Stephen Schwartz: A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: From Russell to Rawls. West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons, 2012.

 

“Personally and passionately involved in the enlightening and edifying enterprise of analytic philosophy,” Professor Schwartz calls it “the dominant Anglo-Saxon philosophical movement of the twentieth century” and also of this century, so far. He is unquestionably correct, especially with respect to academic philosophizing. With the compartmentalization of academic research, and with the division of labor institutional departmentalization reflects, academics ‘doing philosophy’ have needed a way to distinguish their enterprise from mathematics and science ‘hard’ and ‘soft.’ At the same time, they could not ignore the intellectual authority of mathematics and science in the modern world, seen in the thought of Bacon and Descartes, two of modernity’s philosophic progenitors. This authority has increased in the centuries subsequent to their work, and it includes the application or attempted application of scientific method to the work of governments in the form of the ‘administrative state.’ Even its recent philosophic, often ideological rival, ‘post-modernism,’ which rejects rationalism in the name of a democratized Nietscheism, nonetheless eagerly uses the apparatus of the administrative state as its preferred instrument of ruling.

“I am personally and passionately involved in the enlightening and edifying enterprise of analytic philosophy,” Schwartz writes. This engagement seldom injures his account of its history. Quite the contrary, for the most part: History written by a lover almost always outranks history written by despiser, as a lover will attend to the features of his beloved, always wanting to know more about her.

Modern philosophers have tended to group themselves into two major encampments, empiricists (‘Baconians’) and rationalists (‘Cartesians’). Although analytic philosophers began by distancing themselves sharply from Hegelianism, with its grand thesis-antithesis-synthesis historical dialectic, it’s hard to deny that they began by attempting to ‘synthesize’ modern empiricism and rationalism. Empiricists hold that all knowledge is based on experience; ‘experimental’ science tests ideas, initially demoted to the status of hypotheses, testing them by concrete results under the rationally controlled conditions of the laboratory—that is, a place of labor, of action, not of contemplation. Modern scientists, including Einstein himself, were quite relieved that the mathematical formula E=mc² found confirmation in the lab. Modern rationalists concentrate their attention on ideas thought to be innate in the human mind, ideas based on ‘pure’—that is to say, non-empirical, non-factual—reason. Can these two opposite approaches to philosophizing be combined? How?

Bertrand Russell took the first, and very deep, stab at accomplishing this in his Principia Mathematica, co-written with Alfred North Whitehead and published in 1903. Russell sought nothing less than to break with both Aristotelian and Hegelian logic. Taking over a project begun by the German mathematician Gottlob Frege, Russell treated logic like the calculus. As Jacob Klein has shown, the calculus itself was invented to register the interest of modern philosophers, beginning with Machiavelli in kinetics. [1] Moderns are less interested in the stable figures of Pythagorean geometry as in a geometry of motion—of plotting points along a curve. Aristotelian, syllogistic logic seeks to understand things in accordance with their forms and ‘essences.’ Hence such standard syllogistic locutions as “All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal.” “Socrates” is the subject, “man” the predicate. To say “All zebras are animals” is logically the same as to say “Socrates is a man,” despite the fact that a zebra is a species, Socrates a person. Additionally, in syllogistic logic, “Socrates is married to Xanthippe” is logically identical to these other propositions because “married to Xanthippe” is the predicate—this, despite the fact that “married to” is a relation, whereas “is a man” is a statement about the intrinsic nature of Socrates.

In mathematical logic, “predicates represent functions from objects to truth-values,” “functions” being a term from calculus. To say “Socrates is a man” is to say “Socrates satisfies the function ‘man.'” “‘All zebras are animals’ says that if any object satisfies the function ‘x is a zebra,’ then it satisfies the function ‘x is an animal.'” And to say that “Socrates is married to Xanthippe” is to say that the pair Socrates/Xanthippe satisfies the function “is married to.” Such sentences are structured like equations in calculus. They say nothing about the substance of the things equated. They do not posit essences, only the verbal equivalents of points on a line.

Russell’s logic differs from Hegel because it is analytic. It does not aim at producing a synthesis. When X meets not-X there is no necessary Y that comes out of the meeting. The logical principle of non-contradiction enables us to analyze but tells us nothing about synthesis. Analytic philosophy is as kinetic as Hegelianism, but it doesn’t try to tell us where we are going. No wonder Lenin hated it. [2]

Because it is analytic and kinetic, not ‘essentialist’ or substantive and not synthetic, either, “The name ‘analytic philosophy refers more to the methods of analytic philosophy than to any particular doctrine that analytic philosophers have all shared.” For such philosophers, “insight comes from seeing how things are put together and how they can be prized apart; how they are constructed and how they can be reconstructed.” Schwartz notes the similarity between analytic philosophy and the more recent philosophies of ‘deconstructionism.’ The difference, it might be added, stems from the influence of Nietzsche on deconstructionists, which is entirely absent from the minds of the ‘analysts.’ Like the deconstructionists, and like Nietzsche, “analytic philosophers rejected the pretensions of the Enlightenment philosophers,” their grand schemes of rationally-controlled progress. Unlike the deconstructionists and Nietzsche, they did not question the Enlightenment philosophers’ “commitment to reason.” At any rate, analytic philosophy “is not a unified movement or school,” and indeed Russell himself changed his opinions on all manner of things throughout his long career.

“The basic aspects of modernism—rejection of past traditions, experimentation with new methods and forms; fascination with and anxiety about technology and use of new technical methods; focusing on method, surface, expression, and language—all characterize analytic philosophy.” This method also comports with the ambition of modernism to master nature; by basing logic on a particular form of modern mathematics, the calculus, it intends to overcome reality even as it seeks to understand it. As Schwartz puts it, the analytic philosophers “saw their work as freeing philosophy and even society, from its past forms and obsessions.”

“Mathematics is a priori and universal, so how can it be empirical?” Following Frege, Russell initially “treat[ed] logic mathematically, and then treat[ed] mathematics as a form of logic.” By abstracting from experience, mathematical equations give us certainty; for example, we can’t know empirically that there are infinitely many prime numbers because we can’t know if the one we’ve just mentioned is the last one. This appears to lead to a strict form of rationalism. Frege replies that “mathematical propositions are not based on experience or observation, but they are not the results of pure rational insight into the ultimate nature of reality, either.” They may not be ‘about’ anything other than themselves. Russell replies to Frege by counter-example: The famous Liar’s Paradox (a Cretan says, “All Cretans are liars”) doesn’t only yield an ’empty set,’ as mathematicians say; it isn’t a set at all. Originally a Fregian, Russell now could “no longer plausibly claim that mathematics was reducible to pure logic—that it was all analytic.” What he did claim (and here is where empiricism comes in) was that language can be analyzed. The Epicureans’ atomism can return because sentences can be rationally reduced to what Russell called “ultimate simples” or “logical atoms.” They are the objects perceived through the empeiria of this new empiricism; for logical purposes they have the same status as the natural atoms for Lucretius, the sense-data for Locke. And these empirical facts can be analyzed by means of symbolic logic, a logic that takes on the form of mathematical equations but without the need to need to translate the things analyzed into numbers. (In this, Russell sharply diverges from such system as the Gematria in Judaism, which does indeed translate words into numbers. Russell would deny that such a move makes sense.)

It was Russell’s sometime colleague, G. E. Moore, who attacked the then-dominant school of German Idealism, especially as seen in the thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic of Hegel. Hegel and his followers claimed that the dialectic had ontological content, that it registered the logical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit. Moore (with Russell) denied this. The negation of a ‘thesis’ by an ‘antithesis’ yields nothing more than a contradiction; there is no ‘synthesis’ at all. The logical atomists or, as they also called themselves, logical positivists (contrasted with Hegelian ‘negationists’) was nothing but airy “metaphysics.” Logical positivists insisted on limiting reason to matters of common sense, that is, sense data, with which we are all “directly acquainted,” as Schwartz puts it. But we are only acquainted with the sense data we perceive; such notions as whiteness, diversity, and brotherhood are not immediate perceptions. It is through a mental process that we become aware of them. I perceive the appearance of a table sensually, but I know it only indirectly, through words, “by description.” And, in Russell’s words, “Awareness of universals is called conceiving, and a universal of which we are aware is called a concept.” These are logical atoms because any attempt at forming a conception that is exposed as illogical, as self-contradictory, thereby falls apart in our mind, becomes inconceivable. In mathematical terms one might call it a failed function, a pseudo- or dys-functional function.

“Analytic philosophers proudly contrast the clarity, technical proficiency, and respect for natural science of analytic philosophy versus the ultra-sophistication, contrived jargon, and mystification of Continental philosophy.” They are working very broadly within the British philosophic framework of empiricism, seen in Hobbes and Locke, but they add a linguistic layer to perception that the earlier empiricists did not emphasize. To the logical positivists, we truly know only what we make, and what we make first and foremost is concepts, out of sense perceptions mixed with words.

Schwartz adds that there was a political-historical element to all of this. At the time, “Hegelianism was something like the official philosophy of Germany, and especially Prussia.” Germany generally and Prussia particularly had taken on a bad odor for Englishmen as it rose to challenge the British regime at the beginning of the twentieth century. This may or may not have had philosophic relevance (the positivists denied that there can be such a thing as political philosophy), but it aided in obtaining a respectful hearing for a philosophic method distinct from and indeed contradictory to that of the Germans.

Russell and Moore were logicians who called themselves positivists, but ‘logical positivism’ as the term for a philosophic school came to be deployed in Vienna in the 1920s. Its most important proponent was Ludwig Wittgenstein. “Like Russell and Moore, the members of the Vienna Circle reacted against Hegelian German idealism,” very much including its political dimension; “many blamed the Prussian aristocratic traditions for starting the war and for not being able to pursue it successfully”—quite the failure of historicist dialectic, that. “If Frege is the pioneer and Bertrand Russell the father of analytic philosophy, then Wittgenstein’s writings provide the backbone.” Wittgenstein had read the Principia Mathematica before the war, studied with Russell at Cambridge, and then became a decorated artillery officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army. Presumably, his stint in an Italian P.O.W. camp provided the leisure to contemplate the defects of the German-Austrian misalliance, along with the philosophic reasons for doubting Hegelianism and for refining positivism. He published his Tractatus in 1924.

Wittgenstein sees that language attempts not only to represent the world—what analytic philosophers would come to call the “actual” world we perceive with our senses—but also to represent “non-actual states of affairs,” the stuff of plans and fantasies. “In order for us to be able to think about the world and talk about it, there must be a fundamental similarity of structure or isomorphism between thought and language, and between language and the world. This structure is represented by formal logic.” He breaks with Russell, however, in denying that logic describes “very abstract or fundamental facts or truths about the world or thought or even language”; language provides only “the framework or scaffolding that makes statements of facts possible.” The limits of the linguistic framework are tautologies on the one hand, self-contradictions on the other; this is what keeps Wittgenstein within the realm of logic. “Russell was still yearning for some sort of intellectually satisfying certainty, whereas according to Wittgenstein the only certainty available is empty and formal.”

An analytic proposition is self-evident only because it is a tautology. In this it is identical to a mathematical proposition, whether an axiom, postulate, or theorem. This returns mathematics to the apodictic certainty of pure abstraction, and it denies that any certainty can result from empirical investigation. As another member of the Vienna Circle put it, there are statements about facts and statements which “merely express the way in which the rules which govern the application of words to facts depend upon each other.” The latter “say nothing about objects and are for this very reason certain, universally valid, irrefutable by observation.” Therefore, as Wittgenstein writes, “Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences”; it aims only “at the logical clarification of thoughts” and not at “a body of doctrine.” It “does not result in ‘philosophical propositions,’ but rather in the clarification of propositions.” A decade later, A. J. Ayer concurred, asserting that “The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.” Philosophers have been the dupes of language, goofed by grammar. Such a conception as ‘God’ is neither provable nor disprovable. ‘Moral philosophy’ is equally a contradiction in terms, as moral claims have no cognitive content but express nothing but attitudes and emotions. At best, logic will tell us if a moral judgment coheres logically with the moral standard asserted by the one making the judgment.

Logical positivism, popularized (well, at least among academics) by Ayer’s 1936 book, Language, Truth, and Logic, held sway among philosophy professors well into the 1950s. “Much of the development of philosophy and methodology in the sciences since the 1950s has been driven by the criticisms of the doctrines of the logical positivists.” One of the critics would be Wittgenstein himself. These criticisms, however, were undertaken in “the spirit of the logical positivists’ motivation,” deploying many of the same “methods, standards, and attitudes.”

Wittgenstein, for example, came to reject “the use of symbolic logic to dissolve philosophical problems.” He now took “the meaning of a statement” to be not “a picture of reality or a fact” but a tool, a matter of how the statement was used in “practical life.” This begins to move toward a reconception of language as rhetoric: “Language is used to elicit a response in listeners, to coordinate our activities, and so on.” This is the theme of Wittgenstein’s philosophic notebooks, published posthumously (he died in 1951) as The Philosophical Investigations. This shift distinguishes what scholars have come to call the “early Wittgenstein” of the Tractatus from the “later Wittgenstein.”

After Wittgenstein, W. V. Quine took up the mantle. To understand meaning as use is to recall the American pragmatist school, led by John Dewey and William James. Radicalized, the tendency of pragmatism is to reject all attempts to ‘verify’ the truth of a statement; indeed, ‘truth’ itself comes to be guarded by inverted commas, too. Accordingly, Quine rejects even Karl Popper’s more modest principle of falsification, which asks us not to verify anything in accordance with some standard but more modestly to eliminate those claims which contradict that standard. Quine regards all claims, whether they are assertions of the existence of the Homeric gods or of the existence of physical objects, as “cultural posits.” ‘We moderns’ believe in the existence of physical objects only because that belief (as Quine puts it) “has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.” That is, meaning is Machiavellian in intent; it seeks to master Fortuna. “There is no first or fundamental philosophy that discovers truth or rather TRUTH underlying or separate from science”—which is a matter of ‘grasping,’ of touch, not of seeing (noesis) or of hearing (revelation).

If an ‘analytic’ statement has a meaning independent of facts and a ‘synthetic’ meaning is grounded in facts, can we really distinguish between the two? Quine doubts it. What is a ‘cigarette’? Tobacco rolled in cylindrically-shaped paper? What about marijuana rolled in paper? And does a ‘cigarette’ need to be rolled in paper at all? Why not a tobacco leaf? “We begin to see the difficulty of distinguishing pure elements of the linguistic meaning of ‘cigarette’ from empirical facts or generalizations about cigarettes. The notion that the term ‘cigarette’ has a pure linguistic meaning begins to dissolve,” and with it its logical ‘analyticity.’ Quine says that the only way to assign meaning to ‘cigarette’ is to consider it within “the whole of science,” “the totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs,” which he deems “a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges,” a (rather disorderly) “web of belief.” What “positivists and other modern empiricists failed to recognize” was this “holistic character of knowledge.” Human knowledge or science is never comprehensive (as it is in such a great systematizer as Hegel); when a given experience contradicts it, we can and should adjust it accordingly. “Even the laws of logic and mathematics are not immune to revision.” But there is no standard ‘above’ the myth or story of science; we are simply adjusting the “paradigm” (as the historian of ideas Thomas Kuhn calls it). More, we rarely discard an old paradigm for a new one. Kuhn writes, “Typically the adherents of the old scientific paradigm are not defeated by the results of experiments or observations. They are defeated by the grim reaper,” as “older scientists are replaced in positions of scientific power by younger colleagues with fewer intellectual commitments.” (Notice that this last point strengthens the intellectual hands not only of analytic philosophers but of post-modernists, ever alert to ‘will to power’ Nietzsche so vehemently asserted to be the pervasive principle of all life.)

Why, then, do Quine and Kuhn persist in favoring scientific paradigms over others? It can’t simply be a matter of “cultural predilections.” Rather, scientific paradigms have proven more accurate than, say, astrology as tools “for making predictions.” We judge science the same way “we judge any tool. How useful is it? How well does it work? Does it do the job for which it is designed?” Philosophy and philosophizing thus can assist the modern scientific enterprise, so long as philosophers abandon their pretension to see nature and stick to the task of sharpening the tools by which we grasp and shape it.

All of this is quite reminiscent of Dewey, as Quine’s successor, Richard Rorty, insists in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). Rorty, along with his contemporary Hilary Putnam, “labored to dismantle the traditional view of science as an attempt, by rigid and formal methods, to get an ever more accurate picture or mirror of a fixed lawlike world.” This led them to question whether science has a monopoly on knowledge. Why can’t painting, sculpture, music, literature, moral codes, “and perhaps even religion” “contribute to the web of knowledge”? These areas of thought, too, may offer “cognitive content with pragmatic value,” even if modern science remains “the Queen” of the knowledges.

Respecting moral codes, for example, Putnam rejects the fact/value distinction, “which was almost as dear to the positivists as the analytic/synthetic distinction.” Not only such words as ‘cruel’ and ‘kind’ are “value-laden,” but so are “such factual sounding terms as ‘rational,’ ‘logical,’ ‘irrational'”. Putnam considers “his rescuing values from positivist exclusion to be his most important contribution to philosophy.”

Putnam especially insists that this opening-up of knowledge, even combined with the rejection of a standard of truth ‘above the cave’ of our current myth, doesn’t entail relativism. “Denying that it makes sense to ask whether our concepts ‘match’ something totally uncontaminated by conceptualization is one thing; but to hold that every conceptual system is therefore just as good as every other would be something else. If anyone really believed that, and if they were foolish enough to pick a conceptual system that told them they could fly and to act upon it by jumping out of a window, they would if they were lucky enough to survive, see the weakness of the latter view at once.” While “the very inputs upon which our knowledge is based are conceptually contaminated,” such contaminated inputs “are better than none.” And if “contaminated inputs are all we have, still all we have has proved to be quite a bit,” given the success of modern science in doing what its philosophic forebears promised, the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate.

Meanwhile, in England, philosophy shifted its base of operations from Russell’s Cambridge to Oxford, where C. E. M. Anscombe, R. M. Hare, H. L. A. Hart, Charles Stevenson, and Gilbert Ryle worked. They too rejected Cambridge and Vienna Circle formalism, “tend[ing] to view symbolic logic as an attractive snare for the philosophical intellect.” They retained linguistic philosophy’s emphasis on language but turned (Socrates-like, it might be said) to the consideration of “ordinary language” and common sense. Again like their analytic-philosophy predecessors, they sought to elucidate the meaning of concepts, but focused their attention not so much on mathematics and science as on the more concrete realms of literature, the arts, and politics. Ryle held that “philosophy is messy and the messy problems it confronts cannot be resolved by mathematical formulas.” Even as Aristotle had observed that a cultivated man should not expect more precision in a field of knowledge than its subject-matter allows one to have, the “ordinary language philosophers” sought “precision and accuracy of thought and argument, not the precision of the physicist, chemist, or medical doctor.”

Whether analytic philosophers have maintained that symbolic logic mirrors nature, or whether they have maintained that we find meaning only in uses, in pragmatic refinement of paradigms, they have committed what Ryle regards as the fallacy of dualism, what he called (following Arthur Koestler) “the ghost in the machine,” the Geist or spirit/mind as distinguished from the body. Our minds are not separate from our bodies; they are only “organizations of behavior”. Ryle replaces logical atomism and logical positivism with logical behaviorism. We know what people are thinking and feeling primarily by their actions, which include their vocalizations, linguistic and otherwise. Although Ryle eventually questioned behaviorism, finding it insufficient to account for the experience of introspection, behaviorism has enjoyed a long if often pernicious life in the writings of social scientists seeking, as they do, observable and measurable phenomena to describe.

Resistance to dualism entails a rejection of the superiority of mind over matter. This “reflected changes in society,” Schwartz remarks, and indeed it does look like a continuation of the trend toward what Tocqueville calls democracy, social egalitarianism—the pushing-down of aristocratic claims to rule in all endeavors of mind and heart. Would ‘aristocracy’ make a comeback,? Would philosophers begin to call ordinary language philosophy ordinary-all-too-ordinary?

Not entirely. “Since the decline of ordinary language philosophy in the 1960s, no single movement or school has dominated analytic philosophy.” In Schwartz’s estimation, the “most striking and impressive advances” by analytic philosophers came in the investigation of language. And this marked a return to nature, thanks to the work on the linguist Noam Chomsky, whose research into human beings’ innate propensity to language spurred a rethinking of that large portion of philosophic thought which took its cue from John Locke and his (now clearly mistaken) notion of the mind as a tabula rasa. Before Chomsky, the mathematician Kurt Gödel gave “the final deathblow” to the earliest, pre-Principia Mathematica form of analytic philosophy by showing that arithmetic “cannot be reduced to logic and set theory” because some axioms are un-analyzable, unprovable and therefore “beyond the reach of human knowledge.” To put it in verbal terms (as the philosopher Alfred Tarski did), to say that snow is white is true if and only if snow is white. That doesn’t get you very far. More importantly, it can’t, so don’t waste any effort in trying. It is well worth noticing, as Stanley Rosen does, that analytic philosophy tends to deny cognitive status to intellectual intuition or noesis, and that this one of the “limits to analysis.” [3]

To deal with such a conundrum, Tarski distinguished between “object-language”—the sentences in which we talk about objects—and “meta-language”—the sentences in which we talk about the object-language, in which (as Tarski writes) we “construct the definition of truth for the first language.” Donald Davidson elaborated on Tarski’s proposal, linking meta-language to Quine’s anti-positivist holism or Kuhn’s paradigm theory. Or, reaching back still further, Davidson writes, “Frege said that only in the context of a sentence does a word have meaning; in the same vein he might have added that only in the context of the language does a sentence (and therefore a word) have meaning.” Therefore, “an argument must always be interpreted in the way that makes the most sense given the context and other information we have”; “if we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behavior of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational, as having beliefs, or as saying anything.” Taken by itself, this would amount to a highly sophisticated form of classical conventionalism; it took Chomsky to bring nature back in, after it had been driven out by philosophic pitchforks.

Chomsky rejected behaviorism, which “cannot explain our ability to learn a language” because languages are too complex to be learned by an organism starting at zero. “All normal humans are born with a universal grammar already hard-wired in their brains.” This strikes a blow against Quine, a friend of B. F. Skinner, the Harvard psychologist who became the most prominent behaviorist of the postwar decades. [4] Schwartz comments, “Logical behaviorism never had any plausibility. No definitions in terms of behavior and dispositions to behave were ever formulated nor could they be,” inasmuch as “thoughts and day dreams are interior and private and need never be manifested in anything exterior.” They are unverifiable by outside observers.

Further, the natural languages that derive from the universal grammar natural to human beings resemble “a formal logical system.” Whereas Wittgenstein, and Quine following him, denied that the purpose of language “was to express our thoughts,” Chomsky “embraces exactly this view.” Despite his esteem for the Quine insofar as he authored the metaphor of the “web of belief,” Davidson limited such conventionalism by endorsing Chomsky rationalist naturalism: “The dependence of speaking on thinking is evident,” he wrote, “for to speak is to express thoughts.” Schwartz sees that “the next step is not far: [T]he structure of language is isomorphic to the structure of thought, and the world.” The deeper philosophers dove into language, the more they moved toward the classical claim that man is by nature animated by logos, by speech and reason.

From the philosophy of language, then, to the philosophy of mind. Here, philosophers noticed that “the behaviorist cannot forgo appeal to mental states,” which are “functional states of an organism,” that is, states that cause it to behave. External stimuli may ‘push’ the organism to do something, but only as mediated through that mental state (e.g., pain, pleasure, revulsion, attraction). The “functionalist” “views a mental state as a function that takes an input stimulus, plus other mental states, and generates an output that depends on both the input and the other mental states,” indeed, “the entire mental state of the organism.” A computer, which is an artifact imitating the human mind, performing some of the same functions (albeit more efficiently) does much the same thing: its “output depends on the input plus the program the machine is running.”

This is as good as far as it goes, but it “leaves out of the account the subjective nature of our mental lives.” Computers have no consciousness, “as far as we know.” An organism that had no consciousness would feel no pain, even if it were subjected to abuse—a point well known to all of us who have experienced the benefits of anesthesia. Although Davidson and many other philosophers are reluctant to abandon materialism, the idea of consciousness obviously causes a problem for them, even if their web-of-belief organicism disposes of behaviorist simplisme. Schwartz notes, “The problem of mental causation and the problem of consciousness are today the central problems in the philosophy of mind.”

And with all this, even much-denigrated metaphysics, the bugbear of analytic philosophers, has reappeared in the thought of today’s analytic philosophers. This “remarkable development” occurred thanks to “developments in formal modal logic in the 1960s.” Formulated by C. I. Lewis, “modal” logic “is the logic of necessity and possibility,” duly translated into symbolic-logic figures (a box symbolizing necessity, a diamond symbolizing possibility). As Quine immediately saw, and abominated, this suggests that symbolic logic might be made into a means of understanding things in nature, reviving the hated ‘essentialism’ of previous schools of philosophy, and with it metaphysics itself. Schwartz counts himself among those who find Aristotelian essential “intuitive and commonsensical,” very far from impossible to think about logically. “In embracing metaphysics,” he hastens to add, “we did not give up commitment to clarity, care, and careful sequential reasoning, nor to honoring science and mathematics.” That part of the analytic-philosophy mindset remains, well, conscious of itself.

The centerpiece of contemporary metaphysical thought is the idea of “possible worlds,” that is, worlds that “could have been” but are not the “actual” world. The notion of possible worlds was originated by G. W. F. Leibniz, the renowned seventeenth-century metaphysician and indeed theologian. The down-to-earth example of such thinking begins with a “counterfactual”: a world in which, for example, Ralph Nader didn’t run in the 2000 presidential election, resulting in victory for Senator Gore over Governor Bush. Such a possible, but not actual turn of events likely would have led to turns in subsequent events (would President Gore have prosecuted Gulf War II?). In this line of thought, a necessary proposition is true in every possible world, whereas a possible proposition is true in at least one possible world; an impossible proposition is possible in none, and a contingent proposition is true in some worlds, false in others. “This is not about language. Even though we speak of possible world semantics, it is metaphysics.” And it reopens philosophic minds to essentialism: “I have the property of being a human being in every world in which I exist,” Schwartz writes. “I have the property of living in Ithaca in some but not others. I am essentially a human but contingently an Ithacan.” “An essence is a property or conjunction of properties that is necessary and sufficient for being a particular individual.” As Alvin Plantinga puts it, “If Socrates”—not to be confused with Schwartz, but the principle is the same—”had not existed, his essence would have been unexemplified, but not nonexistent. In world where Socrates exists, Socrateity is his essence; exemplifying Socrateity is essential to him.” Or, as Schwartz puts it, “In some worlds, some essences are exemplified, and others are not.” Mathematicians have dealt with such an idea for years in the form of probability theory in statistics. As the political writer George F. Will noticed, a Chicago Cubs hitter whose batting average is .203, isn’t necessary ‘overdue for a base hit,’ whatever some cheerleading baseball announcer may say. In the actual world, he may strike out, even if there are possible worlds in which he saves the day with an RBI triple.

On a loftier level, modal logic revives the ontological argument for the existence of God. In Descartes’ version, since God has all perfections and existence is a perfection, God exists. The modal version of the ontological argument is: “If it is possible that God exists, then God exists”—that is, in essence if not in actuality; “if it is possible that a necessary being who is omnipotent” and possesses the other attributes of the Biblical God exists, “then such a being exists.” This doesn’t prove the existence of God, but, as Plantinga argues, “it establishes the rational acceptability of belief in God—the rational acceptability of theism,” because even if one disbelieves that there can be a possible world in which “maximal greatness is instantiated,” believing that there is, “is not irrational.” Therefore, “theism is not irrational” but rather a logical stance taken on the basis of a premise that cannot be proven or disproven, rather as we understand that snow is white only if snow is white. “To my knowledge,” Schwartz writes, “no one has yet succeeded in demonstrating that the concept of God is impossible, self-contradictory, or nonsensical.”

If nature has returned to philosophy, precisely through the thinking-through of analytic philosophy, what is nature? Putnam defines natural kinds as “classes of things that we regard as of explanatory importance… held together [by] deep-lying mechanisms.” According to the theory of “reference”—what we mean to say that our words refer to something—meaning has “intension” and “extension.” “Intension” is what we mean to say by using a given term; the word ‘lemon’ means a certain “conjunction of properties.” “Extension” is a reference to the things to which that meaning applies. The term ‘lemon’ refers to an object currently sitting in the fruit and vegetable section of Market House, among other objects, many of them not lemons. In logical terms, the concept corresponding to the term is its “intension,” and it “must always provide a necessary and sufficient condition for falling into the extension of the term.” “Analytic” truths “are based on the meanings of terms.” From Hume onwards, “all necessity was construed as analyticity or somehow based on linguistic conventions.” This is what’s behind Hume’s questioning of the theory of causality; there is no sort of “extra-linguistic necessity.” That’s what Wittgenstein has in mind when he claims that essence is expressed by grammar, by a linguistic convention, and need not apply to the physical world.

Keith Donellan argues otherwise. To describe something, he remarks, you may make an “attributive” description or a “referential” one. An attributive description is one in which I infer a characteristic of, say, a person without knowing who the person is. If someone explains E=mc² to me, I might think that the person who first formulated that must have been smarter than I am, but I might not know it was Albert Einstein. If I met Einstein and had a conversation with him, and then described him as being smarter than I am, I would be defining him referentially, now having a definite person in mind. Bringing in ‘possible worlds’ theory, Saul Kripke adds that when I say “Albert Einstein” I mean “the same person whether or not he… satisfies some list of commonly associated descriptions.” Those who knew Einstein as a child attributed no genius to him but nonetheless meant the same dude as those who later described him quite differently. Kripke distinguishes between necessity—a category in metaphysics—a prioricity—a category in epistemology—and analyticity—a category in linguistics.

The same goes not only for persons but for natural kinds. Under the older theory, “the concept associated with a term functions like the set of identifying descriptions supposedly associated with an ordinary name”; “gold” is yellow, shiny, metallic, and so forth. It can be analyzed linguistically, broken down into these other words. Kripke observes, however, that such a description doesn’t truly define gold. Only “its atomic structure defines whether some stuff is gold.” Gold is gold metaphysically, that is, it is gold in all possible worlds. Anything that does not have that atomic structure isn’t gold, “even if it satisfies some list of superficial features that we think” characterize it. Our certainty in this classification derives not from “knowledge of a definition” but from “a well-established empirical theory.” It is not analytic, in the analytic-philosophy sense, but “if it is true, it is necessary” metaphysically.

Schwartz provides another way into the question, distinguishing physical possibility and necessity from metaphysical possibility and necessity, and both from logical possibility and necessity. An alternate world that is physically possible must have the same natural laws as our world. An alternative world that is metaphysically possible might be physically impossible in our, actual, world. An alternative world that is logically possible must only meet the criterion of “logical consistency.” So, for example, it is physically possible for Schwartz to have lived in San Francisco, as this would violate “no natural laws”; what is more, this is also metaphysically and logically possible. It is physically impossible for Schwartz to swim across the Atlantic Ocean; it isn’t metaphysically or logically impossible, however. It is not physically possible for Schwartz to be an alligator, nor is it metaphysically possible “(assuming that I am essentially human)”; it is nonetheless logically possible, for example if I (not doubt unwarrantedly) use the term ‘alligator’ as a metaphor to describe Schwartz’s personality.

Speaking of character, analytic philosophers have also begun to admit ethics into their purview, along with metaphysics and nature. G. E. Moore’s moral-philosophic equivalent of the Principia Mathematica was his Principia Ethica, published in the same year as the Russell/Whitehead opus. Moore denied that there can be any such things as moral philosophy; his book centers on what he calls “metaethics,” the “logical and analytical study of ethics” by means of epistemological, logical, and metaphysical categories. Such categories tell one nothing substantive about right and wrong, good and bad because (according to Moore) such ethical topics have no cognitive content if one considers them epistemologically, logically, and metaphysically. Moore argues that ‘good’ is an indefinable term, rather like ‘white’ or ‘yellow.’ Like those terms, it cannot be analyzed. But unlike shades and colors, it can’t be “perceived by the senses,” either; it is “apprehended by moral intuition.” Because it can’t be perceived by the senses it can’t be natural; in claiming this, Moore affirms Hume’s denial that we can derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’. Philosophers who try to derive ethics from nature commit the “naturalistic fallacy.” The moral intuition amounts to “personal affection” and “appreciation”—to ‘values’ as distinct from ‘facts.’ A later writer in Moore’s line, C. L. Stevenson subsumed ethical discourse under rhetoric: “The point of ethical discourse is to influence not describe.” A. J. Ayer agreed.

Analytic philosophers began to change their minds after World War II, which conflict must have imposed a fairly severe challenge to moral subjectivism. R. M. Hare hoped to stay within the Moore-Stevenson-Ayer orbit, but in the process put an end to their ethical emotivism by remarking (in an unwittingly Aristotelian way) that ‘good’ in morality means essentially the same thing as it means in other areas. We mean ‘good person’ in more or less the same way we mean ‘good dog,’ ‘good car,’ ‘good movie.’ We don’t mean only that we like that person, dog, car, or movie; we also mean that it has some intrinsic quality that fulfills the definition of the noun we use to classify it. And so, to use Schwartz’s example, if Conan the Barbarian understands the good life as the victorious life cannot be right, as victory in itself contributes nothing “to human flourishing,” does not fulfill the meaning of the noun ‘human.’ “It is mere self-interest.” But more, one might argue. Insofar as mere victory in battle might deform the person who achieves it, making him more inhuman than before, it is not even self-interest, rightly understood.

This is the kind of thing C. E. M. Anscombe and Philippa Foot have in mind when they assert that moral terms have factual content, that a ‘value’ can partake of facticity. They founded “a school of ethics, based on Aristotle’s ethics, called virtue ethics,” which emphasizes “moral character rather than moral oughts and goodness” in the utilitarian and also in the Kantian sense. Schwartz somewhat puzzlingly goes on to laud John Rawls, a neo-Kantian, as a veritable “Philosopher King,” although this does at least bring political philosophy back into the ethical universe, as Aristotle had seen it to be.

Looking at the trajectory of analytic philosophy as described by Schwartz, one finds it a remarkable enterprise indeed. What started out as a philosophic method that eschewed metaphysics and morality as sub-philosophical realms devoid of rational content has slowly uncovered doctrines with affinities to Aristotelianism. That is, ultra-‘modern’ analytic philosophy has begun to turn modernity away from itself and back toward the ‘ancients.’ Will postmodernists take a similar turn? As the old saying goes, ‘From your mouth to God’s ears’—God having now been reintroduced to polite philosophic conversation.

 

Notes

1. Jacob Klein: Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origins of Algebra. Eva Brann translation. New York: Dover Publications, 1992.
2. V. I. Lenin: Collected Works. Volume 14, pp. 17-362. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972.
3. Stanley Rosen: The Limits of Analysis. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000.
4. An acquaintance of mine once lived next door to a famous behavioral psychologist. The great man had gone so far as to place his infant son for in what was called a ‘Skinner box’ for substantial periods of time. A Skinner box was a controlled environment in which an animal (very often a rat or a pigeon) would be rewarded for performing a certain action, not rewarded or even punished for failing to perform it. The last time my acquaintance saw him, the lad was chasing the family cat around the back yard, a syringe in hand. This suggests that errors in epistemological theory may have startling actual-world consequences, although admittedly it doesn’t rigorously prove that they do, or must do.

 

Henry Veatch: Realism and Nominalism. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1954.

Henry Veatch: Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1980 [1962].

 

David Hume disrupted philosophy by arguing that ‘is’ implies no demonstrable ‘ought.’ The mere fact that a thing is by nature or by convention does not tell me whether it is good. Natural laws may describe gravity, the growth of a tree, the traits of horses and humans, but they cannot tell me what I should do or become. Nature tells me what pleasures and pains me, not what is right. Similarly, no civil custom or law justifies itself; political society may reward me or punish me, but it cannot prove that it is right to do so. When writing about matters of good and bad, right and wrong, Hume could offer nothing other than experience as the criterion to which I should attend, claiming there is no other. When considering politics, he interested himself primarily in ruling institutions, which shape the experience of citizens and subjects, and history, which recounts the experiences of previous generations for the instruction of subsequent generations.

Evidently, Hume must understand nature to be devoid of purpose. Like Hobbes, he recognizes material, formal, and efficient causes in nature, but not final causes. To put it in historical terms, he shares Hobbes’s rejection of Aristotelian philosophy. That is the fundamental reason for his denial of any connection between ‘is’ and ‘ought.’ Nature, what is, can generate no such thing as an ‘ought.’ Those who claim otherwise therefore fall into both logical contradiction and groundless ethics.

Henry Veatch has his eye on that claim, both as a logician and as a moral philosopher. But he begins well before Hume, considering the major philosophic controversy of the generation before Thomas Aquinas: ‘realism’ vs. ‘nominalism.’ He does so for no antiquarian reason. “Realism and nominalism may well be perennial issues in philosophy” (RNR 1); “today, no less than in the 12th century, there is a realist-nominalist controversy raging” (RNR 2). And this makes sense, inasmuch as the philosophic atmosphere, as it were, of that century resembles that of the mid-1950s: In the twelfth century, philosophers “knew little else in philosophy save logic”; for their part, today’s philosophers are “all pretty much agreed that the only really serious discipline in philosophy is logic” (RNR 2). Then as now, philosophers bind themselves with “logicism” (RNR 2).

Veatch contends that “the current issue of realism vs. nominalism may be in large measure understood in terms of, and perhaps may even be said to have been caused by the rather uncritical use by modern logicians of a certain basic scheme, or ordering pattern, that quite literally dominates the entire vast corpus of modern mathematical logic” (RNR 3). This pattern begins with Gottlob Frege’s understanding of logic in the mathematical terms of function and argument. In any mathematical equation, there is a constant and a variable—for example, in ‘2x’ two is the constant, x the variable. Frege “proposed to generalize these notions so as to make them applicable far beyond the confines of mathematics in the narrower sense, extending them to the analysis of concepts and propositions in logic” (RNR 5). He translates these terms into logic by calling the logical equivalent of the constant the “function,” the x-factor the “argument.” To analyze the sentence, “Caesar conquered Gaul,” he treats “Gaul” as the function or constant, Caesar as the argument or x-factor.

This sets up “the vast and elaborate quantification theory of modern logic, a theory, which it is claimed, almost infinitely surpasses the old subject-predicate theory of traditional logic in range and power” (RNR 8). In subject-predicate theory, “Caesar conquered Gaul” means just that. It registers “a simple one-place function.” But in quantification theory, anything could replace the function, “Gaul,” just as any number could replace the two in “2x.” “The propositions envisaged in quantification theory will involve besides one-place functions, two-place, three-place, four place and so on up to n-place functions!” (RNR 8-9).

Bertrand Russell, for one, became so enamored of quantitative logic that he dismissed subject-predicate logic altogether, holding it “unable to admit the reality of relations” (RNR 10) Why so? Because subject-predicate logic limits itself to only one thing in relation to one other thing; it is cramped by concreteness. Quantitative logic, like numbers, ‘abstracts from’ the particulars: “The true function of logic as applied to matters of experience,” Russell writes, is to “show the possibility of hitherto unsuspected alternatives,” to “liberate the imagination as to what the world may be” (RNR 11). As Veatch puts it, in Russell’s view quantitative logic “provides an inventory of possibilities, a repertory of abstractly tenable hypotheses” (RNR 11). Veatch may be a bit too much of the gentleman to remark that this sort of thing fit rather well with Russell’s socialism, an imaginary construct of what the world may be, abstractly considered. With quantitative logic in hand, a philosopher might do seriously what Plato’s Socrates did ironically: make a city in speech plausible.

In considering realism and nominalism in his thirteenth century, Aquinas distinguished ens rationis and ens naturae, while connecting this distinction to a distinction in logic. Reason, he argued, finds what he calls “intentions” in natural things “insofar as they are considered by reason” (RNR 12). By “intention” he means such attributes as genus and species. One doesn’t find such ideas as genus and species by means of one’s senses’ perception of things; the ideas “rather are consequent upon reason’s consideration of the things of nature” (12). Logic, thought guided by the principle of non-contradiction, does discover the genus and species of things by comparing one thing to another, observing that (for example) a diamond is not a ruby, a sheep is not a goat, because their attributes in some respect contradict one another, whereas a diamond and a ruby are both minerals, a sheep and a goat both animals, because their attributes in some respects are identical to one another, do not contradict at all. Veatch observes, “if the subject matter of logic is the sort of thing which St. Thomas here suggests that it is, then it is quite obviously not the sort of thing that Lord Russell says it is” (RNR 12). They are things of different species. “Liberating the imagination, or drawing up inventories of possibilities, or contemplating unsuspected alternatives as to what in the eyes of God or the devil or Lord Russell the world may be—all this is all very well, but it simply isn’t the business of logic,” since what Russell wants logic to “disclose and reveal are real possibilities; they are not mere intentions in the sense of beings of reason” (RNR 13).

Thomas’s distinction between the natural things and logical “intentions” addresses the realism-vs.-nominalism question he inherited from his immediate philosophic predecessors by connecting reality to names in a logical, and indeed Aristotelian way. Logical intentions have nothing to do with things in the natural world, real or possible, as immediately perceived by the senses. “It is only as things come to be known, or better, it is only insofar as in coming to be known they acquire a status as objects of thought or reason… which otherwise and just in themselves they would not have at all” (RNR 14). If the “subject” we consider is hydrogen, and by measuring it we determine its atomic weight as 1.008, “we make ‘hydrogen’ the subject of a proposition and we predicate ‘having an atomic weight of 1.008’ of it” (RNR 14). Reason “may be said to find in hydrogen, insofar as hydrogen comes to be known and is made an object before the mind,” its atomic weight, the predicate of the sentence ‘Hydrogen has an atomic weight of 1.008’ (RNR 15).

Moreover, “logical intentions, in addition to being consequent upon reason’s consideration of nature, are also instrumental to reason’s consideration of things” (RNR 15). That is, they are “the tools and means of human knowledge,” not only their products; “or better, they are produced in the process of knowledge, precisely in order that through them such knowledge may be made possible” (RNR 16). In nature, “hydrogen is neither a species nor a subject, but in its condition of being known and as an object before the mind, it takes on these purely logical features or ‘intentions,’ as they are called” (RNR 16). The mind classifies hydrogen with respect to it being “a species of a genus or a subject of a predicate” so that “we may thereby come to know that hydrogen really is an element or that it does in fact have an atomic weight of 1.008” (RNR 116-17). “The main instruments of traditional logic—concepts, propositions, and arguments—are, in form and structure, simply relations of identity” (RNR 17). As “tools,” they ‘dig out’ the characteristics of natural objects not perceived by the senses alone, characteristics nonetheless real, albeit real in a different way than sensually-perceived reality. “It is only intellectually or in the mind that what-a-thing-is is abstracted from the thing itself and then reidentified with it in a logical proposition,” such as ‘a sheep is a mammal'” (RNR 17). Through the tool, instrument, device of logic, the mind relates “a thing to its own ‘what,'” causing the thinker “to recognize what that thing is in fact and in reality” (RNR 18). “The relation of identity that the mind sets up between subject and predicate in a proposition is an intentional relation precisely in the sense that through it the mind or reason is able to intend things as they are in themselves and in reality”; when I say what a thing is I am ‘identifying’ it through language (RNR 19). That’s why I might be mistaken and, if my proposition is illogical, why I must be mistaken; I can’t show you how a thing can be or do opposites at the same time, with respect to the same part, in relation to the same thing. A subatomic particle may manifest itself as a wave or as a particle, but not at the same time, by means of the same observation.

Not so with Frege’s quantitative logic. It isn’t “intentional” in the Thomistic sense, for two reasons. First, “the relation of a function to its argument or arguments is not a relation of identity”; therefore, “the function can in no sense be regarded as representing what the argument or arguments are’ (RNR 19). ‘2x’ tells me nothing about what ‘2’ is. The person who speaks or writes ‘2x’ has formed no such (Thomistic) intention. As Veatch puts it, the sentence “Milwaukee is north of Chicago,” in which “Chicago” and “Milwaukee” are the arguments and “north of” is the function, tells me nothing of “what Milwaukee and Chicago conjointly are” (RNR 19-20). Second, “unlike the relation of identity between subject and predicate, the relation between argument and function is not one whose nature is simply to be of or about something else” (RNR 20). The relation of Milwaukee to Chicago in the sentence refers not to the ‘whatness’ of either city, but to “the order of parts in a whole.” It does not tell me what that whole is—if, for example, Milwaukee and Chicago form part of a ‘metroplex.’

Returning to the question of realism and nominalism as they reappear in modern philosophic thought, Veatch observes that for Russell the word or symbol that is the “argument” in the proposition (say, Milwaukee, Chicago, Socrates) stands for an irreducible “particular”; the function sign (say, north of, or Plato) stands for a universal or a relation. In the sentence “Socrates was older than Plato,” “Socrates” and “Plato” are the particulars, the “arguments,” and “being older than” is the relation or universal (RNR 23-24). What does such a sentence, so understood, signify? It means nothing about ‘what’ the particulars are, but rather states (one aspect of) their relation to one another. Veatch calls this “logical atomism,” meaning that both the particulars and the universal/relational exist “outside of and along side” of one another (RNR 27). Russell himself soon saw that this means a word in a logical proposition, and therefore the logical proposition itself, need not have any relation to reality at all. A word of course “contributes to the meaning of the sentence in which it occurs,” Russell writes, but that is a feature of language, not necessarily of any reality beyond language (RNR 31).

Russell thus went from the quasi-Platonic realism of Frege, in which numbers “peopled the timeless realm of Being,” toward nominalism. W. V. Quine takes that final step, denying that there are any abstract entities at all. The word “appendicitis” “is a noun,” he writes, “only because of a regrettable strain of realism which pervades our own particular language” (RNR 35-36). As Veatch puts it, Quine regards “all supposedly ‘descriptive’ words as if they are ultimately and in principle no different from ‘logical’ words” (RNR 36). “This certainly sounds like nominalism”; “the function-argument scheme has indeed given rise to an extreme nominalist type of semantics” (RNR 37). Quine can deny that the ‘function’ side of the proposition, the ‘universal’ side, refers to any objective reality, arguing that “in any proposition involving a function-argument structure, while both parts of the proposition may be presumed to be meaningful and significant, still in asserting the proposition as a whole, what one asserts to exist are only the arguments and not the function” (RNR 40). One cannot, by means of logical propositions, understand anything that is ‘out there.

Thus “modern logicians and semanticists have found themselves forced into one or the other of two very embarrassing alternatives” (RNR 45): either Quine is right, and logic is only a language game which tells one nothing about any reality beyond itself, or one must admit that ‘Milwaukee’ means a particular city, ‘Socrates’ a particular person, ‘north of’ a real direction, ‘older than’ seniority in years—an alternative that re-presents quantitative logic as a realism depending upon a leap of faith (which doesn’t sound entirely logical).

But (Veatch argues) this only indicates that philosophers have entangled themselves in a pseudo-problem. “The entire trouble would seem to stem from the use in modern logic of a schema like that of function and argument, which turns out to be radically non-intentional, and hence not adapted to the proper purposes of logic at all” (RNR 46). Subject-predicate logic avoids this problem altogether because to use logic as a tool, instrument, device “certainly does not imply that one means or signifies by it a real universal entity existing extra-mentally, as the realists would seem to hold; nor is the only alternative to this the nominalistic one of supposing that in using a universal concept, one does not thereby mean or signify anything real at all” (RNR 47). If I assert that “many Wisconsin barns are red” I don’t mean that many Wisconsin barns are redness. I’m not saying that any particular barn or set of barns is the idea of redness, or indeed that it is the idea of barn-ness. Nor does such an assertion commit me to the idea of the Ideas in the supposedly Platonic sense of an ‘extra-mental’ set of realities above and beyond the particulars. In using language to form sentences I intend to bring out, some aspect of the particulars I am talking about; using language logically signifies an intention to correct errors in my perception of those particulars, to re-cognize them. As Thomas puts it in the Summa contra Gentiles, “although it is necessary for the truth of a cognition that the cognition answer to the thing known, still it is not necessary that the mode of the thing known be the same as the mode of its cognition” (RNR 51). In this, Thomas follows Aristotle, that logician who does not need ‘Platonic’ ideas in order to reason about things.

“Somehow,” Veatch concludes (with a hint of exasperation) “one wonders whether, if only this simple and rather obvious principle of intentionality had been observed by modern logicians, there would ever have been the current and seemingly futile dispute between realists and nominalists among modern semanticists” (RNR 51). But what about modern ethicists? To use a recently-invented, Greek-sounding word Veatch avoids, has this ‘epistemological’ debacle twisted them in the wrong direction, too?

Can Ethics Be Logical?

Lord Russell famously answered with a resounding ‘No,’ having taken the ways of mathematical logic for those of logic as such and concluded that in ethics all we have are emotions (as in the fear behind his Cold-War slogan “Better Red than dead”) and that in politics all we have is imagination powered by emotion (as in The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism). In Rational Man, Veatch demurs, deploying Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to refute not so much Russell as the existentialist ethics of William Barrett in his then-recent book, Irrational Man and also the language-philosophy stance of Charles L. Stevenson, who, in his 1944 book Ethics and Language, consigned substantive ethical questions to the realm of less-than-philosophic souls. Veatch intends not to explicate Aristotle but “to use him in a modern effort to set forth and justify a rational system of ethics,” an application of Aristotelian ethics to modern circumstances (RM xiii). “This book will have to do with just such normative questions as the currently regnant intelligentsia has come to regard as not philosophically respectable” (RM xxvi).

Unlike Aristotle, whose ethical philosophy leads directly to political philosophy (a term he may have invented), Veatch promises to duck social and political questions, as in current circumstances so many ‘realists’ skip ethics entirely, jumping immediately to matters of society and politics, conceived simply as field of ‘power relations.’ Such Realpolitik thinkers, ‘Left’ or ‘Right,’ find unintended allies among linguistic philosophers. But what if philosophy has more to offer than language games, however rigorously played? “To most people it must seem that ethics has to do with more than just the meanings of words and the uses of language” (RM 2). What if they are right? Even if to think well about ethics one will need to clarify terms, among other acts of hygiene?

Everyone wants to live well. And, after any number of blunders, most people see that living well requires “an art or technique that one must master, a skill that one must acquire before one can do [the act of living] well, or perhaps even do it at all” (RM 3). In an effort to help in this, optimistic parents send their children to college. But, “Let’s face it: modern learning does not have anything to do with living, or being learned with being human” (RM 4). In considering the lives of philosophers, Kierkegaard “trembles to think of what it means to be a man” (RM 5); Socrates replies that to philosophize one must know oneself and learn how to live. One must find a good way of life—a thought Socrates shares with the founders of major religions, such as the God of the Bible, who very much insists on His way, demanding that His people abjure the ways of Canaanites, Egyptians, Persians, and indeed all others but His own.

In adjuring men to master Fortuna, to conquer nature, modern philosophy, the science it has produced, and the technology that science has produced offer “a truly amazing example of the relevance of knowledge to life” (RM 10). When modern science attends to human nature, it goes so far as to claim to control the lives of non-scientists, reducing human life to a set of “functions” (RM 10)—exactly what one would expect of a project animated by quantitative logic. But who is doing the animation? What is their character? “What is needed for ethics is knowledge not of how to control nature, but of how to control oneself” (RM 10), not only others. In this sense, ethics must precede politics, self-government preceding political rule. What can quantitative logic teach about self-government?

Not much. “Isn’t it a truism nowadays that morals and ethics are relative matters, that is to say, matters of opinion, not of knowledge?” (RM 13) “Ethical relativism has become almost a sine qua non of the educated man, a sort of badge of the modern intellectual,” who maintains that one’s opinions are always ‘relative’ to, even determined by, one civilization, culture class, physical environment, biology, psychological drives. As proof, the intellectual points to the diversity, the contradictory multitude, of moral principles. But this is no proof of anything but the manifoldness of human ways, a fact as well known to Moses and Aristotle as it is to Lord Russell and Professor Stevenson. “The mere diversity in human moral standards does not in principle preclude the possibility of at least some of these standards being correct and others incorrect” (RM 14). Indeed, “the whole world might be wrong and a single individual right” (RM 15), as any number of philosophers (and not only prophets) have started out by thinking.

Ethical relativism follows from Hume’s is-ought dichotomy. The denial of this dichotomy leads relativists “to label their opponents ‘absolutists'” (RM 19n.). Linguistically considered, ‘absolute’ does oppose ‘relative.’ No one calls the knowledge of modern scientists “a purely relative matter”; yet no one calls it “an absolute knowledge,” either. “And if scientists can enjoy an immunity from the dilemma of relativism or absolutism, why may not moral philosophers as well?” (RM 19n)

Some ethical relativists hope that relativism will bring forth greater toleration of differing opinions, and of those who hold them. The anthropologist Ruth Benedict believed so. But, then, so did Benito Mussolini, whose ghost-writer (probably the philosophy professor Giovanni Gentile) wrote for him, “Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition…. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable” (RM 20). Toleration, meet intolerance, each of you standing on the same leg (as do so many of the ‘post-modern’ Leftists whom Veatch, Benedict, Mussolini, and Gentile never lived to see).

All of these would-be relativists face the same dilemma, as well as one another. “No human being can stop with just having convictions, he also has to live and to act. But to act is to choose and to choose is to manifest some sort of preference for one course of action over another. However, to manifest any such human preference means that, consciously or unconsciously, implicitly or explicitly, one has made a judgment of value as to which course of action is the better or the wiser or the more suitable or preferable.” (RM 22)  Benedict holds on high the banner of toleration; Mussolini self-assertion; “liberated youth” their “impulses and inclinations”; skeptics (Hume) “the standards of the community of which [he] is a member” (RM 23). All of these standards rest on “a glaring non sequitar: “Since no course of action is really better or superior to any other, I conclude that the better course of action for me to follow would be thus and so'” (RM 23). Obviously, there is “no possible way in which the denial of all standards of better and worse can itself be transformed into a kind of standard of better or worse” (RM 23). To get out of this impasse, one will need not self-assertion, whether spirited or dispirited, but self-examination.

“Back to Socrates and Aristotle,” then (RM 27). Back, as it happens, to the facts, and to a consideration of facts prior to asserting the ethical equivalent of realism-vs.-nominalism, namely facts-vs.-values. Aristotle observes that every art and every investigation aims at some good (else why undertake it?). Is there a supreme good at which all our actions, taken together, aim? Since all beings have a nature, a set of characteristics defining what they are, the good for each kind of being must be the perfection of its nature. This means that ‘values,’ as they are called, “are simply facts of nature” (RM 29). It can’t be good for water, as water, to evaporate, although sometimes its evaporation may be good for other beings, or for nature as a whole. The distinctively human good, the one fulfilling the definition of what a human being is, “will involve what might loosely be called the maturity or healthy condition of the whole man, or of man in his total being” (RM 29). Further, “since man is a being capable of intelligence and understanding, and consequently of planned and deliberate behavior on the basis of such understanding, it may also be presumed that the way in which a human being attains his appropriate good or natural perfection will be rather different from that of a plant or an animal,” by “a conscious recognition of what the human end is and by deliberately aiming at this proper end” (RM 29). Such recognition, according to Aristotle’s subject-predicate logic, comes from using the “tool” of logic, by reasoning.

Veatch illustrates this by a hypothetical which seems as if it were inspired by the late Franklin Roosevelt. Suppose that a person comes along who begins by “remind[ing] us of how precarious our existence is,” and then offers us a deal: From now on, he will see to it that we will enjoy “freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom from worry,” on condition that “we shan’t know what is going on” (RM 32). In short, life under the soft despotism of administrative statism, ideally conceived. Would we take the deal? We might, “in moods of defeatism, of misery, and of utter hopelessness,” such as many experienced during the Great Depression and the Second World War. But in less dire circumstances “by and large no man in his senses would prefer the existence of a contented cow, however well fed and well cared for, to the existence of a human being with at least some understanding of what is going on” (RM 33). And as a matter of fact, modern rulers usually do not make their offer explicit, shrewdly assuring that the ruled are clever, informed, wise—the very opposite of those deplorable ignoramuses over there—”while in fact depriving them of the reality of all genuine knowledge and understanding,” or at least trying to (RM 33).

Some, following Hegel, will say that human beings don’t want to know so much as they want to be ‘recognized,’ esteemed by their fellows. In running for Congress, the young Abraham Lincoln admitted that such was his ambition. But was that what Lincoln really wanted? “Why do we seek recognition so avidly?” “Because such praise and respect from our fellows somehow serve as reassurance to ourselves that maybe we have accomplished something or amounted to something after all” (RM 35). If so, then recognition or reputation, honor, is only a proximate end; we seek a sense of “our own worth, our own real achievement and perfection” (RM 35). Following Aristotle, Veatch conducts his readers toward self-examination, toward self-knowledge, by his very argument for self-knowledge as a constituent of human perfection. To perfect something or someone, one first must know what it or he is.

What the English would call a ‘horrible’ lurks here. “It would appear that the good life for man, as Socrates and Aristotle envisage it, would turn out to be none other than the academic life, the life of the professor!”—”the pathetic reality of present-day academic life” (and mind you, Veatch is writing in 1962, years before the inmates took over the academic asylums) (RM 36). Perish the thought, preferably by refusing to allow thought to perish, even in academic groves. “Socrates is always careful to stress that the kind of knowledge and wisdom in which human perfection consists is the knowledge of ‘Know thyself’ and the wisdom that makes for the improvement of the soul,” whereas “there is something about nearly all modern science and scholarship that seems to make it not merely impertinent, but actually antithetic to anything on the order of Socratic wisdom” (RM 37). As Veatch’s readers have already seen, the misapprehension of the distinctively human characteristic, reason, and particularly of its tool, logic, has helped to make this so.

Here Veatch ventures a rare departure from Aristotle. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle proposes two kinds of human perfection or excellence: “the practical life of man as possessing reason” that aims at discovering and at walking along the right way of life; and then, in Book X, the theoretical life, the life of the philosopher (RM 38). But although discovering the right way of life does require (finally if not initially) theoretical reasoning about what a human being is, such knowledge aims at living the right life, not merely thinking about it. “Knowledge for its own sake can never be the be-all and the end-all of human existence, nor can the chief good of man ever consist in the mere possession or even the exercise of knowledge”; it must rather consist “in its use in the practical living of our lives under the guidance of such knowledge and understanding as we possess” (RM 40-41). That is human perfection or excellence, full humanity. “The intelligent man, in this sense, is the good man or the man of character, and, vice-versa, the good man, in the sense of the man who has attained his full perfection or natural end as a human being, is the intelligent man,” who has achieved eudaimonia or happiness understood not as a ‘feeling’ but as a condition (RM 41). Happiness is “not a matter of subjective feeling on the part of the individual, but something objectively determinable,” just as the health of an individual isn’t a matter of feeling healthy (RM 42). If one feels contented by some condition that is “anything less than what as a human being he is capable of and what… he is naturally ordered and oriented toward, then we should certainly say that such a person had settled for less than he should have, or that he didn’t know what was good for him” (RM 43). We would say, as Socrates says of some interlocutors, he has a wrongly-ordered soul.

A modern scientist might reply to Veatch by saying that disease is no less natural than health, that nature has no end or purpose, that life and death are indifferent to nature, equally part of nature. Veatch answers, as he does to logical positivists, that modern science excludes consideration of natural end a priori. The ‘method’ of modern science, dovetailing with the method of mathematical logic, excludes considerations of ‘what-ness’ and ‘who-ness.’ But such considerations are exactly what ethical thought requires. This does not make ethical thought irrational; it only makes it unscientific. I once asked an atheist, who found the notion of God unscientific and therefore rationally inadmissible, if his little daughter knew him. If so, she could not know him scientifically, having no knowledge whatever of his chemical composition, his DNA, or nearly anything other things modern scientists can measure beyond his size, shape, and (to some extent) behavior. “The possibility of explanation in scientific terms must involve the exclusion a priori of all such data as do not lend themselves to the particular procedures of scientific testing and verification” (RM 46), as the possibility of explanation in mathematical terms must involve such exclusion of all things do not lend themselves to the particular procedures of mathematical measurement and proof. But these exclusions do not preclude reasoning in other ways, ways which (as Aristotle says) fit the things being considered.

One might reply to Veatch by remarking that all of this depends upon the nature of nature, as it were. What or who are you knowing? Is it or he (or He?) good to know? Veatch, with Aristotle, answers that human being not only has a good but is itself good ‘for itself.’ God might reply, ‘Not so fast, sinner.’ But God will then offer the grace which makes nature better than it now is. And even a mere philosopher might justify his own way of life, in reasonable terms, by explaining that he too requires self-knowledge, and in knowing himself he knows that, qua philosopher, qua lover of theoretical and not only practical wisdom, his perfection consists in attempting to know the whole of nature, including its First Cause. The philosopher’s good is not exactly the same as the good of the practical man. It comprehends, or at least seek to comprehend, more than a good life in the social and political world. The scientific and mathematical ‘universes’ are not necessarily “the only reality there is” (RM 47). But does this leave “in the utterly unsatisfactory situation philosophically of having to acknowledge that truth is not one, but many”? (RM 48).

Whether by natural reasoning or divine revelation, knowledge of the human good requires that human beings think ‘pre-scientifically,’ pre-mathematically. In the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Everything I know of the world, even through science, I know from a point of view which is mine or through an experience of the world without which the symbols of science would be meaningless” (RM 48). “We must first re-awaken this experience of the world,” Merleau-Ponty continues, “for science is its second expression. Science does not have and never will have the same kind of being that the perceived world has, for the simple reason that science is a determination or explanation of the world” (RM 48). This latter claim could (and did, in Merleau-Ponty’s case) lead not to Aristotelianism but to a historicist apology for tyranny, to a claim that morality consists in going with the ever-changing, Heraclitean flow issuing in a universal despotism. With Aristotle, Veatch rather doubts that, and would concur instead with Leo Strauss (who equally called for a return to ‘naive’ or pre-scientific understanding as the foundation of all knowing, including scientific and mathematical knowing) in recognizing that historicism is only another ‘ism,’ philosophically interesting but mistaken, and sometimes calamitously so. Accordingly, Veatch valorizes not Stalinism or Maoism but the less grandiose task of “try[ing] to return, in some sense at least, to the things themselves,” to “a return to this world as it is before scientific knowledge,” to “the concrete world of ordinary human experience” (RM 48-49).

What happens if we do? “Living intelligently involves seeing things as they are and seeing oneself as one is, amid all the confusions and misrepresentations due to one’s own passions and predilections and prejudices” (RM 56). In so living, one finds the passions to be double-edged—often clouding the mind but also providing a useful mental shorthand, as the pain of a bee sting causes wariness of bees, around which one exercises caution ‘without thinking,’ from then on. “Without emotions and passions, a human being would not be human, but a mere clod, lacking the dynamic quality that is requisite for the attainment of human perfection” (RM 59); if passions run too high, they overpower thought altogether. “The virtuous man is the man who knows how to utilize and control his own emotions and desires,” the one who governs himself (RM 59). Fundamentally expressions of desire or aversion, emotions imply judgments of good and bad; this is why Aristotle puts such emphasis on the definition of virtues as means between extremes, and on the particular virtue of moderation. To understand courage (for example) as the mean or the middle between rashness and cowardice implies that the courageous soul leaves itself room for making a reasoned judgment of how to conduct itself in each circumstance which arises. Moderation, which ‘hits the middle’ regarding physical desires, is the virtue needed most often, addressing the ordinary challenges of our daily lives. Virtue understood and exercised as “the mean” also enables us to avoid judging simply according to habit derived from “mere social convention” (RM 61). It enables even a non-philosophic soul to ‘ascend from the Cave’ of social opinion. And it should not go unnoticed that “the mean” isn’t quantifiable; there is no mathematical formula we can devise to get us to hit it, except with respect to bodily goods, care for which requires us first to intend to hit the mean in the first place.

Aristotle identifies magnanimity or greatness of soul as the crown of the moral virtues. Veatch ‘democratizes’ it somewhat, calling it “self-respect” (RM 62). “The man who manages to live well will be the man who has a just estimate of himself, being neither overly complacent about his capacities and achievements, not, at the other extreme, overly lacking in a sense of his own dignity and responsibilities” (RM 62). Veatch criticizes the tendency of many Americans toward “indifference or even… disgust for the purposes and responsibilities of life,” men who preen themselves on such evasion (RM 62). In academia, this attitude results in “your man of learning secretly delight[ing] in picturing himself as a sort of composite Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre, and perhaps Pablo Picasso,” while in reality is “only a Sir Walter Elliot” (RM 66), that model of vanity readers meet on the first page of Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

Ethics consists in the art of living well, but it is more than an art. Aristotle warns that in the arts an intended mistake is not so bad as an unintended one, but in ethics, which involves practical wisdom as well as art, an unintended mistake is worse. That is because in ethics you need more than know-how; “in addition, you have to do” what you know (RM 71). If you know what to do but fail to do it you “would certainly not be a good man” (RM 72), unless unfavorable circumstances prevented a good course of action. What is more, “there just can’t be any knowledge of this sort of thing without doing” (RM 72), developing a desire to do the right thing, cultivating good “habits of choice” (73), having “learned how to let his choices and preferences be determined by such knowledge and understanding as he may have, rather than to proceed simply from chance feelings and impulses of the moment or from long established but mechanical habits of response” (RM 74).

Is the “examined life” possible? Is it the good life for human beings, or are human purposes irretrievably irrational? Yes, it is possible and good because the good life is “the natural end toward which a human being is oriented by virtue of being human,” a “fact of nature” discoverable by reasoning although not created by reasoning (RM 79). That human nature requires deliberation and choice for its fulfillment becomes obvious in considering the many examples of persons lacking in self-knowledge, unable “intellectually to see or know the truth about [themselves], as in not being willing or disposed to see this truth” (RM 83). Such persons may be no less, and even more, intelligent than we are, but what a mess they have made of their lives. This underscores Aristotle’s remark that “in a science such as ethics the end is not knowledge but action” (RM 84). Choosing to do what’s right is harder than knowing what’s right; deliberate habituation in right action—”the repeated performance of just and temperate actions”—is more moral than moralizing. Generally speaking, “in the final analysis our human failures are ultimately due not to the fact that we don’t know what we ought to do, but rather to the fact that we don’t choose to act on our knowledge” (RM 97). Virtue “is more a matter of abiding by one’s knowledge or remaining constant to it, instead of letting it be forever displaced by numberless counter-opinions and judgments that are determined by our passions and whims of the moment” (RM 102). The fact that we may not do this, that we may indeed choose inconsistently, drifting from one opinion to another, one impulse to another, one course of action to another, indicates the human capacity for freedom of judgment. “It is not because of ignorance that we fail, ultiomately, it is because we don’t choose when we could choose” (RM 108).

As for the force of circumstances, “for most of us, most of the time, our adversities and ill fortune are not such as to leave us completely without resources” (RM 115). Rather, “the important thing is how we take our good fortune, or our ill fortune. That is what determines whether we are well off or not, not the good or ill fortune itself” (RM 116). Circumstances seldom allow us to choose the best; they often prevent us from choosing what is especially good, but they always allow us to choose the better or the worse, until incapacity or death wrest choice from us.

Behind the flaccid relativism of thinkers like Russell and Barrett stands Nietzsche, mocking the Last Man whom they comfort with their egalitarian niaiseries and proclaiming grandly, “God is dead”—”God” meaning not only the God of the Bible, and the gods of all books deemed holy, but any “objectively grounded moral order anywhere in the universe” (RM 129). “The purpose of [Rational Man] is to suggest that in Nietzsche’s terms, God is not dead after all, that nature itself, or at least human nature, does involve a moral order, which it should be the concern of human beings to recognize and act upon” (RM 129). Less stirring thinkers than Nietzsche have also supposed that nature offers no real moral support to human beings. Utilitarians, for example, make reason instrumental to the desires. Utilitarians commit what might call the fallacy of misplaced sociality. Their concern for the greatest ‘good’ for the greatest number—good being defined as pleasure—rests on the assumption that “morals or ethics involves only their relations with others and never their relations with themselves” (RM 130). They typically ignore the question of whether pleasure is good for oneself or, if so, what pleasures are good. Further, they “have always had some difficulty in showing why anyone has any obligation to think about others” if hedonism should rule us all. John Stuart Mill argues that we take pleasure in altruism, an argument Veatch finds “dubious, to say the least” (RM 132). It might be more accurate and kinder to say that it is idiosyncratic; what Veatch has in mind, however, is that pleasure is no guarantee of self-knowledge, that one might, on hedonic grounds, take oneself to be happy if permanently deluded with drugs or some other illusion-producing device.

Mill also argues, it should be noted, that some pleasures are better than others, that it is better to be Socrates satisfied than a pig satisfied—assuming of course that one is a man, not a pig. But it also should be noted that in this claim he begins to move a bit closer to Aristotle, and away from Jeremy Bentham. The twentieth-century philosopher and contemporary of Russell G. E. Moore condemns Aristotle for committing what he calls the “naturalistic fallacy.”

Moore wonders why “a natural tendency” should “necessarily be a tendency toward the good” (RM 137). As Paul the Apostle observed long before him, Moore that some men aim at evil, adding that some aim at things morally indifferent. He concurs with Hume: One cannot logically derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is.’ “Aristotle’s definition of the good is held to be mistaken, not because it does not fit the facts, but because it violates the logical canons of good definition: it attempts to define something not in terms of what it is”—a thing—”but in terms of what it is not”—a value (RM 139). That is, to define a fact as a value is to fail to define it at all, to fail to construct a proper definition in the first place. Veatch rejoins that this refutation ranges too widely. “On the same principles just about any definition of anything must also commit a fallacy,” since if you define A as A you’ve produced a tautology, but if you define A as B or C then you’re defining it “in terms of what is other than A, and this violates the principle that everything is what it is and not another thing” (RM 140). “This is far more than Moore himself ever bargained for” (RM 140), limiting the definition of ‘fish,’ for example, to ‘fish.’ If Moore means simply that it is contradictory to say ‘A is not-A,’ or ‘a fish is a not-fish,’ then the question remains, is a so-called ‘value’ a not-is?

The fact/value distinction, progeny of Hume’s is/ought distinction, depends upon “an excessively static and atomistic conception of facts” (RM 145). But is there (in fact, one is tempted to say) “any fact at all that does not suggest all sorts of possibilities of how it might become other and different?” (RM 145). On the contrary, “the whole of reality is shot through with the distinction between potentiality and actuality, between what is still only able to be and what actually is,” between the imperfect and the perfect, the incomplete and the complete, the empty to the full” (RM 145). When Aristotle says ‘the good’ he means “the actual as related to the potential” (RM 145). A mangled hand cannot fully serve the purpose of a hand; a mangled soul cannot fully serve the purpose of a soul. The fact that mangled souls aim at evil or at least defective ends illustrates the point. It is only if he remain within the limits of quantitative logic and/or nonteleological modern science that we must deny that this is so. But the denial may be the product of the limitations of our way of thinking, which restricts rational thought too much.

The existentialism of William Barrett, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other Nietzsche epigoni attacks not only Aristotelian ethics but any rationalist ethics. According to existentialists, “reason cannot tell man anything about how to live or what to live for” not because reason cannot be used for such a purpose but because there is no “ethical truth” to be discovered in the first place (RM 150). Faced with a universe devoid of meaning, human beings can only give meaning to their otherwise meaningless lives by freely choosing the way of life they happen to prefer. This argument replicates the is/ought distinction in its own way, holding up “disinterested, impersonal objectivity on the one hand and a committed subjectivity on the other” (RM 155). Veatch rejoins, choice alone can’t make the choice right. “The issue is whether one can ever choose rightly without knowledge” (RM 155). To deploy the term ‘commitment,’ as such thinkers do, sounds impressive, but why should Sartre prefer his commitment to communism over Hitler’s commitment to fascism? Merely because it is his commitment? This would elevate love of one’s own to unsuspected moral heights. Is ‘my own’ worth of a human being, given the nature of human beings? Is it worthy of my own potential? How, on the basis of existentialism, can I know?

Sartre satirizes what Aristotle esteems as the spoudaios, the serious man. Such a man “tries to hide from himself that it is human freedom which decides on moral values,” that “if man is not the creator of being, he is at least the inventor of moral values”; such a man “takes refuge in the spirit of seriousness” in an attempt “to evade moral responsibility” (RM 155), which requires us not to follow our true nature or to obey divine law but to invent values ‘against’ an indifferent, amoral nature and to admit that divine law is human, all-too-human. But if there is no God—in the broad sense of no personal god or gods and no nature with moral content—then to act as if there were is nothing more than what Sartre calls “bad faith.” Veatch rejoins, to claim that God is dead is to claim “a certain understanding, a knowledge of what the score is” (RM 157). This must be “a morally relevant knowledge, a knowledge that indicates what we should do and what our responsibilities are in light of the facts” (RM 157). “Must not the very dialectic of their own position catch the existentialists up into the logic of ‘Know thyself’ and of the examined life, and ultimately into the ethics of rational man?” (RM 157) And to do that is at least tacitly to acknowledge one’s humanness, one’s givenness, one’s nature, to try to understand what it is, rather than escaping into imagining oneself as a Nietzschean superman, beyond good and evil, or into imagining a socialist utopia as a real future regime.

“While in their capacity as scientists,” Veatch concludes, “men can attain a knowledge of nature that is literally limitless in its own dimension, yet in respects to other dimensions such a scientific knowledge of nature is both narrowly defined and rigorously restricted, not merely in fact, but in principle” (RM 158). Much the same is true for quantitative logic. Meanwhile, however, “men merely as human beings,” not as scientists or mathematicians, “can, by exercising their intelligence, achieve a kind of commonsense understanding of their own nature and of the nature of the world they live in which is different from scientific knowledge, and for which scientific knowledge is no substitute” (RM 158).

 

William Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew.

 

Performed at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Summer 2007.

Performed at the Michigan Shakespeare Festival, July 22, 2017.

 

In front of an alehouse on a heath—a wild place in a wild place—the indignant hostess confronts Christopher Sly. A tinker or itinerant pot-maker, Christopher Sly lives up to the reputation of his profession, then held to be an occupation for drunks. He doesn’t live up to either part of his name, except in the way he puns off the name of his family: “Let the world slide” (Induction i.5). But as to the rest, he is neither a providential nor a provident man. Not Christlike—innocent as a dove, prudent as a serpent—not Machiavellian—vulpine and lion-like— he could not be less a ruler than he is. Incapable of rule, including self-rule, he seemingly cannot be ruled, at least not by the poor Hostess, whom he refuses to pay for some ale glasses he broke. Unjust, a man who will not pay his debts, like all drunks he harbors too much anger as well as too much appetite in his soul. Aristotle might call him the the least political man imaginable, and therefore not fully a man at all, since man is the political animal.

A better ruler, called only “Lord,” chances by, with his retinue and his hunting dogs. [1] Seeing poor, passed-out Sly, he likens him to a swine but recognizes him as human, a “drunken man,” under the Circean spell of ale (Induction i.34). But as a true ruler, the Lord not only judges men aright, he knows what to do with them. Take him back to my home (out of the wild, back to civil society) and make him “forget himself” (which is indeed a favor, given the character of his ‘self’) (Induction i.38). Like a stage director in a play, the Lord directs his men to hang “his fairest chamber” with “all my wanton pictures”; “balm his foul head with warm distilled waters”; scent the air by burning “sweet wood”; when he awakes, have music ready, “a dulcet and heavenly sound” (Induction i.44-49). Sight, touch, smell, hearing: four of the five senses will ‘argue’ for a new identity; eroticism, especially, brings a man out of himself, redirects his thoughts to the loved one (or ones, as there is more than one wanton picture). The Lord does not appeal to Sly’s taste, inasmuch as it inclines to the taste of ale. Let that sleeping swine lie.

“If he chance speak”—show a telltale sign of humanness—tell him a noble lie (Induction i.50): Address him as His Honor, ask him for a command; will you wash yourself, will you dress yourself, and how? Tell him he is a hunter, a horseman, a husband whose lady “mourns at his disease,” which is lunacy—a dreamlike condition from which he has just now awakened (Induction i.60). “Do it kindly, gentle sirs”; kindly means naturally, as he must be called back to his true, human, nature by natural means (Induction i.64). The Lord induces his men to look at it as an amusement, “pastime passing excellent, / If it be husbanded with modesty” (Induction i.65-66). Husbandry or agriculture works with nature; modesty or moderation works with care. He instructs his page, Bartholomew, to dress as a woman and pretend to be Sly’s wife, and to tell him he’s been deathly ill for seven years. Later, one of the Lord’s servants more than doubles the number to fifteen. With fine comic timing, a troupe of actors arrives, looking for work, which the Lord is happy to give them, inviting them to join in with “some sport in hand / Where you cunning can insist me much” (Induction i.89-90). But above all he needs them to rule themselves throughout the stage business. Don’t act ‘out of character’ in my play, lest my stagecraft fail. “Haply my presence / May well abate the over-merry spleen, / Which otherwise would grow into extremes” (Induction i.34-36). The true ruler’s presence moderates the passions of those he rules, civilizes them. He rules by natural means (water, sweet smoke) and mostly by art (wanton pictures, music, a play); Sly is very far from being ready for a real and civil life. He needs a comprehensive moral education.

The Lord and his men carry out this plot. Awakened but far from ‘woke,’ the patient asserts his identity: “I am Christopher Sly; call not me ‘honor’ nor lordship” (Induction ii.5). Reverting to his favorite appetite, he swears he “never drank sack in my life,” sherry being a gentleman’s drink, unlike his preferred ale, the drink of the people (Induction ii.7). For food he wants salt beef. He even gives his lineage, far from aristocratic, dating back only so far as his father, plain Burton Heath, a name that suggests the wild and inhuman part of nature where Sly was found. Son Christopher has been something of a changeling—peddler by birth, cardmaker by “education,” a keeper of a tame bear “by transmutation,” and “by present profession a tinker” (Induction ii.16-19). “Score me up for the lying’st knave in Christendom,” English Christendom’s finest example of the Cretan liar (Induction ii.23-24). To this, the Lord adjures him to “Call home thy ancient thoughts from banishment, / And banish these abject lowly dreams” (Induction ii.29-30). He commands Apollonian music, the opposite of Dionysian drunkenness. With judgelike authority, the Lord proclaims “Thou art a lord, and nothing but a lord,” with “a lady far more beautiful/ Than any woman in this waning age” (Induction ii.59-61).

That arrests the man’s attention, begins to reform his self-knowledge. “Am I a lord and have I such a lady?” (Induction ii.66). Do I dream now or have I been dreaming? Surely, “I do not sleep: I see, I hear, I speak;/ I smell sweet savours, and I feel soft things” (Induction ii.68-69); with a boost from wishful thinking, his senses convince him, as planned, even as common sense could not—he having little of that to work with. He calls for ale again, but now only the weakest kind. The Lord’s men ignore that, instead bringing in his ‘wife,’ Bartholomew, who tells him the doctor has left instructions for her not to share his bed with him, lest his illness recur.  The actors, whom the Lord encountered out on the heath, will cure his understandable melancholy at having his eros first aroused, then denied. They will stage a play, “The Taming of the Shrew.” This play-within-the-play will have its own play (or plays) within it, as the several levels of noble lies are arranged to lead not only a drunkard but all of Shakespeare’s audience (each of us likely drunk with some impediment to wisdom and the other virtues) to clear-eyed thoughts, through the senses but beyond them.

In the play we meet Lucentio (“Light”) and his servant Tranio. They have journeyed from Lombardy (specifically the city of Pisa, “renowned” for its “grave citizens”) (I.i.2). Lucentio would leave the home of a merchant father, foregoing citizenship for the liberal arts, the way to the philosophic life. “Here let us breathe, and haply institute/ A course of learned and ingenious studies” (I.i.8-9), especially the study of “Virtue and that part of philosophy” which “treats of happiness/ By virtue specially to be achiev’d” (I.i.18-20)—the philosophy found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Ah, but as Tranio may know, the Ethics might lead to the Politics, or, if not to politics, then to Stoicism. “Let’s be no Stoics nor no stocks”—restraints—”I pray,/ Or so devote to Aristotle’s checks”—his moderation—”As Ovid be an outcast quite abjured” (I.i.31-33). Logic, yes; rhetoric, very well; “music and poesy” by all means; even mathematics and metaphysics (I.i.36): But ‘pray’ “Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you. / No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en” (I.i.37-38). Epicurean Tranio has a mind rather like an American college student; he likes a curriculum with as many ‘electives’ as possible: “In brief, sir, study what you most affect,” what you want (I.i.40). If you would flee political life, select from Aristotle’s books as you please, but avoid the stern apoliticism of the Stoics and embrace the pleasurable apoliticism of the Epicureans. In Plautus’ play, Mostellaria, from which Shakespeare borrows him, Tranio is a clever slave, as indeed he is here: a man of wit, a fixer, but of ‘slavish’ character—low, pleasure-preferring, given to manipulating the low side of other souls, bending them to his own inclinations. “Gramercies, Tranio, well dost thou advise,” replies Lucentio, as he inclines toward becoming a genteel version of Sly (I.i.41).

An object for erotic desire enters immediately. A Paduan gentleman, Baptista Minola, has an apparently unmarriageable daughter, Katherine, “rough” and shrewish elder to studious, beautiful and modest Bianca. Hortensio and Gremio (the latter an unsuitable suitor, a comical old man exemplifying a stock figure in Italian comedy) would court Bianca, but Baptista will not marry his younger daughter until he finds a husband for undesirable Katherine. Upon seeing Bianca, Lucentio falls in love, too. He devises his own ‘play’ or plot to win her, proposing to present himself as a tutor in order to gain access to Bianca. Meanwhile, Tranio will assume Lucentio’s identity in Padua, a plausible imposture because faces alone don’t distinguish master from manservant. Nature makes no such distinction, at least physically; they can change clothes, even as a clothing change was part of the ‘play’ on Sly, and even as actors in plays change into their costumes, into their assumed identities—to sleep, perchance to dream, not of some Hell but of a person and of things outside their ordinary selves. And so, perhaps, to learn. Shakespeare himself served in his company as plotter, ruler, and player. And he learned as he went, from histories and light comedies to tragedies to The Tempest. Lucentio announces that he has another, undisclosed, purpose in his plotting, but does not say what it is.

This is to say that the Lord presents the changeling Sly with a play about changelings played by actors (themselves by definition changelings). The play will invite Sly to change, to reorient his soul, even as his condition has been changed for him by the Lord.

Veronese gentleman Petruchio and his servant Grumio (not to be confused with old man Gremio) have arrived in Padua to visit his “best beloved and approved friend,” Hortensio (I.ii.3). (The root of “Hortensio” means “garden”; there is perhaps a hint of apolitical Epicureanism in this university town.) His father having died, Petruchio seeks in Padua not the liberal arts but a fortune and a wife, preferably in the same person. Hortensio tells him he knows a prospect, unfortunately “shrewd and ill-favoured” (I.ii.58) but assuredly “rich, and very rich” (I.ii.61). As manly and thumotic as Lucentio is ardent and ‘intellectual,’ Petruchio replies that “wealth is the burden of my wooing dance” (I.ii.66). Therefore, “Be she as foul as was Florentius’ love” (an old hag who nonetheless turned into a beautiful woman, by magic), or “old as Sibyl,” or even “as curst and shrewd / As Socrates’ Xanthippe or a worse”—philosophy lingers in the background, even with Petruchio—all’s well that ends well, wellness being defined by him as wealth (I.ii.67-69). [2] He too has a plot: He will disguise himself as a music teacher to gain access to Baptista’s household, then take things from there.

Lucentio (having assumed his new identity as tutor “Cambio”) and Gremio pass by, discussing their own plots to win Bianca, overheard by the two friends. But Hortensio doesn’t know everything, as he assumes that Gremio really is Lucentio, and that he must be a rival to Petruchio for the hand of Katherine. Of course there’s no real conflict, as these suitors aim at different women. This becomes clear as Petruchio discourses on Katherine, “an irksome brawling scold” (I.ii.184) whom he nonetheless intends to woo: “Have I not in my time heard lions roar?” and the winds howl at sea, seen the “angry boar chafed with sweat” and “the great ordinance in the field,” indeed the greater “thunder in the sky” (I.ii.196-201)? Hunter (like the Lord), sailor and soldier, perhaps unfearful of Heaven’s lightning itself, why should Petruchio fear “a woman’s tongue” (I.ii.204)? He will proceed to vindicate his boast.

Lucentio’s servant Tranio enters, playing Lucentio, and proposes that he, Hortensio and old man Gremio, Bianca’s suitors, deal with one another “as adversaries do in law—/ Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends” (I.ii.275-275). It is a fine proposal for a comedy, and also sets up Tranio’s two gulls for the deception needed to give his master the decisive edge in his contest to win the lady.

Baptista’s house is the setting for the beginning of Petruchio’s celebrated taming of Katherine, who’s been acting insufferably toward her father and Bianca. Suspecting her blameless sister of desiring Hortensio, rich old Gremio, or both, she strikes her; when Baptista reprimands her, she turns on him, accusing him of favoring Bianca and vowing revenge. Baptista’s deranged household thus consists of a weak father, a rebellious and unsisterly daughter, and a decent young woman who for now must suffer them both. Padua, a place of liberal learning, features serious deficiencies in at least one of its ruling families. Families being the foundation of cities, of political life, Padua may be a university town with a government problem.

The several suitors arrive, and Petruchio executes his strategy, which is to contradict Katherine at every turn. Goading her by calling her by the diminutive, ‘Kate,’ he taunts her by praising her as pleasant, gamesome, courteous, slow in speech, yet “sweet as springtime flowers” (II.i.239). With broad irony, he lauds “her princely gait” (II.i.252) and her likeness to the virgin goddess, Diana—the way of a princess ambitious for rule but unfit for it, an impediment to the continuation of her own family and therefore in contradiction with her own ambition. He turns to romantic language, the language of courtly love, into a vehicle of infuriating mockery. For once, the lady is at a loss for words, speech being the coin of politics. She can only sputter, as her father offers her hand in marriage. She recovers her speech sufficiently to protest to when her desperate father, objecting to this impending marriage to a man she judges a “half lunatic,” “mad-cap ruffian” and “swearing jack” (II.i.280-281). Her taming has just begun; Petruchio exits, off to Venice to buy wedding-clothes, but not before describing his betrothed as “temperate as the morn,” the virtue associated with wise rulership in the play’s Induction. As Caton observes [3], Petruchio proceeds with Katherine very much as the Lord did with Sly, in principle if not in practice: To tame the immoderate and unruly soul, he subjects it to the opposite of what it wants, contradicting it at every turn. Unlike the Lord, he does not do so gently, as it were behind the back of his ‘student.’ Public shaming, not private illusion, must be the way to amend a soul drunk not on ale but on the will to power.

Gremio and Tranio (as “Lucentio”) end the scene by arguing over which of them deserves Bianca, appealing to Baptista’s love of wealth by describing their riches, real and alleged, respectively. Tranio outbids Gremio, but now he needs to produce the rich father he claimed. The two self-announced suitors appeal to the father. The two secret suitors, the real Lucentio (as tutor “Cambio”) and Hortensio (calling himself “Litio,” playing the role of a music-master), will make their approaches to the daughter. Both men pass love notes to Bianca in the course of ‘teaching’ her. She prefers “Cambio,” who rightly strikes her as the truer man, beneath the disguise. Hortensio proves the accuracy of her judgment by immediately thinking of shifting his love to someone else.

Long before the actress-queen in Hamlet, Katherine shows herself a woman who protesteth too much, chafing at Petruchio’s absence after having tried to order him to go away. It is this hitherto well-submerged sense that she hasn’t been living well in her father’s household, that she somehow wants and needs a husband stronger than her father, that makes her curable, that will enable Petruchio’s strong medicine to work. When he arrives, disheveled, clever but unwise Tranio begs him to “see not your bride in these unreverent robes,” to “go to my chamber, put on clothes of mine” (III.ii.108-109). Petruchio is not a man to be ‘dressed’ by another, advised by a very clever but less prudent (and less manly) man. The lady will be marrying him, not “my clothes” (III.ii.113), he replies. What she sees will be what she gets. Tranio suspects method in this madness, which continues at the wedding, when Petruchio avers to be “master of what is mine own,” a wife who “is my goods, my chattels,” and “my house,” and indeed his household stuff, field, barn, horse, ox, ass—”my any thing” (III.ii.225-228). Because she is his own, however, the man of military valor will defend her as his own, against all comers: “Kate, I’ll buckler thee against a million” (III.ii.235). He rules her by virtue of his nature, not by the dubious virtue of ‘clothes,’ that is, of convention, changeable appearance. Moderate Bianca, who needs no such taming, remarks that her sister, “being mad herself,” has been “madly mated” (III.ii.240). Thumos has yielded to the superior thumos.

Nor is Petruchio done. The shrew has yielded, but perhaps not wholeheartedly—and if not wholeheartedly, then not for long. Reversing the tactic of the Lord, he takes Katherine from the city to the country. Sly is a human being ‘countrified’ by ale, a drunk passed out on the heath—in a ‘state of nature,’ as later writers would put it. He needs to be civilized gently, by means of seductive illusions, removed to civilization to live a noble lie for a time, in order to learn the truth about his real nature. Katherine, an uncivilized denizen of eminently civil, indeed liberal-artsy, Padua, needs not the gentle atmosphere she has learned to exploit but roughness, exposure to harsh truths, crushing defeat by someone who plays her own game better than she does. She needs exposure to a state of war. Petruchio abuses the servants; she pleads for them, thereby getting out of herself, as did Sly under the rule of the Lord. As one of the servants remarks, “He kills her in her own humor,” even as the Lord kills Sly with kindness (IV.i.169). Like Sly, she “sits as one new risen from a dream” (IV.i.170). In both cases, it is a dream induced in order to bring the patient back to reality. “Thus have I politicly begun my reign,” Petruchio replies (IV.i.172). Unlike Lucentio, like the Lord, Petruchio is a political man. But Caton is wrong to think that he is a Machiavellian one. [4] Petruchio rules her not as a tyrant, for his advantage alone, but for her own good. That is, he rules her as a parent rules a child, replacing her hapless father in founding a new household. “Amid this hurly I intend / That all is done in reverend care of her” (IV.i.187-188). Here he reveals his true nature; he had claimed to be interested only in a rich wife, but now we know he wants a good one. Right rule is a kind of practical wisdom: “He that knows better how to tame a shrew, / Now let him speak; ’tis charity to show” (IV.i.194-195). Like his near-namesake Petrarch, Petruchio knows how to address a woman. Courtly Petrarch shows how to address a gentlewoman; Petruchio shows how to address an ungentle and indeed unkind one.

He soon teaches her how to beg, instead of her habitual commanding. He starves her body, taunting her by offering and then taking away both food and clothing. Enforced bodily suffering requires recourse to the mind, and indeed, as Petruchio instructs her, “‘Tis the mind that makes the body rich; / And as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds,/ So honour peereth in the meanest habit” (IV.iii.68-70). Her thumos, misdirected toward prideful libido dominandi, must be redirected toward the natural honor of a human being, founded in its distinctive nature, the capacity to reason. “O no, good Kate; neither art thou the worse/ For this poor furniture and mean array” (IV.iii.175-76). As with Sly, she must learn her true ‘identity,’ her nature, stripped of convention. When she continues to murmur in rebellion, Petruchio even ‘makes’ time stand still: “It shall be what o’clock I say it is” (IV.iii.191). (Newton supposes time a constant, but Petruchio anticipates Einstein.) He soon makes her call the sun the moon, and then the sun again. Like the Lord, he bends his patient’s perceptions of nature to his will, so as to break her ill-will, and by so doing bring her to see nature aright.

Back in the city, in front of Baptista’s house, Tranio finds in an elderly “Pedant” passing by the perfect type for the needed role of Vincentio, Lucentio’s ‘rich father.’ As a smart casting director, he gives the old fellow motivation, gulling him into believing that his life’s in danger, telling him that he must assume the role of Vincentio for safety’s sake. Pedants and the elderly alike tend to have timid souls. His master and Bianca plot elopement; this is the additional plot Lucentio had hinted at, earlier, as he deployed the decoy ‘Lucentio’ to distract Baptista’s attention from the doings of the real one with Baptista’s daughter. But his, their, plot takes a twist when his real father meets Petruchio along the road and learns from him of the impending marriage. The elopement proceeds, but the young marrieds must now return to Padua, and to their fathers, neither of whom is a happy man for the deceptions. Petruchio and his Kate (herself now openly in love) can now watch the show with amusement, as the quiet, seemingly docile couple have made themselves the center of controversy.

They all gather not at father Baptista’s house but at Lucentio’s; as the Bible and nature both command, the newly-married couple cleave to one another, form a new household. There, Lucentio can offer his guests hospitality, bring “our jarring notes” to “agree” (V.ii.1). “Feast with the best, and welcome to my house” (V.ii.8). (At last, Kate will be fed.) “Pray you, sit down; / For now we sit to chat as well as eat” (V.ii.10-11). This is the first time anyone in the play sits, comes to rest. To eat is to serve the body; to speak is to exercise the mind; the jarring notes of body and soul can now agree in the newly and rightly constituted household, where the newly and rightly constituted household of spirited Petruchio and Kate are welcome guests. When Baptista, Petruchio, Lucentio, and Hortensio (successfully married to a rich widow) make a playful bet on whose wife is the most obedient, Petruchio wins; Kate’s love of victory, redirected, can now contribute to a re-founded, better household than the one she left for marriage.

She makes her victory speech to the ladies, when commanded by Petruchio to “tell these headstrong women / What duty they owe their lords and husbands” (V.ii.135-136). This she proceeds to do, but not in her former way, by her once-characteristic habit of berating. She reasons with them. Her rhetoric depends upon an account of human nature. She teaches them that nature, shared by men and women, has also has differentiated them. She will prove a better Paduan lecturer than many a university prof, then and there, now and here.

“Unknit that threatening unkind brow” (V.ii.136). As always in Shakespeare “kind” means natural, as in grouping natural objects according to their kind, their species. Some parts of nature are also kind in our sense, but not all—as for example the heath from which the Lord rescued Sly. Why is a threatening brow unnatural in a wife? Kate offers four reasons: It wounds your husband, your rightful ruler; it blots your beauty; it ruins your “fame,” your reputation; it is neither “meet” nor “amiable” (V.ii.140-41). Like a dirty fountain, no one will drink from it. That is, if a wife will share a household with her husband, any attempt to inspire fear will fail, if he is a real man, the kind you want for a husband. Your way with him must go through attraction, through your beauty and your amiableness. You will be better off if respected by him, and by others; your honor, even the honor of your family, depends on it.

Properly, your husband is your sovereign, but both a gentle and a kind one, one who “cares for thee” (V.ii.147). He does this by committing his body to “painful labor both by sea and land” (V.ii.147). You stay “warm at home secure and safe” (V.ii.151). In justice, you owe in return for his care “love, fair looks, and true obedience,” the duties a subject owes his prince (V.ii.153). Why so? To disobey “his honest will” makes the wife a “graceless traitor to her loving lord” (V.ii.158-160). But why are these sharply distinct ‘roles’—our own contemporary term suggests playacting—natural?  By nature, women’s bodies are “soft and weak and smooth,” ill-fitted for painful labor both by sea and land, at least in comparison to the bodies of men. Undermine your husband and you weaken his ability to defend you and the household you share with him. The bodies of women are fitted for living in soft conditions, not for “toil and trouble in the world (V.ii.166). Our hearts should be correspondingly soft, Kate urges—harmonized with those of caring husbands, as the Apollonian music heard by Sly might do to his shrewish, unruly soul. Therefore, she reasonably concludes, wives should curb their willfulness and do their own natural duty, even as husbands do theirs.

“Why, there’s a wench!” Petruchio rightly exclaims (V.ii.180). He commands a kiss, and receives one. “We’ll to bed” (V.ii.184), as their marriage is now of a kind as may prove a just, natural, secure foundation for a family.

As for his brother-in-law Lucentio, in victory Petruchio can be magnanimous, great-souled: ‘Twas I who won the wager, though you hit the white”—punning on Bianca’s name—and “being a winner, God give you good night!” (V.ii.186). Whereas thumotic Petruchio presents the matter in terms of victory, Lucentio presents it in terms of thought: “‘Tis a wonder, by your leave, she will be tam’d so.” Philosophy begins in wonder. Lucentio came to Padua to study philosophy, the crown of the liberal arts. Tranio has failed to side-track him. Lucentio needs the example of his spirited, shrew-taming friend to spur him to philosophy, away from a slack epicureanism. Fortunately, his own wife will need no taming, so the young Socrates, if that is what he proves, will have no Xanthippe to harass him. In forming an alliance, and by forming it at Lucentio’s house, Petruchio and his new friend will strengthen the city or cities in which they live. They have formed an alliance between philosophic reason, practical reason, and spiritedness that mirrors not only a well-ordered regime but a well-ordered soul.

What can ale-soaked Sly learn from this play? He can learn how to order his soul rightly He can learn to tame his inner shrew, the anger that lies beneath his drunkenness, the anger that must have made his soul drunk before he touched a drop of the brew. He can learn to get out of his own passions and appetites, away from his longtime identity, aspire to self-rule instead of self-indulgence, make a change that puts an end to his changeling ways. Although men and women have very different ways, by nature, as human beings they struggle with the same anger, the same libido dominandi, while remaining capable of the same capacities to reason and to love, justly and wisely. There is the foundation, in families, for good cities. If Sly heeds the lesson, he will no longer let the world slide, but join in the task of ruling it well, if only by ceasing to be unruly.

 

Notes

1. See Hiram Caton: “On the Induction of The Taming of the Shrew.” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 3, Number 1, Summer 1972, 53.
2.  Florentius appears in the Wyf of Bath’s Tale, a tale about the proper nature of a wife. A young knight and “lusty bachelor” in King Arthur’s court, Florentius rapes a maid and faces death by beheading. Arthur’s wife, Guinevere, calls the king to an act of just mercy: He consents to her ‘plot,’ that Florentius will have a year and a day to discover “what thing is it that women moost desiren.” Florentius goes on the quest, but eventually despairs, as some women tell him they want riches, others honor, or “jolynesse,” or “riche array,” or “lust abedde,” or flattery, or attention, or “bisynesse,” or freedom (meaning to do as they like). And so on. Near the end of his period of reprieve, he comes upon more than two dozen ladies dancing in the forest, ‘in nature,’ who vanish, leaving behind an “old wyf,” foul as she can be—worse than the much-married Wyf of Bath herself. She agrees to tell him the answer to the queen’s question, in exchange for his promise to grant her a wish. The answer, he will tell Guinevere, is “Wommen desire to have sovereynetee / And for to been in maistrie him above.” All women, or at least “worldly women,” harbor this libido dominandi, which Katherine exhibits openly. In exchange for this answer, which Guinevere approves as the correct one (Arthur acceded to it in granting her original request), the old wife demands marriage to Florentius. Understandably, the young knight resists, at which point the old wife offers him another bargain: You can have me “foul and old” but true and humble or young and fair and take your chances. Having now learned what women really want, Florentius leaves the decision up to her: She rewards him by changing into a woman both “fair and good.” They seal their marriage with a kiss, as indeed Petruchio and Kate will do, at the end of the play.
3.  Caton op. cit., 53.
4.  Ibid. 57-58. Both the Lord and Petruchio aim at the good of the one they govern, not simply at their own good, as does Machiavelli’s prince.