A RETURN TO THE OLD MORAL PHILOSOPHY COURSE?
The Contribution of Gladys Bryson
Elmer H. Duncan,Baylor University.
I had earlier thought of giving this paper the title ,"The Search for Feminine Role Models in Philosophy: the Strange Neglect of Gladys Bryson". But it turns out that Ms. Bryson did not teach Philosophy at all;she taught Economics and Sociology at Smith College. For all that,she was trained in Philosophy ,well read in the subject,and she made a contribution. In 1932,she published a significant series of papers,followed by a book,Man and Society:the Scottish Inquiry in the Eighteenth Century,published by Princeton University Press in 1945,and reprinted by Augustus M.Kelley (New York),in 1968.
In these works,Ms. Bryson made two points that should not be forgotten.First,she reminds us that most of the subjects and disciplines in the "Arts" end of our colleges of Arts and Sciences were earlier taught as parts of the "Old" Moral Philosophy course.
This requires more explanation than I can give here. But to begin,it seems to be the case that,originally (in ancient Greece),anyone who sought wisdom of any kind could be labelled a Philosopher.It is well known that Aristotle wrote books on everything from Logic to Ethics to Physics and Biology. All of this was taught in comprehensive courses in Philosophy.This comprehensive approach ,perhaps without Physics and Biology (that was Natural Philosophy), was carried over into the 18th and 19th century Moral Philosophy course.Thus in the first of her papers to be considered here ,"The Emergence of the Social Sciences from Moral Philosophy", Ms. Bryson notes:
"From the time of Socrates until the emergence of the social sciences in the nineteenth century,moral philosophy consistently offered the most comprehensive discussion of human relations and institutions. Today we are likely to equate it too entirely with ethics,without seeing that the scope of its interests was bounded only by the limits of the activities of men. The opening of any book of the general title reveals discussions of human nature, social forces, progress, marriage and family relationships,economic processes,maintenance of government,international relations,elementary jurisprudence,primitive customs,history of institutions,religion,ethics,aesthetics-all topics of import in the social sciences of our day.It displays itself,even to cursory examination ,as the philosophy of the mores."(1).
It would be tiresome and tedious to trace this through the entire history of Western thought,Thus Ms. Bryson turns to a consideration of the modern period, especially eighteenth century Scotland.She could have chosen a specific example from each (or all) of the Scottish universities of that century: Glasgow,Edinburgh,St. Andrews,and the two in Aberdeen.The example she chose was Adam Ferguson.His works are discussed at length in her book,and in the second of her essays I wish to consider,"The Comparable Interests of the Old Moral Philosophy and the Modern Social Sciences".What do we know about Adam Ferguson? First, he was born in 1723,and was educated for the ministry at St.Andrews (where he is buried).Story has it that,at a rather early age,he was a sword-wearing (and possibly wielding?) chaplain of the Black Watch. But the pulpit was not his calling. When David Hume resigned his position at the Advocates' Library in Edinburgh (now the National Library of Scotland) in January of 1757 ,he was replaced by Adam Ferguson. In 1759,Ferguson was named to a professorship (first in Natural Philosophy,later in Moral Philosophy),at the University of Edinburgh. There is a certain irony in the fact that ,today,classes in Philosophy at that university are taught in an impressive,late 20th century, building called the David Hume Tower-though Hume's reputation for religious skepticism prevented his teaching there. Classes in Sociology are taught in the building next door,the Adam Ferguson Building.
Sociology? Why should that be the case? I suspect the answer goes back to Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes ,in 1651,asked in his book,The Leviathan,how,and why,people originally came to live in states,or,put otherwise,why ,and how, did we first come to have governmental systems? To answer,he said we should start by considering men (and women,presumably),in something he called the "State of Nature", prior to any organized state ,or society.
I do not pretend to be an authority on Ferguson,but,in 1767,he published his Essay on the History of Civil Society,a book which the Scots consider the first major work in what is now called Sociology.In that work,Ferguson responded to Hobbes:
"If we are asked therefore,Where the State of Nature is to be found? we may answer, It is here;and it matters not whether we are understood to speak in the island of Great Britain,at the Cape of Good Hope,or the straits of Magellan.While the active being is in the train of employing his talents and operating on the subjects around him,all situations are equally natural."(2).
I take it part of what this means is that it is nonsense to speak of "natural" human beings apart from,or prior to,any sort of society,because we just are social beings.It is society that makes us human;this is our "nature". Actually,Ferguson wrote several books. In 1783,he wrote a History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic,which was sort of a "Jeremiad",warning moderns of the errors of the Romans. Early in his professorial career,in 1768, he published his Institutes of Moral Philosophy,which ,much later,in 1792,he expanded into a two-volume work,The Principles of Moral and Political Science.Looking over his multi-faceted work,and comparing him with Adam Smith and others,Ms. Bryson asks:
"Why in a definitive way should Adam Ferguson be called a sociologist when he could with equal right be called psychologist,political scientist,economist,jurist,anthropologist, and teacher of ethics and aesthetics as well? These men were moral philosophers,with interests as wide as the customs and institutions of man"(3).
Again,Adam Ferguson was not at all unique.Ms. Bryson could have made much the same arguments using the works of Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson, or Thomas Reid (and probably many other writers of this period).But Ferguson served her purposes well. Part Two of his work on "moral and political science" bears the title "Of Moral Law,or the Distinction of Good and Evil,and its Systematic Applications".Among these "Systematic Applications",there are chapters on Jurisprudence and Politics,showing how the Moral Law is related to our legislated laws governing individual men,and also states and nations.
American philosophy,perhaps especially American Moral Philosophy,was based on Scottish models until (roughly)about 1867,and in many places the Scottish way was dominant to the end of the century.We rarely study 19th Century American Moral Philosophy,but a simple look at the tables of contents of American textbooks from this period will show that they also had this same comprehensive coverage. Any number of such books could be cited ,but two good representative works would be Francis Wayland's Elements of Moral Science (first published 1835),and Joseph Haven's Moral Philosophy: Including Theoretical and Practical Ethics (1859).
If I were to give titles to the individual parts of this paper, this second part would be "trailing streams of glory"...Ms.Bryson makes a second point which is somewhat more subtle than her first. After discussing Adam Ferguson (and Adam Smith), and complaining that they are remembered today as simply a Sociologist,and just an economist,respectively,when they were both so much more,she adds:
"Not only do we put a false light on the moral philosopher when we claim him in one of the social sciences as if he had no other affiliations,but we also fail to see the separate social sciences themselves in true historical perspective when we forget that they once had a very different pattern of belonging together and of inhering as one mass in a common set of presuppositions."(4).
What does this mean? In the third of her papers I shall consider,her "Sociology Considered as Moral Philosophy", Ms.Bryson argues that early Sociologists had much the same agenda as the "old" Moral Philosophers.She discusses at length such pioneers of American Sociology as Lester Ward and Albion Woodbury Small to prove her thesis that the range of coverage was the same in the two disciplines. Indeed,she quotes a remark from Prof. Small that Sociology was .."a Moral Philosophy conscious of its task".(5).And speaking of her own day ,she adds,"It may be a surprise to some to discover that even to this day general treatises on Sociology can be analysed along the lines of eighteenth century formulations of Moral Philosophy"(6).
Even today,some parts of the work of John Dewey,a philosopher whose work is once more in vogue,have many of the characteristics we often associate with Sociology-and this may be even more true of the work of his colleague George Herbert Mead. But pardon this aside;Ms. Bryson's point is that the several "arts" and "humanities",or whatever: Sociology,Psychology,Economics,Political Science,etc.,all continue to bear traces of the old Moral Philosophy courses from whence they came. For one thing, no matter what their claims,these disciplines are rarely value- free. They have as their focus the mores of this human species, and their goal is what the "virtue ethicists" like to call "human flourishing".
Ms. Bryson's best work seems to have been done in the 1930's.The last part of my essay might be called,somewhat flippantly,"We've come a long way,Baby!!" But I shall close by emphasizing her contribution.Even as Ms. Bryson was writing,Philosophy in America and Britain came to be dominated by what we now call the Analytic tradition. What did that mean? Permit me to repeat a story I once heard at a national meeting as part of an address by Professor Henry B. Veatch of the University of Indiana. He spoke of a visit by Professor John Wisdom,of Cambridge,to Indiana,presumably in the 1930's,or 1940's. One suspects that Prof. Veatch ,and his colleagues and students,were not as naive as he claimed,but he said,at least, that they knew little or nothing of the then new trends in British Analytic Philosophy. Prof. Wisdom surprized the group assembled by announcing that he would not be reading a paper,but would simply answer questions. As might have been expected,there was a long silence. I now pick up Prof. Veatch's account of what followed:
"Wisdom's words had the effect of rendering his audience speechless,and left him standing up there in front of everyone,with nothing to say. Finally,someone in the audience,quite obviously oppressed by the deeping embarrassment,and anxious to relieve the tension at all costs, stammered out a question of sorts:'Would Prof. Wisdom perhaps mind characterizing and even explaining to his comparatively ill-informed and behind-the-times audience some of the more obvious changes and developments that had taken place in Great Britain from the idealists like Bradley and Bosanquet,down through realists like Moore and Russell,and so on down to the present day'?
No sooner,though,was the question put, than the answer came back,'Sorry,I am not a historian of philosophy.I cannot answer the question'. Again,silence descended upon the stunned and by now incredulous audience. Presently,though,another questioner took heart.......and accordingly asked about the reception which contemporary English philosophers were inclined to give to the writings of the political scientist,Sir Ernest Barker. This time the answer was simply,'I've never read the man.'"(7).
Now the silence became really deafening. Finally, Prof .Wisdom felt obliged to explain matters:
"As if chiding his listeners for being so ignorant of anything so obvious, he remarked: 'In philosophy one does not study physics,but the language of physicists;not political science,but the language of political scientists;not history,but the language of historians;not religion or theology,but religious or theological language.'"(8).
And of course ,this was also true of Moral Philosophy,which was understood to be the study of the language of morals.In her several writings,Ms. Bryson often laments the narrowing of the scope of Moral Philosophy,as she saw it, from the study of the Old Moral Philosophy courses of the 18th and 19th centuries.One suspects she could not have imagined how far this would continue before the trend began to change.When I was a graduate student in the late 1950's and the early 1960's,a favorite topic among moral philosophers was the question of whether or not Moral Philosophy, thus understood as the study of moral discourse, had any relevance at all to the making of concrete moral decisions. Many name philosophers claimed that it did not. Most seemed to think our study was relevant,in that a person who clearly understood what it meant to say he ought to do X,or that he was obliged to do X, just might be in a better position to decide what he should or should not do. But the relevance was remote,and not at all obvious.Further,as the John Wisdom example illustrates,when I was a student there was great concern to keep a proper respect for the borders,or the boundaries,of our discipline.Many a promising discussion among philosophers was brought to an abrupt halt with the remark:"That isn't philosophy,that's history",or "That's psychology",and ,quite often in my early days at Baylor,"That's religion". Nobody wanted to suggest that there was anything wrong with history,psychology, or religion;they just weren't philosophy.As only one case in point,note that some of the best early work done on the French Existentialists appeared in literary journals, such as The Yale French Studies--if we had to say,"That's literature,not philosophy",then make the most of it!
It is a tale too often told, but Douglas Sloan has well documented the fact that one result of all this was that university students ,en masse, came to be simply bored with courses in Moral Philosophy (9), and flocked into courses in Literature and/or Christian Ethics instead. My own view is that the Vietnam war changed things. It gave a new sense of urgency to moral questions. Young men were asked to fight,and perhaps to die,in a war they did not understand,and which (often) they could not support. A direct result was that Moral Philosophers once more began to try to deal with concrete moral issues.Is that the end of the story? My main point in the final part of my paper is that we have not been sufficiently aware that there must be more to the story than that. We also need to recapture the wider scope of the 19th century Moral Philosophy.As an example of what I mean ,one of the things I have recently learned from reading such authors as Robert C. Roberts is that if were are to speak of "human flourishing",as "Virtue Ethicists" so often do,this means we have to be involved in Moral Psychology.(10). That is ,if virtue for human beings means ,in some sense,fulfilling our function, then we have to talk about what is means to be human, i.e.,we need to talk about human nature.
I am going a bit further afield to find a second example.In her book,Man and Society, Ms. Bryson has much to say about Sociology,and about various social institutions. At one point ,she discusses the work of Dugald Stewart, who was Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh after Ferguson, and very popular in America.She notes that in his collected Works,he devoted some 763 pages to the theory of Political Economy,and she comments:
"But he was not content to discuss population,wealth, and trade merely as resources of the state.His general and philosophical interests were always to the fore and his aim was to put before politicians the standards by which the wisdom and expediency of every institution should be checked.A political economist must know human motives and aspirations and must safeguard and balance the concerns of various groups of people and various localities.One of the economist's major problems becomes the ascertaining of what the state should take upon itself and what it should leave to individual initiative,and the solution cannot be approached without an adequate knowledge of the human mind ."(11).
I feel sure that Ms. Bryson wanted to say that Political Economics must,and does,retain many of the concerns of the old Moral Philosophy course.I feel sure ,also, that many of our "pure" economists would deny that,and say that economic theory has nothing to do with Moral Philosophy,whether new or old.I really don't care to argue that it does.I want to argue for the other side of the coin,so to speak.Maybe economists are not much concerned about ,to refer back to Dugald Stewart (or perhaps Ayn Rand ,or even Rush Limbaugh),"...the ascertaining of what the state should take upon itself and what it should leave to individual initiative"...But this is surely , in our day ,a hot political issue,and a serious moral question. And to answer it properly, we need to study,as Stewart did,"the human mind",and also Economics,Politics,and Sociology. In short, I am saying that to really deal properly with the complex moral issues that confront us-and I have not even mentioned euthanasia, same-sex marriages,human cloning,abortion,,etc.,etc.-we need the comprehensive scope of the old Moral Philosophy.
Curiously,one of the greatest of the British Analytic philosophers,Gilbert Ryle,probably said it best.In his 1946 Inaugural lecture at Oxford,he said:
"The problem,that is, is not to anatomize the solitary concept,say,of liberty but to extract its logical powers as these bear on law,obedience,responsibility,loyalty,government,and the rest.Like a geographical survey,a philosophical survey is necessarily synoptic.Philosophical problems cannot be posed or solved piecemeal".(12).
I am only saying that Ryle was right about this; Ryle was usually right. Permit me to close by making clear a couple of things I am not trying to say,or to argue. I am not suggesting a wholesale return to the 19th century,though I am persuaded the 19th century Moral Philosophers have much to teach us.Thomas Wolfe was right;You Can't Go Home Again. For one thing, the "home" you remember is no longer there,and you are not the person you were.And I am not saying we need to read everything,and know it all,in all the relevant subject areas.We can't do that,either. How,then, is this wider focus,this comprehensive vision,to be achieved? Or is it a genuine possibility,in the 21st century? I have to confess I'm not really sure.Maybe,or surely,computers,and the Internet,can help; if we can't know it all,a good search engine can help us find it! And we certainly need to have more team-taught courses in our schools,combining the expertise of scholars from various disciplines.I have only one last "modest proposal" to offer. Maybe a fair beginning would be to simply make a resolution that we will not -ever- permit another promising philosophical discussion to be ended with that cutting remark,"That's not Philosophy;that's Psychology!"or....worse yet,with a sneer,"That's Religion!"
I like to think that Gladys Bryson would approve
Endnotes:
1.Gladys Bryson,:"The Emergence of the Social Sciences from Moral Philosophy" ,The International Journal of Ethics,XLII,April,1932,pp.304-305.
2.Ferguson,Adam,An Essay on the History of Civil Society,Edited by Duncan Forbes,Edinburgh University Press,1966,p.8.
3.Gladys Bryson,"The Comparable Interests of the Old Moral Philosophy and the Modern Social Sciences",Social Forces,XI,October,1932,p.19.
4.Bryson,ibid.,p.19.
5.Gladys Bryson,"Sociology Considered as Moral Philosophy",The Sociological Review,XXIV,,January,1932,p.26.
6.Bryson,ibid.,p.26.
7.Henry B.Veatch,"Language and Ethics:'What's Hecuba to Him ,or He to Hecuba?'", Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, LXIV,1970-71,pp.45-46.
8.Veatch,ibid.,p.46.
9.Douglas Sloan,"The Teaching of Ethics in the American Undergraduate Program,1876-1976",in Sloan,Douglas,ed.,Education and Values,New York:Teachers College Press,1980,pp.191-254.
10.Robert C. Roberts,"Existence,Emotion,and Virtue:Classical Themes in Kierkegaard",in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard,edited by Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino,Cambridge:Cambridge University Press,1998,pp.177-206.This is only one of many relevant examples of Roberts' works that could have been cited.
11.Bryson,Gladys,Man and Society:the Scottish Inquiry in the Eighteenth Century, New York: Augustus M. Kelley,Publishers, 1968,p.217.
12.Gilbert Ryle."Philosophical Arguments" in Ayer,A.J.,Logical Positivism,New York: Free Press,1959,p.335.
Other Sources someone (especially web-surfers) might find useful:
Sociologists?? The problem is,I feel certain, just that I don't know my way around ,but I had trouble finding material on the web about the sociologists mentioned in this study. I did find names,and at least a noting of their contributions ,in Ed Stephan's Timeline ,which I commend to any interested readers.
