Digressions&Impressions

Seneca on Freedom (Letter 51)

I have set freedom as my goal [Libertas proposita est]; and I am striving for that reward. And what is freedom, you ask? It means not being a slave to any circumstance, to any necessity [necessitati], to any chance; it means compelling Fortune to enter the lists on equal terms. And on the day when I know that I have the upper hand, her power will be naught. When I have death in my own control, shall I take orders from her?--Seneca, Letter 51, Translated by Richard Mott Gummere (with minor corrections).

When, in a moment of sadness, I decided to return to Seneca, I was hoping for wisdom. My first response in reading Letter 51 is disappointment. The letter understands itself as a polemic/litigious [litigavimus]; and it is clearly written by a man out of sorts, in deep turmoil. We are informed near the start of the letter that he left the luxury resort town, Baiae, the day after he reached it. More importantly, for an author, he can't even keep straight who he has been reading "Messala, – or was it Valgius." And his inner turbulence is matched/echoed by the description of the near omnipresence of volcanoes, "many regions belch forth fire" [cum plurima loca evomant ignem]. 

We don't have to be Freud to discern Seneca is aware his time is nearly up (see also the quoted passage above suggests). There are lots of hints in the letter that he is holding up the modesty of Scipio in political defeat/exile as exemplar to himself. And the reader is left to wonder in what sense Seneca understands his own political retirement as leading to suicide or death. There is, in fact, an interesting historical question, hinted at by Plutarch, whether Scipio committed suicide (admittedly Livy gives no hint of it).*

We know that Seneca found it very difficult to give up his luxury. For some this marks him as a hypocrite. I don't think I am engaging in himpathy when I say that I find more interesting the fact that his inability to live up to his ideals does not make him change his ideals; and his struggles with adhering to his ideals -- the rapid succession of arrival and departure from Baiae are comic and tragic at once -- allow him also to be instructive even persuasive about the challenges to achieve them. The best witnesses against vice are not the saintly preacher, but (as most rehab centers recognize now) former alcoholics. 

And yet, above I quote the more philosophical passage. Is freedom really a kind of inner state or, better yet, a disposition? A disposition that allows one to be immune from even necessity (that is, death). I recognize that immunity from external causes is an attractive thought during a pandemic. 

When I connect the threads of the letter, it's clear that Seneca is trying his hand at inner exile (political and emotional), and aware he is failing. And failing badly; his travel habits and his inner emotional life (those bursting flames) tell another story.+ This gives the start of the letter -- "Quomodo quisque potest" translated by Gummere as 'everyone does his best'; I think I prefer 'each according to his abilities'  -- a double-edged sword. He is falling, and it gives his teaching a harsh quality. 

It is not easy to write these lines, recognizing my own teaching fails. And yet, it is difficult to feel compassion for Seneca, the stern lecturer of the worldly-successful Lucilius; Seneca, the exorcist of pleasures.  

Looking back at the sentence before the one quoted at the top of this post,** what's lacking is not Seneca's desire for pleasure or his fear about his political fate. No, what's missing in the description of Seneca's inner exile is the acknowledgment of his sadness or, if it that is too modern, of his disappointments his frustrated ambitions. This is mirrored in his treatment of Scipio's downfall/ruin [ruina], which is centered on Scipio's management of his manly honor/nobility [honestius].

Of course, the modern desire for psychological realism bumps up against the ancient rules of decorum. It is too easy, perhaps too lucrative, to turn Seneca into self-help or compassion with his sadness; he is quite clear that "if any vice rend your heart, cast it away from you; and if you cannot be rid of it in any other way, pluck out your heart also."

I wanted to stop there, but I noticed on re-reading that this evisceration of the self is a kind of second-best (perhaps third-best) therapy. In fact, Seneca suggests that in order to destroy the vices, passion needs to be set against passion ("Above all, drive pleasures from your sight. Hate them beyond all other things,"). To eliminate (or strangle [strangulent]) the pleasures, they, or their objects, must be hated; and to habituate such self-betterment, this killing off of bad temptations, location matters. 

And just before I press 'publish,' and, think how Christian Seneca sounds, I ask myself why is he reading "Messala...or Valgius?" These are, after all, in addition two significant authors, also two great political survivors of the turmoil of the late republic and early empire. Messala, in particular, was adept at adapting to changed circumstances.

I don't mean to suggest that we should read Seneca's use of freedom in republican terms here. But rather to remark that if freedom is a disposition that allows one to be immune from all circumstance (etc.), it does not follow that one has to be passive in the face of changing fortunes and retreat into an untouchable (and sadness denying) inner citadel. And while it is foolish to think one can escape death (necessity), one may well be able to influence its circumstances and other goods of fortune. I linger on the thought; maybe Scipio is an anti-exemplar here.

It would be a sublime comedy if the very text that is assumed to teach a form of resignation, the killing off of last remnants of pleasures, is really a manual for political survival by a man still hoping for reversal of fortune. Oddly, this cheers me up.   

 

 

 

7 March 1979: Foucault on The Price of Reality (XXIII)

A second reason for dwelling on these problems of neo-liberalism is what I would call a reason of critical morality....
These two ideas, which are close to each other and support each other— namely, [first], that the state has an unlimited force of expansion in relation to the object-target, civil society, and second, that forms of state give rise to each other on the basis of a specific dynamism of the state—seem to me to form a kind of critical commonplace frequently found today. Now it seems to me that these themes put in circulation what could be called an inflationary critical value, an inflationary critical currency. Why inflationary?
In the first place, it is inflationary because I think the theme encourages the growth, at a constantly accelerating speed, of the interchangeability of analyses. As soon as we accept the existence of this continuity or genetic kinship between different forms of the state, and as soon as we attribute a constant evolutionary dynamism to the state, it then becomes possible not only to use different analyses to support each other, but also to refer them back to each other and so deprive them of their specificity.
For example, an analysis of social security and the administrative apparatus on which it rests ends up, via some slippages and thanks to some plays on words, referring us to the analysis of concentration camps. And, in the move from social security to concentration camps the requisite specificity of analysis is diluted. So, there is inflation in the sense of an increasing interchangeability of analyses and a loss of specificity.
This critique seems to me to be equally inflationary for a second reason, which is that it allows one to practice what could be called a general disqualification by the worst. Whatever the object of analysis, however tenuous or meager it is, and whatever its real functioning, to the extent that it can always be referred to something which will be worse by virtue of the state’s intrinsic dynamic and the final forms it may take, the less can always be disqualified by the more, the better by the worst. I am not taking an example of the better, obviously, but think, for example, of some unfortunate who smashes a cinema display case and, in a system like ours, is taken to court and sentenced rather severely; you will always find people to say that this sentence is the sign that the state is becoming fascist, as if, well before any fascist state, there were no sentences of this kind—or much worse.
The third factor, the third inflationary mechanism which seems to me to be characteristic of this type of analysis, is that it enables one to avoid paying the price of reality and actuality inasmuch as, in the name of this dynamism of the state, something like a kinship or danger, something like the great fantasy of the paranoiac and devouring state can always be found. To that extent, ultimately it hardly matters what one’s grasp of reality is or what profile of actuality reality presents. It is enough, through suspicion and, as François Ewald would say, “denunciation,” to find something like the fantastical profile of the state and there is no longer any need to analyze actuality. The elision of actuality seems to me [to be] the third inflationary mechanism we find in this critique.
Finally, I would say that this critique in terms of the mechanism and dynamism of the state is inflationary inasmuch as it does not carry out a criticism or analysis of itself. That is to say, it does not seek to know the real source of this kind of anti-state suspicion, this state phobia that currently circulates in such varied forms of our thought. Now it seems to me—and this is why I have laid such stress on the neo-liberalism of 1930–1950—that this kind of analysis, this critique of the state, of its intrinsic and irrepressible dynamism, and of its interlinking forms that call on each other, mutually support each other, and reciprocally engender each other is effectively, completely, and already very clearly formulated in the years 1930–1945. At this time it was quite precisely localized and did not have the force of circulation it has now. We find it precisely localized within the neo-liberal choices being developed at this time. You find this critique of the polymorphous, omnipresent, and all powerful state in these years when, liberalism or neo-liberalism, or even more precisely, ordoliberalism was engaged in distinguishing itself from the Keynesian critique and at the same time undertaking the critique of New Deal and Popular Front policies of state control and intervention, of National Socialist economics and politics, of the political and economic choices of the Soviet Union, or, in a word, of socialism generally. It is in this context, in this German neo-liberal school, and taking things in their narrowest or almost petty form, that we find both this analysis of the necessary and as it were inevitable kinship between different forms of the state, and also this idea that the state has a specific, intrinsic dynamism which means that it can never halt its expansion and complete takeover of the whole of civil society.--- Michel Foucault, 7 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 8, The Birth of Biopolitics, 187-189.

Much of lecture 8 is devoted to the French uptake, and re-invention, of neoliberalism, including the development of ideas surrounding negative income tax, in the 1970s. Foucault is rather apologetic about this (cf. "bore" 203). But in passing, he explains one of his main reasons for spending so much time on (German) neo-liberalism, which, it turns out, is distinct from its impact on public policy. Simply put, according Foucault a form of neoliberal thought has had an outsized impact on a certain kind of intellectual discourse that understands itself as moral, even on the right side of history, and yet simultaneously does not recognize and grasp its own sources of social criticism and, in a certain and more important way, its futility as a form of social criticism. That is to say, according to Foucault the road-to-serfdom thesis has become so influential among the educated that it has become a species of fantasy incapable of generating needed distinctions; of describing or learning from reality.

It is important to be clear that Foucault is not here criticizing the original road to serfdom thesis.1 Nazism and Stalinism are real phenomena which developed out of and, to be explained by earlier historical and political events. But the road-to-serfdom also fed into other habits of thoughts, which gained wide currency beyond ordo-austrian-libertarian circles. The inability to make distinctions and grasp essential features of reality creates circumstances when demagogues and cynical authoritarians  are turned into purported fascists and nazis (or where protests -- which are disproportionately petty to the threat of nazism -- are turned into riots or uprisings and other acts of resistance). 

What Foucault is diagnosing, I think, that the road-to-serfdom thesis, once unmoored from its historical specificity becomes an instrument for manichean thinking that infects commentariat that presents itself as learned and intellectually savvy. It is not just among intellectuals, because Stateside it influences, "if not a mass movement, at least a widespread movement" (193; he has in mind the shaping of libertarian ideals on the right). And what Foucault recognizes that this form of thinking is not limited to what are now known as classical liberals, but it becomes predominant across the intellectual spectrum (even if the terminology sometimes shifts from uncontrollable growth of the state to uncontrollable growth of elites). 

That is to say, the unmoored-road-to-serfdom thesis becomes a species of populist thought in which all states morph into each other and each is, say, an election away from fascism and/or the renewed continued control of unaccountable elites. And the problem Foucault confronts is that if you deny the unmoored road-to-serfdom thesis (because these rightwingers are not leading us to fascism; or this social policy is worth the cost), then you are thought an enabler of fascism or an apologists for stalinism. It would be tempting to repeat the exercise for every work that markets itself as against the rise of fascism or denounces <fill in your favored shibboleth> today.

In reading Foucault here, we should note that he is not ruling out that fascism increases.* But in so far as this growth exists, it is due to the implosion or erosion of the state. And that's because Foucault locates fascism in parties, and perhaps cults of personalities, that are at odds with state independence and fill the gap once state power has collapsed.* 

That is to say, Foucault agrees, in his own voice, with a core feature of the ORDOs--that a key bulwark against fascism is the independence of the state against would be particular (party) interests  or cults of personality who tame the state's independence.  And, again following Weber, he claims that it is the 'governmentality of the party' that undermines state independence and so opens the door to fascism.** But, once one refuses to engage in Manichean thought, it does not follow that any strengthening of parties automatically leads to fascism; party elites and primary voters have something to say about this, too. 

Strikingly, and I close with this, Foucault does not ask why or how a kind of fantasy critique stays so attractive and why it persists, despite its anodyne quality, decade after decade. That is to say, it is clear that Foucault thinks it undermines what he calls 'critical morality.' But it is left unclear why, after diagnosing the problem, he thinks a fundamentally -- recall the Freudian themes of lecture 1 -- neurotic, infantile intellectual culture can persist and metastasize on itself in democratic life. That is to say, Foucault diagnoses the effects of mechanisms that prevent the reality principle from being practiced and exercised.+ But Foucault does not explicitly spell out the underlying causes because, I surmise, to do so would overstep the bounds of prudence, that is, break necessary taboos of democratic life. And so he leaves that effort to an audience he simultaneously indicts. 

 

 

 

On Analysis

Seven or so years ago, near the beginning of my analysis, I explained to my analyst, after some frustrating experiences, how important it was to me that they always engage with the actual content of what I was saying. I took a huge amount of care in expressing myself – choosing exactly the right words, multiplying distinctions in order to communicate with laser precision – and I didn’t want to be ‘interpreted’ before the letter of what I was saying had been fully attended to....Those seven or so years ago, when I implored my analyst to take me at my word, it was, almost needless to say, only the first way, according to which it contrasts with “spirit,” that I had in mind. Two or three years after that, well into the analysis, I was becoming more comfortable and more curious. The tight control over my words – the only real power I could exert to protect myself and ensure the analysis did not unleash anything too scary – came to feel constricting, even suffocating...

 At the end I exclaimed “I’d like to go back to that injunction I made right at the start. Please make an effort to engage with the letter of what I am saying before trying to hear what is unsaid.” To which they replied, with some, subsequently confessed, hyperbole: “You do realize that is literally the exact opposite of what I’m supposed to be doing?!” (One reason to think that the designation of psychoanalysis as “the Jewish science” may be misleading.) In some sense, of course, what they said is obvious. They are listening for what is unconscious, which is unlikely to be found in the obsessively-controlled language that I wield almost like a weapon. But it startled me nonetheless and I decided to write this post to help work through it.--Simon J. Evnine "For the letter kills, but the spirit gives life"

One recurring fascination is the common root of 'analysis' in analytical philosophy that it shares with the 'analysis' in psychoanalysis. I sometimes wonder why analyse and its cognates had such pull over late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Viennese and Cambridge) minds. I was reminded of this by Simon Evnine who regularly calls my attention to his blog, "The Parergon." I hope he does not mind too much being the trigger occasion for these impressions. I treat him here as the everyman of analytic philosophy in which all of us can be substituted into his place, opaque contexts be damned!

It is noticeable that Simon treats his precision and "care in expressing" in terms of a "weapon." Even when used in self-defense, weapons are explicitly designed to hurt others.* I have noted before (recall) the analytic philosopher's tendency to describe the toolkit of her  craft in terms of surgical (and laser-like) instruments, but in those instances the instruments are meant to heal. Of course, Simon's intent is not to hurt others, but self-protection ("the only real power I could exert to protect myself.")+ 

I do not know a better expression of the fragility at the root of much analytic philosophy. Any badly formulated phrase is a misstep of monumental proportions. The robustness of the whole collapses with the weakest link. This fragility is fueled by "frustrating experiences." Once primed by psychoanalysis, it's hard not to discern the dependent child here. 

I do not mean to suggest that the analytic philosopher's attitude toward rigor  and clarity only expresses fragility. One may as well -- and here I am inspired by Simon's "extravagant letteralism" -- read it as pure holiness (recall here on Carnap). After all, a Torah scroll is disqualified if even a single letter is added or a single letter is deleted. Every sign must be correct. 

A few days ago a lovely blog post by Liam Kofi Bright inspired me to reflect a bit on what the norms of analytic philosophy would have to be if we "conceived of conceptual engineering as a means to enter into lifeworlds of others." I asserted that the non-dominating way of doing so requires a willingness to be transformed by the experience. What I missed saying explicitly then, and I suspect this omission (recall) is part of my professional deformation, is that one cannot (non-dominatingly) enter into the the lifeworld of another without, as Simon shows without saying, being vulnerable.

Amy Olberding on Politeness and (Individual and Social) Anger

Not letting fly with an uncivil rebuke also means I cannot as readily from such encounters---to stay civil is, more often to stay engaged. By trying to be well-disposed toward others, I try to preserve social connection, even when doing so is displeasing, alienating, and terrible. The defiant optimism underwriting this resolve would have me hold out hope that we will all be better for making such efforts, that we can find some fellow feeling, some scrap of shared humanity that will enable better (or at least not worse) forms of shared life. Amy Olberding (2019) The Wrong of Rudeness: LEarning Modern Civility from Ancient Chinese Philosophy, p. 152 (emphasis in original).

While I very much like Amy Olderding's internet persona, I was a bit apprehensive about reading her book. I had been convinced by Johnson and Kaziarian (remember NewAPPS?) that civility policing was a means for the powerful to police the vulnerable while they (the powerful) could simultaneously ignoring the real harms emanating from micro-aggressions (see here Bejan on Hobbes) and other forms of incitement by way of (to quote Mill, recall here and here) vituperative speech.

I was, thus, worried that Olberding's book would celebrate the virtues of decorum and thereby lecture others on how to play nice. Even so, I was also predisposed to like the book because I am committed to the idea that if there is any idea worth preserving from the nexus of practices and ideological concepts connected to the word 'civilization' that we, qua public facing philosophers, should keep the conversation, including silences and long-stutters, going.

From the start, Olberding disarms the reader by presenting herself as prone to rudeness, even enjoying it. And she also explicitly recognizes that in particular personal and political circumstances, "sometimes incivility will be the best course" even if, in a humane agent, "it will be tinged with regret and distress." (151) Sometimes incivility or righteous anger is the only response that accords with our own dignity and sense of injustice, even if we know that "abandoning good manners, of failing to try to be police, will magnify many social ills and inequalities." (46) There are plenty of tragic circumstances, where all options are subpar. So, I did not find much to disagree in the book, and much astuteness. In what follows, I reflect on a minor thread that runs through her argument.

One way Olberding understands anger is as a species of truth-telling. And so hiding anger is a means of disguising from others what we really feel. We become inauthentic. In addition, such self-policing can have two costly effects. First, it can take real self-undermining effort at psychological self-management in internalizing anger.  By contrast, as Olberding notes "deliberate rudeness provides the chance to set down the taxing burden of hiding what I really think or feel." (2) I return to this in the next paragraph. Second, by not making (to use language from Hume and Adam Smith) one's resentment felt at some social harm one can have a non-trivial negative impact on regulating norms of justice. Since justice is one of the few social institutions devoted to truth disguising or hiding it can can undermine its functioning. This is why I largely agree with Srinivasan's defense of righteous anger.

Now, Olberding notes that "to be polite...entails getting good at managing an internal economy of attention." (32) This is hard work and requires imitation and practice such that it becomes habitual. That is to say, in addition for there to be a social pay-off (in keeping conversation going, and creating possibility of fellow feeling), politeness has a personal pay-off: one becomes, as it were, better at concentrating, especially concentrating on  what really matters to oneself. (This can be articulated in terms of efficiency; but despite the use of 'economy' and Olberding's decision to treat "attention as a kind of currency," (32) I don't think that fits Olberding's confucian framework.) The key point is that attention is a scarce good, and that to maintain and focus it requires considerable skill.

There is something very important lurking here. But to unearth it means we need to challenge the idea that anger is fundamentally a form of truth-telling (although it can be that). A psychoanalytic commonplace is that anger or frustration is a way to disguise from oneself other uncomfortable feelings or an instance of what the freudians call displacement. I find this thought a useful starting point whenever I need to calm down or have managed to calm down from my anger or frustration! One does not have to buy into much of psychoanalysis to see that this can be a plausible mechanism in many circumstances, personal and political.So, anger then is not itself a form of truth-telling although it can be a significant clue for the existence of other problems (this idea can be found in Machiavelli, too). 

As the nod to Machiavelli implies this is not just an individual issue. The whole business model of contemporary social media and news organizations is to habitually induce anger in order to capture your eye balls. The economy of attention is guided by the skillful manipulation of our reactive attitudes without providing opportunity to (learn to) manage their proportionality with regard to their causes and the possible effects. The cumulative effect is a debilitating and infantile public culture.  

When anger is a (voluntary or involuntary) mechanism to disguise from oneself what one feels, it also prevents intimacy or connectedness with others. So, it can be a form of self-undermining at the individual or personal level. Insert your favorite saying of Yoda here. Of course, lecturing somebody who is angry that by being angry they are self-undermining socially or politically can be infuriating, especially when the causes of such anger are conveniently ignored!

The previous paragraphs are not really a criticism of Olberding. Because what she points to is that the practice of individual and social politeness is, in addition to some other benefits, a means to making space for allowing the sources of one's anger and frustration to become transparent to one's personal and social self/selves. So, politeness can be a means to facilitate norms and practices that are truth conductive. It is also, thus, a means of reorienting our attention to more skillful and wiser agency. 

 

Mises, Liberalism, and the Spiritual Life

Liberalism has often been reproached for this purely external and materialistic attitude toward what is earthly and transitory. The life of man, it is said, does not consist in eating and drinking. There are higher and more important needs than food and drink, shelter and clothing. Even the greatest earthly riches cannot give man happiness; they leave his inner self, his soul, unsatisfied and empty. The most serious error of liberalism has been that it has had nothing to offer man's deeper and nobler aspirations.
But the critics who speak in this vein show only that they have a very imperfect and materialistic conception of these higher and nobler needs. Social policy, with the means that are at its disposal, can make men rich or poor, but it can never succeed in making them happy or in satisfying their inmost yearnings. Here all external expedients fail. All that social policy can do is to remove the outer causes of pain and suffering; it can further a system that feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, and houses the homeless. Happiness and contentment do not depend on food, clothing, and shelter, but, above all, on what a man cherishes within himself It is not from a disdain of spiritual goods that liberalism concerns itself exclusively with man's material well-being, but from a conviction that what is highest and deepest in man cannot be touched by any outward regulation. It seeks to produce only outer well-being because it knows that inner, spiritual riches cannot come to man from without, but only from within his own heart. It does not aim at creating anything but the outward preconditions for the development of the inner life. And there can be no doubt that the relatively prosperous individual of the twentieth century can more readily satisfy his spiritual needs than, say, the individual of the tenth century, who was given no respite from anxiety over the problem of eking out barely enough for survival or from the dangers that threatened him from his enemies.
To be sure, to those who, like the followers of many Asiatic and medieval Christian sects, accept the doctrine of complete asceticism and who take as the ideal of human life the poverty and freedom from want of the birds of the forest and the fish of the sea, we can make no reply when they reproach liberalism for its materialistic attitude. We can only ask them to let us go our way undisturbed, just as we do not hinder them from getting to heaven in their own fashion. Let them shut themselves up in their cells, away from men and the world, in peace.
The overwhelming majority of our contemporaries cannot understand the ascetic ideal. But once one rejects the principle of the ascetic conduct of life; one cannot reproach liberalism for aiming at outer well-being.--Mises (1927), Liberalism (4-5)

For Mises the materialism of liberalism expresses a recognition of limits. The state should not be in the business of individual soul-craft nor in the business of creating a good society (in the sense of Adam Smith, Sophie Grouchy, or Lippmann). In a good society, the incentive structure of institutions, public education, and material conditions co-contribute to a flourishing society. For Mises, by contrast, and more minimally, the state should restrict itself to the material "preconditions" of the development of inner life.

Strikingly (ought  implies can), Mises claims that this normative limitation on state ambition is rooted in its inability to provide spiritual goods. I call it striking because the more standard liberal arguments against the attempt are (i) that there is potentially explosive disagreement over which religious faction gets to supply these needs; and/or (ii) that often the attempt to supply these spiritual needs through the state can lead to oppressive political consequences. (Mises is familiar with (i-ii) because he mentions them in a later chapter (see pp. 50-7.) That theocracies tend to be or have tendencies toward being oppressive is common ground among liberals and seems well supported empirically; that theocracies are completely ineffective at supplying any spiritual needs is by no means obvious. 

Unfortunately, Mises does not supply many arguments for his "conviction." In fact, I only discern one: that material "anxiety" prevents the development of a spiritual life.  This anxiety is caused by famine/hunger and by lack of physical security. There are faint echoes with the Epicurean tradition, although it also emphasized the role of clerics in manipulating anxiety for political power.

To Mises' credit he sees that the materialism he advocates can have perverse consequences. For example, "modern wealth expresses itself above all in the cult of the body: hygiene, cleanliness, sport." (192) Strikingly, beauty and aesthetics are completely missing from Mises' attention (but would strengthen his argument.)

Even so, I do not find Mises remotely convincing here because physical hardship seems to be no barrier to intense and apparently sincere religiosity. But lurking in Mises thought is, perhaps, the further somewhat aristocratic, even Nietzschean idea that the religiosity which is fueled or conditioned by hardship is in some sense less than the "highest and deepest" spirituality. (One finds hints of such an attitude, too, in Carnap's (recall) oblique praise for Nietzsche as the right sort of metaphysical poet.) This higher spirituality requires the kind of liberty which allows full, inner development; Mises seems to take this idea for granted.

As an aside, Mises also takes for granted that the "ascetic" and material lifestyles can co-exist. This may well be thought question begging given that Mises' liberalism is self-consciously cosmopolitan and, ideally, global. It is not obvious genuine inner retreat is possible in a world-wide, fully developed consumer society. Some preferences may simply be made impossible by market society. 

To return to the main point. Mises also assumes that the individual and the state exhaust the possible supply of the highest spirituality. When he thinks of communal religious activity he thinks of churches.  But strikingly these are not understood as suppliers of spirituality, but rather of "instruction and education." (56) (He also thinks much of what churches teach is nonsense.) Mises has no time to spare for intermediary, communal activities that may be a source of spiritual life. 

This privatized and individualized understanding of spirituality in Mises' thought is odd. Because he does explicitly recognize that a nationalist feels he participates in an "ethnic and spiritual community." (106) This is so even though Mises thinks nationalism is disastrous. 

Despite the passage I quoted, I suspect Mises must assume the nationalist's experience of spirituality is in some sense delusional (perhaps even caused by a neurosis).* For, Mises is adamant about the epistemic limitations of our access to any ultimate matter:

Our powers of comprehension are very limited. We cannot hope ever to discover the ultimate and most profound secrets of the universe. But the fact that we can never fathom the meaning and purpose of our existence does not hinder us from taking precautions to avoid contagious diseases or from making use of the appropriate means to feed and clothe ourselves, nor should it deter us from organizing society in such a way that the earthly goals for which we strive can be most effectually attained. Even the state and the legal system, the government and its administration are not too lofty, too good, too grand, for us to bring them within the range of rational deliberation. Problems of social policy are problems of social technology, and their solution must be sought in the same ways and by the same means that are at our disposal in the solution of other technical problems: by rational reflection and by examination of the given conditions. All that man is and all that raises him above the animals he owes to his reason. Why should he forgo the use of reason just in the sphere of social policy and trust to vague and obscure feelings and impulses? (7)

Reason here is the constrained reason of instrumental rationality. It is notable that in his rejection of the spiritual dimension of public life, Mises ends up opening the door to a technocratic conception of public policy, but about that some other time more. But by rejecting the very possibility by fiat of any ultimate grounding for the ends pursued in social life, Mises anticipates (by way of a very different route) the Rawlsian attempt to secure a political  form of liberalism. The material rewards of political liberalism may not pacify all who wish for more.

On Freud, Rawls, Rose, the contrast between Analytic/Continental Philosophy, and Lewis-Kripke

Behind one half of Ferrante’s pen name, Elena, is a tale from Greek mythology. According to a relatively little-known version of the story, Zeus rapes and impregnates, not Leda the swan, but Nemesis, who turns herself into a goose to escape him. She then lays an egg, found by a shepherd and handed to Leda, who nurtures it and out of which Elena is born, who is then raised by Leda, in Ferrante’s suggestive formula, as ‘her daughter-non-daughter’.4 It must be one of the earliest stories of surrogacy, as well as offering a model of motherhood without vested interest because it has embraced a stranger.--Jacuqeline Rose, Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty, p. 146.

One important feature of the distinction between analytical and continental philosophy is that analytical philosophy is when not outright hostile to Freud/Freudianism, in its indifference to it, purportedly untouched by it.* This is most evident in the brief spectacle of the late twentieth century flowering of analytical Marxism--these hard-nosed men (it was really a boys club), which self-consciously set itself against the mushy forms of Marxism found in Paris and Frankfurt (and elsewhere). What's conspicuous about their (the analytical marxist) work is not the elegance and wit of their writings, but their inability to make visible how oppression as a social phenomenon generates, through violence and lies/ideology, the deformation, material and psychic, at the heart of of everybody's lives.+ (Of course, one can state and argue this without Freudian theory, but often without fertility.)

I think I can explain what I have in mind: John Rawls (to be sure no analytical Marxist), who read more widely than most analytic philosophers, discusses Freud briefly several time in Theory of Justice in the context of the significance of moral education. For Rawls Freud is somebody who, first, offers cautionary warnings about taking moral sentiments at face value due to their being rooted in processes of "conflict and stress" (TJ, 459); second, he treats Freud as, we may say,  a Nietzschean, who offers a kind of error theory for the sense of justice (and, in so doing, mistakenly conflates envy and resentment). (Susan Moller Okin has also noticed the first passage. She treats it as evidence of Rawls's blindness to Freud's sexism.) Rawls treats the grounds of the "conflict and stress" as mere psychological process to be overcome in adulthood (with the help, surprisingly enough, of "sound principles" that is, political philosophy) and not as expressing the effects of (ahh) a badly functioning basic structure(s) of society.**  

I have come to think it's not Freudianism's dubious character as a science that accounts for analytic philosophy's hostility/indifference (or early analytic philosophy's flirtation with behaviorism), but rather something that G.A. Cohen mislabels as "acid Freudian skepticism:" that all given identities are at once (too) robust in their fixity and fragile in their vulnerability to fracturing. The effect of this acid is that identity becomes liquid. Such liquidity is played with in Derrida and embraced by Deleuze, and treated at arm's length in the analytic mainstream. For, while one may think that political philosophy and moral education are at the margin's of analytic philosophy's self-understanding -- despite the fact that (recall) the Strawson-Carnap debate pivots on it-- identity is central. I can't, of course, prove this point to you.

However, I think I can make it arresting. I hope you will forgive me if I use Kripke as a representative agent, as an exemplar. I want to return to Kripke's response to Lewis's counterpart theory. This response exhibits more than dispassionate philosophical disagreement. I reproduce most of the relevant footnote from Naming and Necessity:

Lewis's elegant paper also suffers from a purely formal difficulty: on his interpretation of quantified modality, the familiar law (y) ((x)A(x) ⊃ A(y) falls, if A(x) is allowed to contain modal operators. (For example, (∃y) ((x) ◊(x ≠y) is satisfiable but (∃y) ◊ (y ≠ y) is not.) Since Lewis's formal model follows rather naturally from his philosophical views on counterparts, and since the failure of universal instantiation for modal properties is intuitively bizarre, it seems to me that this failure constitutes an additional argument against the plausibility of his philosophical views. There are other, lesser, formal difficulties as well. I cannot elaborate here.

Strictly speaking, Lewis’s view is not a view of ‘transworld identification’. Rather, he thinks that similarities across possible worlds determine a counterpart relation which need be neither symmetric nor transitive. The counterpart of something in another possible world is never identical with the thing itself. Thus if we say ‘Humphrey might have won the election (if only he had done such-and-such), we are not talking about something that might have happened to Humphrey but to someone else, a “counterpart”.’ Probably, however, Humphrey could not care less whether someone else, no matter how much resembling him, would have been victorious in another possible world.
Thus, Lewis's view seems to me even more bizarre than the usual notions of transworld identification that it replaces. The important issues, however, are common to the two views: the supposition that other possible worlds are like other dimensions of a more inclusive universe, that they can be given only by purely qualitative descriptions, and that therefore either the identity relation or the counterpart relation must be established in terms of qualitative resemblance.

Many have pointed out to me that the father of counterpart theory is probably Leibnitz. I will not go into such a historical question here. It would also be interesting to compare Lewis's views with the Wheeler-Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. I suspect that this view of physics may suffer from philosophical problems analogous to Lewis's counterpart theory; it is certainly very similar in spirit.

Notice that Kripke repeatedly treats Lewis' position as bizarre. (It is quite amazing, actually, to see a formal difficulty itself be explicated in terms of what seems intuitively bizarre.) The one other time (right at the start) in Naming and Necessity where Kripke treats a view as bizarre is  the denial of the indiscernability of identicals. (Notably he treats the denial of it as on par as the denial of the 'law of contradiction.') My point here is not to claim that Kripke's critique of Lewis isn't well motivated or un-argued.++ Kripke is not cheating. And my present purpose is not to defend Lewis (although regular readers know I think counterpart theory grasps something fundamental about self-identity.)

Rather, I am marking that Kripke's hostility (the repeated bizarre) expresses something that goes beyond mere disagreement. As Freud notes in a very different context (dreams, etc.), treating something as bizarre is a mechanism by which we allow ourselves to ignore something important. It's to Kripke's credit that he explains why Lewis' position must be set aside. Kripke says that the most important point (of disagreement) is that for Lewis the identity relation, including self-identity, must be established in terms of qualitative resemblance.*** Kripke's emphatic ''bizarre" betrays how he recoils from the (ahh) instability this generates. 

On Gillian Rose

This essay starts with a Hampstead anecdote. A few years ago my wife and son met a friendly man, a "political philosopher who commuted to Durham' in a local store. My wife noted, with bemusement, that when she mentioned my name as a fellow political philosopher he should meet, he seemed to have a vague sense of familiarity with my name. After some reflection (recall), I said "was it David Held?" yes. As it happens Held and I did encounter each other a few times around the neighborhood, but we never had a conversation.

I encountered the memorial plaque to Gillian Rose by chance in St John-at-Hampstead Churchyard Extension during an organized treasure hunt with my son and a friend of his through Hampstead on a sunny winter day. I was  immediately struck by her early death. I had a vague sense of having seen some of her books, but as the boys had moved on searching for the next clue, I did not pause on it. Later that day I posted the picture on facebook, and some friends commented on her loss. I made a mental note to look for her works this Summer.

A few months ago Verso had a sale, and I bought Jacqueline Rose's The Last Resistance, a collection of essays. In her preface she writes,

[T]wo ways of thought make their mark, as they always have for me, against the darkness of the times. One is psychoanalysis, in its ability to uncover truths that would remain hidden, and to unsettle the most rigid forms of identity as they play themselves out across the stage of political life. The other is literature whose power to subvert the status quo received new urgency when the dominant cliches and deceptions of statehood, whether here and in the US or in Israel, have reached such new and mind-numbing heights.--(xi)

I think literature can do a lot, but I am rather skeptical about literature's power to subvert any political status quo today or in the future. I am also not very hopeful that psychoanalysis can uncover (previously hidden) truths. But I do agree that psychoanalysis can unsettle identities, including those that manifest themselves on political stages. Even so because psychoanalysis does not scale up very well, its political effects are by nature limited. So, I expected to dislike Rose's essays, and put them aside. 

Yesterday, I accidentally grabbed Rose's collection while packing for a trip to Dublin. I started reading her essays in no apparent order. Suddenly the title of the last essay, "On Gillian Rose," caught my attention. While I am on the second page, it becomes apparent they were sisters. Gillian Rose is quoted as "If I knew who or what I were I would not write." I underline the sentence in agreement. I like her, I decide. 

Jacqueline Rose's presents her sister as a critic of postmodernism, which, "against Athens," erects "a New Jerusalem," which uses (and then she quotes Gillian Rose) a "dangerously distorted and idealised presentation of Judaism as the sublime other of modernity." The distorted view radically separates ethics and politics." (225). I don't think this is true of all of postmodernism, but this captures nicely good grounds of unease about postmodernism. By contrast, Gillian Rose is presented as a thinker who thinks we are "never pure" and "always implicated in power." I underline some more.

Sadly, Jacqueline Rose's essay makes nu allusion to the plaque. This disappoints me because I am curious about the story about it. I wondered who decided on the identification 'philosopher' -- did any of the sisters wish to have her remembered as a sister?; given, as Jacqueline Rose makes abundantly clear, the significance of her Judaism to Gillian Rose, I wonder why it was erected in a non-Jewish burial ground. Google links me to a page that suggests she died in Coventry, but is buried in the churchyard with the memorial. I feel myself in the presence of a mystery

I pause. I remember once seeing a video of my late colleague, Jose Benardete, giving a memorial lecture for his brother, Seth. It must be difficult, I think, to do justice to the thought of another whose frailties you have known before they had transformed themselves into a "philosopher." Jacqueline Rose resolutely refuses us a glance at the philosopher in her family.

A closing end note to Jacqueline Rose's essay reveals the piece is connected to a presentation at the "memorial for the tenth anniversary of the death of Gillian Rose....chaired by David Held." I remember seeing David Held died a few weeks ago. We never did talk. 

On Grounding Identity

Like Beethoven's late works, Freud's Spätwerk is obsessed with returning not just to the problem of Moses's identity - which, of course, is at the very core of the treatise — but to the very elements of identity itself, as if that issue so crucial to psychoanalysis, the very heart of the science, could be returned to in the way that Beethoven's late work returns to such basics as tonality and rhythm..... Above all, late style's effect on the reader or listener is alienating — that is to say, Freud and Beethoven present material that is of pressing concern to them with scant regard for satisfying, much less placating, the reader's need for closure. Other books by Freud were written with a didactic or pedagogic aim in mind: Moses and Monotheism is not. Reading the treatise, we feel that Freud wishes us to understand that there are other issues at stake here — other, more pressing problems to expose than ones whose solution might be comforting, or provide a sort of resting-place....

As to whether Moses can be said to be "foreign" to the Jews who adopt him as their patriarch, Freud is quite clear, even adamant: Moses was an Egyptian, and was therefore different from the people who adopted him as their leader - people, that is, who became the Jews whom Moses seems to have later created as his people....

More bold is Freud's profound exemplification of the insight that even for the most definable, the most identifiable, the most stubborncommunal identity — for him, this was the Jewish identity — there are inherent limits that prevent it from being fully incorporated into one, and only one, Identity. Freud's symbol of those limits was that the founder of Jewish identity was himself a non-European Egyptian. In other words, identity cannot be thought or worked through itself alone; it cannot constitute or even imagine itself without that radical originary break or flaw which will not be repressed, because Moses was Egyptian, and therefore always outside the identity inside which so many have stood, and suffered - and later, perhaps, even triumphed Edward Said (2003), Freud and the Non-European, 28-29 &35

Nothing seems more trivial than, A=A. Let's call it (that is, 'A=A,') 'clean identity.' 

Said has Freud say that in human circumstances, that first 'A' (of 'A=A') is not self-grounding. (Freud resists the Spinozist solution of an infinite chain of As.) It's not that Said is wrong that Freud thinks leader and people co-constitute each other (much the way David Hume constitutes his public), but as Jacqueline Rose perceptively notes in her invited commentary on Said's lecture, Said understates the way in which Freud argues that violence is presupposed even constitutive of any form of identity. (I wish I had read her before writing this post a few years ago.) For, when he turns to his political solution to the problem of Zionism, Said posits a kind of heterogeneous even besieged identity as political ideal, but then fails to name the violence required to sustain partial identities. 

Be that as it may, Said's lecture (recall my post), suggests that any clean identity claim (at least in political contexts) is both more than meets the eye and less. More in that it presupposes (not just violence, but also) symbolic forms that make possible its intelligibility and stability. Less because the impurity of the ground infects the purity of the terms in the clean identity. Each 'A' in clean identity is itself a composite of As and not As.* Yet, ordinarily the not As' elements in 'A' are effaced. 

In the lecture, Said spends quite a bit of time on how Zionist scientific activities (archaeology) facilitate such effacement when it comes to Jewish identity.+ That is, in fact, compatible with individual archaeologists being motivated by the purest moral motives and acting with may be thought best individual epistemic practices. (I would argue the problem is rooted in the structure of the community and its relationship to society.)

In so doing, Said ignores the symbolic ways in which not wholly As can become purified into As. Judaism has many rituals that act as such forms of purification (bathing, washing, fasting, etc.). My friend and one-time-co-author (and less hesitant Zionist than myself) Yoram Hazony audaciously notes that one such species of purification is itself the embrace of the moral law.** (His exemplar (recall) is the compassionate daughter of Pharaoh who saves baby Moses.) The thought is, through some transformative process, one can become essentially 'A' in clean identity.++ 

One may be tempted to respond that such purification is a cheat. I have some sympathy for the complaint. As regular readers know, I am no friend of baptismic accounts that somehow fix identity. But a Freudian (or even a Humean) can't use this line of objection because on her view such symbolic cheating just is, like tonality and rhythm, the essential ingredient of living.  

On the Utility of Uncompromising Eurocentricism

I have often been interpreted as retrospectively attacking great writers and thinkers like Jane Austen and Karl Marx because some of their ideas seem politically incorrect by the standards of our time. That is a stupid notion which, I just have to say categorically, is not true of anything I have either written or said. On the contrary, I am always trying to understand figures from the past whom I admire, even as I point out how bound they were by the perspectives of their own cultural moment as far as their views of other cultures and peoples were concerned. The special point I then try to make is that it is imperative to read them as intrinsically worthwhile for today's non European or non-Western reader, who is often either happy to dismiss them altogether as dehumanizing or insufficiently aware of the colonized people (as Chinua Achebe does with Conrad's portrayal of Africa), or reads them, in a way, "above" the historical circumstances of which they were so much a part.

My approach tries to see them in their context as accurately as possible, but then - because they are extraordinary writers and thinkers whose work has enabled other, alternative work and readings based on developments of which they could not have been aware–I see them contrapuntally, that is, as figures whose writing travels across temporal, cultural and ideological boundaries in unforeseen ways to emerge as part of a new ensemble along with later history and subsequent art. So, for instance, rather than leaving Conrad's compelling portrait of Leopold's Congo in an archive labelled as the dead-end rubbish bin of racist thinking, it seems to me far more interesting to read Conrad's late-nineteenth-century work as - in all sorts of unforeseen proleptic ways - suggesting and provoking not only the tragic distortions in the Congo's subsequent history but also the echoing answers in African writing that reuse Conrad's journey motif as a topos to present the discoveries and recognitions of postcolonial dynamics, a great part of them the deliberate antitheses of Conrad's work...The interesting result is not only that Salih and Naipaul depend so vitally on their reading of Conrad, but that Conrad's writing is further actualized and animated by emphases and inflections that he was obviously unaware of, but that his writing permits.

Thus later history reopens and challenges what seems to have been the finality of an earlier figure of thought, bringing it into contact with cultural, political and epistemological formations undreamed of by–albeit affiliated by historical circumstances with–its author. Every writer is, of course, a reader of her or his predecessors as well, but what I want to underline is that the often surprising dynamics of human history can–as Borges’ fable of Pierre Menard and the Quixote so wittily argues–dramatize the latencies in a prior figure or form that suddenly illuminate the present. The horribly attenuated and oppressed black porters and savages that Conrad portrays in terms that Achebe finds so objectionable not only contain within them the frozen essence that condemns them to the servitude and punishment Conrad sees as their present fate, but also point prophetically towards a whole series of implied developments that their later history discloses despite, over and above, and also paradoxically because of, the radical severity and awful solitude of Conrad's essentializing vision.

The fact that later writers keep returning to Conrad means that his work, by virtue of its uncompromising Eurocentric vision, is precisely what gives it its antinomian force, the intensity and power wrapped inside its sentences, which demand an equal and opposite response to meet them head on in a confirmation, a refutation, or an elaboration of what they present. In the grip of Conrad's Africa, you are driven by its sheer stifling horror to work through it, to push beyond it as history itself transforms even the most unyielding stasis into process and a search for greater clarity, relief, resolution or denial. And of course in Conrad, as with all such extraordinary minds, the felt tension between what is intolerably there and a symmetrical compulsion to escape from it is what is most profoundly at stake–what the reading and interpretation of a work like Heart of Darkness is all about. Texts that are inertly of their time stay there: those which brush up unstintingly against historical constraints are the ones we keep with us, generation after generation.--Edward Said (2003)  Freud and the Non-European, p. 23-27

The quoted passage is a digression, an apologia really, from the main argument of Said's lecture; this lecture is primarily about the nature of  personal and political identity (as represented by Freud in Moses and Monotheism (recall) and the success of Zionism). Said's analysis in the passage quoted here presupposes a distinction between inert or sterile texts and fertile or forceful work. This is a qualitative difference which Said attributes to the capacity of the ("extraordinary") minds of the authors of these text. That is, Said comes close to embracing a cult of genius. And if it is not genius, it is definitely a form of elevated admiration. 

This (the near embrace of the cult of genius) surprised me because it would have been open to Said to claim that the fertility of some works may be an accident a product of path dependency such that later writers keep returning to such texts is itself what makes them fertile. There is a hint of (as Said notes) final or circular causation in my proposed alternative (which is compatible with the thought that the authors of fertile texts are themselves distinctive in various ways), but it may be preferable to the idea that (say) Conrad's extra-ordinariness resides, in part, in something rather reductive: his 'uncompromising Eurocentric vision' which, simultaneously and paradoxically, brushes up unstintingly against historical constraints.

It's not wholly reductive because a key feature of such genius is the capacity to make the reader feel the tension of what is intolerably there and a need to escape from it. That is, to put the reader in a state of performative contradiction. 

Regular readers know that I think Said is wrong in thinking that earlier writers cannot anticipate the later, fertile uses of their works. With other historicists, Said traps, even entombs authors in their own historical context, and yet gives their texts an otherwise magical ability to travel across temporal, cultural and ideological boundaries. Said repeatedly, even neurotically, asserts the epistemic limitation of an author in his/her historical moment: 'could not have been aware;'' "unforeseen;" "obviously unaware;" "undreamed of" (etc, including surprising dynamics). By contrast I think one can deliberately write in a way such that one permits later uses even if one cannot know all the features of such creative re-animations. That is, while radical uncertainty is a reality, sending a signal, means knowing it could be picked up in the surrounding noise. For a reader of Freud there is, or should be, nothing mysterious in deliberately provoking a reaction in an unknown or symbolic other.

Let me close with two observations: first, Said assumes a shared, bourgeois humanistic world of readers -- us, generation after generation -- that itself instantiates a kind of infinite mode ("whole series"), or his secular faith. We are the custodians of the fertile texts in virtue of our passing it on to those who, through creative, even contrary responses, will revive and animate them. 

Second, Said presents himself, in part, as an exemplar to the 'non European or non-Western reader' who can find (recall, by contrast, Lorde) the utility in the tools of the master's house. One may well wonder whether all non Europeans are non Western,* but let's leave that aside. The more important point is that while presenting himself as such an exemplar he is doing so to very European intended and implied audiences (first, abortively in Vienna, then actually in Hampstead).** And oddly he tells them, in the last sentence of the work, that they/we almost don't need Said in order to understand non Europeans, because they/we have Freud, if only we/they knew how to read him and accept (with Said as our informant) that Freud's analysis of unresolved senses of identity+ can be applied quite generally.

On European (Intellectual) Ethical Correctness (ca 1945-1965)

During the years 1945-1965 (I am referring to Europe), there was a certain way of thinking correctly, a certain style of political discourse, a certain ethics of the intellectual. One had to be on familiar terms with Marx, not let one's dreams stray too far from Freud. And one had to treat sign-systems—the signifier—with the greatest respect. These were the three requirements that made the strange occupation of writing and speaking a measure of truth about oneself and one's time acceptable.
Then came the five brief, impassioned, jubilant, enigmatic years. At the gates of our world, there was Vietnam, of course, and the first major blow to the powers that be. But here, inside our walls, what exactly was taking place? An amalgam of revolutionary and antirepressive politics? A war fought on two fronts: against social exploitation and psychic repression? A surge of libido modulated by the class struggle? Perhaps. At any rate, it is this familiar, dualistic interpretation that has laid claim to the events of those years. The dream that cast its spell, between the First World War and fascism, over the dreamiest parts of Europe—the Germany of Wilhelm Reich, and the France of the surrealists—had returned and set fire to reality itself: Marx and Freud in the same incandescent light.
But is that really what happened? Had the Utopian project of the thirties been resumed, this time on the scale of historical practice? Or was there, on the contrary, a movement toward political struggles that no longer conformed to the model that Marxist tradition had prescribed? Toward an experience and a technology of desire that were no longer Freudian. It is true that the old banners were raised, but the combat shifted and spread into new zones.
Anti-Oedipus shows first of all how much ground has been covered. But it does much more than that. It wastes no time in discrediting the old idols, even though it does have a great deal of fun with Freud. Most important, it motivates us to go further.---Michel Foucault (1977) "preface" Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972) by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,

I believe that Foucault's preface was added to the English translation. This indicates, I believe, how famous Foucault was becoming outside 'Europe' in the 1970s, and how little known, relatively speaking, Deleuze (and Guatarri) still were in the broader academy. [Of course, the previous two sentences are nonsense if the preface already existed in the French edition!]

One of the key functions of Foucault's preface is to announce and, thereby, to promote (ahh) a rupture in European thought. He does so by implying that the period between 1945-1965 was non-Utopian (or even anti-Utopian) in character; and dominated by (politically correct) conceptual references to Freud, Marx, and (what one may call) structuralism. While I was born after that period, if i recall correctly, as late as the early 1990s, Jay Cantor -- then a recent MacArthur prize winner -- would offer courses on modernism (ahh) structured around Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. 

Part of Foucault's proposed change is more subtle; rather than adopting the stance of speaking truth to power (which we may associate with Sartre then, and Chomsky today), Foucault insists here on a difference stance regarding that "strange occupation", of "writing and speaking a measure of truth about oneself and one's time." (Of course, this may include speaking some truth to power.) This presupposes that one is capable of grasping some such self-knowledge (there are hints of Socrates here) and could somehow comprehend (elements of) one's time. 

In his preface, Foucault claims that the intellectual edifice of the 1945-1965 was undermined not by contradictions in its internal logic or by other intellectual means, but in virtue of changed historical even political circumstances. One may say that Foucault presupposes that the "powers that be" structure intellectual thought, and that blows to that (political-financial) base undermine the intellectual superstructure. 

A more jarring feature of Foucault's (ahh) analysis is that he treats 1965-1970 as a "jubilant" period. What's jarring about this is that while Foucauth mentions 'war' later in the paragraph, one of the key explicit causes of the "impassioned period,' Vietnam, can be best described as a carnage. Of course, these deaths were not European;* I am not one to take away the sense of warm nostalgia from the generation of 1968. But it is also notable that Foucault treats the period as enigmatic and he, thereby, volunteers that he is capable of speaking some truth about his own time (and so applying for the strange occupation).

As an aside, Foucault asserts here a European consciousness with its own self-understanding. This is, of course, quite standard for French intellectuals after Hegel (go read Sartre's (1961) preface to Fanon's Wretched of the Earth). But he does so without noting the -- recall Spivak's criticism of Foucault/Deleuze and defense of Derrida-- subaltern. 

In Foucault's narrative Anti-Oedipus, is a (ahh) material sign-post on, an invitation to join the path beyond Freud, Marx, and the sign. (See here for some fun ngram data.) With some temporal distance, we can say that Foucault invites to a beyond-modernist intellectual landscape.+ What's notable, however, is that it is left unclear what has happened in the five jubilant years, was it (i) an attack on "social exploitation and psychic repression" (the old banners) or (ii) did new kinds of political struggles and new  experience/technology of desire get developed? It's clear, I think, that Foucault believes (ii) is more likely, and that he thinks (i) involves some kind of self-deception. With the benefit of further hindsight, we can see that nostalgic social democratic interpretations (for whom Reagan, Thatcher, and Hayek are the Antichrists) conform to (i), whereas identity theorists and even (capitalist/technological) anarchic futurist theorists tend to conform more to (ii).    

What's notable, however (again look at the NGRAM), is that while Marx and Freud indeed declined in significance (indeed a trend that developed between 1965-1975), and Foucault himself became rather important (after the 1980s), Marx and Freud continued to be more widely mentioned than Foucault.** That is to say, while undoubtedly somebody who spoke a measure of truth on the period (say) 1975-2015 could mention reasonable familiarity with Foucault and Deleuze, it is not obvious that they were constitutive of our correctness in thought. Some other time, I return on what these requirements might be, although I welcome suggestions by readers.