What I want to do now is focus on how our emotional goals have shifted over the centuries and been shaped by philosophy. This has been much more variable than one might expect. It is important to try to visualise what they were in times past because that way we can break the spell that our present goals are some kind of “fundamental truth”.
In this chapter, I want to explore how it came about that people are driven by the desire to achieve positive emotional states and avoid negative ones. Emotions are the product of evolution by natural selection, and drive the behaviour of non-speaking animals. In humans, there is a non-evolutionary transition where philosophy and language change how humans understand their emotions and thereby how they determine their actions. Happiness is not innate in humans, but probably emerged from philosophical teachings that were principally concerned with morality. However, we could say that the desire to achieve happiness is our core driver, so there is a transition that needs explaining because we are now driven by something that isn’t even innate.
This is a progression that we can trace through the history of philosophical theories because, from the time of the pre-Socratics to the late nineteenth century, most Western philosophers followed the same architecture of reasoning:
(1) Such-and-such is my definition of human nature;
(2) From (1), I can deduce the needs of men, and what drives them;
(3) From (1) and (2), I can deduce a system of morality;
(4) From (1) through (3), I can deduce a political system.
That political ideology requires a notion of human nature was best summed up as follows: “Nor do I know, if men are like sheep, why they need any government: Or, if they are like wolves, how they can suffer it.”97 More precisely, a political ideology and a concept of human nature can be derived from one another by a process of pure algebra: for example, we can take an atom of a political ideology “lowering interest rates, will cause an increase in investment”, and derive from this an atom of human nature “a human will respond to the stimulus of low interest rates by investing more.” This begets the obvious empirical question: “Well, do they?” The problem is that if you believe the ideology, then the answer to the question is too obvious for the question to be asked, and so it is never investigated. This, of course, is tautological, and the precise nature of this tautology is the focus of the second half of this book.
In the late nineteenth century the classical philosophical architecture changed because a new notion emerged – that there was no such thing as human nature. The theory was that men were born as a “blank slate” or a “tabula rasa” upon which any belief (political or religious) could be written. For example, Karl Marx, who jumped right in at the deep end: “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.”98 [Oh, get a grip Karl! Can you name a tribal society that has a proletariat? Hmmm?] With that single sentence summarising the entire history of humanity, he completely skipped steps (1) and (2) of classical reasoning. This was no accident, since Marx was a believer in the blank slate, and he believed his political theories were science. The denial of human nature gave rise to some of the worst political aberrations in the history of humanity, as dictators and intellectuals sought to engineer the perfect man and the perfect society, only to wind up with brutal totalitarianism. The causal chain is all too obvious in hindsight: it is a small step from the denial of human nature to assuming the irrelevance of human suffering.
For my purposes here, I am particularly concerned with the examination of step (2) in philosophical history. What I aim to do is to find the origin of the perception that the conceptualised emotions of men are the core driver of their actions, and then see if I can find out how the fact arose. Trying to figure this out is like trying to find the source of the Nile: the further you get from the sea; the harder it gets. We can find early periods of history when this idea didn’t exist (or at least wasn’t expressed), but between then and now were periods when everything is a bit blurred. In the chapter The Evolution of Emotion, I looked at philosophy from both East and West, but here I will only look at philosophy from the West because this is where the perception arose. This is no coincidence and hinges on one of the critical differences between Eastern and Western thought: Western philosophers have all assumed that the point of life was the attainment of a higher state – for example a positive emotional state.99 Eastern philosophers have all assumed that the point of life was to escape from the cycle of suffering – the avoidance of negative emotional states.
In The Evolution of Emotion, I described how Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics said that man wanted eudaimonia as the ultimate end of all his actions, but that eudaimonia was not the emotional state of happiness, but a sort of precursor to it. However, shortly after the time of Aristotle, most of the ideas of Greek philosophy got buried under a pile of religious orthodoxy. The Christian World did not emerge from this until the Renaissance about 1,500 years later.
The period in between is often known as “The Dark Ages”. It’s a bit unfair to regard this period as entirely dark, but the key factor of the Dark Ages is that philosophy and science were completely subservient to theology. By contrast, the Muslim World during the medieval period flourished culturally, producing the best mathematicians and poets, until the Crusades. Following the Crusades, that were actually a military defeat for the Christian World, an unexpected transformation took place where the Christian World flowered with the Renaissance, and the Muslim World slid into a cultural funk.100
The writings of Abbess Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) can be taken as indicative of the intellectual freezer of the Dark Ages. Hildegard denies the acceptability of secular happiness. She talks at length of “foolish joy” and how to repent from it: “if the men who fail with foolish joy strive to overcome the evil spirits who urged them on to this sin want to flee from this joy, let them restrain their flesh with scourging and fasting in proportion to their sin and according to the wishes of the one who presides over them.”101 She also doesn’t hold back on the appropriate punishment for such misdemeanours: “covered by fog and eaten alive by worms”102, to be precise. [Calm down, Hildegard! It can’t be that bad.] She contrasts unhappiness not with a positive emotional state, but with “blessedness”103, and takes despair as evidence that a person does not trust in God. The only positive emotion that she acknowledges is “heavenly joy” which is the ultimate reward for life, so secular happiness is denied. “Heavenly joy” is what I call a super-positive emotion – a mythological emotion so fabulous that mere mortals cannot possibly imagine it.
So when the intellectual ice age thawed with the Renaissance, where did philosophy go?
During the Renaissance it was virtually impossible to justify any opinion without demonstrating that it had a basis in Catholic theology or the writings of the ancient Greeks. Shaking off the religion took another few hundred years. By the seventeenth century, secular values, a critical application of reason, and a search for practical evidence to support beliefs and theories were becoming accepted. Individualism and a preference for plain speaking began to flourish. Freedom of thought and practice were accepted, despite their threat to religious orthodoxy; in part because they yielded huge advances in science and knowledge generally.
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Perhaps the best place to pick up the journey is Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). Hobbes is significant because he saw politics as a branch of science. He thought that humans could be treated as agents of cause and effect in an almost mathematical way. [Precisely! You tell ‘em Thom!] Hobbes argues that man’s natural state would be one of perpetual conflict:
If any two men desire the same thing, which neverthelesse they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their End, (which is principally their owne conservation, and sometimes their delectation only,) endeavour to destroy, or subdue one an other.104
Without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in a condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man against every man.105
Thus Hobbes argues the legitimacy of the all-powerful nation-state – Hobbes’ Leviathan – to subdue men, without which they would be in “continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”106
Hobbes does not have a concept of emotional drivers for human behaviour, but he has (like Aristotle) a half-formed concept:
When in the mind of man, Appetites, and Aversions, Hopes and Feares, concerning one and the same thing, arise alternatively; and divers good and evill consequences of the doing, or omitting the thing propounded, come successively into our thoughts; so that sometimes we have an Appetite to it; sometimes an Aversion from it; sometimes Hope to be able to do it; sometimes Despaire, or Feare to attempt it; the whole summe of Desires, Aversions, Hopes and Fears, continued till the thing be either done, or thought impossible, is that we call DELIBERATION.107
In Deliberation, the last Appetite, or Aversion, immediately adhaering to the action, or to the omission thereof, is that wee call the WILL; the Act, (not the faculty,) of Willing.108
According to Hobbes, it is usual that the good and evil consequences of acting form such a long chain that we can seldom see the end of it, and deliberation is the process of assessing the net good or evil of action.
Continuall successe in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say, continuall prospering, is that men call FELICITY; I mean Felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetuall Tranquillity of mind while we live here; because Life it selfe is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Feare, no more than without Sense.109
‘Felicity’ is an old-fashioned word that is sometimes interpreted as happiness, but can also mean appropriateness, so we are close to Aristotle’s conception where it isn’t clear that an emotional state is meant. “Felicity of this life” seems better interpreted as a form of appropriateness, which is not far different from Aristotle’s eudaimonia.
John Locke (1632–1704) set out the most thorough and plausible formulation of empiricism (the theory that all knowledge ultimately comes from sense-experience). His views on political theory influenced constitutional law of the United States, France and Britain. He moves forward from Hobbes, but still does not see emotions as a core driver of behaviour. He believes in free will, with the caveat that we have no choice in having free will. “To the Question, what is it determines the Will? The true and proper answer is, The mind.”110 Locke goes on to ask what drives the mind to exercise the will in the way it does:
What moves the mind, in every particular instance, to determine its general power of directing, to this or that particular Motion or Rest? And to this I answer, The motive, for continuing in the same State or Action, is only the present satisfaction in it; The motive to change, is always some uneasiness: nothing setting us upon the change of State, or upon any new Action, but some uneasiness. This the great motive that works on the Mind to put it upon Action, which for shortness sake we will call determining of the Will.111
Locke’s philosophy on the drivers of men’s actions is very much centred on this concept of uneasiness (which he always wrote in italics as if it was a technical term). Desire is an uneasiness caused by the absence of whatever it is that is desired. “Aversion, Fear, Anger, Envy, Shame, etc. have each their uneasiness too, and thereby influence the will.”112 The will is determined by whatever is the greatest uneasiness. “And whenever a greater uneasiness than that takes place in the mind, the will presently is by that determin’d to some new action, and the present delight neglected.”113 [Huh, John – isn’t it the case that if we are always determined by the greater uneasiness, then that would be determinism? You know: the belief that free will is a myth. Oh, never mind!]
So Locke does not see us driven by emotions. Happiness is something we judge ourselves to have, but the driver is the uneasiness. Locke is not a utilitarian, but he also does not have a naturalist philosophy. He has difficulty seeing how liberty can be trusted with morality determined by man-made rules, and so sees morality coming from God. Although he sees the human driver as the uneasiness caused by the passions, his ethics focusses on piety and prudence, presumably because he feels the need for restraint on the fulfilment of desire. Without this restraint, Locke cannot see how man would not run amok – and in this respect his thinking is still rooted in Hobbes.
David Hume (1711–1776) advances on Locke in that he is perhaps the first truly naturalist philosopher. He believes that we can account for morality and human nature entirely in a scientific way without resort to the will of God. The subtitle of his greatest work is “An Attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into Moral Subjects”.114 So Hume is attempting to demonstrate that we can derive morality, and this is dependent upon some conception of human nature that can be gleaned from observation.
Hume also completes the intellectual journey to perceiving humans as driven entirely by their emotions.
I shall endeavour to prove first, that reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will; and secondly, that it can never oppose passion in the direction of the will.115
He argues that our actions are determined solely by the desire to achieve pleasure and avoid pain, both of which he considers to be emotions. Our reason assists us in determining what causes these emotions, based on experience.
’Tis obvious, that when we have the prospect of pain or pleasure from any object, we feel a consequent emotion of aversion or propensity, and are carry’d to avoid or embrace what will give us this uneasiness or satisfaction. ’Tis also obvious, that this emotion rests not here, but making us cast our view on every side, comprehends whatever objects are connected with its original one by the relation of cause and effect. Here then reasoning takes place to discover this relation; and according as our reasoning varies, our actions receive a subsequent variation. But ’tis evident in this case that the impulse arises not from reason, but is only directed by it. ’Tis from the prospect of pain or pleasure that the aversion or propensity arises towards any object: And these emotions extend themselves to the causes and effects of that object, as they are pointed out to us by reason and experience.116
Here, Hume argues that the only function of reason is to determine what causes the emotion. “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”117 Our reason can alter our judgement as to what will bring about pleasure or pain. But this does not alter the fact that it is the aim to achieve pleasure or avoid pain that is the sole cause of the action. [Well done Dave! You got it!]
Hume’s position is basically my own starting point. He explores the causes of self-destructive acts, but is unable to determine the root of them. However, he correctly (in my view) realises that their cause is a false judgement, but he is unable to isolate the origin of that judgement.
’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. ’Tis not contrary to reason for me to chuse my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. ’Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledge’d lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than the latter. A trivial good may, from certain circumstances, produce a desire superior to what arises from the greatest and most valuable enjoyment; nor is there any thing more extraordinary in this, than in mechanics to see one pound weight raise up a hundred by the advantage of its situation. In short, a passion must be accompany’d with some false judgment, in order to its being unreasonable; and even then ’tis not the passion, properly speaking, which is unreasonable, but the judgment.118
False judgement, according to Hume, can lead to seemingly disadvantageous choices of action by incorrectly deducing the cause of an emotion.
I may will the performance of certain actions as a means of obtaining any desire’d good; but as my willing of these actions is only secondary, and founded on the supposition, that they are causes of the propos’d effect; as soon as I discover the falsehood of that supposition, they must become indifferent to me.
Hume understands (correctly in my view) that false judgement leads to false understanding of the causality of emotions, which in turn leads to self-destructive acts. But he does not search out the source of the false judgement.
Hume is not only completing the analysis of emotion as the driver of human behaviour, he is laying the foundation for the philosophy that became known as Utilitarianism. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) argued that not only are humans driven by the desire to achieve happiness, but that the aim of achieving the maximum happiness for the maximum number of people should be the sole basis for morality.
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think.119
We have been tracking the development of the perception of emotion as a driver through the British empiricists of the Age of Enlightenment. It’s worth mentioning that one parallel European train of thought, through Spinoza and Kant, rejected happiness as the measure of good. They thought that pleasure was ignoble and sought to build morality on notions they considered to be noble. This isn’t really relevant to my project because it has little to do with emotional drivers. It also has little acceptance today. However, another European development must be acknowledged: Romanticism. Initially a reaction to the Age of Enlightenment, Romanticism curiously came to similar conclusions with respect to emotions being a driver of human behaviour.
The Romantics saw the advances of science as dehumanising. They feared that science would ultimately demonstrate that men were just machines [as indeed they are]. Their reaction to this was an almost violent rejection of rationality in exchange for uncontrolled emotion. Romanticism wasn’t a philosophy as such, but, as Charles Baudelaire stated, a “way of feeling”. Among the educated and cultured people of France in the eighteenth century, it became fashionable to admire La Sensibilité, which was an outpouring of emotion uncontrolled by reason. This is an historic example of the systematic mass affectation of emotion. It is done to the point where it becomes difficult to distinguish the real from the fake, and the emotion from the belief. The emotions the Romantics considered to be of greatest importance were pity and sympathy.
The Romantics idealised the harmony of the pastoral scene; they admired poverty and considered a peasant to be noble. However, there was something deeply hypocritical about this: Romantics were wealthy and educated. The poor had no time for Romanticism because they were too busy trying to survive. But for a Romantic, what was important was to react emotionally when confronted with poverty; one must be overcome with the emotion of pity. Any attempt to actually solve the problems of the poor was seen as boorish. To do this was considered to dehumanise the peasant by seeing him as an economic unit. The trouble with real poor people was that they were . . . uh, human; and this meant that they might argue back or notice that your sympathy was a sham. Better, then, to avoid real poor people and use paintings of them or poems about them as a surrogate instead. Paintings and poems don’t argue back, and have the added advantage that you can be overcome with pity without being overcome by the stench of sweat.
The Romantic movement produced one standout philosopher although, true to Romanticism, he occasionally deliberately dispensed with rationality. That man was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778).
Rousseau follows the classic pattern of reasoning that I outlined earlier: define human nature, and from this understanding devise moral and political rules for that nature. Rousseau is concerned with the nature of man in his original primitive state. He argues that man is naturally good, and he is concerned with the process by which this natural state became corrupted. Rousseau does not say that man is naturally moral, but that we can speculate as to what man would be like before he had true morality (i.e. self-restraint) and political structures. Rousseau’s concept of original man is often summarised as the “noble savage”, which is a mistake largely arising from the French word “sauvage”, which actually means “wild” as in the sense of “wild horses”.
Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality120 describes the transformation of humans from primitive to civilised. “Its paradoxical vision of human existence: that what makes us civilised is what makes us miserable, is simultaneously outrageous and obviously right.”121
Rousseau uses a form of hypothetical reasoning to explore the distinction between “primitive man” and “civilised man”. The overarching theme here is the transformation of men from simple beings driven by their instincts to socialised beings driven by their emotions. Innocence lost is irreversible, but Rousseau is certain that primitive man was innocent. This view is an attack on Hobbes, who argued that men need government because otherwise they would perpetually be at war with one another.
The ideological battle between Rousseau and Hobbes – whether primitive man was noble or savage was one of the great intellectual battles of the Age of Enlightenment, and remains one of the foundation assumptions of different visions of human nature. In fact, recent anthropology has demonstrated that most tribes with limited contact with the developed world tend to slaughter each other in wars and feuds with shocking frequency and brutality. Sadly, this supports Hobbes, though evolutionary theory also demonstrates that the moral emotions have evolutionary origins, thereby lending support to Rousseau. This argument is difficult to bring to a close because the idea of the “noble savage” is embedded in many religions (for example, the book of Genesis up to the biting of the apple) and religious beliefs are unlikely to be overturned by science. Belief trumps fact, as I will explore in Part II.
Rousseau’s reasoning starts by asking what man would be like if left in his purely natural state. He describes the concept of “original liberty”: primitive man lived instinctively and only sought to satisfy his immediate needs of food, water and shelter. As such, he was solitary and peaceful.
Rousseau conceives of the sentiments122 of primitive humans as consisting of two: amour de soi and pitié. Amour de soi is self-love, but not in a selfish sense; it is the awareness of what gives rise to wellbeing, but only so far as is required for survival. Primitive man, whose behaviour is determined by instinct, is not capable of either altruism or egoism because he is “pre-moral”.123 This is not in conflict with sociobiology and evolutionary theory. Rousseau is making the point that primitive man would act altruistically without having a concept of his actions being altruistic: the distinction between instinctive altruism and the moral altruism of intent is concordant with the science. Pitié as conceived by Rousseau is not pity in the modern sense, but the recognition that any fellow-being that behaves like us must have comparable sentiments; a compassion and, perhaps, the recognition of another’s amour de soi.
It is this compassion that hurries us without reflection to the relief of those who are in distress: it is this which in a state of nature supplies the place of laws, morals, and virtues, with the advantage that none are tempted to disobey its gentle voice: it is this which will always prevent a sturdy savage from robbing a weak child or a feeble old man of the sustenance they may have with pain and difficulty acquired.124
Rousseau was one of the earliest philosophers to realise that language is critical to the ability of humans to engage in conceptual thought and reasoning. He says, “general ideas cannot be introduced into the mind without the assistance of words.”125 Early humans without language could not foresee the future, and therefore did not have the fear of death that becomes such a burden for civilised humans. When such an early human came under immediate threat, they would suffer fear, but would have no such fears in the absence of immediate threats. Self-consciousness is a prerequisite of awareness of mortality, and this is conceptual and dependent upon language. [Rousseau is in agreement here with my distinction made earlier between fear as a pre-language emotion; and anxiety as a post-language emotion.]
Language gives the power of reasoning; this enables humans to break down the concept of amour de soi into its cause and effect, which permits us to create strategies to achieve its fulfilment.
It is by the activity of the passions that our reason is improved; for we desire knowledge only because we wish to enjoy; and it is impossible to conceive any reason why a person who has neither fears nor desires should give himself the trouble of reasoning. The passions, again, originate in our wants, and their progress depends on that of our knowledge; for we cannot desire or fear anything, except for the idea we have of it, or from the simple impulse of nature.126
Rousseau sees agriculture as the origin of our loss of innocence. He prefaces Adam Smith (often credited as the founder of modern Capitalism) when he says “what man among them would be so absurd as to take the trouble of cultivating a field, which might be stripped of its crop by the first comer, man or beast.”127 But he goes on to conflict with Smith:
The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground bethought himself of saying ‘This is mine’, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: ‘Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.’ 128
Language gives rise to reason, which in turn gives rise to selfawareness and therefore self-interest; we see our own interest in contrast to those of others. In this way, amour de soi turns into amour propre or vanity.
Behold then all human faculties developed, memory and imagination in full play, amour propre interested, reason active, and the mind almost at the highest point of its perfection. Behold all the natural qualities in action, the rank and condition of every man assigned him; not merely is share of property and his power to serve or injure others, but also his wit, beauty strength or skill, merit or talents: and these being the only qualities capable of commanding respect, it soon became necessary to possess or to affect them. It now became the interest of men to appear what they really were not. To be and to seem became two totally different things; and from this distinction sprang insolent pomp and cheating trickery, with all the numerous vices that go in their train.129
Thus mankind creates the possibility of virtue and therefore the existence of vice. Rousseau demonstrates how reason leads to the perception of self-interest that causes men to employ tactical deception with their behaviour.
The British empiricists may have been the ones that ultimately realised that men were driven by concepts of their emotions, but Rousseau was the earliest thinker to realise that reason leads men to manipulate their behaviour. Between them, they created the conception of human nature that is my own starting point: we are driven by our concepts of emotion, but we cannot see our emotions because we are surrounded by corruption of the behaviour that is their only external evidence.
Rousseau presages the theory of the logic of self-destruction: reason permits the advancement of civilisation, but this is the origin of man’s problems. “All ran headlong to their chains, in hopes of securing their liberty; for they had just wit enough to perceive the advantages of political institutions, without experience enough to enable them to foresee the dangers.”130 In a civilised society, “the arts, literature and the sciences . . . fling garlands of flowers over the chains which weigh them down. They stifle in men’s breasts that sense of original liberty, for which they seem to have been born; cause them to love their own slavery, and so make of them what is called a civilised people.”131
In this chapter, I have sought to describe how our perception of emotion has changed. I have written almost exclusively of philosophy; however, I have not been philosophising. My argument is that animals are driven by instinct, which includes emotions in an uncorrupted state; whereas humans are driven by emotional objectives that depend upon concepts of emotion. What I have been trying to find is how this transformation took place. Science cannot answer this question because we have no way of observing historical behaviour, and fossil evidence isn’t much help.
I have been using philosophical writings as a sort of historical record of awareness, tracing the development of a human driven solely by the aim of achieving emotional outcomes. However, I have to admit to a chicken-and-egg problem here. The scientist has the problem of being unable to observe historical behaviour; I have the problem of being unable to know which came first – the fact or the perception. Is it that humans have always been driven by emotional objectives, but that Hume and Rousseau were the first to notice this? If this hypothesis is true, then why was Aristotle incapable of noticing it, and why don’t animals function the same way? If, as I have argued earlier, the emotion of happiness did not exist in ancient times, then how could ancient people’s behaviour be driven by the aim to achieve it? This counter-hypothesis simply makes no sense.
There is perhaps a middle hypothesis: perhaps the concept and therefore the actual emotion of happiness arose sometime after Aristotle. The transformation of the driver of behaviour from instinct to conceptualised emotional objectives occurred during this period, but long before Hume and Rousseau noticed it. I think it is also difficult to argue this middle hypothesis on a practical level because shortly after Aristotle, the Western World was smothered by the rise of Christian orthodoxy and entered the “Dark Ages”. Either way, these hypotheses leave completely unanswered the question of how this transformation actually occurred and what caused it.
My belief is that, in the same way that awareness of emotion was dependent upon language in the first instance, this transformation was caused by philosophy. It evolved as a feedback loop between the analysis of philosophers, and how their ideas affected the way that people saw themselves: the evolving concept of what it is to be human. Few people actually read philosophy, and yet the ideas of philosophers somehow seep out into culture. This process is not visible to the casual observer, but Locke has had a permanent influence on America because his theory influenced the US constitution. Rousseau had a permanent influence on France because his ideas were an inspiration for the French revolution. Today, much of the cultural difference between America and France can be traced to the differences between Locke and Rousseau; although that would be to over-simplify. For example, Locke also had an influence in France; mainly through the efforts of Voltaire, who detested Rousseau.132
Additionally, the ideas of philosophers can also have dark and unintended consequences. Bertrand Russell noted, for example, that, “Hitler is an outcome of Rousseau; Roosevelt and Churchill, of Locke.”133 If this statement is alarming, then there is a further consequence of this chapter that is more alarming still: if Western philosophers assumed that the point of life is the achievement of some form of higher state, and that the collective conclusion appears to be that this higher state is a positive emotional state; then is it not also possible that the existence of positive emotional states has actually been an invention of Western philosophy? If this is the case, then much of Western philosophy is founded upon a giant circular argument. Perhaps this is the reason that no philosopher in history has ever produced a system of thought that is simultaneously comprehensive, comprehensible, internally consistent and remotely plausible. The problem with Western philosophy possibly being based on misconceptions is that political ideology all derives from it.
In the next chapter, I will address the concept of the unconscious mind. I need to do this because it was once used as an explanation for all human actions that are self-destructive. As will become apparent, this is a detour from the path, but a worthwhile one since it leads to other ideas that are central to my argument.