In the loneliest desert the second metamorphosis
occurs: the spirit here becomes a lion; it
wants to capture freedom and be lord in its
own desert. ...
But tell me my brothers, what can the child
do that even the lion cannot? Why must the
preying lion become a child?
 

This book is a gesture at reconstruction. It is an attempt to revive certain traditional ideas by placing them on a contemporary foundation. In particular it seeks to revive an undiluted version of virtue as conceived by Plato and Aristotle, and to place it on a scientific conception of nature by uniting it with the notion of mental health. Thus, in the broadest and most grand terms, what is sought is a reconciliation of value and fact, of ancient ways and modern. It could just as well be said that what is sought is a revival of the natural law tradition in ethics.
 

At the same time this book is a thought experiment in philosophical likelihoods. It asks us to suppose what was once taken as the worst possible news for the human spirit -- that human consciousness is a thoroughly natural thing and that we are mere parts of nature, not as different from the rest of animate nature as it has flattered us to think. It supposes that we are, in Nietzsche's symbolism, the earth and nothing more, or at least that we are by now so reconciled to the earth that it no longer bothers us to belong to it alone. It is then asked what really follows for the things we care most about -- especially for ethics? What would become of ethics if we had no "higher" ideal to pursue than our own natural health? Would ethics die or be reduced to some thin shadow of its former self? The answer given is that this would not happen. It is claimed, in fact, that a reasonable naturalism would only repair our tattered moral consciousness.
 

This book is neither reductionist nor metaphysical. It does not claim that humankind is or can be explained as "nothing more than" matter and energy, chemicals, libido or economics. Neither is it linguistic. It does not claim that the word "good" can be analytically defined by some set of natural properties. Nor does it deny any of this. It merely supposes what once seemed metaphysically the worst. It argues that even if human beings are nothing more than healthy animals, only the best would follow.
 

To know that would be a great relief. But what if this naturalistic supposition should turn out to make more sense of what used to be called "spiritual" life than its alternatives? What if on this supposition even "spiritual" things should suddenly fall into place? Would we not then suspect that something went wrong when we first accepted the notion that there was some deep antagonism between nature (earth) and the noblest aspirations of the human spirit? Was that not what Nietzsche meant to show?
 
 

These worries are especially ours. It is doubtless true that at any time or place given individuals and even schools of individuals can conceive of nature as an a-moral force and oppose it to value, which is then understood as some form of human construction. When this happens, as it did among the Greek sophists, for example, the conventional (or, at any rate, the human) can be identified with the spiritual and the natural can be seen as a brute fact to be transcended by culture (Protagoras as pictured by Plato, Hegel, the early Marx). Or the natural can be seen as the only "true" value in comparison to which the thin constructions of human consciousness pale into insignificance (Thrasymachus and Callicles as pictured by Plato, social Darwinism, certain common interpretations of Nietzsche). But even for western philosophy the general acceptance of a great gulf between nature and common moral values was a late development. From the very earliest beginnings of Greek philosophy right up to the birth of modern times, the moral and the natural were generally thought to have an intimate connection. With due allowances made for various exceptions to the rule, from the pre-Socratics to Thomas Aquinas, nature, or natural law, was understood by almost everyone to be the source of moral truth.
 

It is very hard for us who are so comfortable with the distinction between fact and value to sympathize with this early mode of thought. Apparently nature was felt to be authoritative both because of its overwhelming positive presence -- it simply was the way things were and had to be -- and also because of its goodness -- in that the way things were embodied a god's desire, or reflected the dynamics of a creative moral force. In all probability these two reasons were not clearly distinguished. Or at least it so appears in the very first genuinely philosophical sentence to be preserved in the western tradition.
 
 
 

The unlimited is the first principle of things that
are. It is that from which the coming-to-be [of
things and qualities] takes place, and it is that
into which they return when they perish, by moral
necessity (ananke), giving satisfaction to one
another and making reparation for their injustice,
according to the order of time.

Wheelwright's translation of ananke as moral necessity implies the moral ordering of history. There is an order of time, a plot, and it is controlled by a sense of what is owing or due. The things that are (presumably the elements in Anaxamander's cosmology) are unjust to each other -- they encroach on or oppose each other -- and so must be punished by death and non-being, the return into the unlimited from which they came.
 

The concept of ananke mixes logical and/or causal necessity with the force of what is morally due or owing. Presumably it reflects the same ambiguous conception of necessity that is found in the English phrase "have to" as in "I have to return the money I borrowed" and "You have to cross the river to reach New Jersey." In Plato this entwinement of necessities reached explicit formulation when in the Republic when he insisted that from a strictly rational point of view there could be no truth (and hence no being) apart from the goodness that gave rise to it.
 
 
 
 

This reality, then, that gives their true
to the objects of knowledge and the power of
to the knower, you must say is the idea of
the good and you must conceive it as being the
cause of knowledge and truth in so far as
known.⁽¹⁾

...the objects of knowledge not only receive
from the presence of the good their being
known, but their very existence and essence is
derived to them from it....⁽²⁾
 

Here is both the depersonalized notion of the creation of the world by a benevolent God (a clear mixing of the natural and the moral) and also the primary source of the medieval doctrine that bonum (goodness) was one of the transcendental predicates (i.e, a category, something that had to be predicated of all beings). It is ironic that in some quarters Plato's rationalistic dualism should be seen as the source of the devaluation of nature. In fact it was an attempt on Plato's part to preserve the value-laden nature that he felt was threatened by the sophists' separation of nature and convention. For Platonism at even its most rapturous extreme, nature is the moving image of an eternity (Timaeus 37d) that is itself determined in all its general structures by the idea of the good.
 
 

Let us then state for what reason becoming
and this universe were framed by him who framed
them. He was good; and in the good no jealousy
in any matter can ever arise. So, being without
jealousy, he desired that all things should come
as near as possible to being like himself. ...
Desiring then that all things should be good and ...
nothing imperfect, the god took over all that is
visible and brought it from disorder into order,
since he judged that order was in every way the
better.⁽³⁾
 

                                     Anaxamander: The infinite ... seems ... to surround
                                                            all things and steer all.⁽⁵⁾

 The unlimited is the first principle
of things that are. It is that from
which the coming-to-be [of things and
qualities] takes place,
and it is that into which they return
when they perish, by moral necessity
(ananke), giving satisfaction to one
another and making reparation for their
injustice, according to the order of time.⁽⁶⁾

 

Heraclitus: It should be understood that ...strife is justice,
                 and that all things come to pass through the
                 compulsion of strife.⁽⁷⁾

 

All human laws are nourished by the
one divine law, which prevails as far
as it wishes, suffices for all things...⁽⁸⁾
 
 

Anaximenes: As our soul, being air, holds us to- gether
                    and controls us, so does wind [or breath]
                    and air enclose the  whole world.⁽⁹⁾

 

Parmenides: Nor will the force of true belief
                    allow that, besides that which is, there
                    could also arise anything from that which
                     is not; wherefore justice looseth not her
                     fetters to allow it to come into being or
                     perish, but holdeth it fast.⁽¹⁰⁾

 

[In his astronomy] Parmenides said
that there were rings wound one around
the other, one formed of the rare,
the other the dense. ... The middlemost
of the mixed rings is the primary cause
of movement and of coming into being for
them all, and he calls it the goddess that
steers all, the holder of the keys,
justice and necessity (ananke).⁽¹¹⁾

The precise interpretation of any of these lines can be debated, and there are some lines in Heraclitus that pull in the opposite direction, but the general tendency of all these thinkers in the direction of some sort of union between nature and goodness seems impossible to deny. Nor do we have to stay within the confines of philosophy to find this union. The plot of the Iliad, for example, is easily seen as an illustration of the same basic themes. There, despite the petty fury of the characters and the notable a-morality of the subordinate divinities, the nod of Zeus, which governs the plot with an irresistible necessity (ananke), grants Achilles the revenge he hungers for, but only after he "pays the penalty" through the death of his lover. This is tragic necessity, but it is also easy to see it as an act of primitive justice that balances the misery caused by Achilles's raging pride. In the Iliad, as in Anaximander and Heraclitus, there is strife, struggle, and apparent chaos, but the order of things is still controlled by a primitive sense of justice.
 

All of Plato and Aristotle can be seen as an attempt to preserve this union of the natural and the good in response to the challenge posed by the sophists' separation of nature and convention.
 

It is also worth noting that Judaeo-Christian creation mythology, at least as it has come down to us, is not essentially different. Yahweh's faceless transcendence does not amount to a devaluation of nature, as is claimed by recent popular philosophy. To the contrary, the text as we have it repeatedly insists upon the moral value of nature:
 
 
 
 

And God said let the water under
the heaven be gathered together
unto one place, and let the dry
land appear. And it was so. And God
called the dry land Earth, and the
gathering together of the waters called
He Seas; and God said that it was good.
 
And the earth brought forth grass,
herb yielding seed after its kind, and
tree bearing fruit, wherein is the seed
thereof, after its kind; and God saw
that it was good.

And God saw everything that he had made,
and behold it was very, very good.⁽¹²⁾

We ought to take seriously the suggestion that Biblical creation, the Homeric sense of history, most of early Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle were all in agreement that what is or happens is governed by some sort of moral law, and that the entire western natural law tradition was simply an elaboration of this original unity of fact and value.
 

Even in the East, where nature is more truly illusion (maya), the natural order still embodies certain principles of cosmic justice (karma). Certainly there is a moral meaning to the cycle of birth, death and reincarnation -- to the notion that in each lifetime one moves up or down the ontological scale in accord with earned merit. And the cycle of birth, death and reincarnation is, after all, the general formula for all the cycles of nature, the very same cosmic re-cycling that was the concern of Anaximander too. Even as maya, nature offers a moral structure within which can be found the right way of living (and so also for Parmenides' way of seeming, as illustrated by the last quotation.)
 

If it is true that the union of the good and the natural is to be found also in the East, and if Eliade is right in his assessment of the aboriginal mode of thinking, then the possibility arises that only in the modern West is nature generally denied this high regard. Perhaps only for us (and even then, only for the most sophisticated of us) is nature a concatenation of a-moral forces, a mere fact, devoid of moral authority. But even if this grander claim is not true, it is still true that when the modern west adopted these attitudes, it turned against its own philosophical traditions that stretched back from the scholastics to Anaximander.
 
 

At the level of the most basic philosophical attitudes, the modern West defined itself by a more or less self-conscious devaluation of nature. What before was taken as an embodiment of divinity, justice, spirit, purpose, eros or at least some kind of intelligence, came generally to be seen as mere stuff, ordered to be sure, but unreliably (Hume) or to no end that could be usefully discerned (Bacon, Descartes, Hume), or to an end that had only mathematical/aesthetic value, but no concrete moral value (Galileo, Kant). As a rough generalization this is true despite the fact that many of the early scientists read theological meaning back into their scientific work (Kepler and Newton, for example), despite the fact that a modern like Locke could fall back on a (very weak) notion of natural law ethics, and despite Rousseau's "noble savage", whom he himself ignored when, in The Social Contract, he set out to take the business of ethics seriously. The demise and/or semi-permanent postponement of teleological thinking in the interpretation of nature came to be perceived as a precondition for the rise of science. This is a familiar point that was made by many authors well before the recent concern with the environment (Burtt, l924; Collingwood, l945; Stace l952.) But from that moment on the natural law tradition ceased to be the foundation of western moral philosophy.

The desacrimentalization or devaluation of nature that was begun by the scientific revolution was completed by what is called "the enlightenment". By the time it was over one of the essential features of the modern European mind had been set -- the banishment of teleological thinking from the putatively authoritative reconstruction of nature that is called "science". There were nostalgic conservatives among the philosophers (Berkeley, Leibnitz), Neo-pythagorean mystics among the scientists (like Kepler), and there was always a protesting romantic counter-current (Blake, Keats, Shelly, Rousseau, Novalis, D.H.Lawrence, Schelling) but it is undeniable that the general drift of things was in the other direction. As early as 1776 Hume could speak of the fact/value dichotomy and few would even remember that for the scholastics goodness was a transcendental predicate or that sober, learned men had once thought it obvious that the good, the true and the beautiful were all the same. In l912 Russell wrote:
 
 

Such in outline, but even more purposeless,
more void of meaning, is the world which science presents for our belief. Amid such a world ... our ideals henceforward must find a home. That man is the product of causes that had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears ... are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms -- all these things, if not beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy that rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way.⁽¹³⁾
 

Russell's attitude was not new. It is in the sophists, in Epicurus, and Machiavelli. Presumably it has always been around in one form or another. What is new is that neither Russell nor his audience felt a need to prove it.
 
 

It is seldom recognized that in ethics the major consequence of the devaluation of nature concerns a change in the perceived relationship of human beings to their own desires. Nature is represented most poignantly in the human being by the body, and the body is a moral presence as desire -- as the collection of what are called the "bodily desires", which is really the collection of all desires insofar as they stem from the natural forces that have made us. Whoever understands these desires, their relation to each other, and the consequences of acting upon them is said to understand "human nature" and is thought to possess a kind of knowledge worth calling "wisdom."
 

Given the general view of nature held by the pre-scientific tradition, there thus arose for it a peculiar dilemma concerning human nature. On the one hand there was the well-known traditional suspicion of desire, the view of desire as wild, bestial and sub-human. But since nature was a moral order, and since the desires were a part of it, the tradition had also to conclude that human desire exhibited the same order that governed the rest of the cosmos. The desires simply had to be good, a priori, and consequently the good had to be the true object of desire. This is the basic meaning of the Platonic theory of desire (eros) and also of Aristotle's more cautious and qualified version of it.
 
 

....then such being the case, must not
love [eros] be love of only beauty and,
and not of ugliness?
 
....[and] you hold, do you not , that good
things are beautiful?⁽¹⁴⁾
 
Lovers of what is noble [ -- the same
word that is translated as "beautiful things"
in the Symposium] find pleasant the things
that are by nature pleasant, and virtuous actions
are such, so that these are pleasant for such
men as well as in their own nature.⁽¹⁵⁾

Since for both Plato and Aristotle all [natural] desire is for the good, and since for both of them there is only one good for human life, there was in Plato and Aristotle no possibility of basic conflict between desires. All genuine desires thus had to form a coherent system of motivations toward that single good. This coherence of desire with itself and the moral good was understood as a harmony of the soul -- a sort of psychological balance that has some features in common with what is now sometimes called "centeredness" or "the absence of intra-psychic conflict." When, in the Republic, Gorgias, and Symposium, Socrates argues that true happiness and justice entail each other, he means it only for the person who has achieved this harmony of desires -- not for someone who has merely forced himself to engage in morally correct behavior.

The original task of ethics was thus to understand, as far as possible, how this harmony of the soul was to be accomplished, and consequently ethics was at first concerned with matters of psychology and character (that is to say, with desires, virtues, vices, and their relation to happiness) rather than with abstract moral rules and their logical justification. The primary moral question was not, How must I behave in order to conform to the rules of correct behavior?, but rather, What must I do to bring my soul (my desires) into a coherent, balanced, harmonious condition so as to achieve real happiness and be just?
 

This faith in the harmony of the soul derived from the Platonic commitment to the goodness of nature. It was a more or less self-conscious rational construction -- certainly not an empirical fact, except, perhaps, in the case of extraordinary individuals (such as Socrates in the Symposium's portrait of him). Empirically, the desires did not appear to Plato or Aristotle to be either harmonious or good, and so they are treated with the disparagement that so often characterizes traditional philosophy. But that disparagement is only part of the picture, and it is unfortunate that it is the part that generally colors our impression of classical psychology.
 

It requires a good deal of careful textual analysis to show that both Plato and Aristotle posited this harmony at the bottom of the human soul, a harmony that was both a gift of nature and a rare achievement of the very wise. The material is found in some of the less well-known parts of the Republic, the Philebus, and in passages scattered throughout the Niocomachian Ethics. In Chapter 5 I will try to make that case in detail. But for now it should be noted that even in the Republic the good is said to be the sole motive force in the universe. If we extend this to desire, then, since desire is the motivating force in human behavior, it inevitably follows that all desire must be directed toward the one true good, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. One can ask whether outside of the Symposium it explicitly occurred to Plato to extend his theory to desire. One cannot be sure, but the naturally moderate inhabitants of the Republic's "city of pigs" are in fact a perfect illustration of it.
 
 

... they will build themselves houses
and carry on their work in summer for
the most part unclad and unshod and
in winter clothed and shod sufficiently.
And for their nourishment they will pro-
vide meal from their barley and flour from
their wheat, and kneading and cooking
these they will serve noble cakes and
loaves on some arrangement of reeds or
clean leaves, and, reclined on rustic
beds strewn with byrony and myrtle, they
will feast with their grandchildren, drinking
of their wine thereto, garlanded and singing
hymns to the gods in pleasant fellowship, not
begetting offspring beyond their means lest
they fall into poverty or war.
 

........[and they will eat] the sort of
things they boil up in the country ... But
for desert we will serve them figs and chickpeas
and beans, and they will toast myrtle-berries
and acorns before the fire, washing them down with
moderated potations; and so, living in peace
And health they will probably die in old age and
hand on a like life to their offspring.⁽¹⁶⁾

It is important to remember that this original, government-less, philosophy-less city, wherein desire and justice exist in a natural harmony, and not the city of the philosopher king, is said by Socrates to be the "true" and "healthy" city.
 
 

I understand. It is not merely the origin of
a city, it seems, that we are considering,
but the origin of a luxurious city. Perhaps that
isn't such a bad suggestion, either. For by
observation of such a city it may be we could
discern the origin of justice and injustice in states.
The true state I believe to be the one we have described --
the healthy state, as it were. But if it is your pleasure
that we contemplate also a fevered state, there is nothing
to hinder.⁽¹⁷⁾
 

The insistence on the goodness of nature combined with the cold facts of human life thus forced the entire tradition to the paradoxical conclusion that for human beings the natural and harmonious are rare and hidden. This may be the meaning behind the paradoxical "Know Thyself" of Delphi. Because there are two selves, one hidden and harmonious, the other obvious and disordered, the self is not an easy thing to know. But even if that was not the meaning of the oracle, it was an idea that may have received philosophical elaboration at least as early as Heraclitus:
 
 

It pertains to all men to know themselves
and to be temperate.⁽¹⁸⁾
 
To be temperate is the greatest virtue.
Wisdom consists in speaking and acting
the truth, giving heed to the nature of
things.⁽¹⁹⁾
 
And yet: Nature loves to hide.⁽²⁰⁾
 

The hidden harmony is better than the
obvious.⁽²¹⁾
 
You could not discover the limits of soul,
even if you traveled by every path in order
to do so; such is the depth of its meaning.⁽²²⁾

Since by nature the desires are good, it follows that humankind, like every other animal, can be good, just, and happy merely by following its own desires. On the other hand, desire as we empirically know it, is wild and disordered ("bestial" as we sometimes say), and a life spent in its pursuit would be the most immoral and unhappy of lives. Only a dualism in which a hidden reality is the moral one can reconcile these views -- and that is the view taken by the entire tradition from Heraclitus to St. Thomas Aquinas. The distinction that in Plato appears as the difference between real and apparent pleasures, is carried over into Aristotle as the difference between natural and unnatural desire, and reappears in Christian anthropology as the difference between man's fallen nature (which is manifest and commonplace) and his true, original nature as made by God (which appears on earth only in the personality of Jesus and the saints, as a foretaste of heaven).
 
 

...in the first state ...Adam had no
passion with evil as its object... For our
sensual appetite, wherein the passions reside,
is not entirely subject to reason, and hence
at times our passions forestall and hinder
reason's judgement, and at other times they follow
after reason's judgement, according as the sensual
appetite obeys reason to some extent. But in the
state of innocence .. the passions of the soul existed
only as consequent upon the judgement of reason.⁽²³⁾
 
For it [original sin] is an inordinate disposition,
arising from the destruction of the harmony
which was essential to original justice,
even as bodily sickness is an inordinate disposition of
the body, by reason of the
destruction of that equilibrium which is
essential to health.⁽²⁴⁾

For the tradition then, the normal and the natural condition of the human psyche are decidedly not the same thing. For human beings, and presumably only for human beings, the normal condition is unnatural, which is essentially another way of saying that the human being is the sick animal. The other animals are what they ought to be merely by doing what they want, while humankind, by doing what it "wants" cannot achieve is own (true) desires, cannot be its own true self, and cannot even really be the thing it is. For human beings nature is an achievement that stands in need of art (or grace) for its completion. "Art perfects nature," said Aristotle, and for human life the name of this art was ethics. It's task was to restore people to their natural conditions, i.e., to make them well, and so ethics was a kind of healing, a kind of emotional therapy that was meant to bring happiness, moderation and a measure of tranquility into the lives of its practitioners.
 
 
 
 
 
 

This transformational, therapeutic vision of ethics is something very different from the justification of the rules of correct behavior that we now think of as moral philosophy. It is not exclusively modern to put the emphasis on law instead of virtue and obedience instead of transformation. That emphasis is found in the Old Testament and Roman stoicism, for example, as well as in the social contract theorists and Kant. But the truly modern variant on it can be said to begin when, in the name of a principled and consistent empiricism, the possibility of a hidden, morally ordered, happiness-bearing human nature is no longer taken seriously. It begins when, without apology or reluctance, the natural, the normal, and the average are taken to be the same, and when, consequently, the nature of human desire is felt to be exactly what it seems to be -- at best a confusing mixture of good and bad without moral rhyme or reason; at worst a wild and violent thing -- disordered, self-destructive, cruel and bloody, held in check only by the fear of punishment.
 

There are no new facts involved in the adoption of the modern attitude. The unhappy facts were always known. What changes is the paradigm for their understanding. The tradition saw the disorder of human desire as a deviation from our true nature and thus saw it as a form of sickness. But if the idea of nature as a moral order is not taken seriously, then there is no longer a felt need to hypothesize such a hidden nature. Human nature is then free to be exactly what it seems to be. The natural and the wicked can be the same; the healthy man can be a bad one.

The paradigm shift in moral psychology closely parallels the shift that took place in astronomy. On the old paradigm it was insisted a priori that the planets had to go in circles because God would not make a universe in which anything less would do. A theoretical device (the theory of epicycles) was then thought up to explain the apparent disorder.⁽²⁵⁾ In psychology the hidden harmony of the soul is the analogue to the hypothesis of circular motion. It's foundation too lay a priori in the universal presupposition of the goodness of the natural order. To reject this presupposition was then to guarantee the conclusion that desire, happiness, goodness, and frustration are exactly what they seem to be to common observation, and this is precisely the point made by Machiavelli when, in a passage frequently taken as definitive of the modern attitude, he lays it down that life as it really (i.e., naturally) is so far from life as it ought to be that one needs to choose between moral propriety and a successful life in "this" world. That is to say, when he says that the rules of nature do not dance to a moral tune.
 
 

But my intention being to write some-
thing of use...,it appears to me more
proper to go to the real truth of the
matter than to its imagination; and many
have imagined principalities and republics
[and we add, "hidden harmonies of the soul"]
that have never been seen or known to exist in
reality; for how we live is so far removed from
how we ought to live, that he who abandons what
is done for what ought to be done, will rather
learn to bring about his own ruin than his
preservation.⁽²⁶⁾
 

The felicity of this life consisteth not
in the repose of a mind satisfied. For there
is no such finis ultimus, utmost aim, nor
summum bonum, greatest good, as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers. Nor can a man any more live whose desires are at an end, than he, whose senses ... are at a stand. Felicity is a continual progress of the
desire from one object to another; the attaining
of the former, being still but the way to the
latter.⁽²⁷⁾

So understood, happiness is nothing more than the possession of the means to satisfy the endless succession of empirical desires that happen to constitute the psychology of a given individual. It can and has been endlessly argued whether such "success", even were it attainable, would really be worth calling happiness, but no one has ever confused it with morality.
 

This endless succession of satisfactions was happiness as Kant understood it.
 
 

Without any view to duty, all men
have the strongest inclination to
happiness, because in this idea all
inclinations are summed up.⁽²⁸⁾
 

This entire line of thought is epitomized with marvelous generality in Hume's distinction between is and ought. Therein Hume distills the philosophical kernel from Machiavelli's assumption that the rules of life have little in common with the rules of morality. And once the laws of nature (that which is) are in this way seen to be a-moral, it becomes necessary to build one's ethics on some other foundation. Hence Kant's attempt to rid ethics of anthropological speculation and to found morality on a priori principles; hence what is called "deontological" ethics, i.e., ethics that has as little as possible to do with the empirical realities of nature.
 

Utilitarianism, the other great thread of moral philosophy in the scientific period, seems at first to be quite different. Certainly it cares very much to know the specifics of human nature. It defines the moral good as the means to happiness, and therefore needs to know all about desire and its satisfaction. But everything then depends on the operative conception of happiness. If a crudely hedonistic notion of happiness is used, utilitarianism becomes a grotesquely unsatisfying moral philosophy. It becomes more acceptable as its notion of happiness becomes more subtle, and if it were to employ the Platonic/Aristotelian notion that true justice really is true happiness, and that there is a kind of secondary justice that constitutes the means to this ideal condition, then, in its ultimate principles at least, it would be indistinguishable from Platonism. There is no reason why utilitarianism could not be developed in this direction, and when it is combined with a strong notion of alienation, something like this in fact happens. But in general, and despite Mill's own discussion of the "higher" pleasures, the value-free notion of nature has guided the development of utilitarianism, and so the intimate union of justice and happiness has not been a part of it. In general utilitarianism has taken the empirical condition of human life as definitive of human nature and human happiness.
 
 
 
 
 
 

********
 
 
 
 

Utilitarianism and deontological ethics continue to be discussed with great subtlety and refinement in academic philosophy, but at the level of general educated opinion there holds sway a tolerant, liberal form of relativism, which, while granting a maximum of freedom for the subjectivity of individual pleasure, limited only by the need to prevent overt harm to others, has nothing to offer as to how that freedom should be used. Instead of understanding desire and happiness more deeply, our popular, educated culture has tended to turn freedom itself into the substance of moral truth, and, as has been so often said, that is simply not enough. One needs not only to be free from oppression. One must be free for something, but for what? For virtue? At the level of both academic and popular philosophy there is some reason to believe that the time may be ripe for a reconsideration of the moral possibilities offered by the classical theories of virtue.
 

A growing group of academic philosophers has become suspicious of the is/ought distinction and the so-called "naturalistic fallacy" that rests on it. With this suspicion has inevitably come a revival of interest in the traditional concepts of virtue and the virtues. Peter Geach (1956), Elizabeth Anscombe (l958), Michael Stocker (l976), Philipa Foot (l978), James Wallace (l978), and N.J.H.Dent (l984), are some of the more well-known names, but Alasdair MacIntyre (l981, l988) has presented the most impassioned and synoptic case and has gone farthest in the direction of producing a foundation on which the revival of virtue-theory might rest. He argues that the post-enlightenment deviation from matters of character (virtues and vices) to matters of rule or law was a mistake that simply had to lead to our moral dead end (l981, ch.5). The solution, he says, lies in reviving the notion of virtue, with it's traditional emphasis on character, emotion, and the concept of human flourishing.
 

MacIntyre understands, of course, that the pre-enlightenment theories of virtue relied on a moral conception of nature to give substance to their concept of human flourishing --that they were rooted, in other words, in a kind of normative biology. His dislike of such a foundation is presumably rooted in the same considerations that make normative biology distasteful to most modern sensibilities -- the fear that it is an imposition of human values onto nature and the fear that it leads to racism and sexism. And so, rather like the thinkers of the enlightenment whom he criticizes, MacIntyre tries to replace the natural with the social. For him the biological is at most secondary; the social sciences play the role that the tradition would have alloted to biological anthropology. Instead of a natural human essence that defines completeness, perfection, flourishing and/or health, we get the idea of a socially defined, completed life narrative that varies from culture to culture. In his later work (1988) he embeds that narrative within a tradition that defines the parameters of rational discourse. This gives more substance to the notion of narrative, but unfortunately maintains it in a sophisticated version of the historical relativism that is, for many, a symptom of the moral bankruptcy that called forth virtue ethics to begin with.
 

I take MacIntyre's revival of virtue as undoubtedly a major step in the right direction, and so also his general criticism of the excessively "high" enlightenment standards of rationality as producing, on the one hand, an irrelevant academic search for demonstrable moral truths, and, on the other, a popular disbelief in the interpersonal nature of any moral truth at all. But if only a series of incompatible traditions fills in the substance of reason and virtue, then we are still forced to choose between a paralyzing rational cosmopolitanism (which is one side of the positivist/existentialist coin) or a parochial, irrational commitment that costs us our reason at just the most critical, most moral moments of life. But for some it was to avoid precisely this dilemma that we took up the reconsideration of modernity to begin with. Is there then some other foundation for virtue ethics? The harmony of the soul is here offered as a means to this end, and it is promised that when the idea is fully developed in the body of this book, there will accompany it a notion of rationality that is not so strict as that of the enlightenment nor so soft as to rest on the mere acceptance of a historical tradition -- an idea of rationality that is, in fact, very much like Aristotle's own notion of practical reason.
 

The question then is whether there is some modern way of reconstituting the union of nature and goodness that must lay at the foundation of any notion of the harmony of the soul.
 
 

********
 
 
 
 

The harmony of the soul was and still is a very commonplace, very primitive faith that projects into human psychology the entire problem of evil and the justification of the ways of God to man. As already noted, in Plato, when this faith was first called upon to defend itself rationally, it relied on metaphysics and epistemology, on a moral interpretation of the principle of sufficient reason. A significant portion of early modern philosophy was metaphysical debate over these points wherein Leibnitz (chiefly) played the role of Plato. The rationalists lost, however, and the ground was cleared for a view of nature that was free of both rationalistic constraints and commonplace moral sentiment. We will not here renew that metaphysical debate.
 
 

It is interesting, however, now that the project of clearing away metaphysical and sentimental cobwebs has gone on for some three hundred years, to see that many elements of the old teleology have re-emerged, at least at a semi-popular level, within the scientific culture. I do not refer to the many romantic, anti-intellectual reactions against the scientific deconstruction of emotion-laden, value-bearing nature, but rather to the peculiar way that the language of virtue and the presupposition of the harmony of the soul has entered the semi-scientific language of medicine.
 

From Jung on there has been a consistent and coherent thread of thought within psychotherapy that has insisted that the idea of mental health is also a moral (and perhaps even a spiritual) ideal. Erich Fromm (l947, l961), Karen Horney (1950), Abraham Maslow (l962), Scott Peck (l980, l983) and many, many other psychologists, both scholarly and popular, illustrate this particular line of thought, making it either their explicit thesis or their more or less explicit presupposition.
 

What is especially interesting is that this way of thinking has gone out from the world of books and by now resides comfortably in popular thought. For better or worse, the language of therapy has to a large extent taken over the language of virtue. Vices like gluttony and bullying are thought of as "character disorders", and are commonly discussed through a semi-technical, quasi-medical vocabulary. Gluttony becomes a compulsive eating disorder, with another disorder, anorexia, at the opposite extreme. Intemperance becomes symptomatic of the addictive personality. Excessively rigid temperaments are labeled "anal-sadistic", and excessively compliant ones are called "oral-masochistic." A vice like stinginess is understood as a symptom of the anal personality, while excessive generosity, what Aristotle would have called prodigality, is part of the oral-masochistic pathology. And so on. The astonishing fact is that at the very moment when relativism seems to dominate the popular philosophical discussion of ethics, real, concrete virtue-ethics has re-appeared in popular language in the form of psychological medicine.
 

Of course there is also much resistance to this blending of medical and moral language. Traditional Freudians still view morality with psychotherapeutic suspicion; behaviorists (with their crude, allegedly naturalistic reductionism) will have none of it; and positivists like Thomas Szasz do all that they can to purge "the medical model" from psychiatric theory and practice --all of which will be discussed thoroughly in the chapters that follow. But the short of it is that wherever the is/ought dichotomy is still felt to be unbridgeable -- wherever science and values are still thought to belong to different universes of discourse, wherever positivism and existentialism are still the dominant philosophical moods, the synthesis of moral and medical language is resisted. But popular thought, which generally has little use for such subtle (perhaps "oversubtle") distinctions, has short circuited these reservations and run roughshod over the is/ought distinction just as it has always done. The result is that a semi-moral/semi-medical way of thinking about what the self ought to be has become dominant in many circles, and might well be said to constitute an original American contribution to popular ethics, the ethical equivalent of jazz. What, we ask, is the significance of this development from the point of view of traditional philosophical naturalism?
 
 

If there is any value that can be described as natural, surely it is health, and health was always the fundamental idea of traditional naturalistic ethics. In it virtue is understood as the healthy condition of the human being. Indeed, the whole concept of flourishing is a medical concept that is indistinguishable from full, vibrant health.
 

Socrates: ... You admit the existence of bodies
and souls?
 
Gorgias: Of course.
 
Socrates: And do you not consider that there is a
healthy condition for each?
 
Gorgias: I do.
 
Socrates: And a condition of apparent but not real
health?
 
Gorgias: Of course.
 
Socrates: [Then] to the pair, body and soul, there
correspond two arts -- that concerned
with the soul I call the political [or ethical]
art; ... but the art that cares for the
body comprises two parts, medicine and
gymnastics.⁽²⁹⁾

The same point is made more simply in the Republic.
 
 

Virtue, thus, as it seems, would be a
kind of health and beauty and good
condition of the soul, and vice would
be disease.⁽³⁰⁾

For it [original sin] is an inordinate disposition,
arising from the destruction of the harmony
which was essential to original justice,
even as bodily sickness is an inordinate disposition of the body, by reason of the
destruction of that equilibrium which is
essential to health.⁽³¹⁾
 

Physical health is prima facie the one clear natural value --a norm given to us by the forces that made the body. It does not seem to be created by ourselves; it does not seem to be culturally relative; and it is certainly specific enough to provide concrete, non-controversial therapeutic goals. (See Chapter 1 for an extensive discussion of all these points.) It is then only to be expected that if morality is understood within nature, it will be conceived as a kind of health of the soul.
 

From the positivistic point of view this is merely an extension of the "medical model" to behavior, but such a view, if it is meant to any historical validity, incorrectly presupposes that behavior was first viewed non-medically. Historically speaking, the overwhelming likelihood, to judge from Greek moral philosophy and the medical practices of traditional peoples, is that the medical "model" of the soul came first and that it took a great deal of philosophical effort to divorce health and goodness. In this regard it is of no small interest that the words "integrity" and "health" come from the same linguistic/conceptual root. "Integrity" comes from the roots "integer" and "integral." Etymologically "integrity" means to be "one", "not broken into pieces", "whole" "unbroken", "working." "Health" in turn comes from "hale," which in old English meant precisely the same thing -- "whole," "not broken up".
 

It appears that one or another variant on the medical "model" held general sway until the scientific revolution accustomed people to the artifice of a non-teleological anthropology. From then on, of course, the idea of healthy behavior seemed metaphorical, but the fact is that Freud and his humanistic followers were step by halting, unintentional step, renewing in modern form the most ancient foundation of ethics.
 

This does not mean that medicine and morals can be run haphazardly together. The reunion of health and virtue depends on how literally it is still possible to take the idea of a healthy soul. That possibility is clouded over by the usual sort of unclarity that surrounds the simplest notion of health, and the much greater obscurity that derives from all the loose and frequently naive talk about mental health, all of which needs to be gone through and worked over with great care. That is the definitional, or conceptual task of this book and it is worked out in Parts I and II, wherein the definition of physical health is explored, clarified, and then extended to the psyche, without, it is claimed, any importation of metaphorical meaning.
 

But one can go only so far through the clarification of definitions. One can show in a very general way what mental health is, defend its legitimacy, its naturalness, and explain how the offered definition relates to the common standards of mental health used in psychotherapeutic practice. But the case for a new harmony of the soul requires more than this. Once the meaning of health is understood, the question becomes whether or not its concrete embodiment in real human beings is isomorphic with the demands of ethics. To a large extent this is an empirical question -- the sort of thing steered away from by most philosophers. But the question must here be asked, and there is good reason to believe, given current scientific developments, that the harmony of the soul might be an empirical reality -- or at least good reason to believe that this conclusion is more likely than its opposites.
 

In the functionalist rationalism of the theory of natural selection, for example, we find one seed of this new synthesis. So also in the emergence of ecology as a sort of functionalist bio-cosmology; in socio-biology with its struggle to reinstate the natural as a respectable category for the study of human behavior; in the anthropology that corrected our prejudiced conception of "primitive" or "natural" man; in Freudianism for reinstating the categories of health and illness in the study of human behavior, and for making possible again the notion of a hidden structure of the soul (the unconscious); and in the "humanistic" psychology for suggesting that that structure might yet be a harmony.
 

Some of these theories are more controversial than others. Some are more properly "scientific," some are tinged with politics, some have been overworked, and some have been too enthusiastically promoted. Here too there is much to be sorted out, but even so, taken all together they add up to a most remarkable possibility. It will be shown that as a result of these scientific developments, the pieces are now available for a synthesis that would resurrect the harmony of the soul and restore to nature a measure of its former moral authority. The possibility arises of basing virtue on a non-metaphysical, non-theological natural teleology, that would amount to a resurrection of moral psychology -- a reconstitution of the harmony of the soul on the most modern of foundations.
 
 
 
 

*****
 

Our question thus becomes, What if that which has been judged metaphysically the worst were really true -- what if humankind is a purely natural thing with no transcendence beyond nature of any kind (neither Platonic/ontological nor phenomenological/ existential.) The goal is to show that even under these circumstances only the best will follow. To do this we must obviously give free reign to a ruthlessly naturalistic anthropology, which will here be referred to as the reconstruction of human nature "within the naturalistic brackets." Essentially this amounts to assuming that the content and dynamics of human emotion, including the unconscious and the familiar mechanisms of defense, are the controlling forces in human behavior, and that they are themselves controlled by the same forces that control all other structures of living things. Roughly speaking, anthropology within the naturalistic brackets will simply assume that human behavior is governed by thought, thought by emotion, emotion by psychodynamics, psychodynamics by protoplasm, protoplasm by DNA, and DNA by natural selection. On these assumptions we hope to show that the harmony of the soul as elaborated by the tradition is a very real thing -- or to show at least that the supposition of a hidden, moral human nature is more reasonable than any alternative.
 

Of course there is no intention in this of proving the relevant scientific theories -- that is done or not done by the sciences themselves. Here we simply work with the current theories. Philosophy can, however, clarify operating assumptions, remove confusions, and point to connections across broad expanses. Philosophy cannot prove the theory of natural selection or its extension into sociobiology, but it can point out that sociobiology is the logical development of naturalism and that, at least in its broadest outlines, it must be assumed if we wish to see where the naturalistic assumptions really lead. Nor can philosophy settle the intra-disciplinary wrangles of psychology, but philosophy can clarify the idea of the unconscious, relate it back to its simplest, clearest manifestations, point to some of its abuses and separate it from associations that form no necessary part of it (an over-emphasis on sexuality, for example, a male bias, the death-wish, etc., etc.). Most especially philosophy can show how the predominance of unconscious motivation not only does not pose a threat to moral freedom and responsibility (as has been commonly thought), but in fact goes a long way toward helping us to understand how freedom can be achieved (see Ch.6). It can also show how the moral interpretation of the unconscious can make good sense of certain other troublesome ethical problems (conscience and the peculiar nature of ethical knowledge -- also in Chapter 6).
 

It goes without saying that this attempt to work within the naturalistic brackets is not intended as a strict deductive proof of the harmony of soul using the scientific theories as basic assumptions. The matter is far too complex for that. There are simply too many possibilities that cannot be decisively excluded, too many turns in the argument where choices have to be made without definitive evidence. The goal is therefore simply to tell a likely story -- a rational story, which, while not really proving its conclusion, might still show the harmony of the soul to be a likely possibility. In this regard the task is a bit like that set for himself by Plato in the Timaeus. Our concern is not the cosmos but the psyche, and the substance of our reasoning is not metaphysical but scientific. But the goal is to this extent the same -- to show that a hidden harmony is a likely possibility. It would please me to show that it is the most likely of possibilities, but it would content me to show only that it is more likely than it has been respectable to think for many years. To do so would show the harmony of the soul to be a worthy object of rational faith, and, as said above, to know no more than that would be a great relief -- an open door through which one might choose to walk.
 
 

1. Plato, Republic, VI, 508e. Unless otherwise noted all passages from the Republic are by Paul Shorey in the Loeb Library editions.

2. Republic, VI, 509b.

3. Timaeus, 29e-30a. Cornford translation.

4. "...primitive ontology has a Platonic structure; and in that case Plato could be regarded as the outstanding philosopher of "primitive mentality," that is as the thinker who succeeded in giving philosophic currency and validity to the modes of life and behavior of archaic humanity." Eliade (l954:34).

5. Kirk and Raven (l964: 114)

6. Wheelwright (1966:54).

7. Wheelwright (1966:71).

8.

8. Wheelwright (l966:75).

9. Kirk and Raven (l964:158).

10. Kirk and Raven (1964:273).

11. Kirk and Raven (l964:284).

12. Genesis, 1,10, 1,12, 1,31. King James translation. Even if chapter 1 is a later redaction, the same sentiment is found in 2,13: "It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helpmate."

13. Russell (1918), quoted in Burtt (l924:23).

14. Symposium, 201a-c. W.R.M. Lamb, translator. Any number of quotations to the same effect can be found throughout the Symposium and scattered among various other dialogues.

15. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I, 1099a13-15.

16. Republic, II, 372a-d.

17. Republic, 372e -373a.

18.

18. Wheelwright (l966:70)

19. Wheelwright (1966:70)

20. Wheelwright (l966:70)

21. Wheelwright (l966:79).

22. Wheelwright (1966:72).

23. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Question 95, Article 2, Whether Passions Existed in the Soul of the First Man.

24. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Question LXXXII (On Original Sin, As To Its Essence), Article 1.

25. Kuhn (1957).

26. Machiavelli (1520: ch. XV).

27. Hobbes (1651: ch. XI).

28. Kant (1785) p.15.

29. Gorgias 464 a-b.

30. Republic 444e. See also Crito 47d-e.

31. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Question LXXXII (On Original Sin, As To Its Essence), Article 1.