Digressions&Impressions

On Public Philosophy and Transgender Rights Campaign

During the past year professional philosophers have struggled with controversies pertaining to transgender issues (recall the Tuvel/Hypatia affaire here and here; and again involving language in journal articles [recall my piece on the open letter to the editors of PPR at Dailynous here;] the debate between Talia Mae Bettcher and Kathleen Stock;[1] the language of the APA philosophy blog [see Leiterreports]), etc. These debates have intersected with wider society and have even led to campaigns to to have faculty removed from their positions in the UK. While I am no friend of calls for civility in debate (recall this post among many), the way this debate is conducted is unedifying and I have already expressed despair that even the philosophers party to the debate seem to be unable to recognize explicitly each other's vulnerabilities. 

I start this post with two preliminary comments. First, as regular readers know, I support so-called public philosophy (recall; which comes in many varieties [see here]) and philosophical activism (which comes in many flavors and in support of many different kinds of causes) of society and the profession. I have long admired the service philosophy of Kristie Dotson (recall), Hugo Bedau's activism against the death penalty, and John Corvino's work on same-sex marriage. (I am sure readers can add to this list their own favorites.)* Such cause/ideal-promoting political activism is both self-justifying and a useful means of discovery of truth. While philosophy can benefit from a measure of distance, cool reflection, and impartiality, it's also the case that engagement with the messy details of lived experience and the arguments generated by political conflict can also be a useful constraint on and source of creativity for philosophical discovery of the nature and properties of an ideal. 

However, I have  long thought that it seems unwise, or at least imprudent, when philosophers qua being philosophers support active politicians and political parties. (That's compatible with doing so qua being citizens of a particular polity). It seems best if one's pursuit of truth and the good is not sullied by and subject to the many tactical compromises and fatal injustices that accompany political life pursued by imperfect beings like us. I rarely see philosophical excellence in support of a politician or party,+ and much that I find cringe-worthy.

Second, transgender people are subject to bigotry, discrimination, harassment, and violence. This is well documented in the UK and US. The evidence also suggests that many transgender victims are also (intersectionally) members of other historically discriminated minority groups, I assume here that the violence occurs in virtue of their being transgender, and that belonging to it means one belongs to (all other things being equal) a vulnerable category of people. So,

• I wholeheartedly support the campaign for transgender rights and protection under the law.***

Regular readers know (recall this post on MLK Jr.) that I also think that human imperfection, self-interest, and bigotry often undermine enforcement of the law and can even make the most beautifully written laws a tool of oppression. What's needed is, thus, also sufficient popular support or opinion and the right dispositions in favor of such rights. Political campaigns are, therefore, crucial to generate such support.** Of course, there is something of a paradox lurking here, because where such support exists the right would not be necessary.

One important feature of new rights is that the costs and (new) down-side risks of these need not be distributed evenly on the population. That's of special concern if these fall on other vulnerable groups. I understand the present campaign against trans rights, which includes some high profile self-described feminist philosophers -- where not informed by or leaning on bigotry -- as aiming to articulate some such risks to vulnerable women, especially those in prisons and among the homeless. I think such concerns eminently reasonable, but that's because there is a reasonable fear of violence and degradation within prisons and fear of violence against the homeless (see here). But rather than fighting transgender rights, the proper response to such concerns for the very vulnerable is, I would think, to join the coalition for thoroughgoing prison reform and better/more resources and conditions for the homeless.++ 

So my preliminaries have turned into a blog post, which was prompted by my momentary reconsideration of my stance on public philosophy.+++ It's true that there is no reason to believe that philosophical activism will always be beneficial. And I am reminded of the fact that even in the pre-internet age (which, let's stipulate, can make any bad thing worse), there was and never is a golden age of civility (as those of us old enough to recall philosophical debates over abortion, LGBTQ rights, or if one pays attention to debates over Zionism/BDS, etc.)---I have often remarked upon the fact that as a discipline we have an all-too-human fondness for philosophical debates as blood-sports and the delicious take-down.

It's a familiar fact that the pursuit of a worthy cause can turn into fanaticism and unpleasant and vindictive (moral) righteousness. And it is known that friends of worthy causes will find it difficult to condemn the excesses because they do not wish to be seen as undermining the worthy cause. For, it's also all-too-common that critics of the worthy cause will use such excesses as a tactic to undermine a cause, and shift debate away from consideration of the underlying evils. Savvy intellectuals recognize the temptation they may benefit from escalation and from hyping an otherwise unworthy critic, inviting abuse from their anonymous followers, with the cycle being renewed etc. And so it can often happen that wisdom is pushed aside or found crouching unnoticed in the margins of the arresting debates. 

In light of such facts people of good will may prefer to retreat to the ivory tower, and pursue their worthy work in undisturbed quiet. Others will note that these facts are part of the eternal return of life's carnival, and will will them...one tweet at a time eternally.  

 

 

On Glaucon's Sophistic Social Contract

Now listen to what I said would be the first topic—the nature and origin of justice. By nature, they say, to commit injustice is a good and to suffer it is an evil, but that the excess of evil in being wronged is greater than the excess of good in doing wrong. So that when men do wrong and are wronged by one another and taste of both, those who lack the power to avoid the one and take the other determine that it is for their profit to make a compact with one another neither to commit nor to suffer injustice; and that this is the beginning of legislation and covenants between men, and that they name the commandment of the law the lawful and the just, and that this is the genesis and essential nature of justice—a compromise between the best, which is to do wrong with impunity, and the worst, which is to be wronged and be impotent to get one's revenge. Justice, they tell us, being mid-way between the two, is accepted and approved, not as a real good, but as a thing honored in the lack of vigor to do injustice, since anyone who had the power to do it and was in reality 'a man' would never make a compact with anybody either to wrong nor to be wronged; for he would be mad. The nature, then, of justice is this and such as this, Socrates, and such are the conditions in which it originates, according to the theory. Glaucon in Plato's Republic, 358E-359B, translated by Paul Shorey.

In his On Politics, Alan Ryan calls this the "commonsensical" view about the origin of justice and, quite naturally, sees in it an anticipation of the social contract theory of Leviathan. In fact, Ryan is puzzled why it falls flat in the Republic. Unfortunately, Ryan does not explain why he is puzzled, except, perhaps, to note that the Greeks were familiar with contracts and that Glaucon, who is offering a composite view of what folk like Thrasymachus would say, is subtle enough ("philosophically deft") to note that the contract is not an actual contract, but one that would have been made. In what follows I'll call this the sophistic social contract.

The sophistic social contract is grounded in a view of human nature: [A] that to suffer the harms of injustice outweighs the benefits of doing injustice ("the excess of evil in being wronged is greater than the excess of good in doing wrong.") Let's stipulate  for the sake of argument that [A] is true psychologically, although one wonders if the person doing harm would agree (I return below).  [A] seems to presuppose [A*] a kind of hedonic calculus. That such a hedonic calculus is presupposed is not itself a conceptual problem, although one wonders if one is fully entitled to it in a pre-social contract state. For, as Hobbes notes in chapter 16 of the the Leviathan, there private appetites are the measure of goodness/badness. Part of the point of the social contract is, in fact, to supply common measures.

This last point connects to the more serious problem with [A] and that is that it seems to presuppose (justice) what it is supposed to explain (origin of justice). I'll allow that one can save the sophistic contract by allowing that injustice by nature is conceptually not identical to the injustice grounded by social contract. The distinction is clearly in Glaucon's presentation of it, but the story that would help explain how such a distinction is supposed to work is absent.

The second notable feature of the sophistic social contract is that [B] it is grounded in the experience of those that cannot avoid being harmed by a state of nature. This entails that [C] not everone is party to the sophistic state of nature, for the naturally very strong or charismatic are not evidently included. And one can well wonder why, if the very strong and charismatic are not included, the sophistic social contract would get off the ground or be enduringly stable  One can see in Hobbes's version of the very bad state of nature (or (recall) Master Mo's or Suarez's (recall)) as a way of addressing this obvious gap in the argument--it's then very hard to avoid the negative effects of lack of justice. This, in turn, is grounded in natural equality (recall).

These key assumptions of the sophisgtic social contract [B-C] rely on the underlying assumption that the social contract is grounded in the experiences of ordinary human beings not the exceptional types. That is, [D] in the sophistic social contract not everyone is equal. Rather, (and this anticipates Nietzsche's criticism of the social contract) it is a way for the many relatively weak to contain the few relatively strong, who have no initial incentive to join into this socialc ontract.* For them it is not evidently profitable--for them it would be madness to join. This is why [E] the sophistic social contract makes no mention of unanimity (which is required in Hobbes).

So, lurking behind the sophistic social contract is the idea that [F] justice is a way of the many weak imposing their collective strength on the strong and calling it a "compromise." That is to say, in the sophistic social contract, [G] the origin of justice is simultaneously the origin of ideology. This is barely disguised in this account (it's a feature not a bug). This [G] is not itself an objection to the theory. But [F] is problematic because it [F*] presupposes that the weak solve a rather tricky coordination problem and so, in part, assumes what it is supposed to explain.

To sum up. Recall that the Hobbesian social contract assumes this: first, one assumes that (i) in the state of nature it is a contract among (ii) free and equal (iii) individuals who (iv) transfer (some of their) rights to a collective and/or some sovereign and in (v) the process are transformed from a multitude to a unity. The key point is (vi) consent is required for submission or obedience to legitimate authority. The sophistic social contract rejects (ii) and so really has no right to (v), which goes unmentioned. And (vi) does not apply to all because the strong would never consent to the social contract.

The preceding makes it sound that I have a low opinion of the sophistic social contract. But, of course, its lack of reliance on the methodological assumption of natural equality makes it, in some sense, more plausible/realistic. And by grounding it in the good consequences (profit) that are purportedly to follow from it, it does not presuppose a distinctly moral sensitivity in the contracting parties (which hinders many later accounts of the social contract). The problem is that it then also reveals that the sophistic social contract is singularly bad at explaining or motivating continued compliance from those who are most dangerous.+ And so while it is very natural for many reasons to read Hobbes as the heir to the sophists, Glaucon's representation (which should not be the last word, of course) suggests that there are also very important differences.

 

 

On Darwin and the Savage (in The Origin of Species); and Hume's Treatise.

It has often been assumed that man has chosen for domestication animals and plants having an extraordinary inherent tendency to vary, and likewise to withstand diverse climates. I do not dispute that these capacities have added largely to the value of most of our domesticated productions; but how could a savage possibly know, when he first tamed an animal, whether it would vary in succeeding generations, and whether it would endure other climates? Has the little variability of the ass or guinea-fowl, or the small power of endurance of warmth by the reindeer, or of cold by the common camel, prevented their domestication? I cannot doubt that if other animals and plants, equal in number to our domesticated productions, and belonging to equally diverse classes and countries, were taken from a state of nature, and could be made to breed for an equal number of generations under domestication, they would vary on an average as largely as the parent species of our existing domesticated productions have varied.--Charles Darwin The Origin of Species (quoting from the first edition), chapter 1.

I start with a disclaimer. In this post, I ignore what Darwin's views of savages entail about his racial views (in part because I want to resist the temptation here to read his claims about civilizations (for example) in Descent back into The Origin of Species.) I do so primarily because here I want to focus on a methodological move in his argument, which I think is indebted to Hume and Adam Smith (both of whom he read).* To the best of my knowledge the point has not been noticed before, but as always I welcome readers' suggestions.

I don't mean to ignore political theory entirely. In the eighteenth century, and one finds this use, too, in Mill, it is common to use 'savages' as referring to folk who do not live under the rule of law (the contrast is with those that do--these are 'civilized'). Obviously the contrast between savage and civilized is normative (it's generally better to be civilized according to such theorists), but in some contexts 'savages' (and 'civilized') is used descriptively. Darwin kind of leaves ambiguous whether the savages he is discussing are themselves in the "state of nature" -- so that he is also claiming that domestication of animals and artificial selection temporally precedes the founding of political society (I think this is compatible with his views) --  or if he is only treating animal and plant domestication as a departure from the state of nature.  But if he does claim this, it's natural to think (and may say that Nietzsche and Foucault explicitly think it) that on the Darwinian account the escape of the state of nature by humans is itself a form of domestication and artificial selection of humans.+ 

Okay, with that in place, let's turn to the methodological point lurking here. The quoted passage is from Darwin's treatment of artificial selection by humans. In the paragraph, Darwin main claim is that (i) one is not allowed to attribute knowledge of (to use eighteenth century terminology) remote consequences to the intentions of ancient savages. When animals are first domesticated they serve particular local ends for humans. It's possible that domestication precedes utility, that it happens quite accidentally at first (in the same chapter Darwin calls this "unconscious selection"), but the domesticated/ing animals and plans are kept around because they serve human ends.** I return to (i) below, but strikingly in Darwin's hands it follows from (i) that (ii) even in domestication and artificial selection there are unintended consequences. The explanation for (ii) is that such consequences are simply unforeseeable for folk without knowledge of the effects of selection.

Darwin thinks that in the course of time, breeders start developing know how about and even studying the effects of artificial selection and so develop quite a bit of knowledge about remote consequences of their efforts. This is clear because the whole point of chapter 1 is showcase (part of) Darwin's rhetorical (and perhaps epistemic) strategy is to build his own theory of natural selection on top of such knowledge of artificial selection. I don't mean to deny that Darwin's theory natural selection is all about outcomes intended by nobody (natural selection is blind), but it is the case that certain structural elements of such outcomes are foreseeable by theory (later in the book Darwin gives some striking examples of that, but that's for another time).

Hume (himself a theorist of unintended consequences) uses versions of (i) at a key point in his account of the origins of justice:

The idea of justice can never serve to this purpose, or be taken for a natural principle, capable of inspiring men with an equitable conduct towards each other. That virtue, as it is now understood, wou'd never have been dream'd of among rude and savage men. (Treatise 3.2.2.8) [I describe this in my book here.]

Hume's savages are in some sense slightly more hypothetical than Darwin's, but in other respects the strategy is the same.  (Darwin also describes existing savages in the same chapter; in the Treatise, at least, but not elsewhere, Hume has little interest in really existing savages.) Part of the explanatory point is that there are forced moves, I call them social conceptual necessitation relations, that constrain any adequate genealogical explanation. 

Darwin's debt to 18th century political economy (Malthus) is familiar enough, but I hope to have indicated here that there are further methodological roots of Darwinism to be explored in the writings of Hume and smith. Finally, I don't mean to suggest I have  exhausted Darwin's views on savages in origins. At one point (in chapter 11), he writes, "The various beings thus left stranded may be compared with savage races of man, driven up and surviving in the mountain-fastnesses of almost every land, which serve as a record, full of interest to us, of the former inhabitants of the surrounding lowlands." This echoes Plato's Laws, but that's for another time.

On Solana's Civic Anarchism; or a liberalism for free spirits

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.

It is now technically feasible to reproduce without the aid of males (or, for that matter, females) and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do so. Retaining the male has not even the dubious purpose of reproduction. The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples.--Valerie Solanas (1967) SCUM Manifesto [HT Petra Van Brabandt]

The second paragraph is so arresting, as revolutionary transitions are wont to be, that it is easy to overlook, or deliberately pass over, the first sentence of SCUM manifesto. To do so would miss the extraordinary ambition of the text: it aims to establish the conditions of life worth living within a true society. The whole text is structured around two kinds of societies; the false or unauthentic one -- denoted 'society'-- and the true one to come after the civic-minded females have done their revolutionary work. The manifesto sharply distinguishes among three stages: the boring status quo; the thrilling revolution, which makes possible, a grooving society (society is the repetition that holds the manifest together). But it does it in the name of life and (thrilling) civic-mindedness. 

For, a true "society" consists "of rational beings capable of empathizing with each other." Today I wish to articulate the nature of such a true society. In so doing, I pass over what is most exciting in her work: the critique of patriarchy, the unmasking of the art industry, the stinging attack on the corruption of science for life-destroying ends (go read SCUM Manifesto for yourself). This society, which is essentially "complete" and lacking competitive principles is anarchic in character without "a government, laws or leaders." Solanas associates philosophy, not unfairly, with pompous prattle, but she echoes (recall) Socrates' true city and Spinoza that the best political community is one with true companionship and no hierarchy (she also refers to it as "eternity and Utopia"). For in a true society, true community is possible: 

A true community consists of individuals -- not mere species members, not couples -- respecting each others individuality and privacy, at the same time interacting with each other mentally and emotionally -- free spirits in free relation to each other -- and co-operating with each other to achieve common ends. Traditionalists say the basic unit of `society' is the family; `hippies' say the tribe; no one says the individual.

I do not wish to irritate more radical readers of Solanas (they can console themselves that before long my type is dispensable), but what she advocates here is the liberal good life.* She just thinks that men as they have been bred are incapable of it. Of course, she is not a thoroughgoing liberal; she embraces illiberal even thrilling means to solve the transition problem. But in this she is little different than those liberals who pine for Enlightened despots to help escape the cul-de-sac that is everyday politics. 

The point for Solanas of stressing the individual is not to make possible possessive individualism, but to promote the better kind, "to relate, groove, love and be herself, irreplaceable by anyone else." And "like conversation, love can exist only between two secure, free-wheeling, independent groovy female females, since friendship is based upon respect, not contempt." Of course, the material conditions  for this better kind of individualism "requires complete economic as well as personal freedom, leisure time and the opportunity to engage in intensely absorbing, emotionally satisfying activities which, when shared with those you respect, lead to deep friendship."

Not unlike Keynes, Solanas thinks the material conditions to make a true society possible are easily within reach. In fact, she advocates big data computing half a century before it became fashionable ("There now exists a wealth of data which, if sorted out and correlated, would reveal the cure for cancer and several other diseases and possibly the key to life itself. But the data is so massive it requires high speed computers to correlate it all.")

Before I close, I wish to prevent two misunderstandings: first, I do not mean to minimize Solanas's rejection of reform. Hers is a revolutionary program. As she writes, "SCUM will always operate on a criminal as opposed to a civil disobedience basis, that is, as opposed to openly violating the law and going to jail in order to draw attention to an injustice. Such tactics acknowledge the rightness overall system and are used only to modify it slightly, change specific laws. SCUM is against the entire system, the very idea of law and government. SCUM is out to destroy the system, not attain certain rights within it."**  The destruction is menacing for those attached to the status quo.

Second, I do not mean to suggest that for Solanas the best community is only love and conversation. Near the end of her manifesto, she points to a range of activities presupposed in it "to explore, discover, invent, solve problems, crack jokes, make music -- all with love. In other words, create a magic world."

There is, thus, a lush gentility in Solanas's vision. In fact, it is so gentle that one wonders how the civic thrill-seekers will adjust to it once they can repose from their revolutionary work.  

Graeber on Nobility and Markets

A mechanic from Nebraska knows it is highly unlikely that his son or daughter will ever become an Enron executive. But it is possible. There is virtually no chance on the other hand that his child, no matter how talented, will ever become an international human rights lawyer, or a drama critic for the New York Times. Here we need to remember not just the changes in higher education, but also the role that unpaid, or effectively unpaid, internships. It has become a fact of life in the United States that if one chooses a career for any reason other than the money, for the first year or two one will not be paid. This is certainly true if one wishes to be involved in altruistic pursuits: say, to join the world of charities, or NGOs, or to become a political activist. But it is equally true if one wants to pursue values like Beauty or Truth: to become part of the world of books, or the art world, or an investigative reporter. The custom effectively seals off any such career for any poor student who actually does attain a liberal arts education. Such structures of exclusion had always existed of course, especially at the top, but in recent decades fences have become fortresses.

If that mechanic’s son – or daughter – wishes to pursue something higher, more noble, for a career, what options does she really have? Likely just two. She can seek employment with her local church, which is hard to get. Or she can join the Army.

This is, of course, the secret of nobility. To be noble is to be generous, high-minded, altruistic, to pursue higher forms of value. But it is also to be able to do so because one does not really have to think too much about money. This is precisely what our soldiers are doing when they give free dental examinations to villagers: they are being paid (modestly, but adequately) to do good in the world. Seen in this light, it is also easier to see what really happened at universities in the wake of the 1960s – the “settlement” I mentioned above. Campus radicals set out to create a new society that destroyed the distinction between egoism and altruism, value and values. It did not work out, but they were, effectively, offered a kind of compensation: the privilege to use the university system to create lives that did so, in their own little way, to be supported in one’s material needs while pursuing virtue, truth, and beauty, and above all, to pass that privilege on to their own children. One cannot blame them for accepting the offer. But neither can one blame the rest of the country for resenting the hell out of them. Not because they reject the project: as I say, this is what America is all about.

As I always tell activists engaged in the peace movement and counter-recruitment campaigns: why do working class kids join the Army anyway? Because like any teenager, they want to escape the world of tedious work and meaningless consumerism, to live a life of adventure and camaraderie in which they believe they are doing something genuinely noble. They join the Army because they want to be like you.--David Graeber (2007) "Army of Altruists: On the alienated right to do good"@The Anarchist Library. [HT David Jacobs.]

After yesterday's post [in response to Dennett, on meritocracy and the crisis of liberalism], David Jacobs called my attention to Graeber's essay. A regular (recall) inspiration for these Impressions, Graeber fails to acknowledge the exceptions that prove the rule to his analysis, but otherwise his essay has aged well and is very much worth reading.* (I have quoted the concluding paragraph.) It's rhetoric is also nice instance of what I call cosmopolitan patriotism. While the occasion of the piece is political, it's significance is a two-fold conceptual, even axiological distinction (familiar, in fact, from Seneca amongst others [recall for example here]).

First, Graeber treats altruism and egoism as conceptual opposites made possible -- and made intelligible -- by market relations even if, and, perhaps precisely because, the distinction is preached by missionaries. In fact, he treats Christianity as a response to the development of markets and also as a means of the global extension of the cultural-conceptual logic of markets. Graeber draws on anthropology, but one senses a debate with Nietzsche hovering above the whole essay.

Second, orthogonal to the altruism-egoism axis, there is nobility, which is (a) made possible by wealth, and (b) just "is to be generous, high-minded, altruistic, to pursue higher forms of value." I think it is a bit unfortunate that Graeber list altruism here, too. Unfortunate, because this higher kind of altruism relies on "not really" having "to think too much about money" whereas the first kind of altruism is infused by thinking about money if only because money is either the explicit or unspoken other (in terms of self-denial, vows of poverty, pure wills, etc. ) or a measure of the size of the altruistic effort. So, to avoid confusion, when talking about higher forms of altruism (as a species of nobility) I'll use 'generosity' instead.

Such nobility and generosity are not essentially dependent on markets. For markets are not the only source of wealth. But it does not follow that they are incompatible with markets. As even Graeber implicitly allows, commercial society can generate the kind of wealth that makes such nobility and generosity possible. I have argued, in fact, that the original meaning of liberty in liberalism presupposes 'the sense of security that is a consequence of living under the impartial rule of law, and this liberty involves a kind of self- ownership that allows one to exercise one’s judgment in order to make meaningful choices.' Among some such choices are the kind of things Graeber and Adam Smith both call 'noble.' As I have emphasized before, Smith thinks a peculiar form of love of it, which is simultaneously an elevated form of self-love, provides the  motivational pull for generosity: "the love of what is honourable and noble, of the grandeur, and dignity, and superiority of our own characters" (recall here, here; here).

As an aside, I do not mean to deny that Smith was a critic of the rigor-ism that Graeber associates with the missionary; not unlike Hume, he argued that the opposition between egoism and altruism in a way distorts even debases the logic of markets, even morality itself; that prudence, self-care, and market participation can be (inferior) features of a morality worth having. (I think Graber agrees [his Nebraskan mechanic is a dignified character, after all.])**

Now you may be suspicious that I am turning Graeber's critique of the structures of exclusion into a defense of true liberalism worth having. That I am ignoring his point that in modern liberalism, American society demands from those that pursue nobility an initial sacrifice--a sacrifice that is financially un-problematic for those with easy access to family capital, where such capital exists, or that demands considerable self-abnegation and pre-commitment. It is as if contemporary society is saying to those that wish to leave the logic of market relations behind, prove it by cleansing yourself from the habit of financial acquisition.

This purification ritual has two obvious problems: first, the structures of exclusion mean (as Graeber notes) that the possibility of becoming generous in the sense meant here is unfairly distributed. Second, and this echoes the argument of my recent posts on the crisis of liberalism [here, here, and here], the rewards of generosity are increasingly, as one moves up the status hierarchy, measured by money. This is even true of soldiering, which -- let's stipulate in agreement with Graeber -- starts with a desire for 'adventure and camaraderie,' and then is turned into dedication to the mission, even love of country (or constitution), but at the end of a career -- of service and self-improvement -- then is turned into a well paid consultancy gig for a military contractor.+ That is, the purification and sacrifice are blemished by the monetary corruption that beckons at the end.  (The corruption I have in mind here is the undermining of the values that intrinsically belong to the great intermediary social orders; read yesterday's post.) So, the sacrifice ritual becomes kind of vacuous because the holiness it is meant to ensure turns out to be unavailable. Perhaps I have taken Graeber's ideas here a bit beyond his intentions (he actually knows something about the anthropology of sacrifice, after all). But they are not meant as criticism.

But there is a third, more fundamental, problem lurking here, and it is one of the central problems for the revived form of true liberalism I wish to help articulate, but it is also a problem for Graeber (whose political ends are different). Earlier I had agreed with Graeber that generosity and nobility are made possible by wealth. But that was a deliberate euphemism. For while wealth is necessary it is not sufficient; (c) it must be accompanied by some sense of aristocracy. Of course the nature of and entry into aristocracy is very varied in space and time and may -- even if necessarily grounded in capital in some way -- be highly spiritualized.++ 

Graeber rightly notes that it is natural to wish to be part of something higher. But the moral program of recent liberalism, with its embrace of equal dignity, is highly suspicious of any distinction between higher and lower values [unless the private values are strictly private]; and the foreseeable effect of the embrace (by my neo-liberal friends) of revealed preference in modern market economies is to undermine any such distinction. That's a feature not a bug. Graeber rejects the economists (see his Debt), of course, but not the methodological and even moral egalitarianism that lurks below. My point here is not to make trouble for Graeber's project(s);+++ rather to say his insights make trouble for mine: so, yet another way to think the problem of [reviving] liberalism, is how are generosity and nobility possible today? 

 

 

On The Scruton vs Williamson exchange in TLS

Although a good semantic account of “I” is not sufficient for understanding the nature of self-consciousness, it may still be necessary. To take one of Scruton’s examples, brilliantly suggestive though Hegel’s discussion of the first person in The Phenomenology of Spirit is, it is plausible that it involves a confusion between what Kaplan distinguished as char­acter and content, as Alberto Voltolini has argued forcefully. Roughly, the character of “I” is the general rule that, as used in a given context with its standard meaning in English, “I” refers to its user in that context. That rule is constant across contexts. By contrast, the content of “I” varies across contexts; as used in a given context, it is the referent of “I” in that context, the very person who uses it. You and I use the word “I” with the same character but different contents. The distinction may seem elementary once made, yet numerous discussions go wrong because they neglect it. In particular, abstract talk of “the I” tends to muddle just that point.--Timothy Williamson, November 3, TLS, p. 18. [HT Leiterreports]

Tim Crane introduces a somewhat dour and dispiriting exchange between Roger Scruton and Tim Williamson on the nature of philosophy with the (vaguely Sellarsian) claims that [A] "Philosophy aims to outline the most general nature of things -- and if you understand "things" in the most general possible sense to, then philosophy is one of the "things" that philosophy aims to outline. " He then adds that this "inevitably means that philosophers will tend to disagree about the nature of philosophy." Crane thinks that philosophical disagreement is always a possible consequence of this understanding of philosophy in light of the genuine possibility that even the "best method" is open to challenge.*

 

It is a dispiriting exchange because very little is said in it that could not have been said at most moments during the twentieth century by some articulate protagonist writing in the aftermath of some version of the parting of ways. A different kind of spirit than me, would, perhaps, be dispirited because the previous sentence entails a lack of progress. Because I am mostly indifferent to the very idea of philosophical progress (although excited by technical innovation), that's not the source of my response. Let me explain a bit more fully before I return to the passage quoted at the top of this post.

 

Most of the exchange, Williamson refuses to show his hand. Rather, he has great fun at poking holes in the presuppositions and lack of clarity of Scruton's position (on the nature of the meaning of 'empirical world;' 'humanities' and 'science'); Scruton's sloppy terminology and the absurdities it commits him to (about various disciplinary practices inside and outside the humanities and science) are effectively ridiculed by Williamson throughout. I find witnessing such expert demolition dispiriting, too.

 

In fact, in his first response to Scruton, Williamson's makes no assertion about the nature of philosophy at all! He hints that he agrees with "making distinctions;" that one should focus on "easier cases and analyse them more deeply before building up to harder cases later;" and that philosophers (like Grice, Reichenbach, and Kaplan) have contributed to "science" and "scientific theorizing." In fact, in his third response, Williamson is careful to avoid conflating philosophy's contribution to science from philosophy itself. There such "contributions" are treated not as intrinsic to philosophy, but as one of the (extrinsic) things that "also" happens.

 

As an aside, against the textual evidence, in his introduction, Crane insists -- by quoting Williamson's "easier cases and analyse them more deeply before building up to harder cases later;" -- that Williamson here "epitomizes" the approach of "what is generally known as analytic philosophy." That may well be so for Williamson (and analytic philosophy), but in context Williamson is defending the fact that "mathematical decision theory" is an example of the possibility of "scientific study of points of view." That's not a claim about the nature of philosophy, but a method. Of course, it's possible that philosophy could be reduced to method, but that's not Williamson's position.

 

Rather, in his exchange with Scrution, Williamson seems to understand philosophy as a "discipline" (without telling us here what that is) with its "own questions" and "theories" with its "own ways of answering its questions" (including "thought experiments" and "mathematically rigorous formal models")** that "concern all possible instances of their subject matter, not just those that happen to have evolved in our species or on our planet." So, Williamson's understanding of philosophy is intrinsically about a species of generality not far removed from Crane's claim [A] about the nature of philosophy. (This is further evidence that Williamson does not treat contributing to science as really central to philosophy because some of the contributions he praises are really specific to our planet.) It would have been useful if Williamson had been asked to show his hand earlier in the exchange because then Scruton could have used the evident lacunae in Williamson's approach to articulate his own stance.

 

It's not that Scruton does not deserve being made fun of -- he does write [in the  context of explaining that melodies are musical objects that belong to purely intentional realm and so could never be studied scientifically], 'no sounds could arise from the depths as the E-flat major arpeggio rises from the depths at the start of the Das Rheingold' --; the problem here is not just the dated example (and the logical triviality of the claim), but rather that he fails to notice that he is using it as example of "sounds...we as self-conscious beings hear them, under [particular, intentional] concepts" while simply assuming that his readers share his concepts; these days the prelude sounds like something you may hear as background noise while getting a deep tissue massage.*

Williamson's potshots at Scruton are a shame because Scruton also says some important things worth reflecting on.+ But I want to leave those aside (including a curious criticism of Foucault), and close with a reflection on the central philosophical disagreement between Scruton and Williamson that Williamson purports to settle in the passage quoted above. Throughout the exchange, Scruton tries to defend philosophy's role in articulating (what he at one point calls) the "standpoint from which self-conscious beings address the world, what Hegel called the Fursichsein....philosophy as the seamstress of the Lebenswelt" For, somewhat surprisingly, nothing Williamson says really undermines the viability of such a project. If anything, he can be taken to be saying that such a project requires, first, the long and proper development of the careful tools and distinctions of analytic philosophy: "Although a good semantic account of “I” is not sufficient for understanding the nature of self-consciousness, it may still be necessary." (Here, one may well suspect that Williamson himself is close to Carnap's position in the Aufbau.) So, somewhat peculiarly, while Williamson destroys Scruton in the exchange, he leaves his project standing (without, of course, drawing attention to this fact).

 

Now, one may object to the judgment at the end of the preceding paragraph and point to the paragraph quoted above. In it, strikingly, Williamson's appeals to authority. What's peculiar of Williamson's strategy in the quoted passage is (a) beside the fact that he refers to an otherwise obscure paper [although Voltolini deserves wider readership], that here, seemingly en passant, Williamson calls us back (b) to one of the central debates between Russell and Bradley that go into the founding myths of analytic philosophy in which the technically superior Russell philosophically destroys the out of date Hegelians. Given that legend, it is worth nothing (c) that while Voltolini is clearly on Russell's side, he actually shows that Russell's philosophy could not do the job it set out -- destroy Hegelian metaphysics -- because even on the limited question of the thesis of indexical reference to discrete objects, Russell's philosophy lacked the proper resources. [It had to await Kaplan.]

 

But Voltolini's argument is peculiar because (d) the very distinction between character and content [which  is used by Kaplan to offer a good semantic account of "I"] is, to use a Kaplan style phrase, foreshadowed by Bradley himself in defense of the (neo-)Hegelian position (Voltolini himself quotes a passage from Bradley's Logic; I could also point to several passages in Appearance and Reality), although one may grant that it is not exactly Kaplan's version of it. I call this 'peculiar' because, again as (e) Voltolini correctly notes, Voltolini's Kaplan-style-rational-reconstruction of Hegel is not theoretically neutral. [In fact, and this is an aside, (f) Voltolini acknowledges -- but then fails to develop! -- that Bradley has further resources [cough, cough, his famous regress argument] to defend his Hegelian theory against the metaphysical thesis of discrete individuals.]

 

This lack of neutrality matters (if we return to the debate between early analytic and the neo Hegelians), because Kaplan's semantic approach, with its commitment to content presupposing context, actually requires the intelligibility of discrete individuals (in some sense or another) when applied to the Russell-Bradley debate by Voltolini. [For Kaplan assumes our ability to manipulate the conceptual apparatus of direct reference.] So, while one can admire Kaplan's achievement, even hold it up as an exemplar of the kind of contribution one may wish to aspire to, it is peculiar to trot it out as somehow providing useful evidence of muddled thinking in Hegel or Bradley (or Scruton).+

 

My dispiriting suspicion, and this gets me to the point today, is that Williamson probably knows that his appeals to Voltolini and Kaplan and the excursion into muddled confusions -- are a non-sequitur; he will get away with it because why would anybody who cares about the technical issues and, more important, cares for the health of philosophy be willing to come to Scruton's defense?****

 

 

 

On Obscuring The Underlying Issue

A political theory can in principle divert attention from the distorting influence of relations of power without its even being the case that some part of the content of the theory, narrowly construed, is false, wrong, or incorrect. Diverting attention from the way in which certain beliefs, desires, attitudes, or values are the result of particular power relations, then, can be a sophisticated way of contributing to the maintenance of an ideology, and one that will be relatively immune to normal forms of empirical refutation. If I claim (falsely) that all human societies, or all human societies at a certain level of economic development, have a free market in health services, that is a claim that can be demonstrated to be false. On the other hand, if I focus your attention in a very intense way on the various different tariffs and pricing schema that doctors or hospitals or drug companies impose for their products and services, and if I become morally outraged by “excessive” costs some drug companies charge, discussing at great length the relative rates of profit in different sectors of the economy, and pressing the moral claims of patients, it is not at all obvious that anything I say may be straightforwardly “false”; after all, who knows what “excessive” means? However, by proceeding in this way I might well focus your attention on narrow issues of “just” pricing, turning it away from more pressing issues about the acceptance in some societies of the very existence of a free market for drugs and medical services. One can even argue that the more outraged I become about the excessive price, the more I obscure the underlying issue. One way, then, in which a political philosophy can be ideological is by presenting a relatively marginal issue as if it were central and essential. The (mis)direction of limited human attention in this case would be the analogue in the theoretical sphere of the Nietzschean issues of “priority” discussed above. Raymond Geuss (2008 Philosophy and Real Politics, 53-4.

Geuss's core insight here is that attention is scarce and that directing it in certain ways preserves or enhances the unjust/unfair, not to mention ugly, status quo. He is also correct that theorists should be reflexive about this. Because I do not want to quibble about a word (ideological), I'll grant him that the shaping power of directing attention to less pressing concerns in ways that reinforce or entrench the status quo may be ideological in the sense he uses it.* Geuss here resonates with contemporary concerns over not just so-called fake news, but also debates over the status of so-called identity politics.

Now, one might think that Geuss is right that attention-grabbing outrage about the relatively trivial while being indifferent to or obscuring the significant is  problematic. That we do so all the time makes it no less problematic. Many fine people are de facto utterly indifferent to (say) starving children (not just in foreign countries but in the town next over), yet get very exercised about where in town parking is zoned (or not). But in virtue of the fact that attention is finite, it's clear that focus on things one can influence directly without complex coordination is pretty rational and may well be selected for our evolutionary history--our attention and emotions direct us toward the actionable. That is, preference distortion in the sense that Geuss uses it, is inevitable. (Political theory is, then, a battle over what distortions to prefer.) For attention-grabbing outrage about the relatively trivial may be worse (in a moral and aesthetic sense), attention-grabbing outrage about stuff one can't really influence without extraordinary effort may well turn into empty symbolism.

Before I continue; I'll resist the temptation to spend time on the theoretical quicksand on which Geuss decides what the "more pressing" or "narrow" or "underlying" or "relatively marginal" issues are. I'll spot him the (rather questionable) assumption that this can be done in a non-question begging way (although I am extremely doubtful that his own philosophy has the resources to do so--that is, he'll have to draw on normative theories that he clearly rejects).**

The central (ha!) problem here is not that Geuss's stance has a tendency to be scornful of anything short of revolution, but rather that it leaves little room for ameliorative and mitigating projects if these entrench or leave the status quo untouched. To be sure, there are other kinds of thinkers who falsely assume that the removal of, say, injustice X is always a good and so never a cause for qualms. (I have animal rights activists friends who refuse to consider that removing the right to ritual slaughter for minorities may, in fact, reinforce the subordination of these minorities.)+

It's clear that many ameliorative and mitigating projects reinforce the status quo because they detract attention from its fundamental reform and make it better functioning (and so more likely to endure, etc.). And it's also true that most ameliorative and mitigating projects involve engagement in what from the perspective of eternity is really attention to trivial mechanisms of salience production, issue framing, etc. But these are the life-blood of political struggles.

But it is notable that a disciplined theoretical focus on underlying or central issues also entails a practiced indifference to the many ways in which our lives are harmed routinely in medias res. For, our political order is imperfect and necessarily so. The modern liberal, bureaucratic-administrative state with its military-industrial-financial-biotechnological complex [etc!] necessarily generates all kinds of ugliness, injustice, and distortions. (I say necessary because it's true of all political orders. For, if humans were capable of fully just or aesthetic (etc.) political order, we would not have political orders.) And while such indifference to petty harms to self may well be a necessary step on the path to Stoic wisdom, or the expression of Hobbesian magnanimity, indifference to harms to others is not just acceptance of (preventable and unworthy) cruelty,++ but also acquiescence in the many ways noble aspirations are frustrated because (say) of the decisions of petty functionaries and -- dare I say it -- lack of access to drugs.

 

 

 

On Seneca's Mortal Meditations, Impartial Spectators, and Public Crimes (and Janis Joplin)

"Think on death." ['Meditare mortem'] In saying this, [Epicurus] bids us to meditate on freedom [meditari libertatem].  He who has learned to die has unlearned slavery; he is above any power [supra omnem potentiam est], or, at any rate, he is beyond it.  What terrors have prisons and bonds and bars for him?  His way out is clear.  There is only one chain which binds us to life, and that is the love of life [amor vitae].  The chain may not be cast off, but it may be rubbed away, so that, when it is timely [ut si quando res exiget] nothing may retard or hinder us from being ready to do at once that which at some time we are bound to do.--Seneca, Letter 26.

Nietzsche famously castigates Platonism (the whole of Western philosophy) as a life-denying philosophy. At first sight Seneca's mortal meditations confirm the charge: we should meditate on death in order to overcome the love life. Yet, the point of thinking about death is to overcome the ways in which the love of life enslave us and thereby secure true liberty. For, by implication, Seneca holds that when we often assume we are free, we are really in the grip of some attachment, which we are unwilling to lose, and which constrains our actions.

The passage helps explain the fact that while Stoicism could have an apathetic or quietist consequence, it also "had," as Adam Smith noted, "very great influence upon the character and conduct of its followers," and "that though it might sometimes incite them to unnecessary violence, its general tendency was to animate them to actions of the most heroic magnanimity and most extensive benevolence." (Smith fails to note the significance of freedom, although elsewhere in the section he does connect the Stoics to liberty.)

Contemporary, scholarly readers may see in this passage an affirmation of republicanism (a Ciceronian version of which has been revived). But it is by no means always obvious that Seneca is a republican, and, in context, Seneca seems not to be focused on a particular political order (although, of course, he was intimately familiar with the institution of slavery); but, rather, on a certain comportment to life (or death). In fact, the letter as a whole tries analyze how much of Seneca's present character is a consequence of wisdom (that is prior emendation) and how much of it is a consequence of his old age.

So, here it is not entirely clear what Seneca means by freedom. In fact, I doubt that Seneca insists on acting without constraints at all.* For, in the previous Letter 25 (which I commented on obliquely last time) had discussed what we would call ethics by the introduction of an impartial spectator device. In fact, any spectator will do:

There is no real doubt that it is good for one to have appointed a guardian over oneself, and to have someone whom you may look up to, someone whom you may regard as a witness of your thoughts. It is, indeed, nobler by far to live as you would live under the eyes of some good man, always at your side; but nevertheless I am content if you only act, in whatever you do, as you would act if anyone at all were looking on [ut sic facias quaecumque facies tamquam spectet aliquis:].--Letter 25

It is quite notable here, that for Seneca the spectator within need not be Cato or Scipio but can be anyone. Seneca is willing to embrace such egalitarian spectatorship because he thinks that  "solitude prompts us to all kinds of evil" [omnia nobis mala solitudo persuadet.] (Letter 25) What makes me shudder is that today so many political crimes are executed in front of the camera, even demand its presence.

Be that as it may, I was suddenly reminded of the Stoic echoes in Janis Joplin's version of Me and Bobby McGee (written by Kris Kristofferson, who performs it with Joan Baez here):

 

On The Moral Philosophy of Graeber on Debt; Or How Philosophers found a lovable Anthropologist

Anthropology has shown just how different and numerous are the ways in which humans have been known to organize themselves. But it also reveals some remarkable commonalities - fundamental moral principles that appear to exist everywhere, and that will always tend to be invoked, wherever people transfer objects back and forth or argue about what other people owe them.--David Graeber (2011, 2014), Debt: The first 5000 Years, p. 90.

Outside of bits of philosophy of biology (a big field) and philosophy of archaeology (a small sub-set of philosophy of the special sciences), philosophers do not generally pay a lot of attention to anthropologists. At first sight this is surprising because there are clear overlaps between areas of anthropology and work done in philosophy of mind and ethics/political philosophy. It's less surprising if one recognizes that (i) anthropological methods often don't fit the image of science within philosophy. An image of science contain (recall) is (a) a list of characteristics that function as short-hand for representing science when (b) these characteristics are used in debates where one side (or more) appeals to the (epistemic) authority of science to settle debate, and (c) such an image is often accompanied by privileged list of scientific virtues. While field work as such is not at odds with philosophy's image of science, anthropologists have (in the perception of philosophers) increasingly tended toward narrative (and post-modernist versions of it), toward political activism, and moral relativism, which are often not treated as scientific at all in this image of science. In particular, this has coincided with (ii) that during the last few generations, professional philosophers have increasingly come to deny moral relativism the status as a respectable position in ethics (we now associate relativism with many of the silly things said by our worst undergraduates). This is not deny that with John MacFarlane's recent technical work on assessment sensitivity, it should be easier to articulate versions of moral relativism that will get a less dismissive response in the future (see here for an intro).

So, when I was prompted to read Debt by Crooked Timber's memorable symposium on it, I was puzzled by the philosophers's interest in it. To be sure, I was not really puzzled because since the aftermath of the fall of Lehman, debt is very high on the political agenda in lots of ways; in addition, a non-trivial number of philosophers have become skeptical of the status of economics as a science, and Graeber presents his own work in opposition to mainstream economics since Adam Smith. But guided, in part, by Chris Bertram's helpful introduction to the Crooked Timber symposium, I had kind of interpreted Graeber as an ordinary anthropological relativist. For, as Bertram correctly notes, according to Graeber, "human societies are always structured (despite appearances) around three competing moral principles: communism, exchange, and hierarchy." In addition, Graeber writes things like "radical equality and radical inequality do exist in the world, that each carries within its own kind of morality, its own ways of thinking and arguing about the rights and wrongs of any  given situation, and these moralities are entirely different than that of tit-for-tat-exchange," (p. 94). During the symposium I did not really sit down with Debt at the time, but read it superficially, and so Bertram's became my own understanding of Debt. As it happens, I am teaching the book, and (in light of the passage quoted at the top of this post), I wish to revisit Graeber's relationship to relativism.

In his post, Bertram usefully summarizes Debt's three competing moral principles (I would call them "moral-political systems of norms/logics") as follows:

“Communism” is the principle familiar from Marx: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. Each contributes what they can and we are sensitive to the vulnerability of other members of our family or community [...or friendship]....Graeber argues (101) that this “baseline communism” is the “ground of all human social life”. “Exchange”, by contrast, is governed by an ideal of strict reciprocity among free and equal persons. I give you something and you give me something in return. It is, among other things, the ideal principle of market exchange. “Hierarchy” is a principle of authority and status: we are not equal, I have the right to command and you to the duty obey, in virtue of who we are. These principles aren’t mutually exclusive, and they have peculiar ways of morphing into one another. And it can be a matter of controversy and judgement which principle (or combination of principles) is at work at any particular moment.

There is nothing wrong with Bertram's summary, and he usefully calls attention to the fact Graeber treats a certain form of communism as the ground of all human social life (p. 101), and, thereby (see also p. 267), has a certain conceptual, historical, and even normative priority over the  other 'moral-political system of norms.' (Here I ignore the ways conceptual, historical, moral questions are blended by Graeber.) As Graeber writes, "once we start thinking of communism as a principle of morality rather than just a question of property ownership, it becomes clear that this sort of morality is almost always at play to some degree in any transaction--even commerce," (102, emphasis added). He goes on to describe how this explains "shopkeepers in poor neighborhoods are almost never of the same ethnic group as their customers" (p. 102--a topic also quite salient to reflection on the nature of violence in riots and uprisings). I don't think Graeber's any is a slip of the pen, but that's because I have come to recognize that Graeber thinks of anthropology as having discovered some invariances about human nature even if these invariant properties are expressed differently everywhere, too.*

In particular, I read Graeber as identifying two such fundamental invariances (1-2), which in turn lead to a third empirical claim (3):

1. When humans transfer objects back and forth between/among each other or argue about what other people owe them the same fundamental moral principles will be invoked everywhere and always (see the passage above).
2. Humans have a sense of justice that grounds sociality.
3. Mutual sociality grounds all peaceful social relations (p. 101)

That is, (1) is an invariant about the way some parts of morality are discussed and (presumably) understood, while (2) is a kind of biological-psychological fact about us, and (3) an empirical generalization. I take it that for philosophers suspicious of anthropological relativism Debt's insistence that 1-3 are teachings of almost two centuries worth of anthropological inquiry is very welcome. Now (1) is as stated formal; it lacks content. It says that humans have a shared framework for equity, but what this framework is is left silent. Some other time I return to (1) because it requires a kind of synthetic understanding of the whole of Debt.

By a 'sense of justice,' Graeber means, in part, the capacity to track and expect reciprocity, which, in turn, relies on cognitive capacities to track proportionality and symmetry in various context. Now, to be sure, Graeber very clearly rejects inflated versions of (2), which he associates with work inspired by Homans and Levi-Strauss, which claim that reciprocity governs all human interactions. But that is compatible with a more modest version of (2) that allows that we do not always act on the sense of justice. In particular, Graeber is quite explicit that violence can prevent our so acting and that transactions among strangers need not be informed by it. (This matters to his critique of markets and some images of commercial society because market exchange is conceptualized by Graeber as presupposing state violence and as occurring among separated strangers.) By 'modest' I do not mean unimportant because according to Graeber it grounds all peaceful social relations (3), but, of course, not all social relations are peaceful.

Somewhat surprisingly and also maddeningly, Graeber says very little about the grounds of sociality or even the sense of justice, which echoes Rawls's claim that sense of justice “would appear to be a condition for human sociability.” In particular, to the best of my knowledge Debt never mentions sympathy or the sympathetic mechanism in his original book. But in his 2014 afterword, when he takes a "bow to Adam Smith," (p. 398; some other time I return to Graeber's largely polemical and hostile treatment of Smith), Graeber allows that he has not really challenged or addressed Smith's "theory of human motivation that assumed that people, in general, were motivated above all to be the object of others's sympathetic attentions." (p. 399) Part of me wonders if, Graeber also came to recognize that for his stress on sociality to work he requires something like Smith's theory of human motivation to complement what he calls 'a sense of justice.' (In part, because he allows in very Smithian fashion that the spirit of solidarity is itself is directed more to "some people than others" (p. 99).)

I don't mean to suggest that Graeber says nothing about what enters into sociality. He claims, for example, that what he calls 'baseline communism' might be "considered the raw material of sociality." (p. 99) I have to admit that Graeber here edges close to a circle because it seems pretty clear that sociality is, in turn, needed for his account of baseline communism to get off the ground. But rather than harping on this tension in his thought, I close with some observations of what follows from Graeber's inferences from 1-3. One nice feature of Graeber's treatment of communism is that it is really oriented toward a pleasing conviviality. (p. 99)) This is true of "most human beings" (p. 99; on is reminded of the significance of Smith's treatment of the pleasure in mutual sympathy). And presumably this is also what the anthropologist have uncovered. (Because it is only true of most of us, I hesitate to list it as a fourth invariance.)

He then adds a further claim, recognition of our ultimate interdependence...is the ultimate substance of social peace (p. 99). It's not entirely clear if Graeber is here relying on what anthropologists have shown or is innovating here. This allows Graeber to distinguish between the absence of violence (itself a rare occurrence--Debt drills into the reader the pervasiveness of violence) and social peace. For social peace is the absence of violence accompanied by this mutual recognition.+ (To be sure, social peace may rely on all kinds of sanctions and threats.) Of course, who enters into this 'our' is very contested and contextually variant (as Graeber vividly illustrates with various discussions of slavery), but one can discern in this messenger from the anthropologists a Cosmopolitan tendency.

On the Interior Freedom of an Authentic Liberal Education; Or How the Sheltering Sky nearly ruined my life

Can we imagine college classes being conducted without agendas, either political or scholarly?

If this seems a fantasy, can we imagine ways that the agendas that inevitably emerge would be constantly subject to self-critical eyes?

The small-scale culture of a college — not its rhetoric or its bureaucratic shortcuts — would be the only source of such a possibility.

Consider the serious challenges that an ordinary college lecture class faces in this regard. The content-providing professor proceeds according to his or her preestablished conclusions. Grades are constantly dribbled out in a way that can encourage followers or punish dissenters. The student as content-consumer has little incentive or indeed encouragement to undertake an inquiry where much of anything is at stake.

The architects of the liberal arts program at St. John’s and of the original core curriculum at the University of Chicago had an ingenious solution: Demote the professor to the status of a guide and give students the responsibility for the discussion.

The “teachers,” as my college’s advertising boasts, are the authors of great works, Plato, Newton, Austen or DuBois. Let students pursue the questions they bring to the classroom with the books as interlocutors and with their fellow students and teachers as helpers. Let the faculty step back and ensure that the discussions are careful, respectful and relentlessly pursue the truth. And use grades only to signal to outside institutions the student’s fitness for further study.

A great work is one sufficiently complex and majestic to support conflicting interpretations. But it is also one that exposes questions crucial to humanity: on the just structure of society, yes, but also the existence or nonexistence of divinities; the nature of matter and the laws of nature; the inner workings of mathematics; and the pitfalls of the human mind and heart.

Discussing such works is a bottomless journey, pursued in acknowledged ignorance and punctuated by flashes of insight.

Such discussions train us in respecting others, in facing our own inadequacy and in patiently seeking out the reality of a situation. Training the natural and spontaneous interest of a young person in fundamental questions is an excellent preparation for life.

After all, agendas come and go. The challenge is to maintain a broad perspective in an environment driven by money-making fads and more sinister attempts to exploit human beings in the search for power and profit.

The interior freedom an authentic liberal education imparts is the safest space on earth.--Zena Hitz "What is a Safe Space?" Washington Post.

Hitz's article in the Washington Post responds to the debate about safe spaces and trigger warnings, but is really a further articulation, if not development, of her position that a certain kind of education develops interiority (recall her piece in First Things, and my response here). While it is true that the core curriculum and the way of teaching that accompanies it is not political in the sense of taking sides in conventional party politics, she is mistaken to suggest that there is no politics in the conception at all, or that it instantiates a kind of (Weberian) neutrality in which the only politics it produces is an emergent, indirect quality.

The core [recall] she lovingly discusses was developed by President Hutchins at The University of Chicago (and given widespread familiarity by Mortimer Adler) during the Great Depression and is a species of secular humanism (in which, as Hitz notes and exemplifies, religious thought is welcomed). The (slowly evolving) core simultaneously instantiates a great conversation over perennial issues by exemplary minds, and presents the development of thought. Among the self-conscious underlying aims is to produce citizens and thought leaders, and simultaneously be a rescue mission (Wikipedia has a useful intro). I would be the last to suggest that such a rescue mission is not needed today.

The very idea of 'flashes of insight' as a way of knowledge contribution is itself Goethe's contribution to the Romantics (although clearly modeled on a species of religious experience and celebrated in Archimedes Eureka moment), and, in part, an elitist response to the more egalitarian, more democratic ideals of the Enlightenment. To be sure, this is primarily a nobility of the mind acquired through Bildung.

But my point here is not to quibble with Hitz's claims about neutrality and politics. Rather, despite the fact that her piece warmed my heart and made me feel in the company of a true educator, I was troubled by it. After a day's mulling, I recognize that something is missing in the closing line of Hitz's piece (recall),  "The interior freedom an authentic liberal education imparts is the safest space on earth." To put the point philosophically, freedom is never a safe place. True freedom, even if reduced to interiority (as Hitz suggests), always presupposes (as a kind of constitutive principle) the possibility of making disastrous mistakes from which no practice of self-criticism can save us.

Because (recall) I recently read Gertrude Himmelfarb's (1994) "On Looking into the Abyss," I am reminded of a famous, somewhat facetious remark (which she quotes) by Lionel Trilling in his (1961) "On The Teaching of Modern Literature:"

I asked them to look into the Abyss, and, both dutifully and gladly, they have looked into the Abyss, and the Abyss has greeted them with the grave courtesy of all objects of serious study, saying: “Interesting, am I not? And exciting, if you consider how deep I am and what dread beasts lie at my bottom. Have it well in mind that a knowledge of me contributes materially to your being whole, or well-rounded, men.

Trilling points to the phenomenon in  which books have lost the capacity to destroy by, say, making a bad or troubled soul worse, and accentuate immoderate desires.  Hitz does not allow for this when she insists that the true guide through these books, in an atmosphere of mutual respect in which young souls are turned toward the good, provides "an excellent preparation for life." But As Trilling reminds, books can also undo life in ways that are not merely a preparatory experience. I think this is true. I can't convince you of this, but the best I can do is offer some hint of an autobiographical remark.

When I was a late teenager, I read Sheltering Sky. I am unsure how I stumbled upon it (I am pretty sure I read it before the movie came out). But it brought me extremely close to suicide. I have no idea why the story of an overconfident American couple who travel through Africa unnerved me so badly, but I was not just physically shaken by the felt experience, but also overwhelmed by the meaningless of life. (When, later, I read Nietzsche, I found him tame and too refined for my taste.) There is a famous passage in the novel (it was used in the film) that while flirting with the pretentious (and bordering on the incoherent) kind of points to the underlying theme of the book (which I have never re-read again):

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

What gets to me in the passage is not the actual remarks about death or the finiteness of life (I know about that), but rather the sneaky claim that everything, even the most constitutive memories happens a very small number (four or five) times, really. Yes, you can try to cheat: by doing a daily exercise to remember the event many more times or by denying that any thought really matters to you, but so doing would also distract from the art of living, of being alive.

Much of professional philosophy blabbers on about truth, rationality, and morality and never allows the sneaky claims. By contrast, the close reading and shared discussion of the texts that Hitz and I both admire makes space for it. The aim is not, of course, to generate a stream of psychiatric patients or suicides in the class-room--a skilled guide and teacher can forestall it often--, but in the very possibility of unsettling even the skilled guide can slip sometimes and make us worse off, genuinely worse off, than before the conversation started.