Eric Schliesser's Blog, page 15
June 10, 2022
RIP: Rob Brouwer 1938-2022
In a few weeks, Neglected Classics of Philosophy 2 (OUP, 2022) will appear. As you can see at books.google, it's dedicated to "Anneke Luger-Veenstra, Jan Stronk, and Rob Brower, my learned high school teachers, who encouraged a love of the classics." Two days ago my high school classmate, Jorine Lamsma, called my attention to an announcement in the newspaper that Rob had died June 1, 2022. The memorial service and funeral are today.
Rob was my high school Latin teacher for four years at Amsterdam's Vossius Gymnasium. My class (1c, 2c, 3c) was known to be 'trouble' and quite a few teachers fought trench warfare with us, as we found ever more creative ways to prank and be disruptive. But not in Rob's classroom. We called him "Mijnheer Brouwer," of course. He was not on first name basis with his charges.
Rob commanded our instant respect not because he was strict (which he was) and unperturbable (which he was), but because he somehow managed to convey that he instantiated the promise of bildung (without having to say so); he wasn't aiming to reach some learning target decomposed in weekly grammar, vocabulary, and syntax acquired. But rather he always made clear that whatever task of memorization and repetition we were assigned was in the service of our introduction to the classics and, without veneration, their wider cultural significance. As another classmate, Max Rosenberg, put it, each class was part of a much broader whole. And as the years passed, I slowly grasped -- hence my use of 'bildung' --, these classics in turn would be good friends accompanying me in a life-time of imperfect self-cultivation.
Once, I was fourteen or so, a classmate pushed his button, and the unfathomable happened: the boy (no, not me) got sent out of class, with the archaic, 'gaat heen' and Rob, visibly steadying himself, pointing a finger at the door. For years we could get a good laugh trying to mimic that 'gaat heen,' but we had to acknowledge simultaneously that we were in awe of him.
Not just because of his formal language and dress, Rob seemed like a character from a different age -- his classroom had the surprisingly bittersweet smell of his pipe --, he was the subject of myths: his son had died tragically (which turned out to be true), he suffered from Leukemia (which turned out to be true), he had studied to be a Jesuit (possible), and he was dating the German teacher, Erika Langbroek (which also turned out to be true).
I had a very checkered high school career; I should have flunked out at the end of my third and fourth years (ninth and tenth grade). Mevrouw Luger played a big role in bending the rules my way each year. But I always passed my Latin, and to this day, I recognize that I have built a scholarly career on the years Rob put into me. (And I often regretted he was not my Greek teacher.)
I forget if it was my junior or senior year, but I got wind that Rob was doing a reading group in philosophy with some interested class-mates at his home not far from the school in an apartment on the Beethovenstraat. (At this point he wasn't my teacher anymore, but it was before he moved into a different apartment with Erika also on the Beethovenstraat.) I invited myself along for the wine and the mystique. They were reading Die Kritik der reinen Vernunft (in German). I would like to say it got me excited about philosophy, but I suspect the main effect of the reading group was to make me excessively and irresponsibly fearless in the face of any text.
Some time after college, I got back in touch with Rob. I suspect in order to brag to him that I had been taking philosophy classes with Dan Dennett (he was underwhelmed) and Martha Nussbaum. Rob, it turned out, was a real fan-boy of Nussbaum who, in graduate school, was one of my supervisors of my qualifying paper on the puppet image in Plato's Laws. Alongside E.B. England's commentary, Rob's wisdom became instrumental in helping me figure out the nuances of Plato's Greek and thought.
But perhaps I had simply bumped into him with Erika at the kleine zaal at Concertgebouw. Even long after he was struck by an increasingly visible Parkinson, he was a transfixed presence in the little balcony. I didn't share his love for nineteenth century Lieder, but we often discovered that we (or, in my case, my mum) had acquired season tickets for the same chamber music series.
We started to see other more frequently during my Summer visits back home while I was in graduate school. I am also unsure of the exact sequence of events that led to our first reading group with Martin Claes, then a Jesuit getting a PhD (now a pastor and a scholar), on Augustine's De Magistro. I never asked Rob if he identified with Augustine's loss of his son. He never spoke of him to me, but he often expressed pride in his daughter (a lawyer). It was the start of numerous partially overlapping, reading groups with Rob in varying combinations with people from his life -- often people who adored Dante or choir (or both) -- or my own circle of Dutch academics and friends.
Meanwhile, we started corresponding and as I look through our letters, I see that he never stopped trying to broaden my horizon. His letters reflect his curiosity, even an excessive strain of enthusiasm; he offered a never ending stream of suggested novels or works of scholarship. While in his own work, he had an exacting low tolerance for minute error, in his reading habits he was primarily searching for bold and expansive interpretations. As I advanced in academia he relished keeping me informed of scholarly fashion that had somehow captured the imaginations of the culture and book sections even editorial pages of the Dutch broadsides.
In addition to being a teacher, Rob was a scholar, translator, and poet. His translations of Dante's Divine Comedy, Statius' The Thebaid, Lucan's Bellum Civile, Virgil's Bucolica/The Eclogues combine vast erudition with linguistic and poetic sensitivity. He also translated Epictetus. He would probably be very amused to hear me claim modest credit for triggering his renewed interest into Lucan just as he was completing his stupendous Dante translation. But it's true: while teaching the Treatise in my first seminar at Wesleyan in 2002, I was confused by the way the motto of book 3 of Hume's Treatise had been translated in the then new 'student edition' published by OUP. (The motto is from Lucan.) We started a correspondence about it, and I date to it the start of my interest into Seneca.
When I heard Rob had died, I looked at our correspondence to see when we last had written. I noticed to my horror he had never acknowledged my word that I had dedicated the forthcoming Neglected Classics volume to him. I had not registered this silence at all during the depths of my own illness.
Before I close, I don't want to suggest Rob was an ethereal personality only. He was happy whenever he could talk about Erika or Sabine. And our reading groups were carefully planned around not just his choir practices, but also his cycling holidays.
I also don't mean to suggest he was above name-dropping. Once he asked me slyly if I knew who Henny Vrienten was. They had met swimming their laps in de Zuiderbad. Later Vrienten became involved in the recording of Rob's Dante.
Near the end of De Magistro, Augustine suggests that when we praise a teacher, we're really praising ourselves and this never seems to me more true than in the Academy during the many, lovely ritual practices of acknowledging the roles of supervisors in one's education. Self-praise does not strike me as a sin, but I have to admit that all of these academic practices (fests, collections, memorial conferences, etc.) seem, however sincerely felt and expressed, a bit tainted by the multiplicity of self-advancing roles they play in our prestige hierarchies and zero-sum political economy. (Perhaps this also accounts for the sincerity.)
We encounter our high school teachers through their words, their curriculum, their classroom, and features of their personality as well as the school yards myths about them. The older, and more experienced I get in the classroom, the more it seems to me they -- I mean all true teachers -- use a feature of their personality, perhaps made excessively visible to the student, to find a way to connect with the longings and desires, perhaps vanity even (as Adam Smith claims), of their students, and turn this connection, however tenuous, into the engines of shared enquiry. This also means that not every teacher is the right fit for each student.
The reason why when we praise a teacher, we're really praising ourselves according to the closing lines of De Magistro is that teachers are kind of puppets or actors speaking thoughts of others and that it's the student's reason or intuition that is doing the real work of understanding even if the words of the official teacher trigger or guide such understanding. The Platonic idea with which De Magistro closes, that nobody teaches another anything, has, thus, generated learned philosophical commentary that betrays non-trivial professional anxiety.
Augustine does make an exception to this quite general claim at the start of De Magistro, which I doubt is retracted during the dialogue. He suggests that when we ask questions we're really teaching something about our needs or our plans. The latter includes, of course, the path of inquiry, as Augustine explicitly notes. Rob was magisterial in asking questions that directed our gaze to the inner, guiding light that we need on life's path.
June 9, 2022
On Hobhouse, Hayek, Belloc (pt 3) and the Road to Serfdom.
A few weeks ago, I noted in two related posts (here and here) that Hayek credits Belloc's (1912) The Servile State with articulating a road to serfdom thesis. To be sure, it's well known that road to serfdom theses predate Bellow in texts familiar to Hayek and Mises. In Book 4, chapter 1, of Democracy in America, Tocqueville claims that the principle of equality generates a 'road to servitude.' But while the phrase seems to have inspired Hayek, it would be a mistake to treat Tocqueville's version of the road to serfdom as providing the template for Belloc and Hayek (and Mises). Tocqueville is not diagnosing the effects of a welfare state or state capitalism. In my earlier posts I also noted that Belloc's own favored alternative is more akin to a property-owning democracy than anything one might wish to associate with Hayek's version of neoliberalism. So, while the Austrian economists' road to serfdom is modelled on Belloc's template, their substantive commitments differ (recall Ed McPhail here).
Be that as it may, I am pretty sure that Belloc was familiar with Hobhouse's writings and I would be a bit surprised if he had not read Liberalism before he wrote The Servile State. In fact, I can readily imagine that The Servile State, which is really a (1912) pamphlet unencumbered by any citations, was triggered by the very passage I have quoted above. Regardless whether that speculative hypothesis is correct, Belloc is clearly reacting to the kind of developments articulated and celebrated by Hobhouse in passages like the ones above in his Liberalism (on it recall also here; here).
One telling reason for thinking that Belloc is responding to this particular passage is Hobhouse's claim about the "fourth form of monopoly which would be open to the same double attack, but it is one of which less has been heard in Great Britain than in the United States." Much of Section Five of The Servile State, is devoted to alerting his readers to how familiar "the numerous Trusts which now control English industry," really are to the public. Belloc describes in colorful detail how this facilitates what we would call rent-seeking and the corruption of the rule of law, even impartiality of the courts. And "the reason" that they are little discussed "is that political freedom is not, as a fact, protected here by the Courts in commercial affairs."* The point, which involves a kind of conspiracy of silence among elites, is essential to Belloc's argument" "it must always be remembered that these conspiracies in restraint of trade which are the mark of modern England are in themselves a mark of the transition from the true Capitalist phase to another" more servile one.
Now, Hobhouse himself is clearly not a friend of monopoly as such. But he does seem to accept the Marxist idea that monopoly capitalism is inevitable, especially in non-tradeable industries and services. Hobhouse also seems to accept Hobson's diagnosis (recall) about the reciprocal relationship between empire, militarism, and monopoly (see, especially, chapter IX of Liberalism), although Hobhouse is less obsessed with the influence of finance.
Crucially, while Hobhouse is a critic of a variety of socialisms (recall), Hobhouse treats various kinds of state capitalism as inevitable in such areas (the "assured end is nationalization.")_Beloc, by contrast, claims that such piecemeal nationalization is financially and politically impossible (in a society where both capital and labour can organize). And so the state transforms into one where corporate monopolies are accepted and become a controlling arm of the welfare state (and its interests control it in turn). Belloc's despotism is one in which the state mandates large corporations to do its job, and in which many coercive welfare provisions ultimately undermine the freedom of employees. As Belloc discerns, this will also undermine political freedoms. Belloc's fears strike me as rather prescient.
But for present purposes, the key point here is that Hobhouse accepts that there is an underlying dynamic of capitalism that requires an ever expanding welfare state to manage and ameliorate it:
On all sides we find the State making active provision for the poorer classes and not by any means for the destitute alone. We find it educating the children, providing medical inspection, authorizing the feeding of the necessitous at the expense of the ratepayers, helping them to obtain employment through free Labour Exchanges, seeking to organize the labour market with a view to the mitigation of unemployment, and providing old age pensions for all whose incomes fall below thirteen shillings a week, without exacting any contribution.--Chapter VII ("The State and the Individual.")
The underlying purpose is not, to be sure, the management of capitalism. Rather, it is "to secure the conditions upon which mind and character [of individuals] may develop themselves." This is, in fact, the Mill-ian individualist strain (as developed by T.H. Green) with its commitment to individual authenticity and autonomy in Hobhouse. And while iI doubt Hayek was familiar with Hobhouse (see below), Hayek clearly intuited that Mill was the source behind the strain of modern permissiveness he decried (see this post by me; and this one by Erwin Dekker.) Belloc's response is to claim that the very conditions that are meant to secure such freedom ultimately, through a slippery slope, undermine it.+
In the appendix to his (1927) Liberalism: the Classical Tradition, Mises treats Hobhouse's Liberalism as an instance of 'moderate socialism' and as one of the exemplars of the modern change of meaning of 'liberalism.' (One need not agree with Mises to notice that this contestation of the revised meaning of 'liberalism' really pre-dates the New Deal.) To the best of my knowledge neither Mises nor Hayek acknowledge that Hobhouse has developed the framework of the road to serfdom. Hobhouse anticipates the crucial features of the slippery slope argument that Belloc and Hayek articulate. But rather than treating these features as a descent, he treats them as an ascent.
Belloc and Mises refuse to acknowledge the presence of any such individualism in the Hobhouse program. Belloc consistently describes it as 'collectivism.' This is not altogether unfair because earlier Hobhouse had been an articulate defender of 'collectivism' before (see this (1898) paper "The Ethical Basis of Collectivism," in International Journal of Ethics.)
What's interesting to me here, in conclusion, is that in Road to Serfdom Hayek uses Belloc's template articulated in response to the the developments championed by Hobhouse to challenge the much more far-reaching welfare state envisioned in the Beveridge plan. For Hayek, England is going down the dangerous road initiated by Bismarck in Germany. Here follows the final twist in the story.
As Hayek notes ruefully near the conclusion of Road to Serfdom, (p. 188) Hobhouse died in 1929 and is surely not Hayek's intended target. But I doubt Hayek ever realized how much he is echoing Hobhouse here. Hobhouse's 1998 paper is itself a response to the authoritarianism of "Bismarck's State Socialism" (p. 143).** And his Liberalism has a whole chapter (VI) treating Gladstone as the exemplary liberal statesman who understands the liberal art of government.
Hobhouse is largely absent as an interlocuter for the liberals who came together at the Lippmann colloquium and later the Mont Pelerin Society. They largely treat the period in which he writes as decades of retreat from the ideals of true liberalism, as decades in which empire, militarism, and monopoly encroach on true individualism. And so they end up obscuring, I think, that the liberal contribution to welfare state was itself intended to promote a species of individualism in the process often battling the influence of the same figures that Hayek fought against.
*I have slightly rearranged Belloc's words, but not his point.
+Belloc thinks this is also an effect of the oligarchic initial conditions that preceded the development of modern capitalism.
**In fact, Belloc and Mises miss to what extent by 1911 Hobhouse had really re-embraced key features of nineteenth century liberal creed. (That's for another time.)
June 8, 2022
On Hobhouse (with some mention of Adam Smith, Ingrid Robeyns, Pareto and Rawls)
The other day, I remarked that while he goes unmentioned by them, Hobhouse anticipates (mediated by Herkner) Ordoliberal ideas in some key respects known as 'social market economy.' So, it is very tempting to understand Hobhouse as a synthesizing transitional figure between English radicalism and twentieth century social and ordoliberalism. This is especially so because (inspired by T.H. Green) he draws on an organic metaphysics (see the quote above) that many tried to discard through the twentieth century. And because my own interest is, in fact, motivated by his historical role, I thought it would be neat to pause and look at some of his distinctive philosophical moves (since he tends to be neglected in contemporary political philosophy except by Gauss and his students and those interested in the history of social liberalism).
That "whatever inequality of actual treatment, of income, rank, office, consideration, there be in a good social system, it would rest, not on the interest of the favoured individual as such, but on the common good" is a culminating claim of the social theory of the Enlightenment. It is, as he notes, explicitl articulated in the first Article of The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (D��claration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen) of 1789. But Hobhouse's operationalization or precification of the principle breaths the air of then modern social science.
For, on Hobhouse's views considerable economic inequalities are only justified if they meet two social conditions: first, they are conducive to the public or common good. And by this he means not just a summation of individual welfare (a view he associates with the Benthamites), but qualities of collective life. As he puts it, in a passage just before the one quoted at the top of this post, while appealing to a Smithian "impartial spectator" and Green's philosophy, "the common good to which each man's rights are subordinate is a good in which each man has a share." I should note by the way, that while this all seems to be gendered quite male, Hobhouse is a feminist (although the details of his feminism are worth exploring some other time). The common good is, thus, not just the provision of collective services, but also features that are constitutive of common life (such as law, language, the arts and sciences, etc.)
What this notion of a 'share' is supposed to reveal is that there is no fundamental trade-off between individual rights and the common good. This is not a bug, but a feature of the organic or harmonic view of Hobhouse. Again, for many, this is a central feature of a kind of Stoic harmony view that is often attributed to eighteenth century social theory (not me, by the way) in which the invisible hand represents a providential harmony of ends. Hobhouse admits that, in practice, this may seem unrealistic, but the harmonic view is a kind of normative goal not descriptive reality. Even so, this is not a liberalism that expects fundamental value conflict or irreconcilable pluralism.
As an aside, when Hobhouse is confronted by competing claims ground in contradictory value commitments or needs, he does not offer a technocratic conflict resolution mechanism at all or formula's by which these competing interests can be harmonized. He recognizes that many conflicts have different ways of being pacified or resolved. But what this requires is a kind of good will and localized practical judgment familiar from Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments: "an impartial observer will not consider me alone. He will equally weigh the opposed claims of others. He will take us in relation to one another, that is to say, as individuals involved in a social relationship."
Second, the state of affairs instantiated by the inequality under discussion must have two characteristics: first, it must be overall better than possible alternatives under some metric of the common good. Admittedly, it is not obvious what this measure might be for Hobhouse. Nor is it obvious how we should think about the nature of the possibilities that can be devised by us. But the overall thrust of Hobhouse's philosophy makes clear that these characteristic are not meant to justify the status quo; we are on his view often quite capable of conceiving alternatives that allow us to criticize the status quo.
In fact, an important strain of his general argument for all kinds of social programs and state intervention is that great inequalities of wealth undermine the bargaining power of economic actors such that many economic contracts do not reflect the marginal contributions but rather the arrangements of social power. He actually thinks this undermines economic efficiency. In fact, he is a key figure in the part of the liberal tradition that worries about the distorting effects of society to the marketplace.+ And so not unlike Adam Smith he favors a high wages strategy:
the price which naked labour without property can command in bargaining with employers who possess property is no measure at all of the addition which such labour can actually make to wealth. The bargain is unequal, and low remuneration is itself a cause of low efficiency which in turn tends to react unfavourably on remuneration. Conversely, a general improvement in the conditions of life reacts favourably on the productivity of labour. (Chapter VIII "Economic Liberalism")
In fact, Hobhouse is explicitly a limitarian (recall this post about Kramm & Robeyns; and this one about Spinoza) about income: we may take it that the principle of the super-tax is based on the conception that when we come to an income of some ��5,000 a year we approach the limit of the industrial value of the individual.[12] We are not likely to discourage any service of genuine social value by a rapidly increasing surtax on incomes above that amount. It is more likely that we shall quench the anti-social ardour for unmeasured wealth, for social power, and the vanity of display." And the accompanying footnote reads:
"It is true that so long as it remains possible for a certain order of ability to earn ��50,000 a year, the community will not obtain its services for ��5,000. But if things should be so altered by taxation and economic reorganization that ��5,000 became in practice the highest limit attainable, and remained attainable even for the ablest only by effort, there is no reason to doubt that that effort would be forthcoming. It is not the absolute amount of remuneration, but the increment of remuneration in proportion to the output of industrial or commercial capacity, which serves as the needed stimulus to energy.
Obviously, it is worth asking if empirically his assumptions are sound. But my interest here is not to defend his limitarianism, but to note that this limitarianism suggests something about the second condition that considerable economic inequalities must meet before they are justified. And this is a kind of proto-difference principle: the net overall gain to the common good that is to be pursued from our unequal baseline may not hurt those (like B) who are in the weakest groups today (nor may they violate anyone's rights).
I don't mean to be suggesting that the two conditions instantiate a Rawlsian decision procedure or some kind of alternative to Paretian principles. Hobhouse is not trying to compete with economists' normative social choice theories. And I recognize that this this will be seen as a failure by many.
Rather, what Hobhouse two conditions generate is the idea that almost no status quo we may find ourselves in is justified, and so it animates a reformist social spirit in which to "maintain the essence of [liberalism's] old ideas it must be through a process of adaptation and growth." And making this spirit of adaptation -- more than any particular policy -- central to his understanding of liberalism is, I think, Hobhouse's seminal contribution to liberalism's self-understanding.
June 7, 2022
Hudde and Spinoza's Monism, Pt 3
This is the third post in a series triggered by an invite from Karolina Hubner and Justin Steinberg to write on the Spinoza and Hudde (1628 ��� 1704)) exchange. According to Spinoza (recall this post); and this one), Hudde's original request to Spinoza was to provide [1] "a demonstration of the Unity of God from the fact that his Nature involves necessary existence." (Curley 2016: 25) We can infer from Spinoza's response that in his final letter to Spinoza, Hudde raised two remaining concerns about Spinoza's monism:
[3a] It is unclear why Spinoza seems committed to the claim that it is a contradiction to conceive something whose definition involves existence (or what is the same, affirms existence) under a negation of existence. (Curley 2016: 29)
[3b] Spinoza seems to be unable to rule out the [real] possibility that there could not be many beings, existing through themselves, but differing in nature, just as thought and extension are different, and can perhaps subsist by their own sufficiency... (Curley 2016: 30)
I doubt Spinoza's response to [3a] really would have been satisfying. Spinoza writes:
since the limited denotes nothing positive, but only the privation of the existence of the same nature which is conceived as limited, it follows that something whose definition affirms existence cannot be conceived as limited. For example, if the term extension involves necessary existence, it will be as impossible to conceive extension without existence as it is to conceive extension without extension. And if this is maintained, it will also be impossible to conceive a limited extension. For if it were conceived to be limited, it would have to be limited by its own nature, namely, by extension. And this extension by which it was limited would have to be conceived under the negation of existence.
For, Hudde is not worried with the possibility that something whose definition affirms existence can be conceived as limited. Rather, he is worried that one can hold the idea of something whose definition affirms existence at a kind of arms length by, say, putting it between brackets and negating it. (As I noted before Hudde pioneered working with negative numbers, so I this was not something he would have thought of as mere wordplay.) It's quite clear, also from the Ethics, that Spinoza does not consider this a real possibility because for Spinoza the thinking subject becomes unified in a certain sense with the clear and distinct (or adequate) idea s/he affirms and cannot simultaneously genuinely deny it, say, for the sake of argument. So, here Hudde and Spinoza seem to me to be talking past each other. (I actually wonder if this represents a fundamental in 17th century post-Cartesianism on the way of ideas.)
The point in the last paragraph is non-trivial because in a fascinating (1989) paper on the Hudde-Spinoza Correspondence, Wim Klever has suggested that Hudde is a kind of crypto Spinozist. (What makes the paper so fascinating is that Klever noticed that Hudde and Locke corresponded (via Van Limborch) over the same issues decades later.)+ I strongly doubt we need to infer that Hudde is a crypto-Spinozist from Hudde's position (as presented by Spinoza) and I don't see why we should ascribe crypto-Spinozism to Hudde.
In addition, Klever thinks that Hudde is worried about the substance-like nature of the attributes in Spinoza (which is a natural concern had Hudde read the Short Treatise), and that this motivates Hudde's concern with polytheism. This cannot be ruled out altogether; and to be sure, [3b] is compatible with Klever's reading because in it the self-sufficient subsistence of thought and extension are mentioned. But to me they seem more introduced as analogy not the source of Hudde's concern.
The more natural reading of [3b] is that Hudde is worried about multiple self-causing, self-subsisting substances with different (and non-overlapping) natures or attributes existing simultaneously given Spinoza's commitments. And, in Part II, chapter II, of the Appendix Containing Metaphysical Thoughts of the Cartesian Principles of Philosophy, Spinoza himself had invited this concern in the passage on God's Uniqueness (which I had already suggested in the two previous posts on the exchange must have prompted Hudde's questions on other grounds). For in that passage Spinoza explicitly indicates that God has an open-ended number of attributes (including understanding). And Spinoza goes on to write, "If now you say that there are many Gods, or supremely perfect beings, they will all have to understand, in the highest degree." (Curley 1985: 318)
And what Hudde is noticing is that it not obvious that if there are many Gods, that they all have to understand in the highest degree. Spinoza seems to presuppose that to be a God one must have all the attributes (that is, have unity). So, Hudde's original question, 'why does Unity of God follow from the fact that his Nature involves necessary existence?' makes sense. The tought being that maybe all gods necessarily exist (by their own sufficiciency), but they otherwise have a division of labor involving different infinite attributes and they are unlimited in its own kind. So, again, I doubt Hudde needs to be a Spinozist to raise this proto-Leibnizian objection.
My reading seems to be supported by the first sentence of Spinoza's response: "if we assert that something which is only unlimited in its own kind, and perfect, exists by its own sufficiency." This seems to be Hudde's worry as I understand it. But having said that, the way Spinoza refutes Hudde's worry is, in part, by relying on the idea that multiple substance-like attributes actually imply the existence of a single God/substance only might well be taken to support Klever's interpretation (although I deny that that's required).
Okay, let's now turn to Spinoza's full response to Hudde's [3b]:
if we assert that something which is only unlimited in its own kind, and perfect, exists by its own sufficiency, the existence of a being absolutely unlimited and perfect will also have to be conceded. This Being I call God. For example, if we want to maintain that extension or thought (each of which can be perfect in its own kind, that is, in a definite kind of being) exists by its own sufficiency, we will also have to concede the existence of God, who is absolutely perfect, that is, of an absolutely unlimited being.
Here I should like you to note what I said just now about the term imperfection, namely, that it signifies that something is lacking to a thing which pertains to its nature. For example, Extension can be called imperfect only in relation to duration, position or quantity, because it does not last longer, or does not keep its position, or is not larger.
But it will never be called imperfect because it does not think, since its nature, which consists only in extension, that is, in a definite kind of being, requires nothing of that sort. In this respect only limited or unlimited extension is to be called imperfect or perfect, respectively. And since the nature of God does not consist in a definite kind of being, but in a Being which is absolutely unlimited, his nature also requires everything which expresses being perfectly, since otherwise his nature would be limited and deficient.
Since these things are so, it follows that there can only be one Being, God, which exists by its own force. For if we assert, for example, that extension involves existence, it must be eternal and unlimited , expressing absolutely no imperfection, but only perfection. Therefore, Extension will pertain to God, or it will be something which expresses God���s nature in some way. For God is a being which is, not just in a certain respect, but absolutely unlimited in being and omnipotent. And this, which is said of Extension (as an arbitrary example), will also have to be affirmed of everything we want to maintain as having such a nature.
I conclude, then, as in my preceding Letter, that nothing outside God, but only God, subsists by its own sufficiency. I believe these things suffice to explain the meaning of the preceding letter. But you will be able to judge better than I concerning that. (Curley 2016: 30-31)
If I understand Spinoza correctly, Spinoza simply denies what Hudde takes to be possible on Spinoza's view is possible. And that's because if we conceptualize God and attributes properly, then God must have or express all the attributes: "since the nature of God does not consist in a definite kind of being, but in a Being which is absolutely unlimited, his nature also requires everything which expresses being perfectly, since otherwise his nature would be limited and deficient."
By itself this does not seem very compelling as a response to Hudde's worry as I understand it because it rules out polytheism by stipulation. Yet, Spinoza's position is not mere terminology or question begging against Hudde's proto-Leibnizian worry. The really interesting underlying point in the passage quoted above is that Spinozistic God is not the kind of entity that can figure in a question like, 'is there is one or more.' As Jonathan Bennett first suggested (I believe) in his field metaphysics (but relying on the Ethics not this letter), Spinoza's God is, grammatical appearances to the contrary, not a count-noun, but more like a mass noun (Bennett A Study of Spinoza's Ethics, 1984, p. 104).* I doubt that is obvious if one only read the Metaphysical Thoughts or Short Treatise (and, if one is interested in Spinoza's development, I suspect it may not have been obvious to Spinoza himself before Hudde's challenge).
So, in my view the significance of Spinoza's three responses to Hudde is that they show Spinoza articulating, even developing key features of the PSR and the nature of his monism. I leave open here, to what degree Hudde's later challenges to Locke reflects continued dissatisfaction with Spinoza's responses or an evolved understanding of the issue(s) (or both).
+In her important 2014 paper on the Hudde-Locke correspondence (which pays more attention to Locke's side of the discussion than Klever does), Giuliana Di Biase relies on Klever's judgment that Hudde is a crypto-Spinozist (and that, as Klever suggests), Hudde is worried about the substance-like nature of the attributes in Spinoza (which is a natural reading had Hudde read the Short Treatise). Di Biase has informed me that she does not endorse Klever's views on these matters in work in progress.
*I am agnostic here on the possibility that we're better off thinking of this not as a noun, but as a verb (as Valteri Viljanen suggested in 2007 here.). I am also not claiming that Spinoza's position in the Ethics is identical to the position articulated in the third letter to Hudde.
June 6, 2022
Hobhouse & Foucault on the Socialist Art of Government (with a nod to Luxemburg), 31 January 1979, Episode XXXXIV
Foucault (recall also here) famously denies that socialism has an art of government. And notably he does not seem inclined to supply one. That's notable, especially, because the 1979 lectures do supply several variants of a liberal art of government.
But that socialism lacks an art of government is by no means obvious. In chapter VIII, of T.L. Hobhouse's (1911) Liberalism, Hobhouse distinguishes between 'official' and 'mechanical' socialism. These are, to be sure, kinds of socialism Hobhouse rejects. (He is by no means a fierce critic of other kinds of socialism.) It turns out that mechanical socialism lacks an art of government (about which more below), but that 'official socialism' does have one:
Official Socialism is a creed of different brand. Beginning with a contempt for ideals of liberty based on a confusion between liberty and competition, it proceeds to a measure of contempt for average humanity in general. It conceives mankind as in the mass a helpless and feeble race, which it is its duty to treat kindly. True kindness, of course, must be combined with firmness, and the life of the average man must be organized for his own good. He need not know that he is being organized. The socialistic organization will work in the background, and there will be wheels within wheels, or rather wires pulling wires. Ostensibly there will be a class of the elect, an aristocracy of character and intellect which will fill the civil services and do the practical work of administration. Behind these will be committees of union and progress who will direct operations, and behind the committees again one or more master minds from whom will emanate the ideas that are to direct the world. The play of democratic government will go on for a time, but the idea of a common will that should actually undertake the organization of social life is held the most childish of illusions. The master minds can for the moment work more easily through democratic forms, because they are here, and to destroy them would cause an upheaval. But the essence of government lies in the method of capture. The ostensible leaders of democracy are ignorant creatures who can with a little management be set to walk in the way in which they should go, and whom the crowd will follow like sheep. The art of governing consists in making men do what you wish without knowing what they are doing, to lead them on without showing them whither until it is too late for them to retrace their steps. Socialism so conceived has in essentials nothing to do with democracy or with liberty. It is a scheme of the organization of life by the superior person, who will decide for each man how he should work, how he should live, and indeed, with the aid of the Eugenist, whether he should live at all or whether he has any business to be born. At any rate, if he ought not to have been born���if, that is, he comes of a stock whose qualities are not approved���the Samurai will take care that he does not perpetuate his race.
This account of official socialism, which at the time was not reality anywhere, anticipates key features of Burnham's experience based account of managerial socialism (and capitalism) in the (1941; recall) Managerial Revolution. We might also call it 'Leninist/managerial or ethnic biopolitics' (notice the role of eugenics). Presumably Hobhouse has not Lenin, but the Webbs (he mentions them in the next chapter) or George Bernard Shaw in mind. It's the kind of 'government house' socialism we find satirized, if it is that, later in Huxley's Brave New World. One can agree with Hobhouse that a 'noble lying' socialism in the services of an intellectual avant-garde in charge of planning and population control is not very attractive.
From the perspective of Foucault's treatment of socialism in 1979, I note three important features in Hobhouse's analysis. First, the bio-political element is clearly not limited to neoliberalism. Or to be precise, neoliberal biopolitics shares roots with the official socialist kind in English radicalism's response to Malthus and Darwin. Second, Hobhouse clearly does not think he needs to offer arguments against official socialism once he has unmasked it. In part, that's because he thinks his own brand of liberalism has moved beyond Manchester's focus on 'competition' and has a more solid conception of 'liberty' (based on ideas derived from J.S. Mill and T.H. Green.*) In part, because he seems to think once a program devoted to deception has been unmasked it becomes impotent (that strikes me as a mistake or naivete).
Third, Foucault's comment is offered in the context of the German SDP's (1959) commitment (at Bad Godesberg) not just to reformist Bernsteinism, but to the "economic-political consensus of German liberalism" as articulated in the Ordoliberal ideals of a social market economy. Either way, the art of government on offer from official socialism as presented by Hobhouse is indeed unattractive as an art of government for a mass party committed to democratic ideals, Enlightenment, and an ordered market economy.
As an aside, part of my interest in Hobhouse (1864 ���1929) is, in fact, motivated by seeing his (left) Liberalism (about which some other time more) as a possible route toward Ordoliberalism. There are important differences between the ORDOs and Hobhouse's liberalism, but there also commonalities. To be sure, there is little interest in Hobhouse among the main first generation ORDOs. And I suspect that Hobhouse's absence in the neoliberal literature prevents Foucault from drawing on him.
But I learned from a forthcoming paper by Stefan Kolev and Ekkehard A. K��hler, "Transatlantic Roads to Mont P��lerin: ���Old Chicago��� and Freiburg in a World of Disintegrating Orders," that the ORDOs themselves were shaped by the Berlin economist and sociologist, Heinrich Herkner (1863���1932). Herkner was one of the key left-Liberal thinkers of the Weimar age, and in the very work that inspired the ORDOs revisionism from classical liberalism, he was, in fact, also an ardent admirer of Hobhouse's Liberalism (see especially his Sozialpolitischer Liberalismus (1925), p. 39.).
Be that as it may, in the same chapter (in fact, in the previous paragraph) of Liberalism, Hobhouse also rejects another kind of socialism:
We can recognize in the contours of 'mechanical socialism' a Marxist edifice with its commitment to the labor theory of value, class warfare, and a materialist conception of history. What's notable is that unlike the 'official Socialism,' which he simply unmasked, Hobson feels the need to argue against the 'mechanical socialist.' This suggests to me that Hobhouse takes it as a more dangerous and more plausible alternative to his own views.
Regardless what one thinks of the merits of Hobhouse's criticism of 'mechanical socialism,' my present interest is in the following passage (which anticipates Foucault's observations on the absence of an art of government in socialism):
Of this all that need be said is that the construction of Utopias is not a sound method of social science; that this particular Utopia makes insufficient provision for liberty, movement, and growth; and that in order to bring his ideals into the region of practical discussion, what the Socialist needs is to formulate not a system to be substituted as a whole for our present arrangements but a principle to guide statesmanship in the practical work of reforming what is amiss and developing what is good in the actual fabric of industry. A principle so applied grows if it has seeds of good in it, and so in particular the collective control of industry will be extended in proportion as it is found in practice to yield good results. The fancied clearness of Utopian vision is illusory, because its objects are artificial ideas and not living facts. The "system" of the world of books must be reconstructed as a principle that can be applied to the railway, the mine, the workshop, and the office that we know, before it can even be sensibly discussed. The evolution of Socialism as a practical force in politics has, in point of fact, proceeded by such a reconstruction, and this change carries with it the end of the materialistic Utopia. [emphasis added]
Part of Hobhouse's polemical point is that for mechanical socialism to have an art of government requires it to forego Utopianism and become more like his own, piecemeal ameliorative (reformist) liberalism.+ And this means that in many ways it has to be an applied practice informed by concrete policy challenges emanating in particular sectors of the economy (and social life). I am going to leaving aside the well known dangers of reformism (for a revolutionary Marxism). What's notable about Hobhouse's position is that while it is compatible with a kind of technocratic pragmatism problem-solving specific sectorial problems, it also echoes the kind of view (recall) that Rosa Luxemburg (ca 1904) articulates, of a bottom up, local "often spontaneous class struggle seeking its way."
That is to say, while Foucault and Hobhouse both explicitly deny that socialism has an art of government that is compatible with democratic life (and Foucault insists that what passes for an art of government within Marxism is no better than a police state), Hobhouse de facto articulates a social-democratic art of government on behalf of a reformist socialism that is not far from his own social liberalism. I won't surprise you, I suspect, that Hobhouse's point is very much in the service for a political parliamentary alliance between liberalism and social democracy that he advocates.**
*"the teaching of Green and the enthusiasm of Toynbee were setting Liberalism free from the shackles of an individualist conception of liberty and paving the way for the legislation of our own time."
+From my vantage point this is very Smithian in character. And some other time, I hope to return to this.
**UPDATE: I thank Zolt��n G��bor Sz��cs for catching a number of errors in an earlier version of this post.
June 4, 2022
On Structural Explanations in Political Rhetoric.
In this post I want to express a suspicion about the use of certain academic concepts in some species of political rhetoric. That's not a noble enterprise, which is why I do it on the week-end. And before I express that suspicion I also want to claim that I do not wish to cast aspersion on these concepts as proper in a scientific, juridical, or academic context. I am not here to police academic speech, and I am willing to grant that all the concepts I discuss have genuine explanatory value and latch on to features of the world. I know some think that the very distinction I am presupposing in a context of utterance here is incoherent or redolent of a medieval double truth doctrine, so be it. But I am really only interested in what follows in political rhetoric.+
Anyway, here's the suspicion: I suspect a lot of social phenomena that are called 'structural' or 'institutional' in character are done so in order to avoid pointing fingers at particular fellow citizens who can be held accountable or who are ultimately responsible for the state of affairs. I suspect 'implicit bias' and 'capitalism' also have this function in contemporary political rhetoric.
In fact, I suspect such terminology is used to avoid antagonizing particularly powerful opponents, who may be colleagues or superiors or democratic majorities or influential social elites (etc.). (Sometimes this is entrenched in law: the European Central Bank is "collectively accountable" which in practice means the governing board members can barely be sacked.)
That is, I treat the use of such terminology as an expression of awareness of being in a (at least temporary) political minority or vulnerability. So, the category of concepts I have in mind are about social phenomena in which individual decisions are subsumed under social categories that prevent individual accountability. And by 'individual accountability' I am thinking not just of particular individuals in charge of social institutions, but also of democratic majorities.
Of course, such usages are also context specific, and don't always involve oppositional political activity. In Dutch political culture, for example, "governance culture" seems to have a similar function, and it is often used by leading figures to prevent individual accountability. Recently the government even admitted that the tax authorities exhibited ""institutional racism" [google "The Dutch childcare benefits scandal" for background], but don't expect senior civil servants or their political pay-masters to pay any social price. Here, the political elites (see what I did there) use such a category to name a real problem (which they had tried to cover up for years) but without individual accountability.
I don't know a good term for these, so I'll use 'systemic categories of human agency.' Of course, say, implicit bias is a very different kind of phenomenon than governance culture. So, I am not suggesting these systematic categories have much in common or are even part of same political rhetoric generally. (I already noted that their use is not the same when government uses such categories or when social movements do.)
I am not claiming, of course, that the suggestion of the preceding paragraphs -- that certain scientific concepts become central to particular kind or style of political rhetoric that is deployed, in part, in order to prevent naming individuals as responsible for a certain state of affairs -- is the only or main motive for the use of such concepts in political life (that would be reductionist). So, for example, within Marxism there is a train of thought that rejects moralism as itself exhibiting a certain bourgeois outlook and where the deployment of such systemic categories are part of a larger scientific and political strategy aimed at transformation and revolution. For the Marxist, the aim is to get rid of a certain class (and that is a form of accountability that does reach particular individuals).
Perhaps, the use of 'systemic categories of human agency' also helps rationalize the public sphere and make it more amenable to reasoned public, democratic deliberation. And, in fact, I do find there is often a technocratic impulse lurking behind the use of such categories.
Since such 'systemic categories of human agency' are now deeply entrenched in political rhetoric, I don't expect to offer you a decisive reason to abandon them. Clearly a lot of smart people think they are needed to mobilize people in the name of noble causes. And undoubtedly often merely replacing a particular person with another who faces the same incentives and institutional constraints probably does not make much of a difference.
After all, one does not win popularity contests when one insults many of the jurors. So 'systemic categories of human agency' help evade certain fights in the service of higher order change in democratic life. But I also would hypothesize that as a category, their frequent use makes people feel less capable of influencing political change -- because impersonal and abstract -- and that they end up entrenching the very status quo they are aimed at. And my sense is this may not be a bug, but a feature of their use.*
+Obviously that evades a problem of definition of political. Soit.
*I thank Jamie Mayerfeld for some encouragement of this post.
June 3, 2022
Spinoza, Hudde, and Monotheism, PT 2
This is the second post in a series triggered by an invite from Karolina Hubner and Justin Steinberg to write on the Spinoza and Hudde (1628 ��� 1704)) exchange. According to Spinoza (recall this post), Hudde's original request to Spinoza was to provide [1] "a demonstration of the Unity of God from the fact that his Nature involves necessary existence." (Curley 2016: 25) From what follows in Spinoza's letter (OP 34) from 7 January 1666, it is clear that Spinoza understands 'unity' here as a kind of monotheism which rules out a plurality of Gods:
But from his true definition (as I have already demonstrated previously from the second and third hypotheses) the necessary existence of many Gods cannot be inferred. There follows, therefore, only the existence of one God. Q.E.D. (Curley 2016: 26)
Hudde was evidently not satisfied, and seems to have written two follow up letters. I think Spinoza's wording suggests that Spinoza wrote a response (now lost) to the initial follow up (from 10 February 1666), in which expressed his difficulty grasping Hudde's continued problems with Spinoza's argument. (All of Hudde's letters to Spinoza seem to be destroyed.) And after the second follow up (30 March, 1666), Spinoza takes Hudde's true worry to be: [2] "whether there is only one Being which subsists by its own sufficiency or power?" (Curley 2016: 26; Letter 35 OP, 10 April 1666.)
What's interesting about the formulation now attributed to Hudde by Spinoza is that the terminology of 'subsistence' is new here in their discussion. To the best of my knowledge, Spinoza does not use it when discussing substance or god. The one exception I have found is in the Cartesian Principles of Philosophy, in Proposition 16 where the incorporeality of God is demonstrated. (Curley 1985: 260) There Spinoza seems to use 'subsist' and 'exist' interchangeably. But, he is here clearly treating Descartes' position, not his own. And he is using 'subsist' in a conditional mode. So, I am inclined to suspect the terminology reflects Hudde's attempts to grapple with Spinoza's view. (As I noted, if Hudde is responding to Cartesian Principles of Philosophy, the argument is rather cryptic.)
One advantage of this new formulation is that it gets at the worry that [i] it is not obvious why the kind of power that produces God should itself be limited in number. That's subtly different from the original version of the worry (recall) that I attributed to Hudde based on Spinoza's original response: this initial concern is the worry that [ii] it is not obvious why the power that produces God should be limited to producing only one God.*
From the perspective of this re-formulation, Spinoza's new response to Hudde is frustrating. Because rather than focusing on the nature of such power (or sufficiency), Spinoza's new proof relies on the relationship between necessary existence and pure perfection. His fifth step in his new reformulation is: "whatever involves necessary existence cannot have in it any imperfection, but must express pure perfection." (Curley 2016: 27) This is then used to argue that there is only being with such pure perfection.
That Hudde was not fully convinced is clear. But rather than pressing the point about perfection, he seems to have rephrased his concern by splitting it in two as follows:
[3a] that it is a contradiction to conceive something whose definition involves existence (or what is the same, affirms existence) under a negation of existence. (Curley 2016: 29)
[3b] why there could not be many beings, existing through themselves, but differing in nature, just as thought and extension are different, and can perhaps subsist by their own sufficiency... (Curley 2016: 3o)
What's neat about [3b] is that it shows that (in light of the initial concerns of [i] and [ii]), Hudde de facto accepts something like the identity of indiscernibles.(I put this in Leibnizian fashion because I think [3b] clearly anticipates some of Leibniz's worries about Spinoza's position.) And Hudde concedes a principle like: same perfect power must produce same perfect entity. And so Hudde now recognizes that if there are to be (at least) two gods (self-causing, self-sufficient, necessarily existent, etc.) these must be at least different in nature. (This also shows that Hudde was not convinced by the language of perfection.)
By contrast, the way I understand [3a] is as an instance of a more general worry at least in the vicinity of [3a] about Descartes and Spinoza's general approach when it comes to God/Substance. They seem to hold that one literally cannot be said to really think the denial of certain clear and distinct or adequate ideas, not even, as it were, at arm's length. And Hudde -- who pioneered the use of negative numbers -- clearly seems to think that one can at least conceive the denial of whatever one affirms (even if it is a thing with necessary existence or whose definition involves existence).
The other neat thing about [3a] and [3b], from the perspective of the original worry [1], is that Hudde now is decomposing different levels at which concern about Spinoza's argument might enter in. One is at the level of what can be thought/conceived by the meditator. The other is at level of what God(s)'s nature/identity might be. And what he puts his finger on is that in Spinoza's philosophy these two levels seemingly get intertwined. In my next post, I'll explore Spinoza's final known letter to Hudde in response.
*It is worth noting that Spinoza reminds Hudde that "it can also be demonstrated very easily either from God���s intellect (as I showed in P11 of my Geometric Demonstrations of Descartes��� ���Principles���)." As I remarked, Hudde's original question is almost certainly about the scholium that Spinoza attached to the demonstration from this proposition. Spinoza's main proof there is a reductio, and Hudde seems to ignore the proof by reductio throughout the exchange.
June 2, 2022
Covid Diaries: A Half Full Glass and despite Minor irritants, maybe filling
It's been about a month since my last covid update. (For my official "covid diaries," see here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here, here; here; here, here; and here). And, as seems common in the most recent updates, the situation is mixed. But let me start with the non-trivial bits of good news.
First, if I take anti-inflammatory medicine before I have a social interaction (like a lunch or tea) I am capable of engaging in much longer social interactions than I was able to do during the past nine months. I am also capable of doing so in much more complex social environments. I have even been able to do so twice in a day (with a few hours apart). By this I mean that the usual symptoms of head fatigue and subsequent headache don't follow. So that's a big win, and at times I have felt euphoric about it.
Interestingly enough, after some such activities later in the day I do register physically that I have had some such interactions. My body will feel unusually fatigued, and I need to take time to chill. (I am not allowed to nap because I need to keep day/night rhythm very distinct.) Some day, when I am fully recovered, I would like to team up with a (historical) epidemiologist and geriatric specialists because I am increasingly convinced that a lot of symptoms that in the past usually were treated as 'aging' really were the longue dur��e effects of (post-)viral infections.
Anyway, on the medical side, I am experimenting with the dosage of the anti-inflammatory meds. As they say in jargon: I am looking to find the minimally efficacious dosage. The month before I lost about six full days to random headaches. This past month, clearly 50% less. That's a lot of less suffering.
As an aside, it's fascinating that while the physicians can all tell you that there are increased risks associated with the use of my particular meds, nobody can tell you what the order of magnitude of the risk might be for a generic patient or for somebody that shares in some of my demographic or medical characteristics. So, while a lot of physicians practice a kind of pseudo medical autonomy -- telling me things like, 'it's your decision' or 'you need to weigh the trade-offs' --, de facto there is a lot of ignorance being buck-passed onto a patient who is not being given even the minimal coarse-grained information to make autonomous decisions. (And regular readers know, I am no Bayesian--I am not asking for exact statistics, just very broad orders of magnitude.)
Be that as it may, I am quietly hoping that the anti-inflammatory meds also treat some underlying condition such that I can keep hoping for continued improvement over the medium term. The really interesting question for me is this: my symptoms have shifted around every few (two to three) months. And what I am wondering is whether that cycle can be broken. Stay tuned.:)
One thing I have learned about chronic disease or newly acquired disability: other ailments that in a different context would be barely noticed can be greatly destabilizing in the context of disability/chronic disease; think of things like a cold, modest hearing loss, swimmer's ear, blisters, etc. When you are learning to adjust to chronic disease such incredibly modest ailments sap energy. (Again see my comment above about aging as instances of post-viral symptoms.)
Second (back to the good news), next academic year, I'll have the kind of work-load I probably should have had this past year. I am only teaching my giant lecture course Winter 2023. To make this possible a lot of people showed me incredible amount of good-will: my immediate family, which is signing off on three months of research leave stateside (with two weeks of holiday for visits); the folks at Duke University's Center for the History of political Economy and the philosophy department; the folks at University of Arizona's Center for the Philosophy of Freedom. These allowed me to take three months unpaid research leave this Fall. In addition, my department signed off on this. That, too, showed, good-will, but it did involve some negotiations.
Let me explain, one of the very strange features of the University of Amsterdam is that it works with a system of registered hours (for research, teaching, and some admin). Undoubtedly it was introduced for a mixture of fairness considerations (everyone pulling their fair share) and administrative control over the budget. But in practice, the 'hours' registered are by no means equal (and also model-based). And the obvious effect of the system is to turn academics into a bean-counter of sorts and, for some, also a chance to game the system. (I'll get to the really strange part in a second.)
Now, in practice these plan hours are bit like frequent flyer miles. You know what their official value is, but if you have been around for a while you also recognize you can never really cash them for their (ahh) labor value. This is especially so when there is a dire need for budget cuts; these hours are then easy prey. (That's how I 'lost' one batch of over-hours a few years ago.)
Anyway, despite my partial sick-leave, during the past few years, I actually accumulated more over-hours than I had when I started my partial sick-leave! So, to facilitate my leave and considerable teaching reduction I agreed to donate my (ca 900!) hours and start the next academic year back at level zero. I rationalized the deal to myself as a business class upgrade on a transatlantic/pacific flight.:) In addition, because of my medical leave I have been rather costly to the department and a lot of my rank-specific chores have been parceled out to others. While an apparent bad deal on paper, I felt this was very win-win, and also a chance for me to show my gratitude.
So, my underlying outlook is actually quite positive right now. Next year, I feel my work-load should allow me space to recover and do what I love work-wise (research, write, and lecture). It also allows me space to experiment, when I feel sufficiently recovered, with activities I have not dared to try yet (giving professional lectures, attending seminars, etc.) And while I will miss my family and my undergrad electives/seminars, it's good not to have to stress about their effect on my health. On the other hand, as I have hinted above, I am dealing with a bunch of minor ailments that prevent me from having unconditional optimism right now. The glass is half full, possibly filling.
June 1, 2022
On Esoteric Locke (and Cicero/Newton); Yolton's (and Blau's) Polemics with Strauss, PT 2
Strauss has gone to very particular pains to say that Locke was really a genuine Hobbist in his social theory, a claim Strauss pretends to demonstrate by minute attention to and quotation from the Locke corpus. It is not so much the obvious incorrectness of Strauss's reading which calls for comment as it is the techniques employed in support of his reading. Strauss has an ulterior reason for dealing with Locke as he does: he claims that Locke's real doctrine has been purposely hidden under the show of respectability.5 It is not surprising that the Strauss esotericism turns out to be insupportable when applied to Locke, but it is startling to discover the flimsiness of the pretended support and the unscholarly nature of Strauss's analysis. Strauss's general esotericist thesis suffers a severe blow when we consult the techniques he employs.
This post originates in my interest in finding critical engagements with Leo Strauss within analytic philosophy in Strauss' lifetime during the post-WWII era (triggered by (recall here; here; here; especially this one; here; here; here; and here, which was pt 1 on Yolton vs Strauss) an invite by Sander Verhaegh). In the last post I discussed Yolton's (1955) "Criticism and Histrionic Understanding" Ethics (65):3, which is a respectful criticism of Strauss' Natural Right and History (NRH). The underlying point is that in his arguments against relativism Strauss has ignored a plausible alternative position. Yolton's argument can fruitfully be read as an immanent criticism (also because of the kind of authors/authorities he appeals to). As I noted, Yolton's argument itself suffers from some weakness, and somewhat surprisingly does not engage with Strauss views on Locke in NRH which diverge greatly from those that Yolton defends in his important monograph, (1956) John Locke and the Way of Ideas (OUP).
In fact, while I have encountered lots of criticism of Strauss, on the whole the criticism is professional in character. Even when there is deep disagreement, there is also a mark of respect. For example in criticizing Strauss' Hobbes' book, J.W. N. Watkins, who later became quite an influential Popperian at LSE, writes (1955), "Professor Leo Strauss's brilliant, influential and, I believe, misguided work." The main exception is Vlastos' (1951) review of Strauss' (1948) treatment of Xenophon's Hiero, but while the review is polemical the tone is more one of disappointment than the disparagement of Strauss he engaged in later in life (see here).
Yolton's (1958) "Locke on the Law of Nature" in The Philosophical Review 67(4), changes all that. In it, Yolton explains that one of the main reasons "a reappraisal of Locke on the law of nature is" needed is in virtue of "the violently distorted interpretation recently advanced by Leo Strauss." (p. 478; he then cites NRH.) Yolton anticipates, say, the polemics of Ryle's (Yolton's supervisor) review of Bloom's Plato translation (NYRB, 1969 [HT Wiep van Bunge]) and (his student) Shadia Drury (here).
It's very hard to find neutral ground on the issue of Strauss' esotericism. But I warmly recommend Adrian Blau's (2012)"Anti-Strauss." The Journal of Politics 74.1: 142-155, which accepts that for some historical authors esotericism is likely, that most criticisms of Strauss have been lazy/hasty, and who is simultaneously rather critical (even satirical) of Strauss' particular techniques. (This sums up my own position.) Somewhat sadly, in his paper, Blau does not discuss Yolton's paper or Strauss' reading of Locke in NRH. What follows is a mitigated defense of Strauss against some of Yolton's criticism.
Even Yolton, who claims to restrict himself to Strauss' esoteric reading of Locke ("I do not want to question Strauss's general theory about techniques of saying one thing and meaning another, the theory of esotericism"), immediately adds a reference to George Boas, who is presented as undermining esoteric readings of the ancients. So, while Yolton's official argument is restricted to Strauss' interpretation of Locke, it's pretty clear that Yolton is a critic of esoteric readings more widely. In context, I find Yolton's hostility toward esotericism rather odd because McCarthyism had been a real thing Stateside (and elsewhere).
Now, unlike most critics of Strauss' esotericism up to that date (and since), Yolton actually followed Strauss' steps in depth. And it is worth quoting one of Yolton's footnotes to get a sense of what this might involve:
10. I indicate in what follows the more glaring errors made by Strauss and the irresponsible methods he uses to substantiate them. But a word about his method of citation may lend more flavor to the appreciation of what is involved. The pages devoted to Locke in Strauss's book (pp. 202-25i, especially 202- 227) are filled with brief words, phrases, sentences quoted from Locke. After a long series of such quotations, a footnote lists a string of references to the Locke texts. But the order of references in no way corresponds to the order of quotation. In many cases, the references are quite irrelevant to the point Strauss has been arguing. In other cases, parts of sentences have been turned around, a later portion being quoted before the earlier. In all cases, Locke is quoted out of context, the context being ignored or carefully covered up; the references are scattered throughout the Locke corpus. It takes literally hours to trace the references to single words and brief phrases, which usually have a different meaning in their context than they have on Strauss's page. (Yolton 1958: 483, [emphasis added])
At a high level of superficiality/generality, Strauss's esoteric method in NRH is two-fold: first, he interprets texts as if they are written in a code that needs to be broken, and, second, he demands from his readers that his texts are read as if they were scrambled/jumbled ("the order of references in no way corresponds to the order of quotation") and so in kind of code, too. If each code has a different key, then each interpretation will have to be worked out on its own terms; this is one reason why even Strauss' most prominent methods can, as Blau recognizes, be no better than very imperfect heuristics. As Yolton notes this means that one spends hours tracing references in the primary and secondary source(s).
So far so good. But now comes the weird part. Yolton's practice and arguments suggest that he thinks that in order to refute Strauss's irresponsible method "the techniques employed," all Yolton needs to do is show that (i) Strauss is quoting out of context and that (ii) in context Locke is saying something different than what Strauss claims about Locke. If Strauss were not offering an esoteric reading, then (i-ii) would be devastating to Strauss' argument even scholarly standing. (And this is presumably the effect of Yolton's procedure on an impartial bystander.) But they are the wrong sort of argument against any esoteric reading. (I hope Blau would agree.)
Now, Yolton's procedure does make sense if you assume that Locke never practiced esotericism. I have to admit -- and I know I will be ridiculed for this -- that I find this a very strange bedrock assumption, especially (of all books) about the Essay. So, in what follows, I first show why I think this is strange. My argument is my own. I then look at Newton's reception of the Essay to suggest Strauss' response is not a fortiori silly. But, third, I also show that Yolton fails to acknowledge and engage with Strauss' (more or less) explicit argument denying Yolton's bedrock assumption about Locke's esotericism.
On the frontispiece of Locke's Essay, there is a quote from Cicero's de Natura Deorum (on the Nature of the Gods) 1.84: "Quam bellum est velle confiteri potius nescire quod nescias, quam ista effutientem nauseare, atque ipsum sibi displicere." Here's a recent translation (by Walsh): "How splendid it would be, Velleius, if you were to admit ignorance of what you do not know, rather than puking and feeling disgust with yourself for uttering such balderdash." Yolton does not discuss the motto in his book on Locke (or 1958 article).
Now, it's not at all surprising that Locke would use a motto that expresses a skeptical position. The motto also is an injunction to avoid babbling/nonsense [effutientem]. And it foreshadows the Locke we analytic philosophers admire (if only he had been more concise).
Of course, it is a bit peculiar that pious Locke would, of all people, use Cicero's de Natura Deorum (on the Nature of the Gods). It's a book more naturally associated with Hume (whose Dialogues concerning natural religion are clearly inspired by if not modelled on it). The Motto, thus, also invites the reader to reflect on how Locke's Essay relates to theology. How to understand that relationship is, in fact, the core intellectual debate between Yolton and Strauss. (Something I cannot do justice to here.)
As regular readers know (recall), Locke echoes a famous argument from Cicero's De Natura Deorum (without attribution to Cicero or Boyle, who had used the same argument) later in the Essay (at 3.6.9). (For a more scholarly version of this material, see here.) So, the motto is not wholly incidental as a source to the content of the Essay.
So far so good. But in De Natura Deorum, Cicero also has one of his characters say the following:
Undoubtedly closer to the truth is the claim made in the fifth book of his Nature of the Gods by Posidonius, whose friendship we all share: that Epicurus does not believe in any gods, and that the statements which he made affirming the immortal gods were made to avert popular odium. He could not have been such an idiot as to fashion God on the lines of a poor human, even if merely in broad outline and not in substantial appearance, yet endowed with all the human limbs but without the slightest use of them, an emaciated, transparent being conferring no gifts or kindness on anyone, and in short discharging no duties and performing no actions. ���First, such a nature cannot exist. In his awareness of this, Epicurus in actuality discards the gods, while paying lip-service to them. (1.123; here's the Latin.)
I quote it for two reasons. Somewhat oddly, Boas, who Yolton cites approvingly, skips this whole passage. Second, Cicero's Nature of the Gods was very widely read and debated in the early modern period. (For evidence of that see my paper.) Of course, this debate also involved debates over Cicero's own position relative to the arguments and character's in the dialogue (with free thinkers reading it very skeptically and more orthodox types reading it in support of design arguments). That is to say, to those familiar with Cicero's text, and its reception, the motto invites alertness to the significance of Locke's doctrines to theology, and to the possibility that Locke may be paying lip-service to orthodoxy.
As an aside, throughout his life Strauss repeatedly cites Cicero's Nature of the Gods (although I am unfamiliar whether he ever discussed the passage just quoted or the motto to Locke's Essay.) But in NRH Strauss does not use Cicero to motivate his esoteric reading of Locke. To the best of my knowledge, the only time that Yolton refers to the work is to alert the reader that Locke's critic, Stillingfleet, is drawing on it (in his Origines Sacrae), when describing the Epicurean version of prolepsis or anticipations of nature (usually associated with Stoicism).
Anyway, on my view Yolton is on shaky ground to assume without argument at all that Locke would never engage in esotericism. (It would also be odd an claim because we know that Locke was quite interested in alchemy and he definitely hid that interest.) As I noted above, all Yolton's arguments against Strauss presuppose such a denial.
Having said that, what I have said so far (and below) cannot decide the many first order, interpretive questions between Strauss and Yolton about Locke. However, as Yolton notes (see the quote above), Strauss ends up reading Locke's social theory as a kind of Hobbist/Hobbesian in all kinds of ways. It's quite clear that Yolton thinks this utterly ridiculous. I have to admit that I would never teach or read Locke this way myself. But it is worth nothing that Newton (and now I quote Peter Anstey) "after reading Locke���s Essay he took him for a Hobbist." (See The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, 3: 280). Locke and Newton shared mutual acquaintances, but when Newton first read the Essay they were not very well known to each other.
I mention this not because Newton's reading of Locke would settle the debate between Strauss and Yolton (it doesn't because it is by no means clear in what sense Newton too Locke to be a Hobbist). But to note that if we take Locke's Essay in context, which is what Yolton claims to be doing throughout his work, the esoteric, Hobbist reading cannot be ruled out by assuming it away or by quoting passages that seem to violate it because it is a natural reading for some of Locke's major contemporaries. (See what I did here; I used a contextualist move to block a contextualist dismissiveness of Strauss.)
Now, Newton himself was rather prone to esoteric readings and (as Steve Snobelen has shown in 2001) practiced the esoteric art of writing even in the General Scholium to the Principia. It's no surprise, then, Newton would engage in such a reading of Locke because (through Boyle) he knew that Locke shared in their common fascination with chymistry (whose practitioners used code to record and share findings). This is not the end of the matter: as Anstey notes, after Newton got to know Locke personally he changed his mind over Locke's Hobbism. (So I am not motivating a Hobbist reading of Locke myself!)
I am close to wrapping up. What I find really odd about Yolton's criticism of Strauss is that he does not confront Strauss' explicit argument to motivate an esoteric reading of Locke while devoting lots of effort on refuting footnote minutiae. When Strauss introduces his interpretation of Locke, he points out that Locke has a tendency to refer to Hooker as "the judicious Hooker." To the best of my knowledge Locke does this three times in short order in Second Treatise. And admittedly when you hit the third one, it is a bit jarring. Strauss then goes on to claim "But the moment we take the trouble to confront Locke's teaching as a whole with Hooker's teaching as a whole, we become aware that, in spite of a certain agreement between Locke and Hooker, Locke's conception of natural right is fundamentally different from Hooker's." (NRH 165)* And at first this seems to be Strauss' ridiculous argument to motivate an esoteric reading of Locke.
Strauss then skips forty pages (mostly on Hobbes) to indicate the significance of this: Locke "appealed as frequently as he could to the authority of Hooker���of one of the least revolutionary men who ever lived. He took every advantage of his partial agreement with Hooker. And he avoided the inconveniences which might have been caused by his partial disagreement with Hooker by being practically silent about it." (NRH 207) Again, if this were Strauss' argument for his esoteric reading of Locke, I could completely understand Yolton's dismissiveness.
But Hooker is a feint. The real argument follows immediately, and it involves Socrates' fate and Plato's prudence as seen by Locke. Strauss quotes the following passage from Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity:
There was no part of mankind, who had quicker parts, or improved them more; that had a greater light of reason, or followed it farther in all sorts of speculations, than the Athenians, and yet we find but one Socrates amongst them, that opposed and laughed at their polytheisms, and wrong opinions of the deity; and we see how they rewarded him for it. Whatsoever Plato, and the soberest of the philosophers thought of the nature and being of the one God, they were fain, in their outward worship, to go with the herd, and keep to the religion established by law; (NRH 208, emphasis added).
Somewhat oddly Yolton skips this entirely. But Locke is here praising ("soberest") a certain kind of lack of forthrightness when it comes to religious views that may violate common opinion and the law (and with the soberest philosophers seemingly endorsing a Hobbesian claim about outwardly following the law regardless of one's private views). This passage in Locke recalls the passage from Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods 1.123 above. And this motivates Strauss' stance on Locke.
One need not accept Strauss' argument that Locke is an esoteric writer in the Essay. (After all, the Reasonableness of Christianity is the later work.) I am honestly agnostic on the matter.** And I certainly agree with Yolton (and Blau) that Strauss' particular readings often seem strikingly ad hoc and based on selective quotation without method and with confirmation bias. But what I have shown is that Yolton does not address Strauss' own explicit argument and evidence to motivate his esoteric reading of Locke. And so the purported refutation with appeal to ordinary scholarly practice, does not get off the ground. That's notable because Yolton's was, I believe, the most elaborate attempt to discredit Strauss' practice in the early English language reception of Strauss. And certainly the most careful before Blau.
*And the reason why it is different according to Strauss is that Hobbes had changed the terms of debate by drawing on non-teleological science he had destroyed "the basis of traditional natural right."
**Well, at least with the Reasonableness of Christianity one has to be rather cautious in taking Locke's pious claims for granted.
May 31, 2022
The PSR, Spinoza and Hudde
I shall presuppose that:
(1) The true definition of each thing contains nothing beyond the simple nature of the thing defined.
From this it follows that
(2) No definition involves or expresses any multiplicity or any definite number of individuals since it involves or expresses nothing but the nature of the thing, as it is in itself.
For example, the Definition of a triangle contains nothing but the simple nature of the triangle, not some definite number of triangles, just as the definition of the Mind, that it is a thinking thing, or the definition of God, that he is a perfect Being, contains nothing but the nature of the Mind, or of God. It does not contain a definite number of Minds or Gods.
(3) There must necessarily be a positive cause of each existing thing, through which it exists.
(4) That this cause must be affirmed to exist either in the nature and definition of the thing itself���because existence pertains to its nature, or its nature necessarily contains existence���or outside the thing.
From these presuppositions it follows that [A] if some definite number of individuals exists in nature, there must be one or more causes which were able to produce precisely that number of Individuals, neither more nor fewer. For example, if twenty men exist in nature���to avoid all confusion I shall suppose that they exist together and without predecessors in nature���it will not be sufficient, to give a reason why the twenty exist, to investigate the cause of human nature in general. [B] What must also be investigated is the reason why neither more nor fewer than twenty men exist. For (according to the third hypothesis) concerning each man a reason and cause must be given why he exists. But (according to the second and third hypotheses) that cause cannot be contained in the nature of the man himself, for the true definition of man does not involve the number of twenty men. Therefore (according to the fourth hypothesis), the cause of the existence of these twenty men, and hence of each of them separately, must exist outside them.--Spinoza to H [Hudde], Letter 34, Voorburg, 7 January 1666. Translated by E. Curley, The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol. II, (Princeton 2016), pp 25-26. [Emphasis added.]
This post is triggered by an invite from Karolina Hubner and Justin Steinberg to write on the Spinoza and Hudde (1628 ��� 1704)) exchange. If we only had the second quoted paragraph above, and not the earlier part of the letter, we might infer that the third hypothesis is a causal principle in the spirit of ���ex nihilo, nihil fit��� (���from nothing, nothing comes���). What's notable is that rather than using what we may call its negative formulation (ex nihilo, nihi) 'from nothing, nothing...', Spinoza opts for what we may call a positive formulation: "(3) There must necessarily be a positive cause of each..."
The positive formulation of Hypothesis (3) echoes Axiom 11, from Spinoza's (1663) The Principles of Cartesian Philosophy,:
Nothing exists of which it cannot be asked, what is the cause, or reason, why it exists. See Descartes��� Al.
Since existing is something positive, we cannot say that it has nothing as its cause (by A7). Therefore we must assign some positive cause, or reason, why [a thing] exists���either an external one, i.e., one outside the thing itself, or an internal one, i.e., one comprehended in the nature and definition of the existing thing itself. (Curley (1985), Vol 1, p. 246; emphasis in original)
It is worth noting that Spinoza here is explicitly riffing on Descartes' Replies to the Second Objections (of the Meditations), and in the context of his treatment of the Cogito; and that Spinoza does so, as he tells us, because it is "impossible for" him "to think that something may come from nothing." (PCP, Vol 1, p. 242)
In their SEP entry, Yitzhak Melamed and Martin Lin claim that Axiom 11 is "Spinoza���s earliest statement of the PSR." (They omit the causal principle on p. 242 perhaps because it's possible to read it as Spinoza attributing it to Descartes.) It's worth mention that there is a version of the PSR in the Short Treatise, which may well date from before 1663. (I thank John Grey and Daniel Schneider for alerting me to this.) In part 1, Chapter 6 (the one on predestination), paragraph 4, Spinoza writes:
Regarding our second question: whether there is any thing in Nature of which one cannot ask why it exists? our saying this indicates that we must investigate through what cause a thing exists. For if that [cause] did not exist, it would be impossible for this something to exist.
We must seek this cause, then, either in the thing or outside it. But if someone asks what rule we should follow in this investigation, we say it does not seem that any at all is necessary. For if existence belongs to the nature of the thing, then certainly we must not seek the cause outside it. But if existence does not belong to the nature of the thing, then we must always seek its cause outside it. And since the former is true only of God, this shows (as we have already proven before) that God alone is the first cause of everything. (Curley (1985), VOL 1, p. 86)
Be that as it may, let's return to the first letter to Hudde. Let's stipulate, for the sake of argument that Spinoza's conclusion, which I labelled [A], follows from the four 'hypotheses.'* My interest is in the final clause, "neither more nor fewer." That [A] includes 'neither more nor fewer' [nec maiorem, nec minorem] looks, at first glance, a kind of redundant exactitude requirement. To count as a proper explanation (or ground, etc.) the cause of the existence of some entity (or group) may not overshoot or undershoot. I call it 'redundant' because Spinoza already has stated 'precisely' [in Latin: illum iuste].+ [A] anticipates a principle we find in the Ethics, ���if a certain number of individuals exists, there must be a cause why those individuals, and why neither more nor fewer, exist.��� (E1p8s2)
But in the letter to Hudde, from the exactitude requirement in [A] Spinoza infers the requirement/demand [B].++ And [B] seems to demand that the cause X of some entity (or number of entities) Y also explains the omissions of possible entities (Yn) such that only Y. If you think that my gloss on [B] is too strong, fair enough. But it is not wholly improbable interpretation because later, in the Ethics, Spinoza articulates an even stronger version of this principle: ���For each thing there must be assigned a cause, or reason, both for its existence and for its nonexistence���. (E1p11dem). And so it looks like [B] anticipates some such demand for providing causes of nonexistence(s).
I should note that depending on how one thinks of what a cause or reason is, it's not silly to think that an explanation for Y simultaneously helps rule out why all kinds of not Ys do not obtain. If I can show why a projectile with a particular velocity breaks a particular window at a particular time, I can probably also show why given that velocity it is only breaking that window (and not other windows) at that time. If you agree with Spinoza that a definition is a kind of (formal) cause you can run this example through properties of triangles (and which help explain why it's not a hexagon).
So, crucially, then, compared to the Short Treatise and the Cartesian Principles of philosophy, in the letter to Hudde, Spinoza starts packing quite a bit more into what counts as a proper causal explanation of things existing in nature and so also starts developing a heavier duty version of the PSR to be used in explanations of nature.
The foregoing also helps explain why Hudde was confused in the first place. His question to Spinoza was (according to Spinoza) to provide "a demonstration of the Unity of God from the fact that his Nature involves necessary existence." In the Cartesian Principles of philosophy, at the end of his demonstration to proposition 11 ("there is not more than one God") Spinoza had added the following remark:
It should be noted here that it follows necessarily from the mere fact that some thing involves necessary existence from itself (as God does) that it is unique. Everyone will be able to see this for himself, provided he meditates attentively. I could also have demonstrated it here, but not in a way perceptible by everyone, as has been done in this proposition. (Curley (1985), p. 255)**
Spinoza returns to this material in Chapter 2 of the Appendix. And he says somewhat cryptically, "I advise the Reader that by right we infer God���s Unity from the nature of his existence, which is not distinguished from his essence, or which necessarily follows from his essence." (Curley (1985), p 319)
Clearly Hudde -- himself a very accomplished mathematician and natural philosopher [not to say eventually one of the most powerful people in Amsterdam and Holland [and so Europe]] --- had tried to meditate attentively, but had failed in seeing it for himself. And the reason why he had failed in this is, I submit, that Spinoza had actually not yet articulated [A] and [B].
For without such precification or extension of the causal principle it is not obvious how one can even begin to rule out multiple Gods. (I am not suggesting that Spinoza has successfully done so here. Clearly some folk think even the Ethics version fails.) This is especially so if one thinks, not implausibly, that the cause of (a) God can itself be not limited in particular ways (since it it is powerful enough to cause God and neither involves any multiplicity or any definite number of individuals).
*I probably would have translated 'onderstelling' with 'supposition.' But
+In Latin [A] reads: quod si in natura certus aliquis individuorum numerus existat, una pluresve causae dari debeant, quae illum iuste nec maiorem, nec minorem individuorum numerum producere potuerunt.
In Latin [B] reads: sed etiam ratio investiganda est, cur nec plures, nec pauciores, quam viginti homines existant.
**I am assuming that unity and uniqueness here mean the same thing.
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