478
HENRY DAVID AIKEN
The discussions of the intellectual obstacles, the muddles and mis–
conceptions, that stand in the way of self-knowledge are among the
most enlightening in Hampshire's book. And both his increasingly
Spinozistic view of the way to self-mastery and freedom through knowl–
edge of the causes of the passions, as well as his Baconian belief that the
more a person knows of the laws of nature (including the laws of
human nature) the greater is his power and freedom of choice, are
freshly and imaginatively argued. Most impressively, he makes us realize
that the return to a kind of logical and linguistic dualism which opposes
facile reduction of the modes of thought to those of physical behavior
does not in the least entail either indifference to the natural order or
hostility to the intellectual operations and attitudes proper to its under–
standing. Just the opposite.
In his closing pages, Hampshire drastically hedges his bets about
the scope of the difference between that conception of "behavior" which
is translatable
in
terms of purely bodily changes and motions and that
which connotes action and purpose. Perhaps from a residual anxiety lest
he appear to challenge the proper prerogatives of empirical science, he
now concedes that determinism, conceived as the doctrine that all
human behavior is explainable in terms of scientifically correlated "in–
puts" and "outputs," may be true. Surprisingly, he is also prepared to
admit that statements containing such intentional verbs as "to desire,"
"to act" and "to believe" may be "replaceable" by physical state de–
scriptions of the sort that could enter into precise and experimentally
testable natural laws. His only reservations about determinism are now
that there is a normative factor inherent in certain
first-person
state–
ments in the present and future tenses about some states of mind and
some types of conduct, and that this element would not be reproduced
in the descriptions of a scientific observer. To me, h0wever, it appears
that this is by no means all that Hampshire was arguing for in his
earlier accounts of possibility and of volition.
Now I do not deny that there may be general and impersonal
knowledge of "human possibilities"-what men generally want or desire
in particular circumstances. This is the sort of knowledge which, added
to the knowledge of the forms of human discourse and of life dependent
upon them, largely constitutes what we call the knowledge of human
nature. But this knowledge, as Hampshire himself shows, is (as we used
to say) not reducible to knowledge of mindless processes explainable,
as Spinoza would say, in terms of the attribute of extension. And if this
means, as no doubt it may, that a normative element such as he imputes
to first person present and future tense statements may be present
in all statements about mental "facts," then so
be
it.
