Moral philosophy, from the days of Socrates down to our own lifetime, had been regarded as an attempt to think out more clearly the issues involved in conduct, for the sake of acting better. In 1912 Prichard announced that moral philosophy as so understood was based on a mistake, and advocated a new kind of moral philosophy, purely theoretical, in which the workings of the moral consciousness should be scientifically studied as if they were the movements of the planets, and no attempt made to interfere with them. And Bertrand Russell at Cambridge proposed in the same spirit, and on grounds whose difference was only superficial, the extrusion of ethics from the body of philosophy.
The 'realist' philosophers who adopted this hew programme were all, or nearly all, teachers of young men and young women. Their pupils, with habits and characters yet unformed, stood on the threshold of life; many of them on the threshold of public life. Half a century earlier, young people in that position had been told that by thinking about what they were doing, or were about to do, they would become likely on the whole to do it better; and that some understanding of the nature of moral or political action, some attempt to formulate ideals and principles, was an indispensable condition of engaging creditably in these activities themselves. And their teachers, when introducing them to the study of moral and political theory, would say to them, whether in words or not— the most important things that one says are often not said in words—'Take this subject seriously, because whether you understand it or not will make a difference to your whole lives'. The 'realist', on the contrary, said to his pupils, 'If it interests you to study this, do so; but don't think it will be of any use to you. Remember the great principle of realism, that nothing is affected by being known. That is as true of human action as of anything else. Moral philosophy is only the theory of moral action: it can't therefore make any difference to the practice of moral action. People can act just as morally without it as with it. I stand here as a moral philosopher; I will try to tell you what acting morally is, but don't expect me to tell you how to do it.'
At the moment, I am not concerned with the sophisms underlying this programme, but with its consequences. The pupils, whether or not they expected a philosophy that should give them, as that of Green's school had given their fathers, ideals to live for and principles to live by, did not get it; and were told that no philosopher (except of course a bogus philosopher) would even try to give it. The inference which any pupil could draw for himself was that for guidance in the problems of life, since one must not seek it from thinkers or from thinking, from ideals or from principles, one must look to people who were not thinkers (but fools), to processes that were not thinking (but passion), to aims that were not ideals (but caprices), and to rules that were not principles (but rules of expediency). If the realists had wanted to train up a generation of Englishmen and Englishwomen expressly as the potential dupes of every adventurer in morals or politics, commerce or religion, who should appeal to their emotions and promise them private gains which he neither could procure them nor even meant to procure them, no better way of doing it could have been discovered.
The result of all this might have been even worse than it has been, but for the fact that the 'realists' discredited themselves with their pupils before their lessons could take effect. This self-stultification was a gradual and piecemeal business. Not only did they jettison the entire body of traditional ethics; as soon as they began work on their new brand of moral theory, whatever doctrine concerning moral action was tested, to show whether it was fit to form part of that theory, was found wanting. Another traditional philosophical science which was thrown bodily overboard was the theory of knowledge; for although 'realism' began by defining itself as a theory of knowledge pure and simple, its votaries before long discovered that a theory of knowledge was a contradiction in terms. Another was political theory; this they destroyed by denying the conception of a 'common good', the fundamental idea of all social life, and insisting that all 'goods' were private. In this process, by which anything that could be recognized as a philosophical doctrine was stuck up and shot to pieces by the 'realistic' criticism, the 'realists' little by little destroyed everything in the way of positive doctrine that they had ever possessed. Once more, I am concerned only with the effect on their pupils. It was (how could it not have been?) to convince them that philosophy was a silly and trifling game, and to give them a lifelong contempt for the subject and a lifelong grudge against the men who had wasted their time by forcing it upon their attention.
That this did actually happen any one could see. The school of Green had taught that philosophy was not a preserve for professional philosophers, but every one's business; and the pupils of this school had gradually formed a block of opinion in the country whose members, though not professional philosophers, were interested in thesubject, regarded it as important, and did not feel themselves debarred by their amateur status from expressing their own opinions about it. As these men died, no one took their place; and by about 1920 I found myself asking, 'Why is it that nowadays no Oxford man, unless he is either about 70 years old or else a teacher of philosophy at Oxford or elsewhere, regards philosophy as anything but a futile parlour game?' The answer was not difficult to find, and was confirmed by the fact that the 'realists', unlike the school of Green, did think philosophy a preserve for professional philosophers, and were loud in their contempt of philosophical utterances by historians, natural scientists, theologians, and other amateurs.
The fox was tailless, and knew it. But this mental kind of decaudation, when people part with their morals, their religion, the learning they acquired at school, and so forth, is commonly regarded by the tailless as an improvement in their condition; and so it was with the 'realists'. They were glad to have eradicated from the philosophical schools that confusion of philosophy with pulpit oratory which was involved in the bad old theory that moral philosophy is taught with a view to making the pupils better men. They were proud to have excogitated a philosophy so pure from the sordid taint of utility that they could lay their hands on their hearts and say it was no use at all; a philosophy so scientific that no one whose life was not a life of pure research could appreciate it, and so abstruse that only a whole-time student, and a very clever man at that, could understand it. They were quite resigned to the contempt of fools and amateurs. If anybody differed from them on these points, it could only be because his intellect was weak or his motives bad.
The latter end of the 'realist' movement is one of those things whose history will never be written. It is a story of how the men who best understood the ideas of the original 'realists', and tried hardest to remain loyal to them, found one piece of ground after another slipping from under their feet, and stumbled from one temporary and patchwork philosophy to another in a kind of intellectual nightmare. One of them, Bertrand Russell, a gifted and accomplished writer, has left records of his successive attempts at a philosophy; but most of them are, or were, less articulate, or else struck dumb by their sufferings; and when they and their friends are dead no one will ever know how their lives were spent. What I myself know about it I shall certainly not repeat.
From the book An Autobiography - R. G. Collingwood
No comments:
Post a Comment