Professor A. C. Grayling is a philosopher, author and master of New College of the Humanities. He is Vice President of Humanists UK and an honorary associate of this magazine. He has written around 30 books on the history of ideas, and his latest is “The History of Philosophy: Three Millennia of Thought from the West and Beyond” (Viking).
“The History of Philosophy” takes the reader on a global journey that spans from before the time of the Buddha to today. What drew you to undertake such an epic task?
The last comprehensive single-volume history of philosophy is of course Bertrand Russell’s, which brings the story of western philosophy up to the beginning of the 20th century. That century itself was incredibly rich – both in philosophy and the study of the history of philosophy – so bringing that up to date is worthwhile. But also, it’s interesting and valuable to look over the garden fence to other great traditions of philosophy, to the Indian and Chinese in particular.
What does philosophy have to tell us about the grand sweep of history?
[In the book] I try to give the big picture about this great story of the last 2,500 years, of people trying to tackle all the questions that it’s most difficult to answer, in the hope that when we find ways of answering them, they can become separate pursuits and their own special discipline. So I make the point that out of philosophy has come science, social sciences, linguistics, cognitive science, AI, and all these things. Philosophy is very consequential, it’s always trying to give definition to our problems so we can make progress with them. I wanted to tell that story in a way that is very clear and accessible.
What about the relationship between philosophy and humanism?
I’ve always said that humanism is an ethical outlook, which has its roots in Classical antiquity and which pretty well all reflective people have held close, right the way through the history of philosophy. Hume, for example, in the 18th century, said he wished he’d been given Cicero to read rather than the catechism – that’s just one little indication. There are many repetitions of that view.
So, in the book itself, I make clear that, while most other histories of philosophy tend to include theology, my really rather hard-line point is that this is a history of philosophy – not of theology, or of science, which are neighbouring areas on both sides. And that therefore questions of ethics discussed in the book are always humanistic in character.
Can philosophy teach us about the existential crises that we’re facing currently, particularly climate change and Covid-19?
I happen to be working on a book about the fact that the relativism of views about what matters in life, and in society – a relativism of ethics outlooks – is standing in the way of solving problems of a global nature. There are certain solutions where one could try to reach a compromise on a case-by-case basis; so, on climate change, trying to be fair to all the different economies. But there are no compromises on the human rights side, where women are oppressed into a second-class status, or where gay people are not allowed to express their sexuality freely and so forth. So, there are some crunch points, where if everybody in the world were to adopt a humanistic outlook these problems simply wouldn’t arise. There is a polemical point to be made here.
Can you explain what you mean by ethics outlooks?
There is an important distinction to be made between ethics and morality. Of course, they’re connected, but you can see they’re different by looking at the etymology of the terms. The word ethics comes from an ancient Greek word ethos, which means character. The question asked in ethics is: what sort of person should I be? How should I live? What values should shape my life?
Morality is about interpersonal obligations: things like not telling too many fibs, keeping promises, not doing other people harm. Obviously, your morals will flow from your ethics, but it’s a very much more limited thing than ethics, because ethics is about the character of your life, and also therefore the character of your society, and the character of the organisation that you live in. So people talk about corporate ethics or social ethics, and they’re not talking about morals there.
After all, moral attitudes change – we’ve seen an evolution in moral outlooks about the treatment of animals for example, and, in western societies, about the place of women in society. But the great ethics question, which is the question for each one of us individually, never changes.
How do ethics and morality relate to religion, in your view?
Connecting religion and morality is a very recent thing in human history. If you think about the word “religion”, it comes from a Latin word religare, which means “to bind”. It’s the same root as the word “ligature”. In the Roman Empire, because of the huge number of different languages and ethnicities and cultures and traditions and superstitions, religion is what bound the Empire together.
Christianity, and to some extent Islam, introduced the idea of the personal religion between the individual and the deity, where your behaviour is what’s going to get you into everlasting felicity or damnation, depending upon which way you act. And that’s a very recent thing, in the past 1,500 years or so.
The idea of ethics is a much older, richer tradition. If you went to the New Testament and asked it the question, “how shall I live?”, the answer you would get is: give away all your money, make no plans for tomorrow, don’t marry or have children, if your family don’t like what you’re doing, you’ve got to turn your back on them, etc. And that’s unliveable, it’s not really an ethics at all: it’s prudential advice to people who thought the Messiah was coming back next week.
Given that humanism is in fact an invitation to think for oneself, how do we reach more people with the humanist message?
By making a really serious, sober-minded case from humanistic premises. First, that we are social animals, we need one another, we need to love, be loved, have friends, be part of a community: we are concerned about others, because of our connection with them. We are bonded to others; our own welfare and theirs are mutually connected.
The other premise is that the humanistic attitude enjoins us to be generous in our approach to other people. Unless they do something really bad, unless they step across a line – they’re cruel, they’re unkind, they’re greedy, they trample on other people to get an advantage over them, that’s unacceptable.
But until people behave badly, as [Ralph Waldo] Emerson said, we have to give them the same advantage as we give a painting: namely, the advantage of a good light. Just be generous, and sympathetic, and accept the fact that people are going to have tastes, interests and fears that we ourselves can’t understand or share sometimes.
Can this message help us to heal our polarised society?
Yes, because if you start from those premises, it becomes incredibly hard to “other” people, to make them different from you in ways that license you to treat them badly. It demands of you to consider the effects of your actions and choices on other people. And I think that really sober, mature thinking on this kind of basis would lead to a great deal of convergence, a great deal of agreement among people about how we should act, what we should do and what kind of world we want.
This article is from the New Humanist summer 2021 edition. Subscribe today.
