ReligiousLeftLaw.com

Originalism: the dead get the first … and last word (or, to put it positively: toward a democratically sensitive, generous, and full-bodied ‘pragmatic’ legal interpretivism*)

“In the long run, the Supreme Court has helped secure greater protection for civil rights and civil liberties not because judges are smarter or nobler, but because the American people have demanded it. When social movements like the civil rights movement or the feminist movement convince the center of the country that their claims are just, the court usually comes around. Sometimes it gets ahead of the center of public opinion, and sometimes it’s a bit behind. But in the long run it reflects the national mood about the basic rights Americans believe they deserve. The great engine of constitutional evolution has not been judges who think they know better than the American people. It has been the evolving views of the American people themselves about what rights and liberties they regard as most important to them. Rather than a set of shackles designed by long-dead slave-owners, the framers bequeathed to us a Constitution that could adapt to the needs and aspirations of each succeeding generation.” — Jack M. Balkin

I should note that, in the words of Michael C. Dorf, Balkin, “accepts what Professor Solum characterizes as the thesis that public meaning originalism and living constitutionalism are substantially equivalent. That may be [I don’t think they are substantially equivalent] but by calling ‘living constitutionalism’—which you think is correct—a version of originalism, you undermine living constitutionalism in the real world.” I believe that to be true, and since Professor Dorf wrote this in 2017, time has proved him right.

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The latest lexical entry in Larry Solum’s Legal Theory blog is on “Originalism,”** which he introduces as “the most controversial and also perhaps the most influential” of the many different theories of constitutional interpretation. It just so happens that Solum is one of the foremost and well-known proponents of Originalism, a constitutional doctrine I believe in theory to be profoundly wrong and in practice to be often pernicious. Solum has been notoriously keen on defending the proposition that Originalism neither entails nor implies any particular position on the political spectrum, but both the formulation and application of this constitutional “doctrine” has typically been conservative and generally Right-leaning in an emphatic or vigorous way. Given our nation’s legal and political history, we might want to proclaim that “by their fruits you will know them,” or that “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” Solum here helps us make this point:

“Originalism is not just an ivory tower theory. It has had a profound influence on the practice of constitutional interpretation and the political contest over the shape of the federal judiciary. President Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork (an avowed originalist) was one key moment--with his defeat by the Democrats was seen as a political rejection of originalism. The current Supreme Court has at least three members who seem strongly influenced by originalist constitutional theory—Associate Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas. Two others Justices, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh have called themselves originalists and are receptive to originalist arguments, although seem to be open to arguments that precedent should prevail over original meaning, at least in some categories of cases.”

Solum also indirectly reminds us that the legal doctrine of “precedent” is distinguishable from Originalism although they often operate through reliance on the same or similar assumptions and premises, even if, as I believe, we can articulate a (soft or pragmatic) notion of legal precedent that differs in both letter and spirit from Originalist constitutional interpretation.

Far better minds than mine have found much to criticize in Originalist theory and I will not attempt to engage that debate or outline my own specific thoughts and misgivings which, when translated into the consideration of real world legal and political effects, involve vigorous opposition to Originalism. Solum has of course been one of its most sophisticated proponents, and his background work in philosophy has served him well, even if I think it deeply misguided.

For now I simply want to compare his introductory definition or formulation of Originalist theory with consideration of what occurs in the interpretive approach to religious narratives and doctrines which deal with similar if not identical questions of “contextualized [‘frozen’ or ‘fossilized’?] linguistic meaning.” Toward that end, consider:

“Originalism is actually a family of constitutional theories, but two ideas are common to almost all versions of originalism. The first idea is that the meaning of the constitutional text is fixed: the contextualized linguistic meaning of the words and phrases does not change over time. The second idea is that the original meaning of the constitutional text is binding: judges and officials should consider themselves constrained by the text.”

Today, the “original-meaning version of originalism emphasizes the meaning that the Constitution (or its amendments) would have had to the relevant audience at the time of its adoptions,” or “original public meaning.” Here is Solum’s helpful summary of contemporary Originalist constitutional theory:

“’Original public meaning’ is one focal point, and the distinction between ‘interpretation’ and ‘construction’ has gained widespread traction, but there are many points upon which originalists disagree. This leads to the question: does originalism have a core? One answer to this question focuses on the distinction between two dimensions of the debate about originalism. The first dimension is linguistic: the linguistic dimension of controversies about constitutional interpretation addresses the question, ‘What is the meaning of the constitutional text?’ The second dimension is normative: the normative dimension of debates about constitutional practice addresses the question: ‘How should constitutional actors (judges, other officials, and citizens) act once the meaning of the constitution has been determined?’ Almost all originalists agree that the linguistic meaning of the constitutional text was fixed at the time each provision was framed and ratified: this idea can be called the fixation thesis. Originalists have different views about the effect that the constitutional text should have, but almost all originalists would agree that at a minimum the original meaning should constrain constitutional practice: this idea can be called the constraint principle.

The point made in the prior paragraph can easily be misunderstood. New originalists who embrace the distinction between construction and interpretation concede that the meaning of some constitutional provisions is vague, and therefore that these provisions require construction that goes beyond translation of the meaning of the text into legal doctrine. The core commitment of originalism to fixed linguistic meaning does not necessarily entail fixed constructions. For example, it might be the case that the key phrases that define the constitutional separation of powers, ‘judicial power,’ ‘executive power,’ and ‘legislative power,’ have an original public meaning that was vague. Given this vagueness, much of the important work required to resolve a dispute about the application of these phrases must be done by constitutional construction. This means that originalists who share the core commitment to the idea that meaning was fixed by 1789 when the Constitution was ratified may disagree about the proper method of construction of the separation of powers provisions.

Originalists disagree about other important questions as well. In particular, there is no consensus among originalists about the normative justifications for fidelity to the original meaning. Some originalists believe that originalism is normatively justified by popular sovereignty theory: we should adhere to the original meaning because it was ratified by ‘We the People.’ Other originalists, like Randy Barnett, argue that the legitimacy of the Constitution is a function of the justice of its content. And yet other originalists have argued that adherence to original meaning is justified by the rule of law values of predictability, certainty, and stability.”

As a kind of thought experiment, we might ruminate on the various ways we’ve determined the meaning of religious texts (and not just those of the Abrahamic traditions) and what it would mean to claim such meanings are “fixed.” There is a considerable body of literature on hermeneutics and approaches to such things from both within and “outside” these religious worldviews. And there are approaches to linguistic meaning in some religious traditions that strongly resemble Originalist legal theory or at least have an Originalist “flavor” (‘fundamentalist’ Christian evangelicalism, for example). On the other hand, consider how the interpretation of religious texts has been altered by the emergence of modern “environmental awareness” and ecological understanding, as in the case of the notion of “dominion” in Gen. 1:26, which historically often taken to mean exercising “royal dominion” in the sense of power and control over the earth and its creatures, with man acting in the manner of a “king” over God the King’s creation.

Well known among ecologists and environmental ethicists, Lynn White’s 1967 Science article, “The Historic Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” argued that biblical rhetoric countenanced if not directly contributed to the development of Christianity “into the most anthropocentric religion the world has ever seen.” Whatever the merits of this argument (I’m inclined to find it rather weak), it is a vivid reminder that crude anthropomorphism is disturbing to environmentalists insofar as it is understood to encourage an image of human beings as Promethean “masters” of the natural world, the products and inhabitants of which are designed (merely) to serve our interests and needs, as this instrumentalist (i.e. non-intrinsic) valuation is rightly construed as promoting and sanctioning ecological degradation, including the devastating exploitation of natural resources and corresponding destruction or radical alteration of ecological systems and habitats, the precipitous decline in biodiversity, and the deeply troubling ill-treatment of (non-human) animals on a massive scale. Environmental consciousness, if you will, prompted many people of religious faith to look afresh at their sacred texts, and in the case of Jews and Christians, this moved them to speak of “stewardship” rather than “dominion,” indeed, there is now a fairly large body of “stewardship” theology that aims to reflect and encourage environmental awareness and responsibility, not unlike the manner in which Marxists have discovered a more “ecological” Marx by re-examining and re-interpreting much of the Marxist corpus. The “original public meaning” as it were, of several topics in these texts for both Marxists and non-Marxists has been subject to new analysis and fresh interpretation. Thus it is no longer the case that interpretation and construction need mean “The dead hold the living in their grasp.”

I do believe, however, that something on the order of “original public meaning” might serve as one kind of (soft or reasonable) legal constraint on possible or later interpretations of a Constitutional text, but it should not be strongly determinative if only because “our world” has changed (for better and here and there for worse) in fundamental ways from “their world,” and that that should play a guiding role in how we interpret the Constitution, in other words, the strictly legal dimension of this text should be construed as a governing document meant to both preserve and serve our evolving democratic needs, purposes and practices; our understanding of justice; and our overarching and corresponding individual and collective commitment to the pursuit of liberty, equality, and fraternity. As it stands, Originalist interpretation too frequently (and for a number of readily ascertainable ideological reasons or motives) distorts, deforms, neglects, ignores, runs roughshod over, misconstrues, forgets, these various needs, purposes and practices, as well as our best conceptions of justice and the contents and contour of the common and public good.

Notes

* The notion of “pragmatism” I have in mind here is more or less in at least the spirit if not letter of that found in the later works of the philosopher Hilary Putnam.

** I have taken the liberty to correct some typos in the original post.

The rational and ….

There are beliefs, actions, values, and so forth that we might define or describe as (i) rational, (ii) irrational, (iii) nonrational (the question of rationality, in other words, does not enter the picture), and (iv) para-rational, supra-rational, or extra-rational. With regard to (iv), the idea is that there is respect for rationality as such, that is, its significance, importance, value, and so on, but the phenomenon in question involves some sort of transcendence or going beyond what is rational, in other words, this Aufheben or Aufhebung involves “sublation” without abolishing, denying, or contradicting what is rational, thus “preserving” rationality while transcending it. Among the sundry phenomena we might group within (iv) we cite, in general, psychological, emotional, experiential, aesthetic, pragmatic, and religious or spiritual (including ‘mystical’) phenomena. In other words, these are not necessarily (thus they can or might be) simply irrational or non-rational but capable of being para- or extra-rational in constitution and consequence. Because we (i.e., most human animals) have a dispositional tendency to indulge in “black-and-white” thinking (thus, for instance, a failure to recognize there is a spectrum or continuum of possible positions between sanity and mental health or well-being and insanity or mental illness or disorder), we often ignore the possibility of (iv). As Nigel Warburton reminds us, on occasion there may be only, in effect, a choice between two options or positions (e.g., as in U.S. presidential elections or deciding to vote for or against a ballot proposition, etc.), but in everyday life, at least with respect to the bigger questions and decisions, that is rarely the case. (In other words, it is not always the case that if you are not for us, you must be against us.) I happen to believe that we need more consideration of what (iv) is all about, that it is often ignored, misunderstood, or dismissed vis-à-vis the “rational.”

Proverbial Wisdom: a brief introduction to proverbs

Please note: Despite the photos, I am not addressing the Book of Proverbs in the Hebrew Bible (Hebrew: מִשְלֵי, Míshlê [Shlomoh], ‘Proverbs [of Solomon’], which is part of Ketuvim, ‘Writings,’ the third section of Tanakh), what Christians call the Old Testament,¹ nor am I speaking to Erasmus’ annotated collection of Greek and Latin proverbs, Adagia,² compiled during the Renaissance.

“True enough, ordinary people do not produce bodies of written reflection expounding their views of life. [We can readily imagine several likely explanations for this fact: they are comparatively disadvantaged: oppressed or exploited, they are preoccupied with ‘making a living’ and their discretionary time, such as it is, involves entertainment or forms of escape form the drudgery or dreariness of their everyday lives, they are poorly educated, their social and economic circumstances are conducive to neither individuation or self-realization, and so forth and so on.] But other roads lead into their avenues of thought. In particular, a communal group’s proverbial dicta provide us with a window into life as seen by ordinary people—an insight into the philosophical outlook of [the masses] that would otherwise remain mute because philosophy, literature, scholarship, and other modes of written expression remain outside its range.

By common dictionary definition, a proverb is a popular maxim that pithily conveys a useful lesson or instruction. The three salient features of a proverb are thus instructiveness, brevity, and popularity. And its reason for being is to provide useful guidance in the conduct of life. Perhaps we [Rescher is speaking of philosophers and those who read philosophy] can learn but little from this source of ‘popular philosophy,’ but that little is neither uninstructive nor uninteresting. For the proverbs of a people show us how they really think about things.

Proverbs are generally anonymous, passed down from time immemorial. Sometimes, however, the dictum of an identifiable individual becomes proverbial—as, for example, Sir Robert Walpole’s cynical remark now familiarly rendered as ‘Every man has his price.’ [Donald J. Trump believed this, assuming that ‘price’ can also be metaphorical.] Proverbial wisdom is overwhelmingly concerned with the conduct of life, formulating the ‘commonsense’ lessons put at the disposal of everyone the hard-won wisdom of the sagacious. [….] Hence the bulk of it is devoted to rules and instructions (‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’). To be sure, proverbs are sometimes framed in the form of questions. But then the questions are rhetorical and do duty for an injunction. [….] Here, as elsewhere, the exception tests (not proves, save in an antiquated sense of the term) the rule: Exceptio probat regulam.

Proverbial wisdom’s messages are generally universal. In overwhelming measure, proverbs reflect constancies of the human condition and not cultural peculiarities of particular groups or eras. [Rescher here provides numerous examples in a variety of languages.] The basic message is generally universal, although the particular mode of expression may be culturally shaped in ways that call for backward [i.e., historical!] information about prevailing conditions: the English ridicule taking coal to Newcastle, the Greeks taking owls to Athens, the Indians taking pepper to Hindustan. Sometimes, however, closely kindred proverbs move off in somewhat different directions: ‘When it rains, it pours, means once troubles begin for someone, he or she has lots of them [it seems in this instance there is a ‘tipping point’ leading to ‘slippery slope’]. But ‘Cuando llueve todos se mojan’ [‘when it rains, everyone gets wet’] means once troubles begin for someone, many people are affected.”—From Nicholas Rescher’s chapter, “Proverbial Wisdom,” in his book, Human Interests: Reflections on Philosophical Anthropology (Stanford University Press, 1990): 36-41.

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The following are “quotable” definitions of proverbs insofar as I found them clever, incisive, or imaginative, in addition to being more or less true (I also came across some ‘quotable’ definitions that did not strike me as true, while others were needlessly and thus annoyingly elitist and condescending):

• “A short sentence based on long experience.”—Miguel de Cervante
• “The sanctuary of the intuitions”—Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “Consist usually of a natural fact selected as a picture or parable of a moral truth.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “They are all made for men, for their own advantage.”—Thomas Hardy
• “The proverbs of a nation furnish an index to its spirit, and the results of its civilization.”—Josiah G. Holland
• “The wisdom of the streets.”—William G. Benham
• “The philosophy of the common people.”—James Howell
• “Few words, right sense, fine imagery.”—Moses Ibn Ezra
• “A little gospel.”—Spanish proverb

I found these in Eugene E. Russell, ed. Webster’s New World Dictionary of Quotable Definitions (Prentice Hall, 2^nd ed., 1988).

In a forthcoming post I will share Rescher’s list of ten “thematic categories” into which proverbial wisdom “for the most part falls.”

Notes

1. The Book of Proverbs is “traditionally placed among the ‘Writings’ and considered part of the wisdom literature. It consists in part of short sayings expressing in pithy form insights into human affairs, especially of a social and religious natures. The Hebrew word (māšāl) translated ‘proverb’ can mean comparison, and many of the proverbs contain a metaphor or simile. The dates of the material within the book range over a long period of time; while the final edition was made after the exile [hence ‘postexilic’], probably in the fifth century B.C.E., much of the actual contents are earlier and some of it is even pre-monarchic. The oral origins are often obvious.” For the rest of this helpful introductory entry, please see “Proverbs, The Book of,” in Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan, eds. The Oxford Companion to the Bible (Oxford University Press, 1993): 624-626.
2. “Adagia (singular adagium) is the title of an annotated collection of Greek and Latin proverbs, compiled during the Renaissance by Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus. Erasmus’ collection of proverbs is ‘one of the most monumental ... ever assembled’ (Speroni, 1964: 1). The first edition, titled Collectanea Adagiorum, was published in Paris in 1500, in a slim quarto of around eight hundred entries. By 1508, after his stay in Italy, Erasmus had expanded the collection (now called Adagiorum chiliades tres or ‘Three thousands of proverbs’) to over 3,000 items, many accompanied by richly annotated commentaries, some of which were brief essays on political and moral topics. The work continued to expand right up to the author’s death in 1536 (to a final total of 4,151 entries), confirming the fruit of Erasmus’ vast reading in ancient literature.” An English translation of a selection of the proverbs made by William Barker with ample contextual and explanatory material is found in The Adages of Erasmus (University of Toronto Press, 2nd ed., 2001).

Wittgenstein on the praxis of philosophy, psychoanalytic psychology … and professional philosophy

                                                                                           

What follows is from the volume edited by John Hayes, The Selected Writings of Maurice O’Connor Drury: On Wittgenstein, Philosophy, Religion and Psychiatry (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), as well as Ray Monk’s better known biography, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1990/The Free Press, 1990):

Drury: “Wittgenstein constantly urged his pupils not to take up an academic post and become teachers of philosophy. Though later he did admit to me with regard to a few of his pupils he had been wrong; they had turned out to be excellent teachers. But certainly in my own case and that of many others he was most emphatic that we must earn our livelihood in some other way. This advice of his has been misinterpreted. Wittgenstein never advised anyone to give up philosophy, if by that is meant thinking about first principles and ultimate problems. [….]

Why, then, did he strongly discourage pupils from becoming teachers of philosophy. I think it was because Wittgenstein knew from his own experience that in philosophical thinking there are long periods of darkness and confusion when one just has to wait. In philosophy above all there is a time to speak and a time to keep silent [a profound understanding of the necessity and value of silence evidenced here is not that different from that found within monastic and mystical religious traditions, including yogic, contemplative, and meditative practices]. Wittgenstein had a great horror of what Schopenhauer once described as ‘professorial philosophy by philosophy professors:’ people having to go on talking when really they knew in their own heart they had nothing of value to say.”

It is hard to imagine any minimally competent professional (academic) philosopher in our time proclaiming proudly if not perversely, with Wittgenstein, that they have read neither Aristotle nor Hume! Although from within these same ranks, especially among a certain kind of “analytic” philosopher, one would not think it unusual to hear an expression of distaste for—with Wittgenstein—Hegel’s philosophy.

Wittgenstein well knew (and it was widely recognized in all the right quarters) that he possessed a “special ability” for philosophizing. “Yet whilst knowing this, for the greater part of his life he was making plans to forsake this work and to live an entirely different mode of existence to that of an academic philosopher.” Drury goes on to say that “… I am certain we will not understand Wittgenstein unless we feel some sympathy and comprehension for this persistent intention to change his life.”

In the same vein perhaps, Drury informs us that Wittgenstein once said “A philosopher should enjoy no more prestige than a plumber!”¹ I’m inclined to think there is something profoundly true and moving about this remark, which I don’t want to attempt to flesh out here. Oddly enough, the British philosopher Mary Midgley (née Scrutton; 13 September 1919 – 10 October 2018) made an analogical comparison between, of all things, philosophy and plumbing in her book, Utopias, Dolphins and Computers: Problems of Philosophical Plumbing (Routledge, 1996).

As an enlisted soldier in WW I (the ‘Great War’), Wittgenstein “became known to his comrades as ‘the man with the gospels,’” for he had taken to recommending Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief² “to anyone in distress.” What was vigorously recommended to others, for Wittgenstein, began as a need and obligation: “During the first few months of the war, the spiritual sustenance that Wittgenstein derived from reading Tolstoy’s Gospel ‘kept him alive,’ in the sense that it allowed him, as he put it, to lighten his external appearance ‘so as to leave undisturbed my inner being.’”

In the service, before being posted (as he ardently wished) to the Russian Front as “an ordinary soldier,” Wittgenstein performed “mundane clerical work” in an artillery workshop and later was “in charge—as a foreman—of the forge” there. Wittgenstein’s wartime experience included being among those captured by the Italians (one of roughly 500,000) near the end of the war, his prisoner-of-war status not ending until August 21, 1919.³

It seems more than plausible to surmise that Wittgenstein’s “persistent intention to change his life” arose both from his wartime experiences as well as periods in his life when he worked as a village schoolmaster, an architect, hospital porter, paramedic, and an independent researcher in physiology. More than once Wittgenstein considered a vocation in medicine and was always drawn to psychology. Indeed, although we learn from an “isolated remark” in one of his manuscripts that one shouldn’t (lit. ‘don’t’) “play with what lies deep in another person,” and that Wittgenstein characterized psychoanalytic therapy as “a very dangerous procedure,” attesting his knowledge “of a case [thus anecdotal evidence] that did infinite harm,” he “played” at being an amateur (psychoanalytic?) psychologist himself, as recounted by Drury:

“During his visit to Dublin [in 1938] Wittgenstein asked me if I could arrange for him to have discussions with patients who were seriously mentally ill. He said this would be a matter of great interest to him. I was acquainted with one of the resident doctors in St. Patrick’s Hospital, and I put this request to him—and it was soon arranged, after the Medical Superintendent, Dr. Leper, had an interview with Wittgenstein [!]. Wittgenstein then went two or three days a week and visited some of the long-stay patients who had few to visit them.”

It’s hard not to draw the conclusion that Wittgenstein held ambiguous and ambivalent (if not inconsistent) thoughts and feelings not only about professional philosophy but also Freudian psychoanalysis, both as a philosophy and psychology of mind and therapeutic regimen: (psycho-)analysis. Wittgenstein never formally or systematically pursued medical studies or training in psychology, a fact John Hayes attributes to his “misapprehension (certainly insofar as it pertained to British and a fortiori Irish practice) that training in psychiatry would involve a ‘training analysis’ and that would be unacceptable to him.” In both instances, this appears to stem from Wittgenstein’s intriguing conception of philosophical therapy (which might be viewed fruitfully—albeit in different proportions and with somewhat different motivations and reasons—like Freudian psychoanalysis, as existing in an ill-defined or indefinable space betwixt and between psychology and philosophy.

Notes

1. I would add—and Wittgenstein may have assumed this or taken it for granted—a “good” plumber.
2. Available in English: Tolstoy, Leo (Dustin Condren, trans.) The Gospel in Brief: The Life of Jesus (Harper Perennial, 2011).
3. “Some war memorials date the end of the war as being when the Versailles Treaty was signed in 1919, which was when many of the troops serving abroad finally returned home; by contrast, most commemorations of the war’s end concentrate on the armistice of 11 November 1918. Legally, the formal peace treaties were not complete until the last, the Treaty of Lausanne, was signed. Under its terms, the Allied forces left Constantinople on 23 August 1923.”

Wittgenstein on John Calvin and Michael Servetus

Monument to Michael Servetus in Geneva, Switzerland

I am doing a bit of exploration/research into Wittgenstein’s thoughts on religious worldviews as well as psychoanalysis and came across something I want to share, but first a brief introduction to his work as a philosopher (one who was highly critical of professional philosophy as it existed in Europe and North America).

Ludwig (Josef Johann) Wittgenstein (26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) “was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.” The following is from the introduction to his SEP (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) entry:

“Considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein played a central, if controversial, role in 20th-century analytic philosophy. He continues to influence current philosophical thought in topics as diverse as logic and language, perception and intention, ethics and religion, aesthetics and culture. Originally, there were two commonly recognized stages of Wittgenstein’s thought—the early and the later—both of which were taken to be pivotal in their respective periods. In more recent scholarship, this division has been questioned: some interpreters have claimed a unity between all stages of his thought, while others talk of a more nuanced division, adding stages such as the middle Wittgenstein and the third Wittgenstein. Still, it is commonly acknowledged that the early Wittgenstein is epitomized in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. By showing the application of modern logic to metaphysics, via language, he provided new insights into the relations between world, thought and language and thereby into the nature of philosophy. It is the later Wittgenstein, mostly recognized in the Philosophical Investigations, who took the more revolutionary step in critiquing all of traditional philosophy including its climax in his own early work. The nature of his new philosophy is heralded as anti-systematic through and through, yet still conducive to genuine philosophical understanding of traditional problems.”

Wittgenstein often had a noticeably profound impact on his students and emerging young philosophers who knew him, as well as others like Maurice O’Connor Drury (3 July 1907 – 25 December 1976) who, while not a philosopher (he was a physician and psychiatrist), “had a long and deep friendship with Wittgenstein.” According to Wittgenstein’s biographer, Ray Monk, Drury’s book, The Danger of Words (1973), is “the most truly Wittgensteinian book published by any of Wittgenstein’s students.” He was befriended by such intellectual giants of his time as the economist John Maynard Keynes and the “brilliant Cambridge mathematician,” Frank (Plumpton) Ramsey, both of whom “had ’plotted’ (as Ramsey’s sister put it) over most of the 1920s to entice Wittgenstein back to Cambridge.” Some of the earliest philosophers influenced by Wittgenstein include Rush Rhees (a student, friend, and Wittgenstein’s literary executor), Norman Malcolm, and Georg Henrik von Wright (Wittgenstein’s successor at Cambridge). Among those philosophers who knew Wittgenstein but were a bit more independent from him, philosophically speaking, include Elizabeth Anscombe and her husband, Peter Geach, as well as John Wisdom. Finally, philosophers who were more indirectly influenced by Wittgenstein’s philosophical work include A.J. Ayer and Gilbert Ryle, and perhaps J.L. Austin (he appears to have denied this influence). Later, a number of philosophers were frank about their debts to the writings of Wittgenstein (and are sometimes christened ‘Wittgensteinians’), including Peter Winch, D. Z. Phillips, Ilham Dilman, and Hanna Fenichel Pitkin (yes, the daughter of the Freudian psychoanalyst, Otto Fenichel). More recently, P.M.S. Hacker and the late G.P. Baker are contemporary philosophers devoted to explicating much of Wittgenstein’s philosophical corpus (Hacker is the author of a remarkable tetralogy in ‘philosophical anthropology:’ (i) Human Nature: The Categorial Framework [2007], (ii) The Intellectual Powers: A Study of Human Nature [2013], (iii) The Passions: A Study of Human Nature [2018], and (iv) The Moral Powers: A Study of Human Nature [2021]). Among other contemporary philosophers beholden in one way or another to Wittgenstein’s work we should include Cora Diamond, the late Stanley Cavell, and James F. Conant.

I hope this provides at least a taste of Wittgenstein’s philosophical “genius” and legendary powerful personality or character. However, Wittgenstein could also be, as we say, all-too-human, and I want to illustrate this with a snapshot from one particular conversation he had with Drury as retold in the volume of the latter’s selected writings edited and introduced by John Hayes. Rush Rhees once “assured [Drury] that Wittgenstein had spoken to him about [religion] more than to anyone else.” As Hayes writes, “If Rhees was correct, it may have been because Wittgenstein found in Drury someone knowledgeable about issues concerning biblical interpretation [hermeneutics] and the history and theology of the Christian churches, who was to boot a committed believer [Anglican].” Near the end of the conversation in question, we learn that

“… when Wittgenstein reflected on R.H. Tawney’s attempt to link Calvin to the rise of bourgeois civilization in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926) [an argument distinct from and in part a response to Max Weber’s classic study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in German in 1905], he considered Tawney [an economic historian, social critic, and Christian socialist] too daring in his willingness to criticize ‘a man such as Calvin must have been.’ Even when Drury told him that Calvin had Michael Servetus [Miguel Serveto (29 September 1509 or 1511 – 27 October 1553) a Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer, and Renaissance humanist] burnt for heresy on account of his views on the doctrine of the Trinity, this did not dispose Wittgenstein to modify his estimation of Calvin; he thought Servetus’s action in interrupting Calvin’s preaching in Geneva to press his case as a courting of his own death and Calvin could have done no other than he did in the circumstances!”

I might have added a few more exclamation points, but needless to say, this is a morally outrageous reading if not obtuse and inexplicable re-description of this horrific episode in religious, legal, and political history. The Wikipedia entry on Michael Servetus is quite good for much of the relevant historical details.

The U.S. Senate and the elusive hope for sober democratic deliberation

Peggy Noonan reported on Saturday that “15% of Americans agree that the government, media, and financial worlds are controlled by Satan-worshipping pedophiles.” Hopefully, most of them were simply casting contempt on the pollsters, but the distance between the crazies and the Trumpers is trivial. Many of us are outraged by the fact that the Republicans are out to prevent their opponents from voting and are unwilling to condemn the Orange Monster.

But it is worth noting that our constitution is deliberately anti-Democratic. The Senate is obviously anti-majoritarian. Eliminating the filibuster would help make the Senate more democratic, but the sunny Founder’s hope that the Senate would be a place of sober deliberation has become a pipe dream.

Please note: I am posting this for Steve Shiffrin, although I am responsible for the title. By way of reinforcing his argument, one might read Robert Dahl’s democracy-motivated critique, How Democratic Is the American Constitution? (Yale University Press, 2^nd ed., 2003).

Ludwig Wittgenstein: philosophical and religious—or spiritual—therapy

I have long suspected—alongside others—that Wittgenstein understood both philosophy and religion in some sort of “therapeutic” sense insofar as that means a profoundly spiritual and ethical orientation that puts a primacy of spiritual praxis, the search for truth, and living a life suffused with what are often thought to be religious (but not exclusively religious) or spiritual virtues such as love, compassion, profound respect of others as persons and the natural world, faith, trust, and selflessness, for example (this being far from exhaustive of ethical and religious virtues), all the while struggling, to cure the “diseases of belief and desire,” in the words of David Burton in his essay on Buddhist philosophical therapy (in the edited volume by Ganeri and Carlisle below). Either directly or as a welcome by-product of such spiritual praxis, one often finds an arduous and passionate commitment to the amelioration, relief, and elimination of the unnecessary and debilitating suffering of others. There is a perhaps vague if not poorly understood kind of existential if not psychological suffering intrinsic to the human condition and human nature that does not appear to be eliminable, at least for the overwhelming majority of us, although some religious worldviews of Asian provenance—Jainism, Buddhism, and  Pātañjala Yoga, for example—provide us with what they take to be exceptions to this rule; in fact, they believe, in principle, that such suffering can be absolutely transcended and thus eliminated.

I am now beginning to learn more precisely what Wittgenstein’s somewhat elusive spiritual therapy entailed, partaking as it does of elements commonly ascribed to both philosophical and religious worldviews. In doing this I am relying primarily, in addition to some things Wittgenstein wrote about Christianity and religion more broadly (and his discomfort with professional philosophy), on only five sources: (i) Ray Monk’s well-known biography of Wittgenstein (1990), (ii) Garry L. Hagberg’s “The Thinker and the Draughtsman: Wittgenstein, Perspicuous Relations, and ‘Working on Oneself,’” in Jonardon Ganeri and Clare Carlisle, eds. Philosophy as Therapeia (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 66) (Cambridge University Press, 2010): 67-81, (iii) Maurice O’Connor Drury’s (John Hayes, ed., with Foreword by Ray Monk), The Selected Writings of Maurice O’Connor Drury: On Wittgenstein, Philosophy, Religion and Psychiatry (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), (iv) James Kellenberger’s The Cognitivity of Religion: Three Perspectives (University of California Press, 1985), and (v) John Forrester and Laura Cameron, Freud in Cambridge (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Although I cannot commit to even a rough date, as I have several other reading and writing projects ongoing, I hope to be able to make significant sense of what I am learning about Wittgenstein’s “spiritual therapy”(my characterization) so as to share it with you in a coherent if not meaningful fashion.

Images: sculptures by Elizabeth Catlett

On Facts … and Values

A fact-value dichotomy is pernicious and profoundly (or epistemically, morally, and psychologically) mistaken. While conceptually and otherwise distinguishable, facts and values are best viewed in a necessary or obligatory relation of entanglement. Because fascist and proto-fascist members of the cult of Trump in the Republican Party have played loose with facts since (and to a significant extent before) Trump first campaigned for the Presidency, in other words, because they have ignored or distorted facts, have lied about what is factual, preferring myths, illusions, delusions, and phantasies to a social and ontological reality that is intrinsically connected to determination of what is true, to a concern for what bears a connection to socially supported and warranted or justified facts, there’s been a tendency in mass and social media to rely on and emphasize a rather simplistic or crude or convenient notion of facts that blithely ignores fact/value entanglement if only because it raises philosophical and ethical topics that are not easily addressed in such communicative fora.

Explaining this entanglement involves invoking contested notions of reason, rationality and reasonability; of objectivity, generalization and universalizability; of moral and conceptual relativism or perspectivalism; of truth; of instrumental and intrinsic values; of emotions and passions; and so forth and so on. Moreover, it raises the role played by obdurate prejudices and passions, by “personal affinity, loyalty and affective involvement with individuals and groups” that often display symptoms of mental illness or psychopathology, by ideological allegiances that are close-minded and calcified, relying on what Albert O. Hirschman termed the “rhetoric of reaction” that in turn rests on the theses of “perversity,” “futility” and “jeopardy.” Finally, were we to publicly and sufficiently address the nature of fact/value entanglement we would need to speak to the dispositional preference for that species of wishful thinking that privileges our peculiar or idiosyncratic wants and desires in a manner that runs roughshod over evidence and argument, that habitually indulges in self-deception and denial, that orients itself around a regressive narcissistic hedonism.

The following snippets are intended to serve as an introduction to the topic of fact/value entanglement.

“Recently Iris Murdoch has put forward the view that the whole ‘fact/value’ dichotomy stems from a faulty moral psychology: from the metaphysical picture of ‘the neutral facts’ (apprehended by a totally uncaring faculty of reason) and the will which, having learned the neutral facts, must ‘choose values’ either arbitrarily (the existentialist picture) or on the basis of ‘instinct.’ I think she is right; but setting this moral psychology right will involve deep philosophical work involving the notions of ‘reason’ and ‘fact’ (as she, of course, recognizes).”— Hilary Putnam

“Our knowledge of the world presupposes values, indeed, what comes to count as the real world depends upon our values. This is evidenced in the “implicit standards and skills on the basis of which we decide whether someone is able to give a true, adequate, and perspicuous account of even the simplest perceptual facts….” — Hilary Putnam

“[F]act, (or truth) and rationality are interdependent notions. A fact is something that it is rational to believe, or, more precisely, the notion of a fact (or a true statement) is an idealization of the notion of a statement that it is rational to believe. [….] [B]eing rational involves having criteria of relevance as well as criteria of rational acceptability, and…all of our values are involved in our criteria of relevance. The decision that a picture of the world is true (or true by our present lights, or “as true as anything is”) and answers the relevant questions (as well as we are able to answer them) rests on and reveals our total system of value commitments. A being with no values would have no facts either. The way in which criteria of relevance involves values, at least indirectly, may be seen by examining the simplest statement. Take the sentence ‘The cat is on the mat.’ If someone actually makes this judgment in a particular context, then he employs conceptual resources—the notions ‘cat,’ ‘on,’ and ‘mat’—which are provided by a particular culture, and whose presence and ubiquity reveal something about the interests and values of that culture, and of almost every culture. We have the category ‘cat’ because we regard the division of the world into animals and non-animals as significant, and we are further interested in what species a given animal belongs to. It is relevant that there is a cat on the mat and not just a thing. We have the category ‘mat’ because we regard the division of inanimate things into artifacts and non-artifacts as significant, and we are further interested in the purpose and nature a particular artifact has. It is relevant that it is a mat that the cat is on and just something. We have the category ‘on’ because we are interested in spatial relations. Notice what we have: we took the most banal statement imaginable, ‘the cat is on the mat,’ and we found that the presuppositions which make this statement a relevant one in certain contexts include the significance of the categories animate/inanimate, purpose, and space. To a mind with no disposition to regard these as relevant categories, ‘the cat is on the mat’ would be as irrational as ‘the number of hexagonal objects in this room is 76’ would be, uttered in the middle of a tête-à-tête between young lovers. Not only do very general facts about our value system show themselves in our categories (artifacts, species name, term for a spatial relation) but, our more specific values (for example, sensitivity and compassion), also show up in the use we make of specific classificatory words (‘considerate,’ ‘selfish’). To repeat, our criteria of relevance rest on and reveal our whole system of values.” — Hilary Putnam

“Values enter into the very definition of what a fact is; the realm of facts cannot be defined or specified without utilizing certain values. Values enter into the process of knowing a fact; without utilizing or presupposing certain values, we cannot determine which is the realm of facts, we cannot know the real from the unreal.” — Robert Nozick

“There are a variety of reasons why we are tempted to draw a line between ‘facts’ and ‘values’—and to draw it in such a way that ‘values’ are put outside the realm of rational argument altogether. For one thing, it is much easier to say, ‘that’s a value judgment,’ meaning, ‘that’s just a matter of subjective preference,’ than to do what Socrates tried to teach us: to examine who we are and what our deepest convictions are and hold those convictions up to the searching test of reflective examination.” — Hilary Putnam

“(1) In ordinary circumstances, there is usually a fact of the matter as to whether the statements people make are warranted or not. [….] (2) Whether a statement is warranted or not is independent of whether the majority of one’s cultural peers would say it is warranted or unwarranted. (3) Our norms and standards of warranted assertibility are historical products; they evolve in time. (4) Our norms and standards always reflect our interests and values. Our picture of intellectual flourishing is part of, and only makes sense as part of, our picture of human flourishing in general. (5) Our norms and standards of anything—including warranted assertibility—are capable of reform. There are better and worse norms and standards.” — Hilary Putnam

“The moral point is that ‘facts’ are set up as such by human (that is moral) agents. Much of our life is taken up by truth-seeking, imagining, questioning. We relate to facts through truth and truthfulness, and come to recognise and discover that there are different modes and levels of insight and understanding. In many familiar ways, various values pervade and colour what we take to be the reality of our world; wherein we constantly evaluate our own values and those of others, and judge and determine forms of consciousness and modes of being.” — Iris Murdoch

“The concept factual judgment or judgment with a truth-value and the concept of ethical judgment will be different concepts—such a distinction is there to be made, just as the concept mouse and the concept mammal are different concepts—but the distinctness does not preclude a judgment’s being both a factual and an ethical judgment. Compare the way in which the distinct concepts mouse and mammal will each collect any particular mouse you please, Timmy Willy or Johnny Town or whichever, within their extensions. Ethical judgments could be a subset of factual judgments even if they were an utterly special and essentially contestable subset. In this way, we can have a clear difference between the ethical-as-such and the factual-as-such without any dichotomy between their property provinces. The hope of making good a claim of this sort is the characteristic hope of ethical objectivism or moral cognitivism.” — David Wiggins

“The content of an assertion is intrinsically related to a conceptual scheme. [….] In effect, propositions, true or false, are implicitly indexed to some conceptual scheme or schemes. [….] Facts are internal to conceptual schemes, or ways of dividing the world into objects, among which there can be equally acceptable alternatives. [….] [S]uch metaphysical pluralism is consistent with realism about truth.” — Michael P. Lynch

“Minimally speaking, a proposition is true in the realist sense when things are as that proposition says they are. Some aspect of objective reality must simply be a certain way. If it is, then the proposition is true; if not, the proposition is false. The truth of the proposition hinges on the world alone, not on our thought about the world. In short, realism about truth minimally implies two commitments: (a) truth is an authentic property that some propositions have and others lack, and (b) the concept of truth is, in Putnam’s words, ‘radically non-epistemic;’ that is, whether a proposition is true (in most cases) does not depend on what I or anyone else believes or knows. [….] According to correspondence accounts of truth, there are three metaphysical aspects to any true proposition: the proposition itself (the truth bearer), its correspondence (the truth relation), and the reality to which it corresponds (the truth marker). [….] In other words, propositions are true when they correspond to the facts.” — Michael P. Lynch

“[T]here is no logical incoherence in supposing that facts and propositions are relative to conceptual schemes and that truth is the correspondence of (relative) propositions with (relative) facts.” — Michael P. Lynch

“[T]he conditions under which a proposition is true are partly determined by the conceptual scheme in which the proposition is expressed. But what makes a proposition true is not its relation to a scheme but whether or not the conditions in question obtain. For a claim to be true (or false), the conditions must be relative to a scheme. Yet the reason that the claim is true is not because it is relative to a scheme (as the truth relativist must hold); it is true because it is the case. [….] A fact, in the human sense, is simply what is the case.” — Michael P. Lynch

“[I]n taking concepts to be flexible and fluid like, the pluralist is not saying that we are confused about our concepts. Rather, the point is that concepts are not absolutely determinate or closed; they do not have a fixed use in every possible situation. This does not imply, however, that no concepts have determinate uses in all actual situations. Some concepts may be perfectly determinate in actual situations, but not in all possible situations. [….] For the pluralist, concepts are … flexible; they are subject to possible extension in the fact of unforeseen circumstances. Hence, there can be irresolvable disagreements over how to apply any concept. In a sense, concepts are therefore always possibly vague in a nonpejorative sense; they have what Waismann called ‘open texture.’” — Michael P. Lynch

“Thinking about why we should care about truth tells us two things about it: first, that truth is, in part, a deeply normative property—it is a value. And second, this is a fact that any adequate theory of truth must account for. In light of this fact, I suggest that truth, like other values, should be understood as depending on, but not reducible to, lower-level properties. Yet which properties truth depends on or supervenes on may change with the type of belief in question. This opens the door to a type of pluralism: truth in ethics may be realized differently than in physics.” — Michael P. Lynch

“Truth is a property that is good for beliefs to have. Since propositions are the content of beliefs, and it is the content of a belief and not the act of believing that is true, we can also say that truth is the property that makes a proposition good to believe.” — Michael P. Lynch

“All truths are relative, yes, but our concept of truth needn’t be a relative concept.” — Michael P. Lynch

“Deflationists are right to be skeptical of the thought that any one traditional theory of truth can tell us what all and only true beliefs have in common. At a suitable level of abstraction, understanding what true beliefs are simply involves simply understanding what they do—their role in our cognitive economy. To play this role is to satisfy certain truisms, truisms that display truth’s connection to other concepts. It is this truth-role that gives truth its unity; the features that are constitutive of this role are what true propositions have in common, and simply having those features is what we ordinarily mean by saying that a proposition is true. But not all facts are exhausted by the truisms. One such fact is that there is more than one property that make beliefs true. Truth … is immanent in those other properties of beliefs. In some domains, what makes a belief true is that it corresponds to reality; in others, beliefs are made true by a form of coherence. [….] [Traditional theories of truth] are not best conceived of as theories of truth itself. They are better seen as theories of the properties that make beliefs true—or manifest truth.” —Michael P. Lynch

“Truth is immanent in distinct properties of beliefs; our ordinary concept of truth is univocal.” — Michael P. Lynch

“Core Folk Truisms (there may be other truisms): (i) Objectivity: The belief that p is true if, and only if with respect to the belief that p, things are as they are believed to be … is a central truism about truth. (ii) Norm of Belief: It is prima facie correct to believe that p if and only if the proposition that p is true. (iii) Warrant of Independence: Some beliefs can be true but not warranted and some can be warranted without being true. (iv) End of Inquiry: Other things being equal, true beliefs are a worthy goal of inquiry.” — Michael P. Lynch

“A theory of truth should make sense of the following metaphysical principle: Truth is One: There is a single property named by ‘truth’ that all and only true propositions share. The theory should also be ‘able to make sense of the intuition that drives pluralism about truth, namely, Truth is Many: there is more than one way to be true.” — Michael P. Lynch

“[T]ruth is a single higher-level property whose instantiations across kinds of propositions are determined by a class of other, numerically distinct properties. [….] Truth is many because different properties may manifest truth in distinct domains of inquiry. In those domains they have the truish features [we find in those folk-truisms enumerated above]. Truth is one because there is a single property so manifested, and ‘truth’ rigidly names that property.”—Michael P. Lynch

Truth is objective; it is good to believe what is true; truth is a goal worthy of human inquiry; and truth is worth caring about for its own sake.

Suggested Reading: There is an enormous number of articles and books one might include here, and while I usually attempt to provide one with a sense of the abundant relevant literature on a particular topic, this time I leave you with but two sources!

• Putnam, Hilary. The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays (Harvard University Press, 2002)
• Rescher, Nicholas. “Value Objectivity,” in his book, Objectivity: The Obligations of Impersonal Reason (University of Notre Dame Press, 1997): 172-196.

Worldviews and Open-Mindedness: Pedagogical Methods, Part I

         
When I was in the college classroom introducing religious worldviews to my students (being a city college, some of the students were middle-age), I used an analogy to help them consider how a religious or spiritual worldview might differ from one that is purely secular, say, of a humanist or existentialist kind, or simply one, not necessarily coherent as a whole (perhaps in part not even intelligible) and thus more like a bricolage, assembled from this or that source, more or less intentionally, but still functioning like an ideology or worldview for most purposes in the lifeworld of the student (unlike science, religions, so to speak, can and often do proffer a ‘theory of everything’). I would ask them to consider how a physicist might describe their desks (a description that may vary a bit depending on the particular field of physics) in comparison to how they might describe them. The student would say things like, the desk is ‘hard’ to the touch, it ‘solid,’ it is this or that color, made up of parts, including metal and wood, inert, and so on.

Needless to say, and depending on how our physicist understands the nature of matter (at the very least, the desk consists of different sorts of particles dancing around, that is, anything but inert), the description of the desk by a physicist will be radically different from this everyday description that relies on our senses and basic (‘folk’) knowledge (i.e., which is dependent on a number of fairly standard concepts and categories) of what are sometimes referred to a “middle-” or “medium-sized” objects in the natural and social worlds. In any case, what we have here are two rather different accounts of the same object, two pictures, if you will. Many philosophers today, at least those who are not “scientistic” or traffic in the imperialism of science (or even one science, physics), would say that neither picture represents the one true description, that each is true, as we say, in its own way, according to the conceptual parameters of vocabulary and discourse which have been created for specific and discrete purposes and functions, one in the language of physics, the other the vernacular language of everyday life. We can have, in principle, pluralistic descriptions of the same “objects,” each being relatively true (and assuming neither aspires to ‘absolute’ truth). Insofar as theories and pictures change and evolve in the natural and social sciences, the physicist of the future may describe our desk somewhat differently from the physicist of today, while our student of the future will more or less likely say the same things about our desk (unless the material and design of desks itself changes). That may not be relevant for the analogy unless it somehow speaks to questions of custom, tradition, and norms.

Thus a religious or spiritual person and our non-religious person understands and views the same world in different ways, arguably not quite as different as the respective descriptions of our desk, although religious mysticism (one that is a significant part of more than a few religious worldviews, east and west) should be viewed as an exception, serving as a better fit or at least more akin in fact to our model of radically different descriptions. I don’t want to belabor the analogy, which was used merely to soften the students up in the sense that those who were quite ignorant, skeptical, or simply dismissive of religions altogether might as a consequence come to be a bit less judgmental or less dispositionally hostile to religious “pictures.” I also invoked numerous examples of religious art around the world as part of this attempt to soften if not alter their beliefs and attitudes on this score. I was of course not trying to convert anyone to any one religious worldview, but attempting in my awkward way to get them to be open-minded, a quality one would think should come naturally to our young charges, but given child-rearing and pedagogical practices, and the nature of our society more generally, that often does not appear to be the case. What I am doing is not dissimilar, at least in spirit, from what James Kellenberger attempts in his book, The Cognitivity of Religion: Three Perspectives (University of California Press, 1985). While my analogy is quite simple and straightforward, Kellenberger’s strategy is more sophisticated, including an attempt to be less polemical when it comes to adjudicating and assessing treatments of knowledge generally and rationality or reason in particular within religious worldviews. Kellenberger discusses the two main approaches to the “cognitivity” of religion among both insiders and outsiders (or emic and etic approaches) which we will introduce with the following list:

(i) rationalist perspective v. anti-rationalist perspective

(ii) knowledge perspective v. anti-knowledge perspective

(iii) knowledge perspective v. faith perspective

(iv) cognitivist belief perspective v. non-cognitive belief perspective

(v) intellectual perspective v. inwardness perspective

Kellenberger is not happy with these crude and somewhat reductionist dichotomies so he proffers two predominant perspectives at work in the question of the cognitivity of religion: (I) one oriented negatively toward knowledge and the cognitive, the First Perspective, and (II) one oriented positively toward knowledge and the cognitive, the Second Perspective. I can only sketch a few facets of his treatment, but they should suffice by way of acquiring a strong sense of the differences between these two perspectives or orientations to the cognitivity question. Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein (and the so-called Neo-Wittgensteinians), in importantly different ways, exemplify the First Perspective, while the likes of Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas argue that rationality or reason is inherently good and thus not necessarily at odds with religious belief (I suspect Pascal is betwixt and between these two perspectives owing to his unique approach to religious belief and faith, an approach crystallized in his locution, ‘reasons of the heart’). To be sure, Kellenberger provides us with instances of philosophers and theologians who fall into one or other perspective depending on the specific topic being addressed.

Kellenberger concludes that “both perspectives are attractive, [for] both appeal with good reason to aspects of religious sensitivity [and sensibility]. Consequently it is not surprising that some philosophers, like Robert Herbert and John Hick [and, I would add, Ninian Smart], tend toward one perspective on some issues and toward the other perspective on other issues. And it is not surprising that some philosophers, like Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, show an ambivalent tendency toward both perspectives on certain single issues.”

Kellenberger argues that whether or not we are religious adherents, “believers or non-believers,” we can see clearly that the two approaches are no less “antithetical” and “pull in different directions,” perspectives that in some measure at least, I think, are captured by and played out in the story of Job in the Hebrew Bible (what Christians refer to as the ‘Old’ Testament, and thus superseded by the ‘New’ Testament). Kellenberger suspects this state of affairs leaves us dissatisfied, and thus it is natural for us to seek some sort of resolution, a via media or a “third perspective” that transcends while subsuming much of what remains salient or indispensable in the first two orientations. Before going further I should note that Kellenberger is discussing our topic primarily on the basis of presumed knowledge and familiarity with Abrahamic religions, especially Judaism and Christianity (Hinduism and Buddhism, for example, are mentioned rarely and only the latter is cited as being of some relevance to his treatment), although I am convinced his model would require little modification by way of rendering it cross-culturally applicable if not robust and I gather from scattered comments throughout the text that Kellenberger would welcome such an extension, that is, not only of the First and Second Perspectives, but a “third perspective” as well.

Kellenberger elaborates a “Third Perspective” regarding the cognitivity of religion rather than settle on a via media (it seems unlikely that this would satisfy either party) to resolve or simply attempt to weaken the conspicuous differences between the two predominant perspectives or orientations. He frankly admits that the focus of his “third perspective” will be on “its Judeo-Christian manifestations” (in keeping with the earlier elaboration of the first two perspectives), although he does not believe “that it is limited to that heritage.” In the words of Kellenberger, the “third perspective”

“… is embodied in the reflections of certain though not all mystics, in the sensibilities of the authors of various devotional works, and pre-eminently in the Psalms. … [I]n the Judeo-Christian tradition the home of the Third Perspective is in the Psalms and secondarily, in certain mystical and devotional works. At least this is true so far as written religious expression is concerned. One could also say that the home of the Third Perspective is found in the lives, the sensibilities, and the self-understanding of many individual believers.”

        
Suffice to say that had I been teaching graduate students about the cross-cultural examination of worldviews, rather than community college students who confessed to knowing very little about religions, including those in which some of them had in fact been raised, and thus assuming they had already taken undergraduate courses in the study of such worldviews, I would have used Kellenberger’s model rather than my simple if not awkward analogy by way of giving them a taste of what is unique in the comparative study of worldview pluralism wherein religious worldviews are distinguished in several important respect from non-religious or secular worldviews.

Part II will begin to fill out some of the details of what Kellenberger means by this Third Perspective of the model of cognitivity in religious worldviews.

Democratic Theory and Practice from Rhetoric to Praxis: collective reasoning, social epistemology (including science), and collective agency

The following titles concern topics that at various points overlap with each other even if their respective analyses are sometimes made in apparent ignorance in work in nearby fields of intellectual inquiry. My particular focus concerns democratic theory and practice, as well as notions of collective agency and responsibility. As in my prior post, what should be included within this list is material from psychoanalytic psychology, especially (individual and) group psychology (or ‘the psychology of groups’ or ‘social psychoanalysis’), of the sort found, for example (and thus among others), in the pioneering studies of Wilfred Bion, R.D. Hinshelwood, and James M. Glass, on the one hand, and Erich Fromm on the other (perhaps I can add those titles at a later date). Finally, it is my strong belief that this represents the kind of literature avowed Marxists, socialists, anarchists should be—or become—intimately familiar, assuming their commitment to what we now call “realistic utopias.”*

• Bohman, James and William Rehg, eds. Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (MIT Press, 1997).
• Brown, Mark B. Science in Democracy: Expertise, Institutions, and Representation (MIT Press, 2009).
• Brown, Richard Harvey. Toward a Democratic Science: Scientific Narration and Civic Communication (Yale University Press, 1998).
• Cartwright, Nancy, et al. Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
• Christensen, David and Jennifer Lackey, eds. The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays (Oxford University Press, 2013).
• Elster, Jon, ed. Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
• Feyerabend, Paul. Farewell to Reason (Verso, 1987).
• Fontana, Benedetto and Gary J. Nederman, and Gary Remer, eds. Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).
• French, Peter A. and Howard K. Wettstein, eds. Shared Intentions and Collective Responsibility (Blackwell Publishing, 2006).
• Galison, Peter and David J. Stump, eds. The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power (Stanford University Press, 1996).
• Garsten, Bryan. Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgment (Harvard University Press, 2006).
• Garver, Eugene. Aristotle’s Rhetoric: An Art of Character (University of Chicago Press, 1994).
• Giere, Ronald N. Science without Laws (University of Chicago Press, 1999).
• Giere, Ronald N. Scientific Perspectivism (University of Chicago Press, 2006).
• Goldman, Alvin I. and Dennis Whitcomb, eds. Social Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2011).
• Goodin, Robert E. Reflective Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2003).
• Goodin, Robert E. Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice After the Deliberative Turn (Oxford University Press, 2008).
• Isaacs, Tracy and Richard Vernon, eds. Accountability for Collective Wrongdoing (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
• Kitcher, Philip. Science, Truth, and Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2001).
• Kitcher, Philip. Science in a Democratic Society (Prometheus Books, 2011).
• Kock, Christian. Deliberative Rhetoric: Arguing about Doing (University of Windsor/Windsor Studies in Argumentation, 2017).
• Kock, Christian and Lisa S. Villadsen, eds. Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012).
• Lackey, Jennifer. The Epistemology of Groups (Oxford University Press, 2021).
• Lackey, Jennifer, ed. Essays in Collective Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 2014).
• Laden, Anthony Simon. Reasoning: A Social Picture (Oxford University Press, 2014).
• Landemore, Hélène. Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many (Princeton University Press, 2013).
• Landemore, Hélène and Jon Elster, eds. Collective Wisdom: Principles and Mechanisms (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
• List, Christian and Philip Pettit. Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents (Oxford University Press, 2011).
• May, Larry. Sharing Responsibility (University of Chicago Press, 1992).
• Rawls, John. Political Liberalism (Columbia University Press, 1993).
• Rescher, Nicholas. Cognitive Pragmatism: The Theory of Knowledge in Pragmatic Perspective (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001).
• Rose, Hilary and Steven Rose. Genes, Cells and Brains: Bioscience’s Promethean Promises (Verso, 2012).
• Tuomela, Raimo. The Philosophy of Social Practices: A Collective Acceptance View (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
• Urbinati, Nadia. Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Harvard University Press, 2014).
• Warren, D. Michael, L. Jan Slikkerveer and David Brokensha, eds. The Cultural Dimension of Development: Indigenous Knowledge Systems (Intermediate Technology Publications, 1995).
• Ziman, John. Real Science: What it is, and what it means (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

* After the late Erik Olin Wright’s conception of “real utopias” in his book, Envisioning Real Utopias (Verso, 2010). This hearkens back to Otto Neurath’s principles of thinking and acting as a Marxist in Red Vienna, whose scientific and epistemic explorations in theory and practice involved architecture (e.g., the Viennese housing movement and town planning projects in England), economic history, visual education and museum science (for the masses), mathematics and logic, philosophy (but not as a professional philosopher), history, and epistemology (both individual and social), while at the same time working as “a social scientist and teacher at commercial colleges, workers’ colleges, adult education schools, and at universities,” as well as serving as a museum director and playing a pivotal role in the Vienna Circle. Neurath’s intellectual work and public activities were intended to promote and contribute to the common good by means co-operative or democratic planning in the pursuit of freedom and happiness (or eudaimonia). Neurath too endeavored to realize a “concrete Utopia,” a struggle that need not crowd out traditional utopian thought and imagination in a non-pejorative or its best sense (hence to be distinguished from the crude, impatient, and non-democratic forms of utopianism in which the means are in flagrant contradiction to the ends, in other words, where there is a failure to appreciate the necessary part played by prefigurative politics).

Toward a binational democratic state in Palestine

Argument: There is no longer a plausible or viable “two-state” solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Assumptions (which case serve as premises): If one is still speaking of a “two-state” solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it shows you have not been paying attention to the history and politics in the Palestinian territories, that you lack a basic understanding of the nature of Zionist settler colonialism and the role of Zionist nationalism in Israel politics, that you are indulging in ideological myths and fantasies that lack a meaningful orientation to social, economic, and political facts (on the ground, as we say), that you do not grasp the nature of Palestinian self-determination, that you do not sufficiently appreciate the logic, values and principled practices of democratic theory and practice and the corresponding significance of human dignity and human rights … and so forth and so on. Should you persist in believing in the possibility of a two-state solution, share your map of the geo-political boundaries of same.

A bit of relevant history

In 1939, Great Britain proposed a “one-state” solution in Palestine after concluding that the partition proposal was not acceptable to either the Jews or the Arabs. In its White Paper of the same year, the Government noted that the Mandate, which included the notorious Balfour Declaration, was not intended to convert Palestine into a Jewish state against the will of the Arab population:

“His Majesty’s Government therefore now declare unequivocally that it is not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State. They would indeed regard it as contrary to their obligations to the Arabs under the Mandate, as well as to the assurances which have been given to the Arab people in the past…. [….]

It is proper that the people of the country should as early as possible enjoy the rights of self-Government which are exercised by the people of neighbouring countries. His Majesty’s Government are [sic] unable at present to foresee the exact constitutional forms which Government in Palestine will eventually take, but their objective is self-government, and they desire to see established ultimately an independent Palestinian State. It should be a State in which the two in Palestine, Arabs and Jews, share authority in Government in such a way that the essential interests of each are secured.” — Malcolm MacDonald, Secretary of State for the Colonies, in a statement presented to the Parliament (1939).

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In the Los Angeles Times last year (May 23, 2019) George Bisharat argued the case for a democratic, one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a position I heartily agree with:

[….] “The two-state solution is dead, laid low by a thousand cuts – or, more precisely, by the hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, whose immovable presence ensures that no genuinely sovereign Palestinian state will ever emerge there. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have both played a role in delivering the final blows: Trump with his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and Netanyahu by promising voters prior to his recent reelection to begin annexation of the West Bank. [….]

It is time to face some undeniable facts: First, despite Israel’s every effort to establish and maintain a Jewish majority, the two peoples living under Israeli rule hover at near parity, at approximately 6.5 million Jews and 6.5 million Palestinians. Second, Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs are destined to live together in Israel/Palestine in perpetuity. Neither people can or should be forced to leave the land in which they reside and to which they are passionately committed. Third, segregation, of which the two-state solution was a form, is not the answer. As Americans know from our own historical experience, separate is never equal. Finally, it is only equal rights and justice that can provide the foundation for a durable peace for Israelis and Palestinians.” [….]

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In his online column at the Times (July 11), Nicholas Goldberg reports that “Peter Beinart — a Jew who keeps kosher, attends an Orthodox synagogue, is beloved by the liberal intelligentsia and has long been a supporter of two states for two peoples” has likewise announced “concluded that the two-state solution is dead, and that a single state of Jews and Palestinians is a much more promising path to peace. Beinart, a thoughtful and powerful writer who is a former editor of the New Republic, has long been critical of Israel, but has never gone this far.

In an article in Jewish Currents magazine Beinart says the 53-year-old Israeli occupation of the West Bank, continued settlement building and now the threat of partial annexation have made it clear that a two-state solution would mean ‘a fragmented Palestine under de facto Israeli control.’ It is time, he says, to abandon the goal of a separate Palestinian state. While he doesn’t say that a binational, democratic state is the only possible answer (he also mentions the possibility of creating two separate but deeply integrated states), he writes hopefully and encouragingly about a single state in which both peoples would have a home and enjoy equal rights.

It’s obvious why that is so threatening to traditional Zionists: The creation of a single democratic state would inevitably mean the end of the Jewish state as we know it. How could the new country be truly democratic, egalitarian and binational — and officially Jewish at the same time? Beinart suggests that Jews and Israelis begin thinking in terms of a Jewish ‘home’ rather than a Jewish ’state.’” [….] The full column is here.

Essential Reading

• Abunimah, Ali. One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. New York: Holt McDougal, 2007.
• Azoulay, Ariella and Adi Ophir (Tal Haran, trans.) The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.
• Hilal, Jamil, ed. Where Now for Palestine? The Demise of the Two-State Solution. London: Zed Books, 2007.
• Kovel, Joel. Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine. London: Pluto Press, 2007.
• O’Malley, Padraig. The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine—A Tale of Two Narratives. New York: Penguins Books, 2015.

• And see this essay in The Cairo Review of Global Affairs (Winter 2019): “The Case for the One-State Solution,” by Abdel Monem Said Aly.

Finally, see too my compilations on (i) the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and (ii) Zionist ideologies.

Parapraxis/Parapraxes, Freudian “Slips,” or Fehlleistung

“The Garden of Earthly Delights” in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, c. 1495–1505, attributed to Hieronymus Bosch (born Jheronimus van Aken, c. 1450 – 9 August 1516). Click on image to enlarge.

What (some) modern people couldn’t help but notice after Freud, through their symptoms, their dreams, their slips of the tongue and their bungled ambitions—especially modern people who were no longer religious believers—was how unconscious they were, how removed from a clear sense of their own intentions, how determinedly ignorant they were about their pleasure. And, in Freud’s language, this meant how conflicted they were about their appetites, and so how fundamentally divided there were against themselves. As if people no longer knew what was in their best interests or, what their interests were; or indeed whether they had best interests. Modern people could live as if they couldn’t care less about themselves. They would, for example, risk everything or nothing at all for money or for love, for safety or for excitement. It was confounding, after Darwin, to discover that Man, as he was then called, was the animal that deliberately estranged himself from his own nature, that suffered above all, from his capacity for adaptation. In Freud’s account, it had become all too human to adapt (i.e., to assimilate and conform) at the cost of vitality. From a psychoanalytic point of view even the Darwinian facts seemed too simple. Psychoanalysis was to be a therapy in which modern people could work out for themselves what, if anything, mattered most to them: and despite the strictures of science.—Adam Phillips, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (Yale University Press, 2014)

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While taking verbatim notes from a book on psychoanalysis and ethics I twice committed what I would term “Freudian slips,” in this instance, “slips of the pencil” (I always take notes from what I am reading with a mechanical pencil, writing on ‘glue top, 8-1/2 x 11 pads, narrow rule, canary’ paper). I don’t know if the slips had any sort of sub-conscious or unconscious connection with what I am reading: Ernest Wallwork’s uncommonly judicious and incisive analysis and interpretation of Freud’s writings as they concern “psychoanalysis and ethics” (including psychoanalytic ethics for analysis, in the clinic or on the couch) in his book by that title (Yale University Press, 1991), or if it was just a coincidence. While I might later tell you what the two slips were, for now I’d like to share some of my notes on parapraxis/parapraxes, Freudian “Slips,” or Fehlleistung, which includes several dictionary entries (although not in their entirety).

The primary source (although discussed in later works as well): Sigmund Freud (Anthea Bell, trans.), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Penguin Books, 2003 [1901]). As for other important sources in the Freudian corpus, we’ll defer to David Sachs:

“Among Freud’s main works, no others, if they are to be evaluated fairly, demand as much care and tact as The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Nor can one appreciate them without an informed sense of Freud’s two other major works that appeared in the same astonishing half-decade: Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious [also in English as The Joke and Its Relation …] and  Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. The neglected book on jokes is singular for its clear and compelling statement of Freud’s view of the processes of unconscious thought, and the essays on sexuality are indispensable for his view of the materials of unconscious thought, that is, erotic and hostile wishes and resistances to them.”

Parapraxis: “Act whose explicit goal is not attained; instead this goal turns out to have been replaced by another one. When speaking of parapraxes we do not include all failures of memory, speech, or action, but just those acts which the subject is normally able to perform successfully, so that he is inclined to attribute his failure to mere lack of concentration or happenstance. Freud showed that parapraxes, like symptoms, are compromise-formations resulting from the antagonism between the agent’s conscious intentions and what he has repressed. [….]

The German term ‘Fehlleistung’—literally, ‘faulty function’—is understood by Freud as connoting not only acts proper but also all kinds of errors and slips in speech and in mental operations. The German language brings out the common denominator of all these mistakes by giving the prefix ‘ver-‘ to many of the words which describe them: das Vergessen (forgetting), das Versprechen (slip of the tongue), das Verlesen (misreading), das Verschreiben (slip of the pen), das Vergreifen (bungled action), [and] das Verlieren (mislaying).

It is worth noting that before Freud these marginal phenomena of everyday life had never been seen as connected or brought together under one heading—witness the lack of a generic concept for them.” — Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans.), The Language of Psycho-Analysis (Karnac Books, 1988 [Hogarth Press, 1973 and Presses Universitaires de France, 1967])

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“[Examples of parapraxis or the ‘Freudian slip’]: going to the wrong address, speaking the wrong name, or making a wrong statement. Such ‘mistakes,’ Freud explained, were not mere accidents but determined and meaningful acts due to unconscious desires, motives, and conflicts.” — Ross M. Skelton, ed. The Edinburgh International Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis (Edinburgh University Press, 2006)

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Parapraxis: “Errors, slips of the tongue, memory lapses, and the host of manifestations Freud discussed in his book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. They constitute symptomatic acts that are determined by unconscious motives; they are compromise formations between forbidden impulses or ideas and the censorship imposed on them. The principle of psychic determinism is particularly well illustrated in parapraxes.

Repression, which operates in parapraxes, rests on a counter-cathexis. Energy is shifted between ego and id functions, serving to regulate conflict involved in pleasure-seeking, as well as serving to discharge drives. Tendencies particularly subject to conflict involve sexuality, aggression, strength or weakness, and control or lack of control. Parapraxes, like all symptom formations, blend drive, defense, and adaptation.” — Burness E. Moore and Bernard D. Fine, eds. Psychoanalytic Terms and Concepts (American Psychoanalytic Association and Yale University Press, 1990).

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“… [P]arapraxes may be as fruitful for insight as is the analysis of more serious symptoms. Such episodic symptomatic acts usually convey a discrete message about a specific conflict, and they often rather easily yield a hidden message.” — Burness E. Moore and Bernard D. Fine, eds. Psychoanalysis: The Major Concepts (Yale University Press, 1995)

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“A change in a state of being damned up, caused by a neurotic conflict, seems possible only through a break-through of the original impulse or through an intensification of the defense. Actually, however, there is a third possibility which at first glance seems paradoxical: both may occur simultaneously. Compromises are found in which the objectionable impulse finds some substitute outlet, but the substitute outlet may help to ward of the remainders of the original impulse. A part of the damned-up energy is discharged, but in such a way as to intensify the defense against the rest. The typical neurotic symptom expresses drive and defense simultaneously. Slips, errors, and symptomatic acts constitute fairly simple examples wherein the formation of compromises of this sort can be studied in relative isolation.”

“If a person makes a slip of the tongue, it is due to the fact that unconsciously he is somehow resisting what he consciously intended to say. The analysis of a slip discloses what tendency has disturbed the original intention to speak. If a person instead of making a slip of the tongue merely begins to stammer a little, it is obvious that some unconscious motive has disturbed his intention, but we cannot guess what the motive is. If such an occasional stuttering occurs regularly as a response to a specific stimulus, knowledge of the stimulus can used as a starting point for an analysis of the disturbing factor. If, however, a person stammers not only as a reaction to a certain stimuli but does so more or less whenever he talks, the disturbing fact must be rooted in the fact that the very intention to speak has an objectionable significance. Thus some types of occasional stammering may be due to the unconscious instinctual significance of the thing the person is going to say; whereas in severe cases of stuttering the function of speech itself represents an objectionable instinctual impulse.” — Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (W.W. Norton & Co., 1996/1^st ed., 1945)

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“Obviously, if a person knocks down a vase by accident this will not bear any relation to his life and character. But if it is a genuine accident can we describe what is in question as an action or reaction? By a reaction I mean something like slapping someone on the face in anger, bursting into tears on hearing a distressing piece of news, twitching nervously while waiting for an interview, becoming confused, one’s mind going black [or ‘going blank’], forgetting one’s lines, just where one wants to succeed or make a good impression. It is in instances of the latter kind that Freud is not content to rest with such answers as ‘His mind went blank because he was nervous, and he was nervous because so much was at stake for him.’ This may well be true, of course, and the connection in question perfectly intelligible. Still Freud believes that there is room for probing here, a probing in the direction of something more distinctively personal. But need there be some further explanation in every case? Should we never take a statement like the above as the final explanation? Freud’s answer in connection with slips and errors was this: ‘We do not maintain—and for our purposes we do not need to maintain—that every single mistake which occurs has a meaning, although I think that probable. It is enough to prove that such a meaning is relatively frequent in various forms of errors.

Freud explains that by ‘meaning’ he understands ‘significance, intention, tendency and a position in the sequence of mental concatenations.’ Thus when, for instance, the word which a person intended to speak enables a different word to escape him, or when he inadvertently distorts it so that what comes out of his mouth is related to a different word, the word uttered or suggested may express a thought or an affective response which he was checking, though he was not aware of it. Compare with the case where the words which a person speaks in anger may reveal what he really thinks. He may himself be surprised and when he reverts to his everyday slightly deferential attitude, he may dismiss his words as a ‘lapse:’ ‘Those words were spoken in anger, they do not reflect what I think of you.’ Compare with: ‘That was not him; it was the alcohol speaking.’

Freud’s view is that there is a variety of instances in which the truth, in the sense of what a person really thinks or feels, his real reactions or preoccupations, escapes him in unguarded moments, in moments when his powers of attention and self-control are low. It escapes him in words, errors, inadvertent acts, and omissions which may look innocent, so that we are tempted to take them at face value and dismiss them as ‘insignificant’ or ‘trivial.’ We do so because there is no conscious intention on the part of the person in question, because it does not fit in with his conscious thoughts and deliberate actions. Freud’s view is that if we can take a more intimate and comprehensive view of the person, and this would involve a willingness on his part to be conversationally open with us, then we may find that it does fit in. This may change the aspect under which we see it. Such a change of aspect for him involves taking responsibility for certain thoughts and attitudes which, previously, he had been unwilling to own. 

Freud is critical of this kind of dismissiveness: ‘Here, as in still other spheres, determinism reaches farther than we suppose.’ In the previous sentence he makes it clear that an act which seems arbitrary, in the way that an error is arbitrary, is subject to determinism if it is ‘explainable through purposive ideas.’ ‘That there should be uncaused events is unthinkable.’ I commented on this earlier. ‘That there should be innocent slips, errors, or omissions, purely accidental acts, is unthinkable. Freud is inclined to go that way, but he restrains himself, and rightly so: fewer of them are innocent than we suppose. Perhaps his view is that in psycho-analysis we should not assume them innocent until they are proven otherwise, that we should start with the reverse assumption and hold on to it until we have been proven wrong. Perhaps this is the sense of his words: ‘determinism reaches farther than we suppose.” — Ilham Dilman, Freud and the Mind (Basil Blackwell, 1984)

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“Early in this century Freud became convinced that his most persuasive introduction to psychoanalysis was his account of Fehlleistungen, that is, the parapraxes of everyday life: anomalies of memory, slips of the tongue, eye, and pen, bungled actions, and—what to my mind prove most striking—combined parapraxes.

In the Psychopathology, Freud avoids examples that require ‘depth’ psychology. Though he uses the term ‘repression,’ he often employs it interchangeably with ‘suppression.’ In his first two examples he utilizes the technique of free association extensively but in both cases the associations culminate in material that is suppressed rather than repressed. As with those cases, so too with most of the other examples of parapraxes in the Psychopathology: They are not instances of the emergence of deeply ‘repressed’ ideas or affects. Nonetheless, much of the material Freud presents … illustrates basic psychoanalytic tenets. ... [A]mong the phenomena he discusses, combined parapraxes are particularly striking—at least by way of nudging me toward a psychoanalytic viewpoint. Freud’s chapter on them is, however, meager. To help supplement it, I shall briefly discuss certain phenomena closely akin to combined parapraxes, namely, accumulated ones.

Some readers of this piece may have had experiences of roughly the following kind: In the days just before an appointment that a person anticipates with barely felt anxiety, she quite atypically forgets some signal items, say, first, her money purse and, later, her keys. She then—and this too is unusual for her—makes and engagement that, unrealized by her at the time, conflicts with her appointment. She then recalls the latter and tries to postpone it, or recalls it only after the time for keeping it is past.

That sort of example of accumulated parapraxes is, as I have suggested, not unfamiliar. If one inquires among one’s acquaintances, one may learn of a number of examples similar to it. The one I have sketched—drawn from an actual case—is of some evidential value in the following ways: First, in pointing to a disposition to more felt anxiety about the appointment than was actually experienced—a disposition that helps explain the resistance to keeping the appointment; second, the odd forgetting of the signal items, episodes emblematic of the resistance, trenches on the symbolism that Freud, though hardly the first to notice, was the first to employ systematically. In the Psychopathology, Freud often adverts to that symbolism. [….] When Freud states how he came to know the meaning of the symbols, he does not depend on clinical findings. The position is rather the revers:

‘[W]e learn it from very different sources—from fairy tales and myths, form buffoonery and jokes, from folklore [that is, from knowledge about popular manners and customs, sayings and songs) and from poetic and colloquial linguistic usage. [….] If we go into these sources in detail, we should find so many parallels to dream symbolism we cannot fail to be convinced of our interpretations.’

[….] On Freud’s conception, combined parapraxes concur and in some cases cooperate in trying to fulfill the same wish. Accumulated parapraxes—as I am using the phrase—repeatedly express or allude to a wish and may also work toward fulfilling it. (In my example of accumulated parapraxes, the appointment the woman forgot was with a gynecologist and concerned a question charged with anxiety.) Single parapraxes either try to fulfill a wish or express or allude to it.” — David Sachs, “In fairness to Freud: A critical notice of The Foundations of Psychoanalysis, by Adolf Grünbaum,” in Jerome Neu, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Freud (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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For a withering critique of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of parapraxis, one which I think is profoundly misguided and thus mistaken, see Sebastiano Timpanaro (Kate Soper, trans.), The Freudian Slip: Psychoanalysis and Textual Criticism (Verso, 1976).

See too: (i) Marxism and Freudian Psychology bibliography, (ii) Freudian and Post-Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory and Therapy: An Incipient “Science of Subjectivity” and Therapeutic Model, (iii) Psychoanalytic Psychology Beyond the Color Line: A Select Bibliography; and (iv) Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy: A Select Bibliography of Secondary Literature.-

Peggy Noonan: The Bitter with the Sweet

I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. The news reporting is excellent. The Saturday features are terrific. But I ordinarily ignore the ignominious editorial pages except for Peggy Noonan.

She is sometimes infuriating; sometimes insightful; never boring. Last week, she was infuriating and insightful. On the racial issue. She distinguished between faculty lounge Robespierres - racial radicals (apparently the Democrats) and those who will side with Senator Tim Scott (the only Republican African-American Senator) in believing that the U.S. is not a racist country and that racism is a vice. No shades of grey; no acknowledgement that Republicans have campaigned for years on coded racial appeals.

Having established herself as willfully blind to the realities of Republican politics, she proceeds in rousing rhetoric to decimate the “sage of Mar-a-Lago.” He is a “waning figure”; his unfavorable ratings are 15% higher than his favorable ratings; a majority of Republicans said they favored the party over Trump; 44% were the other way around; he is losing air like a deflated balloon from a Thanksgiving Day Parade; and my favorite line: in running in fear from him, Republican politicians “are running from a corpse.”  

With Peggy Noonan, you take the bitter with the sweet.

Thinking about causation: here, there, and everywhere

“What we call a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact (unlike the bird). Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.”

“Our tendency to perceive –to impose—narrativity and causality—are symptoms of the same disease: dimension reduction.”

“We have to accept the fuzziness of the familiar ‘because’ no matter how queasy it makes us feel (and it does make us queasy to remove the analgesic illusion of causality). I repeat that we are explanation-seeking animals who tend to think that everything has an identifiable cause and grab the most apparent as the explanation. Yet there may not be a visible because; to the contrary, frequently there is nothing, not even a spectrum of possible explanations. But silent evidence masks this fact. [….] Note here that I am not saying causes do not exist; do not use this argument to avoid trying to learn from history. All I am saying is that it is not so simple; be suspicious of the ‘because’ and handle it with care—particularly in situations where you suspect silent evidence. [….] We have seen several varieties of the silent evidence that cause deformations in our perception of empirical reality, making it appear more explainable (and more stable) than it actually is. In addition to the confirmation error [or bias] and the narrative fallacy, the manifestations of silent evidence further distort the role and importance of Black Swans.”— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Random House, 2^nd ed., 2010)

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“It is perfectly possible that certain psychological phenomena cannot be identified physiologically, because physiologically nothing corresponds to them. Why should there not be a psychological regularity to which no physiological regularity corresponds? If this upsets our concepts of causality, then it is high time they were upset.”— Ludwig Wittgenstein

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I often forget (and thus neglect) how incredibly complex the notion of causation (i.e., cause and effect, including companion notions of ‘causal relata’ and ‘causal relations,’  ‘constant conjunction,’ ‘necessary connection,’ ‘determination,’ ‘over-determination,’ ‘relations,’ ‘dependence,’ ‘interdependence,’ ‘contiguity,’ ‘mechanisms, ‘chains,’ ‘feedback loops,’ etc.) can be and often is. It came to mind again while learning about “psychic determinism” in Freudian metapsychology and theory (see the two references in ‘E’ below). I will say more about that later. For now, I think it helps to begin with a taste of the myriad sources that might convey—and enable—us to deeply appreciate the aforementioned complexity of causality. In this instance, the sources are conspicuously idiosyncratic insofar as I’ve not made any systematic investigation of this concept in either philosophy or science. Some of the entries under “causation” in the (online) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy are rather intimidating for non-philosophers, so I’ll avoid those but that should not prevent you from satisfying your curiosity or interest (if only because you might not find them intimidating!). For the philosophically inclined or curious, I recommend beginning with the entry on “The Metaphysics of Causation.” The sources I’ve selected to guide further explorations are (A) Indian Philosophy, (B) the philosophy of Hume, (C) Criminal and Tort Law, (D) Natural and Social Sciences, and (E) Freudian Psychoanalysis.

(A) I start in a non-standard fashion, with notions of causation (beginning with the concepts of satkāryavāda and asatkāryavāda) in Indian philosophy. Perhaps the best (‘perhaps’ because I cannot claim mastery of the relevant literature) introduction is found in Karl H. Potter’s classic work, Presuppositions of India’s Philosophies (Motilal Banarsidass, 1991 [1963]), in particular, the four chapters that commence with chapter 6, “Freedom and Causation” (pp. 93-185). For the Buddhist tradition in particular, see (i) David J. Kalupahana’s Causality: The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (University Press of Hawaii, 1975), (ii) Amber D. Carpenter, Indian Buddhist Philosophy (Acumen, 2014 [see ‘causation’ in the Index]), (iii) Jay L. Garfield, Engaging Buddhism: Why it Matters to Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2015 [again, see ‘causation’ in the Index]), and (iv) Padmasiri de Silva, An Introduction to Buddhist Psychology (Palgrave Macmillan, 4^th ed., 2005).

(B) For Western philosophy, I will limit myself to David Hume, because many of the arguments here revolve around what philosophers have written—and argued—about Hume’s ideas on causation. Once more, idiosyncrasy is the rule: (i) Jay Garfield, The Concealed Influence of Custom: Hume’s Treatise from the Inside Out (Oxford University Press, 2019), (ii) Paul Russell, Freedom and Sentiment: Hume’s Way of Naturalizing Responsibility (Oxford University Press, 1995), (iii) Constantine Sandis, Character and Causation: Hume’s Philosophy of Action (Routledge, 2019), (iv) Galen Strawson, The Evident Connexion: Hume on Personal Identity (Oxford University Press, 2011), (v) Galen Strawson, The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism, and David Hume (Oxford University Press, 2014 ed.), and (vi) Barry Stroud, Hume (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977).

(C) Causation is also of course prominent in law and legal theory and philosophy, especially in the areas of criminal and tort law. Here is a very limited—but I hope representative—sample of the literature: (i) Peter Cane, Responsibility in Law and Morality (Hart Publishing, 2002), (ii) Peter Cane and John Gardner, eds., Relating to Responsibility: Essays in Honour of Tony Honoré on his 80^th Birthday (Hart Publishing, 2001), (iii) John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, S.J., Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (Cambridge University Press, 1998), (iv) H.L.A. Hart and Tony Honoré, Causation in the Law (Oxford University Press, 2^nd ed., 1985), (v) Michael S. Moore, Causation and Responsibility: An Essay in Law, Morals, and Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2009), (vi) Moore’s Placing Blame: A General Theory of the Criminal Law (Oxford University Press, 1997), and (vii) David G. Owen, Philosophical Foundations of Tort Law (Oxford University Press, 1995).

(D) For the natural and social sciences there is, not surprisingly, a fairly large body of literature one might cite, so once more I highlight titles I’m fond of for one reason or another: (i) Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science (Cambridge University Press, 1999) [She signed my copy of this book at a conference at our college some years ago!], (ii) Nancy Cartwright and Eleonora Montushci, eds., Philosophy of Social Science: A New Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2014), (iii) John Dupré, Human Nature and the Limits of Science (Oxford University Press, 2001), (iv) Jon Elster, Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2007), (v) Peter Galison and David J. Stump, eds. The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power (Stanford University Press, 1996), (vi) Ronald N. Giere, Science without Laws (University of Chicago Press, 1999), (vii) Richard W. Miller, Fact and Method: Explanation, Confirmation and Reality in the Natural and the Social Sciences (Princeton University Press, 1987), (viii) John D. Norton, “Causation as Folk Science” (2003), (ix) John D. Norton, “How Not to Think About Causation,” (2019), (x) Nicholas Rescher, Nature and Understanding: The Metaphysics and Method of Science (Oxford University Press, 2000), and (xi) Paul Thagard, How Scientists Explain Disease (Princeton University Press, 1999).

(E) Here I will cite but two titles, the first, because it so thoroughly treats—and well defends—Freud’s oft-misunderstood notion of “psychic determinism” and the related charges of strict or hard determinism frequently levied against him; and the second, because it has excellent essays about the larger background and context of this topic in psychoanalysis with regard to philosophy and science: (i) Ernest Wallwork, Psychoanalysis and Ethics (Yale University Press, 1991) [see chapters 3, “The Determinism—Free Will Problem,” and 4, “Reconciling the Paradox: Psychic Determinism and Moral Responsibility,” pp. 49-100], and (ii) Simon Boag, Linda A.W. Brackel, and Vesa Talvitie, eds. Philosophy, Science, and Psychoanalysis (Karnac Books, 2015/Routledge, 2018).

I want to conclude first by noting the fact that “psychic determinism” (wherein, for example, drives, motives, passions, and reasons have causal powers) is common to both Buddhism and Freudian psychoanalysis, hence one reason for the many works that compare the two with regard to philosophy of mind, psychology, and therapy. It is also central to Pātañjala Yoga (especially as it involves guna theory and karmic dispositions), but this is provocative material for another day. Finally, I am not encouraging any unifying or tidy inferences from these disparate domains as to the nature of causation, or anything necessarily common to the manner in which it is conceived in our sources. Indeed, perhaps a contrary and preliminary conclusion would suggest there are different kinds of causation, with each more or less suited to its particular domain, hence a number of pragmatic conceptions of cause and effect, cause and consequence.

Addendum: I thought to share one example of a doctrine in Buddhism that illustrates the cause-and-effect links in a chain (from birth to death to rebirth...) so as to account for the several causes of “suffering.” The Buddhist Doctrine of Dependent Origination* (P.) paticca-samuppāda / (S.) pratītya-samutpāda

“That being given, this comes to be; from the birth of that, this is born. That not being given, this does not come to be; from the cessation of that, this ceases.” — The Buddha

Conditioned by (1) ignorance [avidyā/avijjā] are (2) formations or karmic predispositions [samskāras], conditioned by formations is (3) consciousness [vijñāna/viññāna], conditioned by consciousness is (4) mind-and-body or name-and-form [nāma-rūpa/skandhas/kandhas], conditioned by mind-and-body are (5) the six sense fields (6 organs, 6 objects, and 6 kinds of sense consciousness) [sadāyatana/salāyatana], conditioned by the six sense fields is (6) sense-contact [sparśa/phassa], conditioned by sense-contact is (7) feeling [vedanā], conditioned by feeling is (8) craving, or inordinate or improper desire [trsna/tanhā], conditioned by craving is (9) grasping [upādāna], conditioned by grasping is (10) becoming [bhava], conditioned by becoming is (11) birth [jāti], conditioned by birth is (12) decay and death [jarāmaranam].

There are thus (in this version) 12 links to this chain of causal conditioning. Nos. 1 and 2 assume a past life and karmic process; nos. 3 through 9 refer to the conditioning of the present existence; nos. 8 – 9 to the “fruits” of the present existence that assure the production of karma for most of us, and nos. 10—12  (future ‘fruit’) to a life to come. Nos. 11—12 could be said to “contain” or are shorthand for nos. 1 – 9 or 10. The conditions in the chain are representative and significant—thus not an exhaustive list of—causes. Minimally, therefore, there are at least 3 lifetimes depicted by this schema, although it has also been understood to imply or suggest more than 3 lifetimes, as a fourth life begins anew after no. 12 and then….

What, from a Buddhist perspective, are the two “strongest” (or ‘master’) links of the chain—insofar as they assure the solidity or continuity of the chain of rebirth? At the same time, albeit from another vantage point, they might also be described as the “weakest” links—at least insofar as the Buddhist concentrates on overcoming these by way of ethical conduct, meditation, and wisdom (the triune structure of the Eightfold Path)?

An individual person’s physical and mental make-up comprises five groups of conditions and functions: (1) “form” (rūpā), physical objects, here, a body; (2) “feelings” (vedanā), pleasant, unpleasant and neutral, what in contemporary philosophy might be termed cognitive qualia; (3) “perceptions” (samjña/saññā), recognition of sensory/mental objects and qualia, and which, as in empiricism, allow for ideas and concepts to be formed; (4) “mental fabrications” (samskāra/sankhārā), thoughts, volition, intentions and desires, personality traits; and (5) “consciousness” (vijñāna/viññāna), awareness of objects specific to each sensory or mental modality. These five “heaps” or “aggregates” are known as skandhas (khandhās). It is just this that we typically infer to be the “self,” mistakenly conceived of as permanent, an enduring substance that underlies experience:

“Thus Buddhist thought suggests that as an individual I am a complex flow of physical and mental phenomena, but peel away these phenomena and look behind them and one just does not find a constant self that one can call one’s own. My sense of self is both logically and emotionally just a label that I impose on these physical and mental phenomena in consequence of their connectedness. In other words, the idea of a self as a constant unchanging thing behind the variety of experience is just a product of linguistic usage and the particular way in which certain physical and mental phenomena are experienced as connected. “—From Rupert Gethin’s The Foundations of Buddhism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998

The individual subject’s tendency to identify (separately and collectively) with—or get their sense of personal identity from—the skandhas (khandhās) stems from ignorance (avidyā/avijjā) and gives rise in the first place to inordinate desire or even desire simpliciter (trsna/tanhā).

One helpful exposition in English of the “no-self” anātman (anattā) doctrine is Steven Collins’ Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravāda Buddhism (Cambridge University Press, 1982). I think the best philosophical discussion of the doctrine, however, is Miri Albahari’s Analytical Buddhism: The Two-Tiered Illusion of Self (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

The five skandhas are in effect conditioned by the (‘Kantian’) parameters or modalities of space, time, quality, and relation. Nirvāna (nibbāna), on the other hand, is unconditioned by these parameters, as it is untouched by the “three marks of existence” (trilaksana): anitya (aniccā) or impermanence, duhkhā (dukkhā) or suffering, and anātman (anattā) or no-self.

The Doctrine of Dependent Origination implies several different propositions insofar as it claims that any object of experience depends for its existence or occurrence on the necessary and sufficient presence of its cause:

1. that all conventional phenomena have an origin;
2. that their existence depends on causes;
3. that causes operate in networks;
4. that causes operate inevitably, uniformly, and spontaneously

[The following quotations and paraphrased material is taken (with some editing) from G.C. Pande’s essay, ‘Causality in Buddhist Philosophy,’ in Eliot Deutsch and Ron Bontekoe, eds. A Companion to World Philosophies (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997): 370-80.]

Thus the Principle of Dependent Origination refers not only to the general theory of causation, which is intimately bound up with the dialectical negation of the metaphysics of substance, but also to its application to the chain of human suffering ultimately grounded in the illusion of substance—especially the illusion of the ego-substance. Believing in its own individual and enduring reality, the ego invests the objects of experience with a similar reality and thus engages in action of desire and aversion for what is unreal.

• Logically, the theory explains causality as a functional relation in which the presence and absence of the cause imply the presence and absence respectively of the effect.
• Metaphysically, it denies the substantiality of cause and effect, affirming that they are no more than sequentially ordered functional composita.
• Psychologically, it replaces the notion of a permanent individual soul-substance with that of a stream of consciousness determined by immanent causality rooted in the concatenation of conative (karmic impulses or inclinations/predispositions) factors culminating in volition.
• Ethically, it affirms the moral quality of volition or free will, as voluntary action determines the hedonic (i.e., painful pleasurable, or neutral) quality of subsequent experience.

Sangharakshita says this doctrine is the “primary formulation of the Buddha’s Enlightenment on the intellectual plane, it is the historical and logical basis of all later developments in Buddhist philosophy.” In the Mahāyāna Buddhist schools, dependent origination is characterized by “emptiness” (śūnyatā) meaning the lack of “inherent” existence or essential being (among other things). This emptiness is not “nothingness” but the real mode of being of things, as cause and effect, identity and difference, entity and non-entity function within a cohesive system or complex, interconnected world of dependent origination. As Thupten Jinpa says, dependent origination and emptiness might be thought of as two sides of the same coin. We might ask ourselves at this point how all of this relates to the possibility of nirvāna/nibbāna, defined as the subject’s experience of a liberated or unconditioned mind, the phenomenal character of which is characterized in terms of immeasurable peace and true happiness, “completely untainted by the presence or possibility of mental duhkhā/dukkhā.” 

* The term “dependent origination” can be misleading for, as Buddhaghosa, one of the early and great philosophers of Buddhism pointed out, the emphasis of this doctrine is “not on origination (uppāda) but on conditions and relations.”

See too the entry on pratītyasamutpāda in Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr., The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (Princeton University Press, 2014): 669-670.

Psychoanalysis, Ethicists, and Moral Psychology

       

“In the writings of such once popular writers as Erich Fromm, Philip Rieff, Herbert Marcuse, and Erik Erikson, one looks in vain for clarity as to the precise issues in ethics that psychoanalysis is capable of illuminating. [….] [P]hilosophical ethicists have not been particularly interested in psychoanalysis by and large. Those few philosophers who have studied psychoanalysis sympathetically and in depth (e.g., [Paul] Ricoeur, Jürgen Habermas, [Richard] Wollheim) have been concerned only incidentally with its ethical import. To be sure, Richard Rorty has recently drawn out what he takes to be the ethical implications of psychoanalysis, but his views are based more on an impressionistic reading of how Freud supports his own post-modernist moral pragmatism than on careful study of what Freud actually holds. In the writing of most ethicists, Freud, if he is mentioned at all, is treated as the chief modern enemy of morality, whose work is best ignored or flatly condemned in the process of getting on with the task of doing traditional moral philosophy, unimpeded by the sort of depth-psychological considerations that have transformed everyday morality outside the academy.” — Ernest Wallwork, Psychoanalysis and Ethics (Yale University Press, 1991)

Although written thirty years ago, Wallwork’s remarks remain, unfortunately, largely true, but with some notable exceptions having since surfaced. First, however, permit me to point out that Wollheim published a couple of works after this was written which suggest that he was more than “incidentally” concerned with the ethical significance of psychoanalysis. As for the exceptions, and while they are not, strictly speaking and apart from Michael Stocker, from the pens of prominent ethicists or moral philosophers, such philosophers as Ilham Dilman, J. David Velleman, John Deigh, Michael Stocker, John Cottingham, Jonathan Lear, and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty have delved deeply into the ethical ramifications and implications of psychoanalysis, each in their own inimitable fashion and thus all worth your attention should this subject interest you. Until the rise of “virtue” and “care” ethics (and the resuscitation of Scottish Enlightenment philosophers), contemporary philosophers specializing in ethics and moral philosophy virtually ignored moral psychology and so it should not be surprising that “depth-psychological considerations” were neglected as well. This specific neglect of psychoanalysis might have warranted an entire chapter in Stephen Gaukroger’s The Failures of Philosophy: An Historical Essay (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Should you want a fairly short argument on behalf of the need to integrate psychoanalytic theory and therapy into (philosophical) ethics, I recommend John Cottingham’s treatment of the principal issues in the section, “Psychoanalysis and the Ethical Domain,” from his book, Philosophy and the Good Life: Reason and the Passions in Greek, Cartesian and Psychoanalytic Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1998): 131-166. As Cottingham says,

“In its initial challenge to reason, and in the hope it offers for a new kind of self-understanding, the psychoanalytic approach has inevitable implications for the traditional enterprise of philosophical ethics. Ever since Socrates, the [Western] philosophical enterprise has been seen as involving some element of self-examination [this was an early component of philosophies in Asia as well], and there is a sense in which psychoanalytic theory simply carries that process forward, albeit in a more radically introspective fashion. Ultimately, I believe, it is a mistake to think there is a fundamental discontinuity between psychoanalytic and philosophical modes of searching for the good life [to be sure, however, the aims of the former are often far more modest and limited than those of the latter mode].”

All of this is perfectly compatible with Dilman’s conclusion that “Freud’s whole idea of morality is crude and riddled with philosophical confusion,” as it is not Freud’s specific conception of morality that defines the values and practices of psychoanalysis relevant to ethics as Dilman himself and several of the philosophers listed above attest. Yet we would be remiss should we fail to neglect the fact that, in Wallwork’s words, psychoanalysts has failed generally “to appreciate the rigorous analytic and logical work of contemporary ethicists,” … [thus] not avail[ing] themselves of important intellectual resources for assessing the adequacy of their own high controversial assumptions about the nature and grounding of morality.” Here our focus is on what contemporary ethics might and should learn from psychoanalytic theorizing that falls under the heading of that subdivision within philosophy termed “philosophy of mind,” this entails psychoanalytic therapy’s contribution to philosophical ethics as well as a person’s ability to get her bearings in daily life from a moral and ethical compass. With regard to psychoanalytic therapy (the contribution of which to ethics can be distinguished from psychoanalytic theory proper), for example, the patient or analysand is offered

“… something new; that is, he learns something new about himself from the relationship [with the analyst] and this involves learning new attitudes and new values. The values in question may not be new to him at all, but he learns what it means to keep faith with them and the difficulties this involves. In the process he develops a regard for them he did not have before. One of these values is [variously termed] independence, self-reliance, freedom or autonomy. He learns to establish himself in his relationships with others on a more equal footing. He gives up his false attitudes towards them, exaggerated attitudes of false modesty and of false pride. He learns to consider and respect others without fearing to displease them. He learns to be open with them, to listen to them, without fearing to think for himself and be what he is. Above all, he learns to be close to the people for whom he cares without seeking to merge his identity with theirs or to incorporate theirs into his. This, at the same time is coming to value individual autonomy [which is rooted in moral psychological autonomy].

Certainly, in psychoanalysis the patient learns self-respect and the courage to be himself. But he also learns to respect others, to be giving in his relationships, and to value generosity. Winnicott’s notion of ‘mature dependence’ captures well the balance between these two values which can come into conflict with each other. Put it like this: on the one hand the patient comes to learn the value of independence and of relationships in which others recognize his separateness and respect him as an individual, while on the other hand he learns to acknowledge the value of a life of contact and give and take with others, enriched by affection, humour, concern, and sustained by loyalty.

Analysis, when it works, enables him to grow out of infantile and selfish orientations, particularly in his most intimate relationships. Many of the feelings and attitudes in question, such as greed, envy and jealousy, are such as to keep him in bondage and curtail his autonomy. With luck, what he discovers in himself and the support he finds in the analytic relationship help him to ‘grow out’ of such attitudes and develop a different orientation. This liberates him from cravings that thrust the self to the centre of the stage, cravings of an ego that has remained weak, hungry, and infantile. It also enables him to realize what he values for itself.

Authenticity, honesty or being truthful with oneself and others; autonomy or the freedom to be oneself, to think for oneself and act on one’s own behalf; respect and concern for others, the ability to establish relationships of affection, loyalty, and friendship; creativity, however modest, in the pursuit of one’s interests, and all the attendant capacities such as initiative, trust and generosity are the central qualities which are valued in the kind of orientation implicit in a psychoanalytic approach and promoted by psychoanalytic therapy [emphasis added]. Such qualities of characters as manipulativeness, domineeringness, vanity, cruelty, servility, meanness, egocentricity, possessiveness, mere conformity, all attitudes that are false or compulsive, such as certain forms of submissiveness or overbearingness, and such traits as signal a failure to attain certain standards of character, such as irresponsibility, fickleness and cowardice, are viewed with disfavour in the light of these values. The ‘authoritarian’ attitude, to which both Fromm and Money-Kyrle refer, is seen as violating some of these values, particularly those of individual autonomy, criticism, and independence of thought.” From Ilham Dilman’s Freud: Insight and Change (Basil Blackwell, 1988)

Further Reading

Please see my short article on “Freudian and Post-Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory and Therapy: An Incipient ‘Science of Subjectivity’ and Therapeutic Model,” and this bibliography for secondary literature on “Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy.”

David Hume & Denis Diderot: philosophers … and writers

       

As invariably happens, when doing the research for a bibliography (in this case, on the European Enlightenment) I come across titles on persons or subjects that I’ve not known about or, if familiar by title or renown, I’ve yet to read at any length or with proper care (in some cases of course, I simply was or am not sufficiently interested). Thus the life and especially works of two such individuals has provoked and intrigued me in ways I have not anticipated. The first, David Hume,¹ some of whose works I read breezily (!) in graduate school, never inspired me, likely because I was distracted by thoughts and things in those days rather outside the orbit of Hume’s concerns. The second, Denis Diderot,² I’ve long been drawn to, but never found the time to look at in depth, in part because I was not confident about the secondary literature on him: what I learned about Diderot was in the larger context of more general studies of the Enlightenment or Enlightenment topics (e.g., French salons and Encyclopédie…).  At a later date I will discuss some of Hume’s philosophy which I’ve grown fond of, especially his thoughts and observations on human psychology. As for Diderot, I’ll cite a recent study among several others I’m reading that stands apart in  conspicuous and surprising respects which I will address at a later date: Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s Prose of the World: Denis Diderot and the Periphery of Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2021).

Some readers may be puzzled by the fact that neither of these philosophers were, to put it mildly, religious. But for those of us who are ardent religious believers or spiritually minded or disposed, it is important to appreciate the reasons why others do not share (or may be averse or even hostile) to our worldviews, as well as the acknowledge the fact that many of these individuals from around the world have made and continue to make remarkable and lasting contributions to humanity, to education, the arts, and profoundly civil society, whatever their individual worldviews, not infrequently owing to a humanistic or moral cosmopolitanism of one kind or another, be it incipient, implied, or avowed. The spiritual Left and the—for want of a better term—secular Left, are brothers and sisters in the struggle for justice in general, and liberté, égalité, and fraternité in particular (here is where we can incarnate our more modest version of the Rawlsian ‘overlapping consensus,’ one which may contribute to society’s larger and more arduous Liberal and democratic realization of same with regard to its political pursuit of justice). Yet being religious is no guarantee that one has an abiding moral or ethical orientation or living an ethically infused life in the daily round. That said, our proceedings should turn out quite different in tone and temperament from that of the “new atheists” or the evangelistic materialist and naturalist philosophies (metaphysics) that animate more than a few contemporary professional philosophers (both parties, which of course overlap, act in a manner akin to a missionary or missionizing impulse).

       

Although Diderot is well regarded as an Enlightenment philosophe, it should be noted that he is today not widely acknowledged as a “philosopher,” at least as assessed by the criterial standards of professional philosophers:

“Despite the obvious sophistication of Diderot’s philosophy, his legacy has suffered because of the historical differences separating his writings from the discipline of philosophy as it is practiced today. Enlightenment philosophie was something very different from what professional academic philosophers mean by that term today, and Diderot’s writings are often ignored by modern philosophers because they do not appear to be philosophy as they know it. Like many Enlightenment philosophes, Diderot also worked as an homme de lettres first and foremost, and only as a philosopher narrowly construed in certain instances. He also never authored any recognizable work of ‘systematic philosophy’ if by that term we mean writing in the vein of his contemporaries such as David Hume in his Treatise or Immanuel Kant in his Critiques.” — from the SEP entry on Diderot by Charles T. Wolfe

Perhaps needless to say, my conception of philosophy is capacious enough to call Diderot a philosopher.

Notes

1. “David Hume (May 7 [April 26, Old Style] 1711— August 25, 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism.” He is “[g]enerally regarded as one of the most important philosophers to write in English.” A master stylist in any genre, his major philosophical works—A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740), the Enquiries concerning Human Understanding (1748), An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), as well as his posthumously published Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779)—remain widely and deeply influential.”
2. “Denis Diderot (5 October 1713 – 31 July 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the Encyclopédie along with Jean le Rond d’Alembert. He was a prominent figure during the Age of Enlightenment.”

On Hume: Here is the list of secondary literature on Hume I am working my way through. There is a bias toward later works, so if anyone knows one or more older titles (‘classics’) believed indispensable, please share with us:

• Ainslie, Donald C. and Annmarie Butler, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Hume’s Treatise (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
• Garfield, Jay L. The Concealed Influence of Custom: Hume’s Treatise from the Inside Out (Oxford University Press, 2019).
• Hardin, Russell. David Hume: Moral and Political Theorist (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
• Harris, James A. Hume: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
• Merrill, Thomas W. Hume and the Politics of Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
• Norton, David Fate, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Hume (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
• Pears, D.F., ed. David Hume: A Symposium (Macmillan, 1966).
• Russell, Paul. Freedom and Sentiment: Hume’s Way of Naturalizing Responsibility (Oxford University Press, 1995).
• Sandis, Constantine. Character and Causation: Hume’s Philosophy of Action (Routledge, 2019).
• Sinhababu, Neil. Humean Nature: How desire explains action, thought, and feeling (Oxford University Press, 2017).
• Strawson, Galen. The Evident Connexion: Hume on Personal Identity (Oxford University Press, 2011).
• Strawson, Galen. The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism, and David Hume (revised ed., Oxford University Press, 2014).
• Stroud, Barry. Hume (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977).

On Diderot: This list for secondary literature on Diderot is even shorter than the one for Hume, largely because I’ve confined it to works in English. Still, for many of us, these works should suffice as an even-handed introduction that can at least be used as a starting-point should one want to do more in-depth reading and research, including the material in French.

• App, Urs. “Diderot’s Buddhist Brahmins,” in App’s The Birth of Orientalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010): 133-187.
• Blom, Philipp. Enlightening the World: Encyclopédie, the Book That Changed the Course of History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
• Blom, Philipp. A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment (Basic Books, 2010).
• Blum, Carol. Diderot: The Virtue of a Philosopher (Viking Press, 1974).
• Brewer, Daniel. The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France: Diderot and the Art of Philosophizing (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
• Curran, Andrew S. Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely (Other Press, 2019).
• Furbank, P.N. Diderot: A Critical Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).
• Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Prose of the World: Denis Diderot and the Periphery of Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 2021).
• Wilson, Arthur M. Diderot (Oxford University Press, 1972).
• Wolfe, Charles T. “Diderot and Materialist Theories of the Self,” Society and Politics, 9(1): 75–94. Available: https://socpol.uvvg.ro/diderot-and-materialist-theories-of-the-self/ (click on ‘read more’ and the pdf version of the article will appear).
• Wolfe, Charles T. and J.B. Shank, “Denis Diderot,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/diderot/
  

See too: The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert — Collaborative Translation Project, a labor of love for which we should all be grateful.

“And all I gotta do is act naturally” — from Buck Owens’ song, Act Naturally (although he did not write it)

On an existential level, when we recognize the extent to which our lives are molded by social constructs, we become able to free ourselves from a type of emotional entanglement that disturbs our tranquility. The social ambitions that motivate us—money, wealth, power, privilege—lose their grip, become less influential. Other possibilities for a flourishing life may emerge, not determined by manipulative actions and its attendant desires. With the diminishing of the hold of desires and conceptual constructs, one’s mode of engagement with the world will be more accommodating, allowing events to happen without attachment to outcome. Thus the loosening of artifice goes hand in hand with the cultivation of a sort of indifference toward worldly success and failure. — Steve Coutinho

Some people are only funny when they try to be serious. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nothing makes it so difficult to be natural as the desire to be so. — La Rochefoucauld

*           *           *

My late dear brother, Brian, once took an undergraduate course on Zen Buddhism that affected him deeply, although perhaps not in the way one might expect (he did not become very interested in either Buddhism in general or even Zen in particular). What he took away from the class—as we might say—was the importance of living spontaneously, or “in the moment,” not unlike what Ram Dass famously implored his readers: “be here now,” which is perhaps more about being scrupulously aware or attentive than about trying, as it were, to live in the moment (I’m inclined to label this admonition, like ‘willing what cannot be willed,’ a pragmatic contradiction). I vividly recall his happy announcement to me (in more or less these words): “From now on I am going to act spontaneously,” which upon hearing I laughed heartily, although I did not have the heart to explain to him that that made no sense, for one cannot will spontaneous behavior (yet my dear brother’s desire had noble precedent, for as Elster reminds us, Stendhal’s diary reveals almost identical obsession with ‘becoming natural’).

Indeed. This is an illustration of that mental fallacy Jon Elster, after the late psychologist Leslie Farber, termed “willing what cannot be willed” (that is, in reference to those mental state or states of affairs in the world—like spontaneity or sleep—that cannot be the direct product of willing but are rather the—indirect—outcome or by-product effect of other mental states or actions).¹ And yet, in Daoism, for example, we learn that one can engage in an “intentional project” to “be natural,” which in this case is characterized as wu-wei (lit., non-action). Livia Kohn’s entry on this concept from The Encyclopedia of Taoism provides us with a succinct formulation: “Wuwei or ‘non-action’ means to do things the natural way, by not interfering with the patterns, rhythms and structure of nature, without imposing one’s own intentions upon the world.”² The “natural way” is not meant here in the sense of how most of us, most of the time, “naturally” behave or act (which may be a function of habit, mindlessness or inattentiveness) but has a more specific or technical meaning depending on the way in which the natural world is said to be intrinsically in harmony with or expressive of (in an immanent sense) of the Dao. Thus wu-wei is not, literally, non-action but refers instead to a qualitatively distinct and uncommon kind of action, what the late Huston Smith called “creative quietude,” meaning one acts with a still or clear (‘unmuddied’) mind in a manner that embodies or incarnates or exemplifies the Dao. Such action is characterized by a freedom and spontaneity (ziran) that arise from a heart-mind experiencing, it seems, an ecstatic or blissful oneness (or simply a kind of contentedness) with “all-there-is.” It is the characteristic and conspicuous action of the sage (shengren) and the ideal ruler in the political realm and is, arguably, a direct product of ascetic praxis and mystical states of consciousness. In short, wu-wei is acting with a meditative heart-mind (like a polished mirror, to use a prominent metaphor) in harmony with the natural world and tian while instantiating the Dao.

Ascetic self-discipline or “spiritual exercises,” training in the arts, and meditative praxis are necessary yet not sufficient conditions for wu-wei. In other words, while it is true that “making every effort,” “striving,” “working hard” or even “willing” are, in one important sense, truly the antithesis of wu-wei, arduous striving, self-discipline and training the mind are no less integral to the eventual accomplishment of wu-wei! The “acting naturally” that is wu-wei, therefore, does not come naturally to us, hence we are instructed, by way of an “intentional project,” to “return to the uncarved block,” dampen the passions and still the mind, all by way of attaining a “second” nature in Joel Kupperman’s sense,³ as this requires forms of self-discipline and self-knowledge that are arduous, that involve ascetic or ascetic-like training of the body and the heart-mind (i.e., reason and the emotions). Thus for human beings to act “naturally” in the Daoist sense entails acquiring a “second” nature that is attained indirectly, as a by-product of mental and behavioral dispositions, or mental states and actions that are not “willful,” as when, say, we set out to satisfy our first order desires or instrumentally achieve our ends. The intentional project is fulfilled over an unspecified period of time during which we are engaged in the sorts of practices the Daoist recommends (or hints at) that are necessary but not necessarily sufficient conditions for “acting naturally,” to wu-wei. Only then are we capable of acting in a timely fashion with the consummate skill, grace and spontaneity befitting alike the exigencies of daily situations and unique circumstance, and this in a manner indicative of our ability to “be,” so to speak, one with Dao. In sum, acting naturally in the Daoist sense means cultivating what for us does not come naturally, and thus self-cultivation brings about, so to speak, a second nature, a nature in accord with the natural world, one in which a person has acquired the capability to act spontaneously and effortlessly, a state in which one’s personal judgment coheres with the exigencies of a situation, be these practical, moral, spiritual (perhaps a combination thereof) what have you.

Notes

1. See Elster’s Sour Grapes: studies in the subversion of rationality (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983): 43-66.
2. Livia Kohn, “wuwei,” Fabrizio Pregadio, ed., The Encyclopedia of Taoism, vol. II (New York: Routledge, 2008): 1067. Notice the definition refers to not imposing one’s intentions on the world, suggesting the possibility that an “intentional project” in the extended temporal sense outlined by Fraser in his review of Slingerland’s Effortless Action (2003), to wit: “If acquisition of an effortless state is understood synchronically, this is indeed paradoxical: one cannot be effortless while simultaneously exerting effort. But as long as the process of achieving the effortless state is understood diachronically, no paradox arises. We can and frequently do acquire the ability to act effortlessly, as when we master skills or regain a physical ability through rehabilitation after injury. Acquisition begins with deliberate exertion, but eventually we internalize the skill and develop the ability to act automatically and sometimes effortlessly.” And yet, a paradox perhaps remains: “On the other hand, if we take wu-wei to refer to the absence of intentional action, as I suggest, then the conceptual structure of intentionality may indeed render the directive to achieve wu-wei paradoxical, even construed diachronically. To cite just one of several potential paradoxes, on some accounts of intentionality, an agent cannot intentionally cause herself to perform actions that are wholly non-intentional, because intentions (unlike effort) remain in effect over time, even when not consciously held in mind, and their scope covers all the subsidiary actions that contribute to their fulfillment. For example, this morning I set to work on this review spontaneously, without consciously forming an intention to do so. Nevertheless, my activity was intentional, because it is part of a project I am performing intentionally. At some level of description, any voluntary movement an agent performs is intentional, merely by virtue of being an action rather than a reflex.” For our purposes, what is important is the possibility that the original intentional project is capable of becoming “subconscious” or even “unconscious” in Elster’s sense, meaning one attains a state of “relating directly to the world without relating also to the relating,” which he proceeds to characterize as an exquisite piece of moral psychology, “an argument to the effect that the good things in life are spoiled by self-consciousness about them.”
3. See Joel Kupperman, Learning from Asian Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

References and Further Reading

• Ames, Roger T., ed. Wandering at Ease in the Zhuangzi. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998.
• Ames, Roger T. and David L. Hall. Dao De Jing, “Making This Life Significant:” A Philosophical Translation. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003.
• Cook, Scott, ed. Hiding the World in the World: Uneven Discourse on the Zhuangzi. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003.
• Coutinho, Steve. An Introduction to Daoist Philosophies. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
• Csikszentmihalyi, Mark and Philip J. Ivanhoe, eds. Religious and Philosophical Aspects of the Laozi. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999.
• Elster, Jon. Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
• Forman, Robert K.C. The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
• Fraser, Chris. “On Wu-wei as a Unifying Metaphor,” Philosophy East and West, Vol. 57, No. 1 (January 2007): 97-106.
• Ivanhoe, Philip J., trans. (with commentary). The Daodejing of Laozi. New York: Seven Bridges Press, 2002.
• Kirkland, Russell. Taoism: The Enduring Tradition. New York: Routledge, 2004.
• Kjellberg, Paul, and Philip J. Ivanhoe, eds. Essays on Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics in the Zhuangzi. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996.
• Kohn, Livia. Early Chinese Mysticism: Philosophy and Soteriology in the Taoist Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.
• Kohn, Livia. Monastic Life in Medieval Taoism: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003.
• Kohn, Livia. Cosmos and Community: The Ethical Dimension of Daoism. Cambridge, MA: Three Pines Press, 2004.
• Kohn, Livia, ed. The Taoist Experience: An Anthology. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993.
• Kohn, Livia, ed. Daoism Handbook. Leiden: Brill, 2000.
• Kupperman, Joel J. Learning from Asian Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 
• LaFargue, Michael. The Tao of the Tao Te Ching: A Translation and Commentary. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992.
• Little, Stephen (with Shawn Eichman). Taoism and the Arts of China. Chicago, IL and Berkeley, CA: The Art Institute of Chicago with the University of California Press, 2000.
• Pregadio, Fabrizio, ed. The Encyclopedia of Taoism, 2 Vols. New York: Routledge, 2008.
• Rosemont, Henry, Jr. Rationality and Religious Experience: The Continuing Relevance of the World’s Spiritual Traditions. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2001.
• Slingerland, Edward. Effortless Action: Wu-Wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
• Stanley, Jason and Timothy Williamson. “Knowing How,” Journal of Philosophy, 98.8 (2001): 1-40.

Thinking about Comparative Philosophy: a short bibliographic introduction

Untitled. Ella Bergmann-Michel (1896 –1971), a German abstract artist, photographer and documentary filmmaker.

The introduction to this short list:

As with most of my bibliographies, there are two main constraints: books, in English (a few of the entries consisting of an article or chapter from a particular book). This list is a bit idiosyncratic insofar as it reflects works that have shaped my thinking on this subject (hence its introductory nature and length), a formative process that began in conjunction with my life as a student many years ago (most of my adult life has been outside the academic world), when I was fortunate enough to study under the mentorship of Nandini Iyer, Juan E. Campo, Gerald James Larson, Raimundo Panikkar, Herbert Fingarette (as a teaching assistant for one of his philosophy courses) and Ninian Smart. By my lights, Panikkar, Smart, Fingarette, and Larson (all of whom are no longer with us) were among the foremost pioneers of “comparative philosophy” (or ‘worldviews’). From afar (well, the other side of the country), I learned much about reason and philosophy in Islam from the writings of Oliver Leaman, so I suppose he is a virtual mentor of sorts (this included providing me with an opportunity to have some work published in the field of Islamic Studies). To all of these individuals I remain deeply grateful. 

I implore all who are drawn to or working in this area to read Arindam Chakrabarti and Ralph Weber’s invaluable Introduction to their co-edited volume, Comparative Philosophy without Borders (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). I suspect it would be worthwhile to consider if theoretical or methodological thinking about and exemplifications of comparative philosophical praxis have any implications or relevance for considering questions of comparative law and legal pluralism.

This compilation is found here.

Unpacking an Aphorism

Kawanabe Kyōsai (May 18, 1831 – April 26, 1889), Crow Resting on Wood Trunk (woodblock print; ink and color on paper)

 

“Pharmaceutical companies are better at inventing diseases that match existing drugs, rather than inventing drugs to match existing diseases.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (Random House, 2010).

I agree with this aphorism from Taleb, but it is a conditional agreement. And before I explain why, let me introduce the sūtra in Indic religious and philosophical traditions:

In Indian literary (including religious and philosophical) traditions a sūtra (सूत्र, ‘string’ or ‘thread’; Pali: sutta) refers to an aphorism (cf. maxims, proverbs, etc.) or more often a collection of aphorisms in the form of a manual or, more broadly, a condensed manual or text. Sūtra(s) are a genre of ancient and medieval Indic texts found, for example, in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, as well as other literary, medical, legal, and loosely scientific traditions. Because of their aphoristic or condensed (or even enigmatic) quality, they typically require and thus are often accompanied by one or more bhāṣya(s) (भाष्य), which are expositions, interpretations, and commentaries of the sūtra(s).

Sometimes aphorisms or maxims strike us as either painfully or brilliantly obvious, their meaning more or less transparent, and we admire the author’s skillful, creative, and perhaps wise literary concision, the elusive ability to say so much, as it were, in so few words (cf. the Asian proverb that proclaims ‘one picture is worth a thousand words’), much like the poetic power of haiku, although typically the latter have an experiential or existential dimension that speaks from the heart (or the uncommonly attentive and open mind) and, at least traditionally or conventionally, is written within the parameters of the natural world, unlike its literary twin in Japanese, senryū.¹ Bashō, perhaps the best known haikai master, sought to exemplify in his poetry both comic playfulness and spiritual depth, an uncommon blend of the vita contemplativa, which he practiced on his own terms, with the vita activa, evidenced in his willingness to take seriously “the ordinary, everyday lives of commoners,” portraying such figures as the beggar, the traveler and the farmer.

Comparable in several respects to the Indic sutra, and sharing to some extent the literary qualities of poetry as well, are the “proverb-like polemic aphorisms” and sundry “sayings” found in the Daodejing (earlier translated into English as Tao Te Ching, the later and preferred transliteration facilitating more accurate pronunciation of the words).² It is important to keep in mind that these compositional elements of the text have roots in an oral tradition, with the Daodejing exemplifying the transition between “an oral culture and a culture centered on writing and reading.” While its authorship is traditionally attributed to Laozi (Lao Tzu), scholarly consensus views the chapters as “consist[ing] of individual sayings that once circulated [more or less] independently of each other as oral tradition [in the Laoist shih school].” Michael LaFargue has demonstrated the necessity of a sophisticated hermeneutic approach to interpret accurately the meanings of the aphorisms and sayings that populate the finished composition, combining in this instance the methods of both “form” and “redaction” criticism:

“[Polemic aphorisms] are directed implicitly or explicitly against some views, assumptions, or tendencies Laoists oppose [in addition to views among the masses, these could be the views of other ‘schools’ or philosophies or trends within or outside of Daoism, the latter including the Confucians, Mohists, and ‘Legalists,’ for example]. A second context for sayings consisted of conversations within the Laoist school concerning the practice of self-cultivation, including instruction in self-cultivation given by teachers to students. Most of these sayings are ‘celebratory’ [or laudatory], celebrating the wonderful character of the quality of mind Laoists cultivate.”

We have ample warrant to refer to the self-cultivation at work here as a Chinese version of that species of philosophical and spiritual therapeutic praxis found in other philosophical and religious worldviews (e.g., Stoicism, Buddhism, monastic and mystical traditions in Catholicism, Sufism, and Pātañjala Yoga).

And now we are prepared to return to Taleb’s “polemical” aphorism. Like the literary styles and forms found in the Asian worldviews we introduced all too cursorily, this aphorism requires or deserves “unpacking” (a term I learned in graduate school but now rarely have occasion to use, having long been separated from the academic world). Taleb’s aphorism does not reflect, as far as I can ascertain, any specific expertise in pharmacology or modern medicine, a fact Taleb might characterize as serendipitous or even virtuous. Its meaning is not transparent from my perspective because it is not clear what kind of diseases he is referring to: bodily, mental, both? Is “disease” used here in an analogical or metaphoric sense or is it intended to be understood (defined) in strictly biomedical terms. I think we need to specify more precisely what this aphorism is communicating or else its truth is less obvious and thus eminently more arguable. From my vantage point, it packs a punch only if it is referring to “disease” primarily in an analogical or metaphorical sense (there may be some exceptions, but they help make the rule, not break it), as when we are speaking of someone with a diagnosed or putative mental disorder or illness. Now while it is true that some forms of mental disorder have natural, organic or physiological causes (and perhaps even genetic roots), in which case we can speak properly of a disease, most forms of mental illness, I believe, are not of this sort, and among these, perhaps only the most severe forms of depression are likely to have the worst of their symptoms (i.e., those that cause the most suffering and are detrimental to moral psychological autonomy) ameliorated by pharmaceutic drugs. Taleb may have intended to include biomedically diagnosed bodily diseases,³ which of course affect the whole person, body and mind, but if that is the case, I don’t think the aphorism hits its target, if only because “inventing diseases that match existing drugs,” falls clearly and most often within the province of biological psychiatry and “pharmaceutical logic” (I’ve slightly altered Andrew Lakoff’s term ‘pharmaceutical reason’ from his book title), as the list of titles below attests (culled from my compilation on ‘Biological Psychiatry, Sullied Psychology, and Pharmaceutical Reason’).

By way of a conclusion (apart from the fact that I thought it necessary to unpack Taleb’s aphorim for it to pack a punch), it is worth thinking more generally about the indispensable role of “hard” constraints and “soft” constraints (or conventions) in the arts as incarnate in sūtras, haiku, aphorisms, maxims, and proverbs. This involves, in the first place and among other things, a discussion of “the relation among constraints, value, and creativity.”⁴ 

• Carlat, Daniel. Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry—A Doctor’s Revelations about a Profession in Crisis. New York: Free Press, 2010.
• Conrad, Peter. The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
• Frances, Allen. Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis…. New York: HarperCollins, 2013.
• Goldacre, Ben. Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients. New York: Faber and Faber, 2012.
• Greenberg, Gary. Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010.
• Greenberg, Gary. The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry. New York: Blue Rider Press/Penguin, 2013.
• Greene, Jeremy A. Prescribing by Numbers: Drugs and the Definition of Disease. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
• Healy, David. The Antidepressant Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
• Healy, David. The Creation of Psychopharmacology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
• Healy, David. Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression. New York: New York University Press, 2004.
• Horwitz, Allan V. Creating Mental Illness. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
• Horwitz, Allan V. and Jerome C. Wakefield. The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Kirsch, Irving. The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Anti-Depressant Myth. New York: Basic Books, 2010.
• Lane, Christopher. Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
• Rasmussen, Nicolas. On Speed: From Benzedrine to Adderall. New York: New York University Press, 2008.
• Schwarz, Alan. ADHD Nation: Children, Doctors, Big Pharma, and the Making of an American Epidemic. New York: Scribner, 2016.
• Wedge, Marilyn. A Disease Called Childhood: Why ADHD Became an American Epidemic. New York: Avery/Penguin Random House, 2015.
• Whitaker, Robert. Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill. New York: Basic Books, revised ed., 2010 (2002).
• Whitaker, Robert. Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. New York: Crown, 2010.

Notes

1. Senryū (川柳, literally ‘river willow’) “is a Japanese form of short poetry similar to haiku in construction: three lines with 17 morae (or ‘on’ often translated as syllables, but see the article on onji for distinctions). Senryū tend to be about human foibles while haiku tend to be about nature, and senryū are often cynical or darkly humorous while haiku are more serious. Unlike haiku, senryū do not include a kireji (cutting word), and do not generally include a kigo, or season word. Senryū is named after Edo period haikai poet Karai Senryū (柄井川柳, 1718–1790), whose collection Haifūyanagidaru (誹風柳多留) launched the genre into the public consciousness.”
2. Please see Michael LaFargue, The Tao of the Tao Te Ching: A Translation and Commentary (State University of New York Press, 1992): 196-214.
3. See, for example, Paul Thagard’s How Scientists Explain Disease (Princeton University Press, 1999).
4. Please see chapter 3, “Less Is More: Creativity and Constraint in the Arts,” in Jon Elster’s Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints (Cambridge University Press, 2000): 175-269.

Abstention from alcohol in Buddhist ethics … and intemperance in Thomas Hobbes’s Natural Law morality

By Adolph Gottlieb

[F]orasmuch as the laws of nature are nought else but the dictates of reason; so as, unless a man endeavour to preserve the faculty of right reasoning, he cannot observe the laws of nature; it is manifest, that he who knowingly or willingly doth aught whereby the rational faculty may be destroyed or weakened, he knowingly and willingly breaks the law of nature. For there is no difference between a man who performs not his duty, and him who does such things willingly as makes it impossible for him to do it. But they destroy and weaken the reasoning faculty, who do that which disturbs the mind from its natural state; that which most manifestly happens to drunkards, and gluttons. We therefore sin … against the law of nature by drunkenness. — Thomas Hobbes

*           *           *

Like weakness of will, addiction is a secondary failure of intentional agency, which derives from akrasia, a primary failure of intentional agency. [….] Unlike weakness of will, addiction is associated with a sense of compulsion rather than merely giving in to some guilty pleasure or other. The contrast is frequently posited in recent philosophical works on weakness of will. However, no positive account has been offered as to why we should distinguish the two phenomena in this way, though of course skeptics about weakness of will have presented arguments for the insignificance of this contrast and proponents have aimed to refute these arguments. Applied to addiction and weakness of will, the actualization model provides such a positive account. Weak-willed pursuits depend on being perceived as pleasurable, albeit unworthy. Once a weak-willed agent experiences these pursuits as fundamentally disappointing sources of pleasure, she also grows out of weakness of will. By contrast, addictive behavior transcends the experience of pleasure initially associated with the object of addiction. As illustrated by De Quincey [Confessions of an English Opium-Eater] and Dostoevsky [Notes from the Underground and The Gambler], addiction is bound to survive addicts’ recurrence experience of their addiction as harmful, distressing, and painful. In this respect, addiction is not just a recalcitrant form of akrasia, which is essentially true of weakness of will, but more importantly, a form of akrasia that is utterly devoid of pleasure. Paradoxically, or ironically, being devoid of pleasure is what makes addiction compulsive: the pursuit of a specter of pleasure is bound to be insatiable. In this sense, addiction could be said to involve a disoriented, if not a disordered appetite.

The difference between weakness of will and addiction is not one of degree but of kind. … [T]he pleasure that could be derived from the object of future addiction is already blow out of proportion before the onset of addiction and even before any actual first-hand experience of the object. [….] [S]ome authors aim to avoid framing problems of addiction in explicitly evaluative terms since they consider that this would further stigmatize people with addiction. [….] [N]egative moral appraisal strengthens the person with addiction by reengaging with her as an apt valuer that could also act under the guise of the good, not only the apparent—and disappearing—good of her addiction. For … evaluative immaturity is what necessarily leads to less than successful pursuits, such as akrasia, weakness of will, and addiction. At the same time, however, evaluative immaturity is always object- or pursuit-centered rather than global: less than successful agency still takes place under the guise of the good. And so success in action is never completely out of sight. — Lubomira Radoilska

*           *           *

“It is as easy to deceive ourselves without noticing it as it is hard to deceive others without their noticing.” — La Rochefoucauld

“We are so used to disguising ourselves from others that we end by disguising ourselves from ourselves.” — La Rochefoucauld

“Over the long term, you are more likely to fool yourself than others.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb¹

*           *           *

Āryāṣṭāṅgamārga (Skt., आर्याष्टाङ्गमार्ग) is translated as the “noble eightfold path” in Buddhism, the path that brings an end to the two primary causes of suffering (inordinate desire and ignorance) and thus it’s the fourth of the “four truths known by the spiritually noble ones” (catvāry āryasatyāni), mistranslated but commonly known as the “four noble truths.” The Eightfold Path in Buddhism is tripartite in structure, with meditation (samādhi समाधि) only one part of this threefold division (and each part, in turn as two or three components*), the other two parts being sīla (शील) or ethics, broadly construed, and prajñā (प्रज्ञा) or insight into the true nature of reality (involving both ‘discriminating knowledge’ and ‘intuitive apprehension’). Yet it seems when the question is asked of someone if he or she is a Buddhist and an affirmative response follows, the very next question typically concerns meditation (‘Do you meditate?’), and thus it seems “outsider” knowledge of this religious worldview, in the first instance at least, associates Buddhism with mind training generally and meditation practice in particular. Yet even among some Buddhist practitioners one finds a similar stress or preoccupation with meditation, hence comparatively little attention is devoted to the other two parts of the Eightfold Path. I don’t have a good explanation for why this is so, but perhaps neglect of the ethical dimension follows from the assumption that religious ethics of one kind or another are commonplace to religions. This may be accompanied by the thought that Buddhism proffers nothing unique on this score. And what about prajñā? I raise this issue by way of reiterating the fact that the three parts of the Eightfold Path are meant to be complementary and mutually reinforcing and thus neglect of any one part negatively affects both one’s grasp of basic Buddhist teachings and proper Buddhist spiritual praxis.

(This list has the Pāli translations sans diacritics.)

1. Right understanding (samma ditthi)
2. Right thought (samma sankappa)
3. Right speech (samma vaca) 
4. Right action (samma kammanta)
5. Right livelihood (samma ajiva) 
6. Right effort (samma vayama)
7. Right mindfulness (samma sati)
8. Right concentration (samma samadhi)

* Tripartite division: I = 1 and 2; II = 3, 4, and 5; and III = 6, 7, and 8

I introduce this fundamental framework for Buddhist teaching as a background to something that falls within Buddhist morality or śīla (Skt.), namely, the “five precepts” (pañcaśīla). These precepts are said to be the form the foundation of Buddhist ethics for both lay and monastic devotees (in other words, this does not exhaust the scope of Buddhist ethics, especially for monks and nuns). The five are: (i) to abstain from killing sentient beings, (ii) to abstain from stealing, (iii) to refrain from sexual misconduct (what this specifically entails is controversial and thus contested, with differences often owing to schools, teachers, and geography; one broad criterion entails avoidance of causing suffering through one’s sexual behavior), (iv) to abstain from lying and other forms of harmful speech, and (v) avoidance of intoxicants (that cause ‘heedlessness’), in positive terms, the practice of sobriety.

There are a number of nuanced treatments of these precepts by scholars inside and outside of Buddhism proper but I’ll cite here only one I’ve found particularly helpful: Peter Harvey’s treatment in An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2000): 60-122. Harvey relates the failure to observe the fifth and last precept to its effect on the pursuit of “right mindfulness” (7. above) in particular, but one can find sufficient reason to link it to all parts of the Eightfold Path. He notes, however, the fact that breaking the fifth precept can lend itself to a disposition to break the other four precepts as well! The Buddha himself listed myriad baneful consequences from drunkenness, some well-known to us from our experience with and understanding of alcoholism, others harming our ability to be act virtuously or follow the Buddhist spiritual path. This amounts, I would argue, to a non-fallacious slippery slope argument. One Mahāyāna commentator, Jinaputra, seems to have believed that “carefully drinking a small amount of alcohol, with no desire for intoxication, is not reprehensible in itself, but is best avoided for what it may lead to.” By way of closing our introduction to this precept (there is much more that has and can be said), I’ll share one paragraph from Harvey’s discussion:

“While making a living by the sale of alcohol is seen as ‘wrong livelihood’ [5. above], Buddhists are not generally puritanical about drinking. It would be seen as bad form for a Buddhist who is avoiding alcohol to look down on others who are drinking it in his or her company; rather, it would be appropriate to tune in to their happy frame of mind [an interesting assumption here, as a ‘happy frame of mind’ is not invariably common to those who are drinking together] without having to resort to alcohol [this can be difficult to do, especially if one is trying assiduously to avoid drinking owing to a personal history of problems associated with same, as is the case of course with ‘alcoholics;’ see Jon Elster’s brilliant account of pre-commitment and ‘self-binding’ strategies by way of reducing or eliminating the desire or temptation to drink in Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints (2000): 63-77]. Unlike some Muslim countries, no Buddhist country bans the sale or consumption of alcohol….”

In an earlier post, I highlighted Hobbes’s unusual and surprising argument against Christian missionary activity as a violation of the Law of Nature (its ‘reciprocity theorem’) and “natural reason.” This time round I’d like to share another provocative argument from Hobbes derived from his Law of Nature, one that forbids drunkenness and other forms of intemperance. What stood out for me was, like the Buddhist, Hobbes ties his principal objection intoxication to a high probability for what we might term a slippery slope of adverse consequences. In the words of S.A. (Sharon) Lloyd, “The reason why the Law of Nature forbids drunkenness and other intemperance is that such intemperance impairs our exercise of the rational powers we must use to follow the law of nature.” For the Buddhist, intoxication impairs mind-training and leads in general to what we call weakness of will (akrasia), which may lead to breaking other moral precepts or the kind of behavior strays from the path of Buddhist spiritual praxis as outlined in the Eightfold Path. Again, with Hobbes,

“Intemperance can be understood as forbidden by the Laws of Nature insofar as it compromises people’s ability to observe those laws; not because it harms the agent personally [of course it typically does this as well], rather only because it may contribute to actions by individual agents that do damage to the common good, and in violation of the Law of Nature.”

While Buddhism speaks to the harms that may befall the individual Buddhist in a state of intoxication, the effects redound to others as well, in other words, they increase the quotient of suffering of those interacting with such an individual. In short, such behavior does nothing to reduce suffering in the world, indeed, quite the converse, and thus it is in pragmatic and doctrinal contradiction to Buddhist teachings, much like intemperance is in pragmatic and doctrinal contradiction to Hobbes’s Law of Nature (or several ‘laws’ of nature).

References and Further Reading

• Elster, Jon. Strong Feelings: Emotion, Addiction and Human Behavior (MIT Press, 1999).
• Elster, Jon. Ulysses Unbound: Studies in Rationality, Precommitment, and Constraints (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
• Fingarette, Herbert. Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease (University of California Press, 1988).
• Harvey, Peter. An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2000).
• Lloyd, S.A. Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: Cases in the Law of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
• Radoilska, Lubomira. Addiction and Weakness of Will (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Note

1. Cf. Elster: “Many addicts deny that they have a problem or, if they admit it, deny that they can do anything about it. Here are some of the stock phrases of addictive thinking:

• I am only a social drinker.
• I can quit any time I want to.
• I’ll quit tomorrow.

[I’ve left out those phrases not having to do with the problem drinker or alcoholic.]

Addicts often confuse cause and effect, saying, for instance, that they drink because of a marital problem when it is actually the other way around. Although alcoholics and gamblers may be especially prone to deceive others in order to get to the next drink or the next gamble or to explain away what they have done, they also tend to deceive themselves. More generally, the addict can respond to his predicament in one of three ways: by escaping from his awareness of it, by denying it, and by trying to quit. The alcoholic, for instance, may drown his guilt in alcohol, affirm that he is only a social drinker, or join the Alcoholics Anonymous. The first two responses obey the pleasure principle, the last the reality principle. Many addicts have two strong desires: the desire to consume and the desire to stop consuming. In the struggle for self-control, now the one, now the other desire seems to be gaining the upper hand. The most effective strategies for self-control seem to be private rules and strategies of precommitment [on these rules and strategies see Elster’s Ulysses Unbound, above]. Whichever technique is used, we observe a qualitative change in addictive behavior from the moment when self-control becomes important. [….] The transition from being a heavy drinker to a self-acknowledged problem drinker triggers similar changes. At the same time, a number of deceptive and self-deceptive mechanisms come into play. Ambivalence is a hallmark of serious addiction in humans.”  From Elster’s Strong Feelings (above): 73-74.

See too this compilation: Addiction—Transdisciplinary Perspectives