Digressions&Impressions

A rant on FTX, William MacAskill, and Utilitarianism

Philosophy goes through self-conscious, periodic bouts of historical forgetting.* These are moments when philosophical revolutionaries castigate the reading of books and the scholastic jargon to be found in there, and invite us to think for ourselves and start anew with a new method or new techniques, or new ways of formulating questions (and so on). When successful, what follows tends to be beautiful, audacious conceptual and even material world-building (in which sometimes old material is quietly recycled or reinterpreted). Hobbes, Descartes, Bentham, Frege, and Carnap are some paradigmatic exemplars of the phenomenon (that has something in common with, of course, religious reformations and scientific revolutions). There is a clear utility in not looking back.

What’s unusual about utilitarianism is not that it’s a nearly continuous intellectual tradition that is more than two centuries rich. Even if we start the clock with the pre-Socratics that’s not yet a very old tradition by the standards of the field. But rather that it has become so cavalier about curating and reflecting on its own tradition. In one sense that’s totally understandable from within the tradition: the present just is the baseline from which we act or design institutions or govern society (etc.). Spending time on the past just is opportunity costs foregone or, worse, a sunk-cost fallacy. Worrying about path dependencies and endowment effects prevents one from the decisive path forward.

Of course, the previous paragraph is too crude: some active utilitarians write with sensitivity and care about the less savory parts of tradition’s past (I think of Bart Schultz); And certainly Julia Driver has shown that moral complexity can be fruifully discussed in the tradition. Yet, most of what’s produced about the past from within the tradition is either very narrowly focused or the product of people who don’t really develop the tradition forward. (This claim becomes more evident if you look at the practice of Kantianism, Humeanism, and the variety of virtue ethics out there. Even within formal philosophy there is better curating of their own past.) Nothing has matched Halevy’s The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism in the century since it has appeared in richness and insight (and philosophically it is by no means without problems). Obviously, too much looking back stalls progress (one may think that this what happened say, within, phenomenology or Austrian economics at one point or another), but never checking the rearview mirror also generates certain known risks.

In fact, there is a clear recruiting advantage to this march-forward stance. The barriers to entry are very low, the fundamental principles are well developed and clear enough, and one can start making progress within utilitarianism or applying it to sets of problems rather quickly. And while that’s a gross simplification for areas where there has been lots of existing utilitarian activity, it remains true in the large. If you are earnest and want to improve the world, utilitarianism gives you ready-made tools to think about doing so!  And what tools–elegant, systematizing, and action-guiding! That they risk flattening things is a virtue not a bug. And because the baseline is given, a side effect has been that working within existing institutions is seen as more efficient and more promising to contribute to improving the world –say by making lots of money trading in crypto-currency — than by tackling some of the opaque, entrenched structural injustices through the political processes that got us here.

That’s to say, within utilitarianism there is a curious, organic forgetting built into the way it’s practiced, especially by the leading lights who shape it as an intellectual movement within philosophy (and economics, of course), and as a social movement. And this is remarkable because utilitarianism for all its nobility and good effects has been involved in significant moral and political disasters involving not just, say, coercive negative eugenics and – while Bentham rejected this — imperialism (based on civilizational superiority commitments in Mill and others), but a whole range of bread and butter social debacles that are the effect of once popular economics or well-meaning government policy gone awry. But in so far as autopsies are done by insiders they never question that it is something about the character of utilitarian thought, when applied outside the study, that may be the cause of the trouble (it’s always misguided practitioners, the circulation of false beliefs, the wrong sort of utilitarianism, etc.).

In my view there is no serious study within the utilitarian mainstream that takes the inductive risk of itself seriously and – and this is the key part – has figured out how to make it endogenous to the practice. This is actually peculiar because tracking inductive risk just is tracking consequences and (if you wish) utils. It is especially odd because there is, within utilitarianism, a continuous return to the question — which in a way is crying out for an inductive risk analysis — of how much lying and deception of the public is permissible, or to be precise, “the possibility of esoteric morality.” (I also find it odd that this literature is part of the public, credit economy rather than an oral tradition. But what do I know about esotericism?)

For example, the best example I am familiar with that has really started to do something like what I propose within philosophy (within economics I warmly recommend work by David M. Levy, Sandra Peart, and Thomas C. Leonard), from someone who at least gives utilitarianism all the benefits of the doubt, Allen Buchanan’s (2007) “Institutions, Beliefs and Ethics:  Eugenics as a Case Study” ends up arguing that “ethics must incorporate social moral epistemology, the systematic comparative evaluation of the effectiveness and efficiency of social institutions in producing, transmitting and sustaining the beliefs upon which our moral motivation, judgment and reasoning depend.” This paper has received fewer citations that some of my papers on long dead figures, so it is fair to say it has not generated a major discussion fifteen years on. UPDATE: It has received little scholarly attention.** The most serious response I found suggests (by De Volder, who I admire greatly) basically that ‘this time is different’ (because liberal eugenics does not involve coercion—a claim that is not scrutinized). Maybe I have missed the utilitarian that has taken it seriously, but if it’s out there it has not generated a real debate or uptake.

Notice that Buchanan simply denies the autonomy of ethics. But even if one accepts that diagnosis (and this helps say, guard, against expert over-confidence and misplaced trust in other experts) this does not exhaust the inductive risk. And while in some philosophical theories downstream consequences are shrugged off within utilitarianism today long distance, downstream consequences are the opiate of several projects (including, of course, longtermism). In wider historical context, this unwillingness to take seriously inductive risk of philosophy, in a project that aims to reshape the world, is also odd because the father figure of philosophy, Socrates, was executed, in part, in virtue of the perceived negative effect he had on his students.

Don’t get me wrong utilitarianism is a beautiful, systematic theory, a lovely tool to help navigate acting in the world in a consistent and transparent matter. When used prudently it’s a good way to keep track of one’s assumptions and the relationship between means and ends. But like all tools it has limitations. And my claim is that the tradition refuses to do systematic post-mortems on when the tool is implicated in moral and political debacles. Yes, somewhat ironically, the effective altruism community (in which there is plenty to admire) tried to address this in terms of, I  think, project failure. But that falls short in willing to learn when utilitarianism is likely to make one a danger to innocent others.

This present rant — feel free to check out my more judicious scholarship and blogging about this topic — is obviously triggered by the failure of FTX and the subsequent public comments by William MacAskill, who quite naturally seems angry that he was lied to (although how sincere he is in light of the possibility of esoteric morality I leave to others), and correctly outraged on behalf of the victims that the benefactor of his movement probably committed significant fraud and theft. And if you do not believe me that massive historical forgetting is at play here, at one point in his twitter thread MacAskill writes, “I know that others from inside and outside of the community have worried about the misuse of EA ideas in ways that could cause harm. I used to think these worries, though worth taking seriously, seemed speculative and unlikely.”  As if to think such harms had not already occurred in the past!

I close with one final criticism of MacAskill (who in some ways is a victim of the stories utilitarians tell themselves). When it comes to his own role in the FTX debacle — and the story has been told in many media (in the context of his book launch) — about how he encouraged  Bankman-Fried to embrace “earning to give” over a by now mythical lunch in Cambridge, about that no word in his thread. (Just to be sure, I am actually a fan of effective altruism, albeit a critic of long-termism.)

By framing the problem as Mr. Bankman-Fried’s “integrity” and not the underlying tool, MacAskill will undoubtedly manage to learn no serious lesson at all. I am not implicating utilitarianism in the apparent ponzi scheme. But Bankman-Fried’s own description back in April of his what he was up to should have set off alarm bells among those who associated with him–commentators noticed it bore a clear resemblance to a Ponzi.+ (My regular readers know I am no enemy of markets.) Of course, and I say this especially to my friends who are utilitarians; I have not just discussed a problem only within utilitarianism; philosophy as a professional discipline always assumes its own clean hands, or finds ways to sanitize the existing dirt.

On the Modernity and Popularity of Public Philosophy by Academic Philosophers, and some Foucault on Kant

I sometimes suspect that advocates of public philosophy by academic philosophers [sometimes: PPAP] are (tacitly) are committed to at least two of the following three following propositions.

1. PPAP is a relatively recent invention.
2. Public philosophy is not new at all, it just is (the extension or renewal of) Dewey-ian style pragmatism.
3. Socrates, or the public gadfly, is a good model for PPAP.
4. Public philosophy is the dissemination or making accessible of existing (but otherwise esoteric to the public) philosophical knowledge.

Obviously, this does not exhaust all the possibilities. I want to make two comments about this list. First, those committed to (1.), tend to be analytic philosophers (of the sort that do not tend to understand themselves as intellectual descendants of Dewey--so that can include all kinds of pragmatists). My suspicion for thinking this is that this tribe (my own) has been going through a process of interest and valorization of public philosophy during the last (say) decade. I could point to a lot of blog posts or social media commentary to suggest this (including my own). But this thought also fits with the popularity of the 'icy slopes of logic' thesis (articulated by Reisch) that suggests that analytic philosophy retreated into the ivory tower due to the cold war.

Of course, if the icy slopes of logic thesis were true (which I have been known to doubt), then it follows, almost by definition, that 1 is not true. For, the left wing of Vienna was committed to PPAP. Let's grant that Neurath and Carnap were committed to PPAP before their forced exile. It does not follow that one couldn't say something in the spirit of 1.

One might argue, for example, that as an aspiration PPAP is not recent. But one might say, while reflecting on the fate of the Vienna Circle, that the social conditions to do it right, without danger to oneself (or society, were one takes inductive risk of philosophical praxis seriously) are relatively rare and recent. It's only when what we might call a Mill-ian ethos takes hold of elite/juridical/political institutions (even if grudgingly) and has sufficient popular acceptance then (1.) holds. And we, oh moderns, are blessed with times in which we may think what we like, and say it. Let's call this self-congratulatory stance the Millian Ethos Thesis.

For those who recognize their Spinoza or Hume (or Tacitus) in the previous paragraph, neither were professional academics. Hume famously did not get the job at Edinburgh, Spinoza prudently declined a position at Heidelberg. This failure is especially notable in the case of Hume who starts his Treatise with the express aim to 'to try the taste of the public.'

That such an ethos relatively recent achievement may be illustrated by the fate of (the otherwise well connected) Bertrand Russell, who was sacked from his position at Trinity for his public pacifism during WWI and later was denied a position at City University (for his views on sexual morality and his atheism).* I use Russell here not to argue for the suggestion that PPAP only exists when there is no limitation on what can be said in public, but rather to remind the reader the range of topical constraints that existed until quite recently on the very possibility of PPAP. (There is a real contrast between the way, say, Noam Chomsky has been treated and Russell.)

Second, Socrates is a terrible example of PPAP for mass societies like ours. By this, I don't just mean that he was not an academic and his life ended badly, but also we don't reach anything like 'the public' if we go around a popular spot in town and have elenctic conversations with the folk. (I don't diss the activity, by the way.)  Implicitly this is understood because usually when people talk about public philosophy for our kind, they talk about editorials, TV, podcasts, You Tube channels, etc. These have in common that, with luck, they reach a very wide audience. They also tend to presuppose commitment to (4.) more than (3.), and are often nudged along by grant agencies and administrators.

Of course, when people mention Socrates or Diogenes the Cynic, they really mean something like 'being a gadfly of society.' The problem with a gadfly model is that it often presupposes a kind of persistent challenge to the social and political status quo. Almost no academic has time for that alongside our teaching, publishing, and service obligations. And I know of no modern example that fits the case when one ignores PR machines and looks at the facts dispassionately. (Feel free to offer your examplars.)

These impressions were triggered by reading the following passage in a lecture by Foucault, who was, of course, a significant public philosopher in his own right, to a French group of professional philosophers:

In this definition of the Aufklärung, there will be something which no doubt it may be a little ridiculous to call a sermon, and yet it is very much a call for courage that he sounds in this description of the Aufklärung. One should not forget that it was a newspaper article. There is much work to be done on the relationship between philosophy and journalism from the end of the 18th century on, a study ... Unless it has already been done, but I am not sure of that ... It is very interesting to see from what point on philosophers intervene in newspapers in order to say something that is for them philosophically interesting and which, nevertheless, is inscribed in a certain relationship to the public which they intend to mobilize. And finally, it is characteristic that, in this text on the Aufklärung, Kant precisely gives religion, law and knowledge as examples of maintaining humanity in the minority condition and consequently as examples of points where the Aufklärung, must lift this minority condition and in some way majoritize men. What Kant was describing as the Aufklärung is very much what I was trying before to describe as critique, this critical attitude which appears as a specific attitude in the Western world starting with what was historically, I believe, the great process of society's governmentalization. Michel Foucault (1978) "What is Critique" translated by Lysa Hotroch, reprinted in The Politics of Truth, edited by Sylvere Lotringer, p48. (Ellipses in original)

In the works collected in The Politics of Truth, Foucault expresses similar views, so this is something he clearly reflected on in the last decade of his life. What's neat for our present purposes is that Foucault calls attention to the fact that in "What Is Enlightenment?" Kant engaged in public philosophy, in the sense we tend to use the term today (and as assumed in this post), while also reflecting on the manner of it (and its limits).  Famously, Kant thought that in one's functional role (as professor, cleric, civil servant, etc.) one must be (passively) obedient to authority, while one simultanously one had a duty or at least the freedom to educate the public, including criticism of the authorities without adverse consequences (if one does so in a way that does not undermine now quoting Kant) "the stability of the community."

To what degree such stability really can be reconciled with the mobilizing function Foucault ascribes to Kant's conception of the public use of reason is no easy matter to settle. But it is worth noting that even a hardnosed thinker like Machiavelli (carefully read by both Foucault and Kant) praises the epistemic and social features of Rome's willingness to endure quite a bit of social rowdiness and mobilization as a means toward stabilizing the community (and the evolution of social practices.)+ As an aside, Kant here is at odds with our modern conception of academic freedom, which precisely creates some zone to be critical of one's authorities (and the authorities, and their dogma's) in one's teaching.

What's important to my present purposes is the violation of (4.) in Foucault's treatment of Kant as an exemplar. For while Kant's own view of the free use of public reason, as presented by Foucault (in non-controversial way) sounds something like (4.), the manner in which Kant defends the view is (to quote Foucault) "philosophically interesting." In fact, in a different essay, "What is Enlightenment?" Foucault starts with a contrast between Kant's age of Enlightenment and ours, favorably to the past, in which he describes the present attitude toward in which in public speech/utterances, "there is not much likelihood of learning anything new." This makes our public intellectual life rather boring, as Foucault suggests. (Of course, I am not discussing YOUR contributions to public intellectual life, my dear sophisticated readers.) Even if one suspects that Foucault may be romanticizing the past here, he is right in noticing that commitment to (4.) tends to part and parcel of what we may call the repetitionof the known. Of course, that may still be an important public service (and I am a friend of philosophy as service of the sort Dotson engages in), but the philosophy part is underserviced by it. 

I could stop here because I think it's pretty clear now why I think 1-4 are all false, or undesirable. But I want to close with two final (related) observations on the triggering passage I quoted from Foucault. First, what he says about  governmentalization is undoubtedly obscure if you don't read the wider lecture, and/or lack familiararity with the lectures he gave in that period at College de France. To simplify, it's a species of statecraft (including the art of governing without states or their apparatus). But for present purposes, we can leave it a bit obscure. But I do want to note the connection to Kant, Foucault asserts just before (in discussing developments since the 16th century in "Western Europe) the following:

And if we accord this movement of governmentalization of both society and individuals the historic dimension and breadth which I believe it has had, it seems that one could approximately locate therein what we could call the critical attitude. Facing them head on and as compensation, or rather, as both partner and adversary to the arts of governing, as an act of defiance, as a challenge, a way of limiting these arts of governing and sizing them up, transforming them, of finding a way to escape from them or, in any case, a way to displace them, with a basic distrust, but also and by the same token, as a line of development of the arts of governing, there would have been something born in Europe at that time, a kind of general cultural form, both a political and moral attitude, a way of thinking, etc. and which I would very simply call the art of not being governed or better, the art of not being governed like that and at that cost. I would therefore propose, as a very first definition of critique, this general characterization: the art of not being governed quite so much. (44-45)

Kantian critique then is, on this view, not some esoteric philosophical doctrine, but the outgrowth of a much wider European ethos that itself has a considerable development. And while there is in philosophy, perhaps, a lot more to critique then the idea that one 'not be governed like that' -- the rejection of permanent immaturity -- this is its central idea. It is to be sure, no anarchism. But it is an embrace of a kind of limitation on being governed. I think it is no surprise then that in the following year, Foucault explored at great length the liberal art of government (and Kant's role in developing it) because it just is the tradition that, warts and at all, embraces the art of not being governed quite so much.

My second remark is-- and this is based not just on the quoted passages like these alone (but a more wider reading in Foucault) - that Foucault embraces the Millian Ethos thesis in its Eurocentric fashion; a version that actually embraces European/Western (cultural) exceptionalism.** But let me stop here.

Canon formation within Analytic Philosophy

One of the perennial complaints of philosophy teachers has concerned the dearth of readily accessible and worthwhile reading material in modern philosophical analysis. As a first step toward improving this situation we have prepared the present volume of selections. Our idea was this: In the tremendous bulk of the periodical literature of recent decades, there is a small percentage of articles definitely worthy of reproduction in an anthology. This material required only proper grouping to provide a usable text for intermediate and advanced courses or seminars.
The project in preliminary form was presented by circular letter to about ninety teachers of philosophy in this country and in England. We asked for responses to our proposed selections, that is, endorsements or rejections of titles contained in a list of about 130 items. We also asked for recommendations of valuable material that we might have overlooked. We are pleased to acknowledge with sincere gratitude the enthusiastic and most helpful reactions received from an impressive majority of our correspondents. Because of the limitations of space we had to exclude, with a heavy heart, several excellent articles by authors from whom we had already obtained permission for reprinting.
With the exception of a very few cases in which it seemed clear from the beginning that an article belonged in our collection, we have pondered our choices seriously and long. In many instances it was extremely difficult for us to make up our minds. The exclusion of any article which was either on our original list or had been recommended by our friends was painful; and here, as everywhere, to choose is to exclude. Recognizing in the end that it would be impossible to make our choices coincide with the valuations of all prospective users of this book, we can only plead that within the given aims and limitations we have selected what, after countless considerations, comparisons and consultations seemed the most suitable body of material available for reprinting.
We have been guided in our selections on the whole by the reactions and suggestions of our correspondents. Since some of our own articles met with a very favorable reaction, we felt it would not appear presumptuous to include them. Generally our tendency was not to concentrate exclusively on the work of the great and the famous thinkers, but rather to select on the basis of didactic effectiveness. Clarity, pertinence, incisiveness of presentation, intelligibility independent of too high a degree of technical knowledge, integration into the total pattern of the contents—these were the essential criteria for our choices.
The conception of philosophical analysis underlying our selections springs from two major traditions in recent thought, the Cambridge movement deriving from Moore and Russell, and the Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle (Wittgenstein, Schlick, Carnap) together with the Scientific Empiricism of the Berlin group (led by Reichenbach). These, together with related developments in America stemming from Realism and Pragmatism, and the relatively independent contributions of the Polish logicians have increasingly merged to create an approach to philosophical problems which we frankly consider a decisive turn in the history of philosophy.
Although it is realized that there are no sharp lines of demarcation between this and other contemporary schools, we could not possibly have attempted to represent them all. Since the clearest and most helpful formulation of an idea is not always the first in order of time, or historically the most representative, we have paid relatively little attention to originality as a condition for inclusion. It was rather the penetration, the finesse, and the challenge of the work which counted most. In some instances we succeeded in grouping together divergent and mutually incompatible contributions around controversial subjects. We have tried to avoid definitely obsolete material. Certainly up-to-date-ness in any significant sense is not a mere function of date of publication. Frege, one of whose contributions we included, and Peirce, whose work is not represented because it is so amply available, have more to say to us than many who are writing today....
Courses and seminars in Principles of Philosophy, Contemporary Philosophy, Philosophical Analysis, Theory of Knowledge, Logical Theory, Philosophy of Language, etc., should find ample material for reading and discussion in this anthology. Although some basic articles in Philosophy of Science, Modern Logic, and Theoretical Ethics have been included, we can conceive of additional volumes of selections, very much needed, in these special fields. We express the hope that others will consider work on anthologies along those lines. May we assure them that such work, while arduous, is at least intrinsically rewarding.--"Preface" by Feigl, H., and W. Sellars. in Readings in Analytic Philosophy." New York (1949), pp. v-vi. [HT Alan Richardson]

An informal social media exchange with Jason Stanley got me thinking about canon formation within analytic philosophy. In particular, I started to reflect on the (temporary, but not trivial) dominance of philosophy of language within analytic philosophy such that many analytic programs organized proseminars for entry level PhD students around familiarity with certain classics of that field (which also includes semantics and some bits of philosophical logic). 

While I don't want to claim that the dominance of such philosophy of language was a contingent fact, it's worth noting that as this dominance developed others who were recognizably influential at the time within analytic philosophy, were pushing for, say, philosophy of science as first philosophy (e.g. Ernest Nagel), and one can easily imagine some others to have pushed epistemology in a foundational role (and certainly in some a background empiricism or sense-data theory does play a non-trivial authoritative role). The reason I deny it is wholly contingent is that, for example, axiology or aesthetics cannot have been, then, the dominant core.

Alan Richardson suggested that it would make sense to look at the textbooks of the 1948-53 period as formative. In particular, it is worth noting that, as Alan reminded [Leonard was one of my teachers] me, Leonard Linsky's (1953) Semantics and the Philosophy of Language, A Collection of Readings, clearly anticipates much of the early canon of the philosophy (of language centered) proseminar. Linsky's book is not the definitive canon -- it lacks "On Denoting" (and has no Frege at all) --, but I hope to discuss it some other time. 

But first I want to focus on the Feigl and Sellars text-book, which explicitly sets the agenda for the other textbooks, and simultaneously helps consolidate, roughly, what counts as analytic philosophy (or in modern philosophical analysis) and not. And, pertinent for my present purposes, they do so by using a kind of partial, snowball sampling method to create a canon of texts worthy of inclusion.+ 

To be sure, their grouping of who is included in the "decisive turn" -- (i) the Cambridge movement, (ii) the Vienna Circle, (iii) the Berlin group, (iv) American Realism and Pragmatism, and (v) the Polish logicians -- is not original. We find this nearly exact combination already in 1936 in Ernest Nagel's two-part essay on "Impressions and Appraisals of Analytic Philosophy in Europe."* And certainly there is some contingency in what gets passed on. They themselves note that Peirce would naturally fit their agenda, but with the benefit of hindsight, we see that as time passes on the opportunity costs to find a way to include Peirce into the fold grows so great that effectively -- with the exception of some of his informal essays in the philosophy of science -- he ends up terra incognita for analytic philosophers. 

The influential textbooks of the period are nearly all American. Presumably they were created there not just because it was at the time the wealthiest place around, but also because of the sudden demand due to expansion of Higher Education there. Feigl and Sellars are clearly anticipating fine-grained "courses and seminars in Principles of Philosophy, Contemporary Philosophy, Philosophical Analysis, Theory of Knowledge, Logical Theory, Philosophy of Language" etc.! (And note these are not intended as introductory courses, but "intermediate and advanced courses or seminars.")

One interesting claim that Feigl and Sellars make is that they selected "on the basis of didactic effectiveness. Clarity, pertinence, incisiveness of presentation, intelligibility independent of too high a degree of technical knowledge, integration into the total pattern of the contents—these were the essential criteria for our choices." This is a rare admission that the canon of analytic texts does not reflect originality, or historical priority, but didactic or pedagogic suitability. To be sure, I am not claiming this remains the case in analytic canon formation once analytic philosophy is suitably securely dominant (relative to "other contemporary schools"), but it is prominent at the start. 

And it is worth remarking that several of the features they explicitly mention are de facto rhetorical in character (e.g., "incisiveness of presentation, intelligibility independent of too high a degree of technical knowledge.") That is to say, these are the texts that will persuade students of many different grades of competence of the pertinence of analysis. Of course, it's left vague what counts as pertinence (or clarity, which by no means (recall) means the same in, say, Quine, Carnap, Nagel, or Stebbing). 

One may suspect that the previous paragraph is written in the spirit of unmasking. But that's not the case. It is essential to our self-understanding that we recognize that many of the standard intellectual virtues we associate with analytic philosophy almost as our second nature are originally pedagogical in character. And that is, of course, to be expected of an intellectual school. To what degree their origin in pedagogical (and recruitment) needs generates intellectual problems today, if any, is something I shall consider an other time.

 

On Bureaucrat Philosophers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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.

 

Mediating between Strauss and Dewey: the forgotten radical liberal Arnold Kaufman

In this paper political theory is regarded as properly serving an instrumental function. This view is elaborated, then defended against the criticisms of Professor Leo Strauss...
Political theory should be a guide to action. The political philosopher should provide those who make policy with principles which will aid them in the attempt to cope with specific sociopolitical problems. Instrumental theories of this type should have two roughly distinguishable components: (1) an ultimate ideal; (2) intermediate ideals in their relation to specific policy recommendations.--Arnold S. Kaufman (1954) "The nature and function of political theory." The journal of philosophy 51.1: 5-22.

This post originates in my interest in finding critical engagements with Leo Strauss within analytic philosophy in the post-WWII era (triggered by (recall here; here; here; especially this one; here; and here) an invite by Sander Verhaegh). The topic intersects with my continuing reflection (recall here; here; here; here; here; here) on Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, which convincingly shows that Rawls' Theory of Justice creates a kind of light-cone which does not allow us to discern events behind it. In fact, Forrester mentions Kaufman's work (in the 1960s) on civil disobedience, and treats Kaufman as "the New Left philosopher and intellectual founder of the “ teach-in.” (p. 52; see also p. 56; 61--in her footnotes she also alerts the reader to his views on Black reparations and participatory democracy.)

Kaufman died, June 6, 1971, aged 44 when his airplane collided with a military jet while traveling. Oddly, his supervisor at Columbia, Charles Frankel, who in the 1960s served the LBJ administration that Kaufman was battling from the left, died a few years later in an armed robbery in his home in Bedford Hills. In fact, while at University of Michigan, Kaufman was at the center of things at the founding of SDS and the Port Huron Statement (as Tom Hayden acknowledges), and was, as Forrester hints, alongside Marshall Sahlins and Rapaport one of the Michigan faculty key to organizing the first teach-in on the Vietnam War. (Sahlins was the supervisor of Graeber, who in some respects, is the heir to Kaufman.) Later, while at UCLA, he was (despite their non-trivial political differences) one of the most outspoken defenders of Angela Davis' appointment at UCLA and freedom to teach.

The (1954) piece I quoted at the top of this post was published before Kaufman completed his dissertation (on Hobhouse). It situates itself between Dewey, who is the advocate of instrumental political theory (but of whom Kaufman is also critical), and Strauss, and also wishes to draw from both. (How Kaufman draws from Strauss I leave aside here.)

One might well wonder why I treat Kaufman as an 'analytic' philosopher. I have two reasons for this: first, the later work from the 1960s is very naturally read as analytic philosophy.* Second, the early work I discuss here bears the imprint of Ernest Nagel (who was then at Columbia) because it anticipates some of the methodological claims of Nagel's 1954 presidential address (while still advocating a more activist stance).

While, in this post I can only leave this second reason as a promissory note, it's worth noting what Kaufman's two main criticisms of Dewey are: first, on Kaufman's  view there ought be also "a concern with theory, with logical interrelatedness, with the generality of political principles which would be anathema for Dewey." (21) In particular (and this very much echoes Nagel), Kaufman claims (while drawing on the analogy between natural and social science), "there is considerable evidence that attention to conceptual adequacy, to logical interrelatedness, and to the connections between a verbal structure and the events it was designed to help human beings control, will yield a rich reward." (22) And second, Dewey's political theory is too "programmatic in character. His formulations were extremely abstract and he always shied from the difficult task of linking those views to the "concrete" situations of which he was so fond of talking." (22; Kaufman acknowledges, of course, that Dewey also acted quite nobly in concrete situations of which he talked.)

While an older generation of political theorists and intellectual historians is definitely familiar with Kaufman, and there is some scholarship on him, to the best of my knowledge analytic philosophy has completely forgotten him in the post Rawlsian era. For example, in Jo Wolff's authoritative and fascinating survey, "Analytic Political Philosophy" (in the OUP volume on the History of Analytic Philosophy), Kaufman goes unmentioned (presumably because he made no impact on those collected in the series in Philosophy, Politics and Society. This is a shame because Kaufman quite clearly anticipates and pioneers the revival of advocacy (which is an important theme in Wolff's article). 

Kaufman recognizes that Leo Strauss is a fierce critic of the instrumentalist stance.** (He quotes Strauss' Review of Dewey 's German Philosophy and Politics, in Social Research.) And pieces together from scattered remarks in Strauss' writing an argument against the instrumentalist approach. Kaufman writes this before the publication of Natural Right and History (but he is aware that it is about the appear and hopes that in it Strauss will spell out some of the details of the argument that Kaufman attributes to him (see note 17 on p. 19)). Here's Kaufman's reconstruction of Strauss' criticism of instrumentalism:

[Strauss] argues (1) that it is possible and necessary for the philosopher to search for an objective political philosophy; (2) but one cannot be objective unless he escapes the influence of opinion; and, finally, (3) the instrumentalist, because he regards himself as a guide to action instead of as a discoverer of an objective external order, is influenced by opinion. Therefore, the instrumentalist cannot be objective and is unable to embark on that investigation which alone constitutes political philosophy.
This is the skeleton of the argument. (16)

Let's call this reconstruction of Strauss's position the 'contamination argument.' In my view it's quite plausible to attribute something like this position to Strauss. A weakness in the contamination argument is that it's quite possible for somebody to hold an instrumentalist view of theory without oneself engaging in action, and so creates an instrumentalist theory for others to use from the ivory tower arm-chair. And it is not obvious that such a theorist is necessarily influenced by opinion even if, let's grant this for the sake of argument, she must take it into account in how to move from principles to successful policy. (I don't quite return to this below, but see my final paragraph.)

Kaufman recognizes that (1) is connected to Strauss' criticism of relativism (historicism, positivism, etc.) and the Weberian fact-value distinction. He treats (1) as common ground between him and Strauss, and even Dewey by claiming that "Dewey does believe we can discover moral truths, these truths are relative to specific conditions." (17) It's left unclear if Kaufman actually agrees with Dewey's style of relativism. (Strauss would reject Dewey's position as stable.)

Most of Kaufman's criticism focuses on (2) & (3), which he treats jointly. A key issue is what is meant by 'objective' and why it's impossible to attain for the instrumentalist theorist. And Kaufman settles on the view that according to Strauss "no one engaged in political activity is in a position, no matter how carefully he attempts to make his investigations impartial, to acquire an understanding or a knowledge of political fundamentals, to determine the nature of the best regime." (18) In Strauss' platonic terminology in the 'cave' no real knowledge is possible.+

At this point, Kaufman goes on the offensive because rather than trying to figure out what would make the contamination argument stick (if that's possible), he starts criticizing (not unfairly) the lack of specificity in Strauss' position who leaves underexplained how 'understanding or knowledge of political fundamentals [is] acquired.' And Kaufman concludes his argument that it is very unlikely that Strauss' method "is continuous with that of the empirical sciences. This constitutes a decisive objection to his underlying theory." (19: emphasis added. Along the way, Kaufman implies that Strauss has no adequate response to Mill's criticism of relying on nature as a standard of adequacy.) 

Kaufman here instantiates what I call "Newton's Challenge to Philosophy," that is to argue from the authority of science to some criticism of an opponent. But this begs the question against Strauss who does not recognize that authority in political philosophy.

In fact, Kaufman has many astute and telling criticism of the details of Strauss' philosophy (including on Strauss' better known criticism of the distinction between facts and values). Kaufman is at his best, in fact, when he channels Hume to point that nature sometimes is itself a source of ungrounded action (this is the argument that eludes Oppenheim when he discerns that Strauss is relying on the PSR (recall here; here)). It is a shame (if you were to care about such matters that) for the reception of Strauss, that to the best of my knowledge no sober debate about these criticism ensued subsequently because unlike many criticism of Strauss they go to the heart of Strauss' project. And unlike a later generation of analytic critics, there is no lazy dismissal.

As should be clear from my comments, I do not view Kaufman's response to the contamination argument as fully adequate. He basically claims not to understand some of its key terms (and does show that Strauss has not clarified them properly), and so ultimately sets it aside. This is unfortunate because Strauss' criticism of the instrumentalist position has been echoed in recent times by analytic philosophers who claim that, say, feminist philosophy (and other 'activist' philosophies) is not really philosophy. (In fact, many of Strauss' apparently substantive positions have been quietly adopted by analytic philosophers in later generations.) Such claims against the instrumentalist conception have been met by vigorous rebuttal from (say amongst others) Dotson and in a number of papers, Srinivasan. But the recent analytic critics rarely dare to put their criticism explicitly in the elitist terms of Strauss (and generally fail to reflect on the nature of political philosophy). This matters not because one must agree with Strauss' return to natural right (and the ancients), or  his elitism, but rather because the most realistic interpretations (and justification) of our imperfect liberal democracies (as one can find in the writings of, say, Hume, Smith, Madison, Kant, and, say, more recently, Arendt) crucially suppose that political life is indeed ruled by opinion and so, if the argument isn't met, that such contamination appears to be inevitable for democratic theorists (broadly conceived). 

Kaufman himself falls in the wide gap between Marxism and Rawlsianism (even its leftist incarnation). With the demise of the New Left and the lack of students to take up his program it is no surprise that he left little mark on post Rawlsian philosophy. Yet, many of his papers from the 1960s have, given that they are the product of immersion in political activism, a sense of freshness and immediacy that I hope to share with you in later digressions. While I do not share in his politics or even his philosophic sensibility, one cannot help but be saddened that his life and career were interrupted just as he was developing his own systematic conception of what a liberal philosophy might be. To be continued.

Riker on The Calculus of Consent; some Rawls and Strauss and the confused and unproductive state of Political Theory

As numerous writers have pointed out, political theory as a field of academic concentration has been in a confused and unproductive state for at least the last generation. Most of the academicians who have written about it have been either historians of ideas who speculated about the influence of writer A on writer B or literary critics who simply explicated and criticized the texts of A and B. Very few academicians have had the intellectual courage to play the role of A and B themselves; so that, in consequence, most contemporary political theory has been produced by politicians and journalists. Refusing thus to theorize themselves, most academicians have been limited to a consideration of intellectual primitives or of, what amounts to the same thing, the rantings and ideological tergiversations of half-educated modern pamphleteers. In almost no other field of study do the professionals thus abase themselves before the ancients and the amateurs.

    Not unsurprisingly, there has been much dissatisfaction with this state of affairs and in the last decade or so a number of writers have tried to reorient the study of political theory. Some, like Leo Strauss, have urged a return to the great tradition; but unfortunately the process of return, as it appears in the work of both master and students, has turned out to be an even more sterile historicism than that against which they revolted. Others, like T. D. Weldon and Carl Friedrich, have urged a close and systematic study of words; but again unfortunately, word-study, while a useful preliminary to theorizing, has produced no more than literary criticism and is not properly theory at all. Still others, the political behaviorists, have turned to the theories of contemporary psychology and sociology for a new start in theorizing about politics; and, while these writers have undoubtedly succeeded in generating descriptive theories that can actually be tested empirically, still their theories seem to have more in common with social psychology than with the traditional subject matter of politics. Furthermore, their positivistic character, wholly appropriate for descriptive theories, is far from satisfying to those who believe political theory should be at least partially normative. These three attempts at re-orientation have been useful in the study of history, philosophy, and behavioral science; but they have not added much to political theory itself. Indeed, if these three schools were all we had, it would be fair to say that political theory was no better off than before.

    There is still a fourth school, to which the book here reviewed belongs, which offers some hope of a really successful reorientation of political theory. Since its inspiration is more from economics than any other source and since economics is the social science closest to politics both in the nature of the events abstracted for study and in the process of abstraction, it happens that the works of this school are clearly political in nature. Since economics like politics has a long tradition of normative theorizing, these writings contain normative elements alongside of positive ones. Most important of all, however, they seem to be capable not only of reformulating traditional problems in a more sophisticated way but also of dealing with problems beyond the ken of even the great theorists of the past. Some of the main works in this fourth school of re-orienters of political theory are: Duncan Black, The Theory of Committees and Elections; Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy; Morton Kaplan, System and Process in International Politics (although this work has its roots as much in sociological as in economic theory); Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict; and, as an important addition, James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent.--William H. Riker (1962) Midwest Journal of Political Science, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Nov., 1962) [Reviewing The Calculus of Consent. by James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock], pp. 408-409.

Because I am working on a side project (recall here; here) on the (non-)reception of Leo Strauss within analytic philosophy, I stumbled on this passage in Riker's review of The Calculus of Consent. I also want to situate the passage in the black hole in our collective narrative of what exactly political philosophy could be within analytic philosophy and its sister-discipline political theory pre-Rawls (which was re-opened for me by Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (recall (recall here; here; here; and here). Somewhat to my own surprise these issues intersect with my interest in neoliberalism and the split between ('positive') economics and ('normative') philosophy.

I suspect most of my readers know who William Riker is (not to be confused with the Star Trek character). He is now widely seen as one of the founders of rational choice theory, and among other achievements introduced game theory and social choice theory into political science. He is, what in an earlier generation disparagingly would have been called (by the sociologist Talcott Parsons [recall]), an exponent of 'economic imperialism.' We call it 'intellectual arbitrage' now. He founded the so-called Rochester School that's associated with the 'behavioral revolution' in political science. When he published the review of Buchanan and Tullock, Riker had just published The Theory of Political Coalitions, which was a major contribution to orientation he promoted.

About half of the review is quoted above. And only after this set-up does Riker discuss the contents of the book. So, the review itself is self-consciously a methodological intervention and cannon creation. 

So, Riker distinguishes four approaches to political theory. First, there is the return to the classics which he (correctly) associates with Leo Strauss. This is treated -- much as Bacon treated final causes -- as sterile. Riker correctly represents Strauss's school as critical of historicism, but then misrepresents, either from confusion or from sincere insult, Strauss as instantiating historicism. (I am unsure he ever engaged with Strauss in substantive fashion elsewhere.)

Second there is a school devoted to "a close and systematic study of words." Riker's criticism of it echoes Isaiah Berlin's (1958) criticism of ordinary language philosophy (recall). T.D Weldon I know primarily as a Kant scholar and as being the supervisor of Wilfrid Sellars. But he is also the author of The Vocabulary of Politics (1953), which in reviews is described as an attempt to apply ordinary language philosophy to politics. A book I, thus, have to read because it is clearly in the event horizon of the black hole of analytic political philosophy whose shadow Rawls has (ahh) blotted out.*

I have to admit that I am puzzled by Riker's inclusion of Friedrich in this category. Friedrich's approach is so eclectic, that I would think he would be hard to categorize. This is not to deny he sometimes focuses on words, too. But this comment (alongside the Strauss as historicist 'mistake') makes me wonder, if Riker actually had carefully studied the schools he is rejecting. Or whether his polemics derive from supreme confidence in his own (sophisticated!) methods. That confidence is not without robust intellectual foundation, but one does wonder if in his polemics with opposing schools there isn't an element of bluster and bluff. (This combination is not unfamiliar to us within analytic philosophy.) I actually suspect that Riker is confusing Friedrich with Felix Oppenheim (who can, perhaps somewhat unfairly, be slotted into this category.)

No exemplar of the third school is mentioned. I suspect Talcott Parsons (or those influenced by him) is one of the targets. This school is also engaged in intellectual arbitrage from other social sciences, but Riker finds them wanting. Riker's two criticisms of this approach (not very far removed from his own) are very interesting: first, they produce work that fits social psychology but is in some sense not properly political. One would have liked an extra sentence here because it would have illuminated his own stance toward the subject (or the discipline). Second, on Riker's view political theory ought to be descriptive/empirical (or at least fruitful in generating theoretically salient empirical generations and be an engine for theorizing) and normative/positive. So, the right kind of theory can help us study the political world and tell us how to improve it. (I return to this in the next paragraph.)

These two criticisms do not apply to the fourth school (which is Riker's own). From my perspective what is most interesting here is that Riker rejects the very firm distinction entrenched within economics (in word, less so in deed) since the time of Marshall, Sidgwick, and John Neville Keynes, and articulated by Lionel Robbins (and Milton Friedman) between the positive and normative projects.+ The final paragraph of the review actually explains Riker's own stance on this:

If it is assumed that most men are rational and that the appropriate rational behavior is transparently obvious, then the analysis is entirely positive. If it is assumed that rationality is a goal rather than a fact, then the calculus is normative. If it is assumed that the logic of the calculus is not obvious until it is deduced, then again the analysis is normative. (411)

Of course, the problem here is not the willingness to combine empirical and normative aims, but (to use scientistic terminology) that how to think about circumstances of what is 'transparently obvious' to the theorist/expert may not be so to (ahh) 'most men' and, more important, if, in a political context, the latter have to rely on the former for the deductions in the 'logic.' [As a slogan: Riker takes the relationship between theorist and theorized for granted.]

Be that as it may, lurking in the final paragraph that I quoted at the top of the post is the sense that the fourth school is generating a scientific revolution: "Most important of all...they seem to be capable not only of reformulating traditional problems in a more sophisticated way but also of dealing with problems beyond the ken of even the great theorists of the past." The fourth school has moved beyond the past and is progressive. (Such claims are common among economists of the age.) Interestingly enough the Nobel committee in economics has also recognized the contributions of this school of 'political theory' (including, in addition to Buchanan, Schelling).

After the polemical first half, the rest of the review of Calculus of Consent "list[s] what are for [Riker] some of the most interesting notions in the essay." (409) One important point is that Riker treats Calculus of Consent (not unfairly) as an advance beyond Downs on the question of what the effect is "of differing intensities of concern about particular issues under the rule of simple majority voting." (410)

From the vantage point of thinking about the nature and evolution of political theory at the middle of the twentieth century, the first, main question is actually rather important:

The main question the authors ask is: On what basis does a rational man, situated in a society created by unanimous agreement, consent to the transfer of a particular activity from private to collective decision-making? This question is, of course, a new and more sophisticated form of the question to which the theory of the social contract provided the answer. (409)

In the spirit of progress (we may say), Riker understands Buchanan and Tullock as having surpassed and made obsolete social contract theory. While the historian in me hesitates to disagree with such a well-informed contemporary of them,  Riker somehow misses (presumably for his own polemical purposes) that Buchanan and Tullock themselves present their own work, en passant (but not obliquely) as a contribution to social contract theory. For, throughout Calculus of Consent, they imply both that individuals cannot withdraw from the social contract, as well as (and  more important) that "Insofar as participation in the organization of a community, a State, is mutually advantageous to all parties, the formation of a “social contract” on the basis of unanimous agreement becomes possible." (ch. 17; the whole chapter is relevant, including for understanding why they frequently use scare-quotes around 'social contract,' but not always.)** So, the main question by Riker's lights is answered in terms of a social contract analysis according to Buchanan and Tullock. (The character of their social contract is worth exploring in a digression some time.)

Two final quick promissory thoughts connected to Rawls, since I click-baited you here with Rawls. First, there was a pre-Rawlsian political analytic philosophy. (Riker's second school.) Weldon is an example of this. (So is, perhaps, Felix Oppenheim.)++  And it was noticed by outsiders. But Rawls did not respond to it in The Theory of Justice.*** Oppenheim is cited once respectfully in TJ, and Weldon isn't mentioned. Rather, Rawls took the fourth school, the re-orienters, as his interlocuters and rivals. In fact, in TJ, Rawls also cites Black, Downs, Buchanan and Tullock, and Mancur Olson as authorities. And whatever else he is doing, he is also trying to offer an alternative to their project.+++ That's partially obscured to later readers because he doesn't name them much as targets. But it is worth noting they inherited their own normative project from utilitarianism, which is Rawls' official target. And partially obscured by the fact that after the mid to late 1970s Rawls himself emphasized the normative project in Kantian terms and so it's much harder to see TJ as building on and in competition with Rochester and Virginia.

 

 

A puzzle about a footnote in Pippin on Strauss on Hume

[Leo Strauss] is clearly most worried that any position that links the right with what the will legislates for itself quickly slips down the slippery slope toward legal positivism, historicism, relativism, and finally nihilism....

Note 15: NRH, 17. 1 should note here that Strauss only asserts that "the historical school had obscured the fact that particular or historical standards can become authoritative only on the basis of a universal principle which imposes an obligation on the individual to accept." Depending on what Strauss means by "authorative," [sic] such a claim is either a tautology or begs the question at issue. Some principle can be authoritative for me if, in some situation it counts as a reason for me to act; to claim otherwise would require a much more serious confrontation with a figure who Strauss (and, as far as I can see, most of his students) neglect: David Hume.--Pippin, R. B. (1992). "The modern world of leo strauss." Political Theory, 20(3), and note 15 on p. 453 & p. 468

After my paper on Ernest Nagel, Sander Verhaegh kindly asked me to contribute a paper to a collection on how exiles shaped analytic philosophy Stateside (or something like that). And because Nagel is one of the few analytic philosophers to have engaged Strauss in a substantive way (and so I am well placed to discuss it), and because I tend to think analytic philosophy's polemics are at least partially constitutive of its professional identity, I thought it would be illuminating to write a chapter for Sander on how Strauss and his school ended up being conceptualized as not philosophy/philosophical by analytic philosophy. And this last point would also also allow me to reflect a bit on the role of that strange hybrid, José Benardete, in the upstate NY revival of metaphysics within analytic philosophy.

But I have had to confront a scholarly problem. Within analytic philosophy nearly all the writing about Strauss and his followers is excessively polemical (and often not very good, alas). Much of the remaining scholarship in English on Strauss is by his students (and almost inevitably apologetic in character) or by people interested in tracing the misdeeds of neocons to Strauss or tracing the reception of Heidegger's views. And so while there is huge amount of material on Strauss reception (which is, perhaps, all I need), there is remarkably little sober scholarship on Strauss and his school. In fact, Robert Pippin has corned the market in that niche with three papers: in addition to the paper quoted above, there is a companion piece, "Being, time, and politics: The Strauss-Kojève debate." History and Theory (1993): 138-161, and a more recent work,"The Unavailability of the Ordinary: Strauss on the Philosophical Fate of Modernity." Political Theory 31.3 (2003): 335-358.+ (Feel free to nominate other work!)

All three papers are sober engagements with Strauss and repay study in their own right. They are not, if that were possible, impartial scholarship because each is written from the perspective of a kind of Hegelianism that is explicitly being defended against Strauss (and from Kojève's corruption of Hegelianism). In fact, Pippin generally suggests (and my quote above is exemplary in this respect) that Strauss has missed an (Hegelian) alternative in his (that is, Strauss') diagnosis of a philosophical situation or that Strauss has posited a slippery slope, which may be halted along the way. That is, Pippin's response to Strauss tends to engage in genuine philosophical disagreement where the details matter. Pippin also recognizes that one of Strauss' characteristic modes of argument -- something about modernity (say its 'crisis') is the effect, even inevitable fate, of philosophical assumptions of some past thinker -- is non-trivially Hegelian (e.g., "The Unavailability of the Ordinary:" 341). Finally, Pippen recognizes (and articulates nicely) how odd Strauss seems in light of the "usual way[s] of a professional philosopher in a modern university," ("The Unavailability of the Ordinary: 342) despite the fact that Strauss generated a quite successful school in the modern university.

Okay, with that in place, I want focus on a puzzle that reading Pippin raised for me (and perhaps for me alone). In his 2003 article, Pippin suggests that one of the main themes of Strauss' Natural Right and History (hereafter NRH), and "the central theme of all modern European philosophy since Hegel," is the "relationship between philosophy and experience." (336) In fact, Pippin makes point of reminding his audience that this is also a theme found "in the later Wittgenstein, Austin, Cavell" (344) that is, analytic philosophy (on p. 352 he adds Bernard Williams to the list).

Now, within analytic philosophy, it's Hume that is treated as the philosopher who first problematized the relationship between philosophy and experience (if you don't trust me on this go re-read Quine or Russell). Hume is not explicitly mentioned in Pippin's 2003 piece, but his language is adopted even quoted by Pippin at one key point when he explains that for Strauss the recovery of natural right (that we are said to "need" by Strauss) "would seem to require a dualism, a nonteleological science of the universe and in some way a different, teleological “science of man.” Strauss considers this the Thomistic solution but he clearly rejects it, boldly insisting, “An adequate solution to the problem of natural right cannot be found before this basic problem has been solved,” unmistakably implying that it has not yet and appearing to promise that he will solve it, in the book to follow." (344) What's interesting about this formulation (other than it being Humean terminology) is that there is by now a academic cottage industry, at least since Allison Simmons' 2001 paper showing that various early moderns (Descartes, Spinoza, and Hume) proposed nonteleological science of the universe, and yet somehow produced (consciously/intentionally or not) a teleological science of man. 

With that in mind, in note 15 (in the 1992 paper) quoted above, Pippin is explicitly commenting on NRH; p 17. In that book, Strauss explicitly mentions Hume twice. First, a few pages later (p. 20), in the context of a discussion of historicism, Hume is treated (alongside Kant) as an originator of a "philosophical critique of a philosophic and scientific thought" that leads to skepticism. And Strauss uses the occasion to distinguish the philosophy of skepticism from historicism. Importantly, the contrast is drawn in the sense of how skepticism and historicism view themselves: skepticism is a permanent possibility for humanity (it is "coeval with human thought)," whereas historicism is indexed to specific historical situations. And even if one does not know anything about the larger project of NRH, the manner -- which is not historicist -- in which Strauss draws this distinction implies that Strauss identifies more with the skeptical self-understanding more than the historicist one (Pippin would not disagree, I think, see below).

It should be noted that near the end of the book, Strauss notes that historicism itself is an effect of skepticism about theoretical metaphysics. And this is a "skepticism which culminated in the depreciation of theory in favor of practice." (NRH 320) That is to say, Hume (and Kant) are treated both as contrasts to skepticism as well as the philosophical roots or sources of historicism. (We might say then that for Strauss historicism is at the bottom of the slippery slope from Hume.)

Second, near the end of NRH, in the context of analyzing Burke's defense of practical wisdom against the encroaches of theoretical philosophy, Strauss points out there is a connection between Burke's strictures on (and against) metaphysics and "the skeptical tendencies of his contemporaries Rousseau and Hume." And Strauss goes on to offer Burke's "theoretical work" [sic], A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, as evidence for this claim. 

Let's stipulate that these two mentions are not a "serious confrontation." But they do suggest that in so far as Strauss discusses skepticism, and especially where it shades into philosophy's critique of itself and science, it's legitimate to explore how he may well be drawing on, or engaging with, Hume. I don't mean to suggest this is always the case. For, Strauss also thinks there are different kinds of skepticism. For, 'Socratic wisdom' is in virtue of being self-knowledge of one's ignorance, explicitly "a kind of skepticism," albeit of an "involuntary" kind (NRH: 262). Such skepticism is "not dangerous."* Somewhat confusingly if one is unfamiliar with Strauss, in context it is not just Socrates, but also Rousseau who is being described as an exemplar of Socratic wisdom. Importantly, in Rousseau, Socratic wisdom also has an important effect: it allows for science that is compatible with virtue. (In that scheme, metaphysics is the science that is incompatible with virtue.) And Strauss treats Rousseau (but not Socrates) as somebody who thinks that science can be made to serve virtue (although the way this can be institutionalized is by no means obvious).

As it happens, (an)other kind(s) of Socratic wisdom is possible -- one not wedded to natural science (NRH: 277) -- so this kind of skepticism itself comes in kinds. Strauss clearly admires Socratic wisdom, which is philanthropic in character, and this suggests that in NRH, skepticism does not (always) have a negative connotation.

Rousseau is also treated as a source of insight on a "dangerous kind" of skepticism which is a consequence of the search for truth in modern science. And this is caused whenever scientific truth is useless or unattainable. (NRH 258) It is dangerous because in modernity science has discredited faith and opinion and is meant to replace faith and opinion, and so when science fails it leaves society with nihilism. (258). 

Socrates, Hume, Kant, and Rousseau are not the only kinds of skeptics in NRH. Strauss treats Cicero as an Academic skeptic (155). In addition, Strauss recognizes that from the perspective of seventeenth century philosophy, in "traditional" philosophy (prior to the seventeenth century), there is also a form of skepticism that is a kind of natural accompaniment of dogmatism (NRH 171). I think this is clearly meant to be Pyrrhonean skepticism. And, as it happens, such Pyrrhonean skepticism is transformed in seventeenth century philosophy in NRH. For, Strauss treats Hobbes, Spinoza, and Descartes as sharing in the following commitment (one that is often attributed to Descartes alone based on a reading of the Meditations):

To guarantee the actualization of wisdom means to eradicate skepticism by doing justice to the truth embodied in skepticism. For this purpose, one must first give free rein to extreme skepticism: what survives the onslaught of extreme skepticism is the absolutely safe basis of wisdom. The actualization of wisdom is identical with the erection of an absolutely dependable dogmatic edifice on the foundation of extreme skepticism.  (NRH 172)

The significance of this modern strategy to attain wisdom is not just epistemological. For, in raising a central challenge to Hobbes' philosophy (and the manner of the challenge is rather Schmittian as is also clear in the footnote I am about to quote) in his own voice, Strauss adds a curious footnote:

One may state this difficulty also as follows: In the spirit of the dogmatism based on skepticism, Hobbes identified what the skeptic Carneades apparently regarded as the conclusive refutation of the claims raised on behalf of justice, with the only possible justification of these claims: the extreme situation—the situation of the two shipwrecked men on a plank on which only one man can save himself—reveals, not the impossibility of justice, but the basis of justice. Yet Carneades did not contend that in such a situation one is compelled to kill one's competitor (Cicero Republic iii . 29-30): the extreme situation does not reveal a real necessity. (NRH 196 note 39)

This explicitly treats Hobbes' philosophy as erected on, derived from, a skeptical foundation. Now, to be sure, this kind of skepticism is not at all like Socratic wisdom. In fact, it is the explicit denial that a good life is good in virtue of being in accord with nature (NRH 95), which is the truth embodied in skepticism (that is the basis/foundational step on which Hobbes' dogmatic science is built).

But according to Strauss, Hobbes (not Descartes) generates a form of skepticism, too: "It is this fact that ultimately accounts for the persistence of skepticism and justifies skepticism to a certain extent. Skepticism is the inevitable outcome of the unintelligible character of the universe or of the unfounded belief in its intelligibility." (NRH 174; in my own research I tend to attribute this view to Spinoza, but it's not clear to me that Strauss does so.) Hobbes here is treated, thus, as the ultimate source of a "philosophical critique of a philosophic and scientific thought" that Strauss links to Hume and Kant (and their role in generating both the kind of skepticism coeval with thought and modern historicism).

Let me take stock of where we are because I am fast reaching the limits of a Digression. Running through NRH is a classification of different kinds of skepticism. This matters for the argument of NRH because some kinds of skepticism are treated as wise and as exemplary of the (partial) rejection of historicism that Strauss endorses. In fact, Pippen (largely correctly in my view) treats Strauss as a kind of skeptic: "The radically sceptical, incomplete, or zetetic character of Strauss's version of Socraticism."  (note 12 of Pippin's 1992 article). To put my own exegetical cards on the table, I think the word 'radically' is a bit misleading because the tenor of Strauss skepticism is not Pyrrhonean but fideist (about which another time).

And so the question of skepticism in NRH is also a question of classifying Strauss. And as it happens in NRH, in this classification of skepticism, Hume plays a central role as a source , perhaps partially derivative of Hobbes, of modern historicism while simultaneously standing for the non-historicist always living possibility of skepticism in which the question of the relationship between philosophy and experience is central. In fact, what's notable about NRH is that Strauss invites the question which skeptics, if any, have Socratic wisdom, and leaves it to the reader to figure out the answer.** 

It's worth noting, in closing for today, that according to Strauss (and he is right about this) Hume rejected -- what he claims Hobbes, Spinoza, and Descartes accepted -- that is, the skeptical denial that a good life is good in virtue of being in accord with nature. This Strauss notes in a different work in which he explains the difference between Hume and (modern) positivism(s) (see The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism: 21-22). And so my provisional, tentative conclusion is that Strauss does not have a serious confrontation with Hume because, while Strauss generally sounds like the student of Heidegger he was, in key respects he agrees with Hume (or so I claim ex cathedra). And this somewhat perverse result actually makes the vehement rejection of Strauss and Straussianism by analytic philosophy more interesting than I initially thought.

 

 

 

Tremain on The Inductive Risks of Bioethics, Pt 1. (And *In the Shadow of Justice*, pt 4)

My argument is that the academic discipline of bioethics relies on an epistemology of domination and is an institutionalized vehicle for the biopolitics of our time, that is, bioethics is a technology of government that provides intellectual resources designed to facilitate the “strengthening” (read: fitness) of a certain population and the elimination of others. I submit, furthermore, that the implicit and explicit governmental tenor of bioethical inquiries and discussions contributes substantially to the hostile environment that disabled philosophers confront in philosophy.--Shelley L. Tremain (2017) Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability (University of Michigan), 160-161.

As the quoted passage suggests, Tremain diagnoses two kinds of inductive risks from the way bioethics is practiced: (i) it is eugenic in character: it promotes the "elimination" of populations with characteristics thought undesirable; (ii) it creates a hostile work environment for disabled philosophers within professional philosophy. Today's post is focused on (i). For on her view, it is constitutive of bioethics to "posit conceptions of the normal from which the possibility and probability of deviations are measured and classified in order to prevent and control their actualization." (169) Within the discipline, the normal is taken to be an objective feature of reality (often understood as something statistical or species functional), and the deviations -- in particular below the norm -- are treated as objective defects or harms (or costly). Following Foucault, Tremain treats the disciplinary articulation of this conceptualization a step in what she calls 'normalization.'

For the articulation of these conceptualizations and their understanding as objective (social) facts constitute a field of inquiry and creates a discursive power with normative authority in the university, the hospital, and in wider society. More subtly, Tremain argues that normalization shapes, by various looping effects (Hacking's terminology) the self-conception of ordinary agents in society and the possibilities available to them as they make, what they take to be, autonomous choices. Such normalization becomes eugenic once it becomes constitutive of (autonomous) reproductive choices by individual would-be-parents and by social (and sometimes legally mandated) technologies of risk-management and prevention to facilitate the creation of populations without characteristics thought abnormal (defective, costly, or not conducive to full participation/cooperation in society, etc.).

Before I offer some critical reflections on Tremain's position, I want to note two things: first, I agree with Tremain that until quite recently contemporary bioethics (both in its Rawlsian and Utilitarian guise) is eugenic in character and that it has badly theorized -- mostly by ignoring -- the inductive risk of its own activity. In fact, while it councils 'do-no-harm' to medicine and patient autonomy, it has been long reluctant to explore the possible harm that is the possible effect of social and institutional uptake of normative theorizing. For most of my adult life, analytic applied ethicists simply disparage those disciplines (Critical X) where inductive risk is taken seriously (recall my criticism of Heath). In so far as it is agreed that normative theory has possible bad social effects that's never due to the theory itself, but only due to bad people or bad social implementation. The character of the foreseeable uptake of a theory is not treated as a legitimate (professional) evaluative feature of the theory.

Second, and only a partial aside, while Tremain uses a Foucauldian framework (and linguistic register) to analyze these features, it converges with the decidedly non-Foucauldian treatment of the development of applied ethics offered by Katherine Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (recall here; here; and here). In particular, I want to highlight a structural feature of applied ethics, the significance of which only became clear to me while reading Tremain. Forrester notes that:

Applied ethics soon also encompassed medicine, law, and business. But the fact that moral thinking about war, with all its extremities and appeals to necessity, was one of the first test cases for applied ethics had a wider impact on the development of moral and political philosophy. Its focus on dramatic and extra ordinary moral choices was soon imported into other realms of inquiry. Crucially, it was imported back into the realm of domestic politics, which was turned into a case of its own: public morality.--Forrester In the Shadow of Justice, pp. 74-75 (emphasis added)

Appeals to the necessity of choosing function as a mechanism to prevent the development of questions about the proper form of thought and its institutional embeddedness. The focus on existential social choice facilitates the rise of casuistry without thinking through what the structure of the demand for casuistry does to the supply of ethical theory (as the worth having). (An analogous problem shows up in normative decision theory.) To simplify greatly, we saw the after-effects of this in the most recent pandemic: bioethicists were primed to discuss the rationing of medical care and the justification of vaccine requirements, but had little guidance to offer on how to think about the integration of many different kinds of fast moving (and sometimes still immature) sciences and the complex trade-offs of major social policies.  

Now, let me return to Tremain's analysis; it is important to recognize that normalization (mediated by various social and governmental practices) produces "people with certain kinds of subjectivities, that is, these practices have constituted subjects whose actions are governed through the exercise of their own capacity to choose in accordance with the norm(al)." (190) And while the structure of Tremain's argument is akin to an ideology critique, she recognizes that there is no sense in which she can claim that these subjects have "been duped by the ideological forces of some distant and overarching external power," nor is she in a position (as she admits) to claim "these subjects make morally bad personal decisions." (190) 

Tremain is a very clear writer, and she puts her assumptions and commitments transparently on the table: she is a nominalist, a historicist, and a relativist. And she makes clear that the problem with ("epistemological and ontological assumptions" embedded in) disciplinary practices that are invested in normalization is that "the potentially detrimental effects for disabled people" is ignored. (192; this is also true of embryo research.) Part of these detrimental effects are the widespread uptake of the thought that the disabled have "diminished lives" and so nudge (and legally facilitate) abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia of them. (200)*

I hinted above that I would offer a criticism. The problem is that acknowledging, even internalizing detrimental effects in a (bioethical) theory is neither necessary nor sufficient to undermine such a theory. Again, I draw on Forrester and the implication of appealing to necessity. It is characteristic of applied ethics to use "abstract, personal, and interpersonal modes of justification to explore the most concrete of existential questions of life, death, and killing— questions that continued to remain at the core of applied ethics." (82) To put the point starkly: the 'heroisms' of applied ethics is precisely its willingness to face up to the existential nature of its questions.** That something is eugenic and has harmful externalities is certainly something that -- once pointed out -- has to be faced, but with theoretical equanimity. 

I'll put the dilemma facing Tremain and her partisans as follows: because she is unwilling to develop a normative theory of her own that can meet contemporary applied ethics on its own terms (I almost wrote 'ethical battlefield' there), merely stating and naming, even unmasking, an inductive risk is not sufficient to change a disciplinary practice. If anything, once it is domesticated as inductive risk her insights can feed into other technologies of biopower. (So she may well rightly object to this whole post.) And because such domestication is always a live risk, Tremain is probably prudential in avoiding the development of a normative theory of her own. But as her own analysis shows, society will confer authority on normative theory (and as Forrester shows it will create all kinds of rewards for those who develop it 'best'), so avoiding the contamination of normative theory seems to consign oneself to political and professional wilderness. But that conclusion would be victim blaming, and to understand that we need to look more closely at (ii), the marginalization of disabled philosophers in the profession. To be continued.

 

Huizinga (and Adam Smith) on the Admiration of Political Thuggery

The general deterioration  of the moral principle shows itself rather more in the tendency of modern society to tolerate, to condone, and to acclaim, than in a changed standard of individual conduct. In so far as violence, deception, and cruelty, of which there is more in the world than there used to be, find expression in individual action, this can often be traced to the residue of demoralisation and exasperation left over from the [first] World War and its aftermath of hate and misery. The general deterioration  of the moral sense of values can best be observed, therefore, in those countries which have been least affected by the world-wide political and economic upheaval. This deterioration appears most clearly in the appreciation of political conduct as contrasted with the judgment of economic conduct. In respect to moral failings of an economic nature, offences against commercial good faith, abuse of property rights, etc., the popular attitude remains much as it used to be: sincere condemnation with now and then a tolerant smile. The tolerance increases and becomes coupled with a measure of admiration in proportion to the scope of the offence. The international swindler meets with more sympathy than the embezzling clerk from the suburbs. Into the attitude towards the great financial scandals creeps a certain admiration for the talent with which the gigantic machine of technical organisation and international finance is operated. On the whole, however, the moral valuation of economic crime seems to have remained essentially unchanged.

The situation is entirely different when the party forming the object of judgment belongs to and acts in the name of Government. In its attitude towards political conduct—that is, acts committed by the State or any one of its organs—the public at large shows itself increasingly indifferent to moral judgment. Except, of course, when the acting party is a foreign State or an opposition element within the State which has from the outset been branded as "enemy." Still, the tendency of the public to acclaim and admire great political actions is not limited to the acts of the State to which it owes allegiance, alone. The worship of success, which was already seen to exercise a mitigating influence on the judgment of economic misconduct, is capable of eliminating practically all moral indignation from political judgment. It is carried to such lengths that many seem prepared to value a political organisation whose fundamental doctrines they abhor, according to the degree of success with which it achieves its predetermined aim. Incapable of judging the nature of this aim, the means with which it is pursued, and the degree to which it is actually achieved, the spectator contents himself with the external signs of achievement, which are the only ones the newspaper reader or the tourist can observe. Thus a political system which first filled him with disgust and subsequently with fear and awe, will gradually obtain his acceptance and even admiration. Injustice, cruelty, restraint of conscience, oppression, falsity, dishonour, deceit, violation of law and equity?—But look how they have cleaned up the cities and what wonderful roads they have built!--Johan Huizinga In The Shadow of Tomorrow, Chapter 13. (Translated by Huizinga.)

A few weeks ago, I noted that Huizinga's (1938) Homo Ludens ends with a fierce attack on Carl Schmitt (recall this post on Huizinga's eviction of a Nazi intellectual; and this one on the criticism of Schmitt). A paper by Alexander Lambrow had alerted me to the fact that Huizinga's (1935) In De schaduwen van Morgen (In the Shadow of Tomorrow) is also explicitly critical of  Schmitt in Chapter 12. In fact, while in Homo Ludens the criticism of Schmitt can be treated as an afterthought (I wouldn't do so myself), it is pretty essential to the whole argument of In The Shadow of Tomorrow, which is Huizinga's philippic against the temptations of fascism and a lament on the death throes  of bourgeois culture. This can be seen by the allusion to Schmitt's  ideas in the quoted passage ("when the acting party is a foreign State or an opposition element within the State which has from the outset been branded as "enemy."")* 

The larger argument in Chapter 13, is a criticism of the social tendency to glorify 'existence and life,' and to prefer these over 'knowledge and judgment' (a tendency, which according to Huizinga, can also be found in Lebensphilosophie and what he calls 'existentialism'). This tendency is constitutive of what he calls the 'general deterioration  of the moral principle.' To put it in Nietzschean terms (Nietzsche is mentioned a few times in the book), what Huizinga objects to is the effects on social mores of a cult of the affirmation of life. The passage quoted at the top of this post is an illustration of such purportedly nefarious effects.

The key point for present purposes is that political success, independent of the moral quality of the ends it serves, generates admiration, what Huizinga calls, "the worship of success." Such worship is able to corrupt the moral sentiments when it comes to political matters (it "is capable of eliminating practically all moral indignation from political judgment"). 

It is somewhat surprising that Huizinga treats this as a modern phenomenon requiring special explanation. We might say that the moralists of all ages have declaimed against the worship of success. One of my favorite examples of an analysis of the worship of success can be found in a rather elitist passage of Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments:

Our admiration of success is founded upon the same principle with our respect for wealth and greatness, and is equally necessary for establishing the distinction of ranks and the order of society. By this admiration of success we are taught to submit more easily to those superiors, whom the course of human affairs may assign to us; to regard with reverence, and sometimes even with a sort of respectful affection, that fortunate violence which we are no longer capable of resisting; not only the violence of such splendid characters as those of a Caesar or an Alexander, but often that of the most brutal and savage barbarians, of an Attila, a Gengis, or a Tamerlane. To all such mighty conquerors the great mob of mankind are naturally disposed to look up with a wondering, though, no doubt, with a very weak and foolish admiration. By this admiration, however, they are taught to acquiesce with less reluctance under that government which an irresistible force imposes upon them, and from which no reluctance could deliver them. (TMS 6.3.3o)

According to Smith the worship of success is a natural disposition which grounds our complicity in our own subordination to social and political hierarchy. This is also so when the hierarchy is founded on violence. And while elsewhere Smith also calls this disposition a corruption of the moral sentiments, he also makes clear that it such self-subordination also has social utility: "THIS disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments." (TMS 1.3.1.1)

In fact, throughout TMS, Smith returns to the corrupting dazzle that violent conquerors like Caesar and Alexander generate. As he puts it while contrasting their achievements to more genuine philanthropists:

We may believe of many men, that their talents are superior to those of Caesar and Alexander; and that in the same situations they would perform still greater actions. In the mean time, however, we do not behold them with that astonishment and admiration with which those two heroes have been regarded in all ages and nations. The calm judgments of the mind may approve of them more, but they want the splendour of great actions to dazzle and transport it. The superiority of virtues and talents has not, even upon those who acknowledge that superiority, the same effect with the superiority of achievements. (TMS 2.3.2.3)

I have to admit that, against Huizinga, I think Smith is right that the worship of brutal success even when one does not benefit from it oneself (and it may go against one's moral principles and political commitments) is not a uniquely modern post WWI phenomenon. (That's compatible, of course, with being agnostic about Smith's further claim that the disposition is itself useful because it is order preserving.)+ 

But Huizinga and Smith do help point to the way to how to respond to the worship of success. The proper response to such worship is not to criticize the ends or means that the subject of admiration engages in. This will not undermine the dazzle of achievement. No the proper response, I think, is to either undermine the dazzle by a kind of -- echoing Jason Stanley's terminology  (recall here; here)-- undermining propaganda directed at the splendor that surrounds their success, or, when that it is impossible or too costly, to undermine the very success itself. The best way to tackle, say, an aura of invincibility is to beat the villain at their own chosen path. Of course, if success means victory on the battlefield, that's easier said than done. 

This strategy -- of blocking success from those that are worshipped for their success -- raises complex questions when one simultaneously recognizes that to end, say, an existing conflict face-saving measures may well be required. For these very face-saving measures may well reinforce and entrench the dazzle and splendor that surrounds the (to use Smith's terminology) most brutal and savage barbarians.** And if we look obliquely at today's headlines this means that the temptation to end miserable suffering of innocents has to be weighed against strengthening the interests and dazzle of a violent (and nuclear armed) dictator.