Hobbes and the Argument from Disagreement

In De Cive (The Citizen), Hobbes makes the Argument from Disagreement (AofD) to dismiss traditional moral philosophy (this is from the introductory letter):

"If the moral philosophers had as happily discharged their duty, I know not what could have been added by human industry to the completion of that happiness, which is consistent with human life. For were the nature of human actions as distinctly known as the nature of quantity in geometrical figures, the strength of avarice and ambition, which is sustained by the erroneous opinions of the vulgar as touching the nature of right and wrong, would presently faint and languish; and mankind should enjoy such an immortal peace..."

Hobbes, in typical modern fashion, thinks that the failure of traditional moral philosophy is due to its unscientific character, or its inability to think precisely in the model of the modern natural sciences. The unscientific character of traditional moral argument leads to a diversity of opinion and lack of progress:

"But now on the contrary, that neither the sword nor the pen should be allowed any cessation; that the knowledge of the law of nature should lose its growth, not advancing a whit beyond its ancient stature; that there should still be such siding with the several factions of philosophers, that the very same action should be decried by some, and as much elevated by others; that the very same man should at several times embrace his several opinions, and esteem his own actions far otherwise in himself than he does in others: these, I say, are so many signs, so many manifest arguments, that what hath hitherto been written by moral philosophers, hath not made any progress in the knowledge of the truth; but yet hath took with the world, not so much by giving any light to the understanding as entertainment to the affections, whilst by the successful rhetorications of their speech they have confirmed them in their rashly received opinions."

What indicates the failure of moral philosophy? It's failure to make progress or produce results. Results are the intellectual coin of the realm in the modern world. Knowledge of the law of nature has not grown "a whit" since ancient times. Hobbes adds a new wrinkle to the Argument from Disagreement by citing not only the disagreements among philosophers, but the disagreements of philosophers with themselves.

Hobbes's point reveals a basic misunderstanding of traditional moral philosophy. His point is not new and was addressed by Aristotle long, long ago in the Nichomachean Ethics, Book I, Ch. 3:

"In studying this subject we must be content if we attain as high a degree of certainty as the matter of it admits. The same accuracy or finish is not to be looked for in all discussions any more than in all the productions of the studio and the workshop. The question of the morally fine and the just - for this is what political science attempts to answer - admits of so much divergence and variation of opinion that it is widely believed that morality is a convention and not part of the nature of things. We find a similar fluctuation of opinion about the character of the good. The reason for this is that quite often good things have hurtful consequences. There are instances of men who have been ruined by their money or killed by their courage. Such being the nature of our subject and such our way of arguing in our discussions of it, we must be satisfied with a rough outline of the truth, and for the same reason we must be content with broad conclusions. Indeed we must preserve this attitude when it comes to a more detailed statement of the views that are held. It is a mark of the educated man and a proof of his culture that in every subject he looks for only so much precision as its nature permits..."

Aristotle later in the Ethics elaborates on why moral philosophy will not produce "results" or make "progress" as math or the natural sciences do. Moral philosophy addresses ends, that is what is good and evil. But who has knowledge of the good? Does the wicked or dissolute man have a true knowledge of the good? No, it is the wise and virtuous man who has a true understanding of the good. Unlike math, which can be understood equally well by the evil man as well as the good man, only the good man can truly understand moral philosophy. The education of character, then, is a prerequisite to a true understanding of moral philosophy. The best things in life like love, friendship, justice, honor and magnanimity, are only truly known through experience, and therefore only the man who has lived well for some time can truly know them. The Nichomachean Ethics is not a work addressed to evil or skeptical men, as though they can be forced to acknowledge what is good and just. It is a book addressed to men of good character as a way for them to understand themselves in their virtue, and to point the direction to others who already have some education in virtue. It is natural that there should have been and always will be disagreement about good and evil, for to the bad man evil appears good and is experienced as pleasant. Aristotle even shows why moral philosophers disagree with their own philosophy from time to time. As they mature in virtue and wisdom, they come to a greater knowledge of the good, and from that deeper knowledge they have a foundation from which to criticize their own prior philosophy. But, as with the Argument from Disagreement in general, the fact of disagreement over moral philosophy proves very little.

Interestingly, Hobbes himself argues against the AofD shortly after the passage I quoted above. In his Preface, he lays the groundwork for his famous doctrine of the "state of nature", and that in the state of nature all men distrust and dread each other. He anticipates objections:

"You will object, perhaps, that there are some who deny this. Truly so it happens, that very many do deny it. But shall I therefore seem to fight against myself, because I affirm that the same men confess and deny the same thing? In truth I do not; but they do, whose actions disavow what their discourses approve of. We see all countries, though they are at peace with their neighbors, yet guarding their frontiers with armed men, their towns with walls and forts, and keeping constant watches. To what purpose is all this, if there be no fear of the neighboring power?...Can men give a clearer testimony of the distrust they have each of other, and all of all? How, since they do thus, and even in countries as well as men, they publicly profess their mutual fear and diffidence. But in disputing they deny it; that is as much as to say, that out of a desire they have to contradict others, they gainsay themselves."

Hobbes invokes the principle that disagreement is meaningful only if there is good reason for it. And he cites the prudential defensive measures that individual men as well as cities take as evidence that the objectors themselves don't really believe in their objection (bringing into play the distinction between the public and private books of philosophy.)

And, of course, a similar principle holds with respect to Hobbes's use of the AofD to undermine traditional moral philosophy. That disagreement is meaningful to the extent that there are good reasons for it. But, as we see from Aristotle, disagreement is to be expected as a matter of course in moral philosophy.

The Argument from Disagreement in Action

My favorite writer at National Review, John Derbyshire, has deployed the Argument from Disagreement over at the Corner. The Derb styles himself a "mysterian", but it is hard to tell the practical difference between him and an atheist.

In this case, Derb cites the varieties of religious belief as a reason to be skeptical of religion, and he compares the truths of religion with those "corny, laughable old non-transcendent" truths, among which he cites E=MC squared and Euler's Equation. And, of course, it is certain that it is more difficult to become certain of religious truths than it is of the truths of math and the physical sciences (which isn't to say that such certainty is unobtainable.)

But we may compare the corny, laughable old non-transcendent truths with religious truths in another way. The object of religious truth is the end of man, or the point and meaning of his existence. Knowing the end of man or, if he doesn't have one, that in fact he does not have one, is necessary to understanding the nature of man. And understanding the nature of man is essential to living a reasonable life, a "reflected life." Unfortunately, Euler's equation and anything like it doesn't help you at all in discovering the nature of man (other than the fact that man is the kind of creature who can know Euler's equation.) The non-transcendent truths the Derb cites are very useful as means but no use at all as ends. They are very useful at helping you achieve your goals but no help at all in knowing what those goals should be. Of what use is it to have a supremely fast car if you have no idea in what direction to drive it? This is an image of the modern world: A world of high-powered sports cars driving in circles, the quest for ever more speed and technical virtuosity an end in itself because we know of nothing else to do. Derb doesn't like the Space Shuttle and International Space Station programs because they serve no purpose outside themselves: The point of the Space Station is to be a destination for the Shuttle, and the point of the Shuttle is to have a means of getting back and forth from the Station. But these two programs encapsulate nicely the philosophical state of the modern world. We are unsurpassed masters at technical achievement but have forgotten how to know anything in non-technical terms, the only terms in which the end can be known.

Science and mathematical truth is more certainly known than much of philosophical truth (but not necessarily religious truth, and not philosophically known, self-evident principles), but it is less valuable than philosophical or religious truth, or truth about ends. This was a truism of ancient philosophers: "The slenderest knowledge of the highest things is worth more than the most certain knowledge of lesser things" (St. Thomas Aquinas). The two qualities of truth are its nobility and its certainty, and "it is the mark of an educated man and a proof of his culture that in every subject he looks for only so much precision as its nature permits" (Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics). We in the modern world have lost all sight of the nobility of truth; for us, the only noble truths are certain truths. Thus the truths of mathematics look "pretty good" compared to religious truth because the only scale on which we know to judge truth is by its certainty. But they don't look so good when you are not just trying to get to Miami, but trying to understand why the heck you should even be going there in the first place.

The Argument from Disagreement, Part II

I argued in Part I of this discussion that the Argument from Disagreement (AfD) draws its strength from the ignorance of the listener. The history of philosophy, on superficial inspection, seems to present itself as a never-ending series of disagreements that are never really resolved. Ignorant of the substance of those disagreements, the listener assumes them to be fundamental to philosophy and to characterize its essence. But disagreements are only meaningful if they are knowledgeable, and to know if they are knowledgeable, we must understand philosophy rather than dismiss it with a priori arguments. Continuing that theme, I will argue here that disagreement can’t possibly be the essence of philosophy.

Disagreement is only possible in terms of a more fundamental, underlying agreement between the parties involved. If philosophers are in utter disagreement with each other, they can have nothing to say to each other, for they will have no place from which to begin the conversation. But there is no point in endlessly repeating points of agreement. The conversation is only advanced when we address points of disagreement and see whether they can be overcome. Therefore it is natural that philosophical dialog would seem, to the superficial observer, to be characterized primarily by disagreement. For even if philosophers largely agree with each other, they will not spend their time reciting their agreements but rather hashing out their disagreements. The long history of philosophical conversation, including its disagreements, is testimony to what can be known through philosophy, not the fruitlessness of philosophy. If philosophy were the vain endeavor its critics suppose it to be, then men would have long since stopped indulging in it.

Let us take a specific case to flesh this point out. An ancient and fundamental philosophical question concerns the one and the many, or unity and multiplicity. The question arises because philosophers long ago recognized that unity is not just another thing we know about or experience in the world; it is in some sense behind everything we experience in the world. I wake up in the morning and see the sun and know that a new day has begun. The sun comes to me as a combination of unity and multiplicity. Its rays come to me over time and I can see that the sun is spread out in space. In that sense, I can see that the sun is multiple because it is divisible in time and space. On the other hand, it is one and the same sun that I experience across time and that is spread out across space. In that sense, I can see that the sun is a unity. What is the relationship between unity and multiplicity in the sun, and what is it about the sun that allows it to be both unified and multiple? Furthermore, I see that these same notions of unity and multiplicity characterize other things in my experience, from dogs and cats to trees, boats and rocks, to the number “five” and my own self-identity, to law and the meaning of justice (Is there one justice that men know or are there many different justices that go by the same name?) In fact, unity and multiplicity characterize everything in my experience to such a degree that we may wonder if it is possible to have any experience at all without having an implicit experience of unity and multiplicity. Unity and multiplicity are not ordinary attributes like color, size, shape, evenness, or number. These latter attributes can be applied to some things and not others. An apple has a color but it is neither odd nor even; the number five is odd but does not have a color. But apples, color, evenness, and five all participate in unity and multiplicity. Unity and multiplicity are what may be called “transcendentals” because they transcend all other attributes in the sense of being more fundamental than any of them. Philosophers, whose deepest desire is to get to the most fundamental truth about things, naturally home in on the transcendentals as a point of conversation.

All that I have written in the last paragraph is a statement of near universal agreement among the philosophers of history. The problem of the “one and the many” was first clearly stated by Plato, and he framed the conversation as it continued in Aristotle, Plotinus, Thomas Aquinas, Leibniz and Kant, among many others. Understanding the difference between transcendentals and ordinary attributes was a prerequisite to joining the conversation and constituted the basis of agreement on which the conversation was conducted. (This is why Plato is indispensable basic reading in philosophy.) But, of course, philosophers did not spend the bulk of their time congratulating themselves on their mutual agreement. They spent their time discussing their different answers to the question of the ultimate nature of the one and the many.

The difference between Thomas Aquinas and Kant, for example, may be understood in terms of the different answers they give to the question of the one and the many. For St. Thomas, unity and multiplicity are fundamental to any experience because they qualify being as such. We have tapped into the fundamental nature of things with our notions of unity and multiplicity. Something is only to the extent that it is one. The tree with its roots in the ground and leaves spread to the sky is a unified whole. Chop it down and cut it into firewood and it loses its unity and therefore its being; it passes out of existence into the multiple beings that are merely wood. Each piece of wood, of course, has its own unity as long as it maintains itself in being but, like the tree, they are themselves subject to corruption in the form of loss of unity. For Kant, the transcendentals do not qualify being as such but only our experience of being. Kant thought that philosophers like St. Thomas were “naïve” in directly attributing trancendentals to being. The most we can suppose, Kant says, is that the transcendentals are forms we impose on experience. What being is really like, out there beyond our experience, is something we can never say. Unity and multiplicity are, we might say, “filters” that our pre-conscious thought places on being as conditions of experience.

I side with Aristotle and St. Thomas against Kant, but will not argue the point here. The point for now is not whether their disagreement can be resolved, but the fact that their disagreement is only possible in light of a more fundamental agreement concerning the significance of transcendentals. What unifies the philosophical tradition of the West is its agreement on what the important questions are, and this in turn reflects a basic philosophical agreement that is more often implied than directly stated. The very fact that we can read the twenty-five hundred year philosophical history of the West as a coherent narrative testifies that there is a unity manifest in it. If that history were one of unconstrained contradiction, no coherent history of it would be possible, anymore than we could form a coherent narrative by piecing together random bits of history from Africa, Asia and South America.

Part III to come...

The Argument from Disagreement, Part I

A standard complaint against philosophy is that it never really produces reliable knowledge. An indication of this is the historical disagreement of philosophers. The doctrine of any given philosopher is contradicted by some other philosopher; and that philosopher is in turn contradicted by yet another philosopher, and on and on. Plato says the pre-Socratics were wrong, Aristotle says Plato was wrong, Lucretius says that Aristotle was wrong, Descartes says that Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius were all wrong, Kant says that Descartes was wrong, and on and on. We can suppose that this process will continue indefinitely. At least we have no reason to think that it won’t. We can compare this history with that of the empirical sciences, which do issue in secure knowledge (at least compared with philosophy.) Even when science is contradicted (as Einstein contradicted Newton), the contradiction is only partial and by way of development. Einstein showed that Newton’s Laws are only approximately true, not that they are utterly false, which is the charge that philosophers regularly hurl at each other. Therefore we may conclude that philosophy consists of more or less idle speculation that can never result in secure knowledge. Or, when it does (as it has in the theorems of logic), its results have long since been absorbed by modern scientific thought. The philosophers of the past, then, are of merely historical interest. They have nothing of value to contribute to the ongoing understanding of ourselves and reality. Their history of ongoing disagreement proves that philosophy will never issue in secure knowledge.

The first thing to consider with respect to this “argument from disagreement” (for which I will use the shorthand AfD from here on) is that the data on which it is based is manifestly true. Historically, philosophers have directly and fundamentally contradicted each other. We should not make the mistake, however, of thinking that this is an observation peculiar to modernity. Philosophy was already old by the time of Socrates and the AfD was already a common indictment of philosophy. In fact, one of the charges against Socrates at his trial was that he engaged in clever verbal dialectics that never really established anything but just confused people, making the “weaker argument seem the stronger.” The AfD is a charge that accompanies philosophy like a shadow whenever it is practiced; it is co-existent with philosophy. This should lead us to suspect that the AfD may not be the unbiased conclusion from history that it supposes itself to be.

There is, in fact, something strange about the logic of the AfD. The significance of disagreement is itself something about which philosophers disagree; it follows from the AfD that we can therefore draw no secure conclusion from the fact of disagreement. The AfD undermines itself. The disagreement among philosophers means that we can’t draw conclusions from that disagreement anymore than we can draw any other philosophical conclusion.

Another curious feature of the AfD is its potentially self-fulfilling character. Suppose every philosopher in the world agreed with the doctrines of Aristotle. I could undermine the agreement by simply starting my own philosophical school for the express purpose of contradicting Aristotle. Even if my reasons for contradicting Aristotle were not good, I could point to the “fact of disagreement” as itself reason to doubt Aristotle.

This brings us to disagreement as an empirical fact. There is a distinction between simple disagreement and knowledgeable disagreement. Anyone can disagree with anyone simply by contradicting him. But such a “fact of disagreement” is meaningless unless there is a good reason that supports the disagreement. Disagreement with Aristotle is meaningful if the author of disagreement has mastered the philosophy of Aristotle such that his disagreement reflects a deep understanding of Aristotelian philosophy, and not merely his own degenerate understanding of Aristotle.

The thing about great philosophers like Aristotle and Kant is that they were great philosophers because of their unusual degree of intelligence, learning and insight. We should expect, then, that the mastery of a great philosopher is no easy task, one that might take a lifetime of study, if it is possible at all. Are Kant’s criticisms of classical philosophy knowledgeable criticisms? Did Kant understand Aristotle well-enough that he understood the meaning of Aristotelian philosophy better than did Aristotle? Or was Kant only refuting his limited understanding of Aristotle and not Aristotle in his full depth? The only way to decide this question is to understand both Kant and Aristotle sufficiently such that our conclusion is itself knowledgeable. In other words, the history of philosophical disagreement means nothing unless we have mastered the reasons for those disagreements, which means mastering the philosophers themselves.

Why is the AfD so attractive and why is it an eternal indictment of philosophy? The lure of the argument is that it offers the opportunity to dismiss philosophers without actually taking the trouble to understand them. Who wants to slog through Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Avicenna and Aquinas just to prove them wrong? What a relief to have an argument to hand that dismisses two thousand years of philosophy with a wave of the hand. The argument turns on the ancient sophistical trick of flattery. It offers up the history of philosophical disagreement to the judgment of the listener, with the implicit assumption that the listener is competent to judge the significance of that disagreement. It flatters the listener in his ignorance, rather than exposing that ignorance for what it is in the manner of the true philosopher, archetypically in Socrates (and we know what Socrates received for his trouble.) The irony (or maybe tragedy) of the AfD is that it works to cut off the listener from a genuine encounter with Socrates, the one philosopher who could reveal to the listener the sophistical fallacy behind the AfD.

More to come in Part II...