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What Would the Children Say?

Edvard Munch, The Sick Child (1885–86).
Edvard Munch, The Sick Child (1885–86). Gementes et flentes in hac lacrimarum valle.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Having children may or may not be good for us—but what about for the children?

Whether or not to have children is, perhaps, the most important question of all.

Despite not having any himself, Pope Francis has said, in no uncertain terms, that people ought to have children:

A society with a greedy generation, that doesn’t want to surround itself with children, that considers them above all worrisome, a weight, a risk, is a depressed society … The choice not to have children is selfish. Life rejuvenates and acquires energy when it multiplies: it is enriched, not impoverished.

Pope Francis may not have watched the news, or the weather, but he has at least looked into the Bible. Psalm 127 tells us that ‘children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is His reward’. And in Genesis, the very first thing that God says to Adam is, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth…’

For most of human history, children were a religious duty, as well as a biological destiny, a social expectation, an economic asset, and an insurance policy. The question of whether to have them barely arose—and contraception was in any case more hit than miss.

The Rise of Childlessness

In most times and places, the only truly significant thing that a woman could do was to bring forth children. Women were married off at a young age and, for the most part, did not have much choice or control over their reproductive lives.

Things changed dramatically over the course of the twentieth century with the advent of women’s rights and reliable forms of contraception. Owing to the state pension and social support, people no longer had to rely on having children to underwrite their old age. And childlessness today is much less stigmatised than it used to be—and, in fact, increasingly lauded.

The more educated a woman is, the less likely she is to have children. For many women, children conflict with work; whereas, for men, children may mean working harder than they would otherwise have needed to. Educated women may also struggle to find a suitable partner, or look upon having a partner as more of a hindrance than a help. Interestingly, in the long run, people with children and people without (both men and women) report being similarly satisfied, or dissatisfied, with their lives. And both groups have a similar life expectancy.

Another factor in the rise of childlessness is the decline of marriage. Many people equate marriage with children, and being unmarried is one of the strongest predictors of childlessness—even though more than half of children in England and Wales are now born outside marriage or civil partnership.

Why We Want Children

Before running through some of the arguments for and against having children, it is worth reminding ourselves that, beneath it all, we are animals, and that the purpose of all animal life, and all life, is survival and reproduction.

For many people, the drive to reproduce is an irreducible given that is impervious to reason and argument. The philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe (d. 1990) argued that the human capacities for reason and self-awareness break with nature, giving us more than we, as a part of nature, are able to carry. So as not to go mad, ‘most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.’

The novelist George Eliot made a similar point in her novel, Middlemarch (1871):

That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

Had our parents been clear-thinking, it may be that none of us would have been born—and be worrying about whether to have children.

There remains a lot of social pressure on both women and men, but especially women, to have children. This pressure may be experienced first and foremost as parental expectation, even if it remains largely unspoken. But even without any pressure, many people would still choose to have children. If anything, it is a romantic idea. A friend once told me that he loved his partner so much that he wanted to mingle his genetic material with hers and live alongside what that would look like. He was a zoologist.

Beyond the romance, children can fill our lives with meaning, purpose, and activity. They can remove us from our adult preoccupations into the simpler, more immediate, and more innocent dimension of our own childhood, which we can re-live through them. The creation of another human being is almost God-like, and their need for us, at least in the early years, can give us a God-like sense of power and importance. We hope, or imagine, that they will grow up to be successful and dutiful, that they will become our pride and solace, and that they will imitate and flatter us by having children of their own.

When we die, they will say some fine words at our funeral and garden our grave. They will carry forth our name, our history, even our traits and habits, our manners and ways. They will inherit our accumulated estate, protecting it from dispersion and dilapidation. They will prolong our work and advocate for our memory.

In short, we give life so that life might give back to us.

A Gift to the World?

Perhaps, having a child is not just about us. It is also, we tell ourselves, an act of generosity, a gift to the world—and a new reader for me, thank you.

But is that really so? More and more people are taking a contrary view. The world population stands at around 8 billion and is still rising at an annual rate of over one per cent. For every person alive in Britain or America, how many animals suffer or die, if only to feed that person? How much carbon dioxide is emitted? And how much plastic waste produced? Putting aside animal exploitation and extinction and other forms of environmental degradation, many experts are alarmed about global heating and its impact on future generations. We may go to great lengths to reduce our carbon footprint, but no amount of restraint and recycling on our part could ever make up for the carbon footprint of bringing yet another person into the world.

Whatever they might do, the childless are far more carbon-neutral.

We might hope that, instead of adding to the problem, our child will grow up to become a part of the solution. Perhaps we could offset their carbon footprint through environmental action, for example, by sponsoring the planting of trees.

But even if having a child does contribute to the greater good, we could make an even bigger contribution by adopting an already existing child, or by remaining childless so as to concentrate all our resources on making a difference.

Pregnant in Soul

In the Symposium, Plato says that animals enter into a state of heat because they seek to reproduce and thereby attain a species of immortality. Human beings also seek to become immortal, and are prepared to take great risks, even to die, to attain fame and honour. Most people are pregnant in body and beget children to preserve their memory, but a few are pregnant in soul and choose instead to beget wisdom and virtue. As their children are more beautiful and immortal, people who are pregnant in soul have more to share with one another and a stronger bond of friendship between them. Everyone, says Plato, would rather have their children than human ones:

Who when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather have their children than ordinary ones? Who would not emulate them in the creation of children such as theirs, which have preserved their memory and given them everlasting glory?

Plato thereby distinguishes between the lesser immortality of leaving behind children and grandchildren, which is relatively easy to achieve but only preserves our memory for at most three or four generations; and the greater immortality of leaving behind a significant artistic, intellectual, or social legacy, which is more enduring but also a lot harder to achieve. The childless Plato wrote the Symposium some 2,400 years ago, and here we are today still quoting from it.

Greater immortality may be insecure, but so too is lesser immortality. Our children may become people of a kind that we cannot imagine. They may write us off, or even murder us. Of course, no one imagines that. Lesser immortality is also morally problematic. The more we regard our children as extensions of ourselves, the less fully we regard them as ends in themselves.

The Costs of Having Children

Greater immortality may not be in our grasp, but there are other reasons for remaining childless. Some people do not feel that they will make good enough parents—if only because they have no affinity for children. Others, quite simply, have not found a suitable partner, or one that they are willing to put up with for the next however many years. Contrary to popular belief, relationships tend to suffer from the arrival of a child, and those who have found a partner may wish to protect their relationship by remaining childfree. In addition, many people fear that childbearing may be too traumatic or inconvenient, or that it might damage their health or physique. Some might already be in poor health, or carrying a genetic disorder that they worry about transmitting.

And then there are the costs involved. According to the Child Poverty Action Group, raising a child to the age of 18 now costs around £250,000 for a couple and £290,000 for a lone parent. In other words, roughly the price of a house—or two houses if you send them to a fee-paying school.

As well as financial costs, there are also opportunity costs. We swap friends, free time, restorative lie-ins, sleek interior décor, romantic evenings, and spontaneous travel for soiled nappies, temper tantrums, broken sleep, broken things, babysitting, and school runs—and all, perhaps, to end up with a miserable or obnoxious teen on our hands.

What if, deep down, we didn’t even love them?

Will Someone Think of the Children?

Having a child may well be good for us. It might even be good for the world. But is it actually good for the child itself?

For Immanuel Kant, people, by virtue of being people, ought never to be treated merely as means to an end, but always also as ends-in-themselves. If we are going to bring a child into the world, our first thought should be, not for our own good or even the greater good, but for the good of the child itself.

As we cannot ask a child that does not yet exist for its opinion or consent, we are left to make that decision on its behalf—and to live with that reckoning for the rest of our lives.

If we can see that the child would lead a miserable life, we may feel a moral obligation not to bring it into the world. But if we could be sure that it would lead a fulfilled life, we would not feel a moral obligation to bring it into the world. In other words, we intuitively place more value on the prevention of suffering than on the maximisation of happiness. It seems, then, that preventing a possible person’s suffering matters more than providing for their possible happiness.

Most people report being satisfied with their lives. Even so, do our lives contain more suffering than happiness? Does life in general contain more suffering than happiness? On some level, this boils down to asking whether life is preferable to death, or, at least, to non-existence.

Is Life Better Than Non-Existence?

In one of his Theban plays, Oedipus at Colonus (401 BCE), the tragedian Sophocles has the chorus sing:

Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best; but when a man has seen the light of day, this is next best by far, that with utmost speed he should go back from where he came.

One of the most famous of the lost writings of Plato’s long-time student Aristotle is Eudemus, or On the Soul. A fragment preserved in Plutarch contains the essence of what later philosophers came to call the Wisdom of Silenus (Silenus being the tutor of the wine god Dionysus):

You, most blessed and happiest among humans, may well consider those blessed and happiest who have departed this life before you… This thought is indeed so old that the one who first uttered it is no longer known; it has been passed down to us from eternity, and hence doubtless it is true. Moreover, you know what is so often said and passes for a trite expression. What is that, he asked? He answered: It is best not to be born at all; and next to that, it is better to die than to live, and this is confirmed even by divine testimony … Midas, after hunting, asked his captive Silenus somewhat urgently, what was the most desirable thing among humankind … At length, when Midas would not stop plaguing him, he erupted with these words, though very unwillingly: ‘you, seed of an evil genius and precarious offspring of hard fortune, whose life is but for a day, why do you compel me to tell you those things of which it is better you should remain ignorant? For he lives with the least worry who knows not his misfortune; but for humans, the best for them is not to be born at all, not to partake of nature’s excellence; not to be is best, for both sexes. This should be our choice, if choice we have; and next to this is, when we are born, to die as soon as we can.’ It is plain therefore, that he declared the condition of the dead to be better than that of the living.

We ordinarily assume that life is a gift. But Silenus, famed for his wisdom and compelled to speak, tells us that it is in fact a burden. The reversal is plausible enough to be transmitted by the likes of Sophocles and Aristotle.

The World as Will

Arthur Schopenhauer, who shared in this ancient ‘wisdom’, held that beneath our world of appearances lies the world of will, a blind process of striving and reproduction that courses through all of nature and carries us with it into a life of endless strife and servitude:

Awakened to life out of the night of unconsciousness, the will finds itself an individual, in an endless and boundless world, among innumerable individuals, all striving, suffering, erring; and as if through a troubled dream it hurries back to its old unconsciousness. Yet till then its desires are limitless, its claims inexhaustible, and every satisfied desire gives rise to a new one. No possible satisfaction in the world could suffice to still its longings, set a goal to its infinite cravings, and fill the bottomless abyss of its heart. Then let one consider what as a rule are the satisfactions of any kind that a man obtains. For the most part nothing more than the bare maintenance of this existence itself, extorted day by day with unceasing trouble and constant care in the conflict with want, and with death in prospect…

The will creates deficiency upon deficiency for us to satisfy, or try to satisfy. Satisfaction, or happiness, is not a positive state but merely a momentary reprieve from this ceaseless striving and suffering. Even if satisfaction can be sustained for a short time, boredom is bound to set in. All considered, it would have been better if we and the world had never existed.

The only lasting liberation is to arrive at the realisation, which is the height of Indian spirituality, that the world of appearances and we within it are but illusions, renounce these illusions, and await the release of death.

For my part, I think that Schopenhauer is being too pessimistic, and too binary. It is possible to relish striving, or, at least, some forms of striving—like striving to make a difference, or striving to become a better person. It is also possible to rise above suffering, to grow from it, to sublime it into something bigger than ourselves. Even if life is more suffering than satisfaction, it can still be worthwhile, and maybe more so than a hypothetical lifetime of continuous satisfaction.

Life is not merely the balance of our suffering and satisfaction, but a journey of turning suffering into satisfaction, which might be called art, and which is the greatest happiness of all.

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Every Theory of Laughter Explained—and Superseded

A gorilla and a human laughing

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

I’ve been searching for years for a unified theory of laughter. I still haven’t found one. Lol.

Philosophers and psychologists have proposed any number of explanations for why we laugh. We laugh because we feel superior, because tension has been released, because something is incongruous… Each theory explains something. None explains everything.

And that may be because laughter is more complicated than we think.

Is Laughter Good or Bad?

When looking for romance on dating sites and apps, people often ask for, or promise to offer, a good sense of humour (GSOH).

Today, we tend to think of laughter as a good thing, but historically, this has not always been the case. Laughter seldom features in Plato’s dialogues, and, when it does, it is usually in the mouths of sophists and fools. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates suggests that, to set a good example, heroes in myths and stories should never be portrayed as being overcome with laughter.

The Stoics, too, frowned upon laughter, as did, for many centuries, the monasteries. Even the mild Rule of St Benedict condemns laughter in the strongest terms, for example, in Chapter VI, Of Silence: ‘Coarse jests, and idle words or speech provoking laughter, we condemn everywhere to eternal exclusion.’

Nowadays, most people associate laughter with happiness, health, and a virtuous attitude. But if laughter were that innocent, it wouldn’t be so fun.

The Superiority Theory

The notion that laughter can overcome reason or corrupt moral character finds an echo in the superiority theory of laughter, according to which laughter is a way of raising oneself by putting others down.

The superiority theory is most closely associated with the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who conceived of laughter as ‘a sudden glory arising from sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly’.

When we think of mediaeval mobs jeering at people in stocks, or, closer to our time, Candid Camera, we can see that Hobbes had at least half a point. But the superiority theory is unable to account for all cases of laughter, such as laughter arising from joy, surprise, or relief.

The Relief Theory

According to the relief theory of laughter, most often associated with Sigmund Freud, laughter represents a release of pent-up nervous energy.

Like dreams, jokes are able to bypass our inner censor, enabling a repressed emotion such as xenophobia (or, at least, the nervous energy associated with the repression) to surface—explaining why, at times, we can be embarrassed by our own laughter. By the same token, a comedian might raise a laugh by conjuring some costly emotion, such as admiration or indignation, and then suddenly puncturing it.

More flexible than the superiority theory, the relief theory is able to account for how we might use laughter as a form of release, or to tell or reveal some uncomfortable truth. Upon awakening on her deathbed to see her entire family around her, Nancy Astor quipped, ‘Am I dying, or is this my birthday?’ But not all laughter arises from a release of pent-up energy—not, for example, laughter at a pun or word play—and those who laugh the hardest at offensive jokes are not generally the most decorous or repressed of people.

The Incongruity Theory

Much more popular today is a third theory, the incongruity theory of laughter, associated with the likes of Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard, according to which the comedian raises a laugh, not by conjuring an emotion and then killing it, but by creating an expectation and then contradicting it.

In the Critique of Judgement, Kant shares a few jokes to illustrate his theory of laughter, for example:

A merchant returning from India to Europe with all his wealth in merchandise was forced to throw it overboard in a heavy storm, and grieved thereat so much that his wig turned grey the same night!

In the Poetics, Aristotle states that ‘the ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others…’ Leaning on Aristotle, Kierkegaard highlights that the violation of an expectation is the core not only of comedy but also of tragedy—the difference being that, in tragedy, the violation leads to pain or harm.

Possibly, it is not the incongruity itself that we enjoy, but the light that it sheds, in particular, on the difference between what lies inside and outside our heads. Kant compares the pleasure of laughter, the free play of thought, to the pleasure of music, the free play of sound, and to the pleasure of gambling, the free play of fortune.

Perhaps the only difference between the comedian, the psychologist, and the philosopher is that you can’t pretend to be a comedian.

The incongruity theory is arguably more basic than the relief and superiority theories. When someone laughs, our inclination is to search for an incongruity; and though we may laugh for superiority or relief, even then, it helps if we can pin our laughter on some real or imagined incongruity.

But although the incongruity theory takes us closer to a general theory, it struggles to explain why incongruity should produce laughter rather than, say, surprise, confusion, or mere indifference.

The Social Corrective Theory

In Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose, the monk Jorge de Burgos commits a string of murders to prevent the sole surviving copy of Aristotle’s treatise on comedy (the lost second book of the Poetics), hidden in the abbey’s labyrinthine library, from ever coming to light. For Jorge, the book is dangerous, because laughter, once understood, could undermine the very foundations of religion and society.

After Aristotle, the first major philosopher to write a book specifically on laughter was Henri Bergson.

In On Laughter (1900), Bergson begins by making three observations:

  • Laughter is a human preserve. ‘Many philosophers have defined man ‘a laughing animal’, but they could also have said a ‘laughable animal’—for if another animal can make us laugh, this is only insofar as it reminds us of man.’
  • More than that, laughter is a social activity. Even when we laugh alone, it is because we have conjured up a social context, a gathering of ghosts—‘for laughter implies a certain complicity with others, whether real or imaginary.’
  • Emotion is the enemy of laughter, inasmuch as laughter presupposes a certain distance, a certain indifference, even if it is only momentary—and, in fact, manufacturing this distance can be one of the purposes of humour.

Life, wrote Horace Walpole, is a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel.

These, then, are Bergson’s conditions for laughter: a human dimension, a social aspect, and a detached attitude.

But what is laughter, all laughter, actually about? It is, says Bergson, about a kind of mechanical rigidity, either in body or mind.

Nature is full of vital energy and never exactly repeats itself, but we human beings tend to fall short, to fall into patterns and habits, to ossify, to lose ourselves to ourselves—and laughter is how we point this out to one another, how we up our collective game.

For example, we may laugh at one who falls into a hole through absentmindedness, or at one who constantly repeats the same gesture or phrase. More subtly, we may laugh at a pun or a literal interpretation of a figure of speech; or at a misunderstanding that arises from a scene so formulaic that it is able to belong at the same time to two completely independent series of events.

I would add that we may also laugh at, or from, an unusual or unexpected lack of rigidity, as, for instance, when we break a habit or have an original idea—although this kind of divine laughter, as I call it, may only arise out of the contrast with our customary rigidity.

Ultimately, says Bergson, we are laughable to the extent that we are a machine or an object, to the extent that we lack self-awareness, that we are invisible to ourselves while being visible to everyone else.

Thus, the laughter of others usually draws attention to our unconscious processes, to our modes or patterns of self-deception, and to the gap, or gulf, between our fiction and the reality. This gap is narrowest in poets and artists, who have to transcend themselves if they are to be worthy of the name.

Zen masters teach that it is much easier to laugh at ourselves once we have transcended our ego. At the highest level, laughter is the sound of the shattering of the ego. It is a means of gaining (and revealing) perspective, of rising beyond ourselves and our lives, of achieving a kind of immortality, a kind of divinity.

Bergson has taken us further than Hobbes or Freud. Laughter is no longer merely an expression of superiority or a discharge of nervous energy: it has become a mechanism by which human beings police rigidity and preserve adaptability. Still, Bergson’s theory cannot explain all laughter, such as the laughter of a baby or a primate.

Evolutionary Theory

Another way to understand laughter is to look at it like a biologist or anthropologist might.

Laughter is evolutionarily much older than language, and we share its precursors with other animals. Primates in particular produce laughing sounds when playfighting, play-chasing, or tickling.

As with human children, it seems that their laughter functions as a signal that the danger is not for real—which may be why characters such as Batman’s Joker, who send a misleading signal, are so unsettling.

Perhaps, then, the basic evolutionary meaning of laughter is extraordinarily simple: this is only play, or the danger is not real.

Derivative Uses

Most laughter is not directed at jokes, but at creating and maintaining social bonds. Humour is a social lubricant, a signal of acceptance and belonging.

It is also a way of communicating, of making a point emphatically, or conveying a sensitive message without incurring the usual social costs.

On top of that, it can be turned into a weapon, a sublimed form of aggression, serving, like antlers or plumes, to pull rank or attract a mate.

The subtlety and ambiguity involved is in itself a form of play, and we know that laughter is associated with stress reduction and other health benefits.

If laughter began as a signal of play or safety, it has, in human beings, evolved a number of other functions, none of which are mutually incompatible. Humour is shaped by culture and education, and, if people laugh differently in Berlin or Tokyo, imagine how differently they must have laughed in Ancient Greece or Ancient India.

The same may be true of complex, elaborated emotions such as Schadenfreude and, indeed, romantic love, which build on primitive mechanisms, or ‘basic emotions’. Evolution lays the foundations; culture builds the house.

Why Can’t I Stop Laughing?

This may be where the search for a unified theory begins to go wrong. Superiority, relief, incongruity, social correction, play, and bonding need not be rival explanations. They operate at different levels and, in many cases, answer different questions.

The incongruity theory is principally cognitive; the relief theory is psychological and physiological; the superiority theory is interpersonal; the social corrective theory is social; the play or danger theory is evolutionary; and theories of bonding and aggression are functional. If someone slips on a banana skin, several of these theories could provide an account of the ensuing laughter.

But laughter often admits of several accounts, and, in fact, the more accounts it admits of, the harder we may laugh, as our mind flits from one account to another. Next time you laugh hysterically, pay attention to this flitting and its cascading effect.

When the teacher asks you to tell the class why you were laughing, you’d have to be a genius to explain it.

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Hate Noise? You Might Be a Genius

My silent writing retreat
Where I Wrote The German Greeks, surrounded by all the right sounds.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Silence is God’s first language; everything else is a poor translation. —Thomas Keating

I am excruciatingly sensitive to noise. I always carry earplugs and sometimes fantasise about living in the middle of the woods or on top of a hill. If I were browsing property listings, the first word I’d search for would be ‘secluded’. Is the problem with me—or with the world?

As a misophone (‘hater of sounds’), I’m in pretty good company. Kant hated noise, as did Proust, Kafka, and Darwin—and even, ironically, Wagner. Kant is said to have moved lodgings on account of a crowing rooster, while Proust lined his bedroom with cork.

Among all the great thinkers, none hated noise more openly or fervently than Arthur Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer and the Noisy Seamstress

In August 1821, while living in Berlin, the 33-year-old Schopenhauer had an altercation with a neighbour, the 47-year-old seamstress Caroline Louise Marquet. On that day, he was enraged by the noise of three women talking in the private anteroom to his apartment. When he demanded that they leave, two of the women complied but Marquet refused.

Later, Marquet claimed that Schopenhauer kicked and punched her and threw her down the stairs, leaving her paralysed on the right side and unable to work. He countered that he had only pushed her, and that she fell to the ground on purpose so that she could sue him.

Following a six-year legal battle ending in May 1827, he was made to pay her medical expenses along with a maintenance allowance of 60 thalers per annum for the rest of her life. On the day she died in 1842, the great philosopher of compassion recorded in his ledger, in Latin, Obit anus, abit onus (‘The crone dies, the burden is lifted’). Moral of the story: Don’t make noise around philosophers.

Schopenhauer built his pessimistic philosophy on that of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who lived all his life in Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad). Although gregarious and fond of laughter, Kant needed absolute quiet to write. In May 1784, he penned a letter to the police superintendent to complain about the ‘stentorian singing of prayers by the hypocritical inmates of the jail’ (in the Iliad, the Greek herald Stentor had a voice as loud ‘as fifty voices of other men’). He was offended not merely by the noise but also by the insincerity of the prayers, which were offered, he thought, simply to appear God-fearing to the jailor.

Schopenhauer on Noise

In his essay On Din and Noise (1851), Schopenhauer rails hardest not against the nattering of women but the cracking of whips in narrow resounding streets (the nineteenth-century equivalent of revving motorbikes, or those fart-can cars with modified exhausts): ‘Hammering, the barking of dogs, and the screaming of children are abominable; but it is only [his emphasis] the cracking of a whip that is the true murderer of thought.’ To him, the cracking of whips was all the more unbearable for being unnecessary and, worse than unnecessary, useless.

He goes on to link noise intolerance (misophonia, ‘the hatred of sound’) with intellect and creativity:

Certainly there are people, nay, very many, who will smile at [my predicament], because they are not sensitive to noise; it is precisely these people, however, who are not sensitive to argument, thought, poetry, or art, in short, to any kind of intellectual impression: a fact to be assigned to the coarse quality and strong texture of their brain tissues.

The Difference Between Sound and Noise

But not every sound is noise. The difference between sound and noise is not merely one of acoustics but also of perception. The sounds of nature, I find, are almost always more tolerable than those of man. Years ago, I toured Copenhagen Zoo—the only thing open on a Monday—and noted that the most disturbing cries came not from the animals but from the human children.

I enjoy birdsong, the burbling of a stream, or waves lapping or breaking on a shore, but not, say, an air conditioner humming (unless it is very hot outside), children crying, or people shouting or talking without saying anything useful, interesting, or amusing. If I believe that something is important, meaningful, or beautiful, the sound that it makes is much less likely to constitute noise. Noise, then, is whatever I don’t think is worth hearing. In the final analysis, it is whatever dissipates rather than concentrates my energies.

For Schopenhauer, genius is precisely this: the ability of the mind to remain focused on a single point and object. But as soon as a focused mind is interrupted or distracted, it is no better than an ordinary mind. It is, says Schopenhauer, as with a large diamond, which, if shattered, loses most of its value; or as with an army, which, if dispersed, loses most of its power.

It is not merely a matter of genius but also of happiness. For anyone who has experienced it, deep concentration is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Aristotle famously conceived of God, the traditional fount of all reason, as a mind that turns blissfully upon itself. In contrast, people who are too frightened to put two and two together, or too dense to do so, use noise to occupy and numb their minds.

The Stoic Answer: Can We Rise Above the Noise?

Unlike Schopenhauer, the Stoic Seneca (d. 65 CE) sought not to eliminate noise but to rise above it. In his Letters to Lucilius, he claims to be living above a bustling Roman bathhouse, and paints a vivid picture of the soundscape: the grunts of the weightlifter, the slaps and pummelling of the masseur, the splashing of the enthusiast who bombs into the pool, the ceaseless chatter of the hair-plucker who makes his victims yell… ‘So picture to yourself the assortment of sounds, which are strong enough to make me hate my very powers of hearing!’

Despite the din, Seneca remains able to read and write, assuring Lucilius that ‘this racket means no more to me than the sound of waves or falling water.’

Still, he recognises that some noises are worse than others. Intermittent noises, he says, are more upsetting than steady ones. Spoken words are more distracting than mere sounds, in that they demand our attention: compared to speech, even the saw-sharpener is easier to bear. 

Yet Seneca is able to force his mind to concentrate and ‘keep it from straying to things outside itself’. More than that, he sees this as a test of his Stoicism, mental fortitude, and even virtue. Ultimately, he reasons, noise only disturbs us insofar as it resonates with our own emotional turmoil. If our mind is still, no amount of noise can unsettle it; but if our mind is angry or fearful, or burning with greed or envy, no amount of silence can still it: ‘For of what benefit is a quiet quarter or neighbourhood if our emotions are in an uproar?’

We tend to associate sleeping with resting. But unless we are able to still our mind by the use of reason, the night merely changes the form of our worries. Real tranquillity, in contrast, ‘is the state reached by a rational mind when it is at rest.’

I think there is a lot of truth in that. When overwhelmed by noise, I find it helpful to ask myself, ‘Is my annoyance more to do with me or my prejudices than with the noise itself?’ But I would contest that even if we are able to concentrate in a din, our concentration is less profound or complete than it would otherwise have been, and more wearing too.

Seneca concedes that, having tested ourselves, it is simpler to avoid the uproar, or block it out, just as Odysseus blocked his ears and had his men row faster to get past the Sirens. According to lore, the Sirens were fated to die if someone ever escaped their singing, and after Odysseus were never again seen or heard.

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I explore Schopenhauer and the German philosophers in The German Greeks, and Seneca and Stoicism in Stoic Stories.

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His Life, Character, and Philosophy

Rebels on the run. Hume leading Rousseau to safety in England.

Rousseau’s ideas on freedom, education, inequality, and the corrupting influence of civilisation transformed politics, philosophy, and literature, inspiring figures from Immanuel Kant to the leaders of the French Revolution. Yet the man who urged humanity to return to nature lived a life marked by poverty, exile, and growing paranoia. Few thinkers have had so great an influence while living such a turbulent—and scandalous—life.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born on 28 June 1712 in the Republic of Geneva, more precisely, at 40 Grand-Rue, which still stands on the hill of Geneva’s quaint old town. The French reformer Jean Calvin had arrived in Geneva in 1536, a few months after the city had turned to Protestantism and shaken off the dukes of Savoy. Surrounded by Catholic states, the self-governing city became a haven for Protestant refugees drawn to Calvin’s teachings, and came to be known as the Protestant Rome.

Although he once forfeited his Genevan citizenship (in 1728, at the age of sixteen, for converting to Roman Catholicism) and once renounced it (in 1763, after Geneva condemned the Social Contract and Emile, leading to a warrant for his arrest), Rousseau always pointedly signed his books, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Citoyen de Genève [Citizen of Geneva]. His political thought and religious puritanism are deeply rooted in the Cité de Calvin (or Kalvingrad, as locals still call it, on account of Calvin’s austerity), which he held up as a foil to frivolous Paris and absolutist France.

Rousseau’s father, the watchmaker Isaac Rousseau, also had strong Republican sympathies. His mother Suzanne had been raised by her uncle Samuel Bernard, a Calvinist preacher, and had come with a handsome dowry—hence the house on the Grand-Rue. Only three months after the birth of their first child, Isaac left for Constantinople to serve as watchmaker to the sultan (or so he claimed). He returned after a full six years, shortly after Suzanne’s live-in mother had died and Suzanne had come into 10,000 florins. Soon after his return, Jean-Jacques was born.

Childhood in Geneva

A few days after giving birth to Jean-Jacques, Suzanne died from puerperal fever (a postpartum infection). Isaac’s younger sister moved in to help with the children, and Rousseau grew close to his aunt. From the age of six, he, together with his father, began reading a collection of classics left by Samuel Bernard. Plutarch, who emphasised character over deeds, made the deepest impression on him. Although (or because) he did not receive a formal education, Rousseau rose into a master of French prose.

At the age of ten, Jean-Jacques’s father entered a quarrel and fled to nearby Nyon (then administered by Berne), taking his sister with him. Jean-Jacques and his brother were handed over to the Bernards. The Bernards sent Jean-Jacques and his cousin Abraham Bernard to live with the Calvinist minister Lambercier and his sister Gabrielle in Bossey, a village just outside the city walls, where Jean-Jacques discovered a passion for nature.

At the age of thirteen, Jean-Jacques was sent back to Geneva to work as an apprentice, first to a notary and then to an engraver who frequently beat him. At the age of sixteen, he ran away after returning from a walk and finding that the city gates had been locked.

Madame de Warens

On the run in Savoie, he found shelter with a Catholic priest. The priest put him onto the attractive Françoise-Louise de Warens, who had separated from her husband, converted to Catholicism, and become a proselytiser in the pay of Victor Amadeus II of Savoy (since 1720, Piedmont-Sardinia). Completely smitten, Rousseau completed his conversion to Catholicism in the Piedmont-Sardinia capital of Turin, where he supported himself by working as a footman and secretary to an ailing countess. After the countess died, he pocketed a pink and silver ribbon, which was discovered in his room. He blamed a cook, Marion, who of course denied it. The Count de la Roque dismissed them both with the prophetic words, ‘The conscience of the guilty will avenge the innocent.’

At the age of twenty, Rousseau returned to Madame de Warens in Chambéry, and their relationship turned sexual. Although Warens was also intimate with her household steward, he considered it the greatest love of his life. He began to call her Maman, and she him Mon petit. So far, so French.

In those years, he struggled to establish himself and spent a year travelling. He went mostly on foot, meeting people from all walks of life. When he returned to Warens, he pursued his love of music and read deeply. But Warens could no longer support him, so, at the age of twenty-seven, he took a post as a tutor in Lyon, which gave him the opportunity to reflect on pedagogy.

The Paris Years: The Greatest Scandal of All

With Warens growing cold on him, in 1742, at the age of thirty, Rousseau moved to Paris to present a new system of musical notation to the Académie des Sciences. The Académie praised his mastery of the subject but found his system impractical and rejected it. In 1743, his Enlightenment connections led him to a job as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice. He revelled in the superior Italian music, but did not get on with the ambassador and, the following year, returned to Paris.

He met a laundry girl, Thérèse Levasseur, who would become his life companion and, in time, his wife. In 1746, she bore the first of their five illegitimate children. All five were immediately handed to a foundling hospital, where the chances of surviving into adulthood would have been slim. Later, Voltaire would anonymously publish a pamphlet to expose this secret and discredit Rousseau as a moral and educational authority. Rousseau took in Thérèse and her mother to live with him as servants, and assumed the burden of supporting her large and feckless family.

Rousseau wrote ballets, with little success. He began to spend a lot of time with Diderot, Condillac, and d’Alembert, and became involved with Diderot’s brainchild, the Encyclopédie, to which he contributed almost four hundred articles on politics and music. The Encyclopédie, a pillar of the Enlightenment, was denounced by both the king and the Church.

The Paris Years: The First Discourse and the King’s Pension

In 1749, Diderot was imprisoned in Vincennes for his Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who Can See. While walking to Vincennes to visit him, Rousseau read an announcement in the Mercure de France for the Dijon Academy’s essay contest, on the question, ‘Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals?’ This led to the radical and distinctly un-Enlightened idea that the arts and sciences had led to the moral degeneration of man, who began as moral and vigorous—or, at least, uncorrupted by vanity, superficiality, inauthenticity, luxury, and inequality. Whereas the spirited Spartans set all of Asia trembling, the sophisticated and self-indulgent Sybarites let themselves be overrun by a bunch of peasants. In his Confessions, Rousseau wrote, ‘Within an instant of reading this [advertisement], I saw another universe and became another man.’ With his prize-winning essay, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (the ‘First Discourse’), Rousseau rose into a cause célèbre.

In 1752, Rousseau wrote a simple, Italian-inspired one-act opera, Le Devin du village, which premiered at the royal court at Fontainebleau. The king liked it enough to offer him a pension, which he declined—gaining further notoriety as ‘the man who had refused a king’s pension’.

Return to Geneva and the Second Discourse

In 1754, Rousseau returned to Geneva, converted back to Calvinism, and had his Genevan citizenship restored. He embraced a personal, natural religion, or ‘religion of the heart’, which, together with his belief in the corrupting influence of civilisation, set him apart from the other Encyclopédistes, who championed reason and progress, and atheism.

In 1755, he completed his second major work, the Discourse on Inequality (the ‘Second Discourse’), in which he painted a rosy picture of man in the original ‘state of nature’ and argued that private property is the original source and basis of all inequality and misery. The ‘social contract’ was essentially a conspiracy by the rich to legitimise their ownership and enslave the masses. Though it is impossible to return to the state of nature, it is possible to correct some of the errors of civilisation. When Voltaire received his copy, he wrote back to Rousseau: ‘No one has ever employed so much intellect to persuade men to be beasts. In reading your work one is seized with a desire to walk on all fours.’

Madame d’Epinay, Sophie d’Houdetot, and Julie

The saloniste Madame d’Epinay, having noticed the second discourse, offered Rousseau a pension together with a cottage on her estate in Montmorency. He refused the pension but moved into the cottage with Thérèse and her mother. He resented being in the keep of Madame d’Epinay and soured things by falling head over heels for her cousin and sister-in-law, Sophie d’Houdetot. He came to believe that there was a plot against him and wrote a series of letters to the likes of Diderot and Hume that damaged his reputation. In 1757, he moved with Thérèse into a villa on the nearby estate of the duc de Luxembourg, who became his patron. His bestselling novel, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), is inspired by his liaisons with d’Houdetot and Warens.

The Social Contract and Emile

After Julie, Rousseau turned his pen to his two most acclaimed works, the Social Contract and Emile. In the Social Contract, which begins with the famous sentence, ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,’ Rousseau sets out how to create a just state in which we may recover some of our natural freedom and goodness. Only the general will [volonté générale], which aims at the common good of a people, has the right to legislate. Although Rousseau advocated for direct democracy, the general will need not coincide with the majority vote if citizens are misinformed or motivated by self-interest rather than the common good. The general will, which is the sovereign power, can only legislate laws that apply equally to all, and must be separate from the executive power, which deals with matters of application of the law. Only under the general will can the people be said to be freely obeying themselves.

In Emile, Rousseau, an autodidact with no formal education, set out a system of education which might preserve the individual’s innate vigour and morality. Having encouraged the child to become active, curious, and critical, it remains, in adolescence, to make him into a loving and feeling being, ‘to perfect reason by sentiment’. Emile, however, is aimed exclusively at wealthy orphan boys with a dedicated, live-in tutor (orphan, to remove the corrupting influence of the parents). In the section on Emile’s female counterpart Sophie, Rousseau states that ladies should be ‘passive and weak’ and ‘put up little resistance’. Book IV contains the incendiary ‘Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar’, in which the vicar’s argument leads to natural religion, that is, to an unmediated, self-discovered relationship with a creator God. In a letter, Voltaire deemed Emile ‘a hodgepodge of a silly wet nurse in four volumes, with forty pages against Christianity, among the boldest ever known’ [C’est un fatras d’une sotte nourrice en quatre tomes, avec une quarantaine de pages contre le christianisme, des plus hardies qu’on ait jamais écrites].

On the Run

The Social Contract and Emile were banned from both France and Geneva, with warrants issued for Rousseau’s arrest. Over the next few years, Rousseau moved from place to place until his reputation caught up with him. For a time, he lived on an island on Lake Biel, where no one could throw stones at his windows. Frederick the Great, on principle rather than from shared conviction, offered him protection and assistance. His nemesis Voltaire invited him in vain to Ferney (nowadays, Ferney-Voltaire) on the Geneva border, where renegade writers could border hop to escape the authorities.

In 1766, Rousseau travelled to England with Hume. Tasked with escorting Thérèse to England, Boswell seduced her en route, with Thérèse telling him, ‘Don’t imagine you’re a better lover than Rousseau.’ Perhaps understandably, Rousseau’s paranoia intensified, and he began to suspect Hume of being at the centre of a plot to ridicule him. The two men fell out when Hume, seeking to protect his reputation, published an account of the whole affair.

Final Years

Rousseau returned to France in 1767 under an assumed name, and spent the next three years in paranoid retreat. He married Thérèse, practised botany, and wrote his disarmingly candid Confessions, published posthumously in 1782.

He died in 1778, at the age of sixty-six, from what was recorded as apoplexy (some said suicide). He was buried at midnight by torchlight on the île des Peupliers on the estate of the marquis de Girardin in Ermenonville. In 1794, his remains were moved to the Panthéon and placed next to those of… Voltaire.

Despite his love of hosting, conversation, and fine dining, Kant’s house was unadorned and austere. He had only one picture, which hung above his bureau. This picture was of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was only twelve years older than him.

In his Remarks on the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), Kant acknowledges his debt to Rousseau, who, he says, ‘set him right’:

I feel a consuming thirst for knowledge, and a restless passion to advance in it… There was a time when I thought this alone could constitute the honour of mankind, and I despised the common man who knows nothing. Rousseau set me right. This blind prejudice vanishes; I learn to respect human beings, and I should consider myself far more useless than the common labourer if I did not believe that this consideration could impart a value to all others in order to establish the rights of humanity.

Rousseau had taught Kant to judge people by their moral worth, rather than their education and standing—a lesson that would have resonated with Kant’s memory of his mother.

Rousseau’s influence also extended to Kant’s moral philosophy. If for Rousseau, it is by following the general will that we can be said to be free, for Kant, it is by obeying those moral laws that we would will as universal laws. Moral laws that we would will as universal laws are given not by our individual will but by our rational will, which we have in common with all other rational beings. We often experience this dichotomy in our minds: this is what I selfishly or frivolously want to do, and this is what I truly ought to do—because I want to live in the kind of society that abides by this principle, and would resent it if other people behaved in such a selfish, thoughtless way. To conform to the universal law is not to be a slave; on the contrary, it is to follow reason and free ourselves from our irrational and disordered appetites. For Kant, this capacity to overrule our individual will lies at the heart of our special dignity.

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If you want to know what happened next, read The German Greeks, which tells the story of how Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others responded to the philosophical revolution that Rousseau helped to create.

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His Life, Character, and Philosophy

Hume leading Rousseau to safety in England

David Hume was one of the greatest philosophers of the Enlightenment—and one of its most controversial. At a time when philosophers placed their faith in reason, he questioned everything from causation and the self to religion and morality. His radical scepticism led many to regard him as an atheist and cost him several university appointments. Yet the man whom many feared for his ideas was, by all accounts, open, sociable, and cheerful. Today, he is recognised as one of the most influential thinkers in the history of philosophy.

David Hume was born in 1711 in Edinburgh. His father Joseph was the laird of Ninewells, his mother Katherine the daughter of the Lord President of the Court of Session (Scotland’s supreme civil court). His father’s family was a cadet branch of the Earls of Home (pronounced ‘Hume’). In 1713, Joseph died at the age of thirty-three, leaving Katherine in sole care of three tots.

Hume went up to the University of Edinburgh at the age of ten or twelve, young even for the time, but found little of value in formal lectures. Later, he told a friend that ‘there is nothing to be learnt from a professor, which is not to be met in books.’ He shunned the legal studies that his family intended for him, preferring instead to devour classical and philosophical texts. ‘While [my family] fancied I was poring upon Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors which I was secretly devouring.’

This inner conflict drove him, at the age of eighteen, to a nervous breakdown. A local physician diagnosed ‘a disease of the learned’ and had the good sense to prescribe horse riding for outdoors and, for indoors, wine drinking, which worked a charm. Once Hume had found and embraced who he was, his malady never returned. In later life, he became an advocate of ‘ordinary life’ as a cure for ‘philosophical melancholy’.

I dine, I play backgammon, I converse … and whenafter three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to speculations, they appear so cold, and strain’d, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further.

A Treatise of Human Nature

In 1734, at twenty-three, Hume moved to Bristol to work as a clerk for a sugar importer. Ill-suited to the job, he soon left for Paris, then Rheims, then the small town of La Flèche, with its Jesuit college made famous for having schooled Descartes. Hume had been attracted to La Flèche by the college’s library of some 40,000 books, as well as the lower cost of living compared to Paris or Rheims. He remained in La Flèche for three years (1734-1737), during which he wrote A Treatise of Human Nature.

When it was published in 1739, the reception was not as Hume had hoped. In the short autobiography written near (almost at) the end of his life, he tells us that the Treatise ‘fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.’ He disavowed the Treatise and asked that his more polished Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) be regarded as his final word—a request that posterity has ignored.

Essays Moral and Political

After his disappointment with the Treatise, Hume turned to essay writing, which was then in vogue. In 1742, he published the first volume of his Essays Moral and Political, which were favourably received and ‘soon made me entirely forget my former disappointment’.

Hume developed a talent for prose and a reputation as a skeptic and all-round heretic. In 1745, he applied for the vacant chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh, but was rejected on the strength of his reputation. He took up the post of tutor and companion to the troubled and impossible Marquess of Annandale, but resigned after a year.

He then joined a planned expedition to Quebec, serving as secretary to Lieutenant-General James St Clair. However, the expedition was cancelled and the forces diverted to a raid on Lorient in Brittany. The failure of this operation did not prevent Hume from sporting the uniform of an officer on subsequent diplomatic missions with St Clair to the courts of Vienna and Turin (then the capital of Savoy).

History of Great Britain

In 1748, Hume’s re-write of the first volume of the Treatise of Human Nature was published as Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (retitled in 1758 to An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding). After being turned down as an improper person for the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, he became, in 1752, the Keeper of the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh—affording him the time and resources to write his monumental, and monumentally successful, History of Great Britain, published in six volumes over eight years (1754-62). Hume became, in his own words, ‘not only independent, but opulent.’ Such was the success of the History that, in his lifetime and for a long time after, he was better known as a historian than a philosopher.

Rescuing Rousseau

In 1763, Hume became Secretary to the British Embassy in Paris. He basked in the adulation that le tout Paris afforded to a successful writer. He acquired the nickname le bon David and, according to Horace Walpole, became ‘fashion itself’. Though the relationship was never consummated, he became intimate with the countess and grande dame Madame de Boufflers.

At that time, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was in big trouble following the publication of The Social Contract and Emile. Boufflers put Hume to rescuing Rousseau by sending him to the safety of England. In January 1766, at the end of his tenure at the embassy, Hume left for London with Rousseau. The two men had much in common, not least their infamy, and held each other in the highest regard. But Rousseau was prone to paranoia and began to suspect Hume of being at the centre of a plot to ridicule him. To protect his good reputation against Rousseau’s mighty pen, Hume reluctantly pre-empted Rousseau by publishing an account of the whole affair.

Final Years

In 1767, Hume took up his last appointment as Under-Secretary of State for the Northern Department (the predecessor of the Foreign Office). The following year, he retired to Edinburgh and built himself a house in St Andrew’s Square, where he lived with his sister Katherine.

Within ten years, shortly after the American Declaration of Independence (July 1776), Hume died from a ‘disorder of the bowels’. He wrote a concise autobiography, My Own Life, so near to his death that at the end he switches to the past tense:

I am, or rather was (for that is the style I must now use in speaking of myself, which emboldens me the more to speak my sentiments); I was, I say, a man of mild disposition, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions. Even my love of literary fame, my ruling passion, never soured my temper, notwithstanding my frequent disappointments … I cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is not a misplaced one; and this is a matter of fact which is easily cleared and ascertained.

In his eulogy, Adam Smith, who had recently published The Wealth of Nations (1776), wrote that his friend Hume approached ‘as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit’.

The Newton of Human Affairs

Already at the age of eighteen, Hume complained about philosophy being engaged in ‘endless disputes’ of an entirely hypothetical nature. He disparagingly referred to rationalist systems such as those of Leibniz, Spinoza, and Descartes as ‘speculative metaphysics’. 

Newton, in contrast, set out only to describe and predict events, without seeking to explain them. One of his most famous phrases is, Hypotheses non fingo [I do not feign hypotheses].

I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and mere hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.

Hume saw himself as extending Newton’s experimental method to the study of human nature and the ‘moral sciences’—whence the subtitle of A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects.

Empiricism and Skepticism

At the core of Hume’s radical empiricism are two tenets. First, there are no innate ideas: all knowledge and concepts must arise or else derive from sensory impressions. Without prior observation, Adam (from Adam and Eve) could not have inferred that fire would burn him, or water drown him. All that is not founded in sense experience is essentially meaningless. 

Second, all we can directly perceive are our internal mental states. The self is no more than a bundle or collection of various perceptions and sensations, ‘which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity’. Taken together, these two tenets have dramatically skeptical implications, undermining traditional concepts such as God, the soul, a persistent self, external objects, and causation.

The Problem of Causation

When it comes to causation, we never perceive a ‘necessary connection’ between events, only ever a ‘constant conjunction’ of one event following another, over and over again. The supposed causal link is missing from sense experience. Cause and effect are merely a habit of mind. But that the sun keeps on rising every morning need not mean that it will always rise every morning. Cause and effect, which underpins all science, is justified not by reason and deduction but only by induction (habit), which is unsafe.

Reason the Slave of the Passions

At the height of the Age of Reason, Hume was the great debaser of reason. ‘Reason’ he said, ‘is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions…’ 

Still today, most people think of choice and action as a battleground between reason and the ‘passions’ (desires, emotions, and sensations). Hume argued that it is in fact a battleground between the passions and the passions. For example, if I pass over dessert, this is because my desire to feel and look good is stronger than my desire to eat something heavenly. It can sometimes feel as if the passions are fighting with reason, when, really, it is an urgent passion, such as my desire for dessert, fighting with a calmer, longer term one, such as my desire for moderation which masquerades as reason.

Reason on its own cannot impel action. Its role is simply to supply us with true beliefs about the best means of achieving the ends that our passions have already determined. The aim of a monarch or general in delivering a battle exhortation is not to be right or logically sound, but to fire up the passions and try to make it so that the resolve of his men is greater than their fear.

A passion may be justified or unjustified, but cannot be true or false like a belief. When a passion is founded on a false belief, the problem is with the false belief rather than the passion. Once we have ascertained that there are no gremlins under the bed, or persuaded ourselves that there are no such things as ghosts, our fear of these things simply evaporates.

Morality and the ‘Is-Ought’ Problem

Because morality is about choices and actions, it cannot arise from reason. Or in Hume’s famous turn of phrase, ‘You cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.’ Prescriptive statements (‘oughts’) arise not from facts and reason but from values and feelings, especially the capacity for sympathy, which leads to pleasure in response to prosocial actions and aversion in response to antisocial ones. Whenever a prescriptive statement appears to derive from a descriptive one, this is only because there is a prescriptive premise that is missing but presumed. For example: ‘Stealing harms other people. Therefore, we ought not steal.’ The presumed prescriptive premise here is, ‘We ought not harm other people’—which is not a fact but a value judgement.

You can see why Immanuel Kant was disturbed by all of this. If Hume was right, science rested on habit rather than certainty, and morality on feeling rather than reason. His response, the 856-page Critique of Pure Reason (1781), emerged after a ‘silent decade’ during which he retreated into himself and published a total of just 23 pages. He later wrote that it was Hume who had awakened him from his ‘dogmatic slumber’.

Continue Exploring

If you want to know what happened next, read The German Greeks, which tells the story of how Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others responded to the philosophical revolution that Hume helped to create.

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