The Pursuit of Certainty. Shirley Robin Letwin

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СКАЧАТЬ any possibility of happiness on earth; nor did they impose any austerities. It is indeed difficult to discover from the exact science laid down by Clarke and Wollaston what their moral rules required, apart from commanding that a man should not “desire to gain some small profit to himself by doing violence and damage to his Neighbour”² or that he should “endeavour to appease with gentleness rather than exasperate with retaliation.”³ But the assumption underlying their morality was the same as that of the Cambridge Platonists, and of the Kirk, that man was a divided nature, torn between holy reason and brutish passion. Their faith in reason was much higher than the Kirk’s, but their opinion of their body or the passions no better.

      The Cambridge Platonists had found Platonic and neo-Platonic doctrine attractive precisely because it taught that the spiritual world alone was real, that the soul was immortal and could ascend to heaven. It offered the metaphysical basis of Calvinism shorn of superstition and mystical dross, as well as the basis for a complete answer to Hobbes. When the Cambridge men and their followers departed from Plato, it was only to take a more, rather than less, doctrinaire view. They had none of Plato’s sense for the texture and difficulty of truth; they were as certain as their Puritan ancestors had been that they had discovered in Scripture clear answers to all questions about the soul, heaven and hell, and the nature of God. What worried them was not how man could know what he ought to do, but only how he could acquire the will to do what they knew for certain he should.

      Plato’s latter-day followers learned from him mainly that spiritual man and carnal man saw very different worlds, that a true vision could be reached only by conquering fleshly lusts and unifying human nature with the Divine. The rational faculties, they believed, could come into their own only when the heart was purified and the will disciplined, when reason was not clouded over by a “dark, filthy mist of sin.” The good life meant then endeavouring “more and more to withdraw ourselves from these Bodily things, to set our soul as free as may be from its miserable slavery to this base Flesh.”¹ Imagination had to be transcended, and the “eyes of sense” shut before reason would be left free to see the true permanent realities. Clarke described the passions as “unbridled and furious,” the appetites as “inordinate,” and regretted that some men were robust enough to escape the “natural ill consequences of intemperance and debauchery.”² And Wollaston warned even more sternly against the corruption of human nature: “Unless there be some strong limitation added as a fence for virtue, men will be apt to sink into voluptuousness, as in fact the generality of Epicurus’s herd have done (notwithstanding all his talk of temperance, virtue, tranquillity, etc.), and the bridle will be usurped by those appetites which it is a principal part of all religion, natural as well as any other, to curb and restrain.”³

      Thus the rational moralists, however close they came to Deism, shared with Puritanism the traditional view of the passions as a source of falsehood and evil. Like all philosophers since Plato, and all Christians, they taught that the perfection of man consists in his union with God through his mind, that his imperfection comes of the mind’s union with the body. Moreover, they made it just as difficult to question the moral law discovered by reason as it was to escape the commands of the Kirk. The advocates of rational morality were no more willing than the Predestinarian preachers to accept different interpretations of virtue. They, too, insisted that all men must live in the same way, and that this meant denying, or somehow overcoming, all that was not pure spirit. Their outlook was not much exaggerated by Steele’s paraphrase, “To love is a passion, ’Tis a desire, and we must have no desires.”

      For Hume, the rational moralists underscored the fact that philosophy as well as religion, reason as easily as faith, could be used to subject all men to the same inflexible and unsuitable rules. Philosophy, he decided, had been bent to the uses of theology. Philosophers had become divines in disguise; they had “warped” reasoning and even language “from their natural course,” and endeavoured to establish distinctions “where the difference of the objects was, in a manner, imperceptible”; they disregarded nature and the “unbiased” sentiments of the mind in favour of unreal abstractions.¹ Not only superstition and enthusiasm had to be combated, but perhaps even more the philosophers’ practice of discussing morality in the abstract, of deducing a “variety of inferences and conclusions” from a few general abstract principles. This abstract method did not suit the “imperfection of human nature”; it had been rejected in natural philosophy, and it had now to be abandoned by moral philosophy as well: “Men are now cured of their passion for hypotheses and systems in natural philosophy and will hearken to no arguments but those which are derived from experience. It is full time they should attempt a like reformation in all moral disquisitions; and reject every system of ethics, however subtle or ingenious, which is not founded on fact and observation.”²

      The direction Hume had to follow in order to construct a new view of man was suggested by a fellow Scotsman, Francis Hutcheson, probably the most outstanding and influential opponent of the Covenanters’ creed. He led the Moderates in their attempt to strip Calvinist theology of its gloom and dogmatism, to describe God as a lawgiver and the source of morality, a Deity that reigned rather than governed. The problem, as Hutcheson saw it, was to show that man was not essentially depraved or egoistic, but benevolent.

      The germ of his theory came from Shaftesbury, whose assimilation of morals to art and beauty readily attracted anyone in revolt against Puritanism. Although he, too, had been influenced by Plato, Shaftesbury emphasized an other aspect of Platonic philosophy. He reaffirmed, against the scientific and mathematical current, the importance of beauty. He valued beauty more than logic, fought his opponents with ridicule rather than geometry, and tried to feel the harmony of the universe, not to reduce it to a barren system or set of formulae. The quality of a man’s taste and the style of his life mattered more to Shaftesbury than his declared principles and reasonings. By saying that the moral perfection of man is akin to the perfection of a work of art, that a good man can arouse in a spectator a pleasure like that aroused by any beautiful object, Shaftesbury seemed to free life from the ugliness with which Puritanism had encased it. He placed the foundation for morality in the human constitution itself, not in a power to transcend it, and so removed from man the stigma of natural depravity.

      On what Shaftesbury described as a “rational affection” for goodness, Hutcheson built a more definite system. He traced morality to an internal sense, the moral sense, which he described as a passive power of receiving ideas of good and likened to the sense for beauty. Neither the exact relation between the moral sense and the sense of beauty, nor the character of motives, nor the ultimate end of moral behaviour was ever made perfectly clear by Hutcheson. But he did definitely distinguish the moral sense from reason, and rest moral judgements on feeling, rather than on any rational process. Nature had given man, he asserted, “immediate monitors,” independent of calculation and reflection, for distinguishing good from evil. Moral judgements were not then the results of ratiocination about, or of insights into the relations of things or ideas; they were an immediate feeling of approval or disapproval:

      The Weakness of our Reason … [is] so great, that very few Men could ever have form’d those long Deductions of Reason which show some Actions to be on the whole advantageous to the Agent and their Contrary pernicious. The Author of Nature has much better furnish’d us for a virtuous Conduct, than our Moralists seem to imagine, by almost as quick and powerful Instructions as we have for the Preservation of our Bodys. He has given us strong Affections to be the Springs of each virtuous Action; and made Virtue a lovely Form, that we might easily distinguish it from its Contrary, and be made happy in the Pursuit of it.¹

      There could be no abstract, general rules, because “everyone judges the affections of others by his own Sense, so that it seems not impossible that in these Senses men may differ as they do in Taste.”¹ Nevertheless, there was order and universality in moral judgements. Although he never explained very satisfactorily how there could be variety amidst uniformity in morals, Hutcheson maintained firmly that morality was neither arbitrary, nor perfectly uniform in the sense of the rational moralists. Instead of proposing any single moral idea that all men had to follow, he affirmed СКАЧАТЬ