Eric Schliesser's Blog, page 25

On that Great Policy Idea that remains floating between being and not-being; on stationary research programs

Academics have been discussing carbon taxes as a way to save the environment for more than four decades. (There is a 1977 Nordhaus paper. But if you play around with scholar.google, you may find anticipations.) It's a huge, interdisciplinary scholarly discussion by now with economists, philosophers, policy types, all kinds of environmental scientists, and quite a bit more chiming in (papers, conferences, books, congressional presentations, foundations pushing it, etc.). While governments adore new sources of income, it's remarkable how little uptake the (uniform) carbon tax has had even in relatively high tax countries with (say) considerable taxes on fuel/petroleum. (Here's a list.) I don't mean by this it cannot be explained (lots of theories in economics and political science can do that). But rather, given the breadth of intellectual commitments and fire-power (and Nobel enhanced prestige), this has been a gift that governments have, by and large, refused to accept.

 There are more such policy oriented intellectual communities that have managed to draw in very smart and savvy supply of young minds: for example, universal basic income  (UBI) is a very old idea. In the academy, it's been debated in various ways since the 1960s and it has had a professional community since the 1980s. Not unlike the carbon tax, it draws on all kinds of different academics (perhaps with some competition from and overlap with the negative income tax, etc.). Despite the existence of the welfare state, a full franchise, and the transferring around of 40-50% of GDP by the government in most wealthy countries, it, too, has had relatively little uptake (given the formidable intellectual cross ideological investment).

I think one can tell stories like this about the (slightly more recent) capability approach (and the human development index), cold fusion, and, perhaps, gene therapy (here's the current list). I welcome your own suggestions. The phenomenon I am gesturing at is, of course, not limited to policy salient (and medical) sciences. I grew up on breathless stories of string theory and particle accelerators. The latter has had some successes, but relative to the investment of talent and (oh, you damn economists) opportunity costs, it's meh. 

So, there are these decades long, multi-generational and multi-disciplinary research projects (okay, maybe string theory is a bad example) that, at any given time slice, are eminently plausible and exciting. They are the foundations and mortar for scientific cathedrals. And because they have not had policy uptake [yes, okay, write your angry comments] -- which is the proof in the pudding --, it would be wrong, a category error, to call any of these a degenerative research program. 

Grant me, for shits and giggles, that it's constitutive of science, at least since the scientific revolution [and if I am right, Seneca already grasped it], that if you are in a scientific project that a) with time and (b) the division of labor (c) lots more such knowledge will be attained, including (d) entirely unforeseeable knowledge, that (e) will seem entirely obvious to future generations so that (f) they will look back at Seneca's time as ignoramuses, but, (g) there is no reason to think the enterprise of knowledge ever comes to an end. But in policy/bio-medical sciences, there has to be (h) uptake. Because only with uptake (be it as field experiments or as pilot programs, and then [drumroll] an agency devoted to it), can you have (i) lift-off with further refinement in light of a feed-back loop with messy experience. And it's (i) that is the life-blood of what when I was a kid used to be called a 'progressive' research program in the policy sciences. 

So, on the ideal-type picture sketched here, all science, policy or not, is to be overtaken by the future. But for the policy science caught 'in the form of limitation between un-being and being' (that is, the ones without uptake, but with fresh recruits to the cause) there is no real future, except as a kind of thought experiment.  

What I am describing has been studied, of course in an analogous context.  Harry Collins wrote a beautiful book on Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) before its success. And I am sure that the social-psychological issues are not dissimilar. But if LIGO had always been unable to detect those waves, then at some point that would have been informative about (ahh) nature. (Not that it would have stopped Collins from writing more.) But the lack of uptake in a policy science is different. In general, the lack of uptake of policy-salient multi-disciplinary, multi-generational is not theoretically informative about people or the political process. I don't mean they can't be studied fruitfully from without. Perhaps, archeologists and historians will find half-built cathedrals informative, but probably in order to illuminate the fully built and/or destroyed ones.

Now, since academic life is full of disappointments, rejections, and delayed gratification, I doubt the phenomenological experience of being in such a long range, ambitious multi-disciplinary, policy oriented projects without uptake is any or much different from other academic communities. Challenging, technical problems continue to solved, and clever new review articles will be written. I doubt there is any trouble with motivation (perhaps even less so because of shared, necessary religiosity about the project). I have to admit, I have never been part of an intellectual community that understood itself as progressing, so I actually have no first hand access to what that phenomenological experience is like (except the growth of citation scores).

Obviously, such coriolis research programs may be incubators for and welcoming ecological niches for launching other projects (presumably there is a way to tell a story about NASA or Bell Labs like this). Excellent universities and research communities always are welcoming to people who may, in hindsight, just be passing through to their big thing. 

I wish I had a lovely take home message about the significance of it all. But perhaps, the petering out of this post is sufficient homage to the topic. 

 

 

The Caliban and the Witch, Hobbes, Trevor-Roper, Bodin, and the age of Geniusses

But it the jurists the magistrates, and the demonologists, often embodied by the same person, who in, contributed to the persecution. They were the ones who systematized the argument answered the critics and perfected a legal machine that, by the end of the 16th century, a standardized, almost bureaucratic format to the trials, accounting for the similarities of the confessions across national boundaries. In their work, the men of the law could count on the cooperation of the most reputed intellectuals of the age, including philosophy and scientists who are still praised as the fathers of modern rationalism. Among them was the English political theorist Thomas Hobbes, who despite his skepticism concerning the reality of witchcraft, approved the persecution as a means of social control. A fierce enemy of witches ��� obsessive in his hatred for them and in his calls for bloodshed ��� Jean Bodin, the famous French lawyer and political theorist, whom historian Trevor Roper [sic] calls the Aristotle and Montesquieu of the 16th century. Bodin, who is credited with authoring the first treatise on inflation, participated in many trials, wrote a volume of 'proofs' (Demomania, 1580), in which he insisted that witches should be burned alive instead of being 'mercifully' strangled before being thrown to the flames, that they should be cauterized so that their flesh should rot before death, and that children too be burned.
Bodin was not an isolated case. In this "century of geniuses��� ��� Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Shakespeare, Pascal, Descartes ��� a century that saw the triumph of the Copernican Revolution, the birth of modern science, and the development of philosophical and scientific rationalism, witchcraft became one of the favorite subjects of debate for the European intellectual elites. Judges, lawyers, statesmen, philosophers, scientists, theologians all became preoccupied with the "problem," wrote pamphlets and demonologies, agreed that this was the most nefarious crime, and called for its punishment.10---Silvia Federici (2004 [2021]) Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, pp. 180-181 [p. 168 in the 2004 US edition!]

I turned to Federici after my dissatisfaction (recall) with De Beauvoir's account of the origin of patriarchy, which I think of as a key (illustration of, and) to maintaining all kinds of social hierarchies. Caliban and the Witch is a riveting read and it connects (recall) with one of my other long-standing interests: the Marxist's tendency to impugn the evils of mercantilism to capitalism as such (see also this post on Meiksins Wood; and this one). And while I intend future posts to tease out my reservations about some of the particularly Marxist theses of Federici, I want to be very clear that one of her underlying theses, that is, that centuries of violent persecution of witchcraft created the conditions of modern patriarchy is eminently plausible even in light of what follows. 

But this post is connected to a more general unease about the book that grew out of my initial inability to figure out what the sources of some of her claims were (mostly for future reading on my part), and then noticing all kinds of minor mistakes in the bibliography and omissions in the index (see here for a blogpost that enumerates all kinds of mistakes  [HT Tim Christiaens]). But when she started to discuss material presumably more familiar to me (17th century natural philosophy and political theory), I was really amazed by some of her claims about figures I thought I had studied reasonably carefully in the past. And my first reaction was a kind of panic that my own blinders and prejudices, combined with intellectually inherited ideas of what is significant, had made me miss all kinds of salient, gendered issues (pertaining to witchcraft and persecution). But as I traced out some of Federici's footnotes, I have come to think that she could have benefitted from more careful refereeing and editing.* And while this post illustrates that claim, it is, however, also focused on a strain of argument that runs through the book, even though in some respects it is dispensable to some of her more important theses. 

Take the quoted passage above. Let me start with common ground. Bodin, who routinely gets credited, and now I quote the textbook I use in my own teaching, Alan Ryan's On Politics, for articulating "the modern concept of a sovereign state and theorize its unity in terms of the indivisible sovereignty" (235) was truly a jerk. I was unaware of Bodin's important role in the persecution of witchcraft. (It  goes unmentioned in Ryan's On Politics.) This is no trivial matter because it supports another of Federici's central claims (shortly after the quoted passage above) that the persecution of witchcraft was a key step in the development of modern state: "Thus, it is no exaggeration to claim that the witch-hunt was the first unifying terrain in the politics of the new European nation-states," (p. 182 [p. 169] emphasis in original). That Bodin was of central importance in creating the intellectual framework for (and personally advocating) reviving the persecution of witches is really an unavoidable conclusion from reading Trevor-Roper's fascinating long essay, "The European witch-craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries." (See, especially, p. 112)+ 

But the claim about Hobbes surprised me. And this is actually what first let me to read Trevor-Roper's essay, which I took to be the source for her claims in the passage quoted at the top of this post. For, the only note 10 is appended to material quoted from Trevor-Roper's essay. I will quote the note and Trevor-Roper's source material below. But first, Trevor-Roper never mentions Hobbes in the essay! (I double-checked with word-search.) So, he could not be the source of the claim that Hobbes approved the persecution of witches as a means of social control. This had me scratching my head. 

Now, as it happens, a few pages before Federici had claimed the following:

The incompatibility of magic with the capitalist work-discipline and the requirement of social control is one of the reasons why a campaign of terror was launched against it by the state ��� a terror applauded without reservations by many who are presently considered among the founders of scientific rationalism: Jean Bodin, Mersenne, the mechanical philosopher and member of the Royal Society Richard Boyle, and Newton���s teacher, Isaac Barrow.18 Even the materialist Hobbes, while keeping his distance, gave approval. ���As for witches,��� he wrote, ���I think not that their witchcraft is any real power; but yet that they are justly punished, for the false belief they have that they can do such mischief, joined with their purpose to do it if they can��� (Leviathan 1963: 67). He added that if these superstitions were eliminated, ���men would be much more fitted than they are for civil obedience��� (ibid.).--Caliban and the Witch, p. 154 (p. 143-144 in the American edition)

Now, as regular readers (with a long memory) know, I think the term 'witchcraft' is very important in Hobbes because he uses it to describe the dangers of ambition (Hobbes anticipates (recall) Spinoza Ethics 3, p29, Scholium) of successful demagogues or usurpers who succeed at rebellion. His key example is Julius Caesar. (See Leviathan, chapter 29 and also the final sentence of ch. 36.) By contrast, as is even clear from Federici's quotes (these are from chapter 2 of Leviathian), for Hobbes, the persecuted women taken to be witches are not really witches at all. It is important to recognize how significant this is. For, as Trevor-Roper shows, non of the skeptics and critics of witch-burning had denied the existence of witches or such powers they might possess. Even the greatest of them, Weyer (a student of Erasmus) had granted not just their possibility, but their existence (p. 135). And this meant that the battle was really over the adequacy of the means of establishing witchcraft, especially the use of torture. So, by denying their reality, or at least denying the reality of their power, Hobbes had finally helped create the conditions for the retreat from persecuting witches through juridical mechanisms (which have to involve at least possible facts). 

Now at this point one may claim that the preceding paragraph is irrelevant because Hobbes does claim that "they are justly punished, for the false belief they have that they can do such mischief, joined with their purpose to do it if they can.��� (Leviathan, chapter 2.) And while this can be taken to deny the magic power of witches, it does seem to advocate the persecution of those who understand themselves as witches willing to do harm. It's important to recognize that this alone would dramatically reduce the number of witch-trials because even by Federici's lights few would self-ascribe as witch and whatever powers were claimed were usually deployed for healing and service purposes.   

In addition, and Federici never mentions this, Hobbes, who is not exactly known for his concern with civil liberties, is an opponent of the use of torture: "Also Accusations upon Torture, are not to be reputed as Testimonies. For Torture is to be used but as means of conjecture, and light, in the further examination, and search of truth; and what is in that case confessed, tendeth to the ease of him that is Tortured; not to the informing of the Torturers: and therefore ought not to have the credit of a sufficient Testimony: for whether he deliver himselfe by true, or false Accusation, he does it by the Right of preserving his own life." (Leviathan, chapter 14) The partial critique of torture undermines the very mechanism that's used in the vast majority of witch trials which really on the torture-induced self-incriminating evidence of the accused. In context this is a clear repudiation of the way witches are tried. For, as Trevor-Roper notes most earlier public intellectual critics of the persecution of witches came to their criticism by their sense that torture was thoroughly unreliable (e.g., p. 138). 

And this puts the claim about "justly punished" in a new light. For Hobbes witches are unjustly punished, and this is what frequently happens, if their conviction relies primarily on their torture-induced confession and not on their (intended) actions. 

Okay, but what about the claim that Hobbes promotes the persecution of witchcraft to promote civil obedience? This sounds something like Hobbes might well believe. Here's the full sentence that Federici partially quotes: "If this superstitious fear of Spirits were taken away, and with it, Prognostiques from Dreams, false Prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by which, crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be much more fitted than they are for civill Obedience." (Leviathan, chapter 2.) So, Hobbes' target here is quite clearly the ambitious demagogue who plays on the fear of common people. These ambitious types are dangerous because they exploit (superstitious/fake news) folk opinion to their own ends. 

Now, as it happens this particular sentence is the closing sentence of the paragraph that Federici uses to suggest that Hobbes promotes the persecution of people who think they are witches. What we can now see is that Federici has completely misrepresented Hobbes' point. The real danger is not people who think they are witches and who wish to harm others, the real danger is ambitious political types who exploit such beliefs and the fears they arouse in others for their own ends. And while Hobbes certainly does not take the civil obedience of ordinary people for granted, he thinks the politically ambitious (soldiers, politicians, and clergy) are the real danger. So rather than promoting the prosecution of witchcraft, what he wants is the wide circulation of official views (in particular his own book) that undercut the very idea of the powers of witches. I would not call Hobbes an Enlightenment thinker, but one can see the seeds of of it in him.

Okay, so much for Hobbes. Recall the quote above. In note 10 (which is the only source offered) Federici writes, "H. R . Trevor-Roper writes: ���[The witch-hunt] was forwarded by the cultivated popes of the Renaissance, by the great Protestant Reformers, by the Saints of the Counter-Reformation, by the scholars, lawyers and churchmen.... If these two centuries were an age of light, we have to admit that in one respect at least the dark ages were more civilized....��� (Trevor-Roper 1967: 91)." That's the whole note (p. 310 [p. 211 in the US edition]). This is a very odd note if it is supposed to support most the claims in the paragraph to which it was attached (quoted at the top of this post).

Here's the corresponding passage in Trevor-Roper:

[The craze] was forwarded by the cultivated popes of the Renaissance, by the great Protestant reformers, by the saints of the Counter-Reformation, by the scholars, lawyers and churchmen of the age of Scaliger and Lipsius, Bacon and Grotius, B��rulle and Pascal. If those two centuries were an age of light, we have to admit that, in one respect at least, the Dark Age was more civilized. (p. 84 in my edition)

What's immediately striking is that Trevor-Roper's list is mostly different from Federici's "century of geniuses.��� More important, inclusion in his list is, in fact, not intended to be membership among the advocates of persecuting witchcraft! That's not clear from the passage itself, but it is clear from the larger essay in which Scaliger, Lipsius, B��rulle, and Pascal are never mentioned. He does mention Grotius and Bacon again in a footnote (n.49 primarily on Erasmus), in order to suggest that they avoid the topic and that they probably belonged among the witch skeptics (p. 119)!

In fact, and I'll close with this. Trevor-Roper thinks that the new seventeenth century philosophy (broadly conceived) was one of the main causes of the end of the intellectual obsession with witches:

When we do that, the explanation, I believe, becomes clear. Bacon, Grotius, Selden may have been reticent on witches. So, for that matter, was Descartes. Why should they court trouble on a secondary, peripheral issue? On the central issue they were not reticent, and it is in their central philosophy that we must see the battle that they were fighting: a battle which would cause the world of witches, ultimately, to wither away. (p. 167)

This can't be the whole story, because he recognizes (something Federici passes over entirely in silence) that "no witch was burnt in Holland after 1597 and witch trials ceased in 1610." (p. 158) Trevor-Roper thinks this is primarily due to lay control over the judiciary (and it fits with his larger theme that religious authorities are central to the hunt for witches). 1610 is also the first year of the twelve year armistice (1609-21) of the Dutch war of independence, and presumably peace helped calm things down somewhat. Both 1597/1610 precede the successful uptake of the new sciences by several decades. (1609 is the year of Galileo's The Starry Messenger and Kepler's Astronomia Nova.)

Even so, Trevor-Roper makes a plausible case that it is people influenced by the new science of Descartes, including Queen Christina, and also Thomasius, who shaped the seventeenth century attack on the persecution of witches. One would never get this from Federici, who implies otherwise throughout her argument.**

Finally, of the list "Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Shakespeare, Pascal, Descartes," the one most intimately connected to witchcraft was probably Kepler. His mother was famously accused of witchcraft when he was at the peak of his fame. (The whole episode is ignored by Federici, but it problematizes a number of her claims.) Kepler defended her personally, and successfully!++ 

 

 

*There is another source of problems. It is manifest that a lot of Federici's original research was done in Italian perhaps in the context of her earlier book with Leopoldina Fortunati. So, it is not impossible, and in fact quite natural, that translating notes and source materials into English is a source of error.   

+I read the essay in his collection, The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, first published by Harper & Row in 1967, and my page-references are to it (in a (1999) libertyfund reprint). But in her bibliography she refers to it as The European Witch-craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, and Other Essays, which she cites in a 1967 edition and as first published in 1956. I checked several libraries and google, but I have been unable to find a version of this collection published before 1969. However, in the "preface" to The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, Trevor-Roper writes,

These essays were written and first published on different occasions between 1956 and 1967. Most of them began as lectures or were written in tributary volumes. They were first published together, as a book bearing the title of the first essay, Religion, the Reformation and Social Change. The book was published by Messrs. Macmillan in London in 1967

This may explain the origin of "1956" in Federici's bibliography. 

Interestingly enough, while she uses "Trevor Roper" in the quoted passage, she correctly identifies him in the accompanying footnote and bibliography as "H.R. Trevor-Roper" and "Hugh R. Trevor-Roper."

 

**In refuting the Trevor-Roper thesis, which because of her pattern of citations she cannot credit him with and (perhaps) so attributes to Joseph Klaits, she writes, "But there is no evidence that those who promoted [the new science] ever spoke in defense of the women accused as witches. Descartes declared himself an agnostic on this matter; other mechanical philosophers (like Joseph Glanvil and Thomas Hobbes) strongly supported the witch-hunt." p. 226 [p.202]

++The linked post is a summary of a fascinating scholarly book by Ulinka Rublack.

The Long Haul Covid Glass is very half empty.

It's time for another long haul covid update at ca 11 months. (For my "covid diaries," see 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 pretty clear now that my situation has deteriorated since the late Summer, but before I get to that first some of the decent news:
1. The ENT (ear nose throat) specialist came up with a plausible plan to tackle the after-after-effects of a swimmer's ear (which was interfering with my sleep patterns), which in combination with chronic sinusitis and a malfunctioning Eustachian tube was causing irritation when I am horizontal. I think the new meds are working. But it's not gone yet.
2. Since the break, I have now taught two sessions of my course without collapsing half way and feeling almost normal in doing so. (We'll see what the students say on the evals later.) It's really joyous to be in the class-room.
3. At the suggestion of my better half, after a week of no painkillers at all, I now (largely) only take pain-killers when the headaches prevent me from sleeping. Otherwise I rest in bed. The good news is that the permanent headache and nausea have ended. (Her hypothesis was that I was suffering side effects from the painkillers.) The bad news is I do spend a lot of time in bed feeling crappy.
4. On the not too crappy days, I walk about 8km/day. (Some of you may have noticed my new hobby: pictures that make me peaceful.)
Okay, that exhaust the glass is half full part. Here's a lot of the mediocre news:
A. The morning after the seminar, I start having a headache in my sleep. I woke up with throbbing headache and nauseau. And that headache can last up to 36-48 hrs. (That is now!)
B. All multiperson social interactions trigger what I call head fatigue and headaches. (One on one, especially casual conversation is not so bad.) Zoom is even worse.
C. I avoid cycling because it too gives me a weird head fatigue and headache. (Most of my walks I do with noise canceling headphones on--but wouldn't dare to bike like that.)
D. My occupational physician has decided that I am in no position to increase my workload next semester. So, I will remain half-time. Even though I agree, this depresses me greatly because the undergrad teaching brings the best out in me. (We're now deciding whether I should teach the large tried and tested lecture course on history of political theory or a new course on feminist theory.)
E. I have been referred to an ergo-therapist/occupational therapist. Unfortunately, they have long wait lists, but it looks like I can start in a few weeks with someone near my home.
F. I had such an unpleasant interaction with my (Dutch) neurologist, that I wrote a pointed email the next day which led to a new appointment later in the month. Short version: intake was done by a medical student. By the time the neurologist showed up, I has such a headache and fatigue that all i wanted was the meeting to end. He thought all my symptoms were due to post-viral effects (so no stroke or tumor--good news!) But what I found astonishing was that the physician claimed (a) I was clearly improving, and (b) that I would make full recovery. The next morning I wrote the email from my work address (and signed 'prof') and name-dropped my better half and a comment that most patient complaints are due to miscommunication. I got a response within 30 seconds, and a new appointment in a few weeks.:)
G. As a comparison, I am supposed to see a neurologist in February in London in the NHS. For various reasons that's bad timing. Trying to change that meeting earlier in the week involved four phone calls--several transfers, and a voice message that may or may not get a response! 
H. Meanwhile thanks to sleuthing of my better half, I am now exploring experimental medical trajectories, especially low dose naltrexone in a private clinic in London. My Dutch and UK GPs will give me their view on this treatment this week. The Long Haul clinic in London have promised me feedback next week--I am especially interested in what they have to to say. My occupational physician thinks it worth a try.
I. Because of the class prep/grading, my serious headaches and the effort to obtain more specialized medical care are so exhausting, I am not doing much of any academic writing or even refereeing. (I try to do a few blogs each week, so as not to get too down.) But the headaches make it hard to find space/time for it. 
J. Starting in January my work status will change subtly because there will be an effort to start preparing a possible social security file. (After two years of illness I would get kicked into social security system.) This means that the university has to make a good faith effort to create 'fitting' work for me. That will be interesting, but more about that next year.
K. On Sunday, my sister took me to the unveiling of the stone of (recall) Arthur Wijnschenk. I was sick after. But it felt important to show support for his sister and her family. More selfishly, I wanted a moment to mark my own loss. I was sad I could barely interact with a lot of old friends, but I made some small talk in the edges of the event.  My sister found a bench under a tree near the grave, so I could stay for the whole ceremony.
 
That wraps it up. It's fascinating to see physicians avoid giving you care because they know they can't help you (leaving aside the subtle pressures of rationing operating in the background). Because covid started with lung problems, a lot of the chronic care is oriented toward lungs/breathing, and this generates odd passive aggressiveness among rehab facilities--the emails to me and my occupational physician are really quite striking. (My heart and lungs seem fine.) 
I get a lot out of the mutual support of others who are struggling with long haul. That's basically a few chat messages per week checking in. Because of these posts of mine I have also become a resource for new, long haulers. I hate to tell them I don't have any magic cures.
















A few years ago I did a series of posts on Elizabeth Barnes' The Minority Body (recall here; here; here); and here). For me, the take home message was that all living is living within one's constraints. The adjustment process to my new constraints is frustrating, and generates lots of fantasies of sabbatical-like research escapism (especially because I can read and write pretty much normally again). And I don't especially like it (recall) when philosophizing is a source of escapism. But it could be worse.







 

Cosmic Balance and Civic Flourishing in Omelas.

    They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child���s abominable misery.
    This is usually explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding; and most of those who come to see the child are young people, though often enough an adult comes, or comes back, to see the child. No matter how well the matter has been explained to them, these young spectators are always shocked and sickened at the sight. They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

    The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child.--- Ursula Le Guin "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"

Omelas has an unusual coming of age ritual: the would be adults are initiated into a horrible truth that is simultaneously the foundation of civic happiness. And they may not alter this state of affairs on pain of losing their prosperity (and other good things). In addition, their subsequent free speech is limited in a crucial way, they may not comfort or express compassion to the child that is sacrificed for their flourishing. This would violate "the terms" of a kind of (social) contract (recall here; and here) that is either the actual root of this commercial republic, or a kind of civic religion that structures its social reality. 

A skeptical reader may well deny that such "terms" could ever express a truth since it is so manifestly unjust. But as I have noted before, if the terms actually constitute (political) justice in the city, then this move is external to the civic consciousness of Omelas. (Of course, a defender of natural right might take that as evidence that forms of legal positivism are pathways to evil.) And moreover sometimes the truth indicates the abominable misery of the status quo.

But my present interest is to note that the ritual expresses the significance of social and political knowledge in Omelas. Because this ritual is initiated in order to convey a key knowledge about social life of Omelas when the would-be-adults are capable of "understanding" the "explanations" of it. The reactions of those exposed to it, suggests that those not yet ready for understanding are carefully guarded from the truth. So, the miserable child is a social taboo from which the young are guarded carefully. That is to say, the not young maintain a culture of silence among those who are not yet initiated.  This suggests that in so far as it is a civic religion it is carefully expressed. It is by no means obvious that the many visitors to Omelas that the proud city receives would know about it since these might well tell the children of Omelas or be tempted to protest the state of affairs. (This suggests that freedom of speech is curtailed even more widely in Omelas.)

I have noted before that despite the fact that the actual religion of Omelas lacks clergy, the miserable and innocent child is a kind of piacular scapegoat. To me this suggests that the state and its civic religion has claimed for itself that which properly belongs to revealed or clerical religion.

One of my students, Robin Kan, pointed out to me that the sacrifice of the innocent child functions like a cosmic balance principle in their civic religion. For, at any given time of the polity's existence, the child's immense suffering balances out the flourishing of the polity ("that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child���s abominable misery.") Structurally, such a cosmic balance principle is very similar to Christ's redemptive suffering for the sins of humanity (which is sometimes discussed in terms of such a cosmic balance), except that Christ voluntarily takes on this task and the child is forced into it without ever being allowed any understanding of its role. It is not even offered an ideological explanation for its suffering, and thanks to Omelas' social taboo on it, it has literally no chance of anticipating it. Of course, Omelas' balance principle is not cosmic, but local, bounded by the the territory of Omelas; the child does not redeem all of humanity.

It is natural to teach Omelas as a means to discuss the limitations of utilitarianism in an introductory context. This year my own students saw in it a parable of colonial/imperial conquest or capitalist exploitation, and the way the media makes that available to viewers at the center and simultaneously makes us it feel impossible to change. In a future post I want to discuss one such interpretation because it centers on the purported absence of war in Omelas.

But it is worth noting that if one reads the story on its own terms, it depicts the horrors of state power devoted to the "happiness" of its people. And in the story this is a power that rests on the well informed understanding and tacit consent of its adult citizens, and it is presented as the best kind of polity that accepts the legitimacy of state power. That is to say, the implied point of view of the narration is the question whether it is worth paying the price of the benefits of state power.  

Of course, my present interpretation is informed by my recent (recall) reading of Le Guin's "The Day Before the Revolution." This story invites us to see in one of those who walk away from Omelas the revolutionary founders of a form of anarchism (which rejects state power).* That is, if we take Omelas as a best case scenario for statism, then it invites us both to reflect on the price we're willing to pay to accept our complicity in its horrors, and to what degree we're willing to contemplate (and to pursue) serious alternatives.

One final thought: the line of interpretation that I have offered here is not an alternative to, or a refutation of, treating Omelas as a means toward discussing the limitations of utilitarianism. For, as Foucault emphasizes, utilitarianism is not merely an ethical system, it is also a technology of governance. And so it does ask us what price we're willing to pay in pursuing such technologies and if we're willing to contemplate doing without them.

 

*It is worth noting that in that story Odo did not grow up in Omelas, and was cultivated into her revolutionary life by being born in a revolutionary movement. So Le Guin's own subsequent invitation is to read "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" as a parable. It strikes me that readers might reasonably reject that suggestion.   

 

 

 

Spinoza, Hume, and the Story of Thales and his Olive Presses

Most courteous Sir,���When Professor N. N. visited me recently, he told me that he heard that my Theologico-Political Treatise has been translated into Dutch, and that someone, whose name he did not know, was about to have it printed. I earnestly beg you to inquire carefully into the business, and, if possible, prevent the printing. This is the request not only of myself, but of many of my friends and acquaintances, who would be sorry to see the book placed under an interdict, as it undoubtedly would be, if published in Dutch. I do not doubt, but that you will do this service to me and the cause.

A short time ago one of my friends sent me a pamphlet called "Homo Politicus," or Political Man, of which I had heard much. I have read it, and find it to be the most pernicious work which men could devise. Honor [eer] and riches are the author's highest good; he adapts his doctrine accordingly, and shows the means to acquire them; to wit, by inwardly rejecting all religion, and outwardly professing whatever best serves his own advancement, also by keeping faith with no one, except in so far as he himself is profited thereby. For the rest, to feign, to make promises and break them, to lie, to swear falsely, and many such like practices call forth his highest praises. When I had finished reading the book, I debated whether I should write a pamphlet indirectly aimed against its author, wherein I should treat of the highest good and show the troubled and wretched condition of those who are covetous of rank and riches; finally proving by very plain reasoning and many examples, that the insatiable desire for honor and riches must bring and has brought ruin to states.

How much better and more excellent than the doctrines of the aforesaid writer are the reflections of Thales of Miletus, appears from the following argument [redenering]. All the goods, he says, are in common among friends; wise men are the friends of the gods, and all things belong to the gods; therefore all things belong to the wise. Thus in a single sentence, this wisest of men accounts himself most rich, rather by generously [edelmoedig]  despising riches than by sordidly seeking them. In other passages he shows that the wise lack riches, not from necessity, but from choice. For when his friends reproached him with his poverty he answered, "Do you wish me to show you, that I could acquire what I deem unworthy of my labour, but you so diligently seek?" On their answering in the affirmative, he hired every oil-press in the whole of Greece -- for being a distinguished astronomer he knew that the olive harvest would be as abundant as in previous years it had been scanty --, and sub-let at his own price what he had hired for a very small sum, thus acquiring in a single year a large fortune, which he bestowed liberally as he had gained it industriously, &c.--Spinoza to Jarig Jelles, The Hague, 17 Feb., 1671. Translated by R. H. M. Elwes (with modest modifications).+ [Here is the Dutch version in De Nagelate Schriften.]

In today's post, I am primarily interested in the third quoted paragraph (although the first two are definitely fascinating). I have noted before (recall) that in his Natural History of Religion, David Hume explicitly treats Thales as an "atheist" and, by implication, a proto-Spinozist, who treats cosmogeny without recourse to a deity. Presumably Hume's account of Thales was influenced by Diogenes Laertius, who presents Thales as a kind of pantheist (although not a monist about gods) and Cicero, who, in De Divinitatio (1:111), treats Thales as an exemplary natural philosopher with the skill to have rational foresight of nature.

This matters because Hume treats Thales kind of as the founder of philosophy, especially natural philosophy.* In this -- that Thales is the first real philosopher -- he kind of follows the presentation of Diogenes Laertius, who also attributes to Thales the saying, 'know thyself.' 

And, as regular readers know (recall) I am quite fond of the story of Thales, and its variants in Aristoteles, about Thales' monopolizing oil-presses. Thales shows up in these digressions more regularly (recall here; here; here; here; here); and even in my scholarship (and also here). 

I was reminded of the quoted passage by Spinoza by a Dutch learned (non academic) correspondent, Marco van Heugten, in response to a handbook chapter I published on "Spinoza and Economics."  Van Heugten correctly noted I had missed its significance. This is a shame because it could have nicely supported the general claims in the chapter in which I had argued that that Spinoza thought the open���ended pursuit of wealth is a species of madness (Ethics 4, p44S), even though he did not reject moderate desire for the conveniences of life (Ethics 4, p45c2s). (Most of my chapter is on how he diagnoses a political problem of luxury, and the institutional mechanisms by which it can be managed.)

Spinoza's version of the story of the olive presses is close to Aristotle's version. In one important respect Spinoza's version of the Thales story deviates from Aristotle's. Aristotle very strongly implies that Thales knowledge of the heavens is irrelevant to his source of wealth (regardless what Thales and his friends or the common people may have thought). Monopoly is a decidedly terrestrial feature (and, as Aristotle claims, knowledge and use of it widespread), and any correlation between celestial phenomena and harvests an irrelevant aside. As it happens this nicely fits Aristotle's tendency to treat the heavens and terrestrial matters as relatively distinct.

Spinoza, who lived in an age of commerce, and whose Political Treatise is full examples that he understands the nature of monopoly, the role of incentives, and mechanism design just fine, does not treat Thales' astronomical knowledge as an aside. Post Galileo and Descartes, one may say, the heavens and earthly matters are re-integrated and so the idea that one could forecast (the directionality of) harvests based on astronomical observations was not wholly implausible. (Of course, Spinoza also recognizes that Thales was a monopolist.)

The point of the previous passage is nicely illustrated by Gassendi's (1649) treatment of the anecdote in volume 2 of the Animadversiones. My former (Ghent) colleague, Steven Vanden Broecke called my attention to it.+ Gassendi, who is a critic of judicial astrology, cannot take the relative decoupling of the heavens and terrestrial matters for granted because the new science is re-integrating them (which opens the door to certain forms of astrology still familiar to casual readers of the newspaper). And so he adds more detail about the kind and historical basis of empirical knowledge Thales would have possessed.

As an aside, if I were Justin Smith, I might report to you the contents of seventeenth century almanacs on seasonal forecasting here. But I'll stick to what I know and mention that in the nineteenth century, the economist-logician, Jevons, tried to model, like a modern Thales, the correlation between sun spots and grain harvests. As I learned from my friend Sandra Peart, Jevons thought that the sun spots shaped economic moods (and expectations). Jevons treats Thales as "the father of philosophy."

Interestingly enough, Spinoza does not treat the anecdote about Thales to criticize the vulgar who mock the learned (which is common feature in the story about Thales). Rather, in his rendering it's Thales' own circle of friends who need persuading. And this makes me think that the letter to Jelles was partially intended for Spinoza's circle. 

This suspicion is strengthened by the fact that I have been unable to find the source of the 'argument' attributed to Thales, who is presented here as an exemplary, generous wise man (and it seems to me worth comparing it with (Ethics IV, P45S)). Since Spinoza lived a life very much in the spirit of the 'argument,' it was undeniably important to him. It's psychologically interesting that Spinoza volunteers the story after suggesting he will write a pamphlet (which he never did) against the doctrines of Homo Politicus. And the implication is that he, too, could be rich if he had wanted to be. This would have appealed to Jelles, who was a merchant, but who had turned his back on the business world and had been devoted to his studies. But judging by Spinoza's request to him (in the first paragraph), Jelles was taken to be still influential in worldly affairs. 

So, let me wrap up. Of course, in Spinoza the real point is that if one has wealth one should bestow it on noble causes. This echoes the account of liberality in Book IV (I think, please correct me) of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. And this is either a hint to his friend (who was wealth), or, perhaps more kindly, a thank you to his generous friend. 

We know that Adam Smith very much lived in the spirit of the argument attributed to Thales by Spinoza. (I don't have any reason to think Smith was influenced by Spinoza's depiction of Thales on this score.) But Hume does not. Hume explicitly defends the pursuit of (non-excessive) riches for the wise man and offers himself as an exemplar in his autobiography.

As regular readers know, I think Spinoza is not very far from Hume's pre-occupations at key points in his works. Paul Russell has offered solid reasons for thinking that this idea is a natural effect of the presentation of the Treatise.** In that light it is worth remarking, again, that in Hume's hands, at the start of his own philosophical project, Thales is treated as a natural philosopher and not a moral philosopher. This is, in fact, revisionary because it goes against Thales as one of the exemplary Greek wise men (and the presentation in Diogenes Laertius). And so a Spinozist, free-thinking reader of the Treatise is also alerted to the fact that Hume is no slavish follower at all.  

 

 

 

+One of my more important changes is that Elwes has 'astrologer' where I have 'astronomer'; the Dutch of De Nagelaten Schriften says literally 'experienced in the orbits of the stars,' that is, an astronomer. (In his translation, Curley translates directly from NS, and uses "very experienced in the movement of the stars.") Since the original was in Dutch this seems the right way to go.  Somewhat surprising, the Latin of the Opera Posthuma says 'Astrologus,' which seems to have influenced various other translations (including Akkerman's Dutch one). 'Astrologus' is ambigious between astronomer and astrologer, although I believe that in late the seventeenth century 'astrologus; was rarely used to convey an astronomer. Unfortunately for my present argument, as Steven Vanden Broecke alerted me, Gassendi does use 'astrologis' in vol. 2 of the (1649) Animadversiones (pp. 940-941). In correspondence with me, Piet Steenbakkers suggested that OP reflects the idea Spinoza was describing Thales as practicing juridical astrology in the sense of the art of inferring from the heavens practical consequences. But on my view this was probably part of meteorology for Spinoza. 

*As I have noted (here) Hume's friend, Adam Smith, denies these claims about Thales without mentioning Hume.

**In my own work I have offered other grounds for thinking that Hume is going after Clarke's 'Newtonian' criticisms of Spinoza.

The Day Before the Revolution: Le Guin and Leadership

    In memoriam Paul Goodman, 1911���1972
    My novel The Dispossessed is about a small worldful of people who call themselves Odonians. The name is taken from the founder of their society, Odo, who lived several generations before the time of the novel, and who therefore doesn���t get into the action ��� except implicitly, in that all the action started with her.
    Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic ���libertarianism��� of the far right; but anarchism, as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism���s principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories.
   To embody it in a novel, which had not been done before, was a long and hard job for me, and absorbed me totally for many months. When it was done I felt lost exiled ��� a displaced person. I was very grateful, therefore, when Odo came out of the shadows and across the gulf of Probability, and wanted a story written, not about the world she made, but about herself.
    This story is about one of the ones who walked away from Omelas--Ursula Le Guin (1974) "The Day Before The Revolution."

I think it was Joshua Miller, who recently mentioned Le Guin's "The Day Before the Revolution" in passing on social media. I am assuming it was Miller because he has been my mentor in guiding my reading in science fiction during the last few years after I renewed my interest in the genre. If it was not him, apologies to him (and the person denied credit). 

I don't know when Le Guin added the quoted dedication, but I will assume it's been there from the start. And before long I will use it as invitation to share with you my re-reading of Goodman, who was unfamiliar to me--even his fascinating Wikipedia page states: "despite being the foremost American intellectual of non-Marxist radicalism in his time, his celebrity did not endure far beyond his life." Importantly Le Guin simultaneously describes The Dispossessed as an embodied and literary form of the spirit of (theoretical) anarchism, and simultaneously inscribes it -- not without a touch of merited immodesty ("not been done before")* -- in a carefully circumscribed tradition of the political theory of anarchism.

When I read this, I was ecstatic (in the manner of a pedantic scholar) when I read this because I felt vindicated inscribing The Dispossessed in a tradition of Socratic political philosophy (see here what I mean by this). Vindicated because she clearly implies -- again with a touch of hubris -- she has compared anarchism to "all" other traditions (which I claim is shown, but not said in The Dispossessed.) Since she is one of the few authors I would call 'wise', I don't mean the previous sentence as criticism. 

The point is not pedantic. The Dispossessed is structured around a contrast between a na��ve (the political status quo in Anarres) and sophisticated anarchism (the source of a new revolution within Anarres anarchism), which can both be traced to Odo's writing which take on the character of holy books in the society of exiles founded on her ideals. In The Dispossessed we are shown the effect of these writings alongside the statue of Odo that her successors have erected in her memory. 

In "The Day Before the Revolution," Odo (Laia) is already a "monument" near the end of her life. (The point is repeated twice.) This despite her own practice of pissing "in public on the big brass plaque in Capitol Square that said HERE WAS FOUNDED THE SOVEREIGN NATION OF A-IO ETC ETC, pssssssssss to all that!" That is to say, Le Guin gives us a glimpse of the development of the na��ve form of anarchism before the revolution in the life of Odo.  I don't mean to deny that Le Guin also shows us how Odo resists this turn of events:

She snarled at them: Think your own thoughts! ��� That���s not anarchism, that���s mere obscurantism. ���You don���t think liberty and discipline are incompatible, do you? ��� They accepted their tonguelashing meekly as children, gratefully, as if she were some kind of All-Mother, the idol of the Big Sheltering Womb.

Simultaneously, she fears that "favoritism, elitism, leader-worship," may be ineradicable, "they crept back and cropped out everywhere." (The story  is ambiguous whether time and different social institutions can eliminate these political vices).

One might get the misleading impression from my post thus far, that "The Day Before the Revolution" is a meditation on the mysterious afterlife of one's writings and the institutionalization of memory in political and social practices (and the (ahh) dialectical relationship among them. But that's not quite right.

For, the short story is really about the nature of political leadership in the context of anarchism (which officially abhors the cult of the leader).** And unlike the great other studies of leadership (e.g., recall) Black Jacobins, this is not focused on the leader in action. But a kind of witness to action. The theme is announced in an important set-piece:

But it was hard to eat when everyone was talking so excitedly. There was news from Thu, real news. She was inclined to discount it at first, being wary of enthusiasms, but after she had read the between the lines of it, she thought, with a strange kind of certainty, deep but cold. Why, this is it: it has come. And in Thu, not here. Thu will break before this country does; the Revolution will first prevail there. As if that mattered! There will be no more nations. And yet it did matter somehow, it made her a little cold and sad-envious, in fact. Of all the infinite stupidities. She did not join in the talk much, and soon got up to go back to her room, feeling sorry for herself. She could not share their excitement. She was out of it, really out of it. It���s not easy, she said to herself in justification, laboriously climbing the stairs, to accept being out of it when you���ve been in it, in the center of it, for fifty years. Oh, for God���s love. Whining!

Odo has been the leader of a movement. Her writings have circulated widely. But the moment of decisive action is initiated elsewhere, and takes her by surprise. And in her reaction, we're shown at least four important qualities of good leadership: first, don't try to stand in the way of good actions originating outside one's control; second don't take credit for them. Third, and this gives the first two their possibility and meaning, one must be able to read situations, people, and events, even esoterically ("between the lines"), with good judgment. 

And the fourth? That is, Odo's life is presented as a series of events that at at bottom express an inner necessity, a going on. The significance is not in the grounds of the action, but in one's choices, accepting "the responsibility of choice" (a quote from one of her writings). And this is presented as one of the characteristics of (true) anarchism. For taking such responsibility to oneself, and one's equals, is presupposed in a society where authority cannot be off-loaded onto a sovereign, on experts in living, or a bureaucracy.

The previous paragraph helps, I think, helps explain Le Guin's decision to evoke explicitly in her dedication and invoke "The Day Before to the Revolution" as a link between The Dispossessed (quite naturally, in fact) and her (1973) "The ones who walked away from Omelas."+ For, we're invited now to reflect on Odo's life in the Movement as at least one of the ways in which one does not remain complicit in a status quo from which one benefits (contrast this with my earlier analysis). And depending on the character of one's soul (recall) this is a joyful invitation or a damning indictment.++  

 

 

* "many months" is not much time for mere mortals!

**This, and many other elements, invite the parallel between Odo and Moses. 

+It is, thereby, pulled into the Hainish cycle. 

++I hope to return to the role of gender in the story in light of The Dispossessed very soon.

Seneca's Last Gasps; meditating joyful and brave thoughts (Letter 54)

1.  My ill-health had allowed me a long furlough, when suddenly it resumed the attack. "What kind of ill-health?" you say. And you surely have a right to ask; for it is true that no kind is unknown to me. But I have been consigned, so to speak, to one special ailment. I do not know why I should call it by its Greek name; for it is well enough described as "shortness of breath." Its attack is of very brief duration, like that of a squall at sea; it usually ends within an hour. Who indeed could breathe his last for long? 2. I have passed through all the ills and dangers of the flesh; but nothing seems to me more troublesome than this. And naturally so; for anything else may be called illness; but this is a sort of continued "last gasp." Hence physicians call it "practising how to die." For some day the breath will succeed in doing what it has so often essayed. 3. Do you think I am writing this letter in a merry spirit, just because I have escaped? It would be absurd to take delight in such supposed restoration to health, as it would be for a defendant to imagine that he had won his case when he had succeeded in postponing his trial. Yet in the midst of my difficult breathing I never ceased to rest secure in cheerful and brave thoughts.

4. "What?" I say to myself; "does death so often test me? Let it do so; I myself have for a long time tested death." "When?" you ask. Before I was born. Death is non-existence, and I know already what that means. What was before me will happen again after me. If there is any suffering in this state, there must have been such suffering also in the past, before we entered the light of day. As a matter of fact, however, we felt no discomfort then. 5. And I ask you, would you not say that one was the greatest of fools who believed that a lamp was worse off when it was extinguished than before it was lighted? We mortals also are lighted and extinguished; the period of suffering comes in between, but on either side there is a deep peace. For, unless I am very much mistaken, my dear Lucilius, we go astray in thinking that death only follows, when in reality it has both preceded us and will in turn follow us. Whatever condition existed before our birth, is death. For what does it matter whether you do not begin at all, or whether you leave off, inasmuch as the result of both these states is non-existence?

6. I have never ceased to exhort myself with counsels of this kind, silently, of course, since I had not the power to speak; then little by little this shortness of breath, already reduced to a sort of panting, came on at greater intervals, and then slowed down and finally stopped. Even by this time, although the gasping has ceased, the breath does not come and go normally; I still feel a sort of hesitation and delay in breathing. Let it be as it pleases, provided there be no sigh from the soul.7. Accept this assurance from me: I shall never be frightened when the last hour comes; I am already prepared and do not plan a whole day ahead. But do you praise and imitate the man whom it does not irk to die, though he takes pleasure in living. For what virtue is there in going away when you are thrust out? And yet there is virtue even in this: I am indeed thrust out, but it is as if I were going away willingly. For that reason the wise man can never be thrust out, because that would mean removal from a place which he was unwilling to leave; and the wise man does nothing unwillingly. He escapes necessity, because he wills to do what necessity is about to force upon him. Farewell.--Seneca Letter 54 Translated by Richard M. Gummere (with minor changes)

After many long letters, Seneca returns to brevity with a letter that becomes poignant in light of his own end. For a few years after Seneca wrote this, Nero sentenced him to suicide. And it is not clear that by obeying the sentence, Seneca really wills it himself and so escapes necessity. Compare the contrast with a case in which Nero had sentenced him to die, and that in order to escape the mad emperor's henchmen, Seneca had committed suicide. In the latter case, Seneca can be said to escape necessity in virtue of his own actions. Perhaps there is no real distinction here.

Seneca has set the stage for being remembered for his fearless (and dramatic) death.  If you deny that he could anticipate the future, it is worth noting that in this letter the plane of necessity and death are treated in temporal symmetric fashion. Either way, it is not clear to me why Seneca returns to this theme which he had discussed more fully in (recall) letter 24 (among other places).

When I was a teenager, I was diagnosed with exercise asthma. But once diagnosed, it's been mostly under control except once: in the aftermath of my TIA (recall) in the Summer of 2013, my lung capacity collapsed mysteriously. My asthma medicine was changed, and since then it seems to have no impact on my life and not preventing a fairly active life-style. This last fact seems to disappoint the medical types which have attended to me in the aftermath of covid. (For my "covid diaries," see here;  here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here; here;  here; here, here; here; here; and here.) For, somehow they are all way more confident they can treat lungs than the spooky, cognitive problems I am dealing with.

I had classmates with debilitating asthma, and once (recall) nearly drowned as a kid, so I can imagine without great effort that an asthma attack could be a kind of practice in the what it's like of a last gasp. Seneca is explicit that physicians call the experience "meditating on how to die" [medici hanc 'meditationem mortis' vocant]. It's hard here not to think of those who claimed that philosophy is a meditation on death "Philosophiam esse meditationem Mortis"), which is often (but not always) associated with Socrates (Phaedo 64A). For a brief moment it looks like we have landed in the competition in the authoritative art of living between medicine and philosophy familiar from, say, the Symposium (including its comedy.)

But Seneca refuses the comic note, and he makes clear there is no competition but rather parallelism between art and philosophy. For, during his asthma attacks he practices another kind of meditation with silent exhortations [exhortationibus - tacitis scilicet] which seem to slow down the actual asthma attacks. The exhortations involve a kind of reminder to self that life is surrounded by death. 

The one time I have been in the presence of death -- my father's (recall) -- his last breath sounded like a deep snort of exhaustion not a gasping at all. But then again, he really was ready to die. Because his whole childhood had been surrounded by mysterious disappearances (recall), which turned out to be deaths, I wonder if he saw his whole life as a kind of lucky surplus and so made it easier to let go. I regret not asking him.  

Be that as it may, and as it happens, a lot of people familiar with my cognitive challenges since long haul covid has set on are encouraging me to take on meditation. (These are not just new age types, but also physicians and fellow long haulers.) Last week I went to my first public lecture. After twenty minutes I felt the onset of great fatigue. But I decided to stick it out by closing my eyes and pretending as if I was listening to the lecture from afar. I even asked a (modest) question, but half-way through the Q&A I realized I was not going to make it home without collapsing if I would stay longer. So I left. 

And if the medical specialists can't find anything -- this week I have lined up a number of appointments --, I have, in fact, toyed with trying out some of Seneca's exhortations filled with joyful and brave thoughts [cogitationibus laetis ac fortibus]. And if these work, I'll share my secret here, for free and joyfully.

Nancy Bauer vs Carnap and Langton on Philosophical Authority

    What kind of authority is necessary for a philosopher���s vision of how things are with the world to hold sway? What is necessary, to put the question in Austinian terms, for the successful execution of a philosophical speech act? More fundamentally, what is a philosophical speech act? What sort of illocutionary force does a felicitous philosophical speech act wield? Under what conditions is such a speech act felicitous? Let us pose these questions in light of one of Langton���s philosophical speech acts. At the climax of ���Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts��� Langton writes: ���The claim that pornography subordinates has good philosophical credentials: it is not trickery, or ���sleight of hand���; it is by no means ���philosophically indefensible.������ What act is being attempted in this passage? Well, at this juncture in her article Langton is epitomizing a claim that she has been trying in the article to defend. She is also engaged in a further act of claiming (that the claim that pornography subordinates has good philosophical credentials). If we inspect the felicity conditions for such an act, we will not find that having authority is one of them. But we can say more about Langton���s speech act than that she is lodging a claim. For isn���t she trying to legitimate MacKinnon���s view of the relationship between pornography and sexual subordination, to rank this claim as better justified than the claims that would purport to undermine it, and perhaps even to make it the case that the lodgers of these would-be undermining claims are silenced at the level of the success of their own illocutions���that their attempts to extol pornography will come off as unauthoritative? If so, then by her own lights these actions will misfire to the extent that she lacks the requisite authority. But what is the requisite sort of authority? What authorizes philosophical speech?
    The obvious answer is: reason itself. But this answer begs the question of how reason, on any construal of the notion, gets its authority in the culture. All you have to do is look around to conclude that, contrary to the assumption that appears to pervade philosophical writing these days, the culture does not take reason���s authority to be self-evident. Plato, for one, felt this state of affairs to be intolerable: on his view, any philosopher worthy of the name was obligated not just to commune with the forms but to come down from the mountaintop and attempt to attract the citizenry to the sublime, if almost imperceptible, beauty of reason. It was not enough for the philosopher to churn out journal articles on the mountaintop and hope that the hoi polloi would at some later date decide to take an interest in their acts of legitimating, ranking, and so on. To be a philosopher for Plato is to provide a vision of how things are with the world and to attempt to attract people to the project of recognizing themselves���or not, as the case may be���in this vision.
    Aristotle agreed with Plato. So did the medievals, and so did any number of modern philosophers. In fact, it was not until the mid-twentieth century that philosophy seems to have beaten a retreat to the proverbial ivy tower. Part of the impetus, of course, has been the increasing specialization and institutionalization of the discipline. But philosophers��� relatively recent reluctance to worry about our authority in the culture also has nobler roots. It is to some extent a product of horror at the way their colleagues��� work had been exploited by dangerous ideologues���how Marx���s investment in humanizing humanity had given way to Stalinist Russia, how Nietzsche���s celebration of human nature had provided grist for the mill of Hitler. The young Rudolph Carnap alludes to this horror in the preface to the Aufbau, as we see in the following passage:

We cannot hide from ourselves the fact that trends from philosophical-metaphysical and from religious spheres, which protect themselves against [a scientific, rational, and anti-individualistic conception of philosophy], again exert a strong influence precisely at the present time. Where do we derive the confidence, in spite of this, that our call for clarity, for a science that is free from metaphysics, will prevail?���From the knowledge, or, to put it more cautiously, from the belief, that these opposing powers belong to the past.

Vigorously progressive in his politics, committed to the ideals of socialism, and horrified by the elitism he saw in the metaphysics of, most prominently, his contemporary and compatriot Martin Heidegger, Carnap passionately believed that he was morally and politically obliged to treat philosophy as an at least potentially rigorous science. It is understandable, then, that Carnap in his day and age felt that the cost of philosophizing in the old way���the cost of attempting to arrogate cultural authority by the sheer act of writing���was simply too high. Philosophy was instead to take its carefully circumscribed place in a new world, one grounded not on the philosopher���s personal metaphysical vision but on pure reason itself. The philosopher���s goal, Carnap thought, was to employ reason to make progress on fundamental scientific questions of universal interest and importance. The social and political cost of construing the cultural role of philosophy otherwise, he claimed, was simply too high.
   Carnap is to be lauded for his relentless thoughtfulness about what he was doing, within both philosophy and the wider world. My beef is neither with Carnap nor with the style of philosophizing he bequeathed to the next century. My worry, rather, is that Carnap���s conception of philosophical reason has come apart from the reasons for his investment in it���that we have inherited his thought but not his thoughtfulness. (Crucially, I could say exactly the same thing about Freud or Wittgenstein or Kant as an ethicist.)
   What I am in effect worrying about, then, is whether we can afford to continue to cleave to the narrow conceptions of philosophy we have inherited and their implicit claims to self-evident authority. I am not suggesting that we dumb philosophy down in order to rescue the masses. I am not advocating a return, or forward leap, to any particular style or form of philosophizing. I am not denying that we take tremendous political, social, and moral risks when we attempt to provoke other people to unsettle their settled opinions. I am not encouraging us to aim too high. But I am calling for us to commit ourselves to a grander, more ambitious, and more explicit expression of interest in the question of what it is that we are doing and what licenses our doing it. What would it look like for philosophy to issue an audible call for genuine thinking, to compete, that is, with the penchant for self-anesthetization that contemporary culture encourages? What would it look like for us to aspire above all to have a say in the world?--Nancy Bauer (2015) "On Philosophical Authority" in How to do Things With Pornography, pp. 125-128 

Last week, in the context of her criticism of Timothy Williamson, I noted that Bauer's book is full of metaphilosophy. In many ways the quoted passage, which ends chapter 7, is the meta-philosophical core of the book which is why I quoted it length. 

In contemporary philosophy, clarity and rigor in argument is often held up as the ideal. And this can be understood in two ways. One sees in getting the argument right a means to facilitate further discussion (about the premises, or significance of the conclusion). I associate this (dialogic) view of argument with my former NewAPPS colleague, Catarina Dutilh Noveas, and it can also be discerned, as a dynamics of progress, in Daniel Stoljar (recall) Philosophical Progress: In Defence of a Reasonable Optimism.

The other way sees that arguments have a silencing effect at the pain of being called, as Nozick noted, 'irrational.' Nozick expressed the idea as follow:

The terminology of philosophical art is coercive: arguments are powerful and best when they are knockdown, arguments force you to a conclusion, if you believe the premise you have to or must believe the conclusion, some arguments do not carry much punch, and so forth. A philosophical argument is an attempt to get someone to believe something, whether he wants to believe it or not. A successful philosophical argument, a strong argument, forces someone to a belief��� Philosophical Explanations, p. 4.*

Bauer's worry about Langton's paper has a family resemblance to Nozick's concern about arguments. I mention Nozick, because there is a natural way to construe Langton's exercise as a kind of legitimate self-defense against the previously successful efforts to delegitimize MacKinnon's views which attempt to end the silencing and subordination of women. To put that in context, in May, I put a tentative syllabus for a feminist theory course online, and a very distinguished legal and political philosopher opined on my facebook page that I should put Langton and not MacKinnon on my syllabus because Langton is far more sophisticated and, after I pushed back, that MacKinnon is philosophically not rigorous. His reaction suggests that indeed Langton has legitimated certain views (and simultaneously and ironically allows some to continue to devalue MacKinnon's contribution). And Langton has become the (ahh) authoritative spokesperson within certain overlapping disciplines -- because conforming to certain standards -- for these views.

Nozick also rejects the self-defense model: "For one's own protection it should not be necessary to argue at all, merely to note publicly what bludgeoning the others are attempting-intellectual satyagraha, to use Gandhi's term for nonviolent resistance." (5) But while this is a noble stance in philosophy, perhaps, it is not apt for the law where it might entail unilateral acquiescence in one's subordination. And while satyagraha is a legitimate political stance, it is not to be prescribed to others (because then it can be a further means of subordination). 

In fact, Langton's paper is not just directed at philosophers who did not give MacKinnon's ideas their due (because they mistakenly treated these as incoherent), it is, as the closing sentence of her paper reveals, also designed to open the door to a change in government policy/law.** And the line of influence is pretty clear: if legal philosophers and judges better understand the coherence and legitimacy of MacKinnon's views, they may well prevent courts from rejecting local (and national) anti-porn ordinances. The form of Langton's speech act is perfectly calibrated to try to shape legally influential elite opinion (which has been preventing local democratic majorities from exercising their political authority). So, it strikes me as a mistake to claim that Langton has not properly conceptualized, as Bauer claims "the illocutionary force of her own words." (114)

I mention this because while Bauer recognizes that Langton is "underwriting a particular political position," (120) Bauer also represents Langton as taking a "very carefully circumscribed role with respect to a certain feminist antipornography position...simply to remove a stumbling block--a charge of incoherence---from the path of MacKinnon and like-minded activists" (122). And as should be clear from the long block quote above, Bauer opposes to this a "grander vision of our profession, our capacity to speak in an authoritative voice in our culture, our capacity to call ourselves and others to task of serious reflection." (122) But because the way elite legal opinion co-shapes judicial review, Langton's approach is not a good exemplar for "the irrelevance of contemporary philosophy in the culture at large....for to be worthy of the name feminists must...be committed to serious and social transformation." (116) For, while Langton's approach (writing in P&PA in 1993) may not be known to the culture at large it does help shape social transformation. 

What Bauer misses is that Stateside, and in places with traditions of constitutional review, the authority of philosophical speech is albeit partially, imperfectly, and indirectly, secured by the constitutional order and the customs/practices and force that secure it. (And if one thinks that philosophy or reason is immanent in the sciences, then the political process institutionalizes philosophy into a powerful force in society in many more (imperfect, partial etc.) ways.) This is why it is not wholly misleading to call constitutional government an Enlightenment project. For contemporary critics (often religious and nationalist in character), these constitutional orders also exhibit the dangers of giving a certain philosophy too much power.+ 

Notice that if this is right, it suggests it is wrong to treat Carnap and others move into the ivory tower as a retreat from political influence. (This is not Bauer's view, but it is sometimes associated with Reisch's influential interpretation of cold war philosophy of science.) For in the proper constitutional order, philosophy's uptake is mediated by judiciary, bureaucracy, technology, and sciences. This is, in fact, a kind of mediated trickle-down of philosophy. 

But this observation actually helps illuminate Bauer's larger project: given the incentives, it is very tempting to speak to fellow elites and not the culture at large if you happen to be a philosopher aiming at political influence. On my view this is, for example a feature of utilitarianism as a technology of government, and helps explain some of its moral failures (when it fails to notice that those not at the table or not as sophisticated with the tools may be harmed badly). Of course, political influence may well fall short of social transformation and so one can, with equal justice, describe the position I have just outlined as a form of pacification of philosophy.

So far I have suggested that Bauer has asked the right question about the authority of philosophical practice. I also have suggested she offers the right diagnoses of most of it, but that it misfires in the case of Langton's project. And while I agree with Bauer that in general, philosophers have 'appropriated' Austin's distinctions against the spirit of Austin's own philosophy, Langton's speech act is an important example of how philosophers can do things with words in our political culture. And I say this even though I agree with Bauer's more methodological criticisms of Langton's approach to claims of pornography's authority (on which I have been silent here).

Now,  I have not suggested that Bauer is wrong to want something different from philosophy. But I think her position is at odds with herself and that her use of Plato exhibits this tension. For even in her depiction of Plato, philosophy does not have an authoritative voice in a culture if by that we mean capable of shaping and even transforming the culture.

Rather, what she shows Plato as doing (and I think this is a plausible and inspiring reading of Plato's philosophy and its role as an instrument to call people to the academy) as being skilled in persuading some to an intellectual way of life in which they are challenged to think autonomously. She never mentions Thoreau, but Thoreau's (delayed, perhaps) effect on the young may be thought an instance of such a true education. This still involves philosophy with a public-facing rhetoric, but it is not a rhetoric aimed at the people at large.  

Yet, feminism has -- by her own lights -- a broader ambition: to end patriarchy, and, thus, to transform society radically. And one may well believe that a kind of mediated trickle-down and the Platonic call to individuals are insufficient if it is divorced from a larger social movement shaping the culture, as it were, from below.  Of course, social movements are populated by individuals who think for themselves and recognize themselves in properly transformed social reality. But if you want an authoritative philosophy apt for that project, I suspect you have to be willing to play with the fire that Carnap warns against.

 

 

*I thank Catarina for reminding me of this. 

**"If [the speech of pornographers] does [silence], then it may be wrong for a government to allow pornographers to speak."

+Yes, there is a danger of equivocation in my use of 'philosophy' here; no I don't think I am falling pre to it!

De Beauvoir and The Origins of Patriarchy

Thus, the triumph of patriarchy was neither an accident nor the result of a violent revolution. From the origins of humanity, their biological privilege enabled men to affirm themselves alone as sovereign subjects; they never abdicated this privilege; they alienated part of their existence in Nature and in Woman; but they won it back afterward; condemned to play the role of the Other, woman was thus condemned to possess no more than precarious power: slave or idol, she was never the one who chose her lot. ���Men make gods and women worship them,��� said Frazer; it is men who decide if their supreme divinities will be females or males; the place of woman in society is always the one they assign her; at no time has she imposed her own law.

Perhaps, however, if productive work had remained at the level of her strength, woman would have achieved the conquest of nature with man; the human species armed itself against the gods through male and female individuals; but she could not obtain the benefits of tools for herself. Engels only incompletely explained her decline: it is insufficient to say that the invention of bronze and iron profoundly modified the balance of productive forces and brought about women���s inferiority; this inferiority is not in itself sufficient to account for the oppression she has suffered. What was harmful for her was that, not becoming a labor partner for the worker, she was excluded from the human Mitsein: that woman is weak and has a lower productive capacity does not explain this exclusion; rather, it is because she did not participate in his way of working and thinking and because she remained enslaved to the mysteries of life that the male did not recognize in her an equal; by not accepting her, once she kept in his eyes the dimension of other, man could only become her oppressor. The male will for expansion and domination transformed feminine incapacity into a curse. Man wanted to exhaust the new possibilities opened up by new technology: he called upon a servile workforce, and he reduced his fellow man to slavery. Slave labor being far more efficient than work that woman could supply, she lost the economic role she played within the tribe.---Simone de Beauvoir (1949) The Second Sex translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (2009), pp. 88-89.

A few years ago, while reflecting on work by Liam Kofi Bright and Lionel McPherson (recall), it dawned on me that the very steep prestige, economic, and racial hierarchies (recall) within the academy (and sciences) mirrors those of our oligarchic society. And that if I wanted to understand my own life-world, I needed to study systems of thought that take hierarchy and subordination seriously as objects of enquiry. So, I have been studying golden age Islamic political philosophy and the long history of feminism(s) as much for teaching prep as for self-understanding. Because I recently read Manon Garcia's We Are Not Born Submissive and Nancy Bauer's How to Do Things with Pornography (recall), I was moved to pick up The Second Sex (in translation).

In addition to the functioning of systems of hierarchy, there is also the question of their origins and overcoming. And one might reasonably assume that insight into the origin of a system of hierarchy -- which is not without interest if it is as widespread as patriarchy -- might help in devising strategies for its overcoming. And, in fact, because patriarchy is so prevalent geographically and temporally, and compatible with so many different political systems, it is by no means obvious when to locate its establishment or multiple re-establishments and its persistence. 

De Beauvoir's analysis is primarily focused on patrilineal civilizations of paternal right that "have evolved technically and ideologically," (note on p. 87). As she puts it, "By the time humankind reaches the stage of writing its mythology and laws, patriarchy is definitively established: it is males who write the codes," (91; emphasis added) These civilized societies/stages are contrasted with matrilineal and patrilineal societies that have remained in the "primitive stage". Thus, her stadial analysis presupposes a distinction, familiar from European Enlightenment thought, between savage and civilized (recall this post on Hume).

And because of this conceptual contrast, she also assumes (the idea goes back to Locke) that anthropological insight into contemporary primitive societies provide a window into the very distant past stage of primitive life. This, too, is an Enlightenment idea that more recent anthropologists (since Geertz, I guess) have recognized is a highly dubious working assumption. The effect of these dual ideas of progress (discussed in this and previous paragraph) in De Beauvoir, is that really existing matrilineal or matriarchal societies are irrelevant to her project (because backward) and so can be left aside. (A more polemical author than I might discuss some of the racialized issues lurking here.) It also means that from the perspective of the origin of patriarchy, one does not really have to study history (understood as the history of civilization) because it is (almost by definition) everywhere patriarchal.

As an aside, while De Beauvoir herself is super learned in the long history of feminist thought (Poulain de la Barre offers her one of her epigraphs), one can see how these ideas conjoined with scattered remarks about really existing historical patriarchies, might make a reader of De Beauvoir think that there are few feminist resources in the past and so this has, I suspect, contributed to the idea that feminism is a recent phenomenon.

Okay, let's turn to her explanation of the origin of patriarchy. This follows her very compelling refutations of Freud's and Engel's accounts of the origin of patriarchy (in chapters 2-3 of Part 1 of Volume 1). The first sentence of the quoted passage notwithstanding, I don't think De Beauvoir denies that the institution of patriarchy was violent and maintained by (explicit or the threat of) violence--rather, she denies the claim that there was a single violent revolution.

But, more important, it's not merely violence that sustains patriarchy. There is an underlying idea or view that gets it going and these views are rooted in biological facts and essentialist. And to avoid confusion, De Beauvoir famously herself does not endorse the essentialism or the naturalization of these facts, but she kind of implies that the humans who were on the threshold of patriarchal civilization do (or were capable of using violence to enforce assent to them). And because of that, she sometimes sounds here in offering the explanation of the origin of patriarchy like she herself is rather reductive.  

The underlying idea, "the key to the whole mystery," (76) is, in fact, stated most clearly a few pages before:

On a biological level, a species maintains itself only by re-creating itself; but this creation is nothing but a repetition of the same Life in different forms. By transcending Life through Existence, man guarantees the repetition of Life: by this surpassing, he creates values that deny any value to pure repetition. With an animal, the gratuitousness and variety of male activities are useless because no project is involved; what it does is worthless when it is not serving the species; but in serving the species, the human male shapes the face of the earth, creates new instruments, invents and forges the future. Positing himself as sovereign, he encounters the complicity of woman herself: because she herself is also an existent, because transcendence also inhabits her and her project is not repetition but surpassing herself toward another future; she finds the confirmation of masculine claims in the core of her being. She participates with men in festivals that celebrate the success and victories of males. Her misfortune is to have been biologically destined to repeat Life, while in her own eyes Life in itself does not provide her reason for being, and these reasons are more important than life itself. (76)

A few days ago I jokingly tweeted a picture of this passage out with the caption that she backward projects existentialism onto primitive man and so implies that Sartre peddles a patriarchal and dated philosophy.  The ideology that she is describing here is better known as Homo faber--man the maker--"an inventor since the beginning of time" (75); as she puts it shortly before the passage I quoted at the top of this post: "Homo faber is the reign of time that can be conquered like, space, the reign of necessity, project, action and reason." (87) To be sure my view is that in these passages she is merely describing the ideology not endorsing it, but others have read her as accepting these claims.*

The ideology was undoubtedly familiar to her and her readers from Bergson's Creative Evolution, where he writes, "If we could rid ourselves of all pride, if, to define our species, we kept strictly to what the historic and the prehistoric periods show us to be the constant characteristic of man and of intelligence, we should say not Homo sapiens, but Homo faber. In short, intelligence, considered in what seems to be its original feature, is the faculty of manufacturing artificial objects, especially tools to make tools, and of indefinitely varying the manufacture." (139) [I was pleased to find the work by Margaret A. Simons.] She connects it to Heidegger's emphasis on companionship (mit-sein), or a world dense with human values and social practices.

Crucially, the ideology that originates and sustains patriarchy is one in which man the maker is also a maker (there are shades of Nietzsche here) of values, and so daringly embraces novelty that always goes beyond the empirically given. This embrace of excess, and of novelty is sexed male in opposition to the repetition of empirical and biological reality (sexed female). 

A key point in De Beauvoir's explanatory schema, is that ur-woman admires (aesthetically?) the prestige of this Nietzschean Homo faber, who also throws irresponsibly large but splendid festivities to promote his own (military and hunting) achievements, in contrast to her own boring (ahh) rootedness. So crucially -- and this a major theme of Garcia's book I mentioned above -- women become partially complicit in their own subordination from the start and help sustain it in various ways.

Since this is a rather long post, I just want to note that on its own terms this does not fully succeed as an explanation. For the idea that Homo faber is admirable and worth submitting to, and that biology is destiny, is precisely what needs explaining. As MacKinnon notes, the whole explanation presupposes that "patriarchy is already institutionalized." (Toward a Feminist Theory of State, p. 55)

However, whatever one thinks of this as an explanation, it is, in fact, action guiding. Shulamith Firestone and her more recent Xenofeminist followers see in technologies that decouple reproduction (and motherhood) from biology a possible way to overcome patriarchy. That is, and more culturally, one can unsex Homo faber. Or, one can reject the very ideology of Homo faber (which is, I  think, De Beauvoir's own position).

I close with two observations about this explanation of the origin of patriarchy. First, there is a curious and somewhat subtle rejection of Hobbesian ideas at the root of this explanatory schema. (Yes, Hobbes is never mentioned; but notice patriarchy is a system of sovereignty.) For, in Hobbes submission to authority is found in treating death as the summum malum, and the preservation of life as the minimal baseline (which is bequeathed to liberalism as can be gleaned off 'life, liberty, etc.'). But from the vantage point of the ideology that gives rise to patriarchy, Hobbes' schema turns out to be sexed. For, (to repeat) "in her own eyes Life in itself does not provide her reason for being." And, even more important, "these reasons are more important than life itself."

As is well known, in Hobbes the rejection of a summum malum is thought a mark of unreason or dangerous ambition. That is to say, from the perspective of Hobbes -- which I make here stand in for canonical rationality -- women's self-understanding of her submission to initial patriarchy makes no sense. (This is why above I emphasized aesthetic issues.) Patriarchy as a system of sovereignty is in some ways unintelligible from the perspective of Hobbesian socials science not just because it is founded on the rejection of the summum malum, but also because its appeal to those that do not initially benefit from it is, in fact, a rejection of social reproduction of the same as a fundamental value itself.  

Second, on De Beauvoir's explanation, patriarchy and the existence of slaves or (very) exploited labor are co-extensive. Not because women are the slave population in patriarchy. (De Beauvoir silently glides over those women who are among the slaves.) But because for his  ambitions, which by definition exceed the given (and its constraints), Homo faber always requires a population who can generate a surplus for his projects. Strikingly enough, in this schema, women are not treated as sources of such surplus. That is, by definition, the system of patriarchy always sustains multiple forms of subordination (that can intersect). She doesn't say this, but the explanatory schema also leaves women the role as (unproductive) ornament within patriarchy. 

 

*In a very early and fascinating reception study (1949), the Dutch philosopher, F. J. J. Buytendijk treats De Beauvoir as endorsing homo faber in some sense. This is also the point of view of a more recent (2010) article in Hypatia by Andrea Veltman, which also discusses some literature critical of De Beauvoir for it. 

Admittedly, this idea can be read into Hobbes. 

Leibniz, Clarke, Newton, and Reformation of the Solar System

Thanks to Leibniz, there is a common reading of Isaac Newton in which Newton is committed to the idea that God periodically restores the solar system. I do not mean to suggest Leibniz is solely responsible for this; Clarke's response to Leibniz fails to disabuse clearly the reader of this. And since for a long time Clarke's response was taken to be authoritative of Newton's views the idea has persisted.  

Here is Leibniz's charge right at  the start of the Correspondence:

Sir Isaac Newton and his followers also have a very odd opinion concerning the work of God. According to their doctrine, God Almighty needs to wind up his watch from time to time, otherwise it would cease to move. He did not, it seems, have sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. No, the machine of God's making is so imperfect, according to these gentlemen, that he is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it, as a clockmaker mends his work; he must consequently be so much the more unskillful a workman as he is more often obliged to mend his work and to set it right. Leibniz to Clarke (November 1715), Letter 1, par. 4 (copied from the Ariew edition).

The charge is curious because [A] Newton never claims that God needs to rewind the universe (or solar system) and [B] Newton never compares, I think, God's work and his creation to a watchmaker and watch. Newton's favored analogy is God as the perfect geometer. There are subtle similarities and differences between the two analogies, but I will explore these in a future post.

In his response Clarke comes very close to noting [B], but he fails to do so unambigiously and simultaneously muddies the waters: "the notion of the world's being a great machine, going on without the interposition of God as a clock continues to go without the assistance of a clockmaker, is the notion of materialism and fate, and tends (under pretence of making God a supramundane intelligence) to exclude providence and God's government in reality out of the world." Clarke's first response, par. 4 (copied from the Ariew edition). It is quite natural to read Clarke as accepting [B] and endorsing [A].

As an aside, that Clarke actually rejects [B] (the clock analogy) only becomes clear indirectly. In the fourth response to Leibniz, in the context of explaining that gravity does no fit the mechanist's conception of causation by contact, Clarke writes: "If the word natural forces means here mechanical, then all animals, and even men, are as mere machines as a clock. But if the word does not mean mechanical forces, then gravitation may be effected by regular and natural powers, though they are not mechanical." (par. 46) The natural powers that Newton has really shown to exist make it impossible, ipse facto, to conceive the universe as a (mechanical) clock. (See also Clarke's fifth reply ad 110-116, which also seems to assume this kind of argument.)

Notice, too, in his first response to Leibniz, Clarke does not actually concede the mending charge. All he wants to insist on is God's "providence and God's government." And this he is opposes opposes to "materialism" (Epicurean/Hobbesian system) and "fate" (Spinozism).  The key here is their denial of (general) final causes and the idea that there is really a three-way debate among the systems of fate, materialism, and mind/providentialism. Of course, this also turns on what he might mean by 'government.' I also think Kenny Pearce (whose tweets on the topic prompted this post) is right to claim that "Clarke's response to Leibniz's allegation that Newton's God is an incompetent watchmaker depends essentially on Clarke's view that there are no absolute miracles, only relative ones." I'll let him explain why this is so.

As it happens, in my own work on Newton (following Ted McGuire and Howard Stein) I am not inclined to treat Clarke as authoritative on Newton. So, it is worth explaining why I think Leibniz's charge shouldn't have gotten off the ground at all.

It is, I believe, agreed by all that the following passage from Query 31 of Newton's Opticks gave rise to Leibniz's original charge:

For while comets move in very eccentric orbs in all manner of positions, blind fate could never make all the planets move one and the same way in concentric orbs, some inconsiderable irregularities excepted which may have arisen from the mutual actions of comets and planets upon one another, and which will be apt to increase until this system needs a reformation. Such a wonderful uniformity in the planetary system must be allowed the effect of choice.

I included the final sentence in the quote because I think this helps explain Newton's reasoning. Notice, first that Newton does not mention clocks or watches here. Second, the argument is directed against the system of blind fate and in favor of the system of God's (providential) choice. I think this nobody would deny. 

Now, it is natural to assume that [C] Newton is here anticipating the eighteenth century debate over the stability of the solar system. And that [D] his answer is negative. And if one thinks Newton is committed to [C&D] then it's quite natural to assume that Newton thinks that God needs to rewind the solar system regularly. But I don't think Newton should be taken here to be committed to be thinking about [C-D.]

For, notice, that the claim about the system requiring a reformation is offered as a reductio of the system of fate. And the underlying claim is that the particular patterns of motions we see in the solar system, must be the product of intelligent choice.  That is to say, rather than being worried about the stability of the solar system, Newton is interested in cosmogony (the origin and evolution of the system). And the underlying claim is that from the perspective of the system of necessity one cannot device a system of laws that can account for the simultaneous origin and evolution of the irregular motions of the comets and the regular motions of the planets (and their moons) and their interactions. So, the charge is that Spinozism (which, as Clarke and Newton argue elsewhere, lacks a compelling physics) does not provide an account of the particular motions we observe and would be internally inconsistent if it tried. In my view (see here for details) variants of this argument are trotted out by Newton in his exchange with Bentley and in the General Scholium, and by Clarke in his Demonstration (also directed against Hobbes and Spinoza).