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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

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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

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“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

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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

The capitalist mediation and modulation of taste, fashion, and style: class, status, and standing in the struggle for comparative and competitive identity

As I’ve done in the past, I plan on occasionally sharing one or more of La Rochefoucauld’s (Leonard Tancock, trans.) Maxims (Penguin Books, 1959, first published in 1665), commenting when the mood strikes. Permit me to introduce one of the foremost reasons these maxims continue to enchant us with some characteristically incisive observations from Jon Elster:

“Alone among the moralists, La Rochefoucauld offered something like a theory of human motivations. In fact, his views about unconscious motivation and unconscious cognition are probably more valuable than anything found in twentieth-century psychology. To some extent it is true, as Jean Lafond says, that ‘a certain verbal exuberance together with the exaggeration required for an original assertion turns the psychology into mythology.’ Yet…some systematic views can be extracted from what first appear as a random collection of diamond-like maxims.” — Elster on “the French Moralists” in a work that evidences his singular capacity to see with remarkable clarity both the forest and the trees in the study of emotions, namely, Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

The four writers he treats in one part of the book—Montaigne, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère—“mark the beginning and the end of the greatest era in French intellectual and cultural history.” This amounts to an implicit and unflattering comment on the overweening infatuation with postmodern French philosophers among quite a few intellectuals in the academy.

     

“Our self-esteem is more inclined to resent criticism of our tastes than of our opinions.”—La Rochefoucauld

Rochefoucauld’s maxims were penned when early aesthetic theories or philosophies more or less revolved around a notion of “taste” (beyond its gustatory meaning, literal or metaphorical) while the centrality of this concept in aesthetic theories has greatly diminished (with notable exceptions) since then, it persists in everyday societal and cultural practices and judgments, often as a sign or insignia of class and status, of wealth and privilege (and among the middling and upper classes, as a judgment on the ‘tastes’ of the hoi polloi, the masses, despite their attempts to emulate and imitate those above them in the social order). Reflections on our own tastes may bring in their wake insecurity, anxiety, and envy to the extent they affect our self-esteem and amour-propre more widely.

The more I think about this maxim, the more I’m inclined to believe it is not true. In other words, in general, we’ve become fairly tolerant of different tastes (in an aesthetic sense, however crude or dimly understood) than of opinions, if only because we have so many choices when it comes to the kinds of objects thought to incarnate or reflect our tastes, thus implicating taste in the nature of capitalist societies (be they affluent or less so). Perhaps one corresponding irony is the fact that such toleration goes, in an extravagant sense, hand-in-hand with an obsession with such matters. As Nicholas Xenos reminds us, “the utility of goods becomes secondary to the value they come to have as elements within a symbolic order of consumption.” Thus taste becomes bound up with our desires, dreams, fantasies, illusions, what have you, all of which are indissolubly tied to conceptions of abundance and opulence, to conspicuous consumption and gratuitous wealth. Marketing managers and advertisers (through ‘branding’ in today’s jargon) are experts in stimulating or expanding the reach of our desires, dreams, illusions, and so on through the manipulation (not always successful and occasionally modified by consumers themselves) of our sense of style and fashion, as well our often narcissistic need for social esteem.

     

Building on the thoughts of both Thorstein Veblen and George Simmel on this topic, Xenos notes that

“while it is clear that fashion, in the up-to-date, exclusionary sense, requires the constant creation of something new, in order for it to function as a means of social differentiation it must be articulated within a common set of understandings—fashion as an ongoing activity in a broader sense. There must be novelty, but it must be novelty that is recognized as a mark of fashion and that is at least potentially capable of being imitated and purchased. In this way, fashion can act at one and the same time as a force of social differentiation and cohesion.

The fashionable objects that serve as signs of social inclusion and individual or group demarcation thus have no intrinsic social value of their own, their value is derived solely from their use as signs, whatever utility such objects may have is completely secondary and socially irrelevant. [….] For a brief moment, an object that exists in great quantity may attain to the level of fashion when it is incorporated into a particular style that transforms it, makes it no longer ordinary. When this occurs, it makes no sense to say that the object has a scarcity value—although once the fashion has caught on there may be a temporary lack of available supply of it to satisfy an unexpected fashion demand. What does have scarcity value is the transforming style itself: the object in its fashionable surroundings becomes scarce because only some people have the stylistic acumen to display it in this particular way. In this sense, the stylish always possess a scarce resource independently of the things themselves that they make fashionable.

The emulation that is typical of modernity and is institutionalized in fashion can be characterized as an effort not only—or not at all—to possess what others possess, but to imitate their style. [….] The more natural that style appears, the less effort in construction it seems to require by its possessor, the more appealing it may be, particularly because when we think of our own style it is hard to think of what we are naturally. [….] Fashion advertising, like much advertising in general, is selling a style [and mode] of consumption, not only the particular goods contained within a photograph [or TV commercial]. [….]

The acceleration of changes in fashion noted by Simmel and Veblen is attributable to the instability built into the fashion code as a result of the relative positions within it. The struggle to establish one’s identity and position is ceaseless because there are not objectively fixed statuses [insofar as this is the capitalism of would-be egalitarian democratic societies], but the struggle tends to reproduce the de facto statuses that do exist. The wealthier find it easier to shift consumption from one set of objects to another than those with less wealth. A competitive hierarchy is established, with no rest for anyone but with real upward movement forestalled—the dynamism of individual and group aspirations is thus institutionalized into a form of social stasis. The deep stability of the struggle for competitive identity is concealed by the sometime frantic manipulation of appearances. Those at the top of the social order cast their glances sideways and downward, cultivating a style that appears natural and that imbues the objects that are signified within its objects of elite consumption serve as markers of group identity. Such objects may be located at either end of the temporal spectrum: they may be identified by their antiquity or by their newness. In either case, their authenticity or their timeliness will ensure their scarcity. With new objects governed by fashion, only an elite possesses, by self-determination, the requisite aesthetic sensibility [‘taste’] to see them properly, at least in the short term. [….] [G]ood taste requires the abandonment of fashionable new objects once they have common currency [this is in keeping with, or at least analogous to, an ethic of transgression], and hence no longer marks of distinction, although it sometimes happens that the fashionable set, accustomed to the rapid changes in style necessitated by its precarious social lead, moves on to new styles without the old ones filtering down….

Along with its stylistic acumen, the uppermost strata cultivates an appreciation of antiquities as a sign of taste but also as a sign of ancestry. Thus history is wedded to nature; the stylish not only possess the seemingly natural stability to decipher newly coded fashions but also possess a heritage. The age of an antique (and frequently the lineage of its ownership [save for those cases in which the object was improperly or illegally acquired, as the history of museum acquisitions informs us]) confers a legitimacy on its possessor’s taste—the owner, in Walter Benjamin’s formulation, shares in the aura of the unique original object. The appropriation of the past is a pseudo-aristocratic substitute of the fixed identity conferred by family and rank in the pre-bourgeois era.

For those below this upper crust—that is to say, for most everyone—status identity requires a panoramic view. Identity is established horizontally, but only in small part [as when one envies the new car bought by a neighbor]. More important are the views upward and downward. Positions in the social order are most precarious in the great middle of the middle class, where identity is poised uneasily between relationally defined extremes and where catching up to the styles previously adopted by those above instantaneously results in the debasement of those same styles—the accomplishments of “high” culture become middle-brow, designer labels no longer carry a cachet of exclusivity.” — Nicholas Xenos, Scarcity and Modernity (Routledge, 1989): passim.

On the distinction and differences between AI (‘artificial intelligence’) and human intelligence, judgment and the emotions

This is a revised version from something I posted several years ago. I was inspired by to return to this topic after dipping into Erik J. Larson’s The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2021).

I do not think that it is true or fair to say that “artificial intelligence” (hereafter, AI) replicates human cognitive abilities, although it may “replicate” in a very attenuated or simply analogical sense, one aspect or feature of one particular cognitive ability, even then, in as much as human cognitive abilities do not function in isolation, in other words, as they work more or less in tandem and within a larger cognitive (and affective, etc.) human context, the replication that takes place in this case is not in any way emulative of human intelligence as such. AI is not about emulating or instantiating (peculiarly) human intelligence, but rather a technological replication of aspects of formal logic that can be mathematized (such as algorithms), thus it is a mistake to describe the process here as one of “automated reasoning” (i.e., AI machines don’t ‘reason,’ they compute and/or process), if only because our best philosophical and psychological conceptions of rationality and reasoning cast a net—as the later Hilary Putnam often reminded us—far wider than anything that can, in fact or principle, be scientized, logicized, or mathematized (i.e., formalized).

Moreover, AI only occurs as the result of the (creative, collaborative, managerial …) work of human designers, programmers, and so on, meaning that it does not in any real sense add up to the construction of “autonomous” (as that predicate is used in moral philosophy and moral psychology) machines or robots, although perhaps we could view this as a stipulative description or metaphor, albeit one still parasitic (and to that extent misleading) on conceptions of human autonomy. And insofar as a replication is in reference to a copy, in this case the copy is not an exact replica of the original. We should therefore be critically attentive to the metaphors and analogies (but especially the former) used in discussions of AI: “learning,” “representation,” “intelligence” (the adjective ‘artificial’ thus deserving more descriptive and normative semantic power), “autonomous,” “mind,” “brain,” and so forth; these often serve, even if unintentionally, to blur distinctions and boundaries, muddle our thinking, create conceptual confusion, obscure reality, and evade the truth. Often extravagant claims are made (by writers in popular science, scientists themselves, mass media ‘experts’ and pundits, philosophers, corporate spokespersons or executives, venture capital and capital investors generally, and so forth) to the effect that AI computers or machines possess powers uncannily “like us,” that is, they function in ways that, heretofore at least, were demonstrably distinctive of human (and sometimes simply animal) powers and capacities, the prerogative, as it were, and for better and worse, of human beings, of persons, of personal normative agency.

Recent attempts to articulate something called “algorithmic accountability,” meaning a concern motivated by the recognition that data selection and (so to speak) algorithmic processing often encode “politics,” psychological biases or prejudices, or stereotypical judgments, are important, but attributions of accountability and responsibility, be they individual or shared (in this case, almost invariably the latter), can only be human, not “algorithmic” in the first instance, hence that notion lacks any meaningful moral or legal sense unless it is a shorthand reference to the human beings responsible for producing or programming the algorithms in the first place.

A fair amount of the philosophical, legal, and scientific (including computer science) literature—both its questions and propositions—on AI (‘artificial intelligence’), including robots, “autonomous artificial agents, and “smart machines,” is replete with implausible presuppositions and assumptions, as well as question-begging premises such the arguments can be characterized by such terms as implausibility, incoherence, and even “nonsense” (or failure to ‘make sense’). In short, the conceptual claims upon which its statements and premises depend, that which is at the very heart of its arguments, often make no sense, that is to say, they “fail to express something meaningful.”

Sometimes even the very title of a book will alert us to such nonsense, as in the case of a volume edited by Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen, Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong (Oxford University Press, 2009). The book title begs the question, first with the predicate “moral,” and correlatively, with the phrase, “teaching robots right from wrong,” which depends upon concepts heretofore never applied outside human animals  or persons (we can speak of ‘teaching’ at least some kinds of animals, but it makes no sense to speak of teaching them ‘right from wrong’), and thus it is eminently arguable as to whether or not we can truly “teach” robots anything, let alone a basic moral orientations, in the way, say, that we teach our children, our students, or each other, whether in informal or formal settings. The novelty of the claim, as such, is not what is at issue, although radical and unprecedented manner in which it employs concepts and words should provoke presumptive doubts as to whether or not our authors have a clear and plausible picture of what it means for “us” to “be moral,” what it typically means for us to teach someone “right from wrong,” or how someone learns this fundamental moral distinction. We might employ such words in a stipulative or even theoretical sense, for specific and thus very limited purposes that are parasitic on conventional or lexical meaning(s), or perhaps simply analogical or metaphorical at bottom, but even in those cases, one risks misleading others by implying or evoking eminently questionable or arguable presuppositions or assumptions that make, in the end, for more or less conceptual confusion if not implausibility.

According to our editors, respectively a consultant and writer affiliated with Yale’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and a Professor of History and Philosophy of Science and of Cognitive Science, “today’s [computer] systems are approaching a level of complexity … that requires the systems to make moral decisions—to be programmed with ‘ethical subroutines’ to borrow a phrase from Star Trek” (the blurring of the lines between contemporary science and science fiction, or the belief that much that was once science fiction on this score is no longer fiction but the very marrow of science itself, is commonplace). This argument depends, I would argue, on a rather implausible model of what it means for us to make “moral decisions,” as well as on an incoherent or question-begging application of the predicate “ethical.” Wallach and Allen open the Introduction with the breathless statement that scientists at the Affective Computing Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) “are designing computers that can read human emotions,” as if this is a foregone conclusion awaiting technical development or completion. Human beings are not always adept at reading emotions insofar as we can hide them or simply “fake it,” as it were. In any case, as I argue below, a machine cannot understand what constitutes a human emotion. The expression of emotions in persons is in fact an incredibly complex experience, involving both outward and inner dimensions (some of which are cognitive), biographical history, relational contexts and so forth, all of which are part, in principle or theory, of an organic whole, that is, the person. In the words of P.M.S. Hacker,

“Emotions and moods are the pulse of the human spirit. They are both determinants and expressions of our temperament and character. They are tokens of our engagement with the world and with our fellow human beings. [….] [T]he emotions are also perspicuously connected with what it, or is thought to be, good and bad. Our emotional pronenesses and liabilities are partly constitutive of our temperament and personality. Our ability to control our emotions, to keep their manifestations and their motivating force within the bounds of reason, is constitutive of our character as moral agents. So the investigation of the emotions is a fruitful prolegomenon to the philosophical study of morality. It provides a point of access to the elucidation of right and wrong, good and evil, virtue and vice, that skirts the morass of deontological and consequentialist approaches to ethics without neglecting the roles of duties and obligations, or the role of the consequences of our actions in our practical reasoning.”

Let’s consider in a rough and preliminary matter, the role of emotions from the vantage point of human nature or philosophical anthropology. This should help us appreciate the extravagance or implausibility of the claim that AI machines soon will, in fact, or might, in principle, “read human emotions.” Here I rely upon P.M.S. Hacker’s third volume in his tetralogy on human nature as seen from the vantage point of philosophical anthropology, The Passions: A Study of Human Nature (2018).

In particular, I’d like to briefly address the claim that AI systems can—or soon will—“read human emotions.” By way of tilling the ground for our discussion, it is not an insignificant fact that, in the words of Hacker, “[t]he deepest students of the role of emotions in human life are the novelists, dramatists, and poets of our culture” (Hacker confines his examination of ‘the passions’ from the vantage point of philosophical anthropology to Western civilization). A virtually identical point has been made by Jon Elster in his book, Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (1999):

“… [W]ith respect to an important subset of the emotions we can learn more from moralists, novelists, and playwrights than from the cumulative findings of scientific psychology. These emotions include regret, relief, hope, disappointment, shame, guilt, pridefulness, pride, hybris, envy, jealousy, malice, pity, indignation, wrath, hatred, contempt, joy, grief, and romantic love. By contrast, the scientific study of the emotions can teach us a great deal about anger, fear, disgust, parental love, and sexual desire (if we count the last two as emotions). [….] I believe…that prescientific insights into the emotions are not simply superseded by modern psychology [here Elster means largely what we would call ‘scientific psychology’] in the way that natural philosophy has been superseded by physics. Some men and women in the past have been superb students of human nature, with more wide-ranging personal experience, better powers of observation, and deeper intuitions than almost any psychologist I can think of. This is only what we should expect: There is no reason why one century out of twenty-five should have a privilege in wisdom and understanding. In the case of physics, this argument does not apply.”

I would amend Elster’s account by recognizing that insofar as psychoanalytic psychology is a “subjective science,” it fares far better with regard to instructing us about the role of our emotions in daily life than the “scientific psychology” that dominates the contemporary academic world. Finally, I would further qualify Elster’s remarks with the following from Hacker:

“The constitutive complexity of human emotions, their diverse relation to time, to knowledge and belief of a neurologically uncircumscribable scope, to reasons and the evaluation of reasons, to somatic and expressive perturbations, to motivation and decision, guarantee that there can be no simple correlation [let alone causation!] between genetic, physiological, or neural facts and an emotion [this comment is made with regard to the efforts of developmental and evolutionary psychologists as well as cognitive neuroscientists to identify a class of absolutely basic (‘natural kinds’ if you will) human emotions].”

In short, we can conclude that science does not and will not provide us with our best or most accurate knowledge and understanding of human emotions. One fundamental reason this is the case is the fact that emotions often “exhibit” what Hacker defines as “both compositional complexity and contextual or narrative complexity:”

“Compositional complexity is patent in the manner in which emotions may involve cognitive and cogitative strands (perception, knowledge, belief, judgment, imagination, evaluation, and thought); sensations and perturbations; forms of facial, tonal, and behavioral manifestation; or emotionally charged utterances that express one’s feelings; reasons and motives for action; and intentionality and causality. The contextual complexity is manifest in the manner in which emotions, in all their temporal diversity, are woven into the tapestry of life. An emotional episode is rendered intelligible not only by reference to a past history—to previous relationships and commitments, to past deeds and encounters, and to antecedent emotional states. The loss of temper over a triviality may be made comprehensible by reference to long-standing, but suppressed, jealousy. One’s Schadenfreude (delight at the misfortune of another) or by reference to one’s standing resentment at an insult. The intensity of one’s grief may be explained by reference to the passion with which one loved. [….] For the most part, understanding the emotions, as opposed to explaining their cortical and physiological roots, is idiographic rather than nomothetic, and historical rather than static.”

This suggests that the notion that AI systems or robots “reading emotions” is quite implausible if not impossible (I happen to think the latter), given the manner in which emotions are “woven into the tapestry of life.” Some might respond by asserting, more plausibly (and after the work of the evolutionary psychologist Paul Ekman on ‘facial recognition technology’), that what is being “read” here are simply facial expressions and perhaps bodily comportment. But assuming that is true, it’s still doubtful if only because even episodic or “temporary” emotions “have characteristic multiple associations, manifestations, and forms of expression” both within and across cultures (and these are not static), together with the fact that we can conceal our emotions by, say, pretending to feel an emotion one does not feel and thus mimic emotions and emotional expressions. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, the “facial manifestations of emotions occur in a context that gives them meaning.” Hence facial recognition software alone will not suffice to “read” our emotions, if only because, as Hacker writes,  

“[o]ur emotions are made evident not only by our countenance and voice, but also by our posture and mien [all of which can be mimed and mimicked by a decent actor, an adept criminal, a dishonest person or a ‘drama queen’], the way we walk or sit, our gestures and gesticulations. So called body language, sermo corporis, as Cicero dubbed it, is rich and variegated, with natural behavioural roots and cultural modifications, constraints, refinements, and inventions. [….] Throughout recorded history, posture and deportment were refined and constrained in order to differentiate the aristocracy from the demos or plebs, imperial rulers from the ruled, and men from women. Natural gestures and gesticulations of anger, defiance, triumph, submission, grief, awe, and wonder were, from one period to another, subject to various forms of social modification and restraint to mark out the superior from the inferior, the cultivated from the uncouth.”

Thus,

“[f]acial expression, inarticulate vocal expression, gesture, and mien constitute collectively an orchestra of possible behaviourable manifestations and expressions of agitations, of the perturbations of temporary emotions, of enduring emotions, of moods, and of emotional attitudes. In addition there are wholly conventional behavioral signals by means of which we express our feelings. These include nodding or shaking one’s head, thumbs up or down, pointing with index finger or—rudely—with thumb, winking, beckoning, waving, and rude and obscene gestures of rejections, mockery, and insult. Couple them with the articulate verbal expressions of agitation, emotion, mood and attitude; the tone and speed of utterance; and the volume of voice in which one speaks … and we have a veritable symphony for the manifestation and expression of affections in general and of emotions in particular. The orchestra is normally conducted in honest concord. The various forms of discord are often marks of insincerity, which, for the unaccustomed, is difficult to make. [….] One can wear a veil but, when one doesn’t, one’s features are revealed. That one can sometimes conceal one’s feelings does not imply that, when does not, it is not the very feelings themselves that are manifest—even though anger is not shaking one’s fist and crying is not sadness.”

Hacker explains how the “behaviour of others, in all its diversity and complexity, in a context that renders it intelligible, constitutes the logical criteria for ascribing emotions to them.” These multifarious logical criteria are not available to an AI machine or robot. Furthermore, our emotions are not simply inferred from the behavioural criteria we observe, as behaviour provides the (non-formal) logical and non-inductive ground for ascription of an emotion, and such criteria are defeasible in part because “there is a degree of opacity and sometimes even a form of constitutional indeterminacy about the emotions and their manifestation.” This “interpersonal opacity” is more frequent and pronounced in cross-cultural encounters. In any case, the opacity and indeterminacy of the emotions (or, put differently, their ideographic character), whatever their depth and authenticity or the motives they give rise to, can make for mutual misunderstanding between two people who love each other, or between two close friends who know each other well:

“There need be no disagreement between them over the facts of their relationship—but one interprets the manifold nuances of behavior and attitude one way, and the other another way. There may be no additional data to resolve the misunderstanding—all the facts are given. One person makes a pattern of their emotional life one way, the other person another way. There need be no further ‘fact of the matter.’”

This vividly illustrates, I think, the wild implausibility if not nonsense ensconced in the belief that AI machines or robots can, or in the near future, “read emotions.” The uniqueness of human nature and the role of emotions as part and parcel of the human condition, singled out here in terms of “the penumbra of opacity and indeterminacy surrounding the application of concepts of the emotions,” is an urgent reminder that

“there is such a thing as better and worse judgment about the emotions of others. Greater sensitivity to fine shades of behaviour is conducive to more refined insight into their hearts. Wide knowledge of mankind and openness to what people tell of themselves make for better judgment. If one knows a person well, one is more likely to be able to render his responses and reactions intelligible than if one were a mere acquaintance [or an AI machine!]. One may learn to look, and come to see what others pass over. One may become sensitive to imponderable evidence, to subtleties of glance, facial expression, gesture, and tone of voice. One will then not have a better ‘theory of the emotions’ than others: one will have become a connoisseur of the emotions.”

The capacity for and power of judgment is distinctively human and thus forever beyond the reach of AI. Only a (human) person, not a robot, has the potential to one day become “a connoisseur of the emotions.”

Philosophy of Mind & Consciousness—Selected Readings

• Bennett, M.R. and P.M.S. Hacker. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.
• Bennett, Maxwell, Daniel Dennett, Peter Hacker, John Searle, and Daniel Robinson. Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind and Language. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. (I find the arguments of Bennett, Hacker, and Robinson more sound and persuasive than those of Dennett and Searle.)
• Bilgrami, Akeel. Self-knowledge and Resentment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
• Descombes, Vincent (Stephen Adam Schwartz, trans.) The Mind’s Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
• Dreyfus, Hubert L. What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, revised ed., 1992 (1979).
• Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Stuart E. Dreyfus. Mind over Machine. New York: Free Press, 1986.
• Finkelstein, David H. Expression and the Inner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
• Ganeri, Jonardon. The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012.
• Gillett, Grant. Subjectivity and Being Somebody: Human Identity and Neuroethics. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2008.
• Gillett, Grant. The Mind and Its Discontents. New York: Oxford University Press, 2^nd ed., 2009.
• Hacker, P.M.S. Human Nature: The Categorial Framework. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.
• Hacker, P.M.S. The Intellectual Powers: A Study of Human Nature. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
• Hacker, P.M.S. The Passions: A Study of Human Nature. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2018.
• Hagberg, Garry L. Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Hodgson, David. The Mind Matters: Consciousness and Choice in a Quantum World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Horst, Steven. Beyond Reduction: Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Science. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Hutto, Daniel D. The Presence of Mind. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999.
• Hutto, Daniel D. Beyond Physicalism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000.
• Hutto, Daniel D. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
• Pardo, Michael S. and Dennis Patterson. Minds, Brains, and Law: The Conceptual Foundations of Law and Neuroscience. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
• Patterson, Dennis and Michael S. Pardo, eds. Philosophical Foundations of Law and Neuroscience. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
• Radoilska, Lubomira, ed. Autonomy and Mental Disorder. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
• Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg. Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1988.
• Smith, Christian. What Is a Person? Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
• Sprigge, T.L.S. (Leemon B. McHenry, ed.) The Importance of Subjectivity: Selected Essays on Metaphysics and Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Tallis, Raymond. The Explicit Animal: A Defence of Human Consciousness. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999 ed.
• Tallis, Raymond. I Am: An Inquiry into First-Person Being. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
• Tallis, Raymond. The Knowing Animal: A Philosophical Inquiry into Knowledge and Truth. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
• Tallis, Raymond. Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity. Durham, England: Acumen, 2011.
• Wollheim, Richard. The Mind and Its Depths. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Some relevant bibliographies:

• The Emotions
• Ethical Perspectives on the Sciences and Technology
• Human Nature and Personal Identity
• Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy
• Sullied (Natural & Social) Sciences

I also recommend familiarizing oneself with the literature on “autonomy” in philosophy, moral psychology, and political philosophy, as well as the notion of “human dignity” in philosophy and jurisprudence.  I have made this post available for viewing or download at my Academia page.

Thomas Hobbes’s “reciprocity theorem” (the Golden Rule with regard to our rational agency) and Christian missionary activity

I have not set the background for this post, which would involve a rather lengthy treatment of Sharon Lloyd’s analysis of Hobbes’s methods in Leviathan (which cohere with other and earlier works), in this instance, his “compositive reconstruction” of religion (Judeo-Christianity), a “redescription of transcendent interests,” and the “resolutive analysis” that takes place in Part 4 of Leviathan. I should note, however, Hobbes’s argument that more than a few beliefs, doctrines and practices found in Christianity were imported into this “true religion” from elsewhere: from the Greeks (Gentiles whose beliefs and practices were spread by colonization and conquest, including, ultimately, to the Jews) and the Jews, most notably, and these acted alone and in concert to pervert original (so to speak) articles of Christian faith and doctrine. Thus, for example, demonology (which provides ‘an account of evil, illness, madness, and prophecy as possession by good or evils spirits,’ and is responsible for the practice of exorcism as well as healing and speaking in tongues), with its origins among the Greeks, ultimately infected the religion of the Jews (being ‘carried into Christianity with the conversion of the Jews’). In addition, demonology lends its support to a pernicious interpretation of Scripture that finds us with immortal immaterial souls (as Hobbes says, ‘The soule in Scripture signifieth always, either the life, or the living creature and the body and soule jointly, the body alive,’ which sounds rather like what Wittgenstein later said!). Moreover, idolatry “came into Christianity with the conversion of the Gentiles.” Thus one sees here some of the more significant deleterious effects on the interpretation of Scripture which Hobbes causally traced back to worldviews that were subject to (largely successful) missionary activity.

All the same, this picture gets a bit fuzzy when we understand how Christianity emerged (or evolved, etc.) out of Judaism, Jesus and his disciples being of course Jews and Jesus himself explaining his teaching and preaching as grounded in the Judaic tradition (hence his proclamation that he did not want to abolish the law but to fulfill it). But the missionizing that leads to conversion of Gentiles clearly bothered Hobbes and perhaps an appreciation of this renders our example below of Hobbes’s application of his “reciprocity theorem” to practical reasoning and the doctrines and practices of Christianity more palatable or plausible or even persuasive (bear in mind that, along with Lloyd, and against not a few scholarly interpreters of Hobbes, I do not think Hobbes was an atheist but rather a devout Christian; evidence for this proposition is amply provided in Lloyd’s two books on his moral and political philosophy).

        

What follows is but one—and surprising—application of Hobbes’s “reciprocity theorem” (in essence, the Golden Rule) at the core of his Laws of Nature (at the same time God’s ‘natural law’), which we can arrive through exercise of our natural reason. Despite the fact that this is at once “God’s Law” (thus found in Scripture) and a Law of Nature, it is discoverable in principle by all of us as human beings distinguishable from other animals by our capacity for rational agency [thus atheists, agnostics, and non-theists are not excluded]. This reciprocity theorem serves as both a guide for and constraint upon moral reasoning. Without going into more analytical and explanatory detail here, I just want to note but one intriguing application of this moral and rational principle of reciprocity introduced by S.A. (Sharon) Lloyd in the second of her two works on Hobbes’s moral and political philosophy, Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: Cases in the Laws of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2009). “For instance,”

“[Hobbes] insists that the efforts of missionaries to alter religion in another country are prohibited by the Law of Nature, and this despite the fact that the proselytizer believes he is doing good by his action. Why? Because ‘he does that which he would not approve in another, namely, that coming, from hence, he should endeavor to alter the religion there.’ This application of reciprocity is striking, because it resists the parochial description of the agent’s action as one of teaching ‘true religion’ [which Hobbes himself believed was in fact Christianity] or ‘saving souls,’ in favor of the least abstract description of the action that members of both societies, disagreeing over the value of the proposed missionary work, might be expected to converge upon, namely that it is an instance of coming from one place and trying to alter the religion in another place. We will not approve the efforts of foreigners to alter our religious beliefs, not least because of the civil strife any effective such effort would surely cause among defenders of the former religion and advocates for the new. In this case Hobbes applies his reciprocity theorem to the action under the least abstract description of it—endeavouring to alter the religion—that all affected by the very action may be expected to accept as correct. Men disagree about which religious teachings are true. They disagree about what conversions are salvationary. But they can agree at least that the action under assessment is one of attempted religious conversion.”

The reciprocity theorem is a normative rationality constraint on moral principles derived from the laws of nature which entail a psychological experiment or test [this is where it functions as a ‘guide’ in addition to serving as a constraint] inasmuch as it asks us to perform an imaginative act of empathy* [this is my characterization of the ‘test,’ not Lloyd’s, as she does not invoke the concept of empathy]: “Reciprocity suggests a test for discerning whether one’s actions comport with the Law of Nature, namely that the agent imagine herself on the receiving end of the action she proposes to perform and consider whether from that vantage point she would fault the action as unreasonable:

‘[T]here is an easy rule to know upon a sudden, whether the action I be to do, be against the law of nature or not … [namely], [t]hat a man imagine himself in the place of the party with whom he hath to do, and reciprocally him in his. Which is no more but a changing, as it were, of the scales. [….]

[For a man in a quiet mind] there is nothing easier for him to know, though he never be so rude and unlearned, than this only rule, that when he doubts whether what he is now doing to another may be done by the law of nature or not, he conceive himself to be in that other’s stead. [….] And this rule is not only easy, but is anciently celebrated in these words, quod tibi fieri no vis, alteri ne feceris: do not that to others, you would not have done to yourself.’” [Hobbes uses both positive and negative formulations of the Golden Rule.]

       

Hobbes might be said to have retroactively identified with those Jewish followers of Jesus who vigorously but unsuccessfully argued against proselytizing to Gentiles after the death of Jesus. Looking back, we see clearly how this proselytization or missionary activity provided the tipping point for a Jewish sect that followed Jesus transforming itself into a distinctly different and thus new religion: Christianity (wherein new converts need not practice many of the traditional Jewish rites and rules or laws and, instead, only acknowledge Jesus as the messiah and savior).

* The notion of empathy, for better and worse, has now become one of those notoriously contested concepts, with recent arguments being made “against” empathy. At some point I will try to spell out the sense in which Hobbes is using this concept, while lacking the word for it, which did not emerge until long after Hobbes’s death (‘sympathy’ and ‘pity’ coming closest to what we now mean by empathy).

The unflattering components of human nature in action

First, there is an incredible number of cognitive and social biases to which we are prone (some of these may have a little noticed or implicit emotional or psychological dimension which perhaps make it misleading to describe them simply as ‘cognitive’). Second, there are the infamous “seven deadly sins” or moral psychological vices (avarice, lust, gluttony, etc.). Third, there are a number of unconscious, subconscious and conscious psychological dispositions or dispositional traits or debilitating phenomena (e.g., self-deception, denial, etc., as well as full-fledged mental ‘disorders’ or illness) to which most of us are liable. Fourth, there are at least several passions that more often than not are troubling if only for the disruption or chaos they bring to both our intra- and inter-personal (or collective) lives (some evidence suggests they may have accompanying and harmful physiological effects as well): anger, rage, envy, jealousy, and perhaps pride, for example (as we see, a few of these fall under the heading of the seven deadly sins). Finally, our attention is now being drawn to what are described as “vices of the mind” according to Quassim Cassam, that is, “systematically harmful ways of thinking, attitudes, or character traits,” in brief, “epistemic vices.”* These essentially intellectual or epistemic vices are “first and foremost, epistemically harmful and the other harms they cause—including political harms—are a consequence of their epistemic harms.”

I am inclined to believe that while we need and thus benefit from conceptual line drawing, there may be some overlap and thus permeable boundaries among the above items in our catalogue of human folly, foibles, faults and vices. Indeed, Cassam’s treatment of epistemic vices suggests as much, given his discussion of the “list of the intellectual vices that led to the Iraq fiasco,” among them arrogance, imperviousness to evidence, dogmatism, closed-mindedness, wishful thinking, and gullibility. While what is morally, intellectually and psychologically troubling or disturbing here is best examined in its particulars (through psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the arts, for example), that is, at the level of the individual person, it of course requires both the social and psychological sciences (the foremost of which I believe is the science of subjectivity, namely, psychoanalysis) to properly place these phenomena in a structural context, let alone engage in any sort of plausible social science and historical explanation. The fact that our foibles, faults and vices may be interacting and mutually reinforcing is not an encouraging picture of the human heart and mind. Indeed, this picture might assume the shape and color of the dystopian musings and apocalyptic tenor of our time. Yet, to use a clichéd expression, we ignore it at our peril.

* Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political (Oxford University Press, 2019)

• To place the aforementioned aspects of human nature within the proverbial big picture, please see the works in this compilation: Human Nature & Personal Identity.

Conversation as a vehicle for debate, dialogue and deliberation conducted within the normative orbit of rationality, equality, sense and sensibility or sociability

       

The following, from La Rochefoucauld’s (Leonard Tancock, trans.) Maxims (London: Penguin Books, 1959 [1678]), is perhaps more true today than when it was written:

One of the reasons why so few people are to be found who seem sensible and pleasant in conversation is that almost everybody is thinking about what he wants to say himself rather than about answering clearly what is being said to him. The more clever and polite think it enough simply to put on an attentive expression, while all the time you can see in their eyes and train of thought that they are far removed from what you are saying and anxious to get back to what they want to say. They ought, on the contrary, to reflect that such keenness to please oneself is a bad way of pleasing and persuading others, and that to listen well and answer to the point is one of the most perfect qualities one can have in conversation.

One day I hope to proffer a number of different, more elevating and inspiring models of conversation, some of which have existed in European and Asian history and involved vigorous debate, discussion, dialogue and deliberation of the highest order on matters of significance to the people of that time and place, matters that expressed shared and different beliefs and values and occasionally rather different worldviews and ideologies. They were consciously and otherwise often shaped and guided by norms of equality, rationality, sense and sensibility, sociability, and the moral psychological autonomy of individuals, while the power of their ideas and politics often rippled far beyond the circumference of their small social circles. The interlocutors in these ideal cases are minimally “sensible” and perhaps often “pleasant.” They exemplify the fine art of conversation insofar as they are attentive to the thoughts and feelings of others. This is but one example of what I have in mind:

The anarchist philosopher William Godwin (1756 –1836)* drew inspiration for his model of the anarchist society and its well-known reliance on sophisticated individual judgment as a vehicle of rationality and benevolence from “the context of the social circles in which he lived, worked and debated.” These radical social circles in turn “were part of a larger middle class community which drew on a range of philosophical and literary traditions in developing critical perspectives on contemporary social and political institutions” (Mark Philp). To be sure, Godwin drew upon the philosophes and British radicals, as well as the periphery of the early Liberal tradition (e.g., Paine), but especially the “writings, sermons, and traditions of Rational Dissent” when composing An Enquiry Composing Political Justice (first edition, 1793, later editions to 1798); but his belief in the veracity of his critique and vision was grounded in the daily life of the social circles of metropolitan radicalism in which he worked and spent his convivial and leisure activities. While this social and intellectual culture soon succumbed to government repression, it provides intimate empirical evidence that might be said to confirm Godwin’s belief—one shared with Condorcet—in the “perfectibility” (which is distinct from ‘perfectionism’) of man and the anarchist society for the provision of fertile soil for same. Godwin was not a political activist (although he knew members of radical groups and organizations) but a philosopher, but the radical social circles in which he lived temper the utopian (and crudely utilitarian) tendencies of his great work, at the very least they demonstrate the viability of at least some radical principles through their incarnation in daily praxis, even if Godwin lacked sufficient appreciation of the wider and deeper socio-economic and political conditions that made possible that praxis and served as a necessary material and political condition for radical sentiment and actions.

“Given the assumptions and conventions of his background and his social circles” writes Philp, “his position could be rationally defensible.” Godwin’s seemingly naïve faith in the power of private rational judgment was confirmed in his experience of these social and intellectual circles, which included, but were not limited to academics. In Philp’s words,

“… [Godwin’s] membership [in] a literate and intellectual culture … cannot be identified politically, socially or intellectually with either aristocratic privilege or with the potentially violent and disruptive London poor. It is in this group that we find the politically unattached intellectuals and writers who had greeted the French Revolution and who had called for reform at home on intellectual and humanitarian grounds. [While this group is] “diffuse and made up of heterogeneous social and intellectual currents … there seems to be no doubt that in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, there existed in both London and the provinces significant number of critical, literate, professional men and women who held often very radical views on social, political and religious issues who regularly met together for the purposes of discussion in a number of overlapping social and professional circles. [….] Godwin moves in the company of artists, portrait painters, engravers, grammarians, industrialists, writers, editors, publishers, antiquarians, librarians, actors, theater managers, playwrights, musicians, novelists, poets, classical scholars, scientists, dons, lawyers, mathematicians, doctors, surgeons, and divines—and this list is not exhaustive. We should also recognize that members of these groups sustained a commitment to radical thinking throughout most of the last decade of the century.”

The middling class radicalism of these men and women was not simply the product of a Dissenting background, the French Revolution, and the influence of the philosophes, for it required the warp and woof of a cultural experience of that type of sociability that formed the “basic fabric of late-eighteenth century intellectual life:”

“Once he had concluded his morning’s work Godwin’s day was free and he generally spent it in company—talking and debating while eating, drinking and socialising. His peers’ behavior was essentially similar; they lived in a round of debate and discussion in clubs, associations, debating societies, salons, taverns, coffee houses, bookshops, publishing houses, and in the street. And conversation ranged through philosophy, morality, religion, literature and poetry, to the political events of the day. Members of these circles were tied together in the ongoing practice of debate. These men and women were not the isolated heroes and heroines of Romanticism pursuing a lonely course of discovery; they were people who worked out their ideas in company and who articulated the aspirations and fears of their social group. Their consciousness of their group identity was of signal importance….”

Here we discern the skeletal structure of Godwin’s anarchist ideal of a natural society, one which is fundamentally “discursive” or, better, conversational, in other words, a society defined by “intellectually active and communicative agents, a society wherein advances are made through a dialectic of individual reflection and group discussion.” Reason and “argument” were the lifeblood of a radicalism that flourished in this kind of sociability:

“The rules of debate for this group were simple: no one has a right to go against reason, no one has a right to coerce another’s judgment, and every individual has a right—indeed, a duty—to call to another’s attention his faults and failings. This is a democratically participatory and deliberative discourse; furthermore, it artfully combines a sense of community or fraternity with individual moral and political autonomy: truth progresses through debate and discussion and from each submitting his beliefs and reasoning to the scrutiny of others.” The values of openness, rationality, and discussion or conversation that distinguished this sociability were likewise suffused with the norms and values that animated the literature of “sensibility.”

* As Peter Marshall informs us in his first-rate biography of Godwin, “At different times in his life, [Godwin] was a journalist, literary critic, satirist, political philosopher, psychologist, economist, educationalist, biographer, historian, novelist, playwright, essayist, grammarian, lexicographer, fabulist, and writer of sermons and children’s books,” as well as a nonviolent revolutionary!

       

For more on this, in addition to Philp’s book, Godwin’s Political Justice (Cornell University Press, 1986), from which the above was extracted, see too his later work, Radical Conduct: Politics, Sociability and Equality in London, 1789-1815 (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

The Ubiquity of Confabulation

Confabulation is a beautiful word for—if you will—a tragic concept. It is arguably a ubiquitous phenomenon. Assuming its ubiquity should mean that it’s likely not the case that most instances of confabulation are symptomatic of brain damage or dementia, even if some or many instances are in fact indicative or suggestive of real neuropsychological problems or disorders. In brief, it involves inaccurate or false personal or autobiographical narratives, but more formally: “confabulation is a memory error defined as the production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world. People who confabulate present incorrect memories ranging from ‘subtle alterations to bizarre fabrications,’ and are generally very confident about their recollections, despite contradictory evidence.” As with delusions, confabulations are generally identified by what we term their “surface” or behavioral features and these features of necessity make reference to normative or evaluative epistemic terms: truth, rationality, justification or warrant, and belief.

As Lisa Bortolotti explains, “many of the epistemic features attributed to people with delusions and confabulations constitute infringements of norms of rationality for beliefs, such as resistance to counter-evidence, inconsistency, lack of evidential support, failure of action guidance, or as failures of self-knowledge, such as a distorted sense of one’s personal boundaries, double bookkeeping [in psychology: ‘the tendency, among those who experience delusions, to perceive reality and the delusions as both being real, while remaining unbothered by the discrepancy or inconsistencies between the two’], inaccurate autobiographical narratives and fabricated memories.” And here is where—if not why—confabulation in particular makes it hard to draw hard and fast conceptual, diagnostic and therapeutic boundaries between the fields of psychiatry (or psychology), psychoanalysis and neuropsychology: “principles of classification and diagnosis informing clinical practice and even neuropsychological research into psychiatric disorders are still parasitic on the behavioral manifestations of such disorders” (Bortolotti). The boundaries between everyday stress and distress, existential anxiety or unease, and “disorders” of the psyche, soul or mind (some of which may be etiologically ‘organic’) are likewise in question or at least fuzzy, although conceptual, medical, and mental or psychological distinctions and line drawing is no less necessary even if and when such boundaries are permeable.

I was moved to briefly introduce the concept confabulation because I came across its invocation unexpectedly in a book I am reading, Graeme Hunter’s Pascal the Philosopher: An Introduction (University of Toronto Press, 2013). Hunter relies on this technical and diagnostic concept in philosophy and psychology of mind to explain what he terms “philosophical failure.” Hunter experienced quite a few occasions in which he presented a lucid valid or sound argument on a substantive and contested or controversial topic to a “learned audience” (including his peers in the profession), its members afterwards unimpressed or unpersuaded by the argument’s conclusion, without, as befits their expertise, explaining to him (or discussing amongst themselves) what was wrong with the argument or why an apparent reaction of radical scepticism or failure to persuade was the (unwarranted) result. The characterization of this as “philosophical failure” has some precedent, Hunter informs us, not only in the writings of Pascal, but in our own time in the works of Robert Nozick and Peter van Inwagen. But Hunter, unlike Nozick and van Inwagen, wants to proffer a plausible or even persuasive explanation for this failure, and thus he summons the notion of confabulation to do so. The particular rendering of the concept, however, is a tad different than what we presented above, as it does not necessarily rely on a failure of memory as such, and thus can be considered a bit wider in scope:

“[C]onfabulation is a mental disorder some people exhibit in which, without intending to deceive, they make up explanations that sound rational [or reasonable or plausible] but are based on insufficient [or irrelevant, or improperly conceived or recalled] knowledge. It has been loosely or broadly characterized [by William Hirstein] as ‘a sort of pathological certainty about ill-grounded thoughts and utterances.’ Confabulations resemble lies, except they are believed by the teller and told without intending to deceive. And they are not like ordinary mistakes either, because the confabulator is in a position to see without difficulty [?] that what he is saying is false [while I agree that confabulations are not like ordinary epistemic or mental mistakes, I am not sure it is correct to claim that ‘the confabulator is in a position to see without difficulty’ his or her utterances are false, given what we’ve learned from over a century of psychoanalysis].”

Hunter also contends that “[c]ompelling examples of confabulation can only [emphasis added] be gathered under clinical conditions,” which I don’t think need be the case, although it is true that compelling neuropsychological, psychosomatic, or psychoanalytic explanations of the causes of same in any one individual require the constraints of the clinic for thorough symptomatic diagnosis, etiology, and (if possible) prescription or therapeutic regimen. And he proceeds to argue for a philosophical conception of confabulation to account for philosophical failure (having to do with how valid or sound arguments are received by others) based on reasons associated with professional philosophy and philosophers, which we will not address here. Yet, with him, I am extending the concept beyond what is circumscribed by “brain science” and “naturalized epistemology,” assuming (and here I may be departing from Hunter) there are credible forms of psychology and psychoanalysis (and thus philosophy and psychology of mind) that are neither conceptually nor even scientifically (when psychoanalysis is understood to be a science of subjectivity) beholden to or dependent upon neuropsychology and/or naturalized epistemology.

Given what has occurred in politics with the ascendancy of Trump and the cult that slavishly and blindly supports him, we can make armchair symptomatic diagnoses based on the behavioral manifestations of confabulation we  witness routinely in the news (be it cable television or newspaper; this is also to some extent now documented in social scientific research), to which we can of course add our own personal experiences or encounters as anecdotal evidence and/or “testimony” (construed in the manner of social epistemology). It is rather hard to resist the conclusion that “confabulation” (among other deleterious psychological phenomena: denial, self-deception, delusion, illusion, uninhibited wishful thinking, indulgence of dangerous passions or vices, etc., any or all of which in most cases is in conjunction with more commonplace cognitive biases that afflict most of us one time or another) rules the minds of millions of people in this country, the vast majority of whom proudly if not perversely avow Republican Party* identification or affiliation.

* As I earlier wrote, the GOP is a party of imaginary and delusionary grievance, of crass and cartoonish schtick, of denial and desperation, of repugnance and regression, of illusion and irrationality, of empty gestures and vain cynicism, of authoritarianism and aspirational fascism, of obscene wealth and amoral power, of sycophants and cults, of self-deception and phantasy, of white supremacy (and racism generally) and narcissistic privilege, of putatively Christian nationalism, a faux populism of bread and circuses that has failed to conceal, let alone contain, a degraded and debased political practice drowning in a toxic dump of greed, corruption, and sleaze.

Piecemeal (trial-and-error) Social Engineering and Incrementalism as Obstinate Ideological Doctrine in Government and Politics

... with some family resemblance to the fondness for and fealty to tradition, custom and, in common law, rather strict stare decisis (precedent) among conservatives of yesteryear.

I suspect the following methodological principles are not sufficiently understood in social science and history literature, but even if I’m mistaken, I am far more confident that public policy makers, politicians and administrators are peculiarly prone to violating these methodological principles when assessing constitutions, institutions, and revolutions; I think these principles are also applicable to not only social democratic and welfare state institutions, but to the various species of welfare state: liberal, corporatist, and social democratic, for example (but also what we might call ‘authoritarian’ welfare and ‘benevolent authoritarian’ welfare regimes).

“Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, was concerned to evaluate the social consequences of American institutions. The following methodological principles can be extracted from his work: (i) One must look at the consequences that emerge when the institution in question is widely used rather than marginal. [….] (ii) Any given institution will have many consequences, some of them opposed in their tendency. It is imperative, therefore, to look at their net effect. [….] (iii) One should not evaluate a given institution or constitution according to its efficiency at each moment of time, but rather look at the long-term consequences. [….] (iv) One should not confuse the transitional effect of introducing an institution with the steady-state effect of having it. The initial effect of a revolution may be loose morals, yet the steady-state effect may be to impose stricter morals. (v) The four principles just indicated can only be applied after the fact, to trace the consequences of a system that has been in operation for some time. Our knowledge about social causality is too slight to permit confident predictions about the effects of an as yet untried system. (vi) After the fact we can often perceive that the main advantage of the constitution is found in effects other than those which are its official purpose and in terms of which it makes sense to the participants.” — Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: studies in the subversion of rationality (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

As Elster says in a footnote with regard to (v), “it will not do to argue with Edmund Burke or [Karl] Popper that trial-and-error can be a substitute for well-founded predictions, since these methods fail to respect principles (i) to (iv). By requiring initial and local viability of institutional reform, the incremental method neglects the fact that institutions which are viable in the large and in the long term may not be so in the small and short term. This is, in fact, the main objection that Tocqueville makes to Burke’s evaluation of the French Revolution.”

Cf. too Robert E. Goodin’s Political Theory and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press, 1982), published a year before Elster’s Sour Grapes, in which he attributes the “lack of a proper theoretical base for policy studies” to the “perverse and pervasive doctrine of incrementalism.” Goodin’s critique is a bit more detailed and well-rounded than Elster’s, but in all fairness, Elster was focusing on methodological principles for evaluative purposes, not the doctrine of incrementalism as such (or policy studies in particular). See Goodin’s chapter 2, “Anticipating Outcomes: Overcoming the Errors of Incrementalism,” which remains an indispensable yet seldom cited critique of a policy doctrine that still, it appears, rules the minds of far too many people— be they theoretically or politically or administratively—involved in such matters. 

An incisive critique of Popper’s model of “piecemeal social engineering” from a Marxist vantage point is found in Maurice Cornforth’s The Open Philosophy and the Open Society (Lawrence & Wishart, 1968): 215-231. Incidentally, Cornforth appears neglected (or forgotten) not only (and perhaps not surprisingly) by philosophers but those on the Left as well.

Finally, to place the above within the proverbial big picture, I suggest browsing through the bibliographies for (i) Marxism, (ii) Philosophy, Psychology, and Methodology for the Social Sciences (available on my Academia page), as well as reading (iii) John Friedman’s Planning in the Public Domain: From Knowledge to Action (Princeton University Press, 1987). Should (i) and (ii) prove intimidating or overwhelming, one might instead read carefully Jon Elster’s Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

On the many and obdurate moral psychological obstacles to self-awareness (or self-knowledge), happiness, and eudaimonia (‘human flourishing’) … or individuation, self-realization and human fulfillment (Part 2)

(Part 1 is here)

Introduction

Today we continue sharing material from John Cottingham’s incisive, creative, and compelling (at least by my lights) book, The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge University Press, 2005). Cottingham (Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Reading and Professorial Research Fellow, Heythrop College, London) is a Catholic (he serves on the Advisory Board of the Von Hügel Institute), and his examples, explanations and reflections often draw upon his faith (as we say) while largely assuming—and I think in most cases correctly—that his arguments and conclusions apply in one fashion or to one extent or another to other traditional religious worldviews (he occasionally draws illustrations and comparisons with material from Buddhism). And while he more or less has specialized in the philosophy of Descartes (e.g., he is the co-editor and translator of the three-volume standard Cambridge edition of The Philosophical Writings of Descartes), his work as a philosopher has a far broader compass. Only a handful on contemporary philosophers (Iris Murdoch, Ninian Smart, B.K. Matilal, Jonardon Ganeri come quickest to mind) have written on religion and spirituality in a way that both resonates with and challenges me, and Cottingham is among them. I hope this series speaks to some of your abiding interests and concerns on these topics as well.

*           *           *

“What does this excursus into Freudian theory have to do with the question of spirituality and its link with mora virtue? [….] What is involved in [both the spiritual quest and the psychoanalytic quest] is a systematic programme of askesis which is linked to an interior journey—the journey to find the true self with which the smug, superior, intellectualizing, rationalizing ego is so easily confused [in brief, there are different conceptions of autonomy, some more spiritually and psychologically cogent and availing than others].

The process of growth and transformation, in order to overcome cognitive and the conative defects to which the moral deliberator is typically subject,¹ is a crucial part of what it is to become a developed human agent [that point in a person’s life in which she has fulfilled at least a necessary condition of self-realization through moral psychological individuation]: our moral lives are a journey in a much deeper sense than applies to many parts of our intellectual lives (for example our accumulating knowledge of geography or natural history). Now of course there are many moral philosophers who have acknowledged the importance of learning in the moral sphere; Thomas Aquinas, for example, was well aware of the Aristotelian stress on the importance of training and habituation in ethics [as were several notable philosophers in the Confucian tradition, beginning with Confucius], and he himself spoke of habits of virtue, describing conscience in terms of habits of will, as well as practical reasoning. But the human moral journey described in the works of the great spiritual writers (Augustine is perhaps the paradigm case, though there are many others) is radically different in its outlines—radically different from what one might call the ‘classroom’ model, a model of careful progressive moulding of habits based on innate capacities of practical intellect and will. All such ‘normal’ apparatus no doubt has its place, but, if anything like the religious worldview is correct, there is something more dynamic and more dramatic typically at work in the human spirit. As moral beings, we do not just start from a reliable innate deposit, and then accumulate information and get more skilled in processing it; rather, we gradually, laboriously, stimulated by examples, moved by parables, humbled by error, purged by suffering, begin to change. The faculty enabling us to respond in this way may be innate, and in that sense ‘natural’ (as Aquinas, for example supposed), but it also requires our being open to the possibility of transformation—in Pauline language, to putting off the old nature and taking on the new, or in the language of the Fourth Gospel, to the possibility of rebirth [religious and philosophical worldviews of Asian provenance would of course choose, in most cases, a different metaphor for this process!].

Such rebirth, for any who are sympathetic to the psychoanalytic model, will involve a guided programme of self-discovery, a struggle towards greater self-awareness and clearer resolution, whereby we are progressively freed from the shadows and projections inherited from the past, Not all religious thinkers will want to take on board all the Freudian or Jungian apparatus (though it will be very hard for anyone seriously interested in human moral and spiritual development not to acknowledge the need for at least some of it—for example the lessons to be learned concerning the battle against rationalization and self-deception, the need to recognize the shadow or darker side of the human psyche, in order to understand and transcend it). But however we work out the detail, and the structure of the required programme of askesis, the central point remains: that the healthy growth of the human spirit requires a therapeutic phase, a way of coming to terms with the obstacles to a balanced and harmonious and integrated life.

So far it may seem as if our argument simply presents the need for what could broadly be called a psychotherapeutic phase in human moral development. That itself would be a fairly ambitious result, taking us beyond what most of the leading philosophical accounts of the good life (for example those of Aristotle, Spinoza, Bentham, Mill, and even Kant) have been remotely prepared to acknowledge. But even if we grant a need for such a phase, we need to focus on one particular aspect to provide a rich understanding of what is added by a specifically spiritual dimension in the programme of askesis, and why the full flowering of the moral self may be thought to require it.

Consider for the sake of argument someone who has successfully completed a programme of psychotherapeutic analysis (the imagined case is perhaps rather artificial since it is probably a misunderstanding to envisage a final state of ‘cure’ after which everything is plain sailing, but let that pass for the present). The supposition is of someone who has begun to learn to integrate the disparate and split-off parts of the psyche, who has started to bring to the surface the buried fears and anxieties stemming from early experience, who has begun to master the techniques of self-examination and self-awareness, who has learned something of the dangerous and ever-present propensity to rationalize—the fussy attempts of the controlling intellect to manage life’s problems by neatly parceling them up and thereby concealing all that is most salient to their true meaning. How do we envisage such a person proceeding? After this imaginary ‘graduation day,’ when our subject gets up off the couch and resumes ordinary life, can the askesis of spirituality hence forth be ignored? Can our ‘cured’ patient stride forward into the clear daylight of the moral life, henceforth exercising the sober and self-confident virtue of Aristotle’s phronimos, the man of ‘practical wisdom,’ liberated from any psychological distortions that might previously have got in the way.

That is certainly one model of the good life. And indeed nothing in the present argument implies any denigration of practical wisdom and its virtues. Without the careful evaluation of evidence, accurate means-ends reasoning, calm consideration of alternatives, reasoned debate and discussion, it would be impossible for human beings to pursue the good in any systematic way. But for all that, to uphold the life of practical reason as, so to speak, the last word on the good life for humankind seems in the end both a naively optimistic position, and at the same time, an ultimately pessimistic one. It risks being naïve in so far as it places reliance on the balanced deliberation of the healthy subject to provide a sufficient basis for a fulfilled existence. Freud was more grimly realistic: you have learned to cope with neurotic misery, he said to his patients; now that your treatment is finished, learn to cope with ordinary misery. The fact is that vulnerability—to pain, to love, to fear, ultimately to extinction—is not simply a function of psychological or developmental difficulties, but is part of our very nature as human beings—one of the signs of existence, as the Buddhists have it.² And unless the moral life can be lived in a compartmentalized way, in a way that ignores or dangerously blindfolds us to that vulnerability (and this would involve a sacrifice of our wholeness, our integrity), then we are going to need an askesis [e.g., a daily regimen of spiritual exercises that includes, among other things, readings, contemplation, prayer, meditation, self-examination, the technique of prosoche, and a ‘therapy of desire’] that enables us to come to terms with it.” — John Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge University Press, 2005): 143-146.

Given Cottingham’s Catholic lifeworld (a’ lifeworld’ being the personal individuation of a worldview, religious or not), it is not surprising that he is more intimately familiar with, and argues specifically in favor of a Catholic (Christian) program and strategy of spiritual, moral and personal discipline and exercises for confronting, and embracing, existential vulnerability “as ultimately redemptive.” While mentioning Buddhism in particular, Cottingham appears to appreciate the fact that there are similar when not identical forms of askesis in other religious traditions (cf. Sufi ṭarīqah in Islam), including those of Asian provenance (Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism, for instance), and these are not solely the prerogative of monastic orders or would-be mystics (arguably, the modern or post-modern age seems to be blurring the boundaries a bit between the spiritual praxis of monasticism and the religious life of the laity, most notably in Buddhism and Christianity, with Sufism providing arguably the best model of this insofar as celibacy is not institutionalized and Sufi orders seem to vary more among themselves than is the case with Christian monasticism). Moreover, the specific form of the spiritual exercises and disciplinary practices may differ, as does the metaphysical, philosophical, and in some measure, psychological presuppositions and assumptions that motivate the respective spiritual programs.

We should also note that Cottingham grants there are non-religious responses (unsatisfying or insufficient to the extent that they are ‘naturalistic,’ but he concedes that we can nonetheless speak of a—perhaps attenuated—‘spirituality’ here as well) to human vulnerability in the aforementioned sense: the Aristotelian approach, the “heroic” strategy of the Nietzschean, the “absurdist” existentialism of Camus, or the “romantic realist” (Iris Murdoch) version of Sartre’s existentialism, or the phenomenologically rich feminist existentialism of Beauvoir (Cottingham here cites only Camus).

In our third and final post in this series, the need for and role of spiritual, moral and personal discipline and exercises (which assume the possibility of transcending the natural world or the existence of non- or supra-natural metaphysical properties) will be explored further on its own terms with respect to religious pluralism as well as in relation to philosophy and psychoanalysis.

Notes

1. In a footnote stressing the significance of the distinction between cognitive (perceptual) defects and conative (volitional) defects, Cottingham states his belief that it’s “insufficiently appreciated that the aim of psychotherapeutic programmes of self-discovery is to produce a kind of self-awareness and integration in which the formerly split-off part of the psyche no longer appear as alien forces to be subdued by a ‘superior’ act of will, but instead are perceived in their true colours. The result is that our ‘cognitive’ and ‘conative’ incapacities are found to be intimately related….”
2. Cottingham is here referencing duhkha (P. dukkha), “suffering” or existential “unsatisfactoriness,” being “ill-at-ease” as fundamental ontological or metaphysical condition. It is the first of the “four truths (known by the spiritually) noble” ones (catvāry āryasatyāni, mistranslated but commonly known as the ‘four noble truths’), being a spiritually motivated symptomatic diagnosis of what ails us, as human beings (and a mark of all sentient existence). The second truth identifies different types or forms of such suffering and two principal causes (inordinate craving or desire and ignorance). The third truth is said to demonstrate, as the Buddha himself did, that it is possible, while embodied, to bring an end to duhkha. The fourth and final truth involves the therapeutic regimen of spiritual praxis needed to bring an end (nirodha) to duhkha, the path (marga) being of an eightfold nature (āryastāngamārga), with three principal sections having to do with, generally speaking, (i) morality, (ii) concentration, and (iii) wisdom. Duhkha is also one of the “three marks” (trilaksana) of all conditioned phenomena in samsāra (existence or the natural world), the other two being impermanence (anitya) and nonself (anātman).

(A list of recommended readings and relevant bibliographies is appended to the first post, and while there are no such readings this time round, additional readings will be appended to the third and last post in this series.)

On the many and obdurate moral psychological obstacles to self-awareness (or self-knowledge), happiness, and eudaimonia (‘human flourishing’) … or individuation, self-realization and human fulfillment (Part 1)

“One does not have to go all the way with Augustine and the theory of original sin in order to recognize that humans have a massive capacity to rationalize, deceive themselves, excuse themselves, convince themselves they are acting properly and sincerely, when their true motivations are often highly suspect. To take one example, it is all too clear that we rejig our assessments in our own favour: scarcely realizing it, when making decisions we interpret the balance of reasons in a way that is biased toward ourselves. I am not speaking here of the legitimate partiality that allows any sincere person of integrity to assign a certain reasonable weighting to his or her own self-interests and those of her loved ones, but rather to the distorting shadows cast by pride and vanity, and self-importance and fear and embarrassment and self-defensiveness and envy and greed and self-absorption and fantasies of power. Some contemporary moral philosophers, to be sure, write about these topics, and often they flatter themselves—or indeed quite rightly suppose—that they do so in an acute and insightful way; but one fundamental lesson of psychoanalytic thought is that the most articulate intellectuals are often the most resistant to self-awareness when it comes to their own case. That self-deception can operate right alongside the clearest intellectual grasp of all the salient features surrounding a decision is something that is not particularly easy to grasp without the personal kind of personal askesis that that makes it vivid.

The disciplines of psychoanalysis make available to the subject an understanding — one that is never final, but needs constant practical reinforcement through guided self-examination—of how present objects of choice can become invested with freight from the past, so that they take on a special significance which is opaque to the agent himself. [….] Change and growth require, if the psychoanalytic line is anything like correct, a radical vulnerability—a willingness to delve back into those early parts of our lives in which our very ability to value things, our very models of goodness and love and attraction and self-worth, were shaped and formed. That simple maxim, The child is father to the man, so rarely appreciated in its full significance by intellectualizing ethicists, tells us that we cannot overcome the obstacles to moral growth and fulfillment by intellectual analysis alone.

Nor, indeed, by intellect plus will-power.* For the other lesson of Freudian theory is that resolute determination very often does not do the job in the way we expect it to. Repression of desire, determination to ‘keep the passions in check,’ as some of the ancient philosophical programmes recommended, can simply lead to displacements of libido or psychic energy which may break out in different, but possibly even more serious ways. In a sense there is nothing new about this: the lesson is as old as Euripides’ Bacchae, and Freud’s genius was to make explicit what in one way we all knew already. But the lesson remains: we fantasize (and perhaps academics are ever more prone to this than most) that we are ‘mature,’ intelligent, rational beings who have our destiny in our own hands; but the child remains within us, and we fail to acknowledge it at our peril.” — John Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge University Press, 2005): 142-143.

* On this see chapter II, especially but not only the section on “willing what cannot be willed,” in Jon Elster’s Sour Grapes: studies in the subversion of rationality (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

A short list of suggested reading:

• Ames, Roger T. and Wimal Dissanayake, eds. Self and Deception: A Cross-Cultural Philosophical Enquiry (State University of New York Press, 1996).
• Barnes, Annette. Seeing Through Self-Deception (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
• Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron. The Subtlety of Emotions (MIT Press, 2000).
• Blackburn, Simon. Lust: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford University Press, 2004).
• Bryant, Edwin F., trans. The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali [with commentary and insights from the traditional commentators] (North Point Press, 2009).
• Cohen, Stanley. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Polity Press, 2001).
• Desikachar, T.K.V. and Hellfried Krusche (Ann-Marie Hodges, trans.) Freud and Yoga: Two Philosophies of Mind Compared (North Point Press, 2014).
• de Silva, Padmasiri. An Introduction to Buddhist Psychology (Rowman & Littlefield, 3rd ed., 2000).
• de Silva, Padmasiri. Buddhist and Freudian Psychology (Shogam Publications, 4th ed., 2010).
• Dilman, Ilham. Freud: Insight and Change (Basil Blackwell, 1998).
• Dilman, Ilham. Raskolnikov’s Rebirth: Psychology and the Understanding of Good and Evil (Open Court, 2000).
• Dyson, Michael Eric. Pride: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford University Press, 2006).
• Elster, Jon. Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
• 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).
• Epstein, Joseph. Envy: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford University Press/New York Public Library, 2003).
• Fingarette, Herbert. Self-Deception (University of California Press, 2^nd, 2000).
• Giannetti, Eduardo (John Gledson, trans.) Lies We Live By: The Art of Self-Deception (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000).
• Hacker, P.M.S. The Passions: A Study of Human Nature (John Wiley & Sons, 2018).
• Harris, William V. Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity (Harvard University Press, 2001).
• Hoffer, Axel, ed. Freud and the Buddha: The Couch and the Cushion. (Karnac Books, 2015).
• Marar, Ziyad. Deception (Acumen, 2008).
• Mele, Alfred R. Self-Deception Unmasked (Princeton University Press, 2001).
• Miller, William Ian. Faking It (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
• Nussbaum, Martha C. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1994).
• Roberts, Robert C. Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
• Roberts, Robert C. Emotions in the Moral Life (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
• Rochefoucauld, Duc de la (Leonard Tancock, trans.) Maxims (Penguin Books, 1959).
• Rorty, Amelie O. Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (Beacon Press, 1988).
• Taylor, Gabrielle. Deadly Vices (Oxford University Press, 2006).
• Thurman, Robert A.F. Anger: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford University Press, 2006).
• Tickle, Phyllis A. Greed: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford University Press, 2006).
• Wasserstein, Wendy. Sloth: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford University Press, 2006).

See too the following compilations available on my Academia page: (i) Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, (ii) Dreams and Dreaming, (iii) The Emotions, (iv) Human Nature and Personal Identity, and (vi) Psychoanalytic Psychology and Therapy.

Psychoanalysis, Philosophy and Science

       

I (still) recall when Adolf Grünbaum’s (1923 – 2018) critique of Freudian psychoanalytic theory (and corresponding therapy) first appeared and gained fairly widespread acclaim in academic and intellectual worlds. I was then (mid-1980s) a graduate student (rather older than most of my classmates) in the Dept. of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara where the bulk of the professoriate, largely owing to Freud’s often simplistic critique of religion (mainly but not exclusively in its Judeo-Christian variations) but perhaps for other reasons as well, looked largely askance at Freud’s views on psychology and philosophy of mind. I tended to follow their lead, being a rather impressionable graduate student who, despite appearances to the contrary was, profoundly, intellectually insecure. However, cracks in my beliefs on this score began when I took a seminar on Freud which found us reading works by Jürgen Habermas and Paul Ricoeur (two of the parties, along with Hans-Georg Gadamer, also involved in the ‘hermeneutics’ debate of the time) that spoke to questions of psychoanalytic philosophy or theory, as well as delving into Grünbaum’s rather difficult book (at least for me and in those days), The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique (University of California Press, 1984). I was smitten by Grünbaum’s critique despite sensing his reliance on a rather constricted conception of science, mainly because I was not, as yet, deeply familiar with the entire Freudian corpus, let alone the literature of those that followed in his wake in the psychoanalytic tradition. I recite this biographical snippet to highlight how much one’s heretofore strongly held views can be subject to change (tantamount to a conversion experience!), in this case arising from a commitment to reading consistently and closely in a field of study over a long period of time.

Since Grünbaum’s critique, which many thought slammed the door on the idea that psychoanalysis could claim scientific status or warrant, a handful of philosophers took up a defense of Freud’s model of the mind as well as his core theoretical concepts and therapeutic aims. Grünbaum replied to some thus not all of these and continued to re-work his critique over the years. I won’t here discuss the philosophers who I believe sufficiently rebutted Grünbaum’s principal arguments (Ilham Dilman indirectly and Donald Levy directly, for example, among others), although it should go without saying that his critique, in the end, has had a salutary effect on psychoanalytic philosophy, theory, and therapy insofar as it prompted at least some psychoanalysts to think more clearly and coherently about what they are up to both inside and outside the clinic. A handful of these psychoanalysts are at the same time professional philosophers, for example, Jonathan Lear, Marcia Cavell, Jon Mills, and Linda A.W. Brakel. It is, for now, the work of Brakel that I want to highlight. She’s written three books worth the attention of anyone interested in this subject (that is, the philosophy of psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis as a ‘science’ or a ‘science of subjectivity’), although I happen to be more fond of the first two than the last: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and the A-Rational Mind (Oxford University Press, 2009), Unconscious Knowing and Other Essays in Psycho-Philosophical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2010), and The Ontology of Psychology: Questioning Foundations in the Philosophy of Mind (Routledge, 2013).

I’ve mentioned Brakel’s books here before, but I recently came across her work again in a volume in which she is one of the editors: Simon Boag, Linda A.A. Brakel and Vesta Talvitie, eds. Philosophy, Science, and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Meeting (Routledge, 2015). This volume includes a more recent version of Grünbaum’s critique to which Brakel soundly and, for me at any rate, persuasively replies. For anyone still, so to speak, in Grünbaum’s corner, Brakel’s argument is a must read, as it is for those of us already convinced of the need and value of the psychoanalytic model of the mind, of psychoanalytic philosophy and theory more generally, and its correlative therapeutic regimen dedicated to the relief of common forms of suffering.

       

Is it still properly described as the GOP (‘grand old party’)?

How might or should we characterize today’s Republican Party? In other words, what generalizations* properly describe its views, its policies, and its behavior as a national political party?

The GOP is a party of imaginary and delusionary grievance, of crass and cartoonish schtick, of denial and desperation, of repugnance and regression, of illusion and irrationality, of empty gestures and vain cynicism, of authoritarianism and aspirational fascism, of obscene wealth and amoral power, of sycophants and cults, of self-deception and phantasy, of white supremacy and narcissistic privilege, of putatively Christian nationalism, a faux populism of bread and circuses that has failed to conceal, let alone contain, a degraded and debased political practice mired in a toxic dump of greed, corruption, and sleaze.

However well-intended, that makes mincemeat of Democratic rhetoric and aims on behalf of bipartisanship.

* As with all generalizations, there are exceptions of one kind and degree or another.

Objectivity and Non-Naturalism in Ethics

“It is not that goodness or rightness are ‘miraculous’ properties, or supernaturally decreed supervenience relations. Rather … goodness is like health: the criteria or its attribution to objects and actions have to do entirely with the presence or absence of certain broadly natural features, such as the tendency to alleviate suffering, the promotion of fellow feeling, respectful treatment, and the like. But the normative status of the obligations connected with such types of behaviour is, as Kant famously pointed out, not simply instrumental or hypothetical: we ought to do these things not just because we have contingently evolved to have certain inclinations, not because our society happens contingently to put a premium on certain goals, but rather because such behaviour is categorically right.”—John Cottingham, from his chapter, “Religion and Value: the problem of heteronomy,” in his profound and invaluable work, The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge University Press, 2005)

As Cottingham says, “paradoxically,” the late J.L. Mackie’s characterization of moral objectivism as entailing or “implying the ‘irruption’ of value into the natural world [hence its metaphysical ‘queerness’] is in a certain sense correct.” Or, as Hilary Putnam, Raymond Tallis, or Grant Gillett, might put it, the notion of values, moral and otherwise, involves in some sense and in some way a transcendence of what we typically understand as the natural or material world. For how do we interpret the nature of the conclusive reasons we have to pursue right behavior or goodness? How do we metaphysically account for their objectivity? It seems the religious theist and non-theist alike have objective reasons that are interpreted in such a way, or making meaningful reference to, something that transcends the contingencies of human evolution or development and our individual naturalized embodiment. Avowedly non-religious philosophers who find Kant’s understanding of what we “ought” to do compelling may prescind from describing the metaphysical dimension or precise nature of this transcendence (here they might speak simply of the possibility of ‘non-natural properties’ that are not like natural ones!), they may be uncomfortable with ideas of moral teleology or moral cosmology but it seems we cannot avoid questions that take us beyond a full-throated commitment to metaphysical (or some would say ‘scientific’) naturalism. I am being deliberately provocative here by way of prompting thoughts and comments.  

The European Enlightenment: a basic bibliography

I previously announced to anyone listening that I was no longer composing lengthy bibliographies, but I had to make an exception for this one: The European Enlightenment (which was at once colonialist, cosmopolitan, and emancipatory, as well as revolutionary, liberal, and democratic ).

Belligerent foreign policy in the Middle East and the continued neglect and diminution of international law

U.S. strike in Syria kills 1, wounds several, Iraqi militia official says (AP story in the LA Times)

“A U.S. airstrike [euphemism for ‘aerial bombing’] in Syria targeted facilities belonging to a powerful Iranian-backed Iraqi armed group, killing one of their militiamen and wounding a number of others, an Iraqi militia official said Friday. The official told the Associated Press that the strikes against the Kataeb Hezbollah militia, or Hezbollah Brigades, hit an area along the border between the Syrian site of Boukamal facing Qaim on the Iraqi side. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak of the attack.

The Pentagon said the strikes were retaliation for a rocket attack in Iraq this month that killed one civilian contractor and wounded a U.S. service member and other coalition troops. ‘I’m confident in the target that we went after, we know what we hit,’ Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III told reporters flying with him from California to Washington shortly after the airstrikes.” [….]

There are other, more explicitly geo-political and morally sound political reasons these aerial bombings are wrong in addition to the lucid legal reason provided below by Professor O’Connell (unfortunately, my dear wife had to listen to me angrily summarize them late last night just before retiring for the evening). For example, this emboldens and strengthens the hand of “hardliners” in Iran who do not want to adhere to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) or negotiate with the U.S., although the attempt by the latter to renew its commitment to this pact beyond the relevant sources of international law—primarily the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) treaty law—is a foolish and self-defeating endeavor that conveniently ignores which State party, i.e., the U.S., undermined the JCPOA. Needless to say, the Biden administration has thus begun to replicate the kind of ill-considered and reckless foreign policy behavior common to the office of the Presidency since WW II. And the violation of international law in this regard, once again, fits into an historical pattern of such superpower behavior that has had a cumulative and enormously corrosive effect on the moral, legal, and political validity of international law and norms generally in the world of nation states.* The various forms of putative “message sending” cited among political pundits in the mass media as reasons for this bombing have—like the extremely harsh and needlessly punitive economic sanctions imposed on Iran—nothing but perverse and thus regressive effects: it does not lead in any way lead to “productive engagement.” This is foreign policy reduced to belligerence, however much it warms the hearts of militaristic nationalists in public office long intoxicated by U.S. “exceptionalism.”

“‘The United Nations Charter makes absolutely clear that the use of military force on the territory of a foreign sovereign state is lawful only in response to an armed attack on the defending state for which the target state is responsible,’ she [Mary Ellen O’Connell] said. ‘None of those elements is met in the Syria strike.’”

* For some of the evidence supporting the views expressed above, relevant material is found in a document (91 pgs.) I put together three years ago. One should also read, especially, Daniel M. Joyner’s indispensable book, Iran’s Nuclear Program and International Law: From Confrontation to Accord (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Relevant Bibliographies

• International Criminal Law
• Modern Iran
• Nuclear Weapons
• Toward a Marxist Theory of International Law
• Violent Conflict and the Laws of War

The European Enlightenment: democratic, revolutionary, emancipatory....

       

I have a few outstanding promissory blogging notes and have not posted anything recently, so I thought I’d share the introduction to one of the things I’ve been working on and hope to soon complete: a bibliography on the European Enlightenment (roughly, from the middle of the seventeenth until the close of the eighteenth century, with the historical periods just prior and immediately following being of considerable importance as well). Incidentally, today is the birthday of Michael Harrington.

Introduction

As with most of my bibliographies, this one has two principal constraints: books, in English. I have not included the primary works of the leading scientists—including their precursors—(e.g., Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Joseph Black, Joseph Priestly, Antoine Lavoisier …), philosophes (e.g., Voltaire, D’Alembert, Diderot, Montesquieu) and philosophers (e.g., and in no particular order, Pierre Bayle, Marquis de Condorcet, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Frances Hutcheson, Immanuel Kant, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, G.E. Lessing, John Locke, Moses Mendelssohn, Thomas Reid, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Baruch Spinoza, Johann Gottfried von Herder, and Christian Wolff) of this period (some of whom might be classified just outside the Enlightenment), assuming this literature is fairly well known or easy to look up. In fact, in addition to the secondary literature, this list contains a number of titles that are relevant to the historical periods just prior to and immediately following the Enlightenment in Europe. The history and myriad consequences of the Enlightenment must today of course be placed within a global and cosmopolitan framework in which the triune principles and virtues of liberté, égalité, and fraternité (including the obligations and imperatives of individual human dignity, social justice, and human rights) are the birthright of every human being. The democratic struggles against conformism, religious and ethno-nationalism, authoritarian populism, fascism, militarism, parochialism, racism, sexism, conspicuous consumption and acquisitiveness, unbridled ambition, celebrity worship and fame-seeking, the will to dominate others, in short, “false consciousness” (well-captured in Erich Fromm’s clever locution, ‘the pathology of normalcy’), take place today in concert with unprecedented (with regard to this civilization) and indispensable ecological awareness and environmental concerns evidenced in the first place by response to the facts of catastrophic global climate change. Utopian thought and imagination thus becomes urgently relevant, one reason we can speak, without contradiction, of envisioning “real utopias,” even as our dreams and ideals will never become wholly incarnate, for we cannot but help appreciate the fact that the “perfectibility” of man (after Condorcet and Godwin) does not entail perfection (while human nature is not, so to speak, set in stone, it remains human, however divine our aspirations or the potential for self-realization). I have appended a large number of bibliographies to this compilation germane to these topics and questions.

While not exhaustive, I hope this bibliography is fairly comprehensive within its constraints. I welcome notice of works believed to be conspicuous by their absence.  

I cannot pin down the precise reasons, but the compilation of some bibliographies is more enjoyable than others, the instant case—to borrow a phrase from the law—being a perfect example. It likely has something to do with the understandable hence justifiable dystopian or apocalyptic-like tenor of our time in crisp contrast to the spirit and logic of the European Enlightenment which, for me at any rate, has served as an intellectual and emotional antidote to that altogether bleak and, yes, rational assessment (whatever the subsequent critiques of the European Enlightenment, they in no way detract from its immense and enduring philosophical, moral, scientific, political and cultural value*). And the motivating pleasure and subsequent satisfaction has more than a little to do with the impact on yours truly of the latest cluster of remarkable books penned by Jonathan I. Israel. 

* For a vigorous response to the more over-the-top or hyperbolic critiques (some of which exhibit the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy), please see Stephen Eric Bronner’s Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement (Columbia University Press, 2004).

Epistemology, Psychology, and Democracy: the facilitation or hindrance of moral psychological autonomy and human dignity, on the one hand, and … how to make sense of notions of shared intentions and collective (or shared) responsibility, on the other

Several days ago I posted the following on my FB page:

Social epistemology and the epistemology of groups have become respectable and growing sub-fields within the field of epistemology (it’s about time!). However, I find to date their arguments and insights rather sparse if not predictable largely because they often demonstrate complete ignorance of the literature on the psychoanalytic psychology of groups or group psychology. Of course one cause of this ignorance is the academic division of labor and a related distaste or distrust (willful ignorance?) of psychoanalytic psychology (it fails to meet their positivist or neo-positivist criteria for what counts as ‘scientific’) among the vast majority of philosophers (below are exceptions to the rule, namely, those philosophers who’ve sympathetically and critically examined psychoanalytic theories*), although they may evidence respect for the findings of “scientific” or “experimental” psychology, the findings of which are often unreliable and egregiously meager, especially when it comes to ascertaining their relevance to the dynamics of group psychology and epistemology.

* “Virtually all those who are not ignorant of Freud or totally skeptical of his findings believe that he altered, radically altered, our conception of the mind. He effected a change of what we think we are like, and it was a big change. Astonishingly enough, it is philosophers who have been of all people slowest to recognize this fact. They have been slowest to recognize that this fact has anything to do with them.”— Richard Wollheim, The Mind and Its Depths (1993): 91.

 

In addition to Wollheim himself (regrettably, no longer with us, as are some of the philosophers to follow), among those I count as exceptions to this generalization (a few of whom came to prominence after Wollheim) include (in no particular order and not an exhaustive list): Sebastian Gardner, David Sachs, Jerome Neu, John Deigh, Michael Stocker, Donald Levy, John Cottingham, Marcia Cavell, Ilham Dilman and one of his teachers, John Wisdom, Herbert Fingarette, Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, Jonathan Lear, Ernest Wallwork, Linda A. W. Brakel, Jim Hopkins, J. David Velleman, Michael Lacewing, Edward Harcourt, and Jon Mills (a few of these are—or were—at the same time practicing psychoanalysts).

*    *    *

I want now to add a bit more specificity to the above complaint or appeal. The literature in (A) the philosophical fields of (i) epistemology, (testimony in particular), “social” or “collective” epistemology; (ii) “group agency,” shared intentionality and collective or shared responsibility; (iii) on “social facts” and “social practices;” in (B) political theory or political science on (iv) “collective intelligence” or (less plausibly) “collective wisdom” and, relatedly, groups and/or communities and their role in democracy (especially thus not only deliberative processes); and (C) finally, on (v) the psychoanalytic literature on groups (including crowds, masses, even civilization itself) needs to be brought together or integrated if only because it is necessary to help us more consistently or coherently fill out the notions of—in other words—better understand the causes and effects directly related and thus relevant to, belief in the fundamental values of human dignity and moral psychological autonomy. This task becomes all the more urgent given the state of our knowledge about mass and social media, the Internet, and more truncated forms of both convivial and social communication that distinguish our world of hyper-technology and turbo-capitalism from everything that preceded it. It is more clearly critical and acute in light of the apocalyptic-like nature and scope of the socio-economic, political, and environmental ills that confront us. I’ll later provide representative examples from the various bodies of literature cited above that I happen to be familiar with, so it will not be a comprehensive, let alone exhaustive list. Thoughts or comments are most welcome.

Saving Liberal Political Philosophy from Itself: From J.S. Mill, John Dewey, and John Rawls … to Charles Mills

       

First, I want to share a substantial part of a review essay from The Nation several years ago by way of introducing the work of Charles Mills, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, CUNY (City University of New York). Then we read a snippet from Mills’ recent interview in The Nation which further reveals his unflagging belief in the necessity and value of Liberalism as a political philosophy for democracy, despite its myriad and well-documented historical shortcomings, biases, prejudices and so on. As J.S. Mill, John Dewey, and most recently, the late John Rawls argued in their own distinctive ways, liberalism, democracy, and socialism are capable of complementing and reinforcing each other. In other words, and at the very least, there need be no inherent contradictions between these political, social and economic ideals and ideas. Finally, I leave you with a link to my updated bibliography for Liberalism as a political philosophy.

*          *          *

Up From Rawls: Charles Mills’s effort to save liberal political philosophy from itself.

By Christopher Lebron for The Nation July 18, 2018

“Charles Mills’s Black Rights/White Wrongs represents the culmination of more than two decades of work on the philosophy of race and social justice. Mills received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 1985, working with the left-wing philosophers Frank Cunningham and Daniel Goldstick on the concept of ideology in Marx and Engels. In the following years, liberal political philosophy would be strongly challenged. A growing number of feminists argued that liberal normative theorists were engaged in a form of selective historical imagination, erasing everyone but white males from the story of political society’s origins.

Already fluent in Marxist thought and politics, Mills was strongly influenced by these arguments, particularly as they were delivered in Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract; and in his first book, The Racial Contract, Mills initiated a searing critique of modern liberal theory. Despite its progressive intonations, he argued, the tradition had consistently obscured the history of racism and white supremacy in liberal societies, thereby turning a blind eye to racial inequality while embracing Enlightenment values without qualification.

Mills followed The Racial Contract with two collections that continued this critique: From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism and Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race. In the former, he examined how Marxism also fell prey to masking certain forms of inequality, especially when it came to race; in the latter, he explored the often overlooked sociological assumptions in liberal moral and political philosophy that resulted in the erasure of black people and their political history and experiences during colonialism and postcolonialism. In 2007, Mills and Pateman partnered to write Contract and Domination, a condensed discussion of the main arguments in their critiques of liberal normative theory. But dedicated readers of Mills’s corpus also noticed that he was in the process of rethinking his own criticisms. His essays suggested a pivot toward a systemic theory of his own that would give readers a picture of liberalism’s ills and a way to remedy them. [emphasis added]

Black Rights/White Wrongs, Mills’s latest book, is that long-awaited result: his most thorough account yet of why and how liberal political theory has gone wrong. He returns to his criticism that liberal theory has mainly been attentive to and representative of the sociohistorical demands of white people (men in particular), but he also argues for a refreshed liberalism that retains its core political commitments while offering a fuller reckoning with the racial hierarchies and inequalities of America’s past and present. His argument is best understood as progressing in two phases. The first finds Mills placing liberal theory’s history alongside that of race and empire in the West; the second confronts John Rawls’s foundational work, A Theory of Justice, as well as the social-contract tradition that he helped to revive.

Mills’s first line of criticism indicts the core tradition of liberal theory for persistently sidelining the moral and political questions around race and empire. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, when Socrates wandered the streets of Athens peppering young and old with questions about the nature of justice, political philosophy has been guided by an overarching preoccupation: What is the good society, and what is the role of the citizen in helping both to realize and sustain it? The Enlightenment, Mills continues, developed new ideas to answer these questions. Denouncing the reliance on religious authority that had characterized the preceding centuries, Enlightenment thinkers insisted that human agency, coupled with knowledge, could replace divine revelation as the orienting principle of social and personal change. Thus arose the modern conception of liberty, which depended on free will and human rationality. All that was needed now was an attendant form of political organization that could embody, secure, and promote these ideas and their relations to each other: something that we have come to call ‘liberal democracy.’ Kant, an adherent of Enlightenment thinking and the modern era’s reigning moral theorist, brought the tools of moral philosophy to the aid of democratic theory by emphasizing the notion that every individual was to be treated as an end in themselves, and never as the means to someone else’s ends. This was a perfect ethical complement to the mantra of ‘one man, one vote’ that came to characterize Western democracy.

Thinkers working in the modern tradition came to embrace the Enlightenment ideals of personal agency and sovereignty as checks on government power. Yet, as Mills observes, at the same time that Europe was offering its white male inhabitants liberalism as a way to make good on the ideal of equality among persons, those same newly enlightened nations were in a furious race around the globe to colonize and dominate nonwhite peoples in faraway lands in an effort to establish economic and military might. The triumphant narrative of Western modernity occluded the barbarity of rape, murder, pillage, and the exploitation of millions of persons of African descent as well as Native Americans in the service of a vision of liberal progress. What the writer James Baldwin once called the ‘bloody catalogue of oppression’ effectively subsidized white freedom and the ability to think about white property rights, legislative design, and free markets. And all of this happened in a liberal society because racism, for Mills, is ‘a normative system in its own right that makes whiteness a prerequisite for full personhood and generally…limits nonwhites to ‘sub-person’ status.’

The problem, according to Mills, is that the very foundations of liberalism’s moral and political theory ‘would all then have to be rethought in the light of this category’s existence,’ because liberal philosophers had provided cover for much of this brutal history. This was true in the 17th and 18th centuries, when Locke could be found offering advice on what Carolina colony ought to do with its black population (spoiler alert: It wasn’t giving them the vote) and Kant could be found saying, ‘The Negro can be disciplined and cultivated, but is never genuinely civilized. He falls of his own accord into savagery.’ And it was true in the 20th century as well: Even in an era in which Ella Baker, Thurgood Marshall, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Martin Luther King Jr. urged white and black Americans alike to come to grips with the fact of racial violence and domination in American democracy, few liberal philosophers did. [….]  

Despite all of the problems that beset them, Mills wants to retain the best parts of both liberalism and liberal philosophy, as they provide ‘the most developed body of normative theory for understanding the rights of persons.’ Coupled with a perspective that makes the black diasporic experience central to its thinking, this body of rights can, Mills asserts, produce a politics radical in its distribution of social and political power as well as in its redistribution of economic power.” [emphasis added] [….]

*          *          *

“Charles Mills Thinks Liberalism Still Has a Chance”

A wide-ranging conversation with the philosopher on the white supremacist roots of liberal thought, Biden’s victory, and Trumpism without Trump.

By Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins for The Nation, January 28, 2021

[….] “Liberalism is attractive on both principled and strategic grounds. You’re completely right, of course, about the failures of actual historical liberalism, which are manifest, indeed ubiquitous, all around us. But what is the source of these failures? If liberalism has never lived up to its ostensible principles and values, that goes no way in proving that the principles and values are themselves unattractive ones. The illuminating way to understand these violations of (ideal) liberal norms, I suggest in the book, is not as the consequence of an intrinsically self-undermining ‘illiberalizing’ dynamic within liberalism but rather as a manifestation of the corrupting results of group power, whether of the privileged classes, men, or the dominant race, for liberal theory and practice. Hence the creation of a bourgeois, patriarchal, or racial liberalism (usually all three combined, of course).

But we can appeal to the idealized, non-group-restricted versions of liberal principles and values to critique the exclusionary versions—indeed, that is precisely what most American progressive social movements have historically done. Particularly at the present time of authoritarian ethno-nationalism’s attack on liberal norms, it is all the more reason to affirm them. Moreover, liberalism as I understand it is certainly not committed to an opposition to socialism in the social democratic sense—arguably, that’s just left-liberalism. And any other variety of hypothetical socialism—market socialism, workers’ democracy—would presumably strive to sell itself by promising a deeper and more extensive realization of liberal values, not their abandonment [as we see among such Liberal political philosophers as J.S. Mill, John Dewey, and the later John Rawls as well explained in William A. Edmundson’s book, John Rawls: Reticent Socialist (Cambridge University Press, 2017)]. So I would claim that the socialist case can indeed be made within a liberal framework. It’s noteworthy that Rawls—surely a respectable liberal!—says explicitly in A Theory of Justice that his theory ‘includes no natural right of private property in the means of production.’

As for the strategic reasons: Liberalism (in the broad-spectrum sense that includes right-wing ‘classical’ liberals) has uncontroversially been the dominant political ideology in US history, albeit in the restrictive incarnations just delineated. So in trying to win over a broad political audience rather than preach to the choir, as I presume progressives want to do, one immediately has the immense advantage of invoking the political ideology nominally endorsed by the majority. You don’t have to require them to first convert to Marxism or Foucauldian-ism or whatever; you can just say, ‘If you’re a good liberal, you should support this.’ That doesn’t mean that you can’t get valuable insights from Marx or Foucault, of course, but they are ultimately going to have to be ‘translated’ into a liberal framework.

And insofar as legal change will be crucial for progressive structural reform—necessary if not sufficient—need I make the obvious point that the American and broader Western juridical systems are founded on liberal principles and assumptions? The ‘Black radical liberalism’ I am advocating will thus be able to engage directly with its conservative juristic opponents in a way that nonliberal political ideologies will not. The Republicans generally, and the Federalist Society specifically, are certainly in no doubt themselves about the importance of fighting for particular interpretations of the Constitution and the law, which is precisely why they set out years ago to gain control of the courts. Black rights, and nonwhite rights in general, will have to be advanced by liberal arguments and liberal jurisprudence in this liberal (in the broad sense) arena.” [….] — Charles W. Mills (interview in The Nation)

A bibliography on The Political Philosophy of Liberalism.

Worldviews and Ideologies: analysis (or description), evaluation, and … construction

By way of background and context, I’d like to begin this post with a personal story. I bought several books from our town’s best used bookstore the other day and confess to being rather excited about one of the volumes because it is by my late teacher and friend, Ninian Smart, Buddhism and Christianity: Rivals and Allies (London: Macmillan Press, 1993). I learned beforehand (from its online description) that the book had a gift inscription by Ninian … and sure enough, I recognized his inimitable handwriting. It appears the book has never been read (or opened!). It was inscribed “For Bill, with best wishes from Ninian.” I suspect it was for Ninian’s colleague, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies and East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies, William F. Powell, who specialized in Chinese Buddhism, but of course I can’t be certain.

As a propaedeutic of sorts to what’s to come, I’d like to share some material from the opening paragraphs of the book because it conveys perfectly several of Ninian’s principal intellectual foci and broader “political” concerns in the field of “Religious Studies, foci and concerns I share and hope to illustrate in a forthcoming post, a taste of which follows the excerpt from Smart’s book:

“Perhaps there are four billion worldviews, since every person has her or his set of values and perspectives on life [this is why I distinguish the individuation of worldviews among persons with the term ‘life-worlds’]. But there are also major patterns and systems which shape and are shaped by societies, and we give to these such labels as ‘Christianity’ and ‘Buddhism.’ They break down of course into varied incarnations, such as Roman Catholicism, the Theravāda, Protestantism, Mahāyāna and so on, and more particularly into breeds, such as Anglicanism, the Quakers, Hua-yen Buddhism, Zen and so forth. Blending with these varieties are national and regional variants: Sri Lankan Theravada, Scottish Presbyterianism, German Catholicism and so on. There are other blends too, where social and political diversities get conjoined to major traditions: liberal Protestantism, say in the United States; and socialistic Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Each hybrid in this luxurious garden of the spirit commands its own loyalty [Ninian was well aware that not all of these blends make for ‘gardens of the spirit,’ as when ethno-religious identity and worldviews become fused with nationalism]. How do we get such plants to grow together, as the psychic surface of the globe shrinks, and every culture and every set of values is in interaction with all the others? [….]

There is more. I have listed above some of the great religious movements. But secular worldviews, such as Marxism, secular humanism, nationalism [I’m reluctant to call nationalism a worldview, preferring instead to see it as an ideology; however, it’s likely that it partakes of both in many cases.] and so forth play (so to speak) in the same league as religion, often struggling against it, and sometimes beguilingly takings its hand. That is how we have the combinations I referred to above. But the bitter struggles between some modern ideologies and traditional religions match the more internecine fighting of former times [something which, for better and worse, preoccupied Hobbes]. The Khmer Rouge mowed down Buddhist monks and turned temples into granaries and barracks. Stalin persecuted Ukranian Catholics and Russian Orthodox; nationalism in Italy came into conflict with the Church during the time of Garibaldi; and so on. Consequently, it makes sense to treat religious and non-religious worldviews together [this does not mean, however, that we obliterate the differences or distinctions].” [….]

I am working on an essay entitled “religious and philosophical worldviews as seedbeds and greenhouses for spiritual praxis and philosophy as therapeia,” which includes an attempt to distinguish the concept of “ideology” from the notion of (religious and non-religious) worldviews, while conceding there is a porous boundary between them. For now I want to introduce one part of that essay that falls under the heading “worldviews and ideologies: analysis (or description), evaluation, and … construction.”

Speaking generally and simply, the concept of worldviews is wider in scope and more personal in meaning (particularly at the individual level of ‘lifeworlds’) than ideology. Ideologies may borrow pieces or fragments from worldviews, or in some way be dependent upon them—as a necessary yet not sufficient condition—while worldviews, in turn, may contain ideological beliefs or elements, but it is only from the vantage point of worldviews (a Marxist worldview, for example, but perhaps, say, a Buddhist one as well) that we can critique ideologies, get “beyond” ideology,¹ in other words, an ideology by its very meaning cannot avail itself of an “auto-“ or “self-critique,” for that is precluded by its function as ideology. This treatment involves making methodical (or methodological) distinctions between our attempt to objectively or impartially describe, analyze and understand—make sense of—worldviews that differ from our own (Smart refers to this project as demanding an arduous ‘attempt of fairness, dispassion, imagination [which includes empathy] and objectivity’), a task within the respective purviews of philosophy, the social sciences and “religious studies” (the corresponding division of intellectual labor is not always availing). We also need to critically compare and evaluate such worldviews, an endeavor wholly dependent on properly and thoroughly performing the prior task, which of course is extremely difficult given our cognitive biases, avowed (personal and collective) identities, political allegiances and sensibilities, and possible passions and prejudices, for example.

The values that motivate the first task are found in or derived from the humanities and social sciences, as well as democratic ideas and in particular the values and principles of Liberalism, most notably the notions of individual human dignity (and the idea of ‘self-rule’ or moral psychological autonomy) and pluralism (thus, for example, in the words of Ninian Smart, ‘it is a ‘very illiberal thing [the way in which] philosophy is so often taken as identified with Western philosophy’ or that ‘many of the attitudes which Westerners apply to non-Western religions are very illiberal’²). The close proximity of worldviews today, the fact that they are often “cheek by jowl” as Smart says, results in tension, conflicts, interaction (which entails influencing, borrowing, negotiating, and so on), processes of strengthening or fortifying, as well as weakening or diminishing (almost to a relative vanishing point in some cases), mutual criticism, modulation, adaptation, alteration and so forth. These processes may find us increasingly motivated to engage in “worldview construction,” meaning that a “new” worldview is fashioned that is no longer beholden to any one worldview or tradition, a combination of significant components from two or more worldviews, much like the historical formation of Sikkhism, which quickly “gained converts among Hindus and Muslims in the Punjab region,” the Baháʼí worldview, and Theosophy. The genesis of this is likely in the first instance at the level of lifeworlds, as when, for example, the Dalai Lama describes his lifeworld as “half-Marxist, half-Buddhist;” it is thus possible that others may adopt this view in which case, at some ill-defined or vague tipping-point, we arrive at a newly fashioned full-fledged worldview. In his book, Buddhism and Christianity: Rivals and Allies (Macmillan Press, 1993), Smart envisioned a future in which worldview criticism (or evaluation, including the critique of ideology) and construction will lead to “greater synthesis and eclecticism,” a higher-order pluralism, if you will, but qualified this expectation by stating unequivocally that “worldviews will not merge in the foreseeable future.”³

The word “ideology” is today often used as virtually if not actually synonymous with “worldview,” thus emptied of its original critical content, a development that stems in part from some ambiguous and vague formulations of Marx and Engels themselves, which were exploited by later Marxists. In attempting to distinguish between worldviews and ideologies, I want to retain or recover the concept of ideology as “referring to a distortion of thought which stems from, and conceals, social contradictions,” put differently and concisely, our notion of ideology should have a “clear-cut negative and critical connotation.”⁴

Notes

1. This was the title of a book by Ninian Smart, Beyond Ideology: Religion and the Future of Western Civilization (Harper & Row, 1981), a work at times absolutely brilliant but also relying occasionally on rather questionable assumptions or premises and marked by blind-spots not typical of Ninian’s work.
2. Cf. too Ninian’s further comments on the role of Liberalism: “Liberal values try to find the truth: they are the foundation of modern seeking. There may be colonial [or post-colonial] pollution in liberalism. But criticism, including criticism of colonial pollution [ideology for Marxists] is also part of the liberal ideal. Liberal study as such is no more Western than science itself. Science and liberal values had to arise somewhere.” In saying this, Ninian is implying we avoid the (informal) “genetic fallacy,” that is, explaining or dismissing Liberalism solely in terms or because of its geo-political and historical origins, it being stained, as it were, with original sin.
3. Ninian’s thoughts on this subject can be favorably compared with and in several respects complements the material in the late Hector-Neri Castañeda’s essay, “Philosophy as a Science and as a Worldview” (in Avner Cohen and Marcelo Dascal, eds., The Institution of Philosophy: A Discipline in Crisis?, 1989) although, strictly speaking, Castañeda is writing about philosophies qua philosophy. For example, among the consequences of “pluralistic meta-philosophy” noted by Castañeda is a “later stage in the development of philosophy” in which we will be rendered fit to engage in a “comparative study of master theories of the world and experience,” or what he terms “dia-philosophy.” In other words, our master theories of philosophical structures will be sufficiently rich and comprehensive for us to be able to articulate holistic and dia philosophical critique: “compar[ing] two equally comprehensive theories catering to exactly the same rich collection of data, and, second, assess[ing] the compared theories in terms of their diverse illumination of the data.” “The natural adversary attitude” will take the form of “criticisms across systems or theories,” but “not as refutations or strong objections, but as contributions of new data as formulations of hurdles for steady development.” Castañeda christens the development of master theories of the world and experience for dia-philosophical comparison “sym-philosophy:” “Thus the deeper sense in which ALL philosophers are members of one and the same team is the sense in which we are all sym-philosophers: playing our varied instruments in the production of the dia-philosophical symphony.”
4. Please see the entry on “ideology” by Jorge Larrain in Tom Bottomore, ed., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Blackwell, 2nd revised ed., 1991): 247-252.

argumentum ad hominem and then some

More often than not, ad hominem arguments (be they ‘abusive’ or ‘circumstantial’) are presumptively fallacious (an ‘informal’ fallacy), but given the persistent influence of the pathological cult of Trump on Republican Party members of Congress, they are often presumptively valid, indeed, perfectly appropriate and thus legitimate! The most obvious case where such arguments are necessary involves the case of U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, but she represents but one end of a spectrum of such cases. The irony here is that she herself has a history of indulging in ad hominem arguments, but in this instance they are in fact abundantly fallacious! If you are not familiar with this informal fallacy (implying that, on occasion, it can be a perfectly valid, non-fallacious argument), I recommend the late Douglas N. Walton’s analysis in his chapter, “Personal attack in argumentation,” in his book, Informal Logic: A Handbook for Critical Argumentation (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

When an interlocutor or speaker, be it in politics, on or in social media or mass media, or simply in more personal or private fora, habitually indulges in fallacious abusive and circumstantial ad hominin arguments as well as black and white thinking, fails to understand the meaning of relevant evidence or lies about the nature of existing evidence, routinely resorts to a tendentious citation of facts (historical and otherwise) that suggest an inability to appreciate the meaning of epistemic significance or value generally and social scientific expertise and knowledge in particular, indeed, provides a textbook case for the illustration of both formal and informal logical fallacies as part and parcel of a generalized inability to meet minimal criterial standards for “critical thinking,” it is unavailing or fruitless to attempt to engage in further dialogue or argument. How much worse if it amounts to wishful thinking, states of denial and self-deception, exacerbated by a dispositional tendency to imbibe illusions, phantasies, and delusions in conjunction with or even trumping willful ignorance, ideological calcification, and beliefs forged in the fires of anger, fear and insecurity. In other words, we sometimes find individual speakers or would-be interlocutors who are no longer amenable to reasonable arguments or rhetoric, let alone rational influence or persuasion. What are we to do in such cases? What is an appropriate response or action that suits this state of affairs?

Do we simply mock them, dismiss or ignore them? Do we try to fight fire with fire, that is, fight on their terms or turf? Do we persist in attempting to reasonably address and persuade them? Do we feel sorry or pity for them and move on? Are they beyond hope or our reach? Inquiring and compassionate minds are seeking an answer to these questions if only because we are persons, and nothing human is foreign to us (with apologies to the Roman playwright, Publius Terentius Afer or ‘Terence’).