Digressions&Impressions

On Bureaucrat Philosophers

During my Summer blogging break philosophy's modern association and intertwining with bureaucracy was highlighted in two stimulating essays, which both received considerable social media attention (by philosophy standards): first, in his moving, autobiographical essay, "Two Tendencies," on what we might call the praxis and orientation of philosophy, Liam Kofi Bright articulates a kind of "dualism" in which one of the major tendencies is titled, 'Basically Pleasant Bureaucrat.' Second, while writing at DailyNous about the tensions, even incommensurable value conflicts, that may arise when one innovates in teaching in light of the values of the underlying philosophical source material, C. Thi Nguyen, distinguishes among the roles (and values associated with these roles) of "Teacher, Bureaucrat, Cop."

Now, in C. Thi Nguyen's essay the bureaucrat is explicitly associated with "fairness" in grading and (in more "authoritarian" role) the enforcement of the rules. For those of us who work in systems where the academic is a civil servant (as the Dutch system was in living memory), or where the process of how one assigns grades can be evaluated and challenged at and by exam committees (who in turn have to show evidence of due process and proper application of rules to possible appeals committees), C. Thi Nguyen's challenges of combining pedagogic or mentoring principles with bureaucratic ones are undoubtedly familiar. His lively descriptions of the conflicting considerations involved resonated with me. (Go read the essay!)

However, fairness is not really a bureaucratic principle.* Impartiality and rule-following (and, as he suggests, rule-enforcement) are. I noticed C. Thi Nguyen's emphasis on fairness because in my own Dutch context (teaching at a huge state school) students and administrators alike will use 'equality' -- in the sense of treating like alike not in the sense of giving everyone the same actual grade -- when they focus on the proper process of grading. Despite the different vocabularies, C. Thi Nguyen and my Dutch students both capture the same commitment or principle that indeed is meant to block species of judgment and discrimination, let alone prevent any measure, if that were possible, of how the soul has been turned to the good, to infiltrate one's grading practices.

Once higher education is shaped by government funding in a Weberian state, in which degrees play certain certification roles in public life (or where students can sue over their  grades), it seems inevitable that some bureaucratic principles seep into and constrain professors' evaluative or grading practices in virtue of the fact that we are functionaries of potentially huge organizations. To what degree that undermines the very possibility of a philosophical education I set aside here.

Because he is vocal admirer of Carnap, even one of our foremost exemplifications of what (the Spirit of) a Left Vienna philosophy would look like today, I was not surprised that Liam Kofi Bright embraces the cognitive division of labor and even bureaucracy. Even so his characterization of the Basically Pleasant Bureaucrat surprised me, and in order to explain that I quote the paragraph that introduces it: 

The first tendency is that which is most visible in my published work. Here the thought is that philosophy is a sort of public service work, a small part of the greater enterprise of generating knowledge that can be put to use in bettering our estate. The work is essentially service orientated (Dotson 2015) or Mohist in nature (Johnston 2010) — to work in this tendency one must be trying to find what combination of beliefs, technologies, and social practices will best foster flourishing (including, of course, refining the idea of “flourishing”). At a high level this will involve identifying and resolving social problems. These are cases wherein one finds “the failure of an organised social group to realise its group ideals, through the inability to adapt certain desired lines of action to conditions of life” (Du Bois 1898, 3). Upon finding these one must work out what needs to change — the ideals, the actions, the conditions of life, etc — and work out how these changes may be effected. However it turns out that doing this effectively requires a huge division of labour and so most of the time one will not work at that high level of abstraction, but rather on more specific technical puzzles. None the less, the essence of this tendency is to commit to this project of perpetual collaborative amelioration.

Now, one reason I admire Liam Kofi Bright is how he can find points of contact, even overlap, between purportedly different philosophical traditions. In our discipline, which values disagreement and the focused objection and sharply polices standards boundaries, this capacity to see, say, how Master Mo's ameliorative, egalitarian consequentialism anticipates (say) Carnap's without having to diminish our admiration for Carnap is lovely (and politically important). [It's also lovely how he can turn his wide reading into stimulating reflection for the rest of us!]

Now, public service is a bureaucratic value. But Liam Kofi Bright also demands the kind of initiative (e.g., "one must work out what needs to change — the ideals, the actions, the conditions of life, etc — and work out how these changes may be effected") that one does not naturally associate with bureaucratic life, so there is a latent tension here in the way the first tendency has been labelled. (I return to this below.)

But I was especially surprised by the attempted, seamless integration of the Basically Pleasant Bureaucratic perspective with Dotson's conception (recall) of service philosophy. Now, to begin to explain why, I first (with apologies) quote myself on service philosophy:

Dotson observes that the professional philosophy she encountered is incapable of being self-justifying. This is no surprise because the dominant traditions (e.g., analytical philosophy, scientific philosophy, etc.) rest on broadly consequentialist foundations that presuppose shared values. The tacit elitism that could be counted on to do the real work -- that a life of philosophy is best -- does not sit well rhetorically in a democratic culture. Genuine and secure axiological foundations are not easy to come by in an intellectual culture that is scientistic. Dotson's attractive vision turns the weakness of the recent tradition around and turns it into a virtue: philosophy is not self-justifying or autonomous, but a good tool in the service of other ends. So despite many differences in sensibility, she is, thus, not far removed from the spirit of, say, Left Vienna. (D&I, 03/24/2015)

So, one may well wonder why I act all surprised at Liam Kofi Bright's stance if I myself had already noticed what one may call the 'formal resonance' between Dotson's and his approach to philosophy in which a certain kind of consequentialism and externally given (and optative) ends combine. But, of course, sensibility matters.

For, while in practice the service philosopher may well find herself advising government and shape the bureaucracy, she explicitly receives her ends from social movements and activists and joins in their (ahh) praxis ("I have learned and continue to learn living and working as a Black feminist, epistemology-based activist.") And without wishing to romanticize either bureaucrat or activist, the activist is willing, if necessity demands it, to break rules and violate norms in a way completely orthogonal to the bureaucrat.** 

At this point one  may well object on Liam Kofi Bright's behalf that he may not be adverse to taking guidance from activists, nor abhor a revolutionary impulse. After all in the paragraph I have quoted, he quotes Du Bois, who eventually, late in life, joined the communist party because “Capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism—the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute—this is the only way of human life.” (Quoted from Angela Davis.)

But when Liam Kofi Bright quotes Du Bois, he is quoting from his reformist period. And Liam Kofi Bright himself explicitly advocates "amelioration" even over many generations ("Philosophy conceived of as [the building of] la Sagrada Família.") And while amelioration and even conceptual engineering is formally compatible with some species of activism, there is a different attitude in each toward both the disciplinary and social status quo. So, even if we ignore the virtues of bureaucracy, and treat his first tendency in terms of a highly skilled, even experimental Basically Pleasant Bricklayer there is an important contrast between it and the spirit of service philosophy (relative to the status quo).

I also suspect that there is a more important difference between service philosophy and the BPB tendency. I am circumspect here because I do not self-identify with each approach and I don't have recent phenomenological access toward my speculation: but I suspect the activist philosopher can experience the spiritual satisfaction that the "alienated labour" (that, as Liam Kofi Bright reports), the sublimating BPB experiences.** 

For, while activism can be a soul destroying grind and isolating (even very dangerous), in a well functioning activist milieu, it has as a predictable side-effect the creation of communal feelings in the pursuit of a self-transcending goal that simultaneously is self-justifying. Of course, how to get to that point is no easy matter and actually require some attention to nurturing the life of the mind as part of the activist ethos. (This is a neat subtext in Zena Hitz's Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life.) But the service philosopher's attitude toward her own work would not have to be alienated. 

Let me close with a final observation. Since Max Weber there is a peculiar blind-spot that the bureaucratic life has attracted relatively little attention from philosophers this despite the outsized significance of it in the modern state and, as C. Thi Nguyen and Liam Kofi Bright remind us, to many of own own lives as professional academics. (I suspect this is partial effect of the fact that many high prestige academic institutions try to maintain (at least the fiction of) self-governance in ways that those who work as functionaries cannot maintain.) And while I have only scratched the surface of both essays, a key feature of our involvement in bureaucratic life is that our educational and research practices are shaped by rules, norms, and goals that are extrinsic to philosophy (and education). This strikes me as rather important to our self-understanding if only because it allows us to organize our thinking about the many unhealthy symptoms we often encounter and discuss (reliance on metrics, rankings, stability of hierarchies, the lengthening syllabi, etc.). And so I am grateful to both for starting this conversations.

 

RIP: Rob Brouwer 1938-2022

In a few weeks, Neglected Classics of Philosophy 2 (OUP, 2022) will appear. As you can see at books.google, it's dedicated to "Anneke Luger-Veenstra, Jan Stronk, and Rob Brower, my learned high school teachers, who encouraged a love of the classics." Two days ago my high school classmate, Jorine Lamsma, called my attention to an announcement in the newspaper that Rob had died June 1, 2022. The memorial service and funeral are today.

Rob was my high school Latin teacher for four years at Amsterdam's Vossius Gymnasium. My class (1c, 2c, 3c) was known to be 'trouble' and quite a few teachers fought trench warfare with us, as we found ever more creative ways to prank and be disruptive. But not in Rob's classroom. We called him "Mijnheer Brouwer," of course. He was not on first name basis with his charges.

Rob commanded our instant respect not because he was strict (which he was) and unperturbable (which he was), but because he somehow managed to convey that he instantiated the promise of bildung (without having to say so); he wasn't aiming to reach some learning target decomposed in weekly grammar, vocabulary, and syntax acquired. But rather he always made clear that whatever task of memorization and repetition we were assigned was in the service of our introduction to the classics and, without veneration, their wider cultural significance. As another classmate, Max Rosenberg, put it, each class was part of a much broader whole. And as the years passed, I slowly grasped -- hence my use of 'bildung'  --, these classics in turn would be good friends accompanying me in a life-time of imperfect self-cultivation.

Once, I was fourteen or so, a classmate pushed his button, and the unfathomable happened: the boy (no, not me) got sent out of class, with the archaic, 'gaat heen' and Rob, visibly steadying himself, pointing a finger at the door. For years we could get a good laugh trying to mimic that 'gaat heen,' but we had to acknowledge simultaneously that we were in awe of him. 

Not just because of his formal language and dress, Rob seemed like a character from a different age -- his classroom had the surprisingly bittersweet smell of his pipe --, he was the subject of myths: his son had died tragically (which turned out to be true), he suffered from Leukemia (which turned out to be true), he had studied to be a Jesuit (possible), and he was dating the German teacher, Erika Langbroek (which also turned out to be true). 

I had a very checkered high school career; I should have flunked out at the end of my third and fourth years (ninth and tenth grade). Mevrouw Luger played a big role in bending the rules my way each year. But I always passed my Latin, and to this day, I recognize that I have built a scholarly career on the years Rob put into me. (And I often regretted he was not my Greek teacher.) 

I forget if it was my junior or senior year, but I got wind that Rob was doing a reading group in philosophy with some interested class-mates at his home not far from the school in an apartment on the Beethovenstraat. (At this point he wasn't my teacher anymore, but it was before he moved into a different apartment with Erika also on the Beethovenstraat.) I invited myself along for the wine and the mystique. They were reading Die Kritik der reinen Vernunft (in German). I would like to say it got me excited about philosophy, but I suspect the main effect of the reading group was to make me excessively and irresponsibly fearless in the face of any text. 

Some time after college, I got back in touch with Rob. I suspect in order to brag to him that I had been taking philosophy classes with Dan Dennett (he was underwhelmed) and Martha Nussbaum. Rob, it turned out, was a real fan-boy of Nussbaum who, in graduate school, was one of my supervisors of my qualifying paper on the puppet image in Plato's Laws. Alongside E.B. England's commentary, Rob's wisdom became instrumental in helping me figure out the nuances of Plato's Greek and thought.

But perhaps I had simply bumped into him with Erika at the kleine zaal at Concertgebouw. Even long after he was struck by an increasingly visible Parkinson, he was a transfixed presence in the little balcony. I didn't share his love for nineteenth century Lieder, but we often discovered that we (or, in my case, my mum) had acquired season tickets for the same chamber music series.

We started to see other more frequently during my Summer visits back home while I was in graduate school. I am also unsure of the exact sequence of events that led to our first reading group with Martin Claes, then a Jesuit getting a PhD (now a pastor and a scholar), on Augustine's De Magistro. I  never asked Rob if he identified with Augustine's loss of his son. He never spoke of him to me, but he often expressed pride in his daughter (a lawyer). It was the start of numerous partially overlapping, reading groups with Rob in varying combinations with people from his life -- often people who adored Dante or choir (or both) -- or my own circle of Dutch academics and friends. 

Meanwhile, we started corresponding and as I look through our letters, I see that he never stopped trying to broaden my horizon. His letters reflect his curiosity, even an excessive strain of enthusiasm; he offered a never ending stream of suggested novels or works of scholarship. While in his own work, he had an exacting low tolerance for minute error, in his reading habits he was primarily searching for bold and expansive interpretations. As I advanced in academia he relished keeping me informed of scholarly fashion that had somehow captured the imaginations of the culture and book sections even editorial pages of the Dutch broadsides.

In addition to being a teacher, Rob was a scholar, translator, and poet. His translations of Dante's Divine Comedy, Statius' The Thebaid, Lucan's Bellum Civile, Virgil's Bucolica/The Eclogues combine vast erudition with linguistic and poetic sensitivity. He also translated Epictetus. He would probably be very amused to hear me claim modest credit for triggering his renewed interest into Lucan just as he was completing his stupendous Dante translation. But it's true: while teaching the Treatise in my first seminar at Wesleyan in 2002, I was confused by the way the motto of book 3 of Hume's Treatise had been translated in the then new 'student edition' published by OUP. (The motto is from Lucan.) We started a correspondence about it, and I date to it the start of my interest into Seneca.

When I heard Rob had died, I looked at our correspondence to see when we last had written. I noticed to my horror he had never acknowledged my word that I had dedicated the forthcoming Neglected Classics volume to him. I had not registered this silence at all during the depths of my own illness.

Before I close, I don't want to suggest Rob was an ethereal personality only. He was happy whenever he could talk about Erika or Sabine. And our reading groups were carefully planned around not just his choir practices, but also his cycling holidays.

I also don't mean to suggest he was above name-dropping. Once he asked me slyly if I knew who Henny Vrienten was. They had met swimming their laps in de Zuiderbad. Later Vrienten became involved in the recording of Rob's Dante.

Near the end of De Magistro, Augustine suggests that when we praise a teacher, we're really praising ourselves and this never seems to me more true than in the Academy during the many, lovely ritual practices of acknowledging the roles of supervisors in one's education. Self-praise does not strike me as a sin, but I have to admit that all of these academic practices (fests, collections, memorial conferences, etc.) seem, however sincerely felt and expressed, a bit tainted by the multiplicity of self-advancing roles they play in our prestige hierarchies and zero-sum political economy. (Perhaps this also accounts for the sincerity.)

We encounter our high school teachers through their words, their curriculum, their classroom, and features of their personality as well as the school yards myths about them. The older, and more experienced I get in the classroom, the more it seems to me they -- I mean all true teachers -- use a feature of their personality, perhaps made excessively visible to the student, to find a way to connect with the longings and desires, perhaps vanity even (as Adam Smith claims), of their students, and turn this connection, however tenuous, into the engines of shared enquiry. This also means that not every teacher is the right fit for each student.

The reason why when we praise a teacher, we're really praising ourselves according to the closing lines of De Magistro is that teachers are kind of puppets or actors speaking thoughts of others and that it's the student's reason or intuition that is doing the real work of understanding even if the words of the official teacher trigger or guide such understanding. The Platonic idea with which De Magistro closes, that nobody teaches another anything, has, thus, generated learned philosophical commentary that betrays non-trivial professional anxiety.

Augustine does make an exception to this quite general claim at the start of De Magistro, which I doubt is retracted during the dialogue. He suggests that when we ask questions we're really teaching something about our needs or our plans. The latter includes, of course, the path of inquiry, as Augustine explicitly notes. Rob was magisterial in asking questions that directed our gaze to the inner, guiding light that we need on life's path.

 

 

On Liberal Exemplification: tempered liberalism and the problem of education

Tempered liberals certainly did not present themselves as models to be imitated; this would have been inconsistent with the modesty and self-subverting irony that were important features both of the ethos they advocated and their own ways of being in the world. But they did seek to exemplify a liberal ethos by putting it into practice--in their personal interactions with others, their manner of thinking through problems, and the authorial persona or voice that each cultivated--and by depicting it in earlier thinkers, fictional characters, or political leaders. At their best, they show us, by the force of example, how to cultivate these qualities, and how to urge them gracefully upon others.
The practice of exemplification and emulation is a deeply imperfect response to the liberal problem of character formation. Relying on some to rise to the challenge of exemplariness, and leaving others free to emulate them or not, presupposes that most individuals already have significant ethical resources. This will often not be the case. It may not be possible to have a decent politics without a degree of both personal goodness and political skill that is beyond what most people are mostly able to attain. And the effort to make people better may lead to more suffering and horror. Introspection, self-cultivation, and exemplification--frail reeds though these may be--may also be the best (least bad) means to foster elusive but indispensable virtues. Reflection on exemplars may help to replenish the moral foundations of liberal democracy--habits and ideals of civility, empathy, fortitude, self-restraint, solidarity, circumspection, respect for nuance and for others--by reminding us of why we need them, as well as displaying how admirable they can be.--Joshua Cherniss (2021) Liberalism in Dark Times: The Liberal Ethos in the Twentieth Century, 211

Cherniss's Liberalism in Dark Times is a fascinating book with studies of Max Weber, Raymond Aron, Camus, Niebuhr, and Isaiah Berlin. He treats the latter four as 'tempered liberals." They are treated as admirable exemplars, but by no means not perfect. (210) The main argument of the book is nicely foreshadowed in this passage:

Proponents of “tempered liberalism” accordingly undertook three broad, interlinked tasks. First, they sought to critically reconstruct liberalism--to identify and correct liberalism’s internal weaknesses and failings. Second, they sought to reconceive liberalism as a particular “temper,” a “certain condition . . . of mind or state of being,” rather than (merely) an institutional framework or policy. Finally, they sought (with varying degrees of self-consciousness) not only to explicate, but to exemplify, a liberal spirit, which could belie anti-liberal ethical critiques, and resist the temptations and pathologies of an anti-liberal ethos. (38: emphasis in original)

The passage nicely suggests that a certain kind of ethos is an important feature of being a tempered liberal. My interest in today's post is the nature and status of of liberal exemplification (the third task). In my book on Adam Smith, I had explicitly treated Smith as an exemplar of a certain kind of liberal thinker. I had done so in part, by focusing on the way Smith used Hume's life and thought as a positive and negative exemplar; I had also drawn on resources in Smith that centered on the roles of exemplary characters in his moral psychology and political theory. (These characters are largely abstract fictions.) Smith, in turn, drew on Hume's practice of exemplification and (as I insinuate in the book) Spinoza's (who also uses abstract fictions in this way). Of course, the practice has an important ancient and Machiavellian pedigree.

In both Smith and the tempered liberals, exemplification plays an important role in moral-political education. It's required because these kind of liberals (as well as Smith) highly value contextual judgment. But my approach to exemplification in Smith is different from Cherniss' in some important respects: on my account Smith is a systematic thinker and understands himself as such; exemplification is very much an integral part of this system not a kind of substitute for it as it is, by contrast, in Cherniss and his four tempered liberals. In addition, Smith rejected the kind of modesty Cherniss ascribes to his four tempered liberals, and he seems to advocate emulation of worthy exemplars as models, whereas Cherniss' tempered liberals primarily wish that only a particular kind of ethos is emulated and rejects the idea of a life as a model to be imitated (see the first quoted line above).

There is, thus, an important distinction lurking here between an agent as an exemplary model to be studied and imitated and, say, a style of agency that is exemplified. I will return to that distinction below. But it is important to recognize that on both sides of the distinction there is a commitment to the idea that some things don't fall under a rule or principle, but require the acquisition of certain dispositions and cultivated judgment. (The crispness of this observation I owe to reading David Owen's forthcoming, "On Exemplarity and Public Philosophy.")

But in reading Cherniss I also came to realize I had not really thought through what liberal exemplification might mean. So, what follows is an exploration of Cherniss' account with an eye toward that larger project. As my remark above implies, the status of Weber in Cherniss' argument is a bit ambiguous. Anyone familiar with the depth of Weber's nationalism (and his anti-Polish sentiment) will be hard-pressed to call him a 'tempered liberal.' But he is important to Cherniss to set up the themes of the book. I quote an important passage:

Weber rejected both; this rejection was central to his own revision of liberalism. If liberals sloughed of the elements within liberal thought that reflected an ethic of normative necessity and an ethic of success, they could fortify their commitments and themselves for the hard, uncertain struggle ahead. To look for guarantees reflected inner weakness. Liberals should exemplify, as well as advocate, a dignified and free life, by affirming and defending principles without guarantees, devoting their lives to values that could not be demonstrated as rationally necessary and whose ultimate triumph was in doubt. (67)

It's unclear to me what, according to Cherniss, leads him to think that Weber advocates such exemplification. But it's clear that on Cherniss's account of Weber, exemplification is something that liberals as such should aim for. It's difficult not to think here of, say, puritan (and protestant more widely) ideas about the elect having to live godly lives as individuals and the community. I don't think that association is an accident: in the first half of the twentieth century, as Liberalism seems to be in retreat, the idea that liberalism rests on faith, or requires faith, shows up in other places. I have documented this in the case of Lippmann (here); and it's also visible in the title of Morris R. Cohen's (1946) Faith of a Liberal. (Cohen was then arguably one of the most important philosophers Stateside.)*

Interestingly enough, in the rest of Cherniss' argument, it seems not everyone should aim at such exemplification. Rather this is reserved for liberal intellectuals and public figures (like the four tempered liberals discussed by Cherniss), and, perhaps, also liberal statesmen. On Camus' possible self-understanding as an exemplar see p. 76 (and p. 85). Aron is treated by Cherniss an exemplar (p. 102, and also by Alan Bloom (p. 131)!), but I see no evidence to think Aron thought of himself that way. Cherniss convincingly suggests that Niebuhr did see himself that way (159ff).

That liberal statesman and artists could be exemplars is clearly Berlin's position. Cherniss skillfully takes us through Berlin's portraits of Herzen and Turgenev. Cherniss treatment of Berlin's "accounts of such leaders--Winston Churchill, Chaim Weizmann, and Franklin Roosevelt" is terser and in my view not especially convincing. This is a shame because the question "how political greatness and moral goodness could be balanced, in ways that could serve to sustain a liberal politics" (182) is a vital one. For, I would have liked to have read Cherniss on Berlin's blind-spots (e.g., Churchill's racialized imperialism (which led to a grossly inadequate response to Indian famine) or the fire-bombing of German cities). [To be sure such problems are hinted at by Cherniss because it's acknowledged they were a "morally mixed bunch, as he [Berlin] acknowledged." (pp. 182-3)] Chaim Weizmann as exemplar is even more complex because he was never more important than, say, Ben Gurion. In political terms, much of the last (say) decade of Weizmann's life was a sort of failure. And because of this Weizmann also seems to have been somewhat removed from decisions surrounding Zionist ethnic cleansing during Israel's war of independence.

As a non-trivial aside, in my view Berlin's personal admiration for Weizmann arguably prevented a sober reflection on Weizmann's political life by Berlin. In fact, I read Berlin as treating Weizmann as a model of a new kind of Jew: see his much quoted claim about Weizmann, as the "first totally free Jew of the modern world." But in that same sentence Berlin goes on to claim "the State of Israel was constructed, whether or not it knows it, in his image." And this part of the sentence has aged badly if it ever was plausible.

Now, Cherniss extracts a kind of gross generalization from these portraits by Berlin: "Berlin suggested that the cultivation of political judgment might indeed be connected to the promotion of a more humane politics--and that the dispositions that contributed to failures of political judgment also tended to produce inhumanity." (183) As a generalization it's not very remarkable. But it can only convince, I think, through the sketching of biographies/lives. So, the focus on exemplars allows for a species of political education, especially with those already sharing a certain ethical outlook. This is, in fact, Cherniss own understanding (while drawing on Linda T. Zagzebski and Nancy Rosenblum).

I quote a lengthy passage because I think it helps illustrate what it might mean (for Cherniss) to think of what I called 'a style of agency that is exemplified.'

Pedagogic exemplification involves two elements: exemplification itself, and emulation. The latter consists not of slavish imitation, but a conscious, critical attempt to identify what is admirable and applicable in the exemplar, and to adapt this to the situation and the already-partially-shaped character--of the emulator. Exemplification respects liberty and individuality because the selection of an exemplar reflects the judgment and the needs of the “student,” rather than the exemplar’s will or ability to use force. This means that success is never fully in the hands of the exemplar. As a form of persuasion and guidance, rather than conditioning or compulsion, exemplification relies more on conscious human action--and requires less comprehensive control over background conditions and the experiences of the learner--than a program of habituation. At the same time, since it employs the force of example rather than (or in addition to) purely rational persuasion, it can appeal to the emotions, and promote skills of judgment that are not rule-based. (p. 210)

What's nice about this passage is that helps illustrate what is distinctly liberal about Cherniss' idea of exemplification (although not necessarily unique to liberalism). This is a form of teaching and moral/political education that leaves considerable freedom, individuality, and agency to those of us who wish to become better at being liberal (or liberal intellectuals, citizens, politicians, etc.) It echoes Mill-ean ideas (as well as those we find in Montessori) about education itself being an experiment in living and the cultivation of one's moral sentiments through the development of personality and authenticity.

Of course, the question is how much (to use Cherniss' language) pre-shaping is necessary for this to work as partially intended. That may be an empirical question. But it is also a political one (that is theoretically highly salient since the days of Plato). For example, Mill thought such pre-shaping had to be made compulsory, but was best left to the judgment of parents. Most liberal democracies have thought otherwise. And while this is no criticism of Cherniss' book, it is worth noting that in its very un-systematicity, tempered liberalism as such -- with its neglect of institutions -- has no answer to this question.+ To be continued...

 

 

Long Covid Diaries: On Victim Blaming

This past week, I started two new treatments: on the advice of the UCLH long haul clinic (in London), I started a nightly round of Famotidine. It's mostly used to treat acid indigestion (and related ailments). And when my Dutch pharmacist dispensed to me, she started to explain its use to that end. She was surprised I was prescribed it to treat my long covid. (For my official "covid diaries," see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here;  here; here, here; and here). My Dutch GP, who is kept abreast of my treatment plans at UCLH long haul clinic by me thanks to a wonderful patient centered app the UCLH hospital used, commented that she thought the evidence was rather thin for the effectiveness of Famotidine in long haul. Since I had presumably looked at the very same studies as she had, I had to agree. When the physician at UCLH had suggested Famotidine to me, she said they were doing new trials -- I had been excluded from these because of a too recent booster -- and claimed they were finding that Famotidine was improving cognitive functioning by 20% or so. While a part of me was supremely curious about the measurement of that number, at over fourteen months of illness, I took a modest amount of hope over no hope of improvement. The underlying idea was that my immune system was generating some kind of inflammation.  I wondered whether the anti-histamine of Famotidine might help control the effects of my chronic sinusitis. 

In response to my very kind Dutch GP, I pointed out that the referral she had just written at behest of my occupational physician to start treatment with a 'neuro-psychologist' specializing in long covid, was for a treatment that had no known clinical efficacy for long covid. For, I was under the impression I was being referred for cognitive behavior therapy (CBT). My view was this was unlikely to help my particular symptoms, but I decided it was worth a try since (i) it might benefit me in other ways, and (ii) it was a good idea to be a cooperative patient of my occupational physician (who so far had been a reliable ally). After my intake meeting with the 'neuro-psychologist' a few weeks ago, I was a bit puzzled because she warned me that my treatment might last for one or two years; I always assumed CBT was favored by society because it was relatively brief (and so cheap). But this past week, I realized that CBT would be a minor part of my treatment--one might call it a façade for insurance purposes, but to do so would get someone in trouble. 

The underlying idea of Dutch occupational physicians is that long covid is primarily the effect of a stress system that is out of control. And this, in turn, is an effect of pre-existing conditions or life-style of those hit by long covid. (Since the Dutch university system is chronically underfunded and burn out a systemic problem in it, we should be hit by massive wave of long covid!) So, it's best tackled by a range of low key interventions like teaching patients how to medidate (via an app offered for free by a Dutch medical insurance company) and to re-acclimatize the brain to filtering out various noises. While undoubtedly earnestly felt by those who propagate it -- and a nice cover for complete unwillingness to research long covid by Dutch medical researchers --, it often comes across as victim blaming. (I first learned about it from a fellow long hauler, a high school friend, who is one of the most successful people in the Dutch art scene now, who was not amused.) My neuro-psychologist makes a great show not to blame me -- in fact she repeatedly praises me for life-style changes made during the first year of the pandemic --, but points out my problem is the effect of the accumulated stress of many years showing. I have decided that the best thing about learning mindfulness is to be steeled against this kind of talk, and that after all the British won WWI with a terrible theory of airplane flight (go read David Bloor's classic).

Anyway, my treatment is fairly straightforward: I have to meditate three times a day. One of these times should be after a ten minute period in which I try to work/read with some kind of noise or music in the background. This is to start getting my brain used to filtering out noises. In addition, I am not allowed to wear my noise canceling head-sets while walking about town. (We compromised that before my three remaining lectures I can do it.) I am also trying to reduce cortisol production, so I should avoid exercise that leaves me drained. (Luckily my kind of mellow lap swimming is permitted.) At my own initiative -- surely successful entrepreneurism improves well-being --, I have started to drink black teas, especially Lapsang Souchong, which has the best name and odor in Tea-land. Daily, I thank the heavens that my sense of smell is fine.

In reflecting on existing sources of stress, it occurred to me that that the possibility of an accidental nuclear war and, more prosaically, my uncertainty over my job future might not be trivial. But after meditating on it, I was also reminded of the hard work I had to put in to get some medical reimbursements -- the blood tests I discussed in my last covid diary still hasn't been paid yet --  and to get my university to pay up in various ways. At some point someone in HR decided that given European jurisprudence, the university was required to pay my vacation days in full. (Since I went on partial disability, they had been paying me in pro-rated fashion.) But unaccountably they decided they only had to do so in 2022 and not in 2021. Some correspondence with my chair and various people in HR ensued. I decided to consult my union and read up on the European and Dutch jurisprudence. Somewhat fascinatingly, vacation is treated as a human right in European labor law now, and so employers have to pay out vacation days in full. The union lawyer told me that Dutch jurisprudence had been settled on this quite a while now, and that their practice is to demand full pay-out once an employee can't continue in their job. I wrote a fine letter to HR, and eventually my chair informed that my asking for reasons had apparently caused a change in policy. (I should expect some modest back-pay in a month or two.)

Because I strictly control how many bureaucratic battles I fight per week, I have left the insurance claim for next week. I also have another bone to pick with the university because they refused to commit to paying any balance between what my insurer will cover for the neuro-psychologist and what she will charge. (They cover 100%, but that's 100% of the rate they want to cover.) I was surprised the university was unwilling to do so because the money involved would be modest, and we often pay for all kinds of coaching, mediation, and training (including stress management). And since the neuro-psychologist was prescribed by their own occupational physician, I thought my case would be strong. But I decided to wait with a new letter to HR until it's clear to me how much extra money we're talking about.

That's a let of set-up for the main business of this 'diary.' I have taught ten sessions now of my huge lecture course. I still have trouble falling asleep and sleeping after the lecture, but out of ten sessions, I have had real headaches only four times the next day. Most of the weirdness in my head is gone by the next afternoon. Since all restrictions have been lifted, the auditorium is now filled with students. They kindly wear masks on my behalf on the first three rows, and they send me super sweet messages of encouraged and gratitude. In turn, I adore performing my act for them, and while a part of me is horrified that I have become a figure of entertainment, I soak up the applause after each lecture. I'll be curious to see the evals, but I think it's probably the best cycle of the lecture course I have taught; because I don't try to entertain myself (and so avoid most of the improv shtick that confuses students), I follow the outline of my slides carefully--I have never received so much recurring feedback on how clear I am. If I wrote a private diary, I would have had an entry by now on how I became an analytic philosopher through long covid. Anyway, the good news is I am clearly much better than a few months ago, and I can imagine teaching more even with my current limitations.

I decided to go to London last week-end and visit my family who I had not seen for a month. Nobody had told my teenage son (who is decidedly taller than his mom now and only an inch smaller than I am), and the surprise and joy on his face when I opened the door was followed by a fantastic bear hug. While it was a sweet visit, I  learned that I am still fairly easily drained by non-stop interactions. By 'drained,' I mean I get my characteristic head-fatigue (from the nose up) and the start of a headache. So, I withdrew a few times into the bedroom and simply laid on the bed.  That helped.  At night I slept deeply and calmly alongside my better half.

Yesterday, I started the experiment with ten minutes of concentration alongside background noise. I went to my favorite espresso bar, and decided to read a book outside. Next to me was a guy talking loudly through his earbuds while I was trying to read a paper I was supposed to referee. I have to admit the guy's talk drove me batty. I lasted about eight minutes, and the nausea only dissipated after a half hour amble in the part. Even there the city's noises are never distant. With my noise canceling headsets therapeutically left at home, I already miss the quiet.

Covid Diaries (2022)

I have had an eventful two weeks, and so it's time for another entry covid diary. (For my official "covid diaries," see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; and here). Before I get to the events: the really good news is that my symptoms are under control if and only if I avoid most social contact, avoid contexts with background noise, avoid multi-tasking, go to bed between nine and nine-thirty, and turn off all electronics a half hour before I go to bed. When I don't avoid these I am likely to have what I call head fatigue (which is a leaden feeling from the nose upward). I also spent most of January swimming daily, and during it and the hour after, I would almost feel completely normal.

The bad news is, of course, all this means I lead a very socially isolated existence. I spent too little time with my family. Have stopped hanging with friends, and am excused from work related meetings. For example, one shocking discovery has been that walking together silently is, in fact, also a form of multitasking. As an aside, when you have long covid, minor physical ailments have an outsized impact on well being because they disrupt sleeping patterns and physical exercise. Last Summer, a swimmer's ear threw me back. During the last few weeks, I have struggled with modest but persistent daily pain -- a pinched nerve in my back--  which made it difficult to sit and sleep (luckily I didn't notice it while walking and swimming). Luckily, that's not really bothersome anymore. So much for the status quo before my teaching started (this past Tuesday).

Monday last week I had an appointment at the Long Covid clinic at UCLH. My physician was new to me and a lung specialist. Despite a long delay and lunch time, she took her time to check my past case history with me and to hear about how things were going. She was the first physician I have spoken to who said that my particular symptoms are not unusual. One of her patients, a young mom, is even more noise sensitive than I am and basically can only see her baby a few minutes a day. My physician insisted I should remain hopeful despite the fact that I don't belong to the group of patients that recover after three and nine months. As long as I keep improving, a full recovery is likely in her experience. 

Because of my booster shot, I was not enrolled in various trials they are running. But they are running a trial with Famoridine (an anti-histamine medicine), which has shown improvement in patients that are struggling with cognitive symptoms during long covid. And suggested I try it, too. (I return to that below.) Because there have been quite a few stories about blood-clotting, she also suggested a much wider range of blood tests than ever before.

I walked over to the blood-testing site down the hall. It was a total zoo: people yelling and cheating. There was a number system to queue, but people also could be slotted in with pre-existing appoints. After 45 minutes, I realized that at the rate they were going it would last a couple of hours before it was my turn, and the fighting and anger was not being blocked out with my noise-canceling headphones. I knew I could safely leave the queue to get lunch, but I really didn't want to return to this wild menagerie. Corona lockdowns have really changed national character because I have never seen a queue behavior like this in England. Some asking around landed me with a kind receptionist, and I booked an appointment at the blood bank first thing next morning. The next day, the nurse told me that this kind of behavior is now a daily occurrence at any time of the day. And I suspect that before long the queues will be even longer because of an absence of workers who will put up with this crap. (She also told me that my absence had been noted the day before because apparently some of my blood had been marked for research which surprised me.)

Later that day I went to my GP because I suddenly realized that there was a risk my Famoridine would not be filled before I would leave town. I spent a few days trying to charm the office managers of the practice, and trying to contact a person at UCLH. But eventually I got a text massage from one of the GPs (unknown to me) that if the hospital had wanted me to start the meds at once, they would have given me a script. Now I had to wait for their letter to the GP, and then the GP could write me a prescription. I learned this way, that in the NHS it matters quite a bit which budget pays for your medicine (and hospitals have little budge for non-urgent patient care meds). Lesson learned for next time.

The previous paragraph understates, of course, the powerlessness and energy consuming effort to get care. When I first got covid, when I was in London, I joined my family's GP practice. My London GP had then just (partially) recovered from her long haul. And she was empathic and pro-active. She left -- very clearly annoyed at how her peers had treated her -- and now I am a number in the (very large) GP practice. That same week I was in the practice with my son, and I was on my best behavior to see him get excellent care. 

Because of the hip problems, I didn't feel especially well rested on Tuesday ahead of my lecture first class. (There were also other sources of anxiety unrelated to me that I am skipping.) It's a required, first year, undergraduate-lecture-course with 640 students. Under our corona rules, we're teaching in hybrid format. Class numbers are capped at 75 with a sign in system. When I went to the service desk I was told the hand-held microphone was broken. I felt my heart sink, and I nudged the desk agent to call our service team to try to fix it anyway. When I went to the auditorium, the previous lecturer was running over time. I decided to stand quietly back in the room, but making sure I was in his line of vision. I couldn't believe it that he decided to tag on another ten minutes leaving my crew very little to get me all set up. (We record lectures which is distinct system from the zoom link up we use to broadcast the lectures live.) I had to control my nerves not to give him an earful.

Once the auditorium starts filling up, I immediately realized there were a lot more than 75 students. Tim (who runs our canvas pages in the department) counted 150. I decided I didn't have the energy to try to throw half out. But I did aggressively police masking in the front rows (and banning food or drink for them). Most students were excellent about this, and the ones who protested I offered a spot in the balcony. I told the students about my long haul and warned them  that I might struggle with Q&As, and probably the quality of my jokes would suffer.

Much to my amazement the sound technician showed up as I was introducing my TAs, Wais and Tomás, and Tim, and he fixed the hand-held microphones. So, while I started the lecture ten minutes late, this was a great energy boost. The next ninety minutes were a gigantic adrenaline rush. I even fielded questions during break and after. (About which below.) While I talked slower than I ordinarily would -- I had to cut a few slides near the end --, I thought it went well. I received a resounding applause, and while I usually make fun of that, this time I soaked it up. I had to apologize to the lecturer after me, explaining that I had a late start due to our colleague before me.

As a rule I don't share student stories. But the encounter with one of them after class was so memorable I'll repeat a stylized version of it to protect the identities involved. An excited student who shows up with an entourage tells me it was great, but would like to share a reservation about the syllabus. I say, 'please I welcome suggestions.' It becomes clear the student objects to me putting The Communist Manifesto on the syllabus. I say (a bit worried about where this is heading), 'why is that?' The student explains it will give the other students 'the wrong idea about Marx; it's not theoretical enough. It's too popular.' We go back and forth a bit about different genres. Eventually I ask, 'what would you suggest? Excerpts from the Grundrisse?'

'That would be good or Engels' Dialectics of Nature,' the student responds (and saying the title in English) before explaining to me how important Engels is. I ask the student if s/he read Engels in English, which elicits an apologetic affirmative answer. As I start to feel the exhaustion of the day flowing into me, I say 'look if I were to teach the Grundrisse or the Dialectics of Nature, I would have to teach Hegel first, no?' The student agrees, and castigates me for not having Hegel on the syllabus:)

 

I walked home through town, and with a delicious lentil soup I savor the day on the side of a canal. It takes me a few hours to fall asleep. I know I am apprehensive about how I would feel the next day. I am disappointed when I wake up with a headache around five thirty. And I know I won't be able to fall back a sleep. The headache stays with me for most of the day, but it's not as bad as last Fall. There is no nausea or dizziness. I chill doing nothing. During the afternoon I have to go to the hospital to pick up some sleep testing gear. I walk back through the drizzle along a largely unused canal (Noordhollandsch Kanaal), which nowadays turns out to provide cooling for the hospital.  I realize that I am getting blister on one of my toes. Before taking the ferry back into city (see picture below) I break my low carb diet and treat myself to divine French fries with mayo and curry. 

 

The testing gear is too advanced for me, and after futzing around with them fruitlessly I decide to go to bed without them. I sleep better than the night before, but not great; I wake up fatigued but without a headache. I return to the hospital  next morning, and am informed I am not alone in struggling with the stuff. (Later that day, I learned that the test failed unsurprisingly; I will have to return for more invasive set up that they will apply in the hospital.) 

 

By the time I am back at the university, I wonder if I'll be able to complete the lecture. And whether they have to share tapes of me again later in the semester while I am sick in bed. In my vulnerability I  decide to put on a tie (which I always have available in case I have to show up in academic robes for a thesis defense in my office).  As I walk into the auditorium, the previous lecturer (a different one from the dude that annoyed me in Tuesday) is wrapping up.

 

This time there are even more students in the hall. I am a bit more ambivalent about this lecture. The student questions were phenomenal -- always a great sign --, but the ending is a bit messy. I have to skip a few slides on material I think important, and I notice no applause.  As I walk home, and I notice that the weather suddenly has improved. It's warmer and I exhale. I take pictures and grab my lentil soup. I still have trouble falling asleep. I wake up around 4am. I know a headache is lurking, but I fall back asleep. When I awake it's after 7 and I have have slept almost nine hours. I wouldn't call myself well rested -- I'll chill today --, but there is no headache. And while I will be very cautious the next few weeks, for the first time I think I may get some of my life back.

 

On Pynchon on 1984

By the time they have left the Ministry of Love, Winston and Julia have entered permanently the condition of doublethink, the anterooms of annihilation, no longer in love but able to hate and love Big Brother at the same time. It is as dark an ending as can be imagined. But strangely, it is not quite the end. We turn the page to find appended what seems to be some kind of critical essay, "The Principles of Newspeak". We remember that at the beginning, we were given the option, by way of a footnote, to turn to the back of the book and read it. Some readers do this, and some don't - we might see it nowadays as an early example of hypertext. Back in 1948, this final section apparently bothered the American Book-of-the-Month Club enough for them to demand that it be cut, along with the chapters quoted from Emmanuel Goldstein's book, as a condition of acceptance by the club. Though he stood to lose at least £40,000 in American sales, Orwell refused to make the changes, telling his agent, "A book is built up as a balanced structure and one cannot simply remove large chunks here and there unless one is ready to recast the whole thing . . . I really cannot allow my work to be mucked about beyond a
certain point, and I doubt whether it even pays in the long run." Three weeks later the BOMC relented, but the question remains, why end a novel as passionate, violent and dark as this one with what appears to be a scholarly appendix?
The answer may lie in simple grammar. From its first sentence, "The Principles of Newspeak" is written consistently in the past tense, as if to suggest some later piece of history, post- 1984 , in which Newspeak has become literally a thing of the past - as if in some way the anonymous author of this piece is by now free to discuss, critically and objectively, the political system of which Newspeak was, in its time, the essence. Moreover, it is our own pre-Newspeak English language that is being used to write the essay. Newspeak was supposed to have become general by 2050, and yet it appears that it did not last that long, let alone triumph, that the ancient humanistic ways of thinking inherent in standard English have persisted, survived, and ultimately prevailed, and that perhaps the social and moral order it speaks for has even, somehow, been restored.--Thomas Pynchon (2003) "Introduction" Nineteen Eighty-Four By George Orwell [HT: Victor Gijsbers]

We know that Pynchon is not the only major novelist that grappled with Orwell's Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four; at the end The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood, who according to her own testimony about 1984, "read it again and again," pays homage to it in the "Historical Notes" themselves "Being a partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, held as part of the International Historical Association Convention held at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on June 25, 2195." In presenting these historical notes, Atwood, reassures the reader, who may have no taste for (recall) Socratic metaphysics --  "for everything that has come into being destruction is appointed, not even such a fabric as this will abide for all time, but it shall surely be dissolved" (Plato, Republic, 546a)" -- that the "Gilead period," too, will come to an end in some sense. 

Pynchon, who is not exactly known for his optimism, is right to pay attention to the Appendix to 1984, but I am not entirely sure that his hesitant ("perhaps") optimism about what the Appendix signals can withstand scrutiny. His interpretation assumes, first, that the (let's call it) authorial stance of the Appendix has to be taken at face value. That's decidedly odd because 1984 represents us with a world in which just about every text is a forgery of some sorts. (While it would be a mistake to treat them alike, Orwell and Borges were contemporaries, after all.) In fact, much of the action of 1984 consists in the production of forgeries (not just of texts of memories). The production of newspapers by the Ministry of Truth and the torture chambers of Ministry of love have this in common. So, why would the Appendix be any different?

As an aside, the apparent function of the forgeries in Oceania appear to be to produce a totalizing infallibility about everything, not the least the past, of the Party. (No Pope would dream of this!) And what it illustrates is that even if one were to grant (for the sake of amusement) the linguistic idealist, that all is text, what one may call the production values that inform or are exhibited by the production of texts make a huge difference. Linguistic idealism comes in many varieties. If one treats this focus on 'values' as bourgeois, feel free to replace 'production values' with 'means of production' in the previous sentence. In so far as Orwell is a true socialist (and an author), this attention to the conditions of textual production need not surprise. 

But let's stipulate that we need to take the Appendix at face value. You may say, 'What else can we do, after all?' It's true, as Pynchon emphasizes, that the Appendix treats Newspeak as a thing of the past. Given that Pynchon explicitly understands Newspeak as the essence of Oceania, and in his argument tacitly relies on the metaphysical principle, I'll paraphrase Spinoza (E2D2), that when its essence is taken away the entity ceases to be, Pynchon infers from the demise of Newspeak quite reasonably that Oceania must have ended.

Before I get to the merits of Pynchon's argument, a reader may suspect that I will object to Pynchon's metaphysics as an imposition on the world of 1984. Of course, I am assuming you are not the kind of reader who may find my parading of metaphysical jargon quite pedantic. Even so it's worth noting that the core torture scenes in Part III of 1984, emphasize that metaphysics is salient. The torturer, O'Brien, repeatedly, in fact, reminds his victim, Winston Smith, that metaphysics is not his "strong point." So I am not going to object to the form of Pynchon's argument.*

Newspeak is what the philosophers call a final language. In the text -- I have in mind both 1984 and its Appendix -- this is marked by the contrast between the provisional versions (as, I now quote the Appendix, "embodied in the Ninth and Tenth editions of the Newspeak Dictionary") -- and its definitive form "embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary."  As we learn from the Appendix and, earlier in the novel, from Syme, who, before he is presumably vaporized, is one of the developers of Newspeak, Newspeak is supposed to be an austere language: its vocabulary culled down, and, through some semantic tools the expressive power of particular words is greatly enhanced, the language's expressive power is curtailed. It's a final language designed to be spoken and used by the Party.**

Now, Syme indeed suggests that the "Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak." The narrator of 1984 adds that this is expressed with "a sort of mystical satisfaction." And indeed this idea, the perfection of language, is characteristic of what we may call Enlightenment mysticism (and satirized by Swift). Pynchon's interpretation of 1984 is rooted in Syme's understanding of Newspeak.

The Appendix, which follows Syme's interpretation of Newspeak sometimes literally, omits this mystical claim. I'll quote the Appendix (and then suggest an alternative to Pynchon's interpretation):

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought--that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc--should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever.

Unlike Syme, the Appendix places greatest emphasis on the fact that the purpose of Newspeak was to make what in 1984 is called 'Thoughtcrime' impossible. Even a Quine-ean couldn't be heretical through indirect methods in Newspeak. We might say, then, that it is regimentation that is the fundamental function of Newspeak as a final language.

Interestingly enough, this is an aside, the author of the Appendix recognizes that once Newspeak is perfected, it would make translation of books and even complex fragments from older languages into Newspeak in a certain way impossible unless they either referred "to some technical processor some very simple everyday actions." (The Appendix offers the Declaration of Independence as an example of how "impossible" would be to render it into Newspeak.) One wishes (recall) our advocates of formal languages would keep this in mind.

Be that as it may, a more natural interpretation of the demise of Newspeak presents itself now.  For, from the point of view of the Party, the elimination of even possible Thoughtcrime would be self-defeating. For Thoughtcrime grounds the repressive apparatus of the Party. The possibility of Thoughtcrimes are -- as much as the conditions of permanent War -- central to the structure of self-discipline of the Party. The elimination of Thoughtcrime as a category would spell doom to the survival of the Party because it would lose its main means of self-control as a ruling, corporate spirit. It would then have to start codifying laws of some sort and bureaucratize, formalize these. This was not a problem in the world of 1984 because the perfection of Newspeak had been projected, as the Appendix notes in its closing sentence, into a more distant future (2050).

So, a more natural political possibility is that the Party abandoned the project of Newspeak because it saw that its perfection would be self-undermining and incompatible with the ideological needs of Ingsoc in power.*** (By contrast, a socialist language planner like Carnap recognizes that Esperanto, for example, is great for a world of public Enlightenment.) And the Appendix reflects the writings of someone who is intimately familiar with the abandonment of Newspeak (not the demise of Oceania).  Admittedly, there are some passages in the Appendix that exhibit a rather free-thinking attitude: the use of the Declaration of Independence as an example, in particular, is rather cheeky. And it forms the best evidence for Pynchon's interpretation. But the more literal reading of the Appendix understands it as a fragment from a reconstruction of the rise and fall of Newspeak as a social enterprise. That is compatible with the survival of Oceania once the Party realized that the mystical attitude toward Newspeak threatened to make it the essence of Oceania.+

 

 

On Being Praised by Students, (Seneca Letter 52)

How mad (dementia) is he who leaves the lecture-hall smiling simply because of the clamor from the ignorant (clamores imperitorum)!--Seneca, Letter 52. Translated by Richard M. Gummere (with modest modifications) 

In Letter 52, (by appropriating some remarks of Epicurus,) Seneca describes four kinds of students of philosophy. The first are autodidacts, they find their "way to the truth without any one's assistance, carving out their own path [via]." Socrates, Al-Farabi, and Ibn Rushd are fairly explicit this describes (true) philosophers.

The second kind are a species of heterodidacts -- a term I borrow from a moving and subtle essay by Agnes Callard --; these need the gentle guidance of a teacher. But once they have right direction, they follow willingly. Of course, (recall, say, Letter 30) in Seneca, such a guide/teacher is simultaneously an exemplar, something he emphasizes throughout the letter. Seneca hints that he aspires to be though as a member of the second class. (I return to this below.) 

The third kind is also a heterodidact, but this kind needs what we might call tough love or "who can be forced and driven into the right path," (qui cogi ad rectum compellique possunt). Interestingly, Seneca stress the point by using 'coactore,' that is, one who compels often a tax-inspector. So, the teacher is here compared to someone who extracts wealth and indirectly returns something greater (the proper path, truth) to the unwilling student. 

The opening of Seneca's 52nd letter suggest that most of us need such tough love because we tend to be very inconstant (Fluctuamur inter varia consilia; nihil libere volumus, nihil absolute, nihil semper.) And, in fact, we are extricated from our inconstancy by education (and Seneca plays on the idea that extraction, elevation, and education share a similar root in Latin).

And, to echo Socrates, where is the fourth? Seneca implies some students confuse their desire for entertainment with the path to wisdom. And among these many wish to be flattered. And, in turn, the students flatter their teacher by their adulation. It's tempting to recognize in Seneca's remarks Socrates criticism of Agathon and Aristophanes, and the more general problem of demagoguery. And on some days this would be the moment to discuss the insidious ways Deans and program coordinators incentivize the fourth kind of student in the way they frame, word, and use student evaluations and promote valorisation or public facing activity by their faculty. The fourth kind of students may be credentialed, but are intrinsically non-didacts. 

Now, being a good gentle teacher (of the second kind of student), that is being at ease with one's vulnerability, is no easy matter. But as Seneca hints, helping the third kind of students overcome their own weaknesses and extract wisdom (ad sapientiam se non perduxit sed extraxit) is much more difficult for these students (and by implication for the teachers).

There is an interesting question, left hanging, if the same instructor can teach the second kind and third kind of teacher at the same time. To return to Callard's essay, which is excellent on the interactive nature of true teaching, it would like speaking to two kinds of souls at once with divergent effects and, in turn, receiving their feedback in one's own teaching (and instruction). 

I was led to the thought in the previous paragraph when I reflected on Seneca's suggestion he might be counted among the second kind of student. At first, I thought he was engaged in a false modesty -- 'don't confuse me with the natural or self-actuating wise' --, but then I wondered if the same sentence couldn't be read as flattery of Lucilius (who, we have learned, often needs tough love (recall Letter 49 and no small amount of flattery). It's not impossible that the four kinds of students are ideal types, and that in reality we often exhibit features of each (or most).

One reason why I thought Seneca might be engaged in false modesty here is that while he warmly recommends reading and studying the "ancients" as friends in our heterodidactic journey, fundamentally for him we must choose our teachers among the living. Now this might be due to the fact for Seneca true teaching is being the right sort of lodestar or exemplar in integrity and heterodidacting (those "who teach us by their lives...who tell us what we ought to do and then prove it by practice, who show us what we should avoid, and then are never caught doing that which they have ordered us to avoid.") And so certain kind of book-learning is out. But it also conveniently eliminates other options, except those few at hand.

In this context Fabianus Seneca mentions as a proper exemplar in living memory. Fabianus seems to have courted, and more importantly cultivated, a proper philosophical audience, namely one capable of and becoming capable of self-control (modeste). (Seneca implies young men are least capable of this.) But, as is clear from Seneca's description, Fabianus' audience members were not merely passive receptacles, but (as in Callard's descriptions) active co-constituters of joint learning.

When I read Seneca's letters my thoughts often wander off to my own teaching. And I was about to write something here about my apprehension about returning to the classroom after my long, covid-induced absence (and the relative lack of safety precautions by my employer) and to what degree I would be able to guide anyone at all, when it occurred to me that I was ignoring the surface fact that the conceit of the Letters is that these are (well) letters. And so that in some sense they are intrinsically a contribution to a kind of heterodidact teaching in which the interaction of the teacher and student is both partially imagined and intrinsically delayed--a bit like a very bad Zoom connection.

And, of course, in so far as Seneca's Letters are meant to be read by unknown students and even, as he himself often suggests, by those of us in posteriority (recall, say, Letter 21), the work of imagination (by the implied author/teacher and implied student/reader) and delay is only made harder. And, of course, the real author does not really allow his readers to judge independently from his self-presentation the character of the implied author.

My interest here is not in Seneca's purported hypocrisy (a favorite evergreen in folks writing about Seneca). But rather that like a painter he projects a whole complex universe of true education and teaching onto his letters and so simultaneously flattens the dimensionality of that world into one we can write and discuss. And he is so good at presenting this flattening of this interaction between student and teachers onto the written surface, that we easily forget (qua reader) that his (imagined) projection is, in fact, not alike to our own engagement with his work. And not for the first time, I realize that when Seneca describes the true nature of the skill involved in education he is simultaneously engaged, behind the scenes as it were, in a kind of enchanting artifice. And he leaves it to use decide whether such magic is an essential ingredient of true teaching, or its negation.  

On the Crisis of Liberalism (VIII): Do We Stand for Civic Republicanism?

So what, exactly, are we seeking to defend? What is the character of a liberal democracy? What does it mean for a society to be liberal, rather than for a person to subscribe to liberal principles, such as the ones Paul laid out almost four years ago?

To answer this question I will discuss five broad topics that make up the core of liberal democracy: liberty, democracy, rule of law, capability, and virtue. Liberty is often called “negative liberty” to emphasize that it is freedom from interference, but I think it is most usefully thought of as the specific freedoms—such as freedom of association, freedom of speech, and property rights—which give a liberal order its dynamism. Democracy under liberalism consists of using electoral systems and mass voting as tools for accountability rather than direct governance. Rule of law is a complicated topic but in practice often boils down to the existence, for ordinary citizens, of legal remedies and actions which will by and large be honored, especially by actors in the government. Finally, a liberal society—an actual liberal democracy in which voter sovereignty is given pride of place alongside other liberal characteristics—cannot survive unless liberal values are broadly held by the electorate. The tendency to live by these values on a relatively consistent basis entails what some have referred to as “liberal virtues.”--Adam Gurri "What is Liberal Democracy?" Liberal Currents

This is the eight post (recall here (I);  here (II); here (III); here (IV); here (V); here (VI); here (VII) in an open-ended series (see also here, here, here,  here; and here) on the current crisis of liberalism (which I date to 2008/9).

One of the few glimmers of hope during the current crisis of liberalism, is that since the rise of Trump, to simplify greatly (spare me your outrage), property-loving classical liberals and  justice/redistribution-loving centrist (say, Rawlsian) liberals have rediscovered that liberalism is a lot more than meets the eye. And for a few years now, Liberal Currents has been leading the way in bringing youthful talent together to think through what liberalism might mean concretely, as worth living, into the future. (Let's hope that they fly a few years under the radar of The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine as the next big thing; we need their insouciance to cashing in for a while longer!) 

Gurri is the 'Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Liberal Currents,' and it says something of the experimental and open spirit that after four years he revisits the principles he wishes to stand for. The first few paragraphs of the piece I quoted deserve your attention, even if you have no time for what follows (so go read it). As friend of Liberal Currents, I hope I am allowed to say, 'we wouldn't be liberals if we didn't disagree over the exact meaning of liberalism'. So, today, I would like to say something about the nature of liberal society, and the values or, in Gurri's  terms, virtues in it. 

In addition to the passage quoted above, there is another paragraph  (that partially repeats the one I quoted) that I disagree with:

A liberal state staffed by people uncommitted to liberalism or to the institutions they serve will not remain a liberal state for long. And a liberal democracy in which liberal values are not broadly shared by the electorate is unlikely to remain a liberal democracy for long, nor to retain its democracy much longer than that.

So, versions of Gurri's position are extremely popular in Europe among well meaning friends of liberal democracy. It is also popular among not-so-well-meaning islamo-phobes and xenophobes. And often it is not entirely easy to distinguish the two. But the position is associated with what is called 'civic republicanism,' or (in debates over immigration/refugees) ‘civic integrationist discourse’* and so-called 'homo-nationalism'. (Gurri's position need not reduce to any of these.) Unfortunately, civic republicanism promotes, in practice, conformity and becomes a stick to make the vulnerable and inarticulate play by the rules of intolerant majorities.

Notice, too, that Gurri's position is much stronger than the Rawlsian overlapping consensus of political liberalism (and public reason), which is, at least in principle, compatible with many citizens holding many private illiberal positions.

My  view is that there is little empirical evidence for the two empirical presuppositions Gurri relies on, viz. (i) a liberal society (or, while not the same thing, liberal democracy) cannot survive unless liberal values are broadly held by the electorate; (ii) A liberal state staffed by people uncommitted to liberalism or to the institutions they serve will not remain a liberal state for long. (I call this the 'Athenian insight' -- not because Athens was liberal, it was not --, but because it trusted its citizens with education in right norms/values/virtues.) While I welcome the existence of widespread support for liberal values and virtues (broadly conceived), there is non-trivial historical experience against both. For example, in the early years of the German federal republic, there was little fondness for liberal democracy among the population, and, while there were a few ORDO, Christian Democratic and Social democratic anti-Nazis, the state was staffed by a generation of (largely unrepentant) ex-Nazi functionaries (see chapter 5 of The Denazification of Germany: A History 1945-1950).

Of the two, there is a grain of (conceptual) truth in (ii). For, on (ii) what BLM has revealed is that the liberal state, even in its core judicial/political function, is staffed by quite a few functionaries who are uncommitted to liberalism (even if we have just learned that federal judges are committed to legal principles and, perhaps, defending elections as a means of picking rulers). That's compatible with designing institutions in such a way that what these functionaries are committed to serves to protect lots of other things we care about in liberal society (property, adhering to traffic rules, etc.).+ Even in bread and butter liberal democracies a sizeable chunk of the electorate is attracted to authoritarian political practices. I first learned this from David Art's Radical Right: The Development of Anti-Immigrant Parties in Western Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2011), but I now work in a department where my comparative colleagues are world experts on this.** 

But leaving aside the empirical facts of the matter. I also think -- and this has a Mill-ian sensibility (J.S. Mill not the father), but I get it from Walter Lippmann -- the survival of a non-totalizing liberalism requires the regular confrontation with robust and thoughtful illiberal values and views within our political system, that is, in which illiberal parties and commitments/ideologies/forms of life are present to maintain, even enervate liberalism’s own vitality as a living creed and, thereby, the vitality of the whole political system. So, on my view of Lippmann (see here), in near defeat (ca 1938), liberalism simultaneously comes to endorse its own fundamental commitments and a commitment to a kind of unreasonable pluralism. 

For, the recurring challenge of both liberal emancipatory mass movements (some of which are not initially understood as liberal at all) and illiberal experiments, practices, and ideologies that helps us epistemically and politically, to figure out what we stand for, what we care about, what constitutively 'we' are (as society, polity, etc.). And this means that an open society will have to accommodate (as Kukathas has argued in Liberal Archipelago) many illiberal voluntary associations (and even parties).  

Obviously, Gurri and others are right that there is a tipping point beyond which the absence of commitment to liberalism among citizens and/or staffers makes it very vulnerable to putsches, usurpation, demagogues, and revolution (etc.). But where that point is is hard to foresee, and involves complex coordination, mobilization, and signaling among citizens. And I also do not deny that two-party duopolies (as the US is) become dangerously unstable if (a strategically important element of) one party rejects fundamentally or gradually the liberal experiment.

I do not deny (recall this post on Popper) that Liberalism, more than most other political ideologies, internalizes the idea that there are considerable uncertainties it ought not wish to eliminate. And, perhaps, we need providential hope that our liberal faith, which has been tested again this week (and may be tested the next few weeks again), will never be extinguished. But even amidst despair, we can strive while our enemies are emboldened to postpone and push back our possible defeat.

 

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. 

 

On the Compression of the Past and The Distracted Student (Seneca Letter 49)

It was but a moment ago that I sat, as a lad, in the school of the philosopher Sotion, but a moment ago that I began to plead in the courts, but a moment ago that I lost the desire to plead, but a moment ago that I lost the ability. Infinitely swift is the flight of time, as those see more clearly who are looking backwards. For when we are intent on the present, we do not notice it, so gentle is the passage of time's headlong flight. 3. Do you ask the reason for this? All past time is in the same place; it all presents the same aspect to us, it lies together. Everything slips into the same abyss. Besides, an event which in its entirety is of brief compass cannot contain long intervals. The time which we spend in living is but a point, nay, even less than a point. But this point of time, infinitesimal as it is, nature has mocked by making it seem outwardly of longer duration; she has taken one portion thereof and made it infancy, another childhood, another youth, another the gradual slope, so to speak, from youth to old age, and old age itself is still another. How many steps for how short a climb! 4. It was but a moment ago that I saw you off on your journey; and yet this "moment ago" makes up a goodly share of our existence, which is so brief, we should reflect, that it will soon come to an end altogether. In other years time did not seem to me to go so swiftly; now, it seems fast beyond belief, perhaps, because I feel that the finish-line is moving closer to me, or it may be that I have begun to take heed and reckon up my losses.--Seneca, Letter 49, Translated by Richard Mott Gummere (with minor corrections).

This may the first letter in which Seneca suggests the possibility of learning from students. And in his frustration he reminds us who share in this vocation, of the moments of frustration when there is no teaching by student, or teacher. Seneca leaves no doubt that at times it is the student's misdirected gaze that is to blame for such failures. 

Seneca's angry, even vain response is comic from one perspective: he blames the student for his bad interests, berates Lucilius for his impoverished intellectual tastes. Has Seneca forgotten that it is our job to cultivate these? 

But I don't laugh because I recognize the frustration. The indifferent or bored student is a minor wound compared to the cuts we feel when we encounter the enthusiastic blathering of the talented but misguided ones. These shortchange both of us. 

Suddenly, I remember my moments of weakness: the reading group with my PhD students that I stormed out of; my inability to disguise my impatience for another student's infatuation with digital payments. A whole litany of teaching fails appear fresh in my mind elbowing each other aside, crowding in on my awareness. Compressing my life into a flat dimension of inarticulate powerlessness. 

Initially, I couldn't write about this long-winded letter with its military tropes; its unapologetic reminder that slaves are mere instruments to the owning class; and Seneca's by now all too familiar diatribes against certain topics of study. Seneca's gift for subtle succinctness has deserted him.

One need not be psycho-analytic that inarticulate powerlessness is the condition of the infant-child. The teacher regresses. On re-reading Seneca's letter, I discern it is more artful than I realized, because the infant-child is not just powerless, "At our birth nature made us teachable;" we start out imperfect, but perfectable [Dociles natura nos edidit, et rationem dedit imperfectam, sed quae perfici posset.] 

I recognize that I could only start to write about this letter once I related to it. I dislike myself for this; my scholarly pride likes to think I can write about the unrelatable, too.

There is a moment in childhood when one forgets all the early memories, where the past isn't just flattened but effaced. I wonder if that is a condition of our teachability.

Now, that I am reaching an age where the compression of the past is a familiar fact of life, I also notice that in being past not all moments respect the homogeneity of time. Some stand out like the itchy skin after mosquito bites; I return to them often unbeknownst to me until I recognize i am dwelling on them.

I look at the abstract list of topics Seneca demands his digressing (devia) student to argue (disputa) with him about: "justice, piety, thrift, and that twofold purity, both the purity which abstains from another's person, and that which takes care of one's own self" [de pudicitia utraque, et illa cui alieni corporis abstinentia est, et hac cui sui cura.] Seneca can be a bore.

And just as I wish to be mesmerized by the metaphysical puzzle of the inequity in time's experience, I linger on that two-fold purity. Pudicitia can also be translated as modesty or chastity; both would have sound off. Even so, pudicitia's roots are in shame or being shamed (pudet). 

There is a form of shame, a sense of shame, that can if it is treated tenderly lead to abstaining from violating others and, to use modern jargon, self-care. I wonder why I was incapable of learning this before.