Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Bentham and James Mill

« Bentham and James Mill Jeremy Bentham was born in 1748 in London; his prosperous father, a lawyer who became wealthy from property rather than the law, planned out for his son a brilliant legal career.

After an early education at Westminster and Oxford he was called to the Bar in 1769.

However, instead of mastering the complexities, technicalities, precedents and mysteries of the law in order to carve out a successful career, Bentham's response to such chaos and absurdity was to challenge the whole structure of law and to attempt to replace it with a system as perfect and as rational as it could be.

In many ways a typical philosophe of the eighteenth century, Bentham at this early stage seized on the possibility of improvement through knowledge, on the supremacy of reason over superstition and of order over chaos.

Despite his living and writing into the new age of the nineteenth century—post-revolutionary, industrialized, democratic—this early inspiration that enlightenment would bring about a better world never left him.

To help create a world as it might be—as it ought to be—rather than succeed in a world as it was—customary, prejudiced and corrupt—was his constant aim whatever the particular object he pursued within his encyclopaedic interests, and whether the study be abstract and philosophical or detailed and practical.

His central concern was the study of legislation, a concern developed from his own disillusionment with the state of English law and his positive response to the works of those like Helvetius and Beccaria who had argued that there must be some general and rational test as to the adequacy of existing law in order to justify its reform.

As we shall see, this task involved both expository and censorial elements and the principle of utility which Bentham formulated provided the basis of his life's work. During the eighteenth century his main approach assumed that the successful achievement of Enlightenment thought would lead to its equally successful application through direct contact and conversion of benevolent despots or at least their influential advisers.

In the 1780s he spent two years in Russia with some hope of convincing Catherine the Great, but with his failure to gain influence amongst the powerful, whether over his general ideas or over his detailed projects, he became increasingly convinced that sinister interests—the law, the Church, Parliament—would act as obstacles to Reason and Reform.

In which case, politics would have to be reformed—the ruling elite would have to be tamed—before his life's work could be realized.

Constitutional law not just civil and criminal law stood in need of drastic reform.

The influence of James Mill and later the growth of a school of reformers—the Philosophical Radicals—gave Bentham, now in his sixties, a new zest for work and an added commitment to reforming the law in Russia, America, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Latin America, as well as to reforming all manner of abuses in British public life.

Indeed he was as productive in the last twenty years of his life as he had ever been before, if not more, and his belief in the supremacy of his method and his principle as the key to philosophical and practical advancement was as clear and deep as when he first discovered it over sixty years earlier. The starting point for the whole project which gives meaning and form to these brief biographical points was Bentham's early realization of the importance of language.

Not only in the field of law, where falsehoods, absurdities and nonsensities were common, but in many other fields as well, careful definition was sacrificed to vagueness and emotiveness.

The dominant and therefore sinister interests in any area—law, morality, politics—maintained a language in which the words were either totally unclear or contained an inherent prejudice or bias in their favour. Unless language could be made clear the truth would be concealed and the possibility of improvement would be lost. Definition is the key and it depends first on distinguishing between real and fictitious entities and then on determining the legitimacy or not of the latter by Bentham's new method—that of paraphrasis. Nouns can be divided into those which are names of real entities—those things whose existence gives immediate consciousness, which can be directly perceived by the senses, and which are either states of body or states of mind—and fictitious entities which are referred to as if they really exist but need further exposition to give them meaning.

In the first category the most basic examples would be pleasure or pain while in the latter the most frequent examples, say in law, would be duty, right or power.

These latter are linguistic constructs and as such are ‘fictions' but, as those examples show, this does not mean that language could do without them.

Although they do not exist in themselves and although they give rise to doubt and confusion this does not mean that they are all meaningless.

Fictions then are necessary, but how to distinguish fictions that are legitimate from those which are strictly speaking nonsense—fictional entities from fabulous entities? The key here is a method which while ‘translating' fictional entities into real entities at the same time gives a criterion for denying meaning to those fictions incapable of such ‘translation'. The method Bentham discovered was that of paraphrasis, the only mode of exposition for those abstract terms where there was no superior genus to which they belonged and where the Aristotelian method of definition per genus et differentiam was thus inapplicable.

To define a fictitious entity only by reference to other fictitious entities offered no solution.

The clarification needed is in terms of the real and perceptible; Bentham does this not by translating one word by another or one term by its component parts, but by translating one sentence in which the term appears into another which is equivalent but in which the fictitious entity is replaced by a real one.

In these two parallel propositions the import would be the same but the device of paraphrasis would give simple clarity to the sentence translated and if such translation into real terms were impossible it would reveal the fabulous or nonsensical nature of the original ([1.5], 495).

An example might help here: however much we might classify rights and duties, the general idea of a right or duty can only be explained by paraphrasis—thus a sentence containing those terms would be translated into one explaining for what the law makes us liable to punishment, for doing or not doing, and punishment is then further explained in. »