Digressions&Impressions

Ibn Tufayl's Polemic with Ibn Bajja

When I speak of the rationalists’ method—God raise you to the level of love!—I do not confine myself to their knowledge of the physical world, any more than I confine myself to the metaphysical when I speak of intuition. The two modes of apprehension are quite distinct and are not to be confused, but what I mean by the rationalist’s apprehension includes his understanding of the metaphysical—for example, that of Ibn Bājja. It is a necessary condition of what is reached by pure reason that it be true and valid. Thus the difference between the rationalist and those who enjoy intimacy is that while both are concerned with the self-same things, the latter enjoy a clearer view and far greater delight.
Ibn Bājja censured them for the pursuit of this joy. He claimed it was a product of their imagination and even promised a clear and distinct description of just how ecstasy ought to be enjoyed. Here is the answer he deserves: ‘Do not declare too sweet fruits you have not tasted, and do not trample on the necks of the saintly.’ The man did not, in fact, keep his promise or any such thing. What prevented him, perhaps, was that, as he himself says, he was pressed for time with the trouble of getting down to Oran. Or perhaps he felt that describing this state would force him to say something derogatory to his own way of life or at odds with his encouragement of amassing wealth and of the use of various artful dodges to acquire it. But I digress.--Ibn Tufayl Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, translated by Lenn Evan Goodman, P. 98

One of the "veils" or mysteries that surround Ibn Tufayl's Hayy Ibn Yaqzan is the meaning of the framing device which includes a rather cursory history of philosophy in the Islamic world and an even more cursory review of the state of learning in Islamic Spain. Included in these are the polemical remarks quoted above. These remarks are treated as a digression and are easy to miss because they occur just after a much more memorable and striking thought (recall) experiment in which Ibn Tufayl describes the joyful, transformative experience of suddenly seeing color after being born blind (which is meant to illustrate the nature of a kind of mystical, intuitive knowledge of the highest truth, or union with God). As it happens, some of the texts that Ibn Tufayl discusses in his historical survey anticipate versions of the thought experiment, and so one is invited (recall) to compare his version with those of his predecessors, including Al-Ghazali and Al-Farabi.  

Ibn Bajja (Avempace) is treated as a rationalist critic of those that claim (like Al-Ghazali, Ibn Sinna, and Ibn Tufayl--and later Spinoza) that there is an intuitive faculty beyond (and higher than) reason which can permit a certain kind of ecstatic union with the divine. Ibn Tufayl's response is rather polemical and ad personam suggesting that earthly attachments and the vices needed to accumulate them prevented Ibn Bajja from transcending his own rationalism. (This, too, anticipates Spinoza, see the Emendation of the Intellect.)

I like puzzling through the veils of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan with my students. And last fall one of my excellent undergraduate students, Astrid Ytre-Eide, called my attention to the following feature: that this very criticism of Ibn Bajja is echoed in an episode near the end of the book. In particular, it is echoed in the context of Hayy's failure to convert Absāl's friends, the political and intellectual elite of the island where Salāmān ruled (Salāmān being the one-time close companion of Absāl, who is now Hayy's only spiritual follower). On Hayy's analysis his failure to convert this elite is caused by their commitment to their earthly possessions and a conception of knowledge that leaves no possibility to transcend the material world: 

They had made their passions their god, and desire the object of their worship. They destroyed each other to collect the trash of this world, “distracted by greed ’til they went down to their graves.” Preaching is no help, fine words have no effect on them. Arguing only makes them more pig-headed. Wisdom, they have no means of reaching; they were allotted no share of it. They are engulfed in ignorance. Their hearts are corroded by their possessions.*

Hayy goes on to claim that in a culture in which intuitive knowledge is ruled out, the only possible function of religion is earthly: to regulate social life ("religion was for this world, in that it helped them lead decent lives without others encroaching on what belonged to them.") Now, (recall) Al-Farabi, Ibn Sinna, and (on more controversially, but on my reading) Al-Ghazali all agree that this is indeed one of the purposes of true religion (which they understand in a very broad Platonic sense as any truth-apt public image or ritual conducive toward flourishing in this world). But the other, more fundamental purpose is to generate eternal flourishing (recall also this post on the costs of Salman's rule). This more fundamental purpose is impossible when people embrace a religion (and prejudices) that have the same effect as Ibn Bajja's philosophy.

Now we should not let Hayy's own analysis of these matters be the last word because Hayy lacks understanding of rhetoric and history; he is incapable of further analyzing his own failure. And so he cannot learn (recall) from more successful prophets.

But even so, Hayy's failure does allow us to discern a further feature about Ibn Tufayl's polemic against Ibn Bajja. Ibn Bajja's philosophy is not just false, it is also wrong; the wide circulation of Ibn Bajja's philosophy, which appeals to prejudices of the thoughtful among the rich and powerful, will prevent the development of a more spiritual way of life. Of course, the more fundamental point, perhaps, is that where a philosophy like Ibn Bajja's is adopted, a religion very much like Islam is necessary to regulate social life. It's left to the reader to decide whether the necessity also goes in the other direction.  

On Paul Lodge, on the Manic

Sass and Pienkos seem to be confusing what it is like to think manically with something very different, namely, what it is like to perceive what one takes to be expressions of the thought processes of manic subjects. Testimony of others, as well as evidence from my own writing on occasions when I was manic or hypomanic, suggest that the factors that Shenton and Solovay identified were present during these episodes. However, my recollections are not of states of mind in which it seemed to me that my thoughts were disordered. To the extent that there was an experience of myself thinking, my thinking felt more appropriate and adequate to its task than normal. The identified factors did not seem problematic; in fact, quite the contrary.

Sass and Pienkos also observe that it is useful to think of manic thought in terms of “mattering … or rather of how things matter”. They suggest this partly involves “a form of distraction—an inability to ignore environmental stimuli that are capable of arousing lively but ephemeral interest in the patient, but that, in a normal individual, would remain on the margin of awareness, outside the focus of attention”; or, more prosaically, “there being too many things that matter, and that come to matter too quickly and fleetingly, for the individual”. Here Sass and Pienkos point to another phenomenon that is criterial in DSM-V (“distractibility”). And while they again seem to switch between attempting to describe what it is like for the subject and attempting to describe what the subject is doing (i.e., thinking in a distracted way), Sass and Pienkos do make an observation that I believe is crucial: namely, that mania involves a sense of there being many more things that demand attention than usual.

My own experience concurs with the main features of Sass and Pienkos’ account. But their suggestion that this is all somehow too much for the subject needs qualification. For a proper understanding of these phenomena, it is important to recognize that during at least some manic and hypomanic episodes, there is a sense of an exponential increase in objects of attention. And this brings with it an exhilarating sense of being exposed to an unlimited number of objects and their interconnections all at once, and a sense that one is being offered a window into the true nature of reality. This is not to say that there is never a feeling that this is all too much. Indeed, this feeling is usually a component of the way in which mania and hypomania come to an end, if allowed to run their course without external intervention. And a sense of being overwhelmed may also arise if one feels unable to communicate what one is experiencing to those around one. But for the manic subject, at the heart of the experience is the feeling of successful insight.--Paul Lodge "What Is It Like to Be Manic? " @The Oxonian Review

I have known Paul since his participation in the early modern seminar of April, 2001, that is, nearly my whole academic career. The North American circle of early modern scholars is fairly small, and my supervisor was at the center of much of the intellectual traffic among them in those days. Because we both had a rare scholarly interest in De Volder -- Paul because of De Volder's correspondence with Leibniz; I because he corresponded with Huygens --, we even exchanged some emails. But we did not become friends at first because I found him dour and aloof, which in my insecure moments (which were plenty) I interpreted as arrogance.

Years went by with minor mutual acknowledgment. That changed one morning. I was attending my supervisor's fest at Princeton (september 2014). I was very jet-lagged and trying to find espresso in Princeton early in the morning. And while I was already a coffee-snob, I ended up in the Starbucks on Nassau street which mercifully opens before dawn. (I remember the street name for obvious reasons.) There I found Paul comfortably seated. I joined him. For the next three to four hours we talked; or, I should say, he talked and I listened under the sway of his unexpected charisma and fascinated by the energy of his enthusiasm. I don't think I reveal any improper intimacy, if I say (recall this post) that most of what Paul talked about was his interest in the kind of Christianity exhibited by the great social liberal T.H. Green (see also this post).  

Since my college days I have known that I am fascinated -- with a mixture of intense attraction and repulsion -- by intellectuals who lecture with enthusiastic conviction. I'd like to think this is due to the fact that I find my own thought too conflicted and uncertain, and so I am constantly surprised by what seems to be an entirely different form of consciousness. Despite my mental protests, such enthusiasts have focused my attention, even shaped my interest into Newton, Milton, metaphysics, philosophy of biology amongst other topics. 

Reading Paul's essay in the Oxonian Review brought back the visceral intensity of our two mornings in Princeton. He was not manic, but the heightened awareness of the possible fragility of one's (ahh) orientation toward experience infused his warmth. At the time, I commented on the fact that he seemed a changed person, something he acknowledged. Meeting him almost certainly inspired me to write on my own struggle with depression (recall here).

While I am pretty sure the tendency toward both manic and depressive episodes runs in my own family, the one instance of mania of my own I vividly recall was produced as a side-effect of a heavy prednisone treatment prescribed to me to give me a kind of re-set to reverse the effect of skin allergies. (It worked, although I experienced irritable skin and psyche for another seven years or so.) For about a week, I wasn't just insomniac, but the words streamed out of me often by way of lengthy and spontaneous emails to anybody that crossed my mind. 

I have not had the nerve to reread those letters. In part because I am mortified by what I'll find I thought worth confiding to at 2am to my Dean, my ex-lovers, my accountant, and quite a few professional (ahh) elders, etc. What I do recognize now is the incredible tact of most people. 

But I recognize Paul's claim that in a manic period there being many things that demand attention at once, and that one seems capable, even skilled, at giving them such attention at once. I would describe this as a kind of immersion in the vivid connectedness of things. In these digressions I try to capture this imperfectly with my habit of cross-connections. This involves, as Paul notes, a sense of having been offered a "glimpse into a more truthful relationship to existence." My only quibble is the word 'truthful.' For me, it would be more apt to say, a "glimpse into a more intimate relationship to existence." 

Because of my aversion to the cult of genius, I am often wary of bringing philosophy and mania into association with each other (if only not to encourage the young into experimenting with mind altering drugs); but see this video. And from the perspective of the professional philosopher, there is little reason to do so. Often our ways of analysis encourage (ahh) us to see the disconnectedness of things. We pretend not to notice, perhaps become incapable of noticing, the lateral connections that make any conceptual clarification possible. While I am a critic of the excesses and side-effects* this relentless focus on a clearly defined puzzles produces, at bottom it appeals to my aesthetic sense. 

The aesthetic is not nothing, perhaps it's fundamental.

But sometimes we can experience philosophy as an immersion, an intimate immersion, in which the connectedness-of-the-infinite-cosmos calls out to us. And I can, thus, attest that even a very partial intellectual love of god generates a joy, heightened by the gratitude one is still around to experience it.

 

On Sex Equality, Original Sin, Rousseau, and François Poullain de la Barre

Even the wisest legislators found no interesting role for women when they founded their republics. All laws seem to have been made to keep men in their present position of power. Men we regard as fonts of wisdom have never said anything good about women. In fact, men’s behavior towards women in all places and at all times is so uniform that it seems to be part of an organized movement. Some people have even thought that men are impelled to behave this way through some hidden instinct ordained universally by the Creator of nature.
This view is all the more easily justifiable when we consider the way women themselves tolerate their situation. They see it as being their natural place. Either because they do not think at all about what they are, or because they are born and raised in a state of dependency, they share the male point of view. In all these things, both men and women tend to believe that their minds are as different as their bodies and that the distinctions that necessarily exist between them should be extended to all aspects of life. This opinion, however, like most of the ones we hold about custom and usage, is pure prejudice, and is dictated by superficial appearance rather than close analysis. We would certainly reject it if we took the trouble to go back to its origin. We could find many examples of things that were done formerly that we could compare with the things we do now, and we could weigh ancient customs against present-day ones. If we had followed this rule more often, we would have avoided a lot of mistakes. As far as women’s present situation is concerned, we would have realized that it is simply the rule of the stronger that has put them in such a subservient position, and we would understand that it is not through any natural deficiencies that they have been denied the advantages enjoyed by our sex.
Indeed, when we think honestly about human history, both past and present, we realize that there is one common denominator: reason has always been the weakest element in our decisions, and all stories seem to have been made up for the sole purpose of demonstrating what we see in any lifetime, that from man’s very origins might has always prevailed. The greatest empires of Asia owe their beginnings to usurpers and brigands, and the inheritors of the ruins of Greece and Rome were upstarts who thought they could resist their masters and dominate their equals. All societies exhibit the same kind of conduct. If men behave in this way towards their equals, then it is most likely that they behaved in the same way first of all towards women. Here, more or less, is how it came about.
Men, realizing they were the stronger and physically superior sex, imagined they were superior in all respects. This was of no great consequence for women at the beginning of the world, when a very different state of affairs prevailed from today. There was no government, no learning, no employment, no established religion; dependence was not considered irksome. I imagine that people lived like children, and winning or losing was part of the game. Both men and women, who were naive and innocent, contributed equally to the tasks of tilling and hunting as savages do today. A man went about his business and a woman hers; the person who made the greatest contribution was the most respected.--François Poullain de la Barre (1673) On the Equality of the Two Sexes Translation by Vivien Bosley, Part 1.**

I tend to ignore Poullain de la Barre because he lacks the biting satire I enjoy so much in Gournay or Mandeville, and because I find many of his arguments a bit cringe-worthy, especially because he is so sincere . But re-reading the passage -- made famous by Simone de Beauvoir (see also Marina Reuter here) -- above reminded me that it is quite amazing that Poullain de la Barre died of natural causes.  Beauvoir uses the passage in her argument that men "sought to make the fact of their supremacy a right." I don't disagree with Beauvoir, but there is more here worth noting.

First, the whole paragraph is structured around a contrast between what "some people" think and the truth (according to Poullain de la Barre). What most people think is that the male instinct to dominate, and to dominate in solidarity with each other, is part of human nature. And that this is part of God's providence. This view has a complex relationship to original sin. 

By contrast, according to Poullain people, are naturally cooperative, naturally embrace the division of labor, and more or less accurately track in their praise and blame people's contribution to group welfare. This natural sociability view comes very close to denying original sin altogether by suggesting that an original golden age was actually possible. 

Second, as it happens, our natural sociability is a bit like Locke's pre-political state of nature because there does exist some property. I mention Locke because Poullain de la Barre also associates this child-like friendly state of nature with really existing 'savages.' But, and this indeed anticipates Rousseau (as Reuter notes), it's when states are originated that (great) inequality and permanent gendered structures of hierarchy come into being. And, in fact, according to Poullain de la Barre all polities (I am avoiding the confusing use of 'societies') originate in acts of theft and overthrowing of basically pacific social orders.  This is not just true of all the great empires of the past, but "All...exhibit the same kind of conduct." He is essentially saying that all polities have illegitimate origins that they perpetuate in present conduct.

Third, this last point is a feature and not a bog of his argument because he thinks all (socially significant) gender inequality is grounded, ultimately, in a social order that is inherently violent (see also Reuter) and devalues reason and peace.  So, rather than seeing political society as a solution to the problem of violent or Hobbesian state of nature, it just is the Hobbesian state of nature. To be sure, Poullain is not an anarchist. He ultimately wishes to reform/re-order society on rational grounds in which peace and our true intellectual contributions (not just by women, but also women) are valued--but that is a normative ideal nowhere reality.*

Fourth, political dominance founded in violence and hierarchy always generates an ideology in which the superiority is projected onto other features of the dominant group. He associates the workings of such ideological projection with imagination. (For Poullain de la Barre reason seems both pacific and truth-apt in ways the imagination is.) 

Fifth, and most striking organized religion is itself one of the institutions that facilitate domination and is an exercise of such imaginative ideological projections.+ It only comes into being after polities come into being and then it is inevitably tainted by, if not a tool of, the violence of male hierarchy. 

Let me close with a modest moral. It is a recurring feature to situate Poullain in the Cartesianism of his age (see this excellent piece by Schmitter) That's not all false, and I will return to that link some time. But it also raises expectations about the philosophical nature of his work. In many ways, his evidential and conceptual arguments do not really make one think one is dealing with an especially promising Cartesian (natural philosopher or metaphysician). But unlike most of the Cartesians of his age (and here I am relying on Alex Douglas' wonderful book on Spinoza), who preferred to focus on medicine and science, Poullain did not shy away from very important political and theological issues and consequences of the Cartesian revolution in philosophy. And in so doing he landed in a place that is as radical and far-reaching as, say, Hobbes and Spinoza, and in some ways closer to enduring significance. 

On Historical Experience, Legitimacy, Conventions and the Spirit of Experimentation in Locke

Sect. 50. But since gold and silver, being little useful to the life of man in proportion to food, raiment, and carriage, has its value only from the consent of men, whereof labour yet makes, in great part, the measure, it is plain, that men have agreed to a disproportionate and unequal possession of the earth, they having, by a tacit and voluntary consent, found out, a way how a man may fairly possess more land than he himself can use the product of, by receiving in exchange for the overplus gold and silver, which may be hoarded up without injury to any one; these metals not spoiling or decaying in the hands of the possessor. This partage of things in an inequality of private possessions, men have made practicable out of the bounds of society, and without compact, only by putting a value on gold and silver, and tacitly agreeing in the use of money: for in governments, the laws regulate the right of property, and the possession of land is determined by positive constitutions.--John Locke Second Treatise of Government

The quoted passage is at the end of chapter 5 "Of Property" of Locke's Second Treatise. Much of the philosophical interest is in the earlier articulation of the principle known as the 'Lockean proviso' (in, recall, section  33) and the labor mixing argument grounded in self-ownership (sect 27). On re-reading the chapter recently (with expert guidance of Bas van der Vossen and Katharine Gillespie), I noticed, perhaps for the first time, that the very chapter that justifies property is also a polemic against (feudal) land-owning society (in favor of an economy focused on growing  numbers and economy). 

Earlier in the chapter, Locke had noted that "the invention of money, and the tacit agreement of men to put a value on it, introduced (by consent) larger possessions." (Sect 36). There are five important claims lurking here. I) (the right to) property precedes the invention of money. II) The invention of money facilitates accumulation of property (and of itself; see also sects 48 & 50 quoted above). (III) This generates inequality (this is made explicit in sect 50 quoted above). IV) The value of money is a convention. V) This convention is tacitly consented to. 

As an aside, according to Locke the conventional use of money can in a growing economy itself make other things scarce and so valuable, "(where the increase of people and stock, with the use of money, had made land scarce, and so of some value)" (sect 45). There is a complex issue lurking here: in Locke, unlike Hume and later economists, scarcity is itself not a condition of the possibility of property. But that's for another time. 

Now, interestingly enough, that the use of money is consented to is a refrain repeated through the chapter: e.g., "amongst that part of mankind that have consented to the use of money," (sect 45); "thus came in the use of money, some lasting thing that men might keep without spoiling, and that by mutual consent men would take in exchange for the truly useful, but perishable supports of life," (sect 47). And again in the passage quoted above.

So, one may be tempted to think that Locke's account of the legitimacy of money as an institution is grounded in a consent theory not dissimilar to his account of the social contract. But I am also reminded of his account of toleration, where (recall) the institution of (true) a church is grounded in voluntary association, that is, mutual consent ("A church...I take to be a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord"). But it is crucial to Locke argument in his analysis of the nature of a church that it produces a positive social consequence: piety, that is, obedience to the law. This positive consequence is conducive to social order and, to connect it to the present argument, respect for property.

Let's now, finally,  turn sect 50 quoted above. First, it clarifies that (IV) "the value of money is a convention" is imprecisely formulated. It would be better to say, (IV*) that money is valuable is a convention. For, the exact value of money can vary. And (VI) of  this particular value labor is the measure. How Locke's version of the labor theory of value is supposed to work is not my present concern.

Second, and more important, Locke's account of the legitimacy of the convention of money as a social institution is not just  grounded in  (tacit) consent. It is also grounded in what we may call historical experience over time. They have learned to appreciate ("found out") the social utility ("made practicable") of the convention despite some of its equally evident drawbacks -- that is, others become richer than you do. That is to say, social utility is a matter of judgment about social costs and benefits. This two-staged for of legitimation (first) tacit consent then, after a period, (second) continued consent based on historical experience of positive social consequences. 

This two-stage approach to legitimacy is, I think, capable of being extended to, appropriate for other social institutions (and conventions) in a Lockean approach. As noted above, he comes close to offering it in his account of toleration of certain churches. Obviously, it means that initial legitimacy of a social institution is always conditional on the continued proper effectiveness of the institution over historical time. This analysis of costs and benefits may well involve comparing incommensurables and so will involve good judgment, and it is not impossible that different communities and ages will come to different conclusions.  For some the lack of a clear and objective decision procedure will be thought a problem for Locke; for others, this (almost Aristotelian) contextual variability will be thought a proper feature.

To put the last point provocatively: the Lockean can now respond to (say) the Marxist or Environmentalist critique of (one element of) capital accumulation as follows in the spirit of adaptation/experimentation: sure, the institutions of the status quo have serious drawbacks (as all institutions are wont to do). Why not propose, or better yet, with your comrades, try out an alternative institution or set of institution that can generate consent from its participants and that generates good social outcomes over time worth living by? 

What's striking about all this is that in one sense Locke comes closer to Spinoza for whom all social contracts are never final but always dependant on continued utility of the contract to the parties; and in another sense he now clearly anticipates the more consequentialist style of justification of social institutions found in Hume and Adam Smith, while still remaining distinctly (ahh) Lockean. 

On Russell's History of Western Philosophy (I); Russell on responsible Speech and his Criticism of Pragmatism

MANY histories of philosophy exist, and it has not been my purpose merely to add one to their number. My purpose is to exhibit philosophy as an integral part of social and political life: not as the isolated speculations of remarkable individuals, but as both an effect and a cause of the character of the various communities in which different systems flourished. This purpose demands more account of general history than is usually given by historians of philosophy. I have found this particularly necessary as regards periods with which the general reader cannot be assumed to be familiar. The great age of the scholastic philosophy was an outcome of the reforms of the eleventh century, and these, in turn, were a reaction against previous corruption. Without some knowledge of the centuries between the fall of Rome and the rise of the medieval Papacy, the intellectual atmosphere of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries can hardly be understood. In dealing with this period, as with others, I have aimed at giving only so much general history as I thought necessary for the sympathetic comprehension of philosophers in relation to the times that formed them and the times that they helped to form.

One consequence of this point of view is that the importance which it gives to a philosopher is often not that which he deserves on account of his philosophic merit. For my part, for example, I consider Spinoza a greater philosopher than Locke, but he was far less influential; I have therefore treated him much more briefly than Locke. Some men--for example, Rousseau and Byron-though not philosophers at all in the academic sense, have so profoundly affected the prevailing philosophic temper that the development of philosophy cannot be understood if they are ignored. Even pure men of action are sometimes of great importance in this respect; very few philosophers have influenced philosophy as much as Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, or Napoleon. Lycurgus, if only be had existed, would have been a still more notable example.--Bertrand Russell (1945) The History of Western Philosophy. "Preface"

This is the first of a series of posts on Russell's The History of Western Philosophy (hereafter History), including one, shortly, on why it focuses on "Western Philosophy." The passage quoted above are the first few lines of the History. The first thing to note is the somewhat surprising nod to Verstehen. Russell proposes to offer a contextual philosophy, in which the aim is sympathetic comprehension of philosophers in context. (There are echoes of Collinwood here. Collingwood's The Idea of History was published in 1946, but Russell could have known of Collingwood's lectures in the 1930s.) It is surprising because (recall) Russell's criticism of Bergson are connected to Russell's suspicion of reliance on sympathy. Russell even embraces the stance of "unsympathetic spectatorship!"

Now, the point is not just sympathetic comprehension of philosophers as shaped by their times. The real point of the book, which is explained more fully in the second paragraph, is to offer an account of how philosophy has shaped history. So, right from the start Russell offers a distinction between two sources of evaluation of philosophy:

• (i) an intrinsic one that studies a philosopher/philosophy on its merits;
• (ii) an extrinsic one that is consequentialist in character and studies philosophy on its effects on (a) philosophy and (b) its (social and political) environment. 

Russell does not explain what he means by "merit." (Something But it is clear that this is in some sense connected to the why philosophy is practiced in the "academic sense." So, peculiarly, intrinsic merit is given a sociological understanding. I put it like that not because I think this is what Russell intends, but rather because he accepts that under a certain guise or certain normative understanding of philosophy, Rousseau and Burke, are not philosophers at all because they can't be classified as academic philosophers in any sense. By this he does not mean they lacked academic appointments because Spinoza -- who has very high intrinsic value -- also was not an academic (nor was Locke). But rather that they exhibit, I suspect, the kind of virtues associated with academic philosophy in some sense.

What those virtues are I leave aside now, because Russell is working with a distinction between (say) men of letters and proper philosophers while simultaneously deliberately blurring it because he is going to treat men of letters as key to the history in the History. As he puts in the "introduction" (xiv) the topic of the book is the tracing of "a reciprocal causation: the circumstances of men's lives do much to determine their philosophy, but, conversely, their philosophy does much to determine their circumstances."

That still leaves open what Russell means by 'philosophy' and the intrinsic sense of merit  as well as how he establishes the causal interaction among ideas and circumstances. I wish to return to that in this series. But here I want to focus on the fact that the consequentialist evaluation is not merely neutral. Russell is as interested in the positive and the negative consequences of doctrine. In particular, and this is the theme for today's post, Russell embraces a doctrine of what I have called responsible speech. That it is legitimate to evaluate philosophers in terms of how they will foreseeable shape the environment or even have (surprisingly and unintentionally) shaped the circumstances. To show this I go to the closing set piece of the whole book.* While summing up his criticism of the pragmatist conception of truth, Russell writes,

In all this I feel a grave danger, the danger of what might be called cosmic impiety. The concept of "truth" as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness--the intoxication of power which invaded philosophy with Fichte, and to which modern men, whether philosophers or not, are prone. I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and that any philosophy which, however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster.

The submission to facts is characteristic of Russell's conception of scientific philosophy. It is connected to his criticism of Bergson and his rejection of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), which has low tolerance for arbitrary facts {[recall my discussion with Jeff Bell}.  Notice that (to echo Tarski) the classical conception of truth that Russell accepts itself is defended in consequentialist terms: it produces the right sort of humility, even sanity. That is to say, Russell thinks we can evaluate a regime of truth in terms of its social consequences on the effects of individuals (pride, humility, intoxication, madness, etc.) and society (social disaster, social peace, etc.) 

And when Russell evaluates the classical regime of truth alongside the possible pragmatist regime of truth,** he rejects the pragmatist on consequentialist grounds. And while such evaluation may not be fair or thought lacking in merit, a pragmatist is in no position to object since she embraces the consequentialist method of evaluation is a feature not a bug of her system. For the pragmatist conception of truth is "instrumentalist" because truth is going to be the product of inquiry. In particular, it will be the thing to be agreed upon "ultimately" by "all those who investigate." This idea has had an important afterlife in the Kuhnian focus on consensus in science. But what matters here that the grounds on which all those who investigate cannot itself be truth (that would be circular as Russell notes), but rather, is, in part, informed by the purposes, including practical ones, of investigation.  It's this feature that makes the instrumentalist conception of truth consequentialist. So, Russell's criticism of Dewey/pragmatist is ad hominem, it is not itself unfair. (To say that is not to say it goes through.)

Russell is careful to say that his rejection of the pragmatist regime of truth on consequentialist grounds is, in part, a judgment about circumstance.  Throughout the book,he lets the reader know he is writing at a particular time, namely one that has been shaped by ideas that lead to intoxication and vast social disaster. In such an environment a pragmatist embrace of truth slides us further down the slippery slope. Pragmatism enhances the road to serfdom. To be sure, Russell could well allow that pragmatist conception of truth is worth pursuing in other contexts. Not all contexts, because -- and I will return to this -- Russell insists that in modernity (the "industrial state") fascism is one of the permanent live possibilities (785; note again the soft historicism of Russell).+ So, while he is writing this at a time, the criticism of pragmatism is indexed to a particular kind of epoch.

Let me close, I don't write this to endorse Russell's criticism of pragmatism. Rather, it is notable how important the consequentialist criticism is. Russell is basically claiming that pragmatism is an irresponsible philosophical doctrine when the state is capable of totalitarian powers and itself the object of a romantic (and worse) attachments. In Russell then we see a treatment of inductive risk in earnest: Russell invites us to consider how our philosophical practice can abused.

 

 

Ibn Khaldun, Prophets, and his Critique of Martyrdom

[E]very mass (political) undertaking by necessity requires group feeling. This is indicated in the aforementioned tradition: "God sent no prophet who did not enjoy the protection of his people."...
To this chapter belong cases of revolutionaries from among the common people and of jurists who undertake to reform evil (practices). Many religious people who follow the ways of religion come to revolt against unjust amirs. They call for a change in, and prohibition of, evil (practices) and for good practices. They hope for a divine reward for what they do. They gain many followers and sympathizers among the great mass of the people, but they risk being killed, and most of them actually do perish in consequence of their activities as sinners and unrewarded, because God had not destined them for such (activities as they undertake). He commands such activities to be undertaken only where there-exists the power to bring them to a successful conclusion....Rulers and dynasties are strongly entrenched. Their foundations can be undermined and destroyed only through strong efforts backed by the group feeling of tribes and families, as we have mentioned before. Similarly, prophets in their religious propaganda depended on groups and families, though they were the ones who could have been supported by God with anything in existence, if He had wished, but in His wisdom He permitted matters to take their customary course.
If someone who is on the right path were to attempt (religious reforms) in this way, (his) isolation would keep him from (gaining the support of) group feeling, and he would perish. If someone merely pretends to (achieve religious reforms) in order to gain (political) leadership, he deserves to be hampered by obstacles and to fall victim to perdition. (Religious reforms) are a divine matter that materializes only with God's pleasure and support, through sincere devotion for Him and in view of good intentions towards the Muslims. ...

Most men who adopt such ideas will be found to be, either deluded and crazy, or to be swindlers who, with the help of such claims, seek to obtain (political) leadership -which they crave and would be unable to obtain in the natural manner. They believe that such claims will be instrumental in bringing to them the fulfillment of their hopes. They do not consider the disaster that will overtake them in consequence. The trouble they create will speedily cause their death and bring their trickery to a bitter end.---Ibn Khaldun, "Chapter 3, paragraph 6. Religious propaganda cannot materialize without group feeling," The Muqadimmah (translated by F. Rosenthal), p. 88.

Earlier in the week (recall) I claimed that Ibn Khaldun is a proto-political Spinozist. By which I mean that he embraces the idea that revelation is authoritative in social affairs, but that revelation should not be treated as a book that gives us a philosophy of nature. Today I want to spell out a bit more the way revelation's authority is supposed to work. I have noted before (recall) that Ibn Khaldun treats prophecy as a real agent of historical change. But he explicitly rejects (recall) the (Islamic) philosophers' suggestion that prophecy is just a synonym for a true political founder (akin to a Rousseau-ian legislator). So, for him states, even well ordered states are possible without prophecy. This is no to deny that he thinks prophets can be political legislators.

For, to be sure, he treats Muhammad as a genuine prophet. In fact, he attributes two miracles to Muhammad: he "wrought no greater miracle than the Qur'an and the fact that he united the Arabs in his mission." (Sixth prefatory discussion.) The second of these points to the political significance of Muhammad's life; he was capable of unifying Arab tribes. (This is a standard Islamic idea.) 

Now in Ibn Khaldun's philosophy of history, the pre-unity Arabs are treated as Bedouins who live in a kind of anarchic state of nature, of equality and independence. (They also lack wealth because they do not really practice division of labor.) They have a lot of latent power, but ordinary this power is invisible because they are at war with each other or subordinated to some sedentary civilization.  

This latent power can be channeled through royal authority. And royal authority, in turn, (recall) relies on group feeling, or what I call sympathy. In Ibn Khaldun's philosophy of history, genuine change starts in the periphery and, at first, is destructive of civilization life. There is a strain -- I am uncertain if it is the dominant strain --  in Ibn Khaldun that welcomes such purifications because while he has clear fondness for the benefits of civilization, he also thinks it decadent.

True prophets -- as opposed to false, wannabe prophets -- rely on group feeling to survive. As the example of Muhammad shows, they are capable of gaining what Ibn Khaldun calls royal authority.  They do so, in part, because people follow truthful and ethical leadership willingly: good conduct id taken "as proof of Muhammad's truthfulness." (Sixth prefatory Discussion.)

What I find interesting about Ibn Khaldun's analysis is that he grants that some wannabe prophets may well be motivated by sincere and apt outrage at political injustices: they are "on the right path." (He is also adamant that "most" are political opportunists.) Now, you may have thought that he would treat the sincere would be prophet who gets killed as a martyr. But Ibn Khaldun does no such thing. Not only does he barely register the possibility, he is distinctly reserved about treating anybody as a martyr (treating sincere would be prophets who fail as in the grip of a"delusion and stupidity" (Chapter 6, in par. 51)). 

A quick check (this may be misleading) reveals that in his long book, Ibn Khaldun only acknowledges the existence of three martyrs: Al-Husayn (who is revered in Shia Islam)* and Ibn al-Zubayr. Both opposed Yazid, albeit for different reasons.* Ibn-al-Zubayr basically defended what we would call a democratic kingship conception of the Caliphate against turning it into a hereditary institution. What's striking about the treatment of the case of Ibn-al-Zubayr is that Ibn Khaldun both thinks he was mistaken in thinking he had the authority to revolt, and so was killed with lawful authority, AND that he had "(good) intentions and the fact that he chose the truth." It is notable that Ibn Khaldun does not claim that Ibn-Al-Zubayr was mistaken about the political principle at stake.+ But he treats those who opposed him as right. In particular, they were right to see the consequences of revolt, and, thus, civil war, as leading to bloodshed.

What all of this reveals is that Ibn Khaldun both thinks there is a huge political status quo bias in human social life. Anticipating Hobbes, even justified rebellion is frowned upon.++  On my reading he embraces this so much that his whole book is one long argument against any cult of martyrdom. To put it succinctly, Ibn Khaldun's view is that the only prophets worth having are those that succeed in gaining political power.**

Ibn Khaldun's Proto-Spinozism

As a rule, man is able only to comprehend the causes that are natural and obvious and that present themselves to our perception in an orderly and well-arranged manner, because nature is encompassed by the soul and on a lower level than it. The range of perceptions, however, is too large for the soul, because they belong to the intellect, which is on a higher level than the soul. The soul, therefore,can scarcely perceive very many of them, let alone all of them. This shows the wisdom of the Lawgiver (Muhammad) when he forbade (us) to speculate about causes and to stop with them. Such speculation is a field in which the mind becomes lost and gets nowhere, nor gains any real insight. "Say: 'God,' and then let them amuse themselves with their idle talk." Man often stops (to speculate about causes) and thereby is prevented from ascending to the next higher stage. His feet slip. He becomes one of those who go astray and perish. We ask God for protection against disappointment and obvious perdition.--Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah  translated by F. Rosenthal. Chapter 6, Paragraph 14. 

Let's make a distinction between metaphysical Spinozism and political Spinozism. Metaphysical Spinozism is committed to necessitarianism and the (sort of pantheist) identification of god with nature. Political Spinozism is committed to the idea that revelation is authoritative in practical philosophy or ethics, but leaves the nature of reality behind the appearances we are familiar with to science and/or natural philosophy (broadly conceived). The two forms of Spinozism are separable because a political Spinozist need not embrace (or can be agnostic about) metaphysical Spinozism and a metaphysical Spinozist may reject political Spinozism.

As it happens, Spinoza is naturally read as a political and metaphysical Spinozist. In particular, Spinoza is clear that revelation teaches the (ethical) path to salvation. If we lacked the "testimony of Scripture, we should doubt of the salvation of nearly" everyone. (TTP, Ch. 15) By contrast, Scriptures do not teach, and is not in competition with, scientific truth.* It does not mean Scriptures is compatible with any metaphysics. In particular, Spinoza is adamant that political Spinozism must, in practice, be supplemented with a popular "universal faith" which has a number of metaphysical commitments that may not be known to be false. (Things are not so simple because some of these more providential commitments, in turn, violate metaphysical Spinozism.)

Okay, Ibn Khaldun is a political Spinozist, even though he rejects metaphysical Spinozism.** The passage quoted above is from his treatment of speculative theology. He understands the existence of that discipline as a contingent mistake. Al-Ghazali had in his debate with the philosophers shown how reason can be used to refute speculative ideas that threaten the articles of faith; this had inspired his followers to develop a whole positive program of speculative theology. I don't mean to suggest that Ibn Khaldun is not perfectly aware that (a) there was earlier speculative theology, and that (b) Ibn Rushd has serious philosophical responses to Al-Ghazali. But for present purposes we can leave that aside. 

There are four clear components to Ibn Khaldun's position. First, he, too, asserts that revelation fundamentally teaches practical matters. (Revelation is the "laws and precepts of the religion...and which their firmly rooted (belief in) the truth of the articles of faith caused them to observe.") It is not a book of science.)Second, revelation also teaches a very limited number of speculative doctrines that need to be accepted on faith. Third, there is, thus, (against those who have misunderstood Al-Ghazali's legacy) no subject matter for speculative theology and seems, anyway, forbidden by Muhammad ("he forbade (us) to speculate about causes and to stop with them.") That is to say, Ibn Khaldun thinks no positive program of speculative theology is possible (due to our limited cognitive capacities and our imperfect epistemic position), and he believes this helps explain the rationality of the injunction against it: "the intellect should not be used to weigh such matters as the oneness of God, the other world, the truth of prophecy, the real character of the divine attributes, or anything else that lies beyond the level of the intellect. That would mean to desire the impossible."

By speculative theology, Ibn Khaldun means that sub-set of metaphysics that presupposes God's design and studies particular existing entities (see also Ch.6, par 14). This science was the invention of Al-Ghazali. Ibn Khaldun treats it as apologetics because the articles of faith are assumed to be true. By contrast, a non-theological metaphysics "studies existence as such and what it requires for its essence." Metaphysics and science are natural by-products of the advanced division of labor and accumulation in sedentary civilizations. 

Now, in Ibn Khaldun's scheme, the articles of faith and the results of metaphysics may conflict just as in Spinoza's approach the "universal faith" and his metaphysics can conflict. Ibn Khaldun treats the conflict as follows: When metaphysicians speak of existence as such their utterances are so general that they are irrelevant. But Ibn Khaldun also thinks that when it comes to particular existing entities metaphysical argument is not demonstrable, and so metaphysicians either become unjustifiable dogmatists when they pontificate on such entities or they are self-aware that exact conformity between the results of thought and concrete/existing individuals may not be assumed ("conformity between the results of thinking - which, as they assume, are produced by rational norms and reasoning - and the outside world, is not unequivocal.") And even if there is such conformity, it still relies on (fallible, non-demonstrable) observation.

So, metaphysicians either understand their own limitations or they overreach. Ibn Khaldun is pretty adamant that the essences of spiritual individuals are unknowable to human intellects. Appealing to the authority of Plato (!) Ibn Khaldun argues that "no certainty can be achieved with regard to the Divine" and to other spiritual essences, and so is a topic for conjectures. Ibn Khaldun is well aware, and explicitly acknowledges, that later metaphysicians  (e.g., "of Aristotle, al-Farabi, and Ibn Sinna") had been more optimistic about reason's capacity. But he asserts, even argues, they are mistaken. So, whatever metaphysics is possible, it is fallible in character. The same is true for any (empirical) science.

Ibn Khaldun does not think metaphysics is wholly useless: "it sharpens the mind in the orderly presentation of proofs and arguments, so that the habit of excellent and correct arguing is obtained." But while the (hubristic) mistakes of metaphysics may well be pernicious, it need not be forbidden as long as it is restricted to those "saturated with the religious law and...the interpretation of the Qur'an and jurisprudence."

So, to sum up: Ibn Khaldun's political Spinozism creates genuine space between revelation and science/metaphysics. In Ibn Khaldun' this is achieved by a polemic against speculative theology and by re-inventing metaphysics in a Platonic tenor. Not unlike Spinoza, there is a middle, grey zone where articles of faith and metaphysics may come to conflict; but by treating one as a matter of faith and the other as a matter of conjecture, the conflict is contained.

 

On Progress in Science and Revelation

And again it is clear that in the study of beings this aim can be fulfilled by us perfectly only through successive examinations of them by one man after another, the later ones seeking the help of the earlier in that task, on the model of what has happened in the mathematical sciences. For if we suppose that the art of geometry did not exist in this age of ours, and likewise the art of astronomy, and a single person wanted to ascertain by himself the sizes of the heavenly bodies, their shapes, and their distances from each other, that would not be possible for him-e.g. to know the proportion of the sun to the earth or other facts about the sizes of the stars­ even though he were the most intelligent of men by nature, unless by a revelation or something resembling revelation. Indeed if he were told that the sun is about 150 or 16o times as great as the earth, he would think this statement madness on the part of the speaker, although this is a fact which has been demonstrated in astronomy so surely that no one· who has mastered that science doubts it.--Ibn Rushd, The Decisive Treatise, Chapter 1, Translated by George F. Hourancy

One important conception that makes (the possibility) of progress possible, is the idea that those who arrive late on the scene are likely to be in a better position than ancestors and other originators. The temporally later can draw on a wider intellectual division of labor and the historical record of success and failure.  One striking effect of progress is, as Ibn Rushd makes explicit, that the naturally most intelligent person may know less than an average inquirer or student of a later period. Newton and Einstein really know less about physics than some students because the latter can take advantage of textbooks and other mechanisms by which existing knowledge is aggregated and transferred.* 

A really neat version of such mechanisms is discussed by Al-Farabi at one of the most esoteric points of his metaphysics. It has a very tantalizing implication, so I hope you keep reading.

A key concept of Al-Farabi's metaphysics is the active intellect. When it is introduced, Al-Farabi adds, "of the active intellect, it ought to be said that it is the trustworthy spirit and the holy spirit." (Political Regime, par 3) From the perspective of the overal; argument of Ibn Rushd's The Decisive Treatise, We may say that Al-Farabi introduces an allegorical reading of his metaphysics. (This is notable because Ibn Rushd ignores the possibility; for him allegorical readings of the Quran are introduced to make sense of passages that taken literally are obscure in some way.) Presumably Al-Farabi does so to make that metaphysics more acceptable to those that wish to reconcile demonstration to revelation. (Spinoza also has a tendency to use religious sounding language to explain his metaphysics. And in the interest of understanding, I will make Al-Farabi sound like Spinoza despite the fact that Al-Farabi's jargon is generally far removed from straight Spinozism.  

Now, in Al-Farabi's system the active intellect is a key intermediary mechanism between the eternal celestial worlds and human affairs. To simplify even more, when we reason successfully in a certain way, we turn ourselves into a truly rational being and become the active intellect and, simultaneously, we are eternal in a certain way. I quote the relevant passage so you have an idea of how Al-Farabi expresses the point (and also the added complications):

Consequently, the rational intellect by which a human being is a human being is not in its substance an intellect in actuality. It is not endowed by nature to be an intellect in actuality, but the active intellect causes it to become an intellect in actuality and makes the rest of the things intelligible in actuality for the rational faculty. When the rational faculty attains to being an intellect in actuality, that intellect it now is in actuality also becomes similar to the separate things and it intellects its essence that is [now] intellect in actuality. And what is intellected of it becomes what intellects. At that point, it comes to be a substance that is intellected in that it is an intelligible insofar as it intellects. And, at that point, what intellects, what is intellected, and intellect come to be a single thing itself in it. Through this, it becomes such as to be in the rank of the active intellect. And when a human being obtains this rank, his happiness is perfected. By means of that thing, the rational soul intellects the active intellect; and by means of it, things that are potentially intellected become intellected in actuality. By means of it, a human being, who is potentially an intellect, becomes an intellect in actuality and in perfection until he
comes to be in proximity to the rank of the active intellect. So he becomes an intellect in his essence after having not been like that and an intelligible in his essence after having not been like that. And he becomes divine after having been material. This is the function of the active intellect, and for this it is called the active intellect. (Political Regime par 8-9).

As it happens truly perfect happiness is only attained after earthly, material existence has ended. If one thinks that truth is in some sense correspondence, Al-Farabi makes no sense. But if one allows oneself to see that truth is a special instance self-identity ("what intellects, what is intellected, and intellect come to be a single thing itself"), he does make, despite the jargon, sense. 

Now, I have mentioned before (recall here and here) that for Al-Farabi when a magnanimous soul (that is still alive) joins the active intellect,  he describes this as either a philosopher-king or revelation (see par. 80). It's true that this can only be called revelation because the active intellect "emanates from the existence of the first cause." (Par 79-80) It's pretty clear that for Al-Farabi, the content of revelation just is the practical wisdom by which polities are ruled on a sound (theoretical) foundation. 

Because Al-Farabi is so explicit that revelation comes to a magnanimous soul, I had failed to notice the implication of the following passage shortly thereafter:

When a group passes away, and their bodies are nullified, and their souls are delivered and made happy, then other people follow after them, take their place in the city, and perform their activities; the souls of these [people], too, are delivered. When their bodies are nullified, they come to the rankings of those in this group who have passed away. They are neighborly to them in the way that what is not corporeal is neighborly. And they join with the similar souls of the people of the single group, some with others. Whenever the similar separate souls multiply and some join with others, the pleasure of each one increases. Whenever one of those who came after attaches to them, the pleasure of the one now attaching increases due to his encountering those who passed away. And the pleasures of those who passed away increase through joining with those who attach to them because each one intellects his essence and intellects the same as his essence many times. What is thereby intellected increases as the ones now present attach to them in future time. So there will be a boundless increase of pleasures for each one with the passing of time. That is the condition of each group. This, then, is the true ultimate happiness that is the purpose of the active intellect. (Political Regime, Par. 85)

Now, the core claim here is that in the afterlife, there is a community of souls that join in or fuse with each other in/and with the active intellect. That is to say there is a kind of (what I'll call) posthumous intellectual, disembodied fellowship. This is presented as pleasing. And over time, as new souls join the fellowship, pleasure increases. (I think Al-Farabi is also committed to the claim that there is a cognitive hierarchy of such fellowships.)

Now, this is an extraordinary (ahh) uplifting image.  But it has a two-fold further effect, one explicitly noted by Al-Farabi. First, "what is thereby intellected increases as the ones now present attach to them in future time." This means that the fellowship, which is a kind of fusions of souls, expands over time. So, second, the fellowship conjoined or fused with the active intellect is not just more pleasing, but a larger, more complex and more powerful unity as time passes.

But this entails -- this is my tantalizing conclusion, that revelation that comes later has the benefit of drawing on collective wisdom of rational minds that have come before. (See also this post for significance of this.) So, later revelation ought to be better revelation. Not for the first time I am left wondering if Al-Farabi doesn't open the door to a new prophet.** 

Once more on Socrates and Thrasymachus

Do you think that a city, an army, or bandits, or thieves, or any other group that attempted any action in common, could accomplish anything if they wronged one another?”  “Certainly not,” said he. “But if they didn't, wouldn't they be more likely to?” “Assuredly.” “For factions, Thrasymachus, are the outcome of injustice, and hatreds and internecine conflicts, but justice brings oneness of mind and love. Is it not so?” “So be it,” he replied, “not to differ from you.” “That is good of you, my friend; but tell me this: if it is the business of injustice to engender hatred wherever it is found, will it not, when it springs up either among freemen or slaves, cause them to hate and be at strife with one another, and make them incapable of effective action in common?” “By all means.” “Suppose, then, it springs up between two, will they not be at outs with and hate each other and be enemies both to one a another and to the just?” “They will,” he said. “And then will you tell me that if injustice arises in one it will lose its force and function or will it none the less keep it?” “Have it that it keeps it,” he said. “And is it not apparent that its force is such that wherever it is found in city, family, camp, or in anything else it first renders the thing incapable of cooperation with itself owing to faction and difference, and secondly an enemy to itself and to its opposite in every case, the just? Isn't that so?” “By all means.” “Then in the individual too, I presume, its presence will operate all these effects which it is its nature to produce. It will in the first place make him incapable of accomplishing anything because of inner faction and lack of self-agreement, and then an enemy to himself and to the just. Is it not so?” “Yes.” “But, my friend, the gods too are just.” “Have it that they are,” he said. “So to the gods also, it seems, the unjust man will be hateful, but the just man dear.” “Revel in your discourse,” he said, “without fear, for I shall not oppose you, so as not to offend your partisans here.” “Fill up the measure of my feast, then, and complete it for me,” I said, “by continuing to answer as you have been doing. Now that the just appear to be wiser and better and more capable of action and the unjust incapable of any common action, and that if we ever say that any men who are unjust have vigorously combined to put something over, our statement is not altogether true, for they would not have kept their hands from one another if they had been thoroughly unjust, but it is obvious that there was in them some justice which prevented them from wronging at the same time one another too as well as those whom they attacked; and by dint of this they accomplished whatever they did and set out to do injustice only half corrupted by injustice, since utter rascals completely unjust are completely incapable of effective action—all this I understand to be the truth, and not what you originally laid down.--Plato, Republic 1, 351d-352d, translated Paul Shorey

When I wrote (recall) about this passage before I treated Socrates' argument as a consequentialist one that gained its rhetorical effectiveness from Athenian (recent) experience of civil war.* But I also noted that the history of imperial/mercantile nationalism shows that gross acts of out-group injustice may well be constitutive of, or facilitate, in-group 'justice.' In a zero-sum environment, hurting 'others' may well be, alas, beneficial to 'us' if 'we' can understand ourselves so. As I noted (here and here) Socrates seems to rely on this very point at Republic 470ff when he thinks through the international relations of Kallipolis.

But it occurred to me that the argument with Thrasymachus can also be differently. Socrates can be taken to be saying that collective agency (and individual agency) presupposes justice because justice is was creates the minimal unity for there to be a self to act. I think Socrates is pretty explicit about this very point. And, if one allows, as I would (but certainly everybody) that agency comes in degrees, then partial or imperfect justice creates conditions for partial agency (etc.) With perfect justice one has a perfect unity or harmonious whole, capable of autonomous action. The last point is anachronistic, although I think the Athenian Stranger makes the point in the puppet image in Plato's Laws (ca 644).

Be that as it may, and now we get to more speculative part. First, Socrates is explicitly committed to the idea that injustice is a cause or source of dis-functionality, that is, civil strife (and mutual anger) or antipathy. (Just as a harmonious, just city has mutual sympathy.) And as the rest of the Republic reveals, he is also committed, I think, second, to the idea that in many way the character of the polity takes its character or trickles down from its rulers. (Obviously it's possible I am reading Al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd (recall) into the Republic here.) To be sure that can't be the whole story because Socrates' causal analysis of how one kind of polity devolves into another isn't reducible to that.

Anyway, what Socrates' argument against Thrasymachus licenses is the following inference: political disunity or social strife is itself a signal of lack of justice and so evidence of bad governance. This is a view I associate with Mencius (recall here and here), and others inspired more by Machiavelli). I think the argument is also worth taking serious for those of a realist bent. Political rule that generates conditions of dangerous civil strife or an inability to engage in powerful collective action is self-defeating even by the lights of the powerful who wish to benefit from their rule. But this requires, I suspect, a distinction between self-interest and self-interest properly understood.

 

On Forgotten Public Philosophers-Politicians, Escapism, Willa Cather and Spinoza!

Good afternoon Professor Schliesser,

I hope this finds you well and does not create an inconvenience for you.

I am currently working on an essay on escapism within society and its justifications. Within the research process I found your blog and found your text on philosophy as escapism [here] rather interesting, wich is why I was wondering as to whether you hold an opinion on the value of escapism in our contemporary society.

Any opinions you would like to share are very much appreciated."--[Name withheld], sixthform at a grammar school in England.

A student's question is most capable of exposing my babbling.* My first reaction to reading the email was a discomfort growing into panic that I had no idea what 'escapism' meant, followed by a sense of mortification that I had used it without giving it thought. I went back to my own essay, and saw that I used 'escapism' to signify an activity that displaced discomfiting feelings. (Yes, I noticed the lurking practical regress.) 

 

Online one finds claims that escapism is a modern term (sometimes also used to describe genre) originating during the great depression in the 1930s. Playing around with google.scholar/books I found no use prior to 1800 in English, but tantalizing hints that escaping had migrated into something like escapism in the more recent sense. But it's true that reliable hits for 'escapism' only start to occur in the 1930s. So, for example, one can read in an essay,"His first published novel, One Man's Initiation, appeared a year later. It had evidently been written in the trenches, and was, strangely enough, a quiet, thoughtful book that made no attempt to be harrowing, but sought patiently to understand. In it, however, predominate those twin maladies of escapism and individualism which Dos Passos had acquired at Harvard." It's notable that escapism is treated as a disease here.Willa Cather noticed such pejorative usage of "escapism" (and, I hasten to add, "individualism"), and has a fantastic essay on the subject (1936) that I warmly recommend reading.

 

But it was another early use that caught my attention. In the Monist (1933), I found a transcript of a "A paper read at the tercentenary commemoration of Spinoza sponsored by The Philosophy Club of Chicago and held at The University of Chicago on December 9, 1932." The author is one T.V. Smith about which more below. It's an incredibly critical essay of Spinoza. I start with a long quote:

[T]here is little profit in honoring Spinoza unless it leads us to honor our own opportunities the more. And surely our opportunity is not yet reduced to making the best of the worst; we may still hope to make the worst less bad and the less bad better. The tendency in some quarters to canonize Spinoza leaves me uneasy, though I joy to honor all those who did their part toward fortifying the philosophic mind in adverse days. It leaves me doubly uneasy, however, when reverence for Spinoza is made to ornament a modern escapism. I refer to the tendency to mythologize physics with theological aureoles, to romantize mediaevalism in morals under the guise of good taste founded on uncriticized tradition, to realize Platonism by glorifying contemporary dictators as the long sought philosopher kings. I refer, in a word, to the rationalized romanticism of those who would purge the social sciences of every element that makes them social and present them as logic to be got at dialectically rather than experimentally.
Such attitudes are defeatist, and while they find in Spinoza and in Plato logical prototypes, they wrong the noble dead by accommodating them to a logic of events more pregnant than their ancient logic of discourse. With reference to our social problem and the fruitful attitude toward it I am convinced that Spinoza is a splendid example of the way not to do it in modern times. Passing as a political realist because he built his system on power, Spinoza actually romanticized the distribution of power which prevailed at his time and place. Now power itself is not given to men in a sacred lump with implied anathemas against any who would increase or reallocate it. It waxes and wanes in quantity and migrates here and there in habitat. Our task is, as Spinoza truly said, to understand power, its nature and incidence-not however in order to achieve blessedness under the worst distribution of it but in order to facilitate a more blessed redistribution of power. Spinoza is not our logical leader in the effort through science to increase power; for though engaged in what for his time was a scientific profession-lens grinding-he elected to seek personal salvation through discovering and contemplating the whole of things rather than social amelioration by detailed mastery of his own specialized part. He performed few experiments, wrote only one thing on his scientific pre-occupation, and that without distinction. Nor is Spinoza our logical leader in the task of distributing power more justly to all men; for he could not get along with men well enough to understand, much less to improve, the forms of social relations. Not wholly in his stars but partially also in himself must have lain the cause of his lifelong isolation. (34-35)

After this majestic example of victim blaming it comes as no surprise that Smith was the "editor of the International Journal of Ethics" and soon also turned to politics being elected (as a Democrat) to the Illinois State Senate, then the US House, and briefly the US Senate. (That is consistent with his views in the essay, which promote an embrace of messiness of reality in order to do good.) I have to admit that today -- I have a student to answer! -- I have little interest in fully untangling the nature of modern escapism even though I am interested in the public image/role of Spinoza. But the passage made me wonder: if there is such a thing as "modern escapism" of which Spinoza is the ornament (ca 1930), what is, then, the original (pre-modern) escapism, according to Smith? 

 

It turns out, Spinoza is the source of (original) escapism! Spinoza 

discovered how to make the best of the world at its worst. Now this is an immortal discovery in a world that some of the time for all of us and all of the time for some of us permits little alternative to the worst. All honor, then, to Spinoza for discovering how to snatch one compensation for the withering sterility of cosmic neutrality, i.e., an emotional appreciation of understanding itself. When mind eats mind, mind need never wholly starve, though its resulting life be but a sort of living death (31-32)

Smith, a man of action, is no friend of this kind of escapism. He clearly thinks it risks quietism and deference to inherited status quo. But he does grant it is authentic escapism. I am inclined to agree with Willa Cather ("give the people a new word, and they think they have a new fact") and that Spinoza only managed the not insignificant feat to make it seem as if something new was being said because he tapped into a vital need in a new (linguistic and conceptual) register.

 

It is a tantalizing possibility that an emotional appreciation of understanding itself was discovered after the 1650s and, allow me this play of words, to create, in violation of the principle of sufficient reason (or at least ex nihilo nihil fit) , surplus ("compensation") out of something sterile ("cosmic neutrality"). If I were a Marxist historian of science, I would say that the spirit of capitalism was thus given matter in Holland.

 

But to wrap up. Escapism in this sense -- an intellectual joy in being with [one's] thought** -- is a human need in all places. For, no society will manage to abolish the possibility of people with only lousy options.  And, so, long after the one-time philosophical Senator of Illinois is forgotten, Spinoza keeps being rediscovered.