The Devil in Modern Philosophy

Ernest Gellner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134413249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The essays in this volume gather together Gellner's thinking on the connection between philosophy and life and they approach the topic from a number of directions: philosophy of morals, history of ideas, a discussion of individuals including R. G. Collingwood, Noam Chomsky, Piaget and Eysenck and discussions on the setting of philosophy in the general culture of England and America.

Part one

Philosophy in general

Chapter 1

The devil in modern philosophy

Modern philosophy, from Descartes onwards and including the present generation of philosophers, can be defined as belief in the devil. What gives post-Cartesian philosophy unity is the daemon. Descartes invented him, but all the others believe in him.

Why and how did Descartes invent him? As is well known, Descartes, surveying the chaos of past errors, and noticing that even the greatest absurdities were believed by someone, hoped that reason could lift itself by its own bootstraps and liberate itself from all possible error. But to do that one had to start from scratch. Now, if you want to start from scratch the main difficulty is to find the scratch; to find that firm point from which the totally new but safe departure is to be made. This is where the assumption of the devil comes in. Assume an evil-minded and all-powerful devil whose aim is to frustrate you, and above all to frustrate you in attempts to know anything about the world.

Now try, just try really seriously to make this assumption and see which of your convictions stand up to it: very few, if any. Still, there might be some convictions that survived. There may be some convictions which even on the assumption of the malignant daemon who interferes with us, must still remain indubitably true. If indeed there are such, then they constitute the scratch. They must be the bedrock, the firm and truly reliable base, the foundation of a new edifice. Now just this was the function in Descartes of the assumption of the devil: to use it as an acid test, as a means of isolating that which is really certain, from that which only appears so. Note that for this it is quite unnecessary for the devil really to exist; only the assumption, not the reality, is required. And as a matter of historical fact, Descartes did not believe in his existence. On the contrary, he believed that the truth of rigorous thinking was underwritten by a benevolent God.

The particular firm base that Descartes managed to locate by his device is well known: I think, therefore I am. I may doubt everything, but the doubt itself is a case of thinking, and therefore I exist. Whatever can be doubted, whatever may be suspect as a possible front of the devil, one’s own existence cannot. This argument can be interpreted in (at least) three ways: as what contemporary philosophers would call a pragmatic paradox, as hinging on the fact that the occurrence of a doubt is itself an instance of thinking, and hence the existence of thought is proved by the very doubt itself. Or it can be interpreted as an argument from the certainty and indubitability of the immediate data of consciousness. Or again, it may be interpreted as the argument that an activity entails an agent, a manifestation entails a substance of which it is the manifestation. Whichever of these interpretations we adopt, the arguments conveyed have interesting subsequent histories. Just what Descartes did with his bedrock when he found it doesn’t concern us now.

For most philosophers after Descartes, the devil was far from fictitious. They did not assume his existence, whilst remaining quite confident that he did not exist. No, on the contrary, they firmly believe that he exists. Subsequent philosophers can be classified according to how they identified him.

The first theory was that the devil was our own mind. It was our own mind which organized the systematic misrepresentation which Descartes feared but did not really think went on. It is our own mind which makes us believe in the existence of things which are not truly there, or obscures the existence of those which are. There are many variations on this theme. For instance, it may be held that our mind misleads us by trusting the senses too much; but it has also been supposed that it misleads us through indulgence in abstract thought.

The second major theory is that the devil is history. This theory grew very naturally from the earlier identification of the daemon with mind. Thinkers such as Locke or Hume thought they were carrying out their investigations into the human understanding, or human nature as such; that by dissecting the mind they would be able to tell us enough about the habits of this one daemon, so that anyone anywhere could be forewarned. Not that Hume, for instance, was unaware of something that we may call cultural relativism; still, basically it was the same mind everywhere, the same devil.

The transition from identifying the daemon with mind to identifying him with history came after Kant, and was perhaps implicit in some of his views. If for Kant truth was still unique, error was not random. Error as much as truth reflected the structure of the mind (perhaps more so); such basic errors as exist are external manifestations of something essential in us, and they will for that very reason tend to appear in certain patterns. The errors that we find on looking back at the history of thought are not like the random dispersal round the bull’s eye, a tedious record of trial and error with more error than trial. On the contrary, they are more like the figures on the Swiss clock which appear regularly.

But if error can be deeply revealing and even have a tendency to appear in certain patterns, then why should not the same hold of truth? Indeed it is only a small step to such a conclusion. After Kant, it was less often taken for granted that mind was manifesting itself almost identically in all men. And the source of systematic error was no longer to be sought in the mechanics of mind but in history, in the temporal, geographical, social background of knowledge. The devil who interferes with our apprehension of reality had assumed a new shape. Historicist daemonologies such as the Marxist or the Spenglerian contain accounts of how the daemonology is itself exempt from daemonic distortion, or even of how the daemon himself guarantees its truth.

This historical devil is far from dead today. But whilst the doctrine that man is a slave of history is still alive and kicking, it is not the dominant one at present. The ruling daemon at present, at least in this country, is language.

The manner in which the linguistic devil developed out of the historical one is a subtle business, but there was a logical connection. The development went something like this. After Darwin, the daemon of history was joined by the related daemon of nature. Naturalism accompanied or replaced historism. Under the influence of the advance in biology, theories that the daemon is nature flourished. Pragmatism is the best known of these. Thinking, valuation, knowledge were all to be seen as natural processes governed by laws common to all nature. The tiger’s claw and the giraffe’s neck were, fundamentally, the same kind of phenomenon as geometrical reasoning, or the ten commandments.

This amounted to handing over thought bound and gagged to nature. Some philosophers resisted the various isms—psychologism, historism, naturalism—that is the interpretation of knowledge and truth as the manifestation of this, that or the other power controlling thought, controlling us altogether. These philosophers sought refuge from these daemons in logic, and contributed to a revival of that subject that took place towards the end of the last and the beginning of this century. The new interest in logic was motivated in part by this determination to see thought as really true and really false, rather than as a display of devilish tricks.

Logic profited greatly as a result of the new attention it received, though philosophy in the end did not. Problems arose even in logic, and in consequence of investigations into the foundation of logic, it came to be held that logic is not such an error-impervious strong-hold after all. Logic is rooted in language: and thus the modern linguistic devil came to be born.

There is also the quite celebrated psycho-analytic or unconscious daemon, descended from his mind-devil ancestor via Schopenhauer with an infusion from the biological member of the family.

I have suggested that types of modern philosophy since Descartes can be seen as rival identifications of the daemon as the mind, as history, as biological nature, as the Unconscious mind, as language. This might be called comparative diabolics. But there is another interesting way of grading modern philosophers which could be called differential daemonology. At one end of the scale we can put those who decide to fight, who want to outwit the devil. Having come to the conclusion that he exists, that there is something systematically interfering with our pursuit of knowledge, they decide that it is their task to find ways and means of getting past him (of devising stratagems against him). These are the philosophers who give us rules of thought, who supply pre-fabricated methodologies which if carefully followed will act as charms against error; these philosophers give us formal recipes for what truth or meaning must be like. They see themselves as a kind of Intelligence Service of knowledge, ferreting out agents provocateurs amongst us and sending out spies to tell us of the enemy’s plans.

At the other end of the scale are those who in a way draw the logical conclusion from the fact that the daemon is all-powerful. If the deceiver is indeed all-powerful, what point in trying to outwit him? If the deceiver is all-powerful and systematic, cannot his deceptions be re-named—truth? Can we not make our submission and have done with it? There has been many such collaborationists among philosophers. They should hardly be called traitors, though the charge of trahison des clercs is in part levelled at them. Yet theirs was not treason, for they argued that their policy must prosper, the enemy being ex hypothesi all-powerful. Philosophers of this kind do not devise strategies, they try to smooth the path of occupation by explaining the pointlessness of resisting, and even of wishing that one could resist. Pointless lament, used roughly in this sense, became almost a technical term in recent philosophy. (Philosophers of this kind explain to us, for instance, that it is pointless to wish to know what things are really like as opposed to what they are like when seen and touched by us; that it is pointless to wish to know truth other than as conveyed by some language, and so on.)

Of course, there is no need for every philosopher to be either an all-out resister or an all-out collaborationist. Many or most of them are dispersed somewhere along the spectrum separating the two extremes. One may consider oneself capable of outwitting the daemon in some spheres and not in others. Thus, for instance, Kant stood somewhere in the middle. His major work, the three great Critiques, is essentially a study of the various habits and doings of the mental daemon. The daemon was held to be invincible to the extent that we could not do without him, or break his habits, but he was not invincible to the extent of being able to hide his tricks; at least not after Kant had uncovered them for us. We had to go on living with them, but at least we knew what they were. The more pernicious ones, those tempting us into wild-goose chases, could be neutralized if not extirpated. And in one sphere, Kant deified the daemon; by equating morality with rationality, he equated moral truth with what the mind imposed.

Those who collaborate with the devil often justify it by giving him a good character. There is the sociological theory which makes out deceit to be important for the sake of social cohesion. A man will in some sense subscribe to beliefs which he does not really consider true because they are in his view the devices of a benevolent daemon, even if no longer an all-powerful one. Thus men may subscribe to mythologies which have, they think, desirable political or social functions. This is truly a case of helping a poor devil who can no longer deceive but who pleads good intentions.

Contemporary philosophy in this country has in the recent decades started out from an outlook which intended to outwit the devil by means of a perfect language and logic; these were intended as a kind of holy water that could keep him at bay. Any time the sulphur of metaphysics or of a seemingly insoluble problem was smelt, the incantation of a reduction of the problem in good logical grammar would restore order. Since then, however, whilst the devil continues to be identified with language, there has been an almost complete swing over to deifying him. Thus whatever language does is ipso facto O.K. The main school, the Oxonians, stand for the enthusiastic restoration of Oldspeak. At present they are such enthusiastic collaborators that their main joy is hunting out resisters caught with some of the old logical weapons still in their hands.

The most recent version of the linguistic devil is interesting in that the sphere in which the devil must be fought has shrunk very much indeed. All the common activities, scientific or ordinary, are fairly free from undesirable machinations. It is only past philosophical theories, whether metaphysical or positivist, that reveal his doings. A curious reversal! In the past, ordinary unreflective experience and thought were sometimes considered as the veil past which the philosopher must penetrate to find true reality. According to the new school, it is the veil which is reality; the doctrine that it is the veil is an illusion, and the only one. Descartes started a new philosophy by doubting virtually everything. This new school has started another by systematically doubting nothing. (This is known as Common Sense or respect for ordinary usage.) Or to use another parable; philosophy is still seen in terms of Plato’s cave, but the philosopher’s job is now said to be to lead us back into the cave. 1958

Chapter 2

The crisis in the humanities and the mainstream of philosophy

The state of England

Assume that a nuclear war destroys Britain. The only surviving collection of documents is the library of a philosopher of the recently fashionable linguistic school who, perhaps emulating the legendary self-exile of the Master in Norway, settled on a lonely island in the Outer Hebrides. This linguo-hermit, we shall assume, was one of those who divested himself of all old works of thought, somewhat ashamed of having ever owned them,¹ so that this sole extant library consists of linguo-philosophic works only.

Imagine some archaeologist/historian from another planet discovering this library and reconstructing the history of Britain from it. After much pain, our extra-terrestrial investigator has deciphered the script and come to understand written English. Let us also suppose that he knows, from outside surviving sources, that during the middle of the twentieth century Britain was frequently in economic difficulties.

One can all too easily visualize the history of Britain written by our archaeologist in possession of the linguo-philosophic library. It might run something as follows:

In the middle of the twentieth century, the British economy was stagnant. It is not clear why this was so, given that strong evidence exists that in an earlier period this island was the premier industrial and commercial power. One must assume that a new wave of immigrants, with a social organization and ethos wholly different from the previous industrially and commercially enterprising population, had come in and subdued or expelled the proto-inhabitants, bringing a new set of mores with them.

One must assume, from the fact that they conquered and replaced the earlier inhabitants, that their values and practices contained a military element. Few indices of this, however, survive. The extant literature, on the contrary, contains constant allusions to metaphysical rather than martial preoccupations. Hence one must assume that, rather as in the case of the Indian caste system, a priestly or intellectual class was placed above the warrior class, and that the relative esteem accorded to the latter was so small that the literature was preoccupied exclusively with the concerns of the former.

The preoccupation of metaphysics, both favourable and hostile, must have been very considerable, judging from the very great frequency of allusions to it. Happily we possess a surviving file of a document known as the Radio Times, which gives us a list of the broadcasts of the period. On the so-called Third Programme, devoted to serious matters, a quite outstandingly large proportion of time was given to many and various series of talks expounding the views of the Anti-metaphysical school. As is well known, moralists and thinkers do not preach against vices which do not tempt their listeners: hence the amount of energy and time—far greater than that accorded to any other theme—bears eloquent testimony to the pervasiveness of metaphysical inclinations amongst the people. Given that we know from other sources that this was a period of economic difficulty and decline, it is reasonable to conclude that the other-worldly preoccupations, particularly with metaphysics, of the priestly caste and of the population under its sway (presumably associated with a prohibition of trade), paralysed economic life.

The picture which life on the island presented must have been a curious, even an inspiring, one. A whole population was apparently preoccupied with abstruse issues such as the reality of time or the reality of the external world, or even the reality of each other, and in the hot debate of these issues neglected more mundane tasks.

This trend was not left unchallenged. Appalled by the economic and other consequences of this universal immersion in metaphysics, an anti-metaphysical reformist movement arose as indicated, which attempted to cure this preoccupation by teaching, br...