Aproximaciones finales: de la gestión del riesgo, el riesgo y las amenazas

The main problem with Descartes’ substance dualism, as it became known, is that it does not explain how two things that have almost nothing in common could possibly interact. Some Cartesian philosophers too came to question this view, which

eventually became an untenable position.

One of the most imaginative attempts to refute Descartes’ dualism was made by Benedictus de Spinoza in his Ethics Demonstrated Geometrically, published

posthumously in 1677. Spinoza agreed with Descartes in that mental properties and physical properties are qualitatively distinct, but he also claimed that each is an attribute of the one and only infinite substance, where everything exists.235 The mind is the idea of the body, and in it, mind, matter, creation and creator are ‘the same eternal self-sustaining thing.’236

Human beings in Spinoza’s theory are part of Nature, and the causal order of Nature is as rigid and unbreakable as the logical order of ideas. God is causa sui in this philosophy, and thus we are compelled to accept that the explanation of every event must refer back to God. There is therefore no free will in this view, and the goal of human life is to accept one’s place in the infinite deterministic system. With this understanding, human beings are spared anxiety and ignorance, and will experience equanimity, which is itself the supreme form of human freedom.

In Spinoza’s moral philosophy, good and evil are simply comparative notions, with good being an approach toward some idea of perfection, while evil, on the contrary, everything that hinders us from reaching that model:

By ‘good’, therefore, I understand […] everything which we are certain is a means by which we may approach nearer and nearer to the model of human nature we set before us. By ‘evil’, on the contrary, I understand everything which we are certain hinders us from reaching that model.237

The aim of Spinoza’s ethics is to enable us to move toward a more intuitive, philosophical understanding of the process of self-perfection, in which there is no good distinct from or apart from the totality of things, for the attributes of God, infinity and eternity, belong to the single substance which is at once Nature and God. To understand God as identical with Nature is to understand ethics as the study not of divine precepts, but of our own nature and of what necessarily moves us.238

Spinoza’s attempt to found a true system of moral behaviour was based on his belief

235

See Roger Scruton 2005, pp.52-66; Raymond Martin and John Barresi 2006, pp.133-4; Alasdair MacIntyre 1967/2006, pp.135-40; and Vernon J. Bourke, 1968/2008, pp.229-306, for a detailed account of Spinoza’s philosophy.

236

Roger Scruton, 2005, p.55

237

From Spinoza’s Ethics, Pt. IV., Preface; text cited from a modified translation in Jones, Approaches to Ethics, p.203, quoted by Vernon J. Bourke, 1968/2008, p.304; note. 36, p.364

of the place of human beings in the natural world, and the moral vision developed in his Ethics is the part of his philosophy for which he has been most admired. His theory of human freedom is also linked to a remarkable and unorthodox analysis of the passions, in a way that broke away from the Christian and Jewish moralist tradition that he had known through his life and education. The Cartesian passions of the soul, or emotions, are reduced by Spinoza to three primitive expressions of human feeling: desire, joy and sorrow. Unlike the Stoics and also Descartes, Spinoza does not simply believe that these feelings need to be curbed by reason or will. ‘Man’, he thought, must learn to be alert to the tendency of his passive feelings to take over his life, and he must therefore try to convert his passive affects into dynamic actions.239

Aristotle had emphasised the importance of controlling and ordering our emotions and desires, but for Spinoza ‘human nature’ appears more malleable. His view endows human beings with agency, as beings capable of self-transformation. As we form adequate notions of our emotions we cease to be passive in relation to them; we recognise ourselves for what we are, we understand that we cannot be other than we are. To have seen this is to be free; self-knowledge liberates.240

The development of human powers had by then become the end of the moral political life, but politics for Spinoza is an activity to procure the prerequisites for the pursuit of rationality and freedom - two distinctively new values that would characterise modern society. His moral vision, like that of many of his predecessors, does have both an Aristotelian and a Platonic aspect nevertheless. Like the philosophers of the Platonic tradition, he wished to locate the final wisdom and happiness of humans in the intellectual love of God. But in order to grasp this idea, his philosophy demanded that we see the world ‘under the aspect of eternity’, which in is not endless time, but timelessness, and this for Spinoza is also to see God. The understanding of the universe in its totality is the idea of God, and such an understanding brings us to the love of God, a love that is active and intellectual, not passive and emotional. In acquiring it, we come to participate in the divine nature.241

239 Vernon J. Bourke, 1968/2008, p.303 240 Alasdair MacIntyre, 1967/2006, pp.138-39 241 _{Roger Scruton, 2005, p.64-5}

Spinoza’s abandonment of the first-personal privilege as the basis of philosophy is characteristic of post-Cartesian metaphysics, and the origin of the more powerful of the critiques that were to destroy it.242

Leibniz’s ‘pre-modern’ individualism

The attempt to reconcile the scientific method with a metaphysics that placed God at the centre of this thinking, rather like Spinoza attempted to do, is perhaps best

illustrated by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Like Descartes, this Protestant scholar, also accomplished in history, law, chemistry, geology and mechanics, was a brilliant mathematician and philosopher, who laid the foundations of integral and differential calculus in his quest for ‘an algebra of reasoning.’ A tireless politician and courtier, Leibniz founded the Academy of Berlin, wrote fluently in French, German and Latin, and produced a philosophical system of astonishing power and originality, which provided the basis of German academic philosophy throughout the century that followed upon his death.243

Leibniz’s early philosophical training was scholastic and Aristotelian, and although he had moved away from this inheritance for a time after discovering the new science in the work of Descartes and Spinoza, he remained close to such ways of thinking all his life. His passion for deductive knowledge and metaphysics led him to attempt an understanding of how human life fitted into the larger compass of the universe.

Leibniz’s own intricate metaphysical system is described in his Monadology,

published in 1714, where he stated that the universe that God created is ‘the best of all possible worlds’, a world that contains all the possibilities inherent in its own

principle of being. The central concept of his work is that in the infinity of possible worlds created by God only the best is realised.244

242

According to Scruton, in Spinoza we see the most adventurous development possible of the ideas of God and substance as the medievals had expounded them. The result was a complete description of humanity, of nature, of the world and of God. The weak point in Spinoza’s theory is not in its conclusions, but in its premises, Scruton believes, and in particular ‘in that fatal idea of substance which Spinoza had thought he both needed and could make intelligible.’(Scruton, R., 2005, p.66)

These ontological building blocks,

243

Roger Scruton, 2005, p.67

244

It is rather tempting to find parallels with modern physics, particularly in Paul Davies’ view that the world we live in is indeed the best possible environment for humans to exist, developed as the ‘Goldilocks Enigma’, a theory he describes in his recent book bearing this title.

or ‘monads’, proceed along their own singular path, participating in a cosmic order whose unity and concord are assured by the existence of a pre-established harmony. They are so fully infused with the spirit and the structure of the universe they inhabit that nothing they do can alter its already established relations. This is still the old classical universe, reborn in a language that mixed Scholasticism and modern science, and within which humanity and nature are part of a single intelligible system of ends. We nevertheless recognise in Leibniz a certain kind of individualism, albeit an older, ‘pre-modern individualism’, as Seigel calls it.245

Leibniz conceived of no direct interplay between bodies and minds, or souls, and in this perspective, human individuals appear to lack genuine substance. Nevertheless, his idea of higher-order monads gives him a basis for adopting a viewpoint that complex instances of individuality could exist. In this view, even though God had foreknowledge of everything that happened to an individual, there is room for the creature, or individual, to be responsible for its acts, ‘and for the Creator to respond to his creature’s deeds.’ Leibniz approximates a measure of self-continuity, positing a self-understanding that is arrived in reflection through the higher operations of reason. He thus claims that it is ‘the knowledge of necessary and eternal truths which

distinguishes us from mere animals, and gives us reason and the sciences, raising us to knowledge of ourselves and of God.’ Such knowledge elevates us to ‘acts of

reflection, which makes us think of what is called the self, and consider that this or that is within us.’246

The self was not, however, the main focus of Leibniz’s interest. What concerned him more, ‘in thinking of ourselves’, is that in this process ‘we think of being, of

substance, of the simple and the compound, of the immaterial and of God Himself, conceiving that what is limited in us, in Him is limitless.’247 The self for Leibniz, as Seigel concludes, is thus only a point in the great firmament of metaphysics.

The world that Leibniz conceived as a universe of individuals, whose being reflected that of the cosmos as a whole, was a system that retained its harmony by means of an

245

Jerrold Seigel, 2005, pp.74-5

246

From Leibniz’s Monadology, paragraphs 26-30, in Philosophical Writings, trans. Morris, pp.7-8, in Jerrold Seigel, 2005, p.80; note 56, p.667

authority that sought to impose uniformity on all. This harmonious view of the world, however, would soon be contested. Voltaire for one, followed by other French

philosophes, satirised Leibniz’s claim that the universe that God created is ‘the best of all possible worlds’ in 1759, in his novel Candide, for what he saw as Leibniz’s overly facile optimism.248 Voltaire and these philosophers thus signalled the turn away from rationalism to the empiricism of the English pioneers of this school, Bacon, Newton and Locke. Let us examine the manner in which Locke’s writing develops for such a turn to occur in moral philosophy.