Death and the Afterlife in 20th Century Philosophy

How have 20^th century philosophers approached the subject of death and afterlife?

In the minds of most people, death looms as the end of who they are. It is the end of mortal life, but for many, it is also the transition to the afterlife. Life and afterlife as separate experiences of the one being. Twentieth century philosophers and thinkers have generally approached the subjects of death and afterlife by attempting to understand them in relation to mortal life. It perhaps could not be otherwise, as on the face of it, dying is something the living do, and the afterlife is for those who are dead.

The following essay argues that for death to be understood, twentieth century philosophers have needed to consider death’s relationship with life, just as an explanation of darkness might be formulated as the opposite, or absence of light. Neither death, nor life, can be understood divorced from the other. Ways that death has been considered include life and death as a function of power; death as a social reality; the influence of death on individuals; whether life must have any meaning in the face of death; and, death as an end to life and being.

On the other hand, afterlife has been considered in the following ways: the beliefs of the living about those who are dead; eternal life; as a concept beyond human understanding or not worth pursuing; and, why it might be important to believe in an afterlife regardless.

Some of the thinkers and philosophers whose work will be discussed include D.Z. Phillips, Foucault, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, among others.

Michel Foucault approaches the subject of death as a function of power. From the right of the sovereign over life and death to the genocides performed by the modern state. But he argues that the modern state has more interest in holding power over life than it does over death. He writes that

If genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.[1]

Foucault envisages the power of death as a form of power over life, in that it has the capacity to end life. But death is not the only power over life; living itself exerts power over life. But true to the theme that both death and life must be mutually considered to achieve an understanding of either, Foucault is able to comprehend modern genocide as an enormity of death through reference to an enormity of life, the modern ‘large-scale population’.

But for Foucault, the decline of death in favour of life as the primary function of power, has cast death into a new social role.

It is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its domination; death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most ‘private’.[2]

If modern power is continuing to lose interest in death, then death, according to Foucault, can no longer mark the handing over of sovereignty to a higher power. The lack of pageantry, ceremony and public expression is linked with the modern anxiety about death. [3]

Death has become something to speak about in hushed tones, to avoid saying the ‘wrong’ or ‘insensitive’ thing to those who are bereaved, and many of us have very little personal contact with death. So pronounced is this anxiety, that Martin Heidegger was moved to write “the dying of others is seen often as a social inconvenience, if not a downright tactlessness, from which publicness should be spared.”[4]

Death in this sense is something in which we cannot share, although we know that eventually, we too must face death. It seems that death alone of those most common aspects of life -that of its finishing – is the most estranging. No other can communicate the experience of dying to us, nor shall we be able to impart our own experience, if indeed death is experienced at all. “Death” says Heidegger, “reveals itself as the ownmost nonrelational possibility not to be bypassed.”[5]

Death, that is, belongs to each of us alone in a sense greater than anything else, and it is inevitable. For Heidegger’s Da-sein, death has no before or after, as the life of a being must be understood in terms of its awareness of its own death. He writes

the ending that we have in view when we speak of death, does not signify a being-at-an-end of Da-sein, but rather a being toward the end of this being. Death is a way to be that Da-sein takes over as soon as it is.[6]

Thus from the beginning of consciousness death is an ever present reality. Death can only have a before and after when we consider it in the lives of others, while they lived, and then when life ceased. Jeff Malpas explains Heidegger’s thought on death as being the limit of Da-sein’s possibilities. [7] But not only is death the ultimate limit to all our possible ideas, projects and endeavours, it also represents “that mystery beyond which we cannot think…, but which forces us back to focus on the life that, so long as we are, always lies before us, that always remains in question, that is always demanding of our care.”[8]

In this sense death as a limit not only informs our understanding of our lives, but also is a requisite for this understanding. That is, not only is the fact that we must die relevant to understanding human life, it is essential. But if this is so, why is death evaded and feared? Roy Perrett suggests that the hereafter offers a transformed quality of life which is not easily obtainable in mortal life. “The fear of death is the response to the realization that one’s life does not possess this quality and death will destroy its meaning.”[9]

The search for meaning in both life and death has held constant fascination, but is this meaning obtainable? Schuon argues that,

If the cognitive faculty consists in discerning between the essential and the secondary and if, by way of consequence, it implies the capacity to grasp situations and adapt to them, then he who can grasp the meaning of life and thus of death will be concretely intelligent. This means that the awareness of death ought to determine the quality of life, just as the awareness of eternal values takes precedence over temporal values.[10]

When Schuon states that the ‘awareness’ of death should determine the quality of life, this falls short of the ability to ‘grasp’ the meaning of death. That is, death, like ‘eternal values’, is immutable and greater than that which changes – ‘temporal values’ – or in this case, the way in which we live our mortal lives. There is sympathy here with Heidegger’s view that awareness of death informs our being, but Schuon differs in that not only does the awareness of death inform our being, but that it must. Death, as eternal, must take precedence over life, as temporal.

For Keightley, however, “for someone’s death to be really his death, there must be no continuation of life in any sense, through revival, survival or resurrection.”[11] In this view, death and afterlife are antithetical, as an afterlife could not be reached except through death, but if one lives an afterlife, according to Keightley, then one cannot really be dead. This conception might pose death as an absolute limit to both the temporal and the eternal. But the eternal, by its very nature can have no limit.

Are the eternal and afterlife the same thing? The philosophers and thinkers being considered in this essay have generally approached the concept of afterlife from a practical perspective. As what happens after death is not something any of us can claim to ‘know’ about, D.Z. Phillips argues that those who argue that the dead are simply dead are arguing from belief, rather than the fact of death; “those who speak of the reality of the dead and those who insist the dead are dead share the same language, but take up different perspectives within it.”[12]

Death may be a fact, but Phillips argues that the dead are a reality that do not necessarily rely on an individual’s fantasy or imagination that the dead live on elsewhere. So despite having knowledge of the objective fact of death, even those who wish to assert that there is nothing more to death than this fact are, according to Phillips, confused if they see this as saying less about death than those who say that the “dead are transfigured, glorified, or raised up.”[13]

For Phillips, what people believe about the dead isn’t as important as the fact that people hold beliefs about the dead;

If one asks why people should believe in the reality of the dead, why the dead should be held in awe, reverence or dread, one can only reply that people do react to the dead in this way, that is all.[14]

To Phillips, this belief cannot be explained, but it is fundamental. It is not important how or why people believe in the reality of the dead, it is important that they do. So, just as night and day might not be explained without reference to the sun, a belief in the reality of the dead cannot be explained by merely focusing only on the individual who holds this belief, nor on the circumstances that have informed their belief. That is, to attempt to explain that a person believes in an afterlife in Heaven because they were raised in the Christian faith does not, for Phillips, say anything at all about why people hold beliefs about the dead.

But in this, Phillips finds a position that satisfies Keightley argument on death. He writes

For the believer, his death, like his life, is to be in God. For him, this is the life eternal which death cannot touch; the immortality which finally places the soul beyond the reach of the snares and temptation of this mortal life.[15]

Eternal life, or the afterlife, in this view then, is outside of time, rather than for all time, just as God is outside of time. Keightley is able to assimilate this view of Phillips with his own by arguing that “for Phillips, beliefs about immortality, eternal life, the resurrection, if they are genuine, are expressions of the state of the soul.”[16]

This however, takes us no closer to understanding the idea of the afterlife. Like the earlier discussion on death, philosophers have sought to understand the afterlife by considering its influence on mortal life.

Keightley quotes the following passage from Wittgenstein which highlights the inadequacy of attempting to understand afterlife in itself by considering its influence on mortal life

Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time.[17]

But what is outside of space and time but God? Does this suggest that Wittgenstein believes that we might be unable to comprehend the ‘riddles’ of both eternal life and the present life? Are space and time as the boundaries of life inexplicable without reference to that which is beyond or outside it, just as darkness can be considered as that which is beyond light?

Heidegger seems to see little utility in considering these particular questions of afterlife while a full understanding of death has not yet been reached. He argues that “we cannot even ask with any methodological assurance about what “is after death” until death is understood in its full ontological essence.”[18] This may be so, but can death be understood in its “full ontological essence”, and if not, is pondering this question just as futile? Perhaps not.

Roy Perrett recognises, like Phillips, the importance of humans holding beliefs about the afterlife, but he does this pessimistically:

Most humans are deprived of the opportunity of realizing their potential. Thus for most the realization of this potential would require some form of continued personal life after death. In denying the reality of an afterlife, humanism is committed to the view that for the vast majority existence is in the end irredeemably tragic.[19]

Human potential in the general sense might be anything within the limits imposed by the horizon of death. But is reaching human potential the equivalent of achieving the utmost that is possible within those limits set by death, or is it a relative measure of achievement? Is human potential the same as the perfectibility of man and thus unattainable?

The twentieth century philosophers and thinkers who have been considered in this essay have almost exclusively attempted to understand both death and the afterlife by relating these ideas to the influence they have on our mortal lives. Some have suggested that the answer to these questions lies outside of the possibilities of human understanding, while others suggest that there may be no answer at all, but that it remains important for people to hold beliefs on these subjects.

It is clear however, that death remains a mystery, and the afterlife even more so; but that without an understanding of both of these, life itself can never be fully comprehended.

 

Bibliography

Foucault, M., ‘Right of Death and Power Over Life’, in The Foucault Reader, Paul Rabinow (ed.), London, Penguin Books, 1986.

Heidegger, M., Being and Time, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1996.

Keightley, A., Wittgenstein, Grammar and God, London, Epworth Press, 1976.

Malpas, J., Heidegger’s Topology, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2006.

Perrett, R.W., ‘Regarding Immortality’, in The Philosophy of Religion Selected Readings, Yeager Hudson (ed.), Mountain View, Mayfield Publishing Company, 1991, pp. 592-607.

Phillips, D.Z., Religion Without Explanation, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1976.

Schuon, F., Roots of the Human Condition, Bloomington, World Wisdom Books, 1991.

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[1] Michel Foucault, ‘Right of Death and Power Over Life’, in The Foucault Reader, Paul Rabinow (ed.), London, Penguin Books, 1986, p. 260.

[2] Ibid., p. 261.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1996, p. 235.

[5] Ibid., p. 232.

[6] Ibid., p. 228.

[7] Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2006, p. 101.

[8] Ibid., p. 273.

[9] Roy W. Perrett, ‘Regarding Immortality’, in The Philosophy of Religion Selected Readings, Yeager Hudson (ed.), Mountain View, Mayfield Publishing Company, 1991, p. 606.

[10] Frithjof Schuon, Roots of the Human Condition, Bloomington, World Wisdom Books, 1991, p. 8.

[11] Alan Keightley, Wittgenstein, Grammar and God, London, Epworth Press, 1976, p. 90.

[12] D.Z., Phillips, Religion Without Explanation, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1976, p. 123.

[13] Ibid., p. 136.

[14] Ibid., pp. 134-5.

[15] Phillips quoted in Keightley, p. 89.

[16] Keightly, pp. 87-8.

[17] Wittgenstein, quoted in Keightley, p. 90.

[18] Heidegger, p. 230.

[19] Perrett, p. 593.

The Enlightenment, The French Revolution, and Edmund Burke

‘Burke was a lifelong student of the Enlightenment who saw in the French Revolution the ultimate threat to those modern, rational, libertarian, enlightened values that he sought to defend.’ Discuss.

The particular course of the twentieth century, from the Russian Revolution through to the Cold War which spanned almost five decades following the second world war, revived Edmund Burke from his eighteenth-century obscurity. Burke’s most famous work, his ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ offered a conservative moral and political philosophy which leant hope to those who held hopes of preservation – of religion, liberty, morality – in the most destructive century the world had yet known. This hope is able to be found in the writings of Burke because he clearly articulated the threats posed by ideology and revolution; because he was explicit in the values he supported; and staunch in their defense, from whatever threat. The following is an exploration of these three aspects of Edmund Burke.

Burke, unlike Nietzsche, did not suffer the fate of being largely ignored in the times in which he lived, before later being revived by the interest of scholars. Burke lived a public life as parliamentarian and writer, although he much abhorred the possibility of his private life being made public.[1]

On publication, his ‘Reflections’ sold extremely well with several new editions produced within a year of the first. Peter J. Stanlis, one of the most prominent Burkean scholars, believes the true success of the ‘Reflections’ is qualitatively different to that measured only by sales figures;

If we consider only Burke’s immediate practical intention, to warn against French revolutionary principles and to exalt a Christian and Natural Law conception of civil society, the Reflections was the most successful book of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and it was almost totally opposed to the prevailing spirit of the age.[2]

Burke confronted the general optimism which initially greeted the French Revolution in England with stern and dire warnings, delivered eloquently and with a modest wisdom in prose which sought not to dazzle the mind with its cleverness, but to appeal to the moral sense, heart and entrails of its reader.

Frederick Dreyer prefers to downplay this successful image of Burke. He argues, “that Burke condemned the French Revolution should cause no surprise. Eventually most Englishmen of his class would come to condemn it as well.”[3] Burke however, was Irish, which combined with false insinuations he was a catholic, created a tension within his identity as a British Parliamentarian. As for the reference to class, does Dreyer here mean the political ruling-class? If class were a determining and useful referent then perhaps Burke’s being the son of a successful lawyer, and his own experience of upward social mobility would suggest more affinity with the class of professionals that formed the vanguard of the French Revolution.

There was absolutely nothing “eventual” about Burke’s opposition to the Revolution, the quality of which was first articulated in 1756 in his satirical ‘A Vindication of Natural Society’. With “eventually” being the key word, the descent into violence of the Revolution may have been what “eventually” turned much of British opinion. But Burke had foreseen this, and in 1790 his highly successful and immediately influential ‘Reflections’ became the axis – and the dividing ground – upon which this opinion turned.

More usefully, Dreyer argues that much of the ‘Reflections’ is best understood as an attack or response to the Reverend Dr. Richard Price’s ‘Discourse on the Love of Our Country’;

Without Price, Burke would not have started the ‘Reflections’ when he did; without Price the ‘Reflections’ would have turned into a different kind of book. It is not too much to say that unless we keep Price in mind it is impossible to understand fully the logic of Burke’s argument against the French Revolution.[4]

That is, many of the attacks in the ‘Reflections’ ostensibly directed at the French were a reflection of threats to English circumstances.[5]  J. G. A. Pocock concurs with Dreyer that the Reverend Dr. Price spurred on Burke to write the ‘Reflections’,[6] however the substance each attributes to this is different. Dreyer for instance, argues the passage on Marie Antoinette only makes sense when read with Price in mind.[7] On the other hand, Pocock sees at the heart of the ‘Reflections’ a question of political economy relating to the seizure of Church lands to use them as security for paper assignats (an action analogous to the spoliation of the monasteries under Henry VIII);

it is not possible to read Burke’s Reflections with both eyes open and doubt that it presents this action – and not assaulting the bedchamber of Marie Antoinette – as the central, the absolute and the unforgivable crime of the Revolutionaries.[8]

This variance in possible readings of the ‘Reflections’ is indicative generally of the unsystematic nature of Burke’s writings. As with the work of Nietzsche, this has seen Burke’s writing interpreted as the needs of different readers arose. And yet it remains, despite any charge of Burke’s writings being unsystematic (spread as they were across pamphlets, books, records of parliamentary speeches, and public and private letters), that his ‘Reflections’ were comprehensive; as Seamus F. Deane notes,

Few authors, important or obscure, managed in the following two decades to raise any objection to the philosophes which had not already been expressed by Burke; he reaped the whole harvest of disagreement, insult, and invective in that one sweeping and memorable attack.[9]

Despite his opposition to the French philosophes, which will be discussed later in more detail, there is little doubt that Edmund Burke indeed was a ‘lifelong student of the Enlightenment’, or that he was consistent in his feelings toward it.[10]

Dreyer argues “Burke can be seen as an eccentric thinker only if we define the Enlightenment in perverse and narrow terms.”[11] Burke was much involved in the thinking, writing and ideas of the age, and although his work can be seen as running counter to the ‘prevailing spirit of the age’, he is still of it. If the age of the Enlightenment were to be characterised only by the primacy of rational and scientific enquiry, then it would be no stretch to think of Burke as a nostalgic eccentric. Conservatism and nostalgia, after all, are no strange bedfellows.

Despite Burke’s devout belief in the ‘great chain of being’, he seemed ill-content with his place in it, not following in his father’s footsteps to the bar, instead pursuing a career of letters and politics. This is not to suggest that this ambiguity is the result of hypocrisy or vanity on Burke’s part. Rather, as Isaac Kramnick puts forward, “the beginning of wisdom in understanding Edmund Burke is… in discerning his basic ambivalence to the two great ideological currents whose confrontation dominated his age.”[12]

While this is good advice to keep in mind, I’m not sure it does sufficient justice to the strength of Burke’s convictions. His first published work ‘A Vindication of Natural Society’ demonstrated the need Burke felt to engage with and respond to the main current of the Enlightenment;

Burke’s satire reveals that even in his early twenties he was increasingly aware that the rationalist philosophers of the Enlightenment encouraged men to submit to destructive analysis and criticism all the achievements of men throughout history.[13]

The writing of ‘Vindications’ and its being misunderstood as a serious work by Bolingbroke, whom Burke was satirizing, highlighted to Burke the danger of moral and social theories and speculation. At the heart of Burke’s study and feelings on the Enlightenment is the perilous nature of ideas and words;

When men find that something can be said in favor of what… they have thought utterly indefensible, they grow doubtful of their own reason; they are thrown into a sort of pleasing surprise; they run along with the speaker, charmed and captivated to find such a plentiful harvest of reasoning, where all seemed barren and unpromising. This is the fairy land of philosophy… There is a sort of gloss upon ingenious falsehoods that dazzles the imagination, but which neither belongs to, nor becomes the sober part of truth…[14]

Stanlis is emphatic on this point; Burke “was convinced that words continue to influence people psychologically, even after they have rejected any belief in a historical state of nature.”[15] There can be little doubt that what Burke developed from his study of the Enlightenment was an utter revulsion for the immodest, elaborate, and self-contained historical and intellectual fictions such as ‘the state of nature’ and the abstract ‘rights of man’;

We know that we have made no discoveries; and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we were born…[16]

For Burke, the present state of British government, Constitution and society represented centuries of achievement. The Enlightenment in large part was represented by irreverent and self-satisfied schemers who would dare risk this for the sake of their untested speculations. It is a result of his study of the Enlightenment then that Burke, according to Jeffrey Hart,

was the first to recognize the deep moral division of the West, which was just then opening up, and which today, across the board, is decisive for our moral, political, and metaphysical opinions: and because Burke, having recognized the division and defined its doctrinal grounds, took sides.[17]

If Edmund Burke did not side with the doctrine that asserted no limits to the application of human reason and claimed universal rights and freedom for men, where then, did his values lie? The answer, of course, is that there were many things which Burke held in high esteem, but the three I wish to focus on are his conception of the ‘Moral Natural Law’, civil society, and government. On the ‘natural law’, my understanding of this in relation to Burke comes largely from the work of Peter J. Stanlis. Burke wrote;

Dark and inscrutable are the ways by which we come into the world. The instincts which give rise to this mysterious process of nature are not of our making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps unknowable, arise moral duties, which, as we are able perfectly to comprehend, we are bound indispensably to perform.[18]

God gives man his nature, and although we may not perceive clearly our origins or our end, let alone our purpose, Burke is arguing that we are able to perfectly perceive our ‘moral duties’, our obligation to which is the observance of the ‘natural law’.

Burke understood that there was a fundamental distinction between Natural Law and the philosophes’ natural rights.[19] The leveling zeal of the revolutionaries threatened the natural law, no matter how widely beneficial their egalitarian principles on the surface seemed. For Stanlis, this, rather than Price, or political economy, is the key to Burke’s response to the French Revolution;

To Burke the moral Natural Law was so basic to the ancient inherited social order of Europe that its subversion was enough proof that the revolution was the most extensive project ever launched against all religion, law, property, and real civil order and liberty.[20]

For Burke, because man’s nature was ordained by God, who prescribes his place in the ‘chain of being’, and it is in man’s nature to form society, civil society is then a divine bestowal.[21] Thus the subversion of the moral Natural Law was but one part of the blasphemy of the revolutionaries, in addition to which, Burke understood “that the spirit of the Revolution… was at its roots characterized by a hatred of the very idea of society.”[22]

In imagining a fictitious time where man in a ‘state of nature’ was uncorrupted, freer and supposedly happier than his modern counterpart, due to a lack of social roles and obligation which he must fulfill, the revolutionaries believed they could remove the ‘chains’ of society and free man within it, and without destroying it.

If Burke did imagine a ‘state of nature’, which I am not convinced he did, I imagine it may have been more akin to Hobbes than Rousseau; a ‘war of all against all’. Perhaps more telling than the comment on the ‘state of nature’ in Frank O’Gorman’s assessment is the view of civil society; “for Burke, the state of nature was anarchic and primitive from which civilised social life was a thankful deliverance.”[23] The use of the word ‘deliverance’ is perhaps no accident, through civil society might be achieved the redemption for the ‘fall’ from the biblical ‘state of nature’;

To Burke, man’s relationship to civil society is a moral necessity; it cannot be voluntaristic, for that would exalt will above right reason; nothing could be more false and wicked than the Lockian theory of a voluntary and revocable social contract based upon a hypothetical state of nature.[24]

In that man is a social creature by his ordained nature, and does not choose society but is born into it, he may not choose to forgo society and its rights or obligations. Natural Law, civil society and obligation are inextricably bound with religion. Indeed, Seamus F. Deane argues that;

The belief that the atheist should have no existence in the community because his creed denied the foundations of civil society is one of the most persistent and unshakable of Burke’s convictions.[25]

Thus the separation of church and state pursued by the revolutionaries is to Burke a repudiation of the divine gifts of government, society, and religion. Moreover, it is the interconnection of all these elements, what Rousseau would call ‘chains’, which shelters man and links him with his past and with his species

Without the warm cloak of custom, tradition, experience, history, religion, and social hierarchy – all of which radical man would rip off – man is shivering and naked. Free man from all mystery, demystify his institutions and his intellectual world, and you leave him alone in a universe of insignificance, incapacity, and inadequacy.[26]

The demystification of institutions removes the awe and respect with which Burke believed they should be viewed. None of these could be perfect for all at any given time, yet they were an inheritance that linked man with his past, and it was their duty to preserve or cautiously reform them as needed for future generations.

Kramnick asserts that “Burke repudiates the fundamental liberal belief that institutions are produced by the willful choice of specific individuals.”[27] Not only would the abolition of social institutions with the view to create new ones in their place not succeed to any specified plan, it would disinherit those yet unborn of the link to their history. Reformers in government, then, should approach with caution, with the preservation of the spirit of their institutions in mind and without false hope or millenarian pretenses; for Burke, “all that wise men ever aim at is to keep things from coming to the worst.”[28]

With more in mind, I believe, than simply preventing things coming to the worst, Burke would actively defend the principles of his convictions and the values of the moral Natural Law wherever he found them to be in danger. These occasions included the attempt to impeach Warren Hastings with regard to the abuses of the East India Company in India, and defense of the British Constitution to the point of sacrificing personal friendships. As a politician, O’Gorman argues, Burke’s

main concern was… to preserve the balanced constitution of the eighteenth century, with the separate spheres of influence apportioned to King, Parliament and People no matter from whatever quarter a threat to it might appear.[29]

The affairs of India, the actions of the East India Company, and the impeachment trial of the Governor-General of India, Warren Hastings, were a significant part of the business of Parliament in the 1780s and 1790s. Burke sought to impeach Hastings on the basis of natural law. He argued that no-one had the right to exercise arbitrary power. That the British Parliament enabling Hastings to govern as he saw fit was not a justification for the exercise of arbitrary power, nor was the excuse of arbitrary power being a general and accepted mode of government in Asia.

Stanlis demonstrates that Burke’s attacks against Hastings’s justifications of the exercise of arbitrary power “derives wholly from his ardent faith in Natural Law”.[30] Burke is seeking to defend not only the rights of the people of India as he saw them under the Natural Law, but also to defend against the introduction of “‘Eastern’ principles into England.”[31]

Against what was essentially the cultural relativist position of Hastings, Burke invoked something he believed to be universal;

Mr. Hastings has no refuge… let him fly from common law, and the sacred institutions of the country in which he was born; let him fly from acts of parliament… still the Mohammedan law condemns him… Let him fly where he will… law, thank God, meets him everywhere – arbitrary power cannot secure him against law; and I would as soon have him tried on the Koran, or any other eastern code of laws, as on the common law of this kingdom.[32]

Yet what Burke considered to be universal was inimical to the definition supplied by the philosophes. So deep ran the convictions that Burke held regarding the French Revolution, that it had the effect of separating Burke both politically and personally from many of his allies and friends who sympathized with it, notably Charles James Fox and Sir Philip Francis. Burke’s conception of his duty to the British Constitution apparently left him with no other option.[33] His words in Parliament with regard to the break with Fox are included by Jeffrey Hart, and are worth repeating here for the sense they give of Burke;

It is indiscreet at any period, but especially at my time of life, to provoke enemies or give friends occasion to desert me. Yet firm and steady adherence to the British Constitution places me in such a dilemma; I am ready to risk it, and with my last words exclaim, ‘Fly from the French Constitution’… yes, there is a loss of friends. I have done my duty at the price of my friend. Our friendship is at an end.[34]

Far from viewing events in France as a change of government, Burke observed the specter of rational revolution across the channel beginning to haunt the chambers of the British parliament. For Burke, the French Revolution wasn’t merely a turn of events he did not approve of, it was the culmination of decades of the sort of Enlightenment philosophy that he abhorred. The remaking of a constitution upon abstract universal rights and formalities invented through speculation would not be worth the paper it was printed upon. Rather, “Burke insisted upon the concrete realization of man’s natural rights in civil society, through the incorporation of basic moral principles in constitutional law.”[35]

An ailing constitution was neither the grounds for experimental surgery nor drastic doctrinal measures. In the following famous passage from his ‘Reflections’, Burke’s rhetoric paints a macabre and graphic picture of those that would tamper  irreverently with the institutions of state;

he should never dream of beginning its reformation by its subversion… he should approach to the faults of the State as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude. By this wise prejudice we are taught to look with horror on those children of their country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that by their poisonous weeds and wild incantations they may regenerate the paternal constitution and renovate their father’s life.[36]

To Burke, who spent his entire adult life in opposition to the main intellectual current of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution was the culmination of that movement. In this he saw the Revolution as a continuity of the Enlightenment, rather than an accidental misuse of its principles. Deane argues that in Burke’s view, the philosophes “helped to cause the Revolution. Burke, then, saw the French Enlightenment in terms of the Revolution.”[37] But we know that this is simply not true. Burke had strong feelings toward the Enlightenment thinkers which he expressed decades before revolution.

Burke knew that the threat to Europe didn’t originate in the French Revolution; it was born in the philosophy of sensibility which inspired and found full expression in the revolution. The combining of Cartesian reason with individualism and a conscience based on the feeling of the individual. For Stanlis, Burke’s condemnation of sensibility is the reverse side of the coin which put Natural Law at the heart of his response to the Revolution;

sensibility permeated an epicurean philosophy of pleasure, power, and will with moral feeling; it corrupted people by teaching them to justify evil means in practice for noble ends in theory, to act without restraint or a conscious reference to any legal precedents or moral code.[38]

In this is evidence of an idea that Burke would have found preposterous. The idea that the creation of a better future justified whatever speculative methods the rational politician could devise. As we have seen, Burke did not believe it possible for men to construct institutions according to their will, thus justifying harm to those living for an undeliverable benefit to those yet to be born was a frightful proposition which he saw in naked terms; “justifying perfidy and murder for public benefit, public benefit would soon become the pretext, and perfidy and murder the end.”[39]

Peter Stanlis saw that it was on this reasoning that Burke was able to predict the Terror. The Terror was murder done in the name of public good in the service of abstract rights, and “the ethical norms common to man in civil society would be extinguished in favor of emotional appeals to political slogans favoring the general welfare.”[40]

The attempt to apply Cartesian reasoning to the principles of government, with the view that through this reason might be discovered the perfect system that would be universal in its application, suitable and true for all men at all times, for Burke is an assault upon society and the divine. Deane remarks it unsurprising that Burke “should connect the abstract, universal theory of the philosophes with atheism” and that to declare this universality “is to assert human despotism against the divine plenitude.”[41]

Indeed, this despotism would also be extended over people in society in the exercise of arbitrary power in the name of abstract speculation and millenarian zeal, with no reference to the moral Natural Law. Burke detested arbitrary power, it is precisely this he sought to defend against in the impeachment of Hastings and his criticisms of Britain’s treatment of the American colonies. His support of the Americans and subsequent condemnation of the French confused many observers, but like his willingness to defend the balance of the British Constitution against the King, Parliament and the people as the need arose, so too would he employ what seemed conflicting intellectual defenses against the varied dangers of the Enlightenment thinkers; “Burke exalted reason over will when he opposed the excesses of Rousseau, and sentiment over reason when he opposed the extremism of the philosophes.”[42]

Government should be formed on a strong foundation of concrete moral standards, not on any formal division of power or scheme which is guided by theoretical and speculative rights. For Burke, the French Revolution simply provided the evidence of the intellectual sin and hubris of the Enlightenment philosophes. It was a realization of his deepest fear

that speculative abstract rationalism had the power to destroy all social institutions and conventions, all that people had constructed with great care and labor over centuries of building civilization up from crude barbarism to its present degree of perfection.[43]

What right had the philosophes to disinherit future generations of their property in society? What right to, at their fancy, undo the legacy left for them? While the philosophes would justify such actions against the universal freedom which they believed was the right of man, to Burke, this would be a liberty that encroached arbitrarily on others, those yet unborn. Sovereignty placed in the hands and whims of a majority of the people was neither legitimate or just. It was arbitrary power without check, and without deference to a moral code; and Burke would have none of it;

The French Revolution, say they, was the act of the majority of the people; and if the majority of any other people, the people of England for instance, wish to make the same change, they have the same right. Just the same undoubtedly. That is, none at all.[44]

Burke’s opposite conception of freedom and rights, argues Jeffrey Hart, was the essential element in Burke’s reaction to the Revolution; “ for Burke, freedom was a concrete and historical thing, the actual freedoms enjoyed by actual Englishmen: they enjoyed the historic rights of Englishmen.”[45] This is by no means to say that, because Burke regarded his freedom as privilege of being a member of English society, he would thus deny those same freedoms to other societies which had not managed to cultivate their own liberties and freedoms. Burke’s speeches in the impeachment of Warren Hastings demonstrate this conclusively.

Burke recognised that  “to govern is to restrain man.”[46] Man left to his own devices without the bonds of society, the links rather than the ‘chains’, was corruptible and capable of much darkness and evil. Man’s ‘state of nature’ was civil society, and in this he had proved both wicked and good. “The restraints on men,” argued Burke,

as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. But as the liberties and restrictions vary with times and circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract rule: and nothing is so foolish as to discuss them upon that principle.[47]

Man’s place in society was his link to the divine. Although he knew not how this came to be, nor for what purpose, as far as man could perceive what was moral and what was just, such was his duty. So far as man could humbly and venerably influence the institutions of his society, which were the legacy of his ancestors who themselves through civil society were connected to the divine, man’s duty was to infuse these institutions with the moral Natural Law.           

Would the opportunity to create the ‘best of all possible worlds’ justify a sacrifice of human suffering to attain it? No; from this the best that could be created is the ‘second-best of all possible worlds’. The ‘best of all possible worlds’ would not require any extension of human suffering to bring it into being. Burke understood this, that although we could imagine something greater, we are restricted by what is possible. Burke believed that we always have the opportunity to work slowly and cautiously by degrees in effecting our reforms; but we do not have the ability to construct a new society from the wreckage of the old. The descent of the French Revolution into terror and violence is no small vindication of the principles of Edmund Burke.

 

Bibliography

Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France, New York, The Liberal Arts Press, 1955.

Deane, Seamus F., ‘Burke and the French Philosophes’,  in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, pp. 295-320.

Dreyer, Frederick, ‘The Genesis of Burke’s Reflections’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, pp. 239-56.

Hart, Jeffrey, ‘Burke and Radical Freedom’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, pp. 257-74.

Kramnick, Isaac, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of An Ambivalent Conservative, New York, Basic Books, 1977.

O’Gorman, Frank, British Conservatism: Conservative Thought from Burke to Thatcher, London, Longman, 1986.

Pocock, J. G. A., ‘The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, pp. 275-94.

Stanlis, Peter J., Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment and Revolution, London, Transaction Publishers, 1991.

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[1] Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of An Ambivalent Conservative, New York, Basic Books, 1977, p. 68.

[2] Peter J. Stanlis, Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment and Revolution, London, Transaction Publishers, 1991, p. 39.

[3] Frederick Dreyer, ‘The Genesis of Burke’s Reflections’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, p. 239.

[4] Dreyer, p. 241.

[5] Ibid., p. 253.

[6] J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, p. 278.

[7] Dreyer, p. 251.

[8] Pocock, p. 278.

[9] Seamus F. Deane, ‘Burke and the French Philosophes’,  in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, p. 319.

[10] Stanlis, p. 163.

[11] Dreyer, p. 256.

[12] Kramnick, p. 7.

[13] Stanlis, p. 150.

[14] Edmund Burke, quoted in Stanlis, p. 148.

[15] Stanlis, p. 167.

[16] Edmund Burke, quoted in Stanlis, p. 178.

[17] Jeffrey Hart, ‘Burke and Radical Freedom’, in Iain Hampsher-Monk (ed.), Edmund Burke, Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009, pp. 257-8.

[18] Edmund Burke, quoted in Stanlis, p. 47.

[19] Stanlis, p. 39.

[20] Ibid., p. 49.

[21] Ibid., p. 43.

[22] Hart, p. 262.

[23] Frank O’Gorman, British Conservatism: Conservative Thought from Burke to Thatcher, London, Longman, 1986, p. 14.

[24] Stanlis, p. 42.

[25] Deane, p. 301.

[26] Kramnick, p. 33.

[27] Ibid., p. 25.

[28] Ibid., p. 22.

[29] O’Gorman, p. 13.

[30] Stanlis, p. 33.

[31] Ibid., p. 34.

[32] Edmund Burke, quoted in Stanlis, p. 35.

[33] Hart, p. 259.

[34] Edmund Burke, quoted in Hart, p. 259.

[35] Stanlis, p. 45.

[36] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, New York, The Liberal Arts Press, 1955, pp. 109-110.

[37] Seamus F. Deane in Hampsher-Monk p316

[38] Stanlis, pp. 186-7.

[39] Edmund Burke, quoted in Stanlis, p. 177.

[40] Stanlis, p. 177.

[41] Deane, p. 317.

[42] Ibid., p. 310.

[43] Stanlis, pp. 149-50.

[44] Edmund Burke, quoted in O’Gorman, p. 93.

[45] Hart, p. 260.

[46] Kramnick, p. 30.

[47] Edmund Burke, quoted in O’Gorman, p. 67.

Nietzsche and the Enlightenment

A response to Nietzsche’s ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’

The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche is often rightly considered a break with the Enlightenment. However, a close reading of his 1873 essay ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’ reveals that it very much is a work of the Enlightenment, in that it deals with some of its claims and key concerns. Herein, we can discover thoughts on human nature, society, morality, rational man and truth. But do we need to understand Nietzsche himself to understand the ideas in his writing? The substance of the essay in question suggests Nietzsche might be unsympathetic to our claims of understanding. Indeed, were such a thing as understanding possible, in the case of Friedrich Nietzsche, it might yet still remain impossible.

Two popular interpretations of Nietzsche have been; first, that he was a sort of proto-Nazi, an idea which has since been discredited as stemming from deliberate misinterpretation and integration of his work into Nazi philosophy; and second, that his writings were contradictory and inconsistent, which has in part been blamed by scholars on Nietzsche’s sister, who herself edited and published some of his work posthumously. Nietzsche perhaps would not have been concerned with inconsistency or contradiction. His writings are very different in style to the orderly presentation of Descartes’ ‘Discourse on the Method’ or Kant’s ‘Idea for a Universal History’, and yet, especially in the case of this essay in question, they remain  powerful, lucid and rich.

Nietzsche is well known for the proclamation ‘God is Dead’. The controversial phrasing means this expression is not surprisingly often misunderstood, but for Nietzsche it means that the idea, the belief, the possibility, the illusion and the need for god is dead. Heidegger understood this as the death of metaphysics, although Nietzsche himself saw the metaphysical need as an offshoot of religion, rather than a precursor to religion. But if there is no god, then the foundation of morality and truth is removed, and anything might be possible. Nietzsche realized that the consequences of this could be terrible.

Dorinda Outram describes a common interpretation of the Enlightenment as

a desire for human affairs to be guided by rationality rather than by faith, superstition, or revelation; a belief in the power of human reason to change society and liberate the individual from the restraints of custom or arbitrary authority; all backed up by a world view increasingly validated by science rather than by religion or tradition.[1]

Against this reading, it is relatively unproblematic to present Nietzsche as a break with the Enlightenment project. Indeed, Nietzsche is often placed by scholars as a descendant of the German Romantic movement. This movement was in part a reaction to the ideal of rationalism as presented by the Enlightenment. He was influenced by or admired men such as Schopenhauer, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Voltaire, Wagner, among many others, although many would eventually fall out of his favour. As an anti-Enlightenment thinker, Nietzsche seriously questioned the idea of progress, and of the perfectibility of man or society.

While some writers such as Hobbes and Rousseau have rather distinct views of human nature when it is not constrained by society, Nietzsche, in this piece, has little interest in portraying human nature as either fundamentally good or bad. Human nature is what it is. What others with a pessimistic view of human nature might call bad, would perhaps be of little concern to Nietzsche. Indeed, it is precisely the capacity and desire for deception in man which shields him from the true nature of his existence,

And woe to that fatal curiosity which might one day have the power to peer out and down through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and then suspect that man is sustained in the indifference of his ignorance by that which is pitiless, greedy, insatiable, and murderous.[2]

While Nietzsche may have been angered by some of the ‘life-denying’ aspects of Christian morality, there is a sense that despite this general ‘self-deception’ toward human nature, he might have tentatively approved, if not with the means then at least with the end. According to Graeme Garrard, Nietzsche “thought that Voltaire had correctly realized that man is a ‘beast of prey’ and that civilization is a ‘tremendous triumph’ over his bestial nature.”[3]

One cannot help but get the impression from Nietzsche that he felt society to be limiting both to species and individual. In Nietzsche’s view of society, where ‘truth’ and morality are derived from using the established conventions, there arises a contradiction or tension between the unrestricted inquiry encouraged by the Enlightenment and the stability of the society. This can be linked to Nietzsche’s concept of herd morality, where truth means using the accepted designations for things, and the resisting of both lies and truths which could prove harmful. Unrestricted inquiry could challenge the accepted metaphors. But Nietzsche, as evidenced by his essay, does not hesitate to question the accepted metaphors and concepts.

For Nietzsche, it remains that man chooses for himself these limitations to form a society

From boredom and necessity, man wishes to exist socially and with the herd; therefore, he needs to make peace and strives accordingly to banish from his world at least the most flagrant bellum omnium contra omnes – war of all against all.[4]

The use of the phrase ‘war of all against all’ demonstrates an intellectual link with Hobbes,[5] and is at odds with Rousseau’s conception of man in the ‘state of nature’. For Nietzsche, society is at least a ‘cease-fire’ if not a peace treaty, and also a first step in the origin of the puzzling human drive for ‘truth’.[6]

While society here may be considered a choice, humans are almost always born into society, the only choice being perhaps the unlikely decision to leave it. The consensus of society may equally be one of superstition, rather than that of reasoned explanation. According to Garrard, “Nietzsche enthusiastically commends the Enlightenment for its attacks on Christianity and its elitist disdain for la canaille, as Voltaire sometimes contemptuously referred to the masses.”[7]

But this disdain for the unenlightened mass, the mass which may not make as full a use of the faculty of reason, or adequate use of rationalism and skepticism, which may favour traditions and religion over science and critical enquiry; this disdain suggests that a rational education is a prerequisite for human value, for that is what the class whom Voltaire criticized lacked. Despite the heralding of universal and inalienable rights in the political movements which embraced the Enlightenment, it yet remained that the worthy person was the educated person.

In ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, Nietzsche unravels the web of pretensions which comprise the human intellect. The first pretension is the invention of ‘knowing’, the supposed ability to grasp ‘truth’. ‘Knowing’ is the source of pride which validates for man the value of his existence. Intertwined with this pride is deception, which the individual uses several forms of in maintaining himself against others, and which his nature leads him to use against himself.

In relation to the title of this essay, Nietzsche distinguishes lies from truth as a misuse of the fixed conventions of language. Lies or deception are not hated in themselves, but their harmful consequences are. Nietzsche considers any pretension to the possession of pure truth to be the result of forgetfulness; thus any moral obligation toward truth and away from lies is in the service of minimizing harm, and is a social obligation not stemming from any truth in itself.

“So far we have heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors.”[8] That is, to lie with the herd. The morality of truth is derived from the social obligation to comply with the fixed conventions and metaphors.

For Nietzsche, language demonstrates not only the subjective nature of perception (and thus the myth of objectivity) but also the human disregard for pure truth .

The formation of language is the result of metaphors built upon metaphors into the creation of concepts, which themselves have no direct relationship with the original unique experience, or the thing in itself. This concern partially echoes Descartes geometric argument involving a triangle; we know of a perfect triangle but have “no reason to be assured that there was any such triangle in existence”.[9]

The philosophical claim to truth is parallel to the claim of science to see material reality objectively. Both are impossible as they involve the subject. Logic, reason, time, space and numbers are all constructs, those means by which we attempt to ‘know’ are also the barriers to truth, dividing us from the ‘thing in itself’.

Towards the end of the essay, Nietzsche makes a distinction between intuitive and rational man. What they have in common is that the “drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive”[10]; but this drive is by its nature a creative drive. They are both creative in the sense above, yet have different aims. The creativity of rational man is used in concepts which can be used to guard against the uncertainties of life, whereas intuitive man regards life as something good in itself and uses his creativity to celebrate life. For Nietzsche this is a deception of a different nature, but one he seems more sympathetic towards.

The final paragraph of the essay is used to mock rational man. His ability to learn from and master circumstances which bring misfortune and thus not be perturbed by it, results in his deception being executed precisely when misfortune arises. The rational man who understands weather and can make the causal link between thunderous dark clouds overhead and imminent soaking rain, instead of using this knowledge to protect himself from the elements, must otherwise maintain his dignity and composure, to surrender to the elements he understands precisely because he understands them, rather than to flee from beneath them.

Nietzsche’s ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’ constitutes an attack on the very foundation of the Enlightenment project; an undermining of the idea that man can objectively harness this faculty called reason and apply it to the world, in a sense, knowing and wielding truth. But with truth thus undermined, without subsequent destruction of the belief in reason and truth, we are left with a feeling of teetering and sinking, perhaps even of imminent collapse. Nietzsche has torn back the veil of concepts and shown us metaphors, the shedding of a façade revealing a rotting frame, safe perhaps only while all agree that it is so.

 

Bibliography

Descartes, Rene, ‘Discourse on the Method’, in David Weisman (ed.), Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996, pp. 3-26.

Garrard, Graeme, ‘Nietzsche For and Against the Enlightenment’, The Review of Politics, Fall 2008; 70, 4;  pp. 595-608.

Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, in Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large (eds.), The Nietzsche reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 2006, pp. 114-23.

Outram, Dorinda, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in The Enlightenment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 1-13.

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[1] Dorinda Outram, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in The Enlightenment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 3.

[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, in Keith Ansell Pearson and Duncan Large (eds.), The Nietzsche reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 2006, p. 117.

[3] Graeme Garrard, ‘Nietzsche For and Against the Enlightenment’, The Review of Politics, Fall 2008; 70, 4;  p. 607.

[4] Nietzsche, p. 115.

[5] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985, p. 185. “They are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man”.

[6] Nietzsche, p. 115.

[7] Garrard, pp. 599-600.

[8] Nietzsche, p. 117.

[9] Rene Descartes, ‘Discourse on the Method’, in David Weisman (ed.), Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1996, p. 25.

[10] Nietzsche, p. 121.