Project Gutenberg's Philosophy and The Social Problem, by Will Durant This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license Title: Philosophy and The Social Problem Author: Will Durant Release Date: June 5, 2013 [EBook #42880] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PHILOSOPHY AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM *** Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print project.) bookcover PHILOSOPHY AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM colophon THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO PHILOSOPHY AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM BY WILL DURANT, PH.D. INSTRUCTOR IN PHILOSOPHY, EXTENSION TEACHING COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY τὁν μἑν βἱον ἡ φὑσις ἑδωκε, το δἑ καλὡς ζἡν ἡ τἑχνη. —Unknown Dramatic Poet. NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1917 All rights reserved Copyright, 1917, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. —— Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1917. Norwood Press J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. TO ALDEN FREEMAN CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION 1 PART I HISTORICAL APPROACH CHAPTER I THE PRESENT SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SOCRATIC ETHIC I. History as rebarbarization 5 II. Philosophy as disintegrator 6 III. Individualism in Athens 7 IV. The Sophists 9 V. Intelligence as virtue 12 VI. The meaning of virtue 15 VII. “Instinct” and “reason” 23 VIII. The secularization of morals 27 IX. “Happiness” and “virtue” 31 X. The Socratic challenge 33 CHAPTER II PLATO: PHILOSOPHY AS POLITICS I. The man and the artist 36 II. How to solve the social problem 40 III. On making philosopher-kings 44 IV. Dishonest democracy 52 V. Culture and slavery 55 VI. Plasticity and order 60 VII. The meaning of justice 62 VIII. The future of Plato 64 CHAPTER III FRANCIS BACON AND THE SOCIAL POSSIBILITIES OF SCIENCE I. From Plato to Bacon 67 II. Character 69 III. The expurgation of the intellect 70 IV. Knowledge is power 74 V. The socialization of science 76 VI. Science and Utopia 79 VII. Scholasticism in science 81 VIII. The Asiatics of Europe 85 CHAPTER IV SPINOZA ON THE SOCIAL PROBLEM I. Hobbes 90 II. The spirit of Spinoza 91 III. Political ethics 93 IV. Is man a political animal? 95 V. What the social problem is 98 VI. Free speech 101 VII. Virtue as power 105 VIII. Freedom and order 108 IX. Democracy and intelligence 112 X. The legacy of Spinoza 115 CHAPTER V NIETZSCHE I. From Spinoza to Nietzsche 117 II. Biographical 120 III. Exposition 126 1. Morality as impotence 126 2. Democracy 128 3. Feminism 131 4. Socialism and anarchism 133 5. Degeneration 138 6. Nihilism 141 7. The will to power 143 8. The superman 150 9. How to make supermen 155 10. On the necessity of exploitation 159 11. Aristocracy 162 12. Signs of ascent 165 IV. Criticism 172 V. Nietzsche replies 177 VI. Conclusion 178 PART II SUGGESTIONS CHAPTER I SOLUTIONS AND DISSOLUTIONS I. The problem 185 II. “Solutions” 190 1. Feminism 190 2. Socialism 194 3. Eugenics 198 4. Anarchism 200 5. Individualism 202 6. Individualism again 202 CHAPTER II THE RECONSTRUCTIVE FUNCTION OF PHILOSOPHY I. Epistemologs 214 II. Philosophy as control 218 III. Philosophy as mediator between science and statesmanship 222 CHAPTER III ORGANIZED INTELLIGENCE I. The need 227 II. The organization of intelligence 230 III. Information as panacea 234 IV. Sex, art, and play in social reconstruction 240 V. Education 246 CHAPTER IV THE READER SPEAKS I. The democratization of aristocracy 251 II. The professor as Buridan’s ass 255 III. Is information wanted? 257 IV. Finding Mæcenas 261 V. The chance of philosophy 264 CONCLUSION 268 PART I HISTORICAL APPROACH PHILOSOPHY AND THE SOCIAL PROBLEM INTRODUCTION THE purpose of this essay is to show: first, that the social problem has been the basic concern of many of the greater philosophers; second, that an approach to the social problem through philosophy is the first condition of even a moderately successful treatment of this problem; and third, that an approach to philosophy through the social problem is indispensable to the revitalization of philosophy. By “philosophy” we shall understand a study of experience as a whole, or of a portion of experience in relation to the whole. By the “social problem” we shall understand, simply and very broadly, the problem of reducing human misery by modifying social institutions. It is a problem that, ever reshaping itself, eludes sharper definition; for misery is related to desire, and desire is personal and in perpetual flux: each of us sees the problem unsteadily in terms of his own changing aspirations. It is an uncomfortably complicated problem, of course; and we must bear in mind that the limit of our intention here is to consider philosophy as an approach to the problem, and the problem itself as an approach to philosophy. We are proposing no solutions. Let us, as a wholesome measure of orientation, touch some of the mountain-peaks in philosophical history, with an eye for the social interest that lurks in every metaphysical maze. “Aristotle,” says Professor Woodbridge, “set treatise-writers the fashion of beginning each treatise by reviewing previous opinions on their subject, and proving them all wrong.”[1] The purpose of the next five chapters will be rather the opposite: we shall see if some supposedly dead philosophies do not admit of considerable resuscitation. Instead of trying to show that Socrates, Plato, Bacon, Spinoza, and Nietzsche were quite mistaken in their views on the social problem, we shall try to see what there is in these views that can help us to understand our own situation to-day. We shall not make a collection of systems of social philosophy; we shall not lose ourselves in the past in a scholarly effort to relate each philosophy to its social and political environment; we shall try to relate these philosophies rather to our own environment, to look at our own problems successively through the eyes of these philosophers. Other interpretations of these men we shall not so much contradict as seek to supplement. Each of our historical chapters, then, will be not so much a review as a preface and a progression. The aim will be neither history nor criticism, but a kind of construction by proxy. It is a method that has its defects: it will, for example, sacrifice thoroughness of scholarship to present applicability, and will necessitate some repetitious gathering of the threads when we come later to our more personal purpose. But as part requital for this, we shall save ourselves from considering the past except as it is really present, except as it is alive and nourishingly significant to-day. And from each study we shall perhaps make some advance towards our final endeavor,—the mutual elucidation of the social problem and philosophy. CHAPTER I THE PRESENT SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SOCRATIC ETHIC I History as Rebarbarization HISTORY is a process of rebarbarization. A people made vigorous by arduous physical conditions of life, and driven by the increasing exigencies of survival, leaves its native habitat, moves down upon a less vigorous people, conquers, displaces, or absorbs it. Habits of resolution and activity developed in a less merciful environment now rapidly produce an economic surplus; and part of the resources so accumulated serve as capital in a campaign of imperialist conquest. The growing surplus generates a leisure class, scornful of physical activity and adept in the arts of luxury. Leisure begets speculation; speculation dissolves dogma and corrodes custom, develops sensitivity of perception and destroys decision of action. Thought, adventuring in a labyrinth of analysis, discovers behind society the individual; divested of its normal social function it turns inward and discovers the self. The sense of common interest, of commonwealth, wanes; there are no citizens now, there are only individuals. From afar another people, struggling against the forces of an obdurate environment, sees here the cleared forests, the liberating roads, the harvest of plenty, the luxury of leisure. It dreams, aspires, dares, unites, invades. The rest is as before. Rebarbarization is rejuvenation. The great problem of any civilization is how to rejuvenate itself without rebarbarization. II Philosophy as Disintegrator THE rise of philosophy, then, often heralds the decay of a civilization. Speculation begins with nature and begets naturalism; it passes to man—first as a psychological mystery and then as a member of society—and begets individualism. Philosophers do not always desire these results; but they achieve them. They feel themselves the unwilling enemies of the state: they think of men in terms of personality while the state thinks of men in terms of social mechanism. Some philosophers would gladly hold their peace, but there is that in them which will out; and when philosophers speak, gods and dynasties fall. Most states have had their roots in heaven, and have paid the penalty for it: the twilight of the gods is the afternoon of states. Every civilization comes at last to the point where the individual, made by speculation conscious of himself as an end per se, demands of the state, as the price of its continuance, that it shall henceforth enhance rather than exploit his capacities. Philosophers sympathize with this demand, the state almost always rejects it: therefore civilizations come and civilizations go. The history of philosophy is essentially an account of the efforts great men have made to avert social disintegration by building up natural moral sanctions to take the place of the supernatural sanctions which they themselves have destroyed. To find—without resorting to celestial machinery—some way of winning for their people social coherence and permanence without sacrificing plasticity and individual uniqueness to regimentation,—that has been the task of philosophers, that is the task of philosophers. We should be thankful that it is. Who knows but that within our own time may come at last the forging of an effective natural ethic?—an achievement which might be the most momentous event in the history of our world. III Individualism in Athens THE great ages in the history of European thought have been for the most part periods of individualistic effervescence: the age of Socrates, the age of Cæsar and Augustus, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment;—and shall we add the age which is now coming to a close? These ages have usually been preceded by periods of imperialist expansion: imperialism requires a tightening of the bonds whereby individual allegiance to the state is made secure; and this tightening, given a satiety of imperialism, involves an individualistic reaction. And again, the dissolution of the political or economic frontier by conquest or commerce breaks down cultural barriers between peoples, develops a sense of the relativity of customs, and issues in the opposition of individual “reason” to social tradition. A political treatise attributed to the fourth-century B.C. reflects the attitude that had developed in Athens in the later fifth century. “If all men were to gather in a heap the customs which they hold to be good and noble, and if they were next to select from it the customs which they hold to be base and vile, nothing would be left over.”[2] Once such a view has found capable defenders, the custom-basis of social organization begins to give way, and institutions venerable with age are ruthlessly subpœnaed to appear before the bar of reason. Men begin to contrast “Nature” with custom, somewhat to the disadvantage of the latter. Even the most basic of Greek institutions is questioned: “The Deity,” says a fourth-century Athenian Rousseau, “made all men free; Nature has enslaved no man.”[3] Botsford speaks of “the powerful influence of fourth- century socialism on the intellectual class.”[4] Euripides and Aristophanes are full of talk about a movement for the emancipation of women.[5] Law and government are examined: Anarcharsis’ comparison of the law to a spider’s web, which catches small flies and lets the big ones escape, now finds sympathetic comprehension; and men arise, like Callicles and Thrasymachus, who frankly consider government as a convenient instrument of mass-exploitation. IV The Sophists THE cultural representatives of this individualistic development were the Sophists. These men were university professors without a university and without the professorial title. They appeared in response to a demand for higher instruction on the part of the young men of the leisure class; and within a generation they became the most powerful intellectual force in Greece. There had been philosophers, questioners, before them; but these early philosophers had questioned nature rather than man or the state. The Sophists were the first group of men in Greece to overcome the natural tendency to acquiesce in the given order of things. They were proud men,—humility is a vice that never found root in Greece,—and they had a buoyant confidence in the newly discovered power of human intelligence. They assumed, in harmony with the spirit of all Greek achievement, that in the development and extension of knowledge lay the road to a sane and significant life, individual and communal; and in the quest for knowledge they were resolved to scrutinize unawed all institutions, prejudices, customs, morals. Protagoras professed to respect conventions,[6] and pronounced conventions and institutions the source of man’s superiority to the beast; but his famous principle, that “man is the measure of all things,” was a quiet hint that morals are a matter of taste, that we call a man “good” when his conduct is advantageous to us, and “bad” when his conduct threatens to make for our own loss. To the Sophists virtue consisted, not in obedience to unjudged rules and customs, but in the efficient performance of whatever one set out to do. They would have condemned the bungler and let the “sinner” go. That they were flippant sceptics, putting no distinction of worth between any belief and its opposite, and willing to prove anything for a price, is an old accusation which later students of Greek philosophy are almost unanimous in rejecting.[7] The great discovery of the Sophists was the individual; it was an achievement for which Plato and his oligarchical friends could not forgive them, and because of which they incurred the contumely which it is now so hard to dissociate from their name. The purpose of laws, said the Sophists, was to widen the possibilities of individual development; if laws did not do that, they had better be forgotten. There was a higher law than the laws of men,—a natural law, engraved in every heart, and judge of every other law. The conscience of the individual was above the dictates of any state. All radicalisms lay compact in that pronouncement. Plato, prolific of innovations though he was, yet shrank from such a leap into the new. But the Sophists pressed their point, men listened to them, and the Greek world changed. When Socrates appeared, he found that world all out of joint, a war of all against all, a stridency of uncoördinated personalities rushing into chaos. And when he was asked, What should men do to be saved, he answered, simply, Let us think. V Intelligence as Virtue INTELLIGENCE as virtue: it was not a new doctrine; it was merely a new emphasis placed on an already important element in the Greek—or rather the Athenian—view of life. But it was a needed emphasis. The Sophists (not Socrates, pace Cicero) had brought philosophy down from heaven to earth, but they had left it grovelling at the feet of business efficiency and success, a sort of ancilla pecuniæ, a broker knowing where one’s soul could be invested at ten per cent. Socrates agreed with the Sophists in condemning any but a very temporary devotion to metaphysical abstractions,—the one and the many, motion and rest, the indivisibility of space, the puzzles of predication, and so forth; he joined them in ridiculing the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, and in demanding that all thinking should be focussed finally on the real concerns of life; but his spirit was as different from theirs as the spirit of Spinoza was different from that of a mediæval money-lender. With the Sophists philosophy was a profession; they were “lovers of wisdom”—for a consideration. With Socrates philosophy was a quest of the permanently good, of the lastingly satisfying attitude to life. To find out just what are justice, temperance, courage, piety,—“that is an inquiry which I shall never be weary of pursuing so far as in me lies.” It was not an easy quest; and the results were not startlingly definite: “I wander to and fro when I attempt these problems, and do not remain consistent with myself.” His interlocutors went from him apparently empty; but he had left in them seed which developed in the after-calm of thought. He could clarify men’s notions, he could reveal to them their assumptions and prejudices; but he could not and would not manufacture opinions for them. He left no written philosophy because he had only the most general advice to give, and knew that no other advice is ever taken. He trusted his friends to pass on the good word. Now what was the good word? It was, first of all, the identity of virtue and wisdom, morals and intelligence; but more than that, it was the basic identity, in the light of intelligence, of communal and individual interests. Here at the Sophist’s feet lay the débris of the old morality. What was to replace it? The young Athenians of a generation denuded of supernatural belief would not listen to counsels of “virtue,” of self-sacrifice to the community. What was to be done? Should social and political pressure be brought to bear upon the Sophists to compel them to modify the individualistic tenor of their teachings? Analysis destroys morals. What is the moral—destroy analysis? The moral, answered Socrates, is to get better morals, to find an ethic immune to the attack of the most ruthless sceptic. The Sophists were right, said Socrates; morality means more than social obedience. But the Sophists were wrong in opposing the good of the individual to that of the community; Socrates proposed to prove that if a man were intelligent, he would see that those same qualities which make a man a good citizen—justice, wisdom, temperance, courage—are also the best means to individual advantage and development. All these “virtues” are simply the supreme and only virtue—wisdom—differentiated by the context of circumstance. No action is virtuous unless it is an intelligent adaptation of means to a criticised end. “Sin” is failure to use energy to the best account; it is an unintelligent waste of strength. A man does not knowingly pursue anything but the Good; let him but see his advantage, and he will be attracted towards it irresistibly; let him pursue it, and he will be happy, and the state safe. The trouble is that men lack perspective, and cannot see their true Good; they need not “virtue” but intelligence, not sermons but training in perspective. The man who has ἑνκρἁτεια, who rules within, who is strong enough to stop and think, the man who has achieved σωφροσὑνη,—the self-knowledge that brings self-command,—such a man will not be deceived by the tragedy of distance, by the apparent smallness of the future good alongside of the more easily appreciable good that lies invitingly at hand. Hence the moral importance of dialectic, of cross-examination, of concept and definition: we must learn “how to make our ideas clear”; we must ask ourselves just what it is that we want, just how real this seeming good is. Dialectic is the handmaiden of virtue; and all clarification is morality. VI The Meaning of Virtue THIS is frank intellectualism, of course; and the best-refuted doctrine in philosophy. It is amusing to observe the ease with which critics and historians despatch the Socratic ethic. It is “an extravagant paradox,” says Sidgwick,[8] “incompatible with moral freedom.” “Nothing is easier,” says Gomperz,[9] “than to detect the one-sidedness of this point of view.” “This doctrine,” says Grote,[10] “omits to notice, what is not less essential, the proper conditions of the emotions, desires, etc.” “It tended to make all conduct a matter of the intellect and not of the character, and so in a sense to destroy moral responsibility,” says Hobhouse.[11] “Himself blessed with a will so powerful that it moved almost without friction,” says Henry Jackson,[12] “Socrates fell into the error of ignoring its operations, and was thus led to regard knowledge as the sole condition of well-doing.” “Socrates was a misunderstanding,” says Nietzsche;[13] “reason at any price, life made clear, cold, cautious, conscious, without instincts, opposed to the instincts, was in itself only a disease, ... and by no means a return to ‘virtue,’ to ‘health,’ and to happiness.” And the worn-out dictum about seeing the better and approving it, yet following the worse, is quoted as the deliverance of a profound psychologist, whose verdict should be accepted as a final solution of the problem. Before refuting a doctrine it is useful to try to understand it. What could Socrates have meant by saying that all real virtue is intelligence? What is virtue? A civilization may be characterized in terms of its conception of virtue. There is hardly anything more distinctive of the Greek attitude, as compared with our own, than the Greek notion of virtue as intelligence. Consider the present connotations of the word virtue: men shrink at having the term applied to them; and “nothing makes one so vain,” says Oscar Wilde, “as being told that one is a sinner.” During the Middle Ages the official conception of virtue was couched in terms of womanly excellence; and the sternly masculine God of the Hebrews suffered considerably from the inroads of Mariolatry. Protestantism was in part a rebellion of the ethically subjugated male; in Luther the man emerges riotously from the monk. But as people cling to the ethical implications of a creed long after the creed itself has been abandoned, so our modern notion of virtue is still essentially mediæval and feminine. Virginity, chastity, conjugal fidelity, gentility, obedience, loyalty, kindness, self-sacrifice, are the stock-in-trade of all respectable moralists; to be “good” is to be harmless, to be not “bad,” to be a sort of sterilized citizen, guaranteed not to injure. This sheepish innocuousness comes easily to the natively uninitiative, to those who are readily amenable to fear and prohibitions. It is a static virtue; it contracts rather than expands the soul; it offers no handle for development, no incentive to social stimulation and productivity. It is time we stopped calling this insipidly negative attitude by the once mighty name of virtue. Virtue must be defined in terms of that which is vitally significant in our lives. And therefore, too, virtue cannot be defined in terms of individual subordination to the group. The vitally significant thing in a man’s life is not the community, but himself. To ask him to consider the interests of the community above his own is again to put up for his worship an external, transcendent god; and the trouble with a transcendent god is that he is sure to be dethroned. To call “immoral” the refusal of the individual to meet such demands is the depth of indecency; it is itself immoral,—that is, it is nonsense. The notion of “duty” as involving self- sacrifice, as essentially duty to others, is a soul-cramping, funereal notion, and deserves all that Ibsen and his progeny have said of it.[14] Ask the individual to sacrifice himself to the community, and it will not be long before he sacrifices the community to himself. Granted that, in the language of Heraclitus, there is always a majority of fools, and that self-sacrifice can be procured by the simple hypnotic suggestion of post- mortem remuneration: sooner or later come doubt and disillusionment, and the society whose permanence was so easily secured becomes driftwood on the tides of time. History means that if it means anything. No; the intelligent individual will give allegiance to the group of which he happens to find himself a member, only so far as the policies of the group accord with his own criticised desires. Whatever allegiance he offers will be to those forces, wherever they may be, which in his judgment move in the line of these desires. Even for such forces he will not sacrifice himself,—though there may be times when martyrdom is a luxury for which life itself is not too great a price. Since these forces have been defined in terms of his own judgment and desire, conflict between them and himself can come only when his behavior diverges from the purposes defined and resumed in times of conscious thought, —i.e., only when he ceases to adapt means to his ends, ceases, that is, to be intelligent. The prime moral conflict is not between the individual and his group, but between the partial self of fragmentary impulse and the coördinated self of conscious purpose. There is a group within each man as well as without: a group of partial selves is the reality behind the figment of the unitary self. Every individual is a society, every person is a crowd. And the tragedies of the moral life lie not in the war of each against all, but in the restless interplay of these partial selves behind the stage of action. As a man’s intelligence grows this conflict diminishes, for both means and ends, both behavior and purposes, are being continually revised and redirected in accordance with intelligence, and therefore in convergence towards it. Progressively the individual achieves unity, and through unity, personality. Faith in himself has made him whole. The ethical problem, so far as it is the purely individual problem of attaining to coördinated personality, is solved. Moral responsibility, then,—whatever social responsibility may be,—is the responsibility of the individual to himself. The social is not necessarily the moral—let the sociological fact be what it will. The unthinking conformity of the “normal social life” is, just because it is unthinking, below the level of morality: let us call it sociality, and make morality the prerogative of the really thinking animal. In any society so constituted as to give to the individual an increase in powers as recompense for the pruning of his liberties, the unsocial will be immoral,—that is, self-destructively unreasonable and unintelligent; but even in such a society the moral would overflow the margins of the social, and would take definition ultimately from the congruity of the action with the criticised purposes of the individual self. This does not mean that all ethics lies compact in the shibboleth, “Be yourself.” Those who make the least sparing use of this phrase are too apt to consider it an excuse for lives that reek with the heat of passion and smack of insufficient evolution. These people need to be reminded—all the more forcibly since the most palatable and up-to-date philosophies exalt instinct and deride thought—that one cannot be thoroughly one’s self except by deliberation and intelligence. To act indeliberately is not to be, but in great part to cancel, one’s self. For example, the vast play of direct emotional expression is almost entirely indeliberate: if you are greatly surprised, your lips part, your eyes open a trifle wider, your pulse quickens, your respiration is affected; and if I am surprised, though you be as different from me as Hyperion from a satyr, my respiration will be affected, my pulse will quicken, my eyes will open a trifle wider, and my lips will part;—my direct reaction will be essentially the same as yours. The direct expression of surprise is practically the same in all the higher animals. Darwin’s classical description of the expression of fear is another example; it holds for every normal human being; not to speak of lower species. So with egotism, jealousy, anger, and a thousand other instinctive reaction- complexes; they are common to the species, and when we so react, we are expressing not our individual selves so much as the species to which we happen to belong. When you hit a man because he has “insulted” you, when you swagger a little after delivering a successful speech, when you push aside women and children in order to take their place in the rescue boat, when you do any one of a million indeliberate things like these, it is not you that act, it is your species, it is your ancestors, acting through you; your acquired individual difference is lost in the whirlwind of inherited impulse. Your act, as the Scholastics phrased it, is not a “human” act; you yourself are not really acting in any full measure of yourself, you are but playing slave and mouth-piece to the dead. But subject the inherited tendencies to the scrutiny of your individual experience, think, and your action will then express yourself, not in any abbreviated sense, but up to the hilt. There is no merit, no “virtue,” no development in playing the game of fragmentary impulses, in living up to the past; to be moral, to grow, is to be not part but all of one’s self, to call into operation the acquired as well as the inherited elements of one’s character, to be whole. So many of us invite ruin by actions which do not really express us, but are the voice of the merest fragment of ourselves,—the remainder of us being meanwhile asleep.[15] To be whole, to be your deliberate self, to do what you please but only after considering what you really please, to follow your own ideals (but to follow them!), to choose your own means and not to have them forced upon you by your ancestors, to act consciously, to see the part sub specie totius, to see the present act in its relation to your vital purposes, to think, to be intelligent,—all these are definitions of virtue and morality. There is, then, in the old sense of the word, no such thing as morality, there is only intelligence or stupidity. Yes, virtue is calculus, horrible as that may sound to long and timid ears: to calculate properly just what you must do to attain your real ends, to see just what and where your good is, and to make for it,—that is all that can without indecency be asked of any man, that is all that is ever vouchsafed by any man who is intelligent. Perhaps you think it is an easy virtue,—this cleaving to intelligence,—easier than being harmless. Try it. VII “Instinct” and “Reason” AND now to go back to the refutations. The strongest objection to the Socratic doctrine is that intelligence is not a creator, but only a servant, of ends. What we shall consider to be our good appears to be determined not by reason, but by desire. Reason itself seems but the valet of desire, ready to do for it every manner of menial service. Desire is an adept at marshalling before intelligence such facts as favor the wish, and turns the mind’s eye resolutely away from other truth, as a magician distracts the attention of his audience while his hands perform their wonders. If morality is entirely a matter of intelligence, it is entirely a question of means, it is excluded irrevocably from the realm of ends. The conclusion may be allowed in substance, though it passes beyond the warrant of the facts. It is true that basic ends are never suggested by intelligence, reason, knowledge; but it is also true that many ends suggested by desire are vetoed by intelligence. Why are the desires of a man more modest than those of a boy or a child, if not because the blows of repeated failure have dulled the edge of desire? Desires lapse, or lose in stature, as knowledge grows and man takes lessons from reality. There is an adaptation of ends to means as well as of means to ends; and desire comes at last to take counsel of its slave. Be it granted, none the less, that ends are dictated by desire, and that if morality is intelligence, there can be no question of the morality of any end per se. That, strangely, is not a refutation of the Socratic ethic so much as an essential element of it and its starting-point. Every desire has its own initial right; morality means not the suppression of desires, but their coördination. What that implies for society we shall see presently; for the individual it implies that he is immoral, not when he seeks his own advantage, but when he does not really behave for his own advantage, when some narrow temporary purpose upsets perspective and overrides a larger end.[16] What we call “self-control” is the permanent predominance of the larger end; what we call weakness of will is instability of perspective. Self-control means an intelligent judgment of values, an intelligent coördination of motives, an intelligent forecasting of effects. It is far-sight, far-hearing, an enlargement of the sense; it hears the weakened voice of the admonishing past, it sees results far down the vista of the future; it annihilates space and time for the sake of light. Self-control is coördinated energy,—which is the first and last word in ethics and politics, and perhaps in logic and metaphysics too. Weak will means that desires fall out of focus, and taking advantage of the dark steal into action: it is a derangement of the light, a failure of intelligence. In this sense a “good will” means coördination of desires by the ultimate desire, end, ideal; it means health and wholeness of will; it means, literally, integrity. In the old sense “good will” meant, too often, mere fear either of the prohibitions of present law or of the prohibitions stored up in conscience. Such conscience, we all know, is a purely negative and static thing, a convenient substitute for policemen, a degenerate descendant of that conscientia, or knowing-together, which meant to the Romans a discriminating awareness in action,—discriminating awareness of the whole that lurks round the corner of every part. This is one instance of a sort of pathology of words,—words coming to function in a sense alien to their normal intent. Right and wrong, for example, once carried no ethical connotation, but merely denoted a direct or tortuous route to a goal; and significantly the Hebrew word for sin meant, in the days of its health, an arrow that had missed its mark. But, it is urged, there is no such thing as intelligence in the sense of a control of passion by reason, desire by thought. Granted; it is so much easier to admit objections than to refute them! Let intelligence be interpreted as you will, so be it you recognize in it a delayed response, a moment of reprieve before execution, giving time for the appearance of new impulses, motives, tendencies, and allowing each element in the situation to fall into its place in a coördinated whole. Let intelligence be a struggle of impulses, a survival of the fittest desire; let us contrast not reason with passion, but response delayed by the rich interplay of motive forces, with response immediately following upon the first-appearing impulse. Let impulse mean for us fruit that falls unripe from the tree, because too weak to hang till it is mature. Let us understand intelligence as not a faculty superadded to impulse, but rather that coördination of impulses which is wrought out by the blows of hard experience. The Socratic ethic fits quite comfortably into this scheme; intelligence is delayed response and morality means, Take your time. It is charged that the Socratic view involves determinism; and this charge, too, is best met with open-armed admission. We need not raise the question of the pragmatic value of the problem. But to suppose that determinism destroys moral responsibility is to betray the mid-Victorian origin of one’s philosophy. Men of insight like Socrates, Plato, and Spinoza, saw without the necessity of argument that moral responsibility is not a matter of freedom of will, but a relation of means to ends, a responsibility of the agent to himself, an intelligent coördination of impulses by one’s ultimate purposes. Any other morality, whatever pretty name it may display, is the emasculated morality of slaves. VIII The Secularization of Morals THE great problem involved in the Socratic ethic lies, apparently, in the bearings of the doctrine on social unity and stability. Apparently; for it is wholesome to remember that social organization, like the Sabbath, was made for man, and not the other way about. If social organization demands of the individual more sacrifices than its advantages are worth to him, then the stability of that organization is not a problem, it is a misfortune. But if the state does not demand such sacrifices, the advantage of the individual will be in social behavior; and the question whether he will behave socially becomes a question of how much intelligence he has, how clear-eyed he is in ferreting out his own advantage. In a state that does not ask more from its members than it gives, morality and intelligence and social behavior will not quarrel. The social problem appears here as the twofold problem of, first, making men intelligent, and, second, making social organization so great an advantage to the individual as to insure social behavior in all intelligent men. Which has the better chance of survival:—a society of “good” men or a society of intelligent men? So far as a man is “good” he merely obeys, he does not initiate. A society of “good” men is necessarily stagnant; for in such a society the virtue most in demand, as Emerson puts it, is conformity. If great men emerge through the icy crust of this conformity, they are called criminals and sinners; the lives of great men all remind us that we cannot make our lives sublime and yet be “good.” But intelligence as an ethical ideal is a progressive norm; for it implies the progressive coördination of one’s life in reference to one’s ultimate ideals. The god of the “good” man is the status quo; the intelligent man obeys rather the call of the status ad quem. Observe how the problem of man versus the group is clarified by thus relating the individual to a larger whole determined not by geographical frontiers, but by purposes born of his own needs and moulded by his own intelligence. For as the individual’s intelligence grows, his purposes are brought more and more within the limits of personal capacity and social possibility: he is ever less inclined to make unreasonable demands upon himself, or men in general, or the group in which he lives. His ever broadening vision makes apparent the inherent self-destructiveness of anti-social aims; and though he chooses his ends without reference to any external moral code, those ends are increasingly social. Enlightenment saves his social dispositions from grovelling conformity, and his “self-regarding sentiments” from suicidal narrowness. And now the conflict between himself and his group continues for the most part only in so far as the group makes unreasonable demands upon him. But this, too, diminishes as the individuals constituting or dominating the group become themselves more intelligent, more keenly cognizant of the limits within which the demands of the group upon its members must be restricted if individual allegiance is to be retained. Since the reduction of the conflict between the individual and the community without detriment to the interests of either is the central problem of political ethics, it is obvious that the practical task of ethics is not to formulate a specific moral code, but to bring about a spread of intelligence. And since the reduction of this conflict brings with it a better coördination of the members of the group, through their greater ability to perceive the advantages of communal action in an intelligently administered group, the problem of social coherence and permanence itself falls into the same larger problem of intellectual development. “How to make our ideas clear”;—what if that be the social problem? What a wealth of import in that little phrase of Socrates,—τὁ τἱ; —“what is it?” What is my good, my interest? What do I really want?—To find the answer to that, said Robert Louis Stevenson, is to achieve wisdom and old age. What is my country? What is patriotism? “If you wish to converse with me,” said Voltaire, “you must define your terms.” If you wish to be moral, you must define your terms. If our civilization is to keep its head above the flux of time, we must define our terms. For these are the critical days of the secularization of moral sanctions; the theological navel-string binding men to “good behavior” has snapped. What are the leaders of men going to do about it? Will they try again the old gospel of self-sacrifice? But a world fed on self-sacrifice is a world of lies, a world choking with the stench of hypocrisy. To preach self-sacrifice is not to solve, it is precisely to shirk, the problem of ethics,—the problem of eliminating individual self-sacrifice while preserving social stability: the problem of reconciling the individual as such with the individual as citizen. Or will our leaders try to replace superstition with an extended physical compulsion, making the policeman and the prison do all the work of social coördination? But surely compulsion is a last resort; not because it is “wrong,” but because it is inexpedient, because it rather cuts than unties the knot, because it produces too much friction to allow of movement. Compulsion is warranted when there is question of preventing the interference of one individual or group with another; but it is a poor instrument for the establishment or maintenance of ideals. Suppose we stop moralizing, suppose we reduce regimentation, suppose we begin to define our terms. Suppose we let people know quite simply (and not in Academese) that moral codes are born not in heaven but in social needs; and suppose we set about finding a way of spreading intelligence so that individual treachery to real communal interest, and communal exploitation of individual allegiance, may both appear on the surface, as they are at bottom, unintelligently suicidal. Is that too much to hope for? Perhaps. But then again, it may be, the worth and meaning of life lie precisely in this, that there is still a possibility of organizing that experiment. IX “Happiness” and “Virtue” A WORD now about the last part of the Socratic formula: intelligence = virtue = happiness. And this a word of warning: remember that the “virtue” here spoken of is not the mediæval virtue taught in Sunday schools. Surely our children must wonder are we fools or liars when we tell them, “Be good and you will be happy.” Better forget “virtue” and read simply: intelligence=happiness. That appears more closely akin to the rough realities of life: intelligence means ability to adapt means to ends, and happiness means success in adapting means to ends; happiness, then, varies with ability. Happiness is intelligence on the move; a pervasive physiological tonus accompanying the forward movement of achievement. It is not the consciousness of virtue: that is not happiness, but snobbery. And similarly, remorse is, in the intelligent man, not the consciousness of “sin,” but the consciousness of a past stupidity. So far as you fail to win your real ends you are unhappy,—and have proved unintelligent. But the Preacher says, “He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” True enough if the increment of knowledge is the correction of a past error; the sorrow is a penalty paid for the error, not for the increase of knowledge. True, too, that intelligence does not consistently lessen conflicts, and that it discloses a new want for every want it helps to meet. But the joy of life lies not so much in the disappearance of difficulties as in the overcoming of them; not so much in the diminution of conflict as in the growth of achievement. Surely it is time we had an ethic that stressed achievement rather than quiescence. And further, intelligence must not be thought of as the resignation of disillusionment, the consciousness of impotence; intelligence is to be conceived of in terms of adaptive activity, of movement towards an end, of coördinated self-expression and behavior. Finally, it is but fair to interpret the formula as making happiness and intelligence coincide only so far as the individual’s happiness depends on his own conduct. The causes of unhappiness may be an inherited deformity, or an accident not admitting of provision; such cases do not so much contradict as lie outside the formula. So far as your happiness depends on your activities, it will vary with the degree of intelligence you show. Act intelligently, and you will not know regret; feel that you are moving on toward your larger ends, and you will be happy. X The Socratic Challenge BUT if individual and social health and happiness depend on intelligence rather than on “virtue,” and if the exaltation of intelligence was a cardinal element in the Athenian view of life, why did the Socratic ethic fail to save Athens from decay? And why did the supposedly intelligent Athenians hail this generous old Dr. Johnson of philosophy into court and sentence him to death? The answer is, Because the Athenians refused to make the Socratic experiment. They were intelligent, but not intelligent enough. They could diagnose the social malady, could trace it to the decay of supernatural moral norms; but they could not find a cure, they had not the vision to see that salvation lay not in the compulsory retention of old norms, but in the forging of new and better ones, capable of withstanding the shock of questioning and trial. What they saw was chaos; and like most statesmen they longed above all things for order. They were not impressed by Socrates’ allegiance to law, his cordial admission of the individual’s obligations to the community for the advantages of social organization. They listened to the disciples: to Antisthenes, who laughed at patriotism; to Aristippus, who denounced all government; to Plato, scorner of democracy; and they attacked the master because (not to speak of pettier political reasons) it was he, they thought, who was the root of the evil. They could not see that this man was their ally and not their foe; that rescue for Athens lay in helping him rather than in sentencing him to die. And how well they could have helped him! For to preach intelligence is not enough; there remains to provide for every one the instrumentalities of intelligence. What men needed, what Athenian statesmanship might have provided, was an organization of intelligence for intelligence, an organization of all the forces of intelligence in the state in a persistent intellectual campaign. If that could not save Athens, Athens could not be saved. But the myopic leaders of the Athenian state could not see salvation in intelligence, they could only see it in hemlock. And Socrates had to die. It will take a wise courage to accept the Socratic challenge,—such courage as battle-fields and senate-chambers are not wont to show. But unless that wise courage comes to us our civilization will go as other civilizations have come and gone, “kindled and put out like a flame in the night.” NOTE.—From a book whose interesting defence of the Socratic ethic from the standpoint of psychoanalysis was brought to the writer’s attention after the completion of the foregoing essay: “The Freudian ethics is a literal and concrete justification of the Socratic teaching. Truth is the sole moral sanction, and discrimination of hitherto unrealized facts is the one way out of every moral dilemma.... Virtue is wisdom.” Practical morality is “the establishment, through discrimination, of consistent, and not contradictory (mutually suppressive), courses of action toward phenomena. The moral sanction lies always in facts presented by the phenomena; morality in the discrimination of those facts.” Moral development is “the progressive, lifelong integration of experience.”—The Freudian Wish and Its Place in Ethics, by Edwin B. Holt, New York, 1915, pp. 141, 145, 148. CHAPTER II PLATO: PHILOSOPHY AS POLITICS I The Man and the Artist WHY do we love Plato? Perhaps because Plato himself was a lover: lover of comrades, lover of the sweet intoxication of dialectical revelry, full of passion for the elusive reality behind thoughts and things. We love him for his unstinted energy, for the wildly nomadic play of his fancy, for the joy which he found in life in all its unredeemed and adventurous complexity. We love him because he was alive every minute of his life, and never ceased to grow; such a man can be loved even for the errors he has made. But above all we love him because of his high passion for social reconstruction through intelligent control; because he retained throughout his eighty years that zeal for human improvement which is for most of us the passing luxury of youth; because he conceived philosophy as an instrument not merely for the interpretation, but for the remoulding, of the world. He speaks of himself, through Socrates, as “almost the only Athenian living who sets his hand to the true art of politics; I am the only politician of my time.”[17] Philosophy was for him a study of human possibilities in the light of human...