The Two Moralities of Spinoza

The Two Moralities of Spinoza I Robert McRae The philosophers of the ancient world believed that philosophical knowledge was essential to the attainment of the good life. Rarely has this value been placed upon it in the modem world. No one denied the ancient claim for philosophy more emphatically than Kant himself. "We do not," he said, "need science and philosophy to know what we should do to be honest and good, yea, even wise and virtuous." It is significant that in the search for his supreme principle of morality Kant had proceeded by an analysis of the moral judgments of ordinary men. It was then possible for him to say that in giving the principle an explicit formulation he was not teaching men anything new, but was ouly directing their attention to a principle that they themselves always employed in their moral decisions . Thus the knowledge necessary for the attainment of wisdom and virtue is not philosophical but vulgar knowledge, possessed by the simplest and least educated of men. It is significant also that Kant's conclusion that this is so is something he supposed would already be taken for granted by his readers. "Indeed," he says, "we might well have conjectured beforehand that the knowledge of what every man is bound to do, and therefore also to know, would be within the reach of every man, even the commonest." To emphasize this point Kant went even further. He argued that the common man not only has as good a hope as any philosopher of making a correct moral decision, but is more likely to do so. The philosopher is at the disadvantage of being able to use his philosophical skills to argue on the side of his desires and inclinations against the strict laws of duty, to question their validity, and to corrupt them. Christianity had much to do with the destruction of the ancient claims on behalf of philosophy. It is taught in the New Testament that to enter the kingdom of heaven it is necessary to become a little child. The chances of the foolish to confound the wise have not always, per60 TWO MORALiTIES OF SPINOZA 61 haps, been estimated at the same rate by Christians-St. Gregory Nazianzen protested that the kingdom of heaven was not necessarily confined to fools-but the Church has always taught that the knowledge necessary to salvation is within the grasp of the simplest intelligence . On the secular side the development of theories of natural law also weighed heavily against the classical ideal. When "law" in the sense of "command" or "ordinance" is taken as the basic ethical concept, as is the case in natural law theories, then it will follow that the knowledge required for the attainment of virtue is common knowledge. If a law is to oblige it must be known. This will be as true for moral laws as for civil laws. And since virtue will consist solely in an attitude of obedience towards laws which are evident in the light of every man's reason, the highest virtue is available equally and without distinction to the philosophical and to the multitude, and philosophy is useless in instructing men how to attain it. There were, however, two philosophers of the seventeenth century who were pre-eminent in maintaining that moral knowledge is philosophical knowledge and who thereby denied to the multitude the hope of acquiring it. For Descartes the science of morals, "the last degree of wisdom," rests on the foundations of metaphysics and physics. This moral knowledge he confessed he had not himself reached. He had to be content with a merely provisional code. But if it had been found it could never have become popular knowledge, for the metaphysics on which it was to rest was confined by Descartes to the very few whom he considered capable of metaphysical thinking. Descartes was, however , a good Christian. He could not ignore the doctrine that the knowledge necessary for salvation lies within the reach of every man. He therefore made a sharp distinction between what must be known for salvation in the next world and what must be known for the good life in this world...