What kind of subject is Politics? Is it a science, an art, a religion or a philosophy? Is the study of politics an independent subject—a subject in its own right—or is it simply a branch of some other and, presumably, superior subject?

These questions require to be answered because there is obvious uncertainty at the moment about the nature and status of the study of politics. The uncertainty is shown by the fact that Politics goes under different names and is associated with different subjects in different universities. Politics is sometimes called Political Philosophy and sometimes Political Science. Some universities confine the study of politics to History. Others make it a branch of Ethics. The latest tendency is to associate Politics and Economics and regard the economic as the most important of the relations of politics.

Among the objections to the independence of Politics, one deserves to be noted. Politics, it is said, is an aspect of a total social situation which it shares with Ethics and Economics. Thus it is a mistake to try to disentangle the political factor and view it in itself.

In his 1947 British Academy lecture on Naturalistic Ethics, Mr. W. F. R. Hardie is concerned to ask himself whether a naturalistic theory of ethics can give a “satisfactory account of our moral knowledge or convictions,” or whether some form of non-naturalism is demanded by our moral experience. It will be remembered that after a careful sifting and examination of certain features of our moral knowledge or convictions, Mr. Hardie suspends judgment between naturalism and non-naturalism, observing that “on the one hand philosophers who start from the ostensible facts of our moral experience and thinking, and are most careful and accurate in their rendering of these facts, have tended to be led to objectivist and anti-naturalistic conclusions. Where they least carry conviction is in the moral epistemology which they assume or defend. When we reflect, with the epistemological issue in mind, on the actual process in ourselves of moral reflection and decision, we are more inclined to sympathize with a ‘moral sentiment’ theory than we ought to be if the rationalists are wholly in the right.” In what follows I wish to consider another feature of our moral experience which Mr. Hardie did not examine in his lecture and which appears to be of considerable importance, namely the situation where, to put it very roughly for the moment, we find ourselves at variance with another person or persons on a moral issue, where, for instance, I hold that a certain course of conduct is right, and the other person or persons hold that it is wrong, or vice versa, and where further we may pursue divergent courses of action accordingly. I wish to ask myself whether the naturalistic commentary on this situation of ethical disagreement is altogether satisfactory when we consider it in the light of “the ostensible facts of our moral experience and thinking,” whether, in fact, to use another phrase of Mr. Hardie's, it squares altogether with “our fundamental moral convictions” in regard to such a situation. The naturalistic commentary with which I am primarily concerned is that which is now sometimes labelled “the emotive theory of ethics,” and is to be found admirably developed, for example, in Professor Stevenson's book Ethics and Language.

I propose to examine what I take to be the point at issue between subjectivist and objectivist theories of ethics and to explain that the controversy between them is unreal. It springs from a misunderstanding of the nature of appraisal sentences. What I hope to show is that if such sentences were really analysable in the way in which the critics and many of the supporters of subjectivist theories suppose, then those theories would indeed, as it is sometimes put “fail to do justice to the facts of moral experience.” But it seems to me that objectivist theories are no better off. They make exactly the same mistake though in a more sophisticated way. I therefore propose to see whether any useful results can be achieved by construing appraisal sentences on rather different lines.

By appraisal sentences I mean (a) sentences of the form “I approve of …, I think well of …, I commend …, etc.” I shall call these simple appraisals, (b) sentences of the form “… is good, … is meritorious, … is praiseworthy, etc.” I shall call these moral appraisals. In these terms, subjectivist theories assert that moral appraisals can always be expressed without change of meaning by simple appraisals, though perhaps the addition of an imperative sentence of some kind is required to complete the translation. Objectivist theories deny this possibility and claim that moral appraisals assert truths about the independent world and not psychological facts about the speaker.

In the most recent edition of Language, Truth and Logic, Professor A. J. Ayer still maintains that pure mathematics is analytic, being in fact merely a vast system of tautology. He is much more confident about this than are most contemporary professional mathematicians who have investigated the foundations of their subject. Following the breakdown of the efforts both of Frege and of Russell and Whitehead to derive pure mathematics from logic, i.e. to prove that the denial of any one proposition of mathematics would necessarily be self-contradictory, Hilbert attempted to prove the more modest thesis that pure mathematics is consistent, i.e. that no two propositions of mathematics can contradict each other; but in 1931 Gödel discovered that even this thesis was undecidable according to the “rules of the game.” As Weyl has recently lamented, “From this history one thing should be clear: we are less certain than ever about the ultimate foundations of (logic and) mathematics.”

The sense in which Ayer uses the terms analytic and tautology implies also that in his view the activities of pure mathematicians lead to nothing new. It is true that he remarks that “there is a sense in which analytic propositions do give us new knowledge. They call attention to linguistic usages of which we might otherwise not be conscious, and they reveal unsuspected implications in our assertions and beliefs.” But, he continues, “we can also see that there is a sense in which they may be said to add nothing to our knowledge. For they may be said to tell us what we know already. ” This denial of novelty in mathematics is as typical of contemporary positivism as the prophecy of Comte that the composition of the stars would never be revealed to us and the objections of Mach to the atomic hypothesis were characteristic of nineteenth century positivism. Indeed, one wonders why the term positivism should have been appropriated by successive philosophers whose common outlook could be so much more fittingly described as negativism.

The present state of ethical theory and practice is disquieting. Objectivism, in all its varieties, is unconvincing, and subjectivism, hedonic or emotive, is intellectually incredible and socially intolerable. No one is ethically content—except the dogmatist and the sceptic, who act willy nilly with the exponents of “might-cum-persuasion makes right.” Can we find a happier middle region between these inhospitable poles? Perhaps the very limitations of human valuation will provide the ground that ethics requires.

Let us begin by considering the conditions which must hold if ethical action is to be possible:

1. Only if the agent can provide a justifying reason for his choice of action can he claim to act ethically. For ethical action is a species of purposive action, and to act purposively entails the ability to give justifying reasons for one's choice of action. (“Justifying” here is to be understood as “putatively justifying”). Thus ethical action presupposes putatively grounded ethical judgment.

2. Justifying reasons must be acknowledgeable by all competent judges, i.e. by all persons who (I) are acquainted with all relevant knowledge of the nature and consequences of the alternative courses of action, (2) allow as far as possible for congenital, cultural and idiosyncratic bias, (3) are capable of sane and serious reflection, and (4) are able to make survey of their experience and to draw conclusions from it. For the judgment “the action A is ethically preferable to its alternatives B (in this situation)” entails “A ought to be done” which in turn entails “every competent judge is capable of acknowledging the ground of the judgment ‘A is ethically preferable to B’ and consequently would be able to set himself to perform A as an ethical act, (i.e. an autonomous act for which the agent can provide a justifying reason).” We can assure ourselves of this requirement of acknowledgeability by observing that whenever we resolve, and not merely settle, an ethical disagreement, we have achieved not only a factual, predictive, valuational and attitudinal agreement between the disputants, but a joint acknowledgment of the ground of the ethical judgment. Without this, the agreement could not be said to be ethical, whether the judgment be right or wrong or neither, but merely an agreement to disagree, ethically. Unless ethical disagreement is in principle resolvable, ethical judgment is impossible, for we should be unable to claim that our choice ought to be acted upon.

New ideas are seldom received with moderation. When Spengler's Decline of the West appeared it was greeted with wild enthusiasm, which collapsed like a pricked bubble under criticism. Now that Toynbee, a generation later, has taken up the theme, there seems to be a determination not to be caught a second time. His critics have no wish to be unfair, and much of what they say is true enough; but to anybody who has a sympathetic understanding of what he is attempting most of it seems entirely irrelevant and misleading.

Toynbee's critics fall broadly into two classes—those for whom he says too little, and those for whom he says too much. In the first class are those who complain that he does not define his civilizations, that he does not say whether he is for or against Christianity, or that he does not explain how the deterministic aspects of his results can be reconciled with his liberalism and his avowed belief in free will. Yet if Toynbee had given precise answers to these and other questions, if he had come forward with a cut-and-dried philosophical system, these same critics might well have been the first to complain that he was imposing a priori conceptions on the facts of history—a charge that has been made against every philosophy of history, and one which it is very difficult to refute. Surely we can respect the integrity of a historian who declines to go beyond the facts, or adopt opinions before compelled by the evidence.

A New Philosophy of History for our age of transition from the Christian era to the period of world-unity, combined with a penetrating analysis of our present situation, is offered by Karl Jaspers' Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (Artemis-Verlag, Fr. 14.80). Jaspers is, however, more post-Hegelian than post-Christian, and in fact anti-Hegelian, but pro-Christian. Rejecting Hegel's dictum that the appearance of Christ is the “axis of world history,” i.e. the aim of the preceding, and the origin of the subsequent, centuries, Jaspers tries to discover the real axis of history empirically at about 500 b.c. Eager to find a common historical origin for East and West, he claims the time from 800 to 200 b.c. as axis-time. He believes that in these centuries, man as we know him to-day, with his religion, art, philosophy, and science, emerged in China, India, Iran, Palestine, and Greece. He further believes that a new axis-time is approaching, and the analysis of the three tendencies leading to it, i.e. of socialism, world-unity, and faith, forms one of the most valuable parts of the book. Like Toynbee he believes that a return to a transformed Biblical faith is necessary, if the West is to be saved. Pessimistic about the immediate future, he is optimistic concerning the remote future. History, as the history of single nations, states, or civilizations, is at an end. World History is only just now beginning. This is a book of European importance. It formulates the crucial question, whether Europe has still the spiritual strength to avoid a relapse into its Asiatic background with its despotism, uniformity and loss of personal liberty. In Jaspers' development, it marks a transition from reflecting upon mere possibilities to a consideration of historical reality. His booklet, The Spiritual Situation of our Time (1931) concluded with a chapter on “What may become of Man,” but what really did happen to man in the meantime proved that reality is much richer in possibilities than the liveliest imagination could possibly foresee. Does he now actually reach reality, or rather a “possible” History, as the stage on which man reveals himself in all his potentialities, and which moves from one fictitious axis-time to another equally fictitious? Jaspers' Einführung in die Philosophie (Artemis, Fr. 7.90), most enjoyable and a masterpiece of book-production, is the best introduction to his own philosophy. It emerges here as a possible form of philosophizing in an age of transition; original, sincere, cultivated and stimulating. His method is still the way of reflection, but this now includes meditation and self-examination. Jaspers rightly demands of-a philosopher (1) a thorough knowledge of one special science, (2) an equally penetrating knowledge of at least one great philosopher, and (3) sincerity in his daily conduct and acceptance of responsibility for whatever he is doing. Should he succeed in educating a generation of philosophers on these lines, that would indeed give new hope for the future of European philosophy. Jaspers' Inaugural Lecture, Philosophic und Wissen-schaft (Artemis, Fr. 1.30), discusses in a clear and competent manner this important problem and clearly exposes the confusion of some contemporary conceptions of science, e.g. in Marxism. His lecture, Unsere Zukunft und Goethe (Artemis, Fr. 3.–), rejects a Goethe cult, but stresses the new manner in which Goethe could be appreciated by the present generation. All in all, Jaspers represents the best in German tradition, and is now one of the leading European philosophers.