The philosophy of loyalty

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Contents

LEOTUEE PAGS

I. Nature and Need of Loyalty . . 1

II. Individualism 49

II

I have entitled these lectures, "The Philosophy of Loyalty/' I may as well confess at once that my title was suggested to me, early last summer, by a book that I read — a recent work by a distinguished ethnologist, Dr. Rudolf Steinmetz of The Hague, entitled "The Philosophy of War." War and loyalty have been, in the past, two very closely associated ideas. It will be part of the task of these lectures to break up, so far as I can, in your own minds, that ancient and disastrous association, and to show how much the true conception of loyalty has been obscured by viewing the warrior as the most typical representative of rational loyalty. Steinmetz, however, accepts, in this respect, the traditional view. According to him, war gives an opportunity for loyal devotion so notable and important that, if war were altogether abolished, one of the greatest goods of civilization would thereby be hopelessly lost. I am keenly conscious of the sharp contrast between Steinmetz's theory of loyalty and my own. I agree with Steinmetz, as you will later see, regarding the significance' of loyalty as a central principle of the moral life. I disagree with him very profoundly as to the relation of war both to true loyalty and to civilization in general. The very contrast has suggested to me the adoption of the form of title which Steinmetz has used.

The phrase, "Philosophy of Loyalty," is intended to indicate first, that we are here to consider loyalty as an ethical principle. For philosophy deals with first principles. And secondly, my title means to suggest that we are to view the matter critically and dis* criminatingly, as well as practically. For philosophy is essentially a criticism of life. Not everything, then, that calls itself loyalty, and not every form of loyalty, shall be put in our discussion on the same level with every other moral quality that uses or that deserves the ancient name in question. Moreover, the term " loyalty' ' comes to us as a good old popular word, without any exact definition. We are hereafter to define our term as precisely as possible, yet so as to preserve the spirit of the former usage. In estimating the place of loyalty in the moral life, we are, moreover, to follow neither traditional authority nor the voice of private prejudice. We are to use our reason as best we can ; for philosophy is an effort to think out the reasons for our opinions. We are not to praise blindly, nor to condemn according to our moods. Where loyalty seems to be a good, we are to see why; when what men call loyalty leads them astray, we are to find wherein the fault lies. Since loyalty is a relative term, and always implies that there is some object, some cause, to which any given loyalty is to be shown, we must consider what are the fitting objects of loyalty. In attempting an answer to these various questions, our philosophy of loyalty must try to delve down to the roots of human conduct, the grounds for our moral standards, as far as our time permits.

But when all these efforts have been made towards a philosophical treatment of our topic, when certain discriminations between true and mistaken loyalty have been defined, when we have insisted upon the fitting objects of loyalty, and have throughout indicated our reasons for our theses, there will then stand out one great practical lesson, which I shall try to illustrate from the start, and to bring to its fruition as our lectures close. And the lesson will be this : In loyalty, when loyalty is properly defined, is the fulfilment of the whole moral law. You can truthfully centre your entire moral world about a rational conception of loyalty. Justice, charity, industry, wisdom, spirituality, are all definable in terms of

n enlightened loyalty. And, as I shall maintain, this very way of viewing the moral world — this deliberate centralization of all the duties and of all the virtues about the one conception of rational loyalty — is of great service as a means of clarifying and simplifying the tangled moral problems of our lives and of our age.

Thus, then, I state the task which our title is intended to set before us. The rest of this opening lecture must be devoted to clearing our way — and to a merely preliminary and tentative view of our topic. I must first attempt a partial and provisional definition of the term "loyalty" as I shall use that term. I wish that I could begin with a final and adequate definition; but I cannot. Why I cannot, you will see in later lectures. At the moment I shall try to direct your minds, as well as I can, merely to some of the features that are essential to my conception of loyalty.

Ill

Loyalty shall mean, according to this preliminary definition : The willing and practical and thoroughgoing devotion of a "person to a cause. A man is loyal when, first, he has some cause to which he is loyal ; when, secondly, he willingly and thoroughly devotes himself to this cause ; and when, thirdly, he expresses his devotion in some sustained and practical way, by acting steadily in the service of his cause. Instances of loyalty are : The devotion of a patriot to his country, when this devotion leads him actually to live and perhaps to die for his country; the devotion of a martyr to his religion; the devotion of a ship's captain to the requirements of his office when, after a disaster, he works steadily for his ship and for the saving of his ship's company until the last possible service is accomplished, so that he is the last man to leave the ship, and is ready if need be to go down with his ship.

Such cases of loyalty are typical. They involve, I have said, the willingness of the loyal man to do his service. The loyal man's cause is his cause by virtue of the assent of his own will. His devotion is his own. He chooses it, or, at all events, approves it. Moreover, c 17 his devotion is a practical one, He does something. This something serves his cause. Loyalty is never mere emotion. Adoration and affection may go with loyalty, but can never alone constitute loyalty. Furthermore, the devotion of the loyal man involves a sort of restraint or submission of his natural desires to his cause. Loyalty without self-control is impossible. The loyal man serves. That is, he does not merely follow his own impulses. He looks to his cause for guidance. This cause tells him what to do, and he does it. His devotion, furthermore, is entire. He is ready to live or to die as the cause directs.

And now for a further word about the hardest part of this preliminary definition of loyalty : A loyal man, I have said, has a cause. I do not yet say that he has a good cause. He might have a bad one. I do not say, as yet, what makes a cause a good one, and worthy of loyalty. All that is to be considered hereafter. But this I now premise: If one is loyal, he has a cause which he indeed peris son ally values. Otherwise, how could he be devoted to it ? He therefore takes interest in the cause, loves it, is well pleased with it. On the other hand, loyalty never means the mere emotion of love for your cause, and never means merely following your own pleasure, viewed as your private pleasure and interest. For if you are loyal, your cause is viewed by you as something outside of you. Or if, like your country, your cause includes yourself, it is still much larger than your private self. It has its own value, so you as a loyal person believe. This essential value it would keep (so you believe) even if your private interest were left out of account. Your cause you take, then, to be something objective — something that is not your private self. It does not get its value merely from your being pleased with it. You believe, on the contrary, that you love it just because of its own value, which it has by itself, even if you die. That is just why one may be ready to die for his cause. In any case, when the loyal man serves his cause, he is not seeking his own private advantage.

Moreover, the cause to which a loyal man is devoted is never something wholly impersonal. It concerns other men. Loyalty is social. If one is a loyal servant of a cause, one has at least possible fellow-servants. On the other hand, since a cause, in general, tends to unite the many fellow-servants in one service, it consequently seems to the loyal man to have a sort of impersonal or superpersonal quality about it. You can love an individual. But you can be loyal only to a tie that binds you and others into some sort of unity, and loyal to individuals only through the tie. The cause to which loyalty devotes itself has always this union of the personal and the seemingly superindividual about it. It binds many individuals into one service. Loyal lovers, for instance, are loyal not merely to one another as separate individuals, but to their love, to their union, which is something more than either of them, or even than both of them viewed as distinct individuals.

So much for a preliminary view of what loyalty is. Our definition is not complete.

It raises rather than solves problems about the nature of loyalty. But thus indeed we get a first notion of the general nature of loyalty.

IV

But now for a next step. Many people find that they have a need of loyalty. Loyalty is a good thing for them. If you ask, however, why loyalty may be needed by a given man, the answer may be very complex. A patriot may, in your opinion, need loyalty, first because his country needs his service, and, as you add, he actually owes this service, and so needs to do his duty, viz. to be loyal. This first way of stating a given man's need of a given loyalty, turns upon asserting that a specific cause rightly requires of a certain man a certain service. The cause, as one holds, is good and worthy. This man actually ought to serve just that cause. Hence he stands in need of loyalty, and of just this loyalty.

But in order thus to define this man's need of loyalty, you have to determine what causes are worthy of loyalty, and why this man ought to serve his own cause. To answer such questions would apparently presuppose a whole system of morals, — a system which at this stage of our argument we have not yet in sight.

But there is another, — a simpler, and, at the outset, a lower way of estimating the value of loyalty. One may, for the time, abstract from all questions as to the value of causes. Whether a man is loyal to a good cause or to a bad cause, his own personal attitude, when he is loyal, has a certain general quality. Whoever is loval, whatever be his cause, is devoted, is active, surrenders his private self-will, controls himself, is in love with his cause, and believes in it. The loyal man is thus in a certain state of mind which has its own value for himself. To live a loyal life, whatever be one's cause, is to live in a way which is certainly free from many well-known sources of inner dissatisfaction. Thus hesitancy is often corrected by loyalty; for the cause plainly tells the loyal man what to do. Loyalty, again, tends to unify life, to give it centre, fixity, stability,

Well, these aspects of loyalty are, so far as they go, good for the loyal man. We may therefore define our need of loyalty in a certain preliminary way. We may take what is indeed a lower view of loyalty, regarding it, for the moment, in deliberate abstraction from the cause to which one is loyal. We may thus regard loyalty, for the moment, just as a personal attitude, which is good for the loyal man himself.

Now this lower view of our need of loyalty is the one to which in the rest of this lecture I want you to attend. All that I now say is preliminary. Results belong later. Let us simply abstract from the question whether a man's cause is objectively worthy of his loyalty or not. Let us ask: What does a man gain by being loyal ? Suppose that some cause, outside of and also inclusive of his private self, so appeals to a man that he believes it to be worthy, and becomes heartily loyal co it. What good does he get personally out of his loyalty? In order to answer this question, even in this preliminary way, I must indeed go rather far afield, and define for you, still very tentatively, one of the best-known and hardest of the problems of our personal life.

V

What do we live for? What is our duty? What is the true ideal of life? What is the true difference between right and wrong? What is the true good which we all need? Whoever begins seriously to consider such questions as these soon observes certain great truths about the moral life which he must take into account if his enterprise is to succeed, that is, if he is ever to answer these questions.

The first truth is this : We all of us first learned about what we ought to do, about what our ideal should be, and in general about the moral law, through some authority external to our own wills. Our teachers, our parents, our playmates, society, custom, or perhaps some church, — these taught us about one or another aspect of right and wrong. The moral law came to us from without, It often seemed to us, in so far, something other than our will, something threatening or socially compelling, or externally restraining. In so far as our moral training is still incomplete, the moral law may at any moment have to assume afresh this air of an external authority merely in order to win our due attention. But if we have learned the moral law, or any part of it, and if we do not ask any longer how we first learned, or how we may still have to learn afresh our duty, but if, on the contrary, we rather ask: "What reason can I now give to myself why a given act is truly right? What reason can I give why my duty is my duty?" — then, indeed, we find that no external authority, viewed merely as external, can give one any reason why an act is truly right or wrong. Only a calm and reasonable view of what it is that I myself really will, — only this can decide such a question. My duty is simply my own will brought to my clear self-consciousness. That which I can rightly view as good for me is simply the object of my own deepest desire set plainly before my insight.

For your own will and your own desire, once fully brought to self -consciousness, furnish the only valid reason for you to know what is right and good.

This comment which I now make upon the nature of the moral law is familiar to every serious student of ethics. In one form or another this fact, that the ultimate moral authority for each of us is determined by our own rational will, is admitted even by apparently extreme partisans of authority. Socrates long ago announced the principle in question when he taught that no man is willingly base. Plato and Aristotle employed it in developing their ethical doctrines. When St. Augustine, in a familiar passage in his Confessions, regards God's will as that in which, and in which alone, our wills can find rest and peace, he indeed makes God's will the rule of life ; but he also shows that the reason why each of us, if enlightened, recognizes the divine will as right, is that, in Augustine's opinion, God has so made us for himself that our own wills are by nature inwardly restless until they rest in harmony with God's will. Our restlessness, then, so long as we are out of this harmony, gives us the reason why we find it right, if we are enlightened, to surrender our self-will.

If you want to find out, then, what is right and what is good for you, bring your own will to self -consciousness. Your duty is what you yourself will to do in so far as you clearly discover who you are, and what your place in the world is. This is, indeed, a first principle of all ethical inquiry. Kant called it the Principle of the Autonomy or self-direction of the rational will of each moral being.

But now there stands beside this first principle a second principle, equally inevitable and equally important. This principle is, that I can never find out what my own will is by merely brooding over my natural desires, or by following my momentary caprices. For by nature I am a sort of meeting place of countless streams of ancestral tendency. From moment to moment, if you consider me apart from my training, I am a collection of impulses. There is no one desire that is always V 27 present to me. Left to myself alone, I can never find out what my will is.

You may interpose here the familiar thesis that there is one desire which I always have, namely, the desire to escape from pain and to get pleasure. But as soon as you try to adjust this thesis to the facts of life, it is a thesis which simplifies nothing, and which at best simply gives me back again, under new names, that chaos of conflicting passions and interests which constitutes, apart from training, my natural life. What we naturally desire is determined for us by our countless instincts and by whatever training they have received. We want to breathe, to eat, to walk, to run, to speak, to see, to hear, to love, to fight, and, amongst other things, we want to be more or less reasonable. Now, if one of these instinctive wants of ours drives us at any moment to action, we normally take pleasure in such action, in so far as it succeeds. For action in accordance with desire means relief from tension ; and that is usually accompanied with pleasure. On the other hand, a thwarted activity gives us pain. But only under special circumstances does this resulting pleasure or pain of the successful or of the hindered activity come to constitute a principal object of our desire. We all do like pleasure, and we all do shun pain. But a great deal of what we desire is desired by instinct, apart from the memory or the expectation of pleasure and pain, and often counter to the warnings that pleasure and pain have given to us. It is normal to desire food because one is hungry, rather than because one loves the pleasures of the table. It is water that the thirsty man in the desert longs for, rather than pleasure, and rather than even mere relief from pain as such. For much of the pain appears to his consciousness as largely due to his longing for water. Pain, then, is indeed an evil, but it is in part secondary to thwarted desire; while, when pain appears as a brute fact of our feelings, which we indeed hate, such pain is even then only one amongst the many ills of life, only one of the many undesirable objects. The burnt child, indeed, dreads the fire;

but the climbing child, instinctively loving the ways of his remote arboreal ancestors, is little deterred by the pain of an occasional fall.

Furthermore, if I even admitted that I always desire pleasure and relief from pain, and nothing else, I should not learn from such a principle what it is that, on the whole, I am to will to do, in order to express my desire for pleasure, and in order to escape from pain. For no art is harder than the art of pleasure seeking. I can never learn that art alone by myself. And so I cannot define my own will, and hence cannot define my duty, merely in terms of pleasure and pain.