By Anthony Kenny
Introduction
This is the final volume of a
four-volume history of Western philosophy from its beginnings to its most
recent past. The first volume, published in 2004, told the story of ancient
philosophy, and the second volume, published in 2005, covered medieval philosophy
from the time of St Augustine to the Renaissance. The third volume, The Rise of
Modern Philosophy, treated of the major philosophers of the sixteenth,
seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, ending with the death of Hegel early in
the nineteenth. This present volume continues the narrative up to the final
years of the twentieth century.
There are two different kinds of
reason for reading a history of philoso[1]phy. Some readers do
so because they are seeking help and illumination from older thinkers on topics
of current philosophical interest. Others are more interested in the people and
societies of the distant or recent past, and wish to learn about their
intellectual climate. I have structured this and previous volumes in a way that
will meet the needs of both classes of reader. The book begins with three
summary chapters, each of which follows a chronological sequence; it then
contains nine chapters, each of which deals with a particular area of
philosophy, from logic to natural theology. Those whose primary interest is
historical may focus on the chronological surveys, referring if they wish to
the thematic sections for amplification. Those whose primary interest is
philosophical will concen[1]trate rather on the
later chapters, referring back to the chronological chapters to place
particular issues in context.
Certain themes have occupied
chapters in each of the four volumes of this series: epistemology, metaphysics,
philosophy of mind, ethics, and philosophy of religion. Other topics have
varied in importance over the centuries, and the pattern of thematic chapters
has varied accordingly. The first two volumes began the thematic section with a
chapter on logic and language, but there was no such chapter in volume III
because logic went into hibernation at the Renaissance. In the period covered
by the present volume formal logic and the philosophy of language occupied such
a central position that each topic deserves a chapter to itself. In the earlier.
volumes, there was a chapter devoted to physics, considered as a branch of what
used to be called ‘natural philosophy’; however, since Newton physics has been
a fully mature science independent of philosophical underpinning, and so there
is no chapter on physics in the present volume. Volume III was the first to
contain a chapter on political philosophy, since before the time of More and
Machiavelli the political institutions of Europe were too different from those
under which we live for the insights of political philosophers to be relevant
to current discussions. This volume is the first and only one to contain a
chapter on aesthetics: this involves a slight overlap with the previous volume,
since it was in the eighteenth century that the subject began to emerge as a
separate discipline.
The introductory chapters in this
volume, unlike those in previous ones, do not follow a single chronological
sequence. The first chapter indeed does trace a single line from Bentham to
Nietzsche, but because of the chasm that separated English-speaking philosophy
from Continental philosophy in the twentieth century the narrative diverges in
the second and third chapter. The second chapter begins with Peirce, the doyen
of American philosophers, and with Frege, who is commonly regarded as the
founder of the analytic tradition in philosophy. The third chapter treats of a
series of influential Continental thinkers, commencing with a man who would
have hated to be regarded as philosopher, Sigmund Freud.
I have not found it easy to
decide where and how to end my history. Many of those who have philosophized in
the second half of the twentieth century are people I have known personally,
and several of them have been close colleagues and friends. This makes it
difficult to make an objective judgement on their importance in comparison with
the thinkers who have occupied the earlier volumes and the earlier pages of
this one. No doubt my choice of who should be included and who should be
omitted will seem arbitrary to others no less qualified than myself to make a
judgement.
In 1998 I published A Brief History of Western
Philosophy. I decided at that time not to include in the book any person still
living. That, conveniently, meant that I could finish the story with
Wittgenstein, whom I considered, and consider, to be the most significant
philosopher of the twentieth century. But since 1998, sadly, a number of
philosophers have died whom anyone would expect to find a place in a history of
modern philosophy—Quine, for instance, Anscombe, Davidson, Strawson, Rawls, and
others. So I had to choose another way of drawing a terminus ante quem. As I
approached my seventy-fifth birthday the thought occurred to me of excluding
all writers who were younger than myself. But this appeared a rather egocentric
cut-off point. So finally I opted for a thirty-year rule, and have excluded
works written after 1975.
I must ask the reader to bear in
mind that this is the final volume of a history of philosophy that began with
Thales. It is accordingly structured in rather a different way from a
self-standing history of contemporary philosophy. I have, for instance, said
nothing about twentieth-century neo[1]scholastics or
neo-Kantians, and have said very little about several gener[1]ations of
neo-Hegelians. To leave these out of a book devoted to the philosophy of the
last two centuries would be to leave a significant gap in the history. But the
importance of these schools was to remind the modern era of the importance of
the great thinkers of the past. A history that has already devoted many pages
to Aquinas, Kant, and Hegel does not need to repeat such reminders.
As in writing previous volumes, I
have had in mind an audience at the level of second- or third-year
undergraduate study. Since many under[1]graduates interested
in the history of philosophy are not themselves philosophy students, I have
tried not to assume any familiarity with philosophical techniques or
terminology. Similarly, I have not included in the Bibliography works in
languages other than English, except for the original texts of writers in other
languages. Since many people read philosophy not for curricular purposes, but
for their own enlightenment and entertainment, I have tried to avoid jargon and
to place no difficulties in the way of the reader other than those presented by
the subject matter itself. But, however hard one tries, it is impossible to
make the reading of philosophy an undemanding task. As has often been said,
philosophy has no shallow end.
I am indebted to Peter
Momtchiloff and his colleagues at Oxford University Press, and to two anonymous
readers for the Press who removed many blemishes from the book. I am also
particularly grateful to Patricia Williams and Dagfinn Føllesdal for assisting
me in the treatment of twentieth-century Continental philosophers.
1
Bentham to Nietzsche
Bentham’s Utilitarianism
Britain escaped the violent
constitutional upheavals that affected most of Europe during the last years of
the eighteenth, and the early years of the nineteenth, century. But in 1789,
the year of the French Revolution, a book was published in England that was to
have a revolutionary effect on moral and political thinking long after the
death of Napoleon. This was Jeremy Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles
of Morals and Legislation, which became the founding charter of the school of
thought known as utilitar[1]ianism.
Bentham was born in 1748, the son of a
prosperous London attorney. A tiny, bookish, and precocious child, he was sent
to Westminster School at the age of 7 and graduated from The Queen’s College,
Oxford, at the age of 15. He was destined for a legal career, and was called to
the Bar when 21, but he found contemporary legal practice distasteful. He had
already been repelled by current legal theory when, at Oxford, he had listened
to the lectures of the famous jurist William Blackstone. The English legal
system, he believed, was cumbrous, artificial, and incoherent: it should be
reconstructed from the ground up in the light of sound principles of
jurisprudence.
The fundamental such principle, on
his own account, he owed to Hume. When he read the Treatise of Human Nature, he
tells us, scales fell from his eyes and he came to believe that utility was the
test and measure of all virtue and the sole origin of justice. On the basis of
an essay by the dissenting chemist Joseph Priestley, Bentham interpreted the
principle of utility as meaning that the happiness of the majority of the
citizens was the criterion by which the affairs of a state should be judged.
More generally, the real standard of morality and the true goal of legislation
was the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
During the 1770s Bentham worked
on a critique of Blackstone’s Com[1]mentaries on the Laws
of England. A portion of this was published in 1776 as A Fragment on
Government, which contained an attack on the notion of a social contract. At
the same time he wrote a dissertation on punishment, drawing on the ideas of
the Italian penologist Cesare Beccaria (1738–94). An analysis of the purposes
and limits of punishment, along with the exposition of the principle of
utility, formed the substance of the Introduction to the Principles of Morals
and Legislation, which was completed in 1780, nine years before its eventual
publication.
The Fragment on Government was
the first public statement by Bentham of the principle that ‘it is the greatest
happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong’. The
book was published anonymously, but it had some influential readers, including
the Earl of Shelburne, a leading Whig who was later briefly Prime Minister.
When Shelburne discovered that Bentham was author of the work, he took him
under his patronage, and introduced him to political circles in England and
France. Most significant among Bentham’s new English friends was Caroline Fox,
a niece of Charles James Fox, to whom, after a long but spasmodic courtship, he
made an unsuccessful proposal of marriage in 1805. Most important of the French
acquaintances was E´tienne Dumont, tutor to Shelburne’s son, who was later to
publish a number of his works in translation. For a time Bentham’s reputation
was greater in France than in Britain.
Bentham spent the years 1785–7
abroad, travelling across Europe and staying with his brother Samuel, who was
managing estates of Prince Potemkin at Krichev in White Russia. While there he
conceived the idea of a novel kind of prison, the Panopticon, a circular
building with a central observation point from which the jailer could keep a
permanent eye on the inmates. He returned from Russia full of enthusiasm for
prison reform, and tried to persuade both the British and French governments to
erect a model prison. William Pitt’s government passed an Act of Parliament
authorizing the scheme, but it was defeated by ducal landowners who did not
want a prison near their estates, and by the personal intervention (so Bentham
liked to believe) of King George III. The French National Assembly did not take
up his offer to supervise the establishment of a Panopticon, but did confer on
him an honorary citizenship of the Republic.
Bentham’s interest in legal
theory and practice extended far beyond its original focus on criminal law.
Exasperated by the confused state of civil law he wrote a long treatise Of Laws
in General, which, like so many of his works, remained unpublished until long
after his death. Reflecting on the Poor Laws he proposed that a network of
Panopticons should be set up to serve as workhouses for the ‘burdensome poor’,
managed by a national joint stock company, which would take a dividend once the
inmates’ labour had provided for their sustenance. No Panopticon, whether penal
or commercial, was ever constructed. In 1813, however, Parliament voted Bentham
the giant sum of £23,000 in compensation for his work on the scheme.
In 1808 Bentham became friends
with a Scottish philosopher, James Mill, who was just starting to write a
monumental History of India. Mill had a remarkable two-year-old son, John
Stuart, and Bentham assisted in that prodigy’s education. Partly because of
Mill’s influence Bentham, who had been working for some years on the rationale
of evidence in the courts, now began to focus on political and constitutional
reform rather than on criticisms of legal procedure and practice. He wrote a
Catechism of Parliamen[1]tary Reform, which
was completed in 1809, though it was not published until 1817, when it was
followed up, a year or two later, with the draft of a radical reform bill. He
spent years on the drafting of a constitutional code, which was unfinished when
he died. By the end of his life, he had become convinced that the existing
British constitution was a screen hiding a conspiracy of the rich against the
poor. He therefore advocated the abolition of the monarchy and the House of
Lords, the introduction of annual parliaments elected by universal suffrage,
and the disestablishment of the Church of England.
Bentham’s constitutional and
liberal proposals extended well beyond the affairs of Britain. In 1811 he
proposed to James Madison that he should draw up a constitutional code for the
United States. He was active on the London Greek Committee, which sponsored the
expedition on which Lord Byron met his death at Missolonghi in 1823. For a time
he had hopes that his constitutional code would be implemented in Latin America
by Simo´n Bolı´var, the President of Colombia. The group of ‘philosophical
radicals’ who accepted the ideals of Ben[1]tham
in 1823 founded the Westminster Review in order to promote utilitarian causes.
They were enthusiasts for educational reform. Bentham devised a curriculum for
secondary education which emphasized science and technology rather than Greek
and Latin. He and his colleagues were active in the establishment of University
College London, which opened its doors in 1828. This was the first
university-level institution in Britain to admit students without religious
tests. There, in accordance with his will, Ben[1]tham’s
remains were placed after his death in 1832, and there, clothed and topped with
a wax head, they survive to this day—his ‘auto-icon’ as he termed it. A more
appropriate memorial to his endeavours was the Great Reform Bill, widely
extending the parliamentary franchise, which passed into law a few weeks before
he died.
Among those who knew him well,
even his greatest admirers agreed that he was a very one-sided person, powerful
in intellect but deficient in feeling. John Stuart Mill described him as
precise and coherent in thought, but lacking in sympathy for the most natural
and strongest feelings of human beings. Karl Marx said that he took the English
shopkeeper as the paradigm of a human being. ‘In no time and in no country’,
Marx said, ‘has homespun commonplace ever strutted about in so self-satisfied a
way’ (C 488). Bentham’s knowledge of human nature was indeed very limited. ‘It
is wholly empirical,’ Mill said, ‘and the empiricism of one who has had little
experience.’ He never, in Mill’s view, reached maturity. ‘He was a boy to the
last’ (U 78).
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