Brand Blanshard: Best Quotations
These quotations are dervived from the entirety of Blanshard's published works. (Not merely 'The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard', as on Wikipedia.)
From: The Nature of Thought
Pgs. 126 - 127, Volume Two
In the course of a protracted struggle with the matter, we discovered that the only tenable relation between thought and its object was that of the partial and complete fulfilment of a purpose. From this it was an obvious inference that the way to understand thought was to read it in the light of its end. With this there appears the third course open to the psychologist. It is to interpret thought frankly and fully in the light of what it is seeking to achieve.
And now we are in sight of the answer to the final proposal above for keeping psychology a factual science. That proposal, it will be recalled, was to admit the working of ends or values but to take account of such working only as a particular fact or event, an occurrence in an individual mind, not as anything so pretentious as the operation in consciousness of truth, goodness and beauty themselves. And the answer to this is that once you have gone so far, you are bound willy-nilly to go farther, even if it takes you into metaphysics. Thought refers to, and aims at realizing, a system beyond itself, an impersonal and logical system. Its relation to that system is one of partial realization, and you can no more see what it is and why it behaves as it does without reference to the system than you can explain the behaviour of a lover without reference to the beloved. Does this mean that psychology, to be adequate to mind, must introduce into its account the necessities of logic, morals and aesthetics, must say that human behaviour is, in part, what it is because truth, goodness and beauty are what they are? We answer with another question. Is it these things that the mind is seeking to realize, or is it something less and other? This question answers itself. To say that the aim of thought, for example, is not at truth but at some mask or appearance of it, or at anything else whatever, is, on reflection, absurd. Truth is its sole and sufficient end; and the course of thought is unintelligible unless it is taken as the embodiment through the mind, brokenly always and fitfully and in continually varying degree, but nevertheless essentially, of truth itself.
From: On Philosophical Style
Pgs. 68 - 69
The most unfailingly lucid writer in the history of English literature is Macaulay, whose speeches in particular are masterpieces of incisive statement. The trouble is, as Augustine Birrell once remarked, that you cannot tell the truth in Macaulay's style. In satisfying his passion for clarity, he allows himself to omit shades and qualifications that are there in the facts, but would smudge his sharply etched lines if he were to put them into his picture. His style is the embodiment of his mind, and his mind, with all its learning, its delight in learning, and its extraordinary gift of communicating both, is a mind that moves on the surface of things and shies away instinctively whenever it perceives a depth or feels a mystery; it 'marches through the intricacies of things in a blaze of certainty.' The defects in Macaulay's mind forced themselves into his manner, and showed that the only way to amend that remarkable style was to be a better mind and a better man.
So in the end of all of us. The more perfectly one's style fits the inner man and reveals its strength and defect, the clearer it becomes that the problem of style is not a problem of words and sentences merely, but of being the right kind of mind. 'He who would not be frustrate in his hope to write well in laudable things,' said Milton, 'ought himself to be a true poem.' Does that make the problem of style insoluble? Yes, I am afraid it does. But it shows also that the problem we have been discussing is no petty or merely technical one, but very far-reaching indeed. We may have have to agree with Professor Raleigh that 'to write perfect prose is neither more nor less difficult than to lead a perfect life.'
From: Reason and Analysis
Pg. 25
Since this is a book in defence of reason, we may well begin by saying, at least provisionally, what 'reason' means.
Unfortunately it means many things. For the philosopher it commonly denotes the faculty and function of grasping necessary connections.
. . . .Sometimes reason is broadened again to describe the sceptical and reflective turn of mind generally. For Hobhouse it is 'that which requires proofs for assertions, causes for effects, purposes for action, principles for conduct, or, to put it generally, thinks in terms of grounds and consequences.' Reason in the widest sense of all, says Thomas Whittaker, is 'the relational element in intelligence, in distinction from the element of content, sensational or emotional' . . . .
Pg. 26
Both reason as a source of knowledge and rationality as a practical ideal are today under attack. Indeed there has been no period in the past two thousand years when they have undergone a bombardment so varied, so competent, so massive and sustained, as in the last half-century. The purpose of this volume and the two that follow it is to examine the most important of these criticisms as they apply to the theory of knowledge [Reason & Analysis], theology [Reason & Belief], and ethics [Reason & Goodness]. This book will be concerned with the theory of knowledge only, and we shall therefore be concerned with reason in its narrower senses alone. The criticism here has been more technical than in the other two fields; and though the path of the argument will be made as clear as possible, it will take us over parched sands and through some rather dense thickets. Plainly the journey is not one to take unless it is necessary.
How necessary it is we shall know only if we have some idea of the range and power of the revolt against reason in all its aspects. This revolt is not merely a technical attack by specialists. It is that, to be sure, but it is very much more. The suspicion of rational standards is part of the attitude of our day, which enters in subtle and manifold ways into our artistic criticism, our religious belief, our psychology, our sociology, and our politics, as well as our philosophy. It is part of the revolution of our time. 'Since the Renaissance,' as MacNeille Dixon says, 'there has been no such upheaval of thought, no such revolution of values as in the century upon which we have entered. Now as then, within about fifty years, within the span of a single lifetime, all the old conceptions, the previous beliefs in science, in religion, in politics, have been wholly transformed; a change has taken place, one might almost say, in the inclination of the Earth's orbit.'
Pgs. 492 - 493
Any self-respecting person would be humiliated at the discovery that his conclusions and moral choices were the product of nothing but mechanical clockwork. But there are levels of causality; and there is no reason whatever to suppose that conclusions and moral choices are mechanically determined. In the last chapter we studied a case in point. When a thinker follows a line of implication, the course of his thought is conditioned by the necessity in his subject matter, but far from being humiliated when he realizes this, he finds in it a ground of pride. For a rational being to act under the influence of seen necessity is to place himself at the farther possible extreme from the behaviour of the puppet. For a moral agent to choose that good which in the light of reflection approves itself as intrinsically greatest is to exercise the only freedom worth having. In such cases the line of determination runs through the agent's own intelligence. To think at its best is to find oneself carried down the current of necessity. To choose most responsibly is to see alternative goods with full clearness and to find the greatest of them tipping the beam. This, in a way, is to be determined. But there is nothing mechanical about it. For it is what the rational man means by freedom.
From: Reason and Goodness
Pg. 27
The main question of our time in ethics is whether moral judgment expresses knowledge or feeling. When we say that happiness or understanding is something worth pursuing for its own sake, are we expressing a belief that is, or may be, true, or are we giving voice to the satisfaction we take in these things? When we say that cruelty is wrong, are we making an assertion, or are we giving utterance to a dislike, an entreaty, or a command? Or are we, perhaps, doing both?
The issue bristles with difficulties, as we shall see. But it is of vast importance, theoretic and practical. It is important in theory because upon its outcome depends the place we assign to value both in knowledge and in the world. Traditionally, three kinds of knowledge have been recognized: knowledge of fact, as in 'this rose is red'; knowledge of necessity, as in '2+3=5'; and knowledge of value, as in 'Gandhi was a good man'. This last class of judgments is very wide for it is not confined to moral matters; judgments of value may express our sense of what is beautiful or ugly, comic or tragic, appropriate or rude, indeed in any way desirable or undesirable. The question currently raised is whether any of these judgments expresses insight or apprehension at all. If they do, what sort of attributes are these of goodness or beauty or rudeness? They seem to be neither sensible qualities nor relations, and even those philosophers who believe there are such attributes are perplexed and divided about them.
Pg. 300
The doctrine of psychological hedonism, that we desire only pleasure, seems always to have been accompanied by ethical hedonism, the doctrine that pleasure is the only good; that one is the real foundation of the other. To see that the first is false is to leave the other baseless. And psychological hedonism is false. It ought to have died once for all of the wounds inflicted on it by [Joseph] Butler. But it seems to be as irrepressible as the phoenix, and has cropped up again and again, to be successively scotched with elegance by Sidgwick, Rashdall, Broad, and many others. For anything I shall say of it here, it may go on with these reincarnations; the criticisms already offered seem to me decisive. We desire to eat food, and not merely to have the pleasure of eating; we desire to hear music, and play games, and understand, not merely to gain satisfaction out of objects and activities themselves indifferent. And if our goods reflect the content of our desires, we see again that those goods are not exhausted in pleasure or satisfaction. They consist of satisfying experiences as wholes.
Pg. 278
Perry holds that . . . a thing is good not because of what it is, but because someone happens to like it.
Now it is certain that goodness, in ordinary thought of it, does not sit as loose to things as this. Do we think, to use Bentham's old case, that pushpin becomes as good as poetry if only people like it as much? If two men organize their lives, the one around the game of pushpin and the other around poetry, so that their interest in their respective objects are equally intense, preferential, and inclusive, is it therefore meaningless to question whether the objects they are engrossed in are equally good? I do not think that most people would take this as obvious; I suspect they would take it as untrue. Or supppose that two men devoted themselves, with interests equal in these ways, the one to astronomy or metaphysics, the other to counting and measuring the rocks on a New Hampshire farm; would the knowledge gained, because equal in interest, be regarded as equal in value? Again I do not think so. We seem to have a stubborn conviction that whatever may be the facts of men's interest, some things are worth their devotion and others not, and therefore that our interests should be adjusted to, and appraised by, the goodness, not the other way about.
From: The Uses of a Liberal Education
The Test of a University, pgs. 8 - 9
I suggested that good judgment has two bases, one of which is the reflectiveness that sees beliefs and proposals in the light of what they imply. But there is a second element in good judgment, the sense of value. The first without the second has often been a menace to mankind: think of the intellectual power that German generals and scientists threw into the service of Hitler. There are lawyers of great gifts who are not above using them to smirch innocence and condone wrong. Some large American fortunes have been built on a well-mixed concrete base of shrewdness and callous inhumanity. Indeed, the commonest cirticism of our culture as a whole is that it combines a large control of the means to the good life with much dimness as to what the good life is. If judgment is to be sound, it must be able not only to calculate consequences, but to weigh the good or evil of those consequences.
The Uses of a Liberal Education, pg. 42
Now the educated mind is the mind that has achieved mastery of its own powers, and such mastery is reflected through all the detail of one's living. A liberal education impractical? Why there is nothing in the range of our speech or thought, our feeling or action, that it leaves quite as it was! Because the educated man knows the difference between knowledge and opinion, his thought on everything - on his business, on his creed, on the devaluation of the dollar - will be more self-critical and more precise. Because speech is the reflection of thought, his talk on all these matters will have more point and precision and weight. Again, right feeling is largely a matter of right thinking; if a man is honestly convinced that racial discimination is wrong, the struggle for right feeling is two-thirds won. And besides, feeling is as educable as thought. The person who has really entered in "Rabbi Ben Ezra" or Burns on the field-mouse, or Stephen Benet's John Brown's Body can never feel about old age, or four-footed things, or black people, as he did before.
And if his thought and feeling are affected, so surely will his action be. I have been reading lately Thornton Wilder's The Ides of March. I felt about his hero , Julius Caesar, though with some reservations, as I felt long ago in reading Froude and Mommsen, that there is something not only fascinating but almost frightening in the man. That extraordinary intelligence so permeated everything he did that the ablest statesmen and generals of his time, when they tried to oppose him, looked as you or I would look if we played chess against Bobby Fischer. He was a great man of action, but he was so because his action embodied the precise and lucid mind that wrote the Gallic War, a mind that saw every detail, saw them all in perspective, seized the essential as if by instinct, and conducted a campaign with the economy of a superb artist.
Education as Philosophy, pgs. 50 - 51
The capacity of the average man and even the college student to live in a honeycomb of unconnecting little cells is marvelous. A student will be an expert biologist on six days of the week; on the seventh he will go to church and recite "I believe in the resurrection of the body" without even a sense of difficulty. He will study economics and accept its conclusions about tariffs, monopolies, and taxes; he will then go home and cast a cordial vote for candidates whose views are the contradictories of his economic convictions.
You may say that he doesn't need to be a philosopher to avoid this; all he needs is an interest in thinking things out coherently for himself. I answer that that precisely is what I mean by philosophy. I am not arguing that Professor X's dessicated teachings about the syllogism or fusty old Professor Y's lectures on Descartes-to-Kant are going to save education. I am not thinking of philosophy as courses in philosophy or even as a subject exclusive of other subjects. I am thinking of it in its old Greek sense, the sense in which Socrates thought of it, as the love and search for wisdom, the habitof pursuing an argument where it leads, the delight in understanding for its own sake, the passionate pursuit of a dispassionate reasonableness, the will to see things steadily and see them whole. It is a bent and temper of mind that can show itself in any field; indeed some distinguished educators have held that philsophy would do its work most effectively if the department were abolished and all teachers taught philosophically.
From: Reason and Belief
Pgs. 38 - 39
Leo XII wrote: 'All the books which the Church receives as sacred and canonical are written wholly and entirely, with all their parts, at the dictation of the Holy Ghost; and so far is it from being possible that any error can coexist with inspiration, that inspiration is not only essentially incompatible with error, but excludes and rejects it as absolutely and necessarily as it is impossible that God himself, the supreme truth, can utter that which is not true.'
Now this position is untenable. It requires Catholics to accept as true statements that cannot be true, because they contradict other statements held equally to be true. Let us take first a random sampling of such contradictions, factual, moral and religious. In 2 Samuel 24:9, we read that there were 800,00 men in Israel who drew the sword; in I Chronicles 21:5, the figure is given as 1,100,000. In 2 Samuel 6:23, we read that 'Michal, the daugher of Saul had no child unto the day of her death'. Fifteen chapters later in the same book we find a reference to 'the five sons of Michal, the daughter of Saul' (21:8). . . . All four of the gospels tell the story of the resurrection, but they differ as to the number of angels seen, the places where they were seen, the number of visitors to the tomb, and the times at which the visits were made.
Here is an array of conflicting statements which are taken impartially from the Old Testament and the New, and which could be multiplied many times. Given any pair of them, one member of the pair must be incorrect. . . . what follows is that the book the writer wrote is not infallible, that the collection of books in which this one appears is not infallible, and that the doctors, councils, and popes who pronounced it infallible were not themselves infallible.
Pg. 52
If there is any part of the Bible to which the Catholic would be inclined to attach pre-eminent authority, it would be the recorded words of Jesus himself. But it is clear that Jesus himself did not accept the view of the Old Testament writings which the church regards as mandatory. Their prescriptions were repeatedly cited to him as a challenge, and repeatedly he set them aside when he conceived that they stood in the way of his gospel of love and forgiveness. 'Ye have heard it said by them of old time, but I say unto you . . . '. If the church takes such sayings with their obvious meaning, it faces a curious alternative. It may recognise that the attitude of its founder conflicts with its own, and in deference to his authority abandon its doctrine that all parts of Scripture are to be revered and accepted equally. Or, taking as its base its own account of what is essential to Christianity, it may conclude that the founder of Christianity was not himself a Christian.
Pg. 84
Augustine argued that since every child is born in original sin, it must, if it dies unbaptised, be punished in the eternal fire of hell, though it would somehow be granted a 'mitissima poena' there. Aquinas held that the majority of men are doomed to an eternity of torment every moment of which exceeds the worst that ever has been or can be endured on earth; and though he believed in a milder region of hell set apart for infants, he discouraged mothers from praying for children who died while unbaptised.
Pg. 92
Religious belief often stimulates and strengthens moral purpose; true. The thought of a divine person commanding us to do right, feeling pleasure when we obey and grief or anger when we do not, certainly provides an additional motive for right-doing. Still, such belief is not the true ground for morality, and, when so accepted, may obstruct the passage to moral maturity. The man who is morally mature prefers love to hate, happiness to misery, and knowledge to ignorance, not because God wills that he should so choose, or because he will be rewarded or punished for his choice. Indeed if he wills something merely because God wills it, he is in strictness failing to follow the divine example, since God presumably wills it not because he wills it - a hardly intelligible suggestion - but because it is good. And so far as one prefers good for the sake of a prospective reward, one is like the child whose 'goodness' is bought with chocolates.
From this sort of confusion, at any rate, the man whose guide is rational insight is free. The ends of his life are set neither by dictation nor by an eschatological bait, but by such discernment as he has of good and evil. If his ethics are a poor thing, they are at least his own.
Pgs. 114 -115
There is nothing arbitrary in taking reflectively interpreted experience as the court of last appeal. In the end, it is this or nothing. The sensations with which experience starts are compulsory; our interpretation of them in perception is compulsory; the laws of inference by which we develop and relate our perceptions are compulsory; and once we are launched on the enterprise of science, we find that the order of our experience is inexplicable except through a nature governed by law. The system of thought thus developed is a natural one, and the ideal of explanation through a system whose parts are intelligibly related is immanent at every state of the development. It is idle for any authority, religious or secular, to take its stand against this natural order of thought. Religious systems and scientific theories without number have set their lances in rest against it only to break themselves on it and disappear. Nor can there be pluralism where truth is concerned; to say that the bodily assumption is true for the Catholic, though untrue for Buddhist or Protestant, is only to say that one party thinks is is true and the other not; it could hardly mean that the dogma itself is both true and false. One or the other party must be mistaken.
In the appraisal of Catholicism as of any other system of beliefs, we come then in the end to the question whether it can maintain itself in the light of human experience when this is itself systematised by the logical ideals implicit in it. The unavoidable answer seems to be No.
Pg. 335
The pursuit of truth for its own sake, however, is not the only business of intelligence. Many moralists would consider that its main use falls in the middle ground between motives on the one hand and remote goals on the other; it is the means of implementing desire in such a way that its ends may be achieved. Here foresight and inference are called for, and many kinds of special knowledge. We should feel sympathy for the sick, but if that sympathy is to be fully effective, it must be guided by medical expertise. We should feel charity for the poor, but if they are to be efficiently relieved, we must call in aid the knowledge of the economist, the sociologist, the psychologist, and the large-scale organiser. . . .
The sympathy Jesus showed and taught was personal and immediate; he was the tactician, not the strategist of charity, dealing with each case as it arose, and - according to the record - resorting in emergencies not to the expert but to miracle. This stress on love and this understress on knowledge remained chracteristic of his followers for centuries.
Pg. 375
The ultimate warrant for a rule of conduct is not deliverance by authority, religious or otherwise, but its self-validating power when seen as belonging to a form of life which carries certain intrinsic values with it. Justice, wisdom, and beauty are not good because God approves them; if he approves them, it is because they are good. And the mere perception of these values is a powerful motive to their realisation. Indeed the insight that wisdom is better than ignorance is so effective a motive to the getting of wisdom that all three of the great Greek thinkers believed that if the insight was clear, action in accord with it followed inevitably. And though this is not quite true, it is very nearly so. Such insight and such a motive are not themselves religious. The existence of purely secular goodness has often puzzled religious persons, but there is not doubt of its existence. Take for example what may be done from devotion to the goods of the intellect, which we have just mentioned. If Benjamin Franklin gave of his substance to found the University of Pennsylvania, and Jefferson of his means and energy to found the University of Virginia, if Grote, James Mill, and Bentham did the same for University College, and Sidgwick for Newnham, it was not out of Christian motives, for none of them could be called Christian, but because (no doubt along with other motives) they prized the educated mind.
The conclusion is that while the love of God, in one or other of its senses, may be, and often has been, a powerful supplementary motive, it is not, as the New Testament teaches, indispensable to the moral life, or on an equality with the other great principle of the love of man.
Pg. 519
Thus intrinsic value has a twofold condition; it belongs to those experiences alone that fulfill and satisfy, i.e. realise a demand of our nature and bring pleasure in the realisation. We have described these as 'conditions' of goodness. . . . the possession of the two characters named gives the very meaning of intrinsic goodness - not the meaning that lies on the surface, but the meaning ultimately required by analysis and reflection. This is not an emotivist view. I should insist that the judgement of value is not an interjection; it is the statement that a certain experience is, in the senses indicated, fulfilling and satisfying, a statement that is either true or false. Nor is it an egoistic view, for under like conditions the experience of others has values equal to my own. It is clearly a rationalist view in the sense that both the calculation of consequences and comparison and appraisal of these consequences are the work of reason. It prescribes as the ultimate rule of right conduct: So act as to produce the greatest net good of all affected by your action, the good consisting in experience that is at once fulfilling and satisfying.
Pgs. 559 - 560
There has been much talk in recent years about ethical and cultural relativism by persons who think they can dispose of objective standards merely by pointing to diversities of custom. They would not argue this way in other fields. They would not hold that since masses of Chinese people believe that the moon goes into eclipse because a celestial dog bites a piece out of it, while Western astronomers deny this, there is no such thing as an objective standard in astronomy. They would scout the idea of a Russian and an American physics, or of a French and an Indian chemistry, each contradicting the other but with equal claims to validity. There is simply physics or chemistry, with one universal standard of truth, to which place, time, and nationality are irrelevant.
I believe that, similarly, there is one universal standard of morality, set by the fundamental needs, and therefore ends of human nature. This standard is at work in men's minds implicitly long before it is given explicit shape; its demands become firmer and clearer as it is acted upon, and more generally accepted as social intercourse widens. That its existence is really recognised is attested by such bodies as the United Nations and the World Court, which assume that when a protest is brought before them in the name of justice the term has a common meaning, and that with patience and good will a rational judgement may be achieved. It is true that reasonableness in morals is more difficult and elusive than reasonableness in mathematics; emotions are more deeply engaged and the appraisal of human values calls for richer resources of imagination and sympathy. Reasonableness in the concrete is indeed infinitely and impossibly difficult. Fortunately, it is not one's duty to be infinitely and impossibly rational. It is one's duty only to be a reasonable as one can. If even that were seriously accepted, the world would be strangely different tomorrow morning.
Pg. 564
Reasonableness is not knowledge or learning, though this may help. It is not intelligence, which is in the main a native gift, most unevenly distributed, though if present this too will help. It is not skill in abstraction or in analysis or in argument or in expression, though again these are valuable aids. The reasonableness we are talking about is, rather, a settled dispoostion of mind. It is a disposition to guide one's belief and conduct by evidence, a bent of the will to order one's thought by the relevant facts, and to order one's practice in the light of the values involved. It is the habit of using reflective judgement as the compass of one's belief and decision. Since it is a habit, it is not native, but acquired; as something independent of great natural endowment, it can be acquired in degree by any normal person with sufficient interest in acquiring it.
Pg. 251
Take reason seriously. It has been from the beginning the unrealised architect of religion, of conduct, of the world, but almost always doing its work under the interference of interests alien to its own. Give it its head. Let it shape belief and conduct freely. It will shape them aright if anything can.
From: Four Reasonable Men
Pgs. 25 - 28
What did he [Marcus Aurelius] mean by "reason"? He meant the faculty that chiefly distinguishes man from beast. It was a complex of the higher faculties involved in knowing - the power of looking before and after and laying plans for what is not; the ability to dissect a thing into its attributes, of abstracting and attending to each singly, of grasping its connections with others, of making inferences, and weaving things and characters into systems. He conceived of reason much as did Aristotle, who regarded it as the highest of human endowments . . . .
We are ready for the next step in the Stoic line of thought. If reason is man's highest faculty and a reflection in him of the divine wisdom, it should be made the guide of life. Of course there are other claimants for the position of guide and judge of conduct. Pleasure is perhaps the most powerful one, but our passions for wealth, for power, for fame, for athletic prowess, for commercial success may and do take complete command in the minds of many. None of these will stand examination as the true guide, and in every chapter of his book, Marcus comes back to his emphasis on reason as the sole reliable judge.
. . . it is signifcant that the outstanding moralists of the last hundred years - I mean such men as Sidgwick, Bradley, Rashdall, Prichard, Ross, and Moore - all agreed that moral insight was intellectual. For most of them such insight lay in the weighing against each other of the goods and bads produced by conduct, and though fallible, was an attempt at objective truth. . . . A good man, before keeping a promise or returning a borrowed book or paying a debt, does not calculate what profit there will be in it for himself or others; he chooses honesty not as the best policy, but because he sees it to be right and reasonable. 'What more do you want in return for a service done? Is it not enough to have acted up to nature, without asking wages for it? Does the eye demand a recompense for seeing, or the feet for walking?
Pgs. 28 - 29
Having made reason thus the judge and guide of conduct, it was easy for Marcus to take a further step, in which he was following at a distance of six centuries, a far more penetrating thinker than himself. One of the favorite teachings of Socrates had been that virtue is knowledge, and its corollary that vice is ignorance. Both the views at first glance seem absurd. Socrates maintained that if a man looked clearly at a proposed action in the light of its conditions and consequences, and saw plainly that it was right, he would be drawn to it as inevitably as the bee is drawn to the flower. Human nature is essentially good, in the sense that if its highest part is given sway, it will go right automatically. 'But surely,' it will be said 'there are any number of people who know that they cannot afford a new car but buy it nevertheless; many who know that sweets are fattening and have set out to reduce their weight, yet, with a box of chocolates at their elbow, allow the resolution to evaporate in ignominy.' 'Yes, of course,' Socrates (and Marcus) would have answered, 'but that is because they have allowed their vision to be clouded. At the moment of buying the car, the buyer is not seeing the act in the light of what it means to his exchequer, family, and future. The person who reaches out for the chocolates has allowed the connection between sweets and obesity to fall out of focus. He takes a worse course because at the moment of decision he is acting in ignorance.'
Now this is anything but absurd. It covers by far the larger number of cases where, suppposedly knowing the right, we do the wrong. It was clear to Marcus, as it was to Plato, that men are only brokenly and partially rational, that their reason is seated atop a volcano of seething feelings and desires, and that these lower parts of human nature are continually pushing aside the counsels of reflective foresight. Such foresight, as a modern evoutionist would put it, is a recent and fragile addition to the complement of human faculties; and, as Marcus insists, we are cousins of the animals in the nonrational parts of our being. In most men still the animal impulses of hunger, fear, lust, anger, gregariousness, and the emotions that form part of them, dominate conduct and make impartial judgment all but impossible.
Pg. 37
Was life for the Stoic, then, all a matter of grim and military self-control, with no place for spontaneous happiness or pleasure? If these things were taken as ends, after the manner of the fashionable Epicureans, the Stoics did repudiate them. But in order to understand their view, one needs to see that there is a difference between pleasure and happiness; pleasure is the satisfaction of the short-range impulses like hunger, thirst, sex, the seeing of a play, the winning of a game; happiness attends the satisfaction of the long-range endeavors of a life, finding oneself through a vocation, developing a system of thought, raising a family, intercourse with other minds. For a creature endowed with reason, that is, with ability to see what was important and what was not, the deliberate pursuit of the satisfactions of the moment was a prostitution of its powers. Not that one was never to relax in the enjoyment of these things; but man was a being who lived on various levels . . . .
Pg. 251
Being good calls for doing what is right; and doing the right thing in the voting booth or the courtroom, in child-rearing or in business, demands the ability not only to think but to deal with problems of high complexity. And to do what is objectively right calls for at least three rational insights, all of which may be difficult in the extreme. We must forecast the consequences of our proposed act in the way of intrinsic goods and bads in the experiences of those affected by it; we must see the difference between facts and the values of those facts, which alone count morally; and finally we must be able to weigh values, and sets of values, against each other. It is no wonder that John Erskine felt moved to write an urgent essay on 'The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent.'
Pg. 279
I go so far as to think that without impulses and feelings there would be no values in the world at all, and therefore no point in living. I have admitted that a human being is chiefly a bundle of impulses to love, to fight, to play, to create, to know; and it is those of powerful impulses - the Saint Peters, the Luthers, the Leonardos, the Beethovens - who have the largest potentialities for lives of richness and enjoyment. If men were without these drives and the joy of fulfilling them, if they were mere computers, however errorless, life would have lost its savor. All this I grant
But such freedom will be used differently by those whom the critics call classics and by those they call romantics, and I do not think the advantage is on the romantic's side"
Pg. 287
Confronted again by Arnold's choice between 'culture and anarchy,' we seem to have chosen anarchy. The failure is perhaps temporary and it is in ourselves . . . . What would the quartet we have been studying have said of them? Of course no one can know exactly. But after spending an hour with them, one does draw the line differently between what is tawdry and what is not. They lived up in the hills where one can see farther and think more clearly than we usually do. If our ills are inward, as they largely are, we should do well to listen to what these men say. We should do even better to catch something of the reasonable temper in which they sought with such success to live their lives.
From: The Philosophy of Brand Blanshard
Pg. 36
. . .I saw enough of the seamy side of war to hate it and to detest all glorification of it. I am not a pacifist. When a Hitler turns himself loose on the world, I am not clear that there is any acceptable alternative to halting him by force. But as a rationalist, I do not think that there is any sort of dispute that honest men would find beyond adjudication by reason, and I look with distrust both on the cynics who call war inevitable and on the philosophers who intone that "reason is and must be the slave of the passions."
Pg. 42
The revolutions proposed by extremists are of course always "liberations," though they usually end in dictatorships.
Pg. 45
Dewey holds that what thought was originally it still is, a device for the prudent ordering of behavior. But the fact that it was, and still is, used for practical purposes should not blind us to the fact that it has an end of its own. That end is knowing. The practical and theoretical ends are quite distinct and easily distinguishable. Columbus's judgment that the earth was round was an instrument to his end of sailing round it; true. But his judgment was not merely that; it was meant as a statement of fact. Its cognitive meaning and its practical intention were not the same, and the truth of the judgment was wholly different from its utility. The judgment worked, to be sure, but it worked because it was already true; it did not become true only when it worked. It is the essence of pragmatism to confuse meaning with intention, and truth with utility or with verification in practice.
Pg. 95
Philosophy is in a peculiar position among the liberal disciplines. It has no subject matter of its own; the stuff for its reflection is supplied by art, religion, and the sciences, of which it is the natural extension. If they form the central part of the spectrum of knowledge, philosophy is its infrared and ultraviolet ends; logically, it begins before they do and goes on when their work is done. It raises two types of question about these other disciplines. First, how are their fundamental terms to be defined - terms such as cause, fact, person, right value - and how are their fundamental assumptions, the possiblity of perceptual knowledge, for example, or the law of causality, to be made out? And secondly, when the results of their inquiries are in, how are they to be put together into a consistent whole? For the answer to this question, reflective men have always turned to philosophy; indeed its greatest traditional problems - the relation of body and mind, the place of value in a world of fact, the place of freedom in a world of law, the relation of mechanism to purpose, of science to religion - are precisely attempts to put fragmented human knowledge into an intelligible whole. The instument of this synthesis is reflection. Philosophy, of course, has no monopoly of that instrument. But it is the discipline that cultivates it most assidulously; and only by its cultivated use can the scattered islands be linked and the intellectual traveler enabled to pass without losing his way from the realm of physics to the realm of mind and from anthropology to ethics.
Pg. 288
My position in ethics is teleological. I prefer this term to "utilitarian" because the latter suggests that the end is usefulness, and usefulness is never a good in itself. It is an instrumental good, like that of furniture or a good weapon or a good tool. A teleological ethics, as the name implies, holds that conduct should be directed to an end, but an end that is good in itself and not merely as a means to something else. Teleological moralists have generally identified this end with the greatest good on the whole, that is, the greatest net surplus of good over evil if one takes into account all the goods and evils produced in those affected by it. Moore in his later life preferred to put it in this way: it is self-evident that we ought to make the world as much better as we can. This is my own view also . . . .
Pg. 291
. . . I have argued that there is an ethics of belief [in Reason and Belief] according to which it is self-evidently right, even in matters religious, to follow the evidence where it leads. Now justice, which has been called the most intellectual of the virtues, does involve, I think, the acceptance of certain self-evident truths. Examples are: One man's good, other things equal, should be regarded as of the same intrinsic importance as the like good of anyone else; or in the distribution of respect and of goods, it is more fitting that merit should be rewarded than that wickedness should.
Pgs. 294 - 295
. . . I feel sure that Mr. Johnson, who knows my other writings on ethics, would not classify me as an egoist. It must be admitted, however, that anyone who takes self-realization or self-fulfillment as the end is very likely to be so classified. He is bound to concern himself with what will realize or fulfill a self, taking it for granted that he will be read as talking not about his own self but any and all selves. Thus it was a shock to me to read in so discerning a writer as Broad that T. H. Green was an egoist, and it is something of a shock to learn that my own expressions were capable of a like interpretation. But Mr. Johnson is no doubt correct that I should have made it clearer how one passes from the proposition that one ought to pursue the fulfillment and satisfaction of one's own nature to the very different proposition that one should promote the like good in others. How is one to deal with an egoist who insists that though he feels the pull of his own prospective good, he feels none at all toward the good of others "Why should I put myself out for a good I am never going to realize?"
Now you cannot refute an egoist if his egoism is a Kierkegaardian commitment. You cannot deny or disprove an act of will. But as soon as he puts into a proposition the belief on which he is evidently proceeding, I think he is lost. This propostion is that an experience in another mind, even when qualitatively identical with a good experience of his own, is not to be regarded as good. And this is merely irrational. If being fulfilling and satisfying is what defines goodness, one cannot confer the name on one experience and deny it to the same kind of experience in another mind. The egoist may try to include in his definition of goodness its presence in one mind only, his own. But that is as arbitrary as to say that two and two are four only when this presents itself to one's own mind but not when it presents itself to another. The intrinsic goodness of an experience is no more a function of time, place, or person where it appears than is the truth of a proposition. To prize one's own happiness and be indifferent to another's is a clear case of irrationality.
But why should I be rational? If to this question one wants a rational answer, one has the answer already; one's nature supplies it even in asking the question; the craving for rationality is part of being human. Why should one believe that two and two are four rather than seven? I suppose because it is true, and the interest of one's knowing nature is in truth, not in falsity. Why in truth? Because truth reveals reality, and it is only by fulfilling this cognitive interest that we can live in a real world rather than in one of illusion and insanity. A person may choose, if he wishes, to live in an insane world, and to object that he cannot do so consistently will presumably not interest him, for consistency is part of the baggage he now wants to get rid of. To me this seems mere suicide. The craving for truth is part of my nature, and in a sense the most important part, for only as it is fulfilled am I able to see with any clearness the ends of the other needs and hungers of my nature. I hold with all deliberateness that to be moral is to be rational, and to be rational is to be moral. Thus egoism is the living of a lie.
Pg. 301
. . . a moral judgment is as objective as a judgment in science. For of any proposed action it is either true or not that it will have certain consequences in the way of experience; and of these consequences it is either true or not that they will be as good, in the sense defined, as any alternative consequences. If it is, the action is right, objectively and impersonally right, and it would still be right whatever the speaker or his culture or even mankind as a whole happened to think about it.
