Digressions&Impressions

Gil Harman (RIP 1938-2021): On Adam Smith, Kuhn-Loss and Historiography

One important type of ethical theory treats moral properties as analogous in certain respects to "secondary qualities" like colors. According to this sort of theory, whether something is right or wrong depends on how impartial spectators would react to it. In the 18th Century, the Scottish philosophers Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith explored theories of this type.1 In the 20th Century this sort of theory has sometimes been discussed under the name "ideal observer theory."2 Recently, especially in England, there has been renewed interest in this sort of ethical theory and its comparison between moral properties and secondary qualities.3

One possible objection to an impartial spectator theory is that it seems to require an -overly aesthetic conception of morality to take the primary point of view in ethics to be that of a spectator rather than that of the agent.4 If the spectator is taken to be primary, then the agent's aim would seem to be to produce something that will or would please the spectator. But that is just wrong. Such an aim is too "outer directed" to count as a moral motive. Morality is more agent-centered than that. It is much more plausible to take the agent's point of view as primary. In the first instance morality is a matter of the moral reasons an agent has to act in one way or another, where these reasons derive from the relevant moral rules rather than from a desire to gain the approval of spectators.
A few years ago, I pressed this objection myself when I discussed the ideal observer theory in a textbook of ethics.5 But I was too hasty. In reading Adam Smith's Theory of the Moral Sentiments, I discovered that Smith explicitly considers this issue and provides a plausible reply to the objection.
Because 20th Century discussions have tended not to consider such "psychological" questions as why agents might be motivated to act in ways that impartial spectators would approve (or, for that matter, why impartial spectators would care about anything), I will in this paper ignore recent discussion and return to the three great versions of the theory that were developed in the 18th Century by Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith, indicating why I think Smith's version of the theory is superior to the others.--Gilbert Harman (1986) "Moral Agent and the Impartial Spectator" The Lindley Lecture, The University of Kansas, p. 1. [HT: David M. Levy]

For many years, I heard a story about the late Gilbert Harman, who by all accounts was a supportive mentor, that he put up a sign on his door that said, ‘History of Philosophy: Just Say No!’ And I heard the story from folk, who approvingly treated Harman as an authority within the profession, and those (mostly historians of philosophy) that were horrified by the message this sent about the value of their work and the development of curricula across the profession. The story always puzzled me because thanks to my outside reader on my PhD, the economist David M. Levy, I was familiar with Harman's Lindley Lecture, which is a major contribution to the study of Adam Smith (and his relationship to Hutcheson and Hume).

I quietly wondered whether Harman subscribed to the view -- that I am familiar with from (recall) reading, say,  Samuelson's obituary of Viner -- that only disciplinary royalty should work in history of the discipline, while the rest are worker-bees solving particular, localized problems (including puzzles in the presentation of historical works relevant to the undergrad education of the discipline). And I mused on the fact to what degree his colleagues and students even knew about the Lindley Lecture, which was, in fact, very hard to acquire in the early-internet days when I was a PhD student in Chicago in the 1990s. 

And so I always quietly assumed that Harman was on party 'team progress' (familiar from Kuhn): we need a division of labor within philosophy, and with text-book driven education sufficiently shared background commitments as a baseline that will make, just like the practice of the natural sciences, such progress, or the illusion of progress, possible. And that requires a kind of domestication of the past (and, as Michael Della Rocca has argued the rest of philosophy, too). 

At some point, I became aware of Tom Sorrell's correspondence with Harman on this very topic. But I never tried to figure out its contents. Helpfully, the Princeton website records (a good chunk) of the exchange here. And it suggests the sign was put up in the context of a controversy over the undergrad curriculum. In addition, it quotes Harman's own views on the matter:

I believe my views about the history of philosophy are mostly orthodox nowadays. The history of philosophy is not easy. It is very important to consider the historical context of a text and not just try to read it all by itself. One should be careful not to read one’s own views (or other recent views) into a historical text. It is unwise to treat historical texts as sacred documents that contain important wisdom. In particular, it is important to avoid what Walter Kaufmann calls ‘exegetical thinking’: reading one’s views into a sacred text so one can read them back out endowed with authority. For the most part the problems that historical writers were concerned with are different from the problems that current philosophers face. There are no perennial philosophical problems.

On the whole, these views about the history of philosophy are quite close to those of my late friend Margaret Wilson.

For reasons I do not fully understand, I have sometimes upset people by distinguishing between philosophy and the history of philosophy or by noting that philosophy is what the history of philosophy is the history of.

I also think as an empirical matter that students of philosophy need not be required to study the history of philosophy and that a study of the history of philosophy tends not to be useful to students of philosophy. (Note ‘tends’.) Similarly, it is not particularly helpful to students of physics, chemistry, or biology to study the history of physics, chemistry, or biology.

Of course, it may be helpful for students of physics to start with classical Newtonian physics before taking up relativity theory and quantum mechanics. But it tends not to be helpful for them to read Newton.

The playful sign that was once on my office door, ‘History of Philosophy: Just Say No!’ was concerned with whether our students should be required to do work in the history of philosophy.

That is not to say that I have anything against the study of the history of philosophy. I do not discourage students or others from studying the history of philosophy. I am myself quite interested in the history of moral philosophy for example and have occasionally taught graduate seminars in Kant. I have done a certain amount of work on Adam Smith’s relation to Hume and others.

These remarks suggest I was mostly right about Harman. I have spent a good chunk of my blogging here and previously (sometimes in debates with Mohan Matthen) at NewAPPS, explaining why I think the Kuhnian team progress picture is a bad idea for philosophy (and the historians of philosophy), so won't repeat it here. But as Harman himself stresses his adherence to it is only partial; he recognizes and accepts explicitly that sometimes the history of philosophy is useful to the philosopher. And he reminds his interlocuter that he himself teaches history, and has done it.

As an aside, the denial of perennial philosophy is a self-aware form of the Kuhnian picture of team progress. Within the sciences, the textbooks will treat the pre-paradigmatic states of the discipline as immature babblings about the same topic. Within philosophy, the status quo will treat much of the pre-paradigmatic states as very imperfect expressions on our topics, or material irrelevant to our concerns. After all, so much was packed into philosophy once that we now ignore (for various reasons).

Okay, and returning to main thread, what's left obscure by the exchange reported on the Princeton website is when it is useful according to Harman to do history. As it happens the introductory material in The Lindley Lecture articulates this: the past can be a source of information on moves that are missed in present professional discussions.

This is especially so, when a particular view or theory is re-discovered or renewed without -- one may add -- much attention to prior discussions. In such circumstances an argument or objection can be taken as decisive by a particular, localized professional community and the argumentative (ahh) dialectic is halted prematurely. And while one can discover this in the armchair, too, this is much harder if one is a partisan to the debate (or swayed by local authority). In those latter cases, a careful, sympathetic engagement with the past, without reading the present status quo back into the past, can help those on top of contemporary discussions discern that one has missed an argumentative turn.  Notice, that this suggests another, related use to history. When discussions on particular topics are renewed/revived, it might be helpful to do a careful survey of previous episodes.

Of course, the uses discussed in the previous paragraph -- let's call them 'The Useful Retrieval Task(s)' or 'TURT' -- require the availability of material/texts and specialist knowledge of where to find such episodes. That is to say, what we may call contextual historians of philosophy are a collective good to the profession that it pays to have a large enough pool to have around. Somewhat amusingly, the more antiquarian and bookish these historians of philosophy are the more useful they might possibly be on the rare occasion that retrieval of a missed distinction or argument can be useful. The same argument applies to historians of philosophy that specialize in (so-called) non-Western philosophy. (I once quoted a plea by David Chalmers to that effect, and discussed it critically in an engagement with Amy Olberding here.) Much of such philosophy will be about different matters (again no perennial philosophy), but that does not prevent multiple discoveries of the same problem at different times and locations far apart.

Now, at this point I wanted to discuss Harman's treatment of Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith as an illustration and examination of what I take to be the practice that he preaches. This is also worth doing because I think I can show some of the limitations of that approach. But since this digression has gone longer than it ought, I won't do that now, and hopefully can return to it some other time. 

So, let me close on another detail of Harman's Lindley Lecture. Near the end of his lecture, he writes that "Smith works this theory out with a mass of detail which I cannot try to summarize. I believe that the book in which he works this out, his Theory of the Moral Sentiments, is one of the great works of moral philosophy." (p. 13). And then he adds a remark (labelled postscript 2):

Finally, it is perplexing that Adam Smith's ethics should be so relatively unread as compared with Hume's ethics when there is so much of value in Smith. What I have talked about here only scratches the surface. Why should Smith's ethics be so neglected? Is it that Hume also had a metaphysics and an epistemology and that Smith did not? Or is it that Smith was a more important economist than Hume? And why should that matter? I do not know.19--Harman (p. 14)

Footnote 19 starts with "I am indebted to David Levy for getting me interested in this project." The older I get the more this footnote amuses me because it turns out that TURT can be outsourced to different disciplines. Of course, since professional economists have actively tried to eliminate professional historians of economics from professional economics (on grounds that look like the party of progress familiarized by Kuhn, and, as I have shown [here and here], actively promoted within professional economics before and after Kuhn), there is a real risk (tragedy of the commons) that no discipline will curate the possibility of TURT.

I am also amused because at my dissertation defense, David Levy asked me Harman's questions. At the time (almost twenty years ago), I already knew that Smith's ethics was constantly forgotten and rediscovered in philosophy. My favorite example of this can be found in C.D. Broad's (1950) review in Mind of A.N. Prior's Logic and the Basis of Ethics. Although, I don't think I realized then, as I do now, that this is itself an older, recurring trope. Levy himself thinks that Harman's use of the trope is distinctive because he is rare in thinking that Smith's ethics is in some key respects superior to Hume's (recall the quote at the top of this post).

In my (2017) book I show that Smith does have a metaphysics and epistemology (one that also crucially deviates from Hume), but they are mostly submerged in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. I reconstructed them primarily (note!) from other texts collected in Essays on Philosophical Subjects. To be sure, I did not write my book to address Harman's questions! And I am unsure if having showed this we can make (ahh) progress on Harman's last three questions in postscript 2.

But if we take a step back, we can see that postscript 2 asks the reader to consider the grounds of what Harman takes to be (what has come to be known as) "a Kuhn-loss." And here Harman clearly recognizes that he is on unsure grounds. He plausibly suggests that Smith's TMS got written out of the discipline (philosophy) in virtue of the fact that Smith became part of economics. And I have noted, these two disciplines became conceptualized as non-overlapping complements in the late nineteenth and twentieth century (see especially this article).

But I do think the answer to Harman's Kuhn-loss question is relatively simple. Sidgwick, who is (recall this post on the effect on Rawls) partially responsible for developing the party-of-progress conception in philosophy, wrote textbooks, including Sidgwick's Outlines of the History of Ethics, in which Smith was clearly presented as a lesser (proto-Utilitarian) Hume.

This happens in two ways, when in the Introduction of that influential book, Smith is first introduced, alongside Hume and Hartley, only Hume's views are briefly summarized and Hume's views are treated as not especially significant for ethical matters. They are treated as psychologically significant. (Sidgwick is here developing and anticipating the manner in which the empirical-normative contrast turns out to prefigure disciplinary salience). So, a natural effect of Sidgwick's introduction is that it looks like there is little in Smith for those interested in ethical affairs.

That Sidgwick actually does not intend this implicature about Smith only becomes clear obliquely. When discussing J.S. Mill, Sidwick notes that Mill's treatment of justice is very indebted to Adam Smith (p. 241 in the 1886 edition). 

But that point itself may not be noticed by those readers especially interested in Sidwick's views on Smith. For earlier, he treats Dugald Steward as a (superior) synthesis of the insights of Shaftesbury and Smith (note 2 on p. 221 in the 1886 edition).

Of course, if one reads the section devoted to Smith in Sidgwick's Outlines, one may well come accross two important features. First, that according to Sidgwick, Smith clearly improves on Hume on what Sidgwick calls the "quality of the moral sentiment" (205). But, this, too, is treated more as a contribution to psychology and the "analysis" of its phenomena (206), than to ethics. 

Crucially, for Sidgwick (p. 207), Hume and Smith jointly anticipate the view of the origin of the moral sentiments "current in the utilitarian school." (A point, as noted above, he clarifies on p. 241 in the context of Mill.) But he goes on to say that jointly their "methods of explanation compare unfavorably with that of Hartley," (pp. 207-208). So, at this point there is really no reason for a reader of Sidgwick's Outlines to come away thinking they should read The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). And when he summarizes his view of Hartley, he (Sidgwick) observes that:

Hartley is obviously in earnest in his attempt to determine the rule of life, the systematic vigour which still gives an interest to his psychology, in spite of his defects of style and treatment, is not applied by him to the question of the criterion or standard of right conduct; on this point his exposition is blurred by a vague and shallow. optimism that prevents him from facing the difficulties of the problem. A somewhat similar inferiority appears in Adam Smith's work, when he passes from psychological analysis to ethical construction. He takes care to assure us that the general rules of morality impressed on us by the complicated play of sympathy which he analyzes are "justly to be regarded as the laws of the Deity;" but it can hardly be said that his theory affords any cogent arguments for this conclusion, or in any way establishes these rules as objectively valid. It would seem that the intellectual energy of this period of English [sic] ethical thought had a general tendency to take a psychological rather than a strictly ethical turn. In Hume's case, indeed, the absorption of ethics into psychology is sometimes so complete as to lead him to a confusing use of language.--Sidgwick, Outlines, pp. 211-212.

Again, a natural effect of Sidgwick's treatment is that in so far as Smith's account in TMS is interesting at all, it is primarily as a moral phenomenology or psychology of empirical affairs. But that even in that area, Hartley is more interesting. I think Sidgwick's conclusion is, in part, the result of projecting backwards a particular (anachronistic) version of the fact-value distinction onto Hume and Smith. One that become part of the professional DNA of both economics and philosophy such that a mutual, agreeable division of labor is possible (and in context Sidgwick and Marshall accepted this division).

So, I hope to have answered here Harman's postscript 2 questions (at least in provisional manner). But I also want to note that my answer illustrates one of the dangers of relying on authoritative textbook traditions (which is required by the party of progress). These can shape the self-conception of even advanced students, that even once important and famous books are mistakenly neglected. So, even the party of progress must leave room, as Liam Kofi Bright has suggested to me, for arbitrage opportunities and allow the development of seemingly epiphenomenal intellectual activities (such as history of philosophy and/or economics) that make it possible. 

The Case Against Hume (I)

The king, sensible that nothing kept alive the ideas of military valour and of ancient glory, so much as the traditional poetry of the people, which, assisted by the power of music, and the jollity of festivals, made deep impression on the minds of the youth, gathered together all the Welsh bards, and from a barbarous, though not absurd policy, ordered them to be put to death.--David Hume History of England

Edward I's mass murder of the socio-cultural leaders of the Welsh in 1284 is called 'barbarous,' but not absurd. It's not absurd because Hume recognizes the significance of what one might call a 'civic culture' -- poetry of the people...assisted by the power of music, and the jollity of festivals, -- for possible future (national) political resistance. That is to say, Hume recognizes the instrumental rationality of the English king's pacification of the Welsh which requires forceful methods to succeed. 

That despite finding Edward's policy intelligible from the perspective of (Machiavellian) statecraft, one might well naturally think that Hume also condemns Edward's mass murder, even cultural genocide because he calls it 'barbarous.' And it is certainly case that the sociological contrast between barbarous and civilization, which is an important empirical distinction in Hume, is also normatively laden. For Hume, to be civilized is to be normatively better, more advanced, than to be barbarous. So, the natural thought is not silly here.  I return to this below.

Yesterday, Mauricio Suárez called my attention to an article in The Scotsman, where academics protested the removal of David Hume's name from a university building at the University of Edinburgh. At first sight the critics are correct to suggest that Hume did not get honored belatedly by the university (which infamously refused him a post while living) in virtue of his racism, but for other “great and locally relevant [intellectual] achievements.” Let's stipulate this is true (although below I make an important qualification). It is also an  interesting and tough question (recall Neil McArthur -- himself a distinguished Hume Scholar - here)  how much imperfection one can tolerate in a scholar before certain academic honors for genuine intellectual achievements become off-limits. Jacob Levy (here; here) has done important work on this topic, which has influenced my own evolving sense. 

The critics' defense, as reported (which is an important caveat), of Hume involve at least five other claims: first, that his (acknowledged) racism toward "blacks [is] nonetheless marginal to his body of ideas." It is merely "one racist footnote." Second, that the university process was shoddy (“This is an area which requires sensitivity, tact, procedural transparency and patience.") Third, that the decision potentially negatively impacts the reputation of scholars who work on Hume ("suggests the university also regards these colleagues’ work as dubious or disreputable.”) Fourth, “Hume’s views on race...were common in his day." And, fifth, that the actions of the past are in a certain sense irrelevant today (“History contains many offensive things that cannot now be undone. What matters is how those living in the present conduct themselves towards one another.”)

Since I am a Hume scholar -- even got my first lucky intellectual break to write on Hume for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy --, you may expect me to be sympathetic to the critics and worry about my reputation. But, in fact, Hume scholarship has tried hard to confront Hume's racism (and I discuss some of this scholarship in my book on Smith). Anyway, my concern here is not with the reputation of Hume scholars, but with how to think about Hume's legacy.

I agree with the critics that the University of Edinburgh has done itself a disservice by it's unintellectual and uninformative explanation for its decision (here, so you can make up your own mind; ht Dailynous). But it does not mean the critics are right that there is no case here. As I have explained here, that infamous footnote occurs in a text which is also quite clearly anti-semitic. Hume's attitude toward the Jews (which sometimes could be more sympathetic) contrasts strongly with (say) Toland's advocacy of Jewish emancipation (a generation earlier).

In addition, Hume's views on the Irish (in his History) are not exactly sympathetic. I think (and will argue another time) that Adam Smith's one real fight with his close friend, Hume, involved Hume's prejudice toward the Irish (where Hume takes the side of the English, recycling its propaganda) in his treatment of the Irish (1641) rebellion. But today, I link you to Clare Moriarty's tweet which presents another's testimony. (Moriarty is a scholar of Berkeley's mathematics, who has called attention to his eugenic interests, anti-Irish prejudices, and slave-owning in the past.)

So, it is not true that in Hume's age, Hume's racial views were uncontroversial. Philosophers are endlessly taught, on the authority of both Hume (“that bigoted silly fellow")* and Kant, that James Beattie was a philosophical idiot. But whatever the merits of this claim against Beattie's arguments on causation, Beattie was also a fierce critic of Hume's racism (and may have even influenced Hume to moderate his racism).

So, the scholarly critics of the University of Edinburgh, rely on a flawed modern historicist defense of Hume which itself presupposes moral progress, where we know better and the mythical past was uniformly bigoted, as I have argued here (one of my better blog posts--go read it!) And while Hume was a critic of (ancient) slavery, his views on race were (predictably) used by contemporary defenders of slavery (recall here) and fiercely debated by English abolitionists.** 

So, the case against Hume is that his racism is not a minor aberration in his thought, but a significant element of his larger views. In my view this is so not because Hume was especially animated by cultural prejudice or racism, but rather because he was a proponent of civilization -- which he associated with being governed by rule of law, commerce, humanity, and progress -- and thought it okay, on balance, if civilization was spread, even by force. And this returns me to his comment on Edward I.+ For, while if we only look at the passage above, it might seem Hume condems Edward's brutal policy of pacification, Hume himself offers the following summing up a bit later in the History:

The enterprizes, finished by this prince, and the projects, which he formed and brought near to a conclusion, were more prudent, more regularly conducted, and more advantageous to the solid interests of his kingdom, than those which were undertaken in any reign either of his ancestors or his successors. He restored authority to the government, disordered by the weakness of his father; he maintained the laws against all the efforts of his turbulent barons; he fully annexed to his crown the principality of Wales; he took many wise and vigorous measures for reducing Scotland to a like condition; and though the equity of this latter enterprize may reasonably be questioned, the circumstances of the two kingdoms promised such certain success, and the advantage was so visible of uniting the whole island under one head, that those who give great indulgence to reasons of state in the measures of princes, will not be apt to regard this part of his conduct with much severity. But Edward, however exceptionable his character may appear on the head of justice, is the model of a politic and warlike king: He possessed industry, penetration, courage, vigilance, and enterprize: 

Here Hume quite clearly suggests that Edward I was the best king England ever had before or since ("any reign either of his ancestors or his successors").++ And one of the reasons for this is the very brutal annexation of Wales and the model it provided for the subduing of Scotland. And while Hume grants that from the vantage point of equity and justice Edward can be criticized, the consequences of this brutality are so excellent that the means justify the ends (the expansion of civilization). It is a very natural reading of Hume's History -- which was the source of his initial fame -- that brutal conquest in the name of reason of state is fine as long as you promote and secure the rule of law. This is a consequentialist argument.

Notice that Hume is not shy about judging characters of the past as exemplars worth emulating or not. Hume would reject the historicist argument of his defenders.

And while I have no doubt that British (racialized) imperialism in the name of civilization would have happened without Hume, Hume did help give this ideology (which goes back to earlier times [cf Petty's conquest of Ireland]) extremely wide currency and respectability (despite Adam Smith's and his student Millar's attempts to undo it). So, while this ideology does not influence the problem of induction, I do think it ties together many elements in Hume's moral and political philosophy and defense of commercial society. And I sometimes fear that despite Hume's scepticiam and irreligion (which made him ineligible for a university position), it is this proto-imperialist ideology that made Hume so widely and publically highly regarded (assuming most were uninterested in his metaphysics and the fine points of his epistemology). That's compatible with the claim that there are resources in his philosophy to combat this ideology.

Let me close. I do not think the case against Hume is simple or without complexity. And I do not wish to suggest that one cannot paint a better picture of Hume than I did today. (I have done so myself and will do so again.) But the case against Hume is wider and more relevant than his defenders realize. And ignoring that case means we do not confront the complicity of our heroes in justifying really important evils that ought to be repaired if we still can. 

 

Spinoza and the Origin of Utilitarianism

This, then, is the end for which I strive, to attain to such a character myself, and to endeavor that many should attain to it with me. (2) In other words, it is part of my happiness to lend a helping hand, that many others may understand even as I do, so that their understanding and desire may entirely agree with my own. (3) In order to bring this about, it is necessary to understand as much of nature as will enable us to attain to the aforesaid character, and also to form a social order such as is most conducive to the attainment of this character by the greatest number with the least difficulty and danger.--Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect. (Translated by Translated by R. H. M. Elwes)

Yesterday, Beth Lord discussed the quoted passage from the unfinished Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (TIE) in a terrific paper on Spinoza in London. My present remarks are orthogonal to her purposes and are intended as a homage to her lecture. As Lord noted, at the start of the TIE, Spinoza here calls attention to an important political orientation within his larger project of TIE.+ In one sense this is, of course, no surprise because the very first few sentences of TIE are set in opposition to the vanity and emptiness/futility of communal life [communi vita...vana et futilia esse] and against the pursuit of wealth and recognition [honore ac divitiis]. The latter are rejected, in part, because they are uncertain. One wonders if Spinoza would endorse such worldly pursuits if one could guarantee the outcome.*

As an aside, while one should not read too much into this -- Spinoza is echoing here classical tropes about the unpredictability of  the wheel of fortune -- it seems that he is  sensitive to the fact that market outcomes involve a level of chance. (I say markets because of the context in Amsterdam and the family business.)  

Spinoza makes a striking claim about the ordinary pursuit of wealth and fame/recognition: "the more we acquire, the greater is our delight" (quo plus utriusque possidetur, eo magis augetur laetitia) For Spinoza, wealth and fame both involve increasing (marginal) subjective utility, at least in ordinary life. By contrast, sensuous pleasure -- Spinoza is adamant on the contrast --  involve diminished marginal subjective utility in ordinary life.** Of course, I am putting this in anachronistic terms. (I am not suggesting that Spinoza anticipates the marginalist revolution or is working with indifference curves.) In addition, according to Spinoza (and here he anticipates Smith and De Grouchy) if we fail to acquire wealth and fame, when we wish for it, we feel such lack more intensely. 

Either way, for Spinoza a true good is neither risky nor unsteady in its possession. It's also something that does not diminish in quantity or value if others share in it (this very much echoes Seneca). In fact, Spinoza is explicit that his pleasure increases if others share in true goods with him. This means that individually, he is properly incentivized to be philanthropic in his orientation ("it is part of my happiness to lend a helping hand" to others). The political task is to ensure that (a) institutions of society are so organized that individual pleasures are conducive to the public, true good, and (b) that this is attainable by the the greatest number with (c) the least amount of cost and risk  ("deinde formare talem societatem, qualis est desideranda, ut quamplurimi quam facillime, et secure eo pervenian").

On (a): it is important that these individual pleasures are themselves of a kind with the true good. (Mandeville saw this relationship was not necessary; but his conception of what the public good is, is radically different from Spinoza here--for Spinoza's public choice anticipations see here.) On (b): Spinoza here democratizes Seneca style Stoicism. (I am not claiming he is the first to do so--after all, Christian Stoicism has a pre-history to Spinoza as I learned from Christopher Brooke's book [recall].) And in so doing he is edging toward a form of utilitarianism of the  sort familiar from eighteenth century thinkers like Hutcheson, Beccaria, and Helvétius. On (c): I don't think Spinoza means that in one's institutional design of the social order one can trade off number and costs/risk; rather, I think he means that given the same number of people that can share in the true good, a cheaper and less riskier social order is preferable over one that is costly and riskier. This is the kind of reasoning that leads to a welfare state. In the context of TIE, the last sentence is clearly speculative (he never returns to the social order in it)--but it is informed by  Spinoza's emphasis in his political works on the political importance of reducing and redirecting daily fears.

Obviously, there are important differences between Spinoza and the eighteenth century figures just mentioned; and I certainly do not intend to suggest that Spinoza anticipates a Benthamite calculus. For the Dutch Republic's anticipation of such matters one ought to turn to the De la Court brothers and the uses of probability&utility theory by Hudde, Huygens, and De Witt leading up to Bernoulli. But it's also striking that (again not unlike Pascal) in the context of the rejection of the ordinary market place morality, Spinoza develops the kind of moves that will become familiar in a slightly different register.

On Hutcheson stopping Motion and a hidden, perhaps, polemic with Spinozism

This universal Benevolence toward all Men, we may compare to that Principle of Gravitation, which perhaps extends to all Bodys in the Universe; but like the Love of Benevolence, increases as the Distance is diminish’d, and is strongest when Bodys come to touch each other. Now this increase of Attraction upon nearer Approach, is as necessary to the Frame of the Universe, as that there should be any Attraction at all. For a general Attraction, equal in all Distances, would by the Contrariety of such multitudes of equal Forces, put an end to all Regularity of Motion, and perhaps stop it altogether.--Frances Hutcheson (1726) An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue.

In a lovely paper that he delivered in Ghent on Wednesday, Tamas Demeter made good use of the eminently quotable paragraph, with its seductive comparison between benevolence and Newtonian gravity, quoted above. Ignoring Newton's strictures, Hutcheson implies that attraction is governed by sympathy (see here). The image has a non-trivial after-life in Hutheson's student and astute critic, Adam Smith ("All the different members of it are bound together by the agreeable bands of love and affection, and are, as it were, drawn to one common centre of mutual good offices," [HT Ryan Hanley]) as well as in Smith's careful reader, Wollstonecraft ("private virtue becoming the cement of public happiness, an orderly whole is consolidated by the tendency of all the parts towards a common centre,") [recall this post].

But my eye rested on the final sentence of Hutcheson's paragraph which expresses a counterfactual about the impossibility of an alternative force-law. (Not all possible alternatives, of course.) When you start thinking about it, he seems he has packed quite a bit into the claim. Hutcheson really makes two counterfactual predictions about what would happen if there was uniform gravity (so not based on distance [presumably just based on masses]) in the universe: (a) motion would stop being regular or (b) motion would stop altogether. I focus on (b) first; this is really a kind of anti-cosmogeny. It claims that the world could not have evolved with such a force law.

In fact, Hutcheson's second (b) point ("a general Attraction, equal in all Distances, would by the Contrariety of such multitudes of equal Forces...stop [motion] altogether") sounds (recall this post) akin to a claim that Clarke makes against Spinoza: “because the determination of this self-existent motion must be every way at once, the effect of it could be nothing else but a perpetual rest; it's a an argument that I have long struggled with (see this paper). For the aficionados: I am pretty sure that the then also famous Bentley-Newton correspondence got started by a (now lost) question from Bentley to Newton to rule the possibility of the solar system evolving out of a homogeneous plenum (which the English think Spinoza ought to embrace) with Newtonian force laws. Hutcheson's (b) seems 'intuitive' because one can understand the idea that all forces can cancel each other out so that there is no motion.

But one thing Hutcheson's counterfactual thought experiment, (b), requires is that matter needs to be uniformly or symmetrically distributed (through the infinite universe). Otherwise there is no reason to think that all the possible forces would simply cancel each other out from the start, forever. (We leave aside Norton dome style thought experiments--from my Marij Van Strien's work we know these were familiar in the 19th century, but there is no evidence they were really understood at the start of the 18th century [NB the wikipedia page is weak on the history].) So, contrary to the argument of the General Scholium, Hutcheson is tacitly assuming something like a plenum here (at least as the starting point of cosmogeny). Why he would do so is odd, unless the paragraph originates in an earlier polemic against Spinozism (or the impious development of Cartesianism)? This is a plausible inference, given that Hutecheson is familiar with the polemics surrounding Spinoza and Toland (see here and here), and Hutcheson is often at pains at showing and/or assuming the existence of final causes.

On heroes and courage

A hero–as we use the term in typical English discourse–is someone who voluntarily engages in rightful service to others, even though that service puts him at risk of harm, and who does so out of benevolence rather than a desire for personal gain. So, to assess whether soldiers are heroes, we’d need to know 1) what their motives are, 2) the degree to which they were at risk of harm, 3) whether they were rightfully serving others. The qualifier “rightfully” is important. After all, Nazi soldiers and Gulag guards served others, but they don’t serve the right ends, and they didn’t conduct their service in a morally permissible way...

Whether you think the typical American soldier is a hero or not will depend a great deal on your view of American foreign policy. Some American wars are beyond the pale; no reasonable person could believe them to be justified: e.g., the various wars fought to exterminate and uproot Native Americans, the Mexican-American War, and the Spanish-American war. What about other wars and military incursions? I’ll lay my cards on the table and say that I think hardly any US military actions have been justified according to the correct theory of just war. I didn’t think the invasion of Iraq was justified, and so far, it’s been a disaster. While the Taliban was of course an illegitimate regime, invading Afghanistan seemed like a terrible idea, and so far, it has been. It’s far from clear that US military actions over the past 15 years have done anything to promote or protect Americans’ freedom, though it is clear that these actions have wrought death, suffering, and destruction upon many innocent foreigners.--Jason Brennan, Bleedingheartlibertarians. [See also his follow-up.]

I have been a fierce critic of Jason Brennan in the past. But I have to recognize that given that Brennan is, in addition to being a professional philosopher, also, in part a public philosopher, it takes considerable courage to express the sentiments he does. Brennan risks hurting a promising career as a media pundit and other careers in public service by reminding Americans of some of the worst features of their history.

Unlike Brennan, I would argue that one can be courageous, even a hero, serving non-rightful ends. To oversimplify, the criteria for heroicism are spectator-relative. This is why the exemplary deeds recounted in Greek poetry remain heroic despite changing views on the laws of war and morality more generally. For, as the dictionary definitions remind us, a hero is admired. In fact, as Hume and Adam Smith both emphasized, even distant admiration of the dazzling hero is possible and co-existing with (subdued) moral disapproval.+ (Brennan's approving treatment of the quiet, everyday, dazzle-free heroicism the "local auto mechanic or your neighborhood tailor" is remniscent of Hutcheson's approach [recall]).

So, it's very hard for us to recognize our enemies as heroes, even if we, in our better moments, recognize their courage. That is, there are objective facts of the matter (ability as well as willingness to confront danger, fear, etc.) that make somebody's actions courageous and these are independent of morality. We are repeatedly told that suicide-bombers are cowardly, but this is just propaganda. If they attack, say, armed soldiers, we may abhor their tactics, but we would be foolish to fail to recognize their courage.*

Of Four Kinds of Writer's Block

In the imagination there is no daylight and,                                              

Like Wallace Stevens, I know the dark is crucial.                                         

I sing, I grieve in it, I dream what haunts each night:                                                       

These bodies, even lynched, still are thinking.                               

Nothing is final, I’m told. No man shall see the end—

But them, my fathers, lifted into fire, like tongues.--Rickey Laurentiis.    

 

Poetry is a finikin thing of air

That lives uncertainly and not for long

Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.--Wallace Stevens.

I am often teased by my peers that I write so much;* I frequently answer truthfully that I am no perfectionist and that I have always worked with low (and very low) teaching loads with courses that directly (or indirectly) fed into my research. So, I may be utterly unqualified to write about writer's blog -- 'look who thinks he is nothing!' --, but I am intimately familiar with four kinds of staring at a blank page:

1. I have nothing to say despite (or, perhaps, because) having embraced the image of being a poet or philosopher. No, no (you suspicious mind) not so much from some purported high status that is derived from these venerable terms 'poet,' ('philosopher'), nor with the idea that if I wear black and smoke Gitanes, some beautiful woman will whisper her phone-number into my ear while I babble on about Rilke and Sartre.  No, it's because I regularly have sensory overload, where each pleasure and each pain has an exquisite and hitherto ignored delicacy so that I assume that the world requires me to channel the cosmic fire into words. Even so I stare at blank pages recognizing the painful truth that, perhaps as of yet, I have nothing to say of enduring consequence (few do I learn over the years, but that offers little consolation). Professional philosophy solves this problem by after considerable education, inserting us into a tradition that either embraces the intellectual division of labor, which bequeaths each of us open-problems, or  that allows us to re-tell the same historical story with minor, corrective variations in both cases advancing 'the discussion.' It's possible that if one is 'productive' enough, or mesmerized by chasing the next career step (dissertation, a job, tenure, etc.), one forgets this kind of writer's block.** I have speculated that the existence of  this kind of half-forgetting helps explain some of the professional bullying we encounter.

2. I lack skill. At some point half way through my graduate education and a few years out after the PhD, I could spot problems in what I read and I could sense that an alternative might be philosophically more satisfying, but I didn't know how to start organizing my thoughts. Sometimes the blank space would be filled with extensive notes, and long copiously footnoted excerpts from others (many of my dissertation chapters started like this), but even so I would be unable to find a path from the complexity I perceive (and that I think eminently worth sharing) to something that might count as intelligible to an outsider. Within analytical philosophy, this problem is solved by decomposing the complex mess to something that one can take a stance on, a thesis, (and then argue for while recognizing and incorporating a sub-set of  the innumerable objections one might discern.) In addition, there are tacit templates for journal articles that help set further constraints. At some point, practice, repeated feedback from more skilled others, and, eventually, repeat 'success,' evaporated this kind of writer's block. I re-encountered a version of this kind of writer's block, when I started to write for non-professional audiences or new formats (e.g., newspaper editorials, interdisciplinary venues, blogging, etc.), but without accompanying panic (hence, the past-tense in this paragraph): decomposing and practicing in the new genre always removed the writer's block over time.

The Walk-On Philosopher

[...] Only Dirck, or Theodore Rembrantsz, an astronomer and surveyor in North Holland, made his acquaintance in that time, when the most remote and obscure villages were hardly less fertile in the growth of philosophy, than the flourishing cities of commerce….

Dirck Rembrantsz was a Dutch peasant, native the village of Nierop, at the end of North Holland, facing Friesland. The exercise he made in the trade of shoemaker in the place of his birth, provided him barely with the means necessary to maintain his subsistence. But he had found ways to overcome his fortune by an exquisite knowledge of mathematics, that he could not help but to grow beyond the detriment of the work of his hands. Mr. Descartes' famous name, linked with the minor satisfaction he had received from the mathematical books he had read in the vernacular, resulted into the leave of his village for consulting [the philosopher].

His [Descartes'] fame had portrayed him as a man of the world, who was easy to access, and the idea of a secluded philosopher did not withheld him, even when the entrance of his solitude was guarded by some Switzers. But he was put off by the valets of Descartes as a bold farmer, and they only informed the master of the house, after Rembrantsz returned two or three months later, in the same outfit as the first time, and demanded to speak to Mr. Descartes, with the resolution of a man who seemed to confer with him on important business.

His appearance did not contribute to a better reception than before, and when the news was brought to Mr. Descartes, he was depicted as an importunate beggar, who in the eyes of the servants used his wish to the talk about philosophy and astrology, as an excuse to ask for charity. And to avoid going into that, Descartes sent him some money and wished him [Rembrantsz] to say that he would dispense the trouble to speak to him [any further]. Rembrantsz, whose poverty not had affected his heart, refused the generosity of our philosopher, and decided that his hour had not yet come, and he returned home this time, in the hope that a third trip would become more succesful. This reply was reported to Mr. Descartes, who regretted not have seen the peasant and who ordered his people to give him notice, when he returned.

Rembrantsz returned a few months later and this peasant, who had such a passion to meet Mr. Descartes that he already had made two trips in vain, was recognized, and he was finally satisfied in what he had sought so hard and with such perseverance.

Descartes recognized his skills and merits in this field and would pay back his [Rembrantsz'] troubles with interest. He [Descartes] was not satisfied with the teaching of all his problems, but provided him with the methodology to correct his arguments. He welcomed him yet among a number of his friends, without paying attention to the lowness of his position, but considered him among those of the first rank, and he assured him that his house and his heart was open to him at all times.

From that time on, Rembrantsz, who lived only five or six miles apart from Egmond, frequently visited Descartes, and with his school he became one of the leading astronomers of his time. He had mastered so well the knowledge of his [Descartes'] principles, that in the rest of his life he only build on these foundations.-- Adrien Baillet (1691) La vie de Monsieur Descartes, part 2, pp. 553-556, translated by Huib Zuidervaart in THE CORRESPONDENCE OF DIRCK REMBRANTSZ VAN NIEROP (1610-1682), edited by M. Rijks.

There are, I am guessing, about  forty-thousand professional philosophers world-wide. I am an experienced enough historian of philosophy to assert confidently that even if our civilization continues and digital storage is perfected most of us will -- just a handful excepted -- be forgotten within a generation or two, three, even if we would deny that the Golden Age of analytical philosophy is past. As it is, only a few of us are actually read outside a small, narrow group of specialists at any given moment; a charismatic PhD supervisor may stretch this audience a bit wider. Even most of those that today have a disciplinary or wider public audience are almost certainly incapable of competing in an enduring fashion for scarce, future curricular time, or the more intimate choices of discerning future readers. It's easy to imagine that Berkeley will disappear from the curriculum once the empiricism/rationalism divide is set aside as parochial or, to hit closer to home, that Davidson will be a mere footnote to Quine and Whitehead, while Mandeville, De Grouchy, and Swift will be rediscovered time and again by readers trying to make sense of living in a (let's stipulate, Chinese-speaking) corrupt, commercial civilization (recall this review).

If we reflect on our situation, I suspect most of us console ourselves with the idea that through our teaching we touch the minds of the young and, in so doing, help give their lives, which will radiate in all kinds of unexpected directions, some shape. I know that some of my peers are convinced that they are part of a progressive (even scientific) enterprise within the intellectual division labor in which their contributions allow future generations to progress even closer to the truth; even if they remain anonymous to future generations they will have participated in a great trans-historical project. Such delusions are harmless. Some of us contribute more concretely by offering philosophical reflections that might help our communities navigate what may seem urgent and confused matters. I am not denying, of course, that even the most distinguished (reflexive and privileged, etc.) of our philosophical peers is undoubtedly mostly just enjoying her intellectual activity immersed in the problems and puzzles that animate her thought drawing a generous salary that secures her from the more common anxieties consequent hunger and lack of shelter.

Even so, sometimes the unremarkable play a walk-on role in history, and this is not dispiriting. Let me explain.

On Love and knowledge (and the politics of the Novel)

In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.― John Edward Williams, Stoner

Stoner, a book first published in 1965, sold 183,000 copies in translation in the Netherlands in 2013.* The book paints a pleasantly heroic (in the manner of Hutcheson) portrait of a quiet life dedicated to a single vocation (teaching undergrads) steeped in nostalgia for a simpler age. Unlike many campus novels, satire is not the dominant theme. William Stoner lacks what the Ancients would have called "spirit" (the most violent and, perhaps, best scene in the novel is a comprehensive exam); he is unable to fight for anything or anybody he holds dear or battle the inevitable changes he deplores. It is no surprise that sensitive, spirit-less readers today are so fond of this elegantly drawn portrait (ignoring the omniscient narrator's hostility toward the protagonist's love-deprived wife and her family).  One may well read the novel's unmistakable anti-war ethos as suggesting that inward dignified withdrawal is sufficient in order to avoid contamination.**   

In the passage above, the omniscient narrator moves from the individual at a given time (Stoner, 43 years) to the universal ("love is"). The narrator offers two claims that one can learn:

1. The person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last,
2. That love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another

The narrator does not explain the conditions of such learning. But it is clear that Stoner's book-knowledge has, despite his love "of literature, of language, of the mystery of mind and heart showing themselves in the minite" not prepared him for the practical experience of the sexual affair with his student--rather, it seems that his book-knowledge has delayed the acquisition of knowledge of the nature of love. (Incidentally, Stoner is not portrayed as a predator; rather, he is blind to his own feelings (and the color of her eyes), and his fierce student initiates the affair with a "shut up and come over here.") Here I focus on the second insight.