An
Atheist’s Values – Forty Years On
What philosophy book has
made the most lasting impression on you? For me, it is a book that I read
whilst an undergraduate, but it wasn’t a book on the official reading list. My
tutor introduced it to me with these words: ‘This is a book I like myself. The
author does have some slightly dotty ideas. For instance
he thinks that we should be cautious about employing Roman Catholics in
the civil service because their main allegiance is to Rome. But I like
the book.’ I don’t know whether the health warning was to encourage me to read
it or in case I turned out to be a Christian fundamentalist, but it had the
effect of making me rush out to buy it.
2004 marks the fortieth
anniversary of the publication of that book, An Atheist’s Values by
Richard Robinson. At the time it came out – not so long after the Lady
Chatterley obscenity trial – it probably came as a surprise to many that
atheist’s had values at all. I’m sure that, like Lady Chatterley, it was
a book that many establishment figures would have wanted to keep from their
servants. Forty years on, I still find three reasons to recommend it.
Firstly, despite its
eccentricities, An Atheist’s Values says many rather wise things, and it says them well. I started
jotting down nuggets to include in this article, but there were simply too
many. The following selection are enough to illustrate Robinson’s happy knack
of finding the bon mot :-
“Philosophy is essentially a hair-splitting
form of religion”
“It is no accident that
all the great persecutors have been objectivists”
“The human race is alone
and insecure and doomed. Let us meet this situation with cheerfulness, courage,
love, and the affirmation and pursuit of our ideals”
“The beginning of wisdom
is to value something for itself. (And the second step in wisdom is to value a
second thing for itself.)”
The second reason I
recommend taking a look at Robinson’s book is its capacity to help you think
about your values. Why bother to do this? Over to Robinson. ‘Anyone who tries
to answer the question ‘What things are good?’ is doing something of great
importance and interest, namely appreciating the actualities and possibilities
of life and taking general decisions about his [or her] future actions’. You
may be persuaded that adopting Robinson’s own personal values - truth, reason, love and beauty- would
enrich your life. Myself, I find Robinson’s discussion of reason particularly
illuminating. Robinson defines reason to be much broader than the use of a
single faculty, ‘reason’. He defines
reason to be the virtue of thinking well, and as such it incorporates
‘wondering, imagining, composing, remembering ... and indefinitely many more’
capacities as well as reasoning. Personally,
I’m much more attracted by the idea of thinking well in this wider sense than I
am of being a Spock-like logic machine. Robinson follows his definition by a
discussion of how to be a better thinker
that just happens to be one of the best short treatments of the subject
I’ve read.
Enlightening as
Robinson’s discussions of particular values are, even more instructive is a
method that can be inferred from Robinson’s book which can help everyone think
about their values. It goes something like this:-
There is a further stage, that of declaring and
defending your values publicly. This
step is very important, because it forces you to really examine your
assumptions and gives you the opportunity to adapt what you say in the light of
other people’s comments.
This last point connects
to my final reason for celebrating the book’s
fortieth anniversary. It is the potential of works like An Atheist’s
Values to advance practical philosophy as a body of ideas. By ‘practical
philosophy’ I mean the application of philosophy to individual lives, through
considering such questions as the good life, the meaning of life and the nature
of emotions. Robinson was an Oxford don and an acknowledged expert on Plato and
Aristotle. As such, he was in a fine position to think through the theoretical
foundations of the good life. In the last 20 years there have been many notable contributions to the philosophy
of well-being – including the works of James Griffin, Martha Nussbaum and Derek
Parfit. There has also been a growth in
the ‘practical philosophy movement’ largely outside academia, led by
philosophical counsellors. Yet so far there has very little dialogue between
practitioners and academic philosophers interested in well-being. Surely there
is much to learn on both sides. I expect that Robinson would have been
fascinated to learn how philosophical counselling clients responded to his
ideas. Similarly practitioners have much to learn from academics writing about
the good life, critiquing practical methods and perhaps even developing them
themselves.
In order to encourage the latest generation
of would-be Richard Robinsons, Practical Philosophy, a journal that is
normally the domain of philosophical
practitioners, has just announced that it is to offer a £500 Practical Philosophy Prize Essay. The prize will be awarded for the best
original contribution to practical philosophy submitted, and is open to
practitioners, academics and Ph.D students alike. It’s one small step on a road I that I personally would like to
see lead to universities offering options like ‘Philosophy and the good life’
and ‘Practical Philosophy’. Who knows, An Atheist’s Values may, somewhat
belatedly, find itself on some reading lists …
Originally published in The Philosophers Magazine ©Tim
LeBon