Philosophers From Scotland

"A central thesis then begins to emerge: man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?' We enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed characters - roles into which we have been drafted - and we have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are apt to be construed. It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine, that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are. ...Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things."

"According to Aristotle then excellence of character and intelligence cannot be separated. Here Aristotle expresses a view characteristically at odds with that dominant in the modern world. The modern view is expressed at one level in such banalities as ‘Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever’ and at another in such profundities as Kant’s distinction between the good will, the possession of which alone is both necessary and sufficient for moral worth, and what he took to be a quite distinct natural gift, that of knowing how to apply general rules to particular cases, a gift the lack of which is called stupidity. So for Kant one can be both good and stupid; but for Aristotle stupidity of a certain kind precludes goodness."

"The virtues therefore are to be understood as those dispositions which will not only sustain practices and enable us to achieve the goods internal to practices. but which will also sustain us in the relevant kind of quest for the good. by enabling us to overcome the harms. dangers. temptations and distractions which we encounter. and which will furnish us with increasing self-knowledge and increasing knowledge of the good. The catalogue of the virtues will therefore include the virtues required to sustain the kind of households and the kind of political communities in which men and women can seek for the good together and the virtues necessary for philosophical enquiry about the character of the good. We have then arrived at a provisional conclusion about the good life for man: the good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is."

"There is no way to understand the character of the taboo rules, except as a survival from some previous more elaborate cultural background. We know also and as a consequence that any theory which makes the taboo rules … intelligible just as they are without any reference to their history is necessarily a false theory... why should we think about [the theories of] analytic moral philosophers such as Moore, Ross, Prichard, Stevenson, Hare and the rest in any different way? … Why should we think about our modern use of good, right and obligatory in any different way from that in which we think about late eighteenth-century Polynesian uses of taboo?"

"Our basic moral beliefs have two characteristics, Sidgwick found himself forced to conclude not entirely happily; they do not form any kind of unity, they are irreducibly heterogeneous; and their acceptance is and must be unargued. At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements for the truth of which no further reason can be given. To such statements Sidgwick, borrowing the word from Whewell, gives the name intuitions. Sidgwick's disappointment with the outcome of his own enquiry is evident in his announcement that where he had looked for Cosmos, he had in fact found only Chaos."

"Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues."

"[M]odern society is indeed often, at least in surface appearance, nothing but a collection of strangers, each pursuing his or her own interests under minimal constraints. We still of course, even in modern society, find it difficult to think of families, colleges and other genuine communities in this way; but even our thinking about those is now invaded to an increasing degree by individualist conceptions, especially in the law courts."

"Consider what kind of authority [can be ascribed to] any principle which it open to us to choose to regard as authoritative or not. I may choose for example to observe a regimen of asceticism and fasting … for reasons of health … What authority such principles possess derives from the reasons for my choice. Insofar as they are good reasons, the principles have corresponding authority; insofar as they are not, the principles are to that same extent deprived of authority. It would follow that a principle for the choice of which no reasons could be given would be a principle devoid of authority. I might indeed adopt such a principle from whim or caprice or from some arbitrary purpose … but if I then chose to abandon the principle whenever it suited me, I would be entirely free to do so."

"I have confronted theoretical positions whose protagonists claim that what I take to be historically produced characteristics of what is specifically modern are in fact the timelessly necessary characteristics of all and any moral judgment, of all and any selfhood."

"On Kant’s view it can never follow from the fact that God commands us to do such-and-such that we ought to do such-and-such. In order for us to reach such a conclusion we would also have to know that we always ought to do what God commands. But this last we could not know unless we ourselves possessed a standard of moral judgment independent of God’s commandments by means of which we could judge God’s deeds and words and so find the latter morally worthy of obedience. But clearly if we possess such a standard, the commandments of God will be redundant."

"[M]odern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modem politics is civil war carried on by other means. ...The truth on this matter was set out by Adam Ferguson: 'We are not to expect that the laws of any country are to be framed as so many lessons of morality . ...Laws, whether civil or political, are expedients of policy to adjust the pretensions of parties. and to secure the peace of society. The expedient is accommodated to special circumstances ...' (Principles of Moral and Political Science ii. 144). The nature of any society therefore is not to be deciphered from its laws alone, but from those understood as an index of its conflicts. What our laws show is the extent and degree to which conflict has to be suppressed."

"There ought not be two histories, one of political and moral action and one of political and moral theorizing, because there were not two pasts, one populated only by actions, the other only by theories. Every action is the bearer and expression of more or less theory-laden beliefs and concepts; every piece of theorizing and every expression of belief is a politcal and moral action."

"[M]y present point is not [the liberal-universalist one] that patriotism is good or bad as a sentiment, but that the practice of patriotism as a virtue is in advanced societies no longer possible in the way that it once was. In any society where government does not express or represent the moral community of the citizens, but is instead a set of institutional arrangements for imposing a bureaucratized unity on a society which lacks genuine moral consensus, the nature of political obligation becomes systematically unclear. ...Loyalty to my country, to my community - which remains unalterably a central virtue - becomes detached from obedience to the government which happens to rule me."

"The tradition of the virtues is at variance with central features of the modern economic order and more especially its individualism, its acquisitiveness and its elevation of the values of the market to a central social place. It now becomes clear that it also involves a rejection of the modern political order. ...Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition."

"By reviving the sort of ethics that identifies “the good” with human flourishing, MacIntyre aimed to lead us out of “the new dark ages”, presumably into a better future. He influenced the resurgence of virtue ethics and communitarianism (he denied espousing either), and the now fashionable distrust of liberalism, individualism and the Enlightenment."

"It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead - often not recognizing fully what they were doing - was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the dark ages which are already upon us. ...This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been among us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict."

"The manager treats ends as given, as outside his scope; his concern is with technique, with effectiveness … The therapist also treats ends as given, as outside his scope; his concern also is with technique, with effectiveness …Neither manager nor therapist, in their roles as manager and therapist, do or are able to engage in moral debate. They … purport to restrict themselves to the realms in which rational agreement in possible—that is, … to the realm of fact, the realm of means, the realm of measurable effectiveness."

"In The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966) and also in To My Fellow Teachers (1975) Philip Rieff has documented with devastating insight a number of the ways in which truth has been displaced as a value and replaced by psychological effectiveness. The idioms of therapy have invaded all too successfully such spheres as those of education and of religion."

"The stock characters acknowledged in the dramas of modern social life embody all too well the concepts and the modes of the moral beliefs and arguments which an Aristotelian and a Nietzschean would have to agree in rejecting. The bureaucratic manager, the consuming aesthete, the therapist, the protester and their numerous kindred occupy almost all the available culturally recognizable roles, the notions of the expertise of the few and of the moral agency of everyone are the presuppositions of the dramas which those characters enact. To cry out that the emperor had no clothes on was at least to pick on one man only to the amusement of everyone else; to declare that almost everyone is dressed in rags is much less likely to be popular."

"A striking feature of moral and political argument in the modern world is the extent to which it is innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries who revive old doctrines, while their conservative and reactionary opponents are the inventors of new ones."

"Imprisoning philosophy within the professionalizations and specializations of an institutionalized curriculum, after the manner of our contemporary European and North American culture, is arguably a good deal more effective in neutralizing its effects than either religious censorship or political terror"

"Raymond Aron ascribes to Weber the view that ‘each man’s conscience is irrefutable.’ … while [Weber] holds that an agent may be more or less rational in acting consistently with his values, the choice of any one particular evaluative stance or commitment can be no more rational than any other. All faiths and all evaluations are equally non-rational..."

"Marcuse’s collection of revolutionary forces is a list so familiar in radical circles that we must be careful not to miss its extreme heterogeneity: the student movement in the United States, the black population of the urban slums in the United States, the Chinese cultural revolution, the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, Cuba. There are three elements in this collection: there are first the genuinely aspiring poor of America and peasants in Vietnam and elsewhere, who must not be confused with their self-appointed spokesmen; there are the middle-class whites of the SDS and their counterparts in Britain, Germany, and France, who in their combination of insurrectionism and anarchism exemplify what Lenin diagnosed as leftwing communism, an infantile disease; and there are the representatives of the Communist bureaucracies in China, Cuba, and Vietnam, who represent right-wing communism, an oligarchical disease. These forces have only one thing in common: they are in conflict with the governments of the advanced industrial societies. But, as both Marx and Lenin knew, to be in conflict with the established order is not necessarily to be an agent of liberation."

"My view that tolerance and rationality are intimately connected is not merely an a priori thesis. The transformation of Marxism from a rationally held into an irrationally held body of theory is a transformation which was the result of Marxists cutting themselves off from possibilities of criticism and refutation. The use of state power to defend Marxism as the one set of true beliefs in the Soviet Union produced the atrophy of Marxism and the irrationality of Soviet Marxism. This use of state power was not only repressive in respect of tolerance; it was the instrument of a minority who took up towards the majority an attitude very similar to that which Marcuse advises his minority elite to take up to the majority. The majority was in the Soviet Union the passive object of re-education in the interests of its own liberation. What Marcuse invites us to repeat is part of the experience of Stalinism."

"Music is the universal language of mankind."

"You did late review my lays, Crusty Christopher; You did mingle blame and praise, Rusty Christopher. When I learnt from whom it came, I forgave you all the blame, Musty Christopher; I could _not_ forgive the praise, Fusty Christopher."

"The spirit of true religion breathes gentleness and affability; it gives a native, unaffected ease to the behavior; it is social, kind, cheerful; far removed from the cloudy and illiberal disposition which clouds the brow, sharpens the temper, and dejects the spirit."

"In whatever light we view religion it appears solemn and venerable. It is a temple full of majesty, to which the worshiper may approach with comfort, in the hope of obtaining grace and finding mercy; but where they cannot enter without being inspired with awe. If we may be permitted to compare spiritual with natural things, religion resembles not those scenes of natural beauty where every object smiles. It cannot be likened to the gay landscape or the flowery field. It resembles more the august and sublime appearances of Nature — the lofty mountain, the expanded ocean, and the starry firmament; at the sight of which the mind is at once overawed and delighted; and, from the union of grandeur with beauty, derives a pleasing but a serious devotion."

"The slave who digs in the mine or labors at the oar can rejoice at the prospect of laying down his burden together with his life; but to the slave of guilt there arises no hope from death. On the contrary, he is obliged to look forward with constant terror to this most certain of all events, as the conclusion of all his hopes, and the commencement of his greatest miseries."

"In the eye of that Supreme Being to whom our whole internal frame is uncovered, dispositions hold the place of actions."

"The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible."

"Embellish truth only with a view to gain it the more full and free admission into your hearer's minds; and your ornaments will, in that case, be simple, masculine, natural."

"How shocking must thy summons be, O Death! To him that is at ease in his possessions! Who, counting on long years of pleasure here, Is quite unfurnished for the world to come. In that dread moment, how the frantic soul Raves round the walls of her clay tenement; Runs to each avenue, and shrieks for help; But shrieks in vain."

"That discipline which corrects the baseness of worldly passion, fortifies the heart with virtuous principles, enlightens the mind with useful knowledge, and furnishes it with enjoyment from within itself, is of more consequence to real felicity, than all the provision we can make of the goods of fortune."

"Dissimulation in youth is the forerunner of perfidy in old age; its first appearance is the fatal omen of growing depravity and future shame."

"Anxiety is the poison of human life ; the parent of many sins and of more miseries. – In a world where everything is doubtful, and where we may be disappointed, and be blessed in disappointment, why this restless stir and commotion of mind? – Can it alter the cause, or unravel the mystery of human events?"

"Between levity and cheerfulness there is a wide distinction; and the mind which is most open to levity is frequently a stranger to cheerfulness."

"Look around you, and you will behold the universe full of active powers. Action is, so to speak, the genius of nature. By motion and exertion, the system of being is preserved in vigor. By its different parts always acting in subordination one to another, the perfection of the whole is carried on. The heavenly bodies perpetually revolve. Day and night incessantly repeat their appointed course. Continual operations are going on in the earth and in the waters. Nothing stands still. All is alive and stirring throughout the universe. In the midst of this animated and busy scene, is man alone to remain idle in his place? Belongs it to him to be the sole inactive and slothful being in the creation, when in so many various ways he might improve his own nature; might advance the glory of the God who made him; and contribute his part in the general good?"

"Idleness is the great corrupter of youth, and the bane and dishonor of middle age. He who, in the prime of life, finds time to hang heavy on his hands, may with much reason suspect that he has not consulted the duties which the consideration of his age imposed upon him; assuredly he has not consulted his happiness."

"It frequently happens that where the second line is sublime, the third, in which he meant to rise still higher, is perfectly bombast."

"What we call human reason, is not the effort or ability of one, so much as it is the result of the reason of many, arising from lights mutually communicated, in consequence of discourse and writing."

"Homer is the most simple in his style of all the great poets, and resembles most the style of the poetical parts of the Old Testament. They can have no conception of his manner, who are acquainted with him in Mr. Pope's translation only. An excellent poetical performance that translation is, and faithful in the main to the original. In some places, it may be thought to have even improved Homer. It has certainly softened some of his rudenesses, and added delicacy and grace to some of his sentiments. But withal, it is no other than Homer modernised. In the midst of the elegance and luxuriancy of Mr. Pope's language, we lose sight of the old bard's simplicity. I know indeed no author, to whom it is more difficult to do justice in a translation, than Homer."

"Pride looks back upon its past deeds, and calculating with nicety what it has done, it commits itself to rest; whereas humility looks to that which is before, and discovering how much ground remains to be trodden, it is active and vigilant. Having gained one height, pride looks down with complacency on that which is beneath it; humility looks up to a higher and yet higher elevation. The one keeps us on this earth, which is congenial to its nature; the other directs our eye, and tends to lift us up to heaven."

"I hold that we have a very imperfect knowledge of the works of nature till we view them as works of God,— not only as works of mechanism, but works of intelligence, not only as under laws, but under a Lawgiver, wise and good."

"True humility is a Christian grace and one of the fruits of the Spirit, originating in a deep consciousness of sin past and present, and leading us to discover our nothingness in the view of God, our insufficiency for any thing that is good, and prompting us, as we feel our infirmities, to strive after higher and yet higher attainments."

"As ages roll on there is doubtless a progression in human nature. The intellectual comes to rule the physical, and the moral claims to subordinate both. It is no longer strength of body that prevails, but strength of mind; while the law of God proclaims itself superior to both."

"It is not the motive, properly speaking, that determines the working of the will; but it is the will that imparts strength to the motive. As Coleridge says: " It is the man that makes the motive, and not the motive the man.""

"Newton supposed that all matter attracted other matter inversely according to the square of the distance; and the hypothesis was found to account for the whole movements of the heavenly bodies; which all became verifications of what Newton supposed to be the law of the solar system. Adopt the hypothesis that Jesus was what He is represented, and the whole of the books and the history becomes a verification."

"Our Lord's miracles were all essential parts of His one consistent life. They were wrought as evidences not only of His power, but of His mercy. They were throughout moral in their character, and spiritual in the ends contemplated by them. They were in fact embodiments of His whole character, exemplars of His whole teaching, emblems of His whole mission."

"When Christianity is received, it stimulates the faculties, and calls forth new ideas, new motives, and new sentiments. It has been the mother of all modern education."