Errol E. Harris

Hegel and the Natural Sciences

Hegel is often represented as scornful and contemptuous of the natural sciences. He seems often to ridicule their methods and their achievements and to subordinate them, as forms of knowledge to the speculative “sciences” which, for him, constitute the body of philosophy. This is, at the very best, a half-truth, and is scarcely even true by half; for what Hegel certainly does very frequently ridicule is what he regards as pseudo-science and charlatanry rather than the genuine article, and his taunts are, more often than not, aimed at philosophers with whom he disagrees, and philosophical doctrines about nature which he considers superficial and trivial, than at the practising scientists and their recognized disciplines. Certainly, he did believe and teach, that the empirical sciences belonged to a lower phase of self-conscious reason than philosophy, but such a view is inescapable for any thinker who sees philosophy as the reflective study of human experience, including empirical science; and any philosopher who seeks to deny that his subject includes this reflective task is apt to renounce his own birthright as philosopher. To affirm the reflective (second-degree, or “meta-”) character of philosophy, on the other hand, is not to belittle or to despise the natural sciences; for it is only by paying them due respect that any philosophy of science, whether of its method and the concepts it uses (logic) or of its subject-matter (philosophy of nature), is able to attain its goal.

The State and Politics

Political Theory has been a shuttlecock between the historians and the philosophers for centuries, from the time of Thucydides and Plato. Today the social scientists claim it as part of their domain while philosophers have largely abandoned the attempt to enunciate political principles. The reason for this has been a preoccupation by philosophers with logical and epistemological analysis to which political philosophy seemed alien and which led its practitioners to view the elaboration of political creeds as mere ideology — a view which incidentally brought them into agreement with the sociologists.1 Such estrangement between philosophy and political theory is, however, abnormal and perverse, for the inescapable connexion between morality and social order ensures that ethics, inseparably bound on the one side with the philosophy of mind (and thus with metaphysics and epistemology), is equally enmeshed with the rationale of social and political institutions, on the other. This is not, of course, to say that history and social science have no part to play or that philosophers turning their attention to the principles of political order should neglect what the historian and the social scientist can reveal.

Objectivity and Reason

The need for objective standards of judgement is acutely felt in the bewilderment created by the world situation of our time, a bewilderment that is partly the result of the rapid advance of the natural sciences, with its profound effects upon metaphysical doctrines, religious beliefs and moral attitudes, and partly due to the intractable problems which have arisen in social and political fields. The progress of the sciences, while it seems to have given us secure knowledge of the world about us, has, at the same time, undermined confidence in the criteria of belief and judgement in the conduct of affairs which hitherto had served to guide mankind. Bereft of these the majority of men are unable to see a clear way through the complexities of modern political and economic life and are overwhelmed by the major problems that confront them. As examples of the major perplexities with which mankind is faced today, I shall mention only three:—

Passion and Action

We observed that the passivity of our sensuous awareness was not pure passivity, but that some degree of mental activity was also involved. Similarly, the passivity of the body in registering the effects of external causes is not pure passivity and involves some degree of bodily activity. Not only secondary qualities among our ideas express the nature of our own body as much as, or more than, that of the external bodies which cause those changes in our own of which the ideas are sensations. We also and concomitantly experience emotions which are similarly ideas of the results of interactions between our own and other bodies.

The Absurdity of Atheism

There is perhaps no great philosopher who presents us, with as much confidence and assurance as Spinoza does, with what have appeared to many commentators, and must appear at first sight to most students, as stark contradictions. Yet they are all deduced with rigorous logic from first principles that Spinoza lays down as indubitable and which a critic would be hard put to controvert with any degree of plausibility. One’s first reaction on confronting these apparent conflicts is the conviction that something has gone wrong at some obscure point in the course of the reasoning, but closer examination and more careful consideration of Spinoza’s system and his explicit statements will, I believe, show that he remains consistent throughout, at least in most important respects, and that the conflicts in his doctrine are apparent only.

Contemporary Despair and its Antidote

The prevalent mood of contemporary mankind is one of despair, for never before have the prospects of civilization seemed gloomier or the situation of mankind more helpless. The extinction of the race within the foreseeable future seems threatened from every quarter, whether by the exhaustion of the resources of the earth, or by the pollution of the sea and its life-giving waters, or by the destruction of the ecological systems in which living species cooperate to maintain themselves and one another. All these deleterious processes seem to be happening at an accelerating pace without any deliberate action on the part of man and despite such feeble efforts as he has yet made or seems likely to make to stem the tide of deterioration.

The Mastery of Fate

Spinoza’s account of morality begins in Part IV of the Ethics, in his usual fashion with definition of terms. He then proceeds to explain and demonstrate man’s inevitable subjection to passion and kind of behaviour it occasions, indicating the extent to which it may be regarded as good or bad in accordance with the definition of these terms that he has given.

Good and Evil

In different works, and in different contexts of the same work, Spinoza has made differing statements about the nature of good and evil, creating an appearance at times of inconsistency and at least of confusion. But once again this is only appearance, for the differing accounts are not incompatible and each statement can be given its appropriate place in his system so that they can be seen to cohere. I shall begin by listing and explaining these apparently diverse accounts and shall then show how they fit together in a comprehensive grasp of Spinoza’s total system.

God’s Creativity

God-or-Substance-or Nature is the totality of the real, infinite in the sense of absolutely complete, self-contained, self-caused and self-maintaining. Its eternal essences is expressed in infinite attributes each inexhaustible and illimitable in its own kind, but limited wholly to its own kind. Under each of these attributes there follow from the infinite power (or essence) of God interminable series of modes, some infinite in themselves and the rest infinite, singular things. The infinite modes are the immediate consequences of God’s essences as expressed in his attributes; they follow from his nature, Spinoza insists, in the same way as the properties of a triangle follow from its definition; that is, they are logical consequences of God’s eternal essence. But his essence is the same as his power, so they are consequences, likewise, or effects, of God’s casual efficacy. This two-fold character of God’s creative potency involves some obscurity and needs explanation, to provide which will be the main object of the present chapter.

Spinoza in Retrospect

Anxiety about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune is scarcely sensible for one who believes that all events are determined by eternal laws. He will find it futile to worry about anything beyond that for which he is personally responsible, and if he is responsible only for actions based on, and expressive of, clear and distinct knowledge, he will not be given to futile remorse or unproductive regrets about passionate and unwise conduct committed in the past. Responsible action, moreover, will be simply the natural and unimpeded activity of the intellect following its own laws and principles — free, in the sense that it is self-determined and unimpeded by passion, not in any sense of indeterminate arbitrament. The free man, cognizant of the wholeness of nature and the over-riding importance of synoptic awareness, will be unmoved by the trivial inconveniences of daily occurrence, which seem frustrating only by reference to shortsighted affective judgement. He will be tolerant of his neighbour’s petty misdemeanours and recalcitrance. He will be generous and charitable and will in consequence enjoy peace of mind. Such joyous tranquillity, neither ascetic nor libidinous, is what Spinoza’s philosophy offers. It has much in common with, though it also differs in significant ways from, the doctrine of the Stoics, whom Spinoza admired; but how far is it acceptable to the modern mind? How far is it a dated outlook restricted to the conditions and limitations of a bygone age? How far an impossible ideal founded upon a misconception of the nature of man and the world?