Great literature portrays incredible variations in personality. Abraham and jezebel in the Bible, Macbeth and Shylock in Shakespeare, and Thackeray's Becky Sharp are distinct individuals. Philosophers, on the other hand, focus on what is common in human nature. They study Man rather than men. But they provide diversity, not only in their disagreements one with another, but each in the application of his view of human nature to questions of politics, ethics, and religion.
Plato
Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics so well represent antiquity that other schools must be regarded as atypical. These three agreed that man is basically a rational being. The Sophists, to be sure, held that man was essentially emotional or at most volitional, so that his reasoning power, including the ability to make the worse appear the better argument, is but the slave of passion. In this they anticipated David Hume and other modern philosophers. Because the aim of life is to succeed in getting whatever you want, the Sophists generally considered a tyrannical dictator the happiest of men.
The reason behind this view of life was their skepticism. They believed that it was impossible to attain knowledge. Impossible because mathematics had stumbled upon irrational numbers. Impossible because physics, contemplating a world of constant change, could find nothing that would stand long enough to be known. Impossible also because the Persian Wars had shown that morality is nothing but arbitrary conventionality. Therefore, concluded the Sophists, a man must choose his goals irrationally, and success is the only criterion of a good life. This makes the dictator or tyrant the best man.
For Plato, on the other hand, the aim of life is not determined by irrational desire but by a scientific knowledge of the Good. The physical world of flux is not the real world. The higher, more real, suprasensible World of Ideas consists of objects that do not change, and because they are immune to flux they can be known. Examples of Ideas are Equality in mathematics, Horse and Man in natural science, and Courage and Justice in ethics or morality. Above all is the Idea of the Good. These then are man's criteria for both private and public life.
Though the Idea Man is perfectly rational, men here below are not completely so. Men are three-fold beings. The highest human ability is of course rational and philosophical. Some men possess this ability in a superlative degre. Inferior to reason is man's principle of volition - his "spunk" or spirited element. This element is somewhat akin to reason, and together they make self-control possible. Spirited young men are the best candidates for mature philosophical study. The lowest human function is man's emotional or concupiscent nature.
Since human nature is thus three-fold, and since the State is composed of human beings, in each of which one or another of these three faculties is dominant, the State too is composed of three classes of people. Those persons whose desires control them do all sorts of harmful stupidities and may even become tyrants; but if they can be trained and restrained by wise rules they make useful businessmen and can provide the State with satisfactory economic base. Those individuals who are spirited make good soldiers and become the Guardian army of the State - invincible because courageous, and incorruptible because they have no desire for money. But the only people who know enough to rule are the supremely rational philosopher-kings. In early life these persons approved themselves as good soldiers; they were chosen for further training; and eventually learned enough to govern by the knowledge of the Good.
The virtues proper to the lowest function of the soul and to the lowest class in the State is temperance; that proper to the middle class is courage; and wisdom characterizes the highest function in the individual and philosopher-kind in the State. Justice is defined as the harmonious arrangement among the three - each keeping to its own place.
This scheme is essentially a form of communism or totalitarian paternalism in which the family is abolished as divisive of social unity, religion is a civic duty, and business is rigidly regulated. The two upper classes have no private property, They own the State. In the lower class the richest man may have no more than four times the poorest. If the poorest gets two thousand dollars a year, the president of Athenian Motors is allowed only eight.
Philosopher-kings can be trusted to remain paternalistic instead of turning into tyrants because they have eradicated their desire for wealth by their knowledge of the Good and their understanding of psychology. Everybody admits that he desires what is good for him. No one wants to harm himself. The reason many people do is that they are ignorant of the Good. If they knew that cigarettes injure the heart and cause lung cancer, they would stop smoking. If they knew money is morally corrupting, they would not be capitalists. Education and knowledge therefore are the cure for all ills. Those who are incapable of learning are better off if, instead of being left to their own desires, they are controlled by philosophers who know the Good.
Plato also provides supernatural sanctions for morality. After death the soul of an evil man is punished. In some places this punishment is described in mythological terms of being reborn as an animal: The glutton becomes a pig, the tyrant a lion. In other dialogues the punishment is rebirth as a bad man again. Though there is this variation in Plato's writings, it is beyond doubt that the home of the eternal soul is heaven - the World of Ideas - that the body is a tomb, and that incarnation or reincarnation is a punishment.
Aristotle
Aristotle rejected the World of Ideas; aside from an unintelligible reference to the active intellect there is no hint that a man survives death; and knowledge all by itself does not ensure a moral life. Nevertheless, Aristotle as well as Plato insists that man is essentially rational.
Since there is no world of Ideas, man is not born with any innate tendency toward the Good that an incorporeal existence in heaven might have given him. In strictly naturalistic fashion man is born morally neutral. Therefore morality is a matter of developing good habits. The process is similar to that of learning to play an instrument. Knowledge is admittedly essential, but practice is also indispensable. When a person makes a moral mistake, he must practice longer to erase the effect of this mistake. Eventually, in accordance with a fairly detailed explanation of how to practice, a man may become an excellent moral musician.
This practice of virtue cannot take place in isolation. Courage and liberality require other persons. The process of nature, psychology as fully as biological, produces persons by means of family organization. Therefore, since the family is natural, the State should not abolish it for a communism of wives. Thus Aristotle does not accept Plato's theory of politics. The subsidiary societies or organizations must be integrated into the State, not abolished.
The State too is a natural development, having grown out of the primitive family; for man is not only a rational animal, he is also a political animal. Naturally, a rational animal must be political.
Accordingly Aristotle opens his book on Politics with this paragraph: "Every state is a community of some kind [a community is the condition of having some purposes or things in common; e.g. a business community], and every community is established with a view to some goal [children, money, amusement]; for men always act in order to obtain that which they think good as Plato said, but if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims in a greater degree than any other at the highest good."
This paragraph shows that while Aristotle was not a communist, he was just as totalitarian as Plato. The State, he says, embraces all other societies, not only in the sense of regulating their financial activities, but in controlling their purposes. The State not only aims at good in a greater degree than the other organizations, it aims at the highest good. Thus the sphere of governmental activity is all-embracing. There could be no "freedom of religion." There could be no church, either like the medieval church that was independent of criminal law, or like the Scottish Presbyterian church that, willing to obey criminal and civil law in purely human matters, insisted that Christ alone, not Pope or King, was the head of the church in its essentially spiritual functions.
Of course neither Plato nor Aristotle ever imagined an organization such as a Christian church. Religion for them was rational, cultural, and natural; therefore the State, as was also the case with art and sport, was the judge of the allowable details.
The Stoics
The Stoics, whose school was influential from 200 B. C. to A. D. 300, also believed that man is rational; and virtue is an expression of reason. Indeed this school above all others gained a reputation for practical, actual, and high morality.
Unlike Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics were essentially pantheistic. Following Heraclitus they taught that the universe was made of fire and that this fire is a rational, living force. Each man has or even is a divine spark. Hence, as Epictetus says, nature never gives us any but good inclinations. Surprisingly, however, most men are wicked. In fact, very wicked. Just how a spark of divinity, acting under the all encompassing laws of causation, the rational, inviolable causation of the universal Reason, could choose evil and become depraved is a puzzle the Stoics never solved.
Aside from that, they of all the Greeks were the first to emphasize the role of motive in morality. The others centered their attention on external action. Aristotle in particular held that a man could not be moral when idle or asleep. He was courageous or liberal only when actually doing the things required. The actions, too, are possible only when the physical conditions are right. A poor man cannot be generous, simply because he has no money. The Stoics, however, make morality more internal. It is the action of the will, rather than the action of the hands that counts. Therefore a paralytic can be courageous and a poor man can be generous. Virtue does not depend on external circumstances, but on an inward disposition.
This inferiority of virtue leads the Stoics to view the laws of the State as more conventional than as natural. No doubt society is natural, but the particular constitutions of cities and nations are arbitrary. Here the Stoics hit upon a distinction that the earlier Greeks had not discovered: the distinction between society and the State. In the golden age of vigorous cities, that state seemed to be the producer of society, and Plato thought that families and other organizations endangered the unity of the nation. But now conditions had changed. Even in Aristotle's time the city-states were in decay. Soon the Romans were to enslave them all. Participation in government was no longer a possibility for these erstwhile citizens.
With such external conditions plus the idea of a universal Reason, the Stoics claimed to the "citizens" of the world. They were not "politans," but "cosmo-politans."
This universal outlook, however, did not lead them to anarchy or insurrection. Quite the contrary, they were deliberate conservatives, not only in politics, but also in religion (the Stoic emperor was one of the most vigorous persecutors of the new Christian religion), and in the home. Unlike the Epicureans, who avoided all three in their search for pleasure, the Stoics accepted family obligations as natural and, if called upon, would faithfully execute the office of magistrate. Faithfully, but perhaps also pessimistically. For while some depraved men will be converted to Stoicism and become wise and virtuous, the steadily increasing degradation of Roman society evinced little hope of many conversions. The empire was corrupt and collapsing; and if a Stoic concluded that the situation was intolerable, it was a virtue, or at least not a vice, to commit suicide.
Christianity
Christianity disagreed. This new religion, though actually very old with its Hebrew foundation, has a totally different world-view. No doubt it stressed virtue, but not Stoic virtue; not doubt it classified man as rational, but for reasons Plato would have repudiated; not doubt it asserted the existence of God, but he was neither Aristotle's Unmoved Mover nor a member of the pagan pantheon.
The basis of all the differences between the Hebrew-Christian or Biblical world-view and all other systems is the nature of God. Unlike the Homeric or Roman gods he is omnipotent; unlike the Unmoved Mover he is omniscient and intervenes in the affairs of men - the Incarnation being the most important instance; and unlike Plato's Demiurge, Jehovah is not subject to a higher and independent World of Ideas. All this can be summarized by saying God is sovereign.
A Biblical implication is that God has created the world. Even time and space are not eternal principles: They are, if Augustine has understood it correctly, a priori forms of the created mind. Such ideas the pagans never had.
Another consequence is that man is rational: not because he is a spark of a pantheistic divinity, but because God created him in his own image and likeness. God has knowledge and wisdom, Christ is the Logos or Reason, and God made man similar. Since God is sovereign, the "World of Ideas" must be the result of God's thinking. In the moral sphere (to contradict Plato) the Good is Good because God chooses it. That is to say, God legislates and imposes laws on mankind. Adam, however, broke the law and rebelled against God. If the position of moral law in Christianity differs so fundamentally from the inferiority of the Demiurge to the Ideas, so too rebellion against God cannot be reduced to Aristotle's child who make mistakes as he practices his scales.
The result of Adam's sin is the total depravity of the human race. Instead of loving and obeying God, men naturally hate God. Instead of always acting rationally, they often act irrationally.
Augustine supplies a pointed illustration. As a boy he went out with some others one night and stole some pears. It was lots of fun. It was not fun because the pears were good to eat; they were hard and bitter. Nor was he motivated by hunger: He could have eaten better pears at home. The motivation was simply the fun of stealing with the gang. W. T. Jones (A History of Western Philosophy, Vol. 1, p. 346) chides Augustine for taking so seriously "the pranks and escapades which are the normal products of youthful exuberance." Professor Jones misses the point. Augustine deliberately chose the story of the pears because the act itself was as trivial a one as he could think of. Its triviality, however, and the worthlessness of the pears all the more emphasized the point that the motive was the love of evil for the sake of evil.
Such motivation is normal for youths and for adults as well. Therefore civil government, though it be an evil in that it restricts men's liberty, is a necessary evil because men at liberty are dangerous. The Old testament too says that God ordained civil government for the good of sinful men. The New Testament specifically upholds the government's power of taxation and of waging way and executing criminals.
But there is one tremendous difference between Christian and pagan politics. The pagan theories are totalitarian. The State is supreme. But King Ahab in the Old Testament was condemned by God for stealing private property. The King did not make the law, nor could he change it. Theft and murder are condemned by the laws of God. Therefore in Christian theory there are some things that a State ought not to do.
This is, of course, consistent with the view that all men are totally depraved. Government is necessary because anarchy with evil men is intolerable. But the rules also are evil and need to be restrained. Power always tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Civil government is not God's only method of restraining sin. The Bible is largely, one might even say exclusively, the proclamation of salvation in Christ. When a man hears this Gospel, the Holy Ghost may regenerate him and give him faith in Christ. This removes him from the city of this world and makes him a citizen of the City of God. Once again, then, Augustine describes how these two cities, of different origins and different destinies, are yet intermixed upon the surface of the earth. But they can never be spiritually or intellectually unified; for unification would require either the massacre of all Christians (which God will not allow), or the conversion of all humanity (which God has not decreed). Again the conclusion is that Christianity condemns all totalitarian governments.
Hobbes
Since the views of Augustine were largely accepted until A. D. 1275, when Aquinas turned back the clock to Aristotle, it is permissible to proceed directly to modern times for something new. In contrast with the prevailing opinion that the State was a development of nature, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) proposed a social contract theory: Individual men deliberately make a contract among themselves and organize a government. This idea may be called new, for its nearest antecedent is a short paragraph insufficiently developed by Callicles in Plato's Gorgias.
Hobbes believed that politics could be deduced from a metaphysical materialism and psychological behaviorism. Neither an exposition of his metaphysics nor a discussion of his fallacies is necessary here. One can begin simply by stating Hobbes's view of human nature. Briefly, every man has a natural right to preserve his life; all men are practically equal; and the basic motivations are competition, diffidence, and glory. Implications follow.
Since a man has no more necessary aim than to preserve his own life, it follows, Hobbes says, that he has a natural right to any weapons, property, or means necessary thereunto. Obviously this includes that right to kill anyone who threatens him. Obviously, again, this state of affairs is a way of each against all. Further, all men are practically equal. What one man lacks in physical strength, he may compensate for in stealth or better weapons. The way therefore is a way no one can win. The state of nature is intolerable and suicidal.
Only one solution is possible. Men must assemble and transfer all rights to a kind, an absolute monarch, for only an all powerful kind can end the way of each against all. Because religion in Europe had been a cause of division and way during the preceding hundred years, Hobbes made the King the legislator, the judge, and the executive in all religious questions. Neither Pope, Bible, nor individual conscience could be superior to the sovereign. In thus eradicating all divisions and ensuring the peace that every man needs for his self-preservation, the Kind, himself a man, is not motivated by any altruistic sentiment: he protects the lives of his subjects for his own wealth and glory.
Rosseau
Rousseau is sometimes pictured as a romanticist whose ideas are directly antithetical to those of Hobbes. This is not quite accurate. In fact it is hard to make an accurate statement of Rosseau's view of human nature, for it seems that he occupies a confused transitional position.
First, as to romanticism, Rosseau is far removed from Goethe's position that the good life is one of the unrestrained, infinite variety of sensual experiences. Rosseau's good man is a law-abiding citizen. Nor did he ever say to Mephistopheles:
Lead him on thy downward course,Then stand abashed when though perforce must ownA good man in the direful grasp of illHis consciousness of right retaineth still.
Second, as to Hobbes, Rosseau was not his antithesis in the sense of describing man as naturally unselfish. To be sure, he does not paint main so black as did Hobbes; nor does he speak of a war of each against all. Still, in the "state of nature" there were enemies and inimical actions. "Before civilization had fashioned our customs... our morals were rustic, but natural; and the way a man met a man disclosed his character immediately. Essentially human nature was no better...," but now we are subjugated to a deceitful etiquette and we cannot distinguish a friend from an enemy before it is too late.
The important difference between Rosseau and his predecessors, whether Augustine, Hobbes, or even the French Enlightenment, is that he makes man less rational and more emotional. In this he seems to have been the initiator of an irrationalistic view that came to clearest expression toward the end of the nineteenth century.
Consider his strictures on a scientific education. Education, he says, does not make people better, but worse; in fact, the difficulty of getting an education is nature's way of warning us against the evils of civilization. The errors of science are a thousand times more dangerous than the truth is useful. Actually, the only truth science discovers is that there is an infinite number of ways of going wrong. "The impious writings of Leucippus and Diagoras perished with them: The art of immortalizing the extravagances of the human mind had not yet been invented. But because of the printing press... the dangerous dreams of men like Hobbes and Spinoza will endure forever."
"O Virtue! Sublime knowledge of simple souls, must one go to so much trouble to know thee? Are not thy principles engraved on every heart? And to learn thy laws, is it not sufficient to re-enter oneself and listen to the voice of conscience when passions are silent?*
But though learning the laws of virtue may require no more than listening to the voice of conscience, enforcing those laws so as to produce a happy society requires a particular form of government. It is impossible to return to a "state of nature." There never really was such a state; and there is no historical solution to the puzzle of how government and civilization began. "May is born free; and everywhere he is in chains... How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I can answer."
Rosseau's answer is very much like Hobbes's. Everyone must surrender all his rights, not to a king to be sure, but to the whole community. No one retains any rights, for this would be divisive; and all individuals become cogs in the governmental machinery. Parents are not permitted to educate their children; priests may not appeal to the Pope nor Huguenots to the Bible against the State; and all must conform to a governmentally imposed religion on pain of exile or execution.
Rosseau sugar-coats this prescription with enticing words concerning the General Will that always acts for the good of the people. The State cannot have any interest contrary to that of the individual: "The sovereign is always what it should be."
Now, the selfish, personal motivation of Hobbes's king to preserve his own property is plausibly dependable; but Rosseau's optimism is utterly naive.
Marx
Karl Marx undeniably has exerted tremendous influence on twentieth century society; but it can hardly be said to have resulted from the comprehensiveness or profundity of his philosophy. He left so many haps in his system that his disciples have been able to develop it in several different directions. Even dialectical materialism, now the orthodox Communist position, seems to have been repudiated by Marx in his more mature writings.
There is no doubt, however, as to his materialism. Like his predecessor Ludwig Feuerbach, he vehemently repudiated Hegel and every form of idealism. Like Feuerbach too he ignored the epistemological difficulties of materialism. Unlike the more recent behaviorists he does not try to explain mind or knowledge by the motions of particles. He just jumps from atoms to man in society. Marx has no noble savage in the distant past, nor brutal savage, either. There is no fixed human nature. Man is a product of society. His ideas, his actions, his mind, his "essence" are created by the methods of manufacture and distribution in use at the time. For all of Marx's insistence on the real living individual, as opposed to Hegel's abstract Man, the individual is no more than a blood corpuscle in a larger stream of life. Society, not man, is the unit. Therefore private property is immoral.
Two problems arise here. Marx was and Communists are unsparing in their denunciations of the immorality of capitalism. At the same time they accept a relativistic theory of morals that provides no basis for condemnation of anything. More characteristically they reduce moral norms, so-called, to class demands; and these are to be settled by violent action rather than by rational argument.
Rationality itself has a precarious position in Marxism. The laws of nature or real being are not the laws of thought. Logic is merely an adaptation that material man makes to the world. The function of mind is to act, not to understand. Like Friedrich Nietzsche and his disciple Sigmund Freud, Marx makes man basically irrational. But if so, "logical" argument, the result of irrational urges, counts for nothing in establishing the truth or value of Communism. Only violence counts.
The present years have been years of violence throughout the world. In fact this century is the most violent in all history. Large scale disturbances occur in the United States. Do these activists have any precise view of human nature? Do they have a consistent theory of politics? It hardly seems so. If one may judge from appearances - in the absence of scholarly publications - the hippies most closely resemble the ancient, irresponsible Cyrenaics who after some decades faded away into more sober Epicureanism. Neither school was interested in politics. The present day militants seem bent on destruction and offer no blueprint of a better society. Presumably they are more opposed to logical system than even Marx was. If any theory can be imposed on them, it is probably anarchy. Here Hobbes was right: No society will tolerate anarchy. Anarchy made emperors of Napoleon and Caesar.
That all these theories but one favor totalitarianism is a fact that deserve to be pondered. The United States was founded on the principle that individuals transfer some but not all of their rights to the government. Rights not explicitly so transferred were retained by the people. Although Locke in England and Jefferson here were rather Deists than Christian, their theories came from the Christian principles of the Scottish Covenanters. It was these people, Samuel Rutherford, Richard Cameron, and Donald Cargill, in their struggle against the persecutions by the British Crown, who invented the division of powers (legislative, judicial, and executive) and advocated republicanism. With the Puritans in New England and the Presbyterians in Pennsylvania and the Carolinas, such influence determined the form of our Constitution. Only if man, and the State as well, are regarded as subject to God can an argument against totalitarianism be logically complete.
* Christian Gauss remarks: "If Rosseau did not always practice virtue, he at least always talked about it." Selections from the Works of J. J. Rosseau. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1920, p. 27.
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