The Cult of Virtue — Part Two
‘Since reality has shown itself to be an undivided unity with the universal, then, just as the in-itself of virtue is merely an aspect, so does the being-for-self of the ‘way of the world’ also prove to be no more than that. The individuality of the ‘way of the world’ may well imagine it acts only for itself or in its own interest. It is better than it thinks, for its action is at the same time an implicitly universal action. When it acts in its own interest, it simply does not know what it is doing; and when it avers that everyone acts in his own interest, it is merely asserting that no one knows what action is. When it acts for itself, it simply gives reality to what, to begin with, exists only in itself. The purpose of its being-for-self, which it imagines is opposed to what virtue is in itself, its shallow cunning, as also its fine-spun explanations which know how to demonstrate the presence of self-interest in every action — all these have vanished, just as the purpose of virtue that exists only in itself, along with its rhetoric, have vanished’.
- Hegel, ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’.
Virtue ethics is an approach in normative ethics, which is concerned with ethical action and standards of right and wrong, that lays stress upon the virtues, or moral character, as opposed to alternative approaches where the stress is laid upon rules or duties, that is to say, deontology, or upon the consequences of actions, that is to say, consequentialism. We may all concur that we should assist a person in need; for a consequentialist, a utilitarian say, this would be because the consequences of doing so will maximize well-being; for a deontologist this would be because through doing so an act is thereby performed in accordance with a moral rule, in this case perhaps something along the lines of do unto others as you would be done by; and for a virtue ethicist this would be because helping the person would be humanitarian, benevolent, compassionate, however you care to frame it.
Of course, it is not only virtue ethicists that attend to virtues, nor consequentialists that only attend to consequences, nor deontologists that only attend to rules; for any credible normative ethical theory assumes some kind of perspective upon all three of them and consequently all three will feature in such ethical discourse; but for the virtue ethicist virtue is central, and whereas consequentialists will define virtues as those traits that generate good consequences and deontologists will define them as traits possessed by those who reliably fulfil their duties, virtue ethicists will baulk at defining virtues in terms of some other concept that is perceived to be more fundamental; on the contrary, virtues are foundational insofar as virtue ethical theories are concerned and all other normative notions will be grounded upon them.
And what is virtue? As Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, (1770–1831), points out modern theories of virtue ethics have a tendency to generate mere tediousness and vacuity, there is nothing substantial to them, other than overblown bombastic rhetoric that endeavours to instil a pompous sense of moral excellence that is rather just pretence into a person with words devoid of any real meaning; while the ancient predecessors of virtue ethics on the other hand, Plato, (427 BCE — 347 BCE), and Aristotle, (384 BCE — 322 BCE), for instance, did provide a sturdy and substantial account of practical good and of the virtues; for ancient theories of virtue succeed where modern theories fall short in virtue of a central difference between these two kinds of accounts that is a matter of logic, for while modern theorists erroneously depict virtue as situated within the category of generality ancient theorists more fittingly employ the concept within the category of particularity. Virtue has its own logic, and a proper notion of the virtues should be within the category of particularity and not that of generality.
By distinguishing the generality of modern virtue and the particularity of ancient virtue, Hegel refers to a difference of range covering virtue norms, for modern theories take virtue norms to be general in the sense that they apply to all of humankind and virtues are defined as qualities that make a human being good qua human being; they are part of the essential description of the human form of life. The life of virtue realizes a perfect or ideal version of the human life, whereas a life of vice does not merely violate this or that moral law, a person of vice represents a deviation from this ideal of the human form of life, and a person of vice fails to fully realize his or her form of life, and may well still be a human, but a defective one. This way of thinking about virtue norms as general norms for the whole form of life is reflected, for instance, in the expression that a particular virtuous behaviour is humane, or when a virtuous person is designated a true human, though we should always be wary whenever true features as an adjective in this way. A significant logical feature of this modern view is the presupposition that particular ethical demands, for instance those demands incumbent upon those occupying a particular social role, are derived from the general norm; and the general formulation of a virtue, for instance humans act justly, supposedly has logical priority over the particular formulation, for instance judges act justly; the particular virtues of a judge are only applications of the general norm to the particular situation of a judge.
Ancient virtue ethics, however, limit the range of their virtue norms to the ethical demands and obligations of particular social roles and relationships; they do not aspire to delineate the good life and good actions of a human being by or of itself, but the actions and life of a good statesman, a good teacher, a good parent, a good warrior, a good poet, a good philosopher, and so on. The particular norms of social roles have logical priority over statements like humans act justly, for the latter are only abstractions from the substantial particular norms, and to understand what justice is we have to begin from an understanding of the particular justice of a statesman, a teacher, a parent, a warrior, a poet, a philosopher, and so on. The general and abstract formulations are mainly an abbreviation or condensed form of the more complex and somewhat embellished particular versions.
It may be objected against the Hegelian characterization of ancient virtue ethics that Aristotle himself presented the notion of virtue in terms of being good qua being a human being, not that it is within our power to be anything else. In the ‘Nicomachean Ethics’ Aristotle equates the virtuous life with the good human life:
‘Life seems to be common even to plants, but we are seeking what is peculiar to man. Let us exclude, therefore, the life of nutrition and growth. Next there would be a life of perception, but it also seems to be common even to the horse, the ox, and every animal. There remains, then, an active life of the element that has a rational principle; of this, one part has such a principle in the sense of being obedient to one, the other in the sense of possessing one and exercising thought. And, as ‘life of the rational element’ also has two meanings, we must state that life in the sense of activity is what we mean; for this seems to be the more proper sense of the term. Now if the function of man is an activity of soul which follows or implies a rational principle, and if we say ‘so-and-so-and ‘a good so-and-so’ have a function which is the same in kind, e.g. a lyre, and a good lyre-player, and so without qualification in all cases, eminence in respect of goodness being added to the name of the function (for the function of a lyre-player is to play the lyre, and that of a good lyre-player is to do so well): if this is the case, and we state the function of man to be a certain kind of life, and this to be an activity or actions of the soul implying a rational principle, and the function of a good man to be the good and noble performance of these, and if any action is well performed when it is performed in accordance with the appropriate excellence: if this is the case, human good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete. But we must add ‘in a complete life.’ For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy’.
And further, Aristotle’s descriptions of the virtues appear not to be restricted to certain social roles; on the contrary he appears to discuss justice, courage, prudence, temperance, and so on in an unqualified sense and not about the courage of a warrior and the temperance of a philosopher. This would seem to indicate a general conception of the virtues very much similar to the one that Hegel attributes to the modern virtue ethicists, and after all many of these latter quite categorically put themselves forward as following in the tradition of Aristotle. And yet although Aristotle frequently appears to talk about human virtues and human life in a very general sense he has a very particular audience in view, for the virtues that are espoused in the ‘Nicomachean Ethics’ are those of seasoned and wealthy Athenian noblemen, which is to say, citizens occupying a very particular class of social roles. And such particularity becomes especially evident in the virtue of magnificence whereby the magnificent man is able to donate temple buildings to the city-state, or equip warships, or to host theatre festivals, a virtue quite clearly available only to the fortunate few. And such a kind of dependent relationship between the virtues and social status is even more apparent in Plato’s ‘Republic’, wherein, during the discussion of the Utopian city, quite explicit lines of demarcation are drawn between the virtues of the philosopher-king, of the guardians, and of the workers.
According to Hegel, ancient virtue ethicists had a much finer conception of virtues than their contemporary followers in virtue of a deeper and more penetrating understanding of human nature; the lack of this latter indeed accounts for the failures of ideologies in general. As Aristotle asserted in the ‘Politics’:
‘Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god’.
Human sociability is characterized by co-operation and division of labour at a much higher level than for any other animal, and human societies have a tendency to develop a numerous amount of social roles with highly specialized functions and activities, and the particularity of ancient virtues recognises this fact about human sociability; their virtues reflect the compartmentalised structure of co-operation, and if human life is essentially characterized by co-operation and division of labour, then this also applies to the human good. The diurnal existence of a warrior and of a philosopher, for instance, differs immensely as does the ethical demands that are placed upon them, and different social roles have different functions in society, and to act well means something different in each of these roles. Of course, such differences may well be obfuscated by the general terms that are employed; the statement that a criminal judge should treat the accused justly or that parents should treat their children justly apply the same adverb justly and yet they refer to two distinct kinds of norms. Parents that behave like criminal court judges toward their children certainly do not act justly; and one would not place much faith in a judge to do his or her job properly were he or she to treat the accused as though he or she were the accused’s father or mother.
Hegel of course would not dispute that there are still some similarities between the two kinds of justice, else why apply the same term to both? And yet such similarities are so vague, they certainly lack sufficient content to direct our actions, and if we really want to know what we should do, assuming that this is really a pressing concern for anyone who isn’t a character in a Fyodor Dostoyesky, (1821–1881), novel, Hegel suggests that we focus upon the particular demands of social roles and personal relationships. Any reference to a broad and general conception of a good human being, for instance in the form of the advice be a good human being is worse than useless; there is absolutely nothing substantial to be learned about good action and about virtuous character by any rhetorical flourish supposedly encapsulating a particular notion of mankind. Hence, as Hegel says, contemporary virtue ethics is tedious and vacuous.
There is a particularly significant consequence of this logical difference between modern and ancient concepts of virtue, for the particularity of the ancient concept permits us to perceive that the unity of the virtues and the human form of life is far from being a trivial problem. Modern accounts have a tendency to discount or ignore or even fail to see this philosophical challenge given that they have already presupposed the unity of the virtues and of the form of life in a particular sense, and if all of the particular virtues of social roles were merely applications of a general virtue to certain circumstances, as modern accounts apparently presuppose, then there could be no real conflict between the virtues, for every agent acts upon the same principles, that is to say the virtues of the human form of life. Disagreements may surface only regarding those issues of application and contingent situations, but not about the principles themselves, and yet the picture of the ancient account of virtues differs considerably. Within human society many different virtues, which are grounded upon different social roles, interact with one another, and there may be incompatible demands and claims due to the different underlying principles, but although the different social roles share common objectives, and their operations are mutually interdependent, such common objectives and operations are not merely given, as for instance, in the foundational biological objective of survival and reproduction; rather, from an abstract perspective it appears certainly quite evident that a scientist, a warrior, a judge, a poet, a philosopher, co-operate in a society and share common objectives.
Were we to scrutinise this further however it is not so evident how such co-operation is structured and whose ethical demands should have priority over others; add to that the further complication that human societies are not fixed and without development as appeared to be the case with ancient Egypt with its thousands of years existing in stasis and where its finest minds were set to applying their mathematics to the construction of pyramids; for most societies their objectives evolve and with them the particular details of co-operation alters also. Conflicts between ethical demands cannot be resolved merely by reference to some general notion of human life, they have rather to be worked out by reflection and creative compromise, and the unity of human virtues and the unity of a human form of life are not the place to begin any historical and philosophical enterprise, they are rather an end, an end that has to be re-evaluated and re-shaped continually; for the human form of life is in an act of continual self-reaction, and for Hegel it is ancient virtue ethics that deliver unto us the proper account with which to confront such a challenge.
Friedrich Nietzsche, (1844–1900), was a virtue ethicist, the focus in his philosophy is upon the ethical agent’s inner state rather than their performance of certain actions; upon that basis we are to determine the virtuousness or otherwise of actions. His discourse in ‘The Genealogy of Morals’ against deontology, focussing upon the subject of the relationship between creditor and debtor as one possible source of morality, leads him into some especially murky thinking:
‘It is then in this sphere of the law of contract that we find the cradle of the whole moral world of the ideas of ‘guilt’, ‘conscience’, ‘duty’, the ‘sacredness of duty’, — their commencement, like the commencement of all great things in the world, is thoroughly and continuously saturated with blood. And should we not add that this world has never really lost a certain savour of blood and torture (not even in old Kant; the categorical imperative reeks of cruelty). It was in this sphere likewise that there first became formed that sinister and perhaps now indissoluble association of the ideas of ‘guilt’ and ‘suffering’. To put the question yet again, why can suffering be a compensation for ‘owing’? — Because the infliction of suffering produces the highest degree of happiness, because the injured party will get in exchange for his loss (including his vexation at his loss) an extraordinary counter-pleasure: the infliction of suffering — a real feast, something that, as I have said, was all the more appreciated the greater the paradox created by the rank and social status of the creditor’.
The categorical imperative reeks of cruelty. By whose standards? That of a judge? Or of a philosopher? What does cruelty even mean in this context? Immanuel Kant, (1724–1804), was a deontologist whose categorical imperative may be formulated thus: Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law’. Hegel roundly dismisses it as void of content, whereas Nietzsche, being the defender of virtue that he is, objects to it on the basis of moral feelings that he presupposes we all share; and in the process is apparently celebrating dark not to mention abhorrent impulses, the voluptuous pleasure in committing evil for the pleasure of committing evil, the enjoyment of violation for sake of violation, the pleasure of transgressing social norms for the sake of transgressing them; the kind of inveterate aggressiveness against what society expects that is perhaps even most pronounced in the habitually obedient. ‘I never could bear the idea of anyone expecting something from me’, said Estelle, one of the characters in Hell in Jean-Paul Sartre’s, (1905–1980), ‘Huis Clos’. ‘It always made me want to do just the opposite’.
According to Sigmund Freud, (1856–1939), we are all afflicted by a death instinct, thanatos, that impels us to undo the structures and the rules and regulations that civilization, in particular our modern civilization, imposes upon us; and yet while civilization does its uppermost to suppress aggressions, its achievements in this area can only ever be limited; or worse, such aggressions may indeed explode into colossal displays of violence. In ‘Civilization and Its Discontent’s, Freud references the atrocities of the First World War, but the cost of overcoming the death instinct is high, a growing unhappiness in that it prohibits modern ethical agents from acting out what are supposedly in-bred natural instincts; which has led some to suppose that the one thing needful is to shape our lives both as individuals and as participants in social institutions in such a manner that provides for our aggressions channels to go down that are not so self-destructive. This notion that we possess such inclinations that grate against rational and socially constructive conduct has ancient origins; and in a prevailing strand of ethical thought the central imperative is to have control over or even suppress entirely such inclinations; as Kant depicted moral conduct as a continual struggle between rational duty, expressed by the categorical imperative and our bodily inclinations. and our rational faculty must continually be on the defensive against such rebellious compulsions, hence Nietzsche’s criticism of Kant that the categorical imperative reeks of cruelty; and yet both of them conceive of virtue in terms of the general rather than the particular.
A modern manifestation of the phenomenon is the pubescent antics of Antifa, putatively anti-fascists without seemingly knowing what fascism is, a radical movement that like any radical movement is not radical but rather a conduit for the acting out of adolescent fantasies, comprised of different sub-groups, socialists, Marxists, anarchists, chanting ‘death to America’ under an anarchist banner, of all whom hold anti-capitalist views, while luxuriating within the liberal democratic capitalist state that mollycoddled them, and anti-authoritarian views, while like any such movements they are really concerned to displace existing authoritarianism with their own brand of authoritarianism, for one would need an especially rose-tinted view of human nature to suppose anarchism could ever work, and there will always be moments when one person’s will has to overrule another’s; and their objective they say is to confront those whom they view as racist which is just about anyone they don’t like; and so they fly around America instigating riots, marauding mobs trashing stores and spraying “f**k the police” on smashed windows calling for defunding the police while contributing to increasing spending on police as a consequence of their actions; and these are the virtuous ones who want us to be better people.
Before delving into the Hegelian solution to the problem it may be worthwhile to cite two further examples of contemporary virtue ethicists, Meghan Markle, (1981 — ) and Prince Harry, (1984 — ), who, while criticising both the Commonwealth and the former British Empire, asserted that the Commonwealth, which is headed by the Duke’s grandmother the Queen no less, needed to ‘acknowledge the past’ even if it is ‘uncomfortable’. ‘We’re going to have to be a little uncomfortable right now’, said Meghan, ‘because it’s only in pushing through that discomfort that we get to the other side of this and find the place where a high tide raises all ships… Equality does not put anyone on the back foot, it puts us all on the same footing — which is a fundamental human right’. And she added that this would be a ‘moment of reckoning’, where people ‘own’ their past mistakes.
Such past mistakes do not of course include Caucasian captives sold into slavery in ancient Rome and the Ottoman empire; nor the white slave trade of North Africa and the Muslim world, nor Christians that were sold into the Barbary slave trade; nor need we acknowledge present day ongoing mistakes such as the re-emergence of slavery in Africa. A rising tide lifts all boats, an aphorism attributed to John F. Kennedy, (1917 -1963), who used it in a 1963 speech though he was not to use this particular example of tedious and vacuous platitudes. And speaking of ships, at a time when British history is under attack it has been suggested that Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square should be brought down given the naval hero albeit white supremacist’s vigorous defence of the slave trade.
Vice- Admiral Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson, 1st Duke of Bronté, (1758–1805). We may suppose him to have been a deontologist. ‘England expects that every man will do his duty’ he signalled from his flagship the H.M.S. Victory, prior to the Battle of Trafalgar, 1805. against Napoleon and had it not be won very probably I would now be writing this article in French. The victory confirmed the naval supremacy Britain had established during the course of the eighteenth century, and if you are a consequentialist in ethics this should be regarded as an excellent thing because it enabled the sustained campaign against slaving conducted by the Royal Navy after the passing of the Slave Trade Abolition Act of 1807, naval operations were conducted against slavers of all nations though in particular Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands and Brazil, while illegal traders sought to evade treaty obligations, while the USA sought to prolong the slave trade, while despite inadequate resources the Royal navy’s sixty year campaign compelled slavers to expend ever greater sums to conduct their business and confront the losses inflicted by capture and condemnation, while in response to Britain’s advances, the slavers started using faster ships and used drastic action to avoid capture, while the Royal Navy could only take a ship if it was carrying people, so slavers would throw their human cargo overboard to evade being caught. Britain’s efforts to break up trade was to spread across North Africa, the Middle-East and the Indian Ocean, and overall it took nearly sixty years to abolish the trade for good; though now it has re-emerged.
The purpose of these examples is to illustrate Hegel’s contention concerning the tediousness and vacuity of modern virtue ethics that is disengaged from the real world and empty of substantial content; is there a better way to conceive of virtue, one that conceives of it in terms of the particular and not the general and that is grounded upon a plausible view of human nature? On that latter point Hegel responds to Kant’s apparent antipathy towards the living body, replete and burdened, as Kant regards it, with instincts, and compulsions and cravings, in the ‘Philosophy of Right’:
‘In so far as the determinations of happiness are present and given, they are not true determinations of freedom, which is not truly present for itself until it has adopted the the good as an end in itself. We may ask at this point whether the human being has a right to set himself ends which are not based on freedom, but solely on the fact that the subject is a living being. The act that he is a living being is not contingent, however, but in accordance with reason, and to that extent he has a right to make his needs his end. There is nothing degrading about being alive, and we do not have the alternative of existing as a higher spirituality. It is only by raising what is present and given to a self-creating process that the higher sphere of the good is attained (although this distinction does not imply that the two aspects are incompatible)’.
Hegel’s characterisation of the notion of desire is one of the most intriguing and insightful parts of his philosophical system; an interesting reading of our apparently antisocial aggressions are presented, presaging some of Freud’s insights, and a constructive ethical recommendation for how to accommodate them; for desire may be inherently aggressive in that it subjugates the desired object to the demands of the desiring subject and thereby asserts the subject’s freedom with regard to the objective world; as when I desire an pizza I see the pizza as nothing other than a potential repast, but when I consume the pizza I turn it into my meal, which is to say, I make this formerly independent object, this pizza, a part of my subjectivity; and there is a rational purpose behind this acting out of desire; indeed, it is is a necessary facet of realising my individual freedom.
‘Man is born free, said Jean-Jacques Rousseau, (1712- 1778), ‘and everywhere he is in chains’. Hegel disagrees, humans are born unfree; humans are comprehensively dependent upon the world; humans need it and desire is a mere short stride from dependency, which is to say, a stride towards freedom; for it is not a passive need but the active satisfaction of need; and furthermore, it gives a specific shape to a human’s needs. If I feel hungry I may well need food but I desire a pizza and thereby actively shape my relationship with the world while proclaiming a degree albeit limited of independence. And furthermore, and this explains the antics of Antifa given that its members clearly missed out on certain stages of their development, our desirous nature explains why we sometimes even destroy that which satisfies our needs; perhaps there is something rational behind a baby throwing its toys out of its pram; as Hegel explains in the section on child development in the ‘Philosophy of Mind’:
‘In passing from play to the seriousness of learning, the child becomes a boy. At this stage children begin to be curious, especially for stories; what interests them in these is ideas which do not come to them in an immediate manner. But here the main thing is the awakening feeling in them that as yet they are not what they ought to be, and the active desire to become like the adults in whose surroundings they are living. It is this desire which gives rise to the imitativeness of children. Whereas the feeling of immediate unity with the parents is the spiritual mother’s milk on which children thrive, it is the children’s own need to grow up which acts as the stimulus to that growth. This striving after education on the part of children themselves is the immanent factor in all education. But since the boy is still at the stage of immediacy, the higher to which he is to raise himself appears to him, not in the form of universality or of the matter in hand, but in the shape of something given, of an individual, an authority. It is this or that man who forms the ideal which the boy strives to know and to imitate; only in this concrete manner does the child at his stage perceive his own essential nature. What the child is to learn must therefore be given to him on and with authority; he has the feeling that what is thus given to him is superior to him. This feeling must be carefully fostered in education. For this reason we must describe as completely preposterous the pedagogy which bases itself on play, which proposes that children should be made acquainted with serious things in the form of play and demands that the educator should lower himself to the childish level of intelligence of the pupils instead of lifting them up to an appreciation of the seriousness of the matter in hand. This education by playing at lessons can result on the boy throughout his whole life treating everything disdainfully. Such a regrettable result can also be produced by perpetually stimulating children to indulge in argument and disputation, a method recommended by unintelligent pedagogues; this can easily make children impertinent. Children must, of course, be roused to think for themselves; but the worth of the matter in hand should not be put at the mercy of their immature, vain understanding’.
The Hegelian notion of desire could fill up this gap; toys may well appease a youngster’s need at a particular developmental phase, assisting him or her with the building up of various skills; and yet he or she must demonstrate to himself or herself and to others that he or she is not dependent on them; and threw throwing away or breaking their toys they attain greater independence; for it is not only objects that satisfy their, desire. on the contrary desiring subjects may well be all the more satisfying insofar as they are able to recognise our superiority; and we can interpret in their look their acknowledgement of us as free, or rather, as more free than them. For instance, Don Juan, whom Albert Camus, (1913–1960), identified as an absurd man, a seducer for whom seduction is an endless task, a repetitive affirmation of manly strength and capability, behaviour that may prompt us to shake our heads in pity and disapproval and not because such libertinism offends virtue; rather, it hardly seems the appropriate kind of program to follow were one to attain a good life, however that may be defined. Even the triumphant seducer appears to be a slave of his own desire, in the manner of a youngster reliant upon his or her toys; and such a basic mode of desire that treats the world and even people as nothing more than an object for proving one’s superiority necessarily must be overcome were we are to acquire a more enduring and satisfying freedom.
It is important to note however that such a mode of aggressive desire is not simply a developmental stage and one we can happily abandon; a stage that Antifa members never went through as they still smash their toys; there is also the need for some kind of sphere within which one can affirm one’s superiority over others, a sphere that serves as an outlet for one’s inherently aggressive desire; and this outlet is the particularly modern sphere of civil society, the sphere of the market economy, that which anti-capitalists prefer to call capitalism, they hardly know what it is they are against; a sphere wherein the individual is simply concerned with his self-interest, as Hegel explains:
‘The concrete person who, as a particular person, as a totality of needs and a mixture of natural necessity and arbitrariness, is his own end, is one principle of civil society. But this particular person stands essentially in relation to other similar particulars, and their relation is such that each asserts itself and gains satisfaction through the others, and thus at the same time through the exclusive mediation of the form of universality, which is the sound principle. … If the state is represented as a unity of different persons, as a unity which is merely a community of interests, this applies only to the determination of civil society, Many modern exponents of constitutional law have been unable to offer any view of the state but this. In civil society, each individual is his own end, and all else means nothing to him’.
The individual battles for his or her livelihood and welfare and accrues personal property, often by competing with others, getting the better of them and using them in furthering his or her own ends; indeed, Hegel discusses the modern economic sphere in terms that would not be amiss in any discussion of the animal kingdom red in tooth and claw:
‘Particularity in itself, on the one hand indulging itself in all directions as it satisfies its needs, contingent arbitrariness, and subjective caprice, destroys itself and its substantial concept in the act of enjoyment; on the other hand, as infinitely agitated and continually dependent on external contingency and arbitrariness and at the same time limited by the power of universality, the satisfaction of both necessary and contingent needs is itself contingent. In these opposites and their complexity, civil society affords a spectacle of extravagance and misery as well as of the physical and ethical corruption common to both’.
The human jungle, as it is sometimes designated, and much ethical thinking concerning virtue is certainly concerned with taking us beyond our animal impulses and behaviours; and yet such an overcoming is impossible for it denies essential facets of who we are as rational animals, and so rather than crack down upon our animal natures instead we are to grant it a socially constructive play area that will be of benefit to society as a whole insofar as it increments both personal and social wealth and assists towards to progress and innovation. It may be objected that the market economy depends upon exactly that which Freud associated with modern civilization, namely, rigid compliance to a set of shared norms, and the question then arises as to how can it allow an outlet for antisocial aggressions. An answer presents itself if we compare the economy to a collective game; this latter would expect from us a recognition of the other participants as persons of equal status; and we then all abide by the same rules, and in this respect we must go beyond aggression as a developmental phase, the recognition of others as equals, rather than only as potential satisfaction for our desires; while on the other hand, by recognising others as persons of equal status, we are given enough room within which to assert our superiority over them; for only one or a few of the players can triumph in the game and one aggression is thereby transformed into another socially constructive one.
Karl Marx, (1818–1883), as is well known, presented us with reasons for scepticism concerning the notion that civil society, or more specifically, the market economy, is the locus within which individual freedom is to be realised, and not merely in virtue of the market economy being a jungle to employ a metaphor much favoured by anti-capitalists, but because Hegel, it is alleged, was oblivious to the means by which the capitalist economy was the locus of a modern and unparalleled dominance and control. One may be somewhat hesitant to aver that, for those who partake in it, it is of the nature of a game, or if it is so it is surely not one that is fair and above board and during the course of which they can affirm their individuality. And yet Hegel’s ethical solution to our hankerings and appetites for transgression seems to me reasonable enough, and the evidence is there that the market economy enables an expression of individuality while delivering a sufficient standard of living to give us the time and the space to attend to the virtues, albeit modern virtue ethics is entirely concerned with display, virtue signalling as it has come to be known, without having to trouble ourselves with doing something virtuous. A return to the ancient notions of virtue is therefore needed.
‘There is nothing degrading about being alive’, as Hegel said, ‘and we do not have the alternative of existing as a higher spirituality’.
To be continued …
