Hugues Felicité Robert de Lamennais: Essay on indifference in matters of religion, volume I (1817)

1782-1854

It is always interesting to find thinkers who in their later life completely reverse or at least significantly modify their thoughts in some manner. Catholic priest de Lamennais is an example of such a thinker. While he was originally quite conservative in his opinions, disparaging French Revolution as a destroyer of traditional social and religious values, later on he would become a devout democrat, who would attempt to combine Christianity with a more liberal attitude toward affairs of state.

De Lamennais’ four-volume work, Essai sur l'indifference en matière de religion belongs still to the conservative period of his thinking. He is evidently inspired at least by de Bonald, whom he quotes approvingly several times in the first volume. But while de Bonald emphasised more the role of society, de Lamennais focuses on religion and especially the battle of philosophy against it.

Just like Chateaubriand earlier, at least in the first volume of his work de Lamennais does not even try to give a theoretical argument for the truth of religion in general and Catholic Christianity in particular, but he merely emphasises the practical need for religion. All humans strive for happiness, de Lamennais begins his apology. Yet, any being can be happy only if it satisfies laws of its own nature. A presupposition of this step in de Lamennais’ argument is that it must be possible that a human being can live without satisfying those laws - thus, fatalism must be simply false, de Lamennais says, because in a fatalist world we would all follow the laws of our nature and be happy, which is clearly not the case. Of course, one would easily make this argument collapse by choosing a completely different criterion for human happiness, such as pleasure and pain. Still, if we follow de Lamennais a step forward, we notice that to become truly happy we must know our place in the world, as designed by God, which is the job of religion.

Although individual human happiness is then one thing that de Lamennais uses in his defence of religion, it is especially the social benefits of religion - and particularly of Christianity - which he takes as his primary justification. All societies have been based on religion, and the longer the mores of a society have been in touch with the original religious consciousness, the longer it has lasted. Especially noteworthy in de Lamennais’ eyes is Christianity, which has stabilised and civilised Europe since the fall of Rome - and like Chateaubriand, de Lamennais is quick to compare the havoc caused by French Revolution with the education of Paraguay by Catholic priests.

From modern perspective one might note that Christianity has also been one of the forces stifling the development of society, but for de Lamennais this objection would not be valid, because he is still quite enthused about the conservative ideal of society, in which people are bound in a clear hierarchy, with different obligations and authorities assigned for different classes and genders. The philosophical counterpoint - the story of a pact made to form a society - is not favoured by de Lamennais, because it essentially confuses authority given by divine power with the force of majority to make others follow the laws dictated by them (of course, one might ask, what is meant to be the basis of divine authority, if not the supposed infinite force behind it).

One common enemy of Christianity and liberal politics de Lamennais find in slavery, which cannot really be tolerated. Yet, even here de Lamennais finds the policy of Catholic Church much more reasonable than the attempts of philosophical reformists - while latter try to change the state of African slaves in one enormous upheaval, Church tries to educate men to stop taking people as slaves. One might think that while such slow reform can often be pragmatically best option, it is quite peculiar that Church as the supposed mouth of God in the material world still renounces its own principles and advocates for a pragmatic solution.

The opponents of the Church de Lamennais divides into three categories, all of which are in some measure indifferent to the importance of religion. The first and clearest of these are atheists, who turn their back completely to God. While atheists would nowadays just deny the worth of religion, the supposed atheists of French Enlightenment might have been of different opinion and they could have admitted that religion is a useful tool for upholding society. Or at least de Lamennais says they have admitted this, mentioning at least Voltaire’s quip that he wouldn’t accept atheists as servants (we can ignore for now that Voltaire most likely wasn’t an outright atheist). De Lamennais finds in this attitude a sort of inconsistency, but upholding publicly what one deems as false is not a real contradiction, just a lie - and perhaps such an atheist could say that lies might be necessary and hence acceptable in the matters of society.

A further problem de Lamennais finds in the assumption that religion has been expressly invented as a deceit when creating the first society - such an invention would already require a society, for which it should have been basis. Yet, one need not either take religion as a conscious invention or suppose its divine origin. Instead, we might suppose that religions have grown accidentally from pre-social experiences and interactions of human beings and thus can fail to be true descriptions of the relation between humans and the supposed divinity, while still having an important role in the growth of civilization.

The second category of opponents includes deists, the foremost example of which for de Lamennais is Rousseau, as expressed by the speech of the Savoyard priest in the book Emile. Deists accept the existence of God, but they deny the need for any specific revelation, embodied expressly in the figure of divine mediator or Jesus. De Lamennais follows the official Biblical announcement that Jesus is the only true way toward knowing God and thus easily concludes that deists can really know nothing about God. Their only supposed source for the knowledge of God is human reason, but that is in de Lamennais’ eyes a fickle thing and something prone for errors, as shown by the fact that no two philosophers can agree on the nature of divinity. De Lamennais even uses Hume to show that reason can really say nothing about the existence of God, thus suggesting that deism just paves the way for straight atheism. The only content left for religion in deism is ethics, but this is especially something that cannot be decided by reason, de Lamennais insists, as shown by different customs of different nations. De Lamennais’ work reeks of an attitude where deism is not taken seriously, but is regarded as a mere lightweight substitute for religion - an attitude that doesn’t understand that religiousness can be embodied also in uncertain searching for something divine and not just in a faith founded on strong foundations.

Considering the Catholicism of de Lamennais, it is no wonder that the third opponent of true religion for him is protestantism in its various forms. If atheism tried to severe humans from God and deism from Jesus, protestantism attacks the relation between individual and church. One might think that this is a too severe judgement, because the protestants do have churches also, but it is more the unity of church de Lamennais is talking about. While Luther or Calvin might just have wanted to reform the original church, what they managed to bring about was a number of petty congregations, squabbling with one another. The problem in the whole reformist attitude, according to de Lamennais, is practically same as with deism - it tries to replace Catholic tradition with individual reason and conscience. What de Lamennais criticizes is the multiplicity of possible individual opinions on faith and God, while it is just this tolerance of individual opinions we might cherish as the true benefit derived from Reformation.

Antoine Destutt de Tracy: Elements of ideology, parts 4 and 5. Treatise on will and its effects (1815)

The unfortunately final piece of Destutt de Tracy’s Elements of ideology seems like a patchwork or a combination of disparate parts. Firstly, Destutt de Tracy uses the occasion to introduce a supplementary topic that should have been included somewhere in the first three parts of his work, namely, probability. The aim of this supplement is merely to show that probability requires no independent science of its own, but instead, all sciences should contain a part which deals with uncertainties.

The topic of the book proper is volitional part of human consciousness. Just like in his study of the cognitive side of consciousness, Destutt de Tracy divides his topic into three different parts, yet, he now also begins with a general introduction for all of these parts, dealing with will in general. We have already seen that Destutt de Tracy regards will as a completely passive faculty - it is mere perception of what one finds preferable or what one desires. We have also noticed that Destutt de Tracy considers our self-conception to arise from this volitional perception - we identify these preferences as belonging to ourselves, whereas all hindrances against attaining the preferable seem contrary to ourselves. Despite this rather passive view of volition, Destutt de Tracy admits that there is something active in human nature, namely the muscular system, which serves as our means for fulfilling our desires.

Going somewhat further with the basic concepts, Destutt de Tracy introduces such familiar notions like richness, freedom, right and duty. Richness means for him simply owning things one finds preferable (one wonders how this definition could be used as a basis for actual measuring of one’s riches). Freedom, on the other hand, is for Destutt de Tracy merely the absence of any constraint for one’s actions (what later would be called negative freedom).

Even more peculiar is Destutt de Tracy’s idea that desires determine our rights. Simply put, he says that all basic rights come back to the fact that living entities should have the right to fulfill their desires - a somewhat rash statement, since surely then many rights of different people would clash with one another, like the desire of having some slave serve you would contradict the slave’s desire of walking freely. Similarly, all duties should be determined by our actual means of obtaining things (one might suppose that Destutt de Tracy thinks here that one is morally obligated to use all means to gain what one desires).

The first part of the general science of volition Destutt de Tracy calls economy, which he defines as a study of human actions. Evidently, he is not speaking of just individual actions, but of the actions produced by the society in general. Indeed, Destutt de Tracy indicates that group work is a necessary ingredient in human manner of doing things, since it gives certain advantages to everyone, such as the ability to let each person concentrate on one aspect of a certain work process.

Destutt de Tracy goes even so far as to suggest that society can be divided into three classes according to the parts of a general scheme for all work processes. That is, since all work processes require at most three types of people, a theoretician knowing the general laws governing world, applicationist knowing how to apply theories and a practical person performing the actual work, society should be divided into three parts: scientists, entrepreneurs and workers. In practice, Destutt de Tracy quickly incorporates scientists into the workers, or generally, hirelings of entrepreneurs, and he also introduces a third class of sterile owners, who get their money e.g. from rents and do not actually produce anything new.

Why are the renters then sterile? This statement just reflects what for Destutt de Tracy is the goal to be sought in economy, that is, the production of useful things. This seems quite a materialist dream, although obviously a lot might depend on what is meant to be useful. Unfortunately, Destutt de Tracy’s answer just avoids this issue - the utility of something is evaluated by the number of sacrifices one is willing to make to obtain it. We seem to be walking in circles here - we should do things that are valuable, but valuable are just those things we are willing to do most.

The more we get to the details of Destutt de Tracy’s economy, the more quaint it appears. He divides the work to be made into two different types - the one or industrial produces new things (Destutt de Tracy includes agriculture in this type), while the other or commercial moves things to where they are most needed. It is very notable that the service sector is altogether missing from Destutt de Tracy’s scheme, which just accords with his notion of where the true value in economy lies. Indeed, the only place where he speaks of service work is in connection with the sterile renters, who pay for other people to serve their needs. Since such a service does not produce any new goods, Destutt de Tracy condemns it as a mere luxury, which just consumes the wealth of the society.

It is not surprising that Destutt de Tracy thinks government resembles more the sterile property owners who merely consume without adding to the wealth of society. State in his eyes is just a necessary evil, and indeed, its only function appears to be just to protect its citizens from other states. The inevitable conclusion then is that the state budget should be restricted as much as possible and that the state should not meddle with the economy any more than it needs to. One can raise many obvious objections, the foremost being that there is no a priori reason why state couldn’t also be productive in the sense demanded by Destutt de Tracy; it is then a different question whether such a state-controlled production of goods is as effective as private production, but since he is not treating this as an empirical question, neither need we. Furthermore, we might well also ask whether state could not have other important functions, not involving production of goods, such as construction of infrastructure, education etc., which are handled by many modern states.

Despite the rather right-wing attitude toward state and his enthusiasm for the entrepreneurs, Destutt de Tracy does not forget the salaried workers. Although he does state that some inequality of wealth is almost inevitable, inequality is still unjust and an inherently wrong state of affairs. Despite this, he still denies that the poor would need any special economic policy. Instead, the general development of economy should help also the salaried workers, by giving them more work and cheaper goods.

What developments Destutt de Tracy then expects of the economy? His general attitude is anti-mercantilist in that he advocates for a completely free foreign trade, which in his opinion just serves to combine all parts of the globe, moves goods to where they are most needed and incites even internal trade. He is also somewhat Malthusian, because he thinks population shouldn’t increase unless the means of sustaining them also increase - unemployment does no good for workers. Despite these at the time modern attitudes, deeply conservative is his idea that valuable metals, gold and especially silver, are the only possible form of currency and that especially paper money just encourages swindling and causes disturbances in the economy. One might hear people proclaiming nowadays that we should return to gold standard, but Destutt de Tracy speaks for an even great leap backwards in history. He is again speaking especially for the workers, who apparently are best served by stable prices - this would be a controversial statement nowadays, when a low, but steady inflation is taken as the best state in economy.

Although Destutt de Tracy has emphasised more the means of action instead of its goals in his economy, he might have said something about the latter in the fifth part of his ideology, which would have covered morality, by which he meant the study of human emotions. Indeed, Destutt de Tracy himself suggested that the two books would have been complementary, regarding the same topic from different viewpoints, in a manner reminiscent of Adam Smith. Unfortunately, Destutt de Tracy managed to write only a small part of the beginning of morality, leaving his whole ideology unfinished.

What Destutt de Tracy did manage to complete was an introduction to the book, describing his view on the metaphysical underpinnings of our will in particular and our personality in general. He endorsed the idea of Cabanis that one’s physiology in large part determines what one is like and especially what one fancies and desires. Interestingly, Destutt de Tracy still in a sense upheld the Leibnizian pre-established harmony. Of course. his interpretation of it was rather original - Destutt de Tracy suggested that Leibniz had tried to express the notion that within human body happen some yet unobserved movements, which cause both our experience of wanting something and the corresponding perceivable movements of body attempting to achieve what is wanted. Indeed, if one just replaces Leibnizian soul with the far less ontologically loaded consciousness, this interpretation appears not that far-fetched.

When it comes to the actual emotions of a human being, Destutt de Tracy managed to just begin a chapter on love, which he called the most positive emotion possible. One might speculate that love might have offered him a similar basis for goal of human being as general sympathy did for some British moralists, but this is all a mere speculation. Even less to say we have of the planned sixth part of ideology, which would have completed the section on volitional part of human consciousness. We do know that this part would have dealt with the art of governing societies, but since we have already seen that Destutt de Tracy wanted to restrict the role of government, it would probably been quite a short work.

Antoine Destutt de Tracy: Elements of ideology, Third part, Logic (1805)

The main feeling after reading the third part of Destutt de Tracy’s magnum opus is one of futility - why did he have to write the book or at least why did he have to use so many pages for it? The main point of the work is so simple and could have been said in far fewer words.

Destutt de Tracy’s first point is that traditional logic has followed a completely misleading route. The aim of logic should have been to find the ultimate reasons why we sometimes stumble into error and methods for avoiding such errors. After Aristotle had put so much effort in classifying the various species of valid syllogisms, every logician was under the impression that these rather quaint formulas were the essence of logic, although they were sterile and quite useless in producing new truths.

Destutt de Tracy’s second point is that the true source of certainty can actually be found in the two previous parts of his ideology. All human thinking is just sensation, and in a sense, all sensations are as such reliable. Although this might appear rather far-fetched, Destutt de Tracy’s point appears to be simply that when we sense or experience something, we are certainly having that experience and something either outside or inside us is making us experience things in that manner. This means especially that simple sensations of things present are a completely reliable source of knowledge - if we sense red, then we are sensing red and something is making us sense red.

An error comes into the picture only with judgement. There’s no question about it that we sense red and that something makes us see red, but the question is can we say what this red-sensation-making thing is and whether it is even an object outside us or just some hallucination inducing state within us - or, to take another object, if we see a crooked stick, whether this sensation of crookedness is caused by a truly crooked stick or by a straight stick together with the refraction of water.

Now, judgements are also, Destutt de Tracy said, sensations - they are experiences of one idea being connected to another idea. Thus, there is no particular reason why judgements as such couldn’t be as reliable as ordinary sensations. For instance, if we note that a certain sensation must be produced by an external object, because it resists our efforts to change it, we can be fairly certain that this judgement is reliable.

The reason making certain judgements unreliable, Destutt de Tracy suggests, is essentially our bad memory. We have a sensation and are convinced that this sensation resembles sensations we used to have. If our memory of these earlier sensations were faulty, we would then be in error. Since all our general concepts are just abstractions from earlier sensations, according to Destutt de Tracy, this source of error can easily cause much damage in our cognitive state.

“Base your knowledge on present sensations and try to avoid faulty memories” is then the simple answer to most questions of logic - Baconian empiricism is the solution to everything. The only other thing we need to take into account is the role of language, since most of our cognitive processes happen through words. Indeed, when we learn things just through reading - a favourite point of ridicule, of which scholastics used to be accused - we are just having sensations of certain signs, which have the ability to induce in us some ideas, although these ideas might have no resemblance with our direct sensations. Language is thus another possible source of misinformation, but it is also a possible source of correct information, as long as we just know the semantics of the language used.

And this was it! No further methodology is required, Destutt de Tracy appears to say, and a more cynical reader might ask if experience and semantics is truly enough for finding new truths, although they are undoubtedly good tools for avoiding errors.

Apparently just to add some more pages to his book, Destutt de Tracy chose to give a general outline of what his ideology should contain. Despite its supplementary nature, this is by far the most interesting piece of the work. The three books Destutt de Tracy had published thus far formed only the first third of the whole ideology, or in more detail, the part dealing with human cognitive capacities. Even in this part Destutt de Tracy had noticed that human beings had something beyond mere cognition or sensations, namely, active drives, which we sense as volitions. The second part of ideology should then be formed by the study of our volitional side. Since this part of ideology Destutt de Tracy managed to at least partially publish, I shall not handle it now.

The third planned, but never published part should have then dealt with things external to humans. As we saw already with the first part of Ideology, Destutt de Tracy thought our belief in things external to us was based on our volition and especially on the feeling of resistance we have, when we are prevented from getting what we want. This resistance and its various kinds form then in Destutt de Tracy’s view the basis on which physical sciences would have to be founded.

In addition to physical sciences and concrete bodies, this third part of ideology would deal with the abstraction of distance, which we measure with our movement. Thus, we get the ideas of spatial dimensions and shapes, which form the topic of geometry.

Finally, the third part would have to deal with the imaginary world of numbers, which we create from the abstraction of units and an imagined collections of such units. On basis of this simple beginning can be built more and more complex ways to manipulate numbers, which retain their certainty because of their connection with these original notions of unit and addition and because of precision involved in mathematical language. Despite this world of numbers being completely imagined, Destutt de Tracy said, it could be used in real world, just because and when we could find suitable items to take as units.

Next time, we shall see the conclusion to the story of ideology.

Antoine Destutt de Tracy: Elements of ideology, Second part, Grammar (1803)

Although second part of Destutt de Tracy’s grand work is supposedly about grammar, it is more a book about language in general. Thus, it contains, among other things, an account of the genesis of language. Destutt de Tracy thinks that human beings come with a natural language, consisting of cries, signs and tactile impulses. One might find here a delightful admission that a language need not be aural, but could be something like a sign language or Braille writing. Yet, Destutt de Tracy does not really develop the implications of this idea and considers only speech as a fixed and conventionalised modification of the original language of action

In a quite believable manner Destutt de Tracy considers the original speech to consist of individual expressions indicating whole sentences, somewhat like a child could cry “Milk”, when she wanted to drink milk. The development of language means then a sort of analysis of parts implicit in these original interjections. First, Destutt de Tracy says, language users differentiated a subject from verb, making subject-verb the general form of all language. Here, subject indicates an existing thing and verb signifies its mode of existence (e.g. “Bob runs” says that a thing indicated by the name Bob exists runningly). With the invention of the general and neutral verb “being”, it is possible to abstract attributes or adjectives, which are otherwise like verbs, but lack the idea of existence. Further developments include the introduction of more complex noun and verb forms through the use of prepositions and the capacity to subjunct sentence to other sentences with the general conjunction “que” (that) and later with other, derivative conjunctions.

One can see from this short summary of Destutt de Tracy’s account of grammar that he is engaging in a sort of attempt at universal grammar in the fashion of Chomsky. As with Chomsky, the problems in Destutt de Tracy’s account are evident when one looks beyond the restricted number of languages he considers. One can e.g. argue that subject-verb is not the general form of all sentences (indeed, there are languages, in which subject is not required at all and one might insist that in sentences like “It rains” there is no real subject) and that verbs do not always convey the idea of existence (like when one is discussing fictional things).

It is not just the generation of grammar in speech Destutt de Tracy considers, but also the generation of written signs representing speech. It had been a pet idea of 18th century thinkers like Leibniz that a system of ideogrammatic symbols, like Egyptian hieroglyphs or Chinese characters, which represented complete ideas, would be a perfection of written language, since it would allow turning language into a direct calculation. By the beginning of 19th century, this idea had lost its charm, since ideograms were so obviously difficult to work with. Destutt de Tracy considered them to have a stunting effect to a culture of a nation - ideograms formed a sort of second language, which required years of learning and the use of which was thus restricted to a certain class.

Destutt de Tracy was thus convinced that phonogrammatic symbols, like regular alphabets, which represented sounds of speech, were more suitable for development of sciences. Still, he did not believe that alphabets would have developed out of hieroglyphs - so certain he was that a culture with ideogrammatic writing could invent anything. Instead, he regarded alphabets as an alternative line of development. While hieroglyphs were invented for the purpose of expressing ideas, Destutt de Tracy insisted, alphabets were invented for the sake of music, which required signs by which to indicate different sounds in singing. Although a rather beautiful idea, it is most certainly quite false, since e.g. Hebrew alphabets were a direct development out of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Just like Destutt de Tracy appeared to dream of a universal grammar, he was also keen on finding a universal alphabet, which would be able to represent all kinds of sounds used in human languages. It doesn’t require much consideration to notice how utterly unmanageable as a practical writing tool such a universal phonetic system would be. Indeed, when one looks at phonology of a single language, one sees how utterly confusing it might even be - a single language doesn’t use all possible sounds humans can produce, and in fact, some sounds are alternatives, which to a language user sound just like arbitrary variations of the same sound (phoneme, in technical terms).

Destutt de Tracy actually isn’t so bold as to suggest that all languages in the world should start to use a phonetically perfect alphabet, because he knows that such innovations would not be easily accepted by the majority of language users. Indeed, even a more modest attempt to turn the writing of a given language into phonologically perfect terms, in which one phoneme were represented by a single letter, might be quite difficult to achieve. In fact, what Destutt de Tracy suggests is to use this phonetic writing as a tool for language learning - if words were written with such phonetic signs, one could instantly know how to pronounce a word of foreign language. Of course, even this is a bit too idealistic notion - even phonetic signs don’t teach you to actually pronounce the required sounds, let alone make speaking a language completely natural.

On the whole, Destutt de Tracy is critical of any idea to artificially construct a more perfect language, in which one could just calculate what connections of ideas are true - another pet idea of Leibniz. Destutt de Tracy admits that such a language can exist in a limited setting, such as algebra, but it could never form a complete and living language. Even if one would be able to overcome the resistance of the common people, one would still face a great obstacle. The very structure of thinking varies widely from one person to another and there is no guarantee that two different persons would have even remotely similar ideas of the same things. Thus, in building a perfect language, one would not have any single system of ideas to represent. Indeed, the best one could do in aiding thinking was to cultivate a science of good thinking or logic - the topic of the next part of the series.

Antoine Destutt de Tracy: Elements of ideology, First part, Ideology in the proper sense (1804)

(1754-1836)

Destutt de Tracy is a figure I should have considered far earlier. His influence especially on Maine de Biran’s philosophy is remarkable, but even Ricardo borrowed a few quotations from his work. His probably most important work, Élémens d'idéologie, was originally meant as a textbook for the growing citizens of revolutionary France. The work and especially it first part on Idéologie proprement dite was intended as a sort of theory of theories, that is, a kind of methodological bedrock, upon which all the other sciences could be founded.

The name of the science, which Destutt de Tracy supposed to have found, ideology, refers back to Lockean term “idea”, which described the elements of human mental life - ideas was whatever we happened to have in our minds while thinking something. Thus, the primary question of this science of ideology, for Destutt de Tracy, was what we do when we happen to think. His simple answer was that all thinking was actually sensing, where sensations could be had not just of things outside us, but also of our own internal states. In a sense, one can undoubtedly ascribe to this idea - if by sensing we mean being aware or conscious of something, certainly when we are pondering something, we are conscious or aware of this something. The major unanswered question is whether this description merely loses some essential differences within our mental life - that is, whether being conscious of what lies in front of our eyes isn’t quite different from being conscious of, say, memory of what lied before my eyes yesterday.

Indeed, de Tracy himself admits as much, when he divides sensations into four different species: sensations proper, memories, judgements and volitions. Still, even here we find that de Tracy emphasises more their unity than their diversity. Firstly, he quite correctly points out that these four types rarely occur in isolation, but an individual experience is often a combination of many sorts of sensations - when we perceive an apple, we may also remember the taste of other apples, judge that the taste of an apple would be pleasant and desire to eat this particular apple. Secondly, de Tracy constantly emphasises that even memories, judgements and volitions are still just sensations. This insistence makes de Tracy’s idea of judgements and volitions especially peculiar. Judgements, he says, are nothing but sensations of agreement between other sensations or ideas. That is, judgement is not an active assertion of such an agreement, but just a passive perception of it. Similarly, volition is not for de Tracy an act of wanting something, but merely a passive perception of a need.

De Tracy appears to be quite oblivious of the possibility of describing mental life as consisting of acts rather than through mere concept of awareness. This ignorance might well be behind his opinion that all other supposed species of thinking or mental life reduce to the four basic types. For instance, attention is, according to de Tracy, no independent form of sensation, since it is just quantitatively differentiated sensation proper, in which some part of a sensation has greater vividness than other parts. Or deduction is on his opinion just a concatenation of many judgements. One might object that attention is quite a different act from mere perception or sensation - it is an active concentration on some part of sensation - while reasoning or deducing is quite a different act than mere judgement - it is an act of justifying one judgement through others.

Despite de Tracy’s rather passive notion of sensation, he does not completely forget the active side of human being. Instead, he speaks of active muscular movement as the other necessary ingredient of human life. This muscular movement is peculiarly connected with the type of sensations called volition - when we move voluntarily, we feel both a desire to move in a peculiar manner and at the same time the actual activity of our muscles. This combination forms our sense of self. On the other hand, when we feel that our movements are hindered, we conclude at once that this hindering is caused by another existing thing. Our activity is then our only link to the existence of other things.

Since the existence of other things is revealed especially through movement, de Tracy takes them to be especially characterised through attributes relating to movement. They can be moved, but they also resist attempts to be moved, and together these two features imply that they can also impart movement to other things. Space and time are then in a sense abstractions from movement. Duration is generally something pertinent to all processes, including movement, and duration becomes time, when we choose one type of movement - for instance, apparent movement of the sun around earth - for measuring how long some processes take. Distances are compared according to how long it takes us to traverse them with a constant effort, and when similarly a scale of measure is applied to them, we get a metric space. Because all things we can experience have limits in space, we get different shapes and can do basic geometry.

Something which Maine de Biran was to investigate was more detail was the influence of habit to our different mental faculties. Still, we can find some basic details of Maine de Biran’s theories already implicit with de Tracy. Habit makes mental activities easier and at the same weakens the vividness of the sensations - we can do more, but we are less aware of doing it. Indeed, one might ask if in this description de Tracy is implicitly accepting the idea that mental acts are something completely different from mental awareness and that both are necessary ingredients of human mental life.

The final chapters of de Tracy’s work provide a link to the following parts of Ideology. He investigates the use of signs in general and language in particular. De Tracy notes that we have a sort of natural language, consisting of gestures and interjections. Yet, it is only a proper language, in which the use of sounds and inscriptions is codified, that lets us truly think beyond some simple sensations - for instance, we couldn’t really understand mathematical truths, unless we could speak of units and their sums. But this is already more appropriate topic for de Tracy’s next book on grammar.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia litteraria (1817)

(1772-1834)

Coleridge is best known for his evocative poetry, such as Kubla Khan, but he had his hand also in introducing continental and especially German philosophy into Great Britain. Coleridge’s role was, firstly, quite straightforward as he was the first translator of some works of Schelling in English. Yet, he was more than just a passive translator of German thought. Coleridge was actively engaging with the thoughts of post-Kantian philosophy and preparing a book on the topic. Still, he never managed to prepare a finished philosophical work.

Closest to what we have of philosophy in his published works is Coleridge’s Biographia Litteraria. The title suggests that the book would be a biography, and Coleridge does recount some tales e.g. of his journeys on the continent. Yet, the true import of the book lies in an aesthetical question what forms a proper work of poetry.

Incitement for Coleridge’s question lies in theory of poetics by another poet, William Wordsworth. What especially irked Coleridge in Wordsworth’s ideas was latter’s insistence that poetic language differed in no manner from language of good prose, which in no manner differed from language of ordinary people. Coleridge himself notes that while some lines in poems could be part of a prose text, especially if changes in word order, made due to metre and rhyming, would be cancelled, there are some lines which have an inherently poetic nature. Furthermore, this poetic nature is something completely different from crude speech used by rustic people. Coleridge even reprimands Wordsworth for including in his poems dramatic parts, in which ordinary people speak in their own words - if they truly speak in their own words, it is not poetic, if it is poetic, it is not faithful to the language of ordinary people.

Coleridge’s position is quite traditional - one would think he would be even more horrified of a modern poetry - and it is quite difficult to fathom what is this essential ingredient making a text poetic. Coleridge first states the common element in poems and fictional prose texts: they are both meant to cause pleasure, not to convey truth, like philosophical treatises. Thus, Plato’s dialogues are not poems, although they do have a certain poetic flair.

The external signs of poetry, such as rhyming and metre, are not completely external to the idea of poetry in Coleridge’s eyes. The purpose of them is to hold our attention throughout the whole poem and weave all the details described into a coherent whole. It is indeed this attention to wholes or totalities that is the distinguishing mark of poetry for Coleridge - a poem must form an organic system, in which all details, including such seemingly minute things as the tone of the words, must serve the grand purpose of the poem.

Coleridge connects at once this idea of poems as organic wholes to his notion of imagination. Unfortunately, Coleridge doesn’t actually explain what he means by imagination - an anonymous proofreader was of the opinion that Coleridge’s account of imagination was far above the understanding of an ordinary reader, so it was removed from the final published work. We do hear that imagination is different from fancy, which is a mere mechanical association of ideas. Instead, it appears to be closely connected with the basic forces responsible for the generation of human experience. Here Coleridge’s Schellingian tendencies appear most vividly, for Schelling too connected artistic imagination with the primal forces behind human experiences.

Coleridge paints himself as not just an imitator of Schelling. Instead, he just happened to have similar influences as Schelling did, which inevitably led both to similar conclusions. Coleridge mentions explicitly such names as Plato, Plotinus, Giordano Bruno and Jacob Boehme, all of whom were important also to Schelling - and all of whom had tendencies toward mysticism and pointed philosophy towards a search for something ineffable and beyond human experience. Kant was also important for Coleridge, as showing the limits of ordinary reasoning and as hinting about vistas beyond ordinary human experience. Fichte is also appreciated, as pointing out that truth behind everything lies in activity and not in mechanistic matter, but Coleridge disparages him for ignoring nature as an organic totality - all very reminiscent of Schelling.

It is then no wonder that Coleridge has in metaphysics a strikingly Schellingian attitude. We must look at things from both the viewpoint of the object or nature and the viewpoint of subject or intelligence. When we look at nature, Coleridge says, we inevitably come to laws, which are no mere matter, but intellectual things. As laws are supposed to reveal the deep structure of nature, we end up seeing that nature itself is basically intellectual. Of course, this conclusion presupposes that we accept laws as pre-existing patterns of nature’s movements and not just as our subjective generalisations from natural events.

Starting from the viewpoint of the subject, we have the immediate certainty of our own existence. We also appear to be certain of the existence of quite a number of things, which we assume to be completely independent of ourselves. Yet, as we have no gateway to things outside us, these seemingly external things appear to vanish into mere dreams. Coleridge’s wish is to uphold the every-day realism - these things we see are truly real. Paradoxically, his strategy is to hold that they are in a sense ideal. In other words, their existence is connected organically to my own existence, which means that I can be equally certain of their existence as I am of my own existence.

Coleridge’s justification of his position follows also Schellingian routes. He assumes that it is meaningful to speak about truth - something we might well concede to him, since otherwise we might as well stop caring about philosophy. Now, truth - or more likely, true thoughts - are not something self-sufficient, but dependent on the existence of things (if I know a table, the table must first exist). Then again, a series of truths, if it is to be completely reliable, must be based on something self-evident, which is certain to be true by itself. This self-evident truth must then also be based on something existent, which, Coleridge argues, must then be something, which doesn’t require the existence of anything else (notice how closely we are threading through very traditional theological notions).

What is this object of true knowledge? Firstly, it should be the source of all existence, because it shouldn’t be dependent on anything else. Secondly, it shouldn’t be a mere object or an ordinary thing, because such things would always require a further explanation - it would be something beyond ordinary experience. This means, primarily, that the object of ultimate knowledge must actually be also the subject of this ultimate knowledge. In other words, if we ever could approach this state of final knowledge, we would literally turn into God. The closest we can humanly approximate this state is in our self-consciousness, which is at least certain to ourselves, even if it is not absolutely certain. Secondarily, since this primary object of knowledge cannot be a mere passive thing, it should be an activity, that is, it is a process creating itself as its own object. This act of self-creation is then a part of all self-consciousness and it is apparently this power, which the power of poetic imagination should resemble.

This subjective side of Coleridge’s - or Schelling’s philosophy - is equally suspect as the objective side and for quite similar reasons. Why should we assume that the absolute ground of our self-consciousness resembles us and deserves the name of self-consciousness? How do we know that there is such an ultimate ground of knowledge and not just passing, contextually accepted foundations?

I will not decide the issue of the believability of Coleridgean metaphysics here. Instead, I shall end with his attempt to show how the empiricist school of philosophy can also be reconciled with this metaphysical picture. On a superficial level, the two positions appear to be contradictory - one bases knowledge on the divine self-knowledge, the other on immediate sensations. Yet, Coleridge solves this problem simply by stating that the empiricist describes correctly the generation of knowledge - we simply have no starting point for knowledge seeking but our sensations. Still, we can never said to have found an absolute foundation for even our sensations, before we have experienced ourselves the divine self-knowledge, which is ontologically at the basis of even sensations.

David Ricardo: On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817)

1772-1823

The main aim of David Ricardo’s work is to find the natural measure for evaluating different commodities in economy. Ricardo continues in the footsteps of Adam Smith, who had suggested that corn - or more extensively, nourishment - provided such a natural measure, in other words, that one could always determine the true value of a thing by checking how much food one could get with it. Yet, Ricardo pointed out, the value of food fluctuated as much as the value of any other commodity - during a year when fields produced more corn, its value would be considerably lower. If one wanted to use some commodity as a measuring stick for other commodities, one might as well use gold, the quantity of which didn’t change as radically as the quantity of corn. Still, even the value of gold could fluctuate somewhat, e.g. if new mines were found, so even gold was not the best possible answer for the desired criterion.

Ricardo’s answer was then that the true value of a thing was determined by the amount of human work required for producing that thing. For instance, if a machine could be used for reducing the need of manpower in producing corn, the value of corn would be lowered. At first sight this seems like a strange thing to say - surely the value of a thing would have something to do with how much demand a thing has. Ricardo’s answer appears to be twofold. Firstly, he insists that this effect of demand is in some manner built in to his model of value - work of a jeweler is qualitatively more difficult than work of a farmer. This solution seems a bit of a cop out, especially as Ricardo never develops the idea of qualitative differences in work, but in practice speaks only of things that can be easily mass produced, like shoes or corn. Indeed, one might suggest that a growing part of modern economy happens in a qualitatively higher level than mere simple production of commodities, because e.g. design of a thing may raise its value, although it wouldn’t require that much more work to make it.

Ricardo’s second answer is that he is speaking of the natural value of a thing, which may differ from the actual price a thing has in the market. Ricardo’s point is, first of all, based on the hypothesis that prices of commodities, if left to themselves, would inevitably tend to move towards their natural values. For instance, if it would become more difficult to produce corn, more workers would be required for producing the same amount of corn, thus, the person selling the corn would have to eventually raise the price of corn if he wanted to get some profit from his business.

An obvious objection to Ricardo’s suggestion is that the price of work or the wages of workers can also fluctuate. Suppose, for instance, that the population of a country would grow larger through reproduction or through immigration and that there would then be more potential workers than before. In a non-regulated system and with more competition for all jobs, the employers wouldn’t have to pay that much money to their employees, thus making it possible to for them to get more profits with the same products, although the amount of work required for doing something would have stayed same. Ricardo’s answer is simple. Surely once the wage costs of a manufactured good diminish, someone would come to the market and start selling it with smaller price. In time, other producers would be forced to change their prices, if they wanted to remain in the business of selling things. The price of things in general would be lowered and thus the workers would get the same amount of goods with their money, although their wages would have been seemingly lowered.

Ricardo’s explanation makes one suspect that in many cases the eventual behavior of a commodity cannot be so straightforwardly determined or that the so-called natural values might never be reached, except in very idealised conditions. Indeed, there is a clear moralistic tendency in Ricardo’s theory of natural values - government should leave the economy alone and we would soon be in those idealised conditions. One example of this tendency is the Malthusian strain in Ricardo’s ideas. If the wages of workers would be generally lowered, the worker population would diminish, because workers wouldn’t have enough money to provide for a big family. Diminishing population would then eventually then lead to a rise of the wages to their normal level, where a worker has just enough to sustain himself and a modest family. At least in Western world, this Malthusian link between the price of work and the amount of population has broken, because workers clearly have more than enough money for providing for their families and still the population growth has reached almost a standstill. The reason for this, as I pointed out when speaking of Malthus, is that the link between the satisfaction of basic sexual needs and the family size is no longer in effect, because of developments with contraceptives, changes in moral outlook of Western world and other things.

Although Ricardo’s theory is supposed to be true in all circumstances, it is hence evidently built on the context of his own time. One peculiarity is his theory of the rent of land. On some land, production of some good, say corn, is peculiarly easy, on others, it requires more effort. At first, only the lands easy to till are in use, but as the economy grows, even the less suitable lands will be used for farming. The result of this change is then that the landowners of the better lands will start to ask for a rent from the farmers. The worse and worse are the lands used for farming, the more and more grows the rent in the better lands. This whole story Ricardo makes up is evidently meant to apply to the English society, in which the landowners did not till their lands themselves, and indeed, in which the main use for land was farming. In a modern urban society, value of land is determined more by its environment than its use in production - one square piece near or within a buzzling city is far more in value than a good farmland far away from cities.

If Ricardo’s take on rent looks back on the last feudal vestiges in English society, his ideas about the use of machines show how uncertain he still was of the effects of the industrial revolution. In the original edition, Ricardo was certain that the use of machines could be nothing but beneficial for the workers as well the machine owners, because they could buy cheaper commodities. In a later edition, Ricardo corrected himself that this would be literally true, only if workers would still be able to find work somewhere, even if machines took care of production of commodities. He suggested that the best hope would be if the machine owners would start to live like medieval nobility and hire workers to do menial work for them. This suggestion is in one sense ahead of its time, since in the current Western world it is a quite distinct possibility that the number of workers in service sector might grow when the number of workers in industrial sector diminishes. In another sense, it is another sign of Ricardo’s times - Ricardo speaks of individuals as owners of machines, while in modern world, industries often belong to companies.

Ricardo’s individual-centred view on economy is glaringly obvious in his ideas about foreign trade. He states as a certain truth that capitalists rarely move their industry from one country to another, because they are accustomed to the habits and culture of one country. This may well be generally true of individual owners, but when it comes to large companies with no clear single owner, the case is rather different. Indeed, in the globalising world it is not at all uncommon that one company moves its production to a completely different continent, for instance, to avoid large wage expenses. Workers, on the other hand, are often in a situation where such a movement is practically impossible due to just mentioned cultural differences.

If Ricardo’s blindspot reveals an intimidating possibility of a world where global enterprises can take advantage of workers in one country and leave workers of another country completely destitute, one distinction he makes raises a more hopeful possibility. Ricardo distinguishes between value and richness - while value means the relation of commodity to work required in producing it, richness is for Ricardo the collection of all goods and commodities available to a certain nation. Now, he notes that there is no clear correlation between the two quantities. If a nation uses more workers to produce more commodities, the total value of commodities in a nation grows and at the same time the nation becomes richer. Then again, it is quite possible that nation becomes richer without any increase in value, if the commodities produced are made by machines. Indeed, one might say that the common human being is more interested of richness, which is a general indicator of how much goods people have in their use. One might even suppose that the society would become more ideal if it became richer through use of machines - provided that this increase of richness would make everyone richer, instead of filling up only some pockets. In fact, in such an ideal society all commodities would have quite a low value, because of ease in making things.