Four Phases of Morals: Socrates, Aristotle, Christianity, Utilitarianism

by John Stuart Blackie

We have now clearly before us the battle-field in which Socrates had to appear, and the opponents with whom he had to contend; we see also the cause for which he had to fight. This was nothing less than the establishment of a firm philosophy of human life, a sure guide for human conduct, and a strong regulator of society. The way now lies open to inquire what special doctrine he taught in order to achieve victory in this struggle; and a careful perusal of Xenophon’s book, which we regard as the only safe authority in the matter, leads to a generalized statement of the Socratic moral philosophy, comprised in the following two propositions:—

(I.) Man is naturally a sympathetic and a social animal. He has, no doubt, strong, self-preserving, self-asserting, and self-advancing instincts, which, if left without counteraction, would naturally lead to isolation or mutual hostility, and ultimate extermination; but these instincts of isolated individualism are met by yet stronger instincts of sympathy, love, and fellowship, in the ascendency of which the true humanity of man as distinguished from tigerhood and spiderhood consists.

(II.) Man is naturally a reasoning animal, and is only then truly a man when his passions are tempered and his conduct regulated by reason. The function of reason is the recognition and the realization of truth; truth recognised in speculation is science; truth realized in action is a moral life and a well-ordered society.

These two propositions may appear to many persons now-a-days to contain nothing that is not very vague and very cheap; nevertheless, when looked into accurately and followed out unconditionally, they lead to most important practical consequences; in fact, while their consistent assertion under all circumstances necessarily leads up to a noble and a heroic life, their habitual denial as necessarily leads down to a base and a brutish life. Let us look at them therefore sharply in detail.

The first proposition, as the reader will readily perceive, is levelled directly against the selfish theory of morals which was advocated with more or less openness by many of the Greek Sophists, and was prominently put forth in this country, as is generally known, at the time of the great Civil War, by the celebrated Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. That stout speculator, in his treatise on “the Philosophical Elements of a True Citizen,” lays it down with a distinctness which admits of no qualification, that “all society is either for gain or for glory; that is, not so much for love of our fellows as for love of ourselves;” and again, a few pages further on in the same treatise, he puts forth the famous dictum that “the natural state of man is a war of all men against all men.” Against such a one-sided, unhuman, unworthy, and altogether false assertion, Socrates comes armed, not only with the whole force of a sympathetic, a social, and a benevolent nature, but with that healthy instinct and practical good sense, which in him was prophetic not so much of his immediate disciple Plato as of his great successor Aristotle. In one of the conversations of the Memorabilia of which the subject is φιλία—a much wider word, let it be well noted, than the English “friendship,”—Critobulus, one of the young followers of the philosopher, is introduced as lamenting over the difficulty of making friends; and the views of Socrates follow in reply. We extract the whole passage:—

“What perplexes you, my young friend, said Socrates, seems to be that you have frequently seen even the best men, and of the most noble quality, quarrelling with one another, and fanning themselves into hostility, even more fierce than that which divides the most worthless members of society. Just so, said Critobulus, and not only this, but the best-ordered societies, and those States which seem to possess the most delicate sense of public honour, are often found to plunge into the most unjustifiable wars. Where, then, shall we find a place for social sympathy and true friendship? If the bad by their very nature cannot know what love means, if betwixt the bad and the good there can be no fellowship any more than betwixt fire and water, and if finally the good, who practise virtue most severely, in the ambitious contests of human life are still found for the most part envying one another and hating one another, among what class of men, I ask, are fellowship and good faith possible? But, said Socrates, this is by no means such a simple matter as you seem to think. Nature here as elsewhere has two sides. There is naturally implanted in men a social and sympathetic element; for they naturally need one another, and feel for one another, and help one another by co-operation; and alongside of this there exists also an element of hostility; for wherever a great number of persons find their affections fixed on the same object, which they cannot all enjoy, opposition and war in reference to that object will naturally ensue. Hence strife and wrath and the passion for aggrandizement, and feelings of envy and dislike toward those who in the great competition of life are more successful than ourselves. Nevertheless, so strong is the sympathetic principle in nature, that it penetrates through all these barriers, and joins in bonds of brotherhood all the noble and the good.”

This passage deserves special prominence in every estimate of the philosophy of Socrates, not only on account of its own strong practical good sense—a leading quality of the philosopher’s mind—but on account of the complement which it supplies to the other part of his doctrine, that virtue is practical reason. How true this doctrine of rational morality is, and how comprehensive, we shall endeavour to show immediately; but in the first place, before applying reason to the actions of a social being, we must postulate the existence of a sympathetic instinct, without whose impulsive and attractive power reason could never be induced to exercise itself in any social direction. To prove to a man who has no love in his nature that he ought to love his neighbour, and that without such love no society is possible (a proof by the way which Hobbes leads very triumphantly), is all very well as a piece of reasoning; but it could lead to no practical consequences if the person to whom it was addressed was root and branch made up of pure selfishness. It would be like arguing to a tiger that it should become a lamb. In all moral questions, therefore, the motive powers must be supposed as a fact; they belong to the nature of a moral being as steam belongs to a steam-engine; and therefore Socrates, whose whole teaching breathes the earnest conviction of the great truth that moral philosophy has no meaning as a theory, but exists only as a fact, is everywhere exhibited as a great lover of men. Love of his kind, indeed, was the main inspiration of his life, as in fact it must be that of all men who aspire to the noble position of social reformation in any shape; therefore it was that he was seen constantly in the streets and in the market-places, and in the public shops, and the ateliers of the sculptors, and in festal and convivial celebrations of all kinds; therefore it was that he professed himself on all occasions μάλα ἐρωτικός—a passionate admirer of everything beautiful and excellent whether in man or woman; and from this quick and ready sympathy with all human excellence it was that, while he spoke the truth on all occasions without fear, there was so little generally of harshness in his reproof; nay, he would carry his human forbearance and sympathetic complaisance so far on occasions as to visit a beautiful ἑταῖρα, and converse with her on the philosophy of dress, and the most scientific manner of spreading the net and baiting the hook for her admirers.^[32.1] How incongruous would it not be to figure John Calvin or any modern theological doctor relaxing his gravity in this region so far; and yet Socrates was as veritable a saint as Calvin, only the men were constitutionally not only different, but adverse; besides, Socrates was a Greek, and, so far as impressibility by mere physical beauty is concerned, this implies much. What the modern Protestant theologian would have thought it a sin to look at in the ancient philosopher might have excited an innocent and pious admiration. But the tolerant universality of large human sympathy in Socrates, however difficult it may be for some men to understand, was in fact much less an anomaly in a severe moralist than the selfish theory of Hobbes is in a man pretending to be a man at all. To explain such a perverse phenomenon we must bear in mind that the love of singularity in some minds is greater than the love of truth; that some men of great intellectual capacity are deficient in some of the finer instincts that stir heroic breasts, and fail to recognise in others what they have no experience of in themselves; that in the common characters whom one meets in daily life an essentially selfish motive can often be traced beneath the gracious surface, where to the public eye only benevolence, philanthropy, humility, and self-denial shine out with genial radiance; that the scientific mind has a peculiar pleasure in tracking out such inconsistencies; that the speculative mind in its eagerness to embrace various phenomena under one law is apt to run a-muck against Nature, delighting, as she does sometimes, more in the compromise of various principles than in the triumph of one; and finally, that men trained principally in the political and legal world often have a tendency to transfer the selfish principles which are most considered in their domain to other spheres of the social system, where more free scope is given to the exercise of the benevolent and unselfish propensities. These considerations may perhaps account for the genesis of such an incomplete moralist as Hobbes,—it is only the common instance of a meagre plant growing up in a bad climate. Socrates, on the other hand, surprises and puzzles us by his sheer redundancy of ethical sensibility; as a tropical vegetation seems sometimes to smother with the exuberance of green life the sober demands of an eye educated in a temperate climate.

Let us now turn to the second proposition: Man is a reasoning animal;—trite enough, but what does this imply? and how far does it bring us when we attempt to answer the question started by Dr. Paley, Why am I bound to keep my word? Let us see how Socrates would have answered this question. Through the memoirs he stands forward in no character so strongly as in that of the exposer of unrealities. Himself the most truthful of all men, throughout a long life he can find nothing better to do than to help others, first to draw the real truth out of themselves, and then, by the touchstone thus acquired, to distinguish the true man in the actual course of life from the fake pretender. Truth therefore, unadulterated truth in thought and in act, was the pole-star of his navigation. But the recognition and realization of truth is the distinctive function of reason; therefore truthfulness under every form of thought or action is the grand law of reasonableness, and in virtue of this the grand rule of human conduct. For no creature can be called upon to act at variance with its own nature; and if it should attempt to do so, it will either fail utterly—as if a worm should essay to fly—or, succeeding so far in the experiment, as when a bear dances or a man speaks lies habitually, the creature will make itself either ridiculous or contemptible. As therefore you expect your dog to nose well, your cat to mouse well, your horse to race well, and your cow, when well grassed, to give good milk, so expect yourself on all occasions to think and to act reasonably, that is truthfully or in conformity with the reality of things; and know for certain on each occasion that your thought or your act deviates from right reason, that thus far you are not your proper self, you are not, in the full sense of the word, a man; you are, in fact, in reference to this matter, acting like a madman. For, as Socrates in his familiar way puts it, if a man, imagining himself twelve feet high, should bow his head whenever he entered a door eight feet high, in order to avoid fracture of the skull, would we not call such a person mad? And if he is justly esteemed insane who in such an exorbitant way takes a false measure of his bodily height, why should one be esteemed sane who habitually makes an equally false estimate of his mental stature? If a person were to imagine that he knew Greek, but whenever he opened his mouth poured forth a mere swallow-twitter of inarticulate jargon, could he possibly be held to be of sound mind? or if a man should push himself forward into the van of any great undertaking, such as the building of bridges or the cutting of tunnels, conceiving himself to be able to do these things, when he was known to be ignorant of the simplest practical elements of architecture and engineering, should we not say truly that such a person is labouring under a delusion, which, if not madness, is something very closely allied to it? From such considerations as these Socrates deduced, with all the certainty of mathematical demonstration, that the most imperative duty, and the most binding obligation of every man—the postulate, in fact, of all reasonable and fruitful activity in life—is γνῶθι σεαυτόν, Know thyself! and this maxim does not mean, of course, that a man is to go into a corner, and by a series of probings to take the measure of his own capacity; it means rather that we shall know our relation to that outer world in which our active powers are to be spent; it means that we shall know the world by free intercourse and by cautious trial, and that we shall make it our business with conscientious care to discover what we are fit for on this stage of things on which the drama of our life is enacted, and what we are not fit for. And always in every work, reasonably undertaken, if the execution is to be enduringly successful, let the reasonable and true man study, as the one thing needful, to be the thing that he would seem to be.

From this statement, taken directly from the report of Xenophon, the reader will perceive that we have got in Socrates fundamentally only a very modern Scotch friend with a very ancient Greek face, viz., the excellent laird of Craigenputtoch and venerable prophet of Chelsea on the Thames, the burden of whose preaching has always been the unveiling of Shams. Mr. Ruskin’s Lamp of Truth in Architecture shines also manifestly with a kindred light; and in fact it is quite certain, and the most important of all truths to be implanted in the youthful mind when starting on the career of life, that we live in a world of most grave and earnest and stiff realities, that must be dealt with in a real and honest way—that is, neither in a superficial nor in a false way, nor in an absurd way, nor with any sort of random strokes, but only in a calculated and a reasonable way, and according to the unchangeable nature of things—if not, the penalty is sure. If we will mistake a granite rock for a gigot of mutton, we shall find that we have dined on something that no culinary art can make at all digestible. Let us examine in rapid detail how far the general Socratic principle of acting, reasonably and truthfully will bring out the individual virtues which are the most necessary and the most esteemed, whether in the common concerns of life or in those seasons of rare culmination when manhood rises into heroism. Now, here we see plainly enough, in the first place, that all the so-called intellectual virtues—that is, those that depend on the vigorous and well-directed use of the intellectual faculties—are, by the Socratic principle, at once provided for in the most effective way. These virtues are foresight, calculation, prudence in every shape, trained talent, professional expertness, and substantial work on scientific principles in all trades and occupations. The man who does any kind of work in a careless, bungling, or superficial way is not acting as a reasonable being; for the first demand of reason, as the truthful faculty in the world of action, is to realize its idea completely and thoroughly; and this no hasty and superficial handiwork can pretend to do. Again, if a man, as happens only too often, undertakes a long walk, and having miscalculated the distance, or carried with him confused ideas of north and south, finds himself under the veil of night wandering about in a boggy waste when he ought to have been snug in his bed, he has himself to blame: he acted unreasonably in undertaking an unknown expedition without exact information or wise calculation; and it is only reasonable that he should be overtaken by the necessary consequences of all unreasoning procedure in a world where Reason is the only law and Truth the unerring judge. In the same way, from want of accurate knowledge, wise foresight, and comprehensive survey, Crimean campaigns are bungled, and Reform Bills of most serious consequence are huddled or juggled through a house of fretful or feverish senators, and Acts of Parliament are patched up with clauses that contradict one another, and make the preamble look like a bridegroom who finds he has promised eternal fidelity to a mistaken bride. All this is unreasonable work, and the men who did it were not exercising their reason at the time of the perpetration; for any practical purpose they might as well have been blind, furious, fatuous, or asleep. ’Tis plain, therefore, that all the efficiency of every kind of work done in the world depends on its reasonableness, that is, on its truthfulness; and in full view, so to speak, of the importance of this intellectual virtue Nature has furnished man with a moral excellence closely akin to it. The recognition of truth in the strictly intellectual world becomes, in the world of propulsive passions and inspiring emotions, the love of truth. This virtue shows itself in frankness, openness, and simplicity of character, and in an imperious disdain of all sorts of equivocation, dissembling, falsehood, and disguise, according to the well-known type of the heroic character in Homer:

“That man within my soul I hate, even as the gates of hell, Who speaks fair words, but in his heart dark lies and treachery dwell.”