[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]for Nietzsche and Freud, as for the bar-parlour moralist, psycho-
logical enquiry did often seem to centre on tearing up the floor-
boards to find where the bad smells were coming from. Certain
108 wickedness: a philosophical essay
forms of endemic human self-deception do make that emphasis
often necessary, and at the end of the last century there seems to
have been a particular need for it. But it only makes sense against
a background of wide understanding, a context in which the rest
of the house is examined as well. (Jung is often useful in restor-
ing this balance.) As I have pointed out, the discrepancy between
ideals and practice has two sides to it; it is of great interest that
ideals are so much better than practice. We would be astonished to
find a human society in which there were no such ideals, in
which everybody was perfectly satisfied with current practice.
And even Freud and Nietzsche, of course, were not actually only
interested in bad smells, but in foundations, in the sources of
our strength.
The notion that we could dispense altogether with the con-
cept of human nature is fashionable but it is not, I think, actually
an intelligible one at all. It would involve a depth of scepticism, a
deliberate ignorance which its proponents do not seem to have
noticed. And that general ignorance would not in fact do the
work for which it is proposed. Reformers, from Marx onward,
who have somewhat rhetorically suggested dropping the notion
of human nature do not really want general scepticism. What
they want is to get rid of certain quite limited mistaken views
about human nature, in particular, views about its resistance to
historical change. They do of course want to say that human
nature is more malleable than conservatives suppose. But to say
this is not to stop having a view about it. (Someone who argues
that iron is more malleable than had been supposed is not deny-
ing that iron has a nature.) Revolutionary theory involves having
views about how people will feel and behave when certain
strains and pressures are removed. And if it makes any use of
concepts like dehumanization, it presupposes a set of natural ten-
dencies which will then be released to shape the human future.
If people were really natureless, were mere indefinite lumps of
dough moulded entirely by historical forces, we could have no
fates, causes and free-will 109
notion at all of what they would be like or how they would feel
in any other culture or epoch than our own. Marx was well
aware of the ruinous effect this would have on any attempt at a
general theory of history. In the first volume of Capital, arguing
against what he takes to be Bentham s position, he remarks,
To know what is useful for a dog, one must study dog nat-
ure . . . . Applying this to man, he that would criticize all human
acts, movements, relations etc. by the principle of utility, must
first deal with human nature in general, and then with human
nature modified in each historical epoch.6
Moreover, of course, if the individuals were really taken to be
mere passive dough, the notion of the historical forces which
would be needed to do the moulding is liable to become a wild
and superstitious one, an example of the fatalistic thinking I
mentioned earlier. Historical enquiry about natureless beings
themselves would become impossible. Only by personifying the
historical forces and conceiving them as purposive demons
shaping the future do theorists get the impression that they can
understand what natureless beings would do in an unfamiliar
situation or what they did do in the past.
Hume, pointing out the need for a notion of human nature,
describes very well the sceptical predicament which we should
be in without it:
Were there no uniformity in human actions, and were every
experiment which we could form of this kind irregular and
anomalous, it were impossible to collect any general observa-
tions concerning mankind; and no experience, however accur-
ately digested by reflection, would ever serve any purpose.7
Now our situation may be bad, but it is not that bad. History and
anthropology, not to mention the other social sciences, do teach
110 wickedness: a philosophical essay
us something. They are not substitutes for an understanding of
natural psychology; they depend on it and presuppose it. There
is no competition between these various disciplines; they are all
parts of our apparatus for understanding that very complex
thing, the behaviour of our species.
In this chapter we have been mainly occupied so far in saying
that determinism is not fatalism, and that science does not
threaten free-will. It seems important to say this, because the
sciences are so prominent and useful a part of our culture that
we do not want to get into a conflict with them unless we really
need to. But it is of course equally important to say that they are
not the whole of our culture, nor even the whole of our
thinking.
A great deal of our thinking is practical. It is not aimed at
establishing facts, but at deciding what to do. It does not aim at
prediction at all. When someone is wrestling with a practical
problem, what he wants is a course of action. Bystanders who
watch him and make predictions about which answer he will
come up with are not contributing to his search; they may actu-
ally hinder it. When I mentioned the bystander who might suc-
cessfully predict that the Nile farmer would find the right way of
planting, it may have struck you that there was something a bit
odd about that picture. If this bystander knows already what the
right method is, why doesn t he say so? Co-operation, not pre-
diction, is usually the proper business for bystanders in this
situation. Large practical problems commonly need communal
solutions. And until they get them, there are often no answers on
hand at all. So the idea of predicting which answer will be chosen
scarcely arises. My example of discovering how to plant beside
the Nile was of course a deliberately simple one. The aim here is
simple and obvious, no other aims conflict with it, and the
means for achieving it are at hand. This problem, in fact, is
nearly solved already. But practical problems are often far more
complex than this, and call for creative efforts of quite a different
fates, causes and free-will 111
order. To solve them, somebody may have to invent the wheel, or
the Buddhist religion, a new kind of music, the theorem of
Pythagoras, or the principle of representative government.
People who stand by and try to make predictions about this sort
of thing are going to look pretty silly.
Now does this strong creative element in practical thinking
conflict with determinism? It does not seem so, because deter-
minism is simply irrelevant to it. Here again, it is important to
notice how little determinism promised us. (As with those Del-
phic oracles which misled Oedipus, we need to look closely at
the small print.) Determinism, as I have expressed it, says that we
should assume that events are connected in an intelligible way
and occur according to laws. Therefore, given suitable evidence,
they can be predicted in advance. The key clause is given suit-
able evidence. What would be suitable evidence for predicting
the theorem which Pythagoras is just about to invent? If we had a
comprehensive account of the state of his nerves and brain, and
all the laws governing them, could we predict his next move?
Determinism says that in principle we could. And perhaps it is
right. But obviously, in saying this, the deterministic demon (if
there were one) would be laughing quite as hollowly as the
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