Patriotic Elaborations: Essays in Practical Philosophy 9780773576636

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patriotic elaborations

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Patriotic Elaborations Essays in Practical Philosophy charles blattberg

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

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To Yael

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2009 isbn 978-0-7735-3491-9 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-3538-1 (paper) Legal deposit first quarter 2009 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Blattberg, Charles Patriotic elaborations: essays in practical philosophy / Charles Blattberg. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3491-9 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-3538-1 (paper) 1. Political science – Philosophy. I. Title. ja71.b5345 2009

320.01

c2008-905656-6

This book was typeset by Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

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Contents

Preface

vii

politics 1 Political Philosophies and Political Ideologies 3 2 Patriotic, Not Deliberative, Democracy

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3 The Ironic Tragedy of Human Rights 43 4 Secular Nationhood? The Importance of Language in the Life of Nations 60 5 Federalism and Multinationalism 76 6 Going Rabin One Further 91 7 Canada, Terror, and the Minimal Global Ethic 105 ... and other elaborations 8 From Moderate to Extreme Holism

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9 What’s Wrong with Hypergoods 122 10 On the Minimal Global Ethic 11 Good, Bad, Great, Evil

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12 Opponents vs Adversaries in Plato’s Phaedo 211 13 Loving Wisdom 229 Notes 257 Bibliography 323 Index 365

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Preface

The essays collected here are all largely elaborations on themes present in my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics. In that work I argued that we ought to give a new sense to the idea of patriotism, one that nevertheless reminds us of what it once meant, long before nationalists laid claim to the term. In the ancient world to be a patriot was, above all, to uphold the common good of one’s civic or political community. That, with some qualifications, is what I believe it should mean for us today.1 One qualification is the need to reconceive political society. Since Montesquieu, a standard objection to the classical republican model has become that it is applicable only to small, homogenous polities and hence is inappropriate for today’s large and increasingly multicultural societies. My reply is that the ancient polis never really “worked” that well in the first place, what with its slavery, patriarchy, Peloponnesian War, and so on, and that, regardless, patriotism in its truest sense actually thrives on diversity. Some reviewers of From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics complained that it is odd for a book whose subtitle is Putting Practice First to be so abstract, to contain so little in the way of actual examples of what patriotism might mean in practice. But the text is a work of political philosophy. It aims to criticize a particular account of practical reason (the “pluralist”), to develop an alternative, and to give an indication of what that alternative would mean for the issues of governance, welfare, and recognition that are so important to our politics today. The argument was thus necessarily very general – although not, I hope, in a way that detaches it from practice, particularly from the practice of political culture in the modern West.

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Regardless, I have since published a less philosophical work, one that is indeed meant to show what this “new patriotism,” as I like to call it, could mean for the politics of a specific country, namely Canada.2 For the most part, this text is a return to philosophy, albeit still not in a “theoretical” sense. What I mean is that I continue to reject the idea that politics should be based on a systematic theory of justice. This is because it wrongly assumes that a political society can be unified, that justice can take a “monarchic” form of one type or another (i.e., the rule of the one). I also still oppose the other, “polyarchic” extreme, which would only fragment the polity and so leave no place for the common good. To me, politics requires responding to conflict with dialogue – and dialogue at its best aims for integration, reconciliation, the realization of the common good. When it does so, I call it “conversation,” which is a practice where neither the one nor the many have the final word. Indeed, politics is at its most true – its most patriotic – when no one rules, which is to say when it is “an-archic.”3 So when I assert that patriotism’s central political maxim is “conversation first, negotiation second, violence third,” it should be evident that I am not advocating a method, as with those methods advanced by the theorists of procedural ethics. For one thing, the question of when one should move from one to another of these three options requires wholly particularist judgment, a nontheoretical form of reasoning that strives to be as sensitive as possible to the features of a given context. For another, I consider the systematicity and degree of precision striven for by the procedural approaches to be unattainable, not to mention undesirable, to which I would add that we need to be asking questions not only about which actions are formally obligatory but also about whether certain substantive ends can be furthered. And because these two are intrinsically linked, conversation should be considered pointless if it doesn’t proceed on the basis of a real hope for understanding. Patriotic conversation, I should add, is neither altruistic nor naive; these charges would make sense only if it were comparable to the deliberations advanced by the theorists of Kantian deliberative democracy. Patriots give priority to conversation in politics because we believe that it has the greatest potential to bring justice as well as satisfaction – these two, given our neo-Aristotelian meta-ethics, being considered one and the same. Indeed, since those who converse

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Preface

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aim for reconciliations that realize rather than compromise their goods (compromise being the hallmark of the accommodations struggled for by those who negotiate), I sometimes like to exaggerate a little and refer to conversants as “selfish.” Among other things, this helps respond to those who complain that the call for conversation ignores the real disparities of power between citizens in the modern world. For after all, if reconciliation is in everyone’s interests, this is true for the strong as much as for the weak. That said, real patriots never fail to appreciate the extreme fragility of our preferred mode of dialogue: if just one party is unwilling or unable to converse, the conversation will surely break down. Each and every one of us has what appears to be a veto on conversation, and indeed the same must be said of negotiation since some may choose violence instead. Hence our predicament or, better yet, our challenge: that it is so very easy to fall down the steps of the “conversation-negotiation-violence” ladder and so very difficult to climb up. Patriots, then, do not assume that conversation is always viable. But while not unduly optimistic, we also reject the a priori pessimism of those polyarchists for whom politics is an inherently tragic affair – dominated, at best, by the need to compromise, to sully the hands of its practitioners. In promoting conversation philosophically, my aim has been to tear down the intellectual barriers to it practically and thereby encourage a politics that has room not only for tragedy but also, even if only occasionally, for comedy. Because as Northrop Frye once put it, “the theme of the comic is the integration of society.”4 Patriotism, to introduce yet another distinction, is thus idealistic without being utopian. It affirms an ideal that, depending on the context, could become a reality – even when, to paraphrase Nietzsche, it may be so only for tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Utopian (“no place”) visions, by contrast, are inherently unrealistic, whether because they are incoherent or because they ignore fundamental realities of our condition.5 Indeed, I believe all theories of justice to be utopian in this sense. Not that they are unworthy of our attention; on the contrary. But their disconnect from reality means that they ought to be recognized for what they are: works of fiction. In fact, that, I would say, is what (potentially) comes from the application of theoretical reason to domains in which it is inappropriate: creation as distinct from interpretation. The latter is that

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practical form of reason in which we engage when comparing incommensurables, as when we need to “make sense” of an apparently inconsistent text or of a moral or political conflict. Indeed, it is nothing but conflict, which is always tied to a particular time and place, that must be our consistent point de départ. This is something missed by theorists, with their love of abstractions created on the basis of hypotheticals. But as wonderful as creativity can be, ethics and politics require dialogue instead, the exchange of interpretations rather than creations. Alas, the tendency in philosophy has been to favour the making and application of the latter, indeed so much so that there ends up being very little room for the former. For it all gets taken up by such contradictions in terms as John Rawls’s “realistic utopia.”6 Patriotism’s idealism is one reason to consider it a “practical,” as distinct from theoretical, political philosophy. I agree with Ronald Beiner that “political theory would fall short of its mission if it failed to supply utopian ideals,”7 but I hasten to point out that I am no political theorist. I reject Beiner’s assumption that “theory” is synonymous with “philosophy”; indeed, it seems to me that it is what is behind his call on political philosophers to battle for their favoured visions, to struggle until one emerges as the “triumphant idea.”8 And as the wars in the academy (or should I say fights in the schoolyard?) rage, the lack of consensus around a victor is said to mean that, in practice, we have “no choice but to settle for scaleddown and less ambitious forms”9 of what we consider just. Thus does the way of theory appear to rely on the “force” of the intellect when it comes to thought and on negotiation when it comes to practice. This is loving wisdom? It is because such inherently adversarial endeavours virtually rule out conversation and so the transformative, progressive possibilities of reconciliation that I believe we should be affirming instead a greater ambition, one that is furthered when we find ways to learn with, rather than to defeat, our opponents. Because justice is something worth not fighting for. All the essays that follow are meant to provide support, in one way or another, for patriotism. Chapter 1 presents a contrast between it and three other political philosophies – neutralism, postmodernism, and pluralism – and argues that patriotism is the superior given how it relates to the various political ideologies. A new, patriotic conception of the political spectrum is also advanced, one based on a reinterpretation of what the terms “left” and “right” should mean for

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us today. Chapter 2 offers a critique of deliberative democracy, which is sometimes confused with patriotism given that it also puts conversation at the centre of its concerns. But patriotic conversation is hermeneutical rather than procedural, and patriotic negotiation is much closer to the toleration-driven, good-faith negotiations of the pluralist than it is to the strictly instrumental practice so denigrated by the deliberative democrats. In chapter 3 I argue that, insofar as human rights discourse occupies a primary role in world politics, it is counterproductive: not only does it sap the power of its own values, but it also leads the thinkers who favour it, especially those I call “theoretical cosmopolitans,” to make a series of confused and contradictory claims. Chapter 4 lends support to the distinction between patriotism and nationalism by giving an account of the latter. The argument is that scholars of nations and nationalism have failed to give national artists their due and that this has led to a neglect of the inherently religious dimension of nationhood as well as to unhelpful ways of approaching language policy. Chapter 5 points the way to how we might extricate ourselves from the trap that is the nineteenth-century, nation-state model of what a country is or should be. Chapter 6 explores how a particular form of nationalism, Zionism, should be advanced given patriotic tenets and shows how this supports a new approach to the conflict between Israelis and their neighbours in the Middle East. And in chapter 7, I argue that Canada is particularly suited for adopting and promoting a patriotic way of responding to the challenges arising from the so-called “war on terror.” The next six essays all aim to support patriotism by engaging with less directly political concerns. Chapter 8 offers a critique of Jonathan Dancy’s moral particularism, arguing that the holism he ascribes to the features of a given moral context is, for the most part, not holistic enough. In chapter 9 I criticize the conception of “hypergoods” advanced by Charles Taylor, arguing that it reflects a failure to distinguish adequately between ethics on the one hand and religion and aesthetics on the other. Chapter 10 explores two sources of the “minimal global ethic” that serves, I believe, as the bridge upon which conversing interlocutors the world over may stand. One source is interpretive: humour, in the form of slapstick. And the other is creative: rabbinic Jewish revelation, the fundamentals of which, I argue, have largely reappeared in (high) modernism. The question of the ethic and conflict is then examined. In chapter 11

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I argue for a particular way of distinguishing between the concepts of good, bad, great, and evil and then show how doing so reveals something important about the dangers of dialogue, patriotic or otherwise, when it comes to resisting evil. Chapter 12 develops the contrast between opponents and adversaries that is so central to patriotism, doing so through a critique of the increasingly popular reading of Platonist philosophy as “dialogical.” And in chapter 13 I give an account of what I believe to be the three major conceptions of Western philosophy – I call them the theoretical, difference, and practical – and then argue that the latter, which just so happens to underlie patriotism, is the superior. But this is so only philosophically speaking, for the others, given that they are creative rather than interpretive, sometimes make greater, if nonphilosophical, contributions to truth. Many of the essays collected here have already been published in more or less different forms as follows: chapter 1 as “Political Philosophies and Political Ideologies,” Public Affairs Quarterly 15, no. 3 (July 2001): 193–217; chapter 2 as “Patriotic, Not Deliberative, Democracy,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 6, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 155–74; a portion of chapter 3 as “The Charter: Four Criticisms,” Canadian Issues/Thèmes Canadiens: The Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canadian Society, 1982-2007 (Fall 2007): 131–4; chapter 4 as “Secular Nationhood? The Importance of Language in the Life of Nations,” Nations and Nationalism 12, no. 4 (Oct. 2006): 597–612; a portion of chapter 6 as “A New Approach for Zionists: Conversation,” Palestine-Israel Journal 14, no. 2 (2007): 100–4; chapter 9 as “What’s Wrong with Hypergoods,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 33, no. 7 (Nov. 2007): 803–33; and chapter 12 as “Opponents vs. Adversaries in Plato’s Phaedo,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 22, no. 2 (April 2005): 109–27. I am grateful for the support provided me by a grant from the Research Fund on Society and Culture of the Government of Quebec; a 2005–06 Lady Davis Visiting Professorship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and an invitation to use the facilities during that same year at Jerusalem’s Shalom Hartman Institute. I would also like to thank the following people for having kindly read and commented on previous versions of one, and sometimes more, of the essays that follow: Daniel A. Bell, Steven Bernstein, Jonathan Dancy, Emil Fackenheim, Gaëlle Fiasse, Amos Friedland, Martin

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Gak, David Glidden, Iain Gow, John Horton, Michael S. Kochin, Eric Lewis, Iain Macdonald, Normand Mousseau, Kai Nelson, Alain Noël, Alan Patten, Avery Plaw, Irene Salenson, Avner de-Shalit, Rod Tweedy, and a number of my students at the Université de Montréal, particularly Miloud Chennoufi and Julie Perreault. No one, however, has been more helpful than Yael, which is just one of the reasons why I love her so much. C.B. Montreal February 2008

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.‫םִיַּמַּכ לַּגִיְו‬, ‫הָקָדְצּו ;טָּפְׁשִמ‬, ‫ןָתיֵא לַחַנְּכ‬ Let justice roll on like a river, and righteousness like a mighty stream. Amos 5:24

Opposition is true Friendship. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

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politics

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1 Political Philosophies and Political Ideologies

I want to proffer a schema. I’m going to present, one at a time, four contemporary political philosophies – I call them neutralism, postmodernism, pluralism, and patriotism1 – and then show how they relate to political ideologies, such as liberalism, conservatism, socialism, feminism, green ideology, nationalism, fascism, and so on. This will involve more than just advancing a particular typology, however, for in so doing I shall also be putting forth an argument: namely that, given a proper understanding of the relation between philosophy and ideology, postmodernism is superior to neutralism, pluralism to postmodernism, and patriotism to pluralism, making the patriot’s approach the best of the lot. But first I need to explain what I mean by both political philosophies and political ideologies. And to do that requires saying something about my conception of politics. As I define it, politics consists of responding to conflict with dialogue. Otherwise put, when people’s values or goods conflict, if they are to deal with the conflict politically, they must strive to hear each other out rather than use violence – the latter, at the end of the day, serving as the basis of war as distinct from politics. Note that I’m referring here strictly to public conflicts, those that take place between many people, since the private realm is the locus of ethics rather than politics (although ethics, too, must be dialogical). Premodern politics, which is to say in its classical republican form, drew the line between public and private quite sharply: the household, a domain of inequality and force, was considered private, and the agora, wherein all citizens (which excluded, of course, women, metics, and slaves) were considered equal, was public. Modernity, and so

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modern politics, has witnessed the rise of a new domain between the home and the agora (now “the state”): civil society, which may be subdivided into the “public sphere” and the market economy. Civil society can thus be said to straddle a now rather blurry publicprivate divide; indeed, rather than “divide,” it makes more sense to speak of a spectrum with “public” and “private” at either pole and civil society spread out over the centre. Modern politics, we might thus say, distinguishes itself from the premodern in that its dialogues take the existence of civil society for granted. This means that modern politics upholds – to varying but always significant degrees – respect for the individual, which, of course, is the basis of civil society’s integrity. Now political philosophies are distinguished by their different conceptions of political dialogue. Being philosophies, they are obviously going to be very general conceptions, although they differ as to how general they conceive themselves to be: some claim to be abstract and to have a universal relevance, while others are affirmed as more relative to context. Either way, conceptions of the form that political dialogue does and ought to take will be connected, whether implicitly or explicitly, to positions regarding other philosophical matters, such as the nature of the interlocutors as well as of the medium of their speech (i.e., language). As for the substance or content of what is said, political philosophies may offer us accounts of certain modes of justification important to politics – such as governance, recognition, and welfare – but being philosophies they will, again, do so only in general ways. So while we can expect to hear about certain overarching principles or maxims, political philosophers will have relatively little to say about specific political issues. Political ideologies, on the other hand, being much more programmatic than political philosophies, are concerned with little else. Instead of offering general accounts of the form and content of political dialogue (although ideologies always assume, even if only implicitly, some such accounts and so are always related to one or other political philosophy), ideologists are more interested in guiding us as regards how we should respond to particular conflicts. They will make proposals, that is, about the kinds of things that we ought to be saying while participating in actual dialogues. So when values or goods conflict, those who would respond by invoking an ideology tend to assert at least two kinds of things: (1) how the values or goods in question should be understood (e.g., “liberty is

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freedom from interference” or “liberty is being true to yourself”); and (2) what the proper relationship between them should be (e.g., “honour is more important than equality” or “love is stronger than justice” and so on). Ideology, then, is the stuff of political culture, of law, institutional design, and policymaking. By defining it in this way, it should be evident that I mean to avoid the pejorative connotations that Marx and others have given the term and so return to the less polemical use of it found in the writings of Destutt de Tracy and his fellow idéologues, who were responsible for its coining. Not that I have nothing critical to say about ideological thinking, for as I will show it plays an important yet not always helpful role in politics. That said, it is enough at this juncture to suggest that anyone who asserts a more or less coherent account of what a number of values or goods ought to mean and how they should relate upholds an ideology; whether their doing so constitutes, crudely put, an illusory rationalization of their material interests is another matter.

I i This past century, there have been four major types of neutralism advanced within Anglo-American political thought: the utilitarian,2 Kantian,3 contractarian,4 and analytical Marxist.5 Evidently, by calling all these approaches “neutralist,” I am using the term in a much wider sense than is typical in the literature. Essentially, I mean to refer to the stance one must take when applying a theory of justice, understood as a systematic set of thin, or decontextualized, principles (or perhaps just one principle). How neutralists arrive at their theories varies, but one of the best known routes consists of the reformulation of thick (i.e., contextual) and incommensurable ethical articulations, such as those that take the form of everyday moral maxims, into thin and commensurable “basic goods,” as John Rawls refers to them. These are then interlocked together to form the theory of justice. But however arrived at, what is essential to all neutralists is that there be such a theory, since it is only by applying one that we are said to be able to respond to conflicts justly. Such theories can be considered analogous to the rulebooks of sports or games, since just as the referee or umpire must be neutral vis-à-vis the players, those

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charged with applying a theory (e.g., the justices of a country’s supreme court) must be neutral vis-à-vis the politicians, political parties, interest groups, and so on.6 Notice that, when people talk during the application process, they plead, as when the captains of opposing teams plead their cases to the referee or when citizens hire lawyers to plead their cases in court. But pleading, we should note, lacks the exchange of, and so the change to, ideas that are characteristic of genuine dialogue. True, judges certainly ask questions, but when it comes time to really decide, they don’t do so with counsel but go off alone, returning only when they are ready to hand down their decisions. Implicit here is the notion that the rules being applied should not be altered because of something that happens during the application process, just as a game’s rulebook should not be rewritten while the game is being played. And so although some neutralist theorists – in particular, the contractarians and some of the Kantians – model their theories on imaginary dialogues, all assert that those theories should not themselves be subject to the dialogues of actual, everyday politics. The work of the political theorist, in other words, is to be completed before the theory’s application.7 Pleading is thus a unidirectional mode of discourse, which is why we should not consider the application of a theory to be a genuinely dialogical process (one meaning of the ancient Greek dia is “between,” which suggests the number two or greater since otherwise there would no things to be in between of). And so, given our definition above of politics as the practice of responding to conflict with dialogue, this means that we should consider neutralism to be an antipolitical philosophy. Some neutralist theorists, however, those who defend what has been called “deliberative democracy,”8 do aim to give a role to genuine dialogue in their politics. Yet they also tend to distort it by requiring the interlocutors to respect certain rules established by their theories in advance. Moreover, the issues eligible for deliberation are highly circumscribed, since the assumption is that the more fundamental questions have already been answered by the theory. For in neutralism it is always theory, never politics, that must establish the ground rules upon which the latter must transpire.9 Ideology is another thing that’s decided on before politics may begin. To the neutralist, the kinds of positions that I have claimed to be the purview of ideology are, in a sense, logically derived from philosophical tenets (i.e., from the theory of justice). In fact,

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neutralists consider philosophy and ideology to be so closely connected that they often fail to distinguish between the two. Think of the liberalisms defended by the Kantians or utilitarians such as Bentham or Mill; or of the socialisms advanced by utilitarians such as the Webbs or by the analytical Marxists; or of the libertarianism upheld by most of today’s contractarians. In laying down the theoretical ground rules for politics, neutralists thus see themselves as having also determined its ideological basis, even if they often fail to identify the latter as such. Somehow, neutralism aims both to set up a neutral referee and to favour one of the teams playing. But all this neglects an important feature of ideology, namely its at least partial autonomy from philosophy. To derive an ideology from a philosophy is to assume that the philosophy is systematically unified, that it can be and indeed has been articulated as a self-sufficient and wholly noncontradictory theory. By “self-sufficient,” I mean that one need not rely on material outside the theory for its application, and by “wholly noncontradictory,” I mean the idea that all of the theory’s parts are completely interlocked and so in that sense fully reconciled with each other. This allows the neutralist to claim that certain values – those at the core of his or her preferred ideology – ought to be granted an uncompromisable status, which is to say that they should not be subject to everyday political dialogue. After all, it is only within the chaos and flux of everyday politics that such values are ever put into question; by incorporating them within a theory, they are thus supposedly sealed off from that flux and hence from the “corrosive waters” of political practice. The belief in systematic unity is thus essential to neutralism; but it is unwarranted. Rather than argue the point here, however, all I will say is that it has been my experience that the incommensurability of values or goods is not something that can be theorized away. To assume otherwise is, as Isaiah Berlin once put it, to hold “perhaps one of the least plausible beliefs ever entertained by profound and influential thinkers.”10 For the reduction of incommensurable values to a theory can only distort or, worse, fail to grant some of them a place outright. Thus the Kantian tends to neglect or distort very real consequentialist concerns, the utilitarian the various formal duties, the Marxist the respect for the individual, and the contractarian pretty much everything but this respect. One might say that there is something inherently Procrustean about the projects of neutralist theory – about any attempt to force the incommensurables of an always

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messy and sometimes even dirty world into the purity of a systematically unified order. This, I suggest, explains why there has never been, and never will be, a universally accepted political theory, and it also tells us that, if we want to respond to conflict reasonably, we simply cannot do so by turning to some prefabricated theory for guidance. ii Yet should we even be trying to respond to our conflicts “reasonably”? Postmodernist political philosophers would say “no,” or at least, “not exactly,” because theirs is a paradoxical relationship with neutralism; indeed, we might even describe them as “antineutralist neutralists.” For they assert that theoretical reason is both “totalizing” – not a good thing – yet also, to a degree, inescapable. When faced with a theory of justice, then, the first thing the postmodernist will do is “deconstruct” it in order to uncover its selfcontradictions and demonstrate that it is not a systematic whole after all. This means that it cannot be applied neutrally and so that any attempt to do so will always do violence to those “others” who do not fit in the system. By deflating the neutralist’s pretension to unity, then, the postmodernist aims to make room for “difference,” for making spaces, and so room for all those who suffer from being fixed within a theory’s sights (thRoria, we recall, means “viewing” or “contemplation”). As Emmanuel Levinas once asked: “How can the Other ... appear, that is, be for someone, without already losing its alterity and exteriority by way of offering itself to view?”11 Yet, although subversive of theoretical reason, postmodernists do not consider their approach completely separate from it. For one thing, they tend to begin their works by deconstructing those of theorists such as the neutralists, a tendency so marked that they sometimes appear parasitic on the latter. For another thing, just as theories are articulated in language, the practice of deconstruction is itself recognized as linguistic, and the inability to escape from language means that there can be no complete break from theory. As a result, what we get, as Linda Hutcheon has described, is a paradoxical postmodernism of complicity and critique, of reflexivity and historicity, that at once inscribes and subverts the conventions and ideologies of the dominant cultural and social forces

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of the twentieth-century western world ... [It is] a critique both of the view of representation as reflective (rather than as constitutive) of reality and of the accepted idea of “man” as the centred subject of representation; but it is also an exploitation of those same challenged foundations of representation. Postmodern texts paradoxically point to the opaque nature of their representational strategies and at the same time to their complicity with the notion of the transparency of representation – a complicity shared, of course, by anyone who pretends even to describe their “de-doxifying” tactics.12 Fragmentation and paradox, and the openness to difference that their embrace is said to provide – this is the heart of the postmodernist endeavour. There are at least two distinct forms of contemporary postmodernism: the poststructuralist and the pragmatist. The former tends to emphasize the indeterminacy of all meaning and the role of power in fixing particular meanings, while the latter stresses how the rigidity of theoretical reason interferes with “what works.” Both, however, would sever the “logical” tie that neutralists assume exists between philosophy and ideology. For if all theories are inherently contradictory, it cannot be possible to derive particular ideologies from them. Hence the pragmatist Richard Posner on the relation between pragmatism and liberalism: “The connection between the liberal-visionary and the pragmatic is purely historical and contingent.”13 And here is Richard Rorty on pragmatism and feminism: “Pragmatism – considered as a set of philosophical views about truth, knowledge, objectivity, and language – is neutral between feminism and masculinism ... Neither pragmatists nor deconstructionists can do more for feminism than help rebut attempts to ground these [masculinist] practices on something deeper than a contingent historical fact – the fact that the people with the slightly larger muscles have been bullying the people with the slightly smaller muscles for a very long time.”14 The poststructuralist feminist Judith Butler would certainly agree: “there are no necessary political consequences for [poststructuralism], but only a possible political deployment.”15 Evidently, the relation between political philosophies and ideologies is as underdetermined in postmodernism as it is overdetermined in neutralism. Not that this has prevented postmodernists from

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asserting their own ideological preferences. Posner and Rorty, for example, have both declared themselves pragmatic liberals, as has Charles Anderson, while among the postructuralists we might place Hélène Cixous’s feminism alongside Butler’s and recognize William E. Connolly’s liberalism or Slavoj Žižek’s, Ernesto Laclau’s, and Chantal Mouffe’s socialisms.16 But none of these thinkers will ever be found claiming that “philosophy itself” endorses their ideologies. All this is in keeping with the postmodernist’s aim of maintaining an openness to difference. Doing so, however, is understood to consist of much more than being sensitive to incommensurables. Indeed, what’s required is the kind of openness associated with the artist rather than with the sensitive critic. For according to Žižek: “Politics itself is, in the final analysis, always the politics of fantasy. It needs to imagine answers to antagonisms.”17 Or as Rorty has put it: because “‘immanent’ criticism of the old paradigm is relatively ineffective,” we need to see that “the freer the imagination of the present, the likelier it is that future social practices will be different from past practices.”18 Postmodernists, in other words, would have our response to conflict be creation, not interpretation. So when they talk, as they sometimes do, of “conversation,” they don’t mean to invoke that everyday dialogical activity, wherein people exchange interpretations in order to “make sense” of something, to reach a shared understanding about an issue. Rather, what’s intended is much more along the lines of the kind of talk that artists sometimes engage in, and this, it must be said, is not especially rational. This means that, in advocating a creative or aesthetic politics, the postmodernist is really advocating yet another form of antipolitics. As we might expect, the problem with this antipolitics is different from that associated with neutralism. It arises from the assumption that one’s ideological preference is ultimately a matter of aesthetic taste. The question almost poses itself: does the postmodernist have adequate resources to respond when a Benito Mussolini, for example, asserts something like the following: If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be the bearers of an objective, immortal truth ... then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity ... From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.19

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To reply that Mussolini is wrong to derive his fascism from his philosophical relativism does not say very much; indeed, Rorty himself has admitted that pragmatism “is as useful to fascists like Mussolini and conservatives like Oakeshott as it is to liberals like Dewey.”20 That said, it seems to me that a concern for maintaining a creative openness to difference is not, in fact, compatible with an ideology such as fascism, since this form of creativity lends support to a minimal ethic that would rule the ideology out.21 Nevertheless, I would claim that, regardless of what they say, postmodernists don’t really affirm their preferred ideologies as though they were merely matters of taste. Moreover, if creativity really is their primary concern, they should accept that neutralist theories are in their own way also creative. The only complaint postmodernists should have about neutralist ideologies is thus with their exclusivity. But surely everyone who prefers one ideology over others hopes that his or her compatriots, at least, will prefer that ideology as well. Regardless, if we return to the distinction between creation and interpretation, it seems to me that the existence of the latter allows us to say that there is indeed a place for reasoned dialogue as a response to conflict, and hence for what I am calling politics. But interpretation is a form of reason that neither the neutralist nor the postmodernist seems willing to recognize: a practical reason of the kind that Aristotle distinguished (albeit insufficiently) from the theoretical.22 Whereas thRoria, as we noted, means “viewing” or “contemplation,” and creativity has long been associated with inspired vision, this practical reason is an aural capacity, of the kind required if one is to participate in a dialogue. It aims to be as sensitive as possible to the particulars of a given context, which is why Berlin has identified it with what he calls our “moral sensitiveness.”23 Practical reason as so conceived tells us that incommensurability does not have to mean rational incomparability – as long, that is, as we use our reason to hear rather than look for the truth. Otherwise put, one can respond to a conflict of incommensurable values or goods reasonably, but only if one is willing to engage in dialogue and so in politics. iii Pluralist political philosophers advocate doing just this. Given their own wariness of theoretical reason in politics, they, or at least many of them, share in the postmodernist’s opposition to any

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attempt to derive ideology from philosophy. Among the exceptions here are the pluralist liberals Michael Walzer, Joseph Raz, Robert Dahl, and George Crowder.24 Once, Berlin could have been counted among this group, but that was before he declared: “Pluralism and liberalism are not the same or even overlapping concepts. There are liberal theories which are not pluralistic. I believe in both liberalism and pluralism, but they are not logically connected.”25 This is also Stuart Hampshire’s position, although Hampshire is, for the most part, a pluralist socialist.26 Regardless, like Berlin, he believes that pluralism, the recognition that there are many incommensurable and often conflicting values in the world, requires neither pleading before an authority responsible for applying a systematic theory nor relying on creativity. Rather, people need to be willing to negotiate with each other, to make concessions in the struggle for balanced accommodations. Although neutralists can sometimes also be heard talking favourably of balancing, they do so because they believe that it can be guided by a theory, the values involved having in that sense been commensurated. That is why they conceive of this balancing as taking place without the hard choices that negotiation often requires. The formal pluralist imperative to negotiate is distinct from what Hampshire has called “substantive justice,” which is concerned with the actual positions that parties advance within negotiations – what I claim is relevant to ideology. Substantive justice is always relative to given societies since what one’s moral sense hears in one context is, we might expect, going to be different from what it hears in another.27 Thus Hampshire: “Opinions about substantial justice and the other virtues arise from, and are explained by, natural and widespread human sentiments [i.e., values] greatly modified by very variable customs and social histories.”28 So it is when these opinions clash that there needs to be negotiation. And negotiation, we should recognize, is a genuine form of dialogue, there being a real exchange between all sides, albeit of a sort that requires compromise and hence that we “maim and degrade” the values involved.29 Yet pluralist negotiation is what it is because it is carried out in good faith. The parties, that is, do not make concessions simply because they believe it to be in their strategic interests to do so (i.e., because they have more to gain by doing so than by using violence). That would make for realpolitik rather than good-faith negotiations,

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and realpolitik should not be confused with real politics since it is never dialogical – it may be dia, but it has no place for logos (“reason/speech” from the Greek). For politics requires that negotiated concessions be driven not only by the pressure put on one by the opposing party but also by toleration, which is pluralism’s key political virtue. Pluralists come to it through their recognition of the plurality of values in the world, which is said to mean that there will always be others who, although they do not share one’s own values and so are potential enemies, are nevertheless moral beings and therefore deserve a minimal respect. Hence the need to negotiate with them in good faith. This does not mean abandoning an adversarial stance, however, only accepting that while one pursues one’s distinct aims, it is legitimate for the other to do likewise. Thus can we understand why, say, the Irish Republican Army’s willingness to decommission its arms was so important to the peace process there, as was the famous September 1993 handshake on the White House lawn between plo chairman Yassar Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. Indeed “the handshake” is probably the most powerful symbol of the willingness to engage in dialogue and so politics: while shaking hands, one physically touches one’s opponent, who is thus especially vulnerable, yet no harm is done, this indicating in the clearest possible terms one’s intention to forgo violence. In calling for good-faith negotiations, pluralists can be said to rule out all the antipolitical ideologies, including not only the inherently antipolitical ones such as fascism, anarchism, and libertarianism but also those versions of liberalism, conservativism, socialism, and so on that are affirmed by the neutralists and postmodernists. At the same time, pluralists make way for a wide range of political ideologies. A given decision to favour one over the others will never be as indeterminate as it is with the postmodernist, however, because pluralists believe that such decisions can be derived from interpretations of the given political culture. They have never really been explicit about this, but I think that it clearly derives from their fundamentals. For if different contexts demand different compromises when values conflict, we should expect that different societies will tend to assert different traditions of compromise and hence come to assert different accommodations. So pluralist political philosophy helps us to appreciate the extent to which ideology must be independent of philosophy. Pluralists come to their ideologies neither from theory nor from a creative

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openness to the other but from the dialogues of everyday politics. And indeed, one cannot turn to either philosophy or art for an account of why, during the past century, the Scandinavian countries were homes to democratic socialist political cultures, the United States moved from its New Deal liberalism to the conservatism that characterizes its politics today, and Canada, despite the powerful ideological winds blowing in from the United States, managed to remain largely liberal. In Hampshire’s terms, all these are largely manifestations of how the negotiations over substantive justice in these countries have played out. There is thus, at least relative to neutralism, a great deal of room for change in pluralist politics. Nevertheless, I want to claim, there is not enough. For this change is restricted to determining the various balances that pluralists assume need to be struck in response to political conflict. This balancing takes place in the dimension of the thick since it is here that values are understood to clash and so here that accommodations must be reached when they do. Pluralists also assert the existence of a thin, universalistic, and decontextualized dimension of meaning, which is where they believe the cores of values are to be found in isolated, and hence “pure” or “uncontaminated,” forms.30 These cores, then, are assumed to be fixed; they are essentially ahistorical “souls” or “skeletons” upon which a value’s “flesh” is fastened when it is present with others in given thick contexts. Now it is precisely this flesh, we might say, that gets maimed by the compromises negotiation requires. No surprise, then, that we tend to decry compromises as “shabby,” especially when we feel that we have made too many of them in response to a given conflict. So it is often very difficult to claim that the changes wrought are “for the best,” that they contribute in some sense or other to progress, to some kind of improvement to the practices that express the values in question.31 Such progressive change is also ruled out because pluralists have room for only a very tenuous conception of the “whole” of a society, and hence for the notion that making concessions can contribute something positive to that whole, to the common good. For pluralists must believe that societies, or at least the increasingly multicultural ones in the West, consist of nothing more than the plurality of ways of life that they contain, each of which is made up of various groupings of values.

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Behind this belief is the assumption that values have thin and isolable cores. For it leads to the supposition that the ways of life that the values constitute can also be conceived as separate, and this implies that, when they conflict, the conflict consists of their “clashing” or “colliding,” of the banging together of what are fundamentally independent entities. The result is an adversarial conception of conflict, one that makes it seem as though the best that can be done is to compromise, to balance the values against each other. Thus, by virtue of their analytical meta-ethic, their assumption that values can be conceived as like atoms, pluralists end up limiting political dialogue to the zero-sum terms of negotiation and the compromising that is essential to it. What’s missing is a place for a more reconciliatory approach to conflict, one that strives for “integration” rather than balancing or compromise. This, however, requires a different understanding of moral concepts and of how they may conflict, one that conceives of them not as separable, independent entities but as integral parts of a whole. A holistic conception of conflict is thus made possible: rather than a clashing or colliding of separate adversaries, one imagines a series of “disharmonies” or “disturbances” arising within particular regions of the whole. This allows us to focus on the whole rather than on its parts and hence makes possible the transformation of that whole so that the values, or (better) “goods,”32 can be reconciled, further integrated with little or no compromise. Considered from a society-wide or even global perspective, it thus becomes possible to think of reconciling whole groups or ways of life and thereby contributing to the progressive development of their shared political communities. iv So aspires the patriot. Negotiation, as patriotism would have it, certainly entails compromise, but it may also be thought to bring the polity as a whole to a better place overall. Moreover, the holism characteristic of the patriot’s conception of goods – one that, it is worth noting, draws on the philosophy of language articulated by such hermeneutical thinkers as Hans-Georg Gadamer33 – allows us to say that there are occasions when political dialogue can consist not only of negotiation but also of conversation.

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In a conversation, interlocutors strive to achieve not an accommodation but a shared understanding of what they are discussing. This requires that they genuinely listen to each other, which entails more than simply granting the hearing necessary for attaining clarity about the demands being brought to a negotiation table. For one listens to determine not the minimum trade-offs or concessions necessary for accommodating one’s opponent but whether they are saying something that has some truth, some justice to it. The question becomes: can I learn from them? And it is one that can be answered only if there is a willingness to transform one’s position in order to incorporate, and so to share in, the truths – if there are any – of the other. Thus can we arrive at the integrating or reconciling, rather than compromising, of the goods in conflict and so further develop our understanding of the common good. The ideal of the common good, it should be noted, is one that modern patriots inherit from classical republicans such as Aristotle and Machiavelli.34 Indeed, it was classical republicans who first praised others as “patriots,” long before nationalists began to do so. Fulfilling the common good brings with it its own particular difficulties, some of which are even more challenging than are those of negotiation. For transformation requires transforming the whole of one’s goods, given that all are assumed to be intrinsically connected or integrated (as distinct from “interlocked,” the term I used above to invoke the systematic holism of neutralist theory). Following contemporary hermeneutics, patriots conceive of meaningful wholes of the kind dealt with in the human sciences and humanities as “organic” rather than systematic, meaning that a significant adjustment to one part of the whole always impacts on all the others. Transformation is thus a comprehensive phenomenon, and therein lies its difficulty. One might even say that, although the “bodies” of the goods in question are not “maimed,” conversation can “bruise” them, the hope nevertheless being that they will heal into something stronger than they were before the conflict (i.e., that they will become truer, in their newly articulated and better understood form, to the whole of which they are all a part). So where the pluralist would have us reverse Clausewitz’s famous dictum and assert that politics is like war carried on by different means, the patriot urges that we contradict a line from Yeats instead: “labour is blossoming or dancing where / the body [is] bruised to pleasure soul.”35 A politics that aims to give

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reconciling transformations a significant place is thus going to be (potentially) progressive in a way that is impossible to the pluralist. Just think, say, of how a Wikipedia article develops. So a patriotic politics strives for something more than just accommodation or “damage control”36 and hence has the potential to offer its practitioners more than just the “dirty hands” that come from making compromises.37 Yet, if one finds oneself amidst people who are willing, at most, only to negotiate, then conversation, no matter how much one desires it, will just not be viable; the reality is that all involved must be willing to engage in the kind of speaking and listening that conversation requires. But even when negotiating is the best that we can do, at least patriots can call on the negotiators to strive for those accommodations that are of the greatest importance to the common good as a whole. Nevertheless, it must be said that politics today is dominated by the practices of neutralism, postmodernism, and most of all, pluralism.38 This means that attempts to reconcile our conflicts with conversation are going to be largely futile. Yet the patriot refuses to give up hope. That is why I find so moving anecdotes such as the following, recounted by the patriotic feminist Susan Bickford: [This is] the story of a particular exemplary action that happened several years ago when, in the midst of feminism’s “sex wars,” I attended a protest on the campus where I was a graduate student. A feminist group at this public university had originally designed the action to protest the student union’s sale of pornographic magazines like Playboy. News of this protest spawned a simultaneous counter demonstration by feminists supportive of anticensorship principles and alternative sexualities. So there we were, lines of feminists, both sides chanting and holding signs, one side with a bullhorn, the other without. I was not involved in organizing either protest, and frankly I do not remember being very thoughtful about my own participation; I had not done much representative thinking, let us say. That failure was made clear to me by the gutsy act of a woman on “the other side,” who came over and spoke with several of us. I cannot remember her exact words, but what she said was something like “I want to hear what you have to say, I don’t want us to just yell at each other. Tell me what you want, why you’re doing what

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you’re doing.” It was not a loving or peaceful act. Her face was tight and pinched, her compadres were chanting in the background, and what she was doing was clearly difficult for her, perhaps more so because she was the only one, on either side, who made that effort. She must have felt acutely vulnerable, “appearing” in that particular way and place – not as someone who floated above the conflict, not as someone who stayed “at home,” but as someone who, quite literally, travelled: from her group to ours and back.39 If that woman had said only “Tell me what you want” and left it at that, we could identify her as a practitioner of pluralist politics, as someone willing to negotiate with her adversaries, to hear their demands so that she might determine what concessions might satisfy them. In asking to know why they were doing what they were doing, however, she was announcing her willingness to really listen, to come to understand and perhaps share their position, or at least to develop a new one that all of them could endorse, together. Patriotism’s central aim, then, may be situated between the neutralist’s attempt to unify political society on the one hand and the pluralist’s fragmentation of it on the other, all the while striving to avoid the paradoxes of the postmodernist. Patriots also tread a path between the neutralist’s unification of philosophy and ideology and the postmodernist’s and pluralist’s separation of them. For patriots accept that although their philosophy may help them to say certain things in general about politics, it cannot – on its own, outside of the context of a given polity – lend support to any particular ideology. Moreover, because the common good can also sometimes be fulfilled in creative as distinct from interpretive ways,40 we have reason to make room for an apolitical – but still not antipolitical – patriotism. But given that creative solutions tend to be the exception, never the rule (for after all, sometimes the inspiration just does not come), and given the well-known dangers attending any nondialogical approach to conflict, it (almost) always makes sense to try dialogue, and hence politics, first. Thus patriotism’s central political maxim: “conversation first, negotiation second, violence third.” A patriotic conception of politics can also, I believe, make way for a better conception of the political spectrum than those that have been on offer so far. It is to this conception that I now wish to turn.

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II Especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall, many have concluded that the very idea of a political spectrum has lost its relevance and thus that the terms “left” and “right” no longer carry much meaning.41 Others, however, continue to assert their efficacy. Leon Baradat, for example, conceives of the spectrum as based on the notion of attitudes to direction of change. Those on the left are “progressive” in the sense that they favour change from the status quo to something new, whereas those on the right are “retrogressive,” concerned with a return to a previous state of affairs.42 Norberto Bobbio, alternatively, argues for a spectrum based on attitudes to equality, with those on the left favouring the value and those on the right being more open to inequalities.43 Baradat’s approach, it is true, has the problem that it would require us to describe liberals in the United States today as right-wing since they would have American public policy approximate the country’s New Deal past. But Bobbio fails to explain why one particular value, equality, should be given a special status vis-à-vis all the others; nor can he account for the popularity of describing American neo-conservatives or Russian communists, each of whom favour the forceful imposition of their preferred brands of equality (democratic and economic respectively), as being on the right. Of course, one could always argue that the mistake lies with those who would refer to American liberals as left and to their neoconservative compatriots or Russian communists as right. I nevertheless believe that there is something to these descriptions. That is why I want to suggest an alternative conception of the spectrum, one that helps us to make sense of why they are compelling as well as better captures how the idea of the spectrum has, or at least should have, been used throughout its history. That history, it is worth recalling, originated in postrevolutionary France, when those who sat on the left side of the National Assembly were said to be for progress and against reaction and those on the right the reverse. The conception I want to advance takes its cue from Gianni Vattimo’s claim that “nonviolence” is the central characteristic of the left. Vattimo makes this assertion in the context of a polemic against fundamentalisms, particularly those inspired by metaphysical philosophies.44 But putting that argument aside, I would like to suggest the following: given the assumption that one may respond

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to a conflict with either conversation, negotiation, or violence, we should refer to those doves for whom progress through conversation is feasible as being on the left; to those more pessimistic hawks who consider violence unavoidable as being on the right; and to those in between, who favour negotiation, as being in the centre. This is the patriotic conception of the political spectrum, and it is one that we can sum up as being based on attitudes to conflict. Now given that conflicts can be both very different and changeable, it makes no sense to demand that people situate themselves on this spectrum in any permanent way. I have long thought it odd that so many, so often, choose to declare themselves “lifelong members of the left” or “inherently right-wing” and so on, as though where they happen to be as regards both time and place is somehow irrelevant to their politics. I suspect that vastly overreaching conceptions of rationality or human nature are at work here or, less intellectually grandiose, that people are simply letting their relatively rigid personal sensibilities interfere with their judgment. Regardless, the basic point I want to make is that one’s decision about how best to respond to a given conflict is something that should depend on that conflict and nothing else. Of course, one source of those relatively rigid personal sensibilities is ideological thinking. The problem, we might say, is that people often turn to their preferred ideologies for guidance too soon. For ideology is helpful only after the conversation has unavoidably broken down. Prior to this, one should be willing to listen and so should be open to transforming oneself on the basis of what one hears. The problem with ideologies is that they interfere with this since, as the historian Lewis Namier once noted, there is a certain “fixity” to them; “the less, therefore, man clogs the free play of his mind with political doctrine and dogma, the better for his thinking.”45 But when the time for negotiation, and so for ideology, has come, patriots, like pluralists, will invoke the one that they believe best expresses the identity, the common good, of their political community. And this, it should be said, by no means has to be conservatism. For while conservatives are often said to exhibit the greatest love for their country, patriotism is in no sense biased in favour of their ideology. The reason is that patriots love what they consider to be the true identity of their country (or countries if they feel loyalty to more than one), and whether its current practices best express that identity is something that must remain an open question. It is

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always possible that radical reforms to those practices will be necessary if citizens are to be truer to their ideals. At least as regards such cases, then, Hannah Arendt is quite right to point out that “intense discontent [is] the hallmark of true patriotism and true devotion to one’s people.”46 True patriot love, in other words, can require criticism. Although not biased in favour of any particular ideology, however, patriotism does rule out all the antipolitical ones. All these ultra-right doctrines must be distinguished from the political ones since they consistently reject dialogical responses to conflict in favour of nondialogical forms of talk or of other, more overt forms of force. This is something explicit in the case of fascism or revolutionary Marxism, implicit with the legalism of neutralist liberalism, and inevitable when it comes to narrow, one-dimensional ideologies such as libertarianism. One might thus ask whether, given their antipolitical nature, such ideologies even merit a place on the political spectrum as I have been defining it. For it is, after all, a political spectrum, whereupon positions are to be found that assume there will be at least some occasions when dialogue can serve as a viable alternative to violence. In ruling that dialogue out virtually a priori, antipolitical ideologies take positions so far to the right vis-à-vis our spectrum that they may be said to have fallen off it. Note that, in the case of those ideologies that can be placed upon it, there is no call for doing so in any permanent way. Because each country claims its own political culture, each may be said to have its own “home” ideology at a given point in time, and this is something that can not only change but also move along our spectrum. For example, conservatives in the United States today might, for whatever reason, decide to abandon their ideology or perhaps continue to uphold it while nevertheless moving either more to the centre or to the right (i.e., becoming either more or less open to the prospects of negotiating given conflicts). One constant, however, is that those political parties whose foremost aim is electoral success will always be found competing over their country’s home ideology, which may also consist of a mixture of ideologies. That is why American Republicans and Democrats have, since the mid-1970s, been rightwing and centrist conservatives respectively (there being, admittedly, a few liberals remaining among the Democrats). And it also explains why any Canadian party that genuinely wishes to form the government – whether it be the Liberals, the Conservatives, or the New

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Democrats – has for a very long time now needed to present itself to the electorate as the best representative of Canadian liberalism.47 Of course, not all countries have had the luxury to develop their political cultures to the point where their home ideologies are as sophisticated as conservatism or liberalism, not to mention socialism or those somewhat less developed relative newcomers, feminism and green ideology.48 Modern Israel is a case in point. Since its creation in 1948, its citizens’ fundamentally existential concern with security has, understandably, been given a virtually overriding place in its politics. Its home ideology, in consequence, has remained that of the nationalisms of its two national communities, the majority Jewish and the minority Arab. Nationalism, however, is an ideology that, in more mature political cultures, tends to exist only as an adjunct to the other, more sophisticated ideologies.49 One can only hope that the day will come when Israelis will be able to conceive of it in precisely this way. iii There are, it seems to me, a number of benefits that come from interpreting the relations between political philosophies and political ideologies in the way I propose. For one thing, it helps us to overcome the inherently misleading terms of what has been called the “liberal-communitarian” debate within contemporary political philosophy.50 In that debate, the liberalism invoked is almost invariably restricted, and without justification (indeed, without even the hint that such justification might be required) to the neutralist, usually Kantian, variety; non-neutralist liberalisms are rarely, if ever, acknowledged. Michael Walzer and Charles Taylor, however, two of the debate’s major “communitarian” representatives, are actually pluralist and pluralist/patriotic liberals respectively.51 Indeed, even Alasdair MacIntyre, who clearly is a nonliberal participant in the debate (he affirms a premodern form of politics), has vehemently rejected the term.52 Nevertheless, there are those such as Michael Sandel who continue to equate liberalism with the various forms of neutralist liberalism,53 thus perpetuating the misrepresentation of an ideology that, as Michael Freeden has shown, has long exhibited much richer forms than are compatible with a neutralist framework.54 This leads me to recommend that we not only refuse to limit liberalism the political ideology to those versions of it

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associated with neutralism the political philosophy but that we also drop the term “communitarian” altogether. Doing so would, at the very least, help us to acknowledge such realities as the fact that Isaiah Berlin, universally recognized as a liberal, is more open to compromising the liberty of the individual, one of liberalism’s core goods, than is a so-called communitarian such as Walzer.55 Moreover, we would also make room for the fact that ostensibly anticommunitarian neutralist liberals such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin actually embrace a strong (although I would claim misconstrued) conception of the common good, something that Taylor, for one, has acknowledged.56 All this should help us to appreciate that liberalism is but one modern political ideology among many, albeit the most popular among Western political thinkers today. That is why we ought to eschew the oft-used but misleading description of the West as the home of the political culture of “liberal democracy,” as this only obfuscates the fact that democratic socialism, conservatism, feminism, and green ideology, to name just a few, still claim places as respectable ideologies among the diversity of Western democratic political cultures. The relevant distinction should be not between liberal democracies and other regimes but between regimes that are “political” and those that are not. Finally, the spectrum I have been proposing could help us to account for the tendency of those on the left to exhibit a unique form of bitterness towards their opponents. This is something they do in addition to the natural aversion that all who take their politics seriously feel towards fellow citizens who are sympathetic to ideologies different from their own. I want to suggest that the left’s feelings here are born of the frustration of thinking that one has found a reconciliatory, noncompromising solution to a given political conflict, a solution that contributes to the common good of all, yet those to the right, for whatever reason, refuse to go along. Think of that old proverb about leading a horse to water but not being able to make it drink; then imagine how embittering it would be if one felt that the horse’s obstinacy was preventing many others from drinking as well. That said, there are also those who, while claiming to be members of the left, are bitter for a reason that has little, if anything, to do with an interest in reconciliation. These are the “fascist left,” as they are sometimes called, and they are not really on the left, as I have been defining it, at all. To them words are not the carriers of

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dialogue but weapons in disguise, arrows that, tinged with selfrighteousness and what Nietzsche called ressentiment, are aimed at those who are perceived to be self-serving enemies of equality. But the reality is that the opposition to equality is more often than not an ideologically legitimate one. Such “leftists,” we should thus recognize, are actually as antipolitical as the soldiers of realpolitik; their place, in consequence, is on the far right.

IV I want to conclude by saying something about where patriots in the West today should be situated on this political spectrum of mine. My admittedly contestable claim is that many factors have, at this time, combined to make conversation a truly viable response to a number of political conflicts, certainly much more so than was the case during the Cold War. For the realities of that war served only to infuse right-wing tendencies into politics both between and within states. Its end, while making way for the flaring up of a number of hot wars – including the so-called “war on terror” – has also allowed us to interpret the world anew, without the limitations that war inevitably brings. Indeed, the fact is that the global citizenry has come to enjoy a dramatic drop in casualties from violent conflict,57 and despite the very real threat today of terrorists acquiring and using a nuclear device, Edward Luttwak has rightly pointed out that there remains a very great difference between this and the earlier prospect of nuclear Armageddon.58 Our world, in other words, is simply far more secure than it has been in a very long time. And with security comes the ability to listen that conversation requires. Moreover, it also makes sense today to refer to what Geoff Mulgan has identified as the rise of four new “unleashings of energy” as regards politics and its possibilities. First and most important are the sweeping democratization movements that have arisen throughout the world, from China to Brazil, Kazakhstan to Turkey. Every time an antipolitical regime falls or is challenged, one’s hopes for the possibilities of dialogue, as conversation and not only negotiation, should only grow. Second is the transition towards an era of “human capital,” one that follows the previous shifts from merchant to industrial and then finance capital. When it is human capital that is valued, organizations tend to give resources such as skill and ingenuity greater prominence, and this can only help to develop

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the reconciliatory solutions for which conversations aim. Third is the growing demand on states, public bodies, and in particular global organizations to evolve and often extend their responsibilities. This requires reforms that are sure to produce new contexts and so, once again, new possibilities. Finally, there is the fact that, at least when it comes to the prosperous societies of the developed world, many have found that consumer consumption cannot fulfil their needs for self-realization. The effect has been to catapult the questions and languages of ethics, as distinct from economics, to the forefront.59 The result of these four? The terms employed in dialogue are becoming richer and its potential – especially should states come to make the common good and the virtue of conversation central to their programs for civic education – that much greater. To accept this interpretation of world politics today is to acknowledge the generally leftist orientation that comes from endorsing the tenets of patriotic political philosophy at this time. The fact is that there is significant opportunity for conversation, or for making room for conversation, that simply was not there before. Acknowledging this does not, to repeat, dictate an adherence to any particular political ideology; rather, it requires only that we listen, rather than fight, for justice. The irony, then, is that while many have pointed to the demise of the Soviet Union as the largest factor contributing to the current fragmentation and decline of the left, its fall may, ultimately, have the opposite effect. For we are now, as sentimental as this unavoidably sounds, living in a time when it is genuinely possible to make a better world. Patriots of the world, converse!

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2 Patriotic, Not Deliberative, Democracy Conversation must naturally follow the spirit of the age. “Orlando Sabertash,” The Art of Conversation1

Both those who defend what I call a patriotic politics and those in favour of a deliberative conception of democracy call on us to try to respond to conflict with conversation rather than just negotiation or bargaining.2 And since conversation aims for reconciliation, for realizing the common good, while the compromises of negotiation take us no further than accommodation, both patriots and deliberative democrats can claim an inheritance from the classical republican tradition.3 To classical republicans, negotiation is the mark of a corrupt polity dominated by factions, this being how they would conceive of the politics advocated by contemporary pluralist thinkers.4 Although neither the modern patriot nor the deliberative democrat would go that far, both share the classical republican’s concern for the common good, and thus both will be found voicing worries about too much negotiation. That said, when it comes to conversation, what the patriot and the deliberative democrat each mean by it are not the same. In the theories of deliberative democracy, an uncompromising primacy is given to what is considered a fundamentally “noncoercive” form of dialogue; mostly this is called “deliberation,” “discourse,” or “conversation,” although sometimes also “negotiation,” but it is always contrasted with a self-interested “bargaining” (or, confusingly, “negotiation”). Semantics aside, it is evident that the preference here is for conflicting interlocutors to truly listen to each other, to strive for genuine understanding rather than simply accommodating each other’s differences – and with this, at least, the patriot can have no complaint. Where the two approaches diverge, however, is that patriots conceive of conversation as that ordinary, everyday form of

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dialogue that is carried out in line with one’s common sense, whereas the deliberative democrat would have interlocutors conform to a theory of conversation, by which is meant a systematic set of procedures. This theory, moreover, is at the centre of a particular conception of democracy, one that calls for the state and civil society to relate in ways that would be discouraged by the patriot. Thus, given that I count myself among those who favour patriotism, I want to lend support to the approach here by offering some (admittedly brisk) objections to deliberative democracy.

I The first objection has to do with the rules of conversation that deliberative democrats tend to recommend. Jürgen Habermas has offered three groups of such rules. One is logical and semantic: if there is to be genuine deliberation, he claims, those participating must strive to use their predicates consistently and avoid making contradictions or giving varied meanings to the same expression. A second group derives from the assumption that interlocutors sincerely wish to reach an agreement: speakers must defend only what they really believe to be true, and those who would dispute a notion not under discussion must provide a reason for doing so. The third group is meant to ensure that minds change solely as a result of the better argument: no one competent to speak must be excluded from the discourse, and everyone should be allowed to question or introduce whatever assertion he or she sees fit.5 Let us take each in turn. Even if we accept the understandings of logic and semantics that are implied by the first group, demanding that their standards be met is sure to rule out a number of contributions that it is just hard to imagine us wanting to exclude. Humour, for example, with its tendency towards wordplay, would have to be prohibited,6 as would references to art.7 Although some deliberative democrats have come to be more open to the presence of these things during the deliberations, none is willing to welcome them into the chamber of the concept of deliberation itself; none, that is, considers them aspects of deliberative rationality per se. Rather, they see them as, at best, tolerable exceptions to the process. But humour, as I have argued elsewhere, is a form of interpretation, which suggests that employing it in a discussion is a matter of (practical) reason; and we could say the same about references to art.8

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Regarding the second group, requiring interlocutors to consistently tell the truth (as Habermas conceives of it) suggests, at the very least, that there is a failure to appreciate how such things as rhetoric, exaggeration, flattery, the odd white but tactful lie, and so on can sometimes contribute to reconciliation.9 At the very most, we might take on board none other than Don Quixote’s claim that “nothing that is directed at a virtuous end ... can be called deception.”10 Or we might think of King Lear’s disguised but “honest” Kent, who once declared: If but as well I other accents borrow, That can my speech defuse, my good intent May carry through (I.iv.1–4) This possibility of falsehood contributing to truth is obviously a difficult and complex issue. Perhaps an (admittedly controversial) distinction is in order here, one between what we might call the “plain truth” on the one hand and the “moral truth” on the other: only the latter can sometimes be served by lying. But rather than delve too deeply into this matter here, I will simply suggest that Habermas’s call for truth telling in conversation is just not flexible enough to take account of the complexity of actual dialogue. Indeed, his belief that speakers should defend only what they really believe to be true seems to me to reveal a utopianism that is at odds with the nature of political practice. For politics is a certain way of responding to conflict, and there will always be times when the plain truth must be counted among the antagonists. One might also accuse Habermas of utopianism as a result of his third group of rules, the one which demands that all who are competent be allowed to participate. For pushed to its logical conclusion, the requirement leads us to wonder whether it would be permissible to limit participation in the deliberations to fellow citizens. Not that contributions from foreigners should not be welcomed, only that, when the time comes to really decide, one would think that a citizenry, which after all has to live with the laws that result, should be able to do so on its own. Habermas’s rules, however, seem to imply a cosmopolitanism that is incompatible with this. Difficulties with the content of these rules aside, there is also a more general problem: the rules have their basis in theory, which means that any deliberations conforming to them will, to some

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degree at least, be detached from the practical context; as Habermas himself has put it, “discourses are islands in a sea of practice.”11 But it is only within practical contexts that people may skilfully judge what is – and what is not – appropriate to a given conversation. Instead of fidelity to some theory, in other words, conversation requires the degree of sensitivity that comes from engaging one’s common sense. Doing so necessitates making use of a form of reason that must be distinguished from theoretical reason since it is incompatible with the application of a previously formulated system.12 For only a practical, interpretive reason avoids the reduction, and thus distortion, of our goods that inevitably comes with theory.13 Patriotic conversation, being thoroughly hermeneutical, avails itself of just such a practical form of reason. To the patriot, although it may be helpful to articulate a few culturally relative maxims about how we should go about conversing,14 any theory will, given the standards of precision and systematicity that attend it, ultimately only get in the way. Partly, this is because conversation is a skill, a “knowing how” rather than a “knowing that,”15 and no skill can ever be articulated either in the way or to the degree that theory requires. And partly, this is because theories of conversation serve to shelter the practice itself from conversation; as one theoretical philosopher once put it, the aim of theory is “to present some matter so thoroughly researched that there remains no room for doubt, and so solidly presented that there remains no need for further discussion.”16 A patriotic politics, by contrast, will at least occasionally consist of conversations about conversation itself. Any rules guiding those conversations, then, must be rules not of theory but of thumb.17

II The reliance on theory is responsible for another problem with deliberative democracy: its bias. Deliberative democrats often claim that their theories are “just formal,”18 but in reality at least three kinds of ideological assertion tend to be derived directly from them.19 First, the deliberations called for are said to be especially appropriate within the bounds of civil society – in particular, within its public sphere; only later, once they have concluded, are these conclusions meant to be transmitted to or “pressed upon” the state. Evidently, this is democracy centred on the development of “public opinion,” the “will-formation” of a demos located within a civil society seen as

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autonomous from the state. Karl Marx once described it especially well: “in a democracy the constitution, the law, the state, insofar as it is a political constitution, is itself only a self-determination of the people, and a particular content of the people.”20 But this is only one possible conception of democracy. It is one, moreover, that has led deliberative democrats to emphasize such representative mechanisms as polling and referenda over political parties. The former, however, are much more at home in republican democratic systems such as those of the United States and Germany than in parliamentary ones such as exist in Britain and Canada.21 In a parliamentary system, the background assumption is that the power to govern originates not in “the People” but in “the Crown,” which resides in Parliament. Given this different source, the locus of political power is situated closer to the citizenry’s representatives in Parliament, and so within the domain of the state, than to the people in civil society. That is why, for example, no Parliament will ever bear a sign such as the one posted above the entrance to the German Reichstaag: “Dem deutschen Volke” (The German People). The role of the political party in parliamentary democratic representation is thus, at least in principle, more significant than the poll or referendum since the party, given its presence directly within Parliament, is once again closer to the source of political power. Moreover, rather than lending support to a conception of the state as a tool separate from the demos employing it, the party, through its membership, is an institution capable of connecting Parliament, and so the state, to civil society. In deliberative democracy, by contrast, whether or not there are sometimes calls for deliberations to take place within state institutions, the emphasis is clearly placed on the quality of discourse located in the public sphere. And this is done in a way that invariably affirms civil society’s independence from, rather than connection to, the state. Whenever deliberative democrats defend deliberative citizen forums, for example, these rarely if ever include politicians. No surprise, then, that the state and civil society are seen to partake of qualitatively different forms of power: a “communicative” one said to arise from successful deliberation in civil society’s public sphere and an “administrative” one associated with the functions of the state.22 One result of all this is that deliberative democrats, although they may differ over the balance to be struck between the two elements of

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that famous accommodation “liberal democracy,”23 all nevertheless assume that it is indeed a balance that must be struck. For they see each set of principles – the liberal and the democratic – as rooted in independently distinct domains: the state for the former and the public sphere for the latter; hence their assumption that a zero-sum relation is the best that can be had between them. But all this, again, arises from a tendency to favour polling and referenda over parties, and so it reveals an insensitivity towards the diversity of real-world democratic political cultures. For no good general account of conversation in politics should, in itself, have anything to say about particular institutions or practices since these rely on interpretations of a given polity’s traditions. Abstract theory, once again, only gets in the way. It should go without saying that the choice of some deliberative democrats to endorse liberal democracy constitutes another case of ideological bias on their part, this being the second criticism of their approach that I wish to mention here. Of course, by “liberal” they somehow intend something other than a particular political ideology. But a careful examination of what they believe this “liberalism” requires reveals it to be (un)surprisingly like liberalism the political ideology. For one of the main reasons they endorse it is because it affirms one of the conditions of discourse asserted by their theory, namely the respect for the equal liberty of individuals. But is this form of equality, particularly when it is understood to require an equality of power, really necessary for conversation? I would say not. True, interlocutors must be willing to speak and listen in turn if they are to have a hope of reconciling their positions, and this means striving together in an attempt to reach shared understandings. But they do not have to be equal in power to do these things; on the contrary, people who are radically unequal – whether in terms of physical strength, wealth, communication skills, and so on – are still capable of demonstrating the necessary will. Indeed, I would go as far as to suggest that deliberative democrats themselves haven’t room for this form of equality since, when it comes to what they describe as the “ideal case,” when “the only power that prevails,” as Habermas once put it, is the “force of the better argument,” such power is not, in fact, “a force equally available to all.”24 This is so for the very simple reason that some people are just smarter than others. So rather than equality of power, we

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would do better to follow Martin Buber’s claim that real dialogue requires only a kind of “symmetry” between interlocutors, one that is based on their willingness to participate in the genuine backand-forth – the tactful speaking and earnest listening – that is essential to it.25 That said, meeting the obligation to listen is a way to express a basic form of respect for whomever one is listening to, and an awareness of the importance of this is something that patriots could be said to share with deliberative democrats. Yet the former do not interpret this respect as something that could be captured with an abstract principle – one grounded, say, in a conception of humanity divested of all socially assigned roles. On the contrary, what patriots affirm is the individual’s dignity as a “person” rather than as a “human being,” which is to say that patriotic respect is based on another, more context-dependent value, namely honour. For to converse with others, and hence to listen to what they have to say with an open mind, is a way of honouring them – and this even if, in the end, one continues to disagree.26 It is in respecting people in this way that the patriot can thus be said to respect the integrity of civil society and so to endorse a modern form of politics. But this respect is never absolute. For there are times when one just cannot avoid the turn to negotiation. Deliberative democrats, however, affirm their principle of the equal liberty of individuals as something uncompromisable and hence as deserving of special protection when it comes into conflict with other values. Many of the more liberal deliberative democrats, for example, would enshrine the rights that derive from this principle within a justiciable constitution.27 But this means that those rights are going to be subject to neither conversation nor negotiation but to the pleading that courtroom proceedings make necessary. Thus, although I myself am a (Canadian) liberal, I must confess to being astonished at the assumption revealed here, namely that everyone in a democracy must affirm not only this particular ideology but also a “neutralist” form of it, one for which the idea of a justiciable constitution is virtually axiomatic. However, is it not precisely because there is genuine ideological diversity within Western polities that citizens often find themselves facing conflicts over the principle of the equal liberty of individuals? This means that the only way these citizens are going to be able to respond to these conflicts dialogically is if they refuse to grant the principle – indeed, any principle – an overriding status from the start.

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The same may be said of all the deliberative democrat’s rules. Why, one wonders, do the liberal deliberative democrats stop with the rights associated with the equal liberty of individuals? Why not enshrine into law – constitutional or otherwise – all the rules purportedly essential for successful deliberation? For example, how about a statute that prohibits those participating in deliberations from lying? Of course, few, if any, deliberative democrats would support this, but given their presuppositions, I fail to see why. On what grounds would they distinguish such a law from those derived from the other rules asserted by their theory? The third of the deliberative democrats’ biases is revealed by their call for greater levels of political participation than one tends to see in Western polities today. Of course, this is also the kind of thing favoured by classical republicans. Yet rare is the deliberative democrat who would echo the ancient claim that the life of politics is an intrinsic good in its own right. On the contrary, the deliberative democrat’s concern with greater participation is at least partly due to his or her theory’s requirement that anyone competent be allowed to participate. To the modern patriot, by contrast, any such abstract favouring of more participatory political cultures is inappropriate. This is not because greater participation is considered a bad thing; on the contrary, the patriot shares with the classical republican a belief in political liberty as an intrinsic good (albeit with the caveat that it is one such good among many). Rather, the point is that if a patriot is calling for more participation in politics, we can be sure that it is because he or she considers it a local rather than a philosophical matter, which is to say one that is highly relative to his or her polity. For no philosophical account of conversation ought, on its own, to have much to say about how many people should be joining in; on the contrary, this is just the kind of thing we should be conversing about.

III Another criticism is connected to what strikes me as the deliberative democrat’s too-strong division between just and rational deliberation on the one hand and self-interested and coercive bargaining on the other. In deliberative democracy, deliberation is said to require offering “reasons” as distinct from emotional appeals or “interests,” the latter being relegated to the negotiator. Arguments ought

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not to refer to particular persons or groups but must instead constitute disengaged and generalized claims that speak to the good of everyone.28 Of course, some deliberative democrats go even further, demanding that any claims we make in politics be “reciprocal,” by which is meant that we should be able to assume that others who do not share our particular worldview are nevertheless still able to accept them.29 But even putting this matter aside, it is clear that all deliberative democrats agree that good reasons are detached in the way demanded by most modern forms of theory. The problem with this is not only that one does not need detachment to arrive at the common good but also that detachment is actually an impediment to doing so. Because common goods are things shared by particular communities in particular historical contexts. The members of a given community will thus be capable of being true to their good only if they remain engaged with their own particularity. This is why conversation must allow them to remain intimately connected to the goods that constitute their identities; only this way will they be capable of listening for how to transform those goods in order to bring about reconciliation. Realizing the common good, in other words, cannot be a matter of transcending differences, of reaching a consensus about the same, detached thing, since understanding, hermeneutics teaches us, is always understanding differently.30 Moreover, the detachment required of a deliberative-democratic public would, to borrow an argument from Kierkegaard, actually make its members care less, rather than more, about each other, for people can feel real commitment only when they are present in the concrete.31 The plausibility of patriotic conversation is only enhanced when we contrast its requirements with another posited by the deliberative democrat: the idea that interlocutors must exhibit something of an altruistic spirit if the common good is to be fulfilled. The problem with this is that it makes the call for conversation in politics seem naive. Patriots, however, converse because they wish to avoid making the concessions that negotiation requires, which is to say that they prefer transforming, rather than compromising, their conception of the good. This is why they listen to each other – not because they are selfless but because they hope to learn something and thereby improve their position. If anything, then, we might choose to describe their ethics as a noninstrumental form of enlightened self-interest.32

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We can do so because theirs is a substantive rather than procedural ethics, one that rejects the selfishness-altruism dichotomy underlying the latter. And in so doing, it avoids another difficulty that plagues the deliberative democrat, or would if he or she recognized it. Like patriots, deliberative democrats accept that there are times when it is legitimate for citizens to give up on trying to achieve consensus – times, that is, when the conversation unavoidably breaks down.33 Yet the move to negotiation, which will (one hopes) follow, cannot consist of some stark motivational shift from ethics to self-interestedness, as it would if it amounted to a move from a formal to a purely instrumental form of rationality. On the contrary, the patriot agrees with the pluralist, for whom good-faith (as distinct from realpolitik) negotiations are those based on a willingness to tolerate the other and so to make at least some concessions for reasons other than that one feels forced to do so. Such negotiation cannot be associated with forms of practical reason that require either respecting certain abstract deontic constraints or employing disengaged calculations of rational choice. Yet, although deliberative democrats do distinguish between fair and unfair bargaining – “fair” being said to consist of respect for the procedures that ensure parties have an equal opportunity to pressure each other34 – those parties are nevertheless still said to act according to an instrumental form of rationality. And this means there is no room for their making the kinds of concessions that genuinely good-faith negotiations require. Moreover, even the sometimes legitimate move to force, which arises when negotiations have unavoidably broken down, cannot be considered rational in deliberative-democratic terms. Although deliberative democrats have a theory about how to deliberate, this theory is silent about when it ought to be suspended; the result, we might say, is that they simply do not know when to stop. When is it appropriate to shift from conversation to negotiation or from negotiation to a more untrammelled form of force? One can answer only if one can judge in a way that is engaged with rather than disengaged from the context and thereby make use of the practical form of reason that I identified above with common sense. It is a form of reason, of course, that shares a great deal with Aristotle’s notion of phronRsis, or practical wisdom. But deliberative democrats favour Kant over Aristotle, which is why they end up with an approach that is just too abstract to do the job required.

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IV The final criticism of deliberative democracy that I want to make is, I believe, the most significant. Above, I describe deliberative democrats as calling for a politics that, like the classical republican’s and modern patriot’s but unlike the pluralist’s, affirms the common good.35 That said, deliberative democrats would have us do so in a way quite different from the other two. For one thing, as we have already noted, they assume that deliberation must aim for generalizable reasons that require individuals to at least partly disengage from their particular identities. But this makes available only a very restricted form of solidarity between citizens, essentially a “solidarity among strangers,”36 which is why both the patriot and the classical republican uphold instead a kind of friendship between citizens. Because only this way, they believe, can there be talk of genuine compatriots. This connects to the particular way that the theories of deliberative democracy assert “the boundaries between ‘state’ and ‘society.’”37 The two, as we have already noted, are conceived as separate from each other, with the accent placed on the autonomy of civil society’s public sphere. This separation, however, as well as the embrace of the fragmentation, or plurality, of discourses within the public sphere that sometimes comes with it,38 means there is no place for a conception of the common good that is larger than that shared by the demos. One consequence of this is that the deliberative democrat’s state cannot be said to express, even occasionally, an “ethical community,”39 which is to say a civic or political community that encompasses all citizens, including those who spend their time in and around the state or economy rather than in the public sphere. Now this is a serious failing. One reason why has to do with the basically functionalist grounds on which deliberative democrats establish the independence of the domains of state and civil society. As they see it, the state is unable to exhibit “communicative action,” which is to say that it cannot be a locus of genuine political conversation. The reason is that state agents, unlike those people situated in the public sphere, must meet certain imperatives if they are to secure the state’s longevity and stability: sometimes, for example, politicians must simply come to a decision, meaning that they do not have the luxury to deliberate in a genuinely open-ended way. Interestingly, some

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social-choice critics of deliberative democracy have made the very same complaint about deliberations in the public sphere: Deliberation theorists ... wish away the vulgar fact that under democracy deliberation ends in voting ... Deliberation may lead to a decision that is reasoned: it may enlighten the reasons the decision is taken and elucidate the reasons it should not be taken. Even more, these reasons may guide the implementation of the decision, the actions of the government. But the authorization for these actions, including coercion, originates from voting, counting heads, not from discussion.40 Deliberative democrats effectively counter this charge, however, and so reaffirm their state–public sphere division, by arguing that government is responsible for more than simply the “implementation” of decisions since it is, for the most part, within its domain and not that of the public sphere that the decisions are taken. Not being subject to a similar pressure to decide, the people situated within the public sphere are able to attain a level of openness that is conducive to developing influential discourses, something that is said to be unavailable to state agents. As John Dryzek puts it: Democratic life is not just the endless interplay of discourse. There have to be moments of decisive collective action, and in contemporary societies it is mainly (but not only) the state that has this capacity. Discourses and their contests do not stop at the edge of the public sphere; they can also permeate the understandings and assumptions of state actors. Yet it is important to maintain a public sphere autonomous from the state, for discursive interplay within the public sphere is always likely to be less constrained than within the state. It is within the public sphere that insurgent discourses and identities can first establish themselves.41 Similarly, according to Habermas: Only the political system can “act.” It is a subsystem specialized for collectively binding decisions whereas the communicative structures of the public sphere constitute a far-flung network of sensors that react to the pressure of society-wide problems and

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stimulate influential opinions. The public opinion that is worked up via democratic procedures into communicative power cannot “rule” of itself but can only point the use of administrative power in specific directions.42 In deliberative democracy, then, the voice of the people is heard more through the “context of discovery”43 that it establishes as a result of deliberations within the public sphere than through voting. And this is precisely because the people, unlike state agents, do not feel a similar pressure to decide. That said, the “deliberation–decision” dichotomy underlying all of this is overdrawn. For it contains within it an exaggerated notion of a decision as something that comes only after all the talking has finished, as the mark of a “moment” that breaks the flow of dialogue. In reality, however, time in no sense stops when a decision is taken; no decision is ever really final since even the application of one often invites debate.44 Hence Paul Ricoeur: “every judgement calls for a ‘but’ beyond itself.”45 And after all, what are reasoned decisions if not interpretations of what must be done, and as HansGeorg Gadamer has declared, “conclusive interpretation simply does not exist.”46 In consequence, I want to suggest that we recognize the following possibilities. In the best (patriotic) case, when a decision is arrived at through successful conversation and expresses a reconciliation, it can be expected quickly to lose its controversial character and so to fade into the background. More often than not, however, decisions will be reached because people have had to participate in the give-and-take of negotiations, or because they have accepted the results of a vote, or finally, because the state has imposed a decision even though a minority (and sometimes even the majority) continue to disagree. As regards such cases, it is indeed necessary to speak, to varying degrees, of coercion and not only of dialogue. As Jocelyn Maclure has written, “It is not a question of closing one’s eyes before that other moment in politics: the moment of decision and institutionalization (the one previous being that of deliberation). This is the moment – tragic but unavoidable – when injustices are committed and liberties restricted. Sooner or later, and always in imperfect circumstances, a decision must be taken.”47 Although Maclure’s evident negativity here – “tragic but unavoidable” – smacks of pluralism, he can nevertheless be said to share with the deliberative democrat the notion that the “moment” of

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decision is something sharply distinguishable from that of dialogue. But this is, once again, a mistake. For more often than not the debate carries on after a decision is taken, with those on the losing end vowing to continue the struggle. This will surely influence implementation, as will any new debates that the implementation may itself trigger, debates that themselves will surely be influenced by the original, ostensibly completed one. Given all of this, we should accept that any talk of some sharply distinct “moment” of decision is artificial, implying an unrealistic break between dialogue on the one hand and coercive, wholly nondialogical application on the other. This leads me to call for a blurring of the deliberative democrat’s distinction between the domains of state and civil society. True, there may be more deliberating going on in the latter and more decision taking in the former, but the recognition that these two activities are not all that different suggests that any line we might wish to draw between them should be “dotted” rather than “solid.” And how else to interpret the spaces in that line if not as indicative of something shared between the members of a community that englobes both state and society? This is the civic or political community, and it is one that patriots place at the centre of their concerns.48 We can reach the same conclusion through another challenge to the way deliberative democrats distinguish between state and society. This one has to do with how they believe the public sphere and the state ought to relate: the former, it is said, should “transmit” its deliberations to the latter. Whatever they exactly mean by this, it certainly does not consist of the kind of pure deliberation aimed at the common good that is said to have its place within the public sphere. As Habermas would have it, for example, the communicative power generated in the public sphere should be “exercised in the manner of a siege”49 on the state. And Dryzek has expressed a worry that Habermas’s vision is not adversarial enough, his main concern being with the “co-option” of social movements by the state, something that leads him to go so far as to recommend that those in the public sphere work on behalf of the “insurgency” of the state.50 No surprise, then, that while Dryzek emphasizes the public sphere’s discursive capacity to change the terms of political debate within the state, he specifies that this is discursive only in a Foucaultian and so noncommunicative sense.51 At least Habermas, as we have noted, writes of the public sphere’s ability to establish a certain context of discovery that can influence exchanges between

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state agents. Hence his claim that “in the discursively structured opinion- and will-formation of a legislature, lawmaking is interwoven with the formation of communicative power.”52 In Habermas’s case, then, we ought to conceive of the transmission of deliberations from civil society to the state as characterized by a mix of communicative and other non-truth-seeking forms of discourse. We may say the same of James Bohman, for whom “the debate mixes together argumentation, compromise, and bargaining, as well.”53 But there is a problem with this whole picture. It is that, practically speaking, such a mix is just not viable. For conversation is an extremely fragile mode of dialogue; it can be an effective response to conflict only when all involved strive to engage in the kind of speaking and listening that it requires. One might say that, while disagreeing, conversationalists have to be “opponents” who are not also “adversaries,” which is to say that they must strive, as well as be seen to be striving, together for their common good.54 The slightest indication that one party has taken an adversarial stance is bound to make the others defensive and so undermine their capacity to listen with an open mind. The conversation, as a result, will surely break down. This means that although it is possible for adversarial interlocutors to learn things indirectly from their exchanges, and hence wrong to suggest that no reconciliation, no integration, could ever emerge from their encounter, it would still be wrong to claim that they are involved in a genuine conversation. “Mix,” then, is simply not a feasible characterization of the deliberative democrat’s transmission mechanism. This is why, in a deliberative democracy, no real reconciliation is possible, much less encouraged, between state and society. Citizens, in consequence, have no reason to aim for the realization of their civic, political community as a whole. Now although this will certainly not worry the deliberative democrat, the patriot would indeed object. For is it really true that we should never strive for a degree of reconciliation between state agents and other citizens? It seems to me that only the (unwarranted) assumption that an impermeable border lies between them rules this out. Moreover, recognizing the spaces in that border means recognizing that, depending on the issue being discussed, political conversations have the potential to realize much more than just “democracy” strictly speaking. To the patriot, that is, democracy is

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only a part of good governance, for it is a feature of a larger whole, namely “politics.” Not only the people, but also such goods as a respect for the individual and a concern for economic welfare, for the environment, and so on, make calls that conversing patriots strive to heed.

V In fact, I consider this essay itself to be a contribution to just such a conversation. My disagreement with deliberative democrats, that is, is oppositional but not adversarial, for I believe that we can all be said to share a concern for the truth of the matter that is in question here. Otherwise put, getting a better understanding of conversation’s role in politics is a good that we hold in common. Moreover, even though this particular conversation is, for the most part, limited to the bounds of (academic) civil society, I find it hard to believe that anyone would prefer to have its conclusions pressed upon the state in an adversarial manner as opposed to convincing our political representatives of their veracity. I would also point out that conversations limited to the academy simply do not respect anything like the rules of discourse theory. For one thing, they are certainly not open to all comers: books and journal articles are vetted by appointed readers before publication, and not all proposals for delivering papers at conferences are accepted. For another, there is today a whole school of political thought – namely the postmodernist – whose contributions often consist of ironic wordplay and self-consciously contradictory assertions. Yet few, if any, of those who reject it would support banning its practitioners from the discussion on the grounds of their violating some rule of discourse. In fact, many who oppose postmodernism have taken comfort in its parody by a paper submitted under false pretences to an academic journal that was nevertheless fooled into publishing it.55 Falsehood and deception, they would thus have to admit, are indeed sometimes the way to truth. Finally, it should go without saying that the participants in this discussion come from a variety of ideological persuasions. Liberalism, conservatism, socialism, feminism, green ideology, nationalism – all these and more have their voices, although liberalism’s, it must be said, is the loudest in the academy today. We should not only

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welcome this diversity, however, but also try to ensure that, before people speak up on behalf of their respective ideology, they are willing and able to converse. But for that, they will need to uphold a patriotic, not deliberative, democracy.

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3 The Ironic Tragedy of Human Rights If you are kissing your child or your wife, say that it is a human being you are kissing; if the wife or child dies, you will not be disturbed. Epictetus, The Manual, 86 I wish you to write a book on the power of the words, and the processes by which the human feelings form affinities with them. Coleridge, letter to Godwin, September 18001

I With the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the idea of human rights came into its own on the world stage. More than anything, the Declaration was a response to the Holocaust, to both its perpetrators and the failure of the rest of the world adequately to come to the aid of its victims. Since that year, however, we have seen many more cases of mass murder. Think of China, Bali, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and now Darfur. Of course, one could always claim that such horrors would have been even more frequent if not for the Declaration. But I want to argue otherwise. For I believe that human rights have contributed to making mass murder more, rather than less, likely. I begin with a puzzle. Consider the following: first, the fundamental rights of approximately 6 million human beings were violated due to Nazi persecution; second, an excerpt from Jean Améry’s account of his torture at the hands of an ss man: In the bunker there hung from the vaulted ceiling a chain that above ran into a roll. At its bottom end it bore a heavy broadly curved iron hook. I was led to the instrument. The hook gripped

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into the shackle that held my hands together behind my back. Then I was raised with the chain until I hung about a meter over the floor. In such a position, or rather, when hanging this way, with your hands behind your back, for a short time you can hold at a half-oblique through muscular force. During these few minutes, when you are already expending your utmost strength, when sweat has already appeared on your forehead and lips, and you are breathing in gasps, you will not answer any questions. Accomplices? Addresses? Meeting places? You hardly hear it. All your life is gathered in a single, limited area of the body, the shoulder joints, and it does not react; for it exhausts itself completely in the expenditure of energy. But this cannot last long, even with people who have a strong physical constitution. As for me, I had to give up rather quickly. And now there was a crackling and splintering in my shoulders that my body has not forgotten until this hour. The balls sprang from their sockets. My own body weight caused luxation; I fell into a void and now hung by my dislocated arms, which had been torn high from behind and were now twisted over my head. Torture, from Latin torquere, to twist. What visual instruction in etymology! At the same time, the blows from the horsewhip showered down on my body, and some of them sliced cleanly through the light summer trousers that I was wearing on this twenty-third of July 1943.2 Now I ask the reader: Which of the two has the greater impact? Which stays with you – indeed, might even keep you up at night? Otherwise put, which is the more powerful? Surely it is the second. Yet the reality represented by the first is infinitely worse. Of all people, it is Joseph Stalin who tells us why. As he once purportedly declared: “One death is a tragedy, a million a statistic.” Indeed, allow me to confess to a purposive inaccuracy above. The correct figure for the victims of Nazi persecution is closer to 11 million, whereas 6 million refers to the Jews alone. That so many people tend to overlook this is a testament not to their callousness but to the inherent weakness of numbers to carry meaning and thus to establish fields of significance when in competition with such powerful narratives as the story of Nazi anti-Semitism. This is also why Hiroshima and Nagasaki have always been more notable than Dresden, even though the Allied bombing of the latter was for a long time believed to have produced, by some estimates, 30,000

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more civilian deaths. Thus the lesson here should be clear: when it comes to sensitivity about historical events, literacy will always be more effective than numeracy because the contextual, or “thick,” is always more meaningful, more powerful, than the abstract, or “thin.” There is a reason why the classical rhetoricians referred to vivid, detailed description as enargeia.3 Human rights talk, however, is thin. It invokes both a biological species as well as a series of universal, independently distinct things (the right to life, the right not to be tortured, etc.) that its members are said to bear. To say that these things are independently distinct is to say that they are separable items capable of being placed on a list, as with those of the various charters, schedules, and declarations. And indeed, this is precisely what abstracting does: it separates things out, isolating them from our concerns as social beings immersed in particular cultural practices. As Locke once put it: “Words become general by being made the signs of general ideas: and ideas become general, by separating from them the circumstances of time and place, and any other ideas that may determine them to this or that particular existence.”4 The problem, however, is that we tend to be interested in things as they exist in a context with others. Indeed, the very word “interest” comes from the Latin inter-esse, which means “to be between,” while the Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the root of “abstraction” denotes a “drawing away from” and that the root of its opposite, “contextual,” means “woven together.” Hence that everyday question “How’s things?” which expresses our interest in someone because it refers to the whole nexus of things they are attached to and are concerned about.5 Or think of how difficult it is to memorize lists of isolated words when one is studying a new language; as lexical approaches to language acquisition have shown, collocations, patterns of words, are much easier to grasp and retain.6 Another example: “salt” and “sodium chloride” (NaCl), thick and thin ways, respectively, of referring to the “same” thing. NaCl stands alone, definable with a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, which is to say that its properties are universal rather than relative to context. Salt, however, has a history, or rather histories, that are integrated with myriad cultural practices: it has served as a form of currency, as a means to bring luck (by throwing it over one’s shoulder), as a condiment, and so on.7 Salt is thus much more meaningful than NaCl, and that is why we care about it more.

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So my complaint about human rights is not at all with the values they represent; rather, it is with what happens to those values when they are articulated abstractly. For when it comes to ethics, abstraction disempowers. What I mean is that it detracts from a value’s ability to motivate people to uphold it. This happens because, as we have seen, the move from thick to thin language makes things less of a concern to us, or at least to those of us who are not natural scientists. As Hubert L. Dreyfus once put it: “It is a fundamental and strange characteristic of our lives that insofar as we turn our most personal concerns into objects, which we can study and choose, they no longer have a grip on us.”8 Indeed, abstractions can even serve as a defensive mechanism when we need to distance ourselves from people’s suffering. Think of the numbers that the Nazis tattooed on concentration camp prisoners to identify them without having to use their names, or of euphemistic military jargon: “collateral damage” for the deaths of civilians; “incontinent ordnances” for wayward bombs; “traumatic amputation” for the blowing off of arms and legs. Or consider Boris Pasternak’s reaction when, visiting the Soviet countryside in the early 1930s, he bore witness to the incredible suffering of the peasantry there: “There was such inhuman, unimaginable misery, such a terrible disaster, that it began to seem almost abstract ... [For it] would not fit within the bounds of consciousness.”9 Human rights talk, I am thus claiming, helps to take people out of our consciousness. In fact, just by referring to them as members of a certain species, as “humans” rather than as “persons,” we take them out of their social context and so, once again, makes ourselves care less about them. Hannah Arendt once put the point as follows: “it seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow man.”10 Michael Ignatieff thus seems to me wrong to have declared that “we are all Shakespeare’s ‘thing itself’: unaccommodated man, the poor, bare forked animal.” Indeed, it is just because this thing itself “has become the subject – and the rationale – for the modern universal human rights culture”11 that we need to see how that rationale self-undermines. We can reach the same conclusion by taking account of the kind of equality associated with the idea of human rights. To philosophers such as Richard Rorty, the idea’s global diffusion constitutes progress because it brings “an increase in our ability to see more

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and more differences among people as morally irrelevant.”12 But this encourages us to view those people as equal because essentially the same. Equality as so understood – equality as uniformity – is the equality of abstractions, and in this context it is precisely the wrong kind. Maurice Blanchot, writing of the Marquis de Sade, indicates why: To consider human beings from the standpoint of quantity kills them more completely than does the physical violence that annihilates them. The criminal unites, perhaps, in an indissoluble way with the man he kills. But even while sacrificing his victim, the libertine, on the other hand, only experiences the need to sacrifice a thousand more. He seems strangely free of any connection to his victim. In his eyes, his victim does not exist for him or herself, his victim is not a distinct being, but a simple component, indefinitely exchangeable, within an enormous erotic equation. To read declarations like this one – “Nothing is more enjoyable for me, nothing excites me like a large number of beings” – we better understand why Sade makes use of the idea of equality as support for so much of his argumentation. All men are equal: this means that no creature is worth more than another, every being is interchangeable, each one has only the meaning of one unit within an infinite number. Before the Unique Being, all beings are equal in worthlessness, and the Unique Being, as he reduces them to nothing, only makes this nothingness manifest.13 In affirming the equal uniformity of his victims, the Sadean libertine does not so much “dehumanize” them as “depersonalize” them, which alone is considered an essential step towards their destruction. The target, that is, is not their membership in a certain species, but their particularity as persons, their ability to constitute unique meanings, to affirm that certain things “matter.”14 If evil’s aim is only to reveal its victims as, or make them into, animals, then how to account for the Nazis’ concern with animal welfare? Hitler was a well-known vegetarian, and Reichsmarschal Göring not only barred vivisection in all scientific work, noting the “unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments,” but also threatened to commit to concentration camps “those who still think they can treat animals as inanimate property.”15 Unlike most clichés, the belief that the Nazis thought Jews were not human is only

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a part of the story. For the Nazis’ record of humiliating their victims before killing them suggests that their racism was more a matter of targeting a certain variety of the human species than it was of denying membership in that species.16 They chose their victims, in other words, not because they considered them inhuman but because they viewed them as persons of a certain type, namely those whose “matterings” blocked the Nazis’ “creative” project, the reign of the Third Reich. Hence Joseph Goebbels in 1943: The excuse [lackeys of the Jews] give for their provocative conduct is always the same: the Jews are after all human beings too. We never denied that, just as we never denied the humanity of murderers, child rapists, thieves and pimps ... [T]he Jews must be removed from the German community, for they endanger our national unity ... There is only one effective measure: cut them out.17 To combat such evil, then, one certainly needs to assert the dignity of the persecuted – but as persons not as human beings – which is to say in a way that honours their uniqueness, their identities. I believe the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe was referring to precisely this way of respecting people when he had one of his fictional characters say the following: Let me ask a question. How do we salute our fellows when we come in and see them massed in assembly so huge we cannot hope to greet them one by one, to call each man by his title? Do we not say: To everyone his due? Have you thought what a wise practice our fathers fashioned out of those simple words? To every man his own! To each his chosen title! We can all see how that handful of words can save us from the ache of four hundred handshakes and the headache of remembering a like multitude of praise-names. But it does not end there. It is saying to us: Every man has what is his; do not bypass him to enter his compound.18 What we have here is a general but still thick way of referring to people. Both thick and thin, that is, are domains in which meaning can range from the specific to the general (e.g., thick: from “salt” to “spice”; thin: from “NaCl” to “ionic crystal”). So unlike with Locke’s statement above, we should recognize that separating things out makes them abstract but not necessarily general. And

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unlike with Rorty, we need to be careful to maintain a sharp contrast between the thick and the thin. It is because Rorty views these two as different only in degree that he ends up contradicting himself by affirming the power of thick expression to raise the concern about oppression and suffering on the one hand and endorsing what he calls “human rights culture” on the other.19 No surprise, then, that when it comes to deliberating about justice at the global level, he thinks that it makes sense to tell a “relatively abstract and sketchy story,” one that invokes “abstract principles.”20 But surely a story, any story, given that it presents events together in a context, is the opposite of an abstraction; any narrative ethics, in consequence, must remain thoroughly thick. So given that, as many have pointed out, human rights doctrines emerged to counteract our tendency towards particularistic circles of concern,21 my objection is that it is precisely such circles that motivate us to act ethically. Consider the following from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong.”22 One can read Samantha Power’s “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide as an account of American foreign policy that shows it to be guided by the spirit of Emerson’s declaration. So how to respond effectively? Surely, it cannot consist of calling on people like Emerson to abolish their particularistic circles of concern in favour of duties to “humanitarian” assistance, those that derive from some set of positive human rights. For they simply will not do it.23 Nor should we be trying to show them that they ought to be worried about what happens over there because it will, sooner or later, have an impact on those whom they care about over here. For this, too, rarely works (for long). No, what they need to appreciate is that their poor are also over there (i.e., that their circle of concern is actually much wider than they are aware). All the human rights talk, however, only gets in the way. What is required instead is the telling of convincing thick stories, both fictional and nonfictional, that can empower the relevant values.24 Such stories are effective not because they engage sentiment over reason, as Rorty would argue,25 but because they call upon a practical as distinct from theoretical form of reason, one that should be

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virtually equated with emotion. Much like Aristotle’s conception of practical wisdom (phronRsis), it is a matter of persons having the dispositions appropriate to given contexts, and this requires having good, which is to say reasonable, interpretations of those contexts. The lesson of such stories for people like Emerson? That we are all compatriots. Teaching this would make a difference. I think of my own country, Canada. Although its Constitution contains a Charter of Rights and Freedoms that includes no positive, socio-economic rights, and although it has ratified the un Declaration, which does include such rights, the Canadian state nevertheless redistributes over ten times more wealth to the Canadian poor than it does to severely impoverished foreigners.26 Why is this? It is because the former are recognized not as rights-bearers but as fellow citizens, as members of a civic or political community. This community is based not on some abstract theory of justice but on the sense that we Canadians share a particular, historical good in common, one that we have for some time been striving (albeit inadequately) to express in our laws.27 Now if I, as a Canadian, can feel an obligation to millions of my compatriots, the vast majority of whom I shall never meet, it should be evident that this is a number without limit, which is to say that it is possible for someone to feel an attachment to billions, not only millions. Yet the presence of the world’s civic or political community – one that, it goes without saying, contains many other communities within it – has been obscured by all the talk of human rights. Hence the weakness of its call. And hence the parsimony of the First World when faced with the needs of the Third.

II The rise of human rights has also constituted an ironic tragedy of sorts for those philosophers who have attempted to lend it intellectual support. On the whole, they may be divided into two groups. One tries to interlock rights within abstract systematic theories of justice, thus fixing the priorities between them. The other rejects such theories as infeasible and asserts that the best we can do when rights conflict is to negotiate, to compromise or balance them against each other. Either way, my claim is that their approaches are counterproductive.

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Today, it is the “theoretical cosmopolitans” who lead the first group. In so doing, however, they fail to see that their abstractions not only disempower but also bring a degree of unreality to their claims. For they end up committing an error parallel to one that Martin Heidegger identified with epistemology since Descartes: just as epistemologists fail to appreciate that their subject-object dualism, and so their talk of “mental representations” such as beliefs and desires, presupposes a pre-reflective background of everyday practices,28 theoretical cosmopolitans fail to see that they cannot derive their ideology, their way of defining and ranking values, directly from philosophy.29 For the values an ideology affirms need to be explicitly articulated or prioritized only when they have “shown up” or emerged from our pre-reflective background of practices in particular historical contexts, a result of their having come into conflict. Dragging them out in the abstract leads either to their (albeit sometimes creative) distortion or to the confusion that comes from making vague and contradictory claims. The problem with theoretical cosmopolitans, in other words, is that they fail to put conflict first. Consider Martha Nussbaum’s Stoic cosmopolitanism. In a wellknown essay, she offers a defence of “the person whose allegiance is to the worldwide community of human beings.” Her approach is grounded in a certain philosophical anthropology, one that “recognizes in people what is especially fundamental about them, most worthy of respect and acknowledgement: their aspirations to justice and goodness and their capacity for reasoning this connection.” One might object, however, that some people are more admirable for other reasons, say for their athletic or artistic abilities. Nevertheless, few would disagree that, if Nussbaum is right, we should be concerned, above all, with people’s welfare and thus with coming to the aid of those who are suffering from poverty or oppression. Hence her call on Americans to reform their educational system so that students may learn about such things as “the problems of hunger and pollution in India, and the implication of these problems for the larger issues of global hunger and global ecology.” For if people are “above all, citizens of a world of human beings,”30 focusing on these specific aspects of Indian experience makes a great deal of sense. Yet Nussbaum isn’t very clear about what she means by “above all.” For example, sometimes it seems as though her argument is altogether incompatible with national sentiments, as when she asserts

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that they constitute but “a colourful idol,” or that national boundaries are not “morally salient,” or that a person’s nationality is “a morally irrelevant characteristic.” These all lead her to claim that we should be like the Stoic who affirms “only” reason and love of humanity and thus willingly enters into a kind of “exile” by refusing “to be defined by his local origins and group memberships.” This, she tells us, is the cosmopolitan way – only it is “principled”; only its values are “morally good.”31 Sometimes, however, Nussbaum’s favouring of the global over the local seems far less one-sided. For example, when she writes that the world community is the one that is, “fundamentally, the source of our moral obligations” and that our “fundamental allegiance” should go to it, “fundamental” could mean “much more important” yet not exclusively so. This reading is encouraged by her claim that, although one must “centrally” affirm humanity and world citizenship as “the focus” of civic education, it is acceptable for people to continue to be attached to their “particular loves.” It is even appropriate for them to give their own sphere “special care” and to devote “special attention to the history and current situation of their own nation” – as long, that is, as they do so “in addition” to learning about other cultures. For “we should also work to make all human beings part of our community of dialogue and concern, base our political deliberations on that interlocking commonality, and give the circle that defines our humanity special attention and respect.”32 So Nussbaum is rather vague about what it means to give humanity our “fundamental allegiance.” Doing so could involve bestowing upon it our sole allegiance, since this alone is moral, or only awarding it greater priority over more local concerns. The latter could itself entail trumping those local concerns when there is a conflict, or simply outweighing them to some degree, or even that the global and the local should be considered more or less equally valid, depending on the circumstances. Indeed, the matter is made no clearer on the few occasions when Nussbaum writes about what her position would mean in practice. For example, to agree with her that we should “most seriously consider” the rights of other human beings is said to also mean accepting “large-scale economic and political consequences,” yet Nussbaum says nothing about what these might be. Moreover, when she finally does “put conflict first” by posing two specific practical questions – “May I give my daughter

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an expensive college education, while children all over the world are starving and effective relief agencies exist? May Americans enjoy their currently high standard of living, when there are reasons to think the globe as a whole could not sustain that level of consumption?” – her reply goes no further than declaring that “these are hard questions, and there will and should be much debate about the proper answers.” It is thus difficult to see how this is compatible with her belief that “world citizenship ... places exacting demands on the imaginings of each of us.”33 Nevertheless, I think Nussbaum is right to endorse dialogue as the best response to the questions she raises. But if it is to be a truly open dialogue, a conversation aimed at reconciliation, at realizing the common good, she needs to appreciate how this is incompatible with any antecedent, theory-driven call to give priority to some values over others, whether the global over the local or vice versa. For conversation demands that people listen to each other instead of to some preconceived doctrine – only that way can they determine what is appropriate to the context in question. There is thus something contradictory about Nussbaum’s endorsing cosmopolitanism in the abstract, on the basis of theoretical considerations, while at the same time calling for a dialogical response to conflict.34 And the result is that it becomes very difficult to answer the question of what the priorities she asserts really mean. Thomas Pogge, a much more thoroughgoing theoretical cosmopolitan, partly avoids this contradiction by suggesting that personal questions such as the one Nussbaum poses about her daughter’s expensive education are unnecessary. For he sees cosmopolitanism as entailing certain responsibilities towards the institutions we participate in but not as regards our behaviour towards other individuals or collective agents.35 Thus does he focus on the global economic order, making what appears to be a very strong case that it bears responsibility for the severe poverty in the developing world and that this poverty could be eliminated at very little cost to the developed world.36 Yet Pogge also goes further. Given that, in our day, about one-third of all human deaths (i.e., some 50,000 premature deaths daily)37 are due to poverty-related causes, he implies that the citizens of developed countries can be compared to the Germans who supported the Nazis during the Second World War. For we are “hunger’s willing executioners ... accomplices in a monumental crime against humanity.”38

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Although Pogge doesn’t come out and say so, one would think that, if he is right, some kind of Nuremberg trial is in order, at least for our leaders (although why stop there?). Regardless, I want to suggest that the reason Pogge feels confident enough in his position to invoke the notion that a crime is being committed is that his theoretical cosmopolitanism, like so many practical positions derived from philosophy, is inclined to legalism. For theorists assume that their abstract principles are systematically unified and so, like the relatively uncontroversial statutes of law,39 that they should be considered above the conflicts of everyday politics. It is because Pogge believes that he has a correct theory, and thus that the question is not one upon which reasonable people can disagree, that he would have us turn to the courts rather than to political dialogue. Indeed, Pogge’s theory is also behind why he thinks personal as distinct from institutional questions are irrelevant. According to him, we simply cannot “make our ordinary economic decisions in such a way as to avoid aggravating anyone’s severe poverty. Endorsing this aim is pointless because we cannot possibly live up to it. In the present world it is completely beyond the capacity of affluent individuals to shape their economic conduct so as to avoid causing any poverty deaths in the poor countries.”40 But this is just not true; changing that conduct even slightly could make a very real difference to some people. For example, by regularly donating but a fraction of one’s disposable income to organizations that work to alleviate poverty, real lives could be saved. Let’s be specific. A fine watch, say one valued at US$200, could be sold and the money sent to an oxfam Emergency Relief Program, which as I write could be used to help bring water to the survivors of the October 2005 earthquake in India and Pakistan. Yet many people, including myself, cosmopolitans such as Nussbaum and Pogge, and even egalitarians such as G.A. Cohen,41 still choose to wear such watches, not to mention buy the odd fashionable outfit (equivalent to two lives?), dine out (one life per meal?), or go to the cinema (half a life per film?). My point is not that we absolutely must forgo these things.42 Rather, it is that our choice not to says something about our ethical priorities, namely that our concern for humans the world over is not particularly deep. No surprise, then, that even Nussbaum’s and Pogge’s cosmopolitanisms seem to have room for granting priority to one’s own needs or to the needs of

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those with whom one has a personal relationship over the basic needs of all human beings. Only the needs of one’s country or those of the other communities of which one may be a member appear to be permanently downgraded. But then this helps us to see that only a very small number of people can be described as giving priority “above all” other considerations to the needs of humanity. In fact, there is a very simple reason for why this must be so: heroism is, by definition, exceptional.43 For that, I believe, is what giving overriding loyalty to an abstraction such as “the needs of all human beings” amounts to: the greatness of the hero (or saint). But heroism, we should note, is beyond ideology – indeed, beyond politics.44 Moreover, since “humanity” is an abstraction, we ought to object to all the loose theoretical cosmopolitan talk about the existence of a “community of human beings” – not because there is no global community but because those who belong to it need to be seen as particular, culture-endowed persons, not as members of a biological species. Otherwise put, real communities are in a fundamental sense thick, historical entities. The theoretical cosmopolitan, however, would have us transcend the particular and affirm the universal since anything else is said to give “an accident of history a false air of moral weight and glory.”45 Indeed, as Nussbaum adds: “the accident of being born a Sri Lankan, or a Jew, or a female, or an African-American, or a poor person, is just that – an accident of birth. It is not and should not be taken to be a determinant of moral worth. Human personhood, by which I mean the possession of practical reason and other basic moral capacities, is the source of our moral worth, and this worth is equal.”46 Yet surely the fact that one has been born human and not, say, a canine is just as arbitrary.47 If the reply is that animals should be added to the category of those who deserve recognition as morally equal, one has only to mention vegetation. For the moment that the life of a vegetable is considered as important as that of a person, it should be evident to all that something has gone terribly wrong.48 I said that there is a second group of philosophers who support the language of human rights in a counterproductive way. I am thinking of pluralists such as Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, Bernard Williams, and Michael Walzer. Favouring “the many” over “the one,” they reject any attempt to build a universal, systematic

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theory of justice. But they are also led to an opposite, fragmenting extreme, one that leaves little room for a global civic or political community. As a result, their support for human rights ends up weak at best. Here is how. Pluralists come to human rights through their belief that there exists a minimal global ethic, one that is present in all the world’s cultures and that expresses a small group of values that stands for such fundamental prohibitions as those on murder and other forms of gross cruelty.49 Given the way pluralists conceive of these values as incommensurable with each other, they end up assuming that when in conflict, the values cannot be reconciled and hence that we should see the world as filled with numerous clashing groups and civilizations that ought to negotiate their conflicts (i.e., make trade-offs and concessions). And during these negotiations, we can understand that one might choose to express the values being negotiated in the language of rights since, as pluralists tell us, rights are nothing but independent moral interests that may also be compromised or accommodated.50 The problem with all of this is that, in emphasizing negotiation, pluralists end up exaggerating the distance between parties, which they sometimes even describe as “natural enemies.”51 Thus they cannot be said to share a common good, and this means that it makes no sense to refer to any substantive conception of global justice. And the result of this is that when the parties negotiate, the balances they strike are rigged, a priori, in favour of local conceptions of justice. Thus Walzer has made it clear that he has no truck with the notion that there exists a global civic or political community.52 To him, we ought always to begin with the self-determination of local communities and so with the affirmation of the norm of nonintervention. He is prepared to “honour its exceptions,”53 however, and hence to support interventions for “humanitarian” reasons, but only rather tepidly, as is clear from the following formulation: “Any state capable of stopping the slaughter has a right, at least, to try to do so.”54 Walzer’s evident lack of enthusiasm is, I suggest, a direct result of his denial that there exists a global civic or political community, one to which we all also have an obligation. This denial, it must be said, is something that he and all the other pluralists share with the partisans of realpolitik nationalism. Recall

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Joseph de Maistre’s famous quip about his having “seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians etc.; I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian. But as for ‘man,’ I declare that I have never met him in my life.”55 To Maistre, this means that, because talk of a unified humanity is false, we must accept that there will always be conflict between peoples and thus that, as one of his intellectual descendents famously argued, we need to recognize that the world is divided into friends and enemies.56 Of course, unlike in pluralism, these enemies are considered incapable of negotiating in good faith; when they do talk, the assumption is that they are merely using force by other means, never engaging in real dialogue. Nevertheless, I would accuse both the partisans of realpolitik and the pluralists of failing to recognize a simple fact: that it is possible to come into conflict with a friend and indeed respond to the conflict in a way that strives to maintain the friendship – indeed, perhaps even to enhance it.57 When this happens, the friend is an “opponent” but not an “adversary,”58 and since such opponents can exist across borders, we ought, yet again, to make way for the global civic or political community, for citizens of the world who, to varying but never negligible degrees, belong to each other. Perhaps the time has come for the un to issue everyone passports that would represent this world citizenship and thus our duty to treat each other as compatriots.

III The arguments above will, I am aware, appear counterintuitive to many. After all, human rights have become the basis of perhaps the most celebrated campaigns, both practical and intellectual, on the world stage today. And those leading them certainly do not seem to be lacking in any passion for justice. However, my hunch is that this is because they are driven not so much by a desire to fulfil certain empowered values in the world as by motivations that are best characterized as religious.59 Regardless, I want to conclude by noting how the lack of enthusiasm that the vast majority of people demonstrate when challenged to defend human rights in practice has led activists to favour enforcement mechanisms. Whereas the more cosmopolitan among them call for an international legal order that is able to punish states, others point to the effectiveness of local constitutional regimes.60 However, both sides in this argument have

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gone astray. For in being so concerned with telling people how they ought to act to the neglect of the strengths of their motivations, they fail to recognize that the only real guarantee of our liberties and welfare comes from people’s willingness to stand up for them. This means that we need to convince those people to do so, which is but to say that, at the end of the day, it is what’s in their hearts or minds that matters. But oh, replies the human rights advocate, how ugly are those hearts or minds! Take the millions of Germans who supported the Nazis, the many Bolsheviks, especially the Stalinists, not to mention the Maoists and all the others responsible for or complicit in mass murder during the past century – it is just because of such unspeakable villainy that enforcement is said to be necessary. People can be horrible, and we cannot trust them, so we need institutional mechanisms that are beyond their reach in order to protect them from themselves. Hence Ignatieff: “We build on the testimony of fear, rather than on the expectations of hope.”61 But we simply do not have the luxury to abandon hope. This is not only because, historically, judiciaries have tended to reflect rather than challenge prevailing political and economic currents.62 It is also because judges, in articulating their rulings in terms of rights, do little to convince majorities of their justness, with the result that the rulings even often induce backlashes. Yet what else should we expect from decisions that emerge out of either the application of some supposedly systematic theory of justice or the balancing of whatever rights are said to have clashed in the given case, since both approaches leave little room for the conversations necessary if citizens are to be truly reconciled to the decisions made? And let us not forget that those rulings are just that – rulings – which is to say that they are impositions meant to be backed up by the police. The danger here is that, although the docile can always be expected to go along, they will also be the first to change direction the moment the wind does. One ought not to assume, moreover, that people will become reconciled to those rulings in time (as though there ever was enough time). For this requires their living with them peacefully for more than a generation, a highly unlikely eventuality given the profound diversity of contexts and cultures in the world; conflict, not peace, will remain the norm. That is why states – including any future global state – need to decide for themselves whether their constitutions should be justiciable or not.63 And it is

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also why such decisions ought to be taken in the knowledge that, if one finds oneself thinking that people just do not care enough, the grim reality is that, at the end of the day, there is little alternative to trying to convince them to care more. For anything else, it seems, only makes them care less.

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4 Secular Nationhood? The Importance of Language in the Life of Nations He that’s mounting up must on his neighbour mount, And we and all the Muses are things of no account. W.B. Yeats, “The Curse of Cromwell”1 This treasure is the reserve of poetry, the source of emotional renewal from which the centuries to come will draw. It cannot be transmitted without being transformed – otherwise, we have perversion. Paul-Émile Borduas et al., “Refus Global,” 772

Scholars of nationhood have neglected the artists. It is not that they have failed to recognize the sometimes essential role of national artists; rather, it is that they have not given them their due qua artists, by which I mean as individuals who engage in a specifically creative process. I want to claim that among the prime sources of both the origins and persistence of nations and nationalism has been an aesthetically contingent one: if not for artists having been inspired to create nations, there would be none, and if not for nations’ continual receptivity to their artists’ creations, an important part of the raison d’être of the nation, at least in the eyes of nationalists, would be denied. My argument for this, I admit, relies on a somewhat idiosyncratic conception of creativity, one that few artists or nationalists could be said to uphold, at least explicitly. Even so, I believe that it supports an account of the role that artists have played, and continue to play, as regards national communities that serves as an important complement to those that have been developed so far. Another result of my approach, moreover, is that it leads us to question the standard

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conception of nations, and of the states that recognize them, as secular. This, in turn, suggests that we need to interpret the significance that language has for nationalists in a new way. After showing how, I conclude with an argument about what this new interpretation should mean for language politics.

I In the past century, most approaches to the origins of nations have been “modernist,” the claim being that there were no nations before modernity. We can distinguish between two groups here. One emphasizes the functional requirements of economic or political structures. Ernest Gellner, for example, focuses on the modern industrial economy’s need for a people with a homogenous language and culture, whereas Benedict Anderson stresses how modern democratic states rely on such peoples, nationalism here being seen as a way to encourage their identification with the state.3 The second group, although sensitive to such structural factors, nevertheless emphasizes agency instead. Thus do Isaiah Berlin and Charles Taylor, among others, invoke the “bent twig” phenomenon, according to which elites, reacting to slights to their dignity, develop nationalisms that then come to galvanize large populations.4 And Homi K. Bhabha and Anthony W. Marx, albeit in different ways, highlight the use of national symbols and discourses within political and cultural struggles, showing how given matrices of social power have led to the oppression of marginal groups.5 Why do I claim that the above accounts leave little room for the creative origins of nations? The answer should be obvious when it comes to the first group, since it portrays nations as but functions of economic or political ends. Yet even the more agent-centred approaches show nationhood to be nothing more than the product of certain contexts. The nation may be an original means of responding to those contexts, to be sure, but this is an originality that, I would say, is a product of “interpretation” rather than “creation.” It arises, in other words, out of a thoroughly comprehensible reaction to a situation and to nothing more than that situation. As Berlin describes the bent twig phenomenon, for example, it is “a response to a patronizing or disparaging attitude towards the traditional values of a society, the result of wounded pride and a sense of humiliation in its most socially conscious members, which in due

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course produce anger and self-assertion.”6 Given the insecurities felt by certain elites in newly modern contexts, they are said to react in a way that, psychologically and sociologically speaking, meets the challenges posed. They have, one might say, found a means to “make sense” of their situation, and that is exactly what interpretations aim to do. Creations, however, are different. It is often said that part of what artists respond to is an “inspiration,” by which is meant something irrational, something that cannot be reduced to their psychology or to the exigencies of their situation. Inspirations transcend context, making their coming (or not) a matter of aesthetic, as distinct from historical, contingency.7 Creations, then, are “inspired interpretations,” meaning that they are something other than strictly interpretive and hence not quite (practically) rational. It should be evident that creation as so conceived is also not reducible to the artist’s “will,” something that would make it nothing more than a function of what Nietzsche called “life.” Consider his Zarathustra’s declaration: “It was creators who created peoples and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.”8 To serve something as thoroughly mundane as life, however, is a form of interpretation – vitalistic interpretation, perhaps, but interpretation nevertheless. Nietzsche thus fails to distinguish between interpretation and creation – and hence, ultimately, between nonfiction and fiction. I believe these to be crucial distinctions, however, and although I have obviously not done much to defend them here, I think they can be shown to support some very interesting insights about nations and the nationalisms that uphold them. But before introducing these insights, I want to point out how adopting the interpretation–creation distinction reveals a double irony in Eyal Chowers’s very interesting argument on behalf of the uniqueness of modern Jewish nationalism. Chowers begins by distinguishing between different kinds of wholly teleological notions of history: the linear, as with Kant or Marx; and the cyclical, as with Herder or Hegel. Both are said to posit fully integrated notions of profane, historical time, leaving no room for the aesthetically unanticipated, for the “creative dimension,” as Chowers puts it, which requires what he calls an ontology of “sundered history.”9 The first irony arises from Chowers’s claim that Zionism is distinct from western European nationalisms in that its nation arose due to the radical discontinuity made possible by spaces or gaps in history

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(i.e., it was a product of creation). It seems to me, however, that all nations have come into being because of one form or other of creation or, if not, that most nationalists, even if only implicitly, believe this to be true of their own nations. The second irony in Chowers’s account arises from the fact that the early Zionist thinkers he cites ground creativity in the will and hence in what Chowers describes as “a semimessianism that depends on humans alone.”10 But this, again, leaves us with a process based on Nietzsche’s “life,” one that may be said to produce fictions of a sort, although no more so than does, say, lying. For liars make up their tales to meet some entirely worldly end; their stories, in other words, are but a reflection of their judgment about how best to respond to the realities of a given situation. Falsehood is thus a product of interpretation rather than creation. The irony, then, is that to speak of genuine creation, Chowers must be able to refer to inspirations that do not entirely depend on such mundane ends. By claiming that nations are at least partly the result of such inspirations, I am thus claiming that nations, unlike lies, are works of art (among other things). Should we, then, be turning away from the two groups of modernist accounts and looking to those that date the origins of nations from before modernity? For they tend to place a much greater emphasis on the role of artists. Yet they, too, are limited in important ways. Again, we may distinguish between two groups. The first comprises the romantics, led by Herder, for whom nations claim histories that reach back to time immemorial.11 To the romantic, artists are certainly fundamental to a nation’s development: Chateaubriand and, following him, Victor Hugo went so far as to identify “mother geniuses” such as Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Rabelais who give birth to and nourish all the other great writers of their respective nations.12 But even such greats are viewed as working within already established national contexts: the seed having already been planted, the artist is confined to the task of watering the flower – an activity that, as Herder emphasized, must also fully accommodate itself to the given nation’s natural environment.13 The romantic artist, then, cultivates the already present nation; without it, he or she would be nothing. Hence the romantic claim, one that goes back to Rousseau, that it is not so much the artist as the nation’s “institutions” that give “form to the genius, the character, the tastes, and the customs of a people.”14

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The second group is relatively recent, having arisen out of a felt need to provide a revisionist alternative to the modernist account. To scholars such as Adrian Hastings and Anthony D. Smith, we should be blurring the sharp premodern/modern divide that is assumed by the modernists. This they do by emphasizing the transformation of ethnicities into nations, the latter being distinguished by their self-identification with the biblical model of the elected or chosen people. Hastings, in particular, focuses on the fundamental role played by the translation, sometimes long before modernity, of the Christian Bible into various vernaculars, which he believes paved the way for other literary works that served as the basis of nationhood.15 Smith, for his part, accepts the modernity of nations but nevertheless considers the power of the ancient election model key to the persistence of national identities, and like Hastings, he claims that mythmaking has been crucial for both national formation and persistence.16 Now many translations of the Bible were indeed acts of creation and not merely interpretation (the many “errors” in the beautiful King James version, evident to any reader of Hebrew, ancient Greek, and English, is surely a case in point – Tyndale was a great artist). Neither Hastings nor Smith, however, distinguishes between their trail-blazing creators and those who receive their work, the nonfiction-producing interpreters. Both makers and receivers, that is, tend to be lumped together as “intellectuals,” all of whom appear to have equally important roles in the nation’s development.17 One of the reasons for this, I suggest, is that Hastings and Smith restrict the national artist’s project to the invention of myths about a given nation’s ancient origins, myths that nevertheless conform to the prefabricated mold of the biblical election model. Now they do this in a way that unjustifiably limits the artist’s originality, making his or her creativity comparable, say, to that of a chef baking a cake: one is certainly free to choose from among a variety of ingredients, but the overall product – if it is to be a cake – must meet certain fundamental specifications determined in advance. This, however, is craft (technR), not art. Moreover, if Hastings or Smith were more sensitive to the form and content of what national artists have produced, they might have recognized the presence of other types of community in the historical transitions they trace from ethnie to nation. In particular, they might have identified distinctly “religious” and “civic” communities. For

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example, as regards content, although Hastings is right to read Chaucer as articulating an English community that is no longer simply an ethnie, Hastings’s labelling it a nation is premature. This is because it was a religious community instead, one fully embedded in the premodern hierarchical cosmos. In that world, society is connected to the transcendent through mediating institutions – above all, through the church and the monarchy (with the latter, of course, Dei Gratia Rex/Regina). To Hastings, however, the portrait drawn in the famous prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is of a people only “professedly brought together by religion” since they are shown to be having fun, to enjoy risqué stories, and to be highly literate.18 I fail to see why these things put their religiosity in question, however (unless, of course, one assumes an extremely dour conception of religion). Moreover, the prologue’s opening lines, with their description of the return of spring in cosmically cyclical terms, establish a setting that is clearly in keeping with the premodern ontic logos cosmology. According to it, people must find their place in a preset hierarchy rather than, as in the modern nation, live their lives “horizontally.” One also cannot fail to notice how Chaucer’s characters represent a cross-section of English society, with its fixed division into three broad classes or estates: the military, the clergy, and the laity. This is not to ignore our interest in how those characters depart from type – the corrupt rebellious monk being probably the strongest case in point – yet this literary technique relies precisely on the types being there in the first place. Nor should we neglect that, no matter how distinctly portrayed, none of the characters is given a proper name. Finally, the significance of religion is underscored in that all of them have been brought together because of it: they are on a pilgrimage, after all.19 The other community missed is the civic, political one. For what was Milton’s Paradise Lost if not, among other things, an attempt to infuse the classical republican ideal into a postmonarchic Christian England, just as the fictionalized England of James Harrington’s Oceana strove to do the same in a more pagan way?20 Most famously, however, it was in the two revolutionary societies – the American and the French – that the ideal of a citizenry dedicated to self-rule became widespread, each later replacing it with one that affirmed their respective majority national communities instead.21 Hastings, however, claims that a French nation existed before the Revolution, even though he admits, following Eugen Weber, that

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most of the country’s citizens did not speak French and had little sense of national identification well into the nineteenth century.22 Smith similarly refuses to accept a distinction between patriotism and nationalism,23 one which recognizes that only the former puts the civic or political community at the centre of its concerns.24 Greater attention to the form of what artists have produced would also have served to highlight the differences between these various types of community. Consider Anderson’s insight into the unique, nation-forming way that the eighteenth-century novel managed to fuse the world inside the text – in which a solitary hero moves horizontally through a sociological landscape – with the world outside; or think of Ian Watt’s account of how the novel’s formal realism focused on particulars and individuals with proper names rather than on archetypes and also spoke with the egalitarian voice of a rising middle class, thus contributing to the development of a secular, horizontal sense of time and the relations lived within it.25 Pace Hastings and Smith, then, the rise of the novel points to the limited appeal of such archetypes as biblical election since they belong to a hierarchical cosmology that was by then increasingly outdated. So the novel, we may say, was one of the artistic forms that contributed to the transformation of religious into national communities. Other, nonfictional modes did so as well: Anderson invokes the rise of the daily newspaper,26 and we might also reference works of literary and art criticism, among others. But these media are, again, products of interpretation rather than creation, and it is the created that usually lead the way. This suggests that nations are “imagined communities” not only because their communion, as Anderson asserts, exists in their members’ minds even though they haven’t all met,27 but also, and even more significantly, because the common good they share is something that has largely been created by artists. Giving these artists their due suggests that we should establish a via media between the modernist and revisionist accounts. Whereas the former may be said to exaggerate the discontinuities between the modern and premodern eras, the latter do the opposite. This is not to claim that creations can be wholly disengaged from the contexts in which they arise; the interpretation that is part of all creativity ensures that artistic creation is never ex nihilo. But nor should we limit creative acts to those contexts, since that would lead us to miss the inspirations driving them. All purely social-scientific explanations of the creation of things, including new literary forms

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as well as the communities sometimes fashioned by them, are thus going to be necessarily limited. For after all, what is the term “inspiration” – as well as “genius” or “accident” for that matter – if not a placeholder for the inexplicable?

II One effect of my claim about the importance of creativity to nations is that, while supporting the distinction between religious and national communities, it also puts in question the secularity of the latter. If one accepts that inspiration has a transcendent source, creation as I have been describing it may be said to have a sacred aspect. This is, of course, a highly controversial claim, yet the argument that follows assumes only that it is something (often implicitly) assumed by nationalists. For example, I think it is behind the aura of “greatness” that they tend to believe is present around their most cherished artists.28 Hence my objection to the radically secular conception of the public sphere described by Charles Taylor,29 the public sphere being the domain wherein the nation for the most part resides. The problem with Taylor’s account is that it leaves no room for the sense that the modern social world is, to a degree, sundered or “cracked.” This notion, I believe, is what has led sociologists of religion such as Danièle Hervieu-Léger and Peter L. Berger to reinterpret classic conceptions of the sacred in ways incompatible with its monopolization by traditional religion. To Hervieu-Léger, certain social occasions, such as some sporting events or rock concerts, are productive of meaning in a uniquely modern religious way.30 This is also how she accounts for the disbelieving reactions to the death of the singer-songwriter Jim Morrison, who some took as the founder of a new religion (the more recent example of Elvis Presley is, of course, an even more remarkable case of this).31 And Berger has added the suggestion that, for many people, even ordinary, everyday experiences can stand for “signals” of transcendence, albeit of a second-hand sort.32 If he is right, then even what I have been identifying as interpretations of creations can be said to point towards something beyond. Although I ally myself with these claims, I do not wish to abandon the distinction between national and religious communities, nor that between strictly national communities and those that consist of an amalgam of the national and the religious (i.e., the

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communities defended by contemporary religious nationalists).33 Consider the Jewish nation in Israel today. About half its members are traditionally religious, in the sense that they identify with one of the institutionalized branches of the Jewish religion (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, etc.). The others should not be labelled secular, however, for as Zionists they identify with a community that, as I have been suggesting, sees itself as connected to the sacred through its artists. Indeed, such Zionists can even be said to appeal, even if only implicitly, to the model of biblical election, although only if we understand it differently than Smith, in particular, has encouraged us to do. Smith is far too enamoured with Michael Walzer’s reading of Exodus, which holds that although the Israelites were certainly chosen by God, we should also emphasize their free will, their decision to consent to the Covenant.34 This take awards them a political role, one that is dialogical and interpretive rather than creative. We could, however, see them as creators instead by appealing to a classic alternative conception of the Covenant, one that Walzer seems to give little credit. It views the Covenant as the product of a much more violent process: just as artists receive, or have imposed upon them, inspirations, the Israelites were forced to accept God’s law knowing that otherwise He would have dropped the whole of Mount Sinai upon their heads. They did accept, of course, whereupon it could follow later that “Moses spake in the ears of all the congregation of Israel the words of this poem” (Deut. 31:30, my translation).35 In the light of this alternative reading, Smith’s way of invoking the ongoing resonance of the election model as an account of the persistence of national identity appears too backward-looking. The point is no longer that nationalists comply with the model by asserting an interpreted analogy between their nation and the ancient Israelites; rather, it is that they see it as rabbinic Jews did, which is to say as calling upon the nation that would enter into a Covenant with God to create anew, again and again. To Smith, however, “the myth of election inspires ... action consonant with the message or promise of the original event, as it is reinterpreted by successive generations.”36 Although Smith does not distinguish between interpretation and creation, I think he can nevertheless be said to emphasize the former. We see this in his account of national identity as comprising “the maintenance and continual reinterpretation”37 of the nation’s culture, as well as in his claim that the transformation

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of ethnies into nations, despite drawing upon the sacred sources of traditional religion, tends to take place as though these sources were models and ideals already fully present in history: “Modern nationalists often draw on reinterpreted and received (rather than ‘original’) beliefs, memories, and traditions.”38 Moreover, Smith also sees a nation’s future adaptability as largely a question of the resources it can invoke from the past, there being no mention of the creative originality, as I would conceive of it, of its artists.39 Hence his reference to the repetition of standard patterns in the construction of ethnohistorical myths, such as ideals of a golden age or the sacrifices by national heroes portrayed in late eighteenth-century European painting.40 The result is that nations appear to honour their most creative members not so much for their originality as for their ability to “embody” the people, a wholly secular entity that “constitute[s] the object of this new religion.”41 Smith evidently adheres to a highly Durkheimian approach, one that conceives of religion largely in terms of its functional ability to bind the members of a community together. But this does not leave much room for the sacred, as is clear from Smith’s claim that nationalism and national identity are things “wholly in and of this world.”42 What gets left out of this picture is a sense of how nationalists, by embracing their community’s artists, engage in a form of worship, which is to say in a way of life that strives for the sacred rather than the mundane. As Berger has written of worship: “All true worship is a difficult attempt to reach out for transcendence. It is this reaching out that must be symbolized, by whatever resources a particular tradition has at hand. The chosen form will certainly have a communal aspect. But the community itself is not the object of the exercise; at best it is the subject.”43 Part of the pride nationalists feel about the especially creative members of their nation, I thus want to claim, is that they see the latter’s greatness as attesting to their nation’s having been chosen yet again – chosen, that is, to receive the gifts of inspiration. This suggests a new take on Ernest Renan’s famous declaration: “To have performed great deeds together, to wish to perform still more – these are the essential conditions for being a people.”44 The above leads me to assert that there is a need to reconceive the separation of church and state, or laïcité, as it applies to those states that, in one form or another, grant special recognition to the nations under their jurisdiction. France and Quebec are cases in point. The former’s supposedly neutral Jacobin state has, in fact, for a very

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long time now, granted special recognition to the majority French nation (as distinct from, say, its Basque, Corsican, Catalan, and Breton micronations).45 The Quebec state, having adopted statutes such as its language law, Bill 101 (1977), has also taken on special responsibilities towards the majority Québécois nation, a community that cannot be said to include most of the province’s anglophone or allophone citizens (not that they haven’t been welcome to join).46 These realities in themselves suggest that the states in question cannot be considered neutral; my hope is that an awareness of the sacred dimension of national communities will help to dispel the neutralist myth by undermining claims of laïcité as well. Recognizing this dimension can also assist us in accounting for the tendency of nationalists to affirm their ideology in an “antipolitical” way, which is to say one that favours force over dialogue as a means of responding to conflict.47 Violence is, after all, intrinsic to most connections with the sacred.48 With many traditional religions, this violence has manifested itself as sacrifice or warfare to restore order, or it has been tied to notions of cosmic struggle, which assume that the rules of ordinary morality no longer apply.49 The creativity of the nation points to a different relation with violence, however, one that arises from the felt need to “tear” into the fabric of the profane so as to make cracks or openings to the sacred (i.e., invitations for inspiration).50 Antipolitics is certainly a way to do this, yet it is not the only one, which is why we may say that it is at least possible for nationalists to be true to their ideology while also being (pro-)political. Such is not the case, however, when that politics is restricted to a “pluralist” form, one that gives primacy to dialogue as negotiation.51 For pluralists would have us go no further than engage in the struggles necessary for making accommodations and hence place patches over any of the cracks or spaces underlying conflict. Pluralism, that is, aims for justice as compromise rather than as truth, and this is something that nationalists, given their deep concern for the “authenticity” of national life, can be expected to shun. In this regard, they may be said to share something with their more traditionally religious cousins. As Mark Juergensmeyer has reported of a Sri Lankan Buddhist monk: Interestingly, one of the concepts that disturbed the bhikkhu the most was an activity that most Westerners regards as a cardinal

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strength of the secular political system: the ability to respond impartially to the demands of a variety of groups. The political expediency of giving in to the demands of particular interests, such as those of the Tamils, was cited by the bhikkhu as evidence of the government’s immorality. He felt that such politicians were incapable of standing up for truth in the face of competing, selfish interests, and their impartiality indicated that they ultimately cared only about themselves.52 The monk exaggerates, surely. Nevertheless, those who find it difficult to view their community as some narrowly focused interest group will always resent the politics of pluralism. Moreover, in covering over the spaces between conflicting goods, pluralists can be said to reduce opportunities for inspiration and hence creation. Consider my own country, Canada, where until relatively recently the dominance of pluralist approaches to politics has gone virtually unchallenged. The tendency of Canadians to accommodate their conflicts may explain why Northrop Frye once felt obliged to note that we had yet to produce a writer of classic proportions. For “‘genius’ is as much, and as essentially, a matter of social context as it is of individual character”; and “the Canadian genius for compromise is reflected in the existence of Canada itself.”53 A “patriotic” politics, one that aims for the realization of the common good instead of just accommodation, is also, it must be said, not conducive to creativity. This is because it strives for the “integration” of goods through the reconciliation of conflict, something that would also close any spaces that might lie between them.54 Yet at least patriotism can be said to favour truth over compromise, which is why nationalists – who are, after all, concerned with not only creativity but also the integrity of their national communities – might be able to be convinced to participate in such a politics.

III One subject, in particular, about which this is may be true is that of language. To the nationalist, the vernacular is the chief repository of the nation’s culture. Given the dominance of pluralist models of politics in practice, we can understand why nationalists have tended to approach issues of language in an antipolitical

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way.55 My claims about creativity, moreover, point to another reason for the intensity of nationalist attitudes. For a language can also be understood to constitute the “mitt” with which the nation’s artists “catch” their inspirations, a receptor that is itself transformed by the nation’s critics when they interpret the artworks produced. Hence signs like the one waved at a Montreal protest rally in favour of the Quebec language law, Bill 101 (1977): “Laissons vivre au langue de nos poêtes” (let us live in the language of our poets).56 Or think of Gershom Scholem’s denunciation of those of his fellow Zionists whom he believed failed to recognize how “at times the holiness of our language leaps out and speaks to us.”57 All of this suggests that nationalists see language as more than just their culture’s repository: it is also the bridge between their nation and the sacred. These claims have implications for how we should be approaching questions of language policy, an occasional concern of governing institutions in the West at least since the time of the counter-Reformation Church. I would now like to suggest how we might criticize the two most popular approaches to language policy today. The proponents of the first approach view it as neutralist. History has witnessed many cases of multilingual societies governed in a single or a few dominant languages – Latin among the Romans; Persian among the Mughals; English, French, and German in today’s European Union – but only with the rise of neutralist political philosophy has there been an attempt to give this theoretical justification. To neutralists, a just society needs to be founded on a systematically unified theory of justice. When not silent about language policy, such theories tend to affirm a single language or a limited set of languages as official for the state. Former Canadian prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, for example, endorsed Canada’s Official Languages Act (1985) as preferable to a realpolitik approach. The latter, he believed, would amount to granting English and French official status not because of any conception of justice but because the people who happen to speak them have managed – unlike the speakers of, say, Iroquois or Ukrainian – to obtain “the power to break the country.” To Trudeau, affirming the official status of English and French does not imply endorsing the supposedly divisive “two-nations” conception of the country since his neutralist theory, enshrined since 1982 in the country’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, ensures the country’s unity. As he sees it,

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Canada should be considered a single nation that happens to group together “two linguistic communities.”58 Is this coherent? The question must be asked because whether the reference is to “nations” or “linguistic communities,” the fact remains that the primary languages of some rather than all citizens are being granted special status, and this is something that requires justification. How to respond, for example, when it is asked why French and not one of the other minority languages spoken in the country should be favoured alongside English? Here is Trudeau’s answer: “Some criticize official bilingualism, arguing that it consists of privileging French Canadians. It may indeed be a privilege, but I believe that, from a historical point of view, the fact is that francophones have existed in significant number and have been established in this country for a very long time. Moreover, there has existed since the country’s beginning a kind of entente to the effect that their rights have been recognized. And so, I say: ‘let’s privilege the francophones!’”59 The problem evident here is that the justifications Trudeau offers – population, length of tenure in the country, an entente – simply do not pass neutralist muster. For what are they if not, by neutralist standards, historical contingencies expressive of realpolitik? It seems, then, that an ostensibly neutral theory of justice – particularly one that, like Trudeau’s, asserts an uncompromising respect for the individual60 – cannot coherently favour one or more vernaculars over others. This is because it would inevitably be seen as aiming to promote some linguistic communities over others, namely those whose languages are granted official status. In consequence, it seems to me that the Canadian neutralist who chooses not to be silent about language policy must endorse neither English nor French but a language to which the country’s history has no special attachment – Esperanto, for example. But that, of course, is out of the question. The second approach, which begins by recognizing precisely this point, is pluralist. As Alan Patten writes: “Disengagement cannot be the best response of public institutions to linguistic pluralism because disengagement from language is impossible.”61 Instead of calling on us to apply some overarching systematic theory, then, Patten engages in the typically pluralist endeavour of separating out the various values at stake (pluralist political philosophers are almost always analytic political philosophers). He then groups these into independently distinct policy models and suggests that, when it

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comes to conflict, they must be balanced against each other. The relative weightings of each are to be determined by one’s preferred ideology (liberalism in Patten’s case) and the exigencies of the context. This, too, is standard pluralism since the pluralist, seeing in a genuine conflict of values only separate things that “pull in different directions,” can call upon us to do no more than “try not to do excessive damage to any one of them,” for “difficult choices need to be made.”62 There is, however, something unwarranted about this assumption. Genuine conflicts are not necessarily such zero-sum affairs; they are capable of being accommodated, perhaps, but never truly reconciled. For my patriotic claim is that reconciliation is sometimes possible, but only if those involved focus on how the features of their conflict are parts of a whole, one that may be capable of being transformed in a way that further integrates them rather than balancing them against each other. Given this more holistic conception, it becomes possible for moral and political conflict to admit of synergistic – and not only compromising – solutions. But not if we follow Patten in “chopping up” the historical tapestries from which the questions of language policy always arise. In so doing, he only ensures an adversity that distorts what is really going on. Moreover, Patten’s approach is particularly inappropriate when it comes to language policy since, as we have seen, its favouring of compromise will only encourage the antipolitical tendencies of nationalists. As regards language policy, then, I do not think we should be following either the neutralist or the pluralist. Recognizing that creativity is a significant source of nationhood means giving the sacred dimension of nationalism its due, and this should lead us to conceive of the importance that language has for nationalists in a new way. Language, to them, is simply not something that can be interlocked within some overarching systematic theory of justice, nor can it be subjected to compromise as easily as other, more secular, goods. In consequence, language policy should not be a matter of applying a theory, nor, if possible, of balancing demands against each other. Rather, all involved need to strive to be as sensitive as possible to the context, and this means focusing on the whole by listening to and conversing with each other. What is needed are answers to questions such as: What kinds of communities are present? What languages do they speak? What, if anything, do they require from the state? And how, if at all, can these needs be reconciled

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with other ethical imperatives, such as those associated with the respect for the individual? Answers to these questions will be no more arbitrary than those we aim for to resolve the dilemmas we face in our personal lives, for just as we hope to be authentic to our historically evolving identities as individuals, so too should the political community. And since success at this endeavour represents the truth of the matter, even those citizens who are also nationalists might be able to become enthusiastic about it. Even the nationalist, that is, can be a patriot.

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5 Federalism and Multinationalism

Even those who accept that a single country can serve as a home for more than one nation are often led astray by the venerable nationstate model of what a country is or should be. Consider what has become a virtual axiom among scholars of nations and nationalism, namely that nationalists’ concern for self-determination invariably leads to a desire for sovereignty, for the complete control over a state. When applied to multinational federations, the axiom supports the assumption that the members of the minority nations will, at the very least, favour decentralization. Here, for example, is Will Kymlicka: As a general rule, we can expect nationality-based units to seek greater and greater powers ... There seems to be no natural stopping point to the [minority nationalist’s] demands for increasing self-government. If limited autonomy is granted, this may simply fuel the ambitions of nationalist leaders who will be satisfied with nothing short of their own nation-state. Any restrictions on self-government – anything short of an independent state – will need justification.1 Regarding the Québécois, for example, Kymlicka has concluded that the best that can be hoped for is that they will give conditional allegiance to Canada. [For] the only sort of unity that we can hope to achieve ... is one which co-exists with the firm belief amongst national minorities that they have the right to secede, and with ongoing debate about the conditions under which it would be appropriate to exercise that right.2

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And indeed, it is not only Québécois sovereignists such as the members of the Parti Québécois who desire greater autonomy; even the “soft nationalists” of the province’s Action Democratique and Liberal parties do so. For, as the respected Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson has written, once the “fiscal imbalance” has been “solved,” there will have to be additional demands for more money and/or the transfer of powers since the Quebec government, within that province’s political culture, can never declare itself fully satisfied with the status quo. [Quebec Liberal premier Jean] Charest has already indicated that he wants to take [Canadian prime minister Stephen] Harper’s offer of “open federalism” to another international level. So, not content with being given a position at unesco, Charest will demand one at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and will play host to an international conference of sub-national governments that call themselves “nations” such as Quebec, Catalonia, Scotland, etc.3 And given that, today, the chief instrumental arguments for federation (e.g., economic markets and military security) have become relatively weak, Kymlicka suggests that the most effective way to dissuade minority nationalists from opting for separatism is to highlight the diversity that a multinational federation can provide.4 But surely, the sovereignist could reply, any future sovereign Quebec will itself be highly diverse (after all, it already is), and regardless there is at present only the most minimal cultural exchange between the Québécois and the peoples of the rest of Canada (the French Canadians excepted, perhaps). And who is to say that separation need reduce even this minimum? So separation would be no great loss. Are the prospects for multinational federations such as Canada really this bleak? Must the members of minority nations always desire greater autonomy? I don’t believe so. But the alternative will show itself only when we stop making two mistakes, both of which have roots in the old nation-state model. First, we need to reject the tendency to equate “self-determination” with “self-government” as well as to recognize that nationalists are concerned with the former but not the latter. And second, we need to accept that self-determination is only one of two nationalist imperatives, since nations, if they are to be truly free, must also be recognized for their specificity, especially

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by the state or states under whose sovereignty they live. I shall argue these two points in section I below, where my aim is to show that, within a federal regime, nothing in principle prevents nationalists from identifying with more than one order of government. And if they manage to do so, the question of how powers should be distributed can be an open one; but if the choice is denied them, it will remain resolutely closed. Of course, the Québécois have indeed been denied this choice in Canada. There have been attempts to do something about this, but as I shall show in section II, all have been inadequate. It certainly has not helped that my fellow English Canadians continue, in typical majoritynation fashion, to deny the distinctiveness of our own nation and hence to accept that we constitute but one among many within Canada. In so doing, we have only made it that much more difficult to affirm a truly inclusivist, multinational conception of the country. And as I shall conclude in section III, this difficulty has only been compounded by the many political thinkers who assert highly adversarial conceptions of politics. Altogether, then, it should be evident that there are many obstacles to nations sharing the same country. But given that there will always be far more nations in the world than states, we simply have no choice; these obstacles must be overcome.

I Nationalists, it is said, desire a state of their own because it would assure their ability to “determine themselves,” to decide on the matters that are crucial to their nation. As Wayne Norman has put it, “The core idea of self-determination, whether for individuals or communities, involves being able to do what you want; or in the words of J.S. Mill, it is ‘pursuing our own good in our own way.’ And nations (or nationalists) cannot simply want to have their own political space (such as a state) for its own sake; they presumably want that in order to accomplish other things of value.”5 Notice the implication here that those other things of value are cultural rather than political and thus practised, for the most part, within the home and civil society. Otherwise, we would have to say that nationalists do indeed desire a political space for its own sake and hence that they consider politics an intrinsic good, a good-in-itself. But this, I want to claim, is true only of those who would be members of a political, as distinct from national, community.

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The political community is the community of citizens, the community of persons who, as Aristotle described long ago, share a “civic” kind of friendship.6 They express this friendship when they or their representatives participate in politics, which we may define as the practice of responding to (public) conflict with dialogue. When that dialogue takes the form of conversation, which aims for reconciliation and shared understanding, those involved may be said to desire the realization of their common good; when they instead engage in negotiation, whose goal is the accommodation of differences, they may be described as struggling to perform a sort of damage control on the common good.7 Either way, the results are meant to serve as the basis of their political community’s laws and institutions, and this is the essence of self-government. Originally, of course, these communities took the form of the ancient Greek polis; today, their chief incarnations are modern states. Canada, as well as Quebec and the other provinces, should thus be seen to embody political communities. It is not that their members consider politics the sole (or even a highly valued) good in their lives; only classical republicans do this, and there are few, if any, of them around today. Rather, it is that all, or at least most, modern citizens have an (albeit often buried) sense that they share a civic common good, which implies that politics is an intrinsically and not only instrumentally valuable activity and that those involved in it should aim to converse and not merely negotiate their conflicts.8 For if they only ever did the latter, it would be necessary to speak never of “the common good” but only, at most, of “the public interest.” Of course, those citizens who are also members of national communities will have an additional concern, as I suggested above, with their nations’ cultures. In Canada today, this would apply to the English Canadians, the Québécois, the aboriginal First Nations, and perhaps the Acadians. In distinguishing nations from political communities in this way, I am suggesting that nations have much in common with ethnic communities – for example, with those comprised of Chinese or Italian Canadians. For ethnic communities are also deeply concerned with their cultures (albeit more with their maintenance than their development) as practised, for the most part, within the home and civil society. Yet there are also important differences between these two kinds of community. For example, a nation’s culture is always carried, and known to be carried, by a specific language.9 This explains

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why one cannot become a Québécois, and indeed will have no interest in doing so, if one does not speak French, yet there are many Italian Canadians, for example, who lack proficiency in Italian. The reason for this is that ethnicity is invariably a matter of kinship,10 whereas many nations – the Québécois being, again, a case in point11 – can be joined without one having to be born into them; it is enough to learn the language and to be willing to identify with the culture. Of course, there are many Quebec citizens – members of the political community of Quebec – who cannot speak French, which means that they cannot be considered part of the Québécois nation (not that they wish to, nor must they). Ethnic and national communities also differ as regards territorial attachment. The Italian Canadian community, to continue with their example, has no fixed address: there are major Italian districts within Hamilton, Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, but these can and do move. The Québécois nation, by contrast, is not going anywhere, for it has a permanent and sharply demarcated geographical home. To further bring out the differences between these two types of community, as well as between them and the civic or political community, I want to place them all on a map of what I call the “moral topography” of modern society. I call it this because it is essentially a map of practices, and practices are the expressions of values or goods, communal practices expressing those values or goods that are shared with others. So different communities are practised not only in different ways, as we have just noted, but also in different locations. Here, then, is the map with its major domains identified: Figure 5.1

the state

the public sphere

the home

the market economy

public

private

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As indicated, the map shown in figure 5.1 spans a spectrum whose poles are “public” and “private.” Those practices situated towards the left are more public simply because there are more people involved in them, whereas the opposite is true of those situated towards the right. Note, as well, that the ellipse, which is meant to represent a single society as a whole, is subdivided into three main domains: from left to right we have (1) the state; (2) the public sphere and the market economy – each subdomains of civil society; and (3) the home. The borders between these domains are both porous and jagged: porous to indicate that there are areas in which they are integrated with each other and with other societies; and jagged to represent the compromises that often need to be struck when they are not. The three types of community identified in figure 5.1 are differently situated on this map. Although the political community can be said to stretch its practices out into civil society and the home, since political dialogues also take place there, its locus remains in and around the state: Figure 5.2

the political community

public

private

The practices of both national and ethnic communities, by contrast, are centred on and around civil society, situating them on our map as shown in figures 5.3 and 5.4. In figure 5.3, notice the area, indicated with a darker shade of grey, where the national community, unlike the ethnic community, overlaps into the domain of the state. This represents the need for recognition of the nation by the state. With ethnic communities, by

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Figure 5.3

the national community

public

private

Figure 5.4

the ethnic community

public

private

contrast, if they look to the state at all, it is enough for the state to respect and perhaps assist with the preservation of their cultures; the state, in other words, may remain a tool largely separate from the ethnicities that sometimes make use of it. This explains why, if one asked Italian Canadians whether they would like to see a clause making specific reference to their community inserted into the Canadian Constitution, the answer would surely come back: “No thank you.” Not so the Québécois, or at least those who would prefer that their nation remain within Canada.

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The reason for this is that, when it comes to nations, selfdetermination is never enough. If it were enough, then nationalists, in keeping with most conceptions of self-determination, would have no difficulty taking purely instrumental stances towards their states.12 But their preoccupation with recognition reveals that they require something more, namely that there exists a unique attachment between nation and state, one that integrates the two to some degree. This rules out an instrumental relation because, at least since the High Middle Ages, the very idea of a tool or instrument has implied that there is a degree of separation between user and used, one that supports a radically contingent relationship between them – indeed, a relationship far more contingent than anything that could have been possible under, say, Aristotle’s conception of instruments (organa).13 Otherwise put, in modernity tools are freestanding means: if we stumble upon something else that would do the job equally well or find that what we are using could serve for some wholly unrelated function, then we might very well make the switch. For as Ivan Illich has described, we today assume that there exists a fundamental distance or “distality” between user and used,14 which is why there is no sense in which we identify with our tools qua tools. Say I used a pen to jot down notes in preparation for this essay. Any pen would do – if, for whatever reason, I decided to use a different one instead, it would not matter so long as it was as effective as the first. For I am in only a very minimal sense “connected with” or “integrated to” either. But say I owned a pen that was bequeathed me by my late father, who himself had received it as a gift from my grandfather. My relationship to this pen would be different; it would no longer be purely instrumental since I would indeed, to some degree at least, identify with it. It would no longer be just a tool since, to me, it would be irreplaceable. This is precisely the type of relation that nationalists require between their nation and the state. It cannot be purely instrumental because the nation must be able to identify with the state and this cannot happen if the state does not recognize it. This explains why, not long after the rise of Québécois nationalism following the Quiet Revolution of the early 1960s, during which the transforming community shifted its institutional allegiance from the church to the Quebec state,15 the latter was made to undergo a form of symbolic “nationalization.” Think of the 1968 decision by Jean-Jacques Bertrand’s government to change the name of the Legislature to the

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National Assembly; or of the passage by Robert Bourassa’s government of the Official Language Act (1977), making French the sole official language of the province. Such moves ensure that the nation and the state are integrated rather than separate, which is why the line that I have drawn between them in the diagram above is more dotted than solid. Note, moreover, that integration is the aim of the reconciling form of political dialogue that is conversation. This tells us that, when nationalists call for the recognition of their nation by the state, they are also calling for joining their nation to the community of citizens expressed by that state (i.e., to the political community). Or political communities. For if the nation finds itself within a federal regime, living under the sovereignty of more than one order of government, it will require recognition from each order. And that is the crux of my argument here: it is because, in Canada, the government based in Ottawa does not sufficiently recognize the Québécois nation that the members of that nation have, virtually by default, come to favour decentralization to the government that does, namely the one based in Quebec City. They covet Ottawa’s powers not because they need them for self-determination since this, I want to claim, has already been largely if not wholly achieved; rather, it is because they are wielded by an order of government that does not recognize their nation. Notice the reason Kymlicka gives for the Québécois’s aversion to centralization: “Centralization in Canada is often seen as a threat to the very survival of the Québécois nation, insofar as it makes French-Canadians more vulnerable to being outvoted by anglophones on issues central to the reproduction of their culture, such as education, language, telecommunications, and immigration policy.”16 But Quebec has been guaranteed significant, even sometimes exclusive, powers over the areas Kymlicka mentions. For example, Section 93 of the Canadian Constitution specifies that the provinces have exclusive responsibility for making laws relating to education; Quebec’s Charter of the French Language, Bill 101 (1977), has been most successful at establishing French as the official language of the province, of its government and law, and of “the normal and everyday language of work, instruction, communication, commerce and business”; and the Canada-Quebec Accord (1991) gives Quebec sole responsibility for selecting immigrants and refugees destined for the province. Indeed, even so staunch a Québécois nationalist as sovereignist leader

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and former Parti Québécois provincial premier Bernard Landry has seen fit to emphasize the powers that Quebec already has: The Quebec [he should say Québécois] nation already posses and controls a powerful nation-state, the very same which Jean Lesage once referred to as “the state of Quebec.” Our nation-state, even without complete sovereignty, is nevertheless in certain real, practical respects more powerful than many formally sovereign nation-states. Our state already controls important judicial and financial powers which support programs crucial for our society in the areas of culture, education, social solidarity, the economy, the environment, justice, international relations, and a number of others.17 No sovereignist who says things like this can claim that his nation lacks self-determination.

II So it is the two of these together, self-determination and recognition, that make for national liberation. Whereas Canadian aboriginals have more or less achieved the recognition (thanks especially to Section 25 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms) but not the selfdetermination, the Québécois’s situation is the reverse. Neither, in consequence, can be considered wholly free. National liberty is a distinct form of freedom, different not only from the liberty of the individual, of course, but also from political liberty, the liberty of the political community. Indeed, the selfgovernment that is so cherished by the latter (in which, again, citizens contribute to shaping the laws and institutions under which they live) is nothing other than the means to achieve political liberty; political liberty, in other words, is the very raison d’être of this form of community. With the nation, by contrast, priority always goes to the preservation of its culture since, as the modern Greeks made powerfully clear, its liberty is a distinct and decidedly secondary concern: Athens – 1821. Greeks are fighting for their independence. In Athens, they besiege the Acropolis, a stronghold of the Turkish occupiers. As the siege grinds on, the Turks’ ammunition runs short. They begin to dismantle sections of the Parthenon, prying out the 2,300–year-old lead clamps and melting them down for

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bullets. The Greek fighters, horrified at this defacement of their patrimony, send the Turks a supply of bullets. Better to arm their foes, they decide, than to let the ancient temple come to harm.18 Once the cultural heritage of the nation is secure, however, nationalists may indeed turn their attention to its liberty. And for that, again, self-determination is never sufficient; the nation must also be recognized – both internationally as well as by all the other citizens with which it shares a state. Of course, in Canada there have been attempts to provide the Québécois with the recognition that they require. But all have fallen short. In the case of the Meech Lake (1987), Charlottetown (1992), and Calgary (1997) Accords, the problem is not only that they failed to have any impact on the Constitution but also that they recognized the wrong things: “Quebec” as a “distinct society” in the case of the first two; and “the unique character of Quebec society” as regards the latter. For the nation requiring recognition is, once again, that of the Québécois, the cultural community of Frenchspeaking Quebecers. By recognizing the Quebec state instead, neither Meech nor Charlottetown would have done anything to establish a direct link between Canada and the Québécois nation residing within the bounds of the Quebec state, meaning that there would have been no reason for Québécois nationalists to stop their virtually automatic calls for the decentralization of powers to Quebec. The Calgary Accord at least had the merit of emphasizing Quebec society, although its recognition was too diffuse in that it failed to specify the Québécois nation within that society. It also managed to refer to no more than the role of “the legislature and Government of Quebec” in protecting and developing Quebec society’s unique character, making no mention of the Government of Canada. Thus would it have, once again, failed to give Québécois nationalists any reason to identify with Ottawa and not only Quebec City. In November 1995, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien tabled his own recognition motion in the House of Commons. Yet not only did it neglect to call for an amendment to the Constitution, but in referring to “Quebec’s distinct society,” it also did no more than split the difference between the two formulations above, thus failing, yet again, to specify the Québécois nation. Perhaps most vitiating of all, however, is the circumstances under which Chrétien introduced his motion. For he first made the offer of recognition on television, five

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days before the vote in the last Quebec sovereignty referendum and with the polls indicating an impending victory for the sovereignists. His offer, in other words, was essentially a concession from a leader whose back was against the wall. The problem with this is that, although concessions are certainly appropriate in the context of negotiations, when parties put pressure on each other to reach an accommodation, they defeat the purpose when it comes to conversation. And it is precisely conversation that is required for recognition since, as the root of the French word for it (reconnaissance) makes especially clear, it is a form of knowledge and hence not something open to negotiation. Otherwise put, recognition can be genuine only if it comes about wholly voluntarily, which is to say because the recognizer really believes it to be true. So either one recognizes that the Québécois form a nation or one does not; doing so because one has been forced to will sap the recognition of all meaning, all value.19 Happily, there is no reason to think that current prime minister Stephen Harper’s recognition motion, which came as a surprise to just about everyone when he tabled it in the House of Commons in November of 2006, was introduced under any duress. Moreover, given its affirmation “that this House recognize that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada,”20 it is a great improvement over all of the previous formulations. For it not only uses the word “nation” but also gets the matter right in specifying that the nation in question is that of French-speaking Quebecers. Not everyone reads the motion in this way, of course, but I want to suggest three reasons why they should: first, the French word “Québécois” is used in the English version of the motion; second, the motion’s preamble refers to “their language and their culture” in the singular, suggesting, once again, that the reference is strictly to the community of francophone Quebecers; and third, following the motion’s passage, Harper voted against an opposition party motion, that of the sovereignist Bloc Québécois, which affirmed “That this House recognize that Quebecers form a nation” (evidently, the Bloc are among the many who fail to distinguish their nation from the political community of all Quebecers). But perhaps the most compelling reason for this interpretation arises from the impact that Harper’s motion seems to have had on the sovereignty movement: in the 2007 Quebec provincial election that followed soon after the motion was passed, the Parti Québécois fell to thirty-six seats and

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third-party status, making this the first time since 1973 (the party was founded in 1968) that it did not form either the government or the official opposition. Of course, it is quite possible that I am overestimating the significance of Harper’s motion; after all, many factors play a role in any election outcome. Nevertheless, I want to suggest that, for those of us who are Canadian federalists, the motion constitutes a major step in the right direction. If it, or one like it, ever finds itself included as an amendment to the Constitution, I believe that this would virtually put an end to the sovereignty movement. For it would mean that, for the first time in its history, the Québécois nation would be wholly free. Not that federalists should be satisfied with defeating the sovereignists. For there is still the challenge of getting the Québécois to feel a real sense of attachment to Canada. Liberating their nation within the country would certainly remove a major obstacle to this, but there are others. One of the most important arises from the tendency on the part of my fellow English Canadians to equate our nation – a nation that we ourselves fail to recognize – with Canada as a whole. Of course, not very long ago the English used to do something similar with Britain, a reflection of their taking their dominance over the union for granted: of 112 Victorian textbooks on Britain’s past, 108 referred to themselves as histories of England.21 Here in Canada, although the Canadian state, and so political community, has declared itself officially bilingual, this is not at all the image of the country that one gets upon hearing the voices of English Canadians in civil society. Consider the English service of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (cbc). Radio Three is a cbc station that promotes homegrown, independent popular music. But even though over 95 per cent of the songs it plays are sung in English, even though its dj s speak only English, and even though it has an English-only website and blogs, it sees fit to describe itself as “100% Canadian” or as promoting “The best in Canadian music.” How could this be? Is the best independent Canadian music really so overwhelmingly English Canadian? One might ask a similar question of Jian Ghomeshi, who was once the host of Radio One’s popular 50 Tracks program, which had the declared aim of identifying “the 50 most essential songs in Canadian pop music history.”22 All except one of those songs, however (Gilles Vigneault’s “Mon Pays,” which,

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tellingly, contains the familiar refrain “Mon pays, ce n’est pas un pays”), are sung in English. Similarly, I challenge anyone to listen carefully to the Radio One morning program Sounds Like Canada, hosted by the monolingual Sheila Rogers, without concluding that the show would be more appropriately named Sounds Like English Canada. For by continually equating English Canada with Canada, a message gets sent to nonanglophone Canadians, namely that they are not “really” Canadian. The same message is echoed by the major newspapers the Globe and Mail and the National Post. Although both are published solely in English, the former sees fit to bill itself as “Canada’s National Newspaper,” while the latter proudly declares that it is “Canada’s trusted source” for news. Finally, consider the vast number of books that claim to be about “Canadian literature” but mention nary a work written in a language other than English. Even the exceptions here disconcert, as with the chapter on writings in French in Margaret Atwood’s Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, which is restricted to works translated into English.23 In what surely cannot be considered progress, almost twenty years later Atwood introduced her Oxford University Clarendon Lectures, Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature, by noting that she was not going to deal with works written in French (other languages published within Canadian civil society were not even mentioned) both because of “the political ambiguities involved” and because it would have made the lectures too long.24

III If there is an “elephant in the room” in the above discussion, it is surely my claim on behalf of the existence and distinctiveness of the civic or political community. Far too many political thinkers today exhibit what seems an almost wilful blindness towards it. They do so, of course, for a simple reason: their models of politics have no room for it. With some, this is because they conceive of just citizens not as the members of a real, particular community, concerned with its common good, but as unified around a theory of justice.25 With others, it is because they assume that citizens are always divided, being members of separate groups, and that the best one can hope for when they conflict is that they will tolerate each other and negotiate in good faith.26 Both approaches, however, encourage a highly

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adversarial politics, one that undermines, at times even rules out, the conversational response to conflict necessary if a citizenry is ever to realize its common good. For whether citizens are instructed to plead their cases in win-or-lose battles before some authority charged with applying a theory of justice (usually a supreme court, the summit of an adversarial justice system) or told to struggle to reach an accommodation, there is just no place in such politics for conversation and so for genuine reconciliation. Of course, sometimes the two approaches are combined and citizens are called on to fight it out both ways. This is the message of those “liberal nationalists” who assert a liberal theory of justice yet also want to make room for the national community. No surprise, then, that when they recognize that most countries contain more than one nation, they conceive of those countries’s constitutions not as the expressions of their citizenries’ common good but as “the ultimate battleground for nationalist politics in the multinational state.”27 By ignoring the political community of which all a country’s citizens are members, these liberal multinationalists leave us with no more than a zero-sum competition between nations – that is, with “the balancing or ‘negotiating’ of rival nation-building programmes”28 – always, of course, within the confines of liberal principles, the rules of the game. But politics is no game.29 The rival nationalists within a multinational country are not competing players on different teams, all of whom have agreed to abide by some systematic rulebook. On the contrary, they are members of a political community, one that can include, but must also be distinguished from, their national communities. Yet even those who encourage us to contrast “cultural” and “statist” nationalisms fail to help with this task.30 That is why, instead of following them, we should recognize that nationalism is an ideology that gives priority to the needs of a cultural community that is mostly, although not wholly, expressed within civil society. This is a new way of talking, to be sure, but it is a necessary, just way.

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6 Going Rabin One Further

There are three ways of responding to conflict: conversation, negotiation, and violence. Of course, violence tends, at the end of the day, to be the basis of war, while the other two, being modes of dialogue, are constitutive of politics. But whereas the politics of negotiation aims for accommodation, for resolving conflict through the making of trade-offs and concessions, those who converse strive instead for genuine understanding, for learning from each other and progressively transforming their positions so that they can be not compromised but integrated, reconciled. That is why only conversation is a matter of trying to “convince” people to change, whereas the pressurings of negotiation, not to mention threats of violence, are best seen as means to “persuade” them to do so. And it is also why only conversation can be considered the basis of a politics that is concerned with truth, with the “common good.” The question I want to ask here is the following: how can an appreciation of the differences between the above three help those who, like myself, come to the conflict between Israel and its neighbours in the Middle East from a Zionist perspective?

I Historically, Zionists have tended to respond to attacks on Israel with either violence or negotiation. To those on the right, the assumption has been that most Arabs and Muslims will never accept the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East and thus that defending its interests will inevitably require force, whether as active warfare or of the kind embodied in plans such as those for a unilateral pullout from

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the territories. Of course, only war can be expected from colonialist Zionists, those who strive for a “greater Israel” that would leave no room for an independent Palestinian state. But even those Zionists who would bring about two states through unilateral moves should be considered no more political, many of them having given up on negotiation because they believe there is no partner for it. How else, they point out, to interpret the Palestinians’ rejection of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak’s offers during the July 2000 negotiations at Camp David and then those at Taba in January 2001,1 not to mention Palestinian terrorism? To some, these things only confirm what they have long thought; to others, relative newcomers to the right, following Barak there and accepting the demise of the Oslo peace process has been a torturous but seemingly unavoidable move. Not so those Zionists who continue to favour negotiation. Theirs is the centrist’s position – not the left’s. I say this because I believe that we should reserve the left wing of the political spectrum for those who opt for conversation over negotiation.2 So in this case the centre is the home of those who believe that the Palestinians could be induced to accept a two-state solution, or even that they already more or less do so, but that this will come to pass only when Israel makes significant enough concessions. And to these Zionists, this is something that Barak simply failed to do. I disagree with both these positions, both the right’s and the centre’s. Not that I believe the solution lies in Arabs, Muslims, and Jewish Israelis overcoming all their differences with conversation; given all the blood that has been spilled on both sides, few would be so naive as to think that a full-blown reconciliation of the conflict is viable. Perhaps reconciliation was possible once, when now-defunct movements such as Martin Buber’s Brith Shalom called for it, but it clearly no longer is so today. Yet I do not think that we should give up on conversation altogether. Before explaining why, however, I want to say something about why I believe that both the above groups of Zionists are mistaken. Essentially, it is because each is aware of something that the other is not. What these things are comes to the fore when we examine the different ways they conceive of the demise of Oslo. Let’s begin with the centrists. Israeli participation in Oslo was, of course, made possible by former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s decision to give his blessing to the clandestine negotiations between his government and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. In so

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doing, Rabin contributed in a major way to shifting Israel’s response to the conflict from one that relies mostly on violence to one based on negotiation. The change was perhaps most clearly symbolized by his handshake, however reluctant, with Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat on the White House lawn in September 1993. Indeed, “the handshake” is probably the most potent symbol of one’s willingness to engage in dialogue and so politics. That said, it is not entirely clear just how much of a change Rabin thought he was making. For he himself claimed to have acted largely for reasons of realpolitik; more than anything, it was worries about the surrounding regimes obtaining weapons of mass destruction that led him to contemplate negotiating a deal with the Palestinians.3 Genuine, good-faith negotiations, however, require something more: a willingness to accept the legitimacy of the other, which in this case means the legitimacy of Palestinian nationalism. For it is only when one is open to making at least some concessions for reasons other than that one feels forced to do so that we can speak of real politics instead of realpolitik. Otherwise, negotiations are carried out solely for expediency’s sake, which is to say that the moment one determines that the situation has changed and that a less circumspect use of force has become worthwhile, one will have no compunction endorsing it. This suggests that there is a distinction to be made between two kinds of negotiation: good-faith and realpolitik. Only the former is truly dialogical, truly political. Not that good-faith negotiations are wholly free of force; after all, those involved are still adversaries who put pressure on each other. Nor should realpolitik be said to express a wholly immoral striving to fulfil one’s self-interest, while good-faith negotiations are viewed as something purely ethical, even to a degree altruistic. For (just as with conversation) both are carried out by individuals who aim to do nothing other than realize their values. Yet there remains an important difference between them: only the good-faith negotiator counts the virtue of toleration among those values.4 Although Rabin was, it seems to me, unaware of the distinction between these two types of negotiation, his ambiguity about the legitimacy of the Palestinian national movement suggests that he at least began to make the move from realpolitik to good faith.5 Barak, for his part, can be said to have completed that move, since he has had much more to say in favour of recognizing Palestinian

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nationhood. Perhaps this is why, given his own failure to distinguish between these two forms of negotiation, Barak has seemed so much more confused than his predecessor. Consider his claim to have “unmasked” Arafat and his cohort. As Barak has put it, their unwillingness to accept his offers, not to mention their failure to make any counteroffers or their support for the second intifada, should make it evident to all that the Palestinians will never accept a two-state solution to the conflict. Lest there remain any doubt about this, Barak has pointed to their demand for the right of about 4.5 million refugees to return to Israel, which he sees as “in the deepest sense ... a demographic mechanism to achieve Israel’s destruction.”6 But what, exactly, is Barak claiming to have revealed was under the mask? Is it that, although it was already clear that Arafat’s team consisted of realpolitik negotiators, what those dealing with them hadn’t suspected was that they would never accept a two-state solution? Yet how, then, to explain the bitterness that Barak came to feel after Oslo’s collapse, as is evident in his call on Western leaders to “treat Arafat and his ilk in the Palestinian camp as the vicious, untrustworthy, unacceptable reprobates and recidivists that they are”?7 For this is just not the kind of thing one says about someone whom one thinks did no more than make an instrumental decision, albeit mistaken, to renege on certain promises and so move from realpolitik negotiations to a less circumspect use of force. Rather, it is more like what one says about someone whom one believed was negotiating in good faith only to feel betrayed upon learning otherwise. Indeed, Barak is far from alone in his failure to distinguish between realpolitik and good-faith negotiations. Consider Israel’s land-for-peace deals with Egypt and Jordan, which for many Jewish Israelis have served as models for the kind of agreement that they had hoped the Oslo process would bring. But even though these deals were clearly the products of realpolitik, this has not prevented these Israelis from developing feelings of great esteem, even affection, for those with whom they were negotiated: Egypt’s Anwar Sadat and Jordan’s King Hussein. Is the revelation, then, that Arafat and his team were negotiating according to realpolitik rather than in good faith? But Barak did not need to go to all the trouble of having his offers turned down in order to show this. Indeed, as he himself points out, Arafat “has never affirmed Israel’s right to exist or its legitimacy,”8 to which we can add that these things are also absent from the text of the Oslo

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Accord. But they are precisely what is required for good faith. So it seems that Barak is confused about this as well. Those Zionists who have been on the right from before Oslo appear to have suffered from no such lack of clarity. For they have been consistently skeptical about negotiations of any sort. One reason is that they have been sensitive to the very great difference between current Palestinian terrorism and how it used to be carried out during the time when the accords were reached with Egypt and Jordan. For the more recent attacks have not only done more damage but also receive extensive support – both “moral” and material – from the Palestinian masses. This suggests that any agreement reached with Palestinian leaders will be inadequate since the many terror groups not under their control can be expected to continue attacking. Thus do these Zionists end up calling for punishing the Palestinians, their wish being that this might encourage them not, of course, to recognize Israel’s legitimacy but at least to accept its existence, by which is meant to abandon any hope of ever destroying it. Daniel Pipes, for example, calls on Zionists to “impress on Palestinians that the sooner they accept Israel, the better off they will be,” something which he believes requires teaching them “the hopelessness of their cause.”9 The problem with this is that it is likely to produce the opposite effect of what is intended. For the overriding motive for Palestinian attacks has come to be vengeance, which is to say revenge enacted on behalf of the loser, the dishonoured one. Those carrying them out, that is, are angry not merely because of the existence of the settlements but also because of the humiliation that derives from that existence. And this is a humiliation that would only be compounded by the teaching of any harsh lessons, thus serving to strengthen the desire for revenge. Moreover, such teaching can, at best, make way for the fragile and inadequate peace of the EgyptianJordanian accords, and it goes without saying that it utterly rules out hope for the much more durable and comprehensive peace that could come from a genuine accommodation reached in good faith. So it is here, then, that the right’s gravest error lies. For although the centre may very well be wrong to believe that good-faith negotiations are already viable, the right has done nothing to show that they never could be – indeed, quite the opposite. Thus, while I accept that a conversation which would bring a fullblown reconciliatory solution to this conflict is quite unrealistic,

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I still believe that it is worth trying to engage the Palestinians and their allies in one in order to bring about the changes necessary for making genuine, good-faith negotiations possible. For this is something that has never really been tried.

II My central claim, then, is the following: since the establishment of the modern state of Israel, Zionists have either fought wars with their enemies or attempted to negotiate with them, but we have never sought to reach out to them, to get them to think differently about the very idea of a Jewish state. Recognition of that state’s legitimacy requires conversation because recognition, as both the Hebrew and Arabic words for it make clear, is about knowledge (the Hebrew hakarah is a synonym for “conscious of,” and the Arabic i´tiraf has ma´iraf, which means “knowledge,” as its root), and knowledge is just not the kind of thing that can be offered or taken away as part of some bargaining session. In fact, when such recognition is absent, making concessions, especially when they are generous, can easily be taken as a sign of weakness and thus serve to entrench realpolitik. But if, as I believe, good-faith negotiations are not yet viable, what sense is there in my calling for that even more challenging form of dialogue that is conversation? My answer derives from a very strange fact about the difference between negotiation and conversation, namely that only the former requires trust. For there must be trust if an accommodation is ever to work: if there is no confidence that one will be respected, any negotiations will surely break down. But conversation is different since its aim, again, is not accommodation but learning. It thus does not matter whether one’s conversation partner is trustworthy because all that’s required is that what they say appears to “make sense” of the matter at hand, and this is something one can always test for oneself. In fact, as regards this case at least, conversation is also more appropriate than negotiation since many Palestinians are devout Muslims, meaning that they cannot allow themselves to compromise on what they believe to be the word of God. With the (nonfundamentalist) faithful, in other words, conversation is the only way.10 So Zionists need to take on the task of convincing the Palestinians of Israel’s legitimacy. We need to try to change Palestinian

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minds, to show them that the existence of a Jewish state is not simply something that they must, however reluctantly, accept but that it is itself a good thing, that its survival ought to be counted among their own ends. Why has this never been attempted on any significant scale? Of course, one can think of many reasons. One is plain ignorance, for few contemporary thinkers have given conversation a significant role in their conceptions of politics (although this is beginning to change). More significant, however, is surely this particular conflict’s history, which has witnessed such horrible violence on both sides that the very suggestion that the parties might be able to reach some form of understanding appears a fantasy. We should also note that, although anti-Semitism in the Muslim world is nothing new, the conflict with Israel has given it an unprecedented ferocity, with some having even gone so far as to suggest that Jews are like Nazis (and one should never negotiate, much less converse, with Nazis).11 There are also, of course, Jews with racist beliefs about Arabs, some of which translate into the assumption that Arabs are not only unwilling to converse but also incapable of doing so. Not that we Zionists have shown ourselves to be particularly adept at this form of dialogue. For one thing, conversation requires a much greater degree of sensitivity to one’s interlocutor than does negotiation, and sensitivity, it must be admitted, has never been our strong suit. Consider the criticisms levelled at Barak’s behaviour during Oslo by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley. Whether or not they are correct, they make evident that few of Barak’s moves exhibited much regard for Arab and Muslim, especially Palestinian, opinion. For example, there was Barak’s decision to renegotiate rather than implement the agreement signed by Benjamin Netanyahu on the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank; to continue the construction of settlements; to delay talks with the Palestinians while he concentrated on Syria; to continue to hold Palestinian prisoners detained for acts committed prior to Oslo; and to neglect his commitments to redeploy Israeli troops or transfer control of three Jerusalem villages to the Palestinians.12 To this list can be added the way he carried out the Israel Defence Forces’ withdrawal from Lebanon: by ordering them to evacuate hurriedly and in the dead of night, Barak gave the impression that he was at the head of a vanquished army that was on the run.

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Again, there may have been very good reasons for why Barak made the moves he did. My point is only to note how little regard they appear to have evinced for Israel’s opponents’ attitudes. In particular, they may all be said to have neglected the centrality of honour to Arab cultures. But perhaps this is only to be expected given the extreme candour and bluntness that many have noticed in the Jewish Israeli character – an obvious strength in some contexts but a weakness when it comes to the sensitivity that conversation requires. And it is a weakness that is only compounded by what seems to be a fundamental preoccupation of many Jewish Israelis: the fear of being taken for a sucker (freiyer). There is a reason for the absence of queuing in the country.13 To the above can be added that the vast majority of Israel’s political leaders have been professional soldiers, including nine of the country’s twelve prime ministers, Rabin and Barak among them. This is significant because, if the difference between politics and war does indeed repose upon dialogue (whether as good-faith negotiation or conversation), then it must be said that soldiers, for obvious reasons, lack experience in the art. And this problem has only been exacerbated by the relatively nondialogical nature of early Zionism, which tended to concern itself more with creative building than with interpretive speaking.14 To recognize its continuing influence, one has only to note how often Jewish Israelis today can be heard accusing each other of failing to live up to the standards of a tarbut diboor (“speaking culture”).

III The foregoing, I admit, makes the task I am setting for Zionists only appear that much more arduous, as though it were not difficult enough already given conversation’s inherent fragility. At least we can say that the goal of convincing the Palestinians and their allies of Israel’s legitimacy is less ambitious than is the call many have made for the full democratization of all the regimes in the region. Regardless, before addressing logistics, it is important to be clear about what, exactly, we Zionists should be trying to convince our opponents of. I would identify two truths in particular. The first is rather obvious: Jews are not being accurately portrayed in all the anti-Semitic propaganda – we are not evil, not Nazis. On the contrary, like so many other peoples, Jews constitute a nation, a form

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of community that, among other things, feels a special attachment to a particular piece of territory, even (or perhaps especially) when that territory happens to conflict with an equally valid attachment felt by another nation. The second truth is but an echo of the Palestinians’ own calls for independence: no nation can consider itself free unless it receives some kind of recognition from the state under whose sovereignty it lives. In the case of the Jews, this means that the Jewish nation needs a Jewish state. So how, exactly, to convince Israel’s opponents of these two truths? The most appropriate Hebrew word for what’s required is probably hasbara, which translates as “public information” or what is sometimes called “public diplomacy.” Yet this is a form of diplomacy that aims for something more than just realizing the interests of a particular state, since it is, once again, diplomacy in the service of truth. On, then, to two suggestions as to how it might be carried out. 1. “I must confess,” wrote Martin Buber many years ago, “that I am horrified at how little we know the Arabs.”15 This remains all too true today. Zionists need to develop an intimate knowledge of Arab and Muslim cultures, one that would help us to convince them of our two truths. I have long been dismayed by the choice of so many Jewish Israeli academics to focus so much on, say, Anglo-American cultures. Few, for example, are familiar with the Qur’an, which is especially disconcerting given that the book contains passages that provide strong support for our two truths. “O people!” declares one, “We have formed you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another,” while another states, “And thereafter We said to the Children of Israel: ‘Dwell securely in the Promised Land.’”16 Of course, the ignorance I am referring to extends well beyond the academy. Currently, in the Jewish Israeli public school system, the second language taught is not Arabic but English; indeed, Arabic joins French as an equally recommended option if students wish to study a third language. This in a country with a large Arab minority and which is surrounded by millions of Arab – not English – speakers. Unfortunately, those Sephardic Jewish Israelis who are closest to Arab culture (many even speak – or rather spoke – Arabic) also have the most negative feelings towards the Arabs, given that they came to Israel as refugees from Arab countries. Nevertheless, they represent a resource

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that, I would claim, has yet to be sufficiently tapped. The same may be said of Zionists in the diaspora, who must be shown that sending money to Israel, attending supportive demonstrations, and so on are just not enough: we too need to learn Arabic, we too need to reach out to Arabs and Muslims, whenever and wherever possible. 2. Decrying Arab and Muslim anti-Semitic propaganda is a popular Zionist pastime; little, however, is done to counter it, say by reaching out through the media to those with whom it originates.17 One possibility here would be to publish a free newspaper in Arabic and Farsi, thus complementing the efforts of the new Israel Broadcast Authority’s Arabic satellite broadcasts or the new Arabic Israeli Foreign Ministry website. It must be said, however, that Israeli governments have tended to be far more concerned about American public opinion,18 and, regardless, they usually put very little emphasis on public information. This explains why a recent Israeli hasbara budget represented a pathetic 0.015 per cent of the total, around half that of the advertising budget for one of the country’s popular snack products.19 And what does that hasbara have to say on the few occasions that it is directed at Arabs and Muslims? I once asked Gideon Meir, who at the time was deputy director general for Public Affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (and who, incidentally, does not speak Arabic; indeed, in 2004 there were only 7 Arab Israelis among a staff of 985 in the whole ministry),20 what the central message is that he would like to communicate to the Arab and Muslim world. His reply: “Hi guys. With violence and terror you will achieve nothing.”21 This is far from adequate. It goes without saying that convincing Zionism’s opponents of these two truths does not mean that we must forgo the use of force in Israel’s defence, although it would, of course, help if that force was used as infrequently and as carefully as possible. This means that, among other things, it will always be necessary to distinguish between the tiny minority of Arabs and Muslims who are terrorists and must be met with force and those who merely support them, the hope being that the latter can be convinced to do otherwise. Indeed, “divide and convince” has never been a popular Israeli tactic; it must become one.

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V Until now, I have discussed the why and the how of changing Arab and Muslim minds. But what about our own? For after all, conversation is a two-way street. As I see it, our two truths do more than support a two-state solution for the conflict; they also call for a genuinely “binational” Israel, by which I mean an Israeli state that recognizes not no nations, as many who incorrectly refer to a “binational” model intend,22 but that the country contains within it a Jewish as well as an Arab nation. Otherwise put, Israel’s Basic Laws need to be amended to declare that the state is not only “Jewish and democratic” but also “Arabic.” To see why, we need to be sensitive to the differences between two kinds of community, the civic and the national. The former is thoroughly political: it is the community of citizens who respond to their conflicts with dialogue, the results of which are expressed by the state and its laws. Nations, by contrast, lay claim to practices that are mainly carried out within the home and civil society rather than in and around the state. I say “mainly” because, as we have noted, nations also require some form of recognition from their state if they are to be considered free. This makes them different from, say, ethnic communities, which are comfortable fully within civil society’s bounds. Think of Britain. The country as a whole may be said to constitute a single civic community, the one that is based around Westminster and that counts all British citizens as members. But Britain is also the home of four nations – the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish – as well as of various ethnic communities. Only the nations, however, need some form of recognition from the British state, everything from representative stripes in the Union Jack to their own parliamentary assemblies. Offer something similar to one of the country’s many ethnic communities, and it will be politely declined. Israel, then, is a civic or political community that contains not only ethnic communities but also two nations – the Jewish and the Arab – both of which can be variously subdivided along religious and secular as well as ethnic, regional, and civic (think of municipal governments) lines. Now it goes without saying that there is already state recognition of the Jewish Israeli nation. Not so that of the Arabs, however. That Arabic is one of the country’s official languages

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goes some of the way here, but just as official bilingualism has been insufficient for recognizing the Québécois nation within Canada, much more still needs to be done. Given that the formal legal equality enjoyed by all Israeli citizens has not prevented inferior state treatment of Arab Israelis in everything from education to building permits to garbage removal, one might think that energies would be better spent on a less symbolic issue than this one about national recognition. But that would be to ignore another lesson from the Canadian case: as the Montrealbased philosopher Charles Taylor once put it, “anyone who can use the expression ‘just symbolic’ has missed something essential about the nature of modern society.”23 What I want to claim is that the formal equality of all Israeli citizens has not been sufficiently translated into practice precisely because of a deficiency at the level of national recognition, one felt throughout Israeli society. Its message? That Arab Israeli citizenship is worth less than the Jewish. What form, then, should recognition of the Arab Israeli nation take? Among other things, I would like to suggest the following: a symbol representing that nation (say a crescent moon with a Solomon’s Seal pentagram, which are found on many Arab and Muslim countries’ flags) should be added to the Israeli flag alongside the Star of David.24 I can already hear the cries of horror from my fellow Zionists at this idea. But I hasten to point out that recognizing the Arab Israeli nation in this way detracts not at all from the recognition of the Jewish Israeli nation. On the contrary, it not only fulfils one of the same values fundamental to Zionism – that which, as with all nationalisms, affirms national liberation – but it is also fully compatible with the notion that, with Israel, the Jews have a state of their own. The only qualification would be that it is not exclusively their own. The recognition of nations, in other words, does not have to be a zero-sum affair; on the contrary, it is much like what the Jewish Midrash says of a candle, which loses none of its brilliance in kindling another.25 The Buddha invoked the same ancient metaphor as regards happiness; likewise the Zohar, the central text of Jewish Kabbalah, as regards creativity.26 But it was only with the neoPythagoreans and, much later, the English poet Shelley that the idea was connected to knowledge or understanding, which is the form of it that I wish to invoke here. As Shelley writes:

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True Love in this differs from gold and clay, That to divide is not to take away. Love is like understanding, that grows bright, Gazing on many truths ...27 To be clear, national recognition is a matter neither of happiness, nor of mysticism, nor of love. Rather, it is a form of symbolism that is essential to national liberation and so, despite the claims of neutralist liberal thinkers today (those who, instead of adding “Arabic” to the proclamation of a “Jewish and democratic” Israel, would have us remove the “Jewish”), touches on a fundamental political reality of our world: the needs of national communities. We would do well to give them their due. Those Zionists who would reject this genuinely binational Israel mainly do so for two related reasons. Either they fail to see that it is compatible with a two-state solution to the conflict, or they fail to distinguish between state recognition of a nation, which, as we’ve noted, is mainly symbolic, and the question of who forms the majority in a democracy. The issue of majorities and minorities, however, is a matter of counting individuals, not of recognizing communities. When it comes to recognition, the size of the nations within a multinational democracy is not the point; what matters is taking account of their specific needs. That is why there is nothing contradictory about combining recognition of Israel’s binationality with a constitutional declaration that the state is responsible for maintaining a significant Jewish majority among its citizenry. For although recognizing the country’s two nations can be said to fulfil a form of equality, this is not an equality that should be equated with uniformity. On the contrary, recognition is always a matter of being true to a community’s uniqueness, which is to say its difference, and different communities have different needs. In the case of the Jewish Israeli nation, the importance of a constitutional guarantee of its majority status should be clear: given the Shoah, as well as the historical mistreatment of Jewish minorities within Arab and Muslim regimes,28 the necessity of an Israel that can serve as a guaranteed safe haven for Jews the world over should be evident to all. Affirming Israel’s binationality is not only a matter of domestic Israeli justice; it can also help us to communicate our two truths to Arabs and Muslims outside the country. For example, flying an Israeli flag such as the one I have recommended over Jerusalem

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would (at least partly) respond to those Saladin-like calls of many Muslims to “liberate” the city, thus making their acceptance of Israel that much more likely. Furthermore, in helping to reconcile Arab Israelis to the state – encouraging them to become not Zionists themselves, of course, not Jewish nationalists, but Israeli “patriots”29 – the possibility that they could be enlisted to help reach out to their brethren outside the country can only be strengthened. Finally, a binational Israel would lend support to the notion that any Jewish national minority present within a future Palestinian state likewise deserves to be recognized by that state. For that, too, is what justice demands.

V Particularly since the demise of Oslo, the complaint has often been voiced that Arafat never prepared his people for the concessions essential to peace. My question here has had a different thrust: what was the sense in waiting for him, or anyone else, to do so? We Zionists must make a serious effort to convince Arabs and Muslims of our legitimacy, thus making it possible for them to become genuine negotiating partners. We have not done so because most of us, whether of the centre or the right, have arrived at our positions prematurely: the centre in believing that good-faith negotiations are already viable; and the right in having ruled out the prospect of ever making them so. What is required, then, is conversation. For only that form of dialogue which convinces rather than persuades has the potential to get our opponents to recognize a Jewish Israel; only by “speaking to the rock” (Numb. 19:1–22), not “striking it” (Exod. 17:5–6), will we ever see Israel in peace. Needless to say, there is no guarantee that the approach I am advocating will succeed. But to repeat: it has yet to be seriously tried. Even accepting this, many who have heard it object that it would take a very long time to carry off. To that I can but respond with a question: how long do you wish Israel to remain in the Middle East?

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7 Canada, Terror, and the Minimal Global Ethic All things being balanced, it’s balanced and called balancing somewhere beyond everything it’s being balanced not for the sake of balance but balancing between the throes of learning and the entire thing entirely balancing. The Tragically Hip, “Stay”

I In his final book, Justice Is Conflict, the pluralist political philosopher Sir Stuart Hampshire makes the fundamental point – commonsensical to all except some philosophers – that when faced with conflict, those involved should be willing to compromise. Hampshire’s book begins with the assumption that conflicts are driven by often incommensurable values and that justice requires us to respond to them with an adversarial form of rationality. Faced with a conflict, in other words, we should aim to reach a balanced accommodation with our enemies, and this means negotiating with them in good faith. To Hampshire, this conception of justice is universal, and indeed he asserts that most civilizations acknowledge it – even if they don’t always live up to it.1 Hampshire’s is one way to endorse what I like to call the “minimal global ethic.”2 The ethic stands for more than good-faith negotiations, however, for it also supports prohibitions such as those on murder, torture, slavery, and other forms of gross cruelty. In

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addition, as I shall argue here, the ethic can serve as the basis of a far more ambitious politics than one limited to the negotiations so favoured by pluralism. But before I start, I want to say something about pluralism’s philosophical underpinnings, as well as about its popularity in Canada. To begin with the latter: unlike Americans, who tend to go in for invoking uncompromisable principles, we Canadians are very attracted to negotiation.3 Consider the public forum, held in February 2005 at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and based on the following question: “Terror’s Trade-Off: Do Canada’s Anti-Terror Laws Strike the Right Balance between Civil Liberty and National Security?”4 As one might expect, the answers proffered by the participants ranged from yes, to no, to maybe. No one, however, thought to question the question; none, that is, thought to ask whether the very notion that liberty and security are things that must be balanced is correct.5 This is not to deny that, particularly since the launch of the so-called “war on terror,” we Canadians have been confronted by a number of situations in which these values have come into acute conflict. The more extensive the security measures taken at airports, for example, the less freedom passengers seem to have to say, do, or bring certain things on their flights. It is not that we don’t look for instrumental solutions to these conflicts, in which, for example, a redesign of aviation security might provide us with a means to do an end-run around the conflict with liberty.6 But it is precisely when such solutions are not available – and often, alas, they are not – that we need to speak of genuine moral conflicts, and indeed the assumption that we do is the point de départ of the participants in the Ottawa forum. Yet is theirs the only way to conceive of such conflicts? Pluralism implies that it is. My claim is that it is not. To see why, it is worth recognizing that how pluralists conceive of values and their conflicts is something whose roots go back a very long way – as far, I believe, as those Atomist ancient Greek philosophers of the fifth century bce. According to Leucippas and Democritus, getting a clear grasp of reality requires chopping it up into bits, separating it out into its component parts, each of which is conceived as a self-contained and unchanging atom. Later Atomists came to argue among themselves about whether these atoms were made of earth, fire, air, or water, but we need not take sides on this matter here; it is only the “chopping up” that I am

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concerned with. For it has been taken up by the analytic moral and political philosophies of our day, of which pluralism is but one version. Analytic philosophers believe that clarity rather than distortion comes from analyzing or resolving a subject, which is to say from distinguishing its parts such that they can be defined independently, in isolation from each other. That is why they sometimes use variables to represent values or the actions that express them, variables being, by definition, independently distinct placeholders. Consider Christopher W. Gowans’s definition of a moral dilemma: “A moral dilemma is a situation in which an agent S morally ought to do A and morally ought to do B but cannot do both, either because B is just not-doing A or because some contingent feature of the world prevents doing both.”7 Now what I want to claim is that the assumption about the separability of values implicit here is also largely responsible for the particular way that the organizers of our public forum chose to frame their question about freedom and security. Here’s how. By beginning with an image of values as separable, independently distinct entities, we come to see their conflicts as consisting of their banging together and hence of their “clashing” or “colliding.” We also come to imagine the conflicts between whole cultures and civilizations in this way since they are conceived of as merely expressions of isolable groupings of these values. Hence Samuel P. Huntington’s infamous thesis about the clash of civilizations.8 What we have here, evidently, is an inherently adversarial conception of conflict, and it leads to the belief that there are only two ways to respond: either with war or, at best, with the balancing trade-offs that are inherent to negotiation. In fact, I would suggest that, for many Canadians, the idea that a conflict of values calls upon us to negotiate is so deeply embedded in our common sense about politics that we are not even aware that it is there. No surprise, then, that so many of us find talk of “balancing” so irresistible. Regarding the question about the conflict between freedom and security, it is as though we imagine two matzo balls that need to be placed on different pans of a scale and weighed against each other.9 These are matzo rather than, say, billiard balls because, although they have a hard core, their outer layer is rather mushy due to their having absorbed some of the soup into which they have been placed. This is but a fancy way (or perhaps not) of saying that

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pluralist thinkers, and the many Canadians who go along with them, differ from those such as Gowans in their belief that the meaning of values, which includes how much weight should be ascribed to them in given conflicts, partly depends on the context (the soup) in which those values reside. A value’s “thin,” or abstract, core is assumed to be independent of context, but not its “thick” makeup as a whole (i.e., when it is present in a context with other values).10 In Gowans’s case, the billiard ball would be the appropriate metaphor since he believes that values are best represented thinly,11 his use of variables assuming Aristotelian logic’s principle of identity (a = a) and thus the rejection of the pluralist belief that values are often incommensurable with each other. Despite this important difference, however, all those who conceive of values as like balls of one sort or another tend to see the challenge of responding to their conflicts in terms of the same metaphorical question: how to tilt the balance? Should more weight, for example, be given to freedom or to security? Or should a more or less equal measure perhaps be assigned to both? The basic, shared assumption is that, when faced with a genuine conflict, there is no escape from an essentially zero-sum relation since tilting the balance down in one way means raising it in another and so on. But value concepts are not like balls. On the contrary, they are defined contrastively, as parts of a whole. Opening up any dictionary will confirm this: every word is defined with the use of other words, and picking the right definition from among the many that are usually on offer always depends on the context in which the word is being used. Values are thus intrinsically connected to each other in meaning; they exist in a thoroughly thick, integrative relation.12 That is why it should come as no surprise that when we consult the Oxford English Dictionary on “freedom” and “security,” we find that almost all the definitions of freedom assume situations in which one feels secure (in particular: “the condition of being exempt from or not subject to [a defect, burden, etc.]”). One of the definitions of security even employs the word “freedom” (“freedom from care, anxiety, doubt, etc.”). We can thus understand why romantic thinkers about language such as Wilhelm von Humboldt were so enamoured with the metaphor of a “web” for the idea of a language and its concepts: when one touches any part of a web the whole always resonates.13 I prefer the image of a hologram instead since holograms are constructed on the principle that the whole,

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and so all its parts, is present within every single part. But one need not go this far to see why making good distinctions in ethics and politics ought to consist of drawing lines that are dotted rather than solid and hence why likening values to isolable atoms is a mistake. This idea – that values always exist as parts of a whole – supports a very different conception of how they conflict as well as of how we might respond when they do. For instead of picturing the clashing or colliding of originally separate entities, we are encouraged to speak of “tensions” or “disharmonies” as having arisen within certain regions of a whole. The immediate challenge, then, becomes not that of balancing the values against each other but of searching for ways to transform the whole so as to harmonize or “smooth out” the regions of tension. Otherwise put: instead of looking for the accommodation most appropriate to the circumstance, we should, at least at first, strive to further integrate, which is to say to genuinely reconcile, the conflict. And this means avoiding compromise.14 What would an approach like this mean in practice, when we are faced with conflicts such as those that have arisen around airport security? The contrast with pluralism could not be more stark. Pluralists assume that we already have a more or less clear idea of what freedom and security mean and hence that our challenge, once again, is the relatively straightforward one of determining how much weight is to be granted to each (i.e., how much the other is to be compromised). But given the assumption that freedom and security are contrastively defined as parts of a whole, and given that no one ever has a fully transparent grasp of that whole (except God, perhaps, but He’s not telling), we have reason to pose far more profound questions than those about how these values should be balanced. We need to ask about the deeper meanings that they, as well as all the other values that are connected to them, might have for us in this situation. By focusing on the whole in this way, we could even come to see that the only reason there was talk of conflict in the first place was that we made the mistake of going along with those who choose to articulate values as separate, abstract principles – as rights, for example (the right to free speech, the right to security of the person, and so on). After all, few, if any, Canadians have some deep desire to, say, joke about bombs while they are passing through airports or to carry every little thing with them on board their flights. That is why the inconveniences associated with being unable to do these

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things should not be considered violations of their liberty – even a little bit. For one simply cannot be considered less free as a result of being prevented from doing something that one does not really wish to do. Of course, there will always be some who do indeed “wish to do,” but surely the best response in such cases is to try to convince them otherwise, and this is something we should attempt to do before negotiating with them. What they need to be shown, in other words, is that making such jokes is as wrong as, say, tobacco advertising or, to take a more recent example, as the blasphemous mocking of a certain prophet. If they come to accept this, we can say that the whole of their values has been transformed, a result of those most directly involved in this conflict having been reconciled without compromise, without trading one off against the other. In the end, then, what I am saying is that before negotiation, we need to engage in that mode of dialogue known as conversation. Not that there is ever any guarantee that such a conversation will succeed. Conversing about the values at play in airport security might indeed lead us to understand them differently, revealing that many of the restrictions are quite useless – indeed, absurdly so. As travel columnist and commercial airline pilot Patrick Smith has pointed out, the September 11th highjackers succeeded more than anything because they had the element of surprise with them, something that is obviously no longer the case today. Despite this, and even though sharp weapons can be easily fashioned from virtually anything available on a plane and although the restrictions on liquids and gels protect us from what, it turns out, is an extremely impractical threat, “we are content wasting billions of taxpayer dollars and untold hours of labour in a delusional attempt to thwart an attack that has already happened, asked to queue for absurd lengths of time, subject to embarrassing pat-downs and loss of our belongings.”15 I believe that none other than our balancing mindset is behind our credulity here, our belief that any serious threat to how we live our lives can be properly met only by making equally serious and so inconvenient compromises. And even when the restrictions are worthwhile, conversation may reveal to us that we simply should not conceive of them as violations of our liberty. Of course, there are many other issues in which, no matter how one reconceives the values involved, it turns out that compromising truly is the best that can be done. This is so not only because we are sometimes unable – and sometimes unwilling – to converse but also

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because it often just happens to be the nature of the moral reality in which we are set. But this does not mean that it is never worth trying for genuine reconciliation. Only the assumption that striking balances is the essence of practical reason leads us to that conclusion.

II Canadians have tended to adopt pluralism not only domestically but also as regards foreign policy. Just think of what is intended by all our recent talk in praise of “multilateralism.” Indeed, even back during the Cold War we were known for favouring negotiation. Here, for example, is part of what former prime minister Lester B. Pearson had to say upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1957: In his response to the situations he has to meet as a person, the individual accepts the fact that his own single will cannot prevail against that of his group or his society. If he tries to make it prevail against the general will, he will be in trouble. So he compromises and agrees and tolerates. As a result, men normally live together in their own national society without war or chaos. So it must be one day in international society. If there is to be peace, there must be compromise, tolerance, agreement.16 Pearson then went on to quote the American jurist Learned Hand, who argued that since most conflicts are “incapable of solution,” they need to be “replaced by some compromise that, although not wholly acceptable to either side, offers a tolerable substitute for victory.”17 Of course, when the only alternative is war, negotiation is indeed preferable. Recognizing the minimal global ethic, however, suggests that there is also another way. For it tells us that intercultural conversation is possible, at least in some cases, because those involved in a conflict – not only within countries but also between them – do not always need “to bridge” some divide with negotiation because there is a bridge, namely the ethic, already present. Those standing upon it, in other words, have every reason to converse, to try to reconcile rather than merely accommodate their conflict. Supporting conversation across borders, it is worth mentioning, does not require us to defend some version of cosmopolitanism. For it is only when the conversation breaks down (and we must, once

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again, admit that more often than not it will) that we need to turn to a form of diplomacy that is limited to negotiation, and it is only then that it makes sense to appeal for guidance to a political ideology, whether it be cosmopolitanism, liberalism, nationalism, or whatever.18 Because when conversing one needs to listen to the other, not to some preconceived doctrine. I want to conclude by suggesting that Canada, given its relatively peaceful history, is well placed to engage in this more conversational, and hence less adversarial, politics.19 Indeed, I believe that we can help to encourage the rest of the world to do so as well, and one of the ways to achieve this is to recognize that the challenges arising from the need to protect ourselves from terrorism – as difficult as they have been and will surely continue to be – can also serve as learning experiences. For they can teach us to better understand our values and hence to get a better sense of exactly what we are fighting for – indeed, of who we are. But they will do these things only if we aim for something more, for something higher, than “balancing.”

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8 From Moderate to Extreme Holism

Jonathan Dancy has described his Ethics without Principles as the culmination of twenty-five years of work, and indeed it is a major statement by a leading contemporary moral philosopher. Dancy’s basic aim is to provide an alternative to those mainstream, principlesbased approaches to ethics, which is why a great deal of his energy in this and previous works has been devoted to criticizing that mainstream. My critique here, however, is different in that it comes from “the other side,” so to speak, for I wish to argue that Dancy’s alternative does not take us far enough. Central to my argument is an objection to Dancy’s preference for what he calls a “moderate” over “extreme” holism as regards the meaning of morally relevant features. Holism in general is contrasted to atomism, wherein “features carry their practical relevance around from place to place; [to the holist, however,] context can affect the ability of a feature to make a difference in a new case.”1 According to Dancy, holism’s central claim is that “a feature which has a certain effect when alone can have the opposite effect in a combination.”2 But this way of putting it, as I shall show, is already to take a position in favour of moderate over extreme holism, and it is the wrong position to take.

I Dancy distinguishes between moderate and extreme holism as follows: The extreme form announces that no feature has any value other than that which it acquires as a result of its relation to a context.

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Features bring no value with them, we might say. They have value in a context, but only in a way that is to be explained by other aspects of that context. The moderate form of holism allows the possibility of what we might call “default value.” By this I mean that it can accept a distinction between those features that bring no value to the situation, though once there they acquire a value that they can contribute to the whole, and those features that bring a value with them, though once they are there that initial value can be wiped out, or even reversed, by other features of the situation.3 The latter features are said to have default values because they are meaningful before they have been implicated within a given contextual whole. Dancy offers us the example of the statement “that this is causing needless pain,” which he says appears, on its own, to be already set up such that it will, at least initially, say something negative within whatever whole of which it may later form a part.4 But, the extreme holist could object, what of the attitudes of consenting sadists or masochists, those for whom “needless pain” is something attractive and hence morally positive? The objection does seem to support the extreme holist’s belief that nothing, or at least nothing morally meaningful, can have meaning outside of a context. If correct, this would mean that Dancy is mistaken to assert that a feature of an ethical situation can have “a certain effect when alone,” as in his account of holism’s central claim above, because no features can ever be considered “on their own” (i.e., as other than parts of a whole). I want to argue for this position by showing how Dancy’s moderate holism fails to respond adequately to what he identifies as the skeptical challenge that holism rules out the possibility of responsible judgment. According to the skeptic, since judging a particular moral case appears to require taking account of an infinite number of considerations, moral judgment is impossible. As Dancy describes this position: “Given [the holism of features,] it is going to be impossible ever to know how things actually are with respect to any one feature. No matter how much one knows, there will always be something more that one doesn’t know, but whose truth or falsehood makes all the difference.”5 The skeptic’s challenge may thus be said to draw on what Stuart Hampshire once called the “inexhaustibility of description” of a context: “Any situation which

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confronts me, and which is not a situation in a game, has an inexhaustible set of discriminable features over and above those which I explicitly notice at the time because they are of immediate interest to me.”6 And among those features, of course, will be those with default values that are asserted by Dancy’s moderate holism. Dancy’s initial response to the challenge is to suggest that, since it would force us to admit (as G.E. Moore did when faced with a similar charge) that we can never know whether what we do is right or wrong, it assumes an impossibly ambitious standard of what is required for moral knowledge.7 But Dancy also goes further and offers us a way to deal with the problem. He suggests that we invoke the idea of an epistemic filter, one that would account for how an agent can, by judging the particulars of a given context, restrict the number of features relevant to the case. The standards employed by such judgment, although inherently contextual, can be roughly described in advance, as Dancy does when he tells us that “all and only aspects that the agent is capable of recognizing and/or at fault for not recognizing or for not being able to recognize can pass the filter and so affect the morality of the action.”8 But Dancy’s proposed solution begs the question. For if the problem is that an agent must contend with a potentially infinite number of items, the task of filtering can never be properly completed since there will always be more items that need to be filtered out. Dancy, of course, endorses Gilbert Ryle’s argument that practical judgment cannot consist of the consideration of principles or propositions since determining which such principles would be relevant to a given case is subject to an endless regress; such judgment must thus be considered a skill that consists of a “knowing how” rather than a “knowing that.”9 But Dancy is wrong if he thinks that even a “knowing how” can deal with an infinite number of items.10 For if the number of items is infinite, then the task at hand can never be completed. How does this extreme holist surmount, or rather avoid, this difficulty? By assuming that a “knowing how” judgment works with an always already limited number of features. This is because features are assumed to emerge from a pre-reflective background whole, one to which they remain connected, and only certain features will emerge from that whole in a given case. By “pre-reflective background,” I mean to invoke the kind of thing to which Wittgenstein, among others, refers when he points to the unarticulated and indeed

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unarticulable understandings that are at the bottom of our practices, say those that involve obeying rules.11 “Knowing how,” in this conception, does not consist of a filtering out from among a potentially infinite number of items since the number of items may be said to have been pre-reflectively limited from the start.12 It is a central tenet of extreme holism that one always begins with such a (partly prereflective) whole and that any part must be seen to have emerged from, as well as to remain always connected to, that whole. This implies that there can be no features with default values since, outside of a given context, a feature is submerged within the whole and thus indistinguishable, which is to say that it is not a distinct “feature” at all. Moderate holism, in denying this, is thus untenable.

II Adopting the extreme holist alternative leads to a number of other differences with Dancy’s approach, some of which I want to sketch here. One underlies a distinction that Dancy fails to make, namely between wholes that are unified and those that are not. For Dancy explicitly accepts a version of the doctrine of “organic unities,” according to which one must affirm what he identifies as the extrinsicalist principle of context-dependent value: “the value of one object can be affected by the nature (or value) of others.”13 The irony here is that although extreme holists would differ from Dancy in claiming that the value of an object will always be affected by the nature or value of others, our position is also paradoxically less holistic in its assumption that the wholes of which values or features are always a part are never unified. By this I mean that there exist “spaces” or “cracks” within them, gaps that lie between the values that are involved in conflicts. Indeed, it is only by recognizing these gaps that we can account for conflict since it is only because the whole is disunified in this sense that values could ever emerge from the pre-reflective background and hence be expressed as distinct features. Otherwise, the whole’s perfection would mean that agents would never cease performing their practices pre-reflectively, habitually, since those practices would never exhibit the tensions that are the stuff of conflict. It is only because one’s whole of values – one’s identity – lacks unity that there are occasions when one finds oneself unable to cope with the world pre-reflectively, in complete harmony with the context.

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Extreme holism would also rule out Dancy’s too strong “thoughtpractice” dichotomy. According to Dancy: “Practical reasoning proper is a train of thought which concludes in, closes off with, an action – or at lease a decision to act.”14 But if we recognize that the items about which one is judging are not so much beliefs (i.e., propositional knowledge, whether explicit or partly implicit) as things that remain connected to a partly pre-reflective practical whole, this suggests that reflection is itself a form of practice.15 Moreover, given that no decision is ever really final, since “every judgement,” as Paul Ricoeur once put it, “calls for a ‘but’ beyond itself,”16 the notion that a decision can serve as the basis of a conclusion that sharply delineates thought from practice must also be abandoned.17 A proper blurring of the distinction between thought and practice in ethics should also lead Dancy to reconsider his claim that his holism applies equally to theoretical and practical reasons (i.e., to reasons for belief and reasons for action).18 For those of the former category, at least, must often take account of things as they exist in nature, and I would suggest that research in (normal) natural science does indeed rely on highly atomistic concepts, those that are largely definable with a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. Such concepts are fundamentally thin, or decontextualized, laying claim to a fixity and universality that is absent from the thoroughly thick, historically relative concepts that are central to ethics. Just think, say, of the difference between “sodium chloride” (NaCl) on the one hand and “salt” on the other.19 In consequence, when the thin concepts of natural science are interlocked in theories, those theories should be described as “systematic,” rather than organic, wholes. For they do not exhibit the “holographic” quality (in which the whole is, to a degree, present in every part) that is characteristic of organisms each cell of which contains the dna for the whole body. It is the difference between these two holisms, moreover, that lends support to the classic methodological distinction between the human and the natural sciences,20 another distinction that receives no support from Dancy’s moderate holism. Endorsing extreme holism would also help to clear up Dancy’s apparent ambivalence about the place of “weighing” in ethical practical reasoning. Sometimes, Dancy appears to rule out weighing altogether, as when he tells us that his holism would have us reject transitivity, which is “essential to the very possibility of weight, and

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hence to the practice of weighing.”21 This goes with his objection to what he calls the “kitchen scale” model of practical reason, according to which items are assumed to have constant practical weights that they keep regardless of the context they are in. The model, according to Dancy, is simply too atomistic.22 Yet there are times when he appears to affirm weighing23 – as long, we may presume, as the items to be weighed are not assumed to be transitive and thus to be commensurable. This, I imagine, would be to weigh them by placing them not upon the single-beam balances occasionally found in kitchens but, to invoke Michael Stocker’s metaphor, upon something like a single-pan balance hung by a string in the middle, wherein each element placed upon it is able to tip the pan in a different direction.24 But such weighing, like all weighing, still encourages us to conceive of the things being weighed as atomistic since its zero-sum dynamic brings to mind the image of separate objects being compared against each other. That is why, although extreme holists would not rule out weighing in ethics altogether, we are careful to assert that the practice should be engaged in only after a more holistic approach to practical reasoning has been attempted. This would consist of responding to conflict by focusing on the whole rather than on whatever specific parts of it have shown up, the aim being to develop ways to transform this whole so that the conflict can be integrated or reconciled without the compromising that weighing makes inevitable. And the absence of compromise means that we do not have to speak of moral regret.25 Dancy’s moderate holism, however, causes him to miss this integrative, rather than zero-sum, process, as is clear when he writes that “defeated reasons are the normal result of moral conflict” and that the “proper attitude towards defeated reasons is regret.”26 In closing, I want to point out that adopting extreme holism would mean moving even further away from mainstream analytic philosophy than Dancy already has. For we extreme holists are worried about more than just the “narrowness of focus that,” as Dancy has put it, “often bedevils analytic philosophy.”27 For one thing, we shun a style of argumentation that, as with Dancy, repeatedly invokes variables as a means to illustrate one’s points.28 Because what are variables if not abstract and thus atomistic placeholders? For another, we want to avoid the tendency, encouraged by analytic philosophy (but which is actually much older), to conceive of philosophical disagreement in adversarial terms, to see it,

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that is, as though it takes place on a kind of “battleground.”29 Analytic philosophers are led to do this because their method of analyzing or sharply distinguishing concepts encourages them to conceive of conflict as consisting of a “clash”30 (i.e., of the collision or banging together of what were originally separate, and hence atomistic, things). The extreme holist alternative makes way for conceiving of disagreements in oppositional but not adversarial terms, which is to say as taking place within the context of a shared common good that is capable of being transformed through a genuinely conversational, and hence nonadversarial, mode of dialogue.31 That said, let me conclude with a perhaps ironic retort to Dancy’s claim that those who think about a feature in isolation, in the abstract, are basically asking about how it would operate in an “artificially barren environment.”32 Artificial, yes, but certainly not always barren. For while analysis may indeed distort, those distortions can, at least on occasion, be highly creative. Otherwise put: Dancy’s concern about analytical philosophy’s narrowness suggests that he has missed one of the qualities that make it so compelling: although its theories may not be helpful when it comes to ethics, they are still, at times, quite beautiful.

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9 What’s Wrong with Hypergoods

Charles Taylor fails to distinguish enough between art and ethics. Whereas Kant sharply separates the two domains and Hegel brings them close together, subordinating both to his concept of unified philosophical knowledge,1 Taylor treads an ambiguous path between their positions. Like them, he recognizes that creativity is a unique capacity, that “aesthetic excellence doesn’t just amount to spiritual or moral depth.”2 Yet Kant would not be able to accept Taylor’s conception of interpretation as an activity central not only to art criticism but also to ethics, and Hegel would balk at Taylor’s implication that philosophy cannot be said to encompass art because art is the more clairvoyant and therefore superior mode.3 Taylor’s position is ambiguous in that he blurs the distinction between the created, such as the fictional, and the interpreted, or nonfictional. For example, Taylor defines man as a “self-interpreting animal,”4 by which he evidently means to include our capacity to create, and he claims that interpretive ethics consists of “discovering” as well as “creating” or “inventing” meaning.5 Taylor also refers to our linguistic capacity as “not just that by which we produce prose about the things which surround us, but also those by which we make poetry, music, art, dance, and so on,”6 and he has asserted a very wide conception of what a moral ideal is: “What do I mean by a moral ideal? I mean a picture of what a better or higher mode of life would be, where ‘better’ and ‘higher’ are defined not in terms of what we happen to desire or need, but offer a standard of what we ought to desire.”7 Given that creativity may be channelled into actions and not only artworks, this could easily be understood to include standards of an aesthetic and not only ethical sort.

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So although I broadly agree with Taylor’s “middle way,” I nevertheless think that he needs to move somewhat further from Hegel and closer to Kant by asserting a sharper distinction between creation and interpretation – between making art, on the one hand, and reflecting on it and ethics, on the other. Taylor is familiar with the notion, fundamental to many religions, that the creation of the world is a kind of “gift.”8 Artistic creation is, I believe, similar – the gift here being the inspiration that drives the creation. We call artists gifted, that is, not only because they are lucky enough to have developed certain talents but also because of the inspirations they have received. This is not to imply that only creations can be original, for the transformations brought about by interpretation (which, after all, consists of the reformulation of meaning) may also bring novelty. Yet the interpretive process is best conceived as combining “evolution,” rather than creation or invention, with the discovery of meaning since interpreters may not simply “make stuff up”; rather, they must strive to “make sense” of some phenomenon, to bring understanding, and this requires a thoroughly dialogical process that remains faithful to whatever is being interpreted. The beauty that is the goal of creation, by contrast, cannot be achieved in so rational a fashion; hence our talk of “inspiration.”9 Furthermore, with at least some forms of creativity, if the artist is to receive an inspiration, there needs to be an opening through which it may enter, and this requires that some violence be done, forcing a space between the goods of the world. This means damaging those goods to a degree and so moving, at least at first, in a direction opposite to the reconciling, integrating one that is the aim of ethics and practical reason. I say “at least initially” because creations may – in the long run, after they have been interpreted – contribute more to the integrity of the whole of goods than any strictly interpretive approach ever could. But the initial, irreparable damage should not be denied. Perhaps this is an idiosyncratic account of creativity. The intuition that there is something inherently violent, or at least irrational, about the creative process is widespread, however, and I want to suggest that this is the chief reason for distinguishing between creation and interpretation. I accept that interpretation serves as a kind of bridge between the domains of art and ethics, both because there is interpretation in creation (artists, after all, never create ex nihilo) and because we interpret both artworks and the conflicts of

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goods in roughly the same fashion, hoping to “make sense” of them. As Taylor writes, “the languages of qualitative contrast [i.e., of interpretation] embrace more than the moral.”10 Yet we must be careful not to blur the border between the domains of art and ethics too much. Whereas Taylor sees them as partly overlapping, and to that degree melded together, I would concur but add that there are also spaces – “cracks” of a sort – lying between them. These ensure that there is something aporetic, inherently paradoxical, about their relations, and this is something that Taylor misses. In the first section of this essay, I offer an account of why I think he does so. Then, in the following section, I argue that properly distinguishing between art and ethics should lead us to reconceive what Taylor calls “hypergoods.” As Taylor understands them, hypergoods are those fundamental, architectonic goods that can serve as the basis of our moral frameworks.11 My claim, however, is that hypergoods are affirmed in a creative as distinct from interpretive fashion and thus that they should be situated squarely within the domain of the aesthetic. Hypergoods, that is, are not so much goods as works of art – which is why, when judged from a strictly ethical standpoint, there will always be something “wrong” with them. After arguing for this, I then use the essay’s third section to show how accepting this conception of hypergoods has important ramifications for our understanding of certain social practices and movements. My claim, one might say, is that there are many more artists in the world than Taylor seems willing to admit.

I The argument that Taylor should be distinguishing more strongly between art and ethics proceeds in two steps. First, I try to show that his conception of dialogue, and so of ethics, is overly adversarial. This leads him to fail to contrast it enough with the domain of art because creation, given its irrationality, is inherently adversarial – indeed, if one accepts the role of violence in it, fundamentally so. Second, I argue that Taylor’s conception of creation is too interpretive, too dialogical, and that this makes it appear more like ethics than it actually is. I begin with the overly adversarial ethics. Taylor favours a substantive as distinct from procedural (whether consequentialist or Kantian formalist) ethics, one that engages in what he calls

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“strong evaluation.”12 In its modern form, substantive ethics is said to consist of “reasoning in transitions,” a thoroughly contextual, interpretive form of judgment that echoes biographical narrative. Through it, Taylor claims, we can achieve the greater lucidity that comes from reaching the understandings that successful interpretation can bring.13 One of the reasons Taylor is unsatisfied with procedural ethics is that it fails to recognize how conflicts often arise between intrinsically incommensurable goods, meaning that we cannot turn to some systematic procedure for guidance to respond to them properly.14 Taylor shares this claim with other neo-Aristotelians, including pluralists such as Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, and Bernard Williams. Where he differs from them is in his belief that incommensurability is basically a synonym for conflict: to Taylor, incommensurable practices and the goods they express are “incompatible in principle” because they are “partly define[d]” in contradiction to each other.15 In pluralism, goods can exist in a “thin,” or decontextualized, dimension of meaning, one that allows their cores to be defined wholly independently of each other16 and thus conceived as incommensurable without having come into conflict. Taylor, however, affirms the Heideggerian thesis according to which meaningful things can show up as distinct and incommensurable only because they are in conflict and hence no longer submerged in our pre-reflective background whole of harmonious practices. In the abstract, outside of the context of a given conflict, moral concepts cannot even be distinguished from each other much less defined in isolation. That said, when it comes to responding to conflict with practical reason, Taylor is not as far from the pluralists as he should be. This comes to the fore when we examine his conception of the goal of reasoning about conflict. In pluralism, it is clear, the aim is always to reach an “accommodation,” something that requires compromising the goods involved. Although Taylor has expressed worries about the social fragmentation encouraged by an overly pluralist politics, one that fails to be concerned enough with the common good,17 he nevertheless does not distinguish between accommodation and the genuine “reconciliation” of a conflict. The latter, we may say, arises from integrating rather than compromising goods. Moreover, accommodation and reconciliation should each be associated with different modes of dialogue, “negotiation” and “conversation,” and this is another distinction that Taylor fails to make.

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Conversation constitutes practical reason at its most true and effective: being free of the influence of force, it has the potential to do the most good. Conversation aims for the realization of conflicting goods through their integration, a possibility because they are assumed to be partly integrated to begin with. Indeed, they are parts of a “holographic” whole, one that is present to a degree in every part. While conversing, one searches within a good for its opponent(s) and in so doing aims to transform the whole in order to reconcile the conflict and realize the common good. With negotiation, by contrast, the point, as we have seen, is accommodation. True, negotiators sometimes converse a bit at first, in order to understand precisely what the demands being brought to the table are. But in the end these are indeed received as “demands” rather than as potentially convincing interpretations of the good. For after all, even the most good-faith negotiations consist of adversaries putting pressure on each other. Negotiation, then, cannot be said to be wholly free of the use of force, which is why it should be situated between violence and conversation. Violence constitutes one extreme of this spectrum because it separates us from our adversaries, tearing holes in the common good. The compromises of negotiation do so as well, but its accommodations may then be said to “patch” those holes. When a conversation succeeds, however, we get integration rather than compromise, and this contributes to rather than detracts from the common good. That is why I would claim that only those who respond to a conflict with conversation may be described as “striving” (cooperatively) instead of “struggling” together and thus may be considered “opponents” who are not also “adversaries.”18 Yet Taylor’s conception of the aims of practical reason contains an uneasy mixture of both reconciliation and accommodation – a direct result, I suggest, of his failure to make the distinction between conversation and negotiation. Force and dialogue are certainly distinguished: when it comes to conflict, he writes, as long as the parties remain “this side of violence,” each can be said to view the other “as one who can be, must be, reasoned with.”19 But Taylor makes no contrast between the adversarial and the merely oppositional; to him, those who participate in interpretive, dialogical politics may be said to “strive” or “struggle” as well as to engage in “negotiations” or “semi-agonistic conversation,” with each pair of words here being used as synonymous.20

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This blurring is also reflected in Taylor’s contradictory reading of Aristotle’s ethics. On the one hand, Taylor suggests that Aristotle does not admit of the necessity of tragedy since he assumes that all conflicts can, in principle, be reconciled, rationally resolved without compromise, without moral loss.21 This reading gives a central place to Aristotle’s doctrine of the unity of the virtues,22 and it leads Taylor to claim that “the general atmosphere of Aristotle’s ethical works seems to induce the sense that a harmonious unity of the good life is within the reach of any good-and-moderately-fortunate man.”23 On the other hand, however, Taylor endorses Martha Nussbaum’s interpretation of Aristotle, which emphasizes the role of luck in his practical thought in a way that implies that there are times when, no matter what we think or do, “we may be forced to make hard choices.”24 Unlike the monistic reading, this one sees Aristotle as accepting the pluralist nature of the moral reality in which we are set and so the idea that we are often confronted by conflicts in which, no matter how rational we are, compromise will be unavoidable. One of the problems with this ambiguity about the nature of practical reason is that it makes it difficult to establish the contexts necessary for resolving those conflicts that require conversation and not negotiation. Consider recognition. As Hegel shows in the first stage of his famous dialectic of it, any attempt by one party to obtain recognition from another by force is counterproductive since it can easily lead to the death of one or both of them, thus obviously defeating the purpose. This stage is consequently resolved when the struggle produces a primitive form of recognition, in which one party becomes the master and the other the slave.25 When it comes to the much more sophisticated forms of recognition sought by many groups in contemporary politics, however, I would claim that even negotiation is too adversarial. For what these groups want is to have their full identities recognized, their uniqueness or distinctiveness within the larger polity, and recognition of this sort simply cannot be granted as part of a choice to make some trade-off. That is because this kind of recognition is essentially about truth – and one either learns that something is true or one does not; there is no way to choose to believe in the truth of something since belief just is the stance we take towards something we suppose to be true.26 The only form of dialogue that has the potential to bring the desired recognition is thus conversation, which is nonadversarial. Yet Taylor offers no criticism of the use of adversarial tactics in what he

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describes as the contemporary “struggles” for recognition; he never suggests, for instance, that there is something self-contradictory about the very idea of making a “demand” for recognition.27 Granting adversity a central role in the search for truth is quite understandable, however, if one believes, as Taylor does, that “the adversarial procedure of philosophy is very fruitful”28 or that argument is but a matter of “contesting between interpretations.”29 The same may be said of Taylor’s (only partly facetious) description of his first book as “a vicious attack on, a stab to the heart of, behaviourist psychology”;30 or his giving centrality to the zero-sum, and hence adversarial, metaphor of weighing for practical reason;31 or his referring to the final instalment of his discussion with Richard Rorty as “the nth round”;32 or his approving of the use of “military metaphors” for describing the competition between different languages, a competition meant to include a concern for truth.33 All these are examples of Taylor’s overly adversarial conception of dialogue, of his failure to appreciate that interpretive practical reason at its best is more like conversation than negotiation, more about integrating than balancing, reconciling than accommodating.34 And one result of this is that it leads him to fail to recognize how far interpretation is from the irrational, even violent, process that is creation. I now want to make this argument from the other direction, to show how Taylor’s conception of creation is too dialogical and hence too close to interpretive ethics. I begin with his account of the “expression” of art. Like Heidegger, Taylor rejects subjectivist conceptions of expressivism; as he writes: “The human being is ... a language animal, a being of culture, a being who invents and creates, but the invention and creation are fruitful only when the inspiration comes from beyond the self.”35 How far beyond? Heidegger’s answer seems to be “not very,” since he suggests that the new worlds created by artworks (a result, he claims, of their making perspicuous the “thing-like” character of things or their inaugurating new ways of life)36 are ultimately no more than manifestations of the relation between the world and nature. Originality is accordingly limited since, to Heidegger, creation is largely about revealing an “earth” that can never be fully disclosed given that it is “essentially self-secluding.”37 Creativity, then, is a matter of unconcealing (aletheia), of negating forgetfulness, of disclosing truth against nontruth. There certainly seems to be struggle here – to

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Heidegger, works are a “strife” between world and earth in which concealment (untruth) and unconcealment (truth) are brought together – but this is far from the violence that I have associated with creativity. Indeed, although Heidegger refers repeatedly to a “striving” that is also a “struggle” and virtually defines the work of art as the “fighting of the battle” between world and earth,38 it is nevertheless clear that, in the end, he conceives of this conflict in oppositional rather than adversarial, much less violently adversarial, terms. For even though “world and earth are essentially different from one another,” they “are never separated”;39 the “rift” (Riss) that he says lies between them is thus anything but the kind of tear or crack of nonbeing that I claim is often required, one that goes all the way through, changing the topology. For to Heidegger, “the conflict is not a rift (Riss) as a mere cleft is ripped open; rather, it is the intimacy with which opponents belong to each other. This rift carried the opponents into the source of their unity by virtue of their common ground. It is a basic design, an outline sketch, that draws the basic features of the rise of the lighting of beings. This rift does not let the opponents break apart; it brings the opposition of measure [i.e., world] and boundary [i.e., earth] into their common outline.”40 Taylor’s conception of art is both more romantic and more modernist than Heidegger’s. It is more romantic in the significance he gives to the role of the artist in the creation of a work: the artist actively brings a work to articulation by expressing meaning through his or her “personal index.” This is a matter of making and not just discovering, of constituting rather than simply revealing or disclosing. Creation is thus an activity that is at least partly driven by the power of the person doing the creating.41 With Heidegger, however, as Taylor points out, it is ultimately the cosmos rather than the self that is brought to expression, and this expression is an act driven by the power of language rather than of humans, as well as, again, a matter more of discovering than of making.42 Taylor is more modernist in his recognition that modernist creativity consists of something other than the expression of “epiphanies of being.” Following Baudelaire, Taylor recognizes that modernist artists reach beyond or outside of nature43 by invoking a fragmentation of experience that comes from the juxtaposing of images or even worlds.44 With modernist “interspatial epiphanies,” the creation arises through the space between the words or images,

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the force field that they set up between them.45 Art so created can no longer be understood in expressive terms,46 and Taylor has himself pointed out that its relation to morality is accordingly problematic.47 For some reason, however, Taylor seems to think that romantic creativity, which is thoroughly expressive and thus highly (but not wholly) interpretive, is the more standard type. Hence his claims that art is the paradigm of expressive activity, that our expressive powers are “most fully realized” in artistic creation, and that “to know this is to know something about the characteristic perfection of man” (a “man” who, we recall, is defined as a self-interpreting being).48 Here Taylor appears to exclude modernist creativity altogether, creation being virtually equated with expression. This is an expression, moreover, which includes activities that have nothing to do with art. For example, as Taylor writes, “There is a range of our facial expressions and stances which are expressive in the strong sense, because they are essentially concerned with the disposition to manifest our feelings: expressions of joy and sorrow, a stance of dignity, reserve, intimacy, etc. It is these that I want to take as paradigm examples, along with works of art and the words we utter, of what I am calling ‘expressive objects.’”49 One consequence of this is that Taylor feels little need to contrast the identities, the selves, of especially creative individuals with those of people who live their lives more interpretively, more dialogically.50 But making such a contrast is especially important when it comes to those who engage in the more “mystical” forms of creativity wherein the inspirations are often said to enter through the artist’s “divided,” rather than integrated or cohesive, self.51 Such people, we should recognize, are just not like the rest of us. Taylor, however, asserts that “the self” in general has a “moral topography” best described by using such spatial terms as within/without and above/below, there being no mention of the cracks, spaces, or holes that may lie between its parts.52 This causes him to run together the ethical quest for authenticity, the dialogical, interpretive practice of developing ways to be true to one’s self, with the creation of art: “self-discovery involves the imagination, like art. We think of people who have achieved originality in their lives as ‘creative.’ And that we describe the lives of non-artists in artistic terms matches our tendency to consider artists as somehow paradigm achievers of self-definition.” To Taylor, “the demands of authenticity are closely bound up with the aesthetic.”53

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He can make this claim not only because he overlooks mystical creativity but also because he artificially limits the bounds of the modernist sort. For example, although Taylor asserts that we “live in the aftermath of modernism,” he appears to restrict it to our “cultural world.”54 Other practices may also be creative but only, it seems, in an expressive, and thus highly interpretive, sense. Hence Taylor’s reference to our personal, self-developmental practices as “narratives” and to our social ones as constitutive of a “social imaginary,” with both of these terms meant to include fictional as well as nonfictional elements.55 In so doing, however, Taylor downplays, if not altogether ignores, modernist creativity, and the effect is to make creation in general appear more interpretive than it actually is. We may say the same of Taylor’s conception of religion, given the centrality of transcendence to both religion and art (indeed, if we accept that creative inspiration has a transcendent source, that it is a kind of gift from God,56 we can see why Northrop Frye has claimed that religion and art are one and the same thing).57 As we have seen, Taylor refers to artworks as “epiphanies,” spiritual manifestations, and we note his choice to close his chapter on modernism in Sources of the Self with a citation of Wallace Stevens: “The major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God.”58 Consider Christianity. Taylor has claimed that Mother Theresa’s works of Christian charity (agapê) are subject to moral reasoning like other goods.59 But this would cause us to miss their inspired, violently creative aspects and so her “greatness” – indeed, perhaps even lead us to misjudge her as simply “bad.”60 We cannot understand the struggles of saints, that is, in strictly strongly evaluative terms;61 to do so is to make the mistake of assuming that they are “persons”62 like the rest of us. If only because of their creative ability to inspire others, it should be evident that they are not. Taylor’s transcendence, we might thus say, just isn’t transcendent enough. As he defines it, transcendence consists of going for “some good beyond life.”63 This is a highly Thomistic conception,64 one compatible with the notion that grace can underpin virtues of a certain kind, namely the “theological” ones (faith, hope, and charity) and that these can complement – indeed, perfect – the “natural” everyday ones. But this seems to me to be only half right. True, one might argue that interpretive ethics expresses, even if only implicitly, a hope that we can move towards a perfectly unified, and thus transcendent, Good. Since we never have a full grasp of the “whole of

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goods,” no single argument ever proving globally superior,65 we require faith that the reconciliation of a given conflict will contribute to rather than detract from the overall integrity of the whole – a faith, one might say, that is implied by our very use of interpretive practical reason.66 But the assumption that transcendence can simply complement ethics misses something. Consider God’s instructions in the Bible to those who would be Nazarites and separate themselves off from the everyday in order to pursue the holy, to devote themselves completely to Him. When their period of service is finished, they are told that they must offer a sacrifice for their sin (Num. 6:13–15), one that, as rabbinic Judaism’s Talmud suggests, is due to nothing other than their having cut themselves off from what we may identify as the domain of the good.67 Holiness, in this conception, means going beyond not just life but also the good. Or consider Kierkegaard’s account of transcendence as requiring a “suspension of the ethical.”68 It too implies that some harm, some damage, is going to be done, and thus that transcendence involves, at least at first, transcending not only life but also the good (even though, again, it may in the long run bring about more good overall). To conceive of it otherwise would be to dull this paradox somewhat and miss the point of such central religious parables as monotheism’s story of the binding of Isaac. God’s command that Abraham sacrifice his son suggests that there can be a division between God and ethics, one that is nevertheless overcome to an extent when He ultimately revokes the order – yet only “to an extent,” for although the Lord may provide (Gen. 22:14), the revocation does not – indeed, cannot – erase all of the damage done. This should be evident even if we take a Pauline reading of the story, one that emphasizes Abraham’s faith that either he won’t have to go through with it or, if so, that the story will nevertheless end with a triumphant resurrection.69 For we still need to appreciate just how special, how perfect, is Abraham’s faith, as Kierkegaard implies when he identifies him as a “knight of faith.” Abraham is simply unlike the vast majority of the faithful for whom the violence of the story is inescapable; after all, the man appears intent on murdering his son. Since most of us have a less than perfect faith (if even that), some irreparable damage is thus going be done no matter how things turn out – just think of how the experience must have affected Isaac’s relationship with his father (the Bible, of course, remains characteristically silent about this). Doubt, however, seems inseparable from the

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faith of most; indeed, one might even say that it is doubt that makes it faith rather than certainty: as Miguel de Unamuno once declared, “a faith that does not doubt is a dead faith.”70 Taylor is aware that transcending life can compromise human flourishing, yet he still concurs with René Girard that it is possible for transcendence, when not “imperfectly oriented,” to take place wholly without violence. While advancing a critique of neoNietzschean anti-life positions, Taylor suggests that “the only way fully to escape the attraction towards violence lies somewhere in the turn to transcendence, that is, through the full-hearted love of some good beyond life.”71 So although he can admit that dedication to God may involve “something beyond morality,” 72 he still does not accept that it can also take us beyond the wider category of “the good” or “the ethical.” Thus would he close, to a degree, the paradoxical, only partly complementary schism that lies between religion (and by implication art) and ethics – a utopian, if admirable, ambition that rests on a mistaken sense of how the two can, and generally do, relate in our world. There is a parallel difficulty with Taylor’s account of William James’s favoured variety of religion. It arises from a confusion of mysticism proper with “personal religion.” The latter is indeed, as Taylor points out, a form of devotion that, in its emphasis on the “experience” and “feelings” of the individual, may be considered a species of romantic expressive individualism and so aligned with the ethics of authenticity.73 But mystics, again, like the saints mentioned above, are not ordinary persons. For one thing, the ecstasy they aim for is not in any ordinary sense an “experience”;74 it is something other than a sensory, interpretive phenomenon arising from the dialectical fusion of the self’s horizon with that of whatever is being perceived. After all, ecstasy, as the word’s etymology implies, is all about attaining “no-self,” and it therefore cannot be reconciled with an ethics that strives for self-authenticity. James’s positive evaluation of psychopathology as well as his discussion of the divided self75 should have alerted Taylor to the tension at the heart of James’s preferred stream of “devoutly humanist” religion. But Taylor does not acknowledge it, and this failure carries over into his discussion of the potential relationship between James’s favoured religious practice and more communal or corporate forms. To Taylor, these “ought ideally to complement each other.”76 Yet recognizing the inherent tension between them should, once again,

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lead us to see this as a more utopian than viable ideal. The same needs to be said, and for the very same reasons, about Taylor’s assumption that creation is, in principle, wholly compatible with – indeed, a species of – interpretation. It is because I believe the reality to be otherwise that I have argued we need to sharpen his distinction between art and ethics.

II Having lent support to such a sharpening, I now want to argue that what Taylor calls hypergoods ought to be identified as artistic rather than ethical. As Taylor defines them, hypergoods are “goods which not only are incomparably more important than others but provide the standpoint from which these must be weighed, judged, decided about.”77 Moreover, “the highest good is not only ranked above the other recognized goods of the society; it can in some cases challenge and reject them, as the principle of equal respect has been doing to the goods and virtues connected with traditional family life, as Judaism and Christianity did to the cults of pagan religions, and as the author of the Republic did to the goods and virtues of agonistic citizen life.”78 Hypergoods, then, are not only architectonic but can also call for the supercession, and so negation, of certain goods outright. One result, of course, is conflict. What Taylor calls the Aristotelian “comprehending” strategy, which would have us grant all goods their appropriate place, is said not to be an option since “we are plainly too far gone in our recognition of hypergoods.”79 Yet Taylor still believes that it is, in principle, possible to reconcile hypergood-driven conflicts. He states that “greater lucidity can help us to see our way to a reconciliation. If I may give expression to an even farther-out hunch, I will say that I see this as the potential goal and fruit of articulacy. We have to search for a way in which our strongest aspirations towards hypergoods do not exact a price of self-mutilation. I believe that such a reconciliation is possible.”80 Moreover, Taylor claims that this reconciliation can be brought about rationally, by the interpretive form of practical reason that underlies substantive ethics.81 Indeed, Taylor conceives of philosophy itself as but a more general form of hermeneutical endeavour. Much of his writing consists

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of an interpretive attempt to critique naturalism, that family of approaches present in philosophy, psychology, social science, and elsewhere that aims to model the study of man on the natural sciences. Originally, Taylor strove to demonstrate its limitations scientifically and epistemologically; such was the focus of his The Explanation of Behaviour, Human Agency and Language and his Philosophy and the Human Sciences. But as he himself has acknowledged, the arguments in these books have not been very effective at convincing those to whom they are directed. So “the sense of futility when one fails to carry conviction against what seem ultimately absurd views” has led Taylor to the project of articulating the moral ideals underlying naturalism, the goods that constitute the self that naturalism’s advocates, given their methodologies, have been unable to acknowledge themselves.82 Only the commitment to a certain identity, Taylor believes, can have generated such powerful resistance to his arguments. Hence his work on developing a hermeneutical account of the genesis of the modern self, books such as Sources of the Self, Philosophical Arguments, and A Secular Age. But it was, I suspect, around the time that he made this latter move that Taylor recognized that the naturalists he was criticizing were affirming not everyday moral ideals or goods but hypergoods.83 This meant that articulating their identity, an endeavour that leads directly to a rational assessment of their ideals and an attempt to reconcile the conflicts they may engender, would be qualitatively more difficult than he had originally thought.84 The fundamental role those ideals have played in modernity has thus led him to shift his account of it from interpretations that describe modernity’s goods and that propose radical transformative solutions to their conflicts, which is what he did in his early, socialist-humanist writings,85 to simply description. So Taylor’s hermeneutics is not, as Ronald Beiner has claimed, inherently conservative. Beiner’s argument that it must be, given its refusal to abstract and develop transcultural theoretical standards,86 is merely a Canadian echo of the charge levelled many years ago in the German context by Jürgen Habermas against Hans-Georg Gadamer,87 and it is equally misguided. True, hermeneutics consists, at least initially, of trying to make sense of a confusing or conflictual text or situation, of understanding it as it is. But doing this well should immediately suggest reforms, for “understanding is inseparable from

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criticism”;88 only by transforming a context in a way that brings about the reconciliation of its conflicts can we say that real understanding has been achieved.89 As Taylor conceives of our challenge, then, it is not in principle impossible to reconcile the conflicts driven by the naturalist’s hypergood; rather, it is only that he himself, among others, has so far been unable to come up with the required interpretive solutions. As Taylor writes: “How to reinterpret [hypergoods], and how to make them compatible with the other goods to which we cannot renounce allegiance, particularly those implicit in our historical practices? To answer this would be to say something of real use. This task is, alas, well beyond my powers.”90 It is because of his recognition of the presence of hypergoods in modernity that Taylor’s critical edge has become somewhat dulled, limited to showing how a number of intellectual approaches – not only the naturalist ones – have caused us to miss, even deny, goods that are important parts of who we have become in the modern West. The conflicts that hypergoods engender are thus things that, for the time being at least, it seems we are just going to have to put up with. Regarding politics, for example, although Taylor has argued that purely procedural conceptions of justice are inadequate, he has occasionally accepted stand-alone versions of them, presumably because he believes that those affirming the hypergood underlying them will simply not be reconciled to substantive alternatives. His embrace of a procedural liberalism for English Canada is a case in point, Taylor having gone no further than calling for room to be made for more substantive versions of liberalism strictly as regards the country’s Québécois and aboriginal minorities.91 But Taylor is wrong to think that hypergood-driven conflicts can be rationally reconciled, even if only in principle. Hypergoods are not merely incommensurable with their enemies, partly defined against them, but also, as we have seen, often call for those enemies’ supercession, for their utter rejection. And when they do so, I suggest, it is in a fundamentally violent, irrational way. For in “taking what was previously an ideal and branding it a temptation,”92 they tear open a space in the moral fabric, separating themselves off from those they reject. The conflict that results thus cannot be said to take place within the context of a common good, and this means not only that there is no way for the conversationalist to search within a hypergood for its opponent but also that the respect of

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one’s adversary necessary for the toleration and good faith of the negotiator is absent. Practical reason, in other words, is helpless. As Taylor has suggested, part of rationality requires affirming a “presumption of respect” when it comes to foreign cultures: any way of life adhered to by many people for a long period of time must surely be morally valuable and so have something to teach those ignorant of it.93 With hypergood supercessionism, however, the point de départ is the abolition of some predecessor, a culture that is already known – indeed, intimately so. Instead of respect, then, we get the “pitiless criticism,” as Taylor himself puts it, of an enemy, one designed to “ruthlessly” set aside at least some of its goods.94 The citizens of an agonistic polity are occupied with what are but shadows on a wall; pagans, ignorant of the one true God, are evil idolaters; traditional family life, being inegalitarian, is wholly corrupt; and so on. Or consider, once again, Christianity. As James Carroll has described, it was born out of a supercession of Judaism: “the resolution is that the old Israel is superseded by the new Israel. Implicit in supercession is a fact fraught with implication for the future – that the old Israel no longer has any reason to exist. In effect, the old Israel, by rejecting Jesus, has forfeited the right to be part of the new Israel, which defines itself now as the ‘true Israel.’”95 Hence the historical denigration of Judaism by many Christians, the pendulum having swung continually between two basic forms of dismissal. One originates with Saint Ambrose and continues on to William of Turbeville, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and beyond: it asserts that the very existence of Jews is an affront that calls for them to be either converted or eliminated. The other, advanced by Augustine and the popes who followed him, allows that Jews may survive but never thrive since they have been appointed the role of witnesses to the prophecies concerning Christ. Either way, as Carroll points out, Judaism is held in contempt: the “New” Testament is considered a fulfilment of the “Old,” and the events of one era are used “to ‘trump and trounce’ ... those of another. Fulfillment like this,” Carroll explains, “was abolition itself.”96 According to Carroll, behind this history lies but “a religious misunderstanding.”97 And given that Taylor, as we might expect, also claims that Christianity has no need of a depreciatory conception of Judaism,98 he presumably shares Carroll’s belief in the efficacy of arguing on behalf of that minority, alternative Christian

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tradition, the one advanced in the theological writings of those such as Abelard and Nicolas of Cusa. According to this tradition, supercessionism is but a “temptation,”99 one that could – indeed, should – have been denied.100 But all this is just too quick. There has been more than a “misunderstanding” going on; the “unevangelical horror” that was the Inquisition was not, as Taylor has claimed, simply a “mistake.”101 Rather, there is something inherently irrational about pursuing Christianity as a hypergood, at least when it comes to those goods it sees itself as having superseded. The reason, I suggest, is that the violence of supercessionism is essential to a hypergood’s creation. Hypergoods, that is, are artworks. Taylor himself alludes to what I would identify as their noninterpretive origins when he distinguishes them from everyday goods on the grounds that they do not come to us through our having been “brought up in certain practices”; rather, they “transcend all practices,” some even “transcend the things of this world.”102 Regarding Plato’s hypergood of (socalled) rational self-mastery, for example, Taylor calls on us to recognize the “aspiration to transcendence” behind it.103 Surely, this applies to Christianity as well. My claim, in consequence, is that we should recognize at least two distinct ways to affirm the religion. One, which as we have seen constitutes the dominant tradition so far, is as a superseding hypergood; those who take this route do so because they hope that it will bring further creativity.104 That this entails violence, I have already suggested. The other, Carroll’s and Taylor’s preference, consists of pursuing the faith dialogically, of carrying it out much as a critic approaches a work of art – that is, in the hope of making sense of it, of reconciling it with other meanings, including those of other faiths, present in the world. Now given the history, it goes without saying that there are some very good reasons to urge Christians to follow Carroll and Taylor. The problem, however, is that “reasons” are simply not the kinds of things that those who have already opted for creation over interpretation find compelling. Thus, when it comes to the conflicts between hypergoods and the cultures that they see themselves as having superseded, my claim is that interpretive practical reason just cannot cope. To the degree that there are goods in modernity that hark back to those that enlightenment hypergoods, for example, see themselves as superseding – the goods of theism, for instance, or those associated with the

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organicism and emotionalism that romanticism inherited from Aristotelianism – we can see why Taylor’s various hermeneutical attempts to convince enlightenment naturalists that their moral thought is “utterly misguided in its very essence,” “shallow,” “inconsistent,” and “incoherent”105 have failed to have their intended effect. It is because “interpretive plausibility is the ultimate criterion”106 that Taylor believes what’s required is simply “more convincing argument and with finer moral discrimination.”107 As he once asked, “What if someone doesn’t ‘see’ the adequacy of our interpretation, does not accept our reading?” His good hermeneuticist’s answer was “more of the same” – that is, “We have to show him through the reading of other expressions why this expression must be read in the way we propose.”108 But what if our interlocutors are not “reading” but “creating”? What if, that is, they are just not listening, and indeed cannot do so if they are to remain true to their aesthetic? Obviously frustrated, Taylor has asked of proceduralist utilitarians: “Why don’t they just relax and admit that goods are plural, and save themselves all these strained arguments?”109 The answer, I suggest, is that their affirmation of theoretical rationality and benevolence as a hypergood means that they are artists – and of a kind that makes them immune to sensible hermeneutic argument.

III Conceiving of hypergoods in this way has important ramifications for how we should understand certain social practices and movements since it implies that they have an aesthetic and not only practically rational basis. I want, now, to offer a few examples of where I believe Taylor has overlooked this dimension within modern North Atlantic societies. i The first of these consists of the affirmation of ordinary life, the moral framework which asserts that “the central point of human existence and human fulfillment is to be found in the life of production and reproduction, or work and the family, or labour and sexual love.”110 As Taylor shows, it originated with the Reformers’ attack on the hierarchies associated with monastic life and other such glorified “higher callings.” However, it was still considered a

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form of holiness, for as in rabbinic Judaism (although in a different way) ordinary life was to be lived in order to glorify God.111 Taylor thus interprets it as straddling the “boundary between the transcendent and the life-centred” and hence as causing that boundary to dissolve “in the ambivalence of a twilight zone.”112 Taylor appears to be aware that there is a tension here. As he writes, the integration of Christian agapê with an ethic of ordinary existence is “not always an easy union, naturally.”113 Yet the strain seems to disappear upon ordinary life’s secular transposition, a process that began when it became fused with the philosophy of disengaged freedom and rationality in the seventeenth century. By the end of the eighteenth, there no longer seems to be any room for agapê, and it is even possible to identify a sometimes fiercely antireligious naturalist variant of the ethic.114 Thus do the new secular proponents of ordinary life come to criticize their Christian forebears for not having sufficiently fulfilled life.115 But there would be no reason to abandon talk of ordinary life’s transcendent dimension, and so of the tension between this dimension and ordinary life’s more worldly aspects, if we recognized the importance of creativity to this new, ostensibly secular way of life. Doing so would also put in question Taylor’s association of ordinary life with the world of the “anti-hero,” wherein self-display and the “incomparably higher” are shunned.116 For heroes are not only those who have defeated great adversaries; as even the gloryobsessed militarist Machiavelli knew, creativity is another route to greatness.117 My claim, then, is that Taylor’s detaching of ordinary life from the pursuit of honour and glory is overdrawn and thus that we should be making room for the latter by referring to the affirmation of everyday life instead. For there is nothing ordinary about heroes. What would be some examples of self-display and creativity in everyday life? Consider the practices around romantic love and parenthood. Here I would point to the wild extravagance of many weddings or to the popular belief that couples must be forever monogamous. The latter, given our drive for sexual gratification, is for some a particularly violent contribution to the already difficult challenge of combining their concern for personal authenticity with their participation in deep and lasting intimate relationships; as Freud once put it, “one does not venture to declare aloud and openly that marriage is not an arrangement calculated to satisfy a

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man’s sexuality, unless one is driven to do so perhaps by the love of truth and eagerness for reform.”118 Laura Kipnis is one who is so driven, she having advanced a critique of “modern coupledom” that, although recognizing that “falling in love is the nearest most of us come to glimpsing utopia in our lifetimes,”119 nevertheless overlooks the possibility that it may constitute an aesthetic ideal. Indeed, her call for awarding trump status to unfettered sexual desire is itself made out of a concern not only for our carnal satisfactions but also for creativity.120 Moreover, she herself admits that the ostensibly creative adultery she so favours requires marriage for its very existence,121 to which I would add that the enduring love that romantic love is supposed to inaugurate can itself serve as the basis for yet another creative project, that of raising children. For is there not a sense in which every parent is an artist?122 Regarding work or production, Taylor appears to miss the creativity and hunt for glory underlying many capitalist practices. Following Albert Hirschman, Taylor emphasizes capitalism’s association with the modern rise of le doux commerce,123 according to which business activity is meant to exhibit more “polished” and “gentle” mores and thus replace the aristocratic honour ethic, which stressed the glory won in military pursuits. But surely glory can also come from success in a competitive marketplace. That is to say, the “quiet virtues” that “encourage business,” those that Alexis de Tocqueville identified with “American honour,” are just not as cut off from aristocratic honour or “martial valour” as he believed; Tocqueville was simply wrong to suggest that the American businessman’s boldness is limited to “commercial speculations,” that it has nothing to do with defeating the competition.124 Moreover, the innovative aspects of entrepreneurship point to its creative dimension, the openings for which are sometimes made possible by the devastation wrought during capitalist economic crises.125 To Taylor, the market economy constitutes an extrapolitical field of “purely secular action,”126 and he has also pointed out how, for many, the very category of “the economic” in modernity assumes that it can operate as a unified self-regulating system.127 Yet this ignores the anything-but-systematic, violently chaotic aspects of its operations, those that I would associate with what economists today are increasingly identifying as its “creative destruction.”128 So there is glory, because there is creativity and competition, in everyday life. No surprise, then, that just as the poets of the ancient

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world immortalized its warriors, those such as Baudelaire and Stan Rogers have sung the praises, and tragedies, of the heroic everyman of today.129 And just like the ancient hero, this everyman is divided, there being a fundamental tension between the ethics of his “ordinary” interpreted self and the creativity that makes that self so great. ii The issue of the canon as it pertains to university curricula is another subject regarding which Taylor has recommended we follow a presumption – although only that – of respect, this time as regards works produced within foreign or minority cultural traditions. His advice is directed not only at the ethnocentric among us – those, for example, who assume that nothing can possibly match the West’s tradition of theoretical philosophy – but also at those whom he identifies as “neo-Nietzcheans,” many of who claim that foreign works have been excluded from our canon solely on the basis of power or ill will. To Taylor, this position is itself guilty of a failure of judgment: simply assuming that a foreign work is equal to our best without having truly engaged with it is patronizing as well as homogenizing. It not only leads to a failure to assert high standards but also undermines the principle of diversity, thus undercutting the whole point of a canon.130 I do not wish to deny that ethnocentric and patronizing attitudes have played a role here. Yet it seems to me that another motive is also often present, an aesthetic one that Taylor neglects. Regarding the practitioners of theoretical philosophy, for example, I would suggest that their rigid adherence to its methods serves as a source of creativity.131 Taylor has argued that the theorists of procedural ethics draw upon the moral source of autonomy as a hypergood, and he has also worried that, given that modern standards of justice and benevolence are very high, this source is not strong enough to maintain them.132 But whereas the vast majority of moderns may indeed be experiencing a malaise of sorts, proceduralist theorists, not to mention human rights activists, do not appear to be lacking in zeal. Given Taylor’s claim that the realization of an epiphany is a paradigm case of contact with a motivating source,133 this suggests that their hypergood is epiphanic. Calling on proceduralists to abandon their approach in favour of an alternative, then, is much like calling on the members of a particular school of art to accept

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the techniques of another school; one may certainly do so but not out of a belief that it would be particularly rational or moral. The same applies to naturalist theorists, which is why, again, I have suggested that Taylor’s attempt to use argument to convince them to change their ways will never make much headway. A parallel claim can be made as regards the philosophers of difference, who Taylor believes “have their own complex of underlying epistemological and moral motives.”134 More than anything, he claims, they have made a hypergood of the Nietzschean value of voluntaristic freedom, “the freedom to impose orders, unconstrained by the natural.”135 That is why he refers to them as neoNietzscheans and criticizes their brand of irreligiosity for having an ineluctable tendency to focus on the negation of life, even to celebrate violence. But although this may be true of some of them, in making such a sweeping dismissal, Taylor is once again being too quick – and not only because of all the violence that has been perpetrated in history by so many believers.136 For Taylor also misses the possibility that the basic motivation of difference philosophy is artistic rather than ethical. For example, I think he is wrong to suggest that Michel Foucault gave us an account of his “own ethical position” when “he talked about an ‘aesthetic of existence,’ and about making one’s own life a work of art.”137 Foucault’s reluctance to talk of “freedom” and “liberation” does not, as Taylor claims, “spring from his equating these with the liberation of nature”138 (i.e., a romantic ethic). Rather, it arises from Foucault’s desire to affirm a form of creativity, one that cannot be equated with the good of liberty.139 It is because Taylor misses this sort of thing that he ends up claiming that difference philosophers defend some “deviant”140 form of the highly interpretive ethic of authenticity when, in fact, what they are advocating is not an ethic at all but an aesthetic. iii The domain of aesthetics includes not only creation but also its diametric opposite: destruction. Regarding modern evil, Taylor has either identified it with the total rejection of bourgeois virtues in favour of the goods of honour and greatness141 or viewed it as the indirect result of difficult-to-sustain ethical standards.142 As regards the latter, he invokes Dostoevsky’s account of how people with high

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ideals can transform their disappointments arising from human shortcomings into hatred and contempt.143 But can this explain evil in its most radical sense? Taylor identifies Nazism, for example, with nationalism in hypergood form. This means that even though he associates the movement with a certain type of millenarianism,144 and characterizes the Nazis’ rationale for persecuting their enemies as “usually so absurd and irrational that it comes closer to mania than to reason,”145 he nevertheless believes that it is, in principle, possible to use reason to show them that they are wrong. To Taylor, the Nazis’ acceptance of the ban on the murder of conspecifics, which is what led them to label their enemies as inhuman in order to justify their treatment of them, reveals that they, in however warped a fashion, still inhabit the moral world with the rest of us. Since they do not hold to some radically foreign first premise (i.e., that it is okay to exterminate people), Taylor thinks we can show them that their policy is “unconscionable on premises which both sides accept, and cannot but accept.”146 But the Nazis did not accept the premise in question. Their racism was more a matter of distinguishing a certain variety of human being than of claiming that some are not human. Here, for example, is the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels: “The excuse [lackeys of the Jews] give for their provocative conduct is always the same: the Jews are after all human beings too. We never denied that, just as we never denied the humanity of murderers, child rapists, thieves and pimps ... the Jews must be removed from the German community, for they endanger our national unity ... There is only one effective measure: cut them out.”147 The Nazis hated Jews, then, not because they viewed us as inhuman but because they took us to be people of a certain despicable sort. This suggests that evil is something “other,” driven by “hyperbads” that are beyond the bounds of even Taylor’s overly expansive conception of ethics. Indeed, I would go so far as to claim that it is a kind of other that is not only impossible to argue with but also dangerous, even wrong.148

IV So Taylor fails to restrict the bounds of ethics sufficiently, to distinguish it enough either from the potential greatness of certain forms of creativity and religion or from the evil of destruction. This is what prevents him from recognizing how conflicts involving hypergoods

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are often driven by religio-aesthetic rather than ethical motivations and so why they cannot be reconciled by practical reason. And since hypergoods play such a significant role in the modern identity, we must also reject Taylor’s belief that, by laying that identity out before us, by retrieving those goods that have been hidden, rejected, or disempowered by all the more narrow approaches, he has helped to set the stage so that “the real positive work, of building mutual understanding, can begin.”149 Yet is that it? Is this the last word? If the reconciliation of hypergood conflicts cannot be brought about by reason, does this mean that it is impossible? I don’t believe so. For in presenting these conflicts – and so the cracks – of modernity in such a majestic fashion, Taylor may have prepared the way for solutions of another sort: for reconciliations that are driven not by interpretation but by creation. The artists created hypergoods; perhaps, then, they can save us from them. There is still reason for hope.

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10 On the Minimal Global Ethic

Where do values come from? I’m tempted to say “the stork” and leave it at that, but perhaps a wiser tack would be to narrow the question somewhat and ask about the origins of those values or goods expressed by what I want to call the “minimal global ethic.” The ethic consists of a set of prohibitions, present in all of the world’s cultures, that speak against such utterly base acts as murder, torture, slavery, and other forms of gross cruelty. Those philosophers who have recognized the ethic have been careful to emphasize its minimalism, which is to say that they have distinguished its values or goods from the many others not included within it. For the ethic is said to be compatible with a wide diversity of cultures in the world since it speaks against only a very small set of the most unconscionable acts. Yet although articulating but a bare minimum, its global scope means that it can serve as an effective response to those who would advocate a boundless moral relativism. Not that we should conceive of the ethic as in any sense independent of the various cultures within which it is situated, as though it could stand apart from them, like an island amidst the rivers that are their histories. Yet the ethic can still be described as shared by all peoples who have ever inhabited the earth, although by putting it this way it should be clear that I consider it a “global,” as distinct from “universal,” set of maxims.1 Regardless, even though shared, the ethic has been and always will be understood somewhat differently by everyone. Indeed, that is one reason why I will not try to articulate it in very much detail here, as doing so would wrongly prejudice particular understandings of it. Moreover, the ethic should also not be considered unified in a systematic or any other sense; it

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simply does not constitute a fully coherent set of rules or procedures, articulable, say, as a theory of justice that may be neutrally applied. This is so both because the goods it expresses cannot be said to trump any of those with which it may come into conflict (which accounts for why societies can have longstanding practices that violate it) and because there will also always be cases of internal conflict, situations in which some of the ethic’s goods come into conflict with some of its others, or even with themselves. And whether the conflicts in which it is involved are external or internal, we must accept that they will often not admit of reconciliation, which is to say that there will be times when the best we can do is to struggle for an accommodation through making balanced compromises. My main aim in this essay is to present a philosophical account of the ethic’s origins and nature. In the first and second sections, I describe two of its many sources. Then, in the third section, I examine the question of the ethic and conflict. Finally, in the concluding section, I say a little about how the ethic might serve as the basis for a kind of “global patriotism,” although I also caution against our relying on it too much. Note that, although the accounts to be presented below are meant to be compatible with those of a more anthropological kind, I shall not be making much reference to the anthropological literature here. That said, I do want to say something in passing about the 1968 unesco publication Birthright of Man,2 which was published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The book is essentially a compendium of quotations, fables, parables, and declarations that have been drawn from a wide variety of traditions and periods and that are said to lend support to the Declaration. Now the ethic as I conceive of it is much less ambitious in scope than is the Declaration. This is so both in terms of form, for it is not wedded to any particular language, such as rights talk, and in terms of content, since the ethic stands for much less than does the Declaration. And as I read Birthright of Man, it actually lends more support to the ethic than it does to the Declaration. That is because it makes evident that many of the Declaration’s rights cannot appeal for justification to all the civilizations that have appeared in world history. For example, those civil rights that are associated with respect for the individual are shown to derive from Western sources alone, while all those rights that one might place under the book’s category of

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“political rights and economic conditions” get their support from texts that, without exception, date from the late nineteenth century.3 Birthright of Man, then, may be said to lend weight to the well-known complaint that the Declaration is a quintessentially Western, and thus ethnocentric, document. The same, however, cannot be said of the minimal global ethic. But back to philosophy. My argument, in essence, is that there have been essentially two distinct processes responsible for the ethic’s development: creation and interpretation.4 With these two terms, I mean to invoke nothing more than the commonplace that artists create and critics interpret. Others, of course, do these things as well: prophets, mystics, and charismatic leaders of various sorts are among those said to employ creativity of one kind or another, whereas the rest of us – by which I mean to include philosophers, scientists both natural and human, writers of various sorts of nonfiction, and so on – are often understood to be engaged in endeavours that, although sometimes productive of works of significant originality, nevertheless arrive at them through interpretation rather than creation. Of course, much more needs to be said about these two. At this point, however, I want to suggest only that they have lent support to, and indeed been productive of, the ethic whenever and wherever they have been engaged (although, as we will see, they can also come into conflict with it). With this claim, it should be evident, I wish to distinguish my account of the ethic’s origins from what is sometimes called a “cultural diffusionist” position, one that would conceive of it as something that began in one culture and then spread to others. For as will become clear, I believe that the ethic is “global” in a much stronger sense than this, namely that it is truly indigenous to all the world’s cultures (even though, to repeat the point, it may also come into conflict with other parts of them). One final claim before we begin: although my account of the ethic’s origins shall be limited to these two processes, I do not wish to suggest that they are in any sense self-sufficient, as though they could have produced it without there being some good, some ethical meaning, already there to begin with. Otherwise put, neither creation nor interpretation is responsible for the origins of the institution of ethics itself – what we might refer to simply as “the good” – for neither is able to do what it does ex nihilo. This should be obvious when it comes to interpretation, which after all is about the

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reworking or rearticulating of some already-present meaningful thing. But it is also true of creation, particularly when it is conceived, as I shall suggest we conceive of it, as a process of “inspired interpretation” (even though I do no wish to imply by this that it is simply another form of interpretation).5 Creation ex nihilo has an important place in certain religious traditions, of course, where it is considered a capacity of the divine,6 but the creations that we humans bring about are different. One philosophical advantage of recognizing this, moreover, is that it helps us to avoid committing the “naturalistic fallacy” – the deriving of an “ought” from an “is.” Admittedly, we can do so only by sidestepping the larger question of what we might refer to as the ultimate origin of meaning, ethical or otherwise. But then we would not be the first, nor surely the last, to do this.7

I i I want to begin with interpretation, if only because I expect that what I have to say about it will be less controversial than my account of the ethic’s creative development. Before putting forward my own argument, however, I want to summarize three more or less complementary interpretive accounts. The first is from Isaiah Berlin, who takes what is basically a psychological approach to the question. He begins with the following suggestion: consider a man who is in the habit of pushing pins into people. Even though he is aware that doing this causes them harm, it is of no interest to him. Says Berlin, I ask him whether the fact that he causes pain to other people does not seem to him to be relevant to the question of whether it is desirable to drive pins into people or not. He says he cannot see what I am driving at – what possible difference can pain caused to others or the absence of it make to the desirability of obtaining pleasure in the way that he seeks to obtain it?8 Berlin then poses a few more questions to our pin-pusher, coming (finally) “to suspect that he is in some way deranged.” Berlin has reached this conclusion because, as he puts it,

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a man who cannot see that the suffering of pain is an issue of major importance in human life – that it matters at all – who cannot see why anyone should wish to know – still less mind – whether pain is caused or not, provided he does not suffer it himself, is virtually beyond the reach of communication from the world occupied by me and my fellow men.9 Berlin goes on: This seems to me to show that recognition of some values – however general and however few – enter into the normal definition of what constitutes a sane human being. We may find that these ends do not remain constant if we look far enough in time and space; yet this does not alter the fact that beings totally lacking in such ends can scarcely be described as human; still less as rational. In this sense, the pursuit of, or failure to pursue, certain ends can be regarded as evidence of – and in extreme cases part of the definition of – irrationality.10 To Berlin, then, recognizing something like the minimal global ethic ought to be seen as, for everyone everywhere, a necessary condition of sanity. Stuart Hampshire’s account is somewhat different. He begins by assuming value pluralism (an assumption that he shares with Berlin, of course) and thus adheres to the claim that there is a plurality of not-always-commensurable values in the world and that these sometimes conflict. Recognizing this, Hampshire suggests, should lead us to uphold a respect for cultural difference since cultures are but groupings of these not-always-commensurable values. When cultures conflict, then, those upholding them should be willing to negotiate rather than use force, which is to say to make concessions in the search for balanced accommodations. And to do so, they will have to engage in a form of practical reason that Hampshire calls “the adversarial mode of argument.” All rational persons are said to be capable of employing it, and indeed it is their willingness to do so that is said to reflect a respect for the minimal global ethic. Hampshire’s conception of the ethic is thus much more formal than is Berlin’s: whereas Berlin sees it as affirming certain substantial values such as the avoidance of human suffering, Hampshire claims that, regardless of the values involved in a given conflict, one ought

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to be willing to negotiate in good faith. The recognition of a more substantial set of values may then be said to follow from this.11 Michael Walzer, although probably not in disagreement with either Berlin or Hampshire, invokes instead a rather pragmatic form of rationality to account for the ethic. To Walzer, the ethic consists of a set of prohibitions that represent a series of “tentative and intermittent conclusions” that have arisen in all the world’s cultures – the result, quite simply, of practical experience. The product of years of trial and error, the ethic is said to have come into being gradually, acquiring force, as Hume once put it, “by a slow progression and by our repeated experience of the inconvenience of violating it.”12 Hume’s “our,” quoted by Walzer, is meant to refer to everyone, and Walzer has made sure to invoke the ethic whenever others have charged that, given his well-known support for local rather than global accounts of justice, his political thought is too relativistic. For even though the ethic is internal to cultures, it is, once again, internal to all of them. ii My own account of the ethic’s interpretive development begins with the fact that we are all embodied. This brings with it certain needs, aversions, and vulnerabilities that, repeatedly influencing given acts of interpretation, have come to have moral import. Interpretations involving the body can thus be seen as at least partly constitutive of the ethic because the body is, like the ethic, (roughly speaking) a global constant.13 Interpretations that are not directly related to the body, alternatively, contribute to the diversity of cultures in the world and hence to the development of the many different ethics that these cultures also affirm. I shall argue all this by invoking what many will consider a surprising subject: humour. And given that I cleave to a perhaps idiosyncratic conception of it, I shall begin by describing that conception as well as by explaining why I think it is a form of interpretation. Only then will I go on to show how it lends support to the ethic. In the philosophy of humour, two accounts have tended to dominate. The older one sees it in a rather adversarial light, since it claims that humour arises from the assertion of one’s superiority either to another or to oneself in a former situation. This is the approach

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defended by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, and Bergson,14 although it is perhaps best summed up by Sophocles when he has Athena ask, rhetorically, whether “laughter [is not] sweetest o’er a foe.”15 That said, Aristotle also points out that there are limits to humour’s derisiveness since it must invoke “some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive.”16 Otherwise, he claims, the matter in question won’t be considered funny but will approach tragedy instead. Both Aristotle and Cicero, moreover, also mention the role of surprising incongruity in humour, and this is the quality that is central to the second major philosophical account of it, one defended by, among others, Hutcheson, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Kierkegaard.17 To them, what amuses is not so much a feeling of superiority as a sudden and unexpected contradiction. Of course, the limitations of these approaches become apparent the moment we take account of the many cases of humour to which they either do not apply or apply improperly. Consider the various instances of amusing wordplay in which feelings of superiority appear to play no role. Or think of the numerous incongruities – the instruments out of tune, the irrelevant points made within an argument, and so on – that are just not funny. Although I believe that my own account is relevant to all cases of humour, and only them, I should specify that it is not a “theory” of humour, by which I mean that it is not a systematic articulation of the necessary and sufficient conditions required for something to be funny.18 Rather, it is itself an interpretation, which is to say that it identifies features that remain wholly subject to the unique sensibilities of those who may, or may not, find something funny. Otherwise put, those features are constituted in given contexts, which is why I would claim that nothing is amusing without it having being interpreted by people as such. After all, the “same” thing can be humorous to some but not to others, just as the “same” joke told in different ways will always have varying degrees of success.19 My account may be considered the result of a combinationthrough-transformation of the two classic approaches. One might even say that it is a product of their integration or reconciliation, as though their advocates had participated in a successful conversation. It begins with a Heideggerian conception of human agency, Heidegger being the father of contemporary hermeneutics. To Heidegger, most of the time we carry out our practices pre-reflectively, habitually, which is to say in complete harmony

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with our environment; as such, they may be said to constitute the background of our everyday practical lives.20 That background, moreover, is something that we share with others, since it consists of “how we do things around here” and so contains the “prejudices” that serve as the basis of what is often called common sense.21 “Being-in-the-world,” in this conception, is thus always also a “being-with.”22 Reflection begins the moment we attend to things that have “shown up” as distinct because they have emerged from the background, a result of our no longer being able to cope with them prereflectively.23 When fully embedded in the background, they are, in a sense, invisible to us since that is when they are both indistinct from each other and fully integrated in a whole that is, after all, in the background. Think, for example, of the chair on which you are presumably sitting right now – before, that is, I just pointed it out. This might seem but a banal truism, but it and other examples like it point to Heidegger’s tremendous philosophical originality: his famous thesis that philosophers since Plato have forgotten “the question of Being” is based in part on his belief that they begin philosophizing about things one step too late (i.e., without recognizing that their very existence depends on their having emerged from the background). In neglecting that background, particularly the connection of all things, including our thinking selves, to it, these thinkers neglect much of what it means “to be.” On, then, to my hermeneutical account of humour. Consider someone walking down a street. She does this habitually, wholly pre-reflectively, her practice fully immersed in the practical background. We might say that she is pre-reflectively interpreting her situation, for her stroll expresses an interpretation of her intention to reach a particular destination.24 And should she find it necessary to cope with an incongruity along the way, with something that, we might say, has emerged from the background, this would likewise be interpretive, although now in a fully reflective sense. Say she stumbled upon a construction site blocking her way; she can no longer continue on pre-reflectively since now she needs to think about an appropriate detour. She does so, and it goes without saying there is nothing particularly funny about it. But say that, instead of coming upon the construction site, what happens is that she slips on a banana peel and falls on her behind. Now this is funny, and indeed she bursts out laughing. Why?

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Just as with the construction site, we may say that the fall served to interrupt her pre-reflective agency. But the difference here is that whereas, in the former case, she began immediately to think about a detour, this time she chooses to keep her attention focused on the interruption. Hence my central claim about humour: things are humorous when there has been a conflict with a part of the background and one keeps one’s focus on the conflict rather than turning to some other matter. Think of the function of the “straight man” in a comedy duo: he represents that background and so helps to draw attention to his partner’s violation of a part of it. Or consider the schoolboy who, in front of all his classmates, teases the boy who has made the unfortunate mistake (one he evidently remembers to this day) of showing up to school with a terrible haircut. His simply showing up like that was not enough for it to induce laughter – it takes someone to point out his haircut’s conflict with the background, with the way kids’ hair is normally styled, to put everyone, including the teacher,25 in stitches. All this suggests that Bergson’s notion of the place of the “ridiculous” in humour needs to be extended. To Bergson, humour is the product of mechanical behaviour that produces a “shock” or “jolt” in failing to harmonize with the flow of everyday social life.26 My claim, however, is that any kind of behaviour or meaningful entity that challenges the pre-reflective background has the potential to amuse and that it will do so only if the challenge is such that we end up fixing our attention on it. It should be evident that, so far, this approach to humour shares a great deal with the incongruity account. But it would be inadequate as it stands if I did not add a feature derived from the superiority account: the background, being simply what “one does,” is always, at least initially, granted a superior – indeed, trumping – status vis-à-vis whatever challenges it. That is why whatever is doing the challenging is potentially amusing and so worthy, perhaps, of being laughed at. Not that we should fail to distinguish between humour and laughter, given that not everything humorous produces laughter and not all laughter is a result of humour (think of tickling). This is the main reason why I am dissatisfied with the third classic account of humour, the “relief thesis” defended by, among others, Spencer, Freud, and (although also an advocate of the incongruity account) Kant. For the great emphasis they place on physiology suggests that

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the relief thesis is more applicable to laughter than to humour per se. That said, Kant makes a point that is relevant to my hermeneutical account when he asserts that laughter arises from a tense expectation having been transformed into nothing.27 For talk of transformation into nothing dovetails with the notion that any challenge to the background is always, at least at first, going to be overcome since our initial, virtually reflex, reaction is to favour the background and so to negate the challenge. We can thus see why challenges that do not encourage us to fix our attention on them are considered serious rather than humorous. For in such cases we move immediately to deliberations about how to meet them (e.g., about which detour to take). And since no part of them claims the kind of trumping status that we award to the background, the implication is that there may be no way to solve the issue without losing something of value. As a result, the incident gets taken seriously rather than humorously.28 Say the fall on the sidewalk injured our pedestrian or at least caused her to feel some pain or discomfort. This would have distracted her from focusing on how the act of falling challenged the background, thus ensuring that she did not find the fall amusing. Even if the pain was not too great, she would probably be more concerned with determining the extent, if any, of her injury. This explains why it tends to be easier for us to find things funny when our lives are generally going well, and hence when we are in a good mood, for it is during just such times that we have the luxury to focus on challenges to the background. Another example: say someone pulls out what appears to be a gun at a dinner party. The first thought of those present will be “He must be kidding” or “This must be a joke” since the act challenges the background practice of how one is supposed to behave at such parties. The moment they realize that the gun is real, however, any potential amusement will vanish: all will focus instead on the act’s challenge to their lives rather than to the background. This gives us cause to invoke, albeit for a different reason, Aristotle’s point that a humorous incident must be relatively painless, at least to the degree that, as Kierkegaard later added, we can be “justified in ignoring the pain, because it is non-essential.”29 Say the gun was obviously a water pistol: now what’s threatened is not one’s life but the much less significant concern to remain dry, which means it will be much less likely that one’s attention will be drawn away

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from the gun’s challenge to the background. The potential for humour will, in consequence, remain. That said, even events in which someone loses a life may be considered funny (no matter how much it may be considered in poor taste to laugh). It all depends on people’s ability to remain focused on the event’s challenge to the background. Of course, it will always be easier to do so if one is not too close to the victim, whether physically or personally, since such distance helps us to focus on the event’s challenge to the background rather than on the victim’s life. Think of those popular but mean-spirited Darwin Awards, which aim to “celebrate the theory of evolution by commemorating the remains of those who improved our gene pool by removing themselves from it in really stupid ways.”30 Here is an example, a 1996 nominee entitled “Lawyer Aloft”: Police said a lawyer demonstrating the safety of windows in a downtown Toronto skyscraper crashed through a pane with his shoulder and plunged 24 floors to his death. A police spokesman said Garry Hoy, 39, fell into the courtyard of the Toronto Dominion Bank Tower early Friday evening as he was explaining the strength of the building’s windows to visiting law students. Hoy previously had conducted demonstrations of window strength according to police reports.31 It goes without saying that the victim’s being a lawyer – not among the most highly regarded of today’s professions – makes “ignoring the pain” that much easier, hence facilitating our focus on the challenge to the background practice of how one should act around the windows of office buildings.32 I believe that this approach helps us to account for several aspects of humour that are treated relatively poorly by the classic accounts. First, there is the matter of why it is necessary to “get” a joke or whatever is considered humorous. I would suggest that this arises from the fact that the trumping background is by nature implicit. There’s a good joke-within-a-joke about this: A man told this joke to a group of acquaintances, including an Englishman: A man walked into a saloon, sat at the bar, and ordered a martini. When the drink had been put in front of him, before he could touch it, a monkey that had been sitting on the bar

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a few yards away walked over to the drink, straddled it, and bent until his genitals were in the drink. In horror, the patron turned to the bartender and exclaimed, “Did you see that?” “Oh yes,” replied the bartender, “that was one of the worst things I’ve seen in this bar.” “Well, what are you going to do about it?” demanded the patron. “I’m afraid I can’t do anything,” said the bartender, “the monkey belongs to the piano player.” The patron immediately approached the piano and said to the piano player, “Do you know your monkey dipped his balls in my martini?” “No,” said the piano player, “but if you can hum a few bars I’ll pick it up.” When the joke was finished, all laughed except the Englishman. When he was asked why he didn’t like the joke, he replied that he had not understood it. It was then explained to him that the expression “Do you know ... ?” has a special significance for piano-lounge players, and then he laughed considerably. “So now that you understand it, you think it’s pretty good, eh?” he was asked. “Oh my, yes,” he replied, “but you do have to know the tune.”33 As this joke subtly implies, no explanation of a joke – which we can now identify as the making explicit of that part of the background most directly challenged by the joke – can ever really be funny. For humour relies on there being a conflict with something that is by nature implicit. Hence E.B. White’s insightful observation: “Humour can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process”34 (not that the more recent practice of dissecting frogs that are already dead is much funnier, at least for the frogs). Second, there is the matter of humour’s powers of attraction. It is because the background is something shared with others that we can see why the sight of two or more persons laughing together is considered indicative of their sharing a certain sensibility. Hutcheson goes even further: “laughter is none of the smallest bonds to common friendship.”35 The appeal of participating in such sharing may also account for the power of jokes that are critical of minorities once we recognize that the activity of “making fun of X” amounts essentially

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to slamming X up against the pre-reflective background – that is, highlighting its difference from what is usually considered “normal.”36 The attraction of humour is also probably responsible for laughter’s contagious quality,37 something that, it’s worth mentioning, often plays a role in those humorous vicious circles that drive “giggle fits.” For on such occasions one laughs with growing intensity at least partly because one is aware that the very act of laughing is inappropriate, and increasingly so, to the context since it violates a given background practice. Third, my account helps us to understand the workings of a particular form of humour especially popular with contemporary comedians, one that consists of drawing attention to the many unnoticed contradictions present within our shared background practices.38 This suggests that the background as a whole, although largely harmonious, is nonetheless never so free of conflict or tension that we could describe it as being a “unity.”39 That said, the conflicts within it are, at least when initially revealed, still minor enough that its overall integrity is never really put into question. For otherwise, those conflicts would have shown up of their own accord, and there would have been no need for a comedian to escort them to the foreground. Fourth, there is the question of humour’s place in the comic arts. According to Northrop Frye, theatre and cinema have witnessed basically two comedic genres.40 There is the relatively conservative Old Comedy, from Aristophanes through to Shaw, Beckett, early Chaplin, and The Kids in the Hall, in which there is often a clear unwillingness to go beyond the positing of humorous events (which we can now identify as challenges to the background).41 And there is the more progressive New Comedy, as in the works of Menander up to those of Shakespeare, Molière, and many a Hollywood movie, where we tend to find plots that do go further, plots that close with a clear reconciliation at the end of a teleological journey. Now with both genres, the humour arises from the conflicts posed, one of the antagonists always being something pre-reflectively shared by all, leading us to assume that whatever is in conflict with it is, at least initially, in the “wrong.” It is because Erich Segal misses precisely this point, mistakenly situating the humour around the reconciliation that may follow a conflict, that he ends up concluding that, today, we should be declaring “the death of comedy.”42 That he can pose the question of whether comedy can “sur-

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vive without a wedding”43 indicates that his conception of it is limited to New Comedy, something that leads him to see in the rise of the Theatre of the Absurd the death of the genre. But even putting aside the question of whether genres can ever really “die” (for what, after all, is the Theatre of the Absurd if not a reincarnation, after a very long hiatus, of Aristophanic Old Comedy?), one wonders how Segal can possibly acknowledge the many stories being recounted on the stage and screen today – stories that obviously succeed in making people laugh – yet still consider them something other than comedies. Fifth and finally, there is the question of why repeating something humorous often causes it to no longer be funny. Appreciating how humour arises from a conflict with a part of the background suggests that, if the same conflict is asserted often enough, the reflex of granting the part a trumping status will weaken. The conflict may then become something that we begin to ponder, which is to say to interpret in a reflective way, and hence may no longer have the potential to be funny. Alternatively, an overused humorous act or joke can become stale because the conflict that it would set up has itself begun to fade into and so become a part of the background.44 This is similar to the fading that would result from the successful reconciliation of the conflict that we find at the end of New Comedies. For reconciliation arises from interpretations that produce understanding, and it is not long after we come to understand something especially well that it starts to seem less interesting to us and begins to fade into the pre-reflective background. And indeed, like all things whose features are highly integrated or reconciled, that is where it “belongs.” Unlike with the repetition route to the background, however, such reconciliations will be pleasurable. Recall Plato’s reference to the pleasures of learning (Republic 585) as well as the tutor Tranio’s advice to his student Lucentio in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew: “No profit grows where no pleasure ta’en” (I.i.39). It has, moreover, been argued that Aristotle’s notion of “catharsis” is best translated as “clarification,” which suggests that an audience gets cathartic pleasure not by purging itself of an emotion but by learning, by becoming clear about the sentiment in question.45 This is not to discount the aesthetic form of pleasure that comes from “savouring,” as distinct from creating or interpreting, something.46 Nevertheless, it is in setting up a conflict to be (potentially) reconciled by interpretation

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that humour can be connected with wisdom, as Montaigne has suggested.47 And at least as regards some practical situations, it is not far from this claim to George Grant’s declaration that “the purpose of the art of comedy is to bring together justice and felicity.”48 iii Talk of humour and justice means that it is time for the argument which contends that humour, or at least a certain form of it, has served as a source of the minimal global ethic. I follow those who distinguish between two basic forms of humour: (1) the relatively sophisticated, because more intellectual, type; and (2) the lowbrow, physical sort that has come to be known as slapstick.49 The former tends to be highly relative to culture: as Hutcheson once declared, “What is counted ridiculous in one age or nation, may not be so in another”; or as Peter L. Berger, paraphrasing one of Pascal’s pensées, has put it, “What is funny on one side of the Pyrenees is not funny on the other.”50 Slapstick, however, has a global reach, both temporally and geographically. Regarding the former, one might cite a Victorian commentator’s observation: “A pun tells only once, but it is not so with a poke in the eye.”51 That is to say, slapstick seems capable of being recycled again and again, without this detracting from its humour. There is thus something timeless about slapstick, unlike with intellectual humour. Hence Alan Dale’s ability to point out, as he does at the beginning of his Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies, that every major type of film clown he writes about can also be found in Kenneth McLeish’s book Theater of Aristophanes.52 Slapstick’s reach, as I have said, also extends over geography: slapstick appears to be able to transcend borders much more than does intellectual humour. As Tony Staveacre has observed, it has been found among the Hopi Indians of the American Southwest; the gimis of the eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea; the troupes of clowns and acrobats in Greece of the seventh century bce; Hindu epics in the guise of Vidusaka; the dwarf whose name means “one given to abuse”; Balinese dance-drama; the mimus clown character of the Romans as well as their interpretive dance known as the pantomimes; Italian mime of the fourth century ce; and it forms the basis of the second of the two classifications of

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comic types in traditional Chinese theatre (not the wen ch’ou, where words are used, but the wu ch’ou, where they are not).53 All this makes sense given the above hermeneutical account of humour. For slapstick’s ability to amuse derives from a conflict involving the body, more specifically between those of a given society’s background practices that relate to the body and the actions of a given embodied agent. My reasoning is as follows. The human body has, biologically speaking, roughly the same properties everywhere, including the same limitations, vulnerabilities, susceptibilities to slippery banana peels, and so on. There are also a number of practices that have arisen around it, practices which are driven by interpretations that are influenced by its properties. And given that these practices have been with us – all of us – for a very long time, they have become habitual, allowing us to speak of their place within a global practical background. Consider the case above of the woman who slipped and fell: included in all the world’s cultures is a prereflective practice that consists of ambulatory persons walking along without slipping and falling. To actually slip and fall, then, is to contradict that practice and so, more often than not, to be considered amusing, and cross-culturally so. No such global commonalities exist when it comes to the myriad and diverse meanings and practices associated with the more intellectualist forms of humour. For these arise from conflicts between varying aspects of a given society’s practical background and innumerable other matters, be they political, religious, related to everyday social life, and so on. And given that those matters will be very different in different societies, we can see why intellectual humour has no common theme on par with slapstick’s basis in the fact that, although people come from different cultures, all are incarnate. The latter has ethical import. For the body is, of course, implicated in many more pre-reflective practices than just walking, and some of these are defended by the minimal global ethic. Consider the body’s most basic needs and drives, from nourishment to avoiding pain and even just staying alive. All can be said to have an interpretive and not only biological significance because all serve as the bases of meaningful cultural practices. Think of dining, hygiene, and health care: although they are carried out differently in different cultures, they nevertheless share certain common, somatic

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aims,54 which allows us to put them on par with slapstick as distinct from intellectual humour. This suggests that these practices are expressions or interpretations of a certain minimum of ethical meanings (i.e. values or goods), which, given their common basis, can be said to be shared, even if always somewhat differently, by all the world’s cultures. One might object to the parallel I am asserting between such goods and slapstick by pointing to an apparent contradiction between two ideas: (1) that newly interpreted meanings arise from the transformations associated with the progressive reconciliation of conflicts; and (2) that humour arises from a certain kind of conflict rather than from any reconciliation that might follow that conflict. If the second applies to slapstick while the first implies that goods are developed as a result of reconciling interpretations, how can I claim that slapstick is an interpretive source of any goods? My answer is that slapstick’s conflicts are of a particular sort since their global nature points to the need for a special kind of reconciliation. What I mean is that slapstick calls upon us to accept and so to reconcile ourselves to certain irreconcilables, namely to the limitations that are inherent to our embodied nature. This is why slapstick can be considered a source of the minimal global ethic. For its basic message, as Dale has suggested, ought to be contrasted either with that of certain mystical traditions (Dale refers to Christianity) which would have us transcend the body (ekstasis, after all, meaning “outside of / beyond the body”) or with that expressed by sporting events such as the Olympics which celebrate a form of mastery over the body. Slapstick’s message? That we should accept the body.55 In sending this message, slapstick can be said to lend support to two kinds of goods, both of which, it turns out, are present within the ethic. First, there are all those goods which underlie moral injunctions or practices that are in some way “body-friendly,” such as those which affirm that persons should not be starved, killed, or tortured. Second, slapstick endorses a minimal egalitarianism, for in reminding us that we all share certain susceptibilities (to falling down, say, and losing an equal measure of dignity in the process), it acts as a kind of leveller and so stands against any and all forms of pretentiousness. In taking these two types of normative stands, then, slapstick can be said to have an ethical and not only humorous dimension. And it is one that, once again, has a global reach.

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II i Of course, humour can be associated with creation and not only interpretation, as Freud might be said to have reminded us when he called attention to the parallels between wit and dreams.56 And after all, what are the comic arts if not fictional stories containing humour, events in which some item has been placed in conflict with the background of everyday life? That said, there is a clear limit to comedy’s creativity. For the more imaginative and absurd the story, and the longer it is kept up, the further will one travel from the background and so from any recognizable conflict with it. And without that conflict, as we have seen, there will be nothing to find funny. This tends to be missed by all those who have drawn attention to the tradition of “folly” and its connection to transcendence in order to claim a religious dimension for the comic.57 Because although it may indeed be true that, as King Lear’s daughter Regan declares, “jesters do oft prove prophets” (v.iii.72), when they do so, it turns out, they don’t tend to be particularly funny.58 The connection, however, between transcendence and creativity is strong. To appreciate it, we must first recognize that what makes creation distinct from interpretation is the addition of an inspired element. Baudelaire has been particularly eloquent about the duality here: [T]he beautiful is always, inevitably, of a double composition, although the impression it produces may be one; for even though it may be difficult to distinguish the various elements of the beautiful within the unity of the impression it gives, this invalidates nothing of the necessity of their being a variety in its composition. The beautiful consists invariably of an eternal element – and to a degree of which it is excessively difficult to determine – and a relative element, a contextual one, consisting, one might say, be it one after the other or all together, of a context’s era, fashion, morality, or passion. Without this second element, which serves as something like an amusing envelope or a titillating, appetizing, divine cake, the first would be indigestible, incomprehensible, nonadapted, and thus inappropriate

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to human nature. I defy anyone to discover an unspecified sample of beauty that does not contain these two elements.59 As I read this passage, Baudelaire’s first element is what I call inspiration, whereas his second consists of interpretation. I also want to suggest that we identify that inspiration as having a transcendent source. This obviously controversial claim is not something I will argue for directly; rather, my hope is that it will gain plausibility in the discussion that follows. And if it does so, this should mean less and less room for that conception of creation which assumes that creators are able to do what they do wholly selfsufficiently (i.e., without having to rely on an external source). I mean to refer, of course, to that Nietzschean conception according to which creation is fundamentally a matter of the will.60 Rather than offer an extended critique of it here, however, I shall go no further than to suggest its inadequacy by invoking its failure to account for two things. First, there is the fact that critics are often better judges of the meaning of artworks than are their creators.61 And second, there is the oft-reported sense on the part of creators that their creations, and not just their talents, are the result of gifts; hence our tendency to refer to the more successful artists as “gifted.”62 So whereas interpretation is strictly a matter of logos (reason/ speech), of an attempt to articulate something experienced, something immanent – that is, a text or text-analogue that has “shown up” as a phenomenon accessible to ordinary perception – creation, although always also involving some interpretation, is nevertheless distinct in that it draws on a source which originates beyond that of any interpretable thing. That is why, even though a creation may be inspired by a particular thing, we do not say that it is, like interpretation, essentially about that thing. There is also an important difference in the power dynamics characterizing the two. With interpretation, interpreter and interpreted can be said to participate in a more or less symmetrical relationship, a requirement if there is to be a “dialogue” between them.63 With creation, by contrast, the inspiration is often said to have a kind of “power over” the creator, making for a reversal of the asymmetry characteristic of research in the natural sciences, where the aim is to “capture” nature in one’s theoretical sights. When inspired, the creator has a sense that he or she is the one being “looked at,” not the other way around; the struggle, that is, is

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to “receive” that look. This is very different from interpreters who must, as though in conversation, both listen and speak in turn if they are to “make sense” of, to say something coherent about, and so to achieve a better understanding of whatever it is they are interpreting. And whereas the dialogical nature of interpretation encourages us to reach for aural metaphors to describe the process,64 with creation, as hinted at above, it makes much more sense to invoke ocular-related terms – think of the tendency to refer to inspirations as like “light” and to those receiving them as “visionaries.”65 Of the many forms of creation, I shall call the one that I want to examine here “revelatory.” Revelatory creativity, as the name implies, has religious roots, and indeed I plan to focus on the version of it that has been fundamental to rabbinic Judaism: what the rabbis have called hiddush. To get an initial grasp of it, moreover, I shall contrast it with another form of creativity central to religious Judaism, one that the rabbis have (publicly at least) tended to reject, namely mysticism. One might say that, in religious Judaism as a whole, mysticism and revelation constitute the two chief creative ways by which persons can achieve proximity to the divine. To a certain extent, each is a mirror image of the other, for they consist of “movement” in opposite directions. With mysticism, the division between heaven and earth, sacred and profane, is overcome by a lone individual who, seeking ecstasy, ascends from the human, social world in order to obtain a vision of the light that emanates directly from God. Of course, given that this is seen with the “mind’s eye,” as distinct from those of the body, we can understand why the word “mystic” is derived from the Greek muein, which means “to close one’s eyes.” We thus have a reason to distinguish between the kind of vision being sought for here and the ordinary, sensory, and hence interpretive sort in which one engages to see earthly phenomena. The same must be said about the visions of revelation, although they require the descent of God’s spirit (the Shekhinah) to earth so that it may dwell among a community of persons. Thus whereas Moses’s journey up Mount Sinai to encounter God “from heaven” (Exod. 20:22) can be considered a paradigmatic case of mysticism, his entering the Tent of Meeting located just outside the Israelites’ camp to engage with Him “face to face” (Exod. 33:11) – a possibility thanks to the descent of a pillar of cloud (the Shekhinah again) – should be read as a tale of revelation.66

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To religious Jews, Moses’s mystical encounters with God, as well as those of the prophets who followed him, are the chief sources of the inspirations responsible for the Bible, conceived of as a product of creation and so as a work of art.67 For a good while, its precepts were applied by the priests of Judaism’s biblical era, who were responsible for the operations of the Temple based in Jerusalem. In 70 ce, however, the Temple was destroyed for the second and final time, and the Jews of Israel were scattered throughout the diaspora. Thus did Judaism enter its postbiblical, or rabbinic, age, wherein, it is said, the “gift” of the prophets was passed on to the sages, the rabbis of the Talmud.68 As we might interpret this idea here, the claim is that the mystical creativity of prophecy was transformed into a revelatory process. This made way for continuing the faith in the absence of the Temple, the locus of sanctity having moved from within it to the streets and homes of everyday, diasporic Jewish life. Revelation has taken two principal forms in Judaism. First, there is that integral to Talmudic “study.” I put this word in quotation marks because, although it is often said to consist of the exegesis of Torah, it would be a mistake to conceive of this along the lines of interpretation as described above.69 For the aim is clearly not to make sense of the written text, to rearticulate it into a more coherent and thus understandable form by integrating or reconciling its contradictions. On the contrary, not only is it acknowledged that the text is riddled with paradoxical inconsistencies, but it is also considered to be no less perfect for this.70 For its many “cracks” – as we might refer to the gaps of meaning arising from the contradictions – are seen as openings through which the Divine presence may flow, spaces that make way for the inspirations that can – and have – led to the creation of a new Oral Law, as distinct from the Written Law. These are cracks, then, that go all the way through, providing access to the transcendent. And to be true to their presence in the text – indeed, to make new ones – one must engage in a kind of “study” that requires highly adversarial debate (makhlokot) with others. Makhlokot’s goal is not integration or reconciliation but an increase in the distance between interlocutors (the word’s root, ‫קלה‬, means “to divide”), the hope being that the openings produced will invite the Divine to descend and inspire. What the rabbinic Jew aims to inject between disputing sages, then, is “nothing” – that is, “A nothingness more essential than Nothingness itself, the emptiness

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of the in-between, an interval that is ever deepened and, in deepening, swells up – the nothing as work and movement.”71 So rather than attempting to reach an agreement on reconciliatory readings “about” the text, which may be said to bring us “closer” to it, Talmudic “scholars” aim, if anything, to do the opposite, to do a kind of violence to it, to “rub it in such a way that blood spurts out.”72 Only this way, they believe, may the text then provide the inspirations that drive what we might call the “epiphanies” of revelatory creation. Such epiphanies thus originate from the space between their creators and the text, unlike with mysticism, which may be said to rely on the cracks within the mystic’s self, those that divide it.73 Hence the following parable: A story is told about a rabbi who once entered heaven in his dream. He was permitted to approach the temple in Paradise where the great sages of the Talmud, the Tannaim, were spending their eternal lives. He saw that they were just sitting around tables studying the Talmud. The disappointed rabbi wondered, “Is this all there is to Paradise?” But suddenly he heard a voice: “You are mistaken. The Tannaim are not in Paradise. Paradise is in the Tannaim.”74 In mysticism, that is, the larger the cracks, the less the self that remains, which is to say the more ecstasy and so the further the mystic has travelled from ordinary human life, the life of the dialogical being, of Aristotle’s socio-political animal (zoon politikon). In rabbinic Judaism, by contrast, any transcendence of our earthly existence should await our natural deaths. Jews should thus heed God’s warning that “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live” (Exod. 33:20), and so they should affirm everyday life, along with the connection to society and all of the responsibilities that come with it. Yet this life is to be lived in a creative and not only interpretive fashion. This brings us to the second form of revelatory creation in rabbinic Judaism, one that arises from the application of the Oral Law that, as we have seen, was created by the first. Before examining it, however, it is worth noting that this Oral Law of the Talmud is believed to share Sinaitic origins with the Written Law of the Bible.75 This is because the two are said to arise

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from within the same time dimension, one that transcends ordinary profane time, in which, as Henri Bergson described, the past flows into the present and the present into the future.76 This is the time of the everyday, of interpretation, history, and beings-in-the-world.77 By its measure, the events of Sinai should, of course, be considered long past, archaeologists and historians of religion having dated them to sometime between 1400 and 1250 bce; the creations behind any new Oral Law must thus have taken place much later. But the notion that a transcending inspiration is essential to creation makes way for a different idea, namely that it is possible to break out of profane time, to take advantage of a rupture within it that constitutes a moment wherein a different time dimension interposes, that of an eternal, sacred time according to which all of the epiphanies of history take place simultaneously, within an “infinite now.”78 That creation must involve the combination of both time dimensions is in keeping with the notion that creation combines interpretation and inspiration. Hence those lines from Harmonium’s classic song “Pour un instant”: “For an instant I forgot my name / allowing me to write this song at last / ... I lost my time to gain some time.”79 The suggestion here is that the creator connects with sacred time by virtue of his cutting through the profane. And that is why the creations of Oral Law may be said to be contemporaneous with those of Written Law. Now it was only when Oral Law itself came to be written down, a process that began in the third century ce, that we got the Talmud, a collection of texts that evince their own fair share of contradictions and hence potential openings to the infinite now. As Adin Steinsaltz has described it, the Talmud “is a conglomerate of law, legend, and philosophy, a blend of unique logic and shrewd pragmatism, of history and science, anecdotes and humour. It is a collection of paradoxes: its framework is orderly and logical, every word and term subjected to meticulous editing, completed centuries after the actual works of compositions came to an end; yet it is still based on free association, on a harnessing together of diverse ideas reminiscent of the modern stream-of-consciousness novel.”80 And it is the laws of which the Talmud is a main source, the halakhah, that serve as the basis for the second form of revelatory creation in rabbinic Judaism. Halakhah works in the following way. Normally, people strive to live their lives in interpretive harmony with the flow of social practices. As Heidegger would put it, the nature of man is such that

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he aims to “dwell” on this earth, to be “at home” in the world.81 Halakhah, however, is all about disrupting this – at least to a point. As Joseph Soloveitchick has described, the Talmud’s laws constitute “fixed statues and firm principles” that are meant to be implemented “without any compromises or concessions.”82 As a result, they serve as obstacles to the run of everyday life, standing, we might say, like boulders around which the river of practice must flow. Circumnavigation is necessary not only because of their inflexibility, which ensures that they cannot be transformed and so reconciled interpretively, but also because many of them have been designated hukkim, rules for which no reasonable justification may be given. Why, for example, is mixing meat and milk unkosher? “Because it is God’s will” is all that any rabbi will ever be able to say. Not so when it comes to those halakhah recognized as mishpatim, as with the eminently understandable injunction “Thou shalt not kill.” Yet these too constitute rules that should never be bent. According to Soloveitchick, everything about daily life – indeed, every phenomenon that one might encounter – can be made subject to halakhah.83 Although this seems to me an exaggeration, it is nevertheless true that an impressive number of matters are covered by Talmudic law. For example: When halakhic man comes across a spring bubbling quietly, he already possesses a fixed, a priori relationship with this real phenomenon: the complex of laws regarding the halakhic construct of a spring. The spring is fit for the immersion of a zav (a man with a discharge); it may serve as a mei hatat (waters of expiation); it purifies with flowing water; it does not require a fixed quantity of forty se’ahs; etc. When halakhic man approaches a real spring, he gazes at it and carefully examines its nature. He possesses, a priori, ideal principles and precepts which establish the character of the spring as a halakhic construct, and he uses the statutes for the purpose of determining normative law: does the real spring correspond to the requirements of the ideal Halakhah or not?84 Or, when it comes to contexts related to the rabbinic Jew’s physiological life, halakhah determines the character of all of the animal functions of man – eating, sex, and all the bodily necessities – by means of halakhic

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principles and standards: the bulk of an olive (ke-zayit), the bulk of a date (ke-kotevet), the time required to eat a half-loaf meal (kedai akhilat peras), the time required to drink a quarter log (revi’it), eating in a normal or nonnormal manner, the beginning of intercourse, the conclusion of intercourse, normal intercourse and unnatural intercourse, etc., etc. Halakhah concerns itself with the normal as well as abnormal functioning of the organism, with the total biological functioning of the organism: the laws of menstruation, the man or woman suffering from a discharge, the mode of determining the onset of menstruation, virginal blood, pregnancy, the various stages in the birth process, the various physical signs that make animals or birds fit or unfit for consumption, etc., etc.85 All these rules cannot but interfere with the flow of everyday life. They are obstacles not only to its practice but also, as is evident from the reductions involved in the halakhic approach to the spring above, to the perception of it. There is thus something inherently alienating about halakhah, particularly when it comes to the application of those halakhah that are hukkim. In consequence, halakhic rules tend to be what I have elsewhere distinguished as “regulative” rather than “expressive,” since the fact that one must obey them whether or not they are understood means that they cannot, for the most part, be said to “express” one’s identity.86 But this is as it is meant to be. For it is nothing other than the disruptions produced by the application of halakhah to practice that make way for the specifically halakhic form of revelatory creativity, that which arises from “the lowering of transcendence into the midst of our turbid, coarse, material world.”87 By conforming to halakhah, the Jew establishes finite fields of space and time, both of which are bounded by the rules in question. And when these come up against the flow of everyday practice, we get a rupture – once again, a kind of “crack” – that, just like with Talmudic revelation, is said to make way for the Divine. The hope is that the Shekhinah will descend, contract its infinity in order to fit through the crack, and then come into contact with those nearby, gracing them with holy inspiration.88 As Soloveitchick sums all this up: “The realization of the Halakhah = contraction = holiness = creation.”89 But what, specifically, justifies the reference to creativity here? What gets created? To answer, we must disabuse ourselves of the

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notion that creation can result in only textual, plastic, or other kinds of artworks – because actions, too, can be created. Hence Soloveitchick’s claim that conforming to halakhic rules changes the ordinary world, transforming it from one of “chaos and void” into “a perfect and beautiful reality.”90 Thus are people, by altering their practices, said to help complete God’s creation of the universe. I should say, however, that the way Soloveitchick conceives of the Jew’s role here strikes me as affirming a somewhat overly ambitious – because utopian – unity, one that fails to be true to the inherently fragmentary nature of Oral Law.91 In consequence, I think that we should be conceiving of what’s created differently. For if, rather than bringing us to some perfectly unified reality, the application of halakhah is, again, a matter of tearing into the flowing practices of everyday life (something that, to repeat, happens within the flash of a “moment”),92 it makes more sense to speak of the Shekhinah emerging through the crack and infusing traces of the infinite now, of eternity, into ordinary historical time. In so doing, it epiphanically “energizes” historical time and hence transforms the practices in the vicinity. The epiphany, then, must take the form of disruptive behaviour that cannot, at least initially, be said to contribute to practical harmony. But the following step – one indicated by the unique way that the Israelites accepted the Covenant: “All that the Lord has said we will do and hear” (Exod. 24:7, my translation) – consists of interpreting this behaviour with the aim of reaching an understanding that allows one to move around the halakhic obstruction. Now success here can be said to contribute to the harmony of the whole of practices and, indeed, will presumably do so to a degree much greater than would have been possible without the halakhic creation in the first place. And the more harmoniously integrated that whole, the closer (but only that) will it be to being unified and hence the more holy, the more like God. For as Moses declared, “The Lord is our God, the Lord is One” (Deut. 6:4, my translation), and as He enjoined the Israelites, “Ye shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” (Lev. 19:2; see also Deut. 10:12, 13:5, 28:9). Now halakhic revelation is, in addition to the makhlokotic, central to the activities of Orthodox Jews today. Simply put: they are performance artists. Consider their approach to the Sabbath, a period whose central meaning is none other than the celebration of God’s act of creating the world. During this time, they are expected

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to conform to the command to rest, to do no work nor light or extinguish any fire (and thus, it has been determined, to refrain from turning electrical devices on or off). What results, I would suggest, are actions that should be conceived in religio-aesthetic terms. Consider the parable of the Jew who took the Sabbath commandments to mean that one must rest even from the thought of labour: A pious man once took a stroll in his vineyard on the Sabbath. He saw a break in the fence, and then determined to mend it when the Sabbath would be over. At the expiration of the Sabbath he decided: since the thought of repairing the fence occurred to me on the Sabbath I shall never repair it.93 From that day on, I would claim, the break in the fence represented a creative act (albeit in this case a passive one). The same may be said of all those actions that arise from the need to be true to the halakhah in the light of technological developments. Think of the “Sabbath elevator,” which is programmed to stop automatically at every floor so that it can be ridden without pushing any of its buttons (the manipulation of electricity having been deemed work). I remember how, as a child growing up in a high-rise apartment building in Toronto populated by many Orthodox Jews, I used to be struck by the strange beauty of elderly Orthodox residents riding that elevator. Sometimes I would even accompany them, watching as they stood motionless while the elevator stopped at each floor, opened, paused, and then closed its door, again and again, until it finally reached their own, sometimes very high up. ii Revelatory creativity is not limited to Judaism; far from it. After all, as Leonard Cohen sings, “There is a crack in everything / that’s how the light gets in.”94 For example, I believe that it is central to the arts of (high) modernism (by “high” I mean to exclude, say, futurism, dadaism, and most versions of postmodernism). Not that there aren’t significant differences between modernism and rabbinic Judaism. One of the most important of these is that the artists of the former, given that they are without sacred, “cracked” texts with which to begin, often need to engage in more mystical pursuits in addition to the revelatory.95 Yet the similarities between the two are

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striking. For instance, just as modernists end up emphasizing the artwork over the artist,96 rabbinic Jews, as we have seen, stress the creations that come from revelation over the intentions of those actually doing the creating. And just as modernism’s rejection of the enlightenment parallels the rabbinic Jew’s opposition to Greek theoretical philosophy, the modernist is also notably hostile to romanticism, an antagonism that echoes the rabbinic Jew’s denunciation of the magic of early Hasidism.97 Rabbinic Judaism and modernism also exhibit similar attitudes towards life and nature: just as the rabbinic Jew views daily life as in need of sanctification (following, again, the destruction of the Temple), so too does the modernist, who – although at first sharing in the romantic’s perceived need for a recovery of lived experience, one arising from a desire to overcome what are seen as the alienating effects of the enlightenment – comes ultimately to view life as requiring redemption through its epiphanic transformation.98 Finally, both rabbinic Judaism and modernism contain elitist and egalitarian tendencies. The celebrated greatness of the Talmudic sage has its parallel in the self-glorifying, antibourgeois modernist artists and critics (among them Pound, Eliot, and Clement Greenberg), just as the call for every Jew to conform to the halakhah is echoed by Baudelaire and John Cage when they praise the “art” of everyday modern living.99 However, it is with the conception of what it means for something to be genuinely created, epiphanic, that any comparison between the two must ultimately stand or fall. Here my claim is that modernist artworks are designed to exhibit the very same kind of cracks in their fields of meaning that we find with Talmudic texts and halakhic observance. Modernists, in other words, hope that those who approach their works with the requisite openness will be as capable as they are of making their own creations. As Roger Shattuck has pointed out, criticism in all the modernist arts has settled on the term “juxtaposition” to describe how they create their epiphanies.100 I would suggest that it is through nothing other than the bringing together of contradictory items – whether they be words, sentences, sounds, images, and so on – that the required cracks are established, cracks that make way for the epiphanic by virtue of the inspirations that may flow through them. Hence Charles Taylor’s statement contrasting modernist poetics with the expressivist “epiphanies of being” of romanticism: “The [modernist] epiphany comes from between the words or images, as it were, from the force field

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they set up between them, and not through a central referent which they describe while transmuting.”101 And here is Mallarmé on poetry, clearly (if unknowingly) echoing the Talmud in his assertion that crack-inducing juxtaposing extends to the very page on which a poem is written: “The intellectual armature of the / poem conceals itself and – takes place – holds in the space that / isolates the stanzas / and among the blankness of the white paper; a significant silence that it / is no less lovely to compose than / verse.”102 Finally, we have even the post-Marxist Theodor Adorno, who, despite viewing modernism in non-epiphanic terms, has nevertheless declared that an artwork is at its greatest when “contradiction vibrates though its most remote mediations.”103 Recognizing that such works “contain” spaces, Adorno misses only that it is because of these spaces that they are capable of providing inspiration, an access to something that comes from beyond them, a light that originates from outside of the world. Transcendence. They can do this, however, only if they succeed in breaking away – disengaging – and thereby becoming, to a degree, self-sufficient, independent of the fields of meaning that constitute the everyday. And when they do that, as M.H. Abrams has explained, they may be said to approach one of the qualities of the divine. For it is from Edgar Allen Poe through Baudelaire and on to the Symbolists and Imagists that we can trace the notion underlying the famous call of “art for art’s sake,” which makes sense only if we assume the existence of a dimension radically distinct from that of the everyday world. Abrams thus describes Poe as having posited “the existence of two worlds, terrestrial and supernal, and attributed to poetry the struggle ‘to grasp now, wholly, here on earth ... those divine and rapturous joys’ which appertain only to the realm of ‘supernal Loveliness’ and ‘eternity.’”104 How should we conceive of this “now” if not as that moment of epiphany, that instantaneous flash within which a transcendent eternity – what the rabbinic Jew, as we have seen, calls the Shekhinah – breaks through the more or less integrated meaningful fields of worldly meaning, the “stuff” of profane history, of practice and interpretation? Moreover, just as with makhlokot and halakhah, this may happen only if some violence has first been done in order to rupture the field in question. Consider Mallarmé’s quest for the utterly selfsufficient or “auto-telic” work – the work, as he puts it, of “nothing.” As Abrams describes, to Mallarmé “poetry achieves its purity

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by devouring and wearing away the reality it has no recourse except to employ as its initial material”; hence “his ingenious tactics of negating, eliminating, absenting, disembodying, refining to the verge of nonentity the objects of this world.”105 So what we have here, it should be evident, is a creativity that aims to make the already present cracks in a given field of meaning into much larger spaces, spaces capable of “swallowing” the whole field and thus of leaving nothing behind – a creativity, in effect, that aims for inspiration without the interpretation and so for the ex nihilo. Less extreme but clearly in the same vein are the interspatialized epiphanies of Pound and the other Imagists, which have parallels in much nonrepresentational visual art. And the point of all these cracks, spaces, holes, nothings? Quite simply it is that we are to approach the works exhibiting them not with the intention of interpreting and thereby making sense of them as expressions or representations but with the hope of accessing that inspirational energy, the “force like electricity”106 that may flow through them. It is because of their fragmented nature that we, unlike their creators, have no need of mysticism to bring about our own epiphanies; the only requirement is an openness, a willingness to “plug into” the work, which is to say to approach it not as critics but as artists ourselves. Although there is certainly ample precedent for this sort of thing in the history of art,107 modernist works call for it to a degree unmatched, I would claim, since the creations of the Talmud. If correct, then we need to amend the critic Joseph Frank’s wellknown but ultimately non-epiphanic reading of modernist literature. To Frank, such works are designed so that their readers can achieve momentary flashes of insight by perceiving them spatially rather than chronologically, the latter being supposedly more “natural” given the narrative form. To achieve these insights, he explains, readers need to fuse all of a work’s disparate, juxtaposed parts together into a “unity,” to “connect” or “link” them into “a whole,” and thus to “understand,” “adequately grasp,” or “apprehend” the work.108 But all this implies that the reader is to act as an interpreter, someone who aims to make sense of the work by reconciling or integrating its contradictions, when the point, as we have seen, is creation instead of interpretation. So although Frank is right to see modernist technique as aiming for the cultivation of “holes,” he is wrong to conceive of those holes as, in keeping with a recent metaphysical account, being “made” of space – as holes, in other

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words, that constitute “immaterial bodies” that are as much “a part of this world” as any other immanent, everyday entity.109 For this is precisely not the kind of thing, or rather no-thing, that is central to the modernist endeavour. In modernism, as in rabbinic Judaism, the point of holes and ruptures, as we have seen, is that they are to serve as a way to break through fields of meaning – fields that we may conceive of along the lines of both time and place – in order to provide access to the light of transcendent inspiration. To do this, what is required is more like what I would describe as “holes in holes”110 – holes, in effect, that cut deep enough to go all the way through, changing the topology. Only this way can they open up to a transcendent source of creative, as distinct from interpretive, energy. That is why the aim of a Proust consists, as even Frank points out, of having the reader relate to his text just as he, the author, does, which in turn mirrors the impact of the events of À la recherche du temps perdu on its narrator.111 Indeed, I would suggest that it is just because the modernist work calls upon those encountering it to recreate rather than interpret it that we can understand the feelings of guilt sometimes voiced by critics when they remark on the “parasitical” nature of their craft. It is a measure of the greatness of a critic such as Hugh Kenner that, when confronted with a modernist work such as Pound’s Cantos, he responds not with standard interpretive criticism but with The Pound Era, a work with undeniably fictional aspects. For only in this way can he maintain fidelity to a modernism that is, and indeed always has been, rabbinic. So far, we’ve explored how the creation of modernist artworks shares much with the making of Talmudic Oral Law. But there is a practical parallel as well, which is to say one with halakhah. To recall, halakhah works by the imposition of rigid rules on the flow of practice, doing violence to that flow in order to tear openings into it. In contrast to that elitist l’art pour l’art version of modernism – which would utterly separate art from social life and thus favour the artist who “turns back into himself completely and confronts the objective world without going through any of the forms of History or social life”112 – there is, as we have noted, a more egalitarian modernism, one that would break down the barrier that Kant erected between art and everyday life. In considering the latter, we can benefit from taking as our guides those sociologists who have expanded Bergson’s notion of “spatialization” from a focus limited

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to rationalizing modalities of the mind to one that sees it as a mechanism at work in modern social practices. To Bergson, spatialization consists of breaking up the flow, or durée, of everyday organic historical time by the imposition of a (still secular) rationalized “empty time,” as Walter Benjamin later dubbed it, one that puts it on par with a decontextualized, divisible, and thus calculable space.113 Spatialization therefore does a kind of violence to everyday practice, cutting into its integrity, its historical flow, and parcelling it out in a way similar to that of the inflexible rules of halakhah. Many forces in modern society may be said to have this spatializing effect, but I want to cite just two here: (1) certain capitalist practices; and (2) the impositions of neutralist liberalism. The most substantial accounts of spatialization in capitalism are surely those that have been provided by Marxist and neo-Marxist thinkers. Their notion of reification – of the conversion of shared practices into the relations of separable, inert “things” – is a case in point. To Marx, reification is, above all, the result of capitalism’s conception of the social character of people’s labour as having an abstract “exchange-value” and the corresponding conversion of this labour into a fetishized commodity capable of being circulated in the market.114 As György Lukács has described, reification leads to a fragmentation of both the subjects and objects of the production process: the producing subject is made into “a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system,” while the objects produced are subjected to a specializing rationalization that “declare[s] war on the organic manufacture of whole products.”115 The effect, in sum, is to “transform the basic categories of man’s immediate attitude to the world: it reduces space and time to a common denominator and degrades time to the dimension of space ... Thus time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable ‘things’ (the reified, mechanically objectified ‘performance’ of the worker, wholly separated from his total human personality): in short, it becomes space.”116 Capitalist spatialization is also said to happen in a way accounted for by Marx and Engels’s theory of commercial crises, according to which such crises “by their periodical return put on trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society.”117 How does the bourgeoisie manage to overcome them? As Marx and Engels write, “On the one hand, by enforced destruction of a mass

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of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.”118 Despite – or perhaps because of – the authors’ sensitivity to the violence here, we may speak of their awareness of the role that these crises play in supporting capitalist innovation. Of course, Marx and Engels do not conceive of this in terms of the revelatory creativity that I have been describing. But notice how, to a commentator such as Marshall Berman, their conception of capitalist innovation is intimately associated with the idea that the system itself forces open “empty spaces” within it: “The crises can annihilate people and companies that are, by the market’s definitions, relatively weak and inefficient; they can open up empty spaces for new investment and redevelopment; they can force the bourgeoisie to innovate, expand and combine more intensively and ingeniously than ever.”119 Given their appreciation of the violence this process does to everyday, flowing practices, Marxist and neo-Marxist thinkers thus seem to me to demonstrate a much better grasp of what is going on here than do “postindustrial” sociologists such as Daniel Bell. To Bell, the bourgeois world is undergirded by a unified “rational cosmology” in which we find not gouging and dividing spatialization but “an ordered relationship of space and time.”120 Similarly, although Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert L. Dreyfus would reject Bell’s de facto awarding of sovereignty to empty spatialized time, they still seem to me to go astray when, in Heideggerian fashion, they conceive of the innovative aspects of capitalist entrepreneurship (those that precede the establishment of an enterprise) as requiring nothing more than “skills.”121 For skills are interpretive rather than creative capacities, and interpretation, as we have noted, is all about integration and reconciliation rather than separating violence.122 In consequence, Spinosa, Flores, and Dreyfus may be said to share in Bell’s failure to recognize the essential role of those cracks that, as Adorno once noted, cut through modern society. For as one commentator has aptly summarized his insight here, Adorno perceives the dissonances in the monotony of the whole and these tear the whole asunder, ambivalently threatening destruction and enticing us with unconstrained fulfilment. However much society

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has really become what Adorno terms a “system,” nevertheless its metaphysical “conclusive” integration into an unalterable totality, and Adorno insists on this fact, is mere appearance. It is merely an overarching context of illusion, a spell, one which can and must dissolve, and which is already shot through with cracks, and is riddled with holes through which occasionally a weak Messianic light of utopia can fall onto the seemingly administered world.123 Thus does, again, even a secular post-Marxist thinker such as Adorno appreciate the fundamental link between creativity in modern society and the cracks that make it possible. The other form of spatialization in modernity that I want to identify here is driven by a procedural rather than instrumental rationality. I am thinking of the influence of those (especially Kantian) neutralist liberalisms that, despite their incompatibility with popular economic approaches to the law, have nevertheless made their mark, especially when it comes to the judiciaries of the AngloAmerican world. John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, for example, have each issued well-known calls for the American courts to rule on the basis of their respective theories of justice.124 To the extent that these have been heeded, I think we can speak of a spatialization effect. For Rawls, Dworkin, and their followers simply do not recognize their theories for what they are: works that ought to be placed squarely within the tradition of utopian fiction (Rawls did, however, once describe his approach as “realistically utopian”).125 For although they may serve as useful foils for our societies, and so as enriching aids to social criticism,126 it would be wrong to think of them as capable of providing us with direct, practical guidance about justice. Yet this is precisely how neutralist liberals (indeed, all neutralist political philosophers, not just those sympathetic to liberalism) think of them: they offer their theories as thin or decontextualized systematic unities that are to serve as templates for our states’ constitutions. In so doing, they do not conceive of those theories as contributions to the interpretive conversations that we might be having about political justice; on the contrary, the point is that the theories are to be applied. One effect of this is that it encourages parties to plead before, rather than converse with, whatever authority is charged with carrying out the application. And given that pleading is, like makhlokot, highly adversarial, it cannot but

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increase the distance between the conflicting parties. Nor should we forget that when parties today stand before a judge, someone who will later hand down (notice the asymmetry) his or her ruling, they are subject to something that is meant to be backed up by the police. Add to this a retributivist conception of punishment, and it should be evident to all that neutralist justice divides rather than reconciles.127 This division can be characterized as the result of a spatialization effect. For neutralist theories do not really constitute systematic unities (indeed, given the nature of language properly understood, they simply cannot).128 Their contradictions thus do much more than give their critics something to write about: they encourage division and so social fragmentation. In the end, then, neutralist liberalism gives us but one more reason to continue playing our song: “There is a crack in everything.” It is worth noting that integration also gets ruled out by all those who take a pluralist, as distinct from neutralist, approach to justice. Rather than developing theories intended to interlock values systematically, pluralists commit an error of the opposite extreme, one that derives from their vision of the cores of values as separable, independent concepts. This leads them to imagine conflicts as consisting of separate moral interests (e.g., rights) that have “clashed” or “collided,” thus encouraging an adversarial, zero-sum dynamic between them.129 As with the neutralist, the effect is to insert more space than necessary between opponents, with the result that conflicts become things that may be only won or lost (or lost and lost); reconciliation, the realization of the common good, gets ruled out from the start. Yet unlike neutralists, pluralists would have those involved negotiate an accommodation and so, we may say, place “patches” over the cracks that lie between them. But this means that pluralists would lead us neither to the best that interpretive dialogue – as conversation rather than negotiation – has to offer nor to the creativity that neutralist-induced spatialization may engender. If there has ever been a politics that we should describe as lacking in ambition, pluralist politics is thus surely it. iii What does all this have to do with the minimal global ethic? To answer, we need to take the account of revelatory creation that I have

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been developing somewhat further. For it is not only cracked biblical and Talmudic texts, halakhic observances, and “hol(e)y” modernist artworks and social practices that can serve as what we might call “epiphanic sites,” but certain places, many recognized as sacred by the world’s great religions, as well as certain objects, can also be so characterized. And following Emmanuel Levinas, the same may be said of persons – all persons – an implication of his assertion that we all have “faces.” Now it is this claim that allows us to speak of a creative, as distinct from interpretive, source for the ethic. When Levinas asserts that people have faces, he is not referring to those everyday phenomenological entities – that is, to our faces as they appear to ordinary, rationally interpretable sense perception. Rather, his intention is to invoke revelation. As he writes, “What is produced here is not a reasoning, but the epiphany that occurs as a face,” and this is something “that is not of the world.”130 Elsewhere: “In the other, there is a real presence of God ... I’m not saying that the other is God, but that in his or her Face I hear the Word of God.”131 And: “The idea of Infinity [in the face of the other] is revealed, in the strong sense of the term.”132 No surprise, then, that Levinas describes the encounter with the face as involving the asymmetry of power that, as we have noted, is characteristic of creativity: “Since the Other looks at me, I am responsible for him, without even having taken on responsibilities in his regard; his responsibility is incumbent on me”; and “There is a commandment in the appearance of the face, as if a master spoke to me.”133 My claim – and this is a crucial step in the argument – is that the very same may be said of encounters with all other epiphanic sites.134 Consider Rilke, standing before a statue of Apollo: “For here there is no place that does not see you / You must change your life.” Or Sylvia Plath, faced with some tulips: “Nobody watched me before, now I am watched. The tulips turn to me ... The eyes of the tulips.”135 And so on. What do such epiphanies have to “say” to those open to their revelation – that is, to those able to connect with them in a creative as distinct from interpretive way? I think we can distinguish between two orders of messages here. A message of the first order is sent at each and every revelatory moment, and we can get an indication of its contents by heeding Levinas on the face: “The first word: ‘you shall not commit murder.’”136 Extrapolating to all epiphanic sites, I would suggest that there is a consistent communication emanating from them, one demanding, in essence, that we

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protect them, that we grant them a certain minimum of respect. And because this includes respect for all persons as well, we can identify this message with the minimal global ethic. The second order consists of messages that are more particular to given cases. Yet these, or at least some of them, can also be said to contribute to the ethic. Before offering an example, however, I want to try to account for the very idea of such second-order revelations. It requires giving the element of interpretation present within all artistic creation its due. Recall that, in revelation, creators are driven by an inspirational light emanating from a crack in the epiphanic site. But what is produced will also be shaped by the unique horizon constitutive of the creator’s self or identity. Hence the modernist recognition, inherited from romanticism, that all creation is marked by the “personal index” of the artist. Creation, then, is always at least partly a matter of “expression” rather than, as it has been understood in earlier eras, of simple mimetic representation. That, for example, is why we say today that artists must develop “subtler languages” that are specific to them.137 That said, this notion has long been present in rabbinic Judaism, as we can see by combining Rabbi Ishmael’s principle, repeated eighteen times in the Talmud, that “the Torah speaks the language of men” with the equally important assertion that “as all faces of people are unlike, so too their opinions.”138 Thus do we get claims such as that of the sixteenthcentury Rabbi Hayyim Vital according to which, since sixty myriads of Israelites heard the Torah at Sinai, we should speak of sixty myriads of Torah, each having been marked by an individual’s soul.139 To the rabbinic Jew, the idea that humankind was created in God’s image implies that human beings, like God, are creators and so, as we have seen, partners in the creation of the universe. But since everyone is different, we can expect that each artist will respond differently to the inspirations they receive, thus making unique contributions to this grandest of projects.140 This will be all the more true of those who direct their creativity towards the transformation of their own selves, as though in response to that famous call (an echo of Ezek. 18:31) emanating from Rilke’s statue: “You must change your life.” I promised an example of a second-order revelation that contributed, and continues to contribute, to the minimal global ethic. There is a particular set of moral principles, one that rabbinic Jews believe is derived from a revelation associated with the biblical

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passage that contains what has been called the “Noahide Laws” (Gen. 9:1–17). It is these principles, I claim, that allow us to speak of a Jewish version of the ethic.141

III i What of the ethic and conflict? After all, nothing says that secondorder revelations may not come into conflict with others, be they themselves of the second order or even of the first. There is, in other words, no reason to assume that all creations are compatible; indeed, as we have noted, the idea that they conflict is perhaps the central axiom of the Talmud. Think of Gogol’s self-proclaimed inspired decision to destroy the manuscripts constituting the second part of his Dead Souls, or of the controversy surrounding Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning (1953), a work he produced by erasing one of William de Kooning’s pencil drawings. Both of these are, we may say, cases of artists responding to inspirations that demanded the elimination of previously created works, thus violating the first-order responsibility to protect and respect them. What, moreover, of conflicts between creative imperatives and interpretive ethics – that is, between the domains of “the artistic/ holy” and “the good”? The question virtually poses itself when we consider those cases in which artists have asked others to destroy their creations. Virgil, for instance, issued just such instructions on his deathbed as regards The Aneid; William Faulkner did the same with respect to those of his writings still unpublished at the time of his death; as did Philip Larkin; as did Rabbi Nachman of Bretslev, one of the greatest Hasidic storytellers. Of course, The Aneid escaped, along with Faulkner’s and Larkin’s works; not so one of the Rabbi’s, a text that has come to be known as The Burnt Book (Sefer ha-nafrid). One could cite many other examples,142 but perhaps the most famous is the one associated with Max Brod’s decision to ignore the following note: Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me ... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, to be burned unread; also all writings and sketches which you or others may possess; and ask those

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others for them in my name. Letters which they do not want to hand over to you, they should at least promise faithfully to burn themselves. Yours, Franz Kafka143 Justifying his decision, Brod has claimed that, given an earlier discussion he had had with Kafka, the latter, in his judgment, did not really mean what he wrote in the note.144 Lest one remain unconvinced, Brod also declares that “the fact of the literary and ethical value of what I am publishing would have been enough to decide me to do so, definitely, finally, and irresistibly.”145 Yet even given this, Brod still admits that the note “precipitated me into [a] difficult conflict of conscience.”146 How to understand this? In referring to the literary and ethical value of Kafka’s works, Brod can be read as assuming the compatibility of creative and interpretive imperatives. “Literary value” invokes, perhaps, the first-order creative injunction against destroying such epiphanic sites, while “ethical value” could be said to refer to considerations that take into account the work’s potential contribution to moral understanding and social welfare.147 Yet we can also identify interpretive ethical imperatives that contradict these two: there is Broad’s legal duty to respect an author’s rights (particularly when one is, as Brod was, the appointed executor to Kafka’s will) as well as, perhaps most significantly, Brod’s obligation to what he has referred to as “22 years of an unclouded friendship.”148 Writing of Brod’s decision, Milan Kundera has shown an acute sensitivity to these dilemmas. Although initially describing the decision as an “act of rape,” Kundera also admits that, given that Kafka wrote “nothing greater” than the three novels that were among the material saved, he himself “would not have found the strength to carry out fully Kafka’s ‘testament.’”149 Note that, by referring to Kafka’s instructions in this way, Kundera can be read as invoking yet another religio-aesthetic imperative at play here. For there is always something special about a man’s final request: “Obedience to a last wish is mysterious: it goes beyond all practical and rational thought.”150 I want to hazard a guess as to why that is the case: creation exhibits a degree of closure that is absent from works of interpretation. There is, in other words, something about the creative process that allows an artist to declare his or her work “finished” in a way that is unavailable to the critic. Indeed,

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interpretation invariably carries with it the implication that there is always something more to say, as well as a better way to say it. As Gadamer has put it: “Conclusive interpretation simply does not exist.”151 The interpreter, we might thus say, interprets as though he or she will live forever, which is why we may surmise that the finality of a last request indicates that it is a creative rather than interpretive act. What, if anything, can be said in general about the reconcilability of conflicts between religio-aesthetic and ethical imperatives? Not everyone, of course, would accept this way of portraying the matter. Some, such as Gadamer, would reject my distinguishing between the creative and the interpretive.152 And many of those who would accept something like it would nevertheless, with Kant and Schiller, assert that both are fully compatible, or with Levinas and Soloveitchick, reject my identification of ethics with the interpretive, or with Nietzsche, call for a creativity that takes us beyond the ethical.153 I believe, however, that our best guides to this matter are those who have taken an intermediary position, one that conceives of the relations between the interpretive good and the creative beautiful/holy as being in constant – indeed, often paradoxical – tension. Think of Walter Pater on the good and the aesthetic or of Kierkegaard on the good and the holy. In Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, the aesthetic is alternately presented either as the only genuine form of morality, as superior to “received morality,” or – and Pater himself worried about this a great deal – as pernicious for those who have “any natural tendency to impiety or vice.”154 As for Kierkegaard, it is only in Abraham, the greatest of the “knights of faith,” that we are said to find the good and the holy fully reconciled. According to Kierkegaard, Abraham perceived no contradiction between God’s command that he sacrifice his son Isaac and his ethical responsibilities as a father. The rest of us, however, who are incapable of Abraham’s perfect, doubtless faith, can see in such a command only a “suspension of the ethical.”155 I think that both Pater and Kierkegaard are right to point to a seemingly inextricable tension here. That said, perhaps we can draw some comfort from the notion that these kinds of conflicts may bring with them their own cracks, which may themselves serve as openings to a creativity that can assist us in resolving them. Transcendence might thus rebound back onto the good, as with, for example, Kierkegaard’s hope that his decision to become a Christian

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instead of marrying his love would ultimately lead him to more strongly affirm life than if he had opted for marriage in the first place. But this, of course, can be only a hope. ii Thus the various parts of the minimal global ethic, whether drawing on sources that are interpretive, creative, or both, can be involved in conflict, be it with each other or with goods or artistic/ holy imperatives that are outside of it. Regarding the latter case, little, it seems to me, can be said, for the issue reaches beyond logos. But what of the others? Here too, alas, there is not much to say, at least in general. For if those conflicts are to be met with conversation, with an attempt at reconciliation, the interlocutors must listen to each other rather than to some philosophy. Reconciliation is possible, when it is possible, only because there is a sense in which all of us – although in varying ways and to varying degrees – share the goods in question. And we do so, as I have argued elsewhere, in a way that is holistic in a “holographic” sense, the whole of goods being present in every part. An individual good may still be distinguished from other goods, only not in an atomistic sense, as though a solid line could be drawn around it, since when it comes to ethics, any lines we may wish to draw must always be dotted.156 That is why it makes sense to speak of a single common good affirmed by everyone, one that is realized whenever people manage to reach an understanding and thereby reconcile their conflicts. So the very willingness to respond to a conflict with conversation points to the existence of a civic or political community, whether within borders or across them, the latter indicating that we are all, whatever else we are, citizens of the world.157 Moreover, since reconciliation must be distinguished from accommodation, which is the goal of negotiation, real conversation should never be conceived as a matter of prioritizing goods since reconciliation means that, at least in the given case of it, all have been wholly fulfilled. It is only when the conversation has broken down and we have had to turn to negotiation that there is a need for ranking. Yet here again there is little to say about this in general, for how one ranks particular goods depends not on philosophy but on one’s ideological persuasion.

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So whereas the cosmopolitan, for example, can be expected to give the goods of the ethic a very high place, unlike, say, the nationalist, the true philosopher will remain silent.158

IV I want to conclude with a few observations. The first recalls how the ethic can serve pluralist political philosophers such as Berlin, Hampshire, and Walzer by strengthening their hand against accusations of relativism or ethnocentrism. For it provides them with a basis for criticizing regimes that commit abhorrent acts that clearly and consistently violate the ethic. And if the perpetrators do not accommodate the criticisms by changing their behaviour, the ethic can be invoked to support intervention, the use of force against them. There is, however, a problem with relying on the ethic. But before I get to it, I want to note how those who, like myself, are sympathetic to a “patriotic” as distinct from a pluralist politics, one that aims to give conversation a significant role, will be inclined to conceive of the ethic as serving a further, more ambitious end. For the ethic’s very existence tells us that intercultural conversation is possible, that those involved in conflict do not need to “bridge” some divide with negotiation since a bridge, namely the ethic, is already present. Those standing upon it, in other words, have every reason to try to reconcile, rather than merely accommodate, their conflict. It is only, once again, when the conversation fails – and we must admit that, more often than not, it will – that we should be turning to the form of diplomacy that is limited to negotiation. Most Anglo-American political thinkers, however, perhaps because of the influence of analytic approaches on their thought, fail to call for a conversational response to conflict.159 Charles Taylor is among the most prominent exceptions here, although I would suggest that even he does not manage to go far enough. Consider his recommendation that we aim for a negotiated world consensus on certain basic norms before attempting the more ambitious goal of achieving genuine intercultural understandings (i.e., that we negotiate before conversing).160 The problem with this is that, even though negotiated truces, say, can often be extremely beneficial, there is little point in trying to achieve a consensus on norms in this way. For given that negotiated accommodations are the products

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of compromise, they will invariably contain resentments within them and hence sow the seeds of future conflict. Their adversarial dynamic, in consequence, cannot be expected to bring the sense of security necessary for parties to attain the degree of openness, and thus to exercise the capacity to listen, that conversation requires. Moreover, Taylor also expresses a concern for “bridging differences” between minds, which are said to begin “worlds apart,” and he also writes of the need for reaching “convergences” that will close the “extreme distance” between cultures.161 But all this only lends support to the pluralist conception of intercultural conflict, the one that encourages us to imagine the clashing or colliding of originally separate entities. Samuel P. Huntington’s famous thesis about the “clash of civilizations” comes to mind.162 In failing to put conversation first, then, Taylor, like Huntington, may be said to have failed to give the minimal global ethic its due.163 I want to close with a warning to all those concerned with encouraging this more conversational diplomacy. It is as regards this goal that we need to worry about the pluralist’s use of the ethic when faced with accusations of ethnocentrism. For if conflicts are to be met, at least at first, with conversation, we need to see that invoking some global ethic will only distract from the real listening, the deep sensitivity to history and context, that conversation requires. Say one wishes to get the Chinese regime to own up to the horrible injustices it committed in massacring democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989, or to persuade the Russian authorities to end and indeed atone for their intolerable treatment of the Chechens, or to convince those Arabs who practise cliteridectomy simply to stop doing so. Rather than referring to some general, global ethic, it will always be more effective to make direct reference to such specific traditions as Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism in the Chinese case, Eastern Orthodoxy in the Russian, and Islam when it comes to the Arabs. That is why, although they did so for a different reason, I believe that the ancient Greeks were right to forgo any elaboration of the ethic’s content.164 For although knowledge of its very existence may provide psychological support during the heat of argument – when, after all, one can expect to hear profound challenges to the justness of one’s cause – the ethic just cannot be expected to do much more than this. Indeed, invoking it will only distort the conversation, ensuring that it ends up serving more

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as a reified obstacle to understanding than as the bridge upon which conversing interlocutors may stand. For like so many other things that we use for support in life, the ethic is at its most effective when it remains in the background. One can only hope that the day will come when we can all agree to put it back there.

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11 Good, Bad, Great, Evil

I There is a diversity of goods in the world: the various kinds of liberty (political, national, and individual), equality, welfare, happiness, friendship, beauty, family, pleasure, and so on. We come to adopt these goods as we grow up, forming and reforming the unique wholes that constitute our identities. These we realize throughout our lives as we participate in practices, which are but the expression of our goods. More often than not, we carry those practices out prereflectively, habitually, expressing goods that are so closely integrated and harmonious with each other that we are barely aware that they are there. But sometimes things do not flow so smoothly, tensions arise, and we realize that our goods have come into conflict. They have emerged from the background and are challenging us to respond to their call, to be true to them. But how? By reinterpreting them is one answer, by engaging in a practical form of reason that amounts to having a kind of dialogue about them, about what they should mean for us in the context in question (logos, we recall, means both “reason” and “speech”). What is needed are new interpretations in order to “make sense” of the conflict, to resolve it by integrating or reconciling the goods involved. Now this is possible, when it is possible, only because those goods are parts of an organic or “holographic” whole, one that is present in every part. We need, in other words, to conceive of a given conflict as though tension or disharmony has arisen within particular regions of a whole, the whole of goods. By shifting our attention from the parts in conflict to that whole, we might find a way to

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reconcile or further integrate them. Far too many people, however, imagine instead a “banging together” of what are assumed to be originally separate items. This supports the second best way of responding to conflict with reason, one wherein we weigh the conflicting goods against each other and so compromise rather than reconcile them. Only by giving the holographic nature of the whole its due are we able to engage in a dialogue that is more like conversation than negotiation, one in which we search within each conflicting good for an interpretation that might allow it to relate better to the others. Although this is indeed a kind of search, the process also consists of making something new, which is why we may say that interpretation combines discovery with the evolution of meaning. Moreover, since the meaning of the goods being interpreted always depends on the context, and hence on their place in the interpreter’s “life story,” it makes sense to conceive of the task as aiming to develop an interpretation that coheres with that story. For the point is always to make decisions about what should be done in the future that are true to, keep faith with, the journey along the river of life that has been undertaken so far. When we are successful, harmony can be said to have been restored to the whole, and so our ability to practise prereflectively is re-established. When this process consists of the reconciliation of a single individual’s goods – when, in other words, a personal dilemma is solved – we may say that “authenticity” has been achieved; when the conflict concerns many people, by contrast, the tendency instead is to refer to “justice.” Authenticity is thus the fundamental aim of ethics, whereas justice is that of politics.1 Ethics and politics, then, take place amidst the flow of historically evolving practices; indeed, they are the sources of the reinterpretation of those practices. Their basic aim, again, is to facilitate the flow, doing so by integrating, to the greatest possible degree, whatever conflicting goods happen to show up. The stronger the flow, the greater the “power” of our goods, which is to say the greater their ability to motivate us to uphold them (think of how good music stimulates us to sing and dance along). Presumably, a “perfect” interpretation would be one that produced a final integration, bringing all parts of the whole of goods together such that it could be described as a unity. But this means that there would never again be conflict, that the flow would have come to a halt since we would have arrived at “the

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end of history.” Obviously, we are not there yet; perhaps we never will be. We remain “on the way,” so to speak, questing for “the One.” So as we live our lives, we should expect to find ourselves confronted with conflicts and hence with the need to develop interpretations that respond to them, different interpretations representing different possible paths along the river. Our challenge, of course, is to choose the best of those on offer, and since we do not have a total grasp of the whole, we can do this only by comparing them to each other, by searching for the one that seems truest to, most capable of reconciling, our goods. And because this is a dialogical process, we need to be good listeners if we are to do it well. For as Hans-Georg Gadamer once described, “The primacy of hearing is the basis of the hermeneutical phenomenon.”2 It goes almost without saying that the greater its ability to reconcile, the better the interpretation and thus the more “good” it is. This does not mean that interpretations which fail to reconcile are necessarily “bad.” Indeed, it may be that those which manage only to accommodate a conflict by compromising the goods or, worse, by calling for the utter disintegration of some of them through the use of force are, depending on the context, still the least damaging of those available. If so, we would be in our rights to describe such justifiable injustices as “good overall,” thus recognizing that there is still some bad mixed in. It is worth adding that, because we can never attain that total grasp of the whole, the hope that practical reason can indeed provide us with the most integrating, or least disintegrating, interpretation overall is just that, a hope, which is to say that it relies on faith. For each interpretation may, once again, be judged only in relation to the others on offer, not against all possible interpretations. Moreover, who can say for certain that there even is a One for which to strive and hence that we are justified in speaking of a given interpretation as not only different but also better because more integrating overall? Faith that there is, and that practical reason can take us there, is thus what prevents hermeneutics from lapsing into nihilism.3 So even if we are unaware of it, we ordinarily use the terms “good” and “bad” in relation to the degree of integration or disintegration, respectively, that we believe a given interpretation will bring. Consider the following. A man lacks money, meaning that he is unable to realize many of the goods (e.g., welfare and leisure) that

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he holds dear. So he decides to arm himself and rob a bank. He knows that this will threaten a number of other goods that he also acknowledges (e.g., human life, property, etc.), but he is nevertheless willing to go through with it, thus indicating that welfare and leisure are more important to him (if asked, he might deny this, but as the saying goes, actions speak louder than words). Perhaps he reached his decision to commit the robbery as a result of explicit reasoning (accompanied, one hopes, by the loss of a few nights of sleep); or perhaps he did so wholly pre-reflectively, in which case we might want to describe him as a habitual criminal. Regardless, both the decision and the act itself are interpretations (the latter being an interpretation of the former), and given the details so far provided, most of us would judge them as “bad.” We would certainly be right to do so if they contributed to the disintegration of the whole of his goods (which are our goods as well since we share many of them with him). But say it turns out that the money he planned to steal had been previously stolen from him by the bank and that the bank’s employees, as well as the local police, all work for an organized crime syndicate. Then we might change our minds and describe the robbery as, overall, “good.” And we would say the same of the man who carried it out.

II There is, however, more to our lives than this interpretive, dialogical world of historical, flowing being, more than just the good and the bad. For aside from nature, there is also nonbeing, which we might envision as “cracks” in the river. That is, even though interpretive life always flows more or less harmoniously, there are also, we may say, holes of Nothing situated in the water, spaces that are to be found between certain potentially irreconcilable goods. It is because there is something perhaps incomprehensible about their conflicts that I have reached for this confounding image of cracks in fluid. For the very nature of these cracks is such that they are not open to being articulated, to being made sense of with an interpretation and so brought into the flow of being. It is as though they are apart from the water, inaccessible to our practical reasoning, unable to be “heard.” That said, there are occasions when something like light is emitted through these cracks, a light that, although silent, can nevertheless

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shine on and be absorbed by the being that surrounds them. This is what produces the “visions” or “inspirations” to which artists often refer. Indeed, it is because of these inspirations that we need to distinguish between the creations of art on the one hand and the interpretations of criticism on the other. There is a parallel here with two of the kinds of mutation that we find in genetics: (1) “radiation-induced mutation,” driven by the effects of ultraviolet light on dna, is like creation; and (2) “recombinatory mutation,” such as with sexual reproduction, is like interpretation since there is no extraworldly energy driving the process.4 This makes evident that artistic creation, just like radiation-induced mutation, consists of something more than just the inspiration/light because that inspiration must in some way be combined with being; creation, in other words, is (at least when performed by human beings) never ex nihilo. But despite always having some interpretation in it, it is still the inspiration that drives the whole process since it is to that inspiration, and not simply some object of interpretation, that the artist strives to be true. Creation, then, is “inspired interpretation,” and we may say that it consists of bringing together an energy that tends to be conceived in ocular terms with the dialogical, interpretative process, which, as we noted above, is fundamentally aural. One way to distinguish between created things is thus to invoke the relative proportion of these two elements in the process of their making; poetry, for example, tends to be more inspired and thus less interpretive than prose. Interpretation and creation also differ as regards time. The temporality of the former is the basis of everyday history, wherein the past flows into the present and the present into the future – the time, as Martin Heidegger has shown, of being.5 The reception of an inspiring light shining through a crack of nonbeing is something, however, that takes place within a special sort of “moment,” a present that, to some extent, is separate from both the past and the future, which is why it is sometimes called the “time of eternity” or the “infinite now.”6 All creations and interpretations are more or less original, bringing something new into the world. But their originality arises differently. With interpretation, as we have noted, one aims for reconciliations or integrations that bring understanding, and these will be more or less compelling depending on their ability to integrate or reconcile, as well as on the capacity of interpreters to hear (in the sense of understand) them. Occasionally, a given interpretation will

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be so original, so far “ahead of its time” or “up the river” (for the hope is that the river of being flows not down but up towards the One)7 that it will be very difficult for most to hear. In time, however, they will presumably “catch up” to it, although it is also always possible that, in the intervening period, their society’s practices will change direction so radically that the highly original interpretation will become less relevant and thus less compelling to its members’ new situation. The potential for originality is even greater with creation, however. Imagine shards of light slicing through cracks in the river of being, energizing parts of it and bringing the water in the vicinity to a boil, radically disrupting its flow. At first, these will produce anything but integration and so will be considered “bad,” or at least disturbing. In the long run, however, the changes wrought may bring about a much greater harmonization of flow than could have been possible with interpretation alone. That is why creations, as distinct from interpretations, are sometimes identified as “great” rather than merely good or even very good; for the great artist, by taking a sort of detour home, somehow helps to get us there the sooner for it.8 “To do a great right, do a little wrong,” wrote Shakespeare; and as Nietzsche echoed: “‘Bad! Bad! What? Is he not going – backwards?’ – Yes! But you ill understand him if you complain about it. He goes backwards as everyone goes backwards who wants to take a big jump.”9 That said, creations can contribute to the flow of being only with the aide of interpreters – in the case of artworks, critics who help us to understand and learn from them. Hence George Steiner’s simile comparing the critic to a postman,10 and we note that the ancient Greek god Hermes (whose name serves as the root of the word “hermeneutics”) was known as the messenger of the gods. Of course, some people channel their creativity into actions rather than artworks. These actions ought to be distinguished from the everyday, interpretive practices referred to above, something that we already implicitly do anyway whenever we describe them, and those who carry them out, as “heroic.” Heroic actions contribute to authenticity or justice in a way that bypasses the interpretive dialogues of ethics or politics. Not that we would be wrong to call heroes “patriots,” individuals committed to the common good, but when we do so we need to be aware that theirs is an apolitical patriotism. Such patriots have taken many forms, Carlyle having

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famously distinguished between prophets, saints, and the charismatic leaders of countries and religions. Think of Moses, Francis of Assisi, Churchill, or the Dalai Lama, each of whom Carlyle would describe as like a “flowing light-fountain.”11 For each can be said to have brought being into contact with a creative energy that transcends it. Given that creativity cannot be considered an entirely rational process, we should recognize that there is an element of force, even violence, present in heroism. That is why we need to be careful to perform the sometimes hazardous task of distinguishing between the potential greatness of creation and its related but nevertheless diametric opposite, the “evil” of destruction. That there is something paradoxical about both creation and destruction, making them inherently mysterious, certainly does not help in this task. With creativity, the antinomy centres around how inspiration and interpretation, the silent energy of light and the noisy matter of being, can be brought together, given that the latter is ontic and the former is not. Creators also somehow manage to combine active and passive stances: the making or maintaining of the cracks necessary for an inspiration requires activity;12 the reception of one demands an extreme passivity;13 and the rearticulation of meaning driven by that inspiration necessitates the active speaking and listening characteristic of the good interlocutor. With evil destruction, the paradox arises from the simultaneous presence of two opposites: there is an excess of inspiring light (excess has long been associated with evil; as the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, “exceeding due measure” is a primary meaning of the Teutonic root of the word), and there is a sense that this light has been blocked, which accounts for the oft-remarked connection between evil and failed creativity.14 Those ostensibly responsible for the blocking are then targeted by the evil for destruction. In fiction we find this, for example, in Albert Camus’s L’Étranger, where the character Merseult shoots dead an Arab on a beach overwhelmed with sunlight. Merseult had previously referred to the Arab’s image, his face somehow “covered with shadows,” as “shimmering before my eyes,” as well as to the knife in his hand as having “preyed on my eyelashes and scoured my painful eyes.”15 Or one might think of Michael Ondaatje’s portrayal of Billy the Kid as someone who stands “on the edge of the sun / that would ignite me / looking out into pitch white / sky and grass overdeveloped to meaninglessness.” In this case, Billy’s intended victim is a boy “who blocks out the

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light” and thereby serves as an obstacle to Billy’s hoped-for creative activity: “I am unable to move.”16 Finally, we could cite Scott Merritt’s song “Supply Exceedin,” in which a rocket, overpowered with sunshine, is brought down to hover just above the ground, whereupon weeds climb up and over it, blocking the sun; suddenly, the rocket is underground (in hell?) and blasting the weeds “ten at a time.”17 Destruction. Turning, alas, from fiction to nonfiction, one might refer to Adolf Hitler and all the other evil Nazis, for “failed artists were characteristic of the leadership of the Third Reich.”18 Well into the First World War, it seemed to Hitler that Germany’s enemies had begun to fall into a paralyzing despair. But “suddenly a flaming red light arose in Germany”19 – a general munitions strike in the country led the Allies to believe that they would inevitably win the war. And then, upon hearing that Germany had indeed surrendered – the result, Hitler believed, of Jewish traitors – “everything went black before my eyes ... In these nights hatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible for this deed ... There is no making pacts with Jews; there can only be the hard: either – or. I, for my part, decided to go into politics.”20 Nihilism, in the form of an “anything goes” attitude towards the domain of good and bad that is being, constitutes an intermediary step in this process. It serves as a kind of invitation to evil in that it permits evildoers to direct their wills towards the destruction of the scapegoated part of being – usually an identifiable group of people – that they claim is blocking the inspiration and so constituting an obstacle to their creativity.21 The obstacle tends to be identified with people since, given our capacities to interpret and create, we constitute meaning and hence being, the “stuff” that will fill the crack and so block out the light. Thus, for example, were the victims of Nazi concentration camps selected (at least in the case of Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals) not because of anything they had done but simply because of who they were. For their very existence was enough for them to be seen as an obstacle to the Nazi’s “creative” project, the reign of the Third Reich. We hear the very same kind of ravings when it comes to some serial killers’ explanations for why they targeted their victims. Note how, to the evil, simply murdering the target is deemed insufficient. We can assume that this is because dying with dignity can serve as the creative completion of a life, bringing its narrative to a

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close and thereby contributing to being, which makes it possible to further block the evil’s light. For whereas all deaths are disintegrating and thus bad, most are also creative and thus great. Rilke suggests as much when he writes of how death bears witness to meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction. And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel a trace of eternity.22 It is when one’s death connects with, which is to say is inspired by, eternity that it becomes not only bad but also great. This suggests a problem with Martin Heidegger’s conception of humankind as “Being-towards-death.”23 For if Heidegger is right that (prereflective) understanding is a basic mode of our being24 and that understanding “always press(es) forward into possibilities,”25 there appears to be no room for people to recognize that their lives will to come to an end in one of the ways that death signifies – that is, with the perishing of their bodies and hence the closing of their narratives (at least for them). For if people live in terms of understanding, as well as sometimes in interpretive quest for it, this means they live as though they will do so forever, as though they will always be “on the way.” But sooner or later, of course, we all die. That is why, while Heidegger can agree with Wittgenstein that “death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death,”26 he seems to have no room for the notion that our physical deaths are normally part of a creative rather than hermeneutical process. And given the connection between creativity and the transcendent light that is inspiration, we can understand why the moment of a person’s death is not something that can be grasped interpretively, because a part of it, at least, is inherently incomprehensible.27 Thus, if understanding is indeed a basic mode of our being, this means that creativity, which is something otherwise than being,28 is another such mode – indeed, one that is not fully compatible with the first. All this said, death at the hands of evil is anything but creative. To truly destroy, evildoers first ensure that their victims die without the dignity that can bring creative closure to (or as Rilke would put it, retrieval of) their lives. That is why the Nazis designed their camps to bring about the “depersonalization” of their prisoners

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before their deaths, the project that Primo Levi famously described as “the demolition of man.” It required imposing an anonymous experience of intensely degrading conditions (anonymity being essential if the victims were not to become martyrs, another form of creative death). Or one might think of how Stalin’s terror exhibited what Robert Conquest has referred to as an “almost metaphysical preference” for extracting false and thus degrading confessions before murdering its prisoners.29 Surely, this is but another terrifying example of an evil dictator’s “savage fantasy” of destruction, which is the expression that Solzhenitsyn uses in referring to Stalin’s treatment of those who were known as the “repeaters”: That is what, in the language of the Gulag, they called those still undestroyed unfortunates of 1937 vintage, who had succeeded in surviving ten impossible, unendurable years, and who in 1947–48, had timidly stepped forth onto the land of freedom ... worn out, broken in health, but hoping to live out in peace what little of their lives remained. But some sort of savage fantasy (or stubborn malice, or unstated vengeance) pushed the Victorious Generalissimo into issuing the order to arrest all those cripples over again, without any new charges! It was even disadvantageous, both economically and politically, to clog the meat grinder with its own refuse. But Stalin issued the order anyway.30 So evil’s goal is not only to kill but also to destroy, something that requires forcing people’s identities into the cracks of nonbeing such that there will be nothing left even to disintegrate. Evil is thus an attempt to exceed the limits of being, which is why we may characterize it as excessive in a second sense, and indeed the oed informs us that “overstepping proper limits” is another primary meaning of the root of the word. The goal of destruction is the mirror image of the goal of the creative great. For great actions also consist of something more than just interpretation. And given that they are, as we noted above, inspired, this suggests that evil actions are best described as “expired,” using this term in its senses both of death and of becoming void; evil, then, is “expired interpretation.” This means that it, too, cannot be ex nihilo, even though the nihilo is precisely its point. So although evildoers sometimes offer some set of (always bad) reasons to account for their actions (e.g., that their target is a kind of

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virus that must be exterminated for the good of humankind), no account of those actions that is limited to such interpretable motives will ever be sufficient. For just like the creative great, the evil are, to a degree, beyond reason; unlike them, however, whatever reason they do employ is best characterized as a “logic of destruction.”31 Hence the extremely limited nature of the historian Raul Hilberg’s answer to the question of why the Nazis did what they did: “They did it because they wanted to do it.”32 In like manner, Levi has described an incident that happened soon after his arrival as a prisoner in Auschwitz: Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within hand’s reach. I opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me. ‘Warum?’ I asked him in my poor German. ‘Hier ist kein warum’ (there is no why here), he replied, pushing me inside with a shove.33 Thus was the train ride to the camp “a journey towards nothingness,” and the murder of the first passengers a case of “the night [having] swallowed them up.”34 Auschwitz, Levi quickly learned, was a place whose functionings were all directed towards destruction, to the dark hole of nonbeing that was located at its centre. This explains the central proverb of such Vernichtungslagers (to-nothing camps): “When things change, they change for the worse.”35 It also accounts for Levi’s description of his fellow prisoners as living apart from history and hence from the ordinary flow (forth, but also sometimes back) of being: “For us, history had stopped.”36 And it tells us why, to those who experienced it, “the Holocaust was a ‘kingdom’ not of this world.”37 The evil, then, are not fully of history, even though aspects of their acts do, of course, take place in it. Any attempt to fully grasp why they do what they do must thus necessarily fail. For understanding requires comparison, reasons, which is to say interpretation, but here there is nothing, at least at the centre, to interpret. Those who would limit their explanations to institutional, functionalist, cultural, psychohistorical, ideological, theological, or any other such immanent, interpretive factors will thus surely miss the destructive element, that which occupies a dimension different from all these others. When it comes to historical events marked

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by evil, in other words, we must accept that there will always be something incomprehensible about them.38 All of the above supports a distinction between the evil Third Reich’s leaders and their “merely” monstrously bad followers, both Nazi and ordinary German. Pace Hannah Arendt, then, I believe that only those followers, and not even all of them, could be accurately called “banal.”39 Arendt’s famous “banality of evil” thesis is an attempt to identify evil wholly within the context of totalitarian systems, and in so doing it helps us to recognize the sometimes banal motives of those who live and work within them. But in emphasizing only the refusal of the responsibility to judge, hence the banality of motives of a cog such as Adolf Eichmann, Arendt fails to give the Nothingness, the hole of nonbeing, at the centre of the Nazi regime’s vortex its due. Because as Ian Kershaw has observed, the moving force of Nazi Germany was the notion of “working towards the Führer,”40 and his ultimate aim was not totalitarian control but destruction. Evil as so conceived should also be distinguished from those accounts developed by monistic theologians such as Augustine or Maimonides, even though they, too, associate it with nonbeing or “privation.” For they do not mean the same thing as I do by this term. This is because their metaphysical realism, an ontology that awards primacy to substance, assumes that the reality of being is something noninterpretive. Combined with Aristotle’s notion that change has no real existence in itself,41 evil becomes but a necessary aspect of the constant changes of matter, albeit one that opposes God’s will and so is to that degree “unreal.”42 But privation as so understood is very much like what I have labelled merely “bad.” Otherwise put, just like with Arendt, it seems that monist theologians do not have enough room in their thought for giving the full horror of evil its due. The alternative conception that I have been advancing assumes instead a hermeneutical ontology, one which recognizes that being is indeed partly constituted in interpretation. Privation or nonbeing must thus refer to something other than what is accessible to an interpreter; hence my reference to “cracks” or “holes” in being. Only by giving witness to these spaces can we hope to avoid domesticating and so denying the true reality of evil. Doing this, moreover, implies a very different cosmology from that of the metaphysical realists, one according to which our world is part neither of a fixed

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and perfect unity (as with Plato, Aristotle, and their followers) nor of a unity that is perfect but expressed in historical evolution (Hegel), nor even of one that is still evolving and thus imperfect (ontological hermeneuticists such as Heidegger and Gadamer). Instead, following the Lurianic school of Kabbalah, which asserts that the creation of the world witnessed a “breaking of the vessels” that contained the creative light,43 I reject the unity (although not the wholeness) of being in favour of the idea that it is shot through with cracks. Ours, then, is not the best of all possible worlds, which is indeed precisely why the Kabbalists have called upon us to mend it (tikkun olam). Given that we may carry out this mending creatively as well as interpretively, the notion that the former relies on cracks in being if it is to receive its inspirations tells us that those cracks should not be viewed as evil in themselves. For evil arises when, and only when, people direct their wills to forcing others into those cracks, destroying them. It should be said that dualist cosmologies such as those of dualistic Gnosticism, to which Kabbalah sometimes comes too close, are also incompatible with evil as so conceived, since this conception has no place for the notion that evil is produced by some supernatural force wholly independent of and adversarial to God. Evil as I have been presenting it should thus be associated with a cosmology that we can situate somewhere between the extremes of the unity of monistic theologians on the one hand44 and the plurality of Lurianic Kabbalah on the other. Otherwise, as I have been claiming, we end up unable to distinguish adequately between evil and bad. Within the West, the blurring of these two has sources in both Athens and Jerusalem. Recall Plato’s contrastive pairing of good with evil (e.g., Theatatus, 176a), as well as those erroneous readings of the Bible that have led to mistranslations of the Hebrew word rah, which means “bad,” as “evil” (reyshah), as in the King James Bible’s reference to “the tree of knowledge of good and evil” (Gen. 2:9). But evil, I have been trying to show, transcends the good and bad; it is something more, or rather less, than even the very, very bad: a partly human (or perhaps better, partly inhuman) force against being. That is why natural catastrophes, no matter how devastating, must be categorized as bad rather than evil, as mainstream Western thought came to appreciate following the horrors of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.45 And it is why evil must be distinguished from both sadism, the sadist having a pathological but still

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comprehensible reason – pleasure – for his behaviour,46 and cruelty, the deliberate infliction of pain on the weak to achieve some interpretable end.47 Because evil’s ultimate end is, once again, a nonend: nothing but Nothingness.

III So the good integrate, the bad disintegrate, the great create, and the evil destroy. Much follows from accepting these distinctions. I want to discuss just one ramification here: how we should be responding to evil when we encounter it. Of course, right off there is the question of how to recognize that it is indeed evil with which we are faced and not “merely” the extremely bad. What I have said so far should help us, at least a little, to make this determination: namely that evil is present whenever one detects the insanity of nihilism combined with the targeting for destruction of a class of people on the basis of who they are rather than anything they have done (the inclusion of children among the victims is often an indication of this). But needless to say, there is more to identifying evil than can be captured in such a maxim, a hazardous task that, it should be obvious, is easily open to abuse. Yet I fear that little else can be said in general about how to properly carry it out. Part of the peril arises from the following: the good will always be defeated by evil, which is why we need the great. It has long been recognized that dialogue, the exchange of interpretations, requires interlocutors to adhere to the audi alteram partem (hear the other side) maxim; if just one party is unwilling or unable to do so, some form of force, rather than dialogue, becomes the only available option. When one finds oneself confronted with an unwilling but nevertheless potential interlocutor, which is to say someone who is a mix of good and bad, there is often no harm in testing their unwillingness. But when one is faced with evil, this will always be a mistake. The reason is that dialogue is premised on the notion that interlocutors share a good in common, whether the dialogue’s aim, as when it takes the form of conversation, is to realize that good by reconciling diverging interpretations of it or, when the situation calls for negotiation, to engage in the damage control that comes from producing an accommodation. Neither conversation nor negotiation, however, can be carried out with nihilists, and since nihilism is a necessary but not sufficient condition of evil, we can say

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that dialogue with evil is simply never possible. But our predicament is even worse than this, since the will-to-destruction of evildoers ensures that any attempt to dialogue with them – any attempt, that is, to invoke a shared common good and hence to increase one’s proximity to them – will ultimately only contribute to the destruction. Because when they come too close to the evil, the good are made bad, and the bad are made worse. One might conceive of the danger in this way: when engaged in dialogue, interlocutors aim for either an integration with or an accommodation to what each is saying. But when one is talking with the evil, then whatever meanings they are trying to advance are ultimately headed down into a crack of Nothing. Engaging them in dialogue is thus like trying to hitch a ride on a boat that is caught in a current heading down a vortex. This explains why many of the survivors of the camps and gulags ended up having to do terrible things in order to stay alive. For against the pull of a vortex of evil, against such a siren call, an interpreter has no power to resist. Indeed, power, as we noted above, is itself a matter of the interpretive flow of being, so no part of being that is headed down the vortex can possibly serve as a basis for resistance. To the question “How can reason oppose something it cannot understand?”48 the answer must thus be that it cannot. In a place such as Auschwitz, then, at whose centre is found a large and powerful vortex of evil, one ought to stop up one’s ears. Conversation or negotiation, attempts to understand or accommodate, must be avoided. Hence Levi on the camp: “No one here speaks willingly,” “It was better not to think,” “No one has time here, no one has patience, no one listens to you,” “I have stopped trying to understand for a long time now,” “Ne pas chercher à comprendre.”49 Confronted with evil, reason must flee, and not only because the very posing of questions is, as Claude Lanzmann has asserted, “obscene,”50 but also because such questions will, at best, lead to self-destruction. “Psycho killer, qu’est-ce que c’est? / Better run, run, run, run, run away.”51 Silence when faced with evil has, in fact, long been the advice of folk wisdom. Think of that Grimm’s fairy tale wherein a bewitched princess warns the hero who would save her that when twelve blackened men draped in chains come and speak to him, he must not utter “the slightest word”; indeed, he must remain silent even as they torture and finally kill him – only then will she be freed and

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become able to revive him.52 Evidently, the moral of this story is that interpretation with – even, as we have seen, in too great a proximity to – evil can bring only complicity. Hence Paul Celan: “Whichever word you speak – / you owe to / destruction.”53 What about when one finds oneself living “freely” under an evil regime? In a good regime, where, for the most part, politics moves along a good path, living in a way that passively acquiesces to it means living what, for the most part, would be a good life (unless, of course, one’s private life was exceptionally bad). Pace Heidegger, for whom such coasting along is inherently “inauthentic,” indicative of a “fallen” self,54 I see nothing wrong in it; many people are just like that. In a very bad regime, however, say an authoritarian one that commits atrocities to maintain control (China today, for example, or Iraq under the Ba’athist fascism of Saddam Hussein),55 such coasting can mean only complicity in its crimes. The citizens of such regimes are thus charged with judging whether the harm they might suffer by either leaving or actively resisting would be worse than staying and remaining only passively opposed. Yet making any such judgment is quite impossible when one is present in an evil regime. For it would require comparing good and bad ends with evil, which is to say aspects of being with a drive towards Nothing. This is just not feasible, which is why the very notion that passive opposition to such a regime might be justifiable must be ruled out. Consider the case of Gadamer, whose hermeneutical philosophy has no room for evil as I have been defining it. According to his biographer Jean Grondin, while living under Germany’s Third Reich, Gadamer struggled to avoid complicity with the regime, his aim being to continue his work, “despite the destruction all around,” by entering into “an oasis of scholars ... [an] island in a sea of insanity.”56 The problem here, however, is not only that Gadamer the hermeneuticist should have known that no such island is possible, since there would be no way to keep it from “go[ing] under in the rolling seas of historical life,”57 but also that this same hermeneutics would have served as an obstacle to his witnessing the true nature of the regime he was in (i.e., that it was evil and not just horribly bad). Simply put, Gadamer was mistaken if he thought that he could, even in principle, justify his behaviour. Writing of Gadamer’s decision to take up an academic post that a Jewish friend had been forced to vacate (an act he would repeat on another occasion), Grondin’s rhetorical question “But what was Gadamer

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supposed to do?”58 is thus not only objectionable but utterly misses the point: given the context, what he did cannot be even inadequately justified. Even “inner emigration,” that strategy employed by a (nevertheless still too small) minority of German intellectuals at the time to avoid complicity with the regime, was never really an option since, as Arendt has put it (albeit for different reasons), “the only possible way to live in the Third Reich and not act as a Nazi was not to appear at all.”59 Faced with evil, then, one should try neither to understand nor – as everyone from Neville Chamberlain to Hitler’s domestic political opponents learned – to negotiate. Only resist. For even the force of the most realpolitik negotiations will never be sufficient. Which is why we must say: don’t talk – fight. This, I believe, is Emil Fackenheim’s most fundamental insight: negotiating with evil will bring certain defeat; what is required instead is either exit or violence. Leon Wieseltier would certainly agree, as is evident from his reaction upon visiting “ground zero,” the site of the destruction by terrorists of the World Trade Center in New York: “I was not prepared for what I saw. I do not know how to express the quality of my shock, except to say that it banished culture completely from my mind. I fell dumb and stood there as if I had never read a book. My observations erased my memories. I was without allusions and without metaphors. Can a mind be naked? Then I was naked, without coverings. All I could do was look, and pray to see ... The hole in the sky was more striking than the hole in the ground.” Upon leaving, Wieseltier writes, culture was not restored to his consciousness, only a resolution to engage in politics with allies and in “action”60 with the enemy. Resistance, then, means fighting the evil. When one is oneself its prey, the fight will, at the very least, amount to a struggle not only to survive but also to maintain one’s selfhood, one’s identity as a person, since as we have noted it is the self’s ability to constitute meaning that makes it evil’s prime target. If possible, moreover, resistance should also be creative. Many of the death-camp survivors, not to mention those who did not survive because they sacrificed themselves for others, can be said to have drawn their strength neither from their dialogical identities nor from their simple wills. We know it could not have been their wills because the prisoners of the Nazi camps who had only their wills left were quickly identified as Muselmänner, as “the drowned,” as distinct from “the saved” – the

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Muselmänner being those who, “the divine spark dead within them,” rarely lived more than another three months.61 So what, then, were these “divine sparks” if not flashes of the inspiring light of creation? After all, that light would have found ample room to enter through the spaces in the prisoners’ divided selves62 – divisions that, ironically enough, were exacerbated by none other than their horrible, depersonalizing treatment. Consider this description from Levi of his Auschwitz experience: “One has to fight against the current; to battle every day and every hour against exhaustion, hunger, cold and the resulting inertia ... Survival without renunciation of any part of one’s own moral world – apart from powerful and direct interventions by fortune – was conceded only to very few superior individuals, made of the stuff of martyrs and saints.”63 I believe that Levi is exaggerating the difference between these so-called superior individuals and many of the other survivors because it seems to me that the former were distinct only in that their selves were already divided, before they entered the camps. For it could not have been long before every single prisoner had a self that was sorely lacking in cohesion. So what I am suggesting is that a large proportion of the survivors were heroes, their resistance to evil being a product of creativity.64 The survivor Pelagia Lewinska is one such, as we may surmise given her description of how she struggled to hold on to her self. It all began, she tells us, the moment she “saw the light”: “From the instant that I grasped the motivating principle [of the camp] it was as if I had been awakened from a dream ... I felt under orders to live ... And if I did die in Auschwitz, it would be as a human being, I would hold on to my dignity. I was not going to become the contemptible, disgusting brute my enemy wished me to be ... And a terrible struggle began which went on day and night.”65 That many of those who struggled in this way were indeed creative heroes is perhaps best revealed by the title of another survivor’s book, Inge Auerbacher’s I Am a Star: Child of the Holocaust. Their creative responses to evil must have taken many forms. One of these is “theoretical,” as with the theory of their situation and how to respond to it offered to Levi by Steinlauf, a fellow prisoner: “Precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness, and that to survive we must force ourselves

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to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last – the power to refuse our consent.”66 Now theory is a product not of (interpretive) reason but, when brought to bear on human rather than scientific affairs, of creation. For theory is more a matter of developing a silent vision of something (theôria means “viewing” or “contemplation”) than a dialogical account, which is why theories like Steinlauf’s should be placed squarely within the genre of utopian fiction. His theory may thus help him with his own resistance, much like the game invented by the father to protect his son in Roberto Benigni’s film Life is Beautiful (1997), but it surely fails as a systematically objective account of the situation. Of course, most theorists believe otherwise – some even go so far as to recommend their theories to us as constitutional templates for polities not even particularly threatened by evil. But theories of justice can, I suggest, lead just as easily to a Joseph de Maistre’s proto-fascist praise of the “creative” executioner as it can to Jürgen Habermas’s liberalism.67 No, the creations of theory are just not as useful as theorists would have us believe. Levi writes: “Nothing is of greater vanity than to force oneself to swallow whole a moral system elaborated by others, under another sky. No, the wisdom and virtue of Steinlauf, certainly good for him, is not enough for me. In the face of this complicated world my ideas of damnation are confused; is it really necessary to elaborate a system and put it into practice? Or would it not be better to acknowledge one’s lack of a system?”68 It would indeed, for in so doing, one makes way for an openness to inspiration and hence for the possibility of one’s own creative resistance. It is worth repeating that to be creatively great is no guarantee of being good. Indeed, many of the greatest individuals in history also often did very bad things: concentration camp inmates had no choice but to administer their own camps; the righteous gentile Oscar Schindler and the nonviolent resistor Gandhi were both terrible husbands; Churchill shares responsibility for the firebombing of Dresden; and so on.69 Or one might think of that bad, yet great, black marketer from whom two Austrian Jewish sisters, hiding from the Nazis in the town of Udine, had to make a purchase at an extortionate price: “Late at night that same day, there was a knock at their door. Fearfully they opened it – and there stood the hard-boiled

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black-market operator who said, ‘Forgive me, please. I didn’t know who you were when I sold you that lard this morning. I was told later and have come to apologize. From you I will take no money.’ He thrust an envelope stuffed with their banknotes into their hands, turned, and fled down the stairs.”70 The tendency of the great to be also bad probably has something to do with the violence that is associated with creation, whether because it is necessary for maintaining (limited) cracks in being or because it is a direct result of inspirations that entered through one of these cracks. Regardless, this violence is always bad, often even very bad, but it is never evil, never destructive. That said, even evil violence may, strangely enough, sometimes be compatible with good, or so Michael Ondaatje’s portrayal of the evil Billy the Kid suggests.71 Nevertheless, the point I want to make here is that there exists a clear tension between the openness to inspiration required of creativity and the closing (because integrating) capacity of interpretive judgment that is characteristic of the good person. For after all, did not Gauguin have to abandon his family in order to become a great painter?72 And even if Newton really was a good man, are we not today more comfortable with the image of him as bad?73 I want to conclude with one final point about the resistance to evil. Even though I believe that such resistance can, when it is creative, be successful, I do not think that it may be said to bring an understanding of the evil or, therefore, that it could ever impart meaning to the suffering that the evil has caused. Only suffering brought about by the bad may be given meaning, whether through interpretation (e.g., psychoanalysis) or creation (e.g., art therapy); both processes have the potential to bring “closure,” to seal off the crack brought about by a traumatic experience, although it should be said that creation is the only hope when it comes to repairing the worst such traumas. This, I think, is the message of the book of Job, in which Job manages to reconcile himself to his fate only when he discounts his previous conception of divine governance of the world, the product of his interpretive experiences, in favour of one based on a creative vision: “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee” (Job 42:5). Notice how none of the calamities that befell Job – thieves stealing from him and murdering his children, a natural disaster, affliction with a horrible skin disease – were caused by evil as I have been defining it. Job himself calls them “bad” (although, once again, this is often

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mistakenly translated as “evil”). And they must be because the suffering due to evil is, I repeat, beyond even creative redemption. It is so because, aiming as it does for destruction, for nonbeing, an evil cause is without a horizon, which is to say that there is no meaning – nothing that “matters” – there to be grasped. So even if the resistance to it ultimately takes the form of a constructive project, as many conceive of the creation of the modern state of Israel,74 that project still cannot be said to have brought redemption. Israel, in other words, was created in reaction to the Shoah, but it can never be said to have granted meaning to it.75 For as Emmanuel Levinas has written, the suffering of evil is, and will always remain, useless.76

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12 Opponents vs Adversaries in Plato’s Phaedo A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never gets into the ring. Ludwig Wittgenstein1 But you, if you are a philosopher, will certainly do as I say. Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo2

How are we to understand the philosophy presented in Plato’s dialogues? To be sure, this is not a question about the philosophy that Plato himself affirmed, which is a matter of perhaps interminable controversy. But it is a question that has generated numerous answers in its own right. For the most part, they can be divided into two groups. One reads the dialogues as defending a “theoretical” philosophy, which can be understood either doctrinally or as a way of life. Thus the neo-Platonists through to the modern unitarians claim that the dialogues contain a unified set of doctrines, metaphysical to political,3 whereas the skeptical academies of Arcesilaos and Carneades of the third and second centuries bce through to contemporaries such as Leo Strauss and Iris Murdoch argue instead that the dialogues defend an ongoing rational art of living, a struggle with abstract questions that, depending on the approach, may or may not produce doctrines.4 Of course, there are also those within this group who subscribe to a “developmental” conception of the dialogues, one that gives a place to both doctrinal and nondoctrinal theoretical philosophies. They read the dialogues as defending two distinct theories: (1) the more skeptical and so relatively nondoctrinal approach identified with the Socrates of the early “elenchic” dialogues; and (2) the more dogmatic doctrinal vision said to be expounded in the middle and later dialogues. To Gregory Vlastos,

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for example, the early Socrates believes that nothing is more important than the perfection of one’s own soul that comes from knowledge of good and evil, such knowledge being itself the condition of moral excellence (arete) and so of happiness.5 However, one must come to see the merit of living in this way on one’s own, which is why Socrates spends so much of his time criticizing those views incompatible with it but never defends it explicitly.6 Not so when it comes to the Socrates of the later dialogues, who Vlastos reads as confidently defending the seeking, finding, and living in accord with demonstrative knowledge, all of which is buttressed by a grandiose metaphysical doctrine of separate Forms as well as one propounding a separable, tripartite soul that learns by drawing on its prenatal fund of knowledge. And these theories are, of course, connected to another political one that asserts, among other things, that the just society must be ruled by an elite of philosopher-kings.7 These differences over the nature of the theory or theories contained in the dialogues tend, as one might expect, to be associated with different ways of reading them. When scholars such as Vlastos emphasize doctrine, for example, they focus on the various arguments presented and downplay the dialogues’ more dramatic aspects. The more thoroughgoing nondoctrinal readers, however, interpret the dialogues as dramatic wholes that weave their arguments together with discussion, myth, and so on. For as they see it, the truth of theory is carried not only by argument but also by narrative. Interestingly, this latter, more drama-focused approach is also the one taken by those scholars who reject the view that the dialogues affirm a theoretical philosophy, whether conceived of doctrinally or not. To those of this second group, the dialogues assert a “practical” or “dialogical” philosophy instead. Emphasizing the contexts in which the interlocutors are situated, they conceive of Platonic philosophy as taking an interpretive rather than theoretical approach to questions, one that the character of Socrates is said to exemplify. According to this reading, philosophical knowledge arises not from theorizing, in which a solitary thinker aims for a vision of abstract truth, but from engaging in interpretive dialogue with others. Whereas, for most theoretical interpreters, Socrates defends an antecedently developed theory, most practical philosophers thus conceive of him as exemplifying the philosopher who knows that truth comes not from leaving the cave to obtain some vision but from remaining

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inside and listening to what those they are conversing with have to say. For as Hans-Georg Gadamer has put it, “the primacy of hearing is the basis of the hermeneutical phenomenon.”8 Although I am sympathetic to a practical conception of philosophy, when it comes to Plato’s dialogues, I find myself siding with the theorists. That is, I do not think that the dialogues defend philosophy as a dialogical, interpretive quest; on the contrary, they portray it as aiming for theoretical truth (I won’t take a position here as to whether this should be seen as a matter of doctrine or not). I shall argue for this claim by focusing, for the most part, on the Phaedo, the dialogue that seems to me to exemplify it most clearly.

I As many have noted, one of the Phaedo’s overall aims is to encourage us to take a stand against the excessive skepticism that is considered an inevitable result of embracing the natural science method represented by the Pythagoreans Cebes and Simmias. Socrates is said to be well aware that their approach, in aiming for certainty, will inevitably disappoint, and his worry is that this will lead to a hatred of arguments or “misology” that, in turn, can produce a kind of intellectual apathy.9 When it comes to those proofs advanced by the alternative “hypothetical method” that Socrates himself appears to recommend, those who favour an interpretive or dialogical reading of the dialogue tend to claim that these proofs also fail. They are said to be either fallacious or basically empty, exhibiting a tautological quality which ensures that, although perhaps refuting excessive doubt, they contribute to philosophical knowledge only in the sense of showing how what is known can never be “proved.”10 Socrates’s demonstrations are thus said to have an ironic intent, one meant to reveal that philosophy, just like Pythagorean science, cannot provide certainty and that it is only the presumption that it could which leads to skepticism and, ultimately, sophism. The demonstrations are advanced, then, to imply that rather than searching for conclusive answers regarding matters of philosophical import, we should be spurred to further questioning – and of a sort that requires interpretive dialogue. Thus do these readers tend to highlight the passage in which Simmias agrees with the proofs that Socrates gives for the immortality of the soul but admits

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to still having some doubts, prompting an approving Socrates to suggest more dialectic (107b). For the conversation, Socrates seems to be saying, must continue. But are the arguments Socrates advances for those proofs really that limited? And are they so limited that we should conceive of them as ironic? For after all, there is another avenue of interpretation open to us. As J.L. Ackrill writes, “nobody supposes that the Phaedo argument does indeed prove the pre-existence of the soul. But it is of considerable interest as an argument; its structure is complex, and it involves a variety of philosophical points and difficulties.”11 Moreover, as Joachim Dalfen wonders, “what is one supposed to think of the author Plato (whom many regard not only as a great philosopher but also as a great writer) who ... creates a dialogue with particular scenery, figures, and dramatic setting, but does so in such a way that the figures do not say what he actually wants them to say, but constantly obscure it? Socrates must hope that some time an able thinker will turn up who will reveal the true interpretations.”12 Dalfen is obviously being quite skeptical here, and although I share his skepticism I am nevertheless willing to accept that, as is notorious when it comes to inquiries concerning the use of irony, the matter is complex. That is why I think we need to go beyond an exclusive focus on the arguments underlying Socrates’s proofs, since only by examining the context in which they are set can we determine whether they were meant to serve an end different from the one explicitly claimed for them. Thus, to oppose their reading, I shall confront the dialogical interpreters on their own terrain, so to speak, and attend more to the drama of the dialogue as a whole. I begin with the following question: regardless of our judgment of the quality of the various arguments advanced, are we justified in conceiving of them as proffered within the context of an ongoing discussion or conversation? For it is a central tenet of those who uphold the practical conception of philosophy that interlocutors participate in a dialogue of this kind, one which requires that they strive together in the search for good interpretations of the matter at hand. Their shared aim must be to reconcile those aspects of it that struck them as confusing or contradictory. If the point of the Phaedo is indeed to show that philosophy requires taking such an approach, it would make sense for at least some of its interlocutors to come to appreciate this by virtue of their having engaged in a genuine discussion, one that is presented in

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a positive, productive light. Thus does Gadamer assert that the Phaedo “recounts a human discussion which must be understood as discussion”; while Richard Gotshalt suggests that Plato’s compositions consist of “concrete conversing” that educates “through some form of joint enquiry”; and Walter Watson claims that “the Platonic dialectic seeks agreement between the interlocutors at each step of the argument, and the result is positive, even if it is only the knowledge that one does not know”; and so on.13 To most practical philosophers, only genuine conversation, as distinct from some other form of talk, can bring about reconciliation and so greater understanding. Plato’s dialogues may, in consequence, be said to affirm just such a conception of philosophy if they can be shown to demonstrate that “real thinking is always like conducting a conversation.”14 Conversation requires that interlocutors, despite disagreeing, nevertheless conceive of themselves as engaged in a common interpretive endeavour. One might put it this way: they must be “opponents” of a sort who are not also “adversaries,” which is to say interlocutors who aim to overcome their disagreement by fulfilling their common good. Evidently, if they are to succeed, they need to be open to each other, willing to change their perspectives in the sometimes fundamental ways that make genuine reconciliation possible. This means that they must “hear each other out” in a profound sense, one that consists of truly listening to the reasons being given for an opposing position. The aim, in other words, must be to learn from, and so incorporate, the truths those reasons are assumed to express. So although opponents of this sort certainly oppose – they are, after all, involved in a conflict, each affirming diverging interpretations of what the truth in the given context requires – they nevertheless do so with a shared productive goal in mind. Think of how the muscles of a limb work off of each other so that they can, together, power and control its movement; by virtue of their opposition, a common endeavour is realized. This “cooperation through conflict” spirit is precisely what is absent from the encounter between opponents of the sort who are also adversaries. In some cases this is because each simply wishes to inflict adversity (i.e., hardship) on the other. In other cases, such as when they agree to restrict themselves to one or another form of talk, such talk may still not aim for a truth capable of being shared, for reconciling initially opposed positions, since the interlocutors

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view themselves as involved in a struggle to advance their own, relatively independent ends. It is because these ends are assumed to be incompatible with those of the other that one feels it necessary to harm him or her. Think, for example, of the practice of negotiation, in which each side puts pressure on the other in order to get them to make what are sometimes very painful concessions. The aim is to arrive at an accommodation, which is something distinct from the genuine reconciliation towards which those who converse strive. Finally, there are those cases in which one party attempts to impose a good that he or she believes is also good for the other. Yet even here, that this involves imposition ensures the adversarial quality of the relationship. All of this is to say that one cannot properly speak of a conversation if the goal of reconciliation arising from a cooperative effort to reach an understanding is absent. And for that, it bears repeating, interlocutors need to be both willing and able to listen to each other. As Karl Jaspers writes: Communication requires listening and real answers, forbids silence or the evasion of questions; it demands above all that all statements of faith (which are after all made in human language and directed toward objects, and which constitute an attempt to get one’s bearings in the world) should continue to be questioned and tested, not only outwardly, but inwardly as well. No one who is in definitive possession of the truth, can speak properly with someone else, – he breaks off authentic communication in favour of the belief he holds.15 Or, as Michael Oakeshott worries: Each voice is prone to superbia, that is, an exclusive concern with its own utterance, which may result in its identifying the conversation with itself and its speaking as if it were speaking only to itself. And when this happens, barbarism may be observed to have supervened.16 Now my claim is that the Socrates of the Phaedo is precisely someone who believes himself to be in definitive possession of the truth, someone who, in consequence, ultimately speaks to himself alone. Indeed, there is something about his very nature as a person that

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makes it difficult, if not impossible, for him to engage in the listening that real conversation requires. Socrates’s relations with his interlocutors, I thus want to argue, can be only adversarial.

II Before showing this, however, I want to specify the kinds of adversaries that are not present in the dialogue. It seems to me that there are at least five of these. First, it is evident that the Phaedo contains no negotiators. As pointed out above, negotiation, with its goal of accommodation, has an essentially zero-sum dynamic since each party, although perhaps recognizing that it shares a good in common with the other, nevertheless knows that it may gain only when, and to the degree that, the other loses (i.e., is willing to make a concession). This is clearly adversarial. Not that negotiation isn’t a genuine form of dialogue; after all, it does demand a certain openness to change – indeed, sometimes of a very fundamental sort. But this is not change of the transformative, realizing kind that is associated with the conversational quest for reconciliation; rather, it is the outcome of subjecting what one values to compromise. That is why, although negotiating interlocutors must certainly hear each other out, they do so only in order to get clear about what, exactly, the demands being placed on the table are. “Hearing” in this sense must thus be distinguished from the much more demanding version of it identified above as listening, as when one listens not only for how much the other side wants but also for why they hold the position that they do. For unlike in a conversation, negotiators make no attempt to try to understand, and so to a degree share in, each other’s justifications. Given this, conversation and negotiation can also be said to differ over the latter’s implication that “truth” and “justice” are distinct things. For the negotiator aims for a form of justice that, again, requires compromise and so can produce no more than an accommodation, never a true reconciliation. So while negotiation is clearly at the heart of a genuine form of justice, it is surely less preferable than that form of justice that can be identified with truth, with a better interpretation of the common good.17 That said, even justice as the accommodation of conflict will be less and less present to the degree that those involved use force. The more they do so, the less we can speak of their “good faith.”

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Fortunately, a second, violent type of adversary is also absent from the Phaedo, which allows us to say that there are no adversaries in the spirit of the Homeric warrior present. No one ever threatens, as does Thrasymachus in his famous exchange with Socrates in book 1 of the Republic, to “take the argument and give your soul a forced feeding.”18 Nor, third, does anyone in the Phaedo ever engage in “eristic” argument, which is characteristic of the kind of debate for which Thrasymachus can also be considered a representative. With eristics, one aims to defeat one’s adversary through the use of a form of rhetoric that is said to have no regard whatsoever for either truth or justice. To theoretical philosophers, of course, eristics is central to sophism, which is seen as but a continuation of the practice of the Homeric warrior by other means – essentially, through the use of words as weapons. Struggling with the greatest of all sophists in the Protagoras, there is a moment in which Socrates feels faint, “as if I had been hit by a good boxer.”19 And in the Phaedo Socrates himself is shown to be not wholly immune from the temptations of eristics. For there is a time, just after Cebes and Simmias have advanced a series of seemingly powerful objections to his arguments, when Socrates admits to having “not the temper of a philosopher,” insisting that “like the uneducated, I am only a partisan. Now the partisan, when he is engaged in a dispute, cares nothing about the rights of the question, but is anxious only to convince the hearers of his own assertions” (91a).20 Socrates manages to quickly rally himself and the others, however, and evidently resumes the argument in the appropriate way (what this means, of course, having yet to be determined). Fourth, the Phaedo also contains no adversaries of the kind that we might identify today as of the “legalistic” sort. True, the dialogue opens with its central characters announcing that Socrates is to defend his position as though, in a sense, he were (yet again) on trial (63b). But it is quickly made clear that those who are going to challenge him, namely Cebes and Simmias, will do so along the lines of judges or members of a jury rather than as prosecutors (63e). So their exchange with Socrates is clearly not meant to be comparable to that between advocates pursuing a case in, for example, contemporary Anglo-American legal traditions, which are indeed highly adversarial.21 Finally, the Socrates of the Phaedo is not the practitioner of the elenchus prominent in some of the other dialogues. Elenchus evinces

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what Aristotle called the “peirastic” form of argument, wherein one advances no thesis of one’s own but instead contributes to truth only by refuting the claims defended by dissenting interlocutors.22 Whenever this Socrates encounters a thesis which contradicts one that he already knows to be true, he proceeds to dismantle it, his aim being not to convince his interlocutors of his own position – for this, he believes, everyone must come to on their own – but rather to “destroy,” as Vlastos appropriately puts it, their “conceit of knowledge.”23 For the elenchic Socrates’s aggressivity is meant to do no more than induce an openness to the truth that he believes his interlocutors lack. Hence Vlastos’s reference to the method as “adversative,”24 and it is indeed clear that no one who engages in elenchus listens to others in the hope of learning something about the Good from them. On the contrary, they are engaged in an aggressive endeavour meant to do nothing other than shake them from their intellectual confidences.

III Despite the absence of the above five types of adversaries, and despite the choice of innumerable translators and commentators (not all of whom are advocates of a practical conception of philosophy) to use the words “discussion” or “conversation” to describe what happens in the Phaedo and other dialogues,25 no genuine conversation ever really takes place. Indeed, given that the intended changes of position go in one direction only, from Socrates to his interlocutors, the two-way dynamic necessary for any sort of dialogue must be considered absent. The very reference to Plato’s dialogues as “dialogues” (rather than, say, as simply “teachings” or “talks”) is thus, I claim, a misnomer. And this means that the exchanges between Socrates and his interlocutors that do take place are not the kind that should be welcomed by practical philosophers. Because Socrates is simply not listening, and this for two reasons: (1) he does not wish to; and (2) he is incapable of doing so. i Socrates does not wish to listen because he believes that philosophical knowledge (episteme) does not come from dialogue per se but from employing an approach that is only partly dialogical: the

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hypothetical method. Here is how he first described his use of it in the Phaedo: “I first assumed some proposition, which I judged to be the strongest, and then I affirmed as true whatever seemed to agree with this, whether relating to causation or anything else; and that which disagreed I regarded as untrue” (100a). Note how Socrates portrays the method as something employed by an “I,” not a “we”; indeed, no mention at all is made of a role for discussion or conversation when it comes to establishing the initial hypothesis. That said, the context here is autobiographical, for Socrates is describing what he did after having rejected both the natural science approach and that of Anaxagoras. This means that we cannot yet claim that the approach is monological since it is always possible for someone to have a “dialogue” with themselves or with whatever it is they are interpreting.26 Then again, Socrates does identify the method as a “method” (97b, 100a), so even if we follow Gotshalk in being careful not to equate methodos with the English “method,” we have reason to question its dialogicality. For as Gotshalk himself makes clear, it still consists of “a technique which could be applied independently of the condition of the person involved in the application,”27 and the exchange of interpretations in a real dialogue must be something thoroughly contextual; those involved cannot allow themselves to be guided by some abstract technique, as this would interfere with the sensitivity and flexibility required of them. So method has no place in a real dialogue; on the contrary, it is just the kind of thing that helps us to detach ourselves from a context, much as the philosopher who hopes to journey alone up and out of a cave in order to obtain a vision of the Forms (Republic, 515c–516a) needs to do. Indeed, obtaining a “vision” is precisely the goal of the hypothetical method. That is why, when Cebes says that he “should very much like to hear” (99d, my emphasis) Socrates give an account of it, the latter points out that it is something intended to feed the “eye” of the soul. But because that eye would go blind if it were made to stare directly at its goal, the truth represented by the sun (99d), Socrates explains that those who use the method must have recourse to the logoi, to “the domain of reasoning” (99e), which is concerned with things of the world but in a way that still allows them to approach the sun – albeit indirectly, without having to

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make use of their actual senses, including the ocular. Nevertheless, at least metaphorically speaking, vision is never really abandoned, for the ideas representing the logoi are said to be like reflections of the sun in water (99d–e), and Socrates refers to them with the term eidos, which derives from the simple past of the verb “to see.” So it remains vision, not something comparable to the hearing essential for dialogue, that is given primacy by the method. Now although the method begins by assuming some proposition, it does not end there. When Socrates follows up his initial description of it with an account of how to justify a hypothesis that has been put in question, it is clear that he does not want us to conceive of the method as a strictly unidirectional, deductive procedure. For he says: “And if anyone fastens on you there, you would not mind him, or answer him until you could see whether the consequences which follow agree with one another or not, and when you are further required to give an account of this postulate, you would give it in the same way, assuming some higher postulate which seemed to you to be the best founded, until you arrived at a satisfactory restingplace” (101d–e). Combined with the initial account, we get a method that consists of two aspects: (1) a deductive one that descends from the initial hypothesis, which was assumed to be the strongest; and (2) a more ascending, inductive one that instigates “higher” hypotheses through strenuous, adversarial tests (see Republic, 534c) that have their origins in everyday speech. Although the emphasis is clearly on the former, it is the two, together, that make for theoretical reasoning (logos, after all, meant “thought” as well as, yet less so, “speech” to the ancient Greek theorist). This is confirmed by Socrates’s description of the method in the Republic, where he distinguishes between two segments of the intelligible: on the one hand, a hypothesis that is said to be equivalent to the starting point of those who do geometry (510c–d); and on the other, that which is grasped with the power of dialectic (511b). Some readers, however, have argued for a contrast between the accounts in the Republic and the Phaedo. The Straussian theorist Paul Stern, for example, complains that a conception of the method as progressing deductively from an assumption, one arising from an intimation of the Forms, is hard to credit, so he concludes that, at the end of his life, Socrates came to doubt the doctrine of the Forms. Stern thus rejects the reading of the initial account of the method in

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the Phaedo as implying a deductive move in favour of one that conceives of the source of the higher hypotheses as being nothing other than the speeches we engage in in our everyday existence.28 As we might expect, the practical or dialogical interpreters assert a similar reading. Gadamer, for example, suggests that the framing of the initial hypothesis – the one that, again, is judged to be the strongest – implies “communicative agreement,” and Francisco Gonzalez claims that “the word ‘strongest’ is indeed ambiguous but, given the context, must mean strongest within discourse and not strongest in relation to something outside discourse.”29 Nevertheless, there is an important difference between their reading and Stern’s. For although Stern agrees that the method begins with the perceptions present in everyday speech, he also claims that there is a role for anamnesis (80e–81a), the recollection of the preincarnated soul’s knowledge, in Platonic perception, his argument being that an idea of a thing must arise in the mind if we are to properly perceive what it is.30 Anamnesis, however, given its dependence on prenatal being, cannot be considered contextual and thus interpretive. Even though Gadamer has suggested otherwise,31 this agrees poorly with his hermeneutical conception of conversation, in which interlocutors attend to meaning that is the product of a “fusion of horizons” in a particular context: the horizon of the self doing the interpreting with that of the text or text-analogue that is being interpreted. So Gadamerian conversationalists are those who offer each other interpretations of a given particular, always moving in a single if circular direction: from the whole (the context constituted by the horizons brought together in the fusion), to its parts (those particular features of the whole that “show up” and become the subject of conversation), and back to the whole again. This thoroughly dialogical process can be expected to continue endlessly, moving through a “hermeneutical circle” in a way that, it is hoped, will produce successively more reconciling interpretations, which is to say interpretations that are more coherent and thus more true to what they are interpreting.32 Conceived of in this way, conversation consists of an exchange that is both wholly immanent – all of the horizons responsible for the constitution of meaning are thoroughly contextual – and aural. But this means that there is no place at all for the knowledge of a prenatal soul, not to mention for any understanding of anamnesis that, in David White’s words, “depends in some sense on the

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divine.”33 In Socrates’s preface to his account of it, however, he places its efficacy “in the hands of those above” (95b). Whether by “above” he means the radical transcendence of the monotheist or the “weaker” transcendence of the pagan (the latter supportive of a conception of the Forms as immanent universals) is, perhaps, a matter for debate between the doctrinal and nondoctrinal theoretical readers of the dialogues. All practical readers must agree, however, that this is very far from the dialogical exchange of thoroughly mundane interpretations, in which interlocutors listen, rather than look, for the truth. That is why it is so unconvincing when Gonzalez suggests that “intuition plays an indispensable role in [the Phaedo’s] method, both in recommending propositions for consideration and in revealing the meanings of their terms. Such intuition is assumed in the concrete context of the discussion.”34 For “to intuit,” as its Latin root intueri (“looking”) makes clear, is an ocular rather than aural activity, which explains why even a leading contemporary theorist such as John Rawls is able to grant it a place in his theorizing.35 The problem for the dialogical readers is not only that they must exclude anamnesis from the hypothetical method but also that, like Stern, they must ignore Socrates’s claim that what he has to say about the method in the Phaedo is fully compatible with the accounts he gives of it elsewhere: “There is nothing new ... in what I am about to tell you; but only what I have been always and everywhere repeating in the previous discussion and on other occasions” (100b). This suggests that it would be a mistake to dissociate the Phaedo’s and the Republic’s accounts and hence that it would be wrong to rule out any role in the method for deduction. Not that welcoming deduction back in forces us to consider Socrates’s theorizing as dogmatic, because the fact that dialectic constitutes an aspect of the method means that it cannot be said to provide certainty. For dialectics necessarily brings with it all the limitations that are intrinsic to human language. As Socrates himself once put it, “words are only an echo” (61d), an acknowledgment that is fully compatible with his endorsement of that oft-cited claim made by his interlocutor in the Timaeus: “If then, Socrates, amid the many opinions about the gods and the generation of the universe, we are not able to give notions which are altogether and in every respect exact and consistent with one another, do not be surprised. Enough, if we adduce probabilities as likely as any others; for we must remember

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that I who am the speaker, and you who are the judges, are only mortal men, and we ought to accept the tale which is probable and inquire no further.”36 This willingness to “adduce probabilities” does not, it is worth noting, entail a degree of uncertainty that would rule out a theory-as-doctrine conception of the philosophy presented in the dialogues. But the debate between their doctrinal and nondoctrinal theoretical interpreters is, once again, not one that I wish to take up here; it is enough for my purposes to accept that what is being defended is a theoretical method that combines deduction with dialectic and to recognize that it is because of the dialectical element that Socrates famously identified the method as second-best (99c). The best, presumably, would be one that was strictly deductive, one that consisted (somehow) of a form of thought that has nothing to do with speech. This would be the “thought” of a soul purified of its body and hence of any connection to a living speech community. Such is pure contemplation (nous), and as Plato himself purportedly says in the Seventh Letter (341c), it can produce only truth that is arrheton, or incapable of being communicated through words.37 Giving the deductive aspect of the method its due suggests something intriguing about the kind of truth that the method is capable of producing. David Gallup has raised the worry, quite understandably, that just because a proposition is consistent with a premise does not mean that it is true;38 the notion that fish can ride bicycles, for example, is consistent with the premise that fish have legs. In response, I want to suggest that we conceive of the products of the method as true within just that kind of context which allows for fish with legs, which is to say (science) fiction. What I am proposing, in other words, is that we conceive of Platonic theory as a form of creativity, as the product of a mysterious combination of “inspiration” (the deduction that, if left alone, the Platonist would identify as having no more than the status of “true opinion”) with “interpretation” (the dialectic). After all, even Socrates admits – echoing most artists’ accounts of their creative processes – that his understanding of the method remains “confused” (97b), suggesting that the kind of episteme the method produces, which then becomes the basis for either making doctrines or fashioning the theorist’s own self,39 is the kind of thing that can be compared with fiction. Regardless, even though the first aspect of the method is best understood in ocular terms, this does not mean that the method as a

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whole terminates in something that is necessarily “visionary”; as Socrates describes its goal, it is simply that of a “satisfactory resting place” (101e), which presumably means that it should be capable of receiving unanimous intersubjective agreement and thus that it is a matter of speech. That said, given that the dialectical part of it is dedicated to defending something that is originally produced in a thoroughly nondialogical way, dialectic, too, should not be considered dialogical. This accounts for an extremely important yet often overlooked fact about the dialogues, namely that Socrates is never shown to be really listening to his interlocutors. For whereas the Phaedo begins with Cebes and Simmias as Pythagoreans and ends with their being convinced of, among other things, Socrates’s critique of their mathematicized natural science methods (95a–d), Socrates himself never seems to budge at all. Of course, one might object that he was indeed always listening intently but was simply unconvinced by what he heard and so had no reason to change his mind. Yet it should still strike us as odd that, in dialogues supposedly meant to exemplify a conversational approach to philosophy, Plato never takes the opportunity to portray his hero as having learned something substantial through his discussion with others. In fact, except perhaps for the Parmenides (where we are anyways presented with a very young Socrates, philosophy not yet having taken a firm hold on him), not once does Socrates say something like the following to an opponent: “Well, well, I must say that I never thought of it in that way before. I shall surely have to rethink my position in order to take account of it. Why thank you!” This suggests that, where at least some of his interlocutors might be described as opposing him in a nonadversarial way, Socrates himself consistently does the opposite. Socrates, then, is simply not someone open to reconciling himself to whatever may arise from his exchange with others. When he does hear them out, he appears to do so only as a means to identify weaknesses in their arguments. Indeed, as he himself puts it at an early point in the Phaedo, should Cebes’s and Simmias’s objections turn out to contradict what he believes to be true, “we must fight our case” (86e). And when those objections are voiced, and so effectively that doubts about Socrates’s position arise in the minds of all present, Phaedo sees fit to describe Socrates as “a general rallying his defeated and broken army, urging them to follow his lead and return to the field” (89a). At least one dialogical interpreter has suggested that

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Socrates had no other option, since if he failed to dominate the exchange, his friends, distraught at his immanent death, would burst into intolerably embarrassing lamentations.40 This explanation would strain credulity if not for Socrates’s decision to dismiss his wife and children just before his death, suggesting that he really does have an inordinate fear of emotion. But perhaps this is indicative of another adversarial relation present in the Phaedo, one that is also missed by all those who read it as dialogical. It is the one, moreover, that is behind Socrates’s inability to listen. ii The adversity I am referring to here is internal to Socrates. Socrates, I want to claim, is incapable of listening because he has what psychologists sometimes refer to a “divided” self, one that lacks “cohesion.”41 Indeed, this is one effect of engaging in the hypothetical method, whose two aspects, as we have noted, are in a kind of tension with each other. Socrates himself connects the use of the method to the soul in the Republic: “In one part of it a soul, using as images the things that were previously imitated, is compelled to investigate on the basis of hypotheses and makes its way not to a beginning but to an end; while in the other part it makes its way to a beginning that is free from hypothesis and without the images used in the other part, by means of forms themselves it makes its inquiry through them.”42 Each of the method’s two aspects, then, can be said to engage a distinct part of the soul. Contrast this with the thoroughly dialogical interpreter who aims not to defend some abstract hypothesis but to reconcile or integrate meanings that are themselves partly a product of his or her own self’s horizon as a whole. The hermeneutical endeavour, in other words, is also an ontological one, for any transformation of interpreted meaning can be expected to have an effect on the self involved in its constitution. To attempt to reconcile meanings, then, is to attempt to make one’s own self more integrated, more whole. And the more integrated the self, it is worth pointing out, the more one will feel at home in the community of shared intersubjective meanings of which one is a part. Not so when it comes to the self that would employ the hypothetical method. It not only looks for inspiration before hearing out its interlocutors, but when it does the latter, it listens only for ways of

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being true to that original inspiration, thus erecting a barrier to any reconciliation. But should this come as such a surprise? For does not openness to inspiration, at least when that inspiration is understood to come from above, require one to be on the margins, and hence partly outside, of society? One thinks here of the transcendent aspects of Socratic virtue, which are evoked whenever Socrates does such things as call on philosophers to become like god (Theaetetus, 176a–b; Phaedrus, 247c–249c), or suggest that the life of a true philosopher is a training for death (Phaedo, 64a–67e), or wander off on his own for long stretches of time, forgetting both his social obligations and even his own physiological needs (Symposium, 174e–175b, 220c–d), or assert that philosophical success is a matter of the ability of one’s soul to ascend to the realm of divinity (Republic, 490b; Symposium, 211e–212a), or finally, claim that the body is but an infection, an obstacle to the soul’s purification (Phaedo, 64c–67b, 69a–d; Sophist, 226b–231e).43 Faced with an injunction from the gods against suicide (Phaedo, 61c), anyone who believed such things should be expected to have lived a divided life, one for which self-mastery, defined as the maintenance of a unified soul, would have been a central preoccupation. This provides us with another explanation for Socrates’s decision to send his wife and children away before his death. As Jerome Eckstein has put it, Socrates “fears that Xanthippe’s wailing and crying will whip up his latent anxieties about death to the point of cracking the ceiling of self-control.”44 Socrates has this fear, I suggest, because he is unlike ordinary members of society in that his self shares their degree neither of immanence nor of cohesiveness. He differs from most other “language animals,” that is, because of his alienation from both society and his own body.45 His life, in other words, is much like that of what Aristotle would have called “either a beast or a god.”46 This alienation – a product, again, of the combination of the transcendent and the immanent, of the thought and the speech aspects of the hypothetical method – translates into a ferocious struggle within the self. Recall how the philosopher of the cave allegory is reluctant both to leave as well as to return to the cave; his is surely no easy vocation. One can thus understand why someone who lives in this way might welcome the peace that the end would bring. Socrates’s composure in the face of death, we may thus

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conclude, is a result not of any certainty he has about the soul’s immortality but of a belief that, whatever happens, at least his “sickness” will be over. For this, surely, is one way to interpret his final words: “Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius [the god of medicine]; will you remember to pay the debt?” (118a).47

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13 Loving Wisdom Theorising is an activity which most people can and normally do conduct in silence. They articulate in sentences the theories that they construct, but they do not most of the time speak these sentences out loud. They say them to themselves. Or they formulate their thoughts in diagrams and pictures, but they do not always set these out on paper. They “see them in their minds’ eyes.” Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 27 Never too dark for the blind to travel. Scott Merritt, “Wild Kingdom” I prithee speak. We will not trust our eyes Without our ears. William Shakespeare, Henry IV, V.iv.141–2

Hubris or chutzpah? The successful philosopher, it seems, must have a bit of both. For despite the number of rival conceptions of philosophy on offer today, almost everyone recognizes that to philosophize, even when the results of doing so mean that one ends up rejecting philosophy, involves making claims of the greatest scope and generality. Whether these are understood to be universally or more locally relevant is, of course, one of the central issues at stake in the contemporary debates. But even those who emphasize philosophy’s limitations tend to do so with reference to all philosophy and philosophers, everywhere. That, as someone once suggested to me, is why there can be no such thing as a truly modest philosopher. I believe that there are basically three rival conceptions of philosophy on offer in the West today. My aim here is to contrast them in order to show how they diverge as well as how those divergences arise from their different historical roots. Then, drawing on all the

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hubris and chuzpah I can muster, I will claim that one of them is superior, although only philosophically speaking. For the other two, in their own ways, often make greater, if nonphilosophical, contributions to truth. “Theoretical philosophy” is how we might refer to the tradition that has been by far the most successful in asserting its conception of the discipline – indeed, so much so that to many it is and always has been the only philosophical game in town. In fact, the premise at its heart – that philosophy consists of theoretical reasoning, of reflection that aims for a unified vision of truth – has been accepted by so many for so long that the name I have given it may even appear redundant. Regardless, I mean to refer to the approach that has been widely associated with the standard or classical reading of its Greek founders – Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle – which was modernized in fundamental ways by Descartes and the epistemologists who followed him (whether rationalist, empiricist, or in the case of Edmund Husserl, phenomenologist) and which counts among its most sophisticated contemporary practitioners Saul Kripke, Jürgen Habermas, and John Rawls. Theoretical philosophy has been opposed (although “opposed” is, as I will show, too simple) by what is sometimes called “difference philosophy.” This approach also has ancient roots, yet these are more in Jewish than in Greek thought – in paricular, in Pharisetic or rabbinic Judaism. Its contemporary manifestations, both pragmatist and poststructuralist, were made way for by Freidrich Nietzsche’s attacks on Plato and other theoretical philosophers, which is why they are sometimes described as “neoNietzschean.” Yet on some readings, Nietzsche favoured his own (nondoctrinal) form of theory, and regardless, it is not enough to refer simply to the rejection of theory since difference philosophy is more a kind of complicitous critique of it. In fact, one might say that it advances a blinking, vision-blindness (anti)dialectic as an alternative to theory’s consistently ocular ambitions. Difference philosophers also reject the theorist’s monism in favour of a paradoxical unity of plurality. But they do this not so much to advance their own, alternative conception of reason as to make way for the irreducible difference of the “other,” which they believe is something denied, even suppressed, by theory. Although the most prominent difference philosophers this past century are probably Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Michel

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Foucault, and Richard Rorty, I shall, for the most part, focus on the one who has been the most sensitive to its Jewish roots, namely Emmanuel Levinas. The third approach I call “practical philosophy.” Its point de départ is the distinction, first advanced by Aristotle, between theoretical and practical reason. But whereas Aristotle awarded primacy to the former, practical philosophers do so to the latter. In practical philosophy, theoretical reason is a secondary or derivative form of reason, one relevant to mathematics, to the natural sciences, and to certain restricted domains within the human sciences but not to philosophy as such. Hence the practical claim that there exists a fundamental methodological distinction between the human and the natural sciences, one that is absent from the other two philosophical approaches. Practical reasoning, moreover, is itself conceived as derivative of (largely pre-reflective) practice – indeed, as but a form of practice – for it is said to share in practice’s dynamic and contextdependent qualities. This leads practical philosophers to claim that both thought and practice are fundamentally interpretive. Nontheoretical thought, moreover, is considered interpretive in a dialogical sense since it is said to aim for understanding, which comes from developing interpretations of texts or text-analogues, something that requires entering into a kind of “dialogue” with them. To the practical philosopher, in consequence, we need to listen, rather than look, for the truth. Truth as so conceived is never going to be an all-or-nothing affair. Rather, it arises from the reconciliation or integration of contradictions or conflicts through the development of good interpretations, and no interpretation is ever perfect. Integration, in other words, can never be total, greater integration being equated with no more than greater proximity to unity, never with reaching it. Practical philosophy might thus be described as moving in a particular way between the one and the many – towards the One, as a many, as I would put it – and so it ought to be distinguished from difference philosophy, which, as I have suggested, paradoxically combines both. Yet many practical philosophers make the mistake of leaning too close to one or the other of these two poles: for example, the “ontological hermeneuticists,” led by Martin Heidegger, tend to be somewhat guilty of monism, whereas the “pluralists,” led by Isaiah Berlin, can be accused of the opposite. My claim, as one might expect, will be that the right way here is the middle way.

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I Theoretical philosophy has its origins in Socrates and Plato’s attempts to civilize Homeric ethics by moving “from the many to the one”: a unitary vision of truth (the ancient Greek word theôria means “viewing” or “contemplation”) is to replace the plurality of “blind” Homer’s clashing gods.1 Three tenets of the Homeric worldview are to be superseded. First, as regards religion, there is its polytheism, its belief in multiple gods who implicate themselves in human affairs. Second, in terms of ethics, there is its idea, endorsed later by the great tragedians, that there exists a plurality of goods and that humans inevitably face conflicts between them, conflicts that cannot be reconciled. Third and finally, vis-à-vis the soul or self, there is its ideal of the warrior who achieves glory with the help of gods who inspire a kind of mania by entering through the spaces in his divided self.2 Faced with these tenets, the ancient theorist can be said to affirm instead one form or other of unity. How, exactly, this is to be done is not entirely clear. Originally, theorizing was seen as a matter of achieving knowledge (episteme) through uniting the mind (nous) with the object of its thought: the former is to “participate” in the latter such that both become informed by the same form (eidos).3 This requires transcending our ordinary, everyday way of seeing things, a transcendence that is responsible for ancient theory’s religious dimension. In fact, the Greek word theôros was the title of the emissary of a polis who was to consult the oracle, while theôria referred to the official delegation that a polis would send to a neighbouring city-state to take part in its cult’s rituals or to honour its divinity.4 There is ambiguity, however, about the precise nature of theoretical transcendence. In Plato, for example, we can identify two not necessarily compatible forms of it and so a potential tension between two distinct theoretical paths. One consists of a “weak” transcendence whereby the illusion of plurality manifested in the everyday world is overcome when the theorist manages to point the “eye” of his or her soul in the right direction (Republic, 516d, 518c–e).5 This approach can be comfortably situated within a pagan cosmology, wherein the cosmos is said to constitute a spiritual unity and theory is a matter of transcending the divisions of the everyday to get in touch with the cosmos’s immanent universals. As regards ethics, the idea is that conflicts between goods are, ultimately, unreal and that we overcome them when we see the true, unified

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nature of moral reality. And when it comes to the self or soul, it, too, will be recognized as unified when we see that it is but a microcosm, both of the just polis and of the whole universe. The alternative “strong” transcendence is more radical. It finds support in Plato’s cave allegory, which tells of the philosopher climbing up out of the cave, seemingly transcending the cosmos altogether in order to see the light of the sun (Republic, 515e–516b, 532b). This is the proto-monotheistic Plato, according to which neither us nor our cosmos are unified since unity is an attribute of the transcendent Forms (Republic, 511b, 531d, 537c; Protagoras, 329c–330b6, 349b1–d1), much as with Moses’s declaration that “the Lord is One” (Deut. 6:4, my translation). In terms of ethics, this leads to something like the monotheist’s paradoxical tension between the sacred and the profane, as when the philosopher-king finds that he must struggle with his obligations to philosophical truth on the one hand and political justice on the other.6 This conflict is also reflected in the soul, which is charged with attaining the purity of unity by becoming god-like – that is, by escaping, or at least mastering, its all-too-human body, the source of irrational passions.7 Whether weak or strong, theoretical transcendence is consistently a matter of logos, a word that straddles the meanings of both “thought” and “language.” Ancient theorists always emphasize the former, language doing no more than providing the model for the thinking that they believe must articulate or “lay things out” in propositions if there is to be true knowledge, or episteme.8 Moreover, this thought is conceived as monological rather than dialogical, Plato having described his philosopher as leaving the cave alone to see the truth (seeing being, of course, a silent endeavour). Indeed, as Hannah Arendt once put it, because “every movement, the movements of body and soul as well as of speech and reasoning, must cease before truth,” theoretical contemplation consists of “absolute quiet,” of “an almost breathless abstention from external physical movement and activity of every kind.”9 So successful theorists become god-like because, like the gods who already possess the happiness that is the end of all practice, they are free of the need to act (praxis). For that is what supposedly comes from attaining a unified vision: utter self-sufficiency.10 Ancient theorists (and some modern ones) conceived of unity as having an “organic” form, one that exhibits what we might today call a “holographic” holism since the whole is, just as with

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holographic photography, present in each part.11 Two steps take us from here to the “systematic” unity that is the aim of most modern theorists since Descartes. First, there is the distinction, originally advanced by the neo-Platonist Plotinus, between contemplation (i.e., passive union with the One) and theory (i.e., active dialectical knowledge).12 Theory thus becomes a kind of disposition, an intellectual virtue or habitus, as Aquinas referred to it. The second step comes in the wake of the theological debates originating with the rise of medieval nominalism. The nominalists felt it necessary to reject the Thomistic claim that things have organically unified, universal essences since they saw it as a threat to God’s omnipotence (for if the existing order was created as good, then God could not choose to change it since that would make Him bad). So they argued instead that the universals of theory were but terms of propositions and thus that the activity of theorizing was less some ongoing disposition and more something that concluded with the production of doctrines.13 Combined with the rise of modern epistemology and its subject-object dualism, these doctrines then became mental representations of an independent reality. The mechanism associated with all this, made possible by the reappropriation of Democritian atomistic philosophy of nature,14 then led to the notion that the parts of a theory, whether conceived of as individual atoms or as structures, are capable of being analyzed, separated out into independently distinct components. When reunified, these parts thus become not “integrated,” which is a term more appropriate for the parts of an organic unity, but “interlocked” – that is, the parts of a system rather than of an organism (or “mechanical” rather than “teleological” parts, to use Kant’s terminology). Thus does “systematic unity” become the fundamental aim of most modern theorists, so much so that, as Hubert L. Dreyfus has pointed out, theory is today defined as “the systematic interrelation of distinguishable elements,” to which we can add Kant’s declaration that “systematic unity is what first raises ordinary knowledge to the rank of science, that is, makes a system out of a mere aggregate of knowledge.”15 Evidently, there is no longer room for organic wholes here, those whose parts, although distinguishable, cannot be separated from each other since that would, in a sense, “kill” them.16 But none of this worries the modern systematic theorist since he or she views theory as a matter of producing doctrines, not of living a certain way of life.

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In this, systematic theory can be said to claim an enlightenment heritage, the enlightenment having drawn its inspiration, above all, from modern theoretical physics. Enlightenment is also responsible for modern theory’s egalitarianism, something that was foreign to premodern theorists for whom the enlightenment goal of bringing light to everyone in the cave17 would have appeared utopian. That, for instance, is how premodern theorists would have reacted to John Rawls’s idea of the “well-ordered” society, one governed on the basis of his systematic theory of justice. Rawls is probably the leading political theorist of our time, political theory having been aptly defined as “systematic reflection on the nature and purposes of government.”18 Interestingly, Rawls’s work exhibits a tension that parallels the one arising from the two forms of transcendence present in ancient theorizing. First, there is the Rawls of the “original position,” the standpoint said to be attained by the individual who steps behind a “veil of ignorance” and deliberates in a way that takes no account of his or her personal values or abilities. Whoever does so properly, Rawls claims, will inevitably subscribe to the principles of his theory of justice, principles that are said to be neutral to all the various reasonable conceptions of the good life.19 Rawls’s theory may thus be said to have an “absolute” status in that it is intended to serve as a kind of universal Archimedean point, one that provides an eternal, because fixed and ahistorical, foundation for just societies everywhere. The affinities between this and the strong transcendence of Plato’s cave allegory are clear. But there is also the Rawls who would have us arrive at his theory through a process of “reflective equilibrium,” one that shares something of the spirit of the ancient theorizing of weak transcendence. This Rawls emphasizes the kind of reasoning that should be undertaken before one would be attracted to a standpoint like the original position, and it is a kind that does not require us to disengage completely from the values and capacities that make up our unique identities. As Norman Daniels has described, achieving reflective equilibrium necessitates only that we “detach ourselves from some of our values while assessing them in the light of our other beliefs,”20 these latter being given the status of “provisional fixed points”21 for the purpose of assessment. The goal, in other words, is no longer to discern something absolute since one is only reformulating a set of historical givens (e.g., the regulative rules said to be constitutive of modern democratic practice or, if one is

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employing the method in metaphysics, opinions about, say, the nature of mind).22 The aim, then, is simply to make those givens more systematic. Limiting ourselves to the question of political justice, we may say that the ideal is still a systematically unified theory meant to serve as the foundation for a just society, a “social union,”23 but now that foundation is conceived of as like a platform floating upon the river of history. The reflection that aims for equilibrium is thus an interpretive kind of thought, albeit of a sort that strives for abstract systematicity. The tension between these two forms of transcendence in Rawls is encapsulated in the closing lines of his Theory of Justice. There he appears to tell us that his approach aims for a unified vision which consists of a perspective that is somehow both eternal and situational, both universal and particular: To see our place in society from the perspective of this position is to see it sub specie aeternitatis: it is to regard the human situation not only from all social but also from all temporal points of view. The perspective of eternity is not a perspective from a certain place beyond the world, nor the point of view of a transcendent being; rather it is a certain form of thought and feeling that rational persons can adopt within the world. And having done so, they can, whatever their generation, bring together into one scheme all individual perspectives and arrive together at regulative principles that can be affirmed by everyone as he lives by them, each from his own standpoint. Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and selfcommand from this point of view.24 As one might expect, different readers have emphasized one or the other Rawls. Some, such as Michael Sandel, place the accent on the original position, whereas others, such as Richard Rorty, have stressed reflective equilibrium instead.25 Members of the former group sometimes complain that Rawls’s approach is monological, Rawls having stipulated that “we can view the choice in the original position from the standpoint of one person selected at random.”26 But it seems to me that we have reason to question the dialogicality of reflective equilibrium as well. For one thing, there is the method’s hoped-for conclusiveness: the process, after all, is supposed sooner or later to reach equilibrium,

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to settle on a theory capable of being neutrally applied.27 Actual dialogues, however, although they may come to a close, of course, never truly end since, as Paul Ricoeur once put it, “every judgement calls for a ‘but’ beyond itself.”28 For another thing, there is the assumption that the equilibrium achieved can represent a social consensus around a single systematically unified set of propositions (i.e., the theory of justice). But real interlocutors never manage to attain something like this; even theoretical philosophers have yet to reach a consensus on anything. Of course, these philosophers, whether ancient or modern, can always respond that theirs is still an ideal worth striving for. Whether this is realistic is a question that I shall try to answer below.

II Difference philosophers aim to subvert theory, although they often also admit to being complicit with it. In this, they echo their intellectual ancestors, the rabbinic Jews. Rabbinic Judaism was what replaced the biblical Judaism that, according to the rabbis, had become too theoretical, too “Greek.” Biblical Judaism was basically a dual affair, led as it was by prophets and priests. The prophets were responsible for the Hebrew Bible’s creation, a product of the inspirations that, it was believed, they received as a result of their mystical encounters with God. Much like with proto-monotheistic ancient Greek theory, these encounters were said to arise from their having strongly transcended the world, leaving behind the human, social realm in order to connect with the divine. The result was the vision contained in the Bible, one meant to serve the ancient Israelites as a foundation for a new society.29 The priests then had the task of putting that vision into practice. And following the reign of King David, which witnessed the rise of the Sadducean priesthood and its increasing organization and centralization around the Temple in Jerusalem, there developed a highly theoretical conception of how this should be done. For to the Sadducees, the Bible represented a perfect, selfsufficient unity that embodied an absolute conception of justice.30 The Pharisees, the fathers of rabbinic Judaism, rejected this vision. To them, although the prophetic process was indeed comparable to the theorist’s, this was not the case with what it produced. True, the Bible was perfect; as God Himself declared, “Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish

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ought from it” (Deut. 4:2).31 But this did not mean that, like a philosophical theory was supposed to be, the Bible was a self-enclosed unity, its commandments capable of being transparently read and applied. Of course, this is exactly how the Sadducees conceived of it, which is why they advocated inflexible, literalist readings, applications that knew of “no restriction either on the side of social necessities or on that of human feelings.”32 To the Pharisees, however, the Sadducean approach was not only wrong but also dangerous, for it led to tragedies like the one recounted in 2 Maccabees, written by an anonymous Pharisee scribe. It tells of how the Israelites’ struggle against their oppressor of the time, the Hellenizing King Antiochus, was undermined by a belief that led to their slaughter: attacked on the Sabbath, a period during which they were commanded to rest, they refused to defend themselves (2 Macc. 6:11). But surely, the Pharisees argued, the Bible also commands Jews to live. That the Sadducean approach resulted in such disasters must mean that their theory-like conception of the Bible was deeply flawed. As the Babylonian Talmud puts it, “Jerusalem was only destroyed because judgements were given strictly upon biblical law and did not go beyond the requirements of the law.”33 Thus did the Pharisees propose an alternative conception of the Bible’s perfection: it is perfect precisely because many of its parts are in fundamental contradiction with each other.34 The Bible, in other words, constituted a paradoxical “complex unity,” a notion that Ahad Ha-am has described as follows: “whenever we see a complex whole which captivates us by its many-sided beauty, we see the result of a struggle between certain primal forces, which are themselves simple and onesided; and it is just this one-sidedness of the elements, each of which strives solely for its own end but never attains it, that produces the complex unity, the established harmony of the whole.”35 So what is called the Written Law of the Bible is just such a complexly unified whole. And as for the many “cracks” lying between its conflicting parts, these can serve as openings to inspiration and hence support a form of creativity very different from that of mystical prophesy. But they may do so only if the Bible is not viewed theoretically – that is, as a transparent unity capable of being straightforwardly applied. Because that would be to do a kind of violence to it, to “totalize” it by closing its cracks and so its conduits to God. Not that violence wasn’t integral to the reception of the Written Law. According to a rabbinic reading of the events at Mount Sinai

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that led to the Covenant between God and the Israelites, the Torah entered the world at the tip of a sword of Damocles. As one Talmudic account has it, when the “offer” of the Covenant was made to the Israelites, the whole mountain was raised up above their heads, a clear threat that it would be dropped on them if they declined.36 The Israelites’ response, understandably enough: “We will do and we will hear.”37 Note how this is the reverse of what one would expect from the theorist, who always tries to know first, to understand theoretically, and only then acts.38 Indeed, as a famous Talmudic story (part of the Talmud’s aggadah) has it, what distinguished the Israelites from other peoples was precisely their willingness to agree to the Covenant without examining it and thereby trying to understand it first.39 And according to another: “When the Israelites gave precedence to ‘we will do’ over ‘we will hearken’ six hundred thousand ministering angels came and set two crowns upon each man of Israel, one as a reward for ‘we will do’, and the other as a reward for ‘we will hearken.’”40 Central to this reading, then, is the claim that before thought and understanding must come violence. But not only the violence of the imposed Covenant. For preceding this, as we have already noted, was the violence proper to mysticism, such as that which Moses engaged in by tearing himself from the community in order to receive his mystical vision. Following this is the violence of the priests, who, again, would apply that vision and those of the other prophets uncompromisingly. Biblical Judaism, we may thus say, was a thoroughly violent affair. Now the Pharisees saw themselves as doing no more than replacing this violence with another form of it. To them, the second and final destruction of the Temple in 70 ce conclusively demonstrated the need to supersede the Sadducees’ theoretical approach. This they did by deconstructing its ostensive unity of vision in order to make way for a “revelatory,” as distinct from mystical, form of creativity. To the Pharisees, that is the requirement if Jews are properly to adhere to the Covenant and so receive continual revelations from the Bible, revelations that will inspire a new Oral Law that is equal in divinity, and hence equal in authority, to the Written Law. For as they saw it, “since the day when the Temple was destroyed [this marking the end of biblical Judaism], prophecy has been taken from the prophets and given to the wise [i.e., the rabbis].”41 Revelation has taken two major forms in rabbinic Judaism. First, there is Talmudic “study,” which requires students to enter into

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highly polemical debate (makhlokot). Their aim, however, is not to arrive at shared understandings of a text and thereby to reconcile opposing positions; rather, it is to accentuate the adversity, to increase the space between the debaters as well as between the conflicting parts of the text, for this is understood to bring the openness necessary for revelation. As Levinas has described it, “to rub in such a way that blood spurts out is perhaps the way one must ‘rub’ the text to arrive at the life it conceals ... Has anyone ever seen a reading that was something besides this effort carried out on a text? [Revelatory reading] can only consist in this violence done to words to tear from them the secret that time and conventions have covered over with their sedimentations, a process begun as soon as these words appear in the open air of history. One must, by rubbing, remove this layer which corrodes them.”42 Second, there is the application of inflexible laws (halakhah) to everyday life. These violently interfere with its flow in a way that, once again, makes cracks, the openings necessary for an inspired, revelatory way of life.43 Today, contemporary difference philosophers respond to the works of theorists in the very same way that the Pharisees did to the Written Law of the Sadducees. For example, there is the difference philosopher’s claim that theory exhibits a totalizing violence, one that closes us off from the “other.” Theory reduces by forcibly incorporating what is to be known into the strictures of the ostensibly unified vision possessed by the knower; the challenging differences of the other, its “infinity” of meaning, are thus limited by virtue of its transformation into a self-affirming, containable “same.”44 Hence Levinas’s claim that what I am calling theoretical philosophy has a tendency to a “universal synthesis, a reduction of all experience, of all that is reasonable, to a totality wherein consciousness embraces the world, leaves nothing other outside of itself, and thus becomes absolute thought.”45 Or as Theodor Adorno once put it, “the unity of logos is caught up in a complex of blame because it tends to mutilate what it unifies.”46 Finally, according to Foucault, the will to truth that is modern theory is nothing other than “a system of exclusion.”47 So the theories of theoretical philosophy, as well as those of other disciplines that share its tenets, are said to contain false unities. Whereas the Pharisees distinguished between the Written and Oral Law, Levinas refers, respectively, to “the said” and “the saying.”48 And to make room for the latter, violence once again needs to be done to the former; theories, in other words, need to be

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deconstructed and thereby shown not to contain unified, applicable meaning after all. “In order to suppress violence,” Levinas has declared, “it is necessary to have recourse to violence,”49 or as Derrida once put it, deconstruction is but a “violence against violence.”50 Yet it should be evident that this is not a relation of simple opposition. For just as the rabbinic Jew relies upon the cracks in the Written Law in order to create the Oral Law, contemporary difference philosophers often begin by deconstructing theoretical texts or text-analogues, accentuating the spaces, the “blind spots,” within them. Indeed, this tendency is so marked that their approach sometimes seems positively parasitic on the theorist’s – although if we ask the difference philosopher, he or she will probably say that it is ultimately beneficial, even more “true,” to the host. As Adorno once wrote of art criticism, for example, it does “do violence to the works, but they cannot survive without it.”51 So although a critique, difference philosophy is also, in a sense, complicit.52 No surprise, then, that the repetition of this rejection and reaffirmation of theoretical reason has led some difference philosophers to express their ideas in highly ironic, even parodic, ways.53 For a time, most contemporary difference philosophers were content to do no more than employ this irony as a means to undermine theories.54 Of late, however, they have become more constructive, as with Foucault’s later work on behalf of a philosophy that can “think differently” or with Derrida’s affirmation of a justice that is nevertheless always “to-come.”55 This path, however, is one that Levinas already began to tread much earlier. To him, the point was never only to counteract theory’s denial of the “other” epistemologically since this should always be done to achieve openness to the revelations of the “Other” (i.e., God), revelations that can emerge through the others of this world. Otherwise put: for Levinas, the saying always has something ethical to say. Thus do we find him writing in a paradoxical, disorienting style, his affirmation of “a saying that must also be unsaid” being, as Colin Davis once pointed out, perhaps the crucial characterization of the philosophical prose of Otherwise Than Being, recognized by many as Levinas’s most mature work.56 Given the fear that defending any particular idea will contribute to theoretical totalizing, Levinas has strived to mimic the plurality of conflicting assertions present in the Bible and Talmud, for his hope is that his philosophical writings will themselves facilitate the openness necessary for revelation.

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So whereas, for the rabbinic sage, the creative inspirations driving the revelations of scripture produce halakhah and aggadah relevant to the lives of Jews, for Levinas, revelation can provide a source of ethics for everyone. And whereas religious Jews conceive of the Bible as a kind of “epiphanic site,” a text that, if approached with the requisite openness, can serve as a conduit for revelatory inspiration, Levinas wants us to see, or rather be seen by, each and every human being this way. Hence his repeated references to the notion that people have “faces,” that these make calls on us, and that what one first “hears” amidst these calls is “Thou shalt not kill.” I put the notion of “hearing” in quotation marks because the encounter with the face is clearly something different from the purely phenomenological kind of hearing that is essential to everyday dialogue; with the latter, the speaker is another person, and what he or she says is, of course, heard with one’s ears. Think of Moses’s call, having just descended the mountain, of “Hear me, O Israel,” and then of his speaking “in the ears” (Deut. 31:30) of the Israelites. With the revelation of the face, by contrast, it is the Other who “speaks,” and one “hears” not with one’s ears but with one’s soul. Revelatory speaking and listening should thus not be understood in sensory terms, which is why, when Levinas tells us that “the eye [of the Other] does not shine; it speaks,”57 it should be evident that he believes it does so without making a sound. So the classic association of Jerusalem with the aural and Athens with the ocular can easily mislead. Indeed, I would go so far as to argue that, as long as one remains wary of the theorist’s “idolatrous” attempt to capture truth in a vision, difference philosophers largely retain theory’s ocularcentrism – only now darkness is to be embraced along with the light. This is what the paradoxes of difference philosophy, in which whatever is affirmed is also denied, amount to, since to embrace paradox is to embrace the cracks – the Nothings – that lie between the parts of a whole. We are thus to welcome blindness and not only insight,58 as well as to reverse the theorist’s asymmetrical relation between self and other: instead of struggling to attain a kind of power over something by capturing it within a unified vision, we should submit to the power that the other has over us; as Levinas has put it, “since the Other looks at me, I am responsible for him, without even having taken on responsibilities in his regard; his responsibility is incumbent on me.”59 Again: “There is a commandment in the appearance of the face, as if a master spoke to me.”60

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So it should be evident that the violence of difference moves in the opposite direction to that of theory, for we are to be violently struck by the other’s demands and hence placed in a position comparable to that of the Israelites, who, as we noted, had little choice but to accept the Covenant at Sinai. Rather than the simple unity of Athens, then, what is affirmed here is the complex unity, the “unity of plurality,” or “variety in unity,”61 of Jerusalem (i.e., wholes with numerous cracks between their parts – “constellations,” to use the term Adorno inherited from Walter Benjamin). Hence Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s definition of the concept: “The concept is a whole because it totalizes its components, but it is a fragmentary whole.”62 Of course, Socrates would not have approved at all: “If [someone] were to show me that the absolute one was many, or the absolute many one, I should be truly amazed.”63

III Practical philosophy assumes a fundamental distinction between two kinds of reason. When one is analyzing things in the natural world, which is to say doing research in natural science, the disengaged, “cold” reason of the theorist is considered appropriate. But when the subject is those things that are meaningful in a cultural, context-dependent, and thus historical sense, as with most of the questions faced in the human sciences and humanities, a different, “warm” reason is required, one which demands that we engage with, rather than disengage from, the context. As I mentioned above, all this is based on Aristotle’s distinction between theoretical and practical reason, but he himself was a theoretical rather than practical philosopher because he believed that philosophy requires the former rather than the latter. In fact, even when it comes to practical reason, he conceived of it as grounded in theory: the phronimos aims for well-being (eudaemonia) by concretizing a theory of it, the universal ranking of the virtues that Aristotle believed was essential for human functioning. This is just one reason why Aristotle believed that “we deliberate not about ends, but about what promotes ends,”64 for it is clear that, to him, practical reason can do no more than aim the arrow at a target that theoretical reason has already set.65 The practical reason of the practical philosopher, by contrast, is necessary for both aiming the arrow and setting the target. Moreover, it has a fully dialogical and so nontheoretical nature. This

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means that its logos requires character (ethos) and feeling (pathos) but not the demonstrations (apodeixis) of Aristotelian logic. One result of making dialogue primary in this way is that whereas, as we have noted, the theorist’s logos emphasizes thought over language, and the difference philosopher alternates between reversing this and not, the practical philosopher does not distinguish between thought and language at all. Hence Isaiah Berlin’s claim that “language” and “ideas” are but “different ways of saying the same thing” or Ludwig Wittgenstein’s realization: “Now it is becoming clear why I thought that thinking and language were the same. For thinking is a kind of language.”66 Moreover, rather than attempting, with the theorist, to achieve a kind of power over the object of thought, to “capture it in one’s sights,” or, with the difference philosopher, to alternate between this and submission to the other, the practical philosopher favours the symmetrical relation that is required of the interlocutors in an everyday dialogue. And although the possibility that there is a religious dimension to such dialogue should not be ruled out (a claim central to Martin Buber’s account),67 this dialogue is nevertheless understood to take place not between God and the individual but between individuals. After all, only this way is symmetry possible, since only persons can speak and listen in turn and hence demonstrate the humility required for subordinating themselves to understanding.68 And only this way can they genuinely exchange, and so change, interpretations between them, this being an activity which also assumes that they are embodied agents attentive to their particular context and hence that they perceive meaning through their sensory experience of the world.69 That is why the followers of practical philosophy hear with their ears, not their souls. So practical philosophy asserts the centrality of the aural rather than of the ocular or the (anti)ocular, as with Hans-Georg Gadamer’s declaration that “the primacy of hearing is the basis of the hermeneutical phenomenon.”70 Moreover, when at their best, we can say that interlocutors listen for interpretations that integrate or reconcile, that “make sense” of all the confusing particulars of a given question. So although thought that is fully transparent and unified is considered beyond the reach, and indeed purpose, of this warm, dialogical reason, those who engage in it still hope to develop the best (i.e., the most coherent and comprehensive) interpretation possible. This means they must be prepared to judge an interpretation

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as better or worse, more or less reasonable, more or less true, by virtue of how it compares to all the other interpretations on offer in the given context. One might say that interpreters strive for the best “expression” or “articulation” (rather than “representation”) of something. And if they are to do so, they must be anything but reductive since only this way can they be open to change, to transforming their prejudices if it turns out that these have served as barriers to understanding. Such transformation, moreover, means that interpretation cannot consist solely of the “discovery” of meaning since there must always be some “evolution” of it as well.71 Although this interpretive thinking is a form of practice, it should not be equated with the revelatory “practice” of the difference philosopher. To appreciate why, we need to appreciate both of the senses in which practice is primordial for the practical philosopher. First, it is so in a temporal sense: before there can be thinking, whether practical or theoretical, there is always pre-reflective or habitual practice. This is the kind of practice that we are engaged in most of the time – Heidegger has called this mode of being “average everydayness,” and Dreyfus “everyday coping”72 – all the while expressing or interpreting our identities, the goods that matter to us. We begin to interpret reflectively only when things have “shown up” to us, which is to say that they have emerged from the pre-reflective background because there has been a tension or contradiction (i.e., a conflict). Only then can we choose to engage in interpretive, practical reason as a response. For as the (pre-Heideggerian) hermeneuticist Friedrich Schleiermacher once put it, “strict [i.e., reflective] interpretation begins with misunderstanding and searches out a precise understanding.”73 Second, practice is primordial in terms of significance. To the practical philosopher, the things that the contemporary theorist associates with practice (context, dynamism, etc.) are characteristic of all philosophical thought. Philosophical knowledge, in other words, is itself “warm,” which is to say situated in a context, part of the flowing and transforming rivers of tradition that are themselves a part of history. There may be philosophical ideas that are true for all time (although the practical philosopher will hesitate to suggest any), but even so they are at most “immortally” and never, as with Rawls’s claim above, “eternally” valid, for they remain immanent to history. Even the transcendental argument, which is supposed to be indubitable, can never be fully sheltered from questioning and

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debate.74 Practical philosophy is thus something inherently historical, an inquiry that can never go further than identifying the most enduring features of our historical condition.75 Of course, when practical philosophers turn to ethical or political questions, their interpretations will be even more relative to context. For one thing, this is no place for foundations, whether of the absolute or only “floating” kind, since there is no way to articulate a unified set of rules that is in some sense separate from, and thus capable of being applied to, practice. Interpretation, in other words, never reaches “equilibrium.” At their best, then, rules should be understood as no more than maxims, as expressive guidelines that are to be “mediated with” rather than “applied to” our lives. Instead of decontextualized things that we may or may not view as worthy of our consent, rules are thus more like stories that we are either already at home with or will perhaps one day come to be – when, that is, we manage to hear them, to understand what they have to say. For as Wittgenstein has declared: “When I obey a rule ... I obey the rule blindly.”76 It is because understanding as so understood requires integration, the reconciliation of conflicting particulars, that I like to describe practical philosophy as striving to move “towards the One, as a many.” Underlying this is an organic holist mereology, albeit one in which the whole is never unified, its parts being always more or less – but never totally – integrated (theorists, of course, tend to equate wholeness with unity).77 This means not only that the theorist’s goal of unified knowledge is unattainable, interpretation being always “on the way,”78 but also that the complicit critique of theory by difference philosophers is inadequate. For truth comes best when there is dialogue, and dialogue is at its best when it takes the form of “conversation.” Only conversation strives for understanding through reconciliation; “negotiation,” a distinct mode of dialogue in its own right, consists instead of a struggle for accommodation. Both, however, have their place, although many practical philosophers can be accused of overemphasizing one or the other, a tendency that we can trace to whether their sympathies lie more with the one or the many. It is the ontological hermeneuticists who sometimes stray too close to monism and so end up invoking conversation too much. Consider Heidegger. The account of logos in his early work does not merely refer to its integrative, holistic character, but it does so

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monistically, both in its favouring of the ocular, as when Heidegger writes that logos consists of “letting something be seen in its togetherness with something,”79 and in its reference to the background of practices as “a totality of involvements,” a term, we have noted, that smacks of unity.80 If particular things are ever to show up, however, then the practical background cannot be a unified whole since it is only because of its cracks, the spaces of nonbeing within it, that we sometimes find ourselves facing conflicts. On the opposite extreme are those pluralist practical philosophers such as Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, and Bernard Williams. They may be said to assume a fragmented background, one that, as I have argued elsewhere, fails to account for why certain things, but not others, emerge from it and demand our attention. Only by recognizing the background’s holistic nature – that all its parts are more or less integrated (although not, again, unified) – can we account for the pre-reflective prioritizing of some goods over others. Moreover, the fragmentations of pluralism encourage the view that those goods are atom-like and thus that moral or political conflict consists of their “clashing” or “colliding.” This rules out reconciling or further integrating them through conversation, which aims for the transformation of the whole of which they are all, in reality, always a part. For pluralist practical reason can do no more than weigh conflicting values against each other, meaning that negotiation is the sole mode of dialogue available in pluralist politics.81 Has practical philosophy appeared only over the past century, first with Martin Buber’s turn from mysticism to dialogue and then, among the thinkers mentioned so far, with Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Berlin, and Taylor? I don’t believe so. In fact, not only did it serve as one of the main sources of Renaissance humanism, but it also had a place in both ancient Greek and ancient Jewish thought, albeit as the basis of minority traditions in the two. Heidegger has already made the case for us vis-à-vis the Greeks. It begins with his claim that “metaphysics” originated with Plato’s “forgetting” of being, of the fact that all meaning necessarily arises in a world of shared historical practices. To Heidegger, the preSocratics, especially Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus, were what we might identify as proto-practical philosophers, and it was their approach that, at least in spirit, was taken up and developed by some of the sophists.82 Others such as Gadamer, however, have argued that Platonic dialectic should itself be considered

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practical,83 while Martha Nussbaum can be said to have made the claim on behalf of Aristotle, she having defended a pluralist reading of him.84 I cannot, however, accept these interpretations of Plato or Aristotle;85 for one thing, they would bring them too close to the sophists, whom they rightly saw as their enemies. This is particularly true of Protagoras, who, I would claim, was the greatest of the Greek practical philosophers. More than anything, Protagoras was known for favouring literary criticism and the study of history as the best means to acquire a moral education, each being highly interpretive endeavours.86 Virtue, to him, is thus not merely naturally (phusis) inherited, for it can be taught (didache). Moreover, instead of reading Protagoras’s famous aphorisms – “Man is the measure of all things” and “Make the lesser reason stronger”87 – as favouring a truth-denying relativism, we should recognize how they give support to the practical notions that interpretive experience must provide the standards for judging what is the most probable truth and that such truth claims are best tested through dialogical argument with others. This can actually be supported by drawing on Plato’s account of Protagoras’s creation myth, which distinguishes the wisdom required for a virtuous politics from the techne brought to humans by Prometheus (see Protagoras, 321c–22d; although this is contradicted in Theaetetus, 166d–67d) by identifying justice as a distinct gift from Zeus – one that, it is worth noting, was delivered by Hermes, whose name serves as the root of the word “hermeneutics.” So we have reason to speak of two basic types of sophism, depending on whether justice is conceived as a techne or not. This difference parallels two different ways to understand the fundamental sophist dichotomy between nature and conventional law (nomos). To Gorgias and his followers, distinguishing between them requires downgrading nomos, even, in some cases, claiming that it is but an illusion or a mask for the natural power of the strong. To Protagoras, by contrast, nomos has its own integrity, which is why the judgment required for justice must strive for fidelity to something other than nature and so should be understood as a matter of phronesis rather than techne.88 After all, as even the character based on Protagoras in Plato’s dialogue of the same name points out, people who cannot play the flute (which is to say are not adept at its techne) never claim that they can, whereas everyone professes to have a sense of justice (323b).89 Justice, then, cannot be equated

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with the technical expertise that comes from being well trained. The implication? We ought to respect the methodological distinction between natural science and human science that, as we have noted, is central to practical philosophy. Those who follow Gorgias in not doing so are thus better identified as difference, rather than practical, philosophers.90 As for an ancient Jewish source of practical philosophy, I would refer to the Levitical priesthoods of biblical Judaism’s pre-monarchic periods. Like the sophists, Jewish priests should also be grouped into two types. The Levites make for the first, from Moses (who was not only a mystic: “Hear, O Israel”) to Abiathar and his followers, while the second consists of those whom we might call Aaronites, from Aaron to the Sadduceans Zadok and his followers (although it must be said that they, too, claimed a Levitical heritage). The first group, the story goes, dominated the priesthood in pre-monarchic times, before its centralization in Jerusalem by King David, and we can say that they did so according to practical precepts. The latter, however, particularly after Zadok took over as high priest following King Solomon’s exile of Abiathar, affirmed a theoretical approach. In so doing, they must have been aware of the risk of idolatry, of treating something that was not unified as though it were and thus like God; Aaron, after all, was involved in the incident with the golden calf. Above all, Levitical priests were teachers of the law: “They shall teach Jacob thy judgments, and Israel thy law” (Deut. 33:10; see also Lev. 10:8–11; Jer. 18:18; Ezek. 7:26). Add to this the Jewish Encyclopaedia’s reference to priests as “the authoritative interpreters of the Law”91 (an occupation, incidentally, for which they, like the sophists, were paid; see Micah 3:11), and we have reason to speak of the centrality of hermeneutics to their profession (a hermeneutics that, it is worth pointing out, was later echoed by the work of the ancient Greek Delphic priesthood). And as the Levite’s attire attests, the two chief components of which were the breastplate (hoshen) and the headplate (mitznefet), representing the people and God respectively (see Exod. 28:15, 28:36–8), they stood for the dialogical bridge between them. That there is room in Judaism for doing this in a practical rather than a theoretical way is supported by David Hartman’s point that the story of Noah and the flood closes with God endorsing a distinction between nature and human history (see Gen. 8:21), one that is underlined by the later covenant between Him and Abraham.92 For that covenant, like the one through

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Moses that came after, implies that people are, to some degree, free from God and nature, since only this way could they have had the choice or not to enter into it (a choice that exists even though they may have felt threatened to do so). Humankind, then, cannot be wholly subject to nature’s causal laws, thus allowing us to speak of a Jewish recognition of practical philosophy’s methodological distinction between human science and natural science. It is worth adding that there is a virtual consensus among scholars that the offices of pre-monarchic Jewish priests were never particularly concerned with sacrificial functions. Weber certainly emphasized their this-worldly rationality, having cited their rejection of magic and the pre-eminence that they gave to ethical conduct over and against the observance of purely ritualistic commandments.93 The priests also received confessions and so were responsible for “reconciling” the guilty with God (Num. 5:6ff; Lev. 4:20, 4:31, 5:10, 6:7). They did this, at least on occasion, by manipulating the Urim and Thummin, thought to be a kind of dice that gave yes or no answers to inquiries (Deut. 33:8; Judges 17:5–13). But as Weber implies, this was a highly dialogical process since “everything depended on the way that the question was put,” and many complicated preliminary questions had to be settled before one could be placed before God; very little was thus left to be determined by a roll of the dice.94 That all this invokes the interpretive, context-dependent, warm reason fundamental to practical philosophy also follows from Weber’s account of priesthood in general, part of the crucial feature of which he identifies as an enterprise “permanently associated with particular norms, places and times, and related to specific social groups.”95 I believe that, from the moment when he underwent his famous dialogical turn, Buber can be said to have taken up the spirit of the Levitical priesthood in the twentieth century. Consider his translation of the Israelites’ acceptance of the Covenant at Exodus 24:7. Instead of the rabbinic “We will do and we will hear,” Buber takes the Hebrew letter vav of the text as a subordinate conjunction and so comes up with “We will do in order to hear,” a move that even Levinas admits constitutes “a perfectly legitimate usage.”96 If we follow Buber in this (although my preference is for “We will do and so hear” since it even more strongly equates doing and hearing), we get a reading equivalent to the practical philosopher’s identification of thought with practice. Otherwise put: the Israelites declared their

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intention to fulfil the terms of the Covenant with God by carrying them out in practice, knowing that to do so would always require interpretation. But since everyone can interpret anything like this, the ways of the Levite priest ought not to be limited to those who were born Levites; indeed, as Maimonides once declared, not only all Jews but all people are capable of this kind of holiness.97 Everyone, in other words, can join the dialogue.

IV If by philosophy we mean “the love of wisdom,” what might this say about the three approaches described above? Should we be choosing between them? It all depends, of course, on what one means by “wisdom.” One aspect of it is surely its relation to practical affairs: the wise are those whom we can count on to have good advice about what we ought to do or become, whether personally or politically. They got this wisdom, presumably, from experience, which is why they tend to be older. And as for experience, Heidegger has pointed out that the term has two basic senses: one invokes the confirmation of an idea through its immediate demonstration, through “experiencing” something for oneself; and the other emphasizes what it is to “undergo” an experience, to encounter something unexpected and disruptive, and then in some way or another to learn from it.98 Evidently, it is the second that leads to wisdom. But do all such experiences do this? Gadamer would say yes. To him, all experience is hermeneutical, since hermeneutics is universal: “Nothing is left out of th[e] speech community; absolutely no experience of the world is excluded.”99 But are all experiences “of the world”? The neo-Platonist mystic, for one, certainly did not think so, since his aim was to encounter – indeed, to unify with – something that he believed is strongly transcendent, namely God. It is because God, not being worldly, cannot be known in the sense of being subject to logos that the neo-Platonists engaged in an apophatic process, one designed to negate experience. This, it is worth noting, led them to emphasize two central metaphors, light and darkness,100 a point to which I will return below. If it is possible fully to reach this goal of unity with God (assuming, of course, that there is a God), it must entail a complete evacuation of the mystic’s self and so of experience. But, to raise an obvious objection, how then to account for the mystic’s return to

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the world? After all, as God Himself informs us, “shall no man see me, and live” (Exod. 33:20). This suggests that there is something incoherent about the very idea of total mystical ecstasy101 and hence that mystical union must, to some degree at least, be an experience and so a perception of phenomena, of things in the world.102 Yet this is the case only “to some degree,” and mysticism’s association with the ocular implies that it still must be distinguished from everyday experience, something that, we can agree with Gadamer, is indeed thoroughly interpretive. Without entering into the question of the veracity (or not) of mysticism, it seems to me that its ocularism can tell us something about an activity about which most people are much less dubious, namely artistic creation. For it, too, needs to be distinguished from everyday interpretation, and for similar reasons, since creation is often associated with imagination103 – there is a reason why we tend to call great artists “visionaries.” A universal hermeneutics is problematic, then, not only because it appears to exclude mysticism but also because it leaves no room for the common sense distinction between fiction, in its widest sense, and nonfiction (i.e., between what artists do as distinct from critics). It is when the latter have the greater influence on the philosophy of art104 that we tend to miss the difference, usually because we end up reducing creation to a form of interpretation. So what I am suggesting is that the kind of experience involved in the creation of art is different from the thoroughly hermeneutical sort. Think of the violence that is often associated with creation, art (at its best) being generally much more disruptive than criticism. We might even say that art aims for a diremption from tradition, which explains why creations have a greater potential than interpretations to be original, to be “ahead of their time” (just like the works of prophecy). With interpretation, by contrast, the goal is best understood as that of realizing rather than breaking from tradition, as Gadamer has emphasized. This brings us back to an idea of the wise as those whose interpretive experiences have helped them to come to know a given society’s traditional practices especially well. And this leads me to make the following claim: the philosophers of theory and difference, given that neither engage (at least officially) in the practical reason that is interpretation, are not really philosophers, lovers of wisdom, after all. Rather, they are artists. I realize how strange this must sound, especially as regards the theo-

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rists given Plato’s famous attack on the poets. But I would suggest that Plato has been misunderstood, not least by Plato himself. For his aspiration to unity of articulation, one shared by modern theorists with their praise of “systematic beauty,”105 should be understood as driven by motives that are best characterized as aesthetic rather than rational. For what is the struggle for unity in a world where it does not belong than a way (potentially) to be creative? So whether this unity is organic or systematic, I would claim that it is one’s very aim for unity itself (and not, as Kant asserted, simply striving for a form of unity that is inappropriate to a given subject matter) that makes reason “rave” and so “fantasize.”106 Plato’s attack, I am thus suggesting, should be reinterpreted as one made by an artist of one type against artists of another type, the latter simply having more logos (i.e., interpretation) mixed in as part of their creativity. Think of a poet today criticizing the novel form.107 So although I accept that there is a sense in which, when it comes to theories in philosophy, Wittgenstein was right to declare that language has “gone on holiday,” I do not think that theorists are simply mistaken, as Taylor, for example, has claimed of modern epistemological theory.108 For their posing of supposedly “bad” questions – such as whether there is a world at all, or why there is something rather than nothing, or what the essence of justice is, and so on – may indeed be unwise, but it can also be extremely creative. Theorists, again, are artists, and like all artists they have ways to go beyond simply experiencing the world in the sense of interpreting it. Not that there is never cause for concern about this. Social and political theorists, for example, do not really help us to understand our world so much as show us ways to create it anew. The danger here arises when this is not recognized for the artistic activity that it is. For as Paul Ricoeur has warned, “The nowhere of utopia may become a pretext for escape, a way of fleeing the contradictions and ambiguity both of the use of power and of the assumption of authority in a given situation. This escapism of utopia belongs to a logic of all or nothing. No connecting point exists between the ‘here’ of social reality and the ‘elsewhere’ of the utopia. This disjunction allows the utopia to avoid any obligation to come to grips with the real difficulties of a given society.”109 This is a warning that should be heeded not only within philosophy departments; all those working with theoretical models in the humanities and social sciences ought to take it on board. In Anglo-American political

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science today, for example, rational choice theory remains a dominant paradigm. However, despite how its practitioners and many of its critics conceive of it,110 I would claim that rational choice is not, in fact, a means to do social science but a way to make art. Yes, there is indeed a kind of “flight from reality” going on here,111 but have not such flights always been essential to creativity? We should thus look for the beauty present in many of these works, recognizing them for the genuinely creative accomplishments that they are. There is reason for worry only when their authors succeed in convincing policymakers to apply their theories and so encourage practices that, given the fictional homo economicus vision underlying them, undermine such important goods as those of community. At such times, the wise practical thinker will oppose the theory and join with the artists of difference. For difference “philosophers,” too, are creators; Deleuze and Guattari have even gone so far as to define philosophy as “the discipline that involves creating concepts.”112 Unlike with the theorists, however, their goal is not utopian unity but the epiphanies that can come through the spaces, the cracks, that “exist” between the pluralities of our world. That is why Foucault, dissatisfied with an archaeological or genealogical account of a totalizing order of discourse, one that has subjugated the subject as part of the “violence that we do to things,” has proclaimed that “discourses must be treated as discontinuous practices, which cross each other, are sometimes juxtaposed with one another, but can just as well exclude or be unaware of each other.”113 Thus might we, borrowing Levinas’s language, describe Foucault as aiming to make room for infini alongside the totalité, which is to say for a creativity that “occurs in the interstice.”114 Foucault ultimately came to refer to his approach as an aesthetics of existence, one which assumes that our world is shot through with “lines of fragility ... kinds of virtual fracture” that help us to “open up the space of possible transformation.”115 So just like Levinas on our epiphanic encounters with the “face” of the other, Foucault’s creativity cannot be understood in purely sensory terms, which is to say as the result of simple phenomenological experiences.116 The only danger here arises when this form of creativity interferes with those who would respond to conflict with dialogue or when it leads us to fail to stand up to those who would prevent others from doing so.

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If I am right about this, that both the theoretical and the difference approaches are creative rather than interpretive, artistic rather than philosophical, then this means that each is wrong when it reduces the practical approach to the other. And it means one other thing as well: that there are many more artists in the world than most, including many of the artists themselves, suspect. They have been too modest.

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preface 1 Charles Blattberg, From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First. 2 Charles Blattberg, Shall We Dance? A Patriotic Politics for Canada. 3 For my critique of various forms of monarchy and polyarchy, see ibid., ch. 2. 4 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, 43. 5 In this I diverge from the narrator of More’s book, for whom utopias are, in principle, possible, as Bronislaw Baczko makes evident in his “Utopie,” 76. 6 John Rawls, The Law of Peoples; with “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” 7. 7 Ronald Beiner, “Introduction,” in Liberalism, Nationalism, Citizenship: Essays on the Problem of Political Community, 7. 8 Ibid., 15. 9 Ibid., 7.

chapter one 1 I first introduced these four in my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First. 2 See, for example, Peter Singer, Practical Ethics; R.M. Hare, “Ethical Theory and Utilitarianism”; and John Harsanyi, “Rule Utilitarianism, Equality, and Justice.” 3 See, for example, John Rawls, A Theory of Justice; John Rawls, Political Liberalism; Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle; Bruce

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Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State; and, although no AngloAmerican, Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols. See, for example, Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia; James Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan; and David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement. See, for example, G.A. Cohen, History, Labour, and Freedom: Themes from Marx; and John Roemer, Free to Lose: An Introduction to Marxist Economic Philosophy. On the “well-ordered” (i.e., theory-governed) society as like a game and citizens as like its players, see, for example, Rawls, Theory of Justice, 527. For the idea that the political theorist is comparable to an arbiter, see Plato, The Laws of Plato, 62d11–628a4; Plato, Eighth Letter, 354a1–5; and Aristotle, The Politics, 1284b25–34, 1997a5–7. Hence, for example, Rawls, Political Liberalism, 161: “Liberal principles meet the urgent political requirement to fix, once and for all, the content of certain political basic rights and liberties, and to assign them special priority. Doing this takes those guarantees off the political agenda and puts them beyond the calculus of social interests.” See, for example, James Bohman and William Rehg, eds, Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics. See chapter 2. Isaiah Berlin, “‘From Hope and Fear Set Free,’” 198. Emmanuel Levinas, “The Poet’s Vision,” 130. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 11, 17. Richard A. Posner, Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy, 46. Richard Rorty, “Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View,” 232–3. Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’” 8. See, for example, Richard Rorty, “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism”; Charles Anderson, Pragmatic Liberalism; William E. Connolly, “Identity and Difference in Liberalism”; Hélène Cixous, “Extreme Fidelity”; Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! ch. 5; and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Slavoj Žižek and Noam Yuran, “Disaster Movies as the Last Remnants of Utopia.” Rorty, “Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction,” 227, 231. Quoted in Henry B. Veatch, Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics, 41.

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20 Richard Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” 213n23. 21 See chapter 12, sec. III.iii. 22 I say “albeit insufficiently” because of Aristotle’s claim, in Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin, 1112b33–34, that phrone sis, or practical wisdom, is grounded in a theoretical conception of eudaemonia, or “well being.” For to him, “we deliberate about what promotes an end, not about the end.” To me, however, we reason practically about means and ends. 23 See, for example, Isaiah Berlin, “Equality,” 97. Note that, as Berlin explains in “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” 2, this sensitivity is relevant to politics for the same reason that “political philosophy ... is but ethics applied to society.” 24 See, for example, Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality; Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom; Robert Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics; and George Crowder, Liberalism and Value Pluralism. I distinguish between these “weak” pluralists and the “strong” ones, those for whom pluralism-in-itself cannot endorse any particular ideology, in my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, ch. 2. John Kekes’s pluralist conservatism is also relatively “weak,” although not because he thinks that philosophical presuppositions can grant absolute, overriding status to the values favoured by his preferred ideology. Rather, he argues that endorsing pluralism leads to quintessentially conservative approaches to practical reasoning when values conflict. See John Kekes, A Case for Conservatism. A great deal of what he claims to be exclusive to conservatism, however, is true of all pluralist ideologies. Finally, I should note that I see William A. Galston’s Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice as an unsuccessful attempt to defend a pluralist liberalism that is somehow both strong and weak. For Galston asserts (1) that everything is negotiable, (2) within certain limits, (3) which are themselves non-negotiable. Obviously, the first and third assertions contradict. 25 Isaiah Berlin and Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, 44. See also Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams, “Pluralism and Liberalism: A Reply,” 308–9. 26 See Stuart Hampshire, Justice Is Conflict, ch. 3. 27 See ibid., 27–37. 28 Ibid., 37. 29 As Joseph Schumpeter puts it in his Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 251.

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30 See, for example, Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad. 31 Thus while I would not go as far as Paul Dumouchel, who claims in his “La tolerance n’est pas le pluralisme,” 181, that pluralism is inherently conservative, I do think it assumes a very limited conception of politicsled change. 32 With “goods,” one avoids the Nietzschean connotations of the term “values” and so, among other things, a subjectivist understanding of moral concepts. 33 See, for example, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, esp. part 3. 34 See, for example, Aristotle, The Politics; and Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses. Hannah Arendt is the leading contemporary classical republican; see her The Human Condition: A Study of the Central Dilemmas Facing Modern Man. 35 W.B. Yeats, “Among School Children,” in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, 215. 36 Nicholas Rescher, Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus, 4. 37 For pluralist emphases of the pervasiveness of “dirty hands” in politics, see Michael Walzer, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands”; Isaiah Berlin, “Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century,” esp. 11; Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience, esp. 170–7; and Bernard Williams, “Politics and Moral Character.” 38 For a compelling account of the prominence in the English-speaking world of uncompromising stances (which, I would claim, are encouraged by neutralism) and of stances that go no further than being willing to negotiate (which are supported by pluralism), see Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture: Moving from Debate to Dialogue. Two qualifications to my praise of this wonderful book: there are times (e.g., ch. 4) when Tannen fails to appreciate that dialogues involving compromise necessarily have an adversarial dimension, as well as others (ch. 8) when she mistakenly equates “criticism” or “opposition” with zero-sum adversity (a mistake because one can criticize or oppose with the aim of reconciling with others rather than of pressuring them to compromise). 39 Susan Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict, and Citizenship, 172. 40 See chapter 11. 41 See, for example, Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics, esp. the Introduction and chs 1–2 (although

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note the qualification on 251); and Isaiah Berlin and Steven Lukes, “Isaiah Berlin in Conversation with Steven Lukes,” esp. 124. See Leon P. Baradat, Political Ideologies: Their Origins and Impact, ch. 2. See Norberto Bobbio, Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction. As cited in ibid., 94. See also Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, 28–34. Lewis Namier, “Human Nature in Politics,” 7, 5. Hannah Arendt, “Herzl and Lazare,” 338. See also the distinction that Theodor W. Adorno and his fellow authors draw between “genuine” and “pseudo” patriotism in Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality: Part One, 107–8. See, for example, H.W. Brands, The Strange Death of American Liberalism; and William Christian and Colin Campbell, Political Parties and Ideologies in Canada. For an authoritative study of these five, see Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory. See Michael Freeden, “Is Nationalism a Distinct Ideology?” See, for example, Adam Swift and Stephen Mulhall, Liberals and Communitarians. This is surely one reason why neither has been comfortable with the label “communitarian.” Michael Walzer lumps himself in with the liberals in his “Liberalism and the Art of Separation” and his “The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism.” And Charles Taylor gives “one of the many reasons” why he is “unhappy with the term ‘communitarian’” in his “Charles Taylor Replies,” 250. Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Spectre of Communitarianism,” 34: “I have myself strenuously disowned this label, but to little effect.” Daniel A. Bell is, to my knowledge, the only nonliberal who has embraced it; see his Communitarianism and Its Critics. Amitai Etzioni, who has also done so, is better described as a pluralist liberal (although one who also occasionally voices patriotic concerns); see, for example, his The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society. See the following by Michael Sandel: Liberalism and the Limits of Justice; “Introduction,” in Michael Sandel, ed., Liberalism and its Critics; and Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, esp. ch. 1. See Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory, chs 4–7; and his Liberal Languages: Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth-Century Progressive Thought.

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55 Walzer’s (weak) pluralist liberalism upholds a political scheme that aims wholly to shelter that liberty from compromise. This is implied, for example, by his declaration in Spheres of Justice, 279, that the “autonomous person [is] ... the ideal subject of the theory of justice.” 56 See Charles Taylor, “Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate,” 172, 179–80. 57 See Human Security Centre, Human Security Report 2005: War and Peace in the 21st Century. 58 See Edward Luttwak, “Tales of the Cold War.” 59 See Geoff Mulgan, “The Renewable Energies of Politics,” 186–7.

chapter two 1 John Mitchell, The Art of Conversation, 33. 2 See my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First; James Bohman and William Rehg, eds, Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics; and Jon Elster, ed., Deliberative Democracy. 3 As defended, for example, in Aristotle, The Politics; Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses; and Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition: A Study of the Central Dilemmas Facing Modern Man. 4 Among them are political philosophers such as Isaiah Berlin (e.g., Four Essays on Liberty), Stuart Hampshire (e.g., Justice Is Conflict), and Bernard Williams (e.g., In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument). 5 See Jürgen Habermas, “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” 87–9. 6 Whence Sammy Basu’s suggestion in “Dialogical Ethics and the Virtue of Humour,” 380, that “Habermas is perhaps the apogee of interlocutory humorlessness.” 7 So much for Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “In Defence of Poetry,” which closes with the famous declaration that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose). For a critique of the later Habermas’s restriction of the validity of art to the subjectivity of its creator, a kind of “subjective production aesthetics,” see Pieter Duvenage, Habermas and Aesthetics: The Limits of Communicative Reason, ch. 5. 8 On humour as interpretive, see my (relatively humourless) chapter 10, part II. For a survey of it in politics, see Alexander Rose, “When

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Politics Is a Laughing Matter.” For an example of art in politics, see Yvon Grenier’s interesting study From Art to Politics: Octavio Paz and the Pursuit of Freedom. For an interesting account of the social usefulness of lying, one nevertheless sensitive to its potential abuses, see Jeremy Campbell, The Liar’s Tale: A History of Falsehood. Cervantes, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, 631. Jürgen Habermas, “A Reply to My Critics,” 235. See, for example, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 19–30. See Stanely G. Clarke and Evan Simpson, eds, Anti-Theory in Ethics and Moral Conservatism; Dwight Furrow, Against Theory: Continental and Analytical Challenges in Moral Philosophy, ch. 1; Peter Levine, Living without Philosophy: On Narrative, Rhetoric, and Morality; my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, ch. 1; Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again; and Jonathan Dancy, Ethics without Principles. For a survey of a number of manuals for good conversation, see the cultural historian Peter Burke’s “The Art of Conversation in Early Modern Europe.” See Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, ch. 2. Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, “Letter to Ermolao Barbaro,” 110. See David Bogen, Order without Rules: Critical Theory and the Logic of Conversation. As in, for example, Simone Chambers, Reasonable Democracy: Jürgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse, 164, 172. I refer to “ideology” here in a relatively nonpejorative way. To me, any doctrine meant to provide us with guidance on how to respond to specific political conflicts, whether these concern questions of institutional design or everyday policymaking, is an ideology. See chapter 1. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law,” 31. The classic case for “deliberative opinion polls” is made in James Fishkin, Democracy and Deliberation. Joshua Cohen, however, is a deliberative democrat who writes of the beneficial role of parties, albeit not for the reason I am about to give here; see his “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” 85–6. John Uhr, Deliberative Democracy in Australia: The Changing Place of Parliament, emphasizes parties as well and thus could also be considered an exception – if not for the fact that his account, based as it is on a peculiar, proceduralist reading of Aristotle, should ultimately not be considered a version of

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Notes to pages 30–4

deliberative democracy. The Australian parliamentary background to his approach thus comes as no surprise. See Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, 307–8, 486–7. Works calling for more weight to be given to the democratic side of the balance include Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis; Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy”; James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy, esp. ch. 4; and John S. Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations. By comparison, a greater willingness to endorse liberal institutions can be found in Habermas, Between Facts and Norms; and James Bohman, “The Coming of Age of Deliberative Democracy.” Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, “Power and Reason,” 242, in part quoting Habermas. See Martin Buber, “Dialogue.” Thomas Hobbes, by contrast, in Leviathan, 133, appears to believe that individuals are honoured only if we come to agree with them: “When wee believe any saying whatsoever it be, to be true, from arguments taken, not from the thing it selfe, or from the principles of naturall Reason, but from the Authority, and good opinion we have, of him that hath sayd it; then is the speaker, or person we believe in, or trust in, and whose word we take, the object of our Faith; and the Honour done in Believing, is done to him onely.” For more on honour, see my novel The Adventurous Young Philosopher Theo Hoshen of Toronto. See, for example, Carlos Santiago Nino, The Constitution of Deliberative Democracy, esp. ch. 7. Habermas affirms judicial review in his Between Facts and Norms, 167–8. One of the clearest formulations of this is also one of the earliest. See Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, 109. See, for example, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, ch. 2. See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 309. See Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age, esp. 63. A recent psychological study on charitable giving has even found that “when thinking analytically, people discount sympathy towards identifiable victims but fail to generate sympathy toward statistical victims,” which suggests that “sympathetic reactions are undermined by deliberative thinking.” See Deborah A. Small, George Loewenstein, and Paul Slovic, “Can Insight

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33 34 35

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Breed Callousness? The Impact of Learning about the Identifiable Victim Effect on Sympathy,” 2, 21. For more on patriotic conversation, see Susan Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict, Citizenship; and my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, ch. 3. See my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, ch. 3; and Chambers, Reasonable Democracy, 160. See Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 166–7. Some deliberative democrats are more explicit about this than others. Samuel Freeman is particularly so in his “Deliberative Democracy: A Sympathetic Comment,” 372–3. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 308. Ibid., 299. See, for example, ibid., 168–76, 373–4; and Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond, 50–1. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 296. Adam Przeworski, “Deliberation and Ideological Domination,” 141–2. Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond, 78–9. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 300 (see also 361–2). And see Bohman, Public Deliberation, 179. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 307. Here, the Habermasian would respond that we need to distinguish between “discourses of justification” and “discourses of application” (see ibid., 162), another distinction that, I would claim, is overdrawn. Paul Ricoeur, “The Act of Judging,” 128. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Epilogue to ‘Who Am I and Who Are You?’” 146. In his “Hermeneutics as Practical Philosophy,” 105, Gadamer further states: “The very idea of a definitive interpretation seems to be intrinsically contradictory. Interpretation is always on the way.” Jocelyn Maclure, Récits identitaires: Le Québec à l’épreuve du pluralisme, 214, my translation. See my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, ch. 5. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 486–7. See Dryzek, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond, ch. 4. Ibid., 52. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, 162. Bohman, Public Deliberation, 175. On the distinction, see chapter 12.

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55 I am thinking, of course, of what has come to be known as “the Sokal hoax.” See the editors of Lingua Franca, eds, The Sokal Hoax: The Sham that Shook the Academy.

c h a p t e r th r e e 1 Quoted in Northrop Frye, Words with Power, 1. 2 Jean Améry, “Torture,” 32–3. 3 See, for example, Demetrius, A Greek Critic: Demetrius on Style, nos 208–20; and Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, vol. 2, bk IV.2.63–4; vol. 3, bk VI.2.25–36; vol. 4, bk VIII.3.61–82. 4 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk 3, ch. 3, sec. 6. 5 For more on this sense of “things,” see Martin Heidegger, “The Thing.” 6 See, for example, Michael Lewis, ed., Teaching Collocation: Further Developments in the Lexical Approach. Indeed, memory researchers have found that a thing is made memorable precisely when it is associated meaningfully or “encoded” with things one already knows. See Daniel L. Schacter, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past, ch. 2. 7 For more, see Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History. 8 Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Intelligence, 275. 9 Quoted in Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, 128, my emphasis. 10 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 300. Not that Arendt would support the claims about human rights that I am making here. See Peg Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The Predicament of Common Responsibility. 11 Michael Ignatieff, The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience, 5. 12 Quoted in Michael Ignatieff, “Human Rights as Politics,” 4. 13 Maurice Blanchot, “Sade’s Reason,” 24–5. 14 On this definition of personhood, see Charles Taylor, “The Concept of a Person.” 15 Quoted in Robert N. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer, 129. 16 I thus disagree with Avishai Margalit and Gabriel Motzkin, “The Uniqueness of the Holocaust,” where they emphasize the dehumanizing form of racism as regards the Nazis.

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17 Joseph Goebbels, “The Jews are Guilty!” Hitler refers repeatedly to Jews as a “people” (Volk) in his Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim, bk 1, ch. 11. For more on evil destruction, see chapter 11 herein. 18 Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah, 123. 19 Richard Rorty does the first in his “Habermas, Derrida, and the Functions of Philosophy,” 322–3; and the second in his “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality.” Rorty’s blurring of the distinction between thick and thin is a reflection of his pragmatist failure to distinguish between the methodologies of the human and natural sciences, but it would take me too far afield to show how here. 20 Richard Rorty, “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,” 46. 21 See, for example, Michael Ignatieff, “Human Rights as Idolatry,” 79. 22 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” 266. 23 Noam Chomsky is among those who have yet to accept this; see his “‘Recovering Rights’: A Crooked Path.” 24 These values include not only those expressed by what I have called the “minimal global ethic,” which prohibits such utterly base acts as murder, torture, slavery, and other forms of gross cruelty, but also the global common good that is the basis of the world’s civic or political community. See chapter 10. 25 See Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality.” 26 In 2004, for example, Canada spent $1,241 million on foreign aid and $13,413 million on domestic social assistance. See Statistics Canada at http://www.statcan.ca. 27 See my Shall We Dance? A Patriotic Politics for Canada. 28 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, sec. 63. 29 This is an error made by all “neutralist” political philosophers. See chapter 1, sec. I.i. 30 Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” 4, 8, 6, 6. 31 Ibid., 5, 11, 5, 15, 7, 6, 14, 5. 32 Ibid., 7, 8, 9, 11, 9, 13, 6, 6, 9. 33 Ibid., 13, 14; Martha Nussbaum, “Reply,” 136–7, 138. Nussbaum’s priorities are made no clearer when, in later articles, she summarizes her position as calling for “a complicated dialogue between local attachments and loyalty to humanity,” one wherein we are to ask “how much humanity requires of us, and how much we are entitled to give to our own”; see her “The Capabilities Approach and Ethical Cosmopolitanism: A Response to Noah Feldman, 125; and her “Compassion and Terror,” 22. Although evidently aware of a tension between loyalties to the local and to the human, Nussbaum

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nevertheless fails to appreciate how, as we have seen, the abstractions of the latter undermine the former. One source of this contradiction is her sometimes adherence to an Aristotelian pluralism, which I describe in my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First, 71–2. See his defence of “institutional cosmopolitanism” in Thomas Pogge, “Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty,” 169–77. See especially Thomas Pogge, “General Introduction,” “Moral Universalism and Global Economic Justice,” and “Eradicating Systemic Poverty: Brief for a Global Resource Dividend.” See World Health Organization, The World Health Report 2003, annex, table 2. Pogge, “General Introduction,” 24. Pogge is alluding here to Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. I say “relatively uncontroversial” because I believe that law is but less controversial politics. See my “The Scales of Injustice.” Thomas Pogge, “Severe Poverty as a Human Rights Violation,” 17. See also his “Moral Universalism and Global Economic Justice.” See G.A. Cohen, “Political Philosophy and Personal Behavior.” Peter Singer thinks that we must; see his “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” Given that I believe his argument, which is based on abstract principles, to be sound, I obviously question the wisdom of applying such arguments to ethics. The rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe, who are the focus of Kristen Renwick Monroe’s study The Heart of Altruism: Perceptions of a Common Humanity, were, of course, very rare. See also Norman Geras, Solidarity in the Conversation of Mankind: The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty, ch. 1, where Geras shows that, pace Rorty, those rescuers’ sense of obligation to humanity cannot be considered an extension of their ordinary, more partial loyalties. For an amusing account of one man’s decision to try to live in this way and the effect it has on him and his family, see Nick Hornby’s novel How to Be Good. For the suggestion that most people tend to avoid acting heroically, consider the psychological study showing that our willingness to contribute to a charitable organization is greater when the act is presented as an exchange rather than as straight charity (e.g., when we are offered a product for our donation, even when the product itself holds little appeal). See J.G. Holmes, D.T. Miller, and M.J. Lerner, “Committing Altruism under the Cloak of Self-Interest: The Exchange Fiction.”

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45 Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” 11. 46 Nussbaum, “Reply,” 133. 47 Nussbaum has indicated that she is aware of this kind of objection, but she does not (as a cosmopolitan) respond to it; see ibid., 151n12. 48 As with the song “Carrot Juice Is Murder,” by the English Canadian comedy trio The Arrogant Worms. 49 See, for example, Isaiah Berlin, “Rationality of Value Judgements”; Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience, 72–8; Bernard Williams, “Human Rights and Relativism”; and Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism, 23–5. 50 This pluralist conception of rights has been developed in Joseph Raz, The Morality of Freedom, ch. 7; and William A. Galston, “Practical Philosophy and the Bill of Rights: Reflections on Some Contemporary Issues.” For a critique, see my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, ch. 7. 51 Hampshire, Innocence and Experience, 72, 74. 52 Michael Walzer, “Spheres of Affection,” 125: “I am not even aware that there is a world such that one could be a citizen of it.” 53 See Michael Walzer, “The Politics of Rescue,” 81. 54 Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, 108. This tepidness forces me to note the irony of this book’s epigraph, which is taken from the Yad Va-shem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. It should be said, however, that Walzer offers a somewhat stronger formulation in his later paper, “The Politics of Rescue,” 74, where he writes of the “obligation” to intervene. 55 Joseph de Maistre, Considérations sur la France, 102, my translation. 56 See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political. 57 Perhaps the original source of this failure is Aristotle’s conception of friendship. It is because Aristotle believes that friends are like those who share “one soul” that he can say that they “have no need of justice”; see Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin, 1168b7–8, 1155a28. But they are not, and they (sometimes) do. 58 For more on the distinction, see chapter 12. 59 One recalls that, if it were not for the insistence of sectarian Protestants, there would be no rights in the American constitutional documents of 1776, meaning that the French Revolution would have been without its chief model for the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789). So goes the by now essentially confirmed thesis of German constitutional historian and legal philosopher Georg Jellinek (1851–1911). See, for example, Hans Joas, “Max Weber and the Origins of Human Rights: A Study of Cultural Innovation.”

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60 See, for example, Ignatieff, “Human Rights as Politics,” 13–17, 35–6, 45–8. 61 Ignatieff, “Human Rights as Idolatry,” 80. 62 J.A.G. Griffith, The Politics of the Judiciary, 342: “In the societies of our world today judges do not stand out as protectors of liberty, of the rights of man, of the unprivileged, nor have they insisted that holders of great economic power, private or public, should use it with moderation. Their view of the public interest, when it has gone beyond the interest of governments, has not been wide enough to embrace the interests of political, ethnic, social or other minorities. Only occasionally has the power of the supreme judiciary been exercised in the positive assertion of fundamental values. In both democratic and totalitarian societies, the judiciary has naturally served the prevailing political and economic forces. Politically, judges are parasitic.” 63 The chief aim here should be for all to strive for their version of what I have called the “civic balance,” an equilibrium between laws just in content and laws just in terms of (democratic) form (i.e., considered legitimate by a majority of citizens); see my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, 195–6.

chapter four 1 In The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, 305. 2 My translation. “Ce trésor est la réserve poétique, le renouvellement émotif où puiseront les siècles à venir. Il ne peut être transmis que transformé, sans quoi c’est le gauchissement.” 3 See Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism; and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 4 See Isaiah Berlin, “Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power”; Isaiah Berlin, “The Bent Twig: On the Rise of Nationalism”; and Charles Taylor, “Nationalism and Modernity.” 5 See Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation”; and Anthony W. Marx, Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism. 6 Berlin, “Nationalism,” 346. 7 The “chance” of receiving an inspiration is thus unlike the notion defended by Reinhart Koselleck, for whom chance has a fully historical nature; see his “Chance as Motivational Trace in Historical

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Writing,” 117. Otherwise put: the contingency of inspiration is not only incommensurable; it is non-interpretable. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Of the New Idol,” 75. Eyal Chowers, “Time in Zionism: The Life and Afterlife of a Temporal Revolution,” 655, 654. Ibid., 657. See Johann Gottfried von Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, bks 7–8. See Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe: Tome 1, bk 12, ch. 1; and Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare, bk 2. See Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy, bk 7, ch. 5. As Mikhail Bakhtin describes in Rabelais and His World, 124, the ideal of mothergeniuses “induced the romantic to seek the seed of the future in the past and to appreciate the past from the point of view of that future which it had fertilized and generated.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Government of Poland, 11. See Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism, esp. 3–4, 194–8. See Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations; and his Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity. See, for example, Hastings, Construction of Nationhood, 22, 48–50, 69; and Anthony D. Smith, “History and National Destiny: Reponses and Clarifications,” 197–8. Hastings, Construction of Nationhood, 47, my emphasis. See Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, fragment 1, lines 1–858. See Armand Himy, “Paradise Lost as a Republican ‘Tractatus Theologico-Politicus’”; and J.G.A. Pockock, “Introduction,” in James Harrington, The Political Works of James Harrington. See, for example, Hudson Meadwell, “Republics, Nations and Transitions to Modernity,” 22–6. See Hastings, Construction of Nationhood, 26; and Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870– 1914. See Smith, “History and National Destiny,” 200–1. Different ways to defend the distinction can be found in Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism; Jürgen Habermas, “Appendix II: Citizenship and National Identity”; and my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First.

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25 See Anderson, Imagined Communities, 25–33; Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, esp. 9–61, 87–8; and Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, 286–9. 26 See Anderson, Imagined Communities, 33–6. 27 See ibid., 6. 28 On “greatness” as so understood, see chapter 11. 29 See the following by Charles Taylor: “Liberal Politics and the Public Sphere,” 266–71; Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited, 64–7; and Modern Social Imaginaries, ch. 13. 30 See Danièle Hervieu-Léger, La Religion pour Mémoire, 148–55. 31 See ibid., 222–5; and Norman J. Girardot’s review essay “Ecce Elvis: ‘Elvis Studies’ as a Postmodernist Paradigm for the Academic Study of Religions.” 32 See Peter L. Berger, A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity, ch. 5. 33 On the latter, see Mark Juergensmeyer, Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State. 34 See Smith, Chosen Peoples, 61; and Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution, ch. 3. 35 For the threat of being crushed by the mountain, see Isidore Epstein, ed., The Babylonian Talmud, vol. 1, Sefer Mo’ed: Tractate Shabbath, 88a–b. For a recent commentary along these lines, see Emmanuel Levinas, “The Temptation of Temptation.” And for more on this “revelatory creativity,” of which the Covenant can be considered an example, see chapter 10, sec. III.i. 36 Smith, Chosen Peoples, 49. 37 Ibid., 24–5. 38 Ibid., 255, 256. On page 258, Smith refers to “those who seek to create nations,” but nowhere does he indicate that he means anything other than “reinterpretation” by this (he also often lumps interpretive and creative works together). 39 See ibid., 260. 40 See ibid., 171–2, 223–35. “For all their differences in period costume and accessories, they expressed the same didactic ideal of heroic selfsacrifice, and were repeated and supplemented well into the nineteenth century” (235). 41 Ibid., 41, 42 (see also 235–8). 42 Ibid., 25. 43 Berger, Far Glory, 96.

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44 Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” 19. 45 On France and its minority nations, see, for example, Graham Vaughan Rogers, “Cultural Pluralism under the One and Incorrigible French Republic: Diwan and the Breton Language”; and some of the articles in the journal Pouvoirs Locaux, no. 63 (Dec. 2004), which is dedicated to the theme “Décentralisation: Les nouveaux espaces du Patrimoine.” 46 On the Québécois and the other nations in the province, see my Shall We Dance? A Patriotic Politics for Canada, 67–80. 47 Chowers, for one, admits as much as regards Zionism; see his “Time in Zionism,” 676–8. Zionism, however, has evolved; today, it is a much more dialogical ideology, as the participation of Zionists in the negotiations of the Oslo peace process demonstrates. That said, it still has a way to go. See chapter 6. 48 For one account of this, see Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, esp. 23–4; for another, see René Girard, Violence and the Sacred. 49 See Juergensmeyer, Religious Nationalism, ch. 6. 50 This is related to the crises that Edward Shils, following Max Weber, has identified as a precondition for the eruption of charisma. See Shils, “Charisma,” 132–33; and Shils, “Charisma, Order, and Status,” 263. 51 See, for example, Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty; Stuart Hampshire, Justice Is Conflict; and Bernard Williams, In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument. 52 Juergensmeyer, Religious Nationalism, 21. 53 Northrop Frye, “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada,” 215, 219. On Canada’s attraction to the pluralist politics of negotiation, see my Shall We Dance? 54 See my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics. 55 On the fierceness of nationalist attitudes towards language policy, see Joshua A. Fishman, Language and Nationalism: Two Integrative Essays, ch. 2. 56 From a photo in Paul Beaugrand-Chapagne, ed., Un siècle à Montréal, 68. 57 Gershom Scholem, “Thoughts about Our Language,” 28. 58 See Pierre Elliott Trudeau, “Quebec and the Constitutional Problem,” 31. 59 Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Max Nemni, and Monique Nemni, “Entretien avec Pierre Elliott Trudeau,” 17, my translation. 60 See, for example, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, The Essential Trudeau. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority

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Rights, also defends a neutralist liberal theory of justice, although, unlike Trudeau, he is open to explicitly recognizing national communities. Kymlicka is able to do so because he believes that such communities can, when implicated in questions of justice, be theoretically reconciled with respect for the individual. But this leaves no room for the possibility that the needs of national communities and those of the individual can conflict and that, when they do, the latter should not always trump the former. 61 Alan Patten, “Political Theory and Language Policy,” 693. 62 Ibid., 710. In a later paper on language policy, however, Patten takes a neutralist approach. Now the relevant values are to be balanced according to the priorities and conditions established by an abstract systematic theory. The implication is that the values have been commensurated and thus that justice, although still a matter of balancing, somehow no longer requires compromise. Hence the absence of any talk about “difficult choices.” See Alan Patten, “What Kind of Bilingualism?”

chapter five 1 Will Kymlicka, “Federalism, Nationalism, and Multiculturalism,” 277, 288. 2 Ibid., 288. 3 Jeffrey Simpson, “Jeffrey Simpson Takes Your Questions on Politics.” 4 See Kymlicka, “Federalism, Nationalism, and Multiculturalism,” 288. 5 Wayne Norman, Negotiating Nationalism: Nation-Building, Federalism, and Secession in the Multinational State, 26. 6 See Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin, bks 8–9. 7 For more on these two modes of dialogue, as well as on the politics that is supported by distinguishing them properly, see my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First. 8 On why the civic or political common good must be seen as an intrinsic good, see Charles Taylor, “Irreducibly Social Goods,” esp. 139–43. 9 For an argument as to why, see chapter 4. 10 As Max Weber puts it, to share an ethnicity is to share a belief in “common descent”; see his Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, vol. 1, 389. 11 See, for example, Louis Balthazar, “Les nombreux visages du nationalisme au Québec,” 38. 12 As with Norman’s account cited above. See also Avishai Margalit and Joseph Raz, “National Self-Determination.”

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13 See Ivan Illich, The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich as Told to David Cayley, 71–9, 225–6. 14 Ibid., 226. 15 See, for example, Kenneth McRoberts, Quebec: Social Change and Political Crisis, chs 4–5. 16 Kymlicka, “Federalism, Nationalism, and Multiculturalism,” 278. 17 Bernard Landry, “Une nation? Yes sir!” my translation. Eugénie Brouillet would certainly disagree. Concluding her densely argued La Négation de la nation: L’identité culturelle québécoise et le fédéralisme canadien, she writes that “the original Canadian constitution has undergone a series of jurisprudential reinterpretations that has had the cumulative affect of a greater centralization of power in the country, and this to the detriment of the legislative powers necessary for the survival and flourishing of Québécois cultural identity” (323, my translation). Yet as a resident of Quebec since 2000, I cannot help but note how deeply impressed I have been by the richness and vibrancy of contemporary Québécois culture. Could the nation have managed this without self-determination? For an excellent survey of that richness, see Taras Grescoe, Sacré Blues: An Unsentimental Journey through Quebec. 18 Jeff Jacoby, “‘The Essence of Greekness,’ So Far Away from Home,” 7. 19 I first advanced this critique of Chrétien’s motion in my Shall We Dance? A Patriotic Politics for Canada, 107. For a more philosophical treatment of the issue, see my “Exiger la reconnaissance?” 20 See http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/parliament39/motionquebecnation.html. 21 See Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair, 66–7. 22 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Tracks:_The_Canadian_Version. 23 Margaret Atwood, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, ch. 11. 24 Margaret Atwood, Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature, 11. 25 As with the vision of a “Just Society” that inspired former Canadian prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau to put the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the Constitution; see, for example, his “The Values of a Just Society.” 26 Kenneth McRoberts, Misconceiving Canada: The Struggle for National Unity, is an example of a work that affirms this pluralist conception of Canadian politics. There are many others.

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27 Norman, Negotiating Nationalism, 75. 28 Ibid., 99. However, Norman also states that “national identities are not mutually exclusive, and that rival identity-shaping projects are not locked in a zero-sum battle” (166–7). But this will be so only if the members of those nations recognize that they share a political community and hence that it makes sense for them to respond to their conflicts with conversation and not only negotiation. Norman, however, does not appear to recognize the existence of this community. 29 See my “Taking Politics Seriously – but Not Too Seriously.” 30 See, for example, Chaim Gans, The Limits of Nationalism, ch. 1.

chapter six 1 Barak’s offer consisted of 94% of the territories, with an equivalent of 6% to be swapped from land within Israel proper, and 100% of the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians were to have a form of sovereignty over East Jerusalem, allowing it to become the capital of their new state, while sovereignty over the Temple Mount was to be shared. Regarding refugees, about 40,000 were to be allowed to return to Israel proper as part of a family reunification program, while the others were welcome to move to the new state. See the European Union “nonpaper” describing the outcome of the permanent status talks at Taba in January 2001, prepared by the eu special representative to the Middle East process, Ambassador Miguel Moratinos, http://www.gush-shalom.org/archives/taba.html. 2 See chapter 1. 3 See Yoram Peri, “Afterword,” in Yitzhak Rabin, The Rabin Memoirs, 364–5, 370; and Efraim Inbar, Rabin and Israel’s National Security, 138–9. 4 Evidently, this conception of toleration is incompatible with that of those, such as Hagit Benbaji and David Heyd, who conceive of it as being of special value, or “supererogatory”; see their “The Charitable Perspective: Forgiveness and Toleration as Supererogatory.” For although I agree that toleration is not a deontic moral duty (one that is either always obligatory or always prohibited), this does not make it supererogatory since I would claim that no duties are deontic. Otherwise put, ethics, and indeed politics, are at all times matters of personal, practical judgment. 5 Peri, “Afterword,” 350–6, for example, argues that Rabin began as a “Jordanist,” one who assumes a solution to the conflict could come from territorial compromise with Jordan alone, and that he came to

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see the Palestinians as worthy negotiating partners in their own right for purely strategic reasons. According to Ephraim Inbar, however, in Rabin and Israel’s National Security, 23, “it is noteworthy that Rabin, unlike others in Israel, was ascribing to the Palestinians a national identity as early as the 1960s.” Ehud Barak and Benny Morris, “Camp David and After – Continued: A Rejoinder,” 47. Ibid., 48. Ibid. Daniel Pipes, “Why Oslo Hopes Turned to Dust.” This has even been shown to apply, and effectively so, to some members of Al-Qaeda; see James Brandon, “Koranic Duels Ease Terror.” For a summary of the different kinds of Arab and Muslim anti-Semitic propaganda, see Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice, 127–30, 133–8, 192–235. See Agha Hussein and Robert Malley, “Camp David and After: An Exchange (2. A Reply to Ehud Barak).” I want to hazard a guess as to the source of this fear. At the time of Israel’s establishment, Zionists identified themselves with two archetypal figures, “the farmer” and “the soldier,” holding both in great esteem for quite understandable reasons given the context. Both were also very far from the image of “the scholar,” that fragile, bookish Jew of the diaspora. And, wonders the Jewish Israeli, was not that the very same Jew who, assimilated into the mores of European civilization, went all too peacefully to Auschwitz, hence proving to be the ultimate freiyer? See Eyal Chowers, “Time in Zionism: The Life and Afterlife of a Temporal Revolution,” 675–8. Martin Buber, “No More Declarations,” 79–80. From The Koran, trans. N.J. Dawood, 49:13, 17:104. For more on this and related themes, see Khaled Abou El Fadl, “The Place of Tolerance in Islam.” I once contacted a representative of flame (Facts and Logic about the Middle East), which has spent millions of dollars on pro-Zionist advertisements in English-speaking newspapers and magazines. I asked why they didn’t consider doing the same in Arabic, in publications directed at Arabs. The reply: “What would be the point?” Consider, for example, the America’s Voices program, which brings American talk-radio hosts to Israel to broadcast their shows from

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25 26

27

28

29

Notes to pages 100–4

there; see Michael Freund, “The New Hasbara.” Nathan Guttman, “Israel’s struggle for hearts and minds,” reveals just how steep is our hurdle here. Its focus is strictly limited to the matter of American public opinion – that Arab opinion should be of interest is not even contemplated. At least many Americans think otherwise. See, for example, the report of the Advisory Group on Public Diplomacy for the Arab and Muslim World, Changing Minds, Winning Peace. See “Israel’s pr budget lower than ‘Bamba’ advertising budget.” Yair Ettinger, “Civil Service far from reaching Arab quota.” Interview with Gideon Meir, Jerusalem, 4 July 2002. See, for example, Tony Judt, “Israel: The Alternative.” Judt’s model is best described as “postnational.” Charles Taylor, “Impediments to a Canadian Future,” 194. To the worry that this would fail to represent Christian Palestinians, I reply that symbols can mean different things to different people. For example, although I am a Jewish Montrealer, I identify with the cross atop Mont Royal because, like so many others, I see it in purely secular terms. Midrash Rabbah: Numbers, vol. 2, ch. 21.15. In The Teaching of Buddha (The Buddhist Bible): A Compendium of Many Scriptures Translated from The Japanese, 119, the Buddha says: “Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” In Fischel Lachower and Isaiah Tishby, eds, The Wisdom of the Zohar, vol. 1, 247, we find: “When He created the world with the attribute of reshit (beginning), He descended upon it, but there was no diminution above, and similarly with every sefirah; like someone lighting a candle from a candle, where there is no diminution in the first one, nor in the second, ad infinitum, without end.” Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Epipsychidion,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, lines 160–3. Among the neo-Pythagoreans, see Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, vol. 2, bk 11, ch. 18. See Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book, part 1; Heskel M. Haddad, Jews of Arab and Islamic Countries: History, Problems, Solutions, chs 1–2; Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam; and Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, part 1. On the political philosophy of patriotism, see my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First.

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chapter seven 1 See Stuart Hampshire, Justice Is Conflict. 2 See chapter 10. 3 On the United States, see Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse; and on Canada, see Paul M. Sniderman et al., The Clash of Rights: Liberty, Equality, and Legitimacy in Pluralist Democracy. 4 The major participants of the forum were former deputy prime minister John Manley; general counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association Alan Borovoy; and associate professor of history at the University of Toronto Wesley Wark. The forum was broadcast on the cbc Radio One program The House and is available at http://www.cbc.ca/thehouse/ audio.html. 5 The legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron has also neglected to do so, as has the American jurist Richard A. Posner. See Waldron, “Security and Liberty: The Image of Balance”; and Posner, Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency. 6 As could be brought about by such measures as ensuring that flight attendants receive martial arts training. See section 4 of Philip E. Agre, “Some Notes on War in a World without Boundaries.” 7 Christopher Gowans, “Introduction: The Debate on Moral Dilemmas,” 3. 8 See Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. 9 Thanks to Avery Plaw for the matzo ball metaphor. 10 See, for example, Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad. 11 Things become (metaphorically) more complicated when we recognize that most contemporary analytic philosophers also aim for thin theories of the good – that is, for systematically interrelated principles that are based on an interlocking of the atomistically conceived values, or as a Rawlsian would call them, “basic goods.” Unlike pluralists, these thinkers affirm a form of holism, albeit one that must be distinguished from the “organic” or “holographic” kind that I shall advocate below. For the contrast between systematic and organic holism, see my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First, ch. 1. 12 For more on the type of holism that this implies, see chapter 8.

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13 See Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and Its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind, 31. 14 I have developed this in greater detail in my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, ch. 3. 15 See Patrick Smith, “The Airport Security Follies.” 16 Lester B. Pearson, “The Four Faces of Peace.” Pearson, it should be noted, also mentions “discussions” and “understanding,” so he might be thought to be invoking what I call conversation. But I would claim that he was referring to no more than the preliminary understandings that are sometimes necessary for getting a grasp of the demands brought to a negotiating table. Pluralist philosophers also sometimes talk of understanding but only as the product of an imaginative, reconstructive process, a version of romantic hermeneutics that is said to allow us to understand our adversary while still “protecting” our own values. See, for example, Hampshire, Justice Is Conflict, x-xi; Isaiah Berlin and Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, 109; and Isaiah Berlin, “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” 10. Understanding in this sense has nothing to do with sharing or reconciliation, the goal of conversation. Interestingly, Berlin often invokes the minimal global ethic as the bridge that makes such understanding possible. But given the pluralist conception of understanding as requiring a sort of “jumping into the shoes” of the other, one wonders why a bridge is necessary. After all, is not the gap in question precisely the kind of thing that the romantic hermeneuticist jumps over? As I have argued elsewhere, we should reject his approach in favour of one based on a postromantic, Heideggerian hermeneutics, for it provides a much better account of how we can reach understandings across cultures. See my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, ch. 3; and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s critique of romantic hermeneutics in his Truth and Method, 291–300. 17 In Pearson, “The Four Faces of Peace.” 18 As I have argued in chapter 1. 19 For an account of how Canadians might do so, see my Shall We Dance? A Patriotic Politics for Canada.

chapter eight 1 Jonathan Dancy, Ethics without Principles, 7. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 185.

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Notes to pages 116–21 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

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Ibid. Ibid., 158 (see also 142–3). Stuart Hampshire, Morality and Conflict, 106. Dancy, Ethics without Principles, 158. Ibid., 159. See Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, ch. 2. Pluralist moral and political philosophers such as Stuart Hampshire, Isaiah Berlin, and Bernard Williams are also vulnerable to this criticism; see my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First, 88–90. This is only to be expected since their approach is not even as holistic as Dancy’s (Ethics without Principles, 194–5), as he himself may be said to recognize when he warns against conflating his notion of default values with that of core meanings (i.e., with the idea that values lay claim to thin, invariant or constant centres that are surrounded by thick, variant semantic peripheries). For that is precisely how pluralists conceive of values. See, for example, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, nos 211, 217; and his On Certainty, no. 204. See my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, 90–2. See Dancy, Ethics without Principles, 200. Ibid., 104. Hence Hubert L. Dreyfus’s reference to such judgment as engaging a “practical holism”; see his “Holism and Hermeneutics.” Paul Ricoeur, “The Act of Judging,” 128. This is as true of decision making in politics as it is in ethics. See chapter 2, sec. IV. See Dancy, Ethics without Principles, 74, 198. On the latter, see Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History. See my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, ch. 1. Dancy, Ethics without Principles, 199. See ibid., 105, 198. See ibid., 10, 27, 105, 143. See Michael Stocker, Plural and Conflicting Values, 148–9. See my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, ch. 3. Jonathan Dancy, Moral Reasons, 109, 120. Dancy, Ethics without Principles, 43. See, for example, ibid., 8, 11, 20, 33–5, 46, 49–50, 53, 55, 57–60, 64–7, 87, 97–8, 106–7, 127, 130, 148, 158, 160, 199, 202–5. Ibid., 140. Ibid., 133.

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31 On the distinction between “opponents” and “adversaries” in philosophical dialogue, see chapter 12. 32 Dancy, Ethics without Principles, 142.

chapter nine 1 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, esp. secs 1–5 (which, it must be said, are in tension with the minority doctrine advanced in sec. 49); and G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, secs 699–747; and his Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 1, esp. intro. to part 1. 2 Charles Taylor, “Charles Taylor Replies,” 241; see also his “The Diversity of Goods,” 238; and his Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, 512. 3 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 512: “The artist is like the race-car driver, and [the philosopher and critic] are the mechanics in the pit; except that in this case the mechanics usually have four thumbs, and they have only a hazy grasp of the wiring, much less than the drivers have.” See also Charles Taylor, Hegel, esp. 479. 4 Charles Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals.” 5 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 18, 22. 6 Charles Taylor, “Language and Human Nature,” 235–6. 7 Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, 16. 8 See Charles Taylor, “It Is Strange and Wonderful that We Exist.” 9 I thus agree with Hegel when he describes the “inspiration of the artist” as a “force foreign to him,” a “necessity” that he cannot grasp; see Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817), par. 560, quoted in Taylor, Hegel, 473. Only for me, it is more foreign than Hegel can accept, since it transcends his philosophy, and its inscrutability is a mark not of art’s deficiency but of its potential greatness. 10 Taylor, “Diversity of Goods,” 239. 11 See Taylor, Sources of the Self, 20–4, 63–75. Whether or not Taylor thinks all moral frameworks are based on hypergoods has been a matter of some debate; see Ruth Abbey, Charles Taylor, 36–7. 12 See, for example, the following by Charles Taylor: “Diversity of Goods”; “What is Human Agency?”; Sources of the Self, 85–90; “Comments and Replies,” 242–5; Ethics of Authenticity, 52; “The Motivation behind a Procedural Ethics”; and “Justice after Virtue.” 13 See Taylor, Sources of the Self, 72; and his “Explanation and Practical Reason.”

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Notes to pages 125–7

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14 See, for example, Taylor, “Diversity of Goods.” 15 Charles Taylor, “Rationality,” 141 (see also 145–6). 16 This is an implicit assumption of such stand-alone texts as Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” and “Equality”; Stuart Hampshire, Freedom of the Individual; and Bernard Williams, “From Freedom to Liberty: The Construction of a Political Value” and “The Idea of Equality.” It is worth noting that Hampshire came to recognize there are goods that are partly defined in opposition to other goods; see his Justice Is Conflict, 34–5. 17 See Taylor, Ethics of Authenticity, ch. 10; and his “Liberal Politics and the Public Sphere,” 282–6. 18 For more on the latter distinction, see chapter 12. And for more on conversation and negotiation, as well as on the politics supported by distinguishing them properly, see my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First. 19 Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 27. See also Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 174. 20 See, for example, the following by Charles Taylor: The Pattern of Politics, 8, 59; “What is Human Agency?” 27; “The Hermeneutics of Conflict,” 223, 225–6; “The Stakes of Constitutional Reform,” 146 (where he suggests that “re-defining” Canada is a matter for “negotiations”); and “Response to Bhabha,” 186–7. Distinguishing between these terms would provide Taylor with a response to Neil Levy. Levy complains that because practical reason as Taylor conceives of it cannot cope with people who refuse to listen to “error-reducing” arguments (i.e., people whom I would describe as taking an adversarial stance), such arguments cannot be said to have rational value at all; see Neil Levy, “Charles Taylor on Overcoming Incommensurability.” Affirming my distinctions, however, would allow Taylor to claim that those who refuse to strive together in conversation are, by definition, less rational. 21 See Charles Taylor, “Aristotle or Nietzsche?” 304. The term “moral loss” is from Bernard Williams, “Conflict of Values.” 22 Alasdair MacIntyre highlights the doctrine in his After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 157. MacIntyre further develops its implications as taken up by Thomism in his “Moral Dilemmas,” 379–82. 23 Charles Taylor, “Critical Notice: Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness,” 813. 24 Ibid., 811. 25 See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ch. 4, sec. A(3). 26 See Bernard Williams, “Deciding to Believe.”

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27 Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” 225. Axel Honneth fails to do so as well in his The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. For more on this issue, see my “Exiger la reconnaissance?” 28 Charles Taylor, “Reply to de Sousa and Davis,” 452. Commenting on his exchange with the cognitivist Ronald de Sousa, Taylor writes: “At the moment we are even fighting over what we’re fighting over, but that’s par for the course in philosophy” (454). On the roots of this belief, see Janice Moulton, “A Paradigm of Philosophy: The Adversary Method”; and Michel Foucault on the prevalence of adversarial metaphors in ancient Greek ethics in his The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, part 1, ch. 3. 29 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 72, my emphasis. Elsewhere in the same book, Taylor points out that, if he is to “convince” others of his argument, “much of the ground will have to be fought for” (10). 30 Taylor, “Charles Taylor Replies,” 236. The book is The Explanation of Behaviour. 31 See, for example, the following by Charles Taylor: “The Nature and Scope of Distributive Justice,” 313; “Language and Society,” 32; and Ethics of Authenticity, 111. 32 Charles Taylor, “Rorty and Philosophy,” 158. 33 Taylor, “Hermeneutics of Conflict,” 224. Indeed, as far back as 1959 Taylor was referring to the human, and not only natural, sciences as an “army” and to the terms of philosophical debate as “weapons”; see Charles Taylor, “Ontology,” 136; and his “Phenomenology and Linguistic Analysis,” 110. 34 Taylor shares this ambiguity with Heidegger, for whom “the basic meaning of logos [is] gathering and togetherness ... [But] gathering is never a mere driving-together and heaping up. It maintains in a common bond the conflicting and that which tends apart ... By uniting the opposites [it] maintains the full sharpness of their tension”; see Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 134. 35 Charles Taylor, “Human Rights, Human Difference,” 19; see also his “Language and Society,” 34; and his Sources of the Self, chs 20–4. 36 Van Gogh’s painting A Pair of Shoes (1886) is offered as an example of the former, and the building of an ancient Greek temple provides an example of the latter; see Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 35–7, 41–50. Michael Oakeshott, in “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” 523, is among those who follow Kant in asserting a diametrically opposed view: “As I understand it, the poet is

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37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55

56

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not saying anything at all about ‘things’ (that is, about images belonging to a world of discourse other than that of poetry) ... In short, when you know what things are really like you can make no poems.” Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 47. As described by J.M. Bernstein, in his The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno, 119, for Heidegger the earth stands as “a nonhistorical principle of transcendental opacity, a principle of reserve.” Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” 49–50, 55, 57. Ibid., 48–9. Ibid., 63. See Taylor, Sources of the Self, chs 20–4. See Charles Taylor, “Heidegger, Language, and Ecology,” 116–20. See Taylor, Sources of the Self, 458. See ibid., 462. Ibid., 465–6. Ibid., 467. Ibid., 422, 441–7. Taylor, “Language and Human Nature,” 236. Charles Taylor, “Action as Expression,” 77; see also his “Heidegger, Language, and Ecology,” 107–9. On the latter see, for example, Taylor, “What is Human Agency?” and “The Dialogical Self.” See, for example, R.D. Laing, The Divided Self, 27, 89. See Charles Taylor, “The Moral Topography of the Self,” 300. E.J. Hundert, “Augustine and the Sources of the Divided Self,” has criticized Taylor for overlooking the divided self in his account of Augustine. And Nicholas H. Smith, Charles Taylor: Meaning, Morals and Modernity, 101, has pointed to a tension between the unifying narrative conception of self-development articulated in part 1 of Sources of the Self and Taylor’s later recognition of the modernist fragmented self. Taylor, I suspect, would make the hasty judgment that divided selves are simply pathological; see his Sources of the Self, 27–8. Taylor, Ethics of Authenticity, 62–3 (see also 65). Taylor, Sources of the Self, 482. See ibid., 47–52; and Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 183. In his Secular Age, 322–52, 357, 362–8, 375, 398, 450, Taylor even refers to “cosmic” and “denominational” imaginaries. Taylor might be read as accepting precisely this, given his endorsement, against Hegel and Nietzsche, of the Christian notion of grace; see his Hegel, 493–4, and Sources of the Self, 447–55. See also Stephen

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61 62 63

64 65

66

67 68 69

Notes to pages 131–2

Mulhall, “Sources of the Self’s Senses of Itself: The Making of a Theistic Reading of Modernity,” 146–51. See Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye’s Notebooks and Lectures on the Bible and Other Religious Texts: Collected Works, vol. 13, 7. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 493. See Taylor, “Diversity of Goods,” 234–7. As Christopher Hitchens does in his The Missionary Position: Mother Theresa in Theory and Practice. On these categories, see chapter 11 herein. Mikko Yrjönsuuri, “Reconsidering the Need for Selves,” vol. 71, 94–5, criticizes Taylor’s account of Saint Francis of Assisi on similar grounds. See Charles Taylor, “The Concept of a Person,” part 1. Charles Taylor, “Iris Murdoch and Moral Philosophy,” 27. See also his “Spirituality of Life – and Its Shadow,” 13, “The Immanent CounterEnlightenment,” 386–8, and Modern Social Imaginaries, 57, 60, 65. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, 151, 290, goes so far as to identify Taylor as a (neo-)Thomist. See Taylor, “Rationality,” 149. In his “Comparison, History, Truth,” 150–1, Taylor begs the question when he admits that there is no answer in principle to the charge that some new interpretation is still not in some sense partial or ethnocentric. For at the same time, he claims that if the new interpretation is more inclusive, it necessarily brings gain, a degree of overcoming of ethnocentrism. But is the new interpretation more inclusive? Our belief in the efficacy of interpretive practical reason might thus be said to imply belief in God. This claim would be an example of what Taylor means when he writes in Sources of the Self, 73, that “nothing prevents a priori our coming to see God or the Good as essential to our best account of the human moral world.” I suspect that Taylor must appeal to such a belief if he is to respond adequately to Neil Levy’s complaint in “Charles Taylor on Overcoming Incommensurability,” 58–9, that because interpretive practical reason can advance arguments as only dimensionally, and never globally, superior, it cannot overcome relativism. See Isidore Epstein, ed., The Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Nazir, 2b–3a. See Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling. See Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity, ch. 12.

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70 Miguel de Unamuno, The Agony of Christianity, 10. 71 Taylor, “Immanent Counter-Enlightenment,” 399, my emphasis. See also the following by Charles Taylor: “Iris Murdoch and Moral Philosophy,” 27; “Spirituality of Life – and Its Shadow,” 13; “A Catholic Modernity?” 28–9; and Secular Age, 639. 72 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 270. 73 See Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited, 6–16, 20–1, 79–107. 74 Denys Turner, for one, feels it necessary to reject the term “experience” as a means of referring to the union of the mystic and God; see his The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism, 1–8. Moshe Idel, however, in Kabbalah: New Perspectives, chs 3–5, while wishing to give unio mystica its due in Jewish mysticism, nevertheless does not hesitate to describe it as an “experience.” 75 See William James, Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human Nature, 6–7, 22–5, 127–88, 340, 386, 413. 76 Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today, 16. 77 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 63. 78 Ibid., 65. 79 Ibid., 66. 80 Ibid., 106–7. See also Taylor, Secular Age, 319. Taylor describes himself as “fiercely committed” to this view in the “Introduction” to his Human Agency and Language and in his Philosophy and the Human Sciences, 12. Paul Ricoeur, “Le fondamental et l’historique,” 33–4, is among those who do not share this commitment, however, as suggested by his claim that the heterogeneity of hypergoods constitutes the tragic moment of modern life. 81 See Taylor, Sources of the Self, 72–5. 82 Taylor, “Introduction,” in Human Agency and Language, 5–6. 83 Indeed, it may be that Taylor did not even have the concept of hypergoods before this time. No mention is made of them, for example, in his “Diversity of Goods,” which was originally published in 1982, although there is a reference to the idea of a “master value” in his “Why Do Nations Have to Become States?” 45, originally published in 1979. 84 Taylor would surely reject Richard Rorty’s claim in “Taylor on Truth,” 29, that “all instances of persuasion, of oneself or of others, [are] equally cases of the ‘arbitration of reason’. Debates about astrophysics, how to read Rilke, the desirability of hypergoods, which movie to go to, and what kind of ice cream tastes best, are, in this respect, on a par.”

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85 See, for example, the following by Charles Taylor: Pattern of Politics; “The Agony of Economic Man”; “Socialism and Weltanschauung”; and “The Politics of the Steady State.” 86 See Ronald Beiner, “Hermeneutical Generosity and Social Criticism.” 87 See Jürgen Habermas, “A Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method.” 88 Charles Taylor, “Understanding and Ethnocentricity,” 131 (see also 124). 89 Taylor asserts that substantive, and so interpretive, ethics can be “revisionist” in his “Motivation behind a Procedural Ethics,” 354–7. For a good account of Taylor’s contributions to social criticism, see Smith, Charles Taylor, ch. 7. On the radical potential of hermeneutical practical reason, see my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, ch. 3, sec. IV. 90 Taylor, “Justice after Virtue,” 43; see also his Sources of the Self, 521. 91 See, for example, Charles Taylor, “Shared and Divergent Values” and “Politics of Recognition,” 244–8. Since I believe that English Canadians are not, in fact, in the grip of a hypergood, I have criticized Taylor’s position as having wrongly endorsed the division of the country into seemingly irreconcilable “solitudes.” See my Shall We Dance? A Patriotic Politics for Canada, 32–7. 92 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 65. 93 See Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” 251–6; and his “Comparison, History, Truth,” 156, 164. 94 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 67–8. 95 James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, A History, 133. 96 Ibid., 148. 97 Ibid., 250. 98 See Taylor, “Comparison, History, Truth,” 164; and Taylor, Secular Age, 851n72. 99 Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, 141. 100 See ibid., 148 (as well as 573–616). 101 Taylor, “A Catholic Modernity?” 37. 102 Taylor, “Justice after Virtue,” 34, 35; see also his Sources of the Self, 73. 103 Taylor, “Critical Notice,” 812. 104 Hence, for example, Pope John Paul II’s comparison of the Catholic Church to “a great work of art” in his “Address to the Cardinals of the United States.” A connection between supercessionism and creativity has been identified by Harold Bloom in his Anxiety of

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Notes to pages 139–41

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106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116

117 118 119 120 121 122

123 124

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Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Bloom has himself invoked it as regards the relation between Christianity and Judaism in his Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine. See the following by Taylor: “Charles Taylor Replies,” 250; “What is Human Agency?” 26 (in “Comments and Replies,” 242, Taylor specifies that he means this to apply only to those utilitarians who draw on naturalism to make their case, including, of course, the school’s founders); “Language and Society,” 30; and “Motivation behind a Procedural Ethics,” 349. Taylor, “Introduction,” in Human Agency and Language, 7. Ibid. Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” 17. Taylor, “Charles Taylor Replies,” 251. Taylor, “Hermeneutics of Conflict,” 227; see also his Sources of the Self, 211. See Taylor, Sources of the Self, 221. Taylor, “Spirituality of Life – and Its Shadow,” 11; see also his Sources of the Self, 217. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 258. Taylor tells this story in ibid., chs 14–17. See ibid., ch. 19; Taylor, “Spirituality of Life – and Its Shadow,” 12; and his “Closed World Structures,” 64–5. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 24; however, Taylor also asserts that ordinary life can “appropriate its own forms of heroism” in Modern Social Imaginaries, 103. See Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses, 266 (preface to bk 2). Quoted in Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic, 102. Ibid., 40. See ibid., 9, 49–51, 59, 106, 114–16, 165. See ibid., 176. To recognize that children are “gifts” is to see that they are at least partly the products of creation. Appreciating this has important implications for the ethics of genetic engineering, as Michael Sandel has perceptively argued in his The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering. See Taylor, Sources of the Self, 285; and his Modern Social Imaginaries, 74–5. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, 235–7. In support of my claim, consider the classic status of such management

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138 139

140 141 142

Notes to pages 141–3 texts as Michael E. Porter, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance, which emphasizes the attaining and maintaining of “domination” in the market. I discuss this in the context of the violence associated with the “spatialization” effects of modern market practices in chapter 10, sec. II.ii. Taylor, “Liberal Politics and the Public Sphere,” 272; see also his Modern Social Imaginaries, 92–9. See Taylor, Sources of the Self, 286. The term originates with Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 82–5. See Charles Baudelaire, “On the Heroism of Modern Life,” 116–20; and listen to Stan Rogers, “Working Joe” and “Lies,” both on the album Northwest Passage. See Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” 254–5. As I claim in chapter 13, sec. IV. See Taylor, Sources of the Self, 515. See ibid., 425. Ibid., 100. Charles Taylor, “Logics of Disintegration,” 113. Stephen K. White reminds Taylor of this violence in his Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory, 67–9. Taylor, “Logics of Disintegration,” 114–15. See also Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 236–7; Charles Taylor, “Taylor and Foucault on Power and Freedom: A Reply,” 281, where Taylor goes so far as to suggest that denying the applicability of the moral ideal of freedom to Foucault’s position amounts to “obfuscation”; and Charles Taylor, “Concluding Reflections and Comments,” 114–16. Taylor, “Logics of Disintegration,” 115. This is how I interpret the creative alternative that Foucault proposes to the “author function” in his “What Is an Author?” esp. 105, 119. Unlike Heidegger, who offers an overly interpretive account of creativity (cited above) that affirms a strife in which opponents remain together as part of a unity, Foucault recognizes the separating violence that is often required: “adversaries do not belong to a common space.” See Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 85. Taylor, Ethics of Authenticity, 65. See, for example, Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 180–2. As Taylor states in “Comparison, History, Truth,” 161: “I think these two developments, higher standards and unprecedented gruesomeness, are paradoxically and perversely connected”; see also his

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Notes to pages 144–9

143 144 145 146 147

148

149

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“A Catholic Modernity?” 30–4. Richard E. Flathman points out that Taylor’s notion of evil is inherited from the theological tradition that identifies it with the absence of good qualities rather than as a quality in its own right. See Flathman, The Philosophy and Politics of Freedom, 79. See Taylor, Sources of the Self, 451–5. See, for example, Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 177–8. Taylor, “Explanation and Practical Reason,” 35 (see also 53). Ibid., 36. Accordingly, Taylor questions the possibility of absolute evil in his Secular Age, 646. Joseph Goebbels, “The Jews Are Guilty!” Much earlier, in 1925, Hitler repeatedly referred to Jews as a “people” (Volk) in his Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim, bk 1, ch. 11. As I suggest in chapter 11. Among the examples of evil that I offer there is the figure of Merseult in Albert Camus’s L’Étranger. Taylor, it is worth noting, has described the character as “unrealistic”; see his “Charles Taylor,” 35, my translation. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 196.

c h a p t e r te n 1 The ethic, in other words, is not a “thin,” or abstract, doctrine embedded amidst the cultures of the world, as with Michael Walzer’s claim in “Universalism and Jewish Values” that it exemplifies a “lowflying universalism.” And it is certainly not a “high-flying” universal doctrine, as defended by theoretical cosmopolitans such as Charles Beitz, Simon Caney, Charles Jones, and Thomas Pogge. They might be said to share something with Boethius’s character Philosophy in The Consolation of Philosophy, at least as regards her claim that God would have “the human race stand above all earthly things” (II.v.27). 2 Jeanne Hersch, ed., Birthright of Man. 3 See ibid., 145–9, 361–77. 4 I first distinguished between these two in my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First, 105–8. 5 The paradoxical quality of this formulation is intentional. 6 See, for example, Jonathan A. Goldstein, “The Origins of the Doctrine of Creation Ex Nihilo.” 7 The best-known precedent for this strategy is probably that of Johann Gottfried von Herder, who famously avoided the question about the origin of language (and so, by extension, of meaning) while still

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8 9 10 11

12 13

14 15 16 17 18

19 20

Notes to pages 149–53

managing to win a prestigious contest for the best paper on the subject; see his “Essay on the Origin of Language.” Isaiah Berlin, “Rationality of Value Judgements,” 222. Ibid., 222, 223. Ibid., 223. See Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience, 72–8, or his Justice Is Conflict. Bernard Williams’s position in “Human Rights and Relativism,” 63, is similar: for any state to be legitimate, those in power must be able to offer some kind of justifying explanation or legitimation, and “our conceptions of human rights are connected with what we count as such a legitimation.” Quoted in Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism, 24. As will become evident, there is a sense in which my argument can be considered the reverse of the transcendental one advanced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his The Phenomenology of Perception, part 1. There, Merleau-Ponty asserts that, given our mode of perception, we are necessarily embodied agents. My argument moves in the opposite direction: given the fact of our embodied agency, we have all come to perceive, whatever else we perceive, certain ethical meanings. See John Morreall, ed., The Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, chs 1–4, 15. Sophocles, Aias, 79. Aristotle, Poetics, 1449a; see also his Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald, 1128a4–8. See Morreall, ed., Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, chs 6, 8–9, 11. One might be tempted to say that my account consists of necessary but not sufficient conditions, yet this would still be somewhat inaccurate. For I believe that any necessary condition may itself be defined only with necessary but not sufficient conditions, and so on, which is to say that we must always rely on the context for a condition’s full meaning. Evidently, I question the very notion, so dear to analytic philosophy, of independently distinct, abstract conditions or criteria when it comes to defining such phenomena. They seem to me to rely on a conceptual atomism that makes the mistake of assuming that meanings can be isolated from each other without distortion. On this point, see my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, ch. 3. On the latter point, see Jason Rutter, “Rhetoric in Stand-Up Comedy: Exploring Performer-Audience Interaction.” See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, sec. 14.

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Notes to pages 153–8

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21 See the Heideggerian Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, part II.II.1 for a discussion of “enabling” prejudices and part I.I.1.B.ii on common sense. 22 See Heidegger, Being and Time, secs 25–6. 23 Ibid., secs 15–18. 24 On practice as interpretive, see, for example, Charles Taylor, “Action as Expression”; and Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, ch. 14. 25 His name was Mr Woods. 26 See Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. 27 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, sec. 54. 28 This, I would claim, is why political thinkers such as Ronald Dworkin who would grant rights a “trumping” status actually do anything but take them seriously; see his Taking Rights Seriously. For conflicts involving rights are serious rather than humorous precisely because no part of them automatically overrides any other. 29 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in Morreall, ed., Philosophy of Laughter and Humor, 85n3. 30 See Wendy Northcutt, The Darwin Awards: Evolution in Action. 31 http://www.darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1996–01.html. 32 It should be added that even the victim’s friends or relatives may, however fleetingly, find such incidents funny, for there may be moments when their attention is focused on the conflict with the background rather than on their loss. 33 A slightly amended version of a joke contained in Ted Cohen, Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, 5. 34 E.B. White, “Preface,” in E.B. White and Katherine S. White, eds, A Subtreasury of American Humor, xvii. 35 See Francis Hutcheson, Reflections upon Laughter, 36. 36 As Joseph Boskin shows, for example, in his “The Complicity of Humor: The Life and Death of Sambo,” the Sambo stereotype of African Americans depended on white Americans having certain shared beliefs and attitudes. 37 See Robert R. Provine, “Contagious Laughter: Laughter Is a Sufficient Stimulus for Laughter and Smiles.” The detective novelist Raymond Chandler used to play the following practical joke on moviegoers: he and a friend would go to a cinema showing a melodrama, take seats on opposite sides of the house, and then, at a prearranged moment, laugh hysterically at a tragic scene. Often they succeeded

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39

40 41

42 43 44

45

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Notes to pages 158–9

in getting many others in the audience to laugh along with them. See Tom Hiney, Raymond Chandler: A Biography, 38. Jerry Seinfeld is a leading practitioner of this form of humour, much of his comedy deriving from just this pointing out of the contradictions present in the habitual practices of our everyday lives. Indeed, it is because of the, in a certain sense, insignificance of those practices that his popular television program has come to be known as “a show about nothing.” See Jorge J.E. Gracia, “The Secret of Seinfeld’s Humor: The Significance of the Insignificant.” Here I assume that there is a distinction to be made between “wholeness” and “unity,” according to which a whole may be more or less integrated but not unified. See Northrop Frye, “Romance as Masque,” 148–56. The Kids in the Hall even have a sketch about their conception of comedy, which reveals it to be Old Comedy in that it ends with a resolution so illogical as to be no resolution at all; see The Kids in the Hall, “Sketch Comedy.” See Erich Segal, The Death of Comedy. Ibid., 420. The joke, in other words, has become kitsch. I should like to suggest that, to a significant degree, what we call kitsch arises when an item that should have naturally faded into the background is artificially kept from doing so. Otherwise put: kitsch comes from treating the no longer interesting or attractive as interesting or attractive. This way of conceiving of it is compatible with that of Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, according to which kitsch consists of the denial that there is anything unacceptable in the world given its assertion of a “basic faith” in “a categorical agreement with being” (248). For to pay heed to something kitsch is implicitly to deny that there are other things more worthy of our attention and so to deny that there are conflicts, and hence genuine problems, that need attending to. I would claim that my account is superior to Kundera’s, however, because unlike his, it is compatible with the existence of ironic kitsch such as camp, kitsch that knows it is kitsch and even trumpets this. See Isaiah Smithson, “The Moral View of Aristotle’s Poetics,” 13–17. For an account of practical reasoning in ethics along these lines, see my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, ch. 3. Both seem to play a role as regards, for example, the reception of pop music. New hits mount the charts because they challenge listeners with unfamiliar sounds, resonating with them in pleasurable ways while

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Notes to pages 160–2

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48

49 50

51 52 53

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they are being listened to (i.e., both savoured and interpreted). In time, however, a song becomes boring or “understood,” which is to say that it no longer challenges its listeners with its unfamiliarity. Thus does it fade into their pre-reflective background and, in consequence, promptly descend the charts. Michel de Montaigne, “Of the Education of Children,” 119: “The surest sign of wisdom is constant cheerfulness; ... she makes it her business to calm tempests of the soul and to teach hungers and fevers to laugh, not by some imaginary epicycles, but by natural and palpable reasons.” George Grant, “Preface,” in Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America, 11. See also Sammy Basu, “Dialogical Ethics and the Virtue of Humor”; and my discussion of comedy in From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, ch. 4. The classic exposition of this distinction is found in George Meredith’s 1877 lecture “An Essay on Comedy.” Hutcheson, Reflections upon Laughter, 34; and Peter L. Berger, Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience, 14. To Berger, it is because “the comic always depends on the specific lifeworld within which it occurs” that “the best Jewish jokes fall flat in China” (31). See also the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Laughlab: The Scientific Quest for the World’s Funniest Joke. Quoted in Tony Staveacre, Slapstick! The Illustrated Story of Knockabout Comedy, 5. See Alan Dale, Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies, 1. See Staveacre, Slapstick! 10–12. The Italian mime, it is worth mentioning, was a masked player who carried a knucklebone or what looked like a small cosh as a weapon, a kind of baton that has undergone numerous transformations: into a turtle-shell rattle, a bladder on a stick, a sockful of dried peas, a hinged wooden sword, a red-hot poker, a truncheon, a feather-duster, a “tickling stick,” and so on; see ibid., 12–13. This is what, in the twentieth century, came to be called the “slapstick,” the double-paddles used by circus clowns to beat each other, their loud crack when crashed together being a dependable source of laughter and applause; see Dale, Comedy Is a Man in Trouble, 1. A lesson I draw with regard to hygiene and health care from, respectively, Valerie Curtis and Adam Biran, “Dirt, Disgust, and Disease: Is Hygiene in Our Genes?”; and Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. See Dale, Comedy Is a Man in Trouble, 14.

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Notes to pages 163–4

56 See Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. 57 See, for example, Berger, Redeeming Laughter, chs 12–14; Karl-Josef Kushel, Laughter: A Theological Essay, ch. 3; and Harvey Cox, Feast of Fools, ch. 10. 58 This is to say that if the fool is too transcendent, he will not be considered humorous since he will be too far from the shared social background to properly conflict with it. Thus does Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 12, place the fool squarely within the carnivals of medieval folk culture, a context in which “the people do not exclude themselves from the wholeness of the world.” Indeed, it is the fool’s great distance (given his perspective) from the social background that accounts for why he does not find himself funny. John Donne makes a similar point in “Paradox X: That a Wise Man Is Known by Much Laughing,” 286–7: “I always did, and shall understand, that Adage; Per risum maltum possis cognoscere stultum, That by much laughing thou maist know there is a fool, not, that the laughers are fools, but that among them there is some fool, at whom wise men laugh: which moved Erasmus to put this as his first Argument in the mouth of his Folly, that she made Beholders laugh; for fools are the most laughed at, and laugh the least themselves of any.” 59 Charles Baudelaire, “Le Peintre de la vie moderne,” 371, my translation. “le beau est toujours, inévitablement, d’une composition double, bien que l’impression qu’il produit soit une ; car la difficulté de discerner les éléments variables du beau dans l’unité de l’impression n’infirme en rien la nécessité de la variété dans sa composition. Le beau est fait d’un élément éternel, invariable, dont la quantité est excessivement difficle à déterminer, et d’un élément relatif, circonstanciel, qui sera, si l’on veut, tour à tour ou tout ensemble, l’époque, la mode, la morale, la passion. Sans ce second élément, qui est comme l’enveloppe amusante, titallante, apéritive, du divin gâteau, le premier élément serait indigestible, inappréciable, non adapté et non approprié à la nature humaine. Je défie qu’on découvre un échantillon quelconque de beauté qui ne contienne pas ces deux éléments.” 60 See, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, nos 203, 211, 257, 259–61, 269; and his The Will to Power, bk 3, ch. 4. 61 See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, 5. 62 See Lewis Hyde, The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World. 63 See Martin Buber, “Dialogue.”

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64 Hence Gadamer, Truth and Method, 420: “The primacy of hearing is the basis of the hermeneutical phenomenon.” 65 Consider the title of Barry Wallenstein and Robert Burr’s edited collection of the drafts of a number of famous poems, Visions and Revisions: The Poet’s Process. 66 Those religious Jewish thinkers who have rejected mysticism have tended to offer what strikes me as a rather strained account of the Sinaitic encounter. Their claim is that, more than some ascension from earth, Sinai witnessed God bend the heavens down, lowering them to the top of the mountain. See, for example, R. Ishmael, Mekhilta deRabbi Ishmael: Tractate Bahodesh, 224, 275–6. 67 “And Moses spake in the ears of all the congregation of Israel thewords of this poem” (Deuteronomy 31:30, my translation; ‫הדישּׁ‬ ָ ִ can mean both “poetry” and “song”). See also Isidore Epstein, ed., The Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Nedarim, 38a. Subsequent citations of the Talmud are all to tractates of this edition. 68 See Epstein, ed., The Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Baba Bathra, 12a–b. 69 This is an error that Gerald L. Bruns, for one, makes in his Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern, ch. 5. 70 See Epstein, ed., The Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Sanhedrin, 99a. The Bible’s perfection is also an implication of God’s declaration that “Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish aught from it” (Deuteronomy 4:2). 71 Maurice Blanchot, quoted in Marc-Alain Ouaknin, Le Livre brûlé: Philosophie du Talmud, 139, my translation. 72 Emmanuel Levinas, “The Temptation of Temptation,” 46. 73 The psychologist R.D. Laing alluded to a connection between the divided self and creativity in his The Divided Self, 27, 89. 74 Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man, 75. 75 See Emmanuel Levinas, “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,” 135. 76 See Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, ch. 2. 77 Thus, although Heidegger writes of the “ecstases” of temporality, we should appreciate that time as he understands it has no place for that form of transcendence associated with monotheism. His use of the term is thus close to the original Greek root meaning, which is limited to a “standing outside,” for he wishes to invoke only a horizontal transcendence of being – that is, being “outside itself” strictly in the sense

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80 81 82 83 84 85 86

87 88 89

90 91

Notes to pages 168–71

that it is at once behind, alongside, and ahead of itself within the past, present, and future of its history. For to Heidegger, Dasein is essentially worldly; see his Being and Time, esp. sec. 65. See, for example, Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 73–6; Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 262–3; Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, 82–4; and Gordon Downie’s poem “The Never-Ending Present,” in Coke Machine Glow, 58. “Moment” in this sense is qualitatively different from what Hegel or Heidegger meant by the term, their Augenblick being fully immanent to a dialectical totality. Harmonium, “Pour un instant,” on the album Harmonium, my translation. “Pour un instant, j’ai oublié mon nom / Ça m’a permis enfin d’écrire cette chanson / ... J’ai perdu mon temps à gagner du temps.” Adin Steinsaltz, The Essential Talmud, 4, my emphasis. See Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking.” Joseph Soloveitchick, Halakhic Man, 19, 90. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 22. On the distinction between regulative and expressive rules, see my Shall We Dance? A Patriotic Politics for Canada, chs 1–2. It is because of halakhah’s highly regulative nature that Soloveitchik is able to point out in Halakhic Man, 59, that “many halakhic authorities have even sanctioned, after the fact, a mechanical performance of a commandment, one lacking in intention.” One is reminded here of the classic Christian charge against the Pharisees. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 108 (see also 153n80). See ibid., 106, 108, 121–3. Ibid., 109. Much earlier, Judah Halevi, The Kuzari: An Argument for the Faith of Israel, 147, put it as follows: “In this way [the pious man] connects his mind with the Divine Influence by various means, some of which are prescribed in the written Law, others in tradition.” Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, 106. This fragmentation, however, was ostensibly removed thanks to the development of unified halakhic codes between the eighth and sixteenth centuries, the most important of these being that of Maimonides; see his The Code of Maimonides. It is Maimonides’s influence on Soloveitchick that, I would suggest, is responsible for the utopianism I am identifying, Maimonides having combined rabbinic Judaism with the monistic, theoretical philosophy of Aristotle.

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Notes to pages 171–3

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92 As Soloveitchick puts it in Halakhic Man, 122, this involves “the realization of the eternal Halakhah in the very midst of the temporal, fleeting world, the ‘contraction’ of the glory of the infinite God in the very core of concrete reality, the descent of an everlasting existence into a reality circumscribed by the moment.” 93 As recounted in Heschel, Sabbath, 32. 94 Leonard Cohen, “Anthem,” on the album The Future. 95 See, for example, George Cattaui, Orphisme et prophétie chez les poètes français, 1850–1950. And on mysticism in the accounts of creativity present in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée, see Karen Luscombe, The Epiphanic Self. 96 See, for example, M.H. Abrams, “Coleridge, Baudelaire, and Modernist Poetics,” 132. 97 This denunciation was surely further encouraged by the fact that early Hasidism managed to combine magic with its virtual antithesis, mysticism; see Moshe Idel, Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic. Rabbinic Judaism’s antipathy to magic can be considered but another case of monotheism’s longstanding (over)hostility to paganism, something that has its origins in the ancient Israelites’ rejection of the nature cults of Astartism; see Peter L. Berger, “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven: 2,500 Years of Religious Ecstasy.” Astartist ecstasy, we should note, is distinct from the self-negations of monotheistic mysticism in that it consists of the kind of transcendence that comes, for example, from participating in orgiastic festivals. We might call this creativity “mythical.” 98 Again, this is so only of the high modernists. Many of the others call for the disintegration, rather than redemption, of natural life; see M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 422–7. 99 See Charles Baudelaire, “On the Heroism of Modern Life,” 116–20; and John Cage, “Composition as Process,” esp. 44–7. There are of course tensions between these tendencies. For example, there is a tradition of rabbinic stories, endorsed by many of the sages themselves, in which ordinary persons ignorant of the Bible are portrayed as able to teach the sages about virtue; see Ephraim E. Urbach, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs, 639–42. Similarly, who if not the bourgeois masses could provide the modernists with the success, in the form of both fame and monetary reward, that they felt they so richly deserved? Their attitude to the bourgeoisie can, in consequence, only be described as ambivalent. See Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930, part 1.

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Notes to pages 173–6

100 Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 332. 101 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, 465, my emphasis. 102 Quoted in Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, 230. 103 Theodor W. Adorno, “Is Art Lighthearted?” 249. 104 Abrams, “Coleridge, Baudelaire and Modernist Poetics,” 121. 105 Ibid., 138, 140. 106 Ezra Pound, quoted in Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era, 160. 107 Immanuel Kant, for example, in Critique of Judgement, sec. 49, called for the products of genius to be followed by other geniuses. And George Steiner, Real Presences, ch. 1, sec. 4, refers to an impressive number of artworks said to have been inspired by other artworks. Yet Steiner himself fails to distinguish enough between works created in this way and works of criticism, describing the former as managing to achieve “the closest of critical readings” (13). If I am right that creation is a matter of “inspired interpretation,” then even though it is correct to say that a degree of criticism, and so of interpretation, is present in all creativity (including that inspired by other artworks), the presence of that something other, the element of inspiration, ought to lead us to conceive of the creative process in its entirety as something qualitatively different from criticism. For unlike an interpretation, a creation, once again, cannot be simply about some thing. That is why we should not say that it brings us closer to it; rather, creativity comes from going through and beyond it – in a way that would be fatal to good criticism. 108 Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” George Poulet, L’Espace proustien, reads Proust along what can only be described as these rather postmodernist lines, Poulet conceiving of Proust’s writings as affirming a unity of juxtaposed pluralities. 109 Roberto Casati and Achille C. Varzi, Holes and Other Superficialities, 185. 110 Leonard Cohen’s reference to a “hole in the air” (in his song “Democracy,” on the album The Future) approaches this but nevertheless still doesn’t quite hit the mark. However, it is certainly closer than Casati and Varzi’s “immaterial body” account, as is clear from their assertion in Holes and Other Superficialities, 106, that “every hole is a hole in (or through) something, and we of course suppose that this something is not itself a hole (or a part of a hole).” For whereas, given the notation in which Hxy = x is a hole in (or through) y and Casati

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Notes to pages 176–8

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111 112 113 114 115

116 117 118 119

120 121

122

and Varzi’s ontological definition is Hx = df yHxy (192–3), the kind of hole I am invoking would obviously violate their axiom Hxy → ¬Hy. See Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” 22, 24. Roland Barthes, Le Dégré zero de l’écriture, 76, my translation. See Bergson, Time and Free Will, ch. 2; and part 1 of his introduction to his La Pensée et le mouvant. See Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, chs 1–3. György Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” 89, 88. Needless to say, Marxists such as Lukács were wrong to think that bureaucratic socialism, such as was present in the Soviet Union, was free of spatialization, a point made by David Gross in his “Time, Space and Modern Culture,” 72. Gross’s own response to spatialization, it is worth noting, is to call for locating and then widening the “fissures” it produces so that the flow of historical, durée time may be allowed to enter into them and so into the present; such “disruptive elements,” he claims, allow “a time dimension [to] penetrate a spatial one” (77, 78). I would contend, however, that any such “widening” of spaces will, in the best case, make room for the inspirations behind creativity, not for a historical, interpretive time to flow into those spaces. Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” 89, 90. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 67. Ibid., 68. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, 103. See also Joseph Schumpeter’s discussion of “creative destruction” in his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 82–5. For a pro-capitalist take on this crack-making aspect of capitalist innovation, see Philip Fisher, Still the New World: American Literature in a Culture of Creative Destruction, esp. ch. 1. Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, xxii, n8. See Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert L. Dreyfus, Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity, ch. 2. Hubert L. Dreyfus, again drawing on Heidegger, also mistakenly identifies artistic creation as an interpretive skill in his What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Intelligence, 276–7, 340–1n2. The limitations of Heidegger’s strictly mythical conception of creativity are evident in his “The Origin of the Work of Art.”

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Notes to pages 179–81

123 Hauke Brunkhorst, Adorno and Critical Theory, 67. See, for example, Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, nos 50, 147, 153; and his The Adorno Reader, part 4. 124 See, for example, John Rawls, Political Liberalism, 231–40; and Ronald Dworkin, “Hard Cases” and Law’s Empire, ch. 7. 125 John Rawls, The Law of Peoples; with “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” 7. 126 Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 16: “This development of new, alternative perspectives defines utopia’s most basic function. May we not say then that the imagination itself – through its utopian function – has a constitutive role in helping us rethink the nature of our social life? Is not utopia – this leap outside – the way in which we radically rethink what is family, what is consumption, what is authority, what is religion, and so on? Does not the fantasy of an alternative society and its exteriorization ‘nowhere’ work as one of the most formidable contestations of what is?” 127 For more on how it does so, see my “The Scales of Injustice.” 128 As I argue in my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, ch. 1. 129 Consider, for example, the pluralist Joseph Raz’s “interest theory” of rights (which, strictly speaking, is not a “theory” since Raz shuns the assertion of a systematic relation between rights) in his The Morality of Freedom, ch. 7; and my critique of it in From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, ch. 7. 130 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, 196, 198. 131 Emmanuel Levinas, “Philosophy, Justice, and Love,” 110. 132 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 62. 133 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, 96, 89. See also his Totality and Infinity, sec. III.B.7. 134 Levinas would, I think, concur. For example, although it will come as no surprise that he believes revelation can result from an encounter with biblical text, he also goes further in his Ethics and Infinity, 117: “there is a participation in Holy Scripture in the national literatures, in Homer and Plato, in Racine and Victor Hugo, as in Pushkin, Dostoevsky or Goethe, as of course in Tolstoy or in Agnon.” Levinas did once affirm a strikingly different view, however one that reduced all art to pagan magic, in his “Reality and Its Shadow.” 135 Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Archaic Torso of Apollo,” in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, 61; Sylvia Plath, “Tulips,” in Ariel, 11.

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Notes to pages 182–5

303

136 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 199. 137 See Earl Wasserman, The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems, ch. 1; and Taylor, Sources of the Self, part 5. 138 Epstein, ed., The Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Berakoth, 58a. 139 See R. Vital, Sha’ar Ma’amrey Razal; or Joseph Chaim ben Eliyahu, Sefer Rav Pehalim, vol. 1, 96–7. 140 See Hayyim de Volozhyn, L’Âme de la vie: Nefesh Hahayyim, IV.12–14; and Levinas, “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,” 133, where he asks rhetorically: “Is not the human being the unique ‘terrain’ in which exteriority can appear? Is not that personal – that is, the unique ‘of itself’ – necessary to the breach and the revelation taking place from outside? ... The Revelation as calling to the unique within me is the significance particular to the signifying of Revelation ... [It is] as if every person, through his uniqueness, were the guarantee of the revelation of a unique aspect of truth, and some of its points would never have been revealed if some people had been absent from mankind.” 141 See Epstein, ed., The Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Sanhedrin, 56a–b; and David Novak, Natural Law in Judaism, esp. ch. 6. 142 Some of these are fictional; see, for example, Cervantes, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, part 1, chs 12–14; and W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence, sec. 57. 143 Quoted in Max Brod, “Postscript to the First Edition,” in Franz Kafka, The Trial, 265–6. 144 Ibid., 267. 145 Ibid., 269. 146 Ibid., 267. 147 Paul Edward Geller endorses Brod’s decision on the basis of such considerations in his “Toward an Overriding Norm in Copyright: Sign Wealth,” 69, and his “Must Copyright Be Forever Caught between Marketplace and Authorship Norms?” 148 Brod, “Postscript to the First Edition,” 268. 149 Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, 269, 276. 150 Ibid., 279. 151 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Epilogue to ‘Who Am I and Who Are You?’” 146. 152 See Gadamer, Truth and Method, part 1, sec. 1, as well as his statement that “in a certain sense interpretation probably is re-creation”

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153

154 155 156 157 158 159

160 161 162 163

164

Notes to pages 185–8 (119). See also his “Composition and Interpretation,” which, despite its title, ends up collapsing the former into the latter. See Kant, Critique of Judgement, sec. 59; Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters, letters 13–16, 23–4; Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 199, where he declares that “the epiphany of the face is ethical”; Soloveitchick, Halakhic Man, 54, where we are told that Jews ought simply to equate righteousness with conforming to the halakhah; and Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. See Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean: His Sensation and Ideas, 113; as well as the discussion in Frank Kermode, Romantic Image, 19–22. See Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling. See my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, ch. 3. See chapter 3. See chapter 1. The major exceptions here are the “deliberative democrats,” although their conception of conversation is distorted by their attempt to develop a systematic theory of it. See chapter 2. See Charles Taylor, “Conditions of an Unforced Consensus on Human Rights,” 137–8. Ibid., 126, 143. See Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Also inappropriate is Taylor’s claim that the sharing of practical norms is something that can take place independently of a sharing of meanings or understandings. For this assumes a “thought– practice” dichotomy that, although central to cognitivist epistemologies such as that of John Rawls (whose notion of an “overlapping consensus” Taylor cites approvingly), is nevertheless incompatible with Taylor’s own avowedly hermeneutical ontology. On the differences between the epistemology underlying Rawls’s “reflective equilibrium” (i.e., “Kantian constructivist” methodology) and Heideggerian hermeneutics, the former grounded in the “radical translation” approach of post-empiricists such as Willard Quine, see my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, ch. 1. Fortunately, Taylor avoids making this philosophical misstep in his “Human Rights, Human Difference,” 18–19. The ancient Greek laws of the kind to be found defended by the ethic were to remain unwritten; see Jacqueline de Romilly, La Grèce antique contre la violence, 148–9.

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Notes to pages 191–7

305

chapter eleven 1 See my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First, esp. ch. 3. For a similar conception of practical reason, see Charles Taylor, “Leading a Life.” 2 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 420. 3 This is a threat identified by Gianni Vattimo in his Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy. Thus, unlike Paul Ricoeur in his “Hope and the Structure of Philosophical Systems,” I fail to see how the separation of philosophy from theology is possible, at least for those philosophers who would hope. 4 I first introduced this analogy for distinguishing between creation and interpretation in my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, 105–8. 5 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. 6 See, for example, Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 73–6; Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 262–3; Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, 82–4; and Gordon Downie’s poem “The Never-Ending Present,” in Coke Machine Glow, 58. 7 Indeed, according to Isaiah 2:2, only at the end of days shall all parts ָ ֵ ּ‫נהרו‬ (“all peoples”) of that river flow up to God’s house ( ‫אליו‬ ֲָ). 8 See Scott Merritt, The Detour Home. 9 Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, IV.i.213; Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, no. 280. 10 See George Steiner, “Culture: The Price You Pay,” 90. 11 Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes and Hero-Worship, 2. 12 The Jewish mystic Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav was known for recommending various ways to do just this; see Zvi Mark, Mistika Veshiga’on Biyitsirat Rabbi Nachman Mebratslav [Mysticism and madness in the work of R. Nachman of Bratslav]. 13 This is a particularly prominent theme in Christian mysticism, as Lezek Kolakowski points out in his Religion, 103. 14 See, for example, Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. 15 Albert Camus, L’Étranger, 87, 86, 88, my translation. 16 Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left Handed Poems, 74–5 (for other incidents of too much light, see 76, 78–9, 99, 105, while another case of its blocking can be found on 55). 17 Scott Merritt, “Supply Exceedin,” on the album The Detour Home. 18 Peter Cohen in his documentary film Architecture of Doom. See also Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, which seems to me

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19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27

28

Notes to pages 197–8

to reveal that any aesthetic success Hitler did achieve was restricted to the domain of craft, or techne (i.e., it was never genuinely creative). Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim, 197, my emphasis. James Murphy translates Hitler’s “ein grellrotes Licht” as “a lurid light”; see Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Murphy, 172. Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Manheim, 204–6, my emphasis. For a very different conception of “the scapegoat,” see René Girard, Violence and the Sacred. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Duino Elegies,” in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, 155. See Heidegger, Being and Time, secs 46–53. See ibid., 182. Ibid., 184. For “as thrown, Dasein is thrown into the kind of Being we call ‘projecting’” (185). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.4311. Or as Rabbi Barukh of Mezbizh once put it: “If there were no forgetting, man would incessantly think of his death. He would build no house, he would launch on no enterprise”; quoted in Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters, 96. Søren Kierkegaard makes this assertion in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 147–52. One notes that Heidegger’s notion of humankind as “Being-towards-death” originated in his religion courses of 1920– 21, where he analyzed Christian temporality; see Charles Guignon, “Philosophy and Authenticity: Heidegger’s Search for a Ground for Philosophizing,” 88–9. What happened, I suggest, was that Heidegger tried to integrate a monotheistic eschatology within a secular interpretation of Dasein; the problem, however, is that one cannot keep the structure of eschatological finitude while shunting aside its religious underpinnings. In Being and Time, Heidegger’s “primordial ‘limitSituation’ of Being-towards-death,” which he says is “disclosed as a moment of vision [Augenblick]” (400), is a case of “ecstatico-horizontal temporality” (479) – that is, it is not transcendent in anything like the vertical sense affirmed by monotheists such as Kierkegaard, wherein moments of inspired creation originate from a source up above. That is why Heidegger criticizes Kierkegaard for “cling[ing] to [that which Heidegger strangely calls] the ordinary conception of time” (497n.iii), wherefrom “the traditional conception of ‘eternity’ as signifying the ‘standing “now”’ (nunc stans), has been drawn” (499n.xiii). See, for example, Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence.

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Notes to pages 199–203

307

29 Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment, 131. 30 Alexandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 89–90. 31 The expression is from Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, 10. 32 Quoted in Emil Fackenheim, “Holocaust and Weltanschauung: Philosophical Reflections on Why They Did It,” 146. 33 Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 29. 34 Ibid., 17, 20. 35 Ibid., 116. 36 Ibid., 117. 37 Emil Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought, xiv. 38 This, of course, applies to the Shoah. I am thus trying to chart a course between the positions of those, such as Emil Fackenheim, for whom the historian is utterly incapable of accounting for its meaning and others, such as Michael R. Marrus, for whom we should aim to understand it “as one would understand any other historical problem”; see Marrus, The Holocaust in History, 6. 39 See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. 40 This is the title of the concluding chapter to Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889– 1936: Hubris. 41 See Aristotle, Metaphysics, vol. 2, bk 8, ch. 9. 42 See Augustine, City of God, esp. XI.9, XII.6; Augustine, Confessions, esp. VII.iii.5, xii.18, xvi.22; and Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, vol. 2, part 3, chs 10–12. 43 See, for example, Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, ch. 7. 44 This includes the “modified monism” described by the Christian theologian A. Roy Eckhardt in his How to Tell God from the Devil: On the Way to Comedy, ch. 3. 45 See Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, 240–50, 267–8. 46 As Auschwitz survivor Ella Lingens-Reiner notes: “There were few sadists. Not more than five or ten percent” (quoted in Bernd Naumann, Auschwitz, 91). Sadism as normally understood ought to be distinguished from that version advanced by the Marquis de Sade himself, which George Bataille conceives of as evil much in the way that I am using the term (although he somehow fails to use it pejoratively). As Bataille describes Sade, in his “Sade,” 120, 122, in order to escape

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47 48

49

50 51 52

53 54 55

56 57 58

Notes to pages 203–6

certain limitations to his creativity, of which his imprisonment in the Bastille can be considered a metaphor, Sade affirmed a nihilism that amounted to “question[ing] every value which had hitherto been considered absolute,” and he then followed this with “an exasperated inversion ... the reverse of life.” The latter is said to require “the destruction of a being similar to ourselves. In this destruction the limitations of our fellow human beings are denied; we cannot destroy an inert object: it changes but does not disappear: only a being similar to ourselves disappears, in death.” See also Maurice Blanchot, “Sade’s Reason”; and Rüdiger Safranski, Le Mal ou le Théatre de la liberté, 196–213. To Judith Shklar, however, cruelty is evil; see her Ordinary Vices, 8–9, and “The Liberalism of Fear,” 29. Kenneth Seeskin, “What Philosophy Can and Cannot Say about Evil,” 332. Amos Oz, “On Degrees of Evil,” 112, echoes the question when he asks: “How can one be humane, which means sceptical and capable of moral ambivalence, and at the same time try to combat evil?” Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 29, 37, 38, 48, 103. According to Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 333n11, the survivor Ruth Klüger has similarly asserted that verlorener Verstund (lost understanding) was a necessary condition for surviving Auschwitz. Améry makes the same point in his “At the Mind’s Limits.” See Claude Lanzmann, “Hier Ist Kein Warum,” 279. Talking Heads, “Psycho Killer,” on the album Talking Heads: 77. See Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, “The King of the Golden Mountain.” Similarly, in the Zohar, Rabbi Simeon protects his son from the Angel of Death with a warning not to speak to him; see Fischel Lachower and Isaiah Tishby, eds, The Wisdom of the Zohar: An Anthology of Texts, vol. 1, 136. Paul Celan, “Whichever Stone You Lift,” 71. See Heidegger, Being and Time, 225. The (anti)political ideology of fascism, I should note, purports to be creative, but fascist regimes invariably fail at being so. It was by adding racism to their fascism that the Nazis ensured that their version of it was not only horribly bad but also evil. Jean Grondin, Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Life, 226. Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, 73. Ibid., 177. For a depressing account of Gadamer’s complicities with the Nazi regime, see Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism, ch. 3.

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Notes to pages 206–10 59 60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67

68 69

70 71 72 73

74

309

Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 127. Leon Wieseltier, “Ruins,” 46. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 90. One recalls that in Homeric psychology, heroes receive assistance from gods who enter through spaces in their divided selves; see Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind, ch. 1; and A.W.H. Adkins, From the Many to the One, 13–27. For a contemporary reference to the connection between the divided self and creativity, see R.D. Laing, The Divided Self, 27, 89. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 92. I believe this to be the central thesis of Fackenheim’s To Mend the World. Quoted in Terence Des Pre, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, 62–3, my emphasis. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 41. Jürgen Habermas was aghast to find people discussing the procedures of the Nuremberg Tribunal rather than being “struck silent” by the abomination of the crimes; see his “The German Idealism of the Jewish Philosophers,” 41. Appropriately, Fredric Jameson has described Habermas’s theory as looking to establish a “noisefree” social consensus; see his “Foreword,” in Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, xii. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 41. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 452–3; Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List, 14, 70–1, 389; and Stanely Wolpert, Gandhi’s Passion: The Life and Legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, 14–15, 28–9, 52, 71, 104–5, 207–8. As Churchill himself came to admit, “the destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing” (quoted in I.C.B. Dear, ed., The Oxford Companion to World War II, 312). Hans Jonas, “Epilogue: The Outcry of Mute Things,” 198. See Ondaatje, Collected Works of Billy the Kid, esp. 87. This is suggested by W. Somerset Maugham’s novel The Moon and Sixpence, whose central character is based on Gauguin. See Patricia Fara, Newton: The Making of a Genius, 212–13, 273–4. I should add, however, that I believe the originality of even the most original natural scientists to be a matter more of interpretation than of creation; see my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, ch. 1. See, for example, Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 312. Zionism, it is worth noting, was a markedly creative ideology long before the

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Notes to pages 210–13

anti-Semitic horrors of the twentieth century; see Eyal Chowers, “Time in Zionism: The Life and Afterlife of a Temporal Revolution” (although Chowers’s conception of creativity is more Nietzschean than I am comfortable with). 75 See Emil Fackenheim, What Is Judaism? An Interpretation for the Present Age, 37, 215–17. 76 See Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering.”

c h a p t e r tw e lv e 1 Quoted in M.O.C. Drury, “Conversations with Wittgenstein,” 132. 2 Plato, Phaedo, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, vol. 1, 101e. Unless otherwise noted, subsequent citations of the Phaedo are all to Jowett’s translation. 3 See, for example, Giovanni Reale, A History of Ancient Philosophy, vol. 4, The Schools of the Imperial Age, part 3 on the Neoplatonists from Plotinus on; and the unitarian Paul Shorey, The Unity of Plato’s Thought. 4 See, for example, Leo Strauss, “On Classical Political Philosophy,” esp. 59, 63, 65, 71–2, 74–5, and “Plato: 427–347 B.C.”; and Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, esp. 9–25, 461–2, 474–9, and Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, part 7. 5 See Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher, 110, and Studies in Greek Philosophy, vol. 2, Socrates, Plato and Their Tradition, part 1. 6 See Vlastos, Socrates, 110–11. 7 See ibid., esp. 54–80; and Vlastos, Platonic Studies, esp. chs 3, 5, 16, and Studies in Greek Philosophy, vol. 2, esp. chs 7, 11, 12. 8 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 420. For defences of the practical or dialogical conception of the philosophy contained in the dialogues, see, for example, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato; Francisco J. Gonzalez, ed., The Third Way: New Directions in Platonic Studies; Richard Hart and Victorino Tejera, Plato’s Dialogues: The Dialogical Approach; Francisco J. Gonzalez, Dialectic and Dialogue: Plato’s Practice of Philosophical Inquiry; and Victorino Tejera, Plato’s Dialogues One by One: A Dialogical Interpretation. It is only because they ignore dialogue’s basis in hearing rather than in seeing that some of these thinkers can emphasize the place Plato’s dialogues give to theôria

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Notes to pages 213–19

9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20

21

22 23 24

311

(“vision/contemplation” in the Greek). This is especially evident in Gerald A. Press, “Knowledge as Vision in Plato’s Dialogues.” See, for example, Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Proofs of Immortality in Plato’s Phaedo,” 30, 37; and Richard Gotshalk, Loving and Dying: A Reading of Plato’s Phaedo, Symposium, and Phaedrus, 94–100. See, for example, Gadamer, “Proofs of Immortality,” 37; and Gonzalez, Dialectic and Dialogue, 204–8. J.L. Ackrill, “Anamnesis in the Phaedo: Remarks on 73c–75c,” 13. Joachim Dalfen, “Kenneth Dorter’s Interpretation of the Phaedo,” 219. Gadamer, “Proofs of Immortality,” 21; Gotshalk, Loving and Dying, xv; Walter Watson, “Dogma, Skepticism, and Dialogue,” 198. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Reply to Nicolas P. White,” 259. See also Gadamer, “Proofs of Immortality,” 23. Karl Jaspers, The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, 77. Michael Oakeshott, “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” 492. For Stuart Hampshire, however, the justice that comes from negotiation is justice tout court; see his Justice Is Conflict, which defends a pluralist conception of politics. For a critique of pluralism, one that complains about its over reliance on negotiation, see my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First. Plato, The Republic of Plato, 345b. Plato, Protagoras, 339e. David Gallup’s translation of the final words of this passage refers to the partisan as “one bent on victory”; see Plato, Phaedo, trans. David Gallup, 91a. “I want to see a good, clean fight,” was how presiding judge Lance Ito began his instructions to counsel at the opening of the infamous case of California v. Simpson (1995). Socrates contrasts philosophers and lawyers in Plato, Theaetetus, 172c–76a. See Aristotle, On Sophistical Refutations, 165b3–6. Vlastos, Socrates, 113. Ibid., 49, 113. Janice Moulton, who basically shares this account of elenchus, would nevertheless not concur with the use of this term here since she (unnecessarily) restricts her understanding of adversarial relations to those that exhibit the zero-sum dynamic that I have associated with negotiation; see her “A Paradigm of Philosophy: The Adversary Method,” 156–7.

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Notes to pages 219–26

25 Although it has been the tendency to translate dialegein as “discussion” or “conversation,” one also sees “dialectic,” “reasoning,” and “talk.” 26 See Mikhail Bakhtin’s discussion of the inner “microdialogue” of the self in his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, esp. 74–5. 27 Gotshalk, Loving and Dying, 114. 28 See Joseph Stern, Socratic Rationalism and Political Philosophy: An Interpretation of Plato’s Phaedo, 126–8. 29 Gadamer, “Proofs of Immortality,” 34; Gonzalez, Dialectic and Dialogue, 195. Gadamer also subsumes the hypothetical procedure under “dialectic in general” in his Plato’s Dialectical Ethics: Phenomenological Interpretations Relating to the Philebus, 68. 30 See Stern, Socratic Rationalism and Political Philosophy, 120. Stern admits, however, that how this happens remains somewhat of a mystery (see 210n57). On the place of recollection in the hypothetical method, see also Ludwig C.H. Chen, Acquiring Knowledge of the Ideas, 32–3. 31 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, 45–55, 57–9, and “Text Matters,” 270. I have criticized Gadamer’s embrace of anamne sis in my “Critique de l’interprétation gadamériene de Platon.” 32 See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 190–2, 265–6, 291–2; and my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, ch. 3. 33 David A. White, Myth and Metaphysics in Plato’s Phaedo, 164. 34 Gadamer, “Proofs of Immortality,” 21; Gonzalez, Dialectic and Dialogue, 199. 35 See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 94. 36 Plato, Timaeus, 29c–d; see also Plato, Phaedo, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Jowett, vol. 1, 107b. 37 See also Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald, 1142a25ff, 1178a6ff, where he speaks of contemplation as being “without word” (aneu logou); and the discussion in Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition: A Study of the Central Dilemmas Facing Modern Man, 264–5. 38 In Plato, Phaedo, trans. Gallup, 180. 39 On the latter possibility, see Alexander Nehemas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault, although I cannot accept Nehemas’s reading of Foucault (see ch. 6) as theoretically creative. 40 See Tejera, Plato’s Dialogues One by One, 11, 12. 41 See, for example, R.D. Laing, The Divided Self; and Heinz Kohut, The Restoration of Self. 42 Plato, The Republic of Plato, 510b.

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Notes to pages 227–33

313

43 For more on these religious aspects of Socratic virtue, see, for example, Mark L. McPherran, The Religion of Socrates, 292–302; and Julia Annas, Platonic Ethics: Old and New, ch. 3. 44 Jerome Eckstein, The Deathday of Socrates: Living, Dying, and Immortality – The Theory of Ideas in Plato’s Phaedo, 40. 45 The hermeneuticist Maurice Merleau-Ponty has shown how embodied agency is an essential quality of any interpreter; see his The Phenomenology of Perception, part 1. 46 Aristotle, The Politics, 1253a. 47 This diagnosis of Socrates’s condition shares something with the one that Nietzsche ultimately settled on in his “The Problem of Socrates,” sec. 12: “Socrates wanted to die ...; he forced Athens to sentence him. ‘Socrates is no physician’, he said softly to himself; ‘here death alone is the physician. Socrates himself has merely been sick a long time.’”

c h a p t e r th i r t e e n 1 See A.W.H. Adkins, From the Many to the One; and note Giambattista Vico’s reminder, in The New Science of Giambattista Vico, bk 30, 869, that “Tradition says that Homer was blind and that from his blindness he took his name, which in the Ionic dialect means blind.” 2 See Bruno Snell, The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, ch. 1; and Adkins, From the Many to the One, 13–27. 3 See Aristotle, De Anima, 430a20, 431a1, 431b20–23. 4 See Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice: History of a Concept from Aristotle to Marx, 5–9. Lobkowicz points out that the sacred connotation of theoria was also reinforced by the fact that the term reminded Greeks of the word theos, or god, a point later highlighted by Plutarch as well as Greek fathers of the church such as Gregory of Nyssa, Vasil the Great, and Pseudo-Dionysus. 5 Charles Taylor (over)emphasizes this dimension of Plato’s thought in his Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, ch. 6. 6 On that struggle, see Leo Strauss, “On Classical Political Philosophy,” 60–1. 7 On philosophy as a way of becoming divine, see Plato, Theaetetus, 176a–b; Phaedrus, 247c–249c; The Republic of Plato 490b; and Symposium, 211e–212a. For the idea that the body is but an infection, an obstacle to the soul’s purification, see Plato, Phaedo, trans. Jowett, 64c–67b, 69a–d; and Sophist, 226b–231e.

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Notes to pages 233–6

8 As Charles Taylor points out in his “Language and Human Nature,” 222. 9 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition: A Study of the Central Dilemmas Facing Modern Man, 16, 15. 10 See Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Irwin, 1177a28–b1, 1177b27–1178a3, 1178b8–18. 11 See, for example, Plato, The Republic of Plato, 462–c-d, 464b; and Aristotle, Metaphysics, vol. 1, bk 6, chs 10–11, the holographic interpretation of which is defended by Edward C. Halper in his One and Many in Aristotle’s Metaphysics: The Central Books, ch. 2, sec. 7. Hegel is surely the most renowned modern theorist who affirmed an organic form of unity; see, for example, Michael Wolff, “Hegel’s Organicist Theory of the State.” 12 See Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice, 47–53. 13 See Armand A. Maurer, “The Unity of a Science: St. Thomas and the Nominalists,” although Maurer does not use the term “organic” as I do. 14 See Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, esp. 150–1, 164. 15 Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Hermeneutics and Holism,” 6; Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 832, B 860. 16 For more on these distinctions between organic and systematic wholes and between integrated and interlocked parts, see my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics: Putting Practice First, ch. 1. 17 Allan Bloom describes the enlightenment in something like these terms in his “Interpretive Essay,” 403. 18 David Miller, “Political Theory,” 383. John Rawls has repeatedly referred to his own theory’s “systematic” nature, as well as to the importance of attaining “systematic clarity” in one’s thought; see, for example, his A Theory of Justice, viii, 3, 9, 11, 40, 46, 135, and elsewhere; and his Political Liberalism, xv, 9, and elsewhere. 19 See Rawls, Theory of Justice, esp. ch. 3. 20 Norman Daniels, “Introduction,” in Justice and Justification: Reflective Equilibrium in Theory and Practice, 8. 21 Rawls, Political Liberalism, 8; see also his Theory of Justice, 20. 22 As with David Lewis, Counterfactuals, 88: “One comes to philosophy already endowed with a stock of opinions. It is not the business of philosophy either to undermine or to justify these pre-existing opinions, to any great extent, but only to try to discover ways of expanding them into an orderly system. A metaphysician’s analysis of mind is an

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Notes to pages 236–8

23 24

25

26 27

28 29

30

31

32 33

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attempt at systematizing our opinions about mind. It succeeds to the extent that (1) it is systematic, and (2) it respects those of our prephilosophic opinions to which we are firmly attached.” Rawls, Theory of Justice, 527. Ibid., 587, my emphasis. Jürgen Habermas seems to have been straddling the same two forms of transcendence; see, for example, his “Transcendence from Within, Transcendence in this World,” 80. According to Michael Sandel, in his Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, 47: “The key [to A Theory of Justice] is to see the original position as the fulcrum of reflective equilibrium, in so far as it can be achieved. The original position is the fulcrum of the justificatory process in that it is the device through which all justification must pass, the place at which all arguments must arrive and from which they must depart.” To Richard Rorty, however, in his “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” 183, Rawls must be distinguished from those for whom the “method of reflective equilibrium is not good enough.” Rawls, Theory of Justice, 139. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 161: “Liberal principles meet the urgent political requirement to fix, once and for all, the content of certain political basic rights and liberties, and to assign them special priority. Doing this takes those guarantees off the political agenda and puts them beyond the calculus of social interests.” Paul Ricoeur, “The Act of Judging,” 128. That biblical Judaism saw the Bible as providing a foundation for a new society is supported by Moses’s decision in Exodus to wander in the desert for forty years so that a new generation would arise, one untainted by such idolatrous deeds as the construction of the golden calf. The attempt to get people to begin anew by asserting a break in their history is characteristic of all foundationalisms, including those of the theorist. This is how I read, for example, Aelred Cody, A History of Old Testament Priesthood, esp. 118–19; Deborah W. Rooke, Zadok’s Heirs: The Role and Development of the High Priesthood of Ancient Israel, chs 1–4; and William R. Millar, Priesthood in Ancient Israel. As Haim Cohn points out in his “Prolegomena to the Theory and History of Jewish Law,” 45, this meant that “in His eyes, at least, the Law was self-sufficient and needed neither expansion nor detraction.” Ahad Ha-am, “Moses,” 313. Isidore Epstein, ed., The Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Baba Mezia, 30b. Subsequent citations of tractates of the Talmud all refer to the translations of this edition.

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Notes to pages 238–41

34 See Epstein, ed., Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Sanhedrin, 99a. 35 Ahad Ha-am, “Priest and Prophet,” 128–9. 36 See Epstein, ed., Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Shabbath, 88a. Hence Emmanuel Levinas, “The Temptation of Temptation,” 37: “The teaching, which the Torah is, cannot come to the human being as a result of a choice ... In the beginning was violence.” 37 Levinas, “Temptation of Temptation,” 42. This is a rabbinic way to translate Exodus 24:7; there are others. 38 For the theorist always examines first, before he “buys.” See, for example, Plato, Protagoras, 312b–14b. 39 See Epstein, ed., Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Shabbath, 88a. 40 Ibid., 88a. Commenting on this in “Temptation of Temptation,” 43, Levinas asks, rhetorically, “Wasn’t a third crown needed to reward the reversal of the sequence?” That the Sadducees shared a great deal with the Greek theorist is supported by another piece of aggadah. It portrays a Sadducee criticizing a Pharisee for failing to accept the Covenant in a way that the theorist could be expected to approve: “First ye should have listened, if within your powers, accept; if not, ye should not have accepted”; see Epstein, ed., Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Shabbath, 88a–b. 41 Epstein, ed., Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Baba Bathra, 12b. Levinas has gone further in his “La révélation dans la tradition juive,” 174, asserting that everyone is capable of revelation. 42 Levinas, “Temptation of Temptation,” 46–7. 43 See Joseph Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man. For more on makhlokot and halakhah, see chapter 10, III.i, herein. 44 See, for example, Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, I.A.4. 45 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, 75. 46 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 267. 47 Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” 54. Of course, Foucault later came to argue that the will to truth itself suffers the violence of an inclusive, disciplinary “bio-power.” 48 See Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, I.3, II.3.d, II.4, V.3. 49 Emmanuel Levinas, “Transcendence et hauteur,” 92, my translation. 50 Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” 117. 51 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 480.

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Notes to pages 241–2

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52 See, especially, Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.” As Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 15, sums up postmodernism, which I identify as the political philosophy based on the tenets of difference: “It is the function of irony in postmodern discourse to posit ... critical distance and then undo it.” 53 Derrida and Rorty have explicitly endorsed this sort of irony. See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, esp. chs 4–6; and Jacques Derrida, “Psyche: The Invention of the Other” and “Différance,” esp. page 3, where Derrida tells us that there is a “mute irony” in the différance within which all semiotics participates. 54 For example, Jean-François Lyotard, in his The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, limits himself to expressing “incredulity” at the “grand narratives” underlying such philosophy, all the while advancing one of his own. And as Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, 489, criticizes Derrida: “For Derrida there is nothing but deconstruction, which swallows up the old hierarchical distinctions between philosophy and literature, and between men and women, but just as readily could swallow up equal/unequal, community/discord, uncoerced/constrained dialogue, and the like. Nothing emerges from his flux worth affirming, and so what in fact comes to be celebrated is the deconstructing power itself, the prodigious power of subjectivity to undo all the potential allegiances which might bind it; pure untrammelled freedom. The poverty of this position comes out perhaps most starkly when it is compared with the religious philosophy of Levinas, from whom Derrida derived some of his key terms.” George Steiner has expressed similar worries about Derrida in his Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? 119–34. 55 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, 9; Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” 27. 56 Levinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, 7. See also Colin Davis, Levinas: An Introduction, 74. 57 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 66. This “nondialogical” form of hearing is also advanced by Jacques Derrida in his The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. 58 On difference philosophy’s critique of the ocularism of theory, see, for example, Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, esp. ch. 3, sec. 4; and Martin Jay, The Downcast Eye: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought.

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Notes to pages 242–6

59 Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 96. See also Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, 91. 60 Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 89. 61 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 306; and Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, 25. 62 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 16. 63 Plato, Parmenides, 129c. 64 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin, 1112b33–34. See also Ronald Beiner, Political Judgment, 72–97; and my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, 97. 65 This is how I read Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Irwin, 1094a23–25. 66 Isaiah Berlin, “‘From Hope and Fear Set Free,’” 189; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks, 1914–1916, 82e. 67 See Martin Buber, I and Thou. 68 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Reply to My Critics,” 285: “And does this not mean that one who understands will always be in a subordinate position in respect to one who speaks and who will be understood?” 69 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. 70 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 420. 71 For more on this aspect of dialogical interpretation, see my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, ch. 3, sec. IV.i. Gadamer, however, follows Heidegger in overemphasizing discovery, which accounts, I believe, for why he is uncomfortable with the notion of “progress” in hermeneutics; see, for example, his “Reply to My Critics,” 283. 72 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, esp. 67–71, 421–3; and Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I, 3, 85, 88ff. 73 Friedrich Schleiermacher, “The Hermeneutics: Outline of the 1819 Lectures,” 92. See also Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, 70. 74 See this argument in Charles Taylor, “On the Validity of Transcendental Arguments.” 75 See Charles Taylor, “Philosophy and Its History,” esp. 17. See also Paul Ricoeur, “Action, Story, and History: On Re-Reading The Human Condition,” 60. 76 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, para. 219. Charles Taylor, in his “To Follow a Rule,” 167–8, seems to me to misinterpret this statement as lending support to Saul Kripke’s reading that Wittgenstein advocates a monological, rather than dialogical,

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Notes to pages 246–8

77 78 79

80 81 82 83

84

85

319

conception of interpretation. I think Taylor’s error here results from his following Heidegger (e.g., Being and Time, 187) in identifying the primary mode of access to truth with “seeing” rather than “hearing.” In Taylor’s writings, all knowledge – including that relevant to the humanities and human sciences – tends to be referred to with the use of ocular metaphors. See, for example, Aristotle, Metaphysics, vol. 1, bk 4, ch. 26. The phrase is from Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language. Heidegger, Being and Time, 56, my emphasis of “seen.” Elsewhere, Heidegger states: “from the beginning onwards the tradition of philosophy has been oriented primarily towards ‘seeing’ as a way of access to entities and to Being. To keep the connection with this tradition, we may formalize ‘sight’ and ‘seeing’ enough to obtain therewith a universal term for characterizing any access to entities or to Being, as access in general” (ibid., 187). Later, however, he, moves towards the aural: “The sound of speaking and of its source in saying ... points to simple phenomena. We can see them once we pay heed again to the way in which we are everywhere under way within the neighbourhood of the modes of Saying. Among these, poetry and thinking have ever been preeminent” (“The Nature of Language,” 101). In his late seminars, Heidegger even explicitly abandoned the project of producing a unified understanding of Being. Heidegger, Being and Time, 191, my emphasis. Heidegger also tends to use “whole” and “unity” as synonyms (e.g., ibid., 365). See my From Pluralist to Patriotic Politics, ch. 3. See, for example, Heidegger, Being and Time, 47–9, and “The Age of the World Picture,” 143–7. See, for example, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato; and Jean Grondin, “The Task of Hermeneutics in Ancient Philosophy.” See Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. It should be said that Nussbaum has come to specify that she disagrees with the many readers who, like myself, interpret her account of Aristotle as antitheoretical (see ibid., xxiv–xxviii). For a critique of the idea that Plato’s (so-called) dialogues contain a practical conception of philosophy, see chapter 12 and also my “Critique de l’interprétation gadamériene de Platon.” On Aristotle as a theoretical monist, see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 157.

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Notes to pages 248–51

86 This we can gather from Plato’s portrayal of Protagoras in Protagoras. 87 Protagoras, “Fragments,” B1, B6b. 88 Jacqueline de Romilly, The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens, also tends to distinguish between the sophisms of Protagoras and Gorgias and even associates the former with the defence of a certain form of truth. Yet she fails to assert that Protagorean justice relies on something more like phrone sis than techne . 89 Gadamer, “Reply to My Critics,” 293, echoes this latter claim: “One finds that everyone claims to know the right for all.” 90 See Scott Consigny, Gorgias: Sophist and Artist. Peter Levine, however, in his Living Without Philosophy: On Narrative, Rhetoric, and Morality, ch. 3, makes the mistake of reading Protagoras, and so sophism in general, as defending difference philosophy, particularly of a pragmatist sort. 91 Moses Buttenweiser, “Priest,” 193, my emphasis. 92 See David Hartman, The Significance of Israel for the Future of Judaism, 14. Hartman goes on to point out that God further differentiates between human history and nature when, with Abraham, He moves from Creator to Covenant-Maker, thus accepting “that the Divine Will alone does not ensure that the human world will mirror His vision for history” (14). 93 See Max Weber, Ancient Judaism, 219–25. 94 Ibid., 179. 95 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, vol. 1, 426. 96 Levinas, “Temptation of Temptation,” 42. 97 Maimonides, The Code of Maimonides, bk 7, The Book of Agriculture, vol. 13, 13: “Not only the tribe of Levi, but also each and every individual of those who come into the world, whose spirit moves him and whose knowledge gives him understanding to set himself apart in order to stand before the Lord, to serve Him, to worship Him, to know Him, who walks upright as God had made him to do, and releases his neck from the yoke of the many speculations that the children of man are wont to pursue – such an individual is consecrated to the Holy of Holies, and his portion and inheritance shall be in the Lord forever and evermore. The Lord will grant him in this world whatsoever is sufficient for him, the same as He had granted to the priests and to the Levites.” 98 See Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 19–23.

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321

99 Gadamer, “Reply to My Critics,” 277. 100 See Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism, esp. 1–8. 101 This is argued by R.C. Zaehner throughout his Mysticism Sacred and Profane: An Inquiry into Some Varieties of Praeternatural Experience. 102 As Franz Brentano has shown in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, esp. 88–91, experience is always of such things. 103 See Berys Gaut, “Creativity and Imagination.” 104 Nietzsche complained about this; see his The Will to Power, no. 811. 105 David Lewis, Counterfactuals, 88. 106 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, 296. 107 I find support for this claim in Michael Oakeshott, “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” 516n13: “I have said that I am inclined to think that what I mean by ‘contemplation’ is all that can survive in the Platonic conception of Θεωο. This belief may now be restated as the belief that what Plato described as Θεωο is, in fact, aesthetic experience but that he misdescribed it and attributed to it a character and a supremacy which it is unable to sustain. By understanding ‘poetry’ as a craft, and craft as an activity of imitating ideal models, he followed a false scent which led him to the unnecessary hypothesis of non-image-making, ‘wordless’ experience, namely, that of ‘beholding’ the ideal models to be copied. Nevertheless, the Platonic Θεωο, if it were admitted to be imagemaking, would direct our attention to an activity of image-making which would not be ‘copying’ and whose images would not be ‘representations.’” 108 Charles Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology,” 2: “In some circles, it is becoming a new orthodoxy that the whole enterprise from Descartes, through Locke and Kant, and pursued by various nineteenth- and twentieth-century succession movements, was a mistake.” 109 Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 17. 110 See, for example, Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: A Critique of Applications in Political Science. 111 See Ian Shapiro, The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences. 112 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 5. 113 Foucault, “Order of Discourse,” 67. 114 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 85. 115 Michel Foucault, “Critical Theory / Intellectual History,” 36.

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116 As Levinas states in his Ethics and Infinity, 85: “I do not know if one can speak of a ‘phenomenology’ of the face, since phenomenology describes what appears. So, too, I wonder if one can speak of a look turned toward the face, for the look is knowledge, perception.” Levinas also distinguishes between “experience” and the ethical “testimony” that is said to come from encountering the Other (115).

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Index

Aaron, 249 Abelard, 138 Abiathar, 249 Abraham, 132, 185, 249, 320n92 Abrams, M.H., 174 abstraction, xii, 4, 31–3, 35, 45, 46–51, 53–5, 108–9, 120–1, 125, 135, 177, 211, 212, 220, 226, 236, 268n33, 268n42, 274n62, 291n1, 292n18 Acadians, 79 Achebe, Chinua, 48 Ackrill, J.L., 214 Adorno, Theodor, 174, 178–9, 230, 240–1, 243, 261n46 adversarial: conflict, 15, 39, 74, 107, 180; in contrast with oppositional, xiv, 40–1, 57, 121, 126, 129, 215–16; creativity, 290n139; debate/dialogue, 124, 128, 166, 218, 240; ethics, 124, 284n28; Homeric ethics as, 218; humour, 151; justice system, 90, 218; Platonic dialectic, 221; politics, 78, 90, 112; rationality, 105, 120, 128, 150; Socrates, 226–8; Socratic elenchus as, 219; stance,

xii, 13, 40, 283n20; stances in negotiation, 18, 93, 126–7, 137, 188, 217, 260n38, 311n24. See also makhlokot, negotiation aesthetic(s): contingency of, 62; as distinct from ethics, 122, 130, 185; as distinct from the rational, 253; Foucault’s approach as, 254; Habermas on, 262n7; and Hitler, 306n18; hypergoods as, 138–45; Plato’s theory as, 321n107; pleasure of, 159; politics and, 10; as religion, xiii, 172, 184–5 affirmation of ordinary life, 139– 42, 289n116 Agha, Hussein, 97 Agre, Philip E., 279n6 altruism, x, 34–5, 93 Americans. See United States/ Americans Améry, Jean, 43, 307n31, 308n49 analytic philosophy, 73, 107, 120–1, 187, 291n11, 292n18 Anaxagoras, 220 Anderson, Benedict, 61, 66, Anderson, Charles, 10

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366

Index

antipolitics, 6, 10, 13, 18, 21, 24, 70–1, 74 anti-Semitism, 310; in Arab and Muslim regimes, 97–8, 100, 277n11; Nazi, 44, 47–8. See also Christianity (anti-Judaism) antitheory, 263n14, 319n84 Aquinas, Thomas, 137, 234 Arabs, 22, 91–2, 96–104 Arafat, Yassar, 13, 93–4, 104 Arendt, Hannah, 21, 46, 201, 206, 230, 260n34, 266n10 Aristophanes, 158–9, 160 Aristotle, x, 11, 16, 35, 50, 79, 83, 108, 125, 127, 134, 139, 152, 155, 159, 167, 201–2, 219, 227, 230–1, 243–4, 248, 259n22, 263n21, 268n34, 269n57, 298n91, 312n37, 319n84, 319n85 Arrogant Worms, 269n48 Asclepius, 228 Astartism, 299n97 Atomists, 106, 234 Atwood, Margaret, 89 Auerbacher, Inge, 207 Augustine, 137, 201, 285n52, Auschwitz, 200, 204, 207, 277n13, 307n46, 308n49 Baczko, Bronislaw, 257n5 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 271n13, 296n58 balancing: Canadians’ love of, 107, 110; of commensurables by theory, 274n62; contrast with integration/reconciliation, 15, 74, 109, 128, 147; between liberalism and democracy, 30–1, 264n23; of incommensurables, 120; and negotation, 12, 50, 56,

90, 105, 150; and pluralism, 14, 73–4, 105, 150; as response to conflict, 15, 112; of rights, 58; supported by conceptual atomism, 107–8; in “war on terror,” 106; as zero-sum practical reason, 15, 31, 74, 108, 120, 128, 217 Bali, 43 Baradat, Leon, 19 Barak, Ehud, 92–5, 97–8, 276n1 Basu, Sammy, 262n6 Bataille, George, 307n46 Baudelaire, Charles, 129, 142, 163–4, 173–4 Beckett, Samuel, 158 Beiner, Ronald, xii, 135 Beitz, Charles, 291n1 Bell, Daniel, 178, 261n52 Benbaji, Hagit, 276n4 Benigni, Roberto, 208 Benjamin, Walter, 177, 243 Bentham, Jeremy, 7 Berger, Peter L., 67, 69, 160, 295n50 Bergson, Henri, 152, 154, 168, 176–7 Berlin, Isaiah: and conceptual atomism, 281n10, 283n16; on “dirty hands” in politics, 260n37; and human rights, 55–6; as a liberal, 12, 23; on minimal global ethic, 149–51, 187; on origins of nations, 61–2; on political philosophy, 259n23; on political spectrum, 261n41; as practical philosopher, 231, 244, 247; on practical reason, 11, 125; rejection of systematic unity, 7; and romantic hermeneutics, 280n16

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Index Berman, Marshall, 178 Bernstein, J.M., 285n37 Bhabha, Homi K., 61 Bible (Christian), 132, 202; translation of, 64 Bible (Hebrew), 132, 166–7, 202, 237–42, 297n70, 299n99, 315n29 Bickford, Susan, 17 Billy the Kid, 196–7, 209 Blanchot, Maurice, 47 Bobbio, Norberto, 19 Bohman, James, 40 Borduas, Paul-Émile, 60 Borovoy, Alan, 279n4 Brazil, 24 Brentano, Franz, 321n102 Britain: former domination by English, 88; as multinational political community, 101; parliamentary system of, 30 Brod, Max, 183–4 Brouillet, Eugénie, 275n17 Buber, Martin: call for reconciliation between Zionists and Arabs, 92; as “levitical” Jew, 250; on necessity of symmetry for dialogue, 32; as practical philosopher, 247; on religious dimension of dialogue, 244; on Zionist ignorance of Arabs, 99 Buddha/Buddhism, 70, 102, 278n26 Butler, Judith, 9–10 Cage, John, 173 California v. Simpson, 311n21 Cambodia, 43 Campbell, Jeremy, 263n9 Camus, Albert, 196, 291n148

367

Canada/Canadians: aboriginals, 79, 85, 136; Bloc Québécois Party, 87; Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 50; Conservative Party, 21; domestic social assistance vs foreign aid, 50, 267n26; domination by English Canadian nation, 88–90, 275n17; English Canadian procedural liberalism, 136; Italian Canadians, 79–80, 82; Liberal Party, 21; and liberalism as “home” ideology, 22; parliamentary system, 30; as political community, 79; political culture of, 14; political parties of, 21; politics of, x, 84; popularity of pluralism in, 71, 106–8, 111, 273n53, 275n26, 279n3; prospects for patriotism, 112, 280n19; language policy, 73–4; as multinational, 77–9, 82; New Democratic Party, 21–2; Official Languages Act, 72; Québécois allegiance to, 76–7; recognition of Québécois nation, 84, 86–8, 102; Taylor on, 283n20, 288n91. See also Quebec, Trudeau, “war on terror” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (cbc), 88, 279n4 Caney, Simon, 291n1 canon (literary), 142 Carlyle, Thomas, 195–6 Carroll, James, 137–8 Casati, Roberto, 301n110 Catalonia, 77 Celan, Paul, 205 Chamberlain, Neville, 206 Chandler, Raymond, 293n37 Chaplin, Charlie, 158

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368

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Charest, Jean, 77 charisma, 148, 196, 273n50 Chateaubriand, 63 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 65 China/Chinese, 24, 43, 79, 161, 188 Chowers, Eyal, 62–3, 273n47, 310n74 Chrétien, Jean, 86, 275n19 Christianity/Christians: anti-Judaism of, 137–8, 289n104, 298n86; charity (agapê), 131, 140; Eastern Orthodoxy, 188; grace, 285n56; as hypergood, 131, 134, 138; and Kierkegaard, 185–6; and “modified monism,” 307n44; mysticism of, 162, 287n74, 305n13; Palestinian, 278n24; Protestantism, 269n59; temporality of, 306n27. See also affirmation of ordinary life; supercessionism Churchill, Winston, 196, 208, 309n69 Cicero, 152 civic balance, 270n63 civil society, 41, 78, 81–2; Canadian, 88–9; deliberations in (public sphere of), 29; ethnic communities in, 79; integrity of, 32; and nation, 90, 101; nature of, 4; people/demos in, 29–30; public sphere of, 30, 36; and the state, 27, 30, 36, 39–40. See also market economy Cixous, Hélène, 10 classical republicanism, ix, 3, 16, 26, 33, 36, 65, 79, 260n34. See also Arendt, Aristotle, Machiavelli

Clausewitz, Karl von, 16 Cohen, G.A., 54 Cohen, Joshua, 263n21 Cohen, Leonard, 172, 300n110 Cold War, 24, 111 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 43 comedy: and creativity, 163; “death of,” 158–9; duo, 154; and integration/reconciliation, xi; and justice, 160; New Comedy, 158–9; Old Comedy, 158–9, 294n41. See also humour, tragedy common good, ix, x; absence in pluralism, 56, 125; as basis of political community, 186, 267n24, 274n8; and classical republicanism, 36; contrast with “public interest,” 79; and deliberative democracy, 26, 36, 39; vs evil, 204; as fulfilled by creation, 18; as goal of conversation, x, 16, 23, 25–6, 24, 39, 53, 79, 90, 121, 126, 215; hypergoods vs, 136; as identity of society, 20; incompatability with detachment, 34; and national community, 66; and patriotism, 16–17, 26, 36, 71, 195; Rawls and Dworkin’s conception of, 23; tearing “holes” in, 126; and truth, 91, 217; as “whole” of goods or society, 14. See also community, reconciliation community: civic or political, ix, 36, 39–40, 50, 56–7, 64–6, 79– 80, 89, 101, 186, 267n24; ethnic, 64, 79–82, 101; national, 52, 60– 75, 78–90, 98–9, 101–3, 274n60; religious, 65, 67

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Index concentration camps, 46–6, 197, 208. See also Levi conceptual atomism, 15, 106, 109, 115, 119–21, 186, 234, 247. See also analytic philosophy conflict: importance of starting with, 51. See also adversarial, opponents Confucianism, 188 Connolly, William E., 10 Conquest, Robert, 199 consequentialism, 7, 124. See also utilitarianism constitution: as battleground for nationalist politics, 90; and democracy, 30; justiciable, 32, 58; neutral theory as template for, 179, 208. See also community (civic or political), recognition contractarianism, 5–7 conversation: absence from Plato’s dialogues, 214–17; as centre of political spectrum, 20; contrast with negotiation, 15, 26, 35, 91, 96, 125–7, 180, 217, 219–28; contrast with pleading, 32; and deliberative democracy, xiii, 26, 27–9, 31, 36, 304n159; and diplomacy, 187–8; fragility of, xi, 40, 58, 98; and hermeneutics, 29, 34; ideology interferes with, 20; and minimal global ethic, 111– 12; nature of, 16; and patriotism, x, xiii, 18, 26, 29, 34, 187, 265n32, 283n18; and political spectrum, 20, 24–5, 92; and postmodernism, 10; and power, xi; and practical philosophy, 246–7; and recognition, 87, 96, 127–8; requirements for, 17,

369

24–5, 31–2, 40, 53, 97–8, 165, 186, 188, 263n14; as skill, 29; and transformation of goods, 16, 121. See also common good, reconciliation cosmopolitanism: and Habermas, 28; and negotiation, 111–12; stoic, 51–3; theoretical, xiii, 51, 54–5. See also Nussbaum, Pogge Covenant (between God and ancient Israelites), 68, 171, 239, 243, 249–51, 272n35, 316n40, 320n92 “cracks” (spaces, gaps, tears, holes): in meaning, 67, 70, 202; between art and ethics, 124; and conflict, 70, 118, 145, 185; and creation, 67, 129, 166, 172–80, 185, 195–6, 202, 209, 238, 254, 301n119; and divided self, 130, 167; and evil, 197–9, 202, 204, 209; of nonbeing, 193–4, 201, 247; “patched” by accommodation, 180; and revelation, 170–1, 240–3; as source for minimal global ethic, 181–2 creation: association with vision/ light, 11, 165, 198, 202, 207, 252; of Bible, 237; children as products of, 289n122; and conflict, 183–6; contrast with destruction (evil), 196–8, 306n18, 308n47, 308n55; and death, 197– 9; as distinct from interpretation, xi, xiv, 10–11, 18, 62, 64, 66, 68, 98, 122–34, 148–9, 159, 164, 175–6, 184–5, 194, 198–9, 252, 272n38, 300n107; and greatness, 194–6, 198–200, 203, 207–9; hypergoods as product of, 134–44,

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289n104; and minimal global ethic, 11, 180–3; and modernism, 172–80; mystical, 165–6, 238, 297n73, 299n95, 309n62; mythical, 299n97, 301n122; not reducible to the will, 62–3, 164; and origins of nations, 60–75; philosophy of difference as, 143, 254–5, 290n139, 312n39; in rabbinic Judaism, 165–73, 238–42; and resistance to evil, 206–10; revelatory, xiii, 11, 165–80, 238–42, 301n115; role of inspiration in, 123, 163–4, 207, 224, 285n56, 306n27; theory as, xii, 11, 121, 142–3, 208, 224, 253–4, 255, 301n122, 303n152, 305n4, 312n39; translation of Bible as, 64; and Zionism, 62–3, 309n74. See also “cracks” Crowder, George, 12 cruelty, 56, 105, 146, 203, 267n24, 308n47 dadaism, 172 Dahl, Robert, 12, Dalai Lama, 196 Dale, Alan, 160, 162 Dalfen, Joachim, 214 Dancy, Jonathan, 115–21 Daniels, Norman, 235 Dante, 63 Darfur, 43 Darwin Awards, 156 Davis, Colin, 241 death, 44, 167, 198–9, 227, 306n26, 306n27, 308n46, 308n52, 313n47 deconstruction, 8, 239–241, 317n54

dehumanization (as distinct from depersonalization), 47–8. See also Nazism/Nazis Deleuze, Gilles, 243, 254, deliberative democracy, x, xiii, 6, 263n21, 265n35, 304n159; critique of, 26–42. See also democracy, neutralism democracy, 23, 27, 29–32, 40, 42, 103, 188. See also deliberative democracy Democritus, 106 depersonalization, 198–9, 207; as distinct from dehumanization, 47–8. See also evil, Nazism/ Nazis, Sade Derrida, Jacques, 230, 241, 317n53, 317n54, 317n57 Descartes, René, 51, 230, 234, 321n108 destruction, 47, 143–4, 196–210. See also evil Dewey, John, 11 dignity, 32, 48, 61, 130, 162, 197– 8, 207 disintegration, 192–3, 198–9, 203, 299n98 Don Quixote, 28 Donne, John, 296n58 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 143, 302n134 Dresden: Allied bombing of, 44, 208, 309n69 Dreyfus, Hubert L., 46, 178, 234, 245, 281n15, 301n122 Dryzek, John, 37, 39 Dumouchel, Paul, 260n31 Duvenage, Pieter, 269n7 Dworkin, Ronald, 23, 179, 293n28

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Index Eckstein, Jerome, 227 economic crises, 141, 177–8 elenchus, 211, 218–19, 311n24 Eliot, T.S., 173 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 49–50 Engels, Frederich, 177–8 England, 65, 88 enlightenment, 138–9, 173, 235, 314n17 Epictetus, 43 epiphany, 129, 131, 142, 167–7, 171, 173–5, 181–2, 184, 242, 254, 304n153 epistemology, 51, 135, 140, 230, 234, 241, 253, 304n163, 321n108 ethics: of authenticity, 75, 130, 133, 140, 143; definition of, 191; procedural, x, xiii, 27, 35, 38, 124– 5, 136, 139, 142, 147, 179, 263n21; substantive, x, 35, 124– 5, 134, 136, 288n89 Ethiopia, 43 Etzioni, Amitai, 261n52 evil, xiv, 47–8, 98, 137, 143–4, 196–210, 212, 291n142, 291n148, 307n46, 308n47, 308n48, 308n55 Fackenheim, Emil, 206, 307n38 faith, 62, 96, 131–3, 138, 166, 185, 192, 216 Faulkner, William, 183 federalism, 76–90 fiction. See creation, utopianism First Nations. See Canadians (aboriginals) Fishkin, James, 261n21 flame (Facts and Logic about the Middle East), 277n17 Flores, Fernando, 178

371

folly, 163, 296n58 formalism: Kantian, 124 Forms: Plato’s doctrine of, 212, 220–1, 223, 233 Foucault, Michel, 39, 143, 231, 240–1, 254, 284n28, 290n137, 290n139, 312n39, 316n47 France/French: citizens, 19, 57, 65–6, 69, 70, 273n45 Frank, Joseph, 175–6 Freeden, Michael, 22, 261n48 freedom. See liberty Freeman, Samuel, 265n35 French language, 66, 72–3, 80, 84, 86–7, 89, 99 French Revolution, 65, 269n59 Freud, Sigmund: on humour, 154, 163; on monogamy, 140 friendship, 1, 36, 57, 79, 157, 184, 190, 269n57 Frye, Northrop: on art and religion, 131; on Canada, 71; on comedy, xi, 158 futurism, 172 Gadamer, Hans-Georg: complicity with Nazi regime, 205–6, 308n58; failure to distinguish between creation and interpretation, 185, 303n152; and hermeneutics, 15, 135, 192, 202, 213, 244, 251–2, 280n16, 297n64, 318n68, 318n71; on impossibility of conclusive interpretation, 38, 185, 265n46; misinterpretation of Plato, 211– 28, 310n8, 312n29, 312n31, 319n85; notion of conversation, 215, 222; as practical philosopher, 244, 247, 251–2, 320n89

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372

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Gallup, David, 224, 311n20 Galston, William A., 259n24, 269n50 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, 208 Gauguin, Paul, 209, 309n72 Geller, Paul Edward, 303n147 Gellner, Ernest, 61 Geras, Norman, 268n43 Germany/Germans, 30, 48, 53, 58, 135, 144, 197, 201, 205–6 Ghomeshi, Jian, 88 Girard, René, 133, 273n48, 306n21 Globe and Mail, 77, 89 Gnosticism, 202 God, 68, 96, 109, 131–3, 137, 140, 165–7, 169, 171, 181–2, 185, 201–2, 234, 237–9, 241, 244, 249–52, 286n66, 287n74, 291n1, 297n66, 297n70, 299n92, 305n7, 320n92 Goebbels, Joseph, 48, 144 Gogh, Vincent van, 284n36 Gogol, Nicolai, 183 Gonzalez, Francisco, 222–3 Gorgias, 248–9, 320n88 Göring, Hermann, 47 Gotshalt, Richard, 215 Gowans, Christopher W., 107–8 Grant, George, 160 greatness. See heroism Greenberg, Clement, 173 Gregory of Nyssa, 313n4 Grenier, Yvon, 263n8 Grescoe, Taras, 275n17 Grondin, Jean, 205 Gross, David, 301n115 Guatemala, 43

Guattari, Félix, 243, 254 Gulag, 199, 204. See also evil Ha-am, Ahad, 238 Habermas, Jürgen, 27–9, 31, 37, 39–40, 135, 208, 230, 262n6, 262n7, 264n23, 264n24, 264n27, 264n28, 265n44, 309n67, 315n24 halakhah, 168–74, 176–7, 181, 240, 242, 298n86, 298n91, 299n92, 304n153 Halevi, Judah, 298n89 Halper, Edward C., 314n11 Hampshire, Stuart: on definition of goods, 283n16; and human rights, 55–7; on incommensurability, 125; on “inexhaustibility of description,” 116; and minimal global ethic, 105, 150–1, 187–8; as pluralist moral and political philosopher, 12, 14, 280n16, 281n10, 311n17; as pluralist socialist, 12; as practical philosopher, 247 “the handshake,” 13, 48, 93 Harmonium, 168 Harper, Stephen, 87–8 Harrington, James, 65 Hartman, David, 249, 320n92 Hasidism, 173, 183, 299n97 Hastings, Adrian, 64–6 hearing, 3–4, 12, 16, 18, 20, 171, 181, 192–5, 203, 209, 213, 215, 217, 220, 221, 225–6, 239, 242, 244, 246, 249–50, 297n64, 317n57; contrast with vision, 11, 244, 310n8, 319n76 Hegel, G.W.F., 62, 122–3, 127, 202, 282n9, 285n56, 298n78, 314n11

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Index Heidegger, Martin: conception of creation, 128–9; on pre-reflective background, 125, 153; on truth, 129 Herder, Johann Gottfried: on origins of language, 292n7; on origins of nations, 63; philosophy of history, 62 hermeneutics, xiii, 15, 16, 29, 34, 134–5, 139, 152–5, 155, 161, 192, 195, 198, 201–2, 205, 213, 222, 226, 231, 244–6, 248, 249, 251–2, 280n16, 288n89, 297n64, 304n163, 313n45, 318n71. See also interpretation Hermes, 195, 248 heroism, 55, 66, 69, 140, 142, 195–6, 204, 207, 225, 268n44, 272n40, 289n116, 290n129, 309n62 Hervieu-Léger, Danièle, 67 Heyd, David, 276n4 hiddush, 165–72. See also creation (revelatory), Judaism (rabbinic) Hilberg, Raul, 200 Hiroshima, 44 Hirschman, Albert, 141 history: philosophies of, 62 Hitler, Adolf, 47, 197, 206, 267n17, 268n38, 291n147, 306n18 Hobbes, Thomas, 152, 264n26 holiness, 72, 132, 140, 170–1, 181, 183, 185–6, 251, 302n134, 320n97. See also transcendence holism, xiii; absence from pluralism, 281n10; and conversational response to conflict, 15, 74; Heidegger on, 246; holographic/ organic, 186, 233, 246, 279n11;

373

moderate vs extreme, 115–21; “practical,” 281n15; of prereflective background, 247; systematic, 16, 279n11 Holocaust (Shoah), 43, 103, 200, 210, 266n16, 269n54, 307n38 home, 4, 14, 18, 21, 22–3, 30, 77– 81, 92, 101, 166, 169, 195, 226, 246 Homer, 63, 218, 232, 302n134, 309n62, 313n1 honour, 5, 32, 48, 95, 98, 140–1, 143, 264n26 Hornby, Nick, 268n44 Hugo, Victor, 63, 302n134 human rights: as abstract, 45, 49; as counterproductive, 43–59; as disempowering, xiii, 46; and equality, 46–7; institutional defence of, 57–9; and pluralism, 55–7; and theoretical cosmopolitanism, 51–5. See also minimal global ethic, Nussbaum, Pogge Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 108 Hume, David, 151 humour, 151–63, 262n6, 262n8, 262n38, 293n28. See also comedy Hundert, E.J., 285n52 Huntington, Samuel P., 107, 188 Hussein, Saddam, 205 Husserl, Edmund, 230 Hutcheon, Linda, 8, 317n52 Hutcheson, Francis, 152, 157, 160 hypergoods, xiii, 124; as artworks, 124, 134–45; and conflict, 134– 6, 138, 144–5; as supercessionist, 134, 136–8. See also Taylor hypothetical method (Plato), 213– 19

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374

Index

Idel, Moshe, 287n74, 299n97 ideology: anarchism, 13; conservatism, 3, 11, 13–14, 19–23, 41, 259n24, 20n31; definition of, 4– 5, 74, 263n19; and deliberative democracy, 29–32, 41–2; fascism, 3, 10–11, 13, 21, 23, 205, 208, 308n55; feminism, 3, 9–10, 17, 22–3, 41; green ideology, 3, 22–3, 41; “home” ideology, 21– 2; interference with conversation, 20–1, 112; libertarianism, 7, 13, 21; loyalty to, 25; and political spectrum, 21–2; relation to political philosophy, xii, 3, 13–14, 16–18, 51, 259n24; socialism, 3, 7, 10, 12–14, 22–3, 41, 135, 301n115; transcended by heroism, 55. See also cosmopolitanism, liberalism, nationalism idéologues, 5 Ignatieff, Michael, 46, 58 Imagists, 174–5 incommensurability (of goods), xii, 5, 7, 10–12, 56, 105, 108, 125, 136, 283n20, 286n66 India/Indians, 51, 54 infinite now (nunc stans). See creation, moment instrumentality, xiii, 34–5, 43, 77, 79, 83, 94, 106, 179 integration. See reconciliation interpretation, 10, 13, 27, 38, 50, 62, 122–36, 138–9, 142–3, 148– 69, 171, 174–6, 178–86, 190– 205, 208–9, 212–15, 217, 220, 222–8, 231, 236, 244–6, 248– 55, 286n65, 286n66, 288n89, 293n24, 301n115, 301n122, 313n45, 318n71, 319n76; as

distinct from creation, xi, xiv, 10–11, 18, 62, 64, 66, 68, 98, 122–34, 148–9, 159, 164, 175– 6, 184–5, 194, 198–9, 252, 272n38, 300n107. See also Gadamer, hermeneutics, practical reason, Taylor Irish Republican Army, 13 Israel/Israelies (modern): Arab, 101–3; conflict with its neighbours, xiii, 13, 22, 91–104; Basic Laws of, 101; multinational nature of, 101–3; Jewish, 68, 98; flag of, 102. See also Jews (Zionism) Ito, Lance, 311n21 James, William, 133 Jameson, Fredric, 309n67 Jaspers, Karl, 216 Jellinek, Georg, 269n59 Jesus of Nazareth, 137 Jews, 44, 47–8, 97–9, 102–3, 137, 144, 166, 171–2, 197, 242, 251, 267n17, 268n43, 291n147; Zionism, 62–3. See also Judaism Job, book of, 209 Jones, Charles, 291n1 Judaism, 44, 47–8, 68, 230–1; biblical, 237–8; conservative, 68; levitical, 249–51; mystical, 102–3, 166–7; orthodox, 68, 171–2; rabbinic, xiii, 68, 166, 169–71, 173–4, 182–3, 237–42; reform, 68. See also Israel, Talmud Juergensmeyer, Mark, 70 justice. See political philosophy Kabbalah, 102, 202. See also Judaism (mystical)

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Index Kafka, Franz, 184 Kant, Immanuel/Kantianism, x, 5–7, 22, 35, 62, 122–4, 152, 154–5, 176, 179, 185, 234, 253, 284n36, 300n107, 304n163, 321n108 Kazakhstan, 24 Kekes, John, 259n24 Kenner, Hugh, 176 Kids in the Hall, The, 158, 294n41 Kierkegaard, Søren, 34, 132, 152, 155, 185, 306n27 King David, 237, 249 King Lear, 28, 163 Kipnis, Laura, 141 kitsch, 294n44 Kooning, William de, 183 Koselleck, Reinhart, 270n7 Kripke, Saul, 230, 319n76 Kundera, Milan, 184, 294n44 Kymlicka, Will, 76–7, 84, 273n60 Laclau, Ernesto, 10 laïcité, 69–70 Landry, Bernard, 85 language, 4, 8–9, 15, 46, 61, 71–2, 79–80, 84, 87, 108, 128–9, 180, 182, 216, 223, 227, 233, 244, 253, 291n7; policy, xiii, 72–5, 273n55, 274n62 Lanzmann, Claude, 204 Larkin, Philip, 183 laughter, 152, 154–9, 293n37, 295n53, 296n58 Learned Hand, 111 Leucippas, 106 Levi, Primo, 199–200, 204, 207–8, 210 Levinas, Emmanuel, 8, 181, 185, 210, 231, 240–2, 250, 254, 272n35, 302n134, 304n153,

375

316n36, 316n40, 317n54, 322n116 Levy, Neil, 283n20, 286n66 Lewinska, Pelagia, 207 liberal nationalism, 90 liberalism, 3, 7, 9–14, 19, 21–3, 31–3, 41, 74, 103, 112, 136, 177, 179–80, 208, 258n7, 259n24, 261n51, 261n52, 262n55, 264n23, 274n60, 315n27 liberty, 4–5, 143, 190; individual, 23, 31–3, 85, 106, 110, 262n55, 270n62; national, 85–6; political, 85 listening, 17–18, 20, 24–6, 31–2, 34, 40, 74, 139, 165, 188, 192, 196, 204, 213, 216–17, 219, 225–6, 244; as distinct from hearing, 16, 215, 217; incompatability with theory, 53, 112, 186, 223, 231; revelatory, 242. See also hearing Lobkowicz, Nicholas, 313n4 Locke, John, 45, 48, 321n108 logos, 13, 65, 164, 186, 190, 221, 233, 240, 244, 246–7, 251, 253, 284n34 Lukács, György, 177, 310n115 Luther, Martin, 137 Luttwak, Edward, 24 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 16, 140 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 22, 261n52, 283n22, 293n24 Maclure, Jocelyn, 38 Maimonides, 201, 251, 298n91, 320n97 Maistre, Joseph de, 57, 208 makhlokot, 166, 171, 174, 179, 240. See also Judaism (rabbinic)

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376

Index

Mallarmé, Stéphane, 174 Malley, Robert, 97 Manley, John, 279n4 Maoists, 58 Margalit, Avishai, 266n16 market economy, 4, 77, 80–1, 141, 177–8, 290n124, 290n125 Marrus, Michael R., 307n38 Marx, Anthony W., 61 Marx, Karl, 5, 30, 62, 177–8 Marxism, 7, 21, 174, 177–9, 301n115; analytic, 5, 7; reification, 177 Maugham, W. Somerset, 303n142 McLeish, Kenneth, 160 McRoberts, Kenneth, 275n26 Meir, Gideon, 278n21 Menander, 158 “to mend the world” (tikkun olam), 202 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 292n13, 313n45 Merritt, Scott, 197, 229 Midrash, 102 Mill, John Stuart, 7, 78 Milton, John, 65 minimal global ethic, xiii, 56, 105– 12, 146–89, 267n24, 280n16 modernism, xiii, 129–31, 172–82, 285n52, 299n98, 299n99. See also creation Molière, 158 moment, 38–9, 168, 171, 174–5, 181, 194, 198, 207, 298n78, 299n92, 306n27. See also creation Monroe, Kristin Renwick, 268n43 Montaigne, Michel de, 160, 295n47 Montesquieu, Baron de, ix, 57

Montreal, 72, 80, 102, 278n24 Moore, G.E., 117 moral dilemma, 75, 107, 191. See also conflict moral particularism, xiii More, Thomas, 257n5 Morrison, Jim, 67 Moses, 68, 165, 171, 196, 233, 239, 242, 249–50, 297n67, 315n29 Mother Theresa, 131, 286n60 Motzkin, Gabriel, 266n16 Mouffe, Chantal, 10 Moulton, Janice, 128n28, 311n24 Mulgan, Geoff, 24 Murdoch, Iris, 211, 286n64 Muslims, 91–2, 96–7, 99–104, 277n11 Mussolini, Benito, 10–1 Nagasaki, 44 Namier, Lewis, 20 National Post, 89 nationalism, ix, 3, 41, 112; antipolitical tendancy of, 70; Arab, 22; artistic source of, 60, 63, 67, 69; vs cosmopolitanism, 187; “cultural” vs “statist,” 90; distinct from patriotism, xiii, 16, 66, 71; and language, 61, 71–5, 273n55; Nazi, 144; origins of, 61; Palestinian, 93; Québécois, 86; realpolitik, 56; (traditionally) religious, 68; western European, 62; Zionist, xiii, 22, 62, 102, 104. See also liberal nationalism, liberty (national) naturalism, 135, 289n105 naturalistic fallacy, 149 Nazarites, 132

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Index Nazism/Nazis, 43–4, 46–8, 53, 58, 97–8, 144, 197–201, 206, 208, 266n16, 268n43, 308n55, 308n58 negotiation, xii, 12, 38, 79, 91, 126, 216; absence from Phaedo, 217; between civilizations, 56; Canadian attraction to, 106–7, 111– 12, 273n53; as centre of political spectrum, 20–1; and conflict between Israelies and Palestinians, 91–8, 104, 273n47, 277n5; and deliberative democracy, 33; vs elenchus, 311n24; favoured by political ideologies, 20; good faith, 35, 89, 137; inappropriate with evil, 206; inappropriate for recognition, 87; and minimal global ethic, 187; and patriotism, xiii, 15; and pluralism, 12–15, 56, 70, 105–6, 150–1, 180, 247, 260n38, 280n16, 311n17; realpolitik, 57, 206; of rights, 50. See also conversation (contrast with negotiation), toleration neo-Nietzscheanism, 133, 142–3, 230. See also Nietzsche neo-Platonism, 211, 234, 251. See also Plato neo-Pythagoreans, 102, 278n27 Netanyahu, Benjamin, 97 neutralism, xii, 3, 5–18, 21–3, 32, 69–70, 72–4, 103, 147, 177, 179–80, 235, 237, 260n38, 267n29, 274n60, 274n62. See also deliberative democracy, political philosophy, theory New Deal, 14, 19 Newton, Isaac, 209 Nicolas of Cusa, 138

377

Nietzsche, Friedrich, xi, 24, 62–3, 143, 164, 185, 195, 230, 260n32, 285n56. See also neo-Nietzscheanism nihilism, 192, 197, 203, 308n46 Noah, 249 Noahide Laws, 183 nominalism, 234 nonfiction, 49, 62, 64, 66, 122, 131, 148, 197, 252. See also interpretation Norman, Wayne, 78, 274n12, 276n28 novel, 66, 168, 253 Nussbaum, Martha, 51–5, 127, 248, 267n33, 269n47, 319n84 Oakeshott, Michael, 11, 216, 284n36, 321n107 Olso peace process, 92, 94–5, 97, 104, 273n47 Olympics, 162 Ondaatje, Michael, 196, 209 opponents, xiii, 13, 126, 129, 136, 180, 215, 290n139; contrast with adversaries, xiv, 40–1, 57, 121, 126, 129, 215–16 originality, 61, 64, 69, 123, 128, 130, 148, 194–5, 252, 309n73. See also creation, interpretation, progress Oz, Amos, 308n48 Pakistan: 1995 earthquake, 54 Palestinian Liberation Organization, 92 Palestinians, 93–9, 276n1, 278n24; conflict with Israel 92, 276n1, 277n5; future state of, 104; nationhood of, 98–9

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378

Index

Pasternak, Boris, 46 Pater, Walter: and Marius the Epicurean, 185 patriotism: apolitical, 18, 195; as distinct from nationalism, 65–6, 104, 271n24; as political philosophy, ix–xiv, 3, 15–22, 24–7, 29, 32–6, 38–42, 66, 71, 74–5, 104, 147, 187, 261n52, 265n32, 278n29 Patten, Alan, 73–4, 274n62 Pearson, Lester B., 111, 280n16 Peloponnesian War, ix Pharisees. See Judaism (rabbinic) philosophy: difference, xiv, 143, 237–43; nature of, 229–55; practical, xiv, 231, 243–51; theoretical, xiv, 142–3, 230–7 Pipes, Daniel, 95 Plath, Sylvia, 181 Plato, 153, 235, 247–8, 253, 258, 302n134, 310n8, 313n5, 321n107; contrast of good and evil, 202; on humour, 151–2; monist cosmology of, 202; nature of his philosophy, xiv, 211–28; on pleasures of learning, 159; and self-mastery, 138; as theoretical philosopher, 230, 232–3 Plaw, Avery, 279n9 pleading, 32, 179; favoured by neutralist theory, 6, 90; as nondialogical, 6 Plotinus, 234 Plutarch, 313n4 Poe, Edgar Allen, 174 Pogge, Thomas, 53–4, 268n35, 268n38, 291n1 political philosophy, ix, xii, 3–4; definition of, 3–4; pluralist,

11–15; postmodernist, 8–11. See also neutralism, patriotism political spectrum, 18–22 politics: vs antipolitics, 10, 13, 21, 24, 70–1, 74; and common good, 36; definition of/requirements for, x, xii, 3–4, 28, 79, 91, 93, 98, 109, 191, 259n23, 276n4; humour in, 262n8; as intrinsic common good, 33, 41, 78–9, 90–1; modern, 32; of recognition, 127–8; Taylor on, 136; transcended by heroism, 55, 195. See also ideology, political philosophy Porter, Michael E., 290n124 Posner, Richard, 9–10, 279n5 Pound, Ezra, 173, 175–6 Power, Samantha, 49 practical reason, ix, 55, 119, 259n24; as aural capacity, 11; as comparing incommensurables, 11; as distinct from theoretical reason, 11, 119, 231, 243; as interpretive, 27, 128, 132, 134, 138, 192, 231, 245, 252, 286n66, 288n89; limits of, 137– 8, 145, 193, 283n20; as weighing/adversarial, 111, 119–20, 128, 150, 247. See also conversation, ethics, interpretation, negotiation practice(s): and creativity, 10, 131, 171, 195; harmony or flow of, 168–71, 176–8, 191; and hypergoods, 138; and incommensurability, 125; and interpretation, 162, 191, 195, 231, 245, 293n24; and minimal global ethic, 147, 151, 161; nature of,

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Index 54, 80, 115, 118–20, 190, 245, 247, 294n38, 304n163; and patriotism, 20–1; and politics, 28–9; and pre-reflective background, 51, 152–3, 155–6, 158, 161, 190–1, 247; and progress, 14, 31, 45. See also practical reason, philosophy (practical) pre-reflective: agency, 51, 118, 125, 152–4, 161, 190–1, 193, 231, 245, 247; background, 51, 117– 19, 125, 158–9, 295n46 Presley, Elvis, 67 pre-Socratics, 247 progress, xii, 14–15, 17, 19–20, 46, 91, 158, 162, 318n71 Protagoras, 218, 248, 320n86, 320n88, 320n90 Proust, Marcel, 176, 300n108 Pseudo-Dionysus, 313n4 public sphere, 4, 29–31, 36–9, 67, 80–1. See also civil society Pythagoreanism, 213, 225 Quebec: Action Democratique Party, 77; language law (Bill 101), 72; Liberal Party, 77; Parti Québécois, 77; as political community, 79– 80; power of state, 84–5; Québécois nation within, 68–9, 76–7, 79–80, 82–8, 102, 273n46, 275n17; on recognition of Québécois nation, 78, 85–8, 102, 136 Quine, Willard, 304n163 Qur’an, 99 Rabbi Hayyim Vital, 182 Rabbi Ishmael, 182, 297n66 Rabbi Nachman of Bretslev, 183, 305n12

379

Rabin, Yitzhak, 13, 92–3, 98, 276n5 rational choice theory, 35, 254 Rauschenberg, Robert, 183 Rawls, John, xii, 5, 23, 179, 223, 230, 235–6, 304n163, 314n18, 315n25, 315n27 Raz, Joseph, 12, 269n50, 302n129 recognition, ix, 4, 50–1, 55, 61, 69– 70, 73, 77, 81, 83–90, 93, 95–6, 99, 101–4, 127–8, 274n60 recollection (anamne sis), 222, 312n30 reconciliation, x–xii, 7, 15, 16–17, 23, 25–6, 28, 31, 34, 38, 40, 53, 56, 58, 71, 74, 79, 84, 90, 91–2, 95, 104, 109–11, 120, 123, 125– 7, 132–6, 138, 145, 147, 152, 158–9, 162, 166–9, 175, 178, 180, 185–7, 190–4, 203, 209, 214–17, 222, 225–7, 231–2, 240, 244, 246–7, 250, 260n38, 274n60, 280n16 reflective equilibrium, 235–6, 304n163, 315n25 reification. See Marxism (reification) relativism, 10–11, 146, 151, 187, 248, 286n66 Renan, Ernest, 69 respect for the individual, 4, 7, 31– 2, 41, 73, 75, 147, 274n60 Ricoeur, Paul, 38, 119, 237, 253, 287n80, 302n126, 305n3 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 181–2, 198, 287n84 Rogers, Sheila, 89 Rogers, Stan, 142 romanticism, 63, 108, 129–30, 133, 139, 143, 173, 182, 271n13, 280n16

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380

Index

Romilly, Jacqueline de, 320n88 Rorty, Richard, 9–11, 46, 49, 128, 231, 236, 267n19, 268n43, 287n84, 315n25, 317n53, 317n58 Rose, Alexander, 262n8 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 63 Russia/Russians, 19, 188 Rwanda, 43 Ryle, Gilbert, 117, 229 Sadducees, 237–40, 249, 316n40 Sade, Marquis de, 47, 307n46 sadism, 116, 202, 307n46 Saint Ambrose, 137 Saint Francis of Assisi, 196, 286n61 saints, 55, 131, 133, 196, 207 salt: as distinct from NaCl, 45, 119; thick conception of, 48 Sandel, Michael, 22, 236, 289n122, 315n25 Schindler, Oscar, 208 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 245 Scholem, Gershom, 72 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 152 Scotland/Scottish, 77, 101 security, 22, 24, 62, 77, 106–10, 188 Segal, Erich, 158–9 Seinfeld, Jerry, 294n38 self: and creation, 129–30, 182; divided, 130, 167, 207, 226, 232, 285n52, 297n73, 309n62; and ethics of authenticity, 130, 133, 142; goods constitutive of, 135; and identity, 206; inspiration as transcendence of the, 128; integrated, 130, 226–7, 233; and interpretation, 130, 133, 222; mastery of (Plato), 138, 227,

236; “microdialogue” of, 312n26; modern, 135; moral topography of, 130; and mysticism, 133, 167, 251, 299n97, 309n62; realization of, 25; Socrates’s, 226–8, 313n47; and theory, 224, 232, 242; transformation of, 20 self-determination, 30, 56, 76,78, 83–6, 275n17; as distinct from self-government, 77, 79 self-governement, 76, 79 September 11th, 110 Shakespeare, William, 46, 63, 158–9, 195, 229 Shattuck, Roger, 173 Shaw, George Bernard, 158 Shekhinah, 165, 170–1, 174. See also Judaism (rabbinic) Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 102, 262n7 Shils, Edward, 273n50 Shklar, Judith, 308n47 Simpson, Jeffrey, 77 Singer, Peter, 268n42 skills, 24, 29, 31, 117, 178, 301n122 slapstick, xiii, 160–2, 295n53 Smith, Anthony D., 64, 66, 68–9, 272n38 Smith, Nicolas H., 285n52, 288n89 Smith, Patrick, 110 Socrates, 211–14, 216–21, 223–7, 230, 232, 243, 311n21, 313n43, 313n47. See also self (Socrates’s) Sokal hoax, 266n55 Soloveitchick, Joseph, 169–71, 185, 298n86, 298n91, 299n92, 304n153 Solzhenitsyn, Alexandr I., 199 sophism, 213, 218, 247–9, 320n88, 320n90

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Index Soviet Union, 25, 46, 301n115 spatialization, 129, 175–80, 290n125, 301n115 Spencer, Herbert, 154 Spinosa, Charles, 178 Stalin, Joseph, 44, 199 Stalinism, 58 state, the, 4, 27, 29–31, 36–41, 56, 58, 61, 69, 76, 80–2, 292n11; biand multinational, 90, 101, 103– 4; constitution of, 179; control over, 76, 78; nation’s relation to, 70, 76–8, 82–4, 86, 102; official language of, 72, 74; recognition by, 83–4, 99, 101, 103–4 Staveacre, Tony, 160 Steiner, George, 195, 300n107, 317n54 Steinsaltz, Adin, 168 Stern, Paul, 221–23, 312n30 Stevens, Wallace, 131 Stocker, Michael, 120 Strauss, Leo, 211 subject-object dualism, 51, 234 supercessionism, 134, 136–8, 289n104 supererogation, 176n4 Symbolists, 174 Talmud, 132, 166–70, 173–6, 181–3, 238–9, 141 Tannen, Deborah, 260n38 Taoism, 188 Taylor, Charles: acknowledges common good in neutralism, 23; on affirmation of ordinary life, 139– 42; on Aristotle, 127; definition of personhood, 266n14; on Derrida, 317n54; endorsement of Christian grace, 285n56; on

381

epistemology, 321n108; on evil, 143–4, 291n142; failure to distinguish enough between art and ethics, 124–34, 282n3; on Foucault, 143; on hypergoods, xiii, 134–45, 282n11; on importance of symbolism, 102; on literary canon, 142–3; and minimal global ethic, 187–8; as (neo)Thomist, 286n64; as neutralist/pluralist/patriotic liberal, 22; on origins of nations, 61; on overcomming incommensurability, 283n20, 286n65; 286n66; overlooks the divided self, 285n52; on Plato, 313n5; on politics as intrinsic good, 174n8; as practical philosopher, 247, 253; radically secular conception of public sphere, 67; rejection of “communitarian” label, 261n51; on romanticism and modernism, 129–30, 173–4; on sharing of practical norms, 304n163; on Wittgenstein, 319n76 Temple (Jerusalem), 166, 173, 237, 239, 276n1 terrorism, xiii, 24, 92, 95, 100, 106, 112, 199, 206 Theatre of the Absurd, 159 theory, ix–xiv, 5–9, 11–13, 16, 26– 9, 31, 33–7, 41, 49–51, 53–6, 58, 72–4, 89–90, 119, 121, 135, 139, 142–3, 147, 152, 156, 164, 173, 177, 179–80, 207–8, 211–13, 218, 221, 223–4, 229–46, 249, 252–5, 258n6, 259n22, 262n55, 274n60, 274n62, 279n11, 291n1, 298n91, 302n129, 304n159, 309n67, 310n8,

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382

Index

312n39, 314n11, 314n18, 315n29, 316n38, 316n40, 317n58, 319n84, 320n85 Third Reich, 48, 197, 201, 205–6 Thomism, 131, 234, 283n22, 286n64 Tiananmen Square, 188 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 141 toleration, xiii, 13, 27, 35, 89, 93, 111, 137, 188, 226, 276n4 Tracy, Destutt de, 5 tragedy, 152; and ethics, 127, 232, 287n80; of everday life, 142; and human rights, 43–59; as nonabstract, 44; and politics, xi, 38. See also comedy Tragically Hip, The, 105 transcendence: of creative inspiration, 62, 67, 131, 163–4, 166, 168, 176, 196, 198, 285n56; and folly, 163, 296n58; Kierkegaard on, 132; as means of overcoming conflict, 34; and mysticism, 162; of ordinary time, 168, 174; in religion/of God, 65, 67, 69, 131, 138, 166– 7, 170, 174, 223, 232, 251, 297n77, 299n97, 306n27; and Socratic virtue, 227; “strong” vs “weak,” 232–3, 235–7; Taylor on, 131–3, 138, 140; tension with ethics, 132–3, 185, 202; as theoretical abstraction, 55, 232, 235–6, 315n24 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, 72–3, 274n60, 275n25 truth, xiv, 9–11, 16, 28, 40–1, 70– 1, 75, 91, 99, 127–9, 215–20, 223, 230, 246, 248, 319n76, 320n88; plain vs moral, 28; and

theory, 212–13, 223–4, 230–3, 240, 242, 316n47 Turkey, 24 Turner, Denys, 287n74 Uhr, John, 263n21 Unamuno, Miguel de, 133 unitarians: Platonist, 211 United Nations (un), 43, 147; Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 43, 147 United States/Americans, 14, 19, 21, 30, 49, 51, 65, 100, 106, 141, 179, 269n59, 278n18, 279n3, 293n36 utilitarianism, 5, 7, 139, 289n105 utopianism, xii, 28, 133, 141, 171, 179, 208, 235, 253–4; as distinct from idealism, xi, xii, 134. See also theory variables, 107–8, 120 Varzi, Achille C., 300n110 Vasil the Great, 313n4 Vattimo, Gianni, 19, 305n3 Vigneault, Gilles, 88 violence, x, xi, 20, 91; absence from Phaedo, 218; as antipolitical, 3; and creativity, 68, 70, 123–4, 128–9, 131, 138, 141, 174, 178, 196, 209, 252, 290n139; of difference philosophy, 238–43; of evil, 209; vs handshake, 13; of mysticism, 239; and neo-Nietzscheanism, 143; of neutralism, 8; and patriotism, 18; and revelation, 167, 176–7, 238–43; as right of political spectrum, 21; as sacred, 70; in struggle against evil, 206; of

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Index supercessionism, 137–8; of theoretical philosophy, 241, 254, 316n47; and transcendence, 133 Virgil, 183 Viroli, Maurizio, 271n24 vision, xi, xii; and creativity, 11, 165, 194, 209, 252, 297n65; and mysticism, 239; and theory, 208, 212, 220–1, 225, 230, 232–3, 236, 240, 242, 275n25, 311n8. See also creation (association with vision/light), hearing (contrast with vision) Vlastos, Gregory, 211–12, 219 Waldron, Jeremy, 279n5 Walzer, Michael, 23; on humanitarian intervention, 269n54; as liberal, 12, 261n51, 262n55; on minimal global ethic, 151, 269n52, 291n1; reading of Exodus, 68; rejection of global community, 56; as (“weak”) pluralist political philosopher, 12, 22, 55, 187

383

“war on terror,” xiii, 24, 106 Wark, Wesley, 279n4 Watson, Walter, 215 Watt, Ian, 66 Webbs, Beatrice and Sidney, 7 Weber, Eugen, 65 Weber, Max, 250, 273n50, 274n10 White, David, 222 White, E.B., 157 White, Stephen K., 290n136 Wieseltier, Leon, 206 Wikipedia, 17 William of Turbeville, 137 Williams, Bernard, 55, 125, 247, 260n37, 281n10, 283n21, 292n11 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 117, 198, 211, 244, 246–7, 253, 319n76 Yeats, W.B., 16, 60 Yugoslavia, 43 Zadok, 249 Žižek, Slavoj, 10 Zohar, 102, 308n52