Usually the pleasure in question has been thought to be the subject’s own pleasure, and so the view has been a form of egoism; but there is no reason in theory why it should not be the p
Trang 1harmed Problems for the view are especially salient in the
ethics of creation Imagine an embryologist who can
choose which embryos to implant in women seeking to
have children She knows which embryos would be born
with a painful genetic condition and which without Does
choosing embryos with the condition harm the resultant
offspring? On the above view, it does not For the choice
with respect to each potential individual is existence with
pain versus non-existence The net gain of existing minus
some pain must in most cases be more than not existing
Even if one concedes that comparing existence with
non-existence is not to compare like with like, the problem
remains For, then, against what should we compare the
offspring’s medical state? The offspring’s suffering is,
nevertheless, due to the embryologist’s choice This
perhaps points to some non-consequentialist features of
harm, focusing, perhaps, on harmers’ intentions, or some
other characteristics of their actions
A further problem is avoiding a collapse of the notion of
harm into the related notion of wrong, or being wronged
If harming me is simply the commission of a morally
wrongful act against me, then there will be as many
notions of harm as there are moral principles of rightful
action towards others which can be breached A key
ques-tion here is whether there can be a harmful but not
wrong-ful act Examples of accidental, or unavoidable, harms
might bear out this distinction There are also cases where
we can place a person at a (morally) wrongful
disadvan-tage, yet would decline to call this a harm s.m.-g
*consequentialism; ethics
J Feinberg, ‘Wrongful Life and the Counterfactual Element in
Harming’, in his Freedom and Fulfilment (Princeton, NJ, 1992).
D Parfit, ‘The Non-Identity Problem’, in Reasons and Persons
(Oxford, 1984)
Harman, Gilbert (1938– ) Professor of Philosophy at
Princeton University, best known for contributions in the
philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics Although it
is common to equate ‘being rational’ with ‘being logical’,
Harman distinguishes these sharply Logic provides a
the-ory of implication relations among sentences ‘If A then B’,
coupled with ‘A’, logically implies ‘B’ An agent’s
accept-ing the first two statements, however, does not thereby
rationally oblige him to infer or accept the third At most,
reason demands acceptance of ‘B’ or the rejection of either
‘If A then B’ or ‘A’ In ethics, Harman advances a robust
*moral relativism according to which what agents ‘ought’
to do depends on socially reinforced principles they come
to acquire Agents imbued with different principles will be
differently motivated, hence morally judge and act in
G Harman, Change in View (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).
—— Reasoning, Meaning, and Mind (Oxford, 1999).
—— Explaining Value and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy
(Oxford, 2000)
harmony, logical In a *natural deduction formalization
of logic, harmony is a relation between the introduction
and elimination rules governing a logical constant which renders them in accord with one another: it is not possible
to infer from a statement of a given form more than is war-ranted by the way in which that statement was arrived at
in the first instance The condition for this to hold good is precisely the condition that the basic step of normalization can be carried out with respect to a given logical constant, namely that, whenever in a deduction a statement is derived by an introduction rule, only to be used immedi-ately as the major premiss of an elimination rule, a short cut is always possible that makes no use of that statement This condition is plausible independently of Prawitz’s idea for a proof-theoretic justification of the elimination rules:
namely as a formulation of the requirement of harmony
between introduction and elimination rules For if, with respect to a given logical constant, such harmony does not obtain, the addition of that constant to the language is a non-conservative extension, in that we can derive conclu-sions not containing that constant from premisses not containing it that we could not have derived in the lan-guage lacking the constant
Disharmony occurs when the elimination rules are stronger than is warranted by the introduction rules, taken collectively It can also occur that they are weaker This may also be seen as a defect, though its effects are less serious: the condition that the elimination rules be no
weaker than they need be may be termed stability.
If we distinguish what justifies the assertion of a form of statement and the consequences that follow from accept-ing it as two aspects of the laccept-inguistic practice governaccept-ing it, these notions of harmony and of stability may be general-ized from logic to the whole of language They then become conditions, stronger than the requirement of con-sistency, for the proper functioning of a language, ones not guaranteed satisfaction by the mere existence and use
Nuel D Belnap, ‘Tonk, Plonk and Plink’, Analysis (1962); repr in
P F Strawson (ed.), Philosophical Logic (Oxford, 1967).
M Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (Cambridge, Mass.,
1991)
A N Prior, ‘The Runabout Inference-Ticket’, Analysis (1960); repr.
in P F Strawson (ed.), Philosophical Logic (Oxford, 1967).
harmony, pre-established A theory associated with the philosophy of G W Leibniz It is a basic thesis of Leibniz’s philosophy that there are no causal interactions between created *substances, although there appear to be Accord-ing to Leibniz the states of a created substance are causal consequences of its own preceding states, except for its ini-tial state, which is brought about by God at its creation Leibniz held that God so created substances that, although they do not causally interact, they behave just as we would expect them to behave were they to causally inter-act Leibniz utilized this theory in order to provide an explanation for the relation of the mind to the body, although that is not its basic motivation r.c.sle
*occasionalism
360 harm
Trang 2G W Leibniz, ‘New System of Nature’, in G W Leibniz:
Philo-sophical Essays, ed and tr Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber
(Indianapolis, 1989)
Hart, H L A (1907–92) Philosopher and lawyer who with
J L Austin was central to late 1940s Oxford analytical
philosophy His work while Oxford’s Professor of
Jurispru-dence (1952–68) transformed philosophy of law
(particu-larly analytical jurisprudence and *legal positivism) by
opening it to social theory mindful of the ‘internal point of
view’ of social actors, and so to normative political and
moral theory (conceived by Hart in liberal and Humean
fashion) For Hart, our language is a reminder of the
complexity and inner dimension of human affairs;
philo-sophically sophisticated attention to it undermines
simpli-fying and sceptical reductivisms, whether about causation
(Causation in the Law (1959)), punishment and the mental
element in crime (Punishment and Responsibility (1968)), or
the general structure and functions of law (The Concept of
Law (1961); Essays on Bentham (1982)). j.m.f
*law, history of the philosophy of; law, problems of the
philosophy of
H L A Hart, Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy (Oxford, 1983).
Nicola Lacey, A Life of H L A Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble
Dream (Oxford, 2004).
Neil MacCormick, H L A Hart (London, 1981).
Hartley, David (1705–57) Hartley’s interest was in the
body’s role in the production and association of ideas; he
found the key in Newton’s theory of vibrations Hartley’s
major writing in English appeared in 1749 Here he
de-velops the view that vibratory motions in the brain are set
up by the nerves receiving impressions of external objects,
acting through the ether, and these vibrations typically
continue in the brain, as sensations, a short time after the
removal of the external objects Hartley’s is a
physiologi-cal explanation of the short persistence of a feeling after
the removal of the stimulus He also undertakes a
‘deduc-tion’ of the character of each type of sensation from the
theory of vibrations Ideas of heat, cold, sight, etc and
sex-ual desires result from the vibratory effect in the
‘medullary Particles’, specifically from the kind and
local-ity of the vibrations in the brain, and the line of direction of
influences from nerves to the brain
His writings contain a ‘natural Assent’ argument for a
first cause and an account of moral–political matters and
their dependence upon ‘the Christian Revelation’ d.g
*associationism
David Hartley, Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his
Expectations: Containing Observations on the Frame of the Human
Body and Mind, and on their Mutual Connexions and Influences
(first pub 1749; Hildesheim, 1967)
Hartmann, Eduard von (1842–1906) German philosopher
who tried to reconcile Schopenhauer with Hegel,
Schelling, and Leibniz In The Philosophy of the Unconscious
(1869; tr London, 1931) he argued that the unconscious
*Absolute is both will and idea, which respectively
account for the existence of the world and its orderly nature Will appears in suffering, idea in order and con-sciousness Thus there are grounds for both *pessimism and optimism, and, since the Absolute is one, these must
be reconciled As the cosmic process advances, idea pre-vails over will, making possible aesthetic and intellectual pleasures But intellectual development increases our capacity for pain, and material progress suppresses spir-itual values Hence ultimate happiness is not attainable in this world, in heaven, or by endless progress towards an earthly paradise These illusions are ruses employed by the absolute to induce mankind to propagate itself We will eventually shed illusions and commit collective suicide— the final, redeeming triumph of idea over will m.j.i
D N K Darnoi, The Unconscious and Eduard von Hartmann (The
Hague, 1967)
Hartmann, Nicolai (1882–1950) German philosopher who abandoned his original neo-Kantian belief that
object-ive reality is a mental construct and, in, for example, New Ways of Ontology (1942; tr Chicago, 1953), developed a
realist *ontology There are various levels of being: inor-ganic, orinor-ganic, spiritual, etc A higher level is rooted in a lower, but not wholly determined by it Some categories are involved at all levels of being: e.g unity and multipli-city, persistence and change But each level has its own complex of categories (e.g matter and causality at the inorganic level) which apply to a higher level (e.g organic life) only with modifications As well as general ontology, Hartmann produced a series of ‘regional ontologies’, exploring the categories of, for example, the human spirit and its objectifications and those of inorganic and organic
nature In Ethics (1926; tr London, from 1932) he
de-veloped a non-formal theory of values which, though objective, have only ideal being and affect the world only
in so far as men act on them He denies the existence of a providential God, since it is incompatible with human
*freedom Unlike Heidegger, he was concerned with
W Stegmüller, Main Currents in German, British, American Philoso-phy (Bloomington, Ind., 1969).
Hartshorne, Charles (1897–2000) American process philosopher and theologian at the University of Chicago and the University of Texas who continued to the end of the twentieth century the ‘process’ tradition in which
*becoming is the primary reality Although strongly influ-enced by his teacher Alfred North Whitehead, some of his ideas antedate his encounter with Whitehead and others are improvements on him Like Whitehead, he holds a panexperientialism in which the basic units of reality are creative, experiential events This doctrine does not imply that the reality of an electron is very similar to the reality
of human consciousness, only that both are on a continu-ous spectrum of processive reality Hartshorne’s chief improvements are in the theory of compound individuals Hartshorne and Whitehead, as pantheists, hold that God transcends the world while including it But, whereas for
Hartshorne, Charles 361
Trang 3Whitehead God is a single, everlasting entity, for Hartshorne
God is a temporal society of experiential occasions
Also an ornithologist, he published notable studies of
*process philosophy
C Hartshorne, Reality as a Social Process (Boston, 1953).
Robert Kane and Stephen H Phillips (eds.), Hartshorne, Process
Philosophy and Theology (Albany, NY, 1989).
Harvard philosophy Harvard was founded in 1635, a
cen-tury and a half before the achievement of independence
by the United States There were two distinguished
philosophers during the colonial period, but they were
both Yale men: Jonathan Edwards, the most rigid of
deter-minists, and the American Samuel Johnson, a follower of
Berkeley The first capable Harvard philosopher was
Francis Bowen, an adherent of the Scottish
common-sense philosophy of Reid and Dugald Stewart, which
dominated American universities from soon after its
introduction to the country at the beginning of the
nine-teenth century At Harvard it was expounded by Levi
Hedge from 1795 to 1832 and then by Bowen from 1835 to
1889 The practical attraction of Scottish common-sense
philosophy was that it offered a rational alternative to the
fanatical excesses of Calvinist orthodoxy while resisting,
on another front, the speculative nebulosities of the
ama-teur philosophers of the Transcendentalist movement
C S Peirce, William James, and their early associate
Chauncey Wright were all Bowen’s pupils
In the 1870s these three and others, including John
Fiske, disciple of Herbert Spencer, formed a Metaphysical
Society in which, under the influence of the prevailing
Darwinian evolutionism, the ideas were worked out that
were to constitute pragmatism, a Harvard invention
Peirce, like Wright, the most positivistic of the group, and
Fiske, was associated only informally with Harvard after
graduation But his close relation to the much more
immediately influential James gave his ideas, much more
sophisticated than those of James, some currency James
was soon joined at Harvard by Josiah Royce, who
com-bined an up-to-date interest in logic with the kind of
ideal-ism which holds that only mind is real and that all finite
minds are included in an absolute mind
James’s most gifted student, George Santayana, was
also his intellectually most disobedient one Both were
naturalists who wanted to find some place for religion in
the scheme of things, but they went about the project in
very different ways James adjusted his concepts of truth
and reality so as to accommodate his spiritual yearnings;
Santayana affirmed the materiality of the real and saw
mind as at once its product and decorator He contributed
in 1920 to the collective volume *Critical Realism The
organizer of the earlier collection *The New Realism (1912)
had been Ralph Barton Perry, another Harvard teacher,
loyal to the memory, if not the doctrine, of William
James He went on to write large, soft-centred books
about ethics and the theory of value
James died in 1910, Peirce in 1914, Royce in 1916, and Santayana had departed for Europe in 1912 It seemed that the golden age of Harvard philosophy, and of philosophy
in America in general, had come to an end Whitehead arrived in the mid-1920s to begin, in his sixties, a product-ive and obscurely brilliant new career as a speculatproduct-ive cosmologist, but he had little effect outside a small circle
of devotees and a distantly admiring element in the gen-eral reading public Harvard philosophy turned from James’s conversational breeziness, Royce’s pulpit elo-quence, and Santayana’s civilized belletrism to an al-together more rigorous and professional mode of philosophizing The emblem of this change was C I Lewis, intensional logician, analytic theorist of know-ledge, and combatively naturalist theorist of value, the best philosopher of the inter-war years in the United States His abler associates were unproductive, his pro-ductive colleagues were not all that able He was, there-fore, somewhat solitary But his main doctrines had a considerable overlap with those of the analytic philoso-phers of Britain and the Logical Positivists of Europe
W V Quine arrived for graduate study in Lewis’s time From the start his interest in formal logic was accom-panied by a concern for its philosophical underpinnings
He visited the Vienna Circle and was soon discarding some of their most treasured substantive beliefs, although not their methods and aims As aspects of a comprehen-sive suspicion of the clarity and usefulness of the idea of
*meaning, he rejected the distinction between analytic truths (true in virtue of the meaning of their terms) and synthetic truths, reinstated ontology (condemned by the positivists as meaningless metaphysics), and denied the reducibility of all significant discourse to individually meaningful reports of immediate experience
Something like a new golden age was clearly under way
by the time of his Word and Object (1960) Harvard now
established itself as the most important philosophical centre in the English-speaking world, reversing a cultural dependence on British philosophy which had been interrupted, but not overturned, by the episode of
*pragmatism Quine’s early ally Nelson Goodman joined him there, as, later, did Hilary Putnam and Robert Nozick
a.q
*American philosophy
Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy (New Haven,
Conn., 1977)
—— A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000 (Oxford, 2001).
S P Upham (ed.), Philosophers in Conversation: Interviews from the
Harvard Review of Philosophy (New York, 2002)
Morton G White, Science and Sentiment in America (New York,
1971)
Hayek, Friedrich August von (1899–1992) Although often regarded primarily as an economist (for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1974), Hayek’s philosophical work was fundamental to his thinking His basic insight is epi-stemological Human knowledge is limited and reason constrained in many ways These limitations become
362 Hartshorne, Charles
Trang 4particularly acute when attempting to survey and predict
the workings of a large society, not just because of its
com-plexity, but also because of general difficulties in knowing
human social and economic behaviour in advance of the
decision of agents, and because any predicting agency will
itself become a player in the game But the knowledge
dis-persed among millions of individual agents can be
ampli-fied and captured through the workings of the free
market, and condenses in spontaneously developing
trad-itions and customs Hayek’s epistemology thus leads to a
defence of moral and institutional *conservatism, as
against rationalistic reformers, and of the free market, as
against command economics (which interfere
ineffi-ciently with the flow of economic information within a
society) The neglect of Hayek’s ideas by philosophers is
unfortunate because, though at times unclear and
incom-plete, they are both suggestive and influential a.o’h
F A von Hayek, The Fatal Conceit (London, 1988).
J Gray, Hayek on Liberty (Oxford, 1986).
heap, paradox of the Paradox due to vagueness With a
single grain of sand, you cannot make a heap If you cannot
make a heap with the grains you have, you cannot make
one with just one more So even with 10 million grains you
cannot make a heap Despite its antiquity, ‘heap’ may be
badly chosen: arguably, you can make a heap of sand with
just four or more grains (enough to make a stable
heaping-up without adhesive) But the paradox can be recast, e.g.: 1
is a small number, and any number bigger by 1 than a small
number is small; so all numbers are small Responses
include: denying the major premiss, that is, affirming that
there is a sharp cut-off (even if we don’t know where); and
(alternatively) avoiding the conclusion by revamping
J C Beall (ed.), Liars and Heaps: New Essays on Paradox (Oxford,
2003)
Mark Sainsbury, Paradoxes (New York, 1988), ch 2.
heaven.The abode of God and the angels Celestial
para-dise The ultimate destination of the redeemed (e.g in
Job 3, Hebrews 12, and Luke 16) Once wholly free of sin,
souls or resurrected persons in heaven enjoy the Beatific
Vision, the intuition of God’s essence According to Job 3,
the wicked no longer trouble those in heaven, the weary
are at rest, both ‘small’ and ‘great’ are there, and the slave
is free from the master There are graphic descriptions of
heaven in Revelation and in Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Although spatial, heaven is not spatially related to
ordin-ary space-time Travel to heaven is only by dying and
redemption, not by *motion, so the existence of heaven is
inconsistent with the Kant’s thesis that there is only one
space, because putatively distinct spaces will turn out to
be spatially related Heaven exists now (Romans 10: 6, 1
Thessalonians 1: 10, 4: 16) but is concealed by ordinary
space-time events and sin At death, the presence of God is
*hell
St Augustine, The City of God (Harmondsworth, 1972).
St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (London, 1963–75) Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, tr Norman Kemp-Smith
(London, 1978), esp ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’
Alister McGrath, A Brief History of Heaven (Oxford, 2003).
hedonic calculus If the ultimate object of moral
en-deavour is to maximize pleasure, satisfaction, happiness;
and if pleasures, miseries, and pains can be meaningfully represented on a single scale, and summed, then it may be
thought possible to quantify the overall value or disvalue
of particular acts or policies, and the desirability of intro-ducing, or rescinding, laws Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) proposed a ‘felicific calculus’ which would take account of such factors as intensity, duration, the likelihood of an action producing further pleasure or unwanted pain But the project of such a calculus must fail: human good and evil cannot be reduced to homogeneous sensation, positive and negative Such a scale cannot display the moral urgency of remedying great evils, nor acknowledge that some pleasurable sensations (those of the sadist and rapist, for example) count wholly for the bad r.w.h
*utilitarianism
J Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legisla-tion (1789).
hedonism.The doctrine that *pleasure is the *good It falls into three main types not always distinguished by their proponents:
1 Psychological hedonism: pleasure is the only pos-sible object of desire or pursuit This may be held on observational grounds, or be thought to be necessi-tated by what we mean by ‘desire’
2 Evaluative hedonism: pleasure is what we ought to desire or pursue
3 Rationalizing hedonism: pleasure is the only object that makes a pursuit rational
(2) and (3), when made explicit, seem to suppose the falsity
of (1) in that they suppose it possible, wickedly or ir-rationally, to pursue something other than pleasure Usually the pleasure in question has been thought to be the subject’s own pleasure, and so the view has been a form of egoism; but there is no reason in theory why it should not be the pleasure of humans, or even of sentient beings generally Where psychological hedonism is in question, this has not proved a popular line, but utilitar-ians have developed altruistic versions of (2)
Utilitarians are committed to comprehensive and long-term calculations of pleasure Egoists may also consider the subject’s long-term pleasure; or they may consider that the immediate option which in itself yields or is thought to yield greater pleasure ought to be or is pur-sued Some hedonists seem only or mainly to have so-called physical pleasures in mind; others, like John Stuart Mill, have a penchant for the pleasures of civilized dis-course There are clearly, then, many versions of hedon-ism, and two apparently identical views may, further,
hedonism 363
Trang 5turn out to be very different when one considers the
pro-ponents’ views of the nature of pleasure
Arguments for hedonism will vary according to type
Psychological hedonists ought to show either that all
pur-suits are in fact aimed at what the subject takes to yield
pleasure; or that we only count as really wanted what the
subject either believes will produce pleasure, or is pleased
at the prospect of There is a risk of retreating into the
sec-ond kind of position whenever the arguments for the first
begin to look a little shaky There is a further risk of
mov-ing without notice from points about what the subject
thinks will yield most pleasure to points about what they
view with most pleasure in prospect, and in general to do
the rounds of a variety of explanations in the pleasure
fam-ily without inquiring whether there is a legitimate route
from one to the other
Evaluative hedonists may be content to describe their
end to us in the hope of winning converts Sometimes it
seems that a supposedly familiar morality is taken as given
and desirable, and hedonism is propounded, and so
defended, as the rationale of our moral thought and
prac-tice This is particularly likely to happen with
utilitarian-ism, which might, it is hoped, be seen both as making
sense of what we do and as enabling us to see how to sort
out the muddles we get into morally Most forms of
he-donism are egoistic in form and are seen by opponents,
and sometimes by proponents, as hostile to traditional
morality and Victorian values
Rationalizing hedonists will tend to invite us, by
con-sideration of examples, to recognize that our criterion of
rationality is the presence of a bedrock justification in
terms of pleasure This is usually a version of
psycho-logical hedonism applied not to all our pursuits or desires,
but to our practice of reflective evaluation
All long-term versions of hedonism have to face the
problem of how pleasure is to be measured These
prob-lems are aggravated if there have to be cross-personal
comparisons, as in utilitarianism
In classical Greece and Rome (*hedonism, ancient), the
doctrine was in various forms popular and much
dis-cussed It underwent a revival in post-Cartesian
philoso-phy, especially among the British Empiricists, although
the most unequivocal hedonist, Helvétius, was produced
by the continent of Europe In Britain it tended either to
take a utilitarian form, or to be made the basis of a
utilitar-ian development A combination of partial truth, general
cynicism about human motivation, and confusion of a
variety of different familiar explanations of behaviour will
probably ensure the recurrent attractiveness of some form
*self-defeating theories; utilitarianism
Richard B Brandt, Ethical Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1959).
Roger Crisp, Mill on Utilitarianism (London, 1997).
Fred Feldman, Pleasure and the Good Life (Oxford, 2004).
Justin Gosling, Pleasure and Desire (Oxford, 1969).
John Plamenatz, The English Utilitarians (Oxford, 1958).
John Skorupski, John Stuart Mill (London, 1989).
T Sprigge, The Rational Foundations of Ethics (London, 1987).
hedonism, ancient The central questions of ancient ethi-cal theory concerned the nature of the good life (i.e the life most worth living) and the conditions of its
achieve-ment (*Eudaimonia.) Given that focus, the role of
*pleas-ure in the good life was a topic which, throughout antiquity, was rarely far from the central area of debate In particular, the thesis that pleasure is the good was urged
on different grounds by various individuals and schools, and as vigorously disputed by their opponents
The Pre-Platonic Period The pre-philosophical beginnings
of Greek ethical thought, represented by the didactic poetry of the seventh to the fifth centuries bc, show an ambivalent attitude to pleasure While a few passages advocate the cultivation of the pleasures of the moment, the prevailing attitude is cautious, stressing the dangers of excessive indulgence Yet the latter attitude too can tend towards a more enlightened hedonism, as in the *Sophist Prodicus’ fable of the choice of Heracles between virtue and vice, in which the hero chooses virtue on the ground that, while vice offers more immediate pleasure, virtue offers a pleasanter life in the long run, taking into account the pleasures of good reputation and friendship, which are forfeited by a life of vice This contrast between immedi-ate pleasure and the pleasure of one’s life, viewed as a whole, comes to the fore in Democritus, who is reported
to have held that the supreme good is a state of tranquillity
of mind (thereby anticipating Epicurus’ doctrine of
*ataraxia But tranquillity must be conceived, not merely negatively, as the absence of disturbance, but as a pleasant state Democritus seems, then, to have maintained that the choice of particular pleasures and pains must be made
on the basis of their contribution to the good life, i.e to the pleasant life of tranquillity (for which his own term was
euthumia, whose ordinary sense is cheerfulness) This
‘enlightened’ hedonism may be contrasted with the view
of Aristippus, that the supreme good is the pleasure of the moment
Plato Traces of both kinds of hedonism may be discerned
in the dialogues In the Protagoras Socrates presents
(whether as his own position or as the best available basis for popular morality is disputed) a version of Democritean enlightened hedonism, incorporating the idea of a
calcu-lus of pleasures and pains Callicles in the Gorgias, on the
other hand, advocates the Aristippean ideal of a life devoted to the satisfaction of short-term bodily appetite, supporting this evaluation by the claim that the goal to which nature prompts every agent (indeed every animal)
is the satisfaction of its desires, and by the identification of pleasure with the satisfaction of desire, a conception which is not distinguished from that of the making good of
a physiological deficiency The conception of pleasure as a natural goal is central to most ancient discussions of he-donism The modern distinction between psychological hedonism (a theory of motivation) and evaluative he-donism (a theory of value) was not drawn Rather, both proponents and opponents of hedonism agreed that the natural direction of motivation, for humans as well as for
364 hedonism
Trang 6other animals, either determined or served as evidence for
the good of the organism thus motivated, but differed on
whether that direction was towards pleasure Socrates’
response to Callicles is therefore to argue that every agent
is naturally motivated to seek his own good, not his
immediate pleasure, and that the pursuit of one’s good
requires that one differentiate good (i.e good-promoting)
pleasures from bad (i.e harmful) ones Plato’s own views
on the topic seem to have undergone some development
While he may at an early stage have espoused
Dem-ocritean hedonism (if the hedonism of the Protagoras
rep-resents his own view), the position defended in the middle
and later dialogues is that, while the good life is indeed
pleasant (and in the Republic the pleasantest of all lives) its
pleasantness is merely an adjunct to its goodness, which
consists, not in pleasantness, but in rationality
Aristotle Like Plato, Aristotle both provides evidence of
ongoing debate on the value of pleasure and contributes
to that debate himself The Nicomachean Ethics contains
two substantial and independent treatments of pleasure
(that in book vii probably belonging originally to the
Eudemian Ethics), each of which starts from a
confronta-tion of various opposed views, the extreme posiconfronta-tions
being on the one hand the view of the contemporary
philosopher and mathematician Eudoxus that pleasure is
the *good, and on the other the thesis, usually attributed
to Plato’s nephew Speusippus, that pleasure is an evil Of
those two, Aristotle’s own position is closer to the former,
but it is dubious whether he endorses Eudoxus’ view
with-out qualification He rebuts the attacks on pleasure by
arguing that they rely on a mistaken account of its nature,
namely the view (see above) that pleasure consists in the
process of remedying a natural deficiency in the organism
For Aristotle, pleasure is not any kind of process Rather it
occurs when a natural potentiality (e.g for thought or
per-ception) is realized in perfect conditions (when, for
instance, the mind is working well, free from distractions,
thinking about worthwhile objects, etc.) Every kind of
actualization has its own specific pleasure, e.g the
pleas-ures of thought, and the bodily pleaspleas-ures of sex, food, and
drink Since eudaimonia itself consists in excellent
realiza-tion of the capacities for thought and for rarealiza-tional choice, it
follows that the good life is characterized by the greatest
degree of pleasure It is, however, disputed whether
Aris-totle goes so far as to identify the perfection of perfect
real-ization with its pleasantness While he appears to endorse
that identification in Nicomachean Ethicsvii, in book x he
appears to say (obscurely) that pleasure is not perfection
itself, but a feature supervenient on it ‘like the bloom on
the cheek of youth’ (1174b33) He gives no hint, however,
of what that feature might be, and some commentators
argue that it is nothing other than perfection itself, and
that what it supervenes upon is not (as normally assumed)
perfection, but the simple activity
The Post-Aristotelian Period Some of the positions
men-tioned above continued to have their adherents in this
period Among proponents of hedonism a major dispute
was that between on the one hand the *Cyrenaics, who developed the Calliclean position by maintaining that the supreme good is the pleasure of the moment and that bod-ily pleasures are of higher value than mental, and on the other Epicurus and his school, who developed the Dem-ocritean ideal of the life of pleasant tranquillity as the supreme good Epicurus took over Eudoxus’ argument that the natural impulse of all animals to seek pleasure shows it to be good, and distinguished two types of pleas-ure, that experienced when the organism is making good
a deficiency and that experienced when the organism is in
a stable state, free from all pain or disturbance; the latter type was assigned supreme value His identification of the latter with the absence of pain has been criticized as con-fused, but seems in fact to have been the unexceptionable
doctrine that a painless, trouble-free life is ipso facto
*hedonism
D Bostock, ‘Pleasure and Activity in Aristotle’s Ethics’, Phronesis
(1988)
J C B Gosling and C C W Taylor, The Greeks on Pleasure
(Oxford, 1982)
J M Rist, ‘Pleasure 360–300 bc’, Phoenix (1974).
J Tenkku, The Evaluation of Pleasure in Plato’s Ethics (Helsinki,
1956)
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831) Of all the major Western philosophers, Hegel has gained the repu-tation of being the most impenetrable He was a formid-able critic of his predecessor Immanuel Kant and a formative influence on Karl Marx Through his influence
on Marx, Hegel’s thought has changed the course of nine-teenth- and twentieth-century history
Hegel lived and worked in what we now know as Ger-many, although in his time the many independent states
of the region had not been united into one nation He came of age at the time of the French Revolution, sharing what he later called ‘the jubilation of this epoch’ His career included periods as a private tutor, and nine years as the headmaster of a secondary school, before his growing reputation gained him a university chair He ended his days as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Berlin, which under the reformed Prussian monarchy was becoming the intellectual centre of the German states Hegel wrote several long and dense books, of which the
most important are The Phenomenology of Mind, The Science
of Logic, and The Philosophy of Right His Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences is a summary version of his
philosophical system A number of other works were delivered as lectures, and in some cases published after his
death from his lecture notes These include his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Lectures on Aesthetics, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, and Lectures on the History of Philosophy.
Hegel is a difficult thinker because all his work reflects a systematic view of the world, and he makes few conces-sions to those not familiar with his way of thinking In addition his style is anything but ‘user-friendly’; at first
Hegel, G W F. 365
Trang 7g w f hegel: the lasting hostility of most Anglophone
philosophers to his difficult and ambitious system failed to
prevent the diffusion of his influence into most streams of
philosophy
karl marx adopted Hegel’s theory of the process of his-torical development, but gave matter rather than spirit the central role in the process So it was that his philosophy came to be described as dialectical, historical, or scientific materialism; for him, production is the determining mate-rial function of humans
georg lukacs, Hungary’s most famous philosopher
The life of a prominent public intellectual was not a
tran-quil one in the Communist world Twice briefly a
gov-ernment minister, twice exiled, Lukacs was endlessly
attacked by rival ideologues but managed to survive
Stalin’s Russia and grow old in his native city of Budapest
benedetto croce developed a Hegelian philosophy of spirit, of which his aesthetics was most notable, and put forward a view of philosophy as history The second great Neapolitan philosopher, 650 years after Aquinas
continental european philosophy: the influence of hegel
Trang 8glance most readers will find his sentences simply
incom-prehensible This has led some to denounce him as a
char-latan, hiding an emptiness of thought behind a deliberate
obscurity of expression in order to give an air of
profund-ity Yet the meaning of Hegel’s writing does, eventually,
become apparent after careful study Though his
philo-sophical system as a whole finds few adherents today,
his writings yield original insights and arguments that
illuminate many philosophical, social, and political issues
The easiest point of entry to Hegel’s thought is his
Lec-tures on the Philosophy of History One of Hegel’s greatest
contributions to our intellectual heritage is—as Marx
appreciated—his grasp of the historically conditioned
nature of our thinking One might ask why a philosopher
should write a work that is, in one sense, a brief outline of
the history of the world, from ancient times to his own
day The answer is that for Hegel the facts of history are
raw material to which the philosopher must give some
sense For Hegel thought that history displays a rational
process of development, and, by studying it, we can
understand our own nature and place in the world This
idea of history having meaning can be interpreted as a
reworking of the religious idea that the world was created
by a being with some purpose in mind; but it may also be
understood in a more limited way, as a claim that history
has a direction that we can discern, and is heading to a goal
that we can welcome
Hegel presents his view of the direction of history in a
famous sentence from the introduction to The Philosophy
of History: ‘The history of the world is none other than the
progress of the consciousness of freedom.’ The remainder
of the work is a long illustration of this thought Hegel
begins with the ancient empires of China, India, and
Per-sia Here, he says, only one individual—the ruler—is free
The subjects of these oriental despots, Hegel thought,
lacked not merely political freedom, but even the very
awareness that they are capable of forming their own
judgements about right or wrong It was only in ancient
Greece that the principle of free individual thinking
developed, and even then Hegel saw the Greeks as so
closely identified with their city-state, and so much ruled
by its habits and customs, that they did not see themselves
as independent individuals in the modern sense Though
the spark of individuality was lit by the critical thinking of
Socrates, individuality did not triumph until the
Prot-estant Reformation recognized that each individual can
find his or her own salvation, and gave the right of
individual conscience its proper place
For Hegel the course of history since the Reformation
has been governed by the need to transform the world so
as to reflect the newly recognized principle of individual
freedom The era of the *Enlightenment, culminating in
the French Revolution, was an attempt to abolish every
institution that depended on mere custom, and instead
ensure that the light of reason, to which every individual
can freely assent, guides every aspect of our political and
social lives To Hegel this attempt was based on a ‘glorious
mental dawn’: the understanding that thought ought to
govern reality, instead of the other way around Yet the French revolutionaries misunderstood reason, taking it in too abstract a way, without considering the nature of existing communities and the way in which these com-munities have formed their inhabitants Thus the abstract universalism of the Enlightenment led to the excesses of the guillotine Yet now that we understand what is needed, Hegel concluded, a fully rational organization of the world—and hence a truly free community—is ready
to unfold
Hegel’s conception of freedom is central to his thought, but it often misleads modern readers brought up on a con-ception of freedom made popular through the writings of such classical liberal thinkers as John Stuart Mill Accord-ing to the standard liberal conception, I am free when I am left alone, not interfered with, and able to choose as I please (*Freedom and determinism; *liberty; political freedom.) This is, for example, the sense of freedom used
by economists who picture consumers as free when there are no restrictions on the goods and services they can choose to buy in a free market Hegel thought this an utterly superficial notion of freedom, because it does not
probe beneath the surface and ask why individuals make
the choices they do Hegel saw these choices as often determined by external forces which effectively control
us He even anticipates, by more than a century, the mod-ern critique of the consumer society as creating needs in order to satisfy them: he points out that the need for greater ‘comfort’ does not arise within us, but ‘is sug-gested to you by those who hope to make a profit from its creation’
Behind such insights lies Hegel’s grasp of history as a process that shapes our choices and our very nature So to
be left alone to make our own choices without interfer-ence by others is not to be free; it is merely to be subjected
to the historical forces of our own times Real freedom begins with the realization that instead of allowing these forces to control us, we can take control of them But how can this happen? As long as we see ourselves as independ-ent beings with conflicting wills, we will always regard the existence of other human beings as something alien to ourselves, placing limits on our own freedom In the clas-sical liberal tradition, that is simply the way the world is, and there is nothing that can be done about it For Hegel, however, the problem is overcome when we recognize that all human beings share a common ability to reason Hence if a community can be built on a rational basis, every human being can accept it, not as something alien, but as an expression of his or her own rational will Our duty and our self-interest will then coincide, for our duty will be rationally based, and our true interest is to realize our nature as a rational being
In his belief that we are free only when we act in accor-dance with our reason, Hegel is in agreement with Kant; and so too when he sees our duty as based on our reason; but Hegel criticized Kant’s notion of morality, based as it
is on a *categorical imperative derived from pure reason,
as too abstract, a bare formal framework lacking all
Hegel, G W F. 367
Trang 9content Moreover, on Kant’s view human beings are
des-tined for perpetual conflict between duty and interest
They will always be subject to desires that they must
sup-press if they are to act as the categorical imperative
com-mands A purely rational morality like Kant’s, Hegel
thought, needs to be combined in some way with the
eth-ical customs that are part of our nature as beings of a
par-ticular time and place Thus Hegel sought a synthesis
between our concrete ethical nature, formed in a specific
community, and the rational aspect of our being When
this synthesis was achieved, we would have a community
in which each of us would find our own fulfilment, while
contributing to the well-being of the whole We would be
free both in the subjective sense, in that we could do as we
wished to do, and in the objective sense, in that we would
rationally determine the course of our history, instead of
being determined by it This would then be a truly rational
state, reconciling individual freedom with the values of
community
In The Philosophy of Right, Hegel describes this rational
community in a manner that parallels—though is not
identical with—the Prussian monarchy of his own day
For this he was accused by Schopenhauer of selling
him-self to his employer After Hegel’s death, the Young
Hegelians, a group of young radicals that for a time
included Marx among its members, thought that in The
Philosophy of Right Hegel had betrayed the essence of his
own philosophy They determined to develop his ideas in
a way that was truer to the core of his thought than Hegel
himself had been From this group arose the criticism of
religion developed by Bruno Bauer and Ludwig
Feuer-bach, Max Stirner’s individual anarchism, developed in his
The Ego and its Own, and such early writings of Marx as The
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and The
German Ideology.
More recently Karl Popper has seen Hegel as a
precur-sor of the modern totalitarian state Popper argues that by
exalting the rational state and using the concept of
free-dom in a way that denies that irrational choices are truly
free, Hegel made it possible for later authoritarian rulers
to justify their tyranny by saying that they must force their
citizens to be free It may be true that Hegel’s philosophy
is open to this misreading, but it is a misreading The real
Hegel supported constitutional monarchy, the rule of law,
trial by jury, and (by the standards of his day) considerable
freedom of expression He would never have regarded the
kind of state set up by Hitler or Stalin as a rational state
with free citizens
Yet Popper has touched on a real problem in Hegel’s
philosophy Hegel was driven by an extraordinary
opti-mism about the prospects of overcoming conflict
between human beings, and hence of bringing about a
rational and harmonious community The roots of this
optimistic view lie in his metaphysics, and especially in his
concept of Geist This German word can be rendered in
English, according to the context, either as *‘spirit’ or as
*‘mind’ In the former sense it can have religious
connota-tions; in the second it is the normal word used to describe
the mental or intellectual side of our being, as distinct from the physical Because the German term covers both these meanings, Hegel is able to use it in a way that sug-gests an overarching collective Mind that is an active force throughout history, and of which all individual minds— that is, all human beings, considered in their mental aspect—are a part Thus Hegel sees the study of history as
a way of getting to know the nature of Geist, and sees the rational state as Geist objectified Since there is no ideal
English translation, I shall henceforth use the capitalized
term ‘Mind’ to express Hegel’s concept of Geist.
Hegel’s greatest work is his The Phenomenology of Mind (sometimes referred to in English as The Phenomenology of Spirit), described by Marx as ‘the true birthplace and secret
of Hegel’s philosophy’ In it Hegel seeks to show that all human intellectual development up to now is the logically necessary working out of Mind’s coming to know itself The logic of this process is, however, not the traditional logic of the *syllogism, but rather Hegel’s own dialectical logic In dialectical logic, we start from a given position—
as an example, we might take the customary ethics of ancient Greece Then we find that this position contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction, in the form
of an internal contradiction The questioning of a Socrates leads eventually to the downfall of customary ethics, for example, and its replacement during the Reformation
by a morality based on individual conscience alone Yet this too is one-sided and unstable, and so we must move to a third position, the rational community This third position combines the positive aspects of its two predecessors
This *dialectic is sometimes referred to as a movement
from thesis to antithesis to synthesis In the example given,
the customary morality of ancient Greece is the thesis, the Reformation morality of individual conscience its antith-esis, and the rational community is the synthesis of the two This last is, in Hegel’s philosophy of history, the final synthesis, but in other instances, the synthesis of one stage
of the dialectic can serve as the thesis for a new dialectical
movement In The Science of Logic, Hegel applies the same
method to the abstract categories with which we think Here Hegel starts with the bare notion of existence, or being, and argues that since this bare notion of being has
no content at all, it cannot be anything Thus it must be nothing, the antithesis of being Being and nothing, how-ever, are opposites, constantly moving in and apart from each other; they require to be brought together under the synthesis, becoming Then the dialectic moves on, through many more obscure stages, until in the end Hegel claims to be able to demonstrate the necessity of absolute
*idealism: that is, that the only thing that is ultimately real
is the absolute idea, which is Mind, knowing itself as all reality
Absolute idealism seems a strange doctrine, but it was
by no means unique to Hegel Kant had already argued that the mind constitutes the known universe because we can only know things within a framework of our own cre-ation, namely the categories of time, space, and substance
368 Hegel, G W F.
Trang 10Yet Kant thought that beyond these categories there must
be the *‘thing-in-itself ’, forever unknowable In doing
away with the ‘thing-in-itself ’, and saying that all we know
is also all that there is, Hegel was following the line of
Kantian criticism developed earlier by Johann Fichte
Both The Phenomenology of Mind and The Science of Logic,
then, have the same process as their subject, the process of
Mind coming to know itself as ultimate reality In the
Phe-nomenology this process is presented by an attempt to show
the logical necessity inherent in the historical
develop-ment of human consciousness In the Logic it is shown as a
pure dialectical necessity, as (Hegel tells us) showing ‘God
as he is in his eternal essence, before the creation of nature
and of a finite mind’ The Logic is, therefore, by far the
more abstract and difficult work The Phenomenology is, by
comparison (but only by comparison), a gripping account
of how the finite minds of human beings progress to a
point at which they can see that the world beyond them is
not alien or hostile to them, but a part of themselves This
is so, because Mind alone is all that is real, and each finite
mind is a part of Mind
One curious aspect of the enterprise of the
Phenomen-ology is that it seeks to understand a process that is
com-pleted by the fact that it is understood The goal of all
history is that mind should come to understand itself as
the only ultimate reality When is that understanding first
achieved? By Hegel himself in the Phenomenology! If Hegel
is to be believed, the closing pages of his masterpiece are
no mere description of the culmination of everything that
has happened since finite minds were first created: they are
that culmination
In the light of Hegel’s belief that all finite minds share in
a greater underlying reality, we can appreciate why he
should have believed in the possibility of a form of society
that transcended all conflicts between the individual and
the collective, and was truly free while at the same time in
no sense anarchic We can also see why this belief should
have made it possible for Hegel’s ideas to lead some of his
successors, Marx among them, to a similarly misplaced
optimism about the possibility of avoiding such conflicts
For while Marx claimed to have rejected the ‘mysticism’ in
which Hegel enveloped his system, Marx never freed
him-self from the conviction that history is tending toward a
final destination in which there will be complete harmony
between the interests of the individual and the common
interests of the community That is why he believed that
*communism would be a condition in which everyone
freely advanced the common interests of all p.s
*Hegelianism
F Beiser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge,
1993)
G W F Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, tr A V Miller
(Oxford, 1977)
—— Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, tr T M Knox (Oxford, 1967).
—— Hegel’s Science of Logic, tr A V Miller (London, 1969).
—— Lectures on the Philosophy of History, tr J Sibree (New York,
1956)
Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford, 1992).
—— Hegel (London, 1983).
Richard Norman, Hegel’s Phenomenology: A Philosophical Introduc-tion (Brighton, 1976).
Peter Singer, Hegel (Oxford, 1983).
Robert Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel (New York, 1983) Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge, 1979).
Hegelianism.‘Hegelianism’ refers not only to the doc-trines and methods of Hegel himself, but to those of his followers, especially, but not only, in Germany
Even in Hegel’s lifetime, the obscurity and ambiguity of his teaching gave rise to disagreement over its signifi-cance Does his claim that ‘what is rational is actual and what is actual is rational’ imply that everything that exists, including for example the Prussian state, is as it should be,
or rather that whatever is not as it should be, even though
it exists, is not genuinely ‘actual’? Do his resounding trib-utes to the *freedom and self-consciousness attained in the modern world imply that significant history, including the history of philosophy, has come to an end? Does his belief
that *God is not distinct from the world mean that God
does exist or that he does not? Does his claim that religion and philosophy have the same ‘content’ but present it in different ‘forms’ (imagination and thought, respectively) imply that religion and the Church are now dispensable? Does his assertion that the spirit is eternal amount to an endorsement of the orthodox belief in immortality? Hegel himself does not supply unequivocal answers to these questions, and this omission is connected with sev-eral important features of his thought:
1 Hegel believed his own philosophy to be not ‘one-sided’, like most philosophies of the past, but the ‘univer-sal’ philosophy, embracing and ‘sublating’ (or cannibalizing) all significant past philosophies, doing just-ice to realism or materialism as well as idealism, to athe-ism as well as theathe-ism, and so on (But Hegel is not a dualist,
or a monist, or a pluralist The best numerical account of him is that he is a Three-in-One-ist.)
2 Another reason why Hegel’s system refuses to yield
‘straight’ answers to ‘straight’ questions is that he attempts to examine the terms in which questions are framed, often pre-empting them for purposes of his own,
or assigning them a developing series of interconnected meanings Does Hegel believe that God exists? It depends
on what we mean by ‘God’, ‘believe’, and ‘exist’
3 He believes that at their extreme points opposites veer into each other For example, if we take theism ser-iously and say that a truly infinite God cannot be distinct from the world, but must be in some sense identical with
it, this takes us to the brink of saying that the world is everything and God nothing
4 In the past, humanity has advanced owing in part to its tendency to reflect on its own condition In reflecting
on a philosophy, we develop new thoughts or categories that are at most implicit in the philosophy on which we reflect, and in reflecting on historical events we acquire new thoughts that were not available to the participants
in those events We cannot learn from history, since in
Hegelianism 369