Digressions&Impressions

On the Philosophical Attack on Heritable Intellectual Rank

If there is any good in philosophy, it is this, – that it never looks into pedigrees. All men, if traced back to their original source, spring from the gods....[a] noble mind is free to all men; according to this test, we may all gain distinction. Philosophy neither rejects nor selects anyone; its light shines for all. Socrates was no aristocrat. Cleanthes worked at a well and served as a hired man watering a garden. Philosophy did not find Plato already a nobleman; it made him one. Why then should you despair of becoming able to rank with men like these? They are all your ancestors, if you conduct yourself in a manner worthy of them; and you will do so if you convince yourself at the outset that no man outdoes you in real nobility. We have all had the same number of forefathers; there is no man whose first beginning does not transcend memory. Plato says: "Every king springs from a race of slaves, and every slave has had kings among his ancestors." The flight of time, with its vicissitudes, has jumbled all such things together, and Fortune has turned them upside down. Then who is well-born? He who is by nature well fitted for virtue. That is the one point to be considered; otherwise, if you hark back to antiquity, every one traces back to a date before which there is nothing. From the earliest beginnings of the universe to the present time, we have been led forward out of origins that were alternately illustrious and ignoble. A hall full of smoke-begrimed busts does not make the nobleman. No past life has been lived to lend us glory, and that which has existed before us is not ours; the soul alone renders us noble, and it may rise superior to Fortune out of any earlier condition, no matter what that condition has been.

Suppose, then, that you were not a Roman knight, but a freedman, you might nevertheless by your own efforts come to be the only free man amid a throng of gentlemen. "How?" you ask. Simply by distinguishing between good and bad things without patterning your opinion from the populace. You should look, not to the source from which these things come, but to the goal towards which they tend. --Seneca, Letter 44 Translated by Richard Mott Gummere.

In Morgenröte, Nietzsche treats the invention of Darwinism as the undoing of heritable grandeur, "This however has now become a forbidden path for the ape stands at its entrance and likewise other fearsome animals grinning knowingly as if to say: no further this way!" But as Seneca reminds us, one does not need Darwinsim to make the argument. There are five  key features of Seneca's argument: first, the argument relies on a distinction between what we may call history and pre-history (or the unreliable past). If you think this distinction is too anachronistic, recall this post, prompted by Adrienne Mayor, on the  nature of deep time in Ancient Greek thought. Because of the existence of pre-history, the origin and hence purity of no lineage is secure. This, second, relies on the idea that a noble-making character of the lineage is essential to the lineage and gets handed down through the lineage. The existence of pre-history makes all lineages epistemically suspect hostage to fortune.* In addition, third, and this is more of an empirical claim, what we know of human nature, all lineages will contain the ignoble. Fourth, he relies on the idea, one we have seen him develop through all the Letters, that there is no property right in the truly noble. While his sages have a certain amount of individuality -- given their differing circumstances -- the noble, which instantiates the infinite, lacks individuality (recall letter 3).

Finally, and fifth, he relies on the idea that superior qualities can be caused by a chain of inferior qualities. This point is notable because it goes against the idea -- familiar to modern readers from Descartes's Meditations (but often associated with a species of Platonism) -- that what is more perfect — that is, contains in itself more reality — cannot arise from what is less perfect. But Seneca clearly thinks this would involve one in a kind of genetic fallacy (You should look, not to the source from which these things come, but to the goal towards which they tend.). While the past is full of excellent exemplars, natural genealogy has no special status 

Seneca here anticipates the Hobbesian and Smithian idea that one is not a philosopher by nature, but that one is made into a philosopher. From this vantage point all are noble [omnes...hoc sumus nobiles] or at least capable of attaining it.+ (This is a core commitment of what I call methodological analytic egalitarianism) Now, as David Levy and Sandra Peart always insist to me, that a Stoic is in some sense a radical egalitarian is no surprise (given the known radical strain of early Stoicism--I warmly recommend René Brouwer's book). But Seneca insists that the point can also be found in Plato. This is a bit more surprising because while Plato is not Aristotle (think natural slaves/rulers), Plato tends to be associated with the idea that there is a hierarchy of human types (and  philosophers can be bred accordingly). Sometimes Plato presents  as thinking that natural hierarchy can be irrelevant politically or morally (see this post for some of these claims). This got me curious about the passage quoted by Seneca. (A helpful note by the translator directed me to the Theatetus): 

Hence it is, my friend, such a man, both in private, when he meets with individuals, and in public, as I said in the beginning, [174c] when he is obliged to speak in court or elsewhere about the things at his feet and before his eyes, is a laughing-stock not only to Thracian girls but to the multitude in general, for he [like Thales] falls into pits and all sorts of perplexities through inexperience, and his awkwardness is terrible, making him seem a fool; for when it comes to abusing people he has no personal abuse to offer against anyone, because he knows no evil of any man, never having cared for such things; so his perplexity makes him appear ridiculous; and as to laudatory speeches [174d] and the boastings of others, it becomes manifest that he is laughing at them—not pretending to laugh, but really laughing—and so he is thought to be a fool. When he hears a panegyric of a despot or a king he fancies he is listening to the praises of some herdsman—a swineherd, a shepherd, or a neatherd, for instance—who gets much milk from his beasts; but he thinks that the ruler tends and milks a more perverse and treacherous creature than the herdsmen, and that he must grow coarse and uncivilized, [174e] no less than they, for he has no leisure and lives surrounded by a wall, as the herdsmen live in their mountain pens. And when he hears that someone is amazingly rich, because he owns ten thousand acres of land or more, to him, accustomed as he is to think of the whole earth, this seems very little. And when people sing the praises of lineage and say someone is of noble birth, because he can show seven wealthy ancestors, he thinks that such praises betray an altogether dull and narrow vision on the part of those who utter them; because of lack of education they cannot keep their eyes fixed upon the whole and are unable to calculate that every man has had countless thousands of ancestors and progenitors, among whom have been in any instance rich and poor, kings and slaves, barbarians and Greeks. And when people pride themselves on a list of twenty-five ancestors and trace their pedigree back to Heracles, the son of Amphitryon, the pettiness of their ideas seems absurd to him; he laughs at them because they cannot free their silly minds of vanity by calculating that [175b] Amphitryon's twenty-fifth ancestor was such as fortune happened to make him, and the fiftieth for that matter. In all these cases the philosopher is derided by the common herd, partly because he seems to be contemptuous, partly because he is ignorant of common things and is always in perplexity. Plato Theaetetus translated by Harold N. Fowler. C 

Regular readers know I have a minor obsession about the representation of Thales at the origin of philosophy (recall here; here; here; here); even in scholarship, and also here). And so re-reading this familiar passage -- which so clearly articulates the tense relationship between philosophy and ordinary opinion/commitments [i call that the Socratic Problem; see here]-- in light of Seneca came as a shock to me. For, indeed, Socrates here ruthlessly attacks the idea of nobility by birth as alien to a truly philosophical mind.+ And Socrates' argument anticipates Seneca's in claiming that all lineages are impure: the products of mixture and extremely long chains themselves the product of fortune.*

Seneca, of course, invokes Socrates and Cleanthes as intellectual exemplars. And he implies that Socrates supports his argument that it is constitutive of philosophy to reject inherited social distinctions, including ones based on ethnicity, as relevant to evaluations of philosophical distinction.** I am inclined to think Seneca is right here. And so while there are original sins in the Platonic tradition of philosophy -- its hostility toward rustic wisdom is one --, its known origins (see what I did there?) also point the way toward some noble commitments. 

 

On Books and Strangers in Libraries and the Tube

Yesterday, in the tube, I was reading Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel). It's a long book, and despite a teenage infatuation with Narziß und Goldmund, I have been ambivalent about reading any more Hesse. (I intensely disliked Siddhartha, which I read in college, and Der Steppenwolf, which I could not finish.) Despite my misgivings about Hesse, I had bought it in paperback last year because of a suggestive footnote in Hugo Drochon's  recent (and excellent), Nietzsche's Great Politics (see here).

I enjoy letting me reading habits be shaped by the quiet recommendations of fellow scholars. While I was contemplating the silent web of allusions that connect the formation of my library, I realized that I had stopped reading and was starting at the angelic infant quietly sitting across from me. Or to be precise, I was following his (her?) gaze as s/he explored the confined surroundings of our subway car. I wondered if joint attention really was involuntary.

My silent reveries were interrupted by a pleasant voice diagonally across from me, who informed me that I was reading an excellent book. I looked at her, and said, thank you for that encouragement, I had been uncertain I would finish it. She said resolutely, it gets better the more you read of it. I looked down at my copy, I was on page 154, and wondered at what page I would surrender myself over to the book's life-world. When I looked back at the lady, she had reverted back to the resolute norm not to make eye-contact with anybody in the tube. Before I was aware of what was happening, the angelic infant was dragged out of the tube at Camden Town. 

I had noticed before that the book I would read could attract some comment from other, otherwise resolutely no eye-contact passengers. And once, while exiting the tube at Westminster, I had been given a book I had inquired about over my protests. My benefactor cut my off, as the doors shut, with a compelling I work for Penguin, I will treat this as a marketing expense.

While waiting for the elevator that would take me from the underground level to the exit, I noticed a guy reading Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness. I had seen him on my ride into town earlier in the day; we had been compelled to leave our train, when, while "being held to regulate traffic" at Chalk Farm (I love the name of that station), it was changed from the Morden via Bank to the Morden via Charring Cross line.

I felt a strange excitement to see one of my favorite books being read (recall)  on the London Underground (twice in a day no less). I suddenly understood the pleasant voice's desire to share. So, I mentioned to dude, that's a great book, I hope you are enjoying it. He responded without hesitation, I dislike science fiction, but it was my reading group's choice and so far I am enjoying it. For no apparent reason, while we were entering the elevator, I decided to volunteer, I love teaching her in my utopia/dystopia classes. I could see he was eyeing the book I was holding, Where do you teach, he said with surprise, while I was as subtly as possible trying to make it impossible for him to catch the title of the book. I did not want to talk about Hesse.

I am writing this a day later in the British Library just as a patron sits down next to me with a big pile of books including Stormtrooper Families by Wackerfuss. My friend Jeff Bell coined the term heterobibliophilia, to capture the particular form of scholarly voyeurism when one peek at the books and manuscripts on tables temporarily vacated by other scholars taking a break in the library (recall also this post). I am suddenly grateful that the no-eye-contact-rule norm is even stronger in the British Library than in the tube.* 

As the elevator went up, and we were making small-talk, his eye caught Hesse, and he said with real warmth, as I knew he would, I loved Narcissus and Goldmund. I admitted that my once favorable views on it had changed for the worse a long time ago. At the street corner we were about to part; he firmly shook my hand and said, I am Ned, it was a pleasure. I took it, and said, same here Ned; I am sure we'll bump into each other again. And then, remembering he had mentioned his name, I said, while he was letting go of my hand, I am Eric.

I had not expected Ned's handshake. I looked at my book vaguely guilty for badmouthing Hesse to strangers. As I crossed the street I sensed betrayal to the anxieties and confusions of my teenage self. And yet...through Hesse I had discovered Nietzsche, and through Nietzsche a philosophical journey had opened itself up to me. To mock Hesse meant to mock the chain of causes that got me here. So much for living by amor fati! 

The rain was pouring down Heath strait; I rushed home.

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):