Digressions&Impressions

On How to Teach Old Books, Burnyeat vs Strauss, Part II

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As I noted yesterday, in his famous polemical 1986 NRYB essay, Burnyeat treats Leo Strauss as a charismatic (he uses "inspiring") teacher, who founded a school. He quotes Coser to emphasize the point that Strauss "alone among eminent refugee intellectuals succeeded in attracting a brilliant galaxy of disciples who created an academic cult around his teaching." But Burnyeat notes that inspiration is not sufficient to explain the nature of the school and he implies that there is something about the manner of teaching texts that can help explain not just the devotion of Strauss' students to their teacher, but also to the influence these have on their students (and indirectly on policy).  

This is worth reflecting on because even within analytic philosophy we are not immune to the charms (and vices) of school formation (I could list half a dozen in the Harvard, Pitt, Chicago triangle). Here, I focus on the teaching of (historically and culturally distant) texts. So I am leaving aside the teaching of methods and arguments, although in practice all these can blend into each other.

Burnyeat structures his critique of Strauss' teaching by way of a sharp contrast, which I treat as kind of ideal types in what follows. I have taken courses with Burnyeat (who was a spectacularly exciting seminar leader) and some of Strauss' inspiring students, and their ways of proceeding is, in practice, not so different as the ideal types suggest. 

First, let's look at how Burnyeat describes the method of teaching he favors (we will call it 'analytic pedagogy'). He writes:

When other teachers invite their students to explore the origins of modern thought, they encourage criticism as the road to active understanding. Understanding grows through a dialectical interaction between the students and the author they are studying.

Anyone that comes to analytic (history of) philosophy from other (more philological or historicizing) approaches will recognize what Burnyeat is gesturing at. There is a refreshing -- a term I often hear in this context -- lack of distance between student and text, and the students are encouraged not to treat the assigned material as eternal truths or authoritative, but as material to cut their teeth on in analytic pedagogy. Of course, Burnyeat himself is committed to the pedagogical thesis that we learn by way of criticizing what we're reading and discussing in class. And once this is properly structured -- notice the interaction between students and author is implied to go both ways, and so is dialectical -- this is supposed to produce understanding, although it is not entirely clear what the understanding is understanding of (the ancient texts, of the origin of modern thought, of the distance between us and the old texts?).

One way to think about analytic pedagogy is that philosophy students will seek out the arguments they can recognize in the text, and, if necessary, reconstruct them by looking for premises in the text. Often there are suppressed premises that will make an argument valid and these can be found elsewhere in a text. One can then explore to what degree the argument is sound and this may lead to lovely exploration for the reasons behind the premises and to what degree these stand up to scrutiny in light of an author's other comments. Even when Burnyeat's approach encourages what we might sometimes call an uncharitable attitude of 'fault-finding in a text,' with a skilled instructor and inquisitive students initial (and anachronistic) criticism need not be the end of the matter. 

Before I move on it is worth noting that Burnyeat frames his way of presenting his favored approach in terms of exploring 'the origins of modern thought.' At first sight, this is a peculiar move by Burnyeat, especially in the context of his polemic with Strauss. Let me make two observations, first, I find it peculiar he claims it because there is no reason to believe that the understanding that is yielded by the method Burnyeat defends should or would lead to better genetic understanding of modern thought. I am not claiming this method would hinder one from doing so (although I suspect it), but the dialectic Burnyeat describes doesn't get you there through engagement with texts unless the instructor has deliberately shaped the syllabus to do so (often by inscribing the syllabus in a narrative of progress or unfolding). Oddly enough, what may feel as independent criticism by the student is really, then, a carefully orchestrated (and predictable) march through history. This can still be riveting to the novice, but otherwise best not repeated.

Second, in the context with the polemic with Strauss, Burnyeat's phrasing is rather revealing (and so structures this post). Because Burnyeat explicitly presupposes that it is understanding modern thought that is the telos of pedagogy. Given the details of his criticism of Strauss, one cannot help but suspect that this enterprise becomes a kibd of vindicatory understanding of modern thought. To be sure, even there the means toward understanding will be critical, but it will be pursued with (what one might call for present purposes) shared 'modern' premises. This very much suggests that in the dialectical pedagogical process Burnyeat defends 'we' who are beneficiaries of progress are in a superior position to the authors studied in a number of (moral and technological) ways.

To be sure, there are ways of construing Burnyeat's phrase 'origins of modern thought' more innocently and without some of the baggage I am attributing to him. Feel free to do so, if you think that's right. But do remember that we're supposed to be dealing with an important contrast (and as, you shall see, is made explicit by Burnyeat). And, in fact, Burnyeat explicitly presents his own "task here" (not to be the polemical vanguard of analytic philosophy, but rather) "to tell readers who are interested in the past, but who do not wish simply to retreat from the present." (emphasis added) So, Burnyeat explicitly sees himself as, in some sense, providing an apologetics for a certain kind of modernity.

Strauss' proposed teaching method (hereafter 'Straussian pedagogy') is said to be constituted by a kind of immersion such that the student ends up (empathetically and intellectually) identifying with the author. I quote Burnyeat's summary:

Strauss asks—or commands—his students to start by accepting that any inclination they may have to disagree with Hobbes (Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides), any opinion contrary to his, is mistaken. They must suspend their own judgment, suspend even “modern thought as such,” until they understand their author “as he understood himself.”

Self-understanding is notoriously difficult and we're especially likely to fail to be aware of our own blind spots, so this will be a fraught enterprise. Before I get to Burnyeat's criticism of this way of doing things it's worth noting that the evidence Burnyeat cites on Strauss' teaching (from one of Strauss' students), doesn't merely require such sympathetic identification with an author, but also the embrace of the idea that what they say is "simply true." (emphasis in Burnyeat's text.) That is, the texts studied are treated as if they are a kind of revelation and in which no textual detail is unworthy of attention. Lurking here, thus, is a form of (or a variant on) the joint study Chavrusa (literally, fellowship) one may find in a Yeshiva. (Strauss was, I believe, never enrolled in a Yeshiva, but he may have encountered the practice when he boarded with a cantor in Marburg.)

Learning to suspend judgment is an important skill, one that guards against some non-trivial epistemic vices, especially common among philo-bros (fill in your favorite example). It is a bit of shame that Burnyeat did not pause to let him and his readers reflect on the significance of this. So, Burnyeat is correct to claim that for Straussian pedagogy, "it would be presumptuous for students to criticize “a wise man” on the basis of their own watered-down twentieth-century thoughts. Let them first acquire the wise man’s own understanding of his wisdom." And all I am pointing out in response is that even if one admires analytic pedagogy, it has down-side risks that the Straussian pedagogy internalizes. 

For, there is also no doubt that bracketing -- I use this phenomenological term in part because of Strauss's debts to that tradition --- the superiority of one's own intellectual culture will allow not just a more sympathetic engagement with the text (this is explicitly noted by Burnyeat), but also puts the student in the position to let the text criticize some of the student's (often tacit) commitments (say, about how certain social arrangements naturally are) immanently. (And while this may not be expected at first, it seems more plausible once one has gotten in the habit of treating multiple authors in this way.) This is quite salutary practical wisdom to acquire for educated elite (recall yesterday's post), or to put it more democratically, the public-spirited citizen.

At this point, I should note an important potential confusion in or caused by Burnyeat's argument. He correctly notes that understanding an "author “as he understood himself” is fundamental to Straussian interpretation" and "that it is directed against his chief bugbear, “historicism,” or the belief that old books should be understood according to their historical context." Burnyeat kind of implies that Strauss, thereby, proposes a-historical interpretation of old books, for he quotes Strauss as recommending "listening to the conversation between the great philosophers." This would, by implication, involve Straussian pedagogy in a kind of conceptual confusion because if one wishes to understand an author as she understood herself one needs to have a sense of how she understands or wishes to shape her context (and what that context might be.) In fact, if one goes to the primary text (of several) that Burnyeat cites (On Tyranny, p. 24) Strauss does not advocate an a-historical stance, rather he opposes historicism to what he calls "true historical understanding."*

It should be readily clear why Strauss rejects obtaining an understanding of old books from, as it were, the outside in that is, by appeal, to historical context. For, this is a mechanism to impose conformity on a text by way of assumptions about how a particular age must have or only could have thought. This is especially so because the historicist tends to assume that the past involves cultural unities (as a kind of organic whole.) In addition, the historicist student assumes she has a privileged methodological, asymmetric position relative to the past texts often constituted not just by this historical sense, but also by the progress achieved since.

For, even without being exposed to Dilthey (et al), students often come with some such sense of superiority toward the texts and they are often really surprised to find really smart people in the distant past. One need not be a Straussian or a conservative to appreciate this. In the Dawn of Everything, Graeber& Wengrow attack some such historicism because they, too, want to undercut a kind of self-satisfied eurocentrism and get their readers to appreciate the intelligence of those culturally and historically distant agents they discuss. To be sure, I doubt analytic pedagogy is itself intrinsically wedded to historicism. But by privileging criticism is may fall into similar traps. 

Okay, be that as it may, Burnyeat quotes Dannhouser (one of Strauss' students) as claiming that Strauss' pedagogy also involved the maxim that "one ought not even to begin to criticize an author before one had done all one could do to understand him correctly." So, this suggests that the Straussian student does get to criticism but only at a much later stage. So on Straussian pedagogy, sympathetic identification with an author is then necessary, but not sufficient to complete ones understanding. 

Interestingly enough, Burnyeat denies that one ever gets to the critical stage in Straussian pedagogy, because "It is all too clear" that completion of the first stage is an "illusory goal" given the constraints of university education ("the end of the term.") Again, it is worth noting that Burnyeat is so eager to criticize that does not pause to reflect on the possible benefits of practice in such incomplete identification--that learning to see the world from a diverging perspective is hard and requires effort and skill, may well be thought a useful democratic insight in a complex, multi-cultural society if not for the gentleman, then, for the citizen! (One can recognize this without embracing a natural aristocracy as the proper end of education.)

As an important aside. I met Burnyeat through Ian Mueller, who was much more of an eclectic than either Burnyeat or Strauss (and also much more willing than Burnyeat to let ancient commentators and differing scholarly traditions teach him something about Plato), actually taught (despite clear focus on discerning and rationally reconstructing arguments) in the manner I have called 'Straussian pedagogy.’ For the students that stayed, the effect was always a skeptical Aporia, but also a real appreciation of the difficulties of any interpretation. (For the details, see Stephen Menn's In Memoriam.)

Even so, Burnyeat worries that in virtue of the never-ending process of sympathetic identification with an author one's critical faculties are atrophied and that one ends up surrendering to the text or the teacher (and, if the latter, so a school is formed). As Burnyeat puts it surrendering the "critical intellect is the price of initiation into the world of Leo Strauss’s ideas." Let's stipulate that Burnyeat gets something right that the Straussian pedagogy risks under-developing certain critical skills.

To put some clothes on this claim: in Strauss' writings one repeatedly is directed to the idea that (to paraphrase one formulation) to philosophy means to ascend from public dogma or opinion to knowledge. But one is rarely shown what such knowledge is or the practice that might constitute it. As Burnyeat puts it, correctly, there is much talk in Straussian writings about the nature of “the philosopher” but no sign of any knowledge, from the inside, of what it is to be actively involved in philosophy. In fact, one would never guess from Strauss' writings that he was a student of Cassirer, Husserl, Heidegger who would have been in a position to advance any of their (ahh) programs. To put this as a serious joke: Strauss voluntarily abandoned his place on the philosophical research frontier, and his school never returned to it (except, perhaps, in the study of certain figures).

Burnyeat also observes this, "Certainly, neither Strauss nor Straussians engage in the active discussion of central questions of philosophy which is characteristic of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and modern philosophy departments. They confine themselves to the exposition of texts, mainly texts of political philosophy—not, for example, Aristotle’s Physics or Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason." In so far as they even care about old texts (and most do only in a very mitigated sense), nearly all my friends in analytic philosophy will agree vigorously with Burnyeat here.

But, of course, part of the issue here -- and I am baffled Burnyeat of all people misses this -- is what counts as "central question" or what is first philosophy. If one thinks that 'how should one live?' is central, then political philosophy becomes (at least closely related to) first philosophy and encompasses the rest. While, by contrast, structuring one's education around the so-called 'core' [Logic, Language, Epistemology, and Metaphysics], and to model ethics/meta-ethics on the principles popular in the core, becomes then criminally irresponsible if not to oneself then to society. The recurring inability to even think that responsible speech might be worth thinking about is, thus, symptomatic of the effect of analytic pedagogy. 

Finally, is peculiar that Burnyeat thinks that Straussian pedagogy leads, as described, to "initiation into the world of Strauss'" ideas. In fact, in nearly all the courses I attended taught by Straussians, Strauss was never mentioned, and that even was a kind of running gag about such courses. So, except for the Straussians (now quite aged) who studied with Strauss himself, his ideas could only be accessed through his texts. Unsurprisingly, Straussians themselves don't agree on his views and their own project (with East coast, West coast, Claremont approaches, etc.). At best what the class-room teaching does is whet an appetite to read his texts in the manner that he may wished to be understood. But the more likely impact of the Straussian pedagogy is to whet an appetite for more close reading of texts.

I don't mean to suggest that Burnyeat lacks an argument for his initiation claim. But it's important to see that the argument for this does not reside in the details of what I have been calling 'Strausian pedagogy.' Rather it resides in the purported power of a kind of indirect implication. For to get at Straussian content (of Strauss' own views or the views he attributes to the texts he discusses), "much labor is required to disentangle its several elements from his denunciations of modernity and the exegesis of dozens of texts." That is the Straussian hermeneutic (as distinct from Straussian pedagogy) reads texts as incredibly complex puzzles that can only be solved by a kind of capacious reading and multi-dimensional puzzle-solving. This requires certain dispositions most of us (even in the old-text studies niche of the universe) lack. And so the initiation through the hermeneutics selects on a certain set of dispositions and practices.

But we're left with a kind of weird puzzle here: if (and it is a big if) Burnyeat get Strauss' initiation practice right, and so has properly understood Strauss' teachings, how come it fails to work its magic on Burnyeat, who is singularly unpersuaded? (Persuade and its cognates are the key word in Burnyeat's essay.) This suggests that at best Burnyeat has uncovered a necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition. One might think that Strauss mistakenly assumed a unity of the virtues thesis -- and given how often we are told about the need to return to the Ancients -- this assumption may seem plausible. But since Strauss is much exercised by the conditions under which philosophical teaching fails (Strauss likes to point at "rash Alcibiades"), and certainly is personally familiar with Heidegger as an exemplary case of a conspicuous lack of such unity, this assumption does not pass the smell test. At this point one may be tempted to claim that only exposure to Straussian pedagogy and exposure to Straussian hermeneutics is jointly sufficient to breed Straussians. But this can't be right because, as intended, and in fact, this is not so. (Even Burnyeat notes this because it's only a "few" who fall for it.) I leave it here, but will suggest -- I don't know where this inspiration comes from! -- that the nature of the "power of persuasion" in the Republic is a key to make progress on this very question.  

• This first appeared at: <On How to Teach Old Books, Burnyeat vs Strauss, Part II (substack.com)>a reader supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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*This is p. 25 in The University of Chicago (2009) edition

On Patočka, T.S. Eliot and the Treason of the Intellectuals during the Culture Wars: with a surprising cameo of José Benardete

[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work  consider becoming a paid subscriber at <digressionsimpressions.substack.com>]

Perhaps because I recognize in myself a warmth toward Spinozism, but I am always inordinately pleased when I can recognize and act on the play of chance. After a raucous pub lecture to the members of student-club of the political science department (aptly named Machiavelli) in the Amsterdam red light district, I received Jan Patočka' Living in Problematicity -- a slim volume of essays (selected and translated by Eric Manton) -- as a gift with a touching inscription from a former student. I knew that Patočka (1907-1977) was a philosopher and a courageous co-founder of Charta 77. His clandestine discussion groups and his lectures at the under-ground university are legendary. I had never read anything by him, although his work is becoming increasingly accessible in English.

Yesterday, while in transit, I read "Platonism and Politics," which is a very short meditation on Bendas' La Trahison des clercs (1927; often translated as: The Treason of the Intellectuals); recall this post). Because in preparing a syllabus for a class on conservatism, I had stumbled on a 1944 note by T.S. Eliot engaging with Benda, I had just been musing about the use of Benda by contemporary intellectuals -- I tweeted this on june 4 (and no, Tweeting is not Thinking) -- so this post was born.

I don't mean to suggest I randomly muse about Benda. As regular readers know, I write in a philosophical tradition that feels entitled to be unlearned. And so in our controversies over 'public [facing] philosophy' and 'responsible speech' we end up repeating, over and over again, the same trite clichés without any sense of embarrassment. And this lack of shame is, of course, characteristic of a modern clerisy (in Benda's sense). Since I am a blogger, feel free to read this as self-indictment. Okay, so much for set up.

Now, for sociological reasons I do not fully understand, while Benda is wholly unknown inside my tradition, he does repeatedly get invoked in relatively serious public essays. With the help of Google, here's a few examples of the kind of thing I have in mind:

• Mark Lilla December 7, 2021 Tablet Magazine (taken from his intro to a re-issue): Julien Benda’s The Treason of the Intellectuals, an essential intervention in 20th-century debates about intellectual responsibility, is the second sort of book. Cast into the agitated waters of European politics between the two world wars, it still floats ashore every decade or so, attracting readers with its stirring call to the independent life of the mind, free from the lures of power and authority.... he makes a practical case against practicality, an engaged case against political engagements.

• Elie Kedourie, August 1992, Commentary: The phenomena against which Benda was writing were much more visible in France than in England or the U.S. There was no movement here comparable to the Action Française in its intellectual prestige or in its spread within the academy and among the intellectual classes....But in today’s English-speaking world (as indeed in today’s France), we do now see a political commitment within the academy having to do neither with the character and definition of the body politic nor with the class struggle.

• George Monbiot, 14th May 2013, the Guardian: In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published a piercing attack on the intellectuals of his day. They should, he argued in La Trahison des Clercs (the treason of the scholars) act as a check on popular passions. Civilisation, he claimed, is possible only if intellectuals stand in opposition to the demands of political “realism” by upholding universal principles. “Thanks to the scholars,” Benda maintained, “humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honoured good.”.. the need for a disinterested class of intellectuals which acts as a counterweight to prevailing mores. 

• Antony Julius (reviewing Berman), May 14, 2010, The New York Time: The masterwork, however, is still ­Julien Benda’s “Treason of the Intellectuals.” This book, written in 1927 by one of the leading French intellectuals of the early 20th century, may be regarded as the inaugural work of the line....For Benda, the intellectual betrays his vocation when he compromises his commitment to universalist values. The temptation to make such compromises, he argues, lies principally in the appeal of national sentiment, to which intellectuals are quick to subordinate themselves. And the role they assume as nationalists is to conceptualize political hatreds. 

I listed these because each of these essays is worth reading as a window on their own polemical moment as well as a kind of an evolution of a meme/trope. What's notable here is the subtle shift in character among what Benda was supposedly inveighing against: political engagement by intellectuals; academic activists/political commitment; a betrayal of universal principles understood as disinterestedness; a betrayal of universal principles in the service of nationalism. I don't mean to suggest there is a mystery here: each essay has slightly different polemical contextual target(s) and so each also subtly rejigs Benda to their own local political-polemical ends (including, in the case of Lilla, criticizing Benda). That's what intellectuals do, after all, right? In general, on a left-right axis, the left-intellectuals will invoke Benda to criticize intellectuals serving power and moneyed-interests, while the right-leaning intellectuals will invoke Benda to criticize intellectuals who serve some (what we now call) social justice cause. All sides (correctly) invoke Benda when criticizing a nationalist-friendly intellectual, unless it's their own nation and they are prudently silent.

Now, what I like about Patočka's little essay (it’s shorter than some of my digressions) is that he inscribes Benda in a debate over the reception of Platonism (or "true philosophizing in general"), and to what degree what one might call the possibility of serving a certain (spiritual) kind of 'higher calling" (in the sense of Republic 487a to which Patočka appeals explicitly) associated with it (but rooted in philosophy), is still possible after Nietzsche (who goes unmentioned) and his death of God (which is intimated in various ways) in modern conditions. In context, it's clear that this Platonism is associated with an interesting mélange of Plato and Husserl. I quote from Manton's translation to give you a sense of what he has in mind:

The ultimate meaning of Platonism is, I think, a spiritual universum, into which a person penetrates by means of a certain purely inner and active (but absolutely not mythical) purification. This purification or philosophy is at the same time the most important and most intensive praxis, solely able to give to the life of the individual as well as of society a necessary unity, to give life that inner center which one potentially keeps within oneself as the unfulfilled meaning of one’s life. Thus Plato’s political conception briefly means this: (1) there exists a single and coherent, truly human, spiritual behavior named philosophy; (2) the “object” of philosophy is not primarily the contents of this world; (3) the right of philosophy to establish norms for life consists in its inner truthfulness, in its absolute character; (4) all of human activity, not founded on philosophy and not illuminated throughout by philosophy, has the character of dissatisfaction, falsehood, and a lack of inner order.

Now, I am not interested here in trying to trace each of these claims back to Plato or, by contrast, to appeal to contemporary scholarship to show that any of this is only in a very attenuated sense to be found in Plato. Rather, let's stipulate with Patočka that this captures something of a familiar ideal. For Patočka, Benda's book raises two-fold question: the first is the Nietzschean one, is this ideal dead? The second-fold is, does the ideal “exist in a certain modified form even in our own lives?" Judging by the essays linked above, the answer to the first is: yes. And to the second, no. As Patočka suggests, Platonism so conceived "can only live where those vital hypothesis discussed above on which Platonism is built also exist."

Now Patočka is clear that his conception of Platonism is itself political in a higher sense (familiar, (recall) I hasten to add from Plato Republic,  592ab), although he gives a humanist spin on it (this is the debt to Husserl whom he quotes). Interestingly enough, for Patočka this entails that the impact of philosophy in life is "the permeation, gradually and usually distortedly, of philosophical concepts into the common human consciousness." This turns Platonism into a kind of Enlightenment project, despite the fact that philosophy itself is "a matter of the few." And, in fact, Patočka calls for a kind of 'new Enlightenment' ground in a new actualization of Platonism, while simultaneously criticizing what we might call the idol of collectivism. (I wouldn't be surprised if the essay were mined by biographers who see in it a prefiguration of his later courage under Stalinism with Czech characteristics.)

For, Patočka (who thinks Benda is confused on the proper task of intellectuals and the role of Platonism in this higher sense) what Benda get right (we might say) ‘formally’ is that proper myth, that is not falsehood but rather "an imaginative vestment of truth," is a useful instrument in the permeation of these concepts and for those (collectives) who do not wish to live a spiritual life. The main point of Patočka's essay is to call attention to the need for myths that express or manifest 'poetical, philosophical yearning.' The Spinozist in me understands this yearning, and Patočka grasps what makes Benda's diatribe so enduringly fascinating.

For Patočka the task of the clerisy is to use myths to help spread this new Enlightenment. This is not far removed (as I argue in this lecture) from how my friend José Benardete understood his task in his book on Infinity (although as always with José there are complications), so if you want an example of how this is supposed to work in the hands of a metaphysician go read it. I could stop here.

Interestingly and surprisingly enough, T.S. Eliot of all people, ridicules Benda: "Benda, as I remember, seemed to expect everybody to be a sort of Spinoza." In context, it's clear that Eliot's 'everybody' is 'every member of the clerisy.' Now, I lifted this sentence from the 1944 piece, which as a subtitle has ‘On the Place and Function of the Clerisy;" one of the questions Eliot asks in it is (unsurprisingly given that subtitle) what is the function of the clerisy. One of the proper functions of the intellectuals for him is to promote the right sort of change: "the chief merits of the clerical elite is that it is an influence for change." This leaves underspecified what change they promote, but it is at least sometimes compatible with Patočka's position.

In addition, according to Eliot it is, thus, inevitable that the clerisy ends up in conflict with the forces that defend the status quo: "To some extent, therefore, there is, and I think should be, a conflict between class and clerical elite." Eliot tacitly here presupposes that the ruling class is change averse. But even ruling classes can promote change if they think it will benefit them--this is something quite familiar in our own time; it does not follow we can always identify whether the clerisy is betraying its true vocation.

As I have hinted above, Eliot decouples the function of the clerisy from a higher calling. I don't mean to suggest he completely decouples it because for him "The clerisy can help to develop and modify [culture]; they have a part to play, but only a part, in its transmission." And presumably Eliot, who is no stranger to Platonism, does think that a culture might have a connection to a higher calling. In fact, when it does, then 'culture' just means an imaginative vestment of truth. Fair enough.

Now, Eliot recognizes a form of pluralism that Patočka finds difficult to accommodate (although it is compatible with his Platonism). For intellectuals share in being outcasts, and "are apt to share a discontent with things as they are, but the ways in which they want to change them will be various and often completely opposed to each other." And while it is tempting to say that the opposition is merely over means (again compatible with Platonism), it is, of course, not impossible that the disagreement is also over ends which begins to look incompatible with Platonism if the unity of the virtues is broken as Eliot himself suggests in the remainder of his notes (and hard to disagree with in 1944).*

However, this all must seem rather quaint. Ours is not an age that wishes to gamble on a revitalized humanism. The transgender-wars take place when capital and the heirs of the once noble tradition of the radical philosophers are betting on transhumanism. Even the very idea of a human right, let alone a culture in the bildung sense assumed by Eliot is suspect. Talking about culture without naming the social sins on which it rests seems also a real betrayal of humanity. No high minded stance seems to be able to survive scrutiny.

But it is no better that the poetical, philosophical yearning(s) are met exclusively by hucksters, or worse. And if Platonism is wholly exhausted, what now? And while I dislike the word ‘problematicity,’ perhaps, if you follow me on this substack voyage, this is the question, if it is a single question, we must answer or the ‘problematic’ we must resolve.

• This first appeared at: <On Patočka, T.S. Eliot and the Treason of the Intellectuals during the Culture Wars: with a surprising cameo of José Benardete (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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*See especially his treatment "clerical small fry, we have what is called the intelligentsia...in Cairo and such places."

 

On Olaf Stapledon, Technology induced Extinction Risk, and the Awesome new Atomic and AGI power

 The First Industrial Revolution was almost entirely dependent on coal, oil and falling water, which sources occur only in certain localities. Scientists have been exploring the possibilities of deriving industrial power from the tides, from differences of temperature (which means ultimately from sun-light) and from the disintegration of atoms. It is impossible to say yet what success will be attained in these ventures. But it seems probable that the result will be at least a far wider distribution of the sources of power. It may well be that the perfected production of atomic power will involve a vast and complex enterprise undertaken under a world-wide authority, and the universal distribution of electric current derived from atomic generators. As it is certainly probable that the transmission of power in the form of electricity is going to become very much cheaper and more efficient, ample power will be available everywhere. Each village throughout the world will either tap a high tension grid or generate its own power. As to atomic energy, its frightful dangers are obvious. It is not inconceivable that the belt of minute planets, the Asteroids, between Mars and Jupiter, is the wreckage of a world which its inhabitants accidentally destroyed by the unwise use of atomic energy. It would be a pity to turn our planet into another belt of Asteroids. But atomic energy, though dangerous, promises fabulous source of power in comparison with which coal and oil are quite insignificant. It opens up the possibility of transforming the whole face of the planet according to man's needs. It could , for instance, easily render the Arctic islands and the Antarctic Continent warm and habitable. And atomic power for industrial purposes, we are told, is already “in the offing.” Meanwhile the danger of atomic warfare is increasingly frightful. Short of exploding the planet, atomic energy used as a weapon might do so much damage that the present war, in comparison, would seem an affair of flint arrows and axes. The abolition of war becomes more urgent as man's power increases.--Olaf Stapledon (1946) Youth and Tomorrow, pp. 74-5

Olaf Stapledon (1886 –  1950) is known only to aficionados of science fiction now (Last and First Men and Star Maker are classics that shaped the genre throughout the twentieth century, and arguably kept Spinozistic ideas alive in a positivist age), but in his writings he also helped invent 'futurology' and 'transhumanism.'  I hasten to add, in case you are are of more discerning taste, J.L. Borges was an admirer of Stapledon. Stapledon obtained a PhD in philosophy from University of Liverpool under Alexander Mair (hitherto unknown to me). Stapledon's first book (1929), A Modern Theory of Ethics: A Study of The Relations of Ethics and Psychology, was clearly based on his PhD. Judging by citations, it made no impact on the scholarly world of his day. 

The quoted passage is from a short book written in preparation of a post (second) world war age. In the book, Stapledon is  committed to renewed internationalism (he clearly regrets the failures of the League of Nations) and a form of democratic socialism that can avoid dictatorship (even though Stapledon is clearly very impressed by achievements of the Soviet Union). About his politics some other time more.

The passage caught my attention because it entertains the possibility of technology induced human/species extinction of the species that deploys a new technology. This extinction possibility is in the news again thanks to the (recall) impact of Parfit's writing on longtermism and (the publicity surrounding) rapid developments in AI/AGI. 

Contemplating civilizational collapse or the extinction of species are not new thoughts in the history of philosophical writing or social theory. As I have noted (recall), in book 3 of Plato's Laws, (677a-678a) Plato's Athenian stranger entertains the possibility that the Earth has experienced frequent catastrophic natural events (he explicitly mentions massive floods and pandemics, but it's easy to imagine he also assumes earthquakes and perhaps even meteorite impacts) that have wiped out whole populations of humans and other species of animals, and has set-back the technological capability of civilizations for millennia. (We know from the Hebrew Bible account of the flood and other ancient writings that Plato is not unique in this.)

It's also not new to think that civilizational collapse is endogenous to civilizational life. Arguably this is one of the the natural ways to understand the Hebrew Bible's account of the scattering after the tower of Babel; in (recall) The Great Endarkenment, Elijah Millgram suggests that the linguistic diversification and differentiation (and subsequent cultural implosion and scattering) is itself the effect of the advanced division of labor that makes the building of the tower possible. (This is the great set-piece that opens Millgram's (2015) book.) Social theory going back to Ibn Khaldun is rife with cyclical, civilizational processes in which the key drivers of expansion and success also become self-undermining.

It's also not wholly unusual to recognize the potential civilizational collapse that is endogenous to one's own civilizational life. The writings of a number of elite authors of the final century of the roman republic are pretty clear on the fact that endurance of the roman republic is threatened by its own past history of success (due to conquest imported habits of luxury and/or empowered generals to aim for political power). Of course, often the point of recognizing the potential of civilizational collapse is to create a call to political arms, or a philosophical prophecy, to prevent the collapse from occurring (we can see hints of this in Plato's story of Atlantis). But sometimes the doom is inevitable or fated (as some of the Roman authors clearly came to think).

But, as Parfit de facto notes in Reasons and Persons, there is a non-trivial difference between foreseeing civilizational collapse of one's civilization and the collapse of one's whole species. Now, absent a certain kind of ethical or axiological cosmopolitanism, it seems obvious to me that most authors of the past lamented the possible collapse of their own civilization and showed remarkable indifference to the possible collapse of larger humanity. (This is an option that Parfit does not consider, but if he had he would clearly have suggested that this shows a clear error in their implied axiology.)

Now, Stapledown's writings suggest he is a cosmic cosmopolitan. And in this respect, he clearly fits in a philosophical tradition tracing back to Fontenelle, Huygens, and Kant.  So, it's no surprise he contemplates the possibility of endogenous technologically induced extinction among aliens as an example worth avoiding in the harnessing of atomic power. There are some hints in Youth and Tomorrow that it was written during wartime, and interestingly enough he does not mention the use of atomic weapons. But just before the passage quoted at the top of this post, he claims that "the manufacture of atomic bombs necessitates organisation of production on a national scale and the danger of the misuse of these terrific weapons forces world-wide organisation upon us." (p. 73; emphasis added)

It's a bit unfortunate that Stapledown does not clarify what he means by 'misuse' of atomic weapons here. (He was a pacifist during World War I, but not during the second world war.) Does he mean their deployment, or does he worry about them falling in the hands of rogue states/actors, or does he worry about nuclear world war? But he clearly thinks that atomic power isn't merely a technological problem, but also a political problem on a global scale. After all, he thinks that a world-wide organization is required to handle it.

In the quoted passage at the top of this post, Stapledon is discussing what we now call the 'Kuiper belt' (or Edgeworth-Kuiper belt') [UPDATED: see Ken McLeod's comment below.] But was only then recently proposed by K.E. Edgeworth in a 1943 paper in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association. It would be worth trying to figure out if Stapledon knew Edgeworth personally. In Edgeworth there is no mention of an alien civilization. I am not claiming that Stapledon is the first to propose the hypothesis that the asteroids are themselves the effect of a technologically induced existential collapse, but given this timeline he has to be among the first.* Clearly the function of Stapledon's hypothesis is to alert us to avoid this fate (not, perhaps, to create a testable hypothesis for planetary explorers of the solar system).*

It is, of course, an open question to what degree global institutional control of atomic power mitigates risk or accelerates existential risk. But since this post is long enough as is, I close with the following observation: the possibility of technology induced (endogenous) extinction is, thus, not new with the possibility of AGI. Our society has lived with the possibility of technology induced (endogenous) extinction of humanity for almost eighty years now. To say that is not to underestimate the existential risk that follows from the introduction of new technology. But it is worth noting that we have a history of living with, and perhaps managing, such risk, and perhaps we can learn from this history. For, while it would be nice if there were a technological fix to the existential extinction risk of AGI, it's more likely than not we'll need institutional and social mitigation of such risk. 

 

On the General Hermeneutic; Quentin Skinner on the task of the Historian, part I

As Sam James’s debate with the great John Pocock showed, there are very special problems attendant on writing the history of the present, because you’re going to be writing about people who can answer back. I mean, I never had the problem that, when I explained the precise ideological orientation of Hobbes’ political philosophy, Hobbes will be able to publish an article in which he rubbished what I had said. But this, of course, was what John Pocock sought to do in this particular case. I’m not going to try to adjudicate; I thought that Sam James’s work was wonderful, and very challenging.

But what I want to say, on my own account, is that the approach that I’ve been trying this afternoon to sketch in talking to you purports to be a general hermeneutic. That’s to say, it’s generally applicable — applicable to the present, of course, because it’s generally applicable. So, it’s not just a story about how to get at the past. If you try to use it to get at the present, you encounter all the special problems of trying to get at the present, which I just alluded to. There are special difficulties, of course, attendant on writing contemporary history. And that’s not just because people can answer back; it’s also for a deeper reason, which we’re all familiar with, which is that it’s much more difficult to see our own concepts and our own arrangements as contingent. The goal of the historian, as I’ve been talking about this figure, is to show the contingency of the questions that are raised in the history of philosophy: the extent to which they can be understood if, and only if, you studied the circumstances in and for which they were written. But it’s very much harder, I think, to see your own concepts as having the same kind of contingency. If you see them as wholly contingent, it’s hardly going to be very easy to affirm their truth. So, I think that the history of the present has very great difficulties with attaining the kind of objectivity to which my approach aspires. I think that the historian can at least aspire to give you a sort of objective account — it might not be the account that the agent themselves will give of philosophical works in the past — [but] much more difficult to do it on ourselves.--Quentin Skinner (January 28, 2023) interviewd by Ming. [emphasis added--ES]

Perhaps because when I was younger I was rather polemical toward Quentin Skinner's methodological (and interpretive) historiographic positions an unusual number of people called my attention to the interview with Skinner I have partially quoted above. I had little interest in reading the interview because Skinner has been interviewed rather frequently, and by people who don't really challenge him. But because so many people suggested to me I should read it, I decided to take a look. Somewhat predictably it has triggered a new round of polite disagreement in me.+

I am happy I did so because the interview is fascinating; in it we learn a lot about the origins and development of the Cambridge Texts series that shaped how multiple disciplines could teach the past and how scholars could research it. In addition Skinner says insightful things on the frequently self-deceptive nature of autobiographical writing. And -- the piece has a lot of riches --for people who have just come to the Cambridge school he makes some helpful claims about its intellectual roots of it in twentieth century philosophy.* Go read the full interview yourself!

Now, the paragraph I quoted from the interview occurs in the context of a question about a debate between Samuel James and Pocock about Pocock's "earlier work." Somewhat oddly, during the interview with Skinner it is never stated that James is denying the purported unity of the Cambridge school (concluding there are at least two "strands" if not two "enterprises"). As it happens this is a topic that has already been broached during the interview because Skinner had already stated, "I don’t think it’s helpful to suppose that there’s a Cambridge School." And while there is a way to parse Skinner's claim that makes it distinct from James' argument it is quite at odds with Pocock's own claim (reiterated in response to James) to have helped lay the foundations for the Cambridge school that (on Pocock's telling) was invented by Skinner in his famous (1969) essay! That is, Skinner has already denied the terms of the debate between James and Pocock, so, if Skinner is right, there is no need to adjudicate it. There is, if one presses on this topic, much more such comedy running through the interview (not the least the status of Skinner's utterances on the nature of the Cambridge school in light of the "very great difficulties" diagnosed by himself.) Perhaps, I'll return to that some time.

But my present interest is in the status of a general hermeneutic that seems to be applicable in all circumstances. Now, what is striking and highly revealing in Skinner's formulation of such a hermeneutic, is that "The goal of the historian, as I’ve been talking about this figure, is to show the contingency of the questions that are raised in the history of philosophy." I leave aside the really tough question whether a general hermeneutic is really possible. Although to note skeptically that it reminds me of the hope that methodologists of science once had to discover a logic of induction or a general methodology of science.

Rather, here I focus on the oddity to posit this ["the contingency of the questions that are raised in the history of philosophy"] as the goal of any historian let alone the historian of philosophy for at least three reasons: first, shouldn't the purported contingency of the questions be established by historical enquiry and not be presumed? I don't deny that sometimes, perhaps often, this is a conclusion of historical research. Some historians allow us to celebrate such continency (think of Daston, Justin Smith, etc.). However, even if one denies that there are eternal questions, it is still possible, say, that bits of philosophy are institutionalized as authoritative in a context (think Aristotle and Thomas in the Catholic Church, or Mencius in the Chinese bureaucracy, or Buddhism in the Ashoka empire and its aftermath) that then shapes centuries of fairly constrained enquiry,

One need not be a structuralist to see that if one posits a trade-off between population and luxury spending (as Socrates does in the truthful city) the modeling space is highly constrained even if there are huge technological and demographic changes (as Malthus noticed).  Fill in your own example. I put it in terms of types of models because it is far more likely that there is going to be continuity between or rediscovery of those, even though the tokens have all kinds of external commitments unrelated to the trade-off under issue. That may sound like cheating, but often later authors (not just Malthus, but also Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Berkeley, Smith, and Mill) explicitly refer back to Plato's version. 

Back in 1969, Skinner linked the denial of the sameness of questions to the impossibility of learning from the purported "solutions" of past thinkers to our (perennial) questions or the ones we put to them. Fair enough. But this criticism cannot be directed at the idea that Plato's solutions (birth-control, enhancements, different property arrangements) are very much still explored in much greater depth in these types of two-factor models. (Not that I want to turn you into a population ethicicist or an anachronistic political economist.)** 

Second, shouldn't the historian of philosophy, especially, be allowed to focus on other goals (e.g., what happened, why did it happen, how did we get from then to now, which arguments are worth a second look, etc.)? I don't mean to be exhaustive here. There are a plurality of goals in the pursuit of historical enquiry as such and also in the history of philosophy. In a lot of these, the question of contingency may arise only side-ways. 

Of course, I don't mean to deny -- in fact it is highly salient -- that Skinner's position is articulated in, and received some of its plausibility from, the historical aftermath of what was thought to be the demise of the principle of sufficient reason (which is highly intolerant of contingency). This demise was marked by Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being and Russell's rejection of the PSR (alongside Bradley's idealism). But if historical fortune shifts, and the PSR is re-animated (as Della Rocca argues) then it's foreseable Skinner's approach will seem just special pleading.

Third, there seems to be an unstated assumption that if we understand a question in its proper context, it's contingency is revealed; but this, too, presupposes what needs to be argued or shown. Why can't the original context reveal that a certain question was over-determined? Once Hershell discovered the first binary star system and that they obeyed Kepler's laws, it was pretty predictable that questions about the nature and mechanism of action at distance would be re-openend. Of course, this debate was constrained by new theories and conducted in terms that were more mathematized than earlier versions. Even if one allows, as I do, genuine incommensurability between scientific theories, the continuity of and refinement in evidence creates the possibility of asking questions that are overdetermined and that are, in a certain sense, continuous with each other even if particular at a time. 

Skinner also seems to be claiming, in addition, that if the questions are contingent then it follows that the concepts used in answering them, including our own, will also be contingent. (I infer that from his implied claim we have to see our "own concepts as having the same kind of contingency.") But even if one grants that the questions philosophers have asked are contingent, it does not follow that the conceptual structure that are part of the answers to these questions are contingent. After all, given certain starting point X -- that, let's stipulate is contingent -- what follows from X, namely the answers or concepts Y, can be a kind of hypothetical or conditional necessity. And it would be odd to call Y 'contingent.' Certain questions can have only a narrow range of answers, not the least because earlier folk can shape the manner of later uptake.

Skinner is, thus, naturally read as claiming that his general hermeneutic is callibrated to show that all philosophical questions and answers are contingent. In fact, in the interview this is the view he attributes to Collingwood (something already present in Skinner's famous 1969 essay) as follows:

[Collingwood] and his numerous followers always insisted that the history of philosophy, and perhaps especially of moral and political philosophy, should be written as an account, not of how different answers were produced for a set of canonical questions, but rather as a subject in which the questions as well as the answers are always changing, and in which the questions are set by the specific moral and political issues that seem most salient, most troubling, at different times — and they will continually change and people will continually find that the pressures of their societies are operating in such a way as to raise new questions. 

This is indeed Collingwood's view in the Autobiography. The only sameness that Collingwood allows there is the process that gets one from one question to the next answer. But in Collingwood the claim is linked explicitly to a metaphysical claim, which is simultaneously a claim about metaphysics: that at any given time metaphysics just is what people "believe about the world's general nature" and the history of such beliefs. In fact, the whole Autobiography is almost a carricature, albeit an highly entertaining one, of late historicism. Back in 1969, Skinner Himself granted that it was "excessive" because according to Collingwood (and now I quote Skinner 1969): "we cannot even ask if a given philosopher "solved the problem he set himself."" 

Such historicism (and its valorization of the creative and wholly ideosyncratic genius lurking in it) may be true, of course, but it is odd to think that it can be safely presupposed in one's general hermeneutic today. Skinner himself is, of course, much more cautious than Collingwood and, as far as I know, does not rest his own case on such historicism or such claims about metaphysics. But once we remove it from this wholly skeptical position that only a history of beliefs is possible and no knowledge (not even partial of the world's general nature) there is really not much to say on behalf of the idea that "there are only individual answers to individual questions."

But -- you can probably see this coming a mile away -- while Collingwood's 'logic of question and answer' is fully intelligible, even anchored by, and part of a whole cloth that involves such a historicism (including commitments to the unity of epochs and cultures, the denial of the PSR, etc.), in Skinner it is just special pleading. While I will not assert that one's hermeneutic is always beholden to one's metaphysics -- if that were so no historical understanding would be possible --, it should also not be the case that one's hermeneutic settles metaphysical questions by fiat. 

Without Collingwood's broader metaphysical commitments, Skinner's focus on contingency seems arbitrary. That is, somewhat paradoxically, the general hermeneutic is itself best understood as more informative of the commitments of the Skinnerite historian, perhaps even revealing of Skinner's unwritten autobiography, and so best applicable to the recent present than the past.++

 

Cantillon, Sidgewick, and the Pre-History of (Secular) Population Ethics

The Dutch exchange their labor in navigation, fishing and manufacturing, principally with foreigners, for the products of their land. Otherwise, Holland could not support half of its population. England buys from abroad considerable amounts of timber, hemp and other materials or products of the soil and consumes much wine for which she pays in minerals, manufactured goods, etc. That saves the English a great quantity of the production of their soil. Without these advantages, the people of England, based on their standard of living, could not be as numerous as they are. The coal mines save them several million acres of land, which would otherwise be needed to grow timber.
But all these advantages are refinements and exceptional cases, which I mention only incidentally. The natural and constant way of increasing population in a state is to find employment for the people there, and to make the land provide their means of support.
It is also a question outside of my subject whether it is better to have a great multitude of inhabitants, poor and badly provided for, or a smaller number with better means; a million who consume the product of six acres per head or four million who live on the product of an acre and a half.--Cantillon (1755) Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général translated as An Essay on Economic Theory, Translated by Chantal Saucier, part 1, chapter 15. [See here for the original French.]*

Last week, with some bravura, I made fun of MacAskill's rewriting of the history of population ethics (recall here). And I insisted that population ethics was as old as (Plato inspired) philosophy. However, Gustaf Arrhenius reached out to me, first, to force me to be precise between (what I ended up calling) [I] 'the technical version of population ethics,'  which theorizes about (and now I quote work by Arrhenius), "the moral value of states of affairs where the number of people, the quality of their lives (or their life-time welfare or well-being—we shall use these terms interchangeably here), and their identities may vary."  And [II] "the popular version of population ethics," which MacAskill defines as  "the evaluation of actions that might change who is born, how many people are born, and what their quality of life will be." (MacAskill's What We Owe to the Future., p. 168). (Recall this post.)

While I continue to insist that the popular version is more or less co-equal with the history of European philosophy, in response to Gustaf I was mum about the history of the technical version of population ethics. It's pretty clear that the technical version of population ethics is in Sidwick. In fact, Gustaf reminded me of a passage from Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics that is often mentioned (see here for example) in the context of discussions of the repugnant conclusion.

If we foresee as possible that an increase in numbers will be accompanied by a decrease in average happiness or vice versa, a point arises which has not only never been formally noticed, but which seems to have been substantially overlooked by many Utilitarians. For if we take Utilitarianism to prescribe, as the ultimate end of action, happiness on the whole, and not any individual's happiness, unless considered as an element of the whole, it would follow that, if the additional population enjoy on the whole positive happiness, we ought to weigh the amount of happiness gained by the extra number against the amount lost by the remainder. So that, strictly conceived, the point up to which, on Utilitarian principles, population ought to be encouraged to increase, is not that at which average happiness is the greatest possible, – as appears to be often assumed by political economists of the school of Malthus – but that at which the product formed by multiplying the number of persons living into the amount of average happiness reaches its maximum.” (quoted from the fifth edition)

It is worth noting that the snarky aside about "the political economists of the school of Malthus" is missing from the first 1874 edition (here)!  (I don't know in which edition it was added by Sidgwick.) I noticed it was missing from the first edition of Sidgwick's Methods because it is quoted partially in Edgeworth's (1877) New and Old Methods of Ethics: Or, "Physical Ethics" and "Methods of Ethics", p. 35. And this made me check the first edition!

Now, I mentioned Edgeworth's significance to eugenics in the post responding to MacAskill's claims. (I learned of his significance through the work of David M. Levy and Sandra  Peart.)  It is worth noting that Edgeworth (whose  Mathematical Psychics: An Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences, is rather important in the development of mathematical economics) insists that, in so far as Sidgwick is a kind of exact utilitarian for whom the "greatest quantity of happiness of sentients" is the proper end that this is kind of anticipated in Gustav Theodor Fechner's (1846) Ueber das höchste Gut (here). I am unsure if we find a population ethics in the technical sense in it. But it's a short book, and worth finding out (go for it).

As I was looking at the reception of Sidgwick's passage, a comment by Myrdal (in The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory) sent me back to a different passage in Edgeworth, reviewing Sidgwick's The Elements of Politics in 1891 in the Economic Journal  (which he edited). And it's this review that let me to the passage in Cantillon quoted above. In the passage, Edgeworth gives a kind of mini history of technical population ethics in the technical sense, and treats Sidgwick as its founder (as Sidgwick himself had suggested.) Let me first quote Edgeworth:

Discoveries are hardly possible in ethics, practical principles have grown slowly; but we hold that the nearest approach to an absolutely new idea of first - rate importance in morals was made by the following momentous passage which occurs in the fourth book of the Methods of Ethics (ch . 1 ): 'Political economists of the school of Malthus often appear to assume that no increase of numbers can be right which involves any decrease in average happiness. But if we take Utilitarianism to prescribe, as the ultimate end of action, happiness on the whole, and not any individual's happiness, unless considered as an element of the whole, it would follow that, if the additional population enjoy on the whole positive happiness, we ought to weigh the amount of happiness gained by the extra number against the amount lost by the remainder. So that, strictly conceived, the point up to which, on Utilitarian principles, population ought to be allowed to increase, is not that at which average happiness is the greatest possible, but that at which the product formed by multiplying the number of persons living into the amount of average happiness reaches a maximum."
   Bentham was not led to regard the lot of happiness' enjoyed by a nation as a function of the number of population considered as variable. J. S. Mill was so preoccupied by the evils of overpopulation as hardly to have indicated whether there is an opposite extreme. Even, if innocuous, I confess I see very little reason for desiring it,' he says with respect to the increase of population. Cantillon indeed, had stated, but did not attempt to answer the question, whether it is better to have a large population poor and without comforts, or a smaller population with more affluence; a population of a million consuming the produce of six acres (arpens) per head, or of four millions, each living on an acre and a half.' And Cournot, in his later writings, had pointed to the insolubility of such questions as the rock on which economic optimism foundered. But the question is not regarded as unanswerable, nor is it left unanswered, by Dr. Sidgwick..--P. 784

Edgeworth is here quoting the fourth (1890) edition of Methods of Ethics. And the way I read Edgeworth, he is saying that in the middle of the eighteenth century, Cantillon basically asks the question in such a way that could have led to (somewhat) technical population ethics, but left it aside. It is worth noting, as an aside, that in the sense Parfit and MacAskill use atheism/secular, Cantillon's treatment is entirely secular. (In fact, theorizing about population in the early modern period was nearly always also means to undermine any Biblical narrative--this can be easily seen if you go to Damilaville's (1765) entry on population in Diderot's Encyclopedia.)

Since this is pretty much the length of a solid digression, I will stop here. But I will leave you with a question and a thought: first, to what degree was Cantillon's question really so out of the ordinary? (See here for the claim that it was.; I am not so sure) In part, this requires an engagement with early modern political economy and political arithmetick. Second, and this is my observation, stated as such, Cantillon's question is already modelled in Socrates' account of the city of pigs, where a large healthy  population poor and without comforts, is explicitly preferred over any with luxuries (and where population and conforts are explicitly traded off each other). As Cannan (an important commentator on Adam Smith) notes without mentioning Plato, Paley (yes that Paley) writing later in the eighteenth century agreed with Socrates. 

Good Breeding, Population Ethics and all that. On MacAskill’s *What We Owe the Future*, Part 4

Parfit inaugurated several new areas of moral philosophy. The one that has most shaped my worldview, and which is covered in this chapter, is population ethics—the evaluation of actions that might change who is born, how many people are born, and what their quality of life will be. Secular discussion of this topic is strikingly scarce: despite thousands of years of ethical thought, the issue was only discussed briefly by the early utilitarians and their critics in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it received sporadic attention in the years that followed.6 The watershed moment came in 1984 with the publication of Parfit’s book Reasons and Persons.
Population ethics is crucial for longtermism because it greatly affects how we should evaluate the end of civilisation.--William MacAskill (2022) What We Owe The Future, p. 168.

This is the fourth post on MacAskill's book. (The first one is here which also lists some qualities about the book that I admire; the second one is here; the third here.) MacAskill's note 6 refers to the Mohists, who are not treated as population ethicists because "they did not discuss the intrinsic and instrumentalist benefits and costs of increasing population." (307) Let me grant, for the sake of argument, that such an economic analysis (costs/benefits) is intrinsic to population ethics.

It's unclear why we should exclude non-secular population ethicists (starting with Plato, but not least Berkeley, Malthus, and Nassau Senior all of whom shaped the early utilitarians), although (recall) Parfit has soft-Nietzschean reasons for doing so, but it is left unclear whether MacAskill endorses these. Even so, MacAskill's historical claim is odd. Some of the most important innovations in early twentieth century social and biological sciences and statistical technique (associated with names like Galton, Pearson, Fisher, Edgeworth, and Haldane)* are intertwined with population ethics (and eugenics). I am almost inclined to joke that in their age we even developed a fallacy, 'the naturalistic' one so as to avoid tainting doctrines with their sordid origins.

While undoubtedly some early utilitarians were pioneering population ethicists, it seems unfair to ignore the pre-utilitarian population ethicists of imperialists political arithmeticians like William Petty (seventeenth century), who put the art of managing populations by modern states on a more scientific footing while terrorizing the Irish. The managing of the size and quality of populations was an intrinsic part of the (quite 'secular') art of government in the reason of state tradition of the sixteenth century, too. In fact, civilizations (including feudal orders) that emphasize 'good breeding' (a phrase that had a positive connotation until quite recently) are generally self-consciously engaged in population ethics (even if their cost-benefit analysis deviates from MacAskill's).

Of course, MacAskill's focus is not on the past, but the future. It's notable that population ethics is said to be essential to longtermism. This is by no means intuitive. If one is attached to, say, the survival of civilization, or one wishes to evaluate if one ought to be concerned with it, one need not articulate this or defend it in terms of (a) population ethics focused on wellbeing. MacAskill often writes as if it's the only ethical long game in town. But, as Itai Sher notes, there are passages where MacAskill allows for "non-welfarist, non-utilitarian values" but that means that either his population ethics is itself a mixed (ad hoc) bag or not intrinsic to longtermism. 

To be sure, in between the lines, MacAskill is aware that some wish to promote perpetual peace (which he seems to associate with Steve Pinker, see p. 297 n. 60), but as I noted before (in part 2), he treats this possibility not in terms of, say, a regime of human rights enforcement, but exclusively in terms of "world government" and, so, as undesirable. (158) Of course, there may be other ends (e.g., elimination of hunger, the promotion of leisure, or, more elitist, the arts and sciences) that might make the extension of civilization worth having. Or, perhaps, civilization is intrinsically caught up in social domination, and the anarchists are right that we should aim to abolish it in the long run.

What's odd about doubling down on population ethics is that it both encourages us to take an unhealthy amount of interest in the quality of lives of other people's children and that it encourages us to make calculations that are without any solid ground. On the latter, Itai Sher (who is much more sympathetic to the project than I am) observes that the book makes "too many heroic assumptions and tries to estimate too many things that can't be estimated." That is, MacAskill is completely unwilling to take the significance of Keynesian and Knightian uncertainty seriously at all. Keynes (who had a non-trivial interest in population ethics) wrote in 1937:

The sense in which I am using the term ['uncertainty'] is that in which the prospect of a European war is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence, or the obsolescence of a new invention, or the position of private wealth owners in the social system in 1970. About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever.

In some respects, perhaps, our judgments have become more optimistic (we have tools that can help us estimate, say, the price of copper a few decades out), Keynes' general underlying outlook strikes me as sound. Very long-term forecasting is very difficult. In fact, often the short term calculations are difficult, too. Recently, Peter Singer was unusually sober when asked to comment on the significance of the collapse of FTX and its implications on earning-to-give:

“I think in general, a lot more good has been done by earning-to-give than harm, at least up until the collapse of FTX, which has certainly caused a lot more harm than any other [example]” says Singer. “It’s very hard to reckon up the total balance sheet on that.”--The Guardian (December 23).+

There is an ambiguity here in whether Singer thinks it's difficult to do a cost-benefit analysis on earning-to-give or on the collapse of FTX. But for my present purposes that's irrelevant. If we find it so difficult indeed to weigh up the net costs and benefits of known actions today, how much more difficult does it become when we look into the downstream effects of the very long future. (I return to MacAskill's promotion of earning-to give (pp 232-233) some other time.)

It is worth noting, especially because Itai is too polite to do so, that MacAskill (nearly always) plays the 'uncertainty card' in the opposite direction: "uncertainty cuts both ways" (89) Outcomes may sneak up on us before we anticipate it. And this observation is turned into a carte blanche by MacAskill to posit all kinds of estimates (with incredible precision and confidence), for example "I don't think one could reasonably go lower than a 10 percent chance of AGI in the next fifty years." (91) As I remarked on his use of the Solow-Swan model, it is notable that such claims are not even made (pro forma) as ceteris paribus judgments. (All the more striking because MacAskill co-authored a highly regarded work on moral uncertainty.)

In general, population ethics generates an unhealthy interest in other people's reproductive choices. And so, it is no surprise that population ethics is repeatedly entangled in eugenics and race science. And folk who are attracted to this topic tend to take pride in their own steadfast ability to look cold facts into the eyes and their capacity for plain speaking. MacAskill himself is a lot more cautious, and treats such topics in terms of 'fitness landscapes' and organism's and cultural 'traits.'

The key issue is, of course, how MacAskill proposes to achieve the dominance of certain traits. When it comes to action MacAskill never explicitly suggests that others are directly forced to join in. (He is clearly more interested in building a voluntary social movement.) But it does not mean coercion is absent from the framework. For, MacAskill does promote "political activism" and "voting" (233) to get governments on board with his program. But he is not transparent about how much coercion governments can use subsequently to promote particular fitness landscapes alongside growing populations. (Here it does look like the ends will justify most means.)

Sometimes one is told that inattention to population ethics is also a (de facto) population policy. That's true enough. But there is an also a cost (even an opportunity cost) involved in paying too much attention to population ethics. After all, most population ethicists of the past were unduly worried about the quality of other people's children (the poor, the Irish, the Jews, etc.).

At first sight, MacAskill really does better: he phrases his claims primarily in terms of population size (more is better). In fact, throughout the book there is an argument for having more children. And this, in turn, is justified consequentially, "when children grow up they contribute to public goods through their taxes, they build infrastructure, and they develop and champion new ideas about how to live and how to structure society." (187; he goes on to suggest that sufficiently good lives are also good for children (188)). It is worth noting that, alas, in some political contexts not all children of all political demographics are perceived as future taxpayers (in some contexts this might even count as a dog whistle).

In the text, MacAskill is explicit that governments should not "restrict people's reproductive rights by...limiting access to contraception or banning abortion." (188) But one need not be a careful logician to realize that this leaves it wide open for a community of longtermists or, if they can persuade them, governments to engage in population policies that either enhance the posited desirable traits of desirable children (that is, future tax payers, infrastructure builders, and idea generators) or privilege those sub-populations that are taken as would-be-good breeders for the desired fitness landscape. (The latter is not science fiction because parental 'risk factors' on the child's future welfare are already often incorporated into, say, IVF policies.) One suspects MacAskill is strategically, even wisely, silent here.**

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hobbes and Descartes on the Distribution of Wit, and some Plato

Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though there bee found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind then another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himselfe any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himselfe.

And as to the faculties of the mind, (setting aside the arts grounded upon words, and especially that skill of proceeding upon generall, and infallible rules, called Science; which very few have, and but in few things; as being not a native faculty, born with us; nor attained, (as Prudence,) while we look after somewhat els,) I find yet a greater equality amongst men, than that of strength. For Prudence, is but Experience; which equall time, equally bestowes on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto. That which may perhaps make such equality incredible, is but a vain conceipt of ones owne wisdome, which almost all men think they have in a greater degree, than the Vulgar; that is, than all men but themselves, and a few others, whom by Fame, or for concurring with themselves, they approve. For such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; Yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves: For they see their own wit at hand, and other mens at a distance. But this proveth rather that men are in that point equall, than unequall. For there is not ordinarily a greater signe of the equall distribution of any thing, than that every man is contented with his share.--Hobbes (1651) Leviathan, Chapter 13.

As regular readers know I am rather fond of these two paragrahs in Hobbes and I treat them as foundational to my own methodological analytic egalitarianism (MAE) [recall here; here and originally here]. But recently, during a seminar discussion, I noticed two features that invite reconsideration. First, in the top paragraph, it is striking that when Hobbes justifies that the strength of body is sufficiently equal, he appeals to a political mechanism that has solved what  we may call the original coordination problem (confederacy). This is a bit awkward for two reasons (;) because such fundamental equality is a kind of premise or step in the argment that is supposed to lead to the social contract in the state of nature. But here we are informed that even in nature, political alliance secures such equality. This is not the place to elaborate what this signifies, but the paragraph suggests to me that for Hobbes politics ("secret machination") is constitutive of human co-existence. The state of nature is not, as it sometimes taken to be, pre-political. About that some other time more. But (ii) the capacity to enter into sucessful confederacy with others (or to execute "secret machination" successfully) seems to presuppose non-trivial social intelligence. And while it can provide evidence for bodily equality, it seems to undermine the idea that we are truly equal (intellectually). I return to this in the paragraph below the next one.

It's also worth noting that in that first paragraph, Hobbes here is recalling some key features of Glaucon's version of the social contract in at Republic 358E-359B: that is, "those who lack the power to avoid [being harmed by others] and [unable to impose harms on others] determine that it is for their profit to make a compact with one another" (translated by Shorey).I don't mean to suggest Hobbes is deliberately evoking Plato here, but I do think it possible that there is a more general moral lurking here: in order to argue for the conceptual possibility for an egalitarian social contract that has normative or political authority, the construct seems to rest on a prior step in which the many collaborate in subdueing the strong.

My second point pertains to the final three sentences of the second quoted paragraph above (and these I will connect to Hobbes below). Here, in line with my remark above, Hobbes does not really affirm equal mental capacity in extensional terms. (The existence of rhetoric and science, and perhaps education more generally undermines it.) But this extensional perspective is not really doing the work there. He switches to an intensional context, and points out that we all tend to believe we're smart (in the way at Lake Wobegon parents think their child above average) and that we do not tend to envy other people their smarts. Hobbes is articulating here an envy-free distributive principle, which is a key criterion for an egalitarian distribution of an item.

He explains the endorsement of one's own sufficient keen intelligence ('wit') in terms of a kind of perspectival bias--we are too close to ourselves to judge this really impartially. But interestingly enough, the fact that we're free of envy of other people's smarts suggests that this kind of perspectival bias is itself equally distributed among us.

Of course, Hobbes is also being very funny here (and kind of implying he is smarter for noticing this), because on the whole wisdom is in short supply. In conversation, some people deny what Hobbes attributes to them--they are modest and genuinely wish they were as smart as others. In my view these putative counterexamples are not very problematic to Hobbes because such people are not a source of the kind of political trouble he worries about (ambition): as he puts it in chapter XI, "Men that have a strong opinion of their own wisdome in matter of government, are disposed to Ambition. " In chapter 13, he is not too worried that people will think they are not sufficiently equal to others and so can be rightfully denied political equality. (A theorist of adaptive preferences or structural injustice may well worry more.)  

It occurred to me,  too, that in these three sentences, Hobbes is trolling Descartes with whom he had an unfruitful, acrimonious exchange, published in 1641 as part of the "Objections and Replies" to/in the Meditations. For Hobbes is here evoking, even adopting for his own ends, the then famous opening lines of Part 1 of Descartes' (1637) Discourse on method. Descartes starts with pretty much the same envy-free criterion to establish the equal distribution of good sense:

Good sense [bon sens] is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed; for every one thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that those even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else, do not usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already possess. And in this it is not likely that all are mistaken the conviction is rather to be held as testifying that the power of judging aright and of distinguishing truth from error, which is properly what is called good sense or reason, is by nature equal in all men; and that the diversity of our opinions, consequently, does not arise from some being endowed with a larger share of reason than others, but solely from this, that we conduct our thoughts along different ways, and do not fix our attention on the same objects. For to be possessed of a vigorous mind is not enough; the prime requisite is rightly to apply it. The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellences, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations; and those who travel very slowly may yet make far greater progress, provided they keep always to the straight road, than those who, while they run, forsake it.--Descartes (1637) Discourse on Method, part 1.*

The Discourse on Method is not read much in political philosophy/theory, even though it has quite a bit of pertinent material (recall here; and here).

Of course, Hobbes and Descartes may not saying exactly the same thing (wisdom is not often thought identical to good sense/reason). I am unsure what Hobbes' definition of wisdom in Leviathan is, but in the dedication to  his (1651) De Cive, Hobbes writes that "Wisdome properly so call'd is nothing else but this, The perfect knowledge of the Truth in all matters whatsoever." Leaving aside if wisdom is then possible in reality, this definition suggests that wisdom is considerably rarer than we tend to think it.

Whereas Descartes is suggesting that the capacity to distinguish truth from error is available to us all. That we are led into error is fundamentally the effect of the diversity of or developmental paths and our diverging interests (we conduct our thoughts along different ways, and do not fix our attention on the same objects.) Our life's experience corrupts our capacity to distinguish true from false.

Somewhat surprisingly Descartes goes on to deny the natural equality he had just diagnosed with an intentional envy free criterion, by offering the following extentional judgment: "The greatest minds, as they are capable of the highest excellences, are open likewise to the greatest aberrations." Descartes here echoes a rather important passage [491D] Plato's Republic that one can naturally read as concerned with the inductive risk of the teaching of philosophy to ambitious and smart types  [like Alcibiades].[Recall also Ibn Rushd's commentary here.]

Descartes treats reason as the capacity to distinguish truth from falsity. It's pretty clear that Hobbes thinks this a mistake (and I suspect that's the trolling). For Hobbes defines reason, in deflationary fashion, as "nothing but Reckoning" and, in particular, of tracking "the Consequences of generall names agreed upon, for the Marking and Signifying of our thoughts; I say Marking them, when we reckon by our selves; and Signifying, when we demonstrate, or approve our reckonings to other men." (see chapter 5 of Leviathan, emphasis added). What reason really does, for Hobbes, is keep track of our linguistic conventions. 

 

 

The Culture Wars, the Contradictions of our Age, and the Liberalism of Reparations.

Once upon a time the United States of America was a de jure racist society. As was much of the world beyond its borders, controlled as it was by racist European empires. There was a broadly understood and explicitly codified and enforced racial organisation of who could live where, of how individuals could interact, of what sort of jobs were appropriate for whom, of how law and order would operate — or wouldn’t (Wells-Barnett 1895). The science (Morris 2015), sport (Rogosin 2007), and artistic culture of the day (Cooper 1892), were largely carried out in conformity with, if not support of, racist norms. Gross or subtle as it may have been in any given instance, the colour line ran through everything and one crossed it only at great personal peril (Du Bois 1904, 530).

But mountains crumble and rivers disappear, new roads replace the old, stones are buried and vanish in the earth. Time passes and the world changes. So it was that eventually this de jure racist system went the way of all things. The civil war overthrew the slave regime. Racial immigration laws were repealed. The civil rights act made various sorts of explicitly racist laws and practices impermissible. By the latter half of the 20th century it was clear an officially endorsed de jure racial caste system was no longer to hold sway in American life. Likewise abroad the great European empires fell, and in their place sprang up a plethora of nations governed by formerly colonised peoples. All things considered, the 20th century saw de jure racism suffer a world-historic defeat...

Whatever else changed, the people who have the stuff still tend to be white, and blacks must still sell our labour to them if we are to get by.

In this way American domestic politics mirrored the broader global trends of a post imperial world (Táíwò 2022a, ch.2). The European empires despoiled and depopulated nations (Davis 2002, Marschal 2017). What they left in their wake were often under-developed economies (Rodney 1972) and institutional structures ripe to be taken over by local elites who could simply continue the pattern of authoritarian wealth extraction (Fanon 1961, ch.3; Acemoglu & Robinson 2012). But the end of formal colonisation did not generally lead to reparations. For the most part agents based in the former colonial metropoles retained ownership of key resources and even infrastructure (Nkrumah 1965), and if anything inefficiencies in the credit market have led to a net capital flow from the former colonies to the former colonisers (Picketty 2015, 58). Neither domestically nor internationally did a change in cultural attitudes and legal permissions correlate with a change in racial patterns of ownership. As such, many of the material patterns of inequality from the bad old days of de jure racist regimes have survived the demise of their former ideological superstructure.

Returning to the US, these persistent material inequalities have consequences for occupational inequality....

And the political intelligentsia are still largely white, which has arguably affected the content and focus of their work (Mills 2017). This then is where history has placed us. The maddening ambiguity of our position is what leads to the titular white psychodrama. One cannot reconcile oneself to this society because it constantly pulls in two directions - it presents one with an ideological narrative that speaks of equality, and a material structure that witnesses rank inequality. At some level this society just does not make sense to itself, its own ideology out of whack with the plain facts of its own existence. There are those who are tempted to focus only on the positives, and see in this a story of triumphant progress towards racial justice or a post-racial future. And there are those who are inclined to see in it a story of eternal recurrence, racism ever reinventing itself. But both of these perspectives are too tidy to capture the phenomenon. For this story is of a world and a nation in contradiction with itself.

...How then do people respond to the facts relayed in this historical narrative, and what does it mean for their ability to reconcile themselves to their own social order?--Liam Kofi Bright (2022, forthcoming) "White Psychodrama" Journal of Political Philosophy. [Emphasis added]

Kofi Bright introduces his paper (with nods to Hegel and Rawls) with a methodological aspiration: "One might hope that [i] philosophy could reconcile ourselves to our social world and [ii] each other. To entertain this as plausible is to think [iii] there is some perspective one could reach via philosophical inquiry that [iv] shows our life and society to be as they are for good reason, [v] allowed us to see it all as in some sense rational." (Numbers added to facilitate discussion.) And while I have a growing self-awareness that many of these digressions are modest impressions on or an occasional, recalcitrant modest 'yes but' to Liam Kofi Bright's evolving oeuvre, I have never thought of philosophy as a means to [i-v]. Maybe I am too angry or vain to become identical with such a thought, but neither 'reconciliation' nor 'rationality' ever become applied to my conceptualization(s) of our lives and society. And this, alongside my close vicinity to (if not outright membership in) the "political intelligentsia," makes me suspect with growing dread that I may well be (one of the minor cogs that is) the subject matter of "White Psychodrama."

The methodological aspiration that introduces the paper is partially echoed in the question that closes the block quote at the top of this post (which is the culmination of a section titled, "A Narrative Of How We Got Here.") But there philosophy and 'us' are absent. So, lurking in Liam Kofi Bright's paper is a soft opposition, perhaps it's just a matter of degree, between the orientation characteristic of philosophy and that of the political intelligentsia. Both are thought to reconcile themselves to the world, but only in philosophy can we come to understand the world as rational. That is to say, lurking in Liam Kofi Bright's analysis is a traditional (familiar from Plato, Al-Farabi, Smith, Madison, Arendt, etc.) distinction between the opinions (or ideology) of the political intelligentsia and the episteme (or theodicy rationalizations) of the philosophers.

I don't mean to suggest that Liam Kofi Bright engages in the fallacy of the overlooked alternatives. He recognizes "there may not be such a perspective. Perhaps to see the world aright is to recognise it as a jumbled mess, with no progressive tendency towards greater coherence, and no satisfaction to be had in achieving superior insight. Perhaps there is no good end we are collaboratively working towards, no possible reconciliation with each other; maybe we are perpetually on the brink of descending once more into a Hobbesian nightmare." But what's important about this explicit recognition is that it suggests we're in a high stakes context: the inability to even conceptualise reconciliation is to be some way down a slippery slope toward murderous anarchy. Despite the British spelling, there is no option of mere muddling through (or exiting to a desert island) in his set up. Given that the explicit background is slavery, empire, and genocide, this may be fair enough.

Of course, the way the methodological aspiration is formulated might suggest a quietist attitude. But that would be misleading, Liam Kofi Bright also emphatically claims, "We ought then make the social world worthy of reconciliation." Let's call this the 'revolutionary impulse' in his argument. And, perhaps, my alertness to this impulse is my occasion to highlight the claim that the world and nation is in contradiction with itself. In material dialectics such a diagnosis of self-contradiction is, of course, the funnel toward certain kind of revolutionary action. As he puts it (echoing MLKjr's comments to Harry Belafonte, but unusually in a paper dense with references without citation,) "We cannot and ought not reconcile ourselves to a society wrapped up in its own contradictions, no more than we should seek to integrate into a burning house."

Now at this point one may well suspect that one is listening in on a conversation that may not include everyone as agents in the earlier 'we'. I don't think that's right, but it is worth quoting the full passage to see how easy one can misread the essay:

Here I am interested in how our peculiar socio-economic conditions shape the contours and possible points of resolution in the cultural debate around issues of race. It shall be seen that characteristic responses to our social order, which I shall describe through stylised character archetypes, make it impossible for any lasting reconciliation to be had for participants in the culture war. Instead our responses both generate and constitute a kind of racialised psychopathology, that I describe as white psychodrama. Given this analysis of the social order and its sources of psychic incoherence, I will suggest a way forward. My hope is that this will at least help people of colour caught in the midst of this work towards a world we can live in, and by seeing ourselves as so working reconcile ourselves to our actual present social activities. We cannot and ought not reconcile ourselves to a society wrapped up in its own contradictions, no more than we should seek to integrate into a burning house. But we can come to see ourselves as knowingly and self-consciously working to resolve those contradictions, quenching that fire, and laying the foundations for a better structure that we may all live comfortably therein.

One may well think that the intended audience of 'we' here, is "people of colour" or "the PoC intelligentsia." And, if one reads hastily, one may well wonder if all of this isn't just a call to burn it all down.

But I don't think it's the only audience or that the content of revolution here is destructive. After all, Kofi Bright is not advocating letting the fire consume the house, rather he is explicit in calling for the fire to be quenched. And that quenching and rebuilding is only possible, if I understand him correctly, after reparations.* 

Now, at this point -- knowing my bourgeois, liberal proclivities -- you may suspect I will denounce the revolutionary ardor of Kofi Bright. But I don't view reparations or compensation for injustices suffered as a illiberal, a category error, or a radical step too far. After all, (recall) the Federal Republic of Germany, then governed by (relatively conservative) Ordo-liberals explicitly recognized the ideal of reoperations as the start of a proper response to the genocidal atrocities of Nazism and to make living in a common home, however imperfectly, possible. From the liberal perspective, reparations are the ground zero for massive historical injustices in order to make non-zero-sum interactions available to all of us.+ 

As an aside, Rawlsianism and (even more) utilitarianism have a tendency to privilege forward-looking theorizing and to encourage a kind of forgetting of the past. (This is a feature not a bug in much liberal philosophy.) And this leads them to the familiar sophisms that block reparations in their analyses;  that the status quo provides the solid foundations for the future.

So, clearly there is a possible task for the white political intelligentsia lurking in Kofi Bright's analysis and rhetoric: that is, it is to reject the Repenter stance (who leaves structures alone and only focuses on individual racial improvements) as much as the Represser stance (who would like racial bygones to be bygones). Now, from a Marxist perspective this is an invitation to be a race traitor. (There is no doubt that successful revolutions require them.) And one may well suspect that there are many incentives that despite the effectiveness of Liam Kofi Bright's rhetoric prevent the move from Repenter/Represser to pro-reparations (and "to realise racially egalitarian group ideals.")

But to make integration in the same house possible is, as Lea Klarenbeek (building on Haslanger's ideas) has shown, a two-way process. This process is, thus, much easier when the pie that is to be divided is being enlarged (and so liberalism and markets get a toe-hold back in). How to do so without worsening the climate crisis is a real challenge technologically, economically, and politically. But the task of the bourgeois intelligentsia is not to be a source of diversion, but to articulate the real social problems and to amplify the solutions that experts and social movements devise which will strengthen the survival of democratic self-government and rule of law.

So, while I agree that my kind is primarily engaged in "a conflict over how to psychologically manage the results of living in a materially deeply unequal society," I view reparations as the right thing to do and a sine qua non reformist move to make such stress much better manageable. Material and political inequalities are, I suspect, part of the human condition, but partially repairing the past as a means to more solid foundations is in our power, even now. And if advocating reparations is treated as Repenter-on-steroids-syndrome, I accept the moniker. 

 

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 Tyranny and Method: Vlastos vs Strauss

I noted a few weeks ago that near the end of his career, in (1991) Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher, Vlastos praises "Irwin's brilliant review of Leo Strauss." (I noted, too, that Irwin's review is nothing of the sort--it's a non-review, and would be thought scandalous if professional philosophy weren't also, at times, political in character.) Vlastos makes this claim in note 71, which is about the "shortcomings of Xenophon's perceptions of Socrates as a philosopher." Note 71 is attached to the following passage.

One could hardly imagine a man who in taste, temperament, and critical equipment (or lack of it) would differ as much as did Xenophon from leading members of the inner Socratic circle. The most important difference, of course, is that people like Plato, Aristippus, Antisthenes, Euclid, Phaedo were philosophers with aggressively original doctrines of their own, one of them a very great philosopher, while Xenophon, versatile and innovative litterateur, creator of whole new literary genres, does not seem versed nearly as well as they in philosophy or as talented in this area.'71 This is the first thing we need to understand about him, if we are to use his witness about Socrates, as we must, for we cannot afford to neglect a single scrap of first-hand testimony, as Xenophon's no doubt is.--"The evidence of Aristotle and Xenophon," p. 99.

The reason, then, that Vlastos needs note 71, is to block the idea that [a] Xenophon was a very good or able philosopher in order support Vlastos' claim that [b] Xenophon is the odd man out of the leading people in the inner Socratic circle. Vlastos (1907-1991) goes on to claim in the note that "For what can be said on Xenophon's behalf by a spirited, intelligently non-Straussian defender, see Morrison, 1987: 9-22." What follows from this, then, is that Vlastos recognizes that the Straussian (and Strauss) accepts something like [a] and denies [b].*

This post originates in my interest in finding critical engagements with Leo Strauss within analytic philosophy in Strauss' lifetime during the post-WWII era (triggered by (recall here; here; here; especially this one; here; and here; here) an invite by Sander Verhaegh). And it's clear that by the time of Irwin's (1974) review of Strauss' Xenophon's Socrates in The Philosophical Review which appeared within a year after Strauss' death (1973), the convention within analytic circles of disparaging Strauss and Straussians in print was established.

It is worth noting that Vlastos didn't need to appeal to Irwin for the denial of [a]. He always thought that Xenophon had a "pedestrian mind" who probably couldn't "rise to such [platonic/philosophical] refinements." (Vlastos reviewing On Tyranny by Leo Strauss with a preface by Alvin Johnson (1951) The Philosophical Review, 60(4): 593.)+ I am quoting a bit out of context, but the point stands. In fact, Vlastos' 1951 review of Strauss' (1948) treatment of Xenophon's Hiero is a much better review qua the platonic form of a review than Irwin's (although that low bar turns out not to be cleared by much). Vlastos' (1951) review starts as follows:

Xenophon's Hiero turns to the much debated question whether the tyrant can be happy and answers it with an emphatic affirmative. The tyrant Hiero concedes that what ruins his chances of happiness is mainly the distrust and hostility of his subjects. The poet Simonides replies that this is just what can be fixed; he offers a recipe of skillful and generous statesmanship which will make him loved and, therefore, happy.

Professor Strauss cannot bring himself to believe that a pupil of Socrates could have condoned tyranny to the extent of assuring tyrants that they can be happy and showing them how. So he argues, against the general view, that the "tyrannical" teaching of Simonides in this dialogue is not Xenophon's own; to get at the latter one must "add to, and subtract from Hiero's and Simonides' speeches" (p. 50). The plusses and minuses to the text with which he seeks to redeem Xenophon's Socratic virtue would have astonished the retired colonel who was nothing if not plain spoken and straightforward. Short of its subtleties, the argument boils down to the question: Are the views of Simonides here demonstrably at variance with those we can certainly ascribe to Xenophon on the strength of his other writings. (592)

This passage does not assert the denial of [a], but the way Xenophon is described [c] "the retired colonel who was nothing if not plain spoken and straightforward" contributes to it. The problem with [c] is that Vlastos should have known better. As he notes in 1991 (quoted above), whatever else he was, Xenophon, was a [d] "versatile and innovative litterateur." And while it's possible to reconcile [c] with [d] in all kinds of ways that preserve Vlastos' position (and make it coherent in the technical sense), the much more natural interpretation of Xenophon is, once one recognizes him for the "versatile and innovative litterateur" that he is acknowledged to be, that [e] Xenophon sometimes presents himself as plain spoken and straightforward, but that this is part of his larger literary skill. Notice that strictly speaking [e] is completely agnostic on [a] and even on the right interpretation of the Hiero.

Now, at this point it would be natural to evaluate Vlastos' criticism of Strauss' reading of the Hiero on its merits. But it is worth noting that here Vlastos does not object to Strauss' methodology (with its willingness to engage in esoteric readings) as such. Rather he thinks it badly suited to Xenophon, who is simply claimed to be not that kind of thinker. In fact, it would be wrong to treat Vlastos in 1951 as an anti-Straussian (avant la lettre) or even a fierce critic of Strauss. Here is an excerpt from the final paragraph of the review:

Those who have read and admired Professor Strauss's earlier book on Hobbes will be disappointed in this monograph. The author's learning is still considerable, the agility of his mind exceptional; the weak ness of this work can be traced directly to his present addiction to the strange notion that a historical understanding of a historical thinker is somehow a philosophical liability. If the author had used, instead of spurning, the historical method (surely not to be confused with "historicism"), he would have seen two clues out of the problem raised by the Hiero's lessons in happy and virtuous tyranny. For one thing, the historical Xenophon was not just a shadow of Socrates. He was an upper-class Athenian, an ardent admirer of Sparta, and most of all a successful military commander, bent on generalizing the art of efficient man-management from the army camp to all areas of human relation ships, political, domestic, and economic. (593)

Vlastos' admiration of Strauss' (1936) The Political Philosophy of Hobbes is, I suspect, sincere. (In it, Strauss had put Hobbes in context with great detail to Hobbes' development.) And, in fact, Vlastos treats Strauss as having switched methodology between 1936 and 1948 from the 'historical method' to the method of 'plusses and minuses to the text.' In order to avoid confusion (with historicism), let's call the historical method which aims at historical understanding, 'contextualism.' 

However, it is pretty clear that whatever Strauss is up to in On Tyranny, it's not merely historical understanding. This becomes obvious from the 1954 (French) and 1963 (English) editions expanded with the material of the Strauss Kojève debate (recall my post on Pippin's three essays). The correspondence between Strauss and Kojève  makes clear that Strauss actively sought out Kojève's review.** And in light of the debate, it's quite impossible to ignore the fact that On Tyranny is also an intervention in contemporary philosophy (and, perhaps even, the political atmosphere). [I am not alone in noticing this; see the then contemporary review by Robert D. Cumming in JPhil.]

To be sure, one may  well argue that contextualism and its output, historical understanding, are capable of preparing the way for an intervention in contemporary philosophy. But they are not the same thing. 

And, in fact, I am not guilty of prolepsis here. Because Strauss is quite explicit about of his official intentions for the book on the first page of his analysis: "tyranny is a danger coeval with political life" and this is why he submits it to "political scientists." He goes on to claim:

The analysis of tyranny that was made by the first political scientists was so dear, so comprehensive, and so unforgettably expressed that it was remembered and understood by generations which did not have any direct experience of actual tyranny. On the other hand, when we were brought face to face with tyranny-with a kind of tyranny that surpassed the boldest imagination of the most powerful thinkers of the past-our political science failed to recognize it. (Expanded and Revised (2002) edition, pp. 22-23--all my quotes of Strauss are from this edition.)

So, Strauss is clearly trying to instruct and correct a manifest failure of contemporary political science, and by retrieving Xenophon (who seems to be treated as a 'political scientist') to (and to be cheeky) correct for a Kuhn-loss. And, in fact, Strauss immediately makes an important categorical distinction between two kinds of tyranny: (i) the 'elementary natural form of tyranny' of classical periods; and (ii) the (what we might call) 'monstrous' (or totalitarian) tyranny of our age which can draw on a "science applied to "the conquest of nature" [and] ...popularized and diffused," (23) that is the Enlightenment project. What they have in common is that they are an "essentially...faulty political order." (66)

Vlastos' reading of Strauss' work is, thus, actually quite puzzling. (Also in light of Strauss' motto from Macaulay.) It completely and rather comically misses the stated point of Strauss' book. To anticipate my conclusion: it fails as a book-review. Again, to assert this is not to take sides in the debate over [a].

What is, curious, however, is that Vlastos explicitly recognizes that Xenophon was a kind of expert in 'man-management' and so may well have something to teach in what one may call the art of government even if it is limited by the fact that his art primarily is derived from the army camp. That is, even if one were to grant that one shouldn't read Xenophon in order to understand (say) liberal democracy, I think it's pretty obvious that Vlastos himself should have been able to grasp that from his own commitments about Xenophon, he might well be worth reading on tyranny (if this is understood, say, as the art of efficient 'man-management' on the plan of an army camp.)

Let me wrap up. According to Vlastos, Strauss is wrong to claim [f] "that the "tyrannical" teaching of Simonides in [Hiero] is not Xenophon's own." (592) Most of Vlastos' review is really about contesting this claim (and the denial of [a] is in support of [f].) However, what is most peculiar about Vlastos' presentation of Strauss' position is that Strauss actually explicitly denies that Simonides fully endorses tyranny: "to see the broad outline of Simonides' criticism of tyranny at its best, one has only to consider the result of his suggested correction of tyranny..." (68)

It gets stranger; recall that Vlastos claims that "Professor Strauss cannot bring himself to believe that a pupil of Socrates could have condoned tyranny." But this, in fact, is what Strauss explicitly does allow. He assert that "While Xenophon seems to have believed that beneficent tyranny or the rule of a tyrant who listens to the counsels of the wise is, as a matter of principle, preferable to the rule of laws or to the rule of elected magistrates as such, he seems to have thought that tyranny at its best could hardly, if ever, be realized." (75, emphasis added)

To put this in anachronistic terms: Strauss explicitly diagnoses in Xenophon a preference for what we might call the ideal type of benevolent dictatorship as an ideal worth having. (To say that is not to claim that such benevolent dictatorship is the best kind of rule for Xenophon, or that absent the influence of the wise, tyranny has anything to say for it.)  So, it is a mistake to claim that Strauss deviates from the "general view" of the interpretation of the Hiero as such.

To sum up: Vlastos's review fails to convey accurately what Strauss' book is about, and fails to convey properly Strauss' views. What Vlastos does properly convey is that Strauss' interpretation of Xenophon deviates from contextualism and relies on a method of interpretation that would be a source of ongoing controversy about Strauss. And eventually this controversy of his method, in turn, has functioned as a mechanism (for the allocation of scarce jobs and) not to engage with the underlying ideas of Strauss. (That's compatible with these being false or worse.) But, as we have seen in this series of posts, Vlastos' (1951) stance was still the outlier. Through the 1950s and early 1960s Strauss was debated on the merits of his arguments by analalytic types. And in my next post I turn to Yolton's (1955) reflection on Strauss' Natural Right and History, which in many ways is the most serious 'analytic' response to Strauss on record that I have been able to locate. To be continued.