JOHN SKORUPSKI
Throughout his life Mill studied continental thinkers – tending to present them as more reflective and advanced than the down‐to‐earth, empirical thought of the insular British. He was strongly in sympathy with a variety of strands of French post‐revolutionary thinking, some to be found in Saint‐Simonianism, some in Comte, others in Tocqueville, and others in liberals of the center such as Guizot.
However, it was not French thought that was influential among new friends he made in the impressionable years of 1826–9 that followed his mental crisis. It was German idealism, which was beginning to make its way in Britain, if somewhat uncertainly. Whereas Mill had direct personal knowledge of French thinking,1 his knowledge of German thinkers came, at this stage, mostly indirectly, through these new friends, through Coleridge, and through Carlyle.2
Even this indirect knowledge was enough for him to see that German thinkers posed the most comprehensive, powerful challenge to the enlightenment education, analytic and critical, that he had received. He never, he said, joined in the reaction against the eighteenth century – but he saw the need for a less one‐sided philosophy:
The fight between the nineteenth and the eighteenth century always reminded me of the battle about the shield, one side of which was white and the other black. I marveled at the blind range with which the combatants rushed against one another. I applied to them, and to Coleridge himself, many of Coleridge’s sayings about half‐truths; and Goethe’s device, “many‐sidedness,” was one which I would most willingly, at this period, have taken for mine.
(Autobiography, I: 171)
The rethinking and synthesizing that Mill’s search for many‐sidedness called forth at this time make it one of the most interesting and formative of his intellectual life. It gives us a view on early nineteenth‐century philosophy taken from the standpoint of a young and open‐minded philosopher in the first maturity of his powers.
The considered result eventually came in two brilliant essays on Bentham and Coleridge – “the two great seminal minds of England in their age” (Bentham, X: 77), published, respectively, in 1838 and 1840, when Mill was 32 and 34. They are an impressive attempt to live up to “many‐sidedness.” In reading them, it is true, one feels a leaning, at least at the emotional as against the doctrinal level, towards Coleridge:
By Bentham, beyond all others, men have been led to ask themselves, in regard to any ancient or received opinion, Is it true? And by Coleridge, What is the meaning of it? The one took his stand outside the received opinion, and surveyed it as an entire stranger to it: the other looked at it from within, and endeavoured to see it with the eyes of a believer in it … Bentham judged a proposition true or false as it accorded or not with the result of his own inquiries; and did not search very curiously into what might be meant by the proposition, when it obviously did not mean what he thought true. With Coleridge, on the contrary, the very fact that any doctrine had been believed by thoughtful men, and received by whole nations or generations of mankind, was part of the problem to be solved, was one of the phenomena to be accounted for.
(Coleridge, X: 119–20)
This contrast between the critical‐analytic approach of Bentham and the interpretative or hermeneutic approach of the “Germano‐Coleridgean” (Coleridge, X: 125) school greatly interests Mill. A leaning towards the latter as less superficial, more insightful, is evident in his scathing sketch of Bentham, the “boy to the last” –
Self‐consciousness, that daemon of the men of genius of our time, from Wordsworth to Byron, from Goethe to Chateaubriand, and to which this age owes so much both of its cheerful and its mournful wisdom, never was awakened in him. How much of human nature slumbered in him he knew not, neither can we know. He had never been made alive to the unseen influences which were acting on himself, nor consequently on his fellow‐creatures. Other ages and other nations were a blank to him for purposes of instruction. He measured them but by one standard; their knowledge of facts, and their capability to take correct views of utility, and merge all other objects in it.
(Bentham, X: 92)
Later, Mill conceded that he might be thought
to have erred by giving undue prominence to the favourable side [of Coleridge] as I had done in the case of Bentham to the unfavourable. In both cases the impetus with which I had detached myself from what was untenable in the doctrines of Bentham and of the eighteenth century, may have carried me, though in appearance rather than reality, too far on the contrary side.
(Autobiography, I: 227)
But this later concern to correct appearances should not mislead. There was more to Mill’s reaction even at the time of the essays than youthful over‐enthusiasm; he always remained fully committed to the substance of the assessments that he then made. Furthermore, his evident impatience, in those essays, with a certain kind of narrowly analytic mind is perfectly reasonable, and his account of what Bentham lacked is right on target.
It also introduces the broad comparison I want to consider in this essay: between the state of Anglophone and Continental philosophy at the time Mill wrote and the so‐called Analytic/Continental divide as we have it now. One can’t help noticing that Bentham’s kind of mind, as described by Mill, is readily traceable around today’s departments of analytic philosophy, and that what he has to say about its deficiencies is similar to what critics of analytic philosophy, particularly of analytic moral and political philosophy, have tended to say. Just as it pushed Mill toward Coleridge so, in the current divide between “Analytic” and “Continental,” the same deficiency on the “Analytic” side understandably pushes one towards the “Continental” (even if to discover, disappointingly, at least equally exasperating deficiencies there).
There may be some cause of this long‐standing polarization between the analytic and the hermeneutic mind – a cause which undermines attempts to realize what would otherwise seem the perfectly obvious aim of combining robust critical analysis with insightful understanding. However, what is at stake as between “Analytic” and “Continental” is not just a division of temperaments. The differences between Bentham and Coleridge, and in general between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy, go deeper. We should examine whether there is some difference of doctrine or problematic, as well as temperament, in the face of which one cannot synthesize, but must to the best of one’s ability decide.
Mill’s substantive criticisms of Coleridge are in fact pretty tough. While he criticizes Bentham and Benthamites for lack of psychological and historical insight, he criticizes Coleridge, and through him, the German School, for its untenable philosophy. Bentham is seriously deficient in verstehen, but Coleridge is outright mistaken in his basic metaphysics.3 And while Mill praises the Germans for their historical sense, it is also true, as he notes elsewhere,4 that important ideas about history that he could get from the German school he could equally get from the French: among these would be the idea that societies develop in historical stages, that there is intimate interaction between society and character, that European progressiveness is to be explained by the history of European conflicts, that there is a necessary historicity to all ideas.
If you factor out these propositions, which as Mill rightly thought could be found in Comte, Guizot, and Tocqueville, what are you left with, as distinctive of the German school? And what, in what you are left with, did Mill accept or oppose?
The answer, in brief, is that there is a philosophical anthropology that he accepts, and an ontology that he opposes. To these points I turn in the next two sections. In the final two sections I come back to the Analytic/Continental divide.
A master‐theme in Mill’s ethical thought formed in his mind during these years and shaped his moral and social philosophy throughout the rest of his life. It is a far‐reaching conception of “the internal culture of the individual” (Autobiography, I: 147) – self‐development into wholeness of character. With it goes the idea that such development of potentialities of thought, will and feeling – primarily through a person’s own actions – is the condition of true happiness. It pulls together all the distinctive elements of Mill’s ethical thought: the series of distinctions he makes between means to and parts of happiness, between higher and lower pleasures, between desire and will; the strain of cultural or spiritual elitism that runs through his anxieties about the mediocritizing effect of democracy and his thinking about leadership in a democratic culture – overall, his conception of how internal or moral freedom is connected with social and political liberty.
Nowadays this is not, I think, a contentious thing to say about Mill. Still, to get away from the old picture of Mill as a confused eclectic it remains important to grasp it fully. Mill’s ethics and politics, far from being a mish‐mash of incompatible elements, are worked out with a rare degree of coherence and depth, because they are comprehensively informed by the master‐theme of progressive self‐culture. His ethical project is as robust an attempt at “many‐sidedness” as one will find.
This idea of self‐culture is more German than French; in contemporary French thought, as Mill knew it, the focus was political and sociological more than anthropological. We can be more specific in locating the idea within the interactions of German thought at that time. In making Bildung the master‐theme of his liberal politics Mill’s affinity is with Schiller – not with Kant and not with either Fichte or Hegel.
A detailed comparison of Mill and Schiller would bring out the similarities, but a few passages from Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man will indicate what I have in mind:
it will always argue a still defective education [Bildung] if the moral character is able to assert itself only by sacrificing the natural. And a political constitution will still be very imperfect if it is able to achieve unity only by suppressing variety. The State should not only respect the objective and generic character in its individual subjects; it should also honour their subjective and specific character …
Once man is inwardly at one with himself, he will be able to preserve his individuality however much he may universalize his conduct …
Wholeness of character must … be present in any people capable, and worthy, of exchanging a State of compulsion for a State of freedom (4th letter).
The development of man’s capacity for feeling is … the more urgent need of our age, not merely because it can be a means of making better insights effective for living, but precisely because it provides the impulse for bettering our insights (8th letter).5
Whether or not there is influence here, there is affinity.6 Two other points of affinity are worth noting. Each of the two thinkers worked their way to their own conception of human “wholeness of character” by way of reaction to a philosopher they greatly admired, but found narrow and over‐simple in his ideas of moral psychology and in the ethical notions he founded on these ideas – in Schiller’s case, Kant, in Mill’s case, Bentham. Further, and as part of this reaction, both of them were influential proponents of the romantic Hellenism of their time – in Mill’s words, of a “Greek ideal of self‐development, which the Platonic and Christian ideal of self‐government blends with, but does not supersede” (Liberty, XVIII: 265–6).
The way Mill articulates and develops this idea of human wholeness is a noble statement of a true ideal. His framework for ethics and politics is teleological; the idea of wholeness of character is its core. The framework and its distinctive features rightly preoccupy analytic discussions of Mill’s ethics. Here, however, it is the content of Mill’s humanism that I want to consider.
It is liberal and naturalistic. Leaving the naturalism to the next section, consider, to begin with, how Mill’s liberalism works. In brief, wholeness of character is a kind, and a most important kind, of freedom – freedom from inner compulsion. It is thereby the basis of true well‐being. The argument to liberty is then that wholeness is achieved through self‐culture, and self‐culture flourishes most in a state of liberty.
What should we make of this argument? It is partly normative, partly sociological, and most deeply, hermeneutic. In this last respect it is about the psychological and ethical significance of wholeness, or as Schiller and Mill would see it, freedom of character – what such freedom of character is to us, as well as its relation to self‐culture and to liberty. It is thus a question at least as much about What does it mean? as about Is it true?
There is a critique of this ideal, considered as a public ideal, of which the most powerful source in this period is again German, namely, the ethics and politics of Hegel. It holds the Schillerian ideal to be too individualist and too elitist to serve as a public ideal for ethical life. True liberation, at least for most people, is found in accepting and fulfilling one’s role within ethical life (Sittlichkeit): the social structures of an ethical community. Hegel does not deny the importance in a modern community of the “right of the subjective will”, nor of the right of individual “particularity” to develop – within limits – freely. But he fears that if these elements come to dominate ethical life they will atomize it. His ideal, one can say, is the ideal of at‐oneness in ethical life. It is also, as it turns out, the ideal of at‐oneness in Being. We shall come back to this.
Comparing these two conceptions throws light on each of them. But one can also ask how well either of them can flourish in modern democracies. The question applies in particular to liberal capitalist democracies, as these have developed in the course of their prosperous maturity, that is, since the second world war. By now we have considerable experience of the way they develop; that experience suggests that neither of these visions of a good and fulfilling life flourishes very well.
For anyone committed to the Schillerian ideal, whether via classical‐liberal or via classical Marxist antecedents, the prosperous, commercially‐dominated, apparently stable democracies that we have come to know raise painful questions. For the ideal combines very poorly with the populist ethos that increasingly, it seems inexorably, dominates them. True, populism also makes much of “choice,” “autonomy,” and “freedom to develop in one own way.” But the populist understanding of these notions, whether at the public‐popular, the corporate, or the state‐bureaucratic level, is an enemy of the Schillerian ideal in the way that caricature is the enemy of the real.
For some on the Marxist side this has more to do with capitalism than with democracy, and the remedy is the advent of some form of socialism. Mill, however, thought that at least under the communist form of socialism conformist pressure would be very great (Chapters, V: 746). In any case like other liberals of the nineteenth century his anxieties about populism concerned democracy itself. His remedy is two‐fold. There is the liberty principle and complete liberty of experimentation in life‐styles; but also, perhaps less often noticed, a hierarchy of judgement that would enable liberal humanism to play a public leadership role. The difficulty, of course, is to know how, in a democracy, this could or should work. The intermediating safeguards proposed for the political structure of democracy in Considerations on Representative Government have some relevance, but they are mostly concerned with technical and administrative competence. Deeper, more cultural and ethical worries frequently surface in Mill’s thought. Consider this from Liberty:
At present individuals are lost in the crowd. In politics it is almost a triviality to say that public opinion now rules the world. The only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of governments while they make themselves the organ of the tendencies and instincts of masses. This is as true in the moral and social relations of private life as in public transactions. Those whose opinions go by the name of public opinion, are not always the same sort of public … But they are always a mass, that is to say, collective mediocrity. And what is still greater novelty, the mass do not now take their opinions from dignitaries in Church or State, from ostensible leaders, or from books. Their thinking is done for them by men much like themselves, addressing them or speaking in their name, on the spur of the moment, through the newspapers. I am not complaining of all this. I do not assert that anything better is compatible, as a general rule, with the present low state of the human mind. But that does not hinder the government of mediocrity from being mediocre government. No government by a democracy or a numerous aristocracy, either in its political acts or in the opinions, qualities, and tone of mind which it fosters, ever did or could rise above mediocrity, except in so far as the sovereign many have let themselves be guided (which in their best times they always have done) by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed One or Few. The initiation of all wise and noble things must come from individuals; generally at first from some one individual. The honour and glory of the average man is … that he can respond internally to wise and noble things, and be led to them with his eyes open.
(Liberty, XVIII: 269)
There is much that is revealing in this passage. On the one hand, “the present low state of mind” looks as much a fantasy escape ticket for Mill, as the “the culture industry” is for Adorno. Mill takes comfort in an abstractly imagined process of education that will bring everyone up from their present lowness. Adorno trusts in an abstractly imagined liberation of the mind from commercial domination. But why is the state of the human mind low, and what exactly will transform it? Should we credit the culture industry with an exogeneous power of dominating people’s minds, or simply a power to identify very accurately what they want anyway, whether or not they know it, and to profit by supplying it? Mill and Adorno make hopeful assumptions which the cumulative experience of liberal democracy must make one question.
On the other hand, the later section of Mill’s passage strikes a different note. It is unashamedly elitist about human powers, but at the same time it puts trust in a widespread capacity to recognize and follow the higher. This begins to address the hard problem in a more clear‐eyed, potentially less abstract, if still optimistic way. Are there common dispositions and attitudes, in a liberal and secular democracy, that maintain free space for “wise and noble things” – that can generate an “internal” response that is not commercially or politically suborned? If there are, what institutions can strengthen them? That liberal democracy has insufficient resource to strengthen them – that it is too atomistic – is what Hegel (or say in present‐day terms, Alasdair MacIntyre) would affirm. On this view, to give people an ideal, and a role by which they can live, there is needed from the start a much stronger structure and flow of moral authority, vested in common norms and institutions. In a liberal and secular democracy, they are inevitably lost in the crowd, driven on down the dull track by das Man.7
My point (here) is not to address these questions about democratic cultures, but to note the kind of question they are: hermeneutic, Coleridgean questions about how we understand our culture and about how we should value it. They link normative assessment to investigation of historical and social meaning. Criticism which searches the meaning of attitudes and institutions has kept open the questions – one might say, from Schiller, Hegel and Nietzsche, through to Heidegger and the Frankfurt School, or to Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor.
When liberal thinking becomes so one‐sided as to lose sight completely of pressing questions about the quality of our life and institutions, it becomes dominated by abstract versions of individualism and egalitarianism, and comes to deny anything it cannot see. In contrast, Mill’s liberalism was deeply concerned, all the way through, with these pressing questions. This much – the ambitious Schillerian anthropology, and the consequent anxiety about democratic culture – puts him in the German‐Coleridgean camp. But now for what he rejects: the metaphysics of German idealism.
Mill drew his favorite distinction between a priori and a posteriori schools of philosophy in many places, always putting himself firmly on the a posteriori side. So much is clear; alas, it leaves a lot unclear. For a start, Mill was too eager to turn this contrast into a weapon against people he thought of as sanctifiers of tradition and intoners of the inevitable nature of things. More fundamentally, he was, like many other philosophers in the naturalistic tradition, too impatient with epistemological issues. Thoroughly worked‐out taxonomies of the epistemological options are absent from his work; clear‐cut statements of what option he adheres to are brief and rare. To understand his view, we have to put together scrappy remarks he makes across his writings. And to see how it can be defended takes us beyond anything he said.
He assimilates two very different types of position into the a priori side of his binary divide. There are the implicit epistemological assumptions shared by otherwise widely differing Scottish enlightenment philosophers such as Hutcheson, Smith, and Thomas Reid. And then there are the developments of idealism in Germany after Kant (also of course quite diverse). Mill’s attitude to Scottish common sense is in practice very different to his attitude to the varieties of German idealism. In the former case, he has detailed knowledge and his criticisms reveal an underlying shared epistemological ground. In the latter case, his knowledge is rudimentary (though not inaccurate) and his rejection is complete.
The epistemology of Scottish enlightenment philosophers is naturalistic; this is as true of Thomas Reid as it is of Hutcheson and Smith. In a special sense it is psychologistic: namely, it identifies and defends whatever normative principles it regards as fundamental or ultimate by invoking a criterion of what we are “originally,” “instinctively,” or “naturally” disposed to think, will or feel, and continue on reflection to think, will or feel. I will call this the naturalistic criterion of normativity. To separate it from other issues, we should note two things. First, the Scottish debate about rationalism and sentimentalism in ethics and aesthetics was conducted within the framework of this criterion. Just as the criterion can support the normativity of various kinds of inference by appeal to our original, instinctive, or natural, cognitive and conative dispositions, so it can support normative claims about what is desirable, admirable, and so on, by appeal to original or instinctive or natural affective dispositions of desire, admiration, and so on. Second, the appeal to psychological dispositions is epistemological, not reductive: the claim is that dispositions that can be identified as original, and so on, are the epistemic criterion of what normative principles are fundamental. But the normative principles are not themselves assertions about such dispositions.
Much hangs, plainly, on how such terms as “original,” “instinctive,” “natural” are to be understood. A way to understand them is that they distinguish dispositions that are in a certain sense free and spontaneous – freely arrived at – from those that are in a parallel sense artificial or adventitious. Then if a disposition can be identified as free and spontaneous that warrants taking it to have default normative authority. In contrast, calling it artificial or adventitious implies that even if it seems free and spontaneous the explanation of how it arose would undermine it as a criterion of normativity.
Mill’s underlying epistemology is psychologistic in the sense explained. His appeal to the desired as “evidence” of the desirable is a case in point. This claim is neither reductive nor deductive; it is an appeal to the naturalistic criterion. Similarly, his objection to the Reidian common sense school is not a general objection to the naturalistic criterion of normativity. It is, rather, an in‐house naturalistic objection: his argument is that the best psychological analysis of our dispositions shows that far fewer of them are original or spontaneous than the school of Reid would have us believe.
The contrast between spontaneous and adventitious dispositions is in the first place a hermeneutic, not a theoretical contrast: the philosopher investigates our intuitive responses and their content phenomenologically, rather than causally by means of a psychological theory. Obviously, however, if we accept (as we must) that a disposition may have the wrong kind of etiology to support a norm, that leaves an opening for theory. Theory might provide undermining explanations that disqualify dispositions that seem to introspection to be free and spontaneous.
This is the opening Mill seeks to enter. In Chapter 9 of the Examination (“‘Of the Interpretation of Consciousness”) he distinguishes between an “introspective” and a “psychological” method of interpreting consciousness (IX: 139). The introspective method undertakes an introspective scrutiny of consciousness, on the assumption that that suffices to get at dispositions that are genuinely spontaneous, screening out only attitudes that are merely conventional, or in other ways adventitious. The psychological method – that of Mill – is more theoretical. It tries to reduce the data of consciousness to minimum elements which can, by associationist principles, be shown capable of generating the rest.
Mill’s basic line seems mainly, if not always,8 to be that dispositions acquired through processes of association cannot be classified as original and thus provide no criterial support for normativity. He does not say enough about why associationist explanations should be in and of themselves undermining, but on this basis he acknowledges that the dispositions to make enumerative inductive inferences, to trust apparent memory by default, to desire pleasure, must be assumed by associationism to be original, and (in the case of induction and memory) must be relied on in defending the associationist theory itself. Here the link between theory and normativity seems to be this: any theory of the mind has to postulate some primitive belief‐ and affect‐forming dispositions, in terms of which other dispositions can be explained; showing a disposition to be primitive in this sense warrants treating it as normative. This seems to be the dominant idea in Mill’s version of naturalistic epistemology.
Suppose we now ask whether, according to naturalistic epistemology, any proposition is a priori? The answer is mixed. A clear contrast remains between (1) the specific kind of empirical psychological investigation that is required to warrant the normativity of a principle and (2) empirical investigation of the facts in general. We argue for a fundamental normative principle by means of an inquiry that establishes facts about ourselves on which our criterion of normativity operates; but the principle warranted in this way is normative, not factual. There is still a distinction between a normative proposition argued for in this way and a factual proposition. Psychological evidence (phenomenological and theoretical) is required to establish that a principle satisfies the naturalistic criterion, but it remains the case that the principle itself is, as I shall say, normatively a priori. It is not deduced from empirical facts, nor from some other normative principles plus empirical facts, nor is it itself an a posteriori factual proposition. For example, the principle that there is reason to pursue what one will find pleasant is normatively a priori (if true) whereas the principle that there is reason to stop smoking is not.
Should this naturalistic view of normativity be considered a version of empiricism? It is opposed, like empiricism, to all views that hold that facts, whether natural or “non‐natural,” can be known a priori. It makes no claim to provide such factual knowledge. However, empiricism, as that is commonly understood, goes further. It applies the thesis that only “analytic” or “verbal” propositions are a priori, in such a way as to debar synthetic normative propositions from normatively a priori status. This is one reading of Hume, a reading naturally favored by critics of naturalism, who then argue that Hume saw the skeptical consequences of naturalism in a way that less penetrating, more prevaricating, naturalistic philosophers failed to grasp.9 I do not myself think their argument, that naturalistic epistemology collapses into strict empiricism and thence into skepticism, is sound. Inasmuch as naturalism allows for normative a priori truths it differs from strict empiricism.10 So it is best to think of the basic epistemological positions as dividing into three groups rather than two: a strict empiricism that has skeptical implications, various naturalistic accounts of normativity, and various kinds of metaphysical apriorism.
This analysis allows us to say some things about Mill’s views that it would have been useful for him to clarify. In the first place, he is evidently just as committed to normatively fundamental propositions as Reid. His argument with Scottish common sense is about how many there are. His reliance on associationism to reduce their number is unpersuasive, partly because associationism is questionable, but partly for the more philosophical reason that it is not clear why the mere fact that a disposition is acquired rather than innate determines its normative significance. Second, it becomes clear that the serious metaphysical opposition – to which Mill does not respond – is provided by philosophers who deny the coherence of naturalistic epistemology as such. To group together Reidians and Germano‐Coleridgeans as a priori theorists is to conflate two very different kinds of view. It leads Mill into absurdities such as his remark that Reid is “in principle as much an ontologist as Hegel” (Bain’s Psychology, IX: 344).11 Overall, it means that Mill never comes to grips in a considered way with the metaphysics of German idealism.
Here too, there are important differences. In particular, there is an especially important difference between Kant and later German idealists. Kant’s account of the a priori is not readily fitted into the three‐fold division of positions we have just made. Like Mill, he rejects the possibility of a priori inference from conscious experience, or pure spontaneity of thought, to factual claims about how things really are. This degree of agreement creates scope for debate and the possibility of some common ground. Comparisons can be made between naturalistic and transcendental epistemology that throw light on both (cp. Macleod 2014).
These are topics Mill does not even broach, though he could have done. In contrast, when it comes to “ontology,” in the sense in which Hegel was an ontologist, whereas Reid and Kant were not, Mill could have found no common ground even if he had tried. Here there is a major dividing line with Mill, Reid, and Kant on one side, and Hegel’s absolute idealism on the other. By the end of his life Mill was broadly aware of the latter, and evidently allergic to it.12 He knew via Coleridge how it related to Kant’s distinction between understanding and reason (which we shall come to in a moment), and he saw the affinity with Parmenides:
the Ens of Parmenides, Being in General … what is it (as Mr Grote remarks) but the Absolute of the modern Ontologists?
(Grote’s Plato, XI: 381)
Indeed. Absolute idealism has nothing to do with the epistemological debates that we have sketched in this section. In one of those remarkable changes of subject that sometimes occur in philosophy it introduces a different topic, the question of Being. Hegel’s acceptance of the question, let alone his response to it, puts him in different territory to any that could be recognized as legitimate by Mill, Reid, and Kant. In coming to this question of Being we arrive at the most fundamental issue dividing philosophy after Hegel.
We noticed that Mill’s criticisms of the over‐analytic character of Enlightenment Radicalism, and of Benthamism in particular, sound rather like criticisms that are nowadays made of Analytic Philosophy, especially analytic moral and political philosophy: lack of historical and interpretative sense, shallowness of psychological insight, lack of thoughtful reflectiveness about oneself and one’s time.
We have also noticed the Schillerism of Mill’s ideal of life, the way he connects it to his argument for political liberty, and his anxieties about modern democracy. He feared the respectable hegemony of the bourgeois; what he did not (understandably) anticipate was the contemporary shift from bourgeois respectability to commercial populism – or more exactly, the contemporary alliance between these two.
At the same time, we have seen that Mill’s epistemological and psychological framework remains strongly continuous with Enlightenment philosophy: naturalism in epistemology, optimism about the prospects for scientific psychology. Many‐sidedness, as Mill envisaged it, lies in carrying forward the enlightenment’s epistemological insights and scientific ambitions, while also grasping in full the importance of hermeneutic insight and the new ideas about human personality and powers.
Plainly this raises questions that remain unresolved. Is hermeneutics reconcilable with associationism or indeed with scientific psychology as such? It is crucial to Mill’s kind of humanism that it should be: that the “internal,” meaning‐oriented, understanding of human beings should be reconcilable, at least in the long run, with “external” biological and psychological knowledge. In the full synthesis, hermeneutics should not break the bounds of naturalism nor should naturalism undermine hermeneutics. Liberal humanism that is naturalistic in its epistemology but meaning‐oriented in its ethics and cultural critique is, I believe, what Mill would continue to want, even if many of his specific commitments in psychology, epistemology and ethics, such as associationism, or inductivism, or even perhaps utilitarianism, had to be dropped. This is not incoherently “eclectic.” The refusal to accept, as genuine, oppositions that others regard as decisive is what makes it attractive. It transcends the enlightenment/counter‐enlightenment division or the analytic/continental division, or indeed Mill’s own a priori/a posteriori division, at least as he makes it.
Still there remains a metaphysical, and spiritual, issue that sets Mill distinctly apart from “Continental Philosophy” in the currently conventional sense of that term. I called it the question of Being. But one of the main issues is whether there is such a question – and if there is how important it is to answer it, and how momentous if one is forced to conclude that the question cannot be literally stated, or just cannot be answered – I will call this the “problematic” of Being. It is because their most fundamental concern is the problematic of Being that Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger figure so crucially in the tradition of Continental Philosophy. If one takes this question seriously one is likely to feel, with intensity, that it transcends the liberal humanism of Mill or the liberal humanism of Kant. The drive towards at‐oneness with reality goes beyond the confines of mere humanism. It is taken seriously by Hegel, in his way by Nietzsche, and later, by Heidegger. Let me explain a little further.
A turning point is Hegel’s revaluing of Kant’s distinction between Understanding (Verstand) and Reason (Vernunft). Understanding, for Kant, is the faculty deployed in common‐sense and scientific cognition of the phenomena. Its basic norms, in theoretical and practical thought, are provided by Reason. But Reason, Kant thinks, inevitably seeks to go beyond the phenomena to metaphysical knowledge; in doing so it goes beyond its own limits and falls into dialectical contradiction. It is an essential task of “critical” philosophy in Kant’s sense – essential both for sound science and for religious faith – to place clear and principled limits on the ambitions of Reason.
Hegel reverses this assessment. Through Reason we attain knowledge of the Absolute. While Reason informs the Understanding, its distinctive deployment in speculative logic reaches knowledge higher than scientific Understanding can provide. The contradictions of speculative or dialectical logic are not reductios; they are, on the contrary, insights into the absolute nature of things. Being contains both contradiction and ultimate identity‐in‐diversity, including identity of self and other, of subject and object. In Hegel’s hands, the Kantian contrast between Vernuft and Verstand is transformed into the Parmenidean contrast between the way of truth and the way of seeming.
I have suggested elsewhere that there has always been present, in our search for an understanding of the world, a bifurcation of cognitive interests: a “mystical” and a “theoretical” interest, propounding distinct conceptions of what it is to know reality (Skorupski 1999: sections 6 and 7). The mystical interest is not in a mediated knowledge of reality achieved through analysis of and inference from appearances. It seeks immediate apprehension. Mystical understanding is engulfing: it apprehends in a single insight the differentiated unity of thought and world. Hegel takes with utmost seriousness the need to articulate this mystical conception in philosophical terms, and to reconcile it with the theoretical interest. He believes dialectical logic does that. It is a fully conceptual articulation of the mystical conception; it directly addresses and completely answers the question of Being.
“Mystical” is not used here, of course, in any derogatory way, any more than it is by Hegel. The truth Reason reveals is the truth in mysticism:
The meaning of the speculative is to be understood as being the same as what used in earlier times to be called “mystical” … When we speak of the “mystical” nowadays, it is taken as a rule to be synonymous with what is mysterious and incomprehensible; … About this we must remark first that “the mystical” is certainly something mysterious, but only for the understanding, and then only because abstract identity is the principle of the understanding … As we have seen, however, the abstract thinking of the understanding is so far from being something firm and ultimate that it proves itself, on the contrary, to be a constant sublating of itself and an overturning into its opposite, whereas the rational as such is rational precisely because it contains both of the opposites as ideal moments within itself. Thus, everything rational can equally be called “‘mystical”; but this only amounts to saying that it transcends the understanding. It does not at all imply that what is so spoken of must be considered inaccessible to thinking and incomprehensible.13
This confident, one could say triumphalist, project of articulating the mystical in a fully articulated Concept did not really survive Hegel. But the idea of it, which is something much more resilient, did. A major concern in the development of Continental Philosophy has been the attempt to fight one’s way past the language of the Understanding to a language that can at least point to (if not as Hegel hopes, fully articulate) the “way of truth” – to a reconciliation with Being that goes beyond the “way of seeming” offered by science. After Hegel, the problematic of Being returns in Heidegger, rethought by him in a new way that, as he emphasized, involves a constant struggle with language.14 These attempts to grapple directly with Being collapse in the post‐modern phase of Continental Philosophy. But the problematic does not go away; no therapy finally dissolves it. When Continental Philosophy reaches its post‐modernist stage its underlying pathos is that the problematic of Being is still felt, even though all philosophies of Being have collapsed.
The problematic of Being is alien to anything Mill saw as a problem and attempted to address. It is no part of the humanism that he shares with Schiller (and one can add, the early Marx). Anyone who thinks that blindness to Being is the fundamental blindness of our culture will therefore see it as shallow. And since Mill is the philosopher who most clearly seeks to give humanism both inward depth and naturalistic foundations, he is likely to be seen with particular hostility.
But what in this antagonism is deep, and what shallow? Philosophically, one might try to show that the naturalistic epistemology discussed in Section III is incoherent. Or that even if it is coherent in its own terms, it leaves unsettled questions about the relation between knowing subject and reality as object, which still lead to the question of Being. Or, turning from epistemology to ontology, one might try to show that the deeper serious hermeneutic phenomenology excavates, the more it discloses Being. This is Heidegger’s way of undermining humanism, including its later existentialist versions.15
Even if these challenges are not in the end cogent, or not cogent in a way that introduces the question of Being, the mystical interest remains a standing human disposition. It will not go away. Those who feel it will find no answer in humanism of any kind, even if attempts to articulate the question of Being come to seem ever more marginal and obscure. They may simply feel that they are being pushed back by the dominant culture of shallowness. This divergence is as much ethical and spiritual as philosophical, and is unlikely to be resolved by philosophy. At‐oneness within ethical life somehow fuses with at‐oneness within Being.
Nonetheless, the humanism Mill aspires to cannot be accused of shallowness. Here I am not considering whether Mill’s specific doctrines, be it utilitarianism in ethics or inductivism in science, can be defended. Philosophically they are at least not unreasonable. Even if we disagree with them they are not so wrong‐headed as to undermine his overall naturalistic and liberal stance, with its guiding interest in the true content of human well‐being. That stance can survive internal corrections and improvements. It is in no way philistine: its understanding of human well‐being gives scope to high humanistic ideals. For many people these ideals are fully sufficient to give life meaning.
In the contrast we have now come to, between naturalistic humanism and the problematic of Being, we have found a basic respect in which Mill belongs on the “Analytic” as against the “Continental” side. These are misnomers, as will be clear by now, but I am not going to try different terms. However, something must be said about the Analytic side. I have distinguished elsewhere between Analytic Philosophy and the Analytic School (Skorupski 2013). The latter is a movement of thought belonging to the first half of the twentieth century; along with Heidegger it is a main contributor to twentieth‐century modernism in philosophy. The Vienna Circle is its humanistic, science‐welcoming, future‐oriented element; one could conjecture that the emotional charge of its anti‐metaphysics is radical liberation from the oppressive question of Being. In Wittgenstein, in contrast, the problematic of Being is fully present. He obviously felt the mystical interest intensely, and spent a philosophical lifetime showing its question to be inexpressible. The point, perhaps, is that in coming to see that a careful description of ordinary language dissolves “philosophical” questions one achieves a recognition of Being that purported “philosophical” questions obscure. That would be in one way continuous with two basic themes of the mystical tradition: the impossibility of expressing mystical insight within ordinary language, as one piece of knowledge among others, and yet the intimate closeness of Being to the unreflective routines of everyday life.
So the problematic of Being is not absent from philosophical modernism. Yet we are now well past philosophical modernism. Analytic Philosophy, as the term is now conventionally used, roughly means philosophy done now in Anglophone departments of philosophy (other than the few that consciously specialize in Continental Philosophy). In contrast to the Analytic School, which was in most ways a sharp break from nineteenth‐century philosophy, Analytic Philosophy in this sense is quite continuous with the main currents of Anglophone philosophy in the nineteenth century.
Three broad continuities are noticeable. First, there is a prevailing naturalism in philosophy that gives rise to the same sort of debates as could be found within and about naturalistic epistemology in the nineteenth century. Second, the ethical side of this naturalism is, to a considerable extent, and in a very broad way, liberal humanism. These two tendencies are by no means the only ones to be found in current Anglophone philosophy but they are in various ways fairly dominant. Third, however, we also increasingly see scholarly attempts to come to grips with Continental ideas, especially with those can be found in German idealism and in Nietzsche. To my mind one can criticize some of these attempts as too interested in domesticating these thinkers to Analytic tastes, and not (yet?) interested enough in understanding them in their own terms. But they still have the potential to broaden problems and perspectives. Rather like Anglophone philosophy in the nineteenth century, “Analytic Philosophy” in its current sense has become a broad church that is increasingly open to currents from elsewhere.
See how Mill fits this scene in all three aspects. He is a naturalist in epistemology, a liberal humanist in ethics. He aims to refresh and regenerate enlightenment humanism by opening it up to German hermeneutics, but he balks at absolute idealism – rather as current Analytic philosophy is becoming increasingly open to German idealist themes, but still balks at Hegel on speculative logic or Heidegger on Being.
However, Analytic philosophy also maintains an attitude of critical detachment from contemporary culture: this is another Divide. As with the Continental Divide, there are good and bad sides to that. But it is not a characteristic Mill shares. What still invigorates and refreshes about Mill is his outspoken plain speaking, coming as it does from a liberal humanism that has been thought through. There is a lazy tendency to think that profound criticism of modern culture can be found only in Continental Philosophy. And it is true that, when seen from the perspective of Being, contemporary democratic culture appears lost in its own shallowness, with humanism as just a highbrow element in it. But it is not true that this is the only, or for most of us the most convincing, perspective from which to criticize it. Mill’s humanism is just as much a source of serious critique: as serious, if not as dramatic, and vastly more realistic. Strikingly, what Mill fears in modern culture is not unlike what Nietzsche or Heidegger fear. Nor did he mince words about it. In those respects, the three of them have elements in common. His fears did not, however, lead him to oppose democracy as such. He understood its empowering capacity as well as its populist dangers. He is not a mere spokesman for the democratic ethos; he does not simply take it for granted that it is obviously right. He is more like an honest but anxious friend, speaking from an outlook that many modern people can share. This, I think, is a sound and sober basis for criticism of the democratic culture that we now know.