False Moves in Philosophy and Social Theory: Losing Public Purpose (Political Philosophy and Public Purpose) 3031350278, 9783031350276

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POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC PURPOSE

False Moves in Philosophy and Social Theory Losing Public Purpose

Patrick Murray Jeanne Schuler

Political Philosophy and Public Purpose

Series Editor Michael J. Thompson, William Paterson University, New York, NY, USA

This series offers books that seek to explore new perspectives in social and political criticism. Seeing contemporary academic political theory and philosophy as largely dominated by hyper-academic and overly-technical debates, the books in this series seek to connect the politically engaged traditions of philosophical thought with contemporary social and political life. The idea of philosophy emphasized here is not as an aloof enterprise, but rather a publicly-oriented activity that emphasizes rational reflection as well as informed praxis.

Patrick Murray · Jeanne Schuler

False Moves in Philosophy and Social Theory Losing Public Purpose

Patrick Murray Philosophy Creighton University Omaha, NE, USA

Jeanne Schuler Philosophy Creighton University Omaha, NE, USA

ISSN 2524-714X ISSN 2524-7158 (electronic) Political Philosophy and Public Purpose ISBN 978-3-031-35027-6 ISBN 978-3-031-35028-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35028-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Jose A. Bernat Bacete/Moment/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For our children, John Patrick, David, and Savita, and their loved ones

Preface: Conceptual Healing

False Moves in Philosophy and Social Theory is a set of essays on diverse philosophical topics with a common thread. The aim of False Moves is to identify fundamental problems that recur across philosophy, the false moves made by what we call factoring philosophy. As these false moves pit philosophy against common sense, philosophy loses public purpose. False Moves is modeled after Thomas Nagel’s Mortal Questions , to which it replies. False Moves may also be compared with Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue in that it investigates broad consequences of modern philosophy. MacIntyre argues that a catastrophe for moral philosophy has occurred. While we share MacIntyre’s appreciation for Aristotle and Aquinas, we look more to modern thinkers who renew the Aristotelian tradition— Hegel, Marx, the Heidegger of Being and Time, and Donald Davidson. In its philosophical stance, the book is close to Frank Farrell’s Subjectivity, Realism and Postmodernism: The Recovery of the World in Recent Philosophy. Farrell, however, pays little attention to Nagel, and Marx plays no role in his work. False moves arise from phenomenological mistakes; they involve treating as separable what can be distinguished analytically but is inseparable. For example, we can distinguish the color of the apple from its shape. But color cannot exist without shape. Factoring philosophy mistakes what is distinguishable but not separable for the separable. Employing a phrase coined by James Collins, we call these “purist splits”; the philosophy characterized by them we call “purist philosophy” or

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“false philosophy” or “factoring philosophy.” Most damagingly, factoring philosophy takes the subjective and objective to be separable, positing the purely subjective and the purely objective. Taken to be separable, the self and the world each reduces to an unknowable thing-in-itself or is discarded.

Factoring Philosophy Confounds Common Sense and Sidelines Philosophy Like the wave of a magic wand, false moves make the familiar disappear. If we consider a range of conclusions reached by factoring philosophy, it is no wonder that philosophy remains on the sidelines of public life. Some of the claims of factoring philosophy that are widely held are the following. They correspond to the chapters of False Moves. We will show that defective concepts resulting from false moves are involved in these claims. We reject them all. Concepts are stipulated; as purely subjective posits, concepts cannot be tested by experience. Only a judgment (proposition) can be tested to determine if it is true or false. Life—biological, human, or both—is absurd. Fear of death is irrational. Being dead is something for which I will not be present, so death means nothing to me (Lucretius). Only what I completely control counts. My thoughts matter, but the world and others should be treated with indifference. Those who do so, stoic sages, make themselves invulnerable. Human beings are, or should be, egoists. There is no moral luck. Moreover, the elimination of moral luck by factoring out (purely subjective) intention as the only morally relevant consideration collapses action into (purely objective) behavior. So, moral responsibility becomes a mystery. The right is independent of the good; the right determines what is just in public life. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder: all values, moral, aesthetic, and more are purely subjective. Nothing is good or bad, beautiful or ugly.

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The purely subjective can be factored out of experience, leaving the purely objective as a residue, an unknowable thing-in-itself. Like an “epistemic Midas Touch,” thinking sabotages our efforts to know the world. No footholds remain for the discourse of truth and error. Social theory can do without concepts of specific social forms of wealth and production, such as the commodity and capital. Wealthin-general (as opposed to wealth, which does not exist in general) is a fundamental concept for social theory. Utility (as opposed to the useful) is a fundamental concept for social theory. (Purely) instrumental action (as opposed to purposive action) is a fundamental concept for social theory. Analysis is independent of phenomenology. Moreover, since neither necessity nor universality can be derived from experience, there is no place for phenomenology. False moves foster global skepticism. When basic features of human existence are deemed obstacles to knowledge, global skepticism results. Global skepticism shuts down thinking. By contrast, local skepticism— doubt concerning a specific issue—spurs thinking. Global skepticism gives rise to doubts about what is true, good, or beautiful; to make judgments turns into being judgmental. The difficult virtue of tolerance shrinks to indifference toward the content of beliefs. In Against the Academics , Augustine appeals to a courtroom to present global doubts as false. A skeptical young man caught in adultery casts about for reasons to doubt the judgment that he is guilty. Perhaps the aggrieved husband was dreaming. Perhaps it only appeared to be adultery. Perhaps other bodies and minds do not exist. If objections of global skeptics were reasonable, then who could be convicted of a crime when the standard is proof beyond a reasonable doubt? Of course, the court will dismiss these objections and treat them as a joke. Factoring pervades the history of Western thought. It traces back to Hellenistic philosophies, Stoicism, Skepticism, and Epicureanism, and it shapes modern philosophy. Hume and Kant, Quine and Nagel, are factoring philosophers. We draw on Bishop George Berkeley’s critique of abstract ideas, echoed by David Hume, to argue that philosophical analysis and phenomenology are inseparable. Analysis is needed to draw distinctions, but analysis cannot determine whether the distinguishable is separable; only phenomenological inquiry can.

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By “phenomenology” we do not intend any special school of phenomenology. As we speak of it, phenomenology is experiencebased inquiry into whether what analysis distinguishes is separable. Phenomenology is the necessary complement to analysis. David Hume appeals to phenomenology in this sense when he speaks of a “distinction of reason.” Following Berkeley, Hume observes of a white marble sphere that we can draw “a distinction of reason” or analytical distinction between the whiteness of the marble and its spherical shape, but we cannot separate the two, the way I can take the ring off my finger. Officially, Hume allows only for relations of ideas and matters of fact or existence. But determining that the whiteness and the spherical shape are inseparable is neither. It is an experience-based judgment of necessity, a phenomenological judgment. To assess concepts, we put them to a phenomenological test. Like other judgments, phenomenological ones are fallible. To be unaware that, in doing philosophy, phenomenology is inseparable from analysis makes false moves likely. We turn to “just enough phenomenology” to remedy defective concepts. Just enough phenomenology determines when the distinguishable is not separable. It constitutes the antidote to factoring and frees philosophy from global skepticism, clearing the way for philosophy to do its work of developing good fundamental concepts. Just enough phenomenology works from Martin Heidegger’s primary claim, his opening existential of Dasein: humans exist in the world. Dasein is not separable from the world. The compound expression “being-in-theworld” stands for a unified phenomenon. This primary datum must be grasped as a whole. It requires recognition of what is inseparable. While being-in-the-world cannot be broken up into components to be pieced together, this does not prevent it from having several constitutive structural factors. Put in Hume’s terminology, being-in-the-world is a complex phenomenon about which we can make many distinctions of reason; that is, we can isolate, conceptually, multiple aspects that are inseparable. Just enough phenomenology means that analysis and phenomenology are inseparable for any philosophical task. The faulty phenomenology that separates mind from world generates categories that fall on one side of the purist mind/world divide. The main task of analysis conducted within this horizon of thinking is to factor out the subjective from the objective. Philosophy becomes factoring philosophy. For factoring philosophy, subjective means purely subjective and objective means purely objective. We make the phenomenological

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judgment that all concepts that presuppose the division of pure objectivity from pure subjectivity are defective. Factoring lends itself to false moves that confound common sense and relegate philosophy to the sidelines of public discourse, resulting in loss of public purpose. For an anti-factoring thinker like Donald Davidson, pure subjectivity is a myth. Davidson’s conception of triangulation offers a phenomenological critique of factoring. With triangulation, the factors of language, speakers with interests, and the world are not “incomplete” on their own; they are not on their own in the first place. To think otherwise is a false move. The proper task of philosophy is to identify phenomenological errors rather than the fruitless attempt to factor out the purely subjective from experience. Our aim of conceptual healing in False Moves is to recover the self and the world as knowable. The terminology “factoring philosophy” offers an alternative to the persistent but elusive contrast between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy. It is a conceptually sharper term for classifying philosophical positions. Factoring cuts across the familiar categories of rationalism, empiricism, critical philosophy, and pragmatism. Factoring undermines the discourse of truth and error, substitutes values for goods, and collapses the determinate categories needed for social theory. The seminal essays by Quine and Davidson criticizing “dogmas of empiricism” are better construed as criticizing dogmas of factoring philosophy. There are more dogmas of factoring philosophy. We identify fifteen in Appendix A.

Developing Good Fundamental Concepts To reveal truth belongs to philosophy’s aim. Developing good fundamental concepts is integral to this aim. C. I. Lewis, a model factoring philosopher, takes the stipulative approach to concepts. Purely stipulated concepts are not informed by experience; they are frictionless. They cannot run up against the way things are, hence, they cannot be ascertained as true or not. They are purely subjective, “in the speaker’s mind.” René Descartes initially claims that truth and falsity pertain only to judgments. But he reconsiders that position and allows for a kind of concept that he calls “materially false.” A concept is “materially false” when it represents as something what is nothing at all. The phenomenological mistakes that we call false moves result in concepts that are “materially false” in Descartes’ sense, for there is nothing for them to represent. We call these “pseudo-concepts.”

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In rejecting the purist split between the subjective and objective, we reject stipulating concepts. Concepts are not purely subjective; they are worldly. Davidson compares a concept to a sunburn; both involve exposure to the world. Experience-based judgments enter not only into determining the truth of propositions but also into achieving concepts adequate to expressing truth. Because concepts involve phenomenological presuppositions, reaching good concepts involves just enough phenomenology. For example, the subjective (or projection) theory of value takes values to be purely subjective, which presupposes that the subjective is separable from the objective. If the subjective is not separable from the objective, then the subjective conception of value has taken a phenomenological wrong turn before uttering any propositions. To distinguish the subjective from the objective is often useful. When the ordinary ways of distinguishing subjective from objective fall into purist splits, however, a changeling emerges. Defective concepts rely on the changeling of the purely subjective. This is the original bad abstraction, the pivotal phenomenological error that dogs thinking. It generates the dogma that the activity of the subject in knowing is necessarily falsifying. The “epistemic Midas Touch” claims that subjective involvement per se bars us from knowing things. Whatever Kind Midas touched turned to gold. In the epistemic version, whatever the subject touches becomes “subjective.” This popular dogma presupposes the false move of splitting pure subjectivity off from experience. Factoring out the purely subjective from the purely objective cancels the discourse of truth and error. The purely objective and purely subjective confound common sense. In ordinary life we employ the distinction between subjective and objective without creating conundrums. With factoring, a useful distinction surrenders to false moves and blocks thinking. Purist splits do violence to the phenomena and produce defective concepts. These pseudo-concepts are unworldly in that they falsely split off from the world, including the social world and its constitutive forms. Pseudo-concepts presuppose the phenomenologically untenable separation of the subjective and objective, including social objectivity. Once mind is severed from world, it is a hapless task to show how one matters to the other. With truth conceived of as the purely objective, untainted by subjective handling, purist empiricists look to immaculate perception to find the immediately given. To free ourselves from the impositions of words, George Berkeley urges us to stick to naked ideas, while Francis Bacon looks to minimize the involvement of the intellect. Try not to

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think seems to be the message. Purist philosophy lacks friction: it is unworldly. Purist thinking engenders the factoring impulse. Action, for example, is factored into pure intention—the strictly subjective—and pure behavior—the strictly objective. Some purist philosophers go on to rate the subjective factor at nil, a mere illusion, and factor it away into the purely objective: things just happen. As Thomas Nagel believes, when we assume “the view from nowhere,” there are no actions—only events. How, then, do we make sense, worries Nagel, of holding ourselves and others responsible? Though the essays in False Moves are largely critical, the book’s purpose is a constructive one, conceptual healing. When philosophy stops giving itself the runaround, it is freed to return to its native task, discovering the truth. Hegel captures the change in philosophical attitude and discourse that we seek when he advises us to quit worrying about what is subjective and what is objective—the subjective and objective are inseparable—and focus on determining what is true. Likewise, in the final sentence of his seminal article “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Donald Davidson puts Hegel’s point into an American idiom. When we see through the dualism of conceptual scheme and world, we return to the world, the worldly self, and the focus on truth and error as opposed to factoring the subjective and objective. Subjective mediation is not eliminated; what we abandon is the dogma that taking an active role in knowing is per se falsifying. For each pseudo-concept, a phenomenologically sound concept is missing. We need to conceptualize adequately what these defective concepts seek to disclose. Worldly concepts presuppose the inseparability of the subjective and objective, of the individual and the social. We need phenomenologically sound concepts of absurdity, death, the self, selfishness and self-love, moral responsibility, wealth, usefulness, and purposive action. Conceptual healing replaces pseudo-concepts with concepts informed by the world. Each of the chapters of False Moves addresses one or more key pseudo-concept. The defective concepts (in italics) are followed by their phenomenological remedies. Global absurdity. Healed with a worldly concept of local absurdity that the defective concept of global absurdity undermines. Death as only a future event (for which we will not be present, so it need not concern us). Healed with a worldly concept of death being anticipated throughout a human life so that our existence is being mortal. In Heidegger’s expression, “being-toward-death” is an existential feature

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of the human way of being. To project into the future involves lifelong anticipation of death. The Stoic concept of the self (what Kierkegaard calls “the infinite self” and Davidson calls “the featureless self”). Healed with a worldly concept of the self as a being-in-the-world that is a social being, a being-with other humans who reproduce themselves within a specific mode of production that is a way of life. Philosophical egoism. Both descriptive and prescriptive egoism rely on what we call “philosophical egoism,” which assumes an unworldly conception of the self. That solipsistic self excludes the vice of selfishness and the virtue of self-love. Healed with a worldly conception of the self that rejects “philosophical egoism” and allows for the vice of selfishness and the virtue of self-love. Moral luck. The unworldly concept of moral responsibility presupposes the purist conception of the self which is responsible only for its choices (its own “doing”) and forces the conclusion that there is no moral luck. Healed with a worldly conception of the self that yields a worldly conception of moral responsibility and allows for moral luck. The right conceived of as separable from the good. Michael Sandel describes this false move as justifying the right independently of the good. Plato’s Republic rejects separating the right (justice) from the common good. Healed with a worldly conception of the right as inseparable from the good. Value and preference. Value is conceived of as purely subjective; values are bestowed by the preferences of subjects. Healed with worldly concepts of goods and bads, concepts that reject the purist split between the subjective and the objective. Wealth-in-general, utility, and instrumental action. These three defective concepts lie at the basis of much contemporary social and economic theory. Social formations change, so there is not one answer for healing with worldly concepts. For societies where the capitalist mode of production prevails, Marx’s capital is the most adequate concept. Errors connected to nominalism take various forms. Actual societies are formed in particular ways. General terms glide over the determinations that define kinds of societies. The concepts of wealth-in-general, utility, and instrumental action involve nominalism. This nominalism presupposes that goods (useful things), intentions, actions, roles, and relationships are separable from forms of useful things, intentions, actions, roles, and relationships—forms that nominalism discards as fictions. To

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factor out the social form presupposes “the illusion of the economic,” that society can be characterized in terms that lack specificity. In taking the provisioning process in general as its object of inquiry, economics presupposes that the production and distribution of wealth are separable from the social forms and purposes constitutive of any provisioning process (or that we can simply ignore social forms and purposes). Elizabeth Anscombe criticizes nominalism where knowledge of physical things is concerned. The move that she finds in John Locke, namely, to dissociate a thing from all its identifiable qualities, treating them as subjective impositions on what the thing is in itself, leaves us with a mysterious something I know not what. Anscombe corrects the phenomenology implicit in John Locke’s account of perception, which purports to carve the purely subjective away from the purely objective. Things are inseparable from their qualities; we cannot perceive a thing prior to or independently of its qualities. To perceive a thing is to perceive a kind of thing. Pleasures, actions, and sensations come in kinds. For example, lying exists as a kind of action. The notion of pure pleasure lacks purchase on experience. Pure pleasure does not exist. Humans experience the pleasures of a cool drink when thirsty or the pleasure of the sun breaking through the clouds on a dreary day. In erasing these intentional objects, we lose the particularity of pleasure and with it the pleasure itself. The cause of the pleasure will always have a definite form, and that form will be a factor in making the pleasure what it is. This is to make for pleasures the anti-nominalist point that Anscombe made for perceptions, namely, that a perception is always a perception of this or that. The same holds for pleasures. The phenomenological truth that we do not willy-nilly determine pleasure’s form is evidence of the intentional character of pleasure. Likewise, the idea of “consequences” in what is popularly referred to as “consequentialism” in contemporary moral philosophy is nominalist. It is beyond the horizon of this discourse of “consequences” to judge that one is vain, judicious, a liar, an embezzler, a friend, an adulterer, a murderer, a saint, or a torturer. No such morally freighted descriptions of the consequences of actions are recognized by the discourse of “consequentialism.” Rather, all consequences are morally neutered and fed into a calculation to gauge their moral significance.

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Philosophical Phrases that Realign Discourse Identifying pseudo-concepts and restoring conceptual connection to the world—conceptual healing—is one goal. A further way that our book can shift philosophical discourse is with cogent phrases that realign discourse. Examples of such phrases from twentieth-century philosophy include “the dogmas of empiricism” (W. V. O. Quine and Donald Davidson), “scientific revolution” and “paradigm shift” (Thomas Kuhn), “the myth of the given” (Wilfrid Sellars), and “the naturalistic fallacy” (G. E. Moore). We introduce the phrases “factoring philosophy” and “false moves” to point up the bad consequences of separating analysis and phenomenology. “Factoring philosophy” and “false moves,” in conjunction with the phrases “purist philosophy” and “just enough phenomenology,” encapsulate the central idea of False Moves. We believe that these phrases have the capacity to transform philosophical discourse. They shift the discursive horizon to disclose phenomena that the established discourse keeps from view. “Purist philosophy” and “factoring philosophy” allow us to characterize historical thinkers as well as to detect false moves in current philosophical efforts. Such phrases can help to shift philosophy away from factoring toward a renewed discourse of truth and error, of good and bad, of saying what and how things are in the world. Our phrases dovetail with what Davidson calls “the new antisubjectivism,” with the understanding that it is the purely subjective that we oppose, not subjectivity. The only way to recover actual subjectivity, which is worldly and social, is to uproot the purist conception of subjectivity and to stop trying to factor subjectivity out of experience. Subjectivism, not subjectivity, is the problem. We agree with Davidson that setting aside the purist conception of the subjective gives rise to new problems, notably error. These problems are welcome; they resurface with overcoming global skepticism and recovering the discourse of truth and error. A further way that our book can change philosophical discourse is by putting phrases once taken for granted in a harsh light. In identifying the vocabulary of factoring, we hope to make readers reconsider popular phrases of factoring philosophy. They include: “value added,” “net contribution,” “subtraction,” “paring down,” “stripping down,” “discount for,” “conceptual scheme,” “posit,” “construct” (as in pure construct), “order” (as the mind ordering the world), “introduce” (as

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to introduce unity into sensation), and “projection” (as to project something purely subjective onto the purely objective world). Tell-tale notions of false philosophy such as global absurdity, egoism, utility, and instrumental reason also fit this mold. Correcting the horizons of discourse leaves us wary of language once readily employed.

Historical Materialism and Factoring Philosophy At many points in False Moves, we expose and explore the affinities between the persistence of factoring philosophy and the social forms constitutive of capitalist societies. False Moves takes a historical materialist approach to modern and contemporary philosophy. Marx and Engels wrote in the German Ideology that a mode of production is a way of life. This is the basic phenomenological truth of historical materialism; it represents a watershed in human self-understanding. Ways of life have implications for ways of thinking. Before Marx, Adam Smith recognized that how we employ ourselves affects our understandings. The new reading of Marx, “die neue Marx Lektüre” as Germans call it, gives us fresh reasons to draw Karl Marx and historical materialism more deeply into contemporary philosophy, especially as it concerns the foundations of social theory. New features of the world come to light when we read Marx as a critical analyst of specific social forms, such as the commodity, money, wages, profit, and capital. Marx is not so much a radical economist bent on redistributing wealth as he is a revolutionary aiming to overturn the social form and purpose of wealth in capitalism. Marx does not pretend to write a generally applicable economics book about the wealth of nations. He does not adopt the classical labor theory of value as developed by David Ricardo. The opening sentence of Capital breaks with political economy. Marx’s subject matter is not “the wealth of nations” but societies in which the commodity is the dominant social form of wealth, societies where wealth is produced on a capitalist basis— where money is invested to make money. Marx’s largely ignored or misinterpreted concept of capital should be the cornerstone of social theory. What is the aim of a commercial society? In the first book of his Politics , Aristotle addresses what he calls “retail trade.” The proper purpose of money, he says, is to facilitate the commercial distribution of goods and services, not simply for life but for the good life. To determine what is the good or virtuous life requires an in-depth understanding of human

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nature. Retail trade, directed at making money, undermines the good of society. In the classical tradition of Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, a just society is not separable from the good of human beings. Modern thinkers largely abandon this view. In asserting the priority of the right over the good, liberals break with the classical tradition to advance an outlook that harmonizes with capitalism. Here money has no special role to play in fostering virtue; it is simply an efficient means of exchange. These thinkers celebrate market society for having no compulsory collective goal. Individuals are free to choose their own path; a commercial society is a just society because it refuses to impose any vision of the good life. The good is factored out from justice. This esteem for markets fails to see that a commercial society presupposes a capitalist mode of production. If so, an Aristotelian should turn against a commercial society. Money is not merely a useful facilitator. Capitalist societies have a compulsory goal: accumulating capital. When capital accumulation breaks down (recessions and depressions), capitalist societies go into crises that put the world in turmoil. For a society to pursue a different compulsory good would be to challenge capital’s dominance. Capitalist society disguises itself as the economy-in-general, either having no aim at all—leaving goals up to buyers and sellers—or else being directed at the seemingly benign goal of efficient production and distribution of wealth. The notion that a just society has no compulsory collective good is based on the illusion inculcated by capitalism that there can be such an aimless society and, moreover, that capitalism is that society. But capitalism is not aimless, and there can be no such neutered society. The general concept of wealth has little content and limited usefulness. Falling into “the illusion of the economic” is one of the risks involved with this conceptually poor concept. It is easy to stumble into thinking that because the general concept of wealth is useful there exists wealthin-general. Likewise, we can slip into thinking that, because the general concept of the labor process is useful, there exists a labor process in general. Here flawed phenomenology distorts the use of unobjectionable concepts. Martha Campbell observes of Marx that he sees how capitalist production falsely presents itself as the creation of wealth “pure and simple,” which is then mistaken for its purpose. Because the capitalist mode of production presents itself simply as the production and distribution of useful things, we take it to be production-in-general—something impossible.

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General concepts have limited use. Production per se does not exist, but feudal or capitalist production does. It is a false move to factor social form and purpose out of wealth and production in describing any society. To make this false move means that we lose the central insight of the German Ideology: a mode of production is always a way of life, thick with moral, social, legal, and political consequences. Marx summarizes the point when he says that production is always conducted through a specific form of society. This seminal conception of historical materialism involves a phenomenological judgment that wealth and production are inseparable from their constitutive social forms and purposes. To grasp the difference between general categories and determinate categories, compare how Marx begins Capital to Adam Smith’s “wealth of nations.” Marx begins Capital by answering a question that Smith and mainstream economics, whether classical or neoclassical, fails even to pose. What is the social form and aim of wealth? Marx’s pursuit of that question leads him to answer the further question—inseparable from the first— what is the social form and aim of the production process? Thus, he begins Capital with the wealth of those societies where the capitalist mode of production prevails. Here, new useful things are produced as commodities to make profits. In capitalism, wealth is generally produced in the social form of the commodity. Wealth in any society takes a specific form. In directing their attention to “wealth” and “production” without any determining social forms or purposes, Smith and mainstream economists prove themselves to be factoring philosophers. Robert Heilbroner called the classical political economists the “worldly philosophers,” but, in overlooking the social form and purpose of production and wealth, they prove unworldly. Philosophy is directed at the formation of good concepts. False Moves calls attention to two seminal concepts developed by Marx that for the most part have been overlooked or misconstrued. The first is the general concept of a mode of production as a way of life. That concept dispels “the illusion of the economic,” which is produced by the false move of factoring constitutive social forms and purposes away from wealth and production. This phenomenological truth of historical materialism represents a watershed in human self-understanding. It has been ignored or, under the pressure of factoring philosophy, misconstrued as a reductive form of technological determinism. The second is Marx’s concept of capital. Marx states that developing the concept of capital is essential because it is the foundation of

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modern society. The classical political economists view capital as a thing or resource. In the absence of an adequate concept of capital, social theory turns to pseudo-concepts such as wealth-in-general, utility, and instrumental reason and action. Marx refutes the political economists’ concept of capital as a thing—any produced means of production—rather than a constitutive social form with the all-consuming purpose of capital accumulation. If Marx is right, then most of social theory today lacks crucial conceptual resources. It is a sorry chapter in the history of social theory that Marx’s refutation should be ignored and that economic textbooks today repeat mistakes that were identified over 150 years ago. “The illusion of the economic” summons a world devoid of any way of life constituted by social forms and purposes that are morally, socially, legally, and politically laden. In conjuring a social world in general, mainstream social theory paves the road to positivism and to theories centered on utility or instrumental reason/action. All of these adopt a nominalism of intention, action, and consequence. To recognize these as pseudo-concepts, however, requires going beyond what Marx termed “the bourgeois horizon,” which is the horizon of factoring philosophy. The neglect of Marx’s concept of capital is one indication of the grip of factoring philosophy. False Moves is meant to be a broadly transformative book. We want to shift contemporary discourse so that Hegel, Marx, and the Heidegger of Being and Time move from the periphery to the mainstream. True, there has been a revival of scholarship on Hegel and Marx going back to the seventies, and Heidegger has his followers; all the same, a great deal of Anglo-American philosophy goes on as if Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger did not count. Davidson’s main collections make no mention of any of the three, and the same is true of Nagel’s Mortal Questions and The View from Nowhere. John McCumber quotes Hilary Putnam as saying that one became an analytical philosopher in the 1950s by learning “what not to like and what not to consider philosophy.” Surely Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger are ignored by most analytical philosophers. Putnam added that he thought this was terrible and should be stopped. Our book is one response to Putnam’s appeal. False Moves is intended to shift philosophical discourse away from factoring and to renew the discourse of truth and error, good and bad. As such, our book is not alone; rather, it belongs with the ongoing efforts begun by prominent Anglo-American thinkers, many of whom mine the

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resources of the great anti-factoring philosophers Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger. Such developments include work in an Aristotelian vein by Elizabeth Anscombe, David Wiggins, Amélie Rorty, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Martha Nussbaum; Bernard Williams’ Hegel-inspired critique of “morality,” and an epistemological (or anti-epistemological) turn toward Hegel by Robert Pippin, John McDowell, and Robert Brandom; the rethinking of Marx’s critical theory by Moishe Postone in his Time, Labor, and Social Domination; and commentaries on Heidegger’s Being and Time by Hubert Dreyfus and Richard Rorty. Davidson assesses the new developments by saying that the old dualisms are being questioned and that a revised view of the relation of mind and world are emerging. Knowing that few books in philosophy are widely read or broadly influential, we mean for False Moves to be one of them. Omaha, USA

Patrick Murray Jeanne Schuler

Acknowledgments

Several of our teachers have had a lasting influence on us. We both studied with James Collins at St. Louis University. Dr. Collins supervised Patrick’s dissertation, Marx’s Theory of “Wissenschaft,” and taught him much about working as a historian of modern philosophy; his presence is enduring. Richard Blackwell created the doctoral program in the philosophy of science at St. Louis University from which Patrick graduated. He was a beloved teacher and mentor. Albert William Levi directed Jeanne’s dissertation, Logics of Theoretical and Practical Reason in G. W. F. Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit,” at Washington University. For years, he and his wife, Ute Levi, graciously opened their home as a Friday afternoon salon. Paul Piccone joined the Sociology Department at Washington University and brought the journal Telos to St. Louis, opening new worlds of critical thought. With Dan Dahlstrom, we studied Marx’s Grundrisse with Piccone once the full English translation appeared. Piccone encouraged Patrick to study in Frankfurt as a DAAD (Fulbright) Fellow. In Frankfurt, Patrick took the opportunity to learn from many teachers, including Jürgen Habermas and several of Theodor Adorno’s students. Rüdiger Bubner was especially supportive. Five philosophers whom we came to know in St. Louis took an interest in our work and have been a great resource and support over decades. Peter Fuss let Patrick audit his course at University of Missouri— St. Louis on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, where Patrick was first exposed to Fuss’s translation of the Phenomenology, on which John

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Dobbins would collaborate. Patrick and Jeanne kept talking with Fuss about Hegel, Dante, Kant, Rousseau, Arendt, Marx, and more. James Marsh was a reader of both our dissertations. We kept learning from Marsh’s phenomenological approach to critical theory after he left for Fordham University. Tom Jeannot, who wrote his dissertation on Marx under Marsh’s supervision, has long taken an interest in our work. We are grateful for Jeannot’s exuberant and humane intelligence. Dan Dahlstrom has been a friend and a model of intellectual passion and integrity since he and Patrick started graduate school at St. Louis University. John F. Kavanaugh, S. J., was an inspiration, an unfailing advocate for our work, and a dear friend. We want to acknowledge the members of the International Symposium on Marxian Theory (ISMT), which began when Fred Moseley organized a working conference on Marx’s method in Capital at Mount Holyoke College in 1991. There were eight participants: Chris Arthur, Martha Campbell, Guglielmo (Mino) Carchedi, Paul Mattick, Fred Moseley, Geert Reuten, Tony Smith, and Patrick. What was intended as a onetime event became an annual one with weeklong working conferences every summer for the next 22 years. Over the years, some people left, and others joined the group, including Riccardo Bellofiore, Andrew Brown, Roberto Fineschi, Guido Starosta, and Nicola Taylor. Jeanne, who was reading conference papers all along, and our colleague Amy Wendling participated in the last conference, held at Creighton University in 2014. We thank all the members of the ISMT for their generosity, critical minds, and dedication to the work. Over the years, other scholars helped in developing False Moves, including Christine Achinger, Pete Amato, Dennis Badeen, Samuel Chambers, Ruth Groff, Joseph Fracchia, Peter Hudis, Andrew Kliman, Dan Krier, Judy Levin, Bill Martin, George McCarthy, Anne Pomeroy, Eric-John Russell, and Michael J. Thompson. We have benefitted from associations with several scholarly groups and publications, beginning with the St. Louis Telos group. We have been involved in the American Catholic Philosophical Association; each of us served on its Executive Committee. We served as co-coordinators of the Radical Philosophy Association (RPA) and regularly attend the RPA’s biennial conferences. Sebastian Budgen and other editors of the journal Historical Materialism took an interest in Patrick’s work when the journal was in formation. We regularly attend Historical Materialism conferences. The British Marx & Philosophy Society has sponsored talks by Patrick.

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We spoke at the 40th anniversary celebration of the Cambridge Journal of Economics, and Patrick spoke at the 45th anniversary celebration. False Moves arises out of years of teaching undergraduate students. We integrate chapters from False Moves into our teaching. We are grateful to all our students at Creighton University, especially those in our senior seminar for philosophy majors and Patrick’s students in an honors course, who read and discussed a draft of False Moves. We are fortunate to work in a diverse and intellectually alive philosophy department. We are grateful to our Creighton colleagues and former colleagues in philosophy J. J. Abrams, Michael Brown, Jack Carlson, Elizabeth Cooke, Charles Dougherty, Randolph Feezell, Patricia Fleming, Sam Gavin, Kevin Graham, Sr. Mary Alice Haley, RSM, Jeffrey Hause, Thomas Kiefer, Thomas Krettek, S. J., Chris McCord, David McPherson, Anne Ozar, Chris Pliatska, Ross Romero, S. J., Eugene Selk, William O. Stephens, Amy Wendling, Richard White, and Jinmei Yuan. We thank other Creighton colleagues for their support: Fidel Fajardo-Acosta, Sue Calef, Bette Evans, Maorong Jiang, Richard Miller, Ron Simkins, Ryan Wishart, and participants in the Kenefick Chair Reading Group. To Creighton’s College of Arts and Sciences, we are grateful for sabbaticals, funding for research and travel, and for hosting two ISMT conferences and one RPA conference. We thank our Deans and Associate Deans who have generously supported our work. We have enjoyed the friendship and support of the St. Louis community where we once lived: Michael Bartz, Trish Curtis, Judy Gallagher, Mary Beth Gallagher, Michael Goeke, Julie Kerksick, Sharon McMullen, Mark Nielsen, and Catherine Nolan. We have benefitted from years of conversation with John Duggan, Rene Heybach, Wolfgang RichterGirard, and Dan Semrad. In 1975, Patrick met Moishe Postone at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. Patrick and Jeanne became fast friends with Moishe, and we shared decades of conversation until Moishe’s death in 2018. We gained much from Moishe’s force of mind and depth of understanding. False Moves would not be possible without our parents’ love and support, from Muriel Stehney, George Stehney, Mary Schuler, and Ted Schuler. We appreciate the generosity of our siblings and their spouses, Cathy, Sue, Joyce, Scott, Paul, Kevin, Kathleen, Greg, Christine, Kevin, Joe, and Martha. John Patrick, David, and Savita, our children, grew up while this book was being written; they bring joy into our family,

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which now includes Isabel Malone, Kara O’Malley, and grandchildren Theodore, Benjamin, and Ocean. We dedicate this book to our children and their loved ones.

Contents

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Introduction: How Factoring Puts Philosophy on the Sidelines

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Is Life Absurd?

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Being Mortal

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Reinventing Humans: The Strange Allure of Stoicism

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Beyond the Illusion of Philosophical Egoism: Recovering Self-Love and Selfishness

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Moral Luck, Responsibility, and This Worldly Life

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The Pure Self in Political Life: Reconsidering the Primacy of the Right Over the Good

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Values as Purely Subjective: Against the Idea of “A New Creation”

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Setting Aside the Purely Subjective: Reclaiming the Discourse of Truth and Error

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Why Wealth Is a Poor Concept

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Capital, the Truth About Utility

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The Myth of Instrumental Reason and Action

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CONTENTS

Conclusion: Just Enough Phenomenology

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Appendix A: Dogmas of Factoring Philosophy

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Appendix B: Symptoms of Factoring Philosophy

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Index

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About the Authors

Patrick Murray is John C. Kenefick Faculty Chair in the Humanities and professor of philosophy at Creighton University. He is the author of The Mismeasure of Wealth: Essays on Marx and Social Form and Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge. He is the editor of Reflections on Commercial Life: An Anthology of Classic Text from Plato to the Present. He is co-author with Jeanne Schuler of Philosophical and Political Consequences of the Critique of Political Economy: Recognizing Capital. He is working on Capital’s Reach: How Capital Shapes and Subsumes and on a reissue of Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge. Jeanne Schuler is professor of philosophy at Creighton University. She has published in the history of philosophy and critical theory, including articles on Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Arendt, Iris Murdoch, and Habermas. She is co-author with Patrick Murray of Philosophical and Political Consequences of the Critique of Political Economy: Recognizing Capital. She is working on a series of articles on Hegel and modern philosophy.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: How Factoring Puts Philosophy on the Sidelines

“We have first raised a dust and then complain we cannot see.”1

This book has grown out of our experiences of teaching philosophy for many years. Engaging the works of great thinkers in the classroom is a privilege. We look to the history of philosophy as a resource for addressing questions of the present. There is much to be learned from past philosophers. Studying philosophy makes apparent the ongoing influence of some ways of thinking and the neglect of others. In our view, what gets neglected helps to explain philosophy’s marginal role presently in our world. Philosophy finds itself on the sidelines. The predominant paths of philosophy lead to skepticism and stalemates, not involvement in public deliberation. Philosophy should contribute to understanding the problems we face. But its participation in public life has diminished; philosophers typically respond to each other’s arguments and do not engage a wider audience.2 Rather than deliberation leading to action, philosophical debates often end in intramural standoffs. These essays challenge the usual practice of philosophy with the hope that it could emerge a more effective and forceful participant in public life. We focus on the skepticism that separates thinkers from the world. Philosophy is often dismissed for its stalemates. For George Berkeley, these stalemates arise from flawed thinking. As Berkeley observes, too

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murray and J. Schuler, False Moves in Philosophy and Social Theory, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35028-3_1

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often philosophy kicks up a dust and then complains that it cannot see. The confusion is self-inflicted, not caused by a muddle inherent in the world. Berkeley’s advice for thinking clearly is to hew closely to experience. Ideas that stay rooted in experience do not blind us. By contrast, philosophy stuck in skepticism has little to offer society; instead, it presents dangers. We share Berkeley’s interest in locating the source of disabling doubts. Which presuppositions incline thinking to skeptical consequences, and which prevent them? We find that two modes of thinking broadly characterize philosophy. One leads into skeptical stalemates, while the other avoids the false moves that result in stalemates and can engage public concerns. In this introduction and the rest of the book, we sketch these modes, the skeptical and the worldly, and consider their consequences. We look first into the different ways that philosophers view concepts. How we conceive of concepts signals whether philosophy engages the world or is drawn into self-inflicted doubts. Good concepts are the primary takeaway from worldly philosophical inquiry.

Four Views of Concepts Concepts are fundamental features of knowledge and experience that answer the question: what is x? What is a human person? What is liberty? What is property? Concepts are pervasive, but how are they acquired? One traditional view, the rationalist, is indebted to mathematical thinking. It claims to find key concepts innate in the human mind. For Descartes, basic concepts such as the idea of God as infinite perfection are native to the mind. We do not turn outward toward experience for concepts such as material substance; their origin lies within.3 To reason with these basic concepts found within the mind still requires careful analysis. Spinoza begins sections of the Ethics with definitions so clear and distinct that, presumably, a mind grasps them immediately. Little elucidation is required to intuit clearly defined concepts, such as the difference between finite and infinite. One question faced by this traditional view is whether the mind possesses concepts prior to—or independent of—experience. What can be said if readers deny that fundamental concepts are found upon introspection? Unsupported by public evidence, rationalist appeals to innate ideas have a dogmatic ring. Wary of claims to innate ideas, the mainstream view today takes a second view: concepts are presuppositions of

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analysis. This approach allows us to accept concepts without much reflection. To approach an issue, analysis first stipulates its central concepts. For example, it is stated: “for the purpose of this analysis, we define a friend as ….” As assumptions, initial concepts receive little scrutiny. Thinking takes off from initial concepts that are accepted as familiar or self-evident. Analysis presupposes concepts that we are expected to think with but do not think about. Concepts in hand, thinking takes up the work of formulating propositions and arguments that employ these concepts. In this way, concepts precede analysis and are taken as given; they just turn up, while attention is absorbed with the subsequent reasoning. A common feature of such concepts is their dichotomous form. Stipulated or self-evident concepts often arise in pairs. The list of binary notions is long and familiar: free or determined, altruistic or egoistic, realist or anti-realist, mental or physical, pleasure or pain, finite or infinite, positive or negative, inner or outer, limited or unlimited, internal or external, one or many, passive or active, receptive or spontaneous, same or different. One concept excludes its opposite. What is mental is not physical. An action is free only if it is not determined. It cannot be both. A deeper look at freedom in relation to human thought and action usually is missing. Like a logical disjunction, the two alternatives exhaust all possibilities: nothing further is to be said. A third prominent view rejects innate ideas and stipulated definitions; it claims that the concepts we employ were originally constructed from sensations. For an empiricist like John Locke, innate ideas are nonexistent: the mind is an unfurnished apartment. What the mind originally finds before it are simple sensations, whose streaming is experience. The mind has the power to manipulate sensations and build concepts. When we repeatedly experience similar sensations, the mind constructs the concept then labeled “dog,” and the previously unclassified sensations are progressively named and defined. But the empiricist account of concepts raises questions. Who constructed the concepts that pervade knowledge and experience? Humans always inhabit language, and concepts embedded in language are already with us. Each person inherits concepts with the language learned as a child. But if concepts always belong to language, do we construct new concepts out of raw sensations? Clearly, new concepts emerge as knowledge grows. But observations involve concepts, including the concept of what is unknown. Data depends on knowledge. In proposing to construct concepts from sensations, classical empiricism adopts nominalism: individual sensations are posited as

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prior to and independent of concepts. Making this presupposition is a false move. Constructing concepts sounds familiar, but a closer look reveals that the presupposed separation of sensations from concepts makes constructing them unintelligible. Stalemates lurk in dichotomies engendered by factoring philosophy. The dichotomy of sensations and concepts leads to flip-flops between dogmatism and skepticism. The dichotomy is common to rationalism and empiricism. Ironically, an empiricism that insists on a primordial split between sensations and concepts falls into the arbitrariness that sticks to the view of concepts as stipulated or self-evident. A fourth and final view accepts that concepts are not introduced into a concept-free terrain; it rejects the false move that gives rise to that illusion. Concepts are pervasive in human perception, experience, and knowledge. The supposition that concepts can be separated out is a dogma of factoring philosophy. We cannot get outside of concepts to determine their origin—wanting to is already the mistake. Appeals to sensation are no more concept-free than sensation itself. For example, Locke appeals to concepts like “sensation” to account for the origin of concepts. Language is laden with concepts that are already in use. Other kinds of knowledge may embark at times with stipulated definitions. But philosophy is critical. It should not posit key concepts as self-evident or familiar. Instead, the concepts central to analysis should emerge from the inquiry itself. Plato’s Euthyphro illustrates how concepts emerge gradually from a persistent, testing search. In the dialogue, Socrates asks Euthyphro to define piety, and Euthyphro responds as if the task were simple, at least for a superior mind like his. As might be expected, Euthyphro offers conventional or familiar definitions that involve no thought on his part. Each time, Socrates probes the definition until Euthyphro—now forced to think—reluctantly sees his error and revises the definition. By the end of the dialogue, many readers share Euthyphro’s view that the search was pointless since piety is not yet defined. Implicit in this reaction is the expectation that concepts should be established swiftly. Aren’t basic concepts self-evident? Thinking need not play a big role in their formulation. If basic concepts are self-evident, we have an excuse to avoid the work of thinking our way to good concepts. A different view emerges when we heed Socrates and submit basic concepts to examination. The less-traveled road has much to teach us. The failures that Euthyphro dismisses as futile can teach us to think. A good concept is not grasped immediately. It develops through the

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probing of analysis. Instead of stipulating what counts as piety or justice, we sift relevant experience and knowledge with a critical eye. Though the task is not completed, we learn a lot about piety by the end of Plato’s dialogue. Each failure contributes a measure of understanding. The concept takes shape through inquiry. Good concepts are not separable from good judgments. In the conventional view, concepts are fixed prior to judgments. First, we identify “water” and then affix predicates to it: “water is liquid at room temperature.” But the dichotomy of concepts and judgments is misleading. Judgments evolve as concepts are progressively determined. For example, the concept of friendship evolves as judgments about friendship are tested by experience and reflection. Concepts and judgments improve together. Real thinking is not a matter of holding fast to one’s concepts come what may. Thinking involves an ongoing process of adjustment and accommodation between concepts and judgments. We cannot examine one without the other. Another feature of good concepts involves their content. Immediate concepts usually arise as dichotomous: pure pleasure and pure pain are, of course, mutually exclusive. In excluding their opposites, these purist, binary concepts have meager content. If we reflect further on the features of actual pleasures, say nostalgia, the initial dichotomous form recedes. Dichotomies persist when inquiry into the content of concepts does not occur. Good concepts develop determinate differences that are not purist dichotomies.

The Horizon of Human Existence Acquiring knowledge is a human undertaking. What underlying features of human existence make knowledge and other such endeavors possible? Philosophers call these existential features. As oxygen and nutrition keep the body alive, existential features characterize existence as human. Existential features include meaning, language, tools, sociality, moods, and understanding. Unlike a body, human existence does not break down into parts. Each existential feature belongs to the whole of human existence. They exist together as inseparable, equally original but distinct aspects of human existence. Human existence has similarities with the ways that other animal species live. Creatures are not just things found in the world. They do not collide with each other like inanimate bodies in motion. A person

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moves through the world against a background of meanings, relationships, and practices. Concepts build out from a horizon of involvements and practices within which the search for knowledge ensues. This background or horizon is among the existential features that constitute human existence. This lived horizon makes it possible to encounter what belongs to the world. It allows some things to appear and not others. In a sense it decides what can be seen, believed, or even imagined. It opens some directions and closes off others. The horizon offers a flexible measure, not a strict calibration, of what matters or what to expect. The power of a horizon consists in its ability to exert influence quietly from behind. Like culture or context, the horizon is felt but usually not faced. It is entwined with other existential features and is subject to change. When we recognize bias or challenge prejudice, we become aware of the horizon and correct it. But criticism does not put us outside it. A horizon allows humans to inhabit the world. At this point a cautionary note is in order. We use “horizon” with care to avoid the kind of skepticism that this book challenges. The world is not a collage of various cultures. The world is not constructed by groups. The world remains primary, and horizon opens and closes off a world that is already there. Horizon is inseparable from the world. Because of this inseparability, different horizons can be compared to a degree. They are not incommensurable. A new horizon does not imply that a new world slips into place. The inherent complexity of the world allows for multiple horizons. Our human capacity for self-reflection allows for what HansGeorg Gadamer calls “a fusion of horizons.”4 It is impossible to think of the world apart from horizons, since thinking presupposes human existence. Existing against a horizon acknowledges the primacy of the world in which we are always involved.

Phenomenology, Factoring, and False Moves Human existence involves horizons and other existential features. These features are immanent in all human activities but generally are not reflected upon or put into words. Many are too close to be noticed. The awareness of our own existence is tacit; how often do we focus in amazement on language? When people engage in philosophy, as with any human activity, existential features are present. Reflecting on these existential conditions in a systematic way is what we call phenomenology.

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Phenomenology, as used here, is an experience-based branch of philosophy that articulates the basic features of human existence. Not all philosophers reflect upon the existential features that make knowledge possible. Not all philosophy addresses phenomenological questions, but all knowledge, including philosophy, makes phenomenological assumptions. If the assumptions are well informed, they line up with the actual features of existence. But defective assumptions warp philosophical analysis. Identifying defective phenomenological assumptions is our objective. The mainstream view of knowledge is shaped by the legacy of Hume, Kant, and various currents of neo-Kantianism. This legacy involves a flawed phenomenology that we call factoring. Factoring assumes that mind and world are separable and that the contributions of mind and world to experience can be factored out. Factoring tells us that concepts come from mind; the world supplies sensations to be received and organized. From mind comes language; the world supplies objects or cues to name and talk about. Philosophy conducts factoring analysis, while the horizon of economics and other social sciences presupposes factoring. Most accounts of concepts have factoring as their background. Even deeply critical approaches to philosophy, such as Richard Rorty’s, adopt a factoring analysis that separates thinking, language, and concepts from the world. For these thinkers, mind and world are two independent sources of experience. Factoring overlooks or rejects the inseparability of humans from the world and others that characterizes human existence. Phenomenology is measured against the actual conditions of human existence. All phenomenology shapes analysis by opening some pathways and closing off others. We readily refer to mind and world in ordinary talk. Separate terms may incline us to accept the separability of what the terms refer to. What we call factoring philosophy results from flawed phenomenology, from taking what is distinguishable to be separable when it is not. The ordinary case is that what is distinguishable is separable. Not only can I distinguish my shoes and socks from my feet, but I can also remove them from my feet. A phenomenology that distorts basic features of human existence ultimately breeds stalemates and unanswerable doubts, just as Berkeley recognized. What we call false moves occur when flawed phenomenology gives rise to defective concepts. The master false move is to divide mind from world. Other false moves follow as factoring philosophy creates new divisions. Reasoning cannot help but distort experience if its concepts are not adequate to experience from

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the start. Factoring generates skeptical outcomes in inquiries concerning knowledge, ethics, society, and politics. Assumptions that are not questioned despite their damaging consequences function as dogmas. Separating mind from world operates as a dogma. Flawed analysis pivots on this dogma but does not examine it. False moves are rooted in dogmatic presuppositions that guide flawed analysis. To investigate the problems of philosophy within this factoring horizon means cycling through unsatisfying alternative positions without resolving issues or improving concepts. Dogmatic presuppositions and skeptical outcomes go hand in hand. The doubts that cling to philosophy in this mode differ from the real doubts that figure in an area of thought or experience. Assuming that mind is separable from world leads, sooner or later, to the conclusion that the world itself is unknowable. Without presuppositions adequate to its task, philosophy dead ends or churns in circles. The promise of philosophical inquiry—good concepts rooted in experience—is quashed. Freeing philosophy from this flawed phenomenology has proven to be difficult. Factoring is widespread in part because less attention has been paid to projects in philosophy that show the inseparability of mind and world. In the previous discussion of concepts and phenomenology, we have drawn upon the legacy of Hegel and Heidegger without mentioning their names. We will later refer to the work of Donald Davidson, a more recent anti-factoring philosopher. While their philosophies differ in many ways, all three undertake a phenomenology that uncovers being-inthe-world-with-others as the horizon within which we exist and pursue knowledge. All three deny that mind is separable from the world. All three undertake analysis that is not factoring. They exemplify philosophy that is not dogged by self-inflicted doubts.5 Non-factoring philosophy renews philosophy’s focus on truth and error; factoring philosophy generally throws a wet blanket on truth. Factoring philosophy depicts the (inescapably) subjective character of knowledge as inherently deviating from what is true, what we call the epistemic Midas Touch. This book is not about Hegel, Heidegger, or Davidson, but it is written to show how deeply their ideas matter. That supposition is less common than it should be.

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The Skeptical Drama and the Midas Touch False moves involved in faulty phenomenology have skeptical consequences. To take mind and world as separable sets the stage for a skeptical drama in which knowledge cannot reach its goals. In Act One, we seek to know the world by establishing which claims are true. The plan, confidently pursued, is for mind to grasp what lies out in the world. As the plot develops in Act Two, necessary elements of this project are explored, such as sensing, language, understanding, concepts, hypotheses, tests, evidence, practices, and society. As these factors that constitute human existence come into view, questions arise. Where are these factors situated? Given the original separation of mind from world, they are ultimately placed on the side of purely subjective activity, the mind’s contribution to the effort of knowing. As Act Three begins, the friendly cast of characters is recast as adversaries. What begin as inescapable means of knowing become obstacles to knowing. Like a poison pen, the tools used to get at the world foil the project. As Hegel observes in the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit , tools reshape their object, and knowing seeks the original, unmodified object. Philosophies, like stories, end in many ways, but these outcomes share a common theme with the myth of Tantalus: the goal of truth recedes from our reach. In pursuing knowledge of the world, the project turns against itself. Confidence gives way to doubt. What we wanted was to know the world; what we end up knowing are constructions or impositions of the mind. Hegel’s terms describe the status of truth. For Hegel, the goal of knowledge is truth, or what is “in and for itself.” When the object in itself is not grasped, mind falls short of achieving truth. When we lose hope that truth is achievable, we repurpose knowledge to practical or discursive ends—coping better with the world or keeping the conversation going. If knowledge does not grasp the object in itself, what remains is the object as it exists for us. To regard the claims of knowledge as for us but not in itself replaces truth with what is useful or interesting. This skeptical drama of factoring philosophy evokes the legend of King Midas. In both stories, futility lies in the self as something that one is stuck with. King Midas is granted his lavish wish that everything he touched would turn into gold. His greed gives rise to torment, as food, water, friends, and all else turn to yellow metal at the slightest contact. Taking the shape of his passion, the world disappears into a golden replica, leaving

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Midas alone with the fruits of his doomed desire. Without the world, the self becomes a tomb. When philosophy splits mind from world, subjectivity comes to possess a Midas Touch that recasts objects in the image of the self. The desire to know calls forth our most strenuous efforts. But awareness of them spreads like contagion. What results from the activity of the self becomes qualified as subjective in unwanted ways. We wanted knowledge of things as they exist in themselves. But what results is knowledge of things as they exist for us. The in itself is eclipsed by the for us. At every turn we run into the self in one form or another. As we account for knowledge, the world recedes.

Pure Concepts or Worldly Concepts? Philosophy not entangled in false moves is engaged with its world. Its concepts are informed by experience and are phenomenologically well informed. Such self-consciously worldly concepts have certain features. An analysis constrained by experience, that is, a phenomenologically critical one, tracks the world even at the level of basic distinctions. Good concepts are marked by friction with how things are: not even metaphysics escapes resistance from the world. When analysis attends to the world, concepts do not simply change; they develop. As the matter at hand is determined, concepts move from less adequate to more adequate. Good concepts are required for thinking to contribute to public life. Big disputes often involve philosophical disagreements. Without selfconsciously worldly concepts, philosophy gains little access to public life. Faulty phenomenology engenders empty concepts. It is no coincidence that the categories of factoring philosophy arrive in disjunctive pairs, such as freedom or determinism. The imagined separation of mind and world engenders concepts that line up on the side of the subject, such as freedom, or the side of the object, such as determinism. These concepts are designated as pure.6 Pure in this context means falling on one side of the mind/world divide, either the purely subjective or the purely objective. Pure concepts have little content beyond their opposition. Pure concepts are the offspring of false moves. In presupposing two origins, factoring philosophy’s task is to isolate what mind contributes, what arises from the world, what is the point of first contact between them, and what sorts of syntheses are possible.

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For factoring philosophy, subjective means purely subjective and objective means purely objective. Even where the purely objective is deemed unknowable, it sets the standard that explains why truth is unobtainable. Only the purely objective, if it could be achieved, would deserve to be called knowledge. The dogmatism of faulty phenomenology is mirrored in purist categories. Hegel identifies the dogmatism of traditional metaphysics with an either/or mindset. Not all either/ors are dogmatic or fallacious. Some either/ors inhere in the situation: the calculation is either correct or not. There is no third option. Here an either/or is not fallacious. When the situation is not binary, the either/or becomes fallacious. A war can be won, lost, or dragged on inconclusively. Here the win/ lose binary does not apply. Philosophy must turn to experience in the mode of phenomenology to distinguish the separable from the inseparable. The pure concepts resulting from false moves heedlessly generate binaries throughout analysis. Factoring is one of the main reasons for the absence of philosophy from public life. The point is not to reject analysis. We do not acquire good concepts without good analysis. By no means, however, is analysis equivalent to factoring. Factoring philosophy involves a kind of analysis that goes blank on key experiential constraints. If mind is separable from the world, concepts are not tethered to how things stand. When concepts are stipulated binaries, they do not arise from attending to experience. Whether the initial concepts are adequate does not surface as an issue. It cannot surface as an issue with concepts fixed prior to judgments. Posited concepts launch an analysis that does not look back; there is no room for them to develop. Adequate concepts are constrained by how it goes in the world. Such concepts emerge from thinking through the matter at hand; they do not pop up ready-made to begin analysis. Concepts unconstrained by experience have apparent clarity, but—not being sourced by experience—they prove empty. One mark of false moves is thinking that focuses on building arguments without pausing to explore its main concepts. Arguments that posit concepts can be clever or bold but not convincing or true. A concept that is stipulated is easily replaced by another. By developing worldly concepts, philosophy moves out of these narrow chambers into a broader intellectual exchange. Analysis attuned to basic features of the world has something worth listening to. It becomes a force to contend with, not intellectual sport.

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Worldly concepts acquire determination as analysis proceeds. Purist concepts do not develop after the initial positing. Change would signal irresolution, ambivalence, or equivocation. To maintain clarity and measure, these concepts designate unique meanings fixed in a timeless conceptual space.7 Progress occurs when we somehow adduce further implications from existing sets of terms. Friction with experience does not occur with concepts. If a concept were to be modified, it would signify that the prior reasoning was wasted. Instead, like a building abandoned during construction, the former reasoning is replaced by new concepts. The old concepts cannot be transformed: “conceptual development” is an oxymoron. This notion of clarity is an obstacle to thinking.8 To demand clarity up front as a condition of analysis discourages thinking. As in a Socratic dialogue, the process of examination closes in on a difficult topic. Clarity is an outcome of a reflection through which the initial concepts improve and gain content. Analysis constrained by how things are in the world expects defects to be identified, limits to be examined, and concepts to improve. Analysis advances from less to more adequate accounts. That concepts develop indicates that thinking has occurred. Thinking should expect initial distinctions to fall short and require development. To demand clarity at the start is a false move. It engenders concepts that cannot respond to a deeper grasp of experience. Thinking does not answer all questions or eliminate all doubt. But the clarity that results from thinking, like questions unearthed during analysis, is more real than doubts fabricated by faulty phenomenology. Real clarity does not exclude real doubts that arise from analysis. Worldly concepts are fallible. Better concepts are how philosophy contributes to society. They are not acquired prior to reflection on the world. Concepts, judgments, and arguments, as Hegel presents them in the Science of Logic, are inseparable from each other. They advance together in complex ways that we call thinking.

Purist Concepts and the Pure, Featureless Self Purist notions take a variety of forms that are familiar in modern philosophy, such as first impression, atomistic individual, purely mental, pure power, and pure pleasure. The notion of a first encounter or transition from world to mind suggests that sensations, feelings, and actions occur without possessing a specific character or kind. Actions, sensations, and feelings become formless stuff. Action designates a neutral spatial event,

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mere behavior, which becomes a particular action only with the imposition of the subject’s intention, interpretation, and response. Sensations are thought of as sensory inputs with no form of their own that are organized by the purely subjective impositions of the perceiver’s mind. With the subject split off from its object, pleasure is blank sensation, not the intimacy of friendship or the delight of sunset. Like a chain reaction, one purist concept tumbles into another. From pure pleasure comes the notion of utility. If feelings can be split off from objects and events, why not quantify these homogenized feelings in order to reduce judgment to calculation? If pleasures are recognized as affective responses specific to objects and events, however, utility and its one-dimensional calculus cannot get off the ground. Splitting universal from individual leaves nominalism to interpret the port of entry between mind and world. Pure pleasure is a one-place predicate, whereas actual pleasures are at least two-place. Pure pleasure is a simple predicate of a sensate being, while actual pleasures are always complex and intentional. They are affective responses of a sensate being to some perception, action, or thing. The pleasure of listening to music differs from that of taking a nap. Deciding between two activities does not involve a calculus of pure pleasures. The purely subjective view offers a faulty phenomenology of pleasure; pleasure is worldly, intentional, inseparable from objects and activities. Pure pleasure is a pseudo-concept. Beneath the purist notions of factoring philosophy, as their source, lies the notion of the pure self. The pure self is posited as outside the world. Its worldless purity serves various objectives. As wholly unencumbered, it presumably grasps the essence of things without distortion or prejudice. Purity may signify the power to project—unimpeded—forms and valuations onto the given. The pure self may inhabit an inner sanctum of indifference, untouched by external events. For Kierkegaard, these imagined powers one-sidedly characterize the self as infinite. This self, which Kierkegaard also refers to as the stoic self, is removed from any hint of determinate being. Its independence is complete, and its despair, according to Kierkegaard, turns demonic.9 In a similar way, factoring philosophy seeks to step outside existence in rejecting finitude as part of the make-up of a human self; it, too, is a form of despair. Donald Davidson describes the self that is scrubbed of human, worldly characteristics as featureless:

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There is the idea that any language distorts reality, which implies that it is only wordlessly if at all that the mind comes to grips with things as they really are. This is to conceive language as an inert (though necessarily distorting) medium independent of the human agencies that employ it, a view of language that surely cannot be maintained. Yet if the mind can grapple without distortion with the real, the mind itself must be without categories and concepts. This featureless self is familiar from theories in quite different parts of the philosophical landscape. There are, for example, theories that make freedom consist in decisions taken apart from all desires, habits, and dispositions of the agent; and theories of knowledge that suggest that the mind can observe the totality of its own perceptions and ideas. In each case, the mind is divorced form the traits that constitute it; an inescapable conclusion from certain lines of reasoning, as I said, but one that should always persuade us to reject the premises.10

The pure, featureless self presents itself as a supposed condition for objectivity and freedom. Having features would interfere with the pure self’s perception of the thing itself or the pure expression of the individual will. Even language becomes an obstacle. Presumably, it is by becoming pure that the self can grasp its object or will its objectives. The pure self and the thing-in-itself, like two specters, haunt thinking that takes itself to be unencumbered by the world. Some thinkers posit an irreducible standoff between mind and world. The self is believed to be preserved by this separation. Without the standoff, it is feared that either the world or the self would disappear into the other. So, the separation staves off the loss of the world or the self. Not all fear that consequence. Richard Rorty heralds “the world well lost,” and the consequent emptying of world into self.11 What we call world is presumably constructed by the self. Rorty begins by quoting Jean-Paul Sartre from “Existentialism as a Humanism”: “In reality, things will be as much as man has decided they are.” This hard saying brings out what ties Dewey and Foucault, James and Nietzsche, together—the sense that there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions.12

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Like Midas, the factoring analyst discovers “us” all the way down. Rorty’s skepticism about the world “well lost” is the flip side of dogmatism. As a venture into post-analytic philosophy, it is a disappointment since it holds fast to the disjunction of self and world, even if one-sidedly. Within this horizon, skepticism and dogmatism are yoked together, and there truly is no escape. Both the world and the self go missing.

More False Moves: Winnowing and Flip-Flops In addition to purist concepts and the pure self, another recurring feature of false moves is unchecked winnowing. This analysis is unconstrained by how things exist in the world. Winnowing wheat separates the grain from the chaff. Grain and chaff are parts of wheat that are separable. Trying to pull apart what cannot exist separately is unchecked winnowing, a false move. Parts of a whole can exist separately, but aspects of a whole are inseparable. We can focus on an aspect, such as color, but color does not separate from shape. Unchecked winnowing treats inseparable aspects as separable parts. Winnowing continues until the whole is dissolved into what is simple.13 Unconstrained analysis begins by distinguishing the whole into aspects that are taken as essential and unessential. Winnowing continues as the essential is further divided and the question repeats: which matters more? The process ends when it arrives at the simple that is no longer divisible. Unconstrained analysis reaches its goal. For example, we might begin with an action, such as telling the truth. Analysis asks: what really makes this action good? We notice that the same behavior can be performed in different ways, so the manner of the action splits off from the action as what really matters. Winnowing continues. The manner of telling the truth reveals concern for the self and for others. We ask which really matters and then split off concern for others from concern for the self. The winnowing continues. What kind of concern for others matters? Concern can be based on reason or feeling, intention or consequences, welfare or respect. Unencumbered analysis splits off factors that exist together and assigns each its status as essential or inessential. Unconstrained analysis ends with the ultimate element that cannot be split further. To arrive at the simple essence, winnowing does not return to the concrete whole from which thinking begins. Leaving behind the action of telling the truth, analysis does not test aspects of the action against how things hang together in reality. What results from winnowing is designated as essential; the experiential starting points are left behind as

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unessential appearances. For unencumbered analysis, reduction to what is simple spells progress. But reduction may sacrifice the actual complexity of the world to a dogmatic version of clarity where “both aspects matter” is not allowed. Any analysis that rules out the inseparable is dogmatic. An adequate phenomenology examines aspects of existence—such as horizon—without losing sight of their inseparability. What is inseparable, such as language and feeling, can be examined separately without insisting that one aspect matters more. Unconstrained analysis proves dangerous when aspects that exist together—intentions, rules, feelings, actions, consequences—are isolated. To unchecked analysis, separating the essential from the unessential signifies clarity. However, the consequent effort to piece these separated aspects together breeds skepticism. As unconstrained, analysis is not bound by how things exist but by the results of unchecked winnowing. Through this process, the world is set aside. The world can be disregarded but it cannot be lost. We contend that thinking, regardless of its aspirations, is always thinking in the world. Analysis might ignore the question of the world, but it cannot avoid the world itself. That is not an option. Philosophy can deny the conditions that make it possible. It can misrepresent the human situation in accounting for knowledge or morality. Reality can be distorted, but the relevance of the world is never eliminated, even in false philosophy. False claims are just as dependent on the world as are the true. One sign of the persistence of the world is how unencumbered analysis flip-flops between extremes. Like doublespeak in George Orwell’s 1984, positions shift to suit the occasion. Skepticism and stoicism illustrate the flip-flop. The skeptic says that nothing can be known. But the skeptic still acts on some basis besides a coin toss. These action-enabling beliefs may be described as truth-like or plausible, but not true. In a similar way, the stoic says that external events do not matter; only one’s judgment has moral importance. But the stoic seeks some ends and avoids others. Bread may be a matter of indifference, but the stoic chews bread rather than wood. “Goods” such as bread are called preferred indifferents; the stoic’s need to introduce this contortion is a flip-flop. These swings are symptoms of faulty concepts, poor phenomenology. Empty categories can build arguments but cannot sustain life. The flip-flop is a way to recover distinctions that analysis has erased, while dismissing their necessity or importance. To act well, humans need beliefs that are true and desires for what is good. What is deemed plausible but not true and what is preferred

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but not good are fill-ins. Their standing is supposed to be provisional and pragmatic, as if sages hardly notice their presence. False moves like these flip-flops occur throughout the history of philosophy, from great Hellenistic minds to modern thinkers and their heirs. Tightly woven arguments lacking phenomenological attentiveness run into trouble. Much of what is called wisdom is unconstrained analysis that yields striking portraits of sages bent on detaching from human existence. The critique of false moves is ongoing and varied like the false moves themselves. But false moves prove an elusive target; criticism misfires when it does not get to the faulty phenomenological moorings.

The False Philosopher’s Critique of False Philosophy False philosophy cannot inhabit the faulty phenomenology it posits. After all, we continue to exist as humans even when our ideas are out of touch with human existence. To preserve its flawed grounds, false philosophy must correct for its conclusions. Flip-flops are one correction. What can be called the false philosopher’s critique of false philosophy amounts to a flip-flop. Because pure objectivity lies out of reach, this critic abandons objectivity as such and instead regards knowledge as fundamentally constructed from private or species interests. Or, since pure subjectivity proves to be a mirage, this critic concludes that subjectivity per se is a myth. In each case, instead of figuring out what is wrong with separating mind from world, the critic jettisons objectivity, subjectivity, or philosophy itself, as if philosophy could not endure the loss of dogmas. Philosophy simply is false. For this critic, subjectivity and objectivity really are pure, thus making skeptical conclusions inevitable. Hence, reason is a fraud, claims to truth are naïve, the world disappears, and practical interests dictate the constructions that we call reality. Some kinds of pragmatism and postmodernism offer the false philosopher’s critique of false philosophy.14 These positions conclude that since pure objectivity and subjectivity lead to stalemates, objectivity must be jettisoned. If objectivity is posited as pure, then grasping a thing’s essence requires indifference to the social context of knowledge. But since social context cannot be excluded, essences are rejected and replaced with social constructions, the work of pure subjectivity. This conclusion accepts that objectivity must be pure. Setting essence in opposition to social context

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preserves the faulty phenomenology of mind separated from the world. Objectivity must exclude subjectivity. Anti-essentialism is a common theme in criticism, but the critical thinking does not go deep enough. Contemporary anti-essentialism reaches back to Locke’s doctrine that “nominal essences” are “the workmanship of the understanding.”15 The purist split between mind and world assumed by Locke reveals anti-essentialism to be a dogma of factoring philosophy. When objectivity seems unattainable, the error lies with the background assumptions. The ideal of objectivity should not pose this kind of problem. The error is to identify objectivity with pure objectivity or subjectivity with pure subjectivity, each identified with the absence of the other. For example, when freedom must exclude objectivity, it poses unsolvable problems. When subjectivity is not construed as pure subjectivity, worldly determination becomes a condition of freedom. But within a picture that separates mind and world, real threats to freedom may go unchallenged. The critique of false philosophy takes a different direction in Kant. Kant famously insists that concepts without percepts are empty and percepts without concepts are blind. Simply, the empiricist focus on sensation and the rationalist focus on innate ideas are each incomplete. Kant corrects these false philosophies through an a priori structure that draws together the forms and content of knowledge in the transcendental syntheses of sensing (the aesthetic) and understanding (the analytic). Hegel is sometimes described as a philosopher of reconciliation, but the title more aptly describes Kant’s project. Hegel’s point is that the need for such reconciliation arises from a dust that factoring philosophy has kicked up. Despite its complexity, Kant’s project reconciles what needs to be rethought: the separation of mind from world that eventually posits the unknowable thing-in-itself.16 Kant is the factoring philosopher par excellence. Purism remains the bedrock of transcendental analysis, and dualisms are its characteristic mode of ordering. Kant conceives of experience as a synthesis of what is given to our sensible mode of intuition with the pure forms of intuition and understanding (the faculty of concepts). To determine what the subject and object each contributes to knowledge, the separation of mind and world is preserved but relocated from actual experience to the transcendental level. The only way that Kant can correct for the empiricist conclusion that makes necessity and universality mere matters of custom, as with Hume, is to argue that they have a strictly subjective a priori source.

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Splitting pure subjectivity from objectivity makes transcendental analysis possible. Thus, skepticism is preserved but its origin shifts. The skepticism that bases knowledge on human nature (Hume) is replaced with the skepticism that separates knowable phenomena from the unknowable thing-in-itself. Insisting that form is inseparable from content in experience is a decoy. The separating out of the subjective element in intuition and understanding is as pure as ever at the transcendental level. In factoring philosophy’s project of determining what arises from the subject and from the object, whether in experience or prior to experience, the defect remains intact. Kant’s critique may be an answer to Hume, but it is one false philosopher’s critique of false philosophy answering another’s.

Thinking Tethered to the World This introduction opened with a quote from George Berkeley. Like the cartoon character Pogo, Berkeley “has found the enemy and he is us.” For Berkeley, the enemy is skepticism. Often the source of skepticism is identified as the obscurity inherent in certain topics or the weakness of our cognitive faculties. Some questions are said to exceed our puny intellects and scope of experience. Those who stray beyond our limited capacities are punished by doubt. Thus, skepticism becomes the occupational hazard for philosophers who misconceive or misjudge human limitations. Berkeley takes a different slant. Persistent doubts are not pegged to inherently obscure topics. He states that we kick up the dust that impairs our vision. Not deficient reason but the deficient use of reason is the main source of skepticism. A more thoroughgoing empiricism is the cure. For Berkeley, an intellect untethered to experience concocts abstract ideas that elicit dilemmas and doubts. Berkeley argues that some of Locke’s central concepts, including matter and primary properties, are abstract ideas. Abstract ideas are results of false moves. The lesson behind Berkeley’s attack on abstract ideas supplies our understanding of phenomenology. For Berkeley, an idea becomes abstract if aspects of a whole are split off and treated as isolable elements, when these aspects are inseparable from the whole: they cannot exist without it. Abstract ideas are aspects crystallized as things. As newly minted entities, these abstract ideas generate skeptical showdowns, especially when it comes time to put something back together or conceive of its unity. A thing is divided between secondary qualities that depend on perception and primary properties that

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do not, leaving the simple question dangling, just what is the thing? Elizabeth Anscombe wonders what it is supposed to mean that things “have” properties that seem not really to belong to them either, since what they “really” are is something I know not what.17 The notion that a property is inseparable from a thing is abandoned when properties are split off from each other and from the thing. A property is designated as existing either for us, a secondary quality, or in itself , a primary quality. In Locke’s conception of material substance in general, matter is stipulated as the substratum—an unknowable something—that holds the primary properties together. Posited just beyond the horizon of experience, matter is demanded as the ultimate source of a thing’s unity; its presence can only be inferred. For Hume, to identify inseparable aspects is to make a distinction of reason.18 A distinction of reason, like a place marker, recalls the source of the distinction. For example, color and shape exist as aspects of a thing. This inseparability constitutes a kind of necessity found in experience. We can focus on color and ignore shape for the sake of analysis. A distinction of reason, which demands selective attention, allows thinking to proceed without forgetting how things stand in the world, where color is inseparable from shape. Distinctions of reason constrain analysis and keep it tethered to experience. Distinctions of reason keep the horizon in view. For unconstrained analysis, what is singled out is treated as separable. This analysis does not look back to experience. There are no placeholders to recall the origin of the distinction. What results from analysis is taken to constitute reality. Without regard for distinctions of reason, abstract ideas proliferate, and the world eventually is deemed unknowable, “something I know not what.” Berkeley’s critique of abstract ideas brings out the inseparability of analysis and phenomenology, for it is always a fair question—one to be answered experientially—whether what is distinguishable in analysis is separable in existence. For Berkeley, the cure for abstract ideas involves a return to experience. Analysis constrained by the world consciously maintains its phenomenological footing. But directing questions to experience is no guarantee that false moves are left behind. Accounts of experience vary. Just which aspects of experience belong together is a matter for inquiry. The relation between philosophy and experience is reflexive, not static. Analysis presupposes some features of experience as original, but our understanding of these features hinges on phenomenology. Phenomenology

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involves ongoing reflection. How to understand the phenomenological grounds of knowledge is itself a topic of philosophy. The history of modern empiricism involves ongoing campaigns against defects in our accounts of experience. These defects are called dogmas. This campaign includes Locke’s rejection of innate ideas and Berkeley’s attack on abstract ideas. Quine’s challenge to what he called “two dogmas of empiricism” continues the advance in understanding experience. Quine argues that language and sense content cannot be factored out at the level of sentences. Quine held that a conceptual scheme can be factored out from sense content at the level of theories or language. Davidson calls this assumption a dogma. This “third dogma of empiricism” isolates what is purely objective—sensory cues—from the web of belief. For Quine, beliefs in the web respond to pure impressions encountered at its borders. The dogma that separates the overall scheme from content is presumably the final dogma. With the defeat of this dogma, Davidson announces the end of empiricism. In dispelling the third dogma, Davidson recovers the horizon that moves philosophy beyond factoring back to the discourse of truth. The conceptual scheme/content dogma goes to the root of false moves, but Davidson errs in reducing empiricism to its dogmas. Empiricism does not end with eliminating the last dogma. The promise of empiricism exceeds these dogmas, and the dogmas extend beyond empiricism. The premier conceptual scheme theorist—Kant—is alluded to by Davidson, yet Kant is not usually considered an empiricist. In our view, the consideration of false moves is an ongoing project, and empiricism has a future that extends beyond the dogmas. We identify empiricism with experiencebased inquiry in its broad sense; that includes phenomenology. As the understanding of experience improves, the phenomenological context of philosophy is clarified, better concepts take hold, and dogmas are uprooted. Davidson points up the inseparability of language, society, and world. This phenomenological foundation can be described as triangulation or holism.19 This horizon acknowledges what goes together in experience. All knowledge presupposes this foundation. Accepting this original belonging together allows philosophy to move beyond false moves and endemic skepticism. Like Hegel and Heidegger, Davidson shifts from the inside/outside picture that separates mind and world to a horizon where thinking, language, and action belong to the world, society, and history.

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Davidson’s philosophy (triangulation) recalls the basis of Hume’s distinction of reason and Hegel’s account of spirit. It affirms Heidegger’s finding that being-in-the-world and being-with-others are basic structures of human existence that make belief, doubt, moods, and knowledge possible. Science can formulate the laws of nature only because language belongs to the world and reveals what is there. Language is not comprehensible apart from being-in-the-world and being-with-others. Triangulation conveys their original inseparability: they do not have to be brought into a relation. No intermediaries are needed; no reconciliation is called for. This horizon holds throughout the branches of philosophy. In his excellent guide to this sea change in recent philosophy, Frank Farrell echoes Davidson in stating the phenomenological lesson: “We err if we think we can divide up the contributions of world, language, and interpreter, so as to specify what the contributions of one of those sources would be, in independence of the others.”20 The inseparability of existential factors is a tough pill for unconstrained analysis to swallow. From the view that separates mind from world, winnowing and dividing are required to think clearly. Triangulation, by contrast, sounds unclear and inconclusive. The clarity that resembles logic lacks the illumination of the world. Straining to dismember the triangle in pursuit of pure notions engenders false moves.

Recovery of the World: Then and Now A main source of the persistence of factoring philosophy and the false doubts it yields is unfamiliarity with Hegel and his critique of false philosophy. Hegel is not alone in directing philosophy away from the separation of mind and world. Berkeley’s critique of abstract ideas, Marx’s historical materialist opposition to idealism and materialism, Heidegger’s existential analysis of Dasein, and Davidson’s rejection of the conceptual scheme/content dogma arrive at similar conclusions. For each, analysis is constrained by phenomenology; not everything distinguishable can be pulled apart as separable elements. Aspects (or moments) are not to be treated as parts. The shape of my body is not one of its parts. The rejection of the dominant horizon has been called a sea change in philosophy, “the new antisubjectivism.”21 However, Davidson’s references to the new antisubjectivism and “the myth of the subjective” can mislead. Pure subjectivity, not subjectivity, is the myth. All analysis involves the

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activity of human subjects; what cannot be captured by analysis is the activity of pure subjects—since there are none. Farrell describes the sea change away from unconstrained analysis as the recovery of the world. This phrase captures Davidson’s significance more accurately than talk of a new antisubjectivism. The fundamental split between mind and world that results in the notions of the purely subjective and purely objective is gone. That thinking belongs to the world does not require an act of faith. What else could thinking involve? Error reveals the world in its own way, as does truth. Thinking immersed in the world gets at how things are; reality is not dictated by seamless reasoning. Global doubts about the possibility of knowledge give way to local doubts arising from particular investigations. The dualisms that typify factoring philosophy no longer anchor analysis. Basic concepts develop and become more adequate as thinking proceeds. Absolute exclusions are no longer the backbone of thinking, and the need arises for concepts that express a variety of relations and matters of degree. Constrained analysis moves from initial uncertainties to greater certainty; the demand for unassailable premises gives way to the search for the right questions and concepts that launch an inquiry and develop as it unfolds. Hegel identifies the sea change succinctly. The sure sign that philosophy is released from factoring out the purely objective from the purely subjective is that we talk of truth: But neither we nor the objects would gain anything merely because being pertained to them. What matters is the content, and whether the content is a true one … So nothing at all hangs upon the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity in this sense; instead, everything hangs upon the content, and that is both subjective and objective.22

When the separability of mind and world is recognized as a myth, beliefs reveal what things are—or fail to reveal, in the case of erroneous beliefs. Removed from the shrouds of global doubt, the search for truth becomes obvious and feasible, even if the right answers are not readily obtained. The phenomenology presupposed by philosophy now shifts. The subject’s activity is not a hindrance; on the contrary, it makes knowledge possible. Without a species capable of language and inquiry, knowledge would not exist. What results from disciplined inquiry, with the ongoing acknowledgment of human fallibility, is the case. To identify

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errors or realize that further distinctions are needed depends on the overwhelming presence of truth.23 Basic features of human existence make knowledge possible without constituting knowledge as human creation. They do not strangle the project. Four tenets of false philosophy chart the course of unconstrained analysis: 1. Necessity cannot be known based on experience. 2. Whatever is conceivable is possible. 3. The subjective and objective are separable. 4. The epistemic activity of the knower is always falsifying. All these tenets fail on phenomenological grounds. This picture is not simply an alternative construal. It is false. Unlike that of factoring philosophy, the phenomenology presupposed by Hegel, Heidegger, and Davidson acknowledges the existential grounds of inquiry. We do not have to choose between being human and acquiring knowledge. The goal is a better grasp of human existence and a non-dogmatic empiricism. All attempts to know, including false philosophy, presuppose human existence. The inseparability of language, society, and world describes, at a phenomenological minimum, human existence. This inseparability is the alternative to the false philosopher’s critique of false philosophy as, for example, in Hume’s skeptical solution to skepticism.24 For these essays, keeping this triad in mind is just enough phenomenology to recognize false moves and engage in anti-purist, anti-factoring reflection. The horizon opened by Hegel, Heidegger, and Davidson is described pointedly by Farrell: Heidegger, like Davidson, is trying to rethink the structure of subjectivity that led to the problems of modern philosophy. He rejects the picture of a subjective determining power that, from a position of independence, constructs or orders or projects its patterns upon a world of objects. Thinking is what it is only through already “belonging to” the world and through letting it manifest its character. It is only in “being toward” the world, in being situated in its surroundings, that I as thinker or experiencer have any real content to my activity; and language, rather than being the embodiment of some conceptual scheme or other, is an “openness” in which things themselves are making their appearance. We do not have to

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work to bring an alienated subjectivity back in touch with things, because it is by its very nature as subjectivity always in touch with them.25

If subjectivity belongs to the world, we need not stretch to be in touch with the world. Every false idea or fantasy in its own way is rooted in the world. But knowledge involves effort and often epic struggles. Farrell worries that the notion of knowing as a kind of labor feeds into the misconception that knowledge is socially constructed: to emphasize the subject’s activity as a condition of knowledge risks losing truth and the world. Talk about contemplating, observing, or discovering poses fewer risks. We consider Farrell’s caution to be misplaced. Breaking the hold of purist splits is ongoing work. Concepts like labor must be reconfigured along non-purist, phenomenologically sound lines. Hegel cites labor to convey how analysis moves beyond initial appearances to the essence of things. The meaning of beings is disclosed through the active engagement of the community of inquirers with its objects. Knowledge requires the work of many thinkers. Not just my work, but our work. The question is not whether the subject is active but whether that activity is the right kind: What human beings strive for in general is cognition of the world; we strive to appropriate it and to conquer it. To this end the reality of the world must be crushed as it were; i.e., it must be made ideal. At the same time, however, it must be remarked that it is not the subjective activity of self-consciousness that introduces absolute unity into the multiplicity in question; rather, this identity is the Absolute, genuineness itself.26

In saying that the “identity is itself the Absolute,” Hegel is making the point that the subjective and objective are inseparable; this is what the scary reference to the “Absolute” means. “Absolute” knowing has learned to quit factoring. With the focus for so long on sorting out the objective from the subjective, alternative worries take time to develop. Philosophy needs to regain footing that never left the commonsense view of things, such as wondering whether a claim is true or not.27 Sensing, speaking, and thinking are social and worldly. Concepts properly grasped are not spoken of as mine or even as ours. They have to do with what things are, not what we make of them:

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We must add a remark about the explanation of the origin and formation of concepts that is usually given in the logic of the understanding. It is not we who “form” concepts, and in general the Concept should not be considered as something that has come to be at all. Certainly the Concept is not just Being, or what is immediate; because, of course, it involves mediation too. But mediation lies in the Concept itself, and the Concept is what is mediated by and with itself. It is a mistake to assume that, first of all, there are ob-jects which form the content of our representations, and then our subjective activity comes in afterwards to form concepts of them, through the operation of abstracting that we spoke of earlier.28

To recoil from this passage from Hegel reveals the spell of the purely subjective. The freeing of philosophy from false moves holds great promise. To recognize and improve our basic concepts enlarges our experience, helping us to think straighter and act better. Philosophy that is no longer sidelined by skepticism endemic to factoring philosophy can contribute to the intellectual questions of the day. Nothing compares to a good education in philosophy for getting to real doubts and recovering the world.

Capitalism and False Moves The social forms constitutive of capitalism engender factoring philosophy and lie in the background of this book. The persistence of flawed phenomenology makes us wonder. Why is it so difficult to get off the rails that lead from dogmatism to skepticism and back again? One answer holds that these are the only rails there are. What we call false moves just is philosophy. Sorting out the purely objective from the purely subjective is what analysis does. Criticizing false moves can sound like a wholesale rejection of philosophy. If we abandon this picture, what remains to be done? “If it wasn’t for bad philosophy, there wouldn’t be any philosophy at all,” is an approach often identified with Wittgenstein. Once we let the damn fly out of the bottle, philosophy’s work is done. The persistence of the factoring philosophy’s picture of the world suggests several factors. A slapdash phenomenology supports it. After all, we can mentally bracket persons from the world or focus on thoughts without objects. If we can think of what is mental, why not what is purely mental? The slide from subjectivity to pure subjectivity goes undetected.

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The reverse slide from rejecting pure concepts to doubting both subjectivity and objectivity can derail criticism. The dogma that if it were not for pure subjectivity there would not be any subjectivity at all has quite a grip. Hegel relates forms of reason to the configurations of culture, law, and institutions that he calls objective spirit.29 Reason has a history that reflects in abstract ways the evolving forms of society. This approach suggests that skepticism about reason is rooted in the institutions of commercial society, given their reach. We find that the social forms examined in Marx’s theory of capital shed light on factoring philosophy and why the horizon that separates mind from world is tenacious. The social forms constitutive of capitalism are not readily apparent to an observer; the things closest to us often are not. The dynamic process of the production and accumulation of capital employs numerous appearances and disguises. Skepticism offers one such disguise. The social forms bound up with capital are easily ignored by those skeptical about thinking. A welleducated person is more likely to employ concepts like resource, utility, instrumental action, or greed than the commodity, value, money, or capital. Money and commodities, not to mention capital’s boundless drive to accumulate, exert a real presence but are often overlooked; pseudoconcepts born of factoring philosophy substitute for understanding. In the absence of good concepts that open up the world, it is no wonder that skepticism maintains its appeal. The varieties of skepticism connected to false moves reinforce the status quo. Reason that cannot be counted on to get at the world will not support systematic social critique. The uncertainties generated by capital’s complex, contradictory social dynamic collapse into the general obscurity of things.

The Essay Form: Two Sources of Inspiration This book is written as a series of essays on fundamental topics in philosophy. Our choice of the essay form is inspired by two sources. Hume contrasted easy with abstruse philosophy and was a master of both.30 In the essay “Of Essay-Writing,” unpublished in his lifetime, Hume describes the essayist as an ambassador that moves between the learned and the public. Both parties benefit: philosophy isolated from public discourse slips into narrow and obscure analysis. Without access to scholarship, public discourse sinks into gossip and cliché. The cultivation of the learned and the public, philosopher and citizen, is mutual:

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The separation of the learned from the conversible world seems to have been the great defect of the last age, and must have had a very bad influence on both … Must our whole discourse be a continued series of gossiping stories and idle remarks … learning has been as great a loser by being shut up in colleges and cells and secluded from the world and good company … Even philosophy went to wrack by this moping recluse method of study, and became as chimerical in her conclusions as she was unintelligible in her style and manner of delivery. And indeed, what could be expected from men who never consulted experience in any of their reasonings.31

The essay allows us to contribute to the ongoing conversation between philosophy and the public; it is a worldly genre. The critique of purist splits usually occurs at an abstract level, as it is carried out in this introduction. What is less clear is the difference this abstract critique makes on the ground in shaping the discussion of specific topics. Through these essays, we hope to explore in approachable ways what it means for philosophy to recover the world and public purpose. Mortal Thoughts, by Thomas Nagel, our second source of inspiration, achieves the balance admired by Hume. Nagel consistently engages philosophy with common life in a style Hume would call agreeable. Reading his essays restores confidence in philosophy’s ability to raise speculative issues for a larger audience. Reading Nagel also provoked us to write this book. Nagel takes the opposition of the objective and subjective to be one of the irreducible dimensions of the world.32 An adequate philosophy must respect both the view from nowhere and the view from within; skepticism about either objective claims or personal experience represents a grave failure. To achieve mortal thoughts means to acknowledge the great divide. Nagel defends the variety of knowledge and experience against reductionism, but his defense rests on flawed phenomenology. Opposing the subjective to the objective as irreducible realities is a false move and the source of many others. Nagel’s existential concerns are at odds with his expectations concerning the purely objective and purely subjective. Nagel perceptively articulates real tensions arising from human existence, but he stretches them across a defective frame. When analysis is untethered to experience, a nest of purist concepts covers the actual challenges of knowledge and existence. These pseudoconcepts typically piggyback on real ones. Thus, the notion of pure subjectivity draws from the ordinary sense of subjectivity or being a self.

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The notion that life is absurd draws plausibility from our sense of life’s inherent difficulties. Without the real struggle to be less selfish, the notion of egoism could not get off the ground. The reality of moral complexity, evolving judgments, and disagreement reinforces the notion that values are subjective. Unlike many thought experiments, false moves generally have a ring of reality. The plan to calculate the utility of actions sounds plausible in a society where commodities are universally compared by prices. False moves brush up against experience, hence they are captivating. But false moves do not elucidate experience; rather, they launch arguments that envelop us in dilemmas.

Notes 1. George Berkeley, Introduction to A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Project Gutenberg ebook, December 1, 2003 [EBook #4723]; updated: December 28, 2020. 2. John McCumber’s study of professional philosophy in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century, Time in the Ditch, chronicles the profession’s movement away from public purpose. John McCumber, Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy in the McCarthy Era (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001). 3. On this view, as universals, concepts transcend experience and imagination, leading Descartes to conclude that we come to know ordinary physical objects, such as a bit of wax, solely through pure intellect. Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditation 2, in René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, 4th edition, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), 67–8. 4. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd edition, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, from the translation of W. Glen-Doep (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Co., 1975), 358. 5. We are indebted to Frank B. Farrell’s account of the loss and recovery of the world in philosophy in Subjectivity, Realism and Postmodernism: The Recovery of the World in Recent Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and his critical essay on Richard Rorty’s interpretation of Donald Davidson, “Rorty & Antirealism,” in Rorty & Pragmatism, ed. Herman J. Saatkamp (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995). 6. The watershed text of modern philosophy is Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 7. Despite his enthusiasm for the stream of consciousness, William James was stubbornly Platonic when it came to conceptions: “Each conception

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8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

thus eternally remains what it is, and never can become another … amid the flux of opinions and of physical things, the world of conceptions, or things intended to be thought about, stands stiff and immutable, like Plato’s Realm of Ideas.” From The Principles of Psychology, in William James: The Essential Writings, ed. Bruce W. Wilshire (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971), 112. Clarity is not the problem. As Hegel remarks, “Philosophizing requires, above all, that each thought should be grasped in its full precision and that nothing should remain vague and indeterminate.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co. 1991), 127–8. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 29–35 and 67–74. Donald Davidson, “The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 185–6. Richard Rorty, “The World Well Lost,” The Journal of Philosophy 69, no. 19 (October 1972): 649–65. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xlii. In the steps of Descartes’ method, we see both the drive to separate down to the simple and the absence of any phenomenological check on that drive. The second step—“to divide up each of the difficulties … into as many parts as possible and as seemed requisite”—takes no account of the phenomenological distinction between parts and aspects. Here is a root of unchecked analysis. René Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, Part Two, in Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, 11. Donald Livingston presents David Hume as a critic of false philosophy, but we argue that Hume papers over false philosophy’s problems: he offers a false philosopher’s critique of false philosophy. Donald Livingston, Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998). “The essences of the sorts of things, and consequently the sorting of Things, is the Workmanship of the Understanding.” John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 415. Locke hedges the subjectivism of this position with the qualification that the “Understanding” takes “occasion from the similitude it observes amongst them [things]” (Ibid.). Kant regards the lack of proof of the external world as the “scandal of philosophy,” but the proof that he offers is of a phenomenal external world as distinguished from the world as it is in itself. Heidegger responds,

1

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

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“The ‘scandal of philosophy’ does not consist in the fact that this proof is still lacking up to now, but in the fact that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again.” Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by Joan Stambaugh, revised translation by Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 2010), 197. G. E. M. Anscombe, “Aristotle,” in G. E. M. Anscombe and Peter Geach, Three Philosophers (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961), 10–11. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 24. Donald Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 117–21. Farrell, Subjectivity, Realism and Postmodernism, 78. Davidson, “The Myth of the Subjective,” in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, 47. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, #42, 86. Davidson concludes that “most of a person’s beliefs must be true,” in “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, 146. David Hume, Chapter V, “Skeptical Solution of these Doubts,” in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd edition, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). Farrell, Subjectivity, Realism and Postmodernism, 133. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, #42, 85. Compare this to the concluding sentence of Davidson’s “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”: “In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false” (198). Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, Addition 2 to #163, 228. Here Hegel rejects the classical empiricist view of forming concepts. A more recent effort in this vein is Albert William Levi’s Philosophy as Social Expression (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1974). On the distinction between the “easy and obvious” philosophy and the “accurate and abstruse” one, see Section I “Of the Different Species of Philosophy” of Hume’s Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. David Hume, “Of Essay-Writing,” in David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: LibertyClassics, 1985), 534–5. See especially Chapter 14, “Subjective and Objective,” in Thomas Nagel’s Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

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References Anscombe, G. E. M., and Peter Geach. Three Philosophers. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961. Berkeley, George. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. Project Gutenberg ebook, December 1, 2003 [EBook #4723]; updated: December 28, 2020. Davidson, Donald. “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”. In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. ———. Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. Descartes, René. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. 4th edition. Translated by Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998. Farrell, Frank B. Subjectivity, Realism and Postmodernism: The Recovery of the World in Recent Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. “Rorty & Antirealism.” In Rorty & Pragmatism, edited by Herman J. Saatkamp, 154–88. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 2nd edition. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, who revised the translation of W. Glen-Doep. New York: Continuum, 1989. Hegel, G. W. F. The Encyclopedia Logic. Translated by T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1991. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised translation by Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010. Hume, David. Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. 3rd edition. Edited by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. ———. Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary. Edited by Eugene F. Miller, ed. Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1985. James, William. William James: The Essential Writings. Edited by Bruce W. Wilshire. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Sickness unto Death. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Levi, Albert William. Philosophy as Social Expression. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Livingston, Donald. Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

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McCumber, John. Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy in the McCarthy Era. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001. Nagel, Thomas. Mortal Questions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Rorty, Richard. The World Well Lost. The Journal of Philosophy 69, no.19 (October 1972): 649–65. ———. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.

CHAPTER 2

Is Life Absurd?

What is the meaning of life? The question is compelling. After all, we wonder about the meaning of many things. What is love, friendship, or justice? Our own existence is more fundamental than other topics and sheds light upon the rest. Questions can be revealing. For much of history, life’s meanings were embedded in custom and religion. When identities were secure, the question did not arise for reflection. In modern societies, the power of religion or tradition to illumine our lives can no longer be taken for granted. In a secular setting, the sweeping question of life’s meaning gains traction.1 But how the question is addressed often reveals false moves at work. Determining the meaning of life presupposes an understanding of basic features of human existence. If the phenomenological assumptions of a question are flawed, the answers will be too. One memorable effort to characterize life’s meaning is found in Ivan’s provocative conversation with his younger brother, Alyosha, in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. For Ivan, our goal is to postpone boredom as long as possible. To live means to drain the cup of life’s pleasures.2 Life initially abounds with pleasures—food, books, nature, romance, travel. Eventually, old delights diminish, and new adventures grow scarce. With happiness tied to positive feelings, Ivan is convinced that happiness cannot last. Sensations are fleeting, and repetition dulls

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murray and J. Schuler, False Moves in Philosophy and Social Theory, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35028-3_2

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their impact. Inevitably, pleasures dry up and we lose the battle against boredom. Without feelings that cheer us, life loses its point and emptiness wins. Ivan needles his pious brother that, once the cup is drained, the time comes to “return Him the ticket” and end one’s life.3 The futility of human life is tied not to death or suffering but to the inevitable diminishment of satisfactions. Existence has no inherent purpose for Ivan: simply chase each glistening moment until the string of pearls breaks. Time to go. Our response to Ivan concerns his assumptions. Does the scramble after pleasure mark our path through this life? Do pleasures wear thin like socks? Do we move from one spigot to another until all run dry? For Ivan, pleasure is the goal, and the source hardly matters. Any object of pleasure—blue sky, museums, or friends—will do. From Ivan’s skeptical view, a golden anniversary would honor pointless endurance, not signal lasting happiness. The possibility that repetition could deepen satisfaction is ruled out. Our criticism targets Ivan’s presuppositions about human existence, notably his assumptions that only pleasure gives sense to life and that pleasures wear out. The worth of ideas depends upon the underlying phenomenology. A flawed phenomenology feeds into skeptical conclusions about happiness and life’s meaning. What is the meaning of life? Some thinkers respond to the question by claiming that life is absurd. Like Ivan’s speech, these replies are memorable. What do they mean? Skeptical claims intrigue and trouble us. If life is absurd, this should not be the privileged insight of a few. Everyone should be in on it. The alleged absurdity might shape our view of friendship, work, or politics. Let us consider the claims. What do they mean and are they true? This chapter examines three positions that hold life to be absurd. Albert Camus, Richard Taylor, and Thomas Nagel offer different accounts, but each characterizes life as absurd. Living in France during the Nazi occupation, Camus turned to Sisyphus as the exemplar of the human predicament. In the ancient myth, Sisyphus is punished by the gods and forced to push a rock up a mountain only to have it roll back each time he reaches the top. Absurdity names the fate of humans. For Camus, the crux of the absurd is the collision between unchanging human desires and the indifferent universe: what we long for lies perpetually out of reach. Nihilism—the absence of value—describes our condition. In responding to absurdity through the years, Camus evolves from the

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question of suicide—Ivan’s response—to the need for solidarity with all persons. Taylor takes the stone-rolling Sisyphus to epitomize a different notion of absurdity. For Taylor, endless repetition epitomizes the absurd. Repetitiveness itself is the problem. Since all living things move in cycles, all organisms embody the absurd, including humans. For Taylor, life is the reverse of what happens in the film Groundhog Day: instead of discovering new possibilities in the repetition of the same day, each “new” day condemns us to pointless repetition. Thus, absurdity adheres to living creatures with the fixity of gravity. Presumably, non-living (inorganic) beings alone escape absurdity. Nagel, like Camus, locates absurdity solely in persons. But the themes of Camus’ inquiry—despair, suicide, rebellion—strike Nagel as overwrought. For Nagel, absurdity is no onerous fate. Like a rare spice, absurdity makes our species unique and interesting. For Nagel, the collision at the core of absurdity does not occur between human yearning and an indifferent cosmos: human existence would involve absurdity in any possible world. Rather, absurdity describes the collision within persons between the objective and subjective mindsets that define human existence. We are the species that can step back to challenge the grounds for what matters to us. Nagel identifies this backward step of reflection as “the view from nowhere.” From this angle, purpose drops away as we move toward a “god’s eye” view. For Nagel, this backward step clashes with our everyday immersion in activities that give life meaning. These two inescapable dimensions of human existence—objective spectator and engaged participant—are irreducible and opposed. To be human is to live the irresolvable tension of being two-in-one. For Nagel, the proper mood that acknowledges the rupture at our core is a bemused irony, not spite or despair. Wherever we stand—on the objective or subjective side—irony realizes that, from the other shore, what matters on this side will cease to matter. In each case—Camus, Taylor, and Nagel—absurdity characterizes basic features of existence. To determine which claims are true depends on how existence is characterized. We cannot judge something without an adequate description of it. In each of these cases we find the underlying phenomenology to be defective, as we did with Dostoevsky’s Ivan. Each thinker separates the purely subjective from the purely objective.

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This flawed phenomenology generates the skewed conclusion that life is absurd. But false moves are revealing. While a sweeping notion of absurdity misses the meaning of life, we learn from these failures. They illumine an important dimension of human existence, our capacity for self-reflection, which allows us to recognize meaning, not simply inhabit it. Any grasp of human life’s meaning must acknowledge the centrality of reflection. The challenge is how to characterize reflection without displacing subjects from the world. As accounts of life’s meaning, these global cases for the absurd fail. But a localized notion of absurdity is needed. Some situations are absurd. How absurdity, humor, futility, and the incongruous overlap calls for analysis of specific situations. But cases of absurdity make sense only within a general context that is not absurd. If life were deemed absurd, would absurdities register?4 We now take a closer look at these three efforts to address the meaning of life by appealing to absurdity. Then we offer a phenomenology of the human condition that concludes life is not absurd but makes room for absurdities.

Albert Camus: Our Futile Desire for Knowledge The opening lines of Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus are famous: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”5 Nagel notes that, if life is absurd, that should make some difference. Something should come of it. Camus had gone further. Facing absurdity should convince us to live. The satyr erred who warned: “Oh, man. Better that you should never have been born. And once alive, better that you should die as quickly as possible.”6 For the satyr, the pointlessness of life has the last word. Camus disagrees. Rejecting suicide means rebelling against our fate and taking up the tasks of resistance and morality. The human situation is absurd, but that does not dissolve morality. Not everything is possible. Published in France in 1942 amid war, resistance, and urgent moral choices, the book draws out the consequences of absurdity. Determining life’s meaning is the first matter. Resolutely responding to absurdity is the second. In reverting to suicide, Dostoevsky’s Ivan drew the wrong conclusion thanks to a flawed portrait of existence. For Camus, suicide signifies a confused response to a poignant plight that goes beyond Ivan’s quest

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for pleasure. By raising the possibility of suicide, Ivan shows that life is more than a hunt for pleasure. Ivan lives reflectively. Life is absurd, but absurdity, properly understood, supplies no compelling reason to give up on life. Rather, it lays down a challenge to live without hope, rebelling at our fate in solidarity with others. Suicide, by contrast, loses the tension defining the absurd and amounts to a form of inconsistency. It misses the mark. Rebellion preserves the tension or truth of our situation. Humans are torn; they exist at the edge of the precipice. The plunge of suicide forfeits our torn identity, while integrity keeps the torn identity in view. We are the Sisyphus who does not cease rebelling against the gods. We are the Sisyphus who staggers along out of spite: “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”7 For Camus, rejecting suicide reveals the importance of intellect in navigating the human situation. In facing the absurd, consistency is prized as a mark of integrity. Camus arrives at absurdity through his acceptance of the views of reason common in modern philosophy. The human fall from grace shifts from the salvation story to the realm of knowledge. In place of ancient myths of origins emerges an Enlightenment narrative that might have been written by a forlorn epistemologist. In Camus’ account, persons fundamentally desire to find themselves at home in the world. Above all, we seek to belong. Our quandary is, however, that we exist as aliens or strangers. Absurdity describes the fate of those trapped in collisions between rational aspirations—what Camus calls nostalgia—and an inhospitable world. Absurdity, according to Camus, characterizes a being whose deepest urge cannot be met, forgotten, or corrected. It must be lived as impossible. We are haunted by what always eludes us. The Myth of Sisyphus offers a collage of skeptical arguments and intellectual standoffs familiar to students of philosophy.8 Various aspirations to knowledge are said to lie beyond our reach. Several versions weave through Camus’ tale. In the simplest account, we seek complete knowledge, but human knowledge is always incomplete. Ignorance encompasses more than knowledge; questions outstrip answers. If every question could be answered, presumably there would be no room for absurdity. However, the best efforts of science are little more than candles flickering in a vast night. With complete knowledge as our goal, we are destined to endless frustration. The striking disproportion between knowledge and ignorance makes for the absurd. On another level, human knowledge fails by seeking indubitable foundations. Like Descartes, we dream of knowledge that is impossible to

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doubt. But unlike Descartes, Camus does not find any undeniable first principles. Doubting persists. Actual knowledge relies on hypotheses and results that can always be questioned further. Doubts stretch further than certainties: is it not possible that we are dreaming? If knowledge could remove all hypotheses and draw conclusions with complete certainty, there would be no space for the absurd. Knowledge, however, is inseparable from stipulation and assumption. Human aspirations again are thwarted with the absurd as a result. Yet another account of rational dilemmas recalls Kant and the standoff between the mechanism of science and the human quest for purpose or meaning. No scientific treatise can disclose who I am to become. Kant’s second and third critical questions ask: what ought I do? and what may I hope for? But science offers no answers to these questions. In modern science, teleology has been superseded by causal accounts where there is no room to ask, “to what end?” Science writes human concerns out of nature, so we find our search for meaning expelled from the realm of knowledge. If we could discover our human destiny amidst the scientific data, there would be no room for the absurd. But our purposes and hopes do not appear in the topography of science. Among the epistemological perplexities facing Camus is the status of concepts. In mapping the human understanding, Locke described nominal essences as “the workmanship of the understanding.” The essence of “dog” or “gravity” is not discovered.9 Rather, we come up with classificatory schemes to get on with life: concepts are coping mechanisms. Camus concludes that concepts are constructed—strictly human in origin. According to Kant, transcendental concepts, such as causality, are imposed by the mind on the flood of sensations arising from the world. This view of concepts—of thinking—separates us from the truth we seek. We endeavor to grasp the world itself but end up knowing the world we have ordered, what Kant calls phenomena, a reality relative to our modes of cognition. This suggests to Camus, as it does to naïve empiricists, that immediate sensing comes closest to objectivity, which means that the aims of knowledge, paradoxically, are best reached by sensing, not thinking. Try not to think! If we reduce thought to a minimum, we are closer to contact with the undistorted object: This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of

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which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers.10

Camus presupposes a disjunction: what is purely given or what is purely fabricated. We are in the wheelhouse of factoring philosophy. The notion that cognitive order represents human imposition on formless sensations is a disturbing thought, though a popular one. On the one hand, we invent order to survive, but, on the other hand, we want truth—not lawfulness projected by our mind onto formless sensations. The truth not reducible to human categories and calculus is out of reach, so we are stuck with constructed appearances. Here Camus generalizes Feuerbach, who identifies theology as a misdirected branch of anthropology. Like the gods we devise and then worship, the sciences are shadows cast by our human form. For Camus, there is no escaping the lens of our nature: The mind’s deepest desire—parallels man’s unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity. Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal. The cat’s universe is not the universe of the anthill. The truism “All thought is anthropomorphic” has no other meaning … the mind that aims to understand reality can consider itself satisfied only by reducing it to terms of thought. If man realized that the universe like him can love and suffer, he would be reconciled.11

Of course, Camus would promptly reject any such “realization” as wish-fulfilling anthropomorphism. The posited separation of mind from world rules out any path to reconciliation. Camus leaves us with a rigged flip of the coin: heads you win, tails I lose. For Camus, absurdity is generated at the juncture between human desires and an unyielding universe. Reason does not concoct absurdity; we already yearn to find ourselves at home in the world. Contributions from both the universe and the person are required to generate absurdity. Taking the backward step, Camus witnesses a collision between human desires and the set-up of the world. Humans push with all their might toward unity, and the universe—not the gods—stymies them: But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. The absurd depends as much on man as on the world … The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of

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the world … The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter.12

At the end, we are as far away from that which we seek as in the beginning. We are the Sisyphus who never had to offend the gods to be doomed to futility. What Camus presents as the absurdity of the human condition actually embodies flawed and shifting presuppositions. Nostalgia, the desire to be at home in the world, seeks a kind of knowledge that is dogmatically ruled out from the start. Desires are said to collide with the world only because mind and world are presupposed to be completely separable and incapable of being brought together. Persons are said to demand complete knowledge with perfect certainty—the objective view—from a world that also tells them who they are and gives their lives meaning—the subjective view. These demands are at odds with each other and are raised in abstraction from the actual context of human knowing. Camus situates mind outside the world, a model that provokes persistent doubts concerning the status of knowledge. If human knowledge is qualified as relative to mind, it is subjective in a pejorative sense, that is, not true. Adopting this model ensures that objectivity and subjectivity remain mutually exclusive and that the given data is overtaken by what is constructed or true “for us.” The initial division between mind and world sparks further divisions within persons: we seek the whole and only achieve the part. Every apparent success of human knowing thunders failure to know the rest. Clarity is never enough; what we see is always swallowed up by the obscurity of the unknown. To insist that persons do not learn from experience is dogmatism that fosters skepticism. In Camus’ account, humans do not develop. Our unchanging demands are permanently at odds with real possibilities. Rather than challenge these demands, Camus follows them to their unsettling conclusion—our condition is absurd. This conclusion is guaranteed by the supposedly fixed nature of desires at the human core. These desires are unbending, uninformed by experience, and uneducable … a caricature of integrity. When the subjective is separated from the world, there is no feedback loop that could inform desires. Collisions are inescapable. Who we are cannot change no matter how often we crash into the state of things. Neither can the world change. If desires could be educated by the kind of knowing that lies in our reach, absurdity would be avoided.

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But standoffs are assured when we are stuck with unyielding opposed expectations. Camus inherits the factoring habits of modern philosophy that rivet analysis to skepticism. One mark of skepticism is the flip-flop from one extreme to the other. For example, nostalgia presumably seeks to find meaning and close the gap between persons and world. On the other hand, human knowing is faulted for projecting subjective order onto the world. The bifurcated world whipsaws between being too remote and too human: the world in itself is wholly indifferent to human meaning, while the world for us is wholly fabricated by humanity. No state of affairs could allow for complete knowledge and infuse my life with meaning. On the one hand, we seek certainty as measured by complete absence of doubt. To map the entire universe, deductive systems proceed from premises asserted to be self-evident. Here clarity signifies the necessity of clear and distinct ideas. But initial assertions do not guarantee their truth or certainty. On the other hand, we seek purpose to direct our lives and measure what matters. Clarity here signifies purpose and possibility. A complete system of causality would not supply meaning. Situating our lives in the flow of deductions would not satisfy our desire for meaning. In achieving the goal of mapping the universe with certainty, we would be more homeless than ever. Camus’ antinomy of the nostalgic self who is stuck in a purposeless universe is an artifact of his dogmatic bifurcation: either the self is written out of nature or nature disappears into the self. What cannot happen within the factoring framework is that persons exist in the world without generating a standoff. Factoring does not budge. It is the factoring philosopher—not the human—who is cursed like Sisyphus and helpless to change course. The factoring philosopher charges into battle again and again with “futility” his cry—no wonder that spite is the mood of the absurdist’s hero: I want everything to be explained to me or nothing. And the reason is impotent when it hears this cry from the heart. The mind aroused by this insistence seeks and finds nothing but contradictions and nonsense.13

The plight generated by factoring philosophy calls to mind Samuel Beckett’s character, who lurches along without hope or destination, exuding poignancy in the end: “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”14

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The absurdity that Camus attributes to the supposed clash between our wants and the way of the world is squeezed from self-imposed dilemmas delivered in stirring prose. Absurdity is not discovered; it is a set-up. It is not the gods who punish this Sisyphus; he strides into an ambush of human devising.

Richard Taylor: Repugnance at Life For Richard Taylor, the futility of Sisyphus cuts across organic nature and human life.15 He draws on glowworms in caves and scenes from human life to convey this meaning of the absurd. In each case, repugnance is the test for the absurd. The futile labor of Sisyphus repulses us. Glowworms are disgusting; they mate, hatch eggs, and the winged adults are later trapped and devoured by their offspring. Details add color, but any creature could serve Taylor as an example of pointless repetition ended by death. For Taylor, organic life—from bugs to humans—embodies the futility that signifies the absurd: What great thing awaits all this long and repetitious effort and makes it worthwhile? Really nothing … This has been going on for millions of years, and to no end other than that the same meaningless cycle may continue for another millions of years. All living things present essentially the same spectacle.16

Taking the backward step, Taylor is struck by an unremitting sameness to life. For many, the sights of nature spark wonder at their complexity and elegance. For Taylor, subtle differences ultimately dissolve into sterile sameness. Patterns repeat, cycles continue. From this altitude, nature’s rhythms drum out the same tiresome beat: each creature scrabbling along toward death, absorbed in the endless and pointless tasks of survival. Each dying, for Taylor, offers fresh proof of the absurd, since what gave that creature its meaning is never revealed. Absurdity in Taylor’s view is tied to mortality: human existence is as pointless as that of a glowworm, though we typically overlook this shared fate. Our assessment of glowworms is more honest. Awareness of life’s futility can be brought on by a stroll through the cemetery or observing rush hour. “Is that all there is?” But mortality is half the problem; death is only the exclamation point to life’s futility. The routines that fill our lives disclose the sameness that goes nowhere:

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Look at a busy street any day, and observe the throng going hither and thither. To what? Some office or shop, where the same things will be done today as were done yesterday and … repeated tomorrow. And if we think that, unlike Sisyphus, these labors do have a point … then we simply have not considered the thing closely enough.17

Routines express endless repetition; there is no need to dwell on death to encounter the absurd. It belongs to the everyday. For Taylor, reflection, taking the backward step, reveals a spectacle of futility but, oddly, not a grim one. For humans, objective futility is usually masked by subjective absorption in our lives. Melancholy might sound like the mood that fits the daily grind, but most people are protected by a benign biochemistry that masks life’s pointlessness. The species’ imperviousness to metaphysical discomfort is possibly insured by natural selection. Like children reared in dire straits, humans know no other condition. We are too preoccupied with rolling our stone to be discontent. For Taylor, absurdity is a philosopher’s burden; it does not register in daily life. For the most part, we do not take the backward step, so our condition stays in the shadows. We are generally engaged with matters that we care about. We quarrel about politics or the World Cup, rarely about life’s lack of meaning. If our body chemistry and circumstances are fortunate, we may never hear the humdrum of life. Absurdity is battled daily in Camus’ world; humans continually face the dangers of despair. For Taylor, absurdity, like the unmoved mover or the thing-in-itself, is a metaphysical reality that rarely matters. Not because our lives are meaningful but because absurdity creates no friction that troubles us. We are only slightly more likely than a glowworm to awaken to the pointlessness of our being. By implication, philosophers are the anomaly, those who see in the dark what is concealed to others. This encounter with absurdity is a privilege of the elect. Since few people are dedicated bystanders to their lives, absurdity is news with a small circulation. Like other metaphysical claims, it lacks consequence. In the end, the whirl of ordinary life, our irrational caring—the “Karamazov” in us—has the last word.18 Taylor’s sour reflection reverses Langston Hughes’s poetic “sweet flypaper of life.”19 What would bring meaning to daily life is missing and cannot emerge. Our ordinary use of “boring” loses traction in Taylor’s world. Every time Taylor moves in to examine a possibility, the criteria shift. No matter how Taylor rewrites the Sisyphus story, he preserves

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the conclusion that life is absurd. Flip-flops come with false moves. In one of Taylor’s rewrites, Sisyphus manages to arrive at the mountaintop, where he builds a fine temple. This Sisyphus is judged no less absurd, since temples eventually decay, thrusting Sisyphus down the slopes of futility once again. Taylor then briefly considers a Sisyphus who makes it to the mountaintop and builds a marvelous temple that never crumbles. Dissolution is conquered but not absurdity. Presumably, a temple that never crumbles confronts the same pointlessness as rocks endlessly rolling down hills. What conquers corruptibility is more futility. We are stuck with a temple that cannot decay like fabric impossible to wear out or bell-bottoms always in season. Unchanging eternity is just as ominous as tiresome repetitions in time. Taylor follows Dostoevsky’s Ivan but without the despair: satisfactions are fleeting, but most of us are immune to futility. Claims immune to experience are a feature of factoring philosophy. Actual experience is bothersome. Why go to the trouble of analyzing real life if thought experiments like Sisyphus do the work for us? It is easier to presuppose absurdity than to work through the sources of meaning in actual experience. What would constitute a meaningful or non-absurd existence is never addressed. Taylor cannot imagine human life free of absurdity. He does not know where he wants to go, yet he is sure we cannot get there. Taylor appears to put his notion of the absurd to the test by shifting the story line, but no revision resists his conclusion. No matter what situation is faced by Sisyphus, absurdity results. Each reworking of the myth reaches the same flat conclusion. As with entropy, sameness has the last word. Not even thought experiments glimpse a non-absurd existence. Neither time nor eternity could deliver any possible existence from pointlessness. The non-absurd is not thinkable. Taylor’s backward step presupposes a split between the objective and subjective. In pursuit of objectivity, he retreats to such a distance that meanings disappear and only monotony remains. It calls to mind Harry Lime’s (Orson Welles) chilling speech from the top of a Ferris wheel in The Third Man: Look down there. Would you really feel anything if any one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 [British] pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Calculate how many dots you could afford to spare, free of income tax, remember …20

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For this mindset, sameness and difference stand opposed. And the objective—sameness—trumps subjectivity and differences that matter. From this perch, glowworms can substitute for humans and the articulated developments of organisms vanish into the sameness of the primordial ooze. There is no conceptual space for development when sameness splits off from difference. Differences between species do not matter. But just because we cannot see a person’s expression at a distance does not transform a throng of people into flotsam. At a distance or up close, it is hard to see why the processes of life should breed disgust. On the contrary, the student of nature finds its order amazing. Repugnance might arise if we try to imagine ourselves living like glowworms, but that is not Taylor’s point. We are living like glowworms; we fool ourselves into thinking otherwise. To determine the meaning of any being presupposes understanding what constitutes that creature. When the details of a being disappear, so does our ability to answer the question: what gives life meaning? Taylor is committed to absurdity and rigs his argument to ensure that this conclusion follows. He equates any imaginable existence and every scenario with futility. Absurdity is an original feature of being; it penetrates the universe so deeply that we cannot think past it. Absurdity, our fate, goes undetected; it does not trouble us. Most people do not reflect on life as do philosophers. Like glowworms, we get on with our lives.

Thomas Nagel: The Absurd Two-In-One of Human Existence For Thomas Nagel, absurdity has nothing to do with the universe or other species. Camus erred in naming the cosmos as partner to the absurd. There is no need to imagine a possible universe that frees us from absurdity. Nor is organic repetition pointless. We learn little about being human from glowworms. Absurdity attaches solely to human existence; it is the peculiar trait of those who can step back as bystanders to their lives: one person existing as both participant and observer. Absurdity arises from self-reflection, not cosmic expectations, daily routines, or mortality. Absurdity is not a secret guarded by metaphysicians; neither is it a persistent and disturbing awareness. All persons, not just philosophers, have the capacity to transcend their situation in thought and view it from the outside. Our capacity for reflection makes human life absurd.

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Humans can take up two opposed attitudes at once: while cooking a meal we can observe ourselves performing this action. When we consider all actions from the external viewpoint, we encounter global absurdity. Ordinarily, the absurd is identified with the meaningless or futile. Nagel tries to block this move. He calls absurdity one of the most interesting features of being human. To shift between observer and participant yields the distinctive outlook of irony. Irony arises when humans are most selfreflective. Nagel strikes a lighter note than Heidegger in his account of anxiety at being-toward-death. Irony registers that our situation is absurd. Absurdity makes a difference, but a subtle one. Absurdity does not provoke Camus’ question of whether to be or not to be. The encounter with absurdity alters our underlying disposition rather than changing our behavior or expectations. It is a matter of mood. Like those of Camus and Taylor, Nagel’s notion of absurdity presupposes a purist split. The defining feature of human existence for Nagel is the opposition between the objective and the subjective, or the purely impersonal and the purely personal. That subjectivity is excluded from the objective outlook is dogmatically presupposed. For Nagel, human existence spans two standpoints: we walk on stilts. As participants, we are immersed in experience with the seriousness of those whose endeavors matter. Everyday life involves felt certainties and convictions. This lived perspective is the subjective. As observers, we can step outside experience to observe our engaged being as just another set of events in the world. The objective standpoint drops the thread of familiar meanings, such as my reasons for preparing dinner. An objective account of my behavior will not appeal to such reasons. In stepping outside experience, objective consciousness detaches from the human condition—or tries to. If anthropomorphism is a threat to objectivity, then we must cast off human limitations. Purist objectivity gives rise to skepticism concerning any belief. It lacks a compass for living. It is possible that nothing really matters, and no belief is true. We cannot know for sure. The conjunction of these two opposed stances—serious engagement and skeptical detachment—defines human existence.21 Since we will never know, how the world is does not matter to this account of absurdity. What Camus lumps together as nostalgia, Nagel analyzes into two strands: the view from within and the view from without. Neither is given greater weight by Nagel; it is the collision between them that constitutes our situation and generates the absurd.

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Absurdity is wrongly equated with futility. Rather it signifies the contrast between subjective expectations and awareness that our expectations have no grounding. We experience absurdity, since we can stand back from our lives to observe them from without. What I recognize as a bystander is lost on me as a participant. Each standpoint dislodges the other, yet each is humanly inescapable. Absurdity, thus understood, encompasses what is strange or unsettling. From an objective side, our convictions may be pointless, but the objective side is only half the story. Just as real is our involvement in living, where we cannot jettison our care and convictions. Neither the objective nor subjective constitutes the absurd. Rather, the inescapable oscillation from one to the other constitutes the absurdity of our present condition. The current of human life is alternating, not direct. AC not DC. For some, absurdity arises from the thought of how slight and fleeting is human existence. Uneasiness may come in a flash, like watching family members recede into smudged figures in the rearview window as we drive away or seeing our town gradually vanish as the plane ascends. For Nagel, these accounts of absurdity miss the target. Absurdity is not linked to mortality or to the immensity of time and space. Properly speaking, it is sparked neither by size nor mortality. Absurdity concerns the whole of our lives, not perceptual moments. Redesigned humans of great size who live for millennia would still face the absurdity generated from the cleft in our consciousness. At any size, the bystander’s view collides with the participant’s. Stepping back to observe our lives, according to Nagel, puts the ordinary in a new light: It (the backward step) is not supposed to give us an understanding of what is really important … We never, in the course of these reflections, abandon the ordinary standards that guide our lives. We merely observe them in operation, and recognize that if they are called into question we can justify them only by reference to themselves, uselessly. We adhere to them because of the way we are put together; what seems to us important or serious or valuable would not seem so if we were differently constituted.22

In connecting reflection with absurdity, Nagel echoes the skepticism of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, which investigated “the way we are put together.” When Hume takes the backward step, no justification for ordinary beliefs and values can be found. We believe that the

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sun will rise tomorrow and that the sunset is beautiful, but what justifies such beliefs? Proof of beliefs is not arrived at through objective measures. Rather, human nature—Nagel’s subjectivity—grounds beliefs. It is our nature to expect customary events to continue; justification never gets past our skin. Ordinary standards never describe the world as existing apart from us, for we cannot remove ourselves from the mix of knowing: “Skepticism begins when we include ourselves in the world about which we claim knowledge.”23 If we could separate ourselves from the world that we seek to know, skepticism could be answered. Ordinary standards ultimately describe how it is for humans. The backward step unhinges us; it asks about how things are apart from our mode of existence. This demand for pure objectivity is made but cannot be satisfied. The subject cannot be separated from that which is known; there is no way to compare our context with a context not tailored to us or to some other species. This purely objective context is posited, but it yields no measure. It remains empty, and this emptiness chastens us. Anything might be true or good. What we take as true or good is ultimately rooted in the peculiarities of our make-up; it is arbitrary. There is no way to escape the skepticism aroused by the infinite possibilities outside the human context. In this projected widest context, no standards can be discovered to quiet our doubts. While suitable for everyday matters, ordinary standards do not suffice for complete certainty: they can never block a backward step that would undercut them. In Nagel’s hands, the backward step revives the global skepticism of Descartes’ opening doubts in the first meditation. How do we know we are not dreaming or being deceived? Are there alternative and superior accounts of nature? Nagel presses us: without Descartes’ confident proof of an infinite and non-deceiving being, “at some point the frameable questions will have outlasted the answers.”24 In detaching ourselves from ordinary standards, we land with a thud in the first meditation—with no exit. When God is removed from the picture, the certainty of the Cogito deepens skepticism by disclosing the inescapable subjectivity that binds knowing to a worldless mind. Consciousness finds no reprieve from doubts. Human knowledge makes great progress but cannot free itself of the possibility that the world in itself remains unknown. The skeptic renounces what are said to be human biases without ceasing to be a human self. The backward step reveals our existence as arbitrary or a petitio: what is done by humans

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justifies what is done by humans. Taylor takes a backward step that reveals futility as objective: all life is futile. That is the truth about life. Nagel is more skeptical; he faces a different conundrum. Making a judgment that life is futile requires confidence that we grasp the world itself. Nagel’s skepticism does not allow for such confidence. The backward step does not plant us on solid ground. It cannot be reconciled with ordinary consciousness—after all, we must get on with living. Ordinary standards manage our lives well and deserve our trust. They are justified pragmatically; what they lack is justification in the larger metaphysical context that is home to skepticism. The pursuit of ordinary life in skepticism’s shadow leaves a trace: it alters our mood. Nagel describes this ironic mood in a memorable way: Philosophical skepticism does not cause us to abandon our ordinary beliefs, but it lends them a peculiar flavor. After acknowledging that their truth is incompatible with possibilities that we have no ground for believing do not obtain … we return to our familiar convictions with a certain irony and resignation. Unable to abandon the natural responses on which they depend, we take them back, like a spouse who has run off with someone else and then decided to return; but we regard them differently … We return to our lives, as we must, but our seriousness is laced with irony.25

With no metaphysical solution at hand, ordinary life is pursued within the skeptical parenthesis. Nagel’s skepticism differs from Descartes’. For Descartes, doubt is a method, not a destination.26 Methodological doubt is designed to establish knowledge upon secure principles. Descartes’ method draws from logic, geometry, and arithmetic, three sources of certain knowledge. To achieve similar certainty in metaphysics, methodical doubt first clears the path of less certain principles. For Descartes, this leveling doubt is a method to be employed cautiously. After years of preparing, we retire into solitude, where basic convictions are destroyed in thought. Doubt supplies the lever for reconstruction. Descartes would be troubled by the notion that pervasive doubt actually expresses the native horizon of selfreflection. In Nagel’s telling, the first meditation describes reality from the backward step. Outside customary experience, anything is possible. Doubt is no tool of analysis, rather doubt reveals how reality is observed as an outsider to human life. For Nagel, the first meditation offers the phenomenology of self-consciousness largely missing from Descartes’

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terse presentation of the Cogito in the second meditation. This is the unsettling way that the world looks at the self-reflective person. But is it?

A Phenomenology of Reflection The three defenses of absurdity differ, but the reasonings overlap. Each argument appeals to a fundamental feature of existence: humans can reflect in the detached manner that Nagel calls taking the backward step. Each account of reflection—how we step back to observe—reveals an implicit phenomenology. To determine whether absurdity accurately conveys the meaning of life, we must address these phenomenological assumptions. For Camus, reflection reveals the homelessness of a species that seeks its place in the world in vain: humans are destined to be aliens and exiles. For Taylor, the backward step discloses an overpowering sameness that rids life of difference and meaning. For Nagel, the objective mindset tries to subtract humans from the world. This effort plunges us into a sea of doubt. All three cases appeal to a phenomenology: this is what reflection reveals. From the detached standpoint—whether dogmatic, as in the case of Camus and Taylor, or skeptical, as with Nagel—emerge the incongruities that constitute the absurd.27 Self-reflection is a condition for the growth of knowledge. To observe, we step back from our ordinary concerns to determine the best practices. Reflection is a powerful component of new understandings. But do we experience the backward step in the jarring ways that disclose life as absurd? Does reflection unfasten us from the world and all our everyday meanings and purposes? These accounts of the backward step are driven by presuppositions that have already cut humans off from their world: each is a version of factoring philosophy. Purist splits undergird even the dogmatic claims of Camus and Taylor. If the self is posited as outside the world, absurdity grows plausible. The false moves involved in skeptical presuppositions block persons from recognizing that meaning is inseparable from the world—not a purely human construct. If these assumptions are faulty, self-reflection may have more promising consequences. The backward step could allow us to recognize what purposes already belong to us. Self-reflection, based on a better phenomenology, becomes an essential component of a more meaningful human life. Absurdity is a jazzy notion that highlights important aspects of human existence such as incongruity, despair, uncertainty, moral resolve, irony,

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choice, and scientific objectivity. But Camus, Taylor, and Nagel do not assemble these aspects into recognizable human existence. Each of these writers tailors their account of existence to accommodate the absurd. Absurdity is not a conclusion drawn from an examination of life; it is a presupposition that selects certain features and bypasses others. To assess life’s meaning requires adequate phenomenological grounds. The first question is not what the meaning of human life is, as if what constitutes human existence were self-evident. The first question should ask: what are the basic features of human life? Talk of the absurd skips over this primary phenomenological question. If we set aside the claims about absurdity and raise the more fundamental question, we recognize the sources of meaningfulness that constitute existence: being together, being able to speak, question, understand, be understood, feel, love, laugh, make plans, and act. An adequate account of human existence refocuses the question. There is no single answer to the meaning of life; there are many sources of meaning. These sources can diminish or increase. In some situations, my questions are not heard; my feelings are confused; the future appears bleak. Meaning slips away. Sometimes we find a situation to be absurd. To call it absurd presupposes some measure of judgment. What occurs is unexpected or makes no sense. Every measure is rooted in some feature of existence or situation. Without measures, differences are not detectable, and intelligibility is gone. When life as a whole is deemed absurd, the specific measures go slack. It is not possible for humans to step back so far from ordinary life that all measures vanish. That phenomenology is false. A false phenomenology is appealing because it captures some aspects of experience. The world does look different in the quiet of reflection. Reflection often is disturbing, as we consider relationships and ponder difficult situations that elude easy answers. Reflection may leave us lost. Unsettled. Chastened. Doubtful. Helpless. Taking a backward step, we may confront the limits of our situation. It may disorient us. Nagel, however, goes beyond recognizable confusion to caricature. He smuggles into reflection Cartesian-like presumptions. His backward step plunges us into global doubts, where anything is possible. But this account of human experience is forced. People do not slide into first meditation doubts when they step back to observe their lives. Self-reflection confronts specific challenges, but not utter groundlessness. For Nagel’s skeptic, what is ordinary suddenly appears arbitrary; what is

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reasonable sounds irrational; what is familiar looks strange; and the farfetched is on equal footing with the tried and true. In the search for first principles, Descartes’ thought experiment treated the highly probable (I am sitting in front of the fire) as false (what is occurring is a dream). The reader strains to entertain doubts that go completely against the grain of our lives. For Descartes, global doubt is a method to construct a system of metaphysics. Self-reflection, however, has other aims, such as uncovering meaning, recognizing what matters, and judging how best to respond. From Nagel’s backward step, no recognition is possible because the self becomes just another object in the universe. The observer looks upon his self as an alien whose sounds and movements are gibberish—remember, for factoring philosophy, all meaning is purely subjective. How we even distinguish this body of mine from other things is inexplicable from the purely objective view. A better phenomenology finds reflection compatible with recognition of the self. When we step back to reflect, questions arise only because ordinary standards do not morph into the arbitrary. Without experiencing what is necessary, we could not recognize what is arbitrary. To exclude necessity from experience would eliminate the arbitrary as well. Nagel takes a moment of existence—self-reflection—and treats it as a separable entity. He treats reflection as purely subjective28 Nagel claims to describe the space of self-reflection, but his account moves into another kind of space altogether, a contrived skeptical no-place where we have shed our skin. Hume, among others, conjures this unsettling space—and condition. Hume warned that abstract thought is dangerous if not rescued by ongoing engagement with common life, where persons, theater, books, politics, and art matter.29 The library of abstract thought opens onto the dining room, where the thinker, to remain sane, rarely dines alone. The space of speculation is closely hinged to the space of custom and lived realities. Moving out of the dining room into the library is the precursor to Nagel’s backward step. Hume’s library is the site of philosophical speculation.30 Popular philosophy, such as essays or history, poses little risk to a thinker’s orientation. Abstruse philosophy, such as Hume’s analysis of causality, opens onto a bizarre scene in which the familiar becomes arbitrary... the view from Nagel’s backward step. How such analyses lack adequate phenomenological grounds will be addressed in later chapters. That such terrain is not a faithful rendering of human reflection is evident already. People are not torn by doubt when they step back to assess the

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scene before them. The precarious balance that Hume sought between trust and skepticism, custom and reason, suggests defects that must be resolved. Instead of improving our conceptions of reason and custom, one extreme is braced against the other. Hume’s alternation between dining room and library—common life and reflection—is the origin of the collision that underlies the absurd for Nagel. The alleged absurdity of life is rooted in a phenomenology where the backward step presents a startling view of the world as formless and arbitrary, without causes or meaning—without selves! The purely subjective is presupposed as the source of purposes and concepts. Without subjective interests and decisions, there is no basis for justification. Nagel’s backward step purportedly glimpses the universe separated from subjectivity, where human reality is just another item. But being stripped of the subjective is tantamount to being stripped of the conceptual. This “real world” outside the order allegedly imposed by humans is not uncompromised objectivity; it is a formless abyss, a blank.31 To say that this phenomenology is false means that in stepping back to observe the world we do not land on this precipice. The precipice is an artifact of factoring philosophy, a trompe l’oeil. A better account of reflection would find that, when humans step back to consider the world objectively, they encounter an amazing natural and social order that includes the intricacies of their own consciousness. Objectivity comes from the exercise of disciplined, methodical inquiry by subjects in the world. Without knowing subjects, objectivity could not come into existence. Human existence is the condition for knowledge. It is more likely and fitting that we feel wonder and gratitude—not irony—at our ability to understand the world, which opens itself to our understanding.32

Why Global Absurdity Does not Fit Our Lives To judge human existence as absurd is evaluative. It suggests an absence. What is missing from existence that is globally absurd? What would remove absurdity? What kind of life is not absurd? Perhaps part of our lives escapes the general absurdity of existence. But absurdity is said to be pervasive. No part of our lives is untouched by this general condition. No pristine part remains to spy on the absurd remainder. If we cannot conceive of a hypothetical non-absurd existence, absurdity is a pseudoconcept. Pseudo-concepts sound meaningful, but a closer look finds they do not pick out features of the world.

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An opening argument against absurdity goes like this. Absurdity answers the question: what is the meaning of life? In order to determine that human existence is absurd, a measure for absurdity is needed. What could be the source of this measure? If criteria arise from human existence, the ordinary contexts of language and time are in play. Absurdity is defined within the meanings, purposes, and temporality that constitute our lives. But claims of absurdity call all meaning, purpose, and temporality into question. How can the criteria that depend on features of human existence show them to be illusory? To ask: “what is the meaning of life” presupposes a grasp of the features of life and, more fundamentally, of meaningfulness. Arguments for the absurd violate the conditions presupposed by the question: we operate within the meaningfulness of language and understanding. This self-reflective argument against the absurdity of human life is compelling. To consider life’s absurdity, try to imagine the alternative. What would rid life of its absurdity? How is non-absurd existence constituted? Camus suggests several possibilities. Life would lose its absurdity if we possessed complete knowledge or indubitable foundations or a clear grasp of human destiny. From Taylor, we imagine existence without death or routines or repetition. Presumably, if each trip of Sisyphus were unique, if life has no end, then both boredom and mortality would be conquered. With Nagel, life is not absurd for those who never take the backward step; glowworms do not lead absurd lives. Without transcendence, however, human life is unrecognizable. What would a being perceive whose life was not absurd? Camus imagines a godlike being with complete knowledge. Taylor’s eye is on a brilliant aesthete whose life is unceasing novelty. To live without absurdity, for Nagel, requires loss of reflection. An intelligent being immune to absurdity would encounter no difference between everyday consciousness and the backward step. The self cannot disappear into “the view from nowhere” if no self exists. Nagel differs from others in upholding absurdity as an excellence: we are better off with a reflective self than without one. An ironic person possesses self-knowledge. We are fortunate to live absurd lives. But the contrast between absurd and non-absurd life remains in the background for all three thinkers. In short, a life free of absurdity is godlike or alien: such a life is no longer human. If a life that is not absurd moves beyond human reach, how could it serve as a measure for us? Are fabricated forms of life useful to characterize humans? Can we even understand them sufficiently to determine their worth?

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This chapter argues that the claims for the absurdity of life fail. It is no mistake to contemplate life as a whole. But the measures should be taken from within human existence. Not from an imagined no-place outside it. Human existence supplies criteria of meaningfulness and purpose. These measures must be adequate to the task. To determine life’s meaning, begin with the beings we are. We know what is missing when we say humans do not fly. We do not know what is missing when we say human life is absurd. To evaluate existence as absurd is self-defeating: to exist in a non-absurd way, we must no longer exist as human. To designate time, space, language, society, emotion, history, culture, or any basic feature of existence as a source of absurdity leads to this impasse.

The Importance of the Question of Life’s Meaning The question of a meaningful life challenges the view of philosophy as abstract analysis without personal consequences. What gives life meaning matters. Camus puts the issue bluntly: I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument … Whether the earth or the sun revolves around the other is a matter of profound indifference … On the other hand, I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living.33

To conclude that my life is not worth living might occur under the strain of difficult conditions. A prisoner in permanent solitary confinement may judge that his life is not worth living. While we reject the notion that life per se is absurd, false philosophy’s rigged answers respond to real questions. What is the meaning of life is a real question. Reflecting on the question sharpens our sense of what matters most; which activities deepen our appreciation for life; what ways of living are shallow, disconnected, futile, oblivious, or short on meaning. In exploring fundamental features of existence, whether in the rain forest or Silicon Valley, philosophy contributes to a meaningful life. What conditions are presupposed by human existence anywhere? What contributes to human flourishing? Raising the topic invites self-reflection and honesty; it may elicit the courage to change. The question underlies everyday concerns about ethics and choices. To avoid false philosophy’s conclusion that life is absurd, the question needs to be reframed. To ask what the meaning of life is may provoke

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the empty answer: absurdity. To ask what gives human life meaning turns the discussion in concrete directions. First, we move from the vagueness of life in general to the specificity of human life. Second, we attempt to identify the features that characterize human existence, such as language, temporality, and self-reflection. What distinguishes humans from other species? Only with the specificity of human existence properly construed— the task of phenomenology—can we discuss the activities that make our creaturely existence meaningful. The question matters too much not to be posed in ways that answers are possible.

The Absurd that Matters Arguments for the absurd seem to contact ordinary sensibilities, but this appearance is misleading. The apparent urgency of global absurdity depends on local absurdities. To reject the absurdity of human life frees us to address specific absurdities that matter. Nagel describes local—not global—absurdity in this way: In ordinary life a situation is absurd when it includes a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality: someone gives a complicated speech in support of a motion that has already been passed; a notorious criminal is made president of a major philanthropic foundation … as you are being knighted, your pants fall down.34

What is incongruous or defies expectations gives rise to a sense of absurdity: nutrition programs that malnourish, defense policies that increase a nation’s vulnerability, education that increases illiteracy, and people starving in the midst of plenty. These situations confound us because what would make sense is clear. This sense of futility or the preposterous has a determinate content; thus, an absurd situation conveys real emotion. To reject the notion that life in general is absurd allows us to recognize local absurdity. The concept of the locally absurd belongs to the working vocabulary of critical thinking. Nagel’s “philosophical sense of absurdity,” by contrast, lacks criteria. What would count as a non-absurd yet human existence? Every possible world or consciousness runs into the same blank conclusion. “It’s absurd” also has artistic or expressive meanings. The phrase expresses disquiet with the picture before us. This mood resonates with works by Beckett and Kafka as well as Camus’ protest at the carnage of

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fanaticism and war. The phrase unsettles us; it serves many ends. Absurdity is felt when the starry sky that evoked the sublime for Kant proves too much for us. Under the sway of these impressions, we are swallowed by our smallness. Despite our achievements, we are more lost than found; surely, we deserve something better. Helplessness and frustration converge before what does not change. “It is absurd” expresses protest without the burden of finding solutions. We are stuck with a predicament that can be named but not escaped. What is absurd mocks our efforts to reverse it. Absurdity is no stranger to our lives. The mood passes. Situations change. We can experience futility, incongruity, or disgust because existence matters. Some situations are absurd in particular ways. However, if human life per se is absurd, how do we judge a particular state of affairs as absurd... only more so? The notion that life itself is absurd undercuts thinking and action. A general state of absurdity, if true, would undermine our efforts to respond to local absurdity or distinguish the meaningful from the meaningless. If life as a whole is absurd, specific absurdities don’t register. Nagel contrasts global and local absurdity and claims that both hold: human life overall is absurd, in one sense, and specific events are judged absurd, in another sense. To recover meaning, switch gears and head in the opposite direction. Irony bridges the two forms of the absurd for Nagel: what disappears into objectivity—such as goods or selves—reemerges on the subjective shores. We argue, on the other hand, that one claim expels the other. If global absurdity were true, then local absurdity loses its bearings; it doesn’t matter. But local absurdity does matter. To preserve the importance of local absurdity, our existence must not be absurd. Only because meaningful activity is the norm do we even notice absurdity as the exception. Like other skeptical claims, “life is absurd” has the potential either to awaken thinking or to encase us in a tomb of our own making. To work through false moves teaches about existence and better thinking. Adopting global absurdity is a trap, not an opening. An absurd life would disconnect us from ongoing life; the generalized absurd is empty and cannot enter into the difference-making of existence. We are left with a mood that “seasons” our sensibilities rather than a concept that forms them. What contributes to purpose and meaning is too concrete to touch an empty notion like absurdity. To grasp the meaning of life requires knowledge of the species in its habitats and specificity. For example, how persons mature in virtue, grow less selfish, acquire compassion, confront

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injustice, or learn to love are not relevant to the claim that life is absurd. They are not empty enough to contribute to the discussion of what is life’s meaning. From the heights of false philosophy, matters of justice, for example, are deemed irrelevant. Hence they are excluded at the point of entry. A better phenomenology examines necessities as actually experienced. It begins with experience and how meaning is recognized. Phenomenology does not stipulate what would count as meaning but tunes into the criteria already in play. People can recognize what gives their lives meaning. This is where thinking starts. The alleged absurdity of life is more frame-up than argument. In the grip of false moves, we do not learn what gives meaning to life. It is this philosophy that stops making sense, not the human condition.

Notes 1. Charles Taylor observes that in a secular age, we are “cross-pressured.” In secular societies there has been a shift “from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace.” Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 3. 2. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor, ed. Charles Guignon, trans. Constance Garnett (Indianapolis: IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993), 2. 3. Ibid., 16. 4. This fits a pattern that repeats itself where phenomenological false moves lead the philosophical analysis of a phenomenon to make that phenomenon unintelligible. 5. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 4. 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Birth of Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 42. 7. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 90. 8. Sextus Empiricus provides a handbook of ancient skeptical arguments in his Outlines of Scepticism, trans. Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 9. In Locke’s doctrine of nominal essences, we find a root of contemporary anti-essentialism. Its roots lie in a purist split between mind and world: anti-essentialism is a dogma of factoring philosophy. 10. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 14. Even the claim that I know that the “world” I touch exists remains a hollow epistemic victory since I have nothing to

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

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say about “it.” Here, Hegel’s observation is apt: “neither we nor the objects would gain anything merely because being pertained to them. What matters is the content and whether the content is a true one. The fact that things merely are is of no help to them.” G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1991), addition 3 to #42, 86. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 13. Ibid., 16 and 21. Ibid., 20. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press Inc. 1958), 179. David Wiggins’ discussion of Richard Taylor is illuminating. Wiggins objects to Taylor’s noncognitivist analysis of Sisyphus on phenomenological grounds. Like Nagel, Taylor completely separates the inner from the outer views. The resulting outer view of action, claims Wiggins, is not recognizable to the inner view and amounts to its erasure. Persons do not experience inner psychological states as arbitrarily related to external events. Whether a project succeeds or not gives or thwarts meaning and satisfaction: what is “outside” shapes what is “inside” persons. Values are not separable from what happens and why it matters. For Wiggins, values “light up” states of the world. David Wiggins, “Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life,” in David Wiggins, Needs, Value, Truth (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 137. However, Wiggins does not escape factoring; he does not rethink noncognitivism to its roots to arrive at being-in-theworld as the human way of being. Instead, he accepts the pure subjectivity of noncognitivism and adds objective factors in a combination called cognitive underdetermination. Wiggins seeks to avoid the consequences of purist analysis within the terms of purist analysis. He counters the purist logic of “either/or” with an equally purist logic of “both/and.” For Wiggins, questions of the meaning of life combine the objective and subjective, the discovered and invented, properties and responses, objective states and autonomy. These combinations echo Kant’s line about “concepts and percepts”: experience happens only where they intersect. But the problem with purist terms is phenomenological: objective states can be distinguished from subjective responses, but analysis cannot separate them. What is discovered is never purely given but is given in an already interpreted context. Richard Taylor, “The Meaning of Life,” in The Meaning of Life, ed. E. D. Klemke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 145. Ibid., 146. Consider the opening scene of About Schmidt. The camera takes us into the final minutes of Schmidt’s career as an insurance actuary: seated at his desk, he stares at the clock, waiting for it to strike five and

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18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31.

release him. Alexander Payne dir. About Schmidt (Los Angeles, CA: New Line Cinema, 2002), feature film. Hume attributes our imperviousness to the futility of human life to “the artifice of nature” that has “happily deceived us into an opinion, that human life is of some importance.” Nature tricks us into living. David Hume, “The Sceptic,” in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: LibertyClassics, 1985), 176. Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes, The Sweet Flypaper of Life (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1984). Carol Reed, dir. The Third Man (London, United Kingdom: British Lion Film Organization, 1949; Los Angeles, United States: Selznick Releasing Organization, 1950), feature film. This opposition is addressed in Barry Stroud’s, Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction: Modality and Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 17–18. Ibid.,18. Ibid., 9. Nagel, Mortal Questions , 19–20. Descartes describes his long-standing opinions, for example that he has a body which exists in a world of other bodies and other thinking beings, as “in some respects doubtful as by now is obvious, but nevertheless highly probable, so that it is much more consonant with reason to believe them than to deny them.” René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, 4th edition, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), Meditation 1, 62. Though all three rely on reflection to discern what makes life absurd, only Camus and Nagel limit absurdity to humans. For Taylor, you do not need reflect to be absurd; you just need to be alive. According to Heidegger’s existential analysis in Being and Time, the notion of the “purely subjective” is at odds with the most basic features of human existence. Reflecting is a way of being-in-the-world and being-with-others. See Donald E. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984). The library, with its speculative books, is a real place; Hume’s posited space of reflection is not. Donald Davidson argues, with the homey example of ordering items in your closet, that trying to organize something inchoate is a fool’s errand. “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 192.

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32. This thought is captured in the epigraph from Albert Einstein to Peter Fuss and John Dobbins’ translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: “The eternal mystery of the universe is its comprehensibility.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Peter Fuss and John Dobbins (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019). 33. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus , 3. 34. Nagel, Mortal Questions , 13.

References Beckett, Samuel. The Unnamable. New York: Grove Press Inc, 1958. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage Books, 1955. Davidson, Donald. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Descartes, René. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. 4th edition. Translated by Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Grand Inquisitor. Edited by Charles Guignon; translated by Constance Garnett. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993. Empiricus, Sextus. Sextus Empiricus: Outlines of Scepticism. Translated by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Hegel, G. W. F. The Encyclopedia Logic. Translated by T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1991. ———. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Peter Fuss and John Dobbins. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised translation by Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010. Hughes, Langston, and Roy DeCarava. The Sweet Flypaper of Life. Washington DC: Howard University Press, 1984. Hume, David. Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary. Edited by Eugene F. Miller, ed. Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1985. Livingston, Donald, W. Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Nagel, Thomas. Mortal Questions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.

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Payne, Alexander, dir. About Schmidt. Los Angeles, CA: New Line Cinema, 2002, feature film. Reed, Carol, dir. The Third Man. London, United Kingdom: British Lion Film Organization, 1949; Los Angeles, United States: Selznick Releasing Organization, 1950, feature film. Stroud, Barry. Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction: Modality and Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Taylor, Richard. “The Meaning of Life.” In The Meaning of Life, edited by E. D. Klemke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981. Wiggins, David. 1987. Needs, Values, Truth. Oxford: Blackwell.

CHAPTER 3

Being Mortal

Death surrounds us, but it is part of the human world that seldom becomes ordinary.1 The flow of the everyday halts, above all for the one facing death. Death may come as a blow, especially death that is sudden, violent, or premature. It may come quietly and anticipated as one slips away in the night. Though all organisms die, the loss of a human life is regarded differently. Only humans can be murdered; that speaks to the gravity of the loss of a human life. Central to all cultures and religions are the rituals accompanying death. The date of death, like the date of birth, is carved on the gravestone and often marks a turning point for those surviving the loss of a parent, child, spouse, or friend.

Customary Views of Death Our thoughts on death are formed by philosophy, experience, and memorable scenes from the arts. In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Father Zossima’s estranged older brother, Markel, reconciles with God, family, birds, flowers, and strangers in the cascading weeks of his fatal illness at age nineteen. In the Confessions, the young Augustine’s tumult over the death of his friend verges on madness. Finding the absence of his constant companion unbearable, he is stranded among the living. Later, after converting to Christianity, Augustine hesitates to weep when

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murray and J. Schuler, False Moves in Philosophy and Social Theory, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35028-3_3

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his mother, Monica, dies. Eventually, he gives way to tears, since even believers in bodily resurrection miss those who have passed on. Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich chronicles the illness and death of an ordinary family man and civil servant.2 For those in Ilyich’s circle, his dying intrudes like an unpleasant agenda item slipped into the meeting at the last minute. No one is sure how to respond to the unexpected, including Ivan. Death is an uncomfortable topic that most prefer to avoid. Death may be a fact of life, but few expect the inevitable to happen to them. As his illness progresses, Ilyich gradually takes stock of his life, a process more unsettling than the disease. With clarity comes aloneness as he approaches death with new resources of his own. A favorite rendering of death occurs in Frank Capra’s film It’s a Wonderful Life.3 Reeling from impending financial disgrace, George Bailey prepares to jump from a bridge when his angel, Clarence, jumps first, knowing that George will save him. Clarence enables George to encounter a world in which he had never been born. Without the Bailey Savings and Loan, George’s hometown, New Bedford Falls, is driven into corruption under the tight fist of the resident plutocrat, Mr. Potter, for whom the town has been renamed. The inhabitants are barely recognizable. George’s despair gives way to gratitude. In the vision of this film, one life makes a huge difference in the world, which brings home the depth of the loss involved in death. The language, rituals, images, and practices of common life reveal death as loss. The customary outlook on death reasons that life is good and each human life matters to the living person and to those affected by that person, so a human life’s ending represents a loss. We commonly speak of soldiers making the ultimate sacrifice. Consequently, we have good reason to fear death and to grieve over the dead. Fear and grief do not exclude peacefulness. A person can face dying in a peaceful way while still experiencing the sadness of loss. Not all fear is paralyzing. It is possible to combine fear and sadness with acceptance in the face of death’s inevitability.

Dismissive Philosophies of Death Several prominent philosophers dismiss common understandings of death. We will consider the dismissive views about death put forward by Socrates, Stoics, and Epicureans. This dismissiveness toward death— death is nothing to be feared—stems from phenomenological false moves.

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One false move misreads the temporality of human existence: it fails to include the anticipatory character of human understanding. What lies before us in the future already matters in the present. Being the kind of creature that will someday die shapes the awareness and identity of the living. Another false move results in being dismissive about life, which makes being dismissive about death seem natural.4 Socrates exemplifies this sort of philosopher’s way of approaching death: to be unmoved by, even welcoming of death—and scornful of living. We reject this legacy. Socrates’ attitudes disclose the link between disparaging the fear of death and taking a dismissive view of human life. Those who scorn death are likely first to have scorned life. The speech given by Socrates to the jury in Plato’s Apology exhibits disdain for customary views. Socrates argues that wise persons should face death without fear since death is an unknown. Fear of death, he says, makes a false pretense to wisdom: “No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.”5 Socrates’ reasoning goes like this: wise people live by what they know is true, but we know nothing about death. To fear death is to judge that death is bad, but that is to pretend to know what we do not know. The wise person, then, does not fear death. By focusing on the state of being dead, Socrates skips over what we do know: I will certainly die, even if I do not know how or when, and my earthly life, with my projects and attachments, will cease. I will no longer participate in this world as a mortal creature; I will not be available for anyone depending on me; family and friends will mourn my passing. Even those who expect rebirth or resurrection still suffer the loss of their present life. Looking at death from the standpoint of the living, we are far from ignorant about its meaning. Death means the end of my earthly activities and my availability to others. One point so obvious as to be overlooked is that the world will go on without me. My death may put an end to me, but it will not bring the world to an end. If I love the world, that offers consolation. Why does Socrates overlook or discount these well-known facts about death? Later in his speech to the jurors, Socrates amends the view that we are ignorant; he calls death a blessing. He assumes that death is likely to be one of two things: either oblivion or a transition to an afterlife. While we do not know which to expect, a little reflection reveals that either outcome is good, so neither is to be feared. To imagine being dead, Socrates compares death to an endless, dreamless sleep where “the dead

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are nothing and have no perception of anything.” Socrates remarks, “if it is complete lack of perception, like a dreamless sleep, then death would be a great advantage,” since our waking life rarely measures up to a night of deep sleep.6 Without sensation or consciousness, pain is impossible, so there is nothing to fear. Socrates would take the sting out of death by deprecating life. On the other hand, if death means a transition to the underworld, Socrates will continue his mission of examining his companions, which is his service to the gods and his delight. So, the jury acts in ignorance by voting to punish Socrates with death. Death is a blessing, especially to one who obeys the gods and avoids evil. Socrates professes indifference about life but not indifference about philosophy. In the final scene from the Phaedo, where Socrates drinks the hemlock, which brings all earthly conversation to an end, Plato describes thinking as “training for death.” With a nod to jokes about philosophers being half dead already, Plato’s lovers of wisdom retire from ordinary pastimes to ponder the ultimate reality of timeless truths. A lifetime of withdrawing from active life prepares these thinkers for the awaited— even welcomed—release of the soul from the body at death. Socrates’ final words, instructing Crito to sacrifice a cock to Asclepius, suggest that death heals the sickness that is human life. But Socrates’ devotedness to philosophy and friendship contradicts his impassiveness before death. Being alive allows Socrates to pursue his mission wholeheartedly. Being indifferent is the false note in Socratic wisdom. Socrates’ calm demeanor before death is taken by Seneca, among other Stoics, as the embodiment of courage. It contrasts sharply, for example, with how Iphigenia faces death in Euripides’ play Iphigenia. Both are called brave, but similarities end there. Socrates goes to death unmoved, if not relieved, while Iphigenia grieves her fate and fights the dying of the light. By Socrates’ reckoning, humans are ignorant to fear death. By this standard, most tragic figures are deemed ignorant. However, if someone places little value in living, can he be counted brave when his life is taken? Despite his calm demeanor, Socrates offers a dubious model of courage. Courage should be attributed to one who risks something of value, not someone who shrugs off what is worthless. Stoics claim Socrates as their precursor. To achieve complete tranquility, they are harsh on customary views of life and death. What is so great about living? Seneca, despite his reputation for gentle doses of Stoic medicine, is blunt:

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There’s nothing so very great about living—all your slaves and all the animals do it. What is however a great thing is to die in a manner which is honorable, enlightened, and courageous. Think how long now you’ve been doing the same as them—food, sleep, sex, the never-ending cycle.7

If living were great—or even good—the loss of life would be bad. But, for Stoics, everything other than one’s own judgments is neutral, and the business of ordinary life comes across as tedious. To die courageously means to accept death whenever it arrives as fitting. Even suicide can be honorable, says Seneca, if a person’s suffering is unrelieved. Epictetus tells the seeker of detachment to “let death and exile and everything that is terrible appear before your eyes every day, especially death.”8 If we anticipate our death, we acquire the dismissive attitude toward “externals” that is supposedly freeing. Externals include children, property, reputation, one’s body, and one’s life, over which Stoics say we have no control. The dismissive attitude toward death that Epictetus seeks to cultivate, then, derives from the false move of making a purist split between internals and externals. What is purely internal—thought— belongs to me. The body is an external. This split encourages a dismissive attitude toward life. Most people treasure life and fear death. Stoic indifference would be troubling to them. Epictetus finds no point in disturbing others with one’s indifference, even if one knows better than to be moved as they are. Since Stoic wisdom departs dramatically from ordinary practices, it must be disguised. Training for Stoic virtue requires a good measure of insincerity: When you see someone weeping in grief at the departure of his child or the loss of his property, take care not to be carried away by the appearance that the externals he is involved in are bad … Do not hesitate, however, to sympathize with him verbally, and even to moan with him if the occasion arises; but be careful not to moan inwardly.9

Stoic sages are not harmed by gossip or criticism, but they do not pick fights. Achieving indifference toward death is a hard-won victory that presumably justifies some deception. Among the influential thinkers who are dismissive of death is Epicurus, whose ideas are espoused by Lucretius in On the Nature of the Universe. Epicurus and Lucretius treat death primarily as an event separated from

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the anticipatory aspect of our understanding. Isolating death from the rest of life is a false move that breeds dilemmas. Lucretius pursues the campaign against fearing death by attacking myths that portray the horrors of the afterlife. Reason cannot bring peace to a fearful heart if religion continually agitates us with dire warnings and grotesque images. For Lucretius, like Epicurus, there is only one reasonable view: death— like Socrates’ big sleep—is the end. Any talk of the afterlife is foolish. Following Epicurus, Lucretius has one overriding concern: to show that where suffering is impossible, there is nothing to fear. A simple argument should suffice to uproot fear and thereby heighten life’s true pleasures. Epicurus’ pithy reasoning is well known: you should accustom yourself to believing that death means nothing to us, since every good and every evil lies in sensation; but death is the privation of sensation … There is nothing fearful in living for the person who has really laid hold of the fact that there is nothing fearful in not living. So it is silly for a person to say that he dreads death—not because it will be painful when it arrives but because it pains him now as a future certainty; for that which makes no trouble for us when it arrives is a meaningless pain when we await it. This, the most horrifying of evils, means nothing to us, then, because so long as we are existent death is not present and whenever it is present we are non-existent.10

Epicurus and Lucretius chart a person’s life in terms of pain and pleasure, sensory gauges that register only present conditions. Since sensing stops with death, being dead must be painless, hence nothing bad, and so nothing fearful.11 Fear of death amounts to the false belief that death is painful. To remove the error is to remove the fear. While dying might be painful, and any pain is to be avoided or ameliorated, Epicurus directs himself to the fear that concerns being dead. Being freed from that erroneous fear represents an accomplishment, since life’s pleasures are then unperturbed by any thought of death Epicurus pooh-poohs the significance of anticipating death, “So it is silly for a person to say that he dreads death … for that which makes no trouble for us when it arrives is a meaningless pain when we await it.” As long as we live in the present, death is never an issue: “so long as we are existent death is not present and whenever it is present we are non-existent.” Death matters neither to the living nor the dead. But the lifelong anticipation of death cannot be shrugged off. While we are alive, we do something that we cannot do when we are dead: we anticipate the

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meaning of our life and all of the goods it involves. That is not something we will be capable of when dead, if Epicurus is right that death means the end of us, oblivion. Lucretius drives home Epicurus’s conclusion by observing that the nothingness of being dead mirrors the time before birth. No one looks back in anguish over the time before birth when we did not exist, so why look ahead in fear to the nothing of being dead: “One who no longer is cannot suffer, or differ in any way from one who has never been born, when once this mortal life has been usurped by death the immortal.”12 If the earlier void does not matter, neither should the latter. Lucretius also defends death as a way to recycle bodily matter: “There is no murky pit of Hell awaiting anyone. There is need of matter, so that later generations may arise … one thing must spring from another.”13 Believing that the amount of matter in the universe is limited, Lucretius holds that for persons to be born, others must die. The hope for immortality is not only irrational but also selfish; my immortality would crowd others out of existence. Thomas Nagel challenges Lucretius’s assertion that the oblivion of death is no different than not having existed before birth. Nagel argues that there is a “temporal asymmetry” between the two cases such that death is a loss to a living person whereas there is no one for whom not being born can be a loss: “It is true that both the times before a man’s birth and time after his death are times when he does not exist. But the time after his death is time of which his death deprives him.”14 By contrast, “we cannot say that the time prior to a man’s birth is time in which he would have lived had he been born not then but earlier,” for “anyone born substantially earlier than he was would have been someone else.”15 Who we are is not independent of when we come into the world. The temporality of my existence stretches out from birth. Since Epicurus and Lucretius conceive of persons as vessels filled with pain and pleasure— both conceived abstractly—it is beyond them to grasp the projective temporal character of human experience, i.e., how anticipating the future figures into present experience. Determined to prevent us from fearing death, some thinkers heap scorn on being alive, as we saw Seneca (and even Socrates) do. Lucretius tries to shame his readers out of fearing death: what is so great about one’s life that it should be missed?

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And the Master himself, when his daylit race was run, Epicurus himself died, whose genius outshone the race of men and dimmed them all, as the stars are dimmed by the rising of the fiery sun. And will you kick and protest against your sentence? You, whose life is next-door to death while you are still alive and looking on the light. You, who waste the major part of your time in sleep and, when you are awake, are snoring still and dreaming. You, who bear a mind hag-ridden by baseless fear and cannot find the commonest cause of your distress, hounded as you are, poor creature, by a pack of troubles and drifting in a drunken stupor upon a wavering tide of fantasy.16

To uproot fear of death is the goal. For these philosophers, disgust with life cures fear of death. Being dismissive of living clears the way for being dismissive of death. If death is incorrectly identified with pain, living, for the most part, involves boredom, frustration, and disappointment. What is so great about living that we should regret its loss? For Epicurus, the challenge of being human boils down to eliminating pain. Situated outside life, death can cause no pain and thus it poses no problem: “death means nothing to us.” “Being outside” constitutes one meaning of “end” of life. With death outside, it should have no more relevance to my daily life than the moons of Jupiter. In a few lines, Epicurus resolves the matter of death for humans. But simple solutions can be simple-minded. The appeal of a simple solution wanes when it misconstrues the subject at hand. Just as being mortal is more than the event that ends life, the challenges of being human are not all answered by eliminating pain. What gives life meaning and purpose goes beyond the calculus of pleasure and pain, which do not exist generically as Epicureans suppose.

A Better Phenomenology of Death The customary understanding of death involves loss and grief; some important philosophers, we see, regard death with indifference, if not relief. Both views assume that the meaning of death is self-evident: the end of earthly life. At least that is not in doubt. We challenge this assumption. Before addressing the end of human life, we need to consider those features of the human person that make death a lifelong issue for us. This is the task of phenomenology. An existential analysis or phenomenology is a form of knowledge presupposed by other forms of knowledge. A more fundamental understanding of death than end of life is being mortal. We

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do not wait until death to be mortal. Being mortal characterizes human existence from the beginning: each of us will die someday—and we know it.17 Judging whether to fear death or be indifferent to it requires a prior understanding of what human existence involves. Human existence involves being mortal. When philosophy is out of touch with basic features of human existence, it is untethered. Untethered analysis moves too hastily. It stipulates basic concepts, such as death, to begin. The focus is on working up arguments, and whether to fear death becomes the decisive issue. But good reasoning depends on good concepts that capture fundamental features of the world. These concepts are not picked up easily; they do not simply report how terms are used. Good concepts develop as we think through a topic. Without them, philosophy constructs clever arguments with little purchase on the world. Untethered analysis is the seedbed of false philosophy. Positions multiply, fostering the sense that anything can be claimed and that criticism is futile. In our view, an adequate grasp of being mortal is missing from many arguments about death. Philosophy often takes death’s meaning to be obvious: being alive and being dead split apart as separate states, with dying as the gray zone in between. Being alive excludes being dead, as with other dichotomies. In the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul Edwards states that death has one meaning whether applied to oneself or to others: “disintegration of my body and cessation of my experience.”18 If death is simply an event, then Edwards is right that it has just one meaning for self and others. Life comes to an end for us all. Debates occur in bioethics as to what is the true marker that someone has died. But bioethics, like philosophy generally, takes death primarily as the event that ends life. That assumption rarely is questioned. Controversies arise over what marks that event. Treating death as the end of life frees philosophy to debate whether that event is evil, neutral, a welcome end to life, or a transition to new life. We draw on Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time to distinguish the event of death from the existential situation that we call being mortal.19 For Heidegger, the first task is to characterize the existence of the one who faces death’s inevitability. When thinking attends to death only as an event in the future, a basic feature of human existence is disregarded: how the future is with us already in anticipation. It is true that a person’s death takes place somewhere in the future, but a person’s present involves constant anticipations of the future. Humans exist in an understanding way, and in understanding we project possibilities: we are always

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ahead of ourselves. That is how we can be surprised or disappointed. It is why we caution others: watch your step. The simple act of turning the handle projects the possibility of opening the door. Even though death lies somewhere in the future, its prospect is already with us. Anticipating death as my ultimate end belongs to human existence. Human foresight means that life and death cannot be pulled apart as mutually exclusive states. More basic than the event of death is the everyday tug of mortality. Humans exist toward death; being mortal dawns on us well before the event of death. To detach anticipation from human understanding is a false move, a phenomenological error. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s account of the state of nature, our earliest ancestors had few needs and lived only with present awareness. They did not experience their lives as passing; they were oblivious to death. They lacked foresight. Rousseau’s suggestion is startling. Could human consciousness shift through history in such a basic way? That children must learn about death is clear. That people try to ignore death or disregard mortality is commonplace. But creatures oblivious to the passing of their lives are not recognizably human. Awareness that this life of mine will come to an end characterizes human existence in a fundamental way. To experience my life as passing away anticipates my death. Nagel, a philosopher who shares the customary view of death as loss, echoes Heidegger’s insistence on a preliminary analysis of human existence. In Mortal Questions , Nagel notes that objections to fearing death “have something to do with time” and “the direction of time is crucial to assigning possibilities to people or other individuals.”20 We can describe the projective character of human existence as its temporality. Time involves changes that can be measured, such as the hours of the day. Temporality, by contrast, is lived and not measured; it describes how past and future converge in the present. What is possible for a person draws from the past and opens onto the future. For temporal beings, the future is not excluded from the present. Like the past, it is felt in countless ways, with the anticipation of death privileged among them. To recognize how facing death is an ingredient of human existence reveals life’s temporal character.

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The Death of Others Heidegger’s existential analysis of human existence as Dasein shows how encountering the death of others differs from facing my death.21 Clearly, we learn about mortality when friends or family members die. Human existence, after all, is social all the way down. From tools and work to moods and language, humans exist with others. Being-with-others is not a fact about human interaction; it is a fundamental condition of human existence, beginning with family ties. What I look upon as mine develops out of being together, even in situations where the self is alone. The solitude of the monk and the isolation of the prisoner in solitary confinement are ways of being-with-others. For Heidegger, religions and customs constitute people’s understanding of death in diverse ways, but phenomenology addresses basic meanings that underlie rituals and accounts of an afterlife. The death of others leaves behind the corpse and what Heidegger calls the being of the deceased. A corpse is unlike other objects since “in it we encounter something unliving which has lost its life.”22 A corpse records in its own way a person’s history; it bears a unique forensic significance. The human body can be preserved, and the remains of ancient peoples displayed on a museum shelf, but the corpse differs from the urn or wardrobe as being and not just belonging to a person. The sight of the corpse makes the death of the other real and her withdrawal irrevocable. The presence of the deceased goes beyond ashes and bones. A fundamental feature of human existence is being-with-others. Though each human will die, the survivors are with the deceased in distinctive ways: “In lingering together with him in mourning and commemorating, those remaining behind are with him, in a mode of concern which honors him.”23 The one who dies exerts influence in various ways on the living. “Being-with always means being-with-one-another in the same world. The deceased has abandoned our ‘world’ and left it behind. Nonetheless, it is in terms of this world that those remaining can still be with him.”24 Children may honor or curse their deceased parents. An author may be forgotten and later rediscovered. The legacy of a leader is debated for generations. Underlying these possibilities is how the one who dies continues with us as the deceased. Multiple connections with the dead are evident in memories of survivors. The corpse has a location, but the presence of the deceased, with its many possible consequences for the living, is not localizable.

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From the death of others, we learn what is so obvious as to be overlooked: death does not put an end to the world. Life goes on. We also realize the importance of relationships and the distinctive significance of a human corpse and of the deceased. But the other’s death is not mine; it does not reveal my life as mine. Heidegger suggests that the rituals of mourning may even direct us away from the call of our own existence. My mortality is not only illuminated but also obscured by the death of the other. The mineness of my death is absent. On this crucial aspect of being mortal, the individual does not learn from others. Being present at the death of another does not disclose what is fundamental: death is a uniquely personal experience. Each faces death in a sense alone. In its fundamental meaning, death is mine: “No one can take the other’s dying away from him … Every Dasein must take dying upon itself in every instance. Insofar as it ‘is,’ death is always essentially my own.”25 The mineness of death separates it from other aspects of human existence that have a public character. Heidegger notes that because our lives are interconnected one person can represent another. From the ordinary to the heroic, doing another’s work or accepting another’s punishment, one person can stand in for the other. At times, persons marry through the actions of proxies or carry another’s child. Though someone can save my life, even die in my place, no one can save me from dying. Death can be calmly acknowledged as a general feature of nature. But the order of nature differs from existence that is mine. I encounter existence as one who will someday die: “In dying, it becomes evident that death is ontologically constituted by mineness and existence. Dying is not an event, but a phenomenon to be understood existentially.”26 My existence presupposes general features of mortality. How death belongs to me is not gleaned through the death of others. The unique feature of mineness is missing.

How a Life Comes to an End For Heidegger, the search to understand the whole of life shifts from another’s death back to one’s own death. This move, however, threatens to revert to Epicurus’ dilemma: there is no sense to be made of a state that is not experienced. Where death is, I am not. How can persons look upon their own end? Seeking clues, Heidegger examines ordinary ways in which things come to an end. “Coming to an end” is a phrase that occurs in many contexts. Heidegger examines a few cases to uncover

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what completion means. Heidegger earlier shows that understanding and mood are inseparable. Achieving an existential understanding of death is not a purely intellectual project. Mood always infuses understanding.27 He establishes how understanding, mood, and discourse are mutually constitutive in human existence. Since discourse is inseparable from understanding, how we talk about something coming to an end reveals how we understand the meaning of a totality—in this case, my life. The examples are ordinary. A debt exists when an obligation is outstanding and waiting to be paid off. The debt comes to an end when the outstanding amount is paid off. Human life, by contrast, does not add up to an original amount that exists together at the end. The phases of the moon come to an end, but the moon always exists as a whole that is not visible to the naked eye. The ripening of fruit comes to an end. Humans, like fruit, undergo a process that moves toward an end: “The not-yet is already included in its own being, by no means as an arbitrary determination, but as a constituent.”28 When fruit achieves its end, it reaches its peak condition for eating. Ripeness is a kind of fulfillment. When humans die, a life is spent but not necessarily fulfilled: With ripeness, the fruit fulfills itself. But is the death at which Dasein arrives a fulfillment in this sense? It is true that Dasein has “completed its course” with its death. Has it thus necessarily exhausted its specific possibilities? … Dasein so little needs to ripen only with its death that it can already have gone beyond its ripeness before the end. For the most part, it ends in unfulfillment, or else disintegrated and used up.29

Ordinary examples drive home the unique way in which human life comes to an end. For the most part, things come to an end by stopping, disappearing, or getting finished. Rain stops, the road ends, bread is consumed, the painting is finished: “In death, Dasein is neither fulfilled nor does it simply disappear; it has not become finished or completely available as something at hand.”30 Our life’s possibilities do not come with an expiration date.31 Most people readily acknowledge that persons are not objects. Yet putting into words the different ways that persons and things exist is challenging. It is tempting to let this difference collapse and conclude that death occurs when life stops, disappears, or is finished. This ordinary discourse pushes what is unique about human existence out of sight. What

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lies before humans—their end—belongs to present existence in a distinctive way. Persons can turn toward their end or turn away from it; even being indifferent toward it, as argued by the philosophers dismissive of death, is a way of anticipating it. In each case, the end is already with us. Our end plays a role throughout our lives. People do not become mortal at the moment of death; we exist as mortals all along. When death is regarded primarily as an event situated outside of life and not experienced, our own existence as creatures who anticipate becomes a riddle.32 To grasp human existence calls for understanding how being-toward-death pervades it. To force life and death apart as opposites—and seemingly to free life from death’s cold hand by concluding with Epicurus that “death means nothing to us”—leaves us ignorant of human existence. This false move disables us; we become unable to conceive our own mortality as the awareness that we will someday die. All human understanding is projective. Humans live in the anticipation of death. To understand death as immanent to life is more primordial than viewing death as an event lying somewhere in the future. Death’s immanence is already here. Death arises from the conditions of our existence and makes it possible to reflect on our life as a whole before it is over.

Mortality as Being Toward the End The contrast between thinking about death as an event and thinking about mortality is the crux of Heidegger’s analysis. When death is primarily the event that marks the end of life, humans are said to exist at an end. We may regard this event with hope, or it may intrude upon our thoughts in fearful ways. The event can be characterized as a transition to some other world or as entering oblivion. A disjunction asserts: either dead or alive. Many responses to the prospect of this event are possible, such as ignoring it or dismissing it. When ordinary people or philosophers take up the topic of death, it is this event that they have in mind. Death as an event sometime in the future has primary significance. Other meanings of death are taken as metaphors in relation to the eventual knock of the Grim Reaper. When thinking turns to mortality, death is seen as immanent to life. With mortality, humans exist toward an end rather than at an end. The preposition matters. There is no delay before we exist toward an end. We always exist toward death. As creatures, our anticipated end is already with us: we are mortal. While we can exclude death as an event from

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our awareness, we can never exclude being mortal. At some level, I feel my life moving forward. Whether we are forgetful or keenly aware of our situation as mortals, we take a stance toward death in how we live. All ways of living a human life interpret the totality of “who I am.” “Being toward the end” roots responsibility within the whole of one’s existence rather than restricting it to specific decisions or deeds. How we live embodies our way of being human. An event has a date and location. Temporality, by contrast, draws together past, present, and future, characterizing existence as a totality. Being toward an end is more fundamental than being at an end: one first exists in some way, and this way of being mortal expresses how we approach our life as a whole. Being toward an end describes how humans exist as mortals. Being toward an end is Heidegger’s answer to Epicurus’s dismissive view of death. True, humans do not experience their own death as an event, but they continually experience being toward an end as the fabric of mortal life. However, ordinary discourse sides with Epicurus and replaces the real challenge of being mortal with advice about death. Being toward an end is covered over by idle talk, Heidegger’s term for the inattentive discourse identified with the anonymous “they” [das Mann]. “They” confine death to a future event and urge us to ignore it. Idle talk is full of clichés that cover over the real challenge of our existence: Those “closest by” often try to convince the one who is “dying” that he will escape death and soon return again to the tranquillized everydayness of his world taken care of. This “concern” has the intention of thus “comforting” the “dying person” … Thus, the they provides a constant tranquillization about death.33

We hear that in brooding about death we forget to live; that buried in the future, we neglect the present; that fearful of dying, we poison the joys of living. Techniques for evading thoughts of death are widespread, so even dying persons are comforted with promises of recovery. Idle talk about death numbs persons to their own existence and results in stupor and distraction: “Entangled, everyday being-toward-death is a constant flight from death. Being toward the end has the mode of evading that end—reinterpreting it, understanding it inauthentically, and veiling it.”34 Idle talk designates death as an event to be viewed from the third person: people die. The third-person perspective blocks the first-person

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view: I am mortal, I exist toward death. Admitting in general that death happens distracts us from our own case: The public interpretation of Dasein says that “one dies,” because in this way everybody can convince him/herself that in no case is it I myself, for this one is no one. “Dying” is leveled down to an event which does concern Dasein, but which belongs to no one in particular … Dying, which is essentially and irreplaceably mine, is distorted into a publicly occurring event which the they encounters.35

For realists, death is a universal feature of organic life. “One must die” sounds tough-minded, but “one” dodges the more fundamental reality that “I” am mortal; I will die. Philosophers generally go along with idle talk in treating death as a future event. The concept of death presumably is too obvious to debate: death ends life. Its meaning is simple, like the period that ends this sentence. Debates then crop up over whether to fear this event. By not first clarifying the meanings of “end,” philosophy contributes to everyday evasiveness about human existence. The reasons given against fearing death may incorporate an obtuseness about human existence. To echo Heidegger, before deciding whether to fear death, we must first have a proper understanding of the human situation. What Heidegger calls an existential analysis of death has a richness missing from most accounts. Death becomes an issue for us because existence is already an issue for us; our way of living is a way of interpreting that existence. We should not enter the debates about whether to fear death with a truncated understanding of human existence. The meaning of death, properly understood, is the meaning of my existence. Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis gathers features of being-toward-death, “As the end of Dasein, death is the ownmost, nonrelational, certain, and, as such, indefinite and insuperable possibility of Dasein.”36 Death is mine. We exist with others, but my death is mine alone, no matter how much others are changed by it. We face our existence as individual creatures that will die someday. While our end is certain and not to be avoided, it is also indefinite since no one knows how life will unfold. That I die my own death frees me, in a sense, to live my own life. Humans exist in relation to unfolding possibilities, with death as the ultimate horizon. Awareness of being mortal can become a source of energy for taking up our lives. The force of this existential

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analysis is to release us from false notions. Heidegger’s phenomenology of being-toward-death contests the view that human existence is a matter of indifference. My existence matters. An understanding of death cannot be separated from understanding my life as mine, from possibilities that come my way to be taken up as mine.

Anxiety Over Existing and Fear of Death Understanding and mood converge in awakening me to features of my own worldly existence. Understanding that I am thrown into the world toward an end evokes the powerful mood of anxiety (Angst ): What anxiety is about is being-in-the-world itself. What anxiety is about is simply the potentiality-of-being of Dasein. Anxiety about death must not be confused with a fear of one’s demise. It is not an arbitrary and chance “weak” mood of the individual, but, as a fundamental attunement of Dasein, it is the disclosedness of the fact that Dasein exists as thrown being-toward-its end.37

Heidegger describes everyday existence in these terms: entanglement, ambiguity, and absorption in idle discourse. Ordinary existence turns away from being-toward-death in countless ways. We bury ourselves in the day’s tasks, and the larger horizon of our lives is forgotten. This obliviousness is dangerous because one’s life can trickle away into humdrum self-forgetfulness. “Falling prey” is Heidegger’s term for this treacherous obliviousness. The mood of anxiety interrupts this falling. If in ordinary life we flee basic features of existence, anxiety stops the flight. If being absorbed in the day’s concerns carries us like a current, anxiety interrupts the flow. Anxiety blurs the ordinary focus and disrupts conventional mindsets. Imagine that the background suddenly moves forward and the foreground of the day’s events becomes strangely disjointed. In this case, the background is our being-toward-death. In the existential break with the everyday, what ordinarily makes sense turns strange or uncanny. In the mood of anxiety, everyday life looks dream-like. Why did I think that all that stuff mattered? Now I am awake. Now I see. Now what? For Heidegger, anxiety holds the power of individuation; it is a mood that distances us from conventional responses and flips us out of automatic pilot. Anxiety opens room for making my existence really mine, with the

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possibility of formulating projects as mine. This opening is experienced as a call. Fear and anxiety are not the same mood. Fear has an object, while anxiety has none. A person may fear strangers, heights, public speaking, or spiders. What is feared can often be avoided. Most people fear death. While death cannot be avoided, it can be pushed from view and ignored. A unique mood, anxiety discloses features of our existence in the receding of everyday concerns. Like the stability of the ground beneath us, these features are generally taken for granted, unnoticed, while we are absorbed in the day’s tasks and choices. What is not chosen includes birth, family, language, knowledge, tools, communities, and the web of meanings that comprise the world. With anxiety, the background moves forward, and awareness shifts to the conditions of existence. I am thrown into existence. Moods continually express how the present situation matters. That our situation always matters is not chosen. We exist in relation to possibilities that arise from the situation. Possibilities open onto the future. The inescapability of mood, the possibilities of understanding, idle talk, useful things, and being-with-others converge in the basic structure of human existence. Heidegger summarizes this complex structure as care.

Why We Should Fear Death Let us return to the question we began with: should we fear death? Socrates’ answer is “no.” We are ignorant to fear death. To fear something, says Socrates, presumes that it is bad. We should fear injustice because we know it is wrong. But no one knows whether death is good or bad, claims Socrates. So, we are presumptuous to treat death as if it were bad. After all, death may be a blessing. We disagree with this reasoning on several counts. Socrates dismisses fear concerning the unknown. But fear of what is unknown plays an important role in human life. A natural response, fear helps the species to survive. Fear is often equated with an overwhelming mood: a person paralyzed by fear who cannot act. But being fearful comes in degrees; for example, because we fear harming others, we do not drink and drive. A person without fears would be disordered and dangerous. In Peter Weir’s film Fearless, a passenger on a commercial jetliner (Jeff Bridges) loses his fear inexplicably while the plane is going down, and in his cool state he leads terrified survivors away from the crash.38 He becomes a hero, but, as fearless, he shuts out his former life and can no longer feel the bonds

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of human affection. He risks his life repeatedly to recover that rush of invulnerability that took hold during the plane crash. In this tale, absence of fear leaves one an emotional alien. Convinced that he cannot die, he becomes an outsider to human society and cannot resume his life. Are we ignorant of death? Is death entirely an unknown? No. The losses that come with death are real. They are not a function of one’s attitude, as if by changing my attitude, the losses would disappear. For the most part, living involves activities and relationships that we care about. Even those prepared to die face loss. Death ends our relationships, projects, work, service, and the simple pleasures of being alive. Since being alive is a condition for these goods, death brings the loss of what we know is good. It is reasonable, not ignorant, to fear the loss of what we know to be good. Neither is the loss to others or their grief over my death anything to disregard. The losses involved in my death are not all mine. Fear of death makes good sense; urging indifference toward death is false wisdom. Iphigenia battling her fate is better attuned to life than the impassive Socrates. In his essay on death, Thomas Nagel makes the point that just being alive is good, not neutral or a matter of indifference: There are elements which, if added to one’s experience, make life better; there are other elements which, if added to one’s experience, make life worse. But what remains when these are set aside is not merely neutral: it is emphatically positive. Therefore life is worth living even when the bad elements of experience are plentiful and the good ones too meager to outweigh the bad ones on their own. The additional positive weight is supplied by experience itself, rather than by any of its contents.39

Ordinarily, Nagel contrasts the objective and subjective viewpoints. In this case, the objective and subjective views of death agree. Whether death is looked at objectively as a fact of nature or subjectively as my destiny, death involves loss. Certainly, an untimely death represents a greater misfortune than dying at the end of a long life. A seriously afflicted person might welcome death not as the end of life but as the end of suffering. A good death finds persons at peace and grateful for their life. A religious person may be firmly convinced that death brings new life. But even a good death or death with the expectation of new life involves losses that are real. Contrary to Seneca, a good death is not marked by absence of fear.

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To drink to life or wish someone “long life” makes sense—it is good to be alive. What may happen someday already matters now: “A man is the subject of good and evil as much because he has hopes which may or may not be fulfilled, or possibilities which may or may not be realized, as because of his capacity to suffer and enjoy,” writes Nagel.40 Epicurean tallying up of momentary pleasures and pains is a miser’s misconception of a human life. Our projects in life do not reduce to a calculus of pleasure and pain; they stretch out over time and are subject to being shipwrecked by death. Identifying fear of death with ignorance is faulty reasoning. It makes good sense to fear death.

Fear of Living To fear death is not ignorant. But it is wrong to see death as a shadow that dims our life. That is to despair of the goodness of this mortal life. Fear of death should not dominate our lives. How we live remains the important matter before us. Awareness of being mortal puts the focus on my existence as a whole and its possibilities. Our mortal existence is of immeasurable worth. Heidegger, like Socrates, looks critically at fear of death, but his reasons differ. For Heidegger, fear of death distracts us from the deepest issue that faces each person: how to make existence my own. More basic than decisions about careers, moral principles, or relationships is the defining and pervasive challenge: how am I to live? Fear is directed at the future event of death. Anxiety is the mood that concerns my existence as a whole. When latent anxiety breaks into ordinary life, it surfaces like a threat felt in every fiber of our being. Who am I to become? How am I to make this life my own? What constitutes a life well lived? Anxiety is a wake-up call. It interrupts the flow of everyday moods and involvements, as if my life came to a stop and I stood there, an outsider, observing. Anxiety allows us to hear the call to make existence my own. It brings to the fore the fragility and uncertainty of being a creature seeking her path with limited knowledge and possibilities before her. Anxiety, like fear, involves death, but not as an event. Anxiety is the primordial mood of being mortal, a being-toward-death. Consider someone whose falling into the everyday is interrupted by anxiety. Would a person awakening to mortality still fear death? Yes, death is loss. But when I am immersed in the call to make existence my own, the inevitable end would not be the center of my thoughts. As awareness

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of being mortal deepens, concern about dying would not be central. We would not focus on the fearful event of death but on the challenges of deciding how to live. Heidegger contrasts fear of death with the underlying mood of anxiety. For Heidegger, fear of death is inauthentic—not ignorant; it covers over the angst at being mortal. Like a decoy, fear of death blocks the call to make existence my own. When death is feared, idle discourse rushes in with its clichés that remind us not to waste time worrying about tomorrow. Stop fearing death, and life promises to get easier. This idle chatter sedates its listeners; it does not awaken them to the possibilities already before them. Fearing death can be an alibi for not taking up our mortal lives. It can shut out the future, rather than opening to possibilities. For Heidegger, fake wisdom distracts us from the peculiar challenge of being mortal. To disregard being mortal deadens our awareness of existence. In attunement to mortality, we do not separate life from death. As mortal, our future, while unknown in many ways, is already with us. As mortal, we realize that we do not live here forever. Being toward an end characterizes human existence from the start. It is not the event of death that matters most. What is more important is the awareness of being mortal. Being-toward-death is immanent throughout one’s existence and adds intensity to the character of existence. In turning away from the event of death, idle chatter does not turn toward being mortal. Ordinary life can obscure basic features of our existence, inflicting an existential dislocation that distorts the quality of one’s endeavors. The peculiar challenges of being human get passed over as background. Fear of death can provoke a retreat from the call implicit in being mortal. People often debate whether finite beings can comprehend the infinite. A more fundamental topic concerns how we understand our own existence as finite. Beneath the uncertainty concerning a choice or an action is the question concerning the direction and character of my life. Anxiety attunes us to what should be lived as mine. This mood, like an epiphany, may bring greater clarity and lessen self-forgetfulness. But taking up one’s own existence in earnest does not make life easier. The call to make existence my own is a challenge that eclipses other tasks. Fear of death can be the decoy that distracts me from this call; refusal of mortality is the underlying condition. Fearing death is my alibi for fearing mortal life. For Heidegger, to live in an understanding way achieves a kind of freedom. This awareness does not fixate on death or require a gothic

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sensibility. The future event would rarely enter our minds. Our focus is on our unfolding lives. Taking the proper attitude toward death frees us to live as the mortals we are. Heidegger describes what follows from anxiety as anticipation: But anticipation does not evade the impossibility of bypassing death, as does inauthentic being-toward-death, but frees itself for it. Becoming free for one’s own death in anticipation frees one from one’s lostness in chance possibilities urging themselves upon us … Free for its ownmost possibilities that are determined by the end, and so understood as finite … this anticipation includes the possibility of taking the whole of Dasein in advance … as a whole potentiality-of-being.41

To take hold of existence involves recognizing a purpose or project that is not borrowed from others but rather emerges from the direction of my life as a whole. Some philosophers claim that humans never experience life as a whole. This view ignores the temporality of human existence. A totality does exist for us. In choosing how to exist, one is saying, “this is who I am.” Who I am extends from past experience to the present choice into the anticipated future. Lifelong commitments of whatever sort call for this comprehensive sort of anticipation. Death is the ownmost possibility immanent in present experience that makes this totality possible. What is anticipated is the self’s coming into existence over time. Anticipation does not end with a choice. Anticipation is lived in relation to the possibilities that keep arising from our jointly “thrown” and chosen existence. Recognizing my being toward an end is how the totality exists for me. In some places we disagree with Heidegger. In our view, fear is not absent from one who anticipates his existence as whole. We anticipate the losses that death brings to the self and others. It is natural and reasonable to fear losses, including inevitable ones. One mood does not drive out the other: a person can embrace her existence with passion while fearing the losses that death brings. Not all fear is paralyzing. To equate fear of death with being inauthentic adopts a bias against the ordinary. In Heidegger’s analysis of death, a person’s relations to others are handled severely. We do not learn about being mortal from the death of others; instead, we learn to obscure our mortality. Everyday life is the abject state of self-oblivion called falling. The ordinary is synonymous with numbness. An authentic existence, in Heidegger’s account, repels

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conventional actions and meanings. It involves a sharp turn away from our daily rhythm. The anxiety we feel disrupts the conventional mindsets that discourage me from making this life my own. The authentic person seems to stand alone, an existential hero. In our view, Heidegger exaggerates the oblivion of ordinary life. It is not lost in inauthenticity or self-forgetfulness. The ordinary takes many modes. To exist as authentic, we need not turn away from the conventions and rituals of our culture. Being dismissive of the ordinary puts us at risk of identifying being free with being a non-conformist, like one of Epicurus’s atoms swerving in the void. We lose sight of how everyday being-with-others is a fundamental dimension of human existence. Every kind of existence is a way of being-with-others. That much of Heidegger we accept. Being-with-others includes inauthentic and authentic forms of existence, but there is no need to blanket everyday involvements as inauthentic. While each person dies his own death, to anticipate my existence as a whole does not isolate me from others. Pressures to conform are real enough, and individuals do break away from the crowd, but ordinary relationships need not amount to being lost in the herd. On the contrary, various relationships help us to recognize our mortality. Consider what we learn from our friends about who we are and the importance of being honest with ourselves. We learn more about our fleeting and precious lives from the death of others than Heidegger acknowledges. An obvious lesson, no small consolation to anyone who loves the world, is that my death will not bring the world to an end. How differently I would feel about my death if it did. Heidegger lays out a challenge that is central for all persons: how do I give myself over to work, relationships, and endeavors without losing awareness of my existence as a whole? How do we seek these worldly goals without squelching the sense of being a creature whose days on earth pass quickly? In Lost in the Cosmos, the novelist and essayist Walker Percy described this challenge as a reentry problem.42 As a spaceship soars into the heavens only to return to earth, people must reconcile the moments of transcendence with the immanence of daily life. Percy wonders how Faulkner felt after finishing The Sound and the Fury. Can one create a masterpiece only to trudge back to one’s daily routine and head for a chat at the drugstore? Some writers, notes Percy, come apart during reentry. The transcendence of experiencing the call of my life does not easily harmonize with the smallness of being a creature. The return

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to the ordinary can be rocky. Percy suggests that one who can leap to the infinite and return to the earth is the rarity of an intact self.43 From a human standpoint, none is greater.

Notes 1. In war zones and hospices, death is common, but that does not make it ordinary. 2. Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, in The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Master and Man, trans. Ann Pasternak Slater (New York: Modern Library, 2003). 3. Frank Capra, dir. It’s a Wonderful Life (Los Angeles, CA: RKO Radio Pictures; Liberty Films, 1946), feature film. 4. A dismissive view of life may be a result of finding life to be absurd or accepting the claim that values are purely subjective. Both conclusions result from false moves. 5. Plato, The Apology, in The Trial and Death of Socrates, third edition, trans. G. M. A. Grube, revised by John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2000), 29a, 32. 6. Ibid., 40d, 41. 7. Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, trans. Robin Campbell (London: Penguin Books, 1969), 126. 8. Epictetus, Handbook of Epictetus , trans. Nicholas P. White (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), #21, 16. 9. Epictetus, Handbook, #16, 15–16. 10. Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceus,” in The Art of Happiness, trans. George K. Strodach (London: Penguin Books, 2012), 156–7. 11. Thomas Nagel challenges the Epicurean assumption that what is good or bad for a person can be reduced to presently experienced pleasures or pains. Nagel observes, “the natural view is that the discovery of betrayal makes us unhappy because it is bad to be betrayed—not that betrayal is bad because its discovery makes us unhappy.” Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 5. 12. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. R. E. Latham (London: Penguin Books, 1951), 122. 13. Ibid.,125. 14. Nagel, Mortal Questions , 7. 15. Ibid., 8. 16. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, 127. 17. In his reflections on the book of Genesis, “Speculative Beginning of Human History,” Immanuel Kant identifies anticipation of one’s death as one of the four transformations of primate animal nature that bring

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20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

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humans out of nature and into the realm of freedom as members of a “kingdom of ends.” Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983), 52. Paul Edwards, “My Death,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vols. 5 and 6, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan Publishing, Co., Inc. & The Free Press, 1967), 416. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, revised trans. Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 2010). Nagel, Mortal Questions , 4 and 8. Heidegger depicts human existence with the German phrase “Dasein,” which translates as “being there.”. Heidegger, Being and Time, 229. Ibid., 230. Ibid. Ibid., 231. Ibid. Heidegger writes, “Attunement [mood] always has its understanding, even if only by suppressing it. Understanding is always attuned” (Being and Time, 138). Ibid., 235. Ibid. Ibid., 236. This existential fact is what makes Maude’s decision to end her life on her eightieth birthday strike the viewer of the film Harold and Maude as arbitrary and shocking. Hal Ashby, dir., Harold and Maude (Los Angeles: CA: Paramount Pictures, 1971), feature film. It is not only anticipating our own death or the death of other human beings that troubles us. The prospect of the sun burning out or the universe dying through entropy also disturbs us. Heidegger, Being and Time, 243. Ibid., 244. Ibid., 243. Ibid., 248. Ibid., 241. Peter Weir, dir., Fearless (Los Angeles, CA: Warner Brothers, 1993), feature film. Nagel, Mortal Questions , 2. Ibid., 6–7. Heidegger, Being and Time, 253. Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), 142ff.

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43. Percy’s conception of an intact self may be inspired by Kierkegaard’s conception of a “knight of faith.” See Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 86–91.

References Ashby, Hal, dir. Harold and Maude. Los Angeles: CA: Paramount Pictures, 1971, feature film. Capra, Frank. dir. It’s a Wonderful Life. Los Angeles, CA: RKO Radio Pictures; Liberty Films, 1946, feature film. Edwards, Paul. “‘My Death.’” In The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Paul Edwards, vols. 5 and 6, 416–19. New York: Macmillan Publishing, Co., Inc. & The Free Press, 1967. Epictetus. Handbook of Epictetus. Translated by Nicholas P. White. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983. Epicurus, “Letter to Menoeceus.” In The Art of Happiness, translated by George K. Strodach. London: Penguin Books, 2012. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised translation by Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010. Kant, Immanuel. Perpetual Peace and Other Essays. Translated by Ted Humphrey. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishers, 1983. Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968. Lucretius. On the Nature of the Universe. Translated by R. E. Latham. London: Penguin Books, 1951. Nagel, Thomas. Mortal Questions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Percy, Walker. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983. Plato. The Trial and Death of Socrates, 3rd edition. Translated by G. M. A. Grube, revised by John Cooper. Indianapolis: IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2000. Seneca, Letters from a Stoic. Translated by Robin Campbell. London: Penguin Books, 1969. Tolstoy, Leo. The Death of Ivan Ilyich. In The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Master and Man. Translated by Ann Pasternak Slater. New York: Modern Library, 2003. Weir, Peter, dir. Fearless. Los Angeles, CA: Warner Brothers, 1993, feature film.

CHAPTER 4

Reinventing Humans: The Strange Allure of Stoicism

The sage of stoicism is among the heroes of philosophy. The promise of stoicism is captivating: to release its adherents from suffering and achieve the perfection described as “a man in full.”1 The sage embodies independence and inner strength; he never resents or regrets, never fears or depends on others for comfort or help. Whether facing sickness or health, success or failure, he has learned to remain tranquil. The main Hellenistic philosophies of Greece and Rome, namely Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Skepticism, share admiration for the sage. Each school depicts striking figures that achieve virtue and teach others the way. Their accounts of the sage vary, but one common thread identifies them as healers of the soul.2 Philosophy, like medicine, should diagnose and treat whatever impedes human flourishing. But not all treatments are salutary. In taking up the ethical teachings of Epictetus and Seneca, this chapter will consider the dangers of stoic medicine. Can humans become invulnerable? On the surface, stoic advice is appealing with its goal of freeing the self to follow nature and thus end suffering. But, like a superhero or alien, the sage is not human. Stoicism reinvents what it means to be human to produce this extreme detachment. The inner strength and serenity that are possible for persons take a different form. Beneath the tranquility of stoicism lie faulty phenomenological foundations. Stoicism posits a “purist split”3 between inner and

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outer realms—mind and nature. Splitting the inner self from outer nature, however, is a false move. This separation reemerges in subsequent thinkers, notably Descartes.4 In the Hellenistic Age and in the modern era, many accept this split between the outer and inner. This flawed phenomenology leads to similar defects. The false moves of stoicism shed light on the stumbling blocks of mainstream modern philosophy.

The Promise of Stoicism The defining thought of stoicism is evident in the opening lines of Epictetus’ Handbook: Some things are up to us and some are not up to us. Our opinions are up to us, and our impulses, desires, aversions—in short, whatever is our own doing. Our bodies are not up to us, nor are our possessions, our reputations, our public offices, or, that is, whatever is not our own doing.5

In a stroke, Epictetus divides the world into two mutually exclusive zones, sorting all events into those we can control and those we cannot control. This disjunction splits the inner and outer. What is inner, our self, can be completely controlled through stoic training. Here we are free. What is outer belongs to nature or the gods and is beyond human control. Here necessity rules. For the stoic, each aspect of our lives falls into one or the other of these two slots. The first task of the sage is to sort everything into its proper place. This disjunction exhausts reality and sets the goal of stoic training: learn to focus on the inner self, which we can control, and practice detachment from all else. Concerning whatever is outside my control—bodies, death, disease, war, wealth, fame, actions, success, other persons—the sage practices acceptance. For stoicism, freedom and necessity are opposite but not in opposition, since wise persons freely choose to follow nature. When I form judgments that harmonize with events, I never suffer. Judgments that agree with nature are the focus of stoic training, the core of stoic virtue and power. An appealing aspect of stoicism is the scene of the sage teaching the young seeker of wisdom. Here is one of the platforms from which philosophy speaks directly to students. Humans generally appreciate good advice, and stoic philosophers have frequently been turned to for nuggets of wisdom. A major draw of stoicism is its focus on training youth, a more direct path to virtue than Plato’s probing dialogues. Stoic advice comes

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in familiar rules that get the student’s head nodding: be prepared, act modestly, shake off regrets, resist temptation, ignore insults, avoid gossip, and indulge sparingly. Beneath such ordinary advice are the strange stoic grounds, whose implications emerge gradually. The allure of stoicism is undeniable. Stoicism has had a powerful influence on conceptions of strength and integrity. Stoic attentiveness to the “mineness” of thought helps to explain its appeal; we are the species whose members achieve self-consciousness. Stoicism celebrates the reality and power of one’s thinking. As with Descartes’ discovery of the indubitable cogito in the second meditation, there is joy in affirming the power of the self. It is liberating to realize that selves are real; they are not swallowed by or expelled from the world.6 Biological processes make thinking possible, including my reactions to what happens in the world, but my thoughts remain mine. This certainty underlies the use of “I” in presenting ideas. “I” establishes that an individual mind is at work. What I believe may be false, but that I believe it is true. I avoid risk if I stick to reporting a belief as mine. A trivial-sounding claim, to be sure, but hard to contest. For stoics, other distinctions—between male or female, slave or free, rich or poor, old or young, citizen or foreigner—are trumped by this defining trait of individual thought and, at the deepest level, do not matter. Slaves, like Epictetus, as well as emperors, like Marcus Aurelius, can become sages. Stoicism was the first major philosophy to recognize the moral equality of persons, one of history’s greatest achievements. It anticipates the notion of universal human rights.7 Stoicism progresses beyond Plato’s myth of the metals in the Republic, which establishes a hierarchical class structure among souls naturally suited to rule or obey. For Seneca, the slave is not a lesser being but a victim of misfortune. Treat your slaves with respect, counsels Seneca, since slavery is a matter of chance that could claim anyone. The strengths of stoicism are derailed by its skewed vision. It is one thing to accept that slaves and masters are fundamentally equal. It is quite different to recognize that slavery is unjust—not a matter of chance or fate—and must be ended. If the external arrangements of nature and society cannot harm us, why appeal to a doctrine of universal human rights? Whether one is a slave or an emperor has no bearing on one’s inner life, which is the only life the stoic calls his own.

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Mirroring Nature Conceals Judgment Ordinarily, we assume that actions matter: stealing is bad, acts of kindness are good, etc. The sage undertakes to persuade the reader that events pertain to the realm of nature, which lies outside our control: “What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about the things.”8 Actions involve the human body, which belongs to nature, while intentions belong to the self. What is called stealing is part of nature, like erosion. What matters are the judgments that we make about actions. With practice, the sage learns to regard his actions not as his. Only intentions and judgments belong to us. It is the manner of thinking—not the deed—that determines virtue. The split between the inner self and nature spawns a division between action and judgment. With the focus on one’s judgments, little is said about how to act. Rather, the sage teaches how to react to whatever happens. If my spouse is unfaithful, what is a virtuous response? Stoicism does not offer reasons to be faithful to my spouse—proper acts are supposedly self-evident. Justifying actions is not the sage’s focus. In stoic reality, such reasons are unavailable, since the stoic is at a loss to explain why one set of affairs (a faithful spouse) is better than another (an unfaithful spouse). A faithful and an unfaithful spouse equally represent the necessity of nature at that moment, which must be affirmed. So, no rule for conduct emerges. A complete human life is without suffering. To learn detachment, the sage recommends a narrow range of low-risk actions that are unlikely to fail. For example, a sage in training simply accepts whatever food is offered to him. To strengthen one’s inner power, even better is to accept what is offered without desiring it. For the sage, what happens—whatever happens—constitutes nature. This blanket conception of nature does not single out events that happen in accord with nature from those that do not. Nature is whatever happens; it includes all events, and whatever happens by nature happens with necessity. Contingency is ruled out. The necessity of nature manifests the divine, as Spinoza will say, “God or Nature.” Whatever occurs—however disturbing on the surface—in its depths expresses divine perfection. Our initial sensibilities must be shed to arrive at these grounds of tranquility—the necessity and perfection of the world. According to stoicism, a rational person faced with necessity will accept it. Like a still pool, stoic judgment reflects nature exactly. A wise person aspires to become a mirror of nature. But the split between mind and

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nature that separates a stoic from his actions also blocks the formation of judgment. Good judgment requires deliberation or reflection. Judgment—like action—involves mediation or relating differences. Good judgments identify relevant differences. We might judge a deed as genuine compassion or doubtful courage or justified self-defense. To follow nature sounds like a norm, but norms probe and examine, while the command to follow nature does not go beyond determining what belongs to nature and what belongs to me. The mindset of stoicism makes impossible the kind of deliberation that good judgment requires. Mirroring nature does not constitute judgment in any recognizable sense. Stoic thought erases the difference between the particular and the universal. True judgment links particulars to universals without losing their reality as particulars. The particular does not disappear into the general category as an instance that is equivalent to every other instance. For the stoic, what is particular does disappear into the universal; the distinction between them is lost. This feature of stoic thought puts it out of touch with personal reality. For example, my children are subsumed under “children,” and what is true of children in general exhausts the reality of my children: nothing more remains. When identity excludes difference, the particular is squashed into the universal: When you see someone weeping in grief at the departure of his child or the loss of his property, take care not to be carried away by the appearance that the externals he is involved in are bad, and be ready to say immediately, “What weighs down on this man is not what has happened (since it does not weigh down on someone else), but his judgment about it.”9

All people are mortal, so my child’s death is an instance of the general rule: mortals die. If the death of other children does not unduly disturb me, then consistency demands tranquil acceptance of my child’s death. The events are the same once the particular child vanishes into the universal. With immersion into stoic training, differences between the first person (my child), second person (your child), and third person (a child) disappear. A sage aspires to adopt the third-person point of view on all matters (e.g., “this leg is broken” rather than “my leg is broken.”) To see personal relationships as personal becomes blameworthy. “Your friend died? Get another, if you like.” Epictetus pretends to be puzzled why the death of my child does not weigh down on everyone equally. If “grief” inherently belongs to “death

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of a child,” whenever a child dies, all would grieve. But all do not grieve at the death of each child. This puzzlement, if genuine, plumbs the depths of distorted thought. Like actions, which are not mine, a child is not really mine. It is simply the instance of a universal child that sprang from a shared body to live together under a common roof for years. The experience of person to person gets translated into category to category. If a match flares each time it is struck, so too grief should flare each time a child dies. But grief is not triggered in this lockstep way, so grief does not adhere to the death of a child. Those who grieve are deceived by imagining an evil that is not there.

The Deceptiveness of Stoic Advice The sage’s advice concerning grief is appealing because it bears some resemblance to ordinary advice. Ordinarily, people step back from their troubles to consider the bigger picture. My flooded basement cannot compare to the losses suffered by victims of a hurricane. But in stoic thought, turning to the bigger picture is a trick. Ordinarily, the plight of others enlarges our empathy, so that we are not paralyzed by our loss. Our loss is not erased, but the paralyzing sense—why did it happen to me?—lifts. But the stoic uses this enlarged framework to draw an opposite conclusion. Since I went about my affairs with little interference from the hurricane that devastated others, there is nothing inherent in hurricanes to merit distress. Since “mine” adds nothing to “child” or “house” or “body” or “action,” a virtuous person learns detachment from personal life. Ordinarily, people achieve a sense of solidarity or connection from shared suffering. The sage’s conclusion is shockingly different. The student is counseled to pretend to grieve with a friend: “Do not hesitate, however, to sympathize with him verbally, and even to moan with him if the occasion arises; but be careful not to moan inwardly.”10 Don’t be a jerk just because you know better: go through the motions. A philosophy that rejects basic features of human life must employ disguises. Stoic advice is deceptive. On one level, we encounter familiar advice that few would question, like “be prepared.” For example, when camping in bear country, store your food up high and away from your campsite. However, the source of such advice reverses this apparent meaning. Normally, we seek to be prepared because the success of our project matters: we want to keep bears away. But the actual meaning of stoic advice is that the success of our project does not matter. A

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truly wise person is equally content with any outcome. If a bear attacks your campsite anyway, just accept that as part of nature. The apparent meaning invites us gently into stoic surroundings. The shock of actual stoic reasoning shuts the door that opens onto the familiar. The apparent meaning of stoic advice is not a partial expression or paraphrase. It directly conflicts with the hidden meaning: keeping bears away never mattered in the first place. Stoic thought gyrates between the human mask and the underlying alien ideas. Stoicism’s deeper appeal, in our view, is linked to the human wish to become another kind of being. The stoic sage is an alien, “freed” of basic features of human existence. Super-heroes, the stuff of entertainment, are appealing. But species transformation is not the task of philosophy. Stoic philosophy undertakes a thought experiment that is disguised as actual human wisdom. However, wisdom is no longer human once basic features of existence are removed. The stoic ideal shuns the worldly realities of temporality, sociality, vulnerability, suffering, and emotion. This drive to reengineer the human in the name of virtue is a temptation to resist.

Faulty Phenomenology and Its Fallout All analysis presupposes either an explicit phenomenology or implicit views of human existence. Good concepts acknowledge the necessities found in experience, such as the temporality and the “mineness” of experience. The deceptiveness of stoicism arises from a faulty phenomenology. Stoicism substitutes bare logical forms for concepts drawn from experience. But logical forms abstract from differences found in experience. For arguments to be sound, experience must be respected. When logic dictates how experience is construed, a bizarre phenomenology results. Misapplied logical forms underlie the faulty phenomenology of stoicism. Epictetus’s Handbook embarks with a disjunctive claim: things are either up to me or not up to me. The disjunctive form makes it seem that there are just two possibilities: control or no control. This stoic disjunction identifies the two kinds that purport to constitute the ethical reality of humans: what belongs to us and what belongs to nature. What belongs to us includes everything we can control completely, such as choices and judgments. This is the self; this is what I am. What belongs to nature includes everything else, what we cannot control, what I am not. What belongs to the self and what belongs to nature exhaust reality and constitute a purist split. But does existence divide into these separate realms?

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Determining what we control makes a claim about the experience. This cannot be stipulated in advance by a logical form, by an either/or. To force a disjunction onto a situation that does not divide in this way commits the fallacy of a false dilemma: either I have full control or I have no control. A false dilemma excludes relevant options that do not fit either disjunct, in this case, the familiar situation of having some but not full control. The phenomenology of stoicism imposes a false dilemma. What initially sounds reasonable, or at least logical, is a chute down which recognizable experience disappears. This faulty phenomenology presupposes the purist split of mind from the world. By “things we can control,” Epictetus means completely control. In a flash, an ordinary distinction about control morphs into a purist split. With rigorous training, thoughts and passions presumably are either completely controlled or excised. What we experience constantly—various and changing measures of control over our body, actions, possessions, and passions—gets crammed by stoicism into the extreme of matters over which we have no control whatsoever. But what is complete control? Do humans have such capacity? We control our thoughts and passions to a degree. Likewise, we control our bodies, actions, reputations, and property to varying degrees. If we let concepts arise from experience rather than by fiat, we would see that, for the most part, what we experience is more or less under our control. But purist splits exclude matters of degree. Stoicism has no access to the ordinary or what holds true for the most part. Instead, human existence is wrung out of these categories. From the opening page, Epictetus is addressing simulacra, not human persons. As with mythical heroes, this alien quality has a powerful allure. Stoicism’s phenomenological claim takes hold through deception. Epictetus offers examples of each type of event. His examples suggest that the distinctions are experienced, but we should look closer. In each case, an actual phenomenological feature, such as the mineness of my thoughts or emotions, is equated with a purist category, like complete control. What is actual is replaced with the fantastical. The twist from mineness to complete control leaves experience behind. If thinkers attended to experience, complete control would not surface as the condition for ethical life. False moves come into play when we ignore experience and impose what sound like logically mandated separations. A related feature of human life missing from the stoic account is development. Humans develop over time. What is posited as complete excludes development. Even the transition to a sage is not a process of becoming,

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since there is no place for relative states in this conceptual framework. One is either a sage or is not. Once one is a sage, one no longer suffers or makes errors. If a sage makes a mistake, presumably, he is not a sage at that moment. Being a sage presupposes training, but the achieved state involves no development. At some point in the training, one slips over the line and is —without having become—a sage. Some human states—like naturalized citizenship—follow this path: after meeting the requirements and taking an oath, one is a citizen in a complete sense. Here the middle is excluded as a matter of course: one is either a citizen or not. But virtuous character is not bestowed like citizenship by complying with the conditions of law. Virtues develop over time; they involve matters that we control to some degree. The stoic’s field of vision is bifurcated like the whale’s; what is right in front of me cannot be seen. This middle, where I exercise more or less control, becomes unthinkable, since the disjunctive extremes do not budge. These distinctions do not arise from experience; neither do they fit experience.

The Emptiness of Stoic Virtue The core concepts of stoicism have a lofty sound: wisdom, reason, freedom, virtue, happiness, and tranquility. Different concepts suggest different meanings. But when concepts are segregated from the world— as they are by stoicism’s purist split of self from nature and society—they do not acquire specific content. The verbal distinctions mask sameness: the sage follows reason, which turns out to be freedom and wisdom and virtue and power, all yielding happiness. The multiplicity of terms disguises their vacuity. Without determinations, one concept tumbles into another without adding new meaning. Virtues are arbitrary when severed from externals. What is the point of courage if we are indifferent to every outcome? Boiling the multiplicity of virtues down to one—wisdom—empties virtue of content. This wisdom is a void. Notions that do not arise from experience cannot make their way back to it; consequently, they quickly turn monotonous. Repetition substitutes for understanding, and training without judging amounts to conditioning. In place of thinking, the stoic locates entities either “in here” or “out there.” Despite its emphasis on wisdom, stoicism does not put its concepts to any test. Core distinctions do not develop; they are repeated in a way that gives stoicism a reputation for doggedness. The endurance admired in the sage has its roots in the emptiness of stoic concepts. One

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concept can substitute for another. Progression and complexity do not exist; matters are kept simple, with answers ready to hand. There are no tragic events or thorny judgments. There are no complex situations where principles are not easily employed. The same idea falls like hammer blows—internal or external. For Hegel, a doctrine that applies concepts in a fixed way independently of experience is dogmatic.11 The stoic mindset is “black or white”—unrelentingly disjunctive. In Hegel’s view, dogmatism splits what is essential from the inessential, but it cannot mediate what it divides. The divided factors are not subsequently related or understood to belong together. Analysis that continually separates the essential from the inessential finally arrives at the inner self, a sanctum removed from everything external. This self is designated the seat of virtue; it alone is what matters. Relations to the world, other selves, and one’s own body and actions are left behind in an ambiguous way: they matter somehow—as preferences—but not essentially. To arrive at the inner self, a dogmatic thinker begins with what is recognizable from experience, such as the common view that virtuous happiness depends upon good deeds. Again, appealing to the common view, the thinker notes that appropriate actions are not truly virtuous unless performed in a virtuous manner. So, a divide opens between the action and the manner of acting. Each time analysis yields a division, the thinker asks which aspect is essential: is it the action or the manner of action? We are not allowed to answer that both matter. “Both” does not register in dogmatic thought; every complexity dissolves into a contest that only one can win. That the manner of acting is inseparable from the action is not an option. In this contest, the manner of acting matters more than the action itself. What is deemed inessential slips off the page as the dividing advances. Since the manner of acting involves thought, then it is thinking, not acting, that really matters in judging virtue. The dogmatic winnowing of action down to its supposed core describes the stoic mindset. It contrasts with Aristotle’s “all things considered” approach to virtue. For Aristotle, virtue depends upon ways of judging, feeling, and acting. Stoicism cuts this totality down to a way of thinking alone. The sage reduces virtuous life to a kind of contemplation by showing that action does not matter. Initially, we assume that actions matter, but dogmatic analysis shows that what really matters is our response in thought—our intentions and judgments—not the actions themselves.12 Dogmatic thought begins with what is recognizable and

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ends with a stunning claim that happiness and virtue depend entirely on our thought, not on events in the world or even our actions, which slip away. Stoics replace the “all things considered” approach of Aristotle with “only one thing matters.” The repeated application of the disjunction between essential and inessential leads to the monism that at the bottom only one thing matters. The differentiations of Aristotelian virtues reduce to the oneness of stoic virtue. Wisdom is not simply the greatest virtue; it is the only virtue. To retain virtues in the plural requires that something matters outside one’s thoughts, such as the well-being of others. But if physical life has no inherent value, then I lose nothing of value by losing children, friends, health, property, or reputation. Stoicism denies the reality of loss. In its view, experiencing loss attributes value to what has none.

Passions on the Procrustean Bed Passions or emotions are an original dimension of human existence. Through passions, we are continually being affected by our situation. Like the weather, passions are always present, even when unnoticed or unnamed. A phenomenology of human existence must include passions. Martha Nussbaum observes that for Hellenistic philosophers, passions or emotions are ways of understanding the world. Passions involve beliefs and evaluations. This approach is more adequate to experience and contrasts with those who see passions as an irrational force checked by the counterforce of reason. But the stoic view of passions is twofold. To be under our control in the stoic sense, passions must be completely under our control. Those passions that cannot be brought into a tranquil state must be uprooted—either/or once again. A procrustean bed is a form of torture. The person strapped to a procrustean bed loses all limbs that extend beyond the bed. To achieve virtue, stoic medicine must excise the unruly passions. To bolster the case for such surgery, stoics adopt the rhetoric of passions as natural forces. They are caricatured as akin to madness, seizures, or a toddler’s tantrum. Here Seneca describes anger: His eyes blaze and sparkle; his face is red all over as the blood surges up from the lowest depths of the heart; his lips tremble, his teeth are clenched, his hair bristles and stands on end, his forced breath makes a creaking sound, his joints make a cracking sound from twisting; he moans

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and bellows, his speech bursts out in hardly comprehensible words; he keeps striking his hands together and pounds the ground with his feet; his whole body is aroused, “and performs the great threats of anger.” It is a disgusting and horrifying sight of swelling and distortion—I don’t know whether this vice is more detestable or more hideous.13

Here the cognitive aspect of passions or emotions drops out: passionate persons are unstoppable natural forces, like gravity. Anger sounds like a seizure disorder. The reasons for the person’s anger are not given. Is this Martin Luther King, Jr., angry after the church bombing in Birmingham? Is this a child out of control in the shopping cart? Reasons are not given, because context does not matter. All that matters is that something occurs to trigger a passionate response. No details need be given, since if you let something matter—any external—you play the fool. Phenomenology aims to discover the aspects of existence that do not come apart. Analysis loses touch with experience when it factors out aspects that exist together and treats them as separable. Behind the rhetoric about emotions as forces of nature are analysis that splits apart passions from beliefs and then separates emotions from human existence. Beliefs are first distinguished as aspects of passions. After recognizing the intelligibility of passions, the stoic elevates beliefs over passions. The intelligible aspect now precedes the passion. If passions follow beliefs, then choosing one’s beliefs entails the choice of passion. Splitting passions from beliefs permits their extirpation as a logical possibility, even if human life without passions is not possible. Stoicism wants it both ways. On one hand, it stresses the intelligibility of passions. Passions are ways of understanding the world. On the other hand, it emphasizes the violence of passions. A complete life requires liberation from this savagery. Here beliefs play no part in igniting these outbursts. If beliefs are winnowed away from passions, passions must be forced to submit to beliefs. Unruly passions are strapped to the Procrustean bed and dispatched. What is missing from this polarized account is the actual role of emotion as integral to human existence. Passions are not natural forces that invade the mind. Portraying passions as explosive is a trick to convince us that the real threat to virtue lies in letting externals matter to us. The external world inevitably damages virtue unless we choose otherwise. But the notion that we can root out passions is false; emotions do not signify externality. Our existence as human depends on them.

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Debates about passions or emotions are taken up in phenomenology. Emotions are a fundamental feature of human existence; they interpret situations, foster understanding, and guide action. As Nussbaum notes, beliefs are integral to emotions—not separable from them. Emotions light up the present situation for us. Conscience depends upon ordinary emotions, especially self-love and empathy. Without proper emotional footing, people cannot recognize what is right and wrong. A fundamental dimension of human existence, passions are malleable. As our understanding evolves, our emotions develop. Though educable, passions can neither be uprooted nor rendered purely matters of choice. Passions are worldly.

No Room for Action For Hegel, when a rational notion overcomes obstacles to come into existence, actuality is achieved. Actuality designates the intersection of reason and existence. What is rational that cannot find its way into existence is defective. If Plato’s ideal of a just republic cannot exist, we should wonder why. Actuality signifies an achievement. Human action evokes this meaning of actuality: through acting, the self brings what lies within it into existence. Our inner life also matters. But inner life and active life are not worlds apart. To grasp the role of action is a test for those devoted to purist splits. A philosophy that turns away from action loses contact with actuality. Human existence is largely comprised of action. Action is both personal and worldly, revealing inner and outer life in their union. In Hegel’s terms, action requires mediation or keeping together what defective analysis would pull apart. If intentions and actions are inseparable, we must discard the notion that intentions are fully determinate apart from acting. Actions complete intentions and sound out their meaning; we realize the import of our intentions by acting on them. The consequences of acting inform subsequent actions, but I cannot learn from actions that I disavow. The results of acting serve as a worldly judgment on whether our intentions are naïve or ill informed. A plan that cannot be enacted may harbor defects. Outcomes at odds with intentions call us to take a closer look at what we seek. Action puts our intentions to the test by showing where they lead. Philosophy that is dismissive of action gets off on the wrong foot. For stoicism, everything belongs either to mind or to nature. But action

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repels that bifurcation. Regarding judgments and intentions, supposedly I am unfettered and free. Since actions often lead to unintended consequences, actions are not wholly under my control and hence belong to nature, which is a deterministic order. When mind and nature—freedom and necessity—split, neither characterizes action. Action is not primarily an external event or intention or feelings or bodily motion or outcome or reactions from others, but a process involving all. Under the pressure of dogmatic bifurcations, action drops out of the picture; between the austere freedom of mind and necessity of nature, there is no room for it. Which is action: a choice or a natural event? Neither slot fits. Dividing reality into inner and outer realms excludes mediation and leaves action unthinkable. Actions reveal actuality. Closed to the concept of action, dogmatism cannot comprehend what is actual. In ordinary life, I experience actions as mine or as those of another person. Stoicism insists that actions are external events no more expressive of any self than are phases of the moon. How does a philosophy that lacks room for action guide persons on the path to virtue? With basic features of experience gone missing, the stoic text conditions its readers to accept that my actions are not mine. The term “action” gets replaced by “occurrence” or “event.”14 But to expunge action—and the responsibility that comes with it—leaves human existence unrecognizable.15 To become a stoic subject, we must reinvent ourselves.

Reinventing Temporality Human existence is inseparable from time. Human temporality involves the present continually flowing from the past into the future. We can experience time in many ways; for example, time is said to speed up or slow down. We can be absorbed in the present, largely unaware of what is coming. But our view of time shapes our understanding of possibility, goals, relationships, and every aspect of life. To grasp the meaning of time or temporality is a demanding task taken up by great minds. But the movement of time that carries us from birth to death is a reality for all. To settle on a course of action, we reflect on the past, look to the future, and examine real possibilities. Deliberation and judgment are pointless without possibilities. In reinventing humanity, stoicism cancels the temporal character of human existence in the world. For stoics, nature’s future is under the sign of necessity. With the air of possibility

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sucked out, action is stifled. For the stoic, my bodily behaviors belong to nature. My present behaviors are as good as past, while my existence in the present reduces to judging all that occurs. The stoic advice to anticipate what will happen so that we can affirm it leads us to the strange view that actions are inevitable. Possibility in nature is an illusion. What has not yet occurred only appears to be possible or uncertain. For the sage, acting does not draw my intentions into the world to realize my goals; my actions are behaviors that belong to nature; they merely disclose the necessity there all along. Whether my goal is realized is irrelevant. The only goal that really matters for the stoic is to embrace necessity. It is what it is. Human life opens onto the future. Stoic training is at odds with this projective character of human existence.16 An inversion of time is evident in stoic advice concerning desire. Humans desire what is yet to be. Contrary to this pattern, the sage desires retrospectively. He desires what has occurred, the outcome of events. “Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.”17 Advice that reorients desire from forward-looking to backward-looking is not suited to humans. If the temporality of desire is reversed, another being emerges, if any. This creature could desire to eat what he had already swallowed. Prior to swallowing, this being would lack specific desires and choose “all of the above”: whatever ends up in my mouth. Human desire, by contrast, is forward-looking; it involves risk, loss, and possibilities that are real. For the stoic, risk and suffering signify ignorance and failure. To eliminate suffering is stoic bedrock, the unquestioned measure of virtue. To become virtuous requires minimizing risk, especially when complete indifference is not yet achieved. The sage aspires to be a spectator to his own life—viewing himself in the third person—as if just anyone is performing his actions. If I calmly accept a neighbor’s car being stolen (third person), then I must accept my car being stolen in exactly the same way (first person). The sage transfers to himself his readiness to accept the outcome of actions taken by others. When a stranger’s house burns down, I accept that such things happen. That an experience is first person—it is my own house that burned down—should make no difference. The event is the same, so the judgment is the same. Objections concerning normal human reactions do not faze the sage, who does not have normal persons in mind.

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For the stoic, choice is more powerful than disposition. With enough determination, we can craft our response to events, bypassing the phenomenological features of human existence. The sage decides how to inhabit time, space, desires, culture, and body. This superpower lies outside nature, including human nature. Faced with real obstacles, stoicism tinkers with its phenomenological concepts. The tinkering is directed by the master premise that a free, happy life requires detachment from nature. Other features of human existence are redesigned to preserve this claim. Whether such power of choice could exist is ignored. Hence, time is retrofitted to preserve stoic wisdom. The sage largely ignores the future and treats the present as if it were past—what cannot be changed. If persons in fact exist as openness to the unfolding of projects and relationships, the sage responds: “too bad.” If the temporal orientation of human desire interferes with virtue or results in human vulnerability, reverse it. At odds with the basic features of human existence, stoicism reinvents humans.

One Big Desire---Many Preferences Without goals, we cannot act. Actions involve beliefs and desires that shape goals. In pursuing a goal, one recognizes differences that matter. Actions cannot occur unless some externals matter more than others. Do I marry, contribute to charity, or vote? Do I remove my hand from the fire, get vaccinated, or feed my children? Without differences that matter, a person is like a beached whale—immovable. Stoicism has one master desire: to remain indifferent to externals. The challenge is how to act while remaining indifferent. The sage cannot act to avoid harm, because genuine harm is caused by judgments, not events. There are ineluctable aspects to being human: we must act. Stoicism cannot completely bypass action, so it turns to preferences as a guide to action. A stoic preference is a fungible desire that can be readily switched or set aside as needed. In approaching action, preferences matter. When the deed is performed, indifference takes over. Indifference, the core desire, does not change. Preference is forward-looking: I prefer sunny weather for the game. Indifference dominates the present and past: any weather is fine. Laying preferences over underlying indifference, stoicism charts a course back to a semblance of everyday life. The hybrid— preferred indifference—opens a space to accommodate customary actions, but on the sage’s terms. Preferences are provisional; they do not have the

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status of the good. I prefer health, security, pleasure, success, friendship, and peace, but none of these are conditions of happiness. None of these may supply content to stoic virtue. My life can be complete without them. Respect for property is a conventional virtue, not the genuine virtue of the sage. For the sage, virtue lies in our response to the loss of property and there alone. The emptiness of indifference is preserved. Ordinary preferences are just obvious: adopt the social norms that tell us not to steal. The sage cannot offer reasons for preferences. To ask why health is preferable to illness leads us away from stoic wisdom toward the notion that health is good. If health is good, the external world is not a matter of indifference: sickness and injury are then bad. Given the split between mind and nature, conformity is the default position for the sage. Conventional behavior is the ordinary source of preferences. Most people prefer health, so the sage conforms to the status quo without reasons. In Hellenistic philosophy, radical ideas and conventional behavior are the flip sides of a coin. On one hand, stoicism promises freedom from suffering and complete tranquility. On the other hand, it accepts the given social order without a murmur. On one side is the form of virtue that lacks specific content. On the other side are conventional deeds without the essential form of virtue. What stoicism cannot do is bring together form and content—indifference and preference. Radical indifference is bridged with everyday desires, but the bridging is external and does not reconcile preferences with indifference. Preferred indifference, the stoic philosopher’s duct tape, tries to patch what needs to be reconceived. Rather than reexamine claims in the light of experience, false philosophy flip-flops, a trademark move. Preference guides actions and indifference guides virtue. The sage flips from preference to indifference, inessential to essential. Just as Descartes’ pineal gland would hitch mind to body, preferred indifference would hold together what stoic doctrine drives apart. Stoicism is at odds with the basic features of human existence. The sage looks upon human existence at arm’s length, as if my life were led by my shadow, not by me. Radical indifference is not an option for creatures that exist in the world and act based on what matters there. If I am indifferent about the outcome, my choice becomes arbitrary. But the direction of our lives is not arbitrary. Humans choose for reasons to arrive at specific goals, a feature of human existence that stoicism nonetheless declares inessential.

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Missing Measures and Rudderless Actions This split between mind and world characterizes the extreme doctrines of Hellenistic philosophy, notably stoicism and skepticism. Skeptics doubt whether we can achieve true beliefs. Stoics are indifferent to externals. These extreme views are at odds with the basic features of human existence. Beliefs and desires are constituents of action. I walk into the kitchen because I believe food is there and I want to eat. Beliefs and desires do not arise out of nothing: our actions are guided by measures. The proper measure of belief is truth: there is food in the kitchen. The proper measure of desire is goodness: eating in this case is good. Humans employ measures continually in thought and action, usually without hesitation. To call the sky blue or to judge a friend faithful involves measures. Those who fail to recognize true friendship will suffer. Augustine observes that “measure is surely divine.”18 To repel basic aspects of human existence requires intellectual shuffling. Skeptics cast doubt on whether beliefs are true. Stoicism casts doubt on whether externals are good. But human action requires measures. Stoicism and skepticism reject the measures. Without measures, action lacks a rudder, life grinds to a halt, and we drift into a “whatever” stance. “What is in the kitchen?” “Whatever.” Rudderless action signifies a crisis for the doctrine. We cannot act without beliefs and desires. A philosophy that makes ordinary life impossible would be dismissed. Faulty phenomenology needs rescuing. We saw how stoicism responds to the vacuum of desire with preferences. Skepticism concocts a parallel remedy for the absence of truth with “truth-like” beliefs. We do not know if the belief is true, but we act based on what is plausible or like the truth. Hume’s skeptic leaves the room by the door not by the window because it is plausible that this is safer. He walks through the doorway, however, without making any claims to truth. If we do not know the truth, how do we recognize what resembles the truth? A claim to be like what is unknowable is hot air. True beliefs and good desires are the measures of actions. Plausibility and preference fail as surrogates for true beliefs and good desires because they appeal to no good reasons; instead, they strand us in the arbitrary. Without measures, the space created can be filled in any way. In stoicism and skepticism, the arbitrary ends up as the measure for desire and belief. The preferred

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and plausible look like measures, but a closer look reveals that nothing— or anything—will do. Preferred indifferents and the truth-like are not bridges back to ordinary life but dead ends.

“a Refined System of Selfishness” vs. Virtue Engaged in the World In his essay “The Skeptic,” David Hume, writing in the voice of an ancient skeptic, charges stoicism with reinventing humanity along the lines of Proteus. Faced with obstacles, the shifty god changes shape to escape. No prison can hold someone able to morph into the air and slip out the window: No man would ever be unhappy, could he alter his feelings. Proteus-like, he would elude all attacks, by the continual alterations of his shape and form. But of this resource nature has, in a large measure, deprived us. The fabric and constitution of our mind no more depends on our choice, than that of our body.19

The sage is a mythic figure, a Proteus of the emotions, who can alter his nature at will and cease altogether to care about externals, such as the opinions of others. But even the wisest persons remain human. Human nature is dynamic and evolving but it is not featureless. Hume points out that regard for the opinions of others is an inalterable source of human identity and virtue: “To one who said, that none were happy, who were not above opinion, a Spartan replied, then none are happy but knaves and robbers.”20 We are constituted so as to care about the views of others.21 The stoic admonition to be indifferent to what others think of me is one more stab at reinventing humans rather than offering them guidance. Sages cannot step outside their own nature. It lies within the power of philosophy, says Hume’s skeptic, to modify and educate emotions. It lies outside human power, including that of the philosopher, to uproot emotions. The pursuit of indifference is a perilous exercise that coarsens perceptions and leaves us unresponsive to others and ourselves. When humans dream of becoming gods, they come closer to monsters. Hume worries that, with its core distinctions skewed, the stoic passion for indifference backfires. It promises virtue, but, under cover of detachment, breeds selfishness. In the Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume observes:

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It is certain that, while we aspire to the magnanimous firmness of the philosophic sage, and endeavor to confine our pleasure altogether within our own minds, we may, at last, render our philosophy like that of Epictetus, and other Stoics, only a more refined system of selfishness, and reason ourselves out of all virtue as well as social enjoyment.22

The selfishness of stoic virtue does not concern material goods or status. The sage craves freedom from suffering as of utmost importance. He is determined to remain unmoved in the face of every event. The sage’s eye is locked on himself. Only his reaction matters. The suffering of others—rather than provoking empathy, judgment, and action—becomes a badge of honor for the sage, a reminder that he masters his reactions and remains unmoved. One who suffers has made an error in reasoning: external events do not matter. Tragedy is an illusion to be corrected by proper thought. One who suffers chooses the wrong attitude toward externals. Preserving indifference is the sage’s sole concern. The refined selfishness of the sage renounces virtue at its core. The sage may live cheerfully without wealth, but an obsessively self-seeking miser is enshrined in this doctrine. The miser counts his gold; the sage prizes indifference in the face of any trouble. So long as my virtue remains intact, purrs the sage, let the world go its own way. A philosophy attuned to human existence is not isolated from the world. The logic of stoicism splits apart the mind and world. It excludes moral deeds and eventually is left with neither mind nor world. Thinking takes its content from the world: thinking belongs to the world as a human activity.23 When philosophy isolates mind from world, only husks remain. The stoic sage follows nature, but what is nature? Whatever happens. Tautologies replace judgment and reasoning. Consequently, the poles of nature and mind are strangely similar: freedom requires reflecting necessity as closely as possible. The crystallized sage becomes the mirror of nature. A virtuous human life is engaged in the world. Our well-being is affected by the world and the situations of others. We are vulnerable; we suffer and seek to remove suffering where possible. We may experience consolation or joy in the midst of suffering. But we cannot eliminate suffering from human life any more than we can eliminate language or fellow feelings.24

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Notes 1. Thomas Wolfe, A Man in Full (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998). 2. See Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 3. James Collins introduced the term “purist split” in Interpreting Modern Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 14. 4. Descartes, however, concludes in the sixth of his meditations that the human being is a composite of mind and body, not simply a “thinking thing.”. 5. Epictetus, Handbook of Epictetus , trans. Nicholas P. White (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), #1, 11. 6. Conversely, it is deeply troubling to think otherwise. Thus, Thomas Nagel writes, “Not being able to say what that something is [free human action], and at the same time finding the possibility of its absence very disturbing, I am at a dead end.” Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 117. 7. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, 504-7. 8. Epictetus, Handbook, #5, 13. 9. Ibid., #16, 15. 10. Ibid., #16, 15–16. 11. “In the narrower sense dogmatism consists in adhering to one-sided determinations of the understanding whilst excluding their opposite. This is just the strict ‘either-or’.” Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, addition to #32, 70. 12. “Difference, whether present in the form of some specific thing or in a specific natural mode of conscious being (some feeling, or some desire and what it strives for, be this a purpose set by me or by some ‘alien’ consciousness), no longer has any essential significance. The only decisive differences are those occurring in thought, namely those that aren’t directly distinguishable from myself.” G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Peter Fuss and John Dobbins (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), 99–100. 13. As quoted in Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, 393. 14. Thomas Nagel writes, “The effect of concentrating on the influence of what is not under his control is to make this responsible self seem to disappear, swallowed up by the order of events.” Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 36. Or, as Nagel later puts it, “Everything I do or that anyone else does is part of a larger course of events that no one ‘does,’ but that happens, with or without explanation.” Nagel, The View from Nowhere, 113. 15. See P. J. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” in P. J. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1974).

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16. On the “fore-structure” of human understanding, see Sects. 31 and 32 in Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, revised Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010), 138–49. 17. Epictetus, Handbook, #8, 13. 18. Augustine, Against the Academics , trans. Peter King (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1995), 34. 19. David Hume, “The Sceptic,” in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: IN: LibertyClassics, 1985), 168. 20. Hume, “The Sceptic,” 173–4. 21. See Annette Baier, A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s “Treatise” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 22. Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, third edition, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 40. 23. Heidegger writes, “knowing itself is grounded beforehand in alreadybeing-in-the-world, which essentially constitutes the being of Dasein” (Being and Time, 61). 24. For all of Hume’s criticisms of stoicism, his own skeptical philosophy has deep commonalities with stoicism. Though Hume insists that we cannot afford to remain indifferent to the things of the world—a point stoics are forced to concede in their doctrine of preferred indifferents—Hume insists that the world and everything in it are utterly indifferent.

References Augustine. Against the Academics. Translated by Peter King. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1995. Baier, Annette. A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s “Treatise.” Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Collins, James. Interpreting Modern Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Epictetus. Handbook of Epictetus. Translated by Nicholas P. White. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983. Hegel, G. W. F. The Encyclopedia Logic. Translated by T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1991. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised translation by Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010.

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———. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Peter Fuss and John Dobbins. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. Hume, David. Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary. Edited by Eugene F. Miller, ed. Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1985. ———. Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. 3rd edition. Edited by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Nagel, Thomas. Mortal Questions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Nagel, Thomas. The View from Nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Nussbaum, Martha. The Therapy of Desire. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Strawson, P. J. Freedom and Resentment. In Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays. London: Methuen, 1974. Wolfe, Thomas. A Man in Full. New York, NY: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1998.

CHAPTER 5

Beyond the Illusion of Philosophical Egoism: Recovering Self-Love and Selfishness

In Shusaku Endo’s philosophical novel Deep River, the character Isobe, a dreary mid-level Japanese businessman who was widowed in the opening chapter, reflects on his former life: At some point the vague feeling that he could never believe in anything had come to rest permanently at the bottom of his heart. He had ultimately got along well with everyone in his company, but he had not been able to believe sincerely in any of them. He had learned through experience that egoism resided in the hearts of every individual, and that a man’s insistence on his own good intentions and the propriety of his actions was merely an attempt to gloss over his egoism.1

The death of his wife awakened Isobe from the emptiness of his former life. He had treated Keiko like “air” that existed only to meet his needs. Now, nothing was more real than his wife and his regrets about the past. He had been wrong about many things. One error was his conviction that egoism consumes all persons. That self-serving illusion had justified his selfishness as a husband and father. What is meant by egoism and why is this notion prevalent? Egoism, self-love, and selfishness are prone to be balled up together; often the terms “egoism,” “self-love,” and “selfishness” are used interchangeably,

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creating a moral blur. “Egoism” may be used as another term for selfishness, much as “utility” is used to mean usefulness. We want to distinguish among these terms as we inquire into egoism. We explore egoism in its purist meaning, what we call philosophical egoism, which presupposes a pure self.2 This pure, unworldly self is presumed by most accounts of egoism, including descriptive or psychological egoism and prescriptive or ethical egoism. Attention generally focuses on the competing claims of descriptive or prescriptive egoism. Descriptive egoism asserts that humans always act out of self-interest; prescriptive egoism holds that humans ought to act to optimize selfseeking behavior. Descriptive egoism closes off the space for morality, for the virtue of self-love and the vice of selfishness. Prescriptive egoism’s endorsement of self-seeking eliminates the moral distinction between self-love and selfishness. Both descriptive and prescriptive egoism posit individuals as self-seeking, whether driven by desires or judgments. But what is this self? We focus on the purist conception of the self that underlies these varieties of egoism. The purist self is the outcome of a defective phenomenology that posits individuals as isolated from the world and one another.3 This faulty phenomenology sets up the perplexing problems of the external world and other minds that dog much of modern thought. Philosophical egoism presumes this purist self. Martin Heidegger’s distinction between ontological and ontic can clarify these levels of analysis. For Heidegger, ontology uncovers the basic structures of human existence that identify what we are, while ontic inquiries examine how humans behave. Metaphysics and ontology are ontological discourses; science takes up ontic matters. That humans exist with others is ontological. Whether social life involves tribes, separate households, or clans is a matter of ontic or empirical differences. Philosophical egoism takes analysis down to the ontological level. The purist self excludes basic features of human existence: it results from a false phenomenology. Whether to defend descriptive or prescriptive egoism is ontic and raises empirical or normative questions, respectively. We cannot fully grasp the debate between descriptive and prescriptive egoism without addressing underlying presuppositions about human existence. The ontology of egoism must be examined. False moves begin with experience and then leave it behind. That is the expected route into analysis: we probe the familiar to gain a deeper understanding. What marks thinking as defective is the inability to return to the familiar, including those experiences from which reflection embarks.

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In retrospect, the appeal to familiar experiences serves as a ploy. What is recognizably human is the bait that leads us into an analysis that substitutes a fraudulent self for the human one. For example, we enter the discussion of egoism by noting human tendencies to selfishness and greed. Once untethered analysis establishes philosophical egoism, access to selfishness and greed is cut off. If a universal condition such as egoism existed, it would dissolve the meaning of selfishness. Egoism is not a doctrine of selfishness; it is an illusion resulting from false moves that make self-love and selfishness impossible. Egoism proves to be a pseudoconcept because it has nothing to be the concept of . The purist self is fictitious. Egoism takes the position that what motivates (or should motivate) all human action and judgment is “What’s in it for me?” “Will I be better off?” “What do I get out of it?” No concern weighs (or should weigh) so heavily on a person as one’s own. Egoism purports to bring us down to earth, like no other doctrine. The hard edge of egoism is part of its appeal. Egoism professes to be either the only way or the intelligent way to conduct one’s life. Reflective people accept egoism. But descriptive egoism eliminates selfishness and self-love: there is no room for a contrast between selfish and non-selfish actions. Prescriptive egoism eliminates selfishness by rebranding it as a virtue, much as in Book I of Plato’s Republic Thrasymachus rebrands the tyrant—the perfect egoist— as the just man. We agree with Plato that a perfect egoist would not be recognizably human. Advocates for egoism seem to get the last word. Like jaded journalists, they insist that beneath appearances lies another story. Look under the hood; what looks virtuous or selfless conceals strategic interest. Humans are on the make. We compete constantly to gain an edge or improve our situation. As in film noir, what happens on the streets after midnight punctures the respectable façade of the community. People are out to secure their advantage. Trusting in virtuous motivation is naïve. Get more experience of the world, we are told, and egoism grows plausible. The defenders of virtue cite cases of love and sacrifice to refute egoism. Egoism, they claim, cannot explain why parents care for their children or soldiers die for their country. In reply, partisans of virtue are told to look deeper. Parents benefit when their children thrive; military service advances one’s career. The human core is uniform and simple. Selfinterest is the ground of the self, the soil that nurtures all else. For some, this is a matter of instinct; for others, it is a rule that rational people

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follow. What grounds our actions? All justifications lead to maximizing self-interest, our bottom line. Beliefs, ideals, and convictions reemerge as a personal advantage and interest. Whatever pertains to me becomes mine in the restrictive sense of “benefits me.” Hegel locates these ideas in the French Enlightenment thinker Helvetius and provides a plain statement of descriptive egoism: if in man as a moral being a single principle is sought, this ought to be called self-love, and he endeavoured to demonstrate by ingenious analysis that whatever we term virtue, all activity and law and right, has as its foundation nothing but self-love or selfishness, and is resolvable thereinto.4

Hegel points out one source of egoism’s appeal: boiling morality down to a single principle. If one principle is sought, then self-love is a prime candidate. But egoism does not grasp the love of self as does the gospel, which tells me “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” With egoism, I am pitted against my neighbor. The defense of egoism eventually turns to nature. We naturally prefer those outcomes that benefit us or at least appear to. “Naturally” is meant to capture the superiority of egoism. This doctrine does not import fancy notions about morality or set high expectations about how humans ought to behave. Egoism is said to accept the species as it walks the earth. “Just the facts” is the password that puts egoism in line with accounts of human behavior that reject religious and moral frameworks. The egoist proposes to meet reality head-on without fainthearted illusions. The egoist looks worldly, pursuing goals efficiently, while those promoting the paths of virtue appear naïve. Suspicion never runs in the reverse direction. No one suspects that apparently selfish actions conceal selfless motives. Doubt runs one way: the inner egoist intrigues us, while the inner altruist seems laughable. Egoism speaks plainly, without a complicated set of distinctions. The terms that circulate through this viewpoint are fungible. One easily substitutes for another: self-interest or advantage could signify benefit, preference, profit, pleasure, happiness, or desire. Loose terms are key to egoism’s appeal. It effortlessly zeros in on the origin of human conduct. Trading in these terms sets one on a treadmill from which escape is difficult. Altruism is conscripted to the cause of egoism by insisting that it fulfills my desire and brings satisfaction. In some way, I benefit by acting virtuously, and that benefit provides the motive or measure. One is hard

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pressed to put egoism to the test since with enough doggedness all behaviors can be re-described as self-interested. And what eludes testing is easily mistaken to be true. Such doctrines appear obviously true—invincible. Discussion of egoism often begins by distinguishing descriptive from prescriptive egoism. Descriptive or psychological egoism states that people naturally seek to maximize their self-interest. It is what we do. This hardheaded position scoffs at normativity and urges us to focus on the facts and forget how people ought to act. Prescriptive or ethical egoism claims that rational people should maximize their self-interest. People would improve their lives by adopting an egoist’s code. This code or principle can be justified and encouraged. Egoism here represents a reflective outlook, not a natural or innate disposition. Each branch of egoism answers a fundamental question: what can we count on? In the end, my satisfaction is the best measure of my happiness. Egoism draws the invisible hand of Adam Smith out of hiding and makes its lesson all encompassing. Smith observed that the pursuit of self-interest by individuals produces prosperity for society: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.5

We were wrong to look upon greed as a vice. Greed is the engine of innovation and commerce that will benefit all.6 My drive to acquire wealth means everybody wins. Besides Smith, defenders of self-interest include such influential sources as Hobbes. Books like Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, convince some that self-interest is the only rational path to follow. Though he slights it, David Hume sees egoism as an idea to contend with: “The deduction of morals from self-love, or a regard to private interest, is an obvious thought, and has not arisen wholly from the wanton sallies and sportive assaults of the skeptics.”7 The obvious thought is not always true, however, and Hume rejects egoism.

Egoism and Capitalism Not surprisingly, attention to egoism in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury European philosophy coincides with the dawning of modern commercial society. The emerging culture of capitalism makes the claims

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of egoismmore plausible.8 Karl Marx even argues that only certain social conditions make the narrowing of a person’s interests to the apparently egoistic possible: the point is rather that private interest is itself already a socially determined interest, which can be achieved only within the conditions laid down by society and with the means provided by society; hence it is bound to the reproduction of these conditions and means. It is the interest of private persons; but its content, as well as the form and means of its realization, is given by social conditions independent of all.9

Of course, the society to which Marx refers is commercial society. Like Adam Smith’s butcher, baker, and brewer, neither the egoist nor the participant in commercial society is moved by benevolence. Both challenge traditional virtues by celebrating greed. If the self ultimately is moved by its own interest, as Hobbes argues, then capitalism would be the form of society most in synch with human psychology. In fact, this brief for capitalism has become commonplace. Marx observes that the social conditions that engender the narrowly self-interested motivations of buyers and sellers, namely the establishment of commerce, ironically posit the morally high-minded recognition of buyers and sellers as free and equal persons who must respect one another’s will. In a memorable paragraph summarizing the features of the sphere of commodity exchange and echoing Adam Smith, Marx calls attention to the self-interestedness of buyers and sellers: Each looks only to his own advantage. The only force bringing them together, and putting them into relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interest of each. Each pays heed to himself only, and no one worries about the others.

Yet he also says of buyers and sellers that they “are determined only by their own free will. They contract as free persons, who are equal before the law. Their contract is the result in which their joint will finds a common legal expression.”10 This combination calls to mind Immanuel Kant’s dictum that we can use another human being as a means but never solely as a means. We argue that the egoistic self, the purist self, is a caricature that results from false moves. The vice of greed differs from egoism’s dogma that our every move is a solely self-interested one. Actual motives, like greed,

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have content that can be described. The self-interest posited by egoism lacks markers: whatever occurs is posited in advance as self-interest. Capitalism may nurture greed, but it cannot recast the self along the lines of philosophical egoism. Arguments for philosophical egoism selectively highlight actions that resonate with its claims. Like a changeling, egoism replaces the greediness fostered by consumer culture. If egoism is true, there is no greed—everyone is equally and inescapably self-interested. When all behaviors are reduced to self-interest, the distinction between virtue and vice is replaced by enlightened self-interest. “Self-interest” is a pseudo-concept. Commercial (or capitalist) self-interest, which is socially determined and conditioned by high-minded formal morality, is something actual that promotes the illusion of pure self-interest. It is an alibi for egoism. To acknowledge the reality of greed requires abandoning philosophical egoism. Capitalism is a habitat where skepticism and cynicism thrive. The egoist is one of many stripped-down caricatures of the self to be found in modern thought. A self becomes a caricature when fundamental aspects of experience are erased and cannot be restored. The actual self is replaced by the abstraction, and problems are posed in terms of the abstract self. Parodies of the self are found in doctrines of the state of nature, utility, and rational choice—wherever individuals are posited simply as seekers of self-interest, separated from society, or supposed to live in “society in the abstract.”11 Market relations prod us to regard all actions as investments subject to calculations where self-interest is as measurable as money. Calculations about the expected return on our actions crowd out moral deliberation. Life is shrouded in a “return on investment” mentality. But if moral deliberation represents a basic dimension of human existence, calculations of self-interest are no substitute for it. Something human has gone missing. When analysis severs ties with human existence, a quagmire results. These questions become unanswerable: why be social, why be moral, how do I maximize self-interest. The search for reasons to be moral ensues after a skeptical pit is dug. Being moral, like being social or being a language user, is a fundamental dimension of human existence that is presupposed even by those who doubt morality. Human existence is the source of reasons, but we neither have nor need reasons for using language, affirming moral distinctions, or being involved with others. We cannot step outside our humanity. Phenomenology identifies

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how we find ourselves, what are the most basic features of human existence, what Hume calls the “original” properties of human nature, and what Heidegger identifies as existentials, such as being-in-the-world and being-with-others. Untethered analysis retreats from constitutive features of human existence and then looks for reasons to return.

Responding to Egoism: Socrates Faces Thrasymachus Plato begins his sprawling exposition of a just society, the Republic, with a consideration of egoism. In Book I, the sophist Thrasymachus taunts Socrates and his companions about their concern for justice and raises cynical arguments about the virtues.12 Making threats and demanding money for speaking, Thrasymachus is a bully. Socrates depicts him as a lion, planting the suggestion that without justice, humans devolve into animals. Thrasymachus’ reasons—like jabs and counterpunches—display force, not understanding. The cynical arguments are familiar: everyone seeks his own advantage, but only the stronger succeeds. Justice properly applies to the strong, and the ruler who imposes his will on society is the strongest, hence the most just. To be this tyrant is everyone’s dream, claims Thrasymachus. Socrates observes that such egoism turns the ordinary upside down. Virtuous action represents weakness and ignorance; vice signifies intelligence and greatness. In this upside-down world, justice becomes another name for raw power, and the more power, the more justice.13 Socrates’ questions for Thrasymachus go beyond the horizon of the Republic and involve objections to egoism that do not presuppose Platonism. First, Socrates emphasizes that the tyrant must possess knowledge lest he be mistaken about his advantage. Setting out to maximize self-interest is pointless unless one knows one’s advantage and how to maximize it. Without this knowledge, egoism fails. Socrates does not raise the follow-up question: how does one come by this knowledge? Is egoism equipped to seek knowledge? What would become of the trust in others on which knowledge depends? What calculation could tell me whether keeping this promise or paying that debt maximizes my advantage? One could compare several outcomes, but the maximum advantage goes beyond the short term to the long term. It is a limit concept, not a comparison of two outcomes. If optimal self-interest demands perfect information, it amounts to a pseudo-concept, without reference or use,

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which cannot be acted on. Egoism, it seems, wins adherents at a distance with bold claims. Upon closer scrutiny, it runs into trouble. Socrates prods Thrasymachus to relate his egoistic views to the world. Is there evidence that people function in this way? The unrelenting pursuit of self-interest is not visible in the crafts, which are the work of ordinary Greeks. Medicine, navigation, music, and horse training provide benefits to others. The evidence that people care for others is overwhelming. The simple claims of egoism founder on reality. Even thieves, says Socrates, must trust one another to pursue illicit goals. Virtues make cooperation and coordinated action possible. A world of single-minded self-seekers, if imaginable, would be chaotic. Implicit in Socrates’ remarks on the crafts is the reminder of the social context of human life. Crafts manifest human interdependence, how existence is social to its roots. Egoism treats individuals as separable from their relationships to others, as if social life were a set of calculated moves to enhance one’s own advantage. The defender of egoism maintains that the real story remains hidden. Actual motivations differ from virtuous appearances. Thrasymachus turns to money to drive the wedge between virtuous appearances and egoistic reality: the shepherd cares for the sheep only for the sake of the slaughter and the jingle of coins to follow. The physician heals the patient only for the fee. Money, according to the skeptic, is the real objective driving these seeming benefits to others.14 Plato responds throughout The Republic to the challenge posed by money to traditional virtues. Rulers in Plato’s republic do not own property and are not allowed to sleep near gold. To possess the greatest virtue requires the greatest distance from money. Rulers in an ideal society would live without luxury, like soldiers or monks. Plato’s strategy to safeguard the virtues is through separation; each craft is factored into two crafts. A paid worker, says Socrates, pursues work that benefits its object and the self-centered wage-earning craft. Work separates into the skilled activity and the job, each with its own goal. Plato treats these objectives as independent since a craft provides benefits whether the craftsman is paid or not. But do paid workers pursue two crafts? Thrasymachus insinuates that if money is involved in an activity, money becomes the goal of that activity, so self-interest is all that matters. Plato in effect accepts the egoist’s suggestion and then scrambles to shore up the virtues by way of separation. The thought that ordinary persons pursue two crafts seems awkward for good reason. There is no craft of moneymaking. But if the goals were separate, then it is unclear what a wage would mean. What would wage

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earners be paid for? Factoring into two crafts is flimflam. Plato worries that money will undermine true standards of virtue, but shielding virtue from corruption by fiat—fabricating two independent crafts—generates more problems. Professional virtues and moneymaking are not separate crafts but two dimensions of work in a commercial setting, both shaping it. The prospects for virtue depend upon meeting the challenges of money in the workplace, not inventing distinctions to sequester money. Plato addresses egoism long before the doctrine finds a habitat in the modern era; it is no accident that he does so in the context of moneymaking.15 Socrates offers a model for how to respond to its enduring appeal; he questions whether egoism describes actual human actions. Do persons make decisions by trying to maximize self-interest? Socrates’ cross-examination of Thrasymachus is more helpful than Plato’s bifurcating alternative to egoism. In battling egoism through demarcations, Plato preserves the notion of pure self-interest—embodied in money— rather than calling it into question. By separating the cave from the realm of knowledge, Plato similarly presupposes skeptical demands rather than challenging them. Dividing the cave from the forms departs from human existence. Humans exist amid neither pure illusion nor pure forms. Analysis founded on demarcations is likewise undertaken by Kant, who splits pure duty off from happiness and usefulness, a division that suggests that moral action is radically selfless—egoism’s flip side. False moves occur when two aspects of experience are polarized and taken as separable entities, like Plato’s two crafts or Kant’s duty and enjoyment.

How Untethered Analysis Engenders Egoism Analysis always presupposes a phenomenology. Reasonable analysis presupposes an adequate phenomenology: dead ends and disdain for experience signal a defective phenomenology. When phenomenology is neglected, any claims, including the extreme claims of philosophical egoism, gain traction. Untethered analysis may treat as separate what experience shows to be inseparable. Once aspects are treated as parts, positions such as egoism can arise. The appeal of egoism points to the danger of unconstrained analysis. Philosophy embarks with questions from our lives; if it veers from experience, the purpose of inquiry gets lost.16 The analysis that arrives at egoism is obstinate in the face of experience. It must raise captivating issues that divert attention from its evident distortions of experience.

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Ordinary experience suggests from the start that egoism is out of joint with our lives. If the picture of humans continually calculating self-interest is preposterous, how does egoism emerge as a plausible account of human action? Pure self-interest is as bogus a notion as the pure self. The pursuit of a wage, especially when separated from the work for which the wage is paid (as Plato does), gives the impression of being purely self-interested. For the wage eradicates all reference to the nature of the work for which the wage is paid. That is a peculiar social form for labor to take. What seems to be pure (asocial) self-interest is an illusion created by the social form of labor constitutive of commercial societies. In the modern period, philosophy turns to unconstrained analysis to achieve certainty and truth. The models of certainty for Descartes were mathematics and logic; he dreamed that the rational method could secure similar certainty for all knowledge. He deemed experience dubious until tested by the method of doubt. What results from analysis improves upon experience. Experience does not make plain what is ultimate, and it cannot anchor knowledge. In the second meditation, when the bit of wax melts, its sensible properties change, so sensing cannot detect that the wax is the same. An act of pure understanding is required to grasp the wax as a material, an extended thing capable of taking unimaginably many shapes. An object extended in space can be sensed, but its capacity for taking countless shapes must be thought, not sensed or even imagined. The locus of material identity is just as abstract as the Cogito, the thinking thing. In modern thought, analysis often takes us far from what is familiar. Who would have thought that a bit of wax is colorless, odorless, without texture, without taste, and makes no sound? The completeness of analysis is not measured by its return to recognizable experience but by the alleged improvement of our understanding. Analysis functions in a similar way for classical empiricists like John Locke. Locke invokes experience as the foundation of knowledge but makes a particular analysis of experience the actual foundation. Experience is presumed to be constituted by simple ideas or discrete sensations. Simple ideas reduce what is experienced as a whole to its supposed elements. For empiricist and rationalist alike, analysis discloses what is ultimate, and the results of analysis are posited as true, even if they are not found in experience. We do not perceive simple ideas any more than we sense matter or mind. Untethered analysis is the source of these notions. Once analysis drives a wedge between experience and ultimate truths, it becomes easier to accept the claims of egoism. A sophisticated

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thinker trusts the results of analysis over unanalyzed experience. Like the Cogito or pure matter, self-interest may be the essence hidden beneath the surface of experience. If unrestrained analysis can persuade us that ordinary physical objects are colorless, odorless, soundless, and without texture or taste, why balk when it exposes the egoistic underbelly of even manifestly altruistic actions? Analysis not guided by phenomenology is predisposed to false abstractions and dilemmas. Philosophers may quarrel over whether one or two elements constitute the ultimate truth of human action. In some cases, “ultimate” suggests oneness. For Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza, selfinterest presides unchallenged over human life. David Hume’s analysis is more complex. He pairs self-love with sympathy as original principles of human nature that direct the passions. But concern to establish the more ultimate needles analysis. To find two irreducible factors provoke a competition. Thought experiments pit one element against the other to settle which matters more. Hume imagines a merchant watching his competitor’s ship sink. Here pity is tinged with relief at the boost to one’s fortunes. Relief escalates the more one profits from a disaster. Thought experiments isolate elements to gauge their relative strength. The experiment presumably shows that in crisis self-love trumps sympathy. At base, self-love tugs harder without eliminating sympathy. That does not go far enough for egoism: all regard for others is strategic, purely self-regarding. Analysis achieves its goal when it isolates elements. Descartes’ bit of wax reduces to matter. Like matter, self-interest is the elementary stuff to which human aspirations reduce. In each case, the results of analysis are not what we experience. Experiences appear varied and distinct. Analysis disconnected from experience assumes that beneath the variety of experience, all streams have one source. Like the matter thought to remain after all the sensible properties of the wax change, self-interest constitutes the truth of everyone’s behavior. Another mode of analysis in modern philosophy engages in phenomenology by sounding out the state of nature. The state of nature for Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau establishes the context for justifying authority, rights, and institutions. It serves as the foundation for social and political philosophy. What is considered basic humanity differs in these accounts. Hobbes portrays the individual calculating his advantage without the security that strong government brings.17 Rousseau, the most phenomenologically minded of the state-of-nature theorists, does not champion egoism, as does Hobbes. Rousseau claims that sympathy, or

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pity, is an original feature of the human make-up: our sentiments open us to the plight of other sentient creatures. Nonetheless, his inquiry bolsters egoism when it falls into the trap of untethered analysis in separating humans from fundamental aspects of their existence. Rousseau imagines the natural state as solitary. Humans become social only with the onset of environmental challenges such as food scarcity or the concentration of people on islands. In determining how the species moves from solitary existence to social existence, unrestrained analysis cuts itself off from human existence and then attempts to recover it. But no reasoning can deduce the original features of human existence, such as sociality. In these instances, Rousseau loses contact with the phenomenological context that should orient analysis. How would we recognize a solitary being as human? Philosophy can clarify sociability and examine the range of social bonds, but it falls into a skeptical pit when it asks how humans acquire the features that constitute us. To analyze human origins, sociability must be presupposed. Other examples of phenomenologically flawed analysis that makes egoism plausible include utility theories, such as John Stuart Mill’s. In these analyses, purist splits separate consequences from actions and aggregate them under a single measure such as pleasure or preference satisfaction. These theories popularize the Epicurean notion of maximizing pleasure as the goal of human life, or the skepticism about the good that makes satisfying preferences life’s aim. Both presuppose that consequences are separated from actions by a natural fault line. Intentions likewise are separated from action, so intention and consequence are treated as self-subsistent rather than as distinguishable aspects of action. Moreover, with pleasure or preference satisfaction as the aim, intention and action are assumed to have no form relevant to the pursuit of happiness. Here we can recognize an affinity not only between egoism and utility but also instrumental action. This section has examined how analysis ensnared in defective phenomenology makes egoism more plausible. In search of the foundations of knowledge, experience, or action, such philosophy dissolves human existence into elements, often pushing self-interest forward as the master motivation. When it isolates features of human life that do not come apart, analysis distorts understanding and contrives dilemmas. Sidetracked by pseudo-notions like egoism, philosophy is often silent about indifference, selfishness, and greed, real sources of concern, especially in a commercial world.

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Another Contrived Dilemma: The “Paradox of Hedonism” Joel Feinberg links egoism to what he calls the “paradox of hedonism.”18 Feinberg defines happiness as pleasure and traces the paradox to the pleasure we often feel when actions achieve their goals. In the splintering course of his analysis, pleasure is first distinguished and then split off from the action and its goal. Paradoxes arise when we try to connect what is stipulated as separable. Once pleasure is detached from action, pleasure becomes the real goal, with action serving as a means to pleasure. The deed is now seen as motivated solely by the satisfaction or relief that we eventually feel. Pleasure detached from action is regarded as a sensation or mental state. This fragmentation of action breeds paradoxes. Do we intend the action or only the resulting sensation? If a shortcut could produce that pleasure without the action, why bother to act? If pleasure signifies our real goal, then actions are mere means to pleasure and are not undertaken for their own sake. Does an action have two goals: the outward achievement and the inward pleasure? How is one goal related to the other? Which goal counts most? Intentions are scrutinized for clues as to what is really sought. Tests are devised to determine which goal matters more: would you rather achieve your deepest goal and not know it or falsely believe that your goal was reached when in fact the event never occurred? In other words, does the actual event matter more than the inner sensation of pleasure? Once these elements are split up, analysis naturally tries to rank their importance. One must matter more—clarity seems to demand it. The distance between inner and outer life widens into a gulf. States of mind replace the complex matter of a complete life: we might as well be brains in a vat—or incorporeal minds, for that matter. The slide into stoicism is underway. Feinberg accepts the paradox to which separating pleasure from action gives rise. While happiness (pleasure) is the goal of human life, we seldom seek it directly. We do not start with happiness—our ultimate end—and derive intermediate goals from it. We pursue numerous activities for their own sake, such as doing well in school or training for the marathon, and in this way reach happiness. Focusing on happiness is not how we select intermediate goals or order intentions. Happiness results from pursuing the kinds of activities that matter to our type of being. We begin with

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human life and the challenges it poses. As we sound out the characteristic activities of our kind of being, we determine where excellence lies. Happiness gets its content from the kind of being we are. Friendship and work matter to people; we care about our needs and those of others; the beauties of nature captivate us; thriving community, prosperity, and health figure into happiness. To pursue happiness directly, observes Feinberg, is a set-up for failure: “the single-minded pursuit of happiness is necessarily self-defeating … To derive satisfaction, one must ordinarily first desire something other than satisfaction and then find the means to get what one desires.”19 Our goal, oddly, cannot be pursued directly. Happiness figures as a paradox when human existence is factored out and the pieces cannot be put back together. Contrary to Feinberg, happiness—the fulfillment of human existence—belongs to activities and relationships; it is not separable from them. A paradox results when we forget about this inseparability and split happiness off as happiness-ingeneral, a mental event. The question of whether persons seek happiness or pleasure in this general way is answered by paying attention to the basic features of human existence. We do not seek pleasure-in-general but sorts of fulfillment, such as friendship or challenging work. We seek the pleasures of friendship—not pleasures that happen to be produced by friendship. To isolate satisfaction from the sources of satisfaction—the pleasure from the friendship—separates mind from world. It yields nominalism and makes the case for egoism stronger. The notion of virtuous kinds of actions drops out. Acting as a friend, a way of being and acting in the world, counts for nothing, only my satisfaction matters. Aristotle shows us how to think through the seeming dilemma of happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics.20 For Aristotle, happiness is the end of human life, the ultimate aim of acting. Pleasure is not the end of human life, though a happy life can be expected to be pleasurable since it involves living virtuously. The finest pleasures are not separable from actions that are humanly excellent. For Aristotle, then, “the paradox of hedonism” rests on two misjudgments: happiness is a pleasure and pleasure is separable from the pleasurable activity.

A Deeper Case Against Descriptive Egoism In defense of a faulty notion, it is common to invoke other purist splits. Many accounts of egoism do just that in distinguishing descriptive from prescriptive egoism. Descriptive or psychological egoism holds

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that it is human nature for human beings always to act out of selfinterest; prescriptive egoism holds that people should always act out of self-interest. But what are the underlying concepts of the self and selfinterest? Philosophical egoism underlies both descriptive and prescriptive egoism; philosophical egoism holds that the self is the pure self, devoid of worldly determinants, whether material or social. Søren Kierkegaard calls this the infinite self and identifies it with the stoic self. The usual critiques of descriptive egoism do not go deep enough. They generally leave the egoist’s presumptions about the self and self-interest unexamined; instead, they challenge the empirical claim that humans always act out of self-interest. We criticize philosophical egoism’s concepts of the self and self-interest. Like other purist splits, the wedge between descriptive and prescriptive, facts and values, distorts analysis. One feature of human existence is adherence to norms: it is a fact that humans care about what is right. Judging of all sorts is active in perception and language. I see this vehicle as a luxury car. This argument is a poor one. You libeled me. What you call “enhanced interrogation” is torture. Humans judge throughout the day. A purist split between facts and values is not sustainable. Descriptive egoism claims that acting on self-interest is hard-wired into the species; human preferences direct actions, and their satisfaction is the only good we know. People know nothing but to seek their advantage. Adhering to what is in it for me comes with our operating system. To motivate us, principles translate into desires and desires all lead to the self. Thus, people tell the truth if they think that honesty benefits them. Beneath so-called selfless deeds lies self-interest. Egoism—each is out to feather his nest—is one generalization that holds across the board. This position assumes that egoism is supported by studies of human motivation. The theorist—like a scientist—does not advocate egoism but simply reports on how we work. Feinberg calls descriptive egoism armchair psychology. He wonders where is the data that human motivation relentlessly focuses on oneself: “empirical evidence of the required sort is seldom presented.”21 Egoism pretends to represent empirical reality, but science does not support its claims. Egoism loosely equates desires, reasons, and goals. All reasons and goals supposedly are shaped by the self’s master desire for what it deems its best interest. Where theory is concerned, descriptive egoism circulates within some social sciences as dogma. But studies of actual human behavior find diverse grounds for acting. Actions arise from

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various sources and motivations; they do not follow one route like fuel from tank to engine. Egoism posits selves in isolation from each other; in reality, selves exist in relationships not universal indifference. Egoism substitutes a hollowed-out identity for the rich interplay of involvements, intentions, and meanings that make up human life. Philosophical egoism is unworldly; it denies the fundamental structures of human existence that Heidegger calls “being-in-the-world” and “being-with.”22 Unsupported by evidence, egoism is wishful thinking, not description. Taking a different tack, critics dismiss descriptive egoism for making a claim that is true but trivial. Egoism is sometimes taken to claim that actions and motivations always belong to a self. “Mineness,” however, is a general feature of human actions, thoughts, and desires; it does not distinguish one kind of action from another. Egoism slurs “mineness” into self-interestedness. If acting from self-interest simply means that my choices, intentions, and actions are always mine, we may shrug our shoulders at a phenomenological truism. Egoism is toothless if that is what it amounts to. If egoism means “mineness,” it makes a familiar phenomenological claim, not a moral judgment. One mark of false moves is the absence of criteria. In debating egoism, altruism is often set up as a straw man, the other bookend of the purist split that generates philosophical egoism. But as the mirror-image, altruism becomes as elusive as “meaningful life” was in discussing absurdity. Purist splits generate conundrums. Separated from the goods that give meaning to life, a “meaningful life” remains empty. Altruism presents the paradox of how to perform an action as a self without that action’s being mine. The implicit requirements for altruism are staggering. To qualify as non-egoistic, it seems that persons could take no pleasure or interest in achieving the goal. One must be so detached from the action that it is not regarded as one’s own. Otherwise, who could resist the temptation to take pride in one’s good deeds? A non-egoistic action presumably resembles an external event that just happened somehow to pass like an electrical current through my body. Nothing of me could figure into the deed. A caricature of disinterested morality, the nonegoistic action is not really mine. Then to whom does it belong? Whose action is it? When acting, presumably I am transformed into an immaculate vessel of humanity, a pure self, but not this person. An action could not represent my project, since “mine” is drafted to the cause of egoism. Hegel repudiates this puritanical way of thinking:

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Since the subjective satisfaction of the individual himself (including his recognition in the shape of honour and fame) is also to be found in the implementation of ends which are valid in and for themselves, it is an empty assertion of the abstract understanding [abstrakten Verstandes ] to require that only an end of this kind shall appear willed and attained, and likewise to take the view that, in volition, objective and subjective ends are mutually exclusive. Indeed, such attitudes become even worse if they lead to the assertion that, because subjective satisfaction is present (as it always is when a task is completed), it constitutes the agent’s essential intention to which the objective end was merely a means.23

Egoism follows one false move with another. First, it splits the subjective and the objective, making them mutually exclusive. Then, any appearance of the subjective is taken as proof that the action was selfserving. The criteria for altruistic action are at odds with basic features of human life. Like egoism, its inverse, altruism, is tailored to another sort of being. Feinberg joins Hegel in pointing up conceptual problems when egoists define unselfish actions as unmotivated ones: For what can we now contrast selfish voluntary action with? Not only are there no actual cases of unselfish voluntary actions on the new definition; there are not even any theoretically possible or conceivable cases of unselfish voluntary actions. And if we cannot even conceive of what an unselfish voluntary action would be like, how can we give any sense to the expression selfish voluntary action? The egoist, so to speak, has so blown up the sense of “selfish” that, like inflated currency, it will no longer buy anything.24

Feinberg reveals how the empirical weakness of descriptive egoism is enmeshed with conceptual flaws. Cogent criteria for the notion of egoism are required to establish any empirical warrant. But philosophical egoism makes selfishness and self-love unintelligible. Understanding the self is a goal of philosophy. Egoism blocks this goal when it equates mineness with self-interestedness, presuming that being a self presents an impassable obstacle to virtue instead of being that whose development makes virtue possible. It is difficult to refute egoism, not because it is so well supported by experience, but because of the trickery of empty concepts that seem to pack a punch but go slack.

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Self-Interest is a Pseudo-Concept The core problem with philosophical egoism is the false conception of the self as purely subjective, a stoic self, generated by the false phenomenological move of splitting the subjective and objective. From faulty phenomenology arise further dilemmas. Alasdair MacIntyre observes that self-interest is a pseudo-concept. Egoism appears to rely on a singular motivation or objective—self-interest. But the phrase is a placeholder: any meaning or motivation can be plugged in. There is no singular objective. By identifying self-interestedness with mineness, any aim could be mine. MacIntyre observes, “what is to my interest depends upon who I am and what I want... ‘Self-interest’ is not in fact the name of a motive at all.”25 In that case, egoism—and Smith’s invisible hand—are based on a category mistake.26 Just as “emotion” is not the name of any emotion, “self-interest” is not the name of a motive; it is a placeholder that may encompass virtue or vice, selfishness or generosity. The saint is just as selfinterested as the tyrant. Self-interest underlies all accounts of the self. My interests could motivate me to sacrifice my life or to exploit others. It all depends on who I am. Until we know who the self is, we do not know what matters to it. But philosophical egoism knows what the self is: pure, infinite, unworldly—stoic. The emptiness of the philosophical egoist self matches the arbitrariness of the preferences that determine self-interest. As a general feature of human existence, self-interest says only that individuals seek what is important to them. Accounts of egoism do not allow for the focus of moral psychology, distinguishing human motivations such as ambition or jealousy. Egoism misrepresents experience. It distorts basic features of human existence, such as human sociality, and it presupposes an indifference to others that does not fit the species. Sympathy, Hume observes, is fundamental to human nature, an attitude that must be presupposed by any moral principle: It is needless to push our researches so far as to ask, why we have humanity or a fellow-feeling with others. It is sufficient, that this is experienced to be a principle in human nature … No man is absolutely indifferent to the happiness and misery of others … It is not probable, that these principles can be resolved into principles more simple and universal, whatever attempts may have been made to that purpose … and we may here safely consider these principles as original.27

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We need not calculate benefits to us to care for others; the situation of others already affects us. And their perceptions influence ours. How we are recognized matters. How we are judged matters to us. Humans are just this sort of creature. Humans cannot become egoists and strictly strategic actors—systematically indifferent to others and what they think of us—even if they try. Outside of relationships to the world and others, we cannot figure out our interests and how they matter to us. Desires are not formed in isolation. We are not hard-wired into an insular self until strategic reasons convince us to consider others. Marx, amplifying Hume, observes that “insofar as man, and hence also his feelings, etc. are human, the affirmation of the object by another is likewise his own gratification.”28 Our feelings are like tuning forks not table forks. In the trivial sense of mineness, desires belong to individuals. But their form and objectives are social. Persons do not come into desires all on their own— that is a fantasy of neoclassical economics. Recognizing what is desirable is a cooperative venture. Acting is worldly: it involves the material world and the support of others as well. To factor out my interests from those of others and pursue mine alone—as egoism’s notion of self-interest presumes to do—violates the human make-up. People do not exist that way. We could attempt to imagine a kind of being that operates that way. If paid enough, we might try living that way for a week before conceding defeat. What advice would we give someone to become a better egoist? Egoism reinvents humanity by repudiating what we know about being human. It projects a space outside human possibility. Hume criticized stoicism as a system of selfishness.29 Selfishness may characterize the stoic, but the stoic self of philosophical egoism is an illusion of false philosophy.

Recovering the Virtue of Self-Love and the Vice of Selfishness An empty notion, philosophical egoism gets its purchase on reality by being conflated with selfishness, which egoism makes unintelligible. Bad abstractions inevitably piggyback on ordinary distinctions. In a consumer culture, selfishness seems pervasive, so much so that the virtue of selflove drops from sight, as self-love is branded as selfishness. Marketing campaigns, media, habits of consuming, and career advancement focus on personal satisfaction. Self-love shrinks to “look out for number one.” Little time remains for the other-directed rituals of family, friendship,

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or public life. Self-absorption is more than a temptation; it becomes a climate. The false move occurs with the equivocation of selfishness and self-love with egoism, as if they shared one meaning. Selfishness is grounded in experience and presupposes human interdependence and neglect of obligations to others. Selfishness, unlike the placeholder selfinterest, provides a determinate concept. Selfishness can be usefully distinguished from other conduct, unlike philosophical egoism, which is whitewashed to a universal condition, though an illusory one. The egoist self is not a human one. Selfishness is a concept that elucidates real differences in conduct, while philosophical egoism misses the category of the human entirely. False moves are always in search of disguises: selfishness gives cover to the vacant notion of philosophical egoism. When looking for examples of self-interest, their bread and butter, advocates of egoism turn to selfishness. And not even that, taken broadly; the kind of selfishness of a participant in commercial life is what we usually have in mind, as Adam Smith did. When looking for generality, egoism offers assurance that self-interest provides the real motivation underlying conduct. If we do not ponder self-interest while cooking, studying, bowling, talking, celebrating, or volunteering, never mind, we are assured that self-interest drives our behaviors. Generality here sags into emptiness, self-interest talk adds nothing to what things already mean. Egoism is most plausible at a distance; up close its vacuity becomes evident. A selfish person is not an egoist in the sense examined here: there are no egoists because nothing in our experience matches the presuppositions on which philosophical egoism rests. The difference between selfishness and egoism is not a matter of degree, but of kind. Selfishness gets noticed, named, and judged because specific expectations are let down and the given reasons do not hold. Selfishness, self-love, and egoism—like usefulness and utility—are incompatible. If the claims of philosophical egoism were true, there could be no selfishness or self-love. The differences linked to selfishness would not register. One excludes the other. To recover selfishness and self-love, the false moves that give rise to the dogma of philosophical egoism must be exposed. That requires a deeper critique than the usual criticisms of descriptive and ethical egoism. Egoism arises out of a flawed phenomenology that results in fabricated dilemmas. From experience, it seems obvious that persons cooperate and act on behalf of others. In sports, we practice teamwork; from family, we learn manners and virtues; we try to be considerate of the other; we

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honor Good Samaritans, peacemakers, heroes, and prophets. Courage is admired. Compassion is recognized before we can say it. What seems obvious from experience, philosophical egoists, nonetheless, deem not only false but unthinkable. Phenomenologically faulty analysis shields itself from ordinary experience. In the repertoire of false moves, such analysis assumes that whatever is distinguishable—such as individual and society—is separable. False philosophy ignores the developmental side of virtue. MacIntyre observes: Philosophers discuss what passions men have and not what passions they might acquire. Learning is, at best, peripheral to their inquiry; insofar as it does enter, there is another fallacy in writers from Hobbes on—that of confusing the question of what motives there were originally … with the question of what the fundamental character of motives is now, in adult life.30

People are not virtuous originally. Seneca says that we are born for virtue, not with it. We become virtuous with proper training, favorable experiences, as well as original dispositions. People change, both deliberately and in gradual, adaptive ways. They imitate, borrow, correct, degenerate, and improve. To say that, despite development, nothing really changes is one way that false philosophy turns dogmatic. The notion is impervious to experience and cannot be falsified. Change and development—obvious features of our lives—are dismissed as insignificant. In the grip of false philosophy’s intractable dilemmas, ordinary features of experience become imponderable. Egoism—despite the scarcity of sound reasoning in its favor—finds a home in commercial societies, where individuals appear isolated. Markets, bureaucracies, sprawling cities, and huge corporations foster vulnerability and aloneness. It takes a peculiar society to leave people feeling so alone. Marx understands well how the notion of egoism takes root in the shadow of capitalism. Abstract relationships, such as between buyers and sellers, easily blur into the absence of relationships. Sociability this hard-shelled is generations in the making: it takes time and the cash nexus to make so many strangers. Georg Simmel observes economic transactions in the modern city: “the interests of each party acquire a relentless matter-offactness.”31 Impersonal market relations represent no primeval or original nature; they engender a highly developed, historical sensibility trying to

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account for itself. Writing of the early modern penchant for speculating on humans in “the state of nature,” Marx observes with irony: Only in the eighteenth century, in “civil society” [commercial society], do the various forms of social connectedness confront the individual as a mere means towards his private purposes, as external necessity. But the epoch which produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social … relations.32

Atomism is evidence of social forms that fragment persons—not evidence that humans are by nature asocial.33 With institutions directed at the growth of capital, other aspects of humanity become less visible and consequential. It appears as if we have no call upon one another save through exchange. Sociability seems to cut off and stuffed—somehow— into things, the phenomenon that Marx calls the fetishism of commodities and money. We carry our social power in our pockets to spend as we please.

Notes 1. Shusaku Endo, Deep River, trans. Van C. Gessel (New York: New Directions Books, 1994), 188. 2. When we use the term “egoism” without qualification, we mean philosophical egoism. 3. Heidegger writes of the unworldly “construct of an isolated self” that derails so much of modern philosophy from Descartes through Kant (Being and Time, Sect. 43(a), 198). Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, revised trans. Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010). 4. Hegel, History of Philosophy, vol. 3., trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances Simson (New York: The Humanities Press, 1974), 400. 5. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. I, general ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner (Indianapolis, IN: LibertyClassics, 1981), 26–7. 6. Hume agrees that avarice safeguards the public good better than “a passion for public good, as to make every one willing to undergo the greatest hardships for the sake of the public.” Since this principle is “too disinterested and too difficult to support, it is requisite to govern men by other passions, and animate them with a spirit of avarice and industry,

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7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

art and luxury.” “Of Commerce,” in David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: LibertyClassics, 1985), 262–3. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, third edition, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 215; see also 218–19. Both Smith and Hume use “self-love” for self-interest, not a virtue. See C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962); Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, ed., Wealth and Virtue: the Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Henry C. Clark, ed., Commerce, Culture, and Liberty: Readings on Capitalism Before Adam Smith (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund Inc., 2003). Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1973), 156. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 280. Marx, Grundrisse, 87. Plato, The Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1975). Eventually, a limit is reached—the tyrant cannot be called the just man— and Thrasymachus must speak in terms of advantage rather than justice. Money is associated here with the narrowest form of self-interest. What tale would Thrasymachus tell of a social world in which money played no role?. The associations with moneymaking and moneymakers are strong. The three men who engage Socrates—Cephalus, Polymarchus (his son), and Thrasymachus—are all identified with money-making. The story of the ring of Gyges—the legendary first coiner of money—is recounted in Book II. In Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction, Barry Stroud investigates several prominent cases where analysis ends up making unintelligible what it set out to analyze. Barry Stroud, Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction: Modality and Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). See Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Law, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), Part I, Ch. XIV, #6, 78-9. Joel Feinberg, “Psychological Egoism,” in Joel Feinberg and Russ ShaferLandau, ed., Reason and Responsibility, 14th edition (Boston, MA:

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19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

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Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2011), 514–25. This paradox was noted earlier by Bishop Joseph Butler and by Henry Sidgwick. Feinberg, “Psychological Egoism,” 518. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1985). Feinberg, “Psychological Egoism,” 515. Martha Nussbaum identifies the fourth assumption of “utilitarian rational choice models” as follows, “the theory assumes that people’s preferences are exogenous —in other words, that for economic purposes they can be taken as given.” Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995), 14. But given by what? By pure selves? Exogenous here means unworldly; exogenous desires are given prior to the self’s engagement in the world and with others. The supposition of such a pure self—a false move—is basic to philosophical egoism and to neoclassical economics. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right , ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), #124, 151. Feinberg concurs, “the egoist’s argument assimilates all voluntary action into the class of selfish action by requiring, in effect, that an unselfish action be one which is not really motivated at all … From the fact that all our successful actions … are accompanied or followed by pleasure it does not follow, as the egoist claims, that the objective of every action is to get pleasure for oneself” (Feinberg, “Psychological Egoism,” 516). Ibid., 524. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Egoism and Altruism,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vols. 1 and 2, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan Publishing, Co., Inc. & The Free Press, 1967), 465–66. To view self-interest as arbitrary preferences is no use to Adam Smith. To serve his purpose, self-interest must have content, specifically, interest in making money, as the baker, the brewer, and the butcher do. To avoid that implication, the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank equivocates. The St. Louis Fed points to self-interest as a specific motive and then treats selfinterest as a placeholder for any motive: “Is being self-interested greedy? Is it immoral? While the term self-interest has negative connotations, it does not necessarily imply greedy or immoral behavior. Self-interest just means that you seek your goals. In fact, your self-interest might lead you to study hard for your math test, give money to your favorite charity or volunteer at a local school.” St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank, Economic Lowdown Podcast Series. https://www.stlouisfed.org/education/eco nomic-lowdown-podcast-series/episode-3-the-role-of-self-interest-andcompetition-in-a-market-economy. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 219–20.

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28. Karl Marx, The Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk J. Struik, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 165. 29. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd edition, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 40. 30. MacIntyre, “Egoism and Altruism,” 466. 31. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 327. 32. Marx, Grundrisse, 84. 33. Of commercial societies, Marx observes, “Men are henceforth related to each other in their social process of production in a purely atomistic way. Their own relations of production therefore assume a material shape which is independent of their control and their conscious individual action” (Marx, Capital 1, 187).

References Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1985. Clark, Henry C., ed. Commerce, Culture, and Liberty: Readings on Capitalism Before Adam Smith. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003. Endo, Shusaku. Deep River. Translated by Van C. Gessel. New York: New Directions Books, 1994. Feinberg, Joel. “Psychological Egoism.” In Reason and Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems of Philosophy. Edited by Joel Feinberg and Russ ShaferLandau, 14th edition, 514–25. Boston: Wadsworth, 2011. Hegel, G.W.F. Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Vol. 3. Translated by E. S. Haldane and Frances Simson. New York: Humanities Press, 1974. ———. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Edited by Allen W. Wood, translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised translation by Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010. Hirschman, Albert O. The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. Hobbes, Thomas. Elements of Law. Edited by J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

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Hont, Istvan, and Michael Ignatieff, eds. Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Hume, David. Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. 3rd edition. Edited by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. ———. Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary. Edited by Eugene F. Miller, ed. Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1985. MacIntyre, Alasdair. “Egoism and Altruism.” In The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vols. 1 and 2. Edited by Paul Edwards, 465–66. New York: Macmillan Publishing, Co., Inc. & The Free Press, 1967. Macpherson, C. B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. Marx, Karl. The Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Edited by Dirk J. Struik; translated by Martin Milligan. New York: International Publishers, 1964. ———. Grundrisse. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. ———. Capital, Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1976. Nussbaum, Martha. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Plato. The Republic. Translated by G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1974. Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In On Individuality and Social Forms. Edited by Donald N. Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Vol. I. Edited by R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner. Indianapolis, IN: LibertyClassics, 1981. Stroud, Barry. Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction: Modality and Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

CHAPTER 6

Moral Luck, Responsibility, and This Worldly Life

The wheel spins. The gambler wins or loses. Once my bet is placed, the outcome lies outside my control. The wheel decides. Games turn on luck to varying degrees. In a broader sense, luck describes a situation that matters to us but is beyond our influence. Being lucky acknowledges how something significant or unexpected happens to us. We would never be lucky if all things that mattered came under our control. To be a matter of luck, the changing situation must be close at hand and evoke an emotional response. Proximity depends on context: we are lucky when a large meteor zips past the earth; we are not lucky to miss the last Ice Age. Sometimes proximity is not recognized until after the event. For example, the residents of a Japanese city feel relief when they learn after World War II that they were originally targeted for an atomic bomb.

Luck Happens “Luck” belongs to a family of terms that draws from imagination, understanding, and feeling. These terms include fate, fortune, chance, coincidence, and contingency. Generally, luck pertains to sentient creatures; it would be odd to regard a tree as lucky that was untouched by the forest fire. Luck reveals fundamental aspects of this worldly life: our

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murray and J. Schuler, False Moves in Philosophy and Social Theory, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35028-3_6

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limited powers and our vulnerabilities. A life devoid of luck would not be recognizably human. Is any aspect of human existence beyond the reach of luck? Such a realm would be free of unexpected outcomes and completely under my control. Immanuel Kant posits such a realm as necessary for moral judgment.1 Thomas Nagel appeals to Kant in his essay on moral luck. He summarizes Kant’s view as follows: persons are responsible only for what is up to them. It is not fair to be judged for what we do not control. Often the outcome of my action is not up to me; it is a matter of luck. We should not be judged in matters of luck. So, moral judgments should not focus on actions and their outcomes. Instead, judgments should address the maxim or rule that is willed, not the outcome of our actions. The luck that happens in our lives does not reach into the inner realm of pure practical reason. We can control our intentions completely. Here is the site of human responsibility, the citadel of moral judgment, where luck cannot intrude. Nagel accepts Kant’s premise: we are responsible only for what we can control. But he rejects Kant’s turn inward to the will as the way to free moral judgment from luck. Luck is a dimension of human life; unintended outcomes cannot be disowned as “not mine.” In fact, we often are held responsible for what happens, not for what is willed. As an example of moral luck, Nagel describes the same act with different consequences. You carelessly leave your baby in the tub for a few moments, but no harm occurs. I do the same, but my baby drowns. If moral responsibility concerned defects of will, our recklessness would be judged the same. But the outcomes matter. I am judged severely by myself and others, while you are not—it’s a momentary lapse. You are morally lucky; I am unlucky. Luck cannot be excluded from responsibility. For Nagel, human existence repeatedly, and necessarily, succumbs to inherent paradox. Moral luck is one of these paradoxes: I should be responsible only for what I control, but I find myself responsible for what lies beyond my control. A paradox that cannot be avoided must be lived: this is Nagel’s skeptical conclusion. Paradox is recognized as unavoidable by thoughtful humans. But his argument has a deceptive character: it begins with something out of the ordinary and ends up making it the rule. Nagel begins with the occasional occurrence of luck—some things that matter are out of my control—but ends up with an enveloping objectivity in which nothing is in my control. When luck is generalized to all external events, it becomes unavoidable: all aspects of life turn on luck.

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But at that point, what sense is there in talking about luck? Nagel is correct at the start: luck is a dimension of human life. But luck is not a rabbit hole into which all experience disappears. The phenomenology that divides the internal from the external view, which Nagel adopts, produces paradoxes that negate experience. These are self-inflicted paradoxes that we need not bear. A closer look at experience reveals the inseparability of the inner and outer views for acting and judging.

How False Philosophy Makes the Familiar Disappear Every route into false moves begins with a recognizable experience, such as being lucky. From this experience, unchecked analysis factors experience into purely subjective and objective elements. Through the splitting process, terms lose their initial meaning, and a standoff is born. We are asked to peer into the depths of experience, which previously we overlooked, to see through the familiar. At this so-called deeper level, luck is everywhere, which means that luck in the familiar sense is nowhere. Luck expands from a recognizable part of life to a paralyzing totality. Like a changeling, a purist notion is swapped for the familiar one.2 False moves, like the wave of a magic wand, make the familiar disappear.3 The initial understanding that spurred analysis later is disowned. Being lucky flips from an occasional experience that makes us wonder to a constant and unavoidable one. That is a world without luck. Skewed analysis baits and switches. Barry Stroud examines this ruse in his account of skepticism. The skeptic invokes common sense (bait) to launch an analysis that eventually undermines common sense (switch). For example, analysis begins with the perception of color then ultimately declares color unreal.4 If the bait (color perceived) turns out to be bogus, the subsequent reasoning loses its footing. With false moves, what initiates reflection—such as the familiar experience of being lucky—stops making sense. The familiar serves as an entree that is later discarded. Positing a split between the subjective and objective, factoring analysis never meant to sound out the familiar meaning of being lucky. As an aspect of worldly human existence, luck—including moral luck— belongs in our accounts of experience and knowledge. To remove all traces of luck generates a caricature of human existence. For example, stoicism draws a disturbing portrait of the sage, who apprehends a world

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without luck. In excluding this dimension of experience, stoicism presents the sage as invulnerable. In his theory of justice, John Rawls links social particularity—such as a person’s health, talents, sex, inherited wealth— with luck. If I am born healthy into a loving and well-educated family during an era of peace and prosperity, I am lucky. The universal principles underlying a just society are prior to social particularity. To be rational, principles should not favor the fortunate. Whether rich or poor, a person’s basic rights and opportunities should be the same. Rawls uses the thought experiment of “the original position” to separate the universal principles of a just society from conditions that we do not control. In the pursuit of justice, Rawls wants to outfox luck. The fundamental principles of justice are chosen behind the veil of ignorance by subjects unaware of those aspects of their actual situation that involve the luck of the draw. From this standpoint, subjects understand what matters to humans in abstraction from any identity. Like an amnesiac, these “unencumbered selves”5 are entrusted with formulating the principles of justice for actual humans. Rawls never claims that humans exist as unencumbered by their social identity; he is not a stoic. He does not deny the occurrence of luck; he wants to free justice from the vagaries of luck. But Rawls’ technique for determining principles of justice separates the rational core from constitutive elements, including matters of luck. Luck is a constitutive feature of the worldly existence of human beings; to factor it away is to lose touch with the subjects of the inquiry. This factoring method guides analysis toward further oppositions, such as dividing the right from the good. Splitting the universal from the particulars of human experience is what we call a false move. As a fundamental aspect of human existence, luck can be denied in two ways. For some thinkers, including Nagel, luck infiltrates existence, leaving nothing outside its reach. Instead of an aspect of our lives, luck rules the lot. At that point, talk of luck stops making sense. Others define moral life in such ways as to deny the occurrence of luck. To remove all traces of luck generates a caricature of human existence. Human beings are vulnerable. What happens may not be under our control, but it often matters. By excluding the inevitable dimension of luck, analysis loses sight of a basic feature of existence. Luck, including moral luck, is one of those features; the phenomenological challenge is how to place it in this worldly life. This chapter will focus on Thomas Nagel as an example of how the analysis of luck—of moral luck in particular—goes awry. An unsettling

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topic, luck is often mentioned but seldom explored. Nagel is among those who examines the nature and limits of luck. Nagel’s inquiry widens into a forlorn paradox, pitting stubborn beliefs about moral responsibility against the objectifying view of human actions as events in the natural order.

Sliding from Moral Luck to the Vanishing of Responsibility For the skeptic, what begins as luck eventually envelopes life. Hume’s skeptic sees life as a game, so we might as well play our hand or fold.6 But to regard serious events as a game should not be pleasing, even for skeptics. That important judgments turn on luck is unsettling. The election of a president or the execution of a prisoner is not settled by the roll of dice. Fans hate to see a soccer championship settled by penalty kicks because too much luck is involved. Nagel sets out from the recognizable experience of being lucky only to upend the foundations of morality, making any reasonable account of responsibility impossible. What begins as the exceptional case—being unlucky—ends up being the rule. Once it is taken to be universal, moral luck disappears. Being unlucky no longer indicates a recognizable experience. Splitting experience into purely objective and subjective dimensions is the faulty phenomenology that drives analysis into insoluble problems. When turned into a purist dilemma, moral luck loses its connection to shared experience; the real challenges of life disappear into a contrived logjam. Our task is to grasp how luck happens without having our judgments buckle under to skepticism.

How Kant Excludes Moral Luck The two views that, for Nagel, collide in experience are separated in Kant’s transcendental structure, where natural events and human choices are separated like tenants living on different floors. For Kant, any collision between causality and freedom is avoided by shifting from the empirical to the transcendental plane. This shift opens a realm of freedom that is separable from the conditions that govern knowledge; it addresses the antinomy that leaves Nagel helpless. In Kant’s transcendental philosophy, the possibility of knowledge of nature is seated in the subject’s forms of intuition and understanding. Knowledge is relative to the subject’s mode of experiencing objects; it

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signifies knowledge of phenomenon, i.e., what is true “for us.” There is no science or knowledge of freedom. Freedom does not appear as an object or dimension of experience. Any effort to prove the reality of freedom results in antinomies or contradictions. The idea of freedom goes beyond all experience, beyond the limits of knowledge. Humans can neither prove nor disprove the reality of freedom. We do not observe freedom, but without the idea of freedom we cannot make sense of our lives. We humans find ourselves responsible for choices and intentions; duty calls us. To act from duty, we must presuppose that we are free. Here the versatility of Kant’s transcendental reasoning emerges: the limits of knowledge do not exhaust reality. What exists for us as phenomenal truth posits a limit that opens onto a realm beyond knowledge. Because knowledge is limited to what we can sense, we can make assumptions that go beyond these limits without fear of being contradicted by experience. What does not appear as sensed or understood—the thing-in-itself—cannot be known. We cannot know whether we are free. Though unknowable, freedom is a coherent idea. Coherent ideas can posit what lies beyond the limits of knowledge. These ideas, which Kant calls regulative, serve practical purposes. The idea of freedom, which is not verifiable by experience, must be adopted by practical reason. Only belief in freedom allows us to make sense of our actions. Kant approaches issues through demarcation or splitting. Within his transcendental philosophy, the conflict between freedom and determinism is quelled: borders are established and both claims are recognized in their proper realms. What appears in space and time—as objects of knowledge—belongs to the causal nexus of determinism. What does not appear in space and time—freedom—belongs to the realm of things-inthemselves. To prolong the controversy—are we free or determined?— reveals a stubborn refusal to recognize that knowledge has limits and these limits open possibilities. From Kant’s standpoint, Nagel is a dogmatic, not a critical, thinker for insisting that freedom and determinism both appear in experience. That dogmatism hands him over to an irresolvable paradox. Kant’s resolution to the antinomy of freedom and necessity removes the possibility of moral luck. As creatures in space and time, we are governed by natural processes. As moral agents, we are not responsible for occurrences beyond our control. The moral judgment determined by my rational will outside space and time is alone what matters. Actions and their consequences are external to the will and lie outside the realm of freedom. So, the unexpected outcomes of actions do not faze our worth

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as agents. While unexpected or “lucky” events occur, moral luck does not register within Kant’s system.

The Dualism That Engenders Moral Luck Nagel’s contrast between subjective and objective views does not correspond to Kant’s dualism of phenomenal experience with the thing-initself. Nagel does not address knowledge and experience through Kant’s transcendental lens. So, the conflict between freedom and necessity is not silenced by separating appearances from things-in-themselves, phenomena from noumena. The self, with its reasons and goals, belongs to the same world as the objects of knowledge. Human experience presents the contest between freedom and necessity as ongoing and inescapable. To refuse Kant’s demarcation strategy means that the showdown is unavoidable between the all-encompassing demands of objectivity and the claims of the self to act freely. There is no noumenal realm beyond experience to be freedom’s safe harbor. Any harmonizing of the two demands must take its lead from what can be experienced. The showdown is existential: humans are torn by the opposition between natural necessity and inescapable responsibility. The view from within the subject is just as compelling as the view from nowhere; both are original and they collide. On this battleground, the conflict does not sort peacefully into vectors of reason. Actions are not phenomenal doppelgangers of noumenal judgments. Actions answer to both free will and nature’s determinism. In Nagel’s account of experience, the antinomy is not avoided; it fractures the complacency of thoughtful people. Action unfolds as a paradox that must be lived. The theme of arbitrariness at the heart of judgment anchors Nagel’s analysis of moral luck. The thesis is straightforward. It is reasonable to accept that responsibility presumes control, so we should not be judged for unintended or unforeseeable occurrences. A closer look reveals that our actions are more akin to the involuntary than our moral judgments acknowledge. Nagel cites four types of unchosen factors: (1) the kinds of persons we are, (2) the kinds of situations we face, (3) the prior circumstances that determine events, and (4) whether our actions succeed.7 These factors are fundamental constituents of human existence. Our disposition, circumstances, and history largely constitute our identity. If these factors are stripped away, we are dispossessed of our deeds, leaving Nagel to conclude that “ultimately, nothing or almost nothing about what

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a person does seems to be under his control.”8 With our responsibility hinging on external forces, morality is left an inherently unfair enterprise. The topic of moral luck discloses the dividedness inherent in human life. Luck reveals the clash between subjective and objective stances. What looks like luck to the individual who is concerned about her responsibility signifies just one more instance of necessity to the impersonal or objective view. In Nagel’s hands, the inquiry into moral luck has transformed into a thorough-going dilemma that calls into question choice, the reality of the self, and responsibility. When objective factors determine all, there is no longer a way to identify cases of moral luck. When agency vanishes, moral luck also disappears. Moral luck is not a spoiler; there is nothing left to spoil. Yet, we continue to judge with confidence, especially those actions which produce significant effects. Moreover, we could not live in a world where persons were not held responsible for their actions.9 Nagel here delivers another in his series of paradoxes that disclose the underlying dualism of the subjective and objective. One paradox concerns the conflict between the objective and subjective views of action. Another paradox arises within the subjective between the self and the public. From my point of view, if consequences exceed my intention, attribution of responsibility becomes a matter of luck. The self is identical to the plan, not the outcome of the plan. From the public’s point of view, the self is culpable for the outcome. Nagel concludes that claims concerning responsibility splinter, since experience itself is constituted by inner and outer vantage points. When examined by the public, the deed is attributed to the agent. As seen by the person, the deed may reveal little of the self. This disagreement from the side of the subject leaves judgment susceptible to luck. Stepping back from the public’s view to the view from nowhere, the underlying dualism remains, but the paradox shifts. For the public, individual responsibility is real even when acts do not express intentions. But moral life disappears in the view from nowhere. As actions are interpreted by the purely objective mindset, luck disappears. In the case of moral luck, the self feels innocent, but the public ties me to the deed. In the view from nowhere, all deeds are taken as natural events; the self and the public disappear. With moral luck, our responsibility is excessive; with the view from nowhere, luck and morality vanish. Moral luck and the view from nowhere vary a common theme: the inability to acknowledge the presence of freedom in the process of

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judging. A free act should not be determined by antecedent conditions and should be explained only in terms of justifying reasons and purposes, though not necessarily good ones. Any reference to what lies outside my choice, such as character, pressures, desires, situation, history, or emotions, nullifies freedom. Purist judgments attribute either too much or too little to the self. We are not gods: to determine the exact measure of responsibility lies beyond human discernment; so, most judgment perforce is unfair, which suggests a new field of life’s absurdity.

Cases of Moral Luck: Gauguin and Lt. Calley To illustrate the antinomies of judgment, Nagel cites case studies. Nagel examines the massacre by U.S. soldiers at My Lai during the Vietnam War to exemplify the view from nowhere. As an example of moral luck, Bernard Williams and Nagel appeal to the painter Paul Gauguin, who deserted his family in France to pursue his artistic work in Tahiti.10 In Williams’ analysis, the justification of Gauguin’s action is retrospective since he happened to succeed as a painter—which is a matter of luck. A mediocre artist would not be excused for abandoning his children. Williams stresses the loss of control arising from temporal factors: the lasting judgments of history are retrospective, while Gauguin’s intentions precede events. Nagel offers two views of Gauguin. On one hand, he denies that Gauguin’s feelings about his artistic calling are relevant to the morality of his action.11 How someone feels about his actions does not determine their moral standing. Great artists can be miserable parents. But Nagel flips over to argue just the opposite: what is unintended or a matter of luck has consequences for morality. Moral judgments cannot adhere to the inner view of the person’s intentions. Nagel highlights the spatial barriers that divide inner and outer life: intentions are falsified as soon as the person acts on them. Deeds can never convey the purity of one’s plans. Time and space per se are the primary sources of falsification, followed by the social–historical nexus in which actions occur and are judged. It is our existence in the world and with others that robs us of the ability to embody our intention in acting. There is no fair measure of our responsibility. Williams stops short of Nagel’s thoroughgoing skepticism and concludes that Gauguin is forgiven because, luckily, people value qualities other than the moral. Being a great artist matters more to the public than being a bad parent. Nagel agrees that the esteem felt for Gauguin is

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not moral. But his conclusion is grimmer. It is not the plurality of values (artistic and moral) or the special treatment of celebrities that bothers Nagel but the paradox inherent in all moral judgment. Whether actions succeed or not lies outside our control to varying degrees. But we are judged for our actions; moreover, we acknowledge the lasting force of judgments. Of course, multiple standards exist. Celebrities and heroes are judged differently than ordinary folks. Artists who desert their families for lackluster careers are considered fit targets for righteous indignation. The results often justify the choices, but to varying degrees the outcomes lie outside our control. When seen from the view from nowhere, Lieutenant William Calley has no responsibility for the death of Vietnamese civilians. My Lai simply emerges from the elements of a losing military operation where frustrated soldiers see all enemy civilians as threats. This objectivism is not a version of the Nuremberg rulings after World War II, which linked responsibility to authority such that low-ranking soldiers are less culpable for atrocities than their commanders. The view from nowhere does not mitigate responsibility; it erases it. From this standpoint, neither atrocity nor responsibility exists under any conditions. Human behavior, like natural events, unfolds with necessity. This necessity does not allow for possibility, such as the possibility that Calley could have acted differently. If moral judgments lack reference to the world, there is no moral reality. Massacres do not exist in nature. The dead civilians raise no different questions than landslides or sunspots.12 The view from nowhere when applied to war is called “realism.”13 A realist like Thucydides in his history of the Peloponnesian War dismisses moral judgments as out of place. Presumably, when people fight for their lives, moral rules vanish. Whatever secures victory is allowed. “In war the law is silent” captures the absence of morality in war. Skepticism about rules pertaining to war can serve as a stepping stone to complete moral skepticism. If humans instinctively seek advantage during war, then conduct outside war likewise follows with necessity. But it is nigh impossible to subtract human responsibility from a massacre and regard the dead Vietnamese as we regard trees downed in a storm.14 As Michael Walzer points out in his rebuttal to Thucydides, military deliberation and choices clearly exist during war, so moral deliberation is possible.15 Yet the bizarre, opposite conclusion follows from the demands of objectivity, argues Nagel.

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The opposing perspective to the view from nowhere—the view from within—is not silent. It insists upon possibilities invisible to the detached observer: Calley made choices about how to attack the village of My Lai. He is held responsible for his deeds, writes Nagel: It is next to impossible to remain in the attitude of inability to condemn LieutenantCalley for the murders at My Lai: our feelings return before the ink of the argument is dry. That is because we don’t stay in the rarified objective atmosphere but drop back into our point of view as agents … which seems to depend upon an illusion—a forgetting of the fact that we are just parts of the world and our lives just parts of its history.16

Moral judgment, in Nagel’s view, is not confined to the standpoint of knowledge. To see action as mine, I must deflect the view that actions belong to nature, where there is no “mine.” Human life fractures into the objective and subjective without any way to reconcile them. To judge an action, one must turn away from the objective viewpoint and assert the reality of freedom and responsibility. For Nagel, the objective and subjective sides concerning morality lack common ground. There is no rational way to reconcile the split: they are in conflict and this battle turns on force. Which approach proves stronger? But the sides are not equal. In a showdown, the view from nowhere can dig out more causes than agents can offer reasons. The causal chain can regress endlessly, while reasons for acting come to an end. Thus, the view from nowhere holds more clout than the view from within. The demands of objectivity overpower the assertions of subjectivity. At some point, the acting person dissolves into the situation, where biochemistry, environment, and other causes dictate what occurs. Like reflex motions, Calley’s acts were not his. Human deeds, like natural events, just happen. The realm of nature proves more encompassing than the realm of freedom. Calley presided over a killing field because of the causes that converged at that time and place. Nonetheless, these explanations cannot squelch our conviction that deeds originate from selves. The recognition of responsibility persists despite denials that arise from the objective side. The two ways of thinking are irreducible and irreconcilable. “Stuff happens” but we still hold ourselves and others responsible. Nagel’s dilemma concerning morality invites comparison with JeanPaul Sartre. Like Sartre, Nagel depicts the inherent tension of existing as a self-conscious being thrown into the world. The longing to identify with

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the fixed order of nature is frustrated by endless self-reflection. For Sartre, our capacity for reflection marks us as outsiders to the world who are condemned to be free. But being thrown into the world does not trouble Nagel. His upbeat tone expresses the ironic detachment that all reflection supposedly brings. If we count on reason to iron out conflict, our situation will leave us troubled, but behind Nagel’s appeal to common sense is the conviction that, luckily, the tribulations of reason do not disrupt human affairs. Like Hume’s, Nagel’s skepticism does not cast doubt on our readiness to act in virtuous ways. The Sartrean gloom also lifts because Nagel denies the absoluteness of freedom. Where Sartre imputes endless responsibility for deeds, Nagel finds luck and necessity; my deed looks more like my birth than like acts of freedom. For Sartre, the dualism between freedom and nature does not interrupt the move from will into action: my deeds and their consequences belong to me. Nagel’s view from nowhere, by contrast, kicks in, dispelling the guilt for our choices and actions by admitting that judgment concerns necessities that lie outside our control.17 Nagel’s analysis of Gauguin and Calley is troubling. Can we trust moral judgments? When we press hard on the conditions of human action, do we expel freedom? The opposition of the objective and subjective that shapes Nagel’s philosophy is more disturbing when doubts concern morality than when they concern science. Responsibility, punishment, happiness, and life itself are in the balance when moral judgments come into question.

Kant’s Skeptical Legacy Despite his resolve to break with Kant’s moral project, Nagel’s skepticism is inseparable from Kant’s. Nagel takes the first step with Kant: common sense assumes that we should be judged for what we can control. Beyond this agreement, Nagel seems to turn away from Kant to track moral responsibility into the realm of experience rather than redirecting freedom to the supersensible realm. Nagel dismisses Kant’s proposal as appealing to “the unintelligible idea of the noumenal self which is outside time and causality.”18 Kant, claims Nagel, has prematurely broken with common sense; action, not willing, is the actual locus of morality. But neither Nagel nor Kant has the conceptual wherewithal to comprehend action. Nagel trades the “unintelligible” for inescapable antinomy, undoing what Kant took to be his advance beyond Hume.

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Experience puts the focus on deeds. But deeds, unlike intentions, do not translucently embody moral maxims. In determining their meaning, it matters how our actions appear to ourselves and others. Sometimes, the unexpected outcome of our deeds confronts us with a sinister face that we cannot disown. “That was not my intention. But it is my responsibility” is not an uncommon observation. Yet the principle of accountability does not change: we should be judged only for what we control. Common sense is thus torn by conflicting imperatives: we should be judged for our actions, and we should be judged fairly. With his separation between the subjective and the objective viewpoints, Nagel acknowledges both imperatives by recourse to a dualism as thoroughgoing as Kant’s—but without Kant’s shift to the transcendental to release the pressure. Nagel cannot leave Kant behind because he does not take experience seriously enough. Kant did not extend accountability to actions, since a priori principles breed antinomies when applied to appearances—the lesson of his dialectic of pure reason. Kant consistently adheres to a dualistic logic. Nagel encourages our natural interest in experience without developing concepts that are adequate to it. Paradoxes arise when we apply purist standards to actions. Actions do not split into the inner or outer aspects; they resist being interpreted as purely free or strictly determined. Nagel approaches actions with purist concepts that cannot make sense of them. Lacking concepts that enable us to think about actions, Nagel retreats to Kant’s sharply drawn alternatives only he situates the dualism within the phenomenal realm: “A free action should not be determined by antecedent conditions, and should be fully explained only intentionally, in terms of justifying reasons and purposes.”19 In Nagel’s hands, control is conceived as complete control—a demand familiar from stoicism. Complete control is a purist concept that presupposes the separation of subject from the world of action. Ordinarily, we face no difficulty in determining whether actions are up to us or not. Once the purist standard of complete control is imposed on action, however, dilemmas are inevitable. The false move of positing a purist split between subject and world makes action unintelligible. Stoicism, Kant, and Nagel offer three ways to react to the conceptual failure to grasp action. Stoics take what for Kant is a dogmatic stance of positing two realms: freedom and the deterministic order of nature. Nagel’s approach is also dogmatic from Kant’s point of view. In rejecting the stoic two-world response, Nagel is forced to embrace the antinomy of freedom and determinism that

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Kant sought to avoid with the transcendental turn. Kant avoids the antinomy by rejecting the absoluteness of the phenomenal world, while not dogmatically asserting the realm of mind’s freedom as stoicism does. It is characteristic of false moves that they generate contradictory proposals to address the conundrums that result. The initial division of existence into inner freedom and outer necessity propels the discussion toward further dualism. Nagel confirms Kant’s claims that purist concepts generate dilemmas when applied to experience. Taking subjectivity and objectivity as mutually exclusive strips away phenomenological friction; these unworldly concepts are no help in understanding experience and action. Nagel’s examples are thus misleading. The driver following correct procedures curses the bad luck that leads to manslaughter charges. However, it is the pedestrian’s existence—not his death that threatens this ideal of complete control. To freedom and responsibility in this purist sense, the world itself poses the obstacle. Responsibility regards external reality as interference, as if intentions could function without a body or history, without dependency or engagement. Without the world, a person has no way to act. With Nagel, the moral luck of Gauguin and Calley is the wedge that ultimately drives our actions. Nagel initially rejects Kant’s supersensible realm of pure reason as too “metaphysical.” He professes to stick to experience. Despite this resolve, Nagel leaves experience behind. His purist concepts divide experience, leaving persons as vanishing points flickering outside objectivity. Nagel spurns the supersensible realm but holds on to Kant’s purist concepts, resulting in the antinomies that Kant wants to avoid. Nagel embraces the antinomy: my actions are events within the order of nature, yet I remain responsible for them and hold others responsible for their deeds.20 Both views are true and inescapable. Nagel claims to be an expositor of puzzles inherent in ordinary life, such as moral luck. He claims that the dualism that provokes these puzzles safeguards the personal dimension that objectivity threatens to swallow. These claims are at odds with each other. It is Nagel’s view of reason, not the inherent duality of experience, that directs the argument. He’s loaded the dice. Nagel’s assumptions drive moral judgment into paradox. The subjectivity that is rescued from the voracious view from nowhere shrinks to a will-o-the-wisp. The more grandiose are the objective claims, the more the self must retreat. No room remains to move. Nagel’s faulty phenomenology keeps him from establishing the subject’s existence and

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power. Split off from the world, the self becomes a fifth wheel. What is personal and what is objective become empty and thus oddly similar. The God’s eye view of nature is as elusive as the freedom that slips past nature. What factoring philosophers like Nagel do not recognize is that neither the objective nor the personal can take shape apart from the other. The thinking subject is a condition for achieving an objective view. Countering the suspicion of inwardness in modern thought, Marilynne Robinson observes that “the difficulty with which objectivity can be achieved, to the extent that it ever is achieved, only demonstrates the pervasive importance of subjectivity.”21 When the view from nowhere treats human action like a natural event, who is viewing these events? Without selves, there is no one to do the required thinking, so the view from nowhere is plain nowhere. Nagel pursues a circular strategy. Under the guise of common sense, he translates aspects of experience, such as responsibility, into purist concepts that give rise to paradoxes. He subsequently rescues us from these paradoxes by dividing experience into two inescapable points of view, the subjective and objective, where freedom and necessity reside. But this division is implicit in the initial definition of responsibility that requires total control. Total control as the standard posits a world over which we have no control. The familiar world of partial control is a deception. Partial control is no control at all. Nagel adopts this lesson of stoicism. Seen by Nagel’s external observer (presumably a self), the person’s deeds are events like any other in the big picture of nature; the acting self may protest either as the source of the act or as the unlucky victim of circumstances. The effects of one’s deeds belong to objectivity; the intentions remain personal and free; strangely, the action itself belongs to no one. Action disappears from this account of experience; the underlying false phenomenology allows no conceptual room for it. But look around the world. Actions have not disappeared. We constantly distinguish human actions from natural events. Tort law would be impossible if we did not draw these distinctions. Total control is a bad idea. For one reason, it rejects formal causality; total control of a thing rules out its having any form since that would compromise my total control.22 The world confounds total control. To recognize this is to concede that the oppositions implicit in purist concepts fail. They cannot be employed. If being responsible requires total control, we dare not venture beyond the self and are not safe

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there either. Actions take place in the world. Apart from this worldly involvement, choosing cannot occur. Moral luck is real: it is not a chute descending into determinism and the inscrutability of human responsibility. To understand moral luck requires good concepts. And good concepts call for adequate phenomenological grounds. Without such grounds, we may conclude, like Nagel, that all actions are determined by objective factors so that moral luck stops making sense. The concepts central to moral luck are familiar ones: action, responsibility, and judgment. Reaching adequate phenomenological grounds means that each concept shows in its own way the inseparability of the subjective from the world. Actions are not assembled from purely subjective and objective elements; they are not intersections of the inner with the outer realm. The involvement of subjectivity in its world is the starting point for analysis: the subjective and objective are inseparable all the way down. Subjectivity does not start outside the world and then elbow its way in.23 If your concepts cannot make sense of that, it is downhill from there. To understand moral luck, one’s concepts must be in line with actual existence; they must be phenomenologically perceptive.

A Skeptical View of Judgment and “Objective Engagement” Initially, Nagel acknowledges that in making a choice persons depend on the world. A subject who seeks to understand the world is “objectively engaged.” Through objective engagement, we narrow the opposition of subject and object by anticipating the consequences of our deeds. To a degree, luck varies with awareness. Better understanding means that the world informs my choice. A nasty outcome that is anticipated poses less of a threat to my freedom. The more we anticipate, the less vulnerable we are to luck. Worldly persons are less surprised than those who are sheltered and naïve. Objective engagement lessens the chance of moral luck but leaves the dualism of the purely subjective and objective intact. Luck drops out when we correctly surmise the course of events or our choice is so personal that the external standpoint leaves it undisturbed.24 For example, my color preferences are secure since it is unlikely that any reflection would change my inclination toward yellow or persuade me that this preference was not freely made or was a matter of luck. But significant

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choices are different. Nagel worries that important decisions are paralyzed by the effort to account for future developments: In its earlier stages the process [of objective engagement] does genuinely seem to increase freedom, by making self-knowledge and objectivity part of the basis of action. But the danger is obvious. The more completely the self is swallowed up in the circumstances of action, the less I have to act with. I cannot get completely outside myself. The process that starts as a means to the enlargement of freedom seems to lead to its destruction. When I contemplate the world as a whole, I see my actions, even at their empirically most “free,” as part of the course of nature. At the end of the path that seems to lead to freedom and knowledge lie skepticism and helplessness.25

Faulty phenomenology leads to doubletalk and stalemates. On one hand, an objectively engaged self is more in touch with the world. As understanding expands, we are less likely to face unexpected outcomes. But deeper understanding turns the tables. As reflection grows, the mineness of my action slips away as it is absorbed into nature’s course. Once the backward step is taken, the slide into self-obliteration is seemingly unstoppable. Reflection, as construed by Nagel, sets in motion a process that eventually extinguishes human agency. Thinking is taken as endless; there is no conclusion inherent in reflection. To remain an agent, we must resolve to stop thinking and declare “enough.” But the notion that reflection extinguishes the self has forgotten that only a self can reflect. Trepidation about the view from nowhere is misplaced. The self cannot be erased. Only a self can assume an objective viewpoint and seek knowledge. Nagel loses sight of the constitutive role that human subjects play in the view from nowhere. Nagel’s objective engagement makes a promise on which it cannot deliver. It presupposes that the objective and subjective are inversely related. Increasing knowledge is supposed to reduce our vulnerability to moral luck, but it ultimately dries up our freedom and makes the very idea of moral luck moot. Whether rooted in the subjective or the objective, desire, for Nagel, seeks the unconditional. The determination to act objectively ignites a desire for knowledge that does not cease. Nothing short of omniscience satisfies it, so pursuing an informed decision becomes an endlessly postponed action. Seeking an accurate view of my situation, I step back and regard it from outside. In Nagel’s hands,

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the desire to be objective cancels the ability to act. The effort to enhance freedom through deeper understanding ends up strangling it. Objective engagement proves to be a self-defeating strategy—as Nagel recognizes. Nagel’s opening moves govern his analysis. By maintaining the dualism of self and world, he loses connection with experience and insures a skeptical outcome. Objective engagement seeks to bridge our inner and outer lives. It holds the promise of a phenomenological resolution to the impasse of judgment. It calls forth possibilities that challenge dualism and open a way to understand the proper meaning of moral luck. Even people objectively engaged and worldly run into luck. But Nagel will not reconsider the dualism. The promise of objective engagement withers on the vine. He holds fast to his faulty phenomenological opposition rather than clarify the experience of being responsible. To maintain the opposition, freedom cannot show its face in the world. Nagel cannot make sense of action.

An Alternative Phenomenology: Recovering Judgment and Action Within a dualistic phenomenology, the conceptual space in which to account for judgment and action is missing. The mindset that separates what is purely subjective from the purely objective pushes action off the stage. Actions are neither inner nor outer: they involve subjectivity in the world. If a judgment does not concern action, what is its focus? For moral judgment, Kant looks to the rational will for the maxim of the action. Nagel looks to the consciousness of the person who acts. Neither looks to what is done. In judging, says Nagel, we endeavor to retrieve an inward state. But a state of mind conceived as private is elusive. How do we gain access to a fleeting internal state? If judgment requires access to a unique subjective state—were it to exist—only God can judge fairly. An observer never fully recovers the possibilities that someone faced. This holds even when evaluating my own actions. The causes that explain my action, says Nagel, outweigh any reasons for acting. But the antinomy holds. Subjectivity is inescapable. We still judge because need to acknowledge responsibility. Kant’s moral test—the categorical imperative—measures the maxim by which we act. A person is responsible for willing what is moral. Nagel rejects this a priori measure from pure reason but does not identify another measure for judging. If we could recover the fleeting

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consciousness of the one acting, how would we determine the person’s responsibility? The dualism of subjective and objective throws up one paradox after another. But judging does not require the impossible; we need not recover a moment of prior consciousness to determine responsibility. Consciousness is embodied in action, and actions are in view. Humans inhabit a world of shared expectation and meaning. We do not invent the meaning of our action or intentions. To find out what is in my consciousness, look at what I do. To understand my action, look at its reception in the world. As elsewhere in life, actions are subject to being misunderstood. Error, not subjectivity, is our challenge. Judging action is a fundamental dimension of human existence. It involves consideration of situation, character, competence, information, expectation, intention, and outcome. Action is complex and inclusive; it cannot be factored into separable elements. Whether seen by an observer or perceived by the one acting, these aspects are commingled. Together, they matter for action and judgment. We can focus on an intention, but intention is judged in a public way, and it is not the sole basis for judgment. We do not burrow into someone’s consciousness to understand intentions or deeds. The situation and how we act for the most part reveals meaning. We inherit expectations and meaning much as we inherit language; a speaker does not decide what words mean. Since parents in most cultures are responsible for their children, we do not wonder whether Gauguin had obligations to his children. Since soldiers should not fire on unarmed civilians, we assume that Calley knows the rules of war. But shared meanings do not guarantee shared judgments. When multiple factors matter, we may weigh them differently. Gauguin may be granted license for domestic failings that is not granted our errant neighbors. The situation matters. In judging, we sometimes disagree, and disagreements may be difficult to resolve. Being complex, actions can be misjudged or judged differently as time passes. When something unexpected surfaces, we make mistakes. We may disagree on what matters most in a complex situation. But disagreements rest on some measure of common understanding. What figures into responsibility is not hidden. When we find ourselves in a new culture or subculture, we may struggle like migrants to cope with the unfamiliar code. But the scramble to find footing in a strange setting is the exception. Mainly, we inhabit situations informed by familiar meanings and rules. We are already aware of what is customary, what is possible, and what should or should not be done. Thus, we turn the doorknob to enter a room,

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but sometimes we hang signs from it so as not to be disturbed. This shared know-how is acquired by growing up in a culture; it is not explicitly taught. A situation is recognized as new or confounding against this familiar background. The understanding already present opens possible responses to what is unknown; like meanings, possible responses to a novel occurrence are not arbitrary. Being lucky is a consideration in how we judge actions. As Nagel indicates, negligent driving that results in loss of life is judged more harshly than negligent driving that produces no harm to others. But the drivers have not committed the same action. The outcome belongs to the action. The individual’s awareness is not the decisive factor in judging action. If persons should be aware of rules or customary responses in a situation, my obtuseness is no excuse. Responsibility is measured by norms implicit in situations and actions. Norms usually involve a range of responses. They are fluid and contextual, adjusting for differences of age, health, stress, maturity, and complexity. A five-year-old is judged according to standards that differ from a ten-year-old. We learn expectations like other meanings without difficulty; at no point are we obliged to apprehend what is inaccessible to shared understanding. If a person experienced the unique perspective that Nagel calls the view from within, it could not be put into words. As soon as it is expressed, connections and contrasts are made with other familiar outlooks. Being understandable does not entail agreement. On the contrary, disagreements presuppose some measure of common ground. Our decisions arise from shared understandings; the personal exists amid determinants that do not line up on either side of the purist subjective-objective divide.

The Importance of Objective Determinants for Judging Well If responsibility were situated outside the causal nexus, it would occupy a precarious position. Judgments draw on objective determinants, not existential leaps beyond what is customary. Nagel cites four sources of luck: a person’s character, present circumstances, past events, and the actions of others. These features of our lives are not unpredictable sources of luck. They are conditions that make human existence possible and predictable. Actions reflect habits and expectations, are informed by past practices and current demands, and respond to as well as instigate others’ behavior. We exist with others in shared understanding out of which

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judgments are formed. What Nagel cites as obstacles to freedom and responsibility are conditions of human existence. An existence lacking these factors—patterns of behavior, physical and mental capacities, history, and social interaction—would leave behind pure spirits with neither the means nor the occasion to act. Nagel’s skeptical conclusions follow from these unworldly standards of reason and responsibility not from puzzles inherent in ordinary life and consciousness. A better phenomenology replaces the objective and subjective extremes with a dynamic process of worldly involvement. As humans, we know nothing of ourselves that is not thoroughly charged with natural and social objectivity. Awareness of my intentions arises like any knowledge, through a careful inspection of the situation. Meaning is public. We recognize what our actions mean through their effects and others’ responses to them. Our intentions may be out of touch with the meaning of our actions. I did not intend for my comments to offend you, but they were offensive all the same. Were you excessively sensitive? There is another judgment to make. We continually evaluate possibilities in light of the actual outcomes of our deeds—foreseen, unforeseen, fair, and unfair—in a cycle of selfformation based upon objective considerations. We may think we were driving carefully, but the accident shows that we had not taken adequate precautions in that situation, so we alter our judgments and driving habits. Or the accident reminds us that even adequate precautions do not guarantee success: the unexpected happens. Here is the space of moral luck. Such reflections mitigate our feeling of guilt since we believe that most responsible persons could not have avoided this situation. Without worldly engagement, pure subjectivity and objectivity—the internal view and the view from nowhere—are empty. We become more objective through deeper and wider immersion in human experience, not by abandoning the species entirely. For example, we measure Calley’s behavior by comparison with other soldiers’ responses to similar situations. Responsibility grows or lessens in relation to shared judgments about the degree of control that is normally possible: civil and criminal case law is replete with reasoning about circumstances and degrees of responsibility. Guilt or innocence varies in relation to this collective reflection on experience. Being subject to judgment connects my action to this received evaluation; this comparison with the experience of others is how we gauge responsibility for what is done by us and others. Refusing to recognize shared judgments and norms would make existence impossible.

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While my history and character shape my responsibility, judgment essentially concerns what ought to occur, not a meaning I confer. Recreating a uniquely personal consciousness may be available to the gods, but it is not how humans act or hold themselves responsible. Rather than deepening the opposition of subjectivity and objectivity, human development continually undermines it. Moral reflection distances me from my situation to better understand my obligations and what should be done. Persons who develop in worldly ways are not overpowered by their surroundings; they do not disappear into the universe like a comet, thus losing their capacity to choose. Being better acquainted with the ways of the world and developing habitual responses based upon practical calculations, these persons are less often surprised by the outcome of events or the judgments of others. They are less susceptible to moral luck. For example, better judgments about how to safely secure infants in motor vehicles make drivers less prone to being morally unlucky in traffic accidents. Worldliness does include a measure of powerlessness and acceptance; what should be done may lie outside my capacity. But this measure of surrender to difficult circumstances is not the immobility that Nagel depicts. As Aristotle’s notion of virtue suggests, a person’s goals emerge against objective possibilities, so that in acting we largely experience continuity between our inner and outer lives.26 I become who I am and know what I seek from what I have done and how others respond. Nagel introduces objective engagement but lacks the concepts needed to follow up on its promise to mediate the dualism that separates self from the world. Properly construed, objective engagement is as fundamental to determining responsibility as it is to choosing. Being more informed about the self’s internal and external nature, less of my freedom is swallowed by necessity. Being objectively engaged teaches us about our situation, our audience, and how talents and needs shape our intentions. Nagel calls these social, psychological, and biological traits “alien”; these unchosen traits that speak through our deeds are matters of “constitutive luck.” A better phenomenology recognizes that the facticity that first appears as a threat to freedom allows us to pursue our plans.27 A person objectively engaged seeks to understand how things stand in the world. She must have some measure of trust in the ways of the world. Freedom functions poorly when a person expects to scrutinize every aspect of objectivity before acting. This desire to endlessly appropriate objectivity results more from Nagel’s stipulated dualisms than from a cogent understanding of human activity.

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Good judgment recognizes that our nature is both personal and social. To a great degree, we rely upon common values to live together and reproduce social norms. The presumption of moral self-sufficiency fades with any reflection upon language, let alone deeds. Like artists, moral agents collaborate and create out of inherited meanings and norms. We grasp our artistic achievement much as we grasp the meaning of our actions, by acknowledging our indebtedness to others. Songwriters take direction from the work of others. Being judged for our actions reveals the existence of embodied consciousness, not a sliver of freedom that slips past the causal chain. Freedom, like creativity, is recovered from the collapse of illusions about pure invention or total control. If actions occur within a context of constraints, we need not feel crushed by the notion of the view from nowhere. Only in the weave of givenness and possibilities do choice and responsible action exist. Nagel’s paradoxes are best taken as pleas for new ways of thinking rather than as intractable stalemates. There is no quandary of judgment. Actual judgments recognize that responsibility requires being embedded in social values. Our social, psychological, and biological natures are constituted by norms and values—many of them unnoticed by us—which leave morality more of a group effort than an individual burden. Without some measure of trust in nature, history, institutions, and the traditions that govern our lives, a cloud of suspicion hangs over every deed, since we never achieve the control demanded by Nagel’s purist ideal: “for to be really free we would have to act from a standpoint completely outside ourselves, choosing everything about ourselves, including our principles of choice—creating ourselves from nothing, so to speak.”28 Embodied consciousness frees us from the chimerical attempt to make ourselves from scratch whenever we face a decision.29 Trust in the world has its limits. These connections are disrupted when institutions are sources of oppression. But Nagel treats facticity as guilty until proven innocent, which imposes an inhuman standard.30 Only by trusting most social practices can we live in the world and face its challenges. Without objective engagement—the degree varies with our circumstances—we could never find the means to contest existing practices. Only a critical embrace of facticity makes resistance possible. As Nagel describes it, if moral life is to be rational, it is impossible to act. In our view, it is wiser to consider what makes moral life possible and make sense of it. Moral life is difficult enough without having to choose between being pure spirits or being enslaved to circumstance. If time,

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space, bodies, and culture are deemed obstacles, then moral life moves into the realm of the tragic—or ironic—where reasoning goes lame. A grasp of facticity makes a retreat from moral activism—Nagel’s great fear—less likely. Morality is better served by a recognition of worldliness than by demands for pure concepts, by understanding that freedom exists as our goal, not an impossible dream. Being locked into dualism sabotages Nagel’s ambition to address practical concerns and remain faithful to experience. A more attuned phenomenology can remove the paradoxes of moral luck without erasing it or the tensions inherent in our worldly existence.31

Notes 1. This account of Kant’s reasoning follows Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 24. 2. Being caught in false philosophy is like living with Capgras Syndrome; everything in my world appears to be the same, but instead of familiar it feels simulated, as if I am living on the set of my own Truman Show. But there is no escape to a real world outside. Peter Weir, dir., The Truman Show (Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 1998). The Invasion of the Body Snatchers offers an artistic representation of Capgras Syndrome, only the familiar people have been snatched and replaced. Don Siegel, dir., Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Los Angeles, CA: Allied Artist Pictures, 1956), feature film. 3. On how skepticism makes magic appealing, see Patrick Murray and Jeanne Schuler, “Disappearing Act: The Trick Philosophy of Woody Allen,” in The Blackwell Companion to Woody Allen, ed. Peter Bailey and Sam Girgus (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2012). 4. For Stroud, this move exposes the reasoning as fraudulent. If the initial reality dissolves without a trace, the subsequent analysis vanishes with it. See Barry Stroud, The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Stroud argues, likewise, that the subjectivist account of value makes unintelligible the phenomenon it sets out to explain. See Stroud, “‘Gilding or Staining’ the World with ‘Sentiments’ and ‘Phantasms’,” Hume Studies 19, no. 2 (Nov. 1993): 253–72. 5. Michael Sandel’s term includes the subject behind the veil of ignorance in Rawls’ theory of justice. See Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 6. David Hume, “The Sceptic,” in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1985), 180. 7. Nagel, Mortal Questions , 28.

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8. Ibid., 26. 9. P. J. Strawson maintains that “our natural commitment to ordering interpersonal attitudes [which include holding ourselves and others morally responsible; P. M.; J. S.] … is part of the general framework of human life, not something that can come up for review as particular cases can come up for review within this general framework.” “Freedom and Resentment,” in P. J. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1974), 13. Nagel contests Strawson’s observation: “I believe the position is incorrect because there is no way of preventing the slide from internal to external criticism once we are capable of an external view” (The View from Nowhere, 125). 10. Bernard Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 11. Nagel, Mortal Questions , 28. 12. The view from nowhere echoes Epictetus’ description of nature as the realm of necessity outside mind, where “nothing bad happens.” Epictetus, Handbook of Epictetus , trans. Nicholas P. White (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), #27, 19. 13. For a repudiation of realism in war, see Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 3–20. 14. David Hume’s essay “The Skeptic” protests the Stoic version of this imagined way of looking at human action: “All ills arise from the order of the universe, which is absolutely perfect … Let this be allowed; and my own vices will also be part of the same order.” David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, 173. 15. See Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 9–10. 16. Nagel, View from Nowhere, 124. 17. In the main, Hume and Nagel expect humans to take virtue and vice in earnest, but each provides an escape hatch for those bent on avoiding moral responsibility. Hume worries about a slide into a “voluptuous” hedonism: “And may not such a reflection [‘on the shortness and uncertainty of life’] be employed by voluptuous reasoners in order to lead us from the paths of action and virtue into the flowery fields of indolence and pleasure” (Hume, “The Skeptic,” 176). For Nagel, the objective view is always there to enervate our resolve. 18. Nagel, View from Nowhere, 119. 19. Ibid., 115. 20. See Nagel, View from Nowhere, 120. Nagel begins his discussion of responsibility in defeat, “It seems to me that the problem of responsibility is insoluble, or at least unsolved” (ibid.).

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21. Marilynne Robinson, The Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 36. 22. One of the deep affinities between Hellenistic philosophy and much of modern philosophy is the rejection of forms and formal causality. 23. Frank B. Farrell rejects factoring philosophy: “We err if we think we can divide up the contributions of world, language, and interpreter, so as to specify what the contributions of one of those sources would be, in independence of the others.” Frank B. Farrell, Subjectivity, Realism and Postmodernism: The Recovery of the World in Recent Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 78. 24. Nagel, View from Nowhere, 131. 25. Ibid., 119. 26. Aristotle discusses the impact of fortune upon happiness throughout the Nicomachean Ethics, and his evaluation shifts with the timing and degree of fortune in our lives. Some matters of chance are key determinants of the development of virtue (childhood, education, and native disposition). Aristotle is also clear that virtue alone will not produce happiness unless it is accompanied by enough external goods to meet our needs. Finally, a person of virtue will never achieve true happiness if he encounters tragedies such as those that befell King Priam of Troy. Aristotle assumes that luck or fortune represents an external force over which we have no control. It may detract from our happiness, but our reputation is determined largely by our character and virtuous deeds. Nagel, however, extends the notion of fortune to include our actions and character. This inflated notion of fortune would strike Aristotle as highly incompatible with experience and common sense. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1985). 27. Facticity is not brute fact; I am always relating to it in an understanding way that involves possibilities. Facticity belongs to the human way of being. Nagel rejects that claim. 28. Nagel, The View from Nowhere, 118. 29. See Kierkegaard’s critique of the “hypothetical self” of active defiant despair in Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 67–69. 30. Nagel’s views of facticity as threat or as essential to morality shift. See Nagel, View from Nowhere, 131–34. 31. Nagel’s discussion of moral luck was the provocation for the present book and was addressed in Jeanne Schuler’s review essay of The View from Nowhere, by Thomas Nagel, in International Philosophical Quarterly 28, no. 2 (June 1988): 207–14.

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References Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1985. Epictetus. Handbook of Epictetus. Translated by Nicholas P. White. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983. Farrell, Frank B. Subjectivity, Realism and Postmodernism: The Recovery of the World in Recent Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Hume, David. Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary. Edited by Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Sickness unto Death. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Murray, Patrick, and Jeanne Schuler. “Disappearing Act: The Trick Philosophy of Woody Allen.” In The Blackwell Companion to Woody Allen, edited by Peter Bailey and Sam Girgus. Oxford, England: Blackwell, 2012. Nagel, Thomas. Mortal Questions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. ———. The View from Nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Robinson, Marilynne. The Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Sandel, Michael. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Schuler, Jeanne. “Feature Book Review,” of The View from Nowhere, by Thomas Nagel. International Philosophical Quarterly 28, no. 2 (June 1988): 207–14. Siegel, Don, dir. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Los Angeles, CA: Allied Artist Pictures, 1956, feature film. Strawson, P. J. “Freedom and Resentment.” In Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays. London: Methuen, 1974. Stroud, Barry. The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. ———. “‘Gilding and Staining’ the World with ‘Sentiments’ and ‘Phantasms.’” Hume Studies 19, no. 2 (Nov. 1993): 253–72. Walzer, Michael. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. 2nd ed. New York: Basic Books, 1977. Weir, Peter, dir. The Truman Show Los Angeles, CA: Paramount Pictures, 1998, feature film. Williams, Bernard. Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

CHAPTER 7

The Pure Self in Political Life: Reconsidering the Primacy of the Right Over the Good

At its best, philosophy addresses significant issues that arise from human existence. Good philosophy takes up problems that are recognizable and real. Recent political philosophy advances its theories of justice with features of modern society in view. One way to assess liberalism, or any other approach to justice, is by the depth and perceptiveness with which it comprehends these realities. While philosophy alone will not solve the problems of our day, the concepts of philosophy can advance or hinder the understanding of our world. Good concepts, in their own way, are needed to establish more just societies.

The Task of Political Philosophy Political philosophy takes direction from the realities and struggles of the modern world. It no longer bothers to examine the defense of slavery. That question is settled. Debates have largely ended about whether officially to rank persons according to birth, race, sex-gender, wealth, or talents, as with the myth of metals that determined political leadership in Plato’s Republic. Social movements that challenge disparate treatment based on race, gender, and sexuality continue the push toward equality. Modern ideals take the dignity of persons as absolute, not as indexed

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to status or merit or income. Slavery epitomizes evil, and overt segregation of persons in terms of race or sex is repudiated. Wealthy people are not allowed to vote more than once; they find other means to expand their influence. Proclaiming human equality is one thing; determining the consequences that follow from this doctrine is another matter. Situating human freedom, equality, welfare, and rights in the context of a just society are among political philosophy’s central tasks. If all persons are equal and possess the same rights and liberties, then a just society should, over time, take more democratic forms. The superiority of democratic values is little disputed. But what form should be taken by a democratic state? One approach to this problem, a type of liberalism identified with John Rawls, upholds the primacy of justice or the right over the good. Justice establishes the common conditions under which persons can live together, while the good pertains to the aims of their individual, often conflicting, choices. Thinking about justice involves not only equality, those endowments possessed by all persons, but difference—how each person’s desires uniquely configure happiness. Happiness takes many forms. As people gain more freedom, they strike out in new directions. A son need not follow in his father’s footsteps. A daughter can aspire to non-traditional pursuits. John Rawls calls plurality the fundamental fact of modern society. People cannot be free unless they can pursue their dreams in their own ways. But this liberty has limits. Persons inhabit many kinds of communities, from family to the state. Our individual and distinctive paths unfold within the context of associations that involve some measure of cooperation. In Rawls’ defense of a liberal society, liberty allows individuals to pursue happiness by following their conceptions of the good; the realm of cooperation involves justice or the right. Distributive justice is an aspect of cooperation in modern society that draws together the right and the good. Resources or opportunities such as education and health care are extended to citizens. The expectation grows that a well-ordered society secures elements of a good life for its people. Concerning the distribution of resources, debates abound. Is the minimum wage adequate? Should universal pre-school be required in public schools? Should the government take responsibility for affordable housing? Should interest on student loans be capped? Distributive justice introduces complexity into the understanding of a just society. Treating individuals the same is no formula for justice. In many situations, differences matter. To erect public buildings that are accessible to all, we must

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modify traditional designs. To determine the requirements of distributive justice involves both aspects of a just society: making goods available within the universality of the right. Distributive justice requires good judgments. Considerations of sameness and difference are brought together into judgments in which persons are deemed similar in some respects and different in others. But judgments and concepts are linked. Good judgments are inseparable from good concepts.1 If basic concepts are fixed in forced oppositions, arriving at reasonable judgments—the mainstay of public life—faces obstacles. Not surprisingly, the familiar dualities of philosophy—universal vs. particular or form vs. content—shape thinking about social and political life. One polarity pits liberty against the common good: if liberty signifies that all goods are chosen by individuals and no common goods are recognized, then distributive justice is stymied. If liberty is taken to exclude the very notion of common goods, philosophical discourse is shut out of actual political life, where common goods are up for debate. Conceptual standoffs such as these yield arbitrary judgments, and skepticism about justice increases. In the shadow of skepticism, the public purpose of philosophy constricts and the task of building a just society grows more difficult. Distinctions common in liberal political philosophies include the divisions between private and public, individual and society, morality and law, liberty and authority, and the right and the good. These divisions undergird a free society in which religious persecution and other forms of intolerance diminish. With these oppositions, political philosophers seek to fix the extent of individual liberty and the limits of society’s authority. The insistence on individual liberty marks society as modern; it was peripheral to ancient accounts of justice. Constitutional government, democracy, capitalism, and human rights are rightly regarded as among history’s great achievements. The question is whether the demarcations of liberal theory adequately grasp them. The modern effort to distinguish the public from personal life advances the cause of justice. Institutions such as the household, workplace, and government differ in fundamental ways. But distinctions need not foster dualities. Concepts that carve experience against the grain impede our grasp of justice. Recognizing real differences between public and private institutions need not factor phenomena, such as when the right is divided from the good. Understanding the goods of human life characterizes justice in both public and private life. Dividing the right from the good creates an unjustified stumbling block.

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Rawls’ Project: The Right, or Justice, Takes Priority Over the Good Theories addressing these issues are complex and not easily summarized. In this chapter we focus on one principle central to current debates: the claim that the right, or justice, takes priority over the good, including the good of happiness. The right and good, according to John Rawls, are separate and irreducible values that correspond to the two moral powers of persons. The just framework of society must precede the actual choices of individuals: justice comes first. To determine a framework, constitution, or ground rules is a rational undertaking through which persons with different conceptions of the good can come to agreement. Justice and the good function in fundamentally opposed ways. To lose this distinction forces bad options: either return to an unfree society, like Plato’s republic, where one form of the good dominates, or face endless metaphysical squabbles over the good. The defense of a liberal state strives to avoid these quagmires. The separation of the right from the good resembles the separation of public from personal life and sets forth the defining virtues of each. In public life, justice shapes policies and distributes resources and opportunities. In the private sphere, persons seek the good in countless ways. He lives in a cabin, where he writes, while she teaches at a school walking distance from her apartment. What is right is prior to all goods or ends. This priority of the right over the good protects individual freedom against coercion: no one should be forced to accept the majority’s conception of the good. Justice sets down rules that apply to the whole community. Like an a priori condition, a view of justice is presupposed by actions both public and private. My personal habits may be wasteful, but I have the right to live this way if others are not harmed. If justice is not prior to conceptions of the good, then coercion results as one group imposes its view of the good on others. To determine the meaning of other virtues or goods presupposes this original virtue. With justice independent of any account of the good, the government remains neutral regarding citizens’ choices or ends, so long as they respect the freedom of others. This ranking of the right and good leads Rawls to reject utility theory as the foundation of justice. People may cite utility in pursuing the individual’s good, but utility does not establish the primacy of justice. This ranking is central to Rawls’ account of a just society. Establishing the right

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as prior to the good enables us to map society at the most fundamental level. This map guides how judgments balance universality and particularity—sameness and difference—in the political context by determining the extent of government’s authority and individuals’ freedom. In Political Liberalism, Rawls defends the priority of the right over the good as resonating with modern thought and practices.2 This principle, he contends, is independent of any theoretical foundations, such as Kant’s, since it describes how actual political culture informs our understanding of justice. Adherents of both free will and determinism can support liberal institutions as effective ways to organize common life. Liberty in its political forms is independent of any metaphysics of freedom, argues Rawls. The principles of justice constitute freestanding moral claims compatible with otherwise conflicting systems of thought. Philosophy is accountable to existing convictions that already distinguish justice from the good in how we experience the world. The priority of justice is one crucial strand in the customary practices of modern society. This fact is fundamental to Rawls’ case for political liberalism. This chapter argues that the great causes championed by modern liberalism are not served by a fixed dualism that distorts fundamental features of human existence. Rather than discovering the primacy of the right over the good in existing political culture, Rawls projects it on to the world. He wants to shake off the legacy of rigid metaphysics from political philosophy and start afresh, but his principle of the primacy of the right is mired in his dogmatic presumption of a pure self. Opposing the right to the good entails a metaphysical dualism of its own. Lessons from metaphysics can be instructive. Consider Descartes’ first philosophy. When mind and body are split as separate substances, persistent dilemmas concerning identity and interaction result.3 Analysis reaches an impasse when aspects of existence are treated as separable elements. What can be distinguished gets mistaken for what is separable and independent. Rather than advancing our understanding of the world, dualisms resulting from false moves provoke endless wrangling. Descartes’ stalemate is broken once consciousness is taken as intentional and situated in the world. Similarly, when justice is not indifferent to the good but encompasses the goods of public life—common goods—the liberal’s quandary eases. Rawls claims that the bifurcation of the right and the good does not foster skepticism. But false phenomenology renders basic features of experience inaccessible, and the resultant concepts do just that.

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Markets and Liberal Neutrality A connection little acknowledged in political philosophy is the consonance of liberal ideals with modern commercial forms. Marx notes that “the system of exchange values, and the money system even more so, are, in fact, a system of freedom and equality.”4 Taking markets for granted paves the way for embracing tenets of liberal thought. The freedom of buying and selling in the market epitomizes for some an association where coercion vanishes. The market seems to impose no purpose on commercial agents, leaving us to exchange at our own discretion. By remaining neutral on the topic of human well-being, the market frees individuals to chart their own paths to happiness. Following the lead of market transactions, neutrality steps forth as a condition of freedom generally. Socalled market neutrality suggests that governments likewise should remain neutral. Individual choice and institutional neutrality seem to imply one another. Despite the similarities between conceptions of the market and public space, little is said in political philosophy about economic relations and their influence on the actualization of justice. The affinities between economic and political freedom are largely passed over by liberal theorists and their critics. There are no index entries for money or capital in Rawls’ A Theory of Justice or Political Liberalism or in Michael Sandel’s critique of Rawls, Liberalism and the Limits to Justice. The hum of commerce remains background noise, influencing the formation of ideals but attracting little notice. To focus on this background reveals how conceiving of freedom as unfettered choice reinforces popular conceptions of the market. To probe the split between the right and the good we need to bring this economic background into view. What looks like institutional neutrality conceals free-market ideology. Despite avowals of neutrality, the actual market objectives of continual growth are vigorously enforced. Where the accumulation of capital is concerned, the state cannot afford to be neutral. Tying freedom to individual choices in the market disguises this reality. In both modern economic and political contexts, freedom is understood primarily as choice. Choice is the pared-down form that freedom takes when justice is posited as prior to the good.5 The right describes the situation prior to choosing; the good describes what is chosen. The foundation or presuppositions of choice separate from the ends chosen. Content drops away as the capacity to choose becomes decisive. One

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measure of this is how utility theory shifts from hedonism, which identifies the good with pleasure and the avoidance of pain, toward preference, which replaces the good with the satisfaction of one’s preferences. In making the good purely subjective, preference makes the good go away. Being free to choose dominates talk of justice in political, economic, and personal contexts. Choice conveys legitimacy: it is up to me how to vote or spend my money. Children inherit their parents’ genes and wealth but do not inherit their parents’ faith or type of employment. Religion and career must be chosen. Whether racial or gender identities are chosen becomes a matter of debate as choice enters the formation of basic markers of the self.6 Determining the conditions for genuinely free choices becomes a central task for ethics. Genuine freedom is not fashioned for a pure subject abstracted from actual life and identified with its power to choose. To reconsider the primacy of the right over the good calls for a worldly understanding of freedom.

Demarcation and Skepticism in Locke The move to separate the capacity of choosing from what is chosen appears in one of the sources of modern liberalism, John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration. Locke’s Letter was published in 1689, the year after the restoration of the monarchy and the conclusion of England’s civil war, with Locke on the victorious side. Locke’s message is plain and powerful: tolerance is a condition for domestic peace and an indispensable civic virtue in modern society. Without tolerance, a society faces hostility, polarization, and perhaps war from within. For Locke, the sources of unrest involve religion and government, as seen in years of religious wars. Locke focuses on tensions among Christian believers, Christian sects, and civil magistrates. Tolerance would not figure in a theocracy governed by the Mosaic Law handed down by God. Even Locke refuses toleration to atheists since their testimony could not be validated by oaths and to Catholics for their allegiance to the pope. Though Locke’s focus is on religious discord, his reasoning extends to other sources of conflict in society. Generalizing Locke’s position yields the notion that peaceful coexistence requires tolerance and tolerance involves drawing lines that limit individual liberty and the authority of church and government. These objectives are implicit in how Locke situates religion outside the authority of the law. But to draw these lines, Locke first describes faith and explains why tolerance follows from the

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merest understanding of Christianity. Tolerance is not predicated on skepticism for Locke, but the demarcations that he develops are one pathway to the skepticism familiar today. A strategy of demarcation distorts Locke’s account of faith and religion from the start. Locke’s defense of tolerance begins by characterizing true religion. He contrasts ecclesiastical structure, rules, and authority with an individual’s beliefs. True religion concerns the inner life of faith and conscience, the deepest level of religion. Christian churches have been organized in various ways through history; different structures or liturgies are external to the essence of Christianity and without sanction from Scripture, observes Locke. What should unite all Christians is the realization that salvation depends upon the free acceptance of the truths of Christianity. Locke dismisses as absurd the idea that faith can be imposed by force: And such is the nature of the understanding, that it cannot be compelled to the belief of any thing by outward force. Confiscation of estate, imprisonment, torments, nothing of that nature can have any such efficacy as to make men change the inward judgment that they have framed of things.7

Persons may be invited, coaxed, and persuaded, but not threatened or otherwise compelled. No one is saved by the convictions of others or by mouthing the creed of religion. Freedom is a requirement of faith, and faith constitutes true religion. Locke insists: But penalties are no ways capable to produce such belief. It is only light and evidence that can work a change in men’s opinions; and that light can in no manner proceed from corporal sufferings, or any other outward penalties.8

So, persecution or any use of violence in the name of God is pointless and unholy, since coercion undermines the end that is sought. Churches may excommunicate dissidents or identify heresies, but they may not usurp the government’s power to punish dissidents, deprive them of property, or use the law to attack other sects. Locke approaches the phenomenon of religion by separating inner faith from external institutions, with individual consent as the stamp of authentic belief. The relationship between church and civil magistrates is similarly depicted as external: government and church occupy separate

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spheres, and one must not interfere with the other. At each level, the phenomena are presented in terms of demarcations between inner life and outer institutions or beliefs and structures. The virtue of tolerance is tied to respect for these demarcations. In later liberal mappings of the political landscape, the demarcations that first appear in Locke’s description of true religion reemerge. Locke anticipates John Stuart Mill’s attacks on how society restricts individuals’ liberty for their own good.9 Mill’s rejection of paternalism is among the most memorable defenses of individual liberty. Paternalism, argues Mill, is not what it seems. Behind paternalism lies hypocrisy practiced on a large scale. It seems as if magistrates have our immortal soul in view when they punish individuals for heresy. But society is more concerned with its own sensibilities and the affront to orthodox belief. If society acts primarily to secure individual well-being, why are other misfortunes, such as alcoholism or ignorance, generally ignored? Locke does not doubt that the individual’s beliefs may be false or that their actions may be harmful to them. These errors and harms are usually irrelevant in how paternalism operates. Locke’s account of religious life runs into the pitfalls of a certain kind of analysis. With one factor separated from the rest and dubbed essential, the set-up for false moves is in place. The reasons for tolerance shift during Locke’s defense. Consent is initially identified as integral to religious life, more fundamental than Church teaching. As an individual’s consent splits off, church teaching becomes external—a matter of indifference. Locke notes that all churches claim to be orthodox, so who is to judge among them?10 Consent goes from being an essential element to the pivotal element, eventually pushing faith, conscience, and religion outside the bounds of reason. Demarcating what is properly personal—no one can be forced to believe—ushers in skepticism. In this early defense of liberal demarcations, the drift toward skepticism regarding what is choice worthy is noticeable. When the conditions of choice separate from what is chosen, form breaks away from the content.11 The distinction between an important condition for true religion—the free consent of individuals— and what is being chosen hardens into a dualism. The shift toward false philosophy is underway.

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Utility---A Pseudo-Concept The utilitarian movement led by James Mill and Jeremy Bentham insisted on a theory of the good that put every content into relation with the rest, so all are capable of being compared. Coming up with a cross-contextual theory of the good becomes a condition for reforming society. Like Plato’s insistence that the form of the Good underlies all goods, utility is posited as the universal element. To determine the best choice, utility—whether identified as pleasure or the satisfaction of preferences—is calculated. One objective in asserting the priority of the right over the good is to put utility theory on notice. Outside philosophy, in the social sciences and public policy domains, versions of utility theory are commonly employed.12 Various versions of utility operate in utilitarian ethics, game theory, preference theory, decision theories, and mainstream economics. With the widespread acceptance of utility as the measure, scrutiny of the concept recedes. In this section, we consider reasons for rejecting utility theory as the basis for justice or happiness. Rawls presses the case against utilitarianism, but he does not go far enough. It is not enough to reject utility as the foundation of justice. Splitting the right from the good leaves the notion of utility intact. Rawls rejects utility as the ground for establishing justice in society in such a way that it rebounds to serve as the basis for understanding the good. Rawls disassociates justice from utility, but he relies on it in thinking about the good. But utility theory is inadequate not only as a defense of individual liberty—Rawls’s complaint—it fails as an account of goods. The reasons behind utility’s failure to ground the meaning of justice are more damning than Rawls acknowledges. Regarding utility theory, Rawls’ tactic is containment and appeasement. For Rawls, the right and the good sort into the spheres of influence of Kant and John Stuart Mill, respectively: Kant’s doctrine of duty as a categorical imperative underlies justice as the founding social virtue, and Mill’s notion of utility accounts for the good or happiness. By not getting to the bottom of the problems with utility, Rawls never develops a proper grasp of human goods. Dividing society into public and personal realms anchors liberal thinking about justice. Mill is the great advocate for basing liberal ideals on utility. Following Locke, Mill defends liberty by dividing society into two spheres: individuals are sovereign in the private sphere; in the public

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sphere, where actions directly impact others, society or government may exert authority. Non-interference in the realm of individual liberty marks a free society. Mill claims to justify this mapping of public and private on utilitarian grounds. Justice is achieved as the greatest happiness of the public or majority, while liberty allows individuals to maximize pleasure in personal life. Concerning individual or self-regarding actions, society lacks the capacity to determine where individual happiness lies. Just as Locke recognized individual choice as a necessary condition for faith, so Mill defends liberty as a condition of personal happiness. To force someone to be happy is self-defeating. Moreover, competent adults are best situated to ascertain their own well-being. If my choices make me miserable, those failures educate me and others as to the proper use of freedom more effectively than protecting us from running amuck. Mill’s defense of individual liberty is nearly unconditional. Because liberty possesses absolute value, some consider him—despite his avowal—not to be a utilitarian. Faced with the task of defending justice, utility theory faces criticisms from Rawls’ branch of liberalism. Utilitarianism is faulted for not offering the uncompromising justification that individual rights require. Despite Mill’s wholehearted defense of liberty, calculations of utility shift, since what amounts to the greatest happiness may change over time. Inalienable rights are not secured by fluctuating calculations. An individual’s rights to life and liberty should prevail over other claims; otherwise, situations may arise where the surrender of rights might be demanded. Utility theory looks to favorable outcomes. The majority could strip the minority of basic protections if the outcomes seem to justify that move. Loss of rights defeats the cause of justice. One feature of the good for Rawls is the many forms it takes. Yet utility theory in the end denies heterogeneity. The promised opening to varieties of the good fails to materialize. Utility theory demands a common element into which all actions or entities can be converted. Calculation requires homogeneity, so that like can be added to like. Goods in the plural turn out to be good in the singular, i.e., good reduces to pleasure or the satisfaction of preferences. Desires are the sole remaining source of the good once ends are excluded. As the common currency of desire, utility washes away other understandings of the goods of human life. What Georg Simmel observes of money can be said of utility as well: This psychic mood [the blasé attitude] is the correct subjective reflection of a complete money economy to the extent that money takes the place of all

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the manifoldness of things and expresses all qualitative distinctions between them in the distinction of “how much.” To the extent that money, with its colorlessness and its indifferent quality, can become a common denominator of all values it becomes the frightful leveler—it hollows out the core of things, their peculiarities, their specific values and their uniqueness and incomparability in a way which is beyond repair.13

Like money, utility serves as a common denominator—a “frightful leveler”—because of its indifference to the features of things. The elements of one person’s experience no more evince this one same stuff than do the goods of diverse persons. To calculate utility within an individual’s life requires suppressing the qualitative differences of experience. There is no underlying stuff—utility—that all activities and things share that we can quantify. Pleasures take qualitative form and are tied to objects and activities: there are no scales to compare the pleasures of a bike ride with the pain of a toothache, nor is there any need for one. We do not need utility to determine something’s usefulness, to compare outcomes of actions, or to determine the importance of one situation in comparison to another. The demand that all situations be commensurable is arrogant and self-defeating since goods cannot be stripped of their qualities. The insistence that, to be rational, personal decisions must be calculated based on one homogeneous element is a dogma. Choosing one course of action over another requires reasoning appropriate to the situation, not a measure that compares one action to all others, regardless of context. The context relevant to the goods must be addressed. The goods to be judged are multiple and specific. There is no need to reduce these diverse objectives to one common element to proceed; neither could we reduce them if we tried. Appropriate reasons—not tabulations—make these judgments possible.14 The stock vocabulary of classical utilitarianism—calculating pleasure and pain, or utiles—gains plausibility by mimicking monetary measurements. Since money can be counted, why not goods? Bernard Williams observes: Utilitarianism is unsurprisingly the value system for a society in which economic values are supreme; and also, at the theoretical level, because quantification in money is the only obvious form of what utilitarianism insists upon, the commensurability of values.15

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If commodities can be measured, why not desires? The transactions of the marketplace reduce to calculations since all commodities have a price. Money makes plausible the notion that utility exists. Because corporations operate in the money economy, they can calculate the bottom line, but individuals tallying utilities only ape these calculations. Corn can be priced without violating its nature as corn, but happiness cannot be tallied like a heap of commodities. For Rawls, the right or justice acknowledges the pluralism that defines actual persons: no common factor such as utility sums up individual choices. Qualitative differences are an essential feature of human existence, but utility theory cannot stomach the incommensurable. Utility is often used as a synonym for usefulness. While this loose usage is widespread, there are two diametrically opposed concepts in play. Utility is a pseudo-concept—there is nothing for utility to be—while usefulness signifies a fundamental dimension of human life. Usefulness is gauged in relation to the features of a thing. Marx observes: The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value. But this usefulness does not dangle in mid-air. It is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter.16

A tool is useful if it suits the task at hand. The utility of a tool, by contrast, has nothing to do with its features. A thing’s utility sets it in relation to all other things. The features of the tool are replaced with an abstract measure of its value—x utiles. The abstract quantity can be interpreted as pleasure or preference; either way, one yardstick suffices. Properties, contexts, and purposes disappear in calculating utility. The action or policy is treated as an instrument, and the outcome of the action is regarded as a separate entity. With no sense for contexts or ends, utility lacks the resources to make judgments. Judging usefulness depends on qualitative differences set in relation to ends. Usefulness must be judged. Utility theory compares alternatives by weighing; conclusions are reached by calculation. Supposedly, the precision of calculation marks the superior rationality of utility theory over traditional ethics. Rawls’ critique of utility theory cuts off prematurely, which has consequences for his defense of diversity. Separating the right from the good is intended to widen the choices of the good that are compatible with justice. But Rawls expels utility from the realm of the right only to lodge

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it in the domain of the good. Rather than acknowledging diverse goods, utility levels the field and reduces judgment to calculation. Utility empties the world of phenomenologically defensible conceptions of the good, replacing them with a misconception of the good. The devout believer may seek to live according to God’s will. But a reductive look reveals that what makes this good is that it represents one’s strongest desire. There is no goodness in following God’s will apart from its being desired. The winnowing of complex reality to a single element, such as utility, is characteristic of false moves. This winnowing typically spawns skeptical puzzles. For example, we wonder whether being free is compatible with “choosing” the greatest happiness. If choice is determined by the greatest pleasure or preference, then is choice free?17 If goods are determined by individuals, what happens to public or common goods? By redirecting concern for the good from public discourse to individual choice, utility becomes the default notion that is presupposed by other accounts of the good. The specific goods of friendship reduce to the utility that friendship provides. Utility, the common currency of desire, whites out every other way of thinking about the good.

Reversing the Order of Good and Right While Upholding Utilitarianism John Stuart Mill protected individual liberty from the tyranny of the majority by separating the private from the public sphere. This division, according to Mill, ultimately is grounded on utility. It serves both the greatest happiness of the individual and of the majority. Behind Rawls’ principle that the right is prior to the good is the search for an alternative to the utilitarian defense of liberty. Utility is associated with ends, while the Kantian alternative focuses on the self that is prior to all ends. A conception of freedom or liberty is integral to both projects. Rawls presents the reasoning in this way: It is not our aims that primarily reveal our nature but rather the principles that we would acknowledge to govern the background conditions under which these aims are to be formed … For the self is prior to the ends which are affirmed by it; even a dominant end must be chosen from among numerous possibilities … We should therefore reverse the relation between the right and the good proposed by teleological doctrines and view the right as prior.18

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For Rawls, the disjunction—Mill or Kant—exhausts the alternatives. We must choose whether happiness or justice will be primary. For utilitarianism, happiness is primary, and justice is subsequent to the good, that is, to utility. A Kant-inspired liberalism reverses the order of justice and happiness. Rawls takes this path and argues for the priority of the right or justice over the good. This shift also reverses how action is analyzed. The good signifies the end or outcome of action—what is achieved—while the right signifies the framework of action—what is presupposed and prior to any goals. The utilitarian looks to the outcomes of actions, while the Kantian focuses on the framework, the maxims that guide actions. The primacy of the right reverses teleological theories that put the end—say, happiness—above the means. We should not pursue our end without first ascertaining that our choices are just. Rawls offers a demarcationist criticism of utility. Limiting his criticism to a reversal—giving primacy to prior conditions, not to the pleasurable consequences of acting—leaves basic assumptions of utility theory unchallenged. A reversal does not reconceive the original terms of analysis. Michael Sandel claims that the priority of the right over the good leaves utility theory as the primary way to conceive the good: The limited scope for reflection on Rawls’ account, and the problematic, even impoverished theory of the good that results reveal the extent to which deontological liberalism accepts an essentially utilitarian account of the good, however its theory of right may differ.19

What changes is the ordering not what is ordered. If one problem with utilitarianism involves the separation of the action’s outcome from other aspects, then reversal does not address this defect. What seems like criticism of utilitarianism retains the same distinctions; it only reverses them. Reversal upholds the conceptual status quo, keeping the original disjunction of right vs. good intact. If utilitarianism focuses on ends and ignores the principles guiding individual choices, a reversal cuts justice cut off from the ends that give direction and content to choices. One school of thought looks at what is prior to acting; the other focuses on the aftermath of acting. Both bifurcate; both lose sight of action as a totality. In the grip of these bifurcations, analysis does not find its way back to recognizable experience. One faulty disjunction gives rise to others. To split the right from the good piggybacks on splitting actions into prior conditions and subsequent

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outcomes. This division loses the purposeful character that unifies actions. Action is intentional or directed. To dissolve actions into prior conditions and outcomes cuts off the conditions of agency from the content of an action’s aim. On one side is our capacity for choosing, and on the other side are the goods chosen. This way of separating form from content reenacts Kant’s purist project. Kant sets down pure conditions of experience that lack empirical content. Rawls steers away from Kant’s transcendental argument, but he maintains the form/content split as the template of analysis. Justice concerns the form or framework for choosing, and the good describes the content that then is chosen. Justice secures the conditions of choice and the form of liberty. What is good—apart from the “thin theory of the good” involved in the original position—is determined consequent to these conditions as an expression of individual liberty. For example, the constitution guarantees the right to worship freely (the sphere of justice), while the person adheres to his Islamic faith (the sphere of the good). Rawls criticizes Kant’s transcendental philosophy for its speculative obscurity and its distance from experience. A theory of justice so removed from experience is open to charges of arbitrariness and irrelevance. But obscurity is not the only source of doubt regarding Kant’s project. Kant’s approach to justice is reformulated by Rawls with the form/content bifurcation left intact. What is prior to experience for Rawls is the pure self: “the self is prior to the ends which are affirmed by it.” Kant’s pure self serves as the fulcrum of justice. Rawls rejects transcendental philosophy, but he clings to the notion of a pure self as the gateway to experience and the legislator of justice. The pure self remains the spring of the pure forms of justice. Separating justice from the good, form from content, builds false philosophy into Rawls’ founding categories. When form as the essential is separated from content as the inessential, their relation is bound to be baffling. Hegel observes the inseparability of what is deemed the essential and the inessential: Form and content are a pair of determinations that are frequently employed … in such a way that the content is considered as what is essential and independent, while the form, on the contrary, is inessential and dependent. Against this, however, it must be remarked that in fact both of them are equally essential.20

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Rawls’ mode of analysis does not remove Kant’s problem of arbitrariness; it pushes it closer to the experiential level. Judgments require mediation. Judgments draw together intentions with ends, choices with what is unchosen, individuals with community, and liberty with the good. Rawls recognizes the challenges of arriving at good judgments as “the burden of reason.” When fundamental aspects of actions are fixed in opposition, judging is not just burdensome; it is unintelligible.

Reconsidering the Separation of the Right and the Good Taking justice as prior to the good presupposes that they are separable. But the split of the right from the good constitutes a false move and an obstacle to achieving the well-being of individuals and their communities. Rawls correctly challenges utilitarianism as a source of multiple misconceptions about justice. But establishing a just society on two tracks—the right and the good—involves self-deception. This split is impossible to uphold. We are not questioning the difference between personal and public life. But the distinction between public and personal does not turn on erecting two tables of value: categorical justice and quantifiable pleasures. Defining the right and the good in opposition narrows our ability to address the actual situations people face. This way of carving up social choices hinders the effort to eliminate coercion, ensure basic rights, and foster freedom. To advance the cause of justice requires an understanding of human existence and fulfillment. Deliberation about justice can occur because institutions from households to corporations and government embody an understanding of the goods that sustain and improve us. Achieving a just society requires a grasp of these goods. Being neutral about the elements of human well-being is not an option. The pretense of neutrality about these goods involves selfdeception. Liberal doctrines insist on diversity as fundamental. To secure diverse ways of life—with their varying and conflicting views of happiness—presupposes a more fundamental understanding of the shared goods of human life. This understanding enables us to make reasonable judgments in public and personal life. I can choose a way of life that differs from yours because of the common goods that we share. The point can be made abstractly: the diversity of happiness makes sense against the background of commonality. The framework of justice is the common good.

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The goods that persons share must be acknowledged to recognize and appreciate diversity. Martha Nussbaum’s defense of universal values makes “deep and vague” elements central to justice anywhere.21 Drawing from Greek philosophy and poetry, Nussbaum identifies ten human capabilities that human liberty requires. These include the ability to cultivate emotions, imagination, bodily integrity, health, and play. The goods involved in these capabilities cut across cultures. In any just society, these goods are cultivated through education and are available to citizens. Turning to these capabilities that justice requires moves beyond the distribution of scarce resources to a richer understanding of the goods of a just society. Calling them functional capabilities is Nussbaum’s move to thicken the requirements for public goods while preserving the liberal demand that the right remains prior to the good. Her concept is a hybrid: “capabilities” concern public goods, while “functional” concerns individual rights. Each child should be educated in the arts, but no adult is forced to engage in them. A just society is liberal; it does not compel adults to exercise their capabilities. A society that requires us to eat healthy food or to exercise employs coercion. A just society guarantees that the opportunities or resources are available, but it is up to the individual whether to pursue them. “Functional capabilities” implies that each person must freely choose to exercise their acquired capabilities. Concern about coercion leads Nussbaum to this awkward phrase— functional capabilities—in place of the more accurate notion of common goods. If these functional capabilities or common goods are conditions of freedom, then they are the means to avoid coercion. Individuals generally do not choose their society. Neither are universal goods available until individuals choose to activate their capacities. Our liberty is shaped by the goods present in our lives. As common goods, they already have shaped us. “Functional capability” suggests a false dilemma: either choose the capability or be coerced. In a society that respects bodily integrity and the arts, these goods enrich my life whether I choose them or not. This context of common goods enables my desires to form and my choices to take shape. Nussbaum is right to insist on individual liberty but not as the catalyst to activate the goods. Living with these goods makes freedom meaningful. Jerry Muller calls to mind the importance of institutional settings in the formation of persons: “For the sort of person we become depends, in large part, on the sort of institutions in which we find ourselves, and

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the moral norms to which we are exposed.”22 To receive an aesthetic education or inhabit a culturally rich world does not mean being forced to study piano or attend opera. Those activities are matters of my choosing. Instead of seeing choice as switching capabilities on, we can recognize that living amid these goods allows us to function more freely. Nussbaum’s work is a notable example of political philosophy’s opening to the good. Reflection on experience with liberal societies leads liberalism’s “thin theory of the good” to grow thicker, as various goods come to be seen as important components of public life. The sharp distinction between justice and the good can soften, however, without reconsidering the notion that justice and the good are separate kinds of value. Rawls adjusts to criticism by acknowledging a larger role played by the good within public reason. He lists five examples of goods that are public and inseparable from the principles of justice, such as “basic health care assured [to] all citizens.”23 The primacy of the right over the good becomes increasingly qualified, but the distinction stays fixed in place, like old plumbing too deep in the walls to remove. The principle hinders the goal of sounding out the limits of freedom. It promotes the legend of public neutrality about goods that is lodged in popular accounts of the market and government, and it blocks efforts to address the growing inequalities that grip society. Defective concepts often lead to bad consequences. Making a case for universal health care or occupational safety is hindered by maintaining the division between justice and the good or by endeavoring to distinguish goods that are means from goods that are ends. One of society’s great goods, health care, is valuable as an end and as a means. The split between means and ends, like that between framework and content, poses obstacles to practical judgments. Michael Sandel points out that with the right prior to the good, it becomes tricky to understand Locke’s concern with religious freedom. Being neutral about religion may evolve into indifference. Unless religion first is recognized as a matter of great importance for specific reasons, why bother to guarantee its freedom? Why begin the Bill of Rights with religion? Because religion already belongs to the goods of society, a right to religion exists. Whether I choose to practice any religion, religion already contributes to the common good.24 To Rawls’ claim that religious duties are “self-authenticating from a political point of view,” Sandel wonders what justification there can be “for according religious beliefs or claims of conscience a special respect not accorded other preferences people may hold with equal or greater intensity.”25 A better

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defense of justice identifies the goods of public life—including Nussbaum’s universal values—as ends of justice and conditions of freedom. A political philosophy attuned to the basic dimensions of human existence sounds out and incorporates the goods of public life without diminishing the importance of individual choice.

Distributive Justice and the Pure Self To arrive at a just society, Rawls constructs a veil of ignorance behind which purely disinterested selves can determine principles of justice that privilege no one. These rational but ignorant creatures are moved by self-interest to formulate principles. Purity, as we have seen, characterizes abstractions that cannot make their way back to experience. There are many versions of a pure self. Separating the right from the good invokes the agency of a pure self. The veil of ignorance endeavors to separate what is universal in human nature from any particular identity. Creatures ignorant of their identity will defend just principles to protect their unknown interests. This ghostly self is striking in Rawls’ account of distributive justice. The last part of the second principle of justice is known as the difference principle. The difference principle judges whether resources are distributed fairly. The test is whether the alternative benefits those who have the least. To decide whether resources are distributed fairly first involves identifying resources as well as the traits that constitute an individual’s personality, achievements, and character. Social assets include not only wealth and property but also intelligence, talents, health, character, family, education, physical skills, and disposition. To put justice first, the self behind the veil is stripped of these features so that no one has an unfair advantage from the start. What remains is a pure self, one able to reason, desire, and choose but not capable of seeking any particular interest. The decisions of this pure self are deemed impartial. The self behind the veil of ignorance is empty and lacks differentiation. It recalls Locke’s pure substance in general: something that one “knows not what” underlies the properties of things and minds and makes them one.26 While the principles of justice safeguard diversity, the pure self that constructs these principles resembles the inhabitants of Kant’s kingdom of ends. In the rational kingdom, one person as end is indistinguishable from the next. What is personal has been bracketed. All differences—biological, psychological, economic,

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and social—are unfair by default until certified as fair by the difference principle. This theoretical landscape involves two states: fair or unfair. These alternatives are posited without attending to the underlying features of human existence; in effect, the features of human existence are derived from the theoretical construct. The pure self that inhabits the original position draws the line between fairness and unfairness. The only way for a person or society to move past unfairness is through the principles of justice. A just society establishes selves in their proper dimensions and relationships. The actual person recovers his self as justified if its configuration contributes to the justice of the whole. The attention in liberal theory to minorities and to those at the margins is an important contribution to political philosophy. But the justification behind these claims of distributive justice pushes the believable past the limit. Rawls’ original position, with its veil of ignorance, suppresses fundamental dimensions of human existence. What William James called the “mineness” of consciousness and the social dimension of beingwith-others are missing. Consciousness always belongs to a person; it is misconstrued when taken as a separable substance. Persons exist with others. We cannot develop on our own. We can debate about what mineness encompasses, but whatever constitutes personal identity is neither deserved nor undeserved. Heidegger speaks of our being “thrown.” Persons exist in terms of specific, unchosen relationships, such as family, language, culture, ethnicity, and sexuality. These traits constitute human identity and characterize the species. To arrive at justice in an objective way, we step back from specific instances of these traits but not from the general features. What we deserve as a matter of justice inevitably presupposes general features of who we are as persons. Well-ordered laws and institutions bring justice—not human beings—into existence. When we acknowledge the basic dimensions of human existence, the priority of the right over the good is not plausible.

The Phenomenology of Acting and Choosing Rawls arrives at the principles of a just society by bracketing recognizable human life for a hypothetical state behind the veil of ignorance, the original position. The original position is a version of the state of nature developed by earlier philosophers including Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. By constructing this natural state, we could reason to the

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features of a just social contract. Like its ancestor, the original position views actual life from a distance. It is true that philosophy generally employs abstract formulations. However, it is the type of abstraction that matters. If inquiry makes its way back to recognizable experience, abstractness is not an obstacle. The notion of reflective equilibrium employed by Rawls requires that philosophical abstractions not get too far out of step with common life. What is discovered in the original position must harmonize with our actual thinking about justice. Thus, reflective equilibrium represents a hermeneutic requirement. Our conclusions about justice must rub shoulders with common understandings of human existence. The conditions of choosing and the ends chosen are aspects of human action, i.e., aspects of a whole. We can focus on a particular aspect, but carving up action into conditions and ends misconceives aspects as separable elements. This purist factoring loses touch with human actuality. Bad abstractions are the product. Restoring distinctions to how they function in common life is a phenomenological task. A phenomenology of human action shows that goods do not first come into existence with our choices. Humans always already inhabit a world of goods. We cannot recognize what is good or seek happiness unless we already exist in relation to goods. While we do not choose the common goods of human life, we do choose how we stand in relation to these dimensions of our existence. We seek fulfillment against a backdrop of goods already there. The goods already there establish the possibilities we face and define our horizon of choice. These goods are involved in the capabilities that Nussbaum sounds out and calls universal values. Choice is an aspect of human existence, but choices cannot originate what is good. Otherwise, human choice becomes pure, ungrounded, and unmotivated, like a divine utterance creating the world from nothing. The problem here is analogous to the problem with the idea of a conceptual scheme, that is, the idea that concepts are purely subjective. In his seminal article “The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Donald Davidson employs the homespun example of arranging things in a closet to assess the idea that a conceptual order could be purely subjective— an order that we give the world. Subjects seeking to know their world do not—cannot—project conceptual schemes onto a world that has no intelligible order itself. Davidson dismisses that popular contention. We can organize a closet—or see when one is organized—only because what is being arranged—shoes, shirts, racquets—are already intelligible useful

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things. If the contents of the closet had no intelligibility of their own, the task of organizing a closet would lose its sense. Analogously, the task of practically organizing our life in a world where nothing was good itself would lack intelligibility. Davidson argues: “An appreciation of what makes for such convergence or agreement also shows that value judgments are true or false in much the way our factual judgments are … I have argued that values are objective, that they are rooted in things.”27 “Objective values” are better known as goods. Splitting what is prior to acting from the consequences of acting posits a pure self without a way back to actual existence.28 The priority of justice to the good violates phenomenological integrity by positing the self prior to acting and the choice prior to its ends. Choice that is so decontextualized is an artifact of false philosophy. The separation of the subject from the world lies behind this approach to liberal values: it has a stoic pedigree: desires line up on one side and objects of desire on the other side. Choice is the bridge between them. Unless persons and their desires already exist in relation to goods in countless ways, nothing is present to inform choices. Without already being involved in the world, a subject’s desires cannot be ordered or even understood. Desires are intentional— we desire water, friendship, and sleep—desires do not exist apart from their objects. The pure self is defective on phenomenological grounds. By insisting that freedom acknowledge the common goods that constitute human life, the worry about coercion is acknowledged without stripping all sense from an individual’s choices. Rawls insists that justice as fairness is unrelated to skepticism. But once the right is prior to the good, form is external to content, or the power of choosing is separated from what is chosen, skepticism has its wedge. With liberty put prior to ends or detached from human identity, only desires remain to guide our choice. For something to be christened good, it must be chosen. Desires remain on the side of the self who chooses. In this liberal conception, justice reduces to acting freely on those desires that do not conflict with the choices of others under fair rules. Choice thus makes manifest the desires found within persons. Goods devolve into values. To regard a person’s desires as educated by the world is not possible in this scenario. To reject or judge desires, a measure must be chosen. A measure can determine whether the object desired is good. If the self does not already exist in relation to ends, a regress occurs: one desire is justified in relation to more basic desires. This regress, characteristic of skepticism, eventually leads back to arbitrary desire: something is valuable

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because I value it. For the skeptic, desires cannot be judged in relation to ends until these ends are first chosen. No measures for the good exist. To assess one desire—should I seek great wealth?—sets off a regress to other levels of desire. Human nature cannot serve as a resource for judging desires if the self is deemed to be empty.29 The duality of the right and good excludes human identity from the sphere of justice, since one is expected to construct an identity in one’s own way. I am free to be whom I choose to be, what Kierkegaard calls the hypothetical self. Presupposing general features of human existence purportedly involves coercion, limiting our original power to choose our identity. However, as Heidegger points out, the limitations that come with our “thrownness” free us to act in the world. Stalemates follow in the wake of false moves. The escape routes from the standoffs are familiar. A more adequate phenomenology avoids metaphysical dualism by recognizing consciousness as intentional and inseparable from objects in the world. Consciousness is already in the world. It does not have to seek the world. Already existing amid goods makes the self’s choosing intelligible. Neither justice nor good makes sense outside this inseparability. An individual’s freedom functions amidst the goods of existence. Positing justice as prior to the good leaves choosing groundless. Understanding justice as presupposing a relation to the common goods of human existence allows the individual room to choose those goods that engage her.

Markets and the Illusions of Neutrality Setting the right prior to the good links the notion of justice to the notion of public neutrality about goods. For this liberalism, a just society remains officially neutral about ends, so that individuals might live freely, as long as others are not harmed by their actions. As we observed earlier, associating public life with neutrality is given impetus by how we view the market. The market is commonly thought of as a framework that creates space for countless individual transactions. The framework itself remains neutral, like a procedure that serves many ends since it has none of its own. The emphasis on space suggests an all-purpose design where buyers and sellers move easily in many directions. In liberal societies, individuals, like consumers, make their own choices according to the rules of justice. Government acts to protect the vulnerable and insure justice. But one’s

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way of life, like one’s purchases, is a matter of individual reckoning. To some eyes, markets register the views of the electorate better than the ballot box. Markets come to signify justice broadly. On this expansive view of markets, freedom is synonymous with neutrality and the absence of collective ends. This vision of markets is flawed. The one holding the scales of justice in the courtroom must be blindfolded, but blindfolds are out of place at the cash register. Markets embody an abstract form of freedom precisely because they have definite commercial ends. Choice matters, but it is not the ruling principle of markets. Markets belong to a production process aimed at reaping profits on the sale of goods and services. Goods and services must be sold to willing consumers, so choice matters. But markets are not free-standing institutions. Where do the commodities come from that keep pouring into the market? What motivates firms to keep the stream of commodities flowing? Individuals meet their needs and pursue their desires with their purchases if the return on the firm’s investment suffices. Capital has a fixed, unrelenting objective—to turn money into more money. Yet the abstractness of its aim of endless moneymaking means that “capitalist production as such is indifferent to the particular use-values it produces, and in fact to the specific character of its commodities in general.”30 Capital’s objective is enforced throughout the myriad of exchanges. My ability to secure my goals is ultimately subordinated to realizing this overarching objective. If exchanges do not yield sufficient return on investment, they eventually cease. The idea that markets are neutral frameworks obscures a deeper truth. Consumer freedom is real but constrained by capital’s need to accumulate. How freedom is constrained matters. The myth of neutrality covers up these constraints and the form that freedom and unfreedom take in market societies. Rawls’ case for distributive justice would be stronger if it did not buy into the myth of fairness as neutrality—if the concept of capital were not missing.31 The lesson concerning markets is instructive. We should be suspicious when any public institution is presented as a framework without an inherent end or purpose. Human institutions are always directed at ends. Splitting apart form and content is a mindset that engenders dilemmas in thinking and cover-ups in real life. Claims of neutrality obscure the ends that either are present or should be. Since human action is inherently purposive, it is not surprising that institutions and legal orders are cast in a similar mold.

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A just society identifies and secures the goods of public life that make individual choices substantive and free. Establishing these goods does not signal the end of tolerance or plurality. The fear is misplaced that attention to the good leads back to the unfreedom of Plato’s Republic. The goods belonging to institutions and to individual lives are plural and matters of ongoing deliberation. Nussbaum describes broad and deep capacities that make up an understanding of human existence. Largely unchosen aspects of our lives make choosing real. As humans we can select our ends from ends already there in “vague and deep” ways. We cannot sever the good from the right to achieve some prescribed clarity. When we move in that direction, we end up losing both the good and the right.

Notes 1. On the topic of defining concepts, Hegel says, “philosophy has absolutely nothing at all to do with merely correct definitions and even less with even plausible ones … it is concerned, instead, with definitions that have been validated.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1991), #99, 158. 2. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 3. At the end of his Meditations, Descartes leaves us with the assertion: persons are an intimate composite of mind and body. But perplexity over how mind and body act on one another persists. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, 4th ed., trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998). 4. Karl Marx, Original Text of “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” ed. Larisa Miskievich, trans. Victor Schnittke and Yuri Sdobnikov, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 29: Karl Marx: 1857–61 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1987), 475. 5. Modern sexual morality insists on choice (consent) in sexual relations but has little to say of other goods of sexual relations. 6. See Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990) and Naomi Zack’s Thinking About Race, 2nd ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2006). 7. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1990), 20. 8. Ibid., 21. 9. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Elizabeth Rapaport (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1978).

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10. Locke, A Letter Concerning Tolerance, 21. 11. The severing of judging from what is being judged reaches back to Epictetus’s statement “What upsets people in not things themselves but their judgments about the things.” Epictetus, Handbook of Epictetus , trans. Nicholas P. White (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), #5, 13. 12. In many departments in the U.S. federal government, cost–benefit studies are required. 13. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Modern Mental Life,” in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 330. 14. See Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 15. Bernard Williams, Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 89. Notice how easily “economic” serves for “monetary.” 16. Marx, Capital 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 126. 17. Michael Sandel writes that “Rawls’ self is conceived as barren of constituent traits, possessed only of contingent attributes held always at a certain distance, and so there is nothing in the self for reflection to survey or apprehend.” Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982; 1998), 160–61. 18. John Rawls, Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 560. 19. Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 165. 20. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, 202. 21. See Martha Nussbaum, “In Defense of Universal Values,” in Women and Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 34–110. See also Amartya Sen, “The Place of Capability in a Theory of Justice,” in Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities, ed. Harry Brighouse and Ingrid Robeyns (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 22. Jerry Muller, The Mind and the Market : Capitalism in Modern European Thought (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 152. 23. Rawls, Political Liberalism, lviii–lix. 24. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, 66. 25. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 33; Sandel, Liberalism, 193, n. 29. 26. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 295–97. 27. Donald Davidson, “The Objectivity of Values,” in Donald Davidson, The Problems of Rationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 49, 52. 28. In Chapter 4, we saw that the stoic sage tries to escape the conundrum through the ruse of organizing life with the guidance of “preferred indifferents.” But handing the conduct of one’s life over to arbitrary preferences is no way to organize it intelligibly.

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29. Martin Heidegger insists on that point in section 13 of Being and Time, “knowing itself is grounded beforehand in already-being-in-theworld” (61). Knowing is worldly. So is desiring. Thus, Heidegger writes of attunement or mood, “Mood has always already disclosed being-inthe-world as a whole and first makes possible directing oneself toward something” (Heidegger, Being and Time, 133). Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, rev. trans. Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010). 30. Karl Marx, Capital 3, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1981), 297. 31. Tony Smith’s study Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism: Marx and Normative Social Theory in the Twenty-First Century (Leiden: Brill, 2017) shows that the concept of capital, with all its implications, is missing from the discourse of liberal egalitarians.

References Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York and London: Routledge, 1990. Davidson, Donald. Problems of Rationality. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Descartes, René. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. 4th ed. Translated by Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998. Epictetus. Handbook of Epictetus. Translated by Nicholas P. White. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983. Hegel, G. W. F. The Encyclopedia Logic. Translated by T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1991. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised translation by Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. ———. A Letter Concerning Toleration. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1990. Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1976. ———. Capital, Volume 3. Translated by David Fernbach. London: Penguin, 1981. ———. Original Text of “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (Original Text ). Edited by Larisa Miskievich; translated by Victor Schnittke and Yuri Sdobnikov. In Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Marx and

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Engels Collected Works, vol. 29: Karl Marx: 1857–61. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1987. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Edited by Elizabeth Rapaport. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1978. Muller, Jerry Z. The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Nussbaum, Martha Craven. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. ———. Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice, Revised Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. ———. Political Liberalism, Expanded Edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Sandel, Michael. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Sen, Amartya. “The Place of Capability in a Theory of Justice.” In Measuring Justice: Primary Goods and Capabilities, edited by Harry Brighouse and Ingrid Robeyns. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In On Individuality and Social Forms, edited by Donald N. Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Smith, Tony. Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism: Marx and Normative Social Theory in the Twenty-First Century. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Williams, Bernard. Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972. Zack, Naomi. Thinking About Race. 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2006.

CHAPTER 8

Values as Purely Subjective: Against the Idea of “A New Creation”

In philosophy, the topic of morality raises many issues, including the subjectivity of values. The question can be posed this way: do values belong to the fabric of the world? Or do values arise from human responses to the indifferent warp and woof of the world? When lying is judged wrong, does “wrongness” describe the lie, or does it simply register the subject’s affective response? Though it is an affront to common sense, the notion that all values—aesthetic and moral—are purely subjective has become commonplace. You know, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The view that values are strictly subjective can acknowledge that knowledge and discernment are required to achieve public judgments of goodness, justice, injustice, or wrongness. Actions are carefully described, identified by traits and perhaps by kinds. The consequences of actions are examined. Precedents, traditions, and similar actions are considered. The considerations relevant to determining values are sometimes simple but often vast and varied. Like a room whose walls are painstakingly prepared before paint is applied, the conditions for valuing must be attended to.1 For those who espouse the subjectivity of value, expressing feelings, like applying paint, is separated from the preparation. Determining right and wrong comes down to our affective response, the satisfaction or discomfort that actions or character traits provoke in us. We do not get at values

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simply by describing events or characters. Value is entirely separable from the world and our knowledge of it. David Hume invokes the image of “a new creation” to express the overlaying of values on an inherently indifferent world: Thus the distinct boundaries and offices of reason and of taste are easily ascertained. The former conveys the knowledge of truth and falsehood: the latter gives the sentiment of beauty and deformity, vice and virtue. The one discovers objects as they really stand in nature, without addition or diminution: the other has a productive faculty, and gilding or staining all natural objects with the colours, borrowed from internal sentiment, raises in a manner a new creation.2

The objects that exist in the world lack “colour.” The mind gilds and stains these objects with values that express feelings. To regard values as a “new creation” is a breathtaking vision, but how well founded is it? The claim at issue here is that values are purely subjective; sentiment must be completely separable from understanding—partitioned off—for this controversy to arise.3 The subjectivity of value belongs to the larger picture according to which mind is separable from world. Analysis traces origins to either mind or world, to subjective response or objective property, either projected or real. This larger picture functions as a horizon that directs analysis without being submitted to reflection. Establishing the origin of values is the task of analysis working within this horizon of discourse. What “subjective” or “objective” means is not in question: the issue concerns how to apply terms assumed to designate purist notions. If morality involves subjectivity to any degree, then it is completely subjective—the only way subjectivity comes. The moral essence is winnowed down to one element, and that element either depends on the subject or not. Complexity within purist analysis is limited; analysis may combine purely objective and subjective features and relate them by causal mechanisms, such as the projection of value onto the world. Analysis may correct for subjective responses at varying distances to events or under varying conditions. Analysis may grant that thoughtful sentiments are superior to unreflective responses. But the posited dichotomy of purely objective and subjective factors is prior and holds throughout. The separation of mind from world is flawed phenomenology. Once freed from the resulting dogmatic ontology, we realize that what is good

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belongs to the world. The notion of a value-neutral world and its flipside, purely subjective values, go by the boards.4 False moves engender corresponding false moves. Thus, the notion of purely subjective values propagates notions of brute facticity, the in-itself, the purely immediate, and the mind-independent. Ordinary distinctions take on purist meanings within the context of untethered analysis. Positions called moral realism only reverse purist subjectivism; they designate values as mindindependent, embedded in objects. These positions are misconceived since pure objectivism gets no closer to reality than moral subjectivism.5 When analysis presupposes the separation of mind from world, for values to be in the world, they must be outside mind, since this is how belonging to the world is determined. When morality is analyzed within an adequate phenomenology, however, whether values are objective or subjective is not at issue. Inquiries into goodness and truth are freed from the preconceptions of factoring philosophy.6 Determining which actions are good or which beliefs are true does not require getting hold of sheerly mind-independent traits. False moves gain traction by appealing to experience. We have little trouble distinguishing “objective” and “subjective” in ordinary discourse. This ordinary usage provides cover while analysis veers away from experience to tag aspects as purely objective or subjective. The results of analysis, while incompatible with human existence, nevertheless claim to reveal what lies behind appearances. Analysis answers to experience only in the beginning. Purist philosophy piggybacks on the everyday expectation that knowledge penetrates the surface of experience to uncover its underlying determinants. How values appear does not reveal their true origins or the causal mechanism of their production. Appeals to experience play a strategic role. Since analysis initially invokes the recognizable, we are inclined to accept what follows. Equivocation goes undetected when the ordinary meanings of “objective” and “subjective” are replaced with purist terms. Analysis departs from experience but does not return to it. This outcome is confirmed when untethered analysis concludes that philosophy changes nothing in experience. Everything is left as it is. Hume assures us that the subjectivity of values does not alter our judgments or practices. Acts of murder are judged wrong and prosecuted whether values are deemed subjective or not. In this respect, the subjectivity of values parallels the subjectivity of secondary qualities, the doctrine “that tastes and colors, and all the other sensible qualities, lie not in the bodies,

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but merely in the senses.”7 Unlike primary qualities, colors and tastes are entirely relative to perception. To recognize colors or tastes as subjective does not disturb us. We still call lemons “yellow” and add sugar to sweeten lemonade. Neither should subjectivism about values alter our speech or behavior: There is a sufficient uniformity in the senses and feelings of mankind, to make all these qualities the objects of art and reasoning, and to have the greatest influence on life and manners. And as it is certain, that the discovery above-mentioned in natural philosophy [the subjectivity of taste, color, and other secondary qualities], makes no alteration on action and conduct; why should a like discovery in moral philosophy make any alteration?8

The uniformity of human feelings makes shared values possible, just as human physiology allows most people to see the same colors. When false moves shape analysis, genuine questions are not available. Our goal is to remove obstructions so that philosophical inquiries gain traction with the world. Modern moral theories often seek to reduce judgments or values to one factor. If mind is not separated from world, then one reason for reduction goes. The need to reduce kinds of goodness to an underlying value that belongs either to mind or to world disappears. Freed from notions of the purely subjective and purely objective, there is no call to posit an indifferent world. The picture of a shift from descriptive to prescriptive made by adding value to what is inherently value-free loses its hold. With goodness known to be inseparable from world, moral philosophy can determine the goods that are presupposed by moral judgments or virtues. There is no need to get outside of values to explain them. To avoid false moves does not bring philosophy to an end. The roles of perception, feeling, and language in moral judgment and action remain topics for investigation. To recognize false moves releases us from the global skepticism that accompanies them. We can return to the real doubts of moral life. This chapter takes up several positions from debates on the subjectivity of values. We consider the views of David Hume, Barry Stroud, John Mackie, John McDowell, and Thomas Nagel. We look first at Hume’s defense of the popular notion that values are entirely relative to the perceiver. We then consider Stroud’s challenges to the very idea of projection. Next, we take up Mackie’s arguments against the objectivity of

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values. Against Mackie, both McDowell and Nagel make cases for the objectivity of values. McDowell accepts Hume’s association of value with secondary properties but reinterprets the latter as objective, while Nagel defends pleasure and pain as objective values. However, both these repudiations of Mackie and defenses of objective values rely on factoring out the subjective from the objective; both try to divide what is inseparable. An adequate phenomenology shifts the focus, for example, from pleasure or pain in the abstract to pleasure and pain specified by their worldly determinants. Challenging the subjectivity of values secures and expands the space for moral analysis. If actions, feelings, and motivations belong to the world, then acknowledging that moral judgments track events is not wishful thinking. If the circle is beautiful and lying is wrong, we can determine what these claims mean without separating the eye from what it beholds. By defeating the presumption that values are strictly subjective, renewed purpose is available to address actual moral questions. Moral judgments are sometimes difficult, and perhaps impossible to make at times, but not because values are subjective.

David Hume’s Account of the Subjectivity of Values In his essay “The Sceptic” and in the first appendix to the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, David Hume offers brief defenses of the subjectivity of values that agree with the fundamentals of the position staked out in the Treatise of Human Nature. The skeptic addresses beauty as well as virtues, but the fundamental moves remain the same. The disjunctive mindset frames the discussion from the start, but as a horizon, it does not come into view. Skepticism about values rests on dogmatic adherence to purist presuppositions. The skeptic does not doubt that values have a single origin or that this origin lies either within the subject or the object: value judgments belong either to reason or taste. When asked whether values are inherent in objects or arise from passions and feelings, Hume’s skeptic has no trouble answering: If we can depend upon any principle, which we learn from philosophy, this I think, may be considered as certain and undoubted, that there is nothing, in itself, valuable or despicable, desirable or hateful, beautiful or

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deformed; but that these attributes arise from the particular constitution and fabric of human sentiment and affection.9

Our judgments often differ. From the lover’s esteem of the beloved to the parents’ delight in their offspring, evaluations vary with the perceiver. The baby remains the same, but one beholds a peerless wonder while the other observes a squawky bundle. These cases of passion supposedly reveal the principle that underlies ordinary human responses, where perceptions barely differ. In all cases, values arise solely from the sentiments of observers; they do not track features of the object.10 Variability of judgment suggests that value judgments are relative and depend upon one’s perspective. Hume remarks, “The vulgar may even be convinced by this argument.”11 But Hume realizes that variability alone does not constitute proof that nothing is of inherent value. Moreover, no reasoning leads from the variability of value judgments to the conclusion that the true value of each thing is zero; that is a non sequitur. After all, plenty of variability exists in judgments regarding matters of fact, but contrary opinions about what city is the capital of Canada do not lead us to conclude that there is none. For the skeptic, variability is one strand of argument. The skeptic confirms this principle by varying the subjects while keeping the object the same, but he does not reverse the test. If the skeptic varied the object while keeping the subject the same, sentiments would still shift, suggesting that objects do matter. The latter test, however, is not performed. Given the disjunctive mindset, why bother? Once values are known to vary with the make-up of one’s faculties, then values depend wholly on that make-up; there is nothing to values beyond one’s sentiments. Hume insists, “Objects have absolutely no worth or value in themselves. They derive their worth merely from the passion.”12 The world apart from the perceiver lacks all value. Actions, like objects, are inherently indifferent. All their worth arises from the eye of the beholder. Pushing past the “vulgar” variability argument, Hume’s skeptic contends that the subjectivity of values is evident in immediate experience and constitutes a phenomenological truth. We need not await philosophical analysis to recognize it. If “fact” signifies the rational, the experience of facts differs from the experience of values and offers prima facie evidence of the subjectivity of values. Hume contrasts cognitive with affective perception of the circle:

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Euclid has fully explained every quality of the circle, but has not, in any proposition, said a word of its beauty. The reason is evident. Beauty is not a quality of the circle. It lies not in any part of the line whose parts are all equally distant from a common center … In vain would you look for it in the circle, or seek it, either by your senses, or by mathematical reasonings, in all the properties of that figure.13

It is a fact that the circle is round. That the circle is beautiful registers our affective response to it; it says nothing about the circle itself. Hume’s skeptic stages his case for the subjectivity of values by waffling between opposing claims. First, the skeptic highlights differences among persons to establish the origin of values in the diverse sentiments of subjects. Diversity of feelings is a striking feature of the species: our tastes and projects pull us in different directions. Then the skeptic reverses course to highlight the agreement of sentiments. To a large degree, what we esteem or abhor does not differ greatly: the nobility of courage and the wrongness of murder are widely accepted. Without shared sentiments, it is hard to see how humans could make a life together. These rhetorical shifts have their philosophical counterparts: the first move strips the world of values. What exists independently of humans— the facts—has no normative dimension: facts break off cleanly from values. Second, human nature steps in as a stable measure of value. The traction that might be provided by the worldliness of values will not be missed if human nature can anchor norms and values.14 Just because values are subjective need not mean that they function in unpredictable or unreliable ways. On the contrary, if values were utterly arbitrary, we could not pursue a life in common. Still, the first move remains troubling. It is difficult to fathom that there is nothing inherently wrong in the lie or the murder—that neither suffering nor death is inherently bad. It requires effort to view the universe as lacking purposes, goods, meaning, and direction. To the factoring mind, though, what exists is indifferent through and through. The second move reassures us that human nature, properly educated, is a guardian of virtue. Actions are never perceived as neutral. Humans cannot help but affirm, avoid, and judge; we alleviate suffering, fear death, and seek meaning. To be concerned about right and wrong is not our choice but our condition.15 Lies are recognized as violations of trust. Murderers are prosecuted and punished. Skepticism about the origin of values does not affect how values function in common life. Persons

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generally do the right thing for the right reasons. Our shared human nature, formed through proper education, guides sentiment and supplies a subjective standard of taste. In Hume’s account, the philosopher’s main task is to uncover the principles, such as the subjectivity of values, that underlie experience. His Second Enquiry investigates the principles of morals. Probing beneath recognizable appearances to abstract principles constitutes a type of anatomy for Hume. Just as an anatomist carefully delineates the structures of creatures, the philosopher analyzes the structures of human experience with results that take us far from familiar territory. Experience is winnowed down to elemental perceptions: sense impressions (including passions) and ideas, which copy impressions. Hume’s anatomy is designed to sort out what is subjective—arising from the agent—from what is objective—given to the agent. Mind’s separation from world is key to this anatomy and makes it possible to distinguish these two origins. Hume can conclude that attributes arise solely from the mind only because he presupposes a sharp division between mind and world and further assumes that analysis can track aspects of experience to one source or another. Hume is a factoring philosopher par excellence. Because of the clean demarcation, Hume’s anatomist can speak of the purely subjective traits drawn wholly from the fabric of mind. They borrow nothing from the object. In ordinary life, people recognize that values are diverse. They sometimes avoid moral topics as polarizing and beyond the bounds of civil discourse. While addressing values may be uncomfortable, values are clearly inseparable from human existence. Situations and events matter to us; even indifference is a way of mattering. I might be indifferent to how full my coffee cup is, but my cup is not indifferent; what is incapable of caring is incapable of being indifferent. What the philosopher contributes to ordinary awareness are the underlying principles. In peering beneath familiar experiences, the anatomist Hume makes a recurring discovery: what are taken to be features of the world arise from the mind projecting its sentiments onto things. Causal connections, substance, inductive reasoning, beauty, and goodness begin in the mind as passions and are projected onto the world. What we seem to find—that a sunset is beautiful or that a rock broke the window—registers nothing but our affective responses. Objectivity in its everyday sense of causality arises from imposing our sentiments onto things. Objectivity turns out to be a subset of subjectivity.

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Hume’s explanation of our causal judgments is his best-known account of projecting onto the world. The main lines of the reasoning can be simply stated. We do not directly perceive causal connections on our first observation. Rather, one thing happens, then another. After we repeatedly observe a sequence of similar events, belief in a necessary connection or causal bond emerges. The philosopher-anatomist, seeking the origin of the causal connection, traces the idea to its impression—our sentiments. We expect the pattern to continue. That expectation is a sentiment, purely subjective—our contribution. If causal power were given among our sensations, figures Hume, it would be present from the first look. But no one recognizes necessary connections on the first observation: no one witnesses the power by which one billiard ball moves another. Since subsequent events only repeat the first impressions, it is we, not the object, who change over time: we come to believe in the necessity of the connection. Familiarity breeds strong sentiments, compelling expectations that Hume calls custom. Causal necessity originates from customary feelings that are projected onto the sequence of events. Feelings of inevitability—believing that the rock must break the window—imbue nature with necessity: rocks, we believe, have the power to shatter glass. The philosophical-anatomist does not claim that rocks actually have this power but only that humans must believe in these necessary connections as we must also believe in the uniformity of nature.16 As we saw, Hume uses the New Testament image of a “new creation” to describe how sentiments spread onto objects: “gilding or staining all natural objects with the colors, borrowed from internal sentiment, raises in a manner a new creation.”17 Attributing goodness or beauty to nature, actions, and persons brings about a “new creation.” But knowledge, too, involves a “new creation.” All kinds of judgments presuppose the prior gilding and staining of objects by subjects: ‘Tis a common observation, that the mind has a great propensity to spread itself on external objects, and to conjoin with them any internal impressions, which they occasion, and which always make their appearance at the same time that these objects discover themselves to the senses. Thus as certain sounds and smells are always found to attend certain visible objects, we naturally imagine a conjunction, even in place, betwixt the objects and the qualities, tho’ the qualities be of such a nature as to admit of no such conjunction, and really exist no where … the same propensity is the reason,

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why we suppose necessity and power to lie in the objects we consider, not in our mind, that considers them.18

Powerful sentiments are projected onto objects. Values and causal necessity are displaced human affections. Pure immediacy describes an ideal of objectivity accepted by Hume. It presupposes the separability of mind from world, the quintessential false move. According to this ideal, sensing is presumed to occur immediately, without any shaping by the one sensing—a kind of epistemic immaculate conception. Sensing constitutes the first encounter between consciousness and world. The first encounter supposedly reveals reality directly and without omission. The ideal stipulates that sensations come from the object without any contribution from the subject. This immediacy presumes the mind’s pure receptiveness: sensing receives what is given free of interference. To sense the unaffected object reveals its truth, and nothing else will do. Sensing just happens to us. All determination comes from the singularity sensed; certainty is the subject’s response to what is imprinted upon it, guaranteeing its genuineness. For Hume, sensing offers no resistance and asks no questions; it does not analyze or interpret but accepts whatever is offered. Thinking, however, is undeniably an activity; hence, in interfering with immediacy, it removes us from objectivity. Sensing isolates receptivity from activity, what is initially given differs from the subject’s response. A pure sensor, like a bystander to her own experience, is assailed by sensations. The epistemic strategy that appeals to pure immediacy aims to eliminate subjectivity without eliminating the subject. For Hume’s empiricism, the less subjective, the more objective. Feelings are original endowments of human nature that differ from sense perceptions. Some try to apply the ideal of pure immediacy to feelings, treating them as if they were given like perceptions. John Mackie works in a Humean mode by running the test of pure immediacy on values. If values were objective, he claims, they would be given directly in sensation. Mackie tries to imagine what objective values would be like if they did exist. We will come back to Mackie. The notion of “first look” or pure immediacy involves an untenable conception of time as a series of pure “nows.” Recollection and anticipation belong to human temporality—a pure now is a myth. Hume recognizes recollection and anticipation in his own way by appealing to “custom.” But he factors away recollection and anticipation as aspects

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of experience by introducing new perceptual atoms, namely the purely subjective sentiment of anticipation. To preserve the notion of first look, Hume reifies aspects of experience into experiential atoms. To account for causal or value judgments, Hume must bring complexity into an impression such as the feeling of expectation or the pleasurable feeling that follows seeing a sunset. Hume’s analytic animus is to reduce complexity to its purported elements of discrete and purely subjective sentiments. Confined by false moves, Hume devises an atomistic alternative to the actual human experience of time from which recollection and anticipation are inseparable. Custom emerges as the skeptical solution in the aftermath of doubts about causality, but the sheering of subjectivity from objectivity lies hidden in the background, the crucial but untested presupposition that lends plausibility to Hume’s factoring account of causality. Hume confidently tracks causality to a sentiment arising solely in the subject that is separate from the corresponding impressions from the object. He does not hesitate to sort what is for us (subjective) from what exists in itself (objective), since this dualistic picture of reality is not questioned. For Hume, this skeptical solution means that causal relations do not differ from values. Both are rooted solely in subjectivity. What is truly objective—the sequence of purely immediate outer impressions—supports no causal judgments. Rather, “All beings in the universe, consider’d in themselves, appear entirely loose and independent of each other.”19 Ordinarily, the distinction of fact versus value tracks the opposition of objective versus subjective. And Hume is often cited as the one who lined up these oppositions. But subjectivity is as foundational to Hume’s account of knowledge as it is to his theories of value. For Hume, values and facts fall on the subjective side of the divide. Hume’s analysis of values matches the pattern of his anatomy of causality: feelings are projected onto the world, so values are “found” in their objects. We are caught in a comical situation. If values were objective, beauty or goodness would be impressions immediately given by the object. But values do not have this direct connection to reality; they arise with the subject’s affective reaction to the value-free object, which is what is given immediately. As we saw, Hume contrasts the properties of a circle with the beauty of the circle. The properties of the circle are either directly apparent or arrived at by reasoning from what is directly given. But recognizing beauty requires the intervention of

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feelings. Strictly speaking, beauty exists in the mind as the pleasure experienced consequent to perceiving a circle. Feeling is projected onto the circle but is treated in ordinary discourse as an objective feature—we call the Mona Lisa a beautiful painting. But the Mona Lisa is colored thrice: once with paint by Da Vinci, once with our projection of colors, and once again by projecting the pleasures of the observer. The philosopheranatomist uncovers the actual process of “staining and gilding” the Mona Lisa with the pleasure felt by the observer. But the sentiment is too complex in a way that is trouble for Hume. It must be the sentiment of the beauty of the circle. It must have propositional content: the circle is beautiful. But then what happens to Hume’s atomism of impressions? There is something bogus about Hume’s talk of “staining and gilding,” “bestowing,” “giving,” and “projecting.” Hume’s claim that through projection “objects acquire these qualities [aesthetic or moral value]” is a dead letter.20 Value never reaches the objects themselves: objects remain indifferent. Once I gild a piece of jewelry or stain a table, it is gilded or stained, but value does not work that way—nothing ever acquires value. Moreover, what would it mean to apply a coat of pleasure to a painting or stain it with pain? We criticize Hume’s faulty phenomenology on two grounds: (1) there is no projection; nothing projected ever gets to the world, and (2) it makes no sense to project feelings onto objects in the world. Hume’s account of projection varies with the topic. The subjectivity of causality relies on the first look test. Since causal connections are not perceived immediately, they must arise from the subject’s responses, but these affective responses emerge only after repeated perceptions of similar events. The subjectivity of values works differently. A sunset may be perceived as beautiful at first sight. The pleasure that marks the presence of beauty or goodness may be evoked immediately. Of course, the pleasurable sentiments that register as beauty or goodness, like the sentiments that lie at the basis of our causal judgments, must be separable from and consequent to the value-free and power-free impressions that are objective. Value judgments do not require the repeated experiences that precede the recognition of causal connections. The connection need not be customary; it may be immediate. Nevertheless, value judgments are subject to change, indeed to improvement of a sort. It takes time, talent, a certain level of detachment, and experience to develop the personal traits required to apprehend values in publicly defensible ways that make the discourses of art and morals possible.21 To detect the goodness of an

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action requires wide experience or many first looks. General rules govern proper (publicly defensible) judgments whether of causality or taste, but the rules differ. The rules that govern judgments of value acknowledge that not all feelings of pleasure are equal. To judge properly requires traits that qualify the perceiver to serve as a standard of moral or aesthetic taste. In his essay “Of the Standard of Taste,” Hume describes the requirements for authoritative aesthetic judgments.22 An excellent judge has acquired the ability to make fine discriminations when listening to opera, tasting wine, or viewing a painting. The judge develops this power to discriminate through study and experience. A newcomer to an art form cannot judge well. This judge must be free of prejudices that distort perceptions. Education is key to our ability to enjoy works that cross historical and cultural divides. A person ignorant of another culture is poorly situated to appreciate their customs or art. The conditions under which art is experienced must be optimal; for example, it is difficult to appreciate a performance when one is ill. And perceptions are confirmed through repeated experience; the standard in one society should largely agree with the judgments received from tradition. The pleasure that marks the public recognition of value is felt by one who is educated, disciplined, calm, honest, and broad-minded. This cultivated awareness is the standard of beauty. If this observer takes pleasure in an artwork, its excellence is verified. Since the bottom line in this doctrine of taste is pleasure of certain sorts, Hume’s doctrine remains sentimentalist. Reasoning offers tools to arrive at the expert’s experience of pleasure; it can help prepare the surface, but the pleasure of the critic applies the paint. The ability to judge virtue requires a similar apprenticeship; fairness and perceptiveness are required. What is judged is a person’s character, so one must correctly uncover the motivations of individuals as expressed through their actions. As in the aesthetic case, a good judge of character develops through a formation process. Even a discerning judge cannot identify virtue at a glance since character is not revealed through one deed but only through a range of actions. A good judge, like the acute piano tuner, detects the presence of virtue by trusting his response. To judge another’s character, the good judge looks within to the pleasure or pain elicited by the pattern of the other’s actions. Hume observes: You never can find it, till you turn your reflexion into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towards this

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action. Here is a matter of fact; but ‘tis the object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself, not in the object.23

The pleasure taken by the judge in the company of the other is the measure of virtue. In each judgment—of causality, beauty, virtue—the standard for judging the external lies within us. Hume likens the operation of projecting values to attributing secondary qualities to objects.24 The doctrine of primary and secondary qualities, upheld by John Locke and other philosophers, distinguishes between the object’s primary properties such as size, shape, and number, which exist independently of perception, and the object’s secondary qualities such as color, taste, smell, and sound, which exist only relative to perception. According to Locke, secondary qualities result from the effects that primary properties have upon the perceiving subject. Hume, following Berkeley, may ultimately reject the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, but he retains the disjunction between objective and subjective. Nonetheless, Hume cites the distinction to illustrate how subjectivity no more undermines the reality of values in common life than it undermines the reality of colors and smells: Were I not afraid of appearing too philosophical, I should remind my reader of that famous doctrine, supposed to be fully proved in modern times, “that tastes and colors, and all other sensible qualities, lie not in the bodies, but merely in the senses.” The case is the same with beauty and deformity, virtue and vice. This doctrine, however, takes off no more from the reality of the latter qualities, than from that of the former … Tho’ colors were allowed to lie only in the eye, would dyers or painters ever be less regarded or esteemed?25

No one doubts that the sky is blue, even if physics shows colors to be relative to the presence of light and the character of the perceiver. The subjectivist analysis of color does not lessen its significance in our lives. Neither should anyone doubt that lying is a vice, even if wrongness is traced to the sentiments of the observer. But Hume see-saws between assuring us that the doctrine of the subjectivity of value leaves everything as it is and putting us on notice that life is but a game in which we unwittingly play along with “nature’s artifice” and invest with value things that have none of their own.26

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Barry Stroud’s Criticism of Projection Theory Hume’s account of projection raises questions of a phenomenological nature. Barry Stroud wonders how persons learn to feel causality if they do not first experience necessity in nature. Stroud reasons that persons could not feel powerless unless the idea of power already made sense. And where could that idea come from, since allegedly there is no experience of power? Ideas presuppose impressions, that is direct experiences. If external events are indeed contingent, necessity is not experienced there. Shifting from external to internal impressions does not turn up an impression of power either. In Hume’s telling, internal impressions are as devoid of necessary connections as are external impressions: minds are as powerless as billiard balls. From the succession of events to the succession of thoughts, all is contingent. The imagination supposedly constructs causal necessity from the feelings evoked by successions of events and of thoughts, but Hume is hard-pressed to know why we would ever conjure up such a connection if this idea were not already with us. Stroud spots a circle that the psychological mechanism of projection cannot accommodate. To “stain” objects with causal necessity, we borrow the content of the idea from feelings, such as our inability to stop events in motion. But this feeling presupposes the experience of being powerless; the idea of causal connection must already make sense. Presumably, we do not experience powerlessness unless we perceive the necessity we are forced to undergo. Stroud’s questions concerning the projection of causal necessity apply to values as well. Stroud asks just what Hume thinks that we are projecting onto (intrinsically indifferent) actions and character traits: “The question is how this ‘gilding or staining’ is supposed to work. What is involved in the mind’s ‘spreading’ itself on to external objects and ‘conjoining’ with them, or ‘transferring’ to them, something ‘borrowed’ from internal impressions or sentiments?”27 It would be odd to spread any feelings onto any object, notes Stroud: We presumably do not “borrow” the internal impression itself and ascribe it in thought to an external object . . . That is nonsense … It is not the internal impression itself that we ascribe to the external object. Rather, it seems that it should be what the impression is an impression of that we so predicate.28

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But, according to the projectivist, there is nothing belonging to the object for the feeling to be a feeling of. Indeed, Hume insists that there can be no such thing. Stroud is left, then, with the thought, “What is problematic is therefore to explain how we can have intelligible thoughts or perceptions which do not represent ‘any thing, that does or can belong’ to the way things ‘really stand in nature.’”29 In a clever attempt to explain value judgments, Hume makes the phenomenon to be explained disappear.

John Mackie’s Criticism of Objective Values John Mackie arrives at his destination—there are no objective values—by imagining what an objective value would be like if one did exist. Plato’s description of the forms strikes Mackie as the closest candidate. Forms exist independent of the mind. An objective value or moral fact would resemble the facts of nature that exist independently of people’s beliefs. Just as Galileo discovered four moons of Jupiter, so the wrongness of theft or assault would be discovered through some comparable capacity for moral seeing. Mackie’s test for objective values resembles Hume’s test for causality. Hume takes two perceptions, the blaze and the heat of the fire, and asks whether we perceive the causal necessity that links them. This necessity is not perceived, so Hume concludes that causality is purely subjective, a projection of our sentiments. Mackie’s test is similar. If objective values existed, they would be perceived directly. We would immediately perceive the wrongness of the insult with the insult. Mackie asks: What is the connection between the natural fact that an action is a piece of deliberate cruelty—say, causing pain just for fun—and the moral fact that it is wrong? … it is wrong because it is a piece of deliberate cruelty. But just what in the world is signified by this ‘because’? It is not … sufficient to postulate a faculty which ‘sees’ the wrongness; something must be postulated which can see at once the natural features that constitute the cruelty, and the wrongness, and the mysterious consequential link between the two.30

Like Hume, Mackie looks for a connection in immediate perceptions and does not find it. If the wrongness of cruelty were an objective value,

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then the link between “wrongness” and “cruelty” would be immediately perceived. But this connection is not perceived. Mackie concludes that values are not objective. There are no moral facts. If values were objective, moral deliberation would not be needed. A moral response would be immediate and free of probing; moreover, the sight of goodness would compel good action. In a universe that included moral facts, acting morally would be closer to carrying out logical consequences: when the gas gauge is on empty, one knows what to do. Deliberation, judgment, and decision would not be central to acting, but—Mackie insists—humans would still be recognizable. In his thought experiment, moral facts would not turn humans into robots but into assured actors who hesitate only if visibility is poor: An objective good would be sought by anyone who was acquainted with it, not because of any contingent fact that this person is so constituted that he desires this end, but just because the end has to-be-pursuedness somehow built into it.31

That some persons are good and others are not would suggest a defect in the latter’s powers of perception—like color blindness—since to see goodness suffices to seek it. The realm of moral weakness that Aristotle criticized Plato for ignoring would not exist. Mackie excludes akrasia. Good and bad, along with the moral imperatives “do it” or “don’t do it” would in a sense grow on trees. Objective values would not deny freedom so much as make willing irrelevant. If Platonic forms existed, they would be perceived by reason. We would no more decide to accept them than we decide that bowling balls are heavy at sea level. There would be as little need for individual or cultural perspectives on values as there are personal views on the temperature at which water boils. The thought experiment ends with this question: does this sound like your life? If values were objective, they would be this evident and exert this kind of force on us. But the world is not inhabited by invisible entities that require a special faculty of seeing. The experiment has been a reductio argument all along. Objective values, says Mackie, would be queer things. But these queer things are not found among the furniture of the world; they do not appear in petri dishes or under microscopes. Values fail Hume’s test of pure immediacy: they are not given to perception but rather represent our response to the world. Luckily, Mackie assures us, moral facts are not needed to establish order, certainty, and agreement

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concerning values. Though values are fabricated by humans—invented, not discovered—they have staying power. In lacking moral facts, we miss nothing of importance. One characteristic false move is to focus on judgments and ignore the concepts that make the judgment possible. Concepts supposedly are self-evident or stipulated; controversies concern judgments that connect concepts. Whether values are objective is vigorously debated, but little attention is paid to what “value” or “objective” means. Supposedly, everyone grasps basic concepts. Besides, if they required a defense, unconstrained analysis would fall into a regress; to avoid a regress, thinking must start with some given notions. Philosophy’s distinctions are so abstract that presumably there are no more basic terms from which to draw. When philosophy takes this path, the concepts crucial for our understanding go unexamined. Mackie stumbles into this pitfall. He puts together two concepts without attending to either one; his focus is on the awkward linkage between them. Of course, objective values are queer things or monsters: the incompatibility between objectivity and value is built into both concepts from the start. Mackie only uncovers what he presupposed; his reductio is a petitio (or question-begging). His thought experiment makes no discoveries but only repeats what he refuses to question. For Mackie, that values are subjective is the foundation of moral philosophy. Facts cleanly divide from values: the killing of a person constitutes a fact. That a murder took place is never a fact; that judgment reveals humans’ strong response to the killing. Thinkers like Mackie imagine an unbridgeable gulf between the subjective and the objective—values and facts. To find out what exists apart from humans as the “furniture of the world,” consult science. Whatever does not measure up to science’s standards of objectivity is invented. However great their importance, values remain our invention.

John McDowell on Values as Relational and Objective Discussion of the subjectivity of values is shaped by Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Locke addresses both common sense and philosophical inquiry with distinctions that acknowledge what appears and what underlies appearance. Unlike Descartes’ notion of matter as pure abstraction that is not perceivable, for Locke,

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both primary and secondary properties are perceivable.32 Primary qualities such as shape reveal realities independent of our perceptions, though resembling them. Mass exists independently of perception as inherent in material things. Secondary qualities such as colors and smells depend on perception and are strictly relative to the perceiver. In subjective value theory, values, like colors, are strictly relative to perception. John McDowell adds distinctions to object and subject that allow both values and colors to depend on perception and yet be objective. The revised distinctions expand the notion of objectivity to include both intrinsic and relational properties. Secondary properties differ essentially from objective properties; secondary properties are relational while objective properties are intrinsic. Primary properties are intrinsic in being inseparable from the object. Secondary properties are mediated by the subject and are mind-dependent. McDowell offers a compromise that expands the meaning of the objective to agree with common sense without challenging the terms of analysis that define purist philosophy. Objects are defined both by intrinsic qualities and dispositions that are inherently relational. Subjectivity and objectivity synchronize in this account: the subject’s capacity to perceive correlates with the object’s disposition to be seen. Subjective capacity parallels objective dispositions, the objective engages the subjective. Objectivity, then, involves having two purist notions—capacity and disposition—in synch. The distinction between capacity and disposition re-instantiates the dichotomy of subjective (capacity) and objective (disposition). Opposition to factoring philosophy, however, must reach all the way down. McDowell’s account recalls Locke’s, for whom an object’s dispositions are the powers to affect the perceiver. Adding disposition and capacity to objective and subjective, however, does not overcome the splitting of mind from world that Locke presupposes.

Thomas Nagel’s Defense of Objective Values Thomas Nagel quarrels with Mackie’s dismissal of objective values and argues that some values qualify as objective. For Nagel, pleasure and pain are objective values. Nagel is not alone in identifying these sensations as primary elements of moral existence. Pleasure and pain, it is said, are given immediately in experience; there is no delay, no awaiting discussion or analysis. They make Locke’s list of simple ideas. From Epicurus and Spinoza to J. S. Mill and hedonist economics, pleasure and pain anchor

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moral and political doctrines. These sensations seem essentially like facts of nature, such as shape or distance. They give reasons to act or judge. They are normative as facts. Unlike Hume, Nagel does not restrict objectivity to the purely immediate. He appeals to an understanding of objectivity that involves the view from nowhere. For Nagel, Mackie and others err by limiting objectivity, the “furniture of the world,” to the findings of science. Since science observes the stars, not anything called “values,” Mackie concludes that values are not objective. The remaining source for values is human inventiveness. What is not discovered must be fabricated. Nagel construes objectivity in science and morality in terms of judgment, not immediate perceptions. To get at reality, we take the backward step to judge the matter before us. Objectivity does not operate with a single standard where one size fits all. The methods of science are but one source of objectivity: Realism about the facts leads us to seek a detached point of view from which reality can be discerned and appearance corrected, and realism about values leads us to seek a detached point of view from which it will be possible to correct inclination and to discern what we really should do.33

Nagel tailors objectivity to the topic at hand to avoid begging the question simply by defining values as subjective. Claims concerning beliefs or values should be arrived at through a process of determining their status. A proper kind of distance secures objectivity or impartiality. Stepping back from our current beliefs to observe our situation puts beliefs to the test: are they justified to the disinterested, rational spectator? Over the right kind of distance, beliefs are seen as justified or not. Values are tested in a similar way. The backward step reveals whether an impartial observer removed from the scene could endorse my judgment. Will the observer confirm my evaluation or find it unacceptable? Do they count as values or mere appearances to this critic? Nagel observes that a backward step that goes too far ends up with the experience he calls the absurd, in which all justifications go slack. The backward step slips into free fall. Or stepping back too far leaves values to lose normativity and fade into factual descriptions. Achieving objectivity requires practical judgment concerning how one goes about evaluating the matter in question. Only take objectivity to the hilt if you do not mind the drop into the absurd. To understand a situation, do not be so objective that what

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you try to understand vanishes.34 Pleasure and pain must still matter to any observer who is to be able to see whether this pleasure or pain should count as a reason. After Nagel makes the case for objective values, describing an objective mindset as a view from nowhere is misleading. “Nowhere” suggests an absence of determinations, whereas objectivity requires proper determinations. The spectator must have the right vantage point, which means being somewhere, not nowhere. Likewise, linking objectivity to a particular view also misleads. The reasonable observer does not see values, as Mackie had insisted. Objectivity involves making the proper judgments from an appropriate distance. Objective values presuppose judgment in Nagel’s account. Good judgments attend to context and common knowledge. Not just any pleasure or pain counts as objective. From the start, Nagel excludes those pleasures arising from morally objectionable activities. The pleasures of sadism, gluttony, pornography, or deception are ineligible; to qualify as objective values, pleasure must arise from morally good or neutral sources. Pain alone—if there is any such thing—says nothing about wrongness. Doing what is right sometimes is painful. Simply linking pleasure to good and pain to bad is mindless for Nagel. One must consider the factors that enter into the situation. Judgment is unavoidable. Even identifying such obvious wrongs as genocide or torture involves two types of judgment: judgments involved in coming to the concepts and judgments that apply the concepts in a situation. Moreover, these two kinds of judgment are inseparable. To rest objective values on proper moral judgments seems to pull the rug out from under the claim that objective values exist. Objective values promised a way to anchor morality in the givenness of a world of facts independent of perceptions and judgments. But Nagel wisely recognizes that pleasure and pain per se carry no moral status; determining the moral character of actions requires judgments that recognize which pleasures are properly taken as objective values. Nagel is more philosophical than Mackie insofar as he digs into the meaning of basic concepts and does not focus exclusively on the linkage between them. By sounding out the meaning of objectivity as the judgment of an informed spectator, the very idea of an objective value is no longer such a queer thing. Nagel gets over one hurdle but not others. While pain and pleasure are judged by the standard of morally acceptable or neutral activities, they are described as objective values. That phrase perpetuates the notion of

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pleasure and pain as simply given in experience. Regarding pleasure and pain as values loses the context that judgment requires. If the pleasures of true friendship are values, then so are the other factors that make up true friendship. Nagel is stuck between rejecting and repeating false moves. He situates pleasure within the context of morally significant actions, then he separates pleasure from this context to emerge as an “objective value.” Nagel vacillates; he treats pleasure and pain both as givens and as relative to judgment.

Pleasures and the Myth of the Given Philosophers typically search for the ultimate and irreducible in analysis, such as the crux of normativity.35 As we have seen, this drive for what is simple or ultimate can foster false moves by pulling apart and treating as separable what exists together. Gripped by this aim, philosophy often fails to develop an adequate phenomenological account. With experience distorted, philosophy resorts to ad hoc moves to restore a semblance of reality, such as contrasting the essence of experience—the standpoint of analysis—with ordinary appearance. Ordinary appearance becomes the lesser reality. Instead of analysis acknowledging its dependence upon features of experience, it dictates those features. Not having paid proper phenomenological attention, analysis replaces the necessities of experience with its preconceived demands. False doubts arise when philosophy lacks adequate phenomenological grounds. Instead of questioning the mandate to secure the essence of normativity, philosophy questions reality or human capacities to know. False moves lead to false doubts. In moral analysis, there is a tradition of isolating pleasure from its objects and treating it as an independent factor. When pleasure is broken off from its context as the sole content, we forget that pleasure is an aspect of a complex phenomenon. Ordinarily, persons have no trouble recognizing how the pleasures of casual acquaintance differ from the fulfillments of true friendship. Pleasures are inherently distinctive and come in kinds, such as the pleasures of walking or work. Pleasure is not an independent variable or a fixed outcome producible through whatever means. The inseparability of pleasure from its intentional object can be characterized by its relational nature: the pleasures of autumn in New England, the pain of a sleep disorder. A phenomenologically astute analysis would no longer speak of Pleasure as the subject of ethics. Once

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pleasure is isolated from activity and its object, it becomes homogeneous “stuff” to maximize or minimize but has no further meaning. Activities are taken as means to the goal of satisfactions; no longer their own, they are not morally significant in themselves. A hedonic calculus squelches the particularity of pleasures and disregards the paths to their enjoyment. Isolating pleasure from its object to serve as the ultimate ethical unit implies that values are subjective.

Reviving the Discourse of Goods To assert that values are purely subjective keeps philosophy from acknowledging basic features of the world and fosters a climate of skepticism about personal morality and public purpose. This assertion sounds as if it advances a bold claim, but, until the notion of subjectivity is developed, it says little. If values are subjective because they are not immediately perceivable, then all knowledge is subjective. No knowledge comes to us directly. Moral values are subjective in as much as they concern the actions, judgments, aspirations, and practices of subjects. Values are not subjective in being cut off from the world and cloistered in a separable realm of feeling. Values are not purely subjective. Moral judgments do not differ in kind from other judgments. Like scientific accounts, political analysis, economic forecasts, and artistic productions, they disclose features of the world. Personal and cultural dimensions figure into moral judgments more deeply than with other forms of knowledge. These differences are complex and overlapping, involving multiple determinations within the fundamental structures of human existence. Identifying values with sheer subjectivity quashes this differentiated understanding. Donald Davidson argues that sheer subjectivity makes values unintelligible, incommensurable.36 To hold values apart from facts as opposites obscures the similarities and the real differences between types of knowledge and judgments. Beneath the assertion of the subjectivity of values lie entrenched dualisms, such as the purist splits between subjectivity and objectivity, the invented and the discovered. These splits set the course for analysis and lay the foundation of much philosophy. They are recurrent sources of false doubts. To move beyond empty claims about values, we can examine specific goods. In comparing the pleasures of casual acquaintance with the satisfactions of deep friendship, we employ concepts that distinguish types of friendship. These concepts already interpret and measure the

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phenomena. In an incipient way, evaluation begins with the concepts that tell us what happens. Good moral philosophy calls for good concepts. Good moral concepts are worldly ones—as Davidson puts it: “values are rooted to things.”37 A false phenomenology splits apart facts and values: the world, supposedly value-neutral, awaits human reason or feeling to coat indifferent events with moral shine. But that phenomenology is false which insists on separating what cannot be disentangled. Contrasting discovery with invention fails if the presence of human activity is said to make the difference, since discovery and invention are both activities. What matters is whether the activity is appropriate, not whether activity occurs. We do not step out into an unmeasured world with our human inventions. Morality does not invent measures since nature is already within the realm of measure. We cannot cut measure out of concepts such as friendship to get to bare facts. The presumed indifference of the world is at odds with the very existence of world; things exist as differentiated. Our legal system holds that there are crimes and that their occurrence may be determined beyond any reasonable doubt. We make no headway in understanding science or morality by trying to imagine a world minus human existence. Frank Farrell observes: The world must already be there, with its own well-developed contours, as a condition for counting speech as meaningful, as more than a stream of noise. Even an assignment of interests to a speaker, in order to get hold of the basis of his intentional life, will be plausible only if we assign him the interests that someone would have in that particular world, given its prominent shapes and boundaries that we can use in making sense of his discriminations.38

We do not have to search for the essence of normativity if norms of one type or another are pervasive. To say what something is involves norms. Distinguishing the non-moral from the moral is unnecessary since persons do not pass in and out of moral contexts like traveling through time zones or countries. Moral inquiry works from the events of this world as already understood to varying degrees. It addresses actions, motivations, character, decisions, principles, and judgments. Values do not inhabit a separate dimension as entities of an entirely unique nature. Davidson says the questions are never “where do we find values? Are they in the mind

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or out in the world? ”39 The world is morally fraught. Values inhabit all endeavors. If values are not purely subjective, why speak of values in the moral context at all? Value is usually typecast as opposite to fact. This role is difficult to shed and fosters other misleading distinctions. For example, philosophers identify values as subjective, in one sense, but universal or objective, in another sense. We would do better to speak of goods rather than values. A value sounds like something that is the product of our valuing, which is imagined to be purely subjective. The notion of goods does not immediately suggest the split between being in the mind or in the world. Goods are worldly, relational—goods of , goods for—values are created by pure subjects.40 We think of the goods of health, work, family, environment, or democracy. Hearing “values” trains us to stop and not raise further questions. “Value” easily substitutes for opinion, turning back into the pure subject, while “good” moves in the world without losing its involvement with subjectivity. Davidson argues that truth applies to both descriptive and prescriptive judgments. “What makes our judgments of the ‘descriptive’ properties of things true or false is the fact that the same properties tend to cause the same beliefs in different observers, and when observers differ, we assume there is an explanation … My thesis is that the same holds for moral values.”41 Reviving the discourse of truth and the discourse of goods are related tasks in philosophy. It is the purist opposition of subjective and objective that hinders understanding. Our appreciation of human subjectivity improves when the concept is released from this entrenched dualism. Two goods are compared by referring to specific aspects of actions or events. How moral judgments are supported or improved takes us into the world in multiple ways. Moral reasoning is worldly. The subjectivity of values is not only an untenable claim; it burdens debate with false doubt and hinders our attention to the issues arising in our lives. Discarding the stock assertion about the subjectivity of values frees us to attend to real problems and uncertainties. Pervasive doubts, such as the worry that all our values are strictly subjective, deplete our resources. Consider how medicine would be impaired by an underlying conviction that all diagnoses are purely subjective. Contra Kant, it is often the case that duties are not simple. By retiring the notion of values, more energy is available for difficult judgments. Instead of getting hung up on the supposed subjectivity of values, we can focus on the matter at hand, to know and do what is good.

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Notes 1. “But in order to pave the way for such a sentiment, and give a proper discernment of its object, it is often necessary, we find, that much reasoning should precede, that nice distinctions be made, just conclusions drawn, distant comparisons formed, complicated relations examined, and general facts fixed and ascertained.” David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Enquiry Concerning Morals ), in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd ed., ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 294. “Proper discernment of its object” does not have the ordinary meaning: “proper discernment” is not proper by virtue of identifying the value of the object. 2. Hume, Enquiry Concerning Morals, 173. Hume uses “colours” metaphorically here, but in “The Sceptic” he compares values to colors and other secondary qualities (Hume, “The Skeptic,” 166, n.3). David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985). The image of a “new creation” comes from St. Paul, who speaks of “a new creation” in 2 Corinthians 3:1–6:2 and Galatians 5:1–6:18. 3. Hume writes of a “partition” between the two, “This partition between the faculties of understanding and sentiment, in all moral decisions, seems clear from the preceding hypothesis.” Hume, Enquiry Concerning Morals, 286. 4. Martin Heidegger’s account of “being-in-the-world” in Being and Time turns the tables on subjectivism in just this way: “The kind of being of these beings [ordinary useful objects] is ‘handiness’ (Zuhandenheit ). But it must not be understood as a mere characteristic of interpretation, as if such ‘aspects’ were discursively forced upon ‘being’ which we initially encounter, as if an initially objectively present world-stuff were ‘subjectively colored’ in this way . . . Handiness is the ontological categorial definition of beings as they are ‘in themselves.’” Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, revised trans. Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010), 71. 5. Consider Heidegger’s reply to Kant’s contention that, with his “refutation of idealism” in the Critique of Pure Reason, he had finally put an end to the “scandal” that philosophy had previously failed to demonstrate the existence of the external world. Heidegger smartly answered that the only “scandal” was the belief that any demonstration was called for (Heidegger, Being and Time, 195–97). 6. The situation with regard to goodness is just as Donald Davidson portrays it with regard to truth: “In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but re-establish unmediated touch with the

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familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false.” Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 198. Hume, “The Sceptic,” 166, n.3. Ibid. Hume, “The Sceptic,” 162. Here is a good example of how Hume employs a commonsense judgment, that lovers and parents gush over their loved ones, to reach a purist conclusion starkly at odds with common sense. It is not common sense to believe that someone else’s beloved or baby is utterly without value. Hume, “The Sceptic,” 164. Hume, “The Sceptic,” 166. Ibid., 165. “Beauty, whether moral or natural, is felt, more properly than perceived. Or if we reason concerning it, and endeavour to fix its standard, we regard a new fact, to wit, the general taste of mankind, or some such fact, which may be the object of reasoning and enquiry” (Hume, Enquiry Concerning Morals, 165). Beauty, it seems, is not about beautiful things; it is all about us. Hume proclaims, “if ever there was any thing, which cou’d be call’d natural in this sense, the sentiments of morality certainly may; since there never was any nation of the world, nor any single person in any nation, who was utterly depriv’d of them, and who never, in any instance, shew’d the least approbation or dislike of manners. These sentiments are so rooted in our constitution and temper, that without entirely confounding the human mind by disease or madness, ‘tis impossible to extirpate and destroy them” (Hume, Treatise, 474). David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed., ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge; rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). See also Enquiry Concerning Morals, 169–70. By contrast with Hume, P. F. Strawson and Barry Stroud agree that morality is in our make-up, but neither holds a dogmatic position that all moral judgments are nothing but affective responses to a morally indifferent world. Since these feelings count as beliefs for Hume, if beliefs are propositional attitudes, e.g., I affirm that the rock broke the window, then these feelings must be complex enough to have propositional content. The situation for value judgments parallels this: “We do not infer a character to be virtuous, because it pleases: But in feeling that it pleases after such a particular manner, we in effect feel that it is virtuous. The case is the same as in our judgments concerning all kinds of beauty, and tastes, and sensations. Our approbation is imply’d in the immediate pleasure they convey us” (Hume, Treatise, 471). To “feel that it [a certain character] is virtuous” is to take a

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25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

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propositional attitude and thus to attribute propositional content to such a feeling. It is not clear that such claims cohere either with the insistence that such feelings are completely independent of the objects they judge or with Hume’s splitting sentiments off from reason. Hume, Enquiry Concerning Morals, 294. Hume repudiates the JudeoChristian notion of the created world as good. Hume, Treatise, 167. Ibid., 466. Hume, “The Sceptic,” 171. See Hume’s, Enquiry Concerning Morals, 228. David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, 227–49. Hume, Treatise, 468–69. Other writers follow Hume in drawing this comparison, though not all draw the same conclusions. As we will see below, John McDowell compares values to secondary qualities but defends a kind of objectivity for both. See John McDowell, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” in Morality and Objectivity, ed. Ted Honderich (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985). “The Sceptic,” 166, n. 3. See also Hume’s Treatise, 469. Hume appeals to “nature’s artifice” in “The Sceptic,” 176. Stroud, “Gilding and Staining,” 260. Barry Stroud, “‘Gilding and Staining’ the World with ‘Sentiments’ and ‘Phantasms’,” Hume Studies 19, no. 2 (1993): 253–72. Ibid., 260–61. Ibid., 268. John Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1977), 41. Ibid., 40. According to Descartes in his second meditation, we know the primary qualities of a physical object, say a bit of wax, solely through an act of the understanding; sense and imagination can play no role. See René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, 4th ed., trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), 67–69. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 140. Hume advised, “Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man” (Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 9). Hume locates the crux of normativity in human sentiments. Christine Korsgaard reaches a sharply different conclusion in The Sources of Normativity. Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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36. Our criticism of purely subjective values agrees with Donald Davidson’s. He makes the case for replacing “values” (purely subjective) with “goods” (objective). Donald Davidson, “The Objectivity of Values,” in Problems of Rationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 39–57. 37. Ibid., 52. 38. Frank B. Farrell, Subjectivity, Realism and Postmodernism: The Recovery of the World in Recent Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 78. 39. See the critique of Mackie in Donald Davidson, Problems of Rationality, 47. 40. An aspect of the worldliness of goods that Heidegger notes is the networking of goods: “Strictly speaking, there ‘is’ no such thing as a useful thing. There always belongs to the being of a useful thing a totality of useful things in which this useful thing can be what it is” (Heidegger, Being and Time, #15, 68). 41. Davidson, Problems of Rationality, 47.

References Davidson, Donald. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. ———. Problems of Rationality. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Descartes, René. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. 4th ed. Translated by Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998. Farrell, Frank B. Subjectivity, Realism and Postmodernism: The Recovery of the World in Recent Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised translation by Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. 2nd ed. Edited by L. A. SelbyBigge; revised by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. ———. Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. 3rd ed. Edited by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. ———. Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary. Edited by Eugene F. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985. Korsgaard, Christine. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Mackie, J. L. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.

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McDowell, John. “Values and Secondary Qualities.” In Morality and Objectivity, edited by Ted Honderich. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985. Stroud, Barry. “‘Gilding and Staining’ the World with ‘Sentiments’ and ‘Phantasms.’” Hume Studies 19, no. 2 (Nov. 1993): 253–72.

CHAPTER 9

Setting Aside the Purely Subjective: Reclaiming the Discourse of Truth and Error

Doubting is as fundamental to human existence as believing, and it takes many forms. In the Socratic dialogues, recognizing one’s ignorance marks a turning point. Being able to admit “I don’t know” separates the souls that turn toward the light from Plato’s cave-dwellers. Even for those who are skeptical about Plato’s eternal truths, persistent questions serve to motivate inquiry. Doubting is integral to the enlargement of knowledge. One who refuses to doubt does not learn. Such persons abandon the reasonable life and move toward dogmatism or worse. In his essay “What is Enlightenment?” Kant links doubt to maturity.1 Sapere Aude! Dare to think! An authentic thinker is ready to question authority on intelligent grounds. Obedience that arises from understanding—not fear or conformity—is the obedience that is worthy of humans. For John Stuart Mill, a society that safeguards individual liberty fosters experiments with ideas and ways of life that may revive or improve on current beliefs or practices.2 Innovation presupposes a kind of doubt. Readiness to doubt encourages creativity, personal fulfillment, and social progress. Capitalism’s commercial way of organizing society spurs reappraisals and change. “Tear it down and build something new” is capital’s counterpart to “nothing is sacred.” Different types of doubt acknowledge different aspects of human existence. Doubts are often motivating and

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constructive, attuned to human possibilities and their limits. Any proposal to free humans from doubts is misbegotten.

Two Forms of Doubt Not all doubts have the same character. One goal of this book is to distinguish what we call real doubts from false ones. Real doubts are local while false doubts are global. Real doubts emerge from specific endeavors; for example, citizens question whether the city should subsidize a new sports arena. Local doubts require that surrounding beliefs are established, such as the cost of the subsidy, the city’s financial condition, terms for bonds, etc. In On Certainty, Ludwig Wittgenstein argues that doubts presuppose background certainties.3 Specific doubts emerge against relative certainties. False doubts emerge from skewed analysis and can lodge deep or flutter through us as the futility of even great achievements. Descartes, in the First Meditation, is the master of global doubt. He asks unsettling questions: are we certain that we are not dreaming—or mad?4 Is it possible that God deceives us? Since we sometimes err when a belief seemed certain, is it possible that we are erring now, or even all the time? Other provocative questions ask whether our actions are determined by factors beyond our awareness. Are humans free? Am I the same person today as yesterday? Does belief in a continuous and stable personal identity lack justification? Are values projected onto objects and events? Is color a property of the world or an artifact of consciousness? Are daffodils yellow? Such questions are sweeping and speculative. Without adequate responses grounded in self-reflection, skepticism results. We may wonder whether humans are essentially removed from how things really are. If our body, senses, mind, culture, institutions, and language—basic features of human existence—interfere with knowledge, then knowledge will never reach its goal of grasping the world. Our best efforts will remain captive to how things appear to us, not how things are in themselves. For this skeptic, what counts as objective is qualified as true for us. If some forms of knowledge can transcend their human origins—and take the god’s eye view—access to reality is restored. This latter defense of knowledge as purely objective, undertaken by thinkers from Descartes to Thomas Nagel, provokes doubts of its own.

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Skepticism Departs from Ordinary Discourse Both skeptics and defenders of reason may subscribe to a picture of reality that separates subjectivity from objectivity. This dualism is depicted in various ways: mind vs. world, subject vs. object, inner vs. outer, concept vs. object, mind-dependent vs. mind-independent, active vs. passive. In positing mind and world as separable, philosophy borrows distinctions from ordinary discourse, where their use does not provoke perplexity. In ordinary discourse, distinguishing subjective from objective poses few problems. It is rare to waver over whether human consciousness can represent things in the world.5 Subjective and objective are not bad coins. They are integral to understanding the world. Confusion ensues when ordinary distinctions morph into rigid oppositions. It is reasonable to identify two aspects of knowledge: the conceptual and the experiential. Some questions are sparked by experience and others from examining concepts. From new observations and further reflection come hypotheses and inquiry. Troubles arise when observations and concepts mutate into the exclusive disjunction of the purely objective and purely subjective. Two aspects of knowledge are now treated as two sources of knowledge. “Two sources” suggests a separation of inside (concepts) from outside (objects observed) that knowledge subsequently combines. William James insists that the two ingredients of knowledge— the conceptual and the experiential—cannot be pulled apart any more than we can separate a river from its banks.6 We cannot have one without the other. The river can be distinguished from its banks, but they are not separable. Likewise, concepts can be distinguished from objects, but they are not separable. Concepts are not combined with observations, as if it made sense to think in terms of the purely conceptual and the purely empirical. Concepts always have objects, just as experience always involves forms of thought. Prior phenomenological commitments structure how the problems of philosophy can be approached. As original understanding, phenomenology opens or closes possibilities of inquiry. Flawed phenomenology posits the purely subjective, which has nothing of the objective about it. The purely subjective is a worldless consciousness. The purely objective is a world utterly independent of consciousness. The flawed phenomenology that splits the subjective from the objective produces stalemates. These claims of purity take precedence over the phenomenologically warranted claim that humans exist in the world.

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The move to split subjective from objective sets the stage for deadlocked analyses. Pure subjectivity—not subjectivity—is a myth. Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, and Davidson reach this conclusion in various ways. What is called subjective or mental—sensation, thoughts, concepts, feelings, language—belong to persons existing in the world. Every thought and feeling reveals the world. Pure opposition between the objective and the subjective sounds plausible initially. It evokes a strand of ordinary discourse, where objective signifies true and subjective signifies false. To be objective, we exclude interested parties and weigh the evidence carefully to determine whether the claim is true. Being subjective is being biased; it interferes with being objective. But pure opposition breaks off this connection to ordinary usage. The demand for purity holds knowledge hostage to the impossible. What could purely objective mean? Such a thing could not be put into words, since language, like all other aspects of human existence, is a mode of our engaged being-in-the-world. Knowledge is a human achievement; humans do not disappear into the search for knowledge. When analysis lacks proper phenomenological grounds, false doubts result. Purist categories are sinkholes into which ordinary and useful distinctions disappear. Global and local doubts do not inhabit separate quarters. Local questions become less urgent when global doubt casts a net over our lives. We cannot escape being human. Believing ourselves to be ensnared has implications for how we undertake specific inquiries and experiences. The worry that we might be wrong about everything erodes the responsibility to determine whether any claim is correct or even matters. Why go to the bother? Humans are fallible. As prone to error, we reasonably expect that some current beliefs will eventually prove false. Truth is established thanks to the context of human existence, not despite it. Proper humility acknowledges that knowledge generally will improve over time. But improved understanding does not satisfy global doubt, since it objects to structures of human existence, such as perception, perspective, language, culture, and even time. These structures do not go away. That knowledge improves over time only hardens global doubt’s conviction that truth lies out of our reach. If we were capable of ascertaining truth, the skeptic supposes, we would grasp truth immediately and these certainties would

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not change. The fact that knowledge advances—even has reversals—is a scandal to the global doubter and quashes all confidence in our beliefs. Such skepticism sounds cautious, but misgivings over the human plight make genuine humility superfluous. Real doubts arise from the specific matter at hand. False doubts are indifferent to specific puzzles; global skepticism cannot get past its discontent with human existence, its conviction that our existence is an impassible roadblock. That thinkers are human—not godly—is the sticking point.

The Corrosive Effects of Global Doubt Global doubt cannot be dismissed as intellectual diversion. Global doubt carries consequences for ordinary life. Uneasiness settles in when what is demanded—knowledge of the world—seems impossible to achieve. Skepticism hangs over human endeavors like a cloud that neither moves nor rains. A pervasive mood, it saps public purpose. Global doubt fosters double vision and promotes irony.7 We are led by skepticism to view our lives in conflicting ways. On one level, the world and our actions proceed in customary ways, while on another level, doubt dissolves customs and beliefs. Wherever we find ourselves, the other context serves as an ironic reminder of what presently escapes us. Skeptical arguments often employ a binary logic, for example, positing values as either purely subjective or purely objective—and then judging them to be purely subjective. But we live by values and can exist in no other way.8 What lacks objective reality is conceded subjective necessity. Such is Hume’s “skeptical solution to skepticism.” Skeptical conclusions reached on the theoretical level are bracketed when faced with the demands of living. Because we cannot end the standoff, each option remains viable. As Hume’s character from the Dialogues notes, people will leave the room by the door rather than through the window, regardless of any skeptical qualms concerning gravity. Our customary actions continue in the face of doubt. Sticking to the binary rules out mediation or inseparability. Since mediation between the subject and object is ruled out, irony results. This mindset acknowledges two irreconcilable dimensions of existence—thinking and living—from its imaginary perch outside them both. Stuck with a stalemate, the skeptic shrugs and shifts from one side to the other as disposed.

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The Original Bifurcation If oscillation is taken as inevitable, skepticism may signify a sign of integrity: being willing to face a fractured reality. We disagree that the flip-flop is inevitable. This double vision stems from the presupposition that what is subjective is purely subjective. The presumption of purity is the stumbling block. Purity characterizes various bifurcations. The original bifurcation and source of others is the disjunction between mind and world, the purely subjective and purely objective. Rationalism, empiricism, and Kant’s critical philosophy all presuppose a purist split between subjective and objective. This bifurcation is catchy and begets others. We are familiar with divisions between active and passive, internal and external. Kant divides pure concepts from perceptions: what is purely given in sensation is formed by the purely subjective a priori space and time, and by the mind’s purely subjective categories. For Kant, pure subjectivity alone makes necessity possible a priori. Like Kant, C. I. Lewis draws a sharp distinction between the a priori and the empirical components of experience and insists that both play a necessary role in cognition. Lewis parts with Kant in allowing the a priori component to change, though strangely not because of new empirical promptings: Mind contributes to experience the element of order, of classification, categories, and definition. Without such, experience would be unintelligible. Our knowledge of the validity of these is simply consciousness of our own fundamental ways of acting and our own intellectual intent. Without this element, knowledge is impossible, and it is here that whatever truths are necessary and independent of experience must be found. But the commerce between our categorial ways of acting, our pragmatic interests, and the particular character of experience, is closer than we have realized. No explanation of any one of these can be complete without consideration of the other two.9

Willard Van Ormand Quine, Lewis’s student, cautions us against the lure of factoring the linguistic from the empirical aspects of statements: It is obvious that truth in general depends on both language and extralinguistic fact … thus one is tempted to suppose in general that the truth of a statement is somehow analyzable into a linguistic component and a factual component. Given this supposition, it next seems reasonable that

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in some statements the factual component should be null; and these are the analytic statements. But, for all its a priori reasonableness, a boundary between analytic and synthetic statements simply has not been drawn. That there is such a distinction to be drawn at all is an unempirical dogma of empiricists.10

In the final paragraph of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Quine claims to arrive at a more thorough pragmatism. But why should it seem reasonable a priori that the linguistic and the factual “components” should be separable? The notion that the default position is that what is distinguishable is separable derives from the failure to recognize the inseparability of analysis and phenomenology. Donald Davidson found that Quine, his teacher, did not go far enough in freeing philosophy from the factoring impulse, since he left us with a dualism of conceptual scheme and the “continuing barrage of sensory stimulation” (or “cues”), a dualism that Davidson diagnosed as the third dogma of empiricism.11 From Davidson’s abandonment of the whole project of factoring out the subjective from the objective components of experience and knowledge, Richard Rorty concludes that it is us all the way down: there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions.12

We share Frank Farrell’s view that Davidson is all about “recovering the world,” so we believe that Rorty is mistaken about the consequences of Davidson’s rejection of the third dogma of empiricism.13 Superimposed on the original bifurcation between mind and world is the effort to pry form from content. Arriving at pure form and pure content is the holy grail of unchecked analysis. But splitting form from content conflicts with a basic phenomenological feature of human existence: it is impossible to organize what lacks structure. It may sound odd, but we can only organize what already has some order. Form can be imposed only on what is already formed in some way. Pure content is a surd; it cannot be grasped or ordered. C. I. Lewis’s picture of mind ordering a world that is unintelligible is wrong-headed.

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Donald Davidson makes this point with the homey example of the closet. Davidson’s closet represents the world or the sensible manifold. Our task is to organize what is given in the world or in sensation. A closet can be organized only because it contains shoes, shirts, pants, dresses, and hangers. These kinds of things have uses that allow them to be organized or further determined. If a closet contained unformed content or stuff, it could never be organized. How would you tell if you had organized it or not? Certainly, the order of things can be misperceived; the moon is roughly spherical, but it was a misperception to see it as a perfect sphere. But what lacks all determination could not begin to be organized; it cannot be thought or imagined. That is the proper phenomenological lesson. Splitting form from content replays the dream of a pristine sensation or first encounter between mind and world. This misbegotten brainchild is what is meant by the myth of the given.14 If we try to split subjective from objective or form from content, we lose both the world and the self. That is the point of the present chapter. We call these bifurcations false moves. They do not check out with experience. As false, they lack existential integrity. Basic features of human existence are sacrificed to the demands of unconstrained analysis. In reconsidering these demands, we relearn how to distinguish subjective from objective without positing a dualism. The skeptic’s double vision can be replaced by fallible human vision appropriate to the matter at hand. Getting past the purist split between subjectivity and objectivity makes intellectual and existential integrity possible.

Mind and World as Separable The distinction between objective and subjective has various meanings: subjective could signify human activity or a purely internal origin. For the most part, the picture of reality drawn by thinkers in the modern era treats mind as separable from its objects. Subjective for the moderns signifies internal, mental. Descartes’ philosophy offers the model of unconstrained analysis when it moves from distinguishing subjective activity from the human body to claim that subjectivity is separable from the body and world.15 If subjectivity is pure, then world lies outside mind. This dualism unites philosophies that diverge in other respects. It shapes doctrines labeled rationalist, empiricist, and critical. It supplies the default framework for various inquiries. Subjective comes to mean “what is added by the subject”—epistemic value-added—and objective comes to mean

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“existing apart from the subject.” When judgments about what is good or beautiful are factored, moral and aesthetic values are judged to be purely subjective. These judgments are said to be projections onto a world bereft of value. Typically, what is in itself , or objective, is contrasted with what is for us, or subjective. If the mind’s activity can be factored out from its object, then it makes sense to isolate what is purely subjective and purely objective to get at the truth or, like Kant, to understand why the thing-in-itself eludes us. Parts are often separable from their objects. Aspects are not separable from objects. I can remove a wheel from my car and put it in the garage; I cannot do that for the color of my car. The assumed separability of mind and world assigns to philosophy the task of identifying what mind contributes to knowledge or experience. It is the original bifurcation, the precedent for converting other distinctions into separable and independent elements. To repeat, the distinction between subjective and objective is not suspect. Troubles arise when useful distinctions are drafted into analysis unconstrained by cogent phenomenology. Our obvious ability to focus on persons while ignoring their surroundings is not evidence that mind is separable from world. Persons and objects in their surroundings can exist separately. This ordinary separation can become the template for the purely subjective and objective. At the close of the Second Meditation, Descartes compares the bit of wax’s purely subjective secondary qualities—color, smell, taste—to clothes worn by the wax itself, the purely objective primary qualities of extension and shape.16 Clothes are separable. George Berkeley, intending a phenomenological correction, argues that primary and secondary qualities are inseparable. Doubts should arise once a distinction is taken as purist. Everyday contrasts such as subjective and objective can camouflage unconstrained analysis. The subjective of ordinary discourse is not the purely subjective of purist analysis. Unconstrained analysis designates mind as the seat of mental activities, a sanctum hovering outside the world. How mind recovers the world becomes a quandary. Once we posit subjectivity as pure, actual problems to be addressed turn into irresolvable dilemmas to be endured and worked around. The notion of the purely subjective puts philosophy on the track that leads to skeptical conclusions. In positing the separation of mind and world, unchecked analysis faces an enigmatic task in determining how knowledge is achieved. How to understand objectivity becomes the challenge. Understanding subjectivity is seldom a topic. Subjectivity posited as pure remains in the background,

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framing the analysis but not addressed by it. A few, like Davidson, argue that pure subjectivity is a myth.17 Davidson’s route is largely ignored. Once distinctions get polarized, to deny pure subjectivity seems to erase subjectivity. This fear is based on the dogma that if it was not for pure subjectivity, we would have no subjectivity at all. That polarized view, represented by Thomas Nagel, puts mind and world in stark opposition. Because a purist split underpins the notion of subjectivity, a complementary purity of the objective results. The purely objective is diametrically opposed to the subjective, but both insist on purity. For Hume, sensing epitomizes the direct encounter of mind with the world. As an act, sensing maximizes receptiveness. What is most objective is the given impression. Nagel takes the opposite view. For Nagel, the act of sensing epitomizes the purely subjective since no theory adequately explains sensing. The perception of blue or sweet is grasped uniquely from within by the one who senses. Moreover, our sensations depend on the peculiar character of our human sensory capacities. The human stain is all over sensation. Curiously, the same act—immediate sensation—is described as purely objective by Hume and purely subjective by Nagel. Nagel takes the side of the rationalists, Hume that of the empiricists. The demands of purity are at odds with experience, so the content lacks determination and is designated in arbitrary ways. Since one empty notion resembles another, the purely subjective easily flip-flops into the purely objective. Purist analysis means to shear off the subjective from the objective, as if to gauge the value added by the knower. Positing subjectivity as pure, preemptively assumes their separability. False doubts arise from various kinds of purist analyses. Within the empiricist version of false philosophy, the objective and subjective are inversely related: subjectivity must shrink to make room for objectivity. What is most objective thus coincides with what is least subjective; in this confrontation, the subjective is identified as false. As Ivan Karamazov expresses the supposed conundrum in The Brothers Karamazov, “If I try to understand anything, I shall be false to the fact.”18 So, try not to think. The possibility that is overlooked or discounted is that forms of subjectivity and objectivity are inseparable. Moreover, this inseparability enables knowledge rather than making it impossible. The anti-purist mindset asks which activities of knowers allow for determining what is objective. This makes thinking—and real doubts—conceivable.

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Three Strategies for the Purely Subjective to Grasp Its Object When saddled with an external relation between mind and world, philosophy invents strategies to address the divide. Since persons cannot step outside mind, the task is to identify which mental activities have access to the objective. Mind itself signifies pure subjectivity, so philosophy seeks those resources inherent in pure subjectivity for grasping the objective and acquiring knowledge. The purely subjective is the unexamined starting point. A few strategies emerge for attaining objectivity in philosophy. Three familiar approaches characterize rationalism, empiricism, and Kant’s critical philosophy.19 Each strategy puts truth beyond our reach. The current of philosophy identified as rationalism looks to the power inherent in reason to uncover reality. In his Proslogion, Anselm reasons from the notion of infinite perfection to God’s existence, asserting the power of reasoning independent of experience to uncover objective truths.20 In his Third Meditation, Descartes identifies the innate idea that possesses so much perfection (“objective reality”) or rational content that it could not be caused by his mind. This idea of infinite perfection is found in my mind but cannot arise from it; the power of innate rationality proves itself able to know objective reality.21 This rationalist ground for grasping the essence of objectivity presupposes the dichotomy of reasoning and sensing. Furthermore, the premise of innate ideas is difficult for many moderns to accept. At the outset of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding , John Locke assailed the belief in innate ideas. Empiricism is initially more persuasive. For Hume, pure immediacy describes an ideal of objectivity that we call the first look. According to this ideal—identified with empiricism—sense experience occurs immediately, without any thinking or direction from the one who senses—a kind of epistemic immaculate conception. No resistance occurs to impede the subject’s receptivity. As clear and complete, a sensation brings the world into the mind like a new penny dropped into a piggy bank.22 We cannot make of the world what we want; Hume holds that in sensation we meet reality exclusively on its terms. Sensing—the first encounter between consciousness and world—reveals reality unedited and undistorted. Because sensations are clear and distinct, they—impressions, as opposed to their copies, ideas—can inform and correct thinking. In Hume’s account of objectivity, sensations anchor empirical knowledge.

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Sensing is the subjective activity—or, rather, passivity—in which the purely objective or immediately given presents itself. The empirical elements of knowledge consist of this veridical data. Trouble arises for empiricism when the necessity and universality required for knowledge are not to be found among the given data. Immediate sensations are considered most objective, precisely because they are the least subjective. But sensations are fleeting. Necessity is required for knowledge. We see a leaf fall, but we judge that the leaf must fall. The necessity missing from sensations, then, must be contributed by the subject. To account for judgments of necessity, feelings that come with customary expectations are projected onto patterns of sensations. But the objectivity identified with the first look is gone. With the inevitable involvement of mind, out goes the empiricist’s aspiration to objectivity. Because Hume presupposes the separation of mind from world, he can assign the exact origin of necessity. If necessity were present in sensations, figures Hume, it would be present at the first look. But pure immediacy— the first look—reveals no necessity. Sensations just occur. The cue stick hits the billiard ball that moves across the table and the balls in its path scatter. Hume asks: do we see power in the ball that causes others to move? Causality involves necessity. To see the causal connection would constitute knowledge. But we do not observe this power on the first or the tenth look. If necessity does not appear in the sequence of sensed moments, yet necessity is required for knowledge, where is it found? Hume traces the necessity absent from sensing to the mind. After repeatedly observing the same sequence, the mind alters and acquires feelings that were not present at the first look. The new feeling is an irresistible expectation: the mind expects the sequence to recur. This expectation is wholly subjective in origin; it arises from the mind alone. Hume calls this sentiment, custom, and he traces judgments of causality to the customs of mind. This skeptical conclusion stems from the initial false move of separating mind from world. What constitutes knowledge is rooted in human nature, which means that knowledge formulates what is true for us. What is purely objective and not relative to human nature is the first look. Like Tantalus’s curse, knowledge is always beyond our reach. Endless frustration is our epistemic fate. Hume appeals to human nature, specifically to feelings aroused by customary connections, to locate the source of the necessity in knowledge. Kant faces a similar crisis concerning necessity. Like Hume, he subscribes to the dogma that we cannot get necessity from experience,

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but he seeks a resolution in the notion of two distinct sources of knowledge, concepts and percepts. The transcendental activities or syntheses of the subject’s pure intuition and pure understanding make objectivity possible. For Kant, mind contributes forms of necessity, while the world contributes content or sensible intuitions. The synthesis of concepts and percepts in subjective activity—form and matter—makes knowledge of universality and necessity possible. Kant acknowledges that the subjective and objective sources always go together in knowing: “thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.” But intuitions and concepts can be factored out.23 This is a pithy criticism of rationalists and empiricists. However, tracing concepts to the transcendental understanding and perceptions to sensible intuition epitomizes the purist philosopher’s urge to factor. Hegel agrees with Hume and Kant that categories such as substance and cause are not discovered in sensation; they require thinking. Where he differs from Hume and Kant is over their supposition that our thinking lacks objectivity. Hegel criticizes Kant’s subjectivist approach to the categories: That the categories are to be regarded as belonging only to us (or as “subjective”) must seem very bizarre to the ordinary consciousness, and there is certainly something awry here. This much is correct about it, however: that the categories are not contained in immediate sensation. Consider, for example, a piece of sugar. It is hard, white, sweet, etc. We say that all these properties are united in one ob-ject, and this unity is not found in sensation. The situation is the same when we regard two events as standing to one another in the relationship of cause and effect; what is perceived here is the two isolated events, which succeed one another in time. But that one is the cause and the other the effect (the causal nexus between them) is not perceived; on the contrary, it is present merely for our thinking. Now, although the categories (e.g., unity, cause and effect, etc.) pertain to thinking as such, it does not at all follow from this that they must therefore be merely something of ours, and not also determinations of ob-jects themselves.”24

Hegel sides with common sense in rejecting the dogma that thinking falsifies its object. No strategy of factoring philosophy for grasping the objective suffices. Each works like Midas’ touch: whatever mind encounters turns subjective. If the knowable world is relative to human nature, then the world

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is forever unknowable. According to this dogma, it is not any particular features of the mind’s efforts to know but rather the activity of human reason as such that forecloses objectivity. The purely objective, the in itself or true, is unapproachable. The separation of mind from the world fosters further dichotomies. Kant distinguishes knowable appearances from the unknowable thing-in-itself. The two approaches—the customary feelings projected by human nature (Hume) and the synthesizing activity of pure reason (Kant)—can account for a kind of objectivity, but these achievements come at a steep price. Doubts adhere to knowledge constructed from subjective customs or a priori concepts since appearances do not represent the world in itself. With subjective activity recognized as an ingredient of knowledge, two views of objectivity emerge. Objectivity is marked with an asterisk when the world as known is not identical to the world in itself. What is objective for us differs from objectivity in itself.25 Concepts may be empty without percepts, as in Kant’s account, but having two different sources of knowledge presupposes the separability of mind and world. Percepts and concepts represent the purely objective and purely subjective, respectively. Even if both are always present in experience, they split apart as what is passively given and mind’s spontaneous response. The separation of perceptions and concepts piggybacks on the notion of pure subjectivity. Knowledge shaped by the contributions of mind or human nature is objective in a qualified sense. The popular notion that knowledge is constructed suggests that it could be constructed in different ways, or even that knowledge is constructed all the way down.26 Cultural forces shape our reading of nature. The objective—our desideratum—eludes our grasp. The following section examines Thomas Nagel’s account of objectivity as the view from nowhere. While Hume champions empiricism, Nagel defends a Cartesian-like view of reason’s independence from perception and all specific features of human existence. For Hume, immediate sensing is purely objective but provides no warrant for the necessity that knowledge seeks, so a kind of skepticism results. Nagel allows for both the purely objective—the view from nowhere—and pure subjectivity. They are the extremes of the continuum that constitutes reality, not the true as contrasted with the false.

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Nagel’s Defense of the Dualism Between the Objective and Subjective The unsurpassable opposition between the subjective and the objective is the backbone of Nagel’s writings. Acknowledging this dualism, whether in metaphysics or applied ethics, keeps thinking in touch with a reality constituted by inherent opposition. The purely subjective and purely objective designate two poles of reality, with all knowledge and states of consciousness parceled out between them. To restrict philosophy to objective views of death, for example, and to ignore the subjective views loses half the phenomenon. The temptation for philosophy is to reduce one viewpoint to the other; the challenge, according to Nagel, is to resist this temptation and to respect the implacable opposition that encompasses the real. The integrity of philosophy lies in the balance. In Mortal Thoughts, Nagel defends the subjective standpoint against the conviction that objective knowledge fully discloses reality. In The View from Nowhere, Nagel defends objectivity and truth against the social construction of knowledge that grounds it on subjective interests. Nagel is no proponent of unifying the subjective and objective standpoints. Reconciliation, for Nagel, is suspect. Most efforts to reconcile the opposition amount to bullying: one dimension of reality is shoved aside. In effect, Nagel’s philosophy promotes tolerance for the full range of reality and resists promises of false unity. If things do not fall neatly into place, we should not let that bother us. For Nagel, the world is constituted by viewpoints that are irreducible and real. At one extreme is the lived experience of individual subjects. At the other extreme, the search for knowledge backs us out of our situations. Nagel calls lived experience the view from within. Knowledge of the greatest precision cannot capture what it is like to smell lilacs, be hungry, or fall in love. A qualitative difference separates experience from knowledge. Even a brilliant diagnosis does not fully comprehend the patient’s affliction. This is not a complaint; it just registers the way things are. Compelling arguments for determinism cannot dispel my awareness of an action as mine. “How it is lived from within” evokes this notion of subjectivity. Interior does not mean private or inaccessible. Interiority and intersubjectivity are dimensions of consciousness. Nagel is not skeptical about humans’ ability to grasp objectivity. Objectivity is the measure of knowledge. Nagel identifies subjectivity with the remainder that falls outside knowledge, proof that objectivity does not

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encompass the whole of reality. Missing from physicalist accounts of mind is what Nagel calls the view from within. The resources of science to understand consciousness are incomplete in principle. Individual awareness acts as a firewall against the encroachments of objectivity. But this self that defies objective accounting verges on a vanishing point. What it is like to experience the world as this self is by its nature not subject to being known. Objective measures do not approach subjectivity; they do not get it at all. The universe lacks a self; the self excludes the universe. For objectivity, the subject signifies distortion. For the subject, objectivity signifies irrelevance. Subjectivity is the residue that eludes calculation.27 Objectivity properly grasped faces the unyielding limits of the subjective. Like Kierkegaard, Nagel worries that a culture enthralled with science is forgetful of its humanity. An ardent thinker may neglect his relationships and ignore his mortality.28 For Nagel, as for Kierkegaard, subjectivity primarily takes an individual form: how I experience my life. Subjectivity above all involves mineness. The view from within includes moods, especially the wonder at being this self. The other pole of reality—the view from nowhere—represents the purely objective stance that endeavors to stand outside all phenomena by taking no perspective. From the stance of a completely disinterested observer, nothing is mine. For Kierkegaard, subjectivity represents a progressive development: one becomes subjective and acquires a self. Kierkegaard expects greatness or holiness from the transformations that the subject undergoes. The self comes into existence through the passionate inwardness with which a person embraces despair, ethical duty, choice, and a relationship to the infinite. For Kierkegaard, subjectivity constitutes an achievement; most persons never merit this distinction. They die without having become subjective or acquiring a self.29 For Nagel, by contrast, subjectivity is complete with each act of consciousness; it arises anew with each view from within. Subjectivity takes many forms, but any form serves as a veto on overweening objectivity. Setting this limit is Nagel’s chief concern. Like Hume’s first look, subjectivity embodies pure immediacy: subjectivity is completely present with each sensation. It does not involve matters of degree. What belongs to the view from within is immediately recognizable. One does not become more subjective; a person already inhabits pure subjectivity with the view from within. Subjectivity just plops into our lap. If it weren’t for pure subjectivity untouched by objective determination, there wouldn’t be any subjectivity at all.30

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Achieving Objectivity: The View from Nowhere One consequence of pitting subjectivity against objectivity is the emptying out of the self. To sound out the multiple sources of the self would be to leave pure subjectivity behind. To specify the actual content of self-awareness would threaten its existence. The subjective is protected from any objective reckoning at the price of content. Nothing can be said of this elusive reality without immediately retracting it. Subjectivity is maintained in opposition to objectivity. It lies beyond any determination. It springs up outside the reach of roles or personal features. Like Kierkegaard’s purely infinite self, Nagel’s subject finds limits inherently objectionable.31 Objectivity, on the contrary, represents an achievement and goal. It requires progressive development away from subjectivity: objectivity increases through repeated acts of transcending. Persons become more objective as they recursively step back from themselves, their bodies, culture, language, species, the contours of any possible rationality, until there is nothing left to step back from, leaving pure rationality to apprehend the universe as it is. We can aspire to a more objective viewpoint because the universe exists independently of consciousness, and transparent reason grasps the universe in its independence from us. We can regard the universe as centerless because it lacks a center. The view from nowhere taken by the purely objective self represents a destination. We can advance to a more objective viewpoint not cluttered by the peculiarities of consciousness only because this fundamental difference in kind exists. The destination of pure objectivity is paradoxical. I cannot step outside my mind, although Nagel suggests that self-erasure is our goal. The mind has the capacity to step back from its former perspective and treat it in an objective manner. Repeated acts of stepping back and transcending previous perspectives bring mind close to independence from any context, closer to the view from nowhere. Like pure subjectivity, pure objectivity excludes its opposite. A more objective outlook, for Nagel, means a less subjective outlook: objectivity is inversely related to subjectivity. He discounts as inessential the subject’s efforts to draw closer to objects and understand them. In Nagel’s dichotomous universe, the challenge is to make the self disappear. Nagel conceives of knowledge not in terms of a process of learning by trial and error within the discourse of truth and error but in terms of

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eliminating the subjective. Truth is not primitive; it is what remains once subjectivity is subtracted. As the human presence is wrung from the act of knowing, presumably what something is becomes clearer. The world’s inherent complexity is not the issue; our long shadow conceals the world. The human mind uniquely has the capacity to step back and reflect, withdrawing itself little by little from what prejudices its comprehension of the object. The series of steps that this involves draws the subject outside its own circumstances to view the world in an absolute way that is not relative to any perspective. While this ideal cannot be reached, it can be approached. Thinkers become more objective insofar as their view of the world transcends the peculiarities of human existence—achieving objectivity by subtracting subjectivity. Ideally, the most objective knowledge would be untouched by the conditions of the knower. This account of knowing escapes the Midas Touch by shaving subjectivity down to a vanishing point. The human knower moves steadily toward an identity that would be shared with any rational being regardless of species, chemical composition, embodiment, sense organs, history, culture, or planet. Ideally, the objective account eliminates perspective or location from knowing, hence achieving the absoluteness of nowhere and never. Truth is timeless. One’s humanity is progressively shed, like so many snake skins. The backward step endlessly repeated is Nagel’s strategy for gaining access to the universe as it is. The backward step en route to the view from nowhere generalizes the considerations that led to the doctrine of primary and secondary qualities. Consider color. We perceive yellow as a shade of an object: this daffodil is bright yellow.32 Sensations reveal features of the world and constitute a level of knowledge. Locke describes colors as secondary properties because they depend upon the perceiver. The objectivity of color increases when color is explained in scientific terms and not simply as perceived. The mind steps back from sensing yellow to determine the physical and biological processes whereby the brain identifies a spectrum of light reflected off an object as yellow. Previously, knowing color involved sensing the object as yellow. With the backward step, the color perceived and the act of perceiving taken together is the focus. The previous relation of subjectivity to its object constitutes the new, more encompassing object, now related to a yet more attenuated form of subjectivity.

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For Nagel, drawing together what previously separated the subject and object moves us closer toward the view from nowhere. Thus, a scientific account of perceiving color achieves more objectivity than the act of perceiving color. This level of knowledge depends less on human physiology than does the perception of yellow. It would be comprehensible by any rational being, including those with different sensing structures. Nagel claims that each time this step is repeated, what was previously subjective experience—sensing, perceiving, observing, thinking—is drawn into the objective realm and treated as so many physical events. The realm of subjectivity shrinks as subjective acts shade into objective events, yet subjectivity can never be eradicated. The act of knowing becomes progressively less bound to human characteristics and closer to the objective. The push toward greater objectivity in Nagel is influenced by Locke’s account of things and their properties. Both philosophers presuppose a split between mind and the objective. For Locke, the primary qualities of things are independent of the perceiver and signify the world existing apart from mind, which is objective. They are sensed as they exist. Here sensing, like cognition, does not distort its object. Human perception does not shape these traits. Primary properties are the same in themselves and for us. Secondary properties reveal how the world exists in relation to mind. Here perspective constitutes perception. Colors would not exist apart from perceivers, though the causes of colors—the primary properties—exist apart from mind. Nagel, though, does not arrive at the view from nowhere as easily as specifying unadulterated primary properties. The process is ongoing, but the goal is clear: to shed all vestiges of subjectivity step by step or asymptotically.

A Better Strategy to Avoid Reductionism: Stop Factoring Nagel turns to the subjective/objective polarity to defeat reductionism. Factoring philosophy to the rescue! As he presents it, the objective view excludes pure subjectivity in principle. The view from nowhere faces an implacable limit in the view from within. Nagel’s worries about reductionism are compelling, but his strategy to combat it is flawed. Nagel stipulates subjectivity as pure to rule out reductionism by fiat. In his account, the growth of knowledge steadily replaces acts of subjectivity with objective accounts until only a sliver of mute self-awareness remains.

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Knowledge understood in this way involves a turf war where subjectivity retreats but never surrenders. Outside the sliver of pure subjectivity— the view from within—reductionism rules. Stipulated solutions become the strategy when analysis operates within a defective phenomenology. But stipulated solutions invite skepticism. One can always question this account of the self as vanishing. Is mind separable from world or does the notion of a self whose traits are transcended—a featureless self—stop making sense?33 A better strategy for challenging reductionism acknowledges the existential conditions that make knowledge possible. Yes, humans have the capacity to step back from experience to observe in detached ways. But no paradox is involved since human existence includes rational capacities—some non-human animals may have such capacities as well. Moving beyond subjectivity is not required to comprehend the world. Quite the opposite. Acquiring knowledge is a human, worldly activity.34 Nagel characterizes the backward step to cement the subjective–objective opposition that structures his analysis. For Nagel, the backward step goes in one direction only—away from subjectivity. It wants to escape the self rather than acquire a deepened understanding of self and world. A paradox results since Nagel’s view from nowhere both repels subjective activity and presupposes it. Subjectivity is utterly inessential and yet essential at the same time. The disjunction between subjective and objective does not waver. To step back repeatedly from experience turns a self into a blank, a pure in itself. A better phenomenological account reaches different conclusions. The backward step allows for self-awareness and critical reflection. This space arises within the self, not by hurrying away from it. Described more accurately, the backward step develops, rather than depletes, subjectivity. To recognize a self is not to objectify it. Even a self that is objectified is treated like an object; it never becomes an object. Reflection deepens selfunderstanding and distinguishes humans from other species. The advance of knowledge goes hand in hand with self-development, not the emptying of the self. Our revised account of self-reflection, what Nagel calls the backward step, illustrates Hegel’s provocative dictum: the more subjective, the more objective. The relationship is not adversarial; the epistemic Midas Touch is a dogma. Experience and knowledge—from sensing to research— involve mediation or inseparability of subjectivity and objectivity, never the interplay of pure subjectivity and pure objectivity. From spontaneous

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sensing to sophisticated speculation, subjective activity is involved. Brilliant, systematic research takes us deeper into the world. It does not occur without brilliant persons. Understood as a worldly subjectivity, the self-reflexive aspect of human existence makes knowledge possible. The achievements of science, when not filtered through the lens of the subjective–objective divide, attest to the capabilities of the human species. We need not steer away from objectivity to preserve the status of subjective activity; on the contrary, the subject’s activity makes knowledge possible. Subjectivity does not have to be pure; indeed, it never is. Nagel’s zeal for the subjective is misconstrued when the achievements of science are thought to cast doubt on the reality of the very human capabilities that make science possible.35 Acknowledging the inseparability of subjectivity from the world shifts the footing of analysis. It represents a sea change. Instead of the purist split between subjective and objective, we recognize features of human existence that underlie both personal and impersonal ways of knowing. Reductionism can be opposed with more pressing reasons than grasping for the evanescent remnant of consciousness that defies objective representation. Objective ways of knowing attest to the reality and importance of human consciousness and subjective capacities.

Mind in the World Philosophers in the modern period commonly presuppose the notion of pure subjectivity and the separability of mind from world. Hegel is an exception. In the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit , he reconsiders the strategy of separating intellect from its objects to determine what mind contributes to knowledge—factoring philosophy. Hegel recognizes the appeal of embarking upon philosophy by separating mind from the world. Philosophy sets high standards for clarity. If mind can be separated from its objects, then its contributions and its distortions should be clearly ascertained. However, like Heidegger and Davidson, Hegel identifies the outcome of this separation as skepticism. Once mind is separated from its object, every effort to bring them together ends up qualifying knowledge as true “for us” but not “in itself.” The curse of Midas is unavoidable: everything touched by mind glistens with subjectivity. Hegel’s objections to this line of analysis open an understanding of truth as that which is both in and for itself. We the knowers belong to the process from the start.

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The case for splitting consciousness from its objects appears reasonable. It assumes that knowledge endeavors to know the object as it is. It also assumes that intellect is a medium or tool that can be separated from its object and examined. These assumptions appear clear, responsible, and unavoidable. Since a tool is separable from its user and a person can exist apart from her possessions, it seems correct to examine intellect apart from any involvement with the world. Analysis that does not separate out intellect appears irresponsible, like using a new device without first reading the instructions. The assumption that subjectivity is necessarily falsifying sets the task of philosophy: subtract or correct for what mind contributes to knowledge or experience to know the thing itself. Seemingly irreproachable assumptions can breed trouble. The goal of knowledge is to grasp things as they exist, but assuming the mind’s separation from the world precludes reaching this goal. For Hegel, the unexamined notions of understanding as tool or medium spell trouble for philosophy. Tools can alter their objects, just as a medium filters data. If mind alters or filters the data, the goals of knowledge are called into question. Yet if it does not, why make the effort to inquire? An object cannot be both touched and untouched by mind. Knowledge relativized by the activity of mind is inherently removed from the knowledge originally sought. Knowledge qualified as human is opposed to knowledge that is true, since the world that exists apart from mind, the world in itself, remains unknowable. Knowledge has access only to the world existing for us. Inquiry into the world in itself draws a blank. The result inherent in this standard view is skepticism. We set out to know the world; once wised up to the fact that the conditions of knowing shape experience, we settle for ersatz objectivity, knowledge of appearances. To separate mind from the world, to divide the subjective from the objective, is the hallmark of false philosophy in Hegel’s view: “So nothing at all hangs upon the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity in this sense; instead, everything hangs upon the content, and that is both subjective and objective.”36 Hegel bids us to take up the discourse of truth and error and to set aside that of the subjective and objective. We do not need a way into the world; it is impossible to split the subjective off from the world. Every mode of subjectivity—from the personal to the impersonal—is in the world. The question concerns which modes of representation, which ways of being-in-the-world, achieve the goals of knowledge.

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Pure subjectivity, like pure objectivity, is a myth, a stumbling block that philosophy must remove. When philosophy quits trying to sort out the contributions from the purely subjective and objective, an ordinary sense of truth and error is restored. Davidson ends “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” with this conclusion, “In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false.”37 Truth that depends upon human activity need not be qualified as human truth, as if another sort of truth were thinkable or meaningful. This modifier implies that absolute or unqualified truth would require suspending all subjective activity. Without subjective activity, there would be no knowledge. The goal is not to back-peddle nervously from subjective activity or to erase all its traces but rather to comprehend what exists—the outcome of the proper subjective activity of truth seeking. Truth does not leap forth from the first encounter with an object. It results from thoughtful engagement and inquiry—and by learning from our errors. Abandoning the dogmatic split between subjective and objective frees philosophy from the futile search for immediate, self-confirming truth. If subjectivity does not per se signify distortion, we are left to worry about whether a claim is true, not whether it is contaminated with subjectivity. To see past this dogma of the epistemic Midas Touch makes truth accessible and puts the focus back on eliminating error—not expunging the subjective.38 Getting to the truth involves the hard labor of avoiding error and getting things right. What is true discloses what and how things are. In the discourse of truth and error, the maxim the more subjective, the more objective replaces that of the discourse of the subjective and objective, whose maxim is: the less subjective the better. If other rational species exist, their subjective activity would be required to ascertain truth. These alien species could be recognized as rational only because their beliefs and actions largely agreed with our own. This sensible position is advanced by Davidson in relation to interpreting. Davidson points out that if languages were incommensurable, we would not recognize the sounds or marks as signs. The incommensurable would register as noise. We might not know how to translate a language, but an ancient or unknown language is not for that reason incommensurable. To recognize a language as language presupposes some measure of agreement in interpreting or responding to situations. By presupposing similar responses, translation begins. Hopi is very different from English, but,

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with effort and intelligence, these differences are identified and described. Great differences do not constitute incommensurability. The uninterpreted exists against a background of presumed understandings and true beliefs that make translation possible. The world inhabited by diverse peoples and species makes this assumption of agreement rational. This world can be articulated in an amazing diversity of ways; witness the range of cultures, traditions, and languages. But this diversity unfolds against a background of commonality. With great effort we can begin to understand one another. We share this world and many challenges in life. Faced with unknown events or languages, we can consider what seems to be happening. While not all that is happening is noticeable to an outsider, enough commonality occurs to begin the process of interpretation. We can imagine an alien with superior faculties and an entirely different physiology. While our knowledge might be crude by comparison, it would be recognizably inferior. A superior species would recognize our meager efforts as efforts to understand the world we share. If humans exist essentially and in every respect in the world, then mind is no more separable from world than are bodies from the laws of nature. A new orientation to the subjective and objective arises on the far side of the dualism. Designating mind as “inside” presupposes the notion of pure subjectivity. If pure subjectivity is a dogma, there is no inside separable from what is outside. In that spirit, Davidson compares having a concept to having a sunburn.39 States of consciousness disclose states of the world. States of the world are known by states of consciousness. That my thoughts are not visible does not mean that they perch “inside.” To associate mind and world with inside and outside breeds trouble. Philosophy can attend to consciousness without splitting it off from its objects. That consciousness exists in the world does not mean that its claims are true. Dispensing with pure subjectivity changes our understanding of error. Within the horizon of false philosophy, error is everywhere and nowhere; we never escape our epistemic bind and move beyond what is “for us” to what is “in itself.” So, we are in no better position to identify an error than a truth, which is why we speak of the discourse of truth and error. But determining whether a claim is true or false presupposes beingin-the-world. Truth becomes an everyday matter. False claims identify or order the phenomena incorrectly; they are not claims that got stuck inside the mind.

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Without pure subjectivity, the notion of a fundamental divide between mind and world disappears. With the recognition that subjective activity is present in all knowing, Nagel’s concerns about reductionism are addressed. No firewall is needed to sequester immediate sensing—or pure objectivity—from subjectivity: to the contrary, the most objective forms of knowing require the utmost reflection. All forms of subjectivity involve the world, so questions take a different tact. Without the either/ or disjunction of purism, relevant issues are often matters of degree. We wonder which kinds of mediation reveal the world more truthfully. Does sensing reveal features of the world lost on thinking? Which forms of subjectivity are guides to truth? The emphasis falls on getting at the object’s truth, not minimizing subjectivity or being released from mind. The focus shifts from talk of subjective vs. objective back to talk of truth vs. error. Taking mind to be separated from the world produces global skepticism and blocks talk of the truth. When philosophy is defined by such doubts, it sounds foolish to be assured of our presence in the world. When released from global skepticism, truth becomes an ordinary concern, not out of reach. Real doubts about matters at hand can arise once thinking frees itself of skepticism. Setting aside global skepticism makes local skepticism an earnest matter once again. Recent philosophy that challenges unconstrained analysis rejects pure subjectivity and recognizes the inseparability of mind and world. After criticizing versions of the “myth of the given,” Wilfred Sellars describes the task of philosophy as providing “that articulated and integrated vision of man-in-the-universe.”40 Davidson sees that Quine does not follow the criticism of the “dogmas of empiricism” all the way down. Rather, Quine leaves us with the “third dogma,” the bifurcation of conceptual schemes and the empirical “cues” supplied by the world. The conceptual scheme— the workmanship of the mind—filters the given stimuli. Quine opens the door to a skepticism that is even deeper than Hume’s, if we reason that human involvement in knowing is always falsifying. This third dogma of the conceptual scheme presupposes the “featureless self,” Davidson’s term for an intellect stripped of its make-up so that it might grasp its object. Only this featureless self can ascend to the view from nowhere. This mistaken conception results from the presupposition that mind and world are separable. Fortunately, mind need not—cannot—be featureless to arrive at knowledge. Rejecting the scheme-content dualism lets mind back into the world and the world back into mind. Davidson calls this

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re-direction of philosophy the “new antisubjectivism,” and he sums it up as the inseparable triangle of language, world, and interpreters. The inseparability of mind and world is common ground shared by anti-factoring post-analytic philosophy, Hegel’s philosophy, and Heidegger’s phenomenology. In Being and Time, as we have observed, the most fundamental structure that is presupposed by all aspects of knowledge and action is being-in-the-world. For Heidegger, the supposed problem of moving from mind to world can gain no traction. Frank Farrell understands just how Davidson belongs with Hegel and Heidegger: Heidegger, like Davidson, is trying to rethink the structure of subjectivity that led to the problems of modern philosophy. He rejects the picture of a subjective determining power that, from a position of independence, constructs or orders or projects its patterns upon a world of objects. Thinking is what it is only through already “belonging to” the world and through letting it manifest its character. It is only in “being toward” the world, in being situated in its surroundings, that I as thinker or experiencer have any real content to my activity; and language, rather than being the embodiment of some conceptual scheme or other, is an “openness” in which things themselves are making their appearance. We do not have to work to bring an alienated subjectivity back in touch with things, because it is by its very nature as subjectivity always in touch with them.41

Most beliefs, says Davidson, are veridical (true) and reveal what is the case.42 In a climate of skepticism, this confidence sounds bizarre and needs unpacking. For the focus to shift from subjectivity to error, we first acknowledge that humans are fallible. Any belief might be wrong, but not all beliefs can be false. Determining a claim to be false presupposes that beliefs are veridical. Nor is truth effortless. The openness of language to the world does not mean that opening my mouth yields knowledge in a first statement. Even ordinary sensing is complex and involves memory, experience, language, understanding, testimony, habits, and patterns of recognition. Deeper knowledge occurs within a community of researchers dedicated to systematic, methodical inquiry. In Hegel’s account, subjective activity could be likened to the labor that produces knowledge. For Hegel, knowledge is the product of the labor of cognitive appropriation of the world, and this in no way detracts from its objectivity.43 The labor of comprehension is

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possible because of what is already understood, beliefs that fallibly disclose the world. Davidson describes philosophy released from dualism as “antisubjectivism.” This is misleading. And his phrase “the myth of the subjective” should be “the myth of the purely subjective.” There is nothing mythical about subjectivity. The case against the purely subjective does not erase the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity. There is no need to quarrel with William James’ reference to the two sources of knowledge— mind and world—if they are not pulled apart in the manner of purist philosophy. Knowledge depends upon human capacities, but these are not purely subjective. To draw that conclusion is to flip-flop from one pole of false philosophy to another without grasping where the falseness lies in the first place. When philosophy hangs on to defective assumptions, it does not learn how to think. The notion of getting outside of mind to arrive at truth is magnetic. Behind this magnetism is how we can be tripped up by language, as Bishop Berkeley observes. Talk about objectivity and subjectivity lures us into reifying the objective and the subjective into two separable realms of experience. Purist splits are easily mistaken for clarifications. However, pseudo-clarity brings dilemmas, not development. The disjunction between subjective and objective, the for us and the in itself , is defective; it tempts us away from the responsibilities of thinking. We cannot but exist in the world, even when abstracting from our situation. To abstract requires an original relatedness, a place in the world. The sway of purism over analysis involves habits of mind that are hard to break. Getting at the roots of purism differs from shrugging it off and finding new conversation partners, as with Rorty or Wittgenstein, at least according to some readings. Global skepticism can be addressed on intellectual grounds. However, the roots of the drive toward bifurcation may be embedded in history, as Hegel suggests. The urge to factor out subjective from objective is fostered by ways of being-in-the-world linked to commercial society. False moves in philosophy are encouraged by the forms and disguises of commercial life.44

Notes 1. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishers, 1983).

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2. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Elizabeth Rappaport (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1978). 3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969), #230–370, 20e–35e. 4. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, 4th ed., trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), 60–62. 5. Ludwig Wittgenstein humorously calls attention to that fact in On Certainty, observing, “I’m sitting with a philosopher … he says again and again ‘I know that’s a tree’, pointing to a tree … Someone else arrives and … I tell him: ‘This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy’” (Wittgenstein, On Certainty, #467, 61e). 6. William James, “Pragmatism and Humanism,” in Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 120. 7. Richard Rorty’s, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) summons readers to irony. We reject Rorty’s reading of Hegel as “founding an ironist tradition within philosophy” (79). Instead, we see Hegel as freeing philosophy from false moves that lead to irony. 8. Barry Stroud observes that “the combination of the irreducibility, the indispensability, and the pervasiveness of evaluative judgments defeats the attempt to reach a completely general negative metaphysical verdict about them.” Barry Stroud, Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction: Modality and Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 124. 9. C. I. Lewis, “A Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori,” in Collected Papers of Clarence Irving Lewis, ed. John D. Goheen and John L. Mothershead (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970), 239. Lewis wrote of Kant: “Kant compelled me. He had, so I felt, followed skepticism to its inevitable last stage, and laid his foundations where they could not be disturbed…. The evidence of Kant in my thinking ever since is unmistakable” (C. I. Lewis, “Logic and Pragmatism,” in Collected Papers of Clarence Irving Lewis, 3–4). 10. W. V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in W. V. O. Quine, From a Logical Point of View (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1953), 36–7. 11. See Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). 12. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xlii. Notice how close Rorty is to C. I. Lewis’s statement “Our knowledge of the validity of these [order, classification, categories, and definitions] is simply consciousness of our own fundamental ways of acting and our own intellectual intent” (C. I. Lewis,

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15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

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“A Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori,” 239), only now the element of experience is gone. See Frank Farrell, “Rorty & Antirealism,” in Rorty & Pragmatism, ed. Herman J. Saatkamp (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995). The myth of the given is criticized by Wilfred Sellars in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” in Science, Perception and Reality (New York: Humanities Press, 1963). We urge amending Sellars’ phrase to “the myth of the unmediated given.” Though, in his Meditations, Descartes argues that mind and body are separable, he concludes that, at least in this life, they are not separated but rather form a composite unity: “I am tightly joined and, so to speak, mingled together with it [my body], so much so that I make up one single thing with it.” Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, 94. Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, 68. Donald Davidson, “The Myth of the Subjective,” in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). Despite his title, Davidson’s point is not that subjectivity is a myth—pure subjectivity is the myth. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Grand Inquisitor, ed. Charles Guignon (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1993), 14. Our discussion roughly follows Hegel’s account of the three “positions toward objectivity.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1991), 65–124. We go on to assess a fourth position as found in the work of Thomas Nagel. Anselm, The Monologion and the Proslogion, ed. and trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1995), 99–102. Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, 72–78. “These impressions are all strong and sensible. They admit not of ambiguity. They are not only placed in a full light themselves, but may throw light on their correspondent ideas, which lie in obscurity.” David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd ed., ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 62; see also 22. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 193–4. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, addition 3 to #42, 85–6. Hegel identifies three meanings of “objectivity”: “To start with, it has the significance of what is externally present, as distinct from what is only

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subjective, meant, dreamed, etc.; secondly, it has the significance, established by Kant, of what is universal and necessary as distinct from the contingent, particular, and subjective that we find in our sensation; and thirdly, it has the last-mentioned significance of the In-itself as thoughtproduct, the significance of what is there, as distinct from what is only thought by us, and hence still distinct from the matter itself, or from the matter in-itself ” (Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, addition 2 to #41, 83). Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xlii. Hegel calls Kant’s thing-in-itself , which can be the pure subject as well as the pure object, the caput mortuum. See Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, paragraph #44, 87. Walker Percy shares this concern with Kierkegaard and Nagel. Unlike Nagel, however, Percy appeals to C. S. Pierce’s semiotic account of human communication to identify phenomena in the world that confound the view from nowhere. See Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), 85–126. See Søren Kierkegaard’s treatment of “becoming subjective” in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941), 115–67. In this, Nagel adopts the stoic view of subjectivity. For Kierkegaard, the infinite self is one aspect of the self-relating synthesis of infinite and finite, possibility and necessity, that is the self. To identify the infinite self as the self is defiant despair. See Sickness unto Death, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 29–33. See Barry Stroud, The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). In addition to Hegel, various thinkers challenge the notion of pure subjectivity. Kierkegaard describes the despair of the infinite self (The Sickness unto Death, 29–33); Davidson dismisses the featureless self (“On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” 185); and Michael Sandel challenges the “unencumbered self” of liberal theory in his Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Heidegger is quick to point out that knowing the world is one way of being-in-the-world. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, rev. trans. Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010), Sect. 13, 59–62. See John McDowell, “Scheme-Content Dualism and Empiricism,” in The Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Lewis Hahn (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1999), 101–2. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, addition 3 to #42, 84. Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” 198. “Unmediated” here does not mean purely immediate but rather, not “mediatized,”

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42. 43. 44.

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that is, not in contact with objects by way of “representations,” intermediaries that presuppose that we are removed from the objects. There are no epistemic mediators. See Davidson, “The Myth of the Subjective,” 47. Ibid., 48. Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” 172. Frank Farrell, Subjectivity, Realism and Postmodernism: The Recovery of the World in Recent Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 133. Donald Davidson, “A Coherence Theory of Truth,” in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 137–53. See Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, addition 1 to #42, 85. See Jeanne Schuler and Patrick Murray, “Marx, Subjectivism, and Modern Moral Philosophy,” in The Modern Schoolman 83 (March 2006): 173–96, and “Karl Marx and the Critique of Bourgeois Philosophy,” The Modern Schoolman 85 (January 2008): 163–80.

References Anselm. The Monologion and the Proslogion. Translated and edited by Thomas Williams. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1995. Davidson, Donald. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. ———. Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. Descartes, René. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. 4th ed. Translated by Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Grand Inquisitor. Edited by Charles Guignon; translated by Constance Garnett. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993. Farrell, Frank B. Subjectivity, Realism and Postmodernism: The Recovery of the World in Recent Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. “Rorty & Antirealism.” In Rorty & Pragmatism, edited by Herman J. Saatkamp. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995, 154–88. Hegel, G. W. F. The Encyclopedia Logic. Translated by T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1991. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised translation by Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010.

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Hume, David. Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. 3rd ed. Edited by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. James, William. Pragmatism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. Perpetual Peace and Other Essays. Translated by Ted Humphrey. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishers, 1983. Kierkegaard, Søren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Translated by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941. ———. The Sickness unto Death. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Lewis, C. I. “A Pragmatic Conception of the A Priori.” In Collected Papers of Clarence Irving Lewis, edited by John D. Goheen and John L. Mothershead, Jr. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970. McDowell, John. “Scheme-Content Dualism and Empiricism.” In The Philosophy of Donald Davidson, edited by Lewis Hahn, 87–104. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Edited by Elizabeth Rapaport. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1978. Murray, Patrick, and Jeanne Schuler. “Marx, Subjectivism, and Modern Moral Philosophy.” In The Modern Schoolman 83 (March 2006): 173–96. ———. “Karl Marx and the Critique of Bourgeois Philosophy.” The Modern Schoolman 85 (January 2008): 163–80. Percy, Walker. Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983. Quine, Willard Van Ormand. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” In From a Logical Point of View. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1953. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ———. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Sandel, Michael. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Sellars, Wilfred. “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” In Science, Perception and Reality. New York: Humanities Press, 1963. Stroud, Barry. The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. ———. Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction: Modality and Value. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. On Certainty. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright; translated by Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1969.

CHAPTER 10

Why Wealth Is a Poor Concept

We are familiar with two questions about wealth, but an important third question eludes us. The first two may be illustrated with a passage from Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times. Sissy Jupe, who had been adopted by the Thomas Gradgrind family after her father abandoned her, reports to Louisa Gradgrind on one of her many mistakes in the classroom of Mr. M’Choakumchild: “He said, now this schoolroom is a Nation. And in the nation, there are fifty millions of money. Isn’t this a prosperous nation? Girl number twenty [Sissy Jupe], isn’t this a prosperous nation, and ain’t you in a thriving state?” “What did you say?” asked Louisa. “Miss Louisa, I said I didn’t know. I thought I couldn’t know whether it was a prosperous nation or not, and whether I was in a thriving state or not, unless I knew who had got the money, and whether any of it was mine. But that had nothing to do with it. It was not in the figures at all,” said Sissy, wiping her eyes. “That was a great mistake of yours,” observed Louisa.1

How much wealth is there? How is wealth distributed? Dickens puts in play two questions that are familiar from current political and economic discourse. There is plenty of talk about “economic growth,” or the lack

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murray and J. Schuler, False Moves in Philosophy and Social Theory, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35028-3_10

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of it, and we also hear about disparities in the distribution of income and wealth. A third question about wealth is absent from our discourse, and asking it creates perplexity on the hearer’s part: What is the specific social form and purpose of wealth? The absence of the third question and the perplexity to which it gives rise indicate the poverty of our current discourse about wealth.2 Bad abstractions and false moves hem in this discourse. Among these bad abstractions are the notions of wealth-in-general, utility, and instrumental action.3 Wealth is a general term for useful goods and services of whatever sort. Wealth is not a bad abstraction. There is a point to abstracting from specific social forms, so wealth has a legitimate, limited use in analysis. But wealth says little; it is conceptually thin or poor precisely because it only picks out features common to all societies. We find wealth or useful things wherever we find humans, but only in commercial societies do useful things generally have to be sold—that is, take the commodity form—before being used.4 As a general concept, wealth abstracts from the social forms that distinguish useful things in capitalist societies from useful things in ancient empires or tribes. To exist, wealth involves social forms, and social forms are always particular. There is no society-in-general, no production-in-general, and no wealthin-general. Consequently, to understand any actual wealth requires that we raise this third question and identify the social form and purpose that wealth takes. A false move common in social and economic theory is to overlook or ignore this question. Consequently, social forms are not ingredients in these accounts of wealth. Because wealth is a meager concept with little content, it is prone to play into false moves. One hazard is the tendency to shift from the general concept of wealth to treating wealth-in-general as something actual. But wealth never exists apart from social forms, so wealth-in-general turns out to be a pseudo-concept: there is nothing for it to be the concept of.

Why Bother with the Third Question About Wealth? Why bother with the specific social form and purpose of wealth? If we abstract from social forms, the path from human needs to the production of goods, their distribution, and finally their use appears clear. Needs, labor, and consumption then take a generic form that is free of socially

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imposed obstructions. The building blocks of any society would seem as obvious as the biological requirements of survival. We call the view that settles for these generic features of human life “animalism.” Classical and neoclassical economics are animalistic in this sense. Social forms are excluded from their basic categories. When we attend to the specific social form of wealth, however, matters are not so simple. Consider the familiar case of wealth that takes the commodity form. Commodities are made not to be used by their producers but rather to be sold to others, ordinarily, at a profit. In this familiar case, they function not simply as commodities but as capital. Potential customers, then, must be willing and able to purchase them at a price that yields a return on the producer’s investment. In the Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck illustrates what can happen when goods are wanted but cannot be sold profitably: The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.5

Such indifference to starving people is unaccountable unless we pay attention to the commodity form of the oranges. A second example of the importance of social forms concerns so-called laborsaving technologies. When wealth is produced on a capitalist basis, machinery functions not simply as means of producing useful things, it functions as capital, that is, for the specific social purpose of making money. Marx argues that the surplus labor of wage laborers is the ultimate source of profit. He explains why that matters: John Stuart Mill says in his Principles of Political Economy: “It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.” That is, however, by no means the aim of the application of machinery under capitalism. Like every other instrument for increasing the productivity [Produktivkraft ] of labour, machinery is intended to cheapen commodities and, by shortening the part of the working day in which the worker works for himself, to lengthen the other

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part, the part he gives to the capitalist for nothing. The machine is a means for producing surplus-value.6

If wealth is produced on a capitalist basis, we should not expect socalled laborsaving devices to shorten the workday. The washing machine, on the contrary, does sharply reduce unpaid domestic labor, as HaJoon Chang points out. As the demands of housework decrease, women increasingly join men in producing surplus-value as members of the paid workforce.7 When the third question is missing, we lack the concepts needed to understand why farmers will deliberately destroy their crops or why improved technology does not shorten the workday.8

The Narrowing of Western Discourse About Wealth One sign of the collapse of social theory is the narrowed horizon of Western discourse about wealth. In Democracy’s Discontents, Michael Sandel sketches the constricting of American economic discourse. He observes, “in contemporary American politics, most of our economic arguments revolve around two considerations: prosperity and fairness,” whereas “republican ideals led nineteenth-century Americans to address issues now lost from view.”9 Sandel’s terms “prosperity” and “fairness” correspond to the first two questions about wealth: how much is there? and how is it distributed? Meanwhile, the “issues now lost from view” are of the sort that involve the third question: what is the social form and purpose of wealth? Two historians of modern European thought, Henry C. Clark and Jerry Z. Muller, call attention to the narrowing of discourse. They attribute the contraction to disciplinary specialization: scientific aspirations lead economics away from the broader concerns of the humanities. But that evades the key point, we believe. Clark writes: In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even the most sophisticated students of economic life combined their analyses with moral and cultural considerations more than is usually the case in today’s specialized intellectual environment.10

By using the word “combined,” Clark assumes that “moral and cultural considerations” are separable from “economic” ones. This assumption of

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present-day discourse separates fact from value, descriptive from normative inquiries. Clark projects this assumption onto the past. While Clark correctly notes the narrowing of discourse about the provisioning process, his appeal to specialization diverts inquiry from questions concerning the concept of “the economic.” In The Mind and the Market , Jerry Muller picks up the story for European discourse stretching from Voltaire to Friedrich Hayek and Herbert Marcuse. He justly observes, “thinking about the ramifications of capitalism forms one of the great threads running through modern European intellectual history.”11 As to why this thread of discourse has been lost, Muller, like Henry Clark, sees academic specialization as restricting the scope of modern economics. We need to dig deeper and expose the false moves that are responsible for this restriction. Conceptual shifts that split wealth from its constitutive social forms strand us with the sterile concept of wealth. This split puts “moral and cultural” topics beyond the horizons of present-day discourse about wealth and makes this particular “academic specialization” possible. False moves are the problem, not specialization. Today’s discursive horizon distorts university curricula as well as public and scholarly discourse on wealth. Consider how little room the curriculum makes for any exploration of social forms that constitute capitalist society. Critical questions such as the following go unasked in classrooms: What is the significance of generally producing wealth in the form of a commodity? What is value, that is the sort of value that money expresses, measures, transfers, and stores? What is money? How is money related to value? If they were the same, there would be no inflation or deflation. How integral is money to capitalist societies? What are the social ramifications of money? What is capital? How does it matter that, in capitalist societies, labor generally takes the form of wage labor? These questions concern social forms that constitute capitalism. The horizon of the dominant discourse puts these singularly relevant questions out of sight. As Thomas Pynchon wrote in Gravity’s Rainbow, “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”12 In Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology, Simon Clarke argues that economic discourse was truncated when Marx’s critique of economics was passed over and instead neoclassical economics came to the fore: There was a scientific revolution in nineteenth-century social thought … It was inaugurated by Marx’s critique of the ideological foundations of

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classical political economy, which he located in the political economists’ neglect of the social form of capitalist production.13

Like classical political economy, neoclassical economics presents itself as a generally applicable theory of human behavior: socially specific categories are excluded from the ingredients of the theory. In their textbook Microeconomics, R. Glenn Hubbard and Anthony Patrick O’Brien define economics as “a group of useful ideas about how individuals make choices,” echoing Lionel Robbins.14 People have been making choices for as long as we know, and we can expect that to continue under any social circumstances. Defined this vapidly, economics purports to apply across history to include all matters of choice. It is no wonder that all the “important economic terms” that Hubbard and O’Brien identify are general ones. They speak of goods and services (not commodities, which have prices), labor (not wage labor), natural resources (not landed property), and produced goods used to produce other goods (not capital as a specific social form). When categories that are the ingredients of economics are so broadly construed, they have no social, moral, or political weight. Consequently, rational inquiry into normative questions is displaced, excluded, or renounced. The missed opportunity provided by Marx’s scientific revolution had consequences that spread. Simon Clarke shows how modern sociology adopted the horizon of neoclassical economics. This obliviousness to social forms extends, for the most part, to contemporary social and political philosophy. For example, John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice has no index entries for commodity, money, or capital.15 Calls for the redistribution of wealth, even including means of production, are found in this literature. But to think that it is “wealth” that must be redistributed is to engage in bad abstraction: wealth does not exist independently of specific social form and purpose. Discourse restricted to redistribution puts the topic of the social form of wealth out of mind. The progressive agenda for addressing injustices relating to race, class, and gender often neglects issues raised by capital as the dominant social form of wealth. The discursive space for probing the specific social forms constitutive of capitalist or other societies has largely disappeared. The air has been sucked out of the room. When does the topic of the specific social form and purpose of wealth arise? Generally it does not, which is just how a discursive horizon functions: it keeps certain questions from being asked. Its quiet work of exclusion goes unnoticed.

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Historical Materialism’s Breakthrough Karl Marx had important predecessors, including Aristotle and Hegel. However, Marx is, in our judgment, the most penetrating author on the topic of the social form and purpose of wealth. In his early collaboration with Friedrich Engels, Marx develops the idea of historical materialism. Historical materialism insists not only on the importance of wealth and its production but also on the historically specific social forms and purposes of provisioning processes. Marx and Engels write in The German Ideology: This mode of production [Produktionsweise] must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life [Lebensweise] on their part.16

Marx and Engels oppose the ways of thinking that ignore the definite social form of production and wealth—as if production were productionin-general. Conventional analyses overlook the “mode of life” that belongs to production; they treat it as animalistic, bearing solely on the “reproduction of the physical existence of human beings.” This understanding finds little food for thought in the provisioning for human life. Marx objects to idealist ways of thinking for disregarding the provisioning process because they fail to see that wealth and its production always have historically specific social forms. These forms are of great consequence. Materialists and economists, on the other hand, may champion material production yet likewise miss the fact that a mode of production is a “mode of life.” As Martha Campbell characterizes this two-pronged criticism: “Marx’s case against idealist philosophy of law is that the goal of each particular way of life is realized through the process of satisfying needs; against economics, it is that satisfying needs is the means for realizing the goal of a particular way of life.”17 Historical materialism’s breakthrough is to recognize that social form and purpose reach all the way down and therefore must be elements in understanding any actual mode of production. Marx returns to this idea in the Grundrisse: “Whenever we speak of production, then, what is meant is always production at a definite stage of social development—production by social individuals.”18 We can make general observations about production whatever the state of social development, but there is no production-in-general. Marx then states the kernel of historical materialism, “All production is appropriation of

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nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society.”19 Humans need food, but what I eat and how I come by it involve a way of life. Needs, labor, goods, and services take specific social forms. With this phenomenological breakthrough, Marx foregrounds the third question about wealth. Because we take Marx’s statement to be true—production always does take place “within and through a specific form of society”—we conclude that general categories such as wealth and production have a legitimate use in identifying features that all societies have in common. But these general notions get misused when dissociated from or conflated with specific social forms and purposes.20

What Historical Materialism Offers to Heidegger’s Phenomenology To better appreciate the phenomenological insight involved in historical materialism, we contrast Marx’s account of the human predicament with that set forth by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time. Being and Time is a rebuke to the mindset of modern philosophy from Descartes through Hume to Kant. Popular quandaries of modern philosophy concerning the existence of the external world or of other minds drop away once phenomenological inquiry reveals that “being-in-the-world” and “beingwith” other Dasein belong to Dasein’s way of being. Perceiving, feeling, and thinking are ways that humans always already exist in the world and with other humans; they are not unworldly, purely mental phenomena. Marx, like Hegel before him, has much in common with Heidegger in rejecting the purist splits common in modern philosophy through Kant.21 In his “Theses on Feuerbach,” Marx lashes out against the onesided philosophies of idealism and materialism, both of which presume dichotomies such as form and content, the conceptual and the empirical, activity and passivity, intention and action, reason and emotion, and the subjective and the objective. Such dichotomies are characteristic of the mindset that Marx sees underlying modern philosophy and political economy—what he calls “the bourgeois horizon.”22 Marx’s joint critiques of philosophy and political economy belong to a broader intellectual revolution begun by Hegel against the one-sided categories native to the bourgeois horizon.23 Like Heidegger, Marx sees human beings as

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“in-the-world” and “being-with” other humans. However, Marx’s historical materialism includes a crucial observation absent from Heidegger’s phenomenology. Heidegger’s account of the work world closely resembles Marx’s general observations regarding wealth, that is, useful things, and the process of producing wealth, the labor process. When Heidegger begins, “But the work to be produced is not just useful for … production itself is always a using of something for something,” he draws a distinction between useful things and useful labor, which always involves using tools toward some end. Heidegger continues: A reference to “materials” is contained in the work at the same time. The work is dependent upon leather, thread, nails, and similar things. Leather in its turn is produced from hides. These hides are taken from animals which were bred and raised by others. We also find animals in the world which were not bred and raised and even when they have been raised these beings produce themselves in a certain sense. Thus beings are accessible in the surrounding world which in themselves do not need to be produced and are always already at hand.24

Heidegger’s points match up with Marx’s observations that useful things depend upon their material make-up and form for their usefulness. Human labor is always concrete, useful labor that purposefully employs tools and materials to specific ends. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx rejects the assertion of the German Workers’ Party that labor is the source of all wealth. For Marx, labor is the source of all value. He writes, “Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as is labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a natural force, human labor power.”25 This rebuke tells us that wealth and value are two different things; value arises from the social form that labor takes when wealth is produced on a capitalist basis. Heidegger furthermore recognizes that human work is not only a purposeful transformation of manmade and natural materials into new wealth; it is at the same time a social activity: Thus not only beings which are at hand are encountered in the work but also beings with the kind of being of Dasein for whom what is produced becomes handy in its taking care. Here a world is encountered in which wearers and users live, a world which is at the same time our world.26

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Humans depend upon other humans to supply them with means of production, and humans produce with and for other humans. The world of work, Heidegger sees, is a social world. Likewise, Marx notes in wrapping up his general observations on the labor process: The labor process, as we have just presented it in its simple and abstract elements, is purposeful activity aimed at the production of use-values. It is an appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirements of man … it is common to all forms of society in which human beings live.27

In other words, although we can say some things in general about the labor process, including that it is a social activity, we do so by abstracting from specific forms of society. It is his attention to those specific social forms and purposes that sets Marx apart from Heidegger. Philosophically, Heidegger’s conception of useful things and the work world has much in common with Marx’s treatment of use-values and the labor process in general. While Heidegger grasps the work world as a social phenomenon, he lacks Marx’s further observation that work always takes place “within and through a specific form of society,” resulting in wealth that always has a specific social form and purpose. Like others who fail to figure this in, Heidegger is in no position to investigate the meaning and consequences of those social forms. Adopting the key insight of historical materialism—production always takes place “within and through a specific form of society”—would enrich Heidegger’s phenomenology in Being and Time. With a historically specific investigation such as Capital, rooted in the phenomenological breakthrough of historical materialism, Marx avoids the historicity without history with which Theodor W. Adorno charged Heidegger.28 Ironically, concern over discursive horizons motivates Heidegger’s call in Being and Time (1928) for reopening the question of (the meaning of) being, which he regards as “the most basic [prinzipiellste] and at the same time most concrete question.”29 It is the most concrete question because it affects the fundamental concepts that allow for the “first concrete disclosure” of a domain of objects of research. The “historical and humanistic disciplines” are one such research domain. Heidegger observes, “The real ‘movement’ of the sciences takes place in the revision of these basic concepts.”30 He points to examples of revolutions in the discourse of mathematics and physics, even in theology. Marx’s historical materialism and his critique of political economy revised the fundamental concepts

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of the “historical and humanistic disciplines.” Though this exemplifies real movement in the sciences, Marx is not mentioned. As we have just seen, this omission shows up in the body of Being and Time. Though Heidegger’s fundamental analytic of Dasein describes Dasein as at work in-the-world with other Dasein, no conceptual space is cleared for the phenomenological insight of historical materialism. Marx’s observation that the work world necessarily takes a specific social form and purpose supplies a piece of the phenomenological puzzle missing from Being and Time.

Uses and Hazards of the Concept of Wealth Wealth is not a worthless concept, but it is poor in the sense of being conceptually meager. It does not tell us much. Like other general concepts, wealth can get twisted into an “abstract idea,” or bad abstraction, in the sense explicated by George Berkeley.31 That happens when the general concept of wealth is taken to refer to wealth-in-general, which does not exist. In the context of a capitalist society, this possibility becomes a likelihood because, as Martha Campbell points out, capitalist forms of appearance make commodities seem to be devoid of any material or social form: “What is, for Marx, the extraordinary feature of economic activity in capitalism” is that “it claims to create wealth pure and simple and is organized by this purpose. As a result, capitalism presents wealth as if it were something qualitatively single (uniform).”32 In this way, wealth “pure and simple,” that is “wealth-in-general,” appears to be something that, like money, is distinguishable only by quantity. A legitimate concept—wealth—morphs into one of the illusions that confound thinking about capitalism. For Berkeley, general ideas are not abstract ideas. Berkeley has nothing against general ideas, such as triangle or wealth, but he criticizes abstract ideas for pretending to be perceptible or imaginable, when only sensible particulars are. There is a general concept of a triangle, but there is no abstract idea of a triangle; there is no actual or imaginable trianglein-general to which the general word “triangle” refers. Any actual or imagined triangle must be particular—this scalene, isosceles, or equilateral triangle—though the general concept of a triangle encompasses all three. Likewise, the general concept of wealth encompasses wealth in its many material and social forms, such as salt or a gift. But actual wealth always has specific material and social form: there is no wealth-in-general

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any more than there is a triangle-in-general. General ideas, for Berkeley, are particulars attended to in the right way (or the power to attend properly); there are no abstract ideas. What Berkeley calls abstract ideas we call pseudo-concepts because they can have no referent. David Hume adopts Berkeley’s point with his notion of a “distinction of reason.” A distinction of reason is drawn where we can selectively attend to aspects of a thing in the right way but cannot separate them in perception or imagination.33 Hume’s example involves a white marble sphere. By attending to the color, we can distinguish its whiteness from its spherical shape, but we cannot separate the two.34 In making this point, Berkeley and Hume recognize the necessity for what we call phenomenology, namely, experience-based inquiry that determines which distinguishable features in perception are separable and which are not. A string can be separated from a guitar, but color is not separable from shape. This observation is a phenomenological one from Hume. One reason why wealth is a thin concept that can be twisted into a bad abstraction is implicit in the overlooked third question introduced earlier: what is the specific social form and purpose of wealth? The question assumes that wealth always has a specific social form. Wealth is a thin concept as it must be to be general. It says nothing about the specific social form of any actual wealth. But overlooking the third question makes imagining wealth without social form a serious hazard. Without awareness of what is missing, it seems that the concept of wealth is complete. The phenomenological claim that wealth always has a specific social form and purpose is the seminal insight of Marx’s historical materialism and the core of this chapter. If the claim is true, then the general concept of wealth functions properly as a partial, open concept of any actual wealth, a concept that awaits completion through the identification of the specific material and social form of any wealth.35 The general concept of wealth gets twisted into an abstract idea, a bad abstraction, when wealthin-general is taken to exist. The fact that we can make some useful general observations about wealth irrespective of its social form should not lead us into the fallacy of thinking that wealth ever actually exists in general. There is no wealth-in-general, and there is no corresponding general science of wealth. Because it claims to be a general science, mainstream economics is, as Hans-Georg Backhaus puts it, a science without a subject matter—a pseudo-science.36 Failure to recognize that wealth always has a specific social form and purpose is hazardous. As a thin concept, wealth is relatively uninteresting

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and uninformative. While there are some things to say in general about wealth, they do not add up to anything that we could call a science. Marx observes: there are characteristics which all stages of production have in common, and which are established as general ones by the mind; but the socalled general preconditions of all production are nothing more than those abstract moments with which no real historical stage of production can be grasped.37

This raises grave questions. Economics as usually understood abstracts from wealth’s specific social forms and purposes. Classical and neoclassical economics fit this description: both present economics as a general social science that applies to every society. John Stuart Mill insists that the production of wealth per se is the subject: political economy is “the science which traces the laws of such of the phenomena of society as arise from the combined operations of mankind for the production of wealth, in so far as those phenomena are not modified by the pursuit of any other object.”38 Lionel Robbins’ neoclassical definition of economics likewise sets aside specific social forms: “Economics is the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.”39 One important implication of framing economics this way is that it confines the motivations of economic actors to asocial, ahistorical, natural desires and dispositions. Recall how Hubbard and O’Brien dismiss money and profit as unimportant. This means that classical and neoclassical economics are extensions of state-ofnature theory.40 Economics rests on philosophical egoism. The lesson of Marx’s phenomenology of the human provisioning process is this: if we take economics to be a generally applicable science of human behavior, then there is no economics, for its supposed object of inquiry, “the economy” (the economy-in-general), does not exist.41 When the general concept of wealth is taken up without awareness that wealth always has some specific social form, social theory cuts itself off from the better part of its subject matter. In contrast to the sparse general concept of wealth, the specific social forms of wealth (e.g., commodity, value, money, capital) are morally, socially, and politically rich in content. The false move that abstracts wealth from its specific social form constitutes the breakdown of contemporary social theory. To see what is at stake, consider The Gift, Marcel Mauss’s short anthropological study

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of what he termed “archaic societies.”42 What Mauss calls the gift is a specific social form of wealth with social purposes that make up the subject of his inquiry. Had Mauss played the part of an economist content with the general concept of wealth—“giving gifts” is simply transferring wealth—there would have been no book to write. As we will see, the same holds true for Capital: Marx’s opening sentence announces his intention to study not “the wealth of nations” (Adam Smith) but wealth in the generalized commodity form, a form of wealth peculiar to societies where the capitalist mode of production predominates. Whereas the general concept of wealth gives social theory little to chew on, the implications of the commodity form of wealth provided Marx a lifetime of food for thought.43 Because of the poverty of the general concept of wealth, the grass looks greener on the other side. Social theorists, including economists, naturally turn to familiar, substantive concepts having to do with the specific social forms and purposes of wealth, especially those constitutive of the capitalist mode of production. Whether intentionally or not, they bait and switch. They advertise a general social science, but capitalist forms descend deus ex machina: the commodity, money, wage labor, profit, interest, and rent. Bait and switch is the rule in introductory economics textbooks. These texts claim to set forth a generally applicable social science, usually following Robbins, but leap in with capitalist categories. Supply and demand curves are drawn as if goods everywhere have prices and demand is an all-purpose measure of desire.44 It is easy to miss this point and equate demand with desire. Thus, Wendell Berry writes, “rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.”45 But living under the law of supply and demand involves a peculiar kind of competition, one that rats and roaches do not engage in, since supply and demand are well-defined concepts only where goods have prices. The number of widgets that I am willing to buy at a given price measures my demand for them. No matter how many desires I may have, without money I create no demand. Since only humans take part in a world of commodities and money, only humans live under the law of supply and demand. When the underlying phenomenological point that wealth always has specific social forms is missed, the awareness needed to distinguish between general and specific features of wealth is lacking. Being oblivious to the distinction poses the hazard of conflating general and specific features.46 To take two cases, goods are identified with commodities,

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though goods need not have a price, and instruments of production are identified with capital , though tools need not be used to make money. Conflating general with socially specific categories results in two types of equivocation: general categories are mistaken for socially specific ones and, more commonly, socially specific categories are taken to be general. Mistaking what is socially specific, such as value, for what is general, such as wealth, is what Marx calls fetishism. The classical labor theory of value is fetishistic in this way because it treats the peculiar social powers of commodities—the purchasing power they have as values—as “the socio-natural properties of these things,” as if any sort of labor invested products with these powers.47 Anticipating the subjectivism of neoclassical economics, Samuel Bailey criticizes Ricardians for claiming that value is intrinsic to the products of human labor. Marx disagrees with both the Ricardians and with Bailey; value is intrinsic to commodities but not because they are products of labor per se: their value character is their social form. Fetishism should not be confused with the fetish character of commodities. Fetishism is a mistaken conception, an error. The fetish character of the commodity and money is a different matter; it does not concern how people think about value but refers rather to the peculiar social power that commodities and money pack. To sell one commodity and purchase another of equal value enacts a distinctive social power, purchasing power. In Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman’s neighbor Charley shouts at him, “Who liked J. P. Morgan? Was he impressive? In a Turkish bath he’d look like a butcher. But with his pockets on he was very well liked.”48 Because of the oddly asocial type of sociality involved in the production of commodities, goods become values and have social powers unrelated to their natural properties or the personalities of their possessors. This makes fetishes of commodities. Regarding the peculiar social power of value as expressed in money, Marx compares money to the philosophers’ stone: Money’s relation to the individual thus appears as a purely accidental one; while this relation to a thing having no connection with his individuality gives him, at the same time, by virtue of the thing’s character, a general power over society, over the whole world of gratifications, labours, etc. It is exactly as if, for example, the chance discovery of a stone gave me mastery over all the sciences, regardless of my individuality. The possession

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of money places me in exactly the same relationship towards wealth (social) as the philosophers’ stone would towards the sciences.49

In speaking of the fetish character of commodities and money, Marx is not dismissing their social power as some archaic superstition. No, as its specific social form, value is intrinsic to the commodity. In capitalist society, these powers, though purely social, are objective and inescapable. In a perverse inversion, they lord it over the human beings who organize production in such a way as to induce these impersonal yet familiar powers. It is no mistake to believe in the peculiar social powers of commodities and money; on the contrary, the mistake lies with mainstream economics for dismissing them as occult beliefs and reducing purchasing power to the desires and dispositions of individual participants in the marketplace. That mistake is analogous to dismissing magnetism or gravity as occult powers. Obliviousness to the fetish character of commodities and money manifests the sterility of contemporary social theory.

Wealthism and Productivism: Shadows of Capital’s Boundless Accumulation Pseudo-concepts multiply and sow confusion. Six popular concepts inherit the poverty of the concept of wealth and further disclose its hazards. Wealthism and productivism, greed and abstract hedonism, along with productive labor and productivity, belong to the contemporary quagmire of social theory. Wealthism and productivism are inconsistent hybrids that mix the general concepts of wealth and production with the boundless drive to accumulate that is specific to capitalism. We take up two manifestations of that drive to accumulate capital, namely, greed, the boundless craving for money, and what Marx calls “abstract hedonism,” the singleminded pursuit of pleasure that is indifferent to kinds of pleasure. Greed is actual; abstract hedonism is greed’s shadow; it is a pseudo-concept. Like the general concept of wealth, the general concepts of productive labor and productivity are unobjectionable and useful. The chief hazard that they pose is the same as with the general concept of wealth: to allow for productive labor in general and a measure of productivity in general. This yields bad abstractions, for it severs any actual productive labor and any measure of its productivity from the social form and purpose that constitute that labor. The concept of wealth, with its hazards, is a source of the

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concepts of wealthism and productivism, greed and abstract hedonism, and productive labor and productivity. Marx makes it sound as if capitalism is the apotheosis of wealthism and productivism: “Accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the sake of production: this was the historical mission of the bourgeoisie in the period of its domination.”50 However, this sentence must be taken in context. The preceding sentence reads: “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!... Therefore save, save, i.e. reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value or surplus product into capital!” Marx reminds us that surplus-value is being accumulated: “If, in the eyes of classical economics, the proletarian is merely a machine for the production of surplus-value, the capitalist too is merely a machine for the transformation of this surplus-value into surplus capital.”51 The arc of the argument in Capital makes it clear that what is being produced and accumulated is not wealth—there is no wealth-in-general—but capital. Capital is a social form of wealth and its production; capital is loaded with moral, social, and political significance. Wealthism, the single-minded dedication to having ever more wealth, is a shadow of what impels capitalist society—the boundless accumulation of capital. Wealthism ignores money and capital. In so doing, wealthism conceals the distinctive features of capitalism except its drive to accumulate. Furthermore, it misrepresents that drive as directed at wealth or stuff rather than at capital. Productivism means indiscriminately pumping out more and more wealth, i.e., production for the sake of production. It too is a shadow of capital’s fixation on endlessly producing profitable commodities for the sake of capital accumulation. Productivism also ignores money and capital. But capitalists do not produce for the sake of producing. Their purpose is to produce commodities that reap profits, which can be accumulated as capital. Production on a capitalist basis is inverted. Production is not for the sake of society; instead, “production is production only for capital .”52 Wealthism and productivism go together: both set aside capitalist forms. Wealthism and productivism mask capital. When social theory focuses on them, the real driver—the unending accumulation of capital— slips away. “Materialism” in the everyday sense, not the metaphysical one, is an expression for the paired pseudo-concepts of wealthism and productivism. Capitalism radiates the illusion that the purpose of capitalist production is the production of wealth “pure and simple.” Wealthism and

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productivism mistake the illusion for the reality. There is neither wealth nor production of wealth “pure and simple.” Wealthism and productivism differ from the general concept of wealth; they are mismatches of general categories (wealth and production) and socially specific ones (the commodity, capital, and capital accumulation)— neither fish nor fowl. Wealthism and productivism are not simply poor concepts, as is the meager general concept of wealth; they are bogus. These ill-conceived concepts display three faults. First, wealthism, as the ceaseless pursuit of “wealth,” could make sense only if there were wealth (wealth-in-general) to accumulate. But there is none. In presuming the existence of wealth-in-general, wealthism engages in bad abstraction. By contrast, the general concept of wealth does not assert the existence of wealth-in-general. It applies to every form of wealth, and in so doing it abstracts from the features that distinguish one useful thing from another. Wealth is a useful abstraction for talking in general terms. Second, since neither the category of wealth nor of the wealth-seeker is socially determinate, the explanation for the wealthist fixation attributes it to human nature. The same holds for the productivist fixation on production for its own sake. The problem here is that there is no good reason to think that wealthism and productivism are natural proclivities. Hegel contrasts the finitude of animal needs with the infinity of human needs, but the infinity he has in mind concerns human freedom and the capacity for reflective innovation, not endless stuff: The ways and means by which the animal can satisfy its needs are limited in scope, and its needs are likewise limited. Though sharing this dependence, the human being is at the same time able to transcend it and to show his universality, first by multiplying his needs and means [of satisfying them], and secondly by dividing and differentiating the concrete need into individual parts and aspects which then become different needs, particularized and hence more abstract.53

Human needs are infinite because human beings are free. We are not wired for boundlessly producing and accumulating wealth, a sterile repetition that Hegel would regard as the bad or false (schlechte) infinity. The wealthist and productivist presumptions regarding human nature are untenable; they result from projecting the “false infinity” of the socially specific drive to accumulate capital onto human nature.54

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A third fault with wealthism and productivism is that they presuppose a common measure for wealth, implicitly adopting the basic principle of utility theories. Without a metric, how am I to know if I am accumulating or producing more wealth? Two coats are more wealth than one, but are they more than a computer, a car, or a Van Gogh painting of sunflowers? Goods come in many kinds. Following Aristotle, we argue that there is no measure of wealth that cuts across goods. If I cannot measure wealth, I cannot know how to accumulate or produce more of it. Consequently, the aims of wealthism and productivism are obscure. Because capital has a common measure in money, the accumulation of capital is intelligible. Capital accumulation is the purpose of production on a capitalist basis; accumulation results from a coherent and reproducible process, even if prone to crisis. Without a common measure of wealth, neither wealthism nor productivism is well-defined or operational. There is no coherent wealthist or productivist mode of production. Wealthism and productivism pay no heed to the third question concerning wealth. Marx, however, insists that production always has a social form. Moreover, a form of production must be able to reproduce its social form: Whatever the social form of the production process, it has to be continuous; it must periodically repeat the same phases. A society can no more cease to produce than it can cease to consume. When viewed, therefore, as a connected whole, and in the constant flux of its incessant renewal, every social process of production is at the same time a process of reproduction.55

Wealthism and productivism lack a reproducible social form. As shadows of the capitalist provisioning process, they conceal more than they reveal. Wealthism and productivism are incompatible mixes of general categories (wealth and production) with the boundless dynamism specific to the capitalist mode of production, which aims at the endless accumulation of capital. The prominence of wealthist and productivist ideas in our discourse manifests the confusion afflicting contemporary social theory.

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Greed and Abstract Hedonism: Expressions of Capital’s Indifference Human cravings can become fixated in many ways, for example, on food or sexual satisfaction. A person with specific cravings may be called greedy for the desired object, but we also use the word “greed” narrowly to identify a unique fixation, the miser’s boundless craving for money. Greed is on a different footing than gluttony or lust. Marx identifies money as the object and origin of greed: Money is therefore not only an object, but is the object of greed [Bereicherungssucht ]. It is essentially auri sacra fames. Greed as such, as a particular form of the drive, i.e. as distinct from the craving for a particular kind of wealth, e.g. for clothes, weapons, jewels, women, wine etc., is possible only when general wealth, wealth as such, has become individualized in a particular thing … Money is therefore not only the object but also the fountainhead of greed.56

In this section, greed refers solely to craving for money. Money is a peculiar object of desire. Money represents wealth of every kind, yet when kept out of circulation in a hoard, money is useless and signifies no wealth at all. Greed is boundless in a double sense. First, its object is not any one good or set of goods, as with gluttony or lust. The object of greed, money, can be exchanged for any commodity. Second, accumulating money is frictionless in the sense that it does not encounter resistance from the limits of desires for specific goods. One has the same reason to hoard the next dollar as the last. A million dollars is always welcome; three slices of cheesecake make me sick. In its indifference toward the particularity of goods, wealthism apes greed. But wealthism is only the silhouette of greed, for its object is wealth in general, which is a bad abstraction. Greed is not a pseudoconcept since it seeks money, which is real. Because there is no measure of wealth, there is no way of life that can be identified as wealthist. However, greed—the miser’s endless hoarding of money—is a way of life, though a repugnant one. In a provocative passage in the Grundrisse, Marx considers the relations among greed, money, and what he calls abstract hedonism: The mania [Habsucht ] for possessions is possible without money; but greed itself is the product of a definite social development, not natural.…

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Hedonism in its general form [Genussucht in ihrer allgemeinen Form] and miserliness are the two particular forms of monetary greed. Hedonism in the abstract presupposes an object which possesses all pleasures in potentiality. Abstract hedonism [Die abstrakte Genussucht ] realizes that function of money in which it is the material representative of wealth; miserliness, in so far as it is only the general form of wealth as against its particular substances, the commodities.57

By abstract hedonism Marx has in mind a hedonism that is indifferent toward the particularity of pleasures, much as moneymakers are indifferent to how their money is made. General Motors is as happy to make money on car loans as on cars. Abstract hedonism is a reflective, calculating sort of hedonism. It says maximize pleasure and minimize pain. This hedonism is indifferent to the sources of pleasure and pain.58 We call someone who is bent on the pleasures of fine dining or sexual gratification a hedonist, but such a person is not an abstract hedonist: it is not pleasure in the abstract that is the object of those cravings. Greedy persons exist, but the abstract hedonist is a caricature. Pleasures exist only as particular, the pleasures of a good meal, film, or exercise. Pleasure in the abstract is a pseudo-concept. The abstract hedonist is a shadow of the miser. Marx calls the capitalist the “rational miser” because the capitalist realizes that the best way to accumulate money is to invest, that is, to spend money as capital.59 Greed infuses capitalism with a puritanical spirit: accumulate capital, do not consume goods. Money’s indifference to the particularity of goods frames wealthism and the flip-flopping between miserliness and abstract hedonism. Where the wealthist seeks to accumulate wealth, indifferent to the particularity of goods, the abstract hedonist seeks to maximize pleasure, indifferent to the particularity of pleasures. But neither wealth nor pleasure exists in the abstract. Both the wealthist and the abstract hedonist are fictions; the miser is real. What distinguishes wealthism from abstract hedonism is that the latter is set on maximizing the pleasure that consuming commodities can bring; wealthism is odder with its aim to have wealth, not consume it. Capitalism fosters an indifference toward goods that both disguises and reveals social forms. In their indifference toward the particularity of wealth and pleasure, wealthism and abstract hedonism are shadows of the real indifference of money and capital.

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Before Marx, Aristotle linked money, boundless craving (greed), and something like abstract hedonism. Aristotle traces greed to an abstract kind of hedonism: “The origin of this disposition in men is that they are intent upon living only, and not upon living well; and as their desires are unlimited, they also desire that the means of gratifying them should be without limit.”60 The motto for abstract hedonism states that pleasure is good and more pleasure is better.61 Since money gives access to pleasures of all sorts and more money to more pleasures, Aristotle shows why an abstract hedonist wants money in unlimited quantities. What wealthism, productivism, abstract hedonism, and greed share is indifference toward the particularity of goods. Only greed seeks something real—money; the others chase shadows. Money, the object of greed, is a constitutive social form of wealth belonging to an actual way of meeting human needs. Capital presupposes a monetary economy. As something actual, capital is the truth of wealthism and abstract hedonism, which are its shadows. The hazard for social theory is mistaking shadows for reality.

Productive Labor and Productivity in General: Failing to Ask the Third Question Productive labor and productivity seem to be ordinary categories, but the hazards associated with the concept of wealth recur. We will consider these categories in the light of those hazards. There is nothing wrong with talking about productive labor or productivity any more than there is in talking in general terms about wealth or production. But thinking that there is wealth-in-general involves a false move. Likewise, productive labor in general and productivity in general do not exist. Marx adopts the Aristotelian conception that the measure of wealth derives from wealth’s specific social form. Historical materialism tells us that the social production process is purposive and not all production processes are organized around the same purpose. We look to the purpose of production for its measure of success. Marx applies this to capitalism, concluding: “Capitalist production finds its measure only in capital.”62 The false move is to treat wealth, labor, or production as if any one of them could exist independent of their constitutive social form and purpose. General observations can be made about productive labor and productivity. But there is no actual labor that is productive labor in general, and

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there is no generally applicable measure of productivity. Actual productive labor and actual measures of productivity necessarily involve the specific social form of production and the wealth it produces. “Productive labor in general” and “productivity in general” would make sense only if wealth-in-general were the purpose of labor and production. But there is no wealth-in-general. Hazards proliferate around the concept of wealth. Actual labor, production, and wealth always have a constitutive social form and purpose. A meal you serve a guest at home does not have the same social form as one served to a customer at a fast-food outlet; the latter is a commodity; the former is not. Hand your houseguest a bill for dinner and the significance of the social form of wealth will show itself. Productive labor in general and productivity in general are pseudo-concepts: neither has any referent. Unqualified references to “productive labor,” “productivity,” and “productivity increases” mask actual phenomena, usually labor and production that serve the capitalist ends of profit and increases in profitability. Marx abstracts from every social form to examine the labor process in general. At its conclusion, he writes, “If we look at the whole process from the point of view of its result, the product, it is plain that both the instruments and the object of labour are means of production and that the labour itself is productive labour.”63 Labor, materials, tools, and product—these general terms capture our ordinary conception of productive labor. But Marx shows that this ordinary conception is one-sided. Splitting off labor, production, and wealth from their constitutive social forms and purposes is a false move. Thus, Marx qualifies his statement in a footnote: “This method of determining what is productive labour, from the standpoint of the simple labour process, is by no means sufficient to cover the capitalist process of production.”64 Moreover, the general concept of productive labor is not sufficient to cover any actual production process, since production always has a constitutive social form—the key lesson of historical materialism. Marx observes: Productive labour is only a concise term for the whole relationship and the form and manner in which labour-power figures in the capitalist production process. The distinction from other kinds of labour is however of the greatest importance, since this distinction expresses precisely the specific form of the labour on which the whole capitalist mode of production and capital itself is based.65

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What counts as productive labor varies with different modes of production. At the beginning of Chapter 16 of Capital 1, Marx returns to his definition of productive labor and to his cautionary footnote. First, he expands the general conception of productive labor that springs from the labor process taken in general, and then he contracts it by bringing in the constitutive social form of production on a capitalist basis. Considering the division of labor, he expands it to say: for one to be a productive laborer in the general sense “it is sufficient for him to be an organ of the collective labourer, and to perform any one of its subordinate functions.”66 But this general definition of productive labor contracts when we turn to capitalist production: Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is, by its very essence, the production of surplus-value … The only worker who is productive is one who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, or in other words contributes towards the self-valorization of capital.67

In capitalism, to be a productive laborer is to be exploited as a source of surplus-value. Marx concludes, “To be a productive worker is therefore not a piece of luck, but a misfortune.”68 Social forms co-determine when labor is productive. Marx attributes the failure to recognize the determinants of productive labor to the limitations of the bourgeois horizon: Only bourgeois narrow-mindedness, which regards the capitalist forms of production as absolute forms—hence as eternal, natural forms of production—can confuse the question of what is productive labor from the standpoint of capital with the question of what labor is productive in general; and consequently fancy itself very wise in giving the answer that all labour which produces anything at all, which has any kind of result, is by that very fact productive labour.69

The third question about wealth addresses social form. Because it is oblivious to the third question, the bourgeois mindset conflates specifically capitalist forms and purposes with general ones. Just as he allows for a general concept of wealth, Marx allows for a general notion of productive labor, but that is not to grant that productive labor in general exists. That leap is where the false move, the bad abstraction, occurs.

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Marx is careful to distinguish the social form of productive labor from its material form: for labour to be designated productive, qualities are required which are utterly unconnected with the specific content of the labour, with its particular utility or the use-value in which it is objectified. Hence labour with the same content can be either productive or unproductive.70

One cannot identify what labor is productive without attending to the social form of the labor in question. Marx offers two explanations why so many thinkers tried to base the distinction between productive and unproductive labor on material factors alone. These illustrate the hazards of general concepts, such as productive labor. The first concerns “the fetishism peculiar to the capitalist mode of production from which it arises. This consists of regarding economic categories, such as being a commodity or productive labour, as qualities inherent in the material incarnations of these formal determinations or categories.”71 By “economic” here Marx means “socially specific”; what he calls “fetishism” is the conflation of socially specific categories (commodity and capitalist productive labor) with generally applicable ones (wealth and productive labor). The second explanation is that “looking at the labour process as such, labour is held to be productive only if it results in a product (and since we are concerned only with material wealth, it must be a material product).”72 Here Marx refers to the first part of Chapter 7 of Capital 1, on the labor process in general, which explicitly abstracts from the social form of labor. Productive labor must result in a product; we can say that much in general. But that is not enough. The product (wealth) and the labor that produces it always have a definite social form; to be productive, the labor and its product must have the social forms constitutive for the relevant society. The labor that produced the heap of kerosene-soaked oranges pictured in The Grapes of Wrath turned out not to be productive.

Devastating Consequences What is the specific social form and purpose of wealth? This third question concerning wealth is missing from social theory and notably from economics. Its absence represents a phenomenological failing, a false move. The consequences of its absence for social theory are devastating. The third question arises from the judgment that wealth always has a

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specific social form and purpose and that they matter; the false move commonly made in contemporary social theory is to abstract from specific social form and purpose, usually by ignoring or dismissing them. The phenomenological finding that wealth always has a specific social form and purpose is the momentous discovery of Marx’s historical materialism. This finding is foundational for this chapter and the two that follow. We can make useful general observations about wealth: wealth is a poor concept but not a bogus one. But there is no wealth-in-general. Consequently, as Marx recognized, there is no general science of wealth or the production of wealth: there is nothing to be the object of such a science. Marx grants that “what is customary to say about [wealth and its production] in general terms is restricted to abstractions which had a historic value in the first tentative steps of political economy,” but he goes on to remark, “later, they become leathery commonplaces, the more nauseating, the more they parade their scientific pretensions.”73 When Marx wrote, just before that passage, that “political economy has to do with the specific social forms of wealth or rather of the production of wealth,” he was making a counterfactual statement, since economics, whether classical or neoclassical, fails to make these forms integral to its thinking.74 Political economy—or a discipline that supersedes it—should be about “the specific social forms of wealth or rather of the production of wealth,” but then it would have to abandon its pretension of being a generally applicable social science. Economics is ordinarily understood to be a generally applicable science of human behavior. As such, it is a hoax. General concepts are liable to morph into damaging abstractions. For example, the reasonable general concept of wealth gets converted into wealth-in-general and is treated as something existing. It is as if you ask someone to pass you not the cherries or pears but the Fruit, or you go to the zoo not to see the tiger or giraffe but the Animal. To suppose that the general concept wealth has wealth-in-general as its referent is a false move. It misses the phenomenological finding that wealth and production always have a constitutive social form and purpose. Another false move conflates general categories with categories that grasp the distinctive character and dynamics of the modern world, notably value and capital. For Marx, the key to understanding the modern commercial world is an adequate concept of capital, which in turn requires an adequate concept of value, since capital is value that is increased in value (valorized). The traditional view regards capital as a produced resource that can be used in the production of new wealth. That conception has veered into

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the ridiculous. Today we hear not only of human capital and social capital, but also of natural capital, political capital, cultural capital, concept capital, moral capital, relationship capital, intangible capital, identity capital, spiritual capital, and erotic capital. In other words, any conceivable resource is called capital. With this mindless use, all the teeth have been pulled from the concept.75 Likewise, the language of “adding value” is ubiquitous, yet no thought is given to what it is that is being added.76 Social theory slumps into verbal monkeyshines. If Marx is right, contemporary social science and philosophy lack the most important concept needed to understand the modern world— capital—as well as the concept of value, which is needed to grasp capital.77 The conventional conception of capital as a produced resource that can be used in the production of new wealth—an instrument of production—tells us nothing about what sets a capitalist society apart. Properly conceived, capital is a socially specific form of wealth and the production of wealth with a specific social purpose; capital is value that valorizes itself, that is, increases its value. The absence of this concept accounts for the poverty of social theory.

Notes 1. Charles Dickens, Hard Times, ed. George Ford and Sylvere Monod, 2nd ed. (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990), 47. 2. Drawing on Aristotle’s practical philosophy, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, who also cite this political economy lesson from Hard Times, criticize the restriction of current discourse about wealth to the quantitative issues posed in the first two questions. They raise numerous qualitative considerations about wealth, but they do not identify the topic of the third question. See The Quality of Life, ed. Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 1–2. 3. We treat utility and instrumental reason/action in Chapters 11 and 12, “Capital, the Truth About Utility” and “The Myth of Instrumental Reason and Action,” following the present chapter, which treats wealth-in-general. 4. When commodities are sold, they become ex-commodities, sometimes becoming commodities again, sometimes not. On ex-commodities and quasi-commodities, see Patrick Murray and Jeanne Schuler, “The Commodity Spectrum,” in Continental Thought and Theory: A Journal of Intellectual Freedom 1, no. 4: 150 years of Capital, 112–52. 5. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, Updated Viking Critical Edition, ed. Peter Lisca with Kevin Hearle (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 348.

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6. Karl Marx, Capital 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 492. 7. “Thing 4—The washing machine has changed the world more than the internet has,” Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010), 31ff. 8. Without an understanding of the difference between gold and its value, which is its social form in capitalism, we could not follow the plot of the James Bond film Goldfinger. Why would Goldfinger attempt to destroy— not steal—all the gold in Fort Knox when “he loves only gold”? As Bond surmised, Goldfinger loved gold’s value more than the glittering metal, and he anticipated a boost in the value of his accumulated gold stocks once he detonated a nuclear device in Fort Knox. Guy Hamilton, dir., Goldfinger (Los Angeles, CA: United Artists, 1964), feature film. 9. Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 123 and 168. 10. Henry C. Clark, ed., Commerce, Culture, and Liberty: Readings on Capitalism Before Adam Smith (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2003), ix. 11. Jerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market : Capitalism in Modern European Thought (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), x. 12. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Penguin, 1973), 255. 13. Simon Clarke, Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology (London: Macmillan, 1982), 240. 14. R. Glenn Hubbard and Anthony Patrick O’Brien, Microeconomics, 5th ed. (New York: Pearson, 2016), 17. 15. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Revised Edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). On Rawls and capital, see Tony Smith, Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism (Leiden: Brill, 2017). 16. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, trans. Clemens Dutt, in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels Collected Works, vol. 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 31. 17. Martha Campbell, “Marx’s Concept of Economic Relations and the Method of Capital,” in Marx’s Method in “Capital,” ed. Fred Moseley (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), 146. 18. Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1973), 85. 19. Ibid., 87. 20. Marx calls attention to the conflation of general features of production and distribution with specifically bourgeois ones by political economists. He traces the conflation to the phenomenological false move of splitting production and distribution since both are always determined by constitutive social forms and purposes. See Marx, Grundrisse, 87. 21. While Marx does not figure into his account, Frank Farrell sees Hegel, Heidegger, and Donald Davidson as aiming to “recover the world”

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25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

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that is lost because of the subjectivism that characterizes so much of modern philosophy through Kant. See Frank Farrell, Subjectivity, Realism and Postmodernism: The Recovery of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels Collected Works, vol. 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 3–8. Writing in a letter to Annenkov, Marx says of Proudhon that he “does not rise above the bourgeois horizon.” Karl Marx, “Letter to P. V. Annenkov,” in The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1936), 190. Georg Lukács observes, “Marx reproached Hegel (and, in even stronger terms, Hegel’s successors who had reverted to Kant and Fichte) with his failure to overcome the duality of thought and being, of theory and practice, of subject and object.… In this sense Marx’s critique of Hegel is the direct continuation and extension of the criticism that Hegel himself leveled at Kant and Fichte.” Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1971), 16–17. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, revised by Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010), 70. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, ed. C. P. Dutt, revised translation (New York: International Publishers, 1966), 3. Heidegger, Being and Time, 70. Marx, Capital 1, 290. See also 164 and 283. Adorno writes of Heidegger, “historicality immobilizes history in the unhistorical realm, heedless of the historical conditions that govern the inner composition and constellation of subject and object.” Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1983), 129. Heidegger, Being and Time, 8. Ibid., 9. See the Introduction to George Berkeley’s A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, ed. Colin M. Turbayne (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1957). See also Patrick Murray, “Marx, Berkeley, and Bad Abstraction,” in Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory, edited by Angel Oliva, Antonio Oliva, and Ivan Novara (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 129–149. Martha Campbell, “The Objectivity of Value Versus the Idea of Habitual Action,” in The Constitution of Capital: Essays on Volume I of Marx’s “Capital,” ed. Riccardo Bellofiore and Nicola Taylor (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 86. Marx’s treatments of the use-value character of commodities and of the general characteristics of the labor process in capitalist production are

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41. 42. 43.

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good examples of how selective attention to general features works. See Capital 1, 125–26 and 283–91, respectively. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed., ed. L. A. SelbyBigge; revised P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 24–25. The way that Marx goes on in Chapter 7 of Capital 1 from his account of the labor process in general to present valorization (increasing the value invested in a production process) as the specific social form and purpose of capitalist production is a good example of how this works. Werner Bonefeld writes that Backhaus “defines economics as a discipline without subject matter.” Werner Bonefeld, Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 7. Marx, Grundrisse, 88. John Stuart Mill, “On the Definition of Political Economy and the Method of Investigation Proper to It,” in The Philosophy of Economics, ed. Daniel M. Hausman, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 43. Lionel Robbins, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, in Hausman, ed., Philosophy of Economics, 75. This neoclassical definition or a version of it appears in most microeconomics textbooks. Marx comments on the irony that this notion of the asocial, ahistorical natural individual arises under the conditions of modern society: “the epoch that produces this standpoint, that of the isolated individual, is also precisely that of the hitherto most developed social … relations” (Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 84). See Samuel Chambers, There’s No Such Thing as “The Economy.” Marcel Mauss, The Gift , trans. W. H. Hall (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1973). I. I. Rubin observes, “The basic error of the majority of Marx’s critics consists of … their complete failure to grasp the qualitative sociological side of Marx’s theory of value.” I. I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, trans. Milos Samardzija and Fredy Perlman (Detroit: Black & Red, 1972), 73–74. Marx’s theory of value has a rich “qualitative sociological side” precisely because it is a theory of the specific social form of labor and wealth in capitalist societies. Paul Samuelson writes, “The quantity of a good that people will buy at any one time depends on price; the higher the price charged for an article, the less the quantity of it people will be willing to buy; and, other things being equal, the lower its market price, the more units of it will be demanded.” Economics, 9th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1973, 59). This is an epigram to Paul Farmer’s book Pathologies of Power (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003). Commercial forms such as

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47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

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money and buying and selling are not animalistic; to suggest that they are only serves to conceal them. Marx discloses such conflation in the chapter on “the Trinity Formula”: the three factors of production: land, labor, and instruments of production are conflated with the specific forms that they take in capitalism: landed property, wage labor, and capital, to which correspond the income forms rent, wages, and interest (and profit). Karl Marx, Capital 3, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1981). Marx, Capital 1, 165. As values, commodities, such as a house, can empower their owners to borrow money. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 97. Marx, Grundrisse, 222. Marx, Capital 1, 742. Ibid. Marx, Capital 3, 358. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), #190, 228. Marx shared this view of the infinity and universality of human needs as expressions of freedom. David McNally argues that the endless spiral path of capital’s accumulation represents a bad or false infinity in Hegel’s sense. See David McNally, “Beyond the False Infinity of Capital: Dialectics and Self-Mediation in Marx’s Theory of Freedom,” in New Dialectics and Political Economy, ed. Robert Albritton and John Simoulidis (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 1–23. Marx, Capital 1, 711. Marx, Grundrisse, 222. Marx includes much of this passage in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 132ff. Ibid. Immanuel Kant, too, associates abstract hedonism with money: “If the determination of his will rests on the feeling of agreeableness or disagreeableness that he expects from some cause, it is all the same to him by what kind of representation he is affected…. Just as, to some one who wants money to spend it is all the same whether the material in it, the gold, was dug out of a mountain or washed out of sand provided it is accepted everywhere at the same value, so no one asks, when he is concerned only with the agreeableness of life, whether representations belong to the understanding or to the senses but only how much and how great satisfaction they will furnish him for the longest time.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 20–21.

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59. Marx, Capital 1, 254. More precisely, value is the target of capitalist accumulation. Money is the measure of value, but inflation and deflation show that money is not a fixed measure. The James Bond spoof Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery gets a laugh out of inflation when Dr. Evil travels in time from 1967 into the present and blackmails the world with his nuclear weapons for—one million dollars! Jay Roach, dir., Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (Los Angeles, CA: New Line Cinema, 1997), feature film. 60. Aristotle, Politics, in Murray, ed., Reflections on Commercial Life, 75. 61. Preference utility theory conceives of wealth not as useful things but as satisfaction of preferences. It is more abstract than the abstract hedonism of Bentham’s utilitarianism—it abstracts even from pleasure. 62. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, Part II, ed. S. W. Ryazanskaya, trans. Renate Simpson (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1968), 520. 63. Capital 1, 287. 64. Ibid., 287, n. 8. 65. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus-Value, Part I, ed. S. W. Ryazanskaya, trans. Renate Simpson (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1963), 396. 66. Marx, Capital 1, 644. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid. 69. Marx, Theories, Part I, 393. 70. Marx, Results of the Immediate Production Process , trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Capital: Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), 1044. 71. Ibid., 1046. 72. Ibid. 73. Marx, Grundrisse, 852–53. 74. Ibid., 852. 75. Political economy’s old “trinity” of land, labor, and capital, which Marx criticized in Capital 3, has been replaced by a “unitarian” economic conception, once land has given way to “natural capital” and labor to “human capital.” The traditional three factors of production are collapsed into one: capital (= resource). 76. Marx anticipates this inattention to value: “It is naturally still more convenient to understand by value nothing at all. Then one can without difficulty subsume everything under this category” (Marx, Capital 1, 677, n. 6). 77. Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014) is looked to by many as the standard-bearer for Marxism in the twenty-first century. For all his brilliance, he fails to grasp either the Marxian theory of value or Marx’s concept of capital.

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Hubbard, R. Glenn, and Anthony Patrick O’Brien. Microeconomics. 5th ed. New York: Pearson, 2016. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. 2nd ed., edited by L. A. SelbyBigge; revised by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Kant, Immanuel, and McNally, David. “Beyond the False Infinity of Capital: Dialectics and Self-Mediation in Marx’s Theory of Freedom.” In New Dialectics and Political Economy, edited by Robert Albritton and John Simoulidis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, 1–23. Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971. Marx, Karl. “Letter to Annenkov.” In The Poverty of Philosophy. New York: International Publishers, 1963. ———. Theories of Surplus-Value, Part I. Edited by S. W. Ryazanskaya; translated by Renate Simpson. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1963. ———. Critique of the Gotha Programme. Edited by C. P. Dutt. New York: International Publishers, 1966. ———. Theories of Surplus-Value, Part II. Edited by S. W. Ryazanskaya; translated by Renate Simpson. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1968. ———. Grundrisse. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. ———. Capital, Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1976. ———. Results of the Immediate Production Process. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. In Capital: Volume 1, translated by Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976. ———. “Theses on Feuerbach.” In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels Collected Works, vol. 5. New York: International Publishers, 1976. ———. Capital, Volume 3. Translated by David Fernbach. London: Penguin, 1981. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. Translated by Clemens Dutt. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels Collected Works, vol. 5. New York: International Publishers, 1976. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift. Translated by W. D. Halls. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1990. McNally, David. “Beyond the False Infinity of Capital: Dialectics and SelfMediation in Marx’s Theory of Freedom.” In New Dialectics and Political Economy, edited by Robert Albritton and John Simoulidis. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, 1–23. Mill, John Stuart. “On the Definition of Political Economy and the Method of Investigation Proper to It.” In The Philosophy of Economics. 3rd ed., edited by Daniel M. Hausman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman. New York: Penguin Books, 1949.

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Muller, Jerry Z. The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Murray, Patrick. “Marx, Berkeley, and Bad Abstraction.” In Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory, edited by Angel Oliva, Antonio Oliva, and Ivan Novara. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Murray, Patrick, and Jeanne Schuler. “The Commodity Spectrum.” In Continental Thought and Theory: A Journal of Intellectual Freedom, 150 Years of Capital 1, no. 4 (2017): 112–52. Nussbaum, Martha Craven, and Amartya Sen, eds. The Quality of Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Penguin, 1987. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice, Revised Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Roach, Jay, dir. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. Los Angeles, CA: New Line Cinema, 1997, feature film. Robbins, Lionel. “Selections from An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (excerpts).” In The Philosophy of Economics: An Anthology. 3rd ed., edited by Daniel M. Hausman, 73–99. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Samuelson, Paul. Economics. 9th ed. New York, McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1973. Sandel, Michael. Democracy’s Discontent. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Smith, Tony. Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism: Marx and Normative Social Theory in the Twenty-First Century. Leiden: Brill, 2017.

CHAPTER 11

Capital, the Truth About Utility

One ordinary feature of our world is that commodities surround us from birth until death. Nearly every object in our surroundings was purchased; many carry labels naming distant places. Perhaps a few things are made by me or someone I know. Perhaps I gathered rocks from the river to lay a border around the garden. More likely, I purchased the rocks or paid a landscaper. In our world, even “do it yourself” work—cooking at home, for example—usually requires goods fashioned by unknown persons and processes. Those goods are not produced for the use of their makers; they are produced to be sold. Every garment in my closet was purchased, and each passed through the hands of many strangers on route to clothing my body. The global network of buying and selling makes daily life possible. Most of us know no other way to live. But the ordinary conceals important questions. They all have prices but what makes commodities commensurable? We will argue that goods and services are commensurable as commodities but not as useful things. Prices do not measure usefulness since there is no metric of usefulness, and they do not measure utility since there is no utility to measure. Utility is a pseudoconcept. We will argue that the system of commodities and money is evidence that wealth is being produced on a capitalist basis—not a reason to accept the notion of utility. Capital is the truth about utility.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murray and J. Schuler, False Moves in Philosophy and Social Theory, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35028-3_11

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What Makes Commodities Commensurable? Why do goods and services have prices, and what do prices measure? Having a price means that every commodity on the internet or on the shelf can be compared with any other commodity in the world: commodities are commensurable. Using price lists, we can determine how many bunches of bananas from Guatemala equal one barrel of crude oil from Texas. These equivalences make the global economy possible. But bananas and oil share no pertinent physical traits. What is it about oil that allows it to be measured on the same scale as bananas? There must be a third thing—neither oil nor bananas—that allows them to be compared quantitatively. This third thing, called value, is what price expresses and measures. But what is the substance of value? These questions are implicit in everyday practices; when they are asked, they receive divergent responses. The predominant answer to the question about the substance of value is utility: utility is said to be the third thing that commodities share. We are told that this many bananas and that much oil have the same price because their utility (marginal utility) to potential purchasers determines that price.1 Utility, indeed some quantitative measure of utility, is associated with all useful things, not only with commodities. That false move makes the commensurability of goods and services a natural feature, not a socially and historically specific one that is bound up with the commodity form. According to utility theory, goods and services are commensurable as commodities because they are commensurable as useful things in the first place.2 We argue that utility is a shadow form of value; it is a pseudo-concept because there is nothing for it to be the concept of. Thinkers in the Aristotelian tradition, including Marx, reject the idea that useful things are per secommensurable. If that is right, neither usefulness nor utility can be the substance of value. A different answer to the puzzling question of what can make commodities commensurable must be sought. Classical political economists, such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, answered that labor is the substance of value: commodities are priced based on the quantity of labor required for their production. Marx is still widely thought to have adopted this classical labor theory of value and driven it to a radical conclusion: surplus-value is the result of exploitation.3 ButMarx sees that value is a historically specific sort of social objectivity that results from the social form of labor in capitalist societies—privately undertaken production of commodities for sale

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in the market. In appealing to labor as the substance of value, classical economists give a general answer to a question specific to capitalist societies. If value is specific to capitalist production, as Marx argues, then neither utility nor labor can explain it; neither is the right kind of thing to explain value. If utility is the substance of value, several consequences follow. Marx’s theory of value opposes each. (1) On the dominant view that utility measures preferences, utility is something purely subjective, so value is no property of commodities. They are goods and services that have no social form or purpose. (2) Value is not something socially or historically specific; rather, value is as universal as utility. (3) The social form of wealth and social form of the labor that produces new wealth have nothing to do with value or the commensurability of goods and services. (4) Value has no conceptual connection to money. (5) Value has nothing to do with capital, understood as a dynamic social form of wealth and production aimed at profit and the accumulation of capital. We argue, following Marx, that all five implications are false. It tells us a good deal about modern society and how we think about ourselves that there is so much talk about utility and so little thought given to capital. The titles of two prominent nineteenth-century texts indicate the divide, John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism and Karl Marx’s Capital. Like his father, James Mill, the author of Elements of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill was steeped in both Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian moral philosophy and classical political economy. Our objective in this chapter is to explore the conceptual gulf that separates utility and capital. We hope to show that the concept of utility is a defective lens that obscures key features of the world, whereas the concept of capital unmasks the ordinary and enables us to think deeply about the distinctive and troubling features of our capitalist world. When we ignore capital and assign utility a central role, we are lost in a masquerade. The ascendance of the concept of utility manifests the breakdown undergone by social theory. Unfamiliarity with Marx’s analysis throws up obstacles to understanding how commodities are commensurable. Marx’s Capital is wrongly identified with a radical version of the classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo instead of as a critique of economics, which is what Marx says it is. A second obstacle is that Marx’s critique of the mindset he calls the “bourgeois horizon” is generally overlooked. Much of modern philosophy and both classical and neoclassical economics

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operate within this horizon. Utility theory falls within the bourgeois horizon. Before Marx, Hegel argued that the notion of utility arises from the bourgeois mindset, a form of consciousness that he called “pure insight.” Roots of Marx’s thinking about this bourgeois mentality lie in his critical engagement with Hegel’s account of the Enlightenment in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel’s thesis is that the victory of pure insight over faith culminates in utility (Nützlichkeit ) as its ultimate, and dangerously empty, object. Hegel pursues the danger posed by the emptiness of utility by showing how utility gives way to “absolute freedom” and then to the Terror [der Schrecken].4 For Marx, utility functions as a hinge concept that joins the critique of bourgeois (Enlightenment) philosophy to the critique of commercial society and the economic thinking it engenders. Capital is Marx’s historical materialist response to Hegel: capital is the truth that exposes the sham of utility and reveals its source in the circulation of commodities. As Marx’s thought becomes better understood and these obstacles are removed, the two sides in this controversy come into focus.

On Utility Theory or “the Science of Measurement” for Practical Philosophy Utility theory exemplifies what Aristotle criticized as the “science of measurement” for practical philosophy. In discussing Aristotle’s objections to the science of measurement, Martha Nussbaum identifies four claims constitutive of that so-called science.5 The first is “Metricity,” that is, “the claim that in each situation of choice there is some one value, varying only in quantity, that is common to all the alternatives, and that the rational chooser weighs the alternatives using this single standard.” Second is “Singleness,” “that in all situations of choice there is one and the same metric.” Third is “Consequentialism,” which claims that “choices and chosen actions have value not in themselves, but only as instrumental means to the good consequences that they produce.”6 Nussbaum then introduces “maximization”: if we combine Consequentialism with Metricity, we have the idea of maximization: that the point of rational choice is to produce the greatest amount of the single value at work in each case. Combining both of these

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with Singleness, we have the idea that there is some one value that it is the point of rational choice, in every case, to maximize.

For this so-called science of measurement, the bottom line is all that matters. The fifth claim we might call “content.” This concerns what the metric is a metric of . The two leading candidates for the content have been pleasure (and the elimination of pain) and satisfaction of preferences. However the content of the science of measurement is specified, whether as pleasure or preference satisfaction, it goes by the name of utility: this “science,” then, is utility theory.7 In Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Nussbaum provides a somewhat revised list of four elements of “utilitarian rationalchoice models,” one that tilts toward a preference-satisfaction conception of utility: commensurability, aggregation, maximization, and exogenous preference.8 In connection with aggregation, Nussbaum stresses that the personal character of human beings carries no moral weight in utilitarian thinking; persons are sacks of preferences, nothing more.9 In the utilitarian approach to rational choice, preferences matter, not the person who prefers. Nussbaum summarizes utilitarianism’s disregard for persons and their liberty: neither the qualitative distinctions between persons (beyond the sheer quantity of utility they generate) nor, ultimately, the boundaries between them (they are all just containers of utility or sites at which utility is actualized), nor their freedom of choice (for utility is usually defined in a way that makes no essential reference to agency) will be salient from the point of view of the utilitarian account.10

The element of exogenous preferences may come from the assumptions of neoclassical economics. She writes that, frequently, “it is associated with the view that preferences are simply raw material for personal or social choices and are not themselves the product of social choices.”11 Where such an assumption is made, a false step is taken, for an adequate phenomenology of human beings recognizes involvement with other human beings as ingredient to the human way of being. In the language of Heidegger’s phenomenology of Dasein in Being and Time, “beingwith” others belongs to the human way of being. It is not an add-on. Contrary to Nussbaum, we believe that Kantian fragments play a constitutive part in utilitarian thinking. Moreover, these Kantian bits track

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aspects of the constitutive social forms of capitalist society. First, what justification is there—other than conforming to the dominant egalitarian ethos—for counting each person’s preferences the same?12 That utopian egalitarian procedure is greatly at odds with how people’s preferences count in the world. Second, why is maximizing the satisfaction of individual preferences the objective for contemporary utilitarians? It is easier to see why hedonist utilitarians want to maximize pleasure and minimize pain: pleasure is good; pain is bad. Ironically, selecting the goal of optimizing preference satisfaction stems from a thinly Kantian strain of thinking: I care about the satisfaction of your preferences not because I judge them to be good but because they are yours. In respecting your preferences, I respect you as a person just as I do in respecting your property.13 Utility puts itself forward as an all-purpose measure of usefulness. But measures are not fungible; the measure of a useful thing is grounded in its properties and nature. We measure milk by liters, not meters. A suitable measure reflects the object’s qualities. Marx calls attention to this point: Every useful thing, for example, iron, paper, etc. may be looked at from the two points of view of quality and quantity. Every useful thing is a whole composed of many properties; it can therefore be useful in various ways. The discovery of these ways and hence of the manifold uses of things is the work of history. So also is the invention of socially recognized standards of measurement for the quantities of these useful objects. The diversity of the measures for commodities arises in part from the diverse nature of the objects to be measured, and in part from convention.14

The science of measurement errs in ignoring those diverse natures to posit an all-encompassing measure that cancels diversity. Marx follows Aristotle in rejecting this aspiration to a generic measure of usefulness: qualities that belong to objects, which come in kinds, cannot be expunged from measure. There is no one size fits all here. We follow Aristotle in objecting to utility as a calculus of usefulness that rides roughshod over the specific properties and natures of useful things. Utility claims that everything useful is commensurable and can be ordered quantitatively on a scale. Value, by contrast, orders commodities on a price scale. Utility is a sham. Value is a strange kind of objectivity—Marx calls it “ghostly” [Gespenstige]—that exists only where the capitalist mode of production prevails.

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Distinguishing Utility from Usefulness Though the words “utility” and “usefulness” are often used interchangeably, there is a crucial distinction to be drawn. The concept of utility posits that all useful actions and things are commensurable: visiting a sick relative can be rated against purchasing a used car, repairing a lamp, or grilling eggplant. Pleasures are gauged, or preferences are ranked. The concept of usefulness makes no such claim. In identifying actions or things as useful, I do not presume that they can be put on the same scale. Being useful—or not—involves a relation between qualities and needs. For example, leafy trees shade the house and cut summer energy costs. A broken bicycle gets thrown out. What makes a bicycle useful says nothing about the usefulness of a fish. Being useful cuts across the subject and object: traits of useful things answer to needs. Usefulness is usefulness of something to someone for some purpose. Theories of utility, by contrast, cast usefulness as either purely subjective or purely objective. That usefulness cuts across subject and object gains no traction in the factoring philosophy of utility theory. On the contrary, utility theory is a manifestation of the purist split between the subjective and objective. That is why utility theory falls within what Marx calls the bourgeois horizon. Wealth consists of useful things and services. They are integral to human existence, but wealth takes a social form in each society. A useful thing without a social form is as nonsensical as a stone without a shape or a person without a mood. In feudal society, land, flocks, and serfs constitute the wealth of the nobles. Money plays a limited social role here; as money’s role grows, the feudal order comes apart. In capitalist society, most needs are met with commodities, so we generally acquire wealth in the form of commodities. The cash nexus prevails. Not all wealth involves objects that are bought and sold, but all wealth meets human needs. Good friends, like house and herd, constitute wealth. In a capitalist society, we purchase house and herd, but not friends. Commodities are privately owned; wealth need not be. I do not own my friends or my children or a national park. Wealth need not be property, much less a commodity. Wealth may be a conceptually poor concept, but utility is a false conception of the useful. Utility comes from mixing up useful things, which are not per secommensurable, with commodities, which prices commensurate. As a misconception of the useful, utility involves two bad abstractions, a doubly false phenomenology. Utility abstracts both from

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the qualities that make something useful, say the sweetness of the grapes, and from the specific social form of wealth, say the price of the grapes. In contrast to Marx’s theory of value, utility theories are not directed at capitalist societies, where goods generally have prices; they purport to disclose the substance of value in every society. In the introduction to the Grundrisse, Marx stresses those two phenomenological points, saying that “there is no production in general”; rather, production is always specific in at least two respects, materially and socially.15 First, production is always production of something, soup or nuts. Which good is being produced determines how production is carried out. Second, production is a social activity—and society does not exist in general. As Marx distills historical materialism, “all production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society.”16 The same two observations apply to wealth; the usefulness of goods depends upon specific material qualities, and goods involve a specific social form. Utility is supposed to be the nectar of the goods, but it proves, instead, to be a dangerous abstraction resulting in a false conception of goods. Utility is what Alasdair MacIntyre calls a “pseudo-concept.”17 There is nothing for utility to be the concept of. In beginning Capital, Marx avoids the double error involved in utility theory. In contrast to Adam Smith and the classical and neoclassical tradition in economics, Marx begins not with wealth but with wealth in a specific social form, the commodity form. The commodity, Marx tells us, is the form of appearance of wealth in those societies where capitalist production predominates. Marx calls the commodity “the elementary form of bourgeois wealth.”18 Echoing Aristotle in the Politics , he points out the double character of wealth in the commodity form—the commodity is a useful thing (a use-value), and it has an exchange-value, its price. Marx then offers a brief phenomenology of useful things. These paragraphs are seldom noticed, but here Marx draws a conceptual distinction between usefulness and utility that pulls utility theory up by the root.19 Insofar as a commodity is a useful thing, Marx writes, it is “a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind.”20 So, usefulness involves plural qualities of things capable of meeting diverse human needs. Marx says that discovering the many ways things can be useful is “the work of history.”21 For example, humans learn how to employ sun, wind, and geothermal reserves as sources of electrical power.

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Though Marx has already shown that it is not one property, much less a so-called property such as utility, that makes useful things useful, he drives home this point in an overlooked passage: “The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value. But this usefulness does not dangle in midair. It is conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter.”22 Marx rejects the very idea of utility, which would leave usefulness to “dangle in mid-air” by severing it from the properties that make things useful. When you abstract away all the properties that make things useful, you are not left with one abstract property—utility. No, this bad abstraction leaves us empty-handed.

Utility’s Twofold Masquerade In Chapter One of Capital, Marx argues from the fact that all commodities are compared through the price system, first, that commodities must have some abstract “third thing” in common, which he calls “value,” and, second, that the substance of this third thing is congealed abstract labor.23 Commodities do not share any useful traits across the board, but all commodities result from the expenditure of human labor that can be compared by average number of hours.24 They share what Marx calls abstract labor, that is, concrete labor taken in abstraction from its specific purpose and character, labor viewed simply as human physiological exertion. This reasoning that arrives at abstract labor as the common denominator of commodities resembles the thinking that arrives at utility as the common denominator of all useful things. However, a crucial difference separates the two lines of thought. That commodities are commensurable does not mean that all useful things are. It is a fallacy to reason from the fact that commodities—which are useful things— have prices to the conclusion that useful things represent some quantity of utility. Abstract labor makes sense whereas abstract usefulness, that is utility, does not. “Practically abstract labor,” which creates value by producing wealth in the commodity form, is a socially and historically specific social form of labor; there is nothing socially or historically specific about utility. Already in the German Ideology, Marx has the idea of the “third thing.” For Marx, utility is as phony as a three-dollar bill. He contrasts the “paraphrasing” of various human relations in terms of utility with an actual third thing, value, which necessarily appears as money:

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This paraphrasing [Umschreibung ] ceases to be meaningless and arbitrary only when these relations have validity for the individual not on their own account, not as spontaneous activity, but rather as disguises, though by no means disguises of the category of utilization, but of an actual third aim and relation which is called the relation of utility.25

Marx calls the theory of utility a “verbal masquerade”—utility masks value—that “only has meaning when it is the unconscious or deliberate expression of an actual masquerade”; in this case, utility is masking the “exploitation de l’homme par l’homme” (Saint-Simon).26 The “actual masquerade” is the way that the circulation of commodities in the market conceals the capitalists’ exploitation of wage workers by presenting the market as “the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.”27 For the capitalist, “only one relation is valid on its own account—the relation of exploitation; all other relations have validity for him only insofar as he can include them under this one relation.”28 But the capitalist mode of exploitation is an impersonal and well-concealed one that requires the mediation of money: “The material expression of this use is money, which represents the value of all things, people and social relations.”29 We see here the rudiments of Marx’s mature theory of the value-form: the value (congealed abstract labor) of commodities must appear as money. In turn, money gives utility an alibi, as if useful things per se have a common measure. When the social form of wealth is overlooked or effaced, commodities are easily mistaken simply for useful things and their prices mistaken for proof that useful things per seare commensurable. Marx does not begin Capital with useful things and then ask what they have in common that makes them useful. As we have seen, Marx has already answered the question: there is nothing that useful things have in common that makes them useful. Utility is a hoax. On the contrary, it is precisely their diverse specific properties and natures, which answer diverse human wants, that make them useful. Nothing about useful things per se forces us to posit a third thing that makes any two useful things commensurable. It is solely the fact that Marx starts from commodities (useful things offered for sale) that enables him to arrive at the third thing. The argument hangs on that starting point. There is no metric for useful things, but the price system provides one for commodities. We know that commodities, the social kind of useful things that are bought and sold, are quantitatively ordered by their prices: “The equation of the incompatible,

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as Shakespeare nicely defined money.”30 Utility falsely presents commensurability as a natural feature of goods, when, in fact, the commensuration of goods that are commodities is peculiar to capitalist society. Marx starts with the fact that, in capitalist societies, useful things generally have socially valid or “going” prices. Consequently, a quantity of one commodity is equivalent to a quantity of another commodity. In other words, Marx begins with an everyday fact about capitalist societies and endeavors to account for it. How is it that x amount of commodity A is equated with y amount of commodity B? The commensurability of commodities shows that, in the proper quantities (based on valid prices), they “must, as exchange-values, be mutually replaceable or of identical magnitude.” As exchange-values, a thousand dollars’ worth of water is no different than a thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds. From the replaceability of commodities, Marx draws two conclusions: “firstly, the valid exchange-values of a particular commodity express something equal, and secondly, exchange-value cannot be anything other than the mode of expression, the ‘form of appearance,’ of a content distinguishable from it.”31 To grasp wealth in the commodity form, then, three different concepts are required: use-value, exchange-value, and value (the third thing, which is necessarily expressed as exchange-value or price). Utility is absent from this list since, like Alasdair MacIntyre, Marx regards it as bogus. Utility plays no positive role in Marx’s thinking. Marx then takes two commodities at random, corn and iron, and of them he observes: Whatever their exchange relation may be, it can always be represented by an equation in which a given quantity of corn is equated to some quantity of iron, for instance 1 quarter of corn = x cwt of iron. What does this equation signify? It signifies that a common element of identical magnitude exists in two different things, in 1 quarter of corn and similarly in x cwt of iron. Both are therefore equal to a third thing, which in itself is neither the one nor the other. Each of them, so far as it is exchange-value, must therefore be reducible to this third thing.32

To determine which quantities of the two commodities are equivalent, there must be a common measure. But a measure is always a metric of ; a metric requires a common dimension, which is what Marx calls the third thing: “The exchange values of commodities must be reduced to a common element of which they represent a greater or a lesser quantity.”33

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What must this dimension be that affords commodities a metric? Marx rules out a wide range of answers: This common element cannot be a geometrical, physical, chemical or other natural property of commodities. Such properties come into consideration only to the extent that they make the commodities useful, i.e. turn them into use-values. But clearly, the exchange relation of commodities is characterized precisely by its abstraction from their use-values.34

What does Marx mean that the exchange of commodities “is characterized precisely by its abstraction from their use-values”? And in what sense do the natural properties of commodities not matter where exchange-value is concerned? The answer lies in money. Usefulness is erased in the metamorphosis of commodities into money. Commodities exchange for money. What is on the mind of every seller is to convert commodities into money. To the seller—though not to the buyer—the specific properties of the commodity put up for sale are irrelevant, assuming the commodity sells. In selling, the seller abstracts from the useful properties of what is sold. By contrast, in a barter system, both parties are seeking goods with specific properties. The purpose of barter is to meet needs. In barter, both parties care about the properties of useful things.35 Capitalists sell commodities other than labor power, and their purpose is to make money. Whether commodities have any natural properties in common or not does not matter since the transition to money—the sale—erases the material properties of commodities. If the third thing is nothing natural, then what is this common element? Something strictly social is Marx’s answer. Value is the form that wealth in the commodity form takes. Because a useful thing’s social form is intrinsic to it, value is intrinsic to the commodity. A commodity—whether wheat or wine—exists as value. The two forms—money and commodity—are not the same; they are polarized. The source of the polarity of the value-form lies in the double character of the commodity and, in turn, in the double character of the labor that produces commodities. Commodities are useful things that are values. As a value, a commodity is something supersensible, a determinate quantity of congealed abstract labor, which is a “purely social” and “ghostly” objectivity. As values, commodities are fetishes: the value character of the commodity is its fetish character. “The fetishism of the world of commodities arises from the peculiar social character of the labor which

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produces them.”36 Only money, as the recognized general equivalent, can provide a single observable metric for the quantitative determination of the value of every commodity—its price.37 The polarity of the value-form is inseparable from the commodity form because of the peculiar antagonistic character of the labor that produces commodities, namely, privately undertaken production of goods for sale. We have already seen that in Capital Marx limits his inquiry to those societies where wealth generally takes the commodity form, that is, where goods are bought and sold in the marketplace. Marx’s point is that a commercial society is continually abstracting from the specific properties that make things useful. Commodity exchange is a strange winnowing mill—a money-mill—that strips away the useful properties of products to get to their value, necessarily expressed by money. It’s no wonder that the idea of utility thrives in such a society. In a capitalist society, who is not involved in buying and selling? Participants in the market are involved in practical abstraction: they act toward commodities the way utility theorists think about goods. But notice the differences. Here, Marx’s theory of the form of value, culminating in his theory of money as the necessary expression of value, proves its power. In capitalism, money is not simply a clever device to make barter more convenient; it is the necessary expression of value. No money, no value. As congealed abstract labor, value must be expressed in something other than itself. The expression of value is necessarily polar: the value of x commodity A is expressed in z commodity B. Value requires a measure that attains social validity, a universal equivalent for commodities, namely money. The privately produced commodity is socially validated by being sold. Value necessarily expresses itself in money. The two are inseparable, yet value is expressed as a relation between two things, a commodity on the one hand and money on the other. Marx’s value-form theory, then, has the following implication. If value were utility, then utility could exist only where wealth took the commodity form. But no utility theorist would accept that implication, for utility is posited as a universally applicable category. Consequently, utility is not a candidate for being the substance of value. The polarity involved in the commodity stems from its peculiar social character. Utility, by contrast, is taken to be generally applicable. Nothing inherent in utility requires that it be expressed as money. The polarity and antagonism involved in the commodity and value are not implied by utility. As with the classical labor theory of value (Smith and Ricardo), there is no conceptual basis in utility theory for the necessity of money.

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So, there can be no theory of the “utility-form” that would demonstrate the necessity of money. The root of the difference is that the commodity, exchange-value, and value are socially determinate and conceptually complex categories, whereas utility lacks social specificity and is conceptually barren. That is why the ascendance of the concept of utility signals the failure of social theory. To recognize that value is necessarily expressed as money shows again that utility cannot be the substance of value. Goods are commensurable as commodities —quantitatively, on a single scale— only because value takes the polarized forms of commodities and money, which transforms exchange into buying and selling. To wonder why Marx does not consider utility as a candidate to be the substance of value misses the distinctiveness of Marx’s theory of value. It overlooks his theory of the value-form, which is grounded in the peculiarity of commodity-producing labor. What obstructs our understanding of these issues is that we are prone to equate commodities with useful things as such—concepts that Marx distinguishes.38 If we set aside the specific social form of wealth—which cannot be done in reality—then commodities are reduced to useful things as such. Then the price system, which commensurates commodities, leads naturally to the notion that useful things share some trait that makes them commensurable. Martha Campbell points out how capitalism makes commodities appear to be devoid of any social form: “What is, for Marx, the extraordinary feature of economic activity in capitalism” is that “it claims to create wealth pure and simple and is organized by this purpose. As a result, capitalism presents wealth as if it were something qualitatively single (uniform) that supersedes and encompasses all particular instantiations.”39 By making commodities, which are put on a common scale of prices, appear to be useful things “pure and simple,” capital lends plausibility to utility theory. It is as if money revealed the true nature of wealth—as utility—rather than representing a peculiar social form of wealth, the commodity. If all useful things are commensurable, what would have they in common if not their usefulness, which is conflated with utility?

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Marx’s Solution to the Puzzle of the Commensurability of Commodities Rejecting the very idea of utility came naturally to Marx, for he was indebted to Aristotle’s philosophy, especially his metaphysics of form, a favorite target of Enlightenment thinkers. Marx deeply admired Aristotle, whom he called a “giant thinker [Denkriese]” and described as “the great investigator who was the first to analyze the value-form, like so many other forms of thought, society and nature.”40 Using an example of the “simple value-form,” 5 beds = 1 house, Aristotle recognizes that (in Marx’s words): the value-relation which provides the framework for this expression of value itself requires that the house should be qualitatively equated with the bed, and that these things, being distinct to the senses, could not be compared with each other as commensurable magnitudes if they lacked this essential identity.41

Aristotle does claim that money makes everything commensurable, as Marx points out in a fascinating footnote. He quotes Aristotle from the Nicomachean Ethics, “Money, then, acting as a measure, makes goods commensurate and equates them.”42 The puzzle remains that, while useful things per se are incommensurable, commodities are commensurable. But what is it in commodities that money measures? Marx pursues the commensurability issue in Aristotle, with direct implications for utility theory: Here, however, he [Aristotle] falters, and abandons the further analysis of the form of value. “It is however, in reality, impossible … that such unlike things can be commensurable,” i.e. qualitatively equal. This form of equation can only be something foreign to the true nature of the things, it is therefore only “a makeshift for practical purposes.”43

Marx goes on to explain why Aristotle’s investigation of the valueform breaks down. Aristotle suggests that demand for commodities could explain prices. For Marx, too, the commensuration of goods in the price system involves demand since commodities that no one buys have no value. But demand alone cannot determine price, since demand cannot be abstracted from the usefulness of goods, which remains inseparable from their diverse properties. A purely subjective conception of demand

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makes no sense to Aristotle since he rejects the purist thinking it presupposes. Moreover, demand is not desire, since it is pegged to a schedule of prices, which is socially determined. Demand cannot be purely subjective. It comes too late to explain prices since it presupposes them. Marx’s solution is that homogeneous human labor constitutes the common substance of value. Marx observes that this solution was not available to Aristotle: The secret of the expression of value, namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labor because and in so far as they are human labor in general, could not be deciphered until the concept of human equality had already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion. This however becomes possible only in a society where the commodity-form is the universal form of the product of labor, hence the dominant social relation is the relation between men as possessors of commodities.44

Aristotle did not live in an egalitarian society, even though the presence of commodities and money, buying and selling, gave him enough familiarity with commercial forms to set up the riddle of the value-form and begin to solve it.45 What are we to make of this? Clearly, Marx reads Aristotle as flatly rejecting the very idea of utility: “It is, however, in reality, impossible … that such unlike things [two different useful things] can be commensurable.” Marx does not step in to correct Aristotle and point out that all useful things are commensurable on the scale of utility. On the contrary, Marx agrees with Aristotle in rejecting utility. Yet Marx believes that he has solved Aristotle’s riddle of what makes commodities commensurable: “And that is—human labor.”46 So are all useful things commensurable after all? No, we must not forget—and Marx reminds us—that the topic in Capital is not useful things but a specific social kind of useful things, commodities. And commodities do have something in common, the commodity form, which is their specific social form of wealth, rooted in a specific social form of production. There is labor in any society, and labor always takes a definite social form that involves the way that labor is organized and validated. In capitalist societies, wealth is created not for the use of the producer but for sale in the market. Hence, labor is socially validated in a roundabout manner, through the sale of commodities. The expression and social validation of labor via money and prices are necessary consequences of the peculiar form of production in capitalism. To validate labor in this

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way publicly affirms the equality of all human labor, though impersonally: “in the form of commodity-values, all labor is expressed as equal human labor and therefore as labor of equal quality.”47 Note the qualification “in the form of commodity-values.” Marx is not making a case for the commensurability of all useful things. He sides with Aristotle: that case cannot be made. Under the capitalist mode of production, which produces wealth in the commodity form, the only way to validate labor is for its products to be sold. The commensuration of commodities in the price system, then, incorporates the recognition of all human labor as qualitatively equal. Marx argues that the actual third thing that all commodities share—value—is the consequence of the social kind of labor that produces commodities. The notion that useful things are by nature commensurable is an illusion created by the commodity form, which abounds “in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”48 The price-form exists (in a generalized way) because it is necessary for the validation of labor under the capitalist mode of production. Prices take on a life of their own, as Marx notes: The possibility, therefore, of a quantitative incongruity between price and magnitude of value, i.e. the possibility that the price may diverge from the magnitude of value, is inherent in the price-form itself. This is not a defect, but, on the contrary, it makes this form the adequate one for a mode of production whose laws can only assert themselves as blindly operating averages between constant irregularities.49

The bursting of an asset bubble, as in the 2008 housing crisis, is a painful reminder of this possibility of quantitative incongruence: prices and values can diverge. But there is more. The incongruities native to the price-form can be qualitative as well as quantitative: The price-form, however … may also harbor a qualitative contradiction, with the result that price ceases altogether to express value, despite the fact that money is nothing but the value-form of commodities … Hence a thing can, formally speaking, have a price without having a value.50

The price-form is generalized only in a capitalist society. In capitalism, just about anything can have a price, including “uncultivated land, which is without value because no human labor is objectified in it.”51 Marx’s theory of rent incorporates commodities that are not products of human

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labor, such as undeveloped land, into his theory of value. This unavoidable consequence of the price-form enables Marx to explain how goods that are products and ones that are not both fall under the umbrella of the price system. It is not some common, abstract feature of their usefulness that makes different sorts of commodities commensurable; what they have in common is their peculiar social form, which price expresses. It is tempting to say that money makes everything commensurable. Indeed, if every useful thing had a price, they would all be commensurable—but only because they would all be commodities.

Objections to Marx’s Solution Two common objections are made to Marx’s reasoning that the substance of value is abstract labor. Jon Elster criticizes Marx as follows: “First, labor is not necessarily a component of all goods; secondly, there may be other common features that in fact explain the exchange.”52 Of course, the feature that Marx supposedly ignores turns out to be “the potential for human want satisfaction, or utility or use-value.”53 These objections reinforce one another because utility theory appears ready to address the phenomenon of commodities that are not products of labor, whereas the pricing of such commodities seems inexplicable on a labor theory of value. The former objection can be answered as we have just seen by appealing to the relative autonomy of the price-form and to rent theory; we now focus on the second.54 The fact that Marx is widely thought to have blundered by failing even to consider that utility could be the substance of value reveals deep-seated misconceptions about utility and capital. The most glaring problem with Elster’s complaint is that, as we have seen, Marx does not ignore utility; on the contrary, time and again he flatly rejects utility as a false conception of usefulness based on a false phenomenology of useful things. When we abstract away the properties of useful objects, nothing—not some singular abstract quality of utility—remains. Usefulness does not “dangle in mid-air”; rather, it is “conditioned by the physical properties of the commodity, and has no existence apart from the latter.”55 Conceiving of usefulness as a peculiar, utterly abstract property of useful things—or as something purely subjective—is an exercise in futility. Neoclassical economics shifts utility from measuring objective traits (as Bentham did) to measuring subjective preference, a shift in thinking on which neoclassical economics prides itself.56 CarlMenger, a founder of

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neoclassical economics, conveys the subjectivist insight: “value does not exist outside the consciousness of men.”57 HereMenger echoes Samuel Bailey, a critic of Ricardo’s theory of value and forerunner of neoclassical economics whom Marx examined at length. Bailey holds that classical political economy is guilty of a twofold fetishism. First, it considers value, understood as embodied labor, to be an inherent property of commodities; second, it treats usefulness as inherent to useful things. For Bailey, value simply is exchange-value; exchange-value is just use-value; and use-value is purely subjective utility (preference).58 Likewise, neoclassical economics collapses use-value, exchange-value, and value all into one bad abstraction—utility. Marx’s objections to conceiving of utility as the object’s usefulness also exclude thinking of utility as purely subjective preference. The error lies in ignoring the qualitative specificity of use-values and preferences. Marx observes, “As use-values commodities differ above all in quality, while as exchange-values they can only differ in quantity and therefore do not contain an atom of use-value.”59 Marx’s “therefore” shows his reasoning: anything that is capable only of quantitative variation—such as utility—has nothing to do with usefulness. According to utility theory, useful things fit the mold of exchange-values; that is, they differ only quantitatively. When Marx reasons, “If then we disregard the use-value of commodities, only one property remains, that of being products of labor,” it is not because the notion of utility slipped his mind.60 ForMarx, the usefulness of things is inseparable from the qualities that make them useful and the desires they satisfy. There is no usefulness in general and no preference in general. For utility to be homogenous enough to be the substance of value, utility theory either abstracts from the specific qualities that make things useful or adopts a purely subjective account. In excluding both options, Marx’s phenomenology of usefulness exposes the falseness of utility. These passages from Capital reconfirm the sharp criticism of utility that Marx articulated in the German Ideology. There, Marx and Engels dismissed the notion of utility as preposterous; the only question was what could explain its appeal: The apparent absurdity of merging all the manifold relationships of people in the one relation of utility [Brauchbarkeit ], this apparently metaphysical abstraction arises from the fact that in modern bourgeois society all relations are subordinated in practice to the one abstract monetary-commercial relation.61

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Marx’s account of generalized commercial relations in Capital renews his early criticism of utility theory. In the German Ideology Marx argues that “political economy is the real science of this theory of utility,” and Capital bears the subtitle, “a critique of political economy.”62 A better question than why Marx overlooked utility—since he did not—is why interpreters have remained oblivious to Marx’s persistent rejection of the very idea. For Marx, the mentality he calls the bourgeois horizon explains how a bogus notion like utility can appear persuasive.

The Bourgeois Horizon Marx’s texts from the 1844 Paris manuscripts through Capital develop the critique of what he calls the “bourgeois horizon,”63 directed jointly at modern philosophy and economics. Marx considered John Locke to have “championed the new bourgeoisie in every way”: Locke helped to clear the conceptual space for classical political economy, to which he contributed, as well as for much of modern philosophy. Of Locke’s famed Essay Concerning Human Understanding Marx quipped, “he even demonstrated in a separate work that the bourgeois way of thinking [bürgerlichen Verstand] is the normal human way of thinking.”64 With expressions such as the bourgeois horizon and the “bourgeois way of thinking,” Marx examines the mindset of classical and neoclassical political economy and much of modern philosophy. To construe Capital narrowly, as radical economics, or even as the critique of political economy, misjudges its scope badly. Utility theory figures prominently in the bourgeois way of thinking, which was the target of Marx’s critical endeavors. It is characteristic of this mindset to separate the for us from the in itself . This way of thinking factors out what is inseparable. Jeremy Bentham thinks of utility as the purely in itself, “the property of an object, whereby it tends to produce... pleasure... or to prevent the happening of pain.”65 Marx does not believe that use-value is independent of human consciousness. But acknowledging that fact does not lead him to flip-flop and conclude that usefulness is independent of the specific properties of useful things. The fact that the conceptual moment of the for us—useful things are useful for us—is essential to their usefulness does not make inessential the moment of the in itself—useful properties of things.66 Usefulness is not the sort of thing that can be purely objective or purely subjective. To think that it must be one or the other is a dogma of factoring philosophy.

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The bourgeois horizon involves a skepticism about kinds that is rooted in purist thinking. It factors out kinds, what Locke calls “nominal essences,” as purely subjective. For Locke, kinds are “the workmanship of the understanding.” Utility theory denies both that there are kinds of pleasure or preference and that the sources of pleasure or the satisfaction of preference matter. But kinds always matter. Utility theory presumes a nominalist rejection of kinds of action (e.g., murder) and affect (e.g., jealousy) that brushes off any questions concerning their moral significance. What remains is either an Epicurean conception of pleasure and pain or ranked preferences. Conversely, Alasdair MacIntyre points out that Aristotle’s insistence on diverse kinds of pleasure pulls the rug out from under utility theory, “To have understood the polymorphous character of pleasure and happiness is of course to have rendered those concepts useless for utilitarian purposes.”67 MarthaNussbaum prods us to try the utilitarian calculus on for size: It is a startling and powerful vision. Just try to think it seriously: this body of this wonderful beloved person is exactly the same in quality as that person’s mind and inner life. Both, in turn, the same in quality as the value of Athenian democracy; of Pythagorean geometry; of Eudoxan astronomy. What would it be like to look at a body and see in it exactly the same shade and tone of goodness and beauty as in a mathematical proof—exactly the same, differing only in amount and in location … These proposals are so bold as to be pretty well incomprehensible, from the ordinary point of view.68

What remarkable quality would that be? The pricing of commodities orders the “heap of commodities” with a simple measure, money, reducing qualitative differences to quantitative ones. Pricing fosters the illusion that the notion of utility is uncontroversial. One feature of the bourgeois horizon is its focus on the mirage of production-in-general, supposedly factoring it out from what is inseparable from production, namely, its social form and purpose. Marx was a critic of economics, not an economist. Economics presents itself as a generally applicable theory of the production and distribution of wealth or else of some staggeringly broad subject such as making rational choices under conditions of scarcity. While Marx grants that we can abstract some general truths about the production and distribution of wealth, these

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in no way add up to a science of economics. Marx’s historical materialism argues that no such science is possible. Because there is always production but never production-in-general, scientific inquiry into the production and distribution of wealth must always, and self-consciously, include specific social forms and purposes of wealth among the ingredients of its theories.69 Exposing the failure of economics to incorporate social forms is Marx’s deepest criticism. To miss this sets us up to miss the distinction between the useful things that make up wealth in every society and the commodity as the specific social form of useful things in capitalist societies. Capital is about commodities, not wealth generally and not about the illusory wealth-in-general. Restricted to the bourgeois horizon, economics conceives of value—if at all—as transhistorical, whether its substance is labor or utility. There is nothing socially specific about it. Proponents of utility as the substance of value do not see it as specific to a certain type of society—value is found wherever humans are. But Marx sees value as peculiar to capitalist societies: The product of labor is a useful object in all states of society; but it is only a historically specific epoch of development which presents the labor expended in the production of a useful article as an “objective” property of that article, i.e. as its value. It is only then that the product of labor becomes transformed into a commodity.70

If value is specific to capitalism, then utility cannot be the substance of value. The same problem exists in Ricardo’s classical labor theory of value: utility and labor are equally transhistorical concepts, pertaining to every imaginable society.71 Marx’s theory of value is not Ricardian; it is a theory not of labor but of the specific social form of labor in a capitalist society, the sort that produces commodities. Labor is common to all historical periods. Value, however, is a historically specific phenomenon. Even if utility and labor-in-general did exist, they could not be the substance of value.

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The Appeal of Utility to a Liberal Society The fact that utility theory can be used to support visions of society at variance with capitalism may make it difficult to imagine that Marx is a critic of utility theory or to accept that utility theory is linked to capitalist society. But the bourgeois horizon, the mindset to which utility theory belongs, encompasses more possibilities than free-market capitalism. Neoclassical economics (marginalism) is a variety of utility theory. Simon Clarke catalogues a range of its political possibilities: Marginalism could embrace the reformist socialism of the Fabians and the revisionist wing of German Social Democracy, the liberal reformism of Wicksell, Cassell, Walras, Wieser, Marshall, Pigou, Keynes and Beveridge, and the conservative liberalism of Jevons, Hayek, von Mises and Milton Friedman.72

Likewise, utilitarian moral philosophers propose a wide range of social arrangements. For example, Peter Singer advocates a drastic redistribution of wealth from wealthy nations to poor ones. Marx’s sharp criticisms of Proudhonians, Ricardian Socialists, and the Gotha Programmemake it clear that seemingly progressive political ideas hemmed in by the bourgeois horizon were targets of criticism. Utility theory is no exception. The popularity of liberal ideas makes it difficult to recognize Marx as a critic of utility. Liberalism insists that for people to be free a society must renounce any compulsory collective good. C. Welch notes the kinship between utility theory and liberalism: utilitarianism apparently has a special status in the evolution of modern social inquiry, not just because well-being is the modern obsession, or because the model of the “science” of economics is seductive in an age of science, but because utilitarians claim to offer a criterion of neutrality among competing conceptions of the good life in a pluralistic and antagonistic world.73

Goals such as maximizing my utility or achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number do not require any thick, controversial conception of the good—just the opposite. This makes for an affinity between utility theory and liberalism that adds to the appeal of utility theory in a liberal society. Marx identifies the market as the social basis of utility theory. For liberals, the circulation of commodities and money avoids any compulsory

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collective good. Marx undercuts liberalism by overturning this judgment. For Marx, the market masks a deeper and disturbing phenomenon, the circulation and accumulation of capital. Hence, a commercial society is not free of a compulsory collective good—capital must accumulate and accumulate—so liberalism’s alleged neutrality turns out to be an illusion. That Marx’s critique of liberalism is not widely known poses another obstacle to recognizing capital as the truth about utility.

Notes 1. The concept of utility is conceptually prior to that of marginal utility, which was key to the development of neoclassical economics. 2. The concept of utility provides no conceptual footholds for grasping why, today, wealth generally takes the commodity form. 3. Alfredo Saad-Filho observes, “According to the ‘traditional’ interpretation, Marx’s theory of value is not essentially different from Ricardo’s.” Alfredo Saad-Filho, The Value of Marx (London: Routledge, 2002), 21. 4. Just as Marx associated utility with the generalized circulation of commodities, he associated capital, which is presupposed by circulation, with the Terror: “Appropriation through labour and exchange of equivalents appears as the law of appropriation in this sphere [simple commodity circulation], so that exchange simply gives back the same value in other material. In short, here all is ‘lovely’ [‘sheene’ ], but, just like that, it will end in terror [Schrecken], and that as a consequence of the law of equivalence. We come, namely, to … Capital.” Karl Marx, letter of Marx to Engels, April 2, 1858, in Briefe über “Das Kapital” (our translation) (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1954), 91. 5. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 56–57. Nussbaum observes that “Aristotle rejects all four of these components of the ‘science of measurement,’ defending a picture of choice as a quality-based selection among goods that are plural and heterogeneous, each being chosen for its own distinctive value” (ibid.). Marx adopts Aristotle’s position. 6. Nussbaum does not call attention to it, but this claim amounts to what we call affect, intention, and action nominalism: there are no morally significant kinds of affect, intention, or action that figure into moral deliberation. Moreover, this nominalism encompasses the consequences as well. If the consequence of my action were murder, betrayal of a friend, or a courageous rescue of a drowning person, we could hardly ignore the moral significance of such outcomes, yet that is what the utilitarian way of evaluating consequences demands. “Good consequences” are good not on any independent moral basis; what makes them good is that they maximize

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8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

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utility. Kinds do not count. Utilitarianism is a practical philosophy cast up on the ruins left by moral nihilism. Utility is caught in “the illusion of the economic,” which opens the conceptual space for affect, intention, action, and consequence nominalism. Moral distinctions have no traction in the neutralized space projected by “the illusion of the economic.” We use “utility theory” to cover any theory, whether objectivist or subjectivist, normative, explanatory, or descriptive, that employs a concept of utility. This includes utilitarian moral philosophies but also neoclassical economics, welfare economics, and rational choice theory. Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston, MA: Beacon Press), 14. This indifference to persons is a sore point in Bernard William’s harsh assessment of utility theory. See Bernard Williams, Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, 15. Ibid. Marx argues that egalitarianism emerges only with wage labor and the commodity form of wealth. Karl Marx, Capital 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 152. These Kantian fragments qualify but do not cancel Nussbaum’s point that utility disregards the person and their liberty. An egalitarian respect for persons figures into the make-up of utilitarian theory; that respect frames the rules by which utility is calculated, but it does not figure in as an input to the calculations. As Nussbaum observes, ironically, it is the preferences, not the person preferring, that supply the inputs. Marx, Capital 1, 125–26. Marx’s reference to “the diverse nature” of objects shows his Aristotelian sensibilities. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1973), 86. Ibid., 87. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 62. Karl Marx, Results of the Immediate Production Process , trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Capital 1, 949. Marx draws a sharp conceptual distinction between utility and usefulness, but there is no established linguistic usage. “Utility” may just mean usefulness, without the implications of utility. The German word “Nützlichkeit ” may mean usefulness, or it may mean utility in the sense of utility theory. The word “utility” turns up repeatedly in English translations of Capital, used interchangeably with “usefulness.” Marx, Capital 1, 125. For Marx, the diversification of human needs is something good, an important point of agreement with John Stuart Mill’s rationale for a liberal

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society: “the greater the extent to which historic needs—needs created by production itself, social needs … are posited as necessary, the higher the level to which real wealth has become developed” (Marx, Grundrisse, 527). Marx, Capital 1, 126. Marx goes on to consider the magnitude of value and the form of value; he treats the three aspects as inseparable. Useful things, such as land, that are not the product of labor can also be commodities. The price form allows for this (Marx, Capital 1, 196– 97). Marx calls attention to this objection to the labor theory of value in A Contribution Toward the Critique of Political Economy: “The last and apparently the decisive objection … is this: if exchange-value [value] is nothing but the labour-time contained in a commodity, how does it come about that commodities which contain no labour possess exchangevalue [price]?” Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ed. M. Dobb, trans. S. W. Ryazanskaya (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 62. Marx states that “this problem is solved in the theory of rent,” but he gets to that answer only late in the third volume of Capital. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, German Ideology, trans. Clemens Dutt, in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels Collected Works, vol. 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 409. Ibid. Alasdair MacIntyre also associates utility with masquerade: “the notion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is a notion without any clear content at all. It is indeed a pseudo-concept available for a variety of ideological uses, but no more than that. Hence when we encounter its use in practical life, it is always necessary to ask what actual project or purpose is being concealed by its use” (MacIntyre, After Virtue, 62). Marx answers that utility conceals the exploitation of wage-laborers by capital. Marx, Capital 1, 280. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 410. Ibid. Marx, Grundrisse, 163. Marx, Capital 1, 127. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Hegel contrasts barter with buying and selling: “since money abstracts from the [specific] commodity to pure value, a primitive people does not yet have money, and makes do with inconvenient barter.” G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science: The First Philosophy of Right (Heidelberg 1817–1818), trans. J. Michael Stewart and Peter C.

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38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

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Hodgson (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 88. Unlike Hegel and Marx, Paul Samuelson collapses buying and selling into barter: “Even in the most advanced industrial economies, if we strip exchange down to its barest essentials and peel off the obscuring layer of money, we find that trade between individuals or nations largely boils down to barter.” Paul Samuelson, Economics (New York, McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1973), 55. Marx, Capital 1, 165. Money is the observable measure of value; the non-observable measure of value is congealed, socially necessary abstract labor time. Value is necessarily expressed in something other than itself, money. Marx uses the terms “use-value” and “useful thing” interchangeably; see, for example, Capital 1, 126. A commodity is a useful thing that is a value and has a price. Martha Campbell, “The Objectivity of Value versus the Idea of Habitual Action,” in The Constitution of Capital: Essays on Volume I of Marx’s “Capital,” ed. Riccardo Bellofiore and Nicola Taylor (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 86. Marx, Capital 1, 151. Ibid. Marx, Contribution to the Critique, 68, n. Marx, Capital 1, 151. Ibid., 152. There is a further consideration that Tony Smith spells out: “[T]he social forms analysed by Marx in Capital are historically specific. Commodities, money, profits, and so on, can all be found in precapitalist societies. One of Marx’s fundamental insights is that these were not the same social forms as commodities, money, and profits in capitalism, although we use the same words.” Tony Smith, Globalisation (Leiden, Brill, 2006), 336. Marx, Capital 1, 151. Ibid., 152. Ibid., 163. Ibid., 196. Ibid., 197. Ibid. Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 139. Note that Elster runs utility and use-value together. Ibid., 140. On the first objection see Patrick Murray, “The New Giant’s Staircase,” in The Mismeasure of Wealth, Chapter 16, 443–64. Marx, Capital 1, 126. Neoclassical economists are prone to flip-flop between talking about utility in a subjectivist idiom and an objectivist one—sometimes in the same

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59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

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paragraph. R. D. Collison Black, after writing that “desiredness” is “the capacity of a good or service to satisfy a want, of whatever kind,” follows up in the next sentence with, “Utility in the sense of desiredness is a purely subjective concept, clearly distinct from usefulness or fitness for a purpose.” R. D. Black, “Utility,” in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics in four volumes, ed. John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman (London: Macmillan, 1987), 776. “Clearly” except for that “capacity of a good or service”! Likewise, C. E. Ferguson writes: “if one sought a single criterion to distinguish modern microeconomic theory from its classical antecedents, he would probably decide it is to be found in the introduction of subjective value theory.” C. E. Ferguson, Microeconomic Theory, 3rd ed. (Homewood, IL: Richard D. Irwin, Inc. 1972), 20–21. Yet Ferguson writes, “Economists define ‘utility’ as that quality which makes a commodity desired” (20). That quality of what? Surely the commodity. Flip-flopping such as this, we have come to see, is a telltale sign of false moves, in this case, splitting the phenomenon of usefulness into purely subjective “desiredness” and purely objective (“the capacity of…”) elements. Carl Menger, Principles of Economics, ed. and trans. J. Dingwell and B. F. Hoselitz (Glencoe, IL, 1950), 6–7. This describes Bailey’s center of gravity. As Marx spells out, Bailey held several incompatible conceptions of value. He flip-flops. See Patrick Murray, “The Grammar of Value: A Close Look at Marx’s Critique of Samuel Bailey,” in The Mismeasure of Wealth, Chapter 6. Marx, Capital 1, 128. Ibid., 128. Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 409. Bernard Williams draws the same conclusion, “Utilitarianism is unsurprisingly the value system for a society in which economic values are supreme; and also, at the theoretical level, because quantification in money is the only obvious form of what utilitarianism insists upon, the commensurability of values” (Morality, 89). Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 409; our revised translation. Marx, “Letter to P. V. Annenkov,” in The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 190. Marx, Contribution to the Critique, 77. Jeremy Bentham, Chapter 1 of An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (New York: Hafner Press, 1948), III. Martin Heidegger makes this fundamental point in Being and Time. Against subjectivist theories of value, Heidegger insists that usefulness belongs to useful things in themselves. Usefulness is not tacked on or projected onto them by persons: “The kind of being of these beings is handiness [Zuhandensein]. But it must not be understood as a mere characteristic of interpretation, as if such ‘aspects’ were discursively forced

11

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68. 69.

70. 71.

72. 73.

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upon ‘being’ which we initially encounter, as if an initially objectively present world-stuff were ‘subjectively colored’ in this way.” Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, revised trans. Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010), 71. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 62. See also Martha Nussbaum’s, Love’s Knowledge, 57, where she quotes Aristotle from the Nicomachean Ethics (1173b28ff.) saying that pleasures “differ in kind” in accord with different kinds of activities. Utility theory does away with both kinds of activity and kinds of correlative pleasures and pains. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 116. We say “self-consciously” because it is characteristic of economics to “bait and switch.” Economics advertises itself as a universally applicable social science and then, without giving it a thought, introduces socially specific categories such as interest, profit, wages, and rents. Marx, Capital 1, 153–54; our revised translation. Utility and labor-in-general are both pseudo-concepts; usefulness and the generally applicable concept of concrete labor are legitimate transhistorical categories. Simon Clarke, Marx, Marginalism, and Modern Sociology (London: Macmillan, 1982), 24. C. Welch, “utilitarianism,” in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, four volumes, ed. John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman (London: Macmillan, 1987), 775.

References Alasdair, MacIntyre, After Virtue. 2nd edition. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984. Bentham, Jeremy. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. New York: Hafner Press, 1948. Black, R. D. Collison. “Utility.” In The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics in four volumes, edited by John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman, 776–79. London: Macmillan, 1987. Campbell, Martha. “The Objectivity of Value versus the Idea of Habitual Action.” In The Constitution of Capital: Essays on Volume I of Marx’s “Capital”, edited by Riccardo Bellofiore and Nicola Taylor. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Clarke, Simon. Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology. London: Macmillan, 1982. Elster, Jon. Making Sense of Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

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Ferguson, C. E. Microeconomic Theory. 3rd ed. Homewood, IL: Richard D. Irwin, Inc. 1972. Hegel, G. W. F. Lectures on Natural Right and Political Science: The First Philosophy of Right (Heidelberg 1817–1818). Transcribed by Peter Wannenmann; edited by the Staff of the Hegel Archives; translated by J. Michael Stewart and Peter C. Hodgson. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised translation by Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 2010. Marx, Karl. Briefe über “Das Kapital.” Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1954. ———. “Letter to Annenkov.” In The Poverty of Philosophy. New York: International Publishers, 1963. ———. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Edited by Maurice Dobb; translated by S. W. Ryazanskaya. New York: International Publishers, 1970. ---. Grundrisse. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. ———. Capital, vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1976. ———. Results of the Immediate Production Process. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. In Capital, vol. 1, translated by Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. Translated by Clemens Dutt. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels Collected Works, vol. 5. New York: International Publishers, 1976. Menger, Carl. Principles of Economics. Edited and translated by J. Dingwell and B. F. Hoselitz. Glencoe, Illinois, 1950. Murray, Patrick. The Mismeasure of Wealth: Essays on Marx and Social Form. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Nussbaum, Martha Craven. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. ———. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon Press 1995. Saad-Filho, Alfredo. The Value of Marx. London: Routledge, 2002. Samuelson, Paul. Economics. 9th ed. New York, McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1973. Smith, Tony. Globalisation: A Systematic Marxian Account. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Welch, C. “Utilitarianism.” In The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics in four volumes, edited by John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, and Peter Newman, 770–76. London: Macmillan, 1987. Williams, Bernard. Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.

CHAPTER 12

The Myth of Instrumental Reason and Action

A concept is a pseudo-concept when there is nothing for it to be a concept of. Because the concepts of instrumental reason and instrumental action presuppose a social world devoid of specific forms and purposes— a society-in-general—there is nothing for them to be concepts of. Two phenomenological false moves regarding human action try to force open the conceptual space for the pseudo-concepts of instrumental reason and instrumental action. One false move factors action into means and ends. The second separates action from the socially and historically specific features of the world in which it occurs. This phenomenological misstep imagines action taking place in a society-in-general, where specific forms, with their moral and social significance, do not intrude. Instrumental reason presupposes action that is instrumental. In this instrumental way of thinking about action, the means to achieve a given end are arrived at through an independent, technically rational process—so we are told. The Grundrisse is a manuscript written in 1857–1858, about ten years before the publication of the first edition of Capital 1. At the beginning, Marx anticipates both of these phenomenological false moves.1 He addresses the second move first: “whenever we speak of production, then, what is meant is always production at a definite stage of social development—production by social individuals.”2 There is no production-in-general any more than there is any society-in-general;

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rather, “all production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society.”3 Marx addresses the first false move, pointing out: “If there is no production in general, then there is no general production. Production is always a particular branch of production—e.g. agriculture, cattle-raising, manufactures etc.—or it is a totality.”4 Production is always specific both materially and socially, and both matter all the way down. Marx makes that clear in the seventh chapter of Capital 1, “The Labor Process and the Valorization Process.” In the first part, which deals with the general aspects of the labor process, Marx contrasts human labor with that of bees: Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes [verwirklicht ] his own purpose in those materials. And this is a purpose he is conscious of, it determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it. This subordination is no mere momentary act. Apart from the exertion of the working organs, a purposeful will is required for the entire duration of the work. This means close attention.5

As humans transform nature, ends and means cannot be set apart. Once again, Marx sides with Aristotle. Valorization is the specific social purpose of production on a capitalist basis. Money invested must become more money: M must become M + /\M. The second section of the chapter makes clear that the capitalist overseeing the production process pays close attention to every aspect to make sure that valorization occurs.6 But valorization presupposes a set of ethically fraught social relations that must be respected and reproduced: a state-enforced regime of private property and a market, the social roles of buyer and seller and borrower and lender, wage labor, capital, financial institutions, etc. The “illusion of the economic” arises when these two phenomenological truths are missing: action is formed by social features of its society and does not factor into means and ends. Setting goals, it is said, is not the business of instrumental reason; it does not judge the goal of action. Once a goal is set—whether by instinct, biology, feeling, custom, or preference—instrumental reason determines which actions are best suited to reach that goal. Thus, a notion of generic efficiency, one that measures the suitability of means but refrains from any judgment of the ends of action, is caught in the pseudo-concepts of instrumental reason and action. Generic efficiency measures instrumental

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reason and action; without that measure, there is no instrumental reason or action. But all-purpose efficiency is a pseudo-concept, for there is no generic efficiency to gauge. Pseudo-concepts spawn pseudo-concepts. There is nothing wrong with a general concept of efficiency; it is the decontextualized notion of efficiency that is bogus, just as there is nothing wrong with the general concept of usefulness. The pseudoconcept of utility is the problem. There is nothing problematic in saying that a conventional vacuum cleans my carpet efficiently or that a robot vacuum is more efficient. Would it matter if either vacuum were operated by an immigrant who works under threat of deportation? Context does matter. Like utility, the pseudo-concept of efficiency presupposes a decontextualized measure that applies in every situation. But there is no common dimension or units of efficiency to count. The legitimate general concept of efficiency is not the same as the bogus concept of efficiencyin-general. Just as the general concept of usefulness applies to anything that is useful but does not posit any homogenous measure, as utility does, the general concept of efficiency does not posit a one-size-fits-all standard of efficiency. There is none. Instrumental action is a myth for several reasons. The major objection is phenomenological. Initially, the separation of means from ends seems sensible. However, human action—whether in its general features or in its historical specificity—does not break apart in this way. Taken as a purist split, the distinction of means and ends distorts the reality of actions. Goals are not attached to actions like an address to a house. Goals shape actions from the start and throughout. Conversely, diverse considerations of what would be involved in pursuing an end of action figure into determining my goals. Faking sympathy does not become manipulative suddenly at its conclusion; it is manipulative all along. We do not fully grasp our goals apart from the path we take to reach them. An action is not a composite of goal and means; it is a unity in which ends and means are not dissociated. The instrumentalist notion assumes affect and action nominalism. In that regard, it is like utilitarian thinking: only consequences matter. Affect and action nominalism fit the fictitious neutered world of society-ingeneral.7 Not all concern for consequences presupposes affect and action nominalism; not all concern for consequences is instrumentalist. The notions of instrumental reason and action involve this strange kind of consequentialism. Only in such a pretend world could generic efficiency have any place. But our world is no such place.

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Because it involves self-awareness, human action differs both from instinctive behavior and from the motion of machines. Intentions, understanding, feelings, and outcomes converge in action. This does not mean that deliberation is always involved. Some actions are impulsive and thoughtless—or I may deceive myself about my motives. Social context matters throughout. We act within a space of meanings, reasons, and purposes not of our making. I may choose to accept the job but not how my job is designed to maximize the company’s profits. The manager knows not to separate my labor from this goal. We live in a gendered and class-conscious world where virtually everything is owned, whether by individuals, firms, or governments. We may choose from countless ways of acting in our gendered, class-conscious, and propertied social world, but we cannot escape it. Despite their flawed phenomenology, the concepts of instrumental reason and action are widely accepted, even though they are targets of criticism. Their proponents include positivist and pragmatist instrumentalist thinkers.8 Their critics include the later Heidegger, with his notion of “enframing” and “the age of the world picture”; Frankfurt School thinkers such as Max Horkheimer and Jürgen Habermas; and neo-Weberian sociology as represented by George Ritzer in The McDonaldization of Society.9 Instrumentalist concepts reach back through Max Weberto Kant, who distinguished technical imperatives from categorical (moral) and pragmatic ones.10 MisreadingMarx is another source. Jürgen Habermas wrongly identifies Marx’s general account of the labor process in Capital with instrumental action, which Habermas consequently conceives of as a “monological” relationship between an individual and nature. That notion of labor is reinforced by his understanding of Marx’s historical materialism. Habermas conceives of the forces of production and the relations of production as separable, though acting upon one another. An instrumental account of reason and action is linked to a phenomenology of needs as animalistic and to false moves associated with the concept of wealth. W. V. O. Quine and Habermas posit notions of wealth, needs, labor, and reason that are stripped of social form and purpose. Both conflate historically specific forms with general forms and misconstrue the general form of action as instrumental. We take a critical look at versions of instrumental reason first as found in Quine and Habermas and follow with a consideration of Ritzer’s neo-Weberian study of McDonaldization, where he spills the beans: “economic factors lie at

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the root of McDonaldization.” By “economic factors” Ritzer means those that pertain to making money.

W. V. O. Quine’s Animalistic Path to Instrumental Reason Quine concludes his seminal article “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” with this sentence, “Each man is given a scientific heritage plus a continuing barrage of sensory stimulation; and the considerations which guide him in warping his scientific heritage to fit his continuing sensory promptings are, where rational, pragmatic.”11 Quine leaves us on our own to figure out what guidance to take from the word “pragmatic,” but we can gather some indications from his text. Notice the individualistic emphasis: “each man” warps “his scientific heritage” to fit “his continuing sensory promptings.” But the key point is this: to guide the “warping” of the scientific heritage that each is given, pragmatic considerations must provide standards as independent of the web of scientific beliefs as are the “sensory promptings.”12 It is unlikely that Quine means to posit an independent discursive space alongside science where pragmatic considerations are rationally adjudicated. To do so would only raise the question of the criterion for rationality again, whereas Quine means to settle that question by appealing to pragmatic considerations. Quine probably has in mind some stock of relatively uncontroversial goods (something akin to John Rawls’ thin theory of the good), which are assumed to be above the conversation of culture and science, to provide external standards against which to measure success in revamping our scientific heritage. Food, shelter, health, moderate temperatures, safety, sexual satisfaction, long life, and the reproduction of the species—the sorts of goods that we have in common with other animals—might serve as pragmatic standards.13 To appeal to such goods, however, is to make a false move, namely, to adopt the notion that wealth exists apart from a specific social form and purpose. Human needs are not animal needs; rather, they are always morally, socially, culturally, and politically constituted, which means that there is no neutral instrumental action by which to satisfy them. While meeting organic requirements is essential for humans, specific social forms and purposes are always involved. Quine’s animalism overlooks the crucial point that meeting needs always involves a morally significant way of life. Marx observes that meeting needs “must not be considered simply as

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being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite mode of life on their part.”14 Morality is like the weather: the question is not whether we will have any but what it will be. The determination of what is rational cannot dodge the issues surrounding the “mode of life”; it must take up the questions raised by social forms of wealth. Quine’s pragmatism restricts itself to “the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals.” Quine closes off the conceptual space needed to comprehend rationality and instead posits animalistic needs as the measure of reason. Quine could appeal to individual preferences as a measure, according to which my warping of our scientific heritage is pragmatic (hence rational) whenever it better serves my preferences. But don’t we wonder how rational are my preferences? Or do we close the circle and simply declare that rational action is preference satisfaction, without giving the matter further thought? As in the case of supposedly uncontroversial goods, my preferences are taken to be independent of culture and the web of scientific beliefs. In the language of economists, they are exogenous, which is why they are supposed to function as external criteria.15 But to posit such preferences is no less a false move than to posit needs or wealth apart from social form.

¨ Jurgen Habermas’s Asocial Path to Instrumental Reason and Action In Knowledge and Human Interests, Jürgen Habermas criticizes the pragmatist conception of rationality, focusing on its originator, C. S. Peirce, and he directs the same line of criticism at Karl Marx. According to Habermas, both Peirce and Marx restrict their conception of human rationality to instrumental reason or “purposive-rational action.” Habermas charges both Peirce and Marx with positivism, since purposive-rational action concerns only the question of how well adapted certain means are to reaching a given end. It is not concerned with the rationality of the ends. Such a conception lacks the true scope of human rationality, which, according to Habermas, also includes hermeneutic and emancipatory interests.16 To Habermas, the problem does not lie with instrumental action itself; kept to its proper sphere it serves a legitimate function.17 The trouble begins when purposive-rational action colonizes the space for the claims of hermeneutic and emancipatory rationality. We agree with

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Habermas in rejecting instrumental reason as an adequate conception of rationality, but for a different reason. We argue that instrumental reason is a myth whose source lies in the false move of positing wealth and its production as stripped of social form. The illusion of the economic spawns the pseudo-concept of instrumental reason and action. In striving to corral instrumental action, Habermas is fencing shadows. Habermas supplements an animalistic grasp of labor as instrumental action with his insistence on two other types of action that are distinctively human: The human interests that have emerged in man’s natural history, to which we have traced back the three knowledge-constitutive interests, derive both from nature and from the cultural break with nature. Along with the tendency to realize natural drives they have incorporated the tendency toward release from the constraint of nature.18

Since the philosopher’s task is to provide us with good fundamental concepts, Habermas comes up short.19 Because of his opening false moves, he ends up chasing faulty solutions to phony problems. Habermas criticizes the limitations of Peirce’s pragmatist conception of rationality, writing, in a Kantian voice, “how is scientific knowledge possible? Pragmatism answers this question by legitimating the validity of synthetic modes of inference on the basis of the transcendental structure of instrumental action.”20 While the “transcendental structure of instrumental action” suits natural science, according to Habermas, it cannot come to grips with the communicative action of the scientific community in establishing natural science. Peirce’s instrumental conception of rationality is too restrictive: the communication of investigators requires the use of language that is not confined to the limits of technical control over objectified natural processes. It arises from symbolic interaction between societal subjects who reciprocally know and recognize each other as unmistakable individuals. This communicative action is a system of reference that cannot be reduced to the framework of instrumental action.21

According to Habermas, instrumental action is “solitary,” it is the “monological” encounter of a single subject with nature. As such, it cannot capture the rationality of the scientific community, which involves a plurality of subjects who relate to one another in non-instrumental ways that make communication possible. In implying that it can, Peirce

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and pragmatism converge with positivism: “Here a hidden but unyielding positivism finally prevails.”22 The picture that Habermas arrives at looks like this: instrumental action (labor), which lacks any social form, produces wealth that likewise lacks social form. But there is no production-in-general and no wealth-in-general. So, there is nothing in the human world toward which purposive-rational action could be directed. Habermas trades in bad abstractions. How does he arrive at his position? Habermas looks to Marx as a source of the notion of instrumental labor. Ironically, not only does Habermas claim that Marx conceives of labor solely as instrumental action; he uses Marx to bolster his notion of instrumental action as transhistorical and solitary. This involves a double misreading of Marx. One error equates Marx’s account of “the labor process in general” with instrumental action. A second error posits labor reduced to instrumental action as actually existing. Habermas takes what Marx says about the labor process considered in general as if Marx was reducing labor to these general features and treating the labor process in general as an actual, asocial phenomenon. Habermas fails to recognize that Marx is distinguishing the labor process from its social form. In capitalism, the labor process is a valorization process. Instead, Habermas attributes to Marx a conception of the labor process in general that is asocial in nature, leading Habermas to the conclusion that “purposiverational action … is in principle solitary.”23 Habermas misreads the labor process in general as asocial and then treats it as what can stand alone. Marx does lay out general features of labor that hold across history. He accepts that “production in general is an abstraction, but a rational abstraction in so far as it really brings out and fixes the common element and thus saves us repetition.”24 But neither production nor labor ever exists in general; they always have a specific social form. In misreading Marx, Habermas splits social form from both labor and the wealth it produces.25 Instrumental action is the bad abstraction that results. It must not be identified with Marx’s general concept of labor. If labor is a transhistorical feature of human existence, as Marx believes, and if labor is instrumental action, as Habermas believes and wrongly imputes to Marx, then instrumental action is a transhistorical category. Here Habermas imposes a purist split on Marx. Marx does not conceive of the social forms of labor (relations of production) as alongside labor (forces of production). Both are ingredients of an adequate concept of human labor. Splitting off labor from its social form leaves the

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bad abstraction of instrumental action as the residue. Marx rejects this as a false move, a phenomenological mistake. Habermas treats a strictly analytical distinction as a real separation. Habermas raises a dust and complains that Marx cannot see. He botches the interpretation of Marx’s text, reducing his conception of social labor to asocial instrumental action and then scolds Marx for reducing everything to instrumental action. It should come as no surprise to find that instrumental action is absent from Marx’s concepts. In insisting that purposive-rational action, to which he reduces labor, is by nature solitary, Habermas does not simply overlook the fact that material production always has a social form; he deliberately eliminates any space for concepts of the social form of labor. One cannot inquire into the social form of an activity that is “in principle solitary.” Where Heidegger embraces a social conception of labor but draws a blank on its specific form, Habermas consciously adopts an asocial conception of labor that squelches thought about its social form.

Marx’s Phenomenology of Labor Marx observes that material production is a “perpetual natural necessity of human life.” Persons must act on nature to meet needs. How they act always has a specific social form and purpose that involves a historically specific “mode of life.” This is the phenomenological crux of historical materialism. What concepts of labor does Marx’s phenomenology call for? They cannot be confined to either asocial concepts or transhistorical ones.26 We need both reasonable general concepts applicable to all historical modes of production and concepts specific to a mode of production. Opening the pages of Capital, we find the concepts that historical materialism calls for. Marx analyzes production on a capitalist basis, which is a socially specific kind of production with a peculiar purpose; he employs generally applicable concepts in the treatment of the labor process in general and socially specific concepts (value, wage labor, surplus-value) in the treatment of valorization. Capital began by spelling out the double character of the commodity: a commodity is a use-value that, because it is a quantity of value, has an exchange-value. In the second section of the opening chapter, Marx distinguishes concrete labor, common to all production, and the kind of labor specific to capitalist societies.27 The latter is “practically abstract” labor.28 The concrete labor that creates useful things “is a condition of human existence which is

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independent of all forms of society,” but the labor that produces wealth in the commodity form is a specific social kind. It is labor that is “carried on independently and privately by individual producers.”29 This “independent” and “private” character is a kind of sociality, not the absence of sociality. Valorization expands value through the process of production and exchange; it constitutes the purpose of capitalist production. To achieve that goal involves a web of specific social forms. Marx’s distinction between the labor process and the valorization process is strictly analytical. There is no labor process in general, that is, without a specific social form. The labor process, taken in general, never stands alone. To think that it can is to make a false move. The phenomenological point is that wealth and labor have features that cut across history and societies, but they always have definite social forms and purposes. There is no sociality in general, no labor process in general. One might think that Habermas’s concept of instrumental action matches Marx’s general concept of concrete labor. One might think that the difference from Marx’s perspective is that Habermas lacks historically specific concepts of labor: he has only half a loaf. But Marx’s concrete labor does not match Habermas’s instrumental action; instrumental action is not a legitimate concept at all. We should regard instrumental action, like utility, as a conceptual changeling. The valid concept of concrete labor is swapped for the bogus notion of instrumental action; the reasonable concept of usefulness is replaced with the chimera of utility. How do instrumental action and concrete labor differ? Habermas conceives of instrumental action as a complete, closed concept; it describes something actual. Labor is instrumental action, full stop. Marx’s general concept of concrete labor is incomplete and open. There is no concrete labor in general, full stop. There is no labor without a specific material intent and social form. Habermas asserts that instrumental action is “in principle solitary.” This puts the third question about wealthproducing labor out of bounds. There is no point in asking about the specific social form of asocial activity. No such restriction is involved in Marx’s general concept of concrete labor. Any idea of labor as asocial is miles from Marx’s mind. Recall his statement “all production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a specific form of society.”30 Habermas’s notion of instrumental action as an anthropological constant blocks any moral scrutiny of labor. Marx’s

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open concept of concrete labor does not. For Habermas, hermeneutic and emancipatory considerations are supplemental to instrumental action, hence external to labor.31 Not so with concrete labor. Marx is anything but neutral regarding the social sort of concrete labor that produces wealth in the commodity form. While concrete labor is a transhistorical concept, instrumental action is not. It is not a kind of action at all. Instrumental action is only a shadow of the labor that produces surplusvalue. Hence, the fundamental concept for modern social analysis is not instrumental action but rather capital.32

A Historical Materialist Account of Instrumental Reason and Action Habermas portrays instrumental reason and purposive-rational action as transhistorical. Max Weber, however, famously observed that instrumental reason and purposive-rational action emerge from modern society. The view of reason as a tool to solve problems that arise from needs or preferences has grown congenial to a modern, skeptical audience.33 Moishe Postone challenges the primacy of the rubric of modernity over that of capitalism: “the term ‘capitalism’ has been reintroduced to broader academic as well as general intellectual discussions as a conception that now appears more analytically adequate than that of ‘modernity,’ which had been more dominant in the postwar decades.”34 Modernity is not the name of a mode of production. A historical materialist account challenges Weber’s skeptical belief that modern reason has no ends of its own. In fact, modern reason and action serve ends that are not freely chosen. The apparent separation of thinking or action from ends arises from capitalist social relations. The very idea of instrumental reason and action presupposes the generalization of the commodity form of wealth, which occurs only where wealth is produced on a capitalist basis.35 The social form of wealth in a capitalist society demands the endless accumulation of capital. The necessity of capital accumulation is not freely chosen; it is mandatory for any capitalist society. That reason could be indifferent toward the ends of action is a myth; the goal of capital accumulation must be privileged. A discrepancy, then, lies at the heart of instrumental reason: it purports to be indifferent toward all ends, but its dominance depends on a specific social end, the ceaseless accumulation of capital.

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To speak of instrumental reason’s primacy is to suggest that the society in which it is said to dominate has no collective, compulsory goal, whether rational or otherwise. Such a society, where there is no compulsory collective goal, is precisely the one that classical liberals like Friedrich A. Hayek identify as just.36 Liberals look to the market, where wealth appears in the commodity form, for a social institution that meets that criterion. The indifference toward what goods are produced and sold that characterizes the market—what economists call “consumer sovereignty”—seems to be the perfect match for instrumental reason’s indifference to the ends of action. To take instrumental reason as a basic category of modern society is tantamount, then, to taking the market and the simple commodity form of wealth as the constitutive social categories. Even that is illusory, however, since the market includes important and high-minded moral and social presuppositions that have no place in the notion of instrumental reason and action. If, as Marx argues, the circulation of commodities is only a necessary form of appearance of the circulation of capital, if the commodity is not the simple commodity but rather commodity capital, that is, a bearer of surplus-value, and if the endless accumulation of capital is necessarily the goal of capital’s circulation, then the liberal conception of the just society is a myth. The market presupposes the compulsory collective “good” of capital accumulation. By the same token, Habermas’s focus on instrumental reason is misdirected. The market is indifferent to which commodities circulate in it, but at the same time it is a necessary form of appearance of the circulation of capital. As such, the market cannot be indifferent to the ongoing accumulation of capital. The history of recurring depressions and runaway inflations shows us the dire consequences of failure to meet that goal. Instrumental reason is only a shadow of capital and the constitutive social forms of capitalist society: it discloses the indifference of the market to specific use-values, but it conceals the fact that, in capitalist society, not all aims are equal. The abstractness of the unceasing accumulation of capital hides that fact. In a capitalist society, the goal of capital accumulation takes precedence over every other goal, even material well-being.

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McDonaldization: Disguising Real Subsumption Under Capital The American sociologist George Ritzer’s work is an example of contemporary social science in a neo-Weberian vein. Under the rubric of “McDonaldization,” instrumental reason and action are put forward as keys to understanding contemporary society. In The McDonaldization of Society, George Ritzer identifies the four “principles of McDonaldization” as “efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control [through nonhuman technology].”37 These four are specifications of instrumental reason and action. Max Weber describes instrumental reason as the defining rationality of modern society. For the modern world, setting human goals is not the task of reason; our ends arise from our interests, feelings, or appetites. Goals are assigned by authority or embedded in institutions. Reason plays the subsidiary role of determining the best means—the most efficient ones—to reach those ends. Reason is instrumental, not substantive or critical. It solves problems but cannot decide which problems are worth solving. Instrumental reason is a caricature of reason. Like utility, instrumental reason is at odds with basic features of human existence but gains plausibility under the peculiar conditions of capitalism. Efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control are shadows of the value forms, which are the constitutive social forms of societies undergoing what Ritzer terms McDonaldization. Shadows forms are derivative of constitutive forms and do not stand on their own: just try to organize society based on instrumental reason. To explain McDonaldization calls for the concepts provided by Marx. McDonaldization can be identified with what Marx calls real subsumption under capital, that is, the material transformation of production for the express purpose of making it more profitable. McDonaldization is a means to expand value. As we will see, Ritzer is forced to the same conclusion. Among the principles of McDonaldization is “an emphasis on the quantitative aspects of products sold (portion, size, and cost) and services offered (the time it takes to get the product).” McDonaldization brings about “the assurance that products and services will be the same over time and in all locales … The workers in McDonaldized systems also behave in predictable ways.”38 “Homogeneous products dominate a McDonaldized world.”39 “Don’t dare ask for a rare burger,” Ritzer advises. “The work routines in the fast-food restaurant are highly standardized. Even what the

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workers say to customers is routinized.” What McDonaldized technologies produce are “flattened, featureless products,” food that, to stretch the profit margin, has undergone real subsumption under capital.40 Efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control, these principles of McDonaldization do not delineate a coherent, dynamic, and selfreproducing social order. They are shadow forms, not constitutive forms. These four principles say nothing about why the products take the form of commodities, why the workers work for a wage, or why profits exist and matter. Marx observes, “in capitalist production the tendency for all products to be commodities and all labor to be wage-labor, becomes absolute.” 41 His observation has no traction within this neoWeberian discourse. On the contrary, Ritzer’s Weberian conception of McDonaldization bypasses the basic questions concerning the purpose of wealth and production. There is no conceptual path from these principles of McDonaldization to the social forms of a capitalist or any other actual society. The path goes in reverse. These shadow forms presuppose an illusory economy-in-general as the backdrop to McDonaldization. Marx argues that capital has the immanent drive to accumulate, but none of the four principles posit any coherent driving force. What directs the pursuit of efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control? Ritzer names Weber as the inspiration for his theory of McDonaldization: Weber demonstrated in his research that the modern Western world had produced a distinctive kind of rationality … that Weber called formal rationality. This is the sort of rationality we refer to when we discuss McDonaldization or the rationalization process in general.42

But Ritzer admits that Weber argued: “ultimately, material or, more specifically, economic interests drive rationalization in capitalist societies.” Likewise, Ritzer lists “material interests, especially economic goals and aspirations,” among the “three other factors [that] are also important in understanding the drive toward increasing McDonaldization.” In the end, he concedes that “economic factors lie at the root of McDonaldization.”43 By invoking the term “economic,” Ritzer trades in one pseudo-concept for another, one shadow form for another. For there is no economy-ingeneral. The adjective “economic” refers to aspects of the economy-ingeneral, but there is no such thing. Reality eventually gets the better of

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Ritzer; he drops the talk of the “economic” and invokes value forms, specifically, profit: Profit-making enterprises pursue McDonaldization because it leads to lower costs and higher profits. Clearly, greater efficiency and increased use of nonhuman technology are often implemented to increase profitability. Greater predictability provides, at the minimum, the climate needed for an organization to be profitable and for its profits to increase steadily from year to year. An emphasis on calculability, on things that can be quantified, helps lead to decisions that can produce and increase profits and makes possible measurements of profitability. In short, people and organizations profit greatly from McDonaldization, and as a result, they aggressively seek to extend its reach.44

Ritzer presents his four principles as though they just happen to boost profitability. But he has put the cart before the horse. Like Weber, he has granted that “economic interests” “drive rationalization in capitalist societies.” That concedes that his four principles are derivative. They do not constitute capitalist societies; rather, they are shadows of the forms that do. Instrumental reason is a shadow form. Transforming production to increase profitability is what Marx calls real subsumption under capital.45 Standardizing burgers and cashier chatter are examples of real subsumption. Ritzer’s four hallmarks of McDonaldization are abstractions from the actual principle—real subsumption. McDonaldization is all about capital ’s reach; “Mc” is the prefix of real subsumption.

A Critique of the Notion of Instrumental Action Action is purposive and can be considered instrumental in achieving an action’s aim. I set my alarm at night so that I wake up on time in the morning. In that familiar sense, the terms “purposive” and “instrumental” are not controversial. To speak of action as instrumental in this ordinary sense is to speak of an aspect of action, not to identify a kind of action. How would instrumental action, taken to be a kind of action, distinguish itself from other actions? The answer must be that instrumental action is purely instrumental. Instrumental action (purposive-rational action, Weber’s zweckmässige Tätigkeit ) presupposes a world stripped of social forms with their moral, aesthetic, gendered, social, legal, and political

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features—a conjured world without a way of life. Only then could action be purely instrumental. In introducing the concept of instrumental reason (“subjective reason”) in Eclipse of Reason, Max Horkheimer acknowledges but immediately dismisses the ubiquitous presence of social norms: “Naturally the circumstances of each situation, as well as laws, customs, and traditions, should be taken into account. But the force that ultimately makes reasonable actions possible is the faculty of classification, inference, and deduction, no matter what the specific content—the abstract functioning of the thinking mechanism.”46 “Naturally,” the normative “circumstances” of human action and reasoning “should be taken into account”—except that they are irrelevant! We might add that instrumental action presupposes affect, intention, and action nominalism: instrumental action assumes that there are no morally, aesthetically, socially, legally, or politically determinate kinds of action. If action came in such kinds, it could never be instrumental.47 A world without social forms would lack normatively fraught kinds of action, but that world, presupposed by instrumental action, does not exist. Since there is nothing to which the notion of instrumental action could direct us, it is a pseudo-concept. The fears of a “totally administered world” or a “technocracy” ruled by instrumental action are bad dreams triggered by troubling features of the actual capitalist order in which we live. Nevertheless, instrumental action has come to be thought of as a kind of action. Thinkers like Jürgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt conceive of productive labor as instrumental action in a transhistorical or “quasi-anthropological” way. Across human history, productive labor just is instrumental action. The scope of instrumental action, however, is historically variable. Habermas and Arendt worry about the spread of instrumental action into regions of social life where it does not belong— Habermas under the heading of the “colonization of the life-world” and Arendt under “the rise of the social.”48 Moishe Postone finds both these lines of thinking in Max Horkheimer: Horkheimer, despite some equivocations, identifies labour in and of itself with instrumental action.… but this can hardly explain the growing instrumental character of the world—the growing domination of “value-free” means over substantive values and goals, the transformation of the world into one of means.49

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Although Horkheimer may conceive of labor simply as instrumental action, like Max Weber he conceives of instrumental reason as a product of the modern world. Like Habermas and Arendt, Horkheimer is troubled by the growth of instrumentality. Postone observes (see the first endnote of the present chapter) that it was easy for Horkheimer and Habermas to shift from traditional Marxism’s critical political economy—as opposed to Marx’s critique of political economy—to the critique of instrumental action. The underlying conceptual terrain remains the same. Starting with value, the capitalist form of social wealth, Friedrich Pollock, Horkheimer, and Habermas fail to grasp the constitutive social forms of capitalist society. They end up with a shadow of those forms—instrumental action—that proves to be a pseudo-concept. The empty terrain shared by critical political economy and the critique of instrumental reason is conjured by the illusion of the economic. Both are directed at an object that does not exist, production-in-general. Marx is not engaged in critical political economy. Rather, he undertakes a critique of political economy that makes the constitutive social forms and purposes of the capitalist provisioning process the focus of inquiry. Instrumental action has no place in Marx’s thought. Instead, he grasps the action involved in producing and distributing wealth on a capitalist basis as constituted by these value forms and the subjects that personify these forms. Theodor Adorno speaks of “character masks.” We see this in how Capital is structured. Activities in the marketplace are constituted first by the commodity form and money, along with the social roles of buyer and seller. Reading further in Capital, we learn that the sphere of commodity circulation is the cheery appearance of the deeper and ominous reality of capital’s circulation. Commodities turn out to be not simple commodities but rather commodity capital, that is, useful things produced for the purpose of yielding a profit. The entire account of the production process in Capital is treated under the rubrics of absolute and relative surplus-value.50 Consequently, labor and production are always form-determined by capital, whose single-minded purpose is the accumulation of surplus-value. Relative surplus-value arises from materially transforming production to pump out more surplus-value, Adam Smith’s pin factory for example. These production methods lack the neutrality of purpose that instrumental action presupposes. To recognize the phenomenon of relative surplus-value checkmates the very idea of instrumental action.

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Capital provides a socio-epistemological account of how capitalist social forms give rise to the pseudo-concept of instrumental action, which helps capital cover its tracks. Postone calls attention to the instrumental character of commodity-producing labor: As we have seen, commodity-determined labor is, as concrete labor, a means for producing a particular product; moreover and more essentially, as abstract labor, it is self-mediating—it is a social means of acquiring the products of others. Hence, for the producers, labor is abstracted from its concrete product: it serves them as a pure means, an instrument to acquire products that have no intrinsic relation to the substantive character of the productive activity by means of which they are acquired.51

It is true that commodity-producing labor is a “social means of acquiring the products of others.” It is also true—and peculiar—that the “the substantive character of the productive activity by means of which” those working for a wage acquire products has “no intrinsic relation” to that substantive character. That expresses Marx’s point that the substance of value is abstract labor and that the social kind of labor that produces value is “practically abstract” because, when its products are sold, concrete labor is socially validated as abstract labor. In that transformation from commodities into money, the “substantive character” of value-producing labor (its concrete character, say, tailoring) is extinguished. Nevertheless, the labor of value-producing workers is not simply pure “means” or “instrument.” And the products of value-producing labor are not simply useful things. Value-producing labor does not serve only capitalists as a means. Workers can work only because they are hired by capitalists, an arrangement that involves specific relationships and ends. Profit is the aim of the capitalist; the wage is the goal of the worker. Value-producing labor serves both capitalist and worker only by being surplus-value-producing labor. The labor of wage workers is not “pure means” since it aims at a wage. The wage is a kind of income that presupposes a private property system, profit as the goal of production, and a monetary system in which money possesses purchasing power—a strangely abstract social power. Postone criticizes the Frankfurt School’s turn to the critique of instrumental action, but the criticism needs to reach down to the very idea of instrumental action:

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Although social labor is always a means to an end, this alone does not render it instrumental … in precapitalist societies, for example, labor is accorded significance by overt social relations and is shaped by tradition. Because commodity-producing labor is not mediated by such relations, it is, in a sense, de-signified, “secularized.”52

When Postone writes that being aim-oriented does not make social labor instrumental, he must mean purely instrumental. Postone’s description of “commodity-producing labor” as “de-signified,” calls to mind Karl Polanyi’s characterization of capitalism as the “disembedded economy.”53 If capitalism is the “disembedded economy,” from what, exactly, is it disembedded? Polanyi’s unqualified phrase suggests the answer: disembedded from social relations altogether. This answer plunges us into the illusion of the economic, the imaginary notion that capitalist production is production-in-general, unencumbered by specific social relations and aims.54 Postone makes it clear that, while capitalism is disembedded from “overt social relations … shaped by tradition,” new, non-overt social relations—not the absence of social relations—take their place. In describing value-producing labor as “self-mediating,” Postone interprets Marx as identifying a historically unique form of the social mediation of labor and production. Marx is not denying the presence of social mediation. He rules that out: “Mediation must, of course, take place.”55 Postone links the “de-signification” of labor in capitalism with instrumental action as follows: “Labor acquires its meaning from the social relations in which it is embedded. When these social relations are constituted by labor itself, labor exists in ‘secular’ form and can be analyzed as instrumental action.”56 “De-signified” labor is not overtly social—it is not obvious that it is surplus-value-producing. Consequently, it is easily mistaken for instrumental action. But instrumental action is no action at all. Instrumental action is a shadow cast by surplus-value-producing labor. Postone rejects identifying the general concept of social labor with instrumental action, but he identifies labor in capitalism with instrumental action: “Social labor as such is not instrumental action; labor in capitalism, however, is instrumental action.”57 We accept the first claim but reject the second. Postone rejects Horkheimer’s identification of labor with instrumental action, “Horkheimer, in effect, attributes a consequence of the specific character of labor in capitalism to labor in general.”58 But instrumental action is not “a consequence of the specific character of labor

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in capitalism.” That conclusion does not follow since labor in capitalism has a fixed goal, to produce surplus-value. Surplus-value is a social aim, though not embedded in traditions. Labor in capitalism conceals its social nature, creating epistemic barriers. The notion of instrumental action is a consequence of the social kind of labor in capitalism, but it is a shadow form and a pseudo-concept. Horkheimer and Habermas contend that labor is instrumental action. Since they are wrong, presumably, it must be a specifically historical kind of labor, as Postone states. In that case, there is no better candidate than labor in capitalism. Postone does conclude that instrumental action is labor in capitalism. But that reasoning relies on a false dilemma, for instrumental action is neither transhistorical nor historically specific labor. Instrumental action is no kind of labor at all. Since there is nothing to which it refers, it is a pseudo-concept. Labor in capitalism is not instrumental action. Labor in capitalism produces surplus-value. It has a definite—not arbitrary—purpose and is laden with moral, legal, and political significance. Postone turns to the peculiar social character of production in capitalism to make sense of the notion of instrumental action and the primacy of means over ends: Thus production for (surplus) value is production where the goal itself is a means…. The instrumentalization of the world, within such a framework, is a function of the determination of production and social relations by this historically specific form of social mediation…. Production for the sake of production signifies that production is no longer a means to a substantive end but a means to an end that is itself a means, a moment in a neverending chain of expansion. Production in capitalism becomes a means to a means …. the domination of means over ends noted by Horkheimer…. is rooted in the character of labor in capitalism as a social means that is quasi-objective and supersedes overtly social relations.59

Capitalist production supersedes overtly social relations but not social relations altogether. In capital’s accumulation process, surplus-value does endlessly function to produce more surplus-value. That makes the purpose of capitalist production strange and not “substantive” in a traditional sense. But in capitalism, value is the social substance, and money takes the place of overt social relations—“all bourgeois relations are gilded.”60 But instrumental action is not “a consequence of the specific character of labor in capitalism,” because labor in capitalism is not instrumental action.

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The “instrumentalization of the world” is a way of talking about capital’s domination that leaves out capital. Postone, of course, is talking about capital and about the social mediation of labor in capitalism: As the duality of concrete labor and labor-mediated interaction, labor in capitalism has a socially constituting character. This confronts us with the following, only apparently paradoxical, conclusion: it is precisely because of its socially mediating character that labor in capitalism is instrumental action. Because the mediating quality of labor in capitalism cannot appear directly, instrumentality then appears as an objective attribute of labor as such.61

This is a neat twist on fetishism. The classical embodied labor theory of value takes the value of the commodity to be a natural property. But commodities are values, products of surplus-value-producing labor. They are not pure means; they are not products of instrumental action. What Postone describes as the “only apparently” paradoxical conclusion that “it is precisely because of its socially mediating character that labor in capitalism is instrumental action” is a contradiction. Labor cannot lack social character because of its social character. The paradox is that labor appears to lack social character because of its social character. Labor in capitalism is mediated by non-overt social relations and an oddly empty and monotonous purpose; it is not instrumental action. Because all labor is socially mediated and directed by particular purposes, there can be no instrumental action. Hence instrumental action is a pseudoconcept. Because capitalist production is embedded in the value forms and the purpose of accumulating capital, it seems to be disembedded, and surplus-value-producing labor seems to be instrumental action. Tony Smith takes a position like Postone’s on the relationship between instrumental action and labor in capitalism. Smith writes: “I shall briefly and provisionally examine three of the most significant theoretical alternatives to Marxian value theory: neoclassical economics, Weberian social theory, and neo-Ricardian (Sraffian) economics.”62 In defending Marxian value theory as the key to grasping modern society, Smith rejects all three alternatives, each of which operates under the illusion of the economic. Smith examines the claim that “Weberian social theory offers an alternative to value theory,” namely the notion of instrumental reason. Smith writes:

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[Weber does] propose certain basic categories from which the key features of the capitalist mode of production can be derived. The central category here is that of technical (formal) rationality…. Capitalism can indeed be grasped as a system in which formal rationality holds sway in the economic sphere, in contrast to other modes of production where traditional considerations or a material rationality are more essential.63

For Smith, as for Postone, capitalist social relations are unlike “other modes of production where traditional considerations or a material rationality are more essential.” But capitalist rationality is not purely formal rationality any more than labor in capitalism is (purely) instrumental action. Formal rationality and instrumental action in the Weberian sense taken up by members of the Frankfurt School are indifferent to social form and purpose. Capitalist rationality is preoccupied with accumulating surplus-value, and labor in capitalism produces that surplus-value. Both involve definite social forms and purposes. Instrumental reason and action are myths of modern social theory.

Notes 1. These same two false moves result in the illusion of the economic and lay the basis for the two pseudo-concepts considered in the two previous chapters, wealth-in-general and utility. In a similar vein, Moishe Postone points out that theorists in the Frankfurt School who had a traditional understanding of Marx as a radical political economist were already working within the conceptual horizons of the illusion of the economic before shifting to a critique of instrumental reason and action: “Lacking a conception of the specific character of labor in capitalism, Critical Theory ascribed its consequences to labor per se. The frequently described shift of Critical Theory from the analysis of political economy to a critique of instrumental reason does not, then, signify that the theorists of the Frankfurt School simply abandoned the former in favor of the latter. Rather, that shift followed from, and was based upon, a particular analysis of political economy, more specifically, a traditional understanding of Marx’s critique of political economy.” Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 119. At the end of the present chapter, we will question Postone’s view that labor in capitalism is instrumental action. 2. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1973), 85.

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9.

10.

11.

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Ibid., 87. Ibid., 86. Karl Marx, Capital 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 284. Ibid., 303. “Society in the abstract” is Marx’s phrase for society-in-general. Grundrisse, 87. Neoclassical economics is another proponent since it excludes specific social forms and purposes from its core concepts. Simon Clarke argues that Weber and the mainstream of modern sociology adopts that horizon of discourse, predisposing it toward the concepts of instrumental reason and action. As Simon Clarke describes marginalist economics, “It is essentially a formal analysis of the conditions and consequences of rational economic action in abstraction from any particular society.” Simon Clarke, Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology (London: Macmillan, 1982), 212–13. For Heidegger, see The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). For Horkheimer, see The Eclipse of Reason. (New York: Seabury Press, 1974). For Habermas, see Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy Shapiro (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971). Of the technical imperative Kant writes, “Whether the end is rational and good is not at all the question here, but only what one must do in order to attain it.” Immanuel Kant, “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals,” in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 66. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of View (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1953), 46. Roots of Quine’s instrumental conception of rationality are found in two men who preceded him as Harvard professors, William James and C. I. Lewis (who was Quine’s teacher and colleague). James writes, “The conceptual scheme is a sort of sieve in which we try to gather up the world’s contents … the conception with which we handle a bit of sensible experience is really nothing but a teleological instrument. This whole function of conceiving, of fixing, and holding fast to meanings, has no significance apart from the fact that the conceiver is a creature with partial purposes and private ends.” William James, Principles of Psychology, vol. I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 455–56. We associate “private” ends with animalism. E. M. Adams shrewdly observes of C. I. Lewis: “The ultimate test of the a priori conceptual framework, according to Lewis, is ‘the long-run satisfaction of our needs in general.’ It would seem that value judgments would have to be independent of the conceptual framework that is being pragmatically tested if the test is to be clear-cut and not beg the question.” E. M. Adams, “C. I. Lewis,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 4, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan Publishing, Co., Inc. & The Free

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15.

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17.

18. 19.

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Press, 1967), 457. The trouble with this test is that we do not have needs in general; human needs are socially and historically specific ones, and they involve moral, social, and political matters that are not cut and dried. Donald Davidson rejects the split between “scientific heritage” (or “conceptual scheme,” as Quine also called it) and “sensory promptings” in criticizing the “third dogma of empiricism,” the dualism of conceptual scheme and uninterpreted content. See his “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). By the same token, he rejects any “pragmatist” move to measure conceptual schemes against some preexisting table of goods: “A community of minds is the basis of knowledge; it provides the measure of all things. It makes no sense to question the adequacy of this measure, or to seek a more ultimate standard.” Donald Davidson, “Three Varieties of Knowledge,” in Donald Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 218. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, trans. Clemens Dutt, in Karl Marx, Frederick Engels Collected Works, vol. 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 31. E. M. Adams concludes his Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on C. I. Lewis by challenging the pragmatist credentials of appealing to an exogenous standard: “The question remains: Is the conceptual framework in which normative and value knowledge is formulated pragmatically testable, and, if so, just what could such a pragmatic test amount to? If it is not so testable, then it would seem that in the end Lewis is not a pragmatist after all” (E. M. Adams, “C. I. Lewis,” 458). Adams’ question applies to Quine as well as to Lewis. See Habermas’s inaugural lecture at Frankfurt, “Knowledge and Human Interests: A General Perspective,” the Appendix to Knowledge and Human Interests. “The approach of the empirical-analytic sciences incorporates a technical cognitive interest; that of the historical-hermeneutic sciences incorporates a practical one; and the approach of the critically oriented sciences incorporates the emancipatory cognitive interest that, as we saw, was at the root of traditional theories.” Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, 308. In Habermas’s anti-reductionist conception, each “science” has its role to play. Ibid., 312. Habermas qualifies his characterization of survival as animalistic: “What may appear as naked survival is always in its roots a historical phenomenon. For it is subject to the criterion of what a society intends for itself as the good life.” Knowledge and Human Interests, 313. But this qualification is incompatible with his framework of human interests.

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24. 25.

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Ibid., 121. Ibid., 137. Ibid., 135. Ibid., 137. Habermas takes the term “purposive-rational action” (zweckmässige Tätigkeit ) from Max Weber. Here is confirmation of Simon Clarke’s point that the horizon of neoclassical economics, which champions the solitary individual, was adopted by Max Weber and taken into the mainstream of modern sociology. See Clarke, Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology, 186–242. Marx, Grundrisse, 85. Not recognizing the difference between wealth and its social form, Habermas conflates wealth (a general category) with value (a social category specific to wealth produced on a capitalist basis). On this conflation, see Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 232ff. Moishe Postone observes that Marx “demonstrates that production in capitalist society cannot be understood simply in transhistorical terms, that is, in terms of the interaction of humans and nature, because the form and goal of the labor process are shaped by abstract labor, that is, by the process of creating surplus value” (Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 230–31). Part Four of Capital 1, “The Production of Relative-Surplus Value,” which includes chapters on co-operation, manufacture, and large-scale industry, is all about the material reshaping of the production process by the drive for more and more surplus-value. Habermas’s restriction of labor to instrumental action affords no conceptual space for Marx’s concepts of absolute surplus-value (the formal subsumption of labor under capital) much less relative surplus-value (the real subsumption of labor under capital). This is another way of making the point that instrumental action has no place in Capital. Marx calls attention to the originality and importance of the distinction, “I was the first to point out and examine critically this twofold nature of the labor contained in commodities. As this point is crucial to an understanding of political economy, it requires further elucidation” (Capital 1, 132). For a more complete account of “practically abstract” labor, see “Marx’s ‘Truly Social’ Labour Theory of Value: Part I, Abstract Labour in Marxian Value Theory,” Chapter 4 in Patrick Murray, The Mismeasure of Wealth (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 120–155. Marx, Capital 1, 133. Marx, Grundrisse, 87. For criticism of Habermas’s demarcating and supplementing strategy of critique, see Jeanne Schuler, “The Legend of Hegel’s Labor Theory of Reason,” Social Philosophy Today 14 (1998): 301–16, and Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 230.

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32. Tony Smith makes this point in connection with Max Weber, “Weber himself admitted that technical or formal rationality can become fully institutionalized only after labor has been made a formally calculable factor of production,” that is, after “labor itself has taken on the commodity form.” Tony Smith, The Logic of Marx’s “Capital” (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990), 198. Below we criticize Smith’s assertion that labor in capitalist society may be described as instrumental action. 33. See Chapter I, “Means and Ends,” in The Eclipse of Reason, ed. Max Horkheimer. 34. Moishe Postone, “The Current Crisis and the Anachronism of Value: A Marxian Reading,” Continental Thought & Theory: A Journal of Intellectual Freedom 1, no. 4: 150 years of Capital: 38–54. 35. Marx observes, “Had we gone further, and inquired under what circumstances all, or even the majority of products take the form of commodities, we should have found that this only happens on the basis of one particular mode of production, the capitalist one” (Marx, Capital 1, 273). See also Capital 1, 274, n. 4 and 733, and Marx, Results of the Immediate Production Process , trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Capital 1, 949 and 951. 36. Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. II: The Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976). 37. George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2000), 12. 38. Ibid., 13. 39. Ibid.,183. 40. Ibid., 189. 41. Marx, Results of the Immediate Production Process , 1041. 42. Ritzer, McDonaldization, 23. We treat “formal” and “instrumental” as interchangeable. 43. Ibid., 168–69. 44. Ibid., 168. 45. There is only one explicit reference to formal and real subsumption in Capital 1 (645). For more on real subsumption under capital, see Marx, Results of the Immediate Production Process , 944, 1023–25, and 1034–38. 46. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, 3. 47. In remarks on Bertrand Russell, Horkheimer calls attention to this presumptive moral nominalism regarding human actions. He takes Russell as a representative of subjective reason but praises his inconsistency: “Despite his philosophy, which holds ‘ultimate ethical values to be subjective,’ he seems to differentiate between the objective moral qualities of human actions and our perception of them: ‘What is horrible I will see as horrible.’ He has the courage of inconsistency … If he were to cling to his scientistic theory consistently, he would have to admit that there are no horrible actions or inhuman conditions, and that the evil he sees is

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49. 50.

51. 52. 53.

54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

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just an illusion” (Ibid., 8). The trouble is that Horkheimer’s conception of subjective (instrumental) reason assumes that there are no “horrible actions or inhuman conditions” that could gum up the calculations of instrumental reason. See Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Volume Two: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1987) and Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press), 1958. Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination,180. Marx treats capitalist production under the headings of absolute surplusvalue and relative surplus-value to indicate that it always aims at surplusvalue. He argues that surplus-value is the product of surplus labor, the difference between the value of the worker’s wage and the new value produced by the worker. So, capitalists have two strategies for increasing surplus-value. One is to lengthen the working day, absolute surplusvalue; the other is to reduce the value of labor power by cheapening the commodities that workers buy, relative surplus-value. Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 181. Ibid., 180. See Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), and Karl Polanyi, “Aristotle Discovers the Economy,” in Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economics: Essays of Karl Polanyi, ed. George Dalton (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968). Patrick Murray writes, “Calling the modern commercial economy ‘disembedded’ makes it sound as if it exists without any particular social form. The modern commercial economy does seem to be the economy pure and simple, but this seeming is a consequence of the peculiar opacity of its actual social form” (“General Introduction” to Reflections on Commercial Life, ed. Patrick Murray [New York: Routledge, 1997], 6). Marx, Grundrisse, 171. Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 221. Ibid., 180. Ibid., 181–82. Ibid. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. S. W. Ryazanskaya, ed. Maurice Dobb (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 64. Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 182–83. Tony Smith, The Logic of Marx’s “Capital” (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990), 196. Ibid., 197–98.

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References Adams, E. M. “C. I. Lewis.” In The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 4, edited by Paul Edwards. New York: Macmillan Publishing, Co., Inc. & The Free Press, 1967. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958. Clarke, Simon. Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology. London: Macmillan, 1982. Davidson, Donald. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. ———. Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. Habermas, Jürgen. Knowledge and Human Interests. Translated by Jeremy Shapiro. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971. ———. Theory of Communicative Action, Volume Two: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Translated by Thomas McCarthy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1987. Hayek, Friedrich A. Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. II, The Mirage of Social Justice. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Horkheimer, Max. The Eclipse of Reason. New York: Seabury Press, 1974. James, William. Principles of Psychology, vol. I. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981. Kant, Immanuel. Practical Philosophy. Translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by S. W. Ryazanskaya. Edited by Maurice Dobb. New York: International Publishers, 1970. ———. Grundrisse. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1973. ———. Capital, vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1976. ———. Results of the Immediate Production Process. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. In Capital, vol. 1, translated by Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. Translated by Clemens Dutt. In Karl Marx, Frederick Engels Collected Works, vol. 5. New York: International Publishers, 1976. Murray, Patrick. The Mismeasure of Wealth. Leiden: Brill, 2016. Murray, Patrick, ed. Reflections on Commercial Life. New York: Routledge, 1997. Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.

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———. “Aristotle Discovers the Economy.” In Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economics: Essays of Karl Polanyi, edited by George Dalton. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968. Postone, Moishe. Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. ———. “The Current Crisis and the Anachronism of Value: A Marxian Reading.” Continental Thought and Theory: A Journal of Intellectual Freedom, 150 Years of Capital 1, no. 4 (2017): 38–54. Quine, W. V. O. From a Logical Point of View. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1953. Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2000. Smith, Tony. The Logic of Marx’s “Capital.” Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990.

CHAPTER 13

Conclusion: Just Enough Phenomenology

Philosophy is a distinctive kind of knowledge. One of its tasks is to uncover and correct false moves. This book focuses on the consequences of defective habits of thinking. But philosophy contributes to intellectual formation in many ways. Its job description is complex. Hegel shines a light on the expansive and critical scope of philosophy. Philosophy, like art and religion, addresses the totality in its own way. The concerns of all three encompass human reality. Hence, Hegel groups them together as absolute forms of knowing. Hegel contrasts philosophy with science. Both science and philosophy analyze their objects and seek proof. But proof in philosophy goes beyond empirical data to the adequacy of fundamental concepts. Like literature and history, philosophy is a source for understanding nature, the self, and society. It explores the foundations of human endeavors, including law, morality, love, and religion. Unlike most other forms of knowledge, philosophy’s history is integral to its current practice. The history of philosophy is a workshop where we learn to think. Great minds teach us how to understand the world and deepen our humanity. Studying great thinkers, like great artists, spurs the development of our own abilities. Philosophy is of worldly and personal consequence. At its best, philosophy fosters reasoned hope in the overall advance of history. It goes beyond wonder to understanding the parts and making connections to the whole. A fundamental inquiry, philosophy

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must be acquired and practiced. If it is absent from education, the loss is felt. Like other knowledge, philosophy develops through history but in a distinctive way. Earlier doctrines are not dismissed as obsolete. We continue to study Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Descartes through the lens of present-day concerns, through “the interpreting present.”1 Philosophy’s tradition is living and supplies resources for current inquiry. In Hegel’s history of philosophy, subsequent ideas often recapitulate while superseding earlier forms of thought. This progression of ideas reflects in abstract ways the developments of society. Broadly, the trajectory of history is toward the realization of freedom and reason. For example, the Hellenistic schools cultivate enduring wisdom that is limited by their time. Freedom will develop beyond the horizon of the sage. Hume corrects philosophy with common sense, but later thinkers correct Hume’s constricted view of reason. Philosophy in our day is inclusive and draws from all parts of its history as well as all cultures. But philosophical projects face similar demands. Unlike other knowledge, philosophy does not take concepts for granted; it examines foundations and assesses basic concepts to determine their adequacy. As with all kinds of knowledge, abstraction is involved. Whether examining God’s power or human sentiments, philosophy’s distinctions abstract from ordinary experience and usage. Reflection takes a backward step that leaves behind what is recognizable to probe hidden foundations. Rüdiger Bubner observes that “philosophical reflection is a kind of activity which knows how to bring its instruments under control without being taken over by them, and which thus implies that the kind of knowledge it achieves always entails self-knowledge.”2 We reflect on the background of experience and foundations of knowledge without losing contact with the inquiring self or confusing the backward step with a purported view from nowhere. Philosophical reflection maintains its moorings through proper self-reflection. At some point analysis must return to the familiar. This trajectory describes many kinds of philosophy: thinking burrows beneath the familiar into abstract probing and subsequently returns to the concrete. “Return” is misleading because it suggests that the intervening analysis changes nothing. Any consequential thinking will shed new light on familiar experience. After analyzing color, we still see the car as red, but our understanding has deepened. At its best, analysis makes its way back to the world and explains what formerly only appeared to

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be the case. Thus, the analysis of perception clarifies our understanding of perception. Making connections between the abstract and the recognizable occurs on many levels. But the return to the concrete matters. When it fails to comprehend this world—employing its uniquely abstract terms—philosophy falls short. Not all ways of practicing philosophy shed light on the world. Skeptical stalemates halt analysis. If philosophy does not recover the familiar world, the trajectory of thinking derails. When the possibilities of thinking are stymied, the poverty—not the power—of philosophy prevails. This poverty can turn into a perverse alienation from self and world, raising the prospect of “false philosophy.”3 Philosophy is not unique in its susceptibility to dogmas that block development.4 Fixed notions obstruct human undertakings in many ways. But philosophy is distinctive in its ability to uncover their source. A primary source of false philosophy is defective phenomenology. Whether analysis pursues a narrow focus or develops doctrines systematic and encompassing, basic concepts always involve phenomenological judgments. In our view, phenomenology precedes ontology, ethics, epistemology, and other branches of philosophy. Any phenomenology that separates mind from the world, whether explicitly or implicitly, spawns false moves. A better phenomenology takes being-in-the-world as indivisible: concepts do not line up as purely subjective or purely objective. When thinking hits a skeptical logjam, we should assess the basic concepts. Do the concepts acknowledge being-in-the-world or deny it? When concepts are not adequate to experience, thinking stalls. A key task of philosophy is to disclose and examine the basic concepts at work in knowledge and experience. Good concepts are the takeaway when philosophy does its job well. To dismiss phenomenological reflection on basic concepts fixes in place the default positions that result from false moves. The present book of essays seeks to diagnose impoverishments of philosophy to recover its power. The point is not to dismiss the topics. From the meaning of death to the meaning of capital, the topics matter. They arise from experience and the demands of understanding the world. False moves are obstacles to understanding the world. Identifying false moves is preliminary to more adequate analysis. It represents a preparatory task but not an absolute beginning. Philosophy—like law or science—is always amid its world. It cannot remove itself from history, but it can achieve critical distance on its world. We try to learn from Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, and Davidson about the origin and persistence of false

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moves.5 This critical task is required for philosophy to achieve what Hegel called actuality—what is both real and rational.

Why Phenomenology? Philosophy is linked to big questions, such as what is the meaning of life? An inseparable task attends to the concepts employed in these questions, such as “meaningful” or “life.” Ordinarily, we skip over concepts to focus on the questions. At its best, philosophy pulls concepts out of seclusion to raise Socrates’ “what is it?” question. What is justice? What is piety? In every kind of knowledge, basic concepts shape the field of inquiry. These concepts do not arise one by one but are interrelated and bear on one another. When basic concepts come up for review, whether in physics or history, this inquiry is akin to philosophy. In assessing concepts, we ask: are they adequate? Do they open the world to understanding? Do they block access to the world? Do the concepts enable probing questions to be posed? To focus on concepts takes us back to the underlying existential conditions that make inquiry possible. Generally, truth and falsity pertain to propositions. But good concepts are true because they open up the objects of inquiry. All human activities, including knowing, presuppose human existence. Philosophy, like other endeavors, rests on existential conditions. That is clear. To assess concepts directs us to underlying features of the world and ourselves. Basic concepts are guided by existential conditions that allow us to raise questions and seek knowledge. Concepts that do not line up with fundamental features of existence are defective.6 In this book, we call the experience-based inquiry that determines the adequacy of basic concepts—phenomenology. Phenomenology addresses underlying features of experience and knowledge. As analysis unfolds, these features are sometimes forgotten. Analysis that is heedless of the conditions of existence is adrift. Like Humpty Dumpty, its object is broken into pieces that do not get put back together again. Phenomenology reminds analysis of the conditions under which inquiry takes place. It keeps analysis honest and in touch with the world. Its claims are simple; for example, subjectivity and objectivity are inseparable, but they orient knowing and experience. When basic features of human existence are forgotten, analysis faces pitfalls, such as the search for what is purely objective or subjective. Phenomenology acknowledges the contours of the world and the self. It is not a separate field but the

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kind of thinking that figures into each area of knowledge. In this sense, phenomenology is unavoidable, and good phenomenology is of critical importance.

Just Enough Phenomenology7 Phenomenology, in our usage, is inescapable. Phenomenology is the companion to analysis. How does it function during analysis? What phenomenological review is adequate? Hume gives an example with his idea of a distinction of reason. Reason typically divides its objects during analysis. For example, the analysis of perception distinguishes color from shape. We can attend to a shade of yellow while being indifferent to what yellow object is perceived. But color always has a shape, such as the streak of orange in the sunset. Color does not come without shape.8 Seeking knowledge, reason distinguishes color from shape without losing touch with the inseparable conditions of existence. Here is a lesson to be learned from Berkeley’s critique of abstract ideas. Drawing distinctions, say between the shape and the color of an object, is the work of analysis, but analysis alone cannot tell us whether what we distinguish in thought is separable. The experience-based inquiry of phenomenology is required for that.9 Analysis and phenomenology, then, are two inseparable aspects of thinking. Phenomenology keeps the exuberance of analysis’s distinction-making in check by showing where what can be distinguished cannot be separated. Hume’s distinction of reason is one source on how phenomenology functions. Another is Heidegger’s Being and Time, where each chapter in Division One sounds out fundamental structures of human existence. These structures are “equiprimordial,” that is, inseparable. Together, they are presupposed by every form of experience and knowing. We cannot get behind them since they are always already present from the beginning of analysis. Just enough phenomenology involves taking a few lessons from Heidegger. The first structure is that humans exist in-the-world. The hyphens emphasize the inseparability of humans and world. All other existential features are involved in this original inseparability. Because humans exist in the world, all purist categories that purport to separate humans from the world are ruled out from the start. Involved in the world, humans handle things purposively in moving through the day’s tasks. Primordially, things are purposeful objects to be manipulated. Furthermore, humans coexist and comport themselves with others.

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Being-with-others is primordial. A state of nature inhabited by solitary humans, as Rousseau depicts, lacks this minimal feature of human existence. In the world with others, human existence is constituted by mood, understanding, and discourse. Moods are not “mental states”; they are ways of being-in-the-world. Each mood opens the given situation in particular ways. In summary, humans exist as care that gathers these structures together into one human existence. Being-in-the-world matters. Even boredom is a way of caring, and solitude is a way of being-with-others: a paperweight can be neither indifferent nor alone. Equiprimordial means that no single structure of existence is privileged over any other; together they constitute a totality that is always already there. We already exist as understanding in relation to possibilities. We are always out ahead of ourselves: one’s being is projective affectively and cognitively. Interpreting or perceiving occurs against a background of meaning and mood, not a blank screen. Mood, or attunement, registers thrownness; our feelings are never purely subjective. They are worldly. Wherever we find ourselves, being there already affects us in some way. We deliberate, choose, and speak because possibility, mood, and discourse are always already there. Affectivity is equiprimordial with understanding and discourse. Understanding is an existential feature relevant to the task of philosophy. We exist as understanding and cannot grasp knowing, friendship, perceiving, morality, death, world, or any topic apart from a background of understanding. We could not recognize a thought experiment without presupposing general features of the world. Every analysis presupposes understanding, avoiding an endless regress of knowledge. When a problem arises, what is implicit comes into focus and may face challenges as we seek solutions. Every inquiry rests on suppositions about what is the case. Every act of knowing discloses the world in particular ways. Every beginning represents a way of beginning. No existential structure is first in importance; none gives rise to the others. Being-in-theworld, being-with-others, using things to achieve goals: all exist together from the start. The search for a single essential trait is over. Marx supplies an important addition to the list of Heidegger’s existential conditions. For Heidegger, humans live with useful things that serve as extensions of our body and meet various needs. Marx’s term for useful things is wealth. Like Aristotle and Hegel, Marx recognizes that wealth and needs always have a social form. There is no usefulness in general. Heidegger describes the handiness of tools like the hammer as original: such tools are constituted to meet needs by manipulating the

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environment. This description skips over the kind of society in which hammers are produced and needs are met by hammering. What is useful gets content from the way society is organized. There is no usefulness in general or technology in general. Technology has a history, but what spurs or halts its growth involves social forms. For the most part, wealth in capitalist society takes the form of commodities; useful things are generally produced to be sold for a profit. We do not weave the fabric that covers our body; we purchase clothes with money earned at work. Not all humans in history who consume things are “consumers.” The generalization of the commodity, money, wages, and profit distinguishes our society from the social forms of other societies. By not including social forms, Heidegger’s existential analysis stops short of just enough phenomenology. Yes, humans are always with others—but always in specific ways with specific purposes. Marx’s insistence on social forms as original to human existence illustrates how phenomenology is subject to development. Just enough phenomenology brakes the unchecked analysis that leads to stalemates. Phenomenology reminds us that when analysis ignores experience, it must eventually return to the recognizable world. What reasoning can distinguish through analysis does not necessarily exist separately. Determining whether it can or cannot is a task for phenomenology. An adequate phenomenology guides fruitful thinking; it directs us toward real questions and tosses out other questions as phony from the start. If humans exist in the world with others in history, then to seek proof of the existence of the world or proof of other minds is to chase false doubts. We must presuppose being-in-the-world-with-others to raise any question. Human existence is not bracketed when we raise questions or seek knowledge. A basic phenomenology is presupposed by every analysis. Since discourse, like all features of existence, is in the world, doubts concerning words, meanings, and objects are often false. We cannot set language apart from the world to ponder how they are related; language simply is a fundamental way of being-in-the-world. Donald Davidson describes as “featureless” the self that results from misguided phenomenology. A featureless self is what remains when we subtract traits, such as language, that constitute humans. How language functions in the world remains a real question. Distinguishing true from false doubts requires just enough phenomenology.

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Defective Phenomenology and False Moves Phenomenological assumptions are unavoidable. It is only judging them in a disciplined, experience-based way that is optional. To proceed, analysis takes a stand on how things are for the one raising the question. How we employ concepts presupposes a view of the knower existing in the world. Whether the assumptions are articulated or not, their influence is felt. For those with adverse views of Hegel or Heidegger, for those put off by the term “phenomenology,” substitute “experience-based inquiry.” Determining what exists separately or belongs together involves inquiry into experience. Analysis and phenomenology are two inseparable aspects of thinking—this is a phenomenological truth about philosophy itself. When assumptions conflict with the actual conditions of existence, the phenomenology is defective. False assumptions about experience lead analysis into stalemates that reflect faulty phenomenology and disappear with an improved account of experience. Recall Berkeley’s blinding “dust” that we kick up. Avoiding false doubts is the task of good phenomenology. Not all doubts disappear with improved phenomenology, but many senseless ones do. An improved phenomenology frees us to address the actual issues arising in our world, and here arise real questions. We do not grasp real doubts immediately; they emerge from inquiry into the actual events and objects. Faulty phenomenology is pinned down by questions concerning the very possibility of knowledge, which relegates philosophy to the sidelines of history. The chief stumbling block addressed in the present essays is the presupposition of the separation of mind from world. The dogma of mind’s separation from the world is phenomenological in character. Factoring mind out from the world might be construed as skipping over phenomenology. It is better characterized as flawed phenomenology that skews every aspect of the philosophical project. Separating mind from world makes an implicit claim about how analysis proceeds: winnowing out the purely subjective from the objective putatively sets the conditions for clear analysis. What we call factoring philosophy makes the mistaken phenomenological judgment that mind and world are separable.10 When the foundational directions for knowing or acting are at odds with fundamental features of existence, however, false moves follow. So-called analytical clarity blocks access to actuality. To break with the mindset of false moves, an improved phenomenology is needed.

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Faulty phenomenology assumes two origins that are separable: mind and world.11 With the assumption of mind’s separability from world, factoring philosophy is off and running. Unconstrained analysis then seeks to isolate the purely subjective from the objective, inner from outer, constructed from given, mediated from immediate. Are values subjective or objective? Is meaning socially constructed or discovered? What aspects of experience is mind responsible for? What is independent of mind? Which dimensions of experience are purely objective? Which are purely subjective? How are they related? Is knowledge possible? We modern thinkers know the drill. Talk of the pure, as in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, signals the intent to factor and brings the underlying phenomenology into view. Purist philosophies trade in false moves. With mind outside the world, philosophy struggles to make sense of knowledge, morality, and society. Attempting to relate the purely subjective— such as values—with the purely objective—such as events—produces persistent doubts. Labeling the separation of mind and world as defective does not preclude analysis of mind or its operations. Philosophy should study sensing, understanding, and imagination, but not as powers separable from their objects. Recognizing our being-in-the-world signifies minimal phenomenological adequacy.12 To posit a point of first contact between mind and its object presupposes that they are separable. The very idea of first contact is bogus. The blind person who suddenly recovers sight moves from a world stripped of visual qualities to a visible world. But he has never been out of relation to the world. Sensing always involves sensing of qualities that constitute the world. Sensing is worldly. The consequences of this original faulty phenomenology are other dogmas or false moves. A dogma is an unexamined, fixed claim. Presumed to be self-evident, dogmas operate outside the scope of reflection. They are hidden as the obvious. Phony doubts or dead ends in analysis signal underlying dogmas. Skepticism, the seeming antithesis of dogmatism, is its flip side; its roots are buried dogmas. Philosophy in the grip of false moves leaps from dogmatism to skepticism, from the purely knowable to the unknowable thing-in-itself. As each dogma is cleared away, philosophy’s grasp of the world improves. The attack on dogmas, as well as their defense, runs through modern philosophy. Locke embodies this mixed legacy: he dismisses innate ideas as a dogma while positing passively received atomistic sensations (simple ideas) as the immediate content of experience. The dogma of simple ideas

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eventually leads Locke to the unknowable underlying material substance as their source: “something I know not what.” For the twentieth-century thinkers Quine and Davidson, dogmas mark the blind spots of empiricism, where responsiveness to experience breaks down.13 Quine rejects the distinction between analytic judgments, whose truth is independent of experience, and synthetic judgments, which are founded on experience. This dogma shapes both Leibniz’s rationalism and Kant’s critical philosophy, so it is not limited to empiricism. Quine also rejects verifiability, the dogma that each proposition must be verified with sensory data. Verification does not operate on the level of individual propositions taken one at a time but on the web or system of beliefs. Quine’s defense of the web of belief is challenged by Davidson as a third dogma, for it separates the scheme or framework (web) from the content (sensory input: Quine’s “cues”). Note that this third dogma likewise extends beyond empiricism to include Kant’s critical philosophy. Quine imagines the knower—outside the web—pragmatically employing the web as a tool. Davidson identifies empiricism so closely with these dogmas that he concludes that the empiricist movement ends with the rejection of these dogmas. We reject that judgment: experience-based inquiry that leads to the rejection of dogmas should be counted as improving empiricism, not ending it. We locate the seminal dogma more broadly in the opposition of the purely subjective and purely objective, the separability of mind and world.14 This faulty mindset is implicit in the dualisms of analytic vs. synthetic, empirical proposition vs. sensory input, and scheme vs. content where the conceptual taken as purely subjective and sensory content as purely objective. This presumed separability twists thinking away from truth toward false doubts and dead ends. Its influence is persistent and defines analysis for many: what is widely thought of as analytic philosophy is what we call factoring philosophy. Unless the root dogma is addressed repeatedly, thinking slips back into its old factoring habits, sorting out the purely objective and subjective to yield false philosophy. The alternatives to dogmatic norms are norms better attuned to experience—truer.

Real Concepts and Imposters It is tempting to shrug off phenomenological issues as arcane and without consequence. But deep-seated distortions have consequences. Ignoring phenomenology does not bar its influence, for example, in how concepts

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are formed. Good concepts open the world for understanding and action. Faulty phenomenology allows bogus notions to take root and impede understanding and action. Utility is an example of a concept that requires the separation of mind from world. Utility contrasts with the concept of usefulness, which presupposes being-in-the-world. For a chair to be useful involves properties of the chair as well as human needs. The design of the chair addresses the goals of sitting in comfort. To determine usefulness relates the subject to its object; it presupposes humans existing in the world. We never grasp usefulness by looking solely at subject or at object. Usefulness involves mediation, the philosophical counterpoint to purist splits. Separating the self from the world eliminates many forms of mediation that hold. Utility, by contrast, requires the separation of subject from object: only one side can matter. Utility is situated either on the subject’s side as pleasure felt (or preference satisfied) or as a peculiar property of the object. Utility theories flip from one side to the other, as the situation requires; sometimes utility measures feelings and other times it measures positive consequences of actions. It never measures both. With flawed phenomenology, inconsistency is unavoidable. Being unresponsive to features of existence, such as particularity, also marks bogus concepts. Being useful depends on the needs of the subject and the properties of the object. Particularity is not of interest to utility. For preference, actions, or objects to be comparable, as the theory maintains, any feature is fungible. Particularity must always be cashed out in terms of some homogeneous something. Entities differ only by quantities of utility, stuff which is the same everywhere. Utility and usefulness cannot coexist as two features of the world. When utility is posited, usefulness is denied. The utility of the hammer concerns consequences posited as completely separable from its properties. The hammer’s properties co-constitute its usefulness with specific human needs. All its properties are quashed in the calculation of utility. The concept of utility shuns mediation. Concepts rooted in the features of human existence involve mediation. They reflect the fundamental structure of being-in-the-world. Pure concepts, by contrast, line up on either side of a supposed subject/object divide; they go it alone and lack mediation. Good concepts also contrast with general terms. General terms are not imposters; they are useful tools in analysis. As comparatively empty, they lack the mediation to constitute features of the world. For this reason,

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we call general terms notions, to contrast with concepts, which are more determinate. One example involves the notions of pleasure and pain, familiar from ethical theories. Unlike utility, pleasure and pain are not flawed. As general, they say little. There is nothing suspect in general terms. But to shed light on the world, we must move beyond general terms to concepts that grasp their object. Pleasure and pain seem to describe features of the world. This is an error. Without the relation of generality to particularity, they lack mediation. What kind of pleasure is the reference? Mediation, in this case, relates to objects. Without objects, pleasure and pain are too general to grasp features of the world. As beings in the world, persons take pleasure in certain objects or experiences. Pleasure is not “in our heads” as purely subjective. For pleasure to move from general term into existence requires objects. We do not experience pleasure or pain in general but rather the pleasure of food or friendship, the pain of illness or loneliness. The preposition “of” signifies mediation and makes clear that sensations and moods are in the world. Pleasure and pain are not purely inward or subjective states; they are ways that humans exist in the world. Without mediation, pleasure may function as a bluff that can take any form. Hedonistic versions of utility theory can speak about quantities of pleasure because the term has no content that could resist quantification. The pleasure of smelling freshly baked bread, by contrast, has content. The cause of our enjoyment is worldly and can be identified. When pleasure is treated as an entity that can exist independent of its objects, the general term morphs into utility, a pseudo-concept. Specific pleasures are not readily quantified. A defective phenomenology cuts pleasures off from their object as if experiencing pleasure were like holding a rope that had only one end. A bogus concept lacks reference: nothing in the world ever answers to its description. It lacks any power to comprehend the world. Utility is a bogus concept that presumes the separation of mind from world. The terms of utility—pleasure or preference—are not bogus but incomplete. To achieve the status of concept, we must move beyond the generality of pleasure and pain to specific objects. Theories that treat pleasure and pain as self-subsistent settle for imposters, missing ethical reality. Pseudo-concepts distort our understanding but cannot undo our existence. We do not stop being human: mediation does not go away for being ignored. No human could live as utility theory describes. Martha Nussbaum describes the incongruity of living by a utilitarian code:

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It is a startling and powerful vision. Just try to think it seriously: this body of this wonderful beloved person is exactly the same in quality as that person’s mind and inner life. Both, in turn, the same in quality as the value of Athenian democracy; of Pythagorean geometry; of Eudoxan astronomy. What would it be like to look at a body and see in it exactly the same shade and tone of goodness and beauty as in a mathematical proof—exactly the same, differing only in amount and in location … These proposals are so bold as to be pretty well incomprehensible, from the ordinary point of view.15

What is real cannot be jiggered into a preference schedule, where everything can be compared on a single scale. Just try to rank preferences for a friend, food, scholarship, and a new roof. Real comparisons are worldly and require specificity. To assign utility values involves assertions without links to recognizable judgments. In practice, the kinds of things always matter. Usefulness is an original existential structure; it is ineradicable. This means that we correct for bogus notions in how we act. We talk about utility, but our actions reflect what is suitable for the situation. The human ability to carry on under the burden of bad phenomenological judgments might suggest that pseudo-concepts are without effect. But skewed reflection has consequences for our capacity to reflect on our lives and world. Utility, like money, numbs us to the goodness of kinds and individuals. Subjective value theory assures us that we are not missing anything. Effective thinking carries a potent force; false moves deprive thought of its vitality.

Hegel on the Dogma of Pure Immediacy The dogma of mind’s separation from world, the seminal pitfall, is challenged by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit . The Phenomenology, the entryway into Hegel’s system, is unique in its mode of immanent exposition. Philosophy does not impose concepts on experience; we the reader look on as each form of experience posits norms. A progression unfolds as enacted norms lead to stalemate or failure, provoking a reformulation and advance of experience. In a unique manner, the text tracks norms already in play in experience and history. Hegel’s approach is immanent. For example, moral consciousness shows its weakness by espousing ideals that it cannot act upon. Moral paralysis initiates the need for a more

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adequate understanding. We need not lodge objections; experience itself prods us along. The Phenomenology presents the first task of philosophy as learning from experiences. And central to any process of learning is having some dim sense of what is sought to begin with. If truth or certainty is required from the start, learning is unnecessary, and philosophy embarks from assured foundations. But Hegel shows that philosophy, like human life generally, advances through failures. We arrive at certainty and completeness through a process of development. Truth emerges from the process. Claims of pure immediacy violate the conditions of any experience. The Phenomenology arrives at this conclusion in its first chapter. The first account of experience—sense-certainty—lies furthest from truth. By recognizing its presuppositionlessness as wholly false, learning is made possible. Sense-certainty puts the seminal dogma to the test: it posits the complete separability of mind from world. This form of consciousness claims that sense particulars are certain. Sensing is purely immediate or immaculate. No presuppositions exist. What is subjective is purely subjective: the mere act of sensing. What is objective is purely objective: the singular being sensed. Subjective and objective lack internal or external determination. Their complete separability constitutes their sole identity. In this pure state, the moment of sensing establishes first contact: mind meets world. As purely immediate, sensing rules out any possibility of distortion by the knower. Language, culture, context, and perspective are set aside. Kinds are not recognizable. Not even things are presupposed. This account of sensing expresses the original state as nominalism: particularity is directly sensed. The sensation is the source of self and world. But how? Nominalism is heady to conceive. Consider the first contact between mind as blank slate and object as sheer particularity. How are two formless dualities to connect? In fact, sense-certainty cannot be conceived. It collapses in its weightlessness. The sensed particular or “this” cannot be noted without losing particularity. If “this” is “red,” then redness is shared with other red particulars. If “this” is anchored in time as “now,” then one moment is equivalent to every other now. Furthermore, whatever certainty exists “now” immediately vanishes into the next “now.” So, sensing attempts to preserve certainty by withdrawing from words: what is certain cannot be uttered. But what kind of certainty cannot be spoken without vanishing? What is unutterable has already vanished. This account of sensing twists

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in the wind; its claims come to nothing, leaving a minimally adequate account of perception to arise from the failure.

From Pure Immediacy to the Recovery of Truth and Subjectivity The phenomenology that sets the purely objective off from the purely subjective is wholly defective. Sense-certainty fails completely. From its collapse we learn how space, time, things, and language cannot be set aside in accounting for the world. What especially matters to us is how, in refuting the notion of pure immediacy, Hegel’s short opening chapter establishes the inseparability of mind and world. Pure immediacy posits this separability; the swift demise of sense-certainty shows this expectation to fail. The Phenomenology’s task is to learn from experience. Before any other learning occurs, the assumption of mind’s separability from world is put to a test that it flunks. Implicit in the notion of a first, immediate encounter or pure sensation is the source of false moves. The essays in the present book show the persistence of the dogma that Hegel confronts in the opening pages of his Phenomenology. This dogma stands in the way of knowing; clearing it away has proven difficult. There are various lessons to take away from the failure of pure immediacy. Accepting that mind is separable from world encourages skepticism. As skepticism grows, talk of truth and error dries up, replaced by efforts to factor experience into the purely subjective and purely objective. When the dogma of mind’s separability is rejected, the discourse of truth and error is recovered. In a passage quoted earlier, Hegel dismisses worries about what is objective and subjective.16 He does so because he has shown factoring philosophy to be phenomenologically false. Attention should focus instead on truth. We miss this lesson if we think that terms like subjective and objective are the problem: they are not. Hegel’s criticism concerns factoring the purely subjective from the purely objective. It is pure concepts that breed doubt. Objective and subjective are ordinary distinctions. Hegel employs them throughout his philosophy in various ways. Is truth objective? Of course. True propositions correspond to events in the world. Is language subjective? Certainly. Human subjects are language-users. Assuming that objective and subjective must clash is a bias resulting from purist dogmas. When fixated on factoring out the purely subjective from the purely objective, thinking derails. The failure of the notion of pure immediacy to pan out does not mean that we must

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drop the idea of immediacy. It is only the purist concept of immediacy, which excludes mediation, that must go. The given is only a myth when taken as “purely given.”17 For Hegel, determining what is actual is the task of philosophy. He uses actuality in a distinctive way. Actuality is the result of our effort to comprehend what exists. Simply existing in the world differs from being in touch with actuality. Actuality requires knowledge and presupposes that truth can be reached. Philosophy that comprehends its world achieves actuality. This involves the progression through failure of the Phenomenology and the partial truths of logic, nature, and spirit in his systematic works. Actuality is not seized all at once; it unfolds through conflicts to arrive at more encompassing knowledge. Unless philosophy is directed at actuality, it does not fulfill its promise. It remains an intellectual exercise without consequence. Such philosophy may spark debate but does not shed light on the world. Many thinkers would agree that philosophy should comprehend its world. To reach this goal, however, the terms of analysis must be phenomenologically adequate. One upshot of false philosophy is confusion concerning subjectivity. To posit pure subjectivity means loss of the world; the pure subject gobbles objectivity. To recover the world has as its counterpart the recovery of genuine subjectivity. Subjectivity, as opposed to pure subjectivity, is a topic of first importance. Socrates quotes the oracle at Delphi on the great mission to “know thyself.” Just enough phenomenology recognizes the self’s involvement in every kind of inquiry. Distorted views of the self are felt in every human endeavor. Kierkegaard catalogues the deformations of the self as forms of despair.18 Once pure immediacy is dismissed, subjectivity is no longer the quagmire where inquiry gets stuck. Instead of worrying about whether concepts are subjective, attention focuses on whether concepts are true. “Are values subjective” gives way to “what is good?” or “what is right?” The subjective/objective divide no longer defines analysis. The need to determine what lies within or outside mind ceases. “What is subjectivity” should be approached in many ways but positing it “outside” objectivity is wrong-headed. It is shown to fail. Every topic, including subjectivity, opens onto the world. Being-in-the-world is the condition for asking a question and determining whether a claim is true or a concept is adequate. At a minimum, phenomenology discloses being-in-the-world.

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The False Philosopher’s Critique of False Philosophy When philosophy is identified with false moves, skepticism has the last word and replies to it are compromised. We call these responses the false philosopher’s critique of false philosophy. For some, skeptical outcomes seem to repeat like a treadmill going nowhere. When false moves predominate, thinking eventually feels pointless. The futility of thinking is felt sooner than the source of that futility is grasped. We might conclude that “anything can be proven” or that reason casts only a dim light. Skepticism begets more skepticism. Since thinking is taken as the source of persistent doubt, quit thinking. This dismal view is impossible to enact. Existence requires thinking. Another critique contrasts false philosophy with common sense as the true guide to living. Common sense warns us that “reflection should only go so far” to avoid skepticism. A divide is established between concrete, applied issues that are proper fields of thought and abstruse, speculative issues, which result in doubt. Common sense is the folk remedy for skeptical stalemates: if we hew to customary views, we will not be sucked into a whirlpool of doubts.19 So we end up with the kind of flip-flopping characteristic of factoring philosophy. It may sound odd to quarrel with common sense. But treating common sense as philosophy’s rudder leaves a defective phenomenology in place.20 False moves are entrenched as thinking per se. Common sense, as a form of thinking, is not immune to false moves. Skeptical logjams can occur here too. Like metaphysics, common sense discloses the world in particular ways. Whether claims arise from common sense or metaphysics, our response is the same: are they true? Philosophy has nothing to fear from common sense, while common sense should not be taken as the unassailable corrective to metaphysics. The point is to avoid false moves, not to push philosophy to the sidelines as chronically out of touch with the world. Another response to false moves calls for balance. We should avoid extreme skeptical claims by meeting in the middle. Balance sounds reasonable, but like common sense it entrenches false moves as thinking. Thomas Nagel’s separate-but-equal approach to subjectivity and objectivity represents one form of balance. Another balancing act calls for the synthesis of the objective and the subjective elements of knowledge. This approach, identified with Kant, addresses the dogma of separability

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without grasping the true source of its defectiveness. It does not grasp mediation as fundamental to thinking and goes no further than coupling the elements conceived of as separate. It insists that in experience, sensing never exists without concepts and subjectively ordered intuitions. The two elements of experience have separate origins: sensible intuitions are given to mind; pure concepts and pure forms of intuition come from mind. The synthesis between givenness and responsiveness—passive and active, involuntary and voluntary, external and internal—displays a partnership of equals. Philosophy tilts neither to what is inside mind nor to what lies outside: their contributions are in equipoise. Balancing falls short of correcting defective concepts. In balancing, synthesis preserves the separability of mind from world. David Wiggins and John McDowell offer a balancing response to subjectivism by distinguishing two forms of objectivity: the minddependent objectivity of values and secondary qualities and the mindindependent objectivity of science.21 While the details of their analyses differ, both reject the characterization of values or secondary qualities as illusions or mere projections. Values and colors constitute specific features of the world that answer to the subjective concerns and capacities for perceiving. These features or dispositions of the world are objective and real. There is no call to correct the illusion of color with an analysis in terms of the object’s primary properties, as John Mackie does, following John Locke. A scientific account of color does not negate its existence. Understanding perception, like understanding any phenomenon, presupposes the reality of the phenomenon to be explained.22 The explanation of color does not imply that color is an illusion. Experience is shaped by knowledge, and uncovering error reshapes our experience of the world. Perception, like all experience, is shaped by understanding and knowledge. Both science and perception disclose the world. How the world appears to beings capable of perception is just as basic as how the world is known to beings capable of knowledge. Wiggins describes colors as relative but not relational: colors do not disappear when out of sight. But color is not understandable apart from the capacities for perception. For these writers, primary properties, such as mass, are mind-independent. They are fully understandable apart from any reference to a capacity for cognition. We share this determination to rethink the subjectivity of values and projection theory. Recovering perception as a way of being-in-the-world that is neither subjective illusion nor an immediate encounter with the

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purely given is central to the task. How perceiving presupposes a kind of understanding that differs from knowledge is crucial to this analysis. The progression from perception to knowledge is aptly characterized as progression toward greater objectivity. But the habits of purist thought are tenacious: differences reemerge as splits between the inner and outer. The progression to higher levels of objectivity is lost with the splitting of the mind-dependent from the mindindependent. This division preserves the flawed view that knowing must get outside subjectivity rather than that knowing represents one of the greatest achievements of a subjectivity that is always already in the world. It makes good sense to expect that rational species would converge on their scientific accounts of the universe. Talk of the mind-independent sets objectivity back on the path to the unknowable thing-in-itself. Appealing to a balance of subjective capacities and objective traits preserves a flawed phenomenology. The split between mind and world remains when what is inseparable is treated as two ultimate sources that are always found together. Even a thorough penetration of perceptual givenness by conceptual functioning only preserves the underlying separation. To track conceptuality all the way down is to preserve the notion of mind’s separation from the world—consider what is being tracked. For this mindset, mediation cannot help but come after the purely immediate. Accommodation of subjectivity substitutes for a fundamental shift in thinking that grasps the simple but elusive point that consciousness is in the world, not in constant relation to the world.23 As a minimal phenomenology, being-in-the-world says little, but it rules out plenty. It rules out all accounts of experience as combining mind-stuff with world-stuff, for example, positing the conceptual as implicit in the perceptual. It rules out the notion of knowledge as spanning the conceptual and the non-conceptual, joining form with matter or scheme with content. A concept is not a mental object: concepts are worldly. Davidson ingeniously likens a concept to a sunburn.24 Sunburn registers effects of the sun on certain persons, as concepts register effects of the world on beings capable of thought. Conceiving and perceiving can be distinguished on other grounds than in terms of the split between mind and world. Perception grasps how things stand in the world. Reconsidering the separability of subject and object puts the focus on the shared horizon, just what is usually ignored. Basic questions, such as the meaning of perception, are difficult to address; they involve perspective, space and time, cultural differences, illusion, and error. Among the central topics of

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philosophy is how best to characterize perception. Is perception clear? Do we perceive immediately or does sensing take time? Is perception discursive? Real doubts exist concerning the proper way to characterize sensing in relation to judging or discourse. How perception discloses the world sparks important debates. The topic of error—championed by Davidson—can be raised only because perception reveals features of the world.25 And because subjects fallibly seek to know.

Philosophy Freed of False Moves Philosophy released from false phenomenology has features that can be characterized in a general way. When analysis is not directed by an underlying disjunction—either objective or subjective—its workings change. Analysis develops from less to more determinate concepts and judgments. Initial distinctions move from broader and abstract to concrete and specified. Initial claims are tentative, not certain. Reflection examines the initial claims and develops them further. Instead of sorting matters into a presupposed and fixed opposition, determinations advance to more complete and accurate accounts of the matter at hand. The content of distinctions grows as analysis proceeds. In a general way, analysis advances from the abstract—or less determinate—to the concrete or more determinate. What we take up at the beginning of an inquiry is abstract, with little conceptual content. The beginning of analysis is unavoidably sketchy, even if it appeals to common sense or scenes from everyday life. We get to the truth by examining these initial impressions and thinking the matter through; truth represents an achievement or outcome of analysis. The notion that from the start thinking embarks from truth or certainty—that it comes all at once upon the first look, or not at all—misconstrues knowledge and experience. We gradually understand and improve our initial distinctions through experience-based inquiry: “analysis” is always analysis and phenomenology. The mutual presupposition between opening and subsequent reflection is a feature of philosophical analysis. The so-called dilemma of how inquiry begins—either dogmatic assertion or skeptical regress—is false. Thinking builds on prior analysis, and only at the end do we fully grasp the beginning. An improved phenomenology opens questions for philosophy that were previously passed over. How we understand concepts and perception changes. When mind is set outside the world, concepts are set

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up in oppositions. For example, being free means not being determined, and little more can be said. With an improved phenomenology, the content of concepts comes into view. What freedom means can be addressed as worldly freedom, without the internal/external harness. As analysis becomes increasingly determinate, the basic concepts take on more content. Details and dimensions are addressed that were implicit at the start.26 With an improved phenomenology, matters of degree are recognizable. When concepts are not grounded in fixed oppositions and phenomenological inquiry is ongoing, the possibility of recognizing more or less freedom arises. False phenomenology yields empty claims.27 By separating subjectivity from the world, analysis cannot get at real differences. A more adequate phenomenology is worldly; it draws distinctions from actuality and makes the complexity and density of experience accessible to thinking.

Capital as a Peculiar Form of Sociality Heidegger articulates the fundamental structures of human existence as being-in-the-world and being-with-others. Hegel refutes the separation of mind from world with his critique of pure immediacy. With his concept of spirit, he makes clear that persons are social but never social in general. Being-in-the-world-with-others always takes some form, and that form matters. We exist in and through social institutions directed at specific ends. Like Aristotle long before him, Hegel understands how forms of thought express forms of life or spirit. Hegel identified bad abstractions, such as egoism and utility, and the violence connected with them. Flawed notions have consequences. Failure to grasp the basic structures of the world goes beyond intellectual loss. Hegel’s account of the fragmentation of civil society and Heidegger’s description of everyday existence as falling prey (verfallen) are insightful. However, an adequate understanding of capital is missing from both. Minimal phenomenology requires acknowledging capital as the form of wealth that shapes modern society in pervasive ways. The powers of capital, like the texts of Marx, are largely ignored. Capital is the elephant in the room. Fundamental features of capitalist society make false moves appear plausible. The “bourgeois horizon” is Marx’s term for the mindset that splits off the subjective from the objective, with its resultant dilemmas. Factoring philosophy establishes and operates within

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the confines of the bourgeois horizon. We cannot account for the persistence of false moves apart from inquiry into capitalism’s constitutive social forms. What is it about capitalism that makes subjectivism, and factoring philosophy more generally, so compelling? Across the political spectrum we find agreement that recognizing the dignity and freedom of individuals is the great achievement of history. A just society allows us to determine our beliefs and seek happiness in our own way. Liberty calls for the opportunity of each to seek the good. Forced to accept the choices of others, we would lose our liberty. The give and take between independent agents that defines modern society is anchored in market transactions. Buying and selling represent the visible face of capitalism. Commodity exchange seems to enact freedom of choice. By being neutral as to goals, markets leave individuals to find satisfaction in their own ways. Modern markets address the ancient puzzle of how to harmonize the one and the many—unity and difference—within the new institutions of democratic states. More so than voting, purchasing is the individual choice that shapes the social world. The market signifies the secular Eden, in Marx’s terms, where the aspirations of modern people are realized: The sphere of circulation or commodity exchange … is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity … are determined only by their free will. They contract as free persons, who are equal before the law.28

Commodity exchange suggests the separability of subjective and objective: autonomous subjects stand astride the objects of choice. False moves gain traction when working, producing, investing, selling, and consuming are reduced to commerce and industry. Choice becomes the common denominator into which everything is translated: one person chooses to work for a wage while another chooses to invest. The deeper determining factors of economic life disappear when relationships everywhere are reduced to preference schedules and opportunity costs. The many dimensions of reality are reduced to one; this one-dimensional account makes criticism impossible. The historical features of production under generalized commodity circulation, or capitalist society, are smothered by an all-purpose concept like “industry,” which is matched with commerce. Working for a wage to survive becomes just the revelation of another

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preference. When wage labor signifies preference, then the exploitation of labor—the appropriation of surplus-value—will not show up on the screen. A capitalist society appears as one where industry is most efficient and the exchanges in the market unfetter individuals. Equating capital with produced wealth that is used to produce new wealth—the popular conception of capital—distorts understanding all the way down to the basic levels. Wealth, or resource, is a widely applicable general concept; it holds throughout history. Capital, by contrast, is a concept that refers to a specific social form of wealth with a specific social purpose. The circulation of capital involves dynamic social processes with pervasive implications for our understanding of democracy, domination, and liberation. Too often, for lack of the needed concepts, a well-educated person can say little about these implications. The absence of an adequate concept of capital, in our view, correlates with the neglect of Marx, who undertook the phenomenological investigation into capital. This neglect is felt at every level of theoretical and practical discourse. The topic of capital is treated—if at all—as trivial or obvious. Empty discourse proves to be an effective disguise and a deterrent to real thinking and change. The familiar terms spun by factoring philosophy—purely subjective, purely objective, egoism, utility, instrumental reason, absurdity, social construction, and more—mirror the emptiness of mainstream economic discourse, where capital is stipulated as productive resources without a thought given to their social form or purpose. On these terms, capital has nothing to do with what makes a society capitalist. Without proper phenomenological grounding, concepts flounder. Unmediated concepts have scant content, and little turns on them. Analysis flips from “in-itself” to “for-us”; what is in and for itself, i.e., true, eludes us. Flimsy notions cannot sustain discussion for long. Public debate quickly turns shrill when content is drained away. Thinking that understands the world and sounds out the complex determinations of actuality encounters real doubts. Real doubts are stubborn and often intractable, but they engage the world. In feeling real doubts and formulating good concepts, philosophy recovers the power of worldly thinking.

Notes 1. James Collins introduces the phrase “the interpreting present” in his Interpreting Modern Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).

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2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

Collins rejects any “purist split” between philosophy and the history of philosophy (14). On Hegel’s account of the kinds of reflection, see “Philosophy Is Its Time Comprehended in Thought,” in Rüdiger Bubner’s Essays in Hermeneutics and Critical Theory, trans. Eric Matthews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 38. Donald W. Livingston links false philosophy with madness in Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 23–34. The dogmas identified in the Appendix A affect much more than philosophy. Hegel, Heidegger, and Davidson shape Frank Farrell’s thinking in Subjectivity, Realism, and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Heidegger writes, “The real ‘movement’ of the sciences takes place in the revision of these basic concepts, a revision which is more or less radical and lucid with regard to itself. A science’s level of development is determined by the extent to which it is capable of a crisis in its basic concepts.” Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, revised trans. Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010), 9. Just Enough Logic, by Michael Brown and Randolph Feezell, gave us the idea for this title. They took up the phrase from John Peterkin. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed., ed. L. A. SelbyBigge, revised by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 24–25. By reducing the objects of knowing to either matters of fact or relations of ideas, Hume has no room, officially, for phenomenology. Nonetheless, his notion of a “distinction of reason,” borrowed from Berkeley, requires us to make judgments of necessity based in experience, that is, phenomenological judgments. Marx’s name for the factoring mindset is “the bourgeois horizon,” the rudiments of which he traces back at least as far as to Hellenistic philosophers. Consider John Locke’s division of ideas into those of reflection, whose source is operations of the mind, and ideas of experience, whose source is the world. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 117–18. Hegel criticizes Kantian philosophy for holding that “we place our thoughts as a medium between ourselves and the objects, and that this medium instead of connecting us with the objects rather cuts us off from them.” G. W. H. Hegel, Hegel ’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York, Humanities Press, 1969), 36. Like Hegel, Davidson rejects any “epistemic intermediaries” as begging the question in favor of skepticism.

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13. See Hume’s distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact at the beginning of Chapter IV of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd ed., ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 14. Davidson addresses “the myth of the subjective” and coins the phrase “the new antisubjectivism.” See Donald Davidson, “The Myth of the Subjective,” in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 47. Both phrases are misleading, since they appear to conflate abandoning pure subjectivity with eliminating subjectivity, rather than, as we argue, to the recovery of both subjectivity and the world, properly apprehended. 15. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 116. 16. See Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1991), addition 3 to #42, 84. 17. On the “myth of the given” see “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” in Wilfred Sellars. Science, Perception and Reality (New York: Humanities Press, 1963). 18. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, ed. and trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). 19. Donald Livingston explores this cure in the context of Hume’s philosophy in Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 20. We share Kant’s dissatisfaction with Hume’s “skeptical solution” to skeptical doubts—what we consider the false philosopher’s answer to false philosophy. Kant’s own response of transcendental idealism, however, is only a new variety of factoring philosophy. 21. See David Wiggins, Needs, Values, Truth (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), and John McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 22. Barry Stroud, The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 23. In describing conceptuality that extends all the way out, McDowell formulates the identity of mind and world, sensing and judging, passive and active, implicit and explicit in ways that presuppose the opposition that he challenges. See John McDowell, Mind and World, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1996). By contrast, Frank Farrell writes, “the fixing of content is world guided all the way in” (Subjectivity, Realism and Postmodernism, 53). 24. Davidson, “The Myth of the Subjective,” 48–49. Compare to Hegel’s observation, “It is not we who ‘form’ concepts, and in general the

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Concept should not be considered as something that has come to be at all. Certainly the Concept is not just Being or what is immediate; because, of course, it involves mediation too. But mediation lies in the Concept itself, and the Concept is what is mediated by and with itself.” The Encyclopedia Logic, Addition 2 to #163, 241. Davidson, “The Myth of the Subjective,” 46–47. A case in point is Marx’s account of the commodity in Capital 1. What we learn by the end of that volume is that the commodity is not simply something useful that is sold. Marx argues that the sphere of simple commodity exchange presupposes the circuit of capital. Thus, commodities are (as a rule) products of capital and as such carry surplus-value. This lesson is brought out by Hegel in his account in the Phenomenology of Spirit of the struggle between enlightenment and superstition: the respective conceptions of matter and of God that result from the factoring form of consciousness that Hegel calls “pure insight” are so emptied of specific content (determinations) that they become indistinguishable and collapse into the vacuous concept of utility: everything in the world is for us, of what exists in itself, whether God or matter, we have nothing to say. Karl Marx, Capital 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 280.

References Bubner, Rüdiger. Essays in Hermeneutics and Critical Theory. Translated by Eric Matthews. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Collins, James. Interpreting Modern Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Davidson, Donald. Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. Farrell, Frank. Subjectivity, Realism, and Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Hegel, G. W. H. Hegel’s Science of Logic. Translated by A. V. Miller. New York: Humanities Press, 1969. ———. The Encyclopedia Logic. Translated by T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1991. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, revised translation by Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed. Edited by L. A. SelbyBigge, revised by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. ———. Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. In Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd ed. Edited by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.

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Kierkegaard, Søren. The Sickness unto Death. Edited and translated by Howard V. and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. Livingston, Donald W. Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984. ———. Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by P. H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Marx, Karl. Capital, vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1976. McDowell, John. Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. Nussbaum, Martha. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Sellars, Wilfred. Science, Perception and Reality. New York: Humanities Press, 1963. Stroud, Barry. The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Wiggins, David. Needs, Values, Truth. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.

Appendix A: Dogmas of Factoring Philosophy

In this appendix, we expand the list of dogmas of factoring philosophy from the three repudiated by W. V. O. Quine and Donald Davidson as “dogmas of empiricism.” This list is not complete. We reject these dogmas: 1. Analytic statements can be distinguished from synthetic ones. (Quine) 2. Immediate experiences can verify or falsify individual statements. (Quine) 3. Conceptual schemes can be identified and set off from the world. (Davidson) 4. Anti-essentialism: there are no essences (or natures) in the world; rather, essences are pure constructs. 5. Neither necessity nor universality can be derived from experience. 6. Whatever is conceivable is possible. 7. The subjective can be factored out from the objective. 8. If we are unable to factor out what subjectivity contributes to experience, we cannot confirm that subjects act in the world. Put another way: if it were not for pure subjectivity, there would not be any subjectivity at all.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murray and J. Schuler, False Moves in Philosophy and Social Theory, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35028-3

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9. The activity of the subject in knowing is necessarily falsifying. According to this dogma of the “epistemic Midas Touch,” subjective involvement per se bars us from knowing things as they are in themselves. 10. If knowledge develops, then it is not knowledge but rather one erroneous belief supplanting another. Once we recognize that we are heirs to a history of error, nothing can restore confidence in our beliefs. 11. Everything that there is to be known from a certain sort of experience, say, from one billiard ball striking another, must be able to be known on “the first look,” the first relevant experience. 12. Criteria for knowledge must themselves be fixed and not subject to reconsideration based on experience. 13. Concepts are purely subjective; inductive reasoning is always from concepts through experience to judgments—never from experience to concepts. Put another way: there is no friction between concepts and the world, only between judgments and the world. Concepts cannot develop. 14. The world is unintelligible; any intelligibility we attribute to the world belongs solely to us. 15. Intentions and consequences can be factored out from actions.

Appendix B: Symptoms of Factoring Philosophy

Symptoms of factoring philosophy may indicate problems, usually phenomenological mistakes. We identify the following symptoms without claiming completeness. Some symptoms shade into others. 1. Analysis that makes the original phenomenon unintelligible. An analysis of a phenomenon that makes it unintelligible may result from factoring philosophy. Arguments for the global absurdity of life rely on local absurdity though they undermine it, since local absurdity trades on the genuineness of local norms. If life were globally absurd, what bearings would guide us to understand what that meant? Barry Stroud argues that projectionist accounts of value make the original phenomena unintelligible. When we see a beautiful painting, what do we suppose we are projecting, and on to what? If the beauty of the painting is really a purely subjective pleasurable feeling, what sense can we make of projecting that feeling onto a painting? 2. Dead ends. When analysis hits a dead end, this may be due to factoring philosophy. For Thomas Nagel, the objective view of the world excludes human freedom, yet he is repelled by the thought that we are not free. In such a bind, probing the phenomenological assumptions that make human freedom ineffable yet inescapable might reveal a way out. As Berkeley observes, we may be unable to see because we have first “raised a dust.” © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murray and J. Schuler, False Moves in Philosophy and Social Theory, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35028-3

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3. Unworkable analysis. When a philosophical analysis is unworkable, factoring philosophy may be at fault. In Nagel’s account, the objective view tells us that there are only events in the world, no actions, for it says that we are parts of the world. But Nagel realizes that we cannot function on such a view. In such a jam, it may be best to rethink the moves that got us there. 4. Being forced into the impossible. Nagel’s analysis of human freedom concludes that we want the impossible. Freedom turns out to be the unintelligible: we cannot help but want something that we cannot make sense of. We suffer the fate of Tantalus. Just as what we desire to do is impossible, so too is what we want to be. Nagel thinks that the unavoidable goal set by taking the objective view is to become the absolute source of what we do, which he recognizes is self-contradictory. The objective standpoint cannibalizes the subjective one; we are left with nothing to do or be. When philosophical analysis arrives at self-defeating outcomes, it may be that phenomenological wrong turns were taken. 5. Doing violence to a phenomenon. Nagel winces at implications of his analysis of human responsibility. On Nagel’s assumptions, taking an objective view forces us to be either nothing or mere “contents” of the world. Nagel understandably feels that reducing ourselves to components of the world does violence to our human makeup, but he holds fast to the thinking that inflicts this damaging conclusion. 6. Animalism. Animalism is a special case of doing violence to humanity. With animalism, philosophical analysis carves distinctively human features down to generically animal ones. Alasdair MacIntyre diagnoses the Epicurean account of human pleasure as animalistic and puts his finger on its phenomenological mistake: treating human beings as if they had no culture. Animalism turns up in pragmatism too. E. M. Adams points out that for C. I. Lewis the ultimate test of thea priori conceptual framework is the satisfaction of our needs in general. Lewis appeals to human needs in general to have a fixed, independent measure for testing conceptual frameworks. Treating human needs as generic is animalism. Karl Marx charges idealists with animalism: they separate industry from the specifically human spheres of politics, art, and literature. Hannah Arendt advocates animalism: in the household, humans exist only as animals who are human. Usually, doing

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this sort of violence to a phenomenon leads to a compensatory countermeasure: supplementation. 7. Demarcation/Supplementation. The strategy of demarcation and supplementation is typical of factoring philosophy. When a concept is wrongly determined, it is natural to supplement it, usually with another faulty concept, to make up for the original misconception. Arendt’s concept of the household demarcates it from the distinctively human, that is political action, which supplements it. Jürgen Habermas aims to correct Marx and advance critical theory by way of demarcation and supplementation. He criticizes the notion of synthesis through labor, which he characterizes as instrumental action—a conception of labor that he claims to find in Marx—and supplements it with notions of emancipation and communicative action. 8. Flip-flopping. In his account of utility, R. D. Collison Black flipflops between a purely subjective conception of utility and an objective one. First utility is purely subjective desiredness; then it is a capacity of a good to satisfy some desire. But a capacity of a good or service is objective. Flip-flopping can be expected where phenomenological mistakes result in one-sided concepts, such as the purely subjective concept of utility. Flip-flopping may indicate that a phenomenological truth is detected but resisted. 9. Bait and switch. Stoic texts are mined for bits of practical wisdom. Epictetus cautions his listeners: when you go to the public baths, expect to get splashed. That is sound advice, but his Stoic wisdom also requires that we be prepared for an earthquake that brings the roof down on the bathers and for an attack by ruthless bandits. Common sense advice is offered (bait) as if it gave us good reasons to accept an extreme philosophy based on the purist split between self and world (switch). Or we are told that presumptively unacceptable views are just natural extensions of commonplace observations. Nagel makes this claim repeatedly, for example, in defenses of global skepticism and determinism. Mainstream economists bait and switch: they advertise a perfectly general social science, but, deus ex machina, capitalist forms descend. The commodity, money in several functions, wage labor, profit, interest, and rent do the explanatory work.

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10. Radical divergences from common sense. Radical divergences between philosophy and “vulgar” opinion are another symptom of factoring philosophy. Among the conclusions that common sense dismisses are my body is not mine; I must swear off any claim to know; nothing and no one in the world is intrinsically valuable; human beings are motivated exclusively by self-interest; and human beings never act and consequently bear no responsibility for anything that happens. Martha Nussbaum, referring to the protoutilitarian ancient “science of measurement,” warns of the slide from the ordinary to the unrecognizable. What would it be like to see all goods as homogeneous, differentiated only quantitatively? When ideas profoundly transgress common sense, confidence in them may be misplaced. 11. Pseudo-concepts piggybacking on common sense. Pseudo-concepts spun from factoring philosophy often piggyback on unobjectionable ordinary concepts. For example, the pseudo-concept of utility gets mixed up with usefulness. The conflation of utility with usefulness is hard to spot because the word “utility” can be used to mean usefulness. Utility is a bad abstraction; usefulness is an unobjectionable general abstraction. Utility posits all useful things as commensurable; in one version, they all possess something homogeneous and quantifiable called utility. In another version, utility is something purely subjective, usually pleasure or preference. Either way, utility is cut loose from the features that make something useful (e.g., the sweetness of grapes). Marx contests this false phenomenology of useful things, observing that the usefulness of anything is inseparable from the properties that make it useful. 12. Phony Doubts. In his essay “A Defence of Common Sense,” G. E. Moore offers a catalogue of phony doubts. He itemizes many claims that would be disingenuous to doubt. His explanation is that they are incontrovertibly true. Ludwig Wittgenstein was impressed with the distinctions Moore drew between real doubts and facetious ones, but he begins On Certainty by rejecting Moore’s explanation. What Moore has shown, for Wittgenstein, is not that all sorts of specified claims are simply and certainly true, but rather how members of a linguistic community get on and must get on. We do not, and cannot, doubt just anything, much less everything. Just because we can frame a question, does not mean there is a doubt there. Doubt occurs only against

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a background of certainties. If you doubt (or claim to doubt) whether a brain or sawdust fills your skull, people will think you are joking, mad—or else doing philosophy. Descartes distinguishes reasonable from unreasonable doubts even though—pursuing a course of methodic doubt in search of indubitable foundations— he doubts many things that a reasonable person would not doubt. He describes his long-standing opinions, for example, that he has a body that exists in a world of other bodies and other thinking beings, as more reasonable to believe than not. 13. Frictionlessness. Philosophies that, one way or another, posit a purist split between the world and mind, with its concepts, feelings, expectations, and values, are unfit to make sense of the friction between the two. Stoics deny any friction: the world goes its way, I go mine. Modern philosophers offer an embarrassment of responses to the challenge of the Cartesian “mind–body problem.” Consider Malebranche’s occasionalism, Leibniz’s “preestablished harmony” of mind and body, or Hume’s conclusion that there is no evidence of the mind’s power to affect anything, even its own thoughts. By dividing the noumenal from the phenomenal, Kant tries to save the day by taking the perplexity out of the problem: it is intractable. The critical philosophy disciplines us not to ask how the noumenal self is involved in the phenomenal world. For Nagel, who brushes off Kant’s noumenal realm as a fabrication, the objective view of the world leaves no cranny to the mind, but the subjective view cannot live like that, so we just go on and hold ourselves and others responsible. The incongruity involved in synthesizing the pure, contentlessa priori concepts of the understanding (the twelve categories) with blind intuitions—where is the traction?—leaves Kant grasping for a mediator. There must be a go-between. Kant identifies that “third thing” as the “transcendental schema.” C. I. Lewis follows in Kant’s footsteps, except that he allows for a multiplicity of concepts and conceptual schemes of our own making, all a priori. How is it that arbitrarily devised, purely subjective definitions have any traction in the world? How would they begin to be understood? To answer those questions, Lewis helps himself to the ruse of “initial concepts,” whose origins are obscure. Lewis allows that we may change our concepts and conceptual scheme, but because they are a priori it cannot be the world that makes us change them.

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Having ruled out friction between our conceptual scheme and the world, Lewis is left to resort to purely practical considerations to explain a shift in concepts or conceptual scheme. 14. Arbitrariness. One way of looking at philosophy is as a search for measures, measures for taste, belief, and action. Classical philosophy looked to the beautiful, the true, and the good for those measures. A philosophy whose proposed measures turn out to be arbitrary is suspect of factoring. Augustine argues that the Academic Skeptics’ appeal to the plausible or truthlike—instead of truth—as the standard of belief collapses into reliance on the arbitrary. Augustine jokes about the absence of measures in Academic Skepticism but reminds us that the arbitrary is not always a laughing matter. 15. Absence of criteria. One mark of factoring philosophy is the absence of criteria. In debating egoism, virtue or altruism becomes as elusive as “meaningful life” does in discussing absurdity. Altruism puts forth the dilemma of an action performed by a self but not belonging to it. The implicit requirements for altruism are staggering. To qualify as non-egoistic, persons could take no pleasure or interest in achieving the goal. Cogent criteria for the notion of egoism are missing.

Index

A Absolute surplus value, 353, 355 Abstract hedonism, 278, 279, 282–284 Abstract idea, ix, 19, 20, 22, 273, 274, 363 Abstract labor, 307, 308, 310, 311, 316, 346 Absurd, viii, 29, 36–42, 44–49, 52, 53, 55–60, 62, 178, 220, 389 Accumulation (accumulate), xviii, xx, 27, 176, 195, 278–281, 283, 301, 322, 339, 340, 342, 348 Action, viii, xiii, xv, xx, 1, 3, 12, 13, 15, 16, 21, 27, 29, 48, 59, 76, 85, 87, 94–96, 98, 100, 103–106, 108, 110, 111, 115, 117, 118, 121–132, 144, 147–163, 165, 167, 174, 179, 181–183, 185, 186, 192, 195, 204, 213, 214, 216, 217, 245, 256, 264, 270, 319, 322, 323, 329–335, 337–340, 343–345, 347–351, 353, 354, 369, 394

Actuality, 103, 104, 192, 362, 366, 374, 379, 381 Adorno, Theodor W., 272, 291, 345 After Virtue, vii, 323, 324, 327 Against the Academics , ix, 112 Albert O. Hirschman, 138 A Letter Concerning Toleration, 177, 196 Alfredo Saad-Filho, 322 Altruism, 118, 131, 132, 394 Analysis, ix, x, xvi, 2–5, 7, 8, 10–12, 15, 16, 18, 20, 22, 23, 25–28, 38, 43, 51, 54, 57, 61, 73–75, 78, 80, 86, 97, 100, 102, 103, 116–118, 121, 122, 124–128, 130, 136, 145–147, 149, 151, 154, 158, 160, 179, 185–187, 202–206, 208, 211, 214, 219, 222, 223, 232, 234, 237, 239, 240, 250, 251, 257, 264, 301, 313, 339, 350, 351, 360–369, 374, 376–379, 389, 390 Animalism, 265, 333, 390 Anscombe, Elizabeth, xv, xxi, 20

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. Murray and J. Schuler, False Moves in Philosophy and Social Theory, Political Philosophy and Public Purpose, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35028-3

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396

INDEX

Anselm, 241 Antinomy, 43, 147–149, 154–156, 160 Anxiety, 48, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87 Apology, 67, 88 a priori, 18, 155, 160, 174, 236, 237, 244, 390, 393 Aquinas, vii, xviii, 360 Aristotle, vii, xvii, xviii, xxi, 100, 129, 164, 217, 269, 281, 284, 302, 304, 306, 313–315, 330, 364, 379 Aspect, x, 5, 15, 16, 19, 20, 53, 76, 92, 102, 104, 108, 124, 127, 144–146, 155, 161, 172, 175, 187, 192, 196, 210, 225, 231, 233, 234, 239, 256, 280, 330, 341, 343, 366 At an end, 78, 79 Augustine, ix, 65, 108, 394 Aurelius, Marcus, 93

B Backhaus, Hans-Georg, 274, 292 Backward step, 37, 41, 44–46, 49–56, 159, 220, 248, 250, 360 Bacon, Francis, xii Bad abstraction, xii, 134, 192, 264, 268, 273, 274, 278, 282, 305, 317, 336, 337, 379, 392 Bad infinity (false infinity), 293 Bailey, Samuel, 66, 277, 317 Barter, 310, 311 Beauty, viii, 201, 202, 205, 207–209, 211, 212, 214, 319, 389 Beckett, Samuel, 43, 58 Being and Time, vii, xx, xxi, 73, 256, 270, 272, 273, 303, 363 Being-in-the-world, x, xiv, 81, 122, 131, 256, 270, 364, 379 Being-toward-death, xiii, 48, 79, 86

Being-with, xiv, 75, 122, 131, 270, 271, 303, 364, 379 Bentham, Jeremy, 180, 301, 308, 316, 318, 380 Berkeley, George, ix, x, xii, 1, 2, 7, 19–22, 214, 239, 257, 273, 274, 363, 366, 389 Berry, Wendell, 276 Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism, 198, 290 Bond, James, 290, 294 Bonefeld, Werner, 292 Bourgeois horizon (bourgeois mindset), xx, 286, 301, 305, 318–321, 379 Brandom, Robert, xxi The Brothers Karamazov, 35, 65, 240 Brown, Michael, 382 Butler, Judith, 196 C Calley, William, 152–154, 156, 161, 163 Campbell, Martha, xviii, 269, 273, 312 Camus, Albert, 36–45, 47, 48, 52, 53, 56–58, 60–63 Capgras Syndrome, 166 Capital (capitalism), ix, xiv, xvii–xx, 26, 27, 119–121, 136, 137, 173, 176, 195, 206, 231, 265, 267, 268, 275, 277–281, 283–286, 288–290, 339, 340, 342, 343, 345, 346, 348, 349, 361, 379, 381 Capra, Frank, 66, 88 Causal connection, 208, 209, 212, 215, 242 C. B. McPherson, 138, 141 Chambers, Samuel A., 292 Chang, Ha-Joon, 266 Clarke, Simon, 267, 268, 321

INDEX

Clark, Henry C., 266, 267 Classical political economy, 268, 300, 301, 317, 318 Collins, James, vii, 111 Commensurable (commensurate), 182, 299–301, 304, 305, 307, 308, 312–316, 392 Commercial society, xvii, xviii, 27, 119, 120, 137, 257, 302, 311, 322 Commodity, ix, xvii, xix, 27, 120, 183, 264, 265, 267, 268, 275–278, 280, 282, 285, 287, 300, 305–307, 309–312, 314–316, 320, 322–326, 337–340, 345–347, 349, 354, 365, 380, 384, 391 Common good, xiv, 173, 187 Conceptual scheme, xiii, xvi, 21, 22, 24, 192, 237, 255, 256, 351, 352, 393, 394 Consequentialism, xv, 302 Construct, xvi, 3, 52, 54, 191, 194 Critical philosophy, xi, 236, 241, 368, 393 Critique of political economy, 272, 318, 345, 350 Critique of Pure Reason, 29, 226, 259, 367 Critique of the Gotha Programme, 271 Custom, 18, 35, 54, 55, 209, 210, 242, 330 D Davidson, Donald, vii, xi–xiv, xvi, xxi, 8, 13, 21, 22, 24, 29–31, 62, 192, 193, 197, 223, 224, 226, 227, 229, 234, 237, 238, 251, 253–256, 258–261, 290, 352, 361, 365, 368, 377, 382–384, 387 Davidson’s closet, 238

397

Death, viii, xiii, xiv, 36, 44, 45, 56, 65–88, 92, 95, 96, 104, 115, 152, 156, 207, 245, 299, 361, 364 The Death of Ivan Ilyich, 66, 88 Death of a Salesman, 277, 293 Demand, 12, 23, 42, 50, 128, 155, 182, 188, 234, 276, 313 Demarcation, 124, 148, 149, 173, 178, 179, 208, 391 Democracy, 172, 173, 225, 319, 321, 371, 381 Democracy’s Discontents , 266 Descartes, René, xi, 2, 39, 50, 51, 54, 92, 93, 125, 126, 175, 218, 232, 238, 239, 241, 270, 360, 393 Descriptive (or psychological) egoism, 116, 119 Determinism, 10, 148, 149, 155, 158, 175, 245, 391 Dewey, John, 14 Difference principle, 190, 191 Discourse of goods, 225 Discourse of truth and error, ix, xi, xii, xvi, xx, 21, 247, 252–254, 373 Discursive horizon, xvi, 267, 268, 272 Disembedded (embedded), 341, 347, 349 Distinction of reason, x, 20, 22, 274, 363 Distributive justice, 172, 173, 190, 191, 195 Dogmas of empiricism, xi, xvi, 255 Dogmas of factoring philosophy, xi, 387 Dogmatism, 4, 11, 15, 26, 42, 100, 104, 148, 231, 367 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 60, 259 Dreyfus, Hubert, xxi

398

INDEX

E Edwards, Paul, 73, 89, 139, 351 Efficiency, 330, 331, 341–343 Egalitarian (egalitarianism), 314 Egoism, viii, xiv, xvii, 29, 115–136, 139, 379, 381, 394 Elster, Jon, 316, 325 Emancipatory interest, 334 Empiricism, xi, 3, 4, 19, 21, 24, 236, 237, 241, 242, 244, 368 Empiricus, Sextus, 60 Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 73 Endo, Shusaku, 115, 137 Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction, 62, 258 Modality and Value, 258 Engels, Friedrich, xvii, 269, 317 Enlightenment, 39, 118, 302, 313 Epictetus, 69, 91–93, 95, 97, 98, 110, 391 Epicureanism, ix, 91 Epistemic immaculate conception, 210, 241 Epistemic mediator or intermediary, 261 Error, xii, xiii, xvi, 4, 8, 18, 70, 74, 110, 115, 161, 234, 247, 253–256, 277, 292, 306, 317, 336, 370, 373, 376–378, 388 Essay Concerning Human Understanding , 241, 318 Euripides, 68 Exchange, xviii, 11, 120, 137, 176, 306, 309–312, 316, 322, 324, 325, 338, 380, 384 Existential analysis, 22, 72, 75, 80, 81, 365 Existential conditions, 6, 250, 362, 364 F Facticity, 164–166, 203

Factoring, vii False dilemma, 98, 188, 348 False doubts, 22, 222, 223, 225, 232, 234, 240, 365, 366, 368 False philosophy, viii, xvii, 16–19, 22, 24, 57, 60, 73, 107, 134, 136, 166, 179, 186, 193, 240, 252, 254, 257, 361, 368, 374, 375, 382, 383 Farmer, Paul, 292 Farrell, Frank, vii, 22–25, 29, 31, 168, 224, 229, 237, 256, 259, 261, 290, 291, 382, 383 Faulkner, William, 87 Fear, viii, 14, 66–73, 80–86, 148, 166, 196, 207, 231, 240, 375 Featureless self, xiv, 14, 250, 255, 365 Feezell, Randolph, 382 Fetish character of the commodity, 277 Fetishism, 137, 277, 287, 310, 317, 349 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 41, 270, 291 First look, 209–213, 241, 242, 246, 378 Flip-flops, 4, 16, 17, 107, 240, 326, 391 Forces of production, 332, 336 Formal subsumption, 353 Foucault, Michel, 14 Frankfurt School, 332, 346, 350 Friction (traction), xiii, 10, 12, 156, 204, 393, 394 Functional capability, 188 G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 6, 29 Gauguin, Paul, 151, 154, 156, 161 Geach, Peter, 31 the German Ideology, xvii, xix, 269, 307, 317, 318 The Gift , 275, 292

INDEX

Global doubt, ix, 23, 53, 54, 232, 234, 235 Global skepticism, ix, x, xvi, 50, 204, 235, 255, 391 Goldfinger, 290 Goods, xi, xiv, xvii, 59, 71, 83, 110, 131, 173–175, 180–182, 184, 186–190, 192–196, 204, 207, 223, 225, 264, 265, 268, 270, 276, 277, 281–284, 299–301, 306, 309–311, 313, 316, 322, 333, 334, 340, 352, 392 Gotha Programme, 321 The Grapes of Wrath, 265, 287, 289 Gravity’s Rainbow, 267, 290 Greed, 9, 27, 117, 119–121, 127, 278, 279, 282–284 Grundrisse, 138, 140, 269, 282, 290, 292–294, 306, 323, 324, 329, 350, 351, 353, 355 H Habermas, Jürgen, 332, 334–340, 344, 345, 348, 351–353, 355, 391 Handbook of Epictetus , 88, 111, 167, 197 Hegel, G.W.F., vii, xiii, xx, xxi, 8, 9, 11, 12, 18, 21–27, 30, 31, 61, 63, 100, 103, 111, 118, 131, 132, 137, 139, 186, 196, 197, 234, 243, 250–252, 256–261, 269, 270, 280, 290, 291, 293, 302, 324, 325, 353, 359–362, 364, 366, 371–374, 379, 382–384 Heidegger, Martin, vii, x, xiii, xx, xxi, 8, 21, 22, 24, 30, 31, 48, 62, 73–82, 84–87, 89, 112, 116, 122, 131, 137, 191, 194, 198, 226, 229, 234, 251, 256, 260, 270–273, 290, 291, 303, 326,

399

327, 332, 337, 351, 361, 363–366, 379, 382 Heilbroner, Robert, xix Hellenistic philosophy, ix. See also Stoicism, Skepticism, Epicureanism Helvetius, 118 Henry C. Clark, 138 Hermeneutic interest, 192, 334, 339 Historical materialism, xvii, xix, 269–274, 285, 288, 306, 320, 332, 337 Hobbes, Thomas, 119, 120, 126, 136, 191 Horizon, x, xv, xx, 6–8, 15, 16, 20–22, 24, 27, 51, 80, 81, 122, 192, 202, 205, 254, 266–268, 302, 351, 353, 360, 377, 380, 382 Horkheimer, Max, 332, 344, 345, 347, 348 Household, 116, 173, 187, 390, 391 Hubbard, R.Glenn, 268, 275, 290 Hughes, Langston, 45, 62 Hume, David, ix, x, 7, 18–20, 22, 24, 27, 28, 30, 31, 49, 54, 55, 62, 108, 109, 112, 119, 122, 126, 133, 134, 137–140, 147, 154, 166, 167, 202–217, 220, 226–228, 235, 240–244, 246, 255, 259, 270, 274, 292, 360, 363, 382, 383, 393 Humility, 234, 235

I Idle talk, 79, 80, 82 Ignatieff, Michael, 138 Illusion of the economic, xv, xviii–xx, 330, 335, 345, 347, 349 Immediacy, 210, 217, 241, 246, 372–374, 379

400

INDEX

Indifference, viii, ix, 13, 16, 17, 57, 68, 69, 72, 81, 83, 105–107, 109, 110, 127, 131, 133, 179, 182, 189, 208, 224, 265, 282–284, 323, 340 Infinite self, xiv, 13, 130, 247 Innate idea, 2, 3, 18, 21, 241, 367 Instrumental action, ix Instrumental reason and action (instrumentalism), xx, 330–332, 335, 339–341, 350 Invasion of the Body Snatchers , 166 Iphegenia, 68, 83 Irony, 37, 48, 51, 52, 59, 137, 235 Istvan Hont, 138 It’s a Wonderful Life, 66, 88 J James, William, 29, 191, 233, 257 Just enough phenomenology, x, xvi, 363, 365, 374 K Kafka, Franz, 58 Kant, Immanuel, ix, 7, 18, 19, 21, 29, 30, 40, 59, 61, 88, 89, 120, 124, 137, 144, 147–149, 154–156, 160, 166, 175, 180, 185–187, 190, 225, 226, 231, 236, 239, 241–244, 257–260, 270, 291, 293, 332, 351, 367, 368, 375, 383, 393 Kierkegaard, Søren, xiv, 13, 30, 90, 130, 168, 194, 246, 260, 374, 383 Korsgaard, Christine, 228 Kuhn, Thomas, xvi L Labor theory of value, xvii, 277, 300, 311, 316, 320, 349

Lewis, C.I., xi, 236, 237, 258, 351, 352, 390, 393, 394 Liberalism, 171, 172, 175, 177, 181, 185, 189, 194, 321, 322 Livingston, Donald, 30, 62, 383 Local doubt, 23, 232, 234 Local skepticism, ix, 255 Lucretius, viii, 69–71 M MacIntyre, Alasdair, vii, xxi, 133, 136, 139, 140, 306, 309, 319, 323, 324, 327, 390 Mackie, John, 204, 205, 210, 216–221, 228, 229, 376 Marcuse, Herbert, 267 Marginal utility, 300 Market, xviii, 136, 176, 189, 194, 195, 292, 301, 308, 311, 314, 321, 322, 330, 340, 380, 381 Marx, Karl, vii, xiv, xvii–xxi, 22, 27, 120, 134, 136–138, 140, 176, 183, 196–198, 234, 261, 265, 267–279, 281–294, 300–302, 304–327, 329, 330, 332–334, 336–343, 345–347, 350–355, 361, 364, 365, 379–382, 384, 390–392 Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology, 267, 290, 351, 353 Masquerade, 301 Mauss, Marcel, 275, 276, 292 McCumber, John, xx, 29 McDonaldization, 332, 341–343 The McDonaldization of Society, 332, 341, 354 McDowell, John, xxi, 204, 205, 219, 228, 260, 376, 383 McNally, David, 293 Menger, Carl, 316, 317, 326 Metricity, 302 Michael Ignatieff, 138

INDEX

Michael Sandel, 166 Midas Touch, ix, xii, 8, 10, 248, 250, 253 Miller, Arthur, 277, 293 Mill, James, 180, 301 Mill, John Stuart, 127, 179, 180, 184, 231, 265, 275, 301 The Mind and the Market , 197, 267, 290 Mind and world, xxi, 7–10, 13, 14, 18, 21–23, 42, 108, 110, 208, 233, 236–241, 244, 254–257, 366–368, 373, 377, 383 Mineness, 76, 93, 97, 98, 131–134, 159, 191, 246 Miser, 84, 110, 282, 283 Mode of life [Lebensweise], 269, 334, 337 Mode of production [Produktionsweise], xiv, xvii–xix, 269, 276, 281, 285, 287, 304, 315, 337, 339, 350 Modern philosophy, vii, ix, 12, 24, 39, 43, 92, 126, 256, 270, 291, 301, 318, 367 Money, xvii, xviii, 27, 46, 121–124, 137, 176, 177, 181–183, 195, 263, 265, 267, 268, 273, 275–279, 281–284, 293, 294, 299, 301, 305, 307–316, 319, 321, 324–326, 330, 333, 345, 346, 348, 365, 371, 391 Moore, G.E., xvi, 392 Moral luck, viii, xiv, 144–147, 149–151, 156, 158–160, 164, 166 Moral responsibility, viii, xiii, xiv, 144, 147, 154 Mortality, 44, 47, 49, 56, 74–76, 78, 84–87 Mortality or being mortal, 65

401

Mortal Questions , vii, xx, 62, 63, 74, 88, 89, 111, 166, 167 Moseley, Fred, 290 Muller, Jerry, 188, 266, 267 The Myth of Sisyphus , 38, 39, 63 Myth of the given, xvi, 238, 255, 259

N Nagel, Thomas, vii, ix, xiii, xx, 28, 31, 36–38, 47–56, 58, 59, 61–63, 71, 74, 83, 84, 88, 89, 111, 144–160, 162–168, 204, 205, 219–222, 228, 232, 240, 244–251, 255, 259, 260, 375, 389–391, 393 Naturalistic fallacy, xvi Necessity, ix, x, 16, 18, 20, 43, 54, 92, 94, 104, 105, 110, 137, 148–150, 152, 154, 156, 157, 164, 209, 210, 215, 216, 235, 236, 242–244, 274, 311, 312, 337, 339, 382 Neoclassical economics (marginalism), 134, 265, 267, 268, 275, 277, 301, 303, 316, 317, 321, 349 Neo-Kantianism, 7 Neo-Ricardian economics, 349 Neutral (neutrality), 174, 176, 189, 194, 195, 345 New antisubjectivism, xvi, 22, 23 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 14, 60 Nominal essence, 18, 40, 319 Nominalism (affect and action), xiv, xv, 3, 129, 331, 344, 372 Nussbaum, Martha, xxi, 101, 103, 111, 139, 188–190, 192, 196, 197, 289, 302, 303, 319, 322, 323, 327, 370, 383, 392

402

INDEX

O Objective engagement, 158–160, 164, 165 Objective values, 193, 205, 210, 216–219, 221 Objectivity, xi, xii, 14, 17–19, 23, 27, 40, 42, 46, 48, 50, 53, 55, 59, 144, 149, 152, 153, 156, 157, 159, 163, 164, 204, 205, 210, 211, 218–221, 223, 233, 238–253, 255–257, 300, 304, 310, 362, 374–377 O’Brien, Anthony Patrick, 268, 275 "Of the Standard of Taste", 213, 228 On Certainty, 232, 392 On the Nature of the Universe, 69, 88 Ontological vs. ontic, 116

P Paradigm shift, xvi Passion, 9, 86, 101, 102, 109, 206 Paternalism, 179 Payne, Alexander, 62 Percy, Walker, 87, 88 Peterkin, John, 382 Phaedo, 68 Phenomenology, ix, x, xii, xv, xvi, xviii, 6–13, 16–24, 26, 28, 36–38, 51–55, 58, 60, 72, 75, 81, 92, 97, 98, 101, 103, 108, 116, 124, 126, 127, 133, 135, 145, 147, 156, 157, 159, 160, 163, 164, 166, 175, 192, 194, 202, 203, 205, 212, 224, 233, 237, 239, 250, 256, 271, 272, 274, 275, 303, 305, 306, 316, 317, 332, 337, 361–363, 365–370, 373–375, 377–379, 382, 392 Phenomenology of Spirit , 9, 251, 302, 371

Philosophical egoism, xiv, 116, 117, 121, 124, 130–135, 275 Philosophy of Right (Elements of the Philosophy of Right), 139, 293 Pierce, C.S., 260 Pippin, Robert, xxi Plato, xiv, xviii, 4, 5, 30, 67, 68, 88, 92, 93, 103, 117, 122–125, 138, 171, 174, 180, 196, 216, 217, 231, 360 Polanyi, Karl, 347, 355 Polarity, 173, 249, 310, 311 Political Liberalism, 175, 176 Politics , xvii, 306 Pollock, Friedrich, 345 Positivism, xx, 334, 336 Postmodernism, 17 Postone, Moishe, xxi, 339, 344–350 Practically abstract labor, 307 Pragmatism, xi, 17, 237, 335, 336, 390 Preference, xiv, 106–108, 118, 127, 158, 177, 180, 183, 184, 294, 303, 304, 316, 317, 319, 330, 334, 369–371, 380, 381, 392 Preferred indifferents, 16, 109 Prescriptive or ethical egoism, 116 Primary quality, 20 Production-in-general, xviii, 269, 319, 320, 336, 345, 347 Productive labor (unproductive labor), 278, 279, 284–287, 344 Productivism, 278–281, 284 Productivity, 265, 278, 284, 285 Projection, xii, xvii, 202, 204, 212, 215, 216, 376 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (Proudhonian), 291, 321 Pseudo-concept, xii, xiii, 13, 55, 117, 121, 122, 133, 183, 264, 278, 282, 283, 299, 300, 306, 324,

INDEX

329, 331, 335, 342, 344–346, 348, 349, 370, 392 Pure insight, 302 Purely objective, viii–x, xii, xiii, xv, xvii, 10, 11, 21, 23, 26, 28, 37, 50, 54, 147, 150, 160, 202–204, 232–236, 239, 240, 242, 244–247, 305, 318, 326, 361, 362, 367, 368, 372, 373, 381 Purely subjective, viii–xii, xiv–xvii, 9–11, 13, 23, 26, 28, 37, 54, 55, 133, 145, 158, 160, 177, 192, 201–204, 208, 209, 211, 216, 223, 225, 229, 233, 235, 236, 239–241, 244, 245, 253, 257, 301, 305, 313, 314, 316–319, 326, 361, 364, 366–368, 370, 372, 373, 381, 388, 389, 391–393 Pure self (purist self), 13–15, 124, 125, 186, 190, 191, 193 Purist split, xii, xiv, 18, 48, 69, 91, 97–99, 111, 130, 131, 155, 236, 238, 240, 251, 305, 331, 336, 382, 391, 393 Purposive action, ix Purposive-rational action (zweckmässige Tätigkeit ), 334, 336, 337, 339, 343 Putnam, Hilary, xx Pynchon, Thomas, 267, 290 Q Quine, W.V.O., ix, xi, 21, 237, 255, 332–334, 368, 387 R Rand, Ayn, 119 Rationalism, xi, 4, 241, 368 Rawls, John, 146, 166, 172, 174–176, 180, 181, 183–187,

403

189–193, 195–197, 268, 290, 333 Real doubts, 8, 12, 26, 204, 232, 240, 366, 381, 392 Realism, vii, 29, 31, 152, 203, 220, 229, 291, 382, 383 Real subsumption, 342, 343 Reconciliation, 18, 22, 41, 245 Recovery of the world, 23 Reductionism, 28, 249–251, 255 Reflection, 3, 5, 6, 12, 21, 24, 35, 37, 38, 45, 47, 49, 51–58, 67, 95, 116, 145, 154, 158, 159, 163–165, 181, 185, 202, 232, 233, 250, 255, 360, 361, 367, 371, 375, 378, 382 Relations of production, 332, 336 Relative surplus value, 345, 353 Religion, 35, 70, 177–179, 189, 359 Rent, 276, 293, 315, 316, 324, 391 Responsibility, 79, 104, 144, 147, 149–158, 160–165, 172, 234, 390, 392 Results of the Immediate Production Process , 294, 323, 354 Ricardo, David, xvii, 300, 301, 311, 317, 320 Right and good, viii, 174, 194 Ritzer, George, 332, 333, 341–343 Robbins, Lionel, 268, 275, 276, 292 Robinson, Marilynne, 157, 168 Rorty, Amélie, xxi Rorty, Richard, xxi, 7, 14, 237 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 74, 126, 127, 364 Rubin, Isaak Ilyich, 292 Russell, Bertrand, 354 S Samuelson, Paul, 292, 325 Sandel, Michael, xiv, 176, 185, 189, 197, 260, 266, 290

404

INDEX

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 14, 153, 154 "The Sceptic", 62, 112, 166, 205, 227, 228 Science, 12, 22, 40, 302, 324, 382, 383 Science of Logic, 12 Science of measurement, 302–304, 392 Scientific revolution, xvi, 267, 268, 272 Secondary quality, 19, 20 Second Enquiry, 208 Secular society, 35 Selfishness, xiii, xiv, 109, 110, 115–118, 120, 127, 132–135 Self-love, xiii, xiv, 103, 115–119, 126, 134, 135 Sellars, Wilfrid, xvi, 255, 259, 261, 383 Sen, Amartya, 197, 289 Seneca, 68, 69, 71, 83, 91, 93, 101, 136 Shadow form, 300, 342, 348 Siegel, Don, 166 Singer, Peter, 321 Skepticism, ix, 1, 4, 15, 16, 19, 24, 26–28, 42, 43, 48, 50, 51, 91, 108, 127, 147, 151, 152, 154, 173, 175, 178, 179, 193, 207, 235, 236, 250, 252, 256, 319, 373, 375, 394 Slavery, slave, 93, 171 Smith, Adam, xvii, xix, 119, 120, 133, 135, 137–139, 198, 276, 290, 300, 301, 306, 311, 325, 345, 349, 350, 354, 355 Smith, Tony, 349 Social construction, 17, 245, 381 Social form, ix, xv, xvii, xix, xx, 125, 264–266, 268, 269, 271–279, 281, 284–288, 292, 300, 301, 305–308, 310, 312, 314, 316,

319, 320, 332–339, 350, 353, 355, 364, 381 Socrates, 4, 66–68, 70, 82, 83, 122–124, 374 Specialization, 266, 267 Spinoza, Baruch, 2, 94, 126, 219 Sraffian (Sraffa, Piero), 349 Steinbeck, John, 265, 289 Stoicism, ix, 16, 91–95, 97–100, 102, 104, 106–109, 128, 134, 146, 155–157 Stoic sage, viii, 69, 97, 110 Stoic self, 13, 130, 133, 134 St. Paul, 226 Strawson, P.J., 111, 167 Subjectivism, xvi, 203, 204, 277, 376, 380 Subjectivity of value, viii, 201–208, 212, 214, 218, 223, 225, 376 Subjectivity, Realism and Postmodernism, vii, 29, 31 T Taste, 125, 126, 202, 204, 205, 207, 213, 214, 239, 394 Taylor, Charles, 60 Taylor, Richard, 36, 37, 44–48, 51–53, 56, 61, 62, 291 Technological determinism, xix Temporality, 56, 58, 67, 71, 74, 86, 97, 104, 105, 210 Terror, 302 Theories of Surplus-Value, 294 The Theory of Justice, 176 The Third Man, 46, 62 The Truman Show, 166, 169 Thing-in-itself, viii Three Philosophers , 31 Thucydides, 152 Time in the Ditch, 29 Time, Labor, and Social Domination, xxi, 350, 353, 355

INDEX

Tolerance, ix, 177–179, 196, 245 Tolstoy, Leo, 66, 88 Toward an end, 77–79, 81, 85, 86 Transcendental, 18, 19, 40, 147–149, 155, 156, 186, 243, 335, 383, 393 Transcendental analysis, 19 Treatise of Human Nature, 31, 49, 205, 227, 292, 382 Triangulation, xi, 21, 22 Trinity Formula, 293 U Unconstrained or unchecked or unencumbered analysis, 15–17, 20, 22–24, 124, 125, 218, 238, 239, 255, 367 Useful, ix, xii, xiv, xviii, xix, 9, 56, 82, 183, 192, 226, 234, 239, 264, 265, 268, 271, 272, 274, 278, 280, 288, 294, 299, 300, 304–318, 320, 325, 326, 331, 337, 345, 346, 364, 365, 369, 384, 392 Utility, ix, xiv, xvii, xx, 13, 27, 29, 116, 121, 127, 135, 174, 177, 180–185, 264, 281, 287, 294, 299–308, 311–314, 316–326, 331, 338, 341, 350, 369–371, 379, 381, 384, 391, 392 V Valid price, 309 Value added (value-added), xvi, 238, 240, 289 Value(s), viii, xi, xii, xiv, xvi, 27, 29, 36, 49, 68, 101, 130, 151, 152, 165, 172, 174, 176, 181–183, 187–190, 192–195, 201–208, 210–226, 232, 235, 238–240, 266, 267, 271, 272, 275,

405

277–279, 286–289, 292–294, 300–303, 306–320, 322, 324–326, 337–341, 343–355, 367, 371, 374, 376, 381, 384, 389, 393 Veil of ignorance, 146, 166, 190, 191 The View from Nowhere, xiii, xx, 28, 37, 56, 111, 149–153, 157, 159, 163, 165, 220, 244, 245, 247–249, 255 View from within, 28, 48, 149, 153, 162, 245, 246, 249, 250 W Wage labor (wage), 267, 381 Walzer, Michael, 152, 167 Wealth, ix, xiii, xv, xvii–xix, 110, 119, 146, 177, 263–270, 289, 299, 305, 306, 310, 314, 319, 321, 332, 334, 335, 338–340, 342, 345, 364, 381 Wealth-in-general, ix, xiv, xviii, xx, 264, 273, 274, 280, 284, 285, 288, 320 Wealthism, 278–284 Weber, Max, 332, 339, 341–343, 345, 350, 351, 353, 354 Weir, Peter, 82, 89, 166 Welch, C., 321, 327 Wiggins, David, xxi, 61, 376, 383 Williams, Bernard, xxi, 151, 167, 182, 197, 323, 326 Winnowing, 15, 16, 22, 100, 184, 311, 366 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 26, 232, 257, 258, 392 Wolfe, Thomas, 111 Worldly, xii–xiv, xvi, xix, 2, 10, 11, 13, 18, 25, 28, 81, 87, 97, 103, 118, 130, 134, 143, 145, 146, 158, 160, 163, 164, 166, 177, 198, 205, 224, 225, 251, 359,

406

INDEX

364, 367, 370, 371, 377, 379, 381

Z Zack, Naomi, 196