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"My Early Beliefs" | John Maynard Keynes about G.E. Moore
J.M. Keynes (1883-1946) essay "My Early Beliefs" was written in September 1938, when Keynes was about 55 years old. For publication after Keynes death, the text was edited and introduced by David Garnett, who places the memoir in the context of the audience it was written to be spoken to, who were young Marxists Keynes wanted to warn against basing their ideas, as he had done as a youth, on an a priori, and thus naive, and "disastrously mistaken", "view of what human nature is like". (From Two Memoirs, reprinted in Essays and Sketches in Biography, 1956)
Note.--My comments are written from the point of view of "Wittgenstein's logic of language", and maybe won't be understood without first understanding that.
Outline of this page ...
- How Keynes read G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica
- Both color and goodness were simple, direct perceptions: The use in the language (grammar) of the word 'good' (although goodness is a "non-natural property") was the same as the use in the language of the word 'green' (although green is a natural property)
- Keynes' view of Jeremy Bentham: Bentham's particular version of "what is good is what is useful" is a calculus without high ideal
- Keynes' distinction between "religion" and "morals"
- The missed distinction between Philosophy and Rhetoric
- G.E. Moore's method of philosophical argument
- "A stringent education" in Moore's dialectic
- "Define the question first, for only then can you answer without error" (Preface to the Principia)
- "If only you clearly define your question, then its answer becomes obvious"
- Marxism's relation to Benthamism
- What Keynes meant by calling himself an 'immoralist' (for he was a highly ethical man)
- Keynes' earlier, mistaken views of human nature and "rational self-interest"
- How World War One altered the picture Keynes had of human nature
How Keynes read G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica
We regarded all this as entirely rational and scientific in character. Like any other branch of science, it [ethics, or G.E. Moore's ethics] was nothing more than the application of logic and rational analysis to material presented as sense-data.
Is it logically possible for something "rational and scientific" to be based on the expression "non-natural property", the name of an objectively existing property for which there is no objective test, as there is for a "natural property", i.e. property (The antithesis of 'property' is 'not a property', not 'non-natural property')? Shouldn't Moore's idea have been seen to be non-rational and non-scientific because there is nothing to measure (verify), nor is there consistency (or inconsistency) with the known facts? Normally the reality of a property can be put to the tests of verifiable experience and reason (which can refute by uncovering unclarity or self-contradiction), both being tests that any objectively existing property must stand up to? All these comments are about rules of grammar.
Saying that something is a "non-natural" property is equivalent to saying that it is not a property, but that it is like the hippopotamus in Russell's study: defined into non-existence by the description given of it. "There is an hippopotamus in the room, but it has no head, no tail, no legs, no body." In other words there is no hippopotamus in the room. To say that the good is essentially non-perceptible as we normally use the word 'perceptible' is to say that the word 'good', unlike the word 'green', has a different use in the language than to name a property of things. [Note also that the word 'good' is not defined, its meaning is not explained, the way the word 'love' is.]
Can someone perceive a "non-natural property" -- what is the difference between perceiving one and not perceiving one? Isn't whatever seems right going to be right (PI § 258)?
If Moore's concept 'good' is a concept (and not nonsense; in this instance 'concept' = 'rules for the use of a word') and if there is agreement to what that word is applied to -- does not that agreement belong to a community, not of shared opinions (although Keynes' circle did try to persuade one another) but of shared judgments (cf. Aesthetics).
Calling something a non-natural property seems equivalent to saying that it belongs not to the thing perceived but to the perceiver. When Seneca says "There is no disputing taste", that is a grammatical remark (i.e. a reminder about (the rules, a definition of the) language use). Moore is using the word 'property' in a "non-natural" way: he is breaking the rules of the game (as in "language game"). Not as if Moore were not aware of all this: he knows that he is swimming against the current -- but unaware that the current is a grammatical one: Moore is either playing the game wrong or not at all (OC § 446) (i.e. talking nonsense).
[Moore's ethics is like Socratic ethics in so far as it says that good belongs to the nature of things. And this makes it very different from the views of Hume and Bertrand Russell.]
Both color and goodness were simple, direct perceptions
The grammar of the word 'good' (although goodness is a "non-natural property") was the same as the grammar of the word 'green' (although green is a natural property).
Our apprehension of good was exactly the same as our apprehension of green, and we purported to handle it with the same logical and analytic technique which was appropriate to the latter.
But in the case of color words, color charts can be used to objectively define those words, as e.g. the word 'green'. Is there anything corresponding to this in the case of the word 'good'? Is there a goodness chart? In a way there is: we do define the word 'good' by examples of good and evil deeds -- but not by pointing to a common property named 'goodness'. properties are defined by sight, touch, hearing, smell, taste, but 'good' and 'evil' are defined by reason. (The part of speech of word 'good' is not a property-word.)
Russell's Principles of Mathematics came out the same year [i.e. 1903] as [Moore's] Principia Ethica; and the former, in spirit, furnished a method for handling the material provided by the latter. (p. 244)
Russell's principle of judgment was not "Whatever seems correct is going to be correct" (PI § 258). But it seems that was the inherent, if unintended, principle of Moore's ethics.
The grammar of the word 'good' cannot be remapped to the grammar of a property-word, e.g. on the model of the grammar of 'green'. Well, yes, but does Moore think he has done that, or does he think that there is a distinct part of speech 'non-natural-property-word'? What Moore does is grammar stripping: he negates part of the grammar of 'property'; and thus the grammar of 'good' becomes like the grammar of 'hippopotamus' in the Russell's Wittgenstein story: there is no difference between it's being there and it's not being there. A "non-testable property" is not what we mean by the word 'property [of a thing]'. Compare saying "There is a solid object which your hand can pass through without meeting resistance"; but a 'solid object' is defined as one through which your hand cannot pass without meeting resistance (The "cannot" here signifies a definition, a rule for using a word; strip that rule away and the result is an undefined word = nonsense).
In the TLP, it might seem that God and value (good, beauty) are all "non-natural", because they are not "in the world", but that is not what either Wittgenstein or Moore meant.
Maynard Keynes' view of Jeremy Bentham
Keynes rejected Jeremy Bentham's particular version of "what is good is what is useful", because it was a calculus without high ideal.
... was there an actual objective quality "beauty", just like "green" and "good"? ... we flirted with the idea that there might be some intrinsic quality -- though not, perhaps, quite on a par with "green" and "good" and "beautiful" -- which one would call "interesting" ... Another competing adjective was "important", provided it was quite clear that "important" did not mean "useful". (p. 245)
That was their reaction against Bentham's economic utilitarianism [although Keynes does not use the word 'utilitarianism'], a reflection too of what Keynes calls their "unworldliness" (p. 243, 255). Dr. Sloper in Washington Square asks, "Good -- good for what?" as Xenophon says "If you are asking me whether I know of anything good in relation to nothing, I neither know nor want to know" (Memorabilia iii, 8, 2-3), which is a rejection of the idea that there are things that are good in themselves and that their appreciation is the most important thing.
Keynes' distinction between "religion" and "morals"
We accepted Moore's religion, so to speak, and discarded his morals. Indeed, in our opinion, one of the greatest advantages of his religion, was that it made morals unnecessary
Keynes called himself an "immoralist", but the following shows that Keynes meant something more than that.
... meaning by "religion" one's attitude towards oneself and the ultimate and by "morals" one's attitude towards the outside world and the intermediate.... Nothing mattered except states of mind ... chiefly our own. These states of mind were not associated with action or achievement or with consequences. They consisted in timeless, passionate states of contemplation ... (p. 242)
The Benthamite calculus of his times appeared to Keynes to have no Ideal: "good" was whatever produced the greatest happiness for the greatest number, "happiness" measured above all by material prosperity, and the "good" man was the one who contributed to this production. Such an ethics was no more than a moral guideline ("morals") for "doing good". But now G.E. Moore's book, as Keynes read it, was saying that the good for man lies not in "doing good" and but instead in "being good", in friendship and aesthetic enjoyment certainly -- but mostly in the inner life of the individual, in "states of mind".
Our religion closely followed the English puritan tradition of being chiefly concerned with the salvation of our own souls.... There was not a very intimate connection between "being good" and "doing good" ... But religions proper, as distinct from modern "social service" pseudo-religions, have always been of that character; and perhaps it was a sufficient offset that our religion was altogether unworldly -- with wealth, power, popularity or success it had no concern whatever, they were thoroughly despised. (p. 243)
In Trotsky's book Where is Britain going?, Trotsky quotes [Ramsay] MacDonald as saying, "Socialism forms the religion of service to the people". (Quoted in Keynes review, "Trotsky on England", March 1926, p. 276) This may be an example of what Keynes alludes to as "modern "social service" pseudo-religions".
"Being good" and "Doing good"
In saying that all "religions proper" have always been of that character Keynes gives a false account of historical religions or at least of our concept 'religion'. Keynes takes as his model English puritanism, and of course Keynes can set that limit to the concept 'religion', but by doing so he does not say what the essence of religion is (or what religion "really" is). As we normally use of the word 'religion', religion has no essence. And Keynes puts himself in the absurd position of saying that the so-called Catholic Epistle of James -- indeed, the whole of Jesus's teaching in the Gospel as I read it, in which one cannot be good without doing good, is not a "religion proper". However, all that is beside the point to Keynes' description of his early beliefs.
I have called this faith a religion ... But we should [i.e. would -- conditional, not moral] have been very angry at the time with such a suggestion. We regarded all this as entirely rational and scientific in character.... (p. 244. "Our apprehension of good was exactly the same as our apprehension of green.")
The missed distinction between Philosophy and Rhetoric
Socrates had persuaded Protarchus [in Plato's Philebus] that pure hedonism was absurd. Moore himself was only prepared to accept pleasure as an enhancement of a state of affairs otherwise good. (p. 247)
But Plato's Socrates does not "persuade" Protarchus; rather he refutes Protarchus' thesis by showing in discussion (Socratic dialectic: the cross-questioning of suggested answers) that Protarchus' thesis does not survive the test of reason -- and that is philosophy in contrast to rhetoric. The first refutes (disproves by discovering contradiction), the latter persuades to a thesis but does not prove that thesis to be true.
Also, our concept 'pleasure' is too broad to do any work here: because we also speak of "pleasures of the mind", which has nothing to do with the pleasures of eating and drinking. Is it logically possible to divorce being good from doing good -- unless "being good" amounts to "having good states of mind" -- is that, however, what we mean by 'moral good'?
Confidently distinguishing Good from bad or Perceiving the imperceptible
... the problems of mensuration, in which we had involved ourselves, were somewhat formidable. (p. 246)
Whether called measurement or not, the absence of objective criteria (which "perceiving the imperceptible" is not) -- "We regarded all this as entirely rational and scientific in character" -- for determining good from bad did not make these problems merely "somewhat formidable". (I think Keynes meant that remark ironically.)
It ["our stringent education in dialectic"] did not prevent us from laughing most of the time and we enjoyed supreme self-confidence, superiority and contempt towards all the rest of the unconverted world. (p. 248)
G.E. Moore's method of philosophical argument
It [i.e. our discussions were] all under the influence of Moore's method, according to which you could hope to make essentially vague notions clear by using precise language about them and asking exact questions. It was a method of discovery by the instrument of impeccable grammar and an unambiguous dictionary. "What exactly do you mean?" was the phrase most frequently on our lips. If it appeared under cross-examination that you did not mean exactly anything, you lay under a strong suspicion of meaning nothing whatever.
"A stringent education" in Moore's dialectic
It was a stringent education in dialectic; but in practice it was a kind of combat in which strength of character was really much more valuable than subtly of mind. (p. 246)
How did we know what states of mind were good? This was a matter of direct inspection, of direct unanalyzable intuition about which it was useless and impossible to argue.... In practice, victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accents of infallibility. Moore at this time was a master of this method -- greeting one's remarks with a gasp of incredulity -- Do you really mean that, an expression of face as if to hear such a thing reduced him to a state of wonder verging on imbecility ... Oh! he would say, goggling at you as if either you or he must be mad; and no reply was possible. (p. 243-244)
In other words, although Moore's "dialectic" was discussion, it wasn't dialectic in the classical, Socratic sense of 'dialectic' (which is more than simply question and answer). It was not Socratic because one was not required to render an account to others of what one claimed to know, an account that could stand up to the tests of reason and the evidence of verifiable experience, which do not persuade -- but prove. "Undoubting conviction" is not a criterion of truth: it neither proves nor refutes, although it may persuade. But the Socratic method is not persuasion, nor is the Platonic.
"Define the question first, for only then can you answer without error"
In the preface to his great work, bespattered with innumerous italics through which the reader who knew him could actually hear ... the vehemence of his utterance, Moore begins by saying that error is chiefly "the attempt to answer questions, without first discovering precisely what question it is which you desire to answer.... Once we recognize the exact meaning of the two questions, I think it also becomes plain exactly what kind of reasons are relevant as arguments for or against any particular answer to them." (p. 246)
About Philosophical Questions
That would disallow or make impossible the eternal questions without answers, for which nothing is "plain". And also, often trying to answer unclear questions -- and our philosophical questions usually are unclear, our ideas vague (philosophy often begins with an assertion, a thesis that needs to be cross-questioned for clarity and truth) -- ends up clarifying the question, identifying the question one presumably wanted to ask, but could not see clearly. It is a means of discovery, of learning something new. So that, if I understand Keynes aright, a trouble with Moore's demand to first exactly define the question is that it may not allow new ideas to emerge from the chaos of inexactness. (Wittgenstein's apparent insight "Philosophical investigations -- conceptual investigations" (Z § 458) may also have this effect, although as a preconception.) Don't try to keep chaos out -- "Do not stifle the spirit" (1 Thessalonians 5.19) -- because in all the nonsense you write, there may be a worthwhile idea.
"If only you clearly define your question, then its answer becomes obvious"
So we spent our time trying to discover precisely what questions we were asking, confident in the faith that, if only we could ask precise questions, everyone would know the answer. Indeed Moore expressly claimed as much. In his famous chapter on "The Ideal" he wrote: "Indeed, once the meaning of the question is clearly understood, the answer to it, in its main outlines, appears to be so obvious, that it runs the risk of seeming to be a platitude...." (p. 246)
[Moore's chapter on "The Ideal"] conveys the beauty of the literalness of Moore's mind, the pure and passionate intensity of his vision, unfanciful and undressed-up. Moore had a nightmare once in which he could not distinguish propositions from tables. But even when he was awake, he could not distinguish love and beauty and truth from the furniture. They took on the same definition of outline, the same stable, solid, objective qualities and common-sense reality.
I see no reason to shift from the fundamental intuitions of Principia Ethica ... That they furnish a justification of experience wholly independent of outside events has become an added comfort, even though one cannot live to-day secure in the undisturbed individualism which was the extraordinary achievement of the early Edwardian days ... (p. 250)
It was an important object of Moore's book to distinguish between goodness as an attribute of states of mind and rightness as an attribute of actions. He also has a section on the justification of general rules of conduct. The large part played by considerations of probability in his theory of right conduct was, indeed, an important contributory cause to my spending all the leisure of many years on the study of that subject ... (p. 250-251)
We use to regard the Christians as the enemy, because they appeared as the representatives of tradition, convention and hocus-pocus.
I don't know if Keynes meant that ironically or not, the part about "hocus-pocus" I mean. Because claiming that good is a "non-natural property" which is just as perceptible as the natural property green, is itself certainly hocus-pocus.
'Hocus pocus' ... was a corruption of 'Hoc est Corpus Meum', the words which the priest used when consecrating the Host in the Latin Rite. (Marshall, The Bishop xiii)
Marxism's relation to Benthamism
In truth it was the Benthamite calculus, based on an over-valuation of the economic criterion, which was destroying the quality of the popular Ideal. (p. 251)
Keynes calls Marxism "the final reductio ad absurdum of Benthamism" (p. 251); he calls these "economic bogus-faiths" (p. 252). For Marxism right conduct is whatever would be useful to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of working-class people, happiness measured above all by economic prosperity. I think the Benthamite calculus = "the greatest good for the greatest number". Of how Marxism reduces that calculus to absurdity by taking it to its limits, I am ignorant.
What Keynes meant by calling himself an 'immoralist' (for he was a highly ethical man)
We entirely repudiated a personal liability on us to obey general rules. We claimed the right to judge every individual case on its merits, and the wisdom, experience and self-control to do so successfully. This was a very important part of our faith ... We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions and traditional wisdom. We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term, immoralists.... we recognized no moral obligation on us, no inner sanction, to conform or to obey. Before heaven we claimed to be our own judge in our own case.... so far as I am concerned, it is too late to change. I remain, and always will remain, an immoralist. (p. 252)
Keynes' earlier, mistaken views of human nature and "rational self-interest"
The following may refer back to "We claimed the right to judge ..."
[The view] was flimsily based, as I now think, on an a priori view of what human nature is like, both other people's and our own, which was disastrously mistaken. [We believed -- Keynes calls this the "Utopian" or "meliorist" view] in a continuing moral progress by virtue of which the human race already consists of reliable, rational, decent people, influenced by truth and objective standards, who can be safely released from the outward restraints of traditional standards and inflexible rules of conduct, and left, from now onwards, to their own sensible devices, pure motives and reliable intuitions of the good. The view that human nature is reasonable had in 1903 quite a long history behind it. It underlay the ethics of self-interest -- rational self-interest as it was called ... and it was because self-interest was rational that the egoistic and altruistic systems were supposed to work out in practice to the same conclusions.
How World War One altered Keynes' picture of human nature
We were not aware that civilization was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skillfully put across and guilefully preserved. We had no respect for traditional wisdom or the restraints of custom. We lacked reverence, as [D.H.] Lawrence observed and as Ludwig [Wittgenstein] with justice also used to say -- for everything and everyone. (p. 253)
At this point Moore wrote in the margin of his copy of Keynes' memoir that the two -- i.e. lack of respect for tradition and custom and lack of reverence "for everything and everyone" -- are: "utterly different". (Paul Levy, Moore: G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (1981, orig. 1979), p. 157-158) And I don't know whether Keynes' "thin and precarious crust" statement is true; I would like to take argument.
I still suffer incurably from attributing an unreal rationality to other people's feelings and behavior (and doubtless to my own, too). (p. 254)
I myself still suffer incurably from attributing to other people (and to myself) a basic desire to become better human beings, always trying to do what is good, acting with disinterest towards others, always with kindness and generosity, not like a selfish scoundrel. And I always used to credit others with philosophical integrity, and the desire to learn (rather than simply be entertained and have fun, as if they were children). What I may have learned: Don't try to remake other people, either those you know or those in history (e.g. Galileo, Newton), in your own image, nor attribute to yourself more nobility than you have. All of us are far more ignorant than we would ever be able to imagine, and if virtue is knowledge and its corollary vice is ignorance --. This is enough reason to try to adopt Epictetus's motto "Bear and forbear".
The Community and the Individual
... there are many objects of valuable contemplation and communion beyond those we knew of -- those concerned with the order and pattern of life amongst communities and the emotions which they can inspire. Though one must ever remember Paley's dictum [I think this is William Paley (1743-1805)] that "although we speak of communities as of sentient beings and ascribe to them happiness and misery, desires, interests and passions, nothing really exists or feels but individuals", yet we carried the individualism of our individuals too far. (p. 254-255)
These are not the same thing: existence of the individual, existence of the community he lives in -- i.e. 'existence' has different meanings in these two cases. Yes, but what is the relation between the concepts 'existence' and 'the community'? Community exists in the relationships between the individual members of the community, e.g. common language, schooling, and laws and the shared values and views which justify the laws. (Of course, It is possible to end the existence of a community without ending the existence of its members, and in any community there may be dissenting individuals.) If A is to the north of B, then there exists a relation between them, but of course that relation is nothing you can touch.
And as the years wore on towards 1914 [and The Great War], the thinness and superficiality, as well as the falsity, of our view of man's heart became, as it now seems to me, more obvious ...
Our comments on life and affairs were bright and amusing, but brittle ... because there was no solid diagnosis of human nature underlying them. Bertie [Bertrand Russell] in particular sustained simultaneously a pair of opinions ludicrously incompatible. He held that in fact human affairs were carried on after a most irrational fashion, but that the remedy was quite simple and easy, since all we had to do was to carry them on rationally. (p. 255)
Other Essays:
Maynard Keynes also wrote biographical essays about the economist Alfred Marshall, 1842-1924, the mathematician Frank Ramsey, 1903-1930 and the scientist-magician Isaac Newton, 1642-1727, from which I have taken selections and made comments.
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