|
|
||
 |
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||
|
Essays, Opinion, & Commentary |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Encounter With Thomas Hill Green, by George J. Irbe (con't)
Desire, Will, Morality Green's study of morality and ethics is comparable to that of Aristotle's in The Nicomachean Ethics. Here I will attempt only to summarize Green's main conclusions and declarations on the subject: By an instinctive action we mean one not determined by a conception, on the part of the agent, of any good to be gained or evil to be avoided by the action. By a moral action, an action morally imputable or that can be called good or bad, we mean one that is so determined as the instinctive action is not.(#92) The motives of moral actions have a distinctive character; we examine them through self-reflection by constant reference to the customary expressions of moral consciousness in use among men and to the institutions in which men have embodied their ideas or ideals of permanent good. Man initiates every imputable moral action for the sake of some personal good that is absolutely different from animal want. The moral quality of the act - its virtue or vice - depends on the character of the agent. This character has a history of development through the operation of an eternal self-distinguishing consciousness upon the basic wants of animal origin.(#95) Unless there is an object which a man seeks or avoids in doing an act, there is no act of will. A man's self exercises an act of will by identifying itself with one of many co-existing desires or aversions as that of which the satisfaction forms for the time its object.(#103) A strong will means a strong man. It means that he sets clearly before him certain objects in which he seeks self-satisfaction and does not deviate from seeking them. His objects may be morally bad as well as good. A weak man who takes his objects from any desire that lures him at a given moment cannot be a good man. Therefore, concentration of will does not necessarily mean goodness, but it is a necessary condition of goodness.(#105) Moral action, then, is the expression of a man's character, as it reacts upon and responds to given circumstances.(#107) Just so far as an action is determined by character, it is determined by an object which the agent has consciously made his own. He is conscious of being the author of the act; he imputes it to himself.(#108) Free will is the essential factor in character. The ascription of an action to character as, in respect to circumstances, its cause, is just that which effectively distinguishes it as free or moral from any compulsory or merely natural action.(#109) The character of a man, and his consequent action, as it at any time appears, is the result of what his character has previously been, as modified through the varying response of the character to varying circumstances, and the registration in the character of residua from these responses. The operative instrument in shaping the character throughout is a self-distinguishing and self-seeking consciousness. This self-consciousness is not derived from nature; it has no origin; it is timeless.(#114) In all conduct to which moral predicates are applicable a man is an object to himself; such conduct, whether virtuous or vicious, expresses a motive consisting in an idea of personal good, which the man seeks to realize by action. This characteristic of man is not attributable to evolutionary development; rather, it is due to an eternal consciousness reproducing itself in man.(#115) There is only one subject or spirit in man, which desires in all of his experiences of desire, understands in all operations of his intelligence, wills in all his acts of willing. The essential character of a man's desires depends on their all being desires of one and the same subject which also understands, the essential character of a man's intelligence on its being an activity of one and the same subject which also desires, the essential character of a man's acts of will on their proceeding from one and the same subject which also desires and understands.(#117) The self-conscious soul of man contains the two basic attributes of desiring and understanding. Because they have a common source in the same self-consciousness, the man carries with him into his desires the same single self-consciousness which makes his acts of understanding what they are, and into his acts of understanding the single self-consciousness which makes his desires what they are. Every desire forming a part of our moral experience is what it is because it is a desire of a subject which also understands; every act of our intelligence is what it is because it is the act of a subject which also desires.(#130) The consciousness in the soul is equally involved in the exercise of desire for objects and in the employment of understanding about facts. We may call our inner life as determined by desires for objects practical thought and the activity of understanding speculative thought.(#133) Neither of the two modes of our soul's action, desire and intellect, or practical thought and speculative thought, can be exerted without calling the other into play.(#135) There is really a single subject or agent, which desires in all the desires of man, and thinks in all his thoughts; both speculative thought and practical thought is involved in all the subject's desires and desiring is involved in all his thoughts. Thus thought and desire are not separate powers but rather different ways in which the consciousness of self, which is also necessarily consciousness of a manifold world other than self, expresses itself.(#136) In the sense in which thought and desire enter into an act of will, each is the whole act; and we can only distinguish them by describing one and the same act of the inner man, which thought and desire equally constitute: with respect to desire, the direction of a self-conscious subject to the realization of an idea, with respect to thought, the action of an idea in such a subject impelling to its realization.(#152) Will is equally and indistinguishably desire and thought. The will is simply the man. Any act of will is an expression of the man as he at that time is. In willing he carries with him his whole self to the realization of the given idea.(#153) [Definition] An act of will is one in which a self-conscious individual directs himself to the realization of some idea, as to an object in which for the time he seeks self-satisfaction.(#154) The distinction between the good and bad will lies at the basis of any system of Ethics; the distinction itself depends on the nature of the objects willed. For the Utilitarian the moral quality of an intentional act of will depends only on its effect in producing pleasure or pain. The proposition is understood in a precisely opposite sense by a Kantian. For him the motive of the intentional act of will is paramount; the good will is good not because of its extrinsic effects but in virtue of what it is in itself, not as a means but as an absolute end.(#155) Pleasure is not the object of a desire when a man seeks self-satisfaction in the realization of an idea whose object is not the enjoyment of pleasure. A man will calmly face a life of suffering in the fulfillment of what he conceives to be his mission because he could not bear to do otherwise. So to live is his good.(#159) In every-day life, most men are neither voluptuaries nor saints. The ordinary motives of a man are neither strictly quests for self-satisfaction in the enjoyment of pleasure, nor in the fulfillment of a universal practical law. The motives are grounded in the attainment of objects which, if he attains them, would provide a certain pleasure, but not because pleasures, as such, are the objects desired.(#160) The man who being competently acquainted with both the life of moral and intellectual effort and that of healthy animal enjoyment often prefers the former because the life of moral and intellectual effort brings him more pleasure.(#164) Good and Moral Good Green's concepts of 'good', 'apparent vs. real good', and 'the Best' are quite Aristotelian. He states: Whereas for the Hedonistic philosophers 'the good' generically is the pleasant, for us the common characteristic of 'the good' is that it satisfies some desire; in satisfaction of desire there is always pleasure, and thus pleasantness in an object is necessary incident of its being good. For us, pleasure presupposes desire and results from its satisfaction, while according to the hedonist, desire presupposes an imagination of pleasure. This distinction has an important bearing on the question of the distinguishing nature of the moral good, or on a variant of the same question which asks how the true good differs from the merely apparent good. We naturally distinguish the moral good as that which satisfies the desire of a moral agent, or that in which a moral agent can find the satisfaction of himself which he necessarily seeks. The true good we understand in the same way. It is an end in which the effort of a moral agent can really find rest.(#171) The following passages echo very closely Aristotle's ideas on real and apparent goods, and happiness: We cannot conceive of a life of completed development, of activity with the end attained, of what the state of the ultimate moral good would be, but we are convinced that there is such a state. The conviction that there must be such a state of being, merely negative as is our theoretical apprehension of it, may have supreme influence over conduct, in moving us to that effort after the Better which, at least as a conscious effort, implies the conviction of there being a Best.(#172) A man's reference to his own happiness is a reference to an ideal state of well-being, a state in which he shall be satisfied. The idea of such a state is not fully realizable by us. The objects of which we contemplate the attainment as necessary to the fulfillment of this state are not contemplated as ever completely fulfilling it. We regard these objects as truly good, but the expectation of an indefinable Better is always present for us. We can express our idea of true happiness only indirectly by stating that it lies in the realization of the objects of our greatest interest and not at all in the enjoyment of pleasure we experience in realizing them.(#228) A man's will improves as he seeks satisfaction, his good, in objects conceived as contributing to the best state or perfection. The self-realization of the divine principle in man requires that his ability to will right develops along with his practical reason. In vicious action, a man's will conflicts with a 'better' reason which is informed by those true judgments in regard to human good which come from the eternal spirit, while the reason that justifies his vice takes its objects and content from desires the satisfaction of which do not lead to a real bettering of man.(#179) Selections from the next four sections below give the gist of Green's views on man's relationship with the divine and the vital role that society, and the moral laws of society, play in his moral development. Undeniably, his view is quite idealistic, whence he acquired the 'idealist' label. Most of us have a much more skeptical opinion of man and his aspirations. Through certain media, and under certain consequent limitations, but with the constant characteristic of self-consciousness and self-objectification, the one divine mind gradually reproduces itself in the human soul. This endows man with definite capabilities. Only by the realization of these capabilities, which form his true good, can man satisfy himself. They are not realized, however, in any life that can be observed, in any life that has been, or is, or (as it would seem) that can be lived by man as we know him; and for this reason we cannot say with any adequacy what these capabilities are. Yet, because the essence of man's spiritual endowment is the consciousness of having this divine mind in him, the idea of his having such capabilities, and of a possible better state of himself consisting in their further realization, is a moving influence in him. It has been the parent of the institutions and usages, of the social judgments and aspirations, through which human life has been so far bettered; through which man has so far realized his capabilities and marked out the path that he must follow in their further realization. As his true good is or would be their complete realization (we say that his true good is this complete realization when we think of the realization as already attained in the eternal mind; we say that it would be such a realization when we think of the realization as for ever problematic to man in the state of which we have experience), so his goodness is proportionate to his habitual responsiveness to the idea of there being such a true good, in the various forms of recognized duty and beneficent work in which that idea has so far taken shape among men. In other words, it consists in the direction of the will to objects determined for it by this idea as operative in the person willing; which direction of the will we may call its determination by reason.(#180) The divine idea of man can only be fulfilled through society. Society is founded on the recognition by persons of each other and their interest in each other as beings who are ends in themselves. Each person presents his own self-satisfaction to himself as an object and is aware that the other person does likewise, and finds satisfaction for himself in aiding and witnessing the self-satisfaction of the other. Society is founded on such mutual interest.(#190) The human spirit can only develop as a personality through society.(#191) We believe that a moralizing agent is operative in man which yields our moral standards. This agent keeps before man an absolutely desirable object of unconditional value. Man can never give a complete account of this object because it consists of the realization of his capabilities for the fulfillment of all that he has it in him to be, which can be fully known only at their ultimate realization. This moralizing agent gives meaning to a desire to do something merely for the sake of it being done; without such a desire there would be no morality; it is an action by which no other desire is gratified except for the desire excited by the act itself, because it is the best that man can do. For its sake men impose on themselves rules requiring that something be done irrespectively of any inclination to do it.(#193) |
|
Enrich Your Life With a Philosophy Book... |
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
||
[Homepage] [Newsletter] [Search] [Support the Academy] [Link to Us] [Contact the Academy] [Citing Articles from Our Website] [Privacy Policy & Disclaimer]
Copyright 1998-99, 2000-01, & 2002-03 by The Radical Academy. All Rights Reserved.