‘What is `fair' in a
particular set of circumstances is something upon which a group of high-minded
philosophers, let alone an assembly of Judges, may fail to agree.’
— S v Ngwenya & Others 1998 (2) SACR 503 (W) at 506j-507a
per Leveson J
The
Power of Ideas — Sir Isaiah Berlin
I do not know
who else may have thought this, but it occurred to me that some ultimate values
are compatible with each other and some are not. Liberty, in whichever sense,
is an eternal human ideal, whether individual or social. So is equality. But
perfect liberty (as it must be in the perfect world) is not compatible with
perfect equality. If man is free to do anything he chooses, then the strong
will crush the weak, the wolves will eat the sheep, and this puts an end to
equality. If perfect equality is to be attained, then men must be prevented
from outdistancing each other, whether in material or in intellectual or in
spiritual achievement, otherwise inequalities will result. The
anarchist Bakunin, who believed in equality above all, thought that
universities should be abolished because they bred learned men who behaved as
if they were superior to the unlearned, and this propped up social
inequalities. Similarly, a world of perfect justice—and who can deny that this
is one of the noblest of human values?—is not compatible with perfect mercy. I
need not labour this point: either the law takes its toll, or men forgive, but
the two values cannot both be realised.
Again, knowledge and happiness may or may
not be compatible. Rationalist thinkers have supposed that knowledge always
liberates, that it saves men from being victims of forces they cannot understand;
to some degree this is no doubt true, but if I know that I have cancer I am not
thereby made happier, or freer—I must choose between always knowing as much as
I can and accepting that there are situations where ignorance may be bliss.
Nothing is more attractive than spontaneous creativity, natural vitality, a
free flowering of ideas, works of art—but these are not often compatible with a
capacity for careful and effective planning, without which no even moderately
secure society can be created. Liberty
and equality, spontaneity and security, happiness and knowledge, mercy and
justice—all these are ultimate human values, sought for themselves alone; yet
when they are incompatible, they cannot all be attained, choices must be made,
sometimes tragic losses accepted in the pursuit of some preferred ultimate end.
But if, as I believe, this is not merely empirically but conceptually true—that
is, derives from the very conception of these values—then the very idea of the
perfect world in which all good things are realised is incomprehensible, is in
fact conceptually incoherent. And if this is so, and I cannot see how it could
be otherwise, then the very notion of the ideal world, for which no sacrifice
can be too great, vanishes from view.
The
Power of Ideas — Sir Isaiah Berlin
Physics and chemistry did not tell one why
some men were obliged to obey other men and under what circumstances, and what
was the nature of such obligations; what was good and what was evil; whether
happiness and knowledge, justice and mercy, liberty and equality, efficiency
and individual independence, were equally valid goals of human action, and, if
so, whether they were compatible with one another, and if not, which of them
were to be chosen, and what were valid criteria for such choices, and how we
could be certain about their validity, and what was meant by the notion of
validity itself; and many more questions of this type.
Yet—so a good many eighteenth-century
philosophers argued—a similar state of chaos and doubt had once prevailed in
the realm of the natural sciences too; yet there human genius had finally
prevailed and created order.
Nature, and Nature's laws
lay hid in night. God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.'
If Newton could, with a small number of
basic laws, enable us, at least in theory, to determine the position and motion
of every physical entity in the universe, and in this way abolish at one blow a
vast, shapeless mass of conflicting, obscure and only half intelligible rules
of thumb which had hitherto passed for natural knowledge, was it not reasonable
to expect that, by applying similar principles to human conduct and the
analysis of the nature of man, we should be able to obtain similar
clarification and establish the human sciences upon equally firm foundations?
Philosophy fed on the muddles and
obscurities of language; if these were cleared away, it would surely be found
that the only questions left would be concerned with testable human beliefs, or
expressions of identifiable, everyday human needs or hopes or fears or
interests. These were the proper study of psychologists, anthropologists,
sociologists, economists; all that was needed was a Newton, or series of
Newtons, for the sciences of man; in this way the perplexities of metaphysics
could once and for all be removed, the idle tribe of philosophical speculators
eradicated and, on the ground thus cleared, a clear and firm edifice of natural
science built.
This was the hope of all the best-known
philosophers of the, Enlightenment, from Hobbes and Hume to Helvetius, Holbach,
Condorcet, Bentham, Saint-Simon, Comte, and their successors. Yet this
programme was doomed to failure. The realm of philosophy was not partitioned
into a series of scientific successor states. Philosophical questions continued
(and continue) to fascinate and torment enquiring minds.
Why is this so? An illuminating answer to
this problem was given by Kant, the first thinker to draw a clear distinction
between, on the one hand, questions of fact, and, on the other, questions about
the patterns in which these facts presented themselves to us patterns that
were not themselves altered however much the facts themselves, or our knowledge
of them, might alter. These patterns or categories or forms of experience were
themselves not the subject-matter of any possible natural science.
Kant was the first to draw the crucial
distinction between facts — the data of experience, as it were, the things,
persons, events, qualities, relations that we observed or inferred or thought
about—and the categories in terms of which we sensed and imagined and reflected
about them. These were, for him, independent of the different cosmic attitudes—the
religious or metaphysical frameworks that belonged to various ages and
civilisations. Thus the majority of Greek philosophers, and most of all
Aristotle, thought that all things had purposes built into them by nature—ends
or goals which they could not but seek to fulfil. The medieval Christians saw
the world as a hierarchy in which every object and person was called upon to
fulfil a specific function by the Divine Creator; he alone understood the
purpose of the entire pattern, and made the happiness and misery of his
creatures depend upon the degree to which they followed the commandments that
were entailed by the differing purposes for which each entity had been created—the
purposes that in fulfilling themselves realised the universal harmony, the
supreme pattern, the totality of which was kept from the creatures, and understood
by the Creator alone.
The rationalists of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries saw no purpose in anything but what man himself had
created to serve his own needs, and regarded all else as determined by the laws
of cause and effect, so that most things pursued no purposes, but were as they
were, and moved and changed as they did, as a matter of 'brute' fact.
These were profoundly different outlooks.
Yet those who held them saw very similar items in the universe, similar
colours, tastes, shapes, forms of motion and rest, experienced similar
feelings, pursued similar goals, acted in similar fashions.
Kant, in his doctrine of our knowledge of
the external world, taught that the categories through which we saw it were
identical for all sentient beings, permanent and unalterable; indeed this is
what made our world one, and communication possible. But some of those who
thought about history, morals, aesthetics, did see change and differences; what
differed was not so much the empirical content of what these successive civilisations
saw or heard or thought as the basic patterns in which they perceived them, the
models in terms of which they conceived them, the category-spectacles through
which they viewed them.
The world of a man who believes that God
created him for a specific purpose, that he has an immortal soul, that there is
an afterlife in which his sins will be visited upon him, is radically different
from the world of a man who believes in none of these things; and the reasons
for action, the moral codes, the political beliefs, the tastes, the personal
relationships of the former will deeply and systematically differ from those of
the latter.
Men's views of one another will differ
profoundly as a very consequence of their general conception of the world: the
notions of cause and purpose, good and evil, freedom and slavery, things and
persons, rights, duties, laws, justice, truth, falsehood, to take some central
ideas completely at random, depend directly upon the general framework within
which they form, as it were, nodal points. Although the facts which are
classified and arranged under these notions are not at all identical for all
men at all times, yet these differences—which the sciences examine—are not the
same as the profounder differences which wearing different sets of spectacles,
using different categories, thinking in terms of different models, must make to
men of different times and places and cultures and outlooks.
Philosophy, then, is not an empirical
study: not the critical examination of what exists or has existed or will
exist—this is dealt with by common-sense knowledge and belief, and the methods
of the natural sciences. Nor is it a kind of formal deduction, as mathematics
or logic is. Its subject-matter is to a large degree not the items of experience,
but the ways in which they are viewed, the permanent or semi-permanent
categories in terms of which experience is conceived and classified. Purpose
versus mechanical causality; organism versus mere amalgams; systems versus mere
togetherness; spatiotemporal order versus timeless being; duty versus appetite;
value versus fact—these are categories, models, spectacles. Some of these are
as old as human experience itself; others are more transient. With the more
transient, the philosopher's problems take on a more dynamic and historical
aspect. Different models and frameworks, with their attendant obscurities and
difficulties, arise at different times. The case of contemporary problems in
the explanatory framework of physics, already mentioned, is one example of
this. But there are other examples, which affect the thought not just of
physicists or other specialists, but of reflective men in general.
In politics, for example, men tried to
conceive of their social existence by analogy with various models: Plato at one
stage, perhaps following Pythagoras, tried to frame his system of human nature,
its attributes and goals, following a geometrical pattern, since he thought it
would explain all there was. There followed the biological pattern of
Aristotle; the many Christian images with which the writings of the Fathers as
well as the Old and New Testaments abound; the analogy of the family, which
casts light upon human relations not provided by a mechanical model (say that
of Hobbes); the notion of an army on the march with its emphasis on such
virtues as loyalty, dedication, obedience, needed to overtake and crush the
enemy (with which so much play was made in the Soviet Union); the notion of the
State as a traffic policeman and night-watchman preventing collisions and
looking after property, which is at the back of much individualist and liberal
thought; the notion of the State as much more than this—as a great co-operative
endeavour of individuals seeking to fulfil a common end, and therefore as
entitled to enter into every nook and cranny of human experience, that animates
much of the 'organic' thought of the nineteenth century; the systems borrowed
from psychology, or from theories of games, that are in vogue at present—all
these are models in terms of which human beings, groups and societies and
cultures, have conceived of their expenence.
These models often collide; some are
rendered inadequate by failing to account for too many aspects of experience,
and are in their turn replaced by other models which emphasise what these last
have omitted, but in their turn may obscure what the others have rendered
clear. The task of philosophy, often a difficult and painful one, is to
extricate and bring to light the hidden categories and models in terms of which
human beings think (that is, their use of words, images and other symbols), to
reveal what is obscure or contradictory in them, to discern the conflicts
between them that prevent the construction of more adequate ways of organising
and describing and explaining experience (for all description as well as
explanation involves some model in terms of which the describing and explaining
is done); and then, at a still 'higher' level, to examine the nature of this
activity itself (epistemology, philosophical logic, linguistic analysis), and
to bring to light the concealed models that operate in this second-order, philosophical,
activity itself.
If it is objected that all this seems very
abstract and remote from daily experience, something too little concerned with
the central interests, the happiness and unhappiness and ultimate fate, of
ordinary men, the answer is that this charge is false. Men cannot live without
seeking to describe and explain the universe to themselves. The models they use
in doing this must deeply affect their lives, not least when they are
unconscious; much of the misery and frustration of men is due to the mechanical
or unconscious, as, well as deliberate, application of models where they do not
work. Who can say how much suffering has been caused by the exuberant use of
the organic model in politics, or the comparison of the State to a work of art,
and the representation of the dictator as the inspired moulder of human lives,
by totalitarian theorists in our own times? Who shall say how much harm and how
much good, in previous ages, came of the exaggerated application to social
relations of metaphors and models fashioned after the patterns of paternal
authority, especially to the relations of rulers of States to their subjects,
or of priests to the laity?
If there is to be any hope of a rational
order on earth, or of a just appreciation of the many various interests that
divide diverse groups of human beings—knowledge that is indispensable to any
attempt to assess their effects, and the patterns of their interplay and its
consequences, in order to find viable compromises through which men may
continue to live and satisfy their desires without thereby crushing the equally
central desires and needs of others—it lies in the bringing to light of these
models, social, moral, political, and above all the underlying metaphysical
patterns in which they are rooted, with a view to examining whether they are
adequate to their task.
The perennial task of philosophers is to
examine whatever seems insusceptible to the methods of the sciences or everyday
observation, for example, categories, concepts, models, ways of thinking or
acting, and particularly ways in which they clash with one another, with a view
to constructing other, less internally contradictory and (though this can never
be fully attained) less pervertible metaphors, images, symbols and systems of
categories. It is certainly a reasonable hypothesis that one of the principle
causes of confusion, misery and fear is, whatever may be its psychological or
social roots, blind adherence to outworn notions, pathological suspicion of any
form of critical self-examination, frantic efforts to prevent any degree of
rational analysis of what we live by and for.
This socially dangerous, intellectually
difficult, often agonising and thankless but always important activity is the
work of philosophers, whether they deal with the natural sciences or moral or
political or purely personal issues. The goal of philosophy is always the same,
to assist men to understand themselves and thus operate in the open, and not
wildly, in the dark.
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