When I studied structural linguistics at Moscow University, a long time ago, one of the subjects arousing my lively interest was the concerted effort of certain linguists to create an artificial, computer-friendly language, and, in the process, to improve on the efficiency of the existing natural languages by cleaning them up from the layers upon layers of redundancy, ambiguity, and other such inefficiency. These linguists can be rightly applauded for their great contribution to the computer age of humanity, but by no means for their silliness in trying to make the living human languages more formal and… well, more competent.
The same can be said, I think, of the efforts of certain philosophers, whom in another entry I am referring to as “Jeremy Bentham and the Utilitarian Bunch.” In some ways, their efforts have handsomely paid off, by causing a great debate on a very important subject, whereas in other ways they look to me downright silly and… well, incompetent.
Jeremy Bentham was a prominent British lawyer who became famous when he started dabbling in politics and social reform. His primary claim to historical fame, however, has been as a philosopher, the founder of utilitarianism, capsulated in the key phrase “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” This catchword is not original to Bentham, however. He himself has attributed it to Joseph Priestley’s 1768 Essay on the First Principles of Government, but the minor Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) ought to be given the proper credit for it, writing in his 1720 Inquiry Concerning Moral Good and Evil: “That action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.”
This borrowed phrase has, however, become the distinctive slogan of utilitarianism, or Benthamism, as it is also known. Bentham’s 1776 Fragment on Government and 1789 Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation have become world famous in their own right, probably, as a “collateral advantage” of his great success as a reformer of the whole British government system, and thus, one of the very few officially recognized “establishment” philosophers. Unlike his success in reform, though, Bentham’s philosophy has been naïve and occasionally outright silly, as I have mentioned in my opening parallel with linguistics.
Bentham has been spectacularly lucky in this fashion to become treated as a major philosopher, rather than just a political figure. Even his harshest critics are giving him too much personal credit on the rebound, in recognition of his connection to the political-social system, which took root in Britain, thanks largely to his efforts. Karl Marx’s attack on him sounds like a loud commendation of his overblown role in British social, economic, and political life:
“The arch-philistine Jeremy Bentham was the insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the bourgeois intelligence of the Nineteenth Century.” (Das Kapital, I, 1867)
I value Jeremy Bentham most not for his specific “positive” theories, but for his “negative” contribution to the philosophical debate over politics and government. Like the Russian mathematician Lobachevski was a revolutionary in geometry with his disregard for the basic premise of Euclidean geometry, Bentham can be credited for knocking the gods of social contract and natural law off their pedestals. “The indestructible prerogatives of mankind, he wrote, have no need to be supported upon the sandy foundation of a fiction.”
This reminds me of my own argument against "rationalizing God," which wobbly and inherently fallacious efforts impede and complicate the discovery of the right solution to forego the hopeless search for proof of this improvable theorem, and to accept it as a founding axiom, true by definition.
By the same token, it is patently silly to try to justify a better state of world organization by appealing to a preexistent condition, where sheer pragmatism without any such preconditions may yield fresh unexpected insights and results. Therefore, there is some considerable value in Bentham’s pragmatism, as long as it is not stretched out too far and too authoritatively and does not become a panacea for curing all social ills.
Among Bentham’s similar successes in liberating himself from the conventions of contemporary political philosophy was his reduction of all civil laws to only four purposes: subsistence, abundance, security, and equality. Liberty had little value for him, and he had contempt pour les droits de l’homme, which, he said, were plain nonsense: these rights of man, he said, fell into three categories: unintelligible, false, and both.
John Stuart Mill (see my entry on him in the Significant Others) was literally born into utilitarianism. His father James Mill was a friend and faithful supporter of Bentham, only far more dogmatic and intractable, in their common silliness. (Bentham even acknowledged this, and poked fun at James Mill’s hardhearted zeal: “He rather hated the ruling few than loved the suffering many.”)
The son received a spectacular education at the hands of his father, who saw the topmost prerequisite of good government in excellent education, and, as they say, walked the talk with his own son. John Stuart Mill grew up an accomplished elitist in his philosophical outlook. He feared democracy as a force that had in itself as much propensity for tyranny as the worst kind of authoritarian despot. He attributed all progress of human civilization to the tiniest minority of creative original minds. (“All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.”)
I like a lot about the person and the political philosophy of John Stuart Mill. Although he deeply distrusted democracy, he recognized its basic inevitability and the sheer impracticality of certain much more benign political systems. Here is a quote from his Representative Government (1861), which I have already fondly used before. It goes to the heart of my argument about the practicality of all Utopian projects, Communism being their natural first choice:
“Whenever it ceases to be true that mankind, as a rule, prefers themselves to others, and those nearest to them to those more remote, from that moment Communism is not only practicable, but the only defensible form of society; and will, when that time arrives, be assuredly carried into effect.”
Fortunately for him, and even for the best that our friend Jeremy Bentham has to offer, their legacy cannot be cruelly reduced by some intellectual Procrustes to the one-size-fits-all utilitarian bed that Bentham built and John Stuart Mill was born in.
The same can be said, I think, of the efforts of certain philosophers, whom in another entry I am referring to as “Jeremy Bentham and the Utilitarian Bunch.” In some ways, their efforts have handsomely paid off, by causing a great debate on a very important subject, whereas in other ways they look to me downright silly and… well, incompetent.
Jeremy Bentham was a prominent British lawyer who became famous when he started dabbling in politics and social reform. His primary claim to historical fame, however, has been as a philosopher, the founder of utilitarianism, capsulated in the key phrase “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” This catchword is not original to Bentham, however. He himself has attributed it to Joseph Priestley’s 1768 Essay on the First Principles of Government, but the minor Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746) ought to be given the proper credit for it, writing in his 1720 Inquiry Concerning Moral Good and Evil: “That action is best which procures the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers.”
This borrowed phrase has, however, become the distinctive slogan of utilitarianism, or Benthamism, as it is also known. Bentham’s 1776 Fragment on Government and 1789 Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation have become world famous in their own right, probably, as a “collateral advantage” of his great success as a reformer of the whole British government system, and thus, one of the very few officially recognized “establishment” philosophers. Unlike his success in reform, though, Bentham’s philosophy has been naïve and occasionally outright silly, as I have mentioned in my opening parallel with linguistics.
Bentham has been spectacularly lucky in this fashion to become treated as a major philosopher, rather than just a political figure. Even his harshest critics are giving him too much personal credit on the rebound, in recognition of his connection to the political-social system, which took root in Britain, thanks largely to his efforts. Karl Marx’s attack on him sounds like a loud commendation of his overblown role in British social, economic, and political life:
“The arch-philistine Jeremy Bentham was the insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the bourgeois intelligence of the Nineteenth Century.” (Das Kapital, I, 1867)
I value Jeremy Bentham most not for his specific “positive” theories, but for his “negative” contribution to the philosophical debate over politics and government. Like the Russian mathematician Lobachevski was a revolutionary in geometry with his disregard for the basic premise of Euclidean geometry, Bentham can be credited for knocking the gods of social contract and natural law off their pedestals. “The indestructible prerogatives of mankind, he wrote, have no need to be supported upon the sandy foundation of a fiction.”
This reminds me of my own argument against "rationalizing God," which wobbly and inherently fallacious efforts impede and complicate the discovery of the right solution to forego the hopeless search for proof of this improvable theorem, and to accept it as a founding axiom, true by definition.
By the same token, it is patently silly to try to justify a better state of world organization by appealing to a preexistent condition, where sheer pragmatism without any such preconditions may yield fresh unexpected insights and results. Therefore, there is some considerable value in Bentham’s pragmatism, as long as it is not stretched out too far and too authoritatively and does not become a panacea for curing all social ills.
Among Bentham’s similar successes in liberating himself from the conventions of contemporary political philosophy was his reduction of all civil laws to only four purposes: subsistence, abundance, security, and equality. Liberty had little value for him, and he had contempt pour les droits de l’homme, which, he said, were plain nonsense: these rights of man, he said, fell into three categories: unintelligible, false, and both.
John Stuart Mill (see my entry on him in the Significant Others) was literally born into utilitarianism. His father James Mill was a friend and faithful supporter of Bentham, only far more dogmatic and intractable, in their common silliness. (Bentham even acknowledged this, and poked fun at James Mill’s hardhearted zeal: “He rather hated the ruling few than loved the suffering many.”)
The son received a spectacular education at the hands of his father, who saw the topmost prerequisite of good government in excellent education, and, as they say, walked the talk with his own son. John Stuart Mill grew up an accomplished elitist in his philosophical outlook. He feared democracy as a force that had in itself as much propensity for tyranny as the worst kind of authoritarian despot. He attributed all progress of human civilization to the tiniest minority of creative original minds. (“All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.”)
I like a lot about the person and the political philosophy of John Stuart Mill. Although he deeply distrusted democracy, he recognized its basic inevitability and the sheer impracticality of certain much more benign political systems. Here is a quote from his Representative Government (1861), which I have already fondly used before. It goes to the heart of my argument about the practicality of all Utopian projects, Communism being their natural first choice:
“Whenever it ceases to be true that mankind, as a rule, prefers themselves to others, and those nearest to them to those more remote, from that moment Communism is not only practicable, but the only defensible form of society; and will, when that time arrives, be assuredly carried into effect.”
Fortunately for him, and even for the best that our friend Jeremy Bentham has to offer, their legacy cannot be cruelly reduced by some intellectual Procrustes to the one-size-fits-all utilitarian bed that Bentham built and John Stuart Mill was born in.
No comments:
Post a Comment