A Philosophical Manifesto (Contents)

In this series of articles I explain my own understanding of philosophy and why I think the writings of Jane Austen should be of interest to to anyone interested in modern morality and ethics.

1. A Philosophical Manifesto
2. Classical Philosophy
3. George Berkeley
4. The Enlightenment
5. Immanuel Kant
6. Joseph Butler
7. David Hume and Jane Austen
8. A Short Digression: David Hume in Perspective
9. The Romantics
10. The Cynics
11. Postscript (A Personal Anecdote)

Postscript (A Personal Anecdote)

A few years I visited The National Portrait Gallery to view the portrait of Jane Austen by her sister. I walked all over the gallery in search of it, until someone pointed out that it was in ground-level display case, and sure enough, once I stopped craning my neck at the grand canvases there was Cassandra’s portrait in front of me.

The Cynics

To get a feel for the kind of problems that Austen presents for her critics, consider the Margaret Oliphant (1870) review, an article prompted by the publication of the Austen-Leigh (1870) memoir, triggering as it did the resurgence of interest in Austen that continues to the present.

The Romantics

“I did not know before,” continued Bingley immediately, “that you were a studier of character. It must be an amusing study.”

“Yes, but intricate characters are the most amusing. They have at least that advantage.”

“The country,” said Darcy, “can in general supply but a few subjects for such a study. In a country neighbourhood you move in a very confined and unvarying society.”

“But people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them for ever.”

“Yes, indeed,” cried Mrs. Bennet, offended by his manner of mentioning a country neighbourhood. “I assure you there is quite as much of that going on in the country as in town.”

— Pride and Prejudice (9.15)

It is difficult not to understand this interchange between Elizabeth and Darcy as an anticipation of the debate within Austen criticism as to whether the restriction of her range reflected a limitation of the novelist, and—more to the point—whether this limitation should be reflected in the novels’ status in the canon. This debate will no doubt run and run, but there can be little doubt that this was a choice of Austen’s, a reflection of the judgement that the middle-range rural domestic arena—the familiar and the universal—was the place to be. And it has provoked a reaction from the Romantics reminiscent of Mrs Bennet’s, Charlotte Brontë’s witty response to George Henry Lewes’s provocations speaking for many:

A Short Digression: David Hume in Perspective

David Hume was a great writer and a great philosopher but this doesn’t mean that he produced perfect philosophy. Two of the best assessments I have seen are one by William Russell (see What is Enlightenment?) and Gilbert Ryle.

David Hume and Jane Austen

To have any prospect of succeeding in the study of ethics then we will have to look to authors that are read and discussed. David Hume’s works are widely discussed and read and admired, so by looking at what he did say we can learn a great deal about our modern ethic. His main move in the Treatise was to assert that the faculty of moral discernment was sentimental in nature, not rational.

Joseph Butler

How could Kant’s system could possibly fulfil the function of any Practical Philosophy (i.e., ethics) if even the Kantian specialists’ mastery of it is questionable, unless it is an ethical system entirely for the use of a highly rarefied breed of academic philosopher.  Kant’s system grounded in duties, runs into predictable problems when different duties conflict, such as whether to lie in order to prevent someone from taking another’s life, and it is dead easy to construct these scenarios where the issues are straightforward, as when I decide to conceal an innocent party from some powerful people intent on immorally doing harm to them.  The issue is clear: I have decided to conceal, to mislead, to lie to a group of people in order to prevent them form carrying out a terrible crime.  Kant stuck to his guns and insisted that we must not lie, but if there was ever any doubt in the case, after what happened in Europe in the 1930s, it is manifestly clear that this is the wrong answer, which hasn’t prevented some highly intelligent people, such as Elizabeth Anscombe, from reaffirming it.

Immanuel Kant

‘There are few philosophical texts so confusing and so perplexing as Kant’s works.’ So opens T. K. Seung in his preface to Kant: A Guide for the Perplexed, before going on to lament that ‘it is the fate of his readers to get lost in his text before they can get perplexed with his ideas’. Unfortunately there is a great tendency for people to get ‘perplexed with his ideas’ even in the commentaries—the ’99 edition of the Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Kant is free of any philosophical content, the editors judging (plausibly) that the average layman will be perplexed by any presentation of his philosophy. And the reason isn’t hard to find. As Seung says in the opening paragraph, ‘In Kant’s view, we can elevate our existence beyond the brute animal condition by transforming the a posteriori elements into rational experience through the a priori elements. He calls these a priori elements the transcendental conditions because they enable us to transcend the empirical condition. Hence his philosophy is called transcendental philosophy […].’

The Enlightenment

From losing our minds metaphysically it was but a short step to losing them ethically. The wisdom of the ages had said that those with sharper faculties should use them for higher purposes, and certainly not self-aggrandisement. Self-knowledge was important to offset the tendency to spend one’s time looking for the motes in other people’s eye, habitually projecting our problems elsewhere. This is best summarised in Hume’s famous dictum from his Treatise of Human Nature (§2.3.3): ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.’ There is no finer or more precise statement of our modern Enlightenment ethic; the modern mind spend its whole time dreaming up the most fabulous justifications for its sentiments and this habit has become so entrenched that we are no longer aware of it. The most powerful shared sentiment that moderns have is the idea that we are Enlightened, of course, far more sensitive, free thinking, wise and intelligent than anyone who has lived before or anyone today who doesn’t share our Enlightened values. It follows from this that our Enlightenment is guaranteed, that it will be a self-fulfilling prophesy.

George Berkeley

George Berkeley (1685-1753) reacted to the move towards philosophical materialism of Hobbes, Descartes, Locke and Newton:

Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, viz., that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind, that their being (esse) is to be perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some eternal spirit—it being perfectly unintelligible, and involving all the absurdity of abstraction, to attribute to any single part of them an existence independent of a spirit. To be convinced of which, the reader need only reflect, and try to separate in his own thoughts the being of a sensible thing from its being perceived.

— George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, §6.

Berkeley was reacting to the tendency in the light of Newton’s triumph towards extreme materialism. Berkeley never denied that matter existed—only a lunatic could believe that, and Berkeley was eminently sane; Berkeley’s point was that matter couldn’t make up the whole of reality, that reality had an inescapably ideal aspect. Before Galileo this would not have been an issue but the dazzling success of the atomistic natural philosophers called for pushback.

Classical Philosophy

Have we thrown aside pre-modern philosophy a little carelessly?  We should recall with respect the tremendous stability of classical philosophy.

A Philosophical Manifesto

Why should we be interested in philosophy and ethics? Humanity is facing profound challenges as it becomes clear that we not only have an unsustainable relationship to the environment (we have known that for a long time) but that the situation has become critical. While the best that science and engineering can offer must be part of the solution, that won’t be sufficient. A complete reorientation in out behaviour is required if we are to avoid having a cataclysmic correction forced on us. The source of these enormous challenges lies in our behaviour, our ethics and philosophy; we must take an interest in these and try to find out what has being going wrong if we are to find a solution.