Humanities 2319

   The central ideas of the philosophe movement were:

These are a few of the more influential philosophes influencing the Renaissance  thinkers, as well as our Founders:
   

Voltaire

Besides Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the most influential of the French philosophes was François Marie Arouet or, as he signed his books, Voltaire. Voltaire concentrated on two specific philosophical projects. First, he untiringly worked to introduce empiricism, as it was practiced by the English, into French intellectual life. Second, he persisted in proselytizing for religious tolerance; in fact, most of his works that we still read today had as their theme religious tolerance.

A Treatise on Tolerance : Voltaire had written most of his life on religious tolerance and had gained a large audience. In 1762, however, he was fired into action by the execution of an innocent Protestant in Toulouse. This man, Jean Calas, was accused of murdering his son before that son could convert to Catholicism. Like the OJ Simpson case, this murder created a sensation all throughout largely Catholic France. Calas was inhumanly tortured and eventually strangled, but he never confessed to the crime. When Voltaire heard about this gross miscarriage of justice, he made Jean Calas's case his cause and in 1763 he published A Treatise on Tolerance that focused entirely on the Calas case.

Voltaire's argument was very simple: the most inhuman crimes perpetrated by humanity throughout its entire history have been perpetrated in the name of religion. Mass extermination, torture, infanticide, regicide: behind just about every abominable human crime lay some religious zealotry or passionate religious commitment. The most vicious crimes, though, are those perpetrated by Christians against other Christians who belong to a different sect or church. Since religion does not admit of certainty, and since so many sects and religions have so many things in common, the Treatise argues that people should be allowed to practice whatever religion they see fit, particularly if it's a Christian religion. Individual governments should not impose religious systems on an entire state. The ultimate argument of the book is that secular values should take precedence over religious values; until that happens, human history will be marked by viciousness and inhumanity.

The philosophes movement was not confined to France, but soon spilled over into other European countries. In England, the movement was championed by David Hume, Adam Smith, and Edward Gibbon. It was natural that the English would take to the new ideas, since the French philosophes were so heavily influenced by English thought: Voltaire by English empiricism and Montesquieu by English government.

 
David Hume, (1711-1776) is perhaps the most important English philosopher of the eighteenth century. He was a radical skeptic and his most influential work, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding , argued that human beings can know nothing whatsoever with certainty. Even more influential were his ideas on ethics; he argued for a moral relativism. Since no one can know anything for certain, that means that no individual is in a position to pass judgment on alternative moral systems.

Adam Smith (1723-1790) is one of the most important theorists of the eighteenth century period. His book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), was the first book to systematically theorize capitalism and stands as the book that pretty much invented economics in the Western world.  Smith has one and only one concern in the book: to explain how nations as a collective grow wealthier. While other eighteenth century thinkers were concerned about improvements in knowledge and society, Smith believed that human progress largely consisted in the steady improvement of human life through the increasing wealth of a nation as a whole. The Wealth of Nations is a systematic attempt to explain the processes whereby the collective wealth of a nation grows.

Smith identifies several characteristics of growing economies. The first and foremost is division of labor. The revolution in labor in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in which productive tasks were divided among a number of workers each doing a single task, produced a revolution in production in which output was increased a hundredfold. Smith's foundational argument is that all meaning and value in human life is to be found in productive labor; the exponential increase of production, then, not only resulted in more wealth for the nation, but greater meaning and value for human life.

Second, all monopolies and regulations stifle productive labor. Human beings work for their own profit; regulations and monopolies do away with the profit incentive and so discourage human productivity. In place of these regulations, Smith proposed a natural system of economic liberty, in which each individual in a society is free to choose how to expend their productive labor and their capital. This economic liberty was called laissez faire (let them do as they please); if individuals were allowed to pursue their own selfish aims, then the wealth of the nation as a whole would increase. This selfishness, though, would not result in social injustice; behind this natural economic liberty lay an "invisible hand" which guided people into right action.

Third, the material world was an infinite store of resources that could be exploited for the benefit of humankind. It was incumbent on humans to approach material resources, not as scarce, but as infinitely abundant. The idea that the world is an infinite storehouse of resources open to human exploitation is such a common aspect of our lives that it's hard to realize that it's a modern idea that can be dated back to Smith's book.

The universe is fundamentally rational, that is, it can be understood through the use of reason alone;

Truth can be arrived at through empirical observation, the use of reason, and systematic doubt;

Human experience is the foundation of human understanding of truth; authority is not to be preferred over experience;

All human life, both social and individual, can be understood in the same way the natural world can be understood; once understood, human life, both social and individual, can be manipulated or engineered in the same way the natural world can be manipulated or engineered;

Human history is largely a history of progress;

Human beings can be improved through education and the development of their rational facilities;

Religious doctrines have no place in the understanding of the physical and human worlds

Thomas Hobbes

The first major thinker of the seventeenth century to apply new methods to the human sciences was Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) whose book Leviathan is one of the most revolutionary and influential works on political theory in European history. Hobbes was greatly interested in the new sciences; he spent some time in Italy with Galileo and eagerly read the work of William Harvey, who was applying the new physical science methods to human physiology. After the English Civil War, Hobbes determined that political philosophy had to be seriously revised. The old political philosophy, which relied on religion, ethics, and interpretation, had produced what he felt was a singular disaster in English history. He proposed that political philosophy should be based on the same methods of exposition and explanation as were being applied to the physical sciences.

When he applied these explanatory principles to politics and states, he arrived at two radical and far-reaching conclusions:

• All human law derives from natural law; when human law departed from natural law, disaster followed;
• All monarchs ruled not by the consent of heaven, but by the consent of the people.

These were radical ideas. In the first, Hobbes believed that human beings were material, physical objects that were ruled by material, physical laws. Everything that human beings feel, think, and judge, are simply physical reactions to external stimuli. Sensation produces feeling, and feeling produces decision, and decision produces action. We are all, then, machines. The fundamental motivation that spurs human beings on is selfishness: all human beings wish to maximize their pleasure and minimize their pain. As long as political philosophy is built on some other principle, such as morality, the human inclination to selfishness will always result in tragedy.

 Since all human beings are selfish, this means that no person is really safe from the predations of his or her fellow beings. In its natural state, humanity is at war with itself. Individuals battle other individuals in a perpetual struggle for advantage, power, and gain. Hobbes argued that the society was a group of selfish individuals that united into a single body in order to maximize their safety-- to protect themselves from one another. The primary purpose of society is to maximize the happiness of its individuals. At some early point, individuals gathered into a society and agreed to a "social contract" that stipulated the laws and rules they would all live by.  Human beings, however, could not be trusted simply to live by their agreements. For this reason, authority was created in order to enforce the terms of the social contract. The creation of authority, by which Hobbes meant a monarch, transformed society into a state. For Hobbes, humanity is better off living under the circumscribed freedoms of a monarchy rather than the violent anarchy of a completely equal and free life.

Using this reasoning, Hobbes argued for unquestioning obedience of authority. In a twist of fate, however, both his methods of inquiry and his basic assumptions would form the basis of arguments against absolute authority.

John Locke

 
     Jean Jacques    
         Rousseau

The last important philosopher, besides Pascal and Descartes, of human sciences in the seventeenth century was John Locke (1632-1704). Locke was steeped in the new physical sciences; he was an avid reader of Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, and he was a close friend of Robert Boyle, one of the founders of modern chemistry. He also read Pascal and Descartes avidly. He wrote two far-reaching and massively influential works on human sciences, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Two Treatises on Government (1690).

The Essay takes as its subject human psychology and cognition; it is, undoubtedly, the first European work on human cognition. Locke applied the new science to explaining the human mind itself and all its operations; he started with a radical definition of the human mind. For Locke, the human mind enters the world with no pre-formed ideas whatsoever. The human mind at birth is a blank, a tabula rasa (erased board). Human sensation: taste, touch, smell, hearing, and especially vision filled the empty mind with objects of sensation. From these sensations, humans eventually derive a sense of order and rationality. All human thought, then, and all human passion is ultimately derived from sensation and sensation alone. In Locke's view, the human mind is completely empirical. Not only is he arguing that the best knowledge is empirical knowledge, he was arguing that the only knowledge is empirical knowledge; there is no other kind.

One of the consequences of this empirical view of humans means that every human being enters the world with all the same capacities. No one is by virtue of birth more moral or knowledgeable than anyone else. Since all moral behavior arises from one's empirical experiences, that means that immoral behavior is primarily a product of the environment rather than the individual. If you accept that line of reasoning, that means that you can change moral and intellectual outcomes in human development by changing the environment. Locke proposed that education above everything else was responsible for forging the moral and intellectual character of individuals; he proposed in part an extension of education to every member of society. This view of education still dominates Western culture to this day.

In the Two Treatises , Locke argued that government and authority was based on natural law. Unlike Hobbes, Locke believed that natural law dictated that all human beings were fundamentally equal; he derived this argument from his theories of human development. Since every human being walked into the world with the same capacities as every other human being, that meant that inequality was an unnatural result of the environments that individuals are forced to live in, a belief that still underlies the Western notion of human development. Human beings have a natural inclination to preserve their equality and independence, since these are natural aspects of humanness. For Locke, humans enter into social contracts only to help adjudicate disputes between individuals or groups. Absolute power, then, is an unnatural development in human history.

For Locke, the purpose of authority is to protect human equality and freedom; this is why social groups agree to a "social contract" that places an authority over them. When that authority ceases to care for the welfare, independence, and equality of individual humans, the social contract is broken and it is the duty of the members of society to overthrow that ruler. This work was published shortly after the Glorious Revolution and clearly reflects the political fallout from that event. It would also serve as one of the central influences in the formation of the American government

 Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montequieu

John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), British philosopher, economist, moral and political theorist, and administrator, was the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century. His views are of continuing significance, and are generally recognized to be among the deepest and certainly the most effective defenses of empiricism and of a liberal political view of society and culture. The overall aim of his philosophy is to develop a positive view of the universe and the place of humans in it, one which contributes to the progress of human knowledge, individual freedom and human well-being. His views are not entirely original, having their roots in the British empiricism of John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume, and in the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham. But he gave them a new depth, and his formulations were sufficiently articulate to gain for them a continuing influence among a broad public

For Mill government is not a matter of natural rights or social contract, as in many forms of liberalism. Forms of government are, rather, to be judged according to "utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interest of man as a progressive being" (On Liberty, p. 224). By this he means that forms of government are to be evaluated in terms of their capacity to enable each person to exercise and develop in his or her own way their capacities for higher forms of human happiness. Such development will be an end for each individual, but also a means for society as whole to develop and to make life better for all.

Given the centrality of self development, Mill argues that liberty is the fundamental human right. "The sole end," he proposes, " for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively... in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection" (On Liberty p. 223). This will enable each to seek his or her own best; it will liberate a diversity of interests to the benefit of the individual and of all; and it will nurture moral freedom and rationality. With the latter will come creativity and the means of social and intellectual progress. Mill's On Liberty remains the strongest and most eloquent defense of liberalism that we have. He argues in particular for freedom of thought and discussion. "We can never be sure," he wrote, "that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion, and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still" (On Liberty, p. 229). Our beliefs and actions are reasonable or not depending upon our capacity to critically assess them. Only through free debate can such critical skills be developed and maintained: our self-development as reasonable persons, capable of critical assessments for belief and action. And if our beliefs and actions emerge from the critical assessment such debate involves, if they survive the struggle w it were in the "marketplace of ideas", then, and only then, will one be entitled to accept them as justified. Even so, even though that is the best guarantee that there is sufficient reason to justify accepting the belief as true or the action as right, nonetheless, as always, we are fallible: while it may be the best guarantee of truth or belief or rightness of action that we have, one must also allow that it is best only so far as our fallible judgment allows. And that fallibility means, of course, that the debate must be on-going.

Since individuality is good, it is necessary to foster social institutions that contribute to that individuality. Free, uncensored debate is one such institution. So, more generally, is liberty, the right to do as one wants free from the interference of others, so long as what one wants does no harm to others. (And merely offending the moral sensitivities of others does not count as harm. Especially since others often confuse feelings of repugnance with feelings of moral disapprobation.) Democracy and representative government also contribute to the development of the individual, for much the same reason that free speech so contributes, and so these too are social institutions that are justified on utilitarian grounds