Digressions&Impressions

Contextual Naturalism, Ernest Nagel, and The Philosophy of a Free Society.

It follows that the human scene is as much an integral part of nature, and as valid a subject for the philosopher's concern with basic features of existence, as is any of its other sectors. As contextualistic naturalism views them, man and his works are not inexplicable occurrences, incomparable in every respect with other natural processes. Men come into being and act the way they do only because of the operations of natural forces, and they perish or cease to behave as men when forces no less natural disrupt the normal organization of their bodies and of their fields of behavior. On the other hand, though the conditions of man’s life are thus continuous with the rest of nature, his behavior exhibits features which are discontinuous with other parts of existence. For man is not simply another odd item in the inexhaustible catalogue of created things. He possesses the apparently unique gift of an inquiring mind, which enables him not only to act under the compulsion of internal springs of action and external pressures, but also to direct his impulses and to master many of the forces in his environment.

This gift of intelligence man owes to the organization of his body and the character of his environment, and no supernatural agency or disembodied soul is required to explain it. It is this organization, complicated by the structure of his surroundings, which also accounts for men’s moral and evaluative behaviors. The possession of needs and preferences, and the exercise of reflection upon them in the interest of fulfilling and harmonizing them, are as natural to man as is, for example, the property of a magnet to repel or attract another magnet. In any event, it is in the radical plurality of men’s needs and in the limitations which their physical and social environment impose upon their fulfillment, that contextualistic naturalism locates the source and urgency of moral problems. Accordingly, it does not conceive the primary moral problem to be that of discovering or actually instituting some fixed set of ethical norms valid everywhere and for all time. For basic moral problems are plural in number and specific in character, and are concerned with the adjustment, in the light of causes and consequences, of competing impulses occurring in specific environmental contexts. There can therefore be no general or final solution to the moral predicaments of mankind; the moral problem is the perennial one of finding ways and means for eliminating needless suffering and for organizing in a reasonable manner the energies of men.

The advocacy of a responsible intellectual method, especially in matters pertinent to social and ethical issues as well as in philosophy, is thus an emphatic strain in the writings of contextualistic naturalists. For reliable knowledge is the end-product of a reflective process, involving the use of experimental controls over ideas which initially have the status of tentative hypotheses; and it is this procedure which must be employed if reliable knowledge and reason- able evaluations are to be attained in the settlement of social and moral conflicts. This method of science supplies no guarantees against error, it does not preclude alternative solutions to problems, and it certifies none of its conclusions as eternally valid. But since it is in essence a self-corrective method, and involves the continued criticism of its findings in the light of evidence capable of public inspection, it is a method which can discover its own errors. It is in any case the sole method which has historically shown itself able to yield intellectual and practical mastery over various segments of nature. From the systematic extension of the use of this method to the problems of men, contextualistic naturalists confidently anticipate an increased moral enlightenment. Compared with many fashionable philosophies contextualistic naturalism is almost prosaically sober. It contributes to the current intellectual scene no apocalyptic visions, no thunderous absolutes, no unshakeable certainties. It offers no spectacular promises of salvation. It is essentially scientific and secular in temper, but confident that the concentration of scientific methods upon specific problems will yield a rich harvest of genuine knowledge. It is sane and reasonable at a time when the tides of irrationalism run high in the world and when substitutes for the Appolonian virtues are at a premium. It expresses the convictions of a people confident that a bold but disciplined intelligence is still a creative power in the world.--Ernest Nagel (1947) "Philosophy and the American Temper" reprinted in Sovereign Reason (1954), pp. 56-7 (emphases added).

The other day, I called attention to Ernest Nagel's vision for philosophy of science (which is how he is remembered, if remembered at all). I wouldn't call his (1961) The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation especially lyrical. But even if we leave aside his role in constructing what became analytic philosophy, his essays -- mostly reviews, polemics, and serious studies of the major intellects of his day -- are full arresting asides and rhetorical gems (below I quote a few more).

The passage quoted above was written for a "European audience, and appeared in a French translation in the Chronique des Etats-Unis, a bi-monthly publication of the American office of Information in Paris, In April 1947" (309). I have found almost nothing about this periodical, but it stands to reason it was an instrument of the US State Department or the CIA. But I assume here that it was written before the cold war was a reality, although Nagel was already (recall) hostile to Marxism. In the following years he would publish withering reviews (in the Partisan Review; and Jphil) of Cornforth's Leninist attempts at refuting Carnap, logical empiricism, and pragmatism. So, while anachronistic, it would not be misleading to call "Philosophy and the American Temper" (hereafter: American Temper) a philosophy for cold war liberalism.

American Temper is a short essay. Part of the argument of the essay is a denial that there is a distinctive American philosophy. (Nagel shows no interest in indigenous thought.) He claims this follows straightforwardly from commitment to a "democratic way of life," which shows itself in a restraint from top-down imposition of an authorized philosophy and the expectation of pluralism that is, that the freedom to develop "alternative conceptions of nature and man" will be pursued (50). 

While I tend to think of Nagel as the leader of the scientific wing of twentieth century pragmatism, in American Temper, Nagel describes pragmatism as a decaying research program (53). That here Nagel is describing his own commitments as a 'contextual naturalist,' we can accept on no less authority than Isaac Levy (writing in the Routledge Encyclopedia). I mention this because while Nagel's association with contextual naturalism was noted by contemporary readers and reviewers of Nagel's essay (see here; here), the term never caught on. In a beautiful essay, Lawrence Cahoone makes an excellent case that Nagel's contextual naturalism is very indebted to Morris Cohen. In American Temper Nagel himself grants (53-4) that it grows out of later writings of Dewey, Sheldon's (1942) America's Progressive Philosophy, which is a species of process philosophy, and a collection edited by Krikorian (1944) Naturalism and the Human Spirit, which includes many philosophers associated with Columbia at mid century.

The cardinal thesis of contextual naturalism is "the essentially incomplete fundamentally plural character of existence, in which no overarching pattern of development can be discerned, and which qualitative discontinuities and loose conjunctions are as ultimate features as are firm connections and regular cycles of change." (54) This is clearly now an unfashionable, metaphysical doctrine.+ But we can hear in its pluralism echoes in the (dappled world, disunity) commitments of those associated with the Stanford School of the Philosophy of Science.* Since Nagel was Suppes' supervisor the connection is not wholly coincidental. 

The point of calling it 'contextual' is explained by the "emphasis upon the contextual conditions for the occurence and for the manifested properties of everything whatsoever--upon the fact a quality an objective constituent of nature even though its existence depends on the relations in which it stands to other things." (55) This generates an anti-reductionism and a general mistrust of eliminativist strategies. (How this fits with so-called Nagel reduction is not my present concern.)

Now, I noted recently, that Nagel's philosophy of science is not attracted to the idea that science is a means of silencing others in the name of a unified authority. Kuhn's philosophy of science is not just a methodological alternative, but also a political alternative. And while science contains differential expertise and skill, Nagel views it more as an open-ended conversation responsive to criticism and reasons. This point is echoed in American Temper: "involves the continued criticism of its findings in the light of evidence capable of public inspection." And in this sense Nagel views science as a model for democratic society worth having. To what degree the science of our day would still be thought of as such an apt model is worth asking.

Alongside this is a rejection of ethics as a monistic, authoritative discipline imposing normative rules on the rest of us. Rather Nagel views ethics more in the spirit of what is now known as mechanism design. Its task is to find local, temporary ethical solutions to practical problems in light of our plural commitments in "specific environmental contexts." If there is an overarching theme it is the elimination of needless suffering. Obviously this slogan does not settle important questions (whose suffering will count; by whose light needless; and at what cost elimination?, etc.), but it gives the sense of the spirit of the project which is really about the never final organization of energy of men. The liberalism on offer is one with affinity to the New Deal.

We can also see that Nagel's vision for the philosophy of science as a template for a democratic society is itself ground in a pluralist metaphysics in which no single perspective is ultimately privileged. In addition this metaphysics provides a kind of template for society: each individual has objective existence, but is simultaneously socially embedded. 

Given that circumstances are constantly changing this is a philosophy of forever-unfinished-business, self-conscious of the fact that any proposed solution in the moment will seem archaic at a later date. As I wrap up, Nagel's comment on this point is worth quoting: 

contextualistic naturalists exhibit a profound distrust of philosophic systems which attempt to catch once for all the variegated contents of the world in a web of dialectical necessity. They are keenly conscious of the limitations of purely formal analysis even when they engage in it. For they recognize that a logic, no matter how subtle, provides no warrant concerning matters of fact unless it is supported by controlled observation. Indeed, they sometimes show an almost pathological fear that those concerned with formal analysis may be deceived into supposing that nature is as coherently organized and as simple as are their intellectual constructions. (54)

I hope readers have noticed that Nagel calls his own contextual naturalism 'sane and reasonable' and a 'sober' alternative to more fashionable and fanciful philosophies. There is an unapologetic willingness to develop the  apollonian edifices of civilization. But this way of framing it, and the acknowledged pathology -- the fear that controlled technique may facilitate a form of intellectual self-deception --, suggests recognition of the fact that some forces in our environment, including our own impulses, have dionysian roots that may haunt us. Nagel's analytic head is conjoined to the heart of a disciplined romantic.  

On How Public and Experimental Philosophy Disappears (as Philosophy), and Reappears

Dewey, this most public intellectual and advocate of progressivism in American politics during its most activist age, repeatedly said that science and technology are the engines of not just material but moral progress. His theory of inquiry is robustly objectivist, and he advocates throughout his career not just the objective value of science but the fostering of the values of objectivity right through all human concerns. Here is Dewey in 1938, writing in the first volume of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, as the storm clouds of fascism formed over Europe:

[T]he scientific attitude and method are at bottom but the method of free and effective intelligence. . . [I]t is intensely desirable and under certain conditions practicable that all human beings become scientific in their attitudes: genuinely intelligent in their ways of thinking and acting. It is practicable because all normal persons have the potential germs which make this result possible. It is desirable because this attitude forms the sole ultimate alternative to prejudice, dogma, authority, and coercive force exercised in behalf of some special interest. (LW 13:279–280)

Indeed, already in 1920, in the wake of the First World War, Dewey argued in Reconstruction in Philosophy (MW 12) that bringing the scientific attitude into ethical and social thought was the task of the twentieth century.
This was a widespread understanding of the task of pragmatism around 1930. There were groups who sought to discharge the tasks Dewey had set. If I were to argue that there was a robustly “objective” pragmatist tradition that was active in American philosophy right into the 1960s, I would not point to the analytic luminaries Misak points to but rather to Edgar A. Singer, Jr., and his students and colleagues and their students: C. West Churchman, Russell Ackoff, Richard Rudner, and Bob Butts. This group was a “hard pragmatist” (Singer’s term) community of scholars who were central members of the American philosophy of science community before and during the time of the alleged dominance of logical empiricism in the philosophy of science. It was a group with its own technical projects—largely in probability, statistics, and experimental inference—but whose technical interests remained robustly within the general purview of the “theory of inquiry” that formed Dewey’s conception of logic and trained on socially useful ends. In the end, Churchman, Ackoff, and Rudner all sought a science of ethics as well.
Singer was an undergraduate engineering student at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1890s who went on to work with James at Harvard and then went back to Penn where he was on faculty for about 50 years. He and his students and colleagues—especially the biochemist William Malisoff, who worked for Atlantic Oil in Philadelphia and lived in the University City neighborhood—were the founders in 1934 of the journal Philosophy of Science; Malisoff, Churchman, and Rudner were the journal’s first three editors, over a time period lasting roughly thirty years. They sought to promote the understanding of science, especially of the details of increasingly technical regimes of statistical techniques in experimental inference, and sought to understand how to mobilize science for social good. They thought of themselves as pragmatists who knew the details of what people like Dewey could only gesture at in phrases like “the scientific habit of mind.”
Unlike Misak’s narrative, the story of these scholars is not that of a continuing pragmatist tradition in American philosophy involving central philosophical figures. Just as pragmatist philosophers like George Herbert Mead ended up being much more influential in American anthropology than American philosophy, Churchman and Ackoff left academic philosophy entirely and took up the cause of establishing new social sciences at leading American business schools: Ackoff at Wharton, Churchman at Berkeley. They were founders of operations research, systems science, management science, the measurement of consumer preference, etc. This is how they sought to bring the methods of science into social and ethical philosophy.
If I were to write a book called Some More American Pragmatists, I would offer a different narrative, then. Not a narrative of a continuing, important strand of pragmatist thought in American academic philosophy, but a narrative of a far-reaching impact of American pragmatism in the new features of the American post-Second-World-War university and the growth of an American “scientific-technological elite”—in education schools, business schools, new social sciences, and new methods in old social sciences. This is neither a story of academic philosophy nor one of academic anti-philosophy but of philosophically-inflected social science, a fitting setting for pragmatism as a mature project.--Alan Richardson (2013) "What Good is a (Indeed, This) History of Pragmatism?"  Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 49:3: 411-412.

A few weeks ago I noted (recall) that Feigl's and Sellars' (1949) Readings in Philosophical Analysis. was reviewed in Philosophy of Science by Russell L. Ackoff. I had no idea who Ackoff was, and so looked him up. He became one of the founders of operations research (hereafter OR) and systems thinking in management science. Since I have an interest in the complex interactions between philosophy and economics I made a mental note to investigate further. Also because it reminded me of something I had once picked up, presumably from Alan Richardson, that the institutional founding of philosophy of science, and the journal with that name, Stateside was connected to people who became important in OR.

I couldn't find much written on that from the perspective of the history of philosophy, but there is a neat (2006) volume, Rescuing the Enlightenment from Itself, that gives a sense of how the rather influential school inspired by Churchman and Ackoff understands itself retrospectively. In the most philosophical chapter, "Pragmatism meets systems thinking: the legacy of C. West Churchman" by D Matthews, one can find a lovely account of how Ackoff took a philosophy class with Churchman at Upenn, and how that was the germ of their decades of collaboration.* I was especially struck by the claim that after the war, and after several fruitless attempts at institutional building, that at Case Western, "Churchman and Ackoff established a multidisciplinary faculty group (complete with postgraduate programs for Masters and Doctoral students) for specifically studying the philosophy, methodology and practice of tackling complex organisational and societal problems. By borrowing the appellation Operations Research, from the wartime British and American analysis units set up to help plan operational tactics Churchman, in effect, established the first post-war academic OR group in the US." (Matthews 2006: 184) For several years Churchman and Ackoff kept publishing in professional philosophy, but eventually their professional self-identification and legacy become more and more identified with their academic appointments (outside of philosophy).

Now, Richardson's argument is part of a critical extended review essay of Misak's excellent (2013) The American Pragmatists. And part of the debate between Richardson and Misak is not just about the self-understanding of pragmatism but also analytic philosophy. Regular readers know I am interested in those issues, and so I have to disappoint that in what follows I will not take a stance on their many layered disagreements. But I do think it is interesting Churchman and Ackoff have been nearly forgotten within philosophy, even the history of philosophy. (Rudner is if not still read, at least cited, in the inductive risk literature rehabilitated by Heather Douglas. Butts became an important historically sensitive philosopher of science.)

And this forgetting holds lessons for us, especially those with an interest in the fortunes of experimental philosophy, public philosophy, and interdisciplinary/integrative projects now associated with (say) PPE. For initially, Churchman and Ackoff didn't just understand themselves as pragmatists, but also as adherents of Singer's pragmatist version of experimentalist philosophy (for a philosophical introduction see here). Now what Singer meant by experimental philosophy is not quite what contemporary XPHI has become. But that's for another occasion, perhaps.

Okay, let me turn to the heart of the matter: so one way to understand an important strain of pragmatism just is a species of what we may call (recall) public facing philosophy. And the public here is not just the wider democratic culture (for which Dewey is still famous), but also other forms of knowing. And rather than adopting the philosophy of X model (with X being a special science [POX]), which came to be dominant in philosophy of science generally, Churchman and Ackoff sought not just to shape the special sciences, but to constitute them philosophically alongside the 'technical' machinery mentioned by Richardson. This can be seen in their rather successful efforts at institution building which extended to textbook writing.  

It would be wrong to think of what Churchman and Ackoff did as applied philosophy. Because as Richardson hints (okay so this may be taking sides in his debate with Misak), there is a sense in which what they are doing -- public facing, progressive, socially consequential -- just is what pragmatism is, from a teleological perspective, supposed to be.** How to think of their achievement in the context of higher education in American empire is no easy matter and it would require some comparison with another systems thinker (Talcott Parsons), who was shaped by philosophy and in some sense carried it forward within social theory and sociology.+

From the perspective of philosophy's institutional self understanding today this reminds us of something salutary. It is quite possible that the very best (let's stipulate), public facing, even high profile ones, can become of little interest to other philosophers or invisible to other philosophers as philosophy. I am not suggesting great originality here. Writing from an entirely different angle, the insight is fully present in Kristie Dotson's "How is this paper Philosophy?" Dotson argues for valuing multiple forms of disciplinary validation within philosophy to make space not just for those that have been excluded from its ranks, but for different kinds of (what she calls) cultures of praxis. (We can see hints of this, too, in Srinivasan's call for "more capacious notion of both philosophy and brilliance.") And, perhaps if Dotson and Srinivasan have their way, the future of philosophy will be able to be public facing and socially consequential without a choir of disciplinary influential naysayers. History need not repeat.

But if we think about the issue outside of institutionalized [!] philosophy, but from the perspective of public facing and integrative philosophy or synthetic science-- say in the way PPE may develop --, then it's possible that a form of philosophy can just be a certain intellectual practice of the sort that Churchman & Ackoff's OR became. Now, to avoid misunderstanding I do not mean to remind us of the self-serving and widespread myth that philosophy is the mother of science, and that a special science just is an empirically successful discipline that has liberated itself from philosophical roots.

Rather, these new forms of public and experimental philosophy, or integrative PPE (etc.), aim to fuse recent philosophy with special sciences that themselves are the product or sedimentation, at least in part, of past philosophical constitution or shaping. And so today's public philosophy encounters in its integration with the sciences after many what we may call afterimages of forgotten philosophy and, perhaps, not even recognizable as philosophy. 

 

Transforming Philosophy By Diversifying Its Traditions

A very similar transformation actually occurred in Western philosophy not too long ago. When a major European university began to teach the ideas of a particular noncanonical thinker, mainstream philosophers on the faculty objected that the new philosophy was not part of “our tradition,” and that it was watering down the curriculum in the name of a misguided fad. Because the new philosophy was inconsistent with many widely held positions, some philosophers resorted to a flaccid relativism, arguing that there were “two truths” on these matters. This sort of approach only convinced the mainstream philosophers that the new philosophy was nonsense. However, a brilliant philosopher argued that the best way to discover the truth is through a pluralistic dialogue with all the major world philosophies. This philosophical genius was Thomas Aquinas. In the thirteenth century at the University of Paris, Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, and others encouraged students and colleagues (who had previously only learned a form of Platonized Christianity) to expand the canon and learn not just from the philosophy of the pagan Aristotle (only recently rediscovered in Western Europe), but also from Jewish and Muslim thinkers. The result was to reinvigorate and deepen the Western philosophical tradition.... The case of Aquinas and the rediscovery of Aristotle is just one of many examples that illustrate that the Western philosophical canon is not, and never was, a closed system. Philosophy only becomes richer and approximates the truth more closely as it becomes increasingly diverse and pluralistic.--Bryan W. Van Norden (2017) Taking Back Philosophy: a Multicultural Manifesto, 18

The widespread turn to meta-philosophy, even discussion of the merits of progress, if any, in philosophy are simultaneously signs of self-confidence -- as Montaigne, Pascal, and Margaret Cavendish show it takes a certain courage to question oneself -- and a sense of malaise, not always fully justified, induced by a sense of exhaustion of approaches that have had their trial. And this turn to meta-philosophy occurs after vanquishing -- a word I don't use lightly --, its parochial rivals, and benefitting from soft association with imperial power, analytic philosophy strides the world as a global hegemon increasingly being taught in colleges, often branded with American and European names, around the world.  

While there is a strain of argument in Van Norden's Taking Back Philosophy preoccupied with the distribution of jobs in 'ranked' departments (e.g., 2; 5; 25-26; 31-34 162; see also Garfield's foreword, p. xii; xx) and the scarce resource of  time in the curriculum (e.g., xviii-xix; 8, 36, 103, 115), his more important argument is that philosophy would benefit from what is known as 'diversifying' its canon. And the paragraph quoted above is supposed to offer an instance of such fruits. 

Before I get to that, it is worth noting three features about contemporary analytic philosophy: first, analytic philosophy has exceedingly few substantive dogmas. I don't mean this only as the bad joke that Quine and Davidson jointly could only count to three (and with Socrates we may ask where is the fourth?). But rather in the more serious sense that analytic philosophy always has been like a sponge drawing in ideas and techniques from the sciences and logic, and even rival schools, and, like a high energy shape-shifter, has had an open-ended capacity to reinvent itself. This is why most critiques of analytic philosophy lodged by its rivals often seem so comically off-base within a short amount of time.*   

Second, because analytic philosophy's self-identity is constantly re-invented over time, it has no felt requirement for a fixed canon of texts to give it identity.** So, for example, Feigl's and Sellars' (1949) Readings in Philosophical Analysis. was welcomed as a "book" which "contains a good number of the classics of analysis and should therefore provide useful source material for courses in Contemporary Philosophy, Problems, and Methods." Most of the authors of these classics are still familiar names, - "Feigl (4 essays), Kneale, Quine (2), Tarski, Carnap (3), Frege, Russell, [C.I.] Lewis (3), Schlick (4), Aldrich (2), Adjukiewicz, [Ernest] Nagel, Waismann, Hempel (4), Reichenbach (2)" - , but it is to be doubted that most of the articles themselves, or what they argue for, play much of a role in contemporary undergraduate or graduate education (outside those that cater to specialists in history of analytic). I bet a few names are completely unfamiliar.  One can play a similar game with Rorty's more recent (and larger) Linguistic Turn. To be a classic within analytic philosophy is to risk oblivion quickly from the perspective of eternity. 

As an aside, the author of  the review from Philosophy of Science just quoted, Russell L. Ackoff, became one of the founders of operations research and systems thinking in management science. Even the limited biography of Wikipedia suggests wonderful avenues of research for sociologists of analytic philosophy.

Third, analytic philosophy is, despite inhabiting extremely steep prestige and economic hierarchies, and having become a (near) mono-linguistic culture, still a dispersed discipline with many local nodes doing their own thing. And while a shift to standardizing text-book education may change the dispersed nature, for now analytic philosophy evolves -- despite our natural tendency to be guided by the Williamsons', Chalmers', Siders', Pauls' (etc.) -- in virtue of countless many relatively independent, contingent curricular and refereeing decisions. And while, with Condorcet's jury theorem in the back of the mind, such a structure may offer confidence that we're somewhat truth-apt, it also means that the content of the destination of such a dispersed philosophical 'market' in ideas may be intrinsically uncertain. This means there is also space for local arbitrage opportunities, including (as Justin Smith has remarked) richly supported non-university think-tanks funded by (self-proclaimed) Libertarian billionaires. 

Okay, let's grant Van Norden his main claim that a philosophical tradition can be reinvigorated by a kind of systematic exposure to another tradition or, as in the thirteenth century example, a diversity of traditions. It doesn't follow, as he tacitly recognizes, that it will always do so. Some novelties, regardless of their sources, are fads and claims to ancient wisdom may, upon inspection, be banality. In that respect, it is striking that the thirteenth century transformation involved purportedly incompatible, even contradictory traditions. The contradiction could only be resolved by the genius of a synthesizing mind who created a kind of aufhebung. 

My criticism is not that Van Norden seems to presuppose civilizational intellectual traditions with a true essence here (he denies that the page before, see the quote below); nor is that Van Norden seems to have replicated a basically neo-Hegelian-Romantic scheme of progress and (so the worry goes) imposed it on the historical 'data'. But rather that if the mere fact of contradiction is not a reliable means toward distinguishing fad from source of renewal, the episode seems to teach that one can never know that some innovation isn't fad (given our canons of rigor).  

So, I do like Van Norden's other exemplar better, which is closer to our current situation:

There are also clear historical examples of intellectual traditions accepting and being broadened by alien systems of thought. When Buddhism was brought to China by missionaries from India in the first century ce, there already existed a robust and diverse native spiritual tradition, including Confucianism and Daoism (each of which had a variety of competing interpretations). Buddhism was a completely alien system of thought that challenged many of the fundamental ethical and metaphysical assumptions of the classic Chinese thinkers. However, Chinese philosophers studied Buddhist works, translated them into their own language, learned a new technical vocabulary, and engaged with Buddhist arguments. As a result, the Chinese intellectual tradition was permanently deepened. Even if one refuses to bestow the label of “philosophy” upon any of these systems of thought, the fact that Confucianism and Daoism were able to adapt to and incorporate Buddhist ideas dispels the illusion that intellectual traditions have an unchanging essence that makes them hermetically sealed (17)

What this example reveals is that intellectual traditions can be internally heterogeneous and still sufficiently distinct from each other such that internally heterogeneous alternatives may seem, at first, 'completely alien.' And that members of a resourceful home tradition can bring themselves, despite the barriers of entry [language, technical vocabulary, techniques, argument styles, etc.], to study such an alternative system of thought. I am sure that Van Norden could name these intrepid philosophical explorers/abitreurs that created intellectual trading zones among Confucianism & Daoism and Buddhism at various sites. But these these under-laborers are not named, and the local turmoil that surrounded them effaced, even if (despite presumably some unnamed Kuhn-losses) their fruits are "permanent." 

So, one way to think of attempts at diversifying analytic philosophy, and its relationship(s) to a 'canon', is to generate the conditions of such self-transformation of the tradition without -- pace Condorcet -- any guarantee of success, but with the expectation that the unknown destinations may well give us rewarding sights, even, as I learned from Eileen O'Neill, a better, but painful, political and intellectual self-understanding, and, as collective transformative experiences, unexpected views on the truth.

On David Wootton and Foucault on 24 January 1979: On the Liberogenic (XI)

Locke regarded curiosity and ambition as virtues and not, as he previously had done, as vices. Curiosity and ambition were now sources of uneasiness which motivate human beings to pursue knowledge and glory; these goods in themselves were, in Locke’s new view, no longer capable of motivating human beings to action....

But it also means that nagging, unfulfilled desire, what Locke calls “fantastical uneasiness (as itch after honour, power, or riches, &c.)” is needed if human beings are to escape from indolence. The itches after honor, power, or wealth are what he calls “irregular desires” inculcated by fashion, example, and education, which become natural to us through custom. But these desires, which are irregular from the point of view of the individual because they create an unease that can rarely be satisfied, are regular from the point of view of the society because they encourage industry and other public goods. Consequently they are heavily reinforced by public opinion.

This is how curiosity and ambition come to be reclassified as virtues. If we refuse to reclassify these qualities as virtues, then we have to face up to Mandeville’s paradox: private vices can have public benefits, while private virtues have public drawbacks. If we follow Locke and decide that these vices are really virtues, then we enter a Freudian world in which the social order depends on our acquiring anxieties that will always haunt us, itches that can never be soothed—at least not in this world. But this, too, is Mandeville’s world, for Mandeville regards morality as an invention constructed to benefit society, an invention which, willy-nilly, we are trained to internalize and regard as natural. The later Locke and Mandeville fundamentally agree in their account of human motivation, even if they disagree as to the language to be used in describing it.

What I am suggesting is that in 1689 Locke’s account of psychology and morality was a watered-down Hobbesianism, but by 1694 it was well on the way to being Mandevillian…Locke, I would argue, had also grasped [an]...insidious paradox: in order to be happy as individuals we need society; and in order for society to flourish, we must constantly devise new ways of making ourselves uneasy and anxious.--David Wootton (2018) Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison, 110-113

The main theme of Wootton's book is the embrace and endorsement of a "logic of unending accumulation or limitless pursuit" (72) of power, pleasure, and profit with the simultaneous invention of political economy as constitutive e of the "iron cage" (e.g., 247)we still inhabit.* To simplify a complex argument this joins Machiavelli admiring unbounded expansion of Rome with Newton's embrace of infinite space as the fount of modernity (236).  Some other time, I explore Wootton's recasting of Machiavelli as the first modern (as distinct from the republican here of late). 

In the passage quoted above, Wootton ascribes to Locke the key move in his narrative: that psychological unease triggers both behavior to remove the source of unease as well as generates goals that cannot, in principle, be fully satisfied, but are embraces as fundamental goals. It is worth noting Wootton's "insidious" which alerts the reader that Wootton is not merely tracing a slowly unfolding conceptual innovation; we're in the realm of polemic. As Wootton notes: "to be constantly in pursuit of something you can never catch up with is, it would seem, a form of madness." (72)

For, while individuals pursue mad desires, society benefits (riches, power, etc.) and becomes more stable.+ And, in virtue of being in society, as Rousseau and Smith (who knew their Locke and Mandeville), society shapes social emotions which fuel each cycle of unease (see, especially, Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) 3.1.5, 112). The price we pay, we may say, of being in a great society is permanent dissatisfaction or crisis. Wootton barely mentions Foucault, so it seems perverse to pair him with the French Maître. But, that crisis is entrenched in modern, liberal society is (recall) the great theme of Foucault's third lecture in the Birth of Biopolitics.

And, in fact, Foucault diagnoses, we may say, a second-order version of the form of the 'paradox' that Wootton notes. That is, that the very social mechanism which is supposed to remove a threat generates aspirations that are impossible to complete and so destabilizing. This is especially so when this aspiration is freedom. Wootton helpfully quotes Benjamin Franklin's early (1725) claim that "Freedom from Uneasiness is the End of all our Actions,,"** and we can understand the emancipatory project of liberalism as an open-ended and doomed, heroic effort to create the conditions of such freedom.  Foucault puts the point as follows:

Another form of crisis would be due to the inflation of the compensatory mechanisms of freedom. That is to say, for the exercise of some freedoms, like that of the freedom of the market and anti-monopoly legislation, for example, you could have the formation of a legislative straitjacket which the market partners experience as excessive interventionism and excessive constraint and coercion. At a much more local level, you have everything which takes on the appearance of revolt and rejection of the world of the disciplines. Finally, and above all, there are processes of clogging such that the mechanisms for producing freedom, precisely those that are called upon to manufacture this freedom, actually produce destructive effects which prevail over the very freedom they are supposed to produce. This is, if you like, the ambiguity of all the devices which could be called “liberogenic,” that is to say, devices intended to produce freedom which potentially risk producing exactly the opposite. Michel Foucault, 24 January 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 3, The Birth of Biopolitics. 68-69

The heroism of the effort is not that it victory is out of reach, but that the very "devices intended to produce freedom...potentially risk producing exactly the opposite." That is, in virtue of aiming at freedom, liberalism is (recall) inherently a risky project. There is a more fundamental point related to the “liberogenic,” (a word only used once by Foucault) lurking here. 

This more fundamental point is not the by now familiar one (also associated with Foucault) that the conditions of laissez-faire must be manufactured and policed. But rather, the more subtle one that the liberogenic mechanisms must be multiplied at infinitum and so generate unexpected and potentially destabilizing interactions. This is so because true liberalism (recall, again Locke) embraces a spirit of adaptation because of changing circumstances, which are intrinsically open-ended not just du to the infinite multiplication of the passions and the ends they aim at, but also due to the open-ended development of science and, in particular, (medical and security) technology which, in turn, may respond to evolving and deadly nature (e.g., viruses, changing ecology, etc). 

Marxists will see in this the inevitability of revolution and collapse. A moralists (perhaps Wootton) may see in this a kind of historical theodicy in which the children of liberalism inevitability pay for the many sins of their parents (primarily the fathers). But if we take Foucault's great theme -- that there is a liberal art of government -- seriously, then grasping liberogenic danger just is the precondition to liberal statesmanship. 

On Foucault on 17 January 1979 On Two Concepts of Freedom (IV)

So, there is a shift of the center of gravity of public law. The fundamental problem of public law will no longer be the foundation of sovereignty, the conditions of the sovereign’s legitimacy, or the conditions under which the sovereign’s rights can be exercised legitimately, as it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The problem becomes how to set juridical limits to the exercise of power by a public authority. Schematically, we can say that at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century there were basically two ways of resolving this. The first I will call the axiomatic, juridico-deductive approach, which was, up to a point, the path taken by the French Revolution—we could also call it Rousseau’s approach. In what does it consist? It does not start from government and its necessary limitation, but from law in its classical form. That is to say, it tries to define the natural or original rights that belong to every individual, and then to define under what conditions, for what reason, and according to what ideal or historical procedures a limitation or exchange of rights was accepted. It also consists in defining those rights one has agreed to cede and those, on the other hand, for which no cession has been agreed and which thus remain imprescriptible rights in all circumstances and under any possible government or political regime. Finally, on this basis, and only on this basis, having thus defined the division of rights, the sphere of sovereignty, and the limits of the right of sovereignty, you can then deduce from this only what we can call the bounds of governmental competence, but within the framework determined by the armature constituting sovereignty itself. In other words, put clearly and simply this approach consists in starting from the rights of man in order to arrive at the limitation of governmentality by way of the constitution of the sovereign. I would say that, broadly speaking, this is the revolutionary approach. It is a way of posing right from the start the problem of legitimacy and the inalienability of rights through a sort of ideal or real renewal of society, the state, the sovereign, and government. Consequently, you can see that if, historically and politically, this is the revolutionaries’ approach, we can call it a retroactive, or retroactionary approach inasmuch as it consists in taking up the problem of public law that the jurists had constantly opposed to the raison d’État of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this respect there is continuity between the seventeenth century theorists of natural law and the jurists and legislators of the French Revolution.
The other approach does not start from law but from governmental practice itself. It starts from government practice and tries to analyze it in terms of the de facto limits that can be set to this governmentality. These de facto limits may derive from history, from tradition, or from an historically determined state of affairs, but they can and must also be determined as desirable limits, as it were, as the good limits to be established precisely in terms of the objectives of governmentality, of the objects with which it has to deal, of the country’s resources, population, and economy, etcetera. In short, this approach consists in the analysis of government: its practice, its de facto limits, and its desirable limits. On this basis, it distinguishes those things it would be either contradictory or absurd for government to tamper with. Better still, and more radically, it distinguishes those things that it would be pointless for government to interfere with. Following this approach means that government’s sphere of competence will be defined on the basis of what it would or would not be useful for government to do or not do. Government’s limit of competence will be bounded by the utility of governmental intervention. The question addressed to government at every moment of its action and with regard to each of its institutions, old or new, is: Is it useful? For what is it useful? Within what limits is it useful? When does it stop being useful? When does it become harmful? This is not the revolutionary question: What are my original rights and how can I assert them against any sovereign? But it is the radical question, the question of English radicalism; the problem of English radicalism is the problem of utility.
Don’t think that English political radicalism is no more than the projection of a utilitarian ideology on the level of politics. It is, rather, an attempt to define the sphere of competence of government in terms of utility on the basis of an internal elaboration of governmental practice which is nevertheless fully thought through and always endowed and permeated with philosophical, theoretical, and juridical elements. In this respect utilitarianism appears as something very different from a philosophy or an ideology. Utilitarianism is a technology of government, just as public law was the form of reflection, or, if you like, the juridical technology with which one tried to limit the unlimited tendency of raison d’État....for English radicalism, “radical” designates a position which involves continually questioning government, and governmentality in general, as to its utility or non-utility.
So, there are two approaches: the revolutionary approach, basically structured around traditional positions of public law, and the radical approach, basically structured around the new economy of government reason. These two approaches imply two conceptions of the law. In the revolutionary, axiomatic approach, the law will be seen as the expres sion of a will. So there will be a system of will-law. The problem of the will is, of course, at the heart of all the problems of right, which again confirms the fact that this is a fundamentally juridical problematic. The law is therefore conceived as the expression of a collective will indicating the part of right individuals have agreed to cede, and the part they wish to hold on to. In the other problematic, the radical utilitarian approach, the law is conceived as the effect of a transaction that separates the sphere of intervention of public authorities from that of the individual’s independence. This leads us to another distinction which is also very important. On one side you have a juridical conception of freedom: every individual originally has in his possession a certain freedom, a part of which he will or will not cede. On the other side, freedom is not conceived as the exercise of some basic rights, but simply as the independence of the governed with regard to government. We have therefore two absolutely heterogeneous conceptions of freedom, one based on the rights of man, and the other starting from the independence of the governed. I am not saying that the two systems of the rights of man and of the independence of the governed do not intertwine, but they have different historical origins and I think they are essentially heterogeneous or disparate. With regard to the problem of what are currently called human rights, we would only need look at where, in what countries, how, and in what form these rights are claimed to see that at times the question is actually the juridical question of rights, and at others it is a question of this assertion or claim of the independence of the governed vis-à-vis governmentality.
So, we have two ways of constituting the regulation of public authorities by law, two conceptions of the law, and two conceptions of freedom. This ambiguity is a characteristic feature of, let’s say, nineteenth and also twentieth century European liberalism. When I say two routes, two ways, two conceptions of freedom and of law, I do not mean two separate, distinct, incompatible, contradictory, and mutually exclusive systems, but two heterogeneous procedures, forms of coherence, and ways of doing things.  Michel Foucault, 17 January 1979, lecture 2  The Birth of Biopolitics. translated by Graham Burchell, 39-42

The other day I said that this second lecture by Foucault is dazzling. In this long quote he sketches an interpretation of liberalism as the complex working out of two traditions, which are simultaneously enacting two concepts of freedom/liberty. The working out takes place within each tradition and in their interactions (and distant shadowing). It would be tempting to treat these as geographically distinct, but I don't think that's Foucault's purpose. Part of the dazzle is to see Foucault rewrite Constant, Green, and Berlin (although as I have noted, it is not necessary to efface the mothers of liberalism when doing so). And this rewriting raises a fascinating (and somewhat familiar) question.

The rewriting of a tradition is simultaneously a means of extending it. Of course, it can also be a form of ideology critique or unmasking. But Foucault is explicit that this is not his current enterprise.* Rather, he wishes "to make reality intelligible" and this "is simply showing that it was possible; establishing the intelligibility of reality consists in showing its possibility." (34) This is the kind of passage that analytic philosophers like to mock (if X exists X surely is possible). But one need not be a British Idealist in order to recognize that social reality is, at least in part, constituted by intentional objects (and our beliefs and narratives about them, ad infinitum). And at minimum, Foucault is saying that there is a sense in which the very liberal tradition(s) he is constructing are not fully self-conscious or self-aware. For prior to his articulation the reality they aim to be co-constituting are not fully intelligible (to themselves). 

While there is much more to say about the nature of modality and intentionality Foucault is presupposing here (and which sit uneasily with the theories of concepts and modality fashionable in analytic philosophy [and which are not very useful in thinking about social reality)], we should also marvel at the rationalism inherent in Foucault's project. This is easily missed by all the ways one can assimilate Foucault and his focus on the conditions of possibility (of intelligibility) to a variety of neo-Kantianisms. But that reality is intelligible is the axiomatic commitment of philosophical rationalism.** That is to say, Foucault opens up the possibility for a liberalism that understands how its own art of governance and, thereby, become mature. 

On Foucault's view, liberalism really starts once the questions of sovereignty and constitutions are settled or, more cautiously, can be assumed to be safely settled. That is, liberalism is (recall this post on Hume) a post-revolutionary enterprise. Or to put it differently, it comes to its own when it is safe to ignore foundations and when expectations can be thought reasonable. Foucault, thus, is tracking the liberal's philosophically problematic tendency not to question everything (recall Kofi Bright on logical empiricism (and Zizek on Kant)).

The previous paragraph may be obscure, but note how one conception of freedom starts "from law" (which I will call contractualist-republican) and the other utilitarian one starts "from governmental practice." Yes, Foucault calls the former a revolutionary approach, but the key point is that it occurs "within the framework determined by the armature constituting sovereignty itself." That is a polite way of saying, after revolutionary violence. So, liberalism makes reality intelligible by taking the violence that makes it possible for granted. To put it in Spinozistic terms: the state of nature remains latent in liberal civilization. And what Foucault is saying, is liberalism need not be deceptive about this at all. 

The second key claim here is that liberalism is, thus, a mitigating project. (I have repeatedly noted (recall) this is true to its proper self-understanding.) And it does so by generating technologies of government. Foucault is a bit too quick in assuming that these technologies are intrinsically liberal. But from this perspective civil unrest and riots are (here; here; and also here) part of the technology of government or a signal that governance is malfunctioning.

The problem -- to which Foucault understands himself as a salutary corrective is -- that neither the contractualist-republican tradition (focused on securing rights 'of man') and the utilitarian tradition (focused on independence within the extensive division of labor it embraces) always understand itself primarily as a technology of governance (this is less true of 19th century utilitarianism which did theorize itself like this). And so what both strands of liberalism would gain from self-awareness is that within the liberal art of governance it should secure the proper regulation of itself as a technology. It's as if Foucault is playing Turing to a robot to nudge it to became aware of itself and then formulate and thereby impose the laws of robotics as a subject on itself.

 

On Karl Pearson on Spinoza and Maimonides; On Jerusalem, Athens, and Eugenics

In the above remarks I have considered only the Yad Hachazakah, because hitherto attention seems to have been entirely directed to the More Nebuchim (cf. Joel, Sorley and others). It is not impossible that in the intervening ten years Maimonides somewhat altered his views. I should not be surprised to hear that the More was held more 'orthodox' than the Yad. The latter, despite much Talmudic verbiage and scriptural exegesis, notwithstanding many faults and inconsistencies, yet contains the germs of a truly grand philosophical system, quite capable of power- fully influencing the mind even of a Spinoza. Such a reader would, while rejecting the exegesis, recognise the elements of truth in the pure theosophy (cf. Joel, Zur Genesis, p. 9), and this is the point wherein the two philosophers approach most closely. In the second place, I have confined myself entirely to the influence of the Yad on the Ethica. Greater agreement would have been found with the Korte Verhandeling van God, &c., while Spinoza's views of Biblical criticism (especially his conceptions of prophets and prophecy as developed in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus) owe undoubtedly much to the Yad. Yet I wished to show that the study of Maimonides was traceable even in Spinoza's most finished exposition of his philosophy. Those who assert that Spinoza was influenced by Hebrew thought have not seldom been treated as though they were accusing Spinoza of a crime. Yet no great work ever sprung from the head of its creator like Athena from the head of Zeus; it has slowly developed within him, influenced and moulded by all that has influenced and moulded its shaper's own character. Had we but knowledge and critical insight enough, every idea might be traced to the germ from which it has developed. While recognising many other influences at work forming Spinoza's method of thought, it is only scientific to allow a certain place to the Jewish predecessors with whom he was acquainted. Critical comparison must show how great that influence was. We naturally expect to find considerable divergences between any individual Jewish philosopher and Spinoza; these divergences have been carefully pointed out by Mr. Sorley, but they are insufficient to prove that Spinoza was not very greatly influenced by Hebrew thought. My aim has been to call in question the traditional view of Spinoza's relation to Jewish 'philosophy, i.e., that he learnt enough of it to throw it off entirely. I cannot help holding that, while Spinoza's form and language were a mixture of medieval scholasticism and the Cartesian philosophy, yet the ideas which they clothed were not seldom Hebrew in their origin. He might be cast out by his co-religionists, but that could not deprive him of the mental birthright of his people- those deep moral and theosophical truths which have raised the Hebrews to a place hardly second to the Greeks in the history of thought. Hebrew Philosophy seems to have a history and a development more or less unique and apart from that of other nations; once in the course of many centuries it will produce a giant-thinker; one who, not satisfied by the narrow limits of his own nation, strives for a freer wider field of action, and grafts on to his Hebrew ideas a catholic language and a broader mental horizon. He becomes a world prophet, but is rejected of his own folk. Such an one of a truth was Spinoza, and another perhaps, albeit in a lesser degree, Moses, the son of Maimon.1--Karl Pearson "Maimonides and Spinoza," Mind (8), No. 31 (Jul., 1883): 352-353 [HT: Jeffrey Bernstein]. 

Recently, I posted a picture of Karl Pearson's blue plaque in Hampstead on social media. In which he is presented as "pioneer statistician." By implication, I noted (recall here; and here) that Pearson's eugenic activities where, pardon my expression, white-washed. In subsequent discussion Prof. Bernstein asked whether this is "the Karl Pearson who also wrote some essays on Spinoza?" 

I had no idea! But the answer is: yes. 

I have quoted the conclusion of the essay above. As it happens, a few days before I presented a draft paper, "Spinoza's Emendation of the Hebrew Bible in the Ethics," at an online version of a department colloquium at Santa Cruz (recorded here). While I had removed Maimonides from the slides in the presentation because I had re-read parts of his Guide to the Perplexed in the weeks leading up to the presentation and had grown a bit skeptical of my earlier enthusiasm connecting the two thinkers. So, the timing of Bernstein's comment was perfect because the relationship between Spinoza and Maimonides had become a matter of urgency to me. 

Let me start with Pearson's paper. He offers excellent set of argument for the idea that Maimonides'  Yad Hachazakah (literally: strong hand) is, despite non-trivial differences of presentation and the manner of treating the subject matter, a major influence on Spinoza's Ethics. The Yad is generally known as The Mishneh Torah (מִשְׁנֵה תּוֹרָה‎, or "Repetition of the Torah"). Its main purpose is to articulate and codify Jewish written and oral law. Despite receiving a rocky reception -- parts of which were burned --, it has become an extremely influential work within the development of Jewish law and ritual. 

Some other time I return to the details of Pearson's paper. Here's the thing: I missed the angle between The Mishneh Torah and Spinoza Ethics entirely. And this made me wonder how this is possible. The first thing to note is that Pearson's paper -- despite, and perhaps (I return to this below) the fame of the author -- has had negligible impact on Spinoza reception since. It is cited in a well known paper "A Portrait of Spinoza as a Maimonidean," by Warren Harvey a significant figure in Spinoza scholarship. But the citation is totemic; Pearson's paper is not used at all. And the reason for this is that Harvey is interested in connecting Spinoza to Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed not The Mishneh Torah (which is barely mentioned by Harvey in his article.) 

Now, it is possible that Harvey considered Pearson's papers on its merits and simply rejected the argument. This is not impossible because Pearson cherrypicks favored passages, sometimes relies on a bad translation, and systematically ignores lots of ways in which Spinoza and Maimonides differ in approach. (He does mention a few doctrinal differences, but mostly in order to illuminate the agreements).

But it is more likely that for Harvey the connection that Pearson drew was simply far-fetched. And the reason for thinking this is that Harvey is working with an opposition between Athens (philosophy) and Jerusalem (faith) in which The Guide falls on one side and the Mishneh Torah on the other side. For, Harvey starts his paper with announcing, "I try to sketch a portrait of Spinoza as a Maimonidean, as the last major representative of a tradition that mightily dominated Jewish philosophy for almost five centuries following the appearance of the Guide of the Perplexed." Much of the paper constructs this very tradition of Jewish philosophy artfully and unobtrusively.  In this tradition there is no place for Mishneh Torah, except the accidental one that its author also happens to have been an exceptionally gifted philosophical author of the Guide. Because the Mishneh Torah does not even qualify as philosophy.** 

I do not mean to suggest that learned commentators on Spinoza's Ethics never mention the Mishneh Torah. (Carlos Fraenkel discusses a passage in Cogitata Metaphysica in light of Mishneh Torah). Or that all commentators would agree with the implicit contrast between Jerusalem and Athens. For many, Spinoza's Ethics is timeless philosophy unrooted from any historically situated tradition. If one comes to believe, as is increasingly common for good reason, that Spinoza is to quote Michael Della Rocca "an arch-rationalist," there would be no reason to connect Spinoza's thought with Maimonides' Yad that appears to take revelation for granted. 

Of course, even scholars doubtful of the significance of Jewish philosophy on Spinoza, will recognize that Spinoza discusses the Mishneh Torah in the Theological Political Treatise. But that book, while important to the founding of the radical Enlightenment, is itself generally treated as an application of his philosophy to practical problems (including the relationship between revelation and philosophy). And while political philosophy is now treated as philosophy again, by and large commentators do not read the TTP to find Spinoza's true metaphysics. And so while I do not want to claim that the TTP is itself treated as belonging to Jerusalem, even its fans think of it as less philosophical than the Ethics. This attitude is also visible in Pearson (who treats the Ethics as much more "finished" philosophically than the TTP.

As an aside, part of the argument I presented at Santa Cruz is that the Ethics is, on some crucial matters, far more pious and guarded than the TTP , and also, and even more surprising perhaps, directly engages with the Hebrew Bible.

So, I have suggested that Pearson's essay and the argument he presented have been ignored because they do not fit the preconceptions of what counts as philosophy even by those friendly to the suggestion that Maimonides is a significant influence on or important to understanding Spinoza. But one may think that the reliance on the category of Jewish philosophy should form no objection to treating the Mishneh Torah as a source of Spinoza's philosophy because, after all, Pearson also relies on the category.

But, as the quote above suggests, Pearson's idea of 'jewish philosophy' is more Herderian and relativistic: the contrast between Athens and Jerusalem here is not a contrast between truth and revelation, but rather a contrast between two competing traditions toward the truth. When people like Harvey speak of Jewish philosophy, they mean that the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition is articulated in a Jewish context and responsive to concerns mediated by jewish experience and history. But Pearson thinks of Jewish philosophy as an autonomous philosophical  tradition: "Hebrew Philosophy seems to have a history and a development more or less unique and apart from that of other nations." That is to say, Pearson's conception of Jewish philosophy is analogous to the way scholars in the period (recall here and here) think of Chinese and Indian philosophy, as belonging to a civilization distinct from western philosophy's home.  (Except that Hebrew philosophy occurred geographically within the West.)

At this point one can understand why some readers will have wanted to keep their distance from Pearson, whose later work shows more interest in racial and ethnic superiority. Pearson's fondness for ranking cultures is already visible in the quoted passage. Although it is not impossible that his contemporaries would have been more bothered by his philo-semitism than the fact that he was ranking intellectual/cultural tradition!

Of course, Spinoza and to a lesser extent Maimonides are treated by Pearson as something more than Hebrew philosophers; they are world (philosophical) prophets. And one can discern in this Pearson's hope that, despite varied starting points (even Ohio will do), true philosophy transcends the culture that births or generates it.+ Pearson himself is clearly speaking from this superior to one's own intellectual culture's vantage-point. And, let me submit that it's this almost cosmopolitan perspective, much more than the sense of superiority toward other peoples, that is at the root of the science of eugenics.

 

 

 

 

 

On Siedentop and The Re-Invention of Liberalism (I)

Thus, even before Augustine’s ‘city of God’, Christian apologists were invoking ‘the country of God’ to assert the claims of the individual conscience. Such claims of conscience seemed to follow irresistibly from the assumption of moral equality. Equality, choice and responsibility hung together in their minds. Irenaeus repeatedly insisted on this as early as the mid-second century: ‘God’s just judgement falls equally on all men, and never fails.’
If God has created humans as equals, as rational agents with free will, then there ought to be an area within which they are free to choose and responsible for their choices. Identifying such an area was at first a means of self-defence by Christians. But soon it was also more than that. Tertullian saw clearly the implications of Christian moral beliefs. ‘Here lies the perfection and distinctiveness of Christian goodness,’ he argued. ‘Ordinary goodness is different; for all men love their friends, but only Christians love their enemies.’ Respecting a range of freedom of choice in all humans might be seen as one aspect of the latter.
The suggestion that belief in ‘equal liberty’ appeared in early Christian apologetics will surprise many and irritate some. For the-anticlericalism which has been an integral part of liberal historiography does not lend itself to such a conclusion. Besides, the distrust of anything like teleological explanations in history – of what is often called the Whig interpretation of history – reinforces such scepticism. But texts are facts. And the facts remain. In the mid-second century Irenaeus of Lyon asked, ‘what new thing did the Word bring by coming down to earth?’ For Tertullian, writing only a few decades later, the answer was clear. ‘One mighty deed alone was sufficient for our God – to bring freedom to the human person.’ Larry Siedentop (2014) Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, 77 [HT Bart Wilson]

Jacob Levy's Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom starts with a footnote to Siedentop's work. The name was unfamiliar to me, but I made a mental note to check it out some time. So when, a few weeks ago, Bart Wilson asked me if I had read Siedentop's Inventing the Individual and what I thought of it, I decided to to read the book (now done). As regular readers know (recall), I think the second wave of liberalism has ended, and so it may be useful to take stock of how liberalism was re-conceptualized, even re-articulated, by those on the precipice of imminent collapse. 

Before I get to re-conceptualization, let me do one paragraph summary. The key idea behind the book is that "Christian moral intuitions played a pivotal role in shaping the discourse that gave rise to modern liberalism and secularism." (359) Strikingly, the book ends well before the invention of either 'modern liberalism' and 'secularism.' Rather it is a fascinating attempt to offer a somewhat schematic, genealogical development of western Christianity from Paul to Ockham, as the unfolding of the articulation of key moral intuitions in which we are invited to recognize the shape of future liberalism and secularism. Although Nietzsche is never mentioned, the simplest version to describe one strain, the ethical strain, of the book is that it takes the sardonic and satirical unmasking account of the Genealogy of Morals, and endorses that account with a lot more historical and conceptual detail than Nietzsche had offered. There is also a juridical, political strain which aims to show that the development of canon law and the papal conception of sovereignty prefigure structural features of political liberalism. Along the way, the invention of the institutionalization of the work ethic is attributed to the cluniac reform movement. 

Okay, with that in place, let's turn to the character of the individual and liberalism Siedentop offers, and to start conveying why I find this book highly problematic. For a book on the invention of the individual, it is refreshing to see Petrarca, Luther, Montaigne, and Descartes nearly entirely ignored.*  This is deliberate: Siedentop is not interested in and rejects what he calls the "cult of individuality" which he associates with the Renaissance. (337) He contrasts the individual as a moral notion (originating in Paul's Letters) rooted in ontology (fleshed out by Ockham) with the cultivation of self as an aesthetic project he associates with Renaissance humanists. The true individual is interior and, in its reliance of conscience, in some sense independent of society; whereas for Siedentop the 'cult of individuality' depicts the (false) "individual as the 'victim' of social pressures and heroism as resistance to such pressures. Social institutions were presented as a threat to  the self." (337)

Let's leave aside Siedentop's embrace of Whig philosophy of history. As regular readers know, I have no right to that criticism. I have defended the legitimacy and utility of teleological explanations (of history) in print. My criticisms of Siedentop's historiographical practice will be from the perspective of a teleological fellow traveler. And not unlike him, I have (recall on Petrarca) reservations about the Renaissance expressions of individuality.

Even so, it's worth asking in light of the attack on the 'cult of individuality' what's so liberal about Siedentop's individual. Siedentop identifies "classical liberalism" with the commitment to ‘equal liberty’ which "rests on the firm belief that to be human means being a rational and moral agent, a free chooser with responsibility for one’s actions. It puts a premium on conscience rather than the ‘blind’ following of rules. It joins rights with duties to others." (361)  It is no surprise that Kant is acknowledged as a kind of end-point of the narrative, (p. 107, 359), although somehow Siedentop forgets that this agent is ideal, not flesh and blood.  Even so, let's stipulate that equal liberty understood in this fashion is a core commitment of liberalism.

Yet, something more than our fallen human nature is missing here. Siedentop somehow skipped On Liberty (and Orwell's essays), and so the threats of conformism to (civil rights of) the individual and the ways in which even lofty moral ideals can turn into oppressive group think seem to elude Siedentop entirely.

Of course, he is not entirely unaware of this. To give a telling example: when the inquisition is first mentioned, briefly, it is obliquely criticized in terms of shaky juridical foundations: "Even writers well disposed to the papacy concede that ‘the juristic principles which the procedure embodied bore hardly any resemblance to those which were commonly accepted and consistently advocated by the papacy itself.’ (288) But the next mention of it (on p. 362) is in terms of the "legend of the Spanish Inquisition." My point in mentioning this is not to re-enforce enmity between secularism and religion -- something Siedentop thinks represents Europe's "civil war" -- (362). But while Siedentop clearly endorses "civil liberty" (262) and judicial safeguards for the accused, he seems to have no interest in the conditions of pluralism. 

This is, in fact, revealed by the snub of  Montaigne, who is described, and rejected as a skeptic (335; 386). Rather than understanding Montaigne's skepticism as one of the antidotes to fanaticism and one of the grounds of an experimental life worth having, it is clearly seen as corrosive of ''conviction" (362).

Thus, although the book begins with offering an attractive picture of Christian experimentation with different forms of life, under the collapsing Roman empire, once we get to Augustine, pluralism is generally presented as unattractive. Pluralism is identified with feudal, legal disorder (253; 256)-- and this is a book that embraces the middle ages as a progressive era!

This is surely deliberate. The acceptance by the 'religious camp' in the centuries after the French revolution of "religious pluralism" is presented as a good thing (360). But this is not because of a commitment to true diversity. For, there is explicitly no room for Islam in Siedentop's vision of Europe (362). Siedentop is alarmed by "born-again" Christianity Stateside. With political friends like these, religion needs no enemies.

That is to say, Siedentop shapes a narrative of the "tradition" of the "West" in the service of developing citizens that have moral convictions such that they can "shape the conversation of mankind" (363--these are the last words of the epilogue). Yet, these convictions are not to be tested robustly by alternative viewpoints.

This is characteristic of the central historiographic failure which is ultimately a failure of imagination. In Siedentop's narrative the tradition is entirely, as it were, homegrown. The emphasis is really on 'Western' in 'Western Liberalism' (except not as far west as Muslim Spain, which is mentioned once as a source of translations of Greek philosophy). The tradition, once understood, is sui generis and has nothing to learn from others; and, in fact, in Siedentop's presentation never learned anything from without. To put my cards on the table, ahead of my next installment, if that un-inquisitive autarchic edifice were the liberal tradition, it is not worth re-animating, But luckily, we find in Siedentop some of the clay for a nobler project.

 

 

Is Agamben Entirely Wrong?

In order to make sense of the frantic, irrational, and absolutely unwarranted emergency measures adopted for a supposed epidemic of coronavirus, we must begin from the declaration of the Italian National Research Council (NRC), according to which “there is no SARS-CoV2 epidemic in Italy.”

It continues: in any case “the infection, according to the epidemiological data available as of today and based on tens of thousands of cases, causes light/moderate symptoms (a variant of flu) in 80-90% of cases. In 10-15%, there is a chance of pneumonia, but which also has a benign outcome in the large majority of cases. We estimate that only 4% of patients require intensive therapy.”

If this is the real situation, why do the media and the authorities do their utmost to create a climate of panic, thus provoking a true state of exception, with severe limitations on movement and the suspension of daily life and work activities for entire regions?

Two factors can help explain such a disproportionate response.

First and foremost, what is once again manifest here is the growing tendency to use the state of exception as a normal governing paradigm. The executive decree (decreto legge), approved by the government “for reasons of hygiene and public safety,” produces a real militarization “of those municipalities and areas in which there is at least one person who tests positive and for whom the source of the infection is unknown, or in which there is a least one case that is not connected to a person who recently traveled from an area affected by the contagion.”

Such a vague and indeterminate formula will allow [the government] to rapidly extend the state of exception to all regions, as it is practically impossible that other cases will not appear elsewhere.

Let us consider the serious limitations of freedom imposed by the executive decree:

1. A prohibition against leaving the affected municipality or area for all people in that municipality or area.
2. A prohibition against entering the affected municipality or area
3. The suspension of all events or initiatives (regardless of whether they are related to culture, sport, religion, or entertainment), and a suspension of meetings in any private or public space, including enclosed spaces if they are open to the public.
4. The suspension of educational services in kindergartens and schools at every level, including higher education and excluding only distance learning.
5. The closure of museums and other cultural institutions as listed in article 101 of the Statute on cultural heritage and landscape, and in executive decree number 42 from 01/22/2004. All regulations on free access to those institutions are also suspended.
6. The suspension of all kinds of educational travel, in Italy and abroad.
7. The suspension of all publicly held exams and all activities of public offices, except essential services or public utility services.
8. The enforcement of quarantine and active surveillance on individuals who had close contact with confirmed cases of infection.

   It is blatantly evident that these restrictions are disproportionate to the threat from what is, according to the NRC, a normal flu, not much different from those that affect us every year.

   We might say that once terrorism was exhausted as a justification for exceptional measures, the invention of an epidemic could offer the ideal pretext for broadening such measures beyond any limitation.

The other factor, no less disquieting, is the state of fear, which in recent years has diffused into individual consciousnesses and which translates into a real need for states of collective panic, for which the epidemic once again offers the ideal pretext.

Therefore, in a perverse vicious circle, the limitation of freedom imposed by governments is accepted in the name of a desire for safety, which has been created by the same governments who now intervene to satisfy it. Agamben 26 February, 2020, translated Positions Politics.[HT Omri Boehm]

Agamben's essay has provoked virulent responses. For example, writing in the Chronicle, Anastasia Berg claims it reveals "the dressing up of outdated jargon as a form of courageous resistance to unreflecting moral dogma." In his beautiful essay (which I quoted approvingly last week), Justin Smith writes, "Agamben is pushing a species of Trumpian doubt-mongering by claiming that the “disproportionate reaction” to the pandemic is nothing more than an assertion of authoritarian biopolitics. Honestly, at this point whoever’s left of the vanguard of continental philosophy should probably just start hawking men’s vitamin supplements on late-nite TV." Berg, too, treats Agamben "like a bemused Fox News anchor."

As regular readers know, I find thinking with Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, and Judith Butler especially useful complements to my analytical training in reflecting on the extended political present. I do so not because they are especially good pundits nor because I agree with them -- they would find my liberalism if not dangerous than ridiculous --, but because they help me discern beyond the limitations of my commitments. If my past blogging has not convinced you of the utility of this, cést la vie. By contrast, I have kept my distance from Agamben because I find his theological frameworks and obsession with Schmitt less fruitful. Even so, in reading the responses to Agamben, one wonders if Corona-virus isn't being treated as the opportunity to rid the world of certain kind of intellectual pathogens.* And part of me thinks 'good riddance, too.' But this digression is written from the perspective of the part that does not.

The first thing to notice is that Agamben relies on scientific authority. And he is wise enough to treat its position in conditional terms: "If this is the real situation." To put matters simply: Agamben was not so much irresponsible. So unless he was cherry-picking, he was an unlucky pundit relying on a mistaken epistemic authority. "The National Research Council (Cnr) is the largest public research institution in Italy."  So, to assimilate him to Fox and late-nite TV is simply unfair. The collapse of the medical system in Lombardy was simply not foreseen the end of February. 

As an aside, I don't mean to suggest one should never doubt respectable epistemic authority. As Eric Winsberg and I argue in the New Statesman about the present context, when the relevant application of the science is not quite sorted out -- say, due to lack of high quality data/evidence --  or when the moral and political trade-offs that are undertaken with the backing of authoritative science are not made transparent, it can be necessary to be critical of even the best science of the moment.  By February, and a regular traveler, I was baffled by the lack of action by European authorities to test for and control the spread of the virus in the light of the news from Wuhan.

Second, as Berg admits, and Yuval Noah Harari points out in a wise essay in the Financial Times, policies that may well be justified in and by an emergency are often very hard to undo. So, there is nothing wrong with Agamben's instinct to warn against the actions of the Italian government (and others). Just this month the (2001) Patriot act was renewed, again, for 77-days.

Third, Agamben may well be right that the pandemic will be the "pretext" to pass a lot of legislation. But rather than being evidence of political dishonestly or a "growing tendency to rely on the state of exception" this is actually evidence of quite ordinary politics. Parliamentary politics is the art of what it is possible; and when people are afraid or attentive -- both the natural response to a pandemic -- a willingness to compromise and get things done is likely. A crisis creates openings to shift coalitions and lines of alignment. This is why ideas like basic income and debt jubilees have moved from the fringe to the center. What would be helpful is a means to distinguish new policies that foreseeable advance and entrench the politics of fear from those that do not.**

Now, one may think I am charging Agamben with a kind of confirmation bias. That the real problem with Agamben's approach is that he is in the grip of his own paradigm to see in every response confirmation of his claim that "once again manifest here is the growing tendency to use the state of exception as a normal governing paradigm." (Bold in original.) The confirmation bias is also visible Agamben's follow up piece: "the first thing that the wave of panic that has paralyzed the country obviously shows is that our society no longer believes in anything but bare life."

As Berg notes this is not so "obviously shown." One may understand people's responses  "not for the sake of our bare life, and indeed not for the sake of the bare life of others, but out of an ethical imperative: to exercise the tremendous powers of society to protect the vulnerable, be they our loved ones or someone else’s." Even so, Berg misses Agamben's point. The emphasis is not on bare life itself, but on the claim that "our society no longer believes in anything." Lurking in Agamben's essays is a Nietzschean claim about nihilism.+

If art, philosophy, culture, and even freedom seem of negligible importance in pandemic times than our attachment to them may seem to a certain mind a mere luxury. If our authentic selves are revealed in time of scarcity and danger, and if, then, we show little concern to such higher things we are revealed as puny, cowardly animals.  To such a mind the Hobbesian response to this, that commodious and generous living is only possible once the sovereign creates security, begs the question. Agamben's indictment is that in a crisis we reveal ourselves as last men all too willing to submit to Leviathan.  

One can feel the pull of both Hobbes and Nietzsche, and still note that this is a false dilemma in the moment. During the last few weeks I am noticing a heightened need and hunger for the arts and philosophy. Wonderful artistic responses have circulated to the oddly shared experience of confinement in social media (see here for my personal favorite). I have participated in the poem exchange started by anonymous. And undoubtedly somewhere a religion is starting that provides a re-evaluation of values. That is to say, we can outwardly submit to authority, political and scientific, to make at least short-term coordination possible. While inwardly and simultaneously embrace the arts, philosophy, solidarity, and even the critical spirit of freedom.

 

 

Patrick Deneen and The Noble Lie

During one of the more infamous moments in Plato’s Republic, Socrates suggests that the ideal city needs a founding myth—what he calls “a noble lie”—to ensure its success. The myth has two parts. The first relates that every person in the city comes from the same mother, and thus encourages belief in a common origin and kinship of all the citizens who live in the city. The second relates that every person belongs by birth to a particular class based upon his or her talents and abilities, indicated by a metal gilded upon each soul at birth: gold for the ruling class; silver for ministers, soldiers, and high-ranking servants; bronze and iron for the workers.

Socrates argues that both parts of the myth must be believed by all citizens for the city to succeed. The myth at once seeks to unite and to differentiate, to explain what is common and distinct, to foster civic patriotism amid significant difference. The first part encourages civic commitment, shared sacrifice, and belief in a common good. The second justifies the existence of inequality as a permanent feature of ­human society....If anyone is likely to accept the myth, he suggests, it is the uneducated working class.

...

Unlike Marx, [Plato] did not believe that the members of the lower class would be unlikely to know their own interests. The underclass is likely to accept the myth because they realize it works to their advantage. Its members are keenly aware of the fact of inequality. That part of the “lie” hardly seems false to them. What is novel, and what works to their advantage, is the idea that inequalities exist for the benefit of the underclass as well as the rulers. That is, members with noble metals in their souls are to undertake their work for the benefit of everyone, including those whose souls are marked by base metals. By contrast, members of the ruling class are likely to disbelieve the myth out of self-interest. They balk at the claim that every person, regardless of rank, belongs to the same family. They do not want the advantages that might solely benefit their class to be employed for the benefit of the whole.

Only if each group accepts each part of the “lie,” as Socrates explains, is a kind of social contract achieved. Elites and commoners both accept the part of the myth that does not appeal to them for the sake of the part that does. Elites are distinguished in a society that justifies inequality; commoners are best off in a society that compels service of elites for the whole. Instead of acting as warring parties, both sides work for the good of all. Such a compact is difficult to achieve. 

...

The part of the “noble lie” that once would have horrified the elites—the claim of common kinship—is irrelevant; instead, they resist the inegalitarian part of the myth that would then, as now, have seemed self-evident to the elites as well as the underclass. Today’s underclass is as likely to recognize its unequal position as Plato’s. It is elites that seem most prone to the condition of “false consciousness.”

....

While elites may suffer self-inflicted blindness to the nature of their position, the rest of society clearly sees what they are doing...Our ruling class is more blinkered than that of the ancien régime. Unlike the aristocrats of old, they insist that there are only egalitarians at their exclusive institutions. They loudly proclaim their virtue and redouble their commitment to diversity and inclusion. They cast bigoted rednecks as the great impediment to perfect ­equality—not the elite institutions from which they benefit. The institutions responsible for winnowing the social and economic winners from the losers are largely immune from questioning, and busy themselves with extensive public displays of their unceasing commitment to equality. Meritocratic ideology disguises the ruling class’s own role in perpetuating inequality from itself, and even fosters a broader social ecology in which those who are not among the ruling class suffer an array of social and economic pathologies that are increasingly the defining feature of ­America’s underclass. Facing up to reality would require hard questions about the agenda underlying commitments to “diversity and inclusion.” Our ­stated commitment to “critical thinking” demands no less, but such questions are likely to be put down—at times violently—on contemporary campuses.

....

From the vantage of nearly 2,500 years, Plato’s noble lie doesn’t appear to be a falsehood after all. For a society to function, two seemingly contradictory beliefs must be simultaneously held: We are radically different and radically alike. We are extensively differentiated yet bound together. We are called to sometimes radically unequal tasks, but those tasks are part of an effort to benefit the whole. Plato thought the “fact of difference” would be easy for people to acknowledge, since it is so evident to our senses, if not always easy for those in a position of lower status to accept. The challenge was how to achieve belief in a common origin and shared kinship. TheRepublic of Plato was one effort to answer that challenge, if a fairly absurd and implausible one (as Socrates readily admitted). 

....

So long as liberalism was not fully itself—so long as liberalism was corrected and even governed by Christianity—a working social contract was possible. For Christianity, difference is ordered toward unity. For liberalism, unity is valued insofar as it promotes difference.....

The new aristocrats believe we have transcended the need for Christianity, which they regard as a myth no less mendacious than Plato’s noble lie. They believe that by dispelling the old myths, they can become the vanguard of an ever more equal society. They blind themselves to the fact that this claim is a form of status maintenance, allowing denial of a deeper commonality with those they regard as benighted and backward. Elites denounce the “populists” while denying that they have fomented a class war. They deplore the obnoxiousness of Donald Trump, perfectly obtuse of their complicity in his ascent.

We are in uncharted territory. Liberalism coexisted with Christianity for its entire history, with Christianity moderating the harder edges of the regnant political philosophy, supporting forms and practices that demanded from elites the recognition of their elevated status, and hence, corresponding responsibilities and duties to those less fortunate. The thoroughgoing disdain and dismissiveness of today’s elites toward the working class is a reflection of our newfound “enlightenment,” just as is the belief among the lower class that only a strong and equally disdainful leader can constrain the elites. Liberalism has achieved its goal of emptying the public square of the old gods, leaving it a harsh space of contestation among unequals who no longer see any commonality. Whether that square can be filled again with newly rendered stories of old telling us of a common origin and destination, or whether it must simply be dominated by whoever proves the strongest, is the test of our age.--Patrick Deneen, "The Ignoble Lie" First Things.

I recently read Patrick Deneen's Why Liberalism Failed, and wanted to do a short piece on his claim in that book that liberalism today is in the grip of a noble lie that is serving the interests of elites at the expense of the have-nots; in Deneen's version the elites are deluded while the have nots see clearly. But I had left my copy at the office and instead found a version of his argument at First Things online. While the diagnosis is roughly the same between the book and the blog post, it is worth noting that in the book Deneen reads as an echt-Burkean -- distinct from the pseudo-conservatives who peddle national greatness and global markets --, who advocates a kind of withdrawal from politics in favor of small scale communal living (there are a lot of fond references to the Amish and even counterculture experimentation) while in the blog post he read as an angry Thomist who would, it seems, like to see the return of Christianity to its place of domination in the public sphere. I don't mean to suggest the two sides must be in contradiction with each other, or that Deneen is speaking in split tongues, but the distinct rhetoric is striking. (Here's another one: in the book the present-to-be-lamented-emphasis on diversity is traced back to Madison; in the blog Madison is dropped, and diversity is treated as a modern evil located in silly campus activists.) I also do not mean to imply that the historical Burke would reject national greatness and global markets!

But for my present purposes the differences between blog-Deneen and book-Deneen are irrelevant. For his account of the noble lie is fairly consistent between the two. I agree with Deneen one can encounter in elite social circles, rich folk in the grip of purported self-justifying meritocracy and victim blaming. (It is a bit peculiar that in the blog, but not the book, he seems to extol Charles Murray whose whole business-model turns on this.) But that fact is not to be confused with liberal self-understanding.

In particular, he seems to miss entirely -- and I think this is a great irony -- that his diagnosis of the modern noble lie echoes John Stuart Mill's in the introductory chapter 1 On Liberty. There Mill had argued (recall) that in conditions of domination/subordination, ruling ideologies will tend to favor the self-interest of the ruling classes. In so doing they corrupt the moral sentiments of the ruling class and even pervert how they treat each other. Deneen and Mill agree about this. In addition, Deneen and Mill agree that the lower classes see through the delusion. The one key difference is that Mill seems to suggest that the lower classes are, despite their knowledge, corrupted by becoming servile. Whereas Deneen suggests they turn to socialists and authoritarians. 

That is to say, and Deneen is oblivious to this, liberalism is quite capable of a truthful self-understanding of its own condition as an ideology that accommodates ruler-ship, while simultaneously recognizing that it needs to be committed to ameliorating the conditions that give rise to its rule while simultaneously reinforcing it. In my view this idea is also fully present in Adam Smith, who thought (recall) that property rights protect the rich from the indignation of the poor but that such a system would also benefit the poor. And while this does no justice to Rawls' arguments it is a pretty vulgar, but no less true, interpretation of the difference principle. In fact, once one pays attention to this feature of liberalism it is quite entrenched in the tradition.* 

So,  the more interesting fact is that for all his animus toward liberalism, Deneen can't see that the roots of his very critique is itself grounded in some of the best features of the liberal tradition. That is, the very terms by which Deneen proposes his criticism of liberalism is part of a historical dialectic generated by liberalism, and fully anticipated by the thinking branch of liberalism. In fact, in the book his solutions echo the Smithian strains in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. What I am hinting at is that liberalism's understanding of progress also foresees the kind of reactions Deneen exhibits. 

What to make of this is a harder question. As regular readers know I am not complacent about the future of liberalism. And once I return to the office, I want to use the more perceptive elements of Deneen's diagnosis of liberalism to help articulate our challenge today. But here I close with a kind of puzzle and a further thought: it is a notable fact that some of the most strident and most intelligent enemies of liberalism since, say, Carl Schmitt (recall) have a tendency to treat it as rank stupidity. This is a shame because liberals and even the most skeptically liberal educators have always recognized that we need our critics. Which is the true reason -- and not some deference to Christianity -- our cannon (from Plato to Nietzsche) is, well, so illiberal.

On Al-Farabi's Democratic City and the Transition Problem

115. Of [all] their cities, this [democratic city] is the marvelous and happy city. On the sur­face, it is like an embroidered garment replete with colored figures and dyes. Everyone loves it and loves to dwell in it, because every human being who has a passion or desire for anything is able to gain it in this city. The nations repair to it and dwell in it, so it becomes great beyond mea­sure. People of every tribe are procreated in it by every sort of pairing off and sexual intercourse. The children generated in it are of very different innate characters and of very different education and upbringing.
Thus this city comes to be many cities, not distinguished from one another but interwoven with one another, the parts of one interspersed among the parts of another. Nor is the foreigner distinguished from the native resident. All of the passions and ways of life come together in it. Therefore, it is not impossible as time draws on that virtuous people emerge in it. There may chance to exist in it wise men, rhetoricians, and poets concerned with every type of object. It is possible to glean from it parts of the virtuous city, and this is the best that emerges in this city. Thus, of the ignorant cities this city has both the most good and the most evil. The bigger, more prosperous, more populous, more fertile, and more perfect it becomes for people, the more prevalent and greater are these two...

117. According to them, the virtuous ruler is the one who is excellent at deliberation and fine at using stratagems to gain them their different and variegated desires and passions, preserving that from their enemies, and not depriving [them] of any of their money but restricting himself only to what is necessary for his power.
The one who is virtuous in truth-namely, the one who, when he rules them, determines their actions and directs them toward happiness-is not made a ruler by them. If he chances to rule them, he is soon deposed or killed, or his rulership is disturbed and challenged. The same holds for [102] the rest of the ignorant cities: each of them wants only to be ruled by someone who sets its choices and desires before it, makes the path to them easy, gains them for them, and preserves them for them. They reject the rulership of the virtuous and censure it. However, it is more possible and easier for the virtuous cities and the rulership of the virtuous to emerge from the necessary and democratic cities than from the other [ignorant] cities.--Al-Farabi, Political Regime, Translated by Charles Butterworth.

Regular readers know that Al-Farabi's treatment of the cosmopolitan democratic city/polity has not lost its relevance (recall here and here). Today, I treat a matter of great significance obliquely. I do so, by focusing on how he treats the transition problem (recall last week; see here and here on Ibn Rushd; recall and here), that is, is how to create an ideal political future with a population raised under bad institutions (or worse, that is, bad breeding). As the last sentence of the quoted passage suggests, Al-Farabi thinks the democratic city is one of two kinds of regimes from which the best regime can emerge. This is puzzling because Al-Farabi is clear that while democracies are tolerant enough of the virtuous in their midst, they turn murderous ("deposed or killed") toward would-be truly virtuous rulers. This made me think that, perhaps, he thought Muhammad was the last prophet, even though there is no reason to think that in his metaphysics the possibility of further revelation had ended.

Yet, in light of some other passages, I had also thought that Al-Farabi could also be taken to suggest that a would be virtuous ruler would have to go into exile with would be virtuous followers and start a virtuous regime elsewhere. Think of Muhammad's exile from Mecca to Medina; or Moses in the dessert, etc. But the evidence for this possibility is thin.

But in addition to exile, I now think there are two other options to solve the transition problem.* First, Al-Farabi notes about the cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic democratic city that it "comes to be many cities" (see  the paragraph from 133). This is due to the fact that without constraints human beings have a natural tendency toward multiplicity. (According to Al-Farabi, when people don't mix sexually and are stationary, they are under influence of environment. And then their differences are marked by ethnicity and language.) In one sense this -- that a the democratic city "comes to be many cities" -- is quite damning because it means that the democratic city is not a unity; it is even in a certain sense a kind of contradiction (one is many, etc.). 

But in another sense it means that a virtuous community, ruled by a virtuous leader, could live in a kind of self-governing, inner exile amidst the splendor of the democratic city. (I think of this as the pre-1979-Shia or the pre-1948-Jewish option.)+ The problem with this reading is that Al-Farabi seems, when discussing why a village or a neighborhood is a "defective" political association, adamant that a certain form of self-sufficiency and independence is required for true political life (see par. 64). So, I doubt think that this option really solves the transition problem. But it may be an intermediary step to solving it.

For, second, the key passage -- "If he chances to rule them, he is soon deposed or killed, or his rulership is disturbed and challenged" does not say that a would be virtuous leader is always killed. A lucky would-be virtuous ruler of the whole polity may find his rulership "disturbed and challenged;" but that's compatible with the thought he can (after a rocky start) survive it. I missed this option because I have a tendency to read this passage in light of Plato's parable of the cave, where the cave dwellers kill the person who has access to the truth [517a]. The would-be-virtuous leader is more capable of surviving democratic resistance to his rule if, within the democratic city, there is another, more 'virtuous city' laying dormant to take over.**

If that is so, democracy's greatest strength -- to live and let live ["every one of its inhabitants is unrestrained and left to himself to do what he likes" (par. 113)]++ --, mutual toleration, becomes its greatest weakness. Then again, how to preserve a democratic polity without undermining its freedoms, has not lost its urgency.