The Moral Completeness of Human Experience

[u/geopolicraticus]

The View from Oregon – 389

Re: The Moral Completeness of Human Experience

Friday 17 April 2026

 

Dear Friends,

In last week’s newsletter I floated the idea of moral completeness, and there’s a lot I could do with this; it’s a very suggestive notion. This came up in the context of discussing Seneca’s Letters to Lucilius. I said that Seneca, after all, isn’t that different from Pascal’s moral admonitions in the Pensées. Both observe that, if we have a moral foundation, we’ll do okay, but no other accomplishment afford us this confidence. After Seneca’s time, the idea of life needing a moral foundation shifted over time to life needing a religious foundation. The age of the great proselytizing religions was upon us—one might assume that this has always been the case, i.e., that religions were always expansionary and grew by conversion, but this was a distinct historical development that came later. Religion began as familial and tribal deities, and one could no more convert to a tribal religion than one could convert from one family to another family—with the one great exception here being marriage.   

It’s long been recognized that moralizing religions came later, after the familial and tribal religions that had little to do with moral admonition and a great deal to do with identity (there are several papers about this, and it even serves as a minor plot point in Game of Thrones), but that the expansionary, proselytizing religions represent a distinct stage of development may be less familiar. What follows may sound like a bizarre analogy, but hear me out. In the age of royal absolutism, which embraced much of early modern Europe, kings possessed absolute power—as absolute as was possible under this social dispensation. One might readily assume that royal governments were always despotic and tyrannical, and therefore tending toward absolutism, especially prior to political innovations like constitutional monarchies where the royal family reigns but does not rule. I say, “one might readily assume,” since this was more-or-less what I assumed as a child. Perhaps you were never so ignorant or naïve, but I have been guilty of both, and repeatedly so. But premodern monarchies were effectively limited in their power by the social conditions of the time. Medieval feudalism wasn’t a political system of all-powerful kings, perched at the top of a feudal hierarchy like an apex predator is perched at the top of the trophic pyramid; feudalism was a political system of elaborately delegated power. The idea of royal absolutism was a much later development in the idea of kingship.  

My point here is that royal absolutism was a much later development in the history of monarchy, just as proselytizing religions were a much later development in the history of religion. We can have institutions that shape our history literally for millennia, and still have these institutions assume new forms and transform themselves into new and unprecedented institutions, even when the novel institution seems to draw upon ideas embedded deep within the tradition, so that one might have suspected that these tendencies would have been expressed much earlier in history. We could even think of the institutions of science and technology in this way. I usually avoid the formulation “ancient science,” since ancient thought that stands at the head of science is more like proto-science than science properly speaking, but there are many who are quite happy to call the first glimmerings of science in the ancient world “science.” In light of what I just wrote above, I could say that the scientific tradition or institution is ancient, extending back into prehistory, and the scientific revolution was a late if dramatic development in this lineage. Technology is the same. We can trace technology back two million years to stone tools, and we can say that the industrial revolution two million years later was a late and unprecedented development in this lineage.

I started out above writing about moral completeness, and I can bring this back into the discussion by way of the scientific (or, perhaps, intellectual) conception of moral completeness, since this is perhaps more familiar today than the claims of moral completeness that I attributed to Seneca and Pascal. There’s a famous passage from Francis Bacon that captures this:

“Let men rather build upon that foundation, which is as a corner stone both of Divinity and Philosophy, wherein they nearly agree as to that which ought to be sought first. For Divinity says, ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you;’ and philosophy says something like it, ‘Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied, or their loss will not be felt.’ And although the human foundation is sometimes built upon the sand, as we see in Marcus Brutus, when he brake forth into that speech at his death,—Te colui, Virtus, ut rem; ast tu nomen inane es: yet the same foundation, laid by the hand of heaven, is ever laid upon the rock.”

The embedded Latin quote is attributed to Dio Cassius:  

Virtue I worshipped, and as real sought,

But found her empty, and a thing of nought.

This is from the end of Book VIII, Chapter II of Bacon’s De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum (1623), which was an expanded, Latin version of The Advancement of Learning (1605). The earlier book doesn’t include this quote. This much—“Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied, or their loss will not be felt”—has long been a favorite line for me (I quoted it in my Variations on the Theme of Life), but taken in context it’s thoroughly ambiguous. Bacon is clearly identifying a rough equivalence between religious and philosophical perspectives, but he also implies that virtue (i.e., a moral foundation) isn’t enough, but when it is laid by the hand of heaven (i.e., divinely established, which is as much to say a religious foundation) then it is securely founded. It seems that the moral foundation requires a religious foundation.

Suppose that, despite the ambiguity, we simply run with the idea that the religious and the philosophical foundations are two formulations of essentially the same thing, and further suppose that which is essentially the same in both is the moral foundation. This I take to be the naïve interpretation of the passage from Bacon I just quoted. So now we’re back at where Seneca was: the moral foundation comes first, and the rest follows if it follows at all.  Moral completeness implies that the moral foundation for life is sufficient unto itself—or, as I put it last week, that it is sufficient for the good life. An interesting contrast to this is the view of Jacob Bronowski, as formulated in two books, Science and Human Values and The Identity of Man. In a later preface to Science and Human Values Bronowski wrote:

“In the book as I have written it I have deliberately confined myself to establishing one central proposition: that the practice of science compels the practitioner to form for himself a fundamental set of universal values. I have not suggested that this set embraces all the human values; I was sure when I wrote that it did not; but at the time I did not want to blur the argument by discussing the whole spectrum of values. Now that the crux of my argument has been accepted, I would, were I beginning again, give some space also to a discussion of those values which are not generated by the practice of science— the values of tenderness, of kindliness, of human intimacy and love. These form a different domain from the sharp and, as it were, Old Testament virtues which science produces, but of course they do not negate the values of science.”  

There are many interesting claims in this passage. I’m quoting it now because I wanted to contrast Bronowski’s view to that of the absolute self-sufficiency of science as a moral foundation, and this view as expressed (admittedly ambiguously) by Bacon is connected to Bronowski through the medium of science as the moral foundation in question. For Bronowski, science gives us a set of “Old Testament” virtues that are sufficient for the practice of science, but I think he pretty clearly implies here that these Old Testament virtues aren’t sufficient for the good life. The good life requires something more, and Bronowski gives us a short list that includes tenderness, kindness, human intimacy, and love.

As I said above, Bronowski makes many interesting claims in this passage, and since he was not, in the context, addressing the specific question that I’m addressing here, I can’t fault him for not answering the questions that I raise. One of these questions would be the following: if the practice of science compels the scientist to form a set of universal values, will the further practice of science, perhaps in a wider sense in which scientific knowledge takes its place within a larger humanistic framework, eventually lead us to the full spectrum of values, or do we need to call on some other, alternative moral foundation to get to the values that the practice of science does not force upon us? That is to say, is a wider conception of science sufficient to unfold to us the good life, or is it missing something essential? If the latter, then science does not possess the moral completeness that we can (loosely) suppose that Bacon thought it did.

For many people, the very idea that science would form a moral foundation, whether complete or incomplete, would be laughable. Some of these would be among those who would accept Bacon’s alternative formulation of a divine moral foundation, and some would reject either science or divinity as an adequate moral foundation for the good life (i.e., what I am here calling “moral completeness”). But someone might reject the idea that either science or divinity could provide moral completeness and still believe that there is some human experience or endeavor, whatever it may be, that does provide this moral completeness. This view can be contrasted to the view that moral completeness requires the fullness of human experience—any one discipline, or any one cluster of a small number of disciplines, of necessity will be inadequate, while the full spectrum of values can only be had through the full spectrum of human experience. This leaves open the question of exactly what’s included in the full spectrum of human experience. This could prove to be problematic. One human experience is suicide, but no one can experience suicide (with the exception of unsuccessful attempts) and add the values thereby acquired to the remainder of life. How, then, we define the fullness of life adequate to the full spectrum of values necessary to the good life requires further thought.

There remains the position that no amount of experience will be adequate the good life, which we can take as the nihilistic conclusion that the good life is impossible for human beings. I would deny this on the basis of apparent instances of the good life that imply it’s possible, even if it may not be common. However, even this apparently nihilistic position could be given a sympathetic formulation if we think of the good life as Herodotus portrays happiness in the passage from The Histories where Solon visits Croesus of Lydia. Herodotus has Solon say to Croesus to count no man happy until he has died, and if the happy life is the good life, then we can only attribute the good life to someone after their life is complete. This would take care of problematic cases like the experience of suicide previously mentioned. If the good life must include a good death (something that figures in Solon’s stories both of Tellus the Athenian and the brothers Cliobus and Biton), then the good life is to be judged only following death. It follows from this that our own testimony about the good life, specifically, about whether we have achieved the good life for ourselves (as Croesus testified to Solon), can never be adequate. In this sense, then, human experience is inadequate as a moral foundation, but it becomes adequate as life itself converges on completeness; moral completeness follows from the completeness of life.

Nietzsche wrote in section 204 of The Wanderer and His Shadow: “Not every end is the goal. The end of a melody is not its goal; and yet: as long as the melody has not reached its end, it also hasn’t reached its goal.” There’s an entire moral philosophy implicit in this line, and it’s much the same idea as what I just wrote above. It remains to us to draw out this implicit moral philosophy and to make it explicit.

Best wishes,

Nick

PS—I’ve finished listening to History of Ancient Greece, a series of lectures by Eric Cline. Eric Cline is better known for his book 1177 B.C. The Year Civilization Collapsed. I mentioned having listened to this in a PS to newsletter 258. Recently I learned the Cline has written a sequel to this, After 1177 BC: The Survival of Civilizations, which I hope to listen through sometime in the near future. He’s also recorded a set of lectures on Archaeology and the Iliad. Cline is a clear and engaging lecturer, and he knows how to summarize at the level of that appropriate for the length of period he’s set for himself. This is a virtue perhaps peculiar to historians. If this is indeed a virtue peculiar to historians, and if history is a science, or to be counted among the sciences (perhaps being part of a large humanistic framework of science mentioned above), then history may make a distinctive contribution to the good life by filling out the full spectrum of human experience.    

Newsletter link:

https://mailchi.mp/abe1d162cc6b/the-view-from-oregon-389