A highly general conception of ethics is that it is the science by which men discover those rules which, when followed, will allow them to fulfill their end. The "end" we speak of here has classically been thought as the telos, that towards which man's nature inherently is ordered. Aristotle calls this end "happiness;" Aquinas says it is "the love of God;" Kant suggests it lies in the self-determination of the rational being according to the law of reason; the utilitarians suggest it is mass pleasure. What all these conceptions have in common is that they view the end as something to be achieved as the result or product of a series of temporal actions. Aristotle's happiness is only attainable through the habit of virtue (along with some other developments quite beyond the control of the individual) and Kant's rational self-determination is only possible after exercising one's reason, an exercise which is necessarily bounded by the sequential temporality of time as the condition of inner and outer experience. The maximization of pleasure that the utilitarians seek can only come about as the result of a series of sequential steps enacted in a communal setting.
What is decisive in these systems is a sense that the telos is temporally ahead of man. What I would like to suggest now is that the end they seek may well stand behind them; as T.S. Eliot says in "Little Gidding,"
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
We should see how this saying does not essentially conflict with the conception of ethics as ordered towards a future teleological goal. It is not impossible that the end of man is both ahead of him and at the same time behind him. Socrates states in Republic that the most just form of speech, dialectic, is precisely that sort of speech that "makes it way to a beginning." (510b) The justice of dialectic is that it manages to comprise its own origins at its conclusion, which consists not in some sort of "result," as though thinking were a mechanical process that produced thoughts as the final output, but rather as a transformation in thinking itself.
What this means to ethical thinking is that it cannot depart from a prepackaged conception of human essence towards a prepackaged conclusion as to the ultimate end of man. Utilitarianism is guilty of this more than any other "ethical system;" but it in some way is true of all the other systems we have considered (some much less so than others). It is precisely at that point when ethics becomes separated from the rest of philosophy (and therefore becomes an "ethical system") that it become more or less inherently impossible.
It thus seems that genuine ethical thinking is an exceedingly difficult task, a task that we are perhaps not yet ready for. But is it not folly to expect things to be any other way? If ethics was the sort of easy, common-sense thing that the utilitarians suggest, why is it that we still struggle with matters of ethics? Should we not expect that the science which concerns the origin and end of the human essence would not in fact be an exceptionally difficult sort of science indeed? A science which perhaps turns out to not exactly be a science at all?
We close with some more from Eliot's Four Quartets. These words, again from "Little Gidding," could well be applied to the true nature of ethical thought:
". . . You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always."
09 February 2010
03 February 2010
The problem with tools
In the preceding post, we suggested that utilitarianism existed primarily as a piece of "ethical technology" designed to provide mechanisms to remove ethical issues from the complicated web in which they actually exist and produce quantifiable "scientific" solutions (the "felicific calculus" of Bentham). However, for a number of reasons, this turns out to be impossible, and the usefulness of utilitarianism becomes transformed into a monstrous uselessness.
Exhibit A in this transformation is the work on the highly popular modern "ethicist," Peter Singer. Professor Singer holds a prestigious chair at Princeton and his books are published by the presses of the leading universities of the world. He considers himself a utilitarian, and assumes the utilitarian premises to be self-evident, paying a scant 15 pages of his work Practical Ethics laying out his groundwork (and 7 of these 15 pages are in a subsection entitled "What Ethics is Not.") This does not seem to bother Mr. Singer, since he has set out to try the "application of ethics or morality -- I shall use the terms interchangeably -- to practical issues." Evidently the practical application of ethics requires a scant 15 pages of prologue. How much wiser Mr. Singer must be than the legions of philosophers who have written thick tomes on the topic of ethics or morality; how much wiser still than the billions of men and women whose consciences force them to wrestle with right and wrong! Now that such a great master has arisen, let us examine an early conclusion of his inquiry:
"I shall suggest that, having accepted the principle of equality as a sound moral basis for relations with others of our own species, we are also committed to accepting it as a sound moral basis for relations with those outside our own species - the non-human animals."
Thus begins the section entitled "Equality for Animals?" Yes, incredibly the cutting-edge conclusions of ethical technology are that human beings are in no way intrinsically superior to animals. This leads him to the perfectly reasonable conclusion that one may as well use mentally disabled adults or orphaned children for medical experimentation as an animal.
It was at this point that my disgust forced me to put down the work; thus I cannot share any of Professor Singer's further brilliant discoveries. I in no way am in favor of causing needless suffering to animals, but the very fact that I can consider whether or not I ought to kill and eat an animal seems to point to a manner in which I am superior to the animal. Mr. Singer does consider this point but is (I think willfully) unable to see how the intellectual differences between humans and animals are not simply quantitative but qualitative.
And thus the commonsense usefulness of utilitarianism finds itself transformed into something completely repugnant to common sense. This transformation was necessary from the very beginning; by abandoning any system of value that (to use a word that has been worn away almost completely) possesses a transcendent dimension, the mind degenerates into the madness of ratio being turned back upon itself and analytically removing more and more of itself until all that is left is the dark raging of an empty voice preaching to increasingly emptying classrooms. The attempt to use philosophical thinking as a means to some end is always doomed to failure. Just as the "broken drinking goblet like the Grail" in Frost's "Directive" is spelled so that "the wrong ones can't find it," the attempt to technologize ethics into a tool is doomed to failure.
I will hope in the near future to finish this trilogy with some very brief notes on what ethical philosophy ought to consist in, drawing from the example of Plato's Republic.
Exhibit A in this transformation is the work on the highly popular modern "ethicist," Peter Singer. Professor Singer holds a prestigious chair at Princeton and his books are published by the presses of the leading universities of the world. He considers himself a utilitarian, and assumes the utilitarian premises to be self-evident, paying a scant 15 pages of his work Practical Ethics laying out his groundwork (and 7 of these 15 pages are in a subsection entitled "What Ethics is Not.") This does not seem to bother Mr. Singer, since he has set out to try the "application of ethics or morality -- I shall use the terms interchangeably -- to practical issues." Evidently the practical application of ethics requires a scant 15 pages of prologue. How much wiser Mr. Singer must be than the legions of philosophers who have written thick tomes on the topic of ethics or morality; how much wiser still than the billions of men and women whose consciences force them to wrestle with right and wrong! Now that such a great master has arisen, let us examine an early conclusion of his inquiry:
"I shall suggest that, having accepted the principle of equality as a sound moral basis for relations with others of our own species, we are also committed to accepting it as a sound moral basis for relations with those outside our own species - the non-human animals."
Thus begins the section entitled "Equality for Animals?" Yes, incredibly the cutting-edge conclusions of ethical technology are that human beings are in no way intrinsically superior to animals. This leads him to the perfectly reasonable conclusion that one may as well use mentally disabled adults or orphaned children for medical experimentation as an animal.
It was at this point that my disgust forced me to put down the work; thus I cannot share any of Professor Singer's further brilliant discoveries. I in no way am in favor of causing needless suffering to animals, but the very fact that I can consider whether or not I ought to kill and eat an animal seems to point to a manner in which I am superior to the animal. Mr. Singer does consider this point but is (I think willfully) unable to see how the intellectual differences between humans and animals are not simply quantitative but qualitative.
And thus the commonsense usefulness of utilitarianism finds itself transformed into something completely repugnant to common sense. This transformation was necessary from the very beginning; by abandoning any system of value that (to use a word that has been worn away almost completely) possesses a transcendent dimension, the mind degenerates into the madness of ratio being turned back upon itself and analytically removing more and more of itself until all that is left is the dark raging of an empty voice preaching to increasingly emptying classrooms. The attempt to use philosophical thinking as a means to some end is always doomed to failure. Just as the "broken drinking goblet like the Grail" in Frost's "Directive" is spelled so that "the wrong ones can't find it," the attempt to technologize ethics into a tool is doomed to failure.
I will hope in the near future to finish this trilogy with some very brief notes on what ethical philosophy ought to consist in, drawing from the example of Plato's Republic.
01 February 2010
Utilitarianism as tool
My attempt to approach this topic did not come off as smoothly or cleanly as I would have hoped, so I would ask the reader to forgive the imperfections in the flow of the prose that follows.
I've often wondered why anyone bothers with utilitarianism; this wonder deepens every time I see works of modern social scientists, who seem need to constantly appeal to utilitarianism when articulating their theoretical foundations. As I considered this, it seemed to me that understanding the real meaning of utilitarianism requires us to refocus on the utilis in utilitarian. Utilis is of course the Latin word for "useful;" the utilitarians adopted this word as the name for their ethics because they viewed as good those things that were useful for accomplishing the highest good, which was the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number (I am here referring to classical utilitarian thinkers; we will have the opportunity to consider their modern descendants in the future). For reasons I will now lay out, I believe it would be more appropriate for us to translate the utilis in utilitarian as a statement that utilitarianism itself is a tool, and that its utility consists precisely in its capacity to allow men to leave behind theoretical questions of right and wrong and focus on "practical" concerns of actually doing ethical actions.
Utilitarianism accomplishes this transformation in the essence of ethics by reordering man's end in light of the collective maximization of pleasure and minimization of pain. It is decidedly unoriginal in doing this (the sophists had proposed precisely this sort of ethics thousands of years prior). Its originality consists in the technologization of this transformation. The sophists had only the tattered rags they stole from the cloak of dialectic to clothe their own reflections, but the utilitarians had something both greater and lesser on their side, which was the commonplace dominance of the form of the physical sciences as the preeminent mode of discourse. The "felicific calculus" of Bentham is precisely this sort of construction; a complicated mathematical shell in which a simple (and false) idea has been encapsulated.
Once this piece of technology was developed, its utility became immediately apparent. All sorts of social sciences, from psychology and sociology to political science and economics, now had a new and firm basis upon which they could conduct their inquiries. Questions about the nature or purpose of man no longer stood in the way of these fields, since a convenient answer had been found. Psychology's transformation into "pop psychology," wherein it became completely engaged in the task of providing us with the tools by which we could feel better, has its root in the utilitarian transformation of ethics. Economics could now make the assumption that the rational human being was the one who sought to maximize his own pleasure, a description which philosophy would traditionally have looked upon as quite a questionable premise indeed.
The transformation of ethics into utilitarianism is a decisive one that lies at the foundation of our age. Those of us who are concerned with moving past (the choice of this word is not accidental) modernity would do well to ponder what is transpiring in utilitarianism. As a brief closing comment that anticipates what will come later, I would like to suggest that the fatal defect of utilitarianism is that it does not actually account for the purpose of human existence, which is precisely what people (justly or unjustly) generally expect philosophers to do. The utilitarian (without appeal to other outside principles) could never explain why people should order their lives towards the pursuit of pleasure. Their counter-argument (that most people do in fact try and do this most of the time) is no counter at all, since the fact that it is generally done is hardly an argument in its favor. The utilitarians popular in our own day seem to have recognized this fact and have turned what was originally an eminently commonsense sort of thinking into an outlandishly monstrous recognition of the complete meaninglessness of human existence that follows naturally from the utilitarian premise.
I've often wondered why anyone bothers with utilitarianism; this wonder deepens every time I see works of modern social scientists, who seem need to constantly appeal to utilitarianism when articulating their theoretical foundations. As I considered this, it seemed to me that understanding the real meaning of utilitarianism requires us to refocus on the utilis in utilitarian. Utilis is of course the Latin word for "useful;" the utilitarians adopted this word as the name for their ethics because they viewed as good those things that were useful for accomplishing the highest good, which was the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number (I am here referring to classical utilitarian thinkers; we will have the opportunity to consider their modern descendants in the future). For reasons I will now lay out, I believe it would be more appropriate for us to translate the utilis in utilitarian as a statement that utilitarianism itself is a tool, and that its utility consists precisely in its capacity to allow men to leave behind theoretical questions of right and wrong and focus on "practical" concerns of actually doing ethical actions.
Utilitarianism accomplishes this transformation in the essence of ethics by reordering man's end in light of the collective maximization of pleasure and minimization of pain. It is decidedly unoriginal in doing this (the sophists had proposed precisely this sort of ethics thousands of years prior). Its originality consists in the technologization of this transformation. The sophists had only the tattered rags they stole from the cloak of dialectic to clothe their own reflections, but the utilitarians had something both greater and lesser on their side, which was the commonplace dominance of the form of the physical sciences as the preeminent mode of discourse. The "felicific calculus" of Bentham is precisely this sort of construction; a complicated mathematical shell in which a simple (and false) idea has been encapsulated.
Once this piece of technology was developed, its utility became immediately apparent. All sorts of social sciences, from psychology and sociology to political science and economics, now had a new and firm basis upon which they could conduct their inquiries. Questions about the nature or purpose of man no longer stood in the way of these fields, since a convenient answer had been found. Psychology's transformation into "pop psychology," wherein it became completely engaged in the task of providing us with the tools by which we could feel better, has its root in the utilitarian transformation of ethics. Economics could now make the assumption that the rational human being was the one who sought to maximize his own pleasure, a description which philosophy would traditionally have looked upon as quite a questionable premise indeed.
The transformation of ethics into utilitarianism is a decisive one that lies at the foundation of our age. Those of us who are concerned with moving past (the choice of this word is not accidental) modernity would do well to ponder what is transpiring in utilitarianism. As a brief closing comment that anticipates what will come later, I would like to suggest that the fatal defect of utilitarianism is that it does not actually account for the purpose of human existence, which is precisely what people (justly or unjustly) generally expect philosophers to do. The utilitarian (without appeal to other outside principles) could never explain why people should order their lives towards the pursuit of pleasure. Their counter-argument (that most people do in fact try and do this most of the time) is no counter at all, since the fact that it is generally done is hardly an argument in its favor. The utilitarians popular in our own day seem to have recognized this fact and have turned what was originally an eminently commonsense sort of thinking into an outlandishly monstrous recognition of the complete meaninglessness of human existence that follows naturally from the utilitarian premise.
28 January 2010
On the divided line
An inability to sleep, combined with a recent reading of book VI of Republic, led me to the somewhat disordered diversion of creating an Excel spreadsheet to take a look at the so-called "divided line" that Socrates presents. An immediate problem that we should discover in comprehending the line is that it is completely impossible to actually draw it since the precise dimensions are not given in the dialogue (this is, of course, no accident). However, regardless of which numbers are used, so long as we follow the constraint that Socrates gives us (two unequal segments subdivided into two segments that follow the same ratio as the main division), the larger division of the smaller part of the line and the smaller division of the larger part of the line have the same length. This can be shown mathematically as follows:
Line L is divided into segments X and Y, such that Y > X. X is further divided into segments A and B, while Y is divided into segments C and D. Based on the data that Socrates provides, B = X*(Y/(X+Y)), while C = Y*(X/(X+Y)). Both A and B simplify to XY/(X+Y), so A=B.
This is important because it underscores the necessarily circular relationship that exists between B, which Socrates says contains "the animals around us, and everything that grows, and the whole class of artifacts," and C, which contains "a soul, using as images the things that were previously imitated, [which it] is compelled to investigate on the basis of hypotheses and make its way not to a beginning but to an end." Those sorts of knowledge and knowing that correspond to C (Socrates chooses geometry as an example) attempt to use the sorts of things in B ("material" objects) to discover the template that underlies them, the "things themselves." As useful as this enterprise is, it never reaches to the highest level, D, the level of "intellection," because it has began with the things as images and can neither leave this aspect of them behind nor entirely transform it into something higher. Therefore it will be forever "unable to step out above the hypotheses." This knowledge will therefore be drawn back down towards its material origins and seek to reform the material in light of what it has itself created from the material.
Socrates' statement that this sort of thinking is not the highest kind of thinking should be highly interesting to us, since what normally passes for thought is precisely this sort of thinking. That Socrates suggests the existence of an even higher realm, a realm which is neither the astringent ecstasy of the mystic nor the emotional deluge of the romantic, should give us occasion to ask whether we have ever even begun to think in the highest (yet also most original) sense of the word. Despite the tremendous amount of thinking that people all over the "globe" are doing each and every day, it is possible that what is essential in and to thinking remains as an overlooked challenge sheltered in the Socratic dialogues.
Line L is divided into segments X and Y, such that Y > X. X is further divided into segments A and B, while Y is divided into segments C and D. Based on the data that Socrates provides, B = X*(Y/(X+Y)), while C = Y*(X/(X+Y)). Both A and B simplify to XY/(X+Y), so A=B.
This is important because it underscores the necessarily circular relationship that exists between B, which Socrates says contains "the animals around us, and everything that grows, and the whole class of artifacts," and C, which contains "a soul, using as images the things that were previously imitated, [which it] is compelled to investigate on the basis of hypotheses and make its way not to a beginning but to an end." Those sorts of knowledge and knowing that correspond to C (Socrates chooses geometry as an example) attempt to use the sorts of things in B ("material" objects) to discover the template that underlies them, the "things themselves." As useful as this enterprise is, it never reaches to the highest level, D, the level of "intellection," because it has began with the things as images and can neither leave this aspect of them behind nor entirely transform it into something higher. Therefore it will be forever "unable to step out above the hypotheses." This knowledge will therefore be drawn back down towards its material origins and seek to reform the material in light of what it has itself created from the material.
Socrates' statement that this sort of thinking is not the highest kind of thinking should be highly interesting to us, since what normally passes for thought is precisely this sort of thinking. That Socrates suggests the existence of an even higher realm, a realm which is neither the astringent ecstasy of the mystic nor the emotional deluge of the romantic, should give us occasion to ask whether we have ever even begun to think in the highest (yet also most original) sense of the word. Despite the tremendous amount of thinking that people all over the "globe" are doing each and every day, it is possible that what is essential in and to thinking remains as an overlooked challenge sheltered in the Socratic dialogues.
22 January 2010
The location of power as the difference between Greek and modern philosophy [part two]
This is a continuation of a previous posting.
We may perhaps best bring to a point our necessarily short consideration of the power of essence within Greek philosophy by ending at the end of Republic, in the tenth and final book. Here we see powerfully the manner in which the beginning controls the end. Socrates, after an ambiguous condemnation of the work of the tragic poets, proceeds to expound a mythic account of the doings of the soul after death, which acts as the Socratic counterpoint to the Glaucon’s story of the ring of Gyges. What is particularly remarkable in this account is the manner in which the soul is determined in advance of itself. After death, persons are sorted on the basis of how they acted when they were alive. The just went on to their reward, while the wicked experienced torment in the abyssal depths of the earth. Here we see already that the essence of what one will be after death is determined in advance by one’s actions during life, just as idea determines image and as the necessity of justice determines discourse. The worst punishments of all are reserved to those who had acted impiously towards their “gods and parents and for murder” (615c, p.298). These crimes are precisely the worst sort of crime because they violate the fundamental debt owed to the origin as the source of life for the human person. The allegorical depiction of essence as the primally powerful wellspring of action becomes even more greatly reinforced towards the end of the myth, when Socrates describes the manner in which souls have their destinies assigned to them before their births. Lots are cast, and each man has laid before him “patterns of the lives” that they may live (617e, p.300). These patterns inscribe the destiny of each man in advance of their lives, containing within them the entirety of the conditions that will help determine the life that will be lived. All that is missing is “an ordering of the soul,” absent so that each person can creatively constitute their existence in response to the destiny that has already been laid before them (618b, p.301).
This explication of Republic in light of the relation of the nature of justice and philosophical discourse to the predetermining nature of essence as the ultimately powerful sovereign of all existence has necessarily been highly inadequate. Platonic dialectic does not lend itself to being disentangled except by dialectic itself, and our attempt to focus on one strand of the dialogue has thus forced us to touch upon many others to even come close to justly articulating our thesis. Even in this exposition we have perhaps acted unjustly, since we ourselves did not quite begin at the beginning, and neglected to show the importance of the dialogue’s opening scene, where Socrates is arrested by Polemarchus and his companions. Though the dialogue in this scene is openly comic, with Polemarchus jokingly forcing Socrates to come with him, the scene takes place against the backdrop of the Athenians bringing a Thracian goddess into their city. They are thus impiously abandoning their ancestral worship, even introducing the novelty of “a torch race on horseback,” a non-Athenian practice (328a, p.4). While all this may seem remarkably unimportant to us now, when set against the historical backdrop of the disastrous ending of the Peloponnesian War, which Athens lost because they had corruptly exceeded the appropriate measure of the polis and had instead sought to become an empire, the events take on a much darker hue.
We may perhaps best bring to a point our necessarily short consideration of the power of essence within Greek philosophy by ending at the end of Republic, in the tenth and final book. Here we see powerfully the manner in which the beginning controls the end. Socrates, after an ambiguous condemnation of the work of the tragic poets, proceeds to expound a mythic account of the doings of the soul after death, which acts as the Socratic counterpoint to the Glaucon’s story of the ring of Gyges. What is particularly remarkable in this account is the manner in which the soul is determined in advance of itself. After death, persons are sorted on the basis of how they acted when they were alive. The just went on to their reward, while the wicked experienced torment in the abyssal depths of the earth. Here we see already that the essence of what one will be after death is determined in advance by one’s actions during life, just as idea determines image and as the necessity of justice determines discourse. The worst punishments of all are reserved to those who had acted impiously towards their “gods and parents and for murder” (615c, p.298). These crimes are precisely the worst sort of crime because they violate the fundamental debt owed to the origin as the source of life for the human person. The allegorical depiction of essence as the primally powerful wellspring of action becomes even more greatly reinforced towards the end of the myth, when Socrates describes the manner in which souls have their destinies assigned to them before their births. Lots are cast, and each man has laid before him “patterns of the lives” that they may live (617e, p.300). These patterns inscribe the destiny of each man in advance of their lives, containing within them the entirety of the conditions that will help determine the life that will be lived. All that is missing is “an ordering of the soul,” absent so that each person can creatively constitute their existence in response to the destiny that has already been laid before them (618b, p.301).
This explication of Republic in light of the relation of the nature of justice and philosophical discourse to the predetermining nature of essence as the ultimately powerful sovereign of all existence has necessarily been highly inadequate. Platonic dialectic does not lend itself to being disentangled except by dialectic itself, and our attempt to focus on one strand of the dialogue has thus forced us to touch upon many others to even come close to justly articulating our thesis. Even in this exposition we have perhaps acted unjustly, since we ourselves did not quite begin at the beginning, and neglected to show the importance of the dialogue’s opening scene, where Socrates is arrested by Polemarchus and his companions. Though the dialogue in this scene is openly comic, with Polemarchus jokingly forcing Socrates to come with him, the scene takes place against the backdrop of the Athenians bringing a Thracian goddess into their city. They are thus impiously abandoning their ancestral worship, even introducing the novelty of “a torch race on horseback,” a non-Athenian practice (328a, p.4). While all this may seem remarkably unimportant to us now, when set against the historical backdrop of the disastrous ending of the Peloponnesian War, which Athens lost because they had corruptly exceeded the appropriate measure of the polis and had instead sought to become an empire, the events take on a much darker hue.
20 January 2010
On the myth of the "red state" and the "blue state"
The completely implausible victory of a Republican candidate for the open Massachusetts Senate seat provides as good an opportunity as any to consider the myth of the "red state" and the "blue state." Conventional wisdom goes that the "blue" states generally support liberal causes and candidates, while the "red" states support conservative causes and candidates. This myth has the advantage of being extremely straightforward and simple. It is not even incorrect; states do generally vote in a similar fashion over time. It is precisely the general correctness of the theory that makes it practically useless and dangerous. Any theory that is "usually" true but breaks down in extreme situations is worse than no theory at all, because it lulls its followers into the false sense that they "understand" the essence of a situation when they have in fact not gotten past a simple unification of a series of experiences into a cohesive set of not-yet-essential appearances.
Two politically opposite examples of this same point are the victory of President Obama in the 2008 elections and the present election of Scott Brown that we are now considering. In the 2008 elections, the Republicans not only accepted but embraced the entire "red state" mythos. Their presidential candidate was a fighter pilot POW and their vice presidential candidate was a gun-toting "hockey mom" (whatever the devil that meant). They ran a gleefully anti-intellectual campaign calculated to appeal to the masses of "red" voters who supposedly drove trucks and owned guns and hated the "liberal elite." When it came down to the election, the McCain-Palin ticket found itself derailed not just in the blue states, but in many of the red states as well. What happened?
In Massachusetts just yesterday, the opposite event occurred. Martha Coakley seemed like an ideal blue state candidate. She was extremely "progressive," well-educated, and would have been the first female senator from the state (if I am not mistaken). While arguably she ran a relatively uninteresting campaign, she did this precisely because Democrats don't need to campaign for national office in this state--they always win. Yet she lost, and to precisely the sort of person who one would expect to win in a red state, a truck-driving national guardsman whose biography, as Jon Stewart observed, seemed tailor-made for a nighttime TV drama and not a Massachusetts senator. How could this possibly have happened in one of the bluest of the blue states?
The answer to this question lies in the overcoming of the belief in the actual division of the population into partisan political factions. Not because this belief is incorrect, but because it fails to explain that which is most in need of explanation in a practical theory of political psychology, which is the sudden and incalculably unexpected upset. The fact that red states and blue states only retain their chromaticity in the everyday situation should already suggest to us, who are (hopefully) more penetrating observers than most, that there is another force at play here...
Two politically opposite examples of this same point are the victory of President Obama in the 2008 elections and the present election of Scott Brown that we are now considering. In the 2008 elections, the Republicans not only accepted but embraced the entire "red state" mythos. Their presidential candidate was a fighter pilot POW and their vice presidential candidate was a gun-toting "hockey mom" (whatever the devil that meant). They ran a gleefully anti-intellectual campaign calculated to appeal to the masses of "red" voters who supposedly drove trucks and owned guns and hated the "liberal elite." When it came down to the election, the McCain-Palin ticket found itself derailed not just in the blue states, but in many of the red states as well. What happened?
In Massachusetts just yesterday, the opposite event occurred. Martha Coakley seemed like an ideal blue state candidate. She was extremely "progressive," well-educated, and would have been the first female senator from the state (if I am not mistaken). While arguably she ran a relatively uninteresting campaign, she did this precisely because Democrats don't need to campaign for national office in this state--they always win. Yet she lost, and to precisely the sort of person who one would expect to win in a red state, a truck-driving national guardsman whose biography, as Jon Stewart observed, seemed tailor-made for a nighttime TV drama and not a Massachusetts senator. How could this possibly have happened in one of the bluest of the blue states?
The answer to this question lies in the overcoming of the belief in the actual division of the population into partisan political factions. Not because this belief is incorrect, but because it fails to explain that which is most in need of explanation in a practical theory of political psychology, which is the sudden and incalculably unexpected upset. The fact that red states and blue states only retain their chromaticity in the everyday situation should already suggest to us, who are (hopefully) more penetrating observers than most, that there is another force at play here...
18 January 2010
The location of power as the difference between Greek and modern philosophy [part one]
PART ONE
The forgoing was written as a submission for a graduate philosophy conference on the nature of power. It is not exactly the sort of topic I would have taken up of my own accord, which is why I hope you will pardon if it is constantly bending away from its apparent topic towards something else.
The difference between the philosophy of the Greeks and the philosophy of the moderns comes into sharp relief when we consider the question of the location of power. Where is power located—does power stem from a thing’s origin, as a river does from a spring, or does power lie in the end, bringing objects to itself by a sort of gravity? There are many sorts of power in this world, but the ultimate kind of power envisioned by both Greek and modern philosophy is the power by which things are determined to be the things that they are. This force, designated as essence, is the power by which a thing exists precisely insofar as it is what it is in its formal aspect. The power of essence is absolute power.
For the Greeks, essence lies in advance of that which it essentially determines. One of the most dramatically interesting examples of this fact is found in the philosophical allegory Republic, by Plato. In the dialogue, Socrates suddenly (and entirely unintentionally) finds himself caught up in a dialectical defense of justice. The decision of Plato to compose his ultimate philosophical work on the topic of justice is not an irrelevant detail—unless the nature and necessity of justice is demonstrated, then there is no difference between philosophy and sophistry. The only difference between the dialectic of Socrates and that of the sophists is that Socrates always insists on the truth, which is very often an inconvenient and at times a dangerous endeavor. The dialogue is in no way a political work in the modern sense of the word; Aristotle’s Politics is the first great work of Western political philosophy. Rather, the dialogue seeks to establish the possibility of philosophizing at all, a possibility which rests in the justifying philosophy, rendering it right in light of that to which it owes its essential ground.
These preliminary remarks upon the nature of Republic, insufficient as they are, must suffice to set the stage for our exposition. The ferocious energy of his interlocutors pushes Socrates quickly into an all-out defense of the reality of justice. Socrates proposes to do this by “watch[ing] a city coming into being in speech,” since such an endeavor would allow him to “see its justice coming into being, and its injustice” (Republic 369a, p.45). Socrates begins at the beginning; something he had been trying to do throughout the dialogue. After all, he initially found himself involved in the discussion of whether or not justice was better than injustice, a discussion which he admits was itself unjust, since he did “not know what the just is” (354c, p.34). The expectation that one should establish the nature of justice prior to deciding upon its qualities is itself a precursor to the location of essence at the origin of a thing instead of at its end. He is drawn back into argument by Glaucon, who puts into action the injustice of the sophists by refusing to allow Socrates to examine the essence of justice, instead launching immediately into a memorable attack on the desirability of justice. The fact that Glaucon ignores Socrates’ warning that discourse on justice is impossible except in light of a discourse on the essence of justice is no accident. He becomes in the dialogue an allegory for the sophists, who are themselves (beyond their own historical context) archetypes of unjust men, using their thinking to bypass the beginning in light of some more or less desirable end.
As Socrates begins the unveiling of what he proposes as the ideal city, his simple vision is sidetracked by Glaucon, and Socrates is forced to take a far more difficult and complicated path to demonstrate the necessity of holding to the origin. After Socrates presents a rustic paradise, which Glaucon sees as a “city of sows,” Glaucon attempts to correct Socrates by pointing out that the city Socrates had proposed differed from Athens and similar “modern” Greek cities (372d, p.49). This exchange is notable for two reasons. First of all, it completely refutes the literalist readings that have doomed interpretations of Republic by thinkers as original as Aristotle and as recent as Karl Popper. Socrates clearly states that the simple city he had described moments earlier is, in his mind, “the true city… a healthy city, as it were” (372e, p.49). What he goes on to describe is not his ideal city, but, as he says clearly, “a feverish city” (372, p.49). The entire convoluted narrative that follows, with its rejection of poetry, its caste of guardians, and its noble lie, has departed from the straight path of the ideal city in speech and instead becomes a journey into the unspoken presuppositions of Socrates’ interlocutors. This leads us to the second reason why this exchange it notable for our purposes—Glaucon had not stopped to consider the possibility that we would have to look beyond our limited historical situation to locate the source of justice, and that perhaps justice itself would consist in nothing more complicated than this very retrospective glance. They had, after all, started off in search of the just city; Socrates had imagined a sort of pastoral paradise that would form the prototype of later cities, while Glaucon assumes that not at the beginning but in media res would one find justice.
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