The Pursuit of Certainty. Shirley Robin Letwin

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СКАЧАТЬ theory, certainly to someone in search of a new foundation for ethics, was that he reversed the roles of reason and passion.² As he used “passion” to cover all types of feeling, it followed that the passions, far from being simply the source of human corruption, were the seat of man’s best propensities. The function of reason was not to hold the passions in check, but rather to serve at least some of the passions, to adjust the general direction given by the passions to particular circumstances. Hutcheson himself stopped there; neither he nor Shaftesbury wished to deny the established view that human nature was divided between reason and passion, but merely to adjust it towards more amiable conclusions. Shaftesbury described reason as man’s dignity, the source of virtue and happiness. Hutcheson frequently retreated altogether from the radical implications of his theory, and restored to reason much of its traditional importance, calling it a “divine” faculty that “frames the ideal of a truly good life.” He even tried to develop the relevance of mathematical calculation for morality, so much so that Sterne remarked: “Hutcheson, in his philosophic treatise on beauty, harmony, and order, plus’s and minus’s you to heaven or hell, by algebraic equations—so that none but an expert mathematician can ever be able to settle his accounts with St. Peter—and perhaps St. Matthew, who had been an officer in the customs, must be called in to audit them.”¹

      After all, Hutcheson’s system was linked with an optimistic theology. It was designed to demonstrate the wisdom and benevolence that ruled the universe. Besides, Hutcheson stressed the more ascetic of the Christian virtues—suffering, he said, gave opportunity for practising “the most sublime virtues, such as resignation to the Will of God, forgiving of injuries, returning good for evil. …”² Despite his love for classical authors, Hutcheson was Christian, in just the sense that Hume wished to oppose. But he had planted a suggestion for a truly radical departure.

      Where Hutcheson’s suggestion might lead, Hume discovered through the French writers whom he began reading in Edinburgh. In Bayle, and in a number of writers of the seventeenth century—Fontenelle, l’Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Malebranche—Hume found the view that man was in fact moved by his passions, and reason was but a passive onlooker. They did not deny the dichotomy between reason and passion, nor the holiness of one and the corruption of the other, but suggested that whatever he tried to be, man was after all nothing like God. Bayle said that reason did not always calm the passions, its decrees were not always executed, indeed reason often only increased the chaos within man. For since the Fall, man no longer inhabited the world of reason, but had become “plunged into sense.”³ Bayle even went so far as to say that the passions made the world go ’round, and prevented anarchy as well as caused it.

      In Montaigne, however, Hume found more—a whole “new scene of thought,” a totally different estimate of man that denied the established picture of the hierarchy of being. Montaigne saw human life as Hume had hoped men could. His essays were a continuous lesson in moderation, opposed to every kind of extremism. He taught men to accept themselves for what they were, and to obey the law of their own nature rather than pretend to divinity. Only the subject of holiness and Christian zeal aroused him to severity. Like Hume, he was more offended by Protestantism than by Catholicism because he felt it was less mischievous to bend the knee than the reason. And he, too, warned men to beware of those who bore a sanctified appearance and imposed a burden of austerities. No zeal, he said, produced so much misery as Christian zeal, which moved men to hate and cruelty, never to benignity, goodness, or temperance.

      Montaigne’s descriptions of virtue could hardly have expressed better Hume’s own thoughts, and were echoed again and again in Hume’s work. Virtue was not, Montaigne said, “pitched on the top of a high, steep, or inaccessible hill”; she held her mansion “in a fair, flourishing, and pleasant plain”; she was “lovely, equally delicious and courageous, protesting herself to be a professed and irreconcilable enemy to all sharpness, austerity, fear, and compulsion; having nature for her guide, fortune and voluptuousness for her companions.”¹ The priests had taught men to disdain the joys of life on earth and they had produced as a result nothing but mischief.

      For if men tried to behave like angels, they succeeded only in becoming monsters—“instead of uplifting themselves, they degrade themselves.” They might as well renounce breathing as bodily pleasures. Nature has seen to it that satisfying our necessities should also be pleasurable to us—“it does wrong to the great and all powerful Donor to refuse His gift, to impair it and deface it.”² The most difficult and the first thing for a man to know was how to live the life proper to man:

      It is an absolute perfection, and as it were divine for a man to know how to enjoy his existence loyally. We seek for other conditions because we understand not the use of our own and we go outside of ourselves because we know not what is happening there. Thus it is in vain that we mount upon stilts, for, if we walk upon them, yet must we walk with our own legs; and though we sit upon the highest throne in the world, yet we do but sit upon our own behind.³

      There was a remarkable correspondence, too, between Hume’s antipathy to the Kirk’s commands and to “the eternal and immutable relations” promulgated by the rational moralists, and Montaigne’s dislike of fixity, of general rules, of any rigid schemes. For Montaigne denied that man could commune with the Divine Intellect, or discover any simple coherent theory that could explain or direct human activity. Diversity, Montaigne insisted, was the rule on earth; there were no clear, hard lines between good and bad, virtue and vice, for all virtues were not equally salutary, and some vices were worse than others. Nor did any single set of choices deserve supremacy—that way lay the opposite of life. “We do not live, we only exist, if we hold ourselves bound and driven by necessity to follow one course alone. The finest spirits are those that show the largest choice, the greatest suppleness.”¹ Man’s life was like the wind; and the wind, “more wisely than we, loves to bluster, and to be in agitation and is content with its own functions, without desiring stability, solidity, qualities that are not its own.”²

      Man was and should be a bundle of contradictory things, a flux of impressions—“in everything and everywhere … but patchwork and motley.”³ That was the moral of Montaigne’s essays, where he tried to draw a true man, with all his vacillation and mixture, not a pure, abstract kind of creature. For such a being, ready-made rules of conduct were neither possible nor desirable. He had better rely on experience and example, than on the lofty and elaborate reasonings of philosophers.

      All this in Montaigne showed him to be a kindred spirit. How striking it was then to find his view of human life associated with a unique description of the relation between reason and passion, mind and body. Montaigne did not merely say that passion ruled, or that reason followed more often than the divines admitted. He came near to denying altogether that man was a divided nature, an animal endowed with reason, whose highest affinity was with God. His radical insight was that nature was not split between brutes and spirits, with the uncomfortable human mixture in between, but a continuous line in which spirit or reason played its part at every stage.

      Man as seen by Montaigne had much more in common with the animals than he liked to admit. There was a natural language common to children and animals, and there were many evidences of intelligence in the animals. Man was conceived, born, and fed, he moved, acted, lived and died like the beasts. Only vanity and presumption led him to suppose he had a special place in creation. His true condition was not that of a holy spirit unhappily sullied by its bond with matter; it was a mingled, homely condition, with its own pleasures and privileges, and its own kind of guidance.

      There was no conflict between spirit and matter, indeed nothing more than a narrow seam between mind and body. It was wrong for the soul to draw apart, to despise and desert the body; indeed it could not really do so except through some “ill-shaped, apish trick.” Instead the soul had better “strike fresh alliance with the body, embrace it, cherish it, control and counsel it… marry the body and serve it as a husband to the end that their poverty should not appear to be different and contrary, but one and the same.”¹ СКАЧАТЬ