What is Philosophy? An Historical Introduction

Philosophy 111

Queen’s University

Professor Paul Fairfield

© Paul Fairfield, 2024

Contents

1. Introduction

2. Socrates and Plato

3. Marcus Aurelius

4. Augustine

5. Boethius

6. Thomas Aquinas

7. Michel de Montaigne

8. René Descartes

9. Thomas Hobbes

10. Henry David Thoreau

11. Friedrich Nietzsche

Part 1: Introduction

What is philosophy? This question looks straightforward, but when we try to answer it we are confronted with no end of complexity. Let’s begin with the word itself. “Philosophy” is a combination of two ancient Greek words: “philia,” which is one of the Greek words for “love,” and “sophia,” which means “wisdom” or a kind of knowledge that concerns human life and how we are living it. The “philosopher,” then, by its original definition is a lover, in the sense of a pursuer, of knowledge, and where pursuing does not mean possessing. Socrates, the first philosopher we will be looking at, emphasizes that true wisdom is had only by the gods, not by human beings.

This definition will do as a starting point, but philosophy from its beginning in the ancient Greek world quickly broadened out to mean a quest for a rather comprehensive knowledge of human life and of the world in which we find ourselves. Philosophy would soon encompass several subdisciplines, from the study of the ultimate composition and nature of the world (metaphysics) to the nature of knowledge (epistemology), the nature of the good life for human beings (ethics), the nature of a just society (politics), the nature of art (aesthetics), the nature of rational thought (logic and rhetoric), and in time several more specialized subfields, from the philosophy of religion to the philosophy of science, of history, education, mind, language, and some other things. Philosophy has often been said to be the oldest discipline in the West, and it may be the oldest discipline in the Eastern world as well, although our course is an examination of Western philosophy only. Philosophy in the East is a whole other, and equally long, story.

What is the best way to introduce first-year university students (or anyone else for that matter) to philosophy, a field that has about two and a half millennia of history behind it? Different philosophy professors will take different approaches to this. It is not a field like chemistry or biology where we might begin with the present state of knowledge in the discipline, with little or maybe no attention to its history. Philosophy, as many (by no means all) of us see it, resembles art in at least one respect: if we wish to understand the nature of art, I wouldn’t recommend going to an art gallery that exhibits nothing but contemporary artworks. Were this course called “What is Art?” I’d begin with some art history, quite a lot of it actually, before we even get to the modern period. This is because to understand what art is at the present time, you really need to understand what art originally was and how it has developed through the centuries, the various movements, styles, etc. that make up the history of art. Once you know a good deal about art history, you’ll begin to develop a general understanding of art, but it will take time. We might say the same about religion. If this course tried to answer the question “What is religion?” I’d recommend a lengthy tour through the history of at least the major world religions and maybe a few of the smaller ones as well. The same holds for philosophy. Were we to ignore the last twenty-five or so centuries of what the major philosophers in the Western tradition have thought and written and look at the state of philosophy today, we would find it impossible to get our bearings. Realists and anti-realists, idealists and postmodern constructivists, phenomenologists and hermeneuticists, critical theorists and Marxists, pragmatists and positivists, rationalists and empiricists, continental and analytic philosophers—this only partly describes the contemporary philosophical scene, and understanding it will be a lost cause if we don’t first take the time to see what philosophy was in the beginning and some of the many ways it has been passed down to us over the centuries.

The best way, then, to answer the question “What is philosophy?” is historically. My own view is that there’s no other way to go about this, or not well. Were I to break up this class of 150 or so of you into small groups and ask you to reflect upon the nature of consciousness, knowledge, reason, or justice, with zero background knowledge as to what the great thinkers of the past have had to say about these topics, I doubt very much you would come up with anything but for the shallow answers that our culture readily serves up. If we are serious about such questions then we will need to spend a great deal of time listening to what at least some of the more noteworthy philosophers in our tradition have had to say. If this were a course in songwriting, I would sit you down and have you listen for many hours to the great songwriters of the past and present before assigning you the task of composing your own songs, and philosophy is no different in this way. In this course I will be asking you to write two essays and in each of them to formulate an intelligent opinion of your own on a certain philosophical question. Opinions are not formed right out of the gate, or not the kind of opinions that we are seeking in philosophy. Professional philosophers today all have opinions on whatever questions we are writing about, but such opinions are expected to be supported by reasons and are not mere hunches or subjective statements of feeling. Opinions can be and often are mistaken, and everything that philosophers write is subject to rational criticism. It’s best not to think of opinions as something altogether separate from what is called “knowledge.” It is indeed knowledge that philosophers seek, but it’s not the same form of knowledge that a mathematician or a physicist seeks—although this is itself a philosophical question and quite a difficult one: what kind of knowledge are we pursuing in philosophy, and how does it compare to knowledge in other fields? We shall see. Philosophers have convictions about a great many things, but these convictions are always open to question. Nothing is off limits to criticism in this field of study.

There is a certain attitude of mind that we commonly ask the student of philosophy to adopt. One might call it open-mindedness, a questioning attitude, and a rejection of the sort of dogmatism that regards any ideas as off limits to rational debate. It is not that philosophers or students of philosophy lack beliefs. We have plenty of them, but we’re not in a hurry to arrive at any and insist that such beliefs or opinions must be able to withstand rational interrogation. A philosopher is a certain kind of freethinker, not in the sense that what we think or claim to know is idiosyncratic but that we’re not overly beholden to any given worldview at the outset. Ideas and convictions are best regarded as conclusions from arguments, hypotheses which we have found in the course of reasoned inquiry and conversation to be superior to their alternatives, while they typically if not always remain subject to a questioning process which in principle never comes to an end. Philosophy will not end someday, when we discover all the answers to the big questions. In our field, every conclusion becomes a new question or gives rise to new uncertainties which keep us continually moving forward, as in any conversation that is always on the move. Philosophy itself can be thought of as a conversation, one that has been going on for the better part of 3000 years and will likely continue for as long as we’re here.

What we’ll be doing in this course is introduce students to the discipline of philosophy and to the intellectual underpinnings of Western civilization, and the best way to go about this is historically, where this means taking a fairly close look at a number of major thinkers and major philosophical texts that represent several (by no means most) peaks in the vast mountain range that is philosophy. Selecting a reading list is a difficult task in a course like this one, but the texts I have chosen are based on several criteria. First, I have opted for texts that have carried a great deal of influence since the time of their composition. Second, their authors were all making original and profound contributions to philosophy. Third, their relevance to our own time period and to our lives is considerable. Fourth, they are not excessively weighed down with jargon, as much philosophical prose is. Fifth, I am hoping that you will find each of these texts to be relatively engaging and to make for compelling reading. Some historical philosophers are more appealing to first-year students than others, and I have tried to choose authors whom I think you will find relatively lively and interesting. Also, they are not excessive in length; or when a particular text in on the longer side I will not ask you to read it in its entirety but portions only—portions but not snippets. There are innumerable textbooks on the market with titles like Introduction to Philosophy that contain many short snippets of dozens of philosophers and we won’t be using a textbook of this kind but books—proper texts—which contain a beginning, a middle, and an end, in the way that such books are actually written. Asking you to read snippets of a great philosophical text may be compared to asking you to listen to thirty seconds of a five-minute song rather than the song. You neither understand nor appreciate the song after listening to a snippet, and the same is true of philosophical works.

Finally, it’s important to know something about how philosophy has changed through the ages. Since philosophy began and was given its basic trajectory in the ancient world, we will begin there with a few of its major figures, two Greeks (Socrates and Plato) and one Roman (Marcus Aurelius). Philosophy through the very long period of the Middle Ages became more or less wedded to theology, and mostly for this reason courses like this one often skip over this entire era. We will not. Philosophy didn’t disappear for a thousand years, so we will look at a few of this era’s most notable figures (Augustine, Boethius, Thomas Aquinas). In the modern period it changes again, beginning with some transitional figures of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Michel de Montaigne, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes) and leading into the nineteenth century (Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Nietzsche). Philosophy doesn’t end in 1900, so why are we not reading anything post-1900, you may ask, and also why are they all men? To the first question the short answer is that philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries goes in a thousand directions, none of which are understandable at all if you don’t know how such movements and thinkers are responding to a conversation that precedes them. The Department of Philosophy here at Queen’s offers many second, third, and fourth-year courses that deal with philosophy in the contemporary period, but it’s necessary to be grounded in philosophy’s history before trying to make sense of any of this. To the second question, today there are nearly as many women entering the field of philosophy, whether as students or professors, as men, and through the course of the twentieth century philosophy gradually went from being about as male-dominated a field as any to what we now see.

We will be reading several books in this course, and on the subject of books, it does appear that most students who arrive at this or any university today are in the habit of reading books somewhat less than your counterparts of yesteryear. There are likely many reasons for this, but I am afraid there is no getting away from reading books in a course that endeavors to introduce students to philosophy. The best way to learn about philosophy may well be through your own extracurricular reading, following your interests wherever they lead. My first introduction to philosophy happened outside of school, as a high school student reading books independently and for no credit. You don’t need to learn this in an institution, but here we are in an institution, so let’s go about it in a way that makes sense and that I hope you will find interesting. I’ll be asking you to read not more than about 50 pages per week and sometimes less. I’ll be discussing all the readings in the lecture notes that follow and also in class over the next two semesters, but there is absolutely no substitute for sitting down with a good book and reading it for yourself. When you read these books, best to do it in a place that is quiet and where you can focus on what you are reading. Good philosophers choose their words very carefully and their texts are written with great care, and it’s best to read them with equal care and attention. No good work of philosophy can be understood by reading quickly. You must slow down, find a comfortable chair in a quiet place, and read in a completely different way than we typically consume information on the internet, which is usually very fast and with much skimming. If you skim or speed-read your way through these texts, you won’t understand a word. Reading, writing, and thinking are best done slowly. The technology that we all use today has done nothing to slow the mind or to stretch our attention span—quite the contrary—and any proper introduction to philosophy requires that you slow down and stretch your attention span as you would a muscle. The habit of reading books, patiently and thoughtfully, may be the most important mental habit you can form at this stage of your educational career.

Our main aim in this course is to answer the question “What is philosophy?” and in the process introduce you to a field of knowledge that is extremely diverse in terms of the questions philosophers have asked and, still more, the answers they have offered. Our aims do not include attempting to convince you that a given philosopher was correct or incorrect in their views—and this is quite an important point. A university is a place where students may both freely pursue their interests and also believe what they choose to believe freely, without being indoctrinated into what the professor or the institution does. As the professor in this course, I will make no effort to change your beliefs, be they philosophical, political, religious, or what have you. As a rule, when I have an opinion, I write a book or essay that is addressed to other professors in my field and do not take that opinion into a classroom and try to persuade the students, whether overtly or covertly. I do have views, as any philosopher would, on each of the authors we’ll be studying, but don’t concern yourself with what I think about Plato or Aquinas. What matters to you is what you think about Plato or Aquinas—after, that is, you are properly informed about their ideas and have taken time to reflect on them rationally. A university ought to be (and isn’t always) an indoctrination-free zone, and this course very much is. As a student of ideas, you are being asked to think for yourself rather than uncritically parrot the beliefs of your professors or university officials. When professors or university officials express beliefs of this kind, as many will do, be aware that you are under no obligation to make their beliefs your own. As students of philosophy, we always ask for the reasons and the arguments why someone—anyone—holds the views that they do, and we are in no hurry to make their views, or any views, our own. The attitude of a philosopher is that we will believe X once we have sufficiently understood X and have good reasons to accept it, not because an authority figure has told us we must.

A related point I would emphasize is that in this and every course that I teach, all participants—students, teaching assistants, and the professor—have rights of free speech and free inquiry. The writers we will be studying express views that are controversial. Philosophy is controversial by design, and these writers are doing what philosophers are supposed to do. Any students who cannot handle controversial ideas should either broaden their horizons or take a different course—better the former. While I typically refrain from expressing philosophical views of my own in a classroom setting, I also reserve the right to do so. Students also have an absolute right to take any views they like in this course and in your essays, and you are also expected to back them up with an intelligent argument. Philosophers and students of philosophy are freethinkers. Universities are supposed to value disagreement and value it highly. In this course, we do.

Your university career is a time when you are free to explore ideas and fields of knowledge with no pressure to accept definitively any given set of beliefs. The university does not always live up to this promise, but the promise it has long made is to afford all of you the freedom to think, to speculate, and to inquire into different ways of thinking, and without pressure to accept some particular set of convictions. A university is a home to many people with many convictions, and those convictions are conflicting and not always reasonable. The judge of what is reasonable is you—and not you in a vacuum but in conversation with the tradition that is Western civilization. Once you are well grounded in the intellectual underpinnings of your tradition, you are in a position to think critically about it, but not before. We do not criticize what we have not first understood. There are many today—including some professional academics—who will dismiss all of philosophy as nonsense, and not one of them knows what they are talking about. If you hear someone dismiss philosophy with a wave of the hand, ask them how much they actually know about philosophy and which philosophers they have read.

Over the next two semesters we shall be studying a dozen of the most noteworthy figures in the history of Western philosophy prior to the twentieth century. In each case our goals will be essentially two: the first is to get inside the belief system of a given thinker and, to the extent that we are able, try to see the world as they did, and the second is to have something intelligent to say about their ideas. Both aims will be difficult—the first because these thinkers are distant from us in time and place while the second will call upon each one of us to carry out a similar line of reflection to what they themselves carried out. We will not be quick to judge a philosopher’s viewpoint but ensure that we first have an adequate grasp of it and then try to formulate criticisms and supporting arguments and slowly weigh the different arguments before arriving at a conclusion.

What philosophy itself is may be thought of as a conversation that has been going on since ancient times which consists of certain individual thinkers posing difficult but important questions about the human condition in a very broad sense. Each philosopher and text we will be looking at arises from a particular time, place, and culture, and each reflects the conditions in which it arose. Many of the questions they ask are perennial in the sense that they keep arising generation after generation and century after century, and we’ll be focusing mostly on these questions in what follows. To understand any conversation, and to come up with something to say within it, we need to go back and find out how it all started.

Part 2: Socrates and Plato

The story of philosophy in the West actually begins a few centuries before Socrates and Plato, but for our purposes in this course, and simplifying much, our story begins in the fifth century BC. Socrates’ dates are 469-399 BC and Plato’s are about 427-347 BC. A painting of Socrates by the Italian renaissance painter Raphael here depicts him reaching with his right hand for the hemlock that would end his life after his sentence of execution by an Athenian jury. With his left hand he is pointing up, but toward what? The short answer is the Forms, but what does this mean, and why was he sentenced to death?

Before we turn to the theory of the Forms, let’s begin with the story of Socrates himself and the trial that led to his execution. Why would an ancient court sentence a philosopher of all people to death? According to Socrates himself, a philosopher’s vocation is to pursue wisdom, nothing more. How could this be a crime? The answer comes down to us in Plato’s short dialogue “The Apology,” which I have asked you to read and which comes to a little over 20 pages in the Hackett edition (in Plato, The Trial and Death of Socrates, 3rd edition, trans. G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2000). “The Apology” is Plato’s dramatic depiction of what took place at this trial in Athens in the year 399 BC. Plato was one of Socrates’ young disciples or followers, and he attended this trial. The dialogue he would later compose is an attempt both to describe accurately what took place and who said what, and also to present Socrates as the heroic figure he would come to be viewed as by later generations of philosophers down through the present day. Socrates is still regarded as something of a patron saint of philosophy, somewhat less on account of his ideas than his conduct through life and his rather heroic death.

Let’s begin with the title. The word apology in this context (“apologia” in Greek) doesn’t mean what it usually means for us today but is a formal defence against both the legal charges that have been brought against him and beyond this a defence or justification of his conduct over many years as a pursuer of wisdom in the Athenian marketplace or anywhere else that he found himself. Socrates, aged 70, isn’t sorry, so it isn’t an apology in this sense. On the contrary, he is proud, albeit in a humble way, of how he has conducted himself through his life, in particular in his public life which is the subject of this trial. Athenian courts and trials were not as they are today; the roles of both judge and jury were served by a large jury (501 in this case) of male citizens, and there were also no lawyers. The prosecutor could be any male citizen, and he presented his case to the court while the defendant spoke on his own behalf.

At the outset we find Socrates addressing the jury after his accusers, chiefly a man named Meletus, have made their arguments. He notes how eloquently Meletus has spoken, but the point he urges is that what matters in speech is not eloquence but truth. The truth, as Socrates takes some time to point out, is that his reputation precedes him in this trial. For many years the jurors have heard stories told about this man and how he has repeatedly offended many prominent Athenian citizens by revealing to one and all the limits of their knowledge. A typical Platonic dialogue finds Socrates engaging in intellectual conversation with anyone, whether aristocrat or commoner, who has claimed to be in possession of knowledge. Socrates would begin by asking his interlocutor essentially what it is that they know, how they came by this knowledge, and why the rest of us should accept it. As these dialogues would unfold, Socrates would typically demonstrate that his interlocutor doesn’t know nearly as much as he believes and that he really can’t justify his views at all in the face of rational interrogation. Think of all the things that we all claim to know. We commonly believe, as Socrates’ interlocutors also did, a great deal about morality and politics, science and mathematics, the nature of the world and of the mind, and of a great many things. How much of this actually rises to the level of real knowledge rather than mere opinion? Each of us has a thousand opinions to which we are often emotionally attached, but emotional fervor is no guarantee of truth. Quite the contrary, as Socrates has demonstrated in conversation after conversation, as a consequence of which he acquired a reputation as a nuisance. No one likes to be revealed in public as an ignoramus, and while Plato would always depict Socrates as going about this in a humble and eminently reasonable way, still the reputation of the man went from bad to worse as the years went on.

By the time the trial begins, then, he is already at a major disadvantage as the jury is predisposed against him. Socrates asks the jurors to bracket the matter of his reputation, difficult as that will be, and focus instead on the charges leveled against him and whether there is any truth in them. He distinguishes between his old accusers and his new ones. The new accusations are that, as Socrates puts it, “he busies himself studying things in the sky and below the earth; he makes the worse into the stronger argument, and he teaches these same things to others” (23). His reply to each of these charges is quite straightforward: he hasn’t done these things. He teaches no new doctrines or theories about anything, he deceives no one, and he also does not receive a fee for teaching, although he would have a number of followers, including Plato, who greatly respected him and sought to learn from him. The Greek world at this time had many “sophists,” and Socrates’ accusers were trying to lump him in with this group. The sophists where professional teachers and orators who would travel from city-state to city-state selling whatever knowledge they claimed to possess to whoever would pay their fee—largely young male aristocrats who wished to learn the art of public speaking either in the democratic assembly or in the law courts. This group came to be regarded by both Socrates and Plato essentially as charlatans or intellectual con artists, and we see Socrates here distinguishing himself from them first by pointing out that he has never been paid for practicing philosophy and second by pointing out that he doesn’t claim to possess knowledge. The main doctrine he teaches is the doctrine of ignorance (“docta ignorantia”), and it isn’t exactly a doctrine but a reminder of our intellectual finitude and a plea for humility regarding our knowledge or what passes for it. What I know, in short, is not much of anything—but I know that I am lacking knowledge, and the recognition of ignorance is the first step in the search for wisdom. This first step may be the most difficult, but without it we are (and for Socrates and Plato, most are in fact) doomed to lifelong ignorance.

Socrates then relates a story that concerns the Oracle at Delphi, which was the ancient site of the Temple of Apollo. At this site the high priestess or Pythia would practice the mystical art of divination and answer visitors’ questions most often with a yes or a no. One day, a friend of Socrates by the name of Chaerephon asked the Oracle whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates, and to his surprise the answer came back no. Chaerephon would relate this story to Socrates who was utterly mystified as to what this could mean. How could someone who doesn’t think himself wise be a wise man and indeed second to none in wisdom? This was an extremely serious matter for our philosopher because for centuries the Oracle at Delphi was among the preeminent religious sites in the Greek world, and its pronouncements were taken seriously by everyone in this culture. It became Socrates’ mission, as he tells the jury, to find out whether the Oracle had been right, and his method was to engage in philosophical conversation with anyone with a reputation for real knowledge and find out if they were wiser than he. His recurring experience, as he relates it, was this: “I thought that he [his interlocutor] appeared wise to many people and especially to himself, but he was not. I then tried to show him that he thought himself wise, but that he was not. As a result he came to dislike me, and so did many of the bystanders” (25). Time and time again Socrates would follow this method—what would come to be called “the Socratic method”—of essentially asking questions informally of someone with a reputation for knowledge and demonstrating in the course of reasoned conversation that what they took for knowledge is mere belief, and often enough false belief. What Socrates calls his old accusers, then, are those who took a dislike to him in this way, and they included statesmen, poets and other writers, and especially the sophists. His negative reputation, then, is based not on objectionable conduct but on the empty pride of his former interlocutors.

Socrates then turns to his new accusers or the charges that had been formally brought against him at court. As he says, “It goes something like this: Socrates is guilty of corrupting the young and of not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other new spiritual things” (27). Is any of this true, he asks? The short answer is a simple no. Interestingly, to the charge of atheism or of not believing in the traditional Greek divinities, of which there were many, Socrates does not come straight out and profess his belief in these gods, although he comes close to this in a very short exchange with Meletus: “Is that, by Zeus, what you think of me, Meletus, that I do not believe that there are any gods?” to which Meletus replies, “That is what I say, that you do not believe in the gods at all.” Socrates replies, “You cannot be believed, Meletus, even, I think, by yourself. The man appears to me, men of Athens, highly insolent and uncontrolled” (29-30). We might have preferred that Socrates come right out and state directly that he believes in the gods rather than criticize Meletus. Whether he did actually believe in the gods is open to question, but he does here deny the charge of atheism, however ambiguously. As for professing any “new spiritual things” or doctrines regarding the gods, he denies this directly.

This leaves the charge of corrupting the youth of Athens, which Socrates spends a good deal of time refuting. What might look like an empty charge to us was a very serious matter, and he sets out to ask Meletus a series of questions about what it is to corrupt and also to improve human beings and who it is who does either. Socrates gets Meletus to claim that Socrates alone corrupts people. With what motive, Socrates asks, would anyone do this? If Socrates has been deliberately corrupting his associates, as Meletus claims, wouldn’t he be putting himself in danger, since the corrupted are likely to harm him along with others? Would it not be more prudent to help or improve those with whom we associate, as they are very unlikely to harm us and likely to help us in return? Knowingly corrupting people around us makes no sense. Has Socrates, then, been corrupting the youth unintentionally? If so, this is not a crime and the proper remedy wouldn’t be legal punishment but simple correction, and it is punishment that Socrates’ prosecutors want, and very serious punishment at that. A bit later in the dialogue Socrates adds: “If I corrupt some young men and have corrupted others, then surely some of them who have grown older and realized that I gave them bad advice when they were young should now themselves come up here to accuse me and avenge themselves” (36). None of these men do so; on the contrary, Socrates was commonly regarded by such men as a wise man whom they sought to emulate.

Who are the true corruptors of human beings, who are their improvers, and which group is more numerous? Socrates suggests an analogy between those who benefit human beings and horse trainers. Anyone can corrupt or harm horses, while the skilled horse trainer is more rare. In a similar way, and for the same reason, the true benefactors of humanity are few (because only a few have the knowledge), their corrupters many—although the latter are likely to corrupt others through ignorance rather than malice. Socrates gets Meletus to claim that everyone in Athens improves the young with the sole exception of Socrates, and the claim is implausible on its face.

Another important theme that emerges in “The Apology” is death, a theme to which Socrates would return in “Crito” and “Phaedo,” which are included in our volume and are also fascinating reading. Socrates states that he doesn’t fear death, and that fearing death is irrational. His prosecutors want him executed, so it behooves the philosopher to say something on the subject of mortality. We don’t know what happens to us after death, he says, and it is irrational to fear the unknown. All that matters to one who is rational is that one do what is good and pay no mind to the fear of death that so many have. He will later state that if the traditional stories of the afterlife are true then the soul is immortal and after death Socrates can look forward to meeting the great heroes and thinkers of the past and to engaging them in philosophical conversation. Maybe they have real wisdom to impart. This is hardly something to fear. Socrates is at once advancing a philosophical point about immortality and likely engaging in some provocation of his prosecutors and perhaps the jury as well. The jury is likely to have expected Socrates to cower in the face of these charges and to plead for his life. He instead does the opposite and demonstrates even here the philosophical way of life he had been practicing throughout his life, presumably with full knowledge of the probable consequence of the sentence he would soon receive. He goes further and tells the jury that if they acquit him on the condition that he cease to practice philosophy as he has been doing, he will refuse: “Men of Athens, I am grateful and I am your friend, but I will obey the god rather than you, and as long as I draw breath and am able, I shall not cease to practice philosophy, to exhort you and in my usual way to point out to any one of you whom I happen to meet: ‘Good Sir, you are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?’” (32). Socrates’ mission has been given to him by the gods, and it is to serve the people of Athens in a way that they are unlikely to appreciate: “I was attached to this city by the god—though it seems a ridiculous thing to say—as upon a great and noble horse which was somewhat sluggish because of its size and needed to be stirred up by a kind of gadfly” (33). A gadly is a nuisance, like a mosquito that won’t go away. The people of Athens, or any other place, are intellectually sluggish and most live unexamined lives. What they need is an intellectual awakening, and this is exactly what they don’t want. They don’t want it, but they do need it, for “the unexamined life is not worth living” (39).

The jury disagrees and finds him guilty. The trial now moves into the sentencing phase, which is also determined by a majority vote by the jury of 501. After Meletus requests a sentence of execution it is Socrates’ turn to request an alternative sentence. This is the point at which the prudent course for Socrates, or the usual one anyway, would be to plead for a relatively light sentence such as a fine and beyond this to show some remorse for the crimes of which he has now been convicted. He does the opposite and alienates the jury even further, and no doubt on purpose. The question he must now speak to, as he points out to the jury, is what just consequence is owing to him given everything that has been said in the trial to this point. The prosecutors have convinced a majority of the jury, but it does not follow that what the prosecutors have alleged is true. It is not true, therefore Socrates does not deserve punishment but reward, as he now tells the jury. What reward is fitting, he asks, for a public benefactor who has neither money nor reputation nor power? Athletes who have won victories at the Olympic games are rewarded in the form of free meals in the town hall, as are some other public benefactors. Socrates suggests this as his reward, and the jury is not amused. Given the choice between execution and free meals, the jury opts for execution and by a wider margin than had found him guilty in the first place. Banishment will not do, Socrates points out, since if he is driven out to another city he will go about the same activities there as in his native Athens.

Execution it is, then, but Socrates warns the jurors that he is not the only one of his kind and that after his death there will be other philosophers, including his followers, who will be younger than him and more energetic. The people of Athens can put an end to Socrates’ life, but what they cannot stop is the larger attitude of mind and way of life that he represents. He ends on the note that “there is good hope that death is a blessing, for it is one of two things: either the dead are nothing and have no perception of anything, or it is, as we are told, a change and a relocating for the soul from here to another place. If it is complete lack of perception, like a dreamless sleep, then death would be a great advantage” (41). If the soul is immortal, life in Hades will be very pleasant as “I could spend my time testing and examining people there, as I do here, as to who among them is wise, and who thinks he is, but is not” (42). “The Apology” ends on this note.

Here we see a statue of Socrates on the left and Raphael’s painting of Plato on the right, gesturing upward toward the Forms or the ideas which in Plato’s metaphysics constitute a transcendent order of being. More on that later.

The second and somewhat longer dialogue of Plato’s that we will look at is the Symposium (trans. Christopher John Gill, New York: Penguin, 1999) which was written by Plato some years after “The Apology” but that recounts an event that occurred some years earlier. It again depicts Socrates engaging in philosophical dialogue with a number of aristocratic men, this time at a “symposium” or drinking party which, according to Greek custom, would take place in the evening after dinner at the home of one of the participants who would act as host of the banquet. A symposium today is a panel of speakers and alcohol isn’t usually involved, but a Greek symposium was a semi-formal occasion in which food and wine were served, flute girls would provide the entertainment before the speeches began, and a good time was had by all. The symposium was also an “agon” or friendly contest; the invited guests would be given a question, and they would take turns giving speeches that tried to answer the question. The question on this occasion is, what is love?

The Greek word is “eros,” so we’re speaking of erotic love. There are several ancient Greek words for the different forms of love: “philia” (friendship), “agape” (charity), “xenia” (hospitality), “storge” (familial love), “philautia” (self-love), and eros. Eros was the god of sexual love, and the speeches were to praise the god while also defining what this form of love actually is. The seven speeches are delivered by Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, Agathon, Socrates, and Alcibiades, and as in so many of Plato’s dialogues Socrates’ speech expresses a viewpoint that is more or less indistinguishable from Plato’s own. Plato himself did not attend this event but recounts the story some years later in dramatic literary form. The result is one of Plato’s more artful dialogues on a theme of perennial interest.

The dialogue opens with Apollodorus agreeing to relate to an unnamed companion the content of the speeches while they walk along a road to Athens. The banquet took place at the house of Agathon, a tragic poet. As the guests prepare to dine, Socrates doesn’t immediately join them but is standing on a neighbor’s porch lost in thought, as was his habit. Socrates arrives midway through dinner and remarks to Agathon that he looks forward to hearing the latter’s wisdom for Socrates himself has none. Eryximachus proposes the topic of eros and the guests readily agree. Socrates also agrees and adds somewhat uncharacteristically that “the subject of love is the only one I claim to understand” (9). We will see what he means by this when we get to his speech.

The first speaker is Phaedrus. Eros, he says, has long been honored as among the most ancient of gods and is without parents: “Because of his antiquity, he is the source of our greatest benefits. I would claim that there is no greater benefit for a young man than a good lover and none greater for a lover than a good boyfriend” (10). One will immediately note the accent on erotic love between men, which will remain a recurrent theme in this dialogue. This wouldn’t have surprised Plato’s readers, as such relations were commonly regarded in ancient Greece somewhat differently than in modern times. As our translator notes in the Introduction to this volume, “A familiar pattern in Greek culture in the Archaic (seventh-sixth century BC) and Classical (fifth-fourth century BC) periods is that in which an adult male is attracted to a boy or young man, especially when the latter is between puberty and growing a beard (which marked the entry into full manhood). Scholars usually see this relationship as an asymmetrical one: the older partner (the lover) takes the initiative and gains greater sexual pleasure; the younger (the boyfriend or loved one) gains the friendship and help of the older man” (xiii-xiv). The relationship would typically be short-lived and the older man would often be married. In any event, love in this sense is to be understood variously as between men, between women, or between a man and a woman. Eros remains one, regardless of these considerations. This point does not come into question in the Symposium.

Phaedrus continues: no good—not family, reputation, money, status, or anything else—is more vital than love in imparting a “sense of shame at acting disgracefully and pride in acting well” (10). Without this sense of shame at vice and pride in virtue, no one will live a good life, and the great teacher of this sense is Eros. None of us would wish to be seen by our beloved in a shameful light, and by the same token the wish to impress our beloved inspires many a noble action. “Besides, it’s only lovers who are willing to die for someone else; and this is true of women as well as men” (11). This kind of love underlies countless acts of courage and nobility while discouraging more effectively than any other factor in human life their opposites, Phaedrus says. The lover is more inspired and god-like than the beloved, and is more commonly praised. Love, he concludes, “is the most ancient of the gods, the most honoured, and the most effective in enabling human beings to acquire courage and happiness, both in life and death” (12).

Pausanias is next, and his opening move is to draw a distinction between two kinds of love. Eros is inseparable from Aphrodite, and “since there are two kinds of Aphrodite, there must also be two Loves” (12). These two divinities are Aphrodite Urania, daughter of Uranus, and Aphrodite of all the people, daughter of Zeus and Dione. The second kind of love is common to all, aristocrat and commoner alike, and it is a love more of the body than the mind. Here one wants only to obtain the object of one’s desire, whether by means moral or immoral. The beloved may be male or female, in contrast to the first kind of love which is directed at young males. This heavenly or transcendent Aphrodite is uncommon and is an affair more of the mind than the body. It has an intellectual quality and forswears all violence. If lover and beloved are both of good character, there is nothing disgraceful in this type of relationship, Pausanias says, although moral norms regarding this will vary from one place to another. His own view, as he states, is that a relationship of this kind is neither morally good nor bad in itself but depends on how it is conducted. “It is wrong to gratify a bad man in a bad way, and right to gratify a good man in the right way” (16). Anyone, good or bad, can love in the common way where it’s the body that is desired rather than the mind and character of the beloved. There is nothing especially noble in this, and it is inconstant because the thing that it loves—the body—is inconstant or changes over time. In contrast, transcendent love is constant because its object is the character of the beloved, and good character is constant. It is preferable for the beloved to resist the lover’s advances for some period of time while the latter persists without coercion. The passage of time acts as a kind of test of the character of both, so falling in love quickly is not advisable. The lover being older and ideally wiser than the beloved, it falls to the former to benefit the latter by means of favors and education while the beloved confers benefits of a more immediate kind. The beloved, then, aims “to gratify a lover in the hope of gaining virtue” (17). This kind of relationship with a younger boy is rightly forbidden since the boy doesn’t yet possess the requisite qualities of mind and character.

The next speaker is Eryximachus, who takes Pausanias’ distinction between the two loves as his starting point. Drawing upon his experience as a doctor, Eryximachus suggests that love is found not only among human beings but in all forms of animal and vegetative life: “It’s inherent in the nature of bodies that they manifest these two kinds of love,” he states (18). Love may be thought of as a certain kind of order or a correct relation between opposites. A healthy organism desires different things than the diseased, and love in one is different from the other. It’s medically good to gratify the healthy parts of the body and bad to gratify the diseased parts. The physician tries to bring into right order such opposite elements as hot and cold, dry and wet, and so on, and something similar can be said of agriculture, music, and athletics. In each case we are trying to bring opposing elements into a condition of harmony or order, and this order we call love. In agriculture a proper harmony of hot and cold, dry and wet, produces a good harvest while a disorder of these elements produces the opposite. The same principle governs human relationships which may be harmonious or disharmonious, properly or disordered.

Next up is the famous comic playwright Aristophanes, who changes the subject somewhat from the previous speeches to the topic of the sexes. Our common belief is that there are two sexes, male and female. In the mythical story that he now relates there are three: male, female, and a third androgynous state which was the original condition of human nature. The word androgynous, he points out, is commonly spoken of as an insult, but in the beginning of our species it was the natural state of all humans, and it combined equal elements of male and female. The division between male and female came later. In its original state, as he puts it, “the shape of each human being was a rounded whole, with back and sides forming a circle. Each one had four hands and the same number of legs, and two identical faces on a circular neck. They had one head for both the faces, which were turned in opposite directions, four ears, two sets of genitals, and everything else was as you would imagine from what I’ve said so far” (22). Round in form and remarkable in strength, human beings became full of hubris (a vice dreaded by the Greeks) and mounted an assault on the gods which was ultimately unsuccessful. To punish mortal humanity, Zeus devised a plan to permanently weaken human beings, declaring: “I shall now cut each of them into two; they will be weaker and also more useful to us because there will be more of them. They will walk around upright on two legs. If we think they’re still acting outrageously, and they won’t settle down, I’ll cut them in half again so that they move around hopping on one leg” (23). It was Zeus, then, who put an end to our androgynous nature and made us all male or female. Each of us, having been cut in two, longs passionately to this day for a reunion with our other half, and this is the origin and the nature of erotic love. The beloved for whom each of us searches is not ultimately an other but part of one’s own being, and each one of us has one. This is why lovers often speak of the beloved as completing us or making us whole. The act of love “tries to make one out of two and to heal the wound in human nature” (24). The real nature of love, then, is to return to our original nature or to come as close to this state as possible, “to find a loved one who naturally fits your own character” (27). This is why like seeks like, a phenomenon well known to the ancient Greeks.

The last speech before Socrates is by Agathon, a poet at whose home this symposium is taking place. His aim, he states at the outset, is to praise the god by describing its nature rather than concentrating on the benefits it provides to human beings. While all gods are happy, Eros is happiest as it is the best among them and the most beautiful. It is not the oldest of the gods, as has often been said, but is the youngest and the most beautiful. Eros “always associates with the young and is one of them; the ancient saying is right, that like always stays close to like” (29). Love is forever young and is essentially an affair of youth. It is at once beautiful and virtuous and causes no harm to the beloved. It doesn’t use force but requires consent in all matters, and it is just and moderate. Love masters the other pleasures and avoids access. It is courageous, wise, and poetic. “Everyone turns into a poet, ‘even though a stranger to the Muses before,’ when he is touched by Love” (31). Love is full of good will and generosity, inspiring virtuous acts of many kinds.

It is now Socrates’ turn to speak, and he begins as he often would by acknowledging both the difficulty of the task and his own inadequacy in competing with the speeches that have been given. There is more than a hint of irony in this, as Socrates now tells us that if it is truth we seek rather than beautiful words, he may be able to help us with this. He begins by asking a series of questions to Agathon, demonstrating his usual philosophical practice which is to formulate ideas along with others in a dialogue and by asking questions with an attitude of intellectual humility. He does not play the expert but does nearly the opposite of this. In the resulting dialogue his and Plato’s views, which are now impossible to distinguish, will come to the fore. His opening move is to ask about the object of love: does the lover possess what they love or not? Agathon replies that we usually do not possess the thing or the person we love. Socrates replies that it is more than merely usual or likely that we lack the object of our love but it is necessary. To love is to pursue something or someone we desire. We desire not what we have in the sense of securely possess but what we lack. In the case of something like health, the healthy commonly say that they desire good health, but this isn’t exactly true. We desire health if we are unhealthy, that is, when we lack the object of desire. Although the healthy will say they desire good health, what they really mean is that they desire that in future they will remain healthy. Our future good health is not something we currently possess. What the healthy want is not to be healthy but to remain healthy, and the difference is important for Socrates. We love only what we lack and need. This doesn’t mean that the married person doesn’t love their spouse but that one doesn’t possess the beloved any more than the philosopher possesses wisdom. To love is to pursue, not to own, and to desire the future or continued presence of the one we love. Agathon has said that Eros is a good and a beautiful divinity, but is this true? We don’t love what is bad or ugly but what is good and beautiful, and love is itself good and beautiful, or so Agathon has asserted. Socrates has just shown that love is of what we lack, so if love is of or for the good and beautiful then love itself is neither beautiful nor good.

Socrates then proposes to relate what had been taught to him in his youth about love by a somewhat mysterious woman named Diotima. This wise woman, Socrates tells us, formulated for him the same argument he had just put to Agathon, that if we love only what we lack then love itself is neither good nor beautiful. Rather, the beloved is these things, and to love someone or something is not to have it but to desire and to pursue it. Eros, accordingly, is at once a matter of passion and action, or it is simultaneously something that we feel and something that we do. It doesn’t follow that because love is not good, it is bad, or because it is not beautiful, it is ugly. Love is none of these things, and it is also blasphemous to say of the god that it is bad or ugly. Love is “something in between” the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, just as a person can be intermediate between wise and ignorant (38). Diotima then asserts to Socrates that love itself cannot be a god, much to his surprise. Everyone, he says, believes Eros a divinity, and not just any divinity but one of the greatest and most beautiful among the many Greek gods. Diotima replies that not only she but Socrates himself denies the divinity of love. How so, he asks? The gods, she explains, are happy and have what is good and beautiful; the lover does not but desires these things. If the lover lacks these things then the lover is not a god. Is Eros a mortal, then? Her answer is again that love is neither divine nor mortal but intermediate between them. Love “is a great spirit, Socrates. Everything classed as a spirit falls between god and human” (38). The function of spirits, she says, is to “interpret and carry messages from humans to gods and from gods to humans. They convey prayers and sacrifices from humans, and commands and gifts in return for sacrifices from gods” (39). Gods, Diotima tells Socrates, communicate with human beings not directly but through the intermediary of spirits, and Eros is among these spirits.

The Greek gods had parents and a lineage, and Socrates now asks her about the identity of Eros’ mother and father. In the story she tells, Eros’ father is the god Resource and his mother is the god Poverty. Taking after his mother, love is always in need, yet since Resource is his father he desires and works hard to attain good things. Eros is neither rich nor poor, neither mortal nor immortal, neither wise nor ignorant but in between each of these opposite pairings and now one, now the other. He is a lover of wisdom, and where again the lover does not finally attain what he loves but is oriented toward it.

Are all people lovers or only some? Everyone desires what is good and beautiful, and everyone desires happiness, but would we call all people lovers? Also, what is it that we most ultimately want, among the many things that we desire and pursue? We pursue many values, from education and knowledge to material goods and money, status and reputation, family, freedom, security, health, and some other things. We also tend to pursue the same things, so why do we call some lovers and not others? Ultimately, Diotima proposes, we are all lovers and “the only object of people’s love is the good” (42) in the sense that everything we desire, we desire because it is good or because we think it so. We’re all directed toward the good, but we approach it in different ways, while love itself Diotima sums up as “the desire to have the good forever” (43).

If we desire the good and pursue it in many ways, which way is best? She answers, “Love’s function is giving birth in beauty both in body and in mind” (43). What does this mean, Socrates asks? Diotima answers that “All beings are pregnant in body and in mind, and when we reach a degree of adulthood we naturally desire to give birth” (43) to what is good and beautiful. Literal pregnancy and the act that precedes it are acts of creation, and the same can be said of philosophical conversation that leads to knowledge, and a great many other things in human experience. We’re always giving birth in one way or another, creating what is beautiful or good, and “reproduction is the closest mortals can come to being permanently alive and immortal” (44). A writer writes a book, a builder builds a house, a parent brings a child into the world, a teacher shapes a student’s mind, and so on, where in each case our hope is that the created thing will outlive us. The created thing is not identical with its creator, but it is “of the same type” (45). “So you shouldn’t be surprised,” Diotima adds, “if everything naturally values its own offspring. It’s to achieve immortality that everything shows this enthusiasm, which is what love is” (45). Everyone wants to be remembered after they die, and not merely remembered but remembered for their virtues and good deeds. This is why eulogies speak of the virtues of the dead and not of their vices. It is our way of honoring the dead. We admire dead philosophers like Socrates or Plato on account of their ideas or their texts which remain with us and constitute a form of human immortality.

Diotima continues, when we’re young we’re naturally drawn toward a beautiful body, but in time this passion should be tempered by realizing that the beauty of one body is much like the beauty of another. We should then see the good of beautiful bodies in general and not just one; our passion for a single beautiful body ought to be moderated and regarded as a minor matter. Next, the beauty of minds ought to be seen as having more value than bodily beauty. We gradually ascend from the bodily to the mental, from the material to the immaterial, and from the world that the senses put us in contact with to a transcendent order with which our reason alone brings us into contact. Better than beautiful things is “beauty itself, absolute, pure, unmixed, not cluttered up with human flesh and colours and a great mass of mortal rubbish” (49). Plato will say the same of the good: higher than good things is the Good itself (what he will call the Form of the Good), which is the proper object of philosophical inquiry. More on that below.

Such is the account of love, Socrates tells his audience, that Diotima imparted to him and his speech ends here, although the dialogue continues a while longer. Alcibiades now shows up drunk and unruly, asking to be admitted to the banquet. Alcibiades is a military general a good deal younger than Socrates and also enamored of his former teacher. Agathon allows him in and Socrates mentions to his host the relationship that he and Alcibiades once had. Alcibiades wishes to give the final speech which turns into a eulogy more for Socrates himself than for Eros. He begins by mentioning that Socrates never seems to get drunk but always remains in possession of himself no matter how much he drinks and regardless of what is going on around him. Alcibiades, by contrast, is not known for self-control and proceeds to offer a drunken speech about his unsuccessful attempts to seduce Socrates, whom he describes as a master of restraint and moderation. Toward the end of his speech he relates a story about when he and Socrates were on military campaign together and one morning the philosopher stood alone outside on a cold morning to think about some problem and remained silently there throughout the day, to the amazement of all who saw him. “In the end, when it was evening, some of the Ionians, after they’d had dinner, brought their bedding outside (it was summer then), partly to sleep in the cool, and partly to keep an eye on Socrates to see if he would go on standing there through the night too. He stood there till it was dawn and the sun came up; then he greeted the sun with a prayer and went away” (60).

The speeches are now at an end, but the drinking party is not. More people arrive and all are drinking through the night. Socrates again doesn’t sleep but remains up all night drinking and conversing, now on the subject of literature. In the morning he takes his leave and begins a normal day.

We have been focusing on Socrates, but to repeat, scholars find it difficult and often impossible to distinguish the philosophical viewpoint of Socrates from that of his student Plato. The philosophy of love that Socrates relates in his speech he attributes to the wise woman Diotima, but we can presume that it represents Socrates’ own view as well and also Plato’s. Plato’s early dialogues are generally thought to present a more or less accurate characterization of the historical Socrates while in his later writings Socrates continues to appear as the main figure but becomes something of a literary mouthpiece for Plato himself. I’ve alluded above to the concept of the Forms, and before concluding this section of the course it’s important to discuss this doctrine of Plato’s some more.

In a couple of the paintings above we see both Socrates and Plato pointing upward. What this signifies is that they are urging us to look up to a higher realm of ideas or what Plato would call Forms (usually in the upper case). These Forms, Plato believes, comprise a transcendent and knowable realm that is above and in some sense more real than the world of ordinary experience or the world of material nature. Philosophers, Socrates and Plato are urging us, must look up, as a ship’s navigator looks up at the stars rather than focusing always on what lies ahead. This, in a sense, is what Socrates is urging his fellow Athenians to do: to look up or to reflect in a serious way on what passes for knowledge in our culture, to think in a more rational and critical way about the many ordinary opinions that we all hold. How many of those opinions amount to real knowledge? For Socrates and Plato, the answer is not many. Knowledge and opinion are not the same.

In the theory of Forms that Plato would develop, the various objects that we find in our world—from trees and animals and stars to shadows, works of art, numbers, and so on—are all properly regarded as copies or imitations of these Forms. Take a painting of a person, for example. A painting of Socrates isn’t Socrates himself but a copy or an imitation of the man, and as a copy it is in a sense less ultimately real. The painting has less being than Socrates himself, or it possesses a lesser type of reality. Another example is this symbol: 3. This symbol of the number three is not identical with the number itself but it’s a copy of it. As a copy, it again has a lesser kind of reality than three itself or what we might call three-ness. Another example: you and I are both humans, but we are not humanity. We are examples of humanity, not humanity itself. All the symbols in the world of the number three do not amount to three or three-ness itself. The latter is better understood as a definition or something closely resembling a definition. Similarly, humanity is a definition, not a sum of actual flesh and blood human beings. Individual humans change—we grow, our characteristics change, our behavior changes—but humanity remains what it is. Some things change and others do not, and for Plato and many other Greek thinkers, things that change are in a sense lesser or inferior to things that don’t, such as the gods.

Forms (or what are sometimes called Ideas, the ancient Greek word is “idea” and also “eidos”) don’t change. Change and contingency are marks of imperfection, and it is generally characteristic of the world that we perceive with our senses, the world of nature, that it changes continually. The triangle that I draw on a blackboard also changes and can be erased or modified. It is neither a perfect triangle nor what we can call “triangle itself.” It is a copy of triangle, or it is “a” triangle, not triangle. A straight line, to take another example, can’t be drawn on the blackboard but belongs to a different order of being than the physical. It is a properly mathematical object, and these can be copied or represented in the form of physical objects, but imperfectly.

Socrates spends some time in another dialogue, the Republic, discussing the Forms, but he doesn’t spend a lot of time actually demonstrating their existence. Plato does have a few closely related arguments as follows. First, a science such as medicine deals not with my health or yours but with health itself. Health must therefore exist as a unified object of knowledge; this object is a Form. Second, my cat Fluff is one particular cat, not cat itself or cat-ness. Cat is a general concept of which Fluff is only one example. Cat must exist (not just cats), and this is a Form. Third, even if every particular cat in the world were to disappear, cat-ness would not, and nor would it change. Again, cat or cat-ness itself is a Form. When you think about it, we actually spend a fair amount of time talking and reasoning about objects that the senses never make contact with, such as justice or the number three. We can point to just laws or just actions, or to three objects or a mark on a blackboard, but the senses don’t make contact with three itself or justice or beauty or the good itself. The fact that we reason about and know the truth about them suggests that they exist in a reality to which the senses don’t have access. Plato scholars have spent a great deal of time trying to analyze Plato’s theory of the Forms, but Plato’s dialogues themselves spend curiously little time discussing it. He’s clear that there is a Form of the Good, justice, beauty, and the kind of concepts that philosophers are generally interested in, but it’s not entirely clear whether there’s a Form for every object in the world. Is there a form of computer or of toilet? It’s uncertain, although in Book 10 of the Republic Socrates does allude to a Form of couch or bed.

The foremost or highest Form is the Form of the Good (upper case), which Socrates illustrates, again in the Republic, by means of the metaphor of the sun. As the sun illuminates or renders intelligible everything in the world of nature, so the Form of the Good illuminates or renders intelligible all the other Forms which comprise the intelligible realm. Socrates throughout this dialogue wants to know what is the Good, where this means not what things are good but what is goodness itself. Once the philosopher has beheld the Form of the Good, he or she can then understand all the other Forms and also gain a deeper understanding of mathematical objects, physical objects, and images and shadows.

For more on Plato’s theory of the Forms and his larger metaphysical, political, and educational philosophy, see my lecture notes for “Ancient Greek Philosophy” (Philosophy 233) on the same website, although I am not holding you responsible for that material in this course. Socrates, Plato, and his student Aristotle are the three foremost philosophers of ancient Greece and we don’t have time to do more than introduce the first two in this course, but Plato and Aristotle both made major contributions to metaphysics and the theory of knowledge, moral and political philosophy, and the entire field of philosophy in the ancient period. My lecture notes for 233 cover Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s main book on ethics, the Nicomachean Ethics, but there is so much more to their thought than I can cover in these courses and there is also far more to ancient Greek philosophy than these three thinkers.

We have arrived at the conclusion of the Symposium. It is a fairly short text, so make sure you read it from beginning to end.

Part 3: Marcus Aurelius

We now jump ahead several centuries to the second century AD and to the Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, whose dates are 121-180 AD. He served as Roman emperor for the last nineteen years of his life, which was a long time to serve in that position. Many emperors lasted less than a year in that role, and Marcus to this day has a reputation as one of the greatest of the Roman emperors as well as one of the primary representatives of the Stoic school of philosophy. The Meditations (trans. Martin Hammond, New York: Penguin, 2006) is a concise book of reflections on life that he wrote in Greek (long regarded as the language of higher culture while Latin was the everyday language) during the last decade of his life while on campaign along the northern border of the empire. It is essentially a book of private reflections which was likely not intended for publication but for personal edification alone. The above photo is of a bronze statue of the emperor which is in Rome. This being a short text of twelve chapters or “books,” I’ll ask you to read all twelve; if you have a different edition of the book, that is fine.

Let’s start with some basics: what is Stoicism? It can be described as a movement in ancient Greek philosophy which continued throughout the several centuries of the Roman era and went into eclipse around the fourth century AD when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire. Revivals of Stoicism have occurred, most notably during the Italian renaissance (fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries) and, on a smaller scale, in the contemporary period as well. It originated very shortly after the time of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in the thought of Zeno of Citium, a city on the eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus. Zeno taught in Athens beginning around 300 BC, or shortly after the deaths of Plato and Aristotle, and broadly speaking his ideas can be understood as emerging from the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition while taking some of those ideas in a new direction. The central focus of Stoicism would always be ethics. Socrates had taken the view that the central question of philosophy is the good life for human beings, and this question would continue to hold a central position in the classical philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. The good life, all three believed, is the virtuous life. Happiness and virtue are one, in a deep sense that needed to be philosophically clarified and justified, and Stoicism from the beginning would appropriate this idea from Plato and Aristotle while developing it in some novel ways. As a general rule in Western intellectual history, a new movement such as Stoicism does not originate out of the blue but emerges organically from a prior movement or tradition, many of whose ideas are continued while others are modified or rejected, on the model of a conversation where the various interlocutors hold certain ideas in common while disagreeing about others. The Western tradition as a whole can be regarded as one long chain, to take a different metaphor, while every intellectual movement and thinker is a link in this chain. On the whole one finds far more continuity than discontinuity, although the disagreements and innovations have a way of catching our attention.

The starting point, we might say, for all of these thinkers—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and now the Stoics—is that the highest good in human life is happiness (the Greek word is “eudaimonia,” which can be translated as happiness, well being, or flourishing), and that happiness is bound up in a fundamental way with virtuous conduct or a good character. A rational being—the kind of being that we are by nature—cannot be both happy and vicious. If many people believe that a person of bad character can be happy, even the happiest of all, this is false. The morally good life, the life that is proper to a rational being, and happiness are a kind of package deal, all these philosophers believed. They would disagree about the details and the implications of this basic idea, however. The idea would also survive into medieval Christian thought, albeit with much modification. We shall return to this later in the course.

The basic view of Zeno and later Stoic thinkers, both Greek and Roman—Chrysippus, Diogenes, Antipater, Panaetius, Seneca, Epictetus, and others—is that to achieve happiness, the highest good in human life, we must cultivate the virtues rather than devote our lives to the pleasures, power, prestige, or other worldly goods. Worldly goods come and go, but a virtuous character has a constancy about it and a permanence that rises above the contingencies of human life. A virtuous life is the natural condition of every human being, and while the constant pull of the world leads away from this, our happiness and highest good are one with a morally good character. The philosopher and all of us must direct our focus inward and away from the goods and happenings of the world. We might think it counterintuitive for a Roman emperor to hold such a view, a man who would spend so many of his years embroiled in Roman politics and at war with the empire’s enemies, but what we find in this series of reflections is a philosopher-king with one foot in the world of imperial politics and another in a private world of interior cultivation. By Marcus’ time, Stoicism had emerged as a popular philosophy among Roman intellectuals and cultural elites, and in this book we will find its author developing that philosophy further.

Stoicism gets its name from the painted colonnade or walkway (“stoa poikile”) that was located in the Athenian “agora” or public square and marketplace where Socrates had earlier conducted many of his conversations. It was in this beautiful covered walkway that Zeno and many of his fellow intellectuals would debate the ideas that would become the philosophy of Stoicism. The only complete Stoic texts that we possess belong to later Roman figures such as Marcus, Seneca, and Epictetus, while the Stoics in general, as can always be said of an important intellectual movement, disagreed about many of the details of this general philosophy while sharing an underlying worldview.

Marcus’ Meditations isn’t written in the fashion of a modern philosophical treatise but consists of numerous, loosely organized reflections on a series of themes relating to human life generally and to Marcus’ own life in particular. Remember that this isn’t a book intended for a public audience but for himself alone. The autobiographical material is included not merely as an exercise in self-indulgence but as a crucial part of this philosopher’s attempt to understand life in the most profound way possible. We will find a fair amount of repetition between chapters and an overriding mood of serenity and detachment from worldly affairs.

Let’s have a look at some of the more notable reflections from Book 1. He begins by acknowledging his personal indebtedness to family members and teachers, beginning in the very first sentence with two virtues that he owes to his grandfather. Where do the virtues come from? From parents, grandparents, teachers, and other positive role models in our lives as we grow up. To his father, he says, he owes “integrity and manliness” while to his mother “piety, generosity, … simplicity of living,” and a few other things (3). None of us is born with a good character but learns this in a proper social environment, if we are fortunate. He credits his tutor (the education of aristocrats was largely acquired at home at the hands of private tutors) with not becoming excessively attached to public entertainment and sports; the Greens and the Blues, by the way, which he mentions on page 3 were competing chariot racing teams whose fans were famous for getting more than a little carried away in their enthusiasm. His tutor also taught him “to tolerate pain and feel few needs; to work with my own hands and mind my own business; to be deaf to malicious gossip” (3).

From the first page, then, we find Marcus crediting his early role models for the lasting influence they had on his development. Virtues learned in childhood and youth often remain with us through life, and the qualities of character that this emperor now relied upon in his position and in his life had been acquired at this early stage, he says. Bad role models in youth, as Plato had also argued in the Republic, lead to bad behavior and mental turmoil through life, and it is a hypothesis with which Marcus would agree. He continues in this vein through the several pages of Book One, which like the rest of the book is written in the form of short paragraphs and aphorisms organized around a central topic. We begin to get a sense in these opening pages both of Marcus’ early role models and of a larger conception of ethics and the good life which he acquired under their influence and by which he still lives. Later it would be philosophers from whom Marcus would learn these same things on a higher or more abstract level. He credits the Stoic philosopher, teacher, and politician Rusticus, for instance, for teaching him, among other things, “to keep clear of speechifying, versifying, and pretentious language; not to walk around at home in ceremonial dress, or do anything else like that; to write letters in an unaffected style,” as he is now doing in the Meditations (4). His own writing style is unaffected and free of the jargon and stuffy formality that we often find in philosophical writing and public oratory. The art of public speaking or rhetoric was highly valued in the ancient Greek and Roman world and would often degenerate into empty formality, pretentiousness, and sophistry, and we find Marcus here studiously avoiding this habit. Again, it was a habit that was imparted to him from a teacher rather than something he was born with.

He mentions a number of other philosophers, poets, and rhetoricians from Apollonius to Sextus Empiricus, Fronto, Catulus, and others, acknowledging in every case what he learned from them especially by way of the virtues. The crucial part of all education, Marcus tells us, is not information alone but the example that the true teacher imparts, whether we’re speaking of professional teachers, family members, writers and intellectuals, or whomever they might be. From the Stoic philosopher Sextus Empiricus, for example, he says that he learned a great many things, including “the concept of life lived according to nature; an unaffected dignity; intuitive concern for his friends; tolerance both of ordinary people and of the emptily opinionated; … never to give the impression of anger or any other passion, but to combine complete freedom from passion with the greatest human affection; to praise without fanfare, and to wear great learning lightly” (4). By the end of this short chapter, we have an idea of Marcus’ conception of a virtuous character: it is the person whose life is centred around wisdom and truth, dignity and restraint, kindness and friendship, family and gentleness, courage and honesty, and a mild and pleasant disposition. The virtuous individual does not give offence to the gods or to reasonable human beings, while displaying strength of character and resoluteness in the face of difficulty. This individual combines in typically Roman fashion a virile and a humble quality, and the following chapters will spell out in more detail this basic picture of a well lived life.

The second and brief Book 2 was “written among the Quadi on the River Gran.” The Quadi were a Germanic group located above the empire’s northern frontier in what is now Slovakia, and at the time of writing they were threatening to cross into the empire, as many such groups would attempt through the centuries of the Roman empire. Marcus’ army needed to prevent them from crossing this tributary of the Danube into Roman territory, and while on campaign with his troops he spent whatever free time he managed to find reflecting and writing about the challenges involved in living in the midst of human beings who can be difficult. In the opening paragraph he points out that every day we “meet people who are meddling, ungrateful, aggressive, treacherous, malicious, unsocial,” and that we must develop a way of coping with this (10). We cannot change other people’s behavior or character, but we also cannot avoid such people for they exist everywhere. A solution can only lie within ourselves and in the attitude we take toward our fellow human beings. The attitude he recommends is to learn to see all human beings, whether virtuous or vicious in their actions, as akin to us in a deep sense. Other human beings, no matter their behavior, share “in the same mind, the same fragment of divinity” (10). Remember that Marcus is a polytheist, so by “the same fragment of divinity” he isn’t referring to the Judeo-Christian idea that all human beings are made in the image of one God. The gods are many, in Marcus’ view, so the “fragment of divinity” that we all hold in common must be understood in traditional polytheistic terms. We are akin biologically and culturally; we are all Romans, for instance, and in a sense that runs deeper then mere citizenship in a state. “Rome” was as much or more an idea as a city or empire, and to be Roman meant to belong to a common tradition stemming from the sacred founding of that city. We cannot hate our fellow citizens any more than our left hand can hate our right hand. The two are different, but they were made for each other and “were born for cooperation,” as he puts it (10). To hate, then, is against nature, and this notion of nature will be important to the Stoic worldview. We are all a part of nature and must live in accordance with it.

All things and all human beings belong to a natural order that is presided over by the gods. A human being is a biological organism that is made up of body, breath, and mind. Rightly ordered, mind directs the body much as divine forces such as fortune (the Roman goddess of Fortuna) and necessity direct nature. We do not control such forces, nor are we at the center of the universe. We owe to the gods gratitude and a degree of humility for the blessings they bestow on us, and when fortune deals us a blow we should be slow to complain about our lot. Each of us is what he calls an “emanation” of the universe, not something apart from it or above it but one with it in some sense (11). One of the fundamental human realities is that unlike the gods we are mortal. This is one of the realities of our condition, and it falls to everyone to think about it and face up to it in the right way, neither to imagine we can control it nor to shrink from it. Marcus will make frequent reference to death in this book, beginning in Book 2 where he urges us to have no illusions on this subject and, without wallowing in negativity, to face reality with courage and honesty. We are a part of nature, and in nature everything that has life also dies. There is no basis here for self-pity. On the contrary, we ought to remind ourselves often of our own mortality. As he puts it, “You may leave this life at any moment: have this possibility in your mind in all that you do or say or think. Now departure from the world of men is nothing to fear, if gods exist: because they would not involve you in any harm. If they do not exist, or if they have no care for humankind, then what is life to me in a world devoid of gods, or devoid of providence? But they do exist, and they do care for humankind: and they have put it absolutely in man’s power to avoid falling into the true kinds of harm” (12-3). Death itself is not inherently bad, and indeed nothing is bad that is a part of the natural order. If it is natural then it is good, or at least it isn’t evil and there’s no point in railing against it. It “is nothing more than a function of nature—and if anyone is frightened of a function of nature, he is a mere child. And death is not only a function of nature, but also to her benefit” (13). All things are in the hands of providence and so are not to be feared. If death is a common fear, we have the mental power to keep this in perspective and not despair over it. Everything comes and goes, lives and dies, rises and falls, and a philosophical understanding of life must take this basic fact into account. “This too shall pass” is a fundamental tenet in the Stoic worldview, and it’s an idea that Marcus would repeatedly express. The passions in general must be disciplined and held in check; living in accordance with nature doesn’t mean surrendering to every emotion but almost the opposite.

On the subject of death, let’s have a look at a couple of remarks he will make later on in this text: “He who fears death fears either unconsciousness or another sort of consciousness. Now if you will no longer be conscious you will not be conscious either of anything bad. If you are to take on a different consciousness, you will be a different being and life will not cease” (82). There is nothing to fear about death, and if the fear of it is in a sense natural, the antidote to it is to hold a clear-sighted view of it. Later on he recommends “simply awaiting it as one of the functions of nature. And just as you may now be waiting for the child your wife carries to come out of the womb, so you should look forward to the time when your soul will slip this bodily sheath” (84). To “look forward” in this sense isn’t to long for it but to accept it as a simple and natural inevitability. It also has an upside: “stop to consider the business you will be leaving and the sort of characters which will no longer contaminate your soul” (84-5).

It is imperative, Marcus believes, to maintain a philosophical perspective on life in face of the difficulties that befall us all. Philosophy, he says, or Stoic philosophy anyway, can guide us through life and “consists in keeping the divinity within us inviolate and free from harm, master of pleasure and pain, doing nothing without aim, truth, or integrity, and independent of others’ action or failure to act” (15). This will be a recurring theme throughout the book and in the thought of all the Stoics.

Book 3 was written in Carnuntum which was a Roman fortress and city also located on the Danube river along the empire’s northern frontier. Marcus now reflects some more upon nature, always a major theme in Stoic thought. Contemplating nature as a whole is an important practice, he says, and it is not at all difficult to do. He mentions examples from everyday life such as the split at the top of a fresh loaf of bread, the “bloom and fresh beauty in an old woman or an old man,” and similar perceptions which if we linger upon them rather than always be racing through life serve to remind us of nature in its wondrous totality and beauty (17). Most everything in nature can be so regarded, and when we do so habitually one develops “a genuine affinity for Nature and her works” (17). This kind of affinity is a sense of the oneness of ourselves with others of our species and with the world as a whole, and it requires no great intellectual feat to accomplish. It is simple yet uncommon, and simple things can make the difference between a happy life and an unhappy one. Learn, he says, to get control over your own thoughts, for example about other people. How much of our time is spent thinking and talking about other people, judging the things they do, letting their actions affect us, worrying what they think of us, and so on. None of this holds any real meaning, Marcus contends, yet we waste so much of our time preoccupied with these trivialities. What someone thinks about you, especially someone who doesn’t know you, doesn’t matter, so direct your mind to the things that do matter. Anyone can do this, but few actually do. As he advises, “Train yourself to think only those thoughts such that in answer to the sudden question ‘What is in your mind now?’ you could say with immediate frankness whatever it is” (18). Keep your mind on worthy things rather than allow it to wander wherever it will, as most of us likely do.

He again praises the virtues of self-control, courage, justice, solidarity with our fellow human beings, humility, and also cheerfulness. The Stoic is not overly grave in disposition but kindly and cheerful, for the most part anyway. A dour frame of mind is incompatible with a Stoic outlook on life for if we are in a fundamental sense one with nature and nature itself is good, it follows that human life is good and beautiful when regarded as a whole. We are often consumed by the details of life, and while Marcus doesn’t urge us to forget about any of that he does urge us to keep such things in perspective. We ought to subject every part of our life “to methodical and truthful examination, always at the same time using this scrutiny as a means to reflect on the nature of the universe, the contribution any given action or event makes to that nature, the value this has for the Whole, and the value it has for man” (21). A truthful examination of the everyday stuff of life importantly includes an accent on the divine, which is a frequently repeated theme in this book. “No action,” he says, “in the human context will succeed without reference to the divine, nor vice versa” (21-2).

In Book 4 Marcus continues his analysis of the virtuous character, likening it in the opening paragraph to a large fire that cannot be easily extinguished but absorbs everything we throw into it and masters it. The more we throw onto the fire the larger it grows, and it is not vulnerable as a small fire is. The noble soul has an independence about it; as much as it values sociability it is not needy of others and often prefers to retreat within itself for peace and quiet. Periodic retreat from the world and into oneself and one’s thoughts is to be recommended. As you “retreat into your own little territory within yourself,” he recommends reflecting on two thoughts in particular. The first is “that things cannot touch the mind: they are external and inert…. Second, that all these things you see will change almost as you look at them, and then will be no more” (24). Everything in this world changes and is contingent, including the difficulties of life and the slings and arrows that befall all of us. Therefore, we should not become overly invested in any of them, including our personal reputation which we tend to overvalue. If others think badly of us, still this doesn’t harm us. The only thing that can make one’s life truly worse is when one’s character becomes worse through bad behavior. We often imagine that others are harming us when in truth they don’t actually have this power. If others think or speak ill of us, this only harms us when we judge their opinion as carrying more weight than our own or that of the gods. If someone criticizes us, we should give that criticism a rational and honest assessment. If their criticism contains truth, we should amend our ways and be grateful to our critic. If it’s untrue, then see it for what it is and don’t get carried away with emotion. Marcus is not against the emotions; his point regarding the emotions is not that they are in any way bad but that we shouldn’t live by them but subject them to the governing power of reason. We are rational beings by nature, as Plato and Aristotle had also said, and our lives go well when we live accordingly.

A rational being keeps all worldly goods in perspective, including fame and reputation which Marcus speaks of quite often. Remember that he was not only a philosopher but an emperor, and one thing emperors have in common is a love of fame and glory. He reminds his readers and himself that “One who is all in a flutter over his subsequent fame fails to imagine that all those who remember him will very soon be dead—and he too” (26). Reflecting on death logically leads to reflecting on life and whether we’re making the most of it in the time that is given to us. He is not saying that the goods of this world—reputation, power, wealth—are empty but that they’re not ultimate, as we often imagine. What is ultimately important is living in accordance with nature and with our own rational nature. When we do so we’re able to keep things in perspective, for instance to bear in mind that all human things change and also repeat themselves, as history repeats itself and moves in cycles (an almost universal belief in the ancient world). As he expresses this idea, “the Whole [both the natural and the human world] loves nothing so much as to change from one form of existence into another, similar but new. All that exists is in a sense the seed of its successor” (30). A good character, he says toward the end of Book 4, is like “the rocky headland on which the waves constantly break. It stands firm, and round it the seething waters are laid to rest” (33). Such a character has a constancy about it, and again it is the moral virtues that make it so.

Marcus urges his readers throughout this book to live in accordance with nature, which as we have seen is a constant theme in Stoicism. Book 5 begins with its author urging us to begin every day by giving thought to the myriad animals in nature and how they are likely to spend the day. They get right to work or set about some regular purpose, whether it be finding food, caring for offspring, or whatever it is. We often mistakenly think that acting in accordance with nature means doing whatever we feel like; animals in nature don’t do whatever they feel like but act constantly with a purpose. We also, Marcus recommends, should meet every day with a renewed sense of purpose, and that purpose isn’t merely to live a comfortable life or to maximize pleasure. It is to do something that holds a meaning. Bear in mind that Marcus himself was very much a man of action, an emperor at the same time that he was a philosopher. A contemplative life and a life of action are not opposed to each other, as we often imagine. They are properly bound up with each other, just as Socrates had urged all of us, whoever we are and whatever we do for a living, always to live an examined life. Marcus is not urging everyone to become a philosopher or to write a book like the Meditations but to cultivate whatever virtues do come more or less naturally to us. “So display,” he says, “those virtues which are wholly in your own power—integrity, dignity, hard work, self-denial, contentment, frugality, kindness, independence, simplicity, discretion, magnanimity” (36). One needn’t be an intellectual or highly educated to cultivate any of these. The majority of people undervalue these qualities of character and overvalue tangible goods. A Roman emperor had access to all the tangible goods in the world—money, power, reputation, glory, pleasure—and he found little meaning in all of it. This is not where true happiness is found, he believes both on the basis of his personal experience and as a matter of philosophical principle.

If happiness is found in cultivating a good character, does it follow that happiness is a matter of chance for the reason that our character is an unchangeable fact about us? Our personality seems to be more or less a given, so is he urging us to do the impossible? His point here is not that we can wholly reinvent ourselves but that every one of us has the power of mind and the freedom to transform our character. He gives us the following metaphor: “Your mind will take on the character of your most frequent thoughts: souls are dyed by thoughts. So dye your own with a succession of thoughts like these,” following which he gives us examples of thoughts that have this power to alter our character or soul. The reflection just noted about animals is one. Another is this: “each creature is made in the interest of another; its course is directed to that for which it was made; its end lies in that to which its course is directed; and where its end is, there also for each is its benefit and its good. It follows that the good of a rational creature is community” (41). In his own case, Marcus’ own good is the good of the Roman empire and its people, and for those of us who are not emperors the good still lies in serving our community in the ways of which we are capable. Having a purpose in the sense in which he has been speaking of it is inseparable from serving our community.

Everything in the universe, Marcus tells us, is directed toward something. It is a direction that is given by what he calls “the ultimate power in the universe,” which is itself something to be revered (42). He calls it “Nature” or “the whole of existence, of which you are the tiniest part” (42). This nature has a divine quality, which is an idea we find expressed time and again by ancient philosophers, poets, and others. Remember again that this idea is part of a polytheistic, not Judeo-Christian, worldview. The gods are many, and a good human life is lived in proper relation to these divinities as well as to our human community. The individual in seeking happiness does not regard their happiness apart from these relations. While happiness is the highest good in life, one ought also to keep happiness in proper perspective, which is that in the larger scheme of things one’s own happiness and life is but a small and fleeting thing. Any kind of hedonism or narcissism is explicitly ruled out, as is the hubris which the ancient Greeks taught us to avoid at all costs.

Marcus begins Book 6 with a short encapsulation of the Stoic outlook: everything in nature and history changes, so do not become overly attached to the goods of this world. “Let one thing be your joy and comfort: to move on from social act to social act, with your mind on god,” or the gods (46). Stay humble and retain a perspective on the totality of life. When you achieve success, position, or a fine reputation, remember that “your purple-edged robe” [in Roman times the emperor alone was permitted to wear the color purple] is “simply the hair of a sheep soaked in shell-fish blood” (47). Think of how much of life is spent pursuing awards and honors and of the meaning that such things hold. For Marcus, they are devoid of any real meaning even as so many people pursue them relentlessly. One receives an award, let’s say, for a certain achievement. The action that constitutes the achievement may hold meaning, but the award itself holds none. What is an award but other people’s estimation of your action’s value or of you yourself—and what is the value of their estimation? His answer is very little or none, and the people themselves are not long for this earth. Keeping such matters in perspective, then, means seeing them as either short on or completely without significance.

Marcus well knows that the attitude he’s recommending here is quite rare, even among many of those who might regard it as noble. It’s a difficult attitude to maintain and requires constant reminding. The constant pull of the world is toward worldly goods, he points out, but it’s best to resist this pull as much as we can. He’s not recommending a full-blown asceticism—a thoroughgoing renunciation of material goods and pleasures—but a more measured acknowledgement of the non-ultimate nature or value of such things. An athlete seeks victory and works hard toward this end; this is commendable, but the trophy or medal they earn is but a material object. Below, Marcus is depicted, as emperors often were, wearing a laurel wreath. To more mediocre politicians, that wreath would mean a great deal, and to Marcus it probably doesn’t mean a thing. What holds meaning is the service to the Roman people that he spent nearly two decades doing his best to provide.

It is a strenuous ideal that Marcus is recommending, and while he is well aware of this, he also reassures us that it is not beyond our means. Anything that is humanly achievable can be achieved by you, and if not anything at all then most things. What he calls “a godly habit of mind and social action” can be achieved by anyone (51). It doesn’t take a genius or a saint to live like a Stoic, he tells us. It requires a fair degree of resolve, courage, self-restraint, and a few other things all of which are within the means of most of us and maybe all.

In the middle of Book 6 Marcus expresses an especially important reflection: “You should meditate often on the connection of all things in the universe and their relationship to each other. In a way all things are interwoven and therefore have a family feeling for each other: one thing follows another in due order through the tension of movement, the common spirit inspiring them, and the unity of all being” (53). He has said this before in the book, but this passage beautifully summarizes Stoic metaphysics. Everything that has being, including each one of us, is related both to other particular beings, to nature as a whole, and to a larger and divine order, and we lose our way when we lose sight of these relations. When one views one’s life in the opposite way—as a purely egoistic search for pleasure, wealth, fame, and so on—one is on a path to despair. Notice how a Stoic viewpoint on the universe logically entails a viewpoint on human life and on the good life. Ethics is grounded in metaphysics or in a comprehensive conception of all that exists. What exists again is nature, and I myself am a part of nature; the good life can only be an extension of what it means to belong to this larger order of the world rather than something purely self-regarding.

The second half of this book finds Marcus reflecting on similar themes while spelling out their implications in a variety of ways. Some of this I will skip over, but one theme he mentions in the opening paragraph and from time to time throughout Book 7 is historical repetition. History repeats itself, and indeed “There is nothing new. All is familiar, and all short-lived” (58). This applies to history generally and to our own lives as well. We often imagine that what we are seeing today in our own personal experience or in the general society is novel, but it isn’t. We may not have noticed it before or it may be new to us, but it is not new. The general rule with everything human is repetition, but repetition with a difference. In our own time, for example, every election is the most important election of our lifetime, or so the politicians constantly tell us. The reality is that every election is equally important or unimportant; the same things are said, the same issues are debated, the same strategies are pursued and promises made, with the same results or with small variations on a recurring set of themes. Anything that is genuinely new in my personal experience has been experienced by others countless times before, or something very closely resembling it, and it will go on happening for others in future. If we are sometimes tempted to feel like no one has ever gone through what we are now going through, this is an illusion. Probably everyone and every time has experienced something very similar. “No one has ever seen anything like this” is a statement that is almost never true. The latest pop star is much like the pop stars of the decade before and the decade before that. They may be new to us but they’re anything but new. For Marcus and the other Stoics, and indeed for Greek and Roman thinkers generally, the fundamental view of history is of a process that repeats itself endlessly. Still in Book 7, he will repeat this point as follows: “Look back over the past—all those many changes of dynasties. And you can foresee the future too: it will be completely alike, incapable of deviating from the rhythm of the present. So for the study of human life forty years are as good as ten thousand: what more will you see?” (65). He expresses this again in Book 11 (105). We’ll return to this idea when we get to Augustine.

Another important theme in this book is inwardness, and he will allude to it almost in passing throughout the text, often briefly. In one place, for example, he writes: “Dig inside yourself. Inside there is a spring of goodness ready to gush at any moment, if you keep digging” (67). This “spring of goodness” he has previously referred to as a “fragment of divinity” which is naturally occurring and also the same in everyone. Every human being belongs to nature, and if nature as a whole is good then so are the particulars that make it up. In a polytheistic worldview, the gods are everywhere, and this includes within the soul of every individual. This is not to say that everyone’s behavior is good or their character but that they themselves, or something that lies within them, is good if one cares to go in search of it. In the following book he will state that “a mind free from passions is a fortress: people have no stronger place of retreat, and someone taking refuge here is then impregnable” (80).

Everything in the universe, he tells us in Book 8, came into existence for a reason, and in the case of human beings that purpose cannot be merely to pursue pleasure. Each of us must ask ourselves, “For what purpose, then, were you created?” (74). There must be more to it than a life of pleasure, but identifying what that purpose is requires every individual to think for oneself. That purpose will relate each of us to the larger community and to nature as a whole, but such relations are myriad. Not everyone has the same purpose in life, even while they all may be of good character. Our purpose should show itself in the work that we do, even while people work at various occupations. Someone who works as a Roman senator or a general does not carry out the same actions as a craftsman or a farmer, but all of them and their occupations are capable of achieving the ideal that Marcus is recommending.

As Aristophanes said in his speech in the Symposium, like seeks like or all things seek that with which they have some affinity or similarity. Marcus concurs with this, noting in Book 9 that “All things which share some common quality tend to their own kind” (85). People who have similar interests gravitate toward one another, just as birds of a feather flock together and “Fire rises upwards because of the elemental fire” (85). It is a law of nature that all beings tend toward things of a similar kind. Where does this leave the other, or that which is different from oneself? Again in the way that our left hand regards the right: different and yet equal parts of the whole. One hand doesn’t despise the other, so on Marcus’ view we shouldn’t despise any human being but see them always in relation to the same community of which we ourselves are a part.

Where religion is concerned, Marcus would always be a pious man, but again not in a Christian sense. Marcus was well aware of Christianity, but his attitude toward it is a bit difficult to discern. As an emperor, he needed to observe and to enforce the official religion of the empire which was polytheism. Some respect was afforded to the Jewish people and their faith primarily owing to the ancientness of their religion, but the same tolerance was not afforded to Christian groups which were becoming established in numerous cities of the empire during Marcus’ reign. Marcus’ policy as emperor was largely to leave this legally prohibited religion to local officials while he himself appears to have taken a rather dim view of Christians and perhaps of Christianity as a religion. He would write almost nothing about it, however. As a man of religion, we find Marcus writing in a representative passage from Book 10 as follows: “A great help to keeping these claims to virtue fresh in your mind will be to keep your mind on the gods, remembering that what they want is not servile flattery but the development of all rational beings into their own image: they want the fig-tree to do the proper work of a fig-tree, the dog of a dog, the bee of a bee—and man the proper work of man” (97). Again, the gods are many, and while the virtue of religion is to offer proper homage to them, this is carried out primarily by means of actions rather than sacrifices alone. Polytheists were forever offering sacrifices to the gods, and in Marcus’ time this was a matter of legal as well as moral obligation, but as he says in this passage what matters more than fulfilling such obligations is doing the work that is proper to a rational being—cultivating our character, exercising the virtues, acting for the common good, and so on. For Roman emperors, the trouble with Christians is that they refused to offer sacrifices to the traditional gods that had been recognized by the state for centuries. This was a serious matter to Rome because religion was not regarded as a primarily private or inward matter but as a public one. Offering sacrifices to the gods was long regarded as an expression of citizenship no less, and indeed more, than one of inward spirituality. In Marcus’ time traditional polytheism and Christian monotheism were on a collision course, and while he was on the polytheist side he was reluctant to bring the full force of law to bear against the new religion.

On the question of why Marcus believes in such gods and whether he has ever seen them, he gives us a short answer at the very end of the book. The gods, he says, “are in fact visible to our eyes. Secondly, and notwithstanding, that I have not seen my own soul either, and yet I honour it. So it is with the gods too: from my every experience of their power time after time I am certain that they exist, and I revere them” (121). In more modern terms, we might say that I have not seen my “self” either or perceived such a being with any of my senses (I see a body but not a self), and yet I believe that I am a self (person, mind, soul) and that such a being is an object of respect and a bearer of rights.

Toward the end of the Meditations we find Marcus repeating many of the same themes he has discussed to this point: the fact of historical repetition, the emphasis on Nature and our relationship with the Whole (always in the upper case), rationality, mortality, the importance of cultivating the virtues, and so on. We find a constant tying together of metaphysics and ethics, where philosophical reflection on the universe and on human nature logically produces implications for how we ought to live in the world. The bottom line for Marcus is always the matter of how one ought to conduct oneself in the midst of the difficulty of life and in a world that is so far from perfect, and his recommendation is always that we cultivate restraint, dignity, generosity, justice, and the rest of the Stoic virtues. He is not in any way opposed to the emotions, but he does not regard them as a guide for living. The passions must always be held in check, he would always insist.

It is a strenuous ideal that he would call for, but likely no more strenuous than what Plato and Aristotle had recommended or later Christian theologians. All of these thinkers were in their own way emphasizing the virtues and the inseparability of these from the kind of happiness that is proper to human beings, even while important philosophical differences would separate them.

Part 4: Augustine

Augustine of Hippo (a city of the Roman empire, now named Annaba, on the south shore of the Mediterranean in what is now Algeria) was a bishop of the Roman Catholic church and a philosopher, theologian, and teacher who lived from 354 to 430 AD. We are moving forward, then, two centuries from the time of Marcus Aurelius. Augustine was declared a saint of the Catholic church in 1303, nearly 900 years after his death, although throughout those centuries and to the present day he has been regarded as one of the foremost philosopher-theologians of the Christian tradition and perhaps the preeminent thinker of the period that historians call “late antiquity” (roughly the third through the eight centuries AD) or the transitional era from Roman times into the so-called medieval period or the Middle Ages. The Confessions has long been considered his masterpiece and in some ways as foreshadowing more modern sensibilities as well, and it is one of many books he would write. The City of God is perhaps his second most famous work, although we will limit ourselves in this course to the Confessions. (trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin. New York: Penguin, 1961; it’s fine if you have a different edition). Because of the length of this book, I won’t ask you to read it in its entirety, although as with any classic work I do recommend it. Instead, I’ll ask you to read books 1, 3, 7, and 11 (which totals about 90 pages), and the notes below will cover these chapters. First, however, let’s have a look at the larger picture of what Augustine was attempting in his various literary works and in his life as a bishop.

Most paintings of Augustine depict him looking upward toward heaven and God, including the one above. The first and most obvious point of distinction, then, between this figure and the preceding philosophers is that he is very much a Christian monotheist and at some remove from the Greco-Roman polytheist tradition. Augustine may be thought of as a hinge between the intellectual worlds of ancient and medieval times and the foremost synthesizer until Thomas Aquinas of the spiritual tradition of Jerusalem with the philosophical tradition of Athens and Rome. Augustine sought to weave together these two conceptual frameworks, and most famously in his Confessions of 397-400 and The City of God of 413-426. His task is a large one, and it is to integrate the numerous books of the Old and New Testaments not only with each other but with major elements of Greek and Roman philosophy, especially the new forms of platonism that had become influential at the time. Augustine would never be especially impressed by Stoicism, nor did the philosophy of Aristotle (most of Aristotle’s writings were not available in Augustine’s time and would be rediscovered some centuries later) find its way into his thought. He did read Plato in Latin translation and also Plato’s more recent followers, the neoplatonists (especially Plotinus), and was much influenced by them. Neoplatonism seemed to Augustine to contain the conceptual resources needed to interpret important biblical ideas or to raise them to a higher order of philosophical clarity. Latin was the dominant language in the culture of Augustine’s time, and he also wrote in this language. In the centuries of the Roman republic and (subsequently) empire, Latin had been the primary language of state and of everyday life while classical Greek had remained the language of higher culture. By late antiquity Latin was displacing Greek in the latter role and would remain so until early modern times. The next two philosophers we will read, Boethius and Thomas Aquinas, would also write in Latin.

Biblical interpretation was Augustine’s constant preoccupation, as in text after text we find him seeking clarification of the myriad issues that arise in the reading of this library of books and of their implications for church doctrine. Augustine converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of thirty-two after what he would characterize in the Confessions as “my adolescence, with all its shameful sins” and nine years as a “hearer” (student) among the followers of Mani, an Iranian religious thinker and founder of Manichaeism (133). Some wandering in the intellectual wilderness would lead to a series of conversions first to Manichaeism and subsequently to what he would simply call “philosophy”—especially Plato, Cicero, and Plotinus—and finally to Catholicism. Throughout his life he would draw upon a wide cultural and philosophical heritage in an attempt to satisfy the intellectual and spiritual requirements of the turbulent era that followed the disintegration of the western Roman empire.

In 313 the emperor Constantine had for the first time legalized the Christian religion throughout the Roman empire, and it became the official state religion under Theodosius in 380, when Augustine was twenty-six years old. The larger process of Christianization in the West took a few centuries to unfold as ancient polytheism hung on tenaciously for several centuries, especially in rural areas. In order to find acceptance among urban intellectuals and cultural elites the new monotheistic faith required elaborate philosophical-theological articulation, a process that would take centuries and that in a way continues through the present day. How could the faith of the Roman church and the larger biblical tradition be squared with the philosophical tradition stemming from Greece? This is a very large issue and it underlies everything that Augustine would write.

Both Augustine and the Catholic church to which he belongs would attempt not to jettison Greek and Roman philosophy but to Christen it or rebrand it as it were. The logos—reason—isn’t abandoned but transformed into “the word made flesh.” Reason and faith would need to be synthesized, and he expresses this in his twin formulas of “believe in order to understand” and “understand, the better to believe.” The act of faith, in other words, makes possible a richer understanding of human existence and the world while also inviting a reasoned scrutiny which deepens our belief. The divine does not wholly transcend human reason, and if it is “through a glass, darkly,” as Saint Paul had said, that we see, we see nonetheless. Faith and reason, correctly understood, are in harmony, as are wisdom and knowledge. We may speak of human reason and of divine reason, or of lower and higher forms of rationality where the former is dependent upon the latter while salvation is not contingent upon a highly sophisticated grasp of doctrine. Faith (also authority) and reason are both oriented toward a truth that is inscribed in the human heart. As he expresses it, “with regard to the acquiring of knowledge, we are of necessity led in a twofold manner: by authority and by reason. In point of time, authority is first; in the order of reality, reason is prior” (On Order, in The Essential Augustine, ed. Vernon J. Bourke [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985], 26). Further, “Authority demands faith, and prepares man for reason. Reason leads him on to knowledge and understanding. But reason is not entirely useless to authority; it helps in considering what authority is to be accepted. Clearly the greatest authority is that of the known and clearly evident Truth Itself” (The True Religion, in The Essential Augustine, 31). To knowledge belongs the rational perception of temporal or worldly truths while to wisdom belongs the equally rational comprehension of what is eternal.

Faith in the God of Christianity needs to be rationally established, Augustine believes, as does the authority of the Roman church. Human reason as he conceives of it is not a special capacity of mind that is wholly separate from either divine reason, faith, or perception. Indeed, our perception of the world already contains intimations and rational apprehensions of divine truths which include the creation itself. As he expresses it in a sermon on Psalm 26, “Let your mind roam through the whole creation; everywhere the created world will cry out to you: ‘God made me.’ Whatever pleases you in a work of art brings to your mind the artist who wrought it; much more, when you survey the universe, does the consideration of it evoke praise for its Maker…. Go round the heavens again and back to the earth, leave out nothing; on all sides everything cries out to you of its Author” (On Psalm 26, in The Essential Augustine, 131-2).

His aim is to develop a religious philosophy that incorporates what he admires in Christian spirituality with Cicero’s rhetorical art and commitment to rational speculation. Augustine’s early conversion to philosophy follows his first encounter with Cicero’s Hortensius, a text that is lost to us but that sang the praises of the contemplative life. The combination of Cicero’s high style and devotion to wisdom effected a revolution in the young rhetorician; what Christianity needs, he would come to believe as a young man, is its own Cicero, this first-century BC Roman master of public oratory. The path to his later conversion, or reversion, to Catholicism would lie in a way of life devoted to a wisdom that itself is a combination of Judeo-Christian spirituality with the best of Roman and Greek tradition. The latter could be mined for intellectual resources that can clarify and refine the Christianity with which he had been raised to an order of discourse that was equal to Cicero.

The greatest philosophers in the classical tradition, he believes, are Plato and his contemporary adherents or the neoplatonists, particularly Plotinus, Iamblichus, Porphyry, and Apuleius, all of whom may be enlisted for developing a Christian philosophy. He would engage in a selective retrieval and rechristening of a good many neoplatonic ideas, especially the idea that we should “look for truth as something incorporeal,” notions of spiritual ascent and the fall of the soul, the divine principle within the soul, and the conception of God (154). As he would state, “the Platonist philosophers … saw that no material body is God, and therefore they went beyond all bodies in their search for God. They saw that nothing mutable is the supreme God, and therefore they went beyond every soul and all mutable spirits in their search for the supreme God. They also saw that, in every mutable thing, the form that makes it what it is, in whatever measure and of whatever nature it is, can only have its existence from him who truly is because he exists immutably” (The City of God, Books 1-10, 249). In addition to its popularity in intellectual circles at the time, neoplatonism had both metaphysical and moral affinities with Christianity. There is an otherworldliness in neoplatonism that Augustine admired and would come to regard as an antidote to the materialism of much ancient philosophy.

One question that would immediately strike Augustine upon his conversion is how we should interpret particular biblical passages in a way that is rational. Not all such passages, he believes, should be taken literally but rather figuratively or metaphorically—but how are we to tell which passages to take literally and which to take figuratively? Developing an eye for the figurative and discerning its meaning in context is no straightforward undertaking, and his method crucially involves attending to the kind of symbols and tropes that were freely used in both the New and (especially) the Old Testament. Particular actions, for instance, “that strike the ignorant as infamous, whether they are only said, or also done, whether attributed to God or to men whose holiness is being commended to us, they are all to be taken as figurative, and their secret meanings have to be winkled out for the nourishment of charity” (Teaching Christianity, 185).

The Confessions is arguably Augustine’s greatest and undoubtedly his most personal book, and he composed it in his early-mid forties at the conclusion of the fourth century. What we find in this text is both a spiritual autobiography and an artful synthesis of the traditions of Athens and Jerusalem. Now a bishop at Hippo, his task as both author and prelate is to evangelize audiences that ranged from Catholic, Manichean, Donatist, and other Christian communities to philosophers from the various Greco-Roman schools of thought. This is a tall order, and making it taller still is his ambition to address Roman intellectuals in the high rhetorical style that he and they had both come to expect while also speaking to the heart. Indeed, it is an evolution of the heart that the general narrative of the Confessions relates, the spiritual development of a man of God who would always retain one foot in the classical “pagan” or polytheist world. Comprehending the “God of the philosophers,” chiefly the neoplatonists, together with the God of the Old and New Testaments is a very difficult undertaking, and carrying it out would require both enormous intellectual labor and a conversion of heart from his youthful ways to a new kind of spiritual openness. As he expresses it, “I discovered something that was at once beyond the understanding of the proud and hidden from the eyes of children. Its gait was humble, but the heights it reached were sublime. It was enfolded in mysteries, and I was not the kind of man to enter into it or bow my head to follow where it led. But these were not the feelings I had when I first read the Scriptures. To me they seemed quite unworthy of comparison with the stately prose of Cicero, because I had too much conceit to accept their simplicity and not enough insight to penetrate their depths. It is surely true that as the child grows these books grow with him. But I was too proud to call myself a child” (60). The “confession” (“confessio”) is both an acknowledgment of sin and an act of worship, and both entail a turning of the heart which is not contrary to reason.

The Confessions is simultaneously a work of philosophy, a Christian conversion story, and an autobiography of a kind. The recollections he relates are self-critical to a point we are likely to regard as excessive, unless we regard sins committed in childhood and indeed infancy with the seriousness that Augustine does. The conversion of mind and heart that the book recounts is long on angst, which is among the qualities that give it a somewhat modern sensibility.

Augustine the philosopher, we mustn’t forget, was also a bishop of the Roman city of Hippo Regius. The Confessions’ focus on the interior life would need to be balanced in his own life with the practical realities of his position which spanned everything from preaching church doctrine to the rather mundane settling of legal disputes, most of which concerned the disposal of wills. A good deal of the philosophy underlying medieval Christendom’s general approach to government and public policy was influenced by Augustine, and central to his view are the notions of spiritual warfare and the demonic. The church and its people are at war, spiritually and often overtly, and defeating the enemy requires a resoluteness of will of which the Roman state had provided the example. A community of faith that had been persecuted would in time turn the tables on its enemies, and part of Augustine’s theoretical project would be to formulate a Christian political philosophy.

The polytheists’ divinities, he believes, are either demonic or nonexistent. They have nothing to teach us, especially by way of moral example as their actions exhibit some of the worst forms of depravity. For Augustine, the demonic has a real presence in the world and its powers of persuasion are considerable. Strong measures are needed to defeat it, and when rational persuasion won’t do, legal force may be necessary. This world is the scene of a monumental struggle between the forces of good and evil, and where evil itself, as he believes, doesn’t exist in positive terms but is an absence of the good and a separation from the divine.

Augustine’s philosophy, or theology, of history is also a central theme. Human history, theologically regarded (rather than prosaic history, or the kind of historical research that a modern historian would conduct), is the history of salvation, and the larger undertakings of church, state, and other historical actors all participate in the divine purpose of leading mortal humanity one way or another to the city of God. History itself—again, sacred history—has a “telos” or a goal which is to bring about the universal salvation of souls, and all education and culture is rightly oriented to this end. The idea isn’t entirely Augustine’s invention; it is anticipated in the Old and New Testaments and in the writings of Origen and Eusebius (two other important Christian theologians) in the third and fourth centuries, but he would refine and amplify the concept of history no longer as a cyclical and repetitive clash of forces but as purposive, linear, and explicitly teleological. The past contains a message and a plan, even while it lacks inevitability. It provides the source of political legitimacy as well since human efforts are required to carry out the divine will.

So much for a general overview of Augustine’s project; let’s look more closely now at the Confessions. I haven’t asked you to read the translator’s introduction to this text, but the introductory sections to all the Penguin editions in this course are well worth reading, and the Hackett introductions as well. Of course, far more important is reading the primary text. We begin with Book 1. He begins with words of praise for God, not surprising for a Christian theologian but perhaps a little irregular for a Roman philosopher. He speaks immediately of the need within human nature for worship and for God, saying “our hearts find no peace until they rest in you” (21). There is, Augustine believes, a profound restlessness within each of us, a sense of dissatisfaction or incompleteness in all our dealings with the world. This universal restlessness inclines us, as Plato had said in a very different way, to look upward—not, for Augustine, to a realm of Forms but to a transcendent spiritual order. In the painting above, Augustine is again looking upward, with one hand on a text and one on his heart. Heart and mind must be integrated together, as he will repeat throughout this book.

What the nature of the Christian God is will be a large question for Augustine, and he’ll come back to this issue time and again throughout this text and in basically everything he would ever write. He indicates to begin with that we should not think of the Christian God as remote, impersonal, amoral, or in any way removed from us. There is an otherworldliness and a mysticism in Augustine’s thought, and this partly explains his attraction to neoplatonism. However, the God he is speaking of in the Confessions is a personal divinity, something one finds both in the world and within oneself, and indeed in the deepest part of oneself. As he writes, “I should not exist, unless I existed in you. For all things find in you their origin, their impulse, the centre of their being” (22). In Christianity, of course, God is the creator of all things, and as the creator he leaves a divine trace in everything he creates, somewhat like an artist who leaves a signature on a work of art. Another very imperfect analogy: the author of these lecture notes is imperceptible to you but for his name at the top of this document. As you read page after page you might think this individual doesn’t exist for you don’t encounter him on any page or in any sentence. The author is in a sense nowhere because you don’t perceive him, but in another sense he is everywhere. The creator of anything is “in” the thing he or she creates, or inhabits it so to speak, and in a way that we can become aware of. God is “in” all of creation, for Augustine, and we can develop an eye for this if we choose. Recall Marcus’ surprising statement quoted above that the gods “are in fact visible to our eyes.” He wasn’t speaking of the biblical God, but he gives us this curious statement and then moves on without explaining his meaning in the way we might wish. An atheist, of course, will immediately reply that what is visible to our eyes is a material world only, and neither the gods of the polytheists nor the God of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). Augustine will return to this issue as the book goes along, but his view will be that to “see” the world is a complicated matter involving the mind and also the heart, and that it is more than one. I “see” the pencil on the table, the moon in the night sky, the hand in front of my face, a photo of myself as a child, my own child walking toward me, a painting of a beautiful landscape, and so on; is the act of seeing here one or many? In a passage quoted above, Augustine speaks of the Bible as being “veiled in mystery” and invisible to the proud; in order to see or read this text in the right way, he is saying, one must do so not as a coldly intellectual exercise but with a certain state of the heart. It remains “veiled in mystery” even then, but it begins to come into view when approached in the proper state.

What state is that? It’s not easy to say, but we get a clue to this already in the title of the book. To confess requires an attitude of self-reflection and especially humility. The proud do not confess in this sense of the word but remain in a way distant or haughty. Confession requires personal sincerity and a humble heart, and we find Augustine throughout this book recounting the story of his life in precisely this way. He doesn’t present himself as a man without sin, and indeed very much to the contrary. He tells us at length of his youthful indiscretions and even sins he committed in early childhood. Why is he telling us, for example, that he didn’t work hard enough at his education as a boy? Who did? We’ve probably all done worse than that, and yet shrug it off and forget about it. Is he being excessively scrupulous, neurotic even? We’ll see, but in this first chapter and beyond he recounts the story of his upbringing, not hiding his failings but very much highlighting them. He states, “I broke my troth with you,” and “to love this world is to break troth with you” (34). The English word “truth” comes from “troth,” and it means faith or trust, that on which we can rely (such as a true friend). To break troth is to violate an agreement or someone’s trust, to break faith. Augustine is telling us that in his youth he broke faith with God in small ways, and as a young man in larger ways. He won praise through these years for various actions and achievements, and now he is wondering what is the value of such praise. He will tell us in Book 2 that he was especially given to bouts of anger and lust: “I cared for nothing but to love and be loved. But my love went beyond the affection of one mind for another, beyond the arc of the bright beam of friendship,” and indeed well beyond it (43). He speaks of his misspent youth in a level of detail that would surely have surprised his readers who knew him as a man of God.

The first thing we notice about Augustine’s conception of God is that he is a person, and one whom the author addresses in the second person singular. God is not an “it” but a “him” and a “you”: “You, my God, are supreme, utmost in goodness, mightiest and all-powerful, most merciful and most just. You are the most hidden from us and yet the most present amongst us, the most beautiful and yet the most strong, ever enduring and yet we cannot comprehend you. You are unchangeable and yet you change all things…. You support, you fill, and you protect all things. You create them, nourish them, and bring them to perfection. You seek to make them your own, though you lack for nothing. You love your creatures, but with a gentle love” (23). No words or philosophical theory can describe God adequately, yet we find Augustine attempting such description over and over again, and more as an act of praise than the kind of description or speculation that philosophers usually practice. Plato, let’s recall, wanted to know what love is, even while Eros is also spoken of as a divinity, and thus as a who. But the Form of beauty or the Good is not a who but a what. Augustine’s God is a who, a person, and we come to know this God in something like the way we come to know a person. Augustine will say of God that he is a trinity of persons or three persons in one: God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Spirit. These are three distinct persons and yet one. It isn’t one being that is made up of three parts but one and three simultaneously. This notion of the Holy Trinity, as it would be called, is a mystery, and our existence is replete with mysteries. (He would later write a book titled On the Trinity where he tries to spell out this notion in more detail.) How does one understand a mystery? Again, in Paul’s phrase, “through a glass, darkly.”

He begins Book 3 again in autobiographical mode, recounting a sickness of soul that he experienced as a young man now living in the Roman city of Carthage, in modern Tunisia. He recounts that as a young man he had been searching for God yet without knowing it, and instead was chasing frantically after what he thought to be love while descending into a number of vices: “I was lashed with the cruel, fiery rods of jealousy and suspicion, fear, anger, and quarrels,” even while gaining a fine reputation among his peers. (55). He had a love of the theater and “always looked for things to wring my heart” (57). The more he would sink into vice, the greater his reputation became. Academically, he was becoming an expert in rhetoric (which Aristotle had defined as the art of persuasion, not to be confused with sophistry), further enhancing his reputation while making him ever more conceited. “It was my ambition to be a good speaker, for the unhallowed and inane purpose of gratifying human vanity. The prescribed course of study brought me to a work by an author named Cicero” (58). As noted above, it was Augustine’s reading of Cicero’s Hortensius—a book that is lost to us but that took the form of a dialogue in which its author defends philosophy as the best use of one’s leisure time—that inspired what would become a lifelong love not only of literary eloquence but of the philosopher’s search for truth, whether that truth be expressed in beautiful language or more plainly. Part of Augustine’s unhappiness at the time with the Christianity with which he had been raised is that the Bible for the most part is not written in the kind of high literary style that the great Roman rhetoricians employed. Quite apart from the substance of biblical texts is the question of style and the use of language, and the latter was an important consideration for the young rhetorician. Literary beauty is important, Augustine believes, and it’s a belief that would remain with him in later years. The Confessions itself is a beautifully written book, and in composing it he is trying to combine a rhetorical artfulness with a philosopher’s love of truth, which is a good part of its classical appeal. Of Cicero’s book, he tells us: “It was not the style of it but the contents which won me over, and yet the allowance which my mother paid me was supposed to be spent on putting an edge on my tongue. I was now in my nineteenth year and she supported me, because my father had died two years before” (59). Truth, he was now learning, must be pursued for its own sake, although as a secondary matter it should also be artfully expressed.

Augustine here mentions his parents, and his mother Monica would be an especially important influence upon him. She was a very devout woman, and the Catholic faith in which she and her husband raised Augustine is one he would return to after some years of wandering in the intellectual wilderness. His conversion, or reversion (returning), to the religion of his childhood would begin when, as he puts it, “I made up my mind to examine the holy scriptures and see what kind of books they were” (60). Remember that here he is speaking as a student of rhetoric; what sort of texts are the biblical texts, from a stylistic point of view but also from the point of view of their substance? Is there any truth in them, he is now asking? “I discovered something that was at once beyond the understanding of the proud and hidden from the eyes of children. Its gait was humble, but the heights it reached were sublime. It was enfolded in mysteries, and I was not the kind of man to enter into it or bow my head to follow where it led” (60). The stumbling blocks for Augustine were his own lack of humility and again the Bible’s use of language, which at first he found offputtingly simple. The young man had an exaggerated opinion of himself and of his intellectual abilities, and the biblical texts he was reading called for humility, as Socrates had also said that the search for truth begins with a recognition of intellectual finitude. Wisdom and intellectual arrogance are as oil and water.

He reports as well in Book 3 that he was becoming involved in philosophical debates about Christianity in which he was unable to counter the criticisms that were being directed at it, such as why would a benevolent God allow so much evil in the world. Augustine as a young man had no answer, although now he does: evil exists in the world, and indeed a great deal of it, but the philosophical question to be asked about evil is what is its nature? Is it some sort of being with a positive nature we can describe? His answer will be that evil isn’t a being (some actual thing) but a lack, an absence of the good: “evil is nothing but the removal of good until finally no good remains” (63). Evil is the absence of God, not a positive force or entity in the world. The reason there’s so much evil in the world is because of our human tendency to reject God, as Augustine through his twenties had himself done. For a period of about nine years, he tells us, he “wallowed deep in the mire and the darkness of delusion,” harsh words no doubt, but what he is speaking of is a period of intellectual and spiritual searching which let him down various avenues and eventually back to the faith of his mother: “Often I tried to lift myself, only to plunge the deeper. Yet all the time this chaste, devout, and prudent woman, a widow such as is close to your heart, never ceased to pray at all hours and to offer you the tears she shed for me” (69). If evil itself is an absence of the good or a rejection of the divine will, it comes into existence through an act of the human will, where one freely chooses to do one’s own will rather than the will of the creator. The human will is free, Augustine believes, based on his own experience of making choices, and the will itself is God-given.

We’ll skip ahead now to Book 7, but first let’s mention just a couple of highlights from Books 4 through 6. On the topics of love and death, for instance, he speaks of the death of a close friend as follows: we can become so close to another person that in the event of their death we can be at a loss as to how to go on in their absence. Augustine speaks of his deceased friend as “his second self” and “the half of his soul,” echoing in a way Aristophanes’ speech from the Symposium. “I felt that our two souls had been as one, living in two bodies, and life to me was fearful because I did not want to live with only half a soul. Perhaps this, too, is why I shrank from death, for fear that one whom I had loved so well might then be wholly dead” (77-78). Augustine also briefly mentions Aristotle, relating in the fourth chapter how at about the age of twenty he read Aristotle’s book on the Categories in which the latter proposes that there are ten categories into which all things that exist may be classified: substance, quantity, quality, relative, place, time, position, condition, action, and affection. Augustine relates how he then mistakenly felt compelled to try to speak of God as some kind of substance or entity whose attributes could be listed off. “I therefore attempted to understand you, my God, in all your wonderful immutable simplicity, in these same terms, as though you too were substance, and greatness and beauty were your attributes in the same way that a body has attributes by which it is defined” (88). God, Augustine would come to believe, is not a substance, like a material object or even an immaterial one. As the autobiographical narrative continues, he moves from Carthage to Rome and eventually Milan, teaching rhetoric professionally while continuing his philosophical quest for the truth. In Milan he meets the bishop and theologian Ambrose, who would have a major influence upon him and who shows him that biblical texts are not always to be understood literally. Augustine speaks of the battle that took place within him between, on one hand, the philosophical and spiritual search for the truth which eventually led to his conversion and, on the other hand, the considerable pull of the world and the passions. He desired to marry, and he was also living with a woman who was not his wife and who bore him a son; he mentions another mistress as well. All in all, a complicated life for a man contemplating entering the church as a priest. A life of celibacy would not be easy for Augustine. Lust does seem to have been an issue for him. He famously writes in Book 8, “I had prayed to you for chastity and said ‘Give me chastity and continence, but not yet’” (169).

His question at the outset of Book 7 is how to think about God. When he tries to imagine God, he tells us, he almost automatically thinks of a human body or some other kind of substance or object that is empirically observable. He is glad, he says, that the Catholic church doesn’t think of God in this way—as “some kind of bodily substance extended in space, either permeating the world or diffused in infinity beyond it”—but in what way then (133)? What are we speaking of when we speak of God? There is an important element of mystery here, but is it a total mystery? It’s here that he acknowledges a debt to the neoplatonists. Remember that for Plato himself, what is ultimately real is not the world that the senses put us in contact with but the world of the Forms which are imperceptible to the senses and knowable by reason alone. There is an order of being that transcends the world that we see, and the neoplatonists provided further development to this idea. Christianity develops the idea further again, transforming it into a conception of God as a purely spiritual being. God isn’t known by reason alone nor by the senses, and it’s a knowledge that is as much a matter of the heart as the mind. Again he places an accent on humility, saying “you thwart the proud and keep your grace for the humble” (144). His own mother was a pious but ordinary woman, and her knowledge of God was not dependent upon intellectual arguments or on the senses. Augustine doesn’t prove God’s existence in the way that a mathematician might provide a formal demonstration or a scientist produces empirical evidence. What he’s describing is a spiritual process and a transformation of the heart and soul, and metaphors are needed to describe it. He speaks of a light shining upon him from above, for instance, and a voice that speaks with authority: “I heard your voice, as we hear voices that speak to our hearts, and at once I had no cause to doubt” (147). This is not a proof that will convince the skeptic, but likely nothing will convince the skeptic. Another very imperfect analogy: how do you know when you’re in love? What’s your evidence or your proof? How can you convince a skeptic that it’s not merely infatuation? The answer is you can’t. You know it, and any reasons or evidence you might provide comes after the fact. When you’re in love, you feel it and you know it, and no proof is required. The God in whom Augustine believes is the creator of the world and of everything that is good. He is not seen, or not in the way that a material object is. He qualifies this somewhat by saying that “from the foundations of the world men have caught sight of your invisible nature, your eternal power, and your divineness, as they are known through your creatures” (151). Several sentences later he writes, “Then, at last, I caught sight of your invisible nature, as it is known through your creatures” (151-2). He goes on to describe God as invisible yet knowable “through your creatures,” infinite, unchanging, the creator of all things, beautiful, just, and infinitely good (154). Insofar as we “see” God at all, it is, again as Paul (whom Augustine was also reading at this time) said, “through a glass, darkly.” Along very similar lines, Augustine begins Book 8 with the remark, “Of your eternal life I was certain, although I had only seen it like a confused reflection in a mirror” (157). To know God further, he says, he had to get to know Jesus Christ, where again getting to know a person is not the same as knowing about some object. Plato and the neoplatonists, it now seems to him, had intimated the Christian God but not known him perfectly, although Augustine himself would never claim to know God perfectly.

There are many more issues that he discusses through Books 8-13, although largely these books continue on with the themes we have discussed so far. For our purposes in this course, we will jump ahead to Book 11 which contains a very important discussion of the concept of time. What, he will ask, is time? First, let’s look at the context in which the question arises. Augustine has been speaking of God, and one of the claims he makes is that the biblical God is eternal. To say that something is eternal isn’t to say that it lasts for an infinite quantity of time but that it exists outside of time altogether or beyond the temporal order. God also exists outside of space, he believes. What could it mean to speak of a being—and remember that we are speaking of a spiritual, not a worldly, being—as outside of space and time, but especially time? “In the Beginning you made heaven and earth,” the Bible states (256). God created them, Augustine adds, through language, or essentially by speaking them into existence. How can something be spoken into existence? Consider another analogy: when in baseball an umpire says “Strike 3,” it’s strike 3. Saying it makes it so. There is a reason why the umpire says it (because the ball was in the strike zone), but it isn’t a strike until it’s called one by the designated person. Language sometimes brings something into being or makes it so. “It must therefore be that you spoke and they were made. In your Word alone you created them” (258).

If the universe had a beginning point which is the creation of the world by the biblical God, what, Augustine now asks, was God doing before this? Is it possible to speak of a “before” here at all? Before time itself? Before space and matter and life? Augustine will wrestle mightily with the concept of time at this point, for it is far from clear what exactly time is and how it relates to eternity. God is eternal, or he exists in eternity and not in the temporal order in which human beings exist. He is the creator of time itself, but what is that? Augustine writes in a very famous passage: “What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled” (264). What is it, then? Aristotle believed that time is a measurement of physical motion, especially the movements of celestial bodies. Time is a measurement, and what we’re measuring are movements such as the motion of the sun through the daytime sky or the motions of the hands on a clock. When we speak of a longer or shorter duration of time, we’re measuring the relative location of the sun at one moment and another. Here it makes sense to speak of a “before” and an “after,” as when we say “the big hand gets to one after it has been on 12,” and the measure “five minutes” is the distance between those two points on the clock.

Augustine now asks, is this how human beings actually experience time, and his answer will be no. How do we experience or perceive time? We’re not speaking of a physical object but of something else, and something that is highly elusive. For Aristotle, it’s a physical measurement, but Augustine replies that human beings don’t actually experience time as a measure of motion. How do we experience it, then? Think for a minute about how you actually experience time. What is this experience an experience of? Augustine will say this: in our ordinary, everyday experience of life, we don’t experience time as an object, as we might see a pencil or hear the chickens clucking outside, but rather we experience events as happening temporally or “in” time. One thing happens after another, followed by another, and so on. We can divide time, then, into three phases: the past, the present, and the future, where the past broadly refers to events that happened before, the future refers to events that will happen, and the present refers to what is happening now. We don’t experience either the past or the future, however, but only the present. What each of us experiences is this moment, now. A second later, it’s gone and is followed by another now, in a process that goes on and on. Things in our experience are always changing, as one present moment quickly moves into the past and is replaced by another. All that we actually experience is the present, or what is presently happening. The past itself we don’t experience; we may well say that it doesn’t exist because it’s not an object of experience. The future hasn’t happened yet, so in a similar way we can say that it doesn’t exist. The present exists and the present alone.

Yet, Augustine continues, it doesn’t entirely satisfy us to say that because we have no present experience of the past or the future—neither is taking place here and now, before our eyes—that they don’t exist in any sense. There’s a clear sense in which the past doesn’t exist: we don’t see it, it isn’t here, and the same is true of the future. But isn’t there another sense, Augustine asks, in which both past and future do exist in our experience? Here, his answer is yes. We only experience the present, but when we analyze that experience we find things in it like memories and anticipations. Right now, for example, I’m recalling a cup of coffee that I drank an hour ago; the cup of coffee is gone now and I’m looking at an empty mug on the desk. The cup of coffee doesn’t exist, yet the memory of it does; it’s right here before me, an object of experience or imaginative perception. We can think of similar examples about the future: I haven’t exercised yet today but I’m about to, once I get this paragraph finished. That period of time is not here and it doesn’t exist, but my anticipation of it does. The future, then, is experienced as a present anticipation, and our experience contains countless present memories and present anticipations. The present, as we experience it, is pregnant with the future, haunted by the past, and so on. Augustine proposes, then, that we speak of the present as having three modes: the present past (memories), the present future (anticipations), and the thing in the middle, the present present (what we are perceiving here and now). There are, we might say, three presents, or three modes or forms of it. Unless we have forgotten an event in the past, it still has being in the form of a present memory, and unless we have absolutely no expectations, predictions, or hopes for what is to come, there is a present future. Augustine expresses the point this way: “It might be correct to say that there are three times, a present of past things, a present of present things, and a present of future things. Some such different times do exist in the mind, but nowhere else that I can see. The present of past things is the memory; the present of present things is direct perception; and the present of future things is expectation. If we may speak in these terms, I can see three times and I admit that they do exist” (269).

What we might call human time, or time as we human beings experience it, is forever on the move while eternity is perfectly still. As he writes, “time derives its length only from a great number of movements constantly following one another into the past…. But in eternity nothing moves into the past: all is present. Time, on the other hand, is never all present at once” (261-2). What’s he saying here? He wants now to distinguish human time as just described from eternity. For Augustine, God is eternal, or in other words he exists in eternity and not in time as human beings know it. What eternity emphatically is not is an infinitely long duration of human time. Rather it is atemporal. Another very imperfect analogy: where is the soul, that is, what is its location in space? Augustine will say that the soul doesn’t exist in space as the body does, so where it is is nowhere, or in no spatial location. It is non-spatial, and eternity is in a roughly similar way non-temporal. We could ask a similar question about a mind, a self, or a person: where is it? The body, again, is a material object that can be pointed to because it occupies space and is empirically observable, but this is not true of minds, selves, or persons. Nor does God occupy space, for Augustine. God created the spatial-temporal world in which we live, and but for the traces of himself that he leaves on his creation he is not a resident of this world.

Divine eternity has no beginning or end, no before or after. It has always existed and always will. To the question above, what was God doing before the creation of the world and of time itself, Augustine’s answer is that there is no answer because the question itself is unintelligible. What was God doing before? There was no before: “But if there was no time before heaven and earth were created, how can anyone ask what you were doing ‘then’? If there was no time, there was no ‘then’” (263). The questions, what was he doing, and also what might he get up to after the end of the world, make no sense. If a question makes no sense then it is unanswerable—it can’t be answered and it also doesn’t need to be—and some of the intellectual questions that we ask are like this. For God, as Augustine puts it, “Your years are completely present to you all at once, because they are at a permanent standstill” (263). In human time everything changes, and in divine eternity nothing does. In eternity, the present stands still so to speak, and there is neither a past nor a future. We humans do not experience eternity, but we may catch glimpses or intimations of it when we attend solely to the present (the present present) and pay no mind to the present past or the present future.

At the end of this discussion, he writes, “I still do not know what time is” (273). The above analysis of time and eternity may be regarded as exploratory on the philosopher’s part, or his best preliminary estimation of a topic that remains a mystery. He continues for a while longer on this topic but is left with the same mystery with which he began. Our world is full of mysteries, Augustine very much believes, and a philosopher and theologian such as himself can at most catch a bit of the water as it slips through our fingers. By the end of the book, at least our hands are wet, and this is some improvement. The philosopher seeks truth always, and always in a humble spirit. We are brought up against the limits of our knowledge quite often, so some intellectual humility is in order. Augustine, in everything that he would write, is a spiritual and philosophical seeker after a wisdom that he no more claims to possess than Socrates did.

There are further themes in the Confessions that I will pass over. We now turn the page about a century.

Part 5: Boethius

The student of philosophy today might never have heard of this thinker or the book we will now discuss, yet The Consolation of Philosophy was an extremely influential and popular book through the centuries of the Middle Ages and has had a major influence on intellectuals of various sorts, from Dante to Chaucer and into modern times. This book was written in Latin in the year 523, and Boethius’ dates are about 480 to 524 or 525 AD. He was executed in Pavia, Italy at around the age of 44 and wrote this book while in prison awaiting execution. There are good reasons why the author is in a bleak mood and in need of consolation at the outset of this book. What can console one who has been unjustly sentenced to death? We’re reminded immediately of Socrates and his philosophical musings on the eve of his own execution, and there are parallels to be drawn here.

Boethius (full name Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius) is not an easy thinker to classify—which is one of the things that make him interesting—and, like Augustine, he is drawing broadly upon the Greek and Roman philosophical tradition as well as the Judeo-Christian spiritual tradition. He makes no clear references to Christianity in this, his most important and certainly his most famous, book, so while he would have considerable influence upon Christian thinkers for centuries, exactly what form his Christianity would take is somewhat unclear. One might expect that a Christian awaiting unjust execution would find consolation in religion rather than philosophy, although his conceptions of philosophy and religion are difficult and probably impossible to separate. In any event, he is regarded today as a saint in the Eastern Orthodox church but not in the Roman Catholic church. He clearly read Augustine and one will find some Stoic influence in this book as well.

What is more clear perhaps than his religion is the influence upon this eclectic thinker of Plato and Aristotle. An expert on both these philosophers’ works, he saw no fundamental disagreement between them or with the neoplatonism of his own era. Boethius is traditionally regarded as a neoplatonist himself, and like Augustine is something of a hinge between ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, on one hand, and, on the other, the Christian religion which had gained hegemony by Boethius’ time throughout the former empire. One finds in this book several neoplatonic themes: an identification of the highest good with something approximating a monotheistic God (Plato himself, of course, was not a monotheist, but the neoplatonists of late antiquity proffered a notion of “the One” which they spoke of as immaterial, divine, mystical, and vaguely Judeo-Christian), Plato’s model of education as an upward journey of the mind from ignorance to knowledge, and of course the philosopher’s search for truth. Boethius’ God seems decidedly more personal than the neoplatonists’ abstract “One.”

Boethius came from an aristocratic family in Rome, was fluent in Greek, and had access to and also translated the works of both Plato and Aristotle, among other classical writers, into his native Latin. It was largely due to his translations of Aristotle that that philosopher’s texts survived in Western Europe for the centuries that led to the Italian renaissance (fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries). He followed his father’s footsteps into Roman politics, which was about as treacherous a world as our politics today is and probably more so. He served in various capacities that included advisor to Theodoric, king of the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy after the fall of the western Roman empire. Boethius was convicted of treason and also sorcery (for good measure) and Theodoric ordered that he be put to death. While awaiting execution he would write this book. The Latin word “consolatio” connotes a kind of moral/philosophical therapy which was an established form of discourse in Greek and Roman literature. As Victor Watts points out in the Introduction (again, the introductions to all the Penguin editions in this course are well worth reading), “the Consolation is a skilled fusion of more than one genre. In part it approximates to the monologue, and in part it imitates the dialectic of the Platonic dialogue” (xxiii). The author is a neoplatonist, so the dialogue form modelled loosely on Plato would have been a natural choice for Boethius. One also finds in this text a great many poems, some of them lengthy. The author undoubtedly would have regarded these poems as essential, although when reading this book myself I usually skip over them. I’d suggest reading some of them anyway; it’s always best to read a book the way it was written.

The Consolation of Philosophy is divided into five “books” or chapters. I will again highlight the main themes in the notes below and skip over some of the details. Book 1 opens with a poem wherein the author laments what has happened to him. Fortune (the Roman goddess Fortuna) has been unkind to Boethius, he tells us, and as he is writing this a woman appears who is “of awe-inspiring appearance, her eyes burning and keen beyond the usual power of men” (3-4). Boethius has suffered a cruel fate and is like a sick man in need of some form of medicine. This impressive woman becomes angry that he has turned to poetry for this purpose, for the poets offer “only sweetened poisons” which whip up the passions and deprive us of reason (4). Boethius, she says, “has been nourished on the philosophies of Zeno [the founder of Stoicism] and Plato” and is accordingly a man of reason. His cure or consolation can only be found in philosophy, not poetry. This echoes Plato’s own critique of the poets, especially in the Republic where he warned that the poets lie rather a lot and are far removed from what is ultimately real, namely the Forms. The woman will not repeat Plato’s critique here, however. The muses of poetry retreat at this point, yielding to her authority. Who is this woman, Boethius wonders, and what gives her such authority?

Stop wallowing in lamentations, she tells him, as you’re a man of learning and philosophy. As he looks upon her, he recognizes “my nurse in whose house I had been cared for since my youth—Philosophy” (7). What is she doing here, he asks? Her home is heaven; what would prompt her, this wise personification of “Philosophy,” sometimes called “Lady Philosophy,” to visit a man in such low circumstances? He has been falsely accused of crimes that warrant the death penalty, but she answers him that his oppression is owing to his commitment to philosophy and truth, and it’s appropriate for her to share his burden. “This is hardly the first time,” she says, “wisdom has been threatened with danger by the forces of evil” (7). This is a clear reference to Socrates and presumably Jesus Christ, although again the book curiously lacks explicit references to Christianity. She mentions the persecutions of the presocratic Greek philosophers Anaxagoras and Zeno of Elea (not to be confused with Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism) as well as Roman figures Seneca (a first-century AD Stoic), Soranus (a second-century physician), and Canius (a third-century Christian martyr). Each of them had crossed evil men, and Boethius is now following in their footsteps.

Boethius relates to (Lady) Philosophy his story of how he came to be in these circumstances. A platonist, he adopted Plato’s view that states should be ruled by those who had studied philosophy and so went into the rather dangerous world of post-imperial Italian politics. He did his best there to pursue justice and to resist wicked people and their schemes, and he came to be hated by many of them. Intrigue and treachery were commonplace, the love of justice and truth somewhat less so. His crime was no crime but merely to have attempted to thwart the actions of evil men. Why didn’t Fortune, a goddess after all, intervene to protect him and punish the guilty? Why, he asks, do the guilty so often get away with their crimes while the innocent are punished? Philosophy answers by asking some questions of her own to Boethius. First, is human life governed by chance or by reason? The latter, he responds, and the woman agrees. Some sort of rational principle underlies human existence. What exactly that principle is is an elusive matter, but what is clear is that human life isn’t random. She reminds Boethius of his belief “that the world is governed by God,” but how so? “[W]hat are the means by which you think He guides it?” (19). He doesn’t know. She then asks, what is the fundamental aim that the world in general is directed toward attaining? He isn’t sure, but he believes that God is “the source from which all things come” (19). She tells him that if he knows what the source of life is then he should be able to infer something about its overriding aim or purpose. That purpose must relate to a larger metaphysical question: what is human nature? Aristotle had defined the human being as a rational being. If this is our universal human nature, as Boethius believes, then the highest aim of human life can only be to live as a rational being. The cause, she tells him, of his sickness is that he has forgotten what it is to be a human being and the fundamental aim that animates it. This kind of forgetfulness is indeed a cause of suffering, and the remedy can only lie in being reminded of what Boethius already knows but has lost sight of. When we forget the rational principles by which the world and human life are governed, everything appears chaotic and we are reduced to lamenting an unkind fate.

In this painting (an altered version of which is on the cover of our edition) Boethius is seated looking dejected for obvious reasons while Philosophy stands toward the left, pointer and book in hand, and to the right is the wheel of fortune presided over by the goddess Fortuna. Before the wheel of fortune was a game show it was an important philosophical metaphor, and it’s older than Vanna White by quite a lot. It goes back at least to the time of Cicero, which is over 2000 years ago, and it was a very popular image through the centuries of medieval Europe. At the beginning of Book 2 Boethius has been lamenting his recent misfortune and fall from grace. Having been adopted into an aristocratic Roman family, he had risen to the top of the world of Italian politics, only to be cast down suddenly and unjustly. Fortune had been unkind to him, although not in years gone by. Is it simply the human condition, he asks, to have fortune smile upon us one day and not the next, and in a way that is entirely beyond our control? Is it all random, irrational, and even cruel? One can certainly understand how Boethius might see it this way, but is it true? Philosophy here speaks of Fortuna as a “monster” who “seduces with friendship the very people she is striving to cheat” (22). That king sitting at the top of the wheel won’t be sitting pretty for long. He has been seduced and his days are numbered. How much time he has up there is at her whim, and she’s known for being fickle and often blind as well. As Philosophy says of this goddess, “Change is her normal behaviour, her true nature…. She was exactly the same when she was flattering you and luring you on with enticements of a false kind of happiness” (23). Boethius, she is saying, had been seduced by power, reputation, and similar things which had promised a happiness that is both vapid and fleeting. If you fall for the seduction, you must accept the consequences without complaint. The wheel never stops turning, and in a way you can’t control. She does, and she’ll do what she has a mind to do.

It’s now Fortuna’s turn to speak, and she tells Boethius that he has no reason to complain because she hasn’t harmed him. The goods she had provided him with in former days were not earned but were pure gifts on her part. “Now I have decided to withdraw my hand,” and this is no injustice (25). “Yes, rise up on my wheel if you like, but don’t count it an injury when by the same token you begin to fall, as the rules of the game will require. You must surely have been aware of my ways” (25). How was he aware of her ways? This is a matter of common knowledge: stories have long been told of the rise and fall of some person or other in a way that appears random. Now you’re up, now you’re down, and if you don’t like it then don’t get on the wheel. You’re an educated man, Boethius; you should have known how this works.

He doesn’t have a reply to this but instead looks to Philosophy for an answer. She’ll provide one later, she says, but for now she tells him to stop feeling sorry for himself. From his early childhood he has received many blessings, including being adopted into an aristocratic family as an orphan and receiving the many goods that such a life offers. As an adult he married well and had two fine sons. He was very fortunate for a long time and chose to get on the wheel that has now thrown him down. He’s about to die, but his wife and sons will continue on with their lives, and this too is a blessing. Human happiness, she tells Boethius, is always mixed with its opposite, and if we are to keep everything in perspective we should remember that “No man is so completely happy that something somewhere does not clash with his condition” (30). All human life contains adversity, and there’s no point in wishing it away. By the same token, no one is so completely unhappy that their life is totally without blessings, and when we find ourselves in difficult circumstances we ought to remember the things that we have. Anxiety is universal, and there is no point in wishing it away. “No one,” she says, “finds it easy to accept the lot Fortune has sent him” (31). There is always an unstable quality to human happiness because it’s attached to things that can be taken from us, while even the happiest among us have a tendency toward over-sensitivity and are often unprepared for the suffering that is a part of life. The good things in life come and go no matter who we are, and “Such is the bitter-sweetness of human happiness” (31).

The influence of Stoicism is evident here, as Philosophy enjoins Boethius not to bemoan his fate but to keep it in perspective. This kind of perspective is among the blessings of wisdom, and it is important to maintain this in the midst of happiness and unhappiness alike. Our happiness can be taken from us, and our unhappiness also can turn into its opposite at a moment’s notice. All of this is unpredictable, but it’s especially unpredictable when we find our happiness in the goods of this world rather than within ourselves, she says. True happiness, as the philosophers we have looked at so far have all said, doesn’t lie in tangible values of money, power, reputation, and such things. These things have a shallow quality and are always vulnerable to being taken from us. Where is happiness to be found, then? Is there anything that fortune can’t take away? True happiness, she says, “can’t consist in things governed by chance,” so what isn’t governed by chance (31)? It can only consist in things of the mind and especially in the search for wisdom. Fortune has no power here.

To attain the highest good, in Boethius’ view, we must get off the wheel of fortune altogether with its arbitrary ups and downs. The happiness it promises is always fleeting. Most of us are not aware of just how contingent and fleeting it is, and this kind of ignorance is incompatible with true happiness. If we are not ignorant of this fact, our happiness is again compromised, this time by the knowledge that it can be lost at any time. “And so a continuous fear prevents him being happy” (32). Philosophy goes on to talk about the nature of wealth and its illusory quality, quoting an old saying that “he who hath much, wants [lacks] much” (35). By the same token the poor have little, but they also learn to moderate their needs and are more likely than the wealthy to see the emptiness of all displays of wealth. It is an “overthrow of the natural order,” she says, for a rational being “whose mind is made in the image of God” to find your highest happiness in inferior things, meaning the external goods of life rather than the internal (35). When we lose sight of our human nature, we become not only animalistic but actually “lower than the beasts” because the beasts are acting fully in accordance with their nature when they do the various things that they do, including things that might look base to us (36). It is beneath the dignity of a human being to do some of the things that a dog would do for the reason that a human and a dog have different natures. Philosophy counsels Boethius to stay focussed on what it is to be a human being and not to separate our view of the good from whatever that nature is. The ethical question of how we ought to act and live is rooted in a deeper metaphysical question of the kind of being that we are, as all the philosophers we have discussed in this course to this point have also believed.

Something similar can be said about power and position in society. Such power often falls into the hands of vicious individuals, and it’s impossible, she says, for the highest goods to fall into the hands of evil people: “nature rejects the combination of opposites,” particularly the opposites of good and evil (39). It is plainly true, says Philosophy, that most high positions in society are held by wicked individuals. The world of politics, to take an obvious example, which has condemned Boethius is a veritable den of vipers. If you venture into it, don’t be surprised when you’re bitten. Everything on fortune’s wheel is like this, so get off the wheel and remember that you are a rational being. Leave high honors, fame, reputation, power, and such things for the foolish. Fortuna “has nothing worth pursuing, and no trace of intrinsic good; she never associates with good men and does not turn into good men those with whom she does associate” (40). Philosophy says toward the end of Book 2 that fortune isn’t (exactly) evil but rather capricious. It isn’t to be relied upon, but to say it is bad in itself is an exaggeration.

At the outset of Book 3 Philosophy tells Boethius that the consolation she is offering to him does not have the kind of immediate appeal that tangible goods have. There is a higher form of happiness than such goods, however its appeal will not be evident to most of us, or not at first. There is what she calls a “pattern of true happiness,” which she now sets out to describe, and it’s something of an acquired taste (47). All human beings seek happiness by nature, but we pursue it in different ways and we have different ideas about what true happiness consists of. Happiness is our highest good, and yet it eludes us. The majority of human beings have long believed happiness to lie in the kinds of goods that are to be had on the wheel of fortune. So they hop on the wheel, drama ensues, and they end up lamenting their fate. Such are the lives that most people lead and happiness eludes them. They then wonder why, and ponder questions such as why do bad things happen to good people and why do evil people rule the world. The answer is plain to see: bad things happen to good people because good people (or people who think themselves good anyway) usually value the wrong things, and evil people rule the world because they value power and the other tangible goods of this world. We mistake the lower good for the higher good constantly, the virtuous and vicious alike. What she calls “the general pattern of human happiness—wealth, position, power, fame, pleasure”—isn’t a complete error, in the sense that such values are not values at all (49). The error lies in regarding such values as supreme. She mentions the fourth and third-century BC Greek philosopher Epicurus, who believed that the highest goods in human life are pleasure and a state of mind of “ataraxia” or an untroubledness and absence of distress. Epicureanism is akin to hedonism and is opposed likewise to Platonic-Aristotelian philosophy, Stoicism, and religion generally, be it polytheistic or monotheistic. What Epicureanism recommends, Philosophy says, is merely a sophisticated form of the common and mistaken view of the highest good.

Boethius should know better than this, she says, because he is a philosopher and has been educated in philosophy from his youth. Consider money, for instance. Most everyone values this quite highly, but does it bring happiness? Think about the people who have the most money, including Boethius himself. Remember that he belonged to a wealthy and aristocratic family; did their wealth bring happiness? Those who have a lot of money often become the target of those who don’t, and are sued, blackmailed, and stolen from on a regular basis. The wealthy are always anxious to keep what they have and must depend upon others to safeguard their assets. “Wealth which was thought to make a man self-sufficient in fact makes him dependent on outside help” (53). The poor person doesn’t need such help and is actually more self-sufficient than the wealthy. She’s not recommending poverty but pointing out that money cannot be the highest good because it makes us dependent upon others and we can also be parted from our wealth by evil people and random events. She then provides a similar analysis of high office or prominent positions in society of the kind that Boethius himself used to hold. Those in high office are often far from virtuous, and they become still more evil through the power that they hold. Kings themselves live in fear since they’re surrounded by people who envy their position. How powerful, she asks, is a “man who goes about with a bodyguard because he is more afraid than the subjects he terrorizes, and whose claim to power depends on the will of those who serve him” (57)? She provides a similar argument about fame: “its acquisition is fortuitous and its retention continuously uncertain” (59). Next are the pleasures of the body: “Its pursuit is full of anxiety and its fulfillment full of remorse” (59). It often leads to pain and sickness while as a way of life it’s better suited to animals.

Philosophy has now convinced Boethius where happiness does not lie. Where is it found then? The conversation between these two continues, with Philosophy now proposing that the highest happiness in human life must make us “self-sufficient, strong, worthy of respect, glorious and joyful” (65). The rich, the powerful, the popular, and the hedonistic all lack self-sufficiency and are dependent upon others for this. None of them are worthy of respect and their joy is always precarious. They are all dependent upon fortune. Values of this kind, then, are “only shadows of the true good, or imperfect blessings” (65). Philosophy then references Plato and sings a hymn in which she calls upon the “Creator of the planets and the sky” to help them in their search, again evidencing the neoplatonism of the book’s author (66). Having sung a hymn—and bear in mind that these hymns and poems throughout the book are not separable from the ideas that Boethius is presenting—Philosophy now asks whether the highest good can be found in nature. She has told us that the highest good must make us “self-sufficient, strong, worthy of respect, glorious and joyful,” so this would suggest that we’re looking for something that transcends the natural world. That something is either the Judeo-Christian God, the neoplatonists’ One, or something of this kind. We have to look beyond this world, as Plato had said that the Good (or the Form of the Good) is found outside and above the cave in which most human beings spend their lives watching shadows on the wall which they mistake for reality. Is she urging Boethius to return to Plato, to adopt the Christian faith, some combination of the two, or something else?

Philosophy then proposes this: “It is the universal understanding of the human mind that God, the author of all things, is good. Since nothing can be conceived better than God, everyone agrees that that which has no superior is good” (69). The skeptic of today, of course, will not grant that this is a “universal understanding,” but in the culture of Boethius’ time this wouldn’t have been controversial. This was a deeply religious society, and Christianity by the sixth century in which this book was written had become the dominant religion of the Western world. Ancient polytheism—which Christians were now calling “paganism”—had been defeated intellectually, legally, and often enough militarily, although as we’ve seen neoplatonism was very much in vogue in many philosophical circles. It’s not quite clear whether the God that Philosophy refers to here is specifically biblical or whether (more likely) it constitutes a kind of synthesis of Christian and neoplatonist conceptions. What is clear is that the highest good must have a divine, not a worldly, source. We are speaking, then, of a sort of happiness that is more rational than passionate and transcendent rather than material. This is because human nature itself is rational and vitally connected to the divine. As she puts it, “true happiness is to be found in the supreme God” (69). This divinity is the source from which all good things come, and therefore the highest good as well. This highest good, Philosophy and Boethius have already agreed, is happiness in some form or other. The specific form of happiness must be independent of fortune’s wheel and “identical with supreme divinity” (71). God, goodness, and happiness are in some sense one and the same. All good things are good in virtue of the fact that they participate in or emanate from the good itself, another platonic notion. There is a unity to the good, in contrast with worldly values which are many and distinct from each other, and this “unity is identical with goodness” itself (77). All things in nature, Philosophy proposes, incline toward the good, each in their own way. They seek something, are oriented toward something, or move toward their own good. When we step back and look at the larger picture of the world, we see everything as having a kind of built-in orientation toward the good itself, where again the good is understood as having a oneness about it; it is a unified happiness whose source is divine. Philosophy offers the model of a ship’s crew whose diverse members all willingly obey a single helmsman. They are free to do otherwise, but it would be irrational and far from good for every member of the crew to be their own helmsman. “God controls all things by the helm of goodness, and all things … have a natural inclination towards the good” (80).

Book 4 begins with Boethius telling Philosophy that what bothers him most is the pervasiveness of evil in the world. Even with a divine helmsman, virtue is not rewarded while evil abounds in this world and most often goes unpunished. His own plight is not even unusual, a virtuous man awaiting execution for having run afoul of treacherous people while the treacherous people revel in power and luxury. What consolation can Philosophy provide in the face of this? She replies with the general claim that all virtuous behavior is rewarded and all evil is punished, even though it often doesn’t appear this way to us. The virtuous have a power or a strength about them which the wicked lack. Both the good and the evil desire the good; the first obtains it because they have the power to while the second doesn’t. What the evil lack is either a proper knowledge of goodness or the power to obtain it. In either case, vicious people cannot obtain what is good although they will often appear to. The criminal often gets away with their crime, and so we imagine they’re being rewarded, but we need to look more closely. Similarly, Boethius is being punished for his virtue, but again we need to look more closely at what has happened to him. As she states, “the supreme good is the goal of good men and bad alike, and the good seek it by means of a natural activity—the exercise of their virtues—while the bad strive to acquire the very same thing by means of their various desires, which isn’t a natural method of attaining the good” (89-90). The means by which the wicked most often pursue the good is simply acting on their desires, and this method lacks the power that is necessary for accomplishing this goal. Even in the case of a tangible good such as wealth, if we become wealthy by stealing other people’s money, it may appear that we’re wealthy but we’re not. It is a counterfeit wealth that we have acquired, and the same is true of higher values. If we want to possess a good character, we cannot achieve this simply by acting on our desires. There is more to it than that. As Philosophy has said, goodness is a matter of participating in the divine, which doesn’t have a lot to do with desire.

She then asserts that when we choose vicious means of achieving what is good, there’s a sense in which we cease to exist. What does she mean by this? “Some may perhaps think it strange that we say that wicked men, who form the majority of men, do not exist; but that is how it is” (91). Their existence, she goes on to say, is incomplete in something like the way it is incomplete to say of a corpse that it is a person. “A thing exists when it keeps its proper place and preserves its own nature. Anything which departs from this ceases to exist, because its existence depends on the preservation of its nature” (91). Again we’re back to human nature. We are rational beings by nature, and the good cannot be understood apart from that nature. When we choose evil means for obtaining the good, we betray something within our own nature and become in a sense incomplete—because no longer good and no longer rational—human beings. We cease to exist as the beings we are or are meant to be by virtue of our nature. Boethius has committed no crime, and accordingly “exists” in the sense that he has acted in a way that is fully appropriate to a rational being. Wicked people cannot achieve happiness, or not the kind of happiness that is proper to human beings but only a counterfeit happiness, a counterfeit power, and so on.

Virtuous conduct is always rewarded, but to see this we need to apply the appropriate measure. At the Olympics the reward for victory is a medal, but you wouldn’t expect a medal for being a good friend. A proper reward is specific to a given activity. The reward that is appropriate for acting in accordance with our own rational nature is goodness itself, and this is something that can’t be taken away from us. Fortune has no power here. Boethius remains a good man even as the king himself sentences him to death. Since goodness and happiness are one, good people are happy even when they’re punished for their virtue. “Goodness is happiness, and therefore it is obvious that all good men obtain happiness in virtue of their being good. But we agree that those who attain happiness are divine. The reward of the good, then, … is to become gods”—not literally, of course, but God-like (93). Philosophy draws the conclusion, “just as goodness is its own reward, so the punishment of the wicked is their very wickedness” (93-94). The latter’s punishment isn’t to be thought wicked by human beings—something that is dependent on fortune’s wheel—but to be wicked in fact. Such a person has been “transformed by wickedness” into something that is not fully human; “he sinks to the level of being an animal” (94). Again, it would be more accurate to say that the wicked person sinks to a level beneath the animals because animals act in accordance with their nature while vicious human beings betray their nature.

This now leads into a broader discussion of what Philosophy will call Providence and Fate (both in the upper case). These two concepts would generate a great deal of discussion throughout medieval philosophy and theology. Providence is defined here as a plan, very large in scale, that was devised by God at the creation of the world and which governs everything in the world. The general coming to be and passing away of things is ordered by a divine plan, and the name for this plan is Providence. Providence is eternal and resides, as it were, in the mind of the creator of the universe. The relation between Providence and Fate is not perfectly clear, however Philosophy will define Fate as Providence or the divine plan “when dissolved and unfolded in the course of time” (104). Fate (not to be confused with Fortuna) occurs in time and governs everything that changes while Providence is eternal and unchanging. In trying to clarify this distinction Philosophy mentions the craftsman who before going to work on some object devises a plan as to how the object is supposed to be. Providence is like that plan which is one, unchanging, and found only in the mind of the craftsman. The work by which the craftsman implements that plan is comparable to Fate. Fate is dependent on Providence and involves its execution. As Philosophy puts it, “God in his Providence constructs a single fixed plan of all that is to happen, while it is by means of Fate that all that He has planned is realized in its many individual details in the course of time” (105). A few sentences later we read: “the simple and unchanging plan of events is Providence, and Fate is the ever-changing web, the disposition in and through time of all the events which God has planned in His simplicity” (105). In other words, Providence is God’s plan for his creation while Fate is the execution of that plan in the world. Because the plan is good, so is it execution. All Fate therefore is good, including what can appear to human beings as an ill fate. It is often said that a good person can suffer from an ill fate and that a wicked person can enjoy a kind fate, but Philosophy points out that this is a mistake. For one thing, she says, we are never sure in our assessments of who is truly good and evil; only God knows this with certainty. When it appears to us that Fate smiles upon the wicked, this is an illusion. There is no such thing as an evil Fate, for everything that we experience in life “whether pleasant or adverse is meant either to reward or discipline the good or to punish or correct the bad” (111).

Book 5 opens by turning to the concept of chance: what does this term mean and how is it related to Fortuna, Fate, and Providence? These notions all interrelate, but how so? This set of concepts would be central to a good deal of philosophical thought throughout the so-called Middle Ages (a term, by the way, that wasn’t coined until the fifteenth century), so let’s see how Boethius tries to navigate all of this.

Lady Philosophy, who let’s remember always speaks on behalf of Boethius himself, takes the view that chance always remains subordinate to Providence. Everything in the world is governed by Providence or by God’s general plan for the world which he conceived upon its creation or at the beginning of time. She has explained in Book 4 that Fate pertains to the executing or implementing of this divine plan. What is chance, then, and does it exist at all? The question of whether chance exists depends on what exactly we mean by this word. If by chance we mean random happenings or events they are caused by nothing, it doesn’t exist. All of existence is governed by Providence. There is an order to the world and nothing whatsoever escapes it. She repeats the ancient axiom (or self-evident truth) that “nothing comes out of nothing,” a proposition to which all ancient philosophers gave assent (116). You can’t get blood from a stone, in other words. Chance in this common sense of the word does not exist. If we define chance differently, however, then it does. She gives the example of a farmer digging the ground in order to plant something and discovering buried gold; we’ll often say that he discovered the gold “by chance.” Such things do happen, of course, and they can take on an appearance of randomness, however they are not truly random but unexpected. The difference between these two things is important. The farmer didn’t expect to discover gold, however the presence of the gold in that spot wasn’t random or uncaused. It was caused by someone putting it there at some prior time. The fact that the farmer didn’t know this doesn’t make anything here random. Chance in this sense of the word exists, but what is important here is that even chance does not escape the order of the world or Providence. When we roll the dice, we commonly say it is a matter of chance what numbers will turn up, but all this means is that we don’t know at the outset what the numbers will be. The occurrence of those numbers does not lack a physical cause, but the cause is unknown to us or we don’t know at the outset how that cause is going to come to bear on the dice and with what outcome. As she puts it, “The conjunction and coincidence of the causes is effected by that order which proceeds by the inescapable nexus of causation, descending from the fount of Providence and ordering all things in their own time and place” (117).

Everything in the world is linked by a “chain of close-knit causes” or a “chain of Fate,” where the two phrases are synonymous (118). Some of those causes we know; others we don’t. Boethius’ next question is whether a world so conceived allows any place for human free will. Is the will itself merely an effect of causes over which the human being has no control? We appear to be free to decide many things, but is this a false appearance? Philosophy here takes the view that a rational being is by nature free, or reason and freedom are ultimately inseparable. “Whatever by nature has the use of reason has the power of judgement to decide each matter” (118). No purpose would be served in creating humans as rational beings if they lacked the freedom to act upon their reasoned decisions. Does this mean, then, that the human will is an exception to the above-mentioned “chain of close-knit causes”? It does not, she says. Why so? God has so designed the world that everything in it will behave in a certain way and, being omniscient, he knows at the outset of creation what everything and everyone is going to do. He knows what I’m going to have for breakfast in a little while, so am I free to choose between one cereal and another? It seems so from my perspective, but is this freedom to decide an illusion? Her answer is that it’s not an illusion and the human will is indeed free. What is the meaning of freedom here? It doesn’t mean the capacity to act randomly, and if I’m being rational then I am freely choosing to bring my will into conformity with the divine will. In the course of making free decisions, including when we merely do what we feel like, we’re not acting randomly but doing what we take to be good or we’re choosing what we judge to be the best option or the least bad one. Remember that for Boethius the good and God are so bound up with each other as to be one. When we exercise our free will, then, we’re not acting outside of the divine plan but, especially when we’re acting rationally and morally, voluntarily acting in accordance with that plan. We can also choose to disobey that plan, as we can disobey the law of our country. When we violate our country’s law, we still can’t escape the reach of the law or put ourselves above the law. So it is with Providence; we can act in irrational and immoral ways all we like, but we can’t escape the consequences of our actions.

What about the question of divine foreknowledge? If God knows how we’re going to act before we act, doesn’t this undermine our freedom? Her answer is no: foreseeing is not fore-causing. A parole board can foresee with a high level of probability that a repeat offender is going to reoffend if given the opportunity. The parole board never has 100% certainty about this, but suppose it did: this knowledge would still not cause the criminal to reoffend. He or she reoffends as a free decision, and all human actions (with the exceptions of things like knee-jerk reactions and similar nonvoluntary behaviors) are like this. “Why, then, do you insist that all that is scanned by the sight of God becomes necessary? Men see things but this certainly doesn’t make them necessary. And your seeing them doesn’t impose any necessity on the things you see present” (134).

The book ends on this note. As always, there are more details in this classic work than we can discuss here. We now turn the page some 700 years to Thomas Aquinas, a saint in the Roman Catholic church and incidentally the patron saint of students and universities. Don’t imagine that because we’re jumping ahead by seven centuries nothing happened in that time in Western intellectual history. Plenty happened and some important philosophers lived and wrote. If you think of philosophy as like a mountain range, we’re discussing only a dozen of the more notable peaks in this introductory course, but there are plenty of others. On an institutional level, one of the more noteworthy matters to be aware of is that philosophy in the medieval period began to migrate slowly into the European universities which were beginning to appear in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Part 6: Thomas Aquinas

Let’s begin with the name. Premodern Europeans didn’t have surnames, so Aquinas was not his last name. His given name is Tommaso or Thomas, and he was born and raised in or around the Italian town of Aquino (meaning watery). “Thomas Aquinas” is Tommaso d’Aquino, or Thomas from Aquino. His dates are 1225 to 1274, so he died before the age of fifty. Like Boethius, Thomas came from a wealthy aristocratic family and received an excellent education. At five years of age he was placed in the community of Benedictine monks but later opted for the then less prestigious Dominican order, against his family’s forceful protests. He would later study at universities in Naples and Paris. During his student days his fellow students nicknamed him “the dumb ox,” mistaking his quiet demeanor for stupidity. He subsequently became a priest, a university professor in Cologne and Paris, an extraordinarily prolific writer, and the most influential philosopher-theologian of his age by quite a wide margin. He was declared a saint in 1323. His primary contribution to philosophy was a monumental effort to synthesize the philosophy of Aristotle with the theology of the Roman Catholic church.

Thomas lived during what is often called the “high Middle Ages” and the leadup to the Italian renaissance, which can be understood generally as a rediscovery and revival of an ancient Greek heritage much of which had been lost to the West for several centuries. The basic idea of “renaissance” was that an enormous intellectual and cultural heritage needed to be reintegrated and adapted to the times, and it produced a tremendous output of intellectual and artistic labor which lay the groundwork for what would follow in subsequent centuries—the scientific revolution, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. The main project for philosophers became one of synthesis: how to reconcile the foremost among Greek and Roman intellectual currents—many of whose texts had been rediscovered and translated—both with each other and with Christian monotheism and to fashion a worldview that was encompassing, interdisciplinary, modern, and also rooted in tradition. The longstanding issue of the relation of Platonic and Aristotelian thought received fresh impetus once new translations of both thinkers’ works were produced. Augustine had attempted a similar synthesis, but by Thomas’ time scholars in the West had gained access to a great many texts to which Augustine didn’t have access. Scholasticism was an effort to integrate all of this, and especially the philosophy of Aristotle, within a Christian framework, and it dominated Western philosophy and the universities from the twelfth through until the seventeenth century. Thomas is the foremost representative of medieval scholasticism (the Latin “scholasticus” means pertaining to schools), while other major figures in this movement of sorts include Anselm (eleventh century), Peter Abelard (twelfth century), Duns Scotus (thirteenth), Bonaventure (thirteenth), and William of Ockham (fourteenth).

The text we will be reading is titled A Summary of Philosophy (trans. Richard J. Regan [Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003]). It consists of selections from Thomas’ most important work Summa Theologica (a summary of theology), which was written in Latin and published in unfinished form shortly after his death. My unabridged text of the Summa runs over 3000 pages, so the good news for all of you is that I haven’t asked you to read that from cover to cover. A Summary of Philosophy contains selections from that monumental work, and because of the complexity of Thomas’ thought and prose I’ll ask you to read only selections from this text. The notes below will cover, and I will also ask you to read, the following chapters or chapter portions: 1 (pages 1-12), 2 (pages 50-60), 4 (pages 105-112), 7 (pages 144-148), and 9 (pages 157-171). This comes to about 50 pages. Why only 50 pages? You’ll understand once you read it. Thomas is extremely concise, and this material does not make for easy reading. Philosophy never makes for easy reading, however, so we’re not phased by this. As always, my advice is to read slowly. Bear in mind also that Thomas wrote the Summa specifically for beginning students, such as yourselves.

The book is written as a series of questions and answers, with objections and replies. This is the scholastic method of “disputation,” where one proposes one’s own views not in a conversational vacuum but always in the context of an ongoing debate with one’s fellow “schoolmen” and with a great many thinkers, texts, and commentaries both historical and contemporary. Philosophical thinking here in a thinking along with others, not a soliloquy. “Authorities” such as Aristotle are not to be deferred to uncritically but are eminent conversation partners whom we can draw upon selectively and critically. The editor of this text has removed much of the material that might be considered nonessential and also begins each chapter with some introductory material in italics, all of which is well worth reading as is his “Introduction” to the text.

We begin with God. “God” is the title of Chapter 1, so we’re jumping into the deep end. Is there a way of gently easing into this topic? No, so here we go.

Of course, God was a constant topic of philosophical and theological debate throughout the Middle Ages and into modern philosophy as well, as we’ll see. The questions are perennial: what or who is God? Does he or it exist? Is it one or many? What is its nature? And how do we know any of this? Is there any way to prove the existence of God in a way that is philosophically rational or is the belief in God a matter of faith alone? Can faith itself be rational? Thomas will have much to say on all of these questions and many others.

We begin with God’s existence: does the biblical God exist and can this be philosophically established? His answer is yes to both questions, but how does he know this? Some, such as Anselm, say that the existence of God is self-evident, meaning that merely to grasp the concept of God or to understand the proposition that God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” (Anselm’s formulation) is to perceive immediately that God exists in fact (3). This is known as the ontological argument, and we’ll return to it when we get to Descartes, who will endorse a version of it. Thomas does not. For Anselm, we know from the very definition of God that such a being must exist. If we define God as the greatest conceivable being, such a being must exist in the world and not merely as an idea in the human mind because if it were to exist only as an idea in the mind, there would be a greater being conceivable which is an actual being in the world which corresponds to the idea. God exists by definition, Anselm thinks, or his existence is self-evident to the rational mind. Thomas replies that while God’s existence is self-evident “in itself,” it is not self-evident “to us” human beings because we disagree about God’s nature. We’re certain that God exists, but we’re not certain what he exists as. Some believe God to be a material substance rather than Anselm’s perfect being. In Thomas’ view, God is not a being at all, whether material or immaterial, but rather being itself, or the sheer act of existing. We’ll return to this below. Even if we agree to define God as Anselm proposes, all we have established is that the idea of God exists, not God himself.

For now, Thomas maintains that the existence of God is not self-evident “to us” but instead we need to demonstrate his existence using reason. Specifically, we are reasoning from cause and effect. Sometimes a cause is known primarily or only by its effects, and this is the case with God, Thomas now proposes. We don’t see gravity, but we infer its existence from its observable effects. He now advances a similar argument or “five ways” in which his existence can be demonstrated. First, consider the effect that is motion. We observe various things in our world that are in motion, now what are the causes of these various motions? “Everything moved is moved by something else,” as one ball on a pool table is moved by another ball, which is moved by another, which is moved by a pool cue, and so on (4). The ball doesn’t cause itself to move but its motion is an effect of a chain of prior motions or objects in motion. This chain of motions can’t be infinite—an infinite chain of motions would be absurd—but must originate with some first motion, as a line of falling dominoes must originate with something that gets the process started. Aristotle called this original source of motion a prime or unmoved mover. Thomas now appeals to this notion, “and all understand this first cause of motion to be God” (4).

The second way or argument closely resembles the first while focusing on the concept of change rather than motion. We live in a world in which things are constantly changing, as one change follows another, and so on. Thomas invokes Aristotle’s notion of an “efficient cause” which is the primary source of some change in the world; for example, the efficient cause of a book is its author and the efficient cause of a house is a carpenter. “There is an order of efficient causes regarding objects of sense experience. But nothing is the efficient cause of itself” (4-5). Again, we can’t have an infinite chain of efficient causes, for this would be absurd. Change is an effect, and all effects have causes. Such changes must have an original source, a first and unchanging cause of all the efficient causes in the world. There must be “a first efficient cause, and we call this cause God” (5).

The third argument is a variation on the first two and pertains to the distinction between contingency and necessity. The existence of everything in the world is either contingent or necessary. To say that something’s existence is a contingency is to say that while it does exist, it didn’t have to exist; its existence isn’t necessary in the nature of things but is contingent or dependent on something prior to it which brought it about. To say that something is contingent means that it was possible for it not to exist. It was possible, for example, for you and I not to exist, or any material object, or an idea, an institution, or a country. All of these might not have come into being. The existence of nearly everything in our world is a contingency, but what brought these things into existence? They can’t bring themselves into existence but must be brought into it by something else. If something was brought into existence by another contingent being, what brought that contingent being into existence, and so on? If everything that exists were to exist contingently, then nothing would exist since there would be nothing to get the whole process started. There must be something whose existence is necessary, or something that is outside the set of contingent things, that brings that set of things into existence. And that necessary being is God. God is the only being whose existence is necessary in the sense that his existence does not depend on anything outside of himself.

The fourth argument is sometimes called the argument from degree. It states that there are innumerable things in our world that exhibit varying degrees of some quality, such as goodness, beauty, size, weight, duration, and so on. To say that something shows a higher or lower degree of some quality, we must have a standard by which to measure what is more and what is less. If we are in a shop full of flowers, for example, the proper standard by which to judge the relative beauty of the different flowers is the most beautiful flower in the shop, or in all the shops and all the gardens in the world. In general, Thomas says, we judge what is more and less by the standard of the most. In the case of goodness, we say that some things are better than others. In order to say this we must have a standard of the highest good or goodness itself. That which is most good is the standard by which we measure the relative goodness and badness of things, and this highest good is God.

The fifth way is the argument “from the governance of things” (5). Innumerable objects in our world lack intelligence and knowledge and yet obey laws, such as material objects that obey the laws of physics not by chance but predictably. A stone obeys the law of gravity yet lacks intelligence. It is made or governed to behave in this way, as an arrow is ordered to its target by an intelligent archer. There is an entire order or system of governance in the world, and this system of governance must have an intelligent governor, and again “we call this being God” (5).

He then entertains the objection that because evil exists in the world, a good God must not exist. His reply is extremely concise, but he will return to the issue of evil later. For now he writes: “Because God is the highest good, it belongs to his infinite goodness to permit evil things and bring forth good things from them” (6).

Thomas’ task over the next few pages is to try to describe God, which will be no easy task. Thomas is a Roman Catholic philosopher-theologian, so he is speaking of the biblical God but in a way that will likely strike us as unusual. He isn’t imagining an old man in the sky, so the first thing we need to do is get over that notion. He’s also not speaking of a perfect being or of a divinity that is comparable to the ancient Greek gods. One contemporary Thomist (follower of Thomas) theologian puts it this way: “One of the most fundamental mistakes made by atheists both old and new is to suppose that God is a supreme being, an impressive item within or alongside the universe…. The true God [for Thomas] is the non-contingent ground of the contingent universe, the reason there is something rather than nothing, the ultimate explanation for why the world should exist at all. Accordingly, he is not a being, but rather, as Thomas Aquinas put it, ipsum esse subsistens, the sheer act of to be itself” (Bishop Robert Barron, www.wordonfire.org). Thomas’ Latin phrase “ipsum esse subsistens” means not an existent entity (such as a perfect being, an old man in the sky, etc.) but the act of existence. In other words, God’s essence is to exist, and in this sense he exists by definition. The image of an old bearded man which was popularized in renaissance paintings is imaginative and perhaps aesthetically pleasing but is philosophically misleading and unfortunately became stuck in many minds. Thomas also defends the same doctrine of the holy trinity that Augustine believed in, meaning that God is three persons in one: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

What more can Thomas say of God? God is, in a sense he is about to clarify, simple, perfect, good, infinite, immutable, eternal, and one. The translator and editor of our edition, Richard Regan, points out that in Thomas’ view “God, strictly speaking, has no attributes. He is the fullness of being and pure actuality and so does not ‘have’ anything over and above his substance” (6). Again, Thomas doesn’t regard God as “a” being, whether material or immaterial, but rather “being” itself, “the fullness of being” (Regan), or better yet “the sheer act of to be itself” (Barron). This is a difficult concept to grasp, but we should not think of God, Thomas believes, as any kind of object, entity, or being but as something (again not a thing) that is outside the order of “beings” altogether. A human being, by contrast, is a certain kind of being or substance which we can speak of as having attributes. God does not have attributes, so the next few paragraphs refer to things that can be said of God in his essence, where Aristotle defined an essence as that which makes something the kind of thing that it is. For example, Aristotle classically defined the human being as a rational animal, where reason (“logos”) is that which makes us human. The essence of a thing answers the question, what is it, or what kind of thing is it. An essence is contrasted with the accidental properties of a thing, all of which may change without the thing ceasing to be the kind of thing that it is. For example, a human being changes its height, physical appearance, age, and various other things over time; all of these are accidental properties of a human being, while its being rational remains constant and so defines the kind of being that it is.

The following list, then, are not exactly characteristics of God but that which pertains to his or its essence. Let’s look at each of them in order. First, God is simple. What Thomas means by simple is “identical with his essence” (6). By contrast, a human being or anything else which is composed of parts, both matter and form, is not identical with its essence or its nature. Our essence is to be rational, but a particular human being is not identical with reason or with human nature. You are a person, not personhood or reason itself. God is already contained in his definition and is simple in this sense of the word. He has no parts and is identical with his own nature, or “God’s essence and existing are identical” (7).

Next, God is perfect. Perfect here does not mean possessing all good qualities in the highest possible degree but actual as opposed to potential. God is pure actuality. A human being, by contrast, is a potential this or that; you may be a potential lawyer, a potential doctor, a potential parent, where this means that you are not one in actuality but that you might become one in future. Potentiality is an imperfection; a potential doctor is not a perfect doctor, for example. God lacks potentiality and so lacks imperfection. In Thomas’ words, “things are perfect insofar as they are actual” (7). Since God is pure actuality, he is perfect. Again, “God is intrinsically subsistent existing itself [the act of existing, not an existent thing], and so he necessarily contains in himself the whole perfection of existing” (7). Human beings are never perfect and cannot become God, but they can become like God in the way that a portrait of a person can be similar to the person, although we don’t say that a person is similar to a portrait. God is not similar to us, but we may become similar to him, again on the model of a portrait.

Next, God is good and indeed “the highest good without qualification” (8). To say that he is good means that “all desired perfections flow from him as first cause” (9). God is the source of any good thing in the world.

Next, God is infinite or unlimited. Since God is what Thomas now calls “existing itself,” he isn’t bound by anything, in contrast with a material object which has limits. Existence in the sense of the sum of all existent things (material and immaterial) is finite, but the act of existing couldn’t be. The act of existing, he says, “is not received in something” such as a material form which is finite (9).

Next, God is immutable or unchanging. Thomas has said that God is pure actuality and contains no potentiality. When a thing changes, it goes from being a potential X to an actual X, or it becomes X. For example, you may change from being a potential lawyer to an actual lawyer. Only beings that possess potentiality can change. Since God contains no potentiality, he is not subject to change. God is pure being, not becoming.

Next, God is eternal. Eternity follows logically from immutability. The world human beings live in is a world of contingency, change, potentiality, finitude, and temporality. The ground of this world is none of those things but is necessary, unchanging, actual, infinite, and eternal. It exists outside the order of time, as Augustine also maintained.

Finally, God is one. He must be one for reasons of his uniqueness, simplicity, infinity, and perfection. If there were a number of gods, as in ancient polytheism, each of them would be imperfect at least in the sense that they would be finite or limited by the other gods. Also, if there were several gods, they would need to differ from each other and any one god would lack something that is had by another god. Any such lack would be an imperfection, and God lacks no perfection. Also, the world is integrated or hangs together in one “orderly set of relations” because one divine governor has arranged them into a kind of system. “Therefore, there is necessarily only one first being that brings everything into an orderly set of relations, and this first being is God” (11).

The next question he poses concerns our knowledge of God. Is human reason, this capacity of mind that we have by nature, capable of knowing God fully? Not fully, no. God always remains a mystery, yet he doesn’t surpass our capacity for knowledge altogether, and everything Thomas has said about God to this point appeals to our reason alone, not divine revelation. What he calls “our natural knowledge”—or all knowledge that is not placed in us directly by him—is rooted in our five senses and is limited by them (11). A human being, whether they are good or evil, has the intellectual capacity to reason from an effect to its cause, as Thomas has attempted in his five proofs. If we’re virtuous, God may instill in us further knowledge about himself, but this is by the grace of God or a gift, not a conclusion based on evidence or a rational proof.

Let’s skip ahead now to the last couple of sections in Chapter 2, “Creation and Governance,” beginning on page 50. The last two major concepts he deals with in this chapter and which we’ll discuss here are evil and governance. In the section above on Augustine, we noted what has long been referred to as “the problem of evil”: if the biblical God exists and is good, why is there so much evil in the world? This is a perennial question in Christian thought, so let’s see what Thomas has to say about it.

Augustine provides the point of departure for Thomas. Remember that Augustine sees the world in large terms as something of a battleground between good and evil, and where evil itself isn’t an existent thing but an absence of the good and a separation from God. Thomas will now agree: evil is not “anything existing” such as an active force in the world or any kind of being with an actual nature (51). It is a privation or lack of the good. A maple tree will not grow to maturity in sand because the sand lacks sufficient causal power to produce this effect. A billiard ball will not travel at high speed if the cause of its motion is a second ball traveling at low speed; the second ball again lacks the causal power to produce this effect. Similarly, an evil action carried out by a human being is lacking a kind of causal power which is virtue or goodness. An evil person exhibits an absence, where what is lacking in their character is anything that allows them to rise above the animalistic. Every “nature” is good—human nature, cat nature, tree nature, etc.—when it approximates the perfection that is proper to it. Our human nature, as Aristotle said, is to be a rational animal, and when our capacity for rationality is not cultivated we are left with a deficiency or a privation of the good. Thomas writes, “the nature of evil consists in the fact that things fall short of good” (52). A perfect world requires great variety in the things that exist, as a perfect garden will include many different vegetables or flowers. In such a garden some plants will inevitably turn out better than others, and the very perfection of the garden as a whole requires that not every plant attain perfection. Similarly, “the perfection of the universe requires that there be some things that can fall short of goodness,” and “the nature of evil consists in the fact that things fall short of good. And so there is evil in things, just as things pass away, which is itself an evil” (52). Evil is a falling short, a failure to bring about what is good or to cultivate the virtues. It has no positive reality.

If evil is an effect, namely an absence of the good, what causes it to occur? Why is there evil in the world? If we’re speaking of moral evil (as opposed to natural evils like disease or natural disasters), the short answer is because we choose it, but there’s more to it. The cause of evil things in general, Thomas proposes, is actually good things. This sounds counterintuitive, so how does this argument work? For Thomas, all of creation is good. Beings in general are good—“every being as such is good” (54)—and all causes are beings. If all causes are beings and all beings are good then all causes are good, including the cause(s) of evil. Why would anything good bring about anything evil? Wouldn’t good beget good and evil beget evil? Good things do beget or cause other good things, but they can bring about evil as well. Good things, including people, don’t bring about evil on purpose but incidentally. Everything and everyone seek the good, and “nothing can be evil by its essence” or by its nature (54). Human beings by our nature must rely on our judgment to discern what is good and then to pursue it, and both our judgment of what is good and the way that we pursue it are subject to error. For example, one might come to believe in a given situation that one’s own happiness requires that someone be murdered. One’s happiness is good and yet it acts in this instance as a cause of evil. One has made an error in judgment in this case (only an illusory happiness is found in immoral behavior), but what is decisive for Thomas is that the evil is brought about not for evil’s sake but for the sake of one’s own good or happiness. Evil has no causal power of its own. Also, God does not cause human immorality or sin—human free will (which is good) does—but he does allow it. He also allows for natural evils and for human suffering and death. One’s death is not good from one’s own point of view, however, from God’s point of view a well-ordered universe requires that some things be permanent while others come into being and pass away. It’s not good for me when one of my chickens is eaten by a fox, and it’s even worse for the chicken. It’s good for the fox though, and for the larger ecosystem. Similarly, in a great forest, not every tree grows to a great height and lives for a hundred years; there are particular trees that come into being while others pass out of existence and the forest remains. In general, then, good is the cause of evil, and where evil is always a privation of the good. God is never the cause of evil since evil is a deficiency (a lack) and “there is no deficiency in God” (54).

The next concept he discusses is the ordering or governance of the universe. Everything in the world is ordered toward some end or aim. Human beings are oriented toward happiness; a tree grows upward toward the sun; a stone falls downward every time unless a different force acts upon it. This cannot be a result of chance but can only be brought about by a kind of governance: “the fixed order of things itself demonstrates the world’s governance” (55). If anything has a fixed structure, there must be someone or something that is doing the fixing, a kind of governor of the world. God directs things to their ends as an archer directs an arrow to its target. The ultimate end or purpose of the universe as a totality is to imitate God or to attain perfection, and the same is true of human life. God is the creator and the first cause of the world, but he’s not the only cause. There are countless smaller causes that produce effects throughout the universe, as a nation may have an all-power king but a large number of officials to whom particular powers are delegated. Everything is subject to God’s governance, but he also governs through intermediaries. Nothing takes place that is contrary to God’s governance or will. Everything that happens in the world is either caused (directly or indirectly) by him or allowed by him. The order of the world can be breached only by God, through miracles. What about chance? Chance does exist, Thomas believes, but something happens by chance only “in relation to particular causes” (57). For instance, a roll of the dice produces a particular number not as a random happening but as an effect of “particular causes”—not the first cause of the world but intermediate or local causes—but the number that turns up is not contrary to God’s will. Nothing that happens is contrary to divine providence, and this includes all the evil in the world. Additionally, “every tendency, whether natural or voluntary, is an impulse from the first cause, and so everything, whether by nature or free will, arrives at the end to which God orders the thing” (58).

Moving on to Chapter 4, our next theme is happiness. The highest good in human life is happiness, but there is much to say about happiness and Thomas will advance several claims about it in this short chapter. One is that our highest happiness consists in “beholding God’s essence” (106). Any other goal that we pursue may be good but it isn’t ultimate because it is incomplete, or it leaves something further to want. Our happiness is complete only when we encounter God. What about pleasure? Isn’t this also necessary for happiness? He answers that pleasure is necessary for happiness but only as an accompaniment of some other good that has been attained. It may give one pleasure to see the Blue Jays win a baseball game, but the pleasure attends or accompanies the win; what is good is the win, while the pleasure attends it. Pleasure attends, or goes along with, happiness, but pleasure is not happiness itself. Imagine a drug or a technology that could supply non-stop pleasure in a high degree. This would not be the highest form of human happiness but an existence that is beneath us.

There are three ingredients that are necessary for our highest form of happiness: “the vision of God, which is perfect knowledge of our intelligible end; comprehension, which imports the presence of our end; pleasure or enjoyment, which imports the satisfaction of the lover in the beloved” (107). He adds that there is a fourth factor that is necessary for happiness and this is a free will that chooses the proper ends. In this life, a body is also necessary for happiness while in the next life the soul itself does not require a body for happiness. In general, happiness in its true form requires that our will and our entire being be directed toward God, rather as the church in Thomas’ right hand in the painting below is oriented or pointing upward toward heaven (which is not to say that either God or heaven is located in some spatial location that is upward. Medieval Gothic churches, such as the one below, always point upward, but this signifies a spiritual transcendence rather than a literal place). Thomas himself is looking upward here, as Augustine also was in the depictions of him above.

For happiness in this life as well we require good friends (an idea he borrows from Aristotle), tangible goods such as food and shelter, and bodily health. Happiness in this life may well be achieved, since we are capable of both knowing and choosing the good. However, he qualifies this by distinguishing between perfect and imperfect happiness, and says that only happiness in an imperfect form is achievable in this life. This is because perfect happiness requires a perfect beholding or vision of God’s essence, and this eludes us in this life. This side of heaven, we may attain an imperfect form of happiness. By our natural powers of mind and body, we may become very happy indeed, but perfect happiness must await us in the afterlife.

Moving into Chapter 7 now, Thomas provides a philosophical account of love, beginning with a definition: to love in a true sense is essentially to will the good of another, and not for my sake but for their own sake—ultimately for God’s sake. He immediately distinguishes between the love that is friendship, where we love the friend himself or herself without qualification, and the love that is desire, where we will good things for another (such as their happiness, success, etc.) either for their benefit or one’s own. The second kind of love, the desire for the other person’s good, is a qualified love, since the object of our love is not the other person but their happiness, success, etc. In friendship, or the first and unqualified form of love, like attracts like or we’re drawn toward people with whom we share affinities and interests. Aristotle would always have a large influence on Thomas, and in the background here is Aristotle’s view that true friends support each other in cultivating a virtuous character and do not merely use each other as a means to an end. The latter kind of love or friendship is imperfect, and Thomas agrees. True love or friendship is what he calls “benevolence” or willing the good of one’s friend for their own sake, and again ultimately for God’s sake in the sense that we love God through our friend (145). By contrast, in love as desire it’s actually oneself that one loves and not the other person. In friendship that is based on one’s friend being useful to oneself or a source of pleasure for oneself, it’s one’s own pleasure or benefit that one is seeking rather than what is good for the friend. In true friendship there is a union of oneself and the beloved that he calls “a union of affection,” and “love itself is such a union or bond” (147). He also calls this “union of affection” a “mutual indwelling” where two lovers or friends “strive to search out particulars belonging to the beloved’s innermost being and to enter the beloved’s innermost being” (147), for example by understanding one’s friend. There is a depth to love which transcends desire, a union of the friend’s will and one’s own “so that the lover seems to experience and to be affected by the friend’s good or bad fortune” (148). He is describing a deep reciprocity which is reminiscent of Augustine’s remarks on love and friendship where he spoke of his friend as “his second self.”

Let’s turn now to Chapter 9 where the topic is virtue. Once again, Aristotle and Plato as well are very much in the background of Thomas’ analysis. (I discuss Plato’s and Aristotle’s views on ethics and the virtues in my lecture notes for Philosophy 233, “Ancient Greek Philosophy.”) He begins by defining virtue generally: “virtue is a good characteristic of the mind, the characteristic by which we live rightly, of which no one makes wrong use, and which God works in us apart from any work of ours” (157). He is making several claims here which he will elaborate upon in this chapter. The good life for human beings consists in cultivating virtues of both mind and conduct, some of which virtues are infused or instilled in us directly by God.

Thomas follows Aristotle in distinguishing between intellectual virtues, or virtues that pertain to the mind and knowledge, and moral virtues, or virtues that pertain to human action. He begins in this chapter with a short analysis of several of the intellectual virtues. You can think of an intellectual virtue as a habit of mind that involves knowledge or reasoning well. There are several forms of knowledge or right reasoning: theoretical wisdom (philosophy and theology), which contemplates and knows God, albeit imperfectly; scientific knowledge (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.), which inquires into the truth about the world and the various things it contains; understanding, which is the habit by which the intellect grasps self-evident principles such as the law of identity (A is A) and the law of non-contradiction (a statement can’t be both true and false in the same sense at the same time); practical wisdom (ethics and politics) is the ability to make ethical and political judgments; and skills, or knowledge of how to perform some particular action or art (carpentry, cooking, athletics, etc.). There’s a great deal to say about each of these forms of knowledge. Let’s take a look of some of Thomas’ more central claims.

What he calls the “theoretical intellect” is able to grasp the truth either immediately and self-evidently or through a process of empirical or purely rational investigation. An example of a self-evident proposition is “A is A” or a thing is identical to itself. This is a first principle, meaning that to understand the proposition is immediately to perceive that it is true. There is no need to inquire, empirically or in any other way, whether in every instance a particular thing is in fact the thing that it is. The solution to a math problem or a scientific question, on the other hand, requires some intellectual investigation on our part to ascertain the truth of the matter. It isn’t self-evident, for instance, whether evolution is true or what is the square root of some number. Thomas states, “The intellect immediately perceives the truth of self-evident principles. And the habit that enables the intellect fully to contemplate such truths is understanding, that is, the habit of first principles” (159).

What he calls practical wisdom is the ability to judge the proper way of doing something and also whether it ought to be done. This includes but isn’t limited to situations that call for a moral or political judgment to be made. When we find ourselves having to make a moral or political decision it’s this kind of knowledge that is being used. Things here are not self-evident, for instance, whether to vote for candidate X or candidate Y. We can say that practical wisdom is a skill, but with a difference. He defines a skill as the ability to reason and make judgments about some practical matter, which could be anything from cooking to gardening to military strategy and so on. We can be very skilled or unskilled in any of these things, and we can also be practically wise (or have good judgment) or not. The highly skilled person has a relatively developed capacity to do something well or to produce something well, but what they produce is not necessarily good. A military strategist may be highly skilled while fighting for a bad cause, and we wouldn’t say that this person is practically wise but the reverse. The person with good judgment or practical wisdom, on the other hand, combines skill in doing or producing something with putting that something to good use. As Thomas puts it, “skills are right reasoning about things to be made, and practical wisdom is right reasoning about things to be done” (160). A skilled con artist may be good at what they do, but we would describe this person as clever or cunning but not wise.

Practical wisdom is indispensable in living a good life. This is because it’s imperative not only that we do what is good but that we freely choose the good. If our actions are outwardly virtuous but done under duress, they have no ethical merit. Also, if we do what is good based solely on emotion or impulse then again our actions are without virtue since emotions and impulses are not freely chosen. For an action to be virtuous, one must freely choose both the good that is to be brought about and the means of doing so, and where the means are actually effective in bringing about that good. A good friend, for example, both chooses in a given situation to benefit one’s friend and knows what action will bring this about.

He then discusses the moral virtues which, as Aristotle maintained, most often involve pursuing the mean between excess and deficiency. Doing what is morally good typically (there are exceptions) requires us to avoid extremes of too much or too little of some quality. Courage, for example, is intermediate between the deficiency that is cowardice and the excess that is rashness. Some moral virtues are bound up with emotions (courage, friendship, etc.) while others are independent of emotion (generosity, justice, etc.). Such virtues are in every case bound up with the free will as they align the will with the good. Moral virtues are natural to human beings because of our nature both as a species and as individuals. As a species we are rational, and as rational beings we have a basic knowledge of at least some ethical principles. It is natural for us to pursue the good and happiness. As an individual, some moral virtues may come naturally to us while others may not. One’s physical or psychological makeup, for instance, might incline one toward courage or friendship while another is naturally inclined against it. In any event, “we do not completely possess these virtues from nature” but must actively cultivate them through our habitual actions (164). Repeated actions can produce good habits, and a virtue is a habit, but some virtues (including the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love) are infused in us by God and actions alone can’t produce them.

Thomas then proposes that there are four cardinal or preeminent virtues: practical wisdom (sometimes called prudence or discretion), courage, temperance, and justice. What makes them cardinal virtues is that they generate further and more specific virtues. As we have seen, practical wisdom is essentially good judgment about how to act in whatever circumstances in which we find ourselves. It combines a general knowledge about abstract principles (e.g., friendship is good) with knowledge about a particular situation in which we must do something (what friendship requires of us in this situation). Courage is the ability to overcome fear in the performance of a good action. Temperance is the ability to moderate our passions and to act as morality or reason requires rather than do whatever we have an impulse to do. Justice pertains to giving someone what is their rightful due, either by way of reward or punishment.

The virtues, for Thomas, are for the most part so interconnected as to be a kind of package deal, as they are for Aristotle. Thomas does acknowledge that some virtues—he mentions moderation and courage—“are tendencies in us only toward particular kinds of good deeds,” and that one might have a couple of such tendencies and not others (166). A soldier might be courageous but imprudent and unjust, just as one might be moderate and yet cowardly or unfriendly. Yet these are exceptions from the norm, and Thomas largely agrees with Aristotle in that one is essentially of good character or one isn’t. In particular, one must have practical wisdom in order to exhibit the other virtues. All the moral virtues require an understanding of first principles and an ability to fashion judgments about good and evil, although an intellectual virtue like scientific knowledge isn’t requisite for moral virtue.

Thomas subscribes to what is sometimes called the natural law tradition. In this tradition, which continues to find proponents today, moral and political laws when they are fully rational are not purely human creations but have their philosophical foundation in a deeper conception of law that is bound up with the will of God. In this view, the creator of the universe has effectively directed everything in the universe toward its proper end or purpose, again as an archer orders an arrow to the target. The arrow doesn’t go wherever it wants to but in a direction that has been assigned to it. Similarly, a human being who is living rationally and morally chooses for itself a set of ends and a purpose that is aligned with God’s will. The purpose of Thomas’ own life is to unite his personal will with the will of his creator, and this in short is what the moral life consists in, on his view. In the natural law tradition, natural law is universal, eternal, unchanging, and known to every one of us. It’s inscribed in our conscience and may or may not be something for which we can produce a philosophical demonstration. When we hear, for example, that love is good, murder is bad, goodness is something we should aim for, evil is something we should avoid, we know such things to be true whether we’re able to provide a philosophical case for them or not. We know them to be true in virtue of what Thomas calls “the light of natural reason” which is instilled in us by God. They resemble self-evident principles in that there is nothing more ultimate that we can appeal to in our efforts to justify ideas. They are the most ultimate items of knowledge that we possess and accordingly cannot be proven or disproven. To justify any idea is done by grounding it in some more fundamental idea, and in the case of natural law there is nothing more fundamental that we can appeal to. This is the bedrock of human thought.

There are a thousand details in Thomas’ overall philosophy that we can’t cover in this course, and do recall that this text is itself a small selection from a 3000-page work and that the Summa Theologica itself is but one of Thomas’ books. We now move forward three hundred years into the sixteenth century and to a French thinker who actually wrote in French rather than Latin or Greek.

Part 7: Michel de Montaigne

We are now in the period of the French renaissance (fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries) and the gradual transition into the modern period. Montaigne’s dates are 1533-1592, a time that was marked by the French wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants which followed upon the Protestant Reformation of the same century. Like “Aquinas,” “Montaigne” is a place name. His given name is Michel Eyquem and “de Montaigne” is the name of the estates close to Bordeaux that his grandfather had purchased and which Michel inherited. Michel de Montaigne was a feudal lord, statesman, and mayor of Bordeaux who returned at the age of 38 to his family estate and began work on The Essays, which he wrote in French although he had a thorough knowledge of Latin. Latin had been the principal language of Western philosophy for centuries, but beginning in the sixteenth century and increasingly through the seventeenth and eighteenth, philosophy would now be written in vernacular European languages, especially French, English, and German. He published the first edition of The Essays in 1580 but continued working on it for the remainder of his life, and the final edition appeared posthumously.

My copy of the unabridged edition of The Essays is over 1300 pages long. Our text, The Essays: A Selection (trans. M. A. Screech. New York: Penguin, 2004) contains about a third of this. For our purposes in this course I will ask you to read, and my notes below cover, the following chapters: the book’s opening text, “To the Reader”; from Book 1, chapters 8, 16, 20, 39, 57; from Book 2, chapters 1, 2, 5, 11; and from Book 3, chapter 3. This comes to around 100 pages. As always, it’s a good idea to read the whole work, although 1300 pages is a lot.

The title of this book is significant. The French verb “essayer” means to try or attempt, also to test or experiment. This book has an intentionally undogmatic and experimental quality which differs significantly from how philosophy had been written throughout most of its history and perhaps especially in medieval scholasticism. Montaigne defends very few philosophical doctrines or theories and instead is what we might simply call a freethinker, loosely in the mold of a Marcus Aurelius but with a difference. He’s a very difficult thinker to classify and has been read sympathetically by writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Pascal, Descartes, Hobbes, Emerson, and Nietzsche, among many others. Nietzsche would say of Montaigne, “That such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on this Earth” (Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator”). I’m hoping you’ll find the same. The Essays is a pleasure to read and is written artfully, without technical jargon, and with a personal quality which was entirely unconventional for a sixteenth-century philosopher. He states at the outset, “I myself am the subject of my book,” while the book itself is written not primarily for philosophers but for his friends, relatives, and the general public (3). At various points we’ll find Montaigne defending something that resembles Stoicism, Catholicism, skepticism, humanism, and a few other things all arranged eclectically by this rather single-minded philosopher. There is no such thing as “Montaignism,” although maybe there should be.

We begin with Book 1, Chapter 8, “On Idleness.” This short piece is very representative of The Essays as a whole. We immediately notice the tone in which Montaigne is speaking. There’s no formality here, no pedantry or high style. The topic itself is not the most serious subject in the world and we find the author musing or contemplating in a relaxed way on something that any one of us is likely to have some thoughts about. We can picture the author in the stone tower of his chateau, writing in splendid isolation. While more or less retired while writing this book (although he was also the mayor, and he was also married with a daughter), Montaigne is the opposite of idle himself. An idle person doesn’t write a 1300-page magnum opus. Anyway, Montaigne tells us that his intention at this stage of life had been to retire to his estate and to be idle and practice some introspection and that instead his mind “bolted off like a runaway horse” (10). He writes, “When the soul is without a definite aim she gets lost; for, as they say, if you are everywhere you are nowhere” (10). One’s life must have a definite aim, and his own aim is to write this very long book on very many topics, the connecting links between which are not at all obvious. A quick glance at the table of contents, especially of the unabridged version of this extremely long book, finds its author ranging over so many seemingly randomly chosen topics that one wonders how the whole text hangs together or even whether it is meant to. What is this book about? It’s very difficult to say. I would describe it very imperfectly as a series of reflections on life and especially his own life and on the many things he has noticed in the world around him and reflected upon, with an emphasis on human nature and the business of living well. He is trying to describe as honestly as he can both his own life to this point and the lives he sees people in his society leading, for better or worse, and while drawing upon a great wealth of knowledge which he has acquired. We might think of a man in his late thirties as still young, but we find him here referring to his imminent death. He would end up living nearly sixty years, which was a rather good life span in those days. Anyway, he wants to get his reflections down on paper before the end, and if his mind ends up running off like a runaway horse at least he’ll have it recorded for posterity.

“On punishing cowardice” finds Montaigne reflecting on a question of obvious relevance in a time of great civil conflict, and it’s whether soldiers caught fleeing the battlefield out of cowardice should be punished by death or by something short of this. Can we condemn someone for having a weak nature rather than for real wickedness? He examines the positions on both sides of this issue. Cowardice is a serious vice, Montaigne believes, but only the most flagrant of cowardly acts rises to a level of moral evil that warrants the death penalty. Short of that, we should adopt an attitude of worldly compassion and provide some allowance for human weakness.

One of Montaigne’s lengthier and more classic essays is “To philosophize is to learn how to die.” Remember how Socrates had told his jury that he had no fear of death since death is but a freeing of the soul from the body and for all we know it might be a far better existence than this life spent in the company of the sort of people who were condemning him as a criminal. Philosophy itself, for Socrates, is a kind of preparation for death since the goal of the philosopher is to dwell in the realm of pure Forms rather than in this imperfect world of matter, change, and illusion. Cicero would pick up on this theme, and so now does Montaigne. To think philosophically is in a sense to prepare for death, but how so? Montaigne himself, as we have seen, is anticipating that he will soon die, even though he actually had more time than he thought. As a man of the renaissance, it is typical for him to be drawing upon ancient sources rather than trying to think about a topic like this as if no one had ever thought about it before. Philosophers have been thinking about death from the beginning of the Western tradition, so Montaigne here thinks along with a couple of the more notable ones. He states, “all the wisdom and argument in the world eventually come down to one conclusion; which is to teach us not to be afraid of dying” (17).

All of Western philosophy and theology as he interprets it is most ultimately oriented toward how we are living and the nature of happiness. The great thinkers of the past, whether Greek or Roman, monotheist or polytheist, ancient or modern, have all implored us to become virtuous and for its own sake. This is the goal of life, whether we put it in religious terms or not. To philosophize is to learn how to live or to live well, but living well is something we must learn how to do. Happiness requires thinking and learning, and Montaigne himself is a very learned man. How, he asks, can we be happy in the midst of a world that is so full of strife? Death awaits us all and can come at any time. How can we be happy in the face of such realizations? His answer in short is to learn from the ancients and to cultivate the virtues. One consequence of doing so, he believes, is to develop “a contempt for death, which is the means of furnishing our life with easy tranquillity, of giving us a pure and friendly taste for it; without it every other pleasure is snuffed out” (19). What is he saying here? What is a contempt for death? Contempt isn’t hatred but an absence of feeling about something, a simple indifference. We shouldn’t hate death but try to become indifferent toward it, to deprive it of the intense emotion that commonly surrounds it to the extent that we can. How does one achieve this? In short, by thinking about death often and anticipating it as an everyday possibility. This is the very thing we refuse to do because of the emotions involved. The topic is morbid, we hear, so avoid mention of it. “For ordinary people the remedy is not to think about it; but what brutish insensitivity can produce so gross a blindness?” (20). He quotes the Roman poet Lucretius: “They walk forward with their heads turned backwards,” and as a result they are unprepared for death and at a total loss when they are confronted with the reality of it (20). He mentions how the ancient Romans tried to soften the reality of death through evasion, using phrases like “He has ceased to live” rather than “He is dead” (21).

What, then, is Montaigne recommending and why is he recommending it? His advice is to stop lying to ourselves or imagining that we will live forever if only we don’t think about it and instead to anticipate it actively. Death overwhelms us when we are unprepared for it, when we’ve never thought about it. The solution is to prepare for it by thinking about it and facing up to it with honesty and courage. Some toughmindedness is necessary here: “If death were an enemy which could be avoided I would counsel borrowing the arms of cowardice. But it cannot be done. Death can catch you just as easily as a coward on the run or as an honorable man” (23). Cowardice and avoidance won’t keep death at bay, so don’t allow the topic to be taboo but contemplate it in our everyday experience. As he puts it, “At every instant let us evoke it in our imagination under all its aspects. Whenever a horse stumbles, a tile falls or a pin pricks however slightly, let us at once chew over this thought: ‘Supposing that was death itself?’ With that, let us brace ourselves and make an effort. In the midst of joy and feasting let our refrain be one which recalls our human condition” (24). This is the very opposite of what most of us do, in Montaigne’s time and in our own, as if to imagine it is to invite it magically to appear. Imagining it here and now domesticates it or tempers the fear of death. What terrifies us is the unknown, so make the thought of death familiar by reminding oneself in good times and bad that we will not have it forever. When it comes, we will greet it as a familiar guest rather than an object of terror; of course, the guest will be very unwelcome, but we will have deprived it of the power to overwhelm us. Notice the skull on the cover of our edition of The Essays; this is what has long been called a “memento mori” or a reminder of our mortality. He goes on: “A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Knowing how to die gives us freedom from subjection and constraint” (24). We learn how to die, again, by facing it directly and without dishonesty or cowardice. When we do this, we are learning to live as well by freeing ourselves from unreasonable fear. We can see a clear influence from Stoicism in this essay.

Jumping ahead now to essay 39, “On solitude,” recall that Montaigne has retired from public life and sought solitude in the private confines of his estate and its tower. It’s no surprise to find him singing the praises of solitude, as he begins by denying the common association of solitude with idleness, a topic he has touched upon already. Ambition “gives us a taste for solitude,” since it requires that we step away from the noise and drama of public life and find the freedom to think and act freely (96). If good people are few in number, as Montaigne believes, then crowds are best avoided. “Either you must loathe the wicked or imitate them,” and in a crowd you’re likely to imitate them (97). The wise try to find a place away from the crowd where one doesn’t have to see the vices of others. More than this, he says, “we have to withdraw from such attributes of the mob as are within us. It is our own self we have to isolate and take back into possession” (99). To live well one must gain possession of oneself and eliminate the mob that often finds its way into our interior life. He cites multiple ancient writers on this topic, as he will throughout this book. His point in doing this isn’t merely to put his learning on display but to show how many of the questions that preoccupy us about life have been thought about long before us and how oftentimes a kind of perennial wisdom emerges which Montaigne can draw upon and present for us. Great minds often think alike on such topics, so resist the temptation to bypass the quotations he presents.

Solitude, he continues, can be had in crowds as well, although it’s not optimally sought there. Without going to extremes here, he urges us to “make our happiness depend on ourselves,” something likely easier done in retirement than at earlier stages of life (99). But in youth and middle age as well, he urges that we “set aside a room, just for ourselves, at the back of the shop, keeping it entirely free and establishing there our true liberty, our principal solitude and asylum” (100). Not just a degree of physical separation but mental separation is important here. A room for oneself doesn’t have to be physical, although if you have access to a private tower in a renaissance chateau that would be very good (see photo of Montaigne’s tower below). More important is achieving some degree of mental distancing for the purpose of regaining ourselves from the madness of the world. Time and again in the Western tradition we find philosophers and others reflecting on how the pull of the world is more often than not a pull downward into mediocrity, vice, and unhappiness. Many modern thinkers will also speak about this, as we shall see. For now, we see Montaigne remarking that solitude is especially appropriate later in life, after one has spent most of one’s productive years in public life: “We have lived quite enough for others: let us live at least this tail-end of life for ourselves. Let us bring our thoughts and reflections back to ourselves and to our own well-being” (101). Leave the pursuit of reputation and glory for others, he says, as “Glory and tranquillity cannot dwell in the same lodgings” (107).

Essay 57, “On the length of life” finds Montaigne in a somewhat Stoical mood again. In the first century AD the Roman Stoic Seneca wrote a short book called On the Shortness of Life in which he maintained that while the human lifespan can seem short to us, it’s long enough if we know how to use the time that has been given to us. Montaigne now engages in a similar reflection and asks at the outset of this short piece why so many hope to live until old age. The wise have seldom measured the quality of a human life by the quantity of its years, and yet the common view is that the longer we live the better. Montaigne says that in his own case he has noticed an overall decline of his mental and physical powers since about the age of thirty; beyond that it’s mostly a downhill slide, and at the same time we expect very little of people before the age of about twenty. Do we have just one good decade in us? More should be expected of young people, he thinks: “considering the frailty of our life and the number of natural hazards to which it is exposed, we should not allow so large a place in it to being born, to leisure and to our apprenticeship” (122-123). We tend to think of a natural death as one that comes only in old age, while the reality of human life is that we can die at any time and due to any number of causes. Accidental death, death in war, and so on, are not less natural than death by old age, and nor is death before old age necessarily bad. There is a downside to dying of old age, he says: “It may well be that (for those who make good use of their time) knowledge and experience grow with the years but vitality, quickness, firmness and other qualities which are more truly our own, and more important, more ours by their essence, droop and fade” (122).

Moving into Book 2, essay 1 is titled “On the inconstancy of our actions.” He begins by noting how many of our actions contradict our other actions, and to such an extent that there may be nothing solid and enduring within us at all. He notes that “vacillation seems to me to be the most common and blatant defect of our nature” (124). We understand a person through their actions and their expressions of opinion, but when these regularly contradict each other we’re at a loss. He calls it “the principal aim of wisdom” to arrange one’s life such that it follows some particular path and remains on that path consistently through time (125). But it is also exceedingly rare, he remarks. The norm appears to be exactly the opposite: a person whose life follows no course for long and where our actions and opinions contradict our other actions and opinions. We can neither understand nor judge such a person, as we don’t know who they are from one moment to the next. Imagine a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces don’t fit together; no picture emerges from the whole, and this is the problem he sees in the society of his time. The norm instead is that we follow impulses which are ever changing, imagining happiness to consist in doing what we feel like when how we feel changes like the weather. When there’s no constancy in our actions, Montaigne believes, there’s nothing solid within us, nothing by which others can take the measure of us. It’s an affliction of the person yet one so commonplace that we don’t consider it an affliction but simply the way people are. “We do not go: we are borne along like things afloat, now bobbing now lashing about as the waters are angry or serene” (126). In the ideal Montaigne proposes, a person exhibits considerable regularity of action, even as one is subject to conflicting impulses and tendencies. Our nature inclines all of us to fly off in a thousand directions, but wisdom stands against this. Notice again how many ancient sources he draws upon in this essay. This isn’t only Montaigne’s ideal but one that is widely supported by ancient and medieval thinkers of different schools of thought. He is aware that it’s a difficult task he is recommending, but happiness is more difficult to attain than we often realize and, above all, it’s not found in surrendering to tendencies within us that are forever conflicting.

Essay 2 “On drunkenness” is a must-read. Who says that philosophy isn’t relevant? This renaissance man from the Bordeaux region of France is no stranger to wine and no teetotaler himself, yet a fan of drunkenness he is not. He notes at the beginning of the essay how we tend to rank the different sins or forms of immorality. We imagine certain actions as morally worse than others, but what makes any one type of immoral action worse than any other, he asks? We commonly judge drunkenness either a small sin or no sin at all, he notes, but on the basis of what principle? There is a principled reason why murder is a more serious offence than stealing: stealing someone’s property inconveniences them and maybe insults them, but murdering them causes more than this. Consider the whole list of crimes and immoral actions and try to arrange them into some rank order. Where does drunkenness lie? Most will answer that it’s a minor offence only, however Montaigne points out that it may be more serious a matter than we think since when we are drunk we are essentially surrendering our minds to our bodies. “The worst state,” he says, “for a man is when he loses all consciousness and control of himself” (133). Drunkenness “overthrows” the mind while other vices merely impair it (133). Many vices such as lying or stealing at least involve some activity of the mind, some cleverness or strategy on our part, whereas “drunkenness is all body and earthy,” and “the grossest nation of our day is alone in honouring it”—he’s speaking of the Germans (133).

As the essay goes along, however, Montaigne tempers this by reminding us how ancient thinkers often stopped short of condemning drunkenness and sometimes spoke of its merits. Plato, for one, condemned it only for the young while for those over the age of forty it restores a kind of youthfulness and gaiety which may be beneficial. Montaigne says that while “I find this vice base and stultifying,” it is also “less wicked and a cause of less harm than the others, which virtually all do more direct public damage to our society” (136). His advice is not to avoid it entirely but to moderate it.

Essay 5, “On Conscience,” takes up the issue of moral guilt and the question of torture which, given the wars of religion of this time period, is of obvious relevance to him. It was a common opinion at the time that torture is a rather good means of getting the truth out of a prisoner. The application of pain might get someone to admit to some wrongdoing that was weighing on their conscience but that they had succeeded in keeping secret. The editor of our edition, M. A. Screech, notes that Montaigne’s opposition to torture owes a fair amount to Augustine’s argument against it over a thousand years prior. What is the case against torture? If it indeed solicits the truth out of a criminal or prisoner of war, why not use it? Montaigne’s suggestion here is that the awareness of our own guilt often betrays us without our being aware of it, and without any need of torture. We can give ourselves away even to strangers, and he gives a couple of examples of individuals doing this. “Wickedness forges torments for itself,” he says (144). Adding actual torture to the wrongdoer’s own confessions of conscience isn’t likely to get any more truth out of him than these unwitting confessions themselves. Torture tests our physical endurance more than our ability to hide the truth and is therefore of very limited value. “What would you not say, what would you not do, to avoid such grievous pain? (146). A person who is being tortured merely says whatever they think is likely to get the pain to stop, not the truth about a crime they may have committed. If it’s the truth we’re after, this generally gives itself away through a person’s ordinary expressions, without any need for torture.

Montaigne’s reflections on cruelty continue in essay 11, “On cruelty.” He begins by offering the opinion that the virtuous path in life is invariably difficult. For whatever reason, “Virtue demands a rough and thorny road: she wants either external difficulties to struggle against … or else inward difficulties furnished by the disordered passions and imperfections of our condition” (171). As he goes on, however, he points out that the most noble individual he knows of is Socrates and that Socrates, to the best of our knowledge, didn’t face such a road. Neither Socrates nor Montaigne himself, he reports, ever had to struggle mightily against any “disordered passions,” nor has he had to struggle to control his vices. On the contrary, Montaigne credits his father and also his education for having instilled in him a love of moderation and especially a hatred of cruelty. Cruelty is the lowest of the vices, he thinks, and it’s this more than anything else that accounts for the practice of torture. If the death penalty is warranted for certain crimes, still it is better to execute the prisoner quickly and in the least painful way possible. If the state wishes to deter criminality, this purpose can be served just as well by inflicting punishments on the dead corpse than by cruel treatment of the condemned before they die. He feels for animals as well for their sufferings. “We owe justice to men: and to the other creatures who are able to receive them we owe gentleness and kindness” (185).

Moving on to Book 3, essay 3 is “On three kinds of social intercourse.” Montaigne begins by pointing out that “Life is a rough, irregular progress with a multitude of forms,” or there is more than one form of social contact and it’s best not to limit oneself to a single form (247). As he puts it, “Souls are most beautiful when they show most variety and flexibility” (247). He has already written about the virtue of constancy of character, and without wishing to contradict that idea his focus in this essay is on not getting trapped in our constancy as in a rut but demonstrating some versatility in our attitude toward social life. He tells us that his constant tendency in dealing with any matter whatsoever is to become completely engrossed in it, and while this is no vice it can be distressing. We see him doing this in the writing of this book, where he engrosses himself in his own thoughts at great length. “No occupation is more powerful, or more feeble, than entertaining one’s own thoughts—depending on what kind of soul it is” (248). For a soul like his own it is a vocation, he says, at this stage of his life anyway. He sings the praises of reading books; here is a practice that takes us out of ourselves and our habitual ways and into something utterly different. It sets all one’s powers of mind to work, and in a way that exceeds what we find in ordinary conversation. Montaigne clearly enjoys both learning and intellectual conversation, but “grace and beauty occupy me” no less (248). Too much of one at the expense of the others is a recipe for dullness.

Friendship is especially important to Montaigne, he tells us, but also friendships of more than one kind. Casual acquaintanceships don’t interest him much, it being his nature either to become fully engrossed in something or to be indifferent to it. On the other hand, friendly conversation with people who don’t necessarily belong to his own aristocratic class is something that he says he enjoys, departing from the common habit within his class of talking down to such people. Ordinary friendships of this kind whether with men or women can be very important, where we don’t feel any need to impress others with our learning or our aristocratic ways. “I was born for company and loving relationships,” he says of himself, and while he enjoys solitude in order to return to himself, he also derives great pleasure from ordinary company with people he doesn’t feel the need to impress (253). Friendship with individuals of reputation and talent are also profitable so long as they’re not weighed down by the pursuit of gain or a sense of competition. “The ends of intercourse with such men are simply intimacy, the frequenting of each other and discussion—exercising our souls with no other gain” (253). Such conversation needn’t be confined to matters of great weight and is probably best when it is not.

The second kind of social interaction he finds great value in is with women who, he says, are “beautiful and honorable”—not sure about the non-beautiful and dishonorable (254). “For we too have well-taught eyes” (254); it sounds better when he quotes Cicero saying this in Latin. Anyway, the company of women he finds edifying in its own way, although he also urges caution here. He reports that in his youth he got stung a time or two in such relationships, so best to use some caution but not too much as this form of social interaction is important, he tells his readers. He’s also a married man, let’s remember, so it would be a bit odd for him to advise us much differently on this subject. It’s best not to become too obsessed with relationships of this kind, he advises, while avoiding the opposite extreme as well.

The third form of social intercourse he values highly is the love of books. This doesn’t engage the body at all, while the second kind just mentioned doesn’t necessarily engage the mind, although it’s best when it does. Reading books is clearly one of Montaigne’s great loves, as we can tell as we read The Essays. His frequent quoting of classical authors is no exercise in empty pedantry but reveals his love of these writers. Also, remember that he’s writing a very long book while surrounded by books in his library in his tower. He’s a man with a fondness for books, and he’s recommending this in the highest terms to his readers. This kind of love doesn’t depend on chance or age and “is more reliable and more properly our own” (257). Further, “It consoles me in my old age and in my retreat; it relieves me of the weight of distressing idleness and, at any time, can rid me of boring company. It blunts the stabs of pain whenever the pain is not too masterful and extreme” (257). He travels with books and regards them as friends who can always be counted upon. As a young man, he read books in order to impress people while now he does so he please himself. He sums up the essay: “There you have my three favourite private occupations. I make no mention of the ones I owe to the world through my obligations to the state” (259).

We now have at least a sense of The Essays as a whole, although with a text of this nature and length you’d need to read far more of it to gain a fuller appreciation. Our edition is a selection, and if you have the time I do recommend reading more of it. Let’s touch on at least a few more of the many highlights from the book before moving on to our next philosopher. Briefly, he advises his readers in essay 27, “That it is madness to judge the true and the false from our own capacities,” or from our own capacities alone; it is unwise, in other words, to reject all authority on matters that we are not knowledgeable of from our personal experience. Consider, he says, an ancient figure such as Augustine who reports that he witnessed several clear violations of the laws of nature which he attributed to God. Is it wise to reject all testimony like this regarding miracles? Some of it invites skepticism, but all of it? We should be very careful about imagining we always know better than an Augustine or some other seemingly credible witness to such events, or that we moderns know better than people in previous time periods. Was Augustine lying, naive, or otherwise telling us something false for some reason known only to him? We need evidence of miracles, but we also need evidence to think someone like this is lying to us. There are things in the world that we don’t understand or that go beyond our experience, and “Apart from the absurd rashness which it entails, there is a dangerous boldness of great consequence in despising whatever we cannot understand” (78).

Another interesting highlight is the essay “On repenting.” He speaks of repenting less in an overtly religious sense than as an honest acknowledgement of our errors in judgment and as the kind of regret we often have when we look back on our past, especially in old age. It’s commonplace, he says, for an older person to regret the misdeeds of their youth, but this is not a feeling that Montaigne has much sympathy for. In his own case he regrets rather little about his past, although he knows he has made mistakes. About such errors he writes, “I am always comforted by the thought that they had to happen that way: there they are in the vast march of the universe and in the concatenation of Stoic causes; no idea of yours, by wish or by thought, can change one jot without overturning the whole order of Nature, both past and future” (243). We should learn from our mistakes, but it’s best not to become mired in the past and its regrets. He believes that his own sins were fewer than most, and some self-forgiveness is in order provided our misdeeds do not rise to a high level. It’s also best not to blame anyone for our failures, he thinks, but to remain objective in passing judgments on oneself.

An interesting piece toward the end of our edition is titled “On the lame” (you’ll have to read it to find out what old Italian proverb that’s a reference to). Here we see Montaigne discussing his opinions on various matters from miracles to witches, and also his opinion about his opinions. Opinions pour out of this man like water from an unusually deep well, and here he talks about just how opinionated people in general are and what great confidence they have in such ideas, whatever they are. For his part, Montaigne, although he is going to great trouble to write down his views, isn’t quick to recommend them to others. “Anyone who took account of my ravings, to the prejudice of the most wretched law, opinion or custom of his village, would do great wrong to himself and also to me,” an unusual thing for a philosopher to say (360). “What do I know?” is something of a motto for Montaigne. His opinions are in this book for all to read, but they remain in some sense his opinions only: “I warrant you no certainty for whatever I say, except that it was indeed my thought at the time … my vacillating and disorderly thought. I will talk about anything by way of conversation, about nothing by way of counsel” (360-361). It’s in a general spirit of conversation that he presents his viewpoint, the conversation one might have with a friend in which one opines this way or that but without strongly urging one’s friend to see things the same way that one does. There’s a healthy skepticism or intellectual humility that comes through here. It’s not that he has no convictions, but he doesn’t place such great importance on them as to insist we all agree with him, as many are too quick to do. This is a difficult balancing act; he is in some ways a skeptic—one very mindful of the limits of human knowledge—but also a philosopher and an experienced man of the world whose convictions are based on that experience as well as a great deal of classical learning.

One might think that Montaigne fits a bit awkwardly into the tradition of Western philosophy or even that he isn’t a philosopher at all but some other kind of writer. He is very much a philosopher but, as I mentioned above, he’s more or less impossible to classify. Numerous influences find their way into his essays, all of which are unusually short on doctrine and long on autobiographical self-reflection and musing on the world as he found it. Philosophers today don’t write books like this one, which in some ways is unfortunate because his overall aim is not unlike what is likely to be our own, which is to gain some critical self-understanding which is also an understanding of the culture of his time. The philosopher or student of philosophy today faces the same challenge, although our own circumstances have changed somewhat. Any one of us could write a book like this one. In its pages we find an individual trying in a deliberately experimental and exploratory way to think his way through some of the vital questions of the age and of any age. Ultimately, it’s a book about himself, and as we read it we do get a sense of the person behind it and of the life he has led to this point. He’s a good deal less intent than philosophers usually are upon convincing us of this or that hypothesis than upon doing something like Augustine was attempting in the Confessions and something like Marcus Aurelius was doing in his Meditations—something like both but identical to neither. It’s important for us as students of philosophy to see the different ways that philosophy has been practised and also written throughout its long history and the variety of thinkers it has attracted and the breadth of topics it has taken up. Comparing different philosophers from different eras and schools of thought always has an apples and oranges quality to it, as we see when we try to imagine what a Montaigne has in common with a Thomas or a Descartes. Philosophy is no one thing but more like a tradition or maybe a herd of cats.

This master of the modern essay genre is a free spirit, and to understand his thought and the man himself it’s necessary that we not lose sight of this. He moves from topic to topic in this book, often leaving the reader to wonder what overall picture is meant to emerge from these seemingly disjointed fragments. It’s a book about himself, he tells us, and the self itself can seem like disjointed fragments as we are pulled in so many opposing directions. Through it all we aim for some constancy of character but without dull predictability. He’s a man who has spent his public career trying to be virtuous and succeeding most of the time with few regrets about the rest. He does not believe either himself or his culture or his time period to be superior to others and warns of the hubris of imagining otherwise. Some have seen in this posture a kind of relativism (essentially the view that the good or the true is relative to something or other, usually either a culture, a worldview, or the person oneself, a position that nearly all philosophers regard as untenable), but this is a dubious reading. He isn’t making a case for relativism; his overall views seem instead to tend toward a worldly tolerance, a leniency and compassion which is likely more of an attitude toward people and toward life than a theoretical position. He is strongly opposed to all ethnocentrism and is often quick to oppose the self-satisfied attitude regarding our own way of life that is a commonplace of any time period. He is a thinker with an expansive and a very open mind, and he’ll have this in common with the last philosopher we’ll look at in this course (Nietzsche), who admired Montaigne thoroughly.

We now cross a bit of a threshold into the seventeenth century and the early years of what would in the eighteenth century come to be called the Enlightenment. Philosophy would now be characterized by a few major divisions, and none more central than the famous divide between the rationalists and the empiricists. Our next two philosophers are the foremost early proponents of these two theories of knowledge.

Part 8: René Descartes

We remain in France and not long after Montaigne’s time. René Descartes was born just four years following Montaigne’s death, and his dates are 1596 to 1650. His Meditations on First Philosophy (trans. Desmond M. Clarke. New York: Penguin, 2003; again, it’s fine if you have a different edition) was published in 1641 in Latin and in 1647 in French. Actually, Descartes wrote the book in Latin and it was later translated into French by Duc de Luynes, not by Descartes himself. It’s his most famous work and has long been a must-read for any philosophy student. This is a short book which we’ll be reading from cover to cover. It consists of six chapters or “meditations,” and my notes below will cover all six.

Descartes has often been thought of as “the father of modern philosophy,” and while this is likely overstated it surely contains some truth as well. Fathers have parents too, and so do mothers, and Descartes’ own are many. Reading the Meditations often gives us a sense that its author is an intellectual orphan who has been influenced by no one and is essentially starting from scratch. This is far from the truth. This French rationalist was educated by Jesuits at one of the best schools in Europe at the time, the Collège Henri IV à La Flèche, where he received a classical education in the Jesuit/Catholic tradition. While he studied philosophy (especially Aristotle and Catholic doctrine) there, he found much of it distasteful and wrote of his studies at the Collège: “philosophy teaches us to speak with an appearance of truth about all things and causes us to be admired by the less learned”; also, “no single thing is to be found in it which is not a matter of dispute and which in consequence is not dubious” (Descartes, Discourse on Method). What impressed him greatly in his student days is mathematics, and he later received a degree in law as well before entering the military.

Legend has it that one day in 1619, at the age of 23, Descartes was sitting in a “poêle,” which is a small, stove-heated room likely used for masonry, contemplating the uncertainty of human knowledge. What is the underlying foundation of the sum total of human knowledge, he began to wonder? The answer came to him in a flash: mathematical reason. Mathematics gives us real certainty but about matters that are not of ultimate importance. How can we gain certainty regarding things that are ultimately important? Is there a method and a foundation? It occurs to him that reason in general can be modelled on mathematics. That night Descartes reports that he had a series of dreams that provided divine confirmation of his idea. He then left the military and spent many years writing his books, leaving behind his old life of military service, travel, gambling, and dueling, his favorite pastimes. He subsequently left France for Holland where he lived for twenty years. It was then that he learned of the trial of Galileo in Rome, and because of this he decided to suppress a manuscript he had written on science titled The World or Treatise on Light.

When the Meditations was published it aroused a fair amount of controversy, as Catholics and Protestants were both outraged with what they took to be Descartes’ atheism, although he was no atheist but a Catholic. Descartes had very high hopes for his philosophy and wanted nothing less than for his philosophical system to replace that of Plato and Aristotle. In 1649, Queen Christina of Sweden invited Descartes to come to Stockholm to serve as her private tutor and to be a member of her court. The winters in Sweden are much colder than this Frenchman was used to, and the winter of 1849 was especially harsh. Descartes died of pneumonia in February of 1650 at the age of 54. Queen Christina was in the habit of insisting that Descartes show up at her library at 5:00 every morning, which probably didn’t help his condition. Descartes never married, lived a quiet life for the most part (apart from the gambling and dueling), and died a faithful Catholic.

The Meditations is a short book with a very long title: Meditations on First Philosophy, in which God’s Existence and the Distinction between the Human Soul and the Body are Demonstrated. Meditations had also been the title of Marcus Aurelius’ book, of course, although Marcus himself never gave the book that or any title since he probably didn’t intend the book to be published. The meaning of “meditation” in Descartes’ text is entirely different from Marcus and indeed from any ancient or medieval philosopher. Remember that Plato wrote in dialogue form, as did Aristotle sometimes (his dialogues are all lost to us), Boethius, and some others in the first millennium or so of Western philosophy while medieval thinkers like Thomas wrote in the more formal disputational style. Philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would strive to become somewhat less “literary” and increasingly would be written in the form of the modern treatise, which is a stand-alone text written in relatively formal prose and in vernacular and often relatively technical language. Descartes would adopt the treatise form, although the Meditations is an unusual treatise. A meditation in his sense of the word is not a purely formal, academic enterprise but is essentially a struggling with some difficult but very important question. There is a sense of urgency here, where it’s impossible to sit on the sidelines or be indifferent about what we are going to believe. Beliefs and knowledge form the basis of how we live, who we are, and everything we do, so it’s an urgent matter that we are able to justify whatever it is we’re going to believe. In what discipline, then, can we attain real certainty? His answer is mathematics. Thinking there proceeds according to the strictest of rules, there is a foundation of self-evident principles, and it reaches fully rational and well-justified conclusions, which for Descartes are the indicators of real knowledge. The object of knowledge is certain truth, where truth itself is defined strictly as a relation of correspondence or mirroring between a fact (or a state of affairs) and a statement about that fact. A classic example: “The cat is on the mat” is true if the cat is on the mat in actual fact. The human mind is a kind of mirror of the world, and knowing the truth is a matter of discovering which statements or hypotheses correspond to the way the world is independent of our minds.

A crucial consideration here is that Descartes’ practice of philosophical meditation is meant to be distinguished rather categorically from poetry (presocratics), dialogue (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Boethius), confession (Augustine), disputation (Thomas), the essay form (Montaigne) or indeed from anything that is non-mathematical. Descartes thinks in solitude, or such is his declared aim. The reason for this is that the kind of knowledge he is searching for must have 100% certainty, and as long as this is our goal then entertaining the opinions of other people won’t help us. There is no need for dialogue regarding 2 + 2 = 4, nor would we write an essay or a poem about such a proposition, and it is this kind of certainty that Descartes is seeking for human knowledge in its entirety. To achieve this, knowledge must be placed on an absolute foundation as we would a building. Human knowledge as a whole can be likened to a multi-story building, although Descartes himself doesn’t use this metaphor. Imagine the top floor as consisting of all those beliefs we have about, for example, art or politics or ethics. Beneath that floor are relatively solid believes about science. Beneath that floor is one about mathematics or formal logic. As we continue downward, we eventually reach the building’s foundation. Each floor of a building is either equally or less strong than the floor beneath it, and the building as a whole stands or falls on its foundation. The foundation must therefore be the strongest part of the building, and we can imagine all of human knowledge as like this, Descartes believes. This has more recently been called the foundationalist conception of knowledge, and it is distinctively modern—where “modern” (“modernus” in Latin means pertaining to today) in philosophy loosely means everything from about the seventeenth century to the present.

The title of the first meditation is “Things which can be called into doubt,” and he begins by remarking on how many of his former opinions he later discovered to be false. He had been quite confident in many of these beliefs, as we all are, but they were still false. What this suggests is that the sense of confidence or conviction alone is no guarantee of knowledge, even though it’s what we usually rely on. When I ask you what you believe, you’ll often think of those views you hold that you feel sure of, and Descartes’ rejoinder to this is that the feeling of confidence alone is unreliable. When do we know that we know? If we want to discover the foundations of human knowledge, we will need an objective standard that allows us to separate what we truly know from what we think we know but may be wrong about. Recall Plato’s distinction between knowledge and opinion, which Descartes is going to work hard to keep separate.

In order to do this, he says, we need to wipe the slate of belief clean and start thinking from scratch. Take everything you currently and used to believe, and put it in brackets. This is very difficult to do (many philosophers will say impossible), and to accomplish it requires solitude: “Therefore today I appropriately cleared my mind of all cares and arranged for myself some time free from interruption. I am alone and, at long last, I will devote myself seriously and freely to this general overturning of my beliefs” (18). Solitude, in his view, is essential to meditation, or philosophical thinking is not a social undertaking but an entirely private matter where one does not borrow ideas from others but originates them out of one’s own mind. The ideal of “enlightenment” which would become more explicit in the eighteenth century is that everyone must think for themselves. Immanuel Kant would give the Enlightenment its slogan: have the courage to rely upon your own rational faculty, or dare to know for yourself (“Sapere aude”). This is a kind of individualistic ideal applied to the theory of knowledge or epistemology. Again, Descartes concentrates on the individual alone with their thoughts because other people’s opinions are unreliable, no matter who they are. This is a radical idea, and where radical doesn’t mean extreme but “from the root.” Medieval philosophers didn’t think this way, nor did the Romans or the Greeks. Socrates went into the marketplace to discuss ideas, and thinking for him is an explicitly social practice. Descartes would have replied to Socrates that we ought to forget dialogue because it only misleads one by highlighting other people’s beliefs which are no more reliable than one’s own.

Accordingly, Descartes sets about to start thinking anew, and the first thing this requires is the complete rejection of everything he has believed in the past and in the present. This is the method of radical and systematic doubt. We must doubt every proposition that it is logically possible, not just reasonable, to doubt. This isn’t because all of Descartes’ former convictions were false but because some of them were, and if any one of them was false then all of them are tainted with uncertainty, and it’s certainty that he’s after. As he expresses it, “To do this it is not necessary to show that they are all false—something I might never be able to accomplish! But since reason already convinces us that we should withhold assent just as carefully from whatever is not completely certain and indubitable as from what is clearly false, if I find some reason for doubt in each of my beliefs, that will be enough to reject all of them” (18). It’s unnecessary to show reason for doubting every one of his beliefs, individually; what he needs to do is show how the foundation of his beliefs is uncertain. Beliefs all a whole form a unified system, and if the foundation is rotten then so is the entire structure.

Descartes now formulates a number of skeptical arguments regarding the foundations of knowledge. First, consider the fact that many of one’s beliefs are based on the evidence of the senses: I believe there’s a computer in front of me, that it’s sunny outside, that it’s morning, etc. because I perceive these things. But the senses sometimes deceive me, “and it is prudent never to trust those who have deceived us, even if only once” (19). Descartes then asks, can I really doubt that “I am here, dressed in my gown, sitting by the fire” (19)? Is this a genuine doubt or just an academic exercise? Isn’t it only the insane who doubt such things? Maybe not. If it is possible to doubt this then it’s also rational.

Consider next the problem of dreams: when I’m dreaming, I usually don’t realize I’m dreaming (maybe on occasion, but not very often). How do I know with absolute certainty that I’m not dreaming right now? I can dream of some things happening that are pretty unlikely to occur, and yet I have no clue that I’m actually asleep. Normally we assume that the cause of a perception or sense experience resembles the content of the experience, that our perception of the sun is caused by the sun and corresponds to it also. The principle is suspended, however, in the case of dreams, so we suspend the principle sometimes. We believe the senses only sometimes, but when? What is the difference between dream experiences and waking experiences, and how can I be certain that I’m not dreaming right now? Descartes answers: I can’t, at least not by appealing to my senses. The senses are therefore unreliable, since they can’t even tell me whether I’m awake or asleep. They cannot be the foundations of human knowledge—against the empiricists who will argue to the contrary.

If the senses are unreliable then the fields of knowledge that rely on the senses are unreliable too: the natural sciences. What about mathematics? In math, we do not assert that mathematical objects (numbers, triangles, etc.) exist in reality; instead they are ideas, abstractions, or definitions, and so our knowledge about them doesn’t depend on the senses. Also, whether I’m asleep or awake, 2 + 2 = 4, and a square has exactly four sides. Mathematical knowledge is independent of the senses, so is it certain? It comes pretty close, but unfortunately not close enough. Why not?

Enter the evil genius or the evil deceiver argument: I am accustomed to believing in God, and that this divinity created me and is all-powerful. How do I know that he is not a deceiver, or that he doesn’t cause me to see things that aren’t real? Also, it is said that God is good, but he seems to find it tolerable to watch me make mistakes, including in mathematics where I can still make errors. What if this God were not good at all but rather evil? What if he deliberately sets out to deceive me, about what my senses are telling me, about mathematics, and about everything I think I know? Is there anything at all that this evil genius could not possibly deceive me about?

He continues the argument in the second meditation, “The Nature of the Human Mind, and that it is better known than the Body.” Descartes now asks whether there is even a single point on which he can be completely certain. He is in search of what is sometimes called an “Archimedean point” for all knowledge. Archimedes was a third-century BC Greek mathematician and inventor who sought one firm and immovable point from which he could move the earth from one point to another. Archimedes thought it possible to lift the earth off its foundation if only one had a place to stand and a long enough lever, and what Descartes now wants to discover is a similar Archimedean point for knowledge, some absolute point of view on the universe as a whole. This Archimedean point is going to be the famous Cogito, or “I think.”

The argument goes like this: let’s suppose for the sake of argument that everything I (Descartes’ meditator) believe is false, that everything I perceive is not real, that my memory is completely defective, that my reasoning powers are defective, and that even I myself may not exist. As improbable as it is, it is logically possible that there exists an all-powerful deceiver who is tricking me into thinking that 2 + 2 = 4 when it actually equals five. I can’t be certain that this isn’t the case. If there might be such a deceiver, is there anything at all that he couldn’t possibly deceive me about, even a single proposition? Alas, there is one: I think, or I am thinking—his key move. “Cogito, ergo sum” or I think, therefore I am (I exist). Even an omnipotent and evil genius could not deceive a nonentity into thinking that it exists. Nonentities can’t think, and for every action (thinking), there must be an agent (a thinker) just as there can be no walking without walkers. If there is thinking, there must be a thinker, and that would be me—so the first certain proposition, “I think,” quickly generates a second: “I exist.”

If I now know that I exist, the next question becomes, what am I? What is my nature? I have always thought of myself as a human being, and that this is a rational animal. However, I can be wrong about both of these matters. What am I, then? A body? It certainly appears that way, but again there’s the problem of the evil genius and also the problem of the senses: I believe I have or am a body because I perceive it. Let’s say that I am essentially “a thinking thing,” “a mind, soul, intellect or reason” (25). I am an individual consciousness or center of awareness, possibly one that possesses a body, possibly not. I am radically unconditioned; in other words, what I am is prior to or outside of history, culture, time, social relationships, and physical nature. Consciousness is independent of all these things, so many of the things we think of as belonging to us (history, culture, social relationships, language, nature) don’t belong to us, or not essentially. They are instead what Aristotle termed “accidental properties,” meaning that I would still be me without any of them. This concept of radical individuality is historically new with Descartes, and it would catch on.

I now know a third proposition: I exist as a thinking thing, or that is my essential nature. I am not essentially a body, or a bearer of any of the properties listed above, but a mind or a soul. Maybe I have a body (we’ll see), but I am not a body (my body is not my essence). My body may have a certain relation to me, but that remains to be seen.

Now what else can I know? Let’s think about those things that we think we know best: physical objects. Do we really know their nature, or that they even exist as more than figments of our imagination? Let’s consider one object in particular, as an example: this piece of wax before me. Consider the wax (it could be any physical object): what is it, or what do I really know about it? Let’s observe it for a while, subject it to various conditions and see what happens to it. Let’s place it next to the fire—what happens? It melts—then what? What’s it like once it has melted? Its properties have all changed—its shape, odor, color, taste, etc. The senses are telling us that the wax has become something different, and yet we say it’s the same wax. It has changed, but it’s the same stuff that it was. But how do we know this? Everything about it appears to have changed, so it can’t be the senses that tell us this; they tell us the wax is not the same thing at all but a new thing, and yet we know different. There must be a source of knowledge that is independent of the senses, and this is the mind or reason. It is reason alone that tells me what the wax’s nature is, and its essential property must be spatial extension. I now know that extendedness in space is the essential property of all physical objects. To exist as a physical thing is to occupy space, or to have extension. Note that the existence of physical objects hasn’t been proven yet, but what has is that if such objects exist, their nature is to have spatial extension.

He considers a second example: I look out the window and see below what appear to be people walking in the street. I know that object down there to be a person, but how do I know this? Suppose I’m looking down from a height and all I strictly see are hats and clothing. Still I say that I know the thing to be a person. Are my senses telling me this? For all they’re telling me, it’s possible that it’s actually a robot concealed under the clothing. How do I know it’s a human being and not a robot? Again, it is my mind or my reason that knows this. The conclusion he reaches is that it is not by means of the senses that we know the world but by means of reason. Hence Descartes’ rationalism. Another interesting claim here is that the object of knowledge that the mind grasps with the most certainty is not the world but the mind’s own workings. Self-knowledge is the most certain knowledge of all because it is grasped directly.

Descartes next aims in the third meditation, “The Existence of God,” to discover something about the world outside his own mind. To this point, all he knows about is himself: that he exists, that he exists as a thinking thing, that reason is the method of gaining knowledge, and that his senses are unreliable, but what about the world beyond one’s own mind? Is the world actually the way it appears? These are questions that we would answer by looking and seeing, but Descartes has told us that we can’t do that if we’re after certainty. How are we to proceed, then? He replies, by looking within the mind itself and analyzing its contents or ideas. The ideas that make up the contents of my mind are crystal-clear to me, and I know them directly and perfectly. So let’s close our eyes, stop up our ears, and turn the mind toward its own inner contents. What do we find there but ideas of a great many kinds. One thing I notice about these ideas is that some of them are clear and distinct while others are more vague. If an idea is clear and distinct to my reason, is it a definite object of knowledge? No, because we still have the problem of the evil deceiver. Now what? Here Descartes makes his next key move: I need to find out whether God exists. Without an all-powerful and benevolent God, I am essentially trapped within my own mind, knowing nothing about the external world—even whether it exists. All I know about the physical universe to this point is that if it exists then its essential property is extension; that isn’t much. I don’t know so far whether the world bears any resemblance whatsoever to how I perceive it. To know about the world, then, I need some guarantee that my perceptions are accurate, at least my clear and distinct perceptions. That guarantor is God. Note that Descrates has put tremendous importance on proving God’s existence. If he can’t do this, he is trapped in his own mind, knowing only a few propositions.

How does he prove God, then? Recall Anselm’s argument as outlined earlier, which is often called “the ontological argument”: simply to grasp the concept of God or to understand the proposition that God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” is to perceive immediately that God exists in the world and not merely as an idea; he exists by definition. Descartes formulates the argument this way: let’s think about all the ideas that are presently in my mind. There are many: I have ideas about myself, other people, physical objects, mathematical objects, beliefs, values, theories, etc.—a thousand ideas. Some of these ideas seem to have been produced by me while others do not, or at least I have no memory of creating them (e.g., the ideas of triangle, numbers, the notion of truth, etc.). Where did this second group of ideas come from? Maybe they are innate or maybe they derive from an external source. The origin of many of my ideas is not self-evident. Some ideas appear to conform to my will (I can imagine going for a walk right now, for instance) while others do not. An example of the latter is that when I put my hand very close to the fire, I feel pain, whether I want to or not. Those ideas that do not submit to my will must not be caused by me but must issue from an external source. There is a problem though: the fact that fire causes my pain doesn’t necessarily mean that the fire resembles my idea of it. Just because the fire feels hot to me doesn’t mean that it is hot in fact. It is only by “some blind impulse” that I believe that external objects cause ideas (about themselves) to exist in my mind (via the senses) (34). Do perceptions or ideas resemble the objects that cause them? So far, I have no idea.

Descartes then makes a distinction between what he calls objective reality and formal reality. Objective reality refers to the content of an idea, or an object as represented to the mind (a mind-dependent or notional thing). Only ideas have objective reality. Formal reality refers to the actual object existing in its own right, independently of its being perceived or thought about (mind-independent). An example of formal reality is a desk that is perceived with the senses, while an example of objective reality is one’s idea of the desk (what one sees with the imagination). Next he proposes this: there must be at least as much reality in the cause of something as in the effect. For instance, if a baseball is traveling at 100 miles per hour, the cause of this must be sufficient to bring about that effect; if the pitcher’s hand was traveling at 20 miles an hour at the moment of release, it’s impossible that the ball could travel at 100 unless some additional force was brought to bear on it. The basic idea here is that you can’t get something from nothing, or from nothing comes nothing. Descartes knows this as “it is evident to me by the natural light of reason,” or it’s self-evident (36). Something that is more perfect cannot be caused by something that is less perfect. In every case, a cause must have at least the same degree or amount of formal reality as its effect. In the case of ideas in the mind, the cause of an idea must have at least the same degree of formal reality as the object that the idea represents.

Next, some ideas possess a greater degree of objective reality than others. The degree of objective reality of an idea is determined by the degree of formal reality of its object. Things in general possess different degrees of reality. We usually think that a thing either is real or it isn’t, but not for Descartes. An infinite substance (God) possesses the most formal reality (or perfection), followed by finite substances (bodies, minds, objects), followed by qualities and modes (color, shape, size, number, etc.). God possesses more perfection or formal reality than Descartes; and Descartes possesses more formal reality than the idea of Descartes or Descartes’ shape or color. Consider next our ideas. All ideas possess the same degree of formal reality (they all have the same status as thoughts or mind-dependent things), however ideas have differing degrees of objective reality. For example, the idea of the table has more objective reality than the idea of the table’s shape or color. This is because the table is a finite substance and its color is a mere mode, and the table has more formal reality than its color. The degree of an idea’s objective reality is determined by the formal reality of what that idea represents. For example, my idea of Descartes has more objective reality than my idea of color; and my idea of God has more objective reality than my idea of Descartes. Again, why? Because Descartes himself has more formal reality than his color; and God himself has more formal reality than Descartes. Some of my ideas, then, have a greater degree of objective reality or perfection than others. The cause of all my ideas must possess at least as much formal (or actual) reality or perfection as the ideas themselves have.

Next, let’s think about my ideas, or the contents of my mind. I find ideas of finite substances, infinite substances, and qualities and modes. Am I the cause of these ideas? Consider them each separately. First, ideas of qualities and modes (color, shape, number): can I be their cause? Yes, since I, as a finite substance, have equal or more—actually more—formal reality than qualities and modes do. Second, ideas of finite substances (rocks, animals, furniture): I can cause these too, for the same reason. Third, the idea of God: what can be the cause of this idea? Not the senses, since I’ve never seen God. Am I the cause, then? Again no, because I am only a finite substance, an imperfect being. An imperfect being can’t be the cause of the idea of a perfect being. In other words, a finite substance can’t cause the idea of an infinite substance. Where can the idea of God have come from, then? Only God could have caused this idea, something like in the way an artist leaves a signature on a painting or as an author leaves their name on a book. As Descartes puts it, “And even though I have an idea of a substance from the very fact that I am a substance myself, it would not, however, be an idea of an infinite substance because I am finite, unless it originated from some substance that is genuinely infinite” (38). The idea of God in my mind couldn’t have been put there by my parents either or by the larger society because they too are finite substances. Therefore, God exists.

Reality, Descartes believes, admits of degrees. What sense does this make? We are used to the idea that something either is or is not. However, some things depend for their existence on something else. If X depends on Y for its existence then Y must have in some sense more being (and more perfection) than X. For example, if a work of art depends for its existence on an artist, the work of art is less perfect or has a lesser kind of reality than the artist. Similarly, if a human being depends on God for our existence—if we are created beings—then we are less perfect and less real than our creator. All ideas have the same amount of formal (or actual) reality but different degrees of objective (notional) reality. Only ideas have objective reality. The degree of objective reality of a given idea is determined by the degree of formal reality of its object. The idea of God has the highest degree of objective reality, followed by the idea of finite substance, then attributes of substances, and modes.

Another way of formulating Descartes’ argument for the existence of God is as follows, beginning again with the idea of God that the meditator finds already present in his mind:

1. “[I]t is clear that there must be at least as much reality in a cause as in its effect” (41).

2. I have the idea of a perfect being or God in my mind. This idea, like all ideas, must have a cause or source.

3. The cause of this idea must have at least as much (formal or actual) reality as the idea has (objective) reality.

4. Therefore, the cause of the idea of a perfect being must be an actual perfect being.

5. Therefore, a perfect being (God) exists.

Next, what is this God’s nature? Might he be an evil deceiver? No, since deception is a mark of imperfection or a vice. My idea of God is of not only an infinite substance but one that is intelligent, all-knowing, all-powerful, and also all-good. An all-good, benevolent God would not be a deceiver.

Descartes has put forward some important hypotheses so far, including the following. First, the essential property of the human being is conscious thinking. The mind is always conscious. Second, knowledge of one’s own mind or mental states is certain. There is no such thing as a hidden (to oneself) motive or self-deception; the latter is a contradiction in terms. Third, there are no ideas in your mind that you are not conscious of. Fourth, we are immediately aware of ideas, not the things those ideas are about; or what we are directly aware of are not objects but ideas (perceptions, representations). For example, I don’t see an apple directly; I see red, round, etc. and my reason infers apple. I have no guarantee that perceptions resemble their causes, that the apple actually is red, round, etc. Fifth, the body (material substance) is essentially different from the mind, from which it follows that the laws of material nature have no application to mind. The mind is not a mechanism or a machine. There can be no physical science of the mind, and there is also no need for one since the mind is already fully known to itself. Sixth, all of this gives rise to what is called the mind-body problem: what is the relation between mind and body, and especially how can there be causal interaction between the two? How can a mental state such as fear cause a physical state like an increased heart rate, and how can a physical state like a wound to the skin cause a mental state like pain?

Moving now into the fourth meditation, “Truth and Falsehood,” Descartes’ meditator now knows that God exists, and he knows it with certainty. In fact, “I do not think that anything can be known by human intelligence more evidently or more clearly” than that God exists (44). What follows from this? What can I now know about the world? Does it bear any resemblance to how it appears to my senses?

Consider the nature of this God: according to my idea of God, he is all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing. He is therefore not a deceiver, since deception is an imperfection. Such a God wouldn’t allow me to be deceived—that is, not systematically, not about what seems plainly evident. Such a God would not allow me to be deceived into thinking there is a hand in front of my face when there isn’t. This God created me and gave me the mental faculties that I have. If I use these faculties properly, I shouldn’t fall into error: “Since God does not wish me to be mistaken he obviously did not give me a faculty such that, when I use it correctly, I could ever be mistaken” (44). The problem is that I do make mistakes. How is this possible, if my mental faculties were created by a perfect God? He answers as follows: I am a finite being with finite capacities. My reason is limited, but my will is not. I have free will and can choose to believe anything I want to. Error happens when my will chooses to affirm or to believe something that my reason hasn’t properly grasped. An example of intellectual error is when I engage in wishful thinking: I choose to believe in Santa Claus without adequate evidence because believing in Santa makes me happy. Error occurs when my capacity of choosing outruns my capacity of knowing. If I keep my will in check, I should never make errors in reasoning.

How, then, can I know what the world is like if I am liable to error? His answer: practice some intellectual discipline and keep the will in check. Above all, believe only what you have adequate reason to believe. Affirm only what you know and nothing more, or believe about the world only what you perceive clearly and distinctly. When our ideas about something are not clear and distinct, we should abstain from belief.

The fifth meditation is titled “The Essence of Material Things. Another Discussion of God’s Existence.” Descartes now produces a second and related proof of God’s existence, as follows. Consider again the idea of God. God has often been defined as a perfect being. (We have seen that Thomas Aquinas, the foremost medieval theologian whom Descartes certainly read, rejects this definition; not sure why Descartes omits this). Here again, Descartes is not making a claim about the world—that God exists—but is merely analyzing the idea of God that he has in his mind. Now consider this: suppose that this God does not exist; what would this entail? It would entail that God is lacking something—namely existence—and is therefore imperfect. Existence is a perfection and nonexistence is an imperfection. We have already defined God as a perfect being. If I imagine a perfect being, and list off its qualities, and then say “oh, by the way, it doesn’t exist,” it wouldn’t be a perfect being. It would not be at all, except as an idea. Therefore, an idea of a perfect being must correspond to an actual being, and one that has the highest degree of formal reality. God exists by definition: the idea of a perfect being already includes the quality of existence. Existence belongs to God’s essence, and so God exists necessarily while the rest of us exist only contingently.

Now that God’s existence has been demonstrated to Descartes’ satisfaction, his next question is what can I know about the external world? I no longer have to worry about the evil deceiver, since God wouldn’t allow me to be deceived, or at least not systematically and not about my “clear and distinct” ideas (an important term). Consider again my ideas: which are clear and distinct, and which are not? He now makes another important move: if an idea is genuinely clear and distinct—if I keep my will in check and prevent it from outrunning my reason—then that idea is true. This is the test of any idea: if it is not grasped by my reason clearly and distinctly, it is uncertain. God is the guarantor of my clear and distinct ideas, not my other ideas: “my nature is such that, as long as I perceive something very clearly and distinctly, I am unable not to believe that it is true” (55).

The next question is which of my ideas are clear and distinct? Mathematical ideas definitely are. How about nature? I have clear and distinct ideas about nature too, or some of them anyway. But wait: are we going too fast? Are these conclusions rash? I (the meditator) began by observing that I make mistakes, so how is it that, if so many of my ideas are clear and distinct, I made so many errors in the past? The answer can only be that I affirmed ideas (by means of the free will) that I did not clearly and distinctly perceive (with my reason). I rushed to conclusions, without satisfactory reasons.

Finally, the six meditation is titled “The Existence of Material Things, and the Real Distinction between Mind and Body.” So far, Descartes has proven that he exists, that he exists as a thinking thing (an immaterial and finite substance), that God exists (an immaterial and infinite substance), that the essence of physical objects is extension, and he now has a method by which to learn about the external world: clear and distinct ideas, or those ideas that are clear and distinct to his reason. Why now should we believe in the existence of the world, or in what the senses tell us? Should we at all? Do material objects exist? Descartes has established only that if they exist, their essential property is spatial extension. Next I want to know whether they exist and also whether they are the way they appear to my senses. Is there a chasm between the real (formally or actually real) world and the world of appearance (how objects appear to my senses)? He’ll want to say no, but what’s the argument?

Consider two common assumptions and whether we know them to be true: 1. Sense perceptions are caused by material objects; 2. Sense perceptions resemble their causes (material objects). Descartes will say that 1 is true and he will ultimately reject 2, but why? Let’s now ask, what is the cause of my sense perceptions? Remember that Descartes wants to know whether material objects exist, and by relying on his reason alone. There are three possibilities: (a) I am their cause; (b) God is; or (c) material objects themselves are. First, (a) can’t be true, because I don’t control my perceptions. When I put my hand near the fire it feels hot, whether I want it to or not. If I were their cause, I should be able to control this, yet sense perceptions force themselves on us. Second, (b) can’t be true, because many of my perceptions are not accurate reflections of the world, and God is not a deceiver. For example, illusions, dreaming, phantom limb, objects far away seem small, close up they seem large. If some perceptions are false, God can’t be their cause. This leaves (c); it must be material objects that cause our perceptions of them. The pencil is causing me to have the perception I’m having of it, with help from my senses.

Therefore, material objects exist, since nothing else could be causing my perceptions of them. However, these perceptions may not accurately reflect the objects that cause them. Some of my perceptions are clear and distinct, others are not. Perceptions, then, don’t necessarily resemble their causes. Perception therefore requires reason to correct it, so again it is by means of reason that we know the world. In other words, reason, which he also calls “the light of nature,” must pronounce a final verdict on the evidence of the senses. Knowing the truth about anything is a matter of bringing ideas or perceptions into the light of reason, rather like a court of law in which evidence is presented and yet something is not a legal fact until a judge pronounces it as one. Before that, it is a claim or evidence only, and a similar relation holds between reason and the senses. The senses (perceptions) make claims; reason decides and knows. Sometimes what reason decides is to reject a perception (such as the stick in water which appears bent but isn’t).

Descartes then considers the mind-body problem: what is the relation between these two substances? I am essentially a mind: a thinking thing, an immaterial and finite substance. But I seem to be closely conjoined with a body, and indeed I have a clear and distinct idea of my body. The body is something I have, not something I am. I am essentially different from my body, and therefore “I can exist without it” (62). Further, the meditator clearly and distinctly perceives that “I am very closely joined to it [the body] and almost merged with it” (64). Descartes appears to be suggesting a kind of metaphysical dualism where the human being is a composite substance of mind and body (but mind essentially): as he puts it now, “I am composed of a mind and body” (65). In other words, I am a mind and I have (almost am, but not quite) a body. Essentially still, I am a thinking thing. But there is a problem: how can an immaterial thing (a mind) cause effects in a material thing (a body) and vice versa? When I have a mental experience like fear, my heart rate increases, and a wound in my hand causes my mind to feel pain. Aren’t the material and the immaterial realms separate? Descartes’ answer hasn’t satisfied many, and his thought is that perhaps there is a part of the brain—the pineal gland, he guessed—where mind and body causally interact. That gland actually produces melatonin, but it wasn’t a bad guess at the time.

But wait: what about the dream argument? Descartes now knows that the external world exists, but how does he know he is not dreaming? He has banished the evil deceiver (or God has), but what about dreams? Might not everything I see be a dream? Descartes answers that I can indeed know that I’m not dreaming, but not by means of the senses but through reason alone. There is no sense-perceptible difference between dream experience and waking experience, but there is a difference that is discoverable by reason. In dreams, he says, there is no continuity in my experience, no memory, no larger context in which things take place. Instead, things happen randomly and without any larger context. Rationally, we know that experience is continuous or it unfolds over time. One moment in time leads into the next and one experience leads to another. Not so in dreams: I am suddenly somewhere, doing something that may be very unusual, then everything changes and I’m somewhere else. There is a chaotic, fragmented quality to dream experience that is unlike waking experience. How, then, do I know that I’m not dreaming right now? Because of the continuity of my experience from one moment to the next. I can remember entering this room, sitting down, etc., leading up to the present moment. I always have to think rationally about my perceptions rather than simply take them as given.

By the end of the sixth meditation we now have a foundation for human knowledge, including scientific and mathematical knowledge, and we have a method by which to acquire more knowledge: the rational apprehension of clear and distinct ideas. As philosophers, we should stick with this method. In the ordinary course of life, however, we don’t usually have the time or the inclination to be so rigorous in our thinking, so what’s best is to remain mindful of our susceptibility to error. He ends the Meditations on this note: “For from the fact that God is not a deceiver it follows that, in such cases, I am completely free from error. But the urgency of things to be done does not always allow us time for such a careful examination; it must be granted, therefore, that human life is often subject to mistakes about particular things, and the weakness of our nature must be acknowledged” (70).

Part 9: Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes was a British philosopher who lived in the same seventeenth century as Descartes, from 1588 to 1679, and lived to be 91. He lived through the civil war period in England (1642-1651) and his way of thinking about politics was profoundly affected by this and more generally by the spirit of Enlightenment that was becoming fashionable during his lifetime. He read Descartes’ work and wanted to embark on what is in some ways a similar project but on a separate topic (human nature and politics) while using a different philosophical method: not “reason” but empirical observation or “science.” Leviathan is written as a work of “political science,” a new and very bold idea. The Greeks had no notion of political science in this sense; politics was an art, not a science. Hobbes was never a university professor but worked for the most part as a professional tutor for aristocratic families.

The full title of Hobbes’ most important work is Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, and it was published in English in 1651, at the end of the civil war, and a later Latin edition appeared in 1668. Our edition (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994) has modernized the English spelling, which makes for easier reading. The book’s original cover appears a couple of pages before page 1 in our edition and it’s significant. The human figure appearing at the top of the page is a representation of a state’s proper ruler, as Hobbes will see it, while beneath him is the city and various of its artifacts. Hobbes is going to make the case for an absolute ruler or sovereign, in part as a consequence of the civil war in his country. That war, as Hobbes saw it, had been a disaster for England, and it became an urgent question for him how to prevent such wars from happening again.

This is a big book, and I will ask you to read the following page ranges: from Part 1, pages 3-35 and 63-100; and from Part 2 pages 106-127. This totals 90 pages. As always with the text editions in this course, the editor’s introduction is well worth reading as well.

Philosophers of this general time period tended to be tremendously impressed by the advances being made in the sciences. Hobbes was especially impressed by geometry, which he refers to as “the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind” (19). It is the only science because of how solid its foundations are. It proceeds purely from the definitions of terms. In geometry, all we need to do is settle upon the definitions of certain terms and then deduce what follows from them. It provides a theoretically pure model of thought and an ideal of scientific method. All other sciences, he would argue, ought to be modelled on geometry. Philosophy as well was to be modelled on geometry, insofar as this is possible. Hobbes wants to begin the process of thinking philosophically from an absolutely certain basis, as Descartes had attempted to do. Hobbes was critical of Descartes’ actual arguments but agreed with Descartes’ foundationalist ideal of knowledge itself. The main difference between them, of course, is that whereas Descartes is a rationalist, Hobbes is an empiricist, meaning that the foundation of human knowledge is not the Cogito but empirical data alone—not what Descartes calls reason but the senses and the data they provide. Like natural science, philosophy ought to be exclusively concerned with empirically observable matters.

As mentioned, Hobbes lived through the civil war in England. Politically, Hobbes was a royalist and for this reason took refuge in Paris and wrote a number of his works while there, including Leviathan. After the war, Hobbes would return to his native England and remain there for the rest of his life. The experience of civil war affected Hobbes’ view of the world profoundly, and he will come to say that the human being’s natural condition is the war of all against all. This is the central problem that Hobbes sets out to resolve in his political philosophy: how to create peace given mankind’s natural and constant propensity for war.

Hobbes was also a somewhat controversial figure for his nonpolitical views. In one instance he became involved in a debate with Bramhall, the bishop of Derry, on the subject of free will and determinism, with Hobbes defending determinism. He was also suspected by ecclesiastics of heresy and atheism. Some claimed to find heresies in the Leviathan and in 1683 Oxford University would condemn and burn Leviathan and De Cive (another political treatise) for heresy. Hobbes was almost certainly not an atheist, although if one were an atheist at the time it would have been unwise to say so. In the England of his day, legal penalties (some severe) still existed for heresy and blasphemy. A couple of reasons for thinking Hobbes might have been an atheist are, first, that he was a strict empiricist and we don’t see God. Second, Hobbes would defend metaphysical materialism or the view that only physical bodies exist, and the only way we know anything about them is through sense perception. The only proper objects of philosophical investigation are empirically observable material objects and their causes and characteristics, essentially matter in motion. Where does this leave theology? Are God and spiritual realities in general outside the realm of philosophy? Is there nothing we can know about them? He would never deny God’s existence, but he appears to deny that God is a proper subject matter for philosophy. God is incomprehensible. In a different context he proposes that God is a corporeal being since for a materialist such as himself an “incorporeal substance” is a contradiction in terms. If there is a God, it must be corporeal. Does Hobbes actually believe in such a being? We don’t know, but probably. At any rate, he never professed to be an atheist and he did assert that God is a corporeal entity. Also, if you glance at the table of contents, you’ll notice that Parts 3 and 4 of Leviathan take up the question of a “Christian Commonwealth”—or what kind of state is compatible with Christianity—and the “Kingdom of Darkness.” These are not issues an atheist is likely to take up at such length or at all.

Let’s begin by going over some of the main themes in Part 1 of Leviathan, “Of Man.” I’ve asked you to read a major portion of Part 1 both because of its importance for the political argument that will follow and because of its influence on a great deal of subsequent modern thought to this day. First, regarding the book’s title: the word “Leviathan” is of biblical origin, specifically Job 41 in which Leviathan is a rather ominous sea-monster which has long been associated with the devil. In this book, Leviathan is a metaphor for the state or what Hobbes will call the “commonwealth.” The title foreshadows the kind of state that Hobbes will defend, which is an all-powerful state headed by an absolute sovereign or king. This is not a Platonic philosopher-king or great sage but a different kind of figure.

Leviathan is primarily a treatise on political philosophy or what he’ll term “political science.” Why does he begin with a very long discussion of human nature then? Because for Hobbes (and also for most ancient, medieval, and modern political theorists), metaphysics (specifically a metaphysical account of human nature) is the foundation of political philosophy. Just as Descartes holds that the starting point of all rational reflection is the individual meditator and their ideas, Hobbes’ “individual” is now the foundation of all justice, or what the individual would agree to in the state of nature prior to the creation of government. If the individual plays such a foundational role in political philosophy, we will need an account of this individual: who or what is it, how does it act, what motivates it, what does it value and believe? In the most fundamental terms, what is the nature of this individual?

Hobbes’ answer in short will be that the individual is a kind of machine or mechanism—which Descartes explicitly denies. Hobbes defends a materialist view of human nature and of everything that exists. On this view, only material objects exist, along with their causes and properties. The person, then, must be essentially a body or organism. If all that exists is matter in motion then the human being must be a physical body that does things, or whose actions are so many “motions” of the organism. Everything that pertains to the human being—everything we think, feel, experience, and do—must be described as a kind of physical motion, as he indicates at the outset of the “Introduction”: “For seeing life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within, why may we not say that all automata (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body, such as was intended by the artificer?” (3).

The state too is a mechanism of sorts, and we can liken it to the mechanism of the individual—an all-powerful individual. The state ought to take a particular form because of the constitution of human nature. This in short is the main hypothesis of the book, already stated in the Introduction.

His conception of human beings is going to be expressed entirely within the “scientific” language of materialism. Human nature on his view is universal, unchanging, and also asocial or presocial. It is something the individual brings with it into civil society and is unaffected by the workings of culture, tradition, language, etc. In short, the individual is a system of matter in motion, a self-moving mechanism reacting to motions in its environment. It is an appetitive machine, all of whose actions are motivated by appetites and aversions. Its dominant appetite is the desire for power, and because of this the state of nature is a condition of permanent civil war.

Since Hobbes is starting from materialist premises, morality as well must be conceived entirely in terms of motions and causes. The ultimate aim of the human organism is to continue its own motion, so morality itself can only be understood as a search for the most efficient means of survival or of continuing its own motion. Morality must be translated into the mechanistic vocabulary of self-interest; since the individual is an egoist by nature, human morality must be suitable to this sort of being. All moral and political concepts must be understood in the language of metaphysical materialism. For example, Hobbes defines the good very simply as that for which one has an appetite. Evil is that toward which one experiences an aversion. Moral deliberation is an act of calculation aimed at optimal utility for the self, or it’s the act of calculating the probabilities that an act will satisfy a given desire. It involves the oscillation of passions culminating in the formation of an intention or will. A voluntary action he defines as the one that proceeds from the last appetite or aversion that one entertains in deliberation. Also, there is no free will, for Hobbes, since the will can only be construed in terms of physical causality. Likewise with freedom: a free action is simply a motion of the individual that is unconstrained by physical forces acting upon the individual from without. Rational choice is the identification of the most efficient means of satisfying whatever desires the organism happens to experience. Rationality itself is construed simply as the maximization of utility or the ability to get what you want.

All things human—actions, emotions, mental states generally, reasoning, etc.—are explainable as matter in motion, so concepts of motion, mechanism, cause and effect are all that are needed to provide a complete accounting of human life from the physiological to the psychological to the political. In Part 1, we find a number of chapters on sense, imagination, speech, reason, science, the passions, and so on, and each is given a materialist interpretation. For example, thoughts: what are these? They can only be a kind of motion, but how so? How can thinking be a motion? Hobbes is both a metaphysical materialist (all that exists is matter in motion) and an epistemological empiricist (all knowledge is gained through the senses), so a thought can only be a perception or a representation of an object; he also calls it an appearance. Objects (tables, animals, other persons, etc.) cause sensations to be produced. All thoughts and experiences are produced by physical sensations: “For there is no conception in a man’s mind which hath not at first, totally or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense” (6). For example, when I see a table—or I have the thought of a table—the table produces in me the idea of it, and that idea is a kind of motion. The table impacts on my senses and produces or causes an idea of the table to form in my brain. This is the source of all ideas.

Another example is imagination, which he defines as “decaying sense” (8). When I close my eyes and imagine the same table, the image in my mind’s eye is less clear than when I actually look at it. The idea is decaying, as it were, or as time passes the motion loses momentum and causes my idea of the table to become less clear. This is comparable to when we throw a ball: it loses speed over time, as other forces like gravity come to bear on it. Similarly, my idea of the table becomes progressively obscure as I perceive other objects. When I remember for a long time some object that I perceived long ago, it is because the object caused a large impact on my awareness. Like a ball that is thrown at a very high speed, it takes longer to lose speed and fall. For Hobbes, memory and imagination are the same thing. When I imagine or remember anything, it is an act of calling up an image that I have previously seen. He adds the qualification that there are two kinds of imagination: simple and compound. Simple imagination is at work when I close my eyes and imagine an object I have seen. Compound imagination is at work when I take two or more ideas or images and combine them to form a third thing, for instance, a unicorn which is formed by the images of a horse and a horn. This is, in short, the nature of creativity. Dreaming as well Hobbes conceives in mechanistic terms: dreaming is essentially imagining or remembering that occurs when I am sleeping, or rearranging ideas that I have previously encountered.

Philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have believed that reason constitutes our human essence, but what is reason conceived mechanistically? Hobbes answers this in his characteristically very concise way as follows: “When a man reasoneth, he does nothing else but conceive a sum total from addition of parcels, or conceive a remainder from subtraction of one sum from another; which (if it be done by words) is conceiving of the consequence of the names of all the parts to the name of the whole, or from the names of the whole and one part to the name of the other part” (22). Reasoning is essentially adding and subtracting ideas, or putting ideas together and deducing what follows from them logically. Reason itself “is nothing but reckoning (that is, adding and subtracting) of the consequences of general names agreed upon for the marking and signifying of our thoughts” (22–23). For instance, in legal reasoning, lawyers or judges add together particular laws and particular facts and then deduce what legal judgment follows from them. In philosophical reasoning, we add together certain premises and derive a conclusion through logic. It follows that reason is not innate but acquired in the course of experience. We don’t acquire reason automatically but must work at it just as we learn math or science. We become rational beings; we are not innately rational.

It is, he says, an “abuse” of reason to accept an idea that is not derived from sense perception, but from authority or tradition. Hobbes here expresses the same Enlightenment ideal that Descartes does: relying on authority is a source of prejudice and error. Hobbes mentions in particular the then-common habit of relying on the authority of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas as a source of error. Another example of an abuse of thought is thinking without a method or technique such as logic or the scientific method. Method alone generates knowledge—as Descartes also holds—and where knowledge itself is defined as justified true belief. It is justified, that is, by a method, and where justification means foundational justification and where “truth” means correspondence between statements and facts (as Descartes also holds).

In the case of human beings, there are two kinds of motion: voluntary and involuntary (or “vital”) motion. Vital motion is automatic and not subject to volition; it includes such motions as the heart beat, digestion, breathing, etc. Voluntary motion includes speaking, reasoning, physical movement, etc.

The individual is an appetitive machine or a creature of appetite and passion. We are all slaves to passion, and reason also serves the passions. This isn’t to deny that reason is the essence of human beings, but it places reason in a subordinate position within human nature. Passion is what drives human beings and our conduct, and it may be divided into two types: appetite and aversion. An appetite (such as love) is an inner motion that impels us toward a desired object while an aversion (such as hate) is an inner motion impelling us away from an object. It’s on this basis that Hobbes arrives at definitions of good and evil: “whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire that is it which he for his part calleth good; and the object of his hate and aversion, evil” (28). There is no objective good, then, but instead the good is whatever we desire, individually or collectively. The good is relative, in other words. Moral concepts must be conceived in terms of mechanics—a simple affair of matter in motion—so the good can only be that at which voluntary motion is directed, whatever it is. The same applies to attitudes and emotions. A few examples: hope is an “appetite with an opinion of attaining” (30); fear is “aversion with opinion of hurt from the object” (30); benevolence is “desire of good to another” (30). These are extremely short definitions, and for a reason: there is not a lot of depth in human nature. There is more complexity in the human being than in other machines, but not more depth.

The act of decision-making or deliberation is a vacillation back and forth of appetites and aversions or a weighing of different desires to see which is strongest. This culminates in a decision to act this way or that, and where the action is a product of the most forceful passion. Deliberation does involve identifying what is good but where “good” means only whatever we desire. His definition of the will is simply the last or the most forceful passion in this process of deliberation: “Will therefore is the last appetite in deliberating” (33). It is the appetite that wins out over the others, or the one with the most forceful motion. A voluntary act is one that is caused by the will: “In deliberation, the last appetite or aversion immediately adhering to the action, or to the omission thereof, is that we call the WILL, the act (not the faculty) of willing” (33). There is no faculty of free will, but there is an act of willing.

The concept of power will be central to Hobbes’ political philosophy, as he maintains that the desire for power is the dominant appetite in human nature: “So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death” (58). What is power, then? Very simply, “The power of a man (to take it universally) is his present means to obtain some future apparent good” (50). Power is the capacity to get what one wants. The desire for power is the principal motivation in life, and the main aversion is the fear of death, and where death itself is defined as the cessation of all motion. Ultimately, what we desire is the continuation of our various motions, and their cessation is our greatest fear.

To examine human nature further, Hobbes proposes a thought experiment: let’s go back to the state of nature or to a hypothetical (not actual or historical) time prior to the creation of government institutions and our whole modern way of life. What are individuals like here, in what Hobbes believes is our natural condition? The first thing we notice is that all human beings in the state of nature are equal, in the sense that while some are more intelligent or physically strong than others, such differences are not ultimately important. Regarding physical strength, even the strongest person could be killed, and no one is so much stronger than others as to be completely invulnerable. Likewise with intelligence: some may be more intelligent than others, but the stupid are more numerous and there is strength in numbers. Superior intelligence doesn’t make you invulnerable in the state of nature since your enemies could overpower you through the force of numbers alone. Inequalities with respect to intelligence are not that great; his proof is that everyone seems fairly content with their level of intelligence. No one complains about how stupid they are, even the truly stupid, and “there is not ordinarily a greater sign of the equal distribution of anything than that every man is contented with his share” (75).

The trouble with equality is that it leads eventually to war. This is because when two or more people desire the same object and neither is obviously stronger than the other, they will fight over it. We are natural enemies to each other, and in the state of nature violent conflict is a constant occurrence. Everything we desire, we have to fight and compete for since we tend to want similar things. The consequence is that everyone in the state of nature must prepare themselves for war at all times. Also, in the state of nature there can be no industry or agriculture since someone will steal or destroy what we produce for their own gain. There will be no commerce, or not much, since someone will steal our money. There will be little by way of arts, advanced culture, science, or knowledge because everyone is too busy arming themselves for war. This leads into the most famous passage in Leviathan: “Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same is consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, no culture of the earth, no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (76).

Hobbes then entertains an objection: the state of nature never existed as a matter of historical fact. The state of nature looks like historical fiction. Hobbes’ reply is that it is a thought experiment, not an hypothesis about history—but there are or have been places where there is no government (he mentions America, I guess that includes Canada). Governments as we know them haven’t existed always and everywhere, and it’s where government doesn’t exist, where people are free to act without the constraint of legal authority, that we get some insight into what human nature is really like. In such a state, nothing whatever is unjust since justice holds no meaning before the introduction of the social contract. Even murder is not unjust in the war of all against all. It’s what you sometimes need to do in order to survive.

In the state of nature we are all free by nature or by “natural right.” It is by “the right of nature” that every person is completely free to act as they wish, that is, the right to do absolutely anything to anyone. There are no limits to this natural freedom: “in such a condition every man has a right to everything, even to one another’s body” (80). Freedom or liberty is defined simply as “the absence of external impediments” to action (79), or to be free means to be unconstrained, physically and quasi-physically. This obviously creates a life of extreme vulnerability, and because of our vulnerabiity in the state of nature we begin to value peace. The fear of death naturally gives rise to a desire for peace, and in fact Hobbes considers it the first law of nature to seek peace for otherwise life will be short indeed. The second law of nature is to make contracts (“covenants”) with others in order to create peace, where the most important example is that all persons will be motivated to enter into the social contract in order to save your life and where everyone agrees to give up a large portion of our freedom in order to achieve social peace. Some of our natural rights, then, are alienable or they can be voluntarily given up and sometimes they should be, as a strategy in rational self-interest or a means of personal survival.

The third law of nature is to seek justice, where this essentially means to honor your contracts or agreements. Keep your promises, abide by the terms of the social contract once it is formed. In the state of nature, there is neither justice nor injustice. Both justice and injustice come about once contracts come into being, and where the paradigm case of a just act is keeping a promise. The concept of justice is given a short and straightforward definition, like nearly all his definitions. Because justice is essentially defined as honoring your contracts, it follows that nothing that is done to a person with their consent can be unjust, by definition. Even selling yourself into slavery is not unjust—although it would be irrational—since no injury or harm is done to another person.

Hobbes goes on to identify several other laws of nature which are of somewhat secondary importance. Some examples are gratitude (when we receive a benefit from someone, we should be grateful), accommodation (we should try to accommodate ourselves to other people), pardoning (we should freely pardon those who regret some offence against us), we shouldn’t hate people (or we shouldn’t express it), we shouldn’t be arrogant, and no one should be a judge in their own case. These laws of nature are universal and timeless, so they apply within the state of nature, but they are unenforced since there is no state to enforce them. They apply to our conscience alone—so we do have a conscience in the state of nature, but we are free to obey it or not.

Summing up Part 1: human nature is universal, unchanging and asocial (not antisocial). In short, the individual is a system of matter in motion which possesses the capacity for self-direction. Any moral and political considerations that apply to the individual must be understood in a vocabulary of mechanisms and their motions. Morality is understood in terms of rights and obligations, the ultimate purpose of which is to continue the motion of the individual. All morality and politics must be understood solely in terms of prudence or rational self-interest and it must serve to further the overriding goal that is built into the mechanism, which is the continuation of its own motion. The human being is not only a machine but an appetitive machine. Its actions are strictly reactions to the motions of external objects acting upon it. These reactions occur through a complex series of intermediate causes and motions internal to the mechanism. All of human behavior is an indirect physical response to external matter in motion. Objects in the environment continuously impact the senses and transmit motion via the nerves to the heart and brain. In the brain a countermotion is produced, one that with the aid of memory, language, and reason forms one’s response to the external stimuli. A conception in the brain is generated which in turn produces either appetite or aversion. All behavior is prompted by either appetite (an internal motion that is directed toward an object that is deemed good) or aversion (an internal motion away from an object that is evil). What we have an appetite for is judged to be conducive to our continued motion and the reverse holds in the case of our aversions. Most appetites and aversions are acquired in the course of experience while relatively few are present from birth.

Ultimately, the truth about human relations, according to Hobbes, is the struggle for power. This is the dominant appetite governing all human behavior and where this means the desire not only to get what we want but to be first, to dominate one’s fellow human beings. Human interaction, reduced to its most fundamental (physiological) level, is a struggle between individuals, each of whom desires the subordination of others to one’s own will. All other appetites are means of bringing about this ultimate end. At a physiological level he explains this by means of what he calls the principle of opposed motion: the motion of each individual is not only self-directed but necessarily opposed to that of all other individuals. The individual is essentially a competitor for goods that will appease its appetites, many of which goods are scarce and difficult to come by in the state of nature. Other persons represent either useful means of satisfying one’s desires or they are obstacles in one’s path. Cooperation with others is possible and often prudent, but it’s always a means to an end, and so too is love. The principle of opposed motion ultimately leads to a condition of permanent struggle and war in the state of nature but also in civil society, where it’s more hidden and more carefully managed but no less real. All human beings live a life of perpetual and shared insecurity because the power we have to achieve our ends is roughly equal. All may kill or be killed at any moment, therefore the first law of human nature is to seek peace. It’s only within a state of peace that the individual may go about satisfying its appetites with a measure of security. How does one seek peace? By means of the social contract, or by creating government and other social institutions.

The passions themselves are not voluntary. They do not proceed from the will since the will is itself a passion. Any behavior that proceeds from the will is voluntary, so the notion of voluntariness or volition remains strictly within the ambit of causal processes. Hobbes rejects any conception of a free will that is genuinely self-determining or spontaneous. The will does not in any way represent a break from causal necessity. Nothing in the world, including the will, takes its beginning from itself. Every motion must have a cause, and a human action is a perfectly necessary response to a given set of conditions. Human behavior follows upon a person’s utility calculation. Also, human action may not be knowingly evil or imprudent. This is because, on Hobbes’ account, to commit an evil deed knowingly would mean pursuing what we are averse to.

What is a person? “A person is he whose words or actions are considered either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of another man” (101). A person is the possessor of action and speech, or an agent, one who speaks and acts. A person is an organism that performs and possesses certain motions. There are two kinds of person: natural and artificial. A natural person is what we have when words or actions are one’s own. An artificial person is when words or actions belong to someone else, for example, a corporation. A corporation has a kind of agency, so it’s an “artificial person.” We still talk this way today about corporations, governments, and so on. Later, Hobbes will say that the state is a kind of organism as well, a person representing the entire citizenry. That will do for Part 1, “Of Man.” He has given us so far a 100-page philosophy of human nature which leads into the political philosophy he develops in Part 2, “Of Commonwealth.”

Part 2 begins with the question, why do we need government at all? His short answer is to escape the state of nature and, more generally, to make life more secure and happy. In the state of nature there is no security whatsoever, and pretty much anything is preferable to life in that state. Governments and other social institutions are formed as a strategy in rational self-interest, and there can be no other motivation for creating governments. We can’t argue, for example, that the rationale for the state is to create justice as an end in itself because any appeal to justice must itself rest on a foundation of self-interest as opposed to public-spiritedness for its own sake. Also, while in the state of nature we are governed by natural law, we are also subject to the passions and these often motivate us to violate natural law. Where there is no threat of punishment, natural law is routinely violated by us all.

If this is the single motivation for creating government, what kind of government is most desirable? It will have to be one that provides relief against the insecurity of the state of nature and it will have to render civil war not just unlikely but impossible. What kind of state is this? The answer he’s going to propose is a state with unlimited or absolute power, one that isn’t limited by any other kind of political consideration, such as rights, individual happiness, etc. When forming the social contract, we all agree to surrender our natural rights to the state. As an individual, I agree to surrender all my rights on condition that everyone else do the same: “I authorize and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy right to him, and authorize all his actions in like manner. This done, the multitude so united in one person is called a COMMONWEALTH, in Latin CIVITAS. This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speak more reverently) of that Mortal God to which we owe, under the Immortal God, our peace and defence” (109). (He doesn’t sound here like an atheist, by the way.)

Why should the state have unlimited power? Because in the state of nature all individuals have unlimited natural rights (rights even over one another’s bodies), and when the unlimited rights and power of the individual are delivered over to the sovereign, the sovereign becomes all-powerful. The state may be either one person (usually) or an assembly of persons. In either event, in forming a state the plurality of wills are reduced to one will which represents the will of the social body as a whole. Hobbes views the state as a kind of person in order to emphasize that the social body (the citizenry) is a highly unified entity, not a collection of individual atoms (which the state of nature is), but an organic whole and a kind of agent. The state is an artificial person which is composed of the citizenry in its entirety. The sovereign or ruler may be understood as its head, or the part of the body that deliberates and governs while each individual is like a single cell within the larger social body. The next point is crucial: the body does not exist for the sake of the cell. On the contrary, the cell’s purpose is to serve the larger organism. Similarly, the state does not exist in order to promote individual happiness but instead each of us should find our happiness in serving the social whole. This raises an obvious objection: on Hobbes’ view, doesn’t the individual citizen disappear completely or become subordinated to the social whole, just as an individual cell will often be sacrificed for the greater good of the body? We don’t want the individual to be completely subordinate, do we? Especially given that Hobbes has already told us that we are self-interested individuals by nature. Is he now saying that each of us must be prepared to be sacrificed, even though human nature obliges us to seek our own interests? This is a serious objection, and Hobbes is well aware of it. He replies as follows: the individual is not going to allow the state to do absolutely anything it wishes with oneself. One won’t, for instance, allow oneself to be killed by the state. The individual always retains the right of self-defense, even against the government. We cannot be ordered by law to give up our lives—to risk our life in war maybe, but not to surrender it voluntarily. The right of self-defense is a natural right and it’s inalienable (it can’t be given away). Some natural rights (liberty) are alienable; others (self-defense) are not.

However, in all other matters the individual is obliged to obey whatever law the sovereign enacts for the reason that we agreed to do so. In entering into the social contract, we all consented to obey the law, so whether I personally agree with a certain law or not there is a more fundamental agreement to obey. Even if I believe that a certain law causes me harm, I’m obliged to obey it. At least it’s better than the state of nature—which will become Hobbes’ regular refrain. Anything at all is better than the war of all against all. Our overriding political goal is to seek peace and we must be prepared to give up a great deal for peace and security. Also, because I am a co-author of the law, I cannot object to the law. There can be no objections to what the state does. Since I am a part of the state—or a part-author of its existence—objecting to its actions means objecting against myself. The will of the state and my own will become completely unified once the social contract is signed. Consent or agreement is the basis of justice, so everything the state does it does with my own personal consent. If this sounds ominous, Hobbes says, it isn’t because not only is it improbable that the state would harm any of its citizens, it is impossible. Remember the organic metaphor: the state is like the head of the larger social body. The head doesn’t order the destruction of its own arm or leg but is actively concerned with the overall well being of the body and every part of it. It would be impossible for it to will the destruction of a part of itself. The state cannot commit an injustice or injury to any of its citizens for this would mean injuring itself.

Next, who is to judge what is in the best interests of the social body? The state is, just as on an individual level my mind governs my life. On a societal level, the head of state governs the life of the social body. Who else should govern, if not the head? From this it follows that the people can never justifiably revolt against the government, for to do so would be like an arm or a leg deciding to overthrow the brain. The state governs all matters; it fashions laws, enforces law (there is no need for an independent judiciary), collects taxes, declares war, etc.

Hobbes then looks at three kinds of political constitution: monarchy, democracy, and aristocracy. Which is best? In answering this question, we must ask: which form of government is the most conducive to peace and security, since this is the reason for forming governments in the first place. Whichever political constitution is most conducive to peace is the best. Let’s first consider monarchy and then compare it with aristocracy and democracy. Does a monarchy promote peace or the opposite? His answer: monarchy does promote peace, because under monarchy there is no conflict between the public interest and the private interest of the ruler. A monarch, in looking after the public interest, is also serving his own personal interest. Remember, the body politic is the ruler’s body; their well being is his well being. A monarch will therefore not be tempted to sacrifice the public interest to his own private gain. He will be a benevolent and incorruptible monarch.

How about democracy? Hobbes will say this: our reason tends to conflict with our passions, and our passions cause us to be concerned primarily with our own personal good, followed by the good of our friends, family, etc. The common good is somewhere further down the list of things one typically cares about. What anyone cares about is their own personal well being, so when the people rule they are liable to become corrupted. Their corruption will take the form of sacrificing the common good, as set down in the social contract, to their private good. Legislators, for example, will care most about their own power. Also, a democratic assembly is inclined to be at odds with itself. There are always competing factions and parties that sharply disagree with each other and this will sometimes lead to civil war. A monarch is never at odds with himself in this way.

How about aristocracy? Here too there is a tendency to separate the common good from the private good of the aristocratic rulers. Also, the aristocracy is likely to splinter into competing factions, again leading to civil war.

Therefore, monarchy is best. Next issue: should there be limits on the power of the monarch? Should this person be elected, for example, and should there be term limits? Hobbes’ answers: no, no, and no again. Why not? First, because an elected sovereign is not a sovereign at all but a servant of whoever is truly sovereign. A ruler is not truly sovereign if their power is limited or if they must answer to anybody. Consider an analogy: when one deliberates, the brain doesn’t have to justify its decisions to the limbs, and if it did then the brain wouldn’t be in command of the body. It wouldn’t be sovereign, but instead sovereignty would belong to whoever serves as the final judge. For instance, consider the issue of the right of succession. Who has it, the sovereign or the people? It can’t be the people. Why not? Because you can’t give away what you don’t have, and they don’t have sovereignty. The people gave up their freedom when they entered into society and created a sovereign state. Now, only the monarch possesses sovereignty and therefore only the monarch can pass it on to someone else or appoint a successor.

What has happened to human freedom? Have the people completely surrendered this to a potential tyrant? Here Hobbes will say that there is no contradiction between individual freedom and an absolute sovereign, so no, freedom hasn’t been surrendered. Why not? Hobbes will ask this: what is freedom? His answer: the absence of restraint on one’s actions. Where do I have freedom? Optimally in the state of nature and secondarily in civil society (where we all have much less freedom than in the state of nature). Under absolute sovereignty, I (every one of us) have personally consented to obey the laws and I have given over a large part of my freedom to the state. My freedom wasn’t taken from me against my will. If it had been taken from me (maybe by a tyrant who seized power and forced me into slavery), I would be unfree—and this would be objectionable. But I signed on to the social contract. Doing so was an act of rational self-interest, so I personally am co-author of the law. This includes the very law that might call for me to be sacrificed. If I agreed to this, I can’t very well complain of it now.

It follows from all of this that nothing the state does to its citizens can be unjust: “nothing the sovereign representative can do to a subject, on what pretence soever, can properly be called injustice, or injury, because every subject is author of every act the sovereign doth, so that he never wanteth right to anything (otherwise than as he himself is the subject of God, and bound thereby to observe the laws of nature)” (138). What if the sovereign violates their own law? Also, what if they violate the law of nature? What if the state kills you without any legal justification? Hobbes’ reply: even this doesn’t actually harm the citizen. They gave up their right to protest, and that’s the end of it. What if the sovereign violates the law of nature? This isn’t good and the sovereign shouldn’t do this, but even in this case the injured party isn’t the citizen but the author of the law of nature, which is God. As he puts it, “And the same holdeth also in a sovereign prince that putteth to death an innocent subject. For though the action be against the law of nature, as being contrary to equity (as was the killing of Uriah by David), yet it was not an injury to Uriah, but to God. Not to Uriah, because the right to do what he pleased was given him by Uriah himself; and yet to God, because David was God’s subject, and prohibited all iniquity by the law of nature” (139). Consider an analogy: in hockey, a referee can make a bad call—can even make a call that goes against the rules—but the players agreed to put the referee in charge. The players agreed to play by the rules, even if many of the calls go against them. When the referee himself breaks the rules, he still doesn’t injure the players; he injures the game itself.

Further, the sovereign is not subject to the law, or they are subject to natural law but not civil law. Why not? If the sovereign is the author of civil law, they can’t also be subject to it. Suppose the king breaks a law and is charged with a criminal offense. All he has to do is change the law, which he has unlimited power to do. If he can change the law at will, it is absurd to say that he is subject to the law. All that would mean is that he is subject to his own will. It is a necessary truth that the state is above the law. This would also hold in a democracy.

If we’re now worried about the prospect of tyranny (as well we might be), Hobbes counters that the sovereign should fashion civil laws that conform to the laws of nature. The sovereign should follow natural law, but note that this is a moral claim and it is not enforceable. It doesn’t follow that if the sovereign breaks the law of nature, the people should revolt. They can never revolt under any circumstances. Revolution, even against a tyrant, is a form of civil war, and civil war is the worst thing there is. Even tyranny is preferable to it. Also, the rebel is someone who puts himself in a state of war against all of us, as is the criminal. In the state of war, you can do whatever you want with your enemies.

Hobbes continues in Part 2 to take positions on a number of political and legal issues of the day. I’ll pass over some of this, but here are a few highlights. There is no limit to how the sovereign may treat foreigners. The state can do absolutely anything it wishes with them. This is because the civil laws apply only to citizens of this state, and even the law of nature does not prevent us from harming innocent foreigners. Why not? Because they’re not entirely innocent but are essentially enemies. We are in the state of nature, or a state of war, with respect to all foreigners, and in the state of nature there is no justice or injustice. Toward foreigners we can act in any way we wish or whatever way benefits us. If it benefits our state to conquer another, we may, just as in the state of nature if I want what my neighbor has, I can take it. Also, there are no contracts with foreigners, and the essence of harmful action is violating a contract. If there were such a contract (such as a peace treaty) then we must respect that.

What causes states to deteriorate? Why is it that some states fail while others do not, and how can we prevent our state from deteriorating? Hobbes answers that there are several causes of the deterioration of states. In short, it is imperfections in their constitutions that lead to their failure, just as diseases in the body can lead to its death. What are these imperfections or diseases of the body politic? He identifies several. First is the lack of absolute power. We too often insist on limiting the powers of the sovereign, for instance, by making the king answer to a democratic assembly or by separating the powers of the state into legislative, executive, and judicial branches. This undermines the monarch. A sovereign is not truly sovereign unless he has unlimited power. When we divide the powers of the state into three parts (legislative, executive, and judicial), this is like giving some of the powers of the mind to other body parts. One part must rule the others, and that one part must not be divided into parts. This can only lead to deterioration in the form of a fracturing of the social body. Disunity leads to more disunity and eventually to civil war.

A second cause of the deterioration of states is when citizens rely too much on their own individual judgment. When we all choose our own values and beliefs, rather than defer to the state for this, we are in trouble. This is because we tend to disagree, as in a democracy where everyone will start demanding that the sovereign pass this or that law or agitating for political reform. When they start criticizing the sovereign this causes disunity and eventually, once again, civil war. If civil war is our standard of injustice, we will have to remove its causes, and individual judgment is one of them. Now, this is odd: Hobbes is a philosopher of the Enlightenment and the slogan of Enlightenment is, have the courage to rely on your own understanding or reason. This is a sentiment that Hobbes more or less shares and a premise on which his entire philosophy rests. Isn’t he now throwing this out the window? He’d likely respond this way: individual judgment is a good thing, but there are limits. In civil society we should defer to authority (specifically the sovereign) on matters of politics and law only, while in other matters (such as philosophy) we should use our own faculties. Also, we gave up the right to use our independent judgment when we left the state of nature.

A third cause is when the sovereign becomes subject to the civil law. The sovereign should only be subject to the law of nature since when the king becomes subject to his own laws, he is no longer king but a public servant. The true sovereign then becomes someone else: either some supreme judge who is above the sovereign or the people, and this will not do. When the people rule, civil war follows.

A fourth cause is unlimited property rights. Property rights are well and good but only within limits. We should have property rights against other citizens but not against the state. The state must have the right to tax or even confiscate as much of your property as it wishes, for the good of the social body. When the state doesn’t have this power, it’s not sovereign.

Some other causes of the deterioration of constitutions are the promotion of ideas that undermine sovereignty; any dangerous ideas of this kind we should ban outright. Also, mixed government—for example, compromising between monarchy and democracy, which England was in the process of doing during Hobbes’ lifetime. Also, lack of money. States need money, and it must raise funds through taxation. When people resent paying taxes and insist on their property rights, we have a problem. Also, when a demagogue emerges from the people then the people will put their trust in him rather than the sovereign. Also, free speech—especially the right to speak out against the government. This too creates division. So do the universities if they aren’t properly regulated. Universities are where ideas, some of them dangerous, are born and spread. The universities should teach those ideas that are favored by the sovereign, especially political ideas. Other ideas (such as scientific theories) are less dangerous. Hobbes identifies a few lesser causes of the deterioration of states, but I will end here.

Part 10: Henry David Thoreau

We now head into the nineteenth century and to one of the most noteworthy thinkers of that time period, the American writer Henry David Thoreau, whose dates are 1817-1862. Thoreau was from Concord, Massachusetts and lived just 44 years. He never married (nor incidentally did Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Smith, Bentham, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, or Nietzsche. Make of that what you will.). He was never a university professor either but made his living through a combination of writing, teaching, working in the family’s pencil factory, and a few other things. While Walden; or, Life in the Woods (New York; Penguin, 2017; a different edition is fine) is his most famous work, Thoreau was very prolific and authored a great many shorter essays among which is “Civil Disobedience,” which is also included in our edition. My notes to follow will cover, and I will ask you to read, the following page ranges: 3-43 (most of the chapter on “Economy”); 80-90 (“Reading”); 104-112 (“Solitude”); 257-268 (“Conclusion”); and 271-292 (“Civil Disobedience”). This comes to about 90 pages, but of course the whole text makes for excellent reading.

Thoreau would become a major figure in the movement of nineteenth-century American transcendentalism. What that is, of course, is a long and complex story, as is every major development in the history of ideas, but in short transcendentalism can be thought of as a movement of early-mid nineteenth-century American writers from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Margaret Fuller, Amos Bronson Scott, Thoreau, and various others, among whom were philosophers, poets, essayists, naturalists, journalists, and social reformers. They wrote on such wide-ranging themes as individualism and personal freedom, nature, romanticism, skepticism, neoplatonism, Indian religion, and the German idealism that stems from Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel. That’s an eclectic mix of themes, and this is an eclectic set of writers.

In 1845, Thoreau decided to retreat into the woods on Walden Pond near his native Concord, Massachusetts and to build and live in a solitary cabin for what would become a period of two years and two months. He undertook this experiment in living for a particular philosophical purpose: modern civilization, as he saw it, had become excessively “cultured,” urban, materialistic, technological, interdependent, institutional, and spiritually vapid. It was no longer meeting the deeper psychological and spiritual needs of the time and was creating a malaise the remedy to which might well be to clear away the trappings of modern civilization and get back to an extremely simple, independent, and solitary way of life. This was the thought that inspired Thoreau to experiment with a “life in the woods” which would have been thought by his contemporaries about as absurd as it would now. (For extra credit in this course, by the way, I’ll be asking you to follow his example and to build and live alone in a cabin in the woods, technology free, for a mere four months, and Algonquin Park doesn’t count. If you survive, you’ll thank me.) Thoreau in this book is embarking upon an experiment in self-reliance and spiritual discovery, and reading it is a bit like reading a modern-day Montaigne or perhaps a Marcus Aurelius. There is an independence of thought here, a free spirit who is only loosely beholden to a school of thought and is self-reliant in matters of the mind just as he is in matters more practical. This classic American text, while philosophical, doesn’t employ any technical terminology and in a way makes for simpler reading than a Hobbes or a Descartes. There is a down to earth quality that comes through here—so yes, philosophy in the modern period can be written this way, although a large majority of it is not.

At the age of 28, Thoreau would retreat to the woods and record his experiences and reflections in what would become Walden, which was published nine years later in 1854. There are no highly technical speculations here, as we already see from the book’s table of contents. For the most part what we find is an individual alone with his thoughts on a wide variety of subjects, some more practical and others more reflective. Through it all we get a clear sense of the book’s author and his reflections on the times he is living in. Many of the themes he will speak to are about as relevant today as they were nearly two centuries ago, and maybe more so.

We begin with the first chapter (the chapters are unnumbered), “Economy.” This is the longest chapter in Walden, and in it we find Thoreau describing in some detail the beginning of his adventure in the wilderness and the thought process that inspired it. In a famous sentence near the beginning he remarks, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” (7). What does he mean by this? It’s hardly a complimentary description of modern American life, and a few decades later Nietzsche would be making a similar observation about modern Europe. What quiet desperation is this, and what does it mean? Two pages prior to this sentence he writes this: “Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them” (5). What cares and labors are these? He is speaking of those artificial cares and vulgar pursuits that tend to dominate our lives and take us away from the “finer fruits” that life has to offer. The way we live consists largely in going to work in a job that holds little meaning for us besides allowing us to eke out a living and spending our leisure time in equally empty pursuits. Entertainment, amusement, luxury, and distraction hold little value for Thoreau, but what “finer fruits” is he speaking of here?

He will answer this as the book goes along, but for now he is remarking very critically on the sort of lives he sees the men and women of his society living. “He has no time to be any thing but a machine,” he remarks (5). Many people struggle to survive, staying one step ahead of their creditors and being slaves to the economy. What “divinity in man” is possible when we’re unable to look beyond the needs of today and our lives don’t seem to mean much apart from performing our economic function? Life in both the city and the countryside has an air of desperation about it and a despair which we mask by common forms of amusement. This isn’t a new problem either, he says, for old people as well as the young don’t seem to have any wisdom to impart about how we should be living. He has heard no valuable advice from anyone about life, rather as if it is a new experiment that no one has tried before. Here he is approaching thirty and he hasn’t learned much about life, and not for a lack of trying but for a lack of teachers. What most people consider good isn’t good at all, or so his conscience tells him: “The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of any thing, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?” (9). He has lived a respectable and conventional life to this point, and what good has it done him? As for the philosophers of his time, what wisdom are they offering? Not much, and there are few philosophers: “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically” (12). Thoreau sets out to be a “practical” philosopher in this sense. He is not exactly a theorist in the manner of a Descartes or a Hobbes but an individual focusing on life and the art of living in a way that isn’t pointless, and there aren’t many people to guide him. Even the philosophers of the modern world aren’t philosophers in the mold of a Socrates or a Marcus Aurelius—a freethinker trying to understand life in the most comprehensive way—but university professionals who know no more about life than anyone else does. He has nothing to learn from them—although he is also well schooled in the philosophy of his day and will borrow ideas from some of it.

Thoreau’s idea which his experiment in the woods is intended to test is that what is essential in human life can be revealed by stripping away the trappings of modern civilization and urban life and returning to what is simple and basic. In his words, “It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization, if only to learn what are the gross necessaries of life and what methods have been taken to obtain them; or even to look over the old day-books of the merchants, to see what it was that men most commonly bought at the stores, what they stored, that is, what are the grossest groceries” (10). Discovering what are the basic needs of life holds a key to answering philosophy’s age-old question: what is the good life, how ought one to live? One ought to live, his hypothesis has it, as simple a life as possible—not a life of abject poverty but of comfort and decent prosperity, but above all one of complete independence both from other people and from the false trappings of modern civilization. This isn’t a hypothesis that’s going to be resolved on a blackboard by means of logical arguments. It needs to be lived in order to see whether it is true, so Thoreau embarks on his experiment of “life in the woods” where he can be free “to live a primitive and frontier life.”

The “economy” he speaks of in the title of the opening chapter refers to the domestic economy of life under frontier conditions, from the question of “what are the grossest groceries” one needs to live to how one goes about constructing a proper home. Thoreau was not a carpenter, so building a cabin more or less singlehandedly and with traditional tools is no easy task (by the way, today it would also be illegal in Ontario without a permit, government inspectors, fees, etc.). His home isn’t a mansion, and he isn’t living in luxury for a reason: “Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor” (12). Most everyone wishes they had more luxury, money, and material goods, and spends their life working for these things without having properly estimated their value and then complains about how hard their life is. He mentions the example of wearing a patch on your pants when they get a tear. Who, he asks, would do this? Almost no one would. Why not? Because it’s not thought to be respectable; it’s shameful to seem poor, even if you are poor. Instead, we buy new pants even when we can’t afford them so as to please others and seem respectable. It’s a small example, but it illustrates a good deal about how we commonly think and the values we pursue. Thoreau would mend his own pants with a patch and many similar things, but this is something we no longer do, only to end up complaining of our lot in life.

We are living, he believes, as slaves to convention, without any thought as to whether the conventions make sense or not. He mentions visiting a tailoress to have some clothing made and being told “They do not make them so now,” as if “They” have some power over what he chooses to wear. Can’t he decide for himself what he wants to wear? He must be a slave to fashion, even if he doesn’t like the fashion. But this is how we live, and the example of clothing is only a small one. It applies to all our material goods and to matters of the mind as well or to how we think and the things we care about.

He then mentions shelter. This is a necessity for everyone, but what form of shelter? “Consider first how slight a shelter is absolutely necessary,” he says (23). The cabin pictured below is not a mansion. I doubt he would dress quite as well as this (below left) when sitting on the shore of Walden Pond, but let’s focus on the cabin. Below right is a replica of the cabin and a statue of its inhabitant located close to the original. From the outside, the cabin looks almost exactly like my chicken coop, but it’s slightly larger. It is a humble dwelling indeed, but it’s also no shack. From a construction point of view, it’s very well built. The interior (replica) is pictured below. This is not what a middle-class New Englander of his day aspired to, but is it inadequate to its purpose? The purpose of a home is to provide shelter and living space for its inhabitants, and in this case Thoreau is living alone. He has no wife or children, so a one-room cabin should suffice for the purpose, and for him it does. Note the contents of this room. There is a wood stove and firewood for heat, two large windows, a bed, a table and chair for working, two other chairs and a table for relaxing or entertaining a guest or two. The roof is properly constructed and will keep out any rain or snow. No intruders or pests are able to get in, room temperature and air quality are fine, etc. What more does he need, and yet he knows this would not satisfy his fellow Massachusettsians. Early Canadian pioneers also lived in buildings like this, although they were usually somewhat bigger in order to house a family. Why does this not suffice for us today, he asks? It’s because our thinking makes it so, not our actual needs.

It’s due to this same way of thinking that most of his fellow citizens, especially in the cities, don’t own their homes but rent instead. Animals in nature own their homes while most of his fellow citizens are convinced they can’t afford to own a home. Why not? Because of the kind of home they imagine they need. The one pictured here won’t do. Farmers and other people living in the countryside also want to live in relative luxury, and as a result largely don’t own their homes either. Few farmers of his acquaintance own their farms outright, even while most appear to live in relative prosperity. For the most part the banks own the houses and the farms, and their inhabitants slave away year after year trying to pay their mortgages or renting. “And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him” (27). Whether rich or poor, we become enslaved by our own possessions while refusing to question the value of those possessions.

The name of the game is always to keep up with our neighbors, and Thoreau is at pains to understand why nearly everyone in modern society plays this game their whole life long without ever questioning it. We live like herd animals, following whatever leader is presented to us. In a better time, Thoreau says, human beings lived a simpler life and as “a sojourner in nature” (30): “When he was refreshed with food and sleep he contemplated his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbing the mountain tops. But lo! men have become the tools of their tools…. We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven” (30). Our possessions are no longer possessions but taskmasters, and even as many are unhappy about it they do nothing about it. A materialistic way of life comes at a heavy price, especially spiritually, and we’re all paying it without quite being aware of it because everyone else is doing the same.

Thoreau therefore retreats to the woods, armed with a borrowed axe, and begins building his cabin with a small amount of help from his friends. (If you accept the extra credit assignment mentioned above, I’ll let you borrow my chainsaw.) Within three months his new home is built and ready for habitation. Who else does this, he asks? “I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his house” (37). Virtually no one then and no one now does this. “We belong to the community,” where the division of labor makes each one of us ever more specialized (37). One does not even think for oneself but leaves the business of thinking to professional thinkers. There is virtually nothing in our homes that we made with our own hands, and the same can be said of the thoughts in our head.

He gives us an inventory of the building materials he uses in constructing his cabin, with prices. The total price is just over $28, which in today’s Canadian currency is a little under $1600. For a 28-year-old bachelor, that’s easily affordable without a mortgage. You probably spent that on your phone. The land itself was owned by his friend and fellow transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson. He notes, “the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now pays annually” (39). Does this mean students should build their own houses? Not exactly, “but I mean something which he might think a good deal like that; I mean that they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths learn better to live than by at once trying the experiment of living?” (41). He knows we’re not about to build our own houses or even to consider it, and nor are any of us likely to question the value of our technology and the many other “modern improvements” we esteem so highly (41). We build railroads and telegraphs to distant cities while having no purpose in going there and nothing to communicate to them. Today, of course, we can communicate instantly with someone on the other side of the world while having nothing to say.

He continues through the rest of this chapter in a similar vein, commenting on his crops, groceries, expenses, and furniture, “part of which I made myself” (52). He has more than his share of leisure time, much of which he spends studying and writing: “For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labor of my hands, and I found, that by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study” (55). A good life is a simple life, or such is the conclusion he’s arriving at to this point in his experiment. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” Thoreau writes, which is another way of saying living what Socrates called an “examined life” (72). The formula for living deliberately is “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand” (73).

Let’s skip ahead to the third chapter on “Reading.” This is a short chapter in which the author discusses how he spends his leisure time and the importance of reading books. “My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious reading, than a university” (80). As we have seen, Thoreau isn’t spending all the hours in a day working at practical tasks but has more free time than we would expect. How should we spend our leisure time? He has said he isn’t fond of popular entertainment and amusement, although he isn’t antisocial either and spends some time socializing with his neighbors and friends. He spends some time reading the classics of Greek and Roman literature: “For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?” (81). Travel books are more entertaining, and he reads these too. His reading interests are quite broad and range from the practical to the more academic. He remarks, “To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written” (81). Of course, a writer is likely to say this, but anyone and everyone, he thinks, could profit from spending more time reading. “Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations” (83). Often, we think of reading books as a pastime of intellectuals and elites, but by Thoreau’s time books were being published on an infinite array of subjects and for any readership. Reading Homer in ancient Greek is not something everyone is going to do, and translations into English of many ancient texts had yet to appear. Accessing them at the time required knowledge of ancient languages, especially Greek and Latin, but these languages were widely taught in American public schools in Thoreau’s day. He isn’t advocating something that exceeds the intellectual capabilities of most people. It’s a question more of values than capabilities. He notes that Alexander the Great, who was no intellectual genius (in spite of the fact that Aristotle was his boyhood tutor), always carried with him a copy of Homer’s Iliad. Why couldn’t we all do that, he wonders, if not the Iliad then something that is more to our taste? Few do this, he notes, or if they read at all then they limit themselves to easy reading material. “Even the college-bred and so called liberally educated men here and elsewhere have really little or no acquaintance with the English classics” (85). Very few Christians bother even to read the Bible, he notes. Those who do read are mostly students, and again it’s not for lack of ability or time. Walden itself is a book that may be read by anyone. In terms of its level of difficulty, it’s not Thomas’ Summa and it’s not as lengthy either.

The same questions that preoccupy us have preoccupied people in the past, and we have a great deal to learn from them, as he points out. But we choose not to. We congratulate ourselves on our modern advancements while our knowledge and reading habits remain rudimentary. Every town should have a university, he thinks, where people can learn something about whatever interests them. “Can we not hire some Abelard to lecture to us?” (88). Abelard, you will recall, was the one who formulated the ontological argument which Descartes picked up and made his own. Universities in the 1840s in North America were few in number. Ontario had three universities at the time, including of course Queen’s.

The fifth chapter is titled “Solitude” and it’s equally brief. Thoreau isn’t living like a hermit, by the way, and he is no less social than most people are. Some visitors do come to his cabin, and he is happy to see them. He’d also walk into the village every couple of days or so. But what he loves more are the sounds of the forest, which he also writes a short chapter about. The sounds of a forest do not resemble in the least the sounds of the city or even a small town. He describes these sounds in some detail, from the whippoorwills in the pine and hickory trees to a cow on a distant farm. He would spend hours without boredom listening to the sounds of the forest and pond. His closest neighbor is a mile away and he is essentially alone in the woods, enjoying his solitude. “There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still” (105). There is no quiet desperation out here, and he does seem to regard this as a phenomenon of the modern city. In the wilderness there is no occasion to compare our lot in life with our neighbors or to get caught up in the rat race. Here he finds serenity and a spiritual connection with nature. “I have never felt lonesome,” he says, “or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude” (106). People ask him whether he isn’t lonely out there, and he replies “Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?... What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary?” (107). There is no loneliness in dwelling close to “the perennial source of our life” which is nature (107). The willow tree that stands close to the water isn’t lonely, and nor is Thoreau in his cabin. It is the company of human beings that “is soon wearisome and dissipating” while solitude is “wholesome” (109).

The cost of social life is something we seldom think about, but it includes the “cheapness” that comes from empty niceties and an inability to get away from others. Thoreau’s visitors are few, but he can enjoy their company while in the city he can’t get away from people. There is an unnaturalness to modern life that he very much dislikes, including the over-sized houses we live in and the extravagance of our way of life.

The chapters that follow “Solitude” go on to describe his way of life in great detail, but I will jump to the book’s Conclusion where he summarizes his experiences at the cabin in the woods. “The universe,” he writes, “is wider than our views of it” (257). What exactly his own metaphysical view of the world amounts to is somewhat elusive. He makes occasional reference to Hinduism and the Bhagavad Gita, although it would be a stretch to classify him as a Hindu. Of Western metaphysics and theology he made no major statements, his focus always being the simple experience of life in a natural environment and the spiritual quality of nature itself, without developing this into a full-blown metaphysics. Human life is profoundly rooted in a natural order, and the disconnection from this that he observes in the cities of nineteenth-century America (Canada too, which he visited) brings about a moral and spiritual malaise. The remedy can only lie in a reconnection with the natural world, and Thoreau is endlessly interested in the details of nature and the connections between the human and the natural which he regards as bordering on the divine. He isn’t one for organized religion; his church is nature and its intricate workings, about which he is forever writing.

He places some emphasis on inwardness in the book’s Conclusion, again without working this up into any kind of theory. He repeats the ancient Greek imperative to know thyself, likening this to a Columbus-like exploration. He advises us, for instance, to “be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state” (258). Any new world within us is sure to be rooted in nature, again, and to lead a somewhat fragile existence in the modern city. Having said this, he isn’t advising us simply to abandon the cities and undertake a mass exodus into the countryside. He isn’t urging any “back to the woods” movement but something more subtle, a more informed and appreciative awareness of our natural environment. Nature is not merely so many resources that are there for human consumption but is the more or less divine source of all life, and to see this we need to have an acquaintance with it which, as he laments, is becoming increasingly rare. Disconnection from nature is the root of what ails modern life, and an occasional trip to the beach isn’t going to solve our problems.

The rat race of modern life, the economic materialism, the imperative to keep up with our neighbors, and the unthinking conformity of the times are all symptomatic of this disconnection he is talking about. At the end of the book he returns to his regular life in the town, not having abandoned his cabin but retaining it in his mind and having a deeper knowledge of life. “However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are…. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house” (263). Poverty is nothing to be feared and wealth is not as glorious as we imagine. “I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance, and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not…. There was a man in my neighborhood who lived in a hollow tree. His manners were truly regal. I should have done better had I called on him” (265-266). Walden ends on this note.

Our edition includes Thoreau’s classic essay “Civil Disobedience,” so before moving on to our next philosopher let’s have a look at this essay. Here Thoreau is in a more political mood, as the title suggests. He begins by quoting with approval the saying, “That government is best which governs least” (271). From the opening sentence, we see that he is going to move away from Hobbes’ political philosophy about as far as he can. The political philosophy of the American founders is in the background here and its principles of limited government, the separation and balance of powers, and the rights of the individual. Thoreau is often thought to be an anarchist as well, or a skeptic regarding all forms of government, although that designation fits awkwardly with the argument of this essay which is published in 1849, two years following the conclusion of his experiment at Walden. Thoreau would never write a book comparable to Leviathan or develop a fully elaborated political philosophy; perhaps if he had lived beyond the age of 44 he might have, but what we do find in Thoreau is a reform-minded social critic some of whose views we catch a glimpse of in this and various other writings of his. The American transcendentalist movement more generally included a fair number of social critics and political reformers, and it is within this movement and a larger American political tradition that we should understand this thinker and this essay.

By “civil disobedience” he means disobeying government, and his hypothesis is that there are times when disobedience of the state is not only morally acceptable but morally imperative. The American Civil War has yet to begin in 1849, but the slavery issue is being much debated at this time and Thoreau is decidedly in the antislavery camp. A state in which slavery is both legal and widely practiced, he will argue, is unworthy of obedience. Let’s see how he goes about making his case.

Thoreau makes it clear from the outset of this essay that he is less than optimistic about what government can achieve. It is the citizens of a country who achieve things while governments typically stand in the way of their achievements. What good does government actually do, he asks? “[W]hen it is most expedient, the governed are most let alone by it. Trade and commerce, if they were not made of India-rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way,” and the problem is not limited to economics (272). The individual citizen has a moral conscience which for the most part guides us toward the good while the majority party controls a great deal of our behavior, and very often in ways that violate our conscience. Each one of us is a human being first, before one is a citizen of a state, and as a human being our primary allegiance should be to our conscience. Our most fundamental moral duty is not to do what the law requires but what is right. The simple reason for this is that there are unjust laws, and plenty of them. Laws are formed by legislators whose motives are often about as suspect as their sense of what is right. Their knowledge of morality and justice is in no way superior to that of the individual and often a good deal inferior. We obey the law often for the simple reason that we’re forced to, or we obey with our bodies but not our minds.

Now consider slavery. The civil war hasn’t happened yet, so Thoreau’s government, for the time being anyway, tolerates the existence of slavery and at the same time requires the obedience and cooperation of all its citizens. What is the citizen to do whose conscience tells them that slavery is evil? “I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also” (274). Our conscience, then, tells us to revolt: “All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable” (274). He is equally upset about the Mexican-American war of 1846-48. In both cases, obeying all the state’s laws violates one’s primary moral obligation to one’s own conscience.

The morally correct path, then, is to revolt in some way or other. It is interesting that he doesn’t cite Hobbes’ argument here. Remember that for Hobbes, the citizen has no right to revolt because they have already voluntarily renounced their freedom to the state in return for the state’s protection and social peace. Had Thoreau replied to Hobbes directly on this point, he would have likely pointed out that where slavery exists or a war like the Mexican-American war, there is no social peace. In that case, the state has violated the terms of the social contract and so the contract itself is nullified. Hobbes will always reply that any state is preferable to the state of nature, but Thoreau disagrees. Better no state than one that violates the conscience of its citizens not just in small ways but large. Thoreau isn’t calling for an end to all government, however. He does say, albeit briefly, “to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government” (272). This is not anarchism, although the statement here is very brief. More clear is his call for a revolution of sorts or a right to “resist” the state that becomes tyrannical beyond a point that our conscience can tolerate. The state needn’t be perfect, but it must operate within certain morally acceptable limits. Thoreau isn’t completely clear about what those limits are, however.

What he is clear about is that the individual has a moral (not a legal) right to refuse to pay taxes to a state of this kind, and this includes his own state of Massachusetts. Massachusetts was not a slave state, but it was part of a nation in which slavery was still tolerated and which profited from it. Thoreau himself once spent a night in jail for refusing to pay the poll tax. Why only one night? Because someone, probably his aunt and contrary to his wishes, paid it for him. Every adult citizen was required by law to pay the poll tax, and Thoreau had refused for six years on account of slavery and the war. It’s good to have relatives who will pay your taxes.

Thoreau is a thoroughgoing individualist, and so in his way was Hobbes, but Thoreau’s individualism has an American quality which Hobbes lacked. Self-reliance, personal conscience, and the spirit of the frontier are deeply rooted themes in Thoreau and prevented him from endorsing the kind of state Hobbes recommended. In the end, the individual should answer to himself or herself and to one’s own conscience, and to the state only if it is tolerably moral. He is thoroughly unimpressed with the governments, state and federal, of his time and accordingly does not believe himself to be morally obligated to obey the law or to pay taxes. Just laws must be obeyed, but only just laws, and he is the judge of which laws are just. “I was not born to be forced,” he says, and when it’s by force alone that government rules, it is asking for a revolution (285). If a popular uprising is not likely to happen, Thoreau can have his own personal (nonviolent of course) revolution. As he puts it, “I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually” (288). He has no fundamental criticism of the American constitution but of its current rulers and a good many of their actions. The state rules by the consent of the governed, and “It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it” (292). He looks forward to a day when the rights of the individual will reign supreme, but again he is short on details as to what sort of laws and institutions he favors.

Part 11: Friedrich Nietzsche

The last figure we’ll look at in this introduction to Western philosophy is the famous German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche, whose influence on twentieth and twenty-first century philosophy and culture can hardly be overestimated. No thinker of the nineteenth century has had a larger impact on later generations of thinkers across the humanities than this one. The text we’ll be reading and which I’ll discuss below is Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer (trans. R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin, 2003; another edition is fine), which was written at the very end of Nietzsche’s writing career in 1888. He suffered a permanent mental and physical breakdown in January of 1889, so in this book we find one of Nietzsche’s major and also final expressions of his philosophy. Having been born in 1844, one year before Thoreau’s retreat into the woods, he lived until 1900 but spent the final eleven years of his life insane. What caused his breakdown in 1889 has been much speculated upon but remains uncertain. I discuss Nietzsche as well in a second-year course, “Continental Philosophy 1800-1900” (Philosophy 273), and my lecture notes for that course are also on this website if you’d like a more detailed description. We look at Beyond Good and Evil in that course, but for this one we’ll read Twilight of the Idols in its entirety, which comes to about 90 pages. Our edition also includes The Anti-Christ, which of course is well worth reading as well and covers much of the same ground.

There are many popular misunderstandings about this philosopher that we’ll need to be aware of and to avoid. In short: was he insane at the time he wrote this book, or any of his other published works? No, he was not. Is his writing style on the wild side because he’s some sort of philosophical wild man? No, the writing style is intentional and it serves a purpose. Was he a proto-Nazi? Absolutely not. For propaganda purposes, the Nazis a few decades later would claim him as one of their own, but he would have despised the Nazis as much as you do and likely more. Was he antisemitic? No. A sexist? Well, yes, but it’s complicated.

First, the title of this little book is Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer. We have seen Thoreau philosophize with a borrowed axe, now the tool of choice is a hammer. What does that mean? He’s referring not to the kind of hammer that you have on your work bench but to the more delicate instrument that is a tuning fork (or acoustic resonator) which you apply to a musical instrument such as a piano or guitar in order to see whether the instrument is in tune. To philosophize with a hammer is to “sound out,” as he will say, certain philosophical ideas and ideals, or to apply the tuning fork to a concept such as democracy or equality in order to test how that ideal is faring, what it means and whether it stands up well to criticism or, as he most often finds, whether it rings hollow or has deteriorated into an “idol” (32). The title, Twilight of the Idols, signifies Nietzsche’s overall conviction that a great many of the ideals we have maintained for generations or centuries now have the status of empty idols which we continue to uphold while they are unworthy of the conviction we continue to have about them. He’s going to take particular aim at Judeo-Christian morality. In his youth Nietzsche had planned to enter the clergy but became a convinced atheist. In this book we find him focusing a great deal of his philosophical criticism at both Christian morality and its more secular modern offshoots, from Kantian morality to utilitarianism to liberal democracy, socialism, and so on. Nietzsche is a radical skeptic, and in this and all his books he will express a great many criticisms not only of modern moral and political ideas but of other philosophers, ancient and modern, and of the culture in which he was living. Nineteenth-century Western culture as a whole, in his estimation of it, is suffering from a profound malaise, and what he’s trying to do in this book is to serve as a kind of “cultural physician” who can pronounce a diagnosis of the times and also issue some recommendations as to what ideas should, in his view, replace those received ideals which have turned into idols. Modern culture is in a period of twilight in the sense that these ideals of old are like the sun at twilight that has gone down and yet we continue to find our way about by its ever-decreasing light. “It’s not dark yet,” as Bob Dylan would later say, “but it’s getting there” (Bob Dylan, “Not Dark Yet” from Time Out of Mind). This is the condition of the modern world—and if he were here today, he would be saying the same thing and probably more emphatically.

He begins in the book’s Foreword as follows: “To stay cheerful when involved in a gloomy and exceedingly responsible business is no inconsiderable art: yet what could be more necessary than cheerfulness?” (31). How is one to stay cheerful in dark times? Still in the opening paragraph, he offers this motto: “The spirit grows, strength is restored by wounding” (31). He puts it in Latin, of course. What does he mean by this? The first thing we need to be aware of is the danger of taking Nietzsche literally. Nietzsche is a kind of philosopher-poet, and if we take him literally all the time we will misunderstand him a great deal of the time. Nietzsche puts a great deal of thought into his writing style, and as a rule he will opt for an allegory or a metaphor over a literal expression. He also has a love of hyperbole, bombast, and what can look like autobiographical self-indulgence. Part of the explanation for this rather over the top style of writing is that he wants to speak to his reader in a different way than philosophers usually do. Think of Descartes here: Descartes’ meditator is not the person René Descartes himself but a thinking thing, a purely rational being who has no name or face, and the text is addressed to other thinking things. The meditator is any human being. Also, a modern philosopher like Hobbes is addressing a general educated audience, any rational being who is interested in the topic of his book. Nietzsche doesn’t write this way. He is trying to speak to the individual reader in a far more personal way, rather in the way that art speaks or a sacred text that seems to speak directly to you personally rather than anyone and everyone. Nietzsche’s conviction is that the modern world has fallen asleep or fallen into an unthinking state and must be provoked into thought. We have become intellectually lazy, or perhaps we have always been this way. Nietzsche needs to wake us up, and we see him doing this by using a deliberately provocative and wild (by the standards of modern philosophy anyway) writing style. His books have aroused from the beginning either passionate adherence or passionate dislike from his readers, and he’s doing this on purpose.

“Strength is restored by wounding” or through adversity and difficulty. Nietzsche is fond of military language, partly no doubt due to his Prussian heritage and education but partly as well because he wants to articulate a more muscular philosophy than is usual in the modern era. Strength of will emerges as a major theme in his writings, as we’ll see. One of his most quoted lines appears early on in “Maxims and Arrows”: “What does not kill me makes me stronger” (33). Adversity strengthens the human spirit and the will of the individual. It changes one from the personal one was, which is likely to have been weak-willed and averse to questioning one’s society and one’s own beliefs. It’s not so much physical weakness as weakness of mind that he’s speaking against, slackness of will, and laziness of the intellect.

There are countless highly quotable passages throughout this book, and indeed Nietzsche is one of the most quotable philosophers in Western history. One reason for this is his penchant for compressing a highly complex thought into a few words. Another example from “Maxims and Arrows: “Formula of my happiness: a Yes, and No, a straight line, a goal” (37). Happiness is found in decisiveness, in a resolute and uncompromising will. One sees in this opening section of the book and throughout it a constant jumping from one topic to another, more or less as Montaigne had done but usually in much shorter aphorisms—anything from a sentence to a couple of pages—rather than in longer essays. A glance at the table of contents shows this and is reminiscent again of Montaigne, whom Nietzsche much admires.

Regarding this notion of the will, a major concept Nietzsche would develop is what he calls the “will to power,” which was also to be the title of a magnum opus he had planned but abandoned work on toward the end of his writing career. The will to power, he maintains, is the most basic drive not only in every human being but in any living thing not just to survive or reproduce but to expend energy or in a very general sense to assert oneself, to impose one’s own form on the world and on oneself (self-mastery). It is a will, or an imperative, to accomplish some purpose, to achieve something, to expand one’s sphere of influence. More than this, it is a will to give form or meaning to something that lacks it, and specifically one’s own form in the way, for instance, that an artist or craftsman gives form to matter. The artist imposes on matter a form that is foreign to it, and that is the form of the artist himself or herself, or the artist’s spirit. For Nietzsche, all art is an expression of the will to power, and so is all morality and knowledge in general. Conventional morality, for example, directly expresses the will to power of the masses—and then it denies this and claims that it serves us all. So, Nietzsche believes, is everything else in the realm of human activity an expression of this one underlying drive: our words, our actions, every act of human expression, life itself is an expression or manifestation of the will to power. What underlies life is not the will to survive but to gain and express power in some form.

Is this simple power-seeking, the kind of power that politicians want? It’s much more than that. It is that too, and it can also take very crude forms, including violence, but the will to power is more than this. It includes the whole domain of what minds do: thinking is also an expression of the will to power. Because in thinking about something in the world, I am imposing a form on it, not just passively beholding what is there. I must actively interpret, or impose a meaning on, the object or text and on life as well. Life unto itself has no meaning; what meaning it has is the meaning I have invented and imposed on it. Some of these meanings are surely nobler or more life-affirming than others. Our sense of the meaning of our lives is expressive of either ascending life or descending life, higher or lower. For Nietzsche, all manifestations of the will to power and everything in the realm of what human beings do can be assigned an order of rank: ideas, values, philosophies, values, works of art, cultures, religions, etc. A modern egalitarian he is emphatically not.

In “The Problem of Socrates,” Nietzsche outlines some criticisms of Socrates and Plato which give us some clues to his own viewpoint. He would often express his own philosophical views by contrasting them with an historical philosopher with whom he disagrees, in this case Socrates and Plato. In this instance his complaint against Socrates is that he represents what Nietzsche calls a “declining type” (39). A major theme in Nietzsche’s work is the problem of nihilism—the belief in nothing (“nihil” is Latin for nothing) which the metaphor of twilight refers to explicitly. The modern age, Nietzsche believes, is an age of nihilism. We no longer have convictions about much of anything, or when we do then we lack an intellectual right to those convictions because we lack philosophical grounds for them. When you’re asked, what do you believe, your answer might be very little or nothing at all, and the little that you do believe you may believe without much conviction or rationality. For Nietzsche, ideas—values, beliefs, convictions—are what we organize our lives around and they matter extremely. Every individual must exercise our intellectual faculties to the full extent of our ability in order to decide what one is going to believe and on what basis, but for the most part we don’t do this and find the hard work of thinking rather odious. This is symptomatic, he believes, of a culture in decline and which has been slowly declining since the time of Socrates. He quotes the final words that Socrates ever uttered, as recorded by Plato in his dialogue the “Phaedo” (part of which is included in our edition of The Trial and Death of Socrates on page 58): “I owe a cock to the saviour Asclepius” (39). That means he owes a rooster to the Greek divinity Asclepius, which is something a Greek would do when getting over a sickness. Socrates’ meaning here is that life itself is a sickness and that as death approaches, he is finally about to recover. For Nietzsche, this sentiment is symptomatic of Socrates’ and Plato’s larger worldview which appears to him as pessimistic and life-negating. Remember the paintings above of both Socrates and Plato pointing upward toward the world of Forms which Plato believed to transcend the world we observe with our senses. There is a world that is above this world, these Greek thinkers maintained, and to Nietzsche this looks like a condemnation of this world and this life, and a condemnation which Christianity would amplify. Remember that Nietzsche is an atheist and a rather strident one; there is, he believes, no world above this one and no life after this one, or not to our knowledge. This life and this world are all there is, and a life-affirming philosophy shouldn’t bemoan but celebrate this world and everything that pertains to it, including the human body and the instincts. What Socrates represents, Nietzsche believes, is a negation of the instincts and a condemnation at once of the body, the only world that we know, and the only life that we know. This is “the problem of Socrates” which comes down to us in the modern world as the problem of nihilism, and it’s a problem that pervades Western culture.

As Nietzsche sees it, nihilism is a deep pathology at the heart of modern culture. It is the task of the philosopher to see this, to understand what nihilism is from its roots and how it came to pass, and to think about what is to be done about it. Modern European culture has reached a dead end, where nothing holds any meaning for us anymore. “God is dead,” and we have killed him—meaning that all the old worldviews and belief systems no longer stand up to critical scrutiny (Nietzsche, The Gay Science). “God is dead” is not meant literally; it isn’t a metaphysical hypothesis about the biblical God but an interpretation of what is happening to us in the modern world. We have lost something; modern life suffers from a lost spirit, it is drifting. The decline of ancient worldviews has created a hole—both in the culture and within the individual—that we don’t know how to fill. We no longer have convictions, or a right to hold any. Our ideals of old have deteriorated into idols and empty slogans. This situation in the realm of ideas amounts to a profound cultural and also personal crisis. Nietzsche is a profoundly skeptical philosopher, somewhat in the tradition of a Descartes or a Hume but in a very different way. He is skeptical of all the great world religions (particularly Christianity), all metaphysics and epistemology (rationalism, empiricism, materialism, idealism, etc.), moral systems both old and new (Judeo-Christian, utilitarian, Kantian, etc.), political ideals both old and new (liberalism, socialism, nationalism). In general terms, modern culture and modern ideas in general have reached the end of the road. The state of modern culture is one of meaninglessness, mediocrity, and a drift toward nothingness, and it becomes the task of the thinker and also the artist—it becomes Nietzsche’s task—to revolutionize the modern age through the power of ideas.

“Socrates,” Nietzsche writes, represents “the ressentiment of the rabble” (42). Not a diplomatic phrase, but Nietzsche is no diplomat when he has a pen in his hand. In person, he was actually quite mild-mannered and polite, and his friends were often quite shocked to read his books. Anyway, what does he mean by “the ressentiment of the rabble”? What is ressentiment and who are the rabble? The rabble are us, that is, you and me and modern culture as a whole, with the exception of the occasional noble individual, the sort of human being Nietzsche admires and who are few in number. Ressentiment (he would always use the French word, although he always writes in German) is not simple resentment in the way we usually use this word but a much stronger and enduring malice that we direct toward those whom we believe to be superior in some way to ourselves. It is a neurotic envy that eats away at a person and can persist for a lifetime. Nietzsche’s larger point concerns modern morality, and it is that morality as we know it, whether religious or secular, is symptomatic of an underlying psychology of resentment which refuses to acknowledge this ugly truth about itself and which instead proclaims its moral superiority. There is a false note, he believes, to modern morality and indeed to all premodern morality which follows Socrates and Plato and also the Judeo-Christian tradition. What is his overall criticism of such morality? He has many specific criticisms, but his overall assessment is that such morality is life-negating and slavish; it is symptomatic of a psychology of victimhood, that is weak-willed and resigned to a life that it experiences as oppressive but which, unbeknown to itself, is strongly inclined to oppress others if given the opportunity.

He draws a distinction between two types of morality: what he calls master morality, or an ethics of nobility and individualism, and slave morality, and he defends the first and condemns the second. In master morality the basic ethical distinction is between the good (or noble) and the bad (or base), and where the good has primacy. Slave morality reverses this. The latter’s basic distinction is between good (formerly the base) and evil (formerly the good or noble, which is condemned in the strongest terms). In master morality, or an ethics of nobility, the bad or the base is an object not of hatred or strong condemnation but simple contempt or indifference. This is the indifference you might feel for something that you regard as beneath you. For example, stealing something inexpensive from a store is something you probably wouldn’t do, not necessarily because it’s “evil” or a major crime but because it’s beneath you; it’s base, or something you just wouldn’t do. In master morality, the bad is something of an afterthought. Its original thought is “the good,” which is essentially an affirmation of life and of oneself.

Nietzsche is not saying there are two kinds of people in the world: masters and slaves, and that every person is naturally one or the other. There is, he thinks, a master and a slave in everyone. These two are not actual groups but spiritual or psychological characteristics within all of us. There is a kind of individualistic ideal here, but there is no one conception of the good life and no method of fashioning values objectively. Each one of us is a battlefield of strong and conflicting forces, and there’s a nobility and a slavishness within each of us. These opposite forces or tendencies battle it out within the heart and mind of each one of us. In some, the noble part is more dominant, in others (a larger number) the slavish part prevails.

A reversal of moral value systems took place, Nietzsche proposes, in the ancient world which he would call the “slave revolt” in morality, and it was a revolution of sorts in which was achieved the victory of an ethics of slavery over an older ethics of nobility. He associates the slave revolt especially with Judeo-Christian morality and proposes that in the minds of the ancients, and continuing through our own era, master morality’s conception of the good was transformed or demoted to a new conception of moral evil. The values of master morality include pride, creativity, honesty, solitude, independence, and personal integration, among others. Slave morality, by contrast, values altruism, collectivism, humility, equality, and related values. The slave revolt was victorious, he believes, and its consequences remain very much with us in modern times. He regards this development as a disaster.

Moving on now to ‘“Reason’ in Philosophy,” Nietzsche in this very short chapter addresses the question, what is the meaning of the philosophical concept of reason. This is surely one of the most central questions of philosophy since this discipline has been understood from the beginning as a rational investigation into the world, the good life, and so on. What is reason in philosophy or in any other field? Nietzsche again speaks here in an explicitly critical mode both of the philosophers of his own day and of much of the history of philosophy. We have misunderstood the meaning of reason, he believes. How so? At the outset of this chapter he criticizes philosophers for “their lack of historical sense, their hatred of even the idea of becoming, their Egyptianism. They think they are doing a thing honour when they dehistoricize it—sub specie aeterni—when they make a mummy of it” (45). What is he saying here? To think of something sub specie aeterni is to try to regard it from a completely objective and eternal point of view, as an omniscient God would, or to grasp what Plato called the Form of something in contrast with its appearance. This kind of knowledge is not possible for human beings, Nietzsche believes, for the reason that all human knowledge is contingent and limited. What it’s contingent upon and limited by is history and the perspective of the knower. To know something is not to pull ourselves up by the proverbial bootstraps out of our own mind and body and to grasp something objectively or as it is wholly apart from us. All human knowledge is rational, but reason itself isn’t wholly objective, and nor is it wholly subjective. It is neither; the objective/subjective opposition is false, in his view. He’ll go on to say that a great many of the oppositions or dichotomies that philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have discussed—reality versus appearance, being versus becoming, mind versus body, objective versus subjective, knowledge versus opinion, true versus false, good versus evil, virtue versus vice, rationalism versus empiricism—are false in the sense that they present us with two extreme possibilities and insist unjustifiably that we choose between them.

For Nietzsche, all human knowledge is “perspectival” in the sense that it occurs from some limited point of view and is not objective. To know something is to interpret it in a way that is contingent upon our point of view or perspective. Knowing the world shouldn’t be thought of as Descartes does, where a purely rational mind encounters a reality that simply is what it is. What is—what has being for us—has always already been interpreted, classified, and revealed in ways that reflect our historical heritage. Interpretation belongs to experience in general, and it is in every case uncertain. Knowledge occurs from a finite perspective, one that reveals the object in a particular aspect. Of the many ideas that modern philosophy owes to Nietzsche, none is more central than the concept of perspective itself, or “perspectivism.” The hypothesis that knowing invariably occurs from a finite point of view applies to science, philosophy, and any other way of knowing the world. It is not a condition from which any method could ever deliver us.

What a thing is for us—not merely how it appears but how it is, the manner in which it is manifest to us—is contingent on perspective in the sense of either a language, worldview, disciplinary vocabulary, set of beliefs, values, or will to power. No perspective on any object gives us a privileged view of it but an aspect only. For example, think of any historical event; how do we understand it? It may be interpreted from the point of view of politics or economics, sociology or religion, psychology or morality, or any number of viewpoints and vocabularies. Each perspective opens up a dimension of meaning while closing off others. The same can be said of any known object: in being known, it is revealed to us in a particular and limited aspect.

He continues with this general theme in the one-page chapter, “How the ‘Real World’ at last Became a Myth.” The real world he’s talking about is Plato’s world of the Forms or Immanuel Kant’s world of what he called “things in themselves” in contrast to things as they appear to us. The opposition of a real world with an apparent world is false, Nietzsche believes, or there is no philosophical basis on which to posit such an opposition. “We have abolished the real world: what world is left? the apparent world perhaps?... But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world!” (51).

“Morality as Anti-Nature” continues his critique of Judeo-Christian morality. He writes, “Morality as it has been understood hitherto—as it was ultimately formulated by [Arthur] Schopenhauer [earlier in the nineteenth century] as ‘denial of the will to life’—is the instinct of décadence itself, which makes out of itself an imperative: it says: ‘Perish’!—it is the judgement of the judged” (56). “Morality as it has been understood hitherto” is what he calls slave morality, and it’s an expression of an underlying instinct of decadence or resignation to a life that many experience as a failure. Nietzsche thinks of himself as a philosophical psychologist, and his critique of conventional morality focuses less on the arguments that have been used to defend it than on the psychological mentality of those who believe in it. One of his more controversial hypotheses is that moral values, political values, philosophical beliefs, and ideas in general should be regarded from a psychological point of view as outward symptoms or expressions of an underlying psychology, most often one that is either life-affirming or life-negating. Very often Nietzsche will present his critique of an idea in the form of a psychological and also historical “genealogy,” where an idea of whatever kind is tainted by its origin. What is most important about any given idea, he believes, is its origin—historical and psychological—and not the reasons that justify or fail to justify it. “Morality as Anti-Nature” means that slave morality originates in a hostility against nature, this world, and this life. A more noble morality loves this world and this life and affirms life as a whole.

Nietzsche next proposes that philosophers and the rest of us have been making “Four Great Errors” for centuries now. The first error is that of “confusing cause and consequence.” He mentions the example of a then-popular book that recommended eating a very restricted diet as a formula for longevity. The error here is that such a diet is not the cause of a long life but the effect, or a simple diet will often coincide with a long life without causing it. Some people who live a long time also have a meager diet, so what? The second error is the “error of a false causality,” where we essentially make up a cause for something that we’re trying to explain. He mentions the example of the free will: one performed such and such an action because of the free will, where the free will is a faculty of the mind. Nietzsche takes no position on whether the will is free or determined. The only question that matters about the will is whether it is strong or weak, not whether it is free or determined. The will is not a cause and it “no longer explains anything—it merely accompanies events, it can also be absent” (60).

Closely related to this is the third “error of imaginary causes.” For instance, one experiences something unpleasant and explains it as an effect of an evil spirit. Nietzsche doesn’t believe in any kind of spirits, being a convinced atheist. Indeed, he suggests that the “entire realm of morality and religion falls under this concept of imaginary causes” (63). Fourth is the “error of free will,” which we have already mentioned. Again his criticism of this idea pertains to what he takes to be its origin: the desire on the part “of the theologian for making mankind ‘accountable’ in his sense of the word, that is to say for making mankind dependent on him” (64).

The next short chapter is on “The ‘Improvers’ of Mankind,” and again we find Nietzsche speaking in a skeptical vein of such would-be “improvers.” He begins by stating “that there are no moral facts whatever,” but instead there are moral interpretations and evaluations. Remember the natural law tradition which we discussed briefly in the section on Thomas Aquinas. In the natural law tradition, basic moral values are a matter of natural law, which is taken to be universal, unchanging, and known to every one of us. It’s inscribed in our conscience and may or may not be something for which we can produce a philosophical demonstration. Nietzsche, ever the skeptic, will be skeptical of natural law as well. There are, he believes, no natural laws and no moral facts; instead, moral values stand to each one of us something like in the way that a work of art stands to an artist, which is as an outward expression of something that lies within, and where what is within, for Nietzsche, is the will to power. Moral values and judgments are not exactly subjective, but they’re not objective either. They are expressive of an underlying mentality, usually one that is either life-affirming or (more often) life-negating. The would-be improvers of mankind largely fall into this second category, and they’re not improvers at all. Typically, they are do-gooders who do no good but hide behind a fig leaf of virtue while practicing resentment. Their improvements amount to a domestication of human beings, a “taming of the beast man and the breeding of a certain species of man,” which is the sort of human being who is an unthinking conformist (66). The norm in modern Western civilization, he very much believes (as does Thoreau), is abject conformity, and conventional morality and religion are the primary instruments by which such conformity is brought about.

In “What the Germans Lack” we see that Nietzsche is not a German nationalist. Indeed, he’s the opposite of a nationalist and sometimes calls himself “a good European,” where this means a citizen of Europe or something like what we’d now call a citizen of the world. Nationalism was very much in vogue in the nineteenth century, and Nietzsche wants no part of it. It was also common at the time for intellectuals in different nation-states to try to articulate what was distinctive about their nation and what is good about it. Nietzsche would actually renounce his citizenship and was legally stateless. If there is anything at all in European culture that is distinctively German, he tells us, it is nothing to be proud of. He would always regard French culture as the highest culture in Europe and in the world, and throughout his writing career he would move around from Germany to Switzerland to Italy to France and back again, never having a permanent address. For a decade he was a professor of philology (not philosophy) at the University of Basel in Switzerland but took a medical leave which would become permanent many years before his mental and physical collapse. Some of his readers would have been shocked to read that “German culture is declining,” but such is his view (73). It is declining for the same reason that all of the Western world is declining, because it is an age of nihilism, but also because Germany has become overly invested in military, political, and economic power at the expense of culture. “Culture and the state,” he writes, “… are antagonists: the ‘cultural state’ is merely a modern idea. The one lives off the other, the one thrives at the expense of the other” (74). As the German state strives to become ascendant, its culture declines.

“Expeditions of an Untimely Man” finds Nietzsche addressing a wide range of topics, in no obvious order. He would often speak of himself and his books as “untimely” in the sense of being both out of step with the times and also many years before his time. He’s a philosopher not of the nineteenth century but of the twentieth, he would say, or he’s trying to write for an audience of future philosophers, having given up on nearly all the philosophers of his own era. This chapter of “expeditions” finds him ranging from topic to topic in Montaigne-like fashion, commenting variously on Christianity, numerous philosophers and artists, Darwinian biology, psychology, beauty and ugliness, morality again, freedom, genius, decadence, and a few other things. The 51 aphorisms in this chapter all express the rather freewheeling style of thought and writing that he would always prefer. One idea he mentions briefly which we have not alluded to so far is the distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, which is a distinction he had discussed at length in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. Apollo and Dionysus are ancient Greek gods who have long been understood as antithetical forces. Ancient Greek philosophy has long been thought to represent a transition from “mythos” to “logos” while for Nietzsche it amounted to a decisive and unfortunate triumph of the Apollonian or the rational over the Dionysian or the passionate and instinctive. Philosophical thinking invariably is an instinctive activity of sorts, a form of self-expression not unlike the artistic. If Greek tragedy represented, in Nietzsche’s view, the supreme achievement of ancient culture, it was because of its power to combine the rational spirit of the Apollonian with the instinctive power of the Dionysian. It was this combination of conflicting psychological attitudes and the creative tension between them that made ancient Greek culture great. For Nietzsche, the Apollonian symbolizes order, measure, form, clarity, restraint, balance, and reason while the Dionysian symbolizes instinct, sexuality, intoxication, frenzy, madness. It was their combination or synthesis in tragedy that made such tragedy great, but this combination wasn’t duplicated by any of the Greek philosophers or any who would follow.

For Nietzsche, instinct is the only source from which ideas ever emerge. Philosophy is never a purely rational undertaking, although we usually think it is. With Socrates began the renunciation of the instincts, of the body and the senses, of appearance and experience in favor of the rational and otherworldly, and the loss of the Dionysian instincts in philosophy led directly to its decline or perhaps its stillbirth, since for Nietzsche there was no time either prior to Socrates or later in which philosophy would synthesize the Apollonian and Dionysian in the manner of ancient tragedy. But this is exactly what he wants from philosophy: a combination of reason and instinct, intellectual rigor and creative imagination.

The book’s final two chapters are again short. “What I Owe to the Ancients” is already suggested by the chapter’s brevity: not a lot, or not to ancient philosophers anyway. Nietzsche has a profound love of ancient Greek culture, especially Greek tragedy, and to some extent Roman culture as well. In all of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy he finds little to admire, or so he tells us. “It is really only quite a small number of books of antiquity which count for anything in my life; the most famous are not among them” (116). The thought of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle does not greatly interest him, and most references to them that one finds in Nietzsche’s writings are critical. Greek tragedy represents for him the highest peak not only in the cultures of the ancient world but in all of human history. Greek philosophy is not equal to it, and Nietzsche is always very reluctant to acknowledge more than a few philosophical influences on his own writings. Finally, “The Hammer Speaks,” recalling that the subtitle of this book is “How to Philosophize with a Hammer.” Nietzsche is not smashing things but delicately applying the tuning fork to modern ideas, listening carefully for whether they are in or out of tune. They’re very much not in tune, or such is his conclusion. He states the point more artfully: “‘Why so hard?’ the charcoal once said to the diamond; ‘for are we not close relations?’; Why so soft? Oh my brothers, thus I ask you: for are you not—my brothers?” (122). Hardness—resolve, decisiveness, a strong will—is needed to live a good life and to be the kind of human being Nietzsche admires. The qualities he would always dislike are softness, laziness, apathy, resentment, and conformity, qualities the antidote to which is hardness or strength of will. “For all creators are hard,” and the task that Nietzsche leaves his readers with as the book and his writing career both come to an end is to reevaluate our values, to think for oneself about how one is going to live and what the point of one’s life is going to be (122). This is a question that every one of us must answer for oneself, he believes.

Two final ideas we should touch upon which are central to Nietzsche’s philosophy are his famous “Übermensch” and the eternal recurrence. The German prefix “über” means over, super, or above, and the Übermensch or “overman” is an ideal that arises out of Nietzsche’s contempt for mediocrity and complacency, which he regards as the norm in his time. Nietzsche tells us that the human being (or “man”) is something that must be overcome or transcended, and he would repeat this point constantly throughout his writings. It is time, he writes in a rather prophetic voice, for us to overcome what is “human, all too human” (the title to one of his earlier books) and prepare the way for the overman—meaning what? This is a symbol; it’s absolutely not to be taken literally. It’s a symbol of the human being as an object of reverence, a quasi-religious-mythical symbol of what we are capable of becoming.

Like any symbol—always beware of taking Nietzsche literally—it requires some interpretation on the part of the reader, but let’s think of it as a metaphor for several things, beginning with personal integration (integrity) or what he calls “giving style to one’s character” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science). The overman is the human being who re-evaluates the values of old and goes “beyond good and evil.” This does not mean that the overman is “evil” in any straightforward sense. It does mean that the overman thinks creatively about values—is not a slave to convention but is a non-conformist with respect to values. These people—the creators of new values—are the saviors of the world, and our culture revolves around them.

It’s important to emphasize that the overman is not an actual person or a human type, nor does Nietzsche see himself as a superhuman being. It is a symbol of the transformation and liberation of the human spirit, a transcendence of what human beings merely are and have been. You can think of it as a symbol of humanity’s highest possibilities, a symbol of human nobility and “self-overcoming,” that is, the capacity to overcome obstacles in one’s own nature, internal obstacles that we all have and to will my own personal transformation to my highest possibility.

Closely related to the overman is the eternal recurrence or eternal return. He asks us to imagine, and as a thought experiment rather than an actual hypothesis, that one’s life exactly as one is living it will repeat itself in future an infinite number of times. What if this were to be true? Would one hear this news as good news or bad news? Nietzsche does not present this idea in the form of a theory or an argument but in the form of a question—a “perhaps” or a “what if?” The eternal recurrence—the idea that this life will recur an infinite number of times in the future—ought to be read not as a doctrine or hypothesis but as a test of character and of how we are living. The issue is how one would hear this news. What would my response be? If it would be received as bad news then I must change my life. If I hear it as good news, it is an affirmation of life and how I’m living it.

As with every thinker we have looked at, there are more details in this book and in Nietzsche’s larger philosophy which we don’t have time for here, but this will do for an introductory overview.

A Final Note: What is Philosophy, then?

So ends our brief historical introduction to philosophy. Do we now know “What is Philosophy?” Not exactly, but hopefully we’re starting to get an idea. Generalizing about all the thinkers we have discussed above, and the countless others we have not, is exceedingly difficult. Philosophers have written in different languages and cultures, in different time periods and about different themes, making any general statement about what philosophy itself is rather dubious apart from its original definition as the love of wisdom. A philosopher is a human being who is pursuing knowledge about human existence and the world in which we live, but beyond this there isn’t a lot we can say. What makes Plato a philosopher is not the same as what makes Thoreau a philosopher, or Thomas or Hobbes, and as philosophy would move into the twentieth century and the twenty-first it would become more complex still.

As students of philosophy, one thing we wouldn’t say at the conclusion of an introductory course like this one is that we “have taken” philosophy, as students sometimes put it. Philosophy is not something one has ever taken, if this means that we know all about it and it’s behind us now. This is never the case. As Martin Heidegger, one of the foremost of twentieth-century philosophers, liked to say, a philosopher is always a beginner.