Of all the virtues of H.A. Prichard’s “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?” (1912) — and there are many — its greatest is in exposing the mischief the term ‘really’ has played in philosophy, as in: “Is X really a duty?” ‘Does Y really exist?” “Do we really know that P?” That sort of thing.
In common parlance, the expression has its uses and does no harm. We might reasonably ask about an advertised product, “Is it really the best at getting rid of stains?” insofar as advertisements exaggerate, and whether or not a claim about a product is hyperbole is generally determinable. After drinking too many beers at a party and making out with someone, one might fairly ask oneself the next day, “Was she really as good looking as I thought she was?” given that consuming excessive amounts of booze can distort a person’s perception, and whether or not one finds a person attractive is easily confirmed.
In philosophy, the term has no useful function and the capacity to do tremendous harm. Indeed, I would say that it has fueled the discipline’s most fruitless lines of inquiry in ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, and other areas. It has done this by stoking two distinctly philosophical forms of hubris: first, that there are special methods of verification and demonstration, beyond the ordinary ones, that are the special province of philosophers; and second, that there is a grand finale at the end of the investigative rainbow. There aren’t and there isn’t, but this hasn’t stopped people from building entire careers on the basis of these two conceits.
Feeling obligated can be onerous, and who among us hasn’t wondered on occasion whether we really are duty-bound to do whatever it is we’ve been contemplating? We may think about the person to whom we feel obligated and why we feel this way. Perhaps he has done us a kindness or maybe we have inadvertently wronged him. We may reflect on the nature of our relationship more generally. We may even take into consideration the times that he has failed to do something that we thought he was obligated to do. All of this is natural and common, and may lead us to change our minds about our current feelings…or not.
A certain kind of philosopher however (and in truth, it’s most kinds of philosophers) takes this unremarkable and universal human experience as calling for a theory. He may come up with an account of what constitutes “the good,” then work through whether the action in question “maximizes” it, and conclude that he “really” is obligated after all. This may offer a certain frisson, as he basks in the confidence that his unruly and unreliable feelings have been brought under the steady and elevated light of reason, and if he has a penchant for social media and is of an excitable temperament, he may even lecture strangers about it online.
Alas, it’s all so ephemeral. Inevitably, some won’t be impressed and the glow of righteous certainty will quickly give way to contention. The philosopher will discover that whatever he may think and however much he might believe he’s “proven” it, he has no capacity to make others agree with him or do whatever it is he has deemed “obligatory” and that lecturing people just makes them cranky. Another philosopher may weigh in, armed with an entirely different theory that yields a contradictory judgment for which she claims the support of reason’s steady and elevated light, and our aspirant moralist will find himself in never-ending rounds of arguments over which theory is “really” the correct one. More frustrating still, a clever dick like Prichard may come along and point out that what he thought he’d proven hadn’t really been proven after all; that it actually doesn’t follow from “x is good” that “one ought to do x,” unless one presumes that “what is good ought to be the case,” which means that he simply has grounded one obligation in another obligation (philosophers love “grounding” things) and thus, accomplished nothing.
In epistemology this kind of dysfunctional use of “is x really ___?” begins with Descartes and takes the form of “do I really know this thing I thought I knew?” The point is not that there were no radical skeptics before him (the ancient Pyrrhonists birthed the genre), but that it was with Descartes that the thing took on the character of a “Quest for the Holy Endpoint”; for some “ultimate warrant” that would render whatever knowledge we’ve obtained immune from future contradiction or disconfirmation; and that regardless of the subject matter, human understanding could be modeled on geometry; that…
…all things, to the knowledge of which man is competent, are mutually connected in the same way, and that there is nothing so far removed from us as to be beyond our reach, or so hidden that we cannot discover it, provided only we abstain from accepting the false for the true, and always preserve in our thoughts the order necessary for the deduction of one truth from another. [1]
As you might expect, the project was doomed from the start. Finding the Holy Endpoint (or the Holy Starting Point, depending on how one looked at it) turned out to be really hard. The doubts Descartes offered were toughies — even if you flat-out see something, directly in front of you, it could be a dream or an hallucination, and even something as solid-seeming as a deductive mathematical proof might be marred by one persistently “mis-deducing” — and none of the available responses seemed up to the task. Hume and Reid saw the rot inherent in the thing (that something could be the case, unmoored from any tangible possibility, seems a poor motivation for serious doubt of any kind) and deemed the Search for the Holy Endpoint a fool’s errand, while those who were committed to seeing it through were sent into ever deeper spirals of esoteric weirdness. Kant came along and introduced the “transcendental argument,” in which one basically just took whatever was being doubted and then contrived to “demonstrate” that it was “necessary for the possibility of” some other thing that everyone already agreed on. Meanwhile, Descartes had already pretty much admitted defeat (without actually admitting it), by invoking God’s “perfection” as a reason to think human beings couldn’t be so broken as to always get things wrong, and if you are wondering how you could reasonably doubt something you’d seen with your own eyes but nonetheless know that God exists and has all these perfect attributes, you’d be right, but the idea of the grand finale at the end of the investigative rainbow and of philosophers uniquely tasked with finding it make for a heady and intoxicating cocktail.
I could tell nearly identical stories across the philosophical landscape, but these are more than enough to make the point. By and large, philosophers have an antipathy for uncertainty, open-endedness, conflict (and conflictedness), contingency, indeterminacy, fallibility, hesitation, and any number of other related “states” that largely define the human condition. In short, many philosophers are intensely uncomfortable with their humanity, and rather than trying to get better at being human, they are trying to transcend it instead. This is not a humanistic program, but a quasi-religious one, and should be anathema to a discipline rooted in the idea of being reasonable.
How else to explain the refusal to accept the very clear and obvious answer to the “Is X really___?” question, with which Prichard concludes his short and pithy essay? If I wonder whether I’ve added or multiplied correctly, I do the sum or multiplication again. If I wonder whether I’m really obligated to do something, I revisit the thoughts and feelings and circumstances that made me feel obligated and see if they do so again. This is all that one does, and it is all that one can do, and notice that even after doing it, the doubts may remain or one may change one’s mind later. This is a feature of human thinking and feeling, not a bug, and is something that can’t be fixed and doesn’t need fixing. There are no special means of verification beyond the ordinary ones, and because they are inconclusive by nature, there is no grand finale at the end of philosophical investigation. The questions and hesitations and doubts go on in perpetuity. That so much of philosophy has devoted itself to opposing this healthy, grounded self-understanding is remarkable from a psychological perspective, but from the standpoint of inquiry, it is the reason why we come across as so obsessive, dogmatic, and downright weird to ordinary people and to those in the Academy whose disciplines are more accepting of human nature.
Notes
[1] Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. (1637)
