feb-mar/2024 Philosophy Now

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ISSUE 160 FEBRUARY / MARCH 2024

a magazine of ideas

New from Princeton University Press

“An important philosophical contribution highlighting the thoughts of one of the more important postwar advocates of liberalism in the 20th century.”

“An eloquent defense of our common-sense understanding of the mind. . . . Excellent.” —Andrew Crumey, Wall Street Journal

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“An illuminating must-read for any student of the phenomenon.” —Kate Manne, author of Unshrinking

“In The Weirdness of the World, one of our greatest living philosophers makes a compelling case that the universe we live in is much stranger than we could have imagined.” —Philip Goff, author of Galileo’s Error

Editorial

Land of Saints & Scholars

© CHELSEA MARSHALL 2024

philosophy is alive and well in both the Republic of Ireland and the UK constituent country of Northern Ireland. Ireland has traditionally been known as the Land of Saints and Scholars (although it’s had more than its fair share of Sinners and Scoundrels, too!). In this edition of Philosophy Now we’ll cast a cold eye on the state of philosophy past, present and future in the Emerald Isle, with a focus on Thomas Duddy’s claim, in his book A History of Irish Thought, that such an exploration must be both prosaic and poetic. This issue is dedicated to my late friend Seán Moran, a Philosophy Now columnist and a modern Irish sage whom I met in Waterford many years ago, and whose wit, charm, and graciousness enriched my life. Like Tom Duddy, Seán died much too young. He demonstrated to me the true meaning of William Butler Yeats’s closing words from his poem ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’: “Think where man’s glory most begins and ends And say my glory was I had such friends.” Tim Madigan visiting W.B. Yeat’s grave in Sligo.

Prof. Timothy J. Madigan St John Fisher University “The teaching of philosophy is one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal to empower children into acting as free and responsible subjects in an ever more complex, interconnected and uncertain world.” - Michael D. Higgins.

© ÁRAS AN UACHTARÁIN 2024

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n 2017 Irish President Michael D. Higgins and his wife Sabina launched the Young Irish Philosopher Awards, the purpose of which is to invite students from throughout that country to reflect on thought-provoking questions and partake in philosophical thinking and discussion (see youngphilosopherawards.ucd.ie for details). The words above are taken from President Higgins’ inaugural presentation. In 2023 over 500 young thinkers came together at University College Dublin for the sixth annual gathering. The grand prize winner was Seán Radcliffe from Cork, for his essay ‘Has Plato’s allegory of the cave been warning us of social media for 2,500 years?’ And speaking of Plato, in 2022 an awardwinning documentary film entitled Young Plato received international accolades. It focuses on how Kevin McArevey, the headmaster of a primary school in Belfast’s Ardoyne housing estates, uses critical thinking techniques to empower young children to look beyond the boundaries of their environment and to question the mythologies of war and violence (For more, see YoungPlato.com). As one can see,

Our contributor Peter Stone (read his article on p.18) with Irish President Michael D. Higgins in Dublin in 2023.

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Thomas Duddy & Irish Philosophy Tim Madigan dives into a modern history Irish Philosophy & Me Cathy Barry on the who? what? and why? Edmund Burke & the Politics of Reform Jon Langford on a cautious reformer Philip Petitt & The Birth of Ethics Peter Stone traces a new genealogy of morals Philosophy & Hurling Stiofán Ó Murchadha on unconscious actions Horseplay in Hibernia Seán Moran has philosophical fun with foals

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General Articles

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Alexander Razin (Moscow State Univ.) Laura Roberts (Univ. of Queensland) David Boersema (Pacific University)

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Prof. Raymond Angelo Belliotti, Toni Vogel Carey, Prof. Harvey Siegel, Prof. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong Cover Image by Alex Printed by Acorn Web Offset Ltd Loscoe Close, Normanton Ind. Estate, Normanton, W. Yorks WF6 1TW Worldwide newstrade distribution: Select PS (+44 1202 586848) [email protected] Australian newstrade distribution: Ovato 26 Rodborough Road Frenchs Forest, NSW 2086 [email protected] The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views of the editor or editorial board of Philosophy Now.

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How to Have a Good Life Meena Danishmal on Seneca’s recipe for life 30 A History of Transhumanism John Kennedy Philip on past and future 34

Hume’s Problem of Induction

Patrick Brissey on how to undermine science 40 Towards Love George Mason heads in the right direction 42 The Philosophy of Work Alessandro Colarossi rolls his sleeves up

Reviews 52

Book: The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant & the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton Reviewed angelically by Leonid Bilmes 54 Book: Sad Love by Carrie Jenkins Reviewed sadly by Stephen L. Anderson 56 Classic: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand Reviewed Objectively by Shashwat Mishra 58 Music: Enjoy the Silence Thomas R. Morgan hears Depeche Mode’s Stoic and Buddhist undertones

some of our

Contributors Sophie Dibben Sophie Dibben is a 24 year old Londoner working in a prison. She studied Classics at Trinity College Dublin and has a podcast called Sibyl Service, which interviews historical characters, including Diogenes, along with Paris of Troy and Marcus Aurelius.

Patrick Brissey Patrick Brissey is an instructor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina. His research focuses on modern philosophy and the philosophy of religion. He earned his PhD from the University of South Carolina and regularly teaches classes on speech, applied ethics, God and goodness. FRONT COVER ART BY ALEX

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60 Tallis in Wonderland: Cogito, Ergo Sum? Raymond Tallis thinks therefore he is a columnist for Philosophy Now 64 Islamic Philosophers: On Love AmirAli Maleki begins an occasional column

16 Simon & Finn Melissa Felder 39 Existential Comics Corey Mohler 65 “Stand Out Of My Light” Sophie Dibben watches Alexander meet Diogenes 66 Poem: Greek Statue Clint Inman pens a brief ode to beauty Pinker STEVEN PINKER CMICHEL67 CREATIVE COMMONS 4.0

11 Philosophical Haiku: G.E. Moore Terence Green gives us Moore 36 Brief Lives: Thomas Hobbes Hilarius Bogbinder on a fine, long life 45 Interview: Steven Pinker, optimist, talks to Angela Tan 48 Letters to the Editor 51 The Art of Living: The Discipline of Assent Massimo Pigliucci assents to us publishing this

Fun, Poetry & Fiction

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Stiofán Ó Murchadha has interests in theology, philosophy and literature, with masters degrees in both Theology and Philosophy. Currently, he serves as a Healthcare Chaplain and is a PhD candidate in Philosophical Theology with the University of Exeter. He lives in Ireland with his wife Katelyn.

John Kennedy Philip John Kennedy Philip, a postgraduate in philosophy, has a dynamic mind, exploring Western philosophy, ethics, cosmology, theology, and the philosophy of technology. As a philosophy professor at Divyadaan: Salesian Institute of Philosophy in Nashik, India, and a student at Don Bosco Theological Centre, Chennai, he navigates the profound interplay of human values, the cosmos, theology, and technological philosophy.

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• Sadly, our news round-up this time is dominated by the deaths of four well-known philosophers. This does at least give us a chance to briefly set out the ideas of these intrepid thinkers. Their overlapping interests and concerns reveal much about the course Continental philosophy took in the shadow of the Cold War and afterwards. •

News

ingly well, being picked up not just by academic audiences but by an international public. It was hailed by some as a communist manifesto for the 21st century. Mihály Vajda In March 1944, when Mihály Vajda was nine years old, German troops occupied Hungary and the following year his home city of Budapest was surrounded by the Soviet army. As a teenager, Vajda joined the Communist movement. He began studying chemistry at university, which he soon swapped for Marxism, and finally, when a year after Stalin’s death he experienced first doubts, he moved to philosophy. His teachers, convinced Marxists who opposed the ruling orthodoxy, provided him with a vantage point from which to interpret the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 as an attempt to free the country for ‘true socialism’. After the uprising was crushed, Vajda developed even closer ties to intellectuals such as Georg Lukács, of whose ‘Budapest School’ he was a founding member. In the 1960’s

Gianni Vattimo

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Antonio Negri The influential Italian philosopher and political scientist Antonio Negri, known for his radical leftist views, has died at the age of 90. Born in Padua in 1933, his first experience as an activist was in the Catholic youth organisation Gioventú Italiana di Azione Cattolica. He started organising demonstrations, founding workers’ associations and writing political manifestos as early as his student days. He became a professor of political science at the age of 33, soon after completing his doctorate. Negri was a leading theoretician of the Italian radical left, especially in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and his friendships with extremists made him an object of suspicion as Italy passed through its infamous ‘years of lead’. In 1979, Negri was arrested, together with other left-wing intellectuals, having been falsely accused of involvement in the kidnapping and murder of prominent politician and former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro. Those charges were dropped, but replaced by others of inspiring and carrying moral responsibility for acts of terrorism. In 1983, still in prison awaiting trial, he was elected to parliament as a representative of the Radical Party and could leave prison under parliamentary immunity. He soon fled to France with the support of philosopher Félix Guattari and Amnesty International. In 1997, he gave himself up to the Italian authorities to raise awareness of the status of hundreds of other political exiles from Italy. Eventually his sentence was commuted, and he was released from prison in 2003, having written some of his most influential works during his incarceration. He returned to France where he lived and remained politically active till the end of his life. The author of more than 30 books, his work ranged from Spinoza to various topics within political philosophy. He is internationally best known for his collaborative work with the American political philosopher Michael Hardt. Their 2000 postMarxist book Empire: A New World Order and its subsequent volumes sold surpris-

News reports by Anja Steinbauer

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Vajda was given a position at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, where he began work on a dissertation on Husserl’s phenomenology, which he completed in 1968. In 1973, the members of the Budapest School lost their jobs and were subjected to a publishing ban. Some of them, including Vajda, left Hungary for the decadent capitalist West. He then held a number of guest professorships in Germany, the US and Canada. With the fall of Communism in 1989 he was invited home to become professor of philosophy at the Kossuth Lajos University in Debrecen. There he remained, eventually as director of its Institute of Philosophy, until 2000. The same university gave him an honorary doctorate in 2007 – which he returned in 2017 when the university honoured Vladimir Putin. He died on 27 November 2023. His areas of expertise were German 20th century philosophy, especially that of Martin Heidegger, as well as the analysis of totalitarian societies (having studied them the hard way). He died at the age of 88. Günter Figal Born in 1949 in the Rhineland region of Germany, Günter Figal was a communicator. He excelled at making philosophical ideas accessible in their context, publishing very insightful yet readable books on Socrates, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Hermeneutics and Critical Theory. Having studied philosophy under Hans-Georg Gadamer and Ernst Tugendhat, he held professorships in Tübingen, then in Freiburg. He developed Gadamer’s hermeneutic ideas into reflections on the ‘object nature’ of the world in a ‘hermeneutic space’, and combined aesthetics and metaphysics with particular reference to architecture. An expert on Heidegger, he was President of the Martin Heidegger Society from 2003 to 2015. In late 2014, the publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, an aphoristic philosophical journal that Heidegger had asked to remain unpublished until the end of his complete works, thrust Figal into the limelight. The notebooks showed that Heidegger had been more last-

Shorts ingly committed to National Socialism than had been generally assumed, and more antisemitic too. Figal, who like many had believed in Hannah Arendt’s take on Heidegger’s Nazi enthusiasm as being “a phase”, was deeply shocked and resigned his position at the Heidegger Society. He also amended his popular introductory book on Heidegger. In a 2015 interview, Figal explains: “Philosophy is not in need of gurus; philosophy as founded by Socrates and Plato is critical examination, led by the assumption that every philosophical argument has to stand a critical test in order to prove to be valid. Philosophy is dialogue, not monologue; and Heidegger, at least from the early thirties on, is a very monological thinker.” Gianni Vattimo Given his proud publication list of over 100 books and innumerable articles, it is likely that philosophy enthusiasts will have come across Gianni Vattimo in one context or another. His interests ranged from hermeneutics, in particular hermeneutic ontology, and nihilism. He was an expert in the philosophies of Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Gadamer. Vattimo studied literature and philosophy in Turin, graduating with a PhD on Aristotle in 1961, and was given full professorial status for his work on Heidegger in 1963. Following a research scholarship to study in Heidelberg under Löwith and Gadamer, he became professor of aesthetics and later of theoretical philosophy in Turin, before accepting guest professorships in various US universities in the 1970s and 80s. Vattimo is best known for his idea of ‘weak thought’, il pensiero debole, which reflects the increasing erosion of the metaphysical and rational foundations of modernity. With these pillars of our thinking disappearing, Vattimo believed that society was entering a nihilistic phase, leading to changes in the moral, social and political spheres. Vattimo was honoured with numerous prestigious awards for his work in philosophy. While usually describing himself as Catholic and being personally acquainted with Pope Francis, he once said in an interview: “Thank God I’m an atheist.” In a parallel career in politics, he served two terms as a Member of the European Parliament. Throughout his life, Vattimo, motivated by his own experience of living openly as a homosexual, fought for gay rights, especially the recognition of same sex relationships. He died aged 87 in Rivoli.

Philosophy Shorts by Matt Qvortrup ‘More songs about Buildings and Food’ was the title of a 1978 album by the rock band Talking Heads, about all the things rock stars normally don’t sing about. Pop songs are usually about variations on the theme of love. Tracks like George Harrison’s Taxman, written in response to a marginal tax-rate of 96 percent introduced by Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the Sixties, are the exception. Philosophers, likewise, tend to have a narrow focus on epistemology, metaphysics and trifles like the meaning of life. But occasionally great minds stray from their turf and write about other matters, for example buildings (Martin Heidegger), food (Hobbes), tomato juice (Robert Nozick), and the weather (Lucretius and Aristotle). This series of Shorts is about these unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about.

Philosophers on Dogs

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ené Descartes (1596-1650) infamously thought that animals were but machines, without thoughts, sensations, or feelings, and could for this reason be treated like inanimate objects. No wonder there are horror stories about the Frenchman dissecting his wife’s dog while it was still alive! However, this is merely a vicious rumour. For starters, Descartes never married. He also treated his pet dog Monsieur Grat (it translates as 'Mister Scratch’) with affection. So he was anything but cruel, and he may even have been a dog lover. Likewise, the French poet Louis Racine (1639-1699) was also an enthusiastic advocate of the Cartesian beast-machine hypothesis and a devoted dog lover. Diogenes the Cynic (404-323) was known as ‘the dog’: the Greek word Kynikós means ‘dog’. The philosopher lived in a pithos, which was a large ceramic storage jar (and not, as is often scandalously reported, a barrel). He found the four legged animal superior to us vainglorious humans, and he proudly proclaimed, “I fawn on those who give me anything, I bark at those who refuse, and I set my teeth in rascals.” So was he a dog? Certainly, if you follow the logic of Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677). The Dutchman went back to first principles, stating in his Ethics that “a dog [is] an animal that barks” (Proposition XVII). Some philosophers certainly liked our four-legged friends. Madame de Staël (1766-1817) is said to have remarked: “The more I see of men, the more I like dogs.” Around that time, there was a lot of love for dogs among the philosophers.

“A Dog… appear[s] friendly and sympathizing” remarked G.W.F. Hegel (17701831), another dog-person, in his Philosophy of History (p.231). Whether Ludwig Wittgenstein (18891951) was or was not a lover of our four legged friends is open to debate, but he did think about their inner lives, and pondered, “Why can a dog feel fear and not remorse?” He believed he had found the answer: “Because they can’t talk” (Zettel, p.91). Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was not a dog lover. The English philosopher opined that a man who had been bitten by a canine was infected by a ‘poison’, which would sooner or later “convert him into a Dog” (Leviathan, p.214). This is certainly an interesting theory. However, it is also, to my knowledge, not one that has been proven in anything like conventional medical textbooks – unless he was talking about rabies. Let’s leave this matter alone and go back to something that dog owners care about, and give some practical advice. Nowadays, some people want dogs with a pedigree. We do not know if Aristotle (384-322 BCE) had a dog, but he certainly had more time for mongrels than for pure breeds: “Dogs that are born of a mixed breed between these two [sheep dogs and Molossians] are remarkable for courage and endurance of hard labour” (History of Animals, p.948). Maybe we can say that Aristotle was not dogmatic about this matter? © PROF. MATT QVORTRUP 2023

Professor Matt Qvortrup is author of Great Minds on Small Things, out now. February/March 2024 l Philosophy Now 7

Irish Thomas Duddy & Irish Philosophy Tim Madigan travels through time to seek the essential nature of Irish thought. “There is of course such a thing as Irish thought, but it cannot be characterized in imperially nationalistic terms, or in any terms that presuppose privileged identities or privileged periods of social and cultural evolution.” (Thomas Duddy, A History of Irish Thought, Routledge 2002, p.xii).

few years back I had the pleasure of being the Faculty Director for a Study Abroad Program at the Centre for Irish Studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway (now known as the University of Galway). Part of my duties involved teaching a course to the twenty students who had accompanied me abroad from the US. Since I’m a Professor of Philosophy, I thought it would be appropriate to organize an Irish Philosophy course, but then realized that other than Bishop Berkeley, I knew nothing about any Irish philosophers, so I was in a quandary. A month or so before the course was to begin I headed over to Galway to get things settled, and I visited the university bookstore. On one of the shelves was a book called A History of Irish Thought (2002). Intrigued by the title, I took it down and read on its back cover that it “rediscovers the liveliest and most contested issues in the Irish past, and brings that history of Irish thought up to date. It will be of great value to anyone interested in Irish culture and its intellectual history.” That was exactly what I needed: it cut the Gordian knot for me, as it were, in regards to finding a textbook for my course. I read that it was authored by Thomas Duddy, who I was glad to see “teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the National University of Ireland, Galway”. That added another nice component, to use a book by an NUIG instructor as the text. However, I soon learned that, sadly, Duddy had passed away in 2012, at the far too young age of 62, so I never had the chance to meet him. Still, his book allowed me to organize a course, not on Irish philosophy per se, but on Irish thought broadly speaking. Thanks to Duddy’s book I was able to explore with the students several lively Irish thinkers from medieval times to the present day. By bringing in figures from history and literature I could broaden the focus of the course, and explore the overall question, Is there such a thing as ‘Irish thought’? As our opening quote shows, Duddy most strenuously held that there is.

A

Out of the Mists of Time A History of Irish Thought attempts to avoid narrowly nationalistic or sectarian conceptions of ‘Irishness’. In Duddy’s view, Irishness must instead be considered as inclusive, accommodating those who remained in Ireland as well as those exiled from it (either by decree or by choice), and most of all, allowing for multiple eccentricities and foreign influences. Duddy places special emphasis on the contemporary Irish philosopher William Desmond’s thesis that Irish thought is a ‘Being Between’ – a condition of thriving between different sets of extremities, such 8 Philosophy Now  February/March 2024

as between countries (for instance England and America), religion and science, knowledge and perplexity, and tradition and innovation. Irish thought, Duddy further holds, must be reflected upon in the context of being a colonized nation. Such societies, he argues, have a different story to tell than colonizing nations. “Instead of a history of shared vocabularies and shared frameworks continually exploited by like-minded individuals of talent and genius,” he writes, “there will be a history of conflicting vocabularies and shattered frameworks, sporadically and irregularly exploited by gifted individuals” (p.xii). Indeed, the book is filled with such gifted individuals grappling with historical contingencies, attempting to make sense of what is happening, and trying to forge a sense of identity. These include what he calls ‘accidental Irishmen’, as well as those born in Ireland – Catholics, Protestants, Pantheists, Atheists, and Pagans. It is indeed the fractured realities of Irishness – forged through invasions, oppressions, rebellions, uprisings, immigrations, and alliances – that has marked the nature of Irish thought. Duddy begins by discussing Irish monks of the Fifth Century, who, isolated from mainstream Europe, and especially from Rome, gave their own spin to Christian teachings. Slightly askew, genuinely unorthodox, if not vaguely heretical, they set the pattern for Irish thought going against the grain. One point Duddy stresses throughout the book is how Irish thought does not make a hard and fast distinction between the prosaic and the poetic. Some of Ireland’s greatest thinkers have been novelists, poets, playwrights, painters, and performers. Duddy covers professional philosophers such as George Berkeley, Francis Hutcheson, Philip Pettit, and William Desmond; but also theologians like John Scotus Eriugena, James Ussher, and William King; scientists like Robert Boyle, William Molyneux, and John Tyndall; literary figures like Jonathan Swift, James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats; historical and political figures such as Edmund Burke, Daniel O’Connell, and James Connolly; and some figures it’s harder to pin down, such as the philosopher/novelists Iris Murdoch and John Montague. Duddy also points out that many who took a literary rather than academic route nonetheless contribute to philosophical debates. Swift, for instance, in his Gulliver’s Travels (1726), skewers the popular rationalist philosophy of his time by creating the flying island of Laputa. The feet of the philosophers living there never touch the ground, and they have to be brought out of their constant cogitation by being hit with bladders by their servants. Duddy writes: “Swift’s description of the Academy is interesting not just for what it reveals of his attitude to scientific enquiry and invention but also for what it reveals of his attitude to the uses (and misuses) of reason in general” (p.161). There are rich insights amid the laughter provoked by the literary types, as any theatergoer who attends a performance of Irishman Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952) can attest.

Philosophy Thomas Duddy portrait by Gail Campbell

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Irish

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap […] Would think her son, did she but see that shape With sixty or more winters on its head, A compensation for the pang of his birth, Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

Duddy then writes, “Yearning and disappointment are expressed together in the plaintive, exclamatory language of the closing lines of the poem, as the poet turns to something that is alive, yet at the same time objective and invulnerable. The chestnut tree, though it is a living thing, is nonetheless so unified in its being that, blossoming and dancing as it does, one cannot ‘know the dancer from the dance’.”: Labour is blossoming or dancing where The body is not bruised to pleasure soul, Nor beauty born out of its own despair, Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil. O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?

In his poetic wisdom, Yeats brings forth some of the issues that philosophers have pondered for centuries. “Yeats”, Duddy comments, “is at his most ‘philosophical’ in his exploratory reflections on the notions of self and anti-self... For one thing, a public persona is something elicited from outside, something demanded from us by society, whereas the Yeatsian anti-self is forged from within by oneself, perhaps over against what soci10 Philosophy Now  February/March 2024

ety demands or expects” (pp.298-299). One can see how a ‘Being Between’ comes to exist within us all as we seek to forge our identities from our contrasting private and public selves. It’s not surprising that Duddy gives such a sensitive reading of Yeats’ poem, since he was a noted poet himself. In fact, while I was in Galway, I attended the launch of his posthumously published book of poetry, The Years (2014). It was a very moving event, and in talking with those who knew Duddy as a professor of philosophy, and those who knew him as a poet, I noted how these two groups were mostly unconnected except through knowing him – another type of ‘Being Between’. Duddy’s technical writings focused on the philosophy of mind and a neo-Cartesian defense of the self, as seen in his published dissertation Mind, Self and Interiority (Routledge, 1995). For poetry, in addition to The Years, Duddy also published The Hiding Place (2011), which was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize, and the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. As a young man he had to make an either/or choice: become a professional philosopher or dedicate himself to poetry. Exemplifying his own concept of Irish thought, he chose to do both. My own take on Irish thought, à la Duddy, is that it is willing to accept paradox and ambiguity without feeling these must be solved or merged somehow in a Hegelian synthesis. A Summation of History A History of Irish Thought grapples with the myriad historical, cultural, economic, and social conditions faced for centuries by those living in Ireland, as well as by those who were exiles, either by force or by choice, yet who still remained connected to the Old Sod. It is amazing how many characters Duddy is able to

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Yeats Contemplates A key person throughout Duddy’s text is the poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), whose Irishness was ever-evolving and hard to specify. In many ways he is a pivotal figure in Duddy’s exploration of Irish thought. Yeats was an Anglo-Irish mystic, a reviver of pre-Christian legends, an enthusiast for (but not a participant in) the Gaelic Games and Gaelic language revivals, a poet, a playwright, a politician, a provocateur – but above all, an Irish thinker par excellence. Duddy gives a sensitive examination of Yeats’ 1925 poem ‘Among School Children’, written when Yeats was a sixty year old Irish Senator, glad that the Republic of Ireland was finally independent from Great Britain, but worried about the growing Catholic emphasis on the government he served. The poem begins with him visiting a schoolroom in Waterford in his role as Senator. Yeats notes the young eyes staring at him, wondering why this old man is in their classroom. Suddenly he has visions of himself at their age, as well as visions of the woman he loved when she was a child. He reflects upon the views of such thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras on the nature of the soul and its relationship with the body: material things come to an end, but images survive. Yeats next imagines himself as a baby in his mother’s arms, then has a vision of his young mother holding him now, a sixty-year-old smiling public man. Would she be proud, horrified, or saddened to see him as he is?:

Philosophical Haiku juggle, and how clearly he explicates their works. He even brings us up to the present day. As Duddy states in the Introduction to the companion work he edited, Dictionary of Irish Philosophers (Bloomsbury, 2004), today many Irish philosophy departments have (similar to most other Western institutions) Classicists, Continentalists, and Analysts in their midst; but there is also a fourth strand influencing contemporary Irish thought: “Brash new traditions in the making outside of the Academy... In recent years there has emerged a new kind of Irish philosopher – one must resist the temptation to put philosopher in scare quotes here – who is producing work that might be perceived by the academics to be eccentric and ‘off the register’ but which is often more successful at finding an eager readership than the more methodical and discipline-based work of the academics. These non-institutionalized thinkers are playing an important role in making philosophy provocative and interesting to the general public, and many academics who are happy to write library editions for the university presses would

G.E. Moore

do well to take a leaf or two from the kinds of books that these extra-

(1873–1958)

mural thinkers produce.” (Dictionary of Irish Philosophers, pp.xv-xvi).

One could say that Duddy, a professional philosopher with a gift for clarity and a love for the poetic, was the ideal person to make Irish thought accessible to the general public. Although he passed away in 2012, Thomas Duddy continues to be an influence on Irish thought. What more could any teacher want than to be remembered as a positive influence? I heard from many who took courses with him who attested to the ways in which his gentle prodding continues to guide them. And the University’s philosophy department remembers him as well, with a Tom Duddy Seminar Room that preserves the books he used to write his own, and where many lively discussions occur. Duddy also remains an influence on those who, like me, didn’t know him personally, but who take inspiration from his works. Catherine Barry, whose wonderful website on Irish philosophy was inspired by him, relates: “I never got to meet him, and having heard about him from others, I wish I had. I know him only through his writings, and I use his work every day. I agree with him that Irish people don’t know much about their intellectual history, and I agree that in the Irish self-image there is a tendency to downplay the intellectual side in favor of the artistic and emotional aspects. I would never have guessed that Daniel O’Connell had corresponded with Jeremy Bentham, or that an early philosophical refutation of the Atlantic slave trade was written by Francis Hutchinson from Down…” Tom Duddy’s sympathetic approach to his topic shows that he was not only an able chronicler of Irish thought, but a major contributor to it. I hope that this article will encourage you to read A History of Irish Thought. In his own words from the Preface, “the time is surely ripe for the development of modes of reclamation and redefinition that are confident enough and generous enough to embrace Ireland’s neglected intellectual history.” © DR TIMOTHY J. MADIGAN 2024

Tim Madigan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at St John Fisher University. ‘Madigan’ is Irish for mastiff, meaning he ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog.

Such obscurity: Needless confusion contrived. Analyse the truth!

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eorge Edward Moore is rare among philosophers, because for the life of him he couldn’t understand why other philosophers made everything so complicated. His approach to philosophy, proceeding on the basis that things don’t need to be complicated, was so radical that Moore was considered revolutionary – or alternatively, was dismissed as a naïve simpleton posing as a philosopher. Early twentieth century English-speaking philosophy was dominated by thinkers who said that ordinary language was hopelessly inadequate to the task of ascertaining absolute truths – what was needed was some arcane, abstruse, recondite, incomprehensible idealist investigation, which alone would reveal to us the timeless verities we seek. George’s response was to pen ‘A Defence of Common Sense’ (1925). Feeling compelled to point out the obvious by his colleagues’ dim-wittery, he noted that there was in fact a vast body of beliefs about the world which we can express in perfectly clear and ordinary language, and which are quite obviously true. At this, Western philosophy took a sharp collective intake of breath: “What a simpleton!” it cried. But, said Moore, unperturbed, take for instance a statement like ‘‘There exists at present a living human body, which is my body.’’ Now, even the most deliberately unfathomable philosopher would concede that that is obviously true – it would be the height of rudeness to sit down with Moore and argue that he didn’t have a body. So the real problem for philosophy, Moore continued, was not with language and meaning – most of the time, most of us know what most of us mean – the problem is with analysis. Again, a sharp collective philosophical intake of breath: “Analysis? What does that mean?” Unfortunately, Moore wasn’t sure what it meant. Oh well, at least he was sure he had a body.

© TERENCE GREEN 2024

Terence Green is a writer, historian, and lecturer who lives in Eastbourne, New Zealand. February/March 2024  Philosophy Now 11

Irish

Irish Philosophy & Me Cathy Barry charts her journey through historical Irish thought. ome claim Britain as the origin-point of the Enlightenment. France and Germany are equally famous for their philosophy. But what about Ireland? Those particularly interested in philosophy may have heard of John Scotus Eriugena and George Berkeley, but probably no more than that. Ireland has not been seen as a philosophical place. In 2013 I was dabbling in blogging. Just before St Patrick’s Day (17th March), I saw Berkeley and Irish Philosophy on a library shelf, and decided to post about Berkeley, the single isolated genius I expected to find in that book. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I wasn’t expecting, for example, William Molyneux promoting Enlightenment thought in late seventeenth century Dublin. A correspondent with John Locke, Molyneux set up an Irish philosophical society on the lines of Britain’s Royal Society, and convinced the provost of Trinity College Dublin to add Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding to the syllabus. As for John Toland, he was a shock to everyone. Born into an Irish-speaking Catholic family in Donegal, he left all that behind and became an advocate of ‘rational religion’ (that is, of deism), as he expounded in Christianity Not Mysterious (1696). The book, which argued that true religion includes no mysteries, caused a furore in both England and Ireland. When Toland arrived in Dublin in 1697 he found himself denounced from the pulpit. A few, including Molyneux, welcomed him, but after months of arguing in taverns and coffee shops, he left just before the Irish Parliament ordered his book banned and burned by the public hangman. Never to return to Ireland, Toland was later an editor of republican writings, a political philosopher supporting the Whigs, a pamphleteer for various political figures, and a hanger-on at the court of Sophia of Hanover. Deprived of his presence, yet still jarred by the religious and political implications of his ideas, in Dublin much ink was spilled on explaining how exactly Toland was wrong, mostly drawing on the ideas of Locke. Thus was born ‘theological representationalism’, a theory of how we can know God. It was also the birth of the Irish Enlightenment, whose writers not only advanced their own versions of the theory, but criticised others. The younger generation, educated on Locke in Trinity and reared on these debates, developed their own ideas on other topics too, including aesthetics, ethics, epistemology, toleration, and political theory. Authors included Edmund Burke, Philip Skelton, and of course Berkeley (politically problematic then and now, though for different reasons). Added to the mix were Glasgow-educated Presbyterians, drawn to Dublin first by the Whig Robert Molesworth (Toland’s patron), and then by Francis Hutcheson. First part of the ‘Molesworth Circle’, and later, ‘the Father of the Scottish Enlightenment’, Hutcheson’s writings shaped a train of thought that led to radicalism, including that of the United Irishmen. There were also Irish thinkers more famous for their literary works, such as Jonathan Swift and Oliver Goldsmith. For

S

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the next sixty years, philosophical thought flourished in Dublin. I was hooked. I raided the library for more books on Irish philosophy. Thomas Duddy’s A History of Irish Thought (2002) was a revelation. It spans centuries, from the sixth century Augustinus Hibernicus (the Irish Augustine) drawing on St Augustine to naturalise miracles (or make the natural miraculous), to the neo-Platonic genius Eriugena, the scholastic Peter of Ireland (likely teacher of Aquinas), and the theorist of dominion, Richard Fitzralph. Robert Boyle’s philosophical reworking of science gave way to the Irish Enlightenment, whose political and ethical debates flowed into the nineteenth century. Utilitarianism fuelled arguments for political and economic fairness, including votes for women (Thompson, Wheeler). But there were also reactions against utilitarianism. There was the idealism of Rowan Hamilton and idealistic anarchism of Oscar Wilde; there were heated debates on the meaning of Darwin for ethics and religion. The twentieth century yielded important work on ethics from Iris Murdoch, Wittgensteinian criticism of philosophy via Con Drury, and the ‘republican’ theory of contemporary Irish philosopher Philip Pettit. There is no shortage of Irish thought. I was fascinated by this history I had not known. Wanting to share it, I set up the blog irishphilosophy.com. I’m still writing for it ten years on. Cross-Cultural Connections It intrigues me that, despite being a philosophy student in Ireland, I had known almost nothing about Irish philosophy. One reason surely lies in a particular view of Irishness. Matthew Arnold suggested that the Irish psyche was dreamy and romantic, in contrast to the hard-headed, rational Anglo-Saxon. This view of Irishness was popular even among Irish nationalists, perhaps all the more due to the contrast with the English. The result is a view that philosophy and science clash with the Irish psyche, despite the long history of Irish philosophy and science. In The Irish Mind (1985), Richard Kearney outlines arguments from a debate in the 1980s about Irish thought and thinkers. Berkeley and Hutcheson were said to be “anything but typically and traditionally Irish.” The presence of their names in histories of British philosophy was used to argue that they were not representative of Irishness as such. Kearney’s description of John Toland as “the father of modern Irish philosophy” particularly ruffled feathers, proving that nearly three hundred years after his death, Toland was still capable of provoking a fuss. The problem here is the positing of ‘British’ and ‘Irish’ as a dichotomy. Edmund Burke is an excellent example. His account of political representation and his criticism of the French Revolution are important in British political thought. He spent much of his time in Britain and was an MP there. Yet he was born and educated in Ireland, and was deeply concerned with Irish affairs throughout his whole life. Is he Irish, or is he British? Given Ireland’s complex and contested history, why not replace

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‘either/or’ with ‘both/and’? This accommodation is a principle Kearney attributes as being central to ‘the Irish mind’: “an intellectual ability to hold the traditional oppositions of classical reason together in creative confluence.” Duddy, commenting on the same debate, argues for an inclusive definition of Irish, including those who are ‘Irish by privilege’. Another demarcation problem is between philosophy and non-philosophy. In his History of Irish Thought, Duddy includes writers of philosophical treatises, but also those better known for their literary works, such as Wilde and Yeats. Restricting ‘proper philosophy’ to academic treatises means excluding more marginal ideas – such as United Irishman Thomas Russell’s criticism of the aristocratic monopolisation of political power – and thinkers excluded from academic philosophy, notably women such as Lady Ranelagh or Maria Edgeworth. Another contested term is the name of my blog: Irish Philosophy. Strictly, ‘Irish philosophy’ should refer to a practice where specifically Irish philosophers interact and develop distinctive ideas. This happened in the Irish Enlightenment; in the Trinity College school of Kantian translators and commentators; and in the Irish Franciscan collective work on Duns Scotus, for example. But the Irish Franciscans test the definition, since they were working in Leuven in Belgium, and in Rome. Duddy argues that an Irish history of ‘disruption, displacement, and discontinuity’ means that to look for an extended, continuous history of intellectual development purely in Ireland is to risk defining ‘Irish thought’ out of existence. By contrast, the Irish Philosophy blog embraces philosophy about Ireland or being Irish; philosophy created in Ireland; and philosophy done abroad by Irish thinkers. Writing it has taught me so much, and I owe a great deal to historians’ and philosophers’ generous sharing of information, notably on Twitter, now renamed X. It was there that I discovered the strange world of early Christian Ireland, absorbing clas-

sical learning and writing itself into the history of the world. It was there, too, that I learned about the seventeenth century Irish colleges on the European continent, and the Irish involvement in European debates. As for the rest, there are Irish neo-Platonists (so many that some see this as an essence of Irish thought!), socialists, radicals, free-thinkers, utilitarians, idealists, and so on. Geoffrey Keating described Ireland as “a kingdom apart by herself like a little world”, but the reality is that Ireland has always been open to the world – “appropriating all/The alien brought” as Louis MacNeice said of Dublin. From the classical learning of the sixth century to the philosophical currents of more recent times, the Irish have taken it in and made it their own. They’re doing so still. Since my blog started, Philosophy Ireland was established to support the development of philosophy in the Irish curriculum, universities, and wider community. The first Young Philosopher Awards were held in 2017, and an optional philosophy course included in the Irish curriculum for 12 to 15 year olds. Some primary schools on both sides of the Irish border have introduced critical thinking into classrooms, and one in Northern Ireland has been celebrated in an award winning film, Young Plato (2022). “We Irish think otherwise” said Berkeley when rejecting Locke. The study of Irish philosophy not only examines what we think and why we think it, but who ‘we Irish’ are; whether there’s something essential to being Irish, and what that may be. Like all history of philosophy, it shows how our concepts have changed, and throws our prior assumptions into question, including what it means to be Irish, and who is Irish and who is not. © CATHERINE BARRY 2024

Catherine Barry is the editor of the blog irishphilosophy.com and is @irishphilosophy on Twitter. A Hume Scholar in Maynooth University, she is working on a PhD on toleration in eighteenth century Ireland. February/March 2024  Philosophy Now 13

Irish

Edmund Burke & the Politics of Reform Jon Langford outlines conservative insights gained from revolutionary failures. dmund Burke (1729-97) seems to be a contradictory beast. On the one hand, he is considered by some to be ‘the father of conservatism’; on the other hand, he was an ardent reformer. But the two impulses – conservatism and reform – are not contradictory if there are things to conserve in society as well as things to change. For instance, if a society has a functioning democracy, concerned citizens should be as active in its preservation as in reform. And reform should be a cautious process that improves rather than undermines democracy. Even while identifying faults, we should acknowledge positive attributes. Edmund Burke exemplified this attempt to balance the reforming and the conservative instincts. Burke was born in Dublin to a Catholic mother and a Church of Ireland solicitor father. He followed the Anglicanism (Episcopalianism) of his father, while his sister followed the Catholicism of their mother. Religion, along with the gentry, were, in Burke’s view, fundamental to civilisation, but he was non-sectarian, and he supported the Catholic Relief bills of 1778 and 1791. Burke was a member of the British House of Commons from 1766 to 1794, and made his mark there as an orator and political theorist. Nowadays, he is most remembered for his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), a conservative tract written in reaction to the radicalism of the French Revolution begun the year before. Yet as a reformer he successfully spearheaded change, limiting royal control of government in Britain, and supported foreign causes such as the American Revolution, greater independence for Ireland, and better practise in the East India Company rule of India. This article will lay out Burke’s arguments for conservative caution, then extrapolate from these to suggest some general principles for reformers today.

E

The Nature of Burke’s Conservatism Burke’s conservatism orbited around his admiration for the British polity. Relative to other polities of the time, Britain had the advantage of an entrenched and active parliament, greater freedom of the press, and openness to reform. On these scores there was a lot to preserve in British politics, so in some measure conservatism made sense. Following Burke’s themes in several of his speeches and writings, it is possible to compose two structured arguments on the basis of his insights. These arguments can be extracted for example from the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790); his Speech on a Committee to Inquire into the State of the Representation of the Commons in Parliament (1782); and An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791). The first argument suggests that given the complexity and the slow evolution of any stable society, it is extremely difficult to successfully radically intervene in a society, for example with a revolution. The second argument warns that the stakes are very high when it comes to ini14 Philosophy Now  February/March 2024

tiating significant social change. Both arguments weigh uncertainty and the risks of change against what Burke sees as ‘revolutionary presumption’. So Burke’s emphasis is first on the risks of meddling with the constitution, rather than on what are good conditions for reform. A summary of the first of his arguments is as follows. Effecting successful social change is difficult because: - Society is complex and difficult to understand. AND - Society evolves slowly and the results of constitutional changes emerge only over time. THEREFORE - Intervention requires ‘profound thinkers’, not ‘pettifoggers’. In other words good social change requires wise people rather than an imprudent rabble, such as those that started the French Revolution. Burke sardonically compares the complexity of society to that of a clock: “An ignorant man, who is not fool enough to meddle with his clock, is, however, sufficiently confident to take to pieces and put together, at his pleasure, a moral machine of another guise, importance, and complexity, composed of far other wheels and springs and balances and counteracting and cooperating powers.” (An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, in Consequence of Some Late Discussions in Parliament, Relative to the Reflections on the French Revolution)

For this reason, Burke advises hesitation before meddling with such an intricate assemblage as a society. But a society is not only very complex, it is formed over a long period of time: “it is made by the peculiar circumstances, occasions, tempers, dispositions, and moral, civil, and social habitudes of the people, which disclose themselves only in a long space of time.” If the development of a polity is slow, attempts to improve its working should likewise take place over a longer time-frame. Slow piecemeal fabrication or reform is the only appropriate means of development for a state, since the results of any changes may not be initially apparent: what seems at first to be good may turn out to be bad, and vice versa. As a result of the difficulty of good social change, we need more than a “simple disposition or direction of power”; in fact, we need “profound thinkers”, not the “inferior” sort of lawyers found in the French revolutionary assembly: “The British Constitution has not been struck out on heat by a set of presumptuous men, like the Assembly of pettifoggers run mad in Paris… It is the result of the thoughts of many minds in many ages. It is no simple, no superficial thing, nor to be estimated by superficial understandings... The British Constitution may have its advantages pointed out to wise and reflecting minds, but is of too high an

Philosophy order of excellence to be adapted to those which are common. It takes in too many views, it makes too many combinations, to be so much as comprehended by shallow and superficial understandings. Profound thinkers will know it in its reason and spirit.” (Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790)

The very possibility of there being any profound thinkers who are competent to intervene in society is presented by Burke mostly in the negative sense of criticising those who don’t measure up, like the French revolutionaries. But he does make the positive case that profound thinkers learn from experience rather than from ‘abstract principles’. Meanwhile, the profound thinker is the one who endorses the British Constitution. Fearing the spread of the revolutionary impulse from across the channel, Burke seems to want to garner support for the status quo in Britain amongst the aristocracy and gentry, as well as amongst the electorate. While Burke’s first argument is to do with the difficulty of effecting positive change, his second argument refers to what is at stake: - All societies have faults, but we should keep a sense of proportion about these faults. AND - Traditional European polities have many positive attributes. THEREFORE - The ‘burden of proof’ is on those who want to incur the inevitable costs of systemic change for what are uncertain gains. Burke takes issue with revolutionaries for attacking the faults of the established regime as if these faults were fundamental or the only or even the major thing about it. We shouldn’t, he says, completely reject a regime just because it has minor defects: “The second claim of the Revolution Society is ‘a right of cashiering their governors for misconduct’ ... No government could stand a moment, if it could be blown down with anything so loose and indefinite as an opinion of ‘misconduct’.” (Reflections). So, we should keep a sense of proportion about the faults of a society. This sense is enhanced if we acknowledge all the attributes a society such as old France exhibited, including flourishing manufacturing and arts, philosophers of note, complex cities and infrastructure, and heroic or charitable individuals. Burke concludes: “I do not recognize in this view of things the despotism of Turkey. Nor do I discern the character of a government that has been on the whole so oppressive, or so corrupt, or so negligent, as to be utterly unfit for all reformation. I must think such a government well deserved to have its excellences heightened, its faults corrected, and its capacities improved into a British Constitution…” Following on from advocating a sense of balance about the liabilities and advantages of a polity, Burke contends that the onus is on radicals to prove that their designs wouldn’t do more harm than good, given that radical change entails high costs (to hundreds of thousands of people in the case of France): “The burden of proof lies heavily on those who tear to pieces the whole frame and contexture of their country…” In other words, there is too much at stake to easily risk dramatic change without very good reasons to do so.

Burke wants to warn Britons against emulating the precipitous actions of the French by emphasising the uncertainty and riskiness of revolutionary action. The uncertainty and risk concerning change is in fact the key underlying message of both Burke’s arguments. Society is too complex, and the stakes are too high, to allow rash meddling; so change should be piecemeal, slow and cautious rather than sweeping. Nonetheless, Burke recognises the need for progress. One of his explicit claims with respect to reform is that even reform supports the conservative cause: “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.” However, Burke’s zeal for his own reformist causes suggests more than conservative expediency, as he exhibits as much commitment to reform as to conservatism in his political career. I think Burke’s sophistication was that he was appraised of the complexity of life – a complexity which implies that one can side with much of the status quo, yet also support significant moves for its reform. The two impulses are not contradictory if, like Burke, you are a cautious gradualist. Modern Extrapolations Burke’s arguments are even more relevant to today’s world than to his own. The social democracies in which we now live offer greater good for their people than did the eighteenth century British polity. We have more to preserve than was the case in Burke’s time. The particular relevance of Burke’s writings today can be judged by considering further guidelines for reform based on his insights. Amongst those who have advanced conservative thinking in this area is Michael Oakeshott (1901-90), who, in his 1962 book Rationalism in Politics and other Essays, offers cogent developments of Burke’s arguments. Revolutionary egalitarianism in action

February/March 2024  Philosophy Now 15

Irish The following are some points that apply to the task of promoting social or political change in the modern world. The first three points are my attempts to apply Burke. Points four and five are quotes from Oakeshott:

by Melissa Felder

1. There is no perfect society. Humanity is congenitally flawed, and this fact should moderate our objectives. We should also be aware that many needs are met in existing social democracies (so there is much to be admired), and that misconduct by any given authorities is not itself cause for rejecting the political system as a whole. Nonetheless there’s always room for improvement. 2. Society is complex and the results of interventions are therefore uncertain. So intervention should be piecemeal, in order to reduce the size of unforeseen consequences, and to allow corrections in policy. 3. The results of intervention reveal themselves only over time, so even piecemeal reform should be well spaced, to allow time for both intended and unintended consequences to reveal themselves. This will allow us to deal with adverse consequences before incurring further unnecessary disruption through further misguided reform. 4. “innovation entails certain loss and [only] possible gain, therefore, the onus of proof, to show that the proposed change may be expected to be on the whole beneficial, rests with the wouldbe innovator” (Rationalism in Politics). 5. The conservative “believes the occasion to be important; and, other things being equal, he [sic] considers the most favourable occasion for innovation to be when the projected change is most likely to be limited to what is intended and least likely to be corrupted by undesired and unmanageable consequences” (Ibid). Recognising the absence of the perfect society should colour our appraisal of our social democracies and their problems in a way that reduces the ambition of our demands for change. And alongside recognising the imperfectability of humanity, we should also be aware of the way in which modern social democracies in fact meet the needs of many, perhaps most, of their citizens. Interests have been met by ad hoc adjustments, and most people have found a place for themselves in the hierarchy of their social setup. One should therefore not set oneself against the whole edifice of one’s society, for to do so is to set oneself against the interests of most of the people – which is a fault in terms both of rights and of strategy. The revolutionary impulse for sweeping change falls foul of the facts that there is no perfection to be had, and that social engineering is a difficult, uncertain game which will probably entail huge costs. So our reform goals should be moderate, and our means incremental. A strong ardour for piecemeal reform may be appropriate, at least if Burke’s personal example is anything to go by; but reformers do need to give a good account of what their changes would mean for ordinary people, and why the risks and costs of transition will be worth it. © JON LANGFORD 2024

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Jon Langford studied Philosophy at Sydney University, and has History, Politics, and Commerce degrees from Melbourne and La Trobe Universities.

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Philip Pettit & The Birth of Ethics Peter Stone thinks about a thought experiment about how ethics evolved. hilip Pettit is perhaps the most important Irish moral and political philosopher alive today. Born in Ballygar, County Galway in 1945, Pettit studied at Maynooth College, the National University of Ireland, and Queen’s University, Belfast. He began his teaching career at University College Dublin in 1968, and held numerous other teaching positions before arriving at Princeton University, where he is currently Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Human Values. He also serves as Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at Australian National University. Despite working in the United States and Australia, Pettit maintains ties to his native land, delivering, for instance, the inaugural Edmund Burke Lecture at Trinity College Dublin in 2007, and participating in President Michael D. Higgins’ Ethics Initiative in 2014. Pettit has written numerous books on a variety of topics. He has, for example, for some time been an ardent advocate of republicanism. Long viewed as an alternative to liberalism, this political ideology (no relation to any political party) places nondomination at its core. According to republicans, a free society protects all its citizens, even (or especially) the most vulnerable, from subjection to the arbitrary whims of others. Pettit is also a strong proponent of group agency – the philosophical position that corporate bodies such as states or corporations can legitimately be regarded as agents in their own right, with agendas, beliefs, and preferences of their own. Only the existence of group agency, Pettit holds, can make sense of the way groups

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are able to function coherently over time despite the many differences among the individuals comprising them. Pettit developed his book The Birth of Ethics: Reconstructing the Role and Nature of Morality (2018) while giving the Tanner Lectures, a prestigious philosophy lecture series at the University of California, Berkeley. Like other Tanner Lecturers, Pettit received critical responses to his talks from a number of distinguished commentators. (Unfortunately, only one of these critical responses, by the psychologist Michael Tomasello, found its way into the book.) “The aim of the project,” writes Pettit, “is to offer an account of ethics or morality… that makes sense of how we come to be an ethical species” (p.13). But the account is not a historical one: he does not claim to detail the actual historical process whereby ethics emerged. Instead of an ‘actual history’, Pettit offers a ‘counterfactual genealogy’, the aim of which is “to explore the nature of ethics by looking at factors that would almost certainly have given rise to ethical ways of thinking and acting.” The best way to do this, Pettit believes, is to “offer an account of conditions that would have made [ethics] more or less inevitable.” (p.31). The Genesis of Morality Pettit imagines a fictional land called Erewhon, an anagram of ‘Nowhere’ (the name was originally the title of a nineteenth-century novel by Samuel Butler). Erewhon is populated by creatures very much like us, but lacking ethical concepts. Pettit then imagines “how a community of individuals who do not initially employ

Philosophy ethical concepts might evolve communal practices to a point where such concepts would become available to them” (p.29). The Birth of Ethics In Pettit’s counterfactual genealogy of morals, the first steps by Susan Platow 2024 towards the development of ethics take place when people desire to make commitments to one another. The people of Erewhon can make statements to each other: about the weather, about where to find food, even about their own thoughts, desires, and plans. But sometimes people are mistaken, even about their own desires and needs, and sometimes people change their minds, especially about their plans. Pettit calls these the ‘misleadingmind’ and the ‘change-mind’ excuses (p.78). But the availability of these excuses makes it difficult for people to rely on what others say. Suppose for example you want to go hunting tomorrow, and hunting goes better when more than one person is involved. You ask a friend to join you, and he agrees. But he fails to show up. Your friend could offer a misleading-mind excuse – something like, “I realized my desire to hunt wasn’t really very strong at all” – or a changed-mind excuse – something like, “I did plan to go hunting, but I decided I’d rather do something else.” Either way, it would be very hard to rely upon a friend like that. And that’s a problem not only for you, but also for your friend, who would like you to be able to rely upon him. By making commitments, however, people can foreclose the possibility of such excuses, in one of two ways: they can avow that certain statements they make are true, thereby denying themselves access to a misleading-mind excuse; or they can pledge to do something, thereby denying themselves access to the changed-mind excuse. So commitments, even while not yet ethical in nature, help make us reliable to others. In Pettit’s words, expressed commitments draw us “into a committal form of self-communication in which we back ourselves to live up to the words we utter” (p.121). The development of commitments would naturally lead the people of Erewhon to what Pettit regards as the two central moral concepts, desirability and responsibility. “While ethical concepts vary,” Pettit writes, “they all serve to mark different grounds on which actions count as morally desirable, on the one side, and agents count as fit to be held morally responsible, on the other” (p.14). How might this development happen? The practice of avowal leads naturally to the practice of co-avowal, whereby groups of people avow certain desires together. And the practice of co-avowal leads naturally to the idea of desires fit for common, indeed, universal, co-avowal. As a result, “we are more or less bound to evolve a concept of the desirable” from a universal standpoint, one that anyone could freely adopt, and “this concept is effectively equivalent to the concept of the morally desirable” (p.150). Moreover, “we who have evolved the concept of the morally or multilaterally desirable would go on to hold one another responsible to certain judgments and standards of morally desirability” (p.197). In other words, Pettit regards it as natural to expect the people of Erewhon to hold morally responsible those who “offend against a shared, routine standard of desirability”, given a lack of acceptable excuses (p.217). The act of holding responsible, as Pettit sees it, has three components: the recognition effect, the exhortation effect, and the reprimand effect (p.214). In holding someone responsible for moral failure, we recognize them as being capable of doing better; we exhort them to do better in the future; and we

sanction them for not doing better, even if this is only through our negative judgment of them. Accounting For The Account Pettit’s ‘counterfactual genealogy’ is rich and complex, with many moving parts. I shall therefore raise only one point of criticism about it, dealing with the centrality of language for Pettit’s argument. Pettit claims – avows, in fact – that language is “essential for morality” (p.38). The story of Erewhon relies on the fact that “the practices that make ethics inescapable for the protagonists in that narrative – and the practices, presumptively, that make it part also of our destiny – involve special uses of natural language” (p.7). How, after all, could anyone avow, pledge, recognize, or exhort anything without language? But while it is clear that much of our moral behaviour requires words, it is much less clear that morality itself does, nor is it at all clear that morality only came into being once our ancestors acquired language. After all, our primate relatives do many things that certainly appear moral in nature. According to recent experimental evidence, for example, capuchin monkeys get quite indignant if other monkeys receive better rewards (more fruit) for the same effort (see for instance ‘Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay’, Sarah F. Brosnan and Frans B.M. de Waal, Nature 425, 2003). These monkeys certainly seem to recognize unfairness and to respond accordingly. Tomasello makes a similar point in his response to Pettit included in The Birth of Ethics. According to Tomasello, the origins of morality lie in cooperation, and cooperation may or may not require linguistic communication (p.333). A ‘simple head nod’ or the like will often suffice (p.340). Pettit responds to these concerns in two ways, but both responses, I fear, dilute much of the force of his argument. On the one hand, he does not deny that nonlinguistic creatures behave in ways that appear moral; but he refuses to call such behaviour ‘moral’ if “considerations articulated in moral terms play no part in prompting or in regulating those responses” (p.13). One must have language in order to articulate anything, and so Pettit appears to be defining morality in such a way as to make language an essential part of it, which would render his claim that language is essential to morality trivially true. On the other hand, Pettit responds to Tomasello by agreeing that yes, a head nod may be enough for cooperation, but “a nod will be of no use whatsoever except among agents who have achieved a means and a medium of communication – some form of language, however rudimentary” (p.350). This also threatens to make Pettit’s connection between morality and language trivial: Is it possible to imagine any cooperative species without any means of communication? As I have hopefully made clear, The Birth of Ethics stakes out a controversial position on a topic of great philosophical importance. This is true of Pettit’s books in general. Those interested in any of the topics he addresses are well advised to give the Irish moral philosopher’s work a look. © DR PETER STONE 2024

Peter Stone is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Political Science at Trinity College Dublin. The second edition of his book Bertrand Russell: Public Intellectual (co-edited with Tim Madigan) was recently published by Spokesman Books. February/March 2024  Philosophy Now 19

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Philosophy & Hurling: Thinking & Playing Stiofán Ó Murchadha knowing how we know.

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e are often unconscious of what it is we are actually doing in our actions, including while playing sports. But this is a good thing. If people were explicitly aware of all they do, two major things would follow. Firstly, they would be awed by how amazing they are as organisms; secondly, nothing would get done. Therefore, it is important that we come to intuit certain forms of practical knowledge, in order for acts like hammering a nail into a wall or playing sport to be possible. Michael Polanyi’s book Personal Knowledge: Toward a PostCritical Philosophy (1958) will support us in philosophically investigating the ancient Irish sport of hurling, which is something like a cross between hockey, lacrosse, rugby – and some might add sword fighting. The first part of this article will explain Polanyi’s epistemology of knowledge – in other words, how we know what we know. After that, we will apply this theory to the game of hurling. Tacit & Other Knowledge Polanyi first offers a distinction between focal and subsidiary awareness. Focal awareness is what you’re consciously aware of or explicitly aware of, and subsidiary awareness is what you are less aware of or implicitly aware of. All knowledge has from-to relations because meaning is brought from the subsidiary to the focal which is part of the reason why Polanyi notes that all knowledge must begin with an act of commitment, which is belief. He writes, ‘‘We must now recognize belief as the source of all knowledge’’ (PerDefence Forces vs BOI 2010 sonal Knowledge, 266). An example is using a hammer and nail, in 20 Philosophy Now  February/March 2024

which, in order for the act of hammering the nail into a wall to work, we must be focally aware of the nail and only subsidiarily aware of the hammer. Polanyi says: “When we are relying on our awareness of something (A) for attending to something else (B), we are but subsidiarily aware of A. The thing B to which we are focally attending is then the meaning of A. The focal object B is always identifiable, while things like A, of which we are subsidiarily aware, may be unidentifiable. The two kinds of awareness are mutually exclusive; when we switch our attention to something of which we have hitherto been subsidiarily aware, it loses its previous meaning” (Personal Knowledge, Preface). Therefore, subsidiary awareness provides the meaning to the focus: subsidiary awareness of the hammer is necessary for the focal awareness of the nail. So we can see that subsidiary knowledge is not only important, it is no less rational than focal knowledge. One cannot be both focally and subsidiarily aware of the same things at the same time, and if we reverse the situation, for instance to be subsidiarily aware of the nail and focally of the hammer, the act of hammering a nail into a wall wouldn’t work and would be quite dangerous, like an archer looking at the arrow rather than at the target. Another distinction in Polanyi’s thought is between explicit and tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge, according to Polanyi, means we ‘know more than we can say’. He expands this idea in Personal Knowledge thus: “Tacit assent and intellectual passions, the sharing of an idiom and of a cultural heritage, affiliation to a like-minded community: such are the impulses which shape our vision of the nature of things on which we rely for our mastery of things. No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fidu-

Philosophy ciary framework” (p.266). ‘Fiduciary’ means to do with confidence or trust. So, tacit knowledge is a form of commitment. Polanyi correlated his notion of a personal commitment with the distinction between subsidiary and focal awareness. In Personal Knowledge he writes, ‘‘Like the tool, the sign or symbol can be conceived as such only in the eyes of a person who relies on them to achieve or to signify something. This reliance is a personal commitment which is involved in all acts of intelligence by which we integrate some things subsidiarily to the center of our focal attention. Every act of personal assimilation by which we make a thing form an extension of ourselves through subsidiary awareness of it, is a commitment of ourselves; a manner of disposing of ourselves’’ (61). Tacit knowledge is subsidiary or inexplicable, while explicit knowledge is explicable. Explicit knowledge is often associated with the sciences, and is misunderstood these days to be the only valid form of knowledge. An example of tacit knowledge, in contrast, is swimming: we cannot fully articulate how to swim, but we know how to do it nonetheless. The love of my wife cannot be fully articulated, yet I know I love my wife. Some aspects of religious belief also work in a similar way – in, say, experiencing God’s presence, or having a religious certainty without being able to articulate or make explicit the reasons for it. Moreover, explicit knowledge is not sufficient for an act itself to be known. Even if I know the physics of swimming, I cannot yet say that I know how to swim. Polanyi notes that tacit knowledge is “indeterminable in the sense that its content cannot be explicitly stated” (Knowing and Being, ed. Marjorie Grene, 1969, p.141). Some tacit forms of knowing can be explicitly discovered to some extent: we can explain the physics of swimming. Yet other forms of tacit knowing cannot be made explicit at all. As Polanyi notes, “Things of which we are focally aware can be explicitly identified, but no knowledge can be made wholly explicit. For one thing, the meaning of language, when in use, lies in its tacit component; for another, to use language involves actions for our body of which we have a subsidiary awareness. Hence, tacit knowing is more fundamental than explicit knowing; we can know more than we can tell and can tell nothing without relying on our awareness of things we will not be able to tell” (Personal Knowledge, Preface). We generally associate thinking with the mind and disregard the body’s role in thought. Yet the body has ways of knowing that the mind cannot fully articulate, and judgements and decisions must always be made by both body and mind for a physical act to be complete. Also, the cognitive process does not always develop from the mind to the body; it is in fact more often vice versa, body to mind. An example is when your body tells you it’s hungry. Intuitive judgement from the body tells you to nourish yourself, and the mind articulates that signal. So the body knows things that the mind does not. This tacit knowledge, I claim, is the basis for the epistemology of sport, and especially for the game of hurling. Knowing Knowledge Cognition is a result of both tacit and explicit knowledge, extending from subsidiary awareness to focal awareness, and from embodied activity to conceptual activity. We might say that tacit knowledge arises from the interaction between subsidiary awareness and bodily activity, while explicit knowledge results from the interaction of focal awareness and conceptual activity. So,

since Polanyi believes that subsidiary knowledge is vital for providing meaning to focal knowledge, he’s claiming that tacit knowledge is a more fundamental and primordial form of knowing than explicit knowledge. The psychologist Paul Bloom supports this view, discussing in his article ‘Religion is Natural’ (Developmental Science, 10(1), 2007) how children come to the conclusion that the world has meaning and purpose through tacit knowledge. The physicist John Polkinghorne also noted that science itself begins with tacit knowledge, by the very fact it must begin with the tacit belief that the world is rational. Tacit knowledge is not gained through books. Instead, we obtain it by what Polanyi calls ‘indwelling’ (Personal Knowledge, p.53). This often involves extended experiences like apprenticeships, whether in the trades or in a laboratory. To indwell an activity or situation, someone needs to be empathetic to the act or situation, or they will miss the point and knowledge will not be gained. For example, Polanyi’s aesthetic theory claims that for a symbol to work – for us to understand it – we must be empathetic to it or surrender to its meaning, yet “We do not surrender to a symbol if we are not carried away by it, and we are not carried away by it if we do not surrender to it” (Meaning, Michael Polanyi & Harry Prosch, 1975, p.73). ‘Surrender’ more generally understood is vital to the act of knowing. For instance, in order to learn skills one must submit to an authority. Polanyi notes, “The hidden rules can be assimilated only by a person who surrenders himself to that extent uncritically to the imitation of another… To learn by example is to submit to authority. You follow your master because you trust his manner of doing things even when you cannot analyze and account in detail for its effectiveness. By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are not explicitly known to the master himself” (Personal Knowledge, p.53). To learn from a carpenter one would have to submit to the way the carpenter does things, including mimicking what he or she does. Similarly with driving a car: we learn from an instructor. Eventually we practice enough to gain confidence to allow the gear stick to become subsidiary instead of focusing on it to see which gear we’re putting the car into. Eventually so ‘indwelled’, the car becomes an extension of one’s body, where one can for example know subsidiarily how close or far one is from obstacles. Without such indwelling, knowledge is incomplete and would fail. If we did not indwell the work and experience of carpentry until we eventually allow the hammer to be an extension of our hand in order to focus on the nail, we may focus on the hammer instead, and you can tell what would happen then – a swollen thumb. Indwelling is not limited to physical acts. We can indwell our experiences in such a way that may allow insights that provide knowledge that’s more than the sum of the parts. Such a gathering of information into a meaningful whole occurs when we make sense of something. Mari Sorri gives a good example: a medical student looking at an X-ray (‘The Body Has Reasons: Tacit Knowing in Thinking and Making’, The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 1994). The student sees darkened and lighted areas, and with practice and the help of the teacher, grasps what they mean. What would otherwise be random and meaningless shades are eventually recognized as a particular illness. How February/March 2024  Philosophy Now 21

Irish exactly one identifies an illness from an X-ray may not be fully explicitly specifiable, yet experience can provide confidence in doing so, even if the consultant is unable to write down exactly how to do it. Nevertheless, we can see that many parts have been integrated into a whole to make sense of reality. Exactly how a great deal of sense is made is unknown. Judging tacit knowledge as true or false is correspondingly difficult. It is relatively easy to ascertain whether explicit knowledge is correct or not. For example, one’s explicit knowledge is that ‘2+2=4’ is correct, but the tacit knowledge aspect is what’s used when one is asked to work out what 2+2 is, and that process may evade our understanding. Judging tacit knowledge is even more difficult when judging aesthetic or sporting activities, such as hurling. Judging a good hurler requires not only knowing the rules of the game, but also tacit knowledge of how to play it. So there can be no exclusively explicit criteria to judge a good hurler: rather, the judging must be left to those who have demonstrated expertise in the game, and so have proven their ‘tacit worth’ over and over again. We cannot provide a mathematical equation to judge a good hurler, then, but we can certainly trust the knowledge of experts. Polanyi writes: “What then can we do? I believe to make this challenge is to answer it. For it voices our self-reliance… and it asks our own intellectual powers, lacking any fixed eternal criteria, to say on what grounds truth can be asserted in the absence of such criteria. To the question ‘Who convinces whom here?’ it answers simply ‘I am trying to convince myself.’... we must accredit our own judgment as the paramount arbiter of all our intellectual performances” (p.265). So tacit knowledge must involve confidence in personal judgment, as well as being part of a community seeking truth: ultimately, as Polanyi notes, “The freedom of the subjective person to do as he please is overruled by the freedom of the responsible person to act as he must” (p.309). But the judgements of experts are not held to be merely one subjective opinion among others. Hurling Knowledge So how do Polanyi’s ideas about knowledge apply to the great and ancient game of hurling? When I was learning to play the game, I often wondered how I did something, and troubled myself over trying to explicitly measure or explicitly try something again to get the same result. Of course, I eventually came to learn how to trust and surrender to (that is, to indwell) the game, and to learn from others around me. The distinction between focal and subsidiary knowledge applies to all artistic and sporting forms, albeit some are more based on subsidiary knowledge, and some more focal-based. Yet all forms have from-to relations, requiring knowledge to be brought from the subsidiary to the focal. When first learning to play hurling, a man (the game as played by women has a different name: camogie) is mostly focally aware of what he’s doing, before he gains enough experience to allow some of that knowledge to become subsidiary. Subsidiary awareness is lacking at the start, and this is why the beginning hurler does not play well. (If an experienced hurler were required to focus on his subsidiaries, he would fail to play well too.) For example, the beginning hurler is watching the hurley (his stick), its angle, how his hand is gripping the hurley, and so on. What a practiced player 22 Philosophy Now  February/March 2024

would normally be only subsidiarily aware of is here being brought into focus, making the playing difficult and confusing. In my own beginnings, I used to watch the hurley’s balance with the sliotar (ball) on it, only to find that I could never balance the sliotar on the hurley, because I focused on the hurley and was subsidiarily aware of the sliotar, when I needed to be focusing on the sliotar and be only subsidiarily aware of the hurley. Or, as we noted earlier, in hammering a nail into a wall, to focus on the hammer while being subsidiarily aware of the nail would lead to painful failure. Both bodily and conceptual knowledge are important in hurling, with the bodily being more important. The hurler must be confident in his body and trust its reactions. Strange to say that we need to trust our bodies, as one can easily forget one’s body when being conceptual, in the way that a philosopher deep in thought and on the verge of a breakthrough may forget to eat. But the hurler needs to be comfortable with his body in order for the hurley to eventually be an extension of his body. The body has to be able to interpret the hurley as if in conversation with it, sussing out its weight and size to intuit if this hurley suits their body or not, since a good match needs to be made in order to play as well as one can. One way I matched a hurley with me was closing my eyes to see if I could feel the tips of the grass by swinging the hurley as if it were an extension of my arm. In this sort of way, bodily judgements can be just as cognitive as conceptual judgements, and therefore, just as worthy of trust. But hurling relies upon tacit knowledge more than explicit knowledge, because playing it well results mainly from the interaction of subsidiary awareness and bodily activity. In order to know the weight, power and striking capability of the hurley by subsidiary awareness and bodily activity, one must indwell it, as if it’s an extension of one’s body. A deep trust is required for this to work, in the same sort of way a deep trust is required to truly understand a religion. Hurling is like a religion to the extent that both rely on tacit knowledge. To reduce either hurling or religion to one’s explicit knowledge would reduce its greatness, as we fail to properly indwell such knowledge, in the acts of playing or praying. (Often when playing I have to switch to praying, especially with a minute left on the scoreboard!) Judging Knowledge Tacit knowledge means knowing more than one can say, and it’s quite evident in hurling. No hurler could ever fully explain what they’re doing while playing the game. Since it is correspondingly very difficult to identify how hurling is played, managers and commentators are often critical, because it is easier to spot what is not good hurling than what is. But managers can never tell a hurler how to play; instead they must help the hurlers grow in confidence and trust in knowing how without being able to articulate that knowledge. Where one can be explicit about hurling to some degree, one finds himself becoming a poet. What do I mean? What we can speak or articulate about hurling is limited, and so we must use poetic devices such as metaphors, since one must speak indirectly about what one cannot fully articulate, and hurling is primarily tacit in nature. One common metaphor used is, ‘hurling is a battle’; and to keep an eye on the opponent close to you is to ‘mark your man’. Another image I often found being shouted at me was “House,

Philosophy player. It also requires being part of the team and reading the game. Therefore I can learn a lot about a hurler by watching how he plays with others. To be a good hurler, the hurler must aim for universal greatness. This hurler will not only play well individually, but know when to step back or to sacrifice his own glory for the team’s benefit. For example, if my team is down two points with only a few minutes left to go, to score a goal – which will bring my team ahead by a point with a good chance of winning – I can run through many hurlers with a high chance of injury, knowing I will not be able to run at such speed again. Here my actions are good, whereas if I played a similar move earlier in the game it may be considered a bad move, since it leaves me out of breath. But this is the result of a universal rather than a more individualistic intent. Therefore, aiming for universal good and truth is a sign of a good hurler. Ultimate Knowledge To conclude, the idea of tacit knowledge as developed by Michael Polanyi is very insightful for the ancient Irish game of hurling, and indeed for all sports and arts in general. We identified subsidiary and focal knowledge, the bodily activity, the tacit and explicit and indwelling aspects of hurling, as well as judging whether a hurler is good or not. Polanyi identifies tacit knowledge as fundamental to all acts of knowing, whether in the arts or in the sciences. The arts of course rely on tacit knowledge more. If art relied primarily on explicit knowledge, the act of painting or playing an instrument would fail, and there would be no genuinely good art. Conversely, if the sciences focused on tacit knowledge primarily, their acts of knowing would often fail, and we would have no good scientists. In exploring the epistemology of hurling, both in thinking and playing, the awe and wonder of the sport is highlighted, and a deeper appreciation of the game is reached. This shows that Polanyi has here secured some of those insights that philosophy can offer to all aspects of life. © STIOFÁN Ó MURCHADHA 2024

Stiofán Ó Murchadha is a PhD candidate in Philosophical Theology at the University of Exeter. IRISH DEFENCE FORCES VS BOI HURLING, 2010 CREATIVE COMMONS 2.0

house!” That was because I was slow, so my teammates would often warn me of an opponent coming close to me. When beginning to play, one must submit to the authority of the managers who know the game and also submit to the more experienced hurlers and mimic their way of playing, until one is confident enough to play one’s own way. After some practice, the hurler will gain skills that have become subsidiary, and not long after, the hurler will integrate more skills into a more complete whole, to gain a deeper understanding of the game and those with whom they play. The skills will become part of the subsidiary awareness and general bodily cognition, through which the hurler can be said to be properly indwelling the game, and now knows the game more than anyone who only knows the explicit form of the game, namely, the rules. Once we come to know the game well, after the integration of many subsidiaries into a whole, we can even see when our teammates might not be playing well. The whole truth of the game, therefore, starts to come into focus out of all the subsidiary knowledge one acquires. Learning to judge a hurler as good or bad also comes after a lot of experience, the experience which provides nearly all tacit knowledge. Again, no criteria can be explicitly made to identify a good hurler. Rather, whether a player is judged good enough to play or not is known through a whole range of tacit experiences and empathetic indwelling through knowing the game and the player to some extent. A level of resonance takes place in which the judge can identify with many aspects of the hurler. For example, at senior level when one is ‘soloing the sliotar’ (balancing the ball on the hurley while running at high speed), and happens to lose the balance of the sliotar, an experienced hurler will know that this is a basic mistake because this is expected to be highly configured at this point. The experienced hurler watching will know almost by feeling the mistake. When a hurler strikes a sliotar, experienced hurlers will also tacitly know where to run to intercept it. Asking a hurler how they knew where the sliotar was going to land is not fruitful. All they can really say is “I just knew.” There is a more objective way of judging a hurler. Playing with others will make it apparent how good or bad a hurler is, as being a good hurler is more than being a skilled individual

Defence Forces vs BOI 2010

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Irish

Horseplay in Hibernia Seán Moran explores equine escapades in Eire and elsewhere. ibernia’ is the Latin for Ireland. The Romans didn’t use the word much though, because (unlike our neighbour, Britannia) they never invaded Ireland. Perhaps they were scared of the dancing girls with their long curly wigs, kitsch Celtic dresses, and ferociously competitive mammies. In any case, they had a cheek naming our country Hibernia, which literally means ‘Land of Winter’. They seem to have mixed us up with Narnia. We actually have four seasons – admittedly sometimes on the same day. When present-day Romans visit for a summer holiday, they soon discover that Ireland loves horses. This national characteristic runs across all socio-economic classes. When Queen Elizabeth came to Ireland, she made a pilgrimage to my home county of Tipperary, to admire the thoroughbred racehorses in the paddocks and stables of stud farms. Horses are also found in impoverished Dublin housing estates, and in Traveller encampments around the country. The young charioteers in my photograph are members of the Irish Traveller community. A similar image of a charioteer struggling to con-

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© SEÁN MORAN 2021

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trol recalcitrant horses appears in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus – though in Ireland we call a chariot a ‘sulky’, and the minor drama depicted in my photo took place in a cloudy Tipperary town, not under the blazing sun of Athens. In Plato’s allegory, the chariot of the soul (psyche) is pulled by two horses, one mortal, one immortal. Both horses have wings, but the mortal one is a “crooked lumbering animal… hardly yielding to whip and spur” (Phaedrus, 253). This steed represents our desires or appetites (epithumia). By contrast, the immortal horse is “upright and cleanly made… a lover of honour and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and admonition only.” This second horse symbolizes our thumos – a term that has no direct equivalent in English, but is often translated as spiritedness, boldness, or ‘heart’. The task of the charioteer – who represents our human powers of reason (logos) – is to control these two horses, particularly the unruly epithumia, which would otherwise drag us towards satisfying our base, hedonistic instincts, and into catastrophe.

The charioteer, governed by reason, is the best part of our psyche; the crazy horse following its unruly desires is the worst; and the noble horse, doing what it considers to be honourable, is somewhere inbetween. There are inevitable comparisons with Sigmund Freud’s superego, id and ego, but Plato got there over two thousand years before the Viennese voluptuary, and his analysis is arguably more nuanced than Freud’s. Even though the honourable horse is likelier to do the right thing than the wild horse, this is not guaranteed: it can still ‘lose the run of itself’ as we say in Ireland. Without the restraining influence of reason, thumos can take off spiritedly in totally the wrong direction, boldly convinced in its heart that it’s right. Homer in the eighth century BCE gives us a vivid example of thumos going astray, in his epic poem The Iliad. As the Trojan prince Hector lies dying at the hands of Achilles, he pleads with the victorious warrior to give him an honourable burial. Achilles roars back at him: “My thumos would drive me now to hack your flesh and eat it raw – such agonies you have caused me!” Then he ties Hector’s dead body behind his chariot by the feet, and drags it through the dust around the city of Troy, thereby dishonouring Hector in death. In his rage, Achilles has become an uncivilized brute. The noble horse of his psyche has gone rogue. We are unlikely to experience such viciously dramatic events in our own lives – not commonly in rural Tipperary, at any rate – but it’s a vivid reminder that we can’t always trust our intuitions about the right thing to do. Many atrocities are boldly committed by people who firmly believe they’re pursuing an honourable, even glorious, course of action. Nor should we stop our appetite-driven horse from having the occasional hedonistic treat, or it will only sulk (especially if it’s pulling a sulky). But it’s usually a good sign when our mind and heart agree about the best thing to do. This Platonic combination of rationality and spirit – logos and thumos – is needed to make fine things happen, because the soul is motivated to go in the right direction.

Philosophy Horses For Courses So much for Plato’s use of horses in his philosophy: what about his student Aristotle? That thinker certainly discussed horses seriously in his writings; but I can’t resist instead sharing with you a scurrilous equine story about Aristotle that’s been doing the rounds among philosophers for centuries. Aristotle was acting as tutor to Alexander the not-yet-Great when he discovered that his pupil had fallen in love with a young woman called Phyllis. Aristotle was worried that this love affair would distract Alexander from his royal duties and his philosophical studies, so he counselled him to cool his passions. Phyllis heard about this and decided to humiliate Aristotle. She seduced him by prancing bare-legged through the morning dew, with her hair billowing in the breeze – like a slow-motion, softfocus shampoo advert. Aristotle looked out of his glassless study window and was smitten by this vision of loveliness. He implored Phyllis to be his. She agreed, with one proviso: he had to put on a saddle and bridle and become her horse for a ride round the garden. Later that morning, Alexander looked down from the battlements, amazed to see his respectable old tutor with a bit between his teeth and a saddle on his back, being whipped by young Phyllis as he cantered through the grass. Enough of this. Although it was widely told – and luridly depicted in the sixteenth century by artists including Lucas van Leyden and Johann Sadeler – the story of Phyllis and Aristotle probably isn’t genuine. So let’s move on to my completely true philosophical anecdote about a horse in Ireland. I was recently taking some photographs at the castle of eighteenth century Irish philosopher Bishop Berkeley, in nearby county Kilkenny – it’s not a long way to Tipperary – when a horse that had been grazing behind me decided it wanted to be in the picture. She ambled past me to pose elegantly in front of the castle. Berkeley famously claimed that things only exist while they’re being observed (esse est percipi), so I looked away... and the horse disappeared. It reappeared when I looked at it again, and it was in the photographs when I developed the film. I would show you the image, but the negative also seems to have disappeared from my darkroom while no-one was watching. As compensation for failing to produce my picture of a horse at Berkeley’s castle, I offer you instead a photograph of nineteenth century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche playing a horse. Nietzsche knew about the rumours of Aristotle acting as a horse for Phyllis in Alexander’s garden, and he decided to reenact the scurrilous scene for the camera. In it he and his friend Paul Rée are being whipped by Phyllis, played by Lou Salomé, as he pulls her cart like a moustachioed Teutonic dray-horse. Unfortunately, this jokey horsey tableau vivant foreshadowed poor Nietzsche’s demise. Seven years later, on January 3rd 1889, in Turin, Italy, he was horrified to see a horse being beaten by its owner in the Piazza Carlo Alberta. Overcome with pity for the animal, Nietzsche threw his arms around the mare’s neck, weeping manically, before falling to the ground. He never recovered his mental health after this episode, and spent the last eleven years of his life under psychiatric ‘care’. On a lighter note, I’ve just been re-reading a book by the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift. Gulliver’s Travels (1726) can be read as a fantasy travelogue, like Homer’s Odyssey (except that

Nietzsche and friends

Odysseus endures many perils so that he can return home to his wife and son, whereas Gulliver can’t wait to escape his family and homeland to embark on his next adventure). Alternatively, the stories can be interpreted as satires on the social and political mores of Swift’s time. But the book is also deeply philosophical, and this is where horses come into the picture yet again. Indeed, the intelligent horses, the Houyhnhnms, whom Gulliver encounters on an island south of New Holland (now called Australia), are the philosophical heroes of his narrative: “As these noble Houyhnhnms are endowed by nature with a general disposition to all virtues… their grand maxim is to cultivate reason, and to be wholly governed by it.” The horses are ideal citizens of a state much like Plato’s Republic. In fact, Gulliver’s host, a highly intelligent steed, “agreed entirely with the sentiments of Socrates, as Plato delivers them.” In keeping with Plato’s ‘model’ society, which is marred by eugenics and repressive social control, the Houyhnhnms practise a type of slavery, in which there is a “race of inferior Houyhnhnms bred up to be servants.” However, even these servile horses are superior to the primitive humanoid Yahoos, who represent fallen, depraved humanity. In barbs directed at two apparently respectable human professions, Gulliver is pleased that “here was neither physician to destroy my body, nor lawyer to ruin my fortune.” (A little unfair to doctors, perhaps.) And as a Protestant clergyman, Swift couldn’t resist mocking the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, the idea that the bread turns into the real body of Christ during the mass: Gulliver says that in Europe, lives were lost debating “whether… bread be flesh” – something the intelligent horses in the story would never believe. Naughty Reverend Swift. What do you think? Has considering horses made a worthwhile contribution to philosophy over the centuries? Yea, or neigh? © DR SEÁN MORAN 2021

Seán Moran, RIP, taught postgraduate students in Ireland, and was professor of philosophy at one of the oldest universities in the Punjab. February/March 2024  Philosophy Now 25

How to Have a Good Life Meena Danishmal asks if Seneca’s account of the good life is really practical.

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ccording to the Oxford English Dictionary, the adjective ‘stoical’ means “resembling a Stoic in austerity, indifference, fortitude, repression of feeling and the like”. This gives us some idea of what it is like to be a Stoic. Indeed, the key teaching, arguably the fundamental point, of Stoicism, is that we should focus on controlling the things that are under our control, such as our thoughts, emotions, and actions, whilst accepting those things we cannot control, such as most things that are happening in the world. How did they get there? To consider this question let’s look at the ideas of the Roman philosopher and statesman Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger (4 BCE-65 CE). As a top advisor to the paranoid and murderous Emperor Nero, he probably found Stoicism a particularly practical guide to life. As a Stoic, Seneca believed the soul (Latin: anima or animus) to be a finer form of matter than the body; but matter it is. It was also described as a spark of the fire which had consumed the original matter. With such an understanding of the soul, where does the soul reside within the body? Stoics provided a rather simple answer: everywhere. The soul was considered to be a vital force that animates the whole body. The soul was also the source of reason, virtue, and moral character, which is what Stoic philosophy is built upon, as the rational soul guides individuals towards living in accordance with nature. For us to understand this concept further, it’s vital to grasp the Stoic conception of reality. Stoics see the universe as interconnected and interwoven, and this unified cosmos as governed by rational principles. Within this holistic perspective, the soul is seen as part of the divine rational order of the universe. This understanding forms the basis of Stoic ethics, which emphasises the importance of cultivating reason and virtue in all aspects of life. This encouragement to align thoughts, actions, and desires with principles of reason, is a way for the soul to flourish. Seneca believes it’s vital to make room for leisure. However, a life of pure leisure is considered meaningless. He is also against making a show of everything. Those who do so are described as being ‘idly preoccupied’, and squandering their lives on pointless endeavours. He also criticises people who obsess about their appearance, and asserts that they are not truly at leisure. We are squandering time, which is the most valuable resource of all, by concentrating on how we appear. You may have heard this quote before: “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.” Seneca wrote this in order to urge us to examine life honestly. Our lives feel short because they’re filled with business and stress. In essence, many of us are wasting our potential, living what could be described as a life of ‘simple existence’, simply responding to the random events of life. Seneca, though, describes genuine living as being in charge of oneself and hence either meaningfully enjoying yourself or striving towards objectives that are significant to you. To showcase this contrast he uses the analogy of a boat in a storm: 26 Philosophy Now
February/March 2024

“For what if you should think that a man has had a long voyage who had been caught up by fierce storm as soon as he left harbour, and, swept hither and thither by a succession of winds that rages from different quarters, had been driven in a circle around the same course? Not much voyaging did he have, but much tossing about.” (On the Shortness of Life, c.49 CE)

Perhaps the most important lesson of his essay On the Shortness of Life (De Brevitate Vitae) is that we need to value our time and avoid wasting it. Yet it is not just a matter of understanding this idea, but of translating it into day-to-day life. Also remember that you could die at any point. (Seneca himself committed suicide on Nero’s orders, when suspected of involvement in a plot.) In On the Shortness of Life, Seneca provides some valuable lessons, not only regarding oneself but also regarding the nature of relationships; for instance, “You’ve no right to expect anyone to pay you back for those services; when you offered them, it was a wish to be with someone else but an inability to be with yourself.” I remember the first time I came across this quote it rattled me – in a positive manner: it’s a reminder that true acts of service should be performed without an expectation latched onto them, and it highlights the importance of selflessness and genuine compassion, to engage in acts of service with a sincere desire to contribute to the well-being of others. It also indirectly encourages one to cultivate a healthy relationship with oneself. By doing so, fulfilment can be discovered within our actions whilst also maintaining a balanced approach to our personal growth within society. If after this article you still wish to read On The Shortness of Life, then do be prepared for some brute facts. It’s not for the faint-hearted. Critiquing Seneca’s Stoicism Although Seneca left behind a wealth of wisdom in his writings, it is nevertheless essential to critically examine his account, since some of his teachings may be impractical for those seeking a well-rounded approach to life. For instance, he frequently expresses an idealistic view of human nature and expectation of human conduct, but the stringent dedication to reason and virtue the Stoics promote might be difficult for most people to maintain amid the complications of everyday life. And while Seneca’s emphasis on controlling emotions and impulses is admirable in abstract theory, this ignores the complex reality of human psychology. In practice, it can be extremely difficult to achieve such a level of self-control in every situation. Humans are complex beings with a wide range of emotions, and expecting most people to suppress their natural reactions entirely is unrealistic. Although striving to manage emotions and desires can be valuable, Seneca’s account perhaps neglects the importance of healthy emotional expression and genuine human experiences. Contingent biological factors have almost been neglected in

Seneca the Younger by Stephen Lahey

February/March 2024
Philosophy Now 27

Seneca’s account, too. For instance, women suffering from PCOS tend to have larger mood swings due to the condition causing a hormonal imbalance, whereby their control of their emotions can be severely limited. As a Stoic, Seneca places great importance on detachment from circumstances and the cultivation of indifference towards events beyond our control. Yet while it is undoubtedly beneficial to maintain emotional resilience, Seneca’s account often leans towards a radical detachment which may dissuade followers from actively engaging in society and working for social change. At the logical extreme, Stoic indifference may result in a complete withdrawal from relationships and societal responsibilities, to the detriment of all. Empathy and social connections, are after all, essential components of a good life. A more realistic outlook on life should strike a balance between acknowledging the limits of our affecting the world and actively interacting with it to make a positive difference. Stoicism emphasises the value of individual responsibility and inner fortitude; but it is also crucial to recognise the outside forces that affect a person’s situation. So Seneca’s universal recommendations are less appropriate to the intricacies of real life in as much as they don’t take contextual considerations into account. The distinctiveness of each person’s situation and the variety of difficulties we face are frequently disregarded in his teachings. But people come from various origins, experience various socioeconomic situations, and face particular challenges. Access to resources, opportunities, and support networks is not universally equal. Instead of proposing a one-size-fits-all solution, then, a practical outlook on life should take these factors into account, and adjust accordingly. Seneca’s account might also minimise the value of emotional intelligence and the value of the capacity to comprehend and manage our emotions in a healthy way. Our emotions are an essential part of the human experience, and provide important information about our needs, wants, and values. Emotional numbness, and a separation from our true selves, can result from suppressing or ignoring our feelings. Practically speaking, this can also impede personal development, and prevent people from

being self-aware and emotionally resilient. People benefit more from developing emotional intelligence, empathy, and compassion, than from trying to conceal or remove their emotions because emotional intelligence, empathy, and compassion can lead to general well-being and more satisfying relationships. So recognising the complexity of emotions and learning to harness their potential for personal growth would be a better approach. Seneca also frequently establishes lofty ideals for moral behaviour. Although striving for noble ideals is laudable, the Stoic concentration on obtaining self-control and equanimity can put undue pressure on people and cause feelings of inadequacy. Those who are unable to constantly uphold these elevated goals may feel a sense of failure, which could lead to anguish and disappointment. A more realistic outlook on life would recognise that people are fallible beings who suffer flaws and make mistakes. So instead of aiming for an unreachable level of virtue, people should concentrate on improving themselves constantly, on learning from their mistakes, and on developing a sense of personal integrity. A more realistic and longer-lasting path to self-fulfilment can be found by putting the emphasis on growth and progress rather than on achieving perfection. Lastly, the Stoic stress on independence and self-sufficiency ignores the essential interconnectedness between people. Stoicism frequently downplays the value of interpersonal relationships and the contribution that a supportive community makes to living a happy life. Yet since humans are naturally social creatures, maintaining positive relationships and asking for help from others are essential to happiness. Following Seneca’s account might deter people from making and fostering deep connections. Understanding the importance of interpersonal connections, empathy, and social support is crucial to taking a practical approach to life. Building and sustaining positive relationships with others can promote self-development, resilience, and overall happiness. A more contented and balanced life can be attained by actively participating in our communities than by striving for self-sufficient individualism. Troubled Reflections While Seneca in On the Shortness of Life provides some insightful analyses, it is vital to assess his essay’s applicability in everyday situations. Seneca’s practical recommendations are impracticable due to his Stoicism’s idealistic quality, stress on objectivity, disdain for unique circumstances, poor recognition of emotional complexity, exaggerated expectations of virtue, and omission of human interdependence. A more realistic outlook on life would require striking a balance between reason and emotional intelligence, considering the unique circumstances of each person, and putting an emphasis on one’s own development, self-compassion, and meaningful relationships with others.

© ADDIE LUO 2024

© MEENA DANISHMAL 2024

Meena Danishmal is a political philosophy writer as well as an undergraduate studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Royal Holloway University of London.

Seneca the Emoji Developer 28 Philosophy Now
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• To read about a Stoic philosopher from the other end of the Roman social spectrum, the former slave Epictetus, see Massimo Pigliucci’s column in this issue.

A Philosophical History of

Transhumanism hroughout our history, we human beings have been trying to transform ourselves with a view of overcoming our limitations, even death. There is a tendency in humanity to search for a way around every obstacle and limitation, and to make one’s life happier and better in this world. This discloses our yearning to become better than we are – better than human: to move from being mere Homo sapiens to become Homo superior. Transhumanism is a movement which advocates this transformation of the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing technologies, and then making them widely available. Transhumanism itself has gradually evolved over the past couple of decades. Now it promotes research into areas such as life-extension projects, cryonics, molecular nanotechnology, human enhancement projects such as bionics, artificial intelligence, uploading human consciousness into computers, and designer babies, among other things. We can say that the ultimate objective of transhumanism is to enable us to live forever. Commentators tend to say that transhumanism is either dehumanizing or superhumanizing. The view that transhumanism is dehumanizing is held by ‘bioconservatives’ such as Francis Fukuyama and Richard Jones. Fukuyama expresses his critique in his book Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2003). He thinks that transhumanistic projects will violate basic human rights and will blur the line between natural and artificial, which indeed would induce moral dilemmas. Ultimately, the fear is that transhumans will eliminate original humanity. Transhumanism as a superhumanising concept is a view shared by all the techno-optimists, such as Julian Huxley, Max More, and Nick Bostrom. They believe that transhumanistic projects will bring the maximum benefit to humanity, and that human limitations such as death, disability and ageing, can all be beneficially overcome technologically. These different views about this movement provoke us to question what exactly transhumanism is. So before investigating the ethics of transhumanism, let’s look in more depth at what it is.

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What is Transhumanism? Different thinkers, even different transhumanism advocates, have different ways of understanding the movement. The term ‘transhumanism’ was coined in 1957 by Julian Huxley. Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (1887-1975) was an English biologist, philosopher, educator, and the author of the transhumanist masterpiece, New Bottles for New Wine. He is considered the father of transhumanism. He was also the first Director-General of UNESCO, as well as a grandson of biologist T.H. Huxley. He was greatly influenced by new developments in embryology, systematics, and studies of behaviour and evolution. 30 Philosophy Now
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For Huxley, transhumanism is shorthand for ‘evolutionary humanism’. Evolutionary humanism is, unsurprisingly, a philosophy centered on human evolution. Evolutionary humanists do not view human beings as the ‘pinnacle of creation’, but instead as the unintended product of natural selection. Evolutionary humanists hold the opinion that human life evolved from a single organism and is still evolving. So human nature is not static; rather, we are evolving from one state to another. Under evolutionary humanism, humanity makes a deliberate effort to “Transcend itself – not just sporadically… but in its entirety, as humanity” (New Bottles for New Wine, 1957). This concept was made into an academic discipline by Huxley. Max T. O’Connor, known as Max More, is a British philosopher and futurist. In 1995, at the University of Southern California, More finished his doctoral dissertation, The Diachronic Self: Identity, Continuity, and Transformation, which examines several issues that concern transhumanists. He has since written many articles espousing transhumanism, and especially the transhumanist philosophy of Extropianism (which I’ll summarise later). More introduced the term ‘transhumanism’ in its modern technologically-based sense. He defines transhumanism as “a class of philosophy of life that seeks the continuation and acceleration of the evolution of intelligent life beyond its currently human form and human limitations by means of science and technology, guided by life-prompting principles and values” (The Coming Robot Revolution, Yoseph Bar-Cohen, David Hanson, 2009). Alternatively, Oxford University futurist Nick Bostrom recently said that transhumanism is “an outgrowth of secular humanism and the Enlightenment. It holds that current human nature is improvable through the use of applied science and other rational methods, which make it possible to increase human health-span, extend our intellectual and physical capacities, and give us increased control over our mental states and moods” (from Bostrom’s essay in H +/-: Transhumanism and Its Critics, eds. Gregory R. Hansell and William Grassie, 2010, p.55). Whatever the precise definition, the regulative notion of transhumanism is the scientific enhancement of human beings. However, although the literature on transhumanism encompasses science and technology, it does so in terms of various distinct purposes. Hence, we cannot consider transhumanism as a single movement, but as several with distinct purposes. Some of the most discussed and debated are: (i) Democratic transhumanism; (ii) Libertarian transhumanism; (iii) Extropianism; and (iv) Singularitarianism. Let’s briefly consider each of these movements. Democratic Transhumanism Democratic transhumanism is chiefly propagated by James Hughes (1961-), an American Buddhist monk, sociologist and

FOR MORE ART BY CAMERON GRAY, PLEASE VISIT PARABLEVISIONS.COM AND FACEBOOK.COM/CAMERONGRAYTHEARTIST

John Kennedy Philip goes deep into the search for (post-) human heights.

Transhumanism by Cameron Gray 2024

February/March 2024
Philosophy Now 31

bioethicist, and the executive director and CEO of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, which publishes articles on transhumanism and other areas of bioethics. His magnum opus is Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future (2004). Democratic transhumanism encourages governments to embrace transhumanistic projects, and proposes that technological and other scientific self-enhancements should be accessible to everyone, rather than only a rich elite. Proponents of this approach are critical of the way in which power is distributed unequally – based on gender, race, class, religion, and other categories. They insist that people should have equal access to transhumanistic projects, disregarding such factors. Hughes also emphasizes the importance of having guarantors of these things: “Technoprogressives, like social democrats in general, believe democracy requires strong guarantees of civil liberties and minority rights, a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth and power, a strong state accountable and transparent to its citizens, and a process for deliberation and decision-making open to all competent persons.” (James Hughes in ‘On Democratic Transhumanism’, interview with Marc Roux, Re-Public, 2009). Libertarian Transhumanism Zoltan Istvan, a US presidential candidate in 2016, and one of the world’s most influential transhumanists, promotes libertarian transhumanism. This is another political ideology, which as the name suggests synthesises libertarianism and transhumanism. Libertarian transhumanists believe that all transhumanistic projects should aim at the good of a person’s life, that is, his or her ‘well being’; but, also that the principles of selfownership and the free market are the guarantors of the right to enhancement. In addition, they strongly assert that any attempt to limit the right to pursue transhumanistic projects is a violation of civil rights and civil liberties. They also reject some public policies and laws advocated by democratic transhumanists, because they fear that the state will steer or limit the choices of individuals. Libertarian transhumanists argue that libertarian transhumanism will produce greater prosperity, development, and in general the best outcome for society. Extropianism & Extropism Extropianism is concerned with the framework of values and standards for improving the human condition. ‘Extropy’ or ‘Extropianism’ is not a meticulously defined, technical term; rather, ‘extropy’ is used metaphorically, as an antonym to ‘entropy’, to mean things generally getting more ordered and sophisticated rather than disordered and chaotic. Diane Duane was the first to use this term to state that it’s possible to remain optimistic about the future through technological enhancement interventions. Max More, the most prominent proponent of this approach, himself describes perpetual progress, self-transformation, practical optimism, intelligent technology, open society, self-direction, and rational thinking as principles of Extropianism. The main belief of extropians is that advances in science and technology will someday allow people to live indefinitely. Extropians often promote this belief by doing research and development, or by voluntarily testing new technology on their own bodies. 32 Philosophy Now
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‘Extropism’ is a more recent derivation of Extropianism. The Extropist Manifesto sums up Extropism in the following five phrases: “Endless eXtension, Transcending Restriction, Overcoming Property, Intelligence, Smart Machines” (Quoted in Transhumanism: The History of a Dangerous Idea, David Livingstone, 2015). Singularitarianism Singularitarianism is a movement based on the belief that the technological singularity and so the creation of superintelligence will likely happen in the near future. The technological singularity (commonly known just as ‘the singularity’) is the point where available computing power equals, and begins to exceed, human brain-power. So singularitarianism assumes the development of AI above human intelligence, yielding artificial superintelligence. Superintelligence is a term referring to a hypothetical AI which surpasses human beings in all intellectual fields. In his book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005), Ray Kurzweil (1948-), inventor and futurist, predicts that the singularity, and so the beginning of the creation of superintelligence, will occur circa 2045. Singularitarianism asserts that deliberate action ought to be taken to ensure that the singularity and beyond benefits human beings. Outlining the differences of these movements makes it evident that to arrive at a consensus regarding transhumanism is not easy. Nevertheless, the common thread that runs through all these movements is of enhancing humanity with the help of technology and science. Thus we can formulate a working definition of transhumanism as ‘An intellectual, social, cultural, and philosophical movement that affirms the possibility of improving the human condition through advancements in relevant sciences, such as neurosciences, genomics, robotics, nanotechnology, computer science, and artificial intelligence’. Transhumanism & Posthumanism Two terms inevitably associated together in this research are transhumanism and posthumanism. Before arguing the distinction, we should note that the term ‘transhuman’ is itself distinct from transhumanism. Transhumanism is a movement, while ‘transhuman’ refers to an organism: it is an intermediary form, somewhere between the human and the posthuman. That is to say, transhumans are humans in transition who are striving to become posthuman. Against this background, posthumanity can be understood as a group of (future) people who have radically and categorically transformed themselves from humans with the help of advanced technologies. Hence, posthumans are beings who have reached beyond the conventional definitions and attributes of contemporary humans. A Brief History of Transhumanism, Then In one sense, one can broadly say that the history of transhumanism is the history of humanity. Some commentators even argue that transhumanism has its roots in Dante and St Paul’s epistles. However, as a movement, transhumanism most properly has its roots in the rational humanism birthed in the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is sometimes said to have started with the publication of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (The New Tool) in 1620. In this magnum opus, Bacon stresses the importance of scientific methodology: of finding out about the world through

empirical investigation rather than a priori reasoning. Bacon also advocated ‘effecting all things possible’, by which he meant, using science to achieve mastery over nature in order to improve the human condition. In the year 1784, in his famous essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Immanuel Kant sums it up as follows: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed youth. Youth is the inability to use one's own understanding without another's guidance. This youth is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding’ is therefore the motto of the Enlightenment!”

This heritage of critical thought from the Enlightenment, in combination with the influence of Isaac Newton, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Kant, the Marquis de Condorcet, and many others, forms the basis of rational humanism. Rational humanism emphasizes empirical science and critical reasoning rather than religious authority or social tradition. Thus rational humanism serves as the intellectual basis for transhumanism. The second major inspiration for transhumanist thought is Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). In his masterpiece Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), Nietzsche explains his famous doctrine of the Übermensch (the overman or superman): “I teach you the Overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughing stock or a painful embarrassment” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra trans. R.J. Hollingdale, pp.41-42).

Although Nietzsche does not refer directly to technological transformation, there are similarities with the Nietzschean and the transhuman visions. The 1940s saw the development of the first practical computers, driven in part by wartime needs for code-breaking. Cybernetics and computer science began to be widely discussed; and in the 1960s, optimistic new scenarios about humanity and AI were articulated by science fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clark. Also in the 1960s, various organizations, inspired no doubt by sci fi, began to advocate life extension, cryonics, space colonization, and advances in biotechnology, neuroscience, and neurotechnology – all important projects in transhumanism. In the 1990s, as already mentioned, More brought transhumanism to the academy, formalizing it through the principle of extropy. More considers our human state as “the transitional stage standing between our animal stage and our posthuman future.” These posthuman stages will be reached, according to More, “through genetic engineering, life-extending bio-sciences, intelligence intensifiers, smarter interfaces to smart computers, neural-computer integration, worldwide data networks, virtual reality, intelligent agencies, swift electronics communication, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, neural networks,

artificial life, off-planet migration and molecular nanotechnology” (‘Extropian Principles 3.0’). In 1998, Nick Bostrom and David Pearce founded the World Transhumanist Association (WTA). In the same year, a group of transhumanist activists including Bostrom, Pearce, More, and others, authored the Transhumanist Declaration, expressing the various ethical stands that can be taken by transhumanists, especially when ethical dilemmas arise from technological advances. In a YouTube talk, Bostrom sums up his reasons for founding WTA in three points: (i) “To support discussion on transhumanist thought and to create a public awareness of technology advancements”; (ii) “To propose solutions for the potential consequences [threats] of emerging technologies”; and (iii) “To create a novel platform for transhumanist thought in the field of academic science.” The Extropy Institute, the Foresight Institute, the Immortality Institute, the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology, and the Singularity Institute for AI, are some other contemporary organizations which play vital roles in the promotion of transhumanism. In 2004 Bostrom and Hughes established the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology. In the same year, Francis Fukuyama, after seeing the potential risks of transhumanistic projects, labelled transhumanism as ‘the world’s most dangerous idea’. In 2005, Bostrom, in association with Anders Sandberg and Eric Dressler, established the Future of Life Institute to support and to promote transhumanism. In 2008, the WTA changed its name to Humanity+. The Singularity University was also founded in 2008 in America by Peter Diamand and Ray Kurzweil, with sponsorship from Google, Nokia, eplanet Capital, NASA, the X Prize Foundation, and other leading companies. In 2014, on reading Bostrom’s Superintelligence, Elon Musk tweeted that AI could pose a threat to humanity, and joined the WTA to support responsible technological development. In 2015, Musk donated ten million dollars to the Future Life Institute for the creation of friendly AI. And in 2016, Istvan campaigned for the US presidential election with the agenda of promoting transhumanism. From this reading of its history, it’s clear that transhumanism is not merely a utopian vision of techno optimists, but receives substantial funding from various rich organizations. Questioning Transhumanism Although transhumanism predicts an unparalleled optimistic, even utopian vision of the future, as seen by techno-optimists, it cannot ignore the following kinds of questions: What do we mean by ‘human’? Is a human being just physical matter? Is human nature static or malleable? Is the idea of transhumanism dangerous? Or is the ideology of bioconservatives who oppose transhumanism itself dangerous? How? Are the new sciences and technologies celebrated by transhumanists realistic, or just another form of wishful thinking? What are transhuman beings? From these questions, and many more, it’s clear that transhumanism engenders complex ethically and anthropologically pertinent questions, necessitating a serious investigation into what it proposes and promotes. © JOHN KENNEDY PHILIP 2024

John Kennedy Philip, a postgraduate in philosophy, specializes in Western philosophy, ethics, cosmology, and the philosophy of technology. His intellectual pursuits delve into the intricate relationships between human values, the cosmos, and technological philosophy. February/March 2024
Philosophy Now 33

Hume’s Problem of Induction Patrick Brissey exposes a major unprovable assumption at the core of science.

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ill the sun rise tomorrow? The answer seems simple: an emphatic “Yes!” But how do you know? We can imagine the following commonsense response: “Well, every morning, the sun rises; at least from my perspective. Wait until tomorrow; you’ll see!” The reasoning is that, based on past observations, we know that the sun will more than likely rise in the morning. Notice that this conclusion is not certain: the argument is not a purely logical deduction. There are, after all unlikely science fiction scenarios where the sun is suddenly destroyed. These scenarios show that the claim the sun will rise in the morning is possibly false. Despite this, there seems to be a very good probability that it will rise. In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), David Hume (1711-1776) asserts that even this argument is not good. Hume thinks the skeptical answer – ‘We Don’t Know!’ – is the logical response to this sort of inductive (past-experience-based) argument. For him, we ought to withhold belief on inductive assertions about the future, even over such likely questions as whether the sun will rise in the morning. But perhaps this does not seem right to you: We all know that the sun will rise in the morning, don’t we? Let’s see how Hume gets to his conclusion. The ‘Future Will Resemble the Past’ Principle Imagine someone playing a game of pool. She hits the cue ball, and it collides with the eight ball. What should happen next? Based on past experience, one would think that the eight ball will travel in a straight line away from the cue ball until impeded by another object. But this is only one hypothesis. Consider the following alternative hypotheses: Hypothesis 1: The eight ball follows a rectangular path. Hypothesis 2: The eight ball follows a circular path. Hypothesis 3: The eight ball combusts. Hypothesis 4: The eight ball becomes extremely heavy and sinks through the table. Hypothesis 5: The eight ball hovers over the table. Etc. The original straight-line hypothesis is consistent with our experience; but Hume argues that judgments like this simply assume that the future will resemble the past. But how do we know that this principle that the future will resemble the past is true? In fact, a key issue concerning the plausibility of scientific arguments, which are inductive arguments (since they generate scientific laws from a limited number of observations) is whether we can prove the Future Will Resemble The Past Principle. If we can demonstrate that this principle is true, we can be confident in our scientific and other probabilistic inferences. 34 Philosophy Now  February/March 2024

However, if we can’t prove it, then, like Hume, we should stop thinking that we have good logical reasons to believe that the sun will rise in the morning. Can We Prove the Principle? Hume devises a strategy to prove his skeptical conclusion. He asks us to imagine that we could prove the principle that the future will resemble the past. How would we construct such a proof? Well, as Hume tells us, a proof needs a plausible argument, and there are two kinds of plausible arguments: deductive arguments (which are certain) and inductive ones (which are only probable and depend on the amount of evidence gathered). So, we would need to prove with either certainty or probability that the future will resemble the past. Then we can be confident (at least to the extent of the probability) that the sun will rise tomorrow, and a whole host of other predictions about the future based on past experiences. So first, can we prove the principle with an argument that is certain (deductive)? Hume provides a plausible argument that we cannot. First, he says all knowledge comes to us through our senses. We shall only count as evidence that which someone can see, smell, touch, taste, or hear. Second, he says The Future Will Resemble The Past Principle is a universal principle, meaning that it asserts that the future will always resemble the past. Third, it is impossible to empirically prove any universal, as to do so would require observing all possible instances of its application. So we would need to have the sum total of all possible experiences as evidence to prove that the future will always resemble the past. For instance, we would need to know about all future sunrises, which is impossible. To have this kind of knowledge would necessitate that we live forever; and even then, we would not have experienced the mornings before we were born. Thus Hume concludes that we cannot have definitive proof (that is, certainty) of the principle. Can we prove the principle with an argument that is probable (inductive), then? Again Hume provides a compelling argument that we cannot. The proposal is now that we can have an inductive argument for our The Future Will Resemble The Past Principle. However, this is a logical fallacy, since in order to operate, all inductive arguments must presume the future resembles the past. In inductive arguments, the arguer makes observations, and infers general rules or conclusions using the idea that future observations will be like the past observations. So, if we attempt to justify the principle that the future will resemble the past by an inductive argument – by for instance saying it has done so on previous occasions, so it will do so again – then we would be effectively proving the principle by assuming it, what is committing the fallacy of circular reasoning. We can indeed summarise the problem by saying that in order to prove induction through an inductive argument, we need to first assume the

© SYLVIIE REED 2024

validity of inductive argument. In this kind of argument, nothing is proven, for the conclusion is presumed in the argument. Hume concludes therefore that we cannot justify the principle of induction with an inductive argument. So the conclusion is that the essential inductive (and therefore scientific) principle that the future will resemble the past cannot be proven. No certain (deductive) or probable (inductive) arguments can justify the Future Will Resemble The Past Principle. So we cannot reasonably hold that the sun will rise in the morning even with probability, because this assumes the Future Will Resemble The Past Principle, which Hume has shown cannot be proven. What’s the Big Deal? What’s the problem? Why should we care about Hume’s conclusion? Hume explains that if we cannot prove the Future Will Resemble The Past Principle, then we have no good reason to believe that the future will resemble the past, meaning, logically speaking, that the future is unknown. Given this, we don’t know (either with certainty or with probability) that when we eat bread it will nourish us; whether the sun will rise tomorrow; or that we should trust the conclusions of the sciences. The big deal, then, is that we cannot demonstrate the reasonableness of much

of what we believe, at least concerning future events, and this includes scientific predictions about the world or about future experimental results. However, if we ought not to make claims of knowledge about future events, how can we live? Life necessitates that we make practical choices; but if Hume’s highly abstract conclusion is true, and we only want to do whatever we can demonstrate is reasonable, then we cannot live. Nearly everyone would agree that practical action is more valuable than Hume’s skeptical position. Thus, they propose that it’s Hume who has a problem here. Hume was well aware of this kind of objection. His response is that we ought to live not according to pure reason (which to Hume can prove virtually nothing about the world), but according to our feelings. For Hume, then, we do not know that the sun will rise tomorrow, but we have a strong inclination to believe that it will, and we ought to act on that. Our feelings, for Hume, are sufficient for practical action. Hume’s further rejoinder is that his skeptical view provides moral and practical guidance about the limits of knowledge. So, do you know whether the sun will rise tomorrow? How would you respond to Hume’s argument? © DR PATRICK BRISSEY 2024

Patrick Brissey is an Instructor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina. February/March 2024  Philosophy Now 35

Brief Lives

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) Hilarius Bogbinder looks at a man who wanted to make Peace from Warre.

“O

ne of the greatest geniuses of the 17th Century” was how Pierre Bayle (16461707), a French lexicographer, described Thomas Hobbes in his Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (p.467). It is hard to argue with this assessment, even for a man who was a contemporary of Newton, Galileo, Shakespeare, and Descartes. Hobbes was born under Elizabeth I (1537-1603), and his life overlapped with Shakespeare’s (1564-1616), though the Bard was not mentioned in the philosopher’s works. We know a lot about Hobbes, not least because he presented his story well: he wrote several autobiographies to defend himself from charges of atheism. We are fortunate that John Aubrey (1626-1697), a fellow Wiltshireman, and a friend of the philosopher, also wrote a very readable and, at times, refreshingly candid, biography of Hobbes, which recounted the thinker’s achievements as well as his many quirks. Except for Aubrey, few would be aware that Thomas Hobbes was a health

36 Philosophy Now
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fanatic, and that he was prone to singing for the sake of longevity, not to the delight of others: “He sang aloud (not that he had a very good voice, but for his health’s sake); he did believe it did his lungs good and conduced much to prolong his life” (The Life of Mr Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, p.352). Notwithstanding that Hobbes cared about his health, his friend reported that, “when he did drinke, he would drinke to excesse” (Ibid, p.350). His biographer also reported that the philosopher was six foot tall – at a time when the average was 5’5. He also lived to his 92nd year, at a time when life expectancy was a mere 43. Perhaps Hobbes lived so long because he was a keen tennis player. Certainly, this sport was so central to him that he even mentioned it in his most famous book, though with a caveat: “The skill of making, and maintaining commonwealths, consisteth in certain rules, as doth arithmetic and geometry, not as tennis-play, on practice only” (Leviathan, p.136). But it is fair to say that the sporty singing drinker wanted to be known for

his contributions to philosophy rather than to personal fitness. And this is, of course, how he appeals to readers half a millennium after his birth. Background Hobbes is known for using the methods of geometry and the insights of the thennew physical sciences to expound a rounded system of philosophy based on a purely materialist view of the world. He may not be entirely liked: Bishop Henry Hammond wrote with horror about ‘‘Mr Hobbes’ Leviathan’’, which the reverend cleric called ‘‘a farrago of Christian Atheism.’’ But Hobbes was always respected. Even his opponent, the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), called him ‘the sharp-witted Englishman’ (Political Writings, p.118). To writers of a more recent vintage, Hobbes is above all known as the author of Leviathan. It was famously in this volume that its author described life in the state of nature (that is, before civilisation) as “solidary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” and “a time of Warre, where every man is the enemy of every man” (p.70). The simple plot of this justly famous treatise was that people should, “confer all their power and strength upon one man” – to give one man sovereign power – so that this “mortal god” is “enabled to perform the wills of them all, to [make] peace at home, and to [provide] mutual aid against their enemies abroad” (p.134). This justification for the rule of ‘that great Leviathan’ would have been enough to secure its author a place among the great writers of Western philosophy. But Hobbes’ work goes deeper than providing an apology for rule by a strong state. No understanding of Hobbes is complete without a bit of context. Described by the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990) as “the second son of an otherwise undistinguished vicar near Westport in Wiltshire” (Hobbes on Civil Association, p.15), Hobbes was fond of

Brief Lives

Thomas Hobbes portrait by J.M. Wright c.1669

saying that his mother went into labour for fear of the invasion by the Spanish Armada, because she feared that “a fleet at sea/would cause our nation’s catastrophy” (Latin Verse Autobiography, lines 25-26). Born on 5 April 1588, Thomas Hobbes went to school in the nearby town of Malmesbury, and then later to a private school run by Robert Latimer, a graduate of Oxford. The education must have been good, because before going up to Oxford himself, Hobbes translated Euripides’ play Medea from Greek into Latin. This son of a preacher man was sent to Magdalen Hall, Oxford, to read Classics (Latin and Greek). On the recommendation of the Master of the college, he was subsequently employed as a tutor to the Earl of Devonshire. He stayed off-and-on in the employ of this nobleman and his descendants for the rest of his long life. This provided Hobbes with plenty of leisure time, and a rare opportunity for

travelling abroad. It was on one of these trips that, aged about forty, he discovered Euclid’s Elements, and so, the principles of geometry. He later wrote how, he “delighted with this method, not so much because of its theorems as because of the way of reasoning.” (Prose Autobiography, p.3) Although he was trained as a classical scholar, Hobbes preferred the company of scientists. Indeed, for a short period in the early 1620s, he was a research assistant to the early scientist Francis Bacon (1561-1626). At this time, Hobbes was mainly interested in modern science and ancient texts. But he was also an accomplished writer, and a respected one among his contemporaries. His friends included the likes of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Hobbes also met and corresponded with René Descartes (15961650), though the two men disliked each other, and disagreed on many things.

Hobbes gradually developed a wideranging system of philosophy. He believed that “philosophy consists in three elements, body, man, and citizen” (Verse Autobiography, 137-138). Consequently, he had a plan for a trilogy of three books, on the body, on man, and on the citizen. This ambition was duly executed, with the publication of De Corpore (1655), De Homine (1658), and De Cive (1642), respectively. As the attentive reader will have noticed, the last of this trio was published first. There’s a reason for this. The civil wars in the 1630s and 1640s in England and Scotland, which made “both these kingdoms… miserable” (Leviathan, p.154), prompted him to focus on political theory. However, these books were written in Latin, and so not accessible to most of his compatriots. While living in Paris between 1629-1637 as a tutor to Gervase Clifton, Hobbes had written a short book with the unmistakable Euclidean title The Elements of Politics. In this unpublished book he wrote with a radicalism that would have shocked contemporaries steeped in Christian ethics. Rather than being the command of God, goodness was subjective: “every man… calleth that which pleaseth GOOD; and EVIL, which displeaseth him” (Elements, p.173). But the book remained unpublished. Instead Hobbes rewrote it completely into what became his masterpiece. Leviathan Hobbes had exceptional attention to detail. He actively collaborated with the prominent French artist Abraham Bosse (1604-1676) over the cover to Leviathan, a famous engraving showing a king whose body comprised of many individuals. The cover itself was meant as a kind of summary of parts of the book. A gigantic sea monster in the Old Testament (Psalms 74:14), the Leviathan would have been well known to Hobbes’ Bible-reading contemporaries. Hobbes used the term to mean a sort of personalised body politic, united through the will of the sovereign. Leviathan, while written in an accessible English style, is littered with references to Hobbes’ ambition to be to political science what Euclid had been for geometry. This can be seen in his choice of words: “These dictates of Reason, men use to call by the February/March 2024
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Brief Lives names of Lawes; but improperly: for they are but Conclusions or Theorems concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defence of themselves” (p.81). (For non-mathematicians, a theorem is a statement logically deduced from other formulas or propositions.) Some were surprised that Hobbes wanted – and even dared – to return home from France. As a former tutor to the Prince of Wales – the future King Charles II, and son of the executed king, Charles I – Hobbes was not a natural ally of Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector, who ruled England in the 1650s after winning the English Civil War and ordering Charles I’s beheading. But, in Leviathan, Hobbes argued that peace was preferable even if the ruler had secured power under less than just or legitimate circumstances. As he wrote in the concluding chapter of the book: “there is scarce a Commonwealth in the world whose beginnings can in conscience be justified” (p.529). Leviathan was not so much an apology for the monarchy as a justification for rule by a strong central government. Modern readers may be shocked to read his unashamed defence of authoritarian government: so outraged, perhaps, that they overlook that this is a nuanced book with many subtleties. For starters, the transfer of power to the sovereign is not unconditional. For example, Hobbes is adamant that “the obligation of the subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them. For the right men have by nature to protect themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no covenant be relinquished” (p.171). So if the dictator can no longer secure peace, the deal’s off. Perhaps Hobbes was not an anti-democrat after all, then? Indeed, some have noted that the Leviathan (the governing state body) can be “an assembly of men” (p.134) rather than an individual. Not so fast. In theory, perhaps, the Leviathan can mean a rule by an assembly; but Hobbes was never a great fan of democracy. Indeed, in the 1620s he translated Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War because the 5th Century BCE Greek historian “says democracy’s a foolish thing” (Verse Autobiography, 8586). Indeed, Leviathan goes much deeper than just pertaining to the pros and cons of democracy. It straddles economics, theology, and of course, philosophy. But much as Leviathan brims with ideas and insights, it is above all a book on the complexities of politics and a reflection on the science of government. As such, it speaks through the ages. Hobbes’ Philosophical Positions Hobbes has been seen by some as a proto-capitalist. That, at least, was the view of C.B. MacPherson in his famous book The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (1962). An individualist Hobbes might have been, but not a defender of neoliberalism. Indeed, some of his views make him a precursor of the welfare state: “Whereas many men, by accident, inevitably become unable to maintain themselves by their labour, they ought not to be left to the charity of private persons, but to be provided for… by laws of the Commonwealth” (Leviathan, p.263). Leviathan didn’t merely foreshadow public policies of the twentieth century; it was also a harbinger of other ideas that took root then. For instance, in the past hundred years or so it has become commonplace to talk about the ‘linguistic turn’ in phi38 Philosophy Now
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losophy. Reading Hobbes, one realises that this preoccupation with language is not a novel idea. Indeed in Chapter IV of Leviathan, Hobbes arguably presages the idea of ‘speech acts’ later developed by J.L. Austin after the Second World War, when he observes that words are not merely descriptive, but that we can use words “to grieve one another with the tongue” (p.28). Writers and practitioners have always seen a juxtaposition between reason and rhetoric, but in Hobbes’ view, they live sideby-side. He admits that, “in all deliberations and in all pleadings, the faculty of solid reasoning is necessary, for without it, the resolutions of men are rash and their sentiments are unjust.” Yet he goes on, “if there be not powerful eloquence which procureth attention and consent, the affect of reason will be little” (p.527) Most readers in the twenty-first century (and arguably, before) only read the first two parts of the four-part Leviathan: ‘On Man’ and ‘On Commonwealth’. The other parts, ‘On Christian Commonwealth’ and ‘On the Kingdom of Darkness’ – both of which deal with theology – are almost always overlooked. This is regrettable. No other work is cited as often in Leviathan as the Bible. And whatever you may believe, it is fascinating to read Hobbes’ detailed reflections on theological concepts such as salvation, grace, and sin. For example, he writes, “to be saved is to be secured either, respectively, against special evils, comprehending want, sickness, and death itself” and hence, to be “saved from sin, is to be saved from the calamities that sin has brought upon us” (p.347). Hobbes was not a utopian idealist. He was a pragmatist. His goal was to create, through scientific method, what he called ‘the Arts of Peace’ (p.71). He did not grant democracy a role in securing this. In some ways, Hobbes was simply too rash by temperament to accept government by the people. His posthumously-published dialogue Behemoth (another mysterious mighty animal described in the Old Testament, in Job 40:15–24) was neither as detailed, nor as carefully argued, as his earlier books. Its throwaway remark that “People have been and always will be ignorant” (Behemoth, p.39) probably reflects the aging Hobbes’ prejudices rather than his considered judgement. No wonder that his onetime pupil King Charles II forbade the eighty-year-old Hobbes from publishing it. Yet neither Hobbes nor any other great thinker should be judged by their lesser, posthumously-published works, but by the masterpieces they themselves deemed worth to be read by subsequent generations. Leviathan has been described as “the greatest, perhaps, the sole masterpiece of political philosophy written in the English language” (Introduction to Leviathan, Oakeshott, p.viii). It is a book that provokes, but also one that forces us to deal with one of the biggest issues of all times, namely civil peace. For Hobbes it was self-evident that peace was the goal “for which end [governments] were instituted” (Leviathan, p.131). And whether we agree or disagree with his prescriptions, we should all accept his axiom that it is “a fundamental Law of Nature, which commandeth to seek peace” (Leviathan, p.106). Hobbes suffered a paralytic stroke from which he died on 4 December 1679, aged ninety-one, at Hardwick Hall. His last words were said to have been ‘‘A great leap in the dark!’’ © HILARIUS BOGBINDER 2024

Hilarius Bogbinder is a Danish-born translator and writer who studied theology at Oxford University.

© Corey Mohler 2024. Each week, Corey Mohler draws a new Existential Comics strip and posts it at existentialcomics.com

A comic by Corey Mohler about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world.

ARTWORK © CECILIA MOU 2024.

Towards Love George Mason on love as shared identity. “where I does not exist, nor you, so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.” Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XVII

n his dialogue The Symposium, Plato has Aristophanes recount his myth of the lovers. Human beings were once physically paired, Aristophanes says: creatures with two faces, four arms, four legs. In this form we were powerful enough to challenge the gods, and so Zeus split us forever in two. Condemned to this solitude, humans would wander the Earth searching for their lost halves, and on meeting them, “would throw their arms about each other, weaving themselves together, wanting to grow together.” Aristophanes’ account speaks to a need still keenly felt today for an intimacy denied to us by the human condition: “Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.” True, our psychological isolation is a necessary tragedy of our material individuation. We exist as physical beings, but we experience our selves as ephemeral coalitions of thought and feeling, forever bounded by flesh and bone. Words, endlessly ambiguous, are grievously imperfect vehicles for communication to another mind. Through them we give others not a window to our being and meaning, but a foundation on which to build their own; as Roland Barthes says, communication ultimately allows us representation in another’s mind, but never presence. “Literary

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prose is the best system we’ve ever devised for really accessing the subjectivity of another human being,” writes Sam Kriss, “but for it to work, the other person has to be absent, annulled in words, stripped down to the ghost of a voice.” (‘The Idiot Joy Showland coronavirus reading list’, blogpost, 2020). Love attempts to remedy this problem, but it can only flourish when we treat each other as ends rather than merely means. Immanuel Kant argued that to treat each other merely as means rather than as free individuals (‘ends-in-themselves’) – for example, to pursue loveless sex – is to disregard the other’s rationality, to treat a human being as nothing more than an object, to degrade their humanity. We can go further, to observe that any relationship pursued merely for personal gain adheres to this same inhuman logic. To demand that our partners are there only to improve our own lives, and vice versa, is to reduce the boundless wonder of intimacy to a transactional exchange of benefits – to reduce it to the logic of capitalism. Karl Marx held that the capitalist mode of production obscures the social relations between workers, disguising them as material relations between things, and alienating people from their labour by making such relations “independent of their control and their conscious individual action” – and so independent of the expression of their humanity. In the reduction of love from human expression to pure transaction, a similar process of alienation occurs. And historically, we see that marriage has frequently followed these instrumentalist contours: wives were often reduced to domestic servants and child rearers, to vessels of patrilineal property descent; husbands reduced to patriarchs and providers.

In these circumstances, gay love, pursued in spite of the tragic social and personal consequences it often entailed, naturally cleaved more closely to human flourishing. Doomed and hopeless heterosexual love offered a similar valence. The modern hyperfocus on abuse, codependency, and other psychopathologies in relationships signals the modern retreat from real love. We must never advance the tendency towards destructive and abusive relationships, of course; but for us to pathologise our lovers’ needs for our time, energy, and emotion when these needs detract from other important areas of our lives, is, as per Kant, for us to reduce our lovers to means rather than ends. It is to retreat from the human potentials of adult mutual responsibility into a stunted and childlike self-concern. Aristotle dismissed this sort of retreat as a love of pleasure and utility, and saw it as the pursuit of the kind of transient and self-serving connections sought by the young. This corresponds today to the broader neoteny (retention of childlike behaviours into later life) which is inherent in neoliberalism. The gutting of the labour movement (making striking illegal, etc) brought with it an erosion of the working class gains which formed the material basis of working class prosperity under the post war consensus: of long-term well-paying jobs, stable living standards, the opportunity to buy a home to raise a family in, and so on. The loss of these things is mirrored in the sociocultural extension of adolescence which is the decline of love as a mature commitment to another’s humanity, and its replacement with a capricious and demanding affection closer to that of a young child’s relationship to their parents. This self-regarding love befits liberal individualism rather than mutual solidarity. The ubiquity of both dating apps and multiple partners is one outcome of this process, remaking the cursory and transactional relationship style of youth into an enduring adult norm. Such self-orientation exists in tension with what we know about the potential of love both from our own experience and in the broader sweep of human culture. Real love makes no account of benefits and losses; rather, it demands the mutual exchange of absolute regard, joyfully saying “You matter more to me than myself!” It’s only through this intimacy of care and emotion that we can hope to achieve the kind of epistemic intimacy – the true knowing of and by another – that allows us to escape the solitude that our existence as discrete physical beings entails. This insight is an old one: even the love of God – that ultimate love – consists in such intimate knowledge, according to St Paul: “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12). Of course, we can never achieve totally unmediated intersubjectivity – never entirely escape our material individuation to become one with our lovers as Aristophanes would desire. But through love we encounter enough intimacy that a kind of joint intentionality emerges – a greater version of that convergence of consciousnesses which allows us to experience ourselves as members of families, communities, causes, and of the human race itself. In this way, lovers’ individual identities are destroyed, then remade; the lovers become something new: both the coalescence of two people and something inexorably more than that. For Viktor Frankl this is “the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality,”

and to “see that which is potential in him. That which is not yet actualised but yet ought to be actualised” (Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946). Thus it’s only in love’s mutual identification that our true human potential is revealed – that we can, in Aristophanes’ terms, approach the stature of gods. But such love requires temperance and respect as much as passion. As Simone de Beauvoir writes: “Authentic love must be founded on the reciprocal recognition of two freedoms; each lover would then experience himself as himself and as the other: neither would abdicate his transcendence, they would not mutilate themselves; together they would both reveal values and ends in the world” (Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949). Such restraint, and so the love that goes with it, is never fully realised, of course – and so there’s a deep, keening horror to all this, a wordless promise of ruin. The 2018 film Annihilation is an extended meditation on the agony produced by this destruction and reconstitution of the self and the inevitability of loss. Lena, having engaged in an affair, searches for her missing husband Kane in ‘the Shimmer’, a zone of alien presence and blind, insensate intent where DNA itself unravels and reforms, rendering the cold obscenity of selfnegation manifest. Intestines writhe like snakes, monsters speak with stolen human voices, fingerprints shift and change as you watch. One woman speaks of the twin character of grief entailed by lost love: for the loss of the lover, and for the person you once were. In the course of their journeys, both Lena and Kane are entirely physically annihilated and remade of the alien presence itself, becoming literally constituted of the same being. In the closing scene, the pair are the only survivors of the dozens who entered the Shimmer. Lena asks her husband if he’s Kane: “I don’t know. Are you Lena?” Ultimately, they embrace. The film closes on the chorus of Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s ‘Helplessly Hoping’, which acts as a motif of their relationship throughout: “They are one person, they are two alone, they are three together, they are for each other.” Given this agony – given the desperate horror threatened by betrayal, and guaranteed by the certainty of death and loss – why then love? We can ask a deeper question: why live? Albert Camus argued that suicide is the ultimate human dilemma: faced with the crushing indifference of the universe and the terrifying weight of our freedom, why should we go on? We’ve each already answered this, no doubt, and do so again repeatedly. But in choosing life we must do so fully, in all its colour and intensity, or else we condemn ourselves to a halfrealised existence spent in a cowardice of indecision. Thus life demands we approach the question of love neither in naïve ignorance of its dangers, nor in a cynical guardedness against them, but with the steadfast courage of a person determined to live while they still have breath. In this way, to love is to face the human condition in all its wonder and horror: to witness the tragedies of life, the certainty of death, and of weakness and human evil, and to commit yourself to human good all the same. To build a fire against the dark of unbeing, knowing we will one day turn to ash, and to nonetheless rejoice in its light, together. © GEORGE MASON 2024

George Mason is a mature student studying Politics and Philosophy at the London School of Economics. February/March 2024
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The Philosophy of Work Alessandro Colarossi has insights for the bored and understimulated. f you’ve ever found yourself staring blankly at a spreadsheet or nursing a lukewarm cup of coffee while daydreaming about your next vacation, this is for you. Yes, you, the one who periodically contemplates existential questions between email exchanges and Zoom meetings. If your work feels like a necessary yet uninspiring pursuit, a means to fund your ‘real life’ outside the office, let us delve together into the philosophical underpinnings of work. Who knows, we might find ways to render the banal a little more bearable, or even meaningful.

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Aristotle and the Dignity of Work Aristotle, one of the most influential philosophers in Western thought, had distinctive views on work. He made a clear distinction between chrematistics (wealth acquisition) and oikonomia (household management). In his view, work performed purely for the sake of livelihood, or chrematistics, was not inherently virtuous; it was simply a means to an end. However, work that contributed to the well-being of the community, or oikonomia, was considered virtuous as it served a higher purpose. Aristotle asserted that work aimed at wealth accumulation (chrematistics) was a practical necessity of life, but not a noble goal. It was essential to fulfill our basic needs such as food, shelter, and clothing. However, when wealth accumulation became the primary aim, it could lead to an unhealthy focus on materialism, potentially degrading societal values and causing imbalance in life. On the other hand, Aristotle regarded oikonomia as a more virtuous form of work. This was work that concerned the wellbeing and self-sufficiency of the household and, by extension, the community. It involved efficiently managing resources, caring for people’s needs, and contributing to the collective health and prosperity. Oikonomia was inherently selfless and community-oriented, encouraging cooperation and sharing. Beyond mere wealth acquisition, Aristotle believed that work should also be about fulfilling one’s potential and living a good life, or eudaimonia. He argued that each person had a unique set of skills and virtues (arete) that could be cultivated through their work. By finding work that allowed them to express and develop these virtues, individuals could contribute to society while also achieving personal fulfillment and happiness. To illustrate this, let’s consider the role of a computer repair specialist working a 9-5 job in the contemporary context of 2024. If she approaches her work from the perspective of chrematistics, she sees her job as merely a way to earn money. She is focused on completing as many repairs as possible each day to maximize her income. The quality of her work and its impact on her clients’ lives are secondary considerations. If, however, the same computer repair specialist chooses to adopt the principles of oikonomia, her approach to her work shifts significantly. She understands that her job plays a crucial role in enhancing the digital life of her community, helping people stay connected and productive in an increasingly digital world. She 42 Philosophy Now
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takes the time to understand her clients’ needs, ensures that her repairs are effective and durable, and offers advice on how to maintain devices and protect data. She might even use her skills for broader community benefits, such as offering reduced-rate services to schools or charities or running workshops on computer literacy. By doing so, she contributes to the overall well-being of her community, helping individuals and businesses avoid costly downtimes, protect valuable data, and leverage technology more effectively. Her work gives her not only a paycheck but also a sense of fulfillment, knowing that she is making a difference. Aristotle’s philosophy invites us to rethink the purpose and meaning of our work. It encourages us to view our work as a means to contribute to society and fulfill our own potential, rather than seeing it simply as a source of income. These principles have profound implications in today’s world, where work and wealth accumulation are often seen as primary measures of success. (see Aristotle, Politics) Karl Marx and Alienated Labour In the 19th century, Karl Marx radically transformed the philosophical discourse on work. His concept of ‘alienation’ became central to understanding the worker’s relationship with his or her labor in industrial societies. Marx argued that under capitalism, workers are estranged from their productive activity, the products of their labor, their fellow workers, and their potential for self-realization (Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844). For Marx, true human fulfillment lies in unalienated labor where workers can freely express their creative potential. In Marx’s understanding, the capitalist system can foster ‘alienation’ where workers, like our computer repair specialist, might feel a disconnection from their labor, its products, their fellow workers, and their own potential. They become mere wage slaves. If this repair specialist operates within the traditional capitalist model, she may experience Marx’s ‘alienation’ in several ways. Her work could become a series of repetitive tasks aimed solely at maximizing productivity and profit, disconnecting her from the more intellectual and creative aspects of her labor. She would be doing the work, but control over how it is done may lie with her employers or the demands of the market. Marx’s concept of alienation encompasses various dimensions that directly relate to our specialist’s situation. First and foremost, Marx discussed the alienation from the products of labor. In the case of our specialist, the computers she fixes do not belong to her but to her clients. The profit derived from her repair work primarily benefits not her but the business owners. Despite playing a crucial role in generating this wealth, she only receives a fraction of it, leading to a sense of estrangement from the outcomes of her own labor. In addition to this, Marx also highlighted how capitalism can result in workers being alienated from their fellow workers. Our

potential for self-realization. Capitalist workplaces often restrict opportunities for individual growth and creativity in the pursuit of increased productivity and profit. The specialist might be discouraged from innovating, learning new skills, or taking on more complex and rewarding tasks. Such limitations may impede her self-development, further deepening her sense of alienation.

IMAGE © STEVE TARANTINO 2024. PLEASE VISIT STEVETARANTINO.COM

repair specialist might find herself in an environment where competition is the norm, hindering the development of strong cooperative bonds with her peers. Her work could become a solitary endeavor, lacking meaningful human interaction, thereby increasing her sense of isolation. Furthermore, the specialist may face alienation from her own

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For Marx, the antidote to alienation lies in the creation of a society where workers have control over their labor, can express their creativity, collaborate with their peers, and connect with the products of their work. For our computer repair specialist, this could mean restructuring her work environment to encourage innovation, learning, and cooperation, while also ensuring that she benefits more directly from the value her work creates. Such a transformation would align with Marx’s vision of unalienated labor, where work becomes a means of personal fulfillment and creative expression (Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844). Schopenhauer and the Pursuit of Goals A fundamental element in Arthur Schopenhauer’s metaphysics is the ‘will to live’. He argues that humans are continually driven by a blind urge to strive towards existence and life. We have no final purpose. Therefore we struggle towards achieving goals, but once a goal is achieved, the satisfaction is only temporary, for a new goal or desire arises. This ceaseless striving can create a cycle of anticipation and dissatisfaction, which characterizes much of human life, and which is the root of suffering. Schopenhauer’s perspective here can be applied to the realm of work, shedding light on the dynamics that shape our working lives. Like the ceaseless striving described by Schopenhauer, the computer specialist’s professional journey is marked by a continuous pursuit of goals. Each task completed and computer repaired may bring a momentary sense of accomplishment, but it is swiftly followed by the emergence of new challenges or demands. In this context, the specialist’s experience aligns with Schopenhauer’s observation that the fulfillment of one goal only gives rise to the next desire. The completion of a repair task may offer a brief respite, but soon enough new issues to address or improvements to make arise, reigniting the cycle of anticipation and dissatisfaction. This provides a philosophical framework to understand the inherent restlessness and perpetual striving that characterises many jobs. By recognizing the parallels between Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and the computer specialist’s experience, we gain more general insights into the fundamental nature of human existence and the ongoing pursuit of goals that shape our lives. (Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Book 2) Perspectives from Eastern Philosophy Eastern philosophical traditions also offer valuable insights into the nature of work. In the Bhagavad Gita, a central text of Hindu philosophy, work is seen as a duty that must be performed without attachment to its fruits or outcomes, a principle known as Karma Yoga. This approach encourages individuals to focus on the act of working itself, rather than the rewards it may bring. Applying the principle of Karma Yoga to our computer specialist’s situation suggests that she should approach her work with a sense of detachment from the results. Instead of fixating on the potential benefits or gains she may derive from her repair work, she can find fulfillment by wholeheartedly engaging in the process itself. By immersing herself in the present moment and dedicating her efforts to the task at hand, she can cultivate a sense of both purpose and contentment, independent of external outcomes. Buddhist philosophy, on the other hand, emphasizes the idea of ‘Right Livelihood’ as part of the Eightfold Path. It posits that 44 Philosophy Now
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one’s work should not harm others and should be an expression of compassion and wisdom. This perspective invites a reflection on the ethical dimensions of work. From this Buddhist perspective, the specialist should reflect on the impact of her computer repair work on others and strive to ensure that her endeavors do not cause harm. By approaching her profession with mindfulness, empathy, and a commitment to ethical conduct, she can infuse his work with a deeper sense of meaning and contribute to the well-being of those she serves. By integrating these Eastern philosophical perspectives into our analysis, we expand our understanding of work beyond its instrumental and material dimensions. We recognize the value of cultivating a mindset that transcends attachment to outcomes, emphasizing the intrinsic worth of the work itself. Moreover, we acknowledge the ethical implications of our professional pursuits and the potential for work to be a vehicle for compassion and wisdom. Postmodern Perspectives on Work Postmodern philosophers, such as Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard, offer valuable insights into the complex dynamics of power, knowledge, and work. Foucault’s concept of ‘biopower’ delves into how modern societies exercise control and regulation over their populations through various mechanisms, including work. According to Foucault, work serves as a means of exerting power, as it enables the control and disciplining of bodies, forming habits of obedience that ultimately shape individuals into ‘docile’ subjects (Foucault, Discipline and Punish). Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of consumer culture emphasizes the transformation of work and production in post-industrial societies. Baudrillard argues that in these societies, work and production have become simulacra, detached from their original purpose of satisfying human needs. The nature and purpose of work become increasingly enigmatic and elusive as they are subsumed by the hyperreal nature of consumer culture (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation). Baudrillard’s analysis further illuminates the postmodern landscape, wherein work and production have become ensnared within a hyperreal domain, characterized by an over-abundance of signs and symbols. The enigmatic nature of work in the realm of consumer culture intensifies feelings of disorientation and blurs the boundaries between reality and illusion. To Those Who Tolerate Tedium for the Paycheque Our exploration of philosophical perspectives on work reveals that this central aspect of human life is a rich and complex tapestry, woven with threads of necessity, desire, alienation, fulfillment, power, and ethics. Work is not merely a means to an end – a way to earn the wage that allows you to enjoy life outside the confines of your office. Rather, it’s a profound human activity that reflects our deepest desires and highest aspirations. As we navigate the mundanity and monotony of our daily tasks, let’s remember that even in the driest desert of tedium, an oasis of meaning might be found. © ALESSANDRO COLAROSSI 2024

Alessandro Colarossi is a Technical Consultant from Toronto. He has a BA in Philosophy from York University, and an Advanced Diploma in Systems Analysis from Sheridan College, Toronto.

Interview

at those data, it is often surprising how many of them have decreased, despite the impressions we get from the media. I find the metaphorization of illnesses interesting, especially when talking about historical biases. For example, tuberculosis was known as a disease of passion, even sometimes having class connotations as well, until Robert Koch discovered the bacteria responsible for it. The fantasies and cultural metaphors could be disassociated from the disease only when the cause was discovered . How do metaphors develop, and how are they weaponized? Well, a lot of language is metaphorical. Because we aren’t born with vocabulary for everything we might want to talk about, we have to develop new vocabulary for new concepts. And the terms we use have to be transparent enough that other people know what we’re talking about. So if there’s a new virus, for example, if I just call it a blicket, or a dropsy, then I invent the necessary words, but no one knows what I’m talking about. So it’s natural to reach for a metaphor, then people can understand it in terms something similar, which works since people know it’s not literally true, but it would nevertheless give them a leg up in understanding the new term. For example, we talk in mixed metaphors a little bit when we talk about a meme ‘going viral’, when something gets passed on to others, and lots of people who receive it pass it on in turn, and so on, resulting in an exponential explosion. The metaphor is of exponential, viral, replication. That’s the way viruses work. And you understand that even if you don’t know the concept of exponential growth. Even if you don’t remember your high school math, the metaphor allows you to understand the concept. In fact, when a metaphor becomes useful enough, it ceases to be metaphorical. People forget its origin and it just becomes a word in the language. It’s actually quite astonishing how much of our language is, or at least was, metaphorical. It’s actually not so easy to find language that wasn’t originally metaphorical. This point about the metaphors we live by has been made by the linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher

PHOTO © CHRISTOPHER MICHEL CMICHEL67 CREATIVE COMMONS LICENCE 4.0

Hello Professor Pinker. In your book, The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), you discuss the decline of violence and how, despite appearances otherwise, our own era is by far the most peaceful in human existence. Are there unconscious biases we hold as a society that prevent our seeing a decline in violence? It’s hard to make a generalization about a whole society. But you certainly can talk about the beliefs of an individual, and there are a number of cognitive biases that get in the way of our individually appreciating the ways in which violence has declined. In particular, there’s an interaction between a cognitive bias which Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman dubbed the availability bias, where we use images, narratives, and stereotypes from memory as a guide to estimating the probability and frequency of risk. Are you in danger of getting eaten by a shark if you go into the ocean? Well, if you can remember a shark attack from last year at that beach, you’re gonna stay out of the water, even if statistically you’re in greater danger of dying in a car accident when driving to the beach. There are a lot of distortions of risk that come from reliance on anecdotes. Then, when you think that the news is a nonrandom sample of the most dramatic, usually the worst things, happening on Earth at any given moment, there’s going to naturally be a tendency, given the availability bias, to think that the state of the world is described by the worst things happening at any given time. So while there certainly are disasters – and at this moment you and I are living through one in Ukraine, and one in Israel and Gaza, together with civil war in Ethiopia and Sudan – we tend not to think about the parts of the world that are at peace that used to be at war, such as Latin America. And there are no wars between countries in Southeast Asia. But we tend to overestimate the prevalence of war and violence based on a combination of what the news gives us and what the human mind latches onto. It’s only when you see the data and plot the number of deaths from war, from homicide, the amount of racism, and the amount of domestic violence, over time, that you can see whether violence really has increased or not. I argue in The Better Angels of Our Nature that when you look

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and a popular writer on linguistics and evolutionary psychology. Angela Tan interviews him about politics, language, death, and reasons to be optimistic.

February/March 2024
Philosophy Now 45

Mark Johnson. They point out that we can’t talk about intellectual arguments, for example, without using metaphors for war: “I attacked his argument, and he tried to defend it, but I won the argument: I defeated him!” And we talk about relationships like they’re journeys: “We’ve come a long way, but I think now we want to go our separate ways, I’m going to bail out.” One can say that, at this point, they’re no longer metaphors, they’re just words in the English language with understood meanings. And there’s probably a transition period in which some people do, and some people don’t, turn off their appreciation of the original image. But that’s one way new vocabulary items arise. And that’s why you get mixed metaphors, like ‘The ship of state is sailing down a one-way street.’ The politician who said that has kind of lost cognitive contact with the original image, and it’s just verbiage, which is what often happens with dull, turgid writing – a point I made in my

writing manual, The Sense of Style (2014). Historically, for example in Ancient Egypt, death was respected and seen as part of the process of life. But then, through shifts of society, death has turned into more of a statistical abstraction, segregated from life, where we don’t recognize the process of it anymore. How does the societal shift in the perception of death affect our mental wellbeing and view of life? Well, we still do make a big deal about death: we have funerals and memorial services; we have burials or cremations; and we have headstones and plaques. So we don’t just treat it as an everyday occurrence. Yet as many commentators have said, we are separated from death in a way our ancestors weren’t. I think there are fewer open caskets. People don’t have the body in the living room of the household as often, and death is the physicality that is removed from us. One’s own death always has been and still is a difficult thing for the human

The ‘good old days’: ‘Mars’ from Das Mittelalterliche Hausbuch, c.1480

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mind to process. But we love and interact with other humans; and it’s not just their body we interact with, but we treat them as an immaterial mind, as a locus of beliefs and desires, not just as a product of the activity of, or an organ of, the body. We can’t help but think of the mind as immaterial, and it also doesn’t make any sense intuitively for it to simply go out of existence – for a person’s experience, their emotions, their perceptions, to suddenly vanish. Now when we adopt a more scientific mindset, we know that our consciousness is a product of brain activity; and that the brains, like all physical objects, doesn’t last forever, and when they stop functioning, the consciousness attached to it ceases. But intuitively, it’s very hard to wrap your mind around this, especially when it comes to yourself and your own consciousness. For your very awareness to cease existing is not something that you can easily grasp. On top of that, there’s our sheer cognitive impairment about, and durability of, death. And so, very naturally, we tend to invent or reinvent the notion of an afterlife or of reincarnation, or of the disembodied souls we depict as spirits in hauntings. There’s also a commitment we have to another person while they’re alive that we don’t like to think is easily turned off when they die. For example, when a loved one is not around, we don’t betray them or speak ill of them, even if we could get away with it. We adopt a commitment, a stance, and an ongoing attitude towards the person, where in they are precious and valuable to us, even if they can’t repay our favours. I mean, that’s what it means to be a decent person. Now if you live your life committed to someone you love, someone that you respect, that’s not something you can just turn on and off like a switch. Well, when the person is gone, you can’t just suddenly pretend that they don’t matter. I mean, if you could do that when they’re dead, you could have done that when they were alive, and that would have meant you were certainly less committed as a friend, an ally, or a partner. And so, since we can’t easily flip a switch and turn off our feelings toward a person once they’re dead, this means that we treat the dead in a way that’s Interview

Interview commensurate with the way we treated them when they were alive. And so we get many rituals, for example the Hispanic Day of the Dead, where you leave out food to attract the soul of the person, and you continually treat them as someone you love, even though they are no longer around. I think that kind of mindset is very common. And it’s just part of the psychology of emotional and personal commitment. Are there any specific points in your research that have had a profound and lasting impact on your moral outlook, or even your relationship with your body? A couple. Learning from psychology, including evolutionary psychology, the extent of our self-deception, especially about our own virtue and competence, and the fact that we lie to ourselves in order to be more effective liars to others, means that I now often do think twice, and check myself. And I don’t take my own intuitions at face value, because they might be a kind of PR campaign by my subconscious to make me look good or deserving of other people’s attention or favours. Actually, I’m in a privileged position as a psychologist: almost everything I study I make use of in my everyday life. Everything from perception – ‘Why do I find a sunset beautiful?’; ‘Why do I find a face beautiful?’ – to relationships between the sexes. I don’t think we start off as blank slates, where men and women are psychologically indistinguishable, for example, and so I reflect on what makes men and women react to things differently. I even reflect in my own interaction with women, to remind myself that what seems perfectly natural to me may not seem perfectly natural to a typical woman. I think factoring in the fact that we don’t all react to the same thing in the same ways can increase understanding across the gender line. On a larger scale, I’m influenced by the fact that I’ve exposed myself to various data on human progress: that we kill each other less, we have less torture, we have less domestic violence, we have less homicide, less capital punishment, and how we have more or less eliminated human sacrifice as a species, and have eliminated legal slavery. All these are Interview

progress, if that word has any meaning whatsoever. And all this has strengthened in me the commitment, the hope – the reasonable expectation – that further progress is possible, even though I believe that there’s such a thing as human nature, that I don’t think we’re blank slates. I don’t think we’re ‘noble savages’, though: I think we’ve got a lot of nasty, ugly traits, thanks to evolution, but I also think that we have some means to overcome them, as evidenced by the fact that a lot of our bad behaviors have gone down in frequency throughout history. And the fact that we have been able to, as Abraham Lincoln put it, bring out our better angels, means that it’s not romantic or utopian or hopeless to work for more progress to solve our problems – to expand human rights, human dignity, human flourishing. Looking at the data, I just know that that’s possible. As a high school student, I’m concerned about the growing polarisation of thought and discourse, which sometimes leads to violence. What advice would you give young people who would like to mitigate the polarization, and promote more constructive and peaceful conversations in our communities? Well, I think even posing the question is a good start, in terms of being aware that polarisation is a problem. Polarisation comes from mutual overconfidence; from knowing that one’s own opinions are correct without examining them. What we should foster is a set of attitudes that remind each of us of our own fallibility, that we’re probably wrong about most things, just because most people are wrong about most things. And we’re all human: we’re not angels, and we’re not gods. We also need to know that we are all subject to biases, such as ‘tribalistic’ or ‘my side’ bias, where we always think our own side is correct. Even when it feels on the inside that those other people are stupid and evil, and that we all have halos, it would be good to be able to step outside ourselves and be aware of that bias – to think, well, maybe the other person does have a point. This is learning to see your own opinions as hypotheses that have to be strengthened or weakened as evidence comes in: that they’re hypothe-

ses to be discarded if the evidence changes, rather than commitments showing how steadfast, courageous, and honourable you are as a person. That’s not the way you should treat your beliefs. Rather, your beliefs should be things you hold tentatively, depending on how strong the evidence is, and you should be prepared to give them up to avoid fallacies like attacking the person instead of a position, or certain other fallacious habits of thought that unfortunately have become more common, especially in younger generations. A point made by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), is that that advice is almost the opposite of some prescriptions taken from cognitive behavioural therapy which say that you should trust your feelings, as many people now believe. Bad idea. Rather, you should learn how to discount your feelings. In fact, however, one of the things you’re advised to do in cognitive behaviour therapy is to control your emotions and not let your emotions carry you away. Furthermore, don’t demonize other people; don’t think of the world in simplistic terms of good and evil; and don’t believe that progress consists in victims, the good people, turning the tables on their oppressors, the bad people. Rather, everyone has some good and bad in them. We want to foster the ideals, not punish the people. And we also want to be able to look at our experiences and think that we’ve learned from them. Not everything’s a trauma, and every time you encounter an opinion that makes you feel uncomfortable, don’t think, ‘‘Are you harmed? Are you hurt?’’ Quite the contrary. Being exposed to opinions that you don’t hold makes your own opinions stronger. If the alternative opinions are right, they might lead you to get rid of your own. And if the alternative opinions are wrong? Then that’s ultimately what PN we want to find out. • Angela Tan is a student at York House

School in Vancouver, B.C. She is interested in the intersection of ethics and education. As a host of the oxfordpublicphilosophy.com podcast, she hopes to bridge polarization through dialogue. February/March 2024
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Letters When inspiration strikes, don’t bottle it up. Email me at [email protected] Keep them short and keep them coming! Women Respond DEAR EDITOR: In response to your postscript in Issue 158’s Letters page regarding the lack of female letter writers, I can proudly say that I have had several letters, and answers to Question of the Month, published by you over the last couple of years. I am always tickled to receive my book in the mail as a prize for an answer published. I don’t feel you are doing anything ‘wrong’. I suspect there are simply less females who read your magazine and hence less letters sent. I personally love your magazine and am impressed that you often shine a light on female philosophers (I particularly enjoyed the Hannah Arendt articles in 158), and have not seen any signs of overt (or covert) misogyny or mansplaining. Such obnoxious behaviour is fairly common online – I’m a member of a Facebook philosophy page, and the amount of condescending mansplainers on there can be quite astounding. Also, historically, like many disciplines, philosophy was largely the realm of men, with the majority of philosophy written, read, and discussed by men. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of history will understand the reasons why women did not have an equal seat at the table until relatively recently. Similarly, I suspect the more traditional philosophy topics (for instance, moral relativism, logic, metaphysics etc) are not necessarily of much interest to many women (at least, I don’t know many other females who are as passionate about it all as I am!) Given this, in terms of improving the rate of female readers and letter writers, I can only suggest more female-focussed topics, including articles about female philosophers – many of whom I suspect may have been overlooked or forgotten throughout the history of philosophy And perhaps a more contemporary philosophical focus may be more in tune with today’s women? For example, articles about the ethical considerations of 48 Philosophy Now l February/March 2024

abortion, surrogacy, or the gender pay gap. Additionally, while I can’t speak for all of my sisters, I think many women would be interested in philosophical articles about emotions, relationships, patriarchy and parenthood (particularly maternal ambivalence, which is often not spoken or written about). ROSE DALE, FLOREAT, AUSTRALIA DEAR EDITOR: I appreciate your insightful observation regarding the gender imbalance in our letters section. Why are there so many eager female readers, myself included, who have remained silent until now? One evident factor contributing to the issue is the disproportionately low number of articles authored by women in the journal. While I hadn’t consciously acknowledged this before, I cannot dismiss the possibility that a subconscious sense of alienation may have deterred me from contributing earlier. However, this explanation is too simple to explain such complex reality. Drawing inspiration from Hannah Arendt’s thought-provoking theory, I question how ‘banal’ behaviors may perpetuate this exclusion. The seemingly innocuous acts of men seeking other men’s opinions, tolerating a female colleague’s shame to speak out, or encouraging gender-stereotyped activities, are feeding this injustice. These actions may not be rooted in malice, but have become ingrained in our routines, leading to a state of ‘thoughtlessness’ as Arendt describes, that cancels critical thinking. Regarding female readers, I would wager that none of us attributes men’s intellectual superiority as a reason for not contributing. And it’s obvious that we are not aiming to contribute to the gender gap. Instead, we just do not write, without questioning why. Again, we are ‘only’ falling to realize the consequences of what we are (or not) doing. But please do not take me wrong. As Hannah would say, this banalization of

the issue does not excuse our behavior or lower our responsibility (I actually think it’s even worse). Instead, I urge everyone to be mindful of their actions and the potential gender-related consequences. I guess we all aim to build an inclusive and diverse community that values the perspectives of all its members. So let’s make sure our acts drive us in that direction. ALBA GARCÍA REY DEAR EDITOR: In Issue 158 I see you wrote a note about receiving few letters from women readers. Funny enough, before reading that, I was thinking to myself ‘I should send them my thoughts about Arendt !’ Then I read the letters: the author names were mostly masculine (Roger, Peter, etc…). My mentality shifted to ‘Well… maybe I shouldn’t write to them, since most letters are from men who seem to know what they’re doing’. A bit of context. I am a twenty-fiveyear-old woman studying Behavioural Ecology. While I consider myself a good thinker, I am no expert when it comes to philosophy. I am a woman, and I’m young. It is also my first time reading Philosophy Now (I am so happy I stumbled upon it in a library where I study in the Netherlands). On top of that, English is not my first language. All these characteristics mean that when I walk in our society, I feel less listened to, less valuable, less needed. That holds true in academic or intellectual settings, at the very least. It is no secret, and has been researched, that women are less likely to apply for a job if they fulfill all the requirements but one; whereas men are more likely to apply even if they don’t hold all the required credentials. If we want to know why that is, we should better ask sociologists. Regardless, the truth is that our society often teaches women to be less vocal about their opinions. It takes enormous efforts for some women to speak their mind in a room full of men; and when they do it, their voice might be met with interrupting, undermining responses

Letters from men. Whether those are evil intentions (hint to Banality of Evil), or just the fruit of societal roles that shaped men to be like that is not for me to say. What is sure is that it has consequences on women saying less. So, women are societally pushed into the corner, and their ideas become silenced. We live in a patriarchal society, after all. The same would hold true for people in other oppressed groups, right? Of the names in your previous letters page, only one seemed non-white: Mohammed. This does not imply causality, but correlation; that perhaps you also get less letters from people of colour. Reading the letters of Issue 158, I was feeling increasingly hesitant to send you my thoughts (my ideas were becoming silenced), until I read the note of selfawareness prompting women to send you letters. I was very happy to read that the team of editors not only realized, but also actively sought answers on why less women write. Not too long ago, I held a discussion among women scientists, trying to figure out why less women present papers in scientific conventions, even when there are the same amount of women as men in the audience. Additionally, less women ask questions. This discussion arose from my experiences. It turns out there are ways to make more women engage in conversation. Most of these ways involve reassuring women that they will be listened to, respected, and their opinions valued. For instance, in a scientific conference, women are more likely to ask a question if another woman asks the first question. If the presenter is a woman, women in the audience are also more likely to ask questions. It boils down to seeing representation and feeling confident enough to combat the societal lessons that have so long trained us to undermine ourselves. How could this apply to Philosophy Now? How to get more women to engage? Two paths arise here (not mutually exclusive). Firstly, acquiring the help of sociology experts in this topic would be beneficial and desirable. An expert could help redesign the content of the magazine in a way that promotes more women interacting with it. Secondly, you could ask yourselves: how many articles are written by women in this magazine? What does the board of editors look like: are there enough women? How many articles discuss topics from women

philosophers? Having more women writers might make women readers more comfortable with sending you their letters. Lastly, explicitly asking women to engage more seems to have worked (at least for me), and so is a good example of ways you can tell women ‘Your opinion matters too, don’t be shy!’ I am not a man, not older and experienced, and not a philosopher. With that in mind, should my ideas matter in this magazine? Are my ideas relevant for you? If the answer’s no, then Philosophy Now would be limiting its opportunities. If the answer is ‘yes’ – if my non-expert ideas might spark questions and engage me to learn more philosophy, if promoting open dialogue is the aim of this magazine – then I encourage you to explicitly communicate that to your readers. Phew! I feel nervous writing this. But I’ll send it anyway! CLARA VINYETA, THE NETHERLANDS DEAR EDITOR: Issue 158 was the first time I purchased your journal. I bought it because I was particularly interested in the articles on Hannah Arendt – which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. I also loved your cartoon about Sartre. In your Letters page you ask why you are receiving so few letters from women. I would suggest that you don’t have enough articles that interest women. I looked at all the other articles in that issue, and I have say that I didn’t finish reading any of the others, as they simply didn’t interest me. I am personally interested in the Continental philosophers of the twentieth century. I would also be interested in reading articles written by the great feminist philosopher Toril Moi, or Edward Fullbrook, who has written extensively on how many of Sartre’s ideas originated from Beauvoir, Margaret Simons who has written extensively about Beauvoir’s philosophy, and Eva Gothlin, who has applied existential thought to sex. You need to provide articles that are engaging to women, then women will buy your journal and write to you! I look forward to checking out future issues in Waitrose. If any catch my eye I will buy your magazine, and might even write to you! CLAIRE PHOENIX Free For All DEAR EDITOR: In your article in Issue 159, you (AKA Grant Bartley) argue in support of free will and ask the following good

question: How can determinists account for the evolution of consciousness, since, according to them, consciousness has no effect on our behaviour? Some determinists might consider they could answer that by saying that evolution can involve the accidental acquisition of characteristics that make no difference to survival. However, if we examine the contents of consciousness, I think this question becomes harder for them to answer. We are generally likely to feel attracted to things that help the survival of ourselves and our genes (these could be food, shelter or sex, for example ) and to feel repelled by things that would have the opposite effect (disease and danger, etc). The fact that we evolved to have these particular feelings only makes sense if our feelings made a difference to our behaviour and therefore to our chances of survival. If our feelings did not affect our behaviour, we would be just as likely to have evolved to hate food and sex. But given the ways that we actually tend to feel, it seems very likely that our feelings do lead us to behave in one way rather than another. That strongly suggests that it’s because the feelings lead us to make choices, within consciousness, which then affect the physical brain, and therefore affect our behaviour. If the only cause of mental events is physical, that would indicate there is no free will. However, the preceding argument seems to show not just that physical events cause mental events, but that mental ones also cause physical ones. The extent to which the mental has power over the physical, rather than the other way round, is not yet clear. But this situation in which the relationship of the two is not just the physical causing the mental, allows the possibility that to some extent, the mental may not be caused by the physical, or by anything outside itself. If that does occur, and it features choices being made, then it does suggest free will. PETER SPURRIER, HALSTEAD, ESSEX Not Silent About Zizek DEAR EDITOR: I enjoyed reading the article on language by Slavoj Žižek in PN 159. It brought to mind arguments made by Robert Alter in The Art of Biblical Narrative, which may pose limiting cases for what Žižek claims regarding poetry, and particularly the technique of repetition. As Alter demonstrates, repetition doesn’t appear much in the Hebrew Bible, either because of clumsy editing February/March 2024 l Philosophy Now 49

Letters on the part of ancient scribes, or because of limitations in the literary methods they employed. In fact, though, repetition was an essential part of their craft, as the same words, motifs, or themes, appearing across different contexts, enrich the meaning of the notions they describe. It is precisely because of the comparison of contexts that the inexpressible can be discerned: that it can be known from its effects, through its relation to a whole spectrum of lived experience. Language here remains essential, in constant and necessary interplay with the dramas of human living. It need not be poetic, but can express the inexpressible in prose. In some sense, this may indeed be unique to the Hebrew Bible. ANTHONY A. MACISAAC, PARIS DEAR EDITOR: Slavoj Žižek on diversity and inclusion in PN 159 has been better in his books when arguing that tackling inequality, exploitation and injustice should be prioritised over ‘intolerance’; that the unconditional spiral of productivity ruins the environment; that religion is a big source of murderous violence; that “Today’s anti-immigrant populists are the true threat to the emancipatory core of the European Enlightenment” (resulting in distrust in the rule of law); and that Brussels protects minimal workers’ and refugee rights. MIKE BOR, LONDON Lucky Guesses DEAR EDITOR: I always read Raymond Tallis’s column. He’s thought-provoking even if you don’t agree with him, which is what philosophy is all about. When people discuss the inherent unpredictability of the Universe, they tend to concentrate on quantum mechanics, when it’s chaos that determines virtually everything we observe and experience. We associate chaos theory with the weather, but it also describes biological evolution and the orbits of the planets. In Issue 158 Tallis uses the tossing of a coin as his prime example to support his argument, but it’s the most easily demonstrated example of chaos one can find – though it’s not the actual toss that makes it chaotic but the surface it strikes – the same with dice (see Marcus du Sautoy, What We Cannot Know). Chaos is a mathematical phenomenon as well as a natural one, and the reason the behaviour it describes is unpre50 Philosophy Now l February/March 2024

dictable is because one would need to calculate the initial conditions to an infinite number of decimal places to make an accurate prediction. The relevance to Tallis’s thesis is that the information in a chaotic phenomenon is indeterminable. It’s also the reason I’m confident that we are not in a computer simulation. Even a quantum computer can’t compute to infinite decimal places. But chaos theory also has what’s called ‘strange attractors’ that are stable, the best known being the giant red spot on Jupiter, which is a gaseous whirlpool that could swallow Earth. Your heartbeat is another example of a chaotic stable attractor. (Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice? The New Mathematics of Chaos.) Regarding Tallis’s reference to John Wheeler’s quote, ‘No phenomenon is a real phenomenon until it is an observed phenomenon’, this is a direct consequence of Schrödinger’s equations, which entail all the weird quantum stuff, including Heisenberg Uncertainty, superposition and entanglement. Schrödinger’s equation only gives us probabilities of something happening. Once it’s happened – been observed – it no longer applies. As soon as you have a probability of One, it’s in the past. As Freeman Dyson pointed out, this has nothing to do with consciousness: “the ‘role of the observer’ in quantum mechanics is solely to make the distinction between past and future... We do not need a human observer to make quantum mechanics work. All we need is a point of reference, to separate past from future, to separate what has happened from what may happen, to separate facts from probabilities.” PAUL P MEALING, MELBOURNE DEAR PAUL: My reason for invoking the tossing of a dice is to highlight the fact that the information content of an event is dependent on the interests of a conscious observer. I do this to challenge the claim that the universe is made of information. Under normal circumstances, coins are tossed in order to generate one out of two outcomes, each of which would count as one bit of information. In the absence of this framework established by conscious subjects, there is no definite information content. Or, indeed, any information content. I was particular struck by your quotation of Freeman Dyson. Inadvertently,

he reinforces my point about the need for conscious subjects. As Einstein pointed out, there is no ‘now’ – and hence past or future that are referenced to now – in the physical world as portrayed by General Relativity. For more, see my book Of Time and Lamentation, whose middle section is devoted to tensed time. RAYMOND TALLIS, STOCKPORT Certainly Uncertain DEAR EDITOR: I enjoyed Rob Selzer’s discussion on uncertainty in issue 156, but took issue with his election example. If votes are multiplied by their confidence rating, this would only benefit extremists who were die-hard fans of their chosen politician, and negatively affect cautious or nuance-aware voters. Taking the political climate of the US as an example – a popular phrase these days is that ‘Both are bad choices, but if I don’t vote for Y it’s a vote for X’. This voter would not be able to give a 100% confidence rating for their vote of Y because he is aware of the complexity of choosing either candidate, as they are both poor choices, but by using the confidence multiplier, his vote counts less than someone who may blindly (and confidently) vote for X with 100% confidence. I liked Selzer’s acknowledgement of uncertainty, and I agree that in some cases, such as assessments, incorporating confidence intervals could help make systems more accurate, but in other cases, a confident choice is perhaps less important than a conflicted choice. ANISA RAWLINSON Move Along DEAR EDITOR: Like philosophers everywhere, I squirm whenever I read reports or articles that claim something ‘begs the question’, when clearly the writer means it raises a question about something or another. As philosophers we must both recognize this common logical fallacy and avoid ambiguous use of the term. Imagine my absolute horror then when reading Dermot M. Griffin’s otherwise excellent article on Stoicism in Issue 157. In explaining Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, Dermot exclaims, “This begs the mindboggling question: why would a man write a book not to be published?” It may well raise such a question, but there is no evidence that anyone’s begging any question. I beg your pardon if I’m being too picky. JON BROWNRIDGE, CANADA

The Art of Living The Discipline of Assent Massimo Pigliucci tells us to stop impulsively judging.

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hilosophy can be conceived as an inquiry into the nature of the world (metaphysics), the nature of knowledge (epistemology), and the nature of a number of other things (aesthetic experience, ethics, mind, science, and so forth). Alternatively, we can see philosophy as a way of life. This is the approach I adopt in this column. One powerful example of philosophy as a way of life is presented in the so-called three disciplines of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus of Hierapolis (50-135 CE), which we’ve briefly examined in the past three columns. We studied the discipline of desire and aversion, which teaches us to rethink our values and our disgusts; we then moved on to the discipline of action, which is concerned with identifying the most appropriate way to act toward other people. We’ll conclude here with the discipline of assent. What, exactly, is ‘assent’? In Stoic psychology, we are bombarded by ‘impressions’ (which are sense data), to which we automatically, unreflectively, attach a judgment. For instance, I see an orange Lamborghini cruising the road in front of me and I discover myself imagining the pleasure of driving such a car. But according to the Stoics, we should never assent, that is agree with our reflex judgement of any impression, until we have had a chance to slow down and examine it more carefully. On reflection, would it really be good for me to own a Lamborghini? To begin with, it’s a lot of money (which I don’t have) just to acquire it. It would also cost a significant amount in sheer maintenance. More importantly, it’s an extremely environmentally unfriendly way to drive around. Indeed, I shouldn’t be driving at all, since I live in New York City, where I can simply hop on the subway. So upon reflection, I decide to deny assent to the impression and go for a walk instead. What I just described isn’t too remote from the findings of modern psychological

research; particularly what Daniel Kahneman has described in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) as our two modes of thinking. System I is fast but inaccurate, and System II is slow, and more precise. System I is essentially subconscious and automatic – the sort of mental processing that allows you to make a split-second decision about whether to hit the brakes or steer sharply toward the right if a cat suddenly crosses in front of your car. System II is conscious and deliberate, and it comes into play when you are considering something, say, whether to change career, or to get married, or to buy a new Lamborghini. One psychological problem identified by the Stoics (using different terminology), is that too often we delegate type II decisions to type I thinking – reacting when we should be considering – thereby getting into trouble and regret. One might surmise that the issue is easily solved: contra the famous commercial, we should not ‘‘just do it,’’ but rather stop, reflect on it, and then decide whether doing it is really such a good idea. As Kahneman pointed out, though, not only it is difficult to train ourselves to slow down, often we just can’t afford to do so, because we need to make a decision right here, right now. However, Epictetus, with no knowledge of modern cognitive science, anticipated both the problem and the solution. The first two disciplines we considered, of desire/aversion, and of action, are practiced exclusively by way of System II thinking. The goal is to take our time to reflect on things to make considerate decisions. But the goal of the discipline of assent is to internalize the first two disciplines so well that they become second nature and can be deputized to System I. As Epictetus puts it, the idea is that we should get to the point of automatically doing the right thing even when we’re tired, sick, or drunk. How do we practice the discipline of assent, then? In the same way in which we

learn to drive a car. Initially, we have to pay explicit attention to a number of details, such as the position of the brake and accelerator pedals, shifting gears, road signs, and so forth. We have to do this because we are not good drivers yet: we need to get used to driving. Once we do so with time and repetition, we discover to our delight that our feet, hands, and eyes are going to the right places at the right moments without us having to consciously think about putting them there. So it is with the discipline of assent. Conscientiously practice it until you do it naturally. Here’s one way to practice becoming better and faster at disciplining assent. In Stoic ethics it is bad for our character for us to constantly criticize or demean others – something we unfortunately tend to do all the time, on and off social media. So for a whole week, try to replace any value-laden language you may be tempted to use with more neutral descriptions. Do this as often as you can, both when speaking to others and to yourself. The goal is to report just the facts, to train yourself to think about things the way a camera would see them. Say, for instance, that someone cuts you off on the road and your instinct is to yell “Jerk!” A camera would not see a jerk, right? It would simply see a person cutting in front of you. Initially the exercise will feel awkward and difficult, and you’ll slip up repeatedly. But the more you do it, the more natural abstention from judgmentalism will become for you. And the world will correspondingly be a better place for it. © PROF. MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI 2024

Massimo Pigliucci is the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York. His books include How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (Basic Books) and The Quest for Character: What the Story of Socrates and Alcibiades Teaches Us about Our Search for Good Leaders (Basic Books). More by him at newstoicism.org February/March 2024
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Leonid Bilmes considers the problems we face if we assume our theories match reality, Stephen Anderson is

Books The Rigor of Angels by William Egginton IMMANUEL KANT, WERNER Heisenberg, and Jorge Luis Borges walk into a bar. Kant, ever punctual, arrives first. The problem for Kant, though, is that the barman cannot see him as he really is. What the barman at Antinomy Inn sees before him is a short man with keen eyes and an inordinately large head. The barman rubs his eyes: the image of the short man standing at the counter remains, yet somehow, it’s not really there: it’s like he’s surrounded by a cloudy veil. When the man orders a drink, the barman has difficulties understanding exactly what this apparition is asking him, even though he hears the words well enough. All the barman can see and hear of the greatest philosopher ever to have walked the cobblestones of Königsberg, is a mental construct – the product of the barman’s perceptual apparatus. The real Kant, ‘Kant-in-himself’, remains forever veiled from direct sensory apprehension, even by Kant himself. Next to enter the bar is the youthful and athletic Heisenberg. The barman is again bewildered, as Heisenberg cannot seem to cross the threshold. What the barman perceives is a kind of shimmer: there is Heisenberg just before the threshold, his leg outstretched in mid-stride; and here something is vaguely walking over the threshold, but the barman cannot be sure it’s Heisenberg. The barman can choose to see either the stationary Heisenberg before the threshold, or something crossing the threshold, with some speed. What he cannot see is Heisenberg actually crossing the threshold. The barman understandably leaves Heisenberg to his undecided state, and looks behind him at the lagging Borges. The blind man, sad to say, never even makes it into the bar. Circumspectly tapping his cane in front of him, he first walks half the distance from the pavement to the entrance of ‘Antinomy Inn’; then half of the remaining distance; then again half… His shuffling steps get smaller and smaller all the while. Soon, Borges’s steps become so small that he hardly seems to be moving at all. 52 Philosophy Now  February/March 2024

sad about modern writings on love, and in Classics, Shashwat Mishra introduces Ayn Rand’s massive novel promoting self-interest and laissez-faire capitalism. William Egginton’s The Rigor of Angels (2023) tells a riveting story of intellectual adventure involving our three protagonists – an Enlightenment philosopher, a quantum physicist, and an author of labyrinthine fictions – grappling with the kinds of paradoxes that arise the moment we begin, in Egginton’s pithy phrase, ‘to make idols of our tools’. The ‘tools’ Egginton refers to are ideas spanning the breadth of human endeavour, encompassing philosophical concepts, scientific hypotheses, and artistic creations. Such tools have made life as we know it possible – indeed, it would be impossible to understand the world without their mediation. And yet the moment we idolize them – the moment, that we believe that the world coincides with these instruments conceived by human minds – they blind us. A ‘crevice of unreason’ emerges, growing ever wider, due to what seems to be a ‘’radical incompatibility between being and knowledge.’’ Each of the book’s protagonists deal with this incompatibility in his own way. Real Philosophical Problems Kant argued that we cannot know the world as it is ‘in-itself’: all we can ever hope to know are what we register of the world through our senses. The inputs through our sensemechanisms are then interpreted via various innate principles to create our experiences. For instance, in Kant’s view, the preprogrammed notions of universal time and infinite space are two essential categories for experiencing the world. (Einstein proved Kant wrong where the notions of universality and infinity are concerned, but not about the idea that our experiences of the world are necessarily given in terms of time and space.) Heisenberg, in turn, demonstrated that for elementary particles – the warp-and-woof of the physical world’s fabric – we cannot hope to have absolute knowledge of their behaviour. This is because physical reality does not consist of stable threads existing independently of their interactions with observers, but rather, how we measure affects how it manifests. In his great book, Physics and Philosophy (1958), Heisenberg admonished his fellow physicists not to overlook “a subjective element in the description of atomic events,

since the measuring device has been constructed by the observer, and we have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Heisenberg’s lasting contribution to the study of quantum mechanics is his uncertainty principle. This principle entails that a physicist studying, say, an electron’s path around an atom, can either determine the electron’s position relative to the measuring instrument or calculate the electron’s momentum (the product of its mass and speed), but he cannot know both things at the same time beyond a certain degree of accuracy. Furthermore, the electron does not independently have these properties. This is because the subatomic world is, it turns out, not a world of continually, stably existent physical objects, but a matrix of probabilities of observations. In Heisenberg’s own words: the world of the elementary particles is “a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and actuality” – a statement which tends to leave common sense shaking its head. ‘Just in the middle between possibility and actuality’ is where Borges liked to be in his writing. Throughout his life, Borges was obsessed by the paradoxes inherent in mathematical infinity, the notion of eternity, and the philosophical doctrine of idealism. These include Zeno’s paradoxes of motion, which are well illustrated by the story of Achilles and the tortoise. Achilles, so Zeno’s story goes, challenges the tortoise to a race, giving it a generous head start. Common sense tells us that Achilles must win the race. But here’s the rub, says Zeno: to catch up with the tortoise, Achilles will first have to travel to where the tortoise originally started; but in the meantime, the tortoise will have moved on; and so Achilles has to get to that new place; but by the time he gets there, the tortoise will have moved on still further… and so it goes on indefinitely, meaning that although the distance between Achilles and the tortoise is continually decreasing, Achilles will never quite catch up with the lumbering fellow. In the race of Achilles and the tortoise, the tortoise always wins. What this paradox demonstrates is not, as Zeno thought, the impossibility of motion, but that the idea of motion becomes contraBook Reviews

Books nouns, some speakers on Tlön use impersonal verbs designating acts of perception; a description of the moon rising above a river, for example, might be “Upward behind the onstreaming it mooned”. Other speakers on Tlön opt for adjectives: ‘moon’ becomes ‘aerial-bright above dark-round’, or ‘softamberish-celestial’. Logically, once things and places are no longer being perceived on Tlön, they cease to exist: “Sometimes,” the narrator tells us, “a few birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheatre” from oblivion. “The people of Tlön are taught that the act of counting,” the narrator continues, “modifies the amount counted, turning indefinites into definites.” This weird practice sounds a whole lot like the world of particle physics, where the act of observation also ‘modifies’ the particle being observed, so that ‘indefinites’, like the merely probabilistic position of a particle, become ‘definites’ only in the act of observation.

Ghost Path by Paul Gregory, 2024

dictory “when we mistake, as we tend to do, real things for the idea of those things,” as Egginton puts it. The idea of space being infinitely divisible, upon which Zeno’s paradoxes rely, is mathematically understandable; but we now know that this idea is not applicable to reality. Space cannot be divided infinitely – such division is limited by Planck’s constant. More to the point, Zeno’s paradoxes illustrate the confusion caused when movement is presumed to equate to the stationary space it covers. As Henri Bergson convincingly argued, although we can parcel up the distance covered in a race into as many intervals as we like, we cannot do the same for movement. When Achilles runs, his movement does not consist of points A, B, C, etc. Rather, his movement is one continuous flow. The immobile points ‘A, B, C...’ thus cannot be an accurate representation of Achilles’ uninterrupted progression through space. They are instead an abstraction of the distance covered. The spectre of Zeno’s paradoxes lodged in Borges’s imagination. Indeed, he wrote Book Reviews

several essays and stories haunted by the echoing abysses of infinity and eternity. One such story (and one of Borges’s greatest literary creations) is ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ (1940). In this story, Borges recounts, in characteristically convoluted fashion, the lives of the inhabitants of a planet called Tlön, which as we learn in the story’s postscript, was somehow thought into existence by the combined efforts of generations of thinkers, starting with the seventeenth century philosopher George Berkeley, now best remembered for his epithet summing up the tenets of idealism: esse est percipi – ‘To be is to be perceived’. For the idealistic inhabitants of Tlön, it makes no sense to say that a world exists external to their perceptions; instead, they “conceive the universe as a series of mental processes that occur not in space but rather, successively, in time” (trans. Andrew Hurley). No nouns are used in the various dialects of Tlön, because nouns would be inconsistent with this doctrine, inferring as they do the existence of subject-independent objects. In place of

Across An Abyss Although Egginton does not single out the above passage, The Rigor of Angels is filled with comparisons of this kind. The aim of the comparisons is to sound a warning: as Egginton puts it in a Kantian manner, “Things are not known according to their natures but according to the nature of the one who is comprehending them.” This is precisely the lesson of the story of Tlön, for it gives voice to our deep desire for the world to conform to ourselves: for nature to be like a game of chess, in which we get to decide what the pieces are. To paraphrase William Blake, the human mind often seeks, and sees, worlds in grains of sand, heavens in wild flowers, infinities held in one’s hand (as in Borges’s cosmos-within-a-marble of The Aleph), or eternities lived in an hour (as in his story The Secret Miracle). Borges’s narrator asks, “How could the world not fall under the sway of Tlön, how could it not yield to the vast and minutely detailed evidence of an ordered planet?” Indeed, falling under the sway of various systems of thought does sound like a fitting description of the intellectual history of our species. Whenever we do uncritically fall under the sway of systems of thought, though, we find ourselves on Tlön, and no longer in the real world. Egginton points to several instances of the Tlön mindset in modern scientific and philosophical thought, notably in his criticism of those (for instance, Sam Harris) who propound deterministic explanations of human behaviour, as well as in his rejection February/March 2024  Philosophy Now 53

Books of the multiverse theory. Advocates of the multiverse, in Egginton’s view, have been misled by math: the mathematical expression of two, three, or even a limitless number of potential outcomes of a given quantum experiment is taken to indicate the actual existence of a corresponding number of universes, wherein each of these outcomes is actualized. “We contort our imagination,” Egginton writes, “and make myths out of math; we brew bubbling Kandinsky multiverses and grow gardens of infinite forking paths. But the intimate rifts, the interstices of unreason that those models seek to obliterate, are indelible. They inhabit us. They make us what we are.” Egginton’s prose is often lyrical, and not without humour. The alter-ego narrator of Borges’s story ‘The Aleph’, for instance, is described ‘as a snobbish wet blanket of a man’. We also learn about young Borges’s ‘black bile of despair’ occasioned by unrequited love, and young Kant’s hatchet-job review of the writings of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. In Träume eines Geisterseher (Dreams of a Spirit-Seer), first published anonymously in 1766, Kant wrote of Swedenborg: “If a hypochondriacal wind should rage in the guts, what matters is the direction it takes: if downwards, then the result is a fart; if upwards, an apparition or heavenly inspiration.” In addition to immersing the reader in the lives of Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg, The Rigor of Angels is one of the most lucid and enjoyable introductions to the dizzying world of twentieth century physics, and the assessment of Kant’s philosophy, particularly his rebuttal of deterministic denials of freedom, is equally sharp. But the real hero of the book is Heisenberg, for it is precisely in Heisenberg’s work that the ‘radical incompatibility of being and knowledge’ is most tangibly expressed. The life and work of Heisenberg has recently featured in two other exceptional books: When We Cease to Understand the World (2020), a novel by Benjamín Labatut that gifts its reader with an awe-inducing glimpse of the quantum secrets perceived by twenty-three year old Heisenberg as he paced the wind-lashed cliffs of Helgoland, a rocky island in the North Sea; and Helgoland: The Strange and Beautiful Story of Quantum Physics (2020), physicist Carlo Rovelli’s exhilarating return in prose to the quantum world. Drawing on Rovelli’s ‘relational’ interpretation of quantum mechanics, Egginton suggests that, like the spectral elementary wave-particles which only really 54 Philosophy Now  February/March 2024

‘exist’ the moment they are placed in relation with an observer, we, too, are relational beings, entangled as we are in the world’s fabric, which perennially slips through the grasp of even our most refined tools. © LEONID BILMES 2024

Leonid Bilmes is a researcher living in Spain. His writing on philosophy and literature has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, 3:AM Magazine, and others. He is the author of Ekphrasis, Memory and Narrative after Proust (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). • The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, William Egginton, Pantheon 2023, $23.45 hb, 368 pages

Sad Love by Carrie Jenkins WHAT DOES A ‘’PROFESSIONAL, middle-class, middle-aged, white, polyamorous feminist’’, from a ‘’lowermiddle-class British household’’ characterized by ‘’a focus on underdogs, pessimism, left-wing political satire and toilet humour’’, who today has two live-in partners (one active, one not), know about love? It seems that what she knows is that love is ‘sad’. Carrie Jenkins unloads all that personal information on readers right at the start of Sad Love (2022). Did we need to know all that? Did we even want to? Perhaps not. But she seems to feel it’s vital to spill it anyway. And in a way, it’s good she does. If nothing else, it serves to explain the rather strange structure and procedure of her argument. According to her bio, Jenkins is a professor at the University of British Columbia in Canada, and holder of the Canada Research Chair. Given the impressive history of philosophical discourses on love available to her, from Plato’s Symposium to Kierkegaard’s Works of Love and C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves, one might have hoped that she would render to the reader something wellgrounded in the philosophical tradition, aiming to add to the considerable stock of wisdom on the subject: some sage meditation on the paradoxical roles of deprivation, longing, setbacks and heartbreak, perhaps; or, plausibly, something substantial on trysts and tristesse. But no. That’s not at all what we get. Rather, what Jenkins seems earnest to afford us is a look into her personal meditations on the opportunities and difficulties of unconventional relationships.

Jenkins wants to shatter what she sees as the imminent threat, in our day, of people succumbing to a Disneyfied set of ‘happily ever after’ love expectations. To do so, she proposes ‘a new theory of love’, which she calls ‘eudaimonic’, which has “deep connections with creativity and meaningfulness of the kind the search for ‘happy ever after’ could never have.” She insists that ‘the contemporary romantic ideal’ tends to make us miserable, and pointlessly so. In view of this, she’s working to frame “a conception of love in which sadness has a role… as something other than a failure condition.” Ambitious, that. How does she go about it? Well, she borrows from Aristotle; but exceedingly loosely and merely nominally. She likes his word ‘eudaimonia’, which she identifies with ‘flourishing’ and ‘well-being’, and parses down to its elements as ‘wellness’ plus ‘spirited’. This, she claims, warrants her retranslating eudaimonia into ‘being surrounded by good spirits’, which include ‘’good people, healthy environments, positive influences, supportive communities’’, perhaps ‘deities’ or even ‘’something abstract – art or music itself.’’ She advocates that by so surrounding ourselves we may build a new kind of love, instead of merely waiting around for happiness to be delivered to us by good fortune. The new love will turn out to be ‘collaborative’, she says, though ‘’the details… will be different for all of us.’’ What she’s sure of, however, is that “we are better off without those old-style, one-size-fits-all philosophies of ‘human nature’’’ that led to conventional (mis)understandings of love and happiness. There is a predictable Leftist flavour to everything she writes here. She trots out that old socialist saw, ‘the personal is the political’, and throws in frequent asides on the conventional liberal-extremist modern talking points: whiteness, capitalism, colonialism, hierarchy, patriarchy, consumerism, conservatism, traditional families and sex norms, climate change, the American dream, and Donald Trump (who for some reason always seems to appear in spirit wherever liberal Leftists gather to grind their teeth). She certainly makes no secret of her political affiliations – any more than she does of her personal and private practices. ‘Collaborative’ and ‘collectivist’ are also important words for her. “Meaning-making”, she insists, “is always in a sense collaborative”. Consequently, love must become ‘’a collaborative work of art.’’ It’s really a kind of sexsocialism she’s advocating – a dynamic collectivist erotic process: “It’s about you, and the people you (want to) love, figuring [love] out Book Reviews

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and working toward it together.” She says: “it takes a village to fall in love.” So, she exhorts, surround yourself with good people and things, and experiment freely, according to whatever seems most likely to bring you a sense of meaning: “We don’t have to conform to roles handed out to us by ‘nature’ or by our ‘character’, or by anything else… I may have no predetermined essence, nor am I the soul author of my own life story. There is a collaborative creation process going on: a collective co-authoring by (and of) myself and other daimons [spirits].” The key thing, she believes, is to ‘build’ something, rather than to look for it to ‘be there for the taking’. This will not, she insists, guarantee you any such trivial thing as mere happiness; but it might yield you a deeper sense of ‘meaning’ or ‘well-being’ – two qualities she leaves undefined, for the reader to figure out. How is Aristotle, the main philosopher she mentions, supposed to help us out with this? Book Reviews

It’s not clear. It’s actually a little odd that she even bothers with Aristotle, for it quickly becomes apparent that she has no real interest in disciplining her argument to anything from his views. For Aristotle, eudaimonia meant ‘a life approved by the gods’, which essentially meant a life of rigorous, habitual virtue, entirely independent of mere temporal happiness, and oriented to long-term moral heroism. His definition contains elements of selfdenial and individualism entirely missing from Jenkins’ co-option of his term. In fact, Jenkins frankly admits that ‘’conceptions of eudaimonia inspired by Aristotle do not appeal to me.’’ This ambivalence about Aristotle is far more confusing than illuminating, so one wonders at the wisdom of her invoking him at all. It seems she wants to borrow his authority without borrowing substantially from his actual arguments. Indeed, rather than drawing on any tradition, Jenkins confesses that she has a “vested interest in getting more philosophical discussion of polyamory on the agenda.” In terms of critical approach and style, she selfidentifies as a ‘creative writer’. These admissions really show. She’s very far from Aristotelian, and indeed, far from any other philosophical traditions except socialism, woke liberalism, and a kind of collectivist hedonism, guided by her desire to put polyamory into the mainstream. The overriding feeling I get from Sad Love is that of being handled. There is an attempt to massage, rather than reason, the reader into agreement, and it’s a little creepy. Jenkins clearly feels to need our assent that alternative sex arrangements are just fine; and all the talk about this offering ‘new paradigms’ for love and a better hope for more meaningful and fulfilling relationships (if not more happy ones – she abandons that quest) comes off as an elaborate attempt at self-justification

dressed in philosophical clothes. But these clothes hang far too loosely, and the intellectual approach here is not exactly philosophical. It’s more a creative interpretation exercise, the goal of which seems to be to generate support for Jenkins’ sexual and ideological fetishes. That seems harsh, perhaps. Regrettably, it’s also a fair assessment of the final product. In the end, Jenkins valuing of her own personal experiences becomes determinative for her, and the philosophical traditions on which she claims to draw seem to contribute nothing to her conclusions. Sad Love is truly quite a sad book. Not a great deal of hope and light spring from its pages, despite Jenkins’ promises that a more ‘meaningful’ and ‘fulfilling’ experience waits over the horizon, if only we capitulate to her liberal massage (sic). She concludes, “It feels as if we’re sailing at night on a troubled ocean, and I’m trying to turn out the lamps in all the old lighthouses. And, to be fair, that is exactly what I am doing. But those beacons were guiding us onto the rocks.” To be sure, this comes across with creative flair – but the thoughtful reader cannot help but notice that Jenkins has rather mistaken the particulars. Lights going out on rocks have rarely boded well for maritime navigation. In a way, though, this summarizes the problem with her whole argument. In turning out the lights of the philosophical past in favour of navigating her own course, she finds herself without essential reference points. She’s navigating in absolute darkness. I cannot help but see Jenkins herself as at sea – a rather unhappy and confused person. It’s her own fault: she’s made this book much more a sort of philosophical diary or meditation than any kind of systematic philosophical treatment, and she’s so lavish in supplying personal details that one cannot escape the feeling that she’s mistaking them for something that should prove persuasive. So, personal reflections and selfexposure seem to have been substituted for logic, reason, and respect for the philosophical tradition; yet far too much relevant reflection exists in that tradition for it to be here passed over so indifferently. In the end, Carrie Jenkins’ real question in Sad Love seems to be, ‘Why is love in a faltering, polyamorous relationship, so sad?’ And her hope seems to be that that question does not simply answer itself. © DR STEPHEN L. ANDERSON, 2024

Stephen Anderson is a retired philosophy teacher in London, Ontario. • Sad Love: Romance and the Search for Meaning, Carrie Jenkins, Polity, 2022, 200 pages, $10.80, pb

February/March 2024  Philosophy Now 55

Classics Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand (1905-1982)

Plot Atlas Shrugged is set in a world similar to our own, but where the brightest and most productive members of society have gone on strike. The main character, Dagny Taggart, is the Vice President of Operations at Taggart Transcontinental, a large railroad company. She’s determined to keep the company afloat despite the constant interference of the government and the ineptitude of her brother, James Taggart, who is the President of the company. As the novel progresses, Dagny becomes involved with the mysterious John Galt, the strike leader. Galt has convinced the most productive people to withdraw from normal society and create their own in a hidden valley. These individuals are responsible for scientific and technological advances in the world, so their absence is causing the world to slowly fall apart. Dagny eventually discovers the valley and meets with Galt and the other strikers. They explain their (that is, Rand’s) philosophy of Objectivism, which promotes individualism and laissez-faire capitalism. Dagny is force individuals to conform to its expectaconvinced by their arguments and joins the tions, but rather should allow them to pursue strike, leaving the rest of the world to collapse. their own interests, since she believes that this is the key to a prosperous society. In Atlas Shrugged, the characters who embody this Themes One of the most significant themes in Atlas philosophy are the strikers who have withShrugged is individualism. Rand’s ‘Objec- drawn from the world to create their own. tivist’ philosophy argues that individuals are This philosophy is embodied in the character the most important unit of society and that of John Galt, who represents the ideal of the individuals should be free to pursue their independent, self-reliant individual. Another significant theme in Atlas Shrugged own goals without interference from others. Rand argues that society should not try to is capitalism. Rand argues that capitalism is the 56 Philosophy Now  February/March 2024

AYN RAND COLOURED IN BY JULIUS JAASKELAINEN CREATIVE COMMONS 2.0

ATLAS SHRUGGED, published in 1957, is a novel by RussianAmerican philosopher Ayn Rand. It’s considered one of the most influential novels of the twentieth century and has had a significant impact on libertarian movements. It’s a massive tome, clocking in at over a thousand pages in most editions. However, its length is justified by the sheer amount of ideas and philosophical concepts it contains. Rand explores themes of individualism, capitalism, personal ambition, and the role of government. The novel tells the story of a dystopian society whose brightest and most productive members go on strike, leaving the rest of the world to crumble. Here I want to briefly examine the relevance of the themes of Atlas Shrugged to our own culture.

most moral economic system because it allows individuals to pursue their own interests, which includes creating value for others. She believes that capitalism is the only economic system that allows for true innovation and progress. In the world of Atlas Shrugged, government and other institutions are portrayed as stifling innovation and progress. The government interferes with business, imposes regulations, and heavily taxes the most productive people. As a result, the most productive people go on strike, leaving the rest of the world to fend (badly) for itself. Book Reviews

Classics Despite its controversial nature, Atlas Shrugged has had a significant impact, especially on American politics. The novel has been embraced by libertarians and conservatives who support Rand’s individualism and laissez-faire. Politicians such as Ron Paul and Paul Ryan have cited Rand as a major influence on their beliefs, and the novel has been credited with inspiring the Tea Party movement. Atlas Shrugged has also had a significant impact on popular culture, having been adapted into films, plays, and even a video game.

complex characters and intricate plot offer a nuanced exploration of the human experience, and its philosophical ideas have inspired generations of readers. Whether one agrees or disagrees with Rand’s Objectivism, there is no denying the impact that Atlas Shrugged has had on politics and culture. The novel’s enduring popularity demonstrates the power of fiction to shape our understanding of the world and to challenge our most deeply-held beliefs. As such, Atlas Shrugged deserves to be read, debated, and engaged with for generations to come. © SHASHWAT MISHRA 2024

Conclusions Atlas Shrugged is worth engaging with. The novel raises important questions about the roles of the individual, the government, and the economy in society, and forces readers to consider their own values and beliefs. Its

Shashwat Mishra enjoys exploring how philosophy and economics influence our behaviour and shape how we interact with one another. When not exploring either of them, he plays a lot of quizzes, listens to Classic Rock and watches soccer, F1 and basketball.

PHOTO OF ATLAS STATUE NEW YORK KURT CHRISTENSEN 2006 CREATIVE COMMONS 2

Atlas Shrugged is also a manifesto for Rand’s Objectivism, which emphasizes reason as well as individualism and capitalism. Rand believed that individuals should be guided by reason, not emotion, and that the pursuit of one’s own happiness is the ultimate goal of life (this position is sometimes called ethical egoism). Objectivism rejects the idea that individuals should sacrifice their own happiness for the sake of others or for society as a whole. Rather, Rand believed that individuals should only help others if it’s in their own self-interest to do so. John Galt embodies the principles of Objectivism by being a rational, independent man who is committed to his own happiness and the pursuit of his own goals. Like Rand, he rejects the idea that individuals should sacrifice themselves for others, and, moreover, argues that altruism is a destructive, immoral philosophy. Another significant theme in Atlas Shrugged is the role of government. Rand believed that government should have a very limited role: it should only be responsible for protecting individual rights. She argued that the government should not interfere with the economy or impose regulations on businesses. In Atlas Shrugged the government is portrayed as a corrupt and oppressive institution which imposes regulations, over-taxes the most productive, and uses its power to control peoples’ lives. Rand uses Atlas Shrugged to argue that this kind of intervention stifles innovation, and leads to the decline of society. Criticisms Although Atlas Shrugged has been embraced by many, it has also been widely criticized. One of the main criticisms of the novel is over its politics. Rand’s Objectivism and her embrace of extreme laissez-faire capitalism have been widely criticized by economists, and some philosophers argue that her philosophy is simplistic and unrealistic. Many readers have also criticized the novel’s depiction of female characters, who are often portrayed as subservient to men. Some have even argued that although Ayn Rand was a woman her individualist philosophy is inherently sexist, as it does not take into account the ways in which women are oppressed by established social and economic structures. The novel has also been criticized for its treatment of minorities. Although Rand herself argued that her philosophy was egalitarian, some readers have pointed out that the novel is dominated by white males, and that characters who belong to minority groups are often stereotyped and marginalized. Book Reviews

February/March 2024  Philosophy Now 57

Enjoy the Silence

Music

V

iolator, the seventh studio album by the British band Depeche Mode, was groundbreaking when it was released back in 1990. It’s aptly named, due to its musical style, which combines a somewhat pessimistic outlook with catchy pop-synth tunes, and, more pertinently, due to its subject matter. Indeed, each song (written by Martin Gore) offers a novel take on life, love, and perception. I’ve noticed that several tracks on the album seem to reflect tenets of two schools of philosophical thought, Stoicism and Buddhism. These songs celebrate what I would interpret as ‘inner satisfaction’, or in more religious terms, a form of enlightenment. But I want to focus on one song in particular, ‘Enjoy The Silence’, which is probably the band’s most popular and enduring hit. Various explanations of the song have been put forward, including the band’s official music video directed by Anton Corbijn, which compares it with themes from The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry, the protagonist ‘having everything, but feeling nothing’. Additional interpretations include that it is about an intense affair where words are surplus to requirement; or, to the effects of drugs. My own interpretation follows a philosophical theme. Some of what can be said about this track philosophically could also be applied to other tracks on the album, such as ‘World In My Eyes’. Despite some popular modern perceptions of Stoicism, in its purest form it is a disciplined way of life. Epictetus’s version of Stoicism, which I want to focus on here, certainly is. Having said this, Stoicism is also extremely practical and provides clear advice about how to deal with the challenges of life. Relatively little is known about the life of Epictetus, who lived from about 50 AD to 135 AD, save that he was a slave for around twenty years, after which he gained fame for his aptitude for philosophy. Thanks to a collection of his writings, The Discourses, put together by his student Arrian, Epictetus has been hugely influential. Having learnt the importance of a disciplined mind and self-responsibility through personal hard-

58 Philosophy Now

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by Depeche Mode Thomas R. Morgan hears more than silence. ship, Epictetus recommended an approach to life that many would find unattractive and demanding. For example, he strongly discourages gossip and small talk, but encourages self-sacrifice and the subjugation of desires. There is something of this austerity and self-denial, especially regarding words and language, in ‘Enjoy the Silence’. In the chorus the singer asserts his self-sufficiency, but also discourages language and speaking: “All I ever wanted All I ever needed Is here in my arms Words are very unnecessary They can only do harm”

The protagonist of ‘Enjoy the Silence’ exhibits confidence in asserting that all he wants ‘is here in my arms’. This relates to Stoic teaching regarding desire. Desire can cause suffering when it is untamed or when its object eludes us. To counter this, Epictetus teaches adherents to realise the difference between what they can control and what they can’t. For example, we can control how we behave towards others, but not how they behave towards us. The natural elements and fortune in general similarly stand outside of our control. If we align our desires with what we can control (namely, our ethical conduct), we can avoid much that is, painful, harmful or unsatisfactory. Buddhism takes a similar stance. Its Four Noble Truths outline a link between suffering and desire, and say how to address it. The first truth acknowledges universal suffering; the second finds suffering’s source in desire; the third logically concludes that if desire is curbed, so will suffering be; while the fourth outlines a path forwards. For a Buddhist, the mastery of desire will ultimately lead to heightened states of awareness. Like Buddhism (but perhaps for different reasons), Epictetus implores followers to eliminate desire, since it makes us ‘unfortunate’. The Buddha illustrates this idea through an analogy involving two arrows. As it hits you the first arrow brings pain which cannot be avoided. However, the second arrow represents our

reactions, which reflect our desires, which cause us further pain as we wish to avoid the suffering which cannot be avoided. In Stoic terms, the first arrow is not under our control, but the second is. This teaching is reflected in the Enchiridion of Epictetus, where he asserts that it is our judgements that upset us, as opposed to the events we judge. Or in the song’s terms, our use of words to label and judge the pain of the first arrow brings unnecessary suffering. Stoicism and to a lesser extent Buddhism have been heavily drawn upon in contemporary psychological approaches such as CBT. For achieving mental wellbeing, avoiding mislabelling events and what happens to us can have surprisingly beneficial results. For example, thinking of an event as ‘disastrous’ adds to its emotional distress, so replacing the adjective with something more realistic can reduce the suffering. In the Stoic understanding, freedom consists not of resisting nature and imposing our wills on it but in aligning our wills with it. Interestingly, the downbeat, deep vocals of Dave Gahan in the song don’t suggest that the results of ‘silence’ are euphoric happiness, but more a resignation, or perhaps something more profound. This again is more in line with the ancient spirit of Stoicism than with modern therapy. Furthermore, words and language pose the risk of putting us out of sync with nature. This sentiment about the destructiveness of words is seen in the lyrics: “Words, like violence Break the silence Come crashing in, Into my little world”

Returning to the chorus, the protagonist does not desire anything outside of himself, since doing so would cause suffering. Also, he does not wish to distort the situation with the use of words. Words will harm and create a false sense of what is, so rather than take this risk, we should enjoy the silence. © THOMAS R. MORGAN 2024

Thomas R. Morgan is teacher of religious studies, philosophy and ethics at Westcliff High, England.

IMAGE © JOEL HASEMEYER 2023 JOELHASE.MYPORTFOLIO.COM INSTAGRAM: @JOEL_HASE

February/March 2024 l Philosophy Now 59

R

ené Descartes (1596-1650) has been a conspicuous absentee from this column. Well, here he is at last, uttering perhaps the most famous sentence in Western philosophy: Cogito, ergo sum, or ‘I think therefore I am’. This rather odd statement of the seemingly obvious was prompted by a search for something beyond the reach of doubt, as Descartes describes in his Meditations on First Philosophy (1641). As to the grounds for pervasive doubt, Descartes tells us he’s had experiences in dreams very similar to those when he was awake. When he was dreaming, he believed that the dreams corresponded to reality. As he expresses it in the Meditations, “there are never signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep.” While dreams are transient, and he recognized them for what they were when he woke up, Descartes argues that “it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.” That is no less true when the person by whom we have been deceived is ourselves. Since what passes for waking experience may be a dream, it is entirely reasonable to doubt everything. Well, not quite everything. One thing I cannot doubt, he continues, is that I am thinking; because to doubt that I am thinking requires that I should be thinking. Since anything that thinks - and that includes by doubting - must exist, I-the-thinker must exist, and I cannot doubt this without self-contradiction. Even if I were dreaming that I was rehearsing the cogito argument, its conclusion – that I am – would still hold up. Hallelujah!

Cogito, Ergo Sum? Raymond Tallis has a long-postponed meeting with M. Descartes. cogitans)? Perhaps he chose thought as his starting point for the journey out of scepticism because it was thinking that got him into scepticism in the first place. More to the point, it is possible to think one is not itching without running into self-refutation, but not that one is not thinking. Descartes’ incontrovertible thought that he is thinking doesn’t, however, seem to place much of his existence beyond doubt. Which is disappointing. After all, Descartes wanted to be sure of his own existence, not just that of the existence of anyone or of any thinking being’s existence, or indeed of anything. This highlights how slim are the pickings from Cogito, ergo sum. The physicist, philosopher, and wit Georg Christoff Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

argued that all Descartes could legitimately conclude from observing his thinking is that ‘there is thinking going on’. Granted, you cannot be aware of thoughts unless you are the individual thinking them, but that alone will not take you all the way to an ‘I’ who does the thinking. Descartes reaches ‘I am’ at the end of the argument only if ‘I’ is in place at the beginning, in ‘I think’. So the cogito argument boils down to “If it is an ‘I’ that is thinking – if the thinking is a manifestation of a whole ‘I’ – then my thinking proves that I am.” But the ‘I’ doing the thinking is not packaged into the mere fact that, as Lichtenberg put it, ‘thinking is going on’. Listening in to thoughts does not therefore deliver the existence of the Man in Full: René Descartes the soldier, mathe-

CARTOON © WOLFGANG NIESIELSKI 2024

allis T in Wonderland

Therefore I Am What? But what does Descartes’ cogito argument really deliver? Why, for a start, does it begin with thought? Why not ‘I itch, therefore I am’? A non-existent being could not itch. Or what about ‘I dream, therefore I am’? A nonexistent being could not entertain dreams. So why did Descartes privilege thought? Was it because thinking was closer than itching or dreaming to the kind of entity he thought himself to be – namely a thinking thing (res René Descartes amends his original argument 60 Philosophy Now




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matician, philosopher, fencer, teacher of Queen Christina, etc. Nor does the reassurance the cogito argument provides extend beyond Descartes into the world he thought he lived in. It doesn’t even deliver his own body, notwithstanding that, as he argued, he is not in his body as a pilot in a ship; he’s more entangled with it than that. You don’t get from ‘there is thinking’, to ‘there is a thinker’, and thence to ‘there is a thinker called René Descartes’, and that that thinker is an embodied subject who has been living a certain life. Or not at least without adding assumptions not delivered by the famous sentence. Some of those assumptions, as I said, are smuggled in via the left-hand side of the argument: they are baked into cogito before we mobilise the ergo. Perhaps not all the smuggling is entirely unjustified. An entity who can think ‘I think’ must have the capacity for articulate thought, for self-reference, for thought about thought, and (as the performance of the argument itself indicates) for drawing inferences. Whether this amounts to an embodied subject who has a full-blown biography is moot. It remains unclear how many predicates could be logically attached to the bare existence of the thinker – how substantial is the ‘am’ of his conclusion – or whether, indeed, ‘am’ is justified, given that ‘am’, unlike ‘is’, cannot be confined to the bare existence of an entity with only a handful of predicates. It appears that one introspected episode of thought is required to do some implausibly heavy lifting if it is to deliver the full Descartes and at least some of the world he normally believes in. Descartes is of course aware of how little his cogito argument delivers. As he admits, it does not deal with the concern that he might be the victim of an evil demon who is deliberately deceiving him so that everything else he believes is untrue. To pre-empt that possibility, he invokes a benign God who would not deliberately deceive him or allow him to be deceived about what he calls ‘clear and distinct ideas’. The best-known argument in Western philosophy seems, therefore, to deflate on close inspection. The episode of thinking fed into the opening of the argument does not deliver something as substantial as a particular thinker or an external world. And although the argument seems like an inference – and an irresistible one at that – it is no such thing, notwithstanding the ergo overseeing the transition from ‘I think’ to ‘I am’. The passage from premise to conclusion depends on assumptions buried in the premise, which are not necessarily immune

to the universal doubt from which Descartes is trying to escape. Performing Thinking Such concerns have prompted some philosophers (most notably the Finnish philosopher Jaakko Hintikka in his classic ‘Cogito, Ergo Sum: Inference or Performance?’ Philosophical Review, 1962) to re-think what Descartes was up to. Notwithstanding the ergo, Cogito, ergo sum should not be judged as an argument on paper but as a performance. Any underpinning of substantive truth is to be found not in the mere abstract phrase, but in the speech act by which it is asserted at a particular time and place. What the cogito argument does, then, is to highlight not a logical, but an existential, necessity. This is not located in sentences in the abstract, but in actual statements made – or thought – by someone referring to himself as ‘I’. Descartes’ assertion that he exists is selfevidencing, given that any claim he may make to this effect requires that he should exist in order that he should be able to make it. Moreover, what is delivered by a live performance is a subject with the qualities of a human being capable of arguing like a philosopher. Whether the ‘I think’ input into the cogito performance is an embodied arguer rather than a disembodied premise remains uncertain. The point remains however that there is a performance requiring the performer to say ‘I am’. If so, we can, it seems, cut down the most famous sentence in Western philosophy to one word: sum. This expression is something about which the ‘I’ in question can neither be mistaken nor be suspected of being mistaken. It remains perfectly acceptable for some third party to say of Descartes that ‘he is not’; but not for Descartes himself to say ‘I am not’. Does cogito itself, therefore, contribute nothing to the power of the argument, given that the assertion ‘I am’ is as self-evidencing as, and delivers as much as (or as little as ), ‘I think’? Admittedly, ‘I am’ is a thought: thinking is required for me to stand outside of myself to assert my existence. But it is not a thought that refers to itself as a thought. Nevertheless, while to say ‘I’ or ‘I am’ is to think, it is not necessary to spell this out reflexively by adding ‘I think’ – to assert that the I who is recognising their own existence is thinking. The role of thought – of thinking that ‘I am’ or that ‘I think’ – is not as an input to an inference that leads to the quasi-logical conclusion that the thinker exists. Rather, in both cases, its function is to make the thinker explicit to himself. The ‘I’ as it were speaks for itself rather than being arrived at as a conclusion. This is why it is present either side of ergo.

allis T in Wonderland Most of the cogito argument therefore seems redundant. The work is done existentially, not inferentially. If you can say ‘I am’, then nothing more is needed to reassure yourself that you exist. But it doesn’t deliver much. The ‘I am’, that pops out at the end of Descartes’ argument is not the full Descartes. There is a mismatch between the flimsy episode of thought and the ‘I’ of the philosopher’s identity. Yes, it delivers something he cannot doubt, but that which is placed beyond the reach of doubt seems rather threadbare. There are further questions. Given that the speech act may seem like a recipe for reassuring one’s self that one exists, what is its shelf life? Descartes himself admitted that it was no longer than the duration of the performance. What’s more, no-one else would – or should – be persuaded by his argument. Your thinking, or even saying, ‘‘I think, therefore I am’’ does not prove your existence to me. A figure in a dream I am having or a simulation could ‘perform’ the same ‘act’. Alexa could endlessly repeat the cogito without thereby proving that ‘she’ is an ‘I’ aware of, and asserting, ‘her’ own existence. So, what for Descartes is a proof, is for the rest of us merely the report of a proof that we must take on trust unless we do it ourselves. It works only for the person who performs it, and only while they are performing it. Is it time, therefore, to bury Cogito, ergo sum? Absolutely not. Descartes’ journey from universal doubt to the reason he gives for placing a limit to doubt is the most electrifying example of that awakening out of ordinary wakefulness that is the beginning of true philosophy. As Edmund Husserl said in his Cartesian Meditations (1931), “anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher must ‘once in his life’ withdraw into himself” and undertake the Cartesian journey that led to the cogito argument. © PROF. RAYMOND TALLIS 2024

Raymond Tallis’s latest book, Prague 22: A Philosopher Takes a Tram Through a City will be published in conjunction with Philosophy Now. February/March 2024
Philosophy Now 61

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Philosophy Now 63

Islamic Philosophers

On Love AmirAli Maleki looks at love from an Islamic perspective.

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hat’s more important than everyday life in our world, where philosophical issues such as love, justice, freedom, and are acting upon us in the most vivid way possible? The most important element for philosophy is the need for depth and precision concerning our everyday lives and surroundings. In this, philosophy is like a shopper who stands in front of a shelf in the local supermarket. Every

al-Farabi contemplates love

time he studies that shelf he finds new things that might be of use to him. That shelf is our life, and everything in philosophy depends on this carefulness in studying what might otherwise be routine. Therefore, we should learn to philosophize at the peak of being alive; and that time is every morning when we wake up. Islamic philosophers paid a lot of attention to daily life, and of course they thought about the most basic facts of life according to the conditions in which they lived. Love 64 Philosophy Now




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is one of those facts – perhaps especially so when it seems like it’s present on every street in town and you can’t escape it (especially when you see a couple kissing at a bus stop). So perhaps we should think about love more carefully. And in general, when one philosophises about love, even the most philosophical language sounds more poetic than any poem. Islamic philosophers always express elements of religion in their thought, because they saw their duty as being to deeply review religious issues. In this regard, alFarabi (c.872-951 CE) sees love as a manifestation of God, and indeed, argues that it is through the love within God that all the creatures in the world came into being. As he writes: “Love is the origin of the emergence of creatures and the reason for the immortality and survival of existence.” Basically, al-Farabi’s belief is that if you think you fell in love with your classmate, you in fact originally fell in love with God; and now, through this love of God, you are allowed to invite your classmate to go to the cinema with you, possibly more. Of course, it was not only al-Farabi who saw love as basic to existence. Following his path, Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 9801037 CE) also introduced love as a weapon to help surviving in this world. In his treatise titled Love, Avicenna describes love as an element that exists in all beings in the world, which leads them to love life. He also sees love as the source of all goodness, and even goes as far as saying that every person starts by falling in love with him or herself! Avicenna also believes that loving and being loved are essentially the same thing, and can exist in the personality of any person, so that if someone falls in love, he completes his own personality. So next time you look at your partner, be aware that you’re also looking at a part of yourself. Mulla Sadra (1571-1641 CE) sees love as not only based in romantic or sexual

relations, but as incorporating a strong affection that connects beings together. For him, love is a beautiful thing that makes him depend on his lover and complete his personality through them. Mulla Sadra considers this beautiful matter so important and noble that he says it is impossible to escape from it. For this reason, Mulla Sadra considers love to be a form of ‘awareness’ that can exist in all creatures. This consciousness can be instinctive or voluntary. But perhaps the important thing is that love is attracted to goodness and beauty in any form. Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i (190381 CE), one of the greatest contemporary philosophers of Islam and Mulla Sadra commentators, finds the roots of Mulla Sadra’s ideas in a verse from the Qur’an: “The perfection of love belongs to God” (Ch. Al-Baqara, Vs. 165). Tabataba’i says that Mulla Sadra’s view of love – specifically, of it being a sort of consciousness inside all beings – is present because, as the Qur’an says, God has all degrees of love in himself, and since he created us, he has bestowed his love and affection on all of us. So maybe the evidence and truth of God’s existence within us is our desire for love. The essence of love for Islamic philosophers goes back to the root of the word ‘love’ in both Arabic and Persian, which is from a plant that wraps around a tree and climbs up it, which in English is called ivy. This is the reason why Suhrawardi (115491 CE) considers love to be a great affection that makes a person fall in love by rising and wrapping around their whole life. I too think it is necessary for the plant of love to wrap around our entire lives, to drown us in its breath. But what’s your opinion? Can love be the whole of life? © AMIRALI MALEKI 2024

AmirAli Maleki is a philosophy researcher and the Editor of PraxisPublication.com. He works in the field of political philosophy and hermeneutics.

Fiction

“Stand Out Of My Light” Sophie Dibben watches Alexander the Great meet Diogenes the Cynic.

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to him, and sleeps anywhere. He also live off instincts, has no anxieties, and is not weighed down by status. For this reason I often find myself growling or barking like a dog. I bite the ankles of those who are bad, and I urinate on the bones people throw at me at banquets. My philosophy is even called ‘dog-like’ [Kynikos. Ed]. But this lifestyle has brought me freedom. Many years ago, I was captured by pirates and sold at a slave auction in Crete. No master wants a slave reduced to a skeleton who feasts on dirt. So I starved myself and walked free of dominion and shame.

Now, I drink and bathe in the streams running down the mountain. The gods are on my side today as I see a fire still alight to smoke my rabbit over. After feasting, I rub my belly and drift off again. I awake to a great shadow lingering above me. I can only see a man’s outline through my sleepy eyes, haloed as he is by the sun’s light. He seems to be a tall, mighty fellow. “I am Alexander, King of Macedon!” he declares. Does the man think he is some kind of god?

ALEXANDER AND DIOGENES BY WILLIAM RAINEY, 1910

oday I will bathe in the sun and catch up on some sleep. Last night the dogs were barking, the birds were chirping, the whores were whoring, the drunkards were drinking, and this culmination of sounds seemed to echo around my jar, keeping me awake all night. I tried to sleep again in the morning, but alas, I received the usual shouts and spits from the chitonwearers. They flaunt unnecessary and mannered garments which I rid myself of even as a young boy. After the chiton, I also rejected money and other human conventions, and any last crumb of ‘civilisation’. And as a sleep-deprived old man, I stay away from anyone who claims to be civilised. Or anyone who desires possessions; or anyone blames the gods for their own mistakes. I will climb up to the mountain and sleep there. I am more content in my own company, with just a rabbit to roast. Although they are desperate to be free from their masters, even the slaves turn their noses up at me. They do not see that the truest freedom is to develop a perfect mastery over oneself. Happiness cannot rely on your status, or how people perceive you. And although I receive disgusted looks from both the aristocrats and the slaves, I still believe that nothing done in private cannot be done in public. As I climb the mountain my spirit soars. Like a child, I pretend to be a lion, imitating its movements, roaring at birds, and scratching the earth. Before the winds become too strong, I stop climbing. Like a lion again, I search for a spot to sleep. I find a spot to rest my paws, and doze off on a grassy patch against a wall. Whilst I play like a lion, I champion the life of a dog. The lion sleeps eighteen hours a day, which is contrary to the dog’s infrequent sleeping habits. In his six waking hours, the lion is fighting for dominance, which I am also opposed to. But a dog lives a natural and unaffected life. Like me, a dog performs its natural functions in public, eats anything offered

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Fiction He clears his throat as if to insinuate I should arise before him. He is blocking my entire sun. In his shadow, I am now cold. The shadow continues: “I heard rumours that you were in Athens, so I travelled there. There I met my old tutor, Aristotle, who mentioned you may be in Olympia at the Games. So I travelled there; to hear from the athletes that you were exiled from Olympia and now reside in Corinth. Getting to Corinth, I then followed word from the local slaves that you were up here on this mountain. It is great to finally meet you, O Diogenes!” I can feel my eyes narrowing and my eyebrows lifting. I seem to be embarrassing him. I doubt he has ever been in that position before. As a king, he must be accustomed to people fawning over him. “To what do I owe this pleasure?” I ask ironically. His face lights up. I think the irony was lost on him. “I am the most powerful man in the world. I have conquered all of Greece, Egypt, and Persia. I endeavour to reach the ends of the world and the Great Outer Sea. As Aristotle taught me, I believe this will only be possible by my fully immersing myself in the superior Greek moral and spiritual ethos. This is why I seek to converse with renowned Greek philosophers such as yourself. Ask me for anything, you shall have it.” I don’t need any time to think about that: “Stand out of my light,” I reply. He quickly moves to one side, even as his face flushes scarlet red. I can see one of his foot soldiers sniggering. As I am bathed in the warm sun again, I start to ease off a bit: “Look, Alexander, I have no desires at present except to sleep. I have no doubt that you have conquered lands beyond mortal reach and have reigned over them with a grandeur equivalent to Zeus. But to me, you are enslaved. Enslaved by insatiable ambition. I, however, am free.” Alexander stutters some incomprehensible words. Then he composes himself: “Although I am of Macedonian descent, I was tutored by the great Aristotle of Athens, and have united lands far superior to any Greek leader –” I raise my hand, exasperated in my old age by the so-called ‘unity’ of Greek identity: “I do not care whether you’re Greek or non-Greek, whether you’re a slave or free-born. What is that to me?” There’s a look of shock in his eyes: “You claim no culture?” “I am a citizen of the cosmos,” I reply. He stares at me, his body and face fixed as still as a marble sculpture. The sun is, fortunately, blocking my ability to make eye contact. With his lion-skin belt and aristocratic stature, he resembles Heracles. I would never mention how dazzled I am by his beauty. “I’ll be back, Diogenes.” He walks over to another grassy patch and sits down. His shield-bearer, guards, and companions join him instinctively, but Alexander orders them to leave him to think alone. Whilst I lie, legs spread-eagle, gently stroking the grass, he sits, shoulders tight and fists clenched. I am poorly clothed. He is dressed in regal attire, with gleaming chest plate, helmet and armour, and a purple tunic. For too long have I been carrying a lantern to look into people’s faces, searching for an honest man – a man who does not hide behind a ‘mask of manners’ to shield any uncomfort66 Philosophy Now



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Greek Statue A goddess she is, so perfect, so Greek Carved in marble with classic pose Ideal perfection from toe to cheek, Paradigm of Beauty – or so the story goes. Fixed and frozen forms of art Might show some sacred ideal. My love be not perfect in every part, But I love her best because she’s real. © CLINT INMAN 2024

Clint Inman is a British-born poet and painter, with a BA in Philosophy from San Diego State University in 1977. He’s now a retired high school teacher living in Florida with his wife, Elba.

able truth. I wonder if Alexander will have me killed for my honesty and spare all the liars. I will not run away or beg for forgiveness. I accept my fate. I believe this is the price I must pay. As I feel my body drift off to sleep again, he returns. “Diogenes, you scorn my offer to you, but I see that you do not desire anything. Nor do you have any shame, and for this reason, you are more powerful than I.” I stroke my beard and nod. I live another day. I stay silent, following in the footsteps of my fellow cynic, Zeno of Citium, who said “the reason why we have two ears and only one mouth is so we might listen more and talk less.” Alexander continues his monologue: “Over by that rock I felt the sort of shame you never experience. But you are right. My position is precarious, my authority threatened, my kingship mortal. But you, Diogenes, have complete self-sovereignty. Although I am the king of the world, you are more powerful than me.” “I have felt shame before, Alexander. After following my master Antisthenes around for a year, he had to ward me off with a staff. I decided after that moment that I would never rely on anyone's judgement for my own self-assurance. It’s been more than fifty years now. I believe I’m living for so long because I do not rely on others.” He beckons over his guards and entourage, and makes a grand proclamation to them: “Friends, if I were not Alexander the Great, I would like to be Diogenes.” I notice one companion note this down on his papyrus. Then Alexander bids me goodbye, and they march off. His cloak billows in the wind behind him: his tunic stained purple with murex, the dye so rare only a king can afford it. “If a mouse can be satisfied with a few crumbs, why can’t I be happy with my little means?” I say to myself as I fall back to sleep. © SOPHIE DIBBEN 2024

Sophie Dibben is 24-years-old and studied Classics at Trinity College Dublin. She now works in a prison but continues to study the lives of her favourite ancient legends. She loves Diogenes and thinks he was underrated guy.’

New year – new ideas from Edinburgh University Press Matter and Motion

A Brief History of Kinetic Materialism Thomas Nail

Western philosophy has been obsessed with stasis: eternity, God, the soul, forms, essences, absolute morality. Thomas Nail traces an alternative tradition of ancient and modern thinkers – from Archaic Greek poets to Karan Barad, and from Lucretius to Virginia Woolf – who share a radically diΊerent understanding: it is matter and motion that are central to understanding the world.

Hysteresis

The External World Maurizio Ferraris

Since the 1780s, Western philosophy has been largely under the spell of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. In this book, one of Europe’s leading realist philosophers restores the role of the external world to modern philosophy. Central to his argument is the idea of hysteresis: the ability of eΊects to survive even when their causes have ceased to exist.

Discover these books and more on the Edinburgh University Press website: edinburghuniversitypress.com/philosophy

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