Eric Schliesser's Blog, page 2
June 8, 2023
Fontenelle Hybridized, Human extinction, and Spinozism
[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at ]
A few days ago I was showing off the antiquarian books in my library to the distinguished philosopher of physics and scholar of early modern natural philosophy, Katherine Brading, she made herself comfortable and started reading my copy of one (!) of the translations of Fontenelle's (1686) Entretiens sur la pluralit�� des mondes (known as Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds). The title-page of my copy announces it is a "new translation from the last edition of the French with great additions extracted from the best modern authors, on many curious and entertaining subjects" (and also proudly announced a glossary for technical terms). The book is dated 1760 and the translator as "A Gentleman of the Inner-Temple." There is also a second 1767 edition of this translation.
Google.books has a scan of this edition from the British Library. Somewhat oddly, despite this prominent location, this translation is omitted when people discuss translations of Fontenelle's Entretiens. So, for example, Wikipedia states: "The first English translation was published in Dublin by Sir William Donville or Domville in 1687, followed by another translation by Aphra Behn in 1688, under the title A Discovery of New Worlds and a third by John Glanvill later in 1688." In the translator's preface of recent translation (p. xlviii), H.A. Hargraves includes these three, and mentions a fourth (1715) by William Gardiner. But seems unfamiliar with this fifth, 1760 translation. There is also a sixth (1803) English translation, as Wikipedia notes, by Elizabeth Gunning that (Wikipedia omits this) includes La Lande's notes.* (The 1803 edition also gives a nice overview of French 17th editions of the work.)
In The Great Chain of Being (1936), Lovejoy exhibits familiarity with all of these, except with 'my' 1760 and the translation by Donville. And he is confident enough to claim that the 1715 by Gardiner is largely plagiarized from Glanvill's (p. 348, note 57 in the 1966 Harvard University press edition circulayed in the UK by OUP). Lovejoy acknowledges his debt to the early polymath and Newton scholar, D. Brewster's More Worlds than One. Brewster seems also unfamiliar with the 1760 translation. (Brewster was also a fine scientist!) I indirectly return to Lovejoy���s interests at the end .
My friend Helen de Cruz, plausibly treats Fontenelle's work as an early contribution to hard science fiction (that is, a speculative genre that is constrained by scientific knowledge). Often commentators treat the book also as popularization of then recent primarily Cartesian science and cosmology. In both cases the fact that the new science supports the real possibility of alien life forms is part of the recurring interest. In his introduction to the 1803 edition, Lalande gives a history of respectable/scientific speculation on extraterrestrials, and shows ample evidence this can be found all over eighteenth century natural philosophy. Fontenelle's work attracts the attention, in addition, of scholars interested in the role of learned women because the narrator's interlocuter in the book is a woman and the role of women translators of the book.
However, and this is key to what follows, when Fontenelle's book appeared it was arguably also the first book that pulled together a century���s worth of astronomical observations to put these into a coherent framework/narrative provided by the new science, in a wide sense, to be read fruitfully by natural philosophers and the educated public alike. In this latter learned 'Enlightenment' genre the book risked being quickly out of date, first surpassed by the mathematically challenging Principia of Newton and then in the more accessible Cosmotheoros written by Newton's great rival Huygens (and posthumously published by Huygens' brother Constantijn). (I showed Brading my copy of the first edition of the English translation of it, too.) But Fontenelle updated his editions to keep his book in the Enlightenment genre.* And I assume -- I need to check this carefully -- that the 1760 translation is based on the revised 1742 edition (which appeared in Fontenelle's ��uvres compl��tes). Fontenelle died aged nearly 100, in 1757!
At some point (ca 1700), one may well think that further interest in Fontenelle's work would by antiquarian. However, both the 1760 translation as well as the 1803 updated translation, hybridize Fontenelle's original work with a great deal of additions that reflect new scientific findings (as well as some refutations of Fontenelle's earlier speculations). This can be readily ascertained by the fact that the fifth and sixth English translation are much larger than the original or the modern (1990) English translation (mentioned above) by H.A. Hargreaves, which appeared in a pleasant, slim paperback with University of California Press, and that I used in one of the first undergraduate courses I ever taught back in the 1990s at The University of Chicago. (This 1990 edition is a translation of the first edition and so lacks the sixth evening dialogue that Fontenelle added to his 1687 edition..)
The 1803 edition and translation really are conceived as a kind of popularization (Lalande is explicit on this). But the additions of English translation of 1760 are of a different kind. These consider a wide variety of topics and new findings, and so the 1760 translation (based as it claims to be on Fontenelle's own 1742 edition) is very much in the spirit of the original Enlightenment sense of the work. It competes, in fact, with the ambitious kind of works now shunted aside as 'natural religion' (associated with names like Derham, Nieuwentijt) and works that are now slotted into the pre-history of biology like Buffon. I return to this below. One very nice feature of the 1760 translation is that all the translator���s additions are listed, descriptively, in a table of contents (and, thereby, also reveal many of the translator's non Fontenelle/Huygens/Newton sources, including Boerhaave, Desaguliers, Gravesande, Lovett, etc.).**
I am unsure who the 1760 translator -- "a gentleman of the Inner-temple" ��� is. But one of the additions by tthe1760 translator has attracted modest scholarly attention. In a footnote (14) to a recent paper by Huib Zuidervaart and Tiemen Cocquyt, they speculate on the following.
Intriguing is the fact ��� unnoticed so far ��� that in 1760 a text was published devoted to the optics of the human eye and the properties of light concerning colours, written by ���a gentleman of the Inner Temple.��� Chester Moor Hall frequently added the phrase ���of the Inner Temple��� to his family name, for instance in various book subscription lists, so the text (an appendix to a new English translation of a famous French cosmology book by Fontenelle) could be his. See Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds by M. de Fontenelle. A New Translation from the Latest Edition of the French with Great Additions, on Many Curious and Entertaining Subjects by a Gentleman of the Inner Temple (London: R. Whity a.o., 1760), pp. 239���263.
Their paper, "The Early Development of the Achromatic Telescope Revisited," is very much worth reading because it involves priority disputes, court cases, deception, lies of omission, etc.+ These page-numbers (pp. 239-263) are, in fact, part of the translator's addition to the fourth evening. The addition starts on p. 216 with an account of fire. Then a brief digression on dilation. And then on p. 228 starts the material on the "inflexions of the rays of light" with six definitions that lead into the text briefly described by Zuidervaart and Cocquyt (and which I consider an integral part of)!
As an aside, the history of the Inner-Temple itself originated "when a contingent of knights of the Military Order of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem moved from the Old Temple in Holborn (later Southampton House) to a larger site between Fleet Street and the banks of the River Thames." Some readers may well wonder if they have landed on Justin Smith-Ruiu���s Hinternet, but no I am not going to lead you to templar knights. The Inner-Temple was later an inn and law school, amongst many other social functions.
Despite the many bewildering range of additions, the main point of the 1760 edition is actually not hard to discern, especially if one is familiar with eighteenth century cosmology and natural religion. Or so I claim next.
At first sight the 1760 translation ends with the optimistic cosmic economy of nature familiar of the closing paragraphs of the first edition of the Principia: the universe is teaming with life, and comets bring the necessary building and replenishing materials of life (and even suns) to other solar systems (pp. 385-401, "Of Comets.") So, I first thought this book is a kind of Newtonian, deist providential domestication of Fontenelle's more skeptical spinozism. "Of Comets" is added, as a kind of appendix, beyond the translator's additions to the sixth evening.
However, I suspect this is a deceptive ruse. The main part of the book ��� we are very deep into the translator's additions to the sixth evening ��� nearly concludes with a short section "of chance." (In the table of contents this is listed as "of chance, applicable to what Mr. Fontenelle mentions in his work.") The translator here denies, in his own words, the so-called 'doctrine of chance' or Epicureanism. So far so good.
Now, during the eighteenth century the doctrine of chance is opposed to doctrine of order. This doctrine of order, is sub-divided between the equally heretical Spinozist doctrine of necessity which creates order immanently, and the ordered doctrine (which comes in deist and theist varieties). This is no surprise because the whole book assumes that nature has order (and often seems to appeal to various versions of the PSR). In fact, our translator goes on to claim that:
Every reasonable perfon will allow that this World, that the Universe, that every thing, we fee or know of which is great or good, was at firft formed, and is yet fupported, by a great and omnipotent Being, which we call GOD: a Being whofe attributes man knows little of, and can only judge concerning from his works, which we fee, and which when compared to what we may guefs of, Worlds unnumbered that float fufpended over our heads, in immenfe unbounded fpace are scarce any thing; therefore, as we know but little of the works of the DEITY, we can know but little of their Author it is therefore impoffible to form an adequate idea of him: here even imagination fails us, and we can only fay, he is great beyond our utmost comprehenfion. This we can judge of him with certainty; we know fufficient to anfwer all our purpofes, and therefore confequently to convince us Chance is a chimera without foundation, and that there is not any fuch thing in Nature. It is felf-evident, and does not require a demonftration: it is like an intuitive truth, as evident to our reafon as that 2 and 2 makes 4. (pp. 378-379--spelling left unmodernized)
This may seem, at first blush, a relatively orthodox Newtonian inductive claim in favor of a cautious species of deism. But extrapolating from the argument of the General scholium and reminding us of the immensity of the university, and our lack of ignorance of it, the translator basically argues we really have almost no inkling of God at all. (And this goes well beyond Newton's own view that we lack knowledge of his inner substance.) In fact, all we can really know of this god is that his existence denies the reality of chance, and so -- despite all the providential language -- Spinozism is slid back in. (This is not a surprise because Fontenelle's own work slides, despite regularly evoking deism, into Spinozism at various points.)
And in case one misses it, in the very next, and formally the last of the translator's explicit additions to Fontenelle's sixth evening, the "modern discoveries concerning the fixed stars," the translator immediately teaches his readers that it is the astronomical consensus that the cosmos is teeming with new stars and stars that go extinct. And then, after a book that has celebrated a universe teeming with life on innumerable planets, this book closes with the following chilling, even shocking line: "It is no ways improbable, that these Stars loft their brightnefs by a prodigious number of spots, which intirely covered, and as it were, overwhelmed them. In what dismal condition must their Planets remain, who have nothing but the dim and twinkling rays of the Fixed Stars to enlighten them." (383) And so, in conclusion, we come face to face with the mass extinction of aliens, and (by implication) the possibility of a very cold death of our own species (if we can't figure our interstellar flight).
This first appeared at: <A Mysterious Translator, Fontenelle Hybridized, Human extinction, oh and the PSR (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
*In the preface to her translation Hargreaves notes that the 1708, 1714, The 1724 (seventh), and the 1742 are all expanded editions (p. xli). There is a 1966 critical edition by Calame, which should be consulted by scholars.
**That the 1760 is very much a new hybridized book not of the late seventeenth century but of the middle of the eighteenth century, is, for example, ignored by F.J Tipler in his "A Brief History of the Extraterrestrial Intelligence Concept published in the prestigious" Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1981). Based on Lovejoy, Tipler asserts (correctly) that Fontenelle's Entretiens was a bestseller and "was translated at least three times into English" (p. 127). In fact, Tipler's quotes from Fontenelle are derived from the 1760 translation (and luckily only material already present in the first)!
+If the 1760 translation is indeed by Moor Hall, it would be nice to figure out which translation he repeatedly criticized in his introduction.
On Pato��ka, T.S. Eliot and the Treason of the Intellectuals during the Culture Wars: with a surprising cameo of Jos�� Benardete
[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at ]
Perhaps because I recognize in myself a warmth toward Spinozism, but I am always inordinately pleased when I can recognize and act on the play of chance. After a raucous pub lecture to the members of student-club of the political science department (aptly named Machiavelli) in the Amsterdam red light district, I received Jan Pato��ka' Living in Problematicity -- a slim volume of essays (selected and translated by Eric Manton) -- as a gift with a touching inscription from a former student. I knew that Pato��ka (1907-1977) was a philosopher and a courageous co-founder of Charta 77. His clandestine discussion groups and his lectures at the under-ground university are legendary. I had never read anything by him, although his work is becoming increasingly accessible in English.
Yesterday, while in transit, I read "Platonism and Politics," which is a very short meditation on Bendas' La Trahison des clercs (1927; often translated as: The Treason of the Intellectuals); recall this post). Because in preparing a syllabus for a class on conservatism, I had stumbled on a 1944 note by T.S. Eliot engaging with Benda, I had just been musing about the use of Benda by contemporary intellectuals -- I tweeted this on june 4 (and no, Tweeting is not Thinking) -- so this post was born.
I don't mean to suggest I randomly muse about Benda. As regular readers know, I write in a philosophical tradition that feels entitled to be unlearned. And so in our controversies over 'public [facing] philosophy' and 'responsible speech' we end up repeating, over and over again, the same trite clich��s without any sense of embarrassment. And this lack of shame is, of course, characteristic of a modern clerisy (in Benda's sense). Since I am a blogger, feel free to read this as self-indictment. Okay, so much for set up.
Now, for sociological reasons I do not fully understand, while Benda is wholly unknown inside my tradition, he does repeatedly get invoked in relatively serious public essays. With the help of Google, here's a few examples of the kind of thing I have in mind:
Mark Lilla December 7, 2021 Tablet Magazine (taken from his intro to a re-issue): Julien Benda���s The Treason of the Intellectuals, an essential intervention in 20th-century debates about intellectual responsibility, is the second sort of book. Cast into the agitated waters of European politics between the two world wars, it still floats ashore every decade or so, attracting readers with its stirring call to the independent life of the mind, free from the lures of power and authority.... he makes a practical case against practicality, an engaged case against political engagements.
Antony Julius (reviewing Berman), May 14, 2010, The New York Time: The masterwork, however, is still ��Julien Benda���s ���Treason of the Intellectuals.��� This book, written in 1927 by one of the leading French intellectuals of the early 20th century, may be regarded as the inaugural work of the line....For Benda, the intellectual betrays his vocation when he compromises his commitment to universalist values. The temptation to make such compromises, he argues, lies principally in the appeal of national sentiment, to which intellectuals are quick to subordinate themselves. And the role they assume as nationalists is to conceptualize political hatreds.
I listed these because each of these essays is worth reading as a window on their own polemical moment as well as a kind of an evolution of a meme/trope. What's notable here is the subtle shift in character among what Benda was supposedly inveighing against: political engagement by intellectuals; academic activists/political commitment; a betrayal of universal principles understood as disinterestedness; a betrayal of universal principles in the service of nationalism. I don't mean to suggest there is a mystery here: each essay has slightly different polemical contextual target(s) and so each also subtly rejigs Benda to their own local political-polemical ends (including, in the case of Lilla, criticizing Benda). That's what intellectuals do, after all, right? In general, on a left-right axis, the left-intellectuals will invoke Benda to criticize intellectuals serving power and moneyed-interests, while the right-leaning intellectuals will invoke Benda to criticize intellectuals who serve some (what we now call) social justice cause. All sides (correctly) invoke Benda when criticizing a nationalist-friendly intellectual, unless it's their own nation and they are prudently silent.
Now, what I like about Pato��ka's little essay (it���s shorter than some of my digressions) is that he inscribes Benda in a debate over the reception of Platonism (or "true philosophizing in general"), and to what degree what one might call the possibility of serving a certain (spiritual) kind of 'higher calling" (in the sense of Republic 487a to which Pato��ka appeals explicitly) associated with it (but rooted in philosophy), is still possible after Nietzsche (who goes unmentioned) and his death of God (which is intimated in various ways) in modern conditions. In context, it's clear that this Platonism is associated with an interesting m��lange of Plato and Husserl. I quote from Manton's translation to give you a sense of what he has in mind:
The ultimate meaning of Platonism is, I think, a spiritual universum, into which a person penetrates by means of a certain purely inner and active (but absolutely not mythical) purification. This purification or philosophy is at the same time the most important and most intensive praxis, solely able to give to the life of the individual as well as of society a necessary unity, to give life that inner center which one potentially keeps within oneself as the unfulfilled meaning of one���s life. Thus Plato���s political conception briefly means this: (1) there exists a single and coherent, truly human, spiritual behavior named philosophy; (2) the ���object��� of philosophy is not primarily the contents of this world; (3) the right of philosophy to establish norms for life consists in its inner truthfulness, in its absolute character; (4) all of human activity, not founded on philosophy and not illuminated throughout by philosophy, has the character of dissatisfaction, falsehood, and a lack of inner order.
Now, I am not interested here in trying to trace each of these claims back to Plato or, by contrast, to appeal to contemporary scholarship to show that any of this is only in a very attenuated sense to be found in Plato. Rather, let's stipulate with Pato��ka that this captures something of a familiar ideal. For Pato��ka, Benda's book raises two-fold question: the first is the Nietzschean one, is this ideal dead? The second-fold is, does the ideal ���exist in a certain modified form even in our own lives?" Judging by the essays linked above, the answer to the first is: yes. And to the second, no. As Pato��ka suggests, Platonism so conceived "can only live where those vital hypothesis discussed above on which Platonism is built also exist."
Now Pato��ka is clear that his conception of Platonism is itself political in a higher sense (familiar, (recall) I hasten to add from Plato Republic, 592ab), although he gives a humanist spin on it (this is the debt to Husserl whom he quotes). Interestingly enough, for Pato��ka this entails that the impact of philosophy in life is "the permeation, gradually and usually distortedly, of philosophical concepts into the common human consciousness." This turns Platonism into a kind of Enlightenment project, despite the fact that philosophy itself is "a matter of the few." And, in fact, Pato��ka calls for a kind of 'new Enlightenment' ground in a new actualization of Platonism, while simultaneously criticizing what we might call the idol of collectivism. (I wouldn't be surprised if the essay were mined by biographers who see in it a prefiguration of his later courage under Stalinism with Czech characteristics.)
For, Pato��ka (who thinks Benda is confused on the proper task of intellectuals and the role of Platonism in this higher sense) what Benda get right (we might say) ���formally��� is that proper myth, that is not falsehood but rather "an imaginative vestment of truth," is a useful instrument in the permeation of these concepts and for those (collectives) who do not wish to live a spiritual life. The main point of Pato��ka's essay is to call attention to the need for myths that express or manifest 'poetical, philosophical yearning.' The Spinozist in me understands this yearning, and Pato��ka grasps what makes Benda's diatribe so enduringly fascinating.
For Pato��ka the task of the clerisy is to use myths to help spread this new Enlightenment. This is not far removed (as I argue in this lecture) from how my friend Jos�� Benardete understood his task in his book on Infinity (although as always with Jos�� there are complications), so if you want an example of how this is supposed to work in the hands of a metaphysician go read it. I could stop here.
Interestingly and surprisingly enough, T.S. Eliot of all people, ridicules Benda: "Benda, as I remember, seemed to expect everybody to be a sort of Spinoza." In context, it's clear that Eliot's 'everybody' is 'every member of the clerisy.' Now, I lifted this sentence from the 1944 piece, which as a subtitle has ���On the Place and Function of the Clerisy;" one of the questions Eliot asks in it is (unsurprisingly given that subtitle) what is the function of the clerisy. One of the proper functions of the intellectuals for him is to promote the right sort of change: "the chief merits of the clerical elite is that it is an influence for change." This leaves underspecified what change they promote, but it is at least sometimes compatible with Pato��ka's position.
In addition, according to Eliot it is, thus, inevitable that the clerisy ends up in conflict with the forces that defend the status quo: "To some extent, therefore, there is, and I think should be, a conflict between class and clerical elite." Eliot tacitly here presupposes that the ruling class is change averse. But even ruling classes can promote change if they think it will benefit them--this is something quite familiar in our own time; it does not follow we can always identify whether the clerisy is betraying its true vocation.
As I have hinted above, Eliot decouples the function of the clerisy from a higher calling. I don't mean to suggest he completely decouples it because for him "The clerisy can help to develop and modify [culture]; they have a part to play, but only a part, in its transmission." And presumably Eliot, who is no stranger to Platonism, does think that a culture might have a connection to a higher calling. In fact, when it does, then 'culture' just means an imaginative vestment of truth. Fair enough.
Now, Eliot recognizes a form of pluralism that Pato��ka finds difficult to accommodate (although it is compatible with his Platonism). For intellectuals share in being outcasts, and "are apt to share a discontent with things as they are, but the ways in which they want to change them will be various and often completely opposed to each other." And while it is tempting to say that the opposition is merely over means (again compatible with Platonism), it is, of course, not impossible that the disagreement is also over ends which begins to look incompatible with Platonism if the unity of the virtues is broken as Eliot himself suggests in the remainder of his notes (and hard to disagree with in 1944).*
However, this all must seem rather quaint. Ours is not an age that wishes to gamble on a revitalized humanism. The transgender-wars take place when capital and the heirs of the once noble tradition of the radical philosophers are betting on transhumanism. Even the very idea of a human right, let alone a culture in the bildung sense assumed by Eliot is suspect. Talking about culture without naming the social sins on which it rests seems also a real betrayal of humanity. No high minded stance seems to be able to survive scrutiny.
But it is no better that the poetical, philosophical yearning(s) are met exclusively by hucksters, or worse. And if Platonism is wholly exhausted, what now? And while I dislike the word ���problematicity,��� perhaps, if you follow me on this substack voyage, this is the question, if it is a single question, we must answer or the ���problematic��� we must resolve.
This first appeared at: <On Pato��ka, T.S. Eliot and the Treason of the Intellectuals during the Culture Wars: with a surprising cameo of Jos�� Benardete (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
*See especially his treatment "clerical small fry, we have what is called the intelligentsia...in Cairo and such places."
May 25, 2023
On Hazony vs Kirk, and original sin in modern conservatism
[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at ]
In Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022), Yoram Hazony treats Russell Kirk's (1953) The Conservative Mind as "the most important book by a postwar American conservative." (Recall my series of posts on Hazony's book recall the first one here; here the second; here the third one; the fourth; and, fifth, on Hazony���s critique of Meyer here.) In particular, Hazony notes that "Kirk���s account of the Anglo-American tradition is in many respects similar" to his. They both praise Burke and the American Federalist party, although with important differences lurking in the latter to which I return below.
Now Hazony draws out four important areas of overlap between his own conservatism and Kirk's. I quote Hazony:
Kirk emphasized that, for conservatives, (i) ���custom, convention, and old prescription are checks both upon man���s anarchic impulse and upon the innovator���s lust for power������although they also recognize that ���prudent change is the means of social preservation.��� Conservatives regard (ii) religion as indispensable, including ���belief in a transcendent order��� and the recognition that ���political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.��� They see that (iii) ���freedom and property are closely linked,��� and that the attempt to eliminate ���orders and classes��� from society could only end in tyranny. And they view human life as (iv) a ���proliferating variety and mystery��� that cannot readily be reduced to universal formulas. Kirk regarded these principles as being given voice, most importantly, by Edmund Burke in Britain and by John Adams and the Federalist Party in America.
So far so good. Hazony adds that "Kirk made a magnificent start to reinvigorating the Anglo-American conservative tradition in America," (emphasis added.) This 'start' clearly implies there is unfinished business. In fact, Hazony also thinks that on two issues Kirk drove Anglo-American conservatism in the wrong direction: "The first is Kirk���s emphasis on regional traditions."
In fact, while Kirk opts for John Adams, Hazony has a clear fondness for Hamilton. This shapes a dramatically different view of the content of American nationalism they are willing to defend. Kirk sees in Hamilton an aggressive "empire-builder." I return to this below.
And the "second, more serious problem with his historiography" is to be found in Kirk's "diligent efforts to retrieve what was supposedly worthy in Southern political thinkers who provided the intellectual framework for defending chattel slavery [which] was a mistake from which American conservatism has not yet entirely recovered." What ties the two together is Kirk's unwillingness to see "some local traditions" as "morally questionable." Hazony clearly suspects Kirk is a moral relativist and because of that incapable of criticizing slavery. I return to Kirk's attitude toward slavery below.
As an aside, there is also another line of criticism of Kirk in Hazony: that is centered on Kirk's willingness to participate in fusionism, which for Hazony entails "nothing other than the view that one should be a liberal in one���s political commitments, and a Christian in private." I also return to this below.
Now, it is worth noting that one important reason Kirk admires Burke is that he understands Burke's role in the Hastings affair as a defense of Indian local customs; Hastings "had ridden rough-shod over native religious tradition and ceremonial in India." In fact, throughout The Conservative Mind, Kirk is scathing of (utilitarian) liberal imperialism which imposes uniformity on subject peoples. While critical of Macaulay, he admires "Burke's reforms" because they "were intended to purge the English in India from the diseases of arbitrary power and avarice, to secure to the Indians their native laws and usages and religions." So, it is not surprising that Hazony reads Kirk as a moral relativist of sorts.
But I don't think that's the right reading of Kirk for two reasons (the second being more important than the first). First, Kirk thinks local customs ought to be defended if and only if they involve sincere, socially inherited religious creed because the contents of which are principles of political and social order (see (i-ii) in the passage quoted from Hazony above). But he also thinks Christianity is the superior religion. I quote a passage in which Kirk attributes this precise view to Burke (without dissenting from it): "Christianity is the highest of religions; but every sincere creed is a recognition of divine purpose in the universe, and all mundane order is dependent upon reverence for the religious creed which a people have inherited from their fathers." So the problem with civilizational, imperial liberalism (of the sort familiar from J.S. Mill) is that it lacks understanding of a proper political art of ruling according to Kirk. Violently suppressing existing religion just opens the door to a kind of social nihilism. Kirk's stance is not an expression of moral relativism, but of political prudence.
As an aside, while Kirk is a firm critic of liberal and other homogenizing imperialisms (including "the tremendous imperialistic instinct of modern democracy"), and thinks that "generally imperial expansion is full of risks for any conservative society" it is sometimes defensible. In context he is, for example, not uncritical of Disraeli's imperialism. In fact, while the whole book is a frontal attack on really existing home-grown American imperialism, I read The Conservative Mind as a call for a reformed more prudent imperialism. About that some other time.
If he understands Christianity as the highest religion, then Kirk is not a moral relativist. The key teaching of Christianity is for Kirk the existence and ineliminable fact of original sin. It���s probably the most important concept in The Conservative Mind. As Kirk puts it, in the context of discussing Irving Babbitt���s views, ���The saving of civilization is contingent upon the revival of something like the doctrine of original sin.��� And before you stop reading here, there is something important worth salvaging from this position.
While Hazony is not adverse to using 'sin' and its cognates, 'original sin' is not part of Hazony's moral vocabulary in his Conservatism: A Rediscovery whereas it is the key organizing principle to Kirk's social philosophy. For, one of the crescendos of The Conservative Mind is Kirk's admiration for Nathanial Hawthorne's "chief accomplishment: impressing the idea of sin upon a nation which would like to forget it." In fact from a political perspective, we also find in this account one of Kirk's most important commitments. He praises Hawthorne's realization "that projects of reform must begin and end with the human heart; that the real enemy of mankind is not social institution, but the devil within us; that the fanatic improver of mankind through artificial alteration is, very commonly, in truth a destroyer of souls." (emphasis added.)*
Kirk's focus on original sin also qualifies to what degree he thinks one should be a Christian merely in private. As the previous paragraph suggests he very much believes that the devil within must be tamed by all social institutions working in tandem. And while this is compatible with a privatized Christianity, it does not require it and probably works better with a more robust public Christianity according to Kirk. Kirk is an admirer of various forms of Catholic social theory and a critic of certain strands of individualizing Protestantism. One may see in Shklar���s liberalism of fear a liberal attempt to struggle with Kirk���s diagnosis.
Be that as it may, at this point one may grant that I have provided considerable reason to allow that Kirk was no moral relativist. But in a way, one may think, this makes Kirk's obtuseness on slavery worse. So, Hazony is right to reject Kirk.
Before I continue: a reminder to the reader unfamiliar with my writings that I view myself as on-looker in the debates among conservatives. My own interest in these is primarily understanding and also a curiosity if anything can be learned from conservative self-reflection and understanding. I am not an impartial spectator, but I am also not an advocate for conservatism. Okay, having said that, there is something in Kirk worth paying attention to especially, alas, in the bits that are most egregious to our moral sensibility.
Now, it is true that Kirk claims that "we shall try to keep clear here of that partisan controversy over slavery." And he does so because he is eager to discuss "those conservative ideas which Randolph and Calhoun enunciated." One may well think that Hazony is right that such bracketing is a moral disaster and, when it comes to Randolph and Calhoun, impossible, if only because Randolph and Calhoun themselves tend to bring the issues together.
As it happens, Kirk is rather critical of Randolph and Calhoun and their support for slavery. He writes, "the slavery controversy confuses and blurs any analysis of political principle in the South: the historian can hardly discern where, for instance, real love for state sovereignty leaves off and interested pleading for slave property commences. Both Randolph and Calhoun deliberately entangled the debate on tariffs (at bottom a question of whether the industrial or the agricultural interest should predominate in America), and the debate on local liberties, with the debate on slavery; for thus they were able to rally to their camp a great body of slave-holders who otherwise might have been indifferent to the issues at stake." So, he recognizes that his own bracketing is not the political strategy pursued by Randolph and Calhoun.
Now, a skeptic of my interpretation might suggest that while Kirk clearly admires local liberties, it is not obvious he rejects slavery. But he goes on to claim explicitly: "Human slavery is bad ground for conservatives to make a stand upon." This is not a local relativist speaking, or a friend of slavery. In fact, later, when discussing John Quincy Adams (of whom Kirk has no particular fondness), he adds that "he was right in detesting slavery."
Kirk also recognizes that Randolph and Calhoun were at least in part motivated to defend slavery (although Kirk also thinks that Calhoun was aware of the dangers of slavery). But Kirk thinks "one may lift" their ideas "of their transitory significance and fit them to the tenets of conservatism in our day." That is, Kirk explicitly allows that the origin of some conservative ideas is highly immoral, but (with a nod to the genetic fallacy) that that they can do good work in a different context.
This is a highly unpopular position today. In our political culture tracing contemporary views to bad previous political positions (slavery, eugenics, imperialism, racism, etc.) has become a sure route to disqualifying the opposition. And again, I don't mean to defend Kirk's blinders. He seems to lack warmth for the plight of the slaves, and is not much perturbed by racism. But if you are all in on original sin it is no surprise to find bits of wisdom alongside awful commitments���and I have some sympathy toward this methodological stance.
Kirk also clearly detests Northern abolitionism as species of fanaticism. He seems to be attracted to views he associates with President Franklin Pierce that hoped that slavery would wither away by itself. But that's because Kirk thinks the civil war was an outright disaster, and that it set up the subsequent disasters of failed reconstruction and what he considers the stupidity of Jim Crow. I wouldn���t want to endorse this position; but not seeing the civil war as a disaster is also problematic. (Of course, on my view the disaster should have been avoided by getting rid of slavery beforehand!) So, Kirk understands himself as objecting to the means (war) not the goal (getting rid of slavery).
Underlying Kirk's position is a decoupling of the institution of slavery from mercantile war-mongering nationalist-imperialism. By contrast a liberal would see in slavery and imperialism the same side of a mercantile coin. Slavery is clearly a transient institution for Kirk (and, again, this position also seems informed by a reprehensible lack of warmth toward the plight of slaves), but for him nationalist imperialism is a permanent temptation for democracies in which our nature is not properly tamed. In fact, Kirk understands the opportunities for a revived conservatism as a response to the revulsion engendered by Hiroshima and Nagasaki; he sees the atom bomb as a possible trigger for much needed moral awakening.
Kirk diagnoses war as the opportunity for destructive hubris and nemesis as much as it is the site of the growth of central planning and uniform, leveling standardization. For Kirk Hiroshima is the natural outgrowth of the valorizing of war. (Kirk is not a pacifist; he accepts the need of war for defensive ends.) For Kirk, slavery is, thus, not America's original sin; rather it is the (Hamiltonian) embrace of expansive genocidal militarism centered on an an imperial president.** Hazony, by contrast, while a critic of foreign military intervention, is a friend of (Hamiltonian) economic nationalism and a strong presidency.
On Kirk's view this Hamiltonian position cannot avoid permanent war, which Kirk views as destructive to any higher culture (recall (iv)) worth having. To what degree he is right about this I leave for another time. But since we���re in an age of aggressive and destructive left and right-wing Hamiltonianism, this strain in Kirk seems worth excavating, especially for those who wish to tame our capacity toward evil.
Let me close with some blog house-keeping. As hinted in yesterday���s post, I expect to do almost no or very infrequent blogging until the second week of June. Apologies for that in advance.
This first appeared at: <Hazony vs Kirk - by nescio13 (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
*This also helps explain Kirk's preference for Adams and his rejection of Hamilton.
**Kirk is never more eloquent than when he quotes Burke's second letter of the Regicide Peace in which Burke links a certain kind of statism to militarism. Having said that, he expresses little interest in American, pre-settler indigenous native cultures.
May 24, 2023
Long Covid Diaries: New Treatment
[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at ]
It's been about five weeks since I switched Digressions to Substack and last wrote an entry in my covid diary. (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; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; and here.) It's time for an update on both. Also, some blog house-keeping at the end.
First, my new/replacement neurologist at the NHS long covid clinic in London was unhappy after listening to my narrative. Short version: much recovered by end of January; teaching went well in February/March, but have struggled since. Yes, I am doing much better since the last time one of his colleagues saw me (with apologies for canceling multiple appointments with me). But no, I shouldn't be taking naproxen so frequently at this stage in order to manage the effects of migraine.
The neurologist's concern was straightforward: I am not nipping the migraines in the bud, but rather masking symptoms. Bottom line, he wanted me to try out the treatment plan the long covid clinic had prescribed to me in June 2022 in order to get the covid induced migraines under control. These are primarily triggered whenever I am cognitively multitasking, that is, socializing, for any amount of time.
In addition, I have noticed an odd new symptom. It's a kind of tinnitus when I lie down to go to bed when I am fatigued. The low grade, but persistent noise 'sounds' like an air-conditioner, generator, or vacuum-cleaner in the distance. Luckily, it doesn���t prevent me from falling asleep because the simple meditation my sister taught me still works like a charm. After some testing with sound-meters and earplugs, I realized the sound is purely cognitive. I only 'hear' it at night when I go to bed, but again only when I am especially tired or migraine-y. (Upon reflection, I suspect I have had this symptom since last Fall and I hereby apologize to the Kimpton hotel in Cambridge in insisting on a room change because of the outside noise I heard.)
Problem is that the official June 2022 treatment plan involves rather serious meds, which were originally developed to treat high blood pressure, depression and/or epilepsy--all have serious (cognitive) side effects. I have not been especially eager to try any, especially if they prevent me from teaching, reading, and writing.
Now, a weird big glitch in the NHS is that the specialist generally does not send you home with the meds required (unless it falls under urgent care), and so I would need to go back with my treatment plan to my GP before I could start any of the treatments the neurologist prescribed. And at the moment any non-urgent appointment at my GP takes a lot of time to schedule. So by the time I met my NHS GP, I had devised an alternative plan.
As it happens when I first met my better half she suffered from awful, debilitating migraines that could last three or four days. But after a while she started a new treatment that has been very successful for her: Botox shots in the neck. Basically one poisons the muscles with Botox so that they can't reinforce a developing migraine with extra stress, and one cuts short the migraine cycle. In the NHS this is an approved treatment for migraine, but only after you try treatment with all the pills first. (Unfortunately, in Holland it's not an approved treatment of migraine so I can't get coverage there either.) Both the NHS neurologist and my GP warned me that if I skipped the pills I could never get reimbursed for the Botox shots, even if it worked. But the GP encouraged me to try it anyway, because he understood my apprehensions about the treatment plan.
So, about twelve days ago, I found myself in the most beautiful physician's office I have ever been in with one of the leading cosmetic eye surgeons of the UK (an old friend of my better half, who -- it was my birthday after all -- paid for my first treatment). fter going through the treatment with me, and ruling out some other medical issues, I got my first eight Botox shots at half dosage. (No, I didn't add a secret cosmetic treatment for eyes or chin!) The plan is to give it two to three weeks, and then, if necessary, add another dosage. If the treatment works, I would need the shots about two or three times a year.
After the first week of shots, I wasn't so sure. But in the second week I am seeing grounds for optimism. So, I'll report back later this Summer if the Botox shots have improved the quality of life structurally. It would be nice if it did because I start a full load of teaching in September. Before then, I am also key-noting this week in Utrecht and chairing a job search in the next few weeks so it would be nice not to live on Naproxen during this period. (I am not counting on that because I pulled a muscle in my back yesterday morning and I have had painful back spasms during the last 27 hrs! Hopefully, I can stand for my keynote on Thursday!)
So much for the Covid diaries update. As hinted in the previous paragraph, I expect to do almost no or very infrequent blogging until the second week of June. (This is the blog house-keeping.) Apologies for that in advance.
I want to close with sincere thanks to all the subscribers to my Substack. The good news is that since I switched to Substack, I seem to have doubled my readership, especially because a sizable chunk of my audience continues to read these posts at Typepad (where, for the time being, I re-post them a day later).
Unfortunately, less than 10% of my substack subscribers pays, so it's too early to contemplate a career switch or even reducing my professional appointment. I had been kind of hoping to blog my way to more structural sabbaticals as a way to manage my long covid on my own terms; but so far no cigar.
Going forward, I will experiment with giving my paying subscribers -- thank you, you are the best! -- more frequent, exclusive content during the Summer. (I have done that only once during the first month.) If you have any suggestions or requests, please don't be a stranger.
Either way, I am really enjoying the more intense engagement that Substack generates. I receive a lot more correspondence again about my near daily musings. Merci. And watch this space in June.
This first appeared at: <Long Covid Diaries: new Medical Treatment (and some blog house-keeping). (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
May 23, 2023
Quining Quine, Dennett/Borges and Tocqueville's Spinosizing Spinozism
[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at ]
I like to imagine that Dan Dennett started his celebrated (1988) "Quining qualia" as an attempt to publish a journal article in the manner of a comic, Borges story. (In fairness to my teacher, this was in the age before blogs!) How else to explain the erudite reference to Descartes in the first paragraph of the essay, and then the mock-ironic, scholarly reference to the eight (!) edition of "The Philosophical Lexicon (Dennett 1978c"--I love that well-placed 'c'!-- in the second paragraph. The give away, the tell, is the earnest claim that "I don't deny the reality of conscious experience" in the fourth paragraph.
Perhaps because I tend to read "Quining qualia" as high comedy, I started to misremember the title as 'Quining Quine' in graduate school. As memetic evolution goes, this is minor slippage. Now, in the original 'to quine' means "To deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant." But in my fictitious Quining Quine, 'to quine' means "to offer an immanent criticism and/or a reductio that turns out to be an extreme example of what's being criticized." {Look up it up in the fifteenth edition!}
I was reminded of these halcyon days by the sixth chapter of Russell Kirk's (1953) The Conservative Mind, which repeatedly reminds the reader that Tocqueville is a critic of the so-called system or "doctrine of necessity," (p. 197 & 201) that is, Spinozism. And Kirk hints at a neat argument -- a Quining Quine par excellence -- in which Spinozism is itself historicized. Before I allowed myself a further flight of fancy, I thought it useful to re-open Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and take a sober look at Volume 2, Chapter VII: "Of The Cause Of A Leaning To Pantheism Amongst Democratic Nations" in the Henry Reeve translation of 1840 (for any scholars complaining, it's the edition reviewed by J.S. Mill).
The chapter is a very brief two paragraphs. For the sake of simplicity I just quote it:
When the conditions of society are becoming more equal, and each individual man becomes more like all the rest, more weak and more insignificant, a habit grows up of ceasing to notice the citizens to consider only the people, and of overlooking individuals to think only of their kind. At such times the human mind seeks to embrace a multitude of different objects at once; and it constantly strives to succeed in connecting a variety of consequences with a single cause. The idea of unity so possesses itself of man, and is sought for by him so universally, that if he thinks he has found it, he readily yields himself up to repose in that belief. Nor does he content himself with the discovery that nothing is in the world but a creation and a Creator; still embarrassed by this primary division of things, he seeks to expand and to simplify his conception by including God and the universe in one great whole. If there be a philosophical system which teaches that all things material and immaterial, visible and invisible, which the world contains, are only to be considered as the several parts of an immense Being, which alone remains unchanged amidst the continual change and ceaseless transformation of all that constitutes it, we may readily infer that such a system, although it destroy the individuality of man ��� nay, rather because it destroys that individuality ��� will have secret charms for men living in democracies. All their habits of thought prepare them to conceive it, and predispose them to adopt it. It naturally attracts and fixes their imagination; it fosters the pride, whilst it soothes the indolence, of their minds. Amongst the different systems by whose aid philosophy endeavors to explain the universe, I believe pantheism to be one of those most fitted to seduce the human mind in democratic ages. Against it all who abide in their attachment to the true greatness of man should struggle and combine.
So, the first thing to notice is that Tocqueville is treating of Spinozism, which he associates with "the Germans" (Hegel, Schelling, etc.), not Spinoza. I return to that below. But writing in the nineteenth century, Tocqueville sees Spinozism as the rising ("most of the works") background ideology of the age.
Somewhat surprisingly, Tocqueville, who is purportedly critical of the doctrine of necessity, ascribes the rise of Spinozism not to chance (an 'accidental cause'), as one might expect, but to a structural (in his terminology a 'general') cause. To be sure, I am not accusing Tocqueville of a kind of inconsistency, because a general cause is compatible with the working of providence (itself the effect of the most general cause, after all). That is, Tocqueville is critical not just of Spinozism, but also the system of chance (Epicureanism).
The structural cause of Spinozism is, in fact, egalitarianism (or democracy), or in Nietzsche's terms (which Tocqueville anticipates) the homogeneity or uniformity of last men. And because it eliminates all hierarchy of being (no angels, demons, superior men), Spinozism "fosters the pride, whilst it soothes the indolence, of their minds." The chapter closes with a call to arms (again anticipating Nietzsche) that against the false magnanimity of such Spinozisms those who wish to foster true magnanimity must organize ('combine') and fight (struggle).
Now, it's a core commitment of Spinozism to historicize the holy texts inspired by revelation. And so, I joked on twitter that here Tocqueville is Spinozing Spinozism (in the manner of Quining Quine).
I could stop here, but as always the joke is on me.
In the "preface" of Spinoza's (1670) Theological Political Treatise (hereafter TTP) Spinoza claims, in aside, that already before his time all lead the same kind of life [vita eadem omnibus est]. Long before Tocqueville, Nietzsche, and (echoing Foucault [recall Lecture 5 on, 7 February 1979, pp. 113 and 117]) Sombart, and Marcuse, Spinoza diagnoses a flattening of human kind such that within modernity the differences among people become very narrow and track shallow exterior features, opinions, and religious practices. (See my paper on Spinoza.)* So, while Tocqueville may be Spinozing Spinozism critically, Spinoza got there first. Spinoza, too, understands his own era as an age of flattening homogeneity. And, in fact, the main point of the aside is the conclusion that the existing church has lost its way; nothing [nihl] remains of the religion; it's an empty shell with some adornment [externum cultum], lacking in inner refinement and substance.
Again, I could stop. But it is worth noting that in Chapter VII of TTP Spinoza explicitly alerts his reader to the fact sometimes, when dealing with "simple and most intelligible" matters (of the sort we find in Euclid) we don't need biographical and contextual knowledge in order to understand the intentions of an author. Geometrical entities lack power and have simple (generative) definitions, and so are simple and most intelligible in his terminology. In context, Spinoza seems to imply that in order to understand the author(s) of biblical texts "we need to know about his life, concerns and customs, or in what language, to whom and when he wrote, or the fate of his book, or its various readings, or how and by whose deliberation it was accepted." [VII.67] To be sure, in order to understand the moral teachings, which are also fairly simple and straightforward, of the Bible, such historicism is unnecessary Spinoza suggests. Oddly, in the following chapter, Spinoza goes on to suggest that Ezra is the author of the (first main parts) of the Hebrew Bible and then goes on to historize Ezra who gave Israel the Bible as we have it in order to provide the re-founding of Israel with a religion that simultaneously teaches politics.
I have long thought that Spinoza invites us here to be alert to the circumstances of his own life and times, that is, to historicize his own text. And that's because unlike Euclid, Spinoza's works (even the ones in geometric order) do not merely deal with the simple and most intelligible matters. Spinoza is concerned with power and its differentiated effects. In fact, as an aside, in returning to Spinoza's text, I noticed that Spinoza introduces VII.67, with a proverbial remark that "For things which by their nature are easily perceived can���t be said so obscurely that they aren���t easily understood. As the proverb says: to one who understands a word is enough.��� [VII.66] Caution ahead. Be that as it may, Spinoza is explicit that he is writing in a leveling age.
Again, I could stop here. But I was reminded that Spinoza, too, hints at an account of greatness of soul in the Ethics. At E4p46, Spinoza writes, "He who lives according to the guidance of reason strives, as far as he can, to repay the other's Hate, Anger, and Disdain toward him, with Love, or Nobility." Now what Curley translates with 'nobility' is generositate in the Latin. In the glossary, Curley explains he avoided the use of 'high-mindedness' because it has negative connotations nowadays (in, we might add, our democratic, leveling age). Curley notes that Spinoza's generositas echoes Descartes' g��n��rosit��, which in Descartes explicitly replaces magnanimity (see Passions of the Soul, paragraph 161).** In the Dutch translation of Spinoza in De nagelaten schriften, the connection with magnanimity is explicit because 'edelmoedigheit' (literally 'noble courageousness') just is the common translation of magnanimous. So, Spinoza, understands his own philosophy as a defense of magnanimity.
And, now we're back to Tocqueville. That Tocqueville understands Spinozism/patheism as a religious seduction of democratic man that is simultaneously a self-confirming projection of democratic man is compatible with (even Tocqueville being aware of the fact that) Spinoza generates a project of Spinozism in order to make true religion, namely living under the guidance of reason, possible. However, my interest today is not to resolve to what degree Tocqueville and Spinoza are on the same side, or not. I leave that open.
Rather, I want to turn the knob one more time and return to a passage in Dennett that long intrigued me. It's from near the end of the book (chapter eighteen) that he taught in a seminar I attended while still in manuscript, Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
In chapter 3, I quoted the physicist Paul Davies proclaiming that the reflective power of human minds can be "no trivial detail, no minor byproduct of mindless purposeless forces," and suggested that being a byproduct of mindless purposeless forces was no disqualification for importance. And I have argued that Darwin has shown us how, in fact, everything of importance is just such a product. Spinoza called his highest being God or Nature (Deus sive Natura), expressing a sort of pantheism. There have been many varieties of pantheism, but they usually lack a convincing explanation about just how God is distributed in the whole of nature. As we saw in chapter 7, Darwin offers us one: it is in the distribution of Design throughout nature, creating, in the Tree of Life, an utterly unique and irreplaceable creation, an actual pattern in the immeasurable reaches of Design Space that could never be exactly duplicated in its many details. What is design work? It is that wonderful wedding of chance and necessity, happening in a trillion places at once, at a trillion different levels. And what miracle caused it? None. It just happened to happen, in the fullness of time. You could even say, in a way, that the Tree of Life created itself. Not in a miraculous, instantaneous whoosh, but slowly, slowly, over billions of years.
Amor fati! (Some other time I return to Dennett's life-long fascination with Nietzsche.) Several of us have noticed Dennett's flirtations with Spinozism before (see Huebner (2017); Schliesser (2018) here; Veit (2021)). Here Dennett assimilates Darwinism to pantheism. What's neat about Dennett's interpretation of Darwinism is that it explicitly, "chance and necessity," combines the doctrine of necessity (Spinozism) with the doctrine of chance (Epicureanism). Dennett eliminates the need for worship altogether and displaces it with pure affirmation.
Dennett explains his Darwinism as a strand of pantheism through his own Darwinism. However, from Tocqueville's perspective Dennett's Quining elimination of providence and any distinction in kind in nature is (anticipatorily) itself to be explained through social causes in virtue of the democratic age we live in. Do you place your bets on natural or a social explanation? Dennett and Tocqueville insist that there is a real choice here, but I prefer a Borgesian, skeptical solution in which, inspired by Escher���s Drawing Hands, the left hand and the right hand write each other.
This first appeared at: <Quining Quine and Spinosizing Spinoza; reflections on Dennett and Tocqueville (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
*Here's what Spinoza writes: "Long ago things reached the point where you can hardly know what anyone is, whether Christian, Turk, Jew, or Pagan, except by the external dress and adornment of his body, or because he frequents this or that Place of Worship, or because he���s attached to this or that opinion, or because he���s accustomed to swear by the words of some master. They all lead the same kind of life." (In Curley's translation.)
**"J���ai nomm�� cette vertu G��n��rosit��, suivant l���usage de notre langue, plut��t que Magnanimit��, suivant l���usage de l�����cole, o�� elle n���est pas fort connue.
I have called this virtue ���nobility of soul���, in keeping with the usage of our language, rather than ���magnanimity���, according to the usage of the schools, where this virtue is not much in evidence." (Quoted from Michael Moriarty's chapter, "Cartesian G��n��rosit�� and Its Antecedents.")
May 19, 2023
Stebbing on Analytic Clarification, with some Kuhn and Sellars
[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at ]
One of the eye-opening claims in Frederique Janssen-Lauret's recent (2022) Cambridge Elements on Susan Stebbing is that "much of Stebbing's published work focussed on the philosophy of physics and especially on the philosophy of physics." (32) Accordingly Janssen-Lauret devotes considerable space to Sttebbing���s philosophy of science in her book, especially, Stebbing's famous critique of Eddington, but also -- and I suspect this prepared my mind for what follows -- to the complex relationship between Stebbing's philosophy of science and her distance from Moore's philosophy. I mention this because while this post continues my series on clarity and Stebbing's views on clarity in particular ((recall here; and here; and yesterday), today I unexpectedly veer into philosophy of science.
Recall that if clarity is the effect of analysis (the ���standard conception���), then its character is, at least in part, determined by the nature of analysis. By the 1930s it was sufficiently clear that different kinds of analysis were being practiced alongside each other. In fact, in her (1933) ���Logical positivism and analysis," Stebbing made this very point explicit: ���there are various kinds of analysis.��� She lists ���four different kinds,��� although in context it���s possible she thinks there are more. ���These four kinds are: (1) analytic definition of a symbolic expression; (2) analytic clarification of a concept; (3) postulational analysis; (4) directional analysis.���
On the standard conception of clarity each of these kinds of analysis generates a clarity proper to it. Of course, it���s possible that the kind of fruit born by these four kinds of analysis belongs to the same genus, but one can���t simply assume that, and to her credit Stebbing does not assume so. For Stebbing thinks that "the analytic clarification of a concept differs considerably from the other three kinds of analysis.��� While Stebbing���s views on and practice of postulational and directional -- which she sometimes calls ���metaphysical��� -- analysis have received considerable and increasing attention,[1] her views on analytic clarification much less so. (I substantiate this claim in the footnote accompanying this sentence.)* Even the phrase 'analytic clarification' was -- despite its apparent familiarity -- not much used in the 1930s.
At first sight, it is no surprise that Stebbing's analytic clarification of a concept has received little attention. For she introduces us to it by saying that such analysis ���is due to the fact that we often manage to say something which is true although in so saying we believe ourselves to be referring to what is not in fact the case, and are thus also saying something false.��� As stated this seems unpromising and has the air of paradox, without having the clarity of the more familiar paradox of analysis (on which Stebbing has very interesting things to say as one can read in Janssen-Lauret's Elements.)
But what Stebbing has in mind when discussing 'analytic clarification' of a concept is made evident in the discussion of what follows. For, she introduces the very idea of an analytic clarification of a concept, in order to handle instances where a previously relatively successful scientific theory requires non-trivial revision after what we would now call a ���paradigm change.��� Her examples are, in fact, ���mass,��� ���force,��� and ���simultaneity��� with explicit reference to Newton and Einstein. Here's what she writes. It's terse, and she acknowledges she lacks time to develop it in context:
Examples of concepts which have been thus clarified are mass, force, simultaneity. The need for such analytic clarification is due to the fact that we often manage to say something which is true although in so saying we believe ourselves to be referring to what is not in fact the case, and are thus also saying something false. This happens when we understand to some extent what we are saying but do not understand clearly exactly what we are saying; hence, we suppose something to be essential to the truth of what we say which is, however, not essential. Certainly Newton did not clearly understand what he was referring to when he spoke of "force", but he often said what was nevertheless true when he used sentences containing "force". A striking example is provided by the concept of simultaneity. Before Einstein had asked the question how we determine whether two events are simultaneous, we thought we knew quite well what was meant by saying 'happening at the same time in London and New York'. Einstein has made us see that we did not know quite well what we meant; we now understand that what we thought to be essential is not so. This analytic clarification of a concept cannot be made quite tidy. It involves a change in the significance of all statements in which the concept occurs. (p. 30)
Ever since Kuhn, we tend to discuss examples like this in terms of incommensurability and paradigm shifts. And I use some of that vocabulary (and also that of Sellars) to elucidate what Stebbing is getting at. But the first thing to note is that analytic clarification can (or is) the effect of scientific development. The clarity achieved is the product of the growth in science. ("Einstein has made us see...") ���Analytic clarification��� may be the worst philosophical coinage for failure to convey what it is trying to describe!
Who is doing the clarifying is actually left a bit vague (notice the repeated use of we/us), and that's because Stebbing tends to treat science as a social, situated activity. (Peter West also makes this point in his re-evaluation of Stebbing's famous criticism of Eddington in a recent paper in BJHP.) As she puts it, ���Science is the work of scientists, who, profiting by each other���s labours, come gradually to achieve an agreed body of knowledge, and in the course of this achievement continually develop new and more powerful technical methods��� (Philosophy and the Physicists)** So, I tend to read her as claiming that Einstein triggered a social process of analytic clarification of concepts that had previously been taken for granted in science (and, perhaps, ordinary life--I return to that below). This image of what philosophical analysis can be is in some sense more familiar from strains in the Vienna Circle. and looks forward to Quine's more naturalist approach.
Interestingly enough, analytic clarification does not merely impact the scientific image, it is also shifts the manifest image. (On my reading, Stebbing's thinks Edgington's mistake was not that he thought science could shape the manifest image, but rather that he conflated the scientific and manifest images in places where they are better kept separate.) It's not just physicists who through the development of general relativity learned something new about the significance of simultaneity, all of us.
As an aside, the impact of science on the manifest image is itself due to a wider rationalization of the world; many elements of the manifest image have already been infiltrated and shaped by the scientific image. And this means that common sense itself can shift like quicksand. (I suspect her sensitivity to this is one of her more important differences with Moore.)
When I first read the quoted passage (with Kuhn and Quine in the back of my mind), I thought that the lack of tidiness of analytic clarification was due to a kind of semantic holism of concepts, that the significance of each concept was determined by adjoining concepts in a network. (Janssen-Lauret situates Stebbing as a transitional figure toward Quine's and later Wittgenstein's holism.) So that the adjustments that are required when we figure out what simultaneity really means ramifies out to other, adjoining concepts. But Stebbing actually doesn't say this here in the context of analytic clarification.
Rather, the lack of tidiness is due to the fact that the concepts involved are central to the scientific and manifest image(s). And so that that the clarity gained from analytic clarification about the significance of these particular terms has to be fitted to quite a few claims ("the significance of all statements in which the concept occurs��� emphasis added). This still involves a holist-friendly thought that the full, changed significance isn't evident from a particular use, but needs to be inferred from a whole range of potentially subtly different uses (but this holism isn't semantic). But I suspect that part of the lack of tidiness is also due to Stebbing���s recognition that science itself is open-ended, perhaps intrinsically so, and that it may discover new uses for the concepts in new statements (predictions, extensions, etc.) or through the new use of technology (recall the passage quoted from Philosophy and the Physicists).
Notice that Stebbing resists the temptation to claim that old paradigms were simply false; that what we thought was true was actually false. Rather, she suggests that one can say true things without actually fully understanding the concepts one uses. "This happens when we understand to some extent what we are saying but do not understand clearly exactly what we are saying." This vantage point is extraordinary difficult to achieve about one's own (paradigmatic) utterances, but does become more easily available during and after a paradigm shift.
On this view part of the point of the later paradigm, of the growth of knowledge more generally, is to elucidate how we could speak truth before while strictly speaking not always understanding fully our own concepts. Stebbing here alerts us to the role of philosophy, analytic clarification, within science during shifts in the research frontier. (Of course, this is not philosophy���s only role.)
There is, of course, a wider lesson here about our lives in societies characterized by complex, cognitive division of labor. In the quoted passage, Newton represents the human condition; as through the growth of science and technology the concepts of the scientific image encroach on the manifest image, and as the division of labor within the sciences becomes ever more fine-grained, it is inevitable that at any given time we say true things without understanding the concepts we use. Somewhat paradoxically then, the clarity that is the effect of analytic clarification grows while science and technology grows; but (ahh) simultaneously their growth means that we often are simultaneously in the dark about the truths we utter confidently.
This first appeared at: <Stebbing on Clarity with nods to Kuhn, Sellars, and Quine (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
[1] For recent careful work on directional/metaphysical analysis see, Annalisa Coliva "Stebbing, Moore (and Wittgenstein) on common sense and metaphysical analysis." British Journal for the History of Philosophy 29.5 (2021): 914-934. Douglas, Alexander X., and Jonathan Nassim. "Susan stebbing���s logical interventionism." History and Philosophy of Logic 42.2 (2021): 101-117. Neither paper is interested in analytic clarification of a concept.
* For example, back in 2003, in "Susan Stebbing on Cambridge and Vienna Analysis," Michael Beaney assimilates Stebbing's idea of 'analytic clarification of a concept' to Russell���s ���paradigm��� of analysis. Beaney writes, "I might say ���It is false that the present King of France is bald���, and take myself (as Meinong and the early Russell did) to be referring to some subsistent (as opposed to existent) object. According to Russell���s theory of descriptions, I am saying something true, despite my confusion as to what I am referring. What we have, then, is also paraphrastic analysis ��� the aim being here, though, to ���analyse away��� a problematic expression." (343-344) Later in (2016) "Susan Stebbing and the Early Reception of Logical Empiricism in Britain," Beaney simply skips discussing the analytic clarification of a concept after mentioning its existence.[4] In his (2021) SEP entry on Stebbing with Chapman, they do not even mention it. More recently, Karl Egerton (2021) "Susan Stebbing and the Truthmaker Approach to Metaphysics."[6] also assimilates 'analytic clarification' to analytic definition, but is not much interested in exploring it. Oddly, in Beaney and Egerton ignore Stebbing's claim that analytic clarification a is very different kind of analysis.
**See also K��rber, Silke. "Thinking About the ���Common Reader:��� Otto Neurath, L. Susan Stebbing and the (Modern) Picture-Text Style." Neurath Reconsidered: New Sources and Perspectives (2019): 456.
May 18, 2023
From Early Moderns to Early Analytics on Clarity
[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at ]
From Descartes to Hume, the so-called ���way of ideas,��� was devoted to the notion that clarity is a desirable and potential property or quality of ideas. I don���t mean to suggest that after this way was abandoned clarity disappeared wholly as a philosophical ideal; the subsequent German age embraced, at least briefly, Aufkl��rung for individuals and society alike. One cannot help notice that Aufkl��rung shares a common root with clarification [kl��rung]. But while clarity was not ignored during the nineteenth century altogether, until our ongoing ���age of analysis��� clarity was at best a lower, philosophical virtue.
Somewhat frustratingly, other than being a desirable quality of our ideas, it's much harder to say what clarity is in the way of ideas. In his (1878) "How to make our ideas clear," Peirce mocks a definition of it that he attributes to Leibniz, to wit that clarity is "the clear apprehension of everything contained in the definition" of the notion one is clear about. I'd be surprised this is really found in Leibniz (although he wrote so much, and for all his true genius could also be silly, I wouldn't bet one way or another). But fairly or not, Peirce does put his finger on one of the problems with the way of ideas, which was not so clear on clarity as one would have wished. One often gets the impression that among the early moderns a certain kind of acquaintance (in Russell���s sense) with the experience of clarity of one's ideas is simply assumed. If not familiar, you are not in the game.
Peirce himself revived the notion that clarity is a quality of one's ideas (or, as shall be clear from what follows, one's conception). Peirce's major contribution to the subject is not so much to explain what clarity is, but how we can attain it, although these are not entirely distinct for him. For, he proposed this "rule" to attain clarity: "Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object." Clarity, then, for Peirce is not so much in the first instance a particular quality of our ideas, but it more akin to a kind of second order effect of a proper conception which itself is the effect of a successful kind of enquiry. And the proper conception itself is attained by a species of verification or, if that is too misleading and too anachronistic, substitute for 'verification' here a practical understanding of what may one may do with such a conception. Once one has completed the verification or survey of the effects of the conception one is exploring then one attains clarity about or of the conception. My interest here is not Peirce, so if this is too terse, so be it.
I doubt Peirce's approach to clarity influenced clarity's high status in early analytic philosophy. But Peirce anticipates something of the structure or form of thought about clarity among early analytic philosophers. By this I do not mean the adoption of verificationism in Vienna or a kind of pragmatism that runs through (say) early Wittgenstein and Frank Ramsey. But rather he anticipates the idea that a certain process of investigation/enquiry leads to clarity. That is, clarity is the fruits of analysis.
The previous sentence should be uncontroversial. For, by 1945 (recall) H.H. Price summed up a whole range of criticisms of analytic philosophy with the slogan ���Clarity is not enough,��� (the title of Price���s lecture and also a 1963 volume edited by H.D. Lewis that leads with a reprint of this lecture). In fact in Price the standard conception of clarity he and its critics presuppose just is the fruits or effect of analysis. He writes: ���I propose to use the words "clarification " and "analysis" (both of which are metaphors after all) as if they were synonymous.��� (Price 1945: 3) But, unfortunately, he does not unpack the metaphors.[1] So, for now we're left with the idea that analysis aims at clarity, or analysis clarifies.
Notice, that the ���clarity��� that follows from a successful analysis is distinct from writing clearly or perspicuously or expressing oneself lucidly, that is presentational clarity. Some analytic philosophers quite clearly prized such lucidity, especially in the context of polemics with (say) Heidegger and his followers. I don���t mean to suggest that the clarity that is the effect of analysis is wholly distinct from presentational clarity. It's possible that competence in analysis leads to presentational clarity. One can imagine that philosophical prose written subsequent the habitual (and successful) analysis is more lucid than the kind of prose one writes if one aims at disclosing the essential throwing-ness of dasein. But it's not clear if the connection between clarity as the effect of analysis and presentational clarity is anything but contingent.
I do not mean to suggest that treating clarity as the fruits of analysis itself is idiosyncratic in the early analytic tradition.[2] For, example, it clearly echoes a famous passage in Wittgenstein���s Tractatus (in Ogden���s translation):
The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts.
Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.
A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations.
In his introduction to the Tractatus, Russell had called attention to this very passage (and the material leading up 4.16), that on Wittgenstein���s conception ���The result of philosophy is not a number of `philosophical propositions,' but to make propositions clear.��� On the combined authority of Russell and Wittgenstein, then, that philosophical analysis generates clarity will be, henceforth, dubbed ���the standard conception��� of clarity.
However, in the quoted material in Wittgenstein���s Tractatus there is an oscillation between propositions and thoughts. And in both cases (thoughts and propositions) there is something of a mystery how they could be more or less clear and, say, remain the same entity. Once one starts pressing on what propositions are supposed to be things do not get easier. For, at one point Wittgenstein claims, explicitly following Frege and Russell, that a proposition just is "a function of the expressions contained in it.��� (3.318) Understanding such functions is the road toward clarity, and so on.
I am, then, suggesting that the details of what analysis is about and the tools used in it are going to matter quite a bit in constraining how one conceives of clarity. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it���s the nature of one's analysis that explains the kind of clarity one ends up with in the standard conception.
For example, at a suitable level of generality (and vagueness), it is natural to understand Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein as agreeing that one can design a logical symbolism or formal language to supply the means of analysis. What is clarified thereby is the language or linguistic structure (of, say, mathematics--now stipulating with Paul Samuelson that it is a language--) analyzed. Wittgenstein also thought that analysis could be applied to the way logical symbolism is used in one's analysis. One could thereby learn to avoid, say, not merely equivocations and ambiguity of the language analyzed but also avoid confusions about language or caused by one���s symbolic language of analysis, including the specialist one(s) deployed by the analyst.*
Notice that in addition to thoughts and propositions (and functions), I have now somewhat cavalierly suggested that language or at least language use can be clarified, too. That is, to repeat, the details of the kind of analysis one uses matters to the kind of clarity one can achieve in the standard conception.
As an aside, Stebbing (ca 1933) understands the very same material in Wittgenstein as follows: ���that to clarify our thought we must understand the logic of our language.��� And she goes on to claim that ���This understanding is achieved when we have discerned the principles of symbolism, and can thus answer the question how it is that sentences mean.��� (p. 10) My interest here is not to contest Stebbing���s reading of Wittgenstein (who she treats as a kind of verificationist of the sort commonly associated with a na��ve strand of logical positivism). But here clarity involves a kind of semantic understanding that allows one to do certain things: according to her Wittgenstein ���is thus concerned to lay down certain principles in accordance with which language can be so used as to construct significant propositions.��� (p. 11) That is, semantic understanding is the basis for a certain know-how. I mention this not because I agree with Stebbing���s reading of the Tractatus, but to note that even Wittgenstein���s presentational clarity can give rise to many kinds of informed interpretations of what he thinks clarification really is.
Be that as it may, on the standard position, clarity is the fruit of analysis. This is best understood not so much as a quality of ideas or propositions, but more a second order effect on the analysist (hence, why I started with Peirce here). Of course, what is analyzed and the manner of analysis may well change the nature of this second order of effect. So, lurking in the standard position, which uniformly treats clarity as the effect and desideratum of (successful) analysis, is a possible equivocation about what is fundamentally achieved.
In her (1933) lecture, ���Logical positivism and analysis," from which I have been quoting, Stebbing alerts us to the fact that ���there are various kinds of analysis.��� And she mentioned ���four different kinds,��� although in context it���s possible she thinks there are more. ���These four kinds are: (I) analytic definition of a symbolic expression; (2) analytic clarification of a concept; (3) postulational analysis; (4) directional analysis.��� Each of these kinds of analysis generates a clarity proper to it. Of course, it���s possible that the kind of fruits born by these four kinds of analysis belongs to the same genus, but one can���t simply assume that, and Stebbing to her credit does not assume so. For Stebbing thinks that "the analytic clarification of a concept differs considerably from the other three kinds of analysis.��� And why she thinks this is rather spectacular (and oddly under appreciated), so stay tuned!
But notice, and I end here (with a second cliffhanger), that neither presentational clarity nor the many strands in the standard conception of clarity (as fruits of analysis) are identical to the kind of clarity Stebbing posits (recall here; and here) as necessary to democratic life in (1938) Thinking to Some Purpose. This democratic notion of clarity (hereafter: ���democratic clarity���) is a more general property of cognition and intelligence. Such clarity is necessary condition for success at thinking and action guided by it, or what she calls "effective thinking." (5) In particular, clarity is the absence of distortions in thought and perception caused by bias and ignorance one is not aware of. And she treats such clarity as an acquirable skill by everyone. And so lurking here is a further question about the relationship between the standard conception of clarity of the philosophical analysist and the in principle democratic clarity of citizenry.
This first appeared at: <On Clarity from the early Moderns to Early Analytic Philosophy, especially Stebbing. (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
[1] I use ���standard��� because Price himself also offers a new, additional conception of clarity, what he calls ���synoptic��� clarity which is the effect of ���a conceptual scheme which brings out certain systematic relationships between the [known] matters of fact��� (Price 1945: 29).
[2] Near the start of his lecture, Price notes correctly that ���The word "analysis," it is true, was sometimes associated with a particular school of philosophers, the so-called Cambridge school. But many Philosophers who did not subscribe to all the tenets and methods of that school would have agreed with this conception.��� (Price 1945: 3)
*This whole paragraph is indebted to Michael Kremer 'The Whole Meaning of a Book of Nonsense: Reading Wittgenstein���s Tractatus', in Michael Beaney (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of The History of Analytic Philosophy (2013; online edn, Oxford Academic, 1 Oct. 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199238842.013.0035, accessed 16 May 2023, although I wouldn���t hold it against him if he said I understood nothing.
May 17, 2023
On Hazony and Bourke on Burke and Frank S. Meyer, and the risks of Freedom
[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at ]
Lodged inside Yoram Hazony's Conservatism: A Rediscovery is also a polemic against what came to be known as 'fusionism.' (Recall my series of posts on Hazony's book recall the first one here; here the second; here the third one; and the fourth.) I quote Hazony: "This alignment of liberals and conservatives was assembled, first and foremost, by William F. Buckley Jr., the young founder and editor of the conservative weekly, National Review. But its principal theoretician was his close associate, Frank Meyer, who was credited with having devised a ���fusion��� of liberalism and conservatism appropriate to conditions in America during the Cold War. That this ���fusionism��� was politically successful cannot be denied...Meyer���s fusion was also a version of Enlightenment liberalism." Chapter VI (section 5)
In fact, when Hazony turns to Meyer's (1962) in Defense of Freedom, Hazony is scathing: "Meyer���s book is devoted to repeated attacks on Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, and other defenders of the Anglo-American conservative tradition. Among other things, Meyer accuses Burke of having inspired a standpoint characterized by ���an organic view of society, by a subordination of the individual person to society, and therefore, by a denial that the freedom of the person is the decisive criterion of a good polity.���"
Intrigued by Hazony's characterization of Meyer (how could the architect of fusionism, which I think a historic mistake, be an Enlightenment liberal?), I decided to read Meyer (1909 ��� 1972). Vefore I get to what I want to say about Meyer today, I should note that Hazony subtly misrepresents Meyer here. Meyer is not a critic of Burke the conservative. He is, however, a critic of Kirk and other so-called 'new Conservatives' who have conflated Burke "the practical statesman," whose pronouncements were (to use Huntington's taxonomy [recall yesterday's post]) situational not a political philosophy, with an oracular prophet of a movement. According to Meyer, Burke could take for granted the worth of the (1688) constitution he defended.* That is, Meyer actually admires Burke. (This is not to deny that Meyer also disagrees with some of the late Burke's pronouncements on reason, but he tends to agree with Burke's underlying commitments on liberty.)
Meyer thinks that certain pronouncements of Burke, when treated as an eternal philosophy, lend themselves toward an organicist conception of society and a dangerous form of status quo bias, that what is, is right. As Hazony discerns (and Meyer acknowledges in a note) this is de facto a version of Strauss' criticism of the Burke Strauss found popular among American conservatives.
As an aside, if I am right about this then Richard Bourke���s characterization of recent conservatism (recall yesterday���s post) is misleading. For, our contemporary historical interest in twentieth century conservatism is due in large part to its political success in its ���fusionist guise��� Stateside. (There is no interest in Kirk today other than as the partial trigger of fusionism.) By design, then, fusionism also rejects the very ���Burke myth��� Bourke diagnoses from the start. How this could be so forgotten is, in fact, a very interesting question; but about that some other time.
Okay, with that as set up, let me turn, in conclusion, to the main point of today's digression. Meyer thinks reason is, then, required both as a grounds of criticism of any status quo and in the articulation of the means by which the proper end of society, virtue, must be pursued. (Meyer is in contemporary parlance, a certain kind of indirect liberal perfectionist.) In fact, he puts the point in the following way in a passage from 1964 that I find especially congenial:
In the political and economic realm, however, these truths establish only the foundation for an understanding of the end of civil society and the function of the state. That end, to guarantee freedom, so that men may uncoercedly pursue virtue, can be achieved in different circumstances by different means. To the clarification of what these means are in specific circumstances, the conservative must apply his reason. The technological circumstances of the twentieth century demand above all the breaking up of power and the separation of centers of power within the economy itself, within the state itself, and between the state and the economy. Power of a magnitude never before dreamed of by men has been brought into being. While separation of power has always been essential to a good society, if those who possess it are to be preserved from corruption and those who do not are to be safeguarded from coercion, this has become a fateful necessity under the conditions of modern technology.--"Freedom, Tradition, Conservatism," Reprinted from What is Conservatism? (1964), p. 14 in Libertyfund edition of In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays. [Emphasis added.]
That is, we can describe Meyer's core insight that the pursuit of individual virtue requires negative freedom. But that effective negative freedom, or the freedom of choice worth having, also requires certain social conditions. And in particular, Meyer advocates the (legal) destruction of (to use Sam Bagg's felicitous phrase) concentrated powers (which prevent and curtail formal freedoms in all kinds of ways). Meyer here echoes what I take to be one of the true insights of ordo-liberalism of a generation before. (The ORDOs are more realistic, however, about how much state capacity this presupposes.)
Meyer repeatedly emphasizes that his own position requires fallible contextual judgment. Meyer recognizes that allying with conservatism often entails, I quote from the same page, being "associated with authoritarianism." In context, there is, in fact, a real difference between opposing the state's leviathan to defend the "principle of federalism that reserves to the states or to the people all power not confided to the national authority" before the break up of Jim Crow or after; to worry about sociological scientism in Brown vs Board of Education while agreeing with its verdict in the particular case (or to use such scientism to reject the verdict), etc.
The previous paragraph is not written by a moralist. If one agrees with Meyer's framework it is worth recognizing that opposing concentrated power in the name of making the pursuit of private virtue as free and responsible agents possible is not sufficient by itself to guard against rather significant errors of moral and political judgment. For, one must also make reasoned, and fallible, judgments about the order in which these powers are tackled and by way of coalitions with those whose ends one only partially shares. What makes Meyer's philosophy especially notable, even tragic, is that his is a most articulate sensitivity toward the risk of such grave error as a feature of freedom, that is, ineliminable from the human condition.
This first appeared at: <On Hazony and Bourke on Burke and Frank S. Meyer, and the risks of Freedom (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
See pp. 61-62 and p. 10 of the Libertyfund edition of In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays. (P. 10 is a reference to Meyer's 1955 essay, Collectivism Rebaptized."
May 15, 2023
Adam Smith and the 'liberal' Swedish revolution of 1809
[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at ]
As regular readers know, (recall here; and here) I have argued that the political meaning of 'liberal' that became influential in the nineteenth century can be found in Adam Smith. In Particular, rather than seeing the origin story of liberalism as a reaction to the European religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, I argue that originally liberalism is centered on taming, even domesticating state power. And that ���liberal��� in this sense acquired its original meaning in Adam Smith (see here for a popular version of my argument).
I tried to bolster my argument by building on the work of Spanish scholars that Smith played a very considerable role in the Cortes debates around the Spanish Constitution. In the earlier posts (here; and here), I used Duncan Bell's (2014) influential paper, "What is Liberalism?" as my foil. It's important to my argument that in these Spanish debates Smith isn't merely perceived as a free-trader, but an advocate of political and institutional reform (including of Empire) and understood as such by the Spanish. I won't repeat my arguments here now.
The Spanish Liberales often show up in debates over the early history of liberalism. In part, because is clear that Bentham tried to influence them, and also because, as I show, Bentham used 'liberal' to self-describe in contact with them. But until I read The Lost History of Liberalism: from Ancient Rome to the Twenty-first Century (2018, Princeton) by Helena Rosenblatt I was unfamiliar with early Swedish self-described liberals of 1809. Here's what she writes:
Dissatisfied with the leadership of their [Swedish] king, a circle of high government officials staged a palace coup and deposed him in 1809. It was around this time that a group calling itself ���the liberal party��� came into existence. Not much is known about its members except that they were influenced by French revolutionary ideas and advocated principles such as equality before the law, constitutional and representative government, and freedom of the press, conscience, and trade. They were also known as ���the liberal side,��� or just ���the liberals.���
The Spanish liberal party emerged soon after Napoleon���s armies invaded Spain in 1808, deposed the Spanish King Ferdinand, and replaced him with Napoleon���s brother, Joseph. The Spaniards promptly rebelled and established a government in C��diz. In 1810, a group of delegates to the parliament there, called the Cortes, took the name Liberales and labeled their opponents Serviles, from the Latin servi, meaning slave. The Spanish Liberales, like the Swedish liberals, advocated principles such as equality before the law and constitutional, representative government. pp. 61-62
In a note Rosenblatt cites a 1926 paper by Arthur Thomson. Unfortunately, I don't read Swedish. Now, Rosenblatt is explicit that the Swedish liberals were influenced by French ideas. That seemed eminently plausible, of course. And since Rosenblatt doesn't link Smith to the Spanish liberales for her these two events are just a marvelous coincidence (although, of course, we can't rule out that the Spanish Liberales were inspired by the Swedish liberals). But I wondered if I could show it's possible that the Swedish 1809 liberals took the name from Smith, too.
The short answer is, YES! It involves a man called Count Adlersparre (1760 ��� 1835). But first I want to share a false start. After scholar.googling, I bumped into a lovely 2022 paper by Anna Knutsson. In it she describes Erik Erland Bodell (1774���1848), who was a customs officer (like Smith in the closing decade of his life). She reports that in 1800, Bodell produced partial translation of Adam Smith���s Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter 2, ���Of the Sources of the General or Public Revenue of the Society.��� This actually disappointed me because while Smith uses the word 'liberal' and its cognates in this chapter a number of times, all of these involve the older meaning of 'generous' and 'aristocratic.' In addition, as Knutsson reports, Bodell uses this material to argue for free trade. Neat, but orthogonal to my present purposes. It is no surprise that Bodell also later translated Book IV, Chapter 2 from The Wealth of Nations, ���Of Restraints upon the Importation from Foreign Countries of such Goods as can be Produced at Home��� for the same effect.
Knutsson reports that Bodell went on to write and publish Ber��ttelse f��r ��r 1805, afgifven till H��glof.Gener.Tull-Arrende-Direktionen, Ifr��n Marstrands Kongl. stora sj��tulls-kammare: Om handeln: fabriker och manufakturer: orsaken till minskning eller f��rh��jning i sj��tulls-inkomsterna: huru tillf��llen till sj��tulls-uppb��rdens minskning m��ga f��rekommas: om lurendr��geri: och medel till en b��ttre sj��tulls-bevakning, (Account for the Year 1805���[���������]���about Trade: Factories and Manufactories: the reason for decrease or increase in the Maritime Customs Revenue: how the Maritime Customs revenue decrease might be overcome: about Smuggling: and measures for a better Maritime Customs Surveillance). I love these descriptive titles! And she quotes a wonderful passage from it, that I reproduce in full:
We watch and complain that the trade is decreasing, that the manufacturing is stagnating, that poverty is increasing and that Residents are leaving, and cannot understand that the cause of it are our many prohibitions, high customs taxes���[���������]���Most nations are following the enlightenment of the age, they are led by more liberal tenets in their public economy [statshush��llning], and enjoy all the more profitable consequences. ��� I love my King and my Fatherland too much, to make this comparison with indifference���[���������]���the Nation���s devotion and confidence in their Regent and his officers would increase considerably, if they got laws which agreed with their own desires.
There is an interesting question on how to translate statshush��llning; words like this show up in German and Dutch too during this period and all involve a kind of transposition and explication of household-management (which is a translation of the Greek 'oeconomy') directed at the state. While in the passage 'liberal tenets' could mean 'generous policies', I'd like to think that because Bodell is steeped in Adam Smith (even his opponents accused him of wanting to be the Swedish Smith, as Knuttson notes), it's safe to say that he is using 'liberal' here in a more Smithian inflexion. That is, where liberalism is explicitly opposed to mercantilism (which is 'illiberal') and where liberalism is not reducible to free trade. Of course, Bodell's concerns here are strictly economic, so it does not advance my larger argument. In addition, Bodell did not participate in the events of 1809.
Now, Knutsson mentions Adlersparre's role as follows, "Adlersparre, who had been the first to translate Adam Smith into Swedish ten years previously in his anti-government journal L��sning i blandade ��mnen." Her footnotes suggests this occurred as early as 1799 and through 1800. In fact, a number of my Swedish informants -- Max Skj��nsberg, Lena Halldenius, Johan Norberg -- all pointed me to him as well. In a paper he just published, Max writes, "Adlersparre was the leader of the 1809 coup that led to the king���s deposition and a new constitution that was particularly inspired by Montesquieu���s separation of powers theory." (Notice that���s subtly different than Rosenblatt���s version.) Some other time, I���ll return to the Montesquieu-Smith connection in political thought. (This is a bit understudied.)
In fact, in his article Max never links Adlersparre to Smith. That's because Max is focused on Nils von Rosenstein (1752���1824). The point of Skj��nsberg's argument is that Von Rosentein's F��rs��k til en afhandling om uplysningen, til dess beskaffenhet, nytta och n��dv��ndighet f��r samh��llet (An Attempt at a Dissertation on the Enlightenment, Its Character, Usefulness and Necessity for Society), is shaped by Scottish Enlightenment ideas, including Adam Smith's. Fair enough.
Crucially for my argument Max quotes some Von Rosenstein that helps set the stage for my claim: "When we speak of politics, it is not only FENELON, MONTESQUIEU, SMITH, who have enlightened the world, but also all the great and virtuous Rulers and Ministers, who have intended to make people happy���" That is, for Von Rosenstein Smith is not just an economist or moral philosopher (in fact, Max notes he calls Smith a 'metaphysician'), he is also a guide to what I call (following Locke and Mill) the 'art of government.' Max comments: "Theory and practice worked best when they supported each other." Indeed. And so in Sweden, Smith is not just received as a free-trader. (The role of Fenelon on the same side of Montesquieu and Smith is also neat, and will please my friend Ryan Hanley, but that���s also best left aside now.)
I don't mean to suggest that Skj��nsberg doesn't know the significance of Adlersparre to the dissemination of Smith in Sweden. He notes in passing that "Excerpts from Smith���s Wealth of Nations were published in the periodical press." And elsewhere in his article Max notes that Adlersparre's journal L��sning i blandade ��mnen (Readings in Various Subjects) "discussed political economy with reference to Smith." But that's not Skj��nsberg's main focus. Knutsson notes that Adlersparre's "Smith extracts published in L��sning i blandande ��mnen focused primarily on his work on agriculture and the use of paper money. However, an extract on the balance of trade was also translated, which dealt with matters of international trade policy, arguing that ���the Trade, which is conducted without force and restrictions, naturally and without interruption, between two locations will always be beneficial���." Unfortunately, while Knutsson notes that Bodell was against the 1809 revolution, she does not go into Adlersparre's role.
Now, Johan Norberg was on this very trail a decade ago. Here's what he writes:
Norberg's essay is a kind of popular lecture. And so his use of 'liberal officer' begs the question for my purpose. However, in correspondence, Norberg notes that "Nothing certain is known about why they called themselves liberals." But he also added that he has found evidence that Adlersparre called himself a 'liberal' in the period between his Smith translations and the revolution. I hope to pursue this trail in future research!
So, here's where we are: I don't think it's a mere coincidence that in 1809-1812 two revolutions a continent apart, the anti-imperial/mercantile, reformist parties called themselves 'liberal.' Part of the common cause is familiarity (inter alia) with Adam Smith's writings on political economy. In the Swedish case the link is, in fact, most direct through the centrality of Adlersparre. That is, I hope the Spanish and Swedish political events will also help in re-thinking Smith���s significance in the early history of liberalism.
Let's return again to a celebrated anti-Mercantile passage (the explicit target is Colbert) at Wealth of Nations, 4.9.3, it concludes with, "instead of allowing every man to pursue his own interest in his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice." I won't relitigate my argument that 'liberal' does not merely mean 'generous,' but rather just want to emphasize here that 'equality, liberty, and justice' were not intended or read as merely a free-trade doctrine; this a moral, political, and legal program.*
This first appeared at: <On the Origins of Liberalism: The Swedish Revolution of 1809 and Adam Smith (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
*I thank Erik Angner, Niclas Berggren, and Gustaf Arrhenius for encouragement and suggestions that will lead to other neat digressions.
May 12, 2023
Hume, Husserl and Foucault's The Order of Things
[I am phasing out D&I at typepad. This post was first published at: digressions.impressions.substack here. To receive new posts and support my work consider becoming a paid subscriber at ]
As I have noted before (recall), Hume plays a triple role in Foucault's (1966) Les mots et les choses (hereafter: The Order of Things).* First, alongside a number of other familiar philosophers Hume���s works are treated as illustrations for Foucault's claims about the nature of representation and knowledge in the episteme of the so-called ���classical��� period. In such cases Foucault assumes considerable knowledge about Hume among his implied audience. That Foucault can do so is explained by the second role Hume has, that is, of being a familiar steppingstone in a narrative that undergirds the self-understanding of phenomenology which is treated as the ruling philosophical status quo by Foucault. This narrative is one of Foucault's main targets in The Order of Things. However, and this is the third role, in characterizing the distinctive nature of the classical age, Foucault does single out Hume individually. And this is so because he can both assume familiarity with Hume (given the familiarity of Foucault's audience with Hume as a steppingstone in their standard narrative) as well as render Hume unfamiliar in virtue of his retelling of the story of early modern philosophy. In today's post I am focused on Husserl's role in these matters, especially the second role.
As a flirt, I argue that Foucault���s analysis of Hume���s account of resemblance cannot withstand close scrutiny. This problem raises serious concerns about the status of his whole project in The Order of Things, but that's best left for another time (including a forthcoming paper in Cosmos + Taxis edited by Elena Yi-Jia Zeng.)
Be that as it may, one of the main claims of The Order of Things is to provide what Foucault calls an ���archaeological analysis of knowledge��� (p. xxiv) in the human sciences that shows how across disciplines and over periods of time one can identify, to simplify, conceptual and argumentative similarities that obey similar underlying conceptual constraints. These constraints are durable for centuries on end, but can get replaced during what Foucault calls a ���general hiatus��� (p. 325) by new underlying conceptual constraints, which then structure what Foucault calls an ���episteme��� or ���single network of [conceptual] necessities.��� (p. 63) The period between ca 1600-1800 is called the ���Classical period.��� (p. 43)
The first role Hume plays in Foucault���s argument is to illustrate the effects of these conceptual necessities among a string of thinkers (who all live in the same ���Classical age.���) When it comes to the Classical period, Hume figures repeatedly in such strings: for example, "Hobbes, Berkeley, Hume, or Condillac." (p; 117, where this list returns, and (p. 65), where Condillac seems to be key figure in the network, and (p. 70), where Hume has equal billing with Condillac.) Again with Hume included, Foucault uses a different list to represent the "Classical age" -- "Locke and Linnaeus, Buffon and Hume." (p. 162)
When Foucault offers such examples, Foucault does not refer to particular passages or texts to provide evidence for his claims. That is, he presupposes considerable familiarity with the authors repeatedly singled out as illustrative member of the ���network of necessities��� among his implied audience.[1]
Second, that Hume can play this illustrative role in Foucault���s argument is, in turn, the effect of the role Hume plays in the self-understanding of the philosophical status quo, Husserlian phenomenology, that Foucault is explicitly reacting to (p. 248; elsewhere, Foucault registers the significance of Deleuze���s work on Hume, and their joint satisfaction with the ���phenomenological theory of subject.���+ On Deleuze���s Hume, see my friend Jeff Bell: 2008.) In this phenomenological self-understanding, which Foucault reports, [i] ���Hume's critique��� is the trigger for the "transcendental motif" of Kant. In this self-understanding this transcendental motif [ii] gets merged with "the Cartesian theme of the cogito," and so [iii] via Kant's incomplete Copernican revolution [iv] produces Husserl's revival of "the deepest vocation of the Western ratio." (The Order of Things, p. 325)[2] Here Hume is a kind of steppingstone, who generates Kant���s response which becomes co-constitutive for key features of phenomenology. I have added numbers to facilitate discussion. I have added [iii] because it is contextually implied: "It may seem that phenomenology has effected a union between the Cartesian theme of the cogito and the transcendental motif that Kant had derived from Hume's critique; according to this view, Husserl has revived the deepest vocation of the Western ratio, bending it back upon itself in a reflection which is a radicalization of pure philosophy and a basis for the possibility of its own history. (325; see also p. 65))
In earlier versions of discussing this material, I had already focused on Hume's role in Husserl's works. But a perceptive anonymous referee called my attention to the significance of Husserl's (1927) Formal and Transcendental Logic which I had overlooked. (In what follows I cite and quote Dorion Cairns' (1969) translation, published with Martinus Nijhoff.) And, in particular, if we go to the "historico-critical digression" (Husserl (1969), p. 266) that closes chapter 6 (it's paragraph 100 "Historical-critical remarks on the development of the transcendental philosophy and, in particular, on transcendental inquiry concerning formal logic"���Husserl���s titles shows he should have been born two centuries earlier), we find what Foucault has in mind. I have added the numbers.
The way leading to the whole inquiry concerning origins, an inquiry that must be taken collaterally, as belonging to pure psychology and transcendental philosophy, and includes in its essential universality, all possible worlds with all their essential regions of real and ideal objectivities and all their world-strata (therefore, in particular, the world of ideal senses, of truths, theories, sciences, the idealities of every culture of every socio-historical world) -- that way remained for centuries untrod. This was was entirely understandable consequence of naturalistic and sensualistic aberration on the part of all modern psychology based on internal experience. This aberration only drove the transcendental philosophy of English empiricist into that well known development which it end in countersensical fictionalism; [iii] it also arrested the transcendental philosophy of Kant's Copernican revolution short of full effectuation, so that the Kantian philosophy could never force its way through the point where the ultimately necessary aims and methods can be adopted. If the pure concrete ego, in whom all the objectivities and worlds accepted by him are subjectively constituted, is [as Hume argued] only a senseless bundle or collection of Data--which come and perish, cast together now in this way and now in that, according to senseless accidental regularity analogous to that of mechanics, --the result is that only surreptitious reasons can explain how even as much as the illusion of a real world could arise. Yet Hume professed to make it understandable that, by a blind matter-of-fact regularity, purely in the mind, particular types of fictions having the names "objects with continued existence", "identical persons", and s forth, arise for us. Now illusions, fictions, are produced sense-formations; the constituting of them takes place as intentionality; they are [ii] cogitata of cogitationes...
[iv] Hume���s greatness (a greatness still unrecognized in this, its most important aspect) lies in the fact that, despite all that, he was the first to grasp the universal concrete problem of transcendental philosophy. In the concreteness of purely egological internality, as he saw, everything Objective becomes intended to (and, in favourable cases, perceived), thanks to a subjective genesis. Hume was the first to see the necessity of investigating the Objective itself as a product of its genesis from that concreteness, in order to make the legitimate being-sense of everything that exists for us intelligible through its ultimate origins. Stated more precisely: The real world and the categories of reality, which are its fundamental forms, became for him a problem in a new fashion. He was the first to [ii] treat seriously the Cartesian focusing purely on what lies inside.-Husserl Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 255-256 [Emphases in Husserl]
To be sure, elsewhere Foucault contests the self-understanding of phenomenology (as he presents it). He reinterprets phenomenology as exhibiting the very "great hiatus" that Foucault diagnoses in the "modern episteme at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries." (p. 325)
One might claim that [i] is absent in the passage I quoted and that even the cogito is only implied in it. But Husserl goes on to write (after discussing Hume), "as for Kant...with the dependence on Hume implicit in his reaction against that philosopher, Kant took over the constitutional problem, at leas so far as it concerns Nature; but without the full sense of even the problem of Nature, as only one component in the universal complex of constitutional problems to which Hume's re-conception of the Cartesian ego-cogito as concrete mental being, had pointed." (Husserl (1969), FTL, p. 257) Familiarity with this Husserlian narrative, which supplies the phenomenological tradition self-understanding, is often presupposed in The Order of Things.
Now, it goes beyond my expertise to show the role of and familiarity with Husserl's Formal and Transcendental Logic in French philosophy of the period that Foucault is writing in. But it is worth noting that Suzanne Bachelard had published her Study on it in the preceding decade. Scholars of Foucault have noted, of course, The Order of Things is, in part, a critique of Husserl. While drawing on Lebrun, Stuart Elden recently (2023) emphasizes this in The Archaeology of Foucault, although Elden also suggests this tends to be missed (see p. 76). Elden also calls attention to Foucault's engagement with Husserl in the 1950s (p. 79).
As a concluding aside today, in this very context in Husserl, Hume is actually characterized as falling "into the countersense of a "philosophy of as-if." ((Husserl (1969), FTL, p. 257) That is, Husserl treats Hume as a stalking horse for criticizing Hans Vaihinger's Die Philosophie des Als Ob (a kind of neo-Kantianism). I mention this because I suspect the idea stayed with Foucault. For, when years later (recall), Foucault returned to Hume in his lecture series the Birth of Biopolitics, on 28 March 1979, in the the eleventh lecture, he treats Hume as the fount of Benthamite radicalism and Chicago economics. It is, in fact, not silly to treat Chicago post Milton Friedman's 1953 essay on the methodology of positive economics as a philosophy of as-if. (While I tend to emphasize Max Weber and Talcott Parsons, it's a commonplace of the secondary literature on Friedman's essay to note this connection to Vaihinger.) But I return to this before long.
This first appeared at: <Hume, Husserl's Digression, and Foucault's The Order of Things (substack.com)> a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
*I quote from the Vintage books (1994) edition of the 1970 English translation by Alan Sheridan with page numbers to it.
[1] I put it like that because here my point is not to complain about Foucault���s citation practices. This is not to deny that the near total absence of citation to (competing) secondary literature and possible sources of influence on Foucault is not odd. But where needed Foucault does cite primary sources in The Order of Things.
+Foucault, Michel (1988 [1990]) ���Critical Theory/Intellectual History,��� in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, London: Routledge, p. 24
[2] Foucault does not problematize the eurocentrism of this narrative.
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