal’and ‘Socrates is a man’ are two premises from which the logicalconclusion ‘Socrates is mortal’ follows. You would contradictyourself if you agreed that ‘All men are mortal’ and that ‘Socratesis a man’, but denied the truth of the statement ‘Socrates ismortal.’ That would be like saying ‘Socrates both is and is notmortal.’ One way of thinking about this is that with deductionthe truth of the conclusion is somehow contained within thepremises and logic just teases it out. Here’s another example ofdeduction:

Premise one: All fish have gills.

Premise two: John is a fish.

Conclusion: Therefore John has gills.

It would be absurd to say that premise one and premise twowere true, but that the conclusion was false. That would becompletely illogical.

Induction is very different from this. Induction usuallyinvolves arguing from a selection of observations to a generalconclusion. If you notice that it rained every Tuesday for fourconsecutive weeks, you might generalize from this that it alwaysrains on Tuesdays. That would be a case of Induction. It wouldonly take one dry Tuesday to undermine the claim that it always

rains on Tuesdays. Four consecutive wet Tuesdays is a smallsample of all the possible Tuesdays. But even if you makenumerous observations, as with the white swans, you can still bethwarted by the existence of a single case that doesn’t fit yourgeneralization: one dry Tuesday or one non-white swan, forexample. And that is the Problem of Induction, the problem ofjustifying relying on the method of induction when it seems sounreliable. How do you know that the next glass of water youdrink won’t poison you? Answer: all the glasses of water you’vedrunk in the past were fine. So you assume that this one will be.We use this kind of reasoning all the time. Yet it seems that wearen’t completely justified in putting such faith in it. We assumepatterns in nature that may or may not really be there.

If you think that science progresses by induction, as manyphilosophers have done, then you have to face the Problem ofInduction. How can science be based on such an unreliable styleof reasoning? Popper’s view of how science develops neatlyavoids this problem. That’s because, according to him, sciencedoesn’t rely on induction. Scientists start with a hypothesis, aninformed guess about the nature of reality. An example mightbe ‘All gases expand when heated.’ This is a simple hypothesis,but real-life science involves a great deal of creativity and imagi-nation at this stage. Scientists find their ideas in many places:the chemist August Kekulé, for example, famously dreamt of asnake biting its own tail, which gave him the idea for thehypothesis that the structure of the benzene molecule is ahexagonal ring – a hypothesis that has so far stood up to scien-tists’ attempts to prove it false.

Scientists then find a way of testing this hypothesis – in thiscase, getting a lot of different sorts of gas and heating them. But‘testing’ doesn’t mean finding evidence to support the hypoth-esis; it means trying to prove that the hypothesis can survive

attempts to falsify it. Ideally the scientists will look for a gas thatdoesn’t fit the hypothesis. Remember that in the case of theswans it only took one black swan to undermine the generaliza-tion that all swans are white. Similarly, it would only take onegas that failed to expand when heated to undermine thehypothesis that ‘All gases expand when heated.’

If a scientist refutes a hypothesis – that is, shows that it isfalse – then that results in a new bit of knowledge: the knowl-edge that the hypothesis is false. Humanity progresses becausewe learn something. Observing lots of gases which do expandwhen heated won’t give us knowledge, except perhaps a littlemore confidence in our hypothesis. But a counter-examplereally teaches us something. For Popper a key feature of anyhypothesis is that it has to be falsifiable. He used this idea toexplain the difference between science and what he called‘pseudo-science’. A scientific hypothesis is one that can beproved wrong: it makes predictions that can be shown to befalse. If I say ‘There are invisible, undetectable fairies makingme type this sentence’, then there is no observation that you canmake that will prove my statement is false. If the fairies areinvisible and don’t leave any trace, there is no way of showingthat the claim that they exist is false. It is unfalsifiable and so nota scientific statement at all.

Popper thought that many statements made about psychoÂanalysis (see Chapter 30) were unfalsifiable in this way. Hethought they were untestable. For example, if someone says thateveryone is motivated by unconscious wishes, there is no testto prove this. Every bit of evidence, including people denyingthat they are motivated by unconscious wishes, is, according toPopper, merely taken as further proof that psychoanalysis isvalid. The psychoanalyst will say, ‘The fact that you deny theunconscious demonstrates that you have a strong unconscious

wish to challenge your father.’ But this statement can’t be testedbecause there is no imaginable evidence that could show that itwas false. Consequently, Popper argued, psychoanalysis wasn’ta science. It couldn’t give us knowledge in the way a sciencecould. Popper attacked Marxist accounts of history in thesame way, arguing that every possible outcome would countas support for the view that the history of humanity is a historyof class struggle. So again, it was based on unfalsifiablehypotheses.

In contrast, Albert Einstein’s theory that light would beattracted by the sun was falsifiable. That made it a scientifictheory. In 1919 observations of the apparent position of starsduring an eclipse of the sun failed to refute it. But they mighthave done. The light from the stars was not normally visible, butunder the rare conditions of an eclipse scientists were able to seethat the stars’ apparent positions were where Einstein’s theorypredicted they would be. If they had seemed to be somewhereelse, this would have undermined Einstein’s theory of how lightis attracted to very heavy bodies. Popper didn’t think theseobservations proved that Einstein’s theory was true. But thetestability of the theory, and the fact that scientists had beenunable to show it to be false, counted in its favour. Einsteinmade predictions which could have been wrong, but theyweren’t.

Many scientists and philosophers have been deeply impressedby Popper’s description of scientific method. Peter Medawar,who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine, for example, said, ‘Ithink Karl Popper is incomparably the greatest philosopher ofscience there has ever been.’ The scientists particularly liked thedescription of their activity as creative and imaginative; theyalso felt that Popper understood how they actually went abouttheir work. The philosophers were delighted with the way that

Popper got around the difficult issue of the Problem of Inductiontoo. In 1962, however, the American historian of science andphysicist Thomas Kuhn published a book called The Structureof Scientific Revolutions, which told a different story of howscience progresses, one that suggested Popper had got thingswrong. Kuhn believed that Popper hadn’t looked closely enoughat the history of science. If he had he would have seen a patternemerging.

Most of the time what he called ‘normal science’ goes on.Scientists work within a framework or ‘paradigm’ that the scien-tists of that day share. So, for example, before people realizedthat the earth revolves around the sun, the paradigm was thatthe sun goes round the earth. Astronomers would do theirresearch within that framework and would have explanations ofany evidence that didn’t seem to fit with it. Working within thisparadigm, a scientist like Copernicus who came up withthe idea that the earth goes round the sun would be thought tohave made a mistake in his calculations. According to Kuhn,there aren’t facts out there waiting to be discovered: instead, theframework or paradigm to some extent fixes what you canthink about.

Things get interesting when what Kuhn called a ‘paradigmshift’ happens. A paradigm shift is when a whole way of under-standing is overturned. This can happen when scientists findthings that don’t fit in with the existing paradigm – such asobservations that didn’t make sense within the paradigm thatthe sun goes round the earth. But even then it can take a longtime for people to abandon their old ways of thinking. Scientistswho have spent their lives working within one paradigm don’tusually welcome a different way of looking at the world. Whenthey do eventually switch to a new paradigm, a period ofnormal science can begin again, this time working within the

new framework. And so it goes on. That’s what happened whenthe view that the earth was the centre of the universe was over-turned. Once people started to think about the solar system inthat way, there was a lot more normal science to do to under-stand the paths of the planets around the sun.

Popper, not surprisingly, didn’t agree with this account of thehistory of science, although he did agree that the concept of‘normal science’ was useful. Whether he was like a scientist withan outdated paradigm himself, or had got closer to the truthabout reality than Kuhn had, is an intriguing question.

Scientists use real experiments; philosophers, on the otherhand, tend to invent thought experiments to make their argu-ments plausible. The philosophers Philippa Foot and JudithJarvis Thomson have developed a number of carefullyconstructed thought experiments that reveal important featuresof our moral thinking.

The Runaway Train and theUnwanted Violinist

Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson

You are out for a walk one day and see a runaway train hurtlingdown the tracks towards five workers. The driver is uncon-scious, possibly as the result of a heart attack. If nothing is done,all will die. The train will squash them. It’s travelling much toofast for them to get out of the way. There is, however, one hope.There is a fork in the tracks just before the five men, and on theother line there is only one worker. You are close enough tothe points to flick the switch and make the train veer awayfrom the five and kill the single worker. Is killing this innocentman the right thing to do? In terms of numbers it clearly is: yousave five people by killing just one. That must maximize happi-ness. To most people this seems the right thing to do. In real lifeit would be very difficult to flick that switch and watch someonedie as a result, but it would be even worse to hold back andwatch five times as many people die.

This is a version of a thought experiment originally created bythe British philosopher Philippa Foot (1920–2010). She wasinterested in why saving the five people on the track was accept-able, but some other cases of sacrificing one to save many weren’t.Imagine a healthy person walking into a hospital ward. In theward are five people who desperately need various organs. If onedoesn’t get a heart transplant she will certainly die. Another needsa liver, one a kidney, and so on. Would it be acceptable to kill thehealthy patient and slice up the body to provide the organs for theunhealthy ones? Hardly. No one believes that it would be accept-able to kill the one healthy person, remove his heart, lungs, liver,kidneys, and implant them in the five. Yet that is a case of sacri-ficing one to save five. What’s the difference between that and therunaway train?

A thought experiment is an imaginary situation designed tobring out our feelings, or what philosophers call ‘intuitions’, ona particular issue. Philosophers use them a lot. Thought experi-ments allow us to focus more closely on what is at stake. Herethe philosophical question is, ‘When is it acceptable to sacrificeone life to save more?’ The story about the runaway carriageallows us to think about this. It isolates the key factors andshows us whether or not we feel that such an action is wrong.

Some people say you should never flick the switch in thisexample because that would be ‘playing God’: deciding whoshould die and who should live. Most people, however, thinkyou should.

But imagine a related case. The American philosopher JudithJarvis Thomson thought up this version of the original problem.The runaway train this time is on a straight piece of trackrunning towards the five unfortunate workers who will certainlybe killed unless you do something. You are standing on a bridge,and next to you is a very large man. If you push him over the

bridge, he is heavy enough to slow down and stop the trainbefore it hits the five workers. Assuming you have the strengthto push this man over in front of the train, should you do it?

Many people find this a tougher case, and are more inclinedto say ‘no’, despite the fact that in both this case and in the caseof the fork in the line and the points that you can switch theconsequence of your actions is the death of one person ratherthan five. In fact, pushing the large man off the bridge looksvery like murder. If the consequences are the same in the twocases then there shouldn’t be an issue. If it is right to flick theswitch in the first example, it must surely be right to push thelarge man in front of the train in the second. This is puzzling.

If the imaginary situation of pushing someone over a bridgesuggests physical difficulties, or you are put off by the brutalityof having to wrestle the man to his death, the case can be revisedso that there is a trapdoor on the bridge. Using the same kind oflever as you do in the first case with the point-switching, youcan drop the large man into the path of the train with minimaleffort. You just flick a lever. Many people see this as morally farremoved from the fork in the line case. Why should this be so?

The so-called Law of Double Effect is one explanation of whywe think the forking track case and the fat man case aredifferent. This is the belief that it can be all right, for example,to hit someone so hard that they die but only if your intentionis to defend yourself and a lighter blow wouldn’t protect you.Predictable bad side effects of an action with a good intention(in this case saving yourself) can be acceptable, but deliberateharm is not. It isn’t right to go out and poison someone who isplanning to kill you. The first case is one in which you have anacceptable intention, it’s just that following through on it willresult in someone’s death. In the second case you intend to killthe person, and that isn’t acceptable. For some people, this

solves the problem. Other people think this principle of DoubleEffect is a mistake.

These cases may seem far-fetched and nothing to do witheveryday life. In one sense that is true. They’re not meant to bereal cases. These are thought experiments designed to clarifyour beliefs. But from time to time real-life situations do arisethat lead to similar decisions. For example, during the SecondWorld War the Nazis were firing flying bombs into parts ofLondon. A German spy had become a double agent. The Britishhad the chance to send misleading information back to theGermans, telling them that the rockets were falling far to thenorth of their intended targets. This would have had the effectof making the Germans change their aim, so that instead offalling on heavily populated parts of London, the rockets wouldfall further to the south on people in Kent and Surrey. In otherwords, there was a possibility of giving information that wouldcause fewer people to be killed. In this case the British decidednot to play God.

In a different sort of real-life situation, the participants diddecide to take action. In the Zeebrugge disaster in 1987, when acar ferry sank and dozens of passengers were struggling to getout of the icy sea, a young man climbing to safety on a ropeladder froze with fear and could not move. He stayed in thatposition for at least ten minutes, stopping anyone else fromgetting out of the sea. If they didn’t get out quickly they woulddrown or die of cold. Eventually those in the water pulled himoff the ladder and managed to escape to safety. The young manfell into the sea and drowned. The decision to pull the youngman off the ladder must have been an agonizing one to make,but in these extreme circumstances, as with the runaway train,sacrificing one person to save many was probably the rightthing to do.

Philosophers are still arguing about the train example andhow it should be solved. They’re also arguing about anotherthought experiment that Judith Jarvis Thomson (born 1929)came up with. This one was to show that a woman who hadused contraception but who had still become pregnant didnot have a moral duty to go through with having the baby. Shecould have an abortion without doing something morallywrong. To have the baby in such circumstances would be an actof charity, but not a duty. Traditionally, debates about themorality of abortion had focused on the foetus’ point of view.Her argument was important in that it gave a lot of weight to thewoman’s perspective. Here’s the example.

There is a famous violinist who has a kidney problem. Hisonly chance of survival is to be plugged into a person whoshares his very rare blood group. You have that same bloodgroup. One morning you wake up to find that while you wereasleep doctors have attached him to your kidneys. Thomsonargues that in such a situation you don’t have a duty to keep himplugged into you, even though you know that he will die if youpull the tubes out. In the same way, she suggests, if a woman ispregnant even though she used contraception, the developingfoetus inside her does not have an automatic right to the use ofher body. The foetus is like the violinist.

Before Thomson introduced this example, many peoplethought that the crucial question was, ‘Is a foetus a person?’They believed that if they could show that a foetus was aperson, then abortion would obviously be immoral in everycase. Thomson’s thought experiment suggested that even if thefoetus is a person, that doesn’t settle the question.

Of course, not everyone agrees with this answer. Some peoplestill think that you shouldn’t play God even if you wake up witha violinist plugged into your kidneys. It would be a difficult life,

unless you really loved violin music. But it would still be wrongto kill the violinist even though you had not chosen to help him.Likewise, plenty of people believe that you should never delib-erately terminate a healthy pregnancy even if you did not intendto get pregnant and took precautions against doing so. What thecleverly constructed thought experiment does, though, is bringout the principles underlying these disagreements.

The political philosopher John Rawls also used a thoughtexperiment, in his case to investigate the nature of justice andthe best principles for organizing society.

Fairness through IgnoranceJohn Rawls

Perhaps you’re wealthy. Perhaps you’re super-rich. But most ofus aren’t, and some people are very poor, so poor that theyspend most of their short lives hungry and sick. This doesn’tseem fair or right – and it surely isn’t. If there were true justicein the world no children would starve while others have somuch money that they don’t know what to do with it. Everyonewho is sick would have access to good medical treatment. Thepoor of Africa wouldn’t be so much worse off than the poor inthe USA and Britain. The rich of the West wouldn’t be so manythousand times as rich as those who through no fault of theirown were born into disadvantage. Justice is about treatingpeople fairly. There are people around us whose lives are filledwith good things, and others who, through no fault of theirown, get few choices about how they survive: they can’t choosethe job they do, or even the town where they live. Some peoplewho think about these inequalities will just say, ‘Oh well, life’s

not fair’ and shrug their shoulders. These are usually the oneswho have been particularly lucky; others will spend timethinking about how society could be better organized andperhaps try to change it to make it fairer.

John Rawls (1921–2002), a modest, quiet Harvard academic,wrote a book that changed the way people thought about thesethings. That book was A Theory of Justice (1971) and the resultof nearly twenty years of hard thinking. It’s really a professor’sbook meant for other professors and written in a rather dryacademic style. Unlike most books of this kind, though, it didn’tsit gathering dust in a library – far from it. It became a bestseller.In some ways it’s amazing that so many people read it. But itskey ideas were so interesting that it was very quickly declaredone of the most influential books of the twentieth century, readby philosophers, lawyers, politicians and many others – some-thing Rawls himself had never dreamt was possible.

Rawls had fought in the Second World War, and was in thePacific on 6 August 1945 when the atom bomb was dropped onthe Japanese city of Hiroshima. He was deeply affected by hiswartime experiences and believed that it had been wrong to usenuclear weapons. Like many who lived through that period, hewanted to create a better world, a better society. But his way ofbringing about change was through thinking and writing,rather than joining political causes and rallies. While he waswriting A Theory of Justice, the Vietnam war was raging, andacross the United States large-scale anti-war protests – not all ofthem peaceful – were taking place. Rawls chose to write aboutabstract general questions of justice rather than getting caughtup in the issues of the moment. At the heart of his work was theidea that we need to think clearly about how we live togetherand the ways in which the state influences our lives. For ourexistence to be bearable we need to co-operate. But how?

Imagine you have to design a new and better society. Onequestion you might ask is, ‘Who gets what?’ If you live in abeautiful mansion with an indoor swimming pool and servants,and have a private jet waiting to whisk you away to a tropicalisland, you might well conjure up a world in which some peopleare very rich – perhaps the ones who work hardest – and othersmuch poorer. If you are living in poverty now, you’ll probablydesign a society in which no one is allowed to be super-rich, onewhere everyone gets a more equal share of what is available: noprivate jets allowed, but better chances for people who areunfortunate. Human nature is like that: people tend to think oftheir own position when they describe a better world, whetherthey realize it or not. These prejudices and biases distort polit-ical thinking.

Rawls’ stroke of genius was to come up with a thought expeÂriment – he called it ‘The Original Position’ – that plays downsome of the selfish biases we all have. His central idea is verysimple: design a better society, but do it without knowing whatposition in society you’ll occupy. You don’t know whether you’llbe rich, poor, have a disability, be good looking, male, female,ugly, intelligent or unintelligent, talented or unskilled, homo-sexual, bisexual or heterosexual. He thinks you will choosefairer principles behind this imaginary ‘veil of ignorance’because you won’t know where you might end up, what kind ofa person you might be. From this simple device of choosingwithout knowing your own place, Rawls developed his theory ofjustice. This was based on two principles he thought all reason-able people would accept, principles of freedom and equality.

The first principle was his Liberty Principle. This states thateveryone should have the right to a range of basic freedoms thatmustn’t be taken away from them, such as freedom of belief,freedom to vote for their leaders, and extensive freedom of

expression. Even if restricting some of these freedoms improvedthe lives of a majority of people, Rawls thought, they were soimportant that the freedoms should be protected above all. Likeall liberals, Rawls put a very high value on these basic liberties,believing that everyone had a right to them and that no oneshould take them away.

Rawls’ second principle, the Difference Principle, is all aboutequality. Society should be arranged to give more equal wealthand opportunity to the most disadvantaged. If people receivedifferent amounts of money, then this inequality is only allowedif it directly helps the worst off. A banker can only get 10,000times more than the lowest-paid worker if the lowest-paidworker benefits directly and receives an increased amount ofmoney that he or she wouldn’t have had if the banker waspaid less. If Rawls were in charge, no one would earn hugebonuses unless the poorest got more money as a result. Rawlsthinks this is the kind of world reasonable people would chooseif they didn’t know whether they would be rich or poorthemselves.

Before Rawls, philosophers and politicians who thoughtabout who should get what often argued in favour of a situationwhich would produce the highest average amount of wealth.That could mean that some people could be super-rich, manymoderately rich and few very poor. But for Rawls, such a situa-tion was worse than one in which there were no super-rich, buteveryone had a more equal share, even though the averageamount of wealth was lower.

This is a challenging idea – particularly to those who arecapable of earning high salaries in the world as it is. Robert Nozick(1938–2002), another important American political philosopher,further to the right politically than Rawls, questioned it. Surelyfans who come to watch a brilliant basketball player should be free

to give a small part of their ticket money to that player. It’s theirright to spend their money in this way. And if millions come towatch him, then the sportsman will – fairly, Nozick thought – earnmillions of dollars. Rawls entirely disagreed with this view. Unlessthe poorest got richer as a result of this deal, Rawls argued, thenthe basketball player’s personal earnings shouldn’t be allowed toincrease to such high levels. Rawls, controversially, believed thatbeing a gifted athlete or a highly intelligent person did notautomatically entitle individuals to higher earnings. That was inpart because he believed that such things as sporting ability andintelligence were a matter of good luck. You don’t deserve moresimply because you are fortunate enough to be a fast runner or agreat ball player, or if you are very bright. Being athleticallytalented or intelligent is the result of winning in the ‘naturallottery’. Many people disagree strongly with Rawls and feel thatexcellence should be rewarded. But Rawls thought that there wasno automatic connection between being good at something anddeserving more.

But what if from behind the veil of ignorance some peoplewould prefer to take a gamble? What if they thought of life as alottery and wanted to make sure that there were some veryattractive positions to occupy in society? presumably gamblersmight take the risk of ending up poor if they had a chance to beextremely rich. So they’d prefer a world with a wider range ofeconomic possibilities than the one Rawls described. Rawlsbelieved that reasonable people would not want to gamble withtheir lives in this way. Perhaps he was wrong about this.

For much of the twentieth century philosophers had losttouch with the great thinkers of the past. Rawls’ Theory of Justicewas one of the very few works of political philosophy written inthat century that are worth mentioning in the same breath asthose by Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume and Kant.

Rawls himself would have been far too modest to agree. Hisexample, though, has inspired a generation of philosopherswriting today, including Michael Sandel, Thomas Pogge, MarthaNussbaum and Will Kymlicka: they all believe that philosophyshould engage with the deep and difficult questions about howwe can and should live together. Unlike some philosophers ofthe previous generation, they aren’t afraid of trying to answerthem and to stimulate social change. They believe philosophyshould actually change how we live, not just change how wediscuss how we live.

Another philosopher who holds this kind of view is PeterSinger. He’s the subject of the final chapter of this book. Butbefore looking at his ideas, we are going to explore a questionthat is becoming more pertinent daily: ‘Can Computers Think?’

Can Computers Think?

Alan Turing and John Searle

You’re sitting in a room. There is a door into the room with aletterbox. Every now and then a piece of card with a squiggleshape drawn on it comes through the door and drops on yourdoormat. Your task is to look up the squiggle in a book thatis on the table in the room. Each squiggle is paired withanother symbol in the book. You have to find your squiggle inthe book, look at the symbol it is paired with, and then finda bit of card with a symbol that matches it from a pack in theroom. You then carefully push that bit of card out through yourletterbox. That’s it. You do this for a while and wonder what’sgoing on.

This is the Chinese Room thought experiment, the inventionof the American philosopher John Searle (born 1932). It’s animaginary situation designed to show that a computer can’treally think even if it seems to. In order to see what’s going onhere you need to understand the Turing Test.

Alan Turing (1912–54) was an outstanding Cambridge math-ematician who helped to invent the modern computer. Hisnumber-crunching machines built during the Second WorldWar at Bletchley Park in England cracked the ‘Enigma’ codesused by German submarine commanders. The Allies could thenintercept messages and know what the Nazis were planning.

Intrigued by the idea that one day computers might do morethan crack codes, and could be genuinely intelligent, in 1950 hesuggested a test that any such computer would have to pass. Thishas come to be known as the Turing Test for artificial intelligencebut he originally called it the Imitation Game. It comes from hisbelief that what’s interesting about the brain isn’t that it has theconsistency of cold porridge. Its function matters more than theway it wobbles when removed from the head, or the fact that it isgrey. Computers may be hard and made from electronic compo-nents, but they can still do many things brains do.

When we judge whether a person is intelligent or not we dothat based on the answers they give to questions rather thanopening up their brains to look at how the neurons join up. Soit’s only fair that when we judge computers we focus on externalevidence rather than on how they are constructed. We shouldlook at inputs and outputs, not the blood and nerves or thewiring and transistors inside. Here’s what Turing suggested. Atester is in one room, typing a conversation on to a screen. Thetester doesn’t know whether he or she is having a conversationwith another person in a different room via the screen – or witha computer generating its own answers. If during the conversa-tion the tester can’t tell whether there is a person or a humanbeing responding, the computer passes the Turing Test. If acomputer passes that test then it is reasonable to say that it isintelligent – not just in a metaphorical way, but in the way thata human being can be.

What Searle’s Chinese Room example – the scenario withthe squiggles on bits of card – is meant to show is that even ifa computer passed Turing’s test for artificial intelligencethat wouldn’t prove that it genuinely understood anything.Remember you are in this room with strange symbols comingthrough the letterbox and are passing other symbols back outthrough the letterbox, and you are guided by a rulebook. This isa meaningless task for you, and you have no idea why you aredoing it. But without your realizing it, you are answering ques-tions in Chinese. You only speak English and know no Chineseat all. But the signs coming in are questions in Chinese, and thesigns you give out are plausible answers to those questions. TheChinese Room with you in it wins the Imitation Game. You giveanswers that would fool someone outside into thinking that youreally understand what you are talking about. So, this suggests,a computer that passes the Turing Test isn’t necessarily intelli-gent, since from within the room you don’t have any sense ofwhat’s being discussed at all.

Searle thinks that computers are like someone in the ChineseRoom: they don’t really have intelligence and can’t really think.All they do is shuffle symbols around following rules that theirmakers have programmed into them. The processes they use arebuilt into the software. But that is very different from trulyunderstanding something or having genuine intelligence.Another way of putting this is that the people who program thecomputer give it a syntax: that is, they provide rules about thecorrect order in which to process the symbols. But they don’tprovide it with a semantics: they don’t give meanings to thesymbols. Human beings mean things when they speak – theirthoughts relate in various ways to the world. Computers thatseem to mean things are only imitating human thought, a bitlike parrots. Although a parrot can mimic speech, it never really

understands what it is saying. Similarly, according to Searle,computers don’t really understand or think about anything: youcan’t get semantics from syntax alone.

A criticism of Searle’s thought experiment is that it looks atthe question of whether or not the person in the room under-stands what’s going on. But that’s a mistake. The person is just apart of the whole system. Even if the person doesn’t understandwhat’s going on, perhaps the whole system (including the room,the code book, the symbols and so on) understands. Searle’sresponse to this objection was to change the thought experi-ment. Instead of imagining a person in a room shufflingsymbols around, imagine this person has memorized thewhole rulebook and then is outside in the middle of a fieldhanding back the appropriate symbol cards. The person stillwouldn’t understand the individual questions even though heor she would give the right answers to the questions asked inChinese. Understanding involves more than just giving theright answers.

Some philosophers, though, remain convinced that thehuman mind is just like a computer program. They believe thatcomputers really can and do think. If they’re right, then perhapsone day it will be possible to transfer minds from people’s brainsinto computers. If your mind is a program, then just because itis running in the soggy mass of brain tissue in your head nowdoesn’t mean that it couldn’t run in a big shiny computer some-where else in the future. If, with the help of super-intelligentcomputers, someone manages to map the billions of functionalconnections that make up your mind, then perhaps one day itwill be possible to survive death. Your mind could be uploadedinto a computer so that it could carry on working long afteryour body had been buried or cremated. Whether that would bea good way to exist is another question. If Searle is right,

though, there would be no guarantee that the uploaded mindwould be conscious in the way that you are now, even if it gaveresponses that seemed to show that it was.

Writing over sixty years ago, Turing was already convincedthat computers could think. If he was right, it might not be thatlong before we find them thinking about philosophy. That’smore likely than that they will allow our minds to survive death.Perhaps one day computers will even have interesting things tosay about the fundamental questions of how we should live andabout the nature of reality – the sorts of questions that philoso-phers have grappled with for several thousand years. In themeantime, though, we need to rely on flesh and blood philoso-phers to clarify our thinking in these areas. One of the mostinfluential and controversial of these is Peter Singer.

A Modern Gadfly

Peter Singer

You’re in a garden where you know there is a pond. There’s asplash and some shouting. You realize that a young child hasfallen in and may be drowning. What do you do? Do you walkby? Even if you’d promised to meet a friend and stopping wouldmake you late, you’d surely treat the child’s life as more impor-tant than being on time. The pond is quite shallow, but verymuddy. You’ll ruin your best shoes if you help. But don’t expectother people to understand if you don’t jump in. This is aboutbeing human and valuing life. A child’s life is so much morevaluable than any pair of shoes, even a very expensive pair.Anyone who thinks otherwise is some kind of monster. You’djump into the water, wouldn’t you? Of course you would. Butthen you’re also probably rich enough to prevent a child inAfrica from dying of hunger or of a curable tropical disease.That probably wouldn’t take much more than the price of theshoes you’d be prepared to ruin by saving the child in the pond.

Why haven’t you helped the other children – assuming youhaven’t? Giving a small amount of money to the right charitywould save at least one life. There are so many childhooddiseases that can easily be prevented with a relatively smallamount of money to pay for vaccinations and other medicines.But why don’t you feel the same about someone dying in Africaas you do about a child you can see drowning in front of you? Ifyou do feel the same, you are unusual. Most of us don’t, even ifwe feel slightly awkward about that fact.

The Australian philosopher Peter Singer (born 1946) hasargued that the drowning child in front of you and the starvingchild in Africa are not so different. We should care more aboutthose we can save all over the world than we do. If we don’t dosomething, then children who might otherwise have lived willcertainly die young. This isn’t a guess. We know it’s true. Weknow that many thousands of children die each year frompoverty-related causes. Some die of starvation while we indeveloped countries throw away food that rots in the fridgebefore we get round to eating it. Some can’t even get clean waterto drink. So we should give up one or two of the luxuries thatwe don’t really need in order to help people who are unfortunateabout where they were born. This is a hard philosophy to live upto. But that doesn’t mean Singer is wrong about what we oughtto do.

You might say that if you don’t give money to charity,someone else probably will. The risk here is that we will all belike bystanders, each one assuming that someone else will dowhat is necessary. So many people across the world are living inextreme poverty and going to bed each day hungry that theirneed won’t be met by leaving charity to the few. It is true that inthe case of a child drowning in front of you it is very easy to seeif someone else is coming to that child’s aid. With those

suffering in far-off countries it can be harder to know the effectsof what we do and the effects of other people’s actions. But thatdoes not mean doing nothing is the best solution.

Connected with this point is the fear that giving money foroverseas aid makes poor people depend on the rich, and stopsthem from finding ways to grow their own food and build theirown wells and places to live. Over time this might make thingsturn out worse than if you didn’t give at all. There are caseswhere whole countries have become dependent on foreign aid.What this means, though, is not that we should not contributeto charities, but that we should think carefully about the sorts ofaid these charities are offering. It doesn’t at all follow that weshould not try and help. Some kinds of basic medical aid cangive poor people a good chance of becoming independent ofoutside help. There are charities that are very good at traininglocal people to help themselves, building wells that provideclean drinking water or providing health education. Singer’sargument is not that we should simply contribute money to helpothers, but that we should contribute it to the charities that aremost likely to benefit the worst off in the world in ways that willempower them to live independently. His message is clear: youalmost certainly could have a genuine influence on other people’slives. And you should.

Singer is one of the best-known living philosophers. This isin part because he has challenged several widely held views.Some of what he believes is extremely controversial. Manypeople believe in the absolute sanctity of human life – that itis always wrong to kill another human being. Singer doesn’t.If someone is in an irreversible persistent vegetative state,for example – that is, if they are just being kept alive as abody without meaningful conscious states or any chance ofrecovery or hope for their future – then Singer has argued that

euthanasia or mercy killing may be appropriate. There is littlepoint in keeping such people alive in this state, he believes, asthey have no capacity for pleasure or for any preference abouthow they live. They don’t have a strong wish to keep on living,because they are incapable of having wishes at all.

Such views have made him unpopular in some quarters. Hehas even been called a Nazi for defending euthanasia in thesespecial circumstances – despite the fact that his parents wereViennese Jews who fled the Nazis. This name-calling refers tothe fact that the Nazis killed many thousands of sick and physi-cally and mentally disabled people on the grounds that theirlives were allegedly not worth living. It would be wrong to callthe Nazi programme ‘mercy killing’ or ‘euthanasia’, however,since it was not meant to prevent unnecessary suffering, but toget rid of those the Nazis dismissed as ‘useless mouths’ becausethey were unable to work, and because they were supposedlycontaminating the Aryan race. There was no sense of ‘mercy’there. In contrast Singer is interested in the quality of life of thepeople concerned, and would certainly never have supported toany degree the Nazis’ policies – though some of his opponentscaricature his views to make them sound very similar.

Singer first became famous because of his influential booksabout the treatment of animals, especially Animal Liberation,which was published in 1975. In the early nineteenth centuryJeremy Bentham had argued for the need to take animalsuffering seriously, but in the 1970s when Singer first beganwriting on this topic, few philosophers saw it this way. Singer,like Bentham and Mill (see Chapters 21 and 24), is a consequen-tialist. This means he believes that the best action is the one thatproduces the best result. And to work out the best result weneed to take into account what is in the best interests of allconcerned, including the interests of animals. Like Bentham,

Singer believes that the key relevant feature for most animals istheir capacity to feel pain. As human beings, we sometimesexperience greater suffering than an animal would in a similarsituation because we have the ability to reason and understandwhat is happening to us. This too needs to be taken intoaccount.

Singer called those who don’t give enough weight to theinterests of animals ‘speciesist’. This is like being racist or sexist.Racists treat members of their own race differently: they givethem special treatment. They don’t give members of other raceswhat they deserve. A white racist might, for example, give a jobto another white person even though there is a better-qualifiedblack person who applied for the job. That’s clearly unfair andwrong. Speciesism is like racism. It comes from only seeingyour own species’ perspective or being very heavily biased in itsfavour. As human beings many of us think only of other humanbeings when we decide what to do. But that’s wrong. Animalscan suffer, and their suffering should be taken into account.

Giving equal respect doesn’t mean treating every animalspecies in exactly the same way. That wouldn’t make sense at all.If you slap a horse across the rump with an open hand youprobably won’t cause the horse much pain. Horses have thickskins. But if you did the same to a human baby, you would causeit intense pain. But if you hit the horse hard enough to cause thehorse the same amount of pain as slapping a baby would, thatwould be just as morally wrong as slapping a baby. You shouldn’tdo either, of course.

Singer argues that we should all be vegetarians on thegrounds that we can easily live well without eating animals.Most food production using animals causes suffering and somefarming is so cruel that it causes the animals intense pain.Factory-farmed chickens, for example, are kept in tiny cages,

some pigs are reared in stalls so small they can’t turn round, andthe process of slaughtering cattle is often extremely distressingand painful for them. It can’t, Singer argued, be morally right tolet such farming continue. But even more humane forms offarming animals are unnecessary, as we can quite easily dowithout eating meat. True to his principles, he even printed arecipe for lentil daal in one of his books to encourage readers toseek alternatives to meat.

Farm animals aren’t the only ones that suffer at the hands ofhuman beings. Scientists use animals for their research. It’s notjust rats and guinea pigs – cats, dogs, monkeys and even chim-panzees can be found in laboratories, many of them sufferingpain and distress as they are drugged or given electric shocks.Singer’s test to see if any research is morally acceptable is this:would we be prepared to perform the same experiment on abrain-damaged human being? If not, he believes, it is not rightto perform the experiment on an animal with a similar level ofmental awareness. This is a tough test, and not many experi-ments would pass it. In practice, then, Singer is very stronglyagainst using animals in research.

The whole of Singer’s approach to moral questions is basedon the idea of consistency. Consistency is treating similar casesin a similar way. It is a matter of logic that if what is wrongwith harming human beings is that it causes pain, then otheranimals’ pain should affect how we behave too. If harming ananimal brings about more pain than harming a human being,then it’s better to harm the human being if you have to harmone of them.

Like Socrates many years before him, Singer takes risks whenhe makes public statements about how we should live. There havebeen protests against some of his lectures and he has had deaththreats. Yet he represents the very best tradition in philosophy. He

is constantly challenging widely held assumptions. His philos-ophy affects how he lives, and when he disagrees with otherpeople he is always prepared to challenge the opinions of those hefinds around him, to engage in public discussion.

Most importantly, Singer supports his conclusions withreasoned arguments informed by well-researched facts. Youdon’t have to agree with his conclusions to see his sincerity as aphilosopher. Philosophy, after all, thrives on debate. It thriveson people taking positions against each other and arguing,using logic and evidence. If you disagree with Singer’s views on,for example, the moral status of animals or the circumstances inwhich euthanasia is morally acceptable, there is still a very goodchance that reading his books will make you think hard aboutwhat you do actually believe and how it is supported by facts,reasons and principles.

Philosophy began with awkward questions and difficult chal-lenges; with gadfly philosophers like Peter Singer around, thereis a good chance that the spirit of Socrates will continue toshape its future.