issue 153, december 2022 / january 2023 Philosophy Now

Citation preview

ISSUE 153 DECEMBER 2022 / JANUARY 2023

Philosophy Now a magazine of ideas

Featuring the creative ideas of

• • • •

Wittgenstein Saul Kripke Cicero Machiavelli

PLUS Ethics in Ancient China

New in the Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers Series

A vibrant new translation of Seneca’s “On the Shortness of Life,” a pointed reminder to make the most of our time

THE HOME OF EXISTENTIAL TRAINING

MA in EXISTENTIAL AND HUMANIST PASTORAL CARE WWW.NSPC.ORG.UK/PASTORALCARE

NEW SCHOOL OF PSYCHOTHERAPY AND COUNSELLING 61–63 Fortune Green Road London NW6 1DR 0207 435 8067 // 0203 515 0223 @ [email protected]  nspc.org.uk This programme is quality assured by Middlesex University and you will receive a Middlesex award on successful completion.

An engaging new translation of a timeless masterpiece about coping with the death of a loved one

Now on Amazon We Are Stuck in the Present Knowledge The voice in our head drones on and on. Knowledge is treated as a commodity. "I think" no longer affirms that "I am." We are stuck so we keep talking.

An entertaining and enlightening collection of ancient writings about the philosophers who advocated simple living and rejected unthinking conformity

In This Self We Deserve: A Quest after Modernity, cultural theorist Fuoco B. Fann offers a fresh examination of the modern self today. Drawing from such thinkers as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard, Fann reflects anew on old philosophical questions. Who are we and what can we know? How did we get here and what can we do? "Fann’s take is one deeply entrenched in world history. To understand the present, he seems to assert, readers must first expand their scope; only then can they begin to investigate the past. A dense but worthwhile inquiry into the evolution of Western thought." -Kirkus Reviews

Philosophy & Art Collaboratory www.philosophyandartcollaboratory.com

Editorial

D

avid Bowie was the Picasso of pop. Bowie deliberately completely changed his artistic direction every few years, pushing the style and content of his creativity off at a brand new tangent every time. In this he copied Picasso’s habit of radically, deliberately, frequently reshaping his artistic interests and identity. Bowie was also like Picasso in having the exceptional talent and creativity needed to pull this ambition off. You might even argue that Bowie was one of the few geniuses of art produced in Britain (or even the world) in the second half of the twentieth century. Think of your own list of other geniuses here if you like. I define a genius as someone who communicates or creates new possibilities for experiencing the world or living in it. More precisely, genius is the ability, first, to see things in new ways, then to effectively create or communicate that vision (artists), or to put their new way of seeing into practice themselves (scientists and engineers). The genius of Picasso was to greatly enlarge the possibilities of fine art, both beautifully and radically. Bowie did the same for rock music, and he did it with panache. (And how they conducted revolutions for their own media could potentially be applied to any art, by the way...) Whatever else is essential to genius, both talent and creativity are. And we can at least incontrovertibly say that Bowie and Picasso were both talented and creative to a rare high degree. But what do those terms actually mean here? Creativity is fundamentally the ability to come up with new ideas. An alternative term for it might be free imaginativeness. And let me define talent in this context as the ability to turn ideas into reality. Here, talent means having the technical ability to create a vehicle that will convey your creative vision. In other words, it is about bringing the products of your creative imagination into being, or communicating your ideas well. To be a genius you need a strong impulse to see beyond the horizons envisioned by your fellow humans, and high levels of both knowledge and technique, in whatever area you’re working. One useful definition of ‘God’ is ‘personal creator being’. I’m intrigued by the idea that the name of God in the Old Testament, ‘Yahweh’, is best translated as ‘Creative Being’, or something close to that. In any case, being creative would be the closest to aligning with the essence of the divine that humanity can reach, since creativity must be central to the idea of a Creator. How does that sound to you? Tempting? But whether you think that would be a good thing or a bad thing, how does creativity actually work? First, I think curiosity is vital for creativity, since creativity is in part a function of the degree to which you want to see beyond your present ideas. This is true by definition, if creativity means coming up with new ideas. That definition also

means that to be creative, you have to be willing to do things differently – otherwise you’re just copying. (Having said that, a good piece of advice concerning not just creativity, but all aspects of life, is don’t abandon the good ideas you’ve gathered until you know you must. The ideal is not just to create, but to create well, even to create excellently.) Albert Einstein was chronically making bad puns, whenever he had the time and space to do so. Punning is a common trait among (otherwise) intelligent people. It demonstrates another essential aspect of creativity, which is the habit of making mental connections – perhaps the more abstract the better, and the more tangential, the more creative. Another pro-creative trait is being brimful of different ideas from a lot of different sources, as a result of a wide range of reading, watching, and listening. This is good for creativity both in order to have many ideas to connect together, but also to inform you about the sort of thing that happens or can happen when you do this connecting. Having a wide and deep experience of other peoples’ creativity also improves your perception of whatever problem you’re being creative about, because it finely informs your mind about the sort of ideas it’s good to be looking for. In other words, a good range of cultural influences helps you to build the intellectual telescope or microscope through which to examine the world, or at least your present creative problem. A further necessary requirement to be highly creative is to keep trying. To paraphrase Picasso, working won’t make you a genius, but genius has to find you working. Maybe you can also think of other core aspects of creativity that I haven’t mentioned here – perhaps because I lack the necessary creative imagination! In this issue we’re questing wide to understand creativity. To start our genius engines up, Les Jones takes a philosophical dive into the requirements of creativity. Christine Battersby and Elliot Samuel Paul consider academic perspectives on creativity, including a feminist take on genius. Next we consider two applications of creativity, in terms of generating wise environments for life (‘Creating Cities’), and in terms of generating wise thoughts (‘In Praise of Aphorisms’). Finally, author James Gallant looks in his creative mirror, to help explain how writers work and what they are ultimately trying to achieve. If this issue’s theme of creativity strikes some sparks in you, perhaps you might also like our publication The Ultimate Guide to Aesthetics, which covers this fruitful intersection between philosophy and art, and which is out now. Grant Bartley • Grant’s video on How the Brain Makes Consciousness was recently released on YouTube, at youtu.be/7TJRV68Vrgw December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 3

BOWIES © GIL ZETBASE 2017 CREATIVE COMMONS

Creative Being

Philosophy Now

ISSUE 153 December 2022/January 2023

8

Philosophy Now 43a Jerningham Road, Telegraph Hill, London SE14 5NQ United Kingdom Tel. 020 7639 7314 [email protected] philosophynow.org

Design Grant Bartley, Rick Lewis,

Anja Steinbauer Marketing Sue Roberts Administration Ewa Stacey, Alex Marsh

WITTGENSTEIN BY CLINT INMAN

KANDINSKY

Editor-in-Chief Rick Lewis Editors Grant Bartley, Anja Steinbauer Digital Editor Bora Dogan Book Reviews Editor Teresa Britton Film Editor Thomas Wartenberg Assistant Editor Alex Marsh

Editorial & News

Advertising Team

Jay Sanders, Stella Ellison [email protected]

3

Editorial Grant Bartley

UK Editorial Board

6

News Anja Steinbauer

7

Shorts Matt Qvortrup: Kissing

Rick Lewis, Anja Steinbauer, Bora Dogan, Grant Bartley

General Articles

US Editorial Board

Prof. Timothy J. Madigan (St John Fisher College), Prof. Teresa Britton (Eastern Illinois Univ.), Prof. Peter Adamson, Prof. Massimo Pigliucci (CUNY City College)

8

Plaiting Gravy Les Jones weaves with Wittgenstein’s ideas 12 The Philosophy of Creativity Christine Battersby & Elliot Samuel Paul discuss the genesis of genius 14 Creating Cities Harry Drummond explains why philosophy of architecture matters 16 In Praise of Aphorisms Grahame Lockey informs us why they’re great, philosophically speaking

Alexander Razin (Moscow State Univ.) Laura Roberts (Univ. of Queensland) David Boersema (Pacific University) UK Editorial Advisors

Piers Benn, Constantine Sandis, Gordon Giles, Paul Gregory, John Heawood US Editorial Advisors

Prof. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Toni Vogel Carey, Prof. Harvey Siegel, Prof. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong Cover Image by Alex Printed by Acorn Web Offset Ltd Loscoe Close, Normanton Ind. Estate, Normanton, W. Yorks WF6 1TW Worldwide newstrade distribution: Select PS (+44 1202 586848) [email protected] Australian newstrade distribution: Ovato 26 Rodborough Road Frenchs Forest, NSW 2086 [email protected] The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views of the editor or editorial board of Philosophy Now. is published by Anja Publications Ltd ISSN 0961-5970

Subscriptions p.62 Shop p.63

19 What Am I Doing? James Gallant writes about why he writes

35

CONFUCIUS

Philosophy Now

22

Creativity

Contributing Editors

CHINESE LANDSCAPE ACQUIRED BY HENRY WALTERS 1915 CREATIVE COMMONS

4 Philosophy Now December 2022/January 2023 ●

8

Ethics in Politics Massimo Pigliucci wonders whether it fits 26 French Philosophy Now Manon Royet asks: after Foucault, now what? 30 On Regret David Charles doesn’t regret writing this 32 Poetry & Philosophy in the 21st Century Benjamin Lloyd has answers for modern life

Focus on Chinese Ethics 35

Moral Education in Confucianism Plakshi Jain on two contrasting approaches 38 Mohist Anti-Militarism & Just War Theory Shaun O’Dwyer on philosophers who literally fought for peace

Reviews 50 Book: Seven Ways of Looking at Suffering by Scott Samuelson reviewed by Doug Phillips 52 Book: The Monarchy of Fear by Martha Nussbaum reviewed by Chad Trainer 54 Television: Babylon 5 Stuart Hannabuss says be careful what you wish for.

some of our

Contributors Christine Battersby

COPY OF MONA LISA BY AN UNKNOWN PUPIL OF LEONARDO DA VINCI, (PRADO, MADRID)

Christine Battersby (FRSA) is Reader Emerita in Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Her Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (1989, 1994) is included in the Bloomsbury Philosophy Library: Contemporary Aesthetics Collection. Other books include The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity (1998) and The Sublime, Terror and Human Difference (2007).

Massimo Pigliucci Massimo Pigliucci is the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. His books include How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (Basic Books) and The Quest for Character: What the Story of Socrates and Alcibiades Teaches Us about Our Search for Good Leaders (Basic Books).

8 Regulars

60 Tallis in Wonderland: An Invitation to Navel Gazing Raymond Tallis sees the history of the cosmos 64 Obituary: Saul Kripke Stefan Rinner explains why his ideas matter

11 21 25 37 66

Haus Wittgenstein, Vienna Herb Tate Simon & Finn Melissa Felder Philosophy Café Guto Dias At My Leisure Steven Kent creates rhymes The Great Crumpled Paper Hoax A long-lost short story by Martin Gardner

22 MACHIAVELLI BY MILES WALKER

42 Interview: Peter Adamson talked to Duanne Ribeiro on the occasion of his 400th History of Philosophy podcast 44 Brief Lives: Cicero Hilarius Bogbinder on a reflective Roman 46 Philosophical Haiku: Machiavelli Terence Green on the Prince of Darkness 47 Letters to the Editor 57 Question of the Month: What Grounds or Justifies Morality? Read readers’ righteous responses

Poetry, Fun & Fiction

Harry Drummond Harry Drummond is a PhD researcher and graduate teacher at the University of Liverpool. He works at the intersection of aesthetics and philosophy of mind, exploring how '4E' cognition can inform our understanding of aesthetic cognition. He is currently co-editor of the British Society of Aesthetics' journal Debates in Aesthetics.

Plakshi Jain Plakshi Jain is an Indiantrained lawyer, a recent LL.M. (Master of Laws) Graduate from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law and now a licensed attorney in California. She enjoys writing poetry, watching anime, swimming and sleeping in the sun. Check out her poetry on her blog The Greyness of Life at thegreynessoflife.wordpress.com

December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 5

• Effective Altruism billionaire goes bust • Animal welfare meets big game theory • Philosophers of physics reach critical mass?

News

News reports by Anja Steinbauer

Seán Moran, RIP It is with great sadness that Philosophy Now announces the death of Dr Seán Moran, a regular contributor to the magazine whose Street Philosopher column has appeared since 2016. Seán was a Lecturer in the School of Education and Lifelong Learning at the Waterford Institute of Technology in Ireland, which was quite fitting, as he was the exemplar of a lifelong learner. His love for life, breadth of knowledge, and puckish humor were contagious, and he was seldom without his flute, always ready to lead a group in song and merriment. Seán was a world traveler and, in addition to his accomplishments as a philosopher, was an outstanding photographer. I was glad to have introduced him to Philosophy Now magazine, which seemed a natural home for someone so devoted to making philosophical inquiry accessible and exciting. Those of us who knew him and benefited from his kindness and cheerfulness will deeply miss him, but we are grateful that his ‘Street Philosopher’ columns will be a reminder of his devotion to finding wisdom in everyday life. -Tim Madigan Seán Moran

FTX and Effective Altruism When the cryptocurrency exchange FTX collapsed in early November, this led in a single day to what Bloomberg has called “one of history’s greatest-ever destructions of wealth.” Billions of dollars disappeared amidst accusations of hacking and gross mismanagement. FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who in an interview with a VOX reporter once said that he “had to be” good at talking about ethics because “it’s what reputations are made of”, has shown himself to have feet of clay. And yet, he has been close to an ethical movement dedicated to making the world a better place. The Effective Altruism movement, inspired by utilitarian moral philosopher Peter Singer, has done a great deal of good since it emerged in the early 2000s. The idea is simple. According to the website effectivealtruism.org it is “a research field and practical community that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice.” Oxford philosopher William MacAskill, one of the founders of Effective Altruism organisation Giving What We Can, championed the idea of earning to give. When the young Bankman-Fried expressed his passion for animal welfare, MacAskill suggested that he could best support this cause if he tried to make a lot of money to donate it to charities. And Bankman-Fried did just that. FTX made him a billionaire, and he then created an associated fund called FTX Futures Fund to distribute money to good causes, with MacAskill and others on its advisory board. It committed to charitable grants of around $160 million, but in the wake of the FTX implosion there have been suggestions that it unwittingly provided a reputational shield behind which Bankman-Fried could run amok. The entire FTX Futures Fund board has now resigned, issuing a letter that said, “We are now unable to perform our work or process grants, and we have fundamental questions about the legitimacy and integrity of the business operations

6 Philosophy Now l December 2022/January 2023

that were funding the FTX Foundation and the Future Fund.” The connection between BankmanFried and Effective Altruism throws up a lot of questions about that movement’s approach. Is there a problem with the utilitarian focus on results, so that the end can be seen as justifying the means? Is the emphasis of the Effective Altruism movement on ‘longtermism’ at the expense of immediate need misguided? Are some of its declared aims, such as improving decisionmaking, vulnerable to ideological tinting? Finally, is the approach flawed that uncritically trusts those with extreme wealth and power simply because they declare themselves to be committed to doing good in the world? Iranian Philosophy Student Killed On Saturday 5 November 2022, 35 year old student Nasrin Ghaderi died after falling into a coma due to lethal injuries she sustained during an anti-government demonstration in Tehran. She is reported to have been attacked by security forces and suffered severe blows to her head. Nasrin Ghaderi was a PhD candidate in philosophy in Tehran. Following her death, new protests broke out in her home city of Marivan. Ghaderi’s family had been prevented from giving her a funeral in Marivan. She was instead buried without anyone in attendance. We all mourn the death of this brave young philosopher. A New Take on Animal Justice Recent philosophical approaches to animal welfare tend to take a justice approach, falling into political theory rather than traditional applied ethics. German philosopher Colin von Negenborn believes that combining the methods of philosophy and economics can yield new insights about the relationship between animals and humans. He has embarked on a research project sponsored by Hamburg University in which he will

Shorts use game theory to study both human and animal behaviour. The assumption behind this is that animal behaviour is changed by human interference. Animals adapt their behaviour to human behaviour, by, for example, giving up habitats or moving to new ones. The fact that they do not engage in rational deliberation before acting is irrelevant, Negenborn argues. After all, humans do not always act rationally either. According to him, we will have to completely rethink the way we interact with animals, as we ought to see them as fellow players, rather than as objects that we can manipulate at will. The aim is to offer this different perspective with a view to influencing legislation.

PHOTO BY O. USHER. CREATIVE COMMONS 2.0

Philosophy of Physics The Philosophy of Physics Society (philosophyofphysics.org) is launching an ambitious new scholarly journal. It will be called Philosophy of Physics, or PoP for short, and will be published by LSE Press in London. It will be based on an open access publishing model so that it will be free to read. The Editor in Chief is Prof. David Wallace who holds the Mellon Chair in Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Modern physics has generated many questions of philosophical interest. Relativity revolutionised our views of space and time. Quantum theory is mathematically highly successful but seems to generate paradoxes and is open to a range of different physical interpretations, all of them utterly profound for our understanding of reality and also really odd. So there is plenty of material for philosophers to discuss.

Philosophy Shorts by Matt Qvortrup ‘More songs about Buildings and Food’ was the title of a 1978 album by the rock band Talking Heads, about all the things rock stars normally don’t sing about. Pop songs are usually about variations on the theme of love; a track like Van Morrison’s 1976 hit Cleaning Windows is the odd one out. Philosophers, likewise, tend to have a narrow focus on epistemology, metaphysics and trifles like the meaning of life. But occasionally great minds stray from their turf and write about other matters, for example buildings (Martin Heidegger), food (Hobbes), tomato juice (Robert Nozick) and the weather (Lucretius and Aristotle) This series of Shorts is about these unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about.

Philosophers on Kissing

“

Let no one whom he has in mind to kiss refuse to be kissed by him”, wrote Plato in his Republic. Well, in these #MeToo times there can be plenty of reasons for refusing to be kissed. This was recognised by some philosophers. For example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s eponymous young hero Emile’s desire to kiss Sophie was not reciprocated: “She turns away… She resists feebly.” (Emile, 1762). But, in fairness, most of the philosophers who have covered this subject have been interested mainly in kissing between consenting adults. Martin Heidegger, for example, wrote a love letter in which he informed his lover that kisses stimulated his work: “with a kiss on your pure brow, [I] take the honour of your being into my work.” (Briefe 1925-1975, p.135). The woman to whom this letter was addressed, it may not surprise you to learn, was Hannah Arendt. And she too had a developed sense of the importance of smooching. Great philosophers, remarked the author of The Human Condition, “cannot think without kisses.” (At least, according to the movie Hannah Arendt she said this!) So when Nietzsche wrote that his eponymous Zarathustra “desired to be kissed”, it was totally understandable. (Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1883).

So far it would seem that the philosophy of kissing is the preserve of Continental philosophers. This of course is not the case. Though not long ago the Yale philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff despairingly wrote an article on ‘Why Philosophy of Art Cannot Handle Kissing’. (The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2003). One can ponder the status of kisses and reflect on Marilyn Monroe’s tautological statement that “a kiss is a kiss.” Søren Kierkegaard – another Continental writer on the subject – disagreed. In his arguably most influential work, Either-Or (1843), the Danish existentialist confessed that he had considered writing a whole treatise on kissing, and that he was working on a typology. And, he went on, ‘‘One… makes a Difference between the first Kiss and all the others. What is reflected on here is incommensurable for what appears in the other divisions; it is indifferent to the sound, the touch, the time in general.” (Either-Or p.404). Philosophers always theorize. That is their business. Poets get straight to the point. The ancient Roman poet Ovid was a good example: “I could wish you well with kisses.” (Ex Ponto, IV, ix, 13). © PROF. MATT QVORTRUP 2022

Matt Qvortrup is Professor of Political Science at Coventry University.

Quantum refrigerator at UCL, London

December 2022/ January 2023 l Philosophy Now 7

Creativity

Plaiting Gravy Les Jones on allegories, specific domains and Wittgenstein’s social ideas he word ‘creativity’ is derived from the Latin word creare; literally, ‘to cause, to create, to make’. But this definition itself suggests problems. Humans can certainly make things by putting other things together; but do we have the capacity to create something new, as it were, from nothing? Well, like many others, I will take refuge in the phrase “it all depends what you mean by...” The idea that creation was only in God’s realm seems to have been ditched in the seventeenth century. The word creativity seems to have acquired its present meaning around that time, with its implication that humans too can be creative. One thing we need to clear up first, is that creativity and discovery are not the same thing. Discovery is unearthing something new: that which hasn’t been known before. The discoverer does not know anything of the thing discovered until the discovery occurs. This helps us with what creativity is not: although of course creative people do discover things, creativity can be a frame of mind, whereas discovery cannot. Some have suggested that one criterion for a creative act is that it should be ‘unique’, rather than a copy of a previous act. Clearly however this cannot be the only criterion, or else one could just churn out a random sequence of letters or characters that made no sense at all and claim that to be creative act. So we need a second criterion for creativity: what is created must make some sort of sense. For that to work, the creative event must be embedded in some sort of symbol system intelligible to a wider audience: for example, language, logic, maths or music.

T

Wittgenstein & Creativity So creative events require meaning. Ludwig Wittgenstein claims in his Philosophical Investigations (1953) that, when it comes to language, ‘meaning is use’. For those who have wrestled with the various ideas in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus or his later Philosophical Investigations, it might seem a little incongruous that Wittgenstein has much to say about creativity. His later work brilliantly advances his ‘Private Language Argument’, demolishing the possibility of a strictly personal language developed inside one’s own head using creative abilities inspired solely from one’s own internal world. Rather, Wittgenstein argues that understanding is a public phenomenon; that language can only develop in interactions between individuals. Indeed, his famous notion of a ‘language game’ centres on the fact that language use is embedded within different types of social interaction, so that subtly different rules govern different language games. For instance, the language game played by religions has boundaries that separate it from other language games. (Few language games are circumscribed by belief: religion is one; supporting a football team may be another.) It’s important to note that language games are social by their very nature. If, as Wittgenstein argued, understanding is a public 8 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

phenomenon, then clearly one cannot have a language game if there is no public. If there is no human interaction, then there is no communication. Wittgenstein insisted that language games were not static, but were developing systems constantly under review by those using them, especially creative individuals. Some philosophers have suggested that creativity is forged in a culture of traditions – linguistic, cultural, etc. A new theory or method or way of looking at things is judged creative by those imbued with the values, judgements and theories of the tradition in which they work. But traditions are developed within societies, so it follows that creativity is developed socially. This notion has been named by psychologists and some philosophers ‘the sociocultural theory’. The idea that creativity springs from cultures of traditions is criticised by other philosophers. Creativity, they argue, is about ‘thinking outside the box’; that is, outside the tradition. Wittgenstein has much to say about this – such as, “Genius is courage in talent”. He said further: “Genius is talent in which character makes itself heard.” Is he trying to open our minds here to the fact that creativity has to do with more than just the proverbial ‘Eureka!’ moment? Language, and all that goes with it, must be based in rule-following; and rule-following by definition must be in a public space. Wittgenstein says that there is no magic spark that flashes on in the workings of the individual’s mind, devoid of any contact with the public space. How can it, Wittgenstein asks, when the very building blocks of any new idea are rooted in linguistic rule-following in the social domain? One could even argue that here Wittgenstein is casting doubt on the intelligibility of an idea being completely limited to one’s own private sphere. Many would (publically) say that if there was ever a truly original thinker, it was Wittgenstein. But Wittgenstein wrote in 1931: “I don’t believe I have ever invented a line of thinking, I have always taken one over from someone else. I have simply straightaway seized on it with enthusiasm for my work of clarification. That is how Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, Sraffa have influenced me.” (1931, in Culture and Value 1980). This is a surprising, maybe grievous, thing to say. Perhaps Wittgenstein was being self-effacing, although that doesn’t seem in character. The truth may instead lie in his aphorism ‘Genius is courage in talent’. Here we get a hint that the creative individual must be prepared to suffer and challenge for his or her creativity. The individual must endure and triumph over enormous strain before true creativity can be achieved. Wittgenstein’s own way of working bears witness to these ideals. Yes, he had enormous natural talent; but he also had enormous persistence and doggedness. He would turn a problem around, invert it, weigh its perspectives, and in general, fight against the ‘leave it to another day’ notion that can bedevil many of us. The creative individual believes so intensely in their ideas

Creativity Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) Portrait by Clint Inman 2022

PAINTING © CLINTON INMAN 2022 FACEBOOK AT CLINTON.INMAN

December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 9

Creativity that he or she forces them on culture. This calls on some form of courage to smash through a ceiling of doubt or indolence, to force the idea through by making use of it, living it.

CARTOON © PHIL WITTE 2022

Creativity Through Allegory An allegory is a fictional narrative or image that can lead the reader or viewer to consider moral or political situations. Perhaps the best-known allegory in philosophy is Plato’s ‘Allegory of the Cave’, a story he tells of some prisoners who have been kept in chains in a cave all their lives, watching shadows thrown upon the cave wall by a fire. These shadows are of objects being carried behind them. They are a distorted representation of the world, but they are the only ‘reality’ the prisoners know. For Plato the shadows stand for our sense perceptions, though of course sense perceptions are only a fraction of our total experience, which also includes our reason and analysis. A famous political allegory is George Orwell’s 1945 novel Animal Farm, an allegory of Soviet Communist history. In it a group of farm animals, filled with idealism, stage a revolution and take over their farm. Orwell, a former Communist, describes the shifting situation of the animals as the pigs seize control and are steadily corrupted by the opportunities and selfishness of absolute power. Yet another example of allegory is Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 film The Conformist. On seeing this film, one of Bertolucci’s followers suggested he could ‘plait gravy’ – i.e. achieve something widely seen as impossible. Yes, it seemed (and still seems in many ways) that creative, that complex. The Conformist is set in Fascist Italy in the 1930s. The main character is Marcello Clerici. As a child he was mistreated, and this scars him deeply. Marcello seeks refuge in the overwhelming power of the fascist state. He’s charged with investigating Professor Quadri, who is an anti-fascist and Marcello’s old college professor. Quadri uses Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to condemn the contemporary political situation in Italy. “And what do they see, the prisoners?”, asks Quadri. “Shadows, reflections of things. Like what is happening to you people now in Italy” he persists. Marcello instead takes the route that appears to quell his various anxieties; he is not ready to confront reality. Marcello is self-deluding and on

10 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

the road to moral bankruptcy, but is he morally bankrupt enough to carry out his fascist masters’ orders and kill Quadri? For the viewer this is captivating stuff and also raises profound questions. The truth of Marcello’s situation finally begins to dawn on him. He begins to realise that he is not a puppet master, but one of tens of thousands of puppets. Along with Marcello, the viewer is presented with opposing pathways to good and evil. Has Marcello’s quest for security, status and belonging harmed him more than helped him? Should he even have considered this path? Marcello is becoming ensnared in a moral trap from which there will be no escape. The impression of his growing terror is enhanced by exceptional camera work, light and shade, angles suggesting claustrophobia. The creativity of the artwork is stunning. Bertolucci uses Marcello to explore the drives that fuel cruel autocracies and mendacious dictatorships the world over. Marcello, for all his guile and confidence in his abilities to work the system, finally comes to see the utter bankruptcy of his position, for just like those he despises, he has become an extension of the fascist state. The movie is an allegory, rather than a historical drama, because it tries to awaken all of us to questions about society and our place within it, and to alert us to the lure of conformism, the tendency of so many to mindlessly follow whatever popular trend or set of expectations is dominant in society at a given moment. The raising of such questions, and the limitless possibility of further questions, is the very bedrock of creative thought. Psycho-Philosophical Creativity Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934-2021) identified a type of highly focused mental state conducive to productivity and creativity. He called it the ‘flow’. He described flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.” Csikszentmihalyi advanced a model of creativity that stresses the importance of a ‘specific domain’ to make meaningful contributions within a culture – a time and place in history where many variables come together to form a situation where creativity can bloom. Renaissance Florence is sometimes cited as a domain where many such factors came together. The city was a financial and political powerhouse. The rich were encouraged to advertise their wealth and power through great art – which in its turn attracted artists, sculptors, architects, etc; all the seeds needed for a harvest of creativity. Csikszentmihalyi’s work focuses on creativity as a cultural phenomenon. It is useful, he says, to think about culture as systems of interrelated domains. He puts forward a model of creativity consisting of a domain, a field, and a person. The domain is the wider area of cultural application, whether that be sculpture, mathematics, reason or science. Inside the domain is the specific field; and inside the field is the person. Csikszentmihalyi outlines the creative person as having “a sense that one’s skills are adequate to cope with the challenges at hand, in a goal directed, rule-bound action system” (Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, 1990). To achieve this sense the individual absorbs and develops cultural information. In some individuals this knowledge will reach such a level that they will be selected

Creativity Haus Wittgenstein, Vienna Wittgenstein designed a house, then had the builders reconstruct it to make one of the ceilings 3cm higher. How to become the architect Of your own myth: gesture towards the space That is missing, the space that isn’t there, The three centimetres needed to repair Proportion in a perfectly thought-out place Then stand back and say nothing, be silent. Let others place a table and dine, Or a bed to sleep in a room of their choosing; Living will be their way of approving Your wonderful way of squandering time. © HERB TATE 2022

Herb Tate is a poet and RE & Philosophy teacher in the UK. by the gatekeepers in the field for inclusion into the creative domain. He writes, “Typically, the memes and rules that define a domain tend to remain stable over time. It takes psychic energy to learn new terms and new concepts, and in so far as psychic energy is a very scarce and necessary resource, and provided that the old terms and rules are adequate to the task, it makes sense for domains to remain stable” (Creativity, 2014). Interestingly, Csikszentmihalyi suggests that domains can be transmitted and developed even without an annotation system: “For instance Piaget gave a very detailed description of how rules are transmitted in a very informal domain: that of the game of marbles played by Swiss children. This domain is relatively enduring over several generations of children, and it consists in specific names of marbles of different sizes, colour, and composition. Furthermore, it consists in a variety of arcane rules that children learn from each other in the course of play. So even without a notation system, domains can transmitted from one generation to the next through imitation and instruction.” (Creativity, 2014). Creativity For All This ‘cultural’ view of creativity goes against that of many thinkers, such as Kant or Freud, who saw the spark of individual genius as the source of creativity. Some of these thinkers went to great lengths to rationalise this idea of an individual creative spark. Freud for example seems to have suggested that creativity was related to neurosis, a meandering, disturbing stream of thought. More modern views, such as Csikszentmihalyi’s, see creativity as a more complicated process, subject to far more than ‘delicate flower’ individualism. True, creativity is a delicate flower; but not so delicate that analysis cannot make progress in understanding it. The struggle between the creative culturalists and the creative individualists will continue. But after perusing Wittgenstein’s ideas on creativity, and the ideas of others such as Csikszentmihalyi, one must surely see the relevance of culture. The processes of creativity are carried out through an intertwining of public language and symbol systems like mathematics, with various forms, in various domains. Nevertheless, creativity need not be the exclusive

preserve of those initiated into the higher echelons of a particular field of endeavour. Those who read a novel, view a play or a film, look at a painting, and so on, can also have an input into the meaning of a work of art and perhaps suggest new meanings. Of course, the ‘common sense’ understanding has always been that the artist, writer or other creative determined the intent of the work. This concept was challenged by a revolutionary paper called ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ published in 1946 by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley. Their idea was that the meaning of a work is not necessarily what was in the writer’s mind, at the time of writing or later, but has more to do with what the readers of a work see as its meaning. Beardsley argues that the meaning of a text can change even after the author has died, or maybe even after a week or a month or a year has elapsed, or in the light of events. Georgia Warnke takes the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain as an example, drawing attention to the relationship between Jim and Huck. There has been a revolution in attitudes to sexuality and tolerance since the book was written, and where readers of a hundred or more years ago would be hard put to recognise anything but a platonic relationship between Jim and Huck, some of today’s readers would be struck by a number of passages in the book which could certainly suggest a different story. Creative Conclusions Creativity is an elusive quality. It doesn’t fit easily into a theory or an outlook. Plato speaks of truly great poetry being ‘inspired’ – in effect, a breath from the gods. Talking of Greek gods, Friedrich Nietzsche also saw great creativity in the tragedy and poetry of ancient Greece as a marriage between a ‘Dionysian’ outlook (spontaneity, irrationality, the rejection of discipline) and a more serious and ordered ‘Apollonian’ outlook. But this only goes to emphasise the elusiveness of creativity: maybe it all depends on the respective balance of such ingredients? It has been suggested by some that by its very nature creativity cannot be subject to rigorous analysis. Of course, this itself is a question that can only be resolved by rigorous analysis. Yet Kant – not usually one to shy away from rigorous analysis – seemed to conceive of creativity as something individual that cannot be learned, cannot be related to erudition in the ‘normal’ way, and which is an enigma even to those who display it. As we’ve seen, Wittgenstein does not go along with this view. And the creative products we’ve considered in this short essay, such as The Conformist, rest on public foundations similar to those illustrated by Wittgenstein when he talks of his work resting on the influences of Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell and the others. Indeed, the very notion of allegory cannot take place without something to be allegorical about. Moreover, allegory throws open the door to creative minds to search out new and insightful perspectives, juxtapose insights and conjure up mind-blowing analysis. And by using that phrase ‘conjure up’, am I conceding that creativity may have a touch of the magical – maybe even of the divine? © LES JONES 2022

Les Jones is a retired educational professional. He taught in schools and colleges and has been a department head. He has also worked for exam boards as an examiner and senior examiner for GCE, GCSE and A-Level. December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 11

Creativity

The Philosophy of Creativity Rick Lewis asks what’s new in this fascinating field ow can you be more creative? What is the connection between creativity and inspiration? Where do inspirations come from? The novelist Terry Pratchett, who knew a thing or two about imagination, had an amusing theory about this, as follows: “Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time travelling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss.” In a more earnest vein, Robert Pirsig wrote in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) about the relationship between the mechanic’s mind, hand and eye, as one of constantly assessing a problem and making the changes that seems to be called for, and then reassessing and making further changes, in a continually unfolding creative process. This process, Pirsig claimed, was what united motorcycle mechanics with sculptors and other artists. What have contemporary philosophers written about the nature of creativity? What’s the state of the debate? It has been quieter than you might suppose, but recently there have been signs of life. In 2010 Professor Berys Gaut of the University of St Andrews wrote a wide-ranging paper called ‘The Philosophy of Creativity’ in the journal Philosophy Compass. It included a survey of issues such as those above, and others such as whether the creative process is rational, whether creativity is a virtue, and the relation of creativity to knowledge. Gaut argued that philosophers in this area should pay more attention to what psychologists have been up to. He writes: “In 1950 J.P. Guilford gave a highly influential Presidential address to the American Psychological Association in which he pointed out how little work had been done on the topic [of creativity] by psychologists.” Since then, Gaut went on, there has been constant activity, laboratory investigations, dedicated journals and textbooks, and, most important of all, competing psychological theories of creativity. Gaut said that philosophers had so far paid little attention to this work, apart from some discussion of two theories known as the computational theory and the cognitive psychological approach. Then in 2014, The Philosophy of Creativity was published with chapters by a whole range of thinkers, including Gaut. This illustrated an increasing interest in creativity among philosophers. It was edited by Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman, and in 2017 Les Reid reviewed it for Philosophy Now Issue 120. However, earlier than this, a notable philosophical contribution to understanding creativity had already been made by the well-known feminist philosopher Professor Christine Battersby in her 1989 book Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics. I recently asked first Elliot Paul and then Christine Battersby a couple of questions about the topic. Their answers follow:

H

12 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

Elliot Samuel Paul is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Queen’s University, Ontario. He is co-editor of The Philosophy of Creativity (Oxford Univ Press, 2014) and co-author of the extensive entry on Creativity for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. PN: So, what is creativity? EP: The standard definition of creativity focuses on its products – an idea, performance, or artefact – and says a product counts as creative if it is new and valuable. Novelty is not enough, because something could be new but worthless, in which case it doesn’t deserve to be praised as creative. Going beyond the standard definition, however, the essence of creativity isn’t just about valuable new products; it’s also about the kind of process that generates them. For one thing, the creative process needs to be performed by an agent, by a being who is responsible for what they are doing. A water droplet freezing around a particle produces a unique snowflake, something new and aesthetically valuable. But the water droplet isn’t creative. That’s because it isn’t an agent. Real creativity is an expression of agency. Nowadays AI systems are generating impressive new artworks but we hesitate to call them creative. That’s because it isn’t clear that these systems are creative. PN: Where does inspiration come from? EP: One of the fascinating things about creative insight is the way it takes the creator by surprise. Creators from all domains, from the arts to the sciences, commonly report that they weren’t even focused on the relevant problem (they were taking a walk, daydreaming, or working on something else) when all of a sudden – Eureka! – the solution strikes them. Where did it come from? According to an old myth going back to the Ancient Greeks, such epiphanies occur when a person is inspired – literally filled with the spirit of a god or muse. The divine being is the real creator; she uses the person as a vessel to communicate her ideas. This story is alluring because it coheres with the phenomenology of insight, the way an insight feels like it didn’t come from you and it is mysterious to you how it arose. But instead of invoking divine inspiration, researchers today explain the surprising character of creative insight by appealing to the operation of the unconscious mind. You can’t create anything significant without conscious preparation. In the long term, you have to exert a lot of conscious effort to learn the skills, concepts, and other elements of your domain. In the shorter term, you may deliberately focus on a particular problem or task in that domain, and any ideas that occur to you would emerge, not ex nihilo, but through a process of recombining and altering elements that you’ve acquired through experi-

Creativity ence. When you turn your attention away to something else, your unconscious mind may continue manipulating stored ideas, such that if it later generates a solution which surfaces to your awareness, you won’t have seen it coming and it may seem as if it came from something or someone else. The challenge for researchers is to figure out what cognitive mechanisms come into play at each stage of the creative process and what factors help or hinder their operation. These are largely empirical issues, so my collaborators and I inform our philosophical study of creativity with findings from psychology, neuroscience, and other cognitive sciences.

Christine Battersby is Reader Emerita in Philosophy, and an Associate Fellow of the Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts at the University of Warwick. Her Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics was first published in 1989 and republished in 2022 in the Bloomsbury Philosophy Library: Contemporary Aesthetics Collection. Her article on ‘Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics and Ethics: Mapping Influences and Congruities with Feminist Philosophers’ is included in The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Feminist Philosophy, eds Susanne Lettow and Tuija Pulkkinen, 2022. PN: What is the connection between creativity and genius? CB: Classical and neoclassical connoisseurs of art did not place great emphasis on originality. For them, the function of the best artists or writers was to mirror the underlying truths or universal Ideas that lie concealed behind appearances. Talent, judgment and performative skills mattered more than self-expression. It was during the eighteenth century that ‘aesthetics’ emerged as a distinct branch of philosophy, and this was also the time when creativity, originality and genius emerged as key concepts. The so-called ‘genius’ was ascribed a power of creation analogous to that of a monotheistic, Judaeo-Christian,

God, capable of bringing a brand-new world, and even His own self, into existence through the power of utterance. It was claimed that the uniqueness of the genius’s “I am” is reflected in every facet of his artwork – and indeed throughout his whole oeuvre. According to the Romantics, a great work of art ‘grew’ or ‘burst forth’: it was not a product of calm forethought, mere talent or rational design, but of an overflow of burgeoning psychic energies that operated below the level of conscious thought. This Romantic model of creativity continued to have resonance into the twentieth century and beyond. The creative energies of the ‘genius’ were ascribed to sublimated male sexual energies, and linked to a highly individualised male self. Women were commonly said to lack the individuality necessary for true creativity, and also refused the ability to transcend or to sublimate their bodily instincts and reproductive capacities in the same ways as the exceptional male ‘geniuses’. Creative women credited with similar psychic powers were said to be not fully female. By the end of the nineteenth century, it had become a cliché to assert with Cesare Lombroso in The Man of Genius (1891): “there are no women of genius; the women of genius are men.” PN: How does feminist aesthetics offer a new perspective on creativity? CB: Looking at the ways in which Western and Northern cultures have over-valued an individualised mode of psychic creativity, and under-valued the procreativity of female bodies, can provide us with resources for imagining creativity differently. Women in our culture are, on the one hand, taught to think of themselves as not different from men. But the female subjectposition is also, historically, more irredeemably bodily, and less psychically isolated than that of a typical male – bound, through relationships of love, care, childbearing and childrearing, within interpersonal relationships, to materiality and also to other embodied selves. Focusing on natality, as well as on social and material entanglements, can help us re-imagine creativity in a PN much more cooperative and dynamically interactive way.

FROM A HISTORY OF ART IN ANCIENT EGYPT (1883)

Creativity in ancient Egypt: a potter’s workshop

December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 13

Creativity

Creating Cities Harry Drummond builds a case. hat is the meaning of life? Does God exist? How ought I treat another person? What are the conditions of knowledge acquisition? Engaging, fundamental, and worthy – these sorts of questions are the typical buildings blocks of conversation when a philosopher is asked ‘What do you do?’. What is the nature of building? How can a building influence my life? In what style should we build? These are not the sort of questions it is worth placing money on hearing in the same situation. Yet the philosophy of architecture has attracted some highprofile philosophers. Martin Heidegger, for example, delivered a lecture entitled ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, which proposed the ability of buildings to disclose new worlds to a person (or to Dasein, to use his term). Likewise, the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, who was appointed Chair of the UK’s ‘Building Better, Building Beautiful’ commission striving against architectural ugliness and failure, devoted an entire tome to the Aesthetics of Architecture (1979). Other prolific architecturallyinclined philosophers include Professor Andy Hamilton at Durham University, Gordon Graham of Princeton, and the late Norwegian architect Christian Norberg-Schulz. Given all this intellectual fire-power, why then is it that the philosophy of architecture does not appear alongside epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics in the centre of our philosophical discourse? One reason might be that it is a derivative topic within aesthetics. This makes a difference for two reasons. Firstly, being a topic-within-a-topic in philosophy makes it extra difficult to make headlines. Secondly, we aestheticians remain, rather unfortunately, near the bottom end of the philosophical hierarchy. In addition, architecture seemingly does not warrant the philosophical attention we give to other areas. It’s a case of asymmetry. As I noted, the apparent worthiness and fundamentality of the questions involved in other fields of philosophical debate far surpass that of the questions of building. Much more attractive, both for the general public and, significantly, for research councils (which decide whose research to fund), are answers to whether we can obtain truth, or whether time really exists – as opposed to questions of, say, how a building contributes to my sense of community. So, why should we care about the philosophy of architecture? The most significant reasons arise from an identification of one of the characteristics of architecture that Scruton gives in his aforementioned book. Architecture is the most public of the arts. Buildings are entities we come across everyday. This is especially important when architecture is also fundamentally and irrevocably publicly heteronomous, meaning, it must answer to the taste of the ordinary person in the street. Furthermore, unlike music, painting, sculpture, and film, architecture cannot be considered socially autonomous, that is to say, distanced from its social function. Whilst these other arts have developed from

W

14 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

and transcended their social roots, as say, accompaniments to religious ceremonies, displays of wealth on the staircase of one’s mansion, or popular diversions, architecture is necessarily social. This is in two senses. There is, of course, the sense that architecture needs to be nice to look at (this references the public heteronomy I mentioned). Secondly, there is the fact that buildings must facilitate some goings-on: you need to be able to do stuff in them. Architecture, furthermore, is entirely intersubjective in its nature. Any building entails our relationship with others, insofar as it was designed by someone else, built by someone else, is occupied by someone else, or is destroyed by someone else. It is increasingly important to us that we have buildings that satisfy both our needs and our perceptual wants. There are numerous narratives within architecture that need to be explored philosophically. We come across questions of purpose: why did the architect build it in this way and not that? Or questions of ethics: how should I act given what occurred in this building before its use by me? Can you morally turn an abattoir into a vegan restaurant (or vice versa), for example? Questions in the intersubjective realm include: given how this building came about, the preceding narratives, its location and facilitation of function both inside and out, how does this building contribute to my sense of being-with-others? Moreover, the philosophy of architecture enables us to gain insights into other fields of inquiry, and it is notable in discussions within aesthetics in its use as an illustration. Prof Andrea Sauchelli presents an exceptionally interesting conundrum for those involved in the debate surrounding the notion of functional beauty, for example. Reacting against Kant’s notion of ‘dependent beauty’ – wherein one takes into account the purpose and/or concept that the artefact falls under in one’s consideration of its aesthetic value – functional beauty considers whether we should pay attention to something’s function in evaluations of the aesthetic. Sauchelli applies this to architecture. Specifically, in ‘Functional Beauty, Architecture, And Morality: A Beautiful Konzentrationslager?’ (The Philosophical Quarterly, 2012), he discusses the questions of whether a concentration camp can be architecturally beautiful. As evil as their function was, some concentration camps probably fulfilled this evil function better. So they propose a dilemma, as well as an extreme illustration, as to how we should weigh the concept of function in our aesthetic judgments. Sauchelli’s question also shows the importance of the moral debate in aesthetics: that is, how far should one take moral considerations into account in aesthetic evaluations, if at all? To me it’s clear that the function that was facilitated by the concentration camps should strongly detract from our aesthetic praise of them as architectural manifestations. Does this lead to an impasse for the strict formalists or autonomists, and antimoralists in general, about art?

London Bridge Can you see the point?

Significant, too, are the implications all this has on the repurposing or destruction of buildings. When I wrote the first draft of this article, I was sat at my desk in a study room of an accommodation block repurposed from an old psychiatric hospital. What ways should I act in this building to pay respect to those who may have suffered here? Is it even right to repurpose the building to the function it facilitates now? This again plucks upon the narrative that continuously unfolds within architecture. When we build, we must pay respect to those who occupied that site before us. The Mayor of Durham, for example, refused the covering up of Victorian beams on the outside of some buildings in the town centre simply due to the fact that these old beams stand as a reflection of the city’s history. The main thing to take from this article, then, is that as well as its utility in other fields of inquiry, the philosophy of architecture has direct impact on our day-to-day living. Insofar as architecture is a utilised public art, narrowing down what exactly it is we should be praising and promoting aesthetically about architecture, and what we should be criticising, is crucial for our existence. This is especially relevant when it comes to cases like Scruton’s appointment as the Chair of the Building Better, Building Beautiful commission. Scruton endorsed a strict anti-modernism about architecture, and his wrath towards modernism also encompassed architectural movements such as Neo-futurism and Postmodernism – the skylines of which he dismissed as ‘landscapes of litter’. If a philosopher is to have a say on what buildings are next brought into public use, a clear assessment of their architectural aesthetics is crucial. As well as raising questions in both moral philosophy and the philosophy of architecture’s parent field, aesthetics, there are deeper considerations to be taken into account when discussing architecture. Most fundamentally, given that it is in architectural products that we pursue most of our projects – work, relaxation, study, entertainment – architecture is one of the most important phenomena for disclosing the nature of the human subject. Architecture’s intersubjective character dives into the nature of our existence. It is my hope that the philosophy of architecture will become a more prominent field of thought. To start, this should be in the aesthetic realm. Architecture doesn’t possess the autonomy often bestowed upon, and heralded within, other artforms. Nonetheless, it can be beautiful. In this sense, it is the only art that overcomes heteronomous (that is constraining) determinations to obtain the same aesthetic and artistic value of other arts. Surely such a unique autonomy – autonomy from the other arts – is worth exploring. Additionally, given its ability to disclose our natures (as already identified by Heidegger and Norberg-Schulz), I hope that one day the philosophy of architecture can become a seriously interdisciplinary field of intellectual inquiry. That being said, if you ever meet me and ask what I do, I do not expect you to follow up my answer with, “Ah! A philosophy student! So tell me how the Shard influences our existence…?” © HARRY DRUMMOND 2022

Harry Drummond is a PhD researcher at the University of Liverpool and co-editor of the journal Debates in Aesthetics. December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 15

SHARD_FROM_THE_SKY_GARDEN_2015 © COLIN / WIKIMEDIA COMMONS / CC BY-SA 4.0

Creativity

The Shard,

Creativity

In Praise of Aphorisms Grahame Lockey writes pithy observations to make you think about pithy observations to make you think. once sat down to write a poem. Four words into it, I realised it was complete. It didn’t want a title, it wanted to be left alone:

I

Absence begins at home.

I didn’t know what it was that I had written, but it wasn’t a poem. If I had thought it through to a poem, it would have unwritten itself in the reader’s mind, leaving nothing. I now think it was probably an aphorism. Ask the difference between an adage, a proverb, a maxim, an epigram, and an aphorism, and even a veteran English teacher might scratch their head and furrow their brow. It’s easier to think of what they have in common. The internet is just as confused, giving off the impression that they’re fancy words for quotably quotie things that people make memes with. Well, they do all belong to the extended family of pithy statements, which also include axioms, dicta, mottoes, pensées, precepts, quips and the like. But in order to single out the aphorism, we need to usefully tell it apart from its siblings. Picture five children in a photograph. All short. All stylish. All memorable. Epigram is fair of face, but with a twinkle in its eye. You see that at once. The qualities distinguishing the others are not so readily apparent. Adage and Proverb are twins – that much is clear. Easy to mix them up. Adage is the sensible child; Proverb the practical one. Maxim likes having rules to follow. The fifth child, blurred with movement, is up to its hips in a bag of sorts, as if about to spring out of the picture into a sack race. This is Aphorism, the thinker of the family. As they’re all brother or sister to each other, there is a natural family resemblance. If we turn the children into five Olympic rings, we have a good starting point for tracing areas of overlap. The adage and the proverb share the feature of having stood the test of time. An adage is a generally accepted statement, a capsule of common sense, for example, ‘‘Better late than never’’. A proverb is the concentrated wisdom of bygone people whispering advice over waves of vanished generations: ‘‘A stitch in time’’, they say, ‘‘saves nine’’. They say a lot, the ghosts of all

who have lived; and if we listen to them, our lives go better. That it is intended with a practical application in mind is what a proverb has in common with a maxim. A maxim is a rule to live by. The Golden Rule, ‘Do unto others what you what have them do unto you’, is a little chunk of conscience that if repeated keeps you acting to principle. Meanwhile, ‘Nothing ventured, nothing gained’ is a maxim to spur those who pride adventure over consistency. That maxims are memorable is where they overlap with epigrams – witty original remarks that makes us want to remember them. Oscar Wilde, a master of epigrams, could “resist everything”, we recall, ‘‘except temptation.’’ It is the stylishness of the epigram that marks its border with the aphorism. I called Epigram ‘fair of face’, and so it is. It’s so dazzlingly good-looking that our response to a choice epigram is to marvel at the brilliance of its composition even more than the wisdom of its words. Henry Ford, for example, came up with this beauty: “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.”

Epigram can have a wicked sense of humour too: “My stomach is flat. The L there is silent.”

Epigrams like these are perhaps better termed ‘laughorisms’, as Ambrose Bierce called the diabolical definitions in his Devil’s Dictionary (1911). But whether clever or funny, we understand an epigram quickly: we do not need to puzzle it out. That’s half its appeal. When it clicks, we admire it for its ingenuity, and may commit it to memory so we can offer it to others like a canapé. The aphorism is not quite as popular at parties. Aphorism is the quiet one in the corner. If it speaks, it’s with its mouth full. The Aphorism Comes Into Its Own La Rochefoucauld, maestro of the seventeenth-century Parisian salon, could with a perfected bon mot and a shake of his overembroidered sleeve make ladies titter behind their fans and men involuntarily sting their own thighs with a pantomime slap. Just the sight of him with something to say must have brought a giggle up the throat, although with a hand over the heart in case he said something that tarred them with the same brush they liked him tarring others with. Like this: As it is the mark of great minds to say many things in a few words, so it is that of little minds to use many words to say nothing.

But in among the fun he has pulling verbal jewellery from the human condition, are aphorisms that may have been greeted 16 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

Creativity La Rochefoucauld getting ready to strike

chipped out of any context. I’ve just plucked a random book off my shelf, and while flicking through it, I glimpsed this singing bowl of a sentence: “Supreme simplicity is untranslatable.” The paragraph it introduces falls away. Set alone, this is as bottomless as a koan. And sometimes you can’t help brushing off a few unnecessary words. “Philosophy begins in wonder” didn’t stand alone in Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus, but it deserved to: it needs space before it, space after it, and a starry sky above it. Anything more distracts and detracts from it like a piece of fluff on a face. Elaboration is the death of the aphorism, as elaboration seeks to do our thinking for us. One philosopher who liked to think like a farmer – scattering seeds of ideas into the mulch of his readers’ minds – was Friedrich Nietzsche. Like any aphorist, some of his seeds fell onto stony ground, but he also has invigorating moments when the earth opens up to him like a womb, and to my mind some of Nietzsche’s aphorisms deserve to feature among the most fecund. For example: “When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.”

with a furrowed brow or a stroked chin. Take this: “Ideas often flash across our mind more complete than we could make them after much labour.”

This is no idle off-the-laced-cuff observation. It’s like a lego brick that wants to play – a thought that wants you to think with it. That is what makes it an aphorism. Here’s another from La Rochefoucauld, which I’ve tweaked a little because he would have chewed the lace off his collar at the literal English translation: “Philosophy triumphs easily over past and future evils; but present evils defeat it.”

It’s a salon silencer. Fans go ungiggled behind, thighs unslapped; just grave frowns all round, pondering what that idea says about us, and whether it’s a presentiment of doom. The aphorist Joseph Joubert describes (in a pithy statement, naturally) his obsession with “reducing a book to a page, and that page to a sentence.” This provides a nice way of seeing an aphorism: as the opening, or closing, line of a book that the author has kept blank for us, inviting us to finish it ourselves. Its concentration makes the aphorism a taut springboard to original thinking. It’s not the painstaking research endeavour that would constitute extended scholarly communion with Kant or Hegel, but freestyle scuba-thinking. We think more with less, and with a short aphorism to spring off, we have an empty pool of ideas to dive into. We can swim to whatever depth, and when we surface, it’s in a place we have arrived at by ourselves.

A fine aphorism like this swells itself with the best features of its siblings. Like the epigram it is well-put, though not so beautifully that we mistake the wrapping for the present. The gift here is a piece of advice, which it holds behind its back in a way a proverb wouldn’t; but if we follow this advice, things will go better for us. In fact, whenever we sense indefatigable falsehoods creeping up on us, we can call these thirteen words to mind like a maxim to remind ourselves an early night is probably the best course. A good aphorism is like a pool of still water: when we look into it, we should see ourselves not quite as we are. And for as long as generations continue, it won’t dry up. But how does it remain an aphorism if it borrows so heavily from its siblings? Because it’s still a thought that wants us to think with it. We hear Nietzsche’s clang from the gong of truth, for example, and then: “What ideas have I defeated, and which ones keep getting up again? Why? Is this telling me something about my intellectual fighting style or the unslayability of everything that pesters me?” Already I’m thinking originally about something that could make a difference to my life.

Aphorism Amongst The Sentences Relatively few thinkers write aphoristically, but aphorisms can glow and throb within dense seams of unlikely text, and can be December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 17

Creativity pus said to Caesar: the oyster is not your world.”

PAINTING © CLINTON INMAN 2022 FACEBOOK AT CLINTON.INMAN

Friedrich Nietzsche, king of the philosophical aphorism

Bringing It All Back Home At the mention of me, I must hold up a mirror. It was Humpty Dumpty who said to Alice: “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean.” The aphorisms I attributed to La Rochefoucauld, he called ‘reflections’ and ‘maxims’. What business is it of mine to call them something else? And what if he does mind? What if he’s turning in his grave at the thought of his beloved maxims being sorted into aphorisms and laughorisms, based on unweighable degrees of balance between substance and style? A Gallic shrug. I did first present Aphorism to you as bagged up – in the sack so that parts of it are hidden, as they should be; with a leap to suggest it might be a concept in motion; and a blur because we might not agree. At this point, an idea flashes across my mind more complete than I could make it after much labour. In praising an aphorism for being cognitively evocative, am I not making its identity, and its worth, depend uneasily upon its effect? The adage, proverb and maxim do not need to ponder their mortality. The epigram is safe from existential crises (misattribution aside). But if an aphorism is an aphorism by virtue of making us think, what is it when it ceases to do so? Does an aphorism have the fragility of a firefly – a wandering bead of light that captures our attention in the darkness of our minds, then goes out? What if it doesn’t light up for us at all, and we pass over it entirely? Is it still an aphorism?

What kind of statement is this? It’s not an adage because I made it up. It’s not a proverb because there is no shell of wisdom around a pearl of advice. It’s not a rule to act on, so maxim is out. It lacks the gettable stickiness of an epigram. So, is it an aphorism? I should like to say no. It provokes only what thought is needed to decide it isn’t worth thinking about. If it were a translation from the Latin of something Caesar said to an octopus, it would have meant little to Caesar and less to an octopus. So let’s just stop there. But if you ask a class of seven-year-olds why Julius Caesar might have said such a thing, and what on earth the octopus might have meant in reply, one bright spark will see in it something about our relationship with nature. Then suddenly we all do, and everyone wants to say something. It’s not that Caesar and the octopus make us think, nor that they have to. It is that they invite us to. And that invitation remains open like a key in a lock. Perhaps I have grown tired of La Rochefoucauld’s remark about complete ideas streaking across his mind without any words on – but if someone says it has made them question whether it’s really true that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (an aphorism of Wittgenstein’s), then I’ll go back to it, turn the key, and an old door opens onto somewhere new. La Rochefoucauld has been inviting us through that door since 1665. We and our world have changed. It hasn’t. It remains insufficiently itself, hoping that by giving us less we can take more from it, no matter where we are in life or time. Last Words I started with five quotably quotie-type things that were hard to tell apart because they were all short, well-put, and memorable. However, each has a personal characteristic that identifies it – not always uniquely, but better than Google. What distinguishes these confusable members of the pithy statement clan is ultimately the manner in which they are useful. The others are designed for easy understanding and remembering, otherwise they would not circulate in the currency of everyday life: adages to endorse common sense; proverbs to dispense advice; maxims to guide action; and epigrams for sharing like bonbons. The aphorism is the odd one out. It’s worth as much as you can make of it. And that could be anything. I have a personal reason for wanting to praise the aphorism for not doing all its thinking for us. Philosophy has given me the desire to think up good ideas; but the moment I come up with one, I start to question it, pedantically refine how it’s worded, and almost as soon as I’m happy with it, to start to doubt it, to become sceptical of it, to despair of it, and ultimately, to delete it. The sum of my philosophical works is a blinking cursor on a blank screen. Perhaps, then, this is what first drew me to the aphorism. When an idea flashes across the mind more complete than we could make it, we do not labour, and we should not try to. In the fewest but best possible words, we bring to life the brief racing beauty of the idea and leave it to the reader to thoughtfully complete it in ways that matter to them. © GRAHAME LOCKEY 2022

“Caesar said to an octopus: the world is not your oyster. The octo18 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

Grahame Lockey is a freelance educational consultant and writer.

Creativity

What Am I Doing? James Gallant, writer, reflects on the psychology of creativity.

I

reward of creative life (at least mine) which renders the improbable rewards of other kinds incidental and unnecessary. Harmony can be defined as ‘disparate elements organized convincingly and pleasingly’. The concept of harmony abounds in discussions of the fine arts generally. St Augustine wrote in De vera religione (391 AD), “In all the arts, that which pleases is harmony, which... invests the whole [of a work] with unity and beauty, either through the resemblance of symmetrical parts, or through the graded arrangement of unequal parts.” Mozart wrote in a letter to a friend, of musical ideas coming to him “in a stream... [I] keep them in my head, and people say I often hum them over to myself. Well, if I can hold onto them, they begin to join on to one another, as if they were bits a pastry cook should join together in the pantry. And now my soul gets heated, and if nothing disturbs me, the piece grows larger and brighter until, however long it is, it is all finished at once in my mind, so that I can now see it at a glance as if it were a pretty picture or a pleasing person. Then I don’t hear the notes one after the other, as they are hereafter to be played, but it as if in my fancy they were all at once.” There is a resemblance between what Mozart describes and my own process in writing, although he makes it sound awfully easy. For me, producing an harmonic work is grittier and more willful than that. The nucleus of a creative act for me will be something in my experience or reading that urges exploration for one reason or another. This core functions as a psychic magnet attracting to itself loosely associated ideas, images, personal memories, and scraps of learning. The harmonization of these odds and ends will require willful application on various levels, ranging from broad general concerns (genre, themes, dramatic issues, point of view), down to the shape and flow of sentences, individually and

© HARLEY SCHWADRON 2022 TO SEE MORE, PLEASE VISIT SCHWADRONCARTOONS.COM

have been writing fiction, prose-poetry, and essays for a long time now, whenever the business of staying alive has allowed. I have published quite a lot, including four books (well, three now, one having been delisted by its publisher for lack of sales). I do not self-publish. My wife, an attentive reader of what I write, is also an excellent judge of it, for better or worse. A thumbs up from her means something, although I can’t think of our relationship in this without recalling the aged lighthouse keeper and his wife in Ionesco’s 1952 play The Chairs, who pass the time making up various scenarios, including arranging chairs to seat the distinguished guests coming to hear the old man present his ‘message to the world’. If I announce on Facebook that something of mine has been published, non-literary relatives and acquaintances, for whom publication seems to be something like winning the lottery, will offer their mandatory congratulations. That is not, of course, the same as their reading what I have written. However, ‘‘No prophet is taken seriously in his home town’’, as one translation of Jesus’s remark would have it. It’s even less likely that a writer of serious fiction would be taken as serious by their acquaintances. Nonreaders have always outnumbered readers, of course. But my impression at the moment is that writers outnumber readers. I have not profited from my literary efforts materially in any significant way. Serious dedication to authorship, or to the arts generally, is unlikely to have practical consequences of a happy kind, as everyone working in this sector knows. Ego-boosting rewards of a less material kind have actually been rather paltry, too. When an editor publishes something you’ve written, gives you a thumb’s up – ‘one of those’, as comedian Rodney Dangerfield (who never got any) used to say – it is nice; and seeing what one has written all gussied up in print, or online, evokes a joyous little frisson – which vanishes like fog on a warm morning. I was walking in my Atlanta neighborhood recently when a man I’d never met, sitting on his front porch, called out, “Are you James Gallant?” “Yes,” I replied. He said he’d had read one of my books and thought it brilliant. That was nice, and I thanked him. But I never expect compliments, and, not dependent on them, they bounce right off me. This is all unusual. It’s not like human beings to be so indifferent to rewards that bolster them, materially or otherwise. So what am I up to? Jorge Luis Borges, in his Book of Imaginary Beings (1957) incorporated the image propounded in 1791 by Wang Tai-Hai, of a monkey on the back of a working writer that is content only once it has drunk a sufficient quantity of ink. I know the feeling; but what is it about ink-drinking that’s so satisfying? The Divine Harmony of Creativity The Italian Renaissance poet Girolamo Fracastoro characterized the reward at the end of the process of writing as a feeling of “a certain wonderful and almost divine harmony.” This harmonious feeling – make of it what one will – is, I think, the

December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 19

Creativity

Harmony of the World, Ebenezer Sibly, 1806

in association. This process is not entirely pleasant. And the idea or intuition that powered the effort initially may get lost in the mess temporarily, or for good. I can usually anticipate false starts, dead ends, suspicions of incompetence – not to mention interruptions by practical necessity. The defining character trait of the true writer, one of my teachers once said, is stubbornness. “If I can think it, I can write it”, Paul Goodman once said – a remark acknowledging that a bright idea for a writer is just a starting point, a challenge. Just so, Lodovico Castelvetro (15051571) wrote in his translation of Aristotle’s Poetics, “The appreciation of art is the appreciation of difficulties overcome.” If the challenge has been met, the harmonious result is regarded justifiably as a work. Towards A Harmonious Cosmos Is the harmony that satisfies the writer, artist, or composer, getting the ink monkey off his back irrespective of external rewards, merely a feeling? Or is there more to it than that? The concept of harmony – the fine orchestration of diverse elements that turns up so often in discussions of aesthetics – was conceived in early metaphysical thought as an aspect of the cosmos. In ‘Hellenic Conceptions of Harmony’ (Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 16, No 1, 1963) Edward Lippman surveys variations on the idea in ancient Greek thought. In Hippocratic medicine, health was the harmonic balance of the four ‘humours’ of the human body, black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm. The virtue of temperance in Plato’s Republic is an harmonious order of desires and feelings; and the good society harmonizes conflicting human interests. In Plato’s Timaeus, there 20 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

was only chaos in the beginning, before the Demiurge, the builder of the world, introduced measure and proportion: the orderly motions of the heavenly bodies, the cycle of the seasons, the relations of the sexes, the forms in the natural world... Analogies between harmony in nature and in works of art are at least one reason why the assigning of metaphysical or even religious significance to the arts has been irrepressible. While sharing his contemporaries’ belief that “Nature must always be explained mathematically and mechanically”, the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) urged recognition that the laws of mechanics were but one expression of the orderliness of the Divine Mind, which could also be apprehended in mental processes of a less abstract, more sensuous leaning. Thus he attributed the extraordinary power of music and poetry to their ‘foretaste and small evidence’ of ‘the wonderful harmony of Nature’. Influenced by Leibniz, Christian Wolff (1679-1754) argued that what explained the pleasure people find in a skillful work of art, a handsome person, or a comely cityscape, was an harmonious relation of parts to whole. It was the Mind of the Creator made manifest to our senses. Are pre-rational animals capable of such metaphysical intuitions? The myth of Orpheus, whose singing and lyre-playing charmed audiences of animals, birds, and reptiles, suggests so. Cat or dog owners who play music in their homes are likely to have had the experience of their household beasts paying rapt attention to it. YouTube videos variously depict a herd of cows drawn across a field by a small band performing ‘When the Saints Come Marching In’; a dog mesmerized by a street violinist’s rendition of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’; a dolphin hypnotized by a bagpiper; or elephants swaying in dancelike motions and flapping their ears rhythmically under the spell of a flautist. Discord Over Harmony Attributions of metaphysical significance to the arts such as those made by Leibniz and Wolff cut little ice with Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who denied human access to ultimate reality by

Snowflake by Paul Gregory

any means whatsoever. Kant made major contributions to our understanding of beauty and the sublime in his Critique of Judgement (1790). Romantic philosophers and artists were generally under the sway of Kant’s thinking, but were troubled nonetheless by Kant’s dualism of the thing for us – the world humans perceive and conceive in accordance with their mental categories and interests – as opposed to the thing in itself – ultimate reality independent of the subject, and to Kant, unknowable. For the Romantics, the arts, along with ecstatic communion with Nature, and Romantic love, were the means of transcending this disconnect. The poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), while loyal to Kant, was having it both ways when he wrote, “About the Absolute in the theoretical sense I dare not talk, yet I maintain that he who has recognized it when he experiences it, and keeps his eye constantly fixed on it, will derive a great benefit from it” (The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 1892). However, a friend of Goethe’s, Karl Philipp Moritz (1757-1793), in On the Creative Imitation of the Beautiful, reverted to the concept of humanity as microcosmic mirror of the macrocosmic order, while substituting the harmonious arts for metaphysical reflection or the sciences as the means of communing with ultimate reality. The thrust of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s thinking about the ideal poet was of the same order. Nineteenth century psychology commonly represented the human imagination as the faculty that discovers order in experience spontaneously, through resemblance, contrast, cause-and-effect, contiguity, or remoteness. In Chapter Thirteen of his Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge terms this faculty the Primary Imagination, distinguishing its simple, natural operations from those of the Secondary Imagination – the ideal poet’s imagination. The Secondary Imagination presupposes the Primary Imagination, but demonstrates ‘more than usual order’ combined with a ‘more than usual state of emotion’, harmonizing ‘the plenitude of the senses with the comprehensibility of the understanding’. In Chapter Fourteen, an ideal poetry – the work of the Secondary Imagination – is described as embodying a “balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative… all of this formed into one graceful and intelligent whole.” A harmony, in other words. As for the ultimate significance of this graceful and intelligent whole, a passage in Chapter Thirteen states that the formative impulse of the poetic imagination is “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” – in other words, an emulation of God. For Coleridge, then, it is the ideal poet, not the metaphysician, for whom ultimate knowledge and Being is realized. And one might suppose that if the ideal poet can access the Absolute, so can artists of other kinds who also experience the ‘certain wonderful almost divine harmony’. Whatever metaphysical significance can be attributed to this passion for harmony, that people like myself should embrace this ideal and find it sufficient, irrespective of external reward, and pursue it into obscurity and even poverty as if anticipating an eternal reward, is certainly curious, if not positively mad.

by Melissa Felder

© JAMES GALLANT 2022

James Gallant reflects on philosophic implications of the American government’s take on UFOs in a Fortnightly Review essay online: fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2022/10/gallant-angels-singularity/

SIMON & FINN © MELISSA FELDER 2022 PLEASE VISIT SIMONANDFINN.COM

December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 21

Niccolo Machiavelli and his legacy

Ethics in Politics Massimo Pigliucci trawls the history of politics to see how closely ethics fits it. good number of politicians talk about character, virtue, morality, and doing the right thing. But if you look at what they actually do rather than just listen to what they say, their behavior is often anything but virtuous. They lie, they cheat, and sometimes, they self-aggrandize, or start wars which bring misery to countless people. Did you think I was talking about current politics in the US, the UK, or perhaps Russia? No, actually I was thinking of Renaissance Europe. It was a time when Popes, arguably the highest role models in Christendom (after Jesus himself, of course), sometimes donned armor and rode into battle – when they were not scheming to augment their power, their purses, or both.

A

The Genesis of Realpolitik As you can appreciate, the gap between words and actions hasn’t narrowed that much in the last five centuries. But this stark discrepancy in politics between theory and practice impressed a brilliant Florentine diplomat named Niccolò Machiavelli (14691527) so much that he wrote The Prince, in which he gives advice to statesmen on the basis of a frank assessment of political realities rather than on pious fantasies. Machiavelli had many experiences which inspired his insights. One such was meeting Cesare Borgia. For a time Machiavelli considered him Italy’s best hope for unification against the French and Spanish invaders. (It didn’t happen.) In 1503, Machiavelli met Borgia for a second time, in the course of a diplomatic mission. During the encounter he learned a thing or two about 22 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

Borgia’s modus operandi. At one point, Borgia ran into problems with some noblemen of a nearby town run by the Orsini family, who weren’t too happy about Borgia’s plans for territorial expansion. The Orsinis were invited by Borgia to the city of Senigallia, allegedly to conduct peace talks and reach a reciprocally suitable agreement. As soon as they set foot inside the walls they were captured and executed. Diplomacy Italian style, circa 1500 CE. Another illuminating episode took place in the Borgia-occupied city of Cesena, a territory that needed to be 'pacified’. I’ll let Machiavelli tell the story: Cesare Borgia “appointed Remirro de Orco, a cruel, no-nonsense man, and gave him complete control. In a short while de Orco pacified and united the area… As soon as he found a pretext, he had de Orco beheaded and his corpse put on display one morning in the piazza in Cesena with a wooden block and a bloody knife beside. The ferocity of the spectacle left people both gratified and shocked” (The Prince). So Borgia first had one of his henchmen do his dirty work, knowing that this would anger the people; but since a prince needs popular support, he then found an excuse to execute the henchman, thus giving the people what they wanted and deflecting their ire. No wonder Bertrand Russell called The Prince “a handbook for gangsters.” As Tim Parks aptly puts it in his Introduction to the Penguin translation, “Machiavelli’s little book was a constant threat. It reminded people that power is always up for grabs, always a question of what can be taken by force or treachery, and always, despite all protests to the contrary, the prime concern of any ruler.”

MACHIAVELLI IMAGE © MILES WALKER 2022 PLEASE VISIT MILESWALKER.COM

Machiavelli was the first modern writer to systematically think in terms of what is called realpolitik, or, ‘political realism’. Since then, political realism has seen a number of developments, and has gathered an impressive array of supporters. Arguably the most influential early philosopher in this vein was Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil (1651) articulated the need for a strong ruler in order to avoid the violent ‘state of nature’ to which, according to Hobbes, we would otherwise inevitably revert. This state he famously characterized as ‘a war of all against all’:

At one point Glaucon tells Socrates that Athens will be able to raise its revenues by waging war. To this Socrates responds:

“In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Next Socrates asks whether Glaucon has a good estimate of how long the grain reserves will last, as those are crucial to feed the city. Glaucon’s response is that that task is too overwhelming, and he didn’t feel like carrying it out. Socrates at this point chides Glaucon, reminding him that if one wishes to take charge of a household, one must bother with exactly the sort of details that Glaucon has so far neglected when it comes to affairs of state. Glaucon replies:

Well, who wouldn’t give up a few liberties here and there in order to avoid that? Among the practitioners of Machiavellianism, as one might fairly label the approach, is a who’s who of early-modern and contemporary statesmen; from the French Cardinal Richelieu (of Three Musketeers fame), to the Prussian monarch Frederick the Great; from the Italian Camillo Benso of Cavour, to another Prussian, Otto von Bismarck; all the way down to Mao Zedong, Charles de Gaulle, and Henry Kissinger.

"‘Well, I could do something for uncle’s household if only he would listen to me.’ ‘What? You can’t persuade your uncle, and yet you suppose you will be able to persuade all the Athenians, including your uncle, to listen to you? Pray take care, Glaucon, that your daring ambition doesn’t lead to a fall! Don’t you see how risky it is to say or do what you don’t understand?’” (3.6.15–16)

"‘In order to advise her whom to fight, it is necessary to know the strength of the city [of Athens] and of the enemy, so that, if the city be stronger, one may recommend her to go to war, but if weaker than the enemy, may persuade her to beware.’ ‘You are right.’ ‘First, then, tell us the naval and military strength of our city, and then that of her enemies.’ ‘No, of course I can’t tell you out of my head.” (3.6.8.)

A Socratic Way Yet there is another way of looking at the relationship between ethics and politics, without having to give in to the hypocrisy of Renaissance popes and modern politicians. It was put forth by Socrates in the fifth century BCE, and hinges on the wannabe statesman’s character. Socrates was known as the annoying ‘gadfly’ of ancient Athens, always intent to show people that they really didn’t know what they were talking about when it came to crucial concepts such justice (as shown in Plato’s Republic) or piety (as in his Euthyphro). But another major aspect of Socrates’ activities emerges from less appreciated sources. For instance, Xenophon’s Memorabilia (c.370 BCE) gives two episodes in which Socrates makes it his business to advise about a political career – against or in favor of, depending on who he’s talking to. On one occasion, Socrates meets up with a very young Glaucon, Plato’s elder brother. Glaucon is bent on a political career, and he thinks he knows what that entails. Socrates appears duly impressed, but as usual he begins questioning his interlocutor: “Well, Glaucon, as you want to win honor, is it not obvious that you must benefit your city?’ ‘Most certainly.’ ‘Pray don’t be reticent, then; but tell us how you propose to begin your services to the state.’… Glaucon remained dumb, apparently considering for the first time how to begin.” (Memorabilia, 3.6.3–4.)

Cesare Borgia seizing power

December 2022/January 2023 Now 23

That apparently did the trick, and Glaucon postponed his dream of becoming a statesman. In fact, he never became one. Instead, he fought valiantly at the battle of Megara, at the height of the Peloponnesian War with Sparta, in 424 BCE, the year after this conversation took place. He later became a competent musician, as Socrates attests in the Republic. Contrast this episode with one that took place years later involving Charmides, Glaucon’s son: “Seeing that Glaucon… was a respectable man and far more capable than the politicians of the day, [who] nevertheless shrank from speaking in the assembly and taking a part in politics, [Socrates] said: ‘Tell me, Charmides, what would you think of a man who was capable of gaining a victory in the great games and consequently of winning honor for himself and adding to his country’s fame in the Greek world, and yet refused to compete?’ ‘I should think him a poltroon and a coward, of course.’” (3.7.1)

© VAN SCOTT 2022 PLEASE VISIT GAGRECAP.COM/MOREINFO.HTML

Soon Charmides realizes to his chagrin that Socrates is talking about him in relation to politics, and is setting up the usual Socratic trap: “Don’t refuse to face this duty then: strive more earnestly to pay heed to yourself; and don’t neglect public affairs, if you have the power to improve them” (3.7.9). In this particular case, however, things did not go well. Charmides did enter into politics, but had the misfortune to serve Athens under the Spartan-appointed Thirty Tyrants after Sparta’s defeat of Athens in the war. Charmides died in the battle of Munichia in 403 BCE. This underscores a point appreciated many centuries later by Machiavelli: the statesman needs skill, but also luck. Cesare Borgia was very skilled, at least by Machiavelli’s standards, but in the end he ran out of luck. His strongest supporter, his father, Pope Alexander VI, died before the two of them could make enough progress in the pursuit of their projects. Socrates, however, would have insisted on a third ingredient besides skill and luck: virtue. This insistence becomes very apparent in the course of the First Alcibiades (which is generally ascribed to Plato, despite some doubts about its authorship). Alcibiades was a friend and student of Socrates, and very much wanted to be his lover – at least according to the speech he gives in Plato’s Symposium. At the time of the dialogue in the First Alcibiades, he was twenty years old, handsome, rich, charismatic, and full of self-confidence. Alcibiades wanted to make a difference in

the world, so he went to Socrates for advice on how best to follow the path of virtue. But in the course of the conversation it becomes increasingly clear that Alcibiades is more interested in glory and self-aggrandizement. At one point Socrates diagnoses his problem in blunt terms: “Then alas, Alcibiades, what a condition you suffer from! I hesitate to name it, but, since we two are alone, it must be said. You are wedded to stupidity, best of men, of the most extreme sort, as the argument accuses you and you accuse yourself. So this is why you are leaping into the affairs of the city before you have been educated.” (Alcibiades I.26). Naturally, Alcibiades does not listen to his mentor and follows his instincts instead. This results in one of the most astounding series of political disasters in all antiquity, including a major role in the Athenian defeat in the Peloponnesian War, and ending with Alcibiades’ death at the hand of Persian agents acting on behalf of Sparta. I tell the whole sordid tale as part of the bigger picture concerning ethics and politics in my new book, How To Be Good: What Socrates Can Teach Us About the Art of Living Well (Basic Books, 2022). Cicero’s Third Way While Machiavelli argued that skill and luck, not virtue, make for a good leader, Socrates bet everything on virtue. The Roman advocate, statesman, and philosopher, Marcus Tullius Cicero would say they both only got part of the picture: a good leader needs not only a good character, but also needs to be able to pragmatically navigate complex situations through trade-offs and compromises. That is why Cicero was critical of his friend Cato the Younger, a stern and uncompromisingly virtuous Stoic who eventually did more damage than good to the Roman Republic: “As for our friend Cato, you do not love him more than I do: but after all, with the very best intentions and the most absolute honesty, he sometimes does harm to the Republic. He speaks and votes as though he were in the Republic of Plato, not in the scum of Romulus” (Letters to Atticus, 2.1.8). The fact is that we all live in ‘the scum of Romulus’ (Romulus was the legendary founder of Rome). Good leaders realize that their followers are flawed, and act accordingly – without going to the extremes of a Cesare Borgia. Cicero knew what he was talking about, since he struggled his whole life to save the Roman Republic. He shifted his political allegiances and his short-term objectives in order to always keep his eyes on the ultimate prize. And he did this while trying to maintain his integrity of character and his philosophical commitments. In the end he failed to save the Republic, possibly because the Republic was no longer a sustainable model and had to give way to Empire as a matter of historical necessity; or perhaps because too many others around him behaved in a Machiavellian fashion, putting their own thirst for power and glory ahead of the common good. They could get away with such behavior because the Roman people had given up demanding that their leaders at least try to behave as virtuously as they talked. Let us not make the same mistake. © MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI 2022

Massimo Pigliucci is the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. His books include How to Be a Stoic (Basic Books) and The Quest for Character (Basic Books). More by him at massimopigliucci.org. 24 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 25

© GUTO DIAS 2022. PLEASE VISIT FACEBOOK.COM/PG/GUTODIASSTUDIO OR INSTAGRAM.COM/GUTO_DIAS_CARTOONS

French Philosophy Now Manon Royet tells us what’s happening in French philosophy, and why you don’t know about it. rom Descartes and Voltaire, to Sartre and Foucault, French thought has long occupied a privileged seat in the world’s agora. René Descartes (1596-1650), for instance, is often referred to as ‘the Father of Modern Philosophy’ – which admittedly denotes a Eurocentric field of view that looks at history with blinkers. But twentieth century French thinkers such as Foucault, de Beauvoir, Barthes, and Derrida are also among the most influential voices of modern philosophy. In the West they are unavoidable cultural references for a vast array of academic disciplines, ranging from philosophy to history and sociolinguistics. Foucault viewed his project as a ‘Critical History of Thought’, and Derrida’s most famous work, Of Grammatology (1967) criticised some of the principles put forward by the founder of linguistics, Ferdinand De Saussure. A few years ago, while writing on sociology, I was surprised to receive criticism for having omitted to include works by Michel Foucault in my bibliography. I was puzzled. My research did not engage with Foucault’s precepts: why, then, should he

F

Painting Reality by Dror Rosenski 2022 26 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

be referenced in it? It did not matter, the criticising academic said: the rule of thumb is that whenever one deals with any of the numerous themes that passed under Foucault’s scrutiny, he should be cited. This would cover topics as different as power, discourse, conformity, institutions… the list is long. But if this speaks to the statutory position of twentieth century French thought, it also highlights one thing: we don’t hear of new French thinkers anymore. Think about it. Could you name a French philosopher who is still writing? The Growing Silence Of French Voices A long time has passed since Simone de Beauvoir revolutionised feminism with her discussion of human history through the lens of gender in her groundbreaking 1949 book The Second Sex. It is telling that among the new generation of philosophers, Judith Butler, a contemporary American philosopher of gender, does not have a French counterpart. Julia Kristeva is arguably the only contemporary French philosopher whose writings on women’s oppression enjoy a wide international reputation, and she was born and raised in Bulgaria. She also wrote her most acclaimed works in the seventies and eighties. Comparison only makes the absence of resounding French voices more imposing. It urges us to ask: where have all the great French thinkers gone? Perhaps the lights of French thought just don’t radiate very far anymore. This observation is not new. Articles on this topic have flourished over the past fifteen years. In December 2007, Time magazine ran the headline: ‘The Death of French Culture’. Juxtaposed to this fatalistic title was this caption: ‘Quick, name a living artist or writer from France who has global significance. Right. But help is on the way.’ In the article, Donald Morrison, a former Editor of Time Magazine's European and Asian editions and lecturer at the prestigious Parisian institute of higher education, Sciences Po, pronounced French cultural life quasi-expired. Similarly, Sudhir Hazareesingh, a Professor of Politics at Oxford, and author of the book How the French Think (2015), has denounced what he views as the decadence of French thought on the international scene in multiple opinion pieces. One of them, entitled ‘French thought once dazzled the world – what went wrong?’ is a carefully constructed criticism of ‘the French style of thinking’, which have been extensively debunked, outside and inside the country. The Origins Of Modern French Thinking What is ‘the French style of thinking’ anyway? Examining the development of French philosophy in the eighteenth century helps us grasp its typology, how it manifests today, and why it has receded from the international shores of culture. Although France produced key thinkers earlier, it was

Paris At Night, Benh Lieu Song 2010 Creative Commons

through the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century that French philosophy started spreading en masse, influencing the development of ideas across Europe and America and beyond. During this time, the likes of Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, and D’Alembert were part of an intellectual movement that sought to provide the foundation for a new reason-based political system to replace the monarchy. They wanted this new social and political world to be based on ideals of liberty and equality for all individuals. This movement was itself heir to the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This revolution had showed that reasoned observation-based theories were more successful in explaining natural phenomena than folklore or ecclesiastical storytelling. The Enlightenment envisioned a new society guided by the principles of rationality, universality, and individuality. Its metaphor of light as truth connoted the new emphasis on bringing society out of the darkness of dogma, and into progress grounded in methodical reasoning and universal human values. The Enlightenment’s definition of critical reasoning and progress was not limited to French philosophers alone. It encompassed intellectuals throughout Europe. After all, it wasn’t Voltaire or Diderot, but the Königsberg-born philosopher Immanuel Kant who articulated the most widely-accepted motto of the movement: Sapere Aude, or ‘Dare to know through the use of reason.’ John Locke was English, but he too was committed to using scientific methods to fight against the shadows of arbitrariness, and reason to fight against political tyranny. So, what’s so special about the French? More than their general dedication to critical thinking, it is their absolute emphasis on rationality that set the French

philosophers apart. British philosophers such as Locke and Hume proposed that knowledge was acquired by practical experience mediated by the senses, a position known as empiricism. By contrast their French peers deemed that truth was accessed through deductive reasoning, and that the senses cannot be trusted. Since they’re unreliable, the theory goes, one must automatically and methodologically question the information they pass onto us. The eighteenth century philosophes’ reliance on this ‘methodological doubt’ and the use of rationality makes sense in the light of Descartes’ legacy, since he had maintained that the sole proof even for existence itself was to be found in one’s thoughts, an idea famously summarised in his statement ‘I think therefore I am’. The French philosophical tradition is deeply anchored in Descartes’ radical skepticism. It is contrarian at its core. You heard that right, there is philosophical backing to the cliché that the French are always on strike. Revolutionary impetus and Enlightenment thought were deeply connected, with philosophers providing the arguments for equality, anticlericalism, and generally creating the intellectual context for the Revolution. In other words, French philosophy has long also been deeply enmeshed with politics. French thinkers were so involved in political life that France’s 1789 constitutional document the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen followed their guidance. For instance, the separation of powers was inscribed in it following Montesquieu’s precepts. This charter of human rights, written in the midst of the French Revolution, marks a decisive turn in Western history. It inscribed important concepts about civil society into modern political practice, and philosophers were an integral part of this. December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 27

To sum up: after Descartes, French thinking developed two distinctive features. The first has to do with its intellectual predilections: it was especially preoccupied with rationality, universality, and it highly valued radical skepticism (as it still does). The second is that it is a philosophy undeniably political. In the French tradition, thinkers are lighthouses helping the population navigate the perilous waters of social and political change. French Philosophy Hasn’t Changed, That’s The Problem So the French love abstract, universal ideals, and incredulity. What does that have to do with its alleged, much-commented, downgrade? The answer is ‘a lot’. French philosophy has not changed that much at all; but the world has, and that’s the issue. The Gallic tradition of thought starts from ideas rather than experience, which has led it to tend to conceive of humanity in universalistic terms. It holds that everyone can have access to universal truths through abstract deduction. This implies that everyone can reason themselves into agreeing with each other on humanistic truths. This assumption amounts to saying that conflict due to individuals holding different and incompatible conceptions of the world and values, is avoidable. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen is just one example of French unifying doctrine. France’s so-called ‘civilising mission’ is another. It refers to the vocation of the French, self-proclaimed at the height of the era of colonialism, to bring civilisation to the rest of the world – justified by the French belief in rationality and its universal application. However, from this, the problem with the modern world becomes evident: France’s philosophical allegiance to universalism effectively denies pluralism of worldviews. It simultaneously imbues the fruits of one’s reasoning with a humanitarian character, and the status of undisputable, all-encompassing truth. It comes as no surprise that the idea that one can reach universal principles by resorting to rationality has received extensive criticism from a litany of disciplines. The Sixties’ Poststructuralist philosophical and literary movement, for example, argued strongly that power relations and subjectivity underscored pretty much everything we previously thought of as adamantly objective – including philosophy. And Postmodern thinkers such as Michel Foucault contended that a pretence to universality and neutrality in effect paves the way for more intractable forms of oppression. This movement was lucidly defined by Judith Butler in her essay ‘Contingent Foundations’ (1994). Postmodern thought, she says, is about calling to account how examples and paradigms ‘‘serve to subordinate and erase that which they seek to explain.’’ The argument is that the rationality and universalism so loved by French philosophers have a paradoxical capacity to to exclude different belief systems, and provide the philosophical tools to hide the fact that it’s happening. Such alienation is produced on the foundation that they fail to align with truths found through reasoning, and thus imbued with a false universal applicability French thought shields out everything that falls outside the scope of its supposedly ‘universal because rational’ principles. The development of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century further disproved the conception of the individual as being entirely rational. It revealed the preponderant role of the sub28 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

conscious, undermining the claims both that rationality is the defining feature of humanity, and that we are capable of pure, unbiased abstraction. It is now well-known that humans are contaminated by a long list of cognitive biases (they’re well illustrated in Daniel Kahneman’s 2021 bestseller, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement). The principle of ‘unmodified reasoning leading to universal truth’ becomes merely a confidence-boosting but highly unrealistic ideal. Yet despite the many detractors of philosophical universalism, contemporary thinkers in France just can’t seem to let it go. Alain Badiou (b. 1937) is a former Chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure. He is also the most widely translated living French philosopher. His work deals extensively with political uprisings and liberation of the masses through appeals to universalism, and he conceives of the moments of popular revolt such as 2011’s Arab Spring as movements of emancipatory universalism, motivated by universal principles of justice and freedom. Badiou has been powerfully criticised by theorists such as Elizabeth Paquette, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina. She dedicated an entire book, Universal Emancipation – Race Beyond Badiou (2020) to deconstructing Badiou’s thesis. In it she showed that his commitment to universal principles effectively produces a political theory incapable of dealing with the specificities of struggle. For instance, since his philosophy of ‘indifference’ is blind to race, it cannot account for the struggles of racialised individuals. The result is a justice-inspired philosophical system that is paradoxically ineffective at considering justice and freedom while tackling emancipatory politics. This illustrates a typically French problem. The 1978 law that banned the collection of data based on race or ethnicity is another striking example of French universalism. France likes to see itself as a colour-blind, religion-blind, and pretty-mucheverything-else-blind nation. For this reason, it is not permitted to retrieve statistics on minorities. The contradictions at the heart of this approach, which makes minorities unquantifiable and therefore effectively invisible, have been widely discussed in the international press. A 2020 article published in The Atlantic condemned the hypocrisy of the French universalistic dogma by warning, ‘France Is Officially Color-Blind. Reality Isn’t’. Yet, the French intellectual world persists in its damaging love affair with being out of touch. Blinded by their dedication to abstract, airy ideas, contemporary French philosophers still don’t want to confront their cherished precepts with the lessons of real-life experience. Where has the legacy of Foucault and Postmodern thought led? The new strain of philosophers is recycling old themes. It has failed to integrate the lessons of the Poststructuralist critique of universalism. And the rest of the world just doesn’t care to watch anymore. To renew itself, French thought is confronted with an impossibility. It suffers from what Sudhir Hazareesingh eloquently described as the French ‘tendency to look inwards in space, and backwards in time’. To summarise, French philosophy hasn’t changed, so it has become outdated. It hasn’t integrated new thinking and knowledge, making it ill-adapted to tackle modern problems.

The Political Potential of French Philosophy Paradoxically, the same thing that makes French thought obsolete – its inertia – also contains the potential for its rekindling. French philosophy is rationalist and universalistic, and political in its concerns. While the universalism explains why French philosophy has grown increasingly inaudible outside of France, its political nature may hold the key to reinvigorating it on the international scene. Let me explain. France practically invented the concept of the intellectual as an important public figure. Since the Enlightenment, French philosophers have helped draft watershed political texts; and long after the salon culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gathered intellectuals to debate in fashionable Parisian apartments, the figure of the French intellectual as a political commentator and moral guide remains alive and well. It is common in France for philosophers to be invited onto TV shows alongside politicians to discuss social issues. In the rampup to a presidential election, for example, politicians constantly quote French philosophers in their debates, using them as vouchers for their own legitimacy. For example, the far-right candidate Éric Zemmour’s favourite citation in the lead-up to the 2022 election seemed to be from Rousseau: “Distrust those cosmopolitans who go to great length in their books to discover duties they do not deign to fulfil around them. A philosopher loves the Tartars to be spared having to love his neighbours.” Zemmour often resorts to this bon mot as a sort of authoritative argument, supposed to both prove the hypocrisy of the other candidates’ focus on human rights and to justify his stance on nationalism and domestic preference. (By doing this, Zemmour ironically continues the French tradition of casting the philosopher as a political guide, while trying to rebuke the figure of the good-willed intellectual as an elitist traitor to the nation.) What French philosophers have to say remains eminently political in substance. I mentioned Badiou’s stress on the emancipation of the masses and on political struggle. Jacques Rancière (b.1940) is another major contemporary French thinker who writes profusely about political philosophy. He deals extensively with what he calls ‘the part of those who have no part’. By this, Rancière means the enactment of equality by those who are in subjugated positions by vocalising their right to equal treatment. Rancière’s writings have all to do with the politics of recognition. In a similar vein to Badiou, he stresses the importance of public action, and fights political apathy. Frédéric Gros, lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Paris XII, dedicated his latest book, Disobey (published in English translation in May 2021), to the dangers of political apathy and blind obedience to leaders. It urges the reader to use critical thinking in the face of a corrupt politics that gives free reign to the market: “At a time when ‘experts’ pride themselves on their decisions being the result of anonymous and icy statistics, disobeying is a declaration of humanity,” he writes. While France’s enduring love of skepticism results in an emphasis on political engagement and resistance, its positive sentiment towards intellectuals grants philosophers the platform to denounce delusional optimism. Our world is faced with a multitude of pressing problems. On top of the list is the climate crisis that no COP meeting

seems to adequately address, and the deepening of inequalities worldwide, between a few multimillionaires and billionaires and the rest of us. Popular indignation has expressed itself through the bolstering of nationalist and populist leaders on the one hand or a disinterest in politics on the other. But such inward-looking attitudes heighten social divisions. Hate crimes sharply increased in the United States during Donald Trump’s presidency. And general political indifference means fewer opportunities to generate solutions to the world’s current crises. As philosophers in France are interested in the political game and at the same time part of it, they are bearers of potential. They can hinder what the Belgian philosopher Chantal Mouffe calls the ‘evasion of the political’ – the widespread disengagement with political life. The modern philosophes’ line of thought as well as their public stature encourages people to commit to fighting politically for their visions of societal visions. They show the importance of engaging with political institutions, questioning them, and expressing dissent publicly. So, French philosophy is endemically political. And that’s a good thing. This moment in history requires philosophers everywhere to be politically active. The neoliberal model has encouraged us all to equate politics with economics. To get out of the swamp of political exclusion, apathy, and extremism, we have no choice but to re-enter the political space, and to reflect on the meaning of coexistence. The neoliberal crisis is a crisis of the political. This makes the French tradition an interesting model for reflecting on the current issues we face from a political and philosophical standpoint, instead of an economic one. Conclusion At the core of contemporary French philosophy lies an important contradiction. It is well suited to help us navigate the current political moment, but it is obsolete when it comes to other modern topics such as diversity because it relies on ideas of universalism, and a deep-rooted conviction that society should treat all individuals identically regardless of their social and religious traditions and values. Abroad, the reach of French thought is withering. It used to hold a prominent place in the realm of ideas worldwide. But, unlike French thought, the world has evolved. It has become weary of the one-size-fits-all solutions of philosophical universalism. French philosophy is not doomed. It contains within itself the remedies to its growing global irrelevance. It has the potential to inspire people to reflect on and engage with the crisis of neoliberal democracy. While providing a model where philosophers are central figures in society, the French philosophical tradition also highlights the importance of questioning politics. It seeks to defeat political disinterest, incentivising people to constantly reflect and improve. French philosophy can provide a template that opposes the depersonalised institutions of neoliberalism, if only it will incorporate pluralism and move away from the Enlightenment-inherited script of disempowering universalism. © MANON ROYET 2022

Manon Royet is a philosophy writer, researcher and translator based in London. The thesis of her postgraduate degree at UCL on political philosophy focused on the theories of Jürgen Habermas and Chantal Mouffe. She specialises in questions of identity, multiculturalism in Europe, and their political solutions. December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 29

© ROSE DE CASTELLANE 2022

The Paths Decisions Lead Us Down by Rose de Castellane 2022

On Regret David Charles argues that we should not regret our decisions, but should take responsibility for our decision-making processes. he decision tree of life is colossal. While physicists and metaphysicians explore the possibility that the multiverse grows larger at every decision, it is the ethicist’s lot to consider the paths chosen. That is to say, ethics is generally concerned with the build-up to a decision point. But what happens afterwards? And how do our choices influence our future decision-making? After a decision has been made and acted upon, the person who made it may be satisfied with the intention, the process, and the outcome. Alternatively, they could be dissatisfied or they could be indifferent.

T

30 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

I wonder if being happy after a decision is the least interesting of these states? This attitude seems almost transactional: Was the objective achieved? Tick. Smile. Move on. On the other hand, being merely nonchalant about the outcome could reflect any of several mentalities, from perceiving the decision as insignificant, to a healthy detachment, to an unhealthy detachment. But perhaps the most nuanced and philosophically rewarding state to examine is dissatisfaction. The feelings stimulated by recognising a decision to have been bad can be intense, difficult to shake off, and complexly woven. There are subtly yet distinctly different possibilities within this set: dissatisfaction itself, disappoint-

ment, regret, grief, and potentially, remorse. The way we process any of these emotions will be due to our personal history, and can change our future behaviour. However, as has been intuited by some philosophers and evidenced by modern neuroscientific research (see for example ‘Neural Foundations for Regret-Based Decision Making’, Revue d’Economie Politique, 118:1, p.63, Ambrosino et al, 2008), the most powerful of the post-decision emotions appears to be regret. Some of the bolder thinking on regret, by Spinoza and Nietzsche, followed the idea of amor fati or love of fate. The negative aspect of regret is unnecessary and even irrational, they said, because we ought to embrace the undulations of life. Any such attempt to make rational thinking override naturally-occurring reactions seems a little too idealistic in our modern world of nuanced psychology. However, Spinoza’s argument is focussed less on a desire to feel good about destiny and more on a desire to omit grief from the domain of regret. And as Rüdiger Bittner explores in a 1992 paper, ‘Is it Reasonable to Regret Things One Did?’ (The Journal of Philosophy 89:5), the resolution to stop grieving over past actions allows for the examination of one’s actions with greater clarity. Bittner himself promotes the view that grief is a distraction from the real purpose of regret. If we can put grief about decisions aside and focus instead upon remembrance and understanding, then we can consider our actions and their outcomes in relation to our responsibilities rather than in relation to our responses, which is far more constructive. Bittner observes, “we are the agents we are not just by having done what we did. We are the agents we are by accepting these doings as ours.” I agree, but I think that the concept of agency demands a much stronger sense of ownership than mere acceptance that we have chosen or done certain things. When we regret, it is because we are somewhat aware of the hypothetical outcome that didn’t occur because of our action or inaction. That is, we grieve for the lost opportunity, and we also grieve for our selves that we must endure the new path. Here I’m not talking about the traditional idea that what one regrets most is the things one didn’t do – the exciting paths in life that one didn’t take. That’s about contemplating new actions, new branches in the decision tree. By contrast, I’m talking about taking a retrospective view of our actual actions, and saying that we should not burden ourselves pointlessly by imagining modifying those actions. But I’m also not talking about not regretting at all, or about resolving to ’never do that again’. Instead, I want to suggest that good regret is not about the action itself, but about regretting the lack of prior consideration that might have changed our action and prevented its harmful consequences. This can best be seen from a process perspective: If you did something with planning and forethought, then you might regret not planning better, but you will not regret the planning you actually did. Alternatively if you did something spontaneously, then rather than regretting the action itself, it might be better to regret not having taken a moment to think before acting. In this sort of sense, I propose that we shouldn’t regret actions in general, because actions are deliberate, based on reasons, knowledge and circumstances at the time of the action. We can, however, regret not taking particular cognitive actions, such as thinking a bit harder, planning better, and so on, which might have prevented a subsequent bad choice of action. This

is about accepting not only the deed, but also the responsibility for the consequences that fall on one as a result of one’s status as an aware agent. While the grief must remain, accepting responsibility for the decision-making process forces an examination of that process. One needs to learn to accept that one could have taken more responsibility and planned better, or self-nurtured better. More than just despairing over the failings of an action and its consequences, then, healthy regret is about owning one’s agency. That means firstly in the sense of acknowledging that the action came from you as an agent, and that you chose to act in that manner. Secondly, in the sense that you’re choosing to reflect upon what could be improved about your choosing; upon how you could have chosen differently, or been a better agent. Here my argument progresses from Bittner’s by expanding and enhancing the ownership of responsibility which agency offers. It’s not just about accepting the act: it’s about reflecting on the potential for improvement. We can look at the counterpoint for extra clarity. If you don’t accept the action you’ve taken – if you regret the action rather than the process of choice – then you undermine your own agency, without this yet helping you improve in your decisionmaking in any way. This is something probably most of us have done at many points in our lives. However, even if you accept the action and don’t regret it, because you don’t take responsibility for the consequences of a decision in order to learn from them, you could be accused of an even greater disingenuity than if you had simply rejected the results of the choice. So is there an obligation to take responsibility for our choices? And should we employ regret and grief in order to become better moral agents? I can offer evidence from two neuroscientific studies that demonstrate a benefit to the self (if not explicitly to others) from following this type of regret-processing approach. According to Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde in ‘Regret and the Rationality of Choices’ (Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 365:1538, 2010), undertaking this process of reflection about the deed, the outcomes, and one’s agency, can actually serve to reduce the sense of regret felt because “regret is sensitive to the way the disappointment occurs.” Theoretically, the more responsibility one has in a decision, the more regret that can potentially be felt if the outcome is perceived as negative. However, that regret is somewhat tempered by the sense of being an autonomous agent. So it seems that developing a stronger sense of control and thoughtful responsibility can serve to reduce the unpleasant experience of regret. Or, in the paper I cited earlier, Ambrosino et al found that reflecting on the outcome of a decision, as well as on the feeling of responsibility concerning that choice, “promotes behavioural flexibility and exploratory strategies in dynamic environments.” These two studies support the idea of embracing agency and taking time to reflect upon its workings in your choosing. This can be beneficial, among other things, in terms of providing a feedback mechanism for our personal ethics. More generally, if we invest in ourselves in this manner – making the regrettable consequences of a decision inform our future choice-making – then we can learn to better navigate the decision tree of life. © DAVID CHARLES 2022

David Charles is a data analyst, writer, and former physicist. He’s currently writing a book on Existential Ethics. Twitter: @DataDaveUK December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 31

Poetry & Philosophy for the 21st Century Benjamin Lloyd gets Dewey-eyed over resonant rhymes. John Dewey by Darren McAndrew

“The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact [...] More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.”

For Dewey this is more than a mere question of whether the future of humankind looks to philosophy, science, theology, or poetry for the answers to life. In fact, Dewey is concerned that poetry will lose its genuineness, its sustaining force, if it is cut off from accountability. ‘Who keeps the keeper?’ asks Dewey, and his answer is Truth (see Poetry and Philosophy, the text of Dewey’s Smith College speech, pp.110-112).

ohn Dewey, the father of American Pragmatism, spearhead in the field of education and psychology, acclaimed author and prominent twentieth century scholar, also had a deep appreciation for the arts. More specifically, he had a love for poetry. He even wrote some poems of his own, which were eventually discovered among his papers and published in a volume many years after his death. Dewey (1859-1952) found himself alive during a time of incredible turmoil, industrialization, economic growth, and scientific advancement. With so many aspects of modern life changing from day to day, perhaps it’s not surprising if he sought solace in poetry. It seems that for Dewey writing verse may have been more than a cathartic creative outlet or an artsy hobby. In fact, Dewey thought that poetry could be the replacement that fills the spiritual void left in the West by the decline in religious faith and in the traditions of the past. This is the notion he put forward in a commencement address to the graduating class of Smith College in the spring of 1890. As the young scholars eagerly awaited the completion of the final formality of their college educations, Dewey opened his speech with a passage from The Study of Poetry by English literary critic and poet Matthew Arnold:

J

32 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

Observing a Changing World The superpower of the poet is the ability to observe the same world other individuals observe and to interpret it in a way that will resonate: “Poets cannot be freed from the conditions which attach to the intelligence of man everywhere” (Ibid, p.113). The ever-growing expanse of human knowledge concerns Dewey in the realm of poetry, in the sense that the rapid advancement of the application of science is requiring poetry to adapt to it. The American theoretical physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988) once said, “it is a poor poet who falls silent upon learning the Sun is a massive sphere of hydrogen fusing into helium.” I believe this quote directly relates to Dewey’s concerns. Indeed, poets cannot be freed from the conditions of human understanding. Rather, these conditions free the poet to behold the world with the genuineness for which Dewey calls. Yet as Feynman intimated, no scientific or philosophical revelation could diminish the truth expressed in, for example, Walt Whitman’s Give Me the Splendid, Silent Sun (1865): Keep your splendid, silent sun; Keep your woods, O Nature, and the quiet places by the Woods; Keep your fields of clover and timothy, and your corn-fields and orchards; Keep the blossoming buckwheat fields, where the Ninth-month bees hum; Give me faces and streets! Give me these phantoms incessant and endless along the trottoirs!

Give me interminable eyes! Give me women! Give me comrades and lovers by the thousand!

Whitman notes the beauty of nature and the ‘quiet places by the Woods’; but there is an unrest within him, and in the final line of the poem we bear witness to the evolution of culture. The poem’s rejection of the quiet places by the woods, the fields of clover and wheat, highlights humanity’s shift from finding consolation in natural beauty to finding it in the presence of others. Walt Whitman

Gold & Frost So truth and nothing but truth is to be discovered in the profound lines of Walt Whitman. Shall we find the same upon exploring the verses of Robert Frost? Frost’s Nothing Gold Can Stay (1923) briefly reflects on the impermanence of life; and again we get an especially effective comparison with nature and its beauty: Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.

This concise verse on the uncertainty of life reminds me immediately of the passage from Matthew Arnold: no creed not shaken, no tradition undissolving. Just as Dewey suggested of Arnold’s poetry, Frost’s poem also reminds us of the great philosophy of Stoicism and the writings of Marcus Aurelius. But just as Dewey did not mean to suggest Arnold had translated Aurelius’s Meditations into poetic verse, neither do I claim that Frost has transcribed Stoic philosophy into eight lines: rather that similarities arise from a similar truth observed by these writers. Inspiration from the Stoics is evident in more of Frost’s verse, such as Precaution (1936), a collection of short poems on the span of life:

This transformation is clearly observed after the events that took place in or around the early twentieth century – global war, famine, and ecological destruction unprecedented in the history of our world, much less of our species. When humanity is being hit by the existential threats that plagued that century (three influenza pandemics, two world wars, multiple famines, deadly oppression) it’s hard to be consoled by a simple walk through the woods. In our own day of advanced information technology, we also will likely turn to ‘comrades and lovers’ for emotional solace in our dark hours, rather than to nature. But if poetry is to be our stay, as Dewey suggests, upon what authority does Whitman isolate man from nature? What truth does he find in women, faces, and streets? And can we still look to these verses a hundred and fifty years later to console ourselves? Of course, Whitman’s words ring as true today as the day they were written. After extended periods of quarantine and social isolation, we cannot so easily look to the natural world for support. Now, more than ever, we need human connection and social experiences. The genuine truth that Whitman exposes is verified by the human condition we’re experiencing today, and it doesn’t seem to be losing any momentum. Even in this era of instant, easy international communications, we still find ourselves craving face-to-face contact.

Will the blight kill the chestnut? The farmers rather guess not. It keeps smouldering at the roots And sending up new shoots, Till another parasite Shall come to kill the blight.

Notice Frost’s continued use of metaphor and imagery revolving around nature. Yet while nature is a heavy theme that Frost relies upon for his content, he, like Whitman, doesn’t seem to find much solace in it. Again we must ask ourselves what truth is to be found in these lines. The claims that Frost makes in these verses are what we generally observe of life. Everything in order eventually turns to disorder – this is the law of entropy. The chestnut, which is temporarily spared from the blight, will eventually wither and rot. Is Frost obsessed with death? Or can we find consolation in our mortality? As was the case with Whitman, we don’t have to do mental gymnastics to sympathize with the truths that Robert Frost claims in his poetry. These truths embody the experience of human life, undeterred by advancements in scientific knowledge or by religious revelation. I find it easy to believe that Feynman had the verse of Robert Frost on his mind when he spoke of the skills of the poet. Poetry For The Modern Mind So now we find ourselves at the ‘unnatural wound’ that Dewey speaks of – the unbridged gap between science and poetry, December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 33

AUTUMN_IN_THE_WOODS © PROPOLI87 2021 CREATIVE COMMONS

The purpose of poetry

which is also the disconnect between man and nature. In the world that Arnold envisioned, man has broken free from the celestial chains of religion in search of a new source of consolation and comfort that he is unable to find in the realms of science and philosophy. Is this not reminiscent of the world we live in today? Experiments, tests, hypotheses, records, and revisions – these are the tools of the scientist. Whereas scientists concern themselves with knowledge, the philosopher focuses on wisdom. Logic, questioning, and discussion are the tools of the trade of philosophy. But the tool of the poet is observed emotion and lived experience as he focuses on truth. For sure, the poet is not free from the verifications of science, nor the inquiry of the philosopher. Indeed, if the poet’s verse does not remain consistent with these forces, there will be no truth to be found in them. But in neither Whitman’s nor Frost’s verses do we find scientific inaccuracies or philosophical fallacies. Nevertheless, we do indeed find the stay and consolation that Arnold predicted we would find in poetry, and that Dewey said we so desperately need. If in poetry we search for an anchor - a consolation for the cold facts that science gives us and the hard wisdom that philosophy interprets for us - surely it is there to be found in these verses of Whitman and Frost. If science gives us fact, and philosophy strives for wisdom, then poetry gives us existential truth. Again, the ideas communicated in poems find their authority in the verifiable truth of the experiences shared commonly by people. And although the truths handed to us by Frost, Whitman, and other poets are not freshly discovered, they are delivered in such a way that relates to our experience. Should these ideas be reinterpreted by possibly even more skilled poets, the truths conveyed by these lines would nevertheless not be diminished. 34 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

Poetry For The Universal Mind As I mentioned, for poetry to be accepted as truth, especially under the guidelines given by Dewey, the words must reflect the common experience of humanity. This common experience will be a set of cultural and environmental stimuli not only shared by a single society or community, but globally, and which also persist throughout time. Here ‘the common experience’ differs from cultural traditions and communal rituals, in that the latter die out and are only shared by the individuals of a certain group. And we note that in the age of social media, variations between distinct groups are as clear as the similarities between them. Despite the differences (or perhaps even because of them) the poet must elevate her point of view so that she can relate her experiences to individuals across cultures and times, lest her verse be only a partial rendering of the world. In other words, good poetry rings true to all perceptive individuals regardless of their background or cultural upbringing. This is precisely why we still study, read, and enjoy Shakespeare, Donne, Dante... The daily life of Dante Alighieri would be so different from that of you and I, and the knowledge available to him so limited in comparison, that it is hard to imagine he could write anything still worth studying eight centuries later. But studying it is exactly what we find ourselves doing. And the truths that Frost and Whitman write are the same truths that were available to and were accessed by William Shakespeare and John Donne. And finding a man struck by lightning after winning the lottery might be easier than finding one who has not heard a line from Hamlet (whether they’re aware of it or not). Stay With Poetry In closing, one may look back at Dewey’s speech and find that he is predicting that as scientific knowledge advances exponentially, the split between man and nature will continue to widen. He seems to suggest that although this rip will outgrow religions and traditions, we ought to turn to poetry to reconcile the divide. On one hand, I suggest we keep in mind David Hume’s notion that one cannot get an ought from an is: that one cannot look at the way the world is and determine from that observation the way it ought to be. The great poets that Dewey references may have observed this very division; but as we see from Whitman and Frost, this partition has encouraged man to form stronger bonds with his comrades and lovers, and to appreciate nature when he can. On the other hand, however, I agree that mankind indeed ought to look to poets to interpret the knowledge and wisdom brought to us from science and philosophy. The difference between those truths and the truths interpreted via poetry are but differences of language. Poetry is more accessible, more easily understood and related to by most people. Since this is the case, the poet is the architect tasked with bridging the gap between science/philosophy and humanity. Science is but a mere tool to understand how the world works; philosophy but a means of discourse to understand how we gain that knowledge; but poetry is a way to interpret our understandings to humankind. Indeed, in poetry we shall find an ever surer and surer stay. © BENJAMIN LLOYD 2022

Benjamin Lloyd is a philosophy student at Northern Kentucky University with a passion for literature.

China

Moral Education in Confucianism Plakshi Jain compares ‘reflection’ and ‘learning’ as means of becoming good. sis must be given to thinking and learning respectively. This is where a comparison of the views of his disciples Mengzi and Xunzi comes in.

“Blunt metal must await honing and grinding, only then does it become sharp. Since people’s nature is bad, they must await teachers and proper models, only then do they become correct.” – Xunzi (trans. Eric Hutton)

Growing With Mengzi, Grinding With Xunzi Mengzi’s use of the word ‘grow’ quoted at the start to connote the process of education, and of ‘nourishment’ to connote its importance, in contrast to Xunzi’s words ‘grinding’ and ‘correct’, pinpoint the key difference in Mengzi’s and Xunzi’s philosophies of ethical cultivation. Mengzi or Mencius, lived in the fourth century BCE and is known as the ‘Second Sage’ (i.e. second to Kongzi). He believed that human nature is predisposed to be good just as water is predisposed to flow downwards. This doesn’t mean humans can’t be bad, just as water can be dammed up on a hillside. Yet when humans do bad this can’t be blamed on their nature, but on their circumstances. Evil isn’t innate, but a perversion due to a bad environment, such as childhood trauma, or lacking basic needs. How can Mengzi say that our nature is generally good? He claims that just as all humans have roughly the same feet, or roughly the same tastes, their hearts too basically share the same potential for righteousness. He builds this claim from universal moral impulses, such as the momentary compassion everybody would feel on seeing a child fall into a well (except sociopaths,

his article attempts to compare the views of two significant Chinese philosophers, Mengzi and Xunzi, on the importance of moral education. Both were followers of Kongzi (551-479 BCE) better known in the West as Confucius. His ‘Way’ has been popularized as Confucianism for hundreds of years via the Analects, a text written by his disciples to put forth his teachings. The Way of Kongzi advocates many things for society, but for this article we will focus on the cultivation of ethics. Kongzi believed society can be improved only when people in authority are virtuous, and he developed educational techniques to inculcate kindness and wisdom as well as knowledge. Having said that, his statement, “If you learn without thinking about what you have learned, you will be lost. If you think without learning, however, you will fall into danger” has generated a lot of debate among Confucian scholars on how much empha-

T

CHINESE LANDSCAPE ACQUIRED BY HENRY WALTERS 1915 CREATIVE COMMONS

“If it receives its proper nourishment, there is nothing which will not grow. If it loses its proper nourishment, there is nothing which will not decay away.” – Mengzi (trans. James Legge)

December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 35

who are by definition mentally ill). He calls such sudden compassion ‘the sprouts of benevolence and righteousness’. These shoots have the potential to grow and develop if given the right guidance – that is, the proper ‘nourishment’ – or they will decay away, and the person will succumb to evil. Mengzi wants to cultivate wisdom, not knowledge of specific facts. The guidance he offers comes in form of moral education through reflection. Through reflection, one understands one’s own innate goodness, and extends it levelly in relevant directions. Reflection as moral self-cultivation strengthens our kind and righteous motivations when we respond to them with awareness and approval. Impediments to this growth include a lack of effort, or rejecting the value of virtues. Mengzi uses the illustration of a chess game where one player puts his whole mind into the game while the other is distracted by a swan, thinking of shooting it. Although they learn together, they differ in apparent skill, but not because of a difference in intelligence. Prince Zuko begins the show Avatar: The Last Air Bender (2005) banished by his father, and on an impossible quest to earn his honor back. To capture the Avatar and end his banishment, Zuko commits despicable acts. Then his Uncle Iroh acts as his mentor/guide, providing him the nourishment of love and wisdom he needs. Zuko’s gradual gaining in wisdom through reflection is shown throughout the movie, and in the end he decides to help the Avatar restore balance in the world. How Zuko learns to act out of kindness nicely illustrates Mengzi’s view of the importance of on internalizing ethical cultivation through reflection and thinking. On the other hand, Xunzi (third century BCE) believed that human nature is predisposed to be self-interested, and hence bad. If people follow their inborn dispositions and obey their natures, they will create chaos and disorder. He says that, if someone is hungry, they desire satiety, and that is our inborn nature. We come to give away food to others only by following artificial social conventions. Therefore, Xunzi says, “It is necessary to await the transforming influence of teachers, models, and guidance of ritual [artificial social conventions] and standards of righteousness [yi]: only then they [students] come yielding, turn to proper form and order, and end up becoming controlled”. Rituals created by sages provide the proper form in which to express oneself, in a controlled and restrained fashion for the smooth functioning of society. Xunzi also advocates repeated deliberate efforts to conform one’s actions with the commands of the Analects, in a slow and difficult process that opposes our natural impulses – a grinding, if you like. Mengzi and Xunzi clearly differ over the comparative importance of learning and thinking in ethical cultivation. Because he believes human nature to possess the sprouts of goodness that we simply need to cultivate, Mengzi emphasizes personal reflection. By contrast, because he believes our inborn disposition to be self-interested, even bad, and needing deliberate effort to correct it, Xunzi emphasizes learning from teachers. Considering The Differences Thinking as an internally-sourced process, and learning as an externally-sourced process, can be understood to exemplify the difference between wisdom (internal) and knowledge (exter36 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION 4.0

China

Painting of Mengzi by Kano Sansetsu, Japan, 17th century.

nal). Mengzi says, “Seek and you will find them. Neglect and you will lose them”, while Xunzi says, “The ugly person longs to be beautiful. The poor person longs to be rich. That which one does not have within oneself, one is sure to seek for outside. People desire to be good because they are bad.” So I would say that Mengzi and Xunzi agree on the need to seek wisdom and knowledge, but differ on where to seek it. The difference is largely due to the perceived nature of intrinsic desire. According to Mengzi, people must develop their natural desire for righteousness, whereas Xunzi’s self-interested people must learn to override their innate desires. So here their understandings of righteousness also diverge, since for Mengzi righteousness is an expression of our innate inclinations, but for Xunzi it is artificial, constructed to meet the needs of society. And both views can be contrasted with other schools of thought prominent in China at the time. Laozi’s Daoism aligns more with Mengzi’s internal reflection and rejects Xunzi’s external restraint as pretentious, while the perfector of Legalism, Han Feizi (a student of Xunzi’s) aligns more with Xunzi’s external learning, which is very teacher-oriented, and so authority based.

China Perhaps their conflict can be better understood by examining the metaphors used by the scholars. In the quote at the beginning, Mengzi compares the process of education with growth of a plant, and when provided the necessary ingredients, the plant will grow itself (this is very similar to the Daodejing’s creation without creating and the Iching’s concepts of Qian and Kun). Here the environment plays an important role, as illustrated by Mengzi in his story ‘Mengzi’s mother moved thrice’ – to live in the best environment for the intellectual growth of her son, which she deems to be near a school. Xunzi criticizes Mengzi’s view that emotions and desires require nurturing, rather than being promoted to us in a morally packaged way by teachers; but here Xunzi is misinterpreting what Mengzi is saying. In truth, they both advocate nurturing and guidance, that is, the proper environment – but in different forms. Both scholars use metaphors for moral education which are slow processes happening gradually over time – either vegetative growth or the sharpening of metal. Both imply permanent incremental progress so long as there is no toxicity in the environment, rather than a pattern of relapse or relearning. But the methods differ. Xunzi connects the process of moral education with grinding and honing metal, or the straightening of wood – things that cannot happen on their own accord, as the growth of a sprouting plant does. The grinding and honing of metal or straightening of wood is done against the wood’s nature, or against the metal’s hard resistance. Meanwhile, Mengzi’s cultivation of growth is to be in harmony with the natural inclinations of the sprouting plant. This is exactly where they differ in their model of moral education. Mengzi suggests a self-discovery model that uses a more ‘liberal’ approach: a child taught good values grows up in a healthy environment where those values mature in him as he does. (This approach can be seen in Mengzi’s discussion with King Xuan about the slaughter of an ox.) Xunzi meanwhile suggests a more ‘authoritarian’ model, where morality cannot be discovered by oneself and so one must be told what’s right and wrong. For Xunzi, morality must be imposed from the outside through education to correct and restrain us, and only through a deliberate effort to learn will we be able to become good. This view is implicit when Xunzi says, “I once spent the whole day pondering, but it wasn’t as good as a moment’s worth of learning.” But for him education is not such a pleasant matter as it is for Mengzi, since for Xunzi it involves suppressing your innate desires and learning to deviate from them every day. However, Mengzi and Xunzi both emphasize education as a gradual process that can’t be rushed. Xunzi says, “Learning must never stop. Blue dye is gotten from the indigo plant, and yet it is bluer than the plant. Ice comes from water, and yet it is colder than water. The gentleman learns broadly and examines himself thrice daily, and then his knowledge is clear and his conduct is without fault.” Meanwhile, Mengzi says, “One must work at it, but do not aim at it directly. Let the heart not forget, but do not help it grow.” He gives an example of a misguided farmer who pulls his wheat to make it grow faster. If I want to lose weight and I go to the park and run for hours one day, then eat pizza as a reward for working so hard, all my exercise won’t have helped me. It will only make my legs hurt the next day, making me unable to run, while the pizza makes me

At My Leisure Leisure is the mother of Philosophy, some say; If it’s true my future’s looking great. Oh Man, with all this free time on my hands most every day, Surely I’ll become another Plato. Doing nothing all day long is quite a lot of work – Praying that my genie in her bottle Comes out quick and with a fairly firm-but-gentle jerk Turns me to a modern Aristotle. Fully rested, heavy thoughts all worked out in my head, Then my metaphysics might endure. Us Humans need a teacher; when at last I leave my bed, I’ll be right up there with Epicurus. Note: My muse won’t visit if I cannot hear her voice, So I beg you please to be discreet. She Takes an all-or-nothing stance and leaves me little choice Yet I yield, that I may be like Nietzsche. Leisure is the mother of Philosophy, you bet; Humbly will I play my modest part. The Peace and quiet I require might seem a lot, and yet I need these if I’m to rival Sartre. © STEVEN KENT 2022

Steven Kent is the poetic alter-ego of writer, musician, and Oxford comma enthusiast Kent Burnside. His work appears in Light, Lighten Up Online, Snakeskin, and OEDILF. Please visit kentburnside.com gain more weight. If I want to lose weight, I’ll need to run every day and manage my diet. Similarly, for humans to be good and society to be ordered, then whether goodness is an inborn disposition or not, we need to let moral education take its course from our childhood, and as we mature gradually, so will the benevolence in our hearts and our actions. As Frederick Douglass put it, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” In conclusion, Mengzi and Xunzi aren’t as divergent as one may initially think, both being Confucians. On a deeper reading, they both advocate education as being important for people to be moral and good, and for society to achieve harmony (he) in turn. Where they do differ concerns the way such education influences one’s ethical cultivation – whether predominantly through thinking or predominantly through learning. It is a part of the function of education to help us escape the intellectual and emotional limitations of our own time. These limitations are what both Mengzi and Xunzi see beyond in their own thinking. © PLAKSHI JAIN 2022

Plakshi Jain is an Indian-trained lawyer and a recent LLM (Master of Laws) graduate from the UC Berkeley School of Law. Check out her poetry on her blog The Greyness of Life at thegreynessoflife.wordpress.com. December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 37

China Mohist Anti-Militarism & Just War Theory Shaun O’Dwyer takes an unfortunately still relevant look at how to avoid war. ith the return of geopolitics, and with the international institutions built after 1945 to prevent or contain war now being perilously weak, the world again faces growing risks of conflict between industrialized nations - such as the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There have been polarized responses to this conflict. One response has been to denounce Western military support for Ukraine as ‘militarism’. Often such denunciations cloak a hypocrisy which faults Western imperialism while giving a free pass to the imperialism of non-Western powers, such as Russia or China. Yet both hypocritical anti-imperialists and more impartial pacifists frequently conflate militarism – the policy of building armed forces and using them aggressively to advance national interests against other states – with deterrence and just war theories created to counter militarism. There are important philosophical issues at stake in these debates, over for instance the validity of absolutist norms against military violence, or the ethical dilemmas in trade-offs between defending nations’ self-determination and averting escalation to world war. When such debates fall into well-worn ruts, it can be useful to look to alternative perspectives, which can help disentangle familiar conceptual knots. One such novel perspective comes from outside of the Western philosophical canon, and indeed is even from the margins of today’s Eastern philosophical canon. The Mohists were a community of Chinese thinkers and engineers associated with a philosopher called Mozi. They were prominent in the fifth to third centuries BCE. They developed powerful arguments against militarism. Yet rather than repudiate any military response to militarism as being another instance of it, they also promoted an early version of Just War Theory. With allowance for its very different, ancient, cultural origins, their thoughts might also be relevant for our new era.

W

How Song Kingdom was Saved The Athenian historian Thucydides’ reconstruction of negotiations between the generals of an Athenian expeditionary force and the leaders of the island of Melos in 416 BCE, the ‘Melian Dialogue’, has long been remembered as a parable of geopolitical realism and the triumph of ‘might makes right’ militarism. The (mistranslated) truism attributed to the Athenian generals, ‘‘The strong will do what they can, the weak will suffer what they must’’, was amply borne out in the genocidal conclusion to a siege the Athenians waged against the Melians in the fifteenth year of the Peloponnesian War. Much less known is a dialogue dramatizing events claimed to have unfolded some decades earlier, nearly 8,000 kilometers to the east of Melos, in Warring States-era China. It too concerned a small state threatened with invasion by an imperialist state; yet its very different outcome showcased the effectiveness of Mohist anti-militarism. As related in the ancient Mozi text, the ‘Gongshu Dialogue’ tells how Mozi traveled to the Kingdom of Chu to try to dissuade its ruler from launching an 38 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

unprovoked invasion of the Kingdom of Song. To the King of Chu and his siege engineer Gongshu, Mozi presented arguments highlighting the immorality and illogicality of unprovoked military aggression: if they agree that it is unjust to murder one innocent person, how can they think it is acceptable to murder so many? Moreover, Mozi argued, a large, rich kingdom like Chu invading a smaller, poorer kingdom like Song, was analogous to a rich man ignoring his sumptuous possessions in order to assault and rob an impoverished neighbour. The King of Chu and Gongshu seemed moved by Mozi’s appeals, yet still intent on their invasion. An improvised war game of Gongshu’s proposed siege of Song, although won by Mozi, did not change their minds. A frustrated Gongshu hinted that he had another means for beating Mozi. So Mozi addressed the king with his final argument. It is one of the most glorious ripostes in all of classical Chinese philosophy: “Gongshuzi’s intention is simply that he desires to kill me. If he kills me, no one can defend Song and he can attack. However, my disciple Qin Guli and three hundred others are already equipped with my defense devices and await the Chu raiders on the walls of Song. Even if you kill me, you cannot cut them off.” (All quotations are taken from Chris Fraser, The Essential Mozi, 2020.)

Knowing that those ‘devices’ included giant swivel-mounted crossbows and traction trebuchets fabricated by Mohist engineers, the King of Chu wisely called off his invasion. The strong would not do what they could. Unlike the Melians, the people of Song were saved. Anti-Militarist Consequentialism How can we explain the vehement opposition to war and the argumentative skill the Mohists displayed in texts like the Gongshu Dialogue? First, we need to understand the context for their anti-militarism. The Mohists arose in a period of intense interstate conflict – and extraordinary intellectual and technological progress. The Warring States period’ was an era in the fifth to third centuries BCE in China during which feudal imperial authority in Eastern China had broken down, to be replaced by competing states whose rulers pretended to ducal or even royal authority. The leaders of these states sought to improve the productivity of their lands and subjects so that they could raise more taxes and equip large conscript armies. Like would-be hegemons of other eras, such as the Medicis, some rulers also elevated their status through conspicuous investment in learning and the arts. These states therefore required officials who could help them raise taxes, train and maintain large armies, render their subjects more harmonious and productive, and rule their states successfully without being conquered or overthrown. Much like the sophists versus the philosophers in ancient Greece, rival groups of experts arose to meet these statecraft needs, competing with each other

LANDSCAPE_WITH_BOATMEN ANONYMOUS C.15TH C

China for the patronage of state rulers, and often moving between states for employment. The most famous of these experts were known to later history as the Confucians; but there were many different factions and schools. Some, like the Legalists, are still wellknown today, while others, like the Mohists, disappeared into comparative obscurity around two thousand years ago. The Mohists distinguished themselves in this competition by developing sophisticated arguments to justify their policies to rulers and rebut their rivals – a sophistication which they refined in different directions, pioneering early epistemological and logical theories. In effect, they were the first Chinese philosophers. Contemporary Confucians such as Mencius (or Mengzi) soon felt compelled to adopt similar methods of ‘disputation’ to advance their own counsel and counter Mohist influence. For rulers concerned with state security, Mohist engineers also offered useful advice on counter-siege technology, and could deploy weapons and other devices for defeating siege operations. Yet the Mohists offered their military expertise only to smaller states threatened by military aggression. Their consequentialism explains why. Consequentialism is the attitude that the moral value of an act derives from or can be calculated specifically from the beneficial or harmful outcomes of the act. The Mohists envisaged ideal human society as a well-ordered, harmonious hierarchy, in which everyone fulfilled defined duties in relation to superiors and inferiors, ranging from the ‘Son of Heaven’ or supreme ruler down to princely rulers of states, their ministers and officers, village heads, and parents and children. This perhaps represented an idealized vision of the pre-Warring States era of centralized imperial authority. Atop this social hierarchy was a spiritual realm of ancestral ghosts, then Heaven itself. Thus the Mohists theorized a grand cosmological and moral order for the world. And for the Mohists it was ‘Heaven’s intent’ which provided a universal standard, and a guide for human conduct. Heaven’s intent is for a world ordered so that there is maximum benefit and minimal harm rendered to all impartially. This benign intent, the Mohists insisted, could be inferred from the observable natural order of the world: in the passage of the seasons and in provision for the growth of life-giving crops and other food sources at their appointed times, and in the growth and flourishing of human populations through ‘mutual love and mutual benefit’. Everyone from the Son of Heaven, down the hierarchy to filial (obedient) children, should follow the standard exemplified by those above them in the hierarchy, with all of them answerable to the standards of Heaven. But, the Mohists insisted, inferiors should also hold superiors to those standards, and remonstrate them when they fail. In doing so, all act benevolently (ren) in accordance with universal love, or ‘inclusive caring without partiality’ (jian ai), and with righteousness or justice (yi) in benefitting others. Rather than focus on a single criterion of benefit such as ‘pleasure’ or ‘happiness’ as the British Utilitarians would do over two thousand years later, the Mohists upheld a multifaceted conception of benefit. Mozi claimed that when people act according to ‘inclusive caring’ and “view others’ states as they view their own states… view others’ households as they view their own households… [and] view other people as they view themselves”, with each person striving impartially to benDecember 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 39

China efit others, not just themselves and their own families, communities, or states, the first benefit would be harmony and order throughout the social hierarchy. Other benefits would flow from this harmony and order, including agricultural and economic productivity sufficient for food and financial security and an increasing population. Contrariwise, harms arise when human beings fail to practice inclusive caring, loving only themselves and caring for only their own households, communities, and states, while assaulting others for their own benefit. Selfish extravagance constitutes one source of harm, including the expensively staged rites, musical performances and mourning rituals the Mohists accused the Confucians of promoting. Other harms arise from widespread selfishness, including social disharmony and disorder, manifested in robbery and murder, deprivations of food and security, and war. Breaking into and robbing peoples’ properties is a paradigmatic instance of harming others to benefit oneself. Yet for the Mohists, warfare was the worst source of harms, since invading (that is, breaking into and robbing) other states multiplies and intensifies individual crimes, and thus constitutes the greatest offence against ren and yi. Moreover, as Mozi observed, if the unprovoked killing of one innocent person counts as a capital crime, the killing of ten or a hundred innocents should count as ten or a hundred capital crimes. Yet, the Mohists complained, ‘noble men’ denounce the isolated crimes while glorifying war and calling it just, even though it involves the destruction of states, the plunder of their wealth, and the enslavement or massacre of thousands of innocents. The Mohists would have appreciated the irony in Voltaire’s epigram some twenty centuries later: “It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” As we saw with the Gongshu Dialogue, the Mohists used such

arguments to dissuade would-be expansionists from offensive war. Countering the assertions of rulers who exalted the glory, power, and wealth gained from imperialism, the Mohists also drew on history and contemporary observations to emphasize its risks, including the harms that potentially rebound onto would-be conquerors. The deaths of countless soldiers, not only in battle but also “through cold and hunger, rolled into ditches and gullies to die” is the worst of harms, depriving the state of able-bodied men, depriving families of fathers and sons, and depriving the ghosts of ancestors of descendants to worship them. Moreover, the mass conscription of men into armies takes them away from farms and other employments, depressing economic activity. The need for arms, equipment, and livestock during campaigns needlessly drains state treasuries, and military failure could be followed by retributive attacks and the overthrow of the would-be conquerors. Mohist Just War Theory Mohist anti-militarist doctrine fed into its pioneering just war theories. They devoted little space to what modern just war theory (that is, since Aquinas in the twelfth century AD) describes as the principle of jus in bello, or the ‘just conduct of war’. It is clear that the Mohists considered it acceptable to totally defeat invading armies, killing, maiming, and demoralizing their troops by any means necessary with the gruesome array of weapons listed in their anti-siege manuals. However, as some scholars of Mohist thought, such as Chris Fraser, contend, some aspects of Mohist doctrine anticipated modern jus ad bellum (‘justice about going to war’) doctrine, beginning with the principle of just cause. Wars of aggression were never justified according to the Mohist perspective. However, a war waged defensively against invasion is justified, with some reservations that I’ll discuss shortly. The Mohists also Peace Sells, But Who’s Buying? by Friedrich Farshaad Razmjouie, 2022

China believed there could be just cause for punitive war, as punishment for tyrannical rulers of states who have committed outrages against Heaven and their own people, and have driven their own states into disorder. Critics claimed that this concept of punitive war was no different from that of offensive war. The Mohists countered by arguing that punitive war is only permitted in rare instances, where there are clear signs that Heaven has withdrawn its mandate for those tyrants to rule and given permission for their overthrow. These signs include clear ill omens and portents, natural disasters, and explicit authorizations from spirits to carry out punishment. One example given was of the military defeat and death of the infamous semi-legendary tyrant Zhou. The Mohists, with their clear-eyed assessment of the tremendous harms wreaked by warfare, anticipated another principle of jus ad bellum – that war should be a last resort. The incident from the Gongshu Dialogue I quoted shows how they used both diplomacy and deterrence-signaling to discourage would-be expansionists. They also counseled rulers of smaller states to cultivate good relations with neighboring states to enhance collective security, and diplomatic submission where defensive war might incur worse harms than would acceptance of unfavorable terms from a potential aggressor. So although they never stated it explicitly, the Mohists thereby subscribed to another modern just war theory principle: that a proposed defensive war ‘have a reasonable chance of success’. Other modern just war theory principles, requiring that war be declared by ‘a proper authority’, and that its agents have ‘right intention’, also find their antecedents in Mohist doctrine. The temporal authorization of war would issue first of all with the Son of Heaven – the Emperor – directing or permitting some states to wage defensive or punitive war against renegade states; with ‘right intention’ being determined by whether it accords with signs of ‘Heaven’s intent’. But one objection to this formulation is that in periods of disorder, such as the Warring States era the Mohists lived in, there is no commonly acknowledged Son of Heaven designated to authorize war. The absence of such a line of authority opens the way for diverse states to opportunistically claim ‘proper authority’ and ‘right intention’, and so rationalise wars of conquest as just, punitive wars. This is a rather troubling ambiguity in Mohist conceptions of just war. But the Mohists did criticize rulers who claimed Heaven’s authorization for illegitimate ‘punitive’ wars. Fraser argues that the stringency of Mohist criteria for punitive war rules out any easy resort to it. Nevertheless, the notion of a Heavenly assent to punitive war is a powerful rhetorical device for moralizing military adventurism, in ancient times and today. Another question arises concerning how, given the absence of the clear line of authorization described above, the Mohists could claim authority to undertake diplomacy for and deliver arms to beleaguered states, as Mozi does in the Gongshu Dialogue. The Mohists might have answered this by arguing that theirs was a restorative doctrine. By persuading rulers to practice ‘inclusive caring’, by dissuading or deterring their expansionism, and in the last resort, militarily thwarting them, the Mohists may have seen themselves as de facto agents of Heaven’s intent, hastening the restoration of a peaceful hierarchy of states under the Son of Heaven.

The Modern Relevance of Mohist Just War Thinking Fully cognizant of the harms and horrors of war, the Mohists melded their anti-militarist consequentialism into a just war doctrine. Their calculation was that where diplomacy and deterrence-signaling fails, and invasion will inevitably bring intolerable harms through plunder, destruction of land and habitation, and the massacre or enslavement of innocents, then defensive war will be the less harmful last resort. Yet there is much in Mohist thought which remains alien to modern sensibilities, potentially limiting its application today. First, the conception of a hierarchical world order under the Son of Heaven, with all obedient to the standard of ‘Heaven’s intent’, is incompatible with modern norms of national self-determination, human rights, democracy, and pluralism, not to mention secularism. Nevertheless, it’s possible to envisage a strippeddown, Mohist-like, consequentialist just war doctrine being adapted to multilateral institutions such as the United Nations. The UN could authorize defensive war by beleaguered states and their allies, or punitive war against expansionist, totalitarian states involved in gross human rights violations. But this role is far from what a weakened and geopolitically compromised United Nations is capable of today. A further Mohist-like restorative argument for United Nations authority would seem to be in order. Second, the Mohists saw themselves as politically neutral, delivering diplomatic advice, military expertise, and armaments to any smaller state threatened by invasion when they could. Today, no non-governmental organization has such capabilities. It is mostly great powers which can deliver sufficient armaments and expertise to smaller states to defeat the expansionism of other great powers. This raises the problem of how smaller states can avoid becoming proxies in great power struggles, gaining little benefit and with much risk of harm as they cede control over their affairs to the changeable whims of their great power benefactors. Such are the objections fielded by left-wing critics of military aid for Ukraine: that smaller states like Ukraine are becoming tools for the imperialism of the West, specifically, the United States. Yet the Ukrainians are doing just as the Mohists would urge, cultivating diplomatic relations with multiple neighbouring states and with the European Union. In sourcing weapons and expertise from them, they offset the risk of being drawn into the exclusive geopolitical orbit of the United States. There is also a bleakly persuasive Mohist-like argument that armed resistance is the better alternative than a capitulation or pacifist resistance which leaves territories exposed to the criminal behavior and arbitrary violence of a ruthless, ill-disciplined occupying army. Taras Bilous, a Ukrainian left-wing writer and defender, justifies arming his country by emphasizing the dreadful harms that occur when ‘the weak suffer what they must’: “The more territories the Russian army occupies, the more civilians will be persecuted and murdered. The more missiles our air defences take down, the fewer of them will reach their targets and kill people.” © SHAUN O’DWYER 2022

Shaun O’Dwyer is an associate professor in the Faculty of Languages and Cultures at Kyushu University, Japan. He is the author of Confucianism’s Prospects: a Reassessment (SUNY Press, 2019) and editor of Handbook of Confucianism in Modern Japan (University of Amsterdam Press, 2022). December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 41

The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast has reached its 400th episode, after almost twelve years of steady publication. Written and presented by Peter Adamson, the podcast has made its way philosopher by philosopher, movement by movement, from Thales of Miletus, considered the first Western philosopher, to (as I write) Marguerite of Navarre, a sponsor of French humanism. It has gone through twenty centuries of metaphysical, political, scientific, ethical, and aesthetical debates in Europe and the Islamic world, and has sprouted two spin-offs, dedicated to philosophy in India and Africana philosophy. “My project”, Peter told me, “is inherently about expanding our sense of what the history of philosophy is about.”

Peter Adamson is Professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. Duanne Ribeiro chats with him about the history of ideas, and the meaning and methods of philosophy.

The first episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps was uploaded in December 2010. In December 2022, you complete twelve years of steady work. The main podcast now has spin-offs, and has turned into a growing series of books. Did you imagine from the beginning where this project would take you? True, it has been going for a long time now! I definitely did not foresee how large a project it would wind up being. That sounds kind of ridiculous, since I did say from the start that it would cover the history of philosophy ‘without any gaps’. But at the beginning I assumed the only non-European tradition I’d cover would be the Islamic world. The idea of tackling Indian, Africana, and Chinese philosophy – maybe more – came later. Also, it was not originally conceived as a book series, only a podcast, which I assumed would not have that big an audience. So, it’s kind of spiralled beyond what I originally envisioned. That was more like me sitting down once a week, quickly writing up stuff I pretty much already knew, and recording it. Since I research and teach ancient and medieval philosophy, the prospect of covering lots of material that was new for me seemed far away when I started. But I have really enjoyed learning about new traditions, texts, and figures. Also, I love hearing from listeners, and especially interacting with people outside of academia, which most academics don’t get to do. In general, it’s sort of my main hobby, and I enjoy pretty much every aspect of the process.

42 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

Did this long journey change you somehow? Did having to study philosophers from different periods and places, some of whom I guess were new to you, modify the way you teach, or read philosophy? I imagine it’s an exercise in openness. Yes, definitely. It has had a very direct impact on both my teaching and my research. In teaching, I’ve done several classes here in Munich that I was only able to tackle thanks to doing the podcast; for example, classes on classical Indian or Africana philosophy. And I’ve written several books that came out of reading I did for the podcast. My book in 2022, called Don’t Think for Yourself: Authority and Belief in Medieval Philosophy, pulls together a lot of stuff I was thinking about both in my research and while doing the podcast. You’ve gone through Ancient Greece, early Islam, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and on. The many philosophers you have spoken of have many different understandings of philosophy: how it’s studied, taught and lived, what it does, or what it can’t do. Given this, how would you answer the everrecurring question, What is philosophy? Now, that’s not an easy question! Of course, I get asked it a lot, and what I usually say is that I’m not really operating with a hard and fast rule. It’s more like, if I think it might be worth including in the podcast, then I include it. Since my project is inherently about expanding our sense of what the history of philosophy is about, I’m happy to take the risk of expanding things ‘too far’ – if that is a risk. I mean, the worst that can happen is that the audience learns about some extra stuff along the way that isn’t necessary. If I were to address the question more abstractly, I would say that we need to distinguish the question of what philosophy is now, for us, from what it has been in earlier periods. Some cultures – ancient China or India, for instance – didn’t even have the word ‘philosophy’; and the word has meant both very broad and fairly narrow things at various times and places where it did exist. For example – as is often noted – in European history, until fairly recently, ‘philosophy’ included the physical sciences; whereas in the Islamic world, for a long time falsafa – a loan-word from the Greek – just meant ‘philosophy in the style of Avicenna, Interview

Interview accepting his ideas’ – so something much more specific. And, of course, our own sense of what counts as ‘philosophy’ is likewise a product of our own time and place. Still, I think that we could at least say that there is a set of issues, such as the nature of knowledge, free will, the existence of God et cetera, which can uncontroversially be taken as philosophical. So, if pushed, I would say that I am basically covering the way that philosophical issues have been dealt with across times and cultures. Your podcast path isn’t only temporal, but also geographical, so to speak. We listen to you speaking about philosophy in Byzantium, India, Africa. Does it matter to philosophy, with its claims to universality, to have roots somewhere? And how can a place shape a philosopher’s thoughts – if indeed it’s true that it can? This is absolutely crucial, in my opinion. There is no such thing as a philosophy or philosopher not shaped by time and place, and anyone who denies this is just ignoring the way that their own time and place has shaped them. This is why I try to devote as much attention as possible to historical context as I go along. For example, in recent episodes I’ve talked a lot about how things like the Reformation, the printing press, or the discovery of the so-called ‘New World’ impacted philosophy and the kinds of philosophical views that were being expressed. Even something as basic as the question of which topics or questions a given philosopher chooses to tackle will be conditioned by these kinds of contextual factors. To give an obvious example: it’s no coincidence that Western philosophers started thinking about freedom of conscience and how to deal with diversity of opinion around the time of the European wars of religion, in the sixteenth century. Contextual influence is more obvious in some areas of philosophy than others: of course political philosophy responds to historical context; but it may be less obvious with metaphysics or epistemology. But you can almost always understand any thinker better by knowing more about their context. I remember you saying that one of the reasons you started the podcast was that classes Interview

on the History of Philosophy typically leaped from one household name to another, missing out long periods of human thinking. Could you say more about the role played by the history of philosophy in Western universities? Would you say it’s undervalued? It varies a lot. In Germany, where I teach now, the history of philosophy has traditionally been very central to philosophy, whereas in some American or British universities there has instead been a strong focus on contemporary ‘systematic’ issues. I think probably nowadays, though, the standard approach would be to have a mix of history and contemporary philosophy, with variation as to the balance between them. Personally, I think it would be good if there were even more variation in the ways philosophy is taught. I mean, one thing I have learned from doing the podcast is that there is a heck of a lot of philosophy, so it’s not really possible to cover it fully in just one department. So, it would be nice to see, for instance, more American departments that have a specialism in Asian philosophy, with others focusing on Latinx philosophy, and so on. Of course, there is some value to the idea of having common reference points and a language that all trained philosophers share; but I don’t think that goal should be pursued so relentlessly that diversity of approach becomes impossible. Analytic philosophy is – or was – proud of not studying philosophy per se: “Old books and dead philosophers don’t matter,” it was said, “We focus on philosophical problems.” This may lead, in my opinion, to a bird’s eye view of philosophy, which loses much of the creativity of the past. Do you agree, or what’s your take on that? I like to say that the philosophy happening now is just the most recent part of the history of philosophy, and we don’t have a very good sense of whether it’s a particularly worthwhile part, since we have so little distance on it. Certainly, a lot of philosophy is being produced – more than ever, I guess. So presumably some of it will stand the test of time. And contrary to what you might expect, I really like contemporary analytic philosophy. I have enjoyed and still enjoy having colleagues who work in that area, and I

try to keep up to speed on developments in their fields insofar as I can. However, I can’t really take it seriously when people dismiss the history of philosophy as uninteresting. Like, how would you even know? Have you even looked into, say, Nyaya epistemology, or Mulla Sadra’s theory of modulated existence? Do you even know what I’m talking about? If not, then how do you know it’s worthless? That would seem like bluster masking willful ignorance. Here in Brazil the teaching and research in philosophy is mainly historical. The ‘structural method’ applied by Guéroult and others has made a deep impression here. In any case, it is only one way of studying the history of philosophy. What’s yours? This is relevant to the previous question, since my way of studying the history of philosophy is most definitely informed by analytic philosophy. I am of course not an exception to the rule that philosophers are shaped by their time and context! You can see the influence of analytic philosophy in the issues I’ve chosen to work on in my academic research, but also in the podcast – albeit that I have tried hard to broaden my sense of what counts as philosophically worthwhile. Also, it probably shows itself in the way I write – striving for clarity, making distinctions, focusing on arguments and counterarguments: all that stuff one usually associates with analytic philosophy. As we speak, you have come to Renaissance France in the podcast. You’ll have maybe ten more years of work before reaching our epoch. Are you in good shape to finish the marathon? I always just say “I have no plans to stop anytime soon!” Since I do enjoy it so much, and I know that people are waiting for me to get to the excitements of the seventeenth century and onward, plus there are several non-European cultures I still want to tackle, yes, I do expect to be doing it for another decade, and more. Let’s hope it works out! PN • Duanne Ribeiro is a journalist and PhD Student in Information Science. He also graduated in Philosophy.

December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 43

Brief Lives

Cicero (106-43 BC) Hilarius Bogbinder considers the inconstant career of the most famous politicianphilosopher named after a legume.

T

he name comes from the Latin word for chickpea, cicer. Apparently, the statesman-cum-writer’s ancestors had grown this plant – although more unkind souls suggested that one ancestor had a mole shaped like the legume on his chin. In any case, Marcus Tullius Cicero was not an aristocrat. Rather he came from a provincial middleclass family. He was one of the ‘new men’ – novi homines – who entered public life in Rome to pursue a political career. Cicero had been a student at the best schools (of oratory and philosophy) in Athens, had returned to Rome, and had made a name for himself as a trial lawyer. This experience catapulted him to the forefront of public life, when he prosecuted the notoriously corrupt former governor of Sicily, Verres, in 70 BC. Cicero’s chances were not rated very highly, as his opponent was Quintus Hortensius, a legal superstar who had just been elected to the Consulship, the highest position in the land. Yet, against all odds, and due to thorough preparation, Cicero won the case, paving the way for his subsequent political career. His prosecution speeches also contain insights that he would later make part of his political philosophy, and even his metaphysical writings. It is testament to his eloquence that John F. Kennedy lifted his famous line ‘I am a Berliner’ from Cicero’s line ‘I am a Roman citizen’: civis Romanus sum. In his youth Cicero learned Greek, the language of the educated elite in the Roman Republic – so much so that in fact Julius Caesar never said the Latin ‘Et tu, Brute?’ to his killer Brutus, but ‘And you too, child?’ in Greek (Suetonius, The Lives of Twelve Caesars, p.82). But that’s another story. The one I’m telling here is about the man who did everything in his power to prevent Julius Caesar from overturning the Republican constitution that had existed in Rome from about 500 BC to 49 BC. He failed. Cicero Writing & Thinking If you studied Latin at school, chances are that you’ve read one or two of Cicero’s speeches, since he did more than anyone to transform the local Roman vernacular into a world language. The historian Jacob Burckhardt wrote: “From the fourteenth century, Cicero was recognised universally as the purest model of prose” (The Civilisation of the Renaissance, p.151, 1860). But his influence extended further than just his style. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is famous in ethics for his so-called Categorical Imperative: ‘‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law’’ (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p.30). But Kant was happy to admit that he was inspired by Cicero’s mantra from De Officiis (or On Duties), “We must act in such a way that we attempt nothing contrary to universal nature” (De Officiis, p.43, 44 BC). While Kant could hardly contain his reverence for the 44 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

Roman, his younger compatriot G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) was more cynical, and for good reason. While Cicero was an eminent moralist, he was not exactly moral. Hegel commented, “Cicero (and what fine things he has written about ‘honestum’ and ‘decorum’ in his De Officiis) could divorce his wife in order to pay his debts out of his new wife’s dowry” (Philosophy of Right, p.217). Hardly honourable; but what you would expect from a trial lawyer? Certainly one could accuse Cicero of inconsistency, although he tried to defend himself against this charge: in a letter to a colleague, he noted, somewhat lamely, “Unchanging consistency of standpoint has never been considered a virtue in a great statesman” (Letters to His Friends, p.78). As a writer Cicero was above all a moral philosopher, though he also dabbled in metaphysics. We know Cicero mainly as a writer on rhetoric and politics, and often overlook that Cicero was an also an able metaphysician whose works influenced philosophers in the Middle Ages. For instance, in his main work De Re Publica (54-51 BC), the section on ‘Scipio’s Dream’ established the cosmology uncritically adopted by Dante Algieri in the Divine Comedy.This divides the universe into nine spheres, with the Earth in the innermost circle and God at the apex. Cicero, a poetic soul, even described the music of the spheres. According to the theory of Musica Universalis as articulated by him, “Men by imitating this harmony on stringed instruments and in song, have gained for themselves a return to this region” (De Re Publica, p.273). The idea of the music of the spheres became commonplace in Medieval Europe, and continued to inspire writers from the philosopher Boethius (477524) to the astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). The latter completely adopted the Roman’s cosmological theory wholesale in his Mysterium Cosmographicum (1597). But Cicero’s metaphysical speculations didn’t stop with the music of the spheres. Rather like Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Cicero also speculated that “the first cause has no beginning, for everything originates from the first cause”, and since “it never had a beginning, it will never have an end” (De Re Publica, p.281). More Choice Words From Cicero As a student in Athens, Cicero had idolised Plato (427-347 BC), and this admiration never ceased. He consciously mirrored the Athenian master in the titles of his books De Re Publica and De Legibus (On Law, 49 BC). The former followed the structure of Plato’s Republic, too: beginning with justice, then the origins of the best city and the underlying philosophical principles, and culminating in metaphysics and the afterlife. De Legibus likewise mirrored Plato’s Laws. And both were written in dialogue form, too. But as much as he revered the Athenian master, Cicero did not copy Plato’s philosophical system. Still less did he reach the same conclusions, and certainly not in his political philosophy.

Brief Lives

Marcus Tullius Cicero

For starters, Cicero did not advocate rule by philosopher-kings as Plato did, but proposed a mixed constitution with monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements. Using a musical analogy, Cicero advocated a political system with a polyphony of voices: “what musicians call harmony in song is concord in a city”, that is, “the proportionate blending of unlike tones” – namely those of “the upper, middle and lower classes” (De Re Publica, p.69). Music of the polis, perhaps? Much has been made of his mouthpiece Scipio’s assertion in De Re Publica that ‘‘res publica populi est’’ – loosely translated, ‘‘public affairs belong to the people’’ (p.39), and how this is apparently contradicted by the assertion later in the book that if “compelled to choose one unmixed form, I would choose kingship” (p.54). Yet the contradiction is easily explained, as kings should be elected (p.31). In modern language, Cicero wanted a presidential system; but he thought that this was only possible to establish under ideal circumstances. In practice, he argued on the basis of his experience that “the absolute rule of one man will easily and quickly degenerate into tyranny” (p.44). Sadly, that’s evidently still true today. In language somewhat reminiscent of Aristotle’s defence of government by the many (ie democracy), Cicero advocated a political system that was the combination of many little wisdoms: “If people would maintain their rights they say that no form of government would be superior either in liberty or happiness, for if they themselves would be masters of the laws and the courts, of war and peace, and of international agreements, this government alone can… rightly be called a commonwealth” (De Re Publica,

pp.74-75). Cicero was adamant that he wanted checks and balances, and that he would not give “the title of king… to a man who is greedy for personal power and absolute authority, a man who lords it over an oppressed people” (p.77). Having written about the ideal state, and, in De Legibus, about the second best constitution, towards the end of his life Cicero summed up his lessons in De Officiis or On Duties (44 BC), a book that more or less consciously mirrored Plato’s Politikós (The Statesman). Reportedly written in a matter of weeks, On Duties summarised what is honourable (Book I); elaborated on what is to your own advantage (Book II); and sought how to reconcile the differences (Book III). To be honourable, no one “should be so taken up in the search of truth, as to neglect the more necessary duties of an active life” (p.9). As a politician, Cicero held the maxim that “a governor should endeavour to make himself loved and not feared” (p.81). Readers who are interested in the impact of great books will note that centuries later, in 1513, Niccolò Machiavelli deliberately turned this maxim upside down: “it is difficult for one person to be both feared and loved, and when a choice has to be made, it is safer to be feared” (The Prince, p.80). Modern political philosopher John Rawls talks about a ‘reflective equilibrium’ between principles and intuition (A Theory of Justice, p.44, 1971). Cicero in some way foreshadowed this by noting that it was the statesman’s “duty to determine his choice [of action] if that which seems useful and expedient for him should come into competition with what is honest” (De Officiis, p.165). December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 45

Philosophical Haiku PORTRAIT OF MACHIAVELLI BY SANTI DI TITO

Cicero The Politician Despite his skills as a writer and thinker, above all, Cicero was a practicing politician, and was elected in 64 BC to the highest office of Consul. We still have his brother Quintus’s campaign manual for the election, which was published as A Handbook of Electioneering. The brother was pragmatic, and a bit cynical. A successful politician himself, he counselled that a politician, “must promise his help to all, but give it to those in whom he expected he is making the best investment” (Handbook, p.437). This advice became fateful for Marcus Cicero. When Cataline, a selfaggrandizing demagogue, lost the election in 63 BC, he claimed the election was stolen, and urged his supporters to attack the Capitol, under circumstances not unlike what happened in the Capitol in Washington DC over two thousand years later. It was on this occasion that Cicero uttered his famous lament, ‘O tempora, o mores’ – ‘Oh what times, what customs!’ (In Catilinam, p.12). He warned that the attack could undermine popular government, but was ignored. So, acting rather swiftly, and perhaps without carefully considering the consequences, as Consul he ordered the execution of some of the protesters. But the legality of this move was dubious, and Cicero was exiled in 58 BC. In the years following Cicero spent time in Greece, where he began to write his longer works, including De Re Publica and On The Orator. He was allowed to return to Rome; but after Caesar gained power, he was forced to retire. He tried to make a brief comeback after Caesar’s assassination, but fell out with Mark Antony. He spent his remaining time writing his last great work, the ethical treatise, De Officiis, and other shorter works, such as On Friendship, On Old Age, and On The Nature of the Gods. Like many philosophers with a political career (the Irish-born Edmund Burke comes to mind), Cicero was a mediocre public servant, and as undistinguished as a politician as he was formidable as a writer.

NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI (1469–1527) Better to be feared Than seek friendship through kindness. A prince has no friends

T

In any case, Cicero came to a sad and violent end at the hands of a contract killer hired by Mark Antony. He tried to hide amongst the household garbage when the assassin Herennius came to his house. The rest is recounted by Plutarch, a famous biographer: “He looked steadfastly at his slayers, his head all squalid and unkept, and his face wasted with anxiety, so that most of those that stood by covered their faces while Herennius was slaying him” (Plutarch, Parallel Lives VII, p.207).

oday his name is associated with all that’s dirty, underhanded and despicable in politics. We even call the Devil ‘Old Nick’ after him. But Niccolo Machiavelli was actually a really nice guy. As Rousseau said of him, he was ‘an honest man and a good citizen’ – and given Rousseau didn’t think much of anyone, that’s high praise. So why the low reputation? Born in Florence at yet another time of upheaval, tumult, and war in Italy, Machiavelli witnessed first-hand the ways of man, and he wasn’t impressed. By the age of twenty-nine he held a leading position in the Florentine government, and so got to know some of the movers and shakers of the time, including Cesare Borgia, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, and Pope Julius II. Matters turned sour for Machiavelli when the Medicis invaded and reclaimed control of Florence in 1512. The following year Machiavelli was accused of conspiracy, imprisoned, and tortured. He refused to admit to anything and was released, after which he retired to his estate to contemplate politics and rehabilitate his dislocated shoulders. Reflecting on all he’d seen, he put his thoughts into his short book Il Principe (The Prince, 1532). In this work he said that although it might be an admirably optimistic ideal that rulers should be seen as the embodiment of virtue, the reality is such that any ruler who actually is the embodiment of virtue will be gone before dinner time – to be replaced by someone more realistic about politics. This isn’t something to be happy about, said Machiavelli, but there’s nothing to be gained in denying it, and everything to be lost. People are, Machiavelli lamented, ‘‘ungrateful, fickle, liars and deceivers’’ who ‘‘shun danger and are greedy for profit.’’ Things haven’t changed much, then.

© HILARIUS BOGBINDER 2022

© TERENCE GREEN 2022

Hilarius Bogbinder is a Danish-born translator and writer who studied theology at Oxford University

Terence Green is a writer, historian, and lecturer who lives in Eastbourne, New Zealand.

The End of Politics & Philosophy The great rhetorician asked rhetorically towards the end of his life, “Can we sufficiently express our sense of obligation we owe to philosophy?” (On Old Age, p.218, 44 BC). Cicero was not as great a philosopher as Plato or Aristotle, he conceded; but he was rather relaxed about this: “It is no disgrace for one striving for first place to stop at second or third. Among poets… there is room not only for Homer. And in philosophy, I am sure, the magnificence of Plato did not deter Aristotle of writing, and nor did the later, with all his breadth of knowledge, put an end to the studies of others.” (On The Orator, p.311).

46 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

Letters When inspiration strikes, don’t bottle it up! Write to me at: Philosophy Now 43a Jerningham Road • London • SE14 5NQ, U.K. or email [email protected] Keep them short and keep them coming! Cat’s-Eye World View DEAR EDITOR: Concerning human-cat bonding and metaphysics (Issue 152), I have three cats: Nala, the prima donna; Nick the magnificent beast, and the allknowing oracle, Walter. I read to them from Philosophy Now with the intent of imparting the sage wisdom of human scholars. Nonetheless, they react as if I’m absolutely inconsequential and possessing not even a hint of reality. They know the food and water I provide for them are real because such sustains them physically, and the food tastes good. Beyond that I’m no more real to them than the dark interstices of deep space. It’s no wonder ancient Egyptians worshipped cats as gods. Cats seem to have figured out the essence of the universe: what is real is real, what isn’t real is also real, unless, of course, it’s something else entirely – which hints of something between the concepts of real/not real; or if not between then, undoubtedly, beyond. So sayeth the all-knowing Walter. (He tends not to explain himself.) Only cats fundamentally know and completely understand this. Therefore, it is way beneath them to participate in the academic world of ‘publish or perish’, where discussions of what is real and what is not sustain a huge proportion of the pulp and paper industry – which has no relevance whatsoever to the entire feline population of the world. According to Nala the prima donna – who really isn’t much interested in philosophy – reality is a comfortable place to sleep, and provides good food to eat (she avoids fine wine) and an occasional willing partner with whom to procreate. She doesn’t know that she’s been spayed, so eating and sleeping are for her enough reality, for this time around at least. JESS MERRILL FOLEY, AL (Not) Theo Logically Yours DEAR EDITOR: It is always interesting to consider the ontological argument for

God (as expressed by Reverend Dr Peter Mullen in Issue 152), since it raises a point of logic; and this subject is, perhaps counterintuitively, in some ways quite contentious. This might explain why the ontological argument, after all this time, still has legs, so to speak. The argument says God, by definition, is the supreme being, and this must entail His existence, otherwise His unique supremacy would not be. We may conclude from this that if God exists, then God exists. Therefore God exists? No. The point of logic, ‘If P, then P, therefore P’, is simply saying that if P were the case, it would be the case. But this in no way suggests that P is actually true. Of course, this doesn’t show that God doesn’t exist: it just shows that this purely logical argument, independent of other contingent considerations, couldn’t have any hope of proving His existence. PAUL TISSIER BRIGHTON COLLEGE DEAR EDITOR: Following on from PN 152, I believe that before discussing the question of God’s existence, one should first attempt to define the concept of ‘God’. When I read philosophy at Swansea in the Sixties I was inspired by the lectures of D.Z. Philips. He was a Wittgensteinian philosopher of religion who rejected a supernatural concept of God but defended religious discourse as being a language game with its own internal conceptual understanding and logic. That model entailed trying to make sense of religious concepts by giving them a new content, such as being about universal human love instead of an external God. The problem is though that most of those who use religious terms don’t recognize this as what they mean when they talk of God. They think of God as a being one can talk to, and who can understand one. ‘Our Father, who art in heaven’ lives somewhere – a place one hopes one can come to when one’s body dies.

In earlier times, when one didn’t have scientific explanations of many natural phenomena, it was natural to use supernatural explanations. This isn’t the case any longer. Supernatural explanations of natural phenomena are superfluous. So, what is left of the concept of God? Many thinkers believe that one cannot find meaning in the idea of an external God. To them the idea of a God understood as a consciousness one can communicate with, but without a physical body, indeed, a conscious being without all the ingredients that are a precondition for a human consciousness, is untenable. What is left? To me, it seems that the concept of God becomes vacuous. Denying the God concept is, though, not to deny that one can wonder about the world. It does not entail that value judgements become empty. They still have the same weight they always had. Morality doesn’t need (and cannot have) an external justification. Nothing of substance changes. RICHARD CHALLIS BOUSFIELD COPENHAGEN DEAR EDITOR: The worst day of my life was the day my parents told me there was no Santa Claus. At the age of 7, I had some difficulty taking it in, and it seemed to me that without Santa Claus Christmas itself had come to a dark and sudden end. But my perspective changed in my teenage years when I had the opportunity to study symbolism in mathematics, literature, and poetry. By the time I was 17, I could see that Santa Claus was the personification of a certain spirit of generosity and kindness that manifests itself most clearly at Christmas. No need to find proofs of Santa Claus’s existence. It was right there in my face, and I realized that by adjusting my definitions I could believe in Santa Claus on a whole new level. The God articles in Issue 152 of Philosophy Now reminded me of the thought processes I struggled through in my younger years. As a theology student in

December 2022/January 2023 l Philosophy Now 47

Letters my early twenties I was fascinated with the Proofs of Aquinas, which seemed to be based on impeccable logic. And Anselm’s ontological proof, though a bit fuzzy to me at first, did seem to fit the bill if God was defined as ‘that which is greater than anything else conceivable’. Theology led me through many theories about God’s existence; but it was my undergraduate program in Philosophy of Religion that changed everything for me. Fowler’s stages of faith development allowed me out of the box. Until I was introduced to Fowler’s theory, it never occurred to me that faith was a process. Like most people, I assumed that either you believe something or you don’t. Fowler’s stage 3, the ‘SyntheticConventional’ stage, seems to be where most people are at. This stage, usually associated with adolescence and early adulthood, is characterised by a sense of identity with an ideological group and unquestioned faith in authority figures. People at this stage frequently retain their literal belief in religious stories and moral rules, and many remain at this level of thinking throughout their lives. The articles presented in Issue 152 have clearly moved on to Stage 4. This is the ‘Reflective’ stage, characterised by strong reliance on logical processes and rationality. But as long as the writers are searching for proofs of God’s existence they have not yet escaped from the ‘box’. It was only when I gave my attention to Issue 152’s Fiction section that I found a character who managed to achieve the final stage of faith development. Jeffrey Wald’s professor, with the help of an enlightened student, was eventually able to see God as the encompassment of nature, the universal cosmic energy of which we are all a part. JOHN BROWNRIDGE ONTARIO DEAR EDITOR: I read Lawrence Evans’ article, ‘Aristotle’s Guide to Living Well,’ in Issue 151 and found many references to ‘God’. Capitalizing ‘god’ in relation to Aristotle is a little misleading, I think. Aristotle’s concept, divine nous [intellect] was wholly independent of modern references to ‘God’ except, perhaps, in the most fundamental sense, as the unmoved mover. “Aligning the revolutions in our head... with the harmonies and revolutions of the universe” is to say that individuals should think like the divine nous who put

those revolutions into motion. This is distinct from ‘assimilat[ing] our thoughts to God’s own’ as suggested by Evans. There is a distinction between thinking in the same manner, and thinking the same thoughts. So I find the author’s conclusion, “what it truly means to live well is to become like God in the contemplation of eternal truths” misplaced. It seems to me that Aristotle exhorts us to think in a manner which seeks harmony and revolution in the universe, not to think the thoughts that God thinks – which would in any case be impossible to identify, and may not even have meaning to a human. WILLIAM FISHBURNE GREENBELT, MD Foucault’s Evil Relativism DEAR EDITOR: Roy William’s ‘Brief Life’ of Michel Foucault in Issue 152 was all adulation and no critique, for a man whose ideas demand critique, even condemnation. Foucault denied all objective moral principles, and so could not decide whether rape should be criminalized, because he believed that law was oppressive and lawlessness was freedom. He advocated lawlessness in order to free humans from all a priori limits, especially concerning sexual relations. In fact, he advocated legalizing pedophilia through the abolition of age-of-consent laws, and called for the release of three convicted pedophiles after three years. Whatever Foucault’s achievements (and I deem him horribly overrated), these ugly aspects of his philosophy should be addressed. DR DOUGLAS GROOTHUIS DENVER SEMINARY Time & Everything Else Slips Away DEAR EDITOR: With regard to Issue 152’s mini feature on Time, could time be the simple running down of the Universe, or increase in its entropy, its disorder? Entropy is often called ‘Time’s Arrow’. We always observe entropy increase: a cup falls and breaks, never rises and reassembles. But systems that don’t change (a hydrogen atom in a rock) exhibit no time, nor does a totally disordered system. There is a cosmic speed limit to all such changes as falling cups; the speed of light. As you approach it, time goes more and more slowly for you. If light’s speed was infinite, everything would happen here and now and the universe would have zero length in all dimensions, space and time. With a finite

48 Philosophy Now l December 2022/January 2023

speed for light we can still have selfdetermination, as we can choose whether to drop that cup or to expend energy holding it up. So, intriguingly, life locally reverses entropy – in its youthful stage; old age is when the organism can no longer keep reducing its internal entropy; and death is when rising internal entropy overwhelms all the body’s entropy-reduction mechanisms. However, outside the bounds (or the skin) of lifeforms, entropy must rise. Even more intriguingly, some scientists propose that information is a form of energy. This is a kind of negative entropy, since you can reverse entropy with energy. Maybe reversing entropy with info is what humans are here for, as we are the only species we know of that can systematically create information. DR HILLARY J. SHAW NEWPORT, SHROPSHIRE More Metaphysics & Mysticism DEAR EDITOR: I was intrigued by Kevin Novis’s article ‘Was Spinoza Actually An Atheist’ in Issue 151. Novis is correct that this depends how one defines ‘God’. Most theists believe that God is external to the world or nature. If that was not the case, how could God create the world? But Spinoza did not believe that God could create anything, as that would imply a deficiency in God, which Spinoza would not accept. This unconventional use of ‘God’ indicates that the theist/atheist paradigm is not the best way of understanding Spinoza. A better model would be to link these ideas to top-down panpsychism, in which the world has a spiritual element or divine will/consciousness which permeates everything (an analogy would be a beehive which has an awareness in which the individual bees partake). Brian Morris’s article on Daisetzu Suzuki in Issue 151 comes closer to Spinoza’s perspective when Morris discusses the ‘absolute oneness’ of things as the ‘divine mind’ or a ‘cosmic consciousness’ that saturates and infuses everything with spiritual significance. This is also a good definition of top-down panpsychism (in contrast to bottom-up panpsychism, in which spirituality is an emergent property, which grows and develops as the world becomes more complex). Perhaps a more illuminating article about Spinoza could compare his ideas to Eastern mysticism. RUSSELL BERG, MANCHESTER

Letters DEAR EDITOR: Thank you for the interesting article on Daisetzu Suzuki by Brian Morris in PN 151 – interesting also for what is omitted. I strongly object to the opinion of Prof Morris that Zen is ‘detached from morality and politics’, as he puts it in the last paragraph on the Absolute Self. For instance, I think fascism and Zen are mutually exclusive, at least as I understand the fascist regimes that ruled Germany and Italy. Prof. Morris also does not mention the Four Noble Truths which are at the core of Buddhism, including Zen. The fourth Noble Truth contains the Noble Eightfold Path, which you could compare to the Ten Commandments of Judaism and Christianity. The Noble Eightfold Path has clear recommendations on how to live that no fascist would accept, as I’m sure Suzuki would have agreed. In my opinion Zen is, among others things, a worldview that refers to everything, including morality and politics. I would not however call Zen a philosophy, because it aims also at what lies beyond words and concepts. The practice of Zazen is most important where you just sit (Shikantaza) and are. So reality is one concern – form and emptiness another. Both make up our existence. Many Zen adepts around the world chant the words of the ‘Heart of Great Perfect Wisdom’ Sutra: “Form itself is emptiness, emptiness itself form.” As Ludwig Wittgenstein put it in the last sentence of his Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” LÚÐVÍK ECKARDT GÚSTAFSSON REYKJAVIK DEAR EDITOR: In his interview with Annika Loebig about the connections between morality and happiness (Issue 152), Nat Rutherford states, “you recognise that you don’t know yourself that well...” and suggests that this realisation is ‘quite beneficial’. The understanding that we don’t know ourselves that well gets us closer to the Buddhist concept of ‘no self’ (Anatta/Anatman). If ego allows the accommodation of this concept, then the question of how to be happy dissolves, since there is no one to be happy. There is no fixed, constant thing to be at all. Happiness passes through – ‘a nice byproduct’, as Rutherford remarks. It is an epiphenomenal nomad that not only defies definition but is lost the moment

there is an attempt to grasp or own it. After all, who is doing the grasping? ANDREW LEWIS BLACKWOOD, WALES Seeking Principles In Ancient Greece DEAR EDITOR: I was studying Aristotle’s critical writings about the pre-Socratic philosophers while reading the writings of Aristotle and other Greeks in Issue 151. Aristotle’s criticisms follow two paths. Firstly, he tells us about the pre-Socratic period directly, and accurately. Aristotle also uses the philosophers of the preSocratic period as a tool and a basis for his own system of thought. By discussing with them, evaluating them, he forms his own thought structures. Until Socrates, apart from the Sophists, there was perhaps, no one who focused on understanding society and human beings. But before Socrates, the arkhe, the elusive fundamental principle of things, was paramount. So we are faced with another dilemma. Should one know oneself first, or should one first know the arkhe? Which one can be a source and which a response to the other? And if we still haven’t found answers to the questions Anaximander or Zeno of Elea were focusing on, can we really say that we have made any progress? FIRAT KAZANCI IZMIR, TURKEY Highly Cultivated DEAR EDITOR: In Issue 151 Raymond Tallis claims to “embrace Darwinism, and yet acknowledge[s] the distinctive nature of humanity: that of finding a biological account of what has set us on the road to becoming distant from biology.” In fact, cultural evolution does account even for this nature. It was two million years after the evolution of the grasping hand that the first civilizations arose. It has taken only a few thousand years for cultural evolution to create the ‘great distance’ of our thought from out biology. Also, his statement that “millions of years of evolution of non-human primates haven’t delivered anything more impressive than the use of stones to crack nuts” is a misunderstanding of evolution. It’s as if he’s reproaching chimpanzees for failing to have become human. Evolutionary changes are only made in response to the need to adapt to a particular environment. Evidently, chim-

panzees were successful in doing so, having survived in their environment for ten million years (compared to the one million years humans have existed, whilst bringing extinction to many other creatures). Stone tools were first used by our ancestors 1.5 million years ago. Had it given only a slight advantage to the individual who first used a stone to crack a nut, the benefit would have been immediate. The advantage of that discovery would then have been copied by those who were able to recognize it, introducing a new kind of evolution. That and similar innovations that could be learned would have spread rapidly throughout a tool-making culture. This is a different kind of evolution, changing our relationship with the environment from a passive to an active one. Biological adaptions would then have focused on the brain greatly increasing its size. REG BEACH PENZANCE, CORNWALL Beware the Wrath DEAR EDITOR: The article on gender by F.J. Camacho Jr in PN 150 was cogent, balanced, precise, and extremely wellwritten (unlike the impenetrable quote by Judith Butler in the first para). Camacho is listed as a writer rather than a university academic, so students will not be able to picket university authorities demanding his sacking because he is ‘worse than Hitler’ for slightly questioning their orthodoxy. So upon whom will the activist gauleiters vent their wrath? The obvious target is your good self, the Editor, for having the audacity to publish such dangerous propaganda. I await news of your replacement in due course. TERRY HYDE YELVERTON Resounding Echoes DEAR EDITOR: In Letters, PN 151, Michael Shaw notes that Ukrainian philosopher Pylyp Orlyk is a character in Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa, and challenges us: “Does any other philosopher feature in an opera?” Well, yes they do. I’m surprised if no-one else has pointed out that the stoic Seneca appears in Monteverdi’s Coronation of Poppea. And for an extra point, Leibniz is mocked as ‘Doctor Pangloss’ in Leonard Bernstein’s musicalification of Voltaire’s Candide. Any more? MARTIN PARKINSON BRISTOL

December 2022/January 2023 l Philosophy Now 49

Books

Doug Phillips arms us against the slings and arrows, as he tries to find a point to pointless suffering, while Chad Trainer explores the politics of fear with Martha Nussbaum.

Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering by Scott Samuelson WHEN INDIE BAND The Smiths were still together, and I, falling apart, was listening wistfully to their records, I remember always feeling run over by their first album’s last track, ‘Suffer Little Children’. A funeral march of mournful chords and lyrical melancholy, the song recounts the serial murders in the 1960s of five children in Manchester, some of whose bodies were found buried in the local moors. They had been sexually assaulted. For many, any attempt to make sense of pointless suffering must first begin with the suffering of innocents. Scott Samuelson begins his own ruminations in Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering with his witnessing, as a young boy, a friend being struck and killed by a speeding car. “The suffering of children,” he writes, “sharply illustrates the gap between how the world is and how we think it should be” (p.1). This divide between reality and desire is especially wide for those who must bear their own children’s suffering, as we see so poignantly in Michelangelo’s Pieta, but also terrifyingly in a figure Michelangelo helped to dig up: that of Laocoön and his two sons being tortured together. Laocoön (whose impassioned face appears on the cover of this book), along with his children, was set upon by sea serpents for having gotten his nose in the business of the gods. After warning his comrades about the ruse of the Trojan horse, he was condemned by Minerva to suffer terribly, for the crime of having acted virtuously. The famed ancient sculpture of this, found in 1506, gives exquisite, excruciating expression to the legend. Laocoön’s agony is akin to Christ’s, but he’s entirely without hope for redemption, salvation, reward, or justice. His suffering, it’s fair to say, is pointless. Like his innocent sons, Laocoön is a marbled flux of sinewy resolve and tortured resignation. The image is compelling, writes Samuelson, “because it crystallizes a fundamental, perhaps the fundamental, aspect of the human situation. The story it tells is about how suffering presents itself as point50 Philosophy Now

●

Michelangelo’s Pieta

less” (p.114). Do the right thing, do the wrong thing, it doesn’t much matter in the end: you and I will suffer all the same; and so too will our children. No Grief, No Good? How, then, asks Samuelson, are we “to relate to this bitter fact of the universe?” (p.114). Given the inevitability of suffering, what, if anything, can we do about it? What should we do about it? One thing’s for sure: we, like Lady Macbeth, can’t ever wash our hands clean of the pain. “For twenty centuries,” observed Albert Camus, “the sum total of evil has not diminished in the world” – which is to say, the damned spot of human evil won’t ever out, because it’s forever in. For example, the advent of mobile phones has greatly increased our access to information, but evidently at a high cost to our mental health. For many people, screen addiction means increased rates of anxiety, loneliness, and depression, never mind diminished attention spans infecting whole fidgeting generations. As Samuelson puts it, suffering “can never be eradicated, and when we do try to eradicate it, we generate whole new forms of evil” (p.221). Misery and pain get endlessly recirculated, exchanged, kicked down the road, or put off for a while, before boomeranging right back. Some thinkers, such as Hegel, believe that no matter the sum of suffering, the good will always outweigh the bad, and that everything works out best in the end – a theory Schopenhauer thought easily testable by polling the

December 2022/January 2023

respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other. Regardless, we, like Laocoön, live in the gap between how things are and how we think they should be: in what the poet Keats, in an 1819 letter, calls ‘the Vale of Soul-Making’. Occasionally suicidal – and in any case condemned to an early, tubercular death – Keats is apparently desperate to convince himself of “how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul. A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!” Samuelson agrees. Without such a proving ground as human life, wonders Samuelson, what opportunities would we have to realize our humanity? What need would we have for all those fields of inquiry and belief – science, technology, history, philosophy, poetry, art, religion –that enrich and give meaning to life? For Samuelson, as for Keats, “pointless suffering is where the journey of meaning-making begins” (p.4). But make no mistake: such meaningmaking comes with a cost. The Old Testament’s book of Ecclesiastes, which deals with human suffering, calculated the price of wisdom to be grief. And truth, insists the Greek tragic playwright Aeschylus, is something we must suffer into. To have it otherwise would be “a suicidal wish,” warns Samuelson: “No evil, no us” (p.105). But whatever greater good or cosmic purpose we might divine or rationalize for our suffering, we, like Jake Barnes in Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises Book Reviews

Books (1926), still want to know how to live in it. “Maybe if you found out how to live in it,” says Barnes, “you learned from that what it was all about.” This ultimately is Samuelson’s project. Nietzsche wrote “What really arouses indignation against suffering is not suffering as such but the senselessness of suffering” (The Genealogy of Morals, 1887)). He also believed “if we possess our why of life we can put up with almost any how” (Twilight of the Idols , 1889). Taking his cue from Nietzsche, Samuelson is also on a quest for meaning, for discovering what it’s all about: “this book is largely about how people have found a point in suffering: how artists have found in it the inspiration for our essential works of art, how spiritual leaders have found in it a road to God, how philosophers have found in it atonement with nature and training for our fundament virtues” (p.4). Striking Attitudes to Suffering Toward this goal of meaning-making, in the first half of his book Samuelson offers ‘Three Modern Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering’, with John Stuart Mill, Hannah Arendt, and Friedrich Nietzsche as his guides. In the second half, he puts forth ‘Four Perennial Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering’ by way of Job, Epictetus, Confucius, and (most fascinatingly to me) Sidney Bechet, a famed clarinetist who played and wrote the blues as passionately as anyone. Bechet is the expositor par excellence of what Samuelson calls the blues understanding of

“confronting suffering, living in relation to it, doing battle against it, and ultimately coming to terms with it” (p.215). This understanding informs the whole of Samuelson’s study, from front cover to final page, but especially in those passages in which he draws upon his experiences of teaching philosophy to inmates at the Oakdale Prison in Iowa, many of whom were incarcerated for life. After Covid, lockdown, and now with the threat of military escalation hanging over the world, we’re all in need of blues understanding, now as much as ever. Although Samuelson’s book went to press before Covid-19 reared its ugly head, his philosophical quest for how to live remains pressing in the age of plague, when suffering, like the falling snow at the close of Joyce’s short story ‘The Dead’ (1914) is ‘general all over’. Of course, suffering is and has always been general all over: it’s constitutive of our earthly condition, at least until further notice. But in cutting us off from easily procured entertainments and distractions (never mind from our work, our friends, our routines, and our routine busyness), the pandemic put us face-to-face with the point of our existence – or one might rather say, the pointlessness of our suffering. In so doing, Covid-19 confronts us with Schopenhauer’s sardonic conditional: “If the immediate and direct purpose of life is not suffering then our existence is the most illadapted to its purpose in the world” (On the Suffering of the World, 1850). Rather like Freud, whose practice it was to help deeply miserable people readjust Laocoön & sons at the pet shop

Book Reviews

themselves into a life of ordinary unhappiness, Samuelson wants to help us rethink our understanding of suffering so that we not only become better adapted to its pointlessness, but perhaps even may overcome it. We might, for example, strive with Mill to alleviate all debilitating forms of pointless suffering as best we can, while at the same time recognizing, in Samuelson’s words, that a “genuinely human existence requires a structure of death, suffering, and freedom” (p.109). As Mill discovered for himself – he had a nervous breakdown at a young age – vulnerability, conflict, and struggle are necessary for achieving the ancient Greek ideal he prized above all, that of eudaimonia or self-flourishing. Nietzsche, whose own indebtedness to the ancient Greeks is wellknown, also thought suffering necessary to all that’s good in life, whereas its avoidance is a far worse fate – in Dostoevsky’s term, making one unworthy of suffering. It means dooming oneself to mediocrity, to atrophying into Nietzsche’s ‘last man’, who, in making himself comfortable demands nothing higher of himself, ever. To circumvent such a fate, “Nietzsche encourages us not to tranquilize ourselves,” says Samuelson, “but to embrace life to the fullest, which means to embrace the suffering that’s inseparable from life” (p.59). Pushing the Poles Together To return once more to the duel between Laocoön and the sea serpents: this figure of pointless suffering, claims Samuelson, embodies our own existential condition, while giving us an example of how we might live in it. Like Laocoön, we have a paradoxical obligation when it comes to our own duels in life. Samuelson brings this paradox to the fore with his book’s epigraph, which is a passage taken from James Baldwin’s closing remarks in his book Notes of a Native Son (1955). Channeling Keats’ negative capability, Baldwin makes the case that if we’re not to fall into despair then we must hold two contradictory ideas in our head at once. The first is to accept “life as it is, and men as they are”, including that “injustice is commonplace.” At the same time, insists Baldwin, “one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength.” Throughout his book Samuelson attends to the same basic paradox: we must strive to fix what afflicts us with all our energy and ingenuity, while at the same time facing what we cannot completely remedy, ameliorate, eradicate, or forget suffering. Consider for

December 2022/January 2023

●

Philosophy Now 51

Books example the intractable fact of death; in Larkin’s words, the “sure extinction” which “we travel to / And shall be lost in always” (Abade, 1977). For medical doctors, death is the enemy they’ve sworn to fight, but death – their own, as well as their patients’ – is something they, like we, must also accept. And while we often try to forget what we can’t fix by taking refuge in whatever escape or facile happiness comes our way (“despair’s greatest hiding place”, warns Kierkegaard), we can’t hide forever. Sooner or later we must face facts. Samuel Beckett, a great chronicler of suffering, put it this way: “a man like me cannot forget, in his evasions, what it is he evades” (Molloy. Malone. Dies The Unnamable, 1955). As for the brute fact of our own mortality that other literary Samuel, Johnson, says it “concentrates the mind wonderfully.” We might even say, after Wallace Stevens, that ‘Death is the mother of beauty’ (Harmonium, 1923). Indeed, for Samuelson, there can be no growth, no progress, no enlightenment, no good, no truth, no room for others, no hope for self-overcoming, no authenticity, no beauty or its appreciation, without death and its faithful attendant, suffering. In saying this he aligns himself with the longstanding imperative that ‘to philosophize is to learn how to die’ – not only in the sense of coming to terms with physical mortality, but in the moral obligation to kill off as much ignorance, stupidity, and small-mindedness in ourselves as we can. At times, though, and especially in his chapter ‘Interlude on the Problem of Evil’, Samuelson sounds positively Panglossian in his faith in better things to come – as when he ruminates counterfablely on the plight of Laocoön, the loss of the Trojan War, and Aeneas’s eventual founding of Rome: “had the innocent Laocoön not suffered, there would be no Rome. No tragedy, no civilization. No pointless suffering, no humanity” (p.115). Thanks Laocoön! But for me this is a claim as silly as it is unconvincing, at least when it comes to the search for meaning. Here it’s worth bearing in mind the argument of the contemporary philosopher John Gray, who finds zero evidence for cumulative progress in the realms of ethics, politics, civilization; generally, in our so-called ‘humanity’. Whatever our current achievements in these areas, they remain ever in a state of precariousness, as history has shown time and again. It’s also worth bearing in mind a notion ascribed to Tennessee Williams: “Every path is the right path. Anything might have been anything else and had just as much meaning to it.” 52 Philosophy Now

●

Inconclusions To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, we exist perpetually in a state of emergency. This means that whatever remedy there may be for the next major crisis (fingers crossed), we cannot keep yet another catastrophe from coming round the corner. Still, with Covid, we were strongly reminded that the discoveries of science are crucial to our hopes. But so too are the humanities (including our blues understanding), which have long helped us to face what cannot be fixed, whether natural disasters, deadly viruses, social unrest, or the inevitability of death. For Merleau-Ponty, one such saving grace of the humanities is ‘true philosophy’, which, he says, “consists in relearning to look at the world.” This is precisely Samuelson’s intent with this study. In nodding to Wallace Stevens’ poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, the title of Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering implies that a monochromatic account of suffering would be as limited as seeing a bird of mystery as only black. Then again, maybe a single view of suffering will suffice after all. Maybe it’s enough to say, with James Baldwin, that “People who cannot suffer can never grow up, never discover who they are” – and leave it there. Or maybe we should all listen to The Smiths’ ‘Suffer Little Children’, and remember that some people can never grow up, never discover who they are, because they suffered too horrifically, and died way too soon. © DOUG PHILLIPS 2022

Doug Phillips teaches existential literature and philosophy at the University of St Thomas in St Paul, Minnesota. • Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering: What Philosophy Can Tell Us About the Hardest Mystery of All, by Scott Samuelson, University of Chicago Press, 2019, $25 hb, 270 pages.

The Monarchy of Fear by Martha Nussbaum MARTHA NUSSBAUM’S THE Monarchy of Fear (2018) presents itself as a look at the United States’ political crisis and the nation’s future efforts toward ‘justice and flourishing’. Indeed, the book’s subtitle is A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis. However, Nussbaum doesn’t so much discuss U.S. politics as survey the psychological factors behind it. She chooses examples from classical Greece and Rome to make her points instead of examples from the Trump/Brexit era, since she sees clas-

December 2022/January 2023

sical anecdotes as a means of transcending ‘partisan defensiveness’. Nussbaum focuses on fear as a significant factor in the U.S. outlook both generally and in politics in particular: “Fear is monarchical, and democratic reciprocity a hard-won achievement” (p.60), she writes. She frequently invokes the Roman poet Lucretius as one of her favorite authors, hailing him as ‘perhaps the first (Western) theorist of the unconscious mind’. She understands him as believing that “primary fear operates beneath the level of consciousness, tainting everything with its ‘blackness’.” For Nussbaum, fear frequently underlies the moral concerns in current politics to the extent of destabilizing democracy because “democracy requires all of us to limit our narcissism and embrace reciprocity. Right now, fear is running rampant in our nation” (p.62). U.S. citizens fear, for example, deteriorating living standards, unemployment, and inadequate health care. The American Dream of upward mobility for the duly diligent can seem a thing of the past. According to Nussbaum, insecurity by its very nature scapegoats the vulnerable Other. She also sees insecurity as making citizens indifferent to truth. We can end up preferring “the comfort of an insulating peer group who repeat one another’s falsehoods” which has leaders who are sure to afford them a “womblike feeling of safety”. Instead of engaging in constructive reflection, people resort to aggressive measures that Nussbaum calls ‘othering strategies’. For instance, anger, disgust, and envy derive from fear. Anger, abetted by feelings of helplessness, causes problems in democratic politics by distracting us from sensible solutions. In contrast, Nussbaum celebrates Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela as inspiring “noble and successful freedom movements conducted in a spirit of nonanger.” We also develop disgust toward the things our imaginations merely happen to associate with what we immediately dread, in order to sufficiently distance ourselves from them. The association of all Muslims with hate crimes is a case in point. Such ‘projective disgust’ jeopardizes equality and mutual respect. As for envy, it has posed threats to democracy ever since democracy’s inception. “It is because of a deep underlying anxiety, a root-level painful insecurity, that people engage in zero-sum competition and hate the people who succeed” Nussbaum concludes (p.143). She portrays the Roman Republic as having collapsed into tyranny due to “the positional game of rivalry, envy, and destrucBook Reviews

Books thinking; religious groups (“insofar as they practice love and respect for others”); “solidarity groups focused on securing justice in a nonviolent and dialogical way”; and theories pertaining to justice and citizenship. Social media and the internet come in for some hard knocks from Nussbaum, who argues that they have increased the volatility of politics, especially when it comes to inaccurate reporting and the way this can cascade: “When a report ‘goes viral’, emotions easily get out of control, in a way that is unlike the effect of newspaper reports, or even TV” (p.49). Attention spans, already challenged by people obsessively checking their phones,

more on the extent to which one can play the politics game ethically and self-respectfully. But The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis doesn’t feature the political analysis the subtitle leads one to expect. It reads more like a squishy self-help book. Maybe it should have been subtitled Psychological Accounts of Our Political Crisis. Although Nussbaum appreciates the merits of Kant’s ‘practical hope’, the hundreds of hours I spent subjecting myself to Kant left me convinced that philosophers should be wary of embracing Kantian hope at the risk of it degenerating into escapism, or whitewashing. I’m in favor of practical hope, provided

losing out… Mortality has skyrocketed in both sexes, for those with no college degree, but is higher among males.” (p.190) The Greek and Roman Stoics advised against hope because of its dependence on fortune. On account of the uncertainty and lack of control that hope entails, Nussbaum understands it as the “flip side of fear”, but she calls upon us to appreciate that as related as fear and hope are, hope can be practical and constructive in a way that many fears cannot. She agrees with Immanuel Kant that even when there is a dearth of supporting evidence, we should adopt hope as a ‘practical postulate’, considering the “good action it may enable.” So it can be helpful to work on the premise that people are what we hope they are. The areas of life that can facilitate hope for Nussbaum are: the arts; critical

feed into the notion that “everything worth saying can be said right away, in a trumpet of self-proclamation.” She feels that social media and the internet are therefore, on balance, more likely to function as destructive rather than constructive forces. Considering the havoc social media can wreak, Nussbaum deems it perverse to choose this as a time for reducing government funding for the arts and humanities. The arts and humanities unite people who are otherwise divided by things social media encourage: “The arts offer bridges to seeing human diversity as joyful, funny, tragic, delightful, not as a horrible fate to be shunned” (p.226). Philosophy may be good for providing ways to respect our opponents; but we need the arts and religion to show us how to be loving to them. Ideally, Nussbaum would have elaborated

that it doesn’t exist at the expense of whatever valid pessimism honesty may stipulate. The Italian Antonio Gramsci had it right when he counseled, “We should live by pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.” In any event, as one who has been fascinated with classical philosophy for decades, I appreciate The Monarchy of Fear as being at its best when drawing parallels between primal passions in our times and those in the Greco-Roman era.

IMAGE © VENANTIUS J PINTO 2022. TO SEE MORE OF HIS ART, PLEASE VISIT BEHANCE.NET/VENANTIUSPINTO

tion” [see Cicero’s Brief Life in this issue, Ed]. Nussbaum also cites misogyny as a temporarily satisfying but worthless phenomenon among envious men reluctant to face the questions of “how to reinvent love, care, and the nuclear family in an era of increasing female work and achievement” and traces much of this resentment towards women attaining leadership roles. Nussbaum stops short, however, of claiming that competition requires envy. More generally, “Envy flares up… when a group feels cut out of key good things that other people have.” She writes, “There’s no doubt that white men, particularly in the lower middle classes, are indeed

Book Reviews

© CHAD TRAINER 2022

Chad Trainer is an independent scholar engaged in a study of the history of philosophy. He is the author of Reflections on Russell: Musings on a Multidimensional Man. • The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis, by Martha C. Nussbaum, Oxford University Press, 2018, 249 pages.

December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 53

BABYLON 5

TV

Stuart Hannabuss has five questions for Mr Morden.

What Do You Want? Two of the recurring questions we ask ourselves are what we want, and what we want to be. Implicit in them is what we believe we already are, and also what we think we might become instead. We acknowledge that we have needs (like food and love) and wants (power and influence, youth and beauty perhaps, and more food and love). We know, too, that there are things we should want, shaped by the roles we know we have to play socially say as parents, or by moral or religious frameworks about mutual responsibility and environmental stewardship. We know that some of things we might want we cannot have, or shouldn’t be given, such as absolute power over others, or some scarce resource that if we had it, would cause many others to be dangerously deprived. We ask whether we have a right to be happy while others are not, or why we should live while others die. Yet we know that, if push came to shove, we would try to live even while others died. Most of us, at least. This classic collision of selfinterest and altruism is the crux of moral philosophy.

BABYLON 5 STILLS © WARNER BROS. TELEVISION

E

ven the simplest questions we ask ourselves can imply the deepest meanings and the direst consequences. The ‘how’ of the ways things work or the ‘why’ of the way things are crowd through the busy day for us all. Often there are no answers – or at least they are provisional, tentative, provocative, or unsatisfying. The questions we ask ourselves about past actions, present dilemmas, future plans are sometimes fleeting, sometime recurring; sometimes products of a stream of consciousness, other times the outcome of focused attention. They seem contained within our selves until we express them in words or action. Then others get involved, and they ask questions too, so that things get interactive and performative, and we become accountable and even transparent. We act knowing we are actors. We cannot hide from self-knowledge.

Mr Morden’s Question So it is that when four characters in the television sci-fi series Babylon 5 are asked ‘What do you want?’ by the suave, enigmatic and alarmingly well-connected Mr Morden, the question really hits home. Their answers reveal their fears and yearnings, their very identities as moral agents, and indeed determine the story arc of the entire epic. Putting things in context, Babylon 5 was first broadcast in the 1990s and was a science fiction saga about a spaceship five miles long, on which humans and representatives of a variety of alien species interacted in increasingly tangled ways. Drawing on the Babylonian myths of a world created out of the dynamic between good and evil, the series explored themes of war and peace, duty and personal desire, free will and obsession. Character shapes destiny for all the players as their decisions determine events both inside their minds and outside in the cosmos. I hope it is not too grand to suggest that the show’s concerns are teleological, deontological, and axiological (ie, to do with goals, obligations, and values/beliefs). Within the universe of this show there are new races (humans and exoticallycostumed aliens) and there are old races which lurk unseen, clutching on to power. Tensions abound: the humans and Minbari

54 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

have recently concluded a brutal war, the Narns and Centauri are careering towards mutual destruction, while the Vorlons and Shadows are light and dark versions of unbending tyranny. Science fiction has often been scorned, sometimes deservedly. Yet, in the hands of writers such as Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, the genre has been a laboratory for moral and philosophical inquiry. So it is here with Babylon 5 and Mr Morden’s question, which is “What do you want?” The four characters of whom he asks it are G’Kar the Narn ambassador (played by Andreas Katsulas), Londo Molari the Centauri ambassador (Peter Jurasik), Londo’s deputy, Vir (Stephen Furst), and the Minbari ambassador Delenn (Mira Furlan). Their responses not only reveal their true character and shape the way the plot unfolds, but also shed light on how we ourselves might respond if asked the same question. Or even if it occurred to us to ask it of ourselves. Answers to the Question Mr Morden’s question ‘What do you want?’ strikes home easily with both G’Kar and Londo, for each is driven by hatred for the other and by a lust for revenge. A long legacy of war and prejudice exists between their two races which seemingly only

TV something (like winning the lottery or having sex with lots of beautiful people) or to be free from something (like ageing or financial insecurity or political interference)? What about the future, when I shall probably not think or feel as I do now? My circumstances and hopes will inevitably change as I myself change.

Mr Morden must be nice: he drinks tea

enslavement or total destruction can resolve. Their answers are full disclosures, transparent and stark: what I hate I destroy; what is different should feel pain and then die; what I want is complete power. It is a Faustian pact for both, for the Shadows manipulate them into compliance, each believing the other at fault (the Shadows work below the radar). Their ultimate destiny is literally to destroy each other. Vir and Delenn respond more thoughtfully. Vir is knowing but sceptical, conscious of the dangers of getting what you ask for. Delenn possesses second sight and appreciation of her history. Both reject Mr Morden’s offer – of trusting their destiny to a force that seems to offer everything they’ve ever dreamed of – knowing that the world is not like that, and realising that their moral integrity is being tested.

fact, if and when we ask it of ourselves, or if someone else asks us? And so we move into the valuable philosophical realm of questions about questions. For many of us there would be the issue of trust. Can I trust myself to deal with this honestly and realistically, not just expediently or in terms of mere wishes and daydreams? Can I trust the person making the offer enough to disclose to them something so personal, so close to the bone? Once over that hurdle, what should I say? Do I want to give a good impression, hide a shameful truth about myself, disclose a childish fantasy? If I answer the question asked, what might my answer imply about my beliefs and values, and are these socially acceptable or antisocial, reactionary, selfish? If I say, do I want to have or do

Questions for the Questioner It is not enough to reflect, however subtly, on the impact of Mr Morden’s question either on the characters in Babylon 5 or on ourselves. We don’t even need to be philosophers to recognise that ‘What do you want?’ is a core existential question. Wanting and needing, obligation and selfinterest, harm and consequences, nature and nurture, past and future, values and beliefs – they are all there. As a result, I would suggest five questions are worth raising with Mr Morden. Of course, we will have to set aside our knowledge as viewers that, for all his beguiling human form, Morden represents evil forces – think Screwtape, Machiavelli, Stalin, and the Devil in one debonair package – or resist the temptation to warn the characters to guard their tongues. Now we are set to confront Morden face to face. Our first question has to be ‘Why do you ask me what I want?’ You might get a circular answer: ‘Because I would really like to know’; or an insincerely plausible answer: ‘Because I like you and want to help you’. But then – he would say that, wouldn’t he! Is there a hidden agenda?

Me and my

Questions about the Question J. Michael Straczinski, the creator of Babylon 5, explores many religious and philosophical dilemmas in the series. The Temptation of Christ in the Bible springs to mind here. Naturally, he presents and explores these issues through story and character, yet it is usually clear what moral and intellectual questions are being raised. They concern ourselves and, for instance, how we might respond to Mr Morden’s questionable offer. How do we respond, in

Shadows

December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 55

TV

Does this offer come with strings? What motivates it? People don’t generally offer help unless they expect something back. Let’s hear what you have to say, Mr Morden – and then I can judge for myself. Our second question should be ‘Who do you represent?’ We know from advertising and marketing that people who ask you questions like ‘What do you want?’ are likely to want to sell you something or get you to join something or change your opinions about something. Everything comes with something. Morden speaks only of “the people I represent”, never spelling out who exactly they might be. He is phishing and scamming: don’t fall for his sweet talk. The third question is a time-tested one: ‘How long will it be before I realise the consequences of telling you what I want?’ We know from hard experience that the future exposes the errors of decisions we make in the present, and we are continually trying to correct past mistakes. Wishes have consequences, as human beings have found from Faust to Edith Nesbit’s children who meet the Psammead. Implied in that is the subsidiary query – what happens if I want to change my mind? With the Shadows, there is no going back. Like Bilbo in The Lord of the Rings, we enter a world where moral choices and their outcomes are ineluctable. With our fourth question we should turn to the issue of truth: ‘How can you assure me

that what you say is true and not a lie?’ Are you on the up-and-up, as we might say. But beyond that, is it possible to know whether any offer to give someone ‘whatever they want’ can feasibly be delivered? This is not some small loan, after all, but an eschatological point of no return, after which nothing will ever be the same again. Vir sees through Morden’s spurious claims to honest altruism and rejects his offer. He also foresees Morden’s own destruction by his puppetmasters. Our final question needs to probe into the nature of reality itself. Science fiction, like religion itself, inhabits border-lands between the real and the unreal, and its replicants and avatars have become commonplace features of virtual reality. So it is only right to ask Mr Morden how real he really is and believes he is: “What is the nature of your existence, Mr Morden?” His innocent question is leading and loaded. His manner evokes distrust. His claim to be able to give you whatever you want is unnervingly open-ended. To offer anything or everything you might ever want, or what above all you want at the time, implausibly suggests the omniscience and omnipresence of a Creator. Where, then, does Mr Morden come from and is he truly and reliably human, as he seems? Later in the series we learn that in fact Mr Morden is a dead human artificially resur-

56 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

rected by the Shadows to serve as their agent. We also come to know that Shadow presences stand invisibly beside him in all his encounters. Which all sounds a little creepy. Is it fanciful for us to imagine an aura of evil around some people? After all, we often speak of evil when for instance dreadful murders take place, even if we’re not religious. Concluding We ask ourselves questions about the future all the time: will I, can I, should I? When we do so, we confront ourselves with versions of Mr Morden’s question. We want to be free to, and free from; we must balance wants and needs, duty and self-interest, morality and expediency; what we think, and what we know we are. Philosophy and the social sciences have equipped us with a battery of ologies to deal with questions about questions: teleology, deontology, axiology, eschatology, ontology, and others. Even though Babylon 5 is science fiction, Mr Morden’s question is very real. And we all might some time meet a real Mr Morden, with his ‘so good there must be a catch’ offer, so we all need to be ready with some good questions. © DR STUART HANNABUSS 2022

Stuart Hannabuss has been a Humanist chaplain and is a writer and reviewer based in Scotland.

of the Month Q uestion What Grounds or

? ?

?

Justifies Morality? Our readers give their reasons, each winning the right to a random book. “Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. Imagine that you are doing this but that it is essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature... Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me. Tell the truth.” ― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.

W

ould you consent? Bentham’s utilitarianism justifies the morality of an action on the principle of ‘maximising the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ of people. Kant insists that one’s actions possess moral worth only when one does one’s duty for its own sake, and in this sense consequences are morally irrelevant. What matters, according to Kant, is what we ought to do, which reason alone can establish. Kant believes morality is grounded in reason: we are not only sentient beings, governed by the pleasure and pain delivered by our senses; we are also rational beings, capable of freedom. We must be capable of acting according to laws other than the laws of physics. If our actions were governed solely by the laws of physics, then we would be no different from objects or animals. Kant further argues that we must be capable of acting according to the moral law we give ourselves, and this law is determined by reason. However, his conception of reason is different from that of the utilitarians, who view human beings as capable of only instrumental reason. The job of instrumental reason is to figure out how to maximize satisfying our desires for pleasure and happiness. But for Kant, reason is not just the ‘slave of the passions’ as David Hume called it, but of ‘pure practical reason’ – ‘‘which legislates a priori, regardless of empirical ends.” If reason was simply an instrument to achieve our desires – “if that were all reason amounted to”, Kant says, then “we would be better off with instincts.” Moreover, unlike individual feelings, emotions and desires that are chaotic and based on self-interest, reason is universal and so establishes our moral duties as categorical imperatives that must be demanded of all rational beings. Therefore, I believe that morality can be justified only by reason, regardless of how many people we make happy or unhappy. And our moral duties are… Well, every reasonable person knows what they are! NELLA LEONTIEVA , RANDWICK, NEW SOUTH WALES

T

hose examples which comprise the vast history of ethics are what potentially ground or justify morality. It’s up to us to discover from this considerable history those instances sufficiently cogent to provide a foundational, even universal basis – as was ambitiously approached by Parfit in On What Matters (2017). Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) is an apt starting point for considering this question. Kant argues that making moral choices and judgements presupposes, even necessitates, that we are free agents; that our choices and judgements are not beyond our control. This forms the basis of our duty to take moral responsibility, and so ‘‘act only according

to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.’’ These rational grounds are undermined by those who deny free will, claiming that all our motives and behaviour are determined and best understood through reductive scientific explanations, from the psychological to physiological, then chemical, and ultimately to those of physics. To logical positivists, for example, the claims of metaphysics, ethics, and theology, were meaningless. However, their disdain for mystery and metaphysics was met with a joint "No!" from those Metaphysical Animals featured in MacCumhaill and Wiseman’s recent book (2022) – Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch. This group of four Oxford friends are credited with breathing new life into philosophy and ethical thinking. PN’s own review of the book calls them “leaders in demolishing the logical positivism and moral relativism that dominated English-language philosophy in the mid-twentieth century.” (Issue 151). In ambiguous contrast, the American pragmatist Richard Rorty, though eschewing the relativism simplistically associated with him by critics, nevertheless implies a version of moral relativism when claiming that “belief is caused by nothing deeper that contingent historical circumstance” (Contingency, Irony and Solidarity,1989). However, this claim presumably applies equally to his own position, too. COLIN BROOKES, LOUGHBOROUGH, LEICESTERSHIRE

W

estern philosophy offers three major justifications for morality, associated with three well-known philosophers. Followers of Plato would say the basis of morality is self-interest; those of Hume’s school of thought claim it is other-regarding interests, wants or intentions; and Kantians argue it is justified in terms of the requirements of practical reason. Of course, every moral theory claims that its method for determining right and wrong is correct. Kant argued that reason must be at the heart of any moral action, despite any natural desires to the contrary. His categorical imperative is a necessary and non-negotiable principle. Moral relativism further complicates the issue by denying any universal moral values; saying, rather, that different cultures and sub-cultures often have markedly differing values, and these can change depending on opinion, social context etc. Nietzsche challenged that there is no objective or transcendent justification for moral claims. A kind of moral relativism first arose in ancient Greece, but didn’t really take off until Montaigne’s writings in the sixteenth century. If one is religious, then God/Allah/Jehovah lays down absolute moral truths to live by. Other moral absolutists argue from a non-religious standpoint that there are universal principles that ought never to be violated, regardless of context or consequences. I think we each have our own moral principles based on our individual upbringing and social context. However, I would argue December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 57

?

?

that the majority of people in most cultures would agree on some basic morals, such as treating others how you wish to be treated, do not hurt or kill others, etc. I would defy anyone to argue that murder, or child abuse, for example, is not universally wrong. (I allow that it’s not always clear cut: I’m firmly pro-women’s rights in the abortion debate, but it could be argued that termination of a foetus is murder, and thus wrong). My personal morality is not based on religious belief but on humanism – the principle that every individual has an equal right to live a full life and be free from harm. So in that sense I am somewhat of an absolutist, although I also feel that many aspects of moral relativism are valid. Moral principles of some kind are clearly needed for society not to descend into anarchy. But there are many shades of grey between right and wrong. ROSE DALE, FLOREAT, WESTERN AUSTRALIA

I

start with the premise that organisms such as ourselves have been formed via a process of evolution by natural selection, and further, that any altruistic tendencies we possess have been formed due to the complex of behaviour including those tendencies having a net benefit to our ancestors. If one adds the further premise that morality has arisen due to an attempt to rationalise or formalise our sense of altruism, this leads to the conclusion that morality is grounded in our nature, formed through evolution by natural selection. Someone might argue that morality was arrived at purely rationally or, notwithstanding the origins of the moral sense, that there is a rational grounding and justification for morality, or perhaps morality is a diktat of some sort of supernatural agency. However, the acceptance of such reasons or diktats would itself still need to be grounded or justified. The rational approach articulated by Kant, is the idea of a moral imperative that any rational intelligence would acknowledge. Or as per utilitarianism, might there be a moral imperative to consider the maximising of a measure such as general happiness or flourishing? Another attempt at asserting a rational justification for morality is Aristotle’s contention that being moral or virtuous will tend to lead to a better life. Thus, morality becomes rational on the premise that wishing for a better life is rational. I think all such approaches rely on further premises regarding the intrinsic worth of others, and some judgement as to what makes a better or more sustainable life or society, and of the means to achieve that. These further premises themselves contain value judgements, which are not intrinsically rational. Values may be shaped by rationality, but, as Hume pointed out, they cannot be derived by logic purely from facts about the natural world. If one accepts this then whatever their merits in helping guide our actions, rational approaches can never be the grounds or justification for morality. Instead, morality is grounded by our nature, by our feelings. Justification independent of our feelings, is not available. LAWRENCE POWELL, LONDON

M

orality would have no meaning in a universe without conscious beings. A thermostat might be faulty, but we do not literally claim that it lies. A forest fire may be all-consuming, but it is not actually greedy. Hence, morality is absent from a strictly objective account of the world. Rather, morality is something that arises from conscious experience. In this sense, morality is necessarily ‘subjective’. However, that does not for a moment mean that moral right and wrong are a matter of personal opinion or taste. If it did, there could be no moral debate, or indeed any possibility of revising one’s moral judgement, since according to the subjective view, whatever one judged to be right initially is therefore right by definition. A similar objection applies to the more widespread view that morality is nothing more than the current collective preference of a community. The way we debate moral questions implies necessarily that there are grounds outside our 58 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

?

current communal judgements to which we need to refer. So where in our experience can such grounds be found? Suppose that my mind was so constructed that, although conscious myself I was unable to recognize consciousness in anyone else, and simply regarded other people as moving parts of my environment, in the same way that I regard a wristwatch or a river. Moreover, suppose that I had no conception of a future self. There are indeed creatures with just such a consciousness – possibly including new-born human babies. With such a mind, I cannot see how I could have any idea of right or wrong. Indeed, babies are not usually regarded as morally responsible for their actions; nor most non-human species, for that matter. Now relax that idea. To identify with others, and imagine the pleasure or distress that could result from kind or unkind actions on my part, I now find myself passing critical judgement on myself for neglecting the former or performing the latter. Thus, the morality of altruism depends crucially upon the experience of identification with others. Likewise, the morality of self-discipline depends crucially upon the experience of identification with a later self. In short, the fact that our minds our constructed so that we are prone to experience actions as if we were another self, or a later self, gives us the motivation that is the starting point of morality. ROGER S. HAINES, LONDON

L

ike it or not, religion is morality’s anchor. It grounds morality, and tells us what we ought to do. Why? Ancient Pyrrhonian skeptics such as Sextus Empiricus argued for moral skepticism by introducing the concept of isostheneia or ‘equipollence’ – the idea that every moral argument point has an equally rational counterpoint. This concept was never disproven. But moral skepticism, like an ultra powerful solvent, dissolves categorical imperatives and utilitarianism calculations alike. Once applied, the skeptical critique cannot be unlearned, leaving no moral absolutes, and morality merely becomes taste. Secular readers scoff at the idea that God gave the tribe of Israel eternal moral truths codified as the Ten Commandments on a mountaintop in the Sinai desert millennia ago, or that Jesus Christ reiterated as the Son of God that we are to ‘love the neighbor as the self’ (Leviticus 19:18). Yet divine communications to the sages through the ages has had a huge impact on morality. Moral truths cannot be proven, but they resonate through our lives, since we always act or try to act as if they are true. As Rupert Shortt notes in God is No Thing (2017), “Christianity’s stress on the radical equality of all, and the founding of hospitals, schools and other philanthropic institutions, were [sic] genuinely revolutionary.” A sailor was asked what the most important piece of equipment on a sailboat is. They replied “A good anchor!” When the wind blows hard in the wrong direction, you need a source of moral absolutes and a good anchor. And as Henry Bergson writes in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), “through religion all men get a little of what a few privileged souls possess in full.“ CARL STRASEN, PETALUMA, CALIFORNIA

G

uidelines ruling out negative behaviour between a society’s members, are justified and grounded both in practical considerations and in those one might call spiritual or emotional. It is less likely people will respect you and seek to do you good if you do not respect them. It is therefore prudent to promote moral behaviour. But morality is of even more value when derived from virtue, that is, a genuine desire to benefit one’s fellow creatures. Practising benign emotions leads to happiness – your own or others’ – whereas the negative emotions, or indifference, lead to unhappiness through their harmful effects. And happiness gives purpose to life, being therefore rational. One can only either ‘just live’, or have a reason for living which one is seeking to actuate. So to live without a reason, a purpose, would be illogical. In fact only What Grounds or Justifies Morality?

?

?

a lower organism could simply live. A fully conscious, sentient being would seek a purpose for living and identify it as emotional gratification. That gratification should include the uplifting feeling we experience when treated to the milk of human kindness, and the sense of wellbeing from knowing you have saved a life or done something to improve a life’s quality. One might object that if happiness is the crucial thing, the virtues which promote it are devalued. But to think the virtues to be more important would be like maintaining that a paint brush mattered more than the painting it was used to create. This we don’t do; at most we will say that for practical purposes, the paint brush is as important as the picture, since you can’t have the picture without it. Admittedly not everyone behaves ethically from truly virtuous motives, rather than from pragmatic social conditioning, and some people are amoral or cruel. But this doesn’t invalidate the point that we have good reasons for behaving well. GUY BLYTHMAN, SHEPPERTON, MIDDLESEX

I

believe that the foundation and justification for morality is Guilt. The anticipation, avoidance and presence of guilt are the most constant single basis I can offer for morality. Guilt, as Heidegger might say, discloses itself to us ‘as is’. In individual moral judgement, are we not trying to minimise guilt? ‘Did I do the right thing?’ can often be seen as,’ Am I guilty?’ And guilt can succeed where argumentation fails. Humans can reason themselves into awful things. Evil can be utterly calculated, and in this sense, rational, but no amount of reasoning or smooth-talking can cover our guilt at our own wrongdoing. When we try, anger and confusion overtake us. Guilt comes from within, and that’s what grounds and justifies it. Facing someone we have wronged, or intend to wrong, may have no effect, or illicit an indignant rage. But guilt itself must be self-generated. Someone else cannot be guilty for us, and no one can confer guilt onto us. The justification for morals may be logical or traditional to others; but to us, if we feel guilty, then we cannot morally justify ourselves. Morality is communal through guilt too. In Old English, ‘gilt’ was something’s price – what was owed for it – specifically, what was owed as a result of transgressions. This aspect to guilt, this feeling of ‘owing’, is necessary for moral justice. For justice to transcend mere force, the transgressor must feel contrite: they must feel guilty, and act accordingly. Moreover, morality must be reciprocal in a functioning community, and not only operate at the individual level. This feeling of ‘owing’ others for our wrongdoings provides us the image of justice as balanced scales. Punishment must function as a tool, the ends being the realisation of guilt in the subject and their desire to absolve it. Do we not feel a bit revolted when someone, no matter how prosocial otherwise, is incapable of guilt, of remorse? True guilt is what tells us the person can be forgiven, that trust in them can be restored, and that they are moral. ANDREW KEILLER, ANGUS, SCOTLAND

W

hy should someone be moral if they know that by breaking the law they will be able to escape the consequences? If I’m sure that by robbing a bank I’m going to get rich and that nobody’s going to arrest me, why wouldn’t I? In the Republic, Plato says that even if they escape human law, an offender must face the possibility of punishment after death. Some philosophers agree with Plato that when one follows the dictates of reason and conforms to the moral law, one acquires a form of inner harmony, a mental health that makes happy. Otherwise, inner imbalance makes one deeply unhappy. Aristotle for example considers that only by observing the moral law is a person led to happiness, as people reach their telos, completing the purpose for which they were created. So for Plato and What Grounds or Justifies Morality?

?

Aristotle, moral behavior contributes to the life of humans in harmony with their inner world and their fellow human beings, identified with happiness or mental balance. Morality also guards the coherence of societies, outside of which we cannot live. Selfish motives are not always predominant: very often there are positive feelings of compassion, sympathy and love towards others. This comes from a mental need for communication and solidarity amid the hard trials we face in life. This is the most essential answer to the question of why one should be moral. Since we accept that we must maintain an moral attitude to life, we must consider the following principles. Any moral judgment has a practical character. In essence, it guides us on how we should act in our lives. Moral judgments are universal by nature. The same principles apply in similar circumstances, and to people with similar characteristics. In making and acting on moral judgments we must consider the rights and interests of other people, as our behavior always affects them too. We must understand certain values as essential components of justice; for example, the common good, impartiality, equal treatment, and respect for basic individual rights and freedoms. Finally, we must cultivate the virtues which will allow us to act correctly in situations of moral dilemmas. STYLIANOS SMYRNAIOS, CRETE

I

t’s actually two different questions. As far as what grounds morality: pretty much nothing. That’s the bad news, and why people feel so free to be so immoral. It’s the nihilistic perspective we all potentially share even if we resist or pose philosophical principles against it – principles that ultimately prove to be little more than human constructs based on assumptions that float on thin air or upon the underlying nothingness of things. The nihilistic perspective is why most of our discourses break down to basic assumptions that have nowhere to go and result in standoffs. Take, for instance, the debate over abortion, which always breaks down to arguments about when human life begins. I mean, to what criteria are we going to turn to adjudicate the argument? Nature? If we went by that criterion, we would still be primates guiltlessly killing anything inconvenient that didn’t belong to our immediate tribe. Maybe religion, then? After the Inquisition and the burning of supposed witches, we can all see where that can potentially lead. The good news and upside of the nihilistic perspective is that there is nothing about nothing that requires a negative outcome. So while it might undermine any solid ground for embracing a given transcendental moral principle, nihilism also undermines any grounds for not embracing that principle! This allows for the pragmatic fallback of embracing it simply because it works better than not doing so. In other words: mere practicality justifies morality while not offering an ideological grounding for it that some potential despot might use to oppress others. This is why we have to practically embrace certain transcendental principles such as compassion, equality, liberty, and whatever respects the worth of the other, while taking the ironic stance of recognizing this acceptance for what it is: an attitude that just makes us feel better about being in the world. D E TARKINGTON, BELLEVUE, NEBRASKA

The next question is: What Is Time? Please give and justify your answer in less than 400 words. The prize is a semi-random book from our book mountain. Subject lines should be marked ‘Question of the Month’, and must be received by 13th February 2023. If you want a chance of getting a book, please include your physical address. December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 59

allis T in Wonderland From far, from eve and morning, And yon twelve-winded sky, The stuff of life to knit me Blew hither: here am I. AE Houseman, A Shropshire Lad

I

want to invite you to navel-gaze along with me. It’s an activity that has had a bad press, and has become a by-word for an excessive focus on one’s self, or for an inward-looking preoccupation with a narrow range of issues that excludes awareness of the wider world. But there is a more respectable mode of contemplating one’s navel: omphaloskepsis as an aid to meditation, in which the omphalos (a.k.a. navel or umbilicus) becomes a window on a world beyond the horizon of quotidian concerns. Facing The Darkness Somewhere between the inward-looking gaze of the narcissist and the world-encompassing vision of the omphaloskeptic mystic, there is the objective gaze of the anatomist. It reveals that the item rather dismissively called ‘the belly button’ has a surprisingly complex structure. Have a look and you will see a central bump called the mamelon; a dense scar, or ‘cicatrix’; a slightly raised skin margin, like a fortification, around the mamelon and the cicatrix, known as the ‘cushion’; and the ‘furrow’, which take the form of a depression inside the cushion and surrounding the mamelon. I hadn’t noticed all this until I began researching this article, and so was reminded yet again of how brushing is our acquaintance with our own bodies. Ignorance, like charity, begins at home. I am not sure that I could pick the back of my hand – which I know ‘like the back of my hand’ – out of an identity parade. My navel would be even more resistant to identification in a line-up. Under my skin, of course, darkness rules. The ‘embodied subject’ is a strange creature, as its body has only limited transparency to its subjectivity. We subjects know little of the fleshly kit necessary for our existence and with which we are to some unspecifiable 60 Philosophy Now

●

An Invitation to Navel Gazing Raymond Tallis requests the pleasure of your company for this most philosophical of gatherings. degree identified. I possess organs I have never seen (thank heavens), and am the beneficiary, and to some extent the product, of cellular processes of which I have little ken. Our alien navel reminds us of our hybrid nature as embodied subjects. It also reminds us of the strange time when we grew towards the possibility of ourselves. This scar is the shriveled remnant of the umbilical cord, cut moments after we exchanged the unlit uterus for a bright extra-uterine world which would inflate over the years from a cot to continents; from William James’ ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’ to a life structured and regulated by the timetable and the calendar. Our belly buttons point backwards in time to the first of our many beginnings. Examining it – looking through the layers of curriculum vitae built up over the days, weeks, years, and decades since we greeted the world with howls of distress – we are reminded how and when our story began. It is a relic of the lifeline that connected us to the placenta clamped to the uterine wall. The fat, wobbly straw of the umbilical cord ensured a constant and reliable delivery of oxygen and nutrition, and the removal of carbon dioxide and other metabolic waste – all necessary for the life we had to maintain to grow towards independent viability. The mark left by its removal is a reminder of those months where, neither patiently nor impatiently, we suffered our coming into being. The embryologist Lewis Wolpert has argued that, in the miraculous journey beginning with single-celled zygote born of the fusion of a sperm and an oocyte, and resulting in an entity that would ultimately have sufficient wit to catch a bus, run a business, bring up a child, exhibit icy politeness, or take a position on the Oxford comma, the most portentous step was gastrulation. Gastrulation marks the emergence of an embryonic architecture in which an inner layer of cells is differentiated from an outer layer of cells: a more important landmark, Wolpert says, than birth, marriage, and death. Indeed, this is probably the most

December 2022/January 2023

significant evolutionary innovation in the animal kingdom, since it is the first step in the emergence of complex life. Herein lies the root of all insides and outsides, of surfaces and depths, and ultimately, of the embodied subject who distinguishes the ‘I’ in here from the ‘it’ out there. Welcome To The World During the nine months of his mindless self-assembling, of structuration and differentiation, in which his accumulating body played an increasing role in creating the environment within which his genes would be expressed, your columnist was at best dimly aware of the outside world. It would be many years before he learnt that his gastrulation took place roughly at the time that Stalin declared the beginning of the Cold War, Trans Australia Airlines made their first international flight, Clement Atlee revealed his plan for Indian Independence, Pope Pius XII announced the appointments of twelve new cardinals, and the first general-purpose computer began operation. An unimaginable world was awaiting him, as, courtesy of his umbilical cord ‘the stuff of life to knit me’ was harvested by his growing self. As for that world, it was – and is – utterly unlike that inhabited by any other living creatures. Just how unlike is captured by Ludwig Wittgenstein in the opening lines of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921): 1. The world is all that is the case. 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

By ‘world’, Wittgenstein means the human world rather than the material universe. It is a ‘Thatosphere’ of stuff made explicit by conscious subjects; a realm woven out of the shared intentionality of vast numbers of consciousnesses present and past, forged out of a boundless conversation in which the baby will come to participate as it progresses from howls that register the distance between how things are and how it would like them to be, to smiles and

Navel gazing in 2nd C. Rome. At the Louvre

allis T in Wonderland before it acquires an understanding of its weight, and a bit more before it learns to weigh itself and worry about what’s on the scale. But the length of that interval before it can possess its weight by speaking of it as ‘my weight’ does not make the cognitive journey any less amazing.

gestures, isolated words, and ultimately, to full-blown dialogue. I highlight the distance between the material universe and the human world in response to philosophers who claim that we are ‘just animals’, or theologians who see us as fallen creatures. According to St Augustine, “we are born between faeces and urine” (inter faeces et urinam nascimur). This was not intended as a guide to midwives. Rather, it’s his way of pulling us down a peg or two by reminding us of the rather messy start of our lives. But while this description of our doorway into the world is literally true, it is not the whole truth. No other animal picks out this fact and reflects on what it might say about our nature – and, even less, does so in Latin. We are also reminded of our profound difference from other mammals by the fact that the umbilical cord is cut by a pair of scissors, manufactured to a high standard and imported into the delivery room from some considerable distance, rather than gnawed through by the midwife or mother. In the action-packed minutes that follow, the difference from all other beasts, even from our nearest primate kin, is widened, as we acquire certain particulars that we carry throughout our lives. For instance, our date and time of birth is documented – so we are located in a universal calendar; and we are soon united with the name by which we will introduce ourselves and be introduced to others, and will learn later to write down, or spell out letter-by-letter over the phone. Even more astonishingly, we are almost

immediately gathered up into a quantitative world of assessments and measurements. Thus was it recorded that, at 6:30 a.m. on 10th October 1946, the cooking of Raymond Tallis into the rawest of raw youths was complete and shortly after the cutting of the physical cord – anticipating the future cutting of many symbolic, metaphorical cords – I sat my first examination and was awarded my first marks. My pulse, respiration, general appearance, and activity were all assessed. Had I been born six years later; this would have been totted up to the eponymous score introduced into neonatal practice by Virginia Apgar. To these details would be added my weight, which, next to my sex, would be the particular most eagerly sought out by well-wishers. All of these checks were intended to establish whether this minute, newly-forged, link in the Great Chain of Being was a going concern. I have mentioned ‘my weight’, and readers with long memories may recall how thought-provoking I have found this ‘possessive’. (‘What a Possessive! On Being Embodied’, Philosophy Now Issue 112, 2016). It is especially striking when we think of it as ascribed to a newborn, who is no more able to ‘possess’ this vital statistic as applied to itself than is a bag of vegetables being weighed in a grocer’s shop. I dwell on this to highlight how extraordinary it is that the newborn will eventually embrace a world defined by quantities so thoroughly as to be able to quantify itself. Admittedly, it will be some time – and indeed some kilograms –

Return To The Source And so, I return to my navel to unpack more reflections from this memorial of the months before my entry into the world, and of the first minutes of the first day of my life. That Raymond Tallis should have begun at that particular time is difficult for Raymond Tallis to grasp except as a mere matter of objective fact. I can say it, but I cannot realize it; cannot truly encircle the truth that I entered the universe at a point in its history – and so late in that history. While I know objectively that the universe existed long before I was aware of it, before a minute part of it became ‘my world’, I cannot imagine the endless dark centuries of my absence, lit by the retrospective virtual gaze of factual knowledge. Yes, it is easy to say that the universe has managed without my presence for all but about a two-hundred millionth of its existence, and to acknowledge that I turned up 13.7 billion years after Nothing exploded into Something; 4.5 billion years after the Earth peeled off from the rest of the material world; around 4 billion years after life began in the modest form of single cells; and 200,000 years after so-called ‘modern’ humans first walked the earth. I can rehearse these facts, but, because everything prior to my flash of sentience – made available to me courtesy of being curated by the mouths, pens, and relics of others – covers such vast stretches of time, I cannot truly think them. Given that it was so long before the stuff of life got round to knitting your columnist, and, indeed, you, my reader, it is a pity that so brief an interval separates our beginnings from our endings. © PROF. RAYMOND TALLIS 2022

Raymond Tallis’s latest book, Freedom: An Impossible Reality is out now.

December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 61

Subscribe to Philosophy Now philosophynow.org/shop 6 IDEA-PACKED ISSUES FOR £20/US$35 By subscribing to the print edition of Philosophy Now you can save up to 38% off the newsstand price, have your copies delivered to your door and enjoy unrestricted access to our vast online archive of past articles! Subscribe today at philosophynow.org/shop or fill out and return one of the coupons below. Subscription inquiries: [email protected] or phone 01959 534171 To tell us about a change of address, please email [email protected]

UK / Rest of World

United States

Name _____________________________________________

Name _____________________________________________

Address ___________________________________________

Address ___________________________________________

__________________________________________________

__________________________________________________

Email (for password) ________________________________ Subscribe to Philosophy Now for 6 issues (1 year) Subscribe to Philosophy Now for 12 issues (2 years) UK Canada New Zealand Australia Europe Rest of World

£20/£35 (GBP) $43/$76 (CAD) $49/$89 (NZD) $50/$88 (AUD) 27€/48€ (EUR) £26/£45 (GBP)

starting with Issue 153/Issue 154 (delete as appropriate) Buy The Ultimate Guide to Aesthetics Buy back issues in PRINT (please specify issue numbers) ______________________________________ Buy _____ binders to hold back issues (insert quantity) TOTAL AMOUNT PAYABLE: _________

Email (for password) ________________________________ Subscribe to Philosophy Now for 6 issues ($35) Subscribe to Philosophy Now for 12 issues ($64) starting with Issue #153/Issue #154 (delete as appropriate) Buy The Ultimate Guide to Aesthetics Buy back issues in PRINT (please specify issue numbers) ______________________________________ Buy _____ binders to hold back issues (insert quantity) TOTAL AMOUNT PAYABLE: $_________ Please make your check payable to ‘Philosophy Documentation Center’ or fill in your Mastercard /Visa /Maestro card details below:

Please make your cheque payable to ‘Philosophy Now’ or fill in your Mastercard /Visa /Maestro card details below:

Card no.

Card no. Expiry__________________ Security Code___________ Name on card _______________________________________________ and send it to: Philosophy Now Subscriptions Kelvin House, Grays Road, Westerham, Kent TN16 2JB, United Kingdom

Name on card _______________________________________________ and send it to: Philosophy Documentation Center, P.O. Box 7147 Charlottesville, VA 22906-7147 U.S.A.

62 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

Expiry_________________ Security Code__________

(You can also order on 800-444-2419 or email [email protected])

Back Issues & Digital Editions Back Issues in Print Issue 152

Issue 151

The Ultimate Guide Series

God: Ontological argument, theology vs philosophy, humility, unreliability, Deism, Kierkegaard / Mini-focus on time / Soviet Spinoza / Foucault / WandaVision

Greek philosophy: motion, myths, Socratic dialogue, Aristotle’s happiness, Eratosthenes / Levinas / Be Really Good Digital Liberty focus / Morton interview

We still have copies of these earlier back issues: 55-63, 65-80, 83-89, 91-98, 100-106, 108-116, 118-121, 125-139, 142-144,148-150

You can also buy PDFs of all past issues. For full details, please visit philosophynow.org/shop

Each Ultimate Guide is a collection of some of the best articles from past issues of Philosophy Now, and some new material too. Each is divided into five chapters covering the main aspects of a core philosophical topic. Full colour, 116 pages. The Ultimate Guide to Aesthetics is now out. You can buy it from newsstands, or from our website shop in print or as a PDF.

Back issues in print cost £4.75 each if you live in the UK (inc p&p) or US$10/9€/A$15/C$15/NZ$16/£8.50 elsewhere via airmail. For every three you buy, we’ll give you a fourth for free (please tell us which you would like).

The Ultimate Guide to Ethics, Ultimate Guide to Metaphysics, Ultimate Guide to Mind and Ultimate Guide to Theory of Knowledge are all available as PDFs from our website shop.

Binders: Our smart green Philosophy Now binders with gold lettering each hold 12 magazines. UK£11, US$25, Europe 22€, Australia $35, Canada $35, NZ$37 or Rest of World £19.

Including postage The Ultimate Guide to Aesthetics costs: £9.25 or $18.95 (USA), 14.75€ (Eur), Aus$28, Can$26, NZ$29, or £16 (Rest of World).

Digital (see philosophynow.org/digital) Website Subscriptions

Print subscriptions to Philosophy Now do not include access to the digital editions below, but do include access to our website which has over 3,000 articles from past issues. A password is available on request to print subscribers or is sent automatically if you subscribe online. You can also buy a website-only subscription from our store at: philosophynow.org/shop

Gifts and Merch A wide range of Philosophy Now t-shirts, coffee mugs, tote bags and other gifts in a bewildering variety of designs are now available from our partners Spreadshirt. All sales help to keep our editors and illustrators supplied with gin and biscuits. Please follow the link at the foot of the philosophynow.org/shop page to visit our store on the Spreadshirt website.

IP-based online access is available for

schools and colleges – please visit philosophynow.org/institutions

Philoso

phy Now

App Available in the Apple App Store.

Free sample issue included. Kindle Buy a single issue or an ongoing

subscription. (30 day free trial) Nook Available in the USA via Barnes & Noble’s Nook reader and the Nook app. (14 day free trial) Zinio There is an edition for the Zinio app on iPad and

Android. Single issue or ongoing subscription. Pocketmags There is an edition for the Pocketmags app on iOS and Android. Single issue or ongoing subscription.

December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 63

Obituary

Saul Kripke (13th November 1940 - 15th September 2022) Stefan Rinner tells us about Kripke’s theories and why they matter. s philosophers, we find again and again that ‘What is philosophy?’ is as difficult a question as any other philosophical problem. However, in the middle of the twentieth century, there seemed to be a simple answer to it: philosophers primarily analyze concepts. Accordingly, answering the question “What is knowledge?”, for example, was tantamount to answering the question “What is the meaning of the term ‘knowledge’?” The reason why philosophers thought that their craft consisted primarily in analyzing concepts was a certain theory of meaning – the so-called ‘description theory of meaning’. According to this, the meaning of a referring expression is given by a description uniquely picking out the referent of the term, i.e. the thing in the world to which the term refers. For example a proper name such as ‘Napoleon’ has the same meaning as a description such as “the French emperor who was defeated at Waterloo”, or as a bundle of such descriptions. Thus, answering the question of who Napoleon was is just giving the meaning of the name in terms of a description: “Napoleon was the French emperor who lost at Waterloo.” Similarly, answering the question “What is knowledge?” is just giving the meaning of the term ‘knowledge’ through an equivalent description. In this way the description theory of meaning gave a simple understanding of what philosophical problems and their solutions are. At only thirty years of age, in 1970, Saul Kripke shattered this understanding of philosophy with a groundbreaking lecture series which later became his book Naming and Necessity (1980). In these lectures Kripke put forward powerful arguments against the description theory of meaning, in particular against the description theory of proper names. According to that hypothesis, the referent of a name is determined by a description, or by a bundle of descriptions, that the speaker associates with the name. Against this, Kripke points out that there are cases where the descriptions that a speaker associates with a name do not pick out its actual referent. For instance, many speakers who know the name at all associate the name ‘Peano’ only with the description “the discoverer of the Peano Axioms in mathematics.” But that description actually picks out Richard Dedekind, not Giuseppe Peano! Nevertheless, as Kripke points out, with their uses of ‘Peano’ the speakers are referring to Peano. Furthermore, there are cases where speakers do not even associate a name with a description, in the sense that they don’t pick out exactly one object with their description, but nevertheless, that

A

64 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

is how they use the name. For example, with the name ‘Cicero’ many speakers only associate the property of ‘being a Roman orator’. Therefore, Kripke proposes that rather than being determined by a description or set of descriptions, the referent of a name is determined by a so-called ‘communicational chain’. The first link of such a chain is someone dubbing an object with its name. The other links of the chain are borrowings of this name from one speaker to the next. This is also known as ‘the causal theory of reference’. Kripke goes on in Naming and Necessity to extend the causal theory of reference from proper names to natural kind terms, such as ‘water’ and ‘tiger’. A similar theory had been proposed by Hilary Putnam, and, following the work of Kripke and Putnam, philosophers such as Tyler Burge and Michael Devitt have argued for different extensions of the causal theory of reference beyond proper names and natural kind terms, covering, among other things, social and artificial kind terms. In this way, Kripke’s work has completely changed professional philosophers’ understanding of meaning, from an internalist view – according to which the meanings of our expressions are descriptions or bundles of descriptions in our heads – to an externalist view – which claims that the meanings of our expressions are nothing other than their referents out there in the world. This is why causal theories of reference are often also referred to as ‘semantic externalism’. Semantic externalism has had far-reaching implications for philosophy. For example, by arguing for a causal theory of reference for proper names and natural kind terms, Kripke singlehandedly rehabilitated a philosophical discipline that had suffered badly under the description theory of meaning – metaphysics. After all, if questions regarding the nature of things such as knowledge or Napoleon are only questions regarding the meanings of the linguistic expressions ‘knowledge’ and ‘Napoleon’, then this implies that when talking about reality we are not in fact studying reality itself, but only human language use. In which case metaphysics, as the study of the fundamental nature of reality, seems to have no real subject matter. Playing into the hands of the description theory and the associated linguistic conception of metaphysics, was the fact that, before Kripke, many philosophers thought that everything that is necessarily true can be known by reasoning alone – that is, a priori – and that everything that could be known a priori was necessarily true. From this they concluded that everything that

SAUL KRIPKE BY DARREN MCANDREW

Obituary

is necessarily true has to be true because of the meaning of the sentences used to formulate those truths. This would explain why necessary truths can be known by reasoning alone. Kripke countered this line of thought with one of his main insights, which is that it does not follow from the fact that a sentence is necessarily true, that its truth can be known by reasoning alone. For instance, if Goldbach’s conjecture (a theorem about prime numbers) is true, then it is necessarily true: it can never have been false. However, as Kripke points out,

from this it follows neither that the truth of Goldbach’s conjecture can be known by reasoning alone, nor, indeed, that it can be known at all. Once Kripke had rejected the description theory of meaning and the equating of necessity with being a priori, the way was paved for his intuitive view that both objects and natural kinds have properties that are necessary for their particular existence. This view is known as essentialism. For instance, according to Kripke, Napoleon could not have existed without being a human being: if something wasn’t

human, it wasn’t Napoleon. Similarly, Kripke argues that tigers could not have existed without being mammals. Hence, even though it cannot be known by reasoning alone that ‘Tigers are mammals’ is true, nevertheless, for Kripke, the sentence is necessarily true, and moreover, it tells us something about the nature of tigers independent of the meaning (that is, definition) of the natural kind term ‘tiger’. Rehabilitating metaphysics in this way was also of great importance for Kripke’s work on modal logic. This is the brand of logic involving modal operators, such as ‘It is necessary that…’ or by contrast ‘It is possible that…’. In particular it was important in connection with quantified modal logic, which studies the interplay of the modal operators of ‘possible’ and ‘necessary’ with logical quantifiers such as ‘every’ and ‘some’. While he was still in his teens, Kripke developed an original interpretation of quantified modal logic using so-called ‘possible worlds’. Nevertheless, many philosophers were skeptical when it came to quantified modal logic, since by allowing quantification (some, every, etc) into modal contexts (for example ‘Every tiger is such that it is necessary that it is a mammal’), quantified modal logic seems to presuppose some form of essentialism. Therefore, by rehabilitating essentialism, Kripke also vindicated his early work on quantified modal logic. Kripke was sometimes described as having a certain fondness for philosophical puzzles and paradoxes, and this is certainly true. However, as has been suggested in these few lines, his views are probably as comprehensive as they can be for a philosopher of the twentieth century, replacing the linguistic conception of philosophy which was predominant in the middle of the twentieth century with a view that puts metaphysical considerations first. In this way, Kripke leaves us not only with a better understanding of philosophy, but also with a better appreciation of his and our fondness for its puzzles and paradoxes. Saul Kripke died on September 15 2022 at the age of 81. © DR STEFAN RINNER 2022

Stefan Rinner is an interim professor in philosophy of language at the University of Hamburg.

December 2022/January 2023 ● Philosophy Now 65

Fiction

The Great Crumpled Paper Hoax

66 Philosophy Now ● December 2022/January 2023

air to dust and the paper to gold. ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said to myself, ‘like a yellow diamond’. I was reminded of G.K. Chesterton’s line, “all is gold that glitters.” Suddenly a bizarre thought bombarded my brain. I leaped to my feet. “Eureka!” I shouted. “I’ve found my gimmick!” With trembling hands I picked up from the kitchen counter a vertical spike mounted on a wood base that I use for spearing grocery receipts. I removed the receipts, retrieved my crumpled sphere, then pushed it down partway onto the spike. Next, I sprayed the ball a bright blue. From a distance it looked like a NASA photograph of the Earth – only an Earth with a lovely crumpled surface. The following day I showed the construction to my cousin Archibald. “Magnificent!” he exclaimed. “My gallery is booked through August and September, but in October I can display, say, a dozen of your new works. Of course, you’ll have to change your name.” So I changed my name from Joseph Johnson to Francis Feemster. The October show was a huge success. The New York Times critic warbled about how my crumpled paper modeled the crumpled state of the Earth environmentally. All twelve of my spheres were sold. MOMA then bought a huge ball that I made from a complete Sunday edition of the Times, using glue to fasten the outer layers. For the Brooklyn Museum of Art I provided a large blue ball mounted on a spike, in turn mounted on a wooden cube that contained a tiny motor and two AA batteries. The motor rotated the ball slowly from east to west. The following year I shifted to my pink period, followed by a multicoloured period, using crumpled Sunday comic pages. A Chicago manufacturer bought the rights to mass-produce the balls in colored plastic. Of course they sold for much lower than my originals. Time devoted three colorful pages to what they called ‘crumpled paper sculpture’. Feemster became famous. After Hazel and I were married, we moved to a high-rise apartment on Charles Street in the Village. A well-known art critic is taping our conversation for a biography. I’m now in my black period. The black symbolises the future of the Earth. It goes without saying that Hazel and I have been extremely careful never to let on that crumpled ball art is a put-on. The deception continues to distress us. I’ve been drinking more booze than I should, and my dear wife is hinting that maybe it’s time to check into detox. If I drink myself to death, she tells me, she’ll see that a crumpled ball of concrete will rest on top of my tombstone. © MARTIN GARDNER 2022

The late Martin Gardner was an American popular mathematics and science writer, and a novelist, among many other things.

PAPER BALL

he trouble with your art,” said Hazel, my significant other, “is that you don’t have a gimmick.” It was a hot day in July. I was sitting opposite Hazel in a small basement bar in Soho, on Manhattan’s lower east side. Above us was the Archibald Gallery, where fourteen of my paintings were hanging. It was my first one man show. The exhibition had been a colossal failure. Only one newspaper, the New York Times, covered the show, and the art critic who reviewed it called it “the most vapid show” he had seen in decades. Not a single picture sold. “It’s not just that you don’t have a gimmick,” Hazel went on. She had an annoying habit of always saying exactly what she was thinking, even when it pained a listener: “It’s not just that you need something to distinguish your work from everybody else. It’s that you never learned how to draw.” I winced and put down my glass of beer. Hazel was telling it like it was. I couldn’t paint a decent-looking cow if my life depended on it. “You’re right as usual, my love,” I said. “But what can I do? I refuse to get up at six every morning to go to a job I hate – a job that can’t lead anywhere.” “If you want my advice,” she said, “which I doubt… Forget about landscapes and realism. Go abstract. If your painting is totally non-objective, nobody can tell whether it’s good or bad. But you have to have a gimmick. You have to have something everyone will recognise as your trademark, a unique selling point.” “Gimmick’s a good word for it,” I said. “Did you steal it from that magician friend of yours? Well, I’ve racked my brain for a fresh gimmick for years. But it ain’t easy to think of one. I can’t paint each one a different color, for instance. That’s been done. And I can’t slash the canvas with fat blue brush strokes like Klein, or paint the canvas a solid color like Reinhardt, or glue broken dishes to the canvas, or decorate it with elephant dung...” Hazel flourished her empty glass as signal to the bartender. “Well, keep trying. Have you thought of moving from paint to minimalist sculpture?” “Like Andre’s pile of bricks?” “Yes, like Andre’s pile of bricks.” I paid the tab and we parted: Hazel to her basement brownstone apartment, I to my lonesome loft in Brooklyn. Next morning, during breakfast, I read another review of my show. It was even more scathing than the first. The Brooklyn Eagle wondered “Is the show a deliberate joke?” I ripped out the double pages, crumpled them into a ball, and hurled the ball across the room. It struck a wall then bounced to the uncarpeted floor, where a sunbeam from a skylight turned the

“T

© NIKHILESH HAVAL 2008 PUBLIC DOMAIN

A fantasy by Martin Gardner.

Joseph is dead. Is he in heaven or hell? Worse, Hyleberia!

Demystify baffling language and understand fascinating concepts with this brand new guide by Philosophy Now’s Anja Steinbauer.

A young gambling addict dies in a random toaster fire, but wakes up on a mysterious island called Hyleberia where he is given the chance to start a second life.

The Republic of Reality available in print or for Kindle at: tinyurl.com/RepOfReality

laurenceking.com

The Ultimate Guide series from Philosophy Now

Issue 1 Reissued in print

Issue 4 Available in print

Issue 2 Available in print

Issue 5 Available in print

philosophynow.org/shop

#HumansWanted

It takes human intelligence to make the artificial kind MSc Digital Politics & Sustainability | MA Philosophy | MA Philosophy & Artificial Intelligence MSc Responsible Artificial Intelligence | MSc Computer Science (Software Development)

nulondon.ac.uk