Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Religion: help or hindrance to philosophy?

The Greeks were the first to do philosophy, and one of the perennially great questions is: Why the Greeks and not some others? Various answers focus on their cosmopolitan trading economy, their concurrent development of democratic politics, or some other combination of factors.

I have long thought that the Greeks’ naturalistic religion was a positive, contributing factor. Since their deities were naturalistic beings, the Greeks were less likely to think of the world as governed by other-worldly beings beyond their comprehension. Since the Greek deities intervened in human affairs for motives we can understand (lust, rivalry, envy, revenge), the Greeks were more likely to think of the world as intelligibly cause and effect. And so on.

So let me turn to the dissenting view, from the estimable John Stuart Mill, which I only recently came across. In an 1846 review of George Grote’s History of Greece, Mill takes up the question of philosophy’s birth and says this about the Greeks and their religion:

“With a religious creed eminently unfavourable to speculation, because affording a ready supernatural solution of all natural phenomena, they yet originated freedom of thought.”

Mill’s suggestion is that since the Greek religion already provided easy and intelligible explanations for natural events, there would no reason to seek further. Religion of the Greek sort is thus a hindrance to the development of philosophy.

Thoughts? Should I stick with my original view, or should I switch to Mill’s intriguing hypothesis?

[Mill's “A Review of the first Two Volumes of ‘Grote’s History of Greece’” from the Edinburgh Review, October 1846, can be read online here.]

The scientific mind, according to Aristotle

One of my all-time favorite passages from Aristotle is in his Parts of Animals (Book 1, Chapter 5). After discussing some introductory taxonomic and methodological issues in the animal sciences, Aristotle expresses his wonder and fascination with all aspects of nature, great and small, beautiful to the eye and not:

“Having already treated of the celestial world, as far as our conjectures could reach, we proceed to treat of animals, without omitting, to the best of our ability, any member of the kingdom, however ignoble. For if some have no graces to charm the sense, yet even these, by disclosing to intellectual perception the artistic spirit that designed them, give immense pleasure to all who can trace links of causation, and are inclined to philosophy. Indeed, it would be strange if mimic representations of them were attractive, because they disclose the mimetic skill of the painter or sculptor, and the original realities themselves were not more interesting, to all at any rate who have eyes to discern the reasons that determined their formation. We therefore must not recoil with childish aversion from the examination of the humbler animals. Every realm of nature is marvellous: and as Heraclitus, when the strangers who came to visit him found him warming himself at the furnace in the kitchen and hesitated to go in, reported to have bidden them not to be afraid to enter, as even in that kitchen divinities were present, so we should venture on the study of every kind of animal without distaste; for each and all will reveal to us something natural and something beautiful. Absence of haphazard and conduciveness of everything to an end are to be found in Nature’s works in the highest degree, and the resultant end of her generations and combinations is a form of the beautiful” (645a).

A passionate quest for passionless truth indeed.

Aristotle’s enchantment with the world reminds me of this sentiment expressed 2,200 years later by John Stuart Mill:

“A cultivated mind — I do not mean that of a philosopher, but any mind to which the fountains of knowledge have been opened, and which has be taught, in any tolerable degree, to exercise its faculties — finds sources of inexhaustible interest in all that surrounds it: in the objects of nature, the achievements of art, the imaginations of poetry, the incidents of history, the ways of mankind, past and present, and their prospects for the future” (Utilitarianism, Chapter 2).

Some things never change, and I love it.

Is commerce rendering war obsolete?

In his essay “To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” Kant wrote that “the spirit of commerce, which is incompatible with war, sooner or later gains the upper hand in every state.”

Kant was not a friend of the spirit of commerce, which he associated with the Jews, whom he despised as “immoral and vile” and as a “nation of swindlers.” Nonetheless he believed that the spirit of commerce is opposed the spirit of war.

John Stuart Mill agreed: “It is commerce which is rapidly rendering war obsolete.”

Unlike Kant, Mill was fully in favor of this development: “commerce first taught nations to see with good will the wealth and prosperity of one another,” which overcomes the tradition of seeing other countries’ gains as your country’s losses, which leads to a lessening of war and an increase in mutually-beneficial interactions. That’s from Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, Book III, Chapter XVII, Section 14.

Kant and Mill are asserting the “Capitalist Peace” thesis, which is related to the “Democratic Peace” thesis, both of which can be integrated to form a “Liberal Peace” thesis.

For a contemporary version of democratic peace, I recommend the University of Hawaii’s Rudolph Rummel’s Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence (Transaction Publishers, 1997), and for a contemporary version of capitalist peace, I recommend Columbia University’s Eric Gartzke’s essay “The Capitalist Peace” [pdf].

Some questions for the capitalist peace thesis:

The relatively peaceful nineteenth century was friendly to the capitalist peace thesis. True?
The relatively war-ful twentieth century—does it undermine the capitalist peace thesis?
Wars in the twentieth century were capitalist-leaning countries fighting socialist countries. True?
Are there any twentieth-century examples of capitalist-leaning countries fighting wars against other capitalist-leaning countries?

Haters

I’m all confused.

The hot-headed Nietzsche’s startling line from his 1887 Genealogy of Morals has always stuck with me: “the truly great haters in world history have always been priests.”

That’s from the First Essay, Section 7, in the context of his analysis of slave morality born of ressentiment.

But now I read that, according to the judicious John Stuart Mill, in a work published in 1879: “if appearances can be trusted, the animating principle of too many of the revolutionary socialists is hate.”

That’s from p. 430 of Principles of Political Economy and Chapters on Socialism, in the context of Mill’s analysis of those socialists who seem less interested in improvement than in rage against the ills of the current system.

So who’s right?

Over a century later, in our own era of jihadists and deconstructionists, has anything changed? Do we have better evidence to say whether Nietzsche or Mill is more correct?

Philosophy’s longest sentences

I hereby announce a contest: What is the longest sentence ever written by a philosopher?

The kind of sentence that, as you are reading it through — trying to hold the context and decipher the meaning — flows majestically onwards, or meanders along deceptively, with occasional side streams (and parenthetical remarks), until your cerebrum is full, your powers of concentration are taxed, your resolve is flagging, and you find yourself praying ‘Please God let there be a period soon.’

(Pretty pathetic, hmm? A mere 62 words.)

My contribution to the contest will be four quotations, which I will post once per week over the next few weeks.

Here is my first candidate, weighing in at 161 words, from Chapter 2 of John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism:

“We may give what explanation we please of this unwillingness; we may attribute it to pride, a name which is given indiscriminately to some of the most and to some of the least estimable feelings of which mankind are capable; we may refer it to the love of liberty and personal independence, as appeal to which was with the Stoics one of the most effective means for the inculcation of it; to the love of power or to the love of excitement, both of which do really enter into and contribute to it; but its most appropriate appellation is a sense of dignity, which all human beings possess in one form or other, and in some, though by no means in exact, proportion to their higher faculties, and which is so essential a part of the happiness of those in whom it is strong that nothing which conflicts with it could be otherwise than momentarily an object of desire to them.”

Feel welcome to post your candidates in the comments below.